Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  When the Sydney Morning Herald held a parade in honor of the U.S. Navy men, half the city's population attended, forming the largest crowd ever assembled on the continent. The Great White Fleet's men marched alongside ten thousand Australian troops. The festivities continued with a friendly game of baseball between the two nations, while Australian school children entertained their U.S. visitors with grand pageants.71 A white American correspondent declared, “Balls, parties, luncheons, and smoke nights are sandwiched between gala fetes, water carnivals, military and naval reviews, and processions in a fashion calculated to turn the heads of the most callous cynics.”72

  These spectacles and social gatherings highlighted the transnational cultural and political bonds between the two white settler countries. Metaphors of familial relation permeated the public discourse. Melbourne's Punch published a cartoon depicting an Australian man asking a white American sailor, “Are we not brothers?” as the two stood side by side in front of a poster with the caption “One People, One Destiny, One Speech.”73 The popular stereotype of the obnoxious American who “spoke through his nose, made frequent use of a cuspidor, consumed vast quantities of cocktails, smoked green cigars, swore horribly, and was always in such a violent hurry” seemed to melt away as white Australians mingled with the visiting U.S. seamen. “They have the same ideals, the same habits of thought, the same ways of living as we have,” one Australian editorialist observed.74 He had even come to view the white American sailors as men of his “own blood” and his “own race.”

  For white Americans back in the United States, the numerous reports and photos from the fleet's Pacific voyage inspired both a growing interest in and affinity for their Australian counterparts. “There is much in the history of the island continent that resembles our own,” one white American journalist observed.75 As relatively young nations comprised of diverse populations, the two countries confronted many of “the same problems” and shared similar state structures. The Great White Fleet's travels to the antipodes even invigorated public demand for melodramatic plays featuring “Oriental and Pacific adventures” on the stages of New York City's Great White Way.76 Amid all the pomp and circumstance, these distant strangers had come to feel a sense of common purpose.

  The U.S. fleet's Australian stopover helped to cement the two nations as “partners in the business of dictating the white man's policy in the Pacific.”77 Some Australian commentators hoped that this partnership would soon replace the unstable and ill-advised Anglo-Japanese Alliance orchestrated by Britain, thereby uniting white men in control of the region.78 On both sides of the Pacific alarmist articles about the so-called Asiatic menace coincided with the fleet's voyage. Not only did many white Australians and Americans worry that Japan was developing imperialistic designs, but they also feared that China would “awaken” and begin actively to resist the intervention of Western powers.79 Australians felt especially vulnerable, for they did not possess their own army or navy to secure their isolated white outpost.

  This regional fight for white dominance was also tied to a much broader sense of global white destiny. “If there is one clear principle amidst the welter of wrongs and reprisals and deceits called ‘international politics,’ it is the supremacy of the white man must be maintained,” a writer for Australia's Lone Hand declared. “'My country, right or wrong,' may be questioned as a maxim of conduct, but most will confirm without a moment's doubt, ‘The White Race Right or Wrong.’”80 Keeping the world's dwindling resources for the exclusive use of white men was one of the major concerns driving this Anglo-Saxon cooperation. As President Roosevelt warned, nonwhite peoples everywhere in the world would certainly put up a fight, especially since they had learned about “the making of guns and other elements of progress” thanks to the Western civilizing missions.81

  Still, the immediate crisis for Australia was a national one. The continued influx of Chinese laborers to the continent seemed to threaten the goal of a White Australia.82 Local journalists turned to gendered metaphors of the body to describe this ongoing interracial struggle. An editorial cartoon in Sydney's Bulletin depicted a massive rock in the shape of an Asian man's head towering perilously over a white Australian maiden.83 Moreover, there were anxious calls to reinvigorate Australia as a white body politic. As one reporter cautioned, if Australians “wanted to have the muscles of a body that could stand and defend the country in her hour of need they could not hope to secure it in sufficient numbers by the ordinary growth of population within their boundaries.”84 In order to remain “a clean-blooded limb of Greater Britain,” Australia needed to restrict nonwhite immigration and also to encourage white immigration, preferably of Anglo-Saxon men.85 In this moment of racial instability, white Australians welcomed the arrival of Burns and the Great White Fleet. They also cooled toward Johnson, for his penchant for white women and public grandstanding no longer seemed innocuous or entertaining. With the possibility of a Burns-Johnson prizefight on the horizon, white men from across the Pacific closed ranks.

