Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Braddock remained on the canvas—as cold as a frozen haddock, Run-yon wrote. “Get up, Jim!” some yelled, but not even a muscle twitched. Four men carried him to his corner, the blood from his eyes and mouth dripping onto his shoes, leaving behind a red trail a foot long. It took him several minutes to come to. Louis blinked and grinned slightly when, to an oddly equivocal reception—borne, perhaps, of sympathy for the fallen white man—his hand was raised. McCarthy and his microphone quickly caught up with the new champ. “Joe!” he exclaimed. “A great fight!” “Oh, it was a great fight, a very good fight,” Louis replied gently, sweetly. “When did you think you had him beat?” McCarthy asked. “When I took the match,” Louis replied. He sounded happier than he let himself look; even now, he would not let down his guard.

  But in his dressing room, all was joy. “Chappie! Chappie!” Louis shouted at Blackburn. “Let’s cut the title in two and celebrate!” Blackburn kissed the glove Louis had worn on his right hand. “Ol’ glove, you shoa had dynamite in you tonight,” he said. “I guess them years jes’ crept up on him,” Louis said of his foe. “Nice to be young, ain’t it?” Asked how it felt to be champion, he replied, “It don’t feel no different.” Nor, he said, would he ever let it. He pledged to be “the fightingest champion there ever was.” “Just give me one more shot at that Schmeling… just one more!” he added. On the other side of an improvised partition, Braddock was too drained to talk. He would require stitches over his left eye and on his right cheek. More than one thousand people wired him their condolences, among them James Cagney, Lionel Barrymore, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lou and Eleanor Gehrig. Braddock had even taken a beating financially, making far less than he could have gotten (tax-free) in Berlin. But the secret agreement with Mike Jacobs would sweeten the pot for a decade to come. When Braddock did start talking, he said he wanted another shot at Louis. “I guess the poor guy hasn’t come to yet,” Dempsey’s old manager, Jack Kearns, was heard to say.

  That night, wild celebrations once again convulsed black America. The most glorious, unsurprisingly, were in Chicago. “Swirling, careening, madly dashing from house to house … yelling, crying, laughing, boasting, gloating, exulting … slapping backs, jumping out of the way of wildly-driven cars … whites and blacks hugging … the entire world, this cosmic center of the world tonight, turned topsy-turvy, this is the South-side [sic] of Chicago,” the Courier reported. Someone had had the foresight to prepare thousands of placards declaring simply I TOLD YOU SO. They nicely captured the faith, exultation, defiance, and sense of vindication the celebrants felt. “They threw that party down on 35th street last night—the one they’ve been 22 years getting ready for,” was how the Chicago Tribune saw it. “Pickaninnies who should have been in bed paraded the streets in dishpan bands. Old folks who hadn’t stayed up so late in years went shouting up and down the streets.” There were bonfires in the boulevards; people rode in cabs and trolleys and on the L for free. Rumors that Louis would show up at the Eighth Regiment Armory, where Roy Eldridge and Benny Goodman were playing, caused hundreds to line the streets outside. Thousands also gathered in front of Louis’s apartment, to which he returned shortly after the fight. Before long, the new champion and his wife went out on the balcony and waved to the throng. Someone shouted for a souvenir, and Louis, having nothing else handy, threw down his straw hat, which was quickly torn to shreds. Twenty more times that night, Louis went out and took curtain calls.

  In Detroit, the large crowd that had listened to the fight over a loudspeaker outside the home of Louis’s mother demanded, and got, a cameo from her. She was relieved it was over, she told reporters, because she didn’t really like fights. Then she paused for a moment. “His right really was pretty good, wasn’t it?” she asked. In Harlem, celebrants materialized out of nowhere. “One moment there wasn’t nobody,” one amazed officer remarked. “Next minute there was a million.” A crowd marched down Seventh Avenue, waving Ethiopian flags and chanting, “We want Schmeling!” “We want the Nazi man!” There was a racial edginess to the celebration that hadn’t been apparent after other Louis victories. “How do you like that, white man?” people shouted at passersby. “One thousand policemen fingered clubs menacingly in an obvious attempt to cow the Negro people and stifle their enthusiasm,” the Daily Worker reported. It counted fifty-eight cops on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street alone. Louis “kayoed the same barrier of discrimination that corrals talented young Negro university graduates into post offices as clerks, that bars Negro workmen from the skilled jobs in industry, that segregates the Negro people in slums,” the Worker stated a few days later. “That was behind the joy in Harlem…. The Negro people are going to smack Jim Crow right on the button like Louis hit Braddock.”

