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August 22, 2024 44 mins

In the season finale, we turn back the clock four years, take a side trip to Alabama, meet an extraordinary man named Billy Garland, and ask: What is the right way to reconcile something pure with the messiness of the real world?

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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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
starting with So, this train that's going to run right
out there, it's coming from Chattanooga right going where at Nashville, Memphis,
going to Memphis. Yeah, I'm in a little town in

(00:27):
northeast Alabama called Scottsborough, sitting in an old African Methodist
Episcopal church built in eighteen seventy eight by former slaves.
The church is now a museum and Ben, the daph
Haffrey and I are talking to the director, Tom Reidy
about what happened on the Chattanooga to Memphis train at
the peak of the Great Depression.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
It's nineteen thirty one. People are hoboing all over the
country and on the morning of March twenty fifth, the
nine defendants along with two young ladies from Huntsville, along
with dozens of others. Never 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

(01:12):
a town about twenty 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 the six came off and these other guys
stayed on. There's a fight, Yeah, there's a fight over space.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
This is Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
So these the white guys that got off the train
went back to the agent at the Stevenson depot and said, hey,
we just got thrown off this train, which they were
illegally on right there on ticketed. 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.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
By the time they get to paint Rock, there's anywhere
from one hundred and one hundred and fifty men, horses,
ropes waiting for the train.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Everyone's pulled off the train. The two women say they've
been raped. The nine young men, some of them just
kids twelve and thirteen years old, gets shipped directly to Scottsboro,
which is the county seat. By the time they get there,
another mob is waiting, and.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
There's this wonderful Atticus Finch moment in the story where
the sheriff of Scottsboro, Mattwane, 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.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Because I guess they believed them, And.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Two weeks later, on April sixth, and three hours after
they met their attorney, the trial started.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Him Malcolm Gladwell, Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about
things overlooked and misunderstood. This is a 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

(03:40):
kicked off cognitive dissonance on an international scale. Hitler's wave
of anti Semitism focused the world's attention on Germany, But
in nineteen thirty one, something happened across the ocean from
Germany that held the world's attention in the same way
the Scotsboro Boys trial. In this our series finale, let's

(04:02):
turn the clock back to nineteen thirty one. The Scottsborough
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 in nine.

Speaker 4 (04:21):
Negro youths are hurriedly arrested, promptly marched off to Scottsboro
for trial. Six days later, they are indicted uncharges of assault.
Seven of them are senanced 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.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
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.

Speaker 4 (04:54):
Thousands of telegrams bore into Alabama from all over the world,
asserting that the Negroes had been night a fair trial.
The case is finally carried to the highest court in
the land, the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
There was public pressure, There were appeals, re trials, landlock.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Did you go to jump in chout?

Speaker 5 (05:15):
They tell you what's all about.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Everybody's writing about it. Everybody knows the Discosbrow Voice. People
were starting to have radios in their house. But it's
just remarkable how fast the word did spread on.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
This 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 Scotsboro Boys. There was I. B. Wells,
the great African American activist, Jimmy Cagney, one of the
biggest names in Hollywood, and then Albert Einstein.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Einstein was in Germany when they arrested, and he in
the summer of nineteen thirty one wrote a letter with
a bunch of German scientists to the governor Miller, saying, well,
they were intellectuals, they called them. So German intellectuals demand
the release of the Scottsboro Boys because they're innocent.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
And Einstein, I sent is like physicists living in Germany. Right,
who is somehow so moved by the press accounts of this?

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Right?

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Two years before Hitler became Chancellor, thousands of Germans were
out in the streets protesting American white supremacy.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
And they had people throwing rocks through the American embassy
with notes taped onto him. That was just say they
shall not die.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
And that is why Ben and I were in Scottsborough.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
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 Scottsborough? And then I realized what year it
was and what happened the year after?

