Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 12
A symbolic clash between white and black, the Jeffries-Johnson match marked the rise of a new kind of commercialized racial spectacle—one that earned immense profits as it moved rapidly across the globe in a variety of media. Although the fight was over, the news and images of the event began to take on a life of their own. Later that same day representatives from the Vitagraph Company rushed to New York City by train with the film reels of the historic fight. They arrived in record time on the morning of 8 July and immediately set to work editing the footage into a two-and-a-half-hour show.27
In the meantime, a communications network comprised of telegraphs and telephones carried the fight results to anxious boxing fans gathered at theaters, saloons, and newspaper offices in the United States and beyond. More news went out over the wires regarding the Jeffries-Johnson fight than the fall of Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War. The fight had broken all previous telegraph records, with more than eight hundred thousand words sent at an average cost of two cents per word.28 One African American editorialist boasted, “Never before in the annals of history has telegraph wire sent to the four quarters of the globe two words which were received so anxiously as…‘Johnson Wins.’”29
Two thousand miles away in Johnson's home base of Chicago, the match results came over the wires and made their way onto bulletin boards throughout the city. At the popular Pekin Theater on the South Side, owner Robert Mott read the postfight dispatch to an eager crowd of African American fans, unleashing a wave of celebration. “Men stood on their seats waving hats like mad,” one black journalist recounted. “Women were equally as demonstrative; and through the windows, out of fire exits, and through the regulation exits, the big crowd surged to the streets only to be met by enthusiastic hosts coming from either direction on State street.”30 Thousands of Johnson's black fans streamed out of restaurants and saloons all along “The Stroll,” forming an impromptu parade. Some waved Johnson banners while others pinned newspapers with Johnson's picture across their chests. White people passing through the enormous crowd “were made the butts of black folks' boisterous wit.” Johnson's triumph over Jeffries had brought their submerged feelings of black pride to the surface for all to see.
FIGURE 6. Jack Johnson in the ring with Jim Jeffries in Reno, 4 July 1910. © Bettmann/Corbis. Courtesy of Corbis.
The fight results made their way across the Atlantic and the Pacific. In Paris, many white American expatriates had converged on the offices of the French sporting daily L'Auto to await the telegraph reports. When the news of Jeffries's defeat arrived just after midnight, it spread throughout the city's white American colony causing “general consternation.” Paris's African American community rejoiced. At about two in the morning a group of black American boxers and sportsmen entered the offices of L'Auto dancing with so much excitement that they scared the paper's editor.31 The fight results also reached London, England, where thousands of people had gathered in the neighborhood of Leicester Square to discuss the match. By eleven o'clock that night the crowd of hundreds had grown into a throng of thousands. The “overwhelming majority” of these fans were ardent supporters of Jeffries. However, when the reports of Johnson's triumph arrived at midnight, all of a sudden “the coloured men seemed to become unusually numerous in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, Leicester square, the Strand, and Fleet street.”32 Some scuffles ensued. A crowd of white men attacked a black music hall artist outside London's Alhambra Theater just because Johnson had won.33 News of the fight even traveled to the North Coast region of New South Wales, Australia, where it roused debates among eager white and Aboriginal boxing fans.34
Thanks to this initial onslaught of information, the fight film became a hot commodity. A U.S. film critic declared, “The interest these pictures have aroused throughout the entire world and the advertising they are getting from people who think they should be stopped, should make them a gold mine for the exhibitor in sections where they can be shown.”35 The rights to exhibit the film in Canada alone fetched a price of $150,000. Australian and French promoters had initially bid $50,000 each to obtain the rights for their countries, and yet their offers were rejected as too low. The exclusive rights for Illinois sold for $60,000, Oscar Hammerstein offered $20,000 to exhibit the film in his venues, and one New York theater placed a bid of $12,000 to score the moving picture.36 Even fake films of the match began springing up in a variety of locations, causing legal battles over patent rights.37
