Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  The Hobbesian idea of a “body politic” had become much more literal in the minds of Roosevelt and his contemporaries.14 According to popular belief, a nation's political and cultural dominance was directly linked to the physical condition of its citizens. In a speech before the Hamilton Club of Chicago in 1899 Roosevelt declared that “a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives.”15

  This focus on physical training also exposed a shared sense of anxiety about the decline of white men's control in the world. During the height of Roosevelt's popularity many believed that the shifting circumstances of modernity—industrialization, urbanization, immigration, women's social and political agitation, and imperialism—were wreaking havoc on the health of white nations. Since the 1870s fears of race suicide had been a part of public discussions in most Western countries, and by the early twentieth century some alarmists warned that the white race would die out.16 The spread of tuberculosis among the white working class and the growing decadence of the white elite seemed ample proof of this impending racial downfall.17 The flood of white ethnic immigrants and nonwhites into the cities (both metropolitan and colonial) also sparked new worries about racial competition and miscegenation, while white defeats in the first Italo-Ethiopian War (1895–96) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) demonstrated the vulnerability of European powers. From New York to New South Wales, many imagined that whiteness was literally under assault.

  Not even the United States' recent economic success could insulate it from the dangers of degeneration. Doomsayers like Bernarr MacFadden believed “old-time Americans” not only were dying out but were also being replaced by the substandard progeny of immigrants.18 Europe seemed to provide a cautionary tale. A white American physical culturist argued, “The threatened extinction of the French as a race and France as a nation, should warn us on this side of the water of the dread possibilities which are to be found in a prosperity and a civilization which stifle the natural and encourage the abnormal in man.” In 1907 the number of deaths exceeded the number of births in France.19 Britain also appeared to be in decline. The lackluster performances of British soldiers and sportsmen on the international stage epitomized this national crisis. Britain's massive casualties during the Boer Wars had brought things to a head, inspiring numerous public projects for racial improvement.20

  Regenerating the white body politic became tightly entwined with the social engineering of progressivism, the pseudoscience of eugenics, the discipline of anthropology, and the expansion of the state. Many physical culturists believed that crime, disease, and degeneration were related phenomena, particularly among the poor and working class.21 The inclusion of sport and outdoor activity in formal education and in the programs of organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the Young Men's Christian Association was supposed to minimize this triple threat. With the help of rationalized record keeping and growing bureaucracies, governments began to play a bigger role in the classification and disciplining of their citizens' bodies. With measures like Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts, certain physical “abnormalities” became criminalized. The United States also pioneered laws requiring the sterilization of so-called degenerates.22

  The rise of racial segregation at home and in the colonies accompanied these transnational efforts at white regeneration. New imaging technologies and the development of physical anthropology inspired the racial categorization of humans along a sliding scale of civilization. The intensification of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South, the codification of racial segregation in South Africa, and the rise of restrictive immigration legislation in Australia were just some of the ways in which these distinctions were put into practice.

  Boxing seemed to offer some solace in these troubled times. Roosevelt and many of his sporting contemporaries believed that pugilism was the perfect antidote to the escalating problems of national degeneration and white race suicide. In his popular manual How to Box to Win, How to Build Muscle, the white American featherweight champion “Terrible” Terry McGovern claimed that boxing was one of the best ways for “any schoolboy or newsboy or office boy” to acquire a sound body and the skills of self-defense. The sport was inexpensive and easily practiced in the comfort of one's own home. McGovern also maintained that knowing how to protect oneself was “not only a convenience, but a duty.” After all, General George Dewey and the U.S. Navy could never have conquered Manila “with a rotten, leaky fleet,” let alone a bunch of effete and flabby recruits.23 Boxing melded well with the modern demands of white supremacy both at home and abroad.

  JOHNSON AND WHITE AUSTRALIA

  The haunting specter of Johnson's strong and virile black body came to connect these white anxieties across the Pacific. Commenting on the black heavyweight's recent departure for the antipodes in December 1906, one white American journalist exclaimed, “He will go across and see how they look upon dark meat over in one of King Edward's lands.”24 Although undoubtedly filled with sarcasm, the writer's metaphorical use of the phrase “dark meat” rightly emphasized the physical dimensions of the color line that Johnson would soon be forced to face.

  The most telling event of the African American boxer's first foray abroad was not a ring fight but a court fight stemming from his relationship with a white Australian woman named Alma Adelaide Lillian Toy. Lola Toy, as her friends and family called her, was a twenty-one-year-old traveling pianist whose mother owned the Grand Pacific Hotel, a popular pub in the Sydney suburb of Watsons Bay. The fact that Johnson and Toy's alleged intimacy provoked a public uproar in Australia is not surprising. Given the widespread belief that a nation was only ever as powerful as its citizens' individual bodies, the mounting efforts to maintain white men's physical fitness and white women's sexual purity were fundamentally intertwined. By the early twentieth century the bedroom, much like the boxing ring, was becoming a space of heightened white surveillance in a number of metropolitan and colonial locales.