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Oh right, nineteen thirty two an Olympic year as well,
and where were those games held? I think you can
guess where this is headed. In April of venteteen twenty three,

(07:30):
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

(07:51):
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 nineteen twenties, half a million strong and
growing by the day, a city on the verge of stardom.

(08:14):
Billy watched the sunrise every morning over the San Berardino Mountains,
but never bothered to look to see if it's said
at night.

Speaker 6 (08:23):
LA was really controlled and run by a coterie of
a shadow government comprised of banker's financiers, but really, above
all the real estate.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Man Barry Siegel, the author of a wonderful book about
Billy Garland, Dreamers and Schemers.

Speaker 6 (08:42):
Of which Billy Garland was premier. The prince of the realtors.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Billy.

Speaker 6 (09:01):
Billy was the frontman, 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

(09:22):
the city, promoting the future.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
So in nineteen twenty three, 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. Then the King is opening things,

(09:48):
and like, here's this guy from I mean, from what
their perspective must have been, the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 6 (09:56):
Absolutely, they literally were asking him where Los Angeles is?

Speaker 1 (10:00):
What's his trump card?

Speaker 6 (10:04):
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 is La anywhere near Hollywood?
And Billy was smart enough to say, yes, La is

(10:24):
a suburb of Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
He understood that that glamour, the emerging glamour of the region,
could play to his advantage. Yes, yeah, I'm just thinking
back to the IOC though, because the the IOC really
is it's like every faded aristocrat in Europe is, Yes,
every fuddy dotty you can find with their wax mustache

(10:47):
is around the table. And then this like this, this
this kind of charismatic, wide open, extroverted Californian shows up.
I just I'm just imagining. It's a fantastic scene.

Speaker 6 (11:01):
I've imagined it too, And I think that's part of
how he was effected. 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.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
They're there amidst all of this sort of eighteenth 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.

Speaker 6 (11:38):
It's and that's exactly that's an exact sort of exactly
how he put it too.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
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 delicate stands up and says, so moved, let us

(12:06):
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 Coronel Palace,
home to the country's royal family. Billy spotted a bald
man speaking passionately to a group of onlookers. It was Mussolini,

(12:27):
the newly installed fascist leader of Italy. Billy wandered over
shook his hand. The next day, Billy had an audience
with Pope Pious, the eleventh of the Vatican. Pious said
how much he believed in the Olympic tradition, and Billy
kissed his ring. Billy convinces the IOC to bring its

(12:47):
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 gets swept up in a
miscarriage of justice so outrageous that it sparks a wave
of protest around the world. March is in Germany, South Africa, Cuba,

(13:08):
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.

Speaker 7 (13:26):
That's in the name are the President of the United
stirty I have proclaim open the Olympic Games of Los
Angeles celebrating that tenth opiod on the modern area.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
Well, so if the world is upset about Scottsboro in
nineteen thirty one, then why is there not a boycott
of the LA Games in thirty two?

Speaker 1 (13:59):
I think you know, Well, 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 three hundred years old. They're embedded in the

(14:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
Part of the difference is that Nazism is a new thing,
whereas what's happening in Alabama is just not new at all.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah, what's important is it's because it wasn't it wasn't
a one off. Right, why does America go up and
the black community particular gets so up in arms about
George Floyd because it had happened too many times? Right,
And Scott's part is kind of like that. There's been
a steady drumbeat of this kind of stuff coming out

(15:07):
of the South, and there's you know, the world seizes
on that because they're like it can't, can't keep doing this.
It wasn't system malfunction. It was system function. That's a
lot more kind of a outrageous I don't think you
could make sense of what happened with the Scottsboro Boys
unless you take a step back and look at the

(15:29):
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

(15:51):
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 in 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

(16:12):
maybe it's all three, but Scottsborough 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 Hammill,

(16:33):
and the first thing she brought up was Alabama's state
constitution at the time, which had been rewritten in nineteen
oh one, with one thing in mind. There was no.

