The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler

First published: 1968

First produced: 1967, at the Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.

Type of plot: History

Time of work: 1912-1914

Locale: United States, Europe, Mexico, and Cuba

Principal Characters:

• Jack Jefferson, a black heavyweight champion
• Tick, his trainer
• Goldie, his manager
• Ellie Bachman, his lover
• Cap’n Dan, a former heavyweight champion
• Smitty, a famous reporter

The Play

The Great White Hope opens at the Ohio farm of Frank Brady, the former heavyweight champion who is now being hailed as the Great White Hope—the fighter who will regain the title from the mocking black champion Jack Jefferson. After Brady is convinced by his manager Fred, Cap’n Dan, and Smitty to “stick a fist out to teach a loudmouth nigger” a lesson, Jack’s manager, Goldie, agrees to hold the fight in Reno, Nevada, on July 4.

In a gymnasium in San Francisco, Jack shadowboxes and brags that he will destroy Brady, as he is watched by his trainer, Tick, and his white lover, Ellie Bachman, who will be the cause of his ensuing troubles. Although Goldie warns him about her, Jack refuses to hide their love, even after the reporters taunt them, and after Clara, who claims to be his common-law wife, attacks Ellie. At the Reno arena, Jack soundly defeats Brady and gains possession of his championship belt. At the end of this scene, Cap’n Dan explains that it is dangerous to have a black champion and vows to find another Great White Hope.

Scene 4 presents Jack’s triumphal return to Chicago, where he is greeted by his well-wishers, who beat drums and cheer him and Ellie. The gaiety is threatened, however, by the arrival of the Salvation Army, which protests the immoral activities at Jack’s Café de Champion. After Jack suavely prevents a potential riot, Mrs. Bachman enters with her lawyer, Donnelly, and demands to talk with Ellie, who refuses to see them. Donnelly warns Jack to send Ellie home, and the beating drums now begin to sound ominous.

Smitty, Donnelly, and Dixon, a shadowy federal agent, meet with Cameron, Chicago District Attorney, to discuss how to destroy Jack. When Ellie arrives, she is cross-examined about her sexual relationship with Jack. After she leaves, they agree to arrest Jack for transporting her across a state line for sexual purposes. Their plan is fulfilled at a small cabin in Wisconsin, where policemen break in to arrest Jack. Their forced entry represents the continuing intrusion of the establishment into the lovers’ lives, which can never be private, given Jack’s prominence and their interracial affair.

At the end of the first act, Jack arrives at his mother’s house in Chicago and sets in motion his plan to escape his three-year sentence by going to England. As he changes places with his look-alike Rudy Sims, a Detroit Bluejays baseball player, Clara is prevented from revealing the plan to the officials in the street.

Act 2 has Jack in exile, wandering throughout Europe in search of boxing matches but encountering instead poverty, bitterness, exploitation, and growing estrangement from Ellie. After he is forced to leave England when a group of morally outraged people prevent him from boxing, Jack goes to France, where he savagely beats Klossowski, an arrogant Polish heavyweight. As the crowd grows ugly at the sight of the slaughter, Ellie is in the dressing room being questioned by Smitty, who wants to undermine her life with Jack.

Scene 4 moves to the darkened New York office of promoter Pop Weaver, who, along with Fred and Cap’n Dan, watches a film of the Kid, the new Great White Hope. Dixon promises to reduce Jack’s sentence if he will agree to lose to the Kid. Like Cap’n Dan earlier, Dixon describes what it means to have a black champion who thwarts the establishment: “We cannot allow the image of this man to go on impressing and exciting these people.”

In Berlin, Jack declines further as he engages in a series of pathetic tests of strength with four drunken German officers, who treat him as a curiosity. Ellie tries to persuade Jack to accept an entertainment contract with a sleazy Hungarian showman, Ragosy. Although Jack mocks her efforts, he is forced by economic necessity to appear as Uncle Tom in an ill-fated performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Budapest. Ironically, Jack is reduced to playing a role that he has steadfastly avoided in his own life. The second act ends as Jack refuses Smitty’s offer to throw the projected bout with the Kid.

The third act presents the culmination of Jack’s tragedy, as disruption, defeat, and death dominate his life. At the funeral of his mother, a riot breaks out when police attempt to repress the black preacher Scipio’s separatist speech. After the Kid’s backers meet again at Pop Weaver’s office to discuss regaining the championship, Clara enters, clutching a bloodstained garment and crying for vengeance against Jack.

