A cartoon in the Amsterdam News, titled “When and If Joe Louis Loses,” captured how comically dependent black America, and Harlem in particular, was on Louis. In it were scenes of grown men jumping off a pier, pimps on Lenox Avenue dressed only in barrels, a stream of moving vans leaving Sugar Hill, and a crowd outside of Goldberg’s pawnshop. “Sorry, pops, but the line starts around the corner—an’ then, you have to have references to even get on the line,” a cop tells one customer.
A week earlier, the paper had struck a rare cautionary note. “The white world has long believed that a Negro is not able to carry success gracefully,” it stated. “If Joe Louis should come out of this fight a loser, the white writers will pounce on him with venom and tear him to shreds.” It did not say how the black world would feel under the same circumstances. But to Murray Robinson of the Newark Star Eagle, the danger was less of Louis losing than of losing the chance to see Louis at his peak. Awash in money, with few good men to battle, and from a race not known for longevity in the ring, Louis, he predicted, was bound soon to go into decline.
Now was the time, he said, to see Joe Louis at his greatest—which was “just about the greatest heavyweight you’ve ever seen.”
* One of the stock stories about Louis from this period is apocryphal—that a young black man on death row in North Carolina cried out, “Save me, Joe Louis! Save me, Joe Louis!” as he was asphyxiated. “Not God, not government, not charitably-minded white men, but a Negro who was the world’s most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope,” Martin Luther King, Jr., later wrote about the episode. In fact, nineteen-year-old Allen Foster, the first man to die in the state’s new gas chamber in January 1936, said no such thing, nor had the the room been miked, as King had claimed. Instead, chained down in the frigid room, wearing only a pair of boxing shorts and speaking through glass that forced eyewitnesses to read his lips, Foster apparently told of sparring with Louis as a boy in Birmingham, clenching and moving his fists to demonstrate. Twice prior to the execution, he’d told reporters the same thing. But there is no record of young Louis ever having been in Birmingham, let alone fighting anyone there, and even Foster’s mother conceded that her son was “half-crazy.” The embroidered version may date from a story in the Daily Worker a month later, and it probably took hold because it seemed so plausible. “I’m in death row, and I got only six more weeks to go,” stated a letter Louis did receive from a black inmate in a southern penitentiary in the summer of 1935. “Your picture hanging on the wall will make me feel better as I wait for the electric chair.”
* Not everyone went along: the commander of the dirigibles Graf Zeppelin and Hin-denburg refused to participate, whereupon his name disappeared from the German papers. Whether the Nazis would have, or could have, imposed a similar ban on the country’s most famous boxer is unclear; Schmeling never put them to the test.
* As Wilfrid Smith of the Chicago Tribune later pointed out, one’s view of Louis came to depend partly on what paper one read, and what stylebook it followed. In one paper, he might sound like the old, ungrammatical South. “Ah ain’t afraid of Smellin’. When Ah gets ready this time, Ah’m goin’ to punch him right in de mouf and see how he likes that,” he might say. But in another, the same thing would come out as “I am not afraid of Max Schmeling. It is true he whipped me two years ago, but this time the German will not face an inexperienced youngster. I will wait for my chance and then I will shoot my right to his chin. There will be another ending to this fight.”
* White wasn’t thinking only about boxing, either. He hoped to launch what was to become the famous legal arm of the civil rights revolution, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and had asked Louis to donate the seed money “when you have gotten the [Schmeling] fight out of the way.” It was the first of several such appeals, all of which fell on deaf ears; the very thing that made Louis successful enough to interest the NAACP—his appeal to the American mainstream—made the NAACP too radioactive for him to embrace. Whatever Louis gave to it, he did discreetly; the public knew only about the five dollars he donated to a fund for the Scottsboro Boys. When it came to civil rights, his example would have to suffice, and that wasn’t always perfect. Apart from being faulted for refusing to take on black fighters, he was accused of snootiness for staying in white hotels in New York and Philadelphia.
* Schmeling later said he’d isolated Jacobs only because his “constant upbeat chatter made me nervous” and because he “often came home at night singing or making a racket.”
Victor and Vanquished
THE SKIES, someone said, were weeping for Max Schmeling.
