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Home , Gene Tunney, Jack London (boxer), Thomas Thomas (boxer)

In Black and White

Kegan Doyle

t he Joe Louis story seems simple. He was born Joe Louis Barrow in Lafayette, Alabama in 1914, the son of a sharecropper named Munroe Barrow. In 1926, his mother, Lilie Barrow, moved the family to . He began in the early thirties and after a brief, successful career as an amateur turned profes­ sional on July 4th, 1934. In 1937, he knocked out James Braddock to become champion. There followed an almost 12 year reign as champion, in which he became the most revered athlete in America. In 1942, he joined the army, proclaiming, "We're on God's side." After a five year hiatus from fighting, he came back in 1946, with diminished skills, to diminished returns. He retired in 1948, undefeated as champion. Two comeback bids failed: he was beaten on points by and later knocked out by an almost apologetic . He spent much of his post-fight career living off, and almost destroying, his reputation—wrestling, endorsing products such as Chesterfield cigarettes, working as a greeter at a Las Vegas casino—and died in 1981. Yet the more one examines the Joe Louis story the more contradictions one sees. A laconic champ, a strong, inarticulate type who famously mumbled, "I always let my fists talk for me," Louis wrote three autobiographies, the last of which, Joe Louis, My Life Story, (1978) is a much more engaging, honest work than either the autobiography of the eloquent Jack Johnson (Jack Johnson-In­ side and Outside of the Ring) or that of the even more eloquent (The Greatest). An upright citizen, solid and virtuous in a manner pleasing to America's middle class, Louis had more links to America's underworld than any heavyweight champion of this century, save his close friend and fellow drug- addict . Revered by white America as a figure of reconciliation, whose pickaninny rags-to-Manhattan riches life story seemed to prove that America was the world's great meritocracy, Louis was, for millions of blacks, a violent saviour, who didn't simply raise black pride but enacted fantasies of revenge, by clobbering white men—Braddock, Baer, Carnera, Conn, Nova, Schmeling and many more—to their knees. This paper contrasts Joe Louis's image in White America with his image in Black America. During the thirties and forties, writers established Louis as a kind of "Great Black Hope" for white America, all the while insinuating that their and by extension their nations' lionization of "The Brown Bomber" was a great step forward in race relations. At the center of this process was Paul Gal- lico. The most influential and eloquent sportswriter of his era, Gallico did more to establish the hegemonic image of Louis than any other writer. Undeniably, Gallico's and other white writers' visions and revisions of Louis—and the kinds of public attitudes they encouraged—represented a significant advance in white attitudes towards blacks. Yet the liberal vision of Joe Louis had and continues to have troubling implications. Nobody understood the problems of a simplistic sanctification of Louis better than Richard Wright. For Wright as for much of black America, Louis was a hero, a redeemer. Like Martin Luther King after him, however, Wright knew the dangers of hero worship, how it could deflect attention away from the ugly complexities of real social problems. Wright also understood that making Louis the paradigm of black male achievement could reinforce dangerous notions of black physicality and violence. Although his classic novel Native Son (1940) is not ostensibly about boxing, the character of Bigger Thomas should be understood as Wright's coded response to the Louis phenomenon. Formally, the novel is a boxing novel: in its violent rhythms and its compression of time and space. This "pugilistic structure" no doubt contributed to the novel's stunning popularity in a boxing-obsessed nation. Yet Wright uses this structure to provide an ironic commentary on Louis, black masculinity, ghetto life, and the myth of meritocracy.

A CREDIT TO HIS RACE: JOE LOUIS IN WHITE AMERICA

When Louis turned professional on July 4th 1934, race relations in America were tense—although somewhat more relaxed than a decade earlier. Remembered as the era of great white and black cultural synergy, "the Jazz Age" (according to F. Scott Fitzgerald's estimate the period between the May Day riots in 1919 and the stock market crash in October 1929) was also an era of urban unrest, moral panic, and paroxysms of xenophobic violence. 1919 bore witness to some of the largest and bloodiest race riots in American history. By 1923-24, the Ku Klux Klan had its largest membership ever, with estimates of membership ranging from 4 to 8 million (Jenkins 211). Although relations did improve in the late twenties, the Depression created the potential for class and racial conflict on an unprecedented scale. By 1933, between 25 and 40% of African-Americans in large cities were on relief, 3 to 4 times the number of whites (Franklin 421). According to Franklin and Moss Jr. in "Atlanta in 1935, 65% of African-American employables were in need of public assistance, while in Norfolk no less than 80% of the group were on relief" (421). Fearful of revolt, America's hegemonic classes were wary of any action that might, in Richard Wright's phrase, "uncover dynamite." Why then was Joe Louis allowed to happen? Why was Louis allowed to transgress the color line? Why was the man who came to be known as "the Dark Destroyer" permitted to raise the spectre of the scandalous Jack Johnson? The color line had been redrawn in 1915—the year Jesse Willard defeated Johnson for the championship—and had been strictly "respected" by and Gene Tunney throughout the twenties. A number of factors explain Louis's surprising ascent. After the lucrative "Golden Decade" of the twenties, in which boxing rose to challenge baseball as the masses' spectacle of choice, the sport had fallen into steep decline and by 1934, its finances were in ruin, and its public image was tarnished. Not only did the consuming classes no longer have the money to spend on sport—but there was a paucity of heroes inspir­ ing them to do so anyway. Promoters were receiving a rude lesson in the mad­ dening caprice of collective desire: they could not simply impose "superstars" from above. Although each new champion was tirelessly sold to the public, none caught on because none possessed Dempsey's combination of skill and charisma. Tunney alienated fans by being too much the intellectual out of the ring—reading Shakespeare between sparring sessions—and by being too much the scientist in it. Those who followed were even more uninspiring: was a foreigner; , dubbed the "sobbing sailor," was a mediocre complainer; , a hedonistic clown; James Braddock, a bland workman; Primo Carnera, a circus freak.3 In short, boxing was not only losing money, but something more important, something that it had fought long and hard to keep: authenticity. Every boxer's nightmare is to end up as a wrestler; boxing's nightmare is that it will become equated with wrestling. Boxing needed a fighter who combined awesome physical skill with an aura of honesty and decency. Joe Louis did exist, but it was necessary to invent him. Louis's management team, Julian Black and John Roxborough, themselves both linked to the Detroit numbers racket, knew that Louis had to seem non­ threatening and clean to receive a chance to fight for the title. The memory of Jack Johnson—his flamboyance, his golden grin, his white women—still troubled the American psyche. Roxborough published the seven command­ ments he had made Louis swear to: -Jo e was never to have his picture taken with a white woman. -H e was never to enter a night-club alone. -H e would not participate in any soft fights. -H e would not participate in any fixed fights. -H e was never to gloat over a fallen opponent nor speak negatively about him before or after the fight. -He was to maintain a deadpan expression in front of the cameras.

