by Bryson, Bill
19
Before the 1920s, Florida was known for citrus fruits and turpentine and not much else. A few rich people went there for the winter, but hardly anyone else considered the state a destination. But then the wider mass of Americans discovered the attractiveness of Florida’s climate and the pleasantness of its beaches, and it suddenly became desirable. In 1925, Florida repealed income and inheritance taxes, which made it even more attractive. People swarmed into the state in huge numbers and began an intense and increasingly irrational property boom.
A plot of land in Miami that had been worth $800 before the boom now sold for $150,000. Property deeds sometimes changed hands two or even three times in a day as frantic buyers tried to trade their way to ever greater wealth. Some eager buyers bought plots of land underwater on the hopeful understanding that they would soon become prized beachfront through the miracle of landfill. (And in some cases, it must be said, that actually happened.) The Miami Herald carried so many property ads that one Sunday edition ran to 504 pages.
One of those drawn to Florida was Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert. Ruppert bought ten thousand acres on Tampa Bay with plans to build a resort community, modestly called Ruppert Beach, on a scale to rival Coral Gables or Palm Beach. As part of the process, he moved spring training to St. Petersburg in 1925. Conditions were a little rough at first. At one practice, Babe Ruth was unable to take his place in the field until a groundskeeper chased an alligator back into the swamp beyond the (unfenced) right field boundary. Ruppert gave the development a catchy slogan—“Where Every Breath Brings Added Health and Every Moment Pleasure”—and the promise that this would be the finest investment opportunity on the Gulf Coast. In the spring of 1926, Ruppert Beach was advertising home sites as being available from $5,000—“at the moment.”
Then disaster struck. On September 18 and 19, 1926, a massive hurricane, the first of notable proportions in twenty years, crashed into Florida, laying waste to Miami Beach and much else beyond. More than four hundred people were killed. Eighteen thousand were made homeless. The bottom dropped out of the property market all over Florida, even where this storm did not hit. Many investors were ruined. Carl Fisher, a businessman from Indiana who had more or less started the boom, saw his net worth fall from $500 million to less than $50,000. Also hit hard was Jacob Ruppert. When the storm passed, he was left with nothing but “ten thousand acres of alligators and seagulls,” according to one contemporary observer. Ruppert Beach was never built.
In consequence of the hurricane, Ruppert entered 1927 in a fiscally cautious frame of mind and with heightened respect for the unparalleled earning power of America’s newest sporting infatuation: boxing.
To a surprising extent, boxing was a 1920s phenomenon. Although people had been smacking each other around in rings for over two hundred years, prize fighting in the 1920s acquired three things it had never had before: respectability, mass appeal, and Jack Dempsey. Together they made it a sumptuously lucrative pastime. It was this that stirred the interest of men like Jacob Ruppert.
The rise of modern boxing could be assigned any number of starting points, but a reasonable place to begin is with Jess Willard. Willard was a giant Kansas plowboy and would permanently have remained so except that a boxing promoter spotted him throwing five-hundred-pound hay bales around as if they were scatter cushions and encouraged him to take up fighting. This was in about 1910. At six feet six and 225 pounds, Willard was certainly built for the game. He proved to be a terrifyingly powerful puncher. In his fifth bout, against a promising young fighter named John “Bull” Young, he hit the poor youth so hard that the blow drove a piece of Young’s jaw up into his brain and killed him. Willard scythed his way through a number of opponents, then became heavyweight champion of the world by knocking out the great—but conspicuously black and recklessly outspoken—Jack Johnson in twenty-six rounds in Havana.
Willard’s victory provided a crucial, if not laudable, milestone for boxing: it gave the sport a white heavyweight champion, a shamefully necessary prerequisite for its becoming a popular mainstream sport. Before this time, boxing was virtually the only sport in America—indeed, pretty much the only activity—in which blacks could compete with whites on equal terms. It is an ironic point from a modern perspective, but part of the reason boxing was considered unwholesome and insupportably raffish before about 1920 was that it wasn’t racist. And a big part of converting it into a respectable entertainment in the 1920s was making sure that it was, like all other major sports, dominated by white people. No black fighter would get a crack at the heavyweight title for a generation.