  When Johnson arrived in Sydney his commanding presence inspired white Australians to reflect on their own ongoing debate about the racial contours of citizenship, for he carried with him the freight of the United States' “negro problem.” In 1901 the Australian Parliament had passed the Immigration Restriction Act. This legislation formed the centerpiece of what was popularly known as the White Australia Policy, or the collective political will to exclude nonwhite people, particularly Asians, from immigrating to the continent.25 While fears of a “yellow invasion” from nearby Asian countries definitely drove the formulation of this policy, Australian politicians also looked to the United States' democratic experiment as a lesson in race and nation building. As the Free Trade Party opposition leader George Reid declared, “We have all seen the problem caused by coloured people in the United States. We do not want that to happen here. The Opposition wants the new Australia to be a land for the finest products of the Anglo Saxon race. This [immigration restriction] Bill will make that happen.”26 With this legislation they hoped to “whiten” the continent by deporting and preventing the entry of nonwhites and by encouraging white settlement.

  Some Australian officials also envisioned interracial marriages between European men and indigenous women as “conduits of white-ness.”27 They believed that this particular process of miscegenation would allow for the genetic absorption of Aboriginal people into the nation. Grounded in the principle of white men's sexual privilege as well as the desire to seize Aboriginal lands and eradicate Aboriginal peoples' special entitlements, this view did not extend to sexual or marital relations between black men and white women. As Johnson and Toy discovered, much like their white American counterparts, many white Australians were passionate about preserving the purity of their women.

  The two met in February 1907, when Toy went to Johnson's stage performance at Queen's Hall to inquire about her mother's missing gold pin. Someone in the heavyweight's entourage had apparently walked off with it during a drunken night at the Grand Pacific. Pressed for
time, Johnson invited Toy to drop by his training headquarters at the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel in Botany so that they could resolve the matter. Toy first went to Johnson's hotel accompanied by her stepfather. However, it took a second trip out to Botany with her mother to retrieve the pin. During their visit Johnson invited the two women to watch him train. At just over six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Johnson's taut physique left both Toy and her mother mesmerized as they watched him, stripped to the waist, sparring in the ring. Despite the social taboo against the intermingling of black men and white women, Toy took a liking to Johnson, calling him “a great pugilist and a well-made man.” Even Toy's mother had to admit that he was “a beautiful man.” When Johnson offered to escort the two ladies home, Toy's mother allowed him to ride along in their sulky.28

  Enamored with Johnson, Toy visited his hotel numerous times. She reportedly accompanied him on carriage rides, watched him spar, and waved mosquitoes away from him as the two nestled together on the hotel veranda. He gave her the pet name “Baby” and she called him “Jack.” When the Tivolians, a group of Aussie chorus girls from the Tivoli Music Hall, visited Johnson's training camp, Toy stood next to the pugilist in a group photo. Johnson had his arm around her shoulders while she held his walking stick. Rumors began circulating about Johnson's escapades with Toy and the Tivolians.29

  The two continued to meet. Toy apparently visited Johnson's hotel room at all hours of the day and night—so much so that her stepfather accused her of disgracing the family and kicked her out of the house, locking the door behind her. She finally had to call on a local constable to convince her stepfather to let her return home.30

  Johnson's encounters with Toy had taken place during the lead-up to his match against the white Australian fighter Bill Lang in Melbourne. When Johnson stepped into the ring on 4 March, the white Australian spectators greeted him with a mixture of curiosity, derision, and downright awe. As one sportswriter claimed, Johnson looked like the “'Old Mammy' out of ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’ in his noisy dressing gown and wraps.”31 The consummate dandy, Johnson reputedly arrived in a shiny robe decorated with flowers and frills. Despite the writer's obvious contempt for the black heavyweight's flamboyant and somewhat effeminate fashion sense, he could not disguise his admiration for Johnson's physique: “He is the finest black I have ever seen, and is just about as near physical perfection as mortal man can expect to get.” With his superior strength and skill, Johnson dominated the match, and it soon became apparent to all in attendance that “White Australia was fighting a hopeless battle.”

  Even though Johnson knocked out Lang in the ninth round, this particular conquest of “White Australia” did not stir up much controversy. After the match Johnson toured throughout Victoria, exhibiting fight films and demonstrating shadowboxing in the small towns of Ballarat, Bendigo, and Geelong. He also garnered the praise of the Coloured Progressive Association (CPA) of New South Wales, an organization comprised of about forty to fifty African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Aboriginal men who crossed paths as sailors and stevedores on Sydney's docks. Johnson was an obvious choice of hero for the CPA, for he was part of the same hardscrabble maritime world as its members, having spent his formative years on Galveston's waterfront. Despite this warm reception, Johnson was frustrated with his inability to coax the white Australian champion “Boshter” Bill Squires into the ring for a big-money match, and he resolved to return to the United States.32

  The CPA decided to host a farewell party in honor of the African American pugilist, announcing it “throughout the length and breadth of the land.” Although this activist organization had been in existence for about four years, it was their celebration of Johnson that brought them into mainstream view. Held at Sydney's Leigh House, the CPA's farewell program featured performances by several prominent artists from the Tivoli and the National Amphitheatre, along with Johnson's own ball-punching routine.33

