Raphael Cohen climbed into the ring, through the gap between the taut ropes, one leg first, before snaking his torso through and then pulling his other foot in. His cornermen, Benny Carroll and Jimmy Halloran, who worked with him shoveling coal for the engines, held him by the shoulders, as cornermen do, and they would have steered him and kneaded his shoulders and rubbed his arms.
As he entered the ring for the first round and heard the roar of the men, his secret was surely apparent — this was Cohen’s first time in an actual boxing ring, and that moment of recognition can’t be blustered. Yes, he may have fought on street corners, and sparred and brawled in the hidden corners of the warship, but this was different. The ring was enormous. It dwarfed the space where he shoveled coal, where he had worked for precisely 614 days. And he had never stood before all these men like this, as they laughed and clapped and whistled.
He must have had the nervous panic and impatience of any first-time fighter. Boxers suffer stage fright just as actors do. Too hot, then too cold. Hands clammy in the foul-smelling 5-ounce boxing gloves borrowed from another ship. And the formal minutes before a fight, the deafening clamor of the jeers and the shouts, the panic one has to bluff and swagger through, they were new to him.
The light was dim, though the boxing ring was lit by the most advanced electric Navy deck lights of the day, 32 candlepower lamps. (A modern car headlight is 5,000 candlepower.) Diagonally across the ring, Cohen could see Jordan Johnson, a black man, calm and silent, an experienced fighter, waiting in his corner.
It was shortly after 9 p.m. on July 8, 1905. The captain of the USS Yankee, Edward Francis Qualtrough — 55, overweight, fond of liquor — looked down at his ship’s foredeck. He was entertaining a fellow skipper, and, watching from the bridge, he must have felt an irritating lack of control at what was happening on his own ship. In a makeshift boxing ring, a black man and a Jew, bare-chested in the Caribbean heat, were pummeling each other.
The fighters, both small and fast-moving men, sparred. Around them, the ship was crammed, virtually infested with spectators: Marines and sailors from every ship in the squadron languishing in the doldrums off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Six hundred men in uniform, standing, sitting, perched on the rigging and the rails, watching and laughing.
Edward Francis Qualtrough
A spectacle like this — a chaotic boxing fight taking over the ship — wouldn’t have occurred so overtly back when Qualtrough graduated the Naval Academy in 1871, 34 years earlier. But now, with Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency and his public passion for the manly art of boxing, captains were to encourage matches aboard their ships. They were called "smokers." Of course, the irony was that this smoker, between the Jewish sailor and the black sailor, conflicted with Roosevelt’s other passion, the mythology of Anglo-Saxon Teutonic America and its place in history.
It was also clear to Captain Qualtrough from 40 yards away that the black man was the far better fighter. His name was Jordan Johnson, a gunner’s mate from the USS Olympia, and as he stood in the dim but harsh artificial light and the heat of the tropical night, he displayed the chiseled physique of a Greek god, similar to those of the bronze nude statues that Qualtrough’s wife collected, back in Washington, D.C.
Johnson also would have been one of the only black men in sight, anywhere. All those jeering faces in the crowd, visible in the dimness, though the sun had just set — nearly all those faces belonged to white men. Black men had been shunted out of the Navy under Roosevelt. Those who remained worked in the mess halls or as obsequious servants for the officer cadre; they were made virtually invisible on the decks.
For Captain Qualtrough, too, this disappearance of the black men in the fleet was new, because when he first came aboard as an ensign in 1870, black sailors were common. But now, from his perch high on the bridge, Qualtrough could have heard the crowd of sailors under his command hissing at the bare-chested young black man in the ring.
During this period, a Jew and a black man boxing on a U.S. warship would have been seen by many as objects of ridicule — performing clowns, rather than gladiators.
