Pushkin October thirty first, nineteen thirty five, Park Avenue, mid Taiminhattan.
A great two friends from the Advertising Club of New York City and present another interesting luncheon meeting of this organization.
The meal is served grilled Boston squad with Chris bacon or breaded vealsteak Vienna style, followed by old fashioned strawberry shortcack. The plates are cleared away. The president of the club introduces the head table, a long row of distinguished gentleman, and then the agenda of the day.
The Olympics to be held in Germany in nineteen thirty six. Forgetting the thought of every nation the world over, it seemed fitting then that we should go to our guest of the day.
He gestures to a man sitting next to him with a fabulous, thriving mustache, Charles Hitchcock Cheryl.
Why do we call on General Cheryl? First of all, he's an athlete himself. He's probably the only man who won seven intercillegiate championships while attending jail.
He lists Cheryl's many accomplishments, his time as a diplomat, his training as a lawyer, his service in the New York National guard.
Probably, though I should emphasize above everything else, the fact that for fifteen years he's been a member of the American Olympic Committee, in a nice little Olympic committee, and we've asked him to come here to clear up the fall which some feel exists about this nineteen thirty six Olympic situation.
And there is no better man to clear up this Olympic situation than Charles Hitchcock. Cheryl, of course, he opens his Advertising Club talk with a joke.
Your president has spoken as though I was dead and in a coffin, and he was speaking at the funeral. He left out what I think is the most important thing that he put and that is that I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever met in your life.
He beams, He looks around happily, his eyes twinkle. This is his kind of room. He launches into a brief and modest account of his sprinting accomplishments at Yale. He speaks of his key role in the invention of the crouching start on how the press love to talk about it.
I have a wife at pome So, sir, you've getched the myathletic path. She says, why is it that whenever you achieve anything, they must sprint half naked pictures of you?
And then Charles Cheryl tells the assembled group the story of how he has rescued the Olympic Games from the doubters and the naysayers, not once, but twice. Welcome to episode three of Hitler's Olympics, our story about the nineteen thirty six Games, the most important games in the history
of the Olympics. In the previous installment, we met our would be hero, Charles Cheryl, who single handedly broken the deal in Vienna, promise that he believed would save the nineteen thirty six Olympics, a promise from the Nazis not to exclude Jewish athletes from the Games. But now the deal is imperiled, there are renewed calls for an Olympic boycott, and our hero has been compelled once again to come
to the rescue. All human societies organize themselves into a pyramid, with ordinary people at the bottom and elites at the top. And the crucial thing about the world Charles Cheryl grew up in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is at the top of the pyramid is really really small. It's a pinprick. It's basically rich white men. And if you were all so handsome and a fraternity brother from Yale, so much the better. Charles Cheryl was all those things.
He was at the very apex of the pinbrick. And right from the beginning what distinguished Charles Cheryl was his intuitive understanding of the rules that governed the top of the pyramid, like, for example, never say a discouraging word about another person in that tiny group at the very
very top. I'm reading to you now from Cheryl's unpublished memoirs, where he recounts the story of the time he was part of a group visiting the White House and presented the first Lady, Grace Coolidge, with a bouquet of roses that had been named in her honor. I did this, Cheryl writes, with the comment that the presentation of coolidge roses to missus Coolidge was but holding the mirror up to nature. She replied, not exactly, because the roses are blondes,
and I am a brunette. Ernest cafalis all round. Rule number two. If you are outside this type, little sir, at the top of the pyramid, Charles Cheryl doesn't see you. This is a crucial point. There is a certain kind of racist who is racist because he or she harbors an obsession with the other. In the Jim Crow South, for example, swimming pools were segregated because white people didn't want to share the same water as black people. The idea that something might wash off black skin and linger
in the water gross them out. It kept them up at night. It was visceral. That's not Charles Cheryl. He has plenty of black people in his life. They work in the kitchen, they take his coat, but the thought that he is sharing his Manhattan townhouse with them does not keep him up at night. He has arranged his life so that he doesn't have to think about them at all. So when it comes to the nineteen thirty six Olympics and Jews in Germany, you might be wondering,
is Cheryl a n anti Semite? Well not like Hitler was an anti Semite. Hitler got all worked up about Jews. People like Cheryl, on the other hand, kept their voices down. What is the attitude of these this kind of person in this era towards Jews.
Let's see where to begin.
Nick Lemon historian.
So you're really talking about these sort of upper patrician classes, right. So typically these people lived inside a series of institutions that were quote unquote restricted, which meant, you know, in the broadest sense, only gentlemen could be in them, and in this specific sense usually meant no Jews. So this would apply to you know, private clubs, neighborhoods that often had deed restrictions that you know, no Jews could live there.
