Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Tough old Sam Breadon read quickly. Then he nodded. He did not argue. The Cardinals assembled in a clubhouse at Ebbets Field “to talk about pitching problems.” The real topic was hidden in utmost secrecy. There, in the old Brooklyn ballpark, Breadon read to his ballplayers Frick’s ringing and threatening words.

  (Frick later became baseball commissioner and as such he allowed the Dodgers and Giants to abandon the New York area after the 1957 season, with no replacement teams in sight. Simply wielding a pen he summarily could have stopped both moves. A rational and orderly expansion to California might have followed. Where Frick truly was a hero in 1947, taking on a lynch mob wearing Cardinal red, to many Dodger and Giant fans 10 years later he became a bum. The evidence is irrefutable. Ford Frick was unwilling or afraid to grapple with the Big Oom, Walter O’Malley, conqueror of Branch Rickey, trader of Jackie Robinson and baseball’s all-time ultimate power broker.

  Hero to bum, that is a not an atypical career in the mercurial business of sports.)

  Woodward’s story, in the May 9th New York Herald Tribune, began:

  A National League players’ strike, instigated by some of the St. Louis Cardinals against the presence in the league of Jackie Robinson, Negro first-baseman, has been averted temporarily and perhaps permanently quashed.

  In recent days Ford Frick, president of the National League, and Sam Breadon, president of the St. Louis club, have been conferring with St. Louis players. Mr. Breadon [a native of New York City] flew east when he heard of the projected strike. The story that he came east to consult with Eddie Dyer, manager, about the lowly state of the St. Louis club, was fictitious. He came on a much more serious errand.

  The strike, formulated by certain St. Louis players [outfielder Enos Slaughter, shortstop Marty Marion, team captain Terry Moore], was instigated by a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers who has since recanted [our new old friend, that Southern sipper of fine margaux, Fred “Dixie” Walker].

  It is understood that the players involved—and the recalcitrants are not all Cardinals—will say that their objective is to gain the right to have a say on who shall be eligible to play in the major leagues. . . .

  This story is factually and thoroughly substantiated. The St. Louis players involved will unquestionably deny it. We doubt, however, if Frick and Breadon will go that far. A return of no comment from either or both will serve.

  When “Spike” Claassen, the deputy sports editor of the Associated Press in New York, reached Frick, he drew a somewhat vague reply. “Any player who tries to strike,” Frick said, “will leave me no alternative but to suspend him indefinitely. That’s all I can tell you.”

  He was somewhat more assertive with a reporter for the Sporting News. Here Frick said, “The National League stands firmly behind Jackie Robinson.”

  After that Frick retreated into silence. He came from a generation of baseball people who believed that when something nasty happened in the game, hush it up. Tell no one, least of all reporters. Why then did Frick speak with Stanley Woodward? Because the Coach had the goods on baseball and Frick was sensible enough to realize that a roused Woodward could write up a mighty storm.

  Highly pleased, Woodward wrote a few days later, “It can now be honestly doubted that the boys from the Hookworm Belt will have the nerve to foist their quaint sectional folklore on the rest of the country.” But even as Woodward typed, a powerful disinformation campaign was breaking loose.

  Protecting his investment, or so he believed, Sam Breadon told outright lies. Robinson trouble? Tut, tut, my man. Sheer nonsense. “I came to New York only because my team was losing ballgames. I spoke to team leaders, Terry Moore and Marty Marion, about stories of excessive drinking on my club.”

  Bob Broeg, the preeminent baseball writer in St. Louis and usually a solid reporter, in this instance disgraced himself. There was no strike threat, he said, never was. Woodward? “The son of a bitch is guilty of barnyard journalism. He’s written chicken shit.” For the rest of his life, Broeg preached this nonsense. Too many people listened.

  In 1995, Stan Musial wrote, or lent his name to, a book foreword in which he described baseball’s color line as “reprehensible. I can thank Mr. Rickey for making it possible for me to have teammates like Curt Flood and Bill White. You know,” Musial went on, “Willie Mays says that when he looks at his wallet he thinks of Jackie Robinson. Well, he should think of Rickey, too!”

