Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  After the “signing,” the fighters went their separate ways. Louis headed north to Lafayetteville, the village he’d gone to before the first Schmeling fight, to work out and split logs until his friend Henry Armstrong, training to fight Barney Ross for the welterweight title (one of three that Armstrong, the second most famous black fighter of his day, once held simultaneously) on May 31, cleared out of Pompton Lakes. Schmeling hopped aboard the Upstate Special, the train bound north for Speculator. When he stepped off in Amsterdam, an old factory town an hour southwest of his training camp, five thousand people awaited him.

  The political pressure finally got to Mike Jacobs, who announced via a letter to President Roosevelt that he would donate 10 percent of his net profits from the fight to European refugees. Apart from the antilynching button he had once bought at a Louis camp, people were hard pressed to cite any previous philanthropy from him. The actual donation would be small change, probably around $7,500, but to the boycotters it was a blow, promising to deprive them of whatever breeze remained in their sails. “A master stroke of diplomatic strategy,” the World-Telegram called Jacobs’s maneuver. The German press was ordered to ignore the gesture, which Goebbels assailed in his diary. “Jews are once again trying to sabotage the Schmeling fight by giving the surplus … to German emigrants,” he wrote on May 18. “They want to prevent him from fighting at all. But the Führer determines that Schmeling is to fight.”

  * In Nuremberg, Julius Streicher took the picketing more seriously: to retaliate, he declared a boycott of local Jewish shops.

  * For all those who thought Schmeling was in Hitler’s pocket, there were others convinced that if he lost to Louis he faced disgrace or even the hoosegow. After all, one German athlete who’d spoken out against Hitler, the tennis star Baron Gottfried von Cramm, had already been arrested, his homosexuality providing the Nazis with a convenient pretext. Some American athletes, like Don Budge and Joe DiMaggio, criticized the arrest of Cramm, runner-up at Wimbledon in 1935,1936, and 1937, but Schmeling defended it. “It’s too bad, but there was nothing else for the police to do,” he said.

  * A “Tijuana Bible”—one of the small, pornographic booklets popular during the era—offered a more fanciful view of Schmeling’s trip to New York, and his arrival there. It depicted some rich hussy seducing “Max Smellin” aboard the Bremen; during passionate— and very graphic—lovemaking, “Smellin” throws out his back, and by the time he lands in the United States, he is hobbling around on crutches. “Maxie vot der hell iss. … ?” a flabbergasted friend exclaims upon seeing the incapacitated German. “Ach!” “Smellin” replies. “I tell you I vass fowled by a sea gull!”

  Pompton Lakes and Speculator

  JOE LOUIS WAS AT THE GARDEN BOWL in Long Island City on May 31, three weeks short of his date with Schmeling, when Henry Armstrong fought Barney Ross for the welterweight crown. Twenty-six thousand people showed up, a disappointing crowd, but the explanation was simple: even a fight pitting the dazzlingly fast Armstrong against the Jewish Ross in New York was overshadowed by Louis and Schmeling. “The world heavyweight championship is making all other events kaputt,” Hellmis wrote.

  Louis was not just a spectator that night, but a student. Armstrong’s trainer, Eddie Mead, told Roxborough, Black, and Blackburn that it was silly to have Louis box—that is, rely on tactics and finesse—when he was the greatest puncher in the game, and fighting an old man to boot. They should let him go out and slug away from the opening bell, just as Armstrong, a master of perpetual motion, always did. So this is what Louis was studying, just as he had at Armstrong’s training camp. One reporter speculated that Louis’s brain trust was contemplating how such a “tornadic” start would affect the cool, calculating German.

  “Last time Chappie fot jus’ the’ way Schmelin’ wanted him to,” Blackburn said after Armstrong won. “This time, it’ll be different. Chappie’s going to learn from Armstrong. He’s going to set a fast pace right from the start, work inside Schmelin’s defense and batter away at his body. Schmelin’ ain’t goin’ to stan’ up long under that pace and that poundin’. He’ll start cavin’ in after three or fo’ roun’s, then Chappie’ll git down to real business and finish him.” Not everyone was so sure. Fans debated whether Louis needed to change his style to beat Schmeling, whether he had the intelligence to understand what that change should be, and, even if he did, whether he remained too haunted by the last fight to pull it off.

