The Anti-Nazi League, headed by the prominent lawyer Samuel Untermyer, was a Potemkin village of a protest group, with little of the clout attributed to it, perhaps by those inclined out of either solidarity or paranoia to exaggerate Jewish power. For all the demonizing he endured in the German press, Untermyer actually opposed the fight boycott originally, warning that it could make the league “one of the most hated organizations that was ever brought into existence.” But the movement quickly assumed an air of inexorability. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Westchester County, and New Jersey were also said to be on board. “Schmeling might just as well remain in Germany,” wrote a columnist in New Orleans; any American city staging one of his fights would be deemed pro-Nazi. Also supporting the campaign were Jeremiah T. Mahoney, who led the unsuccessful attempt to withdraw the American team from the Berlin Olympics, and the American League Against War and Fascism, which urged Schmelingto donate three-quarters of his take to German exiles in America.
Jewish fans could make or break any big-time bout. Tex Rickard once said that Jews spent $250,000 on each of Jack Dempsey’s fights, while Mike Jacobs claimed they’d put down $300,000 apiece for Louis’s fights against Carnera and Baer. “Even without the aid of any other organizations the Jews of New York could make the Braddock-Schmeling fight a financial flop,” a sportswriter from Minneapolis said. The Yiddish Forverts declared it a Jewish duty to support the boycott. While some Jews were still loath to classify “easy-going Max” as a Nazi, one had to consider his “continued voluntary residence in Hitlerland,” the Jewish Examiner editorialized. Schmeling “has as much chance of earning another American dollar as his boss Hitler has of owning a delicatessen store on Delancey Street,” it predicted. But typically, the Jewish community did not speak with one voice on the subject. The Jewish Advocate in Boston said its beef was with the Nazis, not with Schmeling. “People tell stories about Schmeling ‘Heiling Hitler,’” it noted. “What of it? The boxer was merely responding to greetings in the way that is now unfortunately accepted in his country.” Boycotting Schmeling, it said, was “just as nonsensical as refusing to eat cheese because the Germans also eat it, or refusing hospital facilities to people with German measles.”
But the two most important Jews in the equation—Mike Jacobs and Braddock’s manager, Joe Gould—all but embraced the campaign, quickly meeting with its organizers and exaggerating how effective it would be. The boycott that had robbed him of $400,000 at the Schmeling-Louis fight had been mild by comparison, Jacobs said; this one would be the father of them all. Schmeling, he conceded, had always been very friendly with Jews. But business was business, and Jacobs saw a chance to jettison a star-crossed fight for something far more lucrative. As for Gould, he “leaped at the excuse like a speckled trout coming out of a stream,” wrote Richards Vidmer. A Braddock-Schmeling fight wouldn’t “draw flies,” Gould insisted. He asked fifteen sportswriters to guess the gate for such a contest; their estimates ranged from a paltry $250,000 to a pathetic $100,000, a tenth of what Gould thought a Braddock-Louis fight would draw. “I want to be fair to Schmeling,” he said, “but I got to take care of Jim.”
For Jacobs and Gould, then, the boycott was a godsend, letting them put an altruistic gloss over a pure money grab. Jacobs, wrote one critic, was hiding behind some “anti-Nazi front men.” “There is a powerful aroma of larceny about this boycott business, a strong scent of lilies-of-hokum,” John Lardner wrote; to Braddock and Gould, the only question was “whether to fight Joe Louis for a stack of dough or Max Schmeling for coffee money.” And once Louis had beaten Braddock, Jacobs would have his real prize: a second, boycott-proof Louis-Schmeling fight. But even those who opposed the boycott made it clear that they had little concern for Schmeling. “We don’t owe the Horst Wessel muzzler anything,” wrote Jack Miley in the News. Shunning Schmeling, Joe Williams chimed in, was “akin to boycotting smallpox.” For all the labels it stuck on him—“Hitler’s boyfriend,” “Storm Trooper Moxie,” “Hitler’s emissary to America”—even the Daily Worker conceded that Schmeling was no anti-Semite. “He never was the kind of guy who sneaks up behind you and knifes you until Hitler got him,” it said. His sin, instead, was simply betting on the wrong horse. “He should have known on which side of the Atlantic his bread is buttered,” it wrote. “He didn’t read the American newspapers except on the sports pages. The result is that he has fallen for the Hitler hooey. And he is going to pay for it.”
