Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  French promoters even went so far as to sensationalize the interracial hatred between black and white American fighters in order to drum up more business at the box office. They invited Parisian fans to be voyeurs of white American negrophobia in action. In April 1910, when Scanlon took on the white American Charley Hitte, French journalists billed it as a contest of the races. Betting was especially swift for this fight precisely because of its obvious racial overtones as a contest between a “policier new-yorkais” (New York policeman) and an African American. One sportswriter declared, “One knows that between Americans of different colors, such meetings are always sincere and always bitter because of the kind of race hatred that exists in the United States between the whites on the one hand, the Blacks, the Redskins and even the Yellows, on the other.”75 There was also a personal vendetta at stake. Hitte sought revenge against Scanlon since the black pugilist had apparently kneed Hitte's white American trainer and fellow boxer Blink MacCloskey in the groin during a previous match. Although the referee eventually deemed the Hitte-Scanlon fight a tie, the African American had physically punished his white opponent. So supposedly intense was their shared hatred in the ring that the Parisian columnist Dispan exclaimed, “If after having knocked him out, Bob roasted Hitte…and then devoured him gluttonously, it would only half surprise us.”76 While French sportsmen could certainly sympathize with the racial plight of black American pugilists, they could not help but view men like Scanlon through the prevailing tropes of African savagery.

  In February 1912 MacCloskey finally got his own chance for revenge against Scanlon in the ring. When Scanlon triumphed, however, many Parisian fans began to ask “what occult power was at work…to so favour blacks in their fistic struggles with the white races.” One French correspondent speculated that MacCloskey's loss may have been “a sort of punishment for the [white] Americans for their hatred of the coloured man.”77 In many respects the cosmopolitan space of the Parisian boxing ring exemplified the complex cultural forces shaping racial formations in the late imperial age. While boxing and other commercial amusements involving black Americans were instrumental to France's culture of racial denial, they also implicated Parisian fans in the increasingly transnational trade of white supremacist entertainments and ideas.

  LES ESPOIRS BLANCS

  Even as French fans attempted to distance themselves from the vicious racism of their white American counterparts, they promoted un espoir blanc (a white hope) of their own. France's beloved young champion Georges Carpentier fought against Jeannette in the spring of 1914. This Parisian match captivated the French sporting public along with the nation's intellectual and artistic community, putting questions of race, manhood, and the state of the French body politic at the forefront of public discussions. Not only was the interracial fight a question of black versus white, but it promised to showcase France's physical regeneration on the world stage.

  As Scanlon later described in his memoirs, during a boxing tour of the French provinces in 1908 he had discovered a “little blond boy” named Carpentier who was managed by François Descamps.78 “I could see that he was the makings of a champion, so I got them [Carpentier and Descamps] to come to Paris,” Scanlon recalled. Over the next few years Carpentier's career took off and Parisian fans dubbed him “The French Idol.”79 Combining youthful effervescence, movie-star good looks, and great ring dexterity, Carpentier offered a strong counterpoint to the pervasive stereotypes of French effeminacy, overcivilization, and effeteness. More than just a question of athletic competition, Anglo-Saxon sportswriters often used these gendered tropes to criticize France's supposed lack of both martial spirit and imperial discipline.

  Through the boxing ring, French fans confronted their anxieties over their nation's racial and geopolitical standing. According to one Parisian correspondent, before the advent of men like Carpentier, one would often hear Frenchmen saying, “Oh, zee French vill nevair beat ze ‘Roasbeefs' [British] with zee box.”80 They thought that their “fiery temperament” and small stature precluded them from success in the ring. “Comparatively puny in those days,” the writer argued, “Frenchmen's eyes opened wide at the spectacle of two Englishmen doing their hardest…to do each other grievous bodily harm.” With the emergence of pugilists like Marcel Moreau, Marc Gaucher, and then Carpentier, Frenchmen began to compete on even ground with Englishmen and white Americans alike. Daniel Rivoire of Le Journal believed that the upcoming Jeannette-Carpentier match would provide perfect “proof of the restoration of [the French] race from the physical point of view.”81 Carpentier stood as “a synthesis of all the efforts made for twenty years to restore energy to a languishing people.” As one of the few white boxers in the world who dared to take on Jeannette, he emerged as an important emblem of the larger project of white French regeneration.

