Cinderella Men

Baseball, boxing and horseracing were the most popular sports in Depression America. All three offered plucky underdogs and Cinderella stories to distract people from their own troubles. While the Yankees were winning the Series with monotonous regularity, the scrappy, often hapless Dodgers had more, and more devoted, fans. When the smaller Seabiscuit outran the mighty War Admiral; when Jimmy Braddock made his amazing comeback; when Joe Louis knocked down Hitler’s superman, it gave you a sense that you might come out all right yourself.

James Braddock’s story was ready-made for the era. He was born in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement in 1905; the following year, his poor Anglo-Irish immigrant parents moved their large family across the Hudson to New Jersey. He started boxing late, at 18, a fighter of tremendous heart and moxie, but bad hands. In 1928, three years into a very promising professional career, he broke his right in two successive fights, and would break it again later. His career slid, until by 1933 “he had gone from headline to breadline,” as biographer Michael C. DeLisa put it. He was taking what work he could get as a longshoreman on the Weehawken docks and accepting $6.40 a week from a New Jersey relief agency to feed his kids.

In June 1935 he made an astonishing comeback. In one of the biggest upsets in boxing history, he went up against the heavily favored world champion Max Baer at the Madison Square Garden Bowl, an outdoor arena in Queens, and won. Overnight he went from a has-been on the dole to world champion. It was the sort of story Depression America loved, and needed, to hear. Damon Runyon pegged him the Cinderella Man.

A month before Braddock’s victory, on May 15, a young fighter named Joe Louis, on his first visit to New York City, stepped off a train in Grand Central to be engulfed by press, fans, and a police escort. Flashbulbs crackled. A group of Pullman porters lifted him in the air and doffed their caps for a photo as the fans cheered. The next day’s New York Post ran a cartoon of a giant Louis bestriding Manhattan like a Colossus, knocking the tops off the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.

You might have thought Joe Louis was the reigning world champion, not Braddock, but in fact he’d been boxing professionally for less than a year. The hoopla had been orchestrated by his promoter, Michael Strauss Jacobs. And New Yorkers, not only but especially black New Yorkers, had proven to be a very receptive audience for it.

Jacobs, who preferred to be called Uncle Mike, was famously homely, with, according to Life, “beady eyes, a dead-pan face, a gruff voice, a set of badly fitting false teeth.” He was born in 1880 into a large Jewish immigrant household on Manhattan’s Lower West Side. As a kid he hawked popcorn and lemon drops on Coney Island excursion boats. By the 1920s he was scalping tickets and promoting events around the city, from Broadway revues to boxing matches. Failing to get the contract to book fights in Madison Square Garden, he forged an ingenious alliance with William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain. He offered to promote fights at other venues as fundraisers for Millicent Hearst’s favorite charity, the Free Milk Fund For Babies. In return, writers for Hearst’s papers, including Runyon, would beat the drums.

That deal in place, Jacobs headed west to investigate this new fighter he’d heard about. Joe Louis Barren was born a dirt-poor sharecropper’s son in Alabama in 1913. He was 12 when the family moved to Detroit, part of the great diaspora of Southern blacks to the industrial north in the 1920s. He started boxing in the Depression to bring in a dollar or two. Billed simply as Joe Louis, he was knocking down opponents at the rate of two a month in Detroit and Chicago when Jacobs signed him.

For Louis’s first fight in New York, Jacobs got the former champion Primo Carnera. The Italian giant had a glass jaw, and was rumored to have won most of his fights because his backers, who included the gangster and Cotton Club owner Owney Madden, paid the other fighters to tank. That didn’t stop local and national press, with Hearst papers leading the way, from building up the match into one of the most highly anticipated sporting events in living memory.

No New Yorkers were more excited about Joe Louis than the 300,000 residents of Harlem. In 1935 they sorely needed something or someone to cheer about. Of all the city’s neighborhoods, the Depression had fallen hardest on Harlem. Unemployment had already been higher there than in the rest of the city. The great majority of black New Yorkers who had jobs in the 1920s worked as unskilled or semiskilled laborers or in the service industries. Seventy percent of the working women were domestics. Those who worked in industry, like the needle trades, consistently earned less than white women working at the same jobs. The city government made some token efforts to hire qualified blacks, but the Irish-dominated police, for instance, systematically prevented black cops from advancing, and no black doctors or nurses were allowed to work in any public hospital in the city except Harlem Hospital. Blacks who tried to run their own businesses always struggled against white competitors. Only one Harlem business in ten was black-owned. The stores that lined busy 125th Street were almost entirely white-owned and white-staffed.

Because black New Yorkers where ghettoized in Harlem and a few other areas, landlords could cruelly gouge them for outrageous rents. Harlem tenants consistently paid more for dilapidated housing where hot water, baths and even heat were often missing. In the 1920s, rents citywide rose ten percent, but shot up 100 percent in some parts of Harlem. The poverty, crowding, terrible housing and lack of services all combined to produce illness and mortality rates, especially from tuberculosis and pneumonia, that were shockingly higher than elsewhere in the city.

When the Depression hit, unemployment in Harlem rose to 25 percent in 1930, and steadily climbed to 50 percent. Anywhere blacks and whites worked together, blacks were fired first. Those who held onto their jobs saw their wages and hours cut. Domestics earned a maximum $15 a week; factory workers as little as $7. Average household incomes in the neighborhood dropped by almost half in the first two Depression years. All the problems the neighborhood had experienced even in boom times were now exacerbated: homelessness, malnutrition, petty crime, juvenile delinquency.

