American Ideas About Race and Olympic Races in the Era of Jesse Owens: Shattering Myths or Reinforcing Scientific Racism?

Abstract

The Olympic victories of Jesse Owens and other non-European athletes during the 1930s have been traditionally hailed as refutations of white racial superiority. Certainly some Americans saw Owens and other African-American stars as destroyers of insidious stereotypes. However, some American scientists interpreted the data differently, claiming that a broader look at Olympic results supported the claim of European physical superiority. Others conceded the alleged genetic superiority of people of African descent in certain athletic contests, while at the same time creating new racist stereotypes which held that physical gifts implied mental deficits. Still others used the anthropometric studies of Owens and other athletes in an effort to shatter existing racial typologies and argue that culture and not just biology played a crucial role in human performance. While most historians have contended that Owens' feats challenged racist notions, the debate reveals far more complexities and nuances than previously realized.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this essay appeared as ‘American Ideas About Race and Olympic Races from the 1890s to the 1950s: Shattering Myths or Reinforcing Scientific Racism?’, in Journal of Sport History 28 (Summer 2001): 173–215.

Notes

[1] Baker, Jesse Owens, 17–32; Dyreson, ‘Jesse Owens’, 115.

[2] The African-American press made the black Olympians into the heroes of the Los Angeles Olympics. Williams, ‘Negro Athletes in the Tenth Olympiad’. For histories of the Los Angeles games see Dyreson, ‘Marketing National Identity’; Riess, ‘Power Without Authority’; Welky, ‘US Journalism and the 1932 Olympics’.

[3]‘Will Rogers Remarks’, Los Angeles Times, 4 Aug. 1932.

[4] Wiggins, ‘The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin’, 278–92. The American ambassador in Germany, Frederic M. Sackett, reported to the US Secretary of State that Der Angriff, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party, wrote an article headlined ‘Events We Fail to Understand – Negroes Win – America Rejoices. Jonath The Speediest White Sprinter – Germany Takes Second Place’. Commenting on American support of Tolan and Metcalfe De Angriff asserted that ‘For us this sorry spectacle is only a symptom of degeneration. The proud American people rates an Olympic victory higher than its principles. In our eyes, America did not win a victory, but suffered a defeat.’ Letter from Frederic M. Sackett to US Secretary of State, 9 Aug. 1932, State Department Records Division, Record Group 59, National Archives and Record Administration II, College Park, Maryland.

[5] Interestingly, in Japanese-language newspapers in the United States such as Los Angeles's Rafu Shimpo, victories by Japanese athletes did spark discussions of racial and national identity among Issei and Nisei groups. Yamamoto, ‘Cheers for Japanese Athletes’, 399–429.

[6] Dyreson, ‘Jesse Owens’, 113.

[7]‘Metcalfe Day’, 360.

[8]‘To Japan’, 295.

[9]‘Tolan Day’, 327. See also Wilkins, ‘Negro Athletes at the Olympic Games’, 252–3; Carter, ‘Prelude to the Olympics’.

[10] Williams, ‘Negro Athletes in the Tenth Olympiad’, 449–60. In ‘for the “honor of their country and for the glory of sport”’, Williams was quoting directly from the athlete's oath for the Olympic games.

[11] Carter, ‘The Negro in College Athletics’.

[12] The term ‘athletic gene’ began to appear in the 1940s and 1950s. See Cobb, ‘Does Science Favor Negro Athletes?’ and Abrahams, ‘Race and Athletics’.

[13] Carter, ‘The Negro in College Athletics’, 208.

[14] The white majority could also read these results as proof of inequality, as Patrick Miller, John Hoberman, and David Wiggins have noted, because the new theories about athletic genes often implied that athletic superiority correlated with intellectual inferiority. See Miller, ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism’; Wiggins, ‘“Great Speed But Little Stamina”’; Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes.

[15] Browne, ‘A Comparison of the Patellar Tendon Reflex Time of Whites and Negroes’. Browne cited literature on this reflex in regards to sprinting including Tuttle et al., ‘Study of the Reflex Time of the Knee-Jerk’ and Tuttle and Lautenbach, ‘The Relationship Between Reflex Time and Running Events in Track’. Browne noted that Tuttle had supervised Browne's study.

