Beyond Glory
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Acclaim for David Margolick’s
BEYOND GLORY
“Margolick goes beyond those loaded symbols to bring alive the complex characters of the fighters. … In a Seabiscuit-like turn, Margolick also captures what life was like in a very different time, when Americans were still struggling through the Depression and when they were just starting to come to terms with a burgeoning civil rights movement. And when a single sporting event could matter so much.”
—Sports Illustrated
“Compelling…. Margolick deftly moves his characters on and off stage against a backdrop of increasing tension…. [He] provides a sense that by managing to unite disparate American interests behind a common cause and undermining the Aryan illusion of racial supremacy, Louis helped insure a nation for the fight ahead.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Engrossing…. Margolick’s work reminds us where we stood in terms of race and freedom then, and makes us think about where we stand now.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A knockout punch…. History at its liveliest.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“[Margolick] deserve[s] praise as much for [his] literary execution as for vividly reminding us of the night when the world held its breath waiting to find out who would come out on top in a boxing match.”
—The Boston Globe
“Margolick does a wonderful job of recreating an era…. Books like Beyond Glory … remind us how transcendent a sport boxing can be.”
—The New York Times
“Margolick’s painstakingly researched book brings to life the ambiguities and tensions of the pre-war years. Beyond Glory is likely to remain the definitive account of the Louis/Schmeling encounters and why they mattered.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“An illuminating study of the period as well as the match…. A meticulous account of how the boxers’ lives were buffeted by the political chaos and racial segregation of their age.”
—BusinessWeek
“[Margolick] lets the argot of sportswriting in the 1930s tell the story…. [He] does a fine job of looking into the smaller ironies and ambiguities of a unique American life and the picture which emerges of complex American attitudes to race…. Margolick’s definitive book does the event and the characters who lived it the justice they deserve.”
—Irish Times
“Brilliant and colorful…. The two principles are deftly drawn…. A great book, packed with great writing and memorable moments.”
—The Flint Journal
“This peerless account from heavyweight author David Margolick deftly evokes the times and skillfully puts the controversy into its rightful con text.”
—Scotland on Sunday
“Beyond Glory [is] a breathless stew of narrative…. Thickly detailed.”
—The Nation
“Superb…. History at its liveliest…. Because of Margolick’s book, the two men—and all they came to symbolize—seem alive again.”
—The Charlotte Observer
“A definitive work…. [Margolick] is a smooth and talented writer…. It might be hard for today’s fans to understand why the fight … seemed so significant…. It was—and still is. Beyond Glory tells us why, brilliantly.”
—The Washington Times
“The most extensively researched book on Joe Louis ever written…. [Margolick] has done his homework and then some.”
—The New York Post
David Margolick
BEYOND GLORY
David Margolick is a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he writes about culture, the media, and politics. He served as national legal affairs editor at The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly “At the Bar” column for seven years. He is the author most recently of Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. This is his fourth book. He lives in New York City.
BOOKS BY DAVID MARGOLICK
Strange Fruit:
The Biography of a Song
At the Bar:
The Passions and Peccadilloes of American Lawyers
Undue Influence:
The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune
Beyond Glory:
Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
To my mother and father
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Introduction
1 Just Off the Boat
2 A Regime’s Embrace
3 A Star Rises in the Midwest
4 New York Falls in Love
5 Champion in Waiting
6 The Condemned Man
7 Victor and Vanquished
8 Climbing Back
9 A German Commodity
10 Banishing Jack Johnson’s Ghost
11 The Rematch Becomes Reality
12 Pompton Lakes and Speculator
13 The Fight
14 Aftermath
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PEOPLE IN THIS BOOK are occasionally quoted talking in dialect, as rendered by someone writing about them at the time. In the belief that contemporaneous documents are precious, and that the insights they provide, both deliberate and inadvertent, must take precedence over evolving standards of fairness or taste, all such quotes appear precisely as they did originally. Readers can be trusted, I believe, to decide for themselves how those quoted must have spoken.
Introduction
ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 22, 1938, the New York Journal-American plastered an enormous cartoon across the front page of its sports section. “Ringside Tonight!” it was titled. It depicted a darkened stadium topped by a circle of flags silhouetted against the evening sky and enclosing a small, illuminated square. Inside that square were two tiny figures, one black, one white, heading toward each other with their arms raised, about to come to blows. Looking on was a mob of people discernible near the action, and visible in the distance only as tiny specks of light. And sitting by the ropes was a giant anthropomorphic globe, with oversize bug eyes and a furrowed brow superimposed over the lines of latitude and longitude. The orb held a small sign, which read, MAIN BOUT, JOE LOUIS, U.S. VS. MAX SCHMELING, GERMANY.
