Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  Boxing promoters capitalized on widespread white anxieties about physical degeneration and racial instability to advertise events and products and to maximize profits. Magazines like Boxing publicized white hope matches to sell copies, while sporting equipment companies like Spalding advertised their wares to fans at white hope elimination tournaments.37 With circulations that stretched throughout Britain and its empire, Europe, and the United States, the London-based Boxing and its sister publication Health & Strength were particularly important in keeping white readers abreast of the imagined crisis. Boxing culture was helping to inspire a sense of Anglo-American rapprochement and interimperial cooperation that spread beyond the realm of government policy makers and officials.38

  The search for a white hope had taken on new dimensions and a new sense of urgency in the wake of Johnson's triumph over Jeffries in 1910. Regardless of their nations' competition for preeminence in the global arena, in the ring white Americans and Britons began to recognize their mutual interests in the preservation of white supremacy. Echoing calls from across the Atlantic, Health & Strength columnist Yorick Gradeley declared, “The fact of the matter is, we're all anxious to find a champion; we don't care whether he's an Englishman or an American or what he is, so long as he's one of our race.”39

  The Australian impresario Hugh McIntosh saw his chance to market these racial fears in the heart of the British Empire. In August 1910 he announced his upcoming trip to London to arrange a full-fledged white hope campaign similar to the one ongoing in athletic clubs throughout the United States.40 His original scheme involved erecting a pavilion in Earl's Court that would hold fight crowds of up to twelve thousand. He even banked on attracting white American fans to his London location, predicting that the puritanical blue crusades sweeping the United States would eventually outlaw professional prizefighting. With this gap in the U.S. market, McIntosh would develop London as the premier place for championship boxing and the center of the quest for a white hope.41

  By the fall of 1910 McIntosh's grand vision seemed to be materializing as he staged “The Search for a White Champion,” a series of qualifying tournaments for the British imperial heavyweight title.42 Promoters in different parts of the world also began organizing their own local crusades. In January 1911 a troupe of U.S. boxers visiting Australasia reportedly inspired a white hope craze in the southern hemisphere.43 From his home country of Canada, Tommy Burns tried his hand at promoting a white hope match in Calgary, Alberta, a prizefight that unfortunately ended in tragedy when the up-and-coming U.S. boxer Luther McCarty died from a blow to the head.44 Although French fans remained far less passionate about the campaign than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, even Parisian boxing managers began calling their heavyweights “des espoirs blancs” (white hopes).45

  Despite the breadth and intensity of the hunt for a white hope, there was none to be found. Yet the historical significance of this phenomenon lies less in its pugilistic outcome than in its ability to inspire ordinary men to imagine themselves as agents in the white man's burden. White working-class men in the cities were the primary consumers of white hope fight tickets and paraphernalia. White hope matches were also imbricated in the larger world of working-class amusements, for they regularly shared the stage with blackface minstrels and physical culturists. It is hardly surprising, then, that after the Jeffries-Johnson fight some of the most violent racial attacks on African Americans occurred in white immigrant neighborhoods.46

  Even the majority of the white hopes themselves were working-class men of immigrant backgrounds whose own claims to an Anglo-Saxon heritage were questionable. They included the likes of Carl Morris, an awkward six foot six engine driver of Irish and Native American extraction from Sapulpa, Oklahoma. Morris's popularity was fleeting as boxing fans abandoned him after his pitiful loss against another white hope named “Fireman” Jim Flynn. Born Andrew Chiariglione in Brooklyn, New York, Flynn moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where he developed his strength in the local fire brigade and later adopted an Irish boxing name.47 The most prominent English hopes were the foot soldiers of empire, including Wells and Gunner Jim Moir, while in the southern hemisphere Australia touted Bill Lang, a man of French-Italian descent whose real name was William Langfranchi.48 The diversity of this white hope contingent not only signaled but also helped to inspire an expanding sense of whiteness that defied ethnic, national, and class divisions.

