American History Reform

Chapter Title: SAMBOS, SAVAGES, AND THE SHAKINESS OF WHITENESS Book Title: I Fight for a Living

Book Subtitle: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915

Book Author(s): LOUIS MOORE

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1vsk8nk.9

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5 SaMBoS, SavageS,

and the ShakIneSS oF whIteneSS

Whites called him “the original nigger in the woodpile,” “smoke,” “cave man,” “Tham,” “Sambo,” and most commonly, the “Boston Tarbaby,” but with one look at Sam Langford’s body, one had to acknowledge his physical perfection. “Built like a wedge, with strong, wide, shoulders. His body narrows down from shoulders to feet, and he is the very picture of strength well muscled and hard. He has long, rangy arms, and is capable of very powerful blows,” one writer fawned.1 In the ring Langford’s brawny black body turned into a fight- ing machine. Langford, who was born in Nova Scotia, was so vicious that one southern white writer joked, “Local ‘mammies’ will probably use Langford’s name as a sort of ‘bugaboo’ to scare their pickaninnies into the straight and narrow path.”2 Regardless of his opponent’s race—whites often complained that black fighters lacked aggression when they faced each other—Langford attacked his rivals with violent, yet controlled, aggression. While white fight- ers often showed trepidation before they tangled with Langford, black fighters readily battled. They rarely had a choice. He fought the best black boxers in the business: Jack Blackburn, Dave Holly, Young Peter Jackson, the “Dixie Kid” Aaron Brown, Joe Jeannette, Joe Gans, Sam McVey, Joe Walcott, and Jack Johnson. Although Langford was black—very black—in the context of manliness and physicality, white fans appreciated his skillful fistic attacks and his magnificent body. He displayed what white men thought whites had inherited: violent, yet controlled, aggression. There was something both primal and powerful that pulled white men to prizefights. “The old Saxon lust for blood, which must have an outlet in a strong race, was satisfied in this fight,” one writer observed in 1905.3 The

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114 . ch a p t e r 5

toughness, discipline, courage, physicality, and manly aggression white box- ers displayed were thought to be inherent racial qualities that proved white authority over the rest of the world. “This contest of men with padded gloves on their hands is sport that belongs unequally to the English-speaking race,” Jack London once observed. “No genius or philosopher devised it and per- suaded the race to adopt it as the racial sport of sports. It is as deep as our consciousness and is woven into the fibers of our being. It grew as our very language grew. It is an instinctive passion of race.”4 Contrary to their racial arrogance, however, white men did not have a monopoly on pugilism or physicality. Black boxers’ ring superiority challenged any notion whites assumed about white physical authority. This was especially true of a man like Langford, who had a knack for the knockout. In 1910, his pugilistic presence became such a problem in Pittsburgh that the chief of police prohibited Langford from fighting a white man, Montana Jack, in the city, because, as the chief claimed, the “one-sided show” would produce race prejudices. In fact, be- tween 1902 and 1912, Langford only lost to one white fighter—a reported bad decision by the referee—and often had to fight white fighters in higher weight classes because white men his own size refused to meet him on equal terms.5 Hoping to coax white fighters into battle with Langford, white dailies often mocked their white brethren, like Stanley Ketchel, as cowards for avoiding contests with Langford. White manhood had to be proved. Most white fight- ers remained unmoved but, still, there were some white men brave enough to try to tackle the tumultuous task, including heavyweights Jim Barry and Jim Flynn, who each outweighed Langford by more than twenty pounds. Langford demolished them too. One fight against Flynn was so racially re- pugnant, Los Angeles writer Harry Carr headlined his article “Cold, Gory Horror, Pitiful, Revolting,” to describe the destruction. The racial imagery Carr created was literally one of a white man versus a black gorilla. “Flynn, was put into the ring with the negro, who, in physique, is a shaven gorilla.” Carr asserted, “It wasn’t hot, passionate, blood-letting. It was cold, deliber- ate slaughter.” “Langford, the cave man, would put his left hand against the white man’s bleeding face and push him away to arm’s length, his little red pig eyes running critically over the maimed white body, a connoisseur selecting a vital spot: then his fist would drive in with a crash.” Before Langford ended the fight, he “looked over the white boy’s shoulder down at the sporting re- porters,” and he told the reporters, “‘I’m going to git him in a minute.” And Langford did just that. “A black arm shot to the white man’s blood smeared

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Th e San Francisco Chronicle sketches Sam Langford as the bogeyman, inferring that white fi ghters are terrifi ed of the black Langford. (1910, San Francisco Chronicle)

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116 . ch a p t e r 5

jaw,” and knocked Flynn cold out. “Without disrespect to Langford,” Carr insisted, “It was like a white boy fighting a jungle man.”6 Seeing the muscular black body in the ring was an important revelation for whites, because previously it had been thought to a white populace anxious about its racial position that black muscles were only suitable for manual labor. To put it another way, as scholar Ronald L. Jackson asserts, “Since the emergence of race as a social construct, Black bodies have become surfaces of racial representation. To say it bluntly, race is about bodies that have been assigned social meanings.”7 The black boxer’s half-naked body revealed his musculature, and his actions in the ring against white opponents demon- strated the new capabilities of his body, that, when pitted against white pu- gilists, challenged whites’ conception of the interconnection of manliness, civilization, and white superiority. Commenting on the importance of white muscles as a symbol of racial superiority, scholar Richard Dyer explained, “The body often figures very effectively as a point of final explanation of social difference. By this argument, whites—and men—are where they are socially by virtue of biological, that is, bodily superiority. The sight of the body can be a kind of proof.”8 But with two muscular men stripped down in the ring, with no perceived advantages, boxing exposed the ideologies of white manhood and racial superiority. White bodies were not supposed to seem so fragile. As Dyer argued, “A naked body is a vulnerable body. . . . The bare body has no protection from the elements—but also in a social sense.” “The exposed white male body is liable to pose the legitimacy of white male power: why should people who look like that—so unimpressive . . . have so much power,” Dyer concluded.9 If the ring represented an arena for racial superiority, and a contest of manhood, what would whites say about a black man like Langford, who showed no regard for supposed white authority? Rather than acknowledge black muscular and physical superiority, whites socially and legally prevented the black body from becoming a legitimate challenge to white manhood. While fighters drew the color line, and cities and states banned interracial competition. White sportswriters did their part to by caricaturizing black boxers in a myriad of despicable ways to assuage white anxieties, and thus allowed for their continuation of their white voyeurism to see and to believe that the black body somehow represented denigration. These racial descrip- tions included portraying black fighters as docile Sambos, uncivilized savages, or comparing black musculature to animals. For instance, writer Harry Carr once told his readers, “Langford is simply a cave man. His is not an athlete: he is a chapter out of the mysterious and prehistoric past.”10 In juxtaposition to their descriptions of black bodies, white writers propped up white bodies

