Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Representative Peter King (R-NY) have joined documentary filmmaker Ken Burns in a bid to obtain a posthumous pardon for the late Jack Johnson (1878-1946). Previous efforts to pardon Johnson, who was convicted of violating the Mann Act, have been unsuccessful, including a bill which stalled in the last session of Congress. In all likelihood, Johnson, a native of Galveston, Texas, who later became a Chicago resident, will be pardoned by President Obama in the near future. Political correctness is likely to prevail since grandiose empty gestures cost nothing.

A distant relative claimed that Johnson’s arrest and conviction was “racially motivated.” Possibly, but, to be truthful, strong arguments can be made on both sides of the question as to whether or not Johnson was properly convicted on morals charges. If Johnson did not violate the actual letter of the law, he certainly violated its spirit repeatedly as he openly consorted with prostitutes and, in one insistence, bankrolled a former madam, who had been one of his personal favorites, when she was seeking start up capital to open her own fully furnished brothel.

Johnson could not have chosen a worst time, however, to openly flaunt his insatiable sexual appetite by flagrantly conducting orgies at resorts across the land. Progressive era reformers were preparing to reinvent American society and to civilize the City of Chicago at the exact same time that Johnson was carousing and celebrating his heavyweight title victory over Jim Jefferies. The times were changing, but Johnson was not paying attention. He was too busy laughing at his Southern detractors who had threatened to lynch him if he returned to Dixie.

Johnson moved to Chicago and opened a night club while a far reaching study of wide scale commercialized vice operations in the city’s infamous Levee district was being undertaken by reformers who were determined to eradicate the white slave trade and shut down the red light district. A delegation of civic minded citizens and ministers visited City Hall to present Mayor Fred Busse with a copy of their final book length report, which was deemed by postal authorities to be too objectionable to be mailed. Busse thanked the commission members for their efforts and filed the report away. When his departing visitors asked the mayor to join them in an impromptu prayer meeting, “Fat Fred” politely declined the invitation, but promised to offer up his own humble prayers at a later time in private. Busse reluctantly decided against standing for reelection and his immediate successor, Carter Harrison, Jr., finally ordered the police to close the Everleigh Club, the Levee’s most opulent and widely advertised brothel. Public opinion had caused Harrison to abandon his earlier toleration of a segregated vice district operating in the First Ward under the protection of Aldermen “Bathhouse John“ Coughlin and “Hinky Dink“ Kenna. Johnson failed to take notice and continued his shameless roistering.

On the national level, a respected Chicago Republican was prepared to enlist federal law enforcement officials in the anti-vice crusade. The Mann Act derived its name from its principal sponsor, Representative James R. Mann. The new legislation authorized federal prosecutions of persons engaging in transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. Congress held that its authority to regulate interstate commerce could be utilized to impede the white slave trade (the recruitment of young women who were abducted, raped and made to serve as prostitutes).

Against this religious revival backdrop, Johnson continued to strut his stuff. He did not merely offend his critics, but actually delighted in shocking them with his outrageous behavior. In an era when miscegenation laws were still the norm, Johnson scandalized the public by marrying not one, but two white women in rapid succession (all three of Johnson‘s recorded marriages were to whites). His first wife was Etta Terry Duryea, who had divorced her original husband, a pioneering automobile manufacturer, before taking up with the boxer. The newlyweds’ turbulent relationship ended quickly as Etta committed suicide by shooting herself. It was alleged that Johnson was a guilty of domestic violence and that his repeated infidelities caused his wife’s suicidal depression. Johnson remarried shortly afterwards. His second wife, Lucille Cameron, was a former prostitute. Johnson was charged with abducting Cameron, but this prosecution failed when she refused to testify against him.

Despised by white supremacists, who succeeded in banning the interstate distribution of boxing films which depicted Johnson beating a series of white opponents, the clever pugilist left himself open to a strong counterpunch which was delivered by the latter day Puritans. Following his abduction trial acquittal, Johnson traveled the country accompanied by his new bride and another prostitute, Belle Schreiber. This tour spurred federal prosecutors back into action and Johnson was charged with transporting Schreiber from Pittsburgh to Chicago for immoral purposes. Following a trial and the entry of a guilty verdict on seven separate counts, Johnson fled the United States for Canada and from there embarked upon a voyage to France rather than face a certain prison sentence in America. The outbreak of World War One interrupted the party on the Seine and Johnson left Paris as a man without a country.

After sojourning as a stranger in a various strange lands, the financially strapped Johnson agreed to defend his title against a challenger from Kansas. The heavyweight championship fight between Johnson and Jess Willard, “the Pottawatomie Giant,” took place on April 5, 1915 before a capacity crowd at a Havana, Cuba racetrack. It was a brutally hot day with the temperature exceeding one hundred degrees. Willard was one of the tallest men to ever compete as a heavyweight, standing six feet and six inches in height. For once, Johnson’s usually superior height and reach were not an advantage. Willard defeated Johnson by knocking him out in the twenty-sixth round. Photographs showed a dazed Johnson laying prone on the canvass shielding his eyes from the blazing sun with an outstretched, gloved hand. Although Johnson continued to box, he never reclaimed the heavyweight title.

Eventually, Johnson tired of his exile and surrendered himself to American authorities in 1920, five years after his fight with Willard. He served not quite a full year in Leavenworth for his prior conviction. Upon his release, Johnson returned to Chicago. He even dabbled in politics by acting as a Democratic ward committeeman for awhile, but his timing was bad. The Democrats controlled the First Ward, but the Second and Third Wards were still solidly Republican enclaves as black voters still supported the party of Lincoln by overwhelming margins.

Reduced to supporting himself by working the carnival circuit, Johnson maintained to anyone who still cared enough to listen that he had deliberately thrown the championship bout with Willard in order to square himself with racist legal authorities, but he had been double crossed. A close examination of the film of the title match belies this myth. Willard outlasted his older opponent, who was somewhat out of condition. According to Mitch Levin, a noted boxing aficionado and lecturer, who owns film footage of the Willard versus Johnson fight, “He [Johnson] could never bring himself to admit that he lost that fight.” Boxing rules differed somewhat in that era and Johnson utilized his long reach to keep opponents at arms length. He would frequently hold his opponents and push them away until they grew tired in the later rounds. Then Johnson would move in for the kill. Against Willard, however, Johnson’s usual height advantage was neutralized and the strategy failed.

The title fight was decided by a knockout after twenty-six punishing rounds. Johnson managed to stay with Willard until the 20th round when he began to tire. When questioned about Johnson’s later claims that the fight was fixed, Jess Willard finally responded, “If he was going to throw the fight, I wish he’d done it sooner. It was hotter than hell out there.” Most objective experts who have examined the fight film agree that Willard won the title fair and square. Johnson was too great of an egotist to admit otherwise. Nevertheless, Johnson’s alibi gained great currency as an urban legend. The tale was printed in such publications as “The Chicago Defender.”

This mythology was furthered by a successful drama that was loosely based upon the life of Jack Johnson. James Earl Jones played “Jack Jefferson,” on stage and in the subsequent motion picture production of “The Great White Hope.” Subsequently, many people confused fiction with reality. In Hollywood, Jones received a nomination for Best Actor for his movie performance.

The award winning play took great liberties with the facts and sanitized many of the less admirable aspects of Johnson’s debauched character. Unlike the belligerent Johnson, “Jefferson” is a somewhat sympathetic figure who is exploited by the white power establishment and society at large. In reality, Johnson’s constant legal problems caused his popular standing to eventually suffer even within the black community (the film alludes to this in a brief scene in which a tramp openly mocks Jefferson). Similarly, the script minimized Johnson’s womanizing and multiple marriages. Only one woman figures prominently in the play, “Eleanor,” a composite character who represents Johnson’s first two wives, Etta and Lucille, while omitting to mention any of his numerous whores. Produced at the height of the civil rights era, “The Great White Hope” is a romanticized liberal indictment of state sanctioned discrimination on the basis of race. Jefferson is a flawed protagonist, not unlike Shakespeare’s Othello, a man who loved not wisely, but too well.

It would be a much simpler to pardon the fictitious “Jefferson” rather than the odious real life Johnson. I suspect, however, that Johnson will be pardoned on the basis that more people are familiar with the empty Hollywood myth as opposed to the uglier historical reality.

Johnson, who loved fast women and faster cars, was often cited for reckless driving and speeding. He died in an automobile accident in 1946. Supposedly, Johnson was enraged after being refused service at a segregated lunch counter in North Carolina. He drove off in a fury and crashed his own car. Once again, Johnson was not at fault for his own actions. The racists at the diner were responsible for his death.

This week, the Associated Press managed to repeat the canard that Johnson was buried in an unmarked, pauper’s grave. In actuality, there is a large monument at the former champion’s grave site in the historic Graceland Cemetery. Unlike Roland Burris, Johnson’s family chose to keep it simple: the inscription simply provides Johnson’s surname without a complete curriculum vita. Johnson’s final resting place is near those of many noteworthy Chicagoans, including members of the Armour, Harrison, Medill, Palmer and Fields families. Two of Johnson‘s three wives, the tragic Etta Terry Duryea and, his final wife, Irene Pineau, are buried next to him. Mayor Busse and another heavyweight champion, Bob Fitzsimmons, are both buried in the same cemetery. Following the death of James R. Mann in 1922, Hegewisch Park on 130th Street  was renamed to honor this former Chicago alderman and member of congress.  Mann is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

Johnson’s egregious misconduct and the intense hatred that he inspired in his bigoted enemies caused Tony Gilmore, the author of a well regarded biography of the boxer, to use an offensive racial epithet as the title of his book. Joe Louis, the next black heavyweight champion, and his managers took great pains to avoid many of the pitfalls that plagued Johnson’s career and limited his earning potential. If Louis had occasional temper tantrums about societal injustice, he was careful not to be seen arguing about such issues in public places. Unlike Johnson, the Chicago City Council chose to recognize Louis by naming him as the honorary mayor of the city.  The Cook County Forest Preserve District renamed the former “Pipe o’ Peace” golf course to honor “Joe Louis, the Champ.” Appropriately enough, it was a course that “the Brown Bomber” had played frequently. In Detroit, a municipal sports arena is also named for Louis.

Johnson’s apologists claim that his prosecution and conviction were entirely improper and “racially motivated.” Perhaps, but by the same token defenders of “Alphonse Caponi” could argue that his prosecution and sentencing on income tax evasion charges occurred due to ethnic prejudice against  Italians, generally, and Neapolitans, specifically, by the White Anglo Saxon Protestants working in the US Department of Justice. Capone also complained that the Treasury Department had framed him on tax charges and that other lesser criminals and politicians had been permitted to pay their back taxes and fines with only light prison sentences being imposed.

Cry me a river.

Interested parties may want to bid upon the former Capone family residence. Is $450,000.00 to steep a price to ask in today’s depressed real estate market?

Daniel J. Kelley is a regular contributor to “The Chicago Daily Observer.”