Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  71. Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6. Also see August, Selling of Empire, 127-41; Bernth Lindfors, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 132-51.

  72. John. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 3.

  73. Ibid., 12. For more on the importance of spectacle in the global imagination of imperialism, see Veit Erlmann, “ ‘Spectatorial Lust’: The Africa Choir in England, 1891-1893,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 107-37.

  74. For a discussion of race as fetish and commodity, see “The Fact of Blackness” in Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109-40; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 207-31; Young, Embodying Black Experience, 87.

  75. On the dissemination and impact of U.S. popular culture abroad in this period, see Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Rob Kroes, Robert Rydell, and D. F. J. Bosscher, eds., Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993).

  76. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 64.

  77. Life, 24 November 1887.

  78. See, for example, Famous Irish Fighters in the Ring: John L. Sullivan (London: Felix McGlennon, [1892]); John L. Sullivan, Life and Reminiscences of a 19th Century Gladiator (Boston: Jas. A. Hearn & Co.; London: Geo. Routledge & Sons, 1892); William Edgar Harding, John L. Sullivan, the Champion Pugilist (New York: 1883); Richard Kyle Fox, Life and Battles of John L. Sullivan (New York: Police Gazette, 1883); Modern Gladiator: Being an Account of the Exploits and Experiences of the World's Greatest Fighter, John Lawrence Sullivan (St. Louis, MO: Athletic Publishing Company, 1889); John Boyle O'Reilly, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888); Wehman's Book on the Art and Science of Boxing (New York: Henry J. Wehman, 1892).

  79. “J. L. Sullivan in Birmingham,” The Sportsman, 14 November 1887. Also see Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 241-42.

  80. “The Triumph of the West,” Life, 15 December 1887.

  81. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 58, 141; Veit Erlmann, “ ‘A Feeling of Prejudice’: Orpheus M. McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers in South Africa, 1890-1898,” Journal of South African Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 331-50; Richard Waterhouse, “The Minstrel Show and Australian Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 24, no. 3 (1990): 147-66. This analysis of the local and the global is informed by the theoretical insights of Walter Mignolo, Local Histories /Global Designs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  82. Quoted in Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), 89.

  83. Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

  84. Athos, “The World's Metropolis,” Indianapolis Freeman, 16 July 1892.

  85. Scholars have begun to explore the importance of popular culture as a conduit for black transnationalism and internationalism. Brown, Babylon Girls; Chude-Sokei, The Last ‘Darky’; Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Harry Elam and Kennell Jackson, eds., Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

  86. Athos, “World's Metropolis.”

  CHAPTER 1. EMBODYING EMPIRE

  1. Jack Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” La Vie au grand air, 4 March 1911, 46.

  2. Ibid., 11 March 1911, 161.

  3. Quoted in Geoffrey Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2004), 85.

  4. Richard Waterhouse, “The Minstrel Show and Australian Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 24, no. 3 (1990): 147-49.

  5. James J. Jeffries, “Mental and Moral Training through Boxing,” Physical Culture, August 1909.

  6. See, for example, “National Physique: Some Differences Explained,” Sandow's Magazine, 2 August 1906; “The Editor's Ideas: Italians in the Ring,” Boxing, 11 December 1909; “The Jew as a Physical Culturist,” Health & Strength, 16 May 1908; “The Rise of the Black: A Short History of the Stages by Which the Negro Race Has Risen to a Commanding Position in the Ring,” Boxing, 4 December 1909.

  7. Jeffries, “Mental and Moral Training through Boxing.”

  8. Theodore Roosevelt to Mike Donovan, 10 February 1899, quoted in Dakin Burdick, “The American Way of Fighting: Unarmed Defense in the United States, 1845-1945” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1999), 101.

  9. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170, 190-92; Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (1913; Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 48.

  10. Mike Donovan, The Roosevelt That I Know: Ten Years of Boxing with the President, and Other Memories of Famous Fighting Men (New York: B. W. Dodge & Co., 1909), 5.

  11. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1-2.

  12. Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); John A. Dinan, Sports in the Pulp Magazines (London: McFarland & Company, 1998).

  13. Michael A. Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997), xii, 33, 35-39.

  14. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used many metaphors of the body to describe the character and function of governments in Leviathan (1651). On the recurring trope of the body politic, see A. D. Harvey, “The Body Politic: Anatomy of a Metaphor,” Contemporary Review 275, no. 1603 (August 1999): 85-93.

  15. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1902), 3.

  16. Budd, Sculpture Machine, 21, 37. Also see Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

  17. See, for example, “Physical Culture in the City,” Health & Strength, 11 April 1908; “Editorial Grips: A Physically Degenerated Army,” Health & Strength, 5 September 1908; H. Mirville, “La Science de santé,” La Vie au grand air, 29 March 1913, 245-46; Gordon Reeves, “Does Civilization Weaken the Physique?” Physical Culture, May 1914.

  18. Bernarr MacFadden, “Are Americans Degenerating?” Physical Culture, [January] 1907. Also see Sydney Cummings, “America's Decreasing Birth-Rate,” Physical Culture, July 1909; Addison Berkeley, “The Decreasing Birth Rate,” Physical Culture, November 1909.

