For Schmeling, though, it was a raw deal. “I don’t believe it,” he sputtered. “It can’t be true.” The Nazi press once again denounced the Drahtzieher, and also went after Louis. Schmeling made plans to travel to the United States to defend his rights. His insistence on representing himself fed yet more rumors that he had finally, and officially, fired Jacobs. Of course, it couldn’t have been true, and wasn’t. “Schmeling’s only defense is Joe Jacobs,” wrote Walter Stewart of the World-Telegram; keeping him around “does not completely clean the slate in Jewish eyes,” he said, “but it helps.” When he arrived in New York on December 10, Schmeling insisted the talk of dropping Jacobs was all a misunderstanding. More important than that, though, was stopping the Atlantic City fight. “Such things cannot be!” he protested. “What is the heavyweight championship? Is it a joke? Is it stuff like wrestling?”
Schmeling’s pleas for fairness stuck in the craws even of those who agreed with him. “Imagine Promoter Mike Jacobs or Manager Yussel Jacobs going before one of Hitler’s crackpot commissions and demanding their rights!” Parker wrote. Besides, Schmeling was a past master at runarounds himself. Even so, on December 12 the New York boxing commission killed the Atlantic City fight, ordering Braddock to fight Schmeling at the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City on June 3, 1937. Five years after he lost it, then, Schmeling was now a giant step closer to regaining the crown; most people thought he would. “The heavyweight champion of the world a Nazi!” Joe Williams wrote in wonder, and horror.*
The commission’s action was predictably assailed in some quarters. The boxing authorities had “goose-stepped with Schmeling,” the Amsterdam News complained; the Daily Worker said the “superannuated geezers” were doing everything they could to deny Louis a title shot. The Nazis now labored to move the Braddock-Schmeling fight to Berlin. The maneuver came with Schmeling’s connivance, earning him more charges of disloyalty and treachery, but it also came to naught. In Nazi eyes Schmeling’s mission to New York was already a great victory: it was a rebuff to the Weltjudentum—world Jewry—which had tried to deny him his rights. But Schmeling could not get too complacent. Two Jews, Mike Jacobs and Joe Gould, still had several months to figure out how to yank him out of—and get Louis into—the heavyweight championship picture.
Louis’s final fight of 1936 took place on December 14, against Eddie Simms in Cleveland. This time, the action lasted all of twenty-six seconds. “I’m sorry it had to be like that,” Louis told Simms afterward. “But you know how it is—either me or you.” As short as it was, it earned the notice of the NAACP. “What a superb job Joe, Jack and you have done on the matter of a right hand,” Walter White wrote Roxborough. “If our friend, Schmeling, read this story of the superb defenses against a right which Joe now has I am sure he would have no great enthusiasm about coming back to America to fight Joe.”
It also caught the eye of another of Louis’s tireless champions, the Daily Worker. By sending the strongest possible signal that Louis was indeed back, it declared, the Simms fight “knocked one more nail in the coffin” of a Schmeling-Braddock bout. But any move to sideline the German only postponed the inevitable. “Whether you like Hitler or the Nazis or Germans or spinach,” Grantland Rice wrote, “the fact remains there can be no recognized heavyweight champion of the world who hasn’t beaten Schmeling.”
* So did a newspaper in Munich, which ran a cartoon showing three reporters, fat and with large noses, standing beside a ring, with a prostrate black man inside. “Schmeling Knocks Out Jewish Horror Press,” it was titled.
* Schmelings Sieg was confined to Germany, but unadulterated fight films showed to large audiences elsewhere. “An atmosphere of tension spread, infecting everyone present,” Box-Sport reported from Basel. “Every landed punch was met with an ‘ouch,’ an ‘ooh,’ or an ‘ah.’ And at the end, such applause and rejoicing broke out as have probably never greeted an image projected on the screen.” In Paris, the films were “the biggest box office attraction of the season.” Among those viewing it in London was George Bernard Shaw.
* In the Worker’s short-staffed sports section, Daugherty was one of the many pseudonyms of the sportswriter Charley Dexter, whose original name was Lou Levinson.
