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Hitler’s Olympics, Part 9: A Plague on Both Your Houses.
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- [00:04]
Malcolm Gladwell
The thing I'm really, really interested in is the kind of way the case was received around the country and the world. That's where I want to get to. But. Okay, but starting with. So this train that's going to run right out there is coming from where? From Chattanooga.
- [00:20]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
Right.
- [00:21]
Malcolm Gladwell
Going where to Nashville? Memphis. Going to Memphis, Yeah. I'm in a little town in northeast Alabama called Scottsboro, sitting in an old African Methodist Episcopal church built in 1878 by former slaves. The church is now a museum. And Ben Nadaff Haffrey and I are talking to the director, Tom Reedy, about what happened on the Chattanooga to Memphis train at the peak of the Great Depression.
- [00:48]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
It's 1931. People are hoboing all over the country, and on the morning of March 25, the nine defendants, along with two young ladies from Huntsville, along with dozens of others. We'll never know who else was on that train between here and Chattanooga. There was an altercation on the train. And at Stevenson, which is a town about 20 miles from here, six white guys were thrown off the train by a group of African Americans. This is probably one part of the story everybody agrees on that. Six came off and these other guys stayed on.
- [01:30]
Malcolm Gladwell
There's a fight?
- [01:31]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
Yeah, there was a fight over space.
- [01:35]
Malcolm Gladwell
This is Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.
- [01:38]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
So the white guys that got off the train went back to these agent at the Stevenson depot and said, hey, we just got thrown off this train, which they were illegally on.
- [01:51]
Malcolm Gladwell
Right.
- [01:51]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
They were unticketed, but. And there's all these black guys. Of course, they didn't call them black guys. And, oh, by the way, two white women.
- [02:00]
Malcolm Gladwell
We have white women and young black men together on a train. The station master at Stevenson depot calls ahead to the Paint Rock station.
- [02:10]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
By the time they get to Paint Rock, there's anywhere from 100 to 150 men, horses, ropes, waiting for the train.
- [02:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
Everyone's pulled off the train. The two women say they've been raped. The nine young men, some of them just kids, 12 and 13 years old, get shipped directly to Scottsboro, which is the county seat. By the time they get there, another mob is waiting.
- [02:39]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
And there's this wonderful Atticus Finch moment in the story where the sheriff of Scottsboro mat wan, comes out with his shotgun and says, the first one that tries to cross me is going to get their head blown off. And that apparently held the crowd back a little bit because I guess they believed him. And two weeks later, on April 6 and three hours after they met their attorney, the Trial started.
- [03:16]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the ninth episode in our series about Hitler's Olympics, the Games behind the Games. We've spent the last eight episodes exploring the many rationalizations, self justifications and delusions triggered by the Berlin Olympics. Berlin kicked off cognitive dissonance on an international scale. Hitler's wave of antisemitism focused the world's attention on Germany. But in 1931, something happened across the ocean from Germany that held the world's attention in the same way. The Scottsboro Boys trial. In this, our series finale, let's turn the clock back to 1931. The Scottsboro trial was a farce. There was no evidence of rape, and one of the women would later retract her accusation. Neither fact made a difference.
- [04:21]
Unnamed Historian or Narrator
The nine Negro youths are hurriedly arrested, promptly marched off to Scottsboro for trial. Six days later, they are indicted on charges of assault. Seven of them are sentenced by justice John C. Anderson to hang by the neck until dead. Subsequent motion for a new trial is overruled as the Alabama Supreme Court affirms the convictions.
- [04:43]
Malcolm Gladwell
This kind of thing had been happening in the south for years. But something about Scottsboro and the brazenness of all white juries saying guilty, guilty, guilty, really touched a nerve.
- [04:55]
Unnamed Historian or Narrator
Thousands of telegrams pour into Alabama from all over the world asserting that the Negroes had been denied a fair trial. The case is finally carried to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court of the United States.
- [05:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
There was public pressure, there were appeals, retrials.
- [05:17]
Unnamed Historian or Narrator
They tell you what it's all about.
- [05:19]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
Everybody's writing about it. Everybody knows the Scottsboro Voice. People are starting to have radios in their house. But it's just remarkable how fast the word did spread on this.
