The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (7 page)

“
We treat Robinson the same as we do Hank Greenberg of the Pirates, Clint Hartung of the Giants, Connie Ryan of the Braves,” Chapman said.

“
When I came into the big leagues, pitchers threw at me, dusted me off, pegged at my head, my legs. I was dangerous.

“
Robinson can run. He can bunt. He’s dangerous.

“
When I came into the league, they wanted to see if I would lose my temper and forget to play ball. They tried to break my morale. They played baseball for keeps. That’s the way we’re going to play with Robinson.

“
If Robinson has the stuff, he’ll be accepted in baseball, the same as the Sullivans and the Grodzickis. All I expect him to do is prove it. Let’s get the chips off our shoulders and play ball.”

I mean to suggest that at this point, early in the 1947 season, the issue of Robinson’s success — the question of integrated baseball — was seriously in doubt. (So, indeed, was Robinson’s mental health.) Oddly, his most vociferous ballfield supporter at that time was Eddie Stanky, the second baseman from Philadelphia who had moved to Mobile and who years later himself needled Robinson in unpleasant ways. But in May 1947 something deep and good was touched within Eddie Stanky, a combative, thin-lipped, verbal ballplayer with limited physical skills and limitless fire. “Those guys [the Phillies] are a disgrace,” Stanky told the New York newspapermen. “They know Robinson can’t fight back. There isn’t one of them who has the guts of a louse.” After Chapman’s behavior moved Stanky to Jackie Robinson’s side, other Dodgers, notably Pee Wee Reese, quickly followed. Some — Bobby Bragan, Hugh Casey, Cookie Lavagetto, and Dixie Walker — did not.

The issue still was in doubt. Herb Pennock, the general manager of the Phillies, had been the leading left-handed pitcher on the 1927 New York Yankees, a team that remains the benchmark of baseball excellence. Tall, lean, dignified, Pennock was nicknamed “The Squire of Kennett Square,” after the Pennsylvania town where he was born.

The Dodgers were scheduled to begin a series in Philadelphia on May 9 and Pennock telephoned Branch Rickey to impose conditions. “You just can’t bring the nigger here with the rest of your team, Branch,” Pennock said. “We’re not ready for that sort of thing yet in Philadelphia. We won’t be able to take the field [at Shibe Park] against your Brooklyn team, if that boy is in uniform.”

Major league rules require that both sides field a team for every scheduled game. Should one side fail to appear, the other team is awarded victory by forfeit. The score of a forfeit is recorded as 9 to 0.

“Very well, Herbert,” Rickey said, “if you don’t field a team and we must claim the game, 9 to 0, we will do just that, I assure you.”

Rickey hung up. Pennock was not through making mischief. When the Dodgers arrived at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and took taxis to the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on the morning of May 9, they were turned away in the lobby. Pennock and his employers had spoken to the hotel owners. The hotel would take “no ballclub nigras.” Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ toothy traveling secretary, had to shuttle about Philadelphia for hours before he found a hotel — the Warwick — willing to accommodate the team. Until then, the Dodgers were considering commuting for the series. Recalling that Philadelphia story, Parrott summed up: “Talk about brotherly love.”

Rickey, not satisfied with Ben Chapman’s feathery reprimand, continued to press Commissioner Chandler for significant action. Chandler responded by hiring Jack Demoise, a former FBI agent, to travel the National League “and look for troublemakers.” Then, finally, the commissioner telephoned Pennock. “If you move in on Robinson,” Chandler said, “I’ll move in on you.”

Chapman himself was slow recognizing the new thrust of things. Gene Hermanski, a Dodger outfielder for seven seasons, is white-haired now, but so vigorous and feisty in his seventies that someone describes him as a “walking advertisement
against
Grecian Formula” (a popular over-the-counter product that turns white hair dark). Hermanski, who was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and resides in central New Jersey, says, as so many old Dodgers do, “Jackie Robinson was a great man.”

“Philadelphia, Gene,” I say. “Do you remember Philadelphia, 1947?”

Hermanski’s eyes light. “That bastard Chapman.” Hermanski moves backwards on wings of memory. His eyes are burning now.

In Philadelphia, first game there, during pregame warmups, Chapman started shouting again. But not at Robinson this time. “Hey, Pee Wee,” Chapman yelled. “Yeah, you. Reese. How ya like playin’ with a fuckin’ nigger?”