The campaign only stoked Nazi claims of Jewish power and deviousness. SCHMELING HECKLED IN UNBELIEVABLE WAY BY USA JEWS, the Angriff shouted. Surely, urged the Berliner illustrierte Nachtausgabe, “racially conscious Americans” would not let “the Jewish Marxist gang” in New York cheat them out of a championship fight. The German news agency, Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, insisted the bout could succeed even without Jews; hadn’t sixty-five thousand people attended the Louis-Schmeling fight, despite boycott calls in the synagogues? The indignation of real Americans upset over Jewish meddling might actually increase attendance, it speculated. Caught between two anti-Semitic stereotypes—of Jews as either manipulators or hucksters—the Angriff couldn’t decide whether the boycott was designed to kill the fight or to publicize it. It predicted that Americans would not be impressed by posters appearing throughout New York declaring IF YOU LOVE YOUR CHILDREN, BOYCOTT THE FIGHT! “Schmeling hasn’t kidnapped any children, nor has he imprisoned any women,” it said. “Schmeling is an upright German and an honest, fair sportsman—certainly a fact that Untermyer regrets.” The Tageblatt appealed to the “traditions of fairness and chivalrous treatment of competitors which are common to all Anglo-Saxon nations.” The German-American Bund deluged Madison Square Garden with letters stating that “100 per cent Americans” wanted the fight to go forward.
That Schmeling’s titular manager was Jewish only complicated things. When boycott organizers tried meeting with “the Hitler-Heiling Joe Jacobs,” he stood them up. On January 18, Jacobs announced that Schmeling would soon return to New York, but would start training only after taking a twenty-two-city tour. The itinerary included Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit, but concentrated on the South. “Schmeling is a hero down in the South for knocking out that Louis guy, and we intend to cash in on it,” explained Jacobs, who had apparently overcome any lingering fears of returning there. BOYCOTT BROKEN! SCHMELING’S EXHIBITION BOUTS IN THE USA BEGIN ON MARCH 1, the Völkischer Beobachter proclaimed. The Nazi press, which rarely acknowledged Jacobs’s existence, now cited him as the authority for the proposition that the boycott was doomed. The Reichssportblatt soon advertised trips to New York for the Braddock-Schmeling fight. But the Germans and Jacobs were unduly optimistic. Opponents of the fight now targeted the tour, too. The commander of the Jewish War Veterans asked posts in the cities on Schmeling’s itinerary to become involved, and urged blacks to pitch in.
Blacks and Jews had been on opposite sides of the boycott of the Berlin Olympics. For blacks the Games promised to be—and became— a moment of glory. Besides, there was an element of payback. “The Jews don’t help us so why should we help them?” one Berlin-bound black athlete asked. Now, though, with Schmeling catering to crackers and threatening to abscond with a prize that a black man stood to win, things changed. No fight should be a windfall for the “Negro-Jew-Catholic-hating Nazis,” the Amsterdam News editorialized. Roy Wilkins urged blacks to support the boycott; no one who knew persecution himself, he wrote, could remain indifferent to the plight of German Jews. But Wilkins complained that many of those same Jews who’d bankrolled the campaign against the Olympics hadn’t given five dollars to combat race prejudice. In fact, he faulted the Jews for being AWOL on civil rights generally. While Jewish radicals, like the staffers on the Daily Worker, were among the most fervent civil rights champions, most blacks encountered Jews only as landlords and businesspeople, relationships that bred far more resentment than camaraderie. “Maybe they have some Negro servant of whom they are fond and they let it go at that, or maybe they give the N
egro porter or elevator boy ten dollars at Christmas and call it square with their consciences,” Wilkins wrote. “Let us do all we can to see that no disciple of Hitler and fascism reaps any benefit here in America. At the same time, let us hope our Jewish friends will not have too short memories when next we appeal for aid.”