-H e was to live and fight clean. (qtd. in Bak 74-75) Combining Franklinesque do-goodism with Jim Crow racism, this list re­ veals that Roxborough understood the depths of white neurosis. White America feared (and was fascinated by) the black male body—its sexuality, its violence, and it dreaded black self-confidence, the possibility that victorious gloating might prove contagious. It feared too the power of black language. Early press reports Louis invariably emphasized Louis's shyness, taciturnity, and ostensible stupidity. For Gallico, Louis was "an ordinary colored-boy, slow-thinking, emotionless" (qtd in Jaher 163). Roxborough's list also suggests an age-old fear of popular culture itself. What America demanded from Louis—and what Roxborough seemed to deliver—was a kind of transparency: that nothing Louis said or did should transgress, be unreadable, ambiguous. Ironically, the silent champion drove writers to linguistic excess. In 1936, even before Louis had become champion, Damon Runyan wrote, "It is our guess that more has been written about Louis in the past two years than about any living man over a similar period of time, with the exception of Lindbergh" (Mead x). More often than not, writers indulged in the usual stereotypes of blacks and boxers. Outside the ring, Louis was a simple man-child, barely conscious of his environment. Inside it, Louis was an animal—a jungle pan­ ther stalking its prey, a thing of instinct, not thought. The real Louis, from Alabama via Detroit, suddenly became the atavistic Louis, a thousand year old beast out of Africa. Louis's expressionlessness, so assiduously cultivated, worked against him, becoming just another symptom of his otherness. He was referred to numerous times as "cold-blooded" and "a killer." Nicknaming—a stock-in- trade of the sportswriter—became a virtual pathology: "the sepia slugger," "the mahogany maimer," "the dark dynamiter," "the Dusky David from Detroit,""the sable cyclone," "the tawny tiger-cat," "the saffron sphinx," "the dusky downer," "the shufflin' shadow," "the heavy-fisted Harlemite," "the coffee-colored kayo king," "the murder man of those maroon mitts," "the tan­ skinned terror," "the chocolate chopper," "the mocha mauler," "the tan tarzan of thump" (quoted in Mead 50-51). Such terms indicate an almost child-like inability to look beyond Louis's apparently kaleidoscopic skin. The moniker that stuck with Louis—"the Brown Bomber"—is curiously ambivalent. It de- emphasizes Louis's race: nobody refers to blacks as brown; Louis's otherness was thus confirmed; his blackness denied.4 Much of this labeling did not originate with Louis—Jack London (and just about everyone else) had called Jack Johnson a "savage." What was new with Louis was how his image outside of the ring evolved. As stated at the outset, Paul Gallico was central in this process. Although his background as the son of a con­ cert pianist and graduate of Columbia doesn't seem like the ideal background for a sportswriter, Gallico understood better than any other writer of his time that the emerging culture of sport appealed to American's craving for the real in a post-frontier culture. Along with Grantland Rice, Damon Runyan, Heywood Broun, Gallico told the stories that made Dempsey a mythic figure and helped make boxing so popular in the twenties.5 But Gallico actually outdid these writ­ ers by climbing in the ring and fighting Dempsey, an experience recounted in "The Feel," the most famous chapter of his book Farewell to Sport. The session with Dempsey was his journalistic breakthrough and landed him the job as sports editor of Joseph Medill Patterson's New York Daily News—America's first tabloid and the first newspaper to have a sports section. As editor and author of a nationally syndicated column, he became something of a celebrity, forever drawing attention to himself and attempting to bring the reader into the event. He played tennis with Bobby Jones, caught a fastball by Dazzy Vance. A trained pilot, he once attended four championship events in one day. His early reports on Louis—distinguished from those of other sportswriters by their slightly elevated tone—emphasized the fighter's tidy duality: like the ideal worker, "The Brown Bomber" was docile at home, ferocious at work. Gal­ lico referred to Louis as a "machine," an appropriate epithet given that before becoming a fighter, Louis had worked on the assembly line at Ford in Detroit. "Machines" were also what African-Americans were expected to be. But Gallico knew that machines do not make good melodrama. In 1935, in his column in The New York Daily News, Gallico described the sensation of being physically proximate to Louis: "I felt myself strongly ridden by the impression that here was a mean man, a truly savage person, a man on whom civilization rested no more securely than a shawl thrown over one's shoulders, that, in short, here was perhaps for the first time in many generations the perfect prizefighter. I had the feeling that I was in the room with a wild animal" (qtd in Mead 67). Perhaps such an inflated description of what sounds like a trip to the zoo should not disturb: hyperbole is the sportswriter's mother tongue. But such language is not innocent either; it draws on and contributes to stereotypes of race and masculinity. In another article, published the day before Louis's 1935 fight with Max Baer, Gallico adopted the language of the naturalist: "Louis, the magnificent animal. He lives like an animal, untouched by externals. He eats. He sleeps. He fights. He is as tawny as an animal and he has an animal's concentration on his prey. Eyes, nostrils, mouth, all forward to the prey" (qtd. in Mead 67).6 This dic­ tion need not be seen as dehumanizing, especially given that an ethos of what Ann Douglass calls "terrible honesty" still dominated in American culture. To call a prizefighter an animal is to pay him the highest of compliments—hun­ dreds of fighters, both real and fictional, have animal nicknames: "Wild Bull of the Pampas," "Raging Bull," "Italian Stallion" are just three of the most famous. Muhammed Ali famously described himself as floating "like a butterfly" and stinging "like a bee." In boxing stories, the boxer often achieves transcendence when he surrenders completely to the call of the wild. But as with Jack London's reports on the Jim Jeffries/Johnson fight—which are arguably foundational texts in the history of boxing writing—Gallico's comments are informed by the a kind of vulgar Darwinism, the same Darwinism that has so often formed our paradigm for understanding athletics throughout the century. Gallico wonders about Louis, "Is he all instinct, all animal? Or have a hundred million years left a fold upon his brain?" (qtd. in Mead 68). Gallico implies that the "Dark Destroyer" is who he is because he has been forged in the cauldron of Africa— where blacks have struggled with other beasts for millions of years. Although they both use pseudo- scientific concepts to understand the black boxer, Gal­ lico and London reach different conclusions about him. London predicted that Jim Jeffries would beat Jack Johnson because Johnson—and by extension his race—was not atavistic enough. Gallico concludes that pure instinct is not enough: "I see in this colored man something so cold, so hard, so cruel that I wonder as to his bravery" (68). True human bravery comes with "the shawl of civilization." Both men were wrong in their predictions: the white fighter lost and lost badly. Gallico's attitude towards Louis would evolve—or rather Louis evolved before Gallico's eyes. In his last patriotic article on the fighter, published in Liberty magazine and reprinted in 1942 in Reader's Digest, Gallico recanted on some of his earlier statements about Louis, in an act that recalls Huckleberry Finn's self-abnegation before Jim: "Years ago, I wrote that Joe Louis was 'mean.' Then he was a primitive puncher just emerging from the pit. Somewhere on his long, hard climb Joe found his soul. It was this, almost more than his physi­ cal person, that he handed over to his country" (Reader's 21). Gallico refers to Louis's decision to join the army in 1942 as the culmination of a long process. Beginning in a pit of darkness, Louis has ascended, acquiring what neo-Carte­ sians from Thomas Jefferson to Gertrude Stein have always felt that animalistic blacks have lacked: a soul. Referred to as "Citizen," and by his original last name, Louis has now acquired full humanity. By mid-century standards, such rhetoric was undoubtedly progressive; but one hears an unmistakable tone of self-congratulation in Gallico's belated paean: complimenting Louis he also compliments himself. An author of popular magazine fiction with a flair for the implausible re­ versal and the achingly sentimental reconciliation, Gallico knew the power of "the weep" as well as "the feel." He turns Louis's story into the quintessential tale of American success: "Everything came to Joe Louis the hard way," he says. Starting in the late thirties, the American culture industry had begun to mass produce books and articles on Louis, which tried to make him the embodiment of the American dream. The title of Margery Miller's Joe Louis: American sug­ gests her patriotic tone. Louis's climb culminates with his self-less devotion to the war effort. A comic book biography published by Fawcett in 1950 declared itself: "The epic story of a farm boy's climb to the Heavyweight Championship of the World" (Joe Louis, Champion of Champions Sept No.1). Conforming to the puritan ethos that informs so much American popular biography, these texts use the language of hardness and pain—yet always emphasize the wealth that is Louis's reward. That a black athlete could be an Algeresque icon of success would have been unthinkable just two or three decades earlier and to this extent Louis's triumph does represent a positive step forward for African-Americans. Yet highly publicized individual success stories often delude as much as they inspire. Historians of popular culture note that an important shift in America's image of success took place in the early twentieth-century; whereas Alger's novels followed the road to success of spendthrift entrepreneurs, twentieth century equivalents focus on celebrities, namely entertainers and athletes. Regardless of how we view the effect of Louis's success on himself—his slide into debt, drug addiction, and mental illness in his post-championship years—we should be skeptical of the role that such "American Dream" stories play. By creating the illusion that class and race barriers are easily surmounted, a success like his effaces the underlying design of major social problems and creates the illusion that athletics are a viable route out of poverty. Yet for every Joe Louis who made it—there were, are, and will be ten- thousand "stiffs," a bum for every month of the millennium. Joyce Carol Oates has written of the structure of : "The top of the pyramid is small, the base broad, shading out into the anonymous subsoil of humanity" (34). Ironically, Gallico knew this "sub-soil of humanity" as well as anyone—his own boxing fiction dealt with the sport's seamier and sadistic sides. Introducing "Oh, Them Golden Mittens," published originally in The Saturday Evening Post in 1941, Gallico declared, "[The Golden Gloves] was bad when it turned the head of youngsters and caused them to take to the ring as a career. We always tried to discourage a boy from turning professional" (143). The Second World War was good to Joe Louis. Without it, he would have been remembered as a great sports hero; because of it, he is remembered by many as something akin to a saint. In June of 1938 in , Louis fought German Max Schmeling for the second time, in what was the most politicized boxing match of the twentieth century. Schmeling had won the championship earlier in the decade (Jack Sharkey was disqualified for a low- blow) and subsequently lost it. He fought Louis for the first time in 1936. Heavily favoured to lose, he managed to knock Louis out in the twelfth round, handing him the first defeat of his career. This fight was not overtly politicized, although any fight between a white and a black had political overtones. White Americans did not see Louis as their representative and many whites rooted for the German, including several senators who stood and cheered in the senate at the announcement of Schmeling's victory. After his victory, Schmeling found himself the toast of Nazi Germany, and Adolf Hitler, one of the first to see the potential of sport as propaganda, arranged for a film of the fight, Max Schmel- ing's Victory—A German Victory, to be played for several weeks in nearly every German movie theater (Schmeling 131). In politicizing the re-match, American writers were following Hitler's lead. During the build-up, writers constructed the event as a clash between two nations, two world views, between freedom and fascism. When Louis knocked out Schmeling in just 124 seconds it appeared that not only Hitler and Nazism had been defeated but also the entire racist legacy of the West. As Heywood Broun wrote, Louis "exploded the Nordic myth with a bombing glove" (qtd. in Mead 159). Bud Schulberg was seated at ringside at this fight—as he has been at so many of the heavyweight championships of this century. Known for exposing the sinister machinations of managers and promoters, Schulberg found himself swept up in the joyous storm that followed the rout. Over fifty years later, he recalled the sense of momentary gemeinschaft: That night we attended a democratic carnival in Harlem. Behind a coffin draped with a Nazi flag, tens of thousands big-appled and cakewalked. It was a spontaneous political demonstration. Joe Louis had gone forth to do battle for us all and everyone was rejoicing, from Wendell Wilkie to the black numbers runner who pulled out a roll and set up drinks for the house at a corner bar we wandered into on Amsterdam Avenue. I told my new friends I had been at ringside and could hear the blow that almost removed the German's head. Everybody laughed and we hugged each other and the closest thing to it I would ever know was V-E night in London. The two victory street operas overlap in my memory—marking the beginning and the end of the long war against gas chambers and Gauleiters. When Herr Schmeling cried out in surrender we were ready psychologically to take on the Luftwaffe and the Waffen-SS. Yes, the God of Boxing and the God of War saw eye to eye that mythological June night in Yankee Stadium. (Sparring 52)

