Rickey & Robinson (11 page)

FANS ASK END OF JIM CROW BASEBALL

Not quite so. Not yet. An editorial followed, unsigned but written by Rodney. It read, “Fans, it’s up to you. Tell the big league magnates that you’re sick of the poor pitching in the American League. You want Satchel Paige out there on the mound. You’re tired of a flop team in Boston, of the silly Brooklyn Dodgers, of the inept Phillies and semi-pro Athletics. Demand better ball. Demand Americanism in baseball, equal opportunities for Negro and white. Demand the end of Jim Crow baseball.”

What happened to Rodney’s opening blast? What became of it? Nothing happened. It did not become. Jim Crow baseball would live on for many years. But Rodney’s impassioned prose drew mail, scores, hundreds of letters from fans. Lester’s prose awakened thousands of people to baseball’s prevailing bigotry and a groundswell began to rise. Coincidentally, the drive against alabaster baseball became a touchstone of the
Daily Worker
.

After my friend Ring Lardner Jr., the screenwriter and novelist, died in 2000, I wrote a memorial tribute for
The Nation
. A week later a letter arrived from Rodney, who was living in a retirement community located in Walnut Creek about 30 miles east of San Francisco. “Best piece,” he wrote, “that I’ve read in quite some time.” The letter served to renew our acquaintanceship and we met for a final time in the spring of 2009, when Lester was 97 years old. His wife, Clare, died in 2004. Now, while recovering from fractured ribs, he was living in the condo of his companion, Mary Reynolds Harvey. His voice was soft as ever, his gaze was steady and his memory was sharp.

He said I should be aware that when he began his
Daily Worker
campaign the times were growing right for integration. American Negroes, notably Jesse Owens, but also including Jackie Robinson’s brother, Mack, dominated the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Joe Louis, whom sportswriters called “the Brown Bomber” and “the Dark
Destroyer,” had become the most dynamic heavyweight champion since Jack Dempsey. With great enthusiasm Rodney recalled a conversation in 1937 with Burleigh Grimes, an old spitball pitcher who was managing a dreary Dodger team to a sixth-place finish.

At last credentialed, Rodney wandered out to right field where Grimes was working with Tom Winsett, a highly touted young outfielder whom the Dodgers had acquired for forty thousand Depression dollars. Winsett was fast becoming a Flatbush Flop. After some easy chatter Rodney said, “How are things going on the team?”

“Frankly I could use another pitcher,” Grimes said, “and just one real good hitter. But we’re doing the best we can.”

“Burleigh,” Rodney said, “how would you like to put a Dodger uniform on Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson?”

Grimes looked as though he had been clubbed by a Louisville Slugger. Sportswriters did not ask such questions in 1937. “Lester,” he said, “you’re just wasting your time. That’ll never happen. Think about the hotels. Think about the restaurants. How could it happen? It’ll never happen.”

“Do you know about some of the good black players?”

“Of course I do,” Grimes said. “So does everybody else. But let’s talk about something different.”

“Can I at least write that you know how good they are?”

“No. I’m not gonna stick my neck out.”

“Not that you’re in favor of signing them, Just that you know that Paige and Gibson are good.”

“No, Lester. No, no, no.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

DURING THESE YEARS OF stirring racial currents, Rickey, the would-be second Great Emancipator, was out to lunch. With a masterfully constructed farm system he created championship teams in
St. Louis, the most segregated major-league city. Building on such homegrown stars as Enos “Country” Slaughter, Marty Marion and Terry Moore, the Cardinals in the late 1930s were on the rise again. But the team was all white, the farm system was all white and the home field, Sportsman’s Park, was rigidly segregated. (Geographically, St. Louis was then the southernmost major-league city, except for Washington, DC.) In St. Louis black fans could sit only in distant right-field stands, the so-called pavilion. “As a point of fact,” Rickey told me, “there was nothing I could do, I ran the team but it was owned by someone else, Sam Breadon. He had no interest in integrating baseball. And St. Louis itself was essentially a Southern city. Whites dominated. The whites made the rules. Negroes had to hide in the corners.

