Last Team Standing (4 page)

N
EARLY THREE YEARS EARLIER
, on October 29, 1940, on a stage in a crowded auditorium in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was blindfolded with a piece of cloth taken from a chair in Independence Hall. On a simple wooden table in front of Stimson sat an enormous glass bowl filled with 9,000 inch-long, cobalt-blue capsules. Inside each capsule was a tiny piece of paper with a number from one to 9,000 written on it. Stimson sunk his hand into the bowl, slowly withdrew a single capsule, and handed it to President Franklin Roosevelt.

The president, standing behind a large podium, broke open the capsule and removed the piece of paper. He leaned into the forest of microphones carrying the ceremony into anxious living rooms across the country and solemnly intoned, “1-5-8.”

America's first peacetime draft was under way.

The historian George Q. Flynn writes, “The idea that all able-bodied men owe an obligation of military defense can be traced to the dark caves of prehistory.” But it wasn't until the French Revolution that conscription was formally codified, the French National Assembly declaring, “Every citizen must be a soldier and every soldier a citizen or we shall never have a constitution.” After
Napoléon I employed draftees to great effect, Britain and Germany adopted conscription as well.

The United States, though, had always viewed conscription with suspicion. Not until the Civil War did Congress authorize a nationwide draft, compelling males aged 20 to 45 to serve in the Union Army. The results were less than spectacular. The law permitted draftees to pay for substitutes, enabling the wealthy simply to buy their way out of service. The draft was so unpopular that in 1863 it triggered riots in New York City that claimed at least 20 lives. (The Confederacy implemented a national draft that was nearly as unpopular, if only because it utterly disregarded the principle of states' rights.) A draft put in place for World War I lasted less than two years and was abolished immediately after the armistice.

But with another global conflict looming, Franklin Roosevelt urged a return to compulsory military service. Not only was the army too small—it comprised fewer than 188,000 soldiers when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939—it was also woefully out of shape. After reviewing troops at Ogdensburg, New York, in August 1940, Roosevelt confided to a friend, “The men themselves were soft—fifteen miles a day was about all they could stand and many dropped out. Anybody who knows anything about the German methods of warfare would know that the army would have been licked by thoroughly trained and organized forces of a similar size within a day or two.” As envisaged by Roosevelt, a draft would not only make the army bigger; by instituting stringent physical requirements for draftees, it would also make it healthier.

In the speech accepting his party's nomination to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, Roosevelt said most Americans “are agreed that some form of selection by draft is necessary and fair today as it was in 1917 and 1918.” However, many Americans were not agreed. Conscription was opposed by a diverse coalition, including organized labor, isolationists, pacifists, religious leaders, youth groups, African-American organizations,
and, perhaps most poignantly, gold-star mothers who had lost their sons in the last war.

Their arguments were equally varied: the draft was unconstitutional and unfair, it would encourage war, it would stymie economic growth. So fervent were the opponents that Senator James F. Byrnes, a Democrat from South Carolina, declared that a draft bill didn't stand a “Chinaman's chance” of passing. But after France surrendered to Germany on June 21, 1940, the opposition began to wane. It all but vanished after Wendell Willkie, FDR's Republican opponent in the 1940 election, came out in favor of the draft on August 17.

On September 16, 1940, the draft became law. All men between the ages of 21 and 35 were required to serve one year in the armed forces. The draft was administered by the Selective Service System, so named because the draft was discriminate: Not every draftee was automatically inducted. Deferments could be granted if a draftee had dependents, was “necessary in his civilian activity,” or was “physically, mentally, or morally unfit” to serve. The draft was discriminate in another way: African-Americans were banned from the Marine Corps and the Army Air Corps (later known as the Army Air Forces), while the Army and the Navy maintained segregated units.

A hallmark of Selective Service was decentralization. More than 6,000 local draft boards were established across the country, each composed of three “reputable, responsible men, familiar with local conditions.” (Women were barred from serving on draft boards because members were occasionally required “to check registrants for physical defects.” The ban was lifted in 1967.) Each draft board was more or less autonomous, free to determine, without interference from Washington, which draftees were to be deferred and which were to be inducted. Inevitably this decentralization led to idiosyncrasies: A draft board in Wisconsin, for instance, was far more likely than one in New York City to consider a cheese maker “necessary in his civilian activity.”

On October 16, 1940, “R-Day,” more than 16 million men registered with Selective Service. At courthouses and libraries, in church basements and elementary school gymnasiums, they completed forms that required them to disclose all sorts of intimate information. Each registrant was asked about his education, occupation, family, health, and criminal record. He was asked whether he conscientiously objected to war, whether he was an ordained minister (or studying to be one), or whether he was in the armed forces or a state legislature (all grounds for deferral). The boards then classified each registrant into categories ranging from 1-A (fit for general military service) to 4-F (unfit), and assigned each a serial number. A lottery would be held to determine the order in which registrants would be called.

Each draft board was limited to no more than 8,500 registrants. To be on the safe side, 9,000 capsules were put into the glass bowl from which Henry Stimson selected number 158. According to the
New York Times,
6,175 men had been assigned that serial number by local draft boards nationwide. They would be the very first men inducted. In New York City alone, the
Times
reported, the 158s included “a Cody, a Chan, a Re and a Weisblum.”

After the ceremonious first draw, the rest of the capsules in the glass bowl were randomly selected and opened by more ordinary bureaucrats. The next four numbers drawn were 192; 8,239; 6,620; and 6,685. The process lasted into the next morning.

2

I
N
1794,
WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS PRESIDENT,
the Pennsylvania Assembly passed “an Act for the prevention of vice and immorality.” Among other things, the act banned “disorderly sports” on Sundays. Pennsylvania was just one of many states with such “blue laws,” so named either for the color of the paper on which they were originally printed or because “blue” was then a disparaging term for the puritanical.

In the early twentieth century, many states relaxed their blue laws to permit Sunday baseball. By 1920, teams in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, St. Louis, and Washington were all allowed to play on the Sabbath, but teams in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were not. Connie Mack, the venerable owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team, bitterly opposed Pennsylvania's antediluvian blue laws, albeit on fiscal, not philosophical, grounds: “We cannot meet our payrolls playing on 77 weekdays at home,” he complained.

In defiance of the blue laws, Mack scheduled a home game for Sunday, August 22, 1926. An “unusually subdued” crowd of 12,000 watched the A's play the Chicago White Sox at Shibe Park that afternoon. Mack's team won the game but he lost the ensuing court battle. In September 1927, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the state's blue laws by a vote of 7-2. The court
ruled that Sunday baseball was an “unholy” form of “worldly employment.”

The blue laws applied to professional football as well, which necessarily made it difficult for the National Football League to do business in Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, two teams tried. The Frankford Yellow Jackets, based in a neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, joined the league in 1924 and played their home games on Saturdays. The Pottsville Maroons joined the league in 1925. They often did play on Sundays, but there wasn't a cop or prosecutor in Schuylkill County with the temerity to tell the lager-fueled coal miners who filled Minersville Park that they couldn't watch football on their only day off.

The Yellow Jackets would go on to win the NFL championship in 1926, and Pottsville nearly won it the year before (but was suspended by the league for playing an exhibition game at Shibe Park, in violation of Frankford's territorial rights). Neither club was strong enough to whip the Great Depression, though, and by 1931 Pennsylvania was without an NFL franchise.

Connie Mack, meanwhile, took his campaign against the blue laws from the courtroom to the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1931, he led a lobbying effort that resulted in the Pennsylvania House passing a bill legalizing Sunday sports. But the Senate soundly defeated the measure, prompting Mack to threaten to move his team across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey. Finally, in April 1933, both chambers passed a bill authorizing each community in the commonwealth to hold a referendum on the blue laws. The legislature was passing the buck: Each town could decide the matter for itself. Governor Gifford Pinchot gladly signed the measure into law; the local voting was scheduled for November 7. (A simultaneous effort to legalize the sale of beer at sporting events was less successful. Ballparks statewide would remain dry until the 1960s.)

Gambling that Pennsylvania's two largest communities would vote to lift the ban on Sabbath sports, the NFL immediately installed teams in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, both franchises went to prominent local citizens with deep football
roots. Art Rooney was awarded the Pittsburgh franchise, which he named the Pirates (an uninspired choice, he later conceded). The Philadelphia franchise went to Bert Bell, who dubbed the team the Eagles, after the symbol of FDR's newly created National Recovery Administration. Both Rooney and Bell paid a league entrance fee of $2,500.

A
RT
R
OONEY HAD GROWN UP
in a poor Irish-Catholic neighborhood on Pittsburgh's north side. He made his money playing the horses in the days before pari-mutuel machines, when the odds were set by bookmakers at the track and savvy gamblers could make a killing. It's said Rooney once turned a $20 bet at Saratoga into a $380,000 payday. (“Racing's not the same now,” Rooney said wistfully years later. “The romance is gone.”)

Rooney was a minor league baseball player, an amateur boxer, a ward politician, and a shrewd investor. He was a football entrepreneur, too. In the early 1920s he organized a semipro team on the north side called Hope-Harvey. (Hope was the name of a fire station that the team used as a dressing room; Harvey was a doctor who cared for injured players without charge.) Rooney was the team's owner, coach, and halfback.

Rooney recruited several players from Hope-Harvey for the Pirates.

“I bought the franchise in '33,” he said, “because I figured that it would be good to have a league schedule and that eventually professional football would be good.”

Bert Bell played a little football, too, but not in an Irish ghetto. Bell was an Ivy Leaguer. Christened de Benneville Bell in honor of a French grandmother (“If I can lick the name de Benneville,” he'd say, “I can handle anything”), Bell was a true-blue blueblood, the scion of a wealthy family from Philadelphia's moneyed Main Line. His father, John Cromwell Bell, was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer who served as Pennsylvania's attorney general from 1911 to 1915. The elder Bell had gone to the University of Pennsylvania and was determined to see his son go there as well.