Speaker 8 (16:44):
Doubt as to what the intent was.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
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.

Speaker 8 (17:00):
We are here to get rid of the nigger.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
The fifteenth 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 dollar fifty 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.

Speaker 8 (17:28):
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

(17:50):
white person that kind of met the requirements but also
maybe didn't, they could get waved through.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
The nineteen oh one Alabama Constitution would end up being
the longest constitution in the world three hundred and eighty
eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty two words, about eight
hundred and fifty times longer than the US Constitution.

Speaker 8 (18:14):
When African Americans went to register after the nineteen oh
one constitution was ratified, they were just turned away.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
In nineteen hundred, there were one hundred and eighty one thousand,
four hundred and seventy one African American men of voting age.
After the constitution, fewer than three thousand of those men
could vote.

Speaker 8 (18:35):
You know, we did not have a black electorate in
this state worth speaking of until the nineteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
It gets worse. In nineteen oh two, a black janitor
named Jackson Giles file suit against the state. Jackson says,
I meet all the requirements, I can read, I understand
the constitution, I paid my pull tax, I own property,
but they still won't let me vote. The case goes
all the way to the Supreme Court in nineteen oh three, where,

(19:07):
writing for the majority, the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
one of the greatest legal minds the Supreme Court has
ever produced. Rites and I'm not making this up. The defendant,
mister 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

(19:30):
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 twenty twos.

Speaker 8 (19:48):
Justice Holmes disingenuously said, Oh, if Jackson Giles wants a remedy,
he needs to seek his member of Congress to do
something about it. But Jackson and Giles had been denied
the right to vote for any member of Congress.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Mister Giles, if you don't like the system that keeps
you from voting, then vote to change it.

Speaker 8 (20:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
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,

(20:46):
the Scottsboro boys would end up serving more than one
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 range. And so do
you study that case in at law school in Alabama.

Speaker 8 (21:06):
No, isn't that a shame?

Speaker 1 (21:09):
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 nineteen thirty six for moral reasons, then
the world shouldn't have gone to Los Angeles in nineteen

(21:30):
thirty two 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 peer competitions. The

(21:51):
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 nineteen

(22:12):
thirty six, 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 Fiorlo LaGuardia signed up to be co chair.
The Governor of New York agreed to hand out prizes.
Proceeds from the event will go to supporting the anti

(22:33):
Nazi movement end eventually to helping Jews escape from Eastern Europe.
The Labour 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

(22:58):
was the winner of the long jump in the night
nineteen thirty two Olympics. George Veroff, 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 forty yard dash was won by a member
of the dressmakers Union, Wanda Oldzuska. Another Oldzuska Mitzi, competed
with her on the winning relay team. When reporter asked

(23:20):
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

(23:44):
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 nineteen thirty

(24:07):
six in Cleveland. When the Olguard 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

(24:27):
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 in gymnastic demonstration on
July fourth, nineteen thirty six, in Taberville, Ohio, near Cleveland,
sponsored by the Czechoslovak Socialist Federation of America, the Czechoslovak

(24:50):
Labor Gymnastic Union, the American Workingmen's Socle of New York,
the Workingmen's Gymnastic 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 of the Socialists, and then the Socialists

(25:12):
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.

(25:33):
Who wants to watch that? So what's the solution? Option two?
Take that absolutism down a notch. Be willing to compromise.
Remember Charles Cheryl, the American delegate who fought so hard
for America to stay in the Berlin Olympics. Just before

(25:53):
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.
Cheryl wrote back your September twenty three letter about the
Prague press story of a Jewish football player killed at
Ratisports Silesia arrived today. If true, it is as bad

(26:18):
as Negro lynchings in our South. Cheryl 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