  French fans still used this prizefight to make public claims about their color blindness. They argued that unlike most Anglo-Saxons, they approached interracial matches from a dispassionate point of view. They contrasted their embrace of the Jeannette-Carpentier match with the violent white American reaction to Johnson's victories against Tommy Burns and Jim Jeffries. “Fortunately, in the match of Luna Park there is for us, in Paris, only the sporting question,” one writer declared. “We do not mingle it with other concerns of color. We do not think that in the boxing ring the superiority of a race, or even of a nationality, is at stake. It should simply be wished that the best man triumph.”82 The writer claimed that if victory smiled on Jeannette, Frenchmen would gladly congratulate the African American pugilist. “We will not take up with the niggers nor with the mulattoes of Paris; we will not massacre them,” he assured. In other words, white French civilization would ultimately prevail even if the black American boxer triumphed in the ring.

  Despite these declarations of impartiality, many French commentators were swept up in the racial dimensions of the fight. Jacques Mortane called Carpentier “the white hope that the whole world wishes to see triumph,” arguing that if the young Frenchman defeated Jeannette it would not only be “a great day for the noble art” but a moment of glory for France.83 While French sportswriters claimed to be color-blind, their portrayals of Jeannette tended to emphasize the black American's exotic blood quantum. One journalist described Jeannette as a “mulatto [with] the blood of a ferocious Indian.”84 Another sports-writer hailed him as “A Coloured ‘White Man.'” “To quote the ‘Duke' in ‘Othello,' he ‘is far more fair than black'—both as regards to colour and character,” the writer maintained. “Although of the Mulatto hue, Joe is a ‘white man' through and through.”85 While Jeannette's racial admixture and his gentlemanly behavior enabled him to become an honorary white man in the eyes of Parisian fans, Carpentier was still the undisputed French white hope.

  With French honor at stake, many predicted that the Jeannette-Carpentier match would beat all previous Parisian box office records. The extraordinary demand for tickets had convinced the organizers to open the box office two weeks before the fight. Moreover, fake tickets were reportedly in circulation.86

  On 21 March the fight at Luna Park attracted a diverse crowd of roughly seven thousand men and women, including “representatives of nearly every race” and social class.87 Jeannette and Carpentier each had their own army of enthusiasts. After the weigh-in the grand boulevards of Paris were reportedly “invaded by a black crowd” of Jeannette's supporters.88 Many of the white working-class men from the mining district near Carpentier's hometown of Lens also made their way to the match. The fight was so popular that organizers had to turn away hundreds of stragglers from the doors of the arena. As one journalist described, “The much-abused sardine was never so tightly packed as the crowd in the gallery, which disappeared almost entirely from view in tobacco smoke.”89 Alongside the masses in the cheaper seats, “the very cream of the Paris monde and demi-monde was present in all its glittering vanity.” Another correspondent recalled, “One highly coloured queen of diamonds, in the front row, carried no less th
an the price of a king's ransom in those precious carbons.”90 The Jeannette-Carpentier fight went on to earn an estimated 150,000 francs, the highest gate ever recorded in Paris.

  Staged in grandiose style, the interracial match had an almost dreamlike quality. A correspondent for La Boxe et les boxeurs described, “The two men are in the boxing ring, amid an extraordinary decor, an impressionist décor, worthy to tempt the imagination of a modernist painter. Above the narrow enclosure reserved for the fight…an intense pinkish light falls, and this light gives the two athletes colors and forms at once very clear and very surreal.”91 Carpentier had “the air of a beautiful statue of old ivory,” while Jeannette resembled “a copper Buddha.” Although both boxers were “very beautiful” in their own right, Carpentier was the crowd favorite. “Certainly, Carpentier remains our national Georges, for whom each Frenchman feels in his heart some fraternal fiber,” the writer declared. Yet, French desires notwithstanding, Jeannette won by referee's decision in the fifteenth round.

