Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  BOXING, BIOPOLITICS, AND THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

  Even though Johnson left the United States to escape Jim Crow segregation, his search for greater liberty and opportunity in foreign lands was hardly an uncomplicated tale of cosmopolitan harmony and good fortune. Traveling aboard steamships and trains, he necessarily moved along the same routes as Western imperial military and political power, commerce, and culture. He also journeyed overseas just as the new religion of whiteness seemed to be sweeping the earth. As Johnson continued to beat white men in the ring and flout racial etiquette outside the ring, he frequently found himself embroiled in public fights against this wider culture of white supremacy.

  Johnson's rise to global fame (and infamy) was not just a simple case of serendipity, nor was it a mere matter of individual personality. The various controversies surrounding his pugilistic success fit within a much larger pattern of geopolitical and cultural shifts at the turn of the twentieth century. While the disparate places he traversed had their own local logics and practices of race, the increasingly transnational flows of people, capital, commodities, and ideas had helped to bring them under the banner of the “white man's burden.” Coined by the British author Rudyard Kipling in a poem published in February 1899 at the start of the Philippine-American War, this phrase took on a life of its own.59 Originally invoked by Kipling to urge white Americans to join their European counterparts in the work of empire, the white man's burden and its gendered philosophy came to provide a ready rationale for numerous forms of racial exploitation and expropriation. In essence, it meant that white men had the collective moral responsibility to civilize the world's supposedly savage peoples of color. Whether expressed as a “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission) in the case of the French or as “benevolent assimilation” in the case of the United States, a collective sense of white racial destiny marked this moment.60

  Although the inner workings of these imperial projects undoubtedly differed, white men from across national borders were discovering a racial common ground on the terrain of the body. This emerging culture of the white man's burden was closely intertwined with the global shift to biopolitics. From a theoretical and practical point of view, the disciplining of individual bodies—white and nonwhite—formed the centerpiece of this Western civilizing mission. White men had to make sure that they were not only politically and culturally prepared but also physically fit to carry out their imperial duties. As social Darwinist ideas about the “survival of the fittest” entered the mainstream, the health and purity of their bodies came to represent the strength and vitality of their nations in the global arena. This imagined mission to civilize also granted white men the authority to control the bodies of nonwhites, not just in the realm of battle or labor, but even in the most intimate domains of life, from the domestic to the hygienic to the sexual. Through this exercise of colonial conquest and discipline, white men and their nations could ultimately ensure their own racial regeneration.61 These gendered notions of the body and the body politic seemed to sanction the Western powers' violent and invasive interventions into the lives of people of color.

  The United States was no exception. Even before Kipling beseeched the young nation to take up the white man's burden, it had already managed to consolidate its continental empire at the expense of Mexicans and Native Americans. The United States then turned its sights abroad. By 1893 it had already made headway into Hawaii, and by the late 1890s the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars brought Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines under U.S. influence. U.S. culture and capital continued to extend their hegemonic reach throughout Mexico and the rest of the Americas.62

  At the same time Britain was working to extend its influence abroad. Faced with the growing threat of nationalist unrest, Britain tightened its hold on India. British forces also began their campaign to consolidate the imperial nation's power and territory in South Africa. The bloody Kaffir Wars culminated with the defeat of the Zulus in 1879. Britain then struggled to bring the Afrikaners' lands under the Union Jack during the First and Second Boer Wars (1880–81 and 1899–1902).63

  With the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, the French imperial government began touting its special duty to civilize the indigenous peoples of the world. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century France increased its holdings in Indochina and also established control over territories in North, West, and Central Africa, covering the areas of modern-day Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, and Djibouti.64

  Despite their blustering rhetoric and enormous scope, these expansionist projects exposed a pervasive sense of anxiety about white men's continued ascendancy in the modern world. Faced with economic depression and the contraction of foreign markets as well as a host of domestic social ills, U.S. and European officials had begun to see imperial growth as a way out of their problems. By the 1890s a self-consciously “new” imperial moment had come into play for Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic, as they looked to the colonies for more consumer markets.65 For U.S. president Grover Cleveland, the control of markets “in every part of the habitable globe” became a national project.66 This would improve the U.S. economy and help to resolve the ongoing conflict between labor and capital.

