The controversy over boycotting the 1936 Berlin Olympics

The controversy over boycotting the 1936 Berlin Olympics tested the claim that sport could remain separate from politics while Nazi Germany persecuted Jews and concealed that persecution from foreign observers. In the United States, the debate moved from protest marches and public argument to a close organizational vote; when the proposed investigation failed, the country’s participation was effectively settled.

Sporting Prestige and the Boycott Question

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing attracted national attention, major press coverage, and crowds of devoted fans. Yet the sport’s prestige was rooted in an eastern tradition shaped by elite British schools and universities. Western programs, including those of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington, had built a rivalry and attracted tens of thousands to their annual regattas, but still struggled for funding, national recognition, and well-heeled patrons. Royal Brougham saw a successful Washington crew as a way to shift the center of American rowing west and win respect for Seattle.

That contest over sporting standing formed part of the background to the Olympic debate, but the boycott question arose from a political crisis. Since Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, Americans had argued over whether sending athletes to Berlin would tacitly legitimize the regime. By 1935, the issue was no longer confined to a small circle of critics: in parts of the country, opposition to participation had intensified into organized public protest.

Evidence of Persecution and Public Protest

The reality obscured by the Games’ promises was visible in German rowing communities. The large Jewish Helvetia Rowing Club had been banned in 1933. Mixed clubs faced pressure to remove Jewish members, while smaller Jewish clubs remained vulnerable to raids, closure, and confiscation of equipment. Former crewmates turned away from one another; names disappeared from club lists, signs barred entry to shell houses, and doors were locked with their keys changed. Jewish owners’ houses around Grünau were boarded up or rented to German families for a fraction of their value. These exclusions made the assertion that sport stood apart from politics increasingly difficult to sustain.

On November 21, 1935, ten thousand anti-Nazi demonstrators marched through New York under police escort. The crowd proceeded down Eighth Avenue and east along Twenty-Third Street to Madison Square Park, carrying a banner calling for Americans to boycott the Games. Most of the demonstrators were Jews, labor leaders, university professors, and Catholics. More than twenty speakers described Nazi actions, the regime’s concealment of them, and the moral cost of American participation. The march showed that the boycott campaign had become a visible public movement shortly before the decision that would end it.

The Arguments Against a Boycott

Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, opposed a boycott in the name of Olympic principles and fairness to American athletes. He argued that German politics should not deprive competitors of their chance to appear on the world stage. But after touring Germany in September 1934 on a brief, closely supervised visit, he returned assured by Nazi hosts that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and publicly dismissed Jewish complaints as exaggerated.

The narrative also sets Brundage’s public position against evidence of his own prejudice. In 1929 he had written of a coming master race as “a race physically strong, mentally alert and morally sound; a race not to be imposed upon.” During the boycott fight, he pointed out that Jews were excluded from clubs to which he belonged, repeatedly grouped Jews with communists, and spoke as if Jews and Americans were separate categories. He described the protest as an effort to use “clean American sport” to transplant “Old World hatreds” to the United States. In this formulation, the danger was recast as the boycott campaign rather than the Nazi persecution it opposed.

Charles H. Sherrill, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and another important ally of Brundage, had also toured Germany. He attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally as Adolf Hitler’s personal guest and met with him privately. Sherrill returned with assurances that minimized the evidence of what was happening to Jews, while warning American Jews against the Olympic agitation. The account presents both men’s opposition as more than a simple defense of athletic neutrality: their assurances helped deny or displace the evidence that had prompted the boycott movement.

The Vote and Its Consequences

On December 8, 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 Nazi maltreatment of Jews. The vote failed, 58.25 to 55.75. Its defeat effectively ended the last serious American effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics. The United States would attend; what remained was the selection of athletes to carry its flag into Nazi Germany.

The decision was a victory for American athletes seeking a place at the Games and for Brundage and his allies, who had fought to prevent a boycott. It was also, the book observes, a victory for Adolf Hitler, who was learning how readily foreign visitors and institutions could be deceived. The contrast between that political outcome and the practical conditions of participation remained sharp. Washington’s working-class rowers, unlike the heirs and industrial scions associated with eastern crews, could not pay their own way. After the Olympic rowing committee demanded five thousand dollars for the crew’s trip, Seattle residents and hometown supporters raised the sum, including contributions from Joe Rantz’s Sequim and the other rowers’ communities. The boycott controversy had ended at the level of national policy, but the Games still exposed who had the resources to compete—and who needed a city to make participation possible.