Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  The Führer, alas, was not among the thirty-five thousand fans who showed up for the fight, a disappointing gate for what turned out to be a disappointing bout. Uzcudun went into his usual shell, giving his opponent few clean shots at him, and Schmeling remained his frustratingly plodding self. He won a decision after what William L. Shirer called “twelve slow and thrill-less rounds.”* Still, Schmeling remained in demand in the United States. Mike Jacobs wanted him to fight Louis in September, and Madison Square Garden wanted him to fight Baer around the same time. Both sides thought they had deals. Somewhere in the middle was Joe Jacobs. He favored Louis because it would be far more lucrative; he’d gone to the Uzcudun fight to convince Schmeling to take him on. Jacobs also needed Schmeling to renew his contract with him, which was about to expire.

  But the boxing press doubted whether Schmeling was listening to Jacobs, or if he’d re-up with him. There were reports that Schmeling wouldn’t even see Jacobs while he was in Europe, and that Yussel had had to cable someone in the United States for enough cash to get home. “One word from Joe,” Bill Corum quipped, “and Max does as he pleases.” Here was Germany trying to drive its Jews out, Dan Parker noted, and two Jews named Jacobs were begging a German Aryan to come to America to collect a pile of dough to take back to Hitler.

  “Schmeling! Schmeling! Who’s got Max Schmeling?” The New York Times asked on July 16. The money lay with Louis, but since the Garden controlled Braddock, a title shot ran through Baer. Ultimately, Schmeling made demands seemingly designed to kill any chance of either fight, and suspicions grew that he was not going to come to the United States that fall, because of his fear of taxes, or of having to pay Joe Jacobs what he owed him, or of Louis, or of incurring Nazi wrath for taking on a black man. For the Nazis had grown hostile toward a Louis fight and toward Louis himself. Why, they asked, should Schmeling take on a “clay face” who should never be given a title shot, particularly since the “Negermisch-ling” was still too green and untested to face someone of Schmeling’s stature? The argument infuriated Fleischer. Schmeling “never saw the day when he was good enough to justify all the fuss that has been made over him recently,” he wrote. Soon, all parties got fed up with Schmeling. “I am convinced he’s been giving us all the old run around, including me, who put him in the championship,” Joe Jacobs complained. “He talks like he was Dempsey and this is 1929,” said the matchmaker at Madison Square Garden. “Who in hell does he think he is anyway?” asked Mike Jacobs. He quickly signed up Louis to fight Baer in September. In one stroke, he’d deprived Schmeling of two possible adversaries.

  The German assault on Louis now intensified. For Schmeling, after his recent triumphs, to have to fight a comparative rube like Louis, said Box-Sport, would be a “national humiliation.” With the help of a photograph, it then dissected the racial makeup of this Mischling, all to prove, apparently, that he wasn’t even a pure version of an inferior being, but some watered-down, mongrelized imitation. “They always say that he is black,” it wrote. “But when one looks at this photo, there is not much of Negro blackness left over…. There is much of the ‘white’ element in him, which one very often finds with mixed-breeds in the States.” The paper explained that race-conscious Americans could always identify light-skinned blacks by their hair, their fingernails—they always retained a “bluish shadowing”— and their odor: “For that one doesn’t need to have an especially sensitive nose.” An artist in Der Kicker depicted Louis as a generic, cartoonish black man, and his followers as dancing African savages, holding a placard that declared HAIL JOE LOUIS OUR PROPHET. Still, most ordinary Germans seemed to feel about Louis the way most Americans did: they liked him.

  Before taking on Baer in September, Louis had a warm-up bout against Kingfish Levinsky, the man whom Schmeling was to have fought the year before. Levinsky, born Harry Krakow, was in some ways a Jewish Carnera, a giant clown with “the body of a caribou and the guileless mind of a child.” In Chicago, though, where the fight was to take place, he was a hometown favorite; “the glorified fish peddler of Maxwell Street,” he was called. By now, Louis was practically a Chicagoan, too, so an internecine struggle loomed. Special trains brought in fight fans, mostly black, from throughout the Midwest; ten dollars bought you not just round-trip train fare from Kansas City but a ticket to the Negro League’s East-West Game. The fight, set for August 7, was Chicago’s biggest since the Dempsey-Tunney “long count” contest of 1927. Few expected anything lengthy about this one, though. Louis had an extra incentive to get it over with fast: his managers pledged that if he ended it in a round, they would all go on the wagon. The wager was aimed primarily at Blackburn, who had been drinking heavily.

