* Many years later, Red Smith wrote that the injection froze up Baer’s entire forearm moments before the fight began.
* Louis and Marva agreed to live apart three weeks before all his fights, which was reasonable enough until Louis suggested fighting once a month. “But Joe, that would hardly be fair to your wife,” Roxborough told him. “We’ll get along,” Louis replied.
The Condemned Man
ON DECEMBER 21, 1935, a rumor swept the country that Joe Louis was dead. This was nothing new; at least ten times over the past few months there had been similar reports. Some had him killed in a car accident, others at the hands of mobsters or a murderous woman with a knife. By five-thirty that afternoon, the switchboard at The New York Times had received more than one thousand calls; the total count eventually topped the 1,267 logged on the day Will Rogers really did die.
“Sho’ ’nuff if I’m dead, I’se a mighty lively corpse,” Louis told one reporter. As 1936 began he was not yet officially champion, but he was de facto champion in nearly all important respects: earnings, attention, ability, aura. Ring magazine even ranked him number one, ahead of Braddock. While Louis had earned $400,000 in 1935, was talking about making his “first million” by 1937, and was traveling in his own luxury Pullman, Braddock was making one-night stands in tank towns, taking in a measly $1,000 a week, and extending his tenure by steering clear of Louis. Braddock was content to let Louis build himself up, thereby guaranteeing himself an even more glorious payday. Blackburn had an apt rejoinder about rumors that he and Louis had split. “Do you think I’m crazy, quitting a gold mine?” he asked.
And that’s what Louis had become, for all of boxing, as Fleischer loved pointing out. Gymnasiums were crackling with activity. Newspapers were once more filled with boxing stories; writers who had wandered off to cover baseball, hockey, or tennis were back. People were again debating who were the best fighters of old and comparing them to Louis. Old-timers were attempting comebacks. And everyone was spending money. “Boxers, managers, promoters, manufacturers of shoes, boxing trunks, and shirts, gloves, bandages, liniments, leather goods that go to make up the head guards, nose guards and protectors, punching bags and other paraphernalia used in training and in active ring combat and even Uncle Sam and the various states where the bouts are staged, are all benefiting by the new life set into motion by one fighter,” Fleischer wrote. Even Ring itself had picked up nearly eleven thousand new subscribers. Nothing in Fleischer’s thirty years in the business could compare to what he was witnessing now. “One man—Joe Louis—has done more for boxing than have any ten dozen men since Jack Dempsey was in his prime,” he wrote.
The search for a “white hope” was another part of this renaissance. “Tall men, skinny men, fat men, roly-poly men—men of all sizes and shapes—are being hauled from their work—whatever it might be, to ‘save’ the day for the white race,” Fleischer observed. Of course, the object was not just to hold the black man back, but to cash in on his allure. Whether or not Louis won the title, wrote Fleischer, “he is so big a drawing card that any white boy who shows ring ability is certain to draw more money with Louis than the average fighter can obtain through an entire career.” Even Jack Johnson had gotten into the act, spending six days in Boston courting a promising white boxer. “It’s a commercial affair with me,” Johnson explained. “There’s big money for the man who can develop a white fighter to cope with Louis and I’m out to find such a man.”
After the Baer fight, Johnson had resumed his usual role of irritant and critic. He insisted that even at his advanced age, he could still go three rounds with Louis without getting touched. He thought Louis would beat Schmeling, but not Braddock; leaving nothing to chance, he offered to help Braddock give Louis “a worse whipping than Mrs. Barrow ever gave him.” Black commentators were predictably infuriated with “Lil’ Arthur.” “Benedict Arnold” and “‘Uncle Tom’ Johnson” were some of the names bandied about for him. “A jimsonweed in the nostrils of those who once cheered him,” one black sportswriter called Johnson.