  BURNS VERSUS JOHNSON

  Months after the U.S. fleet had moved on to its next destination, the Australian impresario Hugh Donald “Huge Deal” McIntosh found another way to reap the rewards of his nation's rush of Anglo-Saxon feeling. He finagled a deal to lease a large tract of land in Rushcutters Bay for just £4 a week. This vacant lot would become the site of a symbolic race war between Burns and Johnson. McIntosh had managed to drum up enough money to lure the white champion into the ring for a twenty-round title match. At the same time Johnson had obtained an official exemption from the White Australia Policy, which allowed him to enter the country for the fight.86 Win or lose, Burns would receive £6,000, while Johnson would earn just £1,000 in cash.87 McIntosh scheduled the match for the day after Christmas, a statutory British holiday otherwise known as Boxing Day.

  McIntosh understood the rough sporting culture of white working-class men, and he had developed a knack for getting them to spend their hard-earned money. Born in Sydney in 1876, McIntosh was the son of a Scottish veteran of the Indian Mutiny who died when he was just four years old. As a young boy he supported himself through an eclectic mix of jobs. He was a miner, a surgeon's assistant, a dairy worker, and even a chorus boy. By the 1890s he had switched to entrepreneurial pursuits. He started off as a caterer, selling pies at parks and sporting events. He then segued into sports promotion, first managing a physical culture club and several prizefighters and later organizing international cycling events.88 Most recently McIntosh had transformed the Great White Fleet's visit into a profitable venture. He speculated that boxing matches involving the white world champion Burns and the local fighters Bill Squires and Bill Lang would prove a lucrative complement to the fleet's Australian stopover. He believed these fights would attract both U.S. seamen and local boxing fans. Although few of the Yankee sailors actually turned out for the Burns-Squires fight on 24 August, McIntosh's gamble still paid off, since fifteen thousand eager Australians filled the stadium seats.89

  Much like the fleet's visit, the upcoming Burns-Johnson prizefight presented the Australian public with another chance to ease their fears of interracial conflict in the region. In many respects, the color line appeared to be disintegrating right in front of their eyes. Chinese laborers continued to flood the continent.90 In the week before the fight a mutiny of Lascars (East Indian sailors) onboard a British ship generated enough consternation to warrant a political cartoon on the front page of the Bulletin. Titled “More Perils of the Sea,” it depicted white women armed with rifles, shovels, and spears boarding a ship staffed by Indian men while their families bid them a tearful goodbye from the docks.91 One Australian editorialist blamed the “Anglo-jap alliance” for the Lascars' newfound belligerence.92 Because of the treaty Lascars could now see “Japs playing cards in the smoking-room with British soldiers, flirting on deck with British maidens, [and] waited on and valeted by British servants.” The writer complained, “He [the Lascar] reckons that if a Jap nigger is as good as a whi
te man, a Lascar nigger ought to be the same.” Whether Japanese or Indian, these “niggers” no longer seemed to know their place. Even Johnson himself had the audacity to be traipsing around Sydney with his white American girlfriend Hattie McClay.

  White Australians had also noticed the Aborigines' growing admiration for Johnson. Titled “A Man and a Brother,” one political cartoon showed a group of Aboriginal men watching the African American heavyweight speed by in a sports car. “That pfeller puts on heap plurry side, my wurrd,” one of the men exclaimed. “What tribe that pfeller belonga?”93 Johnson had apparently been treating the local Aboriginals to rousing demonstrations of his driving skills as he raced around the Sydney suburbs of La Perouse and Botany in his roadster. The African American heavyweight also expressed his admiration of Aboriginal culture, playing on white Australian fears of overcivilization and interracial conflict. “When I visit your museum and see the numerous specimens of prehistoric man's art, your boomerangs of many varieties, your stone axes from various States and the many examples of Palaeolithic and Neolithic man's skill—I simply envy you,” Johnson told a group of Australian journalists. “Your central Australian natives must have been men of genius,” he added, “to have turned out such artistic and ideal weapons.”94 For Johnson, Australia's greatness came from its “primitive” Aboriginal culture rather than the so-called “civilization” of its recent white immigrants.

