American Experience: “The Fight” (Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling) (PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the In Their Own Words program on Muhammad Ali, PBS showed two American Experience programs on famous African-American athletes of the 1930’s, boxer Joe Louis (in case you were wondering how he got two first names, it turns out his real last name was “Barrow” but he dropped it professionally) and Olympic track and field star Jesse Owens. The two shows can be grouped together because not only did both men achieve their career peaks in the late 1930’s but both were caught up in the rivalry between the U.S. and Nazi Germany that would lead the two nations to fight against each other in World War II. The episode on Joe Louis was called “The Fight” and centered around his most famous bout, the June 22, 1938 fight in New York’s Yankee Stadium between Louis and German champion Max Schmeling. It was actually their second fight; Schmeling had beaten Louis on June 19, 1936, also in Yankee Stadium, in what was supposed to set up the winner to fight then-world’s champion James Braddock for the title. Louis and Owens were part of a generation of African-American athletes and performers who were carefully coached by their managers, both white and Black, to be unthreatening, to make no statements against American racism as Jack Johnson had done before them and Muhammad Ali would do even more openly afterwards. The list also includes the Black pianist Teddy Wilson, chosen in 1935 to perform with the Benny Goodman Trio – the first Black musician to play regularly with a white band – and Jackie Robinson, who became the first Black player in major league baseball. All four of these men were carefully coached to avoid responding to any racist insults that might get thrown their way and to concentrate on being as successful as possible and proving their worth on the bandstand, on the field or in the ring. The Louis-Schmeling fight got presented as a battle not only between two prizefighters but between two conceptions of freedom and race.

Ironically, Schmeling had begun his career in Germany during the freewheeling years of the Weimar Republic between Germany’s loss of World War I in 1918 and Hitler’s takeover in 1933 – the era of the great cabarets, the classic German films that were shown all over the world and often got their directors (F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Paul Fejos and later Joe May and Fritz Lang) offers to come to Hollywood, and the period in which Germany was the most Queer-friendly country in the world (a status the Nazis quickly and abruptly reversed). Schmeling had left Germany in 1930 and returned in 1934, when he promptly and opportunistically cozied up to Hitler – who made him an unofficial hero of the Reich and sent him back to the U.S. to make public appearances in which he claimed that everything was hunky-dory in Nazi Germany and the tales that were already starting to trickle out about the Jews being persecuted and marginalized in German life were all B.S. (Ironically, Hitler and his staff had studied America’s Jim Crow racial segregation laws and used them as models for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and their other discriminatory measures against Jews – just as Hitler cited Henry Ford’s viciously anti-Semitic book The International Jew as a source on how terrible Jewish people were and how they were out to dominate the world if white Aryans didn’t unite to stop them first.) Joe Louis was presented as the exemplar of white America’s conception of what a worthy Black person should be – amiable, unthreatening, a good Christian, a faithful husband and one unlikely to challenge America’s strict limits on what Black people could be and do in society. Meanwhile, Schmeling was being presented by the Nazis as their ideal of what the good German should be: physically strong, athletic, handsome and with a trophy wife, Anny Ondra, a German film actress who’d starred in two movies for Alfred Hitchcock (The Manxman, 1928; and Hitchcock’s first talkie, Blackmail, in 1929; HItchcock scholars usually credit her with being the first “Hitchcock blonde,” the characters, icy on the outside but passionate on the inside, whom he usually made the female leads in his stories).

The promos for the Louis-Schmeling fights – especially the second one, held after Louis’s managers had double-crossed Schmeling and given Louis the title fight (which he won) Schmeling thought he had earned by beating Louis in 1936 – played up the battle of the ideologies as well as the two fighters. Schmeling had beaten Louis the first time out by exploiting a weakness he’d noticed in films of Louis’s previous bouts – instead of keeping his arm raised after throwing a left jab, he let it sink to his stomach, leaving an opening for Schmeling to punch him in the chest. Louis won the rematch, which grew his hero status to the African-American community, and would remain heavyweight champion for 12 years until he retired in 1949 – though much of that was due to America’s four-year participation in World War II, which put boxing on hold for the duration. Unlike Muhammad Ali two decades later, Joe Louis served in his generation’s war, most of it in a segregated cavalry unit where he got basic training and then the Special Services Division, which meant the Army used him mostly to entertain and raise morale and money for the war effort. When he got out he was subjected to Internal Revenue Service enforcement because he owed a large tax bill his managers hadn’t paid, though after he retired from boxing he participated in special golf tournaments and began the long process of integrating that sport as well. Louis died in 1981 – living long enough to watch Muhammad Ali become heavyweight champion and to make some public statements attacking him for refusing to serve in Viet Nam and for abandoning the Christian faith – and in his later years he abused cocaine and other drugs. Ironically, according to Louis’s Wikipedia page, Max Schmeling helped pay for Louis’s funeral and served as one of his pallbearers.