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s a mbos , s avage s , a nd t he sh a k ine ss of w hi t e ne ss · 117

as embodiments of racial superiority. Champions like Sullivan, Corbett, and Jeffries demonstrated the innate determination, aggression, and physicality white men had within them to succeed. Importantly, these descriptions of black and white bodies occurred just as anthropologists started to legitimize social Darwinian thought, and as confirmed experts in their own field, sports- writers’ words read like legitimate explorations into civilized whiteness and uncivilized black manhood.11 As black men kept winning, these derogatory racial descriptions took on supreme importance because the disparaging descriptions offered protectionism to the fallacy of physical manhood as it related to racial power. This became even more imperative when Jack Johnson won the heavy- weight championship in 1908. His vicious victory over Tommy Burns em- phatically embodied blacks’ persistent physical challenges to racial assump- tions about white superiority. Collectively, to save the race, whites placed their hope in ex–heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, the greatest white man of them all, and trusted he would win the championship back from Johnson, and thus reestablish white physical domination. The hype surrounding their battle constituted a racial combustion chamber of white cheers and fears about white civilization.

whIte BodIeS on Shaky ground

During the 1880s, the white middle class began admiring the muscular white male body as a symbol of white might and manhood. In this developing construction, boxers, with their hardened muscles and disciplined bodies, took on a new role in society, and their bodies became canvases of desire that reflected white male social and political power.12 To describe the box- ers’ body, writers commonly used words like “hard as a rock,” “specimen of manhood,” or compared pugilists to gods. In 1884, when the press thought Mervine Thompson was a white man, without ever seeing Thompson, one Los Angeles writer told his readers, Thompson’s “muscular development is perfect and he is a most striking specimen of strength and physical man- hood.”13 During an interview with Thompson, white sportswriter John B. McCormick of Cleveland had Thompson “go into a back room and stripped to the waist,” so the writer could “better judge of the physical development.” McCormick acknowledged, “He is one of the finest specimens of a perfect physical man that I have ever had the good fortune to see.” He also observed, Thompson’s “flesh is as hard and firm as a rock,” and “he has the finest fight- ing neck and head I ever saw on a man’s shoulders.” McCormick closed his article fantasizing, “When Sullivan and Thompson strip there will be seen

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118 . ch a p t e r 5

the two finest gladiators the world ever saw, and the wonder will be, ‘Which is the finest?”’14 The two gladiators never battled, because Sullivan exposed Thompson as a black man. Sullivan remained the epitome of white manhood throughout the 1880s. Fans clamored at the sight of the white fighter disrobing and displaying his ripped body before battle. In other words, white men loved to see other white men strip. In this early infatuation for massive male muscles, Sulli- van best represented “this cult of ‘elemental virility.’”15 According to Michael Kimmel, Sullivan was “a walking embodiment of the remasculinization of America . . .”16 In 1883, during an exhibition in Boston, for example, “The shouts which greeted the champion on his entering the ring were deafen- ing. Many present had never seen him, as the sporting term says, ‘stripped’ and when they did they all acknowledged that a finer specimen of manhood never stepped inside a ring.”17 His power was so mesmerizing, and the pull of his perfect body so magnetic, that everywhere the champion went, whites showered him with praise and celebrated his magnificent manly physique. In Chicago, eight thousand people packed Battery D Arena to watch Sulli- van in one of his famous sparring exhibitions, in which he demonstrated his physical skills in a tame, yet aggressive manner. The objective was to captivate the white audiences that flooded the arenas hoping to get a glimpse of white power. Sullivan delivered the goods. “When the magnificent proportions of the Boston pet loomed up in the crowd the audience cheered hastily . . . He was stripped to the waste [sic], and his giant proportions excited wonder and admiration.”18 When Sullivan stayed in shape, and did not binge on alcohol, the words “specimen of manhood” and “John L. Sullivan” became synonymous. Despite his prowess in the ring, the question about Sullivan always re- mained, “Could he respectfully represent the race?” Sullivan was a notorious heavy drinker, and during the reign of his championship his massive body dissipated. No longer a mountain of a man, by the late 1880s, Sullivan was a flabby fool. According to Elliott Gorn, “Sullivan’s difficulties kept piling up. His drinking was becoming serious, even life-threatening. His wife Annie, moreover, initiated divorce proceedings, and her charges of brutality and adultery against Sullivan became a public scandal. To make matters worse, the champion’s avoidance of the regular prize ring caused many of his fol- lowers to desert him.”19 Sullivan’s physical and moral shortcomings showed cracks in the shield of whiteness. Time after time, however, with every new media critique about the champ, and white challenger presented to take his crown, Sullivan, like a true man, got his body ready for battle and beat his beleaguered opponent, until he