  Many white Australians came to see the Burns-Johnson fight through the lens of social Darwinism as a fierce evolutionary competition between racial representatives in which only the fittest would survive. One journalist called the match “a racial study,” claiming that most Australian fans hoped “to see the triumph of the white race enacted under their eyes.”95 From a publicity standpoint, it certainly helped that the two boxers engaged in several public confrontations. “There is bad blood between the men. They positively hate each other,” one sportswriter declared. “Burns does not draw, as it is termed, the color line, but all the same the sight of a black man displeases him.”96

  FIGURE 4. White Australians poked fun at the Aborigines' growing admiration for Jack Johnson. “A Man and a Brother,” Bulletin, 24 December 1908.

  Australian newspapers published physical and mental comparisons of the two fighters that conformed to the period's popular science of race. Burns was the thinking man, the “scientific” fighter, and an astute businessman, while Johnson was the physical man, the simpleminded savage and “over-grown boy.”97 The Bulletin even featured a contemptuous cartoon of the black heavyweight gazing at a gibbon skeleton in a museum. Johnson's caricature exclaimed, “My golly dem undersized niggers must have had a beautiful reach.”98 Since Johnson was supposedly bred from a “lower” species, most white fans believed he had a weak stomach as well as a “yellow streak” or lack of courage. They advised Burns to pummel Johnson with body shots in order to tire him out rather than going straight for his head with the hope of knocking him out.99 According to popular belief, black men possessed thicker skulls and a higher pain threshold than their white counterparts. “A nigger has such a thick hide that no white man could make any impression on him, unless he went at him with a sledge hammer,” one Australian woman explained in a letter to the Tasmanian Mail.100 Consequently, if Burns won, his victory would demonstrate White Australia's readiness and resolve to defend its body politic from the incursion of nonwhites.

  Yet there were no guarantees. On the eve of the great fight a visibly nervous Burns tried to assure reporters, “I am fit to fight the battle of my life, if it be necessary.”101 Much more confident in his prospects, Johnson had spent Christmas day on a hunting trip. “I'm going into the ring firmly intent upon winning,” the black heavyweight announced, “and if I don't succeed, well, none will be more surprised than myself, and that's all there is to it.”

  Thanks to both the promotional wizardry of “Huge Deal” McIntosh and the racial angst of the white Australian public, the Burns-Johnson fight quickly became a huge event. The open-air stadium at Rushcutters Bay was enormous, with a seating capacity of sixteen thousand, not including its standing room. The number of tickets sold surpassed all expectations, far outpacing the box office of the recent Burns-Squires fight. For crowd control McIntosh planned to have two hundred policemen on patrol along with a staff of 222 gatekeepers, ushers, and ticket takers.102

  To snag the best seats some fans spent Christmas night camped out in a park beside the stadium. Early the next morning special trams packed with fight-goers began to arrive in Rushcutters Bay. When the stadium doors opened at 6 AM, thousands of people rushed in, filling the seats in the cheaper sections, and by 10 AM the venue had reached its maximum capacity of twenty thousand spectators. Next to famous sportsmen and entertainers, numerous Australian politicians from the federal, state, and local level sat ringside. The famed white American writer Jack London and his wife Charmian were also in attendance, making it the first time a woman had ever been knowingly admitted to an important fight in Australia (other women reportedly snuck into the fight dressed as men). Both a longtime boxing enthusiast and amateur ethnologist, London had abandoned his South Pacific voyage aboard the Snark to cover the match for the New York Herald.103 Another twenty thousand fans crowded outside the stadium, while several thousand more clustered on a hillside overlooking the ring. People even “swarmed up telegraph poles” hoping to catch a glimpse of the match.104 Thanks to the railways and tramways, approximately forty to fifty thousand people from all across Australia had converged on Rushcutter's Bay, generating a fight gate of £26,000, or roughly $130,000.105