- [05:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
Reedy was sitting inside the old church as we spoke, and behind him there was a poster. It was a list of names linked in some way to the public campaign to get justice for the Scottsboro Boys. There was Ida B. Wells, the great African American activist, Jimmy Cagney, one of the biggest names in Hollywood. And then Albert Einstein.
- [05:52]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
Einstein was in Germany when they arrested. And he, in the summer of 1931, wrote a letter with a bunch of German scientists to the Governor Miller, saying we. Well, they were. They were intellectuals.
- [06:06]
Malcolm Gladwell
They called them.
- [06:07]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
So German intellectuals demand the release of the Scottsboro Boys because they're. They're innocent.
- [06:15]
Malcolm Gladwell
And Einstein. Einstein is like physicist living in Germany, right. Who, yeah, is somehow so moved by the press accounts of this.
- [06:29]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
Right.
- [06:29]
Malcolm Gladwell
Two years before Hitler became Chancellor. Thousands of Germans were out in the streets protesting American white supremacy, and they.
- [06:38]
Ben Nadaff Haffrey
Had people throwing rocks through the American Embassy with notes taped onto them. That was a slave. They shall not die.
- [06:46]
Malcolm Gladwell
And that is why Ben and I were in Scottsboro.
- [06:49]
Unnamed Contributor
I remember when you sent me an email with one line and it was like, we're going to do an episode on Scottsboro. And I was like, why would we talk about Scottsboro? And then I realized what year it was and what happened the year after.
- [07:04]
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, right, 1932. An Olympic year as well. And where were those games held? I think you can guess where this is headed. If you asked someone to name a genius, virtually everyone would give you the same Albert Einstein. The genius of all geniuses. He's most famous for his general and special theories of relativity, and even children today know his renowned equation E MC squared. And yet, there's one thing that even the great Albert Einstein would have trouble understanding today. Mattresses. Think about it. There are so many styles, so many sizes, so many companies selling them, and so many seemingly good deals this time of year. It's enough to make your brain hurt. Fortunately, there's one simple thing you can do. To understand everything you need to know about choosing a mattress, visit the Saatva blog. It has entries like how to test a mattress, what makes a luxury mattress, Best Cyber Monday deals, and even the best mattress for sex. Plus loads of other buying guides. Whatever question you have about mattresses, you'll find the answer at the Saatva blog. It is, in a word, genius. Visit the Saatva sleep blog@saatva.com blog that's s AATVA blog.
- [08:39]
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- [09:52]
Malcolm Gladwell
In April of 1923, a real estate developer from California named Billy Garland traveled to Rome for the annual meeting of the International Olympic Committee. Garland was good friends with Avery Brundage. They were cut from the same cloth. Men from humble beginnings with outsized ambition, dreamers, builders. But where Brundage was grim and angry, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Lake Michigan, Garland was all sunny optimism and charm. Billy, everyone called him Billy, had life force. Billy grew up poor and married money. Billy was the embodiment of Los Angeles, a city in the 1920s, half a million strong and growing by the day. A city on the verge of stardom. Billy watched the sunrise every morning over the San Bernardino Mountains, but never bothered to look to see if it set at night.
- [10:47]
Barry Siegel
Louisiana was really controlled and run by a coterie of a shadow government comprised of bankers, financiers, but really above all, the real estate men.
- [10:59]
Malcolm Gladwell
Barry Siegel, the author of a wonderful book about Billy Garland. Dreamers and schemers, of which Billy Garland was premier.
- [11:08]
Barry Siegel
The prince of realtors.
- [11:10]
Malcolm Gladwell
Billy owned huge swaths of downtown Los Angeles. His best friend was the publisher of the LA Times, the most powerful man in the city. His brothers in the shadow government kept out of the spotlight. Not Billy.
- [11:24]
Barry Siegel
Billy was the front man, a very outgoing personality, making speeches, arriving at the railroad station press conferences, writing columns of his own for the LA Times. Always, always promoting, Promoting the city, promoting the future.
- [11:49]
Malcolm Gladwell
So in 1923, Billy sails to Italy for his biggest pitch yet to the International Olympic Committee. The IOC was meeting that year in the old Capitol building across from the Forum, a venue worthy of a group obsessed with antiquity. To start the day, the King of Italy said a few words and the king is opening things. And like, here's this guy from. I mean, from what their perspective must have been the middle of nowhere.