By the start of 1935, Harlem seethed with resentment and anger. In March it erupted. A Puerto Rican teen was caught shoplifting a cheap penknife in a five and dime on 125th Street. A minor scuffle ensued, but a rumor flashed around the neighborhood that the youth – now turned black – had been viciously beaten and/or killed. Protestors from the Communist Youth League and a group called the Young Liberators gathered outside the store, attracting a sullen crowd. Someone smashed a window, and a full-scale riot broke out. It went on all night, as thousands of fed-up Harlemites raced up and down 125th Street, attacking and looting the white-owned shops. Mayor La Guardia rushed 500 cops to the neighborhood. They made 1,000 arrests, and by 4 a.m. it was over. La Guardia and the district attorney blamed the Communist protestors for causing it; leaders in the neighborhood said the real causes were extreme poverty and hopelessness.

No one was surprised, then, when two months later Harlem greeted Joe Louis not just as a hero but, as Time later put it, “black Moses leading the children of Ham out of bondage.” On the night of June 25, 64,000 people crammed into Yankee Stadium to watch Louis knock the much larger Carnera down three times in the sixth round for a TKO. There was pandemonium in the stadium. Nearby, all Harlem erupted again – this time to dance and sing in the streets until dawn. Louis himself went to bed. He would always be the preternaturally still, calm center in the cyclone of adulation that whirled around him, a man so quiet and deadpan in public that one reporter compared him to a wooden Indian.

When Louis returned to Yankee Stadium to face Max Baer the following September, the crowd of 95,000 included Babe Ruth, Cary Grant, Edward G. Robinson, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and Ernest Hemingway. Some 35,000 blacks filled the bleachers and upper tiers. Baer was still rattled from his loss to Braddock, and Louis dispatched him in four rounds. “Town Goes Mad,” the Amsterdam News reported, comparing the celebrations in Harlem to those at the end of the Great War. The revelers filled Seventh Avenue, banging washboards and tin cans, blowing horns and whistles. People danced on the roofs of parked cars and traffic-stalled taxis.

In June 1936, Louis faced the German former champion Max Schmeling. Schmeling had been the darling of Bertolt Brecht and Berlin café society in the Weimar 1920s, then easily adapted to Hitler’s rise and was now a hero to the Nazis. Mike Jacobs and his newspaper pals ballyhooed it as a duel between America’s sepia superman and Hitler’s übermensch. But with most sports writers predicting an easy Louis win, and Jews threatening to boycott, the crowd of 45,000 failed to fill up Yankee Stadium this time, though millions listened on the radio. Schmeling’s wife listened by shortwave in the home of Joseph Goebbels.

Schmeling had studied Louis carefully and trained hard, while Louis strolled into the ring unprepared and overconfident. To the increasing dismay of black Americans everywhere, the German pounded Louis mercilessly for eleven long rounds and then knocked him down for good in the twelfth. A few elderly black listeners, including one in Harlem, reportedly fell dead of heart attacks by their radios. Langston Hughes would remember walking down Seventh Avenue and seeing “grown men weeping like children.” Meanwhile, it was Yorkville’s turn to party in the streets. The large German community there marched arm in arm along 86th Street, singing and cheering, and clinked steins in the Café Hindenburg and the brauhauses. Schmeling flew back to Germany on the Hindenburg to an ecstatic hero’s welcome whipped up by Goebbels.

Mike Jacobs had Louis back in the ring by August, knocking down a series of lesser fighters. In June 1937 he met the Cinderella Man in Chicago’s Comiskey Park for the world heavyweight title. Braddock had not fought since beating Max Bear two years earlier. He was ten years older than Louis, and still had the bad hands but great heart. He stood up to Louis’s murderous assault into the seventh round, then went down on his face like a dead man. The headline of the June 26 Amsterdam News was KING LOUIS I.

When Louis’s inevitable rematch with Schmeling came to Yankee Stadium on the night of Wednesday, June 22 1938, the whole world was rapt. As David Margolick describes in Beyond Glory, this was much more than a prizefight, more than a title bout. Around the world, this was seen as a symbolic duel between democracy and fascism, freedom and slavery, white and black.

Seventy thousand people packed the stadium. Mayor La Guardia was there, and J. Edgar Hoover with Clyde Tolson, and Tom Dewey, and Cab Calloway, Vincent Astor, Tallulah Bankhead, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Hemingway again, Jack Johnson. Some 2,000 Germans had come over on the liners Bremen and Europa, swastikas snapping from their masts. Sixty million Americans, half the entire population, gathered around radios. All over New York City, deserted streets echoed to the sounds of radios tuned to NBC, announcer Clem McCarthy’s gravelly voice rasping out of windows thrown open on a hot night. Twenty million Germans listened to their own broadcast, and another 20 million elsewhere around the globe, making it the largest audience for any event ever in the history of the world.

What the world heard and saw that night was Joe Louis barreling out of his corner a little past 10 p.m. and demolishing Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds with a blazing whirlwind of punches. It was over so quickly that some latecomers still filing into Yankee Stadium missed it. An unearthly roar shot up from the crowd and was echoed around the world. At the Berlin Olympics two years earlier, another Alabama sharecropper’s son, Jesse Owen, had embarrassed Hitler by beating his Aryan athletes for four gold medals. Now Joe Louis had pummeled the myth of Aryan supremacy to the canvas three times in two minutes, and the world laughed and cheered.

All Harlem, plus a couple hundred thousand visitors, packed Seventh Avenue from 116th Street all the way up to 145th. Amid the singing and dancing and banging of pie tins, many raised their arms in mocking Nazi salutes. The gloom in Yorkville was funereal.

by John Strausbaugh