The weather was iffy. When Mike Jacobs belatedly consulted his Farmers’ Almanac, he saw that June 22 would be “very disappointing.” At his request, around noon a United Airlines meteorologist went up twelve thousand feet and forecast an occasional shower or light mist between six and midnight. Around three o’clock there was indeed a light shower uptown, but barring a downpour, Jacobs decreed, the fight would go on. Both fighters were to report to the stadium by eight, two hours before the scheduled start. Harlem’s streets were jammed. People were wearing their holiday best, and waving red pennants proclaiming JOE LOUIS, WORLD’S CHAMPION. “We were in the land of Louis and his countrymen already were celebrating,” a reporter from Richmond, Virginia, wrote. When Louis’s car stalled in traffic, it was immediately swamped. It arrived at Yankee Stadium half an hour late, and was again engulfed. In the meantime, out-of-town fans kept streaming into Manhattan and up to the Bronx. Holding fight tickets but stuck in Albany until midafternoon, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP begged the conductor to “step on it,” and his train reached Harlem three minutes early. “That good enough for you?” the conductor asked him with a wink. Coming in from Baltimore, Lula Jones Garrett, who was covering Marva for the Afro-American, needed no directions from Pennsylvania Station. “The crowd simply carried you through the gates, up the Eighth Avenue exit, into the sub[way] and into the Stadium,” she wrote. By evening the threat of rain had waned, and the air had cleared. Some 1,700 policemen joined Jacobs’s private army of 1,000, including 675 ushers and 75 ticket takers. Uncle Mike’s mobile ticket offices circled the ballpark, picking off buyers otherwise headed for the scalpers. (Perhaps he’d put them in his newly created rows 9a, 12a, and 15a.) The place was ringed by flags; the swastika was not among them.
Members of the Anti-Nazi League, having failed to convince fight-goers to shun one particular German product, reiterated calls to boycott all the rest. Meantime, the Communists handed out flyers: Usually a sports event is not a matter of “politics.” Far from us to make it so.
But Hitler, and his anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, anti-fair-play pugilist, Schmeling, make this fight a matter of “politics.”
Last time, Hitler played up Schmeling’s victory as an “aryan triumph.” Americans remember, also, Hitler’s personal insults to American athletes in the Olympics.
Schmeling has been a willing tool of Hitler’s propaganda, and has many unsportsmanlike, un-American statements to his discredit.
So if it’s “politics,” let’s tear the mask off!
SCHMELING STANDS FOR NAZISM—
NAZISM MEANS Spy-rings against our Country, pogroms against Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Nazism means bombing and slaughter of innocent Catholic women and children. NAZISM means BARBARISM.
SO WE AMERICANS ALL PULL WITH OUR JOE LOUIS, WIN OR LOSE!
LONG LIVE GOOD, CLEAN AMERICAN SPORTSMANSHIP!
The last line on the flyer provided one more reminder of why the boycott had failed. “READ CRACKERJACK FIGHT NEWS IN TOMORROW’S DAILY WORKER,” it read. People just cared too much. In fact, anyone carrying that day’s Worker into the stadium could have read lots about the fight. “I’d like to see Joe Louis blast Schmeling all over the ring tonight, knock the false bluster and braggodocio [sic] right out of Hitler’s pal much the same as the people of Germany will eventually knock out Hitler,” Lester Rodney had written. “If that sounds like wild overemphasis on a fight between just two men, that’s due only to Schmeling and his Nazi cohorts. They’ve stuck a little swastika right out there on Schmeling’s chin tonight for the greatest hitter of ring history to knock into the thirtieth row along with the wildly screaming Nazi headlines.”
Inside the stadium were hundreds of vendors, all white, and in white uniforms, who had arrived several hours earlier for their assignments, hawking candy, soda, and programs. At a quarter apiece, the programs contained the life stories of the two fighters, along with another profile of Mike Jacobs, a compilation of record gates—this fight instantly took sixth place on the all-time list—and, on the back cover, Joe DiMaggio pushing Camels. (They aided his digestion, he said.) The fans “seemed electrically charged as they went through the turnstiles,” an eyewitness later recalled. Then they found their seats, settling in with the contented sighs of those arriving at the center of the universe in good shape and in plenty of time. The celebrities again came fashionably late, taxing reporters who needed to cram a few names into boldface for the early editions. Popping flashbulbs heralded their arrivals.
