Revisionist History - Hitler’s Olympics, Part 2: Pangloss, Polonius, Prufrock

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Charles Sherrill was everything a gentleman of his generation was supposed to be: rich, handsome, charming, Ivy-Leagued. He was impossibly well connected and extravagantly mustachioed. He was also the person who, as much as anything, decided whether American athletes would participate in the 1936 Olympics. Faced with one of the great moral dilemmas of the day, America needed the wisdom of Solomon. Instead, it got the wisdom of Sherrill. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I have never had a single conversation where both you and I were not kind of grinning as we told Charles Charles stories. Well, I think there's something kind of lovely about his unselfconsciousness. I mean, he's a rare breed in this day and age. The like completely unselfconscious man who never for a second doubts his abilities, even though there's so much evidence for why he should be doubting his abilities. I'm talking to Ben Nadaf Haffrey, my partner in our series on the 1936 Olympics, the most consequential Olympic Games in history. And he's also just a really excellent partner in the goal of mocking him because he really preserves all of the evidence of his follies. And he just like, reads like a great character out of literature. This episode is about Charles Hitchcock Sherrill,

the man who in the early 1930s was at the center of the debate over whether the United States should go to the Berlin Games. In fact, if you ask why the Olympic Games are the Olympic Games, how it flourished and endured over the course of the most tumultuous century in history, there are really only two people who matter. One is Avery Brundage, and we'll get to Brundage later in the series. The other is Charles Hitchcock Sherrill. Sherrill is a forgotten figure today. Traces of him persist only in little scraps here and there. But in his day, when Sheryl gave an after-dinner speech somewhere, it made the times. When Sheryl complained about his neighbor's dog, it made the times.

When he died, the New York Times wrote no fewer than five stories. Five. He was everywhere. He knew everyone. He was friends with every American president, from Teddy to Franklin Roosevelt. He attended every reception of importance, every luncheon that mattered. In his 69 years, he crossed the Atlantic 90 times. He was in constant motion. He was Zelig. He's Forrest Gump. He's Forrest Gump. You know I'm about to. You know who he is. Hold on.

Hold on. Hold on. Oh, no. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. He's Polonius. I have to get this right. Here we are. Okay.

So this is from the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Maybe T.S. Eliot's most famous poem. And Prufrock is a kind of self-aware version of Charles Sherrill. Oh, yes, here we are. Okay. No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. I am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.

No doubt an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and particular, full of high sentence but a bit obtuse, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous, almost, at times, the fool. That's him! It's perfect! That is him. And it also, wait, can I do another literary piece?

He's also Pangloss, you know, Candide's sort of utopian philosopher who's like completely fatuous. The Pangloss quote is, it is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are. We're all being created for an end. All is necessarily for the best end. And that's also Sheryl's kind of, that's his philosophy of inconsequence. Why really bother? Because everything's so great and it's just how it ought to be. Zelig, Forrest Gump, Polonius, Pangloss. Oh, and one more. That reminds me of the Dorothy Thompson, Hugo's Nazi quote, that he has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions.

His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected. Remember Dorothy Thompson's parlor game where she describes going to parties, looking around the room and picking out which person was most likely to go Nazi. Thompson had two particularly interesting archetypes, Mr's B and C. Charles Sherrill was the embodiment of Mr. B. Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money, and he's done lots of other things for money.

His code is not his own. It is that of his class. No worse, no better. He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value. Success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. Has a movement likely to attain power? It would. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is episode two in our

series, Hitler's Olympics, how and why America went to the 1936 Games. Charles Sherrill grew up in Washington, D.C. His father made a lot of money lobbying for the big railroad interests. He went to college at Yale, then worked for a time as a lawyer on Wall Street. He was tall, slender, with a long imperial nose, bright twinkling eyes, a full head of blonde hair, and a thriving mustache. He wrote 20 books, mostly about stained glass. It's his memoirs, though, that are a tour de force, an unpublished 360-page compendium of every anecdote, accolade, witticism, and celebrity encounter in his entire life. Here is my favorite. 1931, I had the honor of lunching alone at the White House with President Hoover, because he wanted me to undertake a certain matter which I guessed he thought me reluctant to do.