Boycott organizers tried repeatedly to enlist the NAACP, but Walter White balked. The group opposed Hitlerism, he said, but felt the movement had been hijacked by “certain individuals in the boxing game”— presumably Jacobs and Gould—“for selfish and ulterior motives.” He worried that the group’s opposition to Schmeling’s sputtering southern tour could, oddly, help revive it. Then there was the matter of fairness: Schmeling had been promised a title shot. “I do not think that we should be demanding fair play and then join in denying it to others, even if we dislike and disapprove of those others,” he concluded. Besides, overzeal-ous publicity men had turned the boycott into a joke: only fourteen people showed up for a much-touted luncheon the Anti-Nazi League threw for sportswriters at Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on February 16 — some, undoubtedly, just for the free lunch.
By late January the papers were writing obituaries for the Braddock-Schmeling bout. Rather than fight Schmeling in Long Island City on June 3, they speculated, Braddock would fight Louis in Chicago a week or two later. Authorities in Illinois had already gone into action, and by February 19 it was official: Braddock would take on Louis for the world heavyweight championship at Comiskey Park on June 22. The champion would collect 50 percent of the gate, Louis the challenger’s take of 17½ percent. The Cinderella Man, who’d once sworn eternal fealty to the Garden for taking him off the breadline, had changed his mind. Mike Jacobs would run the show as a silent partner, with a local man acting as his “promotional stooge.” That way, Jacobs hoped, he would be spared the full wrath of the New York boxing authorities. Madison Square Garden vowed to sue, but the Hearst papers lined up, unsurprisingly, behind the switch. “Why should Jim, who was on relief for years, who hasn’t made a real dollar since winning the title, who has a bunch of youngsters he wants to educate, who has a wife that he wants to build a home for, take $75,000 to fight Schmeling instead of $700,000 for facing Louis?” asked Bill Farnsworth of the Evening Journal.
Box-Sport could not believe what was happening: “a clique that has nothing to do with sports” had shafted someone “just because he is a son of the new German Reich and supports the Fatherland abroad, inside and outside the ring.” It was “simply inconceivable” that a valid contract could be so utterly ignored. But Schmeling and the Nazis had already begun their countermove. In late January, Schmeling asked Hitler to salvage the fight by luring Braddock to Germany. Despite stringent German currency regulations, by February 1 a proposal was in the works offering Braddock $250,000 to take on Schmeling in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. “It is understood that Chancellor Hitler has already voiced his general approval of such a match,” an internal memo from the American embassy in Berlin to the State Department declared.
Within the Nazi apparat, the proposal generated a kind of euphoria. “This fight will be the greatest sporting event of the year 1937,” Hermann Esser, a friend of Hitler’s who was president of the German tourist committee, gushed to the Reich’s chancellory. “The significance of the event for propaganda cannot be overestimated…. The entire world will say that a country that can finance and carry out such a huge sporting event must possess entrepreneurial spirit and can’t be at the end of its financial powers.” With a capacity of 130,000, the Olympic Stadium was the greatest space ever for such an event, and with only the snooty Bayreuth festival to offer otherwise, Germany needed a summer tourist attraction. As for foreign currency, the income from visas alone would cover two-thirds of the $300,000 Braddock was by now demanding. Then there was all the money travelers would bring with them, along with the home-court advantage the fight would confer on Schmeling. “As a fighter in his hometown, and probably in the presence of the Führer, Schmeling will offer a first-rate performance and thus carry the victory,” Esser predicted.
Since Schmeling would win, Esser went on, the fight would inevitably lead to a rematch with Louis that would earn more money for the Reich, even though that battle would surely be in the United States. The Führer “placed the greatest value on the [Braddock-Schmeling] fight taking place on German soil,” Esser concluded. Goebbels expressed concern about scrounging up enough hard currency; Germany had just embarked upon an ambitious four-year plan for economic self-sufficiency, supervised by Hermann Göring, a key part of which consisted of curbing imports, and thereby stanching the outflow of capital. (Even the head of German boxing had to apply for permission to take the equivalent of ten pounds sterling out of the country.) Rubber, fuel, textiles: Germany itself could produce all of them, or at least ersatz versions of them; but one thing it would have to import was champion boxers, and for them, Goebbels realized, it would have to pay dearly. “This still needs to be discussed with Göring,” he wrote in his diary. But Schmeling met with a representative of the Deutsche Reichsbank and the sports ministry, and the Reich office of foreign currency ultimately found enough money to make a credible offer to Braddock. When Schmeling arrived in the United States for his exhibition tour, he would carry the proposal with him.