General Phelan entered with James Farley and ordered Larry MacPhail, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to move down to make room. Frank Hague, the dictator of Jersey City, and Mayor Edward Kelly of Chicago took their places in the “press rows,” along with other high-muck-a-mucks and plutocrats. Some were Mike Jacobs’s “personal” customers, who paid as much as $500 for the privilege. Alongside them, one by one, were the greatest sportswriters of their generation: Damon Run-yon, Grantland Rice, Frank Graham, Bill Corum, Dan Parker, Murray Lewin, Bob Considine, James Dawson, Richards Vidmer, Joe Williams, Jimmy Powers, Jack Miley, Al Buck, Bill Cunningham, Arch Ward, Anthony Marenghi. Though they didn’t have the choice seats, and few whites would ever know any of their names, the cream of black journalism was there, too: Ed Harris, Al Monroe, Ralph Matthews, and Chester Washington, among others.
Swells from the Brook and the Links clubs, along with the patrons of chic restaurants like “21” and the Colony, arrived en masse; twenty or thirty people from the River Club, all dressed to the nines, came up by boat via the East River, docking not far from the stadium. “A Gatsby sort of atmosphere,” a participant later called it. The evening was cool, with a pleasant breeze, just chilly enough for women to wear a light wrap over their summer finery. The air was filled with the scent of the gardenias that many of the women wore. A group of Germans came in together and occupied a block of seats. At ringside, Tallulah Bankhead and her husband sat in front of four Schmeling fans. Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, wearing the Hope diamond, filed in, escorted by the Herald Tribune’s society columnist, Lucius Beebe. La Guardia was one of the latecomers. J. Edgar Hoover was there, along with his confidant Clyde Tolson. So was Thomas E. Dewey, Manhattan’s crime-busting prosecutor. On the other end of the social spectrum were the people watching from the rooftops beyond center field. Here, too, space was in short supply, by order of the building department, which was concerned with collapses: admission was by rent receipt only, and the police were checking. Atop 831 Gerard Avenue, someone had placed planks between two chairs so that the small fry could peer down into the stadium.
Black fans were again among the first to take their seats, primarily in the bleachers, bringing with them chicken wings, pork chops, and ham sandwiches. Others, the upper crust of a downtrodden people, appeared closer in, and in the same outfits they’d worn to Pompton Lakes. A German paper described the “rich Harlem Negroes and their gem-laden [juwelenbehangen] wives.” Cab Calloway and Bill Robinson were present. So were the Mills Brothers and the Nicholas Brothers, Louis and Henry Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Jimmy Rushing. Duke Ellington had postponed hernia surgery just to come. Jack Johnson sported a derby, a blue serge suit, and a cane. Four of Louis’s siblings came. So did Walter White; he might have been the head of the most important civil rights organization in the country, but he could manage no better than a seat in the upper deck. But at what other function in American society—or American history, for that matter—could Mrs. John Roxborough and Mrs. Julian Black sit just behind Mr. Vincent Astor and his party? “A sea of faces,” the Afro-American society correspondent wrote wondrously. “Black faces, brown faces, ivory faces, white faces: a sea of folk. Richly dressed, shabbily frocked, 98-cent dresses, furs worth a king’s ransom; the elite, the hoi polloi.”
At 8:25 the ring lights went on. Twelve minutes later, the first preliminary bout began. There wouldn’t be time for them all; some would be shunted to after the main event. Mike Jacobs walked around, asking the men in the press rows to take off t
heir hats (the words “no ladies admitted” were stamped on all press tickets). A hundred Western Union wires, seven more than at the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, had been installed. But wires could bear only so much traffic. All night long, foreign correspondents in Warsaw found the international phone lines busy; Louis and Schmeling had them all tied up.
