The Original Curse (10 page)

As Aleck entered the train station, his eye was caught by a billet plastered on a post. There were patriotic posters like this all over town, all over the country, imploring citizens to enlist or buy Liberty Bonds or just hate Germans in general—“Halt the Hun” and “Help Crush the Menace of the Seas” and “Blot Out the Hun.” But this one struck Aleck. It was a soldier, seated in a chair. He was smiling, holding a cane, smartly decked in khaki, stretched out and comfortable looking. But something about the uniform was not quite right. It took Aleck a moment to recognize it.

Oh. He saw it now.

The sleeve of the soldier’s uniform was pinned to his shoulder. He had no right arm. Some sacrifice. Under the drawing of the soldier: “The Red Cross is spending Ten Million Dollars a Year to help the disabled ex-service man and his family.”
⁵

Aleck bit his lip, rubbed his arm, and ducked into the LaSalle Street station.

On April 12, just four days before the Cubs were scheduled to open their season in St. Louis, the draft board of Howard County, Nebraska,
called Grover Cleveland Alexander as the 10th of a 12-man quota it was required to send to Camp Funston in Kansas. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. In the government’s ranking system for potential draftees, Alexander had been placed in the first group eligible to be drafted—Class 1A, unmarried and with no dependents. Aleck thought his draft number was low enough to keep him out of the army until much later in the year, if he was drafted at all. He had sought an exemption on the grounds that his elderly mother was dependent on him, especially after the death of his brother, George, in March. But Alexander’s appeal was denied. He was told he’d been drafted as the Cubs made the last leg of their spring training journey, from Guthrie, Oklahoma, to Wichita to Opening Day in St. Louis.

Opening Day wasn’t as celebratory as usual. Heavy rain seemed to doom the Cubs–Cardinals game at Robison Field, but by midmorning the weather broke. The war dominated the pregame festivities. The Great Lakes military band provided music and a parade, the first ball was thrown out by Colonel Hunter of Jefferson Barracks, and a Liberty Loan skit was put on, in which Uncle Sam struck out Kaiser Bill on three pitches, each representing a loan. A crowd of 20,000 was expected, but only 8,000 showed.

Aleck was to be the day’s starter, and he arrived in St. Louis on the morning of the game, agitated and exhausted. He hopped off a train from Chicago, where he’d been trying to nail down the details of his coming trip to Camp Funston. “Alex tried to snatch a nap at the hotel,” the
Tribune
reported, “but went to the ball park pretty well worn out.”
⁶
It showed. An error, a triple by Hornsby, and a double put the Cubs in a 2–0 hole in the first inning, and they couldn’t recover, suffering a 4–2 loss.

The drafting of Alexander was a sobering reality. He was not the first player to leave baseball because of the war, but he was the biggest star taken by the draft. And he was not easing into the soft duty of naval yards—he was picked for the army, which meant he was destined for the front. In previewing baseball’s Opening Day, the
New York Times
wrote, “Peanuts, hot frankfurters and popcorn will no longer have a monopoly, for as side attractions at the ball games, Liberty bonds and Thrift Stamps will also be on sale…. Just what sort of a baseball season this is going to be, under war conditions, is problematical. The war had little effect on the game last season, but as the seriousness of the grim struggle becomes more impressed upon the
public during the coming season there may be a lack of interest in baseball.”
⁷

Indeed, the struggle in Europe was getting more and more grim.

When Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, many assumed that the United States, with its vast wealth and manpower, would quickly turn the tide in favor of the Allies. Broadway writer George M. Cohan popped out a catchy and popular new song, “Over There,” that summed up American bravado. When General John Pershing, the head of the American Expeditionary Force, as it was called, arrived in France, he supposedly stated, “Lafayette, we are here,” as if the Americans would bail out the French as the French had done for the Americans in the Revolutionary War. (It was actually Pershing’s underling who said it.) An editorial in the
Lincoln [Nebraska] Daily Star
read: “What it may mean in loss of life is not now conjecturable. It may mean none. Some are quite sanguine that the war will be over in three months.”
⁸
That sort of optimism was widespread. In Paris, an editorial in
Echo de Paris
stated, “The Americans can give us immediately 500,000 workmen, and let the number include 25,000 specialists capable of building new roads, telegraphic and telephonic systems, saps, mines and all the immense apparatus—what a wonderful contribution to victory this would be!”
⁹

But that optimism badly underestimated how unready the United States was for war, especially the kind of war that was being fought in Europe—a war of trenches, barbed wire, tanks, howitzers, machine guns, poison gas attacks, and air warfare. This was a long way from Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War, a long way from the Civil War. The U.S. Army stood at 202,510,
¹⁰
a pitifully small force whose only recent action had been chasing Pancho Villa’s raiders near the Mexican border. In the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered 57,000 casualties
in the battle’s first day
.
¹¹
By the time the Battle of the Somme ended in November 1916, nearly 1.3 million soldiers on both sides were casualties. An army of 200,000 could not be expected to have any immediate impact.

After Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917, the nation had its first draft registration, which saw nearly 10 million men get their draft cards in June. It was not until July 20 that Secretary of War Newton Baker drew the draft numbers that would determine which civilians would make up the new army. In the first draft,
687,000 men were called into the service, and the nation prided itself on its speed. In Europe, however, the Allies were less than impressed. In the month that it took Congress to pass the Selective Service Act alone, France lost 187,000 men in the failed Nivelle offensive. By the time of the first registration, a mutiny cost the French another 30,000 soldiers. Meanwhile, the United States was still picking draft numbers. It was clear that the half million workmen the
Echo de Paris
sought immediately were not forthcoming.

Once men were drafted, the nation was faced with the problem of training, housing, clothing, feeding, arming, and transporting those men. Here the government had mixed results. It spent $136 million on 16 cantonments where new soldiers could be trained. Another 16 cantonments were built for the national guard (mostly in tent camps in the South, which, because of an uncharacteristically cold winter nationwide, wound up being a bad idea), plus more for the marines and the navy and for officer training. Construction of the cantonments began in June and was mostly complete by early October, as crews rushed through 30,000 tons of construction materials per day, creating training and living space for 1.5 million soldiers. This was counted as a big success for the War Department.

But clothing and supplies were challenges too. In the first year of the war, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps bought 75 million yards of drab olive cloth, 31 million yards of uniform cloth, 20 million blankets, and 49 million pairs of underwear. And, because of the cold winter, it was not enough. One food purchase included 116 million cans of baked beans and 20 million pounds of prunes (which surely made for interesting olfactory conditions in the bunkhouses at night).
¹²
Even when the men were trained, fed, and clothed, there weren’t nearly enough guns. Heavy ordnance was lacking and would remain so. There was a long delay in the nation’s air program, hindered by a graft scandal that saw the government essentially throw away $640 million.
¹³

Beyond all these shortages was the obvious problem of getting the army over the ocean to Europe, especially with German submarines patrolling the Atlantic. And another problem: General Pershing wanted to amass the army in Europe and have it fight as a unit, rather than simply installing battalions with the French and British armies as they became ready. This further delayed the American effort and further angered the Allies.

Senator George Earle Chamberlain of Oregon, chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, was so disappointed in the progress that he launched a probe into the way the country had been conducting the war effort. For three weeks officials shuffled in to explain themselves. Finally Chamberlain stated flatly in a January 1918 talk with the National Security League, “We are still unprepared, without a definite war program and still without trained men…. The military establishment of the United States has broken down. It has almost stopped functioning.”
¹⁴

By April 1918, a full year after the declaration of war and under increasing pressure from the disgruntled Allies, the American army began to lurch into action. There wasn’t much choice. The situation was worsening. In late 1917, the eastern front shut down when Russia—which had seen Czar Nicholas II overthrown and was now controlled by the Bolsheviks in the wake of the October revolution—agreed to peace with Germany. In March that peace was formalized in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Germans seized a large swath of Russian land, greatly increasing their store of resources. Germany turned those resources to the stalemated western front, and in late March the reinvigorated German army began a long series of offensives designed to smash Allied lines and win the war before the United States could become a factor.

