Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / Beyond Glory -- Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink

Beyond Glory -- Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink by David Margolick, Knopf, 432 pages, $26.95, ISBN #0375411925, index, bibliography, source notes, lavishly illustrated with b&w glossy photos.

A half-century ago, the exhausted breadwinner looked forward eagerly to the Friday night fights on television, before changing tastes and mass marketing supplanted them with Monday night football. In case you hadn't noticed, that's gone too, just showing once more how life's one constant is change. So it shouldn't be surprising that before TV, there was radio, but in the days before the proliferation of diversions, prizefights probably drew a greater percentage of the listening audience than any other event.

So, fight fans, bow low and revere the memory of Alfred A. Knopf, whose publishing house during 2005 gave us two of the finest volumes about prizefighting in decades. Early in the year, we enjoyed Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (reviewed in these pages early in the year) and authored by, yes, presidential historian Geoffrey Ward. For a chaser, Knopf has issued an equally-captivating volume, Beyond Glory -- Joe Louis and Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink by David Margolick.

In some respects, the works are very different. While they chronicle the careers of desperately-ambitious athletes, Beyond Glory supplies ready protagonists, demonstrating less animus by German hero Max Schmeling against Joe Louis than from Adollf Hitler and his Nazi regime as well as those Americans who couldn't bear to see a white man from any nation lose to a Negro. By contrast, Jack Johnson's protagonist was the world.

And the ways in which the two black fighters countered their opposition couldn't have been more different. Joe Louis today would be considered an Uncle Tom for his passive demeanor, a lassitude that made some think he must have been retarded, or worse, that he exemplified the inferiority of his race. He was clearly a man of few words but seemed congenitally agreeable and conciliatory, a trait that led opponent Schmeling to say at the end of Louis's life that he loved him and reportedly paid for his funeral.

Jack Johnson lived several decades before, an even more difficult time for ambitious blacks, and his instinct was to offer the white establishment a thumb in the eye, as he squired a succession of white women and lived, as they said then, high on the hog, driving the fanciest cars and wearing head-turning clothes.

In Joe Louis's world, though, Max Schmeling was equally compelling. He was as apolitical as Louis -- both men thought of themselves as sportsmen and discouraged attempts to get them to support political causes. This was most difficult, of course, for Schmeling, who became the darling of the Fuehrer and danced a minuet (now there's an image) between partying with Hitler and impliedly disavowing him by choosing a long-time Jewish manager.

This became more difficult for Schmeling as Hitler's atrocities gradually increased. In 1938, on Krisstallnacht, he reportedly swept up two young Jewish boys from the street and sheltered them in his home from possible death. A nice folk tale told by his publicists, it would seem, except that one of them revealed himself decades later as the owner of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

The focus of Louis/Schmeling book, of course, is their two heavyweight title fights. With Joe Louis favored heavily, Schmeling won an upset decision by a knockout in 1936. It couldn't be more of an understatement to say that the defeat battered Louis's spirit as well as his body. But what fans couldn't see in the reticent Louis was the gathering fury welling up inside him that was finally unleashed in 1938.

Many dismissed Louis's warning that he would dispose of his opponent very early in their rematch. Given Louis's historical demeanor, hardly anyone was prepared for the Hurricane Katrina-like explosion that Joe Louis launched from the opening bell. By the end of two minutes of the first round, it was all over, and Louis had sent Schmeling to the hospital, where he remained for weeks. Decades passed since Louis died, and in the interim, to the credit of both fighters, little if any bitterness ensued. They met on a few occasions and continued to act as we would always hope sportsmen could act, with grace and respect towards each other.

Helping Invent the Computer Without Trying?

The New Yorker recalls an accidental computer pioneer:

"On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced with cyanide. At an inquest, a few days later, his death was ruled a suicide. Turing was, by necessity rather than by inclination, a man of secrets. One of his secrets had been exposed two years before his death, when he was convicted of “gross indecency” for having a homosexual affair.

"Another, however, had not yet come to light. It was Turing who was chiefly responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War, an achievement that helped save Britain from defeat in the dark days of 1941. Had this been publicly known, he would have been acclaimed a national hero. But the existence of the British code-breaking effort remained closely guarded even after the end of the war; the relevant documents weren’t declassified until the nineteen-seventies. And it wasn’t until the eighties that Turing got the credit he deserved for a second, and equally formidable, achievement: creating the blueprint for the modern computer."

Qing Vases Smashed in Accident

"A stumbling visitor to a top museum has destroyed a set of priceless vases which stood on a shelf for 40 years," BBC News reports. "The 300-year-old Qing vases were among the best known artefacts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

"The visitor is said to have slipped on a loose shoelace and fallen down a staircase bringing the vases crashing down as he tried to steady himself. The vases, donated in 1948, were said to hold a "significant value" and were among the best known pieces on display."