  19. Rene DuBois, “The French Nation Dying Out,” Physical Culture, December 1908. French physical culturists also discussed degeneration in their own publications. “A propos des géants,” L'Education physique, 31 January 1907; “Preservation contre la tuberculose,” L'Education physique, 31 May 1907.

  20. See, for example, “Are English Athletes Deteriorating?” Sandow's Magazine, 11 April 1907; “Editorial Grips: Why Are We Degenerating?” Health & Strength, 30 May 1908; “Editorial Grips: Is the Race Deteri
orating?” Health & Strength, 12 September 1908; Viscount Hill, “Britain's Decline and How to Check It,” Health & Strength, 9 October 1909; Samuel Cook, “Race Degeneration Threatening the British Empire,” Physical Culture, April 1907; “Editorial Grips: The Decline of Our Physical Prestige,” Health & Strength, 8 February 1908; Rachda Felley, “Foreign v. British Athletes,” Health & Strength, 4 January 1908.

  21. “Disease and Crime,” Sandow's Magazine, 20 December 1906. Also see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848—c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 176-221.

  22. Budd, Sculpture Machine, 12, 95; Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 238.

  23. Quotations in this paragraph are from John Terence McGovern, How to Box to Win, How to Build Muscle (New York: Rohde & Haskins, 1900), 7, 9.

  24. Milwaukee Free Press quoted in Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 84.

  25. On the White Australia Policy and its legacy, see James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Keith Windschuttle, White Australia Policy (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2004); Jane Carey and Claire McLisky, eds., Creating White Australia: New Perspectives on Race, Whiteness and History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009).

  26. “Immigration Restriction Act 1901” (10 December 2004), www.peo.gov.au/resources/immigration_bill.htm (accessed 23 May 2006).

  27. Katherine Ellinghaus, “Intimate Assimilation: Comparing White-Indigenous Intermarriage in the United States and Australia, 1880s-1930s,” in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 212.

  28. “A Black Blot,” Sydney Truth, 22 March 1908. The details regarding Toy's relationship with Johnson emerged during her libel suit against the Sydney Referee in 1908. For more on the Toy controversy, see Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 88-89, 103-7; Jeff Wells, Boxing Day: The Fight That Changed the World (Sydney: HarperSports, 1998), 66-69.

  29. “Lady and Pugilist: An Announced Engagement,” Argus, 17 March 1908.

  30. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 89; “Lady and Pugilist: The Sydney Libel Case,” Argus, 18 March 1908.

  31. “Boxing,” Punch, 7 March 1907.

  32. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 90-91; John Maynard, “Vision, Voice and Influence,” Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 121 (2003): 94, 96.

  33. “A Black Beano,” Sydney Truth, 17 March 1907; Maynard, “Vision, Voice and Influence,” 95.

  34. Quotations in this paragraph and the next are from “A Black Beano.”

  35. Ibid.

  36. John Maynard, “For Liberty and Freedom: Fred Maynard and the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association,” Lecture for New South Wales State Library, Sydney, 2004, 19-20.

  37. Maynard, “Vision, Voice and Influence,” 96. The photo is from the personal collection of Professor John Maynard, the grandson of Fred Maynard.

  38. “Johnson-McLean Trouble,” Sunday Sun, 24 March 1907.

  39. Quoted in Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 103.

  40. Quoted in ibid., 104.

  41. Quoted in ibid.

  42. “A Black Blot.”

  43. Quotations in this paragraph and the next are from ibid.

  44. Ibid.

  45. Yorick Gradeley, “The Battle to the Strong: The Empire Builders,” Health & Strength, 2 May 1908, 440.

  46. Yorick Gradeley, “The Battle to the Strong: A Powerful and Exciting Physical Regeneration Story,” Health & Strength, 4 January 1908, 14.

  47. Gradeley, “The Battle to the Strong: The Empire Builders,” 439-40.

  48. Yorick Gradeley, “The Battle to the Strong: When Black Meets White,” Health & Strength, 9 May 1908, 463.

  49. Ibid., 464.

  50. Dan McCaffery, Tommy Burns: Canada's Unknown World Heavyweight Champion (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2000), 21-29.

  51. Quoted in Daniel Streible, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 202.

  52. Corinthian, “Boxing,” Punch, 13 August 1908. Also see Richard Broome, “The Australian Reaction to Jack Johnson, Black Pugilist, 1907-9,” in Sport in History, ed. Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 345.

  53. Quoted in Wells, Boxing Day, 108.

  54. Corinthian, “Boxing.”

  55. Wells, Boxing Day, 90. The Bulletin characterized O'Sullivan as “a combination of Samuel Plimsoll, Cicero, John L. Sullivan, and Caius Gracchus.” See Bruce E. Mansfield, “O'Sullivan, Edward William (1846—1910),” Australian Dictionary of Biography—Online Edition, Australian National University, 2006, www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110117b.htm (accessed 4 February 2007).

