American Experience: Jesse Owens (PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The American Experience show on Jesse Owens also touched the familiar bases and depicted him as someone who was held up as an exemplar of the superiority of American democracy and equality over Nazi Germany’s authoritarianism and up-front racism (though Owens, like Louis and every other African-American, had to face the daily humiliations of segregation and all the limits it put on what Black people could do economically, culturally and socially). Like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens was born to a family of sharecroppers in Alabama who moved to the Midwest to escape economic as well as racial oppression. Owens worked with an unusual trainer in his adopted home state of Ohio (he attended Ohio State University and wore their T-shirt in most of the photos of him at the track) who made his runners practice to music (though the song we hear on the soundtrack is Jimmie Lunceford’s “Posin’,” which because it expects the dancer to stop and “pose” at the end of each chorus – much like the 1980’s craze “voguing” which was developed by young African-Americans in New York City and appropriated by Madonna for her hit song “Vogue”). He became a national champion and then in 1935 did a trip to Hollywood that almost cost him his career – he got sucked into the fast life and faster women of the stereotypical “going Hollywood” and another Black athlete started beating him – until Owens pulled it together, returned to Ohio, married his childhood sweetheart and got his training regimen back on. In time for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The Olympics were themselves a flash point of controversy because, while Germany had been awarded both the Winter and Summer Olympics in 1930, that was three years before the Nazis took power.

As explained in a previous PBS documentary about the 1936 games, Adolf Hitler originally wanted to cancel them – as an ardent German nationalist, about the last thing he wanted was an event whose stated purpose, at least, was to celebrate international brotherhood and world equality. Joseph Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda, talked him into letting the Olympics continue, not only because it would allow Nazi Germany to present its best face to the world (there was a temporary delay in the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews during the time the world’s representatives would be in Berlin) and refute all those nasty (and true) stories about how evil the Nazis were, it would also allow white German athletes who fit the Aryan racial stereotype to display their superiority before the world. One other argument that led Hitler to support the Games and bankroll the construction of huge stadia in which to hold them was that Goebbels persuaded him that having Germans, especially German men, train for athletics would make them stronger and more capable soldiers in the world war Hitler intended to start. The Games didn’t work out quite the way Hitler wanted them to; Jesse Owens won the three events he was officially signed up for – the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints and the long jump (in which Owens set a record of 26 feet that lasted for decades) – and also got put on the U.S.’s 400-meter relay team after the Germans protested that the original U.S. team included two Jewish runners. So the U.S. was forced to replace them with Owens and his Black teammate Ralph Metcalfe on the ground that the Nazis considered Blacks subhuman but not the kind of overarching threat to innocent white humanity they thought the Jews were. Owens and his teammates won that event, too – and they were prominently figured in director Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary of the games, Olympia.

As explained here and in even more detail in the previous PBS documentary on the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis actually invented a lot of the pageantry surrounding the modern Games, including the passing-of-the-torch relay from the original site of the ancient games below Mount Olympus in Greece to the host city and the final lighting of the Olympic flame to kick off the Games. The 1936 Olympics were also the first ones to be televised – though the only TV’s in Germany were in special “TV cabarets” where people could go and view them in public (and, ironically, the tickets for the Olympic telecasts in the TV cabarets were more in demand than tickets to see the Games live) – and many of the techniques Riefenstahl developed to film them, including a camera mounted on tracks and propelled by a catapult so it could follow the participants in a sprint race, were copied later and have become standard features of the way sports are filmed and shown today. I suspect Riefenstahl was particularly impressed by Jesse Owens because, for all his identification with the Nazis (she directed Triumph of the Will, the official film of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg and a masterpiece of Right-wing propaganda cinema), she also seemed to be turned on by Black men; when she was blacklisted from the post-war German film industry she became an anthropological photographer, specializing in shots of African tribesmen that often emphasized their huge cocks and other aspects of their sexuality.

If there’s a villain in the Jesse Owens story it’s Avery Brundage, the pro-fascist creep who then headed the U.S. Olympic Committee and was influential with the Amateur Athletic Association, which sponsored virtually all non-professional sports in the U.S. and like its successor, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, had a lot of elaborate rules preventing athletes from making money off their endeavors even in indirect ways like endorsements and sponsorships. In the first flush of Owens’ Berlin triumph, when he’d become a national hero not only because he’d won but because Hitler had publicly snubbed him and refused the traditional greeting from a head of state to the gold medal winners, he got a $10,000 offer from Eddie Cantor for radio shows and live appearances, and some other big-ticket offers as well. Owens had to turn them all down because Brundage, an admirer of Hitler and an anti-Semite in his own right who had successfully fought off attempts by Black and Jewish civil-rights group to get America to boycott the 1936 Olympics, forced Owens to go on a European tour. Owens was disgusted by the back-breaking schedule and the lousy accommodations he got stuck with, so he quit the tour in Britain and went home – and Brundage fought back by blacklisting him and forcing him to earn his living through absurd spectacles in which he would try to outrun a horse. (He would be given a substantial head start, long enough so the horse would be able to catch up with him and leave the final outcome in doubt.)

Like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens fell behind on his income taxes and ultimately had to declare bankruptcy, though he made something of a comeback in the 1950’s, appearing on the What’s My Line? TV show and finally getting some endorsement deals – including one from a cigar company, which made it rather bitterly ironic that when he finally died on March 31, 1980 at age 66 it was of lung cancer (he’d been a pack-a-day cigarette smoker for 35 years). Owens’ Wikipedia page quotes some contradictory statements he made about the radical Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their fists in a Black power salute after placing first and third, respectively, in their event in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. In 1968 he said, “The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There’s where the power lies.” Just four years later, in a book called I Have Changed, he wrote, “I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the Black man was concerned, that any Black man who wasn't a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.” He was invited to the 1972 Olympics in Munich – the first ones held in Germany since 1936 – as an honored guest of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and just before he died he lobbied Jimmy Carter in an unsuccessful attempt to get Carter to lift America’s boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow (an interesting counterpoint to the boycott campaign against the 1936 Berlin Olympics – which Owens had briefly supported before changing his mind, probably under pressure, and saying he was going only as an athlete and not a representative of his race). But when Owens finally passed, Carter paid him this tribute: “Perhaps no athlete better symbolized the human struggle against tyranny, poverty and racial bigotry.”