Perhaps because a second Louis-Schmeling fight seemed too good to be true, no one quite trusted it to happen. Germans feared that “sports-world gangsterism” or “World Jewry” would do it in. Some American commentators, meantime, thought Schmeling had deliberately looked bad against Foord to keep Louis from fleeing. There were rumors that, in a further effort to sidetrack Schmeling, Louis would purposely lose to Mann, fight the German as a nontitleholder, then win back the crown. Then there was the question of war in Europe.
Mann hailed from nearby New Haven, and his partisans packed the Garden for the fight on February 23. They cheered him so loudly that Balogh could scarcely complete his introduction, and they booed Louis heartily. “It won’t be long tonight,” Roxborough told Blackburn. “Joe doesn’t like that.” Blackburn, in fact, hoped to catch an early train to Chicago, and asked Louis to work fast. Louis knocked Mann out in three rounds—the first time he jabbed Mann in the nose, Donovan, who sensed that Louis was more fired up, as well as more skilled, than he’d previously seen him, heard it crack—and Blackburn made his train. Much would one day be said about how the white press regularly, and degradingly, likened Louis to an animal. But the black weeklies did, too; one described Louis that night as “a snarling, fighting man of the jungle.” Bob Considine wrote something in the same vein. Some day, he prophesied, fans would consider the late Joe Louis’s victory over one Nathan Mann in February 1938 only a minor event. They would not realize that on that historic night Louis finally let himself be himself. “Sitting there on his dinky little stool … his kinky head dropped half-way to his knees, puzzled and hurt by wintry boos that greeted the announcement of his name, the long dormant tiger in Joseph Louis twitched and awakened,” he wrote. “The citizens who booed him before the fight the other night will boo him no more,” he predicted. “And when Time, which lends glamour to an athlete, goes to work on Louis, our sons will call him ‘the greatest fighter who ever lived.’”
Louis had one more chance to sharpen up, against Harry Thomas in Chicago on April 1. The fight was an opportunity for head-to-head comparisons; Schmeling had dispatched the same man in eight rounds only four months earlier. Wary of a Levinsky-like rout, only 10,468 people attended; the meager turnout probably killed any chances Chicago ever had to stage the Louis-Schmeling rematch. One of those watching was Joe Jacobs. Convinced that Mike Jacobs was still looking for a way out of a second fight, he wanted to be there should Louis come up with any funny stuff—like a claim that he’d fractured his hand. By the middle of the third round, Thomas was so dazed that even before the bell sounded he walked to his corner and sat down, while his manager vaulted into the ring. That, Louis’s seconds argued, should have ended the fight then and there. But Thomas stood up and the referee let the fight go on; the fans, he believed, were entitled to a knockout. Louis quickly obliged, in the fifth round. He was asked later what took him so long. “I guess it was too cold,” he replied. “Wasn’t there a hockey game in the building last night?” Thomas said afterward that Louis hit harder and from more angles than Schmeling; he’d bet his purse that Louis would knock Schmeling out.
Like Foord, Steve Dudas was a setup for Schmeling. “Although it takes long residence in a city to be accepted as one of its own, Steve Dudas, less than a month in Hamburg, will be a Hamburger tonight— when Max Schmeling is done with him,” Parker wrote. He fell in six rounds; the only mark on Schmeling’s face was one he’d given himself shaving. Schmeling had fulfilled his mission: another poor showing, Hellmis explained, would have given American boxing officials an excuse to put him off yet again. (Of course, in the Nazis’ paranoid worldview, Schmeling couldn’t be too scary, either—that might give Louis second thoughts.) Schmeling’s performance pleased Goebbels. “He really is a brave lad,” he wrote after listening to the fight. The next day, Schmeling met Hitler yet again. The film of the fight was soon showing in 160 theaters around the Reich, including sixty in Berlin, but at his forty-ninth birthday party on April 20, Hitler got a personalized screening, with Schmeling narrating. That film was dwarfed, of course, by the premiere of Riefenstahl’s film on the Berlin Olympics, which Schmeling and Ondra—along with Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Streicher—also attended. A Berlin newspaper now advertised a travel package to the Louis fight (it went for 990 marks, about the price of one of the new Volkswagens soon to roll off the assembly line near Hannover). So did the Reichssportblatt. “Schmeling is expecting you!” it declared. If the fight weren’t enough, the tour included stops in Atlantic City and Niagara Falls.