With only other white boxers to fight, Willard began to look invincible. Then he met Jack Dempsey. Their fight, on the Fourth of July 1919 in Toledo, Ohio, attracted enormous attention. Dempsey was a hot young boxer from out west. Willard had actually once killed a man in the ring. This was a combination the public could not resist.
Toledo was chosen not because it was a popular place for boxing, but because it was a legal one, and in 1919 there were not so many of those. In most places—New York State, most notably—boxing was banned altogether or so ringed around with restrictions as to make it ridiculous. Prizefights, where they were allowed at all, had to be advertised as “sparring exhibitions” or “illustrated lectures on pugilism,” with the participants sometimes described as “professors.” Because the matches were only exhibitions, it was forbidden for one participant to knock out another or for a panel of judges to declare one man the winner. In consequence, prizefighting remained a marginal sport and fights were held in (no disrespect to Toledo intended) marginal places.
Toledo didn’t have a stadium sufficient to hold a crowd of ninety thousand, so one was built, to be used just once, then torn down. To keep gate-crashers out, Tex Rickard, the promoter, had the stadium constructed with a single entrance and exit. Had fire broken out the consequences would have been unimaginable, but at least the authorities had the wisdom to ban smoking for the duration of the contest.
Willard entered the fight supremely confident. Dempsey was scrawny-looking for a heavyweight, slender and wiry rather than bulgingly muscled. Willard was a full head taller and sixty pounds heavier. “This will be one of the easiest bouts I’ve ever had,” Willard assured reporters, adding with a dash of bigoted loftiness that was distasteful even then, “I am better today than when I restored the championship to the white race.” As a demonstration of his confidence, he demanded to be indemnified in case he killed the challenger.
This proved to be something of a misjudgment. Dempsey may have been scrawny, but he was built of iron—hitting him, it was said, was like hitting a tree—and he attacked with startling ferocity, flying at his opponents like a loosened pit bull and pummeling them with merciless intensity. He had just won twelve fights in a row, nine with knockouts in the first round, one in just fourteen seconds. He was an unbelievably destructive fighter, and he proved it now.
Dempsey charged from his corner and smashed Willard’s jaw so hard that he broke it in thirteen places, then followed up with a hook that sprayed six of Willard’s teeth across the canvas. Dempsey floored his opponent seven times in the first round, then pounded away at him for two rounds more, cracking his cheekbone and at least two ribs. Dazed and disheartened, Willard failed to rise for the fourth round. For the rest of his life Willard insisted that the tape under Dempsey’s gloves had been coated with concrete. It appears that it merely felt that way.
Dempsey’s purse for his title fight against Willard was $27,500. Within two years, Dempsey would be fighting for purses of nearly $1 million, and the whole world would be his audience. Boxing had just changed forever.
Damon Runyon dubbed him “the Manassa Mauler,” but the name was no more than partly correct. Dempsey didn’t maul; rather, he struck with deadly, repetitious precision, and Manassa, a small agricultural community in southern Colorado near the New Mexico border, was his home for just the first ten years of his life. After that he grew up all over—in De
nver and smaller towns in Colorado, Utah, and West Virginia—as his alcoholic ne’er-do-well father drifted hazily from job to job.
He was born William Harrison Dempsey—his family called him Harry—in June 1895 (four months after Babe Ruth), into a clan that was unusually mongrel: part Cherokee, part Jewish, part Scots-Irish. Dempsey was the ninth of thirteen children, and the family was poor but close—a fact that would weigh heavily on him in the summer of 1927. As a youth he made a living by entering bars and challenging anyone in the place to fight him for a kitty collected from the other patrons. It made him awfully tough. From there it was only a short step to boxing for a living. He began to fight professionally in 1914, using the name “Kid Blackie.” Along the way, he picked up a wife, Maxine Cates, a saloon-bar piano player and occasional prostitute fifteen years his senior. The marriage, not altogether surprisingly, didn’t last. They separated after just a few months. (She would die horribly in a fire in a brothel in Juárez, Mexico, in 1924.)
