Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  When Walter White and his wife returned from Yankee Stadium, their young son was sobbing “as though his heart would break.” And barely three hours after the fight, Harlem resembled a cemetery. Lenox Avenue was deserted. “Not even the worst days of the Depression could achieve such blanket sadness,” wrote Walter Wendall of the Boston Chronicle. “The musician who usually thumps the piano with such abandon that the diners sway back and forth as they eat, goes thru his numbers mechanically. The diners sit and look at each other. Few speak. Words are futile. Finally a young couple venture on to the dance floor with forced gaiety, but their feet are leaden, and they give up the attempt. They return to their table in a dark corner in silence. All is depressing in this gay spot. Even the waiters speak in hushed tones. Harlem is sad, very sad tonight.”

  The next morning, long lines formed outside Manning’s Pawn Shop even before it opened. People who’d bet on Louis stayed home for weeks for fear of being dunned. A man fined five dollars for scalping got a break by pleading how much he’d lost on Louis. Two days after the fight, cars with southern license plates were still cruising Harlem’s streets; all had been wagered on the fight, and had been lost. The former owner of a Lincoln Zephyr explained that he’d taken twelve hours to drive north, and expected to take twelve months to scratch up the funds to get back to Alabama.

  Harlem’s anguish played out on a smaller scale in black neighborhoods everywhere. In Buffalo, “there was a deathly silence,” a local reporter wrote. “Not even a blizzard this hot June night, not even another earthquake, nothing could have produced such a shock.” In St. Louis, a thirty-four-year-old black man criticized Louis and got his skull fractured for it. A New Orleans man said to no one in particular, “That Louis let me down. I bet money on him and he let me down.” “I’ll let you down, white man!” replied an eavesdropper, who stabbed the man, then fled. In Detroit, women wept in front of Lillie Barrow’s house. Louis’s stepfather, who’d suffered what turned out to be a fatal stroke just before the fight, was not told the outcome. In Coldwater, Michigan, a seventeen-year-old boy murdered his foster father after an argument over the fight.

  On Chicago’s South Side, bars and restaurants expecting to cash in on another Louis victory closed up before midnight. In Cincinnati, Lena Horne, performing with Noble Sissle’s band, was nearly hysterical by the final rounds, and some of the musicians were crying. To her, Louis had suddenly become “just another Negro getting beaten by a white man.” The owners of a black nightclub in Kansas City angrily tore down the bunting decorating the place. GLOOM ENGULFING THE CITY’S HARLEM, ran a headline in Louisville, Kentucky. A young boxer named Walker Smith, soon to be Sugar Ray Robinson, despaired briefly of the sport and pawned his equipment. Black communities in other countries shared in the sadness. “The blow came all the harder to the Coloured people who had visions of another Negro champion of the world,” a newspaper for South African blacks stated.

  Conversely, it was a joyous night for many whites. Cheers halted business in the House of Representatives for several minutes: members who had slipped out to listen to the fight “surged back onto the floor in a rousing demonstration,” and the presiding officer rapped vainly for order. There was similar chaos in the Senate. “The people know now that they have legislators whose souls are so shriveled and corroded by Negrophobia that they prefer seeing a white foreigner take honor, title and money away from America than see one of their own citizens regain them if he is a Negro,” a North Carolina man wrote. As Democrats gathered to renominate Franklin D. Roosevelt in Philadelphia, concerns arose that his ostensibly hapless Republican rival, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, could turn out to be a “political Max Schmeling.”

  Father Charles Coughlin, the right-wing radio priest from Royal Oak, Michigan, whose program had been preempted by the fight, called the spectacle “a one hour’s wonder, appealing to all lovers of honest, virile sport.” In white Detroit, horns blasted, paper floated out from windows, and people “paraded in bedlamic pilgrimages up and down the main streets.” Macon, Georgia, “resembled midnight of New Year’s Eve.” As the fight ended in New York, a white woman named Loula Wiley gave birth on a houseboat in rural Louisiana, and her husband proclaimed that the boy would be named “Max the Great.” (When his wife objected, he settled for Max Berlin Wiley.) Playing before a white crowd in Texas, Cab Calloway gave the bad news to his musicians. While his men moaned, their audience cheered. South African whites celebrated, too—at least once they’d figured out what McCarthy and Hill had actually said.* Their excitement, Box-Sport explained, stemmed from “the limitless aversion of the colonial English, and especially the Boers, to all black skins.”