  Nevertheless, white hope elimination matches were not always successful ventures. Sports fans were not necessarily interested in paying to see white-on-white conflict, especially if the men involved were mediocre fighters. In 1911 several white hope tournaments in New York City, plagued with organizational difficulties and poor attendance, proved anticlimactic from both boxing and business standpoints. Scheduled fighters sometimes failed to show up. Even the matches that came to fruition were often lackadaisical or one-sided. Moreover, the very phrase “white hope” became so ubiquitous that it became meaningless, as managers used it indiscriminately to describe any second-rate heavyweights they represented.49 Many boxing connoisseurs argued that the white hope crisis had placed undue focus on the heavyweight division, thereby ruining the quality of professional boxing.

  Ultimately it was the promise of interracial competition and the vanquishing of the black champion that proved to be the driving force behind the profitability of the white hope phenomenon. In addition to his most famous fight with Jeffries, Johnson's matches against Stanley Ketchell (Stanislaw Kiecal) in 1909 and “Fireman” Jim Flynn in 1912, along with their moving pictures, were huge box office successes.50 Johnson constantly played on the white public's anxious desire to test the relative strength of the races. In order to debunk the myth that black men had weak midsections, he once dared the famed British boxing writer Trevor Wignall to punch his stomach. As Wignall would later report, contrary to popular belief, striking Johnson's abdomen “was like hitting a piece of corrugated iron.”51 Despite Johnson's prowess, white boxing fans stuck to their hope that a white challenger would reinstate their racial supremacy in the ring.

  McIntosh recognized this dynamic and geared his other promotions accordingly. To cash in on Johnson's infamy he planned to pay the African American champion a whopping sum of $90,000 for a barnstorming tour across the Pacific. McIntosh and Johnson eventually settled on the fall of 1911 as the proposed start of the tour, with tentative stops in India, the Straits Settlements (Malaysia), China, Japan, Australia, Fiji, Hawaii, and British Columbia, Canada.52 McIntosh reportedly planned to make Johnson the backbone of his boxing trust. His grand idea was to contract Johnson and other major fighters, including both African Americans (Sam McVea and Sam Langford) and white hope challengers (Al Palzer and Dan “Porky” Flynn), to be part of his traveling show.53 In this way McIntosh could corner a more promising segment of the market, taking advantage of the white hope craze while also capitalizing on Johnson's great popularity among people of color.

  However, as profit motives clashed with imperial politics, interracial prizefights were not without potentially far-reaching consequences. In light of this, McIntosh devised a clever plan for calming British imperial officials' possible fears of native unrest. “Should the English authorities object to his boxing in India, Johnson is willing to become a lecturer and propagandist on the dominance of the white race,” a report on the barnstorming tour explained. “He has already made plans for a series of lectures in which he will tell the colored races that white rule, particularly English, is beneficent. He proposes to detail his own treatment in England, which he says is the freest and most just country on earth.”54 Although Johnson never would have agreed to deliver a lecture on white supremacy, given his respect for Britain he may have consented to speak on behalf of British rule. If all went smoothly the black heavyweight's tour would benefit both McIntosh's pocketbook and Britain's reputation as a benevolent power.

  In spite of its racist goals, the white hope crisis actually broadened the geographic horizons of African American box
ers such as Johnson. Although McIntosh's Pacific tour never came to fruition, this transnational market for interracial spectacles provided black American pugilists with a ready source of income and opportunities abroad, even as Jim Crow segregation reached its height back home. Yet these opportunities were double-edged. Even though Johnson had become a vocal advocate of British racial tolerance, as the controversy over his match with Wells intensified he soon found that there was no real place for him in their white body politic. An African American sportswriter warned, “I am very much afraid that prejudice will come up a bit in England. Even that fairly fair country does not care to have a black-amoor putting it over Englishmen…. I may be mistaken in this but we shall see what we shall see.”55

