The Great White Hopes Read online

  THE

  GREAT

  WHITE

  HOPES

  THE

  GREAT

  WHITE

  HOPES

  THE QUEST TO DEFEAT JACK JOHNSON

  GRAEME KENT

  FOREWORD BY HARRY CARPENTER

  First published in 2005

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Graeme Kent, 2005, 2013

  The right of Graeme Kent to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9615 3

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Harry Carpenter

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. ‘There was no Fight!’

  2. The Future Assistant Provost Marshal of Baghdad

  3. The Philadelphia Irishman and Two Warm Bodies

  4. The Hobo

  5. A Hot Day in Reno

  6. ‘His Chin Begins at His Knees!’

  7. The Hopes and Hopefuls Assemble

  8. The Cowboy from Driftwood Creek

  9. The Bushman and the Blacksmith

  10. French Connections

  11. The Last Hopes

  12. The Pottawatomie Giant

  13. The Captains and the Kings Depart

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  FOREWORD

  by Harry Carpenter

  This book is about envy: white envy of black talent. The talent belongs to Jack Johnson, the first black man to win the world heavyweight championship. Because he was black, and successful, he was reviled in the USA by white men. Mind you, he didn’t help his cause. He was saucy, he smiled a lot (this was interpreted as a sneer), he flaunted his wealth with fast cars and sprauncy clothes, and, oh, the horror of it, he married two white women and formed a liaison with a third, which led to a criminal charge and exile from the States. In the seven years of his reign as champion, the world of boxing was determined to get him beaten.

  Before we get too high-minded about what seems to us now an insane chase for a white Sir Galahad, let’s remember that other sports dragged their feet when it came to recognising black talent. Jackie Robinson was the first black player allowed to participate in major league US baseball, and that didn’t come about until the late 1940s, some thirty years after Jack Johnson had left the world stage.

  In Britain black (or coloured, as we had to say then) boxers were denied the right to fight for a British title until 1948. The first man to break the colour bar was Dick Turpin, elder brother of Randolph. Hasn’t there always been a white edginess about black success and doesn’t it still exist? For evidence of that I give you some members of football crowds.

  I never met Jack Johnson (he died in 1946), but in the 1950s I went to Texas, Johnson’s home state, where segregation still existed. Black people couldn’t stay in white hotels, couldn’t eat in white restaurants and, when they got on a bus, were banished to the back seats. In those surroundings it wasn’t too difficult to understand how the impact of Johnson’s boxing supremacy must have felt.

  The American white hatred of Jack Johnson in those early years of the twentieth century was mirrored when Muhammad Ali came on the scene in the 1960s. Here was a modern-day Johnson: voluble, smiling, taunting, boasting and blessed with a boxing talent such as had not been seen before, or since. The US press immediately pinned the bad-boy label on him. He had too much lip, he was arrogant, he answered back and his unpopularity with white people increased a thousand-fold when he refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the US flag, which meant he wouldn’t go to Vietnam (‘them Viet Cong never called me nigger’). The fate of Jack Johnson now befell Muhammad Ali. He faced a criminal charge and, although he wasn’t forced to leave the States, he was exiled from boxing for more than three years. When he was allowed back, his first opponent, Jerry Quarry, was a white man.

  Graeme Kent is a painstaking researcher and writer. You will find plenty in this book you didn’t know before. I thought I knew a bit about Victor McLaglen. I was wrong. I didn’t know the half of it. There are two levels at which Mr Kent’s book is important. It adds considerably to our knowledge of the heavyweight championship and it lays bare a fascinating slice of social history. Graeme Kent has pulled off a fine double.

  Harry Carpenter

  March 2005

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have received much help from many people in the writing of this book, and I would like to express my thanks to them. For information on Victor McLaglen’s service in the Life Guards at the turn of the century I am indebted to K.C. Hughes, Assistant Curator of the Household Cavalry Museum, while details of other aspects of McLaglen’s rather mysterious wartime military career were supplied by Major (retd) J.E.H. Ellis, Curator of the Cheshire Military Museum, Major (retd) J. Rogerson, Curator of the Prince of Wales Royal Regiment and Queen’s Military Museum, and Amanda Moreno, Curator of the Regimental Museum of the Royal Irish Fusiliers.

  Patti Wotherspoon of the Vancouver Public Library’s Research and Information Centre provided background information on Jack Johnson’s sojourn in Canada, while closer to home Helen Wallder of the Doncaster Local Studies Library discovered a great deal of material on local heavyweight ‘Iron’ Hague. Tracey Booth of the Local Studies Library, Kingston upon Hull, found information about the early life of Con O’Kelly. Malcolm Matthews of the Local and Naval Studies Section of the Plymouth Library Service provided information about the White Hopes campaign in the West of England. My friend, the late Bob Hartley, was able to supply a great deal of first-hand information about life on the boxing booths and the career of the American heavyweight George Christian. I am indebted to Barry Hugman, Editor of The British Boxing Board of Control Yearbook, for his permission to reprint some of the material on Victor McLaglen that was first published in his annual. I am grateful to Dr Sandra Salin for her meticulous translations of French sporting journals and magazines from the opening decades of the twentieth century.