As Schmeling’s southern tour encountered difficulties and delays, so, too, did the date of his departure from Germany. Finally, on February 24 he boarded the Berengaria, the German-built steamer given to the British as reparation for the Lusitania. It was a sop to public relations: the Berengaria would not be flying the swastika—surely an inopportune image for someone fighting an anti-Nazi boycott—as it entered New York Harbor. A large crowd of boxing officials, newspapermen, and fans saw Schmeling off. He arrived in New York on March 2, six days before his tour was scheduled to start. The boycott, he remarked, made him laugh. “You know, they do me an honor, in fact they compliment me,” he remarked. “If they thought Braddock could beat me in two or three rounds there wouldn’t be a boycott movement.” He issued appeals to Braddock and to American good sportsmanship, but pledged to fight a “ghost battle” with Braddock if the champion didn’t show up.
But with anti-Nazi feelings in New York intensifying almost by the hour, the fight seemed doomed. The day after Schmeling arrived, Mayor La Guardia told an audience of Jewish women that a pavilion at the upcoming New York World’s Fair dedicated to religious freedom should include a “chamber of horrors” on Nazi Germany, featuring an exhibit on the “brown-shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world.” The speech prompted another venomous attack on La Guardia in the Nazi press, in which he was denounced as a “shameless Jew lout,” “New York’s chief gangster,” and “a dwarf with a grotesque belly, a knave with a screechy voice, a master blackmailer, a nose completely Semitic—a truly magnificent specimen of his race.” New York, meantime, was labeled the most “un-American city in the country,” a place known to other, real Americans as “Jews-York.” “No less than three million members of this race of criminals live on the banks of the Hudson,” the Fränkische Tageszeitung declared. “They dwell both in stinking outer boroughs, great examples with black coats and temple locks, as well as in the bank palaces of Wall Street and in the great millionaires’ quarters where they surround themselves with their stolen luxury, ‘representing’ New York’s High Society.” Pro-Hitler groups met in Yorkville, and the German-American Bund called La Guardia “a product of the lower east-side of New York … where the boys grow up in an environment of garbage cans and fishy odors.” Meanwhile, in what was probably the worst verbal peacetime attack against it ever, the Nazi press depicted the United States as a place of crime, violence, and Jewish-inspired strikes—like Germany before Hitler rescued it. In contrast to what the Angriff called a land of “real culture”—of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven—America was a cesspool of heartless-ness, corruption, and philistinism. At its decadent core were not just Jews but blacks, subhumans who were nonetheless entitled to b
etter than the poverty and lynch mobs to which a pious and hypocritical America subjected them. In reaction to all this, Jewish groups announced plans to hold a mass meeting against Nazism at Madison Square Garden on March 15.
In so overheated an environment, how could Max Schmeling possibly ply his trade? His tour foundered; two of the first stops, in Newark and Philadelphia, were canceled. And with the Jewish War Veterans mobilizing—“All posts are requested not to diminish vigilance, but watch newspapers and stand by prepared for instant action”—the whole exhibition schedule appeared doomed. So, too, did his fight against Braddock, unless Braddock could be enticed to Berlin. Schmeling’s opening offer— Nazi Germany’s, really—was $250,000, free of German taxes, to be deposited in a bank outside Germany, plus film and radio rights worth another $150,000, plus the right to help pick a referee, plus an American judge. Mike Jacobs and Madison Square Garden would be bought off for another $50,000. Schmeling also agreed to post a $25,000 bond, guaranteeing that if he won the title, he would defend it in the United States in September, against Joe Louis or anyone else. For cash-strapped Germany it was an astonishing gesture, another sign of how central the business of boxing and the heavyweight crown had become to the Nazi psyche. So as not to jinx anything, the propaganda ministry issued instructions to the German press to soft-pedal anti-Semitism for a time, “since in American boxing the Jews play a great role.” The Daily Worker called it “the most boot-licking contract ever advanced for a title match.” But Braddock was in the catbird seat, and he wanted still more. On March 21, the Nazis upped the offer to $350,000. The black press feared that Braddock was running out on Louis. But Joe Gould balked, and the Berlin fight fell through, as did Schmeling’s tour. On March 23, Schmeling returned to Germany empty-handed. The propaganda ministry instructed the Nazi press to say no more about a title bout in Berlin.
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