* In the summer of 1910, according to federal agent F. Pigniuolo, he had interviewed Belle Schreiber in Pittsburgh after hearing a rumor that she had traveled with the champion from Washington to Chicago, “but she denied ever having had anything to do with Johnson.” (Report by F. Pigniuolo, November 18, 1912, DOJ File.)
* The black-owned Chicago Broad Ax advised the “red-eyed, shallow-pated Texan” not to try invading Chicago’s black belt without a force many times that size.
* G.B. Aldrich, a black attorney from Tacoma, Washington, writing in the November 23 Indianapolis Freeman, urged a more charitable attitude toward the champion. Negroes were too prone to criticize other Negroes if they fell from favor with whites. “The fact that [Johnson] likes white women is no reflection on the race.” After all, he continued, “most men like fair women; if you don’t believe it just go into the best Negro homes amid the blackest of the most prosperous Negro families and you will find a yellow or almost white woman occupying the leading place of wife.”
† Johnson was referring to a humiliation his accuser had suffered the previous March. Washington had entered the foyer of an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that was home exclusively to whites. There, a white man attacked him with his fists and then chased him down the street beating him with a cane. Sixteen stitches were required to heal the wounds in his scalp. Later, his attacker accused Washington of being a burglar, then of peering at a white woman through the keyhole in her apartment door. Precisely what happened remains unclear: both Washington and his assailant told unconvincing stories. But to Washington’s Negro critics, the incident was the most vivid possible proof that despite a lifetime of accommodationism, when it came down to it, whites would treat even Booker T. Washington as just another black man.
* Klegin tried to make a career of taking American sports to the Old World. He accompanied baseball teams to France and England, introduced “motor polo” to the Continent, and got a lot of publicity in 1915 by claiming to be close to a deal with the Italian government to stage ancient Roman games in the Colosseum or the Baths of Caracalla. Proposed events included a procession of “vestal virgins,” boxing with the cestus, chariot races, and “a sea fight with Carthage in a flooded arena.” The Italian government evidently thought better of it.
* Twelve years later, Bachrach would be Clarence Darrow’s codefense counsel in the celebrated murder-kidnapping case of Leopold and Loeb.
* “Representative Roddenberry … had a surplus of hot air Wednesday, and had to let it out,” said the black-owned Washington Bee on December 13. “Roddenberry is from Georgia, sah! And he doesn’t want a Negro to marry a white woman, and yet many of the Southern crackers still pursue the high yellows whenever they get an opportunity. The colored people of this country are not responsible for the acts of Jack Johnson. Roddenberry’s next move will be to keep Negroes from breathing.”
* Charles Johnson remains something of a mystery. Adopted by Tiny and Henry Johnson before the age of two, he was smaller and frailer than his siblings, often in ill health and forced to wear thick spectacles to see. The champion paid for surgery on his eyes, put him through undertaking school, called him “son.” But relations between them were evidently complicated, and shortly before Johnson’s arrest for kidnapping Lucille Cameron, he’d had Charles arrested for forgery and embezzlement. The younger man’s eagerness to testify against the champion may have been payback.
* For showing Johnson the witness list—and for having a drink at his home—Coy was reprimanded by his superiors but not dismissed. He had been “thoughtless” but not guilty of “wrongdoing.” (Charles DeWoody to A. Bruce Bielaski, May 15, 1913, DOJ File.)
† Kenny, whose real name was Anthony Xenny, had been jailed at least twice, for beating up two newspapermen in 1897 and for stealing a wallet in 1905. He was not an overly cooperative witness. Days before the trial was set to begin, he vanished in Kansas City, Missouri DeWoody frantically wired the Justice Department office there to “arrest and hold [him] if found…. Keep him good-natured.
Suggest [you] try saloons across from Santa Fe Station—Dugan’s or Bill O’Leary’s.” He was found and brought to Chicago in time for Johnson’s trial, but in the end he never testified. (Police Gazette, February 13, 1897; Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1905.)
* Jones was back in business within weeks.
† He found another way to make his feelings known, however. He attached an especially noisy “cutout muffler” to one of his cars and roared through the city streets until he was fined again—for “creating a public nuisance.”
