Prolegomena to Jesse Owens: American Ideas About Race and Olympic Races from the 1890s to the 1920s

Abstract

In this era American discourses about race generally touted the superiority of people of European descent over all other groups in every aspect of human performance, intellectual, moral, and physical. A pervasive and popular scientific racism found support for its theories in results from athletic contests. Data from many Olympic sports, especially from track and field, were interpreted to support ideas of white supremacy. Allegedly scientific measurements of racial difference through Olympic sport became a popular endeavour in the US, and in other nations. By the end of the 1920s the performances of athletes of non-European descent began to raise questions about theories of European racial superiority. These speculations prepared the ground for Jesse Owens' performances at the 1936 Olympics to challenge existing paradigms regarding the racial dimensions of human performance.

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 the Journal of Sport History 28 (Summer 2001): 173–215.

Notes

[1] The best biography of Owens is Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life.

[2] Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes, 166–8; Rankin-Hill and Blakey, ‘W. Montague Cobb’.

[3] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’.

[4] Cromwell argued that these ‘primitive’ evolutionary traits only helped black athletes in purely physical events such as sprints and jumps. In events such as middle-distance running, which Cromwell asserted required more mental than physical skills, the British ‘race’ dominated. Cromwell and Wesson, Championship Techniques in Track and Field, 5–6, 9–10.

[5] Wiggins, ‘“Great Speed But Little Stamina”’; Wiggins, Glory Bound; Miller, ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism’. In Darwin's Athletes, John Hoberman offers a sweeping history of the subject that has sparked considerable controversy: Sammons, ‘A Proportional and Measured Response’; Hoberman, ‘How Not to Misread Darwin's Athletes’.

[6] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 5; Cobb, ‘Does Science Favor Negro Athletes?’. Hoberman contends that Cobb's life-long interest in athletics, race and human anatomy actually produced a much more complex and conflicted view of the connections between sporting prowess and genetic endowment. While Cobb sometimes argued that culture rather than biology created African-American athletic stars, he also argued for a ‘special “hardihood”’ produced in part by the ‘brutal but ultimately eugenic process of selection’ created by slavery: Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes, 166–8.

[7] The current historiography on race and sport dates the shift from theories of white physical supremacy to black physical supremacy to the first two decades of the twentieth century, when efforts were made to explain the prowess of cyclist Marshall ‘Major’ Taylor, boxer Jack Johnson and other prominent athletes of African heritage. See Miller, ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism’; Wiggins, ‘“Great Speed But Little Stamina”’; Roberts, Papa Jack; Ritchie, Marshall ‘Major’ Taylor. While there certainly were efforts to explain, or explain away, the prowess of Taylor, Johnson and other African-American athletic champions as individual aberrations, the real shift in treating people of African descent as an athletically superior group in scientific and popular literature begins to the 1930s.

[8] Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes, 99–107.

[9] These puzzles would eventually produce the kind of paradigm shift in scientific theories about race and physical supremacy that fits Thomas Kuhn's theory about the nature of change in science: Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

[10] The social construction of race has garnered much scholarly attention in recent decades. The work that presages later histories of the social construction of race in American history are Jordan, White Over Black; Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind. Studies of the social construction of race in American history have concentrated mainly on colonial and antebellum patterns of slavery, on literature and mass culture, and on the labor, class, and politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On slavery, see Abrahams, Singing the Master; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Morgan, Before Cotton and Other Than Sugar; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. In literature and mass culture see Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Sundquist, To Wake the Nations; Lott, Love and Theft; Early, Lure and Loathing. On labour, class, politics and the construction of race see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity; Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans; Durrill, War of Another Kind; Trotter, Coal, Class and Color; Stein, Running Steel, Running America; Lewis, In Their Own Interests; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic. On the construction of ‘whiteness’ see Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters; Hale, Making Whiteness; Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color. The literature on the social construction of race through sport is more limited. See Early, The Culture of Bruising; Early, Body Language; Sammons, Beyond the Ring.

[11] In certain respects Owens ran, as other Americans of African descent wrote; in order to craft what Paulin Houtondji has labeled as a ‘certificate of humanity’ for himself and his race redeemable with white audiences: Houtondji cited in Gates, ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, 12.

[12] John Higham has recently argued that ‘ethnic tensions are best understood within a context of nation-building’. Higham insists that an understanding of racial and ethnic conflicts requires attention to the ideas surrounding ‘[n]ational consciousness – that is, an awareness of an attachment to an American identity’. Higham, ‘Instead of a Sequel’, 333–4.