As for the Jewish fighter, Raphael Cohen, he was a sailor on Qualtrough’s Yankee, though the captain never met him. Cohen worked shoveling coal in the boiler room for the engine, unskilled hard labor that didn’t bring much of a promise of a future, though it did build a distinctively muscular physique. Cohen’s torso was hairy and a pale white, but his face and arms were stained black with coal dust. In fact he and the men he worked with were known as “the black gang” aboard these coal-powered warships, and his face, dark against pale lips, must have looked like a grotesque attempt at blackface. During this period when the Navy was scrubbing itself of African-Americans, a Jew and a black man boxing on a U.S. warship, no matter how they fought, would have been seen by many of the men as objects of ridicule, perceived as performing clowns, rather than gladiators.
The Yankee was deployed to the Dominican Republic not in defense of American land or liberty, but rather on a new form of gunboat diplomacy enforced under the brash President Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s project: to take over the finances of a foreign country whose crime was that it owed money to a powerful American company. It launched a new era in American military intervention — an expedition for profit, not principle.
Indeed, Roosevelt’s influence is threaded through this story: Not only did he send the fleet on its mission, but he was also an impassioned champion of boxing in the military. And whether the idea originated with him or not, he presided over the systematic removal of black Americans from Navy life.
That boxing match between a young black sailor and a Jewish sailor aboard an American warship, and the death of one of the fighters, caused a scandal 110 years ago, threatening the careers of powerful men. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, citing lurid allegations that the bout was held “for the edification” of the officers, and that the fighter who died had pleaded that he was sick and was forced to box, even after he’d been hit so hard that an artery in his brain tore, flooding his brain with blood. It was testament to a mix of grit, glory, and stupidity. Or perhaps just obstinate greed by a crew of men hoping to win a cash prize.
And the victor, who had literally grown up in the Navy, a man who had spent nights in chains in harsh discipline, who’d been handed to the military by his parents when he was only 15 years old, he was soon ushered out of the service, abandoned and destitute in a civilian world he didn’t know.
The fight, and the fighters, are long forgotten now, but the records — the ship’s logs, transcripts of military inquests, the enlistment reports — illuminate a dramatic turning point in American ethnic and military history.
USS Yankee
Raphael Cohen was born in 1880, at 15 Suffolk St., a tenement building full of more than 50 Russian Jews who had been part of the beginning of the migration over from the old country. Tobias, Raphael’s father, had been in the first wave, arriving from Russia in 1866, via Germany, right after the Civil War, and became a successful tailor. The seven Cohen children all grew up in one of the most crowded neighborhoods on earth.
Journalist Jacob Riis, a social reformer of the era, explored the area in 1890 when Cohen was 10 years old, and in his book How the Other Half Lives Riis called the neighborhood “Jewtown.” He wrote that “the manner and dress of the people, their unmistakable physiognomy, betray their race.” “Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown,” he added, “as of its people the world over.” Riis captured the core of the American ghetto: “Life here means the hardest form of work almost from the cradle,” he wrote.
Of course it’s a place that survives now as imagined kitsch, evoked on the walls of Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse, and countless delis with their knishes and lox and herring. But even those foods meant something other than what they do now. “Pickles are favorite food in Jewtown,” wrote Riis. “They are filling, and keep the children from crying with hunger.” He recounts walking the streets at night, when a “dirty baby, in a single brief garment,” as he describes it, “tumbles off the lowest step, rolls over once, clutches my leg with unconscious grip, and goes to sleep on the flagstones, its curly head pillowed on my boot.”
It was a noisy neighborhood, and it evolved fast as Cohen grew up, just around the corner from the giant Beth Hamedrash Hagadol synagogue. A former Baptist church, it was transformed into a thing of the Old World by the immigrants from eastern Europe. The hulking building still stands, derelict now, after years of Hasidic prayer.
Down the street from Cohen’s building on Suffolk Street was Sach’s Café; the place was the unofficial headquarters for the radicals and atheists of the day. Emma Goldman, the fiery anarchist, held court, loud and fast in Russian and Yiddish.
Then, in 1898, when Cohen was 17, a patriotic fervor washed through the Lower East Side. Youngsters started dreaming of being soldiers. War with Spain was coming. The Hearst newspapers provided daily accounts of Spanish atrocities to the rest of America, and so did the Yiddish newspapers.
It was so over-the-top that the Commercial Advertiser in the spring of 1898 ran a story titled “Ghetto War Spirit,” with a subheading: “Jews Bear Spain an Old Grudge — Manila a Victory for Israel — ‘God Gave America the Job of Smashing Spain.’” Somehow the Spanish-American War, the reporter found, was now seen as a vehicle for vengeance against Spain for its atrocities of centuries past, for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand’s old war against the Jews, and the crimes of the Inquisition. America — through this war — was offering its new Jewish immigrants not just the chance to remake themselves, but the chance to seek vengeance against the old, cruel Europe that had treated them so disdainfully.
A tailor quoted in the article said, “They tortured the Jews and banished them from their land and now the God of Israel is getting even with them. It is an old story, more than four hundred years old, but the High One never forgets.”
Cohen's enlistment papers
It was in this environment that, in May 1898, Cohen's father accompanied Isidore, Raphael’s older brother, to the recruiting office. Because Isidore was a minor, a witness had to sign. The recruitment document shows that the witness was Moritz Tolk, a notary, and later an alderman, who operated out of his brother’s saloon down on Canal Street, where he helped sweatshop workers get their papers.
Isidore enlisted in Troop I of the 4th Cavalry, although it is impossible to see how he could ever have ridden a horse in his life. He was sent off to Kentucky for basic training and from there he joined his unit to steam to the Philippines. In the end, he was too late to fight the Spanish, who abandoned the troublesome colony to America shortly after the U.S. invaded.
Instead of vengeance for the Jews for the atrocities of the Inquisition, the 4th Cavalry just did battle with angry Filipino rebels. U.S. troops used the “water cure” — known today as waterboarding — to get the rebel captives to talk; they sometimes killed prisoners. But while his brother fought jungle warfare in Mindenao, Raphael, back in New York, just worked as a day laborer.
He got married in March 1903 to a girl from the neighborhood, a block away, named Sadie Shasam. The two didn’t live together for long. It’s unclear what went wrong, because the records on him go blank for some months, right after the marriage. But in September, he walked to the doors of the big Navy recruiting station down on 319 Market St. in Philadelphia. On his enlistment form, as he signed up for a four-year stint, Cohen wrote “single.”
The records show that he was given a cursory physical examination. Height 5 foot 4½ inches. Eyes brown and hair black. Weight 123 pounds. “Hirsute,” wrote the Navy surgeon who examined his hairy body, when Cohen was standing naked.
“Circumcised,” the doctor noted, too.
Bill Bragg for BuzzFeed News
Just as the noise from the crowd was overpowering, in that instant, after the bell rang, was when Cohen stopped hearing it. Cohen rushed in hard and fast, all intensity of a spider, not fine boxing but bullying. He tried to buffalo Johnson into a corner with a right swing and then a left.
A zbokh, they might have said in Cohen’s old neighborhood, on the alley near Grand Street, if he landed a punch, Yiddish for a hard hit. And then a zetz. Wild swings.
But Johnson slipped both punches with ease, sidestepping with the gentle ballet steps of a fighter, and his move left him wound up like a spring to unleash a powerful left hook to Cohen’s head. A klap, as they would have said.
A sudden hammer of pain. Cohen staggered, and Johnson moved in closer with a right, then a left, and Cohen toppled to the platform.
In the end, it would have been better if Cohen had stayed down.
The fight might have ended then, after the first few seconds. Cohen was down. The crowd hissed at Johnson, who headed to the neutral corner, leaning on the ropes, and they laughed at the little Jew lying there. The referee, George Pettingill from over at the USS Detroit, began the slow count as Cohen lay groggy.
As he lay there, knocked down that first round, the bright deck lights were above Cohen, set against the night Caribbean sky and the silhouette of the bridge and the 5-inch guns. Pettingill was silhouetted there too. And Pettingill counted loud and slow. “One!” he said. “Two!” “Three!” “Four!” Five! Six!” Cohen scrambled to his feet finally.
Pettingill waved the fighters together again. They fought hard to the end of the first round, but Johnson kept Cohen heading back, retreating, and retreating.
In the end, it would have been better if Cohen had stayed down. If he had, he might have lived.