  Once again word went out, largely through the black press, that the routine in Pompton Lakes was all business. Louis studied hard, seldom left camp, played no golf, went to bed early. Marva kept a safe distance, as she had all year; the Afro-American calculated that out of 173 elapsed days in 1938, the Louises had been together “only about sixty-six” of them. One reporter saw flashy white women turned away from the camp; Louis, someone said, was harder to get to than the president of the United States. No one was taking any chances on anything. Amid fears that he would injure a finger, Louis was even forbidden to catch a baseball.

  There were huge crowds at Pompton Lakes—including, one day, a staggering nine thousand people, probably the biggest gathering ever to see any boxer work out anywhere. People gazed upon Louis from trees, fences, roofs, and cars. Many wore their fanciest duds: “men in sports clothes, linen suits and flannel trousers along with women wearing the latest styles in shoes, dresses and hats of every imaginable description,” the Richmond Afro-American Planet related. A Chicago reporter saw “jeweled octoroons from the Cotton Club on Broadway, sport-togged, white-spectacled young blades from Harlem, conservative mulatto businessmen, all rolling up in sedans or touring cars—and one group of laughing showgirls in a taxicab that had brought them the forty miles from 42nd Street and Broadway.” For black America, it was not just a fashion show but a reunion, featuring frequent encounters with old friends. Even when Louis had the day off, people came by just to stare at him. The mob included lots of children. “There’s wire netting round the four sides of the ring,” one British reporter wrote, “and behind this scores of kink-haired negro boys flatten their pancake noses like monkeys behind bars at the Zoo.”

  There were distinguished visitors, including Braddock, whose jaw still ached from the Louis fight, as well as Dempsey, Tunney, and Richard Wright. Again, reports about Louis’s form and attitude were mixed. His sparring mates said they pitied anyone who had to fight him for real. His defense was said to have improved, even though his staffers made a point not to talk about Schmeling and what had happened the last time. The object, according to Louis’s new deputy trainer, a white man named Manny Seamon, was to treat this like any other fight, and Schmeling like “just another fighter he was going to stop when he got around to it.”

  But there were plenty of skeptics. To one, Louis was training “with all the savage vigor of a great-grandmother knitting woolen wristlets.” To another, he was getting hit by punches “that started in Albany.” To a third, sparring partners who couldn’t “hit hard enough to dent a cake frosting” were hitting Louis hard enough to bend him over. BROWN BOMBER LOOKS LIKE TAN TARGET, the New York Post claimed. After one such pummeling, fans were so derisive that the ring announcer asked them to keep their thoughts to themselves. If there were the usual conflicting reports about Louis, there were also conflicting reports about the conflicting reports. Louis was trying to bamboozle Schmeling, or Schmeling was trying to fool Louis, or Mike Jacobs was trying to fool everyone. The evaluations often fell, like so many things, along racial lines. White reporters described how ineffectual or lethargic Louis looked; black reporters said he simply no longer saw a need to dazzle.

  Louis was a good-natured fellow, and it was hard to find too many Americans who didn’t like him, or didn’t want him to win. But the issue of his intelligence still cropped up often, especially when facing someone as shrewd and scientific as Schmeling. And on that score, the press continued to be unkind. Many thought Louis incurably stupid, and felt no inhibitions saying so in various ways: “Lo
uis has never been accused of being erudite” (the Herald Tribune). “Schmeling will make no mistake in strategy. Louis doesn’t know what the word means” (the World-Telegram). “They tried Shufflin’ Joe at class work out here and gave it up as a failure” (the Times). “Experimentation to him is just a word, and a powerful long one” (the Mirror). “There can be no question regarding Schmeling’s mental advantage. Joe is not very bright” (the Los Angeles Times). Bill Corum asked Louis about the psychology of the fight, and claimed to have gotten this answer: “I don’t know that Cy what-you-calls-him, so why should I be worrying ’bout him?” “They are saying Joe Louis had begun to think, now,” James Dawson of The New York Times told O. B. Keeler of the Atlanta Journal. “That is the worst thing Joe Louis could begin to do.” Keeler concurred. “Joe Louis is not constructed for thinking,” he wrote. “He is designed for action unhampered by any mental process that does not spring from the instantaneous reaction of the motor centers of the animal mind.” Louis was clearly in better shape physically than he was for the last fight, Grantland Rice observed, but “I don’t think he has changed a lick on the other side—call it mental or psychological or whatever,” he wrote. “On this side, I don’t think Louis could ever change—not in a thousand years. He just doesn’t work that way.” To Rice, the title of Hemingway’s latest novel, To Have and Have Not, summed up Louis to a T: he had everything on the physical side, and had not on the mental.

