Recounting the Lewis vs. Conn Championship Farce

[Most of the journal excerpts published on this blog to date deal with descriptions of Army life, musings about society and politics, and the occasional introspective journey. My father’s journals, however, are also filled with critiques of books he read and movies he saw, along with dozens of other wide-ranging topics. The following excerpt is an example — a wry description of the June 19, 1946 World Heavyweight Champion bout between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn, held in Yankee stadium and experienced by my father via radio. The detailed — and amusing — recount of the match speaks well of both the broadcast’s quality and my father’s reporting and writing skill. Perhaps he should have gone into sports writing rather than political journalism. Mike Jacobs, mentioned in the first paragraph, was the Don King of his day, a boxing promoter who exerted near total control over the sport.]

June 20, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The records set in Yankee stadium last night were not exactly those predicted in the pre-fight ballyhoo. Possibly there was as much interest in the “three-million dollar gate” as there was in the projected controversy between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn. But the gate was a flop, slightly less than two million dollars when the turnstiles stopped clicking. Though this was the second-highest haul in history, it will draw only sneers from Americans, who have no sympathy with second-best performances. Not a few cynical ladies and gents, who have recently been advised in national magazines of the stranglehold which Mike Jacobs holds on prizefighting, will no doubt derive a perverted pleasure from this financial fiasco. The sportswriters, in a sudden burst of honesty, have come as close as possible to biting the hand that feeds them. They have been hard put to find enough adjectives to describe the avariciousness of kindly old “uncle” Mike. A lot of folks get a hell of a kick out of the disappointment of greed, except when they are involved as principal parties in the drama. Of course there’s no possibility that Mike lost money on his show, but certainly his prestige was deflated just a little.

First congratulations should go to Louis, who has always been a great and fair fighter, and who suffered no loss of reputation last night. Second congratulations should go to the thousands of people who could have got into the stadium for a price, and stayed outside instead. And Billy Conn should get some kind of consolation prize for covering more space in eight rounds than any previous challenger or champion, even after deducting from the total distance the six feet which he covered in the final ten seconds.

Billy put up his best fight in the newspaper article which appeared under his name a couple days before he met Louis in the ring. He was full of Irish cockiness as he claimed right out that Louis was as good as a dead pigeon. Louis, of course, mentioned that Conn might be mistaken in this opinion, but not many people took Joe seriously. The idea was fast gaining ground that the champion was practically in his dotage. Conn himself seemed to be making a lot of this notion; he knew he couldn’t whip Louis by trading punches, but apparently he expected the Negro to drop from the sheer exhaustion of the chase. This strategy might have succeeded on a quarter mile track, with no time between rounds. But in the ring Billy kept running into the ropes and couldn’t dodge quite all of the punches that Joe threw at him.

As heavyweight brawls go, this one was a very genteel affair. Billy and Joe obviously remained good friends throughout. A couple of times Billy slipped on a corner and fell to the canvas. Joe simply stepped back and waited for him to regain his feet, being content to score his putout unassisted. Billy kept grinning every time Joe managed to get close enough to jolt him. Possibly he wanted to reassure his backers who expected him to keep out of range until Louis was staggering with weariness. “A mere tactical error,” he seemed to be saying. Then in the eighth round it was a mere tactical error which laid him flat on his back, and for once poor Billy couldn’t manage a grin.

I heard the fight in Seattle at the Servicemen’s’ Center. Approximately a hundred fellows were bunched around the big radio in the second-floor ballroom. Most of them were sailors, since the Fort Lawton authorities, apparently fearing a race riot, had imposed a fifteen percent quota of passes. That sounded to me like a typical example of brass-hat reasoning. The only riotous phenomenon which came to my attention was the laughter the fellows bestowed on the announcer’s description of Conn’s frantic race against time. The fellows got just as many laughs and were far more comfortable than the suckers who paid a hundred bucks for the privilege of shivering in a ringside seat at Yankee Stadium under the assumption that they were going to see a fight.

