The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (6 page)

Then the
Herald Tribune
broke its story. The St. Louis Cardinals, champions of the baseball world, were planning a strike. They were going to strike against Jackie Robinson themselves and they were going to enlist cohorts on every other team in the league.

The strike would last until Robinson was thrown out of baseball.

The boys from what Stanley Woodward called “the Hookworm Belt” had one thing only against Robinson.

The color of his skin.

You see what you want to see, I suppose. The racists saw ominous black. To others, Jackie Robinson’s color was something else.

Imperial Ebony.

*Leaving a St. Louis hotel with Barber once, I was struck with 95-degree heat and said one word: “Hot.” Barber’s response: “You have to expect heat in St. Louis if you want to be a baseball writer, young man.”

*This may indicate that the Giants, rather than the Dodgers, were truly the beloved bums.

*The Brooklyn organization did sign Newcombe and Roy Campanella, but both were sent to play under circumstances of obscurity and minimal confrontation with the Nashua ballclub of the old New England League in the summer of 1946. Bavasi went to Nashua to oversee a sensitive situation and run the club. On one road trip, a rival general manager refused to turn over the Nashua team’s share of the gate receipts “because you’re just dirtying up our town with your two niggers.” Thus exposed to the peaceful tolerance of New England, Bavasi decked the other man. He got his money.

*Reese says today, “People tell me that I helped Jackie. But knowing my background and the progress I’ve made, I have to say he helped me as much as I helped him.”

+In 1976, Walker approached me at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and asked if we could drink wine together after a game. He was working as a Dodger coach and had just finished giving batting tips to Steve Yeager, a white catcher, and Dusty Baker, a black outfielder. Walker turned out to be an oenophile and we sipped a marvelous Margaux. He told me of a recent trip to England to search for ancestral roots, and he spoke of Salisbury Cathedral and Devonshire gardens. Then Walker got to his point. “I organized that petition in 1947, not because I had anything against Robinson personally or against Negroes generally. I had a wholesale hardware business in Birmingham and people told me I’d lose my business if I played ball with a black man. That’s why I started the petition. It was the dumbest thing I did in all my life. If you ever get a chance, sometime, please write that I am deeply sorry.” Walker died in Birmingham on May 17, 1982.

*In 1948 Parrott quit journalism and became traveling secretary for the Dodgers. In time, he moved up to ticket manager, a position that provides a limitless opportunity for private profit, through off-the-book deals on tickets to sold-out games. O’Malley fired Parrott, who by this time owned a yacht, at Los Angeles in 1968. Parrott spent his remaining years firing salvos toward O’Malley.

J
ACKIE ROBINSON
, who had begun his minor league career so gloriously in Jersey City, began his major league career slowly in Ebbets Field. Opening Day, against the Boston Braves, he grounded out, flied out, and hit into a double play. “Was I nervous?” Robinson said long afterward. “Yes, I was nervous. But it wasn’t nerves that stopped me from getting any hits. Johnny Sain was pitching for the Braves. He threw just about the best curve ball I’d seen.”

Press scrutiny was intense, though not terribly informed. Bob Feller, the great Cleveland pitcher, had done some barnstorming with Robinson. “Good field, no hit,” Feller pronounced. Someone dredged that up after Robinson’s hitless game. (The man batted . 500 through a month of spring training; after one quiet game a columnist writes that he can’t hit.)

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday it rained. On Thursday, again against the Braves, Robinson bunted toward third base and beat the throw. He had his first major league hit. Now things went the other way. “Robinson could bat .300 just bunting,” someone claimed.

People were electric with anticipation and alarm. Bob Cooke, a witty, graceful baseball writer with the
Herald Tribune
, had been a hockey star at Yale. He was social by background but not a snob and certainly not a classic bigot.

“Branch Rickey,” Cooke told two newspaper associates, “has done more to hurt baseball than anybody else in history.”

“How’s that, Cookie?”