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s a mbos , s avage s , a nd t he sh a k ine ss of w hi t e ne ss · 119

could no longer do it. He remained an undefeated champion for ten years and convinced whites, and himself, that the white body could overcome anything. Months before his 1892 fight with “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, for example, after having binged on beers for years before training, Sullivan looked to prove his physical perfection and had himself checked out by a doctor. His doctor assured the champ, “In all my life I have never seen such a magnificent specimen of muscular development, and, indeed, I do not think that another such man is living today. You are in perfect health, Mr. Sullivan.”20 After ten years of drinking, however, Sullivan could not regain his once-powerful form, and in 1892 Corbett, the skilled fighter, the clean fighter, easily defeated him for the heavyweight championship. White heavyweight champions who followed Sullivan understood that their role in upholding racial manhood meant they had to display the power and prowess of whiteness. As an example of their capable white bodies, and their understanding of the economic market for whiteness, they used the vaudeville stage to display their manly bodies for admiring audiences. To be sure, these shows were about racial power. In 1893, a year after Corbett defeated Sullivan for the championship, Corbett traveled to Chicago to perform in his hit vaudeville play, Gentleman Jack, and take advantage of the large crowds who came to the city to witness wonders of civilization displayed at the World’s Fair. In the play, Corbett, the new embodiment of middle-class manhood—he was both an athlete and a gentleman—wowed crowds as he played a banker, college student, and boxer. After successful runs outside the fair, organizers placed Corbett inside the World’s Fair to market his talents to correlate with the racial theme of the fair showcas- ing white supremacy. According to scholar Valerie Babb, the fair “sought to represent America as an emergent world power and a civilized nation.” Babb added, “symbols and images engendered by or present at the exposi- tion did not mirror the nation’s diversity, however, but rather advocated a white nation in which racial difference was contained or erased.”21 Like the fair, Corbett’s show symbolized white civilization. As one advertisement read, “Visitors to the World’s Fair will see many of the noblest works of man, but Nature has only one exhibit in the city of her noblest work—the perfect physical man, James J. Corbett.”22 Instead of performing in the White City alongside other representations of white civilization, however, Cor- bett played at the Midway as the only white attraction. “Where the White City celebrated the white man’s civilization as outstandingly manly,” Gail Bederman notes, “the Midway depicted savagery and barbarism as lack- ing manliness entirely.”23 At the Midway, a greater racial contrast did not

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exist than seeing the heavyweight champion challenge Dahomians from the jungles of Africa or “Orientals” to fights. Of course, onlookers knew Corbett’s challenges to the uncivilized guests represented a ruse; no savage stood a chance with a beacon of whiteness. As Corbett sparred surrounded by supposed savages, his stance as a white civilized champion and carrier of white manhood confirmed what scientist had recently stated: black bodies posed no threats to white civilization. Ac- cording to scientists, the 1890 census proved black inferiority, because the black population had declined relative to the previous census. In 1896, for example, Frederick L. Hoffman published his influential text Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro and argued that the “Negro race” was on route to extinction. Although he used his date to come to faulty conclu- sions, other writers would continue to cite his work to prove their own theo- ries about the dying race.24 Historian George Frederickson notes the census “coincided with the full triumph of Darwinism in American thought, and thus the statistical evidence that blacks were failing to hold their own read- ily fitted into a thesis of ‘the survival of the fittest’ in an inevitable ‘struggle for existence’ among human races.” “As a result,” Frederickson claims, “the 1890s saw an unparalleled outburst of racist speculation on the impending disappearance of the American Negro. From the most reputable sources came confident predictions of black extinction through natural process.”25 In reality, however, whites who paid attention to the prize ring could not be too confident about a diminishing black race. Although most whites tried to avoid the topic, the black boxer’s body and success in the ring challenged scientific assertions of a dissipating race. In other words, the belief that the racialized body equated to white civili- zation and black inferiority rested on shaky ground. As early as 1890, for instance, one white writer openly questioned, “Is the colored race to step in and steal the laurels from us white folk in this way? If so, perhaps those to whom only brute force can appeal as an argument may begin to respect the negro as a man and brother.”26 Whites also realized that black fighters like Peter Jackson had superior bodies to white men. In 1894, for example, the San Francisco Examiner printed a picture entitled “Three Types of Manly Form,” in which strongman Eugene Sandow and Peter Jackson flanked a statue of Apollo. Omitted from this picture, of course, was the heavyweight champion Jim Corbett, who, like Sullivan, could not compare to Jackson’s marvelous muscles. And in the ring, black men outperformed white men. In 1895, a paper confirmed, “The African race has shown much aptitude for the manly art of fisticuffs . . . and they have conquered more Caucasians than

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s a mbos , s avage s , a nd t he sh a k ine ss of w hi t e ne ss · 121

have conquered them.”27 In 1901, after Jack Johnson beat the white fighter Jim Scanlan in Galveston, the Phoenix Club in Memphis cancelled Scanlan’s next appearance in the city because white fans were upset at him that he fought a black man. “It seems to go against the sporting grain of boxing enthusiasts in this part of the country to look at a white apostle of pugilism after having engaged in a contest with his black brother. . . . There seems to be no doubt that Scanlan will be ostracized by the local stuffed mitt cult for throwing down bars to the color line.”28 Having heard the news of Scanlan being os- tracized in the South, a friend wrote to the Memphis Commercial Appeal explaining that most white men had fought black fighters, “Yet Jim Scanlon has never met but one colored man and now his friends are giving him the knife. These twentieth century sports are fickle.”29 Indeed, white men were fickle regarding mixed bouts. To solve these racial challenges, white fighters could draw the color line. But most white fighters and white fans would not hear of this. White manhood had to be proven. Whites yearned to see big, strong, muscular white bodies perform, and at the turn of the century, no white man better represented the race than the 220-pound Jim Jeffries. His muscular body was the very definition of white masculinity and white authority. In 1895, when San Francisco fans viewed his body for the first time they fantasized that he was “muscled like Sandow, with a frame like a youthful Hercules,” and “the physical form that the Greeks defined.”30 On another occasion, a Los Angeles writer described Jeffries, noting, “His shoulders are like the arms of a roomy davenport, yet he is not fat. There is no suggestion of padding in the big frame—just a tre- mendous man, fairly covered with flesh and blessed with good health.”31 In 1899, Jeffries cemented his manly status when he defeated champion Bob Fitzsimmons and became “the best man with nature’s weapons living in the world.”32 The remark about “nature’s weapons” told readers about the necessary innate manliness and virility white men possessed.33 While the government had been bulking up the navy to demonstrate American might and modernity, Americans could not forget what made them great: their superior use of “nature’s weapons.” The link between Jeffries’s primal manli- ness, modernity, and America’s white racial authority became abundantly clear when the champ and Admiral George Dewey met in San Francisco in October 1899. Jeffries, who arranged the meeting, told the Admiral “you are the biggest man I ever met,” which made the Admiral gush, “you are twice as big a man as I am. Why, you look strong enough to carry the Olympia away with you.”34 When the two men met, Dewey was the leading hero of the Spanish-American War, a purveyor of the white man’s burden, a symbol