A German reporter watched his American counterparts, sleeves rolled up, cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths, talking into telephones or pecking away at their typewriters. The stadium, he wrote, lay “in an unreal gray haze,” looking like “the open, greedy jaws of an antediluvian beast.” Everything seemed surreal to him, poised somewhere between day and night; tobacco smoke, viscous and heavy, shrouded the giant bowl like fog over a deep ravine. Accustomed to the Teutonic orderliness of the Sportpalast and the Hanseatenhalle, the American-style tumult impressed him. “It is a chaos of voices, an indescribable excitement, a rushing, a chasing, screaming and raving like in a mental asylum,” he wrote later. “The people here behave completely differently than at home. They pull out their hair, they roar ceaselessly, they change their bets after every round (sometimes in the middle of the fight), and they rave in such a manner that after a fight they’re at least as exhausted as the two boxers in the ring.”
The fight appeared sold out, but in fact, paid attendance was only 66,277; even with the freeloaders, employees, and policemen factored in, another 25,000 people could have squeezed into the stadium that night. But most of those who had stayed away, along with sixty million other Americans, were by their radios, awaiting Clem McCarthy. Assisting him this time was Ed Thorgersen, the sports commentator for Fox Movietone News. Listening to them, Radio Guide predicted, would be the largest radio audience in the history of sports, which probably meant the largest radio audience in history. Apart from Hellmis’s German play-by-play, the fight was also being broadcast in Spanish and Portuguese, so much of South America would be listening. Around ten, an NBC announcer thanked Lucky Strike cigarettes for relinquishing the slot normally filled by Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Then, as if to build the momentousness, a second voice came on, greeting listeners on the “NBC coast-to-coast network, Canada and Honolulu.” “And now,” it continued, “light, curtain, the ringside, Yankee Stadium and Ed Thorgersen!” After a few seconds, Thorgersen came on. There was no time for small talk. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, the two principals in the greatest bout in a generation are in the ring,” was all he said.
In Indianapolis, bar owners along Indiana Avenue had moved their radios out to the sidewalk. On the east side of Los Angeles, blacks gathered up and down Central Avenue. W. E. B. DuBois sat listening with a group of professor friends in Atlanta. Eleanor Roosevelt also listened, almost in self-defense; for days now, all she’d heard about was “the fight.” When Jersey Joe Walcott looked out his window in Camden, New Jersey, the streets were deserted. In Chicago, Studs Terkel and his friends stopped rehearsing Waiting for Lefty, hopped into a car parked in front of the theater, and turned on the radio. Woody Guthrie wandered through the central plaza in Santa Fe, where he “listened in at car doors, trucks, stores, hotels, the hot buildings of sun baked mud, to the Indians, Mexicans, farm and ranch hands, to the artists, cowpokes, tourists on all of their radios.” “Let’s not have speaking now,” the governor of Virginia told a convention of undertakers. “Let’s have a radio.” Campaigning for governor of Ohio, John W. Bricker had the good sense to time his talk to the Republicans in Coshocton to end before the opening bell. In Kingston, Jamaica, fight fans too poor to own radios were invited to listen outside the Biltmore House, and to enjoy curried goat afterward. The high school band in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, postponed its summer concert a night. An ill-timed thunderstorm in nearby Neenah made radio reception treacherous. The field hands on Earl Carter’s peanut farm in Plains, Georgia, listened on his porch along with Carter’s eldest son, thirteen-year-old Jimmy.
In a roadhouse near Lake Mashpee on Cape Cod, black Portuguese cranberry pickers prepared to cheer for Louis. The boys at the Broad Channel Baths near Rockaway, New York, left their lindy-hopping girlfriends and, sixteen-ounce beer bottles in hand, went to the parking lot to listen. In the Bronx, fourteen-year-old Arthur Donovan, Jr., sat down by the radio with a bag of peanuts. In Philadelphia, Angelo Dundee, sixteen, went to listen at the local firehouse, while in Detroit, Eddie Futch, destined, like Dundee, to become one of boxing’s most famous trainers, listened in a locked office at the Brewster Center, where the young Louis had once trained. In Lafayette, Alabama, members of Louis’s extended family gathered in a black restaurant. In the Searcy State Hospital for the Negro Insane, Louis’s father listened in bed. In his hand was an autographed picture inscribed, “To my father, Monroe Barrow, from his son, Joe Louis Barrow?” Marva listened on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, in the apartment of a family friend, a steward for the Pennsylvania Railroad. She fiddled with the dial, just “to show she was absolutely composed.”