Reese ignored Chapman, who shouted the question again. And yet a third time.

Reese stopped picking up ground balls and jogged over to Robinson at first base. Then, staring into the Philadelphia dugout, Reese put an arm around Jackie Robinson’s shoulders.

“Pee Wee didn’t say a word,” Gene Hermanski remembers. “But Chapman had his answer.”

Later that day or early the next, someone prominent in baseball placed a long-distance telephone call to Chapman. (Commissioner Chandler took credit for the call three or four decades later, but Chandler was a frightfully unreliable source.) The telephone call to Chapman probably came from Ford Frick, the president of the National League, or from one of Frick’s assistants.

The sense of the call was this: Chapman’s behavior was out of line. It had to stop. On moral grounds and on
practical
grounds as well.

Walter Winchell, the famous gossip columnist, had picked up reports on Chapman’s conduct. He was telling flunkies at the Stork Club in New York that he was going to “use the column to get Chapman out of baseball. I’ll nail him on my radio show, too. I’m gonna make a
big hit
on that
bigot
.”

The caller told Ben Chapman that organized baseball would not tolerate syndicated embarrassment. If Chapman intended to keep his job, he had better curb his tongue immediately. An apology would not be out of line.

Cornered, Chapman sent word to Robinson before the next day’s ballgame. He would like to start fresh. Maybe he
had
been kinda loud. Would Robinson pose with him for newspaper photographers?

In a remarkably forgiving mood, Robinson agreed. The surviving prints show each man looking as though he’d like to be ten thousand miles away, but after that Chapman never again dared to bait Jackie Robinson or Pee Wee Reese or any others among the athletes Branch Rickey proudly called in subsequent years “my ferocious gentlemen.”*

The final spasm of baseball racism, hurled forth against Robinson, quite the most serious, comes down to us in several versions. As I write these pages early in the 1990s, some of the principals from 1947 survive. But their memories, even the memories of those who want passionately to be honest, have grown blurry. Unlike the Christopher Isherwood heroine, an old ballplayer, an old newspaperman, is not a camera. Besides, not all
want
to be honest.

During the 1940s, the St. Louis Cardinals were the closest thing in the major leagues to a team representing the Old South. Born in another time, Jefferson Davis would have been a St. Louis Cardinal fan.

St. Louis, the “Mound City,” is mostly flat. It sits on the western bank of the Mississippi River, a major manufacturer of aircraft today and a colossal brewer of beer, no more racially troubled or racially tranquil than New York or Boston. But in the 1940s, St. Louis was militantly southern.
All
the hotels were segregated. (Robinson was not permitted to join his Dodger teammates at the Hotel Chase until 1953.) The stands at Sportsman’s Park were segregated until 1946. St. Louis newspapers, from the conservative
Globe Democrat
to the more liberal
Post-Dispatch
, routinely identified individuals in news stories as Negro. “John Walters, 58, Negro, was injured when fire swept through his residence. . . .”

Playing amid this white-supremacist climate in the south-western corner of the major leagues, the Cardinals evolved into a team of fire and primitive élan. Branch Rickey, vice president and business manager for twenty-one years, devised baseball’s first farm system, and soon strings of minor league teams in Rochester, Columbus, Houston, and smaller towns were developing young players for the big club. Rickey’s boss, Sam Breadon, had eastern roots. He began as a garage mechanic, worked hard, saved his money, and somehow acquired a Rolls-Royce dealership. Breadon obtained a controlling interest in the Cardinals for $20,000 in 1920. Like so many old-time baseball owners, Breadon was a flinty businessman, but he was also capable of small kindnesses, and the old garage mechanic was shrewd enough to let Rickey run his baseball team.

The famous Gashouse Gang, performing in St. Louis during the 1930s, included such uninhibited characters as Jay “Dizzy” Dean, Johnny Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin, and “Lippy” Leo Durocher. The manager, Frank Frisch, was a Fordham graduate, but the slant of the team was hillbilly and southern. During the 1934 World Series, which the Gashouse Gang won from Detroit, Dean and some others shouted nasty stuff at Hank Greenberg, whom Dean insisted on calling “Mo.” The Cards for decades were the Ku Klux Klan’s favorite team, an image that changed only slowly and grudgingly over many years with the ascent of Stan Musial, the greatest hitter I have ever seen — and a liberal Democrat.