By early twentieth century standards, the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture was a marvelous production in its own right, providing a dramatic visual narrative of interracial competition. It took viewers inside both fighters' training camps as they prepared for the match, contrasting the stalwart white with the flashy black. A slow yet determined Jeffries punched the heavy bag, sparred, and skipped rope for the camera. He shook hands with the former white world champions John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett in a show of racial solidarity. The cinematograph also captured Johnson's flamboyant personality. The black heavyweight fashioned himself as a prosperous man with panache and pride as he sparred, shot craps, fed chickens, drove a sulky, and even joked with his white entourage in front of the cameras.38
Although cinematographers filmed the prizefight from a distance, the color difference between the two boxers was stark, and Johnson's physical and tactical prowess were unmissable. “The pictures are very fine in quality and show the details of the fight with vividness,” one critic maintained. “They show the great gorilla-like negro, with his catlike pounce, striking in and retreating with dazzling speed…[and] they show the great frame of the boilermaker racked by grinding blows and his head shot back by the smashing force of the negro's attacks.”39 The footage from the fifteenth round featured the production's most intense moments. It left no doubt of Johnson's awe-inspiring triumph, as it showed the black champion pursuing Jeffries and pummeling him to the ground with a right uppercut and three left hooks. It also captured the potent left hook that left Jeffries sprawled across the bottom rope and the final moment when Berger jumped into the ring to end the fight. With its graphic images of black dominance and white defeat, the moving picture appeared to augur a frightening reversal of the racial and imperial hierarchies beyond the ring.
In the month after the match Johnson recorded a voice-over to accompany the film. Produced by the American Cinephone Company for distribution on phonograph, it had inspired one critic to “perceive the possibilities in the way of topic talking pictures.”40 Copies of this rudimentary “soundtrack” were marketed directly to African American fans, complete with a letter from Johnson guaranteeing the recording's authenticity.41 Over the next year the voice-over remained in circulation, even reaching France in February 1911. To satisfy French viewers' curiosity about the black champion, the American Biograph Theater in Paris played the fight film together with the phonograph. “One can very clearly hear the champion explain the details of the 15th round of his great combat in Reno, while the translation of this speech is reproduced…on the screen in French,” one Parisian reviewer described.42 The Jeffries-Johnson fight film pointed to the real moneymaking potential of recorded racialized spectacles.
The film was part of a much broader universe of white supremacist productions that pervaded the early film industry. It circulated right alongside newsreels of events such as President Theodore Roosevelt's African safari and various fictional dramas of U.S. western expansion, including Custer's Last Stand.43 The same individuals and companies that had recorded scenes from the Spanish-American War, including Edison and Bioscope, also took the lead in producing interracial prizefight films. Thomas Edison had even used African American performers to play the conquered Filipinos in his filmed reenactments of battles from the Philippine-American War.44 This interchangeability encouraged the conflation of African Americans and colonial subjects, and white spectators came to view these moving pictures as part of the same genre. As one bored little girl reportedly exclaimed at a screening of the Jeffries-Johnson film
in the Forest Park suburb of Chicago, “This isn't near as nice as the cowboy and Indian pictures.”45 Regardless of the young girl's criticism, interracial fight films appealed to a transnational audience since they embodied contemporary racial conflicts with a heightened sense of immediacy.
The United States' moving picture community certainly realized the far-reaching significance of the Jeffries-Johnson match and its cinematographic exhibition. According to Reverend H. F. Jackson of Moving Picture World, just as the Spanish-American War had brought global attention to the United States, so too had the Jeffries-Johnson cinematograph made the medium of film a “world issue,” especially with regard to “its use.”46 “It [film] is the world's eye,” Jackson argued, “and the world is deciding what it shall behold and keep upon its everlasting retina.” Since moving pictures were now a “universal factor to be reckoned with,” they would have to be “governed accordingly.” “The world at large acknowledges their value, respects their powers and recognizes their possibilities,” Jackson observed. Given the growing backlash against the Jeffries-Johnson fight film, the reverend was not far off the mark.