The rain had begun on the night of June 17, and by the morning of the day of the fight, June 18, it had turned into a downpour. The papers were filled with fight news; the prize for the shortest, bluntest lead paragraph went to the Newark Evening News: “What round?” Whatever the weather, the weigh-in would be held as scheduled at the Hippodrome, the Victorian-era hall on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street that Mike Jacobs had recently annexed to his growing empire. At the World-Telegram, the pressmen had already set LOUIS WINS BY KNOCKOUT in boxcar type. But the odds were that everyone would have to spin their wheels another day before anything actually happened.
Louis and his retinue drove the nine miles from Lakewood to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, where they boarded a private club car attached to the 9:10 train to New York. Clusters of fans greeted them as they headed north, but after struggling for fifteen minutes with “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” on his harmonica, Louis fell asleep and had to be awakened at Pennsylvania Station. Police created a wedge through the crowd, and he made his way to the Hippodrome. He arrived half an hour early, went into Jimmy Durante’s dressing room, played what he said was “Gloomy Sunday,” then fell back to sleep on the couch.
It was raining in Napanoch, too. “Bad day, eh? I think we have no fight tonight,” Schmeling said. When they set out for New York, Joe Jacobs rode with the state troopers in the lead car, with Schmeling following behind. It was a harrowing and interminable drive, with the rain making it nearly impossible to see anything on the narrow, winding mountain roads. For much of the ride Schmeling read a German magazine, speaking only as his car approached the George Washington Bridge. Again, he said it looked as if there’d be no fight that night. Wearing a gray suit and a maroon tie, his right eye puffed and discolored from training, he joined Louis around twelve-thirty. The Hippodrome had recently hosted a circus attraction called “Jumbo,” and the smell of elephants, camels, and kangaroos still permeated the place.
The two fighters shook hands coming out of their dressing rooms, then ignored each other until they were inside the arena, when the reporters hurled questions at them. Schmeling again said he had a plan for the fight; Louis displayed a complete lack of concern for the hullabaloo around him. “You gentlemen know each other, I think,” the head of the boxing commission, General John J. Phelan, told the two. Louis, wearing black trunks with a red border, was examined first, while Schmeling, in purple and blue trunks, watched. Then they traded places. Louis plucked his face nervously. He then picked up a newspaper, lips moving as he read about the Tigers. “Now on the scales: Joe Louis!” a functionary announced. A deputy commissioner fiddled with the weights. “Louis, 198!” he declaimed. There was stunned silence: no one had figured it would be so low, four or five pounds lighter than what Blackburn had forecast. Then Schmeling got up. “Schmeling, 192!” Predictably, it was right on target. Phelan called the two men together and warned them about proper conduct—not to kick each other, for instance, or to use foul language. Louis said nothing. “Thank you, General,” Schmeling remarked. “Good luck this evening, Joe!” he told Louis. Then the bulbs started popping.
Watching it all, Hellmis thought that Louis appeared flustered. Others saw the same thing; Louis seemed afraid to look at Schmeling—the photographers had to coax him into doing it—and welcomed the chance to look away. “As the condemned man an
d the executioner stood side by side,” wrote Vidmer, “a stranger might have thought that it was Louis, not Schmeling, who was going to his doom.” Schmeling smiled and spoke quietly to his attendants; Louis stood and glowered at his feet. One of the medical examiners, Dr. Vincent Nardiello, was struck by how relaxed Louis was—too relaxed, even half asleep. Louis’s blood pressure, 130 over 32, was “too normal, too perfect,” while Schmeling’s, 144 over 84, was much more appropriate; the German was “excited, eager, ready.” Nardiello looked at James Dawson, the boxing writer for The New York Times, and Louis Beck, the boxing commission’s chief inspector, as they stared at Louis. They were like two moonstruck kids.
Mike Jacobs then pulled the curtains, revealing an enormous catered spread. Louis grabbed some chicken, which Blackburn made him put back. The men then returned to their dressing rooms and inspected their gloves. When Louis approved of his, an official wrote “Lewis” on them. “That ain’t no way to spell my name,” Louis said. “Here, give me them gloves.” He then drew a circle with three dots inside and a line beneath. “See, that’s me.” Joe Jacobs then took the gloves and put his own initials in them.