[13] Putnam, Bowling Alone.

[14] As Allen Guttmann has pointed out, the use of sport to construct national identities characterized by racial harmony is not unique to the United States. It flourishes in Latin America, Asia and Africa. ‘If nations are what Benedict Anderson's influential theory claims them to be, imagined communities, then modern sports are an important and popularly accessible aid to this politically indispensable form of imagining’, he contends: Guttmann, Games and Empires, 183.

[15] Six decades later Owens continued to symbolize those two processes, as a recent cover of US News & World Report entitled ‘Olympic Legends’ makes clear. The cover pictures Owens sprinting to glory at the 1936 Olympic games with a subtitle proposing a story explaining ‘How some athletes become mythic figures’. In the accompanying cover story, Owens appears as an icon of both national self-definition and American racial distinctions. Bryan Duffy, ‘Going for the Gold’, US News & World Report, 4 Sept. 2000, cover and 48–53.

[16] According to British geographer John Bale ‘sport is, after war, probably the principle means of collective identification in modern life’. Bale, ‘Sport and National Identity’, 18.

[17] James scolds social historians for treating sport as either ephemera or some sort of opiate of the masses. ‘If this is not social history what is?’ James wonders. Sport, he adds, ‘finds no place in the history of the people because the historians do not begin from what people seem to want but from what they think the people ought to want.’ James, Beyond a Boundary, quotations from preface, 64, 152, 184–5.

[18] Dyreson, Making the American Team.

[19] Meade, ‘An Analytical Study of Athletic Records’, 596. Science was the other official journal for the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

[20] Hildebrand, ‘The Geography of Games’, 89.

[21] This claim to a transnational identity for the Olympic Games that transcends the national character of most sporting events belies the Euro-American essence of the Olympic movement. Guttmann, Games and Empires, 120–38.

[22] Dyreson, Making the American Team.

[23] As William Montague Cobb noted, Americans argued about the relative prowess of African-Americans such as Paul Robeson in football, Satchel Paige in baseball and Joe Louis in boxing, but many realized the ‘subjective’ nature of those comparisons. Only track and field seemed to provide an ‘objective’ laboratory for making racial comparisons. Cobb, ‘Does Science Favor Negro Athletes?’, 74.

[24] Hildebrand's National Geographic essay asserted that one of the great civilizing events in the post-First World War world was the spread of Western sports to the ‘black, yellow, and tan’ peoples of the world. Hildebrand, ‘The Geography of Games’, 89.

[25] Cobb, ‘Race and Runners’, 3.

[26] Gossett, Race, Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Bowler, Evolution; Degler, In Search of Human Nature; Hannaford, Race; Marks, Human Biodiversity; Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research.

[27] Embedded in endeavours to interpret the performances of Jesse Owens and many other Olympians were fundamental assumptions about race and the human species. Defining race has consumed American cultures since the European conquest of the ‘New World’. Historically, race has had multiple and imprecise definitions. In nineteenth-century Euro-American civilization race divided people by nationality, linguistic affinity, religion or cultural practice as well as separating groups by skin colour. Western literature was filled with references to an English race, a Scottish race, a German race, a Jewish race, a Slavic race, an Islamic race, a Southern race and a host of other races. Since at least the first few decades of the twentieth century the concept of race has been linked mainly to skin colour. Gossett, Race; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Banton, Racial Theories. Rarely do modern commentators invoke the older idea of an ‘American race’. They use other terminology to refer to essence of nationhood. For instance, in 1955 the French student of American civilization, Andre Siegfried, determined that there while there was no ‘American race’ no one ‘could deny the existence of an American people’: Siegfried, America at Mid-Century, 45.

[28] Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder lost a lucrative job as a Columbia Broadcasting System sports commentator for his pseudo-scientific speculations that African-Americans had ‘been bred’ by slave holders in ways that made them genetically superior athletes: ‘Scorecard – An Oddsmaker's Odd Views’, Sports Illustrated, 25 Jan. 1988, 7. Sir Roger Bannister, the English runner who in 1954 became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, stirred controversy in 1995 by entering the scientific debate over the idea of racial superiority in athletic performance. Bannister, who as a respected neurologist, supposedly possessed greater scientific acumen than Snyder, offered the same basic view of ‘genetic’ racial superiority as ‘Jimmy the Greek’. Tim Radford, ‘Bannister's Bombshell’, World Press Review 42 (Dec. 1995), 20; Jack McCallum and Kostya Kennedy, ‘A Different Race for Sir Roger’, Sports Illustrated, 25 Sept. 1995, 15. An issue of Scientific American published in September 2000 during Olympics in Sydney featured African-American sprinter Brian Lewis on the cover with the title ‘Muscles & Genes: Are Star Athletes Born, Not Made?’ Although the story accompanying the cover did not speculate on the racial distribution of athletic genes, the authors did make it clear that contemporary science revealed that genetics had an enormous role in shaping elite athletic performance. Jesper L. Andersen, Peter Schjerling and Bengt Saltin. ‘Muscle, Genes, and Athletic Performance’, Scientific American 283 (Sept. 2000), 48–55.