  Jeannette's victory inspired a public backlash that further emphasized the racial stakes of the match. Many French fans believed that the referee had unjustly awarded the match to the African American. Cries of protest filled the venue and continued to fill the pages of Parisian sporting papers in the days that followed. Thousands of Carpentier's supporters had waited outside Luna Park until the wee hours of the morning just to cheer him on.92 La Boxe et les boxeurs received a deluge of letters disputing the referee's verdict. As the magazine's editor, Leon Sée, summarized the situation, it was “an admirable match, [but] a bad decision.”93

  Other reports suggested that Jeannette did, in fact, deserve to win, and that a case of wounded French pride was largely responsible for the outcry. “The French public is overly chauvinistic,” a Parisian sportswriter declared. “It does not want to admit that its idol was beaten.” Another argued that Jeannette had won because of his indefatigable strategy of blasting Carpentier with body shots. Jeannette had apparently “left the ring without the proverbial scratch, while Carpentier was badly disfigured.”94

  Over the next month the Jeannette-Carpentier match continued to inspire popular conversations about race as its moving picture played in Parisian theaters.95 French journalists claimed that even though the younger and smaller Carpentier had lost against the more experienced and much larger Jeannette, his valiant effort in the ring still demonstrated the regeneration of white French manhood. “Who will dare to say after this…that our race is decadent?” Mortane challenged.96 Mortane even advocated military service to help train Carpentier for his continued rise in professional boxing.

  With all of the hoopla surrounding the match, French officials had become increasingly interested in developing a national sporting agenda, including a department and a university dedicated to the promotion of physical fitness. They argued that sport was an essential part of “the physical development of the rising generation” and they hoped that it would “serve as an exhaust valve for the excessive steam of those wound up in the every day battles” of modern life.97 In a world of accelerating change Frenchmen could no longer afford to ignore their bodies. Much like their Anglo-Saxon brothers, they too had to prove their racial and martial mettle for the white man's burden.

  BLACK PROTEST IN THE PARISIAN RING

  Johnson, the consummate showman, certainly knew how to manipulate the cultural climate of the white man's burden to his own ends. Playing into popular French support for oppressed African Americans, the black champion couched his June 1914 fight against Frank Moran in images of primitive masculinity as a revenge match against white American and British racism. French sportswriters grabbed hold of this story of savage retribution, predicting an intense and bloody affair. Thanks to Johnson's knack for self-promotion and to French promoters' desire to make Paris the definitive capital of boxing, this white hope fight quickly became an international event, shaped by the exigencies of interimperial rivalry and racial protest.

  In the lead-up to the interracial match, the English-speaking world backed Johnson's white American challenger. They celebrated the six-foot-tall, twenty-seven-year-old, “sandy-haired Pittsburgher” as an archetypical white man.98 With a mixture of both brains and brawn, Moran was not only a former Navy man but also a university graduate with a dentistry degree. Fresh from a theatrical tour across the United States, the white fighter exclaimed, “The reception tendered me in the different cities made me all the more anxious to regain what Jeffries lost at Reno.…America and England are with me to a man, and I will make good.”99

  Moran was certainly correct in his assumption of white Anglo-Saxon support. Relatively low admission prices made the fight accessible even for “ordinary Britishers,” and many thought it would be their last opportunity to travel to Paris given the ominous signs of war. Likewise, white American expatriates flocked to Moran's training camp and were expected to attend the fight en masse in support of “their hope.”100 Back home, mainstream newspapers like the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Globe, and the Philadelphia Times touted Moran as both a national hero and an assured winner—“a modern Lohengrin” who would “avenge the white race.”101 Each day Moran received telegrams of support from the United States, and some reports even estimated that hundreds of white American sportsmen would make their way across the Atlantic to witness the match.

