Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  Though almost a year had passed since this story appeared in U.S. newspapers, when the Sydney Referee reprinted Johnson's words in March 1908 it caused an instant controversy. Although white Australians had tolerated Johnson's defeat of Lang and merely mocked his connections to the CPA, they now railed at the idea that he was romantically involved with one of their women. Johnson may have been safely tucked away in the United States, but Toy received abuse from all sides. Strangers screamed at her in the street and in the boarding-houses where she stayed while on tour as a pianist. Anonymous letters and postcards with Johnson's photograph arrived by mail, chock-full of condemnations for her rumored racial and sexual transgressions. In desperation Toy sent her attorney to the Referee to demand a printed retraction. She denied ever cavorting with Johnson, let alone agreeing to marry him. The Referee published a halfhearted disclaimer. “If the paragraph has caused Miss Troy [sic] any pain or annoyance we regret it,” they wrote.40 Despite this printed apology White Australia's abuse of Toy continued.

  Determined to clear her name, Toy fought back in the courts. She sued the publisher of the Referee for libel, asking for £2,000 in damages. The publisher's attorney, G. H. Reid, called for the case to be dropped. He argued that it was not inherently “libelous to say that a white woman was willing to marry a black man” since no such color line had officially been drawn in Australia's courts.41 As Reid emphasized, “The noblest woman in the world could marry a colored man without the slightest imputation being made against her morality, charity or modesty.” Yet this was certainly not the case in practical terms. Regardless of Australia's laws, customary ideas about the natural laws governing race and the body made Toy a guilty party in the court of public opinion. Much like the discussions surrounding the CPA's farewell party for Johnson, the ensuing court case exposed the popular fears of interracial mixing and racial subversion in Australia's port cities. Toy, a single white working woman, had freely participated in Sydney's social life, opening herself up to illicit encounters with non-white men.

  Reid cross-examined Toy in front of Chief Justice Sir Frederick Darley and a jury of four men. Strategically clad in white, the young pianist repeated under oath that she had never been in any kind of relationship with Johnson. Reid tried to break Toy on the stand using as evidence the group photo that showed Johnson's arm around her, but she refused to recant her story. Claiming to be “the unconscious victim of a harmless conjunction of events,” Toy said she was unaware of Johnson's arm around her shoulders and that the photographer had given her the walking stick to hold. As she left the witness stand Toy fainted from the stress of Reid's scathing cross-examination and had to be escorted away.42

  The defense then put Johnson's white trainers, Steven Hyland and David Stuart, on the stand. They provided some of the most damning testimony of Toy's racial and sexual wrongdoing, depicting her as a disreputable woman. Hyland had supposedly threatened to resign if Johnson continued to allow Toy to visit his hotel room. “I saw her there three or four times,” Hyland told the court. “Her mother was only there once. At other times, when the mother was not there, the two were in the room by themselves.”43 He even alleged that one night Johnson and Toy had been in the room alone with the lights turned low. In cross-examining Hyland, Toy's lawyer, J. C. Gannon, asked, “Do you suggest anything improper between Johnson and Miss Toy?” While Hyland maintained he was not aware that anything “improper” had happened between them, he remembered hearing Toy say, “Here are all my rings. Come into town and marry me tomorrow morning!” Stuart added insult to injury when he claimed to have seen Johnson and Toy dancing together at a party. He also stated that he saw them flirting one evening at the Commercial Hotel, where Toy had been drinking “a brandy and soda” at the bar. The two had left together in a cab.

  Toy's side called upon two witnesses, one a single woman named Ellen Gertrude Brown. Brown did her best to defend her friend's respectability, declaring that they had stayed together on the nights that Toy had visited the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel. She also maintained that she had never seen Toy dance with Johnson, nor, for that matter, had she witnessed “any familiarity at all” between the two. Still, Reid managed to reduce the young woman to a sobbing mess during his blistering cross-examination.

