“I’m damn glad to get back, even as far as this,” he told newsmen. “The reason I decided to give myself up and come back was to show the world I’m still champion. As soon as I get out of this mixup with the Federal Government, I am going to start training and clean up this Dempsey fellow. Nothing to it.”
He’d confidently told reporters in Los Angeles that Tom Carey and his influential friends had “everything arranged” in Chicago. They didn’t. He’d been assured that Judge Samuel L. Aschuler of the United States District Court would let him out on bail. But Aschuler refused, citing Johnson’s previous flight from the law. Tom Carey’s fifty thousand dollars was worthless to him. Federal Judge George Carpenter, who had presided over his case, was recovering from surgery and wouldn’t be able to hear arguments from the attorneys Carey had hired for Johnson for thirty days.
He would have to spend at least a month behind bars. Johnson seems to have made the best of it. The New York Times reported that he had persuaded the sheriff to let him out of Joliet for “ice cream sprees and automobile trips.” Federal agents then moved him to the Kane County Jail at Geneva, which was said to be run with more rigor.
On September 14, Judge Carpenter finally heard Johnson’s request for bail—and rejected it. Johnson had defied the court and held the laws of the land in open contempt, he said. “This man deserves no clemency.” Jack Johnson would have to serve his year and a day in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth and pay his thousand-dollar fine.
Five days later, federal agents escorted the ex-champion to prison. At the Leavenworth depot a Negro cabdriver named Jim Crawford offered to take him and his escorts to the penitentiary. Johnson agreed, provided that Crawford got out from behind the wheel. Jack Johnson would drive himself to prison.
* Europeans did flock to see Jack Johnson, though they were sometimes less than clear as to just who he was. When he appeared in Bulgaria, for example, he was billed as “the man who received $1,000,000 for beating Jim Jeffries … and was directly responsible for the civil war in the United States between the blacks and the whites.”
* Charles DeWoody was removed from white-slave cases for a time but was subsequently made chief of agents of the Department of Justice in New York City, where he pursued shadowy spy plots and rounded up draft resisters during the Great War. (New York Times, March 12 and 19, April 14, September 4, 1918.)
* Gunboat Smith had become the “White Heavyweight Champion of the World” by knocking out Arthur Pelkey on New Year’s Day, 1914. He was proud of that accomplishment, he remembered, “but still, I knew in my heart that I wasn’t the champion of the world. White, yes—but there was Jack Johnson.” And Smith, who had once been one of Johnson’s sparring partners, wanted no part of a serious fight with him. That summer, Smith was in England preparing for a fight with Georges Carpentier, when Fred Dartnell asked him “if he thought of meeting the big black.” The fighter pretended not to hear the question. Dartnell asked again, he remembered, and “Smith became suddenly busy with some gymnastic apparatus.” Dartnell tried a third time. “Mr. Smith gazed at me with a rather set expression and a ruminative look in his eyes. After a few seconds’ silence he replied: ‘Oh, Johnson will wait…’ Then, suddenly, as if struck by an afterthought, he continued: ‘And the longer he waits, the better.’” (Peter Heller, In This Corner …!, p. 42; Fred Dartnell, Seconds Out, p. 181.)
* No sooner had Johnson agreed to fight Moran in February than he signed for a wrestling match on a German brewer’s private estate outside Hamburg. McKetrick was furious. Johnson’s arm had just healed. Suppose he reinjured it? Johnson was adamant. “I’m needy!” he said. McKetrick decided he’d better go along as an escort. When he turned up at Johnson’s home to pick him up, he found Lucille pointing a revolver at her husband. She, too, wanted him to stay in Paris. Johnson promised that he would, left the house with McKetrick—and then raced to the station to catch the train for Hamburg. As it pulled out, McKetrick remembered, Lucille came running along the platform in her bathrobe and jumped aboard. Johnson entertained the brewer and his guests and afterward, McKetrick said, “he was paid off in cash and the merchandise of the house.”