That opening is very Charles Sherrill. He was not the sort who volunteered. That would be gauche. He waited for opportunity to ask him to lunch. It was an excellent luncheon, he continues, and I was pleased to see upon each of the four corners of the table small silver dishes containing cherries. I am very fond of cherries, and so looked forward to indulging in them when the moment arrived, therefore.

While I was partaking out of a cup of soup, the president ate the cherries out of his dish and remarked to me, I see you do not like cherries, and then proceeded to eat all the cherries out of all four dishes. This stunned me, but of course I made no comment upon his disposal of all the cherries in sight. The president then makes a pitch for the post he wants Cheryl to take. Some minor ambassadorship or blue-ribbon panel. Cheryl demurs. The president is crestfallen.

But as they leave the luncheon, Cheryl turns to Hoover and gently says, I think, sir, that you do not realize that a man does not always know just what the other man likes or does not like. For example, at luncheon, you said I did not appear to like cherries, but you are mistaken because I am very fond of cherries. But there might be something else which I would like to do to serve you, which I like as much as I like cherries, and possibly it is something that you have not thought of in connection with me. And then the kicker. Perhaps this remark of mine has something to do with his subsequently asking me to undertake the embassy to Turkey. I mean, can you see why we are so fascinated with Sheryl?

It's all there in the showdown over the cherry bowl. His willingness to speak truth to power, his will to succeed, his daring conversational gambits. Sheryl's most enduring fame, however, was as a sportsman. He was a champion sprinter at Yale. He never went to the Olympics, but he did briefly share the world record for the 100-yard dash. But that was just part of it. You know how sprinters crouch at the start of every race instead of standing?

Charles Sherrill invented the crouching start. Or at least he says he did. Anyone that looks at my hand will see that I have a luck line which surprises all of those who are wise in such subjects. Sheryl was much sought after as an after-dinner speaker, and he would often begin with a story or two of his halcyon days at Yale as a champion, athletic innovator. Which brings me to the athletic thought that although I should claim credit for the invention of the catching start, the real fact is that it's due more to luck than brain.

I happened upon it and it turned out to be worth at least a yard, and I got credit for something which my luck really deserved. You know how you have an uncle who stole home in Little League to win the county championship, and he's still telling that story 50 years later? Cheryl was like that, with a crouching start. He has this glorious life that everyone in the world is basically supporting. Because even he has all these letters from presidents just being not saying anything important, but being like, Chaz loved your book on stained glass. Yeah. Like three paragraphs from Teddy Roosevelt telling him how great his book on stained glasses.

And I believe that he actually read Charles Sherrill's book on stained glass. But for what reason other than to make Sherrill feel good about himself, which is just the mission of even the most powerful man in the world. Do you know about the Teddy Roosevelt? There's a great Teddy Roosevelt moment in... Oh, yeah. He goes to see Roosevelt. This is from his diaries.

And he waits for half an hour before going into the president's study because Booker Washington had been called in to advise upon a speech touching on the colored race. So just so we know, he's like- Something meaningful is really going on. Booker T. Washington was one of the most important African-American leaders of his generation. And they're talking about the central problem facing the American public. And Sheryl is like waiting impatiently because he said, I followed him and after the purpose of my visit was concluded, I arose to leave. The president asked my opinion of two bronzes. One was the Bronco Buster,

which had been presented to him by the old regiment, the Rough Riders. The other was the Crouching Start by Tate McKenzie. Ah, that's the statue I found in the museum. We are deep into digression mode here. But at some point in our mutual obsession with Charles Sherrill, Ben found himself in a community museum in some waspy corner of Connecticut and stumbled upon a statue of a tall, handsome man in a crouching start. Chills went down his spine.

Exactly, exactly. I laughingly declared my inability to give any unprejudiced answer because I was the first runner to use the crouching start. Not true, by the way. Come back here and sit down, snapped out the president and and then followed a rapid-fire fusillade as to why that start had been invented, its advantages, limitations, etc., until I felt as if a stomach pump had been applied to my brain.

