Cinderella Man and the White Washing of the American Experience

Harry Voiler’s Film and Ron Howard’s Lost Star

By Hymen P. Judah

      Everyone loves a good myth.   Adam and Eve.  Cain and Abel.     Noah’s Ark.  Tinker belle.  

     In 1951 there appeared as part of the Kefauver investigation into organized crime in America a panel of witnesses that included Harry Voiler.   For anyone who has seen the Ron Howard film Cinderella Man in which Russell Crowe, Renee Zellwiger and Paul Giamatti, son of a President of Yale University, lay out the story of a contender against World Champion boxer, Max Baer, it should come as no surprise that Hollywood sanitized the story just a bit.  Well, a lot.

     James J. Braddock’s fight with Baer was filmed and copyrighted by Harry O. Voiler on June 13^th, 1935.   Left on Ron Howard’s cutting room floor was Baer’s signature boxing trunks with the Star of David on the left front panel.   Baer had worn the Star of David in his victory against Max Schmeling  in Germany in 1933.   Just as  Baer was beating a Nazi and enraging the Germanic race to run headlong into war and holocaust, so Baer would cross the Atlantic to join in the fray that was flailing in the U.S..   The “Business Plot” that was uncovered by General Smedley Darlington Butler was attempting to throw FDR out of office by a coup led by Butler.  Among the Fascist Americans were some of corporate America’s leading industrialists.   The timing on Baer’s arrival to take on the Irish Catholic, Braddock,  could not have been more serendipitous….well, unless the fighter had been Jesse Owens.   Baer and Braddock included two of the most despised and hated of America's citizens, Jews and Catholics.    Germanic and Anglo races found Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's senior officials had tried to forge a cross-Channel and a Cross-Atlantic alliance with a late night flight only a few years later to the estate of Lord Hamilton in Scotland.  The attempt failed.

     By the time the Kefauver investigation had pulled Harry Voiler before the hearings as a witness to reveal his lengthy history of corruption and murder, it was apparent that anything was possible with respect to the Braddock fight, the Schmelling loss in Germany and Baers’ defeat at Madison Square Garden wearing the Star of David on his shorts.
 
   According to professional prize fight historian, Carl "Big Ears" McGerk, the Ron Howard film was a missed opportunity to educate Americans about the power of race and ethnicity as a lightning rod for total  mindless anarchy.

     "Ron Howard did not feel that this part of the story was important and Giamatti’s father  was apparently not around to educate them.  Being from Yale, it would not have been wise to do so even if he could in as much as many of the "Business Plotter's" children were at his school in the 1930's and 40's and today have strong, but very cautiously expressed leanings toward the values of Rudolf Hess.  That Joseph P. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, sided with Hitler and Hess against the British does much to mystify this confusing cabaret of cross purposes essential to the fight promoter's bottom line.   Had Joe's son continued to embrace his father's passions, God rest his soul, he might still be alive today.   If he hadn't screwed himself to death or taken a bullet from Jackie, but Jesse Owens and MLK would have been quite angry with him.  That the Irish were arriving in Boston in the early 18th Century by the droves to fight for many of the U.S. power elites who paid them to fight for them in the Civil War, is reflective of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush whose theme song could easily have been Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Favorite Son."  At least Braddock took a pounding with Baer and had the bruises to prove it," said McGerk.  "But still I wish that the little brat, Opie, had left Baer's Star of David in this nice little fairy tale.   It helps to show us just how close we were and still are to total and irreversible annihilation of the earth now that we have nukes and other crap in so many corners."