[29]‘Race Questions at the Olympics’, Independent 73 (25 July 1912), 214–15.

[30] Dyreson, Making the American Team; Dyreson, ‘Playing for a National Identity’; Dyreson, ‘“America's Athletic Missionaries”’; Dyreson, ‘Melting Pot Victories’.

[31] Claims of American victory were based on track and field results rather than an overall medal count. The United States dominated the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, but no other nation bothered to send a competitive team to the St Louis games. Employing creative arithmetic, the United States could perhaps claim a slim victory at Stockholm in 1912. American athletes did not win a majority of the Olympic contests at the Athens, Paris or London Olympics. Dyreson, Making the American Team.

[32] Miller, ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism’ and Wiggins, ‘“Great Speed But Little Stamina”’.

[33] Carter, The Twenties in America, 88–95.

[34] Rydell, All the World's a Fair.

[35]Dyreson, ‘The Playing Fields of Progress’, 4–23; Carlson, ‘Giant Patagonians and Hairy Ainu’.

[36] Cromwell and Wesson, Championship Techniques in Track and Field, 5–6.

[37] Cromwell's widely shared belief that people of African descent are natural athletes while people of European descent win athletic laurels through mental toughness and determination remains deeply embedded in American culture. After a bitter loss by the Detroit Pistons to the Boston Celtics in the 1987 National Basketball Association playoffs, two African-American members of the Pistons claimed that Celtic star Larry Bird was overrated because he was white. They implied that the media portrayed Bird as a player who had to ‘work’ and to use his ‘mind’ in order to became a professional basketball player while black players were considered ‘natural athletes’ who relied on pure physical ability. Such a view stereotyped African-Americans as both lazy and unintelligent. Those attitudes, contended Dennis Rodman and Isaiah Thomas, constituted a powerful form of racism in American culture. Frank Deford, ‘A Player for the Ages’, Sports Illustrated, 21 March 1988, 46–65; Bruce Newman, ‘Black, White – and Gray’, Sports Illustrated, 22 May 1988, 62–9. In ‘The Black Athlete Revisited’, a 1991 update of its seminal 1968 exposé on racism in American sport, ‘The Black Athlete’, Sports Illustrated provided evidence that the images of black athletes as ‘naturals’ and white athletes as diligent, self-made stars who used their ‘minds’ were indeed still a part of American sporting culture: ‘The Black Athlete Revisited’, Sports Illustrated, 5 Aug. 1991, 38–77; 12 Aug. 1991, 26–73; 19 Aug. 1991, 40–51.

[38]‘A Novel Athletic Contest’, World's Fair Bulletin 5 (Sept. 1904), 50.

[39] Charles Edward Woodruff, 1860–1915, earned a physician's degree from Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania 1886. He served for many years as a surgeon in the US Army, including several tours of duty in the Philippines during the American occupation and pacification of the islands. After retiring from the military in 1913 he became the associate editor of American Medicine: see ‘Charles Edward Woodruff’, in Malone, Dictionary of American Biography, vol. X, 496–7.

[40] Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’; ‘Why the Native American Does So Badly at the Olympic Games’, Current Literature 53 (Aug. 1912), 182–4.

[41] Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’, 200–1; ‘Why the Native American Does So Badly at the Olympic Games’, 182–3.

[42]‘Why the Native American Does So Badly at the Olympic Games’; Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’.

[43] Light, skin colour and race fascinated Woodruff. He wrote a series of ‘scientific’ essays exploring those concepts. Woodruff, ‘Does Excessive Light Limit Tropical Plankton?’; Woodruff, ‘The Relation of Pigmentation to Temperature in Deep-Sea Animals’; Woodruff, ‘Unrecognized Enemy of Panama Canal – Excessive Sunlight’, 537. He also wrote a book entitled The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men.

[44]‘Why the Native American Does So Badly at the Olympic Games’, 183–4; Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’.

[45] Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’; ‘Why the Native American Does So Badly at the Olympic Games’, 183.

[46] Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’, 202.