(26:39):
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
nineteen thirty two games because of our negro lynchings in
the South. Oh, right, the endless boycott bet And I
thought about this.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
I think you're right that that probably if you boycott
thirty six, you also have to boycott thirty two. And
then you're looking at there is no Olympics in nineteen
forty because it was planned for Tokyo, and then obviously
World War II cancels that, and not in forty four either,
So then that's a huge stretch of time. It's what
is that it's twenty years, twenty years.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
With the Olympics, twenty eight to forty eight.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
So could the Olympic movement have survived twenty years of
no Olympics? Probably not.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
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 goes like this, sporting and chivalrous
competition awakens the best human qualities. It does not sever,

(27:51):
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 purer and impure your

(28:13):
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

(28:35):
the fall of nineteen eighteen, Los Angeles was in a
rough patch. The war in Europe was taking its toll
on the economy. The nineteen eighteen flew, which it claimed
millions of lives around the world, had shut down the
city streets. Tourism, the great life blood of Los Angeles,
was at a standstill. Billy Garland and his friends needed

(28:55):
a plan to get the city back on track. So
Billy calls a meeting in his office gathers together the
power brokers.

Speaker 6 (29:03):
They were meeting there basically to try to figure out
ways to uh uh promote Los Angeles above all, to
uh avoid future lulsome business.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Barry Siegel again.

Speaker 6 (29:16):
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 uh and draw investors.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
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.

Speaker 5 (29:46):
Them on the ship. That one happened to arm O
Faulki be the limit game without a day, the one
living heritage from those different times.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
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.

Speaker 5 (30:12):
Many thousands of visitors to these games will come to
Los Angeles and California from our thoughts to the globe
and from every portion of our country. Let me add
that California recognized her responsibility as hosts. The stranger within
her gates will be treated to.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
That cordial hospitality and welcome.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
So tradigal of our wonderful state, bring.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
The kids stay at one of my hotels.

Speaker 5 (30:36):
To California, hosts of the world for the sixteen day
period beginning on July. Period the Witness for Yourself, the
aldermate and highest manifestations of modern sportsmanship known to mankind.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
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

(31:15):
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 kaiser Af hotel? Can we have one
in Hollywood? How much do the Nazis look to thirty
two for kind of inspiration on I mean they take

(31:38):
that kind of that notion of the Games as a
spectacle and run with it.

Speaker 6 (31:44):
They were inspired by the thirty two Olympics very much.
So it was my thirty two Olympics for a model
model for them. In that way. Billy Garland and his
game showed them the way.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
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 brought

(32:19):
boycott it in thirty six. 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. The core of
all of it is everyone takes sports really really really
really really really seriously. And I kind of realized halfway

(32:40):
through that I'm one of those people.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
You're a person who thinks sports really matter.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
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 out to race each other.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
With your foil me as a person who is just
sort of like unable to recognize even an Olympic level runner.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
And so, like you know, the question we have to
ask ourselves is if we want a boycott in thirty six,
do we really want an Olympics Because the only way
to have in 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.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
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 nineteen thirty six games,
and I used to feel like we shouldn't have gone
thirty six games. So I don't know what I was
really investigating then having not I guess maybe just like

(33:46):
to confirm my position. I think if you think sports
and the Olympics really matter, which admittedly 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 nineteen thirty six
Olympics because the myth that everyone buys into is that

(34:06):
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 the government that can then caj all
of that moral authority and beauty and excellence and put
it in the service of their own project, which is

(34:28):
the defilement of what it is to be a person,
like one of the most inhumane things in the twentieth 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 one
hundred percent could have moved the Olympics.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yeah, so I am incredibly skeptical of the idea that
a boycott of Berlin would have in any way have
our opposition to Nazism. My guess is the opposite would
have happened. That we would have said, Okay, we've said,
we've set our piece, we don't like the man, and

(35:11):
we're not going to go and participate in these little games.
And like some strikes me, you could make a completely
alternate scenario that this allows 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 just not I don't buy that premise about I