Schulberg's prose vividly captures the jubilation of the moment, the sud­ den feeling of solidarity created by the defeat of a common foe. Yet was this fight really a great boost for democracy? Among other things, it lead to the scapegoating of Schmeling, a by and large innocent athlete, who was himself managed by a Jew named Joe Jacobs. Although described as the incarnation of fascist evil, Schmeling was never a Nazi and would later write of his shock at being abused and harassed by the very same fans who earlier in the decade had cheered him on. The fight also convinced many that a symbolic was enough to beat Hitler. As history showed, Louis's defeat of Schmeling did nothing to dissuade Hitler of the veracity of his racialist theories. Moreover, the fight did not psychologically prepare America to do battle. According to Phillip Jenkins, it was not until the Battle of Britain that "public sympathy was stirred" (225) for the Allied cause. Finally, the solidarity created by Louis's vic­ tory concealed the fact that American society was racist at every level. Harlem itself was rapidly deteriorating at this time and would be the site of several riots during the war years. Moreover, America's freedom-loving military was still almost totally segregated. The U.S. military did become somewhat less segregated throughout the Second World War, and Louis's role within it no doubt helped in this process. But it would take more than twenty-five years for American society to become officially desegregated.7 Schulberg has written apropos of Louis that the "Lord of Boxing is a Machia­ velli of social balance" (52). What he means is that Louis seemed to magically reconcile warring forces in society. Such a comment ignores the agency of the writer's involved who cultivated the image of Louis as the "Great Black Hope." The ideological limitations of these writers' views become much more evident when we broaden our focus to look at the views of black writers and the image of Louis in Black America.