  In a last-ditch effort to demonstrate Toy's “innocence,” Gannon asked his client if she would be willing to submit herself to a chastity test and Toy said yes. Both the defense and the judge agreed that this measure was extreme given the parameters of the case, yet Gannon realized there was much at stake in proving Toy's sexual—and, by extension, racial—purity. In his closing remarks Gannon pleaded on Toy's behalf. He argued that if the public continued to believe that Toy had been intimate with Johnson she “would be stamped as an abandoned strumpet.”44

  His entreaty must have struck a chord, for the four-man jury reached a guilty verdict after two hours of deliberation, awarding Toy £500 plus court costs. Five years before Johnson's Mann Act conviction for white slave trafficking in the United States, his penchant for white women had already come under attack in Sydney. The Australian court had refused to endorse the idea that a white woman could desire a romantic or sexual relationship with a black man. This policing of the bedroom was part and parcel of the period's larger concerns about the preservation of white nations and the maintenance of white imperial control. It was also just the beginning of Johnson's numerous fights over the global color line, both in and out of the boxing ring.

  WHITE POWER IN THE PACIFIC

  A few months after Toy's lawsuit was settled a regular contributor to Health & Strength named Yorick Gradeley published a fictional piece about an interracial boxing match for the “championship of the Pacific” between John Jackson of Cuba and Tom Perkin of England.45 This imaginary match, featured in the twelfth episode of Gradeley's serial story “The Battle to the Strong,” closely resembled the potential meeting of Johnson and Burns in Sydney—a prizefight in the midst of negotiations and much discussed in the international press. Billed as “A Powerful and Exciting Physical Regeneration Story,” Gradeley's “Battle to the Strong” was a manly tale of life in the British colonies.46 Surviving natural disasters and savage battles, Perkin was a white protagonist tailor-made for the troubles of the day. He had fought in the Boer War and later founded a settlement in the far west of Canada. After learning that Jackson had decided to put his boxing title on the line, Perkin challenged the black champion to a match.47

  Gradeley's fictional fight followed a familiar narrative of the period, as it pit a burly and brutish black man against a much smaller yet skilled white man. Jackson was a “mountain of mahogany.” At six foot three and 210 pounds, his body seemed “to positively vibrate with strength.”48 Though slight in stature, Perkin was the ultimate frontiersman and imperial soldier. “The natural whiteness of his skin had been tinted a picturesque bronze by the caresses of sun and wind,” Gradeley wrote, “and there were scars that were not disfigurements, but rather stripes of honour conferred upon him by the god of War.”

  Although the powerful yet dim-witted Jackson dominated the first few rounds of the fight, the quick and scientific Perkin made a mighty comeback to win by knockout. “Massa Perkin you am dasht clebber!” the fallen Jackson exclaimed as he looked up at his white vanquisher.49 Through this utterance Gradeley managed to turn the “mountain of mahogany” into a stereotypical darky. Even if black men were physically strong, they were nevertheless mentally unfit for citizenship and self-government. In the months that followed, the publicity surrounding the impending match between Burns and Johnson echoed many of the same themes.

  Though not as dashing or daring as his alter ego Perkin, Burns emerged as a popular embodiment of white manhood in the late imperial age. Born Noah Brusso on 17 June 1881 in a rural Ontario town, Burns personified Anglo-Saxon cooperation. Though technically French Canadian, Burns was still a citizen of a British dominion. Moreover, he spent so much of his fighting career in the United States that many mistook him for a
Yankee.

  Burns received his first knocks in the rough-and-tumble world of Canadian hockey and lacrosse. Known for his short fuse and his tendency to fight, he honed his boxing skills for self-defense on the ice and the field. Typical of most other pugilists at the time, Burns grew up working class, holding a number of different jobs, from house painter to factory laborer to tavern doorman. The young scrapper later found work aboard a Great Lakes steamship. In 1900, after a fight with the ship's steward, Burns lost his job and decided to stay in Detroit, Michigan, where he began his prizefighting career.50

  At five foot seven and 175 pounds, Burns was relatively small for a heavyweight, yet he routinely beat men much larger than him. In 1905 when the reigning world heavyweight champion Jeffries retired undefeated, he handed his crown to Marvin Hart. A year later Burns beat Hart to claim the world title. Feeling the need to step out of Jeffries's shadow and legitimize himself as a bona fide champion, Burns declared, “I will defend my title as heavyweight champion of the world against all comers, none barred. By this I mean white, black, Mexican, Indian, or any other nationality without regard to color, size, or nativity.”51 Regardless of his bold claim, Burns ignored Johnson's many challenges, refusing to fight the rising African American star for anything less than £6,000 or $30,000, a prohibitively expensive purse for the time.