Anyone scheduling something opposite the fight obviously had to make some accommodations. In Charleston, South Carolina, the Palmetto Theater pledged to interrupt Joy of Living, starring Irene Dunne and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., for as long as the fight lasted. Wrestling fans in Mobile, Alabama—whites in the 40- and 60-cent seats, blacks in the 25-cent ones—were also promised a blow-by-blow account. A black church in Chicago revamped its schedule so that all who ordinarily prayed on Wednesdays “could come and root for Joe.” At a “championship ball” for blacks in Brooklyn, there would be dancing until three, with a short time-out while, as the New York Age put it, Louis “knock[ed] Der Moxie loose from his dental work.” In Manhattan, the Muzak Corporation made plans to pipe in the broadcast to hotels and restaurants serving thirty thousand people on an ordinary night. Throughout crowded apartment blocks radios blared, and with windows open, the broadcast bounced around courtyards and reverberated along empty streets.
Gold and diamond miners listened in the jungles of British Guiana. Jurors at a murder trial in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, had a radio installed where they deliberated. South Africans hoped atmospheric turbulence wouldn’t make Clem McCarthy even less intelligible than he normally was to non-Americans; those who couldn’t understand him would have to wait for the fight extra the Rand Daily Mail planned to publish. Harry, who presided over the New York Bar in Paris, promised patrons he would tune in. “The world will hold you responsible for failure to spot announcers equipped to give sensational account of this epoch making event no kidding,” an anxious Mexican official wired NBC. The fight was not to be broadcast in Italy, the Chicago Daily News reported, perhaps because Mussolini feared embarrassment “should a Negro defeat a Fascist.” And sitting by their Volksemfänger, Germans again awaited Hellmis. A special fight broadcast had begun two hours earlier, at one a.m. Berlin time, featuring some commentary, a statement from Metzner, a reading from Hellmis’s book on Schmeling, and two live bands. A reporter for a Yiddish paper in Warsaw was among those listening. “There was no doubt whatsoever that victory was on their side,” he later wrote; at stake was “the absolute survival and honor of the nation.” Like the other Jews of Warsaw, he was pulling for the “Schvartser Bombardier.” Hitler was reportedly listening at his Bavarian retreat.
Several movie theaters in Berlin planned to play the radio broadcast. In Karlsruhe, a boxing exhibition would carry on until the fight began. The mandatory closing hour for pubs had once more been moved from 3 a.m. to 5:45 a.m., though the anticipation had begun long before then. At around midnight, a reporter for the Angriff motored around Berlin. “Behind the windows in almost every apartment, the lights were burning,” he wrote. “In the west, in the south, in the north; on the Kurfüstendamm, in Friedenau, in Potsdamer Strasse, and around Alex [Alexanderplatz]. We turned on the radio in the car. For the time being, music. Up above, behind the windows, they are just as impatient as us.” He called to wake up a number of people, but they were all up already, and indignant: “‘No time. Listening to the broadcas
t. Call after the fight.’ Click. Hung up!” Though the owner and many regulars were in New York, seats at Schmeling’s table in the Roxy-Bar on Rankeplatz remained at a premium. Sitting there were, among others, Goebbels’s deputy, Hans Hinkel, and the man who directed Schmelings Sieg, Hans Zerlett, along with athletes, actors, and journalists. The only Schmeling on the premises was a cardboard cutout; earlier that evening it had toppled over. Anny Ondra planned to spend this fight night at home, and would spare herself another nerve-racking broadcast. What worried her most, she told the Angriff, was “the murderous American heat,” in which a black man was in his element. Her maid was to listen for her, and give her the results in the morning. At a small bar in the western part of Berlin—and at hundreds like it—a man ordered perhaps his sixth cup of coffee as zero hour approached. At Berlin’s Hildesheimer Yeshiva, members of what would turn out to be Germany’s last crop of rabbinical students, hiding from both the authorities and their rabbi, sat by a crystal set someone had built just for the fight, preparing to pull for Louis. Yet many Jews around them pulled for Schmeling. They still thought of themselves as Germans first.
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