Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  The Courier had helped launch Joe Louis’s career, but no story in the paper’s history perked up circulation like the story of baseball’s integration. It started as early as 1938, when Smith began polling white players, managers, and owners as they came through Pittsburgh to play the Pirates, asking if they thought black ballplayers ought to be allowed to compete with white players. Smith, because he was black, wasn’t permitted in the press box for Pirates games. Rather than fight it, he conducted his interviews outside the ballpark and in the lobby of the Schenley Hotel. “Have you seen any Negro ballplayers you thought could play major league baseball?” he would offer as an opener. It was a nonthreatening question, and Smith was a nonthreatening figure, but it nevertheless took courage for him to ask. The results were encouraging: Roughly three out of every four interviewees expressed support for integration. Smith’s editors liked the stories so much they gave him a raise.

  Other writers around the country conducted similar campaigns. Smith was joined by Sam Lacy, who worked for the Washington Tribune and the Chicago Defender before joining the Baltimore Afro-American, as well as by Joe Bostic of the People’s Voice in New York. The communist Daily Worker agitated on the issue, too. In 1943, Commissioner Landis and baseball’s owners, responding to pressure brought by the black journalists, granted Smith, Lacy, and a few others an opportunity to state their case. It was a bit of showmanship on the part of Landis, who had hoped to get the journalists off his back. To heighten the drama of their presentation, the newspapermen brought the controversial singer and actor Paul Robeson along for the meeting. If a black man could play Othello as part of an all-white cast on Broadway, as Robeson had done, why couldn’t a black man play baseball on an all-white team? the actor asked. The visitors’ presentation lasted about thirty minutes. When it was over, the owners stared in silence. After the delegation departed, Landis said there would be no discussion. At first glance, the meeting seemed a disaster. But Smith thought he detected a glimmer in the eye of Branch Rickey, a small flicker to suggest Brooklyn’s owner had taken more interest than the rest.

  The following year, Landis was dead, replaced by Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, lawyer, former U.S. senator, and former governor of Kentucky—a stubborn man and yet as difficult to dislike as his nickname would suggest. Chandler was a southern Democrat, but a fairly conservative man. No one knew for certain where he stood on integration. Smith, along with the communists and a few other interested writers, continued to pound away, picking up supporters in the mainstream press. Then, in April 1945, came a breakthrough: In Boston, a white city councilman named Isadore Muchnick, apparently trying to maintain his hold on office as more black families moved into his district, began pressing the Red Sox and Braves to integrate. Many years later, Smith would say he had phoned Muchnick and suggested to him that the integration of baseball would make a great campaign issue. Muchnick, a liberal, threatened to deny the teams the annual permits required to play baseball on Sunday if they didn’t make some racial progress. Eddie Collins, general manager of the Red Sox, responded by telling Muchnick that no black player had ever asked for a tryout. When Smith heard the excuse, he contacted Muchnick and told him he had three black prospects eager for tryouts with the Boston teams. The prospects Smith chose for the job were Sam Jethroe, a speedy outfielder with the Cleveland Buckeyes; Marvin Williams, a second baseman with the Philadelphia Stars; and Jackie Robinson, then playing shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs. Why Jethroe, Williams, and Robinson? Why not Paige or Gibson? For one thing, Smith wanted younger men. He wanted everyday players, not pitchers. He wanted intelligent men who had played with white athletes and who weren’t afraid to take a little harassment. He wanted men capable of assimilation. In other words, he wanted men like himself. In explaining his choice of Robinson, completely unproven as a baseball player to that point, he said, he “wasn’t necessarily the best player. He was the best at that time for this particular situation.”

  The Braves were out of town when Smith and his players arrived by train, but the Red Sox, after some hemming and hawing and delays for rain, finally agreed to grant the players a tryout. All three of the men played well in Boston, and Robinson played especially well, but it didn’t matter. Team officials did just enough to get Muchnick off their backs, and then sent Smith and his crew packing. The Red Sox would wait another twelve years to bring a black man, second baseman Pumpsie Green, to the majors, making them the last team in baseball to integrate. For all the talk about Boston’s Curse of the Bambino—the notion that the Red Sox went eighty-six years without a World Series championship as some sort of karmic punishment for trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920—the curse of Jackie Robinson hurt them far more.

