Avery Brundage

Avery Brundage was the American Olympic Committee president whose defense of sending American athletes to the 1936 Berlin Olympics joined an appeal to sporting principle with a refusal to confront Nazi persecution. He argued that politics should not deprive athletes of the chance to compete, but his own prejudices and his acceptance of German assurances helped turn that principle into a defense of participation. In Berlin, he praised Germany as an embodiment of Olympic spirit; aboard the team’s ship, he exercised his authority by expelling swimmer Eleanor Holm for drinking and insubordination.

Olympic authority and the boycott campaign

As president of the American Olympic Committee, Brundage became a leading opponent of the effort to keep the United States out of the Berlin Games. He believed strongly that politics should play no role in sports and argued that it would be unfair to American athletes if German politics cost them the opportunity to compete on a world stage. The argument appealed to a real stake: thousands of young Americans were then competing for places on the Olympic team. But as conditions in Germany worsened, a declaration of political neutrality could also leave the consequences of persecution unaddressed.

Brundage had toured Germany in September 1934. The visit was quick and closely supervised: German hosts showed him athletic facilities and assured him that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. He returned to the United States confidently repeating that the Jewish outcry was much ado about nothing. The book presents his credulity not simply as the success of Nazi deception. Brundage’s views, it argues, appear to have been colored by the antisemitic prejudices of many Americans of his class, making him receptive to the assurances he had been given.

That prejudice was visible in the arguments he used. In 1929 he had written about the likely emergence of a master race, describing it as “a race physically strong, mentally alert and morally sound; a race not to be imposed upon.” During the boycott dispute, he cited the exclusion of Jews from the clubs he belonged to, as though that exclusion answered rather than reinforced the case against discrimination. He also repeatedly grouped Jews with communists and treated boycott supporters as part of the same general category. In public argument, he distinguished “Americans” from Jews, implying that Jewish Americans could not belong fully to the national community whose athletes he claimed to defend.

The vote and the decision to compete

Brundage worked with allies including Charles H. Sherrill, a former ambassador to Turkey who had attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally as Adolf Hitler’s personal guest. After his own visit to Germany and private meeting with Hitler, Sherrill returned with assurances that helped him deny mounting evidence of the treatment of Jews. He paired ostensibly pro-Jewish remarks with warnings that Olympic protest might provoke antisemitism in the United States. Brundage advanced a parallel reversal of responsibility, arguing that American sport should not become a vehicle for importing Old World hatreds. In this account, the alleged danger came to be attached to those protesting Nazi persecution rather than to the regime inflicting it. By late 1935, the narrative observes, Brundage had crossed the line between being deceived and being a deceiver, deliberately or not.

The boycott movement remained active in November 1935. On November 21, ten thousand demonstrators marched through New York under police escort, carrying a banner urging Americans to boycott the Games in Nazi Germany. The marchers—among them Jews, labor leaders, university professors, and Catholics—gathered in Madison Square Park to hear speakers describe Nazi actions, the concealment of those actions, and the moral cost of American participation. Their demonstration made visible the opposition Brundage and his allies sought to defeat.

On December 8, at the Commodore Hotel in New York, the Amateur Athletic Union voted on a proposal to send a three-man committee to Germany to investigate claims of Nazi mistreatment of Jews. The resolution failed, 58.25 votes to 55.75. With its defeat, the last serious American effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics was effectively over, and the United States was going to the Games. The result secured the opportunity to compete for American athletes and vindicated Brundage’s campaign; it also served Adolf Hitler, who was learning how readily foreign visitors could be reassured or misled.

The American team’s departure and arrival

When the athletes departed for Berlin aboard the Manhattan, Brundage and other American Olympic Committee officials gathered with them on the sundeck to unfurl the Olympic flag. More than ten thousand people crowded Pier 60 as the ship prepared to sail. The crowd chanted “Ray! Ray! Ray! For the USA!” while a band played and the Manhattan backed into the Hudson. The rowing team joined the chant from the rails. Brundage’s presence at this ceremony placed him at the center of a public display of national and Olympic unity, the same participation his campaign had made possible.

In Berlin, he appeared at the American athletes’ reception at Lehrter Station, where thousands of Germans had gathered and a locomotive marked with swastikas stood beside the platform. The procession carried the visitors through the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter den Linden, amid crowds waving Olympic, Nazi, and occasionally American flags. At the Rotes Rathaus, Brundage accepted the keys to the city and praised the German hosts: “No nation since ancient Greece has captured the true Olympic spirit as has Germany.” The declaration gave public form to his confidence in the welcome and assurances he had received. Yet the spectacle of cheering crowds and ceremonial hospitality existed alongside the persecution the boycott campaign had tried to force into view.

Discipline aboard the Manhattan

Brundage’s authority over the team was also personal and disciplinary. On the second day at sea, swimmer Eleanor Holm attended an all-night party on the first-class decks with journalists, drank heavily, and had to be carried back to her cabin in tourist class. Brundage summoned her after she came to and warned that he would remove her from the team if she continued drinking. Holm attended another party several nights later, and the team’s chaperone, Ada Sackett, caught her there. The following morning, after the ship’s surgeon examined the badly hungover swimmer, Brundage expelled her from the American team.

The expulsion provoked anger among Holm’s fellow athletes, and more than two hundred signed a petition seeking her reinstatement. Some believed journalists had set her up; others thought Brundage’s decision was less about drinking than about her defiance of him. The tension was sharpened by his instructions to the team on its first day out of New York: although the athlete handbook prohibited drinking, he had described eating, smoking, and drinking as matters of individual judgment. He later wrote that Holm had been removed partly for insubordination. Meanwhile, alcohol was available and used below decks: Chuck Day and other rowers held their own all-night parties. Brundage’s strict response to Holm therefore revealed not a uniform enforcement of abstinence, but the weight he gave to discipline and obedience.

The incident also had consequences beyond the team. It became a headline story in the United States, where press coverage was largely sympathetic to Holm, and the Associated Press hired her to report on the Berlin Olympics, with her articles to be ghostwritten. The episode thus complicated Brundage’s image as a guardian of orderly amateur sport: his decision removed an athlete from competition, while the resulting publicity helped create a different opportunity for her. Across the boycott dispute and the expulsion, his authority operated through both public argument and individual sanction. The book sets those actions beside one another without treating them as identical: one helped send the United States into a Nazi-hosted spectacle, while the other showed how Brundage’s insistence on discipline could determine an athlete’s place within the team.