- [12:20]
Barry Siegel
Absolutely. They literally were asking him where Los Angeles is.
- [12:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
What's his trump card?
- [12:27]
Barry Siegel
Hollywood. By that time, Hollywood films were widely popular all around the world. And that's one of the things he was asked at that meeting, Is LA anywhere near Hollywood? And Billy was smart enough to say, yes, LA's a suburb of Hollywood.
- [12:50]
Malcolm Gladwell
He understood that the emerging glamour of the region could play to his advantage.
- [12:57]
Barry Siegel
Yes.
- [12:58]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, I'm just thinking back to the ioc, though, because the IOC really is. It's like every faded aristocrat in Europe is.
- [13:06]
Barry Siegel
Yes.
- [13:07]
Malcolm Gladwell
Every fuddy duddy you can find with their wax mustaches is around the table. And then this, like this, this kind of charismatic, wide open, extroverted Californian shows up. I'm just imagining it's such a fantastic scene.
- [13:25]
Barry Siegel
I imagine it too. And I think that's part of how he was effective. I mean, he was a breath of fresh air. He knew how to talk to them. The idea when he rose to give his talk, his pitch, he's pitching America. He's pitching the culture of America, which is still. Which is strange and exotic to them.
- [13:47]
Malcolm Gladwell
They're there amidst all of this sort of 18th century grandeur. And the American stands up and says, there's this brand new country across the ocean. You guys need to go there next. Kind of. This kind of. Yeah, it's.
- [14:03]
Barry Siegel
And that's exactly. That's an exact sort of exactly how he put it too.
- [14:07]
Malcolm Gladwell
He says, if the Games are to be truly international in character, they must also be held in other parts of the universe. The Olympics should come to Los Angeles. The room is silent. No one says a word. Then one delegate stands up and says, so moved. Let us take our beloved creation to the shores of the Pacific. Someone else seconds the motion. It goes to a vote. It carries unanimously. The whole group celebrated. At the Coronal palace, home to the country's royal family, Billy spotted a bald man speaking passionately to a group of onlookers. It was Mussolini, the newly installed fascist leader of Italy. Billy wandered over, shook his hand. The next day, Billy had an audience with Pope Pius XI at the Vatican. Pius said how much he believed in the Olympic tradition. And Billy kissed his ring. Billy convinces the IOC to bring its temple of human idealism to the United States. And just as the whole dazzling spectacle is about to launch, nine black kids in northern Alabama get swept up in a miscarriage of justice so outrageous that it sparks a wave of protest around the world. Marches in Germany, South Africa, Cuba. And the world finds itself in the same position as it would four years later on the eve of the Berlin Olympics, contemplating a pure competition in an impure place. With one difference. No one ever threatened to boycott the Los Angeles Games.
- [15:50]
Unnamed Historian or Narrator
Mr. President, in the name of the President of the United States, I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Los angeles, celebrating the 10th Olympiad of the modern era.
- [16:15]
Unnamed Contributor
Well, so if the world is upset about Scottsboro in 1931, then why is there not a boycott of the LA Games in 32?
- [16:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
I think, you know, the obvious reason is the nature of American transgressions in civil rights are on the surface, so different from the nature of Nazi transgressions. American transgressions are 300 years old. They're embedded in the kind of culture of the country, and I can't stress this enough, they involve black people and it's just, it is simply the case and continues to be the case in some sense that a transgression against a black person is not considered the same as a transgression against a white person.
- [17:04]
Unnamed Contributor
Part of the difference is that Nazism is a new thing, whereas what's happening in Alabama is just not new at all.