* With the Olympics safely secured, there was no more need for public-relations niceties on racial matters. The Angriff was soon praising lynching as “popular justice to expiate racial disgrace” and an element in “the healthy racial defenses of the largest state of Teutonic origin.” Another paper printed a photograph of Jesse Owens and Bill Robinson dancing. “The white audience is cheering, but none of them would share a table with these niggers,” it said. But here, too, the attitude of ordinary Germans was more benign. Covering the black Olympians for the Amsterdam News, William C. Chase described Germans of all ages staring at them. “The people expected to see us eat with our fingers instead of silverware,” he wrote. Some Germans knew only four English words: “Jesse,” “Owens,” “Joe,” and “Louis.” “I met a number of Germans who admire Louis,” wrote Chase, “and think he is the greatest fighter of all times.” At one point Louis was receiving a dozen fan letters a day from Germany.
* Around this time the Daily Worker, which had previously published sports news only on Sundays, launched a daily sports section, which, given its interest in the man, could have been called the “Joe Louis Section.” In Communist eyes, professional sports was yet another way for capitalists and their journalistic handmaidens to distract the public from more serious matters. But given the way he was upsetting the established order, the Worker argued, Louis was an example of how this bread-and-circuses strategy could backfire, creating a “nice little Frankenstein monster that’s going to eventually sock [capitalism] out of existence.” Like the Nazis, the American Communists concluded that some professional sports were simply too popular to ignore, and in fact could be turned to their advantage; both groups followed the Sharkey fight and were pleased with the result. To the Worker, it meant Louis was back; to the Angriff, it proved that Louis was no pushover and, therefore, showed how great Schmeling’s victory over him had been.
* Perhaps the commission had suddenly sided with Schmeling simply as a matter of fairness. Or maybe Schmeling had discovered, or rediscovered, a friend. A few weeks earlier in London, at the Walter Neusel–Ben Foord fight, he had run into James A. Farley, the former New York boxing commissioner. Farley, now chairman of the Democratic Party, postmaster general, and close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, had tangled with Schmeling years earlier, but had grown to like him. According to the Völkischer Beobachter, Farley had pledged to help him with his difficulties in New York. It would not be the last time.
A German Commodity
IT WAS, SOMEONE LATER SAID, “an unprecedented event in the annals of Detroit night life.” On the evening of December 31,1936, Joe Louis, dressed in white tie and tails, presided over the official opening of the Brown Bomber’s Chicken Shack. Louis had sunk $10,000 into the place, not so much as an investment as to provide his pals with a place to hang out. While hundreds watched enviously from outside, Detroit’s black elite, dressed in formal wear and fur wraps (some of which Louis himself supplied), toasted the new establishment, the new year, and their newly rehabilitated host. The chicken ran out—and so, too, did Louis, to join his mother in church, as he did every New Year’s Eve.
The new year opened with the boxing world in a fix. Braddock was the champion, but no one gave him much of a chance to beat either Louis or Schmeling. The only questions were who would beat him first, whether racial or international politics would help make that choice, and whether the two challengers would fight each other again before it happened. Fleischer saw an epochal era in the offing, one in which black boxers would surge forward. Mike Jacobs agreed that it would be a big year for Louis; he talked of having him fight once a month, enough to make him the first boxer ever to earn a million dollars before he won the title, which Jacobs had scheduled for September. Louis promised to be, as
Jacobs put it, “the greatest money-making athlete the world has ever seen.”
Al Monroe of the Defender remained convinced that Louis would not get a shot in 1937, or at any other time: since Louis was too honest to cut them in on the deal, the “Nordic” boxing powers had decided that a title shot wasn’t worth the dangers. In an article titled “Joe Louis Should Never Be Champion” in The Commentator, a popular radio announcer, John B. Kennedy, urged that for the sake of domestic harmony and the “tranquil progress” of Louis’s own people, the color line should be maintained. Walter White promptly countered that America had come “a long, long way” from the Jack Johnson era, and that Louis was no Johnson. He urged the magazine to publish something called “Joe Louis Should Be Champion,” offering, to no avail, to write it himself. The Daily Worker was even angrier, claiming that the article was permeated with “the stench of the old slave market” and consisted of “underhanded lynch incitement masking itself as ‘friendly advice’ to the Negro people.”