The Cardinals won pennants in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1946 and won three of those four World Series. The Cards were strong and tough and raucous and dominant. Before leaving St. Louis for Brooklyn, Branch Rickey had put together a dynasty in the Mississippi Valley. Mickey Mantle remembers rooting for the Cardinals as a child, sitting beside a radio in Oklahoma. Fans came to Sportsman’s Park from Arkansas and Tennessee. The Cardinals were an absolute down-home triumph.

But in 1947 Sam Breadon felt beset. Rickey was gone. A pair of Mexican banditos — actually oil megamillionaires — Jorge and Alfonso Pasquel, were starting an “outlaw” league south of the Rio Grande. They had “stolen” the fine left-handed pitcher Max Lanier. Breadon worried obsessively about money. St. Louis, he told friends, really wasn’t big enough to support two major league teams, his Cardinals and the Browns. He talked of moving the Cardinals to Los Angeles.

The Cardinals of 1947, defending world champions, were a gifted group, but not a happy one. Almost everyone on the team felt underpaid. Cliques were developing. Some players were drinking heavily. The world champion Cardinals lost nine of eleven games in April and played no better than . 500 ball in May.

Except for Musial and the bibulous third baseman, George “Whitey” Kurowski, the team had a Confederate cast. Shortstop Marty Marion, captain and center fielder Terry Moore, and right fielder Enos Slaughter were all southerners. The manager, Eddie Dyer, was a native of Louisiana. The promising young catcher, Joe Garagiola, raised on “Dago Hill” in St. Louis, was not as enlightened as he would become.

These were the ‘47 Cardinals: losing, underpaid. They did not seem able to do much about either. What they
could
do was conspire. Several did.

“I heard talk,” Stan Musial says. “It was rough and racial and I can tell you a few things about that.” Musial is seventy as we speak at breakfast in St. Louis. He has been grand marshal of a parade in Tennessee the day before and is traveling to Washington tomorrow, but he has rearranged his schedule to make time to talk about something significant that makes him uncomfortable.

“First of all, everybody has racial feelings. We don’t admit it. We aren’t proud of it. But it’s there. And this is big league baseball, not an English tea, and ballplayers make noise. So I heard the words and I knew there was some feelings behind the words, but I didn’t take it seriously. That was baseball.

“I had no trouble myself with integration. I’d played with a black kid in high school,* for one thing. Second, I knew that integration was overdue.

“I make jokes now and then about being Polish. Actually my father, Lukas, was born in Poland but my mother, Mary Lancos, was Czech. They both came to America for the same reason. They wanted economic opportunity. Dad worked in a steel mill and he sweated but he made a decent living. I knew these things. My parents came to America for economic opportunity. That was the first thing Jackie Robinson was asking for, it seemed to me. An economic opportunity. That’s something of what America is about.

“For me at that time — I was twenty-six — saying all that would have been a speech and I didn’t know how to make speeches. Saying it to older players, that was beyond me. Besides, I thought the racial talk was just hot air.”

The leaders of the anti-Robinson movement on the Cardinals did not take Musial — who was in pain much of the time from appendicitis — into their confidence. They did talk to several Dodgers, including Dixie Walker. Some later claimed that Walker developed the idea of a general strike throughout the league. At first the Cardinals thought of striking on May 6, when the team was scheduled to play at Ebbets Field.

But Brooklyn was, after all, Robinson’s home turf. It made more sense, the conspirators decided, to wait until May 20 when the Dodgers played their opening game at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. Walker said he might go on strike himself then and enlist some other Dodgers to join. It began to look as though on the sixth of May seven Cardinals and several key Dodgers would refuse to take the field with Jackie Robinson.

Nor did the scheme stop there. Some Phillies might join the strike. Ben Chapman did not stand alone. The best pitcher in baseball, Ewell “the Whip” Blackwell of Cincinnati, didn’t care for integration. He could be recruited. As the Cardinals traveled about the circuit, the redneck ballplayers began loosely to organize a league-wide strike.

The Cardinals’ team physician, a doctor named Robert Hyland, liked to hear himself described as the surgeon general of baseball. Like most team physicians, Hyland was a ball fan and he enjoyed the camaraderie of major league athletes. Someone, no one remembers who, told Hyland of the strike plan. Hyland sought out Terry Moore, the St. Louis captain, called “the greatest center fielder I ever saw” by Joe DiMaggio. Moore was thirty-five years old, approaching the end of an outstanding career.