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Disillusionment in the Army and in America’s Literary Scene

[The following excerpt is sure to offend some, given my father’s caustic characterization of the typical men in America’s army. Even he recognizes his “sullenly superior attitude,” which would quickly earn him an “elitist” denunciation from many in today’s America. He uses “the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks” as a springboard into a rumination about the state of American literature, and his own desire to ultimately write novels that do more than cater to the popular taste.

I like this excerpt because it illustrates my father’s ambitions and idealism as a young man, but also his realism and self-doubts. Tangentially, and sadly, one comment also references two marginalized professions of post-war America: fundamentalist ministers and book critics.  One of those groups went on to thrive in the subsequent years, but not the one that my father would have hoped.]

May 6, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The first summer that I was in the Army I wrote a letter to President Hutchins of the University of Chicago suggesting, among other things, that the Army qualified as a mass school of democracy. When he answered, he said that the only thing he remembered learning in the Army was how to avoid details. He suggested politely that I was wrong as hell.

Three years later I know that he was right. Very few men, I believe, have been improved by their contact with the Army, democratically or otherwise, and a great many men have been worsened, at least temporarily.  I myself have retained only tattered shreds of my respect for “the common  man of democracy” whom I fancied I would meet in mass in the Army. Actually, of course, I was looking for one of those idealistic myths which sensitive undergraduates construct during their days on campus and in the classroom

This is no “common man of democracy” in actual fact, and the Army is an institution which will soon make the most starry-eyed dreamer aware of actual facts. Most of the men of the American Army are poorly-educated, loudmouthed, undisciplined, and excessively vulgar individuals. Many of the officers, I suspect, are fundamentally members of this same class, though social pressure and fear of punishment forces them to exhibit the mechanics, if not the spirit, of civilized behavior in public.

In one sense I have gained from the Army an important lesson in American democracy. The fact that it hasn’t been the type of lesson I expected to receive has not lessened its value. The danger for me, and fellows like me, is that the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks will persuade us that somehow America has cheated us, and our former zeal for social service will turn into a disillusioned resentment. The way of the expatriate is extremely seductive to those who pass through this disillusionment to the conviction that it is impossible in America to win mass appreciation for any serious artistic work. But one may pertinently question whether a work of art, particularly in literature, can be serious when it is deliberately divorced from its national and social origins. Those who write purely to entertain, which is apparently a not unworthy motive in a world of entertainment-hungry people, may write about a 17th century English prostitute or a 20th century American race horse or a fairy princess. So far as I can remember, the so-called “literature of escape” has never been unpopular, and today there is a phenomenal demand for it. A number of young ladies, in particular, has discovered that there is great profit and fame to be gained in the writing of sexy tales of romance. Their books seem to impress favorably almost everyone except the book critics. This situation suggests that book critics are members of an obsolete profession still blindly faithful to the literary standards of a forgotten age. They stand in a class with fundamentalist ministers and a few other stubborn individualists as forlorn standard-bearers for a culture which was imported in chunks from Europe, never properly assimilated by the masses, and almost completely ignored by the population at large in the years since the first World War.

The traditions of literature as an art based on the study of contemporary conditions and characters in society has not entirely died out. Occasionally a young writer still comes to maturity with an inescapable urge to give his own honest reaction to and interpretation of the life he has observed in his society. For every ten “Forever Ambers,” perhaps, there is one “Winesburg, Ohio.” For every simple magazine of honest opinion there are perhaps twenty to thirty movie, detective, confession, and comic magazines. These proportions are not statistically accurate, of course, but they indicate closely enough the state of literature in America today.

There’s plenty to be said for following the popular taste. Even a moderately skillful writer can make a fortune if he lets his work be dictated by the demands of vulgarity and sensationalism, and hires a smart press agent. He will find Hollywood eating out of his hand. The polite disdain of a few unimportant critics is a small price to pay for such rewards. He has even satisfied the predominant American moral code which classifies right action in terms of profit and success.

