Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  The cynosure of neighboring eyes was Jackie Robinson. He fouled a pitch. Strike one. The white fans cheered. A curve bounced. Ball one. Now, from behind the ropes, came a cheer from the blacks. The high-decibel competitive cheering persisted and grew louder. I had found a seat in the press box, which was supported by slim poles and had walls of glass. I thought suddenly, When the race riot starts and the poles get knocked down, how many reporters will be killed by shards of glass? Nor was I alone in anxiety. George “Shotgun” Shuba, who was playing left field, said he began considering how, when the riot began, he could climb the wall behind him to escape.

  There was no riot, just another uncomfortable afternoon of racism. Then we all boarded an (integrated) dining car to eat shrimp cocktail and steaks before moving to our berths or into the (integrated) club car for cards or reading or chatter. But the next day, when we debarked in Montgomery, the racism surrounded all of us again, as strong and virulent as ever. I think a good description of life with the Dodgers in the South back then is contained in the current psychological term “bipolar.” We had a pleasant integrated existence in the train. Then as soon as we stepped off—raw apartheid.

  But beyond our shuttling through what the crusading sports editor Stanley Woodward called “the Hookworm Belt,” something beautiful was happening. Like it or not the racists saw—they had to see—that right there before their eyes on the ball fields blacks and whites were working together and usually, since the Dodgers won most of the time, working together in triumph.

  “And even beyond that,” Rickey said, proudly, “in the daily papers. A box score tells you who made hits and who scored runs. It does not tell you anything about a man’s religion nor does it even suggest the color of his skin.”

  Anyway, each and every April I was glad to get the hell out of Dixie.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  AS I HAVE MENTIONED before, and may well mention again, Rickey traced his integration decision clear back to 1903, when the manager of the Oliver Hotel in South Bend tried to bar Charles Thomas from lodging for a night. To a devout Christian believer such as Rickey, the incident resonated with the Bible story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem. Once again, there was no room at the inn. The episode was fundamental to Rickey’s emotional development and to his long-held determination to bring blacks into the major leagues. When finally he acted, when finally he was free to act, no fewer than 43 seasons later, he found himself ambushed at a secretive baseball meeting held in Cleveland on April 26, 1945. That is another story now clamoring to be told. But to understand the forces that were at play on that contentious afternoon, one first needs to remember that Rickey was a lawyer long before he established himself as a premium baseball man. He did not move to integrate the game until he determined that the law was on his side. Even so, if Rickey read T. S. Eliot—I am not certain that he did—he would have agreed that April is the cruelest month, although not simply because it mixes memory and desire. Rickey’s April of ’45 mixed ostracism, anger and bigotry.

  Again, as with the fans at Ebbets Field, we encounter that special closeness between Jews and blacks, for baseball integration proceeded from the passion of a white Methodist Republican (Rickey), the foresight of a conservative Episcopalian governor (Thomas E. Dewey) and a Jewish counterstrike at anti-Semitism.

  For a significant part of the 20th century organized medicine—the American Medical Association and the governing bodies at medical schools—sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the lucrative business of doctoring. One reason was coldly economic. The WASPs at the top did not want to share the shekels—so to speak—with Jews. Another was irrationally emotional. Do we want to have leering Jews examining our naked Christian ladies?

  The situation was particularly dramatic in New York City, where thousands of outstanding Jewish science students were routinely denied admission to medical schools, notably the ones affiliated with the Ivy bastions, Columbia and Cornell. As in Brooklyn, Jews made up a significant percentage of the voters in the city at large, and that was the wedge that various Jewish groups, led by the famous reform rabbi Stephen Wise, used to persuade the state legislature to hold hearings in 1944.

  These proved to be a disaster for the Establishment bigots. One dean at Cornell Medical School said that of course a Jewish quota was in effect. No matter how many qualified Jews applied, no more than 5 percent of a freshman class “could be followers of the Hebrew religion.” The dean defended the quota with such stubborn arrogance that some listening to his words heard echoes of Hitlerism. Out of that came the drafting of the so-called Ives-Quinn law, which made job discrimination on the basis of race or religion a crime in New York State. (No mention of age or sex discrimination appeared. Those would have to wait for another time.) Soon journalists and others were calling this new law, remarkable in its day, FEP, for Fair Employment Practices.

  Governor Dewey signed the FEP bill on March 12, 1945, using 22 pens during a crowded ceremony at the Red Room of the state capitol in Albany. The right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler furiously attacked the new law as “pernicious heresy against the ancient privilege of human beings to hate.” But the Federal Council of [Protestant] Churches; the American Jewish Congress; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing; and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP figuratively cheered.

  A prominent black news photographer, the late Alfredo “Chick” Solomon, covered the 22-pen signing and drove 150 miles at high (and probably illegal) speed from the state capitol to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where quite coincidentally officials of the Negro National League were holding a routine meeting. Chick 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.”