Louis liked to golf in the rain, and thought that maybe boxing in it might be fun, too. “How’s about it, Uncle Mike?” he asked Jacobs. “Let’s have it anyway. Or does you care ’bout folks coming?” Jacobs then bade the fighters good-bye. “Go to bed now and don’t get run over by a truck,” he said. A well-drenched crowd stood along Sixth Avenue as the men emerged. Schmeling went back to the Commodore Hotel. Louis repaired to the Hotel Alamac, on Broadway and Seventy-first Street. Like Tex Rickard before him, Jacobs always consulted the Farmers’ Almanac before picking a fight date, and this time it had let him down. After calling the weather bureau one last time, he postponed the proceedings until the next night: Friday, June 19. There was no sadness in his voice; the veterans were still cashing their bonus checks. If it rained again on Friday, the fight would be held Saturday afternoon, forcing Louis and Schmeling to go up against Carl Hubbell of the Giants and one of the Dean brothers from St. Louis at the Polo Grounds. To Mike Jacobs, that was an easy call. “You can see them guys all summer long and for the next ten years,” he said. Unless it was “raining pitchforks,” there would be no more delays: Jacobs could feel enthusiasm for the fight waning and didn’t want a “dead fish on his hands.” Harlem that night was filled with overanxious fans, waterlogged Louis posters, and counterfeit tickets for cheap seats; J. Edgar Hoover was already on the case.
Joe Jacobs said the postponement was catastrophic for Louis. “He worried off four pounds,” he said. “Give ’em another twenty-four hours and he’ll be a flyweight.” The pause would also help Schmeling recover from his nerve-racking drive from Napanoch. But everywhere else, there were the predictable wisecracks about the condemned man getting a brief reprieve. One came from Morton Moss of the New York Post:
The stay the heavens gave him
Expires tonight at ten;
Now nothing more can save him—
Unless it rains again!
But Schmeling had a hearty lunch, read another German magazine, and went for a walk—unrecognized, under his hat. Then he saw a Jack Oakie movie, went for another walk, played some cards, and went to bed. Louis passed the afternoon in Harlem, had dinner, spent a half-hour with Marva, and went back to the Alamac.
The weather was still unsettled on Friday. The papers contained one novelty: Bill Farnsworth, Jr., of the Evening Journal was now picking Schmeling. “Max will weather Louis’ early assault and come on in the final rounds to win the decision,” he wrote. But Farnsworth’s sportswriter father was his boss as well as Mike Jacobs’s business partner, and people assumed the young man was simply doing as he’d been told, just to spice things up. A rumor circulated that a Jewish boy had slashed Schmeling’s arm. The boxing promoter Walter Rothenburg, a friend of Schmeling’s, reportedly telegraphed him from Germany: “Heute sieg swelft runde” [sic]: “Today twelfth round.” Louis got up early, had breakfast, walked three miles in Central Park, then came back and slept. That afternoon, W. W. Edgar of the Detroit Free Press found him cocky, bored, already looking beyond the fight and beyond fighting. His conversation was “all golf, stances and grips and hooks and slices,” a perplexed Edgar wrote.
As evening approached, people again converged on the stadium. The bleacher fans arrived earliest, bringing umbrellas to fend off any new rain and newspapers to soak up the old. With the weather still threatening, holders of costlier seats tarried even longer than usual; the preliminaries, beginning around eight, played to a largely empty house. Ushers wearing tropical hats—color-coded to match tickets—escorted fans to their seats. The wind shifted and the weather stabilized. People leafed through the programs Mike Jacobs had put together—which featured a glowing profile of Mike Jacobs.