Shortly before Louis’s next scheduled fight, against Bob Pastor on January 29, Bob Considine encountered Mike Jacobs nibbling with his store teeth on a pencil stub while jotting down some big numbers on the back of a bill. Uncle Mike was totaling up the take from Louis’s fights since Schmeling beat him. “That bust on the chin Max gave Louis is going to be worth two million dollars before Joe gets back the reputation he had before the Schmeling fight,” Jacobs said. “And the funny part of it all, he’s still got another crack at Schmeling waiting for him, and you can just guess how high that one would go. All things considered, it was a great break for Joe.” And for the fight game, too, he added.
While Louis was fighting his way back, Pastor, a graduate of New York University, was fighting his way backward: for ten rounds that night at Madison Square Garden, he followed his manager’s advice not to stand still. The result was one of the most infuriating bouts in history. Pastor, Parker wrote, had beaten “all records for retreating since Napoleon set the standard at Moscow.” But simply for having lasted, it was a moral victory for him, and a setback for Louis, even though he got the decision. For the first time, he heard catcalls. The criticism only intensified in the papers, which said Louis was too bewildered or too dumb to adjust to Pastor’s dodge. Maybe, Fleischer admitted, Jack Johnson had been right about Louis after all. But black sportswriters charged that had Pastor been fighting a white man, the referee would have tossed him out of the ring. “The legend of ‘American sportsmanship’ proved to be just a myth as they applauded the rank cowardice of the white man,” Roi Ottley wrote.
In Kansas City three weeks later, Louis had a rematch with Natie Brown, the fighter he’d beaten two years earlier, before all those sports-writers in Detroit. This time, too, it was a historic event: local officials had authorized mixed bouts only six months earlier. Fans, black and white and from all walks of life, greeted Louis when he arrived. “Thank God! I’ve seen him at last,” one bent old man murmured afterward. One section of ringside seats, along with part of the balcony, was set aside for blacks. The anticlimactic fight lasted four rounds. Traveling in the Pullman car Alf Landon had used late in his presidential campaign, Louis then embarked on a monthlong barnstorming tour through Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and California. In Wichita, plans called for Louis’s car to stop at some undisclosed location just short of town, to keep fans from descending upon it. In Houston, admiring blacks lined the tracks for blocks as the train pulled in. At the local arena, the 2,500 ringside seats were reserved for whites; blacks, who made up more than half the crowd, were confined to the bleachers and had to use a special entrance. The tour ended in California, where Louis insisted he’d learned his lesson well. “They say I can’t take a punch to the jaw,” he said. “Well, I’m not supposed to take one.” By one estimate, in three weeks of barnstorming Louis had played before 150,000 people.
Jack Johnson continued to haunt, and taunt, Louis. Bill Corum caught up with him one day at Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus on Forty-second Street, west of Broadway, where he had become part of the freak show, selling memories “at a penny a throw.” “What about Joe Louis?” he was asked. “Just another fighter,” replied Johnson, who was to keep a photograph of the 1936 fight—it showed Louis approaching Schmeling with a left, leaving his chin conspicuously exposed to the German’s cocked right—conveniently within reach. On those frequent occasions when fight arguments arose, John Lardner wrote, “the brown wizard of Galveston reaches for the photograph and shows you why Joe Louis will never be a Jack Johnson.” “People claim I’m jealous, but that picture tells different,” Johnson told him. “I ain’t jealous. I just state facts.” Even at age fifty-two, Johnson told another writer, he’d have bet “a hundred dollars to five” he could have cornered Pastor within three rounds. Johnson paid a high price for his opinions: in Harlem once, he stood in the center of the ring for five minutes as a jeering crowd refused to let him speak. Half of Louis’s mail was about Johnson, mostly admonitions from elderly southern blacks not to follow his bad example. For three consecutive months, the Defender asked readers which of the two boxers was greater with prizes promised for the pithiest answers. Among nearly forty thousand voters, Louis won by better than five to one. “His clean living and high-minded morals were perhaps his greatest asset,” the paper explained.