Like, just so we understand, Roosevelt has just met with Booker T. Washington to discuss the central issue facing the republic, which is the continued, like, continued crime committed against the black people. Sheryl shows up and what does the president do? Finally comes alive with the question of the origin of the crouching start. Presidents were impressed by Charles Sheryl and so was an organization that lies at the very heart of this story.

The International Olympic Committee. The IOC. The IOC is the governing body of the Olympic Games. Then as now, it is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Neutral territory. It has ultimate control over all aspects of the Games. The rules, the events, the schedule, where the Games are held, who gets invited. The organization's founder was Pierre de Coubertin, Baron de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. He got the modern game started in Greece in 1896,

planted the seed, and from the beginning he surrounded himself with his friends, basically other aristocrats. He referred to them as the trusted men. The baron's successor to run the IOC was Count Henri Dubay-Latour of Belgium. Someone once wrote of the count's wife, the Comtesse Elisabeth von Clary-Anne Aldringen. She traveled widely, as her husband was a passionate tourist.

The Comtesse was also a Nazi, who wrote a personal note of thanks to Adolf Hitler after he invaded her country. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Another Olympic committee member, His Excellency the Most Excellent, the Marquise of Samarank, the Spanish aristocrat who ran the IOC for 21 years. One biographical note on Samarank reads that, quote, during his studies, he practiced roller hockey, for which he created world championships, which the Spanish team won.

Roller hockey. He picks a sport no one plays and then invents a world championships where he has to be the favorite. I mean, that is just about the most perfect description of enterprising white guy privilege ever. And let's not forget about Lord David George Brownlow Cecil Burley, heir to the Marquess of Exeter,

who once ran around the upper promenade deck of the Queen Mary ocean liner in 57 seconds, dressed in street clothes, a record that I'm pretty sure still stands. Burgley was the one who bestowed the gold and bronze medals on the American runners John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the Mexico Games in 1968, where, on the victory stand, the two famously raised glove fists in a black power salute. When asked why Carlos and Smith wore gloves that day, Burgley said,

I thought they'd hurt their hands. These were the men of the IOC. They would meet every year or so in a grand hotel in one of the many storied capitals of Europe, put on long black coats and striped pants and bowler hats, drink a lot of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild, and regale each other with stories of past athletic triumphs. It was the greatest men's club in the world. And in retrospect, it was surely only a matter of time before the IOC set their sights on a certain dashing, mustachioed sprinting champion from New York City who held

the ear of presidents. Let me read to you from the June 8, 1922 edition of the New York Times. Olympic Committee Alex Sherrill. Mr. Sherrill will bring a vast store of athletic knowledge to the committee. While at Yale, he won the intercollegiate 100-yard dash championship four years in succession. He was, wait for it, the originator of the crouching start, which is now used in all sprints in every section of the world. Zellig, Forrest Gump, Polonius, Pangloss, Mr. B, and the Thomas Edison of the crouching start. Our man of parts has now been given his greatest role ever, a member of the International Olympic Committee, and over the next decade, his medal will be put to the test. Do I dare to introduce yet another literary analog? Hercules, of course, whom the Oracle of Delphi directed to perform 12 trials in exchange for immortality. The slaying of the Hydra, the cleansing of the Augean stables, on and on.

You read the Greek myths and immediately you're thinking of Charles Hitchcock Sherrill. And by the way, where is the most famous depiction of the labors of Hercules? In a sculpture found in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. It all fits. Adolf Hitler's rise to the leadership of Germany was swift. In 1923, in his mid-30s, he makes an incredibly clumsy coup attempt in Munich and gets arrested. Spends nine months in prison, where he writes Mein Kampf, his vision for a new Aryan Germany, cleansed of Jews and outsiders. And as soon as he gets out, his star ascends. By the time our famous American journalist Dorothy Thompson interviews Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel in 1931, the Nazis are the second biggest party in the German parliament

and gaining ground. And Thompson is trying to figure out whether Hitler can actually get elected chancellor, especially since he makes it clear that he doesn't actually believe in democracy. Thompson wrote, People were to awaken and Hitler's movement was going to vote dictatorship in. In itself, a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights. In 1933, Hitler pulls it off. He comes to power.

