Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  * On December 21, 1908, Flynn would fight Sam Langford in San Francisco. At ringside was one of his biggest boosters, sportswriter H. M. “Beany” Walker of the Los Angeles Examiner, who had called Flynn the coming champion. In the first round, Langford maneuvered Flynn until he stood just above Walker.

  “Now, Mr. Walker,” he said, “here comes your champion,” then knocked Flynn through the ropes into Walker’s lap.

  * Later, after he and Fitzpatrick had parted ways, Johnson would allege that Hattie McClay’s father had financed their passage. Boxing historian Nat Fleischer suggested a more plausible explanation: since neither Johnson nor Fitzpatrick ever had much cash—Johnson because he spent it as soon as he got it, Fitzpatrick because he was always lending it to Johnson—they borrowed five thousand dollars from George Considine, a New York hotelier, and a group of fellow sports who hoped to win big money betting on Johnson against Burns. (Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 156; Fleischer, Fighting Furies, p. 67.)

  * This rebuff convinced Johnson that Burns was “the most sarcastical man [I] ever met.” (“Leonce,” “Jack Johnson.”)

  * Taylor’s trainer, Joe Palmer, never forgot Johnson’s “supreme confidence.” “Talk about coolness! Johnson’s was arctic in the ring. When the big fellows nowadays put down their opponents they have, too often, to be told to stand back until the fallen man rises. Johnson put Taylor down in the seventh round. Instead of trying to stand over his fallen foe, Johnson walked back, as impudent as you like, to his own corner and asked for a drink of water…. It was cheeky, but it betokened the supreme confidence and coolness of the man. He knew well enough he could avoid a thunderbolt by a hair’s breadth if necessary.” (Palmer, Recollections, pp. 47–48.)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ____________________________________________

  THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN SMILE

  SO FAR, NEITHER JACK JOHNSON’S ambition nor Tommy Burns’ avarice had been enough to bring them together in the ring. That would take an unlikely combination of events far removed from the world of boxing and the bold entrepreneurship of an Australian showman.

  On December 16, 1907, while Johnson was still playing five shows a day at the New Star Theater in Milwaukee and Burns was in England getting ready for “Gunner” Moir, President Theodore Roosevelt, in top hat, frock coat, and striped trousers, had stood on the bridge of the presidential yacht Mayflower off Hampton Roads, Virginia, and watched as sixteen gleaming American battleships steamed past him and out to sea, beginning a forty-five-thousand-mile, six-continent round-the-world voyage. Roosevelt’s motives for dispatching the Great White Fleet were clear-cut. He had made the United States Navy second only to Britain’s and wanted the world to see it (and Congress to continue to support it). He also wanted to impress upon the rulers of Japan—whose navy had stunned the world by humiliating Russia in 1904 and 1905—that they would not have a free hand in the Pacific.

  Japan’s victory over imperial Russia had alarmed Americans, but it had terrified Australians, whose fear of an imminent invasion of their mostly empty continent by Asian “hordes” had already driven one prominent daily to change its slogan from “Australia for the Australians” to “Australia for the White Man.” And in March 1908, when it was announced that the American warships would call at Sydney and Melbourne that summer, many saw it as a spectacular sign of white solidarity across the seas, welcome evidence they had not been abandoned by their fellow Anglo-Saxons.

  But one citizen of Sydney, a sharp-featured thirty-year-old promoter named Hugh D. McIntosh, saw something else in the arrival of the American fleet: the chance to make some really big money. He had been on the make from earliest childhood. The son of a Sydney policeman who died when Hugh was four, he left home at eight to become a jeweler’s apprentice, then moved on to become a surgeon’s assistant, a silver-ore picker, a farmhand, a professional milker, and a chorus boy on the Melbourne stage. He sold pies from a tray at racetracks and prizefights, too, and by the time he was twenty-one had married the boss’ daughter and turned the bakery into a full-scale catering firm and a profitable restaurant chain. As president of the New South Wales League of Wheelmen, he cashed in on the worldwide enthusiasm for bicycling, promoting international six-day races at Sydney; when rumors of race-fixing undercut that sport, he abandoned it in favor of investing in holiday resorts in the Snowy Mountains.