  British and French officials also looked to their colonies for national revival. English politicians believed that their economic survival depended on securing more foreign markets for their surplus products. According to prevailing logic, white colonial settlers would boost the domestic economy as they consumed British-manufactured wares and procured valuable resources for British factories. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), politically and economically vulnerable France began an emboldened pursuit of imperial prestige and profits. The ailing industrial power was looking for a way out of its recent economic slumps (1882, 1890), and the colonies appeared ripe with opportunity.67

  In the midst of this restless imperial moment, white settler nations began to deploy a host of immigration restrictions and other modes of racial segregation. The influx of free people of color into formerly white preserves had aroused concerns about the control of land and resources and also challenged racialized notions of citizenship and democracy. In the United States, the racial reconciliation of white Americans in the North and the South, along with the rise of de jure segregation, had effectively relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. Similarly, Australia, Canada, and the Union of South Africa seemed bent on excluding people of color from the political and economic benefits of Western modernity. In 1901 the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia further marginalized the Aboriginal people while also passing racial immigration restrictions in an effort to “whiten” the continent. Under the slogan “White Canada Forever,” Canadian officials passed a series of immigration laws to prevent the entry of people of Asian and African descent. By 1910 even the British and the Boers had found common racial ground in the newly formed Union of South Africa as they worked together to exclude Africans, coloreds, and Indians from full citizenship.68 Because of their physical proximity to nonwhite peoples, many white settlers believed that they bore the brunt of the white man's burden. They became some of the most fervent converts to the new religion of whiteness.

  This urgent sense of shared purpose in the preservation of the racial and imperial status quo was not just the result of overlapping political and economic crises. It was also a product of the accelerating flows of commercial mass culture. The rise of transnational sporting industries was particularly vital to this emerging global economy of race. Competitive sports seemed to offer the perfect complement to the defensive physical stance of the white man's burden. Collective fears about the rising power of nonwhites were often expressed through gendered metaphors of the body. As the Australian politician Charles Pearson argued in his foreboding book National Life and Character (1893), white men had to remain on guard or else they wou
ld be “elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside” by their nonwhite subjects.69 Popular discussions about the supposed degeneration of white bodies at the hands of urban industrialism betrayed much deeper concerns about the diminishing power of white nations and empires.

  In the midst of these widespread fears, elaborate rituals of physical fitness and grand exhibitions of the white male body gained mass popularity. By the 1890s, “heavyweight champion of the world” had become an internationally recognized title. The first modern Olympiad took place in Athens, Greece, in 1896. Around this time several international sports organizations also came into existence, including the Davis Cup of tennis (1900), World Series Baseball (1902), and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) (1904).70

  At once intimate and public, boxing seemed best to encapsulate the growing struggles over the racial and imperial order. Boxing involved unscripted hand-to-hand combat between individual men who embodied races and nations in the eyes of their fans. As they fought bare-chested in the ring, with no weapons and only the protection of leather gloves, professional pugilists offered spectators an occasion to witness firsthand the “survival of the fittest.” Although intimate in practice, boxing emerged as one of the world's most popular live sporting events and it also generated a myriad of inexpensive and accessible publications, souvenirs, exhibitions, and films that reached diverse audiences across national borders. Physical and highly visual, boxing always threatened to expose the hypocrisy of the white man's burden.

  The stakes were high, for the boxing ring was more than just a metaphorical site; it was a public forum in which racial divisions were drawn and debated. By Johnson's day, the ring had become a space of heightened white surveillance, much like other intimate sites involving potentially subversive and sexualized interracial contact. However, as prizefighting slowly emerged from the criminal underworld, where race mixing was not as strictly policed, it presented white officials with a particular set of problems. Profit motives and consumer demand foiled their attempts to maintain a rigid color line in the boxing ring, while modern technology prevented them from keeping the triumphs of black men such as Johnson out of the public domain. Ironically, the overwhelming desire of white men to prove their own physical supremacy in the ring turned interracial title matches into massive commercial spectacles that reverberated around the world. Without the specter of black challengers, the victories of white boxers simply could not hold the same explanatory power for the white man's burden. Boxing's burgeoning popularity was closely tied to its very embodiment of contemporary battles over the racial boundaries of Western modernity.

  COMMERCIAL MASS CULTURE AND THE GLOBAL COLOR LINE

  This keen desire to showcase white dominance was not limited to the boxing ring. The exigencies of Western empire, technological advances, the growth of urban industrialism, and the rise of consumer capitalism had inspired a diverse and profitable trade in racialized amusements that stretched across national borders. Instrumental in spreading the new religion of whiteness, these popular diversions and their vast array of related products helped to enlist the support of regular people in the white man's burden. As Johnson and other black sojourners ventured abroad, they entered a complex racial economy driven by the increasingly transnational currents of commercial mass culture.

  By the turn of the twentieth century boxing was just one part of a much “broader universe of white supremacist entertainments.”71 On both sides of the Atlantic world's fairs and imperial exhibitions encouraged the collective celebration of white control. Britain presented the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) and the Jubilee celebrations (1887, 1897); France hosted the Universal Expositions (1889, 1900); and the United States staged the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition (1893), the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition (1901), and St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904). In addition to these official state-sponsored events, scores of commercial amusements, including zoos, ethnological expositions, blackface minstrel shows, circuses, freak shows, museums of curiosities, dime novels, and Wild West shows reinforced prevalent ideas of white supremacy.

  Writing in 1901, the English economist John A. Hobson called this white imperialist sentiment “the psychology of jingoism” in a book with the same title. He blamed the burgeoning entertainment and recreation industries for inspiring “the glorification of brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners” among “large sections of the [white] middle and labouring classes.”72 He believed that commercial spectacles had become “a more potent educator than the church, the school, the political meeting, or even than the press” because of their ability to reach the semiliterate masses. Indeed, imperialism and what Hobson called “spectatorial passion” went hand in hand.73 Many of these commercial amusements put nonwhite men and women on display for the pleasure and edification of white audiences while also enacting visual narratives of white conquest over primitive peoples of color at home and abroad. They helped to create a more expansive sense of whiteness that defied not only national borders but also ethnic and class lines.

  Since this growing trade in white supremacist entertainments relied intrinsically on the circulation and exhibition of nonwhite bodies, it presented men such as Johnson with many opportunities to compete and perform overseas. Yet this opportunity and visibility came at a price and never guaranteed political or social equality. Instead, so pervasive was this trade that black sojourners had difficulty finding work outside the realm of entertainment. Even those who initially went abroad as sailors and laborers often found themselves forced into sporting arenas and playhouses out of financial necessity. Their racialized bodies proved to be valuable commodities as they performed largely for the amusement of white spectators and for the financial gain of white promoters. Whether they were boxing or performing in vaudeville acts, or a combination of both, the ability of African American athletes and entertainers to stage their “blackness” was integral to their survival in this marketplace of race. The mechanical reproduction of their images only expanded this marketplace.74 Although swept up in this trade, Johnson and other rebel sojourners refused to be defined by it. They began to develop their own counterculture of blackness as they navigated through the undercurrents of interimperial exchange.

  Nevertheless, the expansion of mass culture was pivotal to the construction of a global color line. Commercial amusements helped to reshape older conceptions of race for modern consumption. As they separated white from nonwhite bodies, they effectively breathed new life into biological theories of racial difference, even as cultural explanations began to emerge in academic circles. They also spawned a visual shorthand for ideas of racial hierarchy that proved to be both adaptable and enduring across space and time. This trade in racial images emerged as one of the first examples of globalization in the late imperial age.

  As the United States became a more powerful player in world politics, it moved to the forefront of this trade. U.S. commercial culture—amusement parks, circuses, vaudeville shows, dime novels, moving pictures—had already been spreading U.S. racial mores abroad since the mid-nineteenth century. Just as these cultural products had eased the process of racial reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War, so too did they help to reinforce transnational bonds of whiteness.75 Circulating within this mix of media, stock images of the Western frontier, southern plantation slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the “American negro” became reference points against which other nations judged the state of their own racial and imperial relations. Although U.S. race culture became inextricably linked with local conceptions of race across the globe, this was not merely a case of “Americanization.” Instead, commercial amusements provided a shared “cultural space” in which everyday people in a variety of places “indigenized” American racial ideas to speak to their local circumstances.76

  In the decades before Johnson's championship reign, the transnational careers of two rival heavyweights, the Irish-American John L. Sullivan and the black Au
stralian Peter Jackson, exemplified these cultural dynamics. Both prizefighters' reputations reached far beyond their homelands. Their international celebrity revealed at once the growing influence of U.S. ideas of race abroad and the increasing importance of commercial mass culture in shaping modern conceptions of race.

  In November 1887 New York City's Life magazine boasted that America was “doing a vast deal” for its British cousins by sending them two of its national heroes, the frontiersman William F. Cody, popularly known as “Buffalo Bill,” and the champion boxer Sullivan, dubbed “The Boston Strong Boy.”77 Complete with Indian skirmishes and stagecoach races, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show had already proven a smashing success alongside the summertime events of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Shortly thereafter Sullivan had arrived in London just as Buffalo Bill was about to embark on a tour of the English provinces. The Boston Strong Boy was already a well-known commodity in Britain. His photos, life story, fight record, and training methods had long appeared in inexpensive penny papers, pamphlets, and boxing manuals on both sides of the Atlantic.78