* Fifty-four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court would declare all such laws unconstitutional.
† Since McCarty’s father was a medicine-show peddler who billed himself as “White Eagle, the Indian Doctor,” his eligibility for his title did not bear close examination.
* “Johnson would be foolish to run away,” Benjamin Bachrach told a reporter after hearing that his client was missing. “If, however, it is true that he has left he has a perfect right to do so. The bond he is under does not prevent him from leaving the States or the country. The only condition imposed is that Johnson shall appear in the United States Court of Appeals at the time his case is called there.”
On April 14, 1914, the Circuit Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, would make its ruling. While it refused to overturn the “immoral conduct” counts, it did call for a new trial on the prostitution indictments, citing improper cross-examination, the admission of irrelevant material “regarding whether the defendant exercised his fighting abilities upon women,” and “an overall atmosphere of prejudice.” Johnson was not present to hear this good news, and his absence made him for the first time officially a fugitive from justice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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THE FUGITIVE
WHEN JACK JOHNSON ARRIVED IN Paris in 1911, the French press had greeted him as a conquering hero. Eager reporters stood around his steamy hotel bathroom while he bathed, comparing notes on his physique. This time, they piled into a string of taxis and followed him, his wife, and Gus Rhodes as they drove from hotel to hotel in search of a place willing to rent them rooms. The Grand Hotel turned them away. So did the Ritz and the Elysée Palace, the Excelsior and the Hotel Neuilly. They finally got rooms at the St. Lazare Terminus hotel. Johnson was still a celebrity, but he was also a fugitive.
He did his best to minimize that fact. He had big plans, he said. He and his wife planned to build themselves a cottage in Neuilly that would be headquarters for their new lives in the Old World. He had the recipe for an elixir drawn up by his mother that he hoped to market all over Europe. He also wanted to build a sanitarium for “neurasthenic” people, for whom he had developed a special empathy after his wife’s tragic death. But first, he said, “I must complete my library of all books written about Napoleon. I visit his tomb at least twice a week and on August second I am going to see Waterloo. I am also going often to the opera. I should like to see something by Alexandre Dumas played, as I have read all his works.” He planned to apply to become a naturalized citizen of France. “My ambition has always been to live in France, but I am very melancholy in my mind, for I shall never again see the land of my birth.” Meanwhile, he was going to appear for twelve evenings at the Folies-Bergère and use the daylight hours to star in a motion picture called Jack Johnson’s Adventures in Paris. (Its provocative title promised more than the film would deliver, but it did give the champion a chance to show how well he and Lucille could dance the Grizzly Bear.)
In London, where he began a music hall tour in August, crowds still followed him everywhere—and to insure that they did, one eyewitness noted, he sometimes stood on “prominent street corners” until enough people had gathered around him to start his stroll. But the executive committee of the Variety Artists’ Federation urged that no member of the federation appear onstage with him because, as the editors of the London Times put it, “Johnson
’s engagements in the existing circumstances are a question of public decency.” Even the normally friendly Mirror of Life and Boxing World couldn’t resist asking, “Isn’t it rather remarkable that in his three visits to England, Jack has brought a different Mrs. Johnson every time?”
He rented a furnished flat in the West End and, wearing “a gay frock coat” and “giving full display to his diamonds,” invited reporters in for tea to see if he couldn’t calm things down. “Take anybody educated with a brain, properly developed—those who know Jack Johnson—they know he isn’t the fellow they read about,” he said.
The people in Paris—the select people—know Jack is a loyal, true fellow. As for the music hall people they will soon come around and will be the first to lend a pal a hand. And as to that conviction in the United States, why, when the jury was selected I leaned across to my lawyer, and said, “My boy, eleven of those men are for life conviction and the other is for hanging before hearing the evidence.” If you could only have seen those jurymen! They were the sort of people to give you two years for drinking cider.
Did he plan to fight Sam Langford?
“No, I am going to draw the color line like some other actors.”
The reporters laughed.