- [17:09]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, what's important is it's because it wasn't, it wasn't a one off. Right. Why does America get go up in the black community in particular, get so up in arms about George Floyd? Because it had happened too many times. Right. And Scott's pro is kind of like that. There's been this steady drumbeat of this kind of stuff coming out of the south and then it's, you know, the world seizes on that because they're like, can't keep doing this. It wasn't system malfunction, it was system function. And that's a lot more kind of outrageous. I don't think you can make sense of what happened with the Scottsboro boys unless you take a step back and look at the Alabama Constitution. I mean, look at the kind of legal infrastructure that was in place in Alabama at the time. So why did the LA Games escape moral scrutiny? It's puzzling. Maybe it's as simple as the fact that the world holds America to a different standard than everyone else. If you're a young upstart of a country, you get away with more. Or maybe the world cares less about crimes against black people than it does about crimes against white people. Or maybe the Nazis were making the Olympics so much about Nazism that it was really easy to see the contradiction between the Games and its host in a way that didn't seem as obvious with the LA Olympics. Or maybe it's all three. But Scottsboro was not some strange outlying event. It touched a raw nerve because people understood that it was typical. It was how the south worked. Discrimination was baked right into American law. I called up a law professor at the University of Alabama, Susan Hamel, and the first thing she brought up was Alabama's state constitution at the time, which had been rewritten in 1901. With one thing in mind there, there.
- [19:06]
Unnamed Law Professor
Was no doubt as to what the intent was.
- [19:12]
Malcolm Gladwell
As one delegate said, they were driven by, quote, the necessity of relieving the black belt of the incubus resting on it. Another delegate was more blunt.
- [19:23]
Unnamed Law Professor
We are here to get rid of the N I G G e R.
- [19:28]
Malcolm Gladwell
The 15th Amendment to the US Constitution bars states from denying people the right to vote. So the framers of the Alabama Constitution devised a bunch of workarounds. First, a poll tax. You had to pay A$50 to vote, which was a lot of money back then. Right there. You've gotten rid of a lot of sharecroppers. But they kept going, adding every obstacle they could think of.
- [19:52]
Unnamed Law Professor
They had to own property. There were literacy tests, and there was the overall discretion of the white voting registrars. The voting registrars in terms of who was actually registering folks had a great deal of discretion. If you had a white person that kind of met the requirements, but also maybe didn't, they could get waved through.
- [20:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
The 1901 Alabama Constitution would end up being the longest constitution in the world. 388,882 words, about 850 times longer than the US Constitution.
- [20:38]
Unnamed Law Professor
When African Americans went to register after the 1901 Constitution was ratified, they were just turned away.
- [20:46]
Malcolm Gladwell
In 1900, there were 181,471 African American men of voting age. After the constitution, fewer than 3,000 of those men could vote.
- [20:58]
Unnamed Law Professor
You know, we did not have a black electorate in this state worth speaking of until the 1970s.
- [21:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
It gets worse. In 1902, a black janitor named Jackson Giles files suit against the state. Jackson says, I meet all the requirements. I can read, I understand the Constitution, I paid my poll tax, I own property. But they still won't let me vote. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court in 1903, where writing for the majority, the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the greatest legal minds the Supreme Court has ever produced, writes, and I'm not making this up. The defendant, Mr. Jackson, alleges that the state of Alabama has constructed a voting system that is in open violation of the Constitution of the US but he is asking to be registered to vote under the very same rules that he says are an open violation of the Constitution of the United States. If we rule in his favor, we are complicit in the violation. It's one of the all time Great Supreme Court Catch 22s.
- [22:12]
Unnamed Law Professor
Justice Holmes disingenuously said, oh, if Giles, if Jackson Giles wants a remedy, he needs to seek his member of Congress to do something about it. But Jackson Giles had been denied the right to vote for any member of Congress.
- [22:30]
Malcolm Gladwell
Mr. Giles, if you don't like the system that keeps you from voting, then vote to change it.
- [22:36]
Unnamed Law Professor
The US Supreme Court, like the rest of the country, just wanted to wash their Hands of, if I can put it this way, the dirty South.
- [22:48]
Malcolm Gladwell
Now we can understand what happened in Scottsboro. The jury pool in Alabama is drawn from the voting pool. And since the voters are basically all white, then the juries are all white. Which means that when nine black kids are accused of some bogus crime on the Chattanooga to Memphis train, those nine kids are out of luck. All told, the Scottsboro Boys would end up serving more than a hundred years behind bars for something that never happened. And in Giles v. Harris, the Supreme Court of the United States signs off on the whole arrangement. And what? So do you study that case in at law school in Alabama?
- [23:30]
Unnamed Law Professor
No. Isn't that a shame?