The fact that I have not yet been won over to this theory of literature probably proves that I’m not capable of applying it successfully anyway. My sullenly superior attitude is no doubt a shield of vanity with which I contrive usually to hide my own incompetence and laziness even from myself. Without denying either of these charges, however, I maintain that if I do eventually write novels and stories they will be in the tradition of Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Lewis. If I do have a literary bent that’s the direction in which it turns.

To get back to the Army, which was mysteriously lost somewhere near the beginning of this discussion, I have found it disillusioning in terms of certain of my college concepts, but enormously revelatory of the type of society which produces the men who actually make up the Army. I don’t flatter myself that I have made any original discoveries. The originality in my work will have to come in my application of recognized generalities to specific characters. One thing in particular which I hope to learn quickly is how to prevent myself from spending an evening in dressing up banalities for no one’s edification.

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Modern World Threats to Creativity and Culture

[This journal excerpt revisits the theme of individual creativity, which my father saw as being threatened by many of the conveniences and distractions of the “modern” world in 1942. After all, how could the average person be creative when they were so easily drawn into passive activities such as listening to the radio, watching movies, or driving their automobiles through the countryside? Plus, people’s association with culture was fast becoming one of paying to experience its expression by others, rather than one of contributing to culture themselves.

My father, of course, would eventually see television eclipse all other forms of passive entertainment, and lived long enough to witness the emerging role of the Internet as a huge time sink. One can make a case that the Internet cuts two ways — both as a vehicle for endless browsing and superficial exchanges, and as a platform on which individuals can create and disseminate creative works with an ease unparalleled in history. On balance, though, I think the warnings my father raised in 1942 are much more apparent, and dire, today.]

January 28, 1943 (Middlebury College)

A central point in the arguments for socialism is the increased leisure time that will redound to the working classes, which they will be able to use in “a new burst of cultural feeling,” as E.C. Lindeman puts it. More efficient organization and utilization of the means of production will make comparatively short that part of the day which each individual must spend in physical labor. In other words, we put the machine in the proper place, as our slave, or, at least, as a subordinate partner, and then use our leisure time to participate in a great revival of the arts.

Maybe. We might remember, however, that our leisure life is as completely mechanized as our working life, – the automobile, radio, motion picture machine, and mass production printing presses. So we wonder if our machines really can give us new leisure, to be used creatively, or do they simply force us to live at such a whirlwind pace that we shall never really have the time for a “new burst of cultural energy.” We get our culture in such fitful and varied snatches that each one of these snatches becomes practically meaningless to us. We cram our lives up with incidentals in which we ourselves have no creative part – listening to the radio, watching sports contests, going to the movies and the theatre, driving through the countryside.

All these activities are supposedly part of the “broader, fuller life” which our machines have made possible for us. I don’t agree. If anything, the life of the common man today is narrower, even than that of the pioneer on our Western frontier a century and a half ago. Then a man was forced to produce the essentials of his own life. Though this was admittedly hard labor, it furnished a wide range in which he might exercise his creative powers. Today we don’t build; we buy. Our vaunted division of labor has been carried so far that we learn to spend our days as assembly lines, performing the simplest single operation in the manufacture of a product which we shall probably never use ourselves. For this degradation into an automaton we learn to be satisfied with a wage with which we can buy the essentials of life, and perhaps have enough left over to buy a little culture. Is it any wonder that men who find their lives crammed into such a narrow orbit sometimes go on strike. Wages aren’t their primary objective, no matter what they are told. Way down in deep they have a yearning to be men. Of course they are fighting against the feeling of insecurity, but behind this feeling is the caged fury of wild creative beings who have grown up in a society that has made the cramping of their native powers a prerequisite of existence.

No malevolent “ruling class” has consciously willed this situation. We grow up learning to listen to the radio, to watch movies, to ride in automobiles. Most of us never have a chance to be born, in any creative sense. We become culturally lazy by learning to admire the cultural activities of a few outstandingly creative, or skilled, persons in our society, and worse than this, we learn to look upon this admiration as a privilege, by often being forced to pay for it. We become hero-worshippers, and forget that we ourselves might have become heroes.

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