Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  * Not everyone agreed: Pegler said that Celler’s plan was to “shame the Nazis by lying down and rolling in the same gutter with them.” Nazi discrimination against Jewish athletes would surely pass over, he predicted, “and the victims will be no worse for it.”

  A Regime’s Embrace

  ADOLF HITLER TURNED FORTY-FOUR on April 20, 1933, and among the many greetings he received were messages from the Deutscher Reichsverband für Amateurboxen. They assured him they stood ready at all times to assist him in his great work and to “stand in defense, with clenched fist, against all enemies.” At the national championships a week later, each of the winners received a silver-framed, autographed picture of Hitler. There was a speech from a Nazi functionary, reiterating Hitler’s devotion to boxing. Then came the singing of “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Song.” The boxers greeted the crowd with the Hitler salute. They also telegrammed the Führer, thanking him again and promising “to follow in his path with iron decisiveness and unswerving trust.” What had formerly been a sporting event had turned into a Nazi pageant.

  Everywhere, the Nazification of German boxing was intensifying. In the upcoming competition with Italy, German boxers would sport new uniforms, with black swastikas on the left leg of their white trunks; among the sponsors of a boxing tournament staged by the German police were the two principal Nazi party newspapers: the Angriff and the Völkischer Beobachter. Just about the only remnant of the old-style German boxing was Schmeling, now poised to start a tour that would take him to several northeastern American cities and a couple more in Canada before the Baer fight in June.

  The man watching, and judging, Schmeling most closely was Dan Parker of the New York Mirror. It was an unlikely role for both Parker, a Catholic New Englander, and the Mirror, a Hearst tabloid whose proprietor, according to his critics, was vaguely sympathetic to Hitler. Parker served his readers zealously and colorfully. Unlike most sportswriters, he did not buy the Schmeling line that politics and sports were automatically and perpetually distinct, and more than anyone else, he took on the vexing task of figuring out just who Schmeling was, how he was behaving, and what the best way was to deal fairly with him.

  “The movement to make Max Schmeling suffer for Halitosis Hitler’s oppressive policies against Jews in Germany is gaining terrific momentum,” Parker reported a week after Schmeling arrived. He then yielded to Morris Mendelsohn, chairman of the “Nazi Boycott Committee” of the Jewish War Veterans. Schmeling’s insistence that all was well with the Jews in Germany, Mendelsohn wrote, merely emphasized that “none is so blind as they who won’t see.” “We think, however, his eyesight will not fail Mr. Schmeling when he notes the empty seats in all of his scheduled encounters here in America,” Mendelsohn warned. “Why should we send Schmeling back to Germany with a bag of gold to throw into Hitler’s lap? Let us send him back with a ringing message that America will not countenance the persecution of helpless minorities in this advanced age.”

  Two days later, Parker heard from Heinz Reichmann, the American correspondent for the Ullstein papers, the Jewish-owned German publications which, the Nazis had previously charged, Schmeling had used as his mouthpiece. Reichmann, who had joined Harry Sperber in broadcasting Schmeling’s fights back to Germany, defended Schmeling, who, he said, was “no more of a Jew-hater than Rabbi Wise,” referring to Stephen Wise, then one of America’s most prominent Jews. Reichmann said he didn’t know any Germans with so many Jewish friends as Schmeling: nine out of ten, by his estimation. Ernst Lubitsch and Max Reinhardt, notable figures in German entertainment, would burst out laughing if they heard that busybodies were portraying Schmeling as an anti-Semite, he declared. It was a stirring defense, one that could hardly have helped Schmeling back home. Reichmann, like all Jewish reporters, was soon out of a job, and his Jewish publisher was soon out of business.

  Parker’s column also provided a forum on Joe Jacobs. Jacobs’s rabbi declared that by boycotting Schmeling, the Jews were descending to the Nazis’ level. And though he’d parted bitterly from Jacobs (after smashing a plaster bust of Schmeling over his head), Jacobs’s former business partner, an Irish Catholic named Bill McCarney, now touted Yussel’s credentials as a Jew. (Jacobs was not one of those High Holy Day-only types, he wrote; traveling in Europe, the first thing Jacobs always did was find a synagogue in which to say kaddish for his father.) Parker acknowledged the awkward position in which Schmeling now found himself. He “has to return to Germany some time and doesn’t want to find a room in the hoosegow awaiting him,” he wrote. “All he can do is point to the fact that his record has always been clean and that his long association with Jacobs proves that he doesn’t go in for Jew-baiting or hate.”