- [23:33]
Malcolm Gladwell
Scottsboro was an embarrassment, an outrage, exposing the very dark heart of the country that was about to host the purest of athletic spectacles. If the world shouldn't have gone to Berlin in 1936 for moral reasons, then the world shouldn't have gone to Los Angeles in 1932 either. Where can you go? In the lead up to the Berlin Games, a group known as the Jewish Labor Committee set out to solve the problem of what to do about impure places and pure competitions. The organizers were the same people who had been up in arms over the Scottsboro Boys four years earlier, who helped fund their legal defense, who were fighting for the rights of working Americans. Their hands were clean. They called their games the World Labor Athletic Carnival. It was held in New York City on Randall's island in August of 1936, overlapping with the last two days of the Berlin Olympics. Invitations went out. The carnival will function as a show of protest against the iron heel of Nazism. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia signed up to be co chaired. The Governor of New York agreed to hand out prizes. Proceeds from the event will go to supporting the anti Nazi movement and eventually to helping Jews escape from Eastern Europe. The Labor Games represent the first solution to the dilemma of the Olympics. Carve out a little corner of ideological purity. Don't compromise. Align your political values with the ethic of amateur sport. Be an absolutist. Ed Gordon was there. He was the winner of the long jump in the 1932 Olympics. George Veraff, the so called jumping janitor, was there too. His gold medal jump beat the winning mark in Berlin by a full inch and a half. The women's 40 yard dash was won by a member of the dressmakers union, Wanda Olzewska, another Olzewska, Mitzi competed with her on the winning relay team. When a reporter asked Mitzi how she trained, she Responded? Oh, picketing and throwing stones through windows and nobody came to watch. The stands were half empty. Why? Well, the Games were supposed to draw their support from the labor movement, but the Jewish Labor Committee was an anti communist socialist group, so some communists felt left out and stayed home. Then came a second disagreement, this time between the American Socialist Party, the Old Guard, and some upstart progressives led by Norman Thomas. Let me just read to you from a history of the Labor Games by Edward Shapiro. The struggle came to a head at the party's annual convention in 1936 in Cleveland. When the Old Guard left, the party, took the magazine the New Leader with them and created the Social Democratic Federation. The New Leader viewed Randall's island as virtually a New York Social Democratic Federation event, copiously discussing its progress from its inception in May through the Games themselves in August. The pro Norman Thomas socialist call, in contrast, merely printed a pro forma announcement of the Games. More to its liking was a track and gymnastic demonstration on July 4, 1936 in Taborville, Ohio, near Cleveland, sponsored by the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America, the Czechoslovak Labor Gymnastic Union, the American Workingmen's, so called of New York, the Workingmen's Gymnastics association, and the Workers Sports League of America. This is the problem with the pursuit of purity. At a certain point it starts to get absurd because the Communists get upset at the socialists and then the socialists get upset at each other. And sooner or later, your athletic spectacle that was intended to showcase the greatest talent in the world is in Taberville, Ohio, under the aegis of the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America. I mean, with all due respect to the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America. Who wants to watch that? So what's the solution? Option 2. Take that absolutism down a notch. Be willing to compromise. Remember Charles Sherrill, the American delegate who fought so hard for America to stay in the Berlin Olympics? Just before the Games, someone sent him a news clipping about the killing of a Jewish footballer who had apparently been dragged off the field by Nazis in the middle of a match. Sheryl wrote back your Sept. 23 letter about the Prague Press story of a Jewish football player killed at Ratisbor, Silesia, arrived today. If true, it is as bad as Negro lynchings in our South. Sherrill had ideals he was perfectly willing to compromise around the edges. Yes, the American south is a nasty place, but so what? Show me a country without nasty places. You have to hold a pure competition in an impure place because there aren't any pure places. Here's how Cheryl finishes The letter answering your clipping. Let me ask you what you would have said if any foreign team had boycotted our Los Angeles 1932 games because of our Negro lynchings in the South. Oh, right, the endless boycott. Ben and I thought about this.
- [29:24]
Unnamed Contributor
I think you're right that probably if you boycott 36, you also have to boycott 32. And then you're looking at there is no Olympics in 1940 because it was planned for Tokyo. And then obviously World War II cancels that and not in 44 either. So then that's a huge stretch of time. It's what? What is that? It's 20 years. 20 years without the Olympics.
- [29:45]
Malcolm Gladwell
28 to 48. 48.
