Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  Despite all the distractions, by mid-May Johnson was training hard, and reporters were on hand every day in search of fresh stories.* Many were centered on the same weary stereotypes that had characterized coverage of Johnson since he first began to attract attention: his love of speed and fine clothes, his prodigious appetite and alleged fondness for chicken. And he was willing to play along if it sold tickets. “No stolen chicken ever passes the portals of my face,” he said. “Chickens see the gleam in my eye and keep out of my way. Chicken and corn fritters are affinities. They are meant for each other and both are meant for me.”

  But occasionally newspaper readers got a glimpse of the complex, mercurial man behind the grin. One afternoon, a group of writers turned up at Seal Rock too late to see Johnson spar. “I can’t box anymore today,” he told them, “but if you will come upstairs I’ll give you a little music, instead.” The reporters trooped up the stairs after him. As a reporter for the Baltimore American wrote, they all expected to see something like a minstrel turn.

  [But] once in his private quarters the negro became a changed man. He ordered one of his assistants to load the phonograph, and for an hour the hotel was filled with the strains of operatic music, vocal selections rendered by Caruso, Sembrich, Nordics, Mary Garden and others. Not once did a “ragtime” piece appear, and a search of a pile of disks failed to find one in evidence. Johnson’s music box is a most expensive affair and fills a corner of one of his suite of rooms. The pugilist champion tells with great pride how much it cost and can name offhand the price of any record, some of which, he explained, were worth as much as $10.

  In another corner there stood an immense bass viol. Somebody asked casually who played it, and Johnson said, “I do. Like to hear me?”

  They said they would. He put a record on the turntable and played along, eyes closed, lost in the music.

  When it was over, he took several of his visitors for a spin through Golden Gate Park in his latest automobile, a ninety-horsepower, six-cylinder machine that he said would go ninety miles an hour. Behind the wheel, the Baltimore American man reported, “Johnson is entirely a different man, alert and almost savage.”

  If there is an open stretch of road ahead of him he will cut loose at terrific speed and will not permit any car to pass him. Seated low down in the car with his powerful hands clinched on the steering wheel, he guides the machine without the slightest effort….

  “You ain’t afraid are you?” [he asked]…. He drove along the deserted boulevard at a speed which varied between 60 and 70 miles per hour, taking turns with a swoop that threatened to turn the car turtle any moment.

  All the time he was watching out of the corner of his eye the frightened passengers, who hung on like leeches, wishing that a motorcycle policeman would appear and save them from sudden death. Johnson just grinned and said, “We can’t hit it up here; wait until we reach a level stretch up ahead, and then I’ll show you what this car can do.”

  As he drove, Johnson spotted a pair of lovers strolling along the edge of the road, their arms around each other. “Oh look there,” Johnson said. “Just watch me.” He slid the car up behind them, then blew his horn and cut out the muffler. The terrified young lovers fled into the shrubbery “like frightened partridges.” Laughing, Johnson roared back toward Seal Rock as the sun went down.

  A reporter for the British magazine Boxing captured San Francisco’s mood in late May.

  The clergy are preaching THE FIGHT, the whole fight, and nothing but the fight—and cannot stop it. The stores have statuettes of the fighters. Photos of the fighters as they were yesterday, as they are today, and as they will be tomorrow—perhaps—are in every window. Scraps of conversation in the street reach you like this: “Boxed nine rounds yesterday” —“Faster than ever” —“Can’t get the Black to work hard enough” —“Had his auto out” —“Not training” —“Corbett’ll do it for him” —“Too old” —“Good as ever” —“Bet you.”

  There continued to be plenty of talk of a rigged outcome. “You heard nothing but fake, fix, and double cross,” Tad Dorgan remembered. John L. Sullivan himself told the New York Times the bout was likely a “frame-up,” and California’s governor, J. N. Gillette, agreed. “This Jeffries-Johnson fight is simply a scheme to make a lot of money out of the credulity of the public,” he told a reporter.