  In mid-April 1933, Schmeling and Jacobs set out on their tour. Some five thousand people came to see Schmeling in Pittsburgh. “I’ll try to make [Max Baer] think you’re to blame for all that trouble over in your country,” Jack Dempsey joked to Schmeling before an audience there. “That will be all right,” Schmeling replied. “I never care what they say.” He even made light of his predicament. “Shall I give them a political talk?” he quipped to Joe Jacobs before going on a local radio station. Although Jewish boxing fans were urged to stay away, four thousand people greeted Schmeling in Montreal. One local cartoonist gave him a Hitler mustache, but he was also feted at a Jewish nightclub there. A special train ferried fans to see Schmeling in Bangor, Maine. But an appearance before the German club at the state university was hastily canceled—ostensibly because Schmeling had to train, but more likely to avoid a ruckus.

  Schmeling and Jacobs were in Maine when word of the ban on Jews in German boxing dribbled belatedly into the American press. Schmeling had no comment, but Jacobs did. “We simply ignore it,” he said. A German boxing official hastily explained that Schmeling was free to keep Jacobs, but only for bouts outside Germany. “Well, that’s awfully nice of him, telling Schmeling what he can do in the United States,” Jacobs snapped. “Max and I, we don’t have nothin’ to do with them guys.” Few columnists ever commented on the Jewish ban. One of them was Fleischer, who called Hitler’s actions “malicious, vitriolic, and imbecilic.” But Fleischer still had faith in Schmeling. “Will he throw aside the man who made him a world champion, Joe Jacobs, American Hebrew, to abide by the German edict?” he asked. “I venture to predict that he will tell the Federation officials to take a trip to Hades, where they belong.”

  Whatever Schmeling elected to do, New York’s Jewish boxing fans now had to decide whether to boycott the fight against Baer. It was difficult to take anything involving the wacky and undisciplined Baer very seriously; certainly, Baer himself rarely did. This was, after all, a man who, when he first came to New York, had banged his head against a radiator to prove his durability. When a boxer named Frankie Campbell died after he was done with him, Baer became afraid of his own strength; that fear, plus his own sunny nature, left him erratic for the rest of his career. Baer could have been the greatest of them all, Benny Leonard, the legendary Jewish lightweight, once said, had he only been able to concentrate. He’d start his fights seriously, only to spot a friend in the crowd; “at that moment,” said Leonard, he’d stop being a fighter and become “a friend, or a lover, or something. He’d wave, and the other guy would hit him while he was doing it.” “I’ve got a million-dollar body and a ten-cent brain,” admitted Baer, who once sold more than 100 percent of himself because, he explained, he thought he had 1,000 percent to parcel out. Baer was confused about his purported Jewishness, too, a matter with considerable commercial consequences in New York. He said that his father was Jewish, though reports that the old man raised pigs in California did not bolster his case. Many years later, the trainer Ray Arcel claimed that having seen Baer in the shower, he could definitively say Baer was no Jew at all. What Baer was, in fact, was strategically Jewish.

  In America, Jews were all over boxing, not just as fighters and fans but as everything in between: promoters, trainers, managers, referee
s, propagandists, equipment manufacturers, suppliers, chroniclers. No major ethnic group in American history ever so dominated an important sport. The phenomenon is largely forgotten, in part because it was only scantily analyzed at the time. For Gentile writers, the topic might have been too sensitive; for Jewish ones, the problem may have been embarrassment. The various strains of American Jewish culture at the time—elite German Jewry; secular, socialist eastern European Yiddishists; the religiously observant—all disdained the sport. They deemed it coarse, uncouth, inappropriate—“goyishe nakhes,” the kind of foolishness Christians enjoyed.

