Media, motives, and white hopes: The news media's construction of the era of Jack Johnson, 1908--1915

The controversial reign of African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson from 1908 until 1915 is acknowledged widely as a key issue in twentieth century American history. The ensuing media-generated search for a "great white hope" to defeat Johnson has been well documented in both scholarly and popular culture. Although this existing research has been thorough in many respects, for the most part these studies have been more descriptive than interpretive---few have been informed by clearly articulated critical stances or clearly stated epistemological and ontological positions.; This research seeks to expand upon the existing body of Jack Johnson research by offering an interpretive analysis of the manner in which the era's dominant white news media constructed Jack Johnson during this tumultuous period. To gain such insights, this study applies an amalgam of established critical methodologies that address the integral relationship between narrative and social action. As such, this study differs from previous research in that it does not view Jack Johnson as an agent of history; rather it portrays him as means of agency---an icon that the media opportunistically exploited to enact broader cultural motives. This research complements existing research by demonstrating the extent to which racism, the dominant motive underlying media coverage of Jack Johnson, was multifaceted and related to other vital cultural motives of the era. This study posits a racial dynamic animated not so much in terms of relations per se, but by strategies of assimilation and appropriation. These strategies, the dissertation argue, were vital reflectors of the era's broader need to construct imagined communities of consumption to support the demands of a nascent economic system shaped by industrial capitalism.; This study argues that to accomplish these broader social objectives, the media constructed the era of Jack Johnson not so much as a series of discrete stories, but as a larger narrative that created meaningful totalities out of what otherwise would have been viewed as scattered events. In these regards, this study posits a system of social and symbolic dynamics in which the media did not merely "frame" the story of Jack Johnson, the media was central in "enacting" dominant cultural motives by constructing a broader narrative framework to delineate social action. As such, this research provides insights not only into the historical text itself, but also into the instrumentality of the applied critical methodology.