  I am deeply indebted to Harry Shaffer for allowing me access to many old newspaper clippings from his magnificent collection in Archives of Antiquities of the Prize Ring antekprizering.com.

  The only other book published on the subject of the White Hopes is White Hope by Oswald Frederick (the late Fred Snelling, doyen of British boxing writers). This is a small paperback published in the 1940s. Fred, with typical modesty, claimed that he wrote it in a few weeks while fire-watching during the London bombing raids. Fred was very kind to me when as a young man I first wrote about boxing in the 1950s, and I hope that I may have done some justice to the topic that is rightfully his.

  Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my editor Sarah Bryce, for her unflagging enthusiasm and support for the project and her dedication and conscientiousness in seeing it through to its conclusion.

  Graeme Kent

  Lincolnshire, March 2005

  INTRODUCTION

  The worldwide search between 19
08 and 1915 to find a white fighter who could defeat the unpopular black champion Jack Johnson is one of the most unusual yet little-known stories in the annals of world sport. This is the first full-length book to deal with the history of the White Hopes.

  Carrying out the research has occupied many years in a number of different countries. A great deal has been written about the charismatic and controversial Johnson, but hardly anything has been said about his Caucasian challengers. Apart from the film actor Victor McLaglen, none of the White Hopes wrote a book about his experiences, and even McLaglen’s autobiography hardly touched upon his ring career. Much of this investigation necessarily has been conducted with the aid of yellowing press cuttings and dusty contemporary accounts of court proceedings between 1908 and 1915, along with other public records and private reminiscences, published and unpublished.

  During the bizarre hunt, hundreds of ambitious young men came forward all over the world to challenge Jack Johnson, and thirty or forty of them proved good enough or determined enough to have been classified, no matter how briefly, as a White Hope. Their stories are told, often for the first time, in these pages.

  The optimistic Hopes came from different countries and varied backgrounds. Victor McLaglen was the English son of a South African bishop. Oklahoman railway fireman Carl Morris was sponsored by an oil millionaire, failed as a scientific boxer and reinvented himself under the billing of the world’s dirtiest fighter.

  Luther McCarty ran away from a tent show where he was selling snake oil dressed as a Native American. George Rodel’s manager claimed that his South African heavyweight had been a Boer War hero, until the unforgiving press discovered that the fighter had only been a child when the war ended. French Hope Georges Carpentier was a genuinely decorated war hero, but was so small that he seldom dared to be photographed next to potential opponents. Handsome, philandering Frank Moran was the boyfriend of silent-film stars Mary Pickford and Pearl White and was stranded penniless in wartime Paris by a heartless manager. There were many others, all with their own fascinating stories.

  Their heyday was a brief one, less than seven years in duration, and when it was over the fall from grace for many of them was equally swift. Sandy Ferguson and Jim Barry were both killed in barroom brawls. Al Palzer was shot to death by his own father. Iron Hague was gassed on the Somme and never fought again. Luther McCarty was killed in the ring.

  The saga of the White Hopes was played out against a background of vicious racial prejudice and unrest. Only twelve years before Jack Johnson took the title, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson had upheld the principle of racial segregation. Jack Johnson was feared by many whites as ‘a bad nigger’, the term traditionally applied to slaves who had had the courage to rebel against their masters. To have such a proud and independent man as heavyweight champion, a position Eldridge Cleaver, spokesman for the militant Black Panthers movement, has called ‘the ultimate focus of masculinity in America’, was regarded by many whites as an affront to white supremacy, to be rectified quickly.

  The era of the White Hopes was a fascinating one and deserves to be remembered. It is hoped that this account will present a true picture of an unusual and long-departed age.

  1

  ‘THERE WAS NO FIGHT!’

  It was several minutes past midday on the afternoon of 26 December 1908. The first World Heavyweight Championship under the Marquess of Queensberry rules between a white and a black boxer was about to end. In the fourteenth round, Tommy Burns, the totally outclassed Canadian heavyweight champion of the world, had been smashed to the canvas for a count of eight. As the fighter staggered to his feet, bleeding from the nose and mouth, Superintendent Mitchell, in charge of the 250-strong police contingent at the ringside in the open-air stadium at Rushcutters Bay, just outside Sydney in Australia, climbed into the ring.

  Unable to make himself heard above the noise of the crowd, the inspector indicated to the referee, Hugh D. McIntosh, who was also the promoter of the contest, that he should stop the fight. McIntosh nodded and moved forward to do so. Ignoring him, Jack Johnson, the black American challenger, advanced to finish off the reeling Burns.

