The Amateur Athletic Union’s rejection of a proposal to investigate Nazi maltreatment of Jews effectively closed the last serious American route to boycotting the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The decision followed a mass protest and a bitter institutional fight over whether political neutrality protected American athletes—or helped conceal persecution. It sent the United States toward the Games, but did not resolve the money or class barriers facing the working-class Washington crew that hoped to compete there.

Background: Sport, prestige, and unequal access

By the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing was a major public sport, with national press coverage, large crowds, and millions following crews through the season. The eastern universities occupied the center of its prestige and resources. Western programs, including those of the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley, had built a following through their rivalry, but received less funding and recognition and had little access to wealthy patrons. Their crews still faced the expense of traveling east and the condescension directed at western rowers from working-class backgrounds.

That unequal sporting landscape formed part of the stakes of the Olympic dispute. For young American athletes, a boycott meant losing the chance to compete on a world stage; for the Nazis, American participation offered international legitimacy while the regime concealed its treatment of Jews. The fight over attendance was therefore not simply a disagreement about athletic opportunity. It concerned what participation would mean in a state increasingly defined by persecution.

Protest and the case against participation

The boycott movement was still active in late November 1935. On November 21, ten thousand demonstrators, escorted by police, marched through New York City during rush hour. They carried placards and a banner calling on Americans to boycott the Games in Nazi Germany, proceeding down Eighth Avenue and east along Twenty-Third Street before gathering in Madison Square Park.

The crowd included Jews, labor leaders, university professors, and Catholics. More than twenty speakers described conditions in Germany, accused the Nazis of concealing them, and argued that American participation would be unconscionable. The scale and composition of the protest showed that the challenge to the Olympics had become a broad public campaign rather than a private concern confined to athletes or Jewish organizations.

The vote and the arguments around it

On December 8, at the Commodore Hotel in New York, the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States considered a resolution to send a three-man committee to Germany to investigate allegations of Nazi maltreatment of Jews. When fractional votes were counted, the proposal lost, 58.25 to 55.75. Its defeat made the last serious American boycott effort effectively dead.

Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, had led the opposition with an appeal to the principle that politics should not interfere with sport. He argued that American athletes should not be deprived of an international competition because of German politics. Yet his position was reinforced by more than a general defense of athletic neutrality. After a brief, closely supervised tour of German athletic facilities in September 1934, Nazi hosts assured him that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly; he returned to the United States dismissing the complaints as exaggerated.

The account also describes Brundage’s own antisemitic prejudices as shaping his response. He had written approvingly of the prospect of a physically strong, mentally alert, morally sound master race, and during the boycott fight invoked the exclusion of Jews from clubs he belonged to as though that exclusion answered the charge against Germany. He repeatedly grouped Jews with communists and distinguished Jews from Americans, while portraying boycott advocates as importing old-world hatreds into American sport. In this way, the language of neutrality redirected blame from Nazi persecution toward those trying to expose it.

Charles H. Sherrill, a former American ambassador to Turkey and an important ally of Brundage, had likewise toured Germany and attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally as Adolf Hitler’s personal guest. After a private meeting with Hitler, Sherrill returned with assurances that discounted the mounting evidence against the regime. He called himself a friend of American Jews but also warned American Jews against the Olympic agitation, suggesting it might provoke antisemitism. The episode reveals how prominent supporters of American participation could present themselves as protective of athletes or Jews while repeating arguments that weakened the case against Nazi policy.

Consequences: Participation, with costs unresolved

The vote settled the immediate question: the United States was going to the Berlin Olympics. For athletes seeking selection, that outcome preserved the possibility of competing; for the Nazi regime, it meant that the boycott campaign had failed to prevent American participation. The decision did not establish that the allegations were unfounded. Rather, the proposal to investigate them had been rejected, and the Olympics proceeded without that inquiry.

Nor did the vote guarantee that every American crew could afford to travel. In 1936, the Washington rowers learned at Princeton that the Olympic organizers expected them to pay their own way or risk losing their place to second-place Penn. The crew’s working-class members could not finance the trip themselves. A rapid fundraising drive, including contributions from their hometowns, eventually produced a $5,000 certified check. Their passage to the Games thus depended on a separate mobilization of local support: the national decision to participate had ended one barrier, but not the economic one. The contrast makes the episode’s stakes concrete—formal access to an Olympic stage did not mean equal access to the resources needed to reach it.