THE CENSORSHIP MOVEMENT
Reverend Jackson was not the only one pondering the global consequences of the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture. In the weeks following the match a collection of coordinated movements to ban its exhibition arose in various locales throughout the United States, the British Empire, and Europe. Although some white reformers and officials joined the opposition because of their general distaste for boxing's barbarism, it was clear that the racial dimensions of the fight had sent them into crisis mode. Moving Picture World called the mounting protest “one of the strongest demonstrations ever started in the amusement world.”47 Troubling questions of race and representation were galvanizing concerned white citizens across ethnic, regional, and national divides.
Beginning in its home city of Boston, Massachusetts, just days after the Jeffries-Johnson match, the United Society of Christian Endeavor (USCE) organized a national campaign that quickly evolved into a transnational crusade against the exhibition of the moving picture. Heeding the complaints of Boston's USCE chapter, Mayor John F. Fitzgerald expressed his hope that the film would not be shown in the city and declared that Bostonians should take the lead in banishing prizefight pictures. Under the direction of its general secretary, William Shaw, the USCE then sent a telegram to all the state governors requesting their support: “Race riots and murder in many places following announcement of Johnson's victory in prizefight. These results will be multiplied many fold by moving picture exhibitions. Will you join other governors in recommending prohibition of these demoralizing shows? Save our young people. Wire answer.”48
The USCE also urged former president Theodore Roosevelt to use his influence on behalf of its cause. In an article published in Outlook magazine, Roosevelt complained that prizefight films had “introduced a new method of money-getting and demoralization” to the sport of boxing.49 “It would be an admirable thing,” Roosevelt declared, “if some method could be devised to stop the exhibition of the moving pictures.” Other progressive reformers and religious organizations began joining the movement. The Women's Christian Temperance Union built a coalition of civic groups to oppose the film publicly.50 The International Association of Police Chiefs, the Juvenile Protective Association, the Young People's Christian Union, the Epworth League of Methodist Episcopal Churches, and settlement house workers such as Jane Addams also expressed their disapproval of the film.51
Even though few places in the United States had laws prohibiting prizefight pictures, police and government officials in nearly twenty states and thirty cities across the country made plans or issued orders to prevent the exhibition of the incendiary film. Actions against the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture arose in Washington, D.C., Alabama (Birmingham, Mobile), Arkansas (Little Rock), Georgia (Savannah, Atlanta), Kentucky (Louisville, Newport), Louisiana (New Orleans), Maryland (Baltimore), South Carolina (Charleston), Texas (Forth Worth), Virginia (Norfolk, Portsmouth, Richmond), California (Fresno), Illinois (Macomb), Michigan (Saginaw, Detroit), Missouri (St. Louis), New York (Rochester, Buffalo), Ohio (Cincinnati, Aurora, Cairo), Pennsylvania (Harrisburg), Rhode Island (Providence, Woonsocket), and Wisconsin (Milwaukee).52 In the United States' empire, Manila's Municipal Board in the Philippines and the Cuban government took steps to ban the Jeffries-Johnson film, fearing the incitement of racial animosities.53 In the face of this ever-expanding opposition, the Chicago syndicate that owned the film rights stood to lose a lot of money, and on 7 July they threatened to sue for permission to override the various prohibitions. Just two days later, however, they backed down from this stance, assuring the public that they would not fight the bans of any U.S. state or municipality.54
Hoping to extend the geographic dimensions of their crusade, Christian Endeavor leaders in the United States wired urgent messages to all the organization's branches around the world.55 By 1910 the USCE had become an international force to be reckoned with, comprised of roughly four million members. This nondenominational Protestant society had more than seventy thousand chapters worldwide, mostly concentrated in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. There were also chapters based in India, Madagascar, France, Mexico, Japan, the West Indies, Turkey, China, Africa, and Germany. The USCE's well-oiled publicity machine of letter-writing campaigns and press contacts, along with its own newspapers and international conventions, had helped the organization to sustain an influential voice in both the government and the public sphere.56
The USCE's movement against the Jeffries-Johnson fight pictures fit well within its dual vision of domestic regeneration and Christian imperialism. Its main constituents were white middle-class progressives with a decidedly global view of religious and moral reform. As part of the wider Social Gospel movement of the early 1900s, Christian Endeavorers also believed in the necessity of practical action. Worried that the exigencies of modern life were causing the decline of Western nations, the USCE worked to eradicate the disease and vice popularly associated with urbanization and industrialization, including consumption (tuberculosis), obesity, pornography, gambling, and drunkenness.57 They believed not only in the importance of uplifting and disciplining the white working class at home but also in the necessity of civilizing colonial subjects abroad.