  The white Australian press looked upon the whole affair with disdain, describing it as a kind of minstrel show. A reporter for the Sydney Truth called the party a veritable “coon corroboree”—corroboree being the European term for a ceremonial gathering of Aboriginal people.34 “The gorgeous mirrors of the dance room reflected the gyrations of the coloured cult of the city,” the reporter observed. “At the ballroom entrance several natty young coons attired in faultless raiment, passed in the guests. Just inside the door there was a typical Uncle Tom in evening dress.” Women both “white and coloured” were also in attendance, including Toy and the Tivolians. At one point a group of “coloured damsels” danced a “captivating cakewalk” to the sounds of a “rattling good nigger song.” When the guest of honor finally arrived in a stylish light tweed suit, the “big and little coons” greeted him with “admiring ejaculations of ‘Mistah’ Johnson.” In one of the denigrating cartoons that accompanied the report, a blackface caricature of Johnson strolled by while a crowd of “coons” looked on in awe.

  With the Tivolian Cassie Walmer on his “ebon wing,” Johnson later ducked upstairs for a more exclusive party. The reporter for the Truth peeked in on the festivities, catching a glimpse of the “upper-crust coons” in attendance. Regardless of their class pretensions, Johnson's guests were apparently “going great game” and “chicken was disappearing at a fast bat.” As the reporter recounted, “The sight of Mistah Johnsing picking his gold tooth with the wish-bone of a baked turkey was too reminiscent of a Cannibal Island King and stewed missionary.” In the minds of many Australians the dissolute stage darky had come to epitomize all nonwhites, no matter their ethnicity or social status. As the reporter's reference to cannibalism implied, their colored excess was not just a matter of individual decline but also posed a threat to the white body politic.

  These attempts to downplay the significance of this “coon corroboree” betrayed the reporter's uneasiness with the presence of this motley crowd of revelers in White Australia. Johnson's farewell party embodied white Australians' worst nightmares, from the interracial mixing of nonwhite men and white women to the open expression of a colored consciousness that transcended national borders. During the event the president of the CPA, “a former steamtug skipper” named Captain W. Grant, had expressed some of the group's political objectives. Although described as an “elderly colored gentleman” who appeared to have “struggled into a dress suit,” Captain Grant “let it be distinctly understood that the Black Progressives didn't like the Commonwealth restrictive [immigration] legislation.” As the correspondent for the Truth scoffed, “They want an open black door, which coons can enter at their own sweet will.”35 For years white Australian officials had tried their best to keep sailors of African and East Indian descent from entering the nation, forcing them to go through customs at every port, subjecting them to strip searches, and even preventing them from leaving their ships to come ashore.36 As the CPA honored Johnson it supported the defeat of White Australia both in the boxing ring and at the border.

  A surviving photo of the party further contradicts the white reporter's dismissive account of both the CPA and its celebration of Johnson. In actuality the event appears to have been a rather refined affair, with most of the men dressed in dark suits with white shirts and seated around tables. While the Truth's reporter claimed that the “coloured gentlemen and ladies were almost entirely of the American type,” Aboriginals were definitely in attendance, including Fred Maynard, who later cofounded the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association in the 1920s. Johnson's farewell celebration encapsulated the CPA's integral role in exposing the locals to the political ferment of the African diaspora, thereby paving the way for the influence of Marcus Garvey and other black internationalists on subsequent Aboriginal activism.37 Johnson's iconic status had served to unite these men of color in a common cause, pushing their grievances into public view.

  FIGURE 3. Jack Johnson with the Coloured Progressive Association at their farewell party for him in Sydney, 14 March 1907. Johnson is in the center back wearing a beige suit. Abor
iginal activist Fred Maynard is third on the right of the men sitting in the second to back row. Courtesy of Professor John Maynard.

  Along with his subversive political contacts, the rumors of Johnson's interracial romantic connections were making him increasingly suspect in the eyes of White Australia. Just before his scheduled voyage home a violent confrontation and ensuing court battle with his former manager McLean forced him to remain in Sydney longer than expected. McLean claimed that the heavyweight still owed him money, but Johnson refused to pay. As he awaited trial Johnson told the Sunday Sun, “I expect to get married shortly, and I'm liable to make this my home.…I like the people here and I'm going to stop; and I'll go into business after I'm here a while.”38 “I hope,” Johnson concluded, “that the people of Australia will have the same opinion of me now as they had before this trouble.” Even though his problems with McLean did little to damage his reputation, his choice of fiancée did raise the ire of white Australians.

  Contrary to what Johnson claimed in his interview with the Sun, when he lost his case to McLean he set sail for California aboard the steamship Sonoma in late April 1907. Shortly after his return Johnson's wedding plans made their way into several white American newspapers. A journalist in Oakland, California, asked the champion to confirm or deny the rumors circulating about his engagement to Toy. “Yes, it is true that I am to marry Miss Toy and I expect to marry her in November,” Johnson reportedly affirmed. “She will come from Sydney, Australia, and I expect that our wedding will take place in this country.”39