SAVE ME, JOE LOUIS: JOE LOUIS IN BLACK AMERICA

When viewed in contrast with African-American statements about Louis, white visions of the fighter as a figure of reconciliation seem laughably short­ sighted. Singer and sometime lover of Louis, Lena Horne spoke for millions when she wrote in her autobiography that "Joe was the one invincible Negro, the one who stood up to the white man and beat him down with his fists. He in a sense carried so many of our hopes, maybe even dreams of vengeance" (Horne and Schickel 75). Louis was a super-hero, invincible and otherworldly, but also a better, stronger self, someone with whom one shared an intimacy: he embodied "hopes," fulfilled "dreams." This intimacy derived from the fact Louis did to whites what every black who had been tormented or terrified by a white dreamed of doing. Memories of Louis and Louis fights appear in a number of major African- American autobiographies, including those of Horne, Maya Angelou, and Malcom X. Malcolm X claimed that "Every negro boy old enough to walk wanted to be the next Brown Bomber" (31). The most spectacular and unique examples of this identification with the champion are the numerous Joe Louis blues songs. These songs' oddity resides partly in the fact that they defy the conventions of the genre. In The Blues Tradition, blues historian Paul Oliver notes that blues songs are seldom concerned with narrative events about people other than the singer and his immediate circle: personal contact seems especially important to the blues singer and though there are exceptions, they are relatively isolated. (148) Almost no other leading African-American personality of the Depression was sung about in a blues song. No blues songs were written about Olympic track and field hero Jesse Owens, for example, even though his fame briefly rivaled that of Louis. Louis's appeal to songwriters lay in his mythical might and his solitude: like the bluesman himself and unlike Owens who was part of a team, Louis confronted the white world alone. Products of sheer emotional ferment, many of these songs were recorded the day before or after a major Louis bout. The first was recorded by Joe Pul- lum following Louis's defeat of Primo Camera in 1935 and emphasized Louis's generosity towards his mother. Shortly after, Memphis Minnie McCoy recorded "He's in the Ring (Doin' the Same Old Thing"), which was released to coincide with Louis's 1935 match with Max Baer. Later she recorded the "Joe Louis Strut," which wasn't so much a song but, as Oliver says, "mainly spoken comments and exultant cries" (Blues Tradition 153). So popular was the champion that a producer from Port Washington, Wisconsin grouped a series of Louis songs together on one record: these included pieces by Carl Martin, Ike Smith, and a curious number by George Dewey Washington, a monologuist and vaude- villian, called the "Joe Louis Chant." Although Louis's defeat at the hands of Max Schmeling produced an outpouring of grief in black America, it did not produce any blues songs. When Louis defeated Schmeling in 1938, however, Bill Gaither recorded a song just a day after the fight: "It was only two minutes and four seconds poor Schmeling was down on his knees, He looked like he was praying to the Good Lord to have 'Mercy on me please." (qtd. in Levine 291) Images of doomed, supplicant white men abound in these songs.8 Later pieces include L'il Johnson's "Knock Out King," Bill Hicks and The Sizzling Six's "Joe the Bomber" and Sonny Boy Williamson's "Joe Louis and John Henry." Although there were fewer such songs in the forties, as late as 1947, The Dix- eaires recorded a gospel song called "Joe Louis is a Fightin' Man." Oliver claims that Louis was like the hero of a Western epic; Gerald Early, on the other hand, describes Louis as "the greatest, the most expansive and mythical blues hero in twentieth- century America, nothing less" (Tuxedo 177). Historian Lawrence Levine claims that Louis's fists "spoke so eloquently that no other contemporary member of the group was celebrated more fully and identified with more intensely by the black folk" (433). Yet Louis was a new, twentieth-century type of African-American hero. His iconic status was made possible by the technologies of mass culture: his fights were major radio events—listened to by millions—and the songs that mythologized him were not folk songs, but were recorded, distributed, and played on gramophones. Secondly and more importantly, Louis had a different kind of power from earlier African-American heroes. Whereas heroes such as Brer Rabbit were tricksters who relied on deception, Joe Louis stood in the middle of the culture, under the spotlight in Yankee Stadium or , and brought "the man" to his knees. This is not to say that for African-Americans Louis was all brute force. Early claims that Louis acted out the phrase "How I Got Over," a phrase that implies "underground victory, the rebel victory that is not simply enduring one's adversaries but outslicking them" (Tuxedo 178). In other words, Louis not only beat white people up—he hustled them, his placid, inarticulate persona, simply an exquisite ruse. At times, though, African-Americans' emotional investment in Louis could become tragic delusion. In Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King relates a harrowing episode: More that twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in the novel situations. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and gas curled upward, through the microphone came the words: "Save me, Joe Louis. ..." It is heartbreaking enough to ponder the last words of any person dying by force. It is even more poignant to contemplate the words of this boy because they reveal the helplessness, the loneliness, and the profound despair of negroes at that period. (110-111)9 King hints at some of the desperation that may have motivated African- Americans' identification with Louis. This story also suggests more troubling aspects of Louis as a social phenomenon. Like King after him, novelist Richard Wright suspected that the cult of Joe Louis may not necessarily be a positive development for African-American culture. In The Culture o f Bruising, Early argues that Wright was "deeply fas­ cinated" by Louis (24), seeing in him a kind of alter- ego. Like Louis, Wright was the son of a sharecropper and came of age in the Jim Crow South, and like Louis he migrated to a Northern ghetto in the twenties, from which he spent his late youth trying to escape. Yet as much as he admired and identified with Louis, Wright was deeply distrustful of the effect that Louis had on his culture, something which becomes clearer when we look at the three articles he wrote about "the Brown Bomber" and his novel Native Son. The articles, published in the late thirties in The New Masses and The Daily Worker, should be understood in relation to Wright's distrustful, even hostile, attitude towards mass culture. Many of Wright's characters delude and even de­ stroy themselves through a longing to be part of the glitter of modern America. In his first novel Lawd Today, the radio provides a kind of "white noise" against and within which the characters beat out their frustrated and largely uncon­ scious existences. An avid tabloid-reader, the novel's protagonist Jake Jackson identifies with Hitler's aggressions—mob hysteria being another of Wright's great fears—and lashes out at "Reds." In the first story of his volume Uncle Tom's Children, "Big Boy Leaves Home," a hulking Louis-like adolescent called Big Boy envisions himself achieving tabloid immortality as a Cagney-esque anti-hero. Bigger Thomas also comes to identify with his tabloid image. In another story from Uncle Tom's Children, "The Long Black Cloud," a rural black woman is seduced—with apocalyptic results—by a white traveling salesman who woos her by playing spirituals on a gramophone. For Wright, boxing is part of the great American dream factory: it mysti­ fies, murders. Nearly all of his images of boxing are negative. A boxing match forms one of the (anti)- climactic moments in his auto-biography Black Boy. Co-workers manipulate Wright and a black acquaintance into boxing each other by creating the illusion that a dangerous animosity exists between them. Angry, humiliated, and in tears, the two young men try to destroy each other in the ring: "The shame and anger we felt for having allowed ourselves to be duped crept into our blows and blood ran into our eyes, half blinding us" (212). Boxing is exposed as a convenient tool of white hegemony: rather that providing the black male with a moment of confrontation with white power, boxing furnishes whites with the comforting spectacle of black self- destruction. Elsewhere Wright implies that boxing is not only bad for boxers but also for the audience. In "The Man Who Lived Underground," the unnamed narrator crawls from the sewage and alights upon a group of joyous spectators. He believes for a moment that he has come upon the audience of a prizefight; it turns out the crowd is really watching a film. Either way, the crowd is still trapped in Plato's cave, watching "animated shadows of themselves" (Reader 527). In Lawd Today, Wright also shows the