Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  If it was possible, Louis-worship reached new heights. A black minister in Mobile wrote that God had strengthened Louis as He had already empowered Samson, David, and Elijah. Even Jack Johnson called Louis’s victory “a great fight by a great champion.” (But some blacks weren’t quite ready to allow “Lil’ Arthur” aboard the Louis bandwagon. “He is one of the worst we have and any paper that would even print his death notice should not have our support,” one Maryland woman wrote.) There were more Louis poems and songs, including Bill Gaither’s “Champ Joe Louis (King of the Gloves),” recorded the day after the bout.

  I came all the way from Chicago

  To see Joe Louis and Max Schmeling fight

  I came all the way from Chicago

  To see Joe Louis and Max Schmeling fight.

  Schmeling went down like the Titanic

  When Joe gave him just one hard right.

  Even after Louis’s day was done, James M. Reid wrote in the Defender, “[H]is spirit will stalk the world—everywhere black men shall dwell, carrying a message of inspiration to youths reminding them of their fine lineage and of one who sought right and justice for a race.” But perhaps the greatest encomium came from a headline in the Pittsburgh Courier: DUKE ELLINGTON RATED JOE LOUIS OF MUSIC, it declared. It all got to be too much to one black woman. “I have been a reader of the Afro for years but I will have to give it up if I keep reading about Joe Louis,” she complained to the paper.

  The white press featured fewer grand pronouncements, but there were some. Heywood Broun conceded that a fight was just a fight, but prophe-sized that “even the tiniest hint that the Nazi bark is more than the Nazi bite could possibly loose a train of consequences…. And one hundred years from now, some historian may theorize, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi prestige began with a left hook delivered by a former unskilled automobile worker who had never studied the policies of Neville Chamberlain and had no opinion whatsoever in regard to the situation in Czechoslovakia.” The world would rejoice “not so much that Schmeling himself was battered to wreckage,” wrote Elmer Ferguson of the Montreal Herald, “but that the arrogant, bold ideals Schmeling stands for, the ideals of intolerant superiority of birth and blood, the ideals that fire and steel must prevail, the complete indifference to personal rights and liberties, are all rebutted by this quiet young negro who was born the descendant of slaves in a little cabin on a southern cotton plantation.”

  “With the defeat of the boxing Hitler envoy, the whole Nazi blabber about race becomes the joke of the world,” said a German émigré paper in New York. It also ridiculed Schmeling’s foul claim. “It doesn’t prove any ‘moral superiority’ of the superman that he now tries to sell the world a new myth of a stab in the back, just as the Nazis did regarding the—for now—last World War,” it said. The Philadelphia Record marveled not only that a black man was heavyweight champion, but that he was so popular among all Americans. “Grandfather wouldn’t have believed that possible,” the paper said. “But grandfather may have been wrong about a number of things, including the rate at which America was progressing toward tolerance.” Several Americans sent Hitler derisive telegrams after the fight; “Our sympathies on the disgraceful showing Herr Max made tonight,” said one.

  Of course, though Louis had beaten Schmeling, he still could not beat all the stereotypes. R. M. Hitt, Jr., of the Charleston News and Courier, who had predicted Louis would be “a scared nigger” when he saw Schmeling’s fists, confessed error. Instead, his Louis was “like a tiger which had been kept in a cage without food for two years while succulent hunks of beef dangled in the air just out of reach”; when the bell rang, “the door to the cage was flung open.” Somehow this barbarism coexisted with laziness and indolence. “Joe Louis, the lethargic, chicken-eating young colored boy, reverted to his dreaded role of the ‘brown bomber’ tonight,” was how Lewis Achison of The Washington Post began his account of the fight. “It is nothing for us to weep about and seek white hopes,” wrote General Hugh Johnson, the head of Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. “These black boys are Americans—a whole lot more distinctly so than more recently arrived citizens of say, the Schmeling type. There should be just as much pride in their progress and prowess under our system as in the triumph of any other American. For all their misfortunes and shortcomings they are our people—Negroes, yes, but our Negroes.”