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of manliness, and “the highest type of American civilization.”35 Together, Jeffries and Dewey represented the pillars of white American might and strength. White managers understood the racial mania surrounding Jeffries’s physi- cal prowess and were always looking to unearth the next big white hope to pit against the champion. Because of the infatuation with the white body, fights between two white men for the heavyweight championship commanded the most attention. The bigger the better, and white fighters like Gus Ruhlin, Jack Monroe, Sandy Ferguson, Fred Russell, and Toothpick Kelly—all mountains of men—were touted as possible opponents for Jeffries. But while white managers searched for behemoths like Toothpick Kelly to best Jeffries, the heavyweight division was also flooded with some of the greatest black tal- ent in the history of the division. Men like Bob Armstrong, Frank Childs, Hank Griffin, Jack Johnson, Ed Martin, and Sam McVey posed a serious challenge to white manhood. Before Toothpick Kelly fought Sam McVey in 1903, one Los Angeles writer asked “Is ‘Toothpick’ Kelly the man who is to put Champion James J. Jeffries out of business,” while another writer noted Kelly was the biggest white heavyweight and built, “straight as an arrow and is splendidly proportioned. It is claimed that his punching talents are on a par with his size.”36 In the fourth round of his fight with McVey, however, the “Oxnard Wonder” shot two jabs to the stomach, which dropped Kelly’s hands, and then he knocked him out with a shot on the jaw. There went another white hope. The press quickly changed their tune about Kelly. The Los Ange- les Express headline called him a “Dough Boy” and their writer complained, “‘Toothpick’ is a big, strapping fellow with plenty of muscle and weight; but that is all.”37 White marvels like Kelly that hoped to fight Jeffries, but did not have a clear path to the top, had to work their way up the heavyweight ladder, which often meant fighting the best black fighters and potentially exposing the myth of whiteness. White heavyweight Fred Russell’s fights against black men best demon- strate the burdens of race white fighters faced when they could not uphold their end of the racial bargain. By racial rights, white fighters were supposed to defeat black men, but Russell became a virtual whipping boy for black men.38 Before his fights with black men, Russell’s muscular body signified the embodiment of white manhood. Prior to a match with Griffin in Los Angeles, for instance, the Los Angeles Times described Russell as “tall as the Eiffel Tower and nearly as broad as a hasty campaign assertion. His general appearance leads the hasty observer to the conclusion that his diet is shingle nails and unground quartz.”39 And the Los Angeles Herald compared him to

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s a mbos , s avage s , a nd t he sh a k ine ss of w hi t e ne ss · 123

Jeffries: “He looked like a bigger edition of the champion [Jeffries] himself. South of the neck Russell is a fine looking man.” The Los Angeles Express pre- dicted that there had been so much talk about his “terrible hitting powers, phenomenal height and reach that many probably will attend just to see so strange a specimen of physical manhood.”40 In truth, Russell was all brawn and body, but could not box. He fought all the top black fighters—Frank Childs, Hank Griffin, Jack Johnson, Ed Martin, and Sam McVey—and all but Griffin, who lost because of a referee’s mistake, mangled him. Even in his fight with Griffin, in September 1902, Griffin domi- nated that action. In the first round Griffin bloodied his face, and by the third round, “a straight left to Russell’s chin followed by another to the head, cutting Russell’s eye, caused the white man to stagger. The blood trickled down Rus- sell’s face and the spectators predicted that he would be blinded.” But reporters also predicted that if Russell could not beat his black opponent, he would, like a coward, intentionally foul him. And he did just that in the thirteenth round. He fouled Griffin, which sent him to the floor, but instead of giving Griffin an opportunity to get up, the referee allowed Russell to hit him while he was down, and he knocked his opponent out.41 But in November, he had to face McVey. Although Russell was the betting favorite, in the first round “McVey surprised him in an unguarded moment and landed so suddenly and so hard on the point of the giant’s jaw that the big man measured his length on the floor and lay insensible for half a minute.”42 While Russell’s white body impressed white observers before fights, his failing body disappointed white fans in defeat. After his failure against Jack Johnson, in December 1902, the Los Angeles Express called Russell a “ring coward,” and the Los Angeles Herald noted the “white man” was not “game enough to take a beating.” Even more to the point at cutting Russell’s man- hood, a Los Angeles Times sportswriter claimed Russell “wears long chry- santhemum hair, and always goes mincing into the ring like a coy little girl.” The writer further added that Russell “has large, wondering blue eyes which seem to be saying, ‘Oh I am such a itay [sic] bite a fing [sic] to be all alone with all these men.’ . . . You expect him to say every minute ‘Now Gerald if you try to kiss me I’ll scream.’”43 Although Johnson licked Russell, Johnson did not yet register as the “bad Nigger” as whites would later portray him. Instead, whites treated Johnson like a good Negro, a black man who would not question white authority. According to the Herald, Johnson “appeared to be a well behaved, orderly negro, thoroughly interested in his business, which is boxing, and has made a great number of friends.”44 Physically gifted, yes, but whites need not worry about a “well behaved, orderly negro.” Russell,

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124 . ch a p t e r 5

on the other hand, could no longer represent white manhood, for if he did, whites were in trouble.