“Johnson down in his heart doesn’t believe half the things he is saying about Joe, but he is a demon publicity hound and knows that most any remark about Joe will land him on the sports pages,” Lewis Dial wrote in the New York Age. But Gordon Hancock of the Norfolk Journal and Guide praised Johnson for helping blacks surmount blind group loyalty. Blacks, he maintained, should be able to say what they want or root for whomever they wish without being accused of treason. Johnson himself insisted he was only speaking his mind. “Say, I like Joe,” he said. “He’s done wonders and I wish him all the luck in the world. But what’s the use of kidding ourselves into declaring that Joe is the greatest ring warrior of modern times?” The black press continued to view the “white hope” campaign with amused contempt. And for all those whites wanting to knock off the incumbent Joe Louis, there were blacks vying to be the next one. Of the seventeen thousand boxers trying out for places on the American Olympic boxing team, six thousand were black. Louis also remained an object of intense interest and curiosity elsewhere. When the Pittsburgh Courier questioned Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa in March 1936, Selassie questioned the Courier about Louis.
Louis was to have fought three times before the Schmeling bout in June, but his schedule turned out to be far less hectic. His fight against Isidoro Gastanaga in Havana in late December was abruptly canceled after six machine-gun-toting Cubans greeted Mike Jacobs as he began an inspection tour. There were fears that if the fight went forward, someone might be kidnapped. Louis did fight Charley Retzlaff in Chicago on January 17, 1936—for all of eighty-five seconds. So between mid-December 1935 and June 1936 Louis spent less than two minutes in the ring, at least when it counted. It was by far Louis’s longest layoff, and was, presumably, just what Joe Jacobs had wanted. Readers eager to keep abreast of Louis, then, had to settle for news of him outside the ring.
In December, Louis gave “Joe Louis banks”—with 50 cents in each— to 150 black schoolchildren in Detroit. In January, he placed an order for twenty-five new suits with Billy Taub, the New York tailor who had dressed every heavyweight champion since Corbett. Woolworth and Kresge were selling Louis figurines. There was talk of Louis backing a black baseball team in Detroit or Chicago. And in planning the group’s annual meeting in Baltimore that June, Walter White warned that “the N.A.A.C.P. would blow up in despair” if the Louis-Schmeling fight were held in Chicago, making it either too expensive or too much of a conflict to attend. In February, Paul Gallico, frustrated at American ineptitude during the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, wired an unusual cry for help. “For heavens sake, send over Joe Louis,” he pleaded. Meantime, the bandleader Jimmie Lunceford handed out autographed pictures of Louis to the first fifty girls attending a performance in Wheeling, West Virginia, and rumors that Marva was expecting swept Chicago. In March, Louis was elected a director of the Victory Mutual Life Insurance Company, a black-owned firm in Chicago, and the Courier announced a symposium on “What I Think About Joe Louis and His Future Fights.” A jury in Chicago took all of twenty-five minutes to acquit Jack Blackburn of criminal charges arising from a gun battle in which a stray bullet killed an elderly man. “With the Brown Bomber present as a character witness, testimony proved needless,” the Amsterdam News reported, though some walking-around money may have helped. In April, a group in Nashville hinted that if Louis visited there, mixed bouts would be allowed. In Pittsburgh, his reception was rivaled by only— maybe—“Caesar’s triumphant entry into Rome.” In May, Fleischer reported that the stash of Louis photographs and handkerchiefs he’d brought with him was quickly exhausted by worshipful fans in Jamaica, Panama, Trinidad, and elsewhere. In June, Mrs. Viola Place of Engle-wood, New Jersey, had twin boys, and named them Joe and Louis.*
As the Schmeling fight approached, some observers continued to see secret cabals and grand conspiracies against Louis. One intimated that Roosevelt, fearing that a black champion might offend southern voters, woul
d delay a title bout until after the election in November. The Daily Worker cited a “report” that England, France, and Holland, all countries with third-world colonies, had sent “secret suggestions” to Washington that a Louis championship was unacceptable. Meanwhile, Mike Jacobs weighed bids from various cities for the fight. For him, the issue was the impact of a Jewish boycott, and whether it justified moving the contest out of New York. Fleischer supported such a boycott; by this point, Ring had been banned in Germany. But Jacobs concluded that Louis’s star power, plus the likelihood that he would crush Schmeling, would more than offset any boycott. The fight stayed put.