Attention Gift Givers

For the history junkies of your acquaintance, History Channel has a store stocked with hundreds of DVDS from Churchill to Lincoln to the Founding Fathers. Also available is History Channel Magazine.

Book Alert / Weight -- The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

Weight -- The Myth of Atlas and Heracles, by Jeannette Winterson, Canongate, $18, 176 pages, ISBN #1841957186.

Where would literature be without myth? Not only to tell and retell stories from mythology's rich archives but to adapt the tried and true myth to a contemporary context. We've all watched statues of Atlas, straining under the weight of the globe, but it's to be expected that when you have little else to do, you get to wondering why you're bearing this weight at all.

Now, as Jeanette Winterson tells us, Heracles is the only one strong enough to take the globe off Atlas's shoulders, but that fact doesn't answer the basic question. Maybe the gods know....or maybe they don't. So Winterson brings Atlas into the 21st century to retell the story. In so doing, she sets him free. What happens then? Read the book.

Book Alert / Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Restless Genius

Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Restless Giant by Leo Damrosch, Houghton Mifflin, $30, 566 pages, ISBN #0-618-44696-6, index, no bibliography, source notes, biographical timeline, b&w illustrations sprinkled through text.

Were they here today, the Founding Fathers might do what they could to diminish the impact that European thinkers had on their crafting of the documents by which Americans live their lives -- the Constitution, of course, and perhaps even the Declaration of Independence. They'd be at pains to deny, even with the application of lie-detector testing, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract helped crystallize their social and political views.

But who was this fellow who had such an influence on the colonists? Until now, Leo Damrosch tells us, there's never been a thorough-going biography of this influential thinker: "Motherless child, failed apprentice, autodidact, impossiblly weird lover, Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century scene as a literary genius who would change the course of human history."

Shortlisted for the 2005 National Book Award, Damrosch's book obviously has something to offer.  His publisher asked the author why he gets under the skin of many readers: "I suppose you mean readers of the Confessions, which is probably the best-known of his books. Well, he sometimes sounds self-righteous, and as soon as he reveals some misdeed he starts explaining it away -- most notoriously his failure to explain to explain why he consigned his children to a foundling home as soon as they were born, over the protests of their mother. William Blake said that the book is really is really an apology and not a confession. But I think that if you really listen to Rousseau, it's the pain and built and self-knowledge that come through more than the self-justification. He's not someone you'd want for a roommate, but that's true of most great geniuses."

Book Alert / New York Burning

New York Burning -- Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore, Knopf, $26.95, 323 pages, ISBN #1-4000-4029-9, index, no bibliography, source notes, extensive informative appendices about participants.

Aside from DeTocqueville's Democracy in America, it's rare to read extensive nonfiction narratives of 18th century slavery in America, since it tends to be elbowed out by works on abolitionism and the civil strife that led to the Civil War. Yet the former is even more compelling, especially in its human stories, in an age before slaves had much, if any, support from the majority (read whites). 

If you choose to read one book in 2006 on black-white relations, then or now, make it Jill Lepore's New York Burning. The slave rebellion in 1741 New York City (if it even took place) is so well told on so many levels that it is likely to change the orientation of readers to that period in American history.

It was a time, let's remember, before the Stamp Act and such oppressive factors ripened the colonists to rebel against the British throne. Many in charge had a basic allegiance to the Crown. And as a lawyer, this reviewer found most memorable the state of jurisprudence in 1741 America. We've been told, even in law school, that our legal system was simply based on English common law and grafted onto our own rudimentary system. A reading of this book gives one a sense of the importance of how the founding fathers thought through how people relate to their government before adopting the Constitution we live by today.

Lepore, a Harvard history professor, is an uncommonly graceful writer, who has the alchemical talent to transform dusty, crumbling pages of research into a living narrative. In 1741, fully one-fifth of New York's population of 10,000 were slaves, many of whom came there from the Caribbean or the American South, which had a history of slave rebellions. So the tradeoff for obtaining free labor in New York was constantly looking over your shoulder (a trace of paranoia here?) to make sure your slave wasn't armed with a knife to do you in.

New York Burning contains coverage of the libel trial of (dare we call him) journalist John Peter Zenger, who published at the bidding of lawyer/patron James Alexander, and whose acquittal was based on the establishment of the principle that truth is a defense to libel, a principle that is alive and well today.

But the book's focus is the alleged slave rebellion of 1741 and the ten blazes set by someone (probably but not certainly slaves), which inflamed the city and resulted in arrests, brutal imprisonment, trial, hangings and burnings at the stake of scores of people, most of them black. A number were led to what amounted to their funeral pyre to get them to confess and then, whether or not they did, burned at the stake anyway.