The more political conditions deteriorated in Europe, the more fragile the second Louis-Schmeling fight became. Mike Jacobs wanted Schmeling to set sail early, so that he’d be safely ensconced in New York should war break out. One German reporter heard the two Jacobses talking on a transatlantic call, with Mike urging Joe that when he left Germany he should bring Schmeling with him. All the talk of war was “crazy,” insisted Yussel; Berlin was more peaceful and quiet than New York. Mike decreed that if Schmeling couldn’t come over, Baer would fight Louis in his place. Mike also made inspection tours of Detroit and Chicago; Philadelphia, too, had bid for the fight. The two biggest sports events of 1938—the Louis-Schmeling fight and the race between Seabis-cuit and War Admiral—were “as homeless as Orphan Annie,” Considine wrote. But on April 26 Jacobs announced that the fight was staying put: he said he felt an obligation to the city of New York. “His main and valid ‘obligations’ are his convictions that the fight will draw 80,000 people and more than $1,000,000 when held in the Yankee Stadium,” one magazine commented. Here, after all, was a fight that needed no ballyhoo; the front pages offered enough. “Boxing’s oldest gate gag is trotting out a ‘man you love to hate,’” one reporter wrote. “In Schmeling the promoter has one such ready made.” “For every customer who stays away to keep from enriching Schmeling there’ll be ten who will go to see his block knocked off,” Braddock said. Harlem fans were pleased to have the fight in New York, but not in Yankee Stadium. Simply being back in the place, they feared, would traumatize Louis.
Once Jacobs opted for New York, the Anti-Nazi League announced another boycott, though this time with a caveat: it would be dropped if Schmeling agreed to turn over his purse to a fund for refugees from Nazi Germany. The group gave him until May 2 to decide; after that, the picketing would start. But even boycott stalwarts now seemed halfhearted, almost apologetic. A tidal wave of interest, much of it among people who felt about the Nazis just as they did, threatened to sink the movement. Reporters canvassed the garment district and Jacobs Beach to gauge the boycott’s prospects. A furrier called Schmeling “a Nazi tool” and said he might have to miss his first title fight in twenty years, but another man said he wanted to see Louis knock Schmeling out. The Brooklyn Eagle found a bare majority favoring the boycott. The World-Telegram surveyed around the Hippodrome. Boycotting Schmeling was unfair, the consensus ran, and besides, the fight was too good to miss. “Unless Schmeling shows himself an active Nazi propagandist I will patronize him, just as I would a German actor or actress with real talent,” one man said.*
In late April, Joe Jacobs returned from Germany. Reports that all German Jews would soon be forced to liquidate their property had thrown them into another panic, but Jacobs presented his usual benign view of things. “Most of the trouble with the Jews over there is caused by the Jews in this country,” he declared. The synagogues were still open, he noted; he’d been to one three times in a single day. Box-Sport, which rarely acknowledged Jacobs, now made an exception, noting his positive impressions of Germany. But among some American Jews, Jacobs was denounced as never before. “Jacobs said he did not see any concentration camps, but admitted he did not look for them,” I. Q. Gross wrote in The Nation. “He did not see non-Aryan business men being stripped of all their earning power or Jewish professional men forced to wash the streets on their hands and knees. He wasn’t looking for that type of Nazi entertainment. The ears of Yussel, the son of an orthodox Jew, w
ere deaf to any mention of the hundreds of his co-religionists who had committed suicide in the new Great Germany or been reported dead from unknown causes.” The Jewish War Veterans were more pointed. “It is unfortunate that such as he must be classed as a Jew,” its magazine stated. “Every race has a minority of black sheep, so let’s just ignore him.”
Mike Jacobs had ordered Schmeling to be in New York by May 12, and Schmeling arranged to arrive several days before that. On May 2, tanned, healthy, and in good spirits, he met with the press in Berlin. Hellmis, the Angriff announced, would accompany him to the United States; this time, it seemed, he wouldn’t be paying his own way. German newspapers offered free trips to New York to the winners of fight-related contests. The Anti-Nazi League introduced a set of brochures designed to help people “Out-Talk the Nazi Spellbinders.” “Weaken Hitler by Boycotting the Louis-Schmeling Fight!” stated the flyers, which claimed that a “cheering squad” of a thousand storm troopers would attend the fight, threatening to make it “the largest Nazi ego-builder of 1938.” “No ticket sale, no fight. No fight, no ‘Nazi Supremacy’ ballyhoo,” they stated. Inside were photographs of Schmeling, along with his wife and his mother, smiling with Hitler. “‘I never went in for politics’—Max Schmeling,” read the caption.
League officials devised tactics to advance the cause, like having “six attractive women” leafleting in front of Madison Square Garden, the Century Club, and the New York Athletic Club. By May 6, ten women were in front of the Hippodrome and Mike Jacobs’s ticket offices on West Forty-ninth Street. One of Jacobs’s minions watched the picketers from a window upstairs. “Those folks are crazy,” he said. “Joe Louis will knock Schmeling as flat as a German pancake, and what will Herr Hitler do then, poor thing? His shining knight in Nazi armor chopped into mincemeat by a Negro! That’s something these anti-Nazis are overlooking.” To Mike Jacobs, too, such campaigns made no sense, given how they only inflamed Nazi anti-Semitism. “Every time these boycotts get under way over here those guys over there take it out on the Jews, who can’t protect themselves at any time,” he said.
The protest generated little sympathy in the New York newspapers. Once again, the Herald Tribune called it “silly.” “Herr Schmeling may be a Nazi. He probably is,” wrote John Kieran in the Times. “But over here Schmeling is just a prizefighter when in the ring and a quiet, inoffensive foreigner outside the ropes.” Reader reaction to that piece was strong enough, however, for Kieran to hand over his space one day to a Jewish dissenter, who argued that Americans should not patronize a representative of a repressive regime whose earnings subsidized the whips used to humiliate Jews. Kieran stuck to his guns. “A representative of a government?” he wrote. “Come, come, good people! If Shufflin’ Joe Louis fought in London, would he be a representative of the government of the United States? To link a prizefighter with a political program, or to view a prizefighter as the official standard-bearer of a race, a creed or a nation still seems to this observer to verge on the fantastic.” Times readers backed Kieran with gusto. Maybe, one wrote, the Yankees should sell Joe DiMag-gio to protest Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, or boycott Lou Gehrig because his forbears were German.
On May 9, Schmeling’s ship steamed into New York Harbor. Near the Statue of Liberty it took on the usual boatful of writers and photographers. The newsreel men set up on the main deck. Schmeling first closeted himself with the Jacobses; then, over the traditional German beer and sandwiches, he took questions in his suite. Immaculate in a single-breasted worsted suit, with only a few stray gray hairs on the back of his head, he told the reporters he felt good; he’d now fought three times in the last six months. Asked whether he’d knock out Louis again, Schmeling replied, “I didn’t make this trip for fun.” “How is it already, the gate?” he asked at one point, before adding that the money didn’t really matter. Joe Jacobs— hovering around Schmeling “like a blue mountain in a Maxfield Parrish painting,” as Parker put it—then swung into action, seeking to tamp down any notion that Schmeling was in line for some top Nazi post overseeing German youth were he to win. “This is—how you say?—‘noose’ to me,” Schmeling said. The press conference over, the entourage headed up to the sun deck so that the cameras could capture what Hellmis called the “most photographed head in the world of sports.”*
At customs, Schmeling faced the usual interrogation, half official, half playful. As Hellmis heard it, an official joked that it was forbidden to punch any honorable citizens of the United States, but concluded, “Here’s your stamp, my good young man. Go now and knock that nigger out, good and clean, understood?” An American reporter, by contrast, heard the official ask Schmeling why he needed a visa for three months, since the fight was barely a month away. “You won’t need six weeks to recuperate,” the official said, before giving Schmeling two months instead. As several hundred admirers awaited him, Schmeling walked down the gangplank and hopped into a cab. A photographer from one of the black papers ran breathlessly alongside the car, begging for a picture, and Schmeling ordered the driver to stop. “You see, he’s a Negro,” he explained. The press then followed Schmeling to the Essex House, where he again held court. “Louis may not even know it himself, but he’ll always be afraid of me, down deep inside,” he said. Louis had now had two years to ponder the last fight, Schmeling explained, and they had taken their toll. “That is the psychological after-math,” he said. “This is especially so in a man of Joe’s race.”
