Jesse Owens in Berlin and the Honours His Own Country Was Slow to Give

Here is a sentence no propagandist ever wants to write: "Our master race has been outrun by the grandson of a sharecropper." The regime that built a vast stadium to prove a theory got to watch a stopwatch disprove it, in public, four times, with the whole world taking notes. Folks, you cannot buy that kind of irony. You can only run it in 10.3 seconds.

Jesse Owens is the best-known athlete of the twentieth century who never needed a slogan. He did not give speeches in Berlin. He did not hold a press conference about the theory of race. He ran and he jumped, and the arithmetic did the arguing. That is the part of his story that conservatives should love without apology. The second part, the one about what his own country did and did not do for him afterward, is just as important, and it is the part that makes the story an American one rather than merely an athletic one.

The boy from Oakville and the coach who did not care about the colour of his shoes

James Cleveland Owens was born in 1913 in Oakville, Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, and his family moved north to Cleveland, Ohio, as part of the great migration of those years. The "Jesse" came from a teacher who misheard his accent when he said his initials, and the name stuck for life. In junior high a coach named Charles Riley noticed that the thin, fast boy ran as if he were gliding over the cinders, and he gave him the thing that matters most to any young athlete and to any young anything: attention, and a standard to meet.

Owens went on to East Technical High School in Cleveland and then to Ohio State University. I want to be precise about what Ohio State was in the middle of the 1930s. It admitted him and let him compete. It did not give him a scholarship in the way we would now understand the word, and it did not make his life easy. He lived off campus, he held down jobs while he trained, and he was forced to live off campus with other Black athletes, and when the team travelled he was limited to takeout or Black-only restaurants and Black-only hotels. That is the record, and it is not one any honest patriot should flinch from. A country that has to be told the truth about its past in order to deserve its future is exactly the country the Founders described.

May 25, 1935: forty-five minutes in Ann Arbor

On May 25, 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Owens did something that track and field people still describe in lowered voices. In roughly forty-five minutes he equalled one world record and set three more. He tied the world mark in the 100-yard dash at 9.4 seconds. He then jumped a little over twenty-six feet and eight inches in the long jump, a world record that stood for a quarter century. He ran the 220-yard dash in 20.3 seconds, and he took the 220-yard low hurdles in 22.6 seconds, both world records as well.

Think about that as an athlete would. Each of those events draws on a different blend of muscle, timing and nerve. A man who is good at one of them is a star. A man who sets records in four in a single afternoon is not specialised, he is simply the best thing the sport has seen. He had also reportedly been nursing a sore back that week, which makes the performance sound like a movie script that the producers would send back for being unrealistic. The account that he nearly sat out the meet is told widely and I would treat the detail as colour, not as settled fact. The records are not colour. They are on the books.

Berlin, August 1936

The 1936 Summer Olympics were awarded to Berlin in 1931, before the Nazi party took power, and by the time the Games opened the host government had every reason to want a showcase. There had been a serious boycott debate in the United States. The Amateur Athletic Union voted narrowly in December 1935 to send a team, and Avery Brundage, the head of the American Olympic Committee, argued that sport should be kept clear of politics. Whatever one thinks of that judgment, notice the irony that it set up. The regime decided that sport was politics. Owens decided to find out what happened when politics was put on a starting line.

He won four gold medals. He won the 100 metres, the long jump, the 200 metres, and, as a member of the American 4x100 metre relay team, the relay in a world-record time. Four events, four golds, a performance that went unmatched in Olympic track and field for nearly half a century until another American, Carl Lewis, did it in 1984.

The theory he refuted was not an accident or a hobby of one party. The regime taught, as state doctrine, that peoples were arranged in a ladder of worth, and that its own people stood at the top. It was a wicked idea dressed in the language of science, and its refutation required no lecture. The stopwatch does not care about doctrine. A free society is one in which anyone can step to the line and be measured by the clock, and the point of America at its best is that we are supposed to let him.

