Defeat of the proposal for a U.S. boycott of the Berlin Olympics

The defeat of the proposal for a U.S. boycott of the Berlin Olympics came on December 8, 1935, when the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States rejected a plan to send investigators to Germany to examine reports of Nazi maltreatment of Jews. The vote, 58.25 to 55.75, effectively ended the last serious American effort to keep the United States from the Games. What was presented as a defense of athletes and the Olympic ideal also became a consequential decision about which evidence would be believed, whose protest would be heard, and whether sport could be separated from the state hosting it.

Background and Stakes

The debate unfolded against a growing conflict between the promise of international sport and the realities of Nazi rule. The Berlin Olympics offered American athletes a chance to compete on a world stage, but reports of persecution raised the question of whether participation would lend legitimacy to the German government. The issue had become more than a dispute over athletic opportunity: a boycott could express opposition to Nazi treatment of Jews, while sending a team risked making that treatment seem incidental to the Games.

For American rowing, the stakes of international competition were especially tangible. Western programs had spent years seeking recognition against Eastern institutions and better-funded rivals. The University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley had built a prominent West Coast rivalry, but the eastern colleges remained the center of gravity in collegiate rowing. A place at the Olympics meant access to an international contest and public recognition that could not be separated from the unequal resources and prestige already shaping American sport. The boycott decision therefore landed in a culture where the chance to compete carried real weight, even as the question of what that competition endorsed remained unresolved.

Protest and the Vote

The boycott campaign was still active in late November. On November 21, ten thousand anti-Nazi demonstrators marched under police escort through New York rush-hour traffic. They carried placards and a banner calling on Americans to boycott the Games, moving down Eighth Avenue and east along Twenty-Third Street before gathering in Madison Square Park. Most were Jews, labor leaders, university professors, and Catholics. More than twenty speakers described Nazi actions, the concealment of those actions, and the moral cost of American participation.

Less than three weeks later, at the Commodore Hotel in New York, the Amateur Athletic Union considered a resolution to send a three-member committee to Germany to investigate claims of mistreatment. Fractional votes included, the proposal failed by a margin of just two and a half votes. The defeat did not itself select or send the American team, but it removed the last serious institutional effort to investigate the claims before the Games. The book presents the result as a decisive turn: America was going to Berlin, and the remaining question was which athletes would carry its flag.

The Case Against a Boycott

Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, and his allies had fought the boycott effort. Brundage argued that politics should not interfere with sport and that American athletes should not lose their chance to compete because of German politics. That appeal to fairness addressed a genuine cost to the athletes, but it also framed participation as neutral even while the dispute concerned the conduct of the state staging the Olympics.

Brundage had toured Germany in September 1934. His visit was brief and closely supervised, and Nazi officials assured him that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. He returned to the United States publicly dismissing the complaints as exaggerated. The account places that confidence alongside Brundage’s own prejudices: his earlier writing imagined a physically strong, mentally alert, morally sound master race, and during the boycott dispute he invoked the exclusion of Jews from clubs he belonged to as though one form of discrimination could excuse another. He also repeatedly associated Jews with communists and blurred the distinction between Jews and Americans. In this context, his appeal to keep politics out of sport did not simply protect athletes from political interference; it helped redirect scrutiny away from Nazi policy and toward those protesting it.

Charles H. Sherrill, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and another important ally of Brundage, had also visited Germany and attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally as Adolf Hitler’s guest. After meeting Hitler, Sherrill returned with assurances that denied increasingly visible evidence of persecution. His public claims of friendship toward American Jews were accompanied by warnings that Olympic agitation could provoke antisemitism in the United States. Brundage likewise portrayed the boycott campaign as the importation of foreign hatreds into American sport. In doing so, these arguments cast those objecting to persecution as a threat to national unity, while treating the persecution itself as a secondary matter.

Consequences and Significance

The vote was described as a victory for young Americans hoping to compete, as well as for Avery Brundage and the allies who had worked to prevent a boycott. Above all, it served Adolf Hitler’s interests: the decision showed how readily international participation could continue despite reports of Nazi persecution. The outcome did not establish that sport was free of politics. Instead, it showed how the language of sporting neutrality could shape which political facts were recognized and whose objections were dismissed.

The sequence also marks a change in the book’s focus. With the boycott effort effectively dead, attention turns from whether the United States will attend to the practical task of choosing its Olympic representatives. That transition leaves the moral question in place rather than resolving it: athletes could pursue a rare opportunity, while the national decision to send them helped the Berlin Games proceed without the investigation the proposal had sought.