Had you picked up any other newspaper that day, in Berlin or London or Tokyo or Johannesburg or Moscow, the message would have been the same: something extraordinary was about to happen in New York City. Around ten p.m., a timekeeper would strike a small bell, and much of a world still unaccustomed to acting in unison would cease whatever it was doing and come to attention. In Yankee Stadium, nearly seventy thousand fans would lean forward in their seats; throughout the rest of the world, a hundred million people or more—the largest audience in history for anything—would gather around their radios. Everything else would suddenly cease to matter.
“Wars, involving the fate of nations, rage elsewhere on this globe,” the New York Mirror had declared that morning, “but the eyes of the world will be focused tonight on a two-man battle in a ribbon of light stabbing the darkness of the Yankee Stadium.” The Angriff, the mouthpiece of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, had little in common with the Mirror, a tabloid read primarily by working-class American Jews. But regarding this point, the two newspapers agreed. “On this day,” the Angriff observed, “two men will hold an entire world in the utmost tension.” Twenty million Germans would join the sixty million Americans who would be listening, even though it would be three o’clock the next morning in Berlin when the gong sounded. Much of Germany would simply not go to bed. Five months before Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass—the pogrom that would signal the end of any remaining semblance of normal Jewish life in Germany—the N
azi state would experience what one newspaper called “The Night of the Bright Windows.”
Unique among the sports, boxing seemed to crystallize the ethnic, racial, and political tensions of a culture. But even to veteran boxing writers, this fight, between a twenty-four-year-old black American and a German nine years his senior, between the world heavyweight champion and a former title holder—and the only man ever to beat him in his professional career—was unlike any other. It was not just black against white, which was combustible enough, but youth versus age; raw talent and instinct versus experience; freedom against fascism; and, in its own way, the Jews versus Adolf Hitler. Though everyone made a prediction, no one felt very confident about it; there were too many imponderables. Since the moment two years earlier when, in one of the greatest upsets in the history of sports, Max Schmeling had knocked out the purportedly unstoppable Joe Louis, people had savored the idea of a rematch. For months now, it had been analyzed from every possible angle. “The relative merits of each fighter from the size of the pupils of his eyes down to the manner in which he shuffles his feet when he walks have been mulled over in a million conversations,” Richard Wright wrote in the Daily Worker, the official paper of the American Communist Party, which for all of its Marxist wariness of professional athletics was following the fight as closely as any publication. “Louis or Schmeling?” the great sportswriter Grantland Rice asked. “These two names beat upon your eardrums as steadily as the tom-toms of a Zulu tribe moving to a raid.”
No single sporting event—even Jack Johnson’s victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910, which sparked race riots throughout the United States, or anything in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—had ever borne such worldwide weight. The fight implicated both the future of race relations and the prestige of two powerful nations. Each fighter was bearing on his shoulders more than any athlete ever had. “Louis represents democracy in its purest form: the Negro boy who would be permitted to become a world champion without regard for race, creed or color,” a sportswriter from Boston had written that morning. “Schmeling represents a country which does not recognize this idea and ideal.”
In a nation still racked by the Depression, people had spent nearly a million dollars for tickets, something that had happened in boxing only a few times before, and only during boom times. “Judges and lawyers, Representatives and Senators, Governors and Mayors, bankers and brokers, merchant princes and industrial giants, doctors, artists, writers, figures of prominence in the various fields of sports, champions of the past and present in the ring … stars of the stage and screen—everybody, it seems,” would be at or near ringside that night, The New York Times predicted. But equally impressive were those in the bleachers, many of them black, who had dug down deep into their pockets and their cookie jars, sacrificed their relief checks, pawned the precious little they owned for the privilege of watching two distant specks do battle, and to be—at least for a little while—at what felt like the center of the universe.
By ten o’clock, the streets in most American cities would be utterly deserted. With open windows offering the only defense against summertime heat and humidity, the sounds of the fight would float out of homes and apartments, spilling out into the streets and reverberating around empty courtyards. In movie theaters and restaurants, at baseball games and dances, the fight would be piped in. Four months later, when Sea-biscuit beat War Admiral, perhaps forty million Americans would be listening. Tonight, sixty million would be—nearly half of the country’s population, more people than had ever heard one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Of course, anyone missing the action on NBC could read plenty about it the next morning; by one estimate, more journalists would gather at Yankee Stadium than there had been in Versailles for the formal end of World War I.
One didn’t need to be an anthropologist to know there had never been anything like it, or a soothsayer to know there would never be anything like it again. If Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” lost, the energy and dynamism with which he had single-handedly revitalized an entire sport over the previous four years would quickly dissipate, and the crown would go to Nazi Germany, where it could sit until Hitler deigned to let it go. If Louis won, no rivalry on the horizon could possibly generate as much excitement. And with Europe and, inevitably, America, on the brink of war, the world would soon have more than prizefights on its mind.