  Anybody with the least sense knows the whites of this country won’t allow Johnson or any other negro to win the world’s championship from Jeffries…. Johnson knows that. He’s no fool. He knows that to win that fight he would have to whip every white man at the ringside. So he has agreed to lay down for the money.

  Rickard got the governor to claim he’d been misquoted. But the whispers continued, and the national campaign against the contest intensified. A Cincinnati reformer printed up a million postcards reading “Stop the Fight. This is the Twentieth Century,” meant to be signed and mailed to Gillette. The Methodist Preachers’ Association of Philadelphia declared that “this fight can be regarded as nothing less than a national disgrace and a calamity to the moral life of our people” and appealed to President Taft to intervene.* Fifty preachers knelt and prayed on the capitol steps in Sacramento. Gillette stood firm: he didn’t approve of boxing, he said, but California law permitted boxing “exhibitions,” and no one had told him the Johnson-Jeffries fight would be anything else. He claimed to be powerless to stop the fight.

  Meanwhile, to demonstrate that he was in good shape and taking the coming fight seriously, Johnson put on a three-round exhibition with Kid Cotton at the Dreamland Rink on June 3. Afterward, he addressed the crowd. “Though he was frequently interrupted by cat-calls from the gallery,” a reporter noted, “the majority of fans demanded fair treatment and the negro’s talk was liberally applauded.”

  “For the benefit of the gentlemen present,” he began, “I will indulge in a few remarks regarding the heavyweight battle which will take place in San Francisco on the Fourth of July.” Here, he paused for hooting in the gallery to subside. “And,” he resumed, “for the benefit of the well educated gentlemen in the gallery I do hope that when the people from all parts of the world come here that they will see …”

  “A funeral,” floated down a voice from upstairs.

  “… will see two men well trained,” continued Johnson apparently unruffled, “both in the best condition and a fight in which the best man will win.”

  The close of the speech brought cheers from parts of the house.

  Three days later, Johnson fired George Little. Things between them had gone from bad to worse. Someone had slipped Frank Sutton a Mickey Finn; Johnson suspected that Little had been behind it—and that it had been meant for him. Then, according to Johnson, after Little and Lillian St. Clair had an ugly public brawl during which Little broke a mandolin over his companion’s head, the champion asked the manager of the hotel to throw him out. When Little refused to leave, the police were called.

  Little stormed out, breathing defiance. “I am no Sam Fitzpatrick,” he told the press. “He can’t do this to me. I will manage Johnson, or there will be no fight.” He had a contract entitling him to a quarter of the champion’s earnings and demanded that he be paid back the ten thousand dollars he said he had put up as forfeit. He was also spotted stalking up and down Market Street, Johnson recalled, “showing his pistol to everybody and shouting that I’d robbed him. When I learned of this I got my car and drove there, intending to punch him in the nose.” The police kept them apart.

  Johnson hired the onetime Cincinnati Reds pitcher-manager Cal McVey as an armed guard to keep Little away from him and to patrol Seal Rock House at night.

  Little attached Johnson’s Chicago house and both his cars to keep him from disposing of his property and then pleading bankruptcy.

  Johnson countered by obtaining a warrant for Little’s arrest for issuing him a phony check.

  Each man hired an attorney. Then, on June 22, the two
announced a reconciliation. Johnson promised to pay Little $16,500 in exchange for a release from all further claims against him; for his part, Little promised to pay Johnson back $10,000 as soon as Johnson turned over to him a diamond brooch he said was worth $2,000. “I have wagered large amounts on Johnson,” Little said. “I still believe he will win.”