whIte protectIonISM and the IMage oF BLack BoxerS

With black men dominating in the ring and with their bodies clearly more muscular than white fighters, in order to help their readers understand the visual and physical racial challenges black fighters presented to white man- hood, a number of white sportswriters compared black fighters to horses. This allowed whites to fetishize over the black body while denying black men humanity and equality.45 For instance, a writer described Hank Griffin’s body, calling him “a picture in bronze. The muscles stand out in his brown body like small mountains. The veins are like whip cords. He looks like a Kentucky race horse ready for the Futuristic.”46 On another occasion, the paper called Griffin “a superb big animal, with the long aquiline features as often seen in mulattoes . . .”47 The Los Angeles Times described “Denver” Ed Martin: “He is built like a dragon about the hips, slender and flat in the loins. Then he broadens out in beautiful lines to a chest and arms and shoulders that might go into statue.” And the Times commented that Johnson’s “thick muscular arms and legs are like a horse in their sleek but massive symmetry.”48 These black men were physical marvels, but they were not racial equals. Beyond focusing on black musculature to dehumanize black fighters, sportswriters wrote about features like skin and hair to create an image of black savagery.49 In the early twentieth century, heavyweight Sam McVey became a favorite target of the white press. Though Johnson was clearly the best black fighter of his era, earlier in the fighters’ careers, white fans were more enamored with McVey than Johnson. Johnson was a highly skilled heavyweight in the early 1900s, but he was a slight 180 pounds and too de- fensive for whites’ taste. As a writer noted, “Jack Johnson bears the reputation of being the most cautious man who ever put a leg through the ropes. He protects the money first, last and all the time and never cuts loose when there is a chance to win without it.”50 Johnson lacked that innate manly aggression white fans celebrated, but McVey exhibited the power and aggression whites touted. The Los Angeles Herald’s Harry Stewart said no fighter “possessed of a better physique than McVey—six feet in height, weight 210 pounds and hard as nails, with no bad habits and his twenty-first birthday yet to greet him.”51 With a powerful punch—a punch that was measured more powerful than Jeffries’s—McVey reminded fans of a black Jim Jeffries.52

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While McVey’s prizefighting skills challenged white perceptions of white physical superiority, his features allowed whites to minimize his threat. One writer explained, “His skin would make a nut-brown taste feel like a false alarm. His hair is kinky and his face is blacker than his body. His face would make a black hole in the darkest kind of night and he doesn’t show the whites of his eyes when he is beaten in the nose.” Another journalist contended that “any man who could stand up twenty rounds before McVey’s face, however, and not run howling through the round for help deserves a great reputa- tion for bravery. McVey has a countenance that would scare back the rising moon.”53 When a Los Angeles Herald writer learned that McVey traveled from Oxnard to Los Angeles so that he could adjust to the weather a week before his fight, the writer racialized this smart decision: “McVey need not worry his dear little head about such a small thing as climate. If you shipped that dark gent to the North Pole he would soon have all the big white bears coming south for their health. Climate hurt him? They only way that such a thing could ever happen would be to steer Samuel up against a piece of

One of the great heavyweights of his generation, Sam McVey poses for the camera. (1910, Library of Congress)

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Kansas climate with a man’s size tornado on the tail end of it. And as for my humble opinion, I would back McVey to put an average tornado away in ragtime. Yes, indeed.”54 And six years later, sportswriter Tip Wright for the Tacoma Times used pseudo-anthropological musings about McVey to cast the fighter at the lower end of social Darwinian evolution. Wright told his readers, “Imagine a great big, overgrown chunk of black humanity, of the type that sometimes gives credence to Darwin’s theory that we are creatures of evolution, with a small, cone-like bean, powerful torso and ape-like arms, possessed with little intelligence and as ignorant as a freshly landed Slav im- migrant . . .”55 That was McVey in white men’s eyes: a fighting machine, but black and ugly as ever. Soon they stopped calling in the “Oxnard Wonder” and started calling him Sambo. In the context of race and the ring, to help assuage white fears about black male physicality, sportswriters often caricaturized black fighters as Sambos: passive, dim-witted, happy-go-lucky throwbacks to the old days of slavery.56 According to the scholar Joseph Boskin, “The ultimate objective for whites was to effect mastery: to render the black male powerless as a potential war- rior, as a sexual competitor, as an economic adversary.”57Also on this note, historian Leon Litwack has argued, “To flatter their egos, as well as to as- suage their doubts and apprehensions, whites during slavery had invented the figure of Sambo. . . . If whites embraced this image during slavery, they became downright ardent in their reverence for it after emancipation. They needed Sambo more than ever before.”58 McVey and Langford, both named Sam, were regularly denoted as Sambo. They also happened to be the two most aggressive black fighters. Despite black domination, white writers told their readers that black fight- ers lacked the necessary manly courage of white men; grittiness and tough- ness belonged to white men. In 1889, for example, one writer remarked, “The question has often been asked: Has the negro the grit and the staying qualities of the white pugilist? Can he stand the punishment and face the music as well and is he equal in skill?” While this particular writer claimed he knew a few black fighters who “possessed all these qualities,” and made “surprising records,” most white writers would not, and could not, acknowledge black grit. Instead, writers continued to push the threadbare lie that black fight- ers had a yellow streak. For whites, labeling black men as having a yellow streak was a suggestion that black men, like boys, cowered at the first sight of adversity.59 In 1904, for example, a writer noted, “The negro fighter, no matter how clever, is generally regarded as being the possessor of a big ‘yel- low streak,’ and if given considerable punishment, would quit.”60 But anyone who paid attention to prizefighting would prophesize otherwise.

