709Also, the fight was no slugfest. The New York Timesdubbed it
“one of the worst heavyweight championship contests” in box-
ing history. Reporters assumed that Baer failed to take the early
rounds seriously, lost others on foolish fouls, and realized too
late that he was behind. Baer, too, was no unfeeling monster. He
never teased Mae Braddock or gloated over killing two fighters
in the ring. He even raised money for the first boxer’s widow.
Most interesting is the movie’s error of omission, or, more pre-
cisely, of suppression. It makes no mention of the fact that Baer
proudly trumpeted his Jewish ancestry. Baer had a large Star of
David stitched onto his trunks, an image that appears in the
movie once, briefly and from a distance.
Why did director Howard evade the truth about Baer?
The likely answer is that Howard knew that fairy tales require
villains as well as heroes.Cinderella Man’s Braddock looms
larger for slaying the Big Bad Baer.
In fact, the real enemy was the Great Depression.
Braddock understood this. When asked how he managed to
turn his career around, he explained,“I was fighting for milk.”
Damon Runyon, the writer who first called Braddock
“Cinderella Man,” recognized that the boxer’s story took on
mythic proportions because it encapsulated the aspirations
of an entire nation.
But the movie misses the point that many ethnic groups
had their own boxing champions. After Braddock had upset
Griffin, he fought Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber. While the
movie rightly shows Irish Americans praying for Braddock, it
neglects the millions of African Americans who also gath-
ered around radios, praying for Louis. Jewish fans, similarly,
identified with Baer, cherishing his 1933 defeat of the
German boxer, Max Schmeling, Hitler’s favorite. When
Braddock defeated Baer, many Jews were devastated.
In 1936, the Chicago Defender, an African American
newspaper, wrote that history would be kind to Braddock.
“Years from today you will read that Jim Braddock was the
one champion who would not and did not draw the color
line,” it noted. But it concluded that Braddock did so for mer-
cenary reasons: “The facts are that Braddock needs money
and he more than anyone else knows that only with Joe
Louis in one corner can he draw a purse benefiting a cham-
pion’s appearance.” Three years later, when Louis defeated
Braddock to win the heavyweight title, the fight at Chicago’s
Comiskey Park attracted the largest mixed crowd of blacks
and whites in boxing history.
Madison Square Garden, keenly aware of the ethnic
appeal of boxing, worked hard to ensure that nearly every
major immigrant group had someone to cheer for on fight
night. Boxing promoters were among the first to learn that in
sports, as in entertainment more generally, segregation did
not pay.
Cinderella Mandepicts, with considerable accuracy, a
simple and good man’s triumph over adversity. His story was,
indeed, the stuff of myth. But in its earnest attempt to univer-
salize Braddock’s appeal, the movie obscures the ethnic divi-
sions that characterized so much of American life during the
first half of the twentieth century.Max Baer (left) and James J. Braddock eye each other during the heavyweight championship fight on
June 13, 1935. Note the “Star of David” on Baer’s trunks.Question for Discussion
■Do you think the Depression encouraged solidarity
among Americans of different races and ethnicities,
because everyone could empathize with each other’s
suffering? Or did it exacerbate tensions by pitting differ-
ent groups against each other in search of scarce jobs?