  Solomon’s view of the power of the law proved optimistic. Change did not come in a rush. (It was not until 10 years later, for example, that the New York Yankees employed their first black major leaguer, the redoubtable catcher Elston Howard. (I have not known a finer gentleman in the game.)

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  I FIRST HEARD ABOUT the 1945 baseball meeting at which Rickey was excoriated from his grandson, Branch B. Rickey, then president of the Pacific Coast League and himself a man of considerable eloquence. On the night of September 23, 1997, in the sedate college town of Princeton, New Jersey, Arnold Rampersad, then Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and African-American Studies, organized a campus evening called “Remembering Branch Rickey.” Rampersad, who was born in the island state of Trinidad and Tobago, had written a well-received biography of the poet Langston Hughes and then a life of Jackie Robinson, authorized and to some extent controlled by Rachel Robinson, Jack’s strong-willed widow. As Jacqueline Kennedy earlier demonstrated, the influence of a willful widow on the posthumous biography of a hero husband exemplifies the term “mixed blessing.”

  “Did Rachel have editorial control?” I asked.

  “No,” Rampersad said, “but she brought to bear emotional pressure.”

  Thus the Robinson one encounters in Rampersad’s book is considerably less charged with testosterone than the Robinson I remember. Rampersad, an interesting black academic, told me his forebears on his father’s side had come to the Caribbean from India. “It’s a little ironic that I hold the chair I do at Princeton,” he said, “because Woodrow Wilson, whatever his virtues, was a bigot.” Rampersad later moved on to Stanford. In 2010 he was awarded a medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  That September night in Princeton the panelists were Branch B. Rickey; Sharon Robinson, Jack’s daughter; and myself. Our moderator was another high-powered academic, Sean Wilentz, history professor and director of American studies at Princeton. (Wilentz made later news in the 2008 presidential campaign with slash-and-burn attacks on Barack Obama and “the liberal intelle
ctuals who abdicated their responsibility to provide unblinking and rigorous analysis of him.” Wilentz himself grew up among liberal intellectuals in New York, where his father, Eli, founded the Eighth Street Bookshop, a gathering place in Greenwich Village for such notable writers as W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings and Jack Kerouac.)

  Most interesting at the start in Princeton, at least to me, was the fact that our audience of several hundred included the entire varsity baseball team. Coach Tom O’Connell believed that remembering Branch Rickey was, or anyway should be, as important to young ballplayers as learning how to hit behind a runner. The most passionate speaker turned out to be Branch B. After his grandfather moved to break the big-league color line, Branch B. said, the other owners gathered in a secret meeting and denounced him. According to young Branch, the rival magnates stormed about and shouted that integration could very well destroy baseball. Talk about slash and burn. “To a man,” young Branch said, in ringing tones, “everyone in the room condemned my grandfather. No other owner, not a single one, stood up for him. Among men he thought were colleagues and friends, my grandfather found himself utterly and completely alone.” In the shocked silence that followed Branch’s speech, I remembered words that my own father said were uttered once by Abraham Lincoln. After a contentious debate during which every member of the cabinet opposed his decision to go public on a matter of consequence, Lincoln said calmly, “One man in the right constitutes a majority.” The next day he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

  When the Princeton proceedings ended, Branch and I eased back with a few drinks at the Nassau Inn, a Princeton tavern that dates from 1756, when Princeton was a mostly Quaker town, a small colonial landmark between New Brunswick and Trenton. I asked where he had heard about the meeting that so roundly condemned his grandfather. “From my grandfather himself,” Branch said. “He spoke about it more than once.”

  Criticism from the media bothered Rickey, but usually only to a mild degree. He recognized that he was more literate and more intelligent than the sportswriters who busied themselves slamming him. When such attack dogs as Dick Young and Jimmy Powers of the raucous tabloid New York Daily News referred to him as “El Cheapo,” Rickey contained himself. “After all,” he told me once, “Young didn’t like Jackie Robinson, either, and I understand”—a malevolent chuckle burst forth—“he is not even enthusiastic about his wife.” Young was renowned throughout press boxes as a philanderer. No cocktail waitress’s private parts were safe after a night game when Dick Young, nicknamed Young Dick, came to town.

  To Rickey the assault from other baseball men was far more wounding than press criticism. It was a shattering explosion detonated by people whom he had regarded as colleagues and friends. Rickey found their racism devastating. Their attack left him feeling threatened and humiliated. For all his days Rickey clung to a mystical sense of the goodness of baseball as a homegrown American institution. He never got over the bigoted attacks directed against him from within the game’s fraternity and in time he even exaggerated their magnitude. People do that, of course. We all exaggerate the pain of episodes that hurt us badly, be it a divorce, a dislocated knee or a proposed expulsion.

  Keeping blacks out of organized ball for more than six decades was the work of many people and proceeded with the tacit—and sometimes outspoken—approval of American society at large. As far as I can learn, there were no sustained calls from any groups, black or white, to boycott alabaster baseball, to hit the magnates where they were most sensitive. That place was not the heart, but the wallet.