Almost immediately, there's a boycott of Jewish businesses. People start beating up Jews in the streets. Jews get banned from professional organizations and sports clubs. The Nazis, it turns out, care a great deal about sports, about physical fitness, about vigorous competition. and their vision of sports does not include Jews. Germany's best tennis player at the time is Jewish, Dr. Daniel Prenn, and he gets kicked off the country's Davis Cup team. In the spring of 1933, the head of the German organizing committee for the Berlin Games, Theodor Laval is stripped of his post because there were some Jewish people in his family tree. In May of 1933, the German sports commissioner gives an

interview where he says that German sports are for Aryans. The American Jewish Congress sends a telegram to the American delegates to the IOC. It says, No Jew in America or in other countries could in self-respect undertake to appear in Germany under present conditions. The Olympic ideal and the Nazi agenda are on a collision course. Now it's June 1933. The IOC has its big meeting set for Vienna. It was almost certainly at the

Hotel Imperial, a magnificent building in the Italian Neo-Renaissance style. Marble lobby, coffered ceilings, crystal chandeliers. No other place would be up to the IOC's standards. Little-known fact about the Imperial, by the way, Hitler worked there briefly as a janitor when he was bombing around Vienna in his 20s. Sixty-six delegates are coming for the IOC meeting from every country of significance in the world. The men's club has gathered in their long black coats, their striped pants and bowler hats. A special program is printed up for all in attendance, which begins on its opening page with a questionnaire. Are you a sportsman?

1. Do you play the game for the game's sake? 2. Do you play for your team and not yourself? 3. Do you carry out your captain's orders without question or criticism? 4. Do you accept the umpire's decision? Absolutely. Five, do you win without swank and lose without grousing? And then the crucial one, six, would you rather lose than do anything which you are not sure is fair? The Vienna meeting focuses squarely on that sixth question. A true sportsman would rather lose than do anything that wasn't fair, and the delegates are perfectly aware of what's going on in Germany. Not letting Jews compete simply because they are

Jews is, for the sportsman, surely the definition of unfairness. But... Our international committee does not concern itself with internal athletic conditions in any country, but only with the choice of that country's members for its Olympic team. This is Sheryl in a speech outlining the Commission's dilemma that week in Vienna. Now that's very important to remember. With that choice, we insist that race, religion, color, and so forth shall not interfere. Cognitive dissonance is upon us, and the Olympic Committee members have four ways they can resolve it. They can move the Games somewhere else. They can cancel the Games, the way they did in 1916 in the middle of the

First World War. They can keep the Games in Berlin and simply let everyone boycott. Or they can convince the Nazis to have a change of heart when it comes to their Jewish athletes. What should they do? Let us put ourselves in the mind of our hero, Charles Hitchcock Sherrill. He has sailed the Atlantic 90 times. He has written a book on German stained glass windows. He knows the Teutonic soul. And did not Charles Hitchcock Sherrill stare down the President of the United States over the thorny issue of the disputed cherry bowl? Why bow to tyranny? Why not compel tyranny to bow to you? The last option, to convince the Nazis to be less Nazi, was the only choice.

Sherrill sends a telegram home to the American Jewish Congress. Rest assured that I shall stoutly maintain the American principle that all citizens are equal under the law. The key business of the Vienna meeting was conducted by a six-man executive committee headed by the Belgian count Henri de Baillet-Latour. And Cheryl, by virtue of his stature as a diplomat and storied athlete, is the key player in that inner circle. They meet behind closed doors. Imagine a room full of mustachioed gentlemen in an ornate conference room festooned with portraits of other mustachioed gentlemen.

Cheryl, Baillet-La Tour, and the English delegate on one side of the Long Oak conference table, the Germans on the other. It was a trying fight, Cheryl explains later in a letter to a friend. The British said, let the Germans be, but Cheryl would have none of it. The Germans yielded slowly, very slowly. First they conceded that the other nations could bring Jews. Then I went at them hard,

insisting that as they had expressly excluded Jews, now they must expressly declare that Jews would not even be excluded from German teams. He would tell this story often in the intervening years. I personally, fearing unfair treatment of Jewish athletes in the selection

for the German 1936 Olympic team, made it my business to push the point so far that our committee received from the German Ministry of Interior, Ministerium des Internes, a letter of three short paragraphs, a third of which reads, as a principle, German Jews shall not be excluded from German teams at the games of the 11th Olympiad, that is, next year.

