| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs. Schmeling. By Lewis A. Erenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiv, 274 pp. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-0-19-531999-6.)
Lewis A. Erenberg's excellent book about the famed boxing bouts between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling offers an entertaining and enlightening account of race, international politics, and American society. The Louis-Schmeling fights of 1936 and 1938 encapsulated, in the writer David Margolick's words, "a world on the brink," investing the contests with significance far beyond the world of boxing.	1
Louis, an African American born in poverty in Alabama, took up boxing in Detroit during the Great Depression and eventually became the heavyweight champion in 1937. Erenberg offers insightful coverage of the way Louis and his handlers sought to deflect racial prejudice by carefully managing Louis's image, forbidding him, for example, to smile when he defeated a white boxer. Although Louis's private life did not match the public facade, the success of his team in cultivating a reputation for the boxer as polite and deferential—the opposite of former champion Jack Johnson, who had delighted in provoking white ire by challenging racial mores—allowed him to surmount the de facto bar on black participation in the heavyweight championship that had been set after Johnson's 1908 win.	. . .

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