Cooke was tall, lean, patrician, and normally quite gentle. “When I played hockey at Yale, I shot the puck harder than any of the Rangers. But I couldn’t play in the National Hockey League. I couldn’t skate with the Canadians. They had the legs. Now we have the same damn thing in baseball. The Negroes have the legs. It starts with Robinson but it doesn’t end with Robinson. Negroes are going to run the white people out of baseball. They’re going to take over our game.”

The speed of blacks had threatened some whites, particularly after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, when American blacks, led by Jesse Owens, won gold medals at 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, and 800 meters. (Jackie Robinson’s brother Mack finished second to Jesse Owens in the 200-meter sprint.) An anthropologist, whose name seems lost, claimed to have analyzed the skeletal structures of scores of black and white athletes and made a discovery. The heel bones of blacks were somewhat longer, the anthropologist said, giving them extra running power.*

Now on Friday, April 18, the Dodgers moved into the Polo Grounds to start a three-game series. Coming to bat for the first time against left-handed Montia Kennedy, Robinson lined a home run into the left field stands. The Polo Grounds resounded with cheering. Robinson had hit his first major league home run.

In the press box, behind home plate, Heywood Hale Broun, covering the ballgame for the vanished newspaper
PM
, turned to Bob Cooke and said solemnly: “That’s because their heels are longer.”

Baseball integration proceeds from the passion of a white Methodist Republican, the foresight of a conservative governor, and a Jewish counterstrike at anti-Semitism. That is not popular with some of today’s revisionist black historians, but it is so. Jews put the law on the side of Jackie Robinson.

For a significant part of the twentieth century, organized medicine — the American Medical Association and governing bodies at medical schools — limited the number of Jews allowed into the lucrative business of doctoring. The situation was particularly dramatic in New York City, where thousands of outstanding Jewish science students were routinely denied admission to medical school. Jews made up about a third of the voters in New York City, and that was a wedge that various Jewish groups, led by the famous Reform rabbi Stephen Wise, used to persuade the state legislature to hold hearings.

These proved a disaster for the establishment reactionaries. One dean at Cornell Medical School testified that a quota was indeed enforced at Cornell Med. No matter how many qualified Jews applied, no more than five percent of a freshman class could be Jewish. The dean defended the quota with such arrogance that some heard Hitlerism in his response. Out of that, in 1944, came the drafting of the so-called Ives-Quinn law, which made job discrimination a crime in New York State. (Journalists and others soon were calling this new law FEP, for Fair Employment Practices.)

Governor Thomas E. Dewey signed the FEP bill on March 12, 1945, using twenty-two pens in a crowded ceremony at the Red Room of the State Capitol in Albany. Westbrook Pegler attacked the new law as “pernicious heresy against the ancient privilege of human beings to hate.” But the American Jewish Congress, the Federal Council of (Protestant) Churches, Archbishop Richard J. Cushing of Boston, and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP figuratively cheered.

A prominent black news photographer, Chick Solomon, covered the twenty-two-pen signing and drove at high (and probably illegal) speed 150 miles from Albany to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where officials of the Negro National Baseball League were meeting. Solomon was exultant. He brought copies of the new law with him. “Listen, everybody,” he said. “The law is on our side now. Doesn’t mean we’re gonna make Christians out of the bastards who run the major leagues. But at least there’s nothing now that can stop a black ballplayer from going up and demanding a tryout.”*

Wesley Branch Rickey, the devout Methodist who ran the Dodgers, traced his decision to integrate baseball to an episode in 1903 when he was student-coach of baseball at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. (His salary was $15 a month.) The Ohio Wesleyan team included one black player, first baseman Charles “Cha” Thomas, later a successful dentist who settled in Albuquerque. When the Ohio Wesleyan team traveled to South Bend to play Notre Dame in April, a desk clerk at the Hotel Oliver said Thomas could not stay there. “We provide accommodations only for white people.” Voices were raised. Thomas volunteered to leave. Rickey raged and cajoled. Finally the hotel manager agreed that Thomas could spend the night, on a cot in Rickey’s room.