despair that can be caused by identifying with an ath­ lete. Thinking about Italy's conquest of Abyssinia and Joe Louis' defeat by Max Schmeling, Jake Jackson laments, "You know ... it looks like we black folks is just about to be shutout. We done got two outs on us in the ninth inning. Old Hail Selassie and Joe Louis both done struck out" (52). Wright implies that Jackson, whose name ironically echoes that of Jack Johnson, is imprisoned by the sports paradigm: conceiving of racial struggle—in this case between Italians and Ethiopians—as a game and of athletes as failed saviours. Yet the three essays Wright wrote about Louis display an uneasy joy, with the author moved by the pride that blacks take in the champion's triumphs. His first piece—his first published piece of journalism—"Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite" is a report on Louis's 1935 fight with Max Baer. The title is somewhat misleading, for the essay isn't sure exactly what Joe Louis's knockout of Baer has uncovered, only that "something" very exciting has happened. "Something" is the text's central term and its vagueness suggests that Louis is not sure of how to interpret this event. Written for the communist weekly The New Masses, the article focuses not on the fight but on the outburst of feeling that occurs on 's South Side after it's over. Already possessing the novelist's flair, Wright uses multiple voices to evoke the newly awakened folk-consciousness. As in Native Son, the emotion that dominates is fear: Something had popped loose, all right. And it had come from deep down. Out of the darkness it had leaped from its coil. And nobody wanted to say. Blacks and whites were afraid. But it was a sweet fear, at least for the blacks. It was a mingling of fear and fulfilment. Something dreaded and yet wanted. A something had popped out of a dark hole, something with a hydra-like head, and it was darting forth its tongue. (Reader 34) Clearly, for Wright, some revelation was at hand, some settling of historical accounts. Early notes perceptively that some of the fear latent in this piece is Wright's own and that the author experiences this outburst of folk-feeling as a personal as well as political catharsis (Culture 24). But this article's political dimension should not be downplayed, for at this moment in his career Wright considered himself a revolutionary deeply committed to finding a usable past and present within African-American folk-culture. At article's end, he exhorts his comrade/reader to recognize that the victory crowds are the raw stuff of revolution—the force that needs to be channeled aux barricades. Yet there is something half-felt about Wright's conclusion. The piece's real ending seems to come in the previous paragraph, where, after describing the way "black cops" spoil the victory party, he talks of the crowd's defeated ebb, using words such as "sullen," "confused," and "sentimental." Ultimately, Wright seems skeptical of this kind of politics of affect—the event's fleetingness bewilders him. Through­ out his life he would insist on a politics based more on rational thought, less on affect and collective hysteria. His later two articles—both about the second Louis fight in 1938—are similarly contradictory. On the surface, they evoke that race pride and revo­ lutionary fervor that Louis's victory has uncovered. Yet they also suggest that Louis's battle with Schmeling is little more than empty spectacle. As his career progressed, Wright became much more skeptical about the democratic po­ tential of sports crowds. In his non-fiction study of Spain called Pagan Spain, Wright discusses bullfighting, seeing in it a clue to understanding the Spanish psyche. He concludes that the real violence in the ring is caused by the crowd who urge the matador into taking greater and greater risks. Attempting to discover the sport's essence, Wright travels to rural Spain to watch a fight in a small town. At the end of one of the fights, the crowd descends on the bull and mashes its testicles. The event, Wright implies, is a savage drama of Freudian resentment—more fascistic than democratic. In a radio interview with Georges Charbonnier shortly before he died, Wright discussed the reactions to Joe Louis' victories: "One might have thought this was a political manifestation. I do not believe it was, now" (Wright Conversations 233-234). It is in Native Son, though, that Wright comments most extensively and pro­ foundly on Louis and his effect. Throughout the early part of his career, Wright flirted with writing a boxing book. In the late thirties prior to writing Native Son, he composed one hundred pages of a novel about Tar Baby, a character loosely modeled on Jack Johnson (Fabre 127). His autobiography Black Boy shares (or perhaps borrows) its title from a popular play of the twenties about Johnson. According to his daughter, he intended to write a biography of Louis. No such work appeared, but he did compose a song about Louis called "King Joe." Co-written by Count Basie and sung by Paul Robeson, this song empha­ sized Louis's Southern-ness. Early points out that Louis was a possible model for Bigger Thomas: Thomas was, in fact, the name of the character played by Louis in the 1937 film called "Spirit of Youth" (Culture 23). Like Louis, Bigger is more or less fatherless and from the Deep South: in Bigger's case, from Mis­ sissippi; in Louis's, Alabama. Like Louis, Bigger is physically powerful, yet quiet and inarticulate—at least around whites with power. Like Louis, Bigger moves from the cramped squalor of ghetto life to the opulent white world, albeit with far different and far more tragic results. In a sense, then, Native Son is the boxing book—and the Joe Louis book— that Wright wanted to produce. Although it is not explicitly about prizefight­ ing, it implicitly makes boxing a paradigm for understanding the experience of urban black males. "Action follows action, as in a prize fight," Wright says of the novel in "How Bigger Was Born" (41). Native Son, in other words, is a series of violent exchanges, of , feints, crosses, of knock-downs and knock-outs, and finally of doom-laden bells. Houston Baker claims that Native Son's treat­ ment of space "suggests the narrow confinement of black life" (86). Bigger is "cornered" in cramped spaces throughout: his apartment, the Dalton's car, his bedroom at the Dalton's, an abandoned warehouse, and finally a prison cell. Christian Messenger has shown how Nelson Algren's naturalistic boxing novel Never Come Morning—a novel which Wright deeply admired—uses the as "a spatial metaphor for violence and entrapment" (98). Although Native Son doesn't make explicit the "life-as-boxing ring" metaphor, Bigger does appear like a trapped and harried fighter numerous times. For instance, he responds to the crowd at Mary Dalton's inquest as if it were a hostile fight crowd: "The atmosphere of the crowd told him that they were going to use his death as a bloody symbol of fear to wave before the eyes of that black world. And as he felt it, rebellion rose in him. He had sunk to the lowest point this side of death, but when he felt his life again threatened in away that meant that he was to go down the dark road a helpless spectacle o f sport for others, he sprang back into action, alive, contending" (italics mine; 235- 236). Soon after springing up, he faints—almost as if knocked out. Like a prize fight, N a tiv e Son begins with a ringing bell: "Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!" This bell thrusts Bigger into his first fight, with a cor­ nered rat. Yet Wright plays on the bell's connotations—no ordinary alarm clock, this bell tolls for Bigger—it is his death-knell. Joyce Carol Oates has written of boxing, "Time, like the possibility of death, is the invisible adversary of which the boxers—and the referee, the seconds, the spectators—are keenly aware" (15). Both the reader and Bigger can't ignore the march of time in Native Son: loudly ticking clocks and ringing bells abound. For example, after he is interrogated by Detective Britten for the first time, Bigger falls asleep. Outside, a church bell starts ringing, the sound of which enters into his subsequent nightmare: "He opened his eyes and looked about him in the darkened room, hearing a bell ring. He sat up. The bell sounded again. How long had it been ringing? He got to his feet, swaying from stiffness, trying to shake off sleep and that awful dream" (141). But no matter how many times he springs back into action, Bigger lives in what Oates calls the "alarmingly accelerated" time of the fighter—and will die because of it (19). Bigger is also like a prize fighter in that he responds physically to almost all stimuli. Each day, he undergoes a physical and semiotic assault, the white- dominated world coming to him in a blizzard of confusing signifiers and violent stimuli. His inner life—or what we see of it—is a lethal dialectic of fear and hate. His muscles are always "taut" or "tight," as if ready to strike. He begins his day by killing the rat. He then waves the rat's corpse in the face of his terrified sister—an act which foreshadows his murders. Later, he adopts a plan to hold-up Blum's delicatessen. The