She receives her wish when Jack, reduced to training in an unused barn in Juarez, Mexico, finally tells Ellie that she must leave him. Distraught, she commits suicide by throwing herself down a well. The sight of her body compels Jack to accept the fixed bout with the Kid. The play ends in Havana with Jack, after punishing his opponent for a number of rounds, being “knocked out.” The triumphant Great White Hope, with the championship belt around his neck, is carried aloft by his supporters like “the lifelike wooden saints in Catholic processions.”

Dramatic Devices

The Great White Hope is a sprawling play of nineteen rapid scenes that occur in eight countries and over two continents. Despite the range and speed of the scenes and the large cast, Howard Sackler infuses Jeffersons’s tragic cycle of victory, exile, and defeat with unity through the use of parallel scenes, choral characters, and visual motifs such as the heavyweight championship belt.

Sackler employs parallelism effectively in the repetition of crowd scenes in which Jack is at first applauded and then attacked and forced to escape. In Paris, when Jack savagely beats Klossowski, the cheering crowd turns ugly, and Jack and Ellie are forced to flee. Similarly, in Budapest the crowd, initially favorable to his performance as Uncle Tom, hoots Jack off the stage. These unpredictable crowds represent public opinion, a many-headed beast controlled by the forces that defeat Jack.

Another unifying device is the appearance throughout the play of five choral figures who provide different perspectives on Jack’s complex personality. Cap’n Dan appears twice in a symmetrical fashion. After the third scene in act 1, when Jack beats Brady, Cap’n Dan vows to find a Great White Hope to defeat him, and at the end of the third scene in the last act he announces that everyone eagerly anticipates the Kid’s victory. Cap’n Dan’s prophecy joins with Clara’s choral condemnation of Jack at the end of the preceding scene to lead inevitably to the destiny enacted at the Oriente Racetrack in Havana.

Sackler also uses the unifying visual device of the championship belt, which is emblematic of the theme and conflict of the play. In the first scene, Brady poses with the belt, which he promises to prevent Jack from winning. At Jack’s victory celebration, however, Tick holds up the “gold belt in its plush-lined case.” Finally, after the Kid defeats Jack, he wears the belt draped around his neck as he is carried by the crowd. The belt has passed from Brady to Jack and then to the Kid; it has served, along with the repetition of parallel scenes, to create structural unity in a series of diverse and rapid scenes.

Critical Context

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and a Tony Award, The Great White Hope is an epic presentation of Jack Jefferson’s tragedy, based on the history of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion. Howard Sackler endows the play with tragic magnitude through the poetic use of the American vernacular tradition. As a poet, screenwriter, and director of William Shakespeare’s plays and T. S. Eliot’s verse dramas, Sackler is able to fuse poetry, history, and popular culture into a classical yet modern drama in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson.

Jack Jefferson, the center of this hybrid drama, is at war with society and within himself as a result of his refusal to accept the roles that white and black people wish to impose upon him. Jack plays these various roles with equal parts of bitter glee, malice, condescension, and sadness, but he ends crushed by these demands and his inability to forge a powerful identity. Jack’s tragedy is similar to that of the title characters in Sackler’s long one-act verse drama Uriel Acosta (pr. 1954) and Semmelweiss (pr. 1977). Acosta flees the Spanish Inquisition to live in the Amsterdam Jewish community, but he soon learns that his prophetic spirituality is at odds with its crass materialism. In Semmelweiss, which also has an epic structure, the nineteenth century physician Ignaz Semmelweiss discovers the principle of antisepsis, which can prevent the spread of germs in hospitals, but the narrow-minded establishment refuses to accept his ideas. Eventually, he is driven to suicide by their continued ridicule. Sackler builds the conflicts in these plays around historical characters who represent the tragic fate of outstanding individuals attacked by societies determined to crush them for their superiority.

The Great White Hope is also significant for its relationship to the turbulent political and social context of the late 1960’s, when the United States was engaged in the Vietnam War and African Americans continued their struggle for civil rights. Muhammad Ali, the black heavyweight champion who was stripped of his title for refusing to fight in the war, identified with Jack Jefferson’s plight, which also paralleled the situation of many young men who escaped the war by going into exile. Thus for literary, social, and political reasons, The Great White Hope represents a distinguished achievement in American drama.

Sources for Further Study

Gilman, Richard. Review in The New Republic 159 (October 26, 1968): 36-39.

Paulin, Diana R. Review of The Great White Hope. Theatre Journal 53 (October, 2001): 506-508.

Trousdale, Marion. “Ritual Theatre: The Great White Hope.” Western Humanities Review 23 (Autumn, 1969): 295-303.