  In “darktown Baltimore” it was like “Christmas Eve in darkest Africa,” Alistair Cooke later wrote. Russell Baker heard “a tumult of joyous celebration” coming from the same neighborhood, while Baltimore’s whites reacted with “the silence of the tomb.” In Americus, Georgia, 136 blacks who’d gathered at Dopey Joe’s, a rickety, riverside juke joint and dance hall, jumped for joy. Down went the building, and the celebrants with it, into the creek. Blacks in Lansing, Michigan, went “wildly happy with the greatest celebration of race pride our generation had ever known,” recalled one of them, who would later be known as Malcolm X. Only Jack Johnson dissented. “I guess the better man won,” he said sourly. Schmeling, he added, could still knock out Louis “seven days a week.”

  “The cynical philosopher will shake his head at such goings on,” the Norfolk Journal and Guide said of the festivities. “After all, this celebration was occasioned not by an exhibition of something beautiful like love but by commercialized physical strife, primitive carnage, bloody fighting. But the philosopher is invited to take a running broad jump into the nearest lake by fight fans. For Mr. and Mrs. Colored America, the triumph of Joe Louis in Chicago was something more than just another fight victory for the hero of most Americans, white or black. That win epitomized a struggle for recognition, for achievement against almost impregnable odds of prejudice, injustice, discrimination, disadvantages.” To the California Eagle, Louis had advanced “into the brightest limelight that can shine upon the head of any public figure except the President.”

  Louis’s victory gave the black press a chance to reflect upon how far race relations had come, and how far they still had to go. “If this same Joe Louis… had remained in his native Alabama, no southern governor would have ever known he lived,” a black weekly in Oklahoma City said. The Washington Tribune lamented that in the nation’s capital, the Louis-Braddock fight would have been illegal. Floyd Calvin of the New York Age took Walter White to task for having urged black editors to calm down their readers. “That letter should have been sent to white editors, and not colored,” he wrote. “The colored people can’t do anything but express their joy. It’s the white folks who can and do raise sand when they take a notion, win or lose.” Louis’s victory emboldened his fans. When one radio announcer called him something sounding like a “flat-footed nigger,” sixty-four people called to complain. The Afro-American saw implications for colonial Africa. “England trembles every time a black man shows prowess against whites, for England rules by sheer psychology,” it stated. “Any incident which might send cowed natives in Africa on the war path might become a bloody incident in British history.”

  The Courier noted that whites and blacks listened to the fight together, then discussed it afterward, without any trouble. But in the very same issue, the paper reported that Miami’s chief of police had banned films of the fight, citing laws against “Negro entertainment in a theater for white persons” and prohibiting a black man from baring “any part of his body above the knees or below the chest before white people.” There were racial disturbances in Durham, North Carolina, New Orleans, and probably many other places that went unrecorded. The black newspaper in Durham chastised some local blacks for their “utter lack of restraint” following the fight. “
An inferiority complex, born in the days of slavery, inevitably arouses, among the untutored, a fierce exultation in the triumph of a race representative,” it explained. “Driven by jealousy and the ‘Can’t Take It’ mood,” the Louisiana Weekly reported, whites in two New Orleans neighborhoods set upon black passersby and trolley passengers. There was also violence between young black and white women at a reform school in Washington, D.C. A newspaper in Columbus, Georgia, urged that mixed bouts, still criminal throughout the South, be banned everywhere for fomenting race hatred.

  The Daily Worker, which had agitated tirelessly against baseball’s color line, got fresh inspiration from Louis’s victory. The black press made the same point, on strictly economic grounds. Even in bad times boxing was booming, thanks to black boxers and fans; baseball could be, too, but “there are none so blind as those who will not see.” The white South accepted the new black champion, though with some misgivings. The Birmingham News saluted his “quiet, inoffensive personality,” but noted that “Joe Louis won’t duplicate his feat of knocking out Jim Braddock on Birmingham theater screens”; the local federal prosecutor threatened to indict anyone showing fight films. Such films were shown in Nashville at three theaters, two black and one white. That was a far cry from the Louis-Schmeling films, which appeared at numerous white theaters. Fleischer contended that even where fight films were shown, the bloodiest footage was omitted to prevent race riots.

