BOOKS IN BRIEF
Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink by David Margolick (Knopf, 432 pp., $26.95). No sport employs hype more than boxing. There have been many self-proclaimed “Fights of the Century,” but the greatest was the second Louis-Schmeling bout in June 1938. Now David Margolick seeks to place this famous grudge match in historical perspective.
Joe Louis emerged as a heavyweight contender when boxing was in the doldrums following the sport’s golden era in the 1920s. Margolick describes him as an exciting fighter with a devastating punch who waded through the ranks of the heavyweight contenders with ease before he was 21. He also was an African American in a still racist nation.
Schmeling was a former heavyweight champion when he met Louis in 1936. Louis was thoroughly-beaten with the bout culminating in a twelfth-round knockout. The clamor for a rematch began immediately.
Louis and Schmeling are made to represent their respective countries. America, in the midst of the Great Depression, needed new heroes like Louis. Schmeling had to carry the burden of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, although Margolick believes Schmeling “was never Nazi Max.” But the Nazis exploited Schmeling, arguing that his defeat of Louis proved their racist theories.
The American boxing community adopted Louis because a great heavyweight was needed to revive a sport dead since the retirement of Jack Dempsey. Despite this, Louis was viewed by sports writers as ignorant. The writer Paul Gallico admired Louis, but described him as living “like an animal, untouched by externals. Is he all instinct, all animal? Or have a hundred million years left a fold upon his brain?” The Hearst papers were worse. They referred to Louis as America’s “pet pickaninny.”
Given the background of the two nations it is easy to see the Louis-Schmeling conflict as a clash of democracy versus tyranny, a cliché Margolick wisely avoids.
Louis’s rematch with Schmeling was the most ballyhooed fight since the second Dempsey-Tunney bout. For the Nazis, another Schmeling victory would be a propaganda bonanza. To many Americans, it would be a bloody nose for Hitler. Louis’s devastating knockout of Schmeling in one round was cheered throughout the nation, especially in the black community. No other black celebrity had captured their enthusiasm as did Louis. Not only was he a great heavyweight champion, but, by regularly beating whites, he also vindicated black hopes for equality.
In the long run, who really won? After a twelve year reign, Louis wound up broke. He was in and out of mental hospitals the rest of his life and ended his career as a greeter at a Las Vegas casino.
Schmeling became a millionaire through ownership of a Coca-Cola dealership and was postwar Germany’s most popular sports hero. He remained close to Louis because their friendship helped lift the Nazi stigma from him.
Margolick’s study is overlong and is drawn almost exclusively from newspaper and magazine articles. There are some questionable assertions, such as the Nazis pushing Schmeling to fight because Germany was short of hard currency. This will come as a surprise to those nations smashed by the blitzkrieg in 1939-40.
Yet, overall, Margolick has produced a fine study of a brutal sport that casts insights into America in the last years of the Great Depression.
– John P. Rossi