You know, very very often workplaces had rules against Jews who's being hired. It was understood that Jews weren't allowed in this world of sort of upper class gentlemen and ladies.
People in Cheryl's class arranged their lives so that they didn't have to deal with Jews.
And I think they would have thought, you know, Jews, or course, they're vulgar, they're not gentlemanly, they think about money all the time, things like that.
But they didn't think of Jews. To use one of Hitler's favorite words, as Vermin. Cheryl's great friend on the International Olympic Committee was the group's president, the Belgian count unreaded by La Tour. Remember Latour's wife was the one who wrote Hitler a thank you note when he invaded Belgium.
Now she wouldn't call herself a Nazi. She would say that sending a thank you note to your invaders upon the occasion of your country's invasion was just good manners, like sending a bud cake to the family that moves into the mansion across the street. The Count, meanwhile, once said of Jews in a letter to a friend that he wasn't fond of them. He wrote, the Jews usually quote shout before there is reason to do so. The Jews, in the view of the cultured men of the European aristocracy,
were annoying and vulgar and a little bit exasperating. But the Count was quite clear that you couldn't ban Jews from the Olympics. Just because a particular race was annoying and vulgar didn't mean that they couldn't participate in say the long Job. People like bay Latour and Charles Cheryl liked Jews in theory, but just not in practice, in contrast to the Nazis, who didn't like Jews in practice or in theory. In nineteen thirty five, that distinction seemed important.
Oh Ru three from the top of the pyramid. Remember when we said in the last episode that another of the people Cheryl reminds us of is Candide's pangloss, the man who believes that all is necessarily for the best end. Essentially, everything happens for a reason, and a good reason at that. I mean, how could it not when you're living a life like Charles Hitchcock Cheryl.
I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever met in your life.
That's not just a statement of character and disposition, It's an ideological belief. He looks around at those who would question the status quo, radicals, communists, suffragette's Jews, and he says, what are you complaining about? From where I sit at the top of the pyramid, the view is pretty great, Okay, final rule of pyramids and maybe the most important. From his happy perch high up on the pyramid, Charles Cheryl
con trucks the following syllogism. If we are really happy with things just as they are, then what do we make of those at the very top responsible for keeping things just as they are? We like them a lot. Charles Cheryl's great literary accomplishment, Apart from the books he wrote about Stained Glass was an ambitious work of history. He told the story of Otto von Bismarck, the nineteenth
century strong man who unified Germany. Bismarck was a master strategist, steely character, enormous, bushy eyebrows, a furious mustache, a jaw chiseled from the finest Bavarian granite, a row of medals on his crisply starched tunic. They called him the Iron Chancellor, and in his treatise Cheryl compared Bismarck with his other great man crush, the Italian strong man Benito Mussolini Ilduchack vor of modern fascism. Cheryl admired Bismarck, but Mussolini, for
Il Ducce he had true passion. In the course of his research, he would visit Mussolini in his massive office. As he would write, it is a fashion for writers upon Mussolini to describe this lofty room, devoid of all decoration, as an entirely appropriate background for this forthright statesman. Possibly they are right, but I see a wider, bolder background
for him. Il Ducjay would come striding over, and Cheryl's heart would go all a flutter looking back on the memory, He wrote, if he has known you several years, the greeting is pleasingly cordial, his caesar like features lighting up, and those piercing eyes softening into friendliness, and then a good manly handscheck. Was Cheryl's Bismarck and Mussolini a good book?
Probably not. It got a three sentence review in the American Journal of Sociology, ending with the line Cheryl's special field of competence would appear to be handling and assessing columns of marching men. A lesser man would be crippled by a sentence like that, but not Charles Cheryl. Because when Cheryl sent Mussolini his book, Il Ducce liked it so much he gave Cheryl the highest of all Italian
military and civilian honors. He made him a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy, a
gold star, plus a striking right shoulder sash. Mussolini sent it in a box to New York, where it arrived in time for Cheryl's twenty fifth wedding anniversary, a dinner at the Pier Hotel with one hundred and forty two guests, where the honor was pinned on Cheryl's chest by the Italian Consul General in the presence of the French, Argentine, Spanish and Cuban ambassadors and Dutch, Swedish, Greek and Czechoslovak ministers. A guess list that all of us have dreamt about
for our twenty fifth wedding anniversary. Let the assistant professors of sociology write what they choose about the book. Our hero was now a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Now think back to Dorothy Thompson, America's most celebrated foreign correspondent, who famously interviews Hitler in nineteen thirty one when he is on the cusp of power. Thompson's day job is not a
lot different from Cheryl's. As part of his diplomatic duties or his role at the IOC, Cheryl goes around Europe meeting with heads of state and aristocrats. As a foreign correspondent, Thompson does the same thing. I'm sure they meet some of the same people, but she's not at the top of the pyramid. She was raised by a struggling preacher.