Upstairs, Thomas began to weep. As Rickey recounted the scene, “His shoulders heaved, and he rubbed one great hand over the other with all the power of his body, muttering, ‘Black skin . . . black skin. If I could only make it white.’ He was trying literally to claw the black skin off his bones.”

When Rickey told me this story, tears appeared in
his
eyes. Signing Jackie Robinson, he said, was a way of trying to make things right for his old and wounded Wesleyan friend, Cha Thomas. That was Rickey, crusader and thespian. He was also a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Baseball lured him away from practice, but when Rickey learned something of the law, he remembered it.

New York was the only one of the forty-eight states with a fair employment act. Without question, Rickey’s decision to sign Robinson proceeded from a sense of justice. But before Rickey acted, job discrimination had been made illegal in his venue.

Rickey read the Bible regularly and never attended baseball games on Sundays. “A promise to my wonderful mother, Emily,” he said. He was not comfortable with radicals of the left or of the right. He respected institutions. He paid his parking tickets.

“Having the law on my side when I signed Robinson,” he told me, “was a comfort, during some dark days. A comfort like religion. You can understand what I mean. I’m an institutional kind of man.”

On April 22, a clear, cold day — the temperature never rose above 45 degrees — the Philadelphia Phillies came to Ebbets Field to start a three-game series. Ben Chapman, born in Tennessee and raised in Alabama, was the manager of the Phillies, a thick-browed, volatile character with a tumultuous history. He played outfield for the Yankees during the early 1930s, batting as high as .316 and stealing sixty-one bases in a single season. Like anyone else, he made bad plays from time to time and when he did, the fans at Yankee Stadium sometimes jeered. Most ballplayers ignore hoots. Chapman took a different route. Jeered by Yankee fans in the Bronx one day in 1932, he turned to the grandstand and shouted: “Fucking Jew bastards.”

His intemperance persisted. Fans complained to the Yankee management, and at length, in 1936, the Yankees traded Chapman to Washington for another outfielder, Alvin “Jake” Powell.* Chapman went from Washington to the Red Sox to the Indians to the White Sox, before dropping out of the major leagues. Late in World War II, when the military had claimed the best ballplayers — Greenberg, DiMaggio, Musial, Williams — Chapman signed with a weak Dodger team as a backup outfielder and sometime pitcher. The Phillies hired him to manage in 1945.

If Chapman disliked Jews, and he did dislike Jews, he
hated
“nigras.” As the Dodger-Phillies game began, Chapman’s strong, carrying drawl rose from the visiting dugout.

“Hey you, there. Snowflake. Yeah, you. You heah me. When did they let you outa the jungle . . .

“Hey, we doan need no niggers here . . .

“Hey, black boy. You like white poontang, black boy? You like white pussy? Which one o’ the white boys’ wives are you fucking tonight?”

Usually in baseball, even crude assaults give rise to back and forth banter. None was forthcoming in Ebbets Field that chilly April day. The Dodgers, southern and northern Dodgers, Dixie Walker and Carl Furillo, Pee Wee Reese and Spider Jorgensen, were shocked. Like Robinson, they sat in silence.

Lee Handley, Ben Chapman’s third baseman, later made it a point to seek out Robinson. He said quietly, “I’m sorry. I want you to know that stuff doesn’t go for me.” Handley was the first opposing major leaguer to treat Robinson as a man.

Robinson remembered Lee Handley, out of Clarion, Iowa, for the rest of his life. But he could no more respond to Handley at the time than he could respond to Ben Chapman. He thought of the many times he had been told that he
had
to turn the other cheek. But, Robinson asked himself, do I really have to live a sermon?