As a fighter, Dempsey was instinctively brutal. “In the ring he seemed to enjoy hurting other people,” writes his biographer Roger Kahn. Once, in a bad mood, he knocked out every one of his sparring partners. When the writer Paul Gallico, then sports editor of the New York Daily News, accepted an assignment to spar a little with Dempsey, to demonstrate what it was like to face the champ, Dempsey hit him almost hard enough to kill him. Gallico didn’t remember a thing but reported afterward that he felt like a building had fallen on him. The sportswriter Grantland Rice, who was present, wrote: “At the end, the head of young Mr. Gallico was attached to his body by a shred. We only hope he is not asked next to cover an electrocution.” Al Jolson, in a similar spirit, took a playful swing at Dempsey for photographers. Dempsey smacked Jolson so hard it split open his chin.
Yet the instant a fight was over, Dempsey would often bound forward and solicitously help to his feet the person he had just made horizontal. Although he looked every inch a villain with his prison haircut and steely gaze, in private Dempsey was a pleasant, rather shy, surprisingly thoughtful, and articulate individual.
Nothing about Dempsey’s fight against Willard in Toledo did more to excite entrepreneurial spirits than the knowledge that Tex Rickard had spent $100,000 on a temporary arena and still made a fortune on the undertaking. The crowd of ninety thousand was the biggest ever to attend a sporting event anywhere on the planet—and in Toledo, Ohio, for goodness’ sake. Boxing was clearly too lucrative to be left to marginal cities in the distant west, especially when existing venues like Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds stood unused for 250 days or more a year. Almost at once, New York state senator (and soon-to-be New York City mayor) Jimmy Walker shepherded a bill through the legislature making boxing fully legal in New York. Other states quickly followed.
Boxing still faced a great deal of opposition in some quarters, however. Many people were horrified by its violence and brutality. Others fretted that it was an incitement to gambling. The Reverend John Roach Straton saw a worrisome threat to morals in allowing members of the weaker sex to gaze upon “two practically naked men, battering and bruising each other and struggling in sweat and blood for mere animal mastery.”
In fact, as it turned out, that was very much what women wanted, and the person they most keenly wished to see glistening and lightly clad was the French boxer Georges Carpentier. He was, by universal female consent, an eyeful. “Michelangelo would have fainted for joy at the beauty of his profile,” wrote one smitten female observer, and her comments were echoed in ladies’ magazines across the land. Women simply adored him. When Gene Tunney beat Carpentier in a later fight, a distraught blonde leaped into the ring and tried to scratch his eyes out.
Carpentier was not a great fighter, and occasionally he resorted to a helpful fix. This didn’t always work out quite as planned. In 1922 in Paris, a Senegalese fighter known as Battling Siki agreed, for a generous consideration, to take a fall against Carpentier. Unfortunately, Siki forgot his commitment and instead knocked out the dumbfounded Frenchman in the sixth round. For Siki it was the high point of a mostly disappointing life. He never won another important match, and in 1925 was shot dead for no apparent reason on a Manhattan street. The murderer was never caught.
Carpentier landed a fight with Dempsey based almost entirely on three considerations: he looked strong, he made the ladies swoon, and he was a war hero. (He had been a decorated aviator in World War I, in which capacity he became great pals with Charles Nungesser.) The fight attracted unprecedented levels of public interest. Reporters came from across the world. The New York American hired George Bernard Shaw to comment. H. L. Mencken, in an essay, expressed his satisfaction that it was a fight between white men.
Carpentier claimed to have developed a secret punch that would catch Dempsey by surprise. Damon Runyon suggested that he would be better off practicing taking ten-second naps since that is mostly what he would be doing during the fight. Before the bout, Tex Rickard beseeched Dempsey: “Don’t kill the son of a bitch, Jack.” Rickard wasn’t concerned about Carpentier’s well-being, but about what a death would do to boxing just as it was getting lucrative and respectable. “The best people in the world are here today,” he said. “If you kill him, all this will be ruined. Boxing will be dead.”