  The weigh-in was a chilly affair. Someone asked Levinsky the name of the black cocker spaniel he’d brought with him. “Joe Louis,” he replied with a grin. “Boy, I bet that dawg sure has a lot of dynamite in him,” an unamused Louis remarked. Nearly 40,000 people were inside Comiskey Park, with another 100,000 people, mostly black, milling outside and 50,000 more outside the Savoy Ballroom, where Louis had trained, and where he was expected to appear afterward. In popular mythology, Mike Jacobs, worried that Levinsky might flee, started the fight an hour early. Though this was not so, Levinsky’s face, wrote Runyon, was the color of someone “at the rail of ocean liners in a heavy storm” as he entered the ring. Louis threw one of his trademark short punches, a left hook to the jaw. In seconds he had Levinsky down, then again, again, and again. With a single punch, a man at ringside later insisted, Louis had given the Kingfish two black eyes. “Don’t let him hit me again, Mister!” Levinsky begged the referee, who quickly stopped the fight. The time: 141 seconds. Louis had won his bet; Blackburn would become a teetotaler, at least temporarily.

  Perhaps because of that, Louis showed some uncharacteristic emotion afterward, dancing and laughing his way to his corner. When word came over the public-address system that fight films would be shown the next day, the crowd began hooting. “I must have been in a transom,” Levinsky said in the locker room. One local paper called the celebrations “the gayest jubilee Chicago’s Negroes have ever enjoyed.” (In New Orleans, a white policeman who’d bet on Levinsky told a young black celebrant to desist, and when he wouldn’t, broke his teeth with a billy club. “You can kill me but Joe Louis is the king of all,” the man shouted before being thrown in jail.) As for Louis himself, he telephoned his mother, then looked on indifferently as some black beauty queens were paraded before him at the Savoy Ballroom. His common sense, wrote William Pickens of the Associated Negro Press, was a greater force for good than his skill. “His personality is more impressive than a thousand sermons, for he will be felt where no sermons will ever be heard,” he said. Still, the path would not be easy. In Washington, D.C., a sportscaster called Louis a “nigger,” prompting numerous complaints.

  Immediately after the fight, Mike Jacobs corralled representatives of Louis and Baer in a hotel room, barricaded the door, and hammered out a contract. The fight was set for September 24, and given the lure of the two principals, it promised a crowd unprecedented in New York boxing or New York sports, for that matter. Would Braddock dodge Louis if Louis beat Baer? “Dodge him?” Braddock’s manager, Joe Gould, asked. “Say, listen, I’ll follow him around just to make sure nothing happens to him.” “I don’t care who’s in the other corner,” Braddock said. “I just like a guy who can draw the dough.”

  And that he seemed to have.

  * Wango was a typical black athlete of that time and place, playing the savage for laughs. But audiences loved him, and he became the prime attraction during a tournament there. According to the rabidly Nazi Westdeutscher Beobachter, however, some spectators objected to watching a black man, whose slippery skin gave him an unfair advantage, humiliating white opponents. Worse, German women were cheering him on. Julius Streicher, the local Nazi leader and editor of the Jew-hating Stürmer, called a halt to this degraded spectacle and banished Wango. The Nazi papers said no more about him, but accordi
ng to the French magazine Journal, he left Nuremberg for Berlin, where he died suddenly and mysteriously.

  * The fight turned out to be more important politically than athletically. The political commissar of Berlin, Julius Lippert, who’d been the fight’s sponsor, had promised Schmeling he’d be paid in full notwithstanding the meager turnout. When he balked, Schmeling sued Lippert personally, rather than in his official capacity. The city and Lippert settled quickly, but when they had trouble coming up with the funds, Schmeling threatened to impound Lippert’s property. Members of the Berlin city council were furious. One, Karl Protze, called Schmeling a “jüdische Börsenjobber” (a Jewish stock market gambler)— placing his own greed above the common good—as well as a coward, for taking on an underling when he’d have never challenged, say, Goebbels. Another called Schmeling’s behavior “very close to treason,” and suggested he’d profit from four weeks in a concentration camp. Noting Schmeling’s good relations with Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring, Protze then said it was crucial they be informed about Schmeling’s “Jewish behavior.”