Most compelling to this reviewer, at least, was the state of jurisprudence at that time, in which blacks could only testify against blacks (they weren't, in fact, full human beings), yet whites were free to testify against blacks. In an era before the U.S. Constitution guaranteed separation of powers, there was essentially no independent police and prosecutorial investigation of crimes, so Lepore describes judges hearing a case after interviewing suspects in their cells without defense lawyers present. Her book is an eye-opener for all those interested in American justice before the advent of the founding fathers. If the book has any flaws, it's probably the reproduction of scarcely-legible documents from 1741 New York, which add little to the narrative.

Book Alert / First Man

First Man -- The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (The Authorized Biography) by James R. Hansen, $30, 769 pages, ISBN #0-7432-5631-X, index, bibliography, source endnotes, dozens of b&w glossy photos.

Authorized biographies are invariably less fun and often less illuminating than unauthorized ones, as the reader senses the author's airbrush at work. But Neil A. Armstrong, first human to set foot on the moon, is certainly a worthy subject for a biography, and, at age 75, he has now authorized dozens of his friends and family members to speak about him for the first time, so this book certainly does flesh out the largely two-dimensional image America has had of him.

There's no question of Armstrong's credentials to be first on the moon. He flew 78 combat missions in Korea, became a test pilot for the precursor agency to NASA and flew 900 flights in experimental planes, all of which gave him a leg up to be designated an astronaut in September, 1962, not long after President Kennedy vowed (as a Cold War gambit) that America would put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Armstrong would beat that deadline by only 5 months.

Obviously, the first man on the moon would overshadow the contributions of even Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris in 1927. So politically as well as logistically, it was vital that NASA choose someone cut from a heroic mold. Chris Kraft, then-director of flight operations for NASA, told Hansen in one of 125 interviews he did for this book:

"Look, we just knew damn well that the first guy on the Moon was going to be a Lindbergh...(He) would be a  legend, an American hero beyond Lucky Lindbergh, beyond any soldier or politician or inventor. It should be Neil Armstrong. Calm, quiet, and absolute confidence. He had no ego. He was not of a mind that, 'Hey, I'm going to be the first man on the Moon!' That was never what Neil had in his head. We had two men to choose from, and Neil Armstrong, reticent, soft-spoken, and heroic, was our only choice. It was unanimous."

The other choice was Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin, who wasn't about to take Armstrong's selection lying down. "...when the competitive Aldrin got wind that Armstrong had been designated to take the first steps," Hansen writes, "he mounted a lobbying campaign on his own behalf with NASA administrators and fellow astronauts that was not well received."

Hansen depicts Armstrong, like Lindbergh, as a reluctant hero. The two men met after the Apollo II flight and compared notes about how it felt to become an international folk icon and the effect it had on friends and family. Armstrong's long marriage to his first wife, Janet, ended in 1994, and her 12-hour interview with the author is reportedly her first since the 1960s.

Cuomo Tied to Homophobic Posters?

"A nasty political episode from Andrew Cuomo's past returned to haunt him when some members of a gay political club accused him of making insensitive remarks about a flap during his father's 1977 mayoral campaign," according to Newsday.

"During a forum held late Wednesday in Manhattan by the Stonewall Democrats of New York City, Cuomo, a candidate for attorney general, was asked about his alleged involvement in the distribution of "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo" signs when Mario Cuomo ran against Ed Koch. Denying he had a hand in the tactic, the younger Cuomo referred to those charges as "folklore," which some in the audience took as a suggestion that the signs were never distributed. Cuomo said he was misunderstood, but Brice Peyre, a member of the club who posed the question to Cuomo, said, "The clear implication was these fliers never existed."

The Challenger -- 20 Years After

"Twenty years ago, space shuttle Challenger blew apart into jets of fire and plumes of smoke, a terrifying sight witnessed by the families of the seven astronauts and by those who came to watch the historic launch of the first teacher in space," reports the Associated Press.

"The disaster shattered NASA's spit-shined image and the belief that spaceflight could become as routine as airplane travel. The investigation into the accident's cause revealed a space agency more concerned with schedules and public relations than safety and sound decision-making. Seventeen years later, seven more astronauts were lost on the shuttle Columbia, leading many to conclude NASA had not learned the lessons of Challenger.

"But after last summer's successful return to flight under the highest level of engineering scrutiny ever, many space watchers are more hopeful. "Don't we all learn as we go?" said Grace Corrigan, who lost her daughter, teacher Christa McAuliffe, in the Challenger accident. "Everybody learns from their mistakes." Joining McAuliffe on the doomed Jan. 28, 1986 Challenger flight were commander Dick Scobee, pilot Mike Smith and astronauts Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnik, Ron McNair and Greg Jarvis."