  RAPPROCHEMENT IN THE RING

  To escape the growing commotion over his upcoming match with Wells in London, Johnson traveled to Paris for his training camp in late August 1911. White American and British observers were quick to criticize Johnson's obvious sense of entitlement in the French republic. In Paris Johnson apparently could live like a king, and he made every effort to make this public knowledge. William A. Nash, the president of the Corn Exchange Bank of New York, was in the midst of a European holiday when Johnson arrived in Paris. He went to see Johnson train at Magic City, a popular amusement park much like Coney Island. Nash recounted, “Johnson, who has been here only a few days, is attracting general attention, especially by his luxurious style of life. He arrived with a retinue of trainers and friends in four big automobiles and took a fine apartment at the Grand Hotel, where he entertains daily a host of admirers.”56 By late September Johnson and his white wife, Etta Duryea, had moved into a little chateau at the end of Boulevard Victor Hugo in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. As one British correspondent described, “Here ‘Jack' and Mrs. Johnson live, surrounded by companions, attendants, and servants, who compose the little ‘court' of the negro boxing monarch, who, although quite a good-natured person seems to realise his importance and likes to be surrounded by white people.”57

  Regardless of Johnson's efforts to cultivate a regal persona, white American and British sports fans still cast him as a misguided minstrel who had forgotten his place. They assumed that the black heavyweight had chosen the City of Light because of its reputation for fetes, feasting, fashion, and freedom from discipline. London's Boxing World and Athletic Chronicle included a grinning caricature of Johnson smoking a cigar in Paris while dressed in a garish getup complete with a top hat, tails, and sparkling jewels.58 Other British cartoons and articles described Johnson doing everything that went against the accepted ideals of physical culture and respectability, from gorging on chicken to avoiding training.59 The white American dailies also turned their scrutiny on Johnson's Parisian hosts. They mocked the unusual French adoration of black boxers, suggesting that the overcivilized and effeminate Frenchmen were failing to uphold their end of the white man's burden.60

  As Johnson continued with his training in Paris, the public backlash against his scheduled showdown at Earl's Court became even more expansive and impassioned. Reverend F. B. Meyer emerged as the representative “face” of the British crusade against the interracial fight. Born in London in 1847, Meyer was not just an outspoken pastor but also an adventurous globetrotter and a progressive reformer. Since the 1890s he had traveled throughout North America, East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South Africa, and Australia.61 As a reformer Meyer had first made his mark in the physical culture scene in April 1908, when he penned a manifesto for Health & Strength that called for a collective fight against white degeneration.62 With his worldwide outlook and his concern for the well-being of white bodies, Meyer was the perfect man to spearhead the campaign.

  On September 16 the Times printed a letter of protest signed by Reverend Meyer and Charles Brown of the National Free Church Council.63 This letter ignited a firestorm of opposition to the prizefight that spread beyond the British Isles. Meyer and Brown called the Wells-Johnson match a brutal spectacle and urged all nonconformist clergy to dedicate Sunday's service to calling for its cancellation. In response to this public tirade, the promoter James White tried to reassure Meyer that the prizefight would be run in the most civilized manner, with three referees to enforce the Queensberry rules. White also promised that a board would review and edit the fight film before releasing it to the public. Even with these concessions Meyer refused to call off his campaign against the interracial bout.64

  Instead he catapulted the protest into the realm of politics. Meyer asked the London City Council (LCC) to intervene in the situation. While the LCC did not have any direct authority to ban the match, it warned the owners of Earl's Court that they would jeopardize their license renewal if the interracial fight went on as planned. Speaking in defense of the match, the press manager at Earl's Court argued that the LCC's threat was simply unwarranted because Britain had a long history of tolerance for interracial bouts. Earlier in the year the African American Sam Langford had fought against Bill Lang at London's Olympia without any objections from the public.65