  Bill Corum said Louis was the greatest fighter he’d ever seen, or expected to see. “Somebody’ll beat him,” he wrote. “But nobody will ever beat the Louis you saw last night.” One of Louis’s most persistent critics, Davis Walsh, called the fight “the greatest exhibition of punching that I and Max Schmeling ever saw.” “Probably he punches faster and harder than any heavyweight that ever lived,” wrote Hemingway. Characteristically, Frank Graham of the Sun put it most elegantly. “The ring may have seen a greater fighter than Joe Louis, but it never saw a greater one over a span of little more than two minutes than he was at the Yankee Stadium last night,” he wrote. For Schmeling, on the other hand, there was little but contempt, both as a boxer and as a man. “Schmeling was worse than Kingfish Levinsky,” Jimmy Powers wrote. “I’m undecided whether Joe put up a great fight or Max an awful one. Probably a little of both.” Gene Tunney called Schmeling “just pathetic.” That very week, the pitcher Johnny Vander Meer of the Cincinnati Reds had thrown consecutive no-hitters; now, someone cracked, Schmeling had tossed a third. The Charlotte Observer theorized that the notoriously anti-Semitic Der Stürmer would now claim the Jews had poisoned Schmeling, shone blinding lights into his eyes, and pelted him with kosher food. The Herald Tribunes Caswell Adams predicted that when Schmeling returned to Germany, “he’ll find that he had a grandfather named Goldberg.”

  O. B. Keeler, the Atlanta sportswriter who had denigrated Louis from the outset, was now simply resigned to a black champion; after all, he noted, “our fastest runners are colored boys, and our longest jumpers, and highest leapers.” But most southern editorialists were more generous. “The colored people do not win many great victories, and when they do win in a fisticuff in New York or a foot race in Berlin, we don’t grudge it to them,” the News and Courier in Charleston said. “No intelligent person, of whatever color, is likely to claim that this proves Alabama negro stock is superior to Aryan stock, but the situation appeals to the American sense of humor and love of fair play,” the Huntsville (Alabama) Times said.

  The outcome prompted mirth and contempt from various Jewish papers. It was just like World War I, the New York Yiddish daily Morgn-zhurnal opined: the Germans were great at delivering punches, but when the Allies fought back they’d “lost all of their courage, lifted their hands high and screamed, ‘Kamerad!’” Schmeling had taken the blows, but the Führer had taken it squarely in the “philosophy,” said the Forverts. “If only Schmeling’s collapse can be taken as a portent of the weakness of Nazism as a whole, our troubles are almost over,” the Jewish Times editorialized.

  The Communists, too, rejoiced in Louis’s win. If Neville Chamberlain had stood up to Hitler over Austria and the brewing conflict over the Czech Sudetenland the way Louis had to Schmeling, several papers commented, the world would be a safer place. Lester Rodney marveled at the Nazis’ idiocy—how on Schmeling’s exposed chin “they stuck the whole stupid myth of ‘Aryan’ supremacy for a member of one of the ‘non-Aryan’ races to swing at.” “The Negro sent the ‘pureblooded Aryan’ down for the count,” declared Izvestia in Moscow. In Poland, there was widespread satisfaction over German embarrassment. A newspaper in Lodz recalled how the Nazis had touted Schmeling’s win two years earlier as the triumph of intellect over brute strength. If that were really true, it said, Thomas Mann, Bruno Walter, Freud, and Einstein would now be running Germany, and the world wouldn’t have to fear another war. Poland’s Jews reacted more emotionally. What the fight proved, the principal Polish-language Jewish daily declared, was that Jews must recognize the symbolic value of sports, and stop treating its
athletes as stepchildren. “Let’s not disrespect good fists, developed muscles and everything that is not intellectual,” it said. In the same paper, a Jewish poet named Wladys-law Szlengel wrote a poem.*

  Hey Louis! You probably don’t know

  What your punches mean to us

  You, in your anger, punched the Brown Shirts

  Straight in their hearts—K.O.

  A Jewish boy in Katowice cut out a photograph of Schmeling at Louis’s feet that appeared in a local newspaper and placed it in the mailbox of the German consulate.

