Rickey & Robinson (8 page)

“Did Rachel have editorial control?” I asked.

“No,” Rampersad said, “but she brought to bear emotional pressure.”

Thus the Robinson one encounters in Rampersad’s book is considerably less charged with testosterone than the Robinson I remember. Rampersad, an interesting black academic, told me his forebears on his father’s side had come to the Caribbean from India. “It’s a little ironic that I hold the chair I do at Princeton,” he said, “because Woodrow Wilson, whatever his virtues, was a bigot.” Rampersad later moved on to Stanford. In 2010 he was awarded a medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

That September night in Princeton the panelists were Branch B. Rickey; Sharon Robinson, Jack’s daughter; and myself. Our moderator was another high-powered academic, Sean Wilentz, history professor and director of American studies at Princeton. (Wilentz made later news in the 2008 presidential campaign with slash-and-burn attacks on Barack Obama and “the liberal intellectuals who abdicated their responsibility to provide unblinking and rigorous analysis of him.” Wilentz himself grew up among liberal intellectuals in New York, where his father, Eli, founded the Eighth Street Bookshop, a gathering place in Greenwich Village for such notable writers as W. H. Auden, E. E. Cummings and Jack Kerouac.)

Most interesting at the start in Princeton, at least to me, was the
fact that our audience of several hundred included the entire varsity baseball team. Coach Tom O’Connell believed that remembering Branch Rickey was, or anyway should be, as important to young ballplayers as learning how to hit behind a runner. The most passionate speaker turned out to be Branch B. After his grandfather moved to break the big-league color line, Branch B. said, the other owners gathered in a secret meeting and denounced him. According to young Branch, the rival magnates stormed about and shouted that integration could very well destroy baseball. Talk about slash and burn. “To a man,” young Branch said, in ringing tones, “everyone in the room condemned my grandfather. No other owner, not a single one, stood up for him. Among men he thought were colleagues and friends, my grandfather found himself utterly and completely alone.” In the shocked silence that followed Branch’s speech, I remembered words that my own father said were uttered once by Abraham Lincoln. After a contentious debate during which every member of the cabinet opposed his decision to go public on a matter of consequence, Lincoln said calmly, “One man in the right constitutes a majority.” The next day he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

When the Princeton proceedings ended, Branch and I eased back with a few drinks at the Nassau Inn, a Princeton tavern that dates from 1756, when Princeton was a mostly Quaker town, a small colonial landmark between New Brunswick and Trenton. I asked where he had heard about the meeting that so roundly condemned his grandfather. “From my grandfather himself,” Branch said. “He spoke about it more than once.”

Criticism from the media bothered Rickey, but usually only to a mild degree. He recognized that he was more literate and more intelligent than the sportswriters who busied themselves slamming him. When such attack dogs as Dick Young and Jimmy Powers of the raucous tabloid New York
Daily News
referred to him as “El Cheapo,” Rickey contained himself. “After all,” he told me once, “Young didn’t
like Jackie Robinson, either, and I understand”—a malevolent chuckle burst forth—“he is not even enthusiastic about his wife.” Young was renowned throughout press boxes as a philanderer. No cocktail waitress’s private parts were safe after a night game when Dick Young, nicknamed Young Dick, came to town.

To Rickey the assault from other baseball men was far more wounding than press criticism. It was a shattering explosion detonated by people whom he had regarded as colleagues and friends. Rickey found their racism devastating. Their attack left him feeling threatened and humiliated. For all his days Rickey clung to a mystical sense of the goodness of baseball as a homegrown American institution. He never got over the bigoted attacks directed against him from within the game’s fraternity and in time he even exaggerated their magnitude. People do that, of course. We all exaggerate the pain of episodes that hurt us badly, be it a divorce, a dislocated knee or a proposed expulsion.

Keeping blacks out of organized ball for more than six decades was the work of many people and proceeded with the tacit—and sometimes outspoken—approval of American society at large. As far as I can learn, there were no sustained calls from any groups, black or white, to boycott alabaster baseball, to hit the magnates where they were most sensitive. That place was not the heart, but the wallet.