  Louis’s relatives in Alabama walked four miles into the black community of “Powder Town” to listen around two radios belonging to one of Louis’s aunts. Afterward, a thousand people danced in the streets. Two days later, Louis’s family had something else to celebrate: Louis’s father, Monroe Barrow, long assumed dead, miraculously resurfaced at the Searcy State Hospital for the Negro Insane in Mount Vernon, Alabama. Within a few days, a reporter from Chicago ventured there, and described “an old, sad-eyed, gray-pated Negro” poring over pictures of the Braddock fight. “My little Joe the heavyweight champion of the world?” the old man said. “I can hardly believe it. Say, it must be all of twenty years or more since I last saw my Joe. He was a husky baby, all right. And now he’s the greatest fighter in the world. Well, well, well.” Again, he grabbed the pictures and studied them more closely. “He looks more like his mother, I think,” he added. “But here, doesn’t he look something like me, too? Gee, I’d like to see him now.” The superintendent of the hospital promptly asked Louis for money; to those who could afford it, the institution charged $30 a month. Louis pledged that once he confirmed the man’s identity he’d be happy to oblige.

  The Montgomery Advertiser promptly followed up, and did a bit of math. Monroe Barrow, who suffered from “dementia praecox of the recurring type”—schizophrenia—had been institutionalized since 1912, but Joe Louis had been born in 1914. The hospital’s records explained the discrepancy: “In his earlier manhood,” the paper revealed, Monroe Barrow “demonstrated an annoying propensity for escaping. Nostalgia invariably led him back to home and family. One such unauthorized leave lasted two years; ladies and gentlemen, the heavyweight champion of the world—Joe Louis.” A writer in the Norfolk Journal and Guide saw in Barrow’s sudden emergence an effort by embittered whites to pull Louis off his pedestal, and faulted the black press for playing along. But he praised Louis for embracing the old man rather than running away from him. In fact, Monroe Barrow died within a year and a half, and Louis apparently never met him.

  The day after the fight, Mike Jacobs suggested that Louis would defend his title four times a year. “If he rests too long, he gets fat and lazy,” he explained. That prospect excited some black fans and offended others, who sensed a double standard at work. “If white champions can loaf two or three years without risking loss of the title, why should Joe Louis defend his title more than twice a year?” the Courier asked. And then there was the question of whom he would fight. Despite all the “white hope” campaigns, there was really only one white hope: Schmeling. Everyone agreed that a Louis-Schmeling rematch would be, as Davis Walsh put it, “as natural as young love.” And Schmeling wasn’t getting any younger; in September he’d be thirty-two years old. Using Fleischer as his emissary, Jacobs tried to entice Schmeling into a fight that fall. The boxing commission also weighed in. But Schmeling was still steaming, or holding out for more money. He “merely wanted Rockefeller Center, 51 percent of Andy Mellon’s fortune, and a first mortgage on the Ford plant,” one black paper wisecracked.

  In fact, Schmeling, and the Nazis, had different plans. Following Goebbels’s instructions, the German press wrote little about the fight.* One paper ran a large head shot of Louis. “That’s What America’s Boxing World Champion Looks Like,” it said. “The Yankees, greedy for money, let the sport go down the drain,” it explained. The 12 Uhr-Blatt devoted almost its entire front page to boxing, but Louis wasn’t the headliner; the continent was. “Europe Steps In,” it announced. “Louis the Victor—But Schmeling World Champion!” “June 22 will remain the darkest day in the long history of American boxing,” it declared, a day when gangsters and world Jewry had crowned a heavyweight champion. Schmeling, who had now been elevated to “the greatest boxer the world has ever known,” would meet not Louis but Tommy Farr for the real world championship.

  Whether in German eyes the fight would be for an open title or would be Schmeling’s first title defense was never entirely clear; in any case, it would be a “historic event.” “We will box in September in one of London’s great open-air arenas!” Schmeling excitedly told the Angriff, for the largest purse in British history. The British, too, had signed on; everywhere except New York, the Daily Mail reported, the Schmeling-Farr match would be seen as a title fight. For the Nazis and for Schmeling, their plan was meant to strike a blow for honor and idealism. The Angriff said that Germany had had enough of American crookedness, and would now have its own world championship, one recognized by everyone placing sports above dollars. Having helped engineer the Schmeling-Farr title fight, the Nazi regime placed considerable resources behind it. Hitler met with Schmeling on June 29, and told him that German fans should be encouraged to attend, even though that would again mean easing German currency regulations. “The Schmeling fight against the Englishman, Farr, should be presented as a ‘world championship fight,’” Goebbels instructed the German press. “Coverage not only in sports section!” By government fiat, then, sports had become too important for the sports pages. Now it was officially impossible for Schmeling to be “just a sportsman.”

  The maneuvers in Berlin and London quite naturally met with scorn in New York. The Daily Worker called the proposed fight “the sour-grapes edition” of the heavyweight championship. Pegler again expressed amazement over how enmeshed with boxing the Nazis had become. “The Reich is the first state in the world so hard up for honors as to regard the title as a valuable national asset,” he wrote. But the Germans were about to get a real lesson in Realpolitik. First, the New York boxing commission ruled that as long as he offered to fight Schmeling first, Louis was in fact champion. Then Mike Jacobs set about to scuttle the “European championship.” He briefly considered having Louis fight in London immediately before the Schmeling-Farr contest simply to steal its thunder. But it was easier just to steal Farr. Which he promptly did, by doubling what the Germans had offered him.

  Goebbels now had to make a hasty, humiliating about-face. “Nothing should be carried about the reports in the English press that the boxer, Farr, doesn’t want to appear against Schmeling,” he told the German media. Farr now got the Braddock treatment in German newspapers; he, too, was a coward and a money-grubber. German publications could acknowledge the Louis-Farr fight, but only buried deep inside; to play it any more prominently than that “would amount to a lack of self-respect.” “One beaten by Schmeling against one who chickened out of a fight against Schmeling—a ‘fine’ fight for the title!” one Berlin paper complained.

  The Louis-Farr fight was set for August 30. Jacobs kept it in New York, desp
ite his puzzling complaint that Harlem’s fans did not come through for Louis at the box office. As Jacobs saw it, delaying the Schmeling rematch only helped; the public could savor the fight longer, the boycott fervor might subside, and Schmeling would be even older and less likely to win. “Promoter Jacobs’ plans call for stalling Max until next Summer when he’ll be so rusty all the erl in Oklahoma won’t enable him to get in shape for Louis,” Parker surmised. “The longer they postpone the fight, the better it’ll be for Schmeling,” Joe Jacobs countered. “Two years from now, Louis won’t be a fighter at all. He’ll be through.”

  Louis did appear to be wearying. Blackburn claimed he was still three years from his prime, but Louis himself said he wanted to quit once he’d beaten Schmeling, and go back to school. One visitor to Pompton Lakes, where Louis was training for Farr, understood why. As Louis tried to read a newspaper, scores of people “with mouths wide open and eyes pop-eyed” stared at him “with an intensity worthy of the most fanatical Nazis.” “Can you blame the man for wanting a little peace and freedom?” the reporter asked. The time had finally come to determine when Schmeling and Louis would get back into a ring together, which made Schmeling’s departure for New York on August 11 front-page news in Germany. By now, Schmeling’s frequent transatlantic crossings had become a joke; he was threatening “the back and forth record now jointly held by Larch-mont Doakes, motorman of the Times Square shuttle, and Hemingway Forsythe, jai-alai champion of Bronxville,” a paper for German émigrés in New York joked. “In Germany they call me the champion,” Schmeling told reporters upon his arrival. “Dot is not so—only morally. Louis is the champion. He won the title from Braddock. Now I want my chance.” He said he’d seen the fight pictures, and “if poor old Chim can knock down Louis, I can. I don’t think he has improved, this Louis.” When someone suggested that he might not get his shot until June, Schmeling “laughed with all the cheery good humor of a spoon tinkling in a medicine glass,” wrote Bob Considine. But the passage of time did not scare him. “Not having the championship keeps me young,” Schmeling insisted.