  • • •

  On his way back to Pittsburgh, Smith stopped in Brooklyn and visited Rickey at his office on Montague Street, telling him all about the tryout in Boston. At the time, the Dodger boss was talking about establishing a new Negro league to help fill Ebbets Field when his big-leaguers were out of town. Rickey asked Smith which black players he had brought with him to Boston. “And when I said ‘Jackie Robinson,’ ” Smith recalled, “his bushy eyebrows raised, and he said, ‘Jackie Robinson! I knew he was a good football player . . . but I didn’t know he played baseball.’ ”

  A week later, Rickey telephoned Smith and asked again about Robinson, although he never used his name, lending to the conversation a sense of mystery and urgency. Smith had the feeling that Rickey was intrigued by Robinson’s fame as a college football player, that it might make him a strong attraction at the box office. Rickey told Smith that he was interested in hiring “that young man from the West” for his new Negro-league team, and that he was sending a scout, Clyde Sukeforth, to have a look at the prospect. Smith tipped off Robinson, telling him to be on his best behavior when Sukeforth arrived. And though he had a feeling that Rickey might be interested in Robinson for the major leagues, not for some new Negro league, Smith put his ego aside. He had more than enough evidence to splash a big story speculating on Rickey’s plan, but he held off. The outcome meant more to him than the scoop.

  Robinson, his shoulder aching, wasn’t playing much when Sukeforth came around in late August 1945. But in one Monarchs game, with the scout watching, Robinson displayed some of the temper for which he had been well known in California. Some accounts of the incident have suggested that Robinson clenched a fist and prepared to throw a punch at the umpire. Sukeforth reported the incident to Rickey, and Rickey in turn called Smith. Was the young man from the West “a belligerent type of individual?” he asked. Smith lied: “I didn’t want to tell Rickey, ‘Yes, he’s a bad guy to get along with.’ . . . I told Robinson to watch his conduct. Sure, I knew he was belligerent.”

  A few months later, when Rickey agreed to sign Robinson, he added Smith to his payroll, too, at a salary of fifty dollars a week. It was agreed that Smith would continue writing for the Courier, where he also earned fifty dollars a week. But he would serve as Robinson’s chaperone and Rickey’s unofficial Negro-league scout. “Now, Mr. Rickey,” the journalist wrote in a personal letter, “I want you to feel as though the publishers of the Pittsburgh Courier and I are a distinct part of this undertaking. We do not want you to take all of the responsibility with regards to help to strengthen these boys spiritually and morally for the part to play in this great adventure. For that reason I want you to feel you can call upon me for any cooperation which you think I may be able to render.”

  Smith rendered every kind of service. He bunked with Robinson; wrote the ballplayer’s weekly newspaper column for him; helped find hotels and restaurants on the road when whites-only businesses turned them away; and turned his own column into a long-running advertisement for the benefits of racial integration. Dixie Walker and Ben Chapman may have done Robinson a favor by making him a victim, but it was Smith more than anyone who created the impression that Robinson was untroubled by the victimization, that he was letting the insults roll off his back when, in fact
, he was absorbing them all like blows to the gut. Robinson was never going to be baseball’s Gandhi, but Smith helped create the illusion of serenity, at least for one season.

  “Through all of this,” Smith said, “I always tried to keep it from becoming a flamboyant, highly militant thing. And I think that’s why it succeeded. If there had been picketing and all that type of thing, this would never have developed the way it has. . . . There were agitators at that time, people who knew the part I was playing, Negro organizations who wanted to be a part of it, to push it faster, and I kept them out of it. . . . We always tried to play this thing in low-key. That was Rickey’s idea, too.”