  But where was Stan the Man, the greatest of Cardinal players, in the contentious spring of 1947? Conflicted by his sense of right and wrong and by his sense of loyalty to fellow Cardinals, Musial was paralyzed into silence. He did not confirm the strike story for the rest of his life. But he did arrange for me to meet with Terry Moore in 1991, and he told Moore that I was “fair-minded.” The result was nothing less than a final and conclusive confirmation.

  Terry Bluford Moore, called by Joe DiMaggio “the greatest center fielder I ever saw,” and a longtime Cardinal team captain, was retired to a modest home in Collinsville, Illinois, across the big river from St. Louis. A painted cardinal adorned Moore’s mailbox. He was 71 years old and suffering from prostate cancer.

  Moore welcomed me to his porch and fetched me a soft drink. “I gotta get radiation for this thing [the cancer],” he began. “They burn me every few weeks. If you live long enough, you’ll get prostate cancer, too.”

  “I can hardly wait, Terry,” I said, and we both made sounds of strained laughter.

  He unbent slowly. Yes, the Cardinals were talking about a strike. Bob Hyland, the doctor, said, “You fellers don’t have to like Negroes, but a strike is a terrible idea.” Sam Breadon read a threat from the league president that everyone would be suspended. Paychecks would stop. “None of us was making a lot of money,” Moore said. “A suspension without pay would mean some fellers would lose their homes or the family farm. That killed the strike movement right there.

  “Look,” the old outfielder said with great earnestness, “Robinson was a great player. The Dodgers beat us out of the pennant in ’47. They couldn’t have done that without him.” I was taking notes in a steno pad. “I’m being honest with you,” Moore said, “and now I want you to do something for me. I was raised in a small town called Vernon, Alabama. When you write about the strike thing please point out that I was only acting on what I had been taught to believe as a boy.”

  We shook hands. I felt we had been men together. When I read that the cancer killed Terry Moore in 1995, I felt a twinge of sorrow. Like Dixie Walker, Terry Moore was a redneck who grew and changed.

  The press at large did not do much with Woodward’s story. The New York Times belligerently ignored it. Rationalizing, the Times’s senior baseball writer, a genial sort named John Drebinger, said to me, “The strike didn’t actually happen, did it? At the Times we don’t cover things that don’t actually happen.”

  But there was one luminous exception, the gifted and largely forgotten Jimmy Cannon, who wrote for the New York Post. A self-educated Irishman from Greenwich Village, Cannon drew on Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway—and of course himself—for a style that many, including Hemingway, found overwhelming. I am here reprinting the entire column Cannon wrote following the Woodward scoop. It dazzled me when I first read it 65 years ago. It dazzles me today.

  LYNCH MOBS DON’T ALWAYS WEAR HOODS

  by Jimmy Cannon

  “America’s ace sportswriter”

  New York Post, May 12, 1947

  You don’t always lynch a man by hanging him from a tree. There is a great lynch mob among us and they go unhooded and work without rope. They have no leader but their own hatred of humanity. They are quietly degraded, who plot against the helpless with skill and a coward’s stealth and without fear of reprisal. Their weapon is as painful as the lash, the hot tar, the noose or the shotgun. They string up a man with the whisper of a lie and they persecute him with ridicule. They require no burning cross as a signal of assembly and need no sheet to identify themselves to each other. They are the n
ight riders who operate 24 hours a day.

  They lynch a man with a calculated contempt which no court of law can consider a crime. Such a venomous conspiracy is the one now trying to run Jackie Robinson out of organized baseball. It does not go for all ballplayers and not even all the St. Louis Cards, some of whom are accused of trying to arrange a strike to protest against the presence of a Negro in the big league. But such a state exists and we should all be ashamed of it, not only those connected with the sport, but any one who considers this his country. It is an indication, I believe, that as a people we are a failure and not as good as the laws by which we live.

