Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, the Amateur Athletic Union, and the

RESEARCH NOTE
RESEARCH NOTE*
Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney,
the Amateur Athletic Union,
and the Olympic Games
JOHN A. LUCAS†
State College, Pennsylvania
T
HE LIFE OF JEREMIAH TITUS MAHONEY (1875-1970) revolved around the law, New
York City politics, and the world of amateur sport. He was a member of the American
Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) for
sixty years. By sheer force of personality and a consecrated belief that amateur sport was
superior to the other kind, he and his friend Avery Brundage led a small group in strengthening the AAU and the USOC. Brundage and Mahoney altogether served nine terms as
presidents of the AAU from 1928 to 1937; the Chicago engineer Brundage was elected
president of the USOC, 1930-1953. No two persons ever dominated these two American
organizations as they did. Their styles differed: Brundage was publicly gruff, unsmiling,
and “puritanical” in one of that word’s several definitions. Mahoney, also strong-willed
and a judge of the Supreme Court of New York State, was affable most of the time, hiding
an old-fashioned conservative Roman Catholic “mind-set” that may have had traits similar to those displayed by Brundage’s secular behavior. However Brundage became the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) leader for twenty years from 1952 on and consequently has been subject to more study than Mahoney. This research note is a beginning
in rectifying the imbalance.
*Research notes of up to 2,500 words are invited for possible publication. They should provide
insights or cautions for other researchers.
†
Correspondence to [email protected].
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Mahoney was an energetic individual. One journalist noted that, while going to law
school at night, Mahoney gained degrees from three city universities, earned a beginner’s
salary as assistant counsel to the city controller from 1900-1905, and worked for Mayor
William J. Gaynor in the office of Aqueduct Commission: all this while not yet “settled in”
to practice law.1 Somehow, Mahoney also found the time for track and field athletics,
winning national honors in the high jump. The AAU president and secretary-treasurer,
James Edward Sullivan, invited Mahoney to make the long trip to Athens, Greece, for that
country’s 1906 Olympian celebration, but he was unable to do so amidst his graduate
studies at City College, St. Francis College, and work toward his law degrees from New
York University Law School.2
For much of his life he was a friend of Avery Brundage, but for a brief period in the
mid 1930s they had a major difference of opinion about America’s participation in the
1936 Berlin Olympic games. In 1929 he wrote to Brundage to say “how fortunate the
AAU is to have you [for the second time] as its President.”3 Mahoney himself was elected
to that position in 1935 which soon brought him into conflict with his erstwhile friend,
by then the President of the American Olympic Committee. Mahoney possessed an especially heightened sense of moral virtue or rectitude that influenced his life and work. Such
moral consciousness was irreconcilable with Brundage’s pragmatism and unwavering support of his nation’s Olympic Committee. Mahoney’s passionate opposition to U.S. competition in the 1936 Olympic games, while not unique among American AAU and USOC
leaders, was of Olympian proportions, unrivaled by fellow Americans.
The astute sportswriter on The New York Herald Tribune, Jesse Abramson, wrote on
December 8, 1934, that “there is a movement afoot to draft J. T. Mahoney as AAU president,” replacing Brundage. Mahoney was not the first to criticize Hitler for his pledge to
finance fully a 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. Mahoney shuttled back and forth between
New York City and Washington, D.C. in a special consultative role for his friend, Franklin
Roosevelt. The American president was circumspect in criticizing Adolf Hitler and his
Nazi Germany early on in 1934. 4 But “released” from his obligation to President Roosevelt,
Mahoney began a year-long vituperative attack on all U.S.A. plans to participate in the
games. Paul Gallico wrote in July 1935 that “if and when a resolution to withdraw from
the games comes to a vote . . . he [Mahoney] for one will vote to withdraw.”5 Immediately, journalists Maurice O. Shevlin and Richard Vidmer “made a special point of attacking Jeremiah T. Mahoney because of his conviction that Jewish athletes were not being
given a fair chance.”6
The distinguished American IOC member and former Yale University athlete—Charles
H. Sherrill (1867-1936)—visited Germany in the fall of 1935 and “found nothing but
efficient Olympic Games preparation.” He was met, wrote Duff Hart Davis, “by a blast of
scorn from Judge Mahoney”: the judge’s “savage indignation” had just begun.7 Mahoney
was a masterful speaker, very much at ease with the written word, and his spring 1935
“open letter” to Dr. Theodore Lewald, president of the German Olympic Committee, was
superior to Avery Brundage’s earlier pamphlet, “Fair Play for American Athletes.” Mahoney’s
semi-legal but passionate letter of thirteen typed pages had the title “Germany Has Violated the Olympic Code.” The country was “guilty of innumerable intrusions into Olympic business”, “and, continued Mahoney, “much worse, of monstrous incidents of racism,
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brutality, and genocide.”8 From his AAU office at 233 Broadway, Mahoney sent out a
fragment of his “open letter”: “It is contrary to the fundamental motive behind the Olympic Games that they be held in a country where the spirit of decency and fair-play has been
so flagrantly violated.”9 The Olympic Code, wrote Mahoney, “is the direct antithesis of
Nazi ideology.”10 The Literary Digest essayist in Berlin wrote: “A storm is brewing across
the Atlantic . . . which threaten[s] the very foundations of the mammoth Olympic plant.”11
There were perorations in every paragraph. Olympic games pole vault co-champion, A.C.