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But the assertion about black docility could easily be disproved by black action in the ring. Even that same writer from 1904, who claimed black fight- ers had a touch of the yellow streak, had to admit that “the past few years has demonstrated that there are many black fighters who are capable of taking great amount of punishment, and in this respect they compare favorably with the white pugs.”61 Specifically, blacks had won a championship in every division except for the heavyweight division. By 1907, some white writers willingly acknowledged the unthinkable; black superiority. That year, after Joe Gans successfully defended his title in January, one writer confirmed, “Once again the physical and mental superiority of the black over the white as a fighting man has been demonstrated. I add mental to the physical, be- cause it takes thought as well as strength and quickness to win in the prize ring.”62 What explained black domination? To account for the unthinkable, white writers developed a myriad of reasons to explain black superiority in the ring. All of their answers rested on whites’ belief that blacks lacked civilization. In 1908, for example, in his article, “What Makes the Negro Such a Fighter,” writer Harry Burke argued, “Since the game began the Anglo-Saxons, or those transported into their atmosphere and environment, have been champions, be it at war on the field with gun and power or in the roped arena with five-ounce gloves.” But, Burke explained, black fighters like Dixon, Gans, Walcott, Johnson, and Langford challenged whites’ monopoly in the fighting spirit. To ex- plain his assessment, Burke used scientific racism and suggested that black fighters dominated the ring because black men naturally had hard heads. “It is useless to pound a negro on the head. Any white fighter will tell you so. The body is his vulnerable spot.” In opposition to the black fighter, the “white man’s chin is his vulnerable spot,” Burked claimed. To support his opinions, Burke quoted Dr. Stephen Walker, who expertly concluded, “It would be hard to explain to the lay mind, but the fact is that the negro’s jaw is stronger than the white man’s, and the shock to his does not carry the message to the base of the brain as quickly and decisively as it does to that of a white man.” With their hard jaws, blacks had dominated every division in boxing except the heavyweight class, but as Burke warned, “the dusky brethren” were “camping on [Tommy] Burns’ trail and Tommy is worried.”63 Years later, Los Angeles sportswriter De Witt Van Court urged, “It is also a well-known fact that the best and easiest way to defeat a col- ored boxer is never to waste time hitting them in the head, but to confine punches to the body.” Van Court argued “It is a scientific fact that a negro’s skull is twice the thickness of a white man’s, and punches aimed or landed on their heads are usually wasted, unless they are lucky enough to land a

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good and solid punch squarely on the point of the chin.”64 For white fight- ers, this was always easier said than done. Indeed, by 1908, black fighters Langford, McVey, and Johnson all clamored to get a shot at heavyweight champion Tommy Burns. Lacking great white behemoths to fight, Burns could not hide from all of these black men. The public demanded action and insisted that Burns prove and protect pillars of whiteness. In the end, Burns sold his championship status for $30,000 and signed to fight Johnson. To buoy his confidence for his bout with Johnson, Burns used scientific racism to discredit Johnson’s manhood. He argued that black men had hard heads, but soft stomachs, and he asserted he would attack Johnson in the abdomen. Burns also argued that once he began his onslaught on Johnson, Johnson would turn yellow. “Take it from me,” Burns urged, “that if ever I make a man quit when I get him in the ring it will be that nigger. Remember what I say, because you know as well as any one else that he has a yellow streak in his makeup a hundred feet wide, and all that is needed is to sting him a time or two and it’s pay day.”65 Burns was wrong. The physically superior Johnson toyed with his diminutive white opponent on his way to shattering the myth about black inferiority.66

the FIght oF the century

When Johnson defeated Burns on December 26, 1908, white Americans knew they had to act. His victory put blacks in a position of racial authority, or at least that is what black men believed. As one black writer bragged, “now that the victory at last has been achieved the unwilling civilized world must admit the physical prowess of the black race.”67 Ever since Sullivan won the championship in 1882, whites had been convinced that a white heavyweight champion was a symbol of white power and authority.68 Heavyweight cham- pions Sullivan, Corbett, Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, and Marvin Hart supported this racial assertion and refused to let black men fight for the championship, but Burns broke the unwritten pact, and his loss to Johnson unleashed a new movement: a search for a white hope to restore honor to the race. Led by writer Jack London, whites begged Jeffries—he retired an undefeated champion in 1905—to win back the championship. “But one thing now re- mains,” London pleaded the day after Johnson defeated Burns, “Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you. The White Man must be rescued.”69 As Johnson continued to dust off white foes in 1909, the pressure on Jeffries built up until the weight of the moment finally forced the former champion

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out of retirement to save the white race. “Jeff thinks that every white man is dependent upon him to redeem the honor of the white race; he thinks the whole white man’s burden has fallen upon his shoulder,” a southern writer exclaimed.70 Aft er he signed his contract in December 1909, Jeff ries told the press, “I decided to meet Johnson to regain the title of champion heavyweight of the world, to win back for the white race the title which the other fellow allowed to be wrestled from him.”71 Jeff ries had to win the battle. Aft er all, he was, “the white man. Mothered of a race which has dominated the world.”72 Th e Jeff ries–Johnson match was more than just a championship battle; the contest represented a racial contest about proving primal power. In order to win, Jeff ries had to display he was the “abysmal brute,” a word that on its

On the day before Halloween, the Memphis Scimitar cartoon suggests that nothing scares the white man, Jim Jeff ries, especially not Jack Johnson. (1909, Memphis Scimitar)

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surface seemed derogatory, but in reality represented a compliment about white determination and virility. Coined by London—he first referred to Bat Nelson as an abysmal brute after Nelson knocked out Jimmy Britt—the abysmal brute had the primal instinct to reach deep inside his soul to recoup the necessary vitality within the race to win a fight. According to London, “This protoplasmic vigor may be our brute heritage, but whatever it is it is a good thing to have whether one is a prize-fighter or not.” Only true repre- sentations of manhood, however, had the “abysmal brute” in them. “In the fibers of the one resides a primitive vigor and capacity for exertion that the other lacks.”73 Importantly, London assured whites that Jeffries had the nec- essary ruggedness and physicality to do the job. “He is a big bear, heavy and rugged, and he is physically a man that one may well say occurs no oftener than once in a generation.”74 As Jeffries prepared for his fight, he tapped into this wellspring of primal authority deep down inside. Leading up to the fight, Jeffries’s training camp represented a primitive venture that reassured white men that they still had the virility their ances- tors once held. Before he headed to training camp, Jeffries, the avid hunter and mountain man, spent some time in the Los Angeles mountains to get himself right for the fight. He “returned from the mountains lean, lank, and active,” and his body, according to one writer who saw Jeffries in the bath- room, “was a magnificent specimen of physical perfection to look upon.”75 For his official training camp, Jeffries stripped down to the bare essentials and trained in the mountains of Rowardennan, California. Buying into this white racial fantasy of primal man, the press called him the “Big Bear,” the “California Grizzly,” and showed their readers endless pictures of Jeffries’s hairy bare-chested body, flexing his muscles, wrestling, and exercising in the river as a natural man. From being out in the sun so long, his body showed signs of rugged primitiveness: “Jeffries tanned to the healthy brownness of a prospector, looks almost the Indian . . .”76 In an article entitled “Big Fellow’s Love of the Open Will Prove Savior,” one New York doctor argued that being an outdoorsman preserved Jeffries as a perfect specimen. “Jeffries has lived much in the open,” the doctor observed. “He farms, fishes, rows a boat and loafs around. This is the ideal for a man of his temperament.”77 One mem- ber in Jeffries’s camp, wrestler Farmer Burns, claimed swimming in the icy cold waters proved Jeff ’s toughness: “When you find a man who can take a plunge in water as cold as that and then, after swimming around a quarter of an hour, comes out without being chilled, you can bet your last dime that he has the vitality,” Burns said.78 Jeffries had gone primal and was ready for the fight.

