All Blood Runs Red

by Phil Keith

  John Arthur “Jack” Johnson was born in 1878 and grew up around Galveston, Texas. One of nine children of hardworking former slaves, he was a scrawny and rather skinny child. He had two older sisters who did any fighting necessary to protect their little brother. Totally opposite of Bullard’s experiences as a child, Johnson recalled that everyone around his family in Galveston was so poor it didn’t matter if they were black or white. He ran, in fact, with a gang of “white boys” until he was a teenager and recalled being in the homes of many of his white friends, dining with them, playing with them, going to church and school with them.

  By the time Johnson was sixteen he had had enough of working low-paying laborer jobs in Galveston. He struck out for, of all places, New York City, just to see what the “big city” was all about. Having done some sparring and a little recreational boxing, he gravitated to working in a Manhattan gym, and roomed for a time with Joe Walcott, a welterweight from the West Indies, who introduced him around. This was not the more famous, and later, “Jersey Joe” Walcott but was the same fighter that had once gone twenty rounds with the Dixie Kid.

  At the age of twenty, Johnson entered the ring for the first time as a professional, back in Galveston, and beat a fellow named Charley Brooks, in fifteen rounds, for the “Texas State Middleweight” title—even though prizefighting was illegal in the state at that time. A second bout, in 1901, resulted in both fighters being arrested. A bail of $5,000 was set, which neither man could fork over. As a compromise, the sheriff would let the men out at night if they would spar, in jail, during the day, and allow crowds to watch. After three weeks of this, the local grand jury threw out the case. Johnson later credited his “jail time” with the success of his career.

  In 1903, Johnson won his first official title, defeating “Denver Ed” Martin for the World Colored Heavyweight Championship. Over the next few years he won several more fights, and successfully defended his title, but he could not claim the “real” world title until he beat the white man who actually held the belt at that time, a Canadian by the name of Tommy Burns.

  Burns finally agreed to the fight, in 1908, after getting a guarantee of $30,000. The contest took place in Sydney, Australia, in front of twenty thousand screaming fans. The fight lasted fourteen rounds but was stopped by the police who feared the nearly all-white crowd was getting too agitated about watching a black man pummel their favored white champion. The referees settled the contest—to the amazement of the world—in Johnson’s favor.

  Almost overnight, Johnson became the most famous black man on the planet. He kept beating white challengers, one after another. Racial animosity demanded a “Great White Hope” to bring this black upstart down. That “hope” arose in the return of the former undefeated world champion James J. Jeffries. He had retired in 1904 and was happy farming his alfalfa fields. He had also gained one hundred pounds since his retirement. White promoters were so anxious to bring Johnson down, that they finally got Jeffries to agree to a fight with an offer of $120,000 (about $3.2 million in today’s currency). It was a staggering and unheard-of amount for a fight. What did Jeffries have to lose? Well, one hundred pounds, to start, which he did, and then he entered the ring on July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, in front of a huge crowd.

  The odds on Jeffries were reported to be 10-7. Tension was so high that the entire arena was ringed with police who did not allow any alcohol, fans who had consumed too much alcohol, or guns. Enormous amounts of money had been wagered on the fight. Using his trademark style of dodging his opponent until he had tired him out, Johnson knocked Jeffries down for the first time in his professional career, then knocked him down again. The fight went fifteen rounds and then Jeffries’s corner threw in the towel. This “Fight of the Century,” as it had been billed, earned Johnson $65,000, or well over a million in today’s dollars. It was a stunning blow to racism. Alas, it also resulted in race riots erupting all over the country. Cities like New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Houston, New Orleans and more saw riots that injured hundreds of people. Twenty people actually died in the clashes.

  What racism couldn’t do in the ring to bring Johnson down it finally did outside the arena. In 1912, Johnson was tried and convicted on trumped-up charges of violating the notorious Mann Act. It was alleged that he had crossed state lines, with a white woman, “for immoral purposes.” An all-white jury in the courtroom of Judge “Kennesaw Mountain” Landis (the future commissioner of Major League Baseball) convicted Johnson and sentenced him to a year and a day in jail. Johnson’s response was to skip his bail, flee to Canada disguised as a member of a Negro league baseball team, and sail to France. Johnson would live the next seven years of his life in European exile, boxing, and that’s where he met and befriended Eugene Bullard.

  Unlike the larger-than-life Jack Johnson, Bullard knew his limitations, and accepted them. He knew how fortunate he had been to get as far as he had. His heart was not set on becoming a world champion. His only overriding goal, using boxing as a means to an end, was to settle in France, and that was, by early 1914, at long last, finally going to happen.

  * * *

  1 He would be awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire for his aerial heroics, and his bravery only enhanced his boxing career, which lasted until 1927. Like Gene Bullard, he would become a very successful club owner, and even a part-time movie actor. He died of a heart attack at age eighty-one in 1975.

  2 All Blood Runs Red, Eugene Bullard’s unpublished autobiography, 1960.

  3 Pickaninny (also picaninny, piccaninny or pickinniny) is a racist American slang term referring to dark-skinned children of African descent. Its origin may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino, a diminutive version of the word pequeno, “little.”