“Speed up,” French high commissioner André Tardieu warned, “but be sure that anyhow you come not too late.”
¹⁵
The United States began hurrying men across the Atlantic, and as soldiers left the cantonments, the army drafted more civilians. This had a wide-ranging effect. Had Russia not given up the eastern front, had the German offensive not been launched, had German resources continued to erode beneath the strain of a two-front war, the U.S. Army might have continued its snail’s crawl into action, and fewer American boys would have been pushed into war. It can be conjectured, then, that the activities of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks not only forever changed world political history but changed baseball history too. Grover Cleveland Alexander might have become the greatest pitcher baseball had ever known if war had not intervened. Aleck might have also done the remainder of his hurling in a Cubs uniform. That could have changed history for generations of North Side fans.
Told he’d been drafted before Opening Day, Alexander said, “I am not worried. I am ready to go at once if I am called. No one will have a chance to call me a slacker. However, I hope they will give me a chance to pitch the opening game in St. Louis on Tuesday, as I would like to win one game before going away to join the colors.”
¹⁶

He had plenty of motivation for wanting a win. Cubs fans who pinned their 1918 hopes on Alexander’s pitching had watched their new star conduct an embarrassing holdout that spring. He wanted a bonus of $10,000, what he considered to be a piece of the money the Phillies received for him. When Baker would not pay, Alexander put the demand to the Cubs. He refused to practice until the bonus was paid. For a week, he watched spring training from the bleachers, hung out at the team’s headquarters at the Hotel Green, sat in Killefer’s car (Killefer had a house in southern California), and played golf. He was labeled a prima donna, and there was something unsavory about a player conducting a holdout while thousands of young men were being sent to war.

Through it all, Wrigley did most of the talking with Alexander—significantly, with Weeghman in Chicago, Wrigley had the air of Cubs decision maker. Wrigley took Alexander golfing at the Midwick Club, sat with him in the bleachers, and took him to the house of one of the most popular actors in the country, Doug Fairbanks. Finally, it was Wrigley, with Mitchell and Craighead, who worked out the bonus. The day after the agreement, the
Los Angeles Times
wrote, “Mr. Wrigley and the star hurler disappeared at once in the former’s touring car, and it was thought possible they went to the bank for a bag of gold.”
¹⁷

Alexander, naturally, wanted to show Cubs fans he was worth all that gold. He didn’t want baseball fans’ last memory of him to be a holdout. After the April 16 loss to start the season in St. Louis, there was good news: Alexander would not have to report for military duty until April 30, which left time for two more starts. In his next outing, Alexander cruised to a 9–1 win in Cincinnati and, two days later, Weeghman’s trained seals finally headed home to Chicago after a long, bizarre spring.

There was more excitement for the Cubs’ home opener than there had been in St. Louis. Craighead advertised the game in the papers, pointing out that Weeghman Park “is the most comfortable ball garden
in America. The ladies can wear their daintiest summer frocks without fear of soiling them.”
¹⁸
Dainty frocks wouldn’t have been a good idea for Opening Day, though, as cold winds limited the crowd to about the 10,000. Before the game, 450 jackies (sailors were called
jackies
and soldiers were called
sammies
) from the Great Lakes training center “went through with some of the fancy stunts taught on the North Shore and wound up in a ‘charge bayonets’ attitude while the flag was raised to the pennant pole and the band played the national hymn.”
¹⁹
Illinois governor Frank Lowden threw out the first pitch, joined by powerful federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had managed to sneak off the bench for the game. When Lowden uncorked a wild heave, Landis shouted, “Ball one!” There weren’t many other bad pitches for the home team—Hippo Vaughn threw a one-hitter and won, 2–0.