  Few of the great Jewish boxers were heavyweights—another reason people questioned Baer’s Jewish credentials—but at one time or another, Jews dominated all of the lighter categories. Surely the most storied Jewish fighter was Leonard, who sat atop his division from 1917 to 1925, who parlayed his deftness, lethal punch, and good looks into enormous fame and popularity. One Jewish newspaper said he was far more famous than Einstein, and maybe more important. In 1923, in a match with another Jew, Lew Tendler, in the newly opened Yankee Stadium, he fought in front of nearly seventy thousand people. Small wonder, then, that Tex Rickard once said he’d pay all the money in the world for a great Jewish heavyweight. Apparently as a publicity stunt, someone had floated rumors prior to the first Schmeling-Sharkey fight that Schmeling himself was Jewish, and that he had relatives on the Lower East Side with whom he ate gefilte fish every Friday night. Schmeling politely brushed the stories aside, while stressing that if he really were Jewish, he’d not be ashamed of it. Of course, he’d be unlikely to reiterate that now.

  For the Jewish boxers themselves, fighting may have been strictly an economic proposition, a brutal but lucrative alternative to the sweatshops. But for their fans, its appeal was more tribal, and primeval. It was a way to assert their status as bona fide Americans, to express ethnic pride, settle ethnic scores, refute ethnic stereotypes; after all, no one ever cast the Irish and Italians as victims and bookworms, cowards and runts. Every Jewish kid ever set upon by street toughs lived vicariously through his Jewish ring heroes, and the heroes encouraged this, often wearing Stars of David on their trunks. After Arabs murdered sixty-seven Jews in Palestine in 1929, five Jewish fighters took on five non-Jews at a Madison Square Garden benefit; the “Hebrews” scored a clean sweep in front of sixteen thousand feverish fans. Many of them came from the Garment Center, either rank-and-file workers in the needle trades or executives who passed around fight tickets to their customers. But Jews of every background and economic stratum went to the fights. If the garment workers were fans, so too was Bernard Gimbel, whose family store sold what those workers made. What drew Jews to boxing was more than chauvinism, though. Perhaps it was also part of relishing America after their cloistered lives in Europe, or the Jewish love of going out, whether to vaudeville or to Broadway or to the Yiddish theater of Second Avenue.

  So pronounced was Jewish hegemony over boxing that some attributed the eclipse into which the sport had fallen by the early 1930s less to the Depression than to the paucity of good Jewish fighters. The exception was Barney Ross, a scrappy lightweight from Chicago. (“Hey, Barney,” Ross’s trainer asked him before one of his big fights in New York, “if Hitler dropped a bomb on this place, how many of our tribe would he kill off?”) The grim news from Germany only intensified the pride Jews already took in their fighters, especially when they were taking on Germans. So while some Jewish boxers in Germany were fleeing for their lives, Gentile boxers in America were pretending to be Jews. Baer did even more, turning himself into a modern, if uncircumsized, Maccabee. “Every punch in the eye I give Schmeling is one for Adolf Hitler,” he declared.

  Several writers saw through Baer’s ruse, though it was hard to get very worked up over it. One newspaperman said Baer was “reported to have become a Jew by press agent edict rather than by Bar Mitzvah.” “Baer was only a 50 per cent Hebrew when he set out for New York,” Parker wrote. “He became a 100 per cent when he arrived in Gotham and were it not for the fact that the Atlantic seaboard intervened, he might have kept right on traveling until he was at least 350 per cent Yiddle.” “Hitler is more of a Jew than is Baer,” Fleischer claimed. But his image as a Jew persisted, in both New York and Berlin, infusing the Schmeling-Baer bout with a significance it would not normally have had. Boycotting it was wrong, some argued, because with people like Baer and Joe Jacobs involved, American Jews would suffer a lot more than Hitler ever would. German papers opined that Baer’s Jewish talk, along with his anti-Nazi saber rattling, was simply reklame, the kind of shameless huckstering for which Americans, and Jews in particular, were so noted. The virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer took Schmeling to task for fighting a non-Aryan, calling it a “racial and cultural disgrace.”

