Bill Veeck (6 page)

After being abandoned, Bill delighted in admitting, he had noticed a horse grazing in a field nearby. The horse carried him to a farmhouse; waking the farmer, Bill used his telephone to call a cab company, which picked him up and drove him to the fraternity house. As for the money to pay for the cab, before he left his room Bill had folded a ten-dollar bill into a tiny wedge and concealed it in his tight, curly hair, where his fraternity brothers had never thought to look.
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In June, Bill made news of his own. A short Associated Press report, also noted in
The Sporting News
, informed the world that he was in the hospital after falling out of a dormitory window.
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Veeck had been standing on the ledge of a fourth-floor recreation room window surveying the females who were coming to attend a dance, with one hand firmly clutching a bottle of beer and the other holding on to the inside wall. A friend waved to him from across campus. “I waved back. Being in a somewhat befuddled state, I used the wrong hand, waved myself right off the ledge, and toppled like a sack of wheat to the ground. A sober man would probably have been killed.” Veeck got away with two broken legs.
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By 1932 the full force of the Great Depression had affected Major League Baseball; that year had been particularly bad. Foreclosures had become so routine and feared that in many locations local bands of citizens set up armed roadblocks to prevent outsiders from coming in and buying up farms and homes. By the end of the year, the unemployed numbered upward of 13 million, and one family out of every four was without a breadwinner. Perhaps as many as 2 million people, including family farmers turned into homeless migrants, were wandering the country in a random and futile quest for work.
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Americans were more likely to be in a breadline than a bleacher seat: overall attendance at major-league games had dropped from more than 10 million in 1930 to just under 7 million in 1932. In anticipation of even worse turnstile numbers, salaries were cut widely for the 1933 season, with Commissioner Landis taking a 40 percent pay cut, from $65,000 to $39,000. Ruth took a $23,000 salary cut; Gehrig, who was paid a lot less, lost $5,000; and some managers took 50 percent cuts.
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In early February, Fred Lieb of
The Sporting News
addressed the problems of baseball in a series syndicated to newspapers throughout the country. Lieb outlined a range of concerns, including the threat posed by the growing interest in golf as both a participation and spectator sport. He was legitimately concerned with the growing aloofness of players toward fans. Though the National League had ceased imposing fines on players who
spoke with the public during the season—a practice that had begun because of the fear that gamblers would get inside information—the American League held on to the ban on fraternization with fans; a White Sox player had even been fined $5 for talking to his father. Lieb felt this rule was deeply offensive to the fans.
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But nowhere did Lieb suggest that the color line was one of the game's problems.

On February 5, 1933, while Lieb's “What's Wrong with Baseball” series was running in newspapers, the grand ballroom of New York City's Commodore Hotel hosted more than 600 of the game's leaders—including Veeck senior and all the National League officials in town for their annual meeting—at the tenth annual New York Baseball Writers' Association of America dinner. It was a night of fun, frolic, and frivolity. Sportswriters took turns spoofing everyone from the guest of honor, retired New York Giants manager John McGraw, to the New York Yankees, who had won the World Series in October. In addition, the scribes performed their annual blackface minstrel show in front of the predominantly white crowd.
New York Times
sportswriter John Drebinger in his column the next day called the minstrel show the most entertaining part of the evening, but never mentioned its most dramatic moment. Heywood Broun, a talented and outspoken Scripps-Howard columnist who was syndicated in dozens of newspapers and admired by his fellow writers, offered a full-blown proposal for racially integrating baseball, arguing that the game's falling gate receipts could be reversed by dropping its invisible “color line.” Branding baseball's segregation as “silly,” Broun asked rhetorically: “Why, in the name of fair play and gate receipts, should professional baseball be so exclusive?”
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Invoking the name of a man who was one of the leading actors, singers, and activists of his time, Broun continued: “If Paul Robeson is good enough to play football for Rutgers and win a place on the mythical All-America eleven, I can't be convinced that no Negro is fit to be a utility outfielder for the Boston Red Sox. There were a number of superb Negro athletes on the American Olympic track team. Indeed, Eddie Tolan, the sprint champion, was almost a team in himself…. If Negroes are called upon to bear the brunt of competition when America meets the world in an international meet, it seems a little silly to say that they cannot participate in a game between the Chicago White Sox and the St. Louis Browns.”

