Dreamers and Schemers: How an Improbable Bid for the 1932 Olympics Transformed Los Angeles from Dusty Outpost to Global Metropolis by Barry Siegel (review)

It is difficult to believe Barry Siegel’s Dreamers and Schemers is the first book-length treatment of the fascinating story of how Los Angeles came to host the 1932 Olympics and their impact on the city. This tenth Olympiad boasted a series of important firsts: the first of the modern games hosted outside of Europe, the first hosted by a U.S. city, the first to house athletes in an Olympic Village, the first to open all sports to female competitors, the first to use photo-finish cameras, the first to build a high-tech media press box, and the first to utilize an elevated victory stand. As Siegel makes very clear, the games themselves would not have happened without William May Garland, or “Billy,” to all who knew him, and was eulogized as “a man who walked with Kings yet kept the common touch” (p. 197).

Both a Los Angeles and sports enthusiast, Garland used his position as the Los Angeles Athletic Club president and his personal financial resources to spend considerable time in Europe following the Olympics. Already a successful businessman in Los Angeles and a realtor of national standing, Garland first addressed the possibility of Los Angeles hosting an Olympics in 1918.

Los Angeles was officially awarded the games at an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Rome, Italy, in 1923. By this time, Garland was already a member of that prestigious body. Siegel did a wonderful job portraying Billy as the promoter he was. Always full of optimism and bold predictions about Los Angeles’s future, Garland was also a master of personal relationships and public spin. To the IOC, he cast Los Angeles as a privileged location far from the trouble brewing in war-torn Europe. When European nations balked at the distance and expense of sending athletes to the far western edge of North America, Billy reminded them that the United States had been sending athletes to Europe for the past several games. To soften the expense, he negotiated lower transportation costs with steamship and railroad companies on behalf of the European athletes. Furthermore, he announced the idea to house the male athletes in a temporary Olympic Village at the low cost of $2 day. Female athletes were boarded at a local hotel for the same price. The Los Angeles Olympic Committee absorbed the extra cost.

A highlight of the book is the very clear and outlandish rash of controversies that rocked Los Angeles in the 1920s amidst its preparation for hosting the 1932 Olympics. These include Hollywood disgraces involving sensational deaths and drugs, a bubonic plague outbreak, a national political scandal involving a local oil baron, the apparent murder/suicide of his son and close advisor, a different oil man who perpetrated a widespread pyramid stock scheme, and a high-profile case of kidnapping and murder. Siegel reviews each of these well, while keeping the story of the preparations for the Olympic games at the forefront of the book. During this same time period Los Angeles hit the one million population mark, Garland and his associates built the Coliseum, and builders completed the world-class Biltmore Hotel downtown.

Siegel relied heavily on primary sources from the LA84 archives and a wide selection of other primary sources, theses, books, and articles. While the entire book is undergirded with these sources, two sections stand out. The letters between Billy and Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, demonstrate Garland’s exceptional diplomacy. With clear respect for one another, each of the men was trying for the outcome he thought best. One was focused on building up Los Angeles; the other on protecting his legacy and the continuation of the Olympic games. The other section is the...