In March, when he traveled to Sweden for what was evidently a fixed wrestling match, Swedish officials escorted him back to the border and warned him not to try to return. “Tryin’ to pick a quarrel with a wrestler,” wrote the sportswriter Sandy Griswold in the Omaha Herald. “Now waddya know about that? We could almost pity the poor old crooked coon.” (Lardner, White Hopes, pp. 42–43; Omaha Herald, March 21, 1914.)
* McKetrick’s vendetta against Frank Moran was unrelenting. In October of 1915, Moran was in his dressing room at Madison Square Garden, getting ready to fight Jim Coffey of Dublin, when a process server handed him a paper attaching $2,800 from his share of the gate receipts. McKetrick still wanted those training expenses, plus interest. “I won’t take my pants off till I get some cash!” Moran shouted. The promoter gave him enough to motivate him to climb into the ring—where he demolished the Irish Giant in three rounds.
A few months later, according to John Lardner, Moran got a kind of revenge. McKetrick’s suit was dismissed on the ground that the money should have been collected from “the famous purse that McKetrick had paralyzed in Paris.” Moran and his lawyer went to a chophouse to celebrate. McKetrick and his attorney turned up a few minutes later. Moran’s lawyer said something to McKetrick. McKetrick punched him. Soon, he and both lawyers were rolling on the floor, punching and cursing, as Frank Moran looked on. “The rarest bliss that can befall a pugilist,” Lardner wrote, “is the sight of managers and lawyers punching each other, for nothing.”
In 1927, McKetrick enlisted the mayor of New York, James J. Walker, who was on his way to France for a vacation, to try to talk the Bank of France into coming up with the cash. It refused, Walker told McKetrick when he got home: “The French think you’re running some kind of a con game, Dan.” (Lardner, White Hopes, pp. 48–49; New York Times, October 20, 1915.)
* In an effort to recoup his losses, he returned to the recording studio—the Edison Bell Company in London’s West End this time—and delivered a booming monologue on physical culture. He encouraged everyone to “strut and walk and run,” but his most important recommendation was to drink prodigious amounts of cold water, “the most strengthening thing that we can possibly use.” (Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds, p. 248.)
* This happened so often to the good-looking but weak-chinned Rodel that some sportswriters began to call him the “Diving Venus.”
* Some influential American expatriates in Cuba were dead set against the fight’s coming off there. “I and the other ranch owners are unalterably opposed to having [Johnson] beat up a white man,” Captain Cushman A. Rice told the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. “The colored champion can fight any of his own race if he desires, but there must be no inter-racial feeling engendered if it can be prevented.” Johnson was so angered by Rice’s attitude that on the afternoon of the fight, when Miss Cecilia Wright Keith, the rancher’s “protégée” and a stringer for the United Press, showed up in a ringside seat, he insisted that she be made to sit farther back. As she left, she waved her seat number—13—at him, hoping he’d be “hoodooed.” (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, February 26, 1915; Chicago Evening American, April 6, 1915.)
* Most newspaper stories about this fight were virtually interchangeable with those banged out from Sydney or Reno or Las Vegas, New Mexico. But a few were unique to Cuba. On March 26, for example, the Milwaukee Free Press reported a racial incident involving both the champion and Lucille:
“HAVANA. Fear is felt that race trouble may arise here following an altercation between the white wife of Jack Johnson … and a pretty manicurist…. Johnson has threatened legal proceedings against the manicurist. The police … are endeavoring to hush the matter up.
“The altercation arose … when the manicurist refused to serve a white woman ‘who had married a negro.’ Heated words followed and the manicurist seiz
ed the other woman by the hair, jerking it completely down, and violently pummeled her in her face with her fists. Other girls working in the establishment called the police who came in and parted the scrapping women.
“Afterward, Johnson demanded an apology, which was immediately forthcoming from the proprietor but flatly refused by the manicurist. She flung a wet towel in the proprietor’s face, told the champion what she thought of him, and left the place.”