  Champion in Waiting

  THE IMPROVED BENEVOLENT AND PROTECTIVE ORDER OF Elks of the World, aka the Negro Elks, had two honored guests when it convened in Washington in late August 1935: the two most famous black athletes in the world. Jesse Owens, then a student at Ohio State University, was the more accomplished; on a single afternoon two months earlier, he had set three world records in track. To Shirley Povich, then a young sportswriter for The Washington Post, he was also the more impressive; smart, nimble-witted, and personable, he was the “epitome of Negro progress.” But walking around Washington’s black neighborhood with the two men, Povich was amazed by what he saw. People might have recognized Owens’s face, but track and field meant little to them, and most didn’t know his name. “The gasps, the ah’s and the oh’s” were for Joe Louis alone. Even Owens stood in awe of him, behaving like “some flunky who knew his place.”

  Louis had arrived in town on August 26, his car escorted by a lone black policeman on a motorcycle. The officer was clearly from Maryland, one paper explained, because Washington had no black motorcycle officers. Louis’s host was a local black doctor, whose house was quickly surrounded by mobs of people hoping to catch a glimpse of the contender; among them were many black cooks and maids, some still wearing their aprons. One had simply walked off her job and over to Louis’s temporary quarters when her employer refused to let her “get a peek at Joe” during dinnertime.

  Louis had a full schedule of activities in the capital. A tour of Washington’s “Little Harlem” was marred only by the behavior of the tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, whose shuffle and jive threatened to undermine Louis’s manicured image of seriousness and dignity. There was a press conference at Howard University, then an “all-colored boxing show” at Griffith Stadium, for which one of the largest fight crowds in Washington’s history paid anywhere from 80 cents to $2.20 to see Louis. “Just to see him,” one reporter wrote incredulously. “He didn’t fight, he didn’t referee, he didn’t work as a second, he didn’t tap dance, he didn’t sing, he didn’t, to come to the point, do anything.” Introduced as “the forthcoming champion of the world,” Louis was once more speechless. “How you, Mr. President?” he asked Franklin D. Roosevelt later at the White House, smiling as he shook the president’s hand. “Joe, you certainly are a fine looking young man,” Roosevelt told him. (The real question, the Amsterdam News boasted, was “whether it was Joe Louis who greeted the President of the United States or the President of the United States who greeted Joe Louis.”)* “Impossible,” one German newspaper called their encounter; it only underlined anew how Germany would have to uphold the honor of the white race by itself.

  By August 1935, Louis was receiving more than a thousand letters a week. (One letter, from New York, was addressed simply to “The Punch Without the Smile.”) One pillar of Louis’s reputation was that he never pitched items, like liquor and tobacco, that he didn’t use himself. But his name started appearing in the black weeklies alongside other products. There was Esso, the only gasoline used in his training camp, “smooth and full of punch.” And Murray’s Superior Hair Pomade, thanks to which Carnera hadn’t even mussed up Louis’s coiffure. And Fletcher’s Castoria, which neatly linked motherhood, upward mobility, and regularity. The black papers became Louis’s public bankbooks, offering regular accountings of his wealth. After the Levinsky fight, his earnings stood at $120,000; of that, $40,000 had gone to his managers, another $20,000 to taxes, $7,200 to buy himself a Lincoln, and $2,800 for his mother’s Buick. Some saw the Lincoln, which looked like something Rudolph Valentino might have driven, as the first step down the pugilist’s familiar path to profligacy. But this still left Louis with a tidy sum; no one, he boasted, would ever be holding any benefits for him. Louis’s mother even repaid the $269 she had collected on relief seven years earlier. All this money made Louis an alluring target. Churches needed new roofs, women needed their teeth fixed, farmers needed new trucks, children needed boxing equipment. Some requests came in heartbreaking, handwritten scrawls, like one from a widow in Meridian, Mississippi, penned on the back of a brown paper bag. “Send me some money so that I won’t be put out of house and home,” she pleaded. After a black inmate from Oklahoma asked for, and received, ten dollars from Louis, every black prisoner in the penitentiary sent his own request.

  Many letters offered Louis advice, some free and some costly, like the man demanding $1,000 for the secret to beating Baer. Louis was inundated with rabbits’ feet and other amulets. There were love letters, too, from the enraptured and the opportunistic. “You really is my kind of man,” went one. “I don’t like no weakling and a man like you should have a woman like me.” A seventy-eight-year-old woman sent Louis two dollars for him to bet on himself. Louis inspired numerous poems, many appearing as letters to the editor. And following the Carnera fight, there appeared what may well have been the first Joe Louis song, Joe Pullam’s “Joe Louis Is the Man.” It praised his modesty, his dress, and his kindness to his mother, and said he was “bound to be the next champion of the world.” Memphis Minnie’s “He’s in the Ring (Doin’ the Same Old Thing),” recorded nine days later, related how she’d “chanced” all her money that Louis’s latest opponent wouldn’t last a round:

  I wouldn’t even pay my house rent

  I wouldn’t buy me nothin to eat

  Joe Louis said “Take a chance with me,

  I’m gonna put you up on your feet!” He’s

  in the ring (he’s still fightin!)

