The Bad Guys Won

Brown’s book tells the story of the American eight-man rowing team that won gold at Berlin. Brown places oarsman Joe Rantz at the center of the tale, following him from his hardscrabble childhood in rural Washington State to his college days at the University of Washington, where he and his teammates defeated their arch-rivals at the University of California and better-pedigreed East Coast universities, and finally to the gold medal race in Berlin.

In the introductory chapter, Brown explains that Rantz insisted that the book focus not simply on his story or on his teammates: Brown had to write about “the boat.” Indeed, the boat becomes a metaphor for the team and teamwork, for the way the parts of a rowing crew make a whole greater than their sum.

Brown extends this metaphor to imply something much greater: in the end, The Boys in the Boat describes the American spirit. It implies that all those who rallied around their radios to hear Rantz and his teammates defeat the German and Italian crews presaged how the nation would come together against much tougher foes: the Great Depression and the Nazis.

This is how many Americans like their history: the twentieth century presented as a series of hard-won stands on the podium — skipping over, of course, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and their black-gloved fists in 1968. And they love The Boys in the Boat for adding another tableau to this pageant.

At the end of October 2016, Brown’s book has spent 125 consecutive weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Its publisher, countless newspapers, libraries, public radio and television stations, and even Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck (or his very creative publicist) have all published reading group guides that ask questions about the victory’s larger significance.

They all tend to elide, as Brown himself does, the political significance of US participation in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Win or lose, American athletes could not help but draw global attention to the German government’s successful staging of the Games — the boys in the boat may have won the race, but the Nazis indisputably won the public-relations war.

The Olympics had been awarded to Germany in 1931, before Hitler came to power. The Führer himself was lukewarm to the idea, but Josef Goebbels managed to convince him that it would be an economic and political boon. The German economy, in the midst of the Great Depression and devastated by its devalued currency, saw tens of thousands of tourists spend foreign currency there in the summer of 1936, sustaining the regime. Close to $3 million US dollars flowed into German coffers from ticket sales alone. A nation with five million unemployed when it was awarded the Games suddenly received an enormous public works project: building sports venues and a luxurious Olympic Village modeled on Los Angeles’s 1932 hospitality.

The world saw Berlin cleaned up and made ready for its hosting duties, its “Juden Underwünscht” (“Jews Not Welcome”) signs removed from public places for the duration of the Games. Hitler addressed the Opening Ceremony on the first television broadcast strong enough to escape the planet, a testament to Nazi technological prowess. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia: Festival of the Nations endures as perhaps the best example of sports documentary as state propaganda.

Perhaps this would have happened without US participation. But 1936 was an opportunity for the international community to ostracize the Nazi regime. Instead, the United States was one of fifty-one countries — the largest number yet in the modern Olympic era — that chose to attend.

Brown celebrates the gold medal as a symbolic victory for the United States but ignores how the race marked a material victory for Josef Goebbels. In choosing to ignore this material history, the book implicitly argues that the Olympics — and by extension sports — have no bearing on international politics: that, in 1936, the rowers, their coaches, the American Olympic Committee, and even the US government bore no responsibility to oppose Germany, except on the field of play.

At various points, Brown does gesture to the Games’ significance to the Nazi regime. He writes about Goebbels planning them and about Riefenstahl documenting them, and takes his opportunities to villainize the Nazi propaganda machine: Goebbels limps around leering at starlets and failing to woo the “beautiful and brilliant” Riefenstahl. When Allied shells kill Goebbels’s children in a flash-forward, the narration has a mild celebratory tone. Reviewing The Boys in the Boat, Jay Parini makes it simple: “It doubtless helps the narrative that the bad guys are so bad.”

The good guys are so good, too: Rantz plays the guitar and the banjo and loves his girlfriend and ice cream. He worked on the Grand Coulee Dam in the summer of 1935 and learns to be a better rower when the quasi-mystical boatbuilder George Pocock tells him to love his teammates with all his heart.

He and his teammates also participate in a where-have-you-gone-Joe-DiMaggio nostalgia: Timothy Egan writes that “they could not be any different from, say, the one-and-dones (college basketball players who leave for vast riches of the pros after their freshman year) who dominate that game.”

