Jesse Owens: An American Life (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7 55 and texts of newspaper articles in which Wooster spoke of her relationship with John Wilkes Booth. Louise Wooster remains an enduring source of fascination for those interested in the history of Birmingham. With the addition of Baggett’s notes, a new generation may now embark on the delightful scavenger hunt of finding the true Lou Wooster. Although much of her story reads as a cautionary tale, it gives hope to the downtrodden and also illuminates a compelling chapter in the life and growth of the city of Birmingham. STACI S. SIMON GLOVER University of Alabama at Birmingham Jesse Owens: An American Life. By William J. Baker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xii, 289 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-252-07369-X. William Baker’s Jesse Owens: An American Life has been the standard biography of Jesse Owens since its publication in 1986. This republication of the original will make it accessible to a new generation of readers. The general contours of his life are well known. His winning of four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany is one of the most remembered and politically charged athletic accomplishments of the twentieth century. The unprecedented athletic feat serves as a demarcation point in his life story. Owens devoted his pre-Olympic years to developing his athletic talents and his post-Olympic years attempting to capitalize on his renown after the games. James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens, the youngest of ten children, was born into a poor Alabama sharecropping family in 1913. Like many other African Americans, the Owens family migrated north, to Cleveland, Ohio, when Owens was ten years old. He developed his athletic prowess after being spotted by a white track coach in eighth grade. Owens outshone his fellow high school athletes and ascended to national fame at Ohio State University. His Olympic success made him perhaps the best-known athlete of his generation. Baker celebrates Owens’s athletic career as a man overcoming the challenge of poverty to accomplish great success. Owens’s post-Olympic life is a rather different story. Within weeks of the 1936 Olympics, the Amateur Athletic Union stripped Owens of his amateur status in a disagreement concerning a post-Olympic tour. This ended the young star’s athletic career. He spent the next forty-five years T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 56 fashioning a livelihood based on his Olympic fame. For the first fifteen years after the Olympics, Owens scrambled from short-lived employment to ill-advised commercial ventures to questionable publicity stunts, such as racing horses in exhibitions. These money-making schemes were restricted to the African American community. During the Cold War environment of the 1950s, however, Owens became useful to white America as a symbol of a successful African American who represented American opportunity. His patriotism, faith in capitalism , racially non-confrontational manner, and rags-to-riches story made him an ideal spokesman for the American Dream. Owens parlayed these traits into a healthy and steady income. He became a polished speaker who unflinchingly stressed his conservative ideology while representing the American government and business. In the late 1960s, however, his political and social perspective clashed with young African American radicals, such as Harry Edwards, organizer of the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Owens, who died in 1980, struggled during his last decade with these hostile criticisms and his estrangement from younger African American athletes. The chronologically organized book is well researched and well written . It is accessible to a popular audience, but also useful to historians. Baker used archival sources, interviews, newspapers, and Owens’s FBI file to create an impressive biographical portrait placed in a broader historical context. Baker’s thorough research allowed him to dispel a surprisingly large number of myths about Owens. For example, the often retold story of Hitler’s snubbing of Owens by refusing to shake his hand after his first Olympic victory is incorrect. During the first days of the games, Hitler invited select winners to his stadium seat. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) insisted that he greet either...