Her mother died when Thompson was a child. Her life experiences haven't made her comfortable with power or left her thinking that the world is just fine the way it is. Quite the opposite. When Thompson got out of college, she immediately threw herself into the suffrage movement. She spent three years on that fight, and when it finally looked like women might get the vote, she decides, I want to find the next fight, and she buys a ticket on an ocean liner, and.
Then she landed in Europe just as fascism was starting to build.
The historian Sarah Church, well.
It's actually important that we all remember that that fascism was by no means a German phenomenon, especially in the nineteen twenties, or uniquely certainly not a uniquely German phenomenon. And in the twenties it's Mussolini. Well, of course gives it its name. So Thompson traveled to Italy. She encountered Italian fascists. She was educating herself about Italian and European fascism.
She marries a Jew, a Hungarian writer, a radical. She meets his crowd, artists, writers, outsiders.
This was an experience, a relationship that opened her eyes and her understanding to political conversations in Eastern Europe around the rising tensions and all of the volatility of the European political situation at that time. So by the time Hitler came into power in nineteen thirty three, she'd spent
a decade becoming an, you know, pretty expert. Certainly for an American, she probably had a more nuanced understanding than virtually any other American of her generation, because she'd spent the best part of that decade living among Europeans who were breathing and debating and arguing and figuring out what these new fascist movements were going to mean.
But I was care, I want to go back to the thing about she starts with the suffrage movement, and I wondered whether that experience kind of permanently sensitizes you to the kind of the plight of the powerless in a certain way, Like, I might be really hard to be pro fascist if you spent your early twenties fighting for women suffrage, don't you think?
Yeah? Absolutely so. She certainly she had a strong sense of sympathy and identification with people who saw themselves as being an oppressed class and oppressed minority.
The point is that when Dorothy Thompson thinks of Mussolini, it is not to remark on his manly handshake and piercing eyes. And when she goes to see Hitler, she doesn't defer to him just because he's on the cusp of running Germany. She sees him for what he is, an angry, vicious demagogue. But if you are Charles Cheryl looking at that same man, what do you see? You see someone very different. In the summer of nineteen thirty five, the deal to save the Games that Cheryl had hammered
out in Vienna two years before is imperiled. The Germans had promised to keep their Olympic team open to Jewish athletes, but Nazi anti Semitism is accelerating and people around the world are threatening again to boycott the games. Cheryl is worried that his diplomatic master stroke will come to nothing. He knows he has to act, and now he sees the mistake he made back in Vienna he dealt with underlings.
He realizes it's time to confront Herr Hitler himself. Does he go through Putsy Hitler's wagner playing Harvard trained pr men. Probably Putsy was always the point of entry for Americans
want again audience with her Hitler. If Charles Cheryl had lived to see how things turned out with the Nazis, he would have edited his papers, particularly the Chief Offender scrap Book thirty five, that he would have buried in the back yard of his estate in the Hamptons, along with his Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy. That's what people like Charles Cheryl did
after the war, cleaned house. But Charles Cheryl died too soon, and so there remains in the archives of the New York Historical Society a love letter in seven doubles based type pages. His Excellency, reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler received me at noon August twenty fourth, nineteen thirty five in his own private Munich residence. Let me, first of all, frankly confess that this will not prove a journalistic interview with Germany's chief of state. It merely narrates a foreigner's visit
to an undeniably great leader. As a gift, Cheryl brings Hitler two of his books, his treatise on German Stained Glass Windows, and of course his master work comparing Mussolini and Bismarck. Then they talked man to man for an hour and ten minutes. He wrote, I was immediately struck by the fact that Hitler deliberately chose the seat facing
the window and its bright sunlight. When in nineteen twenty one I talked with fifteen European prime ministers plus four presidents and two years later nine kings, none of them did this, nor have any leading statesman I have since then met Charles Cheryl had nothing but respect for a man unafraid to sit facing the window he goes on.
His photographers do him grave injustice in two Guards. They do not show enough the strength of his upper head above the expressive eyes, and give no hint of the engaging human being he can be when he wants to be. Dorothy Thompson, remember, looked into those same eyes and found the peculiar shine which often distinguishes Genius's alcoholics and hysterics.
