Rickey & Robinson (15 page)

To quote from one biography: “In 1937, Papini published his
History of Italian Literature
, which he dedicated to Benito Mussolini: ‘Il Duce, friend of poetry and of the poets.’ Subsequently the Fascist government awarded him top positions in academia. Papini supported Mussolini’s racial discrimination laws of 1938, which among other things prohibited marriage between Jews and Christians.”

Mussolini’s views on blacks were yet more vicious. He sent his modern armies into Ethiopia, an independent black African nation, in October 1935, and completed a colonialist conquest the following May. In the course of the war Mussolini violated international law by using mustard gas against the Ethiopian forces. Mussolini’s invaders killed roughly 275,000 black Africans. Having seen the face of fascism up close, the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, spoke before the League of Nations in Geneva. “If it is us today, tomorrow it will be you.” Haunting words, but the leaders of the League, hurtling toward World War II, did not respond.

When the Fascist regime crumbled in 1943, Papini retreated behind the walls of a Franciscan convent. Although never prosecuted as a war criminal, he was thoroughly discredited by the subsequent non-Fascist Italian regime.

Did Rickey’s small-town Christian zealotry blind him to Papini’s fascism? Was Rickey unaware of Mussolini’s war crimes against blacks? Or did he simply not care, believing in his zealotry that Jesus’s message trumped all other considerations? I never got a chance to bring up these questions with him. My belief is that his zealotry was blinding.

As for Robinson, in later years he attended university seminars on dictatorships and racism, but in 1945 he had never heard of Papini. When Alan Paton, author of the great antiapartheid novel
Cry, the Beloved Country
, visited Ebbets Field in 1953, Robinson had never heard of him, either. The old four-letter varsity star was still developing intellectually. How would he have reacted if he knew Rickey was feeding him words composed by a man who believed that it was acceptable for a mechanized white European army to bomb and shoot and gas black Africans? The Jackie Robinson I remember would have walked out. But he did not know and he did not walk out. Instead, the meeting lasted three hours, Rickey constantly emphasizing the need to turn the other cheek. At one point Robinson said, “Are you looking for someone who doesn’t have the courage to fight back?”

“No,” Rickey said. “I’m looking for someone who has the courage
not
to fight back.” The old spellbinder went on, “We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid that many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we convince the world that I’m doing this because you’re a great ballplayer, a fine gentleman.

“Jackie, I just want to beg two things of you: that as a baseball player you give it your utmost and as a man you give continuing fidelity to your race and to this crucial cause you symbolize.

“Above all, do not fight. No matter how vile the abuse, ignore it. You are carrying the reputation of a race on your shoulders. Bear it well and a day will come when every team in baseball will open its doors to Negroes.”

Rickey lowered his voice. “The alternative is not pleasant.”

Robinson agreed to accept a bonus of $3,500 and a salary of $600 a month to play baseball in 1946 for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm team, in the Triple A International League. There he would establish himself as an outstanding second baseman, steal
40 bases and lead the league in hitting at .349. He was also a significant gate attraction. More than one million people went to games involving Robinson in 1946, an amazing figure by the standards of any minor league.

But off the field many communities coldly rejected him. Summing up that memorable season the witty, acerbic (and corrupt) Dick Young wrote, “Jackie Robinson led the league in everything except hotel reservations.”

T
HE INTEGRATION OF BASEBALL, heroically engineered by Branch Rickey, heroically executed by Jackie Robinson, would be called the Noble Experiment and become the stuff of books, essays, seminars, doctoral theses and, within the world of baseball, unending self-congratulation. Put briefly, Robinson’s debut season in Montreal, summer of 1946, was a sheer, if stressful, triumph. He hit, he ran, he fielded and he led the Royals to victory in the ultimate minor-league playoff, the Little World Series. But for Branch Rickey, who shared that triumph as Robinson himself invariably pointed out, the times brought not only triumph but also trappings of disaster. His Brooklyn Dodgers, of Pee Wee Reese, Dixie Walker and Carl Furillo, lost a tight pennant race to the St. Louis Cardinals, of Stan Musial, Terry Moore and Enos Slaughter. (Rickey, the architect, designed both teams.)

