Sport should be separate from politics

Sport should be separate from politics is an Olympic principle whose meaning becomes unstable in the struggle over American participation in the 1936 Summer Olympics. Presented as a defense of athletes and fair competition, it also became a reason to disregard Nazi persecution and reject a boycott. The book’s account places that contradiction alongside the material realities of sport: who could compete, who paid to reach the games, and whose treatment officials were willing to call political interference.

Sport as prestige and public life

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing was not a marginal pursuit. It drew enormous crowds and extensive press attention, and leading crews could command a national following. Yet the sport’s prestige was bound up with social privilege. Eastern private schools modeled rowing on elite British institutions, and their oarsmen moved on to universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Across the country, the spectacle presented itself as athletic competition while also reflecting the institutions and social groups that had the resources to sustain it.

That imbalance shaped the rivalry between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington. Their annual contests drew students, alumni, and local crowds, but western programs struggled for recognition and funding. Their coaches earned far less than eastern counterparts, and the western schools had virtually nothing for recruitment or wealthy patrons. The center of American collegiate rowing remained in the East; a stronger national profile could bring prestige to the West, but the contest for that recognition was already entangled with money and regional status. The sport was never simply outside public life: its victories could advertise a university and a city.

The class boundaries were visible in competition rules as well as budgets. At the Henley Royal Regatta, a rule dating from 1879 excluded anyone who had worked for wages as a mechanic, artisan, or laborer. Australian policemen were classified as laborers and barred from competing, despite their arrival for the prestigious Grand Challenge Cup. Their exclusion makes the supposed neutrality of sporting rules difficult to separate from judgments about which kinds of people counted as proper competitors. The rules did not merely regulate technique; they restricted access along occupational lines.

The case for a boycott

American opposition to participation in the Berlin Olympics had been developing since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. By late 1935, the question had become a national dispute. On November 21, ten thousand demonstrators marched through New York under police escort, carrying an appeal for a boycott. The crowd included Jews, labor leaders, university professors, and Catholics. Speakers described Nazi persecution and argued that taking part in the games would be unconscionable while the German government concealed what was happening.

The U.S. Olympic Committee’s president, Avery Brundage, opposed a boycott in the name of Olympic principle. He argued that American athletes should not lose their opportunity to compete internationally because of German politics. That position made a serious claim about the athletes: they should not be made to bear the cost of a government’s actions. But the debate also revealed the limit of treating sport as politically separate. A decision to attend would itself have consequences for the regime hosting the games, and the question of what American participation signified could not be settled simply by declaring politics out of bounds.

Reassurance, prejudice, and denial

Brundage’s public case rested in part on his 1934 visit to Germany. His tour of athletic facilities was brief and closely supervised, and Nazi hosts assured him that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. He returned to the United States confidently dismissing the Jewish protest as exaggerated. The visit offered him reassurance, but it did not provide an independent account of conditions; the government whose conduct was in question controlled what he saw and what he was told.

The narrative also links Brundage’s response to his own prejudice. In 1929 he had written approvingly of the prospect of a physically strong, mentally alert, morally sound master race. During the boycott fight, he cited his own clubs’ exclusion of Jews as though that made exclusion in Germany less objectionable. He grouped Jews with communists and treated the boycott’s supporters as a suspect bloc, while speaking as if Jews could not also be Americans. His appeal to keep politics out of sport thus did not operate as an even-handed refusal to judge. In practice, it redirected attention away from Nazi discrimination and toward the people protesting it.

Charles H. Sherrill, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a prominent ally of Brundage, offered another example of how official assurances could harden into denial. Sherrill had toured Germany and attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally as Adolf Hitler’s personal guest. After a private meeting with Hitler, he returned home with assurances similar to Brundage’s and rejected mounting evidence of the persecution of Jews. He also warned American Jews that Olympic agitation could provoke antisemitism in the United States. The warning shifted responsibility from the persecuting government to those objecting to its actions. Brundage likewise framed protest as the introduction of foreign hatreds into American sport. By late 1935, the distinction between being deceived and helping to deceive had become difficult to maintain.

The decision and its material stakes

The boycott effort was effectively settled on December 8, when the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States rejected a proposal to send a three-man committee to Germany to investigate claims of Nazi mistreatment of Jews. The vote failed by 58.25 to 55.75. The decision ended the last serious American attempt to boycott the games, and the United States would participate. For young athletes, that meant the chance to compete remained open; for Adolf Hitler, it meant that American participation would proceed despite the evidence and protests surrounding his government.

The Washington Huskies rowing team’s preparations reveal that access to the Olympics depended on practical resources as well as official principle. After the crew qualified, its leaders were told that Washington would have to pay its own way to Berlin or yield its place to Pennsylvania. The American Olympic Committee lacked funds, but this demand struck especially hard because the Washington oarsmen were working-class men who could not finance the trip themselves. The university had already struggled to raise money to send them east to compete. Their sporting opportunity therefore depended on public and local fundraising, not merely on selection or the abstract promise of fair competition.

The response in the Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city was immediate. Donations arrived from businesses, civic groups, and the hometowns of the rowers, including $75 from Joe Rantz’s Sequim. Volunteers sold $1,523 in fifty-cent tags on the first day; by the end of the second day, a $5,000 certified check had been sent to Al Ulbrickson. The episode makes the political economy of supposedly apolitical sport concrete: a qualified crew could still be excluded by cost, while community support could secure its passage. The principle that sport should be separate from politics could protect an athlete’s chance to compete, but it could not erase the institutions, inequalities, and political choices that determined what competing meant—or who could afford to do it.