  Meshing with the racial concerns of boxing fans in a variety of places, the Burns-Johnson match became an international phenome-non.106 The telegraph cables remained busy the entire day, conveying updates of the fight to anxious fans in the United States and across the British Empire. Australia's deputy postmaster general later released the official figures on wire transfers: 22,061 messages were sent and 21,047 received. Including all other cables and messages in connection with the match, a total of 46,362 communications took place over the course of the day.107

  By the time the two pugilists made their way into the stadium, “the tension was screwed up almost to breaking point.”108 The Australian fight crowd “was aggressively white in its sympathy,” expecting to see the black challenger “beaten to his knees and counted out.” Nevertheless, their anxiety was palpable, as dark storm clouds hovered on the horizon like “an omen of disaster.”109

  As Johnson entered the ring the Aussie spectators greeted him “with mingled cheers and hoots,” calling him a “coon” and a “nigger.”110 Undaunted, the black heavyweight bowed, making the most of his moment in the spotlight. When Burns climbed through the ropes he “was nearly blown out of the Stadium by the crash of applause that thundered from 20,000 throats.”111 The stadium crowd “yelled itself hoarse” for five minutes straight, and just as they quieted down the thousands of fans outside the arena began cheering for Burns.112 Yet as the white world champion stripped to his fighting togs, he looked far from majestic. Not only did he appear puny next to Johnson, “but he looked fat, and his muscles seemed flabby, and his face was of the strange yellow hue that bespeaks the sick man.”113

  Burns also wore large elastic bandages to protect his elbows. Citing an unfair advantage, Johnson demanded that Burns's armbands be removed before the start of the match. The white champion's Australian supporters began to chant, “Good boy, Tommy! Good boy, Tommy!” with a rhythm redolent of a “tremendous battle-song.”114 Above “the bass roar” of the crowd “came shrill voices adjuring Burns not to give way to the ‘black cow,’ and other animals.”115 Although McIntosh ruled the armbands admissible, Johnson remained in his corner, refusing to fight. Eventually Burns relented, and as he ripped off his bandages with righteous indignation, he received yet another noisy ovation from the Australian crowd.

  Burns found himself hopelessly outclassed by Johnson. The black heavyweight was not only physically im
posing but also highly skilled. As one correspondent recounted, “Burns looked like a small boy beside the beautifully-modelled giant.”116 Others argued that the match was akin to “a gorilla toying with a small meal,” “a grown man cuffing a naughty child,” or even “a gentle schoolmaster administering benevolent chastisement to a rude and fractious urchin.”117 Johnson remained “the personification of coolness and confidence,” while Burns appeared “high-strung and nervous.”118 Burns's talent for infighting was simply no match for Johnson's combination of solid defense and blinding quickness.

  The match displayed a frightening role reversal that challenged the racial protocol of the white man's burden. An Australian correspondent recalled, “With his native ‘flashness,’ Johnson grated all quarters of the amphitheatre just as a cannibal king might condescend to humor his most humble subjects.”119 Going against boxing's unwritten rule of silence in the ring, Johnson openly trash-talked his opponent. He also treated the crowd to his gold-toothed smile as he pummeled Burns.120

  Johnson's audacious performance was especially troubling given that the match was being recorded on film for international distribution. Adept at the art of self-promotion, Johnson consciously constructed an image of black defiance that would not only rile white spectators but would also speak to the concerns of his far-off African American fans. To one journalist it appeared as if Johnson, in his contempt for Burns, thought only of the cinematograph—thought only of the black thousands of the Southern States. Mentally, he saw the coloured audiences crowding to see the pictures, and he gave them what they would love and applaud.”121 Johnson deliberately “postured and mouthed” for the cameras, as if to provide “a festival for the men of his own colour.” He knew that his black American supporters would be closely following his feats in the ring. In the lead up to the match, many of them had bet heavily on him, including the likes of the famed vaudeville duo of Bert Williams and George Walker.122