THEN AS NOW, New York City was usually too sprawling and too imperturbable to bend very much to anything in its midst. The place swallowed up sporting events, no matter the magnitude. “World Series scarcely cause a crush on the subway,” one sportswriter observed two days before the fight. “Olympic tryouts go on unheeded. International tennis matches are just murmurs in the city’s roar. But even New York and all its millions wouldn’t submerge this fight,” he went on. “It dominated everything.” By one count, the city had more visitors that week than at any time since the Democratic Convention of 1924. Hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs were jammed. More blacks had flooded into New York than at any time in its history; since all of Harlem’s hostelries were filled, and since hotels downtown were either too expensive or too discriminatory, these visitors were sleeping in their cars. Whatever prosperity black America could muster in these worst of times was on display, either on wheels or on their backs or in the hands of bookies. “If Joe loses, and no one here even thinks that, so many tears will flow down Seventh and Lenox avenues that it will seem like a Mississippi River flood,” the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s principal newspaper, reported. “On the other hand, if Joe wins, more liquor will be consumed than there is in ‘Ole Man Ribber.’”
As many as two thousand Germans had come to New York for the fight, most of them aboard mighty ocean liners like the Bremen or the Europa, swastikas flying from their masts. All were fired up by pre-fight coverage in the Nazi press, which predicted that Schmeling was simply too superior to Louis—both as a boxer and as a man—to lose. Schmeling had been boxing for more than ten years. Several times, his career had been declared over. But always, through skill, discipline, and tenacity, he had clawed his way back. And as the ground in his homeland trembled beneath him, he had displayed diplomatic footwork fancier than anything ever demanded of him in the ring, making the jarring transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany without a stumble, replacing friends who had fled—Jews, artists, intellectuals—with a new crop in better odor with the regime. How many people, after all, could say they had cabled congratulations to Franklin Roosevelt when he was elected president, and then, only a few months later, received a wedding present from Adolf Hitler?
The Führer had been a boon to German boxing. He had extolled it in Mein Kampf and insisted it be taught in German schools. What made for good fighters—courage, resolve, speed, cold-blooded calculation—made for good soldiers, too, he said. In Reich sports culture, the Daily Worker had wisecracked, boxing was second only to Jew-baiting in popularity. The Nazis initially had little use for professional athletes. They served the wrong gods: themselves. Schmeling, moreover, was dark and brooding and had an almost Asian cast, a far cry from the lithe and cheery Aryan blonds of Leni Riefenstahl’s films. But Schmeling’s ability to confound his critics, to rebound from defeat, to prevail by sheer force of character and will, embodied the Nazi vision of a renascent Reich. When he had beaten Louis two years earlier, the Nazis had embraced him. Schmeling’s Victory: A German Victory, they titled the film of that fight, which was shown throughout Germany by Hitler’s personal decree, to enormous audiences of rapturous fans. “The first nationally-sponsored heavyweight,” one American writer called Schmeling.
But placating Hitler and the Americans simultaneously was a challenge even for the nimble and malleable Schmeling. In the United States, boxing meant New York, and New York, in large part, meant Jews. The man who controlled the sport in New York, and who was promoting tonight’s fight, was Jewish. Many boxers, including champions in several divisions, were Jewish. So were many of the trainers, writers, and suppliers, as well as an enormous n
umber of fans. So, too, were most of the fight managers, including Schmeling’s; this irritated the Nazis, but it was, they surely realized, the price they had to pay to do business in New York. For five years now, New York fans had looked warily upon Schmeling, and upon his insistence that he was a “sportsman” rather than a “politician” and that nothing was amiss back home. Many came to consider him as much a German product as Krupp steel, someone whose purses helped prop up a brutal but financially strapped regime, and they had boycotted his fights. The Nazis believed that Schmeling had deserved a title shot the previous year and that New York Jews had killed it, and it was hard to argue with either point. For a time, the fight’s promoter talked of moving the bout to a venue where there were fewer Jews. But he ultimately decided that despite the political pressures, the Jews would come out to this fight anyway: they were too eager to see Louis slaughter Schmeling to stay away. This hatred only made Germany embrace Schmeling more tenaciously. On the morning of the fight, Hitler sent a telegram wishing him luck.
That Schmeling was fighting a black man, and on behalf of a regime for which race was paramount, upped the symbolic ante. All whites, the Nazis asserted, were in Schmeling’s corner—not just in Germany but in the American South, Australia, South America, and South Africa. German commentators had repeatedly charged that the United States was more concerned about retaining the heavyweight crown than about upholding the honor of the white race, so the task had fallen to Germany. That anyone could accuse a segregated and bigoted America of giving people of color a break was almost comic. But Louis, only the second black man ever to win the heavyweight title, and the first in twenty-two years, had made himself indispensable—and, just as remarkably, largely acceptable—to white America.