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In the great paradox of prizefighting, however, while the white press turned black pugilists into Sambos, the black fighter’s words, training, and built body told white readers otherwise. For the most important battle in boxing his- tory, the papers had to address Johnson’s training habits, which also meant writers had to acknowledge his manly body. The press showed pictures of Johnson working with the medicine ball, cutting wood, sparring, and run- ning, and newspapers printed pictures of his built black body posing with his muscles flexed, which revealed a far more superior body than his oppo- nent’s. Even worse, doctors confirmed whites’ worst nightmare: Johnson was a specimen of manhood who rivaled, if not surpassed, Jeffries. In January, the leading physical culture expert, Dr. Dudley Sargent of Harvard, concluded that Johnson had some of the finest measurements ever. In April, Dr. C. W. Piper, who examined both fighters, observed “If Jeffries is a Hercules, then Johnson surely is a black Achilles—the Roland the black race represents for combat with the Oliver of the whites. If the Caucasian is physically perfect it must be admitted in fairness that the black is equally so.” Dr. Piper con- tinued, “Jack Johnson, in brief, is primordial man, big boned, steel muscled and impressive—capable, it would seem, to grapple with a cave tiger of the first era, or with his war club to stalk the mighty prehistoric buffalo. Here, indeed, is a man, even though his skin be black.”79 How could whites refute an expert? To pronounce his own physical perfection, Johnson used the press to claim his manly superiority. The champion argued, “The pugilist world has never had a fighter more capable of defending a championship than I am. It is a shame Jeffries isn’t the champion of old, for I believe his defeat at my hands would be just as much a cinch under such conditions as it is now.” He con- tinued, “I am not egotistical but I honestly believe Jeffries will not be able to land a blow on me.”80 Tackling the issue of his supposed yellow streak, John- son reminded whites that he had manly grit. “Remember what I am going to tell you now,” Johnson told a reporter, “Men with the yellow streak in them do not work themselves up until they reach a world’s championship. They stumble and fall and the ‘yellow’ splashes all over them long before they get within reaching distance of a title.” With all of his racial passion and pride, Johnson proclaimed, “I would rather be carried dead from the ring than by any sign, move or action to show that I am not the ‘yellow’ creature that I have been branded.” “I am making a strong talk now,” Johnson concluded, “but one which I intend to stand by.”81 Because Johnson’s body proved a threat to white power, and his manly words suggested he would die to prove his manhood, the white press had to remind their readers of Johnson’s blackness.

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Despite the proof of Johnson’s physical perfection, white writers tried to counter that reality by depicting Johnson as a lazy darky, a chicken-eating colored boy. While Johnson shipped in his own bottled water, brought in his own chef (black hotel owner Frank Sutton), and sent for a doctor (the black doctor F. C. Caffey from Montgomery), white reporters readily mocked John- son’s diet and seemed more focused on his fascination with watermelon and chicken rather than his affinity for training. One cartoon sketch printed in the San Francisco Examiner depicted Johnson jogging twelve miles on the beach juxtaposed next to a sketch of a grinning Johnson waiting for his dinner at his chicken coop he had built on his training quarters. The San Francisco Exam- iner’s W. W. Naughton wrote an article solely dedicated to Johnson and chicken. “The news that Jack Johnson covers from eight to twelve miles a day on the road is commonplace. The news that the same Jack Johnson devours from eight to twelve chickens a day is crisp and startling. And is true.” Appealing to the racial sensibilities of his white readers, Naughton said, “As a hobbledehoy in his native Texas, Jack used to close his ears to the rattle of dice and the yells of the crap-shooters. He saved up his pennies and as soon as he could command the price gorged himself on his favorite dish.” Naughton continued, “He grins when you ask him why he didn’t respect the traditions of his race and secure his chicken the ‘natchel way.”’ Johnson reportedly replied, “No stolen chicken ever passed the portals of my face.”82 Across the bay, the Oakland Tribune’s Eddie Smith quipped, “When the champion fighter of the world mentioned watermelon you can believe me he smacked his chaps in lavish anticipation of what he would do to the first melon he gets during the 1910 season, and if you were to ask me right now the best way to get on the right side of the gentleman of color I would say produce a watermelon.”83 Unlike Jeffries, who enjoyed fishing, Johnson, writer C. E. Van Loan observed, “does not care any- thing about fishing or hunting. The only time he manifests any interest in a speckled mountain trout is when he finds one on his plate. A chicken is the only game which he cares to slaughter.”84 How could a chicken-eating coon beat the epitome of the white race? To further deny Johnson his manhood, the white press turned the cham- pion into an uncivilized Sambo. In white writers’ summation, Johnson, the happy-go-lucky black, was devoid of thought. “Johnson, essentially African, feels no deeper than the moment, sees no farther than his nose—which is flat and of the present. No dark fancies to come to daunt him. Without imagination to lead him onward, he makes no excursions into the blind, un- measured, unsearched caverns of futurity,” a writer claimed.85 In comparing the two gladiators, Eddie Smith told his readers, “A careful study of the men