It's like they're meeting a different man. Thompson found Hitler formless, cartilaginous, ill poised, and insecure, but Cheryl finds himself drawn to Hitler's famously short mustache. It's not like Cheryl's mustache, which of course is full and luxuriant and suggestive of all manner of daring and panash. But something this concise yet emphatic for the fur totally works. It suits Hitler's face while speaking, because revealing all of the expression around the mouth.
Welcome to the top of the pyramid, my little mustachioed friend. So what do the two men talk about? Here's Cheryl again. Because I am a member of the International Olympic Committee, we naturally spoke of our nineteen thirty six games schedule for Berlin. In these he expressed keen interest. Then Cheryl brings up what he calls the unfortunate Jewish question. Not the Nazis' anti Semitic policies writ large, of course, but the annoying controversy over Jews of the German Olympic team
and how it's threatening to derail the games. Cheryl has a proposal for Hitler, a simple way to calm the waters back in the United States. Just put a Jew on the Olympic team. One will do. Cheryl even has someone in mind, a fencer named Helene Mayer. Mayor is German and living in Los Angeles. She's one of the greatest fencers of all time. Technically she's only half Jewish since her mom is a proper Arian. Cheryl thinks that fact will help persuade Hitler. Plus mayor is blonde and
blue eyed and really looks the part. Hitler pushes back, so Cheryl brings up the Vienna Declaration that it hammered out two years previously at the Hotel Imperial Germany's agreement in principle not to exclude Jews. Hitler says he's never heard of the Vienna deal. Cheryl is shocked, what how is that even possible? He doubles down. Hitler responds, German sports are for arians only. Cheryl comes at him again.
It's back and forth, back and forth. Later, in a note to Frank and Roosevelt's private secretary, Cheryl describes the scene my book. Bismarck and Mussolini lay before him, and he faced a fine limback portrait of Bismarck. It was a last chance, so I went right at him with a question, what would Bismarck, master of foreigner's psychology do today? He was polite but showed nothing. Had My appeal won no sign. Two titans duking it out at the top
of the pyramid. Mustache to mustache. It was dreadful nerve for me to tackle him in his own Munich home. But I am only a private citizen and he can't eat me. Cheryl leaves the meeting, has his bold gambit worked, daring her Hitler to put himself in autovon Bismarck's shoes WWBD What would Bismarck do? Cheryl dashes off a letter to his friend by latour. Prepare yourself, he says, for the very real possibility that all of my brilliant diplomatic stratagems in Vienna two years ago have come to Nod,
please speak to him. Cheryl pleads, we need Hitler to compromise for the sake of the games. He writes, It will be a trying test for even your remarkable tact in Savo Affaire, and the sooner you meet the situation, the better the hope for your success instead of a destructive explosion. Did our hero endure a sleepless night in his agonies? Did he turn the essential question on himself? W w b D. What would Bismarck do if, say, Mussolini renegged on an agreement, but then he gets a
note in the mail. It's there in the famous scrap book thirty five, a little embossed card inviting him to the Nuremberg Rally in mid September, the annual propaganda festival put on by the Nazi Party. I'm sure you've seen film clips, thousands of soldiers marching in lockstep, chanting Hyle Hitler. Cheryl lives for moments such as these. Remember, even the American Journal of Sociology has noted his taste when it comes to columns of marching men. So he accepts the
invitation from the Nazi Party. He packs an overnight bag. They offer him a ride on Hitler's train.
He says yes, And then in his scrap book there then follows many pages of press coverage Schwastika's Nazi propaganda that he collected.
Mccullague bend Adaf Haffrey reporting on what he found in Cheryl's papers at the New York Historical Society.
There's an amazing photo of him at the Nuremberg Rally at some official events surrounding it, with all these medals on his tuxedo jacket, sort of gazing up at the ceiling in awe, because you imagine he's in some vast hall surrounded by just they look, there's such prototypical Nazis.
So it's just this man kind of daphly wandering around this grand hall, surrounded by these deeply evil people, and completely unaware of the historical significance of what he's witnessing, other than that it's a very important event and therefore must be prepared for his scrapbook.
The nineteen thirty five Nuremberg rally is where Hitler announced the so called Blood Laws, outlawing marriage between Arians and Jews and stripping German Jews of their citizenship. It was the clearest articulation yet of the Nazis' murderous anti Semitism, and for many Americans, Nuremberg put the conundrum of the games into sharp focus. If that's who these people are, can we really go there? But that's not how Cheryl sees it.
