Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  “No,” Rickey said. “I’m looking for someone who has the courage not to fight back.” The old spellbinder went on, “We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid that many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we convince the world that I’m doing this because you’re a great ballplayer, a fine gentleman.

  “Jackie, I just want to beg two things of you: that as a baseball player you give it your utmost and as a man you give continuing fidelity to your race and to this crucial cause you symbolize.

  “Above all, do not fight. No matter how vile the abuse, ignore it. You are carrying the reputation of a race on your shoulders. Bear it well and a day will come when every team in baseball will open its doors to Negroes.”

  Rickey lowered his voice. “The alternative is not pleasant.”

  Robinson agreed to accept a bonus of $3,500 and a salary of $600 a month to play baseball in 1946 for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm team, in the Triple A International League. There he would establish himself as an outstanding second baseman, steal 40 bases and lead the league in hitting at .349. He was also a significant gate attraction. More than one million people went to games involving Robinson in 1946, an amazing figure by the standards of any minor league.

  But off the field many communities coldly rejected him. Summing up that memorable season the witty, acerbic (and corrupt) Dick Young wrote, “Jackie Robinson led the league in everything except hotel reservations.”

  SEVEN

  SHOW THE BUMS THE DOOR

  THE INTEGRATION OF BASEBALL, heroically engineered by Branch Rickey, heroically executed by Jackie Robinson, would be called the Noble Experiment and become the stuff of books, essays, seminars, doctoral theses and, within the world of baseball, unending self-congratulation. Put briefly, Robinson’s debut season in Montreal, summer of 1946, was a sheer, if stressful, triumph. He hit, he ran, he fielded and he led the Royals to victory in the ultimate minor-league playoff, the Little World Series. But for Branch Rickey, who shared that triumph as Robinson himself invariably pointed out, the times brought not only triumph but also trappings of disaster. His Brooklyn Dodgers, of Pee Wee Reese, Dixie Walker and Carl Furillo, lost a tight pennant race to the St. Louis Cardinals, of Stan Musial, Terry Moore and Enos Slaughter. (Rickey, the architect, designed both teams.)

  But the New York press did not gush with praise. As exemplified by the tabloid Daily News, then selling two million copies a day, the press generally declined to applaud Rickey’s merits. In fact, Dick Young, the News’s most prominent and virulent baseball writer, turned on Rickey with a vengeance worthy of Macbeth. To Young, Rickey was first of all a skinflint and a hypocrite. “But a great baseball man, Dick,” I said, after we had become contentious acquaintances. “Surely you’ll give the old boy that.”

  “Maybe it’s something in me,” Young said, “but I just can’t seem to appreciate a pompous tightwad son of a bitch who is always quoting the Psalms . . . even if he does know the game.”

  RICKEY CLAIMS THAT 15 CLUBS VOTED TO BAR NEGROES FROM THE MAJORS

  Declares He Used Robinson Despite Action

  Taken at Meeting in 1945—Officials

  Deny Dodger Head’s Charges

  Despite this headline, which appeared in the New York Times of February 18, 1948, this remarkable story—Baseball Bigotry’s Last Stand—has lain fallow for many years. No written records of the meeting survive, although I know from various sources that a high-level baseball meeting occurred at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago on August 29, 1946. But no one present at the meeting seemed to recall the overwhelming anti-Negro vote. The source, the only source, on baseball bigotry’s last stand was Branch Rickey himself. In our discussions of the anti-Negro vote—and we had several—Rickey always insisted that I keep his words off the record for all the rest of his life. “It ill becomes one,” he said, “publicly to turn and curse the leaders of a game that has nurtured him for almost all his days.”

  William Wilberforce was an early-19th-century English abolitionist and a convert to the Methodist religion. He led the parliamentary campaign against Britain’s lucrative slave trade, which persisted until 1807. Previously, British ships legally transported captured black Africans to lives of slavery in America’s racist South. The practice of slavery was profitable for more than one country. Both the town of Wilberforce, Ohio, and Wilberforce University, which is located there, were named in his honor. The African Methodist Episcopal Church founded Wilberforce University in 1856 and today it stands as one of the three oldest private predominantly black colleges in the country.

  The devoutly Methodist Rickey accepted an invitation to speak to his coreligionists at the Wilberforce annual football banquet on February 17, 1948. His audience was small, no more than 250 people. As far as I can learn, the only reporter there was someone from the Associated Press. He took careful notes and filed a story that would shake the rulers of baseball to their ganglia.

  The AP man—anonymous to this day—quoted Rickey at length from a speech he called “candid and impassioned.”

  “After I had signed Robinson, but before he had played a game,” Rickey began, “a joint major league meeting adopted unanimously a secret report prepared by a joint committee [representing both the National and American Leagues] which stated that however well intentioned, the use of Negro players would hazard all the physical properties of baseball.

  “You can’t find a copy of that report anywhere, but I was at the meeting where it was adopted.

  “I sat silent while the other 15 clubs approved it.

  “I’ve tried to get a copy of the report, but league officials tell me all were destroyed.

  “But let them deny they adopted such a report, if they dare.

  “I’d like to see the color of the man’s eyes who would deny it.”

  According to the AP reporter, Rickey grew increasingly impassioned at the Wilberforce banquet. “I believe,” Rickey said, “that racial extractions and color hues and forms of worship become secondary to what a man can do.

  “The American public is not as concerned with a ballplayer’s pigmentation as it is with the power of his swing, the dexterity of his slide, the gracefulness of his fielding or the speed of his legs.

  “Who thinks of the inconsequential when great matters of common challenge and national interest confront us? It is not strange that Robinson should be given a chance in America to feed and clothe and shelter his wife and child and mother in a job he can do better than most.

  “It is not strange that a drop of water seeks the ocean.”

  Rickey expected his comments to attract praise. Instead his eloquence drew a firestorm of rage from his old deputy, Larry MacPhail, and barefaced contempt from his once and future enemy, the populist New York Daily News. Two days after the Wilberforce speech, the News published a prominent headline:

  RICKEY ‘LYING’; M’PHAIL

  REFUTES NEGRO CHARGE

  In a written statement MacPhail said no secret report existed. A report was indeed filed. MacPhail himself retained a copy. It recommended certain “changes in the structure of the major leagues.” “Other copies,” MacPhail maintained, “were collected because they contained a criticism of the commissioner [Chandler], written by me, which the commission felt was unfair and unproductive.

  “If and when Branch Rickey said that my committee recommended that Negroes be banned from major-league baseball, Branch Rickey was lying.”

  The usually voluble MacPhail would take no questions. He would let no one see his copy of the disputed report. After that Rickey never again spoke to MacPhail.

  Is it plausible to believe that Rickey, in an orgy of self-praise, fantasized the anti-Negro meeting? It certainly does not appear that way here. Rather it seems likely that MacPhail, in a fit of passion, went on a rant against his old boss for accomplishing something in Brooklyn that MacPhail, for all his innovations and promotio
ns, schemes and dreams, had failed to realize. I don’t think Larry was innately a bigot. But, particularly when drinking, he was one of the notorious hotheads of his time. “Part genius,” said Leo Durocher, “and part madman.” On the issue of integrating baseball, and indeed America, starting in Brooklyn, in an Ebbets Field that MacPhail had repainted and restored, it seems the madman in MacPhail knocked the genius in MacPhail clear over Canarsie and out of sight, somewhere above the waters of the stormy North Atlantic.

  That was not the editorial opinion at the News. The sports columnist there, the ambitious Jimmy Powers, had this to say. “Branch Rickey gets up at Wilberforce U and showers rose petals on himself. . . . We are wondering just what purpose this blast at other baseball executives serves at this time. As an admirer of Negro Jackie Robinson we realize that some owners were, for good and sufficient reasons of their own, against the breaking down of the color line. We also happen to know that many of these people are now in favor of Robinson and accept him as a gentleman of culture and irreproachable conduct. Others are still opposed to the whole setup, as is their privilege. Why stir up these prejudices today just to pose as a superior human being?

  “It is significant that all of Rickey’s moves save him money. He is paying Robinson only $5,000 a year, not even a hundred dollars a week. We will be the first to toss our hat into the air and pelt rare Brazilian orchids at El Cheapo when we see that a single one of his magnanimous acts COSTS him money out of pocket.”

  Dick Young followed up with sarcasm. “No longer do baseball personalities squirm on the spot if their own backfired remarks claim that they’ve been ‘misquoted,’” Young wrote. “But rather that they’ve been ‘misinterpreted.’ That was the position taken yesterday as the Dodger prexy attempted to square himself with his fellow owners. . . . ”

  Some years later I asked Rickey specifically how he had reacted to the Powers piece. “Neither my wife, Jane, nor I was accustomed to being subjected to such vitriol,” he said. “To put it succinctly, we were stunned.”

  “Did you realize that this column was in a sense a declaration of war?”

  “Not at the time,” Rickey said. “With hindsight, however, I accept your characterization.”

  As for Powers, he appeared conveniently to be forgetting the lines he wrote in the News when Rickey broke the color line. With absolute certitude, Powers declared: “Jackie Robinson will not make the grade in the big leagues this year or next. He is a 1,000-1 shot.” It is not superfluous to point out that good journalism begins with reporting and Powers had never seen Robinson play.

  The meeting officially was organized to contend with issues other than integration. The lords of baseball felt threatened by a new independent Mexican League, which was signing big leaguers in defiance of the American reserve clause. A second matter was the rising demand voiced by outstanding major leaguers, including Allie Reynolds and Ralph Kiner, for recognition of a players’ union.

  A Latin entrepreneur named Jorge Pasqual had organized the so-called “outlaw” Mexican League, backed by $50 million, and he was staffing it in part with well-known big leaguers. Among these were Mickey Owen, the former Dodger catcher; Max Lanier, an accomplished Cardinal left-hander; and (almost) Stan Musial, to whom Pasqual offered a bonus of $50,000 in cold cash. Musial, then earning $11,500 annually from the Cardinals, told me, “He laid out the money in big bills right on the double bed in a hotel suite. He said sign and then I could put all that money in my pocket. Not later. Right then. I thought long and hard. I finally decided that I just didn’t want to move my family to Mexico.”

  At the Chicago meeting the Establishment owners elected to impose a lifetime ban on any ballplayer who signed a contract with Jorge Pasqual. This feudal decision led to lawsuits and in time to both cash settlements and reinstatements. The most notable star coming back from a Mexican fiesta was the rugged right-hander Sal “the Barber” Maglie, later famous for fastballs clipping whiskers from Dodger batters’ chins.

  Within a decade the Mexican League ceased to be a problem. Blowing through $50 million, it went bankrupt. Some 30 years would pass before the players’ union became strong enough to overturn the reserve clause. But at the Blackstone Hotel that August, Rickey’s integration was here and now.

  “I remember,” Rickey told me, “that Larry MacPhail was very angry. He had just bought the Yankees and he claimed that Pasqual had hired one of your colleagues on the Herald Tribune to recruit Yankee ballplayers for the Mexican League. Recruit them right there in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. He was insisting that the Tribune fire the reporter, a man named Rud Rennie, who always seemed to me a decent sort. [Rennie denied the charge and Wilbur Forrest, the executive editor of the Tribune, hotly refused MacPhail’s demand.]

  “Ford Frick presided at the meeting. Where was Happy Chandler, our new commissioner? I’m not really sure. Frick passed out a report on integration prepared under the direction of MacPhail and Phil Wrigley, the chewing gum manufacturer who owned the Cubs. As I said, MacPhail was angry. He stood up and glared at me. Robinson was then playing for Montreal. Did I realize, MacPhail said, that when Montreal played in Baltimore and Newark more than half the fans in attendance were Negroes? And did I further realize that all those Negroes were going to drive away our white fans?

  “He was raging. I made no answer. We read a report that essentially said the time was not right for bringing Negroes into the major leagues. I hoped someone would challenge the report. No one did. Then Frick asked all of us to return our copies to him. After that was done the MacPhail–Wrigley report against Negroes simply vanished from the face of the earth.

  “I cannot tell you how dismayed I was. These were my colleagues and, I had thought, my friends. I had only the good sense to hold my tongue. Then over the next few days I sent letters to the baseball people I considered most important, calling their attention to the Ives-Quinn law.

  “Discrimination had always been wrong.

  “Now, I pointed out, it was also illegal.”

  Rickey believed that the strongest human emotion was sympathy. “The word derives from the classical Greek sumpatheia, which suggests mutual understanding which blossoms into affection,” he said. “I believed that when my ballplayers saw what Jackie Robinson was going through, sympathy would make them reach out to him. Eventually most of them did, but it took more time than I had anticipated.

  “Ballplayers love money. They love World Series checks. I thought when they saw how good the colored boy was, when they realized that he could get them into the World Series, they’d pretty much force me to promote him from Montreal and make him a Dodger. After that, one problem—Robinson’s acceptance by his fellows—would solve itself.”

  During spring training 1947, Rickey arranged for the Dodgers and the Montreal Royals to play a seven-game series, touring the Canal Zone. Robinson, still on the minor-league roster, rose majestically. In the seven games, he stole seven bases. He batted .625. When he won one game for Montreal with a squeeze bunt, Hugh Casey, the Dodgers’ best relief pitcher, picked up the baseball, cursed and threw the ball over the grandstands.

  In considering the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre defined bigotry as a passion and passion is, of course, irrational. You cannot talk someone away from avarice; you can’t reason a person away from lust; you could not argue Nazis out of their murderous anti-Semitism. The core of veteran Dodger players was not roused by Jackie Robinson’s success. They felt no sympathy, none at all, for a brave, solitary black man. Instead, the veteran core felt passionate outrage. Bigoted ballplayers would hate Robinson if he batted 1.000, which he damn near did. “How dare a colored fella be that good?”

  In Panama the Dodgers were billeted briefly in an Army barracks at Fort Gulick on Gatun Lake. There, one night in March, Clyde Suke-forth, working as a bench coach, told Leo Durocher that some veteran players had drawn up a petition that said simply, brazenly: “We the undersigned will not play on the same team as Jackie Robinson.” Dixie Walker, a literate and int
elligent man and a native of Georgia, had done the phrasing. (In 1976 Walker, then 66, told me, “Starting that petition was the dumbest thing I did in all my life.”)

  But back in 1947 the petition began to catch on. Bobby Bragan, a backup catcher but a clubhouse leader, signed. So did Hugh Casey. Both men were Southerners. Carl Furillo signed. He grew up in Pennsylvania. Next came Cookie Lavagetto, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. But a youthful Gil Hodges flatly refused. Pete Reiser, the gifted center fielder, said that when one of his children was gravely ill, the only person who would help out was a Negro doctor. “So I got nothing against the colored people, nothing at all.” Now the petitioners turned to Pee Wee Reese, from whom they expected strong support. Reese was raised amid segregation in Louisville, Kentucky.

  “It was a terrible moment,” Reese told me years afterward when we had become close friends. “I knew what these fellers were doing was wrong, just plain wrong, but they were my buddies.” In a quiet, nonevangelical way, Reese was a practicing Christian. “As a Christian,” Reese said, “how could I deny another human being the right to inherit a small portion of the earth? That was what was in my heart. Jackie Robinson had that right.” But at the time Reese was not comfortable speaking so intensely to his teammates. “It could have sounded too churchy or too uppity.” Instead he told them, “This thing might rebound, fellers. If we sign, we all might get the boot. I can’t take that chance. I just got out of the Navy. I got no money and I have a wife and baby to support. So, fellers, just skip me.” The petition lost momentum but did not die.