Gilbert, wrote to author Mahoney: “Your splendid [open] letter is candid and frank.”12
Allen Guttmann, Amherst College historian writing two generations later, summarized
Mahoney’s fiery letter with this disinterested comment: “Every allegation has been verified by subsequent scholarship.”13 The AAU, an excessively powerful constituent member
of the American Olympic Association, voted 58 to 55 for America’s participation in the
Berlin games. “Mahoney Forces Lose,” cried the headline on the front page of The New
York Times.14 On December 27, 1935, IOC member William May Garland wrote
Brundage: “I am glad that you got Mahoney’s scalp.”15
Mahoney lost the battle, but not the war. His country’s two main amateur sport
organizations had voted to participate in the Berlin games. The man in the White House,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was still without a public position, and as Stephen Wenn,
Canadian Olympic historian, writes convincingly: “His [Roosevelt] personal involvement in the public debate regarding participation was exceedingly limited.”16 But Mahoney
had numerous friends. Before he traveled to Houston for the AAU’s 48th convention,
1,200 of them gathered in New York City’s Commodore Hotel. A telegram was read from
Mahoney’s boyhood chum, Robert F. Wagner, now senior senator from New York: “Gerry
Mahoney is enlisted on behalf of tolerance and justice. Fight on . . . .” Mahoney, as
always, spoke easily: “All chivalry, all fair play and all sportsmanship [will be] squeezed out
of the Olympic Games under Nazi influence.”17
How unseemly was the behavior of some Mahoney and some Brundage “factions”!
This included “bickering, arguments, and gavels pounding for order” as shadow boxing
and verbal passages of arms coincided with resignations by supporters of the ousted AAU
leader Mahoney. Brundage was already USOC president and now, again, the AAU chief
officer. This New York City AAU gathering was not the organization at its best.18
As the Olympic games year 1936 opened, the sixty-one-year-old Judge Mahoney may
have appeared “down and out,” but that was not so. He continued to oppose his nation’s
participation in the Berlin games, because of “Nazi Germany’s unspeakable anti-semitism.”19
The opening ceremony took place on August 16 before 110,000 spectators, with 4,500,000
advance ticket sales. Avery Brundage was there, but not Mahoney, who was preoccupied
with thoughts of how Adolf Hitler might be stopped. From his comfortable mansion in
Rumson, New Jersey, Mahoney saw in 1936 Germany a portent of ultimate evil. And
despite all the superlatives heaped upon these Berlin summer games, Mahoney continued
his litany that Hitler must be stopped now, and said so at a November meeting of the New
York Lodge B’nai B’rith.20 At the Houston, Texas, AAU meeting, Mahoney was re-elected
to the AAU presidency,21 while his friend-rival Brundage was elected onto the aloof IOC.