[47]The charts and graphs drawing racial conclusions from Olympic performances based on per capita medal-production represented a very simplistic pseudo-science. The pseudo-science was founded on two concepts that science could not isolate as purely physical phenomena – race and athletic performance. Race was not a measurable empirical category. Athletic performance, from many perspectives, also contains many important elements that defy empirical measurement. The philosopher of science Karl Popper demanded that scientific theories had to be not only testable and falsifiable, but grounded in measurable empirical categories in order to ‘demarcate’ them from non-scientific theories. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations.

[48] Confusing social data, the number of Olympic medals won or the percentages of African-Americans in the National Basketball Association, National Football League or other athletic organizations with genetic data remains an all-too-common problem in studies of race and sport. See, for instance, Entine, Taboo.

[49] Woodruff, ‘The Failure of Americans as Athletes’, 204.

[50] Ibid.; ‘Why the Native American Does So Badly at the Olympic Games’, 183–4. Woodruff's Olympic arguments buttressed the Malthusian forecasting he had engaged in several years earlier. Woodruff, ‘Population of the United States During the Next Ten Centuries’.

[51] Ironically, at about the same time Woodruff was touting the superiority of the ‘blonde types’, Edwin B. Henderson, a pioneering African-American physical educator, hypothesized that slavery had created a natural reservoir of athletic ability in African-Americans. Henderson thought that African-American athletes were ‘naturally’ superior to European Americans. He called on black leaders to nurture ‘the native muscular development and vitality of the Negro of the South’ in order to assault European-American conceptions of racial superiority. His assertion that African-Americans had ‘natural’ athletic advantages would later be used by white commentators to re-enforce racial stereotypes. Henderson, ‘The Colored College Athlete’, 115–19. See also ‘Edwin Bancroft Henderson, African-American Athletes, and the Writing of Sport History’, in Wiggins, Glory Bound, 221–40.

[52] It was not a solitary dissent: Posse, ‘How Physical Training Affects the Welfare of the Nation’.

[53]‘American and British Physical Characteristics as Shown in the Oxford-Princeton Meet’, Literary Digest, 21 Aug. 1920, 106–8. The Digest argued that the 1920 Olympics would provide an even more ‘striking’ illustration of racial differences.

[54] C. Meriwether, ‘Review of the Effects of Tropical Light on White Men’, National Geographic 17 (Jan. 1906), 47–8.

[55]‘Woodruff’, in Malone, Dictionary of American Biography, 479.

[56] Woodruff, The Expansion of Races.

[57] Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, 17.

[58] Carter, The Twenties, 88–9.

[59] Hoxmark, ‘The International Olympic Games as an Index’.

[60] Ibid.

[61] Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics; Davis, Latin American Thought; Stabb, In Quest of Identity.

[62] Huntington, Civilization and Climate; Huntington, The Character of Races.

[63] See his chapters on ‘Health and National Character’, and ‘Human Activity and Temperature’, in Huntington, Mainsprings of Civilization, 250–75.

[64] For a brief history of the role of Huntington in American scientific racism see Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research.

[65] Hoxmark, ‘The International Olympic Games as an Index’, 202.

[66]‘“Conquering North” Threatens to Conquer Olympics’, Literary Digest 81 (19 April 1924), 66–70; Von Ziekursch, ‘Will the “Conquering North” Win the Olympics?’.

[67] Ibid.

[68] The Boston Herald paid homage to the ‘liberal sprinkling of every race which excels in sports, the tightly nerved Latins, the running English and Scotch, the jumping Irish, the swimming Hawaiians, the Germans, Swedes and Norwegians, all with their own strong characteristics, and the surprisingly good Finns’ that comprised the American team. ‘Why America Wins Olympics’, Literary Digest 82 (26 July 1924), 10–11.

[69]‘Our Secret Discovered’, The Living Age 322 (2 Aug. 1924), 199–200. In a series of three articles published two years before the 1924 Olympics, Elmer Mitchell made a similar claim that American social environments melded European ethnic groups, and even small numbers of other ‘races’ such as the ‘Negro’, the ‘Jew’, the ‘Indian’ and the ‘Oriental’, into a world-beating Olympic team that would conquer the world in Paris. Mitchell defined race as both a combination of biological heredity and culture and history. He was convinced that athletic achievement correlated directly with the highest levels of civilized achievement. Echoing the older melting-pot theorists of the pre-First World War era, he was also certain that environment ultimately trumped heredity in shaping the athletic aptitude of various races. Mitchell, ‘Racial Traits in Athletics’.