The music hall audiences gave him a mixed reception. At the Euston Theatre of Varieties, for example, two actresses known to have opposed Johnson’s appearance were booed off the stage, but as soon as he himself appeared men seated in the boxes who had been silent until that moment hissed and jeered so loudly he gave up trying to speak and retreated behind the curtain.
The next day, the tenth marquess of Queensberry, son of the Scottish peer who lent his name to the rules of modern boxing, wrote an open letter to the London Daily Express offering a carefully qualified defense of the American visitor. Johnson was not actually at fault, he said. The real issue was the inexplicable lack of laws to keep black and white boxers from facing each other in the ring.
As regards Johnson’s domestic affairs, again we get back to exactly where we started, the problem of black and white. Why is not a law passed in all civilized countries forbidding these marriages? Until this is done what reason was there that Johnson should not marry [Lucille Cameron]? Perhaps if the truth were known it is in all the circumstances the most decent thing he has ever done.
We pride ourselves in this country on fair play. Give the man fair play and take on yourselves, you the great public, the lawmakers, the blame for the present state of affairs.
Give the devil his due. Johnson is not the principal sinner. It is the people who with both hands have held the cup to his mouth—the cup which bore wine which begets vanity, greed, and passion—and who now despise him because he is drunk with the wine they themselves concocted for him and gave him.
By fall, Johnson was back on the Continent. Gus Rhodes was now his uncle’s road manager, sometime trainer, and full-time press agent, assigned to provide reassuring reports to the readers of the Chicago Defender that all was well with their hero. His first story, datelined Vienna, appeared in October. “Besides giving boxing exhibitions,” Rhodes reported, “[the champion] and Mrs. Johnson do the tango and the audience goes wild. They are called back again and again.” Johnson was being paid five thousand dollars a week, Rhodes wrote, and was “rumored” to be worth two million. “He is being shown the greatest courtesy and especially entertained by aristocracy. All eyes are on him when he and his wife are out driving along the boulevards.”
Six weeks later, Rhodes reported, the Johnsons were packing the Orpheum Theater in Budapest. A boxing tournament was staged in the champion’s honor at Budapest University, “which is six times larger than the Chicago University.” Wherever Johnson traveled, Rhodes continued,
his headquarters are where the noblemen and lords are seen daily and they treat him as they do their fellowmen…. There is no discrimination against the colored man [in Europe]. When one sees how like a man he is treated here, he wonders why he remains in America to be treated as serfs. Johnson is in Europe to enjoy his freedom. Who can blame him?*
Johnson always did enjoy his freedom wherever he happened to be, but in reality he was now scuffling. Rhodes had grossly exaggerated how much money he was being paid and how much he still had in the bank. His flight had forced him to forfeit his bond. Belgium had banned him. His show now included strongman feats: spinning audience volunteers round and round while they hung from his neck; allowing three at a time to stand on his belly; stopping two horses with chains clamped to his biceps. In November, back in Paris, he took part in staged wrestling matches at a Montmartre music hall called the Nouveau Cirque. His opponents—the “Great Uhrbach” from Germany; André Sproul, the “Savage Siberian”; and a Scot named Jemmy Esson—didn’t matter much. Crowds came to see Jack Johnson lose his temper at their wicked tactics and lay them out with a choreographed roundhouse swing. By the third match, some people had seen through the theatrics and began pelting the ring with vegetables.
Johnson’s personal reputation was already badly tarnished. Now his reputation as a fighter had begun to crumble as well. That month, the French Boxing Federation declared the world’s heavyweight title vacant. There were two reasons, its director, the Paris promoter Theodore Vienne explained: Johnson had been sentenced to prison in his own country, and more important, he seemed unwilling to face serious challengers, “notably Sam Langford.” To reassert his ownership of the title—and to make some money—Johnson hastily agreed to face “Battling” Jim Johnson, a black journeyman, in Paris in December, and to take on Frank Moran, a white hope from Pittsburgh, in the same city the following month.