  Undeterred, Johnson followed Burns first to Europe and then to Australia, trying to entice him into the ring. In August 1908, hordes of fans cheered for the white world champion as he moved through the streets of Perth. In Adelaide a large crowd greeted him outside the cathedral of St. Francis Xavier. The people of Melbourne even organized an official welcome for him at a local hotel, complete with speeches and free champagne. The prominent sportsman John Wren gave the keynote address, inviting Burns to “make himself at home” on the continent, promising him the “good-will” of the Australian people, “win or lose.”52

  Both Burns and boxing embodied Australia's way forward in challenging times. A correspondent for the conservative Lone Hand called his body “an exquisite fighting engine,” akin to that of Hercules.53 With his “clean-cut profile” and “gentlemanly manner,” Burns also possessed the air of a statesman.54 Some even claimed that he bore a striking resemblance to Napoleon Bonaparte. As Burns continued his travels across the continent by rail, fans greeted him at every depot. By the time he reached Sydney's Central Station eight thousand onlookers had gathered in anticipation of his arrival. Just outside the Crystal Hotel on George Street, a local alderman and two members of the legislative assembly, Edward William O'Sullivan and Colonel Granville De Laune Ryrie, greeted Burns with celebratory speeches. The physically fit O'Sullivan proclaimed that rugged activities like boxing had made England a great nation.55 A veteran of the Boer War and a former amateur boxer, Ryrie also trumpeted the sport as “an important element in the bringing up of Australians.” Given the ominous threat of a “yellow invasion,” Ryrie argued, they needed “a sturdy young Australia to protect their hearths and homes.”56 Much like the Asians who seemed to be inundating the continent, Johnson would soon follow, forcing Burns to prove his mettle.

  In the meantime another North American fighting wonder, the United States' Great White Fleet, arrived on the heels of the white world heavyweight champion. Ordered by President Roosevelt, the fleet's circumnavigation of the globe from December 1907 to February 1909 was designed to demonstrate the United States' rising military power. The correspondence of the Burns-Johnson match with the Pacific leg of the fleet's voyage was more than just a mere coincidence. These two spectacles of white male strength were linked both literally and figuratively. Given the deep-seated connections between boxing, militarism, and the white man's burden, they became an early exercise in cross-promotion.

  The proposed interracial match must have seemed like it would provide the perfect climax to the U.S. fleet's Pacific tour, for boxing had long followed the transoceanic flows of U.S. imperialism. By the turn of the twentieth century pugilism and other forms of physical training had become popular pastimes aboard U.S. naval ships. Sailors honed their bodies with dumbbells and boxing bouts on vessels like the USS Brooklyn and the USS Oregon, both of which participated in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War.57

  When Admiral Dewey entered Manila Bay aboard the USS Olympia in 1898, boxing went along for the ride. Many of Dewey's personnel were ardent followers of John L. Sullivan, and throughout the ensuing Philippine-American War and U.S. occupation, scores of U.S. soldiers carried boxing gloves with them. Faced with alarming rates of desertion, suicide, venereal disease, and substance abuse among their troops, U.S. military officials began to see the utility of the sport as a means to prevent servicemen from degenerating and “going native” in the tropics. After all, boxers in training were supposed to avoid tobacco, alcohol, and sexual activity to help fortify their bodies for battle. By 1902 Major Elijah Halford had requested $200,000 of philanthropic funds to build a YMCA training facility in Manila.58 Yet this imperial project of physical training was not without its own set of contradictions. African American soldiers stationed in the Philippines won a disproportionate number of the U.S. Army's athletic competitions. Boxing also brought together black Americans and Filipino rebels, encouraging camaraderie and collusion. Despite these ironies, pugilism and the practice of imperial control clearly went hand in hand.