The new AAU president got in another anti-Hitler jab when he stated that the “Olympic
Games fail to teach any great lessons” when held in an ultra-nationalistic nation such as
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Hitler’s Germany, “a country which surrenders its athletic functions . . . to its government.”22 Many years later, French socialist Olympic historian, Jean-Marie Brohm, wrote
of Mahoney’s uphill battle: “The brilliant orator, Jeremiah T. Mahoney, profoundly idealistic . . . waved a moral flag against Hitler’s obscurantism-racism.”23
The most sober historians believe, as did Peter Longerich, that the Hitler Third Reich
had “succeeded in gaining a modicum of respectability in its foreign policy . . . by participation in the Olympic Games of 1936, and their positive reception.”24 Mahoney knew
this more than seventy years ago and renewed his opposition, not to the Olympic movement, but against “the progress of Nazi ideology and their surrender to a pagan god.”25
Retired justice of the New York State Supreme Court, Mahoney crisscrossed his city in
1937, warning anyone who would listen about the evils of “fundamental Nazi principles,”
about “Hitler’s religious persecutions,” and against “rising intolerance . . . everywhere in
the United States.”26 Mahoney’s ceaseless protests against Nazism continued into 1938,
as Hitler’s bellicosity reached new intensity. A full house jammed Carnegie Hall on January 30, 1938, to “protest five years of Hitler,” said one of the speakers—J.T. Mahoney.27
He spoke well on his feet and also over the radio.28 At a giant celebration of the New York
Athletic Club, 800 persons were in the club’s gymnasium. “At the dais,” wrote Jesse
Abramson, “were AAU president, Samuel E. Hoyt, Graeme M. Hammond, M.D., and
Jeremiah T. Mahoney.”29 Ending a tumultuous year of European discord and American
uncertainty was an American Jewish Congress and Labor Committee of 500 persons in
the Hotel Astor. Guest Mahoney was passionate, as always: “We love the masses of German people. They are imprisoned today. . . . The Jew has learned to fight. . . . Go on
fighting and you will defeat nazidom and its crooks and murderers.”30
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and the Second World War
began. A few days later, a tragedy, infinitesimally smaller, but terribly hurtful to Mahoney,
occurred: his wife and son were killed in a small plane crash. Mahoney survived the ordeal,
as did married daughter Mrs. Paul Kamay and son J. Ehret Mahoney, twenty-two years of
age. The sixty-four-year-old widower took the train down to Hollywood, Florida, for the
51st annual AAU meeting. Incredibly, Mahoney and Avery Brundage worked on a plan .
. . a substitute for an Olympic games, called “The Pan-American Games of 1940 for
nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Mahoney, unable to contain himself, opined: “We
have nothing in common with such nations as Germany and Japan, so let’s stay in this
hemisphere where Olympic ideals still are appreciated.”31 Home from Hollywood, the
almost always unamused Mahoney found fault with the Soviet Union’s military destruction of Finland. The AAU and spokesman Mahoney wrote a resolution attacking the
recent German-Russian nonaggression pact as “an illicit and immoral aggressive combination to destroy liberty and democracy and God everywhere.”32
The year 1939 spun into 1940 and the U.S. had not yet joined in the war although
horrors were taking place in Britain and on the European continent. The Finnish government announced on April 29, 1940, that Helsinki could not host a summer Olympic
games. Mahoney and Brundage, apparently no longer “enemies,” worked briefly on the
impossible idea of a Pan-American Games. There had to be another way to use their
intellect and physicality, and they found it—separately. Brundage kept in weekly touch
with the interim IOC president, Sweden’s J. Sigfrid Edstrom (1870-1964), hoping to
maintain contact with European IOC colleagues for a post-war meeting.
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The guest of honor at a joint meeting of the AAU and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1945 at Richmond, Virginia, was seventy-year-old “Jerry”
Mahoney. His “buddy,” Brundage, was there also, but neither played any role. The
official NCAA historian, Jack Falla, wrote about the 1945 Richmond, Virginia, meeting:
We sought “peace, even though we have to fight for it.”33
The Olympic games survived twelve years of postponement and finally resumed in
1948, at St. Moritz, Switzerland, and then London, England. The USOC, forever free of
government largesse, relied on Judge Mahoney’s Olympic Finance Committee, which collected $191,468—a great deal of money in 1948.34 He attended the 1952 summer
games, paid much of his own way, as usual, but did charge a small sum to the committee,
resulting in a huffy eight-hundred-word complaint to Owen V. Van Camp, USOC finance chairman. “I don’t mind saying,” wrote Mahoney, “your conversation with me was
one of the most unpleasant happenings that I ever experienced in amateur athletics, and
chiefly because it was so . . . unjustified.”35 President Brundage, displeased about the
“incident,” almost immediately wrote to Assistant Secretary-Treasurer James F. Simms,
“This matter should be considered closed. Judge Mahoney has done more than enough
for the Olympic Movement to warrant his being included in the official [invited] party if
he so desires.”36
Mahoney continued assisting the AAU-USOC’s uneasy alliance in preparations for
the Olympic games of 1956. “We need $500,000 . . . to beat Russia.” Their government
fully subsidizes their Olympic athletes, he continued, and volunteer monies from American citizens are needed to continue “America’s athletic greatness.”37 Everlastingly grandiose, Mahoney told another journalist: “America must continue to set an example for the
world.”38 He did not make the trip half way ‘round the world to Melbourne, Australia,
for the summer games, held November 22-December 8, but his son Jay-Ehret was America’s
water polo manager for the Second Pan American Games held in Mexico City in 1955.39
1
“Mahoney Entered Politics as a Youth,” New York Times, 17 September 1937, p. 18 [hereafter
NYT].
