Rickey & Robinson (21 page)

“I told the banker that for all the Dodgers’ recent success under MacPhail, the team was in a precarious position. The stars MacPhail acquired were not young men. Dolph Camilli, Billy Herman and Whitlow Wyatt were moving toward the downward side of their careers. My ideal team, as I may have told you, consists of youth at the eight positions, youth with speed that is a factor offensively and defensively. But I retain a preference for older pitchers. They know the craft and are possessed of poise. ‘Have I ever put together an ideal team?’ you may ask. The answer is ‘Not up to this time.’

“But the Cardinals of ’42 came reasonably close. We had outstanding position players in Slaughter, Musial, Marion and Walker Cooper. We had experienced pitchers like Mort Cooper and Max Lanier. Not only did that team win 106 games, they simply blew away the mighty Yankees in a five-game World Series. Simply blew ’em away.” To emphasize his point Rickey blew a thundercloud of cigar smoke into the already polluted Pittsburgh summer air.

“All well and good for St. Louis and myself, but now I was in Brooklyn. I told George McLaughlin that I would have to work very hard with a reasonable budget or else when peace returned the Cardinals would dominate the National League for many years.”

“I am going to have to expand the Dodger farm system,” Rickey told McLaughlin. “I want to hire the best scouts in the country.”

McLaughlin absorbed Rickey’s brilliant analysis with some surprise. Jeopardy? Not really, although Rickey would be spending a lot of the bank’s money. The Brooklyn team had just won 104 games. But as the banker considered them with some thought, Rickey’s points made sense. “But one thing I’m going to urge,” he said after a pause, “is economy. MacPhail was terrible at thrift. That’s why we are still having to carry Dodger debt on our books. We want you to win. We also want the ball club to be solvent. That’s why I brought in a tough lawyer, Walter O’Malley, to keep an eye on spending.”

“I’m glad you brought in this fellow O’Malley,” Rickey said, probably for the only time in his long lifetime.

During the seven years in which the
Daily News
attacked Rickey as a tightwad, no one at the tabloid appeared to know or care that he was operating under directions from a bank.

He dropped his real bombshell almost casually. “In order to be ready for the end of the war, we are going to have to beat the bushes, and that might include a Negro player or two.”

According to papers filed by one of Rickey’s aides at the Library of Congress, McLaughlin’s eyebrows shot up. The Brooklyn Irish Catholic Establishment was just emerging from a decade in which one of its hallmarks was raw bigotry, specifically street-corner anti-Semitism. Everywhere people quoted the high priest of prejudice, Father Charles Coughlin, who insisted that all rich Jews were dangerous international bankers and that all poor Jews were dangerous Communists. But by this point, to paraphrase Bob Dylan from another period, the times were a-changing. (Walter O’Malley’s special affection for me hardly characterized the behavior of an anti-Semite.)

McLaughlin was a businessman, not an ideologue. More blacks were moving into Brooklyn. They could swell attendance figures at Ebbets Field. The borough was heavily New Deal Democrat. This was not Atlanta or Birmingham. Rickey’s revolutionary plan could work and open a large new market. Finally McLaughlin spoke. “If you are
doing this to improve the ball club,” he said, “go ahead. But if you’re doing it for the emancipation of the Negro, then forget it.”

Rickey could not remember his response. The proper, but probably dangerous answer would have been “Both.” Instead he pressed forward. Could McLaughlin quickly arrange a meeting for him with the board of directors? He would like their approval on his overall approach and particularly for his idea of bringing in a Negro.

A week later the directors and possibly Walter O’Malley met for lunch in a spectacularly inappropriate setting on Central Park South, the fervidly racist New York Athletic Club. The New York AC categorically barred Jews from membership. Admitting a Negro was unthinkable. I brushed up against the club on several early assignments from the
Herald Tribune
, where a press card temporarily trumped bigotry. At one point I asked a club official, John F. X. Condon, what the club policy was on Jews and blacks. “We don’t accept either Jews or black as members,” he said in a genial tone, “any more than we would accept dogs.”