plan, which he forces on his fel­ low gang members, is essentially a self-destructive assault on the entire white world. He sabotages it by attacking his fellow gang member Gus, onto whom he has projected his own fear. This physicality proves disastrous once he enters the white world of the Daltons, the rich family who hires him as a chauffeur. Confronted with "the white gaze," of Mr. Dalton, of Jan, even of Mrs. Dalton's white cat, he experiences a burning sense of shame over his black skin and longs to "blot out" the other. Eventually he does "blot out" Mary Dalton, suffocating and then decapitating her. According to Christian Messenger, boxing fictions are usually structured through an antithesis between youth and age. There are, of course, a great va­ riety of forms this antithesis can take and also a great many narratives that can flow out of it. Sometimes, though, boxing fictions take on a darker tone, in which the central antithesis becomes that between predator and prey. In Mes­ senger's words, the fighters "are the quarry as well as the hunters in constant metamorphisis" (96). In Native Son, Bigger metamorphoses from predator to prey. When the novel opens, he is the predator, forever stalking; however, after he commits murder, he becomes the prey—hunted down by the police on Chicago's South Side. But he never accepts his status as prey and while pursued tries to become a predator again: "Rape was what one felt when one's back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one" (193). In his daily life, Bigger is bombarded by images of black physicality and male violence. The day he kills Mary he watches a film called Trader Horn, which is filled with images of "naked black men and women whirling in wild dances" (29). The bedroom that he inher­ its at the Dalton home is covered in pictures of prizefighters and Hollywood starlets: "Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and ... Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Janet Gaynor" (51). Louis and the other fighters form half of a libidinally-charged binary, one that leads Bigger to believe that male violence is the only meaningful form of agency, that only by preying on women can he have power. Yet Wright shows that such "agency" is futile and self-destructive; Bigger becomes prey once more of the white world. Like the hero of so many naturalistic boxing narratives, Bigger becomes the youthful quarry of a rapacious, heartless system. Because its depiction of black life is so harrowing and unremittingly nega­ tive, Native Son has been controversial from the start—even in the mind of its author as he wrote it. In "How Bigger Was Born" Wright describes his fear that middle-class blacks will object to his depiction of Bigger because they didn't want "people, especially white people, to think that their lives were so much touched by anything so dark and brutal" (34). In his essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", James Baldwin later claimed that Native Son simply inverts the Uncle Tom stereotype—now instead of being a cringing man-child, the black man is his dialectical reverse, a hyper-masculine monster, still without humanity: "Big­ ger is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New woman [Harriet Beecher Stowe] are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses" (18). Variations of this critique continue to this day, many commenting on the fact that Wright seems to see murder and rape as existential affirmations. Related complaints might be made about Wright's use of the boxing paradigm: is he not simply being sensationalistic by invoking the world of sport? Worse still, is he not simply confirming suspicions about black physicality? To be sure, Native Son appealed, and continues to appeal, to people because of its pugilistic compressions and violent physicality. Yet Wright also implicitly criticizes the cult of Joe Louis and of prizefighting itself. Whereas white writers like Gallico made Louis the poster boy for liberal meritocracy—see, the system works: any boy with a strong back can make it—Wright turns Louis into every white's nightmare. In 1940, the year of the book's publication, save for a few entertainers—Louis Armstrong, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Hattie McDan- iel—with very safe public personas, blacks were by and large invisible to white America. Bigger Thomas was an alternative example of black masculinity to Joe Louis. America used Louis to deny not only its past but also its present—Native Son forced America to confront that present and show that four centuries of racial oppression are not easily overcome or forgotten. Wright's aim was not simply to render African-American ghetto life immediate, but also to show how the Great Migration was, among other things, a massive somatic trauma for migrants. More subtly, the novel showed the consequences that the reverence for black physicality evinced by the cult of Joe Louis and it showed the danger of setting up famous athletes as role models for the race. As Henry Louis Gates wrote over 50 years after Native Son was published: "An African-American youngster has about as much chance of becoming a professional athlete as he or she does of winning the lottery. The tragedy for our people is that so few accept this truth" (78). We learn throughout the novel that Bigger has never been encouraged to develop a mastery of language or narrative. When a Southern newspaper edi­ tor is interviewed by the Chicago Tribune about Bigger's childhood, he reveals, without intending to, precisely why Bigger has become Bigger: "We of the South believe that North encourages Negroes to get more education than they are organically capable of absorbing, with the result that northern N egroes are generally more unhappy and restless than those of the South. If the separate schools were maintained, it would be fairly easy to limit the Negroes' education by regulating the appropriations of moneys through the city, county, and state legislative bodies." (239) The editors comments are ironic on a number of levels. Segregation is what has made Bigger so afraid and so hostile to the white world. Lack of education and opportunity is what has made Bigger resort to violence. Much of the latter part of the novel is concerned with Bigger fumbling towards self-knowledge. Wright shows that for Bigger self-knowledge can only come once he has enough mastery of language to be able to make a coherent narrative of his life and once he no longer has the possibility of expressing himself physically, through violence. Interestingly, Wright's diction when describing Bigger's thoughts after killing Bessie echoes that he used to describe the emotions of the crowd in "Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite": But what was [Bigger] after? What did he want? What did he love and what did he hate? He did not know. There was something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and something he himself had; something spread out in front of him and something spread out in back; and never in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness. In both cases, violence provides wholeness; in the case of the fight, the wholeness of community; in Bigger's case, spiritual and psychic wholeness.10 Yet what is suggested in Wright's description of the crowd's reaction to Louis's victory becomes painfully obvious in his description of Bigger's confidence after killing his girlfriend: namely, that this feeling of unity is an illusion. It is also, in Bigger's case, grotesquely ironic: he can only find unity through destroying that which he should love. Incarcerated and thus deprived of his means of destruction, Bigger becomes more aware of the limitations of a purely physical response to life. The novel ends as it begins with a ringing—only this time it is a prison door clanging shut, a sound which indicates that Bigger's life is over—that he has nothing to expect but the electric chair. Although he still insists on the idea that his killings "must've been good," Bigger greets his circumstances with "a faint, wry, bitter smile[,]" a smile that indicates that he has to some extent recognized the futility of his fight (358, 359). After his lawyer leaves him, he does not yell out, "Save Me, Joe Louis!" Conclusion In the end, Wright's and Gallico's visions of Louis are not that different. Both authors show the process by which an African-American male acquires his "humanity." The processes described by each differ immensely, however. Gallico's Louis becomes "American," by beating an enemy of America and by joining the army; it is a classic American story of the outsider who works hard and makes good. Wright's Bigger, on the other hand, acquires his humanity as he is about to lose his life. In a sense, Bigger only discovers himself once he can articulate the fact that he and his people have been doomed by social and economic conditions. Writing at a time when athletes like Louis were being constructed as saviors of their race and when sport was coming to be seen as the most important area of black achievement, Wright offered a cautionary note. In the era of O.J. Simpson and , Native Son has lost none of its relevance.