  4

  “BON POUR LE SERVICE”

  Bullard’s few days here and there performing in Paris with Miss Belle’s “Picks” gave the young expatriate his first, tantalizing tastes of the fabled France he had so long sought. As soon as he returned to London, he began haranguing the Dixie Kid about arranging fights in Paris. The Kid was game to give it a try, so in November 1913, the Dixie Kid and the Sparrow gave their first exhibitions there. Actual bouts followed, also featuring Sam Langford, Bob Scanlon, Blink McCloskey, and Jack Johnson.

  These initial fights brought the Dixie Kid and Bullard into the orbits of Sam McVey and Joe Jeanette. These two pros, both heavyweights, had been leaders in popularizing the sport of boxing in France during the previous decade. Like Johnson, McVey (sometimes listed as “McVea”) and Jeanette had done very well in the United States but saw their possibilities blocked by the color barrier. Both men, at different times, would win the World Colored Heavyweight Championship, but after Johnson beat Jim Jeffries, neither boxer could get a shot at another white fighter. The possibility that white “favorites” could be beaten by more than one black man made bouts impossible to even think of, much less promote.

  Jeanette and McVey brought English-style boxing into the French arenas in contrast to “La boxe Française,” which was little more than street fighting where kicking was legal and gloves were not worn (much like today’s mixed martial arts fights). The two men, who were actually good friends, had fought several times, including twice in Paris in 1909. On February 20, McVey beat Jeanette on points. The April 17 rematch, at the Cirque de Paris, in front of a sold-out crowd of twenty-five thousand, became the longest fight in boxing history, going an incredible fifty rounds. After three and a half hours of pummelings and knockdowns, McVey’s trainer finally realized that his man’s left wrist was broken, and he threw in the towel.

  After memorable bouts like these, French-style boxing was finished. The much more entertaining English style took over, and a flood of very good English, American, Australian, and Canadian fighters flocked to the Continent.

  Bob Scanlon, a member of McVey’s entourage, hailed originally from Mobile, Alabama. Scanlon’s main
claim to boxing fame was a powerful right hand. Many of his opponents felt it at one time or another, and Blink McCloskey was once hit so hard by Scanlon that he went out cold for thirty minutes. Scanlon would reappear in Gene Bullard’s life on several occasions, especially in both world wars.

  Sam Langford, although born in Canada, grew up in and around Boston; thus, the colorful nickname of the “Boston Tar Baby.” Over a very long career, more than 250 professional fights, he scored an impressive 180 wins, 128 of them knockouts. He has been called the “Greatest Fighter Nobody Knows,” and a number of boxing historians place him in the top five fighters in boxing history. He beat, at one time or another, McVey, Jeanette, and the Dixie Kid. He narrowly lost, on points, the World Colored Heavyweight title to Jack Johnson in 1906.

  McCloskey’s real name was Louis Silverman, and he was a Jewish kid from Philadelphia. His journeyman boxing career lasted from 1906 until 1921. Winning about as much as he lost, he was respected for his persistence and powerful punches. He got his nickname of “Blink” because he actually had a glass right eye, the result of damage in the ring. The injuries were so severe that the eye had to be surgically removed. To the amusement—or sometimes the horror—of each opponent, before a fight, he’d carefully remove his glass eye, hand it to the referee for safekeeping and proceed to box. That he won any fights at all with his degraded depth perception was something of a miracle. McCloskey would come to play an important role in Bullard’s life in Paris, after World War I, and in a different occupation.

  These men, all boxers of great renown in their time, formed the core of a new wave of French boxing promotion and exhibition in the days immediately before the Great War. The press in France called it “Toujours l’invasion Americaine.” Bullard became part of that “invasion” in early November 1913, when he won a twenty-round contest at the Élysée Montmartre against the French boxer Georges Forrestal.

  From that moment forward, he was determined to find a way to live, work, and stay forever in Paris. When the Dixie Kid and a few members of his boxing clan returned to London, Bullard was told that a series of fights had been arranged for him in England over the next few months. For him, that was dismal news. He told the Dixie Kid, “I could never be happy for the rest of my life unless I could live in France.”

  Reluctantly, the Kid let Bullard go. Without any arranged fights in France, he returned to Miss Belle and toured with the Picks again from that December until the spring of 1914. When the troupe left Paris, Bullard stayed behind. He finally picked up a few bouts, sparred with other boxers and took jobs interpreting for other fighters. He hung out with McCloskey, Langford, Scanlon, and Jack Johnson, all of whom looked out for and tried to help the “Sparrow.” Bullard had finally found a home, and a refuge: Paris was, indeed, all that he had hoped for, and more. He vowed to live in the City of Light for the rest of his days.

  * * *

  Parisian weather in the spring and early summer of 1914 was spectacular. Warm sunshine and comfortable temperatures prevailed. The citizens of “Gay Paree” strolled down the boulevards sporting new fashions from the noted houses of couture and a decent economy ensured that all but the poorest would have a few spare francs to plunk down at the cafés and cabarets scattered about the capital.