  • • •

  The Pirates, like the Dodgers, had a new first baseman in 1947, one who knew a little something about discrimination. Hank Greenberg was a New York City kid, a product of James Monroe High School, and one of the game’s greatest sluggers during the 1930s. Though there had been other Jews in baseball, Greenberg became the game’s first Jewish superstar as a member of the Detroit Tigers. For Jews who were otherwise agnostic when it came to baseball, he was the only ballplayer who mattered. “Moses in Cleats,” they called him, though only because it was catchy; Greenberg was not observant of his faith and never attempted to be a leader of his people. “Sure there was added pressure being Jewish,” he wrote in his autobiography, noting that he heard cries of “Jew bastard,” “kike,” and “sheenie” from both players and fans. “I used to get frustrated as hell. Sometimes I wanted to go up in the stands and beat the shit out of them.”

  Playing for the Tigers, Greenberg led the American League in home runs four times, and twice won the Most Valuable Player Award. He was drafted into the army at the age of thirty, re-enlisted after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and missed more than four full seasons of baseball. When he returned in 1945, at age thirty-five, his swing was as sweet as ever, but his legs wobbled a bit. After the 1946 season, the Tigers sold him to the Pirates. Greenberg considered retirement but was lured back by a contract offering one hundred thousand dollars—the first six-figure salary in the game’s history—and a promise that Pittsburgh would shorten the left-field fence at Forbes Field to about 335 feet. Reporters began calling the area behind the chicken-wire fence, where his home runs soon would land, “Greenberg Gardens.”

  Greenberg and Robinson met in the third inning of their first game at Forbes Field. Robinson of late had been hitting the ball nicely, well enough that he wasn’t self-conscious about bunting anymore. So as pitcher Ed Bahr made his pitch, Robinson slid his right hand up the barrel of the bat, squared around, and tapped gently at the ball. It rolled back toward Bahr, who scrambled to field it and throw to first. When the throw sailed wide and toward the outfield, Robinson tried to make the turn toward second. But the first baseman, Greenberg, was in his way. The men collided. Robinson tumbled to the ground. He picked himself up and took off again for second, where he arrived in plenty of time.

  “That particular play was the type that prejudiced writers and players and big league owners used to say would cause a riot,” Smith wrote after the game. “Those who have fought against the entrance of Negro players into the majors have always contended that the kind of collision that Robinson and Greenberg had would only result in a free-for-all and the ‘good’ name of baseball would be smeared.” Quite the contrary, Smith reported, later in the game, when Robinson reached first on another single, Greenberg expressed his concern and admiration for the rookie.

  “Hope I didn’t hurt you,” he said. “I tried to get out of your way, but it was impossible.”

  “I didn’t get hurt,” Robinson replied. “I was just knocked off balance. . . .”

  “How are things going?” Greenberg asked.

  “Pretty good,” he answered.

  Greenberg offered Robinson a few encouraging words, and Robinson sang the big first baseman’s praises after the game: “He sure is a swell guy. He helped me a lot by saying the things he did. I found out that not all the guys on the other teams are bad heels. I think Greenberg, for instance, is pulling for me to make good.”

  Smith visited the Dodger clubhouse after each game in Pittsburgh and reported that much of the tension seemed to be dissipating. Robinson, he wrote, “has actually become a part of the club.” As an example, Smith cited the third game with the Pirates, when pitcher Fritz Ostermueller threw a fastball up and in. Robinson, unable to duck it in time, raised his arm to protect his face and fell to the ground.

  “When the ball hit him a deathly silence hovered over the entire park,” Smith wrote. “Jackie was on the ground grimacing in pain.” The Dodger bench emptied as teammates checked to see if he was all right. As soon as Robinson got up and ran to first, some of his teammates began shouting threats at Ostermueller. Stanky was particularly loud and to the point, warning that the Dodgers would get even when Ostermueller’s turn to hit arrived. Though the taunting was profane, Smith interpreted the Dodgers’ attacks on the pitcher as “expressions of their regard for Robinson.” Later in the game, Frankie Gustine singled and went to first, where he apologized to Robinson on Ostermueller’s behalf. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it,” Gustine told Robinson, adding that he, too, was happy to see the rookie getting on well in the big leagues. That’s how Smith, always looking on the bright side, reported it, at least.