  He was, as an admirer wrote, a distinctive “blend of charlatan, genius, dreamer and bandit,” and always on the prowl for bigger schemes and better profits. Twelve thousand American sailors were to come ashore at Sydney and Melbourne with the Great White Fleet, all of them looking for excitement. What could provide more of it than a pair of heavyweight title fights between the American world champion, Tommy Burns, and Australia’s best, Bill Squires and Bill Lang? (Burns was actually Canadian, to be sure, and he had already twice knocked Squires cold, but those facts needn’t be unduly emphasized. Australian pride in “Boshter Bill” seemed unshakable, and since Burns now lived in the United States, most Australians considered him a Yank.)

  McIntosh resolved to make it happen, a decision that would make him a far richer man than he already was and earn him the nickname he would carry for the rest of his life, “Huge Deal” McIntosh. Nothing escaped his notice. When he learned that the Americans were to put in first at Auckland, New Zealand, he hurried there and bought up all the bunting he could find so that when the time came to welcome the fleet, the slower-moving city fathers would be forced to buy it back from him at a handsome profit. Then he fired off a telegram to Burns in England offering twenty thousand dollars for the two bouts. Burns was quick to accept; he had little to fear from Squires or Lang, and had run out of opponents in Britain, while no one had come up with the thirty thousand dollars he still insisted upon before he would face Johnson.

  When McIntosh discovered that it would be prohibitive to rent the Sydney Exhibition Hall, he found a vacant lot at the end of the tramline on Rush-cutter’s Bay, talked the gullible ironmonger who owned it into renting it to him for four pounds a week so that he could stage what he described as “a two-man show to make a few bob out of the sailors,” then put up on the site an octagonal open-air stadium with seats for fifteen thousand spectators.

  Everything was ready when the American warships entered Sydney Harbour on August 20. More than 250,000 people had risen before dawn to greet them. The editor of a Sydney monthly called The Lone Hand spoke for many of his fellow countrymen:

  As a friendly hand across the Pacific comes to Australia the Great White Fleet. In flashing white it comes, … a symbol of a racial ideal to be upheld, and yet of a pacific purpose…. “My country, right or wrong,” may be questioned as a maxim of conduct, but most will confirm without a moment’s doubt, “The White Race Right or Wrong.”

  Hugh McIntosh had assumed that most seats for the Burns-Squires bout at Rushcutter’s Bay four days later would be filled with Yankee sailors, but not many actually turned up; suspicions about Burns’ honesty had spread through the fleet, and few of the Americans ashore in a wide-open port that boasted so many other delights wanted to waste time watching a fixed fight. It turned out not to matter. Fifteen thousand Australians filled the stadium, and twenty-five thousand more milled about outside. Burns carried Squires for thirteen rounds this time, allowing the crowd to have its fill of chanting “Go, ‘Boshter Bill’!” and the cameramen to capture enough footage to make the fight film a potentially profitable attraction—then knocked him out again.

  The U.S. fleet and its badly hungover crew soon moved on to Melbourne, where just eight days later Burns fought Bill Lang in another brand-new stadium hastily built by McIntosh. Lang managed to knock the champion down for the first time since Burns had won the title—and was made to pay for it by being knocked down five times himself before he was counted out in the fifth.

  It had all gone better than even Hugh McIntosh had dared hope—he personally had cleared more than fifty thousand dollars from the two fights—and he sa
w no reason to end things now. Ever since Burns had arrived in Australia, reporters had plagued him with questions about Johnson. To one, he claimed that Johnson had been dodging him, that if Johnson—who suffered from the “yellow streak” to which all blacks were prone—wouldn’t fight him, he planned to retire. “All niggers are alike to me,” he told another, “but I’ll fight him even though he is a nigger,” and he would “make it tough for Mr. Coon” when he did so—provided, of course, the money was right.