Works Consulted Angelou, Maya. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1969.

Bak, Richard. Joe Louis, The Great Black Hope. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Baker, Houston A. "Richard Wright and the Dynamics of Place in Afro-American Literature" in New Essays on Native Son. Ed. Kenneth Kinnamon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. Barck, Jr., Oscar Theodore. Since 1900, A History of the United States. New York: MacMillan, 1974.

Bardolph, Richard. The Negro Vanguard. New York: Vintage, 1961. Carter, Jimmy. Why Not The Best? Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974. Clark, Patrick. Sports First. New York: Facts on File, 1981.

Davis, Lenwood G. Joe Louis: A Bibliography of Articles, Books, Pamphlets, Records, and Archival M aterials. (With Assistance from Marsh L. Moore) (Foreword by James E. Newton). Greenwood: Greenwood Press, 1983. Early, Gerald. The Culture o f Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture. Hopwell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994. Edmunds, Anthony O. Joe Louis. Detroit: William B. Eerdmans Publishers, 1973. Evensen, Bruce J. When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum, Storytelling and the Jazz Age. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996.

Farrell, James T. "The Fall of Joe Louis," The Nation CLXL11 (June 2 7 th, 1936). Gallico, Paul. "Black Moses." Time 38 (Sept. 29, 1941): 60-64. . "Citizen Barrow" in Reader's Digest 40, June 1942: 21-25.