- [29:48]
Unnamed Contributor
So could the Olympic movement have survived 20 years of no Olympics? Probably not.
- [29:54]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. So it starts to seem like you can only keep the Olympics alive at a cost. After the Berlin Games, the Germans put out a report, and there's a quote on the title page. It goes like this. Sporting and chivalrous competition awakens the best human qualities. It does not sever, but on the contrary, unites the opponents in mutual understanding and reciprocal respect. It also helps to strengthen the bonds of peace between the nations. May the Olympic flame therefore never be extinguished. Signed Adolf Hitler. That's where you end up when you casually mix the pure and impure. Your ideals in the mouth of a monster. Idealism does not survive the journey to an impure place. So where does all this confusion leave you? Option three, Billy Garland. In the fall of 1918, Los Angeles was in a rough patch. The war in Europe was taking its toll on the economy. The 1918 flu, which had claimed millions of lives around the world, had shut down the city streets. Tourism, the great lifeblood of Los Angeles, was at a standstill. Billy Garland and his friends needed a plan to get the city back on track. So Billy calls a meeting in his office, gathers together the power brokers.
- [31:27]
Barry Siegel
They were meeting there basically to try to figure out ways to promote Los Angeles above all to avoid future lulls in business.
- [31:38]
Malcolm Gladwell
Barry Siegel again.
- [31:40]
Barry Siegel
And somewhere in that meeting came up the idea of bidding for and staging the Olympics as a way to put LA on the map and draw investors.
- [31:51]
Malcolm Gladwell
The third way to resolve the dilemma of the Olympic Games is just to be a realist. You say, whatever. Let's not complicate things. The Games are really useful, and if you play our cards right, we can all get rich. So Billy got his Games. Here he is announcing them.
- [32:11]
Billy Garland
Conceived in the spirit of the purest sportsmanship, 7 1/2 centuries or more before Christ These Olympic Games are today the one living heritage handed down to earth from those different times.
- [32:26]
Malcolm Gladwell
Billy didn't write those lines, believe me, someone at IOC headquarters in Switzerland did. But I'm guessing this is the part Billy did write.
- [32:36]
Billy Garland
Many thousands of visitors to these Games will come to Los Angeles and California from all parts of the globe and from every portion of our country. Let me add that California recognizes her responsibility as her. The stranger within her gate will be treated to that cordial hospitality and welcome so traditional of our wonderful state.
- [32:57]
Malcolm Gladwell
Bring the kids. Stay at one of my hotels.
- [33:00]
Billy Garland
Come then to California, host of the world, for the 16 day period beginning on July 30th, to witness for yourselves the ultimate and highest manifestations of modern sportsmanship known to mankind.
- [33:18]
Malcolm Gladwell
Billy builds a magnificent stadium, the Coliseum, just south of downtown. He builds the first true athletes village up in Baldwin Hills. Billy recruits the two biggest movie stars of the day, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, to be his spokespeople. Billy creates a spectacle. Billy even makes a profit on the Games. A million dollars. A few years later, Billy would be all in favor of the Olympics in Berlin, but not because he'd performed some elaborate political analysis. Please, more like, love the Kaiserhof Hotel. Can we have one in Hollywood? How much do the Nazis look to 32 for kind of inspiration on. I mean, they take that kind of. That notion of the Games as a spectacle and run with it.
- [34:08]
Barry Siegel
They were inspired by the 32 Olympics? Very much so. It was 32 Olympics were a model, model for them in that way. Billy Garland and his gang, you know, showed them the way.
- [34:21]
Malcolm Gladwell
There was a point deep into this series where I found myself more and more sympathetic to Billy Garland, to the guy who just made things work. Ben never went that far. We argued about it. I started this whole investigation way back when believing that we should have boycotted in 36. Now I'm not sure. I'm not sure I agree. And now I think I'm glad we went. Everyone involved in this debate back then and everyone involved in debate like this today, at the core of all of it is everyone takes sports really, really, really, really, really, really seriously. And I kind of realized halfway through that I'm one of those people.
- [35:05]
Unnamed Contributor
You're a person who thinks sports really matter.
- [35:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. I didn't think I was. I was like. I thought I was the guy who said, why are we spending all this time and attention arguing about, you know, running a race against each other? And then I'm like, wait a minute. I am that person who cares passionately about the People running how to race each other with your.