  Doin the same old thing!

  Eventually, there would be dozens of songs, exponentially more than for any American sports figure before or since. A composer and musician named Claude Austin went a step further, writing an operetta on Louis’s life. Paul Robeson was reportedly to be cast in the lead.

  The Amsterdam News formed a Joe Louis Boys Club to train youngsters in the manly art as well as in clean living and thinking. An advertisement in the Chicago Defender called a new book on Louis “a worth while [sic] addition to the library of every home.” Parents, Ralph Matthews wrote in the Baltimore Afro-American, had found Louis a more effective deterrent than the hairbrush and a greater inspiration than George Washington. Even little white kids were calling themselves “Joe Louis”; “When white children want to be called by a Negro’s name, that is news,” wrote Gordon Hancock in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Some white intellectuals, like Carl Van Vechten, the semiofficial photographer of the Harlem Renaissance, were also excited. “Aren’t the papers wonderful about Joe Louis, and isn’t Joe Louis wonderful?” he wrote to the black writer James Weldon Johnson. “Hitler and Mussolini have done their part to make Americans fairer to Negroes, quite a big part, too!”

  For all the scrutiny of Louis’s life, nothing had surfaced yet about Marva Trotter, the young Chicago stenographer. But speculation about his love life was rife in the black press, and understandably so, for it had great implications for every
one. “The last thing I wanted Joe and Jesse [Owens] to do was fall in love,” stated the Pittsburgh Courier’s “Talk O’ Town” column in July. “It will take the power out of their punch … it will rob them of the physical prowess that has set an entire nation wild. … Joe, you have got to be the champ … then go Mormon, I don’t care.” Any athlete who marries is “usually no good for a year,” the Afro-American warned. But if Louis had to have a girl, the Amsterdam News pleaded, let it be a black one. There was, one letter writer pointed out, no shortage of attractive candidates, especially in Harlem, “where our beauticians are prepared to use every beauty appliance necessary.” In mid-August the Defender announced that Louis and Marva were engaged. Louis denied it, but he called Marva every night from his training camp, squeezing into a phone booth with a pocketful of change, sweating so profusely that it got his trainers worried. But soon Louis proposed to her over the phone, and she was “not overlong making up her mind.” There would be no more pictures of her taking dictation; “Miss Trotter, who had been employed in the office of a Chicago dentist, has resigned that position,” the Defender solemnly announced. Marva soon sported a three-carat diamond—“so massive and sparkling that any Queen would want it”—and was buying herself a gigantic wardrobe and furniture for the couple’s new apartment. If, as some suspected, Roxborough and Black had engineered the whole thing, they had selected well. “Marva is an old-fashioned girl, sweet, clean, modest, pretty,” the Afro-American wrote. “She has intelligence, poise, common sense. She has personality and is a pleasant, friendly type who makes friends because she is cheerful and kindly.” Most important, she was black.

  Louis and Marva discussed their engagement in the Chicago Tribune. “Sure, she can cook southern fried chicken,” Louis told the paper. “Yes, and she can broil steak, too, with French fried potatoes.” (The black press was more candid, admitting that Marva had never prepared an entire meal.) Louis said they’d marry within a few days of the Baer fight; Roxbor-ough said it might happen later that very night. Baer claimed to be happy over the turn of events. “Louis’ mind will be on the girl friend when he is in there against me,” he said. “And when you’re fighting anyone, especially me, you have to think of boxing all the time.” A poll in the Pittsburgh Courier revealed that of fifteen people in Detroit “representing all walks of life,” eleven opposed Louis’s marriage to Marva—or to anyone else, for that matter. “If this girl really loves Joe she won’t be so selfish as to hinder his career,” a female cashier declared. As Memphis Minnie had sung, Louis’s fans had a stake in him. “I reckon he knows what he’s a-doing, at least I hope so ’cause we have put our life’s savings on his fight with Baer,” said Rufus Peterson, a laborer. (In fact, marriage was to make little difference to Louis; he strayed almost from the very beginning. “He’d go for coffee and come back three days later,” his longtime lawyer, Truman Gibson, later recalled.) Box-Sport ran Marva’s picture, along with the usual racial analysis. “She is a mixed-blood [ein Mischblut], just like Joe Louis,” it explained.