* Later, he or someone working for him laid out the reasoning that allegedly lay behind this decision in a document that was published by a number of black newspapers, including the June 19, 1915, Chicago Defender: “A championship fight between a black man and a white man makes bad blood between the races. Jack Johnson did more to hurt his people than Booker T. Washington did to help them. I am not saying this in a mean way. I’m not excusing white men for feeling that way. I think it shows ignorance. But lots of white men did feel that way. Who doesn’t remember all the sickening ‘white hope’ business? And just as ignorant white men thought their race disgraced, so did a lot of ignorant colored men think that their race had been proved the better by Johnson’s victory. That’s why I’m going to draw the color line. I say this because I don’t want anybody to think that I’m doing it from any mean, dirty little prejudice. It isn’t race or color that counts: it’s brains. A sober decent Chinaman looks better to me than a drunken bum of an American. A Negro who uses his intelligence is a finer man than a white man who soaks his mind in a whisky glass. Some of the greatest fighters in history have been black men. And I want to say that they have always showed up as game … as white fighters.”
* This was a reference not to his phantom contract to take a dive but to his legitimate share of the first proceeds from showing the fight films in Canada, a sum Curley and Frazee had evidently delayed.
* German propagandists seized upon his war work to ridicule the British: “To this, proud England has come,” said the Prager Tagblatt, “that they are obliged to use the efforts of a colored boxer to obtain recruits for the war. And this man is an exile from America!” (Washington Post, January 2, 1916.)
* Retitled The Black Thunderbolt, the film would play Harlem’s New Douglas Theater and other black movie houses across the country in 1922. Later, a Barcelona chocolate-maker would include a photograph of Lucille in a series of giveaway cards devoted to “famous movie stars of the world.” She posed in a dressing gown with the Johnsons’ two Pomeranians. “Fragile and beautiful,” the caption said, “her figure contrasts with that of her husband, the formidable black man whose fists of iron broke down so many adversaries.”
* The presence of Jack Johnson and other black Americans south of the Texas border troubled both state and federal officials. “Many negroes are going into Mexico,” Captain W. Hanson of the Texas Rangers reported to the Justice Department. “Twenty were counted at the theatre in Mexico City one night. They are publicly in favor of riots in the United States and are conferring with many Carranzista generals in Mexico City, with a view, supposedly, of assisting the Carranzistas in case of trouble with the United States. It is an open secret in Mexico City that Carranza is working with labor organizations through [Samuel] Gompers and others, and with the protestant churches, to further propaganda in the United States. The above information was given me very confidentially, by Don Pablo Recandon, just from Mexico City…. In this connection, I will state that Jack Johnson gave a boxing exhibition in Nuevo Laredo a short time ago and something like 20 negroes from the United States [met] and conferred with Johnson, and it is suspicioned by well posted Americans, that this meeting was held in Nuevo Laredo for the purpose of giving Johnson [a] chance to have an understanding with his visitors, and to further Carranza propaganda in the United States. At this time there are three negro musicians, and a small, well-educated yellow negro in Nuevo Laredo, and several Americans have informed me that they have seen [Johnson] in close consultation with the Carranzistas there. It is rumored that Johnson has a commission under the Carranza government.” (DOJ File.)
* Mrs. Josephine B. Blanchard, a white woman wrongly arrested for car theft, happened to be in the waiting room while Johnson was there. Later, she sued for false arrest and asked for additional aggravated damages because members of the big crowd outside, peering through the barred windows, had “pointed her out as ‘Mrs. Jack Johnson.’” (Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1921.)
CHAPTER TWELVE
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THE STEPPER
ON SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 19, 1920, Jack Johnson became Federal Prisoner No. 15461. He gave his occupation as “pugilist-chauffeur.” Asked for a “full history” of his crime, he answered only, “It is alleged that I violated the Mann Act to which charge I entered a plea of not guilty.” And when led before the camera so that full-face and side-view identification photographs could be made, he smiled into the lens with the relaxed ease of a celebrity accustomed to admiring attention. Clearly, he was not going to be an ordinary prisoner.
Nor was Leavenworth an ordinary prison. Known to its inmates as the “big L,” or the “Big Top” because of the dome above its administration building, it was established in 1895 for punishment, not rehabilitation. It was a city unto itself, with its own power station and farm and factories, and its own cemetery called Peckerwood Hill. Some seventeen hundred men lived within its forty-foot-high redbrick walls. More than four hundred of them had been convicted of violent crimes.