  Two days later, Johnson fired Little again. The veteran trainer Tom Flanagan would see to any business matters the champion couldn’t handle on his own.* He had always been his own manager, the champion explained. “You must have talent and ability to get through to the top in fighting. That’s all there is to it…. If you keep your eyes open you … don’t need to split up your earnings with a boss.”†

  By then, the fight itself seemed to be in jeopardy. On June 15, Governor Gillette reversed himself and barred the fight from his state. Money, not morality or the likelihood of a fix, had made him change his mind. A few days earlier, the president of the San Francisco Board of Trade, William R. Wheeler, received a telegram from New York Republican congressman William S. Bennett. The congressman was a delegate to the Presbyterian General Assembly and opposed to prizefighting on principle, but more important, he was an influential member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In the next few days, that body was to recommend either San Francisco or New Orleans as the site of the 1915 Panama Exposition, which seemed sure to bring in millions for the winning town. Bennett was quite sure, he told Wheeler, that “the moral sentiment of the House” would go against awarding the exposition to what he called “a prize-fighting city.” Translation: if San Francisco gave up the fight, it stood an equal chance of being given the exposition; if it did not, the prize was sure to go to New Orleans. Wheeler went to see the governor. Millions were at stake. “Go to San Francisco,” Gillette told his attorney general, “and tell Rickard to get out of my state. Tell him to take Johnson and Jeffries with him. What he is planning is a prize fight and against the law.”

  Rickard had less than three weeks to find a new town willing to host the fight, disassemble his brand-new stadium, ship it to the new site, and put it all together again by July Fourth. Nevada was his best hope. It prided itself on being more open-minded than its neighboring states: it encouraged gambling, made divorce so easy that unhappily married well-to-do women from all over the country had begun to congregate there, and permitted anyone willing to pay a thousand-dollar license fee to put on “glove contests, or exhibitions between man and man.” Best of all, its governor, Denver S. Dickerson, was said to be “prayerproof.” He had only one question for Rickard. “Just tell me, man to man, it’s on the level, Tex.”

  “It will be the squarest fight ever pulled off,” Rickard promised. The contest was back on.

  Two towns competed for the honor of hosting it, Goldfield and Reno. Since Rickard’s gaudy career as a boxing promoter had begun in Goldfield, the city fathers believed their town the sentimental favorite. But Tex Rickard was not a sentimental man: Reno, the divorce capital of the country and the site of the Hart–Root elimination contest five years earlier, had better railroad connections than Goldfield: the Southern Pacific, capable of hauling in thousands of ticket buyers from both coasts, funneled right through the center of town.

  Reno was fine with Johnson. He was sure he’d win wherever he and Jeffries fought. “I want to advise every one of you to bet on me,” he told the five hundred Negroes who came to the Oakland depot to see him off for Nevada. “Just get your money down … and then sit back and wait until the time comes to cash in.”

  But Jeffries was so rattled by the change of venue that he nearly pulled out. He had signed to fight in California and nowhere else, he said; he hated to leave the congenial isolated world of Rowardennan; and he feared that all the hard training he had done would be undercut by Reno’s greater heat and higher altitude. It was only his “good nature,” he said, his concern that his friend Tex Rickard not be ruined, that made him agree to the move. One rumor had it that the real reason Jeffries was so upset was that the move to Nevada somehow meant Johnson was no longer willing to lie down, that he would have to face a fully engaged champion for his title. But if there had been such a deal, it is hard to see how crossing the California line would have affected it. Another tale had it that Jeffries feared the shift to Nevada because, while attending the Nelson–Gans contest in 1906, he’d lost twenty-five thousand dollars at the gambling tables and then run out on his IOUs. Rickard was said to have talked Jeffries’ debtors into accepting a settlement of fifty cents on the dollar.

  Until it was given its name in 1868, Reno was known as End of the Line, an obscure rail junction on the Truckee River to which the little Virginia and Truckee line brought carloads of silver ore from Virginia City and the Comstock Lode for transfer to the transcontinental railroad. In June of 1910, it was still a small settlement surrounded by sagebrush, home to just eleven thousand people. Tex Rickard’s skill at ballyhoo would soon turn it into what the novelist Rex Beach, writing for the Atlanta Constitution, called “the precise magnetic center of the civilized world.”