Christian Endeavorers railed against the commercialism and barbarism of prizefighting, a sport dominated by immigrant working-class men. Known for its materialistic, lascivious, hard-drinking, and race-mingling culture, professional boxing seemed to represent a dangerous trajectory for the modern world. The USCE worried that the interracial fight film would have an especially demoralizing effect on white children. In England, the Portsmouth and District C. E. Union chapter of the Society of Christian Endeavour passed a formal resolution against the moving picture on behalf of its 1,600 youth members. They claimed that any screening of the Jeffries-Johnson film “would be injurious to the moral welfare of…young people by fostering a taste for low and brutal amusement.”58 Despite their ostensible concern about the film's “brutality,” what they really feared was the potential impact of its irrefutable demonstration of white weakness. Given the supposedly moribund state of Western civilization, this type of racial demoralization simply could not be tolerated.
The USCE's campaign seemed to have convinced some British authorities of the need to take action. Member of Parliament Sir Howell Davies announced that he would ask Home Secretary Winston Churchill to prohibit the moving picture in the interest of “public decency.”59 Although Churchill maintained that he had no direct power to bar it, he allowed local authorities to take action. The London City Council warned the proprietors of entertainment venues that they would have difficulty renewing their licenses if they exhibited the Jeffries-Johnson film, while the Glasgow Corporation of Scotland spoke disparagingly of the moving picture. In Ireland, both the Lord Mayor and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin came out in opposition to the “b
rutalizing” cinematograph.60 Given the prevalence of concerns about white degeneration, it is not surprising that opposition to the fight film arose even in places where relatively few nonwhites resided.
As much as the USCE claimed responsibility for sparking a widespread white backlash against the Jeffries-Johnson film, it was not the only purveyor of doomsday news. With their traumatic accounts of Johnson's victory and its bloody aftermath, wire services and newspapers also helped fuel the public fire for a ban. Stories of race riots across the United States made their way into British metropolitan and colonial publications. The Cape Times shared a frightening cable report of black American unrest with its South African readers: “Troops have been called out. The prisons are overflowing.…Fifty people were injured in New York, where knives and revolvers were freely used.”61 The U.S. correspondent for Britain's Boxing magazine described a case in which four African American boys in Chicago packed a buggy full of guns and drove around terrorizing innocent white citizens. “Multiply this case by a few hundred,” the correspondent cautioned, “and you can get some idea of what a state of high fizzle the Johnson victory has put the negro mind in.”62 Even though white Americans were actually the biggest perpetrators of racial violence in the wake of the fight, narratives of wanton black brutality dominated the pages of white newspapers.63
The cover of Boxing greeted readers with an ominous silhouette of the black champion's bust spanning the globe with the caption, “Jack Johnson in his Pride.”64 Throughout the British Empire political officials, newspaper editors, and police forces began calling for the prohibition of the Jeffries-Johnson film. On 8 July the Times of Natal in South Africa declared that a “world-wide movement” had coalesced around the issue. As proof, it pointed to the anti-fight film editorials in London's Westminster Gazette, Calcutta's Englishman, and Bloemfontein's Friend as well as the initiatives already underway in the United States.65 The San Francisco Examiner captured the mood of this growing protest in a clever cartoon titled “And Not a Friendly Port in Sight.” It showed an ocean wave of “opposition” pushing a projector labeled “Jeffries-Johnson moving pictures” away from three armed forts labeled “U.S.,” “Europe,” and “Africa.”66