  56. Quoted in Broome, “Australian Reaction to Jack Johnson,” 345. See also A. J. Hill, “Ryrie, Sir Granville de Laune (1865—1937),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography—Online Edition, Australian National University, 2006, www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110512b.htm (accessed 4 February 2007).

  57. See photos of the USS Brooklyn (1898) and the USS Oregon (1898), Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  58. For an overview of Philippine boxing history, see J. R. Svinth, “The Origins of Philippines Boxing, 1899-1929,” Journal of Combative Sport, July 2001, http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_svinth_0701.htm (accessed 20 January 2005).

  59. E. Hayward Conisby, “Our Fleet and Its Cruise in the Pacific,” Physical Culture, February 1908. Conisby estimated that the total number of vessels was actually thirty to forty, since six torpedo boats and other noncombatant crafts followed the U.S. fleet. There were nearly fourteen thousand men onboard the battleships alone.

  60. “Battle Fleet Sails West,” Boston Daily Globe, 7 July 1908. Also see James R. Reckner, Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988); Kenneth Wimmel, Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet: American Seapower Comes of Age (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1998).

  61. “President to the Fleet,” Boston Daily Globe, 7 July 1908.

  62. Conisby, “Our Fleet and Its Cruise in the Pacific.”

  63. “16 Battleships Reach Auckland,” Atlanta Constitution, 9 August 1908; “Sailors at the Races,” Washington Post, 12 August 1908; Margaret Werry, “The Greatest Show on Earth: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 3 (October 2005): 366.

  64. “Supremacy in the Pacific,” New York Times, 22 July 1908.

  65. “Our Fleet in Australia,” Washington Post, 1 June 1908.

  66. Melbourne Age quoted in Graeme Kent, The Great White Hopes: The Quest to Defeat Jack Johnson (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2005), 3.

  67. “America's Armada,” Argus, 21 March 1908.

  68. “Australia's Greeting Warm,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 October 1908.

  69. “Punch's Fleet Number,” Punch, 10 September 1908. The Bulletin also printed a special edition in honor of the fleet and provided readers with the sheet music for “Yankee Doodle.” “The White Supplement,” Bulletin, 20 August 1908; “Yankee Doodle,” Bulletin, 20 August 1908.

  70. “Australia Plans Big Fleet Welcome,” New York Times, 16 August 1908.

  71. Wells, Boxing Day, 97-98; “Australia's Greeting Warm.”

  72. “A New Talk of Alliance,” Washington Post, 16 August 1908.

  73. “The Glad Hand,” Punch, 10 September 1908. For similar cartoons, see “Tug of Peace,” Punch, 10 September 1908; “The Enduring Bond,” Punch, 13 August 1908. The first depicted the fleet as a rope used to pull the two nations together, while the second featured Lady Australia holding out her hand as Lady America walked across the Pacific on the tops of the U.S. battleships.

  74. “New Relations,” Punch, 10 September 1908.

  75. “Our Fleet in Australia.”

  76. Werry, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” 367.

&
nbsp; 77. “Big Fleet a Friend Maker,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 August 1908.

  78. “Australia and the Asiatic,” Bulletin, 27 February 1908; “The Nigger Asserts Himself,” Bulletin, 27 February 1908. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance (established in 1902 and renewed in 1905) had been a strategic move for both nations. It had given Britain an ally in East Asia that would help not only to restrain Russia but also to preserve British commerce in China. For Japan, it offered official recognition as an important world power along with the chance to challenge Russian prerogatives in Manchuria and Korea. Yet the alliance clashed with Australia's own desire not only to control the Pacific region but also to remain a white nation. See Phillips Payson O'Brien, ed., The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902-1922 (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).

  79. Wells, Boxing Day, 96; “Immigration to Australia,” Observer, 19 December 1908; “Firm Policy in Far East,” New York Times, 16 August 1908; “Description of an Imaginary War between the United States and Japan,” Washington Post, 12 July 1908.

  80. Lone Hand quoted in Wells, Boxing Day, 94-95.

  81. “Last Shovelful of Coal: President Roosevelt's Warning,” Bulletin, 20 August 1908.

  82. “The Stowed Away Chinese,” Punch, 10 December 1908; “A Medium in All Things,” Punch, 10 December 1908.

  83. “Threatening Mass,” Bulletin, 20 August 1908.

  84. “Immigration to Australia.”

  85. “Praise for our Sailors,” New York Times, 7 September 1908. Also see “Notes and Queries,” Observer, 9 January 1909; “Australian Immigration,” Punch, 7 January 1909.

  86. Maynard, “For Liberty and Freedom,” 26.

  87. “Melbourne Notes,” Tasmanian Mail, 2 January 1909.

  88. Broome, “Australian Reaction to Jack Johnson,” 345; Wells, Boxing Day, 79-81. Also see Chris Cunneen, “McIntosh, Hugh Donald (1876-1942),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography—Online Edition, Australian National University, 2006, www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100280b.htm (accessed 4 February 2007).