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yesterday leads me to believe Jeff is the more worried of the two.” “Johnson,” Smith contended, was “true to his traditions of his race, loved music, has a hearty laugh and fi nds amusements in things that would be passed over by the white mass as trifl es beneath his notice.” Jeff ries, however, was “playful at times but it is the playfulness of a sullen bear. He plays a few moments and then sulks about his yard as a captive bear would about his cage.”86 And Jack London observed, “In shirt sleeves, [Johnson’s] shoulder muscles and biceps bulge knottily. Like Jeff ries, he too is every inch a big man. But they are vastly diff erent types of men. Under all his large garniture of fi ghting strength, Johnson is happy-go-lucky in temperament, as light and carefree as a child. He is easily amused, he lives more in the moment, and joy and sorrow are swift passing moods with him. He is not capable of seriously ad- justing his actions to remote ends.”87

Th e San Francisco Chronicle racially mocks Jack Johnson and insinuates he has a natu- ral love for chicken. (1910, San Francisco Chronicle)

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For his part, however, Jeffries wanted to hear nothing of the race talk. He knew whites had been blinded by their obsession with race. “When you get into the ring with a man you are exactly on the same footing with him in every way, whether he’s black, white, yellow, or brown. That’s the way I stand on this black and white proposition.”88 In the ring, according to Jeffries, de- mocracy, discipline, and determination would prevail. But it was too late for racial reasoning. As Max Balthasar of the Sacramento Star said of Jeffries, “the white race pins its hope of wrestling the world’s heavy-weight championship from the Ethiopian.”89 Situating Johnson as a man-child created a racial dilemma for whites. If Johnson, the childlike Sambo, beat Jeffries, what would that mean for the interconnection of physical superiority and white authority? Johnson domi- nated the fight from the first bell with a steady diet of left jabs and right up- percuts. By round six Johnson had eliminated whites’ hopes. He hit Jeffries’s eye with a sharp left uppercut that nearly closed the eye. In the fifteenth and final round the final fireworks began. A flurry of punches from Johnson sent Jeffries down to the canvas for the first time in his career. During training camp Jeffries had assured whites that he could come back for this fight be- cause he had never been down. “Why, I have never even been dazed in the ring—never,” he told the press. “Did you ever figure that way? The boys that don’t come back are the lads that have been flattened—boys that have been so badly beaten that they have never quite recovered.”90 Jeffries, and white fans, had entered into uncharted territory. Jeffries got up, but Johnson quickly swarmed him again with a series of punches and knocked the challenger down for the second time. Jeffries’s corner began to scream to referee Tex Rickard to stop the fight, because they did not want Jeffries to be knocked out. Rickard did not oblige. When Jeffries rose up, Johnson commenced to hit him with more vicious punches, and for the third time Jeffries went down. Rickard had seen enough, and declared Johnson the winner.91 Jack Johnson had proven the fight experts wrong and had retained his heavyweight title. Johnson’s victory made whites momentarily reassess the relationship be- tween physicality and superiority. Instead of putting stock in the white male body, white writers reasoned that brains, and not brawn, made white men su- perior. The idea of the “primitive masculine” had seemingly died. Sportswriter Rex Beach claimed Johnson “demonstrated further that his race has acquired full stature as men: whether they will ever breed brains to match his muscles is yet to be proven.”92 Another editorial urged, “Never you mind, white man. You have something still which lifts you above the black: the Bible, Shake- speare, Milton, Goethe, Fulton, Stephenson, Edison, and Darwin.”93 In his

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racial reasoning, psychologist and criminologist W. C. Morrow claimed that Jeffries’s superior racial intellectual abilities hindered him in the ring. Mor- row asked, “What makes a great prize fighter? Brains? No. Culture? Heaven forbid! That Jeffries has a larger brain than Johnson goes without question. With a higher brain development he had, as a matter of course, a more effi- cient nervous organization.” Morrow added, “If we imagine the two men in their normal state, each with the strength and training that we know them to have had, Johnson could not possibly have stood before the white man through three rounds.” In the end, it was the “temperament of Jeffries, and behind it brains and nervous organization, all of them superior to anything of the sort possessed by Johnson, that proved the white man’s ruin. The white man was destroyed by his superiority—his superiority in everything, but the one vital thing, and understanding of the black man from the Congo.”94 The criminologist labeled Johnson a savage, not a civilized citizen, and in doing so he tried to protect the construction of white manhood. In what now has become a common conversation about black athletic superiority, in 1912 Australian promoter Hugh McIntosh, who worked with Johnson, Langford, and McVey, became the first person to relate black suc- cess to slavery. “The American negro, for example, is bound, at his best, to be physically equal, if not superior, to the class from which the white boxer

Jack Johnson with his golden smile. (1909–1915, Library of Congress)

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is drawn.” “In recent times,” McIntosh noted, “his ancestors have had to survive the horrors of the Middle Passage; to work fourteen hours a day in the cotton fields, and be speedy and resourceful enough to escape, over rough country, from well-mounted slave-owners and their highly trained bloodhounds.” This horrific history, McIntosh concluded, meant that blacks “needed amazing vitality to resist the awful living and insanitary conditions, poor food, dreadful climates, and ill-usage generally which were their lot.”

Puck imagines reversed roles in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if Johnson beats Jeffries. (1910, Library of Congress)

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In the ring, this meant that “every willing slam which the African black has received from his white master through the ages has done a little to make Johnson, McVea, and the rest the affluent folk they are.” In this understand- ing, the slave whip prepared black men for pugilistic punishment. “In the ring, when the negro is getting a thrashing, he feels neither rage nor shame; he is only getting what his forefathers had been getting over since civilization first prized the race out of its primeval forest.”95 But in truth, white fighters struggled to beat black men. Whites needed something more than the same- old newspapers racism; they need lawmakers to save the race.

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