But the New York press did not gush with praise. As exemplified by the tabloid
Daily News
, then selling two million copies a day, the press generally declined to applaud Rickey’s merits. In fact, Dick Young, the
News
’s most prominent and virulent baseball writer, turned on Rickey with a vengeance worthy of Macbeth. To Young,
Rickey was first of all a skinflint and a hypocrite. “But a great baseball man, Dick,” I said, after we had become contentious acquaintances. “Surely you’ll give the old boy that.”

“Maybe it’s something in me,” Young said, “but I just can’t seem to appreciate a pompous tightwad son of a bitch who is always quoting the Psalms . . . even if he does know the game.”

RICKEY CLAIMS THAT 15 CLUBS VOTED TO BAR NEGROES FROM THE MAJORS

Declares He Used Robinson Despite Action

Taken at Meeting in 1945—Officials

Deny Dodger Head’s Charges

Despite this headline, which appeared in the
New York Times
of February 18, 1948, this remarkable story—Baseball Bigotry’s Last Stand—has lain fallow for many years. No written records of the meeting survive, although I know from various sources that a high-level baseball meeting occurred at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago on August 29, 1946. But no one present at the meeting seemed to recall the overwhelming anti-Negro vote. The source, the only source, on baseball bigotry’s last stand was Branch Rickey himself. In our discussions of the anti-Negro vote—and we had several—Rickey always insisted that I keep his words off the record for all the rest of his life. “It ill becomes one,” he said, “publicly to turn and curse the leaders of a game that has nurtured him for almost all his days.”

William Wilberforce was an early-19th-century English abolitionist and a convert to the Methodist religion. He led the parliamentary campaign against Britain’s lucrative slave trade, which persisted until 1807. Previously, British ships legally transported captured black Africans to lives of slavery in America’s racist South. The practice of slavery was profitable for more than one country. Both the town of Wilberforce, Ohio, and Wilberforce University, which is located there,
were named in his honor. The African Methodist Episcopal Church founded Wilberforce University in 1856 and today it stands as one of the three oldest private predominantly black colleges in the country.

The devoutly Methodist Rickey accepted an invitation to speak to his coreligionists at the Wilberforce annual football banquet on February 17, 1948. His audience was small, no more than 250 people. As far as I can learn, the only reporter there was someone from the Associated Press. He took careful notes and filed a story that would shake the rulers of baseball to their ganglia.

The AP man—anonymous to this day—quoted Rickey at length from a speech he called “candid and impassioned.”

“After I had signed Robinson, but before he had played a game,” Rickey began, “a joint major league meeting adopted unanimously a secret report prepared by a joint committee [representing both the National and American Leagues] which stated that however well intentioned, the use of Negro players would hazard all the physical properties of baseball.

“You can’t find a copy of that report anywhere, but I was at the meeting where it was adopted.

“I sat silent while the other 15 clubs approved it.

“I’ve tried to get a copy of the report, but league officials tell me all were destroyed.

“But let them deny they adopted such a report, if they dare.

“I’d like to see the color of the man’s eyes who would deny it.”

According to the AP reporter, Rickey grew increasingly impassioned at the Wilberforce banquet. “I believe,” Rickey said, “that racial extractions and color hues and forms of worship become secondary to what a man can do.

“The American public is not as concerned with a ballplayer’s pigmentation as it is with the power of his swing, the dexterity of his slide, the gracefulness of his fielding or the speed of his legs.

“Who thinks of the inconsequential when great matters of common challenge and national interest confront us? It is not strange that Robinson should be given a chance in America to feed and clothe and shelter his wife and child and mother in a job he can do better than most.

“It is not strange that a drop of water seeks the ocean.”

Rickey expected his comments to attract praise. Instead his eloquence drew a firestorm of rage from his old deputy, Larry MacPhail, and barefaced contempt from his once and future enemy, the populist New York
Daily News
. Two days after the Wilberforce speech, the
News
published a prominent headline:

RICKEY ‘LYING’; M’PHAIL

REFUTES NEGRO CHARGE

In a written statement MacPhail said no secret report existed. A report was indeed filed. MacPhail himself retained a copy. It recommended certain “changes in the structure of the major leagues.” “Other copies,” MacPhail maintained, “were collected because they contained a criticism of the commissioner [Chandler], written by me, which the commission felt was unfair and unproductive.