[70] Americans could read athletic scientific racism from European as well as American sources. One European observer of the 1924 Olympics concurred with Hoxmark that race, modified by climate, determined athletic performance. ‘At these games the profound difference between the white races – from the physiological point of view – will strike the eye once more’, predicted Dr Maurice Boiegy. ‘Under the influence of different climates, different historic and different economic conditions, each people has developed differences in nerve and muscle, which have eventually become hereditary and which are emphasizing themselves more and more in each generation so as to impress special characters on their typical forms of physical exertion.’ Maurice Boiegy, ‘The Olympic Games To-Day and Yesterday’, The Living Age 321 (17 May 1924), 952.

[71]‘Who Really Won the Olympic Games?’, Current Opinion 77 (Sept. 1924), 340–1.

[72]‘America at Amsterdam’, The World's Work 56 (Oct. 1928), 584.

[73] Philip Coan, ‘Finnish Athletic Success’, Outlook 137 (23 July 1924), 461; ‘Why the Finns are Champions Athletes’, Literary Digest 82 (2 Aug. 1924), 39.

[74]‘The Yankee and the Finn’, New York Times, 15 July 1924; ‘Why America Wins Olympics’, 11; ‘The Giant and the Pygmy’, Outlook 137 (16 July 1924), 417; Coan, ‘Finnish Athletic Success’, 461–4; Grantland Rice, ‘The Sportlight’, New York Herald Tribune, 17 July 1924; W.O. McGeehan, ‘Down the Line’, New York Herald Tribune, 19 July 1924; ‘Dry Hails Olympic Victory’, New York Times, 13 Aug. 1928; John Kieran, ‘Sport of the Times’, New York Times, 3 Aug. 1928; ‘Hardy Young Finland Aspires to High Athletic Ideal’, New York Times, 19 Aug. 1928.

[75]‘Changing the Olympic Games’, World's Work 48 (Sept. 1924), 476–8. ‘Robertson Favors Shorter Program’, New York Times, 7 Aug. 1924.

[76]‘Fay Says’, Chicago Defender, 28 July 1928.

[77]‘Chester L. Washington, Jr., ‘“Ches” Says: Comments on National and Local Sports’, Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Aug. 1928.

[78]‘El Ouafi’, The Negro World, 18 Aug. 1928.

[79] Roderick D. McKenzie (1885–1940), a University of Chicago-trained sociologist then at the University of Washington, was one of the pioneers of the field of ‘human ecology’. He was an outspoken critic of anti-Asian campaigns on the West Coast. He published prolifically in the American Journal of Sociology and wrote several books. For biographical details see Amos Hawley's introduction to McKenzie, On Human Ecology.

[80]‘No “Superior Nordic” Says White Savant’, Norfolk Journal and Guide, 11 Aug. 1928; ‘Nordic Myth of Supremacy Gets Attack’, Chicago Defender, 11 Aug. 1928; ‘“Nordic Supremacy” Has No Scientific Validity, Professor Drives Home’, The Negro World, 11 Aug. 1928.

[81]‘Olympic Results Hurt Nordic Pride, Scientist Declares’, Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Aug. 1928.

[82] In a curious intersection of Olympic and anthropological history, Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, covering the Amsterdam games for a press syndicate, identified El Ouafi as a member of the Rif tribe of North Africa. Knute K. Rockne, ‘Joie Ray Finished Fifth in Marathon’, Pittsburgh Press, 6 Aug. 1928. Carleton Coon, a Harvard-trained anthropologist whose The Origin of Races served as a basic text for scientific racists in the second half of the twentieth century, led the Peabody Museum's expedition in the late 1920s among the Rif of North Africa. Coon classified the Rif as an ‘African Nordic’ type. He made no mention of El Ouafi or the Olympic marathon in his study: Coon, Tribes of the Rif, 410.

[83]‘Bow Ye Nordics!’, New York Herald Tribune, 7 Aug. 1928, 16.

[84] Barkin, The Retreat of Scientific Racism; Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science; Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings.

[85] Boas, Race, Language and Culture; Benedict, Race.

[86] A classic restatement of this earlier twentieth-century idea in the inter-war period is Tunis, Democracy and Sport.

[87] Patrick Miller has characterized this switch in definitions of what accounted for athletic prowess as ‘moving the goal posts’. Miller observes that ‘though many African-Americans had subscribed to the ideal that achievement in sport constituted a proof of equality, a mechanism of assimilation, and a platform for social mobility, they were betrayed in their beliefs and strivings’: Miller, ‘The Anatomy of Scientific Racism’, 129, 125.