  “What the race lost in money was as dust to diamonds compared with the loss suffered in hope,” wrote Enoc P. Waters, Jr., in the Defender. A race that had been “brow-beaten, kicked about, ignored and segregated” had recently fixed its eyes on a “glorious hallowed trinity”: Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Haile Selassie. But the Italians had banished Selassie, and now Louis, too, was gone. “It is a mighty difficult job,” Waters concluded, “for 12,000,000 persons to balance themselves on a stool which now has but one leg.” “An idol,” wrote a columnist in the New York Post, “representing everything that was good and kind and wholesome and sportsmanlike; an idol that meant pride and self-respect and an incentive to honor and religion—an idol fell last night, and the crashing was so complete, so dreadful and so totally unexpected that it broke the hearts of the Negroes of the world.” From that point, as Mabe Kountze of the Boston Guardian later put it, “the Negro race went around for months singing songs in a minor key.” The shadow of Louis’s loss lay “draped like a vulture’s wings” over all of black America.

  Black weeklies that had predicted whites would pounce on Louis were he to lose were quickly vindicated. “From a conquering fistic idol Joe Louis was transferred today into a beaten, pitifully dejected colored boy who craved nothing but seclusion from the world which had heaped glory on his kinky head and piled gold at his feet,” wrote Lester Avery of the United Press. Louis’s “jungle cunning” was no match for Schmeling’s much superior intelligence, Grantland Rice wrote. To William McG. Keefe of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, boxing’s “reign of terror” was over: “The big bad wolf has been chased from the door.” “Joe Louis is just a legend today,” observed John Carmichael of the Chicago Daily News. “You couldn’t scare the kids away from the jam pantry with his name.”

  Never had so many “experts” been so wrong, and the boxing press ate prodigious helpings of crow. An annoyed Dan Parker dubbed June 20, 1936, “I-Told-You-So Day.” In the southern press, Louis’s loss unleashed a torrent of pent-up resentment. O. B. Keeler of the Atlanta Journal sent out gloating telegrams—collect—to twenty-two writers who’d praised the “Pet Pickaninny” most effusively. “Who the hell ever had the right to nominate this fairly good, flat-footed Senegambian boxer as a superman?” he asked irately. “Louis did what all the negro prize fighters before him have done. He quit,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal said. The black press, meanwhile, described the ugly vein of American racism that the fight had exposed. The Defender detailed the ensuing hate mail, filled with terms like “nigger,” “darkie,” “coon,” and “Sambo.” The Richmond Planet complained about Schmeling’s fan mail, most of which came from the South, “that hinterland of barbarism which wallows in the filth of ignorance, bestiality, prejudice and wanton depravity,” dominated “by hillbillies, ignoramises [sic], slant eyes tobacco and snuff spitting morons, self-styled aristocrats and egotists who are too cowardly to attack except in packs like wolves.”

  The day after the fight, while Louis remained in seclusion, Schmeling basked. He stayed in bed until noon and then, hiding his shiners behind a pair of brown sunglasses, gave interviews at the hotel. Louis would be a good fighter once he learned a bit more, he said, but had shown him a fresh flaw that would make him even easier the next time. He weighed various commercial offers—endorsing a soft drink, taking an
interest in a fruit farm—and said he had turned down $152,000 for ten weeks of vaudeville appearances. “Americans are interested in money. Not me,” he said. In fact, Schmeling’s agent had booked him—in the event he won—for a week in Atlantic City for $7,500, followed by appearances in Montreal, Toronto, and Baltimore. But Schmeling received a call from someone— never specified—in Germany, and the road show was scotched. He was to have gone home by ship, but to Hitler and his associates—who had perfected the art of dramatic arrivals by air—so pedestrian a passage would now never do. Schmeling was directed instead to return on the dirigible Hindenburg, which was leaving the United States in three days. The flight was fully booked, but one of the officers was either relinquishing his berth for the Heimat or had been bumped. Machon would return by boat, accompanied by the cars, which, in what some saw as an effort by the promoter to sever Schmeling’s already rocky relationship with Joe Jacobs and cement his own ties to the German, Mike Jacobs had given them: a Cord for Schmeling, a Chevrolet for his trainer.