Reading The Boys in the Boat on those terms, it’s easy to forget that the bad guys really did win and that they used the good guys to do it.

Historical Blindness

The Nazis didn’t achieve this triumph without a fight: the American boycott movement began to take shape in 1933 when the American Athletic Union (AAU) included a provision in its participation vote that demanded the Nazis pledge not to discriminate against Jewish athletes.

A number of important figures in sports and diplomacy agreed with the AAU. The American ambassador to Germany and the head of the American delegation in Vienna both objected to American participation. The antifascist Ernst Lee Jahncke — a former assistant secretary of the Navy — was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for his opposition to the Berlin Games, marking the first time anyone was ever expelled from that notoriously corrupt body.

American syndicated columnist and Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun wrote: “I think that one of the most useful kinds of protest that can be made against the fascist regime of Hitler lies in our staying away from the Olympic Games in Berlin.” AAU president Judge Jeremiah Mahoney wrote that participation in the Games amounted to an endorsement of the Nazi government. But Avery Brundage’s grace and propriety would ultimately have their way.

The Boys in the Boat covers the boycott controversy in a couple paragraphs, characterizing the final vote to participate as “a victory for the thousands of young Americans who were then competing for a chance to participate in the Olympics.”

It does acknowledge that the Games were also a victory for Hitler and brings up Brundage’s casual anti-Semitism. But Brown moves on quickly, ending the chapter with soaring patriotism: “what remained was to select the athletes worthy of carrying the American flag into the heart of the Nazi state.”

If Josef Goebbels rejoiced — as he certainly must have — when he learned that the United States would send athletes to race in front of Riefenstahl’s camera and Hitler’s podium, Brown leaves it out.

When Rantz and his teammates arrive in Berlin and walk down streets lined with Nazi flags, Brown writes that they “could not have known” the regime’s dark side. But the boycott controversy demonstratively contradicts this: Nazi Germany was very much a part of public discourse by 1936; an American who was headed to the Olympics or was interested in the Olympic team would have followed the story of the boycott and known why it was proposed.

In fact, anyone who read the newspaper or listened to the radio — even if just to find out who was favored in an intercollegiate athletic event — would have had to know something about the Nuremberg Laws. The New York Times thoroughly reported on them in 1935, two years after it had covered the opening of the Dachau concentration camp and called Hitler a dictator on its front page.

What’s more, at least one of the boys in the boat knew exactly how dangerous Nazi Germany had become for Jews. When coxswain Bob Moch learned that he’d be making the trip, he received a letter from his father telling him about relatives in Germany he could visit or call on. In a separate sealed envelope, with instructions to read it in private, Moch learned a significant family secret: he was Jewish. His father warned him to be careful.

If thoughts about that fact crossed Moch’s mind while he was there — if he was afraid or outraged, or if he was just excited to be a college champion in the Olympics — Brown doesn’t seem interested. By the time Moch gets to Berlin, his heritage and his father’s warning are both forgotten.

False Solidarity

David Brooks recently wrote that Colin Kaepernick and all the athletes following his example are contributing to a crisis of solidarity in America and not living up to the ideals of the “Europeans [who] first settled this continent.” That those Europeans bought, owned, and sold black people — and that their hopes and dreams therefore do not match up with those of antiracist protesters — doesn’t seem to matter in Brooks’s analysis. What matters is that athletes participate in the ritual, that they keep up the performance of solidarity when the lights and cameras are on.

Ironically, it was Nazi propagandist Kurt Münch who put this most succinctly. In the pre-Olympic publication Knowledge About Germany, he wrote: “athletes and sport are the preparatory school of the service of the state.” This is the solidarity that The Boys in the Boat celebrates: the boys of the American crew team defeated the Germans and the Italians — a symbolic international conflict that predicts the real one less than five years away.

This display of international good sportsmanship and American triumph obscures an important fact: the 1936 Berlin Games legitimized a genocidal government that tried to take over the world and whose defeat cost nearly half a million American lives.

History affords us the perspective to bring that truth out of the shadows of the Olympic pageant. When Daniel James Brown separates politics from athletics in his version of the 1936 Olympics, he does Joe Rantz and the rest of the boys in the boat a disservice: he puts them to work for the wrong state.