“If and when Branch Rickey said that my committee recommended that Negroes be banned from major-league baseball, Branch Rickey was lying.”

The usually voluble MacPhail would take no questions. He would let no one see his copy of the disputed report. After that Rickey never again spoke to MacPhail.

Is it plausible to believe that Rickey, in an orgy of self-praise, fantasized the anti-Negro meeting? It certainly does not appear that way here. Rather it seems likely that MacPhail, in a fit of passion, went on a rant against his old boss for accomplishing something in Brooklyn that MacPhail, for all his innovations and promotions, schemes and dreams, had failed to realize. I don’t think Larry was innately a bigot.
But, particularly when drinking, he was one of the notorious hotheads of his time. “Part genius,” said Leo Durocher, “and part madman.” On the issue of integrating baseball, and indeed America, starting in Brooklyn, in an Ebbets Field that MacPhail had repainted and restored, it seems the madman in MacPhail knocked the genius in MacPhail clear over Canarsie and out of sight, somewhere above the waters of the stormy North Atlantic.

That was not the editorial opinion at the
News
. The sports columnist there, the ambitious Jimmy Powers, had this to say. “Branch Rickey gets up at Wilberforce U and showers rose petals on himself. . . . We are wondering just what purpose this blast at other baseball executives serves at this time. As an admirer of Negro Jackie Robinson we realize that some owners were, for good and sufficient reasons of their own, against the breaking down of the color line. We also happen to know that many of these people are now in favor of Robinson and accept him as a gentleman of culture and irreproachable conduct. Others are still opposed to the whole setup, as is their privilege. Why stir up these prejudices today just to pose as a superior human being?

“It is significant that all of Rickey’s moves save him money. He is paying Robinson only $5,000 a year, not even a hundred dollars a week. We will be the first to toss our hat into the air and pelt rare Brazilian orchids at El Cheapo when we see that a single one of his magnanimous acts COSTS him money out of pocket.”

Dick Young followed up with sarcasm. “No longer do baseball personalities squirm on the spot if their own backfired remarks claim that they’ve been ‘misquoted,’” Young wrote. “But rather that they’ve been ‘misinterpreted.’ That was the position taken yesterday as the Dodger prexy attempted to square himself with his fellow owners. . . . ”

Some years later I asked Rickey specifically how he had reacted to the Powers piece. “Neither my wife, Jane, nor I was accustomed to being subjected to such vitriol,” he said. “To put it succinctly, we were stunned.”

“Did you realize that this column was in a sense a declaration of war?”

“Not at the time,” Rickey said. “With hindsight, however, I accept your characterization.”

As for Powers, he appeared conveniently to be forgetting the lines he wrote in the
News
when Rickey broke the color line. With absolute certitude, Powers declared: “Jackie Robinson will not make the grade in the big leagues this year or next. He is a 1,000-1 shot.” It is not superfluous to point out that good journalism begins with reporting and Powers had never seen Robinson play.

The meeting officially was organized to contend with issues other than integration. The lords of baseball felt threatened by a new independent Mexican League, which was signing big leaguers in defiance of the American reserve clause. A second matter was the rising demand voiced by outstanding major leaguers, including Allie Reynolds and Ralph Kiner, for recognition of a players’ union.

A Latin entrepreneur named Jorge Pasqual had organized the so-called “outlaw” Mexican League, backed by $50 million, and he was staffing it in part with well-known big leaguers. Among these were Mickey Owen, the former Dodger catcher; Max Lanier, an accomplished Cardinal left-hander; and (almost) Stan Musial, to whom Pasqual offered a bonus of $50,000 in cold cash. Musial, then earning $11,500 annually from the Cardinals, told me, “He laid out the money in big bills right on the double bed in a hotel suite. He said sign and then I could put all that money in my pocket. Not later. Right then. I thought long and hard. I finally decided that I just didn’t want to move my family to Mexico.”