The paid attendance was 39,878. Joe Jacobs didn’t buy it—“That was the biggest 39,000 I ever saw,” he complained—and he was right: with thousands plunking down a few dollars at the last minute and told to sit wherever they liked, the stadium was more filled than that. But to anyone who’d seen Louis fight Baer nine months earlier, the contrast was startling. Empty seats “yawned in the darkness like divots on a fairway,” Vid-mer wrote. Mike Jacobs attributed it less to wariness over Louis’s expected easy victory than to Jews who had indeed opted to stay home, shaving a third or more off what turned out to be a $547,000 gate. According to one black paper, Jewish firms had bought large consignments of tickets from Jacobs to sell to their employees, then dumped thousands of unsold tickets on Uncle Mike the day of the fight. At least one black newspaper was impressed. “Unlike the American Negro, Jews do not believe in licking the hand that smites them nor in feeding the mouths of those who seek to crush them body and soul,” the Richmond Planet declared admiringly.
Clem McCarthy had scored points for his work at the Louis-Baer fight, and nearly six of ten American radios were now tuned in to hear him again. That meant sixty million Americans—more than twice as many people as would hear the keynoters at the political conventions that summer, and five times the audience when King Edward VIII abdicated the throne six months later. Once again, Edwin C. Hill supplied the color. He served up all the usual clichés about the vast darkness of the stadium, the twinkling of all those thousands of cigarettes, the diversity of the crowd, all presumably written out before he had actually seen any of it.
In Radio City, one hundred fight fans would get to see the fight on “television.” But it was two older generations of technologies, the radio and the newswire, that would now bind and spellbind the nation. In Culpeper, Virginia, the fight was broadcast from a bandstand in front of the courthouse. Thousands gathered in front of the home offices of the Buffalo Evening News, the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer, the Laurel (Mississippi) Call. The fight would be reconstructed, blow by blow, on an “illuminated bulletin board” outside the Boston Post. The nightcap of a doubleheader between Newark and Syracuse “was just something for the fans to look at while listening to the broadcast.” Fans gathered in New London, Connecticut, for the Harvard-Yale regatta the next day assembled around a radio in the lobby of the Mohegan Hotel. In Chicago, all Balaban and Katz movie theaters promised fight results. An Indiana man parked outside the Polk Street station in Chicago to listen, and soon two hundred people had massed around his car. The Red Sox listened on the train from Chicago to St. Louis, crouched around a small portable radio in the dining car, with Moe Berg relaying to his teammates whatever he managed to hear. The game between the Dodgers and the Cubs at Ebbets Field that afternoon had been called off, giving the Chicagoans ample time to get to Yankee Stadium. Loudspeakers were set up on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue, as well as outside Rockefeller Center.
The fight would be broadcast overseas in English, Spanish, and German. Harry at the New York Bar in Paris announced he would give out the results. The play-by-play would start at four a.m. in Johannesburg; anyone able to understand the fast-talking Ame
rican commentators would know the outcome before the Rand Daily Mail’s fight extra hit the streets. The bout would go on at three in the morning in Germany, broadcast from stations in Berlin, Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, Königsberg, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and Saarbrucken. Some thirty million Germans were expected to tune in, many on the “People’s Receivers,” or Volksempfänger (known more colloquially as “Goebbels-Schnauzen”— “Goebbels Snouts”), the Nazis had popularized. Many listened in their homes, others—as in Klein Luckow, Schmeling’s birthplace—in bars allowed to remain open beyond their normal curfews. In some instances, the broadcast was played over loudspeakers, notwithstanding the ungodly hour. Having already directed that his radio be in perfect order, Hitler listened in his private railroad car en route to Munich.
Anny Ondra had remained in Germany. Perhaps to calm her nerves, she’d spent the previous two days in the country, picking strawberries. Now, rather than listen at home, as she’d told one Berlin newspaper she would do (and as she later told one American newspaper she had done), she went to the home of Joseph and Magda Goebbels in Berlin’s posh Schwanenwerder section. This was not so unusual; since Schmeling had gone to the United States to prepare for the Louis fight, she’d seen Goebbels at least four times. “Chatted and laughed with her,” he’d written after one such visit. “She is so wonderfully naïve.” They’d had ample time to enjoy one another’s company; Ondra had also been there the previous night, before the fight had been canceled. “We’re anxious the entire evening,” Goebbels wrote. “Little Anny Ondra is hysterical…. We tell stories, laugh, and cheer up Anny. She’s delightful.” A photographer was on hand to record the hosts and their guest as they listened intently together alongside the giant radio.
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