Joe Louis: Hard Times Man
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jar314
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoThrough the economic decay of the 1930s and 1940s, through Jim Crow racism, through the national frustration with the shelled husk of American life and a vague national ideal barricaded against the encroaching hoard of fascism, there was Joe Louis. Randy Roberts's impeccable new biography of Louis and his sport provides a necessary new account of Louis's role as connective tissue for the frayed ends of his age. In Roberts's hands, Louis is neither a poster boy nor a victim. Louis was a creature of the Great Depression. He fought because there was nothing else to do, no work to be had. He became competent because the numbers men who thrived in the 1930s on the backs of those who were hard up and feeling aimlessly for hope used their purse strings to convince a trainer to work with him. He was also a creature of boxing itself, its respectability forged by the likes of John L. Sullivan and the circumference of its possibilities for black fighters marked by the antics of and backlash against Jack Johnson. To that end, Louis was coached both within the ring and without to be a model citizen, to be the anti–Jack Johnson. Joe Louis was not a creation, however—a Frankenstein's monster that bent to the will of handlers only to become an icon by default. Louis was, by nature and intent, already the anti–Jack Johnson, crafted in that crucible of race, poverty, and masculinity that belied Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty (1995).
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