I had the honor of drafting that third paragraph. Perhaps you will agree that I felt everyone at home and abroad thought that I was thus doing my best for the Jews. In Vienna, there are reporters gathered at the hotel, waiting for news to break. Sheryl emerges, triumphant. The games will go on. A cheer goes up around the world. The New York Times, Charles Sheryl's newspaper of record, calls him a hero. The straightforward character of the promise obtained from the German government

came as all the greater surprise, and the opinion was expressed that a real blow had been struck in the cause of racial freedom, at least in the realm of sports. Charles Sherrill confronts the contradiction of the Berlin Games, the cognitive dissonance of a pure competition in an impure place, and he resolves it. How? Not like Dorothy Thompson. She said, you resolve it by not going. He says, no, you resolve it by making the impure place pure. By staring down his German counterparts across the negotiating table and through sheer force of personality and intelligence and courage and good old-fashioned New York City moxie bending them to our will. The Vienna Declaration was Charles Hitchcock Sherrill's finest hour. The controversy over

the games faded. The Olympics were saved. Problem solved, right? Oh no. Problem is just beginning. I want to keep talking about what's funny about Charles Sherrill because I do think he's hilarious and he brings me so much joy. I think he also raises a number of very complicated moral questions.

And I found myself at the end of the second day that I went into the archives. His scrapbooks are at the New York Historical Society. The New York Historical Society is a massive bozar building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, right by the Natural History Museum. If you were a man of Charles Sherrill's stature, there is no other place worthy of your collected papers. So we found out that Charles Hitchcock Sherrill had lovingly documented his entire life. You know, most archives you go to, they're just boxes of stuff that was left to a library, and then they had to figure out some kind of archival organization scheme for it. Not Charles Cheryl's papers. Everything that he kept was preserved in a scrapbook, in actually 44 scrapbooks, that then when he died in 1936,

his wife bequeathed to the New York Historical Society. Ben spent days at the Historical Society archives digging through the Sherrill motherlode. I mean, they're all like six inches wide. And the thing is, the legacy of Sherrill continues in the christineness of these scrapbooks. I mean, his ink doesn't fade, the glue he uses to bind this stuff doesn't give, and all of the paper was still so crisp and weighty. Everything is written on these like robin's egg blue and pearl thick stock pages or like silky diary pages. He just had the best of everything. And it's all withstood the test of time. Was the wife in donating these materials? Let's accept for a moment the premise that the wife

may not have been, the relationship may not have been, shall we say conventional. Do you think she's, do you think she knows what she's doing? Oh, the wife. We haven't talked about her yet. She was the heir to the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company, which would later merge with Hathaway to create, you guessed it, Berkshire Hathaway, which her family would turn around and sell to a young Warren Buffett. Yet another way in which the world turns around Charles Hitchcock Sherrill. Anyhow, Mrs. Charles Hitchcock Sherrill

takes the complete set of her husband's papers, has them preserved in perpetuity, and apparently never checks to see what's in them. Or maybe she does, and she's fine with it. Now, it's crucially important that he dies in 36. Right. The former head of manuscripts at the New York Historical Society points out that this is the rare occasion on which an American who really fell in love and hard with the Nazi party was unable to then sanitize his records after seeing what happened in World

War II. So what we have here is a perfectly preserved in amber, it's like the Jurassic Park mosquito of 1930s American fascism. Because nothing, there was, you know, already a very high bar for self-consciousness in Charles Sherrill's life. And so the full force of his love for the Nazis is on display in volume 35 of his 44 scrapbook collection. In our next episode, we delve into the buried treasure of Scrapbook 35, the uncensored journal of a man in the process of going Nazi. I'm an attendant lord,

one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince. No doubt an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous, full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous, almost, at times, the fool.

Well, yes. Thank you. by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flan Williams, Sarah Bruguera, and Jake Gorski, engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Shikurji. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you.