(35:32):
never have bought that premise about symbolic acts of protest.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
But don't you think that the record shows that having
the Olympics in Berlin in thirty six is helpful to
the Nazis? Like Gerbel says, this is a really big
breakthrough for US and foreign currency floods into the country.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
They're happy that they got away with it. Yeah, but Ben,
on the scale of things that were happening in the
nineteen thirties that had an effect on the progress of Nazism,
this is so far down the list.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
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
nineteen thirties to combat Nazism, But like, why wouldn't you
do all the things like it makes sense to do.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
We're not doing any of the other thing. This is
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

(36:36):
going on there, you realize this is a deeply evil
man who we need to do something about, right, something
real about My point is, what kind of the games
is not real? It's just I'm sorry. It's a substitute
for actual behavior.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
But it doesn't need to be a substitute. It's a
substitute if you take that action in bad faith.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
But I think, I think any kind of useful reading
of human nature suggests that nine times out of ten,
symbolic actions discharge our responsibility, they don't turbo charge them.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
I one hundred percent agree with that. However, what is
the connection between the 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

(37:29):
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

(37:50):
of the thirty six 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 were just describing
that could have happened. And I would just prefer that
one the one in not going, maybe for like complicated reasons,
and then hope that it puts the right kind of

(38:10):
pressure on this sort of ethereal systems level realm which
is not taking the action it needs to do.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Ben and I do not agree three options absolutism, soft idealism, realism.
Are you going to fight, compromise or shrug? Is your
true north? Dorothy Thompson, Every Brandage or Billy Garland. The

(38:39):
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
into first place. The last interview Ben and I did

(39:08):
for this series was in Los Angeles at UCLA with
Millan 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.

(39:29):
They were a handful of athletes milling about, and then
a young woman came running past us. She was doing
two hundred 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.

(39:52):
I want to see where how beautiful runners are. I
don't know see she's gonna run for us, but 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. If she washed, her run just
a gorgeous and she was flying. Most people have seen
runners at high school track meets, or maybe world class

(40:12):
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.

(40:32):
Just the tap tap tap of their shoes landing lightly
on the track, you can just tell what someone's I
don't know who she is. Then Milan Tiff said, that's
Sidney MacLaughlin. Sidney McLaughlin, Sydney McLaughlin, Lavroney, two time Olympic
gold medalists in the forumder Beater hurdles, the world record holder,

(40:56):
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 art student
would feel 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,

(41:19):
so I started to whisper, to try and play a
cool as soon as I thought she was much taller.
She's one of the greatest female athletes. I was like,
I mean, I can't believe I didn't.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
It didn't ever occurred to me that it was full.
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 nineteen thirty six, first should
we go? And then, more importantly, if you have ideals,
how do you hold onto them in an ugly, messy world?

(41:52):
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

(42:15):
in the future, just as we had in nineteen thirty six.
We continued 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

(42:36):
be clear about what we're arguing. For Charles Cheryl 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

(43:00):
and with so much excess baggage that it's a miracle
that didn't sing 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.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
What's the right to the line? Sidney MacLaughlin is bringing
it to the La La. Muhammed Mohammad's trying to hold
on McLoughlin on the inside to the line. That's gonna
be Sidney's time again. That's a long record again.

Speaker 8 (43:36):
My Cloughlin.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Orisionist History is produced by Benda daf Haffrey, Tolly Emmlin
and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact
checking by Arthur Gomberts and Jail Goldfine. Original scoring by
Luis Kara, Mastering by Sarah Bruger and Jake Krsky, Engineering
by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

(44:10):
Special thanks to Karen Schakerji. Additional thanks to Michael Yushinsky,
Meredith Rawlins, Michael Specter and Michael Linton at Pushkin. Special
thanks to Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey,
Jordan McMillan, Nicole opten Bosch and Brian Schrebnick, Christina Sullivan,

(44:31):
Kerry Brody and Greta Come. I'm Malcolm Glapnow
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Host

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

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