Luz Long

The most beautiful moment of those Games did not involve a medal ceremony. In the long jump, Owens fouled on his first two qualifying attempts and qualified on his third, and in the final he won the gold. A German long jumper named Luz Long, who was himself a competitor for the gold, took the silver and was the first to congratulate the winner, in full sight of the stands. A popular story says Long had advised Owens in qualifying to take off from a spot a little before the board. I will not repeat it as fact: Owens himself later admitted that it was not true, calling it just a good story.

Long was killed in the Second World War, dying of wounds received in the fighting in Sicily in 1943, and Owens later visited Germany to meet Long's son. I would say two things about this story. First, the tale of the advice at the pit is a legend, so tell it as one. Second, it matters that the friendly gestures that day did happen. It shows that the system did not turn every German into the regime's creature, and it shows that sport can still hand people a way to be decent to each other under pressure. Courtesy at the highest level of competition is a lesson for adults, not just for children.

The snub, and the truth about it

You will hear that Hitler "snubbed" Owens by refusing to shake his hand. The honest version is a little more tangled. On the first day of competition Hitler had received some German winners and then, after being told by Olympic officials that he must greet either all the winners or none, chose none and stopped receiving any publicly. So the Reich chancellor did not specifically single out Owens in the way the legend has it. What he did, in effect, was decline to honour the athlete, and the athlete's own later reflection was that the more pointed insult came from home.

That is the sentence conservatives should hold on to. Owens said, in various forms over the years, that he was not snubbed by Hitler as much as by his own president. Franklin Roosevelt did not invite him to the White House and did not send him a telegram of congratulation. Whatever the exact record of communications, the fact is that no presidential reception was held for him, and no president of the era honoured the four-time champion in person. The man the regime had failed to beat on the field came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York, and then, by his own later account, found that no one offered him a job, and then to the ordinary business of making a living in a country that was still segregating its public life.

What happened to a champion

After the Olympics Owens was suspended by the Amateur Athletic Union when he declined to join a post-Games European exhibition tour, preferring to go home and pursue paying work. The suspension ended his amateur career. The man with four golds spent a stretch of years racing against horses, cars and motorbikes at exhibitions for cash prizes, working as a gas station attendant and a playground janitor, and at one point he went bankrupt and later was convicted of tax evasion. This is a grim list of ways to spend a life after winning the Games, and it is worth saying plainly that no one holding such an achievement in any other field would have been left to scrape. Here the fault was a mixture of the amateur rules of the day, a sporting world that had no real system of paying its heroes, and a country whose racial rules made the marketplace for a Black champion much narrower than it would have been for a white one.

Conservatives should not make the mistake of treating that story as proof that the system was rotten to the core, and liberals should not treat it as a fairy tale about a country that had nothing to apologise for. It is a story in which a free person made the most of a rigged environment and, in doing so, put a crack in the rigging. That is how most progress in America has actually happened.

The honours, late and real

Rewards for the achievement did arrive, and they are worth listing exactly because they came late. In 1976, Gerald Ford awarded Owens the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour the president can bestow. Owens died in 1980. In 1990, a decade after his death, Congress honoured him with the Congressional Gold Medal, and President George H. W. Bush presented it to his widow, Ruth Owens. The Gold Medal is Congress's highest civilian award, and the length of the wait is the point. It took the American government fifty-four years to say in the language of formal honours what the world had seen in the stadium in 1936.

Is that a scandal or a success? I would argue it is both, and that holding both thoughts is what a mature patriotism looks like. The wait was a shame. The honour was real, it was given in public, and it was given by the same institutions that had once looked past him. A nation that can apologise with a medal, a law and a ceremony has something that the regime he beat could never offer: a mechanism for correcting itself.

What the story says about merit

Let me lay out the argument the way a debater would, because this story is not just a feel-good yarn. It supports a position.