  The gleaming metal bodies of the Great White Fleet became traveling symbols of the U.S. nation's strength as a policeman of global white supremacy. Led by Rear Admiral Charles Stillman Sperry's flagship Connecticut, the U.S. fleet of sixteen battleships left San Francisco on the afternoon of 7 July 1908.59 The fleet had already journeyed around South America, and as it set out for the Pacific region, each of its “white and buff ships glistened in new paint.”60 Thousands of onlookers had gathered in the hills to watch as America's very own armada departed for a long list of destinations, including Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, China, Japan, and the Philippines.

  The men onboard were just as important as the ships as representatives of the nation. In a special telegram to the fleet's crew President Roosevelt declared, “You have in a peculiar sense the honor of the United States in your keeping, and therefore no body of men in the world enjoys at this moment a greater privilege or carries a heavier responsibility.”61 Physical Culture published a feature article on the fleet's Pacific tour that included a detailed discussion of the crew's health.62 Apparently the young sailors' exposure to “fresh air,” “plenty of exercise,” and “manly virtues” was ideal for the development of physical fitness and mental fortitude. The very practice of empire was making them stronger. In this moment of imagined white degeneration, the fleet was not only a demonstration of U.S. imperial might, but it was also a floating representation of the white American body politic.

  British colonial officials were also keenly aware of the cultural and strategic importance of the Great White Fleet's voyage. To them, the fleet symbolized a developing body of white Anglo-Saxon collaboration, and they planned to do everything possible to make their U.S. allies feel the warmth of white brotherhood in the Pacific. New Zealand was the first British territory to roll out the red carpet on 9 August. Around fifty thousand Kiwis were on hand to witness the fleet's arrival in Auckland. Countless British and U.S. flags covered the city in a sea of red, white, and blue. New Zealand's prime minister Joseph Ward spared no expense on the public addresses, parades, military reviews, Maori pageants, banquets, tours, and sporting exhibitions held in honor of the U.S. servicemen.63 “The day will come when a great fight will be necessary for the supremacy of the white races in the Pacific,” Ward declared, “and when this time comes, Great Britain can have the assistance of the American fleet, and the two nations will be found fighting shoulder to shoulder to preserve to future generations the rights and privileges due to all classes.”64

  Several months before the fleet's arrival in the antipodes Australia's postmaster general had already commissioned a set
of postcards featuring the British and American flags entwined. A squadron of British-Australian warships was also scheduled to greet the U.S. fleet in the port of Suva, Fiji. “It will be a picturesque gathering, when the Stars and Stripes and the union jack meet in the tropical seas and thundering guns awake the echoes in the recent haunts of the cannibal,” one Washington Post reporter exclaimed. “There will be pomp in the great procession that moves onward to Australia, there to revive and strengthen the ties of friendship between far-separated white races.”65 Despite this outpouring of support, some Aussies worried that the Great White Fleet would not be so white. Rumors circulated that the U.S. warships would be manned almost entirely by African Americans, who would inevitably chafe against the White Australia Policy. Given that many of the sailors who passed through the country's port cities were men of color, these fears were understandable. As the Melbourne Age tried to reassure its readers, “It is not at all probable…that a very large proportion of the crews will be found to be coloured. There will be some on the battleships, but they will not be nearly as numerous as rumour is suggesting just now.”66

  The impressive sight of the Great White Fleet and its British-Australian naval escort cruising into Sydney's harbor on 20 August helped to dispel any remaining reservations. The imposing vessels ranged from battleships to torpedoers, with a reported sixteen thousand men manning 850 guns.67 An estimated forty thousand people, including Burns and his wife Jewel, converged on Watsons Bay to greet the U.S. sailors. As a report in the Chicago Daily Tribune boasted, “Fleetitis is raging all over the antipodes just now.”68 Punch magazine's special fleet edition broke all of its previous sales records.69 There was also a record demand for U.S. flags and hand-carved replicas of American eagles. Many of these decorations graced the specially designated “America Avenue,” which extended down Sydney's main street to the gates of the Federal Government House, symbolically traversing Australia's first white settlement.70