Years later, when we were working up a story on bigotry for
Our Sports
, a magazine in which he had invested, Robinson recalled his reactions to Ben Chapman in the Golgotha of that clear, cold April day.

“I don’t remember everything they shouted. Probably just as well. My wife, Rae, she’s into psychology. She says that some things that are too upsetting, you make yourself forget.”

Although Robinson could not or would not recount all that he heard, he vividly remembered his emotions. “All my life I’ve been a proud guy. I won’t sit in the back of a bus. If you call me nigger or boy, I want to tear your throat out. I’m a proud guy.

“So there I am in Brooklyn, which is supposed to be the Promised Land, and I’m hearing the worst garbage I ever heard in my whole life, counting the streets, counting the army, but I’ve sworn to Mr. Rickey that I won’t fight back.

“It’s Chapman and some of the Phillies ballplayers, and I set my face and I say goddamn, I’m supposed to ignore ‘em and just play ball.

“So I play ball. but they don’t stop. Jungle bunny. Snowflake. I start breathing hard. I’m just playing ball. I’m doing my job. I’m a good ballplayer. Deep down, I’ve been thinking, people will see I’m a good ballplayer and they’ll see I’m black and they’ll put that together. A black guy’s a good ballplayer. A black guy can be a good guy.

“But that’s not happening. What do the Phillies want from me? What did I ever do to them? What does Mr. Rickey want? I’m in great shape. I’m playing hard. I’m not sassing anybody. What the hell does everybody want from me?

“All of a sudden I thought, the hell with this. This isn’t me. They’re making me be some crazy pacifist black freak. Hell, no. Hell, no. I’m going back to being myself. Right now. I’m going into the Phillie dugout and grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his fucking teeth and walk away. Walk away from this ballpark. Walk away from baseball.

“I thought some more. This didn’t take as long in my head as it takes to tell you, Rog. I thought of Mr. Rickey and Rae and my baby son. Standing on that ballfield in Brooklyn, standing still, I had come to a crossroads.

“For a second I felt, this is it. I’m cracking up.

“But wait, wait, wait. Am I gonna give Ben Chapman that satisfaction . . .”

In the eighth inning Robinson singled up the middle. Then he stole second base. When Andy Seminick’s throw bounced into center field, Robinson ran on to third. Gene Hermanski singled to right. That was the run. There weren’t any more. The Dodgers defeated the Phillies, 1 to 0, on Robinson’s run.

Robinson took the subway back to the McAlpin Hotel on 34th Street in Manhattan, where he lived while looking for an apartment. Rachel cooked dinner on an electric hotplate. The baby, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, Jr., had a cold and the couple stayed up much of the night trying to help their child sleep.

At Ebbets Field the next day, Robinson walked up to bat in the first inning feeling better than he had the day before.

“Hey, Jungle Bunny,” Ben Chapman shouted. “You go out and get yo-sef some white pussy last night?”

Stanky and a few other ballplayers told newspapermen what was going on. Branch Rickey, informed by his new manager, Burt Shotton, telephoned the commissioner, Happy Chandler. Something had to be done, Rickey said, in the name of decency.

Chandler had suspended Leo Durocher for a year, ostensibly for living loosely. What punishment, then, would be appropriate for William Benjamin Chapman, Klansman without a hood?

Chandler considered at length. Then he ordered Chapman to grant an interview to Wendell Smith, a congenial black sportswriter for the black newspaper the
Pittsburgh Courier
.

No suspension. Not even a fine. Just a suggestion that Chapman ease up and an order that he spend one hour in civil conversation with a Negro.

Dan Parker wrote a column in the
Daily Mirror
criticizing Chapman’s “guttersnipe” language. But generally the press persisted in its belligerent neutrality. This account, from
The Sporting News
of May 7, 1947, is characteristic:

Jackie Robinson’s position in the major leagues and the manner in which he will be treated by the Philadelphia Phillies was clarified in a straight from the shoulder interview from Ben Chapman. . . .