In Germany, where the Olympics would soon take place and appearances temporarily mattered, the Nazis had suspended their withering rhetoric about Louis. Box-Sport said that Louis had become a “darling of the Americans” not just because of his talent, but because he had remained a child within: “kind-hearted, honest, and without falsity.” It presented him as a religious man and a fair fighter, whose only vices were “fine suits and a splendid car.” Louis wasn’t subhuman, said Box-Sport, just shallow, caring only about money; unlike Dempsey or Tunney, he had “no understanding for the honor and dignity of being the world champion.” The 12 Uhr-Blatt conceded that Louis was “surely no unintelligent fellow” and cited his good manners, particularly compared to his boorish brethren. Of course, he had his reasons: “Were Louis arrogant and impudent, the Americans would not tolerate him at the spot he’s occupying right now.” Box-Sport actually paid Louis an extraordinary tribute, admitting him into the honorable fraternity of anti-Semites. The only fighter he ever really hated was Kingfish Levinsky, it said approvingly, since “one cannot think of any man more unpleasant, arrogant and repugnant than the Jewish kingfish from Chicago.” (There was nothing to the charge.)
A myth was to arise and persist that Nazi Germany saw Schmeling as a sure loser, ignoring him as he set off for the suicide mission he’d so foolishly undertaken. Schmeling fostered this idea, later describing how Hitler “seemed disturbed and somewhat angry” that he would place German honor on the line against a black man, especially one so likely to beat him. In fact, the Germans clearly thought they had a winner. While blacks had greater endurance, were “predestined” to fight with their fists, and had eyes that were not so easily read, their moral weakness opened the door for whites, Box-Sport said. “A better fighting morale can move mountains,” it declared. Far from discouraging people from attending the fight, the North German Lloyd Line reduced rates on two of its premier liners, the Bremen and the Europa. The cruises were announced in Goebbels’s Angriff. Whatever ambivalence the Nazis felt about the fight was for professional athletes generally. “This great commercial enterprise can very well be fought without us,” declared the Reichssportblatt, the official publication of the Berlin Olympics. But this viewpoint was clearly losing ground.
Early in the year, the German sports ministry declared that nonpoliti-cal sportsmen were “unthinkable” in the new Germany. Henceforth, all athletes had to be trained as fighters for Nazism and tested for their “political reliability”; no athlete was complete without mastering the details of Hitler’s career, along with Nazi principles and racial theories. But Schmeling was either exempted from all this or satisfied some broader construction of the new rules. He did not join the Nazi Party, though he had high-ranking Nazi friends like Hans Hinkel, Hitler’s overseer of Jewish culture, whose ties to the Führer went back to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. He gave the Nazi salute when circumstances warranted, appeared at Nazi events, and made the occasional pro-Nazi statement, as in late March 1936 when he, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and other German celebrities urged Germans to vote for Hitler in a “referendum” on his leadership. “In my heart I view this day as a collective expression of the deepest trust in the Führer,” he said.*
Schmeling never said any more than he had to to stay in the Nazis’ good graces. He did not spout Nazi rhetoric or wrap himself in the swastika. It will never be clear whether this was a matter of conviction or calculation, or even whether the decision was his or someone else’s. But for all concerned, things worked out quite nicely. Whenever the Nazis asked him to pitch in, he obliged. Never did they ask him to do anything that would unduly foul his American nest, which produced great capital for both Schmeling and the regime. To one anti-Nazi German émigré paper in New York, it was Schmeling’s earning power that most interested the Nazis; any country that barred its citizens from taking more than four dollars’ worth of currency beyond its borders was seriously strapped for cash. “Max Schmeling will remain Hitler’s hero … willing to take a beating from a Negro [and] managed by a Jew, to bring his bankrupt fatherland money in the hour of peril,” it said. Schmeling conceded as much to an American reporter. “I expect to bring home a couple of hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “I guess Dr. [Hjalmar] Schacht [the minister of finance] won’t mind that.”
Schmeling never indulged in Nazi racist rhetoric or “anthropology” regarding Louis, though sometimes his views reflected popular prejudices of the time. “You see, Louis didn’t make the mistake other colored boxers made,” he told one German interviewer. “He never tried to gain access to the circles of white society. For me there exists no racial dividing line in sports and no one has mentioned the matter to me over here.”
