Bill Veeck (13 page)

The game's promoter was Abe Saperstein, the star attraction was Satchel Paige, and the event's cheerleader was Fay Young of the
Defender
, who saw it as much more than just another exhibition game, and even as a potential turning point in the racial composition of baseball. The
Defender
noted that Cubs management was going all out to make this game a “tremendous success,” and Saperstein employed all of his well-honed promotional skills.
¹⁵

Paige tossed the first six innings for the Monarchs, allowing only two singles and one run. Dean, by then a broadcaster and sometime barnstormer, pitched the first inning, retiring all three batters he faced. But the real story of the game had occurred before it started, as thousands of fans, black and white, had lined up peacefully for hours before game time to get a ticket. Scalpers got several times face value for mere general admission seats. The crowd was the largest the ballpark had seen for the season. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the White Sox played the Tigers in a doubleheader attended by 10,000 fewer fans. Dean, Paige, and the very popular
Bonura obliged fans after the game by signing hundreds of scorecards, programs, and scraps of paper.
¹⁶

Apart from its social implications, the other lesson of this game, certainly not lost on Veeck, was that such an event, if properly staged and properly promoted, could attract vast amounts of press attention. The Associated Press in Chicago filed more than a week in advance, and preview articles, as well as coverage of the game, appeared in dozens of papers, including the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, which normally paid scant attention to black-versus-white exhibitions, including earlier contests pitting Paige against Dean.
¹⁷
Dean and Paige repeated their show in Washington, D.C., on May 30, with Saperstein again promoting the event. It drew 22,000 fans, the biggest crowd ever to watch a non-major-league game in Griffith Stadium.
¹⁸

All of this aggravated Chicago-based Commissioner Landis, a longtime foe of interracial exhibitions, especially those contests in which the major leaguers lost. He was also irked by the fact that exhibitions such as this, which only tangentially provided relief funds for the military, were cutting into major-league contests devoted exclusively to Army and Navy relief. On June 4, Landis ordered the major and minor leagues not to allow the use of their players or facilities for such commercial events and convinced the Army and Navy not to let players in uniform participate.

On June 25, with Paige on loan to the legendary Homestead Grays, Saperstein staged still another event in Washington, drawing about 30,000. The Grays won 2–1 in eleven innings over Dean's team. Landis then banned all future games between the Dean All-Stars and any Negro league team. The game between Paige's and Dean's All-Stars scheduled for July 4 in Indianapolis was cancelled.

Fay Young understood Landis's scrutiny of games played for charity but was livid when the commissioner ruled against Dean and Paige, claiming only one conclusion was possible: “Landis is against Negro ball clubs playing white major league players.” Young pointed out that Negro organized baseball had but one park—that of the Memphis Red Sox—and all the other venues were rented from white magnates: “since Judge Landis rules the white ball yard owners, we will have to dance by his music or else.”
¹⁹
Landis remained determinedly silent. In early July, Ric Roberts, the Washington correspondent for the
Baltimore Afro-American
, wrote that “Landis answers his thousands of hecklers, most of them white, who seek to put colored boys in the white major leagues, with a military tinctured—‘No comment!'”
²⁰

Fay Young reported a rumor that after a heated meeting of baseball executives on the eve of the July 7 All-Star Game, in which the subject of Negro ball players had been raised, the transcription had been ordered destroyed.
²¹
A few days later Hy Turkin of the New York
Daily News
, then the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, added fuel to the debate by reviving a charge from the ever outspoken Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to the effect that Landis and the owners were blocking the signing of Negroes, and that he would sign them if this were not the case. Durocher's comment had appeared in the Communist
Daily Worker
in 1939, but to little effect at the time. Now Turkin brought it front and center: “A casual remark made by Leo Durocher to Lester Rodney, Sports Editor of the
Daily Worker
, now in the Army, may do more for his place in history than all his shortstopping and managing histrionics. He said that he would hire Black players and this is like the tail of the tornado that has overwhelmed Judge Landis with two million signatures and threatens the democratization of our national pastime.”
²²