Many years later, Schmeling wrote that as the ship pulled into New York that day, people screamed abuse and carried signs calling him “an Aryan Show Horse” and representative of the “master race”; the police, he recalled, had been forced to escort him through an angry mob and take him via the backstreets to his hotel, where more picketers awaited him. On Broadway or Fifth Avenue, he went on, people taunted him with upraised arms, and he received “thousands” of hate letters. “In small groups I would try to explain—to no avail—that I would hardly have Joe Jacobs as my manager if I were a Nazi,” he was to write. But writing at the time, Box-Sport described a very different reception, one that was “completely heartfelt and friendly.” “The general public opinion is for Schmeling,” it wrote. That wasn’t true either, of course. At the same time, none of the Americans following Schmeling that day reported anything approaching the hostility he later described. But there were picketers outside Schmeling’s hotel, and though Hellmis insisted that they didn’t rattle Schmeling, they left Hellmis himself indignant. “The contents of the flyers are too stupid to describe in detail,” he wrote.
Three days after Schmeling’s arrival, at eight in the morning, a thousand people greeted Louis when the Commodore Vanderbilt pulled in to Grand Central. He sported a wisp of a starter mustache, a green sports coat, a green sweater, and fawn-colored pants. He seemed poised and nonchalant, a far cry from the shy young man who had stepped off the train in the same spot only three years earlier. At 209 pounds, he was 9 pounds above his optimal weight. “All I have to do will be to cut down on my ice cream,” he said. This time, he’d left his golf clubs at home. Someone mentioned Schmeling’s claim that Louis couldn’t shake off his fear of him. “When I get in the ring with S’mellin’ I’ll shake it off onto him,” he replied. Louis would not pick a round, but insisted the fight would end fast. “You can bet all de money you got the fight ain’ta gonna last as long as the other,” he said. “Either me or him will drop early. They ain’t gonna be no decision. All the judges can stay home that night.”
Later that day, Louis and Schmeling made their way downtown for a “signing ceremony” at the boxing commission. Shortly after Schmeling entered Louis walked over to him. “Hah’ya, Max,” he said. Schmeling seemed taken aback, but quickly recovered. “How are you, Joe?” he replied. “You look goot! How you feel, goot?” Louis took a step back, and lowered his eyes. “Fine. I feel fine. You look good, too.” The two then sat down to sign something. “Joe, we want two words from you,” one of the cameramen asked. “Hel-lo,” Louis
replied. Then the two men shook hands, exchanged platitudes, and shook hands again. “Louis handed him what must have felt like a large damp herring which Max seized, squeezed, and shook it hard enough to set up a movement in Joe’s chubby cheeks,” wrote Considine. Louis just gazed at the door, his expression unchanging. Once the cameras stopped rolling, the two fighters separated, in such a way, Considine wrote, “as you would if a friendly-looking fellow came up, began shaking your hand and said ‘I’m Joe Doakes—the leper.’”
Hellmis saw it as a pleasant affair, in which Schmeling was greeted with loud cheers. He continued to insist that Schmeling was more popular than ever in the United States, received warmly wherever he went. (The only discordant note came when the boxing commission, citing the latest of Joe Jacobs’s infractions—apparently letting another of his fighters, “Two Ton” Tony Galento, be photographed with a beer mug in one hand and a cigar in the other—said it would not renew his licenses as a manager or second. This meant that, once again, he would not be in Schmeling’s corner the night of the fight. If this had happened in Germany, Jacobs shrieked, people would have cried anti-Semitism!) For Hellmis, these were busy days indeed: he was now writing simultaneously for the Angriff, the Völkischer Beobachter, the Reichssportblatt, the 8 Uhr-Blatt, Box-Sport, and other publications, typing frantically in order to get his dispatches to the Bremen before it set sail. At first blush, his role as a one-man cheering squad reflected how amateurish, at least at this stage, the publicity machine of mighty Nazi Germany could be; alternatively, it illustrated how little attention the German press generally gave to sports. All this writing required Hellmis to recycle some information, like the fact that Schmeling carried that autographed picture of Hitler wherever he went. This trip, it turned out, was no exception. “His eyes shine in proud delight when he has a chance to show it to a friend,” Hellmis wrote.
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