- [35:23]
Unnamed Contributor
With your foil. Me as a person who is just sort of like, unable to recognize even an Olympic level runner.
- [35:30]
Malcolm Gladwell
And so, like, you know, the question we have to ask ourselves is if we want a boycott in 36, do we want. Do we really want an Olympics? Because the only way to have an Olympics is to. Is to hold your nose from time to time. And I realized, oh, actually, I think I'm. I think I would be willing to hold my nose.
- [35:49]
Unnamed Contributor
I think, though I feel in some ways like the less intellectually curious member of this team, because I started feeling like we should boycott the 1936 Games, and I still feel like we shouldn't have gone. So I don't know what I was really investigating then, having not, I guess, maybe just like, to confirm my position. I think if you think sports and the Olympics really matter, which admittedly, I. I do love the Olympics, but I'm not that person. I think if you think sports really, really, really matter, then it's even more incumbent on you to boycott the 1936 Olympics. Because the myth that everyone buys into is that this is a festival celebrating the best of what makes us human. Everybody's going to come together and try their hardest and have a defining moment of their life in a place with a government that can then catch all of that moral authority and beauty and excellence and put it in the service of their own project, which is the defilement of what it is to be a person. Like one of the most inhumane things in the 20th century. So if you really think that sports matters that much, then I think it's incumbent on you to not lend it to that project. And not all. In a way, this is just a false question because the IOC 100% could have moved the Olympics.
- [37:14]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. So I. I am incredibly skeptical of the idea that. That a boycott of Berlin would have in any way have accelerated our opposition to Nazism. My guess is the opposite would have happened, that we would have said, okay, we've set our piece. We don't like the man, and we're not going to go and participate in these little games. And, like, it strikes me you could make a completely alternate scenario that disallows the Germans to feel like, okay, the rest of the world is like, that's. You guys don't like what we're doing, we're just going to go off on, you know, be even worse. I don't know. I'm not. I'm just not. I don't buy that premise about I never have bought that premise about symbolic acts of protest.
- [37:59]
Unnamed Contributor
But don't you think that the record shows that having the Olympics in Berlin in 36 is helpful to the Nazis? Like Goebbels says, this is a really big breakthrough for us and foreign currency floods into the country.
- [38:11]
Malcolm Gladwell
I think they're. They're happy that they got away with it. Yeah, but, Ben, on the scale of things that were happening in the 1930s that had an effect on the progress of Nazism, this is so far down the list.
- [38:25]
Unnamed Contributor
Yeah, you're right. But I still feel like the boycott makes sense. And I agree it's incredibly low down on the list of things that you should do in the 1930s to combat Nazism. But, like, why wouldn't you do all the things like it. It makes sense to do.
- [38:39]
Malcolm Gladwell
We're not doing any other things. We're not doing the other things. This is why I get so. I lose patience with this kind of precious view of our moral responsibilities, because it misses the point. If you spend more than five minutes taking a look at the way that Dorothy Thompson does and examining what's going on there, you realize this is a deeply evil man who we need to do something about. Right. Something real about. And my point is, boycott in the Games is not real. It's just. I'm sorry, it's a substitute for actual behavior. And.
- [39:16]
Unnamed Contributor
But it doesn't need to be a substitute. It's a substitute if you take that action in bad faith.
- [39:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
But I think. I think any kind of useful reading of human nature suggests that 9 times out of 10 symbolic actions discharge our responsibility. They don't turbocharge them.
- [39:33]
Unnamed Contributor
I 100% agree with that.
- [39:35]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
- [39:35]
Unnamed Contributor
However, what is the connection between the, like, daily reality that most of us live and the systems level action? And the answer can't be that there is no connection, that one of these things happens in, like, the ether, and the other one happens on the ground. And we can do whatever we want on the ground because the thing is, in the ether is going to take care of itself. Like, there is some obscure bridge between those two levels of existence. And it might be that you yourself run for office and then try and change things. But, like, that isn't the only way you can affect these issues. And one of the ways, plausibly many boycotts, absolute nonsense. A boycott of the 36 games based on what the Olympics do for the Nazis, like that one probably would have meant something. There are two sets of morally disingenuous actions. One that actually happened and one that we're describing that could have happened and I would just prefer that one the one of not going maybe for like complicated reasons and then hope that it puts the right kind of pressure on this sort of ethereal systems level realm which is not taking the action it needs to do.
