8/15/23
Newsletter #428
The Crack of Dawn
Tomorrow Madonna will be 65 years old. The day after, Aug. 17, Robert De Niro will be 80, Sean Penn will be 63, and I’ll be 65. Also born in 1958, but no longer with us, Michael Jackson and Prince would both be turning 65 this year as well as me, but alas, they will not. I outlived both of them. I’ve also outlived Theodore Roosevelt, who only made it to 61; and his cousin, Franklin, who miraculously made it to 64. Franklin Roosevelt, by the way, was married to his cousin, Eleanor, who was the daughter of Teddy’s brother, Eliot.
At the Harvard Club in NYC, both Teddy and Franklin became acquainted with a fellow Harvard alumnus, a six-foot-five, raucous, fun-loving, piano playing, German named Ernst Hanfstaengl, humorously known as “Putzi,” which means “little penis” in German. Putzi was a gifted piano player and wrote several Harvard football songs that are still standards. He moved back to Germany in 1922. Putzi heard Hitler speak, became an immediate ardent fan, and the two became very good friends. After Putzi had attended several early Nazi rallies, he informed Hitler that his Nazi rally songs stunk. He sat down at a piano and played Hitler a variety of American college football songs, all of which were very Ra-Ra, and extremely easy to convert to Nazi songs. A particular favorite was the University of Michigan football song, (Hail to) The Victors, that already sounded like a Nazi song. It became an extremely popular tune and was first played in public by John Philip Sousa's band in 1899 in Ann Arbor. It goes like this:
Hail! to the victors valiant
Hail! to the conquering heroes
Hail! Hail! to Michigan
The leaders and the best!
Hitler loved it, and the three syllables of Ger-man-y fit in perfectly with Mich-i-gan.
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, they were already stuck with having to host the 1936 Olympics, a commitment made by the previous government. Hitler didn’t like sports and was against it. His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, however, thought it was a glorious opportunity to show off the great success of Nazism and Aryan Supremacy. They built an enormous, 100,000-seat stadium, hired the award-winning filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, to make a documentary movie out of it called Olympia, and trained their team of Aryan, Übermensch, supermen, to show the world who was really and truly superior.
Except neither Goebbels nor Hitler were sports fans, so these numb-nuts didn’t realize until it was too late and actually occurring around them that the United States’s team was composed of whites, blacks and Jews. When Jesse Owens won a Gold Medal on the first day, and Olympic tradition was for the country’s leader to congratulate him, Hitler and Goebbels ducked out, snubbed Jesse Owens, and had an emergency meeting in the parking lot. Goebbels was quoted at that meeting as saying, “Not only niggers, but Jews, too?” And they simply banned the Jews.
The two Jewish runners were Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller. They were replaced in the 400-meter relay race by the black runners, Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf, who with two other white runners, won the event and received gold medals. Gold medals that Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller might well have had. Jesse Owens ended up the big winner of those Olympics with four gold medals, so there went Hitler and Goebbels Aryan Supremacy theory up the spout.
But the Jews didn’t even get to participate. The Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Team both immediately acquiesced to banning the Jews. Not a problem. Look at that smile on Marty Glickman’s face.
From a sports standpoint, Hitler and Goebbels would have been much better off banning the black athletes, who just kicked their ass every which way. And I just love this fact: coming in second to Jesse Owens in the 200-meter dash, and receiving a silver medal, was Mack Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s older brother.
Oh, and Ralph Metcalf, who won four gold and silver medals at the ’32 and ’36 Olympics, became a four-time Congressman from Illinois.