“You can only make a bold move when the time and place are right. When God ordains it, you might say. During my time in St. Louis, that was not the case.”

Rickey, then, would not agree with me that he was out to lunch. He maintained that the absent party was God.

A blazing portrait of a Southern racist appears in Vachel Lindsay’s mighty poem
Simon Legree, A Negro Sermon
. A few lines here can introduce us to Legree:

He beat poor Uncle Tom to death

Who prayed for Legree with his last breath
.

Then Uncle Tom to Eva flew
,

To the high sanctoriums bright and new;

And Simon Legree stared up beneath
,

And cracked his heels, and ground his teeth:

AND WENT DOWN TO THE DEVIL
.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.

And the Devil said to Simon Legree:

“I like your style, so wicked and free
.

Come sit and share my throne with me
,

And let us bark and revel.”

And there they sit and gnash their teeth
,

And each one wears a hop-vine wreath
.

They are matching pennies and shooting craps
,

They are playing poker and taking naps
.

And old Legree is fat and fine:

He eats the fire, he drinks the wine—

Blood and burning turpentine—

DOWN, DOWN WITH THE DEVIL

Legree was fictive. The actual gatekeeper at baseball’s racial barrier, its impenetrable cotton curtain, did not drink burning turpentine, but neither was he a pussyfooting slouch. “The Judge,” wrote J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the
Sporting News
from 1914 to 1962
, “was a tempestuous character who led a tempestuous life from the time he took his first breath in Millville, Ohio. There was never anything prosaic about him.” A. L. Sloan, political editor of the
Chicago Herald-American
, wrote, “The Judge was always headline news. He was a great showman, theatrical in appearance, with his sharp jaw and shock of white hair, and people always crowded into his courtroom, knowing there would be something going on. There were few dull moments.”

This tempestuous, theatrical showman-judge was, of course, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He was the first commissioner and the most absolute commissioner ever. Landis did not want black players appearing in organized ball. Stories persist that in 1940, when the Phillies constantly were losing games and money, someone proposed dumping the whole bumbling squad and replacing them with gifted players from the Negro Leagues. Landis is said to have killed the plan. He had the power to throw anyone—player, owner, umpire—clear out of organized baseball if he felt the expulsion was “in the best interests of the game.” Talk about an elastic clause. Landis was
prosecutor, judge and jury all in one. After Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. exempted baseball from the antitrust laws governing business in 1922, there was no appeal from a Landis decision—no appeal, no protest, no escape except perhaps to slit one’s throat.

I am not sure about the black-ballplayers-for-Philadelphia story. Supposedly the would-be buyer was Bill Veeck, a friend of mine for more than 25 years. I visited him often at his home near Easton, Maryland, and we stayed up late many evenings talking baseball. Bill never mentioned Philadelphia. But he did tell me that in 1939, when he was running the Milwaukee Brewers in the Triple A American Association, he decided to sign a few black players to strengthen his club. Veeck dispatched scouts to Negro League games and Landis, who had more sources than J. Edgar Hoover, found out about the plan. He had long known Veeck’s late father, once president of the Chicago Cubs. “Our families go back a ways,” Landis told Veeck on a long-distance telephone line. “It would pain me greatly, Bill, to have to throw you out of baseball. But if you even try to sign a colored ballplayer, that’s what I will do. Out of baseball, Bill. For life!”

I asked Veeck, “What did you say?”

“Not much. Just thank you for your time.”

Landis was a complex and quintessential Midwesterner, the sixth child born to Mary and Abraham Landis in Millville, a small community in a southwestern corner of Ohio, centered around, predictably, a grist mill. It was less than 100 miles from Branch Rickey’s birthplace, Stockdale.