  Parisian sportswriters sensationalized the depths of white American negrophobia while also publicizing their own nation's racial exceptionalism. One journalist claimed that ever since Johnson had wrested the world championship from Tommy Burns in 1908, “America had but one thought: to punish the nigger.”102 Another prefight report reminded French boxing fans that Johnson's victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910 had triggered antiblack “riots” and “massacres” across the United States.103 While white Americans' “hatred of the negroes” had apparently blinded them to Moran's pugilistic shortfalls, French sportsmen boasted that their racial impartiality had allowed them to see that Johnson was the superior boxer.104

  Hoping to cash in on this interimperial competition, promoters scheduled the fight for the day after the Grand Prix, the prestigious French turf race that attracted thousands of sporting enthusiasts to Paris each year. It would take place on 27 June 1914 at the Velodrome d'Hiver, a modern indoor arena with a capacity of around thirty thousand people. The Associated Press, representing seven hundred U.S. newspapers, paid five thousand francs for the right to install a ringside telegraph wire that would connect directly to transatlantic cables. Round-by-round fight news would reach all four corners of the earth with amazing speed.105

  Johnson took full advantage of this occasion to broadcast his critique of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. He expressed his determination to exact vengeance on his white American tormentors. “Even though I respect Frank Moran, I must make him pay for all the insults of the Americans,” Johnson asserted. “The Americans are already dancing around my scalp,” he complained. “They believe I'm finished, used up.” However, he assured French readers, “It is not yet time for the whites to have my scalp.”106

  Every afternoon Johnson held an open training session at Luna Park to show off his physique and technique. One Parisian correspondent wrote, “This time, it is a warlike Johnson, slender…shining like a handsome thoroughbred—a Johnson who for two months has worked his body, his lungs, his heart, and his breath with the furious will to avenge himself against a new adversary.”107 Fans were assured of a bloody fight that would not only showcase the African American champion's incredible strength but also unleash his savage animosity for white America.

  Despite Johnson's various efforts to drum up support, the results were mixed. He and his pursuit of savage retribution had apparently developed a particular appeal with the street urchins of Paris. On the evening of 27 June a crowd of white French boys stood at the entrance of the Velodrome d'Hiver chanting, “Vive le Nigger.”108 Although Billy Lewis tried to rationalize their use of the term “nigger,” arguing that it was an “expressi
on of endearment” in Paris, the boys' choice of words belied their paternalistic and exotic view of the African American boxer.

  Later that night when Johnson entered the ring, followed by his imposing troupe of black trainers, he received only a smattering of applause. In contrast, an almost crazed clamor permeated the stadium as Moran arrived. All of the white Americans in attendance stood and cheered as Moran and his white entourage stepped into the ring. While the Velodrome d'Hiver in reality was only half full, it was such a large venue that the match still garnered a record gate of 181,000 francs.109

  The lighting for the making of the fight film gave everything in the immense space a rosy tinge, adding drama to the scene.110 Spectators from all sectors of society, most noticeably French women, attended in formal evening dress. As a report in the New York Times described, “The singular spectacle was presented of several hundred women in handsome gowns applauding the two pugilists as they struggled up and down the ring, feinting and dodging and hammering each other.”111 A French correspondent named Colette Willy, popularly known as a sportswoman, performer, and avant-garde writer, even covered the match for Le Matin.112

  In addition to containing French women, the fight crowd was “amazingly international,” with numerous dark faces dotting the predominantly white audience. Several hundred white Americans were in the best seats. Also in attendance were various public figures, including the likes of Spencer Eddy (former U.S. minister to Argentina), the Duke of Westminster, Louis Barthou (former premier of France), the Baron James de Rothschild (of the Rothschild banking family), and several marquises and dukes. When Moran's blows connected the white American fans in the audience rose to their feet, cheering on their white hope, while race baiting Johnson.113 Not to be outdone, Johnson taunted Moran in the ring. When the Moran punched Johnson's stomach, the black champion held his arms up and grinned, as if to say, “He [Moran] can do that as long as he likes.”114 Throughout the fight black American expatriates rooted for Johnson alongside black men from Senegal, Dahomey, and the Caribbean. The Guadeloupeans Gratien Candace and Rene Boisneuf, two black members of the French Chamber of Deputies, watched the fight with intense interest. Even Prince Dhuleep Singh of India and Omar Sultan, the pasha of Egypt, were in attendance.115