One eloquent individual protest survives from 1939. It was issued by Wendell Smith in the prominent black newspaper the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Under the heading “A Strange Tribe,” Smith wrote:

Why we continue to flock to major league ballparks, spending our hard earned dough, screaming and hollering, stamping our feet and clapping our hands, begging and pleading for some white batter to knock some white pitcher’s ears off, almost having fits if the home team loses and crying for joy when they win, is a question that probably never will be answered satisfactorily. What in the world are we thinking anyway?

The fact that major league baseball refuses to admit Negro players within its folds makes the question that much more perplexing. Surely, it’s sufficient reason for us to stop spending our money and time in their ballparks. Major league baseball does not want us. It never has. Still, we continue to help support the institution that places a bold “Not Welcome” sign over its thriving portal. . . . We black folks are a strange tribe! . . .

We have been fighting for years in an effort to make owners of major league baseball teams admit Negro players. But they won’t do it. Probably never will. We keep on crawling, begging and pleading for recognition just the same. We know that they don’t want us, but we still keep giving them our money. Keep on going to their ballgames and shouting until we are blue in the face. Oh, we’re optimistic, faithful, prideless—we pitiful black folk.

Yes sir—we black folk are a strange tribe!

Presidents from William Howard Taft to Franklin Delano Roosevelt had appeared for cameras on Opening Day, dutifully throwing out a first ball and turning a blind eye toward segregation. The mainstream press accepted segregated baseball quite matter-of-factly. The Establishment press practiced segregation itself, informally but no less rigidly. Nor was this just the policy of the wealthy elitists who published, say, the
New York Times
. In 1939, when Wendell Smith applied for membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a group consisting of and run by working sports reporters, he was turned down.

Major-league baseball was integrated for 15 years before mainstream newspapers generally began hiring black sportswriters. During that time, writers from such prominent black newspapers as New York’s
Amsterdam News
were required to sit in the back rows of press boxes, as if they were riding buses on rural blacktops in Alabama.

A prominent newspaperman named Tom Swope, sports editor of the
Cincinnati Post
, filled the press box air with racist slurs. When
Jackie Robinson came to bat, Swope liked to crow, “The jig is up.” When I told him to bridle his tongue, Swope said, “What’s the matter? Can’t I call a spade a spade?” Then Swope laughed. In 1956 Bob Teague became the first black sportswriter to work for a white-owned New York newspaper. He was employed by the
New York Times
. Some time after that, he engaged me in an intense discussion. Teague said he hoped that the
Times
had hired him because he was good, not just because he was black. We never found out how good a sportswriter Teague might have become, because a few years later he jumped to TV news.

The tide was running against the bigots, and it had been for some time.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

AS THE DECADE OF the 1930s arrived, and with it the Great Depression, calls for change (and cries for help) rumbled through America. As a third of the nation scrambled for food and shelter, as college graduates sold apples from street carts, people collectively began to realize that the dream of a “more perfect union” had not yet arrived. In 1933 the American unemployment rate reached 24.9 percent. Put differently, 11,385,000 Americans were out of work. Millions more were grossly underpaid or had to pursue pathetic make-work occupations. I remember walking with my father on St. Mark’s Avenue in Brooklyn one pleasant May afternoon when a stranger approached us holding several boxes of yellow pencils. He had a thin, intelligent face, but his clothes were shabby.

“Pencils?” he said to my father. “Three for a dime.”

My father fumbled a bit and found a dollar bill. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ll pick up the pencils another time.”

After we moved on, I asked, “Why didn’t you take the pencils, Dad?”

“Because now he can sell them to somebody else.”

Beyond the cities, hundreds of thousands of farmers were losing their land, their herds, their homes. Foreclosures swept across the Great Plains. The nation had never experienced anything like this before and the American people and the American Establishment were shaken clear down to their ganglia.

Woody Guthrie, from Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, gave voice to the people—mostly people of the left—when he sang:

Oh, I don’t want your millions, mister
.

I don’t want your diamond ring
.