According to papers in the Library of Congress, the luncheon gathering with Rickey included McLaughlin and his banking associate, George Barnewell; Joseph Gilleaudeau, representing the interests of the Ebbets family; and James Mulvey, a forceful executive at MGM, representing the McKeevers. (Eight years later McKeever’s daughter Ann would marry Ralph Branca.) No record exists of an O’Malley presence, although he later claimed that he was there. It became important to him in later years to maintain that he was prominent in the decision to integrate, which he was, but it is reasonable to doubt that he was present at the creation. I almost always could catch Buzzie Bavasi’s misstatements. Walter was a more difficult case. Whenever I pressed him harder than he wanted to be pressed, he turned jovial and announced, “You have to remember that only half the lies the Irish tell are true.” Although he personally disliked Jackie Robinson—“an inveterate seeker of personal publicity,” O’Malley
once called him—he was proud that the Dodgers had integrated the game and deeply envious of the credit that eventually fell like manna onto the shoulders of Branch Rickey.

That summer day in Pittsburgh, 1954, Rickey told me that he was aware of wintry chill between Gilleaudeau and Mulvey. The Ebbets and McKeever families never reconciled. “I wanted to avoid a situation at that luncheon where if one man said yes, the other would automatically say no,” Rickey said. “Barnewell was most helpful in steering away from that. ‘We,’ Barnewell said, referring to all of the various people in Dodger management, ‘probably haven’t tapped the Negro market enough.’ I followed up along those lines being very careful not to sound either too zealous or too ideological. Courting the Negro market would simply be good business. After a while and without any real debate everyone agreed that I could go ahead with my grand plan.”

“Were you aware that the New York Athletic Club barred Jews and Negroes from its ranks?”

“Not at that time. But over the next few years, I gave myself an intense course in racism and bigotry in America. I would not attend a meeting at the New York Athletic Club today.”

Now Rickey began to resemble the legendary horseman who rode off in all four directions at once. He read Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish socialist who wrote on the discrepancy between America’s stated ideals and its actual treatment of blacks. He learned that in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson had written, “all men are created free and equal.” Benjamin Franklin crossed out the word “free.” Rickey thought that was ironic. Jefferson was a slaveholder. Franklin was not.

Rickey wanted the process of baseball integration to proceed without violence, and he began studying the passive resistance methods of Mohandas Gandhi. More than once he cited one of Gandhi’s observations:

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the

good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

Overhearing that, Tom Meany, a very sharp baseball writer for the remarkable and forgotten newspaper
PM
, nicknamed Rickey himself “the Mahatma.” Except in the
Daily News
, that wonderfully apt nickname stuck.

Now the directors were on board, but what was to be done about Negro players during spring training in the South? Where would they eat; where would they live? Despite its winter influx of tourists from the north, derisively known as snowbirds, Florida was as racist as Alabama, particularly small-town Florida, where so many exhibition games were played. How should he prepare the other Dodgers for playing alongside a Negro? He might have to do some evangelical preaching in the clubhouse. The gifted Dodger sportscaster Walter Lanier “Red” Barber was a proud Southerner, raised among fierce racist traditions. Faced with black Dodgers, would Barber quit? Other teams were eager to bid for his services, which, as I’ve mentioned, included such homespun Southern phrases as “tearin’ up the ol’ pea patch.” That meant that the Dodgers were rallying.

How would the rival owners react not to a theory but to a reality, a black man wearing a Brooklyn Dodger uniform? What about the press? Aside from Lester Rodney, the Communist columnist, only a few, Dan Parker in the New York
Daily Mirror
, Shirley Povich in the
Washington Post
, had announced themselves as pro-integration. “I was busy with the day-to-day details of running the Brooklyn club,” Rickey said, “but my mind was constantly racing ahead, trying to envision the future.” To the
Daily News
and Jimmy Powers’s Powerhouse, however, the future was now. And now was sordid.

Although I never seriously considered Rickey’s suggestion that I go to work for him in Pittsburgh, when he wanted someone urgently his sales pitch would put the gabbiest used car salesmen to shame. His
persuasive power and his great baseball gifts brought a wide variety of talented people into the once atrophied Dodger organization. These included his son Branch Jr., nicknamed Twig, a baseball-wise hard-drinking diabetic; Allan Roth, the founding father of modern baseball statistics; E. J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, smart and charming and as devious as a counterspy; and Arthur Mann, a former newspaper reporter who gained renown by playing the role of Branch Sr. in skits staged by the New York baseball writers at their annual dinner in the Hotel Waldorf Astoria. Mann looked a bit like Rickey, sounded a lot like Rickey and was Rickey’s choice to collaborate on Rickey’s memoir. (A heart attack killed Mann at the age of 65, before the memoir was even begun.)

Mann monitored the
News
and specifically studied the Powerhouse on a daily basis. He counted a total of 154 columns that blasted Rickey with varying degrees of severity. Powers wrote that Rickey secretly disliked Brooklyn and was trying to quit and take over the Yankees. He wrote repeatedly that “El Cheapo Rickey pays his players coolie salaries.” He demanded that the Dodger stockholders fire Rickey. He then asked readers to vote upon two choices: “Shall we send Rickey over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Shall we maroon him on a Bikini atoll?”

The
News
ran these angry pieces even as Rickey was assembling the greatest baseball team in Brooklyn history. Among the white stars-to-be that he signed were Gil Hodges, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine and Duke Snider. The black stars, Robinson, Campanella and Newcombe, followed close behind.

Within just a few years, Rickey had established ownership or working agreements with no fewer than 27 minor-league teams. That meant contracts for about 500 players. Newport News of the Class D Piedmont League, equivalent to a Single-A league today, numbered 15 athletes 17 years old or younger on its roster. Jake Pitler, one of the few Jewish minor-league managers, ran the club and commented, “Our kids were so young that our team bus was loaded with comic
books and candy bars, but practicably no shaving cream.” Two of the youngsters were Clem Labine and Duke Snider. Rickey showed me Pitler’s scouting report on Snider, dated September 2, 1944.

“Well built and moves good,” Pitler noted. “Good fielding. Good power. Very good arm. Must improve on hitting curveball. Has a lot of ability. Might go all the way.” Snider, of course, went all the way to Cooperstown. But Jimmy Powers did not look into what was really going on in Brooklyn, much less on the vital but faraway farms. In something like four seasons of covering the Dodgers pretty much every day, I never once saw Powers at Ebbets Field. Why not? He never went to Ebbets Field. He was committed to rage rather than reporting, and he even managed to attack Rickey on the issue of integration.

“We question Branch Rickey’s statement that he is another Abraham Lincoln,” Powers wrote. (I never heard nor can I find a record of any such statement. Rickey did hang a picture of Lincoln above his desk, but that evidenced admiration, not ego. For the same reason a replica of Leo Cherne’s bust of Lincoln, presented to me by the Union League Club, sits prominently on a bookshelf in my own office.) Jimmy Powers continued, “We resent pontificating sports promoters who talk a lot. What we wish to see is how much money these ‘liberals’ are personally willing to sacrifice to back up their fancy speeches. You will usually find they are framing their pretty press releases primarily to make money out of the colored people and the colored athletes.”

Sometimes, when Powers was occupied with other matters, he ordered Dick Young to ghostwrite the Powerhouse, directing the thrust of what Young was to type. On one occasion Young approached my
Herald Tribune
colleague Harold Rosenthal and said, “I got a date. I need you to write tomorrow’s Powerhouse for me.” Rosenthal agreed, then told me merrily, “I’m ghosting a column for Dick Young ghosting a column for Jimmy Powers.”

“A ghostly trio,” I said, but Harold didn’t hear me. He had already started typing.

When Powers found time to write his own column, he continued his barrage. The Cardinals’ success, pennants in 1942, ’43, ’44 and ’46, was largely the work of good field managers, Billy Southworth and Eddie Dyer, not the efforts of “Old Man Rickey” upstairs. Ebbets Field needed refurbishing. That would never happen with “El Cheapo” Rickey running things, Powers announced. He wouldn’t even pay to modernize the restrooms. Brooklyn fans, Powers wrote, were proving to be the best and most loyal anywhere in baseball. Despite their small home ballpark, the Dodgers led the major leagues in attendance five times in an eight-year stretch during the 1940s. What was happening to all those gate receipts? Powers asked. The fans of Brooklyn had a right to know. (Among other persons, places and things, the money went to fund the best farm system in baseball, pay a superb scouting staff and outstanding coaches and to build Dodgertown, the matchless spring-training facility where black and white players would live comfortably side by side, even though they were situated within the borders of Vero Beach, a small, all-white, racist Southern town.)