  There were more animal comparisons. Give Schmeling six pounds of peanuts, someone wrote, and he would spend hours coaxing a chipmunk to eat them out of his hand; give them to Louis, and he would eat them himself, then take a nap. The most egregious of these came from Austen Lake of the Boston Sunday Advertiser, who compared dinner at Pompton Lakes to “feeding time at the zoo.” “Joe’s ears waggled while he chewed,” he wrote. “His lips made moist, smacking noises and his eyes, as impersonal as twin cough drops, roved the company with the chill and scrutiny of a house cat.” While Blackburn, “the simian-faced Negro with a knife scar along one cheek,” offered fight talk, Louis “made guttural grunts which filtered through his food in thick blurbs, and focused the full beam of his attention to chewing.”

  Occasionally there’d be a backhanded compliment. Hugh Bradley of the Post said Louis had “vastly improved mentally.” Parker insisted that his mental deficiencies were irrelevant. “In Joe’s trade a well-delivered clout on the chin makes up for quite a few points in the Intelligence Quotient Department,” he wrote. Almost everyone agreed that if he tried outsmarting Schmeling, he’d lose; his best strategy lay in reverting to his former primitive self. The plan at Pompton Lakes, Considine wrote, could be reduced to four words: “Keep Joe from thinking.” This inability to work out a plan and stick to it was something all blacks shared, Bill Corum stated. But like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, and Ethel Waters, Corum continued, Louis had “that remarkable sense of rhythm, timing, instinctive pace,” and in the ring, that made him formidable indeed. Of course, there were others who argued that Louis wasn’t an animal at all but a marionette whom Blackburn controlled, or a robot, more machine than human.

  There were exceptions. Richard Wright said after talking to Louis that while he was uneducated, he was an amazing guy with a full sense of what he represented to other blacks. Another defender was the writer Maxwell Bodenheim, who complained in the Daily Worker about the “chauvinism and backwardness” of the mainstream sports press. “A prize-fighter is not supposed to be an intellectual giant and Louis possesses an average amount of intelligence and is a man who has fought his way through poverty, discrimination and the lack of education inflicted upon him by our economic system,” Bodenheim wrote. While sportswriters threw “verbal bouquets” at “the Nazi challenger,” he charged, they went “miles out of their way to heave rotten fruit at the Negro heavyweight champion, a clean, normal, honest lad.”

  Many assumed Schmeling still had the “Indian sign” on Louis. Even Louis’s sympathetic biographer conceded the possibility: Freud would ask whether Schmeling had “inflicted an inferiority complex” on the Bomber, he wrote. There was, of course, a racial tinge to all of this: no one ever asked Schmeling whether Hamas had the “Indian sign” on him before Schmeling crushed him in their rematch. As for Louis, he brushed it all aside. How, he quite sensibly asked, could he never forget something he couldn’t even remember?

  Some southern writers thought Louis could not escape his blackness. “Joe Louis never will admit it, but when he gets into the ring and looks down at the German’s right fist, he’s going to be a scared nigger,” one columnist wrote. A student sportswriter at the University of Texas pondered what a local black man had told him: that a nigger was a fighting fool until you knocked him down, and after that he was worthless. “The psychology is true … for the Southern Negro who is used to being downtrodden, but it is not true of the Northern Negro,” he observed. So, where would one situate a black man born in Alabama but raised in Detroit? Even for many southerners, though, national, regional, and personal loyalties mattered more than race. “Joe Louis is as much an American as the whitest American who ever lived,” a columnist in Richmond wrote. “For the first time in the history of the old South a colored boy has become the fair-haired child of the masses,” observed a reporter for the Daily News. A few Georgians remembered Joe Jacobs from his run-in with the Ku Klux Klan, and resented Schmeling’s treatment of him. Schmeling had been “immensely popular” in the “corn pone area” after his 1936 win, the News man observed, but clearly that was no longer true, undoubtedly because of his ties to the Nazis. Walter White again wrote to Lowell Thomas, editor of the magazine that had said Louis should never be champion, this time to remind him how wrong it had been. “The public, even in the deep South, has accepted Joe Louis as champion and not only without bitterness but with tremendous enthusiasm,” wrote White, who said he’d polled newspapermen on the topic throughout a recent southern swing. “I probably sound like a professional Pollyanna but I do believe that at least in the field of prizefighting we have inched forward a bit.”