. Confessions of a Storyteller. London: Michael Joseph, 1961. ______. Farewell to Sport. New York: Knopf, 1970. Gates, Henry Louis. "Delusions of Grandeur," Sports Illustrated 19 August 1991: 78.

Gilmore, Al-Tony. "The Myth, Legend, and Folklore of Joe Louis: The Impression of Sport on Society." South Atlantic Quarterly 1983 82 (3): 256-268.

Hemingway, Ernest. "Million Dollar Fight (Between Max Baer and Joe Louis)," Esquire December 5, 1935.

Hoberman, John. Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America And Preserved The Myth o f Race. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Jaher, Frederic Jople. "White America Views Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammed Ali" in Sport in America. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Jenkins, Phillip. A History of the United States. London: MacMillan, 1997. King, Martin Luther. Why We Can't Wait. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Louis, Joe, with Edna and Art Rust Jr. Joe Louis: My Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1978.

Malcolm X with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Mead, Christopher. Joe Louis, America's Great Black Hope. New York: Scribner's, 1985. Messenger, Christian. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues. (1960) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. . The Blues Tradition. New York: Oak Publications, 1960.

Reed, Ishmael. Wrightin' is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years ofBoxing on Paper. NewYork: Atheneum, 1988. Rice, Grantland. The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life in Sports. New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1954. Robeson, Paul. "Louis is Still Our Champion," People's Voice Dec. 20, 1947.

Sammons, Jeffrey T. Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1988.

______. "Boxing as a Reflection of Society: The Southern Reaction to Joe Louis." Journal of Popular Culture 1983 16(4): 23-33.

Schulberg, Bud. Sparring With Hemingway. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995. ______. "Uncle Mike and the Big Strike—Joe Louis." Collier's Vol. 125. No. 18, May 6th, 1950, 67-69. Sherry, Michael. In the Shadow of War: The United States Since 1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Wright, Richard. "High Tide in Harlem." New Masses 28 July 5th, 1938. ______. "How He Did It—And Oh!—Where Were Hitler's Pagan Gods?" The Daily Worker

June 24th, 1938. ______. "How Bigger Was Born." Bigger Thomas. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

______. "Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite," New Masses XV!!! Oct. 8, 1935. Rpt. in Richard Wright Reader.

______. "King Joe" (with Count Basie and Paul Robeson). New York Amsterdam Star News. Oct. 18th, 1941.

______. Lawd Today. (1938) New York: Walker, 1963. ______. Native Son. New York: Harper's and Brother, 1940. ______. Richard Wright Reader. Ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Notes 1. Camera was perhaps the worst of all. He had been "discovered" in a small town in Italy where he worked as a circus strongman. Backed by known underworld figures "Dutch" Schultz and Owen "Owney" Madden, he won a series of fixed and soft fights, his reputation as a Latin leviathan soaring when he killed Ernie Schaaf in a fight. Schaaf had been seriously ill and discouraged from fighting, but only insiders knew about it. Camera's career inspired Bud Schulberg's novel The Harder They Fall (1947); the novel exposes the corruption of the management ranks, but focuses on the complicity of writers in this corruption. The novel's main character, Eddie Lewis, is a struggling writer who, rather than finishing a serious play, is bribed into writing puff-pieces for the Carnera-like boxer. The book was made into a film by Mark Robson starring Humphrey Bogart in 1956. Schulberg later claimed it was "a portrait of the fight game at its base worst in the early thirties" (Sparring 72). 2. Louis was also the subject of much newspaper doggerel Acclaimed sportswriter Grantland Rice, who in private referred to Louis as "the nigger" (Bak 107) wrote this on June 19th, 1936 for The Atlanta Constitution:

"Let politicians have their howl in this infested land Let cock-eyed thinkers bore us each time they take a stand The world still seeks its vanished thrill—a in either hand. (Quoted in Edmunds 43) In Rice's version, boxing provides a needed escape from the modern malaise by returning us to our atavistic roots. Like much of the journalism of the era, this poem refers to Louis as a "prehistoric man."

3. For more on the role of sportswriters and boxing in the twenties see Evensen's When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age Evensen emphasizes how box­ ing's enormous popularity in this decade could not have occurred without the melodramatic storytelling of writers like Gallico, who managed to turn Dempsey into the embodiment of the American frontier.

4. Ernest Hemingway also reported on this fight, for Esquire magazine, while awaiting the publica­ tion of his The Green Hills of Africa Hemingway claims that it was "the most disgusting spectacle, outside of a hanging, that your correspondent has ever witnessed. What made it disgusting was fear" (212). Hemingway goes on to talk about Louis's eventual defeat and uses the occasion to dwell on one of his favorite themes: the inevitability of physical defeat. Contrary to his image as a boxing aficianado, Hemingway almost invariably wrote about boxing in negative terms. 5. The fight did, however, provide a vocabulary with which US. propaganda could justify the war to African-Americans. In the film The Negro Soldier, black actor Carlton Moss claims, over footage of Louis doing military training: "Joe Louis, training for the fight of his life. This time it's a fight not between man and man but between nation and nation. A fight for the real championship of the world, to determine which way of life shall survive, their way or our way, and thus we must see to it that there is no return engagement. For the stakes this time are the greatest that men have ever fought for" (qtd. in Mead 222-223). Directed by Frank Capra, the film documented black achievement and was praised by both blacks and whites. Langston Hughes called it, "the most remarkable Negro film ever flashed on the American scene" (qtd in Bak 227). The film was careful in its presentation of Black history, mentioning neither the Civil War or slavery. Louis also appeared in a film version of Irving Berlin's This is the Army (1943). 6. Gaither's song makes an interesting contrast with Schulberg's observations about the Schmeling fight Whereas Schulberg sees the fight as a great political event, Gaither relates it to personal hardship:

If I'd had a million dollars would have bet every dime on Joe, (twice) I'd've been a rich man and wouldn't have to worry no more. (qtd. in Blues Fell 275) 7. The expression "Save Me, Joe Louis" has obviously resonated with people It has been used as the title for two novels in the 1990's, one by Millicent Bell, the other by M.T. Kelly. Neither novel concerns Louis. 8. There are other echoes of the first Louis article in Native Son In the article, blacks swarm the South Side to celebrate Louis's victory. In Native Son, on the other hand, Bigger Thomas's actions lead to a political siege of the South Side; 8,000 police officers are mobilized to track him down. Whereas Louis's triumph creates a sudden feeling of empowerment in the African- American community, Bigger's murders show how little power that community really has.