1. Merit is a standard that does not ask who you are. The clock, the tape measure and the scale are the great equalisers in sport. A sprinter finishes first or does not. That is why Owens's result was so devastating to a theory of racial hierarchy, and it is why people who care about human equality should defend the idea of objective measure wherever it can be had.
2. Where a society refuses to apply the standard, the failure is the society's, not the standard's. Owens met the standard and the country around him did not meet its own. The cure for that failure is the application of the principle, not its abandonment. Frederick Douglass made the same argument in the nineteenth century, and Martin Luther King made it again in the twentieth when he spoke of the promissory note in the Constitution and the Declaration.
3. Honours matter, and they should track achievement. A late medal is better than none, but the lesson is to give the credit while the person can use it. Teaching children the stories of people like Owens is one of the cheapest and most powerful forms of civic education there is.
4. America's capacity to improve is its distinguishing feature. The Founders wrote an imperfect Constitution and then built a mechanism for amending it. The country that held back honours from Owens in 1936 is the same country that gave him the Medal of Freedom in 1976 and the Gold Medal in 1990. The direction of travel is what a conservative should insist on measuring.

The strongest objection

The strongest objection comes from the left, and it says: you cannot praise a nation for honouring a man decades late when the nation was the one that held him down. The objection has force, and no honest account should dodge it. A medal after death does not repair a bankruptcy during life, and a country that needs forty years to catch up is a country that needs watching.

I accept the premise and reject the conclusion. The wrong should be named, and the schools should teach it. But the remedy for a nation that applies its principles slowly is to apply them faster, not to disown them. The people who demanded that the country live up to the promise of equality before the law, from Douglass through King, did not say the principles were a fraud. They said the principles were true and the practice was a lie. That is a conservative argument, in the oldest sense of the word, and it is the reason the Owens story can be told without cynicism.

Why this is worth telling to children

If you are a parent or a teacher, here is the practical lesson. Children today are told many stories about heroes in hushed, careful tones, with an eye to which categories the heroes belong to. The Owens story needs no such handling. It has a hero, a villain, a friendship across enemy lines, an injustice and a late correction, all in a narrative that a ten-year-old can follow. It also teaches the one thing that I believe the modern curriculum gets most wrong, which is that excellence is a form of moral argument. Owens did not need a pamphlet. He needed a track.

It also fits with the broader story of sport in public life. The ritual of the anthem before games, the argument over whether athletes should speak out, and the long contest over fairness in competition all come from the same root: sport is where Americans test whether the rules apply to everyone. For that history see Why We Play the Anthem Before Games, From the 1918 World Series On and Should Athletes Keep Politics Off the Field? Conservatives Disagree. For the legal tradition that underlies the colour-blind principle Owens embodied, see Colorblind Law Is Not a Code Word, It Is Harlan's Dissent Made Good. And for the contrast between the Hollywood that stayed home and the one that went to war a few years later, see When Hollywood Enlisted, the Studios and Stars Who Went to War in 1942.

One more point deserves a line. A country that abolished the scoreboard in the name of fairness would have erased the one instrument that made Owens's case undeniable, a thought explored with appropriate cruelty in What If Every League Abolished the Scoreboard in the Name of Equity. If you want to protect the next Jesse Owens, you protect the clock.

The case in brief

1. Jesse Owens won four gold medals at Berlin in 1936, in the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and 4x100 relay, refuting a racial theory with a stopwatch rather than a speech.
2. His road ran through Ohio State, the 1935 Big Ten meet where he set or equalled four world records, and a country that was still segregated and slow to honour him.
3. The late honours, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990, are both a rebuke and a proof: America was slow, and America corrected itself.
4. Merit, applied honestly, is the friend of equality, and the answer to a nation that fails its own standard is to hold it to that standard.

What you can do: read the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph aloud with a child this week, then tell them Owens's story and ask where the two meet.