It did not take long for Carpentier to discover how outclassed he was. Dempsey broke his nose with his first punch. Soon afterward, Carpentier hit Dempsey in the face with the hardest punch he could throw. Dempsey barely blinked. Carpentier had broken his thumb in two places. Dempsey took just four rounds to demolish the Frenchman and leave him unconscious on his back in the middle of the ring. From beginning to end, the whole lasted twenty-seven minutes. The gate was $1,626,580—a fourfold increase from the Dempsey-Willard fight of just two years earlier.
The problem for Dempsey now became an absence of opponents rash enough or worthy enough to climb into the ring with him. Boxing might well have lost its momentum had it not been for the timely arrival on American soil of an Argentinean giant named Luis Ángel Firpo—“the Wild Bull of the Pampas,” as he was extravagantly but accurately dubbed. A poor youth from Buenos Aires, Firpo arrived in America in 1922 carrying a cardboard suitcase that held one spare shirt collar, a pair of boxing trunks, and nothing else.
He was not a stylish fighter—“he punches like a man throwing rocks” was how one observer put it—but he was huge and powerful, and he now proceeded to club to the canvas one opponent after another. By the time he met Dempsey at the Polo Grounds in September 1923, he had won twelve fights in a row—nine by knockout. Like Dempsey, Firpo was a fighter who was prepared to stand in one place and slug it out. The world couldn’t wait to see what Dempsey would make of him. What followed was perhaps the most exciting four minutes of slugging ever seen in the ring.
Firpo brought a gasp to eighty thousand pairs of lips by dropping Dempsey to one knee with his very first punch. Dempsey responded furiously and knocked down Firpo seven times in the first round, but Firpo got up each time swinging. After the seventh knockdown, Firpo reached back and caught Dempsey with a right hook so ferocious that it knocked the champ through the ropes and clear out of the ring. Dempsey fell into the crowd at ringside, and was pushed back by many sets of eager hands—“so many that it looked like he was getting a back massage,” Firpo recalled later. Among the enthusiastic pushers was Babe Ruth, beaming all over. Dempsey should have been disqualified for receiving assistance, but the referee let the fight continue.
In the first minute of the next round, Dempsey hit Firpo in the head with two mighty blows and Firpo slumped to the canvas, not to rise again. Most reporters declared it the most exciting fight they had ever seen. Grantland Rice thought it the most exciting fight there had ever been.
And then Dempsey stopped boxing. Fights were mooted and even negotiated, but in every instance came to naught. From September 1923 to September 1926, Dempsey didn’t fight at all. Instead, he settled in Los Angeles, acted in a couple of movies, had his nose fixed,
married a minor movie star named Estelle Taylor (and slept with several others), and became pals with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.
Dempsey’s brother Johnny, who nurtured dreams of being a Hollywood star himself, was in Los Angeles already and had formed friendships of his own with several well-known figures, in particular a matinee idol named Wallace Reid, then one of the biggest box-office draws in movies. Reid had the wholesome good looks of the boy every mother wants her daughter to marry, but in private life he was secretly and deeply addicted to narcotics. From Reid, Johnny Dempsey learned the dangerous pleasures of cocaine and heroin. Reid died from the cumulative effects of dissipation in 1923 at the age of just thirty-one, but not before he had made Johnny Dempsey a hopeless addict, too. The young Dempsey’s drug problems and deteriorating mental state would be a prolonged and painful distraction for his brother Jack.
In 1926, Philadelphia held a world’s fair, called the Sesquicentennial Exposition, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The enterprise was a fiasco from the start. The site chosen was marshy and difficult to build on. The vision for the fair was grand, but the funding meager. The State of Pennsylvania declined to contribute anything to the costs.
Construction efforts fell so far behind that hardly any exhibits were finished when the fair opened on May 31, 1926. President Coolidge declined to attend and sent his secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, and his omnipresent commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover. The park that greeted them was embarrassingly incomplete. An eighty-foot-high Liberty Bell, the exposition centerpiece, was still shrouded in scaffolding. Work hadn’t even started on the New York State pavilion. The tardiest exhibition of all was Argentina’s, which was dedicated on October 30, just in time for the exposition’s closing.