The champion’s bout with Jim Johnson was to be the first-ever heavyweight title contest between black boxers—it would also be the last for more than a quarter of a century—but it did not turn out to be much of a fight. Because Jim Johnson shared the champion’s last name and was also said to come from Galveston, some British reporters suggested that the two men must be related. They weren’t, but in the weeks before the fight, the challenger—who was tall and dark and, like the champion, shaved his scalp—had a fine time signing “Jack Johnson” in autograph books proffered by worshipful but confused Parisians. If Jack Johnson really did want to remain history’s sole black heavyweight titleholder, as some papers insisted he did, a fight with Jim Johnson was a pretty safe bet. Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford might conceivably have beaten the champion: Jeannette had at least held his own with Johnson over their ten matches, and Langford had grown in size, skill, and punching power over the seven years since their first encounters in Massachusetts. But Jim Johnson wasn’t in their class: he’d lost almost half of his thirty-three fights. Fireman Jim Flynn and Joe Jeannette had beaten him; Al Kaufmann and Sam McVey had knocked him out.
When the two men met at the Nouveau Cirque on December 19, nothing much happened for two rounds. Both were counterpunchers, and Battling Jim seemed especially wary. In the third, the champion launched an attack that sent the younger man reeling. Then, for no apparent reason, he pulled back. There were cries of “Fake!” Some customers called for their money back. In fact, the champion had fractured his left forearm slamming the challenger’s head and had to fight the next seven rounds with just one hand, clinching whenever he could. At the end, it was the younger man who was breathing hard. The referee declared the bout a draw. The crowd, unaware of Johnson’s injury, hissed both men. “A terrific hubbub marked the conclusion of a wholly unsatisfactory encounter,” the London Times reported. “The audience dispersed, continuing to express its disapproval of the whole proceedings.” Johnson walked away with just a little over one thousand dollars. His contest with Frank Moran would have to be postponed until spring.
On January 22, 1914, he was at ringside in Paris, watching two Frenchmen go at each other, when an American named C. F. Bertelli tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he could have a word with him between rounds. Johnson agreed. Bertelli explained that he was a stringer for the Chicago Examiner. The pap
er had run a series of sensational stories over the past few days suggesting that Johnson had paid twenty-five thousand dollars in bribes to federal officials in order to be allowed to flee the country. He’d been sent to ask Johnson whether or not these tales were true. Johnson grinned. They were indeed, he said, and dictated a statement for the paper.
I am delighted that some people in Chicago are beginning to be awake to the fact that I have been shamefully treated and am the victim of blackmailing officials in that city.
Just before I got away I handed $20,000 to Roy Jones, who said he was sent to me by a man named DeWoody, who represented Harry Parkin, Assistant District Attorney.
DeWoody and Parkin used to frequent my saloon during the early part of my trouble in Chicago. They were accommodated in a private room back of my saloon.
In various sums I paid out this way a total of $25,000. I am going back to see the thing through when the time is ripe (and I think that will be soon) and prove the case was a put-up job against me.
The truth was finally out, he said. He could hardly wait to get home and tell his wife.
The story had broken in the Examiner on January 18. Mrs. Sol Lewinsohn, the wife of the shady South Side bondsman and fixer who, Johnson claimed, had acted as his go-between and then disappeared, had gone to U.S. District Attorney James H. Wilkerson and demanded that he launch a grand jury investigation. She had check stubs, she said, proving that her husband had paid money to federal officials, including Assistant District Attorney Parkin, Bureau of Investigation chief DeWoody, and U.S. Commissioner Mark Foote before whom defendants in need of bondsmen appeared, and the man who had set bail for Lucille Cameron. Wilkerson agreed to a hearing. Most of the case had no bearing on Jack Johnson. Mrs. Lewinsohn’s real object was to bloody the federal officials most likely to prosecute her husband for embezzling from his bank. And everyone she and Johnson charged with wrongdoing denied it categorically. DeWoody called the charges “absurd.” Parkin said he’d never taken a dollar. Roy Jones said Johnson was just out to get even with him for having testified about the beating of Etta Duryea—though he also thought his old friend had “got a dirty deal somewhere.” Stung by the champion’s new charges, an angry Department of Justice now threatened to have him extradited on a charge of “conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice.”
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