  Sam Fitzpatrick, Johnson’s manager, and his seconds, terrified that their man would be disqualified, screamed at Johnson to step back. Their cries rose to the cloudless skies; unable to borrow enough wood to complete the stadium, McIntosh had built it without a roof. The black heavyweight saw his handlers’ wild gesticulations and hesitated. McIntosh shouted, ‘Stop, Johnson!’, and placed his hand on the black man’s shoulder as an indication that he was the winner and new champion.

  Realising what was happening, Tommy Burns turned on Superintendent Mitchell, who had instigated the stoppage, and swore luridly at him, demanding that he be allowed to fight on. Pat O’Keefe, a British middleweight boxer and Burns’s chief second, hurried across the ring and led the still shouting and struggling former champion back to his corner. Burns was $30,000 richer, the highest sum ever paid to a boxer up to that time, compared to Johnson’s $5,000, but his championship had passed out of his hands.

  Towards the end of his life the Canadian would always deny vehemently that he had been outclassed by Johnson. He claimed that the police had intervened mainly because Rudy Unholtz, a Germanborn South African boxer on Johnson’s payroll, had crept under the elevated ring as early as the tenth round. From here, Burns declared indignantly, Unholtz had kept screaming, ‘Stop the fight!’, thus influencing the police at ringside. Few spectators backed Burns’s claim.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Rushcutters Bay championship bout, Burns stayed on in Australia and lost much of his purse money at the races. He took his losses philosophically. A shrewd businessman but a pragmatist, he had been paid one dollar and twenty-five cents for his first fight, against Fred Thornton in Detroit in 1900, and he had once journeyed all the way to the Yukon to inspect a gold mine he had won in a poker game. Finding it to be worthless, he had earned his passage back by fighting the local champion, Klondike Mike Mahoney.

  For some time Johnson had been pursuing Burns halfway across the world in search of a title shot. Over a nine-year period, he had defeated all the major black contenders and those white heavyweights who would fight him, and now he was 30. He had scraped a living across the USA, working as a sponge fisherman, stable boy, porter, dock labourer and sparring partner. He had ridden the rails as an itinerant wanderer and lived and fought in hobo jungles. Before he had been lucky enough to embark upon an organised boxing career, he had taken part in the horrific ‘Battles Royal’, where half a dozen or more black youths were pitched into a ring at the same time and forced to fight for the delectation of a largely white audience until only one was left standing. It was the right sort of background to produce a tough, bitter and fearless man.

  After years in the doldrums, boxing was undergoing a worldwide resurgence, although there was little legislation anywhere to control the sport. There were no national controlling bodies and there was little organisation, just fights everywhere before huge crowds. Even President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House had his own resident fisticuffs trainer in ‘Professor’ Mike Donovan, a grizzled former bare-knuckle fighter and veteran of General Sherman’s Civil War march through Georgia.

  Taking advantage of the general enthusiasm for boxing, Johnson decided temporarily to remain in Australia, though definitely not in Sydney. A goodwill visit by a fleet of sixteen US battleships, which had occurred before the title fight, had aroused alarm and anti-black resentment in the city. Many citizens feared that the warships would be crewed almost exclusively by black seamen, who might not take kindly to the prevailing ‘White Australia’ policy. This had caused The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, to state reassuringly, ‘It is not at all probable, however, that a very large proportion of the crews will be found to be coloured. There will be some on the battleships, but they will not be nearly as numerous as rumour is suggesting just now.’

  Hugh D. McIntosh had relied on sa
ilors from the fleet to support the Burns–Johnson contest. In fact the Americans showed very little interest in the bout, causing the promoter to remark, possibly with some exaggeration, ‘Australians supported it. I had counted on American sailors for a possible sellout. Exactly two appeared in uniform. They started fighting and had to be evicted.’

  Before the fleet had left to sail home, the Australian Defence Minister, Mr Ewing, had urged the departing Americans to tell their fellow-countrymen that they had seen for themselves that Australia was emphatically a white-man’s country and would remain so.

  The ‘White Australia’ policy had been sparked off in the 1850s to combat the influx of over 50,000 Chinese immigrants who came to join in the gold rushes. Not only were the new labourers distinctive in their appearance, maintaining their own social customs, they toiled hard and cheaply. Soon they became very unpopular with Australian workers in the goldfields. By 1888, legislation had banned any more Chinese from entering the country. It was not long before the policy was applied tacitly to all non-whites. This was emphasised in 1903, when a trading vessel was wrecked off the coast at Point Nepean. The survivors were taken to Melbourne by a rescuing tugboat, but only the white officers and crew-members were allowed ashore. The non-whites were put on a Japanese mail ship and conducted to Hong Kong. Within another five years, by the time that Burns fought Johnson, most of the South Sea Islanders who had been recruited in the nineteenth century to work in the cane fields of the north had been sent back home.

  So how did a black boxer become heavyweight champion of the world on Australian soil? White Australians loved their sport and were becoming increasingly good at it. The English cricket team which had toured the continent in 1907/08 had lost four of the five games it had played against the Australians, while at the 1908 Olympics the Wallabies had defeated England, the only other entrant for rugby football, 32–3.