  The Pirates took two of three games. By now a pattern was emerging on the road trip. Huge crowds were coming out to see Robinson, he was giving them plenty of cause to cheer—hitting .428 since leaving Brooklyn, raising his average to .299—and the Dodgers were losing. Robinson admitted to feeling more confident. “Perhaps I do look bad on a curve and a low outside pitch occasionally,” he said. “But the pitchers haven’t found any weakness yet, I guess.”

  Coach Sukeforth said the rookie had reason to feel good. “The guys on the team are all for him. Yes, sir,” he smiled. “Mr. Jackie Robinson’s going to do all right.”

  TWELVE

  “A SMILE OF ALMOST PAINFUL JOY”

  It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, May 18, and Chicago Stadium was packed to its capacity, but the event had nothing to do with baseball. The fifteen thousand gathered came purely to express their patriotism as part of “I Am an American Day,” the date thus proclaimed by President Truman. The crowd heard speeches by General George Churchill Kenney, commanding general of the Strategic Air Command; Governor Dwight Green; Mayor Martin H. Kennelly; and movie stars Edward G. Robinson and Dale Evans. Some five hundred immigrants became naturalized citizens on the spot. It was all part of the postwar rah-rah, the president’s effort to enliven the spirit of democracy in a country still recovering from war.

  Meanwhile, a bigger and more spontaneous display of Americanism was shaping up across town at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. Fans filled every seat and every available space in which they were permitted to stand. When the last click of the turnstiles had been recorded, 46,572 paying customers were wedged into the cozy ballpark on the city’s North Side, and 20,000 more clustered outside, trying to figure out a way in. It was another record. Not since 1930, on a day when 30,000 women were admitted free of charge and overflow crowds were permitted to stand on the field, had so many fans packed Wrigley. None of the reporters on hand estimated the number of black fans in the crowd, although photos from the game and eyewitness accounts suggest they turned out in massive numbers.

  Chicago was the capital of the black migration, the epicenter of the nation’s great demographic shift. The Negro problem, as the sociologists called it, had once been a southern problem. Now, almost overnight, it had become a northern problem, and an urban problem. In 1900, Chicago had been home to only about 30,000 black people. By 1945, that number had grown to about 350,000, or roughly 10 percent of the city. The most striking thing about the population in Chicago, beyond its great size, was its solidarity. “Its Negro district is immense and unbroken,” St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton wrote in the introduction to their 1945 book Black Metropolis. In New York, while H
arlem was the African-American hub, there were several black neighborhoods of considerable size scattered throughout the city. But that was not the case in Chicago, where black residents clustered almost entirely on the South Side. In Chicago, it was possible for white people to live on the North Side and go days or weeks without seeing a black face. Nowhere else in America was the chasm so great.

  That’s what made for such a stunning sight on Sunday morning, May 18, as black fans from the South Side began arriving on the North Side by bus, train, and car, coalescing around the neighborhood that contained Wrigley Field. Allan H. Selig, known to friends as Bud, counted himself among the astonished. The future commissioner of Major League Baseball was just twelve years old, soon to give up his own dream of playing the game professionally. He traveled by train from Milwaukee to Chicago for the game, found himself sitting in the upper deck, and feeling as if he and his companions (one of them Herb Kohl, a future U.S. senator, the other a cousin who taught at the University of Chicago) were the only white people around. “It was so exciting,” he recalled. “It made a lasting impression on me.”

  Once again, the black media had warned fans to behave. Fay Young, writing in the Defender, reminded spectators that they would be on trial as much as Robinson would—and that Robinson wouldn’t face jail time if he messed up. “The telephone booths are not men’s wash rooms,” Young wrote. “The sun and liquor, even if you drink it before you head north, won’t mix . . . Don’t tell us all our fans are Sunday school members and behave like Emily Post would have us. Tain’t so. . . . The Negro fans can do more to get Jackie Robinson out of the major leagues than all the disgruntled players alive. President Frick . . . and other fair minded men can regulate the players but they can’t regulate the ignorant, loud-mouth, uncouth or whiskey crazed fans.”