Abraham Landis, a German immigrant, was a surgeon in the Union Army grievously injured during Sherman’s March to the Sea. At the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in northwestern Georgia, Landis was dressing the wounds of someone he recalled as “a beardless, blue-clad infantryman” when a nearly spent Confederate cannonball ricocheted off a tree and struck him full on one leg. The iron ball crushed flesh and shattered bone; another Army doctor had to amputate the
leg. Curiously, Landis chose to memorialize this agonizing event by naming his fifth son after the battle that crippled him, Kenesaw Mountain. (Somewhere between Georgia and Ohio, Dr. Landis dropped a letter out of “Kennesaw.”)

The injury made it impossible for Dr. Landis to make the rounds of a rural medical practice and he moved to Logansport, Indiana, and bought a farm. Ken Landis remembered a happy boyhood on the farm performing chores and, at every opportunity, playing baseball. In time he played for and managed the Logansport High team. After a smattering of courses at the University of Cincinnati, Landis studied law in Chicago at Union College of Law (now the Northwestern University School of Law).

Sometime after graduation Ken Landis found a position as assistant to Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state, Walter Gresham. The young lawyer was hard-driving, patriotic and bright. When Gresham became ill, he designated Landis to sit in for him at meetings of the presidential cabinet. The future judge was on his way.

Following Gresham’s death, Landis moved back to Chicago, where he developed a flourishing law practice. Then, in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt rewarded the bright young man—Landis was not yet 40 years old—by appointing him a federal judge. Landis became famous two years later when he found against Standard Oil in an antitrust trial and fined the mammoth company an unprecedented sum: $29 million. (On appeal the verdict was set aside.) He later presided over the trial of Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight champion, who was accused of transporting a white woman across a state line “for immoral purposes.” An all-white jury convicted Johnson. Landis sentenced him to prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

He had always been a baseball fan and claimed to have played semi-pro ball as a teenager. But his first formal connection with organized baseball came in the courtroom. The Federal League was founded in 1912 and in 1914 began playing a full schedule of
major-league baseball in direct competition with the National and American Leagues. Eight teams, from the Brooklyn Tip-Tops to the Kansas City Packers, competed and at least five Hall of Famers appeared in Federal League uniforms: Charles Albert “Chief” Bender with the Baltimore Terrapins; Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, St. Louis Terriers; Bill McKechnie, Indianapolis Hoosiers; Eddie Plank, Terriers; Edd Roush, Newark Peppers; and Joe Tinker, Chicago Whales. This was and is the most serious challenge in the annals to the monopoly of the National and American Leagues.

It was expensive starting the league—think building new ballparks—and after beginning, the Feds hoped for some mergers with the established ball clubs. Getting nowhere, the Feds filed an antitrust suit, which led to the court of the old trustbuster, Judge K. M. Landis. In this instance, Landis did no trust busting, but let the case languish. The Federal League folded. Landis had shown himself to be a friend of Establishment baseball.

When later it came to light that seven or eight Chicago White Sox had taken bribes and dumped the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, the country reacted with profound shock. This comes across in a passage from Scott Fitzgerald’s signature novel,
The Great Gatsby
:

“Who is he, anyhow, an actor?”

“No.”

“A dentist?”

“Meyer Wolfsheim? [In reality, Arnold Rothstein.] No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

Nothing excluding earthquakes or tsunamis at ballparks near the sea can be worse for baseball than gamblers tinkering with final scores. Staged, which is to say fixed, professional wrestling matches could be advertised in many states only as exhibitions. By contrast, big-league ballgames were contests. Take away that element, the contest, the struggle to and fro grinding down to the final out, the final pitch, and you kill an essential part of baseball’s appeal. Suspicions of the White Sox’s effort surfaced even as the World Series was being played. Christy Mathewson sat next to Ring Lardner in the Chicago press box on October 1 as the Reds won the first game, 9 to 1. On Lardner’s scorecard Mathewson silently circled White Sox plays that he thought looked suspicious. Then Lardner wrote a scathing song that he sang two days later after a few drinks of Prohibition whiskey in a Pullman car headed for Cincinnati: Based on the popular tune “Blowing Bubbles,” Lardner’s lyrics went like this: