Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Thomas got three turns at bat, 30 swings, against Claude Crocker, a fast 19-year-old left-hander. Bostic said Thomas sent several drives a long way. Then it was done. McDuffie and Thomas returned to the dressing room and donned street clothes. Neither ever heard from Rickey again. Bostic had a good sense of drama, but whether his Bear Mountain adventure advanced baseball integration is subject to question.

  Rickey later said that McDuffie, then 32, “has a major flaw in his delivery. He does not follow through properly. That could take time to correct and McDuffie is not a young pitcher.” Rickey had this to say about Thomas: “I have many better rookies than that fellow. I wouldn’t be interested in Dave Thomas if he were 24 years old. And he’s 34.”

  Writing in the black-owned Chicago Defender, Andrew “Doc” Young said, “If that was a fair tryout, I’m a billionaire. And I’m not.” The leader of the mainstream white press, the New York Times, tried its best to ignore the episode. In later years I sat next to Roscoe McGowen, the Times Dodger beat man for several seasons, in press boxes. Roscoe was too genteel to indulge in the crude bigotry of a Tom Swope, but politically he stood, as the saying goes, to the right of Attila the Hun. He never championed Jackie Robinson’s cause and he seldom missed an opportunity to underline any error Robinson made, even when the error had no bearing on the final score.

  McGowen chose to ignore McDuffie and Thomas, and the Times elected to rely on an unsigned dispatch by the Associated Press that ran under a two-column headline:

  TWO NEGROES ARE TRIED OUT

  BY DODGERS BUT THEY FAIL

  TO IMPRESS PRESIDENT RICKEY

  Joe Bostic stayed in sports until his death in 1988 and during the 1970s, in a different racial climate, he worked as the ringside announcer at Madison Square Garden. But his greatest day, he always maintained, was the one in April 1945, when McDuffie and Showboat failed to make the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Just as well, perhaps. About four months later the FBI arrested Showboat Thomas. While playing for the New York Cubans he had been moonlighting as a security guard at the military facility called the Army Port of Embarkation, located on a number of piers in Brooklyn. Thomas, and several other guards, were charged with stealing 126,000 safety razor blades, which were to have been shipped to troops in Europe. The arrest brought to light another fact. Thomas was not 34 years old. He was 39. In time he avoided prison with a plea bargain. After that he sank into obscurity.

  Where, then, can we find a hard-driving press arising and demanding, time after time, year after year, the integration of baseball here and now? Militant and unflinching protests appeared consistently in only one place, the sports pages of the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party, USA. Who wrote most of those protest pieces and led the charge? A soft-spoken journalist from Brooklyn named Lester Rodney, who was born into a mercantile Jewish family. The Brooklyn Jewish–Negro connection never looked tighter.

  Battle lines were being drawn even well before Bostic at Bear Mountain. On one side stood rednecks, racists and club owners, sometimes all embodied in a single person. The game is white, the ball is white and both so shall remain. Opposing this bunko-bunker thinking was Rickey, a man some called a full-scale religious nut. His steadfast ally: the principal sportswriter of the Daily Worker, published by the Communist Party of America, an organization that swore a solemn oath to atheism.

  [Choir as a hymn]

  Integration is the path of righteousness.

  Hallelujah!

  May the Good Lord bless biracial second base.

  [Sing as a chant]

  Religion is the opiate of the masses.

  Most club owners are mini-minded jackasses,

  Ball Fans of the World—Unite!

  Better Red Than Wrong.

  FIVE

  THE ORIGINAL BIG RED MACHINE

  THE LESTER RODNEY I REMEMBER FROM THE long-ago press boxes of New York was slim, bespectacled and soft-voiced. Dick Young of the Daily News was caustic and loud. Benny Epstein of the Daily Mirror was funny and loud. Louis Effrat of the New York Times was opinionated and loud. Baseball writers were a swaggering lot back then, but Rodney was recessive. You might never have noticed him if you hadn’t read his stuff.

  In the middle of the 20th century I admired numerous warriors of the left: Henry Wallace, who ran for president as a Progressive in 1948 and spoke of “the century of the common man”; Paul Robeson, whose recordings of anti-fascist songs made even Bing Crosby’s baritone sound thin; Howard Fast, who wrote Citizen Tom Paine and Spartacus, easy-reading novels—books for bright children, Ring Lardner Jr. said—that became political manuals for left-wing Americans. Myself, I was more left than right, but I was not comfortable having communists as close friends any more than I was comfortable with the extremist Roman Catholics who said Jews murdered Jesus, or the Protestant fundamentalists who said Darwin was a fraud. These folk, it seemed to me, followed inflexible directives and embraced a theopolitical mysticism that was a long way from the contemporary world of reason. (Ring, once Red as the flag of Soviet Russia, was the remarkable exception. His communism never interfered with his clear thinking.)

  Lester Rodney and I exchanged greetings, little more, when I began covering baseball for the Herald Tribune in 1952. An episode that led to a humiliating Communist directive caused me really to notice him. The clubhouses at the old Polo Grounds were situated in a green blockhouse back of center field, about 500 feet from home plate. After games the ballplayers had to take a long walk or trot to the dressing room surrounded by clamoring fans. Following one game, a teenager ran up behind Leo Durocher, snatched the Giants cap from Durocher’s bald scalp, and tried to disappear into the mob.

  Rodney and Durocher got along. Lester told me once, with a flash of pride, that Durocher had said, “For a fucking Communist, you know your baseball.” Observing the cap snatch, Rodney wrote a piece saying that ballplayers and even managers were working people and the fans, working people themselves, should treat baseball men with respect. Next day it developed that police had caught the cap thief. He was Puerto Rican. John Gates, editor in chief of the Daily Worker, issued a ukase along these lines: Puerto Ricans are a persecuted, exploited minority. The boy who stole Durocher’s cap did what he did in response to white American capitalist prejudice. Therefore the theft was appropriate. That was the Communist Party line and a day later it rang out shrilly through the corrective column John Gates required Lester Rodney to write.

  The Daily Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party, USA, began publication in 1924, the same year, coincidentally, that Fleetwood Walker died. The Worker attracted such gifted contributors as Richard Wright, the prominent black novelist, but for most of its span, the dominant aspect of the Worker was its adherence to the Communist Party line, as printed in red block letters by Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. The paper reached a circulation of 35,000 at its peak and I saw it on many newsstands around New York, proclaiming, “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism.”

  Many of the Worker’s editorial positions matched those of moderate liberals. For most of the 1930s it fiercely opposed Hitler and Mussolini. It supported the Spanish loyalists against the brutal fascist Francisco Franco. But some of its advocacy was bizarre. To deal with white American hostility toward Negroes, the Worker at one time proposed the creation of a self-contained all-black republic to be carved out of portions of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

  “What will this new republic be called?” someone asked.

  A non-communist answered, “The Ukraine.”

  Before Rodney, the Worker had taken a hard line on sports. “I don’t believe that [New York Giant] Blondie Ryan is a conscious agent of the capitalist class seeking to dope the workers with his swell infielding,” a Worker story began early in 1934. “But when a couple of dozen Blondie Ryans and [star first baseman] Bill Terrys, with the aid of hundreds of sportswriters, rivet the attention of millions of workers upon themselves rather than upon unemployment, wage cuts and wars, the
n we can draw the conclusion that Ryan, et al., consciously serve the purpose of the ruling class.” The Giants won the National League pennant in 1933 when Terry, a sullen Southerner, batted .322. But Ryan, the “swell” infielder, made an appalling number of errors at shortstop: 42.

  Aside from shaky reporting, you can hear in that Worker story an echo from antiquity. The Roman elite famously pacified the masses with bread and circuses. Alternately, you can regard the piece simply as ludicrous. When I covered baseball for the Herald Tribune, big-league play did indeed rivet my attention. But I recognized also that my salary, $72.50 a week, was outrageously low. It stayed low until I nailed an offer from Sports Illustrated. Then the Trib jumped me to $10,000 a year. Riveting on baseball in no way distracted me from trying to make a decent living. The big shift in the Daily Worker’s policies came in 1935. It was then that a Moscow conference, attended by Communist Party leaders from 76 countries, the so-called Comintern, decided to campaign for a “popular front.” Alarmed by the rise of fascism, the Reds would cease sniping at others on the left and now try to ally themselves with socialists and even liberals. Their newspapers would reach out beyond hard-line readers and court a broad audience. That Moscow decision, intended principally as a response to Adolf Hitler, is what brought Rodney, then 25, into the offices of the Daily Worker in New York and then into the struggle for integration. Hitler to Stalin to baseball: an unusual triple play.

  Rodney’s father, Max, was a Republican who lost both his business and his home in the 1929 stock market crash. Lester was 18. The family had been living comfortably in the section of Brooklyn called Bensonhurst and Lester, like so many other Brooklyn youngsters, worshiped at a shrine of baseball, Ebbets Field. “I’d rather watch the Dodgers and the Phillies battling for seventh place,” he once said, “than see the best football game in the world.” He played stickball and street hockey (no ice, no skates) and ran track for New Utrecht High School well enough to be offered a half scholarship to Syracuse University. But the market crash left the family unable to afford even half the Syracuse tuition. Rodney worked at an odd mix of jobs: summons server, chauffeur, lifeguard, and once in a while he wrangled an assignment from the Brooklyn Eagle to cover a local event—baseball teams from Consolidated Edison and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company meeting on Diamond One at the Parade Grounds.

  The Depression drove Rodney away from his father’s Republicanism, but he did not join the Communist Party until he landed the newly created job of sports editor with the Daily Worker in 1936. There was opposition from hard-liners. Rodney remembered an ideologue named Betty Gannett saying, “This is ridiculous. It’s kid stuff. Does it make sense for a hard-pressed radical paper to give one-eighth of its space to games?” The Baseball Writers’ Association, guardian of press credentials, refused Rodney membership for a year. He was given a pass to the grandstands, but was denied admission to clubhouses, playing fields and press boxes. Thus he had to write without interviewing. “But,” he told me, “after they saw I was seriously covering the stuff they relented.” He recalled run-ins with Jimmy Cannon and Milton Gross, both of the New York Post, then the most liberal mainstream daily in the city. McGowen and John Drebinger, the baseball reporters from the New York Times, and Dan M. Daniel, the grizzled veteran on the World Telegram, declined to speak to him. “But generally,” Rodney said, “the other writers accepted me with just a little hazing.”

  “Such as?” I said.

  “Such as ‘Why do they have so many statues of Stalin in Russia?’ At the time I said it was because the people loved Stalin for getting rid of the czar. Now”—this was 2009—“I know better.”

  No sensible person has ever accused the communist movement of subtlety. On August 13, 1936, Rodney prepared a boxed announcement that covered half a page.

  OUTLAWED BY BASEBALL

  THE CRIME OF THE BIG LEAGUES

  The newspapers have carefully hushed it up! One of the most sordid stories in American sports! Though they win laurels for America in the Oympics—though they have proven themselves outstanding baseball stars—Negroes have been placed beyond the pale of the American and National Leagues. Read the truth about this carefully laid conspiracy. Beginning next Sunday, the Sunday Worker will rip the veil from the “Crime of the Big Leagues”—mentioning names, giving facts, sparing none of the most sacred figures in baseball officialdom.

  Three days later a front-page headline announced:

  FANS ASK END OF JIM CROW BASEBALL

  Not quite so. Not yet. An editorial followed, unsigned but written by Rodney. It read, “Fans, it’s up to you. Tell the big league magnates that you’re sick of the poor pitching in the American League. You want Satchel Paige out there on the mound. You’re tired of a flop team in Boston, of the silly Brooklyn Dodgers, of the inept Phillies and semi-pro Athletics. Demand better ball. Demand Americanism in baseball, equal opportunities for Negro and white. Demand the end of Jim Crow baseball.”

  What happened to Rodney’s opening blast? What became of it? Nothing happened. It did not become. Jim Crow baseball would live on for many years. But Rodney’s impassioned prose drew mail, scores, hundreds of letters from fans. Lester’s prose awakened thousands of people to baseball’s prevailing bigotry and a groundswell began to rise. Coincidentally, the drive against alabaster baseball became a touchstone of the Daily Worker.

  After my friend Ring Lardner Jr., the screenwriter and novelist, died in 2000, I wrote a memorial tribute for The Nation. A week later a letter arrived from Rodney, who was living in a retirement community located in Walnut Creek about 30 miles east of San Francisco. “Best piece,” he wrote, “that I’ve read in quite some time.” The letter served to renew our acquaintanceship and we met for a final time in the spring of 2009, when Lester was 97 years old. His wife, Clare, died in 2004. Now, while recovering from fractured ribs, he was living in the condo of his companion, Mary Reynolds Harvey. His voice was soft as ever, his gaze was steady and his memory was sharp.

  He said I should be aware that when he began his Daily Worker campaign the times were growing right for integration. American Negroes, notably Jesse Owens, but also including Jackie Robinson’s brother, Mack, dominated the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Joe Louis, whom sportswriters called “the Brown Bomber” and “the Dark Destroyer,” had become the most dynamic heavyweight champion since Jack Dempsey. With great enthusiasm Rodney recalled a conversation in 1937 with Burleigh Grimes, an old spitball pitcher who was managing a dreary Dodger team to a sixth-place finish.

  At last credentialed, Rodney wandered out to right field where Grimes was working with Tom Winsett, a highly touted young outfielder whom the Dodgers had acquired for forty thousand Depression dollars. Winsett was fast becoming a Flatbush Flop. After some easy chatter Rodney said, “How are things going on the team?”

  “Frankly I could use another pitcher,” Grimes said, “and just one real good hitter. But we’re doing the best we can.”

  “Burleigh,” Rodney said, “how would you like to put a Dodger uniform on Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson?”

  Grimes looked as though he had been clubbed by a Louisville Slugger. Sportswriters did not ask such questions in 1937. “Lester,” he said, “you’re just wasting your time. That’ll never happen. Think about the hotels. Think about the restaurants. How could it happen? It’ll never happen.”

  “Do you know about some of the good black players?”

  “Of course I do,” Grimes said. “So does everybody else. But let’s talk about something different.”

  “Can I at least write that you know how good they are?”

  “No. I’m not gonna stick my neck out.”

  “Not that you’re in favor of signing them, Just that you know that Paige and Gibson are good.”

  “No, Lester. No, no, no.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  DURING THESE YEARS OF stirring racial currents, Rickey, the would-be second Great Emancipator, was out to lunch. With a masterfully constructed farm system he created champio
nship teams in St. Louis, the most segregated major-league city. Building on such homegrown stars as Enos “Country” Slaughter, Marty Marion and Terry Moore, the Cardinals in the late 1930s were on the rise again. But the team was all white, the farm system was all white and the home field, Sportsman’s Park, was rigidly segregated. (Geographically, St. Louis was then the southernmost major-league city, except for Washington, DC.) In St. Louis black fans could sit only in distant right-field stands, the so-called pavilion. “As a point of fact,” Rickey told me, “there was nothing I could do, I ran the team but it was owned by someone else, Sam Breadon. He had no interest in integrating baseball. And St. Louis itself was essentially a Southern city. Whites dominated. The whites made the rules. Negroes had to hide in the corners.

  “You can only make a bold move when the time and place are right. When God ordains it, you might say. During my time in St. Louis, that was not the case.”

  Rickey, then, would not agree with me that he was out to lunch. He maintained that the absent party was God.

  A blazing portrait of a Southern racist appears in Vachel Lindsay’s mighty poem Simon Legree, A Negro Sermon. A few lines here can introduce us to Legree:

  He beat poor Uncle Tom to death

  Who prayed for Legree with his last breath.

  Then Uncle Tom to Eva flew,

  To the high sanctoriums bright and new;