  We are a people guaranteed more freedoms than any other on earth. Yet there are among us some who would refute those documents which pledge us the things that people fight for everywhere and rarely achieve. When such persecutions become the aim of a government it is the record of history that men rise in revolt against the leaders of their state. It was to defeat such persecutions that men fought in the undergrounds of Europe and in every righteous army since man first realized freedom is seldom achieved without struggle. We are a people who consider such privileges as ordinary because they were written down in the book for us to live by long ago. But among us are those who consider these liberties as their own and would take them from the defenseless whom they can afford to torment. They form a lynch mob that is out to avenge a right.

  Only the stupidly bold among them collect on mountain sides by the light of torches. You find them wherever you go and their lodge is national although they pay no dues and carry no card. It is only natural that baseball, being our country’s sport, should be played by some of them because they are in all trades and professions and they carry an invisible rope with them at all times. It is my belief that such a philosophy of hate does not dominate baseball. If it does, then they should burn up all the bats and balls and turn cattle to graze on the outfield grass. Baseball is not a way of life but an escape from it. It is to the bleachers and the grandstands that the multitudes flee to forget the world beyond the fences. Such a haven should not be corrupted by senseless hate, but once it is, baseball has no reason to exist.

  Baseball is supported by the people and I have heard them demand justice for Robinson. If their applause is any indication, they ask that Robinson be accepted as an athlete and is entitled to the right to be judged by the scorer’s ledger and not by the prejudices of indecent men. It is my belief that Robinson is a big leaguer of ordinary ability. If he is not, then he should be sent down to the minors because it is the opinion of all of us who consider baseball a sport that skill and honesty are the only qualifications a man should have. It is doubtful if Robinson has yet shown his true worth. He came up as a shortstop, was transformed into a second baseman at Montreal and now is playing first. It is a tribute to his solidness as a man that he hasn’t fallen apart as a ballplayer. Less heart has burned better ballplayers out of the big leagues. About him rages the silent uproar of a perpetual commotion. He is the most discussed ballplayer of his time and his judges do not evaluate him for his actions on the field alone. But he has concealed the turmoil within him and when you talk to him there is no indication he regards himself as a special man who faces problems no other big leaguer ever faced before. The times I have spoken to him he has praised all those with whom he plays.

  What goes on in the privacy of the hotel rooms where the Dodgers gather I don’t know. I have listened to Eddie Stanky praise Robinson for his alertness. Jackie told me himself that Hughie Casey had helped him when he needed practice and advice on making the difficult plays a first baseman must face.

  But in the clubhouse Robinson is a stranger. The Dodgers are polite and courteous with him but it is obvious he is isolated by those with whom he plays. I have never heard remarks made against him or detected any rudeness where he was concerned. But the silence is loud and Robinson never is part of the jovial and aimless banter of the locker room. He is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.

  We have been involved in a war to guarantee all people the right to a life without fear. The people of the earth are still assailed by the same doubts and terrors. The old men once more talk of violence and only the dead are sure of peace. In such a world it seems a small thing that a man be able to play a game unmolested. In our time such a plea should be unnecessary. But when it happens we must again remember that all this country’s enemies are not beyond the frontiers of our homeland.

  Everything in this long, eventful history seemed to be coming down to just a few days in May. The Dodgers headed west to Cincinnati, where they would play three games at Crosley Field against a mediocre Reds ball club. Mediocre but loud.

  The paths of glory lay beckoning ahead.

  AFTERWORD

  GRAND LARCENY

  JACKIE ROBINSON’S CANDLE BURNED BRIEFLY. BLINDED and partially crippled by diabetes, he died in October 1972, at the age of 53. Branch Rickey lived to be 30 years older. Rickey died in 1965 after suffering a stroke, while orating in Columbia, Missouri. I think it is fair to say that the year of major-league integration, 1947, was the climax of the lives of these two extraordinary Americans.