[16] Eleanor Metheny's work at Iowa State University on racial difference and sporting prowess had perhaps the strongest influence. See Metheny, ‘Some Differences in Bodily Proportions’. Studies seeking to link racial typologies with athletic abilities or standards of ‘fitness’ became quite popular during the 1930s and early 1940s in the Research Quarterly of the American Physical Education Association. Cozens, ‘A Study of the Performance of Japanese Boys and Girls in Physical Education Activities’; Adams, ‘A Comparative Anthropometric Study of Hard Labor During Youth’; Steggerda and Petty, ‘An Anthropometric Study of Negro and White College Women’; Lloyd-Jones, ‘Race and Stature’; Steggerda and Petty, ‘Body Measurements on 100 Negro Males from Tuskegee Institute’; Taylor, ‘Certain Implications of the Sickness Records’; Thompson and Dove, ‘A Comparison of Physical Achievement’.

[17] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 3–4; Cobb, ‘Does Science Favor Negro Athletes?’, 74–7.

[18] Allen's best-seller on American trends was Only Yesterday.

[19] Allen, ‘Breaking World's Records’, 308.

[20] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 3. In this endeavour Cobb was continuing in the scholarly battle against racial mythologies launched in 1934 by The Journal of Negro Education. In a special issue devoted to ‘The Physical and Mental Abilities of the American Negro’, a group of respected black and white scholars attacked the core assumptions supporting scientific racism, making cases against the claims of hereditary racial differences in intelligence, vigour and a host of other attributes. Cobb contributed the section on the science of racial differences in ‘physical constitution’. In summarizing Cobb's analysis, the conclusion of the special issue noted that ‘in view of the obvious racial differences such as hair, colour etc., a surprisingly meagre number of physical differences are found and these differences are very likely without survival value’. Dearborn and Long, ‘The Physical and Mental Abilities of the American Negro’, 532.

[21] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 3–5.

[22] Cobb had also been a boxing champion at Amherst. Rankin-Hill and Blakey, ‘W. Montague Cobb’, 78–9.

[23] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 3–5.

[24] Ibid., 5–6.

[25] Cobb, ‘The Physical Constitution of the American Negro’.

[26] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 6.

[27]Ibid., 52–5. In a later recitation of the same argument Cobb argued not only that Owens had ‘Caucasoid’ lower extremities but that the white American sprint champion of the 1930s, Frank Wykoff, had ‘Negroid’ lower extremities. Cobb, ‘Does Science Favor Negro Athletes?’, 77. Wykoff and Owens were teammates on the 1936 United States Olympic team. They won a gold medal, setting a world record in the process, in the 4 × 100 metre relay.

[28] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 52.

[29] Wiggins, ‘The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin’; Kass, ‘The Issue of Racism at the 1936 Olympics’.

[30]‘Will Rogers Remarks’, Los Angeles Times, 18 July 1936.

[31] Williams, ‘Negro Athletes in the Eleventh Olympiad’, 59.

[32] Baker, Jesse Owens, 109.

[33] One text claims Owens ‘confounded Nazi racial theories’. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision, 888.

[34]‘To Be Somebody’.

[35] Baker, Jesse Owens. See also Owens, Blackthink; Owens, The Jesse Owens Story; Owens, I Have Changed; Owens, Jesse.

[36]‘Joe Louis and Jesse Owens’, The Crisis 42 (Aug. 1935), 241.

[37] Indeed, Germany's Racial Policy Office pointed out that Nazi race theories were based on scientific precepts accepted by the international scientific community and that Germany wanted to implement eugenics policies already in practice in the United States. Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, 88.

[38] Snyder had a long career as a research physiologist at the Johns Hopkins medical school. He published a variety of works in such journals as the American Journal of Physiology and the Quarterly Review of Biology. He also published extensively in the widely circulated scientific journal Science. Among his publications were Snyder, ‘Does the Mammalian Heart Obey the Law for Chemical Reaction Velocities as Influenced by Temperature’; Snyder, ‘On an Interpolation Formula Used in Calculating Temperature Coefficients for Velocity of Vital Activities’; Snyder, ‘A Study in Biokinetics’.

[39] Snyder, ‘The Real Winners In The 1936 Olympic Games’.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid., 374. From his correspondence in the letters to the editor section of Science, it seems fairly clear that Snyder spent some time in Germany during the 1930s and was a defender of German science and some aspects of the ‘new Germany’ against American critics. Snyder, ‘Two Busts of Great Scientific Men’; Snyder, ‘On the Courage of Scientists’.

[42] Snyder, ‘A Study In The Demographic Distribution of Cultural Achievement’. Ironically, W. Montague Cobb also published in Scientific Monthly, offering a very different view of the science of race. Cobb, ‘Municipal History from Anatomical Records’.