Landis was furious with Durocher and summoned him to Chicago for a closed-door chewing out. He issued a statement on July 17 to the
New York Herald Tribune
that Durocher had recanted his remarks and no such blocking rule existed, “formal or informal, or any understanding, unwritten, subterranean, or sub-anything.”
²³

On July 24, J. L. Wilkinson, co-owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, met with Satchel Paige in Chicago and told him the Monarchs would not stand in the way of his joining a major-league team. This Wilkinson-Paige meeting came on the eve of a Wrigley Field doubleheader between the Monarchs and the Memphis Red Sox, which was being promoted as “Satchel Paige Day.” As the loudspeakers announced the appearance of Paige on the field, Landis read a prepared statement asserting that “negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been during the 21 years I have been commissioner…. A manager can have one or 25 negroes if he cares to.”
²⁴

A few days later, Wilkinson asserted that at least twenty-five Negro players were of major-league caliber, led by Paige and Josh Gibson, the latter a catcher for the Homestead Grays who, with his 40 to 70 home runs a season and lifetime batting average of .349, was poised to step into Babe Ruth's shoes. Wilkinson also made public that he had given Paige his blessing to break his Monarchs contract if he could thereby go to the majors.
²⁵

Negro newspapers were not convinced by Landis's pronouncement. “The
statement of Landis is about as empty as the promise of any major league manager to sign a negro ballplayer,” Fay Young shot back in an editorial entitled “Judge Landis Decision—Bosh!” “The owners would remove the manager.” Young charged that no team had the “nerve or guts” to take Landis at his word and sign a Negro.
²⁶

In response to the Landis declaration, the
Pittsburgh Courier
contacted the owners and managers of sixteen teams to get their opinions on the ban. Only six replied, and of those, two responded with no opinion; three agreed with Landis but offered no ideas as to how to integrate the game; and one, Clark Griffith of the Washington Senators, suggested that the Negro leagues be developed to the point where they would play the existing teams in a black-versus-white World Championship, thus giving the Negro league teams a chance “to really prove their caliber.”
²⁷

Soon after this survey,
The Sporting News
ran an editorial outlining a number of reasons why integration would not work, including “racial overtones,” both between players and between fans and players, that would be “damaging to the game.” Taking a clear shot at the editors of the
Courier
, the
Defender
, and the other half dozen Negro newspapers that were participating to various degrees in the campaign, the editorial ended with the point that Negro agitators pressing for the integration of organized baseball had the interest of neither the sport nor the race at heart.
²⁸

At the end of July, William Benswanger, president of the Pittsburgh Pirates, offered to give tryouts to Negro ballplayers, admitting to the
Pittsburgh Courier
that he had no idea who would show up for the tryout. A well-meaning racial moderate, he said at the time: “Colored men are American citizens with American rights. I know there are many problems connected with the question, but after all, somebody has to make the first move.”
²⁹

Three players took Benswanger up on his offer: Dave Barnhill of the New York Cubans and Sam Hughes and Roy Campanella of the Baltimore Elite Giants. Campanella later recalled the invitation he got from Pittsburgh: “It began with the attempts made by the
Daily Worker
to get me a tryout but [the offer] contained so many buts that I was discouraged before I had finished reading the letter. ‘You must understand that you would have to start at the very bottom … you must come up through our minor league farm system in the conventional manner … it might take you years to reach the major leagues … the pay would be small … there is no guarantee that you would
ever make it … your years of hard work might be for nothing …' The letter was signed by William Benswanger, president of the club. I didn't let my feelings stop me from replying to the letter. The prospect of playing in the big leagues, no matter how remote, was too wonderful to let slip by without making a try for it. I answered promptly. I wrote that I'd be only too glad to start in the minors and work my way up. All I wanted was a chance.”
³⁰

Campanella waited and waited but never heard another word from Benswanger, who later claimed that unspecified “pressures had prevented the tryouts.”
³¹

With Campanella and the others still in limbo, Benswanger again announced that the Pirates were ready to sign a Negro to play to the team. Several members of the
Courier
staff suggested that Benswanger take his pick of the players on the local Negro league Homestead Grays, who, along with the Kansas City Monarchs, were black baseball's most established franchises and held contracts for catcher Josh Gibson and first baseman Buck Leonard. For the second time, however, tryouts were never held.