  Schmeling saw a fringe benefit to his victory. “Maybe the people in Germany look on me as Max Schmeling and not Mr. Anny Ondra,” he joked. In fact, he had little to worry about. The day after the fight, the Angriff effectively made Schmeling a metaphor for the new, resurgent Germany. When “the victorious German boxer raised his arm for the Hitler salute, 80,000 went head over heels in enthusiasm,” it said. “Loud cries for Germany were heard, and all prejudices collapsed.” Goebbels and his colleagues now had other favors to bestow on him. First, the propaganda minister banned all statements by Schmeling’s former manager, Arthur Bülow, from the German press; it seemed Bülow had offended German dignity by doubting Schmeling’s chances. “I will liberate Schmeling from his mean adversary. He’ll be happy about that,” Goebbels told his diary. Two days later, Hitler pardoned Schmeling on a tax violation. As Westbrook Pegler later put it, Hitler had suddenly discovered “that the swarthy brunet with the narrow black eyes and high cheek bones was a true, blond Aryan.”

  “Germany, the land of the fastest race cars, the land of the safest airships—this Germany now also has the ‘Greatest Heavyweight Boxer of All Time,’” a newspaper in Dresden boasted. A paper in Regensburg linked Schmeling’s win to other signs of German revival, like the autobahn. (But a merchant in Karlsruhe discovered the comparisons could only go so far. “An achievement like that of Max Schmeling has by no means anything to do with the quality of a mattress,” the local newspaper remonstrated.) Cartoonists gloated, often with primitive renditions of Louis as a generic, primitive-looking black man. One showed him with a meat cleaver in his hand, strutting along with Schmeling on a leash. “My sacrificial lamb,” he states. In the next panel, Schmeling is stuffing Louis into his mouth. “What the Negro thought… and our ‘Maxe’ did,” the caption declared. Several papers pushed to bring Schmeling’s forthcoming title bout against Braddock to Berlin. Schmeling himself threw cold water on the idea, candidly confirming everything Nazi diehards had always said about professional athletes (and belying his own insistence that filthy lucre really didn’t matter to him). “You know, the money is in this country,” he told the New York Post before leaving for Germany. “Here is where I made my money. Here is where I will make more if I win the championship.”

  Even before Schmeling arrived back home, there were official celebrations of his victory. One was a mammoth pageant marking the summer solstice, held on a mountain overlooking Nuremberg. There, Julius Streicher, editor of the violently racist Der Stürmer, analyzed the fight for 200,000 people, including 20,000 uniformed Hitler Youth and Unity Mit-ford, the notorious British Nazi, and declared that Schmeling was part of “a New Germany … a Germany that has faith in itself again.” The magazine of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps, said that Schmeling’s fists had defeated the enemies of Nazism and “saved the reputation of the white race.” Hitler’s friends in Fascist Italy agreed. Schmeling, one Roman paper opined, had “confirmed the supremacy of a race that could not be undone by brute force.” England, France, and North America could not thank Schmeling enough, stated another German magazine, Der Weltkampf, for he had checked black arrogance. “The Negro is of a slave nature, but woe unto us if this slave nature is unbridled, for then arrogance and cruelty show themselves in the most bestial way,” it declared.

  Though the Nazi press had built up Schmeling’s previous adversaries to make his triumphs that much more magnificent, extolling a Negro proved too much to bear. One newspaper claimed that Louis “made a one-sided and primitive impression.” Another charged that his low blows were deliberate. Schmeling had not just knocked out Louis, a Box-Sport editor suggested, but dispensed with him once and for all. “Beaten is not the right word for the terrible catastrophe that has befallen the Negro,” it stated. “The myth of Joe Louis is smashed, smashed for all times.” Thankfully, the 8 Uhr-Blatt wrote, the moral inferiority of black boxers gave whites a fighting chance to overcome any physical disadvantages. Hellmis agreed. “When an acquaintance said, ‘The mind is just better,’ he hit the nail on the head!” he wrote. Sure, Louis took Schmeling’s punches with inhuman toughness. “But what a man of ‘genuine’ courage would have done—once again, with fierce determination, to risk everything and try to turn the match around—one waited for that in vain,” Hellmis wrote.