“Schmeling is the most famous and best loved athlete in modern German history and the Reich wishes him well,” Guido von Mengden, press chief of the Nazi sporting organization, said before his departure. “Naturally, we hope Schmeling wins, but if he loses, the nation will not go into mourning.” Schmeling heard no defeatism from Goebbels, whom he and Ondra visited shortly before Schmeling’s departure. “The Schmelings are quite open, and tell about their lives and doings,” the propaganda minister wrote in his diary, in the first of many such favorable references to the couple. “He is traveling to America to fight Joe Louis. Best wishes!” Noting the article in the Reichssportblatt, The New York Times called Schmeling’s sendoff “shabby,” feeding what became the hoary myth that his government had disowned him. “Race-conscious Germany cannot forgive Max for fighting a Negro and letting himself be paid therefor,” it claimed. In fact, Schmeling kept his departure plans private and left in the middle of the night to avoid any fuss; the glad-handing and backslap-ping could come when he returned victorious. Even Ondra, who had the flu, didn’t see her husband off. But to those who did, Schmeling hardly seemed beleaguered or ostracized. “If the mood at Schmeling’s departure is an omen for his return, then at the beginning of July there will be a giant reception appropriate for a great victor,” wrote the editor of Box-Sport, Erwin Thoma. “Seldom have we seen Schmeling before a big fight in as good a mood as this time. An aura of confidence literally radiated from him.”
As for fighting a black man, the Nazis were making precisely the kind of compromise they repeatedly made in other spheres—for instance, tempering anti-Jewish agitation whenever it threatened German interests. As Schmeling saw it, even if Louis landed a big one on his chin, he would be taking it for the Fatherland. “It has been confirmed to me many times that my mere participation in this bout already promotes the German cause abroad,” he told the 12 Uhr-Blatt shortly before his departure. The paper agreed, suggesting Schmeling had little choice but to take the fight to help assure Yankee participation in the Berlin Olympics. None of this coverage would have appeared, just as Jacobs would not still have represented Schmeling, had Hitler not wanted it to happen.
On April 21 the Bremen again arrived in New York, a swastika now hanging routinely from its mast. Fifty reporters, cartoonists, and cameramen sailed out from the Battery and boarded the ship, then accompanied Schmeling as it headed north to the West Forty-sixth Street pier. Photographers recorded scenes unlikely to appear in any German newspaper, like a smiling Schmeling with his arms around the two Jacobses. Then, for two hours, reporters yet again questioned Schmeling, who was sunburned from the passage and a bit above fighting weight, even though he’d
run twelve miles a day on deck. He repeated what he’d said about Louis—that he was amateurish and a sucker for a good right. “I guarantee you, if Louis makes the same mistakes with me that he did with Baer, I shall knock him out!” he said. Someone asked whether Hitler had seen him off. “Why should he?” Schmeling replied. “He’s a politician and I am a sportsman.”
As the swarm headed to the promenade deck, some reporters lingered below with Max Machon and the Münchner beer. He disputed those reports that the Germans opposed the fight. “Against it?” he exclaimed. “That is all they talk about. They do not even talk about the Olympics. All they talk about is Schmeling and Louis.” Millions would be listening over the radio, he predicted, not just in Germany but throughout Europe. Meantime, Mike Jacobs repeatedly tried to welcome Schmeling for the newsreel cameras, only to keep flubbing his lines. Schmeling and the reporters continued their conversation at the Commodore Hotel, which Schmeling was once more making his New York base. “I’ll tell you what: you’ll lick this guy and lick him good,” Joe Jacobs cried out at one point. “What do you think would have happened to this Louis if you hadn’t softened Paolino up like a wet doughnut?” Schmeling told reporters that even at $400 per head for the trip, nearly two thousand Germans were coming to see the action. His chores for Mike Jacobs finally discharged, Schmeling went to see a film about another legendary impresario: The Great Ziegfeld. A couple of days later, Ed Sullivan spotted Gene Tunney at the Stork Club and Schmeling at Leon and Eddie’s, and surmised that Tunney had to be the happier of the two. “How much enjoyment can Schmeling get out of night clubs, when he knows that on June 18 he walks the last mile of resin through the little green door of pugilism to face the thunderbolts of Massa Joe Louis?” he asked.
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