[43] Indeed, although Snyder did not mention it, the Soviet Union suffered a peculiar handicap in his ranking system. Tsarist Russia had competed at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912. In its short history between 1917 and 1938 – the year of Snyder's study – the Soviet Union had not competed in an Olympic games. That made it impossible for the Soviets to win points in one of the three categories Snyder had established. Snyder, ‘A Study In The Demographic Distribution of Cultural Achievement’, 261–5.

[44] Ibid., 266.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid., 267.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Gossett's Race stressed the breakdown of racist constructions in scientific theory among the intellectual community during and after the 1920s. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man indicated that racially-based conceptions of intelligence continued to exert great influence in scientific circles after the 1920s.

[50] Oswald Garrison Villard, ‘Issues and Men’. The Nation 143 (15 Aug. 1936), 185; cover photograph of Jesse Owens, The Crisis (Sept. 1936); ‘Twilight of the Gods’, 272; ‘From the Press of the Nation’, 275; ‘Saga of Jesse Owens’, 267; ‘Black Auxiliaries’, 273.

[51] Tunis, Democracy and Sport, 47–8; 27–8. Tunis quoted from Gallico, Farewell to Sport, 299.

[52] These scientific formulas for measuring population-to-Olympic-medal-production ratios have proven to be popular devices. Indeed, the formula has remained in use as the first century of modern Olympic games concludes and a second century begins. Reporting on one of the ways in which IBM's database depicted Atlanta's 1996 Olympics, Sports Illustrated's Steve Rushin noted that ‘the US won the most medals (101), but the Yanks ranked 39th in medals per capita, with one for every 2,612,020 American citizens’. Rushin drew no racial conclusions from that statistic. He noted that Tonga finished first in the per-capita medal count while India finished last. Steve Rushin, ‘Odyssey of Oddities’, Sports Illustrated, 12 Aug. 1996, 86–7.

[53] Tunis, ‘An Nation of Onlookers?’.

[54] Tygiel's Baseball's Great Experiment offers the finest history of that chapter in the struggle for racial equality.

[55]‘Joe Louis and Jesse Owens’, 241.

[56] Raymond Gram Swing, ‘Introduction’, in Tunis, Democracy and Sport, viii.

[57]‘Every citizen should have the right to vote. Every citizen should have an opportunity to play games’ – Tunis, Democracy and Sport, 40, 10.

[58] James, Beyond a Boundary, 257–61.

[59] The new paradigm continued to misunderstand that race was a social reality, not a physical reality. Athletic performance, which common sense perceives as one of the most physical of all human realities, was in fact also a social construct. The genetic structures of athletes and nations were inseparably bound with historic traditions, social conditions and cultural suppositions. Chance and happenstance played a part in making Olympic medallists. Isolating cause and effect in such a complex process remains beyond the ability of modern science. The scientific racists argued that race mattered in athletic performance. And race did matter, as a cultural and not a natural factor.

[60] Such attitudes are still commonplace. One example is a 1991 USA Today poll that indicated half of the respondents assented to the proposition that ‘blacks have more natural physical ability’ than whites. Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes, 146.

[61] That version of American racism was precisely what inspired Harry Edwards's revolution that sparked the 1968 Olympic protests by African-American athletes: Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete.

[62] As Patrick Miller points out many contemporary defenders of racial bases for intelligence see black athletic prowess as some sort of ‘compensatory’ development for lower levels of intellectual skill: Miller, ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism’, 123. For examples see Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, ‘Race and IQ: An Apologia’, The New Republic (31 Oct. 1994), 38; D'Souza, The End of Racism, 437–41; Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, 9.

[63] Meade, ‘An Analytical Study of Athletic Records’; Meade, ‘Youthful Achievements of Great Scientists’; Meade, ‘A Negro Scientist of Slavery Days’; Meade, ‘The Natural History of the Mud Snake’.

[64] Meade, ‘The Negro in Track Athletics’.

[65] Ibid., 366–70.

[66] Ibid., 370–1.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid., 371.

[69] Meade, ‘An Analytical Study of Athletic Records’, 596.

[70] Coon, The Origin of Races; Wolpoff and Caspari, Race and Human Evolution, 154–72.

[71] Abstract of George Meade, ‘The Negro in Track Athletics’, Papers of Carleton Stevens Coon, Box 62, File on ‘Races of the World: Ideas and Clippings’, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC.

[72] Coon served as the key expert in a popular essay in Life on how the 1964 Tokyo Olympics illustrated racial differences. Marshall Smith, ‘Giving the Olympics an Anthropological Once-Over’, Life 57 (23 Oct. 1964), 81–4.

[73] Abstract of George Meade, ‘The Negro in Track Athletics’, Papers of Carleton Stevens Coon.

[74] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 52.