- [40:42]
Malcolm Gladwell
Ben and I do not agree. Three options. Absolutism, soft idealism, realism. Are you going to fight compromise? Shrug is your true north. Dorothy Thompson, Avery Brundage or Billy Garland? The absolutists end up in Taberville playing to an empty stadium. The quasi idealists end up with Hitler stealing their thunder. And the realists give us the games but with so much Coca Cola and memorial T shirts and mixed use urban construction that we forget why we wanted the Olympics in the first place. The last interview Ben and I did for this series was in Los Angeles at UCLA with Millen Tiff, that wonderful triple jumper who knew Jesse Owens. It was hot. One of those hazy Los Angeles mornings. A helicopter was hovering somewhere overhead. We were standing on the track at Drake Stadium, right by the long jump pit. There were a handful of athletes milling about. And then a young woman came running past us. She was doing 200 meter intervals, halfway around the track, hard with a jog recovery, around and around and around. And she was magical. Ben's not a track and field obsessive like I am. I wanted Ben to see what I was seeing. I'm gonna see how beautiful runners are. I don't know if she's gonna run for us, but if you see her sprinting, it's just like, it's just like unlike any running you. I don't know who she is, but she's a real runner and she watched her run. Just gorgeous. And she was flying. Most people have seen runners at high school track meets or maybe world class athletes on television. But to really appreciate this kind of performance, you have to witness it in real life up close. Like we were at eye level, five feet away. Then you can see the full beauty of what a human being can do, propelling themselves with such elegance and effortlessness. Just the tap, tap, tap of their shoes landing lightly on the track. You can just tell when someone's, I don't know who she is. Then Milan Tiff said, that's Sidney McLaughlin. Sidney McLaughlin, Sydney McLaughlin Lavroney. Two time Olympic gold medalist in the 400 meter hurdles, the world record holder, one of the greatest sprinters in history. We walked towards her. I felt the way an art student would feel if they randomly ran into Picasso on the street. No, that's not quite Right. I felt the way an artist, if they stumbled across some amazing painting at a garage sale, stared at it in awe and then realized, it's a Picasso. We were standing right next to her. So I started to whisper to try and play it cool. For some reason, I thought she was much taller. She's one of the greatest female athletes of, like. I mean, I can't believe I didn't. I didn't. It didn't ever occur to me that it was her. Ben and I had spent months trying to solve the moral puzzle presented by the Berlin Olympics, trying to see clearly through the fog of 1936. First, should we go? And then, more importantly, if you have ideals, how do you hold on to them in an ugly, messy world? And that day at the UCLA track, by some miraculous twist of fate, we got a glimpse of the sublime gliding past us clear as day, close enough to touch, showing us the way. We will have many more arguments in the future, just as we had in 1936. We continue to live in a very impure place and we should have those arguments. That's our job, to engage with what is difficult, to try and pick a safe path through the minefield. But the epiphany I had as Sidney McLaughlin swept past us is that we need to be clear about what we're arguing for. Charles Sherrill was protecting some archaic notion of amateurism. Avery Brundage was furthering his own ambitions. Jesse Owens was navigating the impossible complexity of life as a black man. Billy Garland just wanted to build stuff altogether. They loaded up the Olympic movement with so much excess baggage that it's a miracle it didn't sink. And we don't need any of it. It's just getting in the way. The pure place that everyone was looking for is not a country or a city. It's a feeling. It's the awe that comes from watching someone perform an athletic feat better and faster than anyone else. Sydney McLaughlin is bringing it to Dalila Muhammad. Muhammad's trying to hold on McLaughlin on the inside to the line. It's gonna be Sydney's time again. And it's a world record again. McLaughlin 5147 blows her 5190 away. Revisionist history is produced by Ben Nadaff Haffrey, Tali Emlin and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking by Arthur Gompertz and J.L. goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Sarah Breguer and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Shakergy. Additional thanks to Mikhail Yashinsky, Meredith Rollins, Michael Spector and Michael Linton at Pushkin. Special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Nicole Optin Bosch and Brian Srebinek. Christina Sullivan, Kerry Brody and Greta Cohn. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.