So what does he do at the Nuremberg rally? He collects signatures he and his scrap book has autographs from people he met at the Nuremberg rallies that are scrawled on this one of the brochures from it, describing what's going to happen on September in nineteen thirty five and then there's all these pencil signatures from what I can only assume it's prominent members of the party.
He's fan blowing the Nazi Party.
It's but it's like that, yeah, he's he was not even Yeah. I don't think that Charles Cheryl would approve of a campaign to exterminate the Jews. I think he all he can recognize is force, wilfulness and power, and so he understands that this will be a good one for the scrap book or the after dinner toast. But there's something about that the autographs thing I found very It's it's really chilling, and there's like, is there has to be a it's it feels like a different category
than the banality of evil. It's like the there there, we have to invent a new term for the relationship. Charles Cheryl bears to this evil.
I'm with you. He's so, he's he's got he's just he's just, he's he's just unbelievable. At the end, a top Nazi official pulls him and tells him her, Cheryl, we have good news for you. We are inviting the half Jew Helene Mayer to join the German Olympic team. Mission accomplished, he sails for home on the S S. Normandy, the largest and fastest passenger ship of its day. He
steps off the boat and is mobbed by reporters. I am more convinced than ever that America should take part in the Olympics, he says, and I'm probably the best friend the Jews have in America. Then he makes a threat. I'm not here to stop any antisemitic waves, but I
warn of the danger of such a development. If five million Jews in the United States can make one hundred and twenty five million Americans pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the Jews in Germany, Jews Cheryl is saying shouldn't complain about anti Semitism because that will cause anti Semitism. Besides, having not given you exactly what she wanted. Helene Mayer a brilliant fencer and a Jewish, or at least the daughter of a Jew, which ought to count
for something. Right, aren't you happy now? Charles Cheryl chose to resolve the dilemma of the pure competition in an impure place by layering a flimsy piece of wallpaper over the menace that was the Nazi regime and hoping no one will look underneath. Remember Dorothy Thompson's taxonomy of who goes Nazi? Mister b It's like she was writing with Charles Cheryl in mind. 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. As a movement likely to attain power, it would. He goes home to his Manhattan townhouse, rests his weary head in triumph, and a week later takes the stage at the Advertising Club of New York City, where he will say.
I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever met in your life.
Charles Cheryl will not live to see the Berlin Olympics. He will die of a heart attack at his Paris townhouse the following June, a few weeks before the spectacle of the opening ceremonies in Berlin. That is a shame. Few would have enjoyed that bit of fascist pageantry more than Charles Hitchcock Cheryl. So the Advertising Club speech is really the last time we will see him in his element, and he has a message for the world that day. It's about the Jews. They are violating the rules of
the pyramid. People are supposed to be nice to each other. People are supposed to accept the world as it is, be glad for it. People at the bottom are supposed to stay out of sight, and everyone should revere the people at the top. But ever since he stepped off the normandy and said that bit about how Jews shouldn't really complain about antisemitism because that will cause antisemitism, people had been mean to him. This is what he wanted to tell the August members of the Advertising Club of
New York. He has been wronged.
After all my years of arding a square deal for Jews. They called me andy Jewish. Many questions have been asked me by telephone a letter about the type of communication that have been coming in since my arrival from abroad ten days ago. In the first place, almost all the Jewish letters, I'm sorry to say, have been either abusive or threatening.
He goes on and on. He is aggrieved, heavy hangs the head, the worse the crown.
This force is me, and I say it with deef emotion. So there's this from those friendly efforts in the future. But neither that incident nor the torrent of Jewish abuse recently poured upon me can succeed in making me Auntie Jules.
He doesn't hate the Jews, he's trying to say, but he will not stand with them again because his feelings have been hurt. And then our wounded lion raises his heavy head and says.
Enough, everybody has a perfect right to have an opinion on this much discussed question. But now that decision to go to Berlin has been definitely made by the only American group having the right of decision.
That would be people like Charles Hitchcock Cheryl, the people at the top of the pyramid.
It would be well to remember General Grant saying the close of our civil war, let us have tea.
And with that the room rises in loud agreement on to Berlin.
General cherfls, you have quickened our democratic faith by telling us of that global international democracy, the Olympic Gay and let us run with patients. The race that is set.
Before religion's history is produced by ben Na daph Haffrey, Tolly Emlin and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking by Arthur Gomperts and JAYL Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Flawan Williams, Sarah Buger and Jake Gorsky. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Chakerji. I'm Malcolm Gladwell