  The day after the fight, during a press luncheon at the Forrest Hotel, Schmeling donned a chef’s hat for the photographers and ate turkey with élan. At one point Braddock came by, and took Schmeling’s right fist in his hand. “Take good care of that, Max, until September,” he said. “You will need it.” “Dot’s a good idea, Jim,” Schmeling replied. “I take care and expect I will use it.” Julian Black also stopped in, and was asked about Louis. “Joe’s all right,” he answered. “He’s on the train now for Detroit.” The legendary black boxer Harry Wills, who’d also congratulated Schmeling, expressed faith in Louis’s future. “I don’t think Louis is through,” he said. “Sure, he took an awful licking, but I was proud of that boy as he lay on that canvas. He showed his heart was right. And when a man’s heart is right, he can win. Didn’t Mistah Schmeling prove that las’ night?”

  The Daily News described how Schmeling, “beaming like a school kid on the first day of a Summer vacation,” “twitching” and “trembling” with excitement, watched films of the fight in a darkened Broadway movie house. Three sounds, always in the same sequence, filled the theater: the ominous thud of a Schmeling right; then the awestruck “ooooph” of the audience; then Schmeling’s husky, throaty laugh. “Dot is good, dot is good,” he would roar. Then he would slap Joe Jacobs on the back.

  “Should clean up,” Variety predicted about the fight films, which, in a rare lapse of judgment, Mike Jacobs had sold for a mere $27,000. Theaters hyped them—“The End of the Reign of Terror of the ‘Brown Bomber,’” the Oshkosh Northwestern advertised; “The Fight So Thrilling It Caused the Death of Twelve People,” claimed the Times Recorder of Zanesville, Ohio, alluding to all those who’d had heart attacks during the broadcast— but it was hardly necessary. In San Francisco, police were called in to handle the nearly 100,000 people who passed through one theater; in Chicago, three cinemas in the Loop showed it simultaneously. Everywhere, North and South, people who once cheered Louis jeered him now, laughing or applauding whenever Schmeling landed a punch or Louis faltered. “All this turning of coats to be on the winning side, all this mirth and high spirits in the face of a man’s ambition and body being broken under spotlights—this is callous, knavish … somehow obscene,” wrote Otis Ferguson in The New Republic. “Daddy, I could kill those people who laughed when Joe was knocked down,” Walter White’s son said sobbingly after watching the film in New York. If Louis really had it, White replied consolingly, he’d come back greater than ever. “If he’s got it?” the boy replied. “He has got it!”

  The Associated Negro Press complained that while films of Louis victories had been banned in the South, films of his loss to Schmeling were shown. In Memphis, howev
er, the film was prohibited. In Virginia, the hairsplitting state censorship board found a way to allow the Louis-Schmeling films to be shown, but let stand its ban on the Louis-Baer fight. “If it were not for the deep tragedy beneath, it would be great fun being a Negro in America,” Arthur Davis wrote of Richmond’s peculiar solution in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. “One could really enjoy oneself watching the delightfully inconsistent and foolishly paradoxical situations which grow out of the kind of segregated living we have in this land.” “Foolish, foolish Southerners!” he concluded. “When will… you ever lift the crushing weight of the Negro idea from your mind?” The inconsistency soon proved too much for a local white judge, who ruled that both films could be shown. The Richmond Times-Dispatch approved, noting that since Virginia’s theaters were segregated anyway, the threat of violence was minimal. Indeed, in those southern communities where the Louis-Schmeling films could be seen, blacks and whites watched from entirely separate worlds— separate theaters, or separate portions of theaters, or at separate times of the day. In Dallas, the Rialto Theater offered three special showings—each at 11:30 p.m.—for blacks. The local black paper predicted that despite the late hour, all 1,300 seats would be sold for each show.