Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  The table fell silent. Robinson told me that Casey’s words so shocked him that for a moment he could not see. Quite suddenly his throat went dry. Then, under tremendous control, he said to Casey, “Just deal, man. Just deal.” And the game resumed.

  Robinson’s bat had come to life at the Polo Grounds, where Shotton made his debut, managing in a topcoat and a pearl gray fedora. Starting on April 18, the Dodgers played a short set there against the Giants, and now large crowds began turning out. Many black fans made the relatively short walk down from Harlem into Coogan’s Hollow.

  During the 1940s, a number of academics, including William Shockley, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, were investigating the success of blacks in sport. Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, had been heavyweight champion for 11 years. Jesse Owens’s performance in the 1936 Nazi Olympics established him as the greatest sprinter ever. Other blacks were almost as successful. The academics were working in an uncertain field known as eugenics. At length Shockley and others maintained they discovered that among certain West African tribes the heel bones of males were exceptionally long. This, Shockley said, explained blacks’ speed afoot and general athletic success.

  On that April day, his Polo Grounds debut, Jackie Robinson came up in the third inning against a smallish left-hander named Dave Koslo. He lined the third pitch deep into the upper stands in left—his first major-league home run. A number of Dodgers lined up near home plate to shake Robinson’s hand. The crowd, particularly the blacks in an assemblage of 37,000 fans, cheered mightily. In the press box the witty sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun made a home run notation in his score book. Then deadpan Woodie Broun said, “That’s because their heels are longer.”

  Afterward Red Smith wrote in his Herald Tribune column, View of Sport:

  Burt Shotton saw for himself that Jackie Robinson isn’t exactly bad. Robinson hit a fierce line drive for a home run, hit a fiercer one that became a double play through the splendid offices of the Giants rookie Lucky Lohrke, and finally dropped a single in short right. Even before this, alert souvenir hawkers were offering lapel pins, which read, “I’m for Jackie Robinson.”

  On April 22 the Dodgers began a three-game series against the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field. “Ben Chapman, our manager, was one forceful character,” the late Robin Roberts told me over drinks three years ago at the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown. Roberts, one of the best right-handers in the annals, was a 20-game winner in Philadelphia for six consecutive seasons. “Before that first game against Robinson and the Dodgers,” he said, “Chapman ordered all of us, the whole team, to get on Robinson in any damn way we could. Anybody who failed to get on Robinson would be fined $50, serious money back then.”

  Robinson later recounted to me some of the slurs that came bellowing out of the Philadelphia dugout.

  “They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy.”

  “Back to the cotton fields, nigger.”

  “How did your mother like fucking that ape?”

  During the series Robinson went only 3 for 12. He said he was unprepared for the onslaught because he thought the Phillies as a northern team would give him no particular trouble. But here they were defiling him and in his own home ballpark, Ebbets Field. Robinson remembered Eddie Stanky shouting at the Phillies, “Fucking cowards. Why don’t you yell at somebody who can answer back!” He also remembered to the end of his days a trim Phillie infielder, Lee “Jeep” Handley, apologizing to him.

  A few newspapermen learned of the Phillies’ behavior. Typically the New York Times ignored the issue but Dan Parker, who wrote trenchant columns for the tabloid Daily Mirror, cheered Robinson as “the only gentleman in the entire incident.” Walter Winchell, the country’s preeminent gossip columnist, heard about Chapman and in his lair at the Cub Room of the Stork Club Winchell said of Chapman, “I’m gonna make a big hit on that bigot.” Alarmed, commissioner Happy Chandler stepped in, offering admonishments. He then ordered Chapman to pose for a picture with Robinson. The photograph survives. The two are holding the ends of a Louisville Slugger. Neither appears happy. Each man is looking away from the other. A year later the Phillies fired Chapman and he never managed in the major leagues again. (He did resurface as a coach with Cincinnati in 1952. That season the Reds finished sixth.)

  Afterward Rickey cited the Philadelphia story as critical to Robinson’s acceptance by the Dodgers. “Chapman did more than anyone else to unite the team,” he said. “When Chapman poured out that string of objectionable abuse, he solidified and united 30 men.” (Not quite. Dixie Walker and Bobby Bragan still demanded to be traded away from Robinson and Carl Furillo continued to grumble about playing with him.)

  At the Otesaga Hotel years later Robin Roberts concluded his Philadelphia memories in an interesting way. “After a while,” he said, “Chapman came to realize that Robinson usually played his best when he felt the heat was on. So then Chapman issued a new directive. The $50 fine stuck. But now it went against anyone who did get on Robinson.

  “‘Don’t stir up the jungle boy,’ Chapman would say.

  “I never liked Robinson myself, but I have to give you this. He was one hell of a competitor.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  THE UNCHALLENGEABLE TRIUMPH OF baseball integration was assured soon afterward during a period of roughly seven days in May. One factor was the failure of a massive racist movement. The other was a simple touch of friendship.

  I have previously published some details of the great anti-Robinson strike, but the murky tide of revisionist history has since blurred truth and impels me here to tell the story in full, this time including major facts that I did not earlier have at my command. The strike could well have made the National League, and perhaps all major-league baseball, a disaster area. The piece that saved the game ran on May 9, 1947, as a copyrighted story in the New York Herald Tribune.

  In an earnestly researched but ultimately plodding book, Baseball’s Great Experiment, the late Jules Tygiel wrote, “[Stanley] Woodward often receives credit for averting a player rebellion [against integration]. This was not the case.” Tygiel, a college professor in Northern California, had never covered major-league baseball on a daily basis, nor was he aware of the workings of big-city newspapers. These shortcomings probably led him to a conclusion that was thumpingly incorrect.

  In a more recent book, this one claiming to cover Robinson’s first major-league season, a journalist named Jonathan Eig is also dismissive of Woodward, who was the finest sports editor of his time. Eig sometimes writes effectively, but he simply does not understand what went on in 1947, a season that unfolded roughly two decades before he was born.

  One man who immediately understood Woodward’s achievement was Jimmy Cannon, Woodward’s intense, complex contemporary on the New York Post. All but forgotten now, Cannon was one of the most eloquent and passionate of all the columnists who reported and typed for newspapers in their heyday.

  The idea of a player’s strike originated in the busy brain of that exceptional and contradictory character Fred “Dixie” Walker of Brooklyn and the Confederacy. The issue, as Walker rationalized it and later carefully explained it to me, was not about banning blacks from organized baseball. Rather, he said, it was about establishing the right of professional athletes to chose with whom and against whom they would play—and with whom or against whom they would not play. At the time I was too startled by Walker’s sweeping assertion to put up much of an argument. But no such players’ right exists. However lofty their salaries, ballplayers are employees. In a capitalist society the team’s owner and management decide who will play, whether the management is brilliant (Larry MacPhail, Branch Rickey in Brooklyn) or blundering (Peter O’Malley, Frank McCourt in Los Angeles). In a communist society, as I learned while traveling through Canada with the great Central Soviet Army hockey team, the choice of players rests with coaches working under commissars. Nowhere do pro players get to pick their teammates or their opponents. That simply is the way thing
s are.

  But Walker recognized that a case for players’ rights, however implausible, would play better with the press and public than a campaign for a continued ban against blacks. After the dramatic days of World War II, America was becoming a more open community. Besides, the Holocaust had given bigotry a bad name.

  Walker’s original idea called for a league-wide strike. Working in as much secrecy as possible, he recruited leaders on other National League teams. He found confederates in Ewell Blackwell, a star pitcher with the Reds, and first baseman Phil Cavarretta, who later managed the Chicago Cubs. Neither was a Southerner. Cavarretta was born in Chicago. Blackwell grew up in Fresno, California. But the key people with the St. Louis Cardinals were as Southern as grits. Those included were Enos Slaughter from North Carolina, Marty Marion from South Carolina and the team captain, Terry Moore, a native of Alabama. I have not been able to learn the names of the other Walker allies on other teams. Some surely existed but their secret remains buried in their coffins. (Walker himself died of stomach cancer at the age of 71 on May 17, 1982.)

  The story burst forth in the city edition of the Herald Tribune dated May 9, 1947. Copies went on sale at about 10:30 the night before. The Associated Press picked up the story crediting the Herald Tribune and a brief version, citing the AP—but not the Trib—appeared in late editions of the dormant New York Times. Editors at the Times made a deliberate decision not to credit the Herald Tribune as the source of the story. The legal issue here may be somewhat muddy, but the moral issue is clear. The Times pilfered and minimized Woodward’s scoop. Here is all the Times, America’s self-proclaimed Paper of Record, published on a movement that could have shattered the National League.

  FRICK SAYS CARDS’ STRIKE PLAN AGAINST NEGRO DROPPED

  Ford Frick, National League president, said last night a threatened strike by the St. Louis Cardinals against the presence of Negro First Baseman Jackie Robinson in a Brooklyn Dodger uniform has been averted, The Associated Press reported.

  Frick said that Sam Breadon, owner of the Cardinals, came to New York last week and informed him that he understood there was a movement among the Cardinals to strike in protest during their just-concluded series with the Dodgers if Robinson was in the line-up.

  “I didn’t have to talk to the players myself. Mr. Breadon did the talking to them. From what Breadon told me afterward the trouble was smoothed over. I don’t know what he said to them, who the ringleader was, or any other details,” Frick said.

  Asked if he intended to take any action, Frick said he would have to investigate further before he could make any decision.

  The National League president said he had not conferred with Baseball Commissioner A. B. (Happy) Chandler concerning the matter.

  The Tribune’s headline and subhead went like this:

  NATIONAL LEAGUE AVERTS STRIKE OF CARDINALS AGAINST ROBINSON’S PRESENCE IN BASEBALL

  General League Walkout Planned by Instigators

  The story carried the byline of the sports editor, Stanley Woodward, and a copyright notice that the New York Times chose to ignore. Spectacular as this scoop was, the Tribune published it not on page 1, where it would have boosted newsstand sales, but back on page 24, where it was invisible, unless of course you had already bought the paper. The managing editor responsible for this misplay, George Anthony Cornish, was, Woodward pointed out, “a native of the Hookworm Belt.” (Actually, a village in Alabama called Demopolis.) Woodward felt that Cornish was so excessively cautious that he nicknamed the editor “Old Double-Rubber.” Woodward added, “In this instance, caution and boyhood bigotry combined. Old Double-Rubber couldn’t kill my story, but he could keep it the hell off the front page, which is what he did. Obviously that night my story should have led the paper.”

  Woodward was a large, myopic, powerful man with a strong tenor voice. (I am reminded of other large, powerful tenors, Jack Dempsey and Jackie Robinson.) Woodward’s first name, which he never used, was Rufus. Generally he was called Coach. Woodward ran the Tribune sports section when I began working there, first as a nighttime copyboy at $26.50 a week. Woodward sometimes sent me downstairs to the storied saloon the Artist and Writers Restaurant to buy him “a couple of packs of Camels.” Invariably he handed me two dollars. Back then a pack cost a quarter in a machine and when I returned Woodward said, also invariably, “Keep the change, son.” Given the pay scale of a copyboy, the tip was good enough for a modest meal—salisbury steak, a Mrs. Wagner’s Home-Baked Apple Pie and muddy coffee—in the Herald Tribune’s cafeteria. Although many Tribune people sent me on many errands during my copyboy years—executives, clerks, Pulitzer Prize winners—Woodward was the only person kind enough and generous enough to tip.

  He encouraged my writing and in time, joined by our love of journalism, poetry, lucid prose and well-played sports, we became close friends. Over the years he told me much of how he came to write the great Robinson strike story.

