American Olympic Committee

The American Olympic Committee was the national organization responsible for sending American athletes to the 1936 Berlin Games, but its shortage of funds turned qualification into a financial crisis for the victorious University of Washington crew. Its inability to guarantee the rowers’ passage exposed how Olympic participation depended not only on results in competition but also on access to money—and, in this case, on a citywide effort to find it.

National role and financial strain

The committee’s predicament emerged after the final Olympic trial at Lake Carnegie. The race drew approximately ten thousand spectators, while Royal Brougham broadcast it live to fifty stations on the CBS network. Al Ulbrickson’s crew had won its place through competition; the unresolved question was whether the organization could afford to send it to Berlin. The distinction between athletic qualification and financial eligibility became suddenly consequential.

The shortage was not confined to rowing. That week, swimmers, fencers, and dozens of other teams were being asked to pay or partially pay their own fares. The American Olympic Committee had come up short of funds, and the scale of the problem was broad enough that athletes across the national delegation faced requests for contributions. For the Washington rowers, however, the news was especially stark: until the crisis surfaced, neither the committee nor the rowing committee had indicated that the winning crew might not be sent.

The Washington ultimatum

On the night of the trial, Henry Penn Burke brought Ulbrickson, George Pocock, and Ray Eckman, Washington’s athletic director, into a room at the Princeton Inn. Burke told them that if the crew wanted to go to Berlin, its members would have to pay their own way. The demand was not merely that the university try to raise a contribution: Washington had to produce five thousand dollars by the end of the week or Penn, the second-place finisher, would take its place. Burke said that the committee did not have the money and pointed to other teams that had raised private funds for earlier Olympics.

The proposed solution ignored the difference between the Washington athletes and the wealthier programs invoked as examples. Ulbrickson knew that Yale could raise money more readily and that California’s 1932 trip had been a much shorter journey, from Berkeley to Los Angeles. The Washington university had already scraped together funds from alumni and citizens to get the crew east for the regattas at Poughkeepsie and Princeton. Its rowers were working-class Americans, not heirs able to cover an international passage themselves. The ultimatum therefore made the prospect of Olympic representation depend on resources that the athletes did not possess.

Ulbrickson asked how much was required and how quickly it was needed. Burke’s answer—five thousand dollars by week’s end—gave the crisis a precise deadline. The threat to substitute Penn made that sum the immediate price of keeping Washington’s hard-won place, rather than a general appeal for help that could wait until after the trials.

The Seattle fundraising response

That same evening, Ulbrickson met with Brougham and George Varnell. Within minutes, they were preparing headlines and special columns for the next day’s newspapers. Eckman called his assistant, Carl Kilgore, who began contacting people at home; by 10 p.m. Seattle time, dozens of civic leaders had been enlisted and a campaign plan was taking shape. The response linked the crew’s Olympic place to the civic pride Brougham had long sought to promote: a team from the West would need its community behind it to reach Berlin.

The following morning, Seattleites encountered alarming headlines and radio bulletins, and volunteers set about raising the money. Coeds on summer break went door to door with tin cans. Students sold newly printed lapel tags for fifty cents. Radio announcers interrupted regular programming to appeal for donations, while I. F. Dix of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph became campaign chairman. Telegrams went to chambers of commerce throughout the state, and more than a thousand letters were sent to American Legion posts and other civic and fraternal organizations. The drive made a national committee’s funding shortfall a local, practical task: gather small gifts, solicit institutions, and do it before the deadline.

Contributions arrived in sharply varied amounts. The Seattle Times started the effort with $500; Standard Oil gave $50; the Hide-Away Beer Parlor gave $5; an anonymous donor sent $1; and Cecil Blogg, one of Hiram Conibear’s former coxswains, contributed $5. Support also came from the rowers’ home communities: Montesano and Bellingham each sent $50, Olympia sent $299.25, and Sequim sent $75 for Joe Rantz. Volunteers sold $1,523 worth of tags on the first day. By the end of the second, T. F. Davies, chairman of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, had airmailed Ulbrickson a certified check for $5,000. The collected amount met the precise sum Burke had demanded.

Resolution and significance

Ulbrickson did not wait for the campaign’s full public story to unfold before acting. After speaking with Brougham and Varnell, he returned to Burke and the committee and announced that Washington did have the money to pay its way to Berlin. He accepted an invitation from the New York Athletic Club to train on Long Island Sound, then left Princeton before awkward questions could arise about how the funds had been secured so quickly. The boys were kept largely unaware of the shortage; they went to bed believing the arrangements would be all right and prepared to sail on the SS Manhattan on July 14.

Once the funding was in place, the rowers were officially recognized as the U.S. eight-oared Olympic rowing team. At the Lincoln Hotel, they signed in with the American Olympic Committee and joined the other Olympians. The late-arriving money from Seattle had thus carried them across a threshold the trial victory alone could not cross: from successful contenders to members of the team bound for Germany.

The episode shows the committee not simply as the body that assembled an Olympic delegation, but as an institution constrained by scarcity and reliant on outside support. Its funding problem threatened to transfer a winning crew’s place to a rival, while the solution came through a fast-moving partnership among university figures, newspaper and radio publicity, local organizations, students, businesses, and small donors. The crew’s passage was secured, but only after a community supplied the resources the national organization could not provide.