  Even before the Burns-Lang bout, McIntosh had gone to work to make sure it was, by talking several wealthy sports into helping him come up with the thirty thousand dollars Burns demanded. Then he started another exchange of telegrams with England, this time with Sam Fitzpatrick. If Johnson would accept five thousand dollars and come back to Sydney, the chance at the title to which he felt he’d been entitled for more than five years would be his at last. Johnson bitterly resented having to accept one sixth of what the champion was to get, but the opportunity was too good to pass up.

  Fitzpatrick had already committed Johnson to a fight with Sam Langford at London’s National Sporting Club. But the club manager, Peggy Bettinson, agreed to delay it and even lent Fitzpatrick and Johnson money to help pay for their passage to Australia. In exchange, Johnson signed a letter promising to come back to London and fight Langford for five thousand dollars, whether he won or lost his fight with Tommy Burns.

  The fight was on. DE BIG COON AM A-COMIN’, headlined the Sydney Truth. It was set for twenty rounds at Rushcutter’s Bay on the day after Christmas—Boxing Day in England and her colonies. John L. Sullivan, for one, was horrified to hear that Tommy Burns was going to risk his title against a black man. “Shame on the money-mad Champion!” he said. “Shame on the man who upsets good American precedents because there are Dollars, Dollars, Dollars in it.”

  In his book Knuckles and Gloves, Bohun Lynch set forth in one appalling paragraph many of the beliefs shared by whites around the world concerning Negro boxers and mixed bouts, beliefs that would now be tested as for the first time a black man prepared to fight a white one for the heavyweight championship of the world.

  The history of the Nigger in boxing has yet to be fully explored…. Negroes … have fought with certain exceptions under the severe handicap of unpopularity. Without entering too deeply into the Colour question, we may say that this unpopularity comes also from tradition. The vast majority of negro boxers have been slaves or the descendants of slaves. In early days and in the popular imagination they were savages, or almost savages. Also it was recognized from the first that the African negro and his descendants in the West Indies and America were harder-headed than white men, less sensitive about the face and jaw; most black boxers can take without pain or trouble a smashing which would cause the collapse of a white man. Occasionally, this is balanced by the nigger’s weakness in the stomach—but, one thing with another, the white man is at a disadvantage. But physical inequality is not the only point of difference. Niggers are usually children in temperament, with the children’s bad points as well as their good ones. The black man’s head is easily turned, and when his personal and physical success over a white man is manifest he generally behaves like the worst kind of spoiled child. In extreme cases, his overwhelming sense of triumph knows no bounds at all, and he turns from a primitive man into a fiend. His insolence is appalling. When the black is in this condition ignorant white men lose their heads, their betters are coldly disgusted…. As a rule, it is far better that negroes, if fight they must, should fight amongst themselves. No crowd is ever big-hearted enough, or “sporting enough,” to regard an encounter between white and black with a purely sporting interest.

  Australia would not now prove as sporting or as big-hearted toward Johnson as it had been just a little over a year earlier. In early October, he, Hattie McClay, and Sam Fitzpatrick boarded the RMS Ortona at Naples. At first, things went as well as they had the year before. “We have a gym fixed up on the boat,” Fitzpatrick cabled to a friend in London, “and Arthur puts in a couple of hours punching the [bag] and skipping rope, now and then taking on a few husky firemen from the crew.” When his party landed at Perth, Johnson showed off the handsome diamond-and-ruby scarf pin he’d won for being the best-dressed man at the captain’s ball, and cheerfully boasted of what he was at last going to be able to do to Tommy Burns. “I am a larger man than Burns, and am cleverer,” he said. “How does Burns want it? Does he want it fast and willing? I’m his man in that case. Does he want it flat footed? Goodness, if he does, why I’m his man again. Anything to suit; but fast or slow I’m going to win.”

  But the cheerful self-confidence that had charmed Australians in 1907 was now seen by many as boastful, insolent, unsporting—“flash.” A Sydney reception in his honor was sparsely attended. He had often been patronized in 1907. Now he found himself hideously caricatured. In the brightly colored poster by Norman Lindsay that greeted him everywhere, his white opponent was portrayed as a handsome, sturdy little hero while Johnson loomed over him, big and black and threatening, his eyes glowing red—Bohun Lynch’s Negro “fiend” incarnate.