Many years later—on the eve of Jackie Robinson's induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame—Benswanger told Harry Keck, one of the
Courier
reporters at the 1942 meeting, that among the reasons for the trials being cancelled were that Cumberland Posey, the owner and general manager of the Grays, had begged him not to go after his players, because if the stars were taken from the Negro leagues, then it would spell the end of “big time Negro baseball.”
³²

What made Posey's plea especially meaningful to Benswanger was that the Grays played often at Forbes Field, owned by the Pirates. They also had a second home in Washington, D.C., at Griffith Stadium. The large revenues from stadium rentals and concessions that accrued to many owners were a major factor in keeping the color bar in place—they would be lost if the Negro leagues were drained of stars and eventually folded. Yankee Stadium and Griffith Stadium were known to net more than $100,000 a season renting to Negro teams. When the Yankees were on the road, the New York Black Yankees took over the stadium, and when the Senators left town, the Homestead Grays rolled in. Larry MacPhail in Brooklyn made no bones about the fact that this cash payoff—many times Joe DiMaggio's salary—was paramount in his reasoning. “If I wanted to do it,” he said of hiring a Negro, “I'd just do it. Who the hell would stop me.”
³³

Now that Wrigley Field had opened its gates to the black teams, Phil Wrigley was also among those profiting from baseball's apartheid. During
the remainder of the 1942 season Wrigley hosted five more Negro league events, culminating on September 27 when Paige took the mound for the Monarchs against the Homestead Grays in a Negro World Series game.
³⁴

Well apprised of all the arguments regarding integration following the major league World Series in 1942, Veeck made his move to buy the Philadelphia Phillies. His funding was to be from unnamed sources in Chicago, Philly Cigars—“a natural in Philadelphia”—and other backers in Philadelphia. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), an industrial trade union that would later merge with the American Federation of Labor to become the AFL-CIO in 1955, agreed to help, but as Veeck revealed later, it wanted him to agree that at no time would there be nine whites or nine blacks on the field. “I said I wouldn't tell the manager how to run his club and I certainly wasn't going to let them.” But he did accept its backing, although he never publicly revealed the name of his contact within the union.

Having made, he thought, a deal with the Phillies' owner, Gerry Nugent, Veeck headed back to Chicago to make sure his financing was still in place. He made a quick call to his sister, Peg, to let her in on his plan.
³⁵
Then, as he was about to go back to Philadelphia, he ran into John Carmichael, a sports columnist for the
Chicago Daily News
and an old friend.

Carmichael asked Veeck, who was carrying a suitcase, “Where you going?”

“I'm going to Philadelphia.”

“What're you going to do in Philadelphia?”

“I'm going to buy the Phillies. And do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put a whole black team on the field.”
³⁶

In the hours before the train departed, Veeck decided to alert Commissioner Landis of his intentions. With Saperstein looking on, “we told Judge Landis we wanted to field an entire team of Negroes,” Veeck later told Shirley Povich of the
Washington Post
, pointing out that such a move wouldn't have offended anybody. “It wouldn't be integration and it was in line with the old Supreme Court ruling of separate but equal facilities.” He figured Landis would not dare say black players were unwelcome, not while blacks were fighting in World War II.
³⁷
Though details of that meeting were never recounted by anyone there, the meeting was no doubt cordial, given Veeck's father's friendship with Landis and their own long association.
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