At first, Johnson’s family and friends must have worried about his safety. He still received death threats. Violence was commonplace in prison. There were madmen among his fellow inmates. The all-white guard staff routinely imposed its will with clubs, and Johnson’s lifelong refusal to defer to anyone’s authority seemed designed to set them off. But Johnson turned out to have a powerful ally. Former Nevada governor Denver S. Dickerson, the man who had made the battle at Reno possible—and, according to Johnson, had also made “several thousand dollars” betting on the outcome—was now superintendent of federal prisons and president of the parole board as well.*
Dickerson may or may not have let it be known that he was taking a personal interest in how the former champion was treated, but the morning Johnson arrived, Warden A. V. Anderson announced that his new prisoner would not be laying bricks or plowing the prison field, laboring on the road gang or breaking rocks in the quarry. Instead, he would become the “baseball park orderly,” in charge of making sure the field was kept “spick and span for the Saturday afternoon games.” When the season ended, Anderson continued, he planned to put the ex-champion in charge of an exercise program for the men. As soon as Johnson could be fitted out with the prison uniform, a hickory shirt and dungarees, he was hustled out onto the field to umpire a game between two prison teams, the Kitchens and the Twilights.
“In all,” Johnson wrote, “my imprisonment was in no wise as severe as I had anticipated. There was virtually no one over me and there was no one to whom I was answerable in the performance of my duties in the prison except the executives.” That was how Jack Johnson liked things. But it did not please the men in charge of day-to-day life on the cell blocks, and they made their feelings plain in a sheaf of written complaints addressed to their superiors. An indignant officer reported that on October 4 Johnson “did use the guard’s toilet … in the brick yard.” Two months later, the ex-champion loudly questioned another guard’s judgment in changing a friend’s work assignment, employing what the complaining officer called “rude language.” When the guard asked “what business he had to talk about me, [Johnson] replied in a very insolent manner that he had as much right to talk that way to me as I had to ride him, and I could not stop him.” A few days later, another officer came upon Johnson in the bakery, asking for extra bread; when he was ordered to move on, he took his own sweet time. “This prisoner does not get up for the A.M. count,” another officer reported in January. “This is a daily occurrence and he seems to think the guard’s orders as to
this do not apply to him.” A month later, he was reported again, this time for “loafing in main hall and offices. He comes in hall when ready…. All by hisself. Goes where he pleases. Asks nobody no permission.”
Most of Johnson’s transgressions—which would likely have been punished summarily had he been any other prisoner, let alone a black one—were routinely minimized by the guards’ superiors. The “loafing” charge, for example, did lose Johnson his yard privileges for two weeks, but Deputy Warden L. J. Fletcher remained sympathetic to him: “This prisoner is an orderly in Isolation and is supposed to go anyplace inside the walls if he has business…. He no doubt stops and visits places he should not, but on account of the unusual number of necessary trips and the fact that he is more conspicuous than ordinary prisoners, some allowance should be made.”*
In prison, Johnson wrote in his 1927 memoir, he “found little cause for complaint … and outside the fact that I chafed under the ordeal of restriction from the outside world, my life was pleasant and comfortable.” Only once, he said, did he get really angry. With permission from the warden, he had arranged for a hunter to shoot a possum for him. The man “was unable to find one, and rather than lose the dollar which I had promised him, killed and dressed a cat, being careful to remove all parts of the animal which would reveal its identity.” The cook, unfamiliar with possum anatomy, duly served it
with all the approved … trimmings. I had invited two or three friends to dine with me, but before we had partaken of the delicacy which we had anticipated with watering mouths, the deception was discovered…. Had I been able to lay my hands on the hunter at that moment, I fear that I would have treated him rather roughly.
This story sounds like the crudest kind of minstrel turn. But like so many of Johnson’s apparently tall tales, it turns out to have been true. A blind item in the prison newspaper, the Leavenworth New Era, provides corroboration: “Wonder why ‘Meow! Meow!’ has a strange sound to the ears of Jack Johnson? Can it be that he is suspicious about that kind of music?”
Unforgivable Blackness Page 54
