The grotesque display of corruption and bigotry hosted on the White House grounds this past weekend was a reminder of the ways combat sports have been used throughout American history as a vehicle for propaganda. 

The politics of paid punching have not always been what they are today. In fact, as hard as it may be to imagine with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, there was a time when America’s president glommed onto the fight game and its surrounding machismo as a means to fight — rather than fuel — global fascism.

That’s the crux of a new History Channel documentary on iconic boxer Joe Louis called “The Clash of Nations,” which may come as a bit of a palate cleanser in the aftermath of Trump’s UFC event. The film documents the story of Louis, the Black American known as the “Brown Bomber” who garnered support from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his two bouts against German boxer Max Schmeling, whom Adolf Hitler and the Nazis saw as the epitome of Aryan dominance. It also chronicles the personal bond the two established years after their iconic fights. 

The two fights, held at Yankee Stadium, unfolded in as cinematic a fashion as one can imagine. Schmeling won the first via knockout, giving Hitler a propaganda victory so great that he mandated German theaters show footage of the fight. The loss also devastated many Americans, particularly Black Americans, who had viewed Louis as an avatar for democracy and a symbol of American dominance over Nazism. Louis’ son, Joe Louis Barrow Jr., is featured in the film and told me the loss and the feeling of utter failure that weighed on his father.

“This world, this country particularly, does not treat Black people the way they should,” Barrow said, observing that the U.S. experiences “peaks” and “valleys” in racial progress. “We’re now in a valley because people don’t respect the Black man the way they should, and that distinguishes Joe Louis, because everyone wanted a hero at the time to defeat the Germans.” 

The second fight was a different story. Louis knocked out Schmeling and beat him so badly that Nazi officials cut the radio feed of the fight immediately after Schmeling was counted out.

But Louis’ life after that fight underscores the political purposes to which combat sports and the attendant hypermasculine ethos have been put. While enjoying his stardom, the prize fighter joined the Army in 1942 in a noncombat role that had him deployed as a means to boost recruitment during World War II. 

Louis did this not out of blind loyalty to his country, but out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to help integrate the armed forces. This is emphasized by a quote from the film attributed to Louis, in which he admits the U.S. has its problems but none that Hitler can fix. 

“The fact that there’s a Black man, who endeared and loved this country as much as Joe Louis did, just reinforced that other Blacks throughout this country loved this country, even though they could not live the freedoms,” Barrow said. “The Ku Klux Klan was doing what they did, [Black people] were sharecroppers in the South, but he wanted to show America that the Black man loved his country as much as a white man loved this country.” 

On the heels of the White House UFC event, “Clash of Nations” shows us a prize fighter who opposed fascism, foreign and domestic, and used his stardom in the fight to dismantle it. That’s a stark difference from the UFC grunts who beat each other to a pulp on the White House lawn to amuse Trump and his illiberal associates.

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