  The Tribune employed a debonair Canadian, Cecil Rutherford Rennie, called Rud, as one of its senior baseball writers, and Rennie developed friends, both male and female, all around the major-league circuit, which then ran from New England to Missouri. One such was Dr. Robert Hyland, an orthopedist whom the St. Louis Cardinals used as team physician and the St. Louis Browns engaged as a consulting specialist. Hyland, a prominent figure on the St. Louis sports scene, liked to call himself “the surgeon general of baseball.”

  Rennie came into St. Louis with the New York Yankees in May 1947. The Yankees were about to play and outclass the St. Louis Browns. Rennie, a highly skilled typist, filed a fast piece and then joined his friend Hyland and some others for an evening of drink and song. “Not opera,” Rennie told me, “or even Broadway songs. Just barbershop stuff. ‘Sweet Adeline’ . . . ’If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ . . .”

  As the group sang and drank whiskey that long-ago night hard by the Mississippi River, Doc Hyland turned to his friend and said, “Rud, it’s a shame you aren’t covering the Dodgers. If you were, you’d get one helluva story.”

  “What might that be?” Rennie said.

  “Strike,” Hyland said. “The whole [Cardinal] team is going to strike, rather than take the field with that colored boy.”

  “Robinson?”

  “You got it,” Hyland said. “And not just the Cardinals. If this thing goes through the way they’re planning it, no team in the National League will take the field on May 21. Not one. And no team will take the field again until the Dodgers release Robinson. What I understand is that the men want the basic contracts changed giving them the right to approve or disapprove of the people they play with and play against.” Incredibly, Dixie Walker’s wild scheme was coming to life.

  Rennie was sober enough to think sensibly. Hyland was right. A big-league baseball strike, however insane, would be one helluva story. But Rennie felt he could not be the person to write it. His friendship with Hyland was widely known. If he wrote the piece himself, Rennie feared, Hyland would be suspected as the source. He was the Cardinals’ team doctor and here he was, ignoring medical confidentiality, spilling the team’s darkest secret. Rennie went to a telephone and quietly passed along Hyland’s words to Stanley Woodward, who was relaxing with his wife, Ricie, and a five-to-one martini, in his comfortable apartment on Park Avenue in New York. After Rennie hung up, the Big Coach put down his drink. Then he exploded into action.

  Both logic and tradition have made protecting sources the prime commandment in newspaper work. Indeed, newspaper people are forever campaigning—with limited success—to have the confidentiality of sources shielded by law.

  Close as we were, Woodward would not tell me much about how he proceeded to confirm Dr. Robert Hyland’s astonishing tip. The identities of most of his secondary sources thus are lost. Which is not to say, as some new journalists do, that they did not exist. The Herald Tribune, highly reputable and essentially conservative, for decades retained a renowned libel lawyer, E. Douglas Hamilton of New York. The lawyer revi
ewed Woodward’s reporting, in utmost confidence, before recommending that the story be published. Shielded by lawyer–client confidentiality, Woodward disclosed everything he had and did to Doug Hamilton. Without a shield, speaking with me, Woodward later said, “I talked to Ford. I’ll tell you that much. And no more.”

  Ford Christopher Frick, an Indiana native, had been a sportswriter for Hearst newspapers in New York, a baseball publicist and now in 1947 he was president of the National League. Frick confirmed Hyland’s tip and gave Woodward the text of a statement he had prepared for delivery to the entire Cardinal squad.

  If you strike, you will be suspended from the League. You will find the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you. You will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended, I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another. You will find if you go through with your intention that you will have been guilty of complete madness.

  Woodward called this statement “the most noble ever made by a baseball man.” In another century, few would disagree. But in the excitement of the moment, Woodward made a mistake. Frick did not deliver his powerful message to the insurgent ballplayers. Instead he handed it to Sam Breadon, a tough onetime auto mechanic, later a dealer of luxurious Pierce-Arrows and now a self-made millionaire who owned the Cardinals. “I’d like you to pass this on to your team, Sam,” Frick said quietly and very firmly.