  The fight was front-page news in Tokyo. In Britain, it got bigger play than the death of the queen’s mother. In Johannesburg, fans snapped up the “special fight edition” of the Rand Daily Mail. HITLER’S RACISM KNOCKED OUT LIKE LIGHTNING, a paper in Buenos Aires stated.†

  “A terrible defeat,” Goebbels wrote in his diary the day after the fight. “Our newspapers had reckoned too much on victory. Now the entire nation is depressed. I’ll send an encouraging telegram to Schmeling and flowers to Anny Ondra. They could both use that now.” Contrary to much that was written later, Schmeling and Ondra remained in good official odor, even if he was understandably less lionized and conspicuous than before. Schmeling could expect a perfectly respectful reception in Germany if he wanted one. Hitler, who had not listened to the fight but had awakened in the middle of the night and asked for the result, was said to be both “extremely depressed” and to have received the news “philosophically.” The “triumphal entry through a beflagged Berlin” that had been planned for Schmeling, culminating in a meeting with the Führer, now had to be scuttled, though it was said that Hitler would still see him upon his return.

  At eleven on the morning after the fight, the Polyclinic Hospital issued its first bulletin on Schmeling’s condition. He had a fracture on the transverse process of the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, with a hemorrhage of the lumbar muscles. Schmeling would recover, but would have to spend three weeks in the hospital. Word of the diagnosis spread far more slowly than the inevitable rumors that Schmeling had either died—NBC had to broadcast a bulletin denying it—or been irreparably maimed. Once again, concerned fight fans jammed newspaper and radio switchboards. New York’s municipal radio station urged listeners to stop calling the hospital, whose emergency services were threatened by the deluge. The Times took more than two thousand calls that afternoon and evening, and newspapers elsewhere reported similar experiences. “It seemed as if everyone in Jacksonville had heard that the German had suffered a fatal injury,” the local paper reported. Germany, too, was rife with rumors. “It was impossible even for a minute to put down the telephone receiver,” the Angriff noted.

  Enormous crowds soon gathered outside the hospital. By four-thirty p.m. the day after the fight, the entrance and lobby were so crowded that the police had to be summoned. Inside, immobilized in an upraised bed, Schmeling received a few visitors: Machon, Joe Jacobs, General Phelan of the boxing commission, Hellmis. Schmeling and Machon persisted with the foul charge, but said they would not file a protest. Ondra reassured her husband that Germany had not turned on him, describing the torrent of letters, flowers, and calls she had received. “It’s terrible that punches like that are permitted,” she told the German press. She made plans to travel to the United States, but canceled them once doctors authorized Schmeling to return via the Bremen, which was leaving New York in less than two weeks, provided he remained immobilized during the passage. The Daily News managed to sneak a photographer into Schmeling’s room and splashed a picture of the pajama-clad patient, looking demoralized and weak, on its front page. Some cynics suspected Schmeling was faking it, either in league with the Nazis or to protect himself from them. ‘MAX’ INJURY A RUSE TO FOOL HITLER, read a headline in the Chicago Times. An unnamed doctor told the Forverts that the German could walk out of the hospital if he wanted to. Seeking to set things straight, the Jacobses prevailed upon the hospital to release Schmeling’s X-rays, which promptly appeared on the front pages of several newspapers. To those who could read them, they showed that Schmeling’s injuries were quite real.

  Joe Jacobs lobbied for a third fight, but only halfheartedly. “Max didn’t go out of his way to get me in the corner,” he admitted. All around, it was a bad time for him. For services rendered to the Reich, Parker wrote, Hitler would now place Jacobs in charge of all concentration camps for Jews. “Disowned by his race because he sold them out for an office boy’s job with Schmeling, Jacobs cuts a rather sorry figure today,” Parker opined. “His meal ticket gone, Yussel will have to find himself another racket because he has worn out his welcome in the fight game. Maybe, through his pull with Herr Goebbels, he could get a job as a photographer on Der Angriff.” Writing in the B’nai B’rith Messenger, Irv Kupcinet called Jacobs “the sorriest figure in sportdom.”

  Two days after the fight, Ambassador Dieckhoff checked in on his most famous invalid. Mike Jacobs also visited, though perhaps only because Schmeling owed him $40,000; three times, Schmeling had left the country without paying taxes, and Jacobs had footed the bill. At one point, Machon and Uncle Mike got into a shouting match; Jacobs vowed that if Schmeling ever fought for him again, he would deal with him directly, and not through mouthpieces. “He is his own manager and has been for a long time,” he said. Contrary to another hoary myth, Louis was not among those stopping by nor even attempting to do so. “No, I ain’t going over to see him,” he explained. “I just guess he was just the only man I ever been mad at. Sorry if he’s hurt, tha’s all. I don’t like to hurt nobody.” Instead, Louis and his advisers dashed off a note and sent it by messenger to Western Union. “Wishing you good luck and hope you are not seriously hurt,” it said. That was enough.