2
NYT, 1 August 1935, p. 5.
3
Microfilm, reel 145, box 332, Avery Brundage Collection, Special Collections, Paterno Library,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, originals in Avery Brundage Collection,
University of Illinois Archives, Champaign, Illinois [hereafter ABC].
4
New York Herald Tribune, 8 December 1934, p. 18 [hereafter NYHT].
5
“German Religious Upheaval Causes Olympic Difficulties,” Washington Post, 26 July 1935, p. 19.
6
Shevlin wrote for the St. Louis Globe Democrat and Vidmer for the New York Herald Tribune. See
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945 (New
York: The Free Press, 1986), 76-77.
7
Duff Hart-Davis, Hitler’s Games: The 1936 Olympics (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 80. The
phrase, hopefully appropriate, is from the epitaph on Jonathan Swift‘s grave.
8
John Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1980), 165.
9
“The Olympic Protest Letter,” reel 119, box 32, ABC.
10
“Nazi Bias on Olympics Proved, Mahoney Says, Insisting on Ban,” NYT, 21 October 1935, p. 3.
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11
“Storm over Berlin,” Literary Digest, 31 August 1935, p. 34.
Letter, A.C. Gilbert to [Jeremiah] Mahoney, 7 August 1935, reel 119, box 32, ABC.
13
Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 73.
14
See NYT, 9 December 1935, p. 1; NYHT, 9 December 1935, p.1, p. 20; Allen Guttmann, The
Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 61.
15
Stephen. R. Wenn, “A House Divided: The U.S. Amateur Sport Establishment and the Issue of
Participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics,” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 67 (1996): 161.
16
Stephen R. Wenn, “A Suitable Policy of Neutrality? FDR and the Question of American Participation in the 1936 Olympics,” International Journal of the History of Sport 8 (1991): 327-328.
17
NYT, 8 November 1935, p. 7.
18
NYT, 5 December 1935, p. 1; 6 December 1935, sec. 5, pp. 1 [QUOTATION], 5; NYHT, 9 December 1935, p. 20.
19
NYT, 30 April 1936, p. 23.
20
NYT, 25 November 1936, p. 7.
21
NYT, 6 December 1936, part 5, pp.1, 5; NYHT, 7 December 1936, p. 21.
22
NYHT, 8 December 1936, p. 28.
23
See Jean-Marie Brohm, Jeux Olympiques a Berlin (Brussels: Editions Complexe 1983), 57.
24
See Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution (Charleston, S.C.:
Tempus Pub. Co., 2001), 34-35.
25
NYT, 6 June 1937, p. 36.
26
NYT, 7 June 1937, p. 3 [1ST QUOTATION]; 3 July 1937, p. 1 [2ND QUOTATION]; 16 July 1937, p. 17
[3RD QUOTATION].
27
NYT, 31 January 1938, p. 6.
28
He condemned Nazism over Station WEVD, see NYT, 4 August 1938, p. 4; and over Station
WMAC, see NYT, 25 October 1938, p. 16. In Madison Square Garden, the ex-AAU leader, Mahoney,
and others spoke of “cruelties of the leaders of Nazi Germany” (NYT, 18 November 1938, p. 4).
29
NYHT, 9 December 1938, p. 34.
30
NYT, 19 December 1938, p. 5.
31
NYT, 9 December 1939, p. 20. The entire scheme seems “premature” wrote the author of an
article in the NYHT, 9 December 1939, p. 18.
32
NYT, 11 December 1939, p. 11.
33
Jack Falla, NCAA: The Voice of College Sports (Mission, Kan.: NCCA, 1981), 59.
34
Asa S. Bushnell, ed., Report of the United States Olympic Committee 1948 Games (New York: USOC
1948), 47.
35
Letter, [Jeremiah] Mahoney to [Owen V.] Van Camp, 27 January 1953, reel 119, box 32, ABC.
36
Letter, [Avery] Brundage to [James F.] Simms, 24 February 1953, reel 119, box 32, ABC.
37
Quoted in William J. Briordy’s article in the NYT, January 27, 1953, p. 29.
38
NYHT, January 27, 1953, p. 22.
39
See United States 1956 Olympic Book (New York: USOA 1957), 13, 377-378.
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