  As the fight approached, Schmeling continued to talk up the “New Germany,” but selectively—for instance, to German-language publications few ordinary New Yorkers read. “Abroad, one can have no concept of how Germany looks today,” he told the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. “A renewal of the Reich is under way which can only be in the best interest of Germany.” Otherwise, he made few waves. His German compatriot Walter Neusel had not only kept his Jewish manager but had briefly gone into exile, something Schmeling was not about to do. Neusel had also provided that a part of the gate from a forthcoming fight in London be devoted to a Jewish relief fund; Schmeling was not about to do that, either.

  Four days before the fight, at a dinner given by the Jewish War Veterans, Congressman Celler renewed calls for a boycott. “Schmeling is a friend of Hitler,” he said. But the protests fizzled. Fight backers worried that Baer’s non-Semitism was actually driving away more Jewish fight fans than was Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Baer’s manager begged Jewish fans to ignore the doubts cast on Baer’s ethnic credentials and go watch “a genuine half-Jewish boy fight a 100 percent German.” Ticket sales in Yorkville, the German community on New York’s Upper East Side, were said to be making up for any losses in the Jewish community. The Staats-Zeitung warned that given “the growing antipathy against everything German” in New York, Schmeling would have a hard time landing another fight there were he to lose. Meanwhile, the fight would not be aired in Germany. Sperber and Reichmann, after all, were Jews; shortly before the fight the Nazis decreed that henceforth only Aryan broadcasters would do. (Sperber promptly wired Goebbels to “Leck’ mich am Arsch”—to lick his ass—a message the non-German-speaking Western Union operator dutifully took down and transmitted.)

  Sixty thousand people, many getting in at the Depression-era price of a dollar a seat, attended the fight, at least fifteen thousand more than would watch Sharkey lose the heavyweight title to Primo Carnera three weeks later. Millions more were updated by bulletins on NBC. Schmeling was the heavy favorite, but no one knew he was under the weather (or at least he later said he was), and that the heat—the night was stifling even without the powerful lights over the ring—made things worse. Baer, who for the first time was wearing the Star of David on his trunks, started out the fight furiously, while Schmeling was leaden. In the tenth round Baer put an end to things. “A punch all the boxing instructors decry as the sucker’s wallop, suddenly arched through atmosphere made milky by tobacco smoke and resin dust,” wrote Pegler, and Schmeling was down and out. “That wasn’t a defeat, that was a disaster,” Machon said afterward in the dressing room. Meantime, Baer was looking at his puffed-up nose in the mirror. “They thought I was a Hebe and now I look like one,” he said.

  Politics permeated the postfight analysis. The Nazis would probably claim Schmeling had been done in by international Jewry, the Times editorialized. In the American Jewish press, there was hope that the outcome presaged better days. With Schmeling’s loss, one commentator speculated, maybe those two “gas bags,” Hitler and Goebbels, would now harness their energies more usefully. “Let Hitler stop gassing and go to work,” he declared. One of New York’s Yiddish dailies, Der Tog, acknowledged its embarrassment over even caring
about a prizefight. Before Hitler came to power, “who would have been interested if [Schmeling] is a German or a Tatar—and whether the boxer who beat him, Max Baer, is a Jew or a Turk?” it asked. But the Hitler crowd had changed all that, it pointed out, and so for the Jews, now facing a peril unlike any other, Baer’s feat had come to symbolize Jewry’s struggle against the Nazis.

  Schmeling vowed to keep fighting until he became champion again, but Gallico thought his pal was washed up. So did many in Germany. “Schmeling’s dream of regaining the world’s championship is over,” the 12 Uhr-Blatt declared. Other publications claimed Schmeling had been done in by a life of celebrity, wealth, and luxury. “A man who travels only first-class, sleeps under down covers, and eats the food of millionaires will, after a short while, no longer possess the constitution necessary to grapple with the ‘roughnecks’ of the American rings,” said the Völkischer Beobachter. Not surprisingly, the Nazi papers blamed the debacle on Jacobs—for giving Schmeling poor counsel, for letting him remain idle for too long, for having him train in excessively hot Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, rather than in a climate more congenial to a German, for steering him toward Baer rather than to an easier rubber match with Sharkey.