Sunday, August 28, 2005

Marty Glickman and The 1936 Olympics

This past Shabbos, a history teacher at the local Yeshiva Ketana was talking about an untold part of the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany involving Marty Glickman, the former sports announcer. What I found online seems to confirm what he said.

Everyone knows the story of Jesse Owens.
He won his first gold was in the 100 meters.
He won his second gold in the long jump.
He won his third gold medal in the 200-meter dash.
And he won his fourth gold medal in the 4x100 relay team.

That is where the controversy starts. The 3rd event was supposed to be Jesse Owens' last:

That was supposed to be the end of Owens' Olympic participation. But from out of the blue, Owens and Metcalfe replaced Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jews on the U.S. track team, on the 4x100-meter relay.

The rumor was that the Nazi hierarchy had asked U.S. officials not to humiliate Germany further by using two Jews to add to the gold medals the African-Americans already had won. Glickman blamed U.S. Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage for acquiescing to the Nazis.

But there may be more to the story than that, by Glickman's own account:

By Glickman’s own account, the last-minute switch was a straightforward case of anti-Semitism. Avery Brundage, chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s regime and denied that the Nazis followed anti-Semitic policies. Brundage and assistant U. S. Olympic track coach Dean Cromwell were members of America First, an isolationist political movement that attracted American Nazi sympathizers. Additionally, Cromwell coached two of the other Olympic sprinters, Foy Draper and Frank Wyckoff, at the University of Southern California and openly favored those two over Glickman and Stoller.

Anyone who has read David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews knows about the Anti-Semitic immigration policies of the US during WWII.

The story of Marty Glickman is a reminder of how real such sentiment was.

His autobiography, The Fastest Kid on the Block, was published in 1996.


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