  One eloquent individual protest survives from 1939. It was issued by Wendell Smith in the prominent black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier. Under the heading “A Strange Tribe,” Smith wrote:

  Why we continue to flock to major league ballparks, spending our hard earned dough, screaming and hollering, stamping our feet and clapping our hands, begging and pleading for some white batter to knock some white pitcher’s ears off, almost having fits if the home team loses and crying for joy when they win, is a question that probably never will be answered satisfactorily. What in the world are we thinking anyway?

  The fact that major league baseball refuses to admit Negro players within its folds makes the question that much more perplexing. Surely, it’s sufficient reason for us to stop spending our money and time in their ballparks. Major league baseball does not want us. It never has. Still, we continue to help support the institution that places a bold “Not Welcome” sign over its thriving portal. . . . We black folks are a strange tribe! . . .

  We have been fighting for years in an effort to make owners of major league baseball teams admit Negro players. But they won’t do it. Probably never will. We keep on crawling, begging and pleading for recognition just the same. We know that they don’t want us, but we still keep giving them our money. Keep on going to their ballgames and shouting until we are blue in the face. Oh, we’re optimistic, faithful, prideless—we pitiful black folk.

  Yes sir—we black folk are a strange tribe!

  Presidents from William Howard Taft to Franklin Delano Roosevelt had appeared for cameras on Opening Day, dutifully throwing out a first ball and turning a blind eye toward segregation. The mainstream press accepted segregated baseball quite matter-of-factly. The Establishment press practiced segregation itself, informally but no less rigidly. Nor was this just the policy of the wealthy elitists who published, say, the New York Times. In 1939, when Wendell Smith applied for membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a group consisting of and run by working sports reporters, he was turned down.

  Major-league baseball was integrated for 15 years before mainstream newspapers generally began hiring black sportswriters. During that time, writers from such prominent black newspapers as New York’s Amsterdam News were required to sit in the back rows of press boxes, as if they were riding buses on rural blacktops in Alabama.

  A prominent newspaperman named Tom Swope, sports editor of the Cincinnati Post, filled the press box air with racist slurs. When Jackie Robinson came to bat, Swope liked to crow, “The jig is up.” When I told him to bridle his tongue, Swope said, “What’s the matter? Can’t I call a spade a spade?” Then Swope laughed. In 1956 Bob Teague became the first black sportswriter to work for a white-owned New York newspaper. He was employed by the New York Times. Some time after that, he engaged me in an intense discussion. Teague said he hoped that the Times had hired him because he was good, not just because he was black. We never found out how good a sportswriter Teague might have become, because a few years later he jumped to TV news.

  The tide was running against the bigots, and it had been for some time.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  AS THE DECADE OF the 1930s arrived, and with it the Great Depression, calls for change (and cries for help) rumbled through America. As a third of the nation scrambled for food and shelter, as college graduates sold apples from street carts, people collectively began to realize that the dream of a “more perfect union” had not yet arrived. In 1933 the American unemployment rate reached 24.9 percent. Put differently, 11,385,000 Americans were out of work. Millions more were grossly underpaid or had to pursue pathetic make-work occupations. I remember walking with my father on St. Mark’s Avenue in Brooklyn one pleasant May afternoon when a stranger approached us holding several boxes of yellow pencils. He had a thin, intelligent face, but his clothes were shabby.

  “Pencils?” he said to my father. “Three for a dime.”

  My father fumbled a bit and found a dollar bill. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ll pick up the pencils another time.”

  After we moved on, I asked, “Why didn’t you take the pencils, Dad?”

  “Because now he can sell them to somebody else.”

  Beyond the cities, hundreds of thousands of farmers were losing their land, their herds, their homes. Foreclosures swept across the Great Plains. The nation had never experienced anything like this before and the American people and the American Establishment were sha
ken clear down to their ganglia.

  Woody Guthrie, from Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, gave voice to the people—mostly people of the left—when he sang:

  Oh, I don’t want your millions, mister.

  I don’t want your diamond ring.

  All I want is the right to live, mister.

  Give me back my job again.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  We worked to build this country, mister,

  While you enjoyed a life of ease.

  You’ve stolen all that we’ve built, mister,

  Now our children starve and freeze.

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

  Think me dumb if you wish, mister,

  Call me green or blue or red.

  There’s just one thing that I know, mister,

  Our hungry babies must be fed.

  It is instructive to look at the results of the 1932 presidential election.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat 22,821,857 57.3%

  Herbert Hoover Republican 15,761,841 39.6%

  Norman Thomas Socialist 884,781 2.2%

  William Z. Foster Communist 102,991 0.3%

  Although the actual bloc on the far left, 2.5 percent, may not seem large, almost a million Americans—987,772—voted either Socialist or Communist. Not a mighty wind of change, perhaps, but certainly a noticeable breeze. Subsequently the Communist Party, USA, became a leading advocate for baseball integration.