  More than three hundred reporters descended on the little town in the week before the fight; nearly every major American daily sent its own reporters. So did papers in Britain, Australia, and France. Variety sent Al Jolson. Telegraphers arrived with a boxcar full of equipment.

  Rex Beach was not the only prominent literary figure to find himself in Reno. The muckraking journalist Alfred Henry Lewis was there, too, working for the San Francisco Examiner. So was Jack London, whose melodramatic coverage of the Johnson–Burns contest for the New York Herald had had so much to do with drumming up enthusiasm for this one. “I am glad I’m here,” he wrote.

  No man who loves the fighting game, has the price and is within striking distance of Reno should miss the fight…. There has never been anything like it in the history of the ring…. Even if no more stringent legislation is passed against the game, even if every state threw itself wide open to prize-fighting, still there can be nothing like this fight for a generation to come.

  “In a single day,” Rex Beach wrote from Reno, “one hundred and fifty thousand words went out from here over the wires. The fall of Port Arthur [China, during the Russo-Japanese War] did not take one quarter that number of words to tell and every day it is the same. In other words, two novels are written every twenty-four hours, dealing entirely with the question of individual superiority.”

  The two individuals who would settle that question were the focus of everyone’s attention from the moment they stepped down from the train at the little brick depot in the middle of town.

  Jeffries turned up first. His progress from Rowardennan to Reno, Jim Corbett remembered, “was more or less of an ovation. He was cheered all the way out of his own state and far into the night we were awakened by the familiar, ‘Three cheers for Jeffries,’ and ‘O, Jeff, come out and show yourself.’” Jeffries and Corbett had fought a series of exhibitions at Carson City in 1897, and as they ate breakfast in the dining car the following morning Jeffries was almost animated as he reminisced about Nevada’s sparkling trout steams. But when the train began to slow for Reno and he saw the big crowd waiting by the tracks to greet him, he scowled. “Go on and get off first,” he told the rest of his party. “All you people get off first.” As Corbett remembered:

  For a few seconds, I had an idea that Jim was going to do the matinee idol thing. I thought that he was going to wait until all the other celebrities had made their bow…. So we all got off the train ahead of him. The members who were recognized were cheered to the echo and then there came a long wait. Men and women were fighting their way into the jam…. I began to think something must have happened to him, when all at once a yell from the newspaper photographer informed me what had happened. Jeffries jumped off on the other side of the train, walked around the rear car, and quietly started for the hotel.

  When Jack Johnson pulled in the following day, he plunged right into the crowd, shaking hands and joking with everyone a
s he made his way with Etta to a waiting car. He climbed in, doffed his white hat, and bowed. “One glance at Jack’s beaming face was sufficient to show that he was intensely pleased with the reception accorded him,” one paper reported.

  Someone called for a speech but Jack shook his head. He compromised by removing his Panama and posing for a battery of cameras…. The snapshot men would have held him there till sun-down, but finally Jack became impatient. He jammed his hat over his ears, dropped into a seat, and the chauffeur, with horns tooting, made his way through a blockade of wagons, which were in turn rendered unwieldy by the jam of humanity which filled the street from curb to curb.

  The fighters’ camps, too, highlighted the contrast between them. Jeffries took up residence at a secluded, deeply shaded resort on the Truckee called Moana Springs. “At Jeffries’ quarters you behold a vine-embowered cottage,” Rex Beach wrote, “surrounded by a fence with a large readable sign ‘Private, Keep Out,’ and inside the cottage there is silence, peace. He has the white man’s sense of privacy.”

  Certainly, Jeffries’ own personal sense of privacy was highly developed. He may have been a “stubborn, rushing master” in the ring, Beach continued, but outside it he still had “the disposition of a tarantula,” mysteriously able to detect the approach of strangers and scuttle out of reach. “There was nothing winsome about Jeffries,” Arthur Ruhl wrote in Collier’s: