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The First One
The First One is set during the Progressive Era, at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a time of the rise of the common man, when political leaders and the burgeoning labor union movement were beginning to assert the rights of the white, working and middle-classes and curb the worst excesses of the Robber Barons and the Gilded Age. But it was also a time of uncommon contradictions: when African Americans were being expelled from the South, when violence against them was rising unchecked across the country, when they were steadily losing the gains and protections of Reconstruction.
It was a time-only thirty-five years after the deadly, fratricidal Civil War-when the United States had become the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world: when America’s startling material success seemed preordained, a mandate from heaven, confirmation of its exceptionalism, the rightness, the righteousness of it ways: when an influential Senator could openly declare that God “had marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world:” when mass immigration from northern Europe had ended, and the people of eastern and southern Europe, from Russia, Italy, Austria and Hungary, who had taken their place, were widely denounced as members of inferior, alien, mixed-blood races, remnants of effete, decaying civilizations. It was a time when the rights of women were severely restricted. When they couldn’t vote, however educated and accomplished, rarely worked outside the home, dated and married only men their parents had approved, and risked banishment and ostracization if they asserted even minimal independence.
The First One revolves around what is still probably the single most significant sporting or social event ever held in the United States: the so-called “Fight of the Century” between the new champion, Jack Johnson, the first black man to be crowned heavyweight champion of the world, and Jim Jeffries, the undefeated former champion, who had been lured out of retirement to regain the title for the white race. No single event, of any kind, before or since, has ever commanded the entire country with as much passion and intensity. And certainly, not until the assassination of Martin Luther King more than a half century later, would a single event provoke such widespread rioting and loss of life.
The novel recounts the story of that fight and the extraordinary events that surrounded it-including Johnson’s affairs, liaisons with and marriages to a long list of white women, the suicide of his first wife, and his trial and conviction of White Slavery-events that unleashed extraordinary passions throughout this country and much of the white world. The Jack Johnson story has been told many times, but never as vividly, as faithfully to historical accuracy, nor in the full context of the type of country America was at the time, nor with a full appreciation of the magnitude of the political and social challenge Johnson represented to the status quo.
Johnson’s victory in Australia in late 1908 provoked alarm and distress in much of white America. That very night, from his ringside seat at the Sydney Stadium, newspaper correspondent and popular novelist Jack London had dispatched the first, urgent appeal: “There was no fight. No Armenian slaughter could compare with the hopeless slaughter that took place in the Sydney Stadium today. But one thing now remains; Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson’s face. Jeff it’s up to you. The white man must be rescued.”
Dour, uncomfortable in the spotlight, already comfortably wealthy, and by far the most formidable of the “White Hopes” recruited to separate Johnson from his title, Jeffries initially made it clear that he had no interest in rescuing the white race. But provocative behavior by the black champion, offers of enormous sums of money, and appeals from newspaper editorials and the general public, soon made the pressure to return virtually irresistible. Explaining that he was responding “to that portion of the white race that has been looking to me to defend its athletic superiority,” Jeffries finally agreed to get back into the ring and restore the natural order of things.
Staged primarily in New York; Boston; Chicago;Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Reno, Nevada; and featuring a wide cast of characters, historical and fictional, The First One is not an attempt to tell the entire Jack Johnson story. Instead, it focuses on the years 1909 to 1913, the most momentous and tumultuous of his remarkable life.