  Undaunted, Meyer swiftly organized a petition signed by prominent clergymen that called upon Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who was then with King George at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, to stop the fight.66 Feeling a sense of urgency, Meyer offered to travel north to deliver the petition personally. The home secretary, however, advised him to remain in London, assuring him that the matter was receiving the “closest attention.”67 Adding the support of the Anglican Church to Meyer's cause, the archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Cantuar, also advised Churchill that the match was “really a Home Office matter” since it would diminish Britain's reputation not only among its own citizens and subjects but also “in the eyes of other nations.”68 The crusade continued to gain momentum as the bishops of London, Oxford, Ripon, Rochester, Bristol, Manchester, Wakefield, Lichfield, Durham, and Truro; the headmasters of Rugby, Dulwich, Mill Hill, and Taunton schools; several members of Parliament; the Lord Mayors of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham, Portsmouth, and Hull; Lord Kinnaird (president of the Football Association); Lord Lonsdale (president of the National Sporting Club); Sir Robert Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts); and even the famous physical culturist Eugen Sandow all publicly denounced the match.69

  The belief that race mixing in the boxing ring threatened to blur the line between white and nonwhite both locally and globally animated most of the resistance to the upcoming match. The fight's fiercest opponents argued that racial disturbances around the world had become increasingly interconnected as the rise of commercial media overrode the traditional buffers of geographic separation. “ ‘Colour feeling' it is true, is still largely unknown in the British Isles, but it has already shown signs of unexpected growth,” an English journalist maintained. “What is done at Earl's Court is not in any case to be done for Earl's Court alone. It will inevitably be spread by the Press and will have its effect on every community in which black and white live side by side.”70 The Wells-Johnson match became the focal point of a transnational debate about the boundaries of race, manhood, and citizenship in the modern era.

  Even though Britain had a long tradition of hosting interracial prizefights, the stakes now seemed much higher. “The relations between white and black have undergone a vast change in the last century,” a Times editorialist observed. “We have assumed throughout the Empire great and unparalleled responsibilities.”71 All across the newly formed Union of South Africa, newspaper editors and clergymen jumped on the bandwagon of metropolitan protest. The Wells-Johnson controversy inspired special concern in South Africa since its white minority population feared racial upheaval on a daily basis. The timing of the match also dovetailed with the ongoing racial reconciliation between Britons and Boers, as white settlers worked to exclude colored subjects from social, political, and economic rights. Cape Town's South African News called for the Union government to ban the importation of the fight film, while prominent leaders like the moderator of
the Dutch Reformed Church pressed for the prohibition of all newspaper descriptions and illustrations of the fight.72 Soon the Mail and the Star of Johannesburg, the Bloemfontein Friend, the Cape Argus, the Cape Times, and the Pietermaritzburg Witness joined the fray.73 Following South Africa's lead, colonial officials in Uganda and Nigeria came out in support of the ban. A Times correspondent expressed, “There can be no doubt that in this part of British West Africa, and in such places as Sierra Leone and Cape Coast [Ghana], the news flashed over the wires that a physical struggle between a white man and a black man, attended by thousands of spectators, has been waged in the capital of the Empire, would have a thoroughly mischievous effect—especially if the black man won.”74 The British liberal concept of imperial citizenship marked by civilization, rather than color, seemed inapplicable, if not naïve, in this case.

  This nervous recognition of the transnational reach and racial symbolism of the Wells-Johnson match also fostered a sense of Anglo-American solidarity. The white American dailies weighed in on the domestic implications of the foreign fight. “As a contest between a white man and a negro, the controversy has especial interest for America,” a New York Times correspondent contended.75 Many British commentators concurred, expressing their concern about the interracial prizefight's potential effects in the United States. As Reverend J. H. Shakespeare of the British Baptist Union predicted, “White and black will be pitted against each other in anger, revenge and murder, especially in lands like America in which the negro is the gravest of all problems.”76 Reverend Moffat Gautrey, the president of the Brotherhood Conference, worried that the match would actually damage Anglo-American relations. “What will the best of the American States say of Britain when they read the telegraphic accounts of the fight?” Gautrey asked. “How London can permit such a degradation amazes me.”77 White sentiments throughout the United States and the British Empire were beginning to align on the question of interracial competition in the boxing ring.