  Walter O’Malley, Rickey’s “most devious man,” plotted, schemed and insinuated to drive Rickey out of Brooklyn. Rickey had continued to cut himself in on the receipts from player sales, and to make sure that there were plenty of players to be sold he maintained a Dodger farm system including as many as 25 minor-league teams. Most lost money. Rickey started a professional football team, also called the Brooklyn Dodgers, and despite great work by a tailback named Glenn Dobbs, this venture lost money as well. O’Malley told the other trustees that they, and the Dodger organization, would never turn a profit as long as Rickey remained in charge. The O’Malley gang voted out Rickey after the 1950 season, although the Dodgers had finished a close second to the Phillies.

  Rickey owned 25 percent of the Dodger stock, which he was now obliged to sell to O’Malley, provided that O’Malley matched the highest outside offer Rickey could find. O’Malley told me that he thought Rickey’s stock was worth about $250,000. But Rickey produced a bid from William Zeckendorf, an early version of Donald Trump, for nothing less than a cool million bucks. Furious, O’Malley insisted that the offer was fraudulent. But without proof, he had to pay Rickey $1,000,050 (which he borrowed from the Brooklyn Trust Company). After that O’Malley, as the new Dodger president, issued a directive: Anyone mentioning the name of Branch Rickey in the Dodger offices at 215 Montague Street was to be fined $1. “Walter wanted to make Rickey a non-person,” says Frank Graham Jr., the Dodgers’ publicity director at the time. “Shades of Josef Stalin. But since Rickey had signed Duke Snider, Carl Erskine, Jackie Robinson and the rest, you could never make him a non-person in Brooklyn.”

  Soon afterward John Galbreath, a multimillionaire real estate developer who was principal owner of the Pirates, brought Rickey to Pittsburgh as de facto general manager. The great performer Bing Crosby, a minority Pirate shareholder, came visiting and spent a few hours in a private conversation with Rickey. “Amazing ideas. Amazing vocabulary,” Crosby told me later. “I thought I’d seen and heard just about everything. But I’ve never met anyone even close to Rickey in Hollywood.”

  Unfortunately for Rickey, his Pittsburgh team was slow to develop. He was forced to resign in 1959. But in 1960 the Pirates, with such Rickey stars as Roberto Clemente and Dick Groat, won the World Series from the New York Yankees.

  With no National League teams in the New York area, talk began to rise about starting a third major circuit, the Continental League. Rickey now emerged as founding president. He sought backers for franchises from New York to Denver, but the start-up costs were monumental. (Think constructing, all at once, six or eight new big-league ballparks.)

  Harold Rosenthal of the Herald Tribune asked at a press conference, “Don’t you think the odds are strong against the Continental League actually getting into operation?”

  “Harold,” Rickey said. “My father
died at the age of 86, planting fruit trees in unpromising soil.”

  Frank Chance, first baseman and manager for the Chicago Cubs early in the 20th century, was widely known as “the peerless leader.” Considering Rickey and his latest venture, John Lardner, the gifted columnist, called him “the peerless leader of the teamless league.”

  When the major leagues expanded early in the 1960s, the Continental League ceased to exist. It played a role in the baseball expansion and is a sort of forgotten godfather to the New York Mets. But when the billionaire Whitney family created the Mets, they turned not to Rickey but to old Yankee hands to run the business. With George Weiss supervising the front office and Casey Stengel managing the team, the 1962 Mets lost 120 of the 161 games they played.

  August Busch of Budweiser, the brewmeister who owned the Cardinals, hired Rickey as a consultant in 1963. Now in his 80s, Rickey could not get along with general manager Vaughan “Bing” Devine. Busch fired Rickey two years later, on December 9, 1965.

  The late years of Wesley Branch Rickey, a family member has told me, were weighted by considerations of the Holocaust. Baseball’s Great Emancipator shared the common revulsion for Adolf Hitler, but his concern was more subtle than simple horror. He knew Germany as a nation of devout Lutherans and Roman Catholics. How, Rickey wondered, could the Holocaust have been spawned in a country that professed to follow the teachings, real or imagined, of Jesus Christ?