  Goebbels’s ministry quickly tried to distance itself from the debacle, insisting that it had always counseled caution on all fight coverage. “The newspapers now only have themselves to blame if they’ve made fools of themselves,” it declared. Having gone so far out on a limb, the state-controlled press could hardly pretend the fight hadn’t happened, or bury fight-related stories in the back pages. Schmeling himself, meantime, was to remain praiseworthy. “It is entirely clear that Schmeling continues to have our sympathies,” the orders stated. On the streets of Berlin, some professed indifference to the outcome. On the Berlin underground, a man was overheard to say he felt bad about Schmeling’s ordeal. “Yes, Schmeling may have been almost killed,” his friend replied, “but Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony still lives on.” A South African paper, however, described Berlin as “dumbfounded” by the outcome. Only two papers published their planned fight extras, it said; the rest “were canceled in disgust.” A Frankfurt paper offered its own absurd explanation: “The reports from New York were so contradictory that we, in the interest of accurate coverage, decided not to publish a special edition.”

  Throughout the Reich, conspiracy talk was rife; many believed that Louis had had lead or cement in his gloves. So was racial stereotyping. “Neger und Elefanten vergessen Prügel nie!” the saying went: Negroes and elephants never forget a beating! But good sportsmanship was to be the official Nazi party line. All talk of fouls and all denigration of Louis were forbidden; perhaps this was why Schmeling dropped the charge so fast. Schmeling was officially decreed to be the victim of a bad break. And Schmeling, moreover, was not Germany; there was to be no talk about loss of national prestige. The image of Schmeling the tenacious, impeccable sportsman who had shown Germany how to persevere and prevail over all obstacles lived on, at least for now. For many years Schmeling’s victories had made the Germans “proud and happy,” one paper declared. Now, it said, Germans had to “show we can be fair losers.” Newspapers wished him a speedy recovery and promised him a gracious welcome home.

  A few German papers gave Louis, or Louis’s advisers, some credit. “Schmeling seems not to have reckoned with the tactics of Louis who apparently was brilliantly advised,” one wrote. Schmeling, the Angriff noted, was simply not up to an attack from someone nine
years younger. But despite the officially sanctioned good manners, there was plenty of scapegoating and stereotyping. A few days earlier, the German press said Schmeling couldn’t lose; now it insisted he never could have won. Schmeling hadn’t lost because Louis was a superman, but because “certain American profiteers”—the Jews, of course—had made him wait for a fight to which he’d been entitled. Under such circumstances, it would have been miraculous if he’d prevailed. In other ways, too, it hadn’t been a fair fight; for one thing, Louis wasn’t quite human. He “attacked like an animal,” with an “animal-like will to annihilate,” Box-Sport said. The fight hadn’t been between two men, but two species; all of Schmeling’s evolutionary advantages—craft, experience, intelligence, will—had been nullified by the primitive biological edge of “an uncontrolled half-savage.”

  Others insisted, notwithstanding Goebbels’s edict, that Louis’s punches had been dirty and deliberate. “To be beaten by such means is not dishonorable,” a Freiburg paper said. “Such an ending fits the image we had of the Negro Joe Louis all along, although we never spoke about it out of a feeling of athletic chivalry toward the American sports community.” Last time, Louis had merely tried to stave off the inevitable by fouling; this time, he had succeeded. The paper discouraged talk of a third fight; who could guarantee that Louis would not cheat yet again, putting Schmeling’s health at risk? “We gladly leave to the Americans world championships that are won this way,” it concluded. On June 24, the propaganda ministry moved to control the story more tightly, and to tamp it down. “It is time to have the subject of Schmeling disappear from the first two pages of the newspapers,” it directed. Newspaper editors threw in the towel as quickly as Machon had. Virtually overnight, a story that had dominated the German press for weeks, first excitedly and then either ruefully or indignantly, all but disappeared.