All I want is the right to live, mister
.

Give me back my job again
.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.

We worked to build this country, mister
,

While you enjoyed a life of ease
.

You’ve stolen all that we’ve built, mister
,

Now our children starve and freeze
.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.

Think me dumb if you wish, mister
,

Call me green or blue or red
.

There’s just one thing that I know, mister
,

Our hungry babies must be fed
.

It is instructive to look at the results of the 1932 presidential election.

Although the actual bloc on the far left, 2.5 percent, may not seem large, almost a million Americans—987,772—voted either Socialist or
Communist. Not a mighty wind of change, perhaps, but certainly a noticeable breeze. Subsequently the Communist Party, USA, became a leading advocate for baseball integration.

In 1933, the year of Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural, none of the 16 major-league clubs drew as many as 750,000 fans at their 77 home games. One club, the St. Louis Browns—sportswriters customarily called them the
Hapless
Browns
—
drew fewer than 100,000—for an entire season. In the National League, the Philadelphia Phillies—in sportswriter jargon the
Phutile
Phillies—drew barely over 150,000. We are talking about gatherings of 1,200 to 2,000 fans on sunny afternoons in ballparks built to hold crowds of 35,000. When my father took me to Ebbets Field during the mid-1930s, we could arrive 15 minutes before game time and find good seats between home plate and first base priced at $1.10. Until I grew taller than the old-fashioned Brooklyn turnstiles, I was admitted free. That was the policy, kids shorter than the turnstile gained free admission, provided, of course, that they were accompanied by an adult who paid for his ticket. (The range went like this: bleachers 55 cents; general admission $1.10; reserved seats $1.65; boxes $2.20. Luxury boxes? There was no such animal.)

Inside, a nickel bought you a scorecard featuring the lineups and an advertisement for Between the Acts Little Cigars. These scorecards appeared in black and white. Glossy color scorecards had not yet been invented. All game long, vendors bellowed, “Hey, frank ’n’ a roll here!” as they hawked Stahl-Meyer hot dogs. I remember those hot dogs as being just about the finest food on earth. They cost 10 cents. The Gulden’s mustard was free.

In 1934 the Dodgers drew 434,188 for 70 home dates. Empty seats were the order of the day. The team wasn’t much that year, finishing sixth under a novice major-league manager named Casey Stengel. Only one regular, third baseman “Jersey Joe” Stripp, hit .300. The pitching was mediocre except for the great fireballer Van Lingle
Mungo, who won 18. But losing games was not the greatest problem facing the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. Unable to pay down their bank mortgage, the Depression Dodgers faced a continuing threat of bankruptcy.

Our family moved from Alsace, in eastern France, to Brooklyn in 1848, and came to develop great pride in their new native ground. But my father kept his civic pride well damped, except at the ballpark. Here, in casual conversations with other fans, he maintained, among the empty seats, that Brooklyn in truth was a great baseball town. The greatest. “If we had a decent team,” he’d say, “we’d draw a million.” (When the Dodgers won the pennant in 1941, after a wretched drought lasting 20 years, home attendance totaled 1,214,910, the highest in the major leagues by a margin of several hundred thousand. Branch Rickey came to agree with my father that Brooklyn was a great and special baseball town. It remained so until Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles.)

Like most other businesses in Depression days, baseball was dominated by frugality. Although Lou Gehrig finally drew $40,000 a year from the Yankees, the average major leaguer’s salary in 1933 was $6,000. Ballplayers took winter jobs as factory watchmen, mill hands and clothing salesmen. (That persisted even into the 1950s when Gil Hodges, the Dodgers’ slugging first baseman, sold Buicks in a Flatbush Avenue dealership during the winter.) The best Depression ballplayers—those with the most crowd appeal—turned to post-season barnstorming for extra revenue. Before television, just to see great big leaguers in uniform was an event to be remembered in a hundred American towns along a million miles of American railroad track. These rolling road shows were less tightly structured than regular-season baseball. Here, every October, in a country badly overdrawn, the common pursuit of cash wiped out the supposedly ineradicable cotton curtain.