SHORTLY AFTER HITLER CAME TO POWER in 1933, someone who signed his name “Patriotic American” wrote a letter to the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, an ad hoc group set up to boycott German goods in the hopes of strangling the Nazi regime. He urged a campaign against the Schmeling-Baer fight. “Think: practically all of the money Mr. Schmel-ling [sic] will earn he will take back to Germany—HIS VATERLAND—to help continue [Hitler’s] barbaric abominations,” the man wrote. The suggestion had been ignored; the letter had been filed under “Cranks.” But four years had passed. The lot of German Jews had grown increasingly desperate, and Schmeling seemed about to recapture the heavyweight crown. “Patriotic American” was about to be vindicated.
In late December 1936, the league decided to add Schmeling to its list of verboten German goods. This boycott, unlike the one surrounding the Louis fight, would not be a surreptitious campaign of chain letters between Jewish clothing manufacturers, but open and conspicuous, complete with advertisements, circulars, and pickets. It would also be far more broadly based. The league had consciously kept the word “Jewish” out of its name, and along with a Jew like David Stern (owner of the New York Post) and quasi Jews like Mayor La Guardia, its directors included prominent Gentiles such as the editor and publisher Oswald Garrison Villard and the Methodist bishop of New York.
On January 8, Davis Walsh of the Hearst wire service broke the news of a boycott that would “make all others seem pale and pointless by contrast.” All events at the Hippodrome and Madison Square Garden would henceforth be shunned, he wrote, until the Schmeling-Braddock fight was called off. Hitler was preparing for war, a league official explained; depriving him of money and raw materials was the only way to stop him. He predicted that a victorious Schmeling would become head of “Hitler’s Youth Movement” and that “another surge of hysteria of nationalism” would ensue. If the fight were moved elsewhere in America, so, too, would the protests; the Jewish War Veterans, which had chapters everywhere and had previously opposed Schmeling’s fights against Baer and Hamas, would see to that. On January 9, the league asked the state boxing commission to withdraw its support for the fight. Its protest, it stressed, was not against Schmeling himself, but the government “which he willingly or unwillingly represents.” Asked why the group had not boycotted Schmeling when he fought Louis, a league organizer admitted that its leaders thought Louis would win, and that the chance to humiliate Hitler was worth enriching him a bit.
The boycott generated a storm of criticism from writers and fans alike. They called the move immature and silly and said it betrayed the same intolerance the protesters were trying to combat. Anyone unhappy about the fight could stay home,
the Herald Tribune editorialized. Some of the reactions were more crude. “Why should Americans boycott the Schmeling-Braddock fight because the Jews insist on hounding Germany?” Puzzled Gentile Fighter wrote to the Daily News. “Does every prize fight have to be kosher?” “God help the Jews in Germany if the proposed Schmeling-Braddock boycott forces cancellation of the bout,” a Brooklyn man warned in another letter to the paper. “The suffering the German Jews have already endured will be as nothing compared with the attacks, both financial and physical, to which they will be subjected if Schmeling is cheated of his hard-earned shot at the title. I suggest that the boycott committee arrange to evacuate all Jews now in Germany if it insists on going ahead with the boycott.” A group of German businessmen based in New York’s Upper East Side predicted that the “almost stupid beyond belief boycott” would “ultimately produce an overwhelming wave of Anti-Semitism in this country.” “Must we allow these most loathsome and despicable of all human forms (the Jews) to dictate to us americans [sic] what they allow us to do in our sports and privat [sic] business in our own country?” asked another letter, to the head of Madison Square Garden. “That is the result of freedom and equal rights that we give to these verm ins.”
Bill Cunningham of the Boston Post sympathized with Schmeling’s plea to keep sports and politics distinct, but noted that Germany itself had crossed that line most flagrantly, and that Schmeling was doing his share. Dempsey’s wins over the Argentine Firpo or the Frenchman Carpentier had never been billed as an American victory over inferior races, nor had any president sent flowers to the wife of an American boxer when her husband knocked out a foreigner, nor invited that boxer to the White House. Schmeling “is forced to be a Nazi if he doesn’t want to rot in jail,” he wrote. But if anyone had to be sacrificed to make a larger political point, a wealthy prizefighter from Nazi Germany was probably a suitable target.
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