  What had happened? Newspaper stories detailing Johnson’s romance with Lola Toy probably had something to do with Australia’s change of heart. (The Bulletin, an advocate of Australia’s whites-only policy, for example, was not pleased to report that “the coloured man is accompanied by his wife, a white woman somewhat addicted to jewelry.”) Then, too, the stakes were higher now than they had been in 1907, when no critical title had been on the line. But most important was the orgy of Anglo-Saxonism that had accompanied the visit of the U.S. fleet and helped reinforce Australia’s sense of itself as what the poet Roderic Quinn called “the World’s White Outpost.”

  When Burns beat Squires, Australia’s best heavyweight had fallen to a foreign champion, to be sure, but at least the winner had been a white man.* Hugh McIntosh did all he could to emphasize that fact. He organized teas presided over by Mrs. Burns so that the ladies of Sydney—who would be barred from the bout itself—could get to see the title holder rattle a punching bag hung with the flags of all three countries whose champions he had defeated: England, Ireland, and the United States. And he orchestrated press interviews so that journalists could marvel in print at Burns’ allegedly keen intellect and clean living, his supposed strength and skill—he was an “exquisite fighting engine,” said a writer for The Lone Hand; no one on earth could beat him. McIntosh himself seemed to share that view: at the end of what would be “a desperate struggle,” he predicted, “Burns will have the big coloured man’s scalp dangling from his belt.” Canada’s Tommy Burns had been transformed into Australia’s “Tommy Boy.” And Jack Johnson had turned from the colorful curiosity he had been just a year earlier into the symbol of all the dark forces Australians seemed to fear. “Citizens who have never prayed before,” said the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, “are supplicating Providence to give the white man a strong right arm with which to belt the coon into oblivion.” “This battle,” according to the Australian Star,“may in the future be looked back upon as the first great battle of an inevitable race war.”*

  The contest was nearly eight weeks away. Johnson used the time to do what he could to win back the Australian public. He began with an appeal to the sense of sportsmanship on which Australians always said they prided themselves. “The words I am about to speak to you, gentlemen, I speak from my heart,” he told one Sydney gathering.

  Each and everyone in this room who has read the sporting papers knows that I have traveled the world over trying to get Mr. Burns. I don’t believe in making a lot of noise because I believe in the old saying that a barking dog won’t bite.

  I, myself, have picked up several papers with interviews from Mr. Burns saying that I have a yellow streak. I have traveled all over the world and nobody has yet found that yellow streak. I am a man and I say it is a thing that any man would take offence at—any man in the world would…. We will see who has the yellow
streak. All I ask for—I don’t ask any favor—is a fair field.

  Based again at the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel, Johnson took part in publicity stunts amiably enough, chasing down a wallaby on the hotel lawns, then a greased pig, finally a hare—all to demonstrate his speed. He tried to show he was more than a mere athlete, as well; somewhere along the way he’d learned to play the bass viol so he and Hattie McClay played impromptu after-dinner duets for their fellow guests. He told a reporter she and he were also rehearsing for a production of Othello. And he put on a shadowboxing show each afternoon: while Hugh McIntosh organized no teas for Hattie to preside over, hundreds of women paid a shilling each to see Jack Johnson sweat in the sun.

  But nothing he could do alleviated the apprehension the whole country seemed to feel as the day of the fight approached. And his own feelings toward Tommy Burns proved impossible to hide. He was mostly his genial self when a writer for The Lone Hand came to call, full of eager talk about his boyhood, his earlier bouts, his achievements inside and outside the ring. Then the reporter mentioned the champion.

  Johnson does not like Burns. [He] thirsts to humiliate his detractor. He hurls no charge of streak-ownership at Burns, but he says he is a grossly over-estimated battler…. Johnson contemns Burns for his niggardliness. He considers it beneath the white man’s dignity to have but one attendant to perform the multitude of duties that are required by a world’s champion….* Burns is his conception of a thoroughly rude and offensive person. The colored champion has engaged in some hundreds of public contests in his time. The struggle with Burns will be the first, he claims, in which he will enter the ring with a feeling against his adversary.