Broun addressed head-on the concern that some players would object to racial integration, but then dismissed it by pointing out that ballplayers
objected to many things that still took place with a high degree of regularity, such as fines, supensions, and the widespread salary cuts being imposed for the upcoming season.
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Bill Gibson, a writer for the
Baltimore Afro-American
and one of a handful of writers from the Negro press at the dinner, found a number of people who expressed an open mind on the subject, including Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals, Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig, and John Heydler, president of the National League.
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Jimmy Powers, a reporter for the New York
Daily News
, was amazed at the sentiment in favor of Broun's proposal. In a column two days later entitled “Colored B.B. Players—OK,” he argued the point even more forcefully than Broun, pointing out that blacks were well integrated into college sports, including football, basketball, boxing at all levels, and track and field. “There are only three popular sports today in which the dark skinned athletes are snubbed—tennis, golf, and baseball.” Powers became, in the words of Lester Rodney of the Communist
Daily Worker
, “the most articulate and consistent supporter of the Negro stars since the campaign to end Jim Crow baseball began to catch hold.”
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A few weeks later, the popular Dan Parker, sports editor of the New York
Daily Mirror
, wrote a letter to the
Pittsburgh Courier
fully endorsing an end to the color bar, insisting that club owners who welcomed the patronage of black fans had no right to bar black athletes. “In my career as a sports writer,” Parker added, “I've never encountered a colored athlete who didn't conduct himself in a gentlemanly manner and who didn't have a better idea of sportsmanship than many of his white brethren. By all means, let the colored ballplayer start playing organized baseball.”
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The issue raised by Broun, Powers, and Parker dated back to the period immediately following the Civil War when baseball flourished among both blacks and whites, especially in northern cities, and most notably in Philadelphia, where the Pythians and other all-black professional teams regularly played against white squads.
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At the National Association of Base Ball Players national convention in Philadelphia in December 1867, a proposal was introduced from the floor to ban “persons of color” from playing both with and against whites. The proposal was in response to the
Pythians' petition for membership in the Pennsylvania Association of Amateur Base Ball Players, and it was passed by vote, with the Pythians and other blacks jeering from the balcony seats where they were required to sit.
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The ban held into 1871, when the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was created to replace the earlier group. The formal ban was replaced by an informal one under which several Negroes were allowed to play professional ball. At the end of the 1884 season, with the release of Fleet Walker, no person who was obviously black was allowed to play. In 1901 John McGraw, managing the Baltimore Orioles, signed a new second baseman, who, according to the
Cincinnati Inquirer
, was a full-blooded American Indian named Chief Tokohoma. In fact he was a Cincinnati Negro named Charley Grant, and the subterfuge fell apart when the team reached Chicago for an exhibition game against the White Sox. Many of Grant's friends recognized him and showed up at his hotel with a floral tribute and staged an impromptu parade in his honor. The White Sox, owned by Charles Comiskey and managed by Clark Griffith, refused to take the field against the Orioles, and Comiskey told the
Chicago Tribune
: “If McGraw really keeps this ‘Indian,' I will put a Chinaman on third base.”
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He was ignoring the irony that all racial minorities except American Indians were part of the unwritten rule, including Asians.
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Since 1885, when the first professional black team, the Cuban Giants, was formed as a product of racial segregation, the Negro leagues had become the solution for black baseball players. The first true Negro league, the Negro National League, was formed in 1920, with teams from the Midwest filling out its ranks. The Negro leagues were loosely organized; seasons varied from forty to ninety games, supplemented by barnstorming tours. The Negro leagues played annual All-Star Games beginning in 1933 and periodically (1924–27 and 1942–48) conducted their own World Series.

Bill Veeck Jr. inherited a sense of tolerance from his father.
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“I grew up in the ballpark. I liked to see good ball players, and I wasn't really interested in their color because there were some ball players, many ball players, as a matter of fact, in the Negro leagues that were certainly as good, or better than anybody that I would watch in the National League or in the American
League,” young Veeck would later say. He often told stories of watching the greats, including Josh Gibson, whom he watched drive balls deep into the center-field bleachers at Comiskey Park and of whom he would later say, “If they ever let him play in a small place like Ebbets Field or old Fenway Park, Josh Gibson would have forced baseball to rewrite the rules.”
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On February 20, 1933, Veeck senior accompanied the Cubs to spring training for the first time in many years and exuded a rare level of optimism about his pennant-winning team, which he saw as the perfect blend of “pitching, punch, and speed.”
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As the season began, Arch Ward of the
Chicago Tribune
proposed an idea to be incorporated into the Century of Progress Exposition, the great World's Fair that would open in Chicago at the end of May. He wanted to stage a baseball game made up of the best players of the two major leagues. To be called the All-Star Game, it would be run by the
Chicago Tribune
, with all profits going to a charity, the Association of Professional Base Ball Players of America, which helped old and dependent ballplayers. The idea was universally supported in the American League but ran into stiff opposition from four of the National League owners.

Ward, who was a close friend of Veeck's, watched with delight as Veeck got the owners to agree. Veeck's first line of resistance was Cubs heir Phil Wrigley himself, who saw the game as an intrusion on the excitement of the World Series but relented after Veeck pointed out how dependent the Cubs were on the goodwill of the
Tribune
. Deep resistance by the owners of the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Giants was overcome with an assist from the persuasive and popular Veeck. The last to relent were the Boston Braves, following an unconfirmed report that Ward threatened to publicly expose owner Emil Fuchs as having personally blocked the game. One of the objections posed by the National League owners was their fear that the contest would be dominated by the American League and by Babe Ruth in particular. The first contest was held on July 6, 1933, at Comiskey Park, the location determined over Wrigley Field by a coin flip. It attracted 49,000 paying fans and yielded a net profit of some $46,000 for the charity. The game was indeed won by the American League—as would be twelve of the next sixteen games—by a score of 4–2, with the aid of a two-run homer by the Babe in the third inning.
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Veeck senior was in New York City on August 22 for the Cubs-Giants
game, but it was rained out. Gotham scribes were “looking for a rainy day story,” which Veeck gave them. With an eye to Cubs attendance, which had shrunk by about 400,000 during the season, he proposed a series of mid-season games between American and National League teams as a means of stimulating interest in the game. He maintained that the game was in “critical condition” and that aggressive action had to be taken to revive interest before the 1934 season. “There is no use kidding ourselves any longer,” Veeck told Alan Gould of the Associated Press. “Only one big league club of 16 made money last year.” He pointed out that anyone who looked at the attendance figures from July 5 until the middle of August saw that the game was in the doldrums.
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Calling these weeks the game's “dog days,” Veeck urged their monotony be broken up with interleague games that counted in the standings. Veeck's plan was quite specific: thirty-two interleague games for each club, with four against each team of other league—two home and two away.
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