  For Bullard, it was Paradise. His haphazard travels and many months of careening from one city to the next, one means of employment to another, had finally landed him in the city of his dreams. His abilities as a boxer and his occasional singing and dancing gigs made him enough money to afford a small flat of his own near Montmartre. He was only eighteen years old that summer, in very fine shape physically, and had every prospect for continued success and enjoyment in his adopted land. Then, as August headed toward September, the roof he had so carefully built over his hopes and dreams unceremoniously fell in.

  On June 28, in Serbia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Grand Duchess Sophie, were gunned down by a penniless student anarchist. By August, the haphazardly constructed patchwork of intercontinental alliances between the European nations had been lit off, like a string of firecrackers, and the world, or at least a large piece of it, was at war.

  It must have seemed a cruel irony to Bullard that his hard-won nirvana was instantly under the threat of being crushed by the Central Powers.1 The military leaders of France were guilty of jingoism, too, as war loomed, and perhaps even more than the Germans. The honor of France was still stained by the crushing blow dealt to it by the legions of Otto von Bismarck in 1871. During lightning-quick strikes, the Iron Chancellor and his troops had quickly defeated an overconfident France and Napoleon III. The monarchy fell (again) and French pride was utterly crushed.

  As what would become World War I took hold, the French, in their bright red-and-blue uniforms, heads topped with jaunty kepis, felt they could march to Berlin in a month. Many believed the war would be over by Christmas. French lancers polished the tips of their spears and saddled their horses. The tank had not yet been invented, but rapid-fire artillery and the heavy machine gun had been. By the end of 1914, the gaudy uniforms would be discarded, tens of thousands of young Frenchmen would be dead, and both sides would begin frantically digging long muddy trenches from Dunkirk to the Pyrenees.

  Friends that Bullard had made in Paris disappeared—swallowed up by the massive call to arms. Many of them were already wounded or dead. He concluded he had to pitch in on behalf of his new country, so he determined to sign up, too. There were challenges, however, the first being that he was too young. The soonest he could enlist would be his nineteenth birthday, October 9. Secondly, he was a foreigner.

  Most young Frenchmen of military age were preregistered to fight for their country, much like the Selective Service System that would be activated in the United States in three years. Each recruit was preliminarily assigned to a regiment, so that when the calls went out, as they did in August and September, millions of men dropped whatever they were doing and reported to their units or to the training centers associated with their ultimate assignments. There were many foreign nationals living or working in France who wanted to fight, like Bullard, for their adopted nation.

  The only service open to non-French nationals was the Foreign Legion. Even so, the minimum enlistment was for five years. Since most potential recruits believed that the war would be over in a matter of weeks or months, the five-year minimum was daunting. Not wishing to turn away thousands of much-needed volunteers, the minister of war came up with a clever compromise: he would allow foreigners to enlist in the Legion for “the duration of the war,” and the wartime volunteers would be assigned to special marching regiments that were, essentially, troops signed on for temporary service.

  On his nineteenth birthday, Bullard walked into the local Foreign Legion recruiting office. He had no official papers, either French or American, but he was taken at his word. The fluent French he was already able to speak—and the good German he knew—were, no doubt, assets. His excellent physical condition was a benefit to his acceptance; although, as Bullard wrote later in his memoirs, the exam given by the French Army doctor was cursory, at best:

  [The doctor] listened momentarily with a stethoscope for some sound of heartbeat. The volunteer opened his mouth. Queries about his height and weight. The officer prodded his body in a few obvious places. He nodded to the clerk, “Bon pour le service” (good to serve).

  With a tacit nod to the staggering casualties already being endured, and the willingness to take on anyone who volunteered, he was signed up: Eugene Bullard of Georgia was instantly a member of the French Foreign Legion, committed to serve “for the duration.”

  * * *

  Bullard was in the second wave of Americans to enlist in the Foreign Legion. Almost as soon as the first “guns of August” began booming, young men from the United States gravitated to France, anxious to get in on the action, or as they often said, “to do my bit.” Most of these early volunteers were idealists, f
ixated on “battling the Hun,” and defending democracy and freedom. Many were disappointed that the pacifist President Woodrow Wilson was not interested in getting America into the war, so they would take up the cudgel themselves. A great many of these men were the sons of wealth and privilege. A disproportionate number were from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, referred to as the “Ivy League crowd.”

  There were others, too, from less privileged or dramatic backgrounds: men who operated on the fringes of society and were simply looking for the next adventure or something to do to fill their needs or their wanderlust. Bob Scanlon, Gene’s boxing pal, was among these men. There were roustabouts, salt-encrusted sailors, cooks, race car drivers, stevedores, even one medical doctor, an advertising executive, and men with shadowy backgrounds of unknown pedigree. The Foreign Legion had always been a refuge for men running from something, and in 1914 it was no different.

  Among the Americans in that first wave was Alan Seeger, one of the Harvard graduates who gravitated to France immediately after the war commenced. Already a poet of some note, he had been living the Bohemian life in New York’s Greenwich Village for a time. (Seeger’s Class of 1910 also included T.S. Eliot and Walter Lippmann.) Alan’s brother, Charles, would become the father of famed folk singer Pete Seeger who would play a peripheral role in Eugene Bullard’s later life.