  Preparing Louis for Schmeling became a joint effort. Noting that Louis didn’t retain things very long, Armstrong gave him a refresher course on rushing in and swinging. Even Dempsey, who’d liked Schmeling and written off Louis (and all black boxers) after the 1936 fight, pitched in, almost as if it were his patriotic duty. He paid a clandestine visit to Pompton Lakes, telling Louis how to roll away from punches more easily. He then left the camp, only to order his driver back. “You fight him the way you did the last time and the way you boxed today and you got to get licked again!” he scolded Louis after rejoining him. He then removed his coat. “Move into me!” he’d scolded. “Come on! Move! Bend! Get your tail down! Don’t wait! Start punching!” Louis must have thought he was nuts, Dempsey said, but he didn’t give a damn; he was just trying to help him. And maybe he had.

  Gene Tunney also hovered around the camps, but his role was more ambiguous. As the Mirror reported breathlessly, Tunney had visited Louis in Lafayetteville, also unsolicited and in great secrecy. Together, they watched films of the Schmeling fight, with Tunney pointing out Louis’s mistakes and Schmeling’s flaws. Then he, too, rolled up his sleeves and talked technique, all to help keep the heavyweight crown in the United States. Black newspapers were floored by this revelation, given Tunney’s past hostility to black fighters; only a few months earlier, Tunney had praised Schmeling for “the greatest right hand I ever saw,” and predicted he could “whip Louis tomorrow.” “One of the most liberal and genuine American gestures in the history of boxing,” the Courier called his tutorial. Tunney promptly wired Schmeling, calling the story “ridiculous” and insisting on his neutrality. Schmeling, for one, believed him. “Gene, he not only never fought a Negro fighter, he never had one for a sparring partner,” he explained.

  Tunney, boxing’s house intellectual ever since he had once been caught reading Shakespeare, analyzed the matchup in Connecticut Nutmeg, the weekly magazine
he had just launched with Heywood Broun and others. To him, the fight pitted Louis’s natural gifts against Schmeling’s experience and “spiritual fortification.” Like Gallico and some British writers, Tunney appeared to get a kind of thrill from the new German ardor. “To Schmeling this is not merely another fight for which he will be well paid,” he wrote. “It is a sacred cause and he feels he is the standard bearer of 65 million Germans, a nation of determined people who have inaugurated a new worldwide racial movement. He is their hero, their Hermes who will herald to the world the Nazi supremacy.” Louis was superior mechanically, Tunney conceded, but Schmeling, well, he had something greater: a quasi-religious spark. Hellmis endorsed Tunney’s sentiments enthusiastically; because of its independence, he said, Tunney’s publication “did not have to dance to the tune of Jewish big interests.” Up in Speculator, Schmeling’s handlers professed to be pleased by all the advice Louis was getting; it was certain to confuse him as much as Schmeling’s right had done. Machon asked one reporter to do him a favor: when he reached Pompton Lakes, please encourage Louis to come rushing in like Henry Armstrong; “he would be awkward as a school girl on her first pair of ice skates,” he said.

  A joyous crowd welcomes Schmeling at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, June 26, 1936.

  Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, caught Schmeling and his awestruck claque en route to Berlin, June 26, 1936. Schmeling’s wife, Anny Ondra, is at left.

  Hitler meets with Schmeling’s mother (at left), Ondra, and Schmeling at the Reich’s chancellory, June 27, 1936.

  Left: The documentary Goebbels ordered up of the first Louis-Schmeling fight, Schmeling’s Victory: A German Victory, gave millions of Germans another chance to celebrate.