Read Online The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Roger Kahn - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Roger Kahn
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that Chapman never again dared to bait Jackie Robinson or Pee Wee Reese or any others among the athletes Branch Rickey proudly called in subsequent years “my ferocious gentlemen.”*
The final spasm of baseball racism, hurled forth against Robinson, quite the most serious, comes down to us in several versions. As I write these pages early in the 1990s, some of the principals from 1947 survive. But their memories, even the memories of those who want passionately to be honest, have grown blurry. Unlike the Christopher Isherwood heroine, an old ballplayer, an old newspaperman, is not a camera. Besides, not all
want
to be honest.
During the 1940s, the St. Louis Cardinals were the closest thing in the major leagues to a team representing the Old South. Born in another time, Jefferson Davis would have been a St. Louis Cardinal fan.
St. Louis, the “Mound City,” is mostly flat. It sits on the western bank of the Mississippi River, a major manufacturer of aircraft today and a colossal brewer of beer, no more racially troubled or racially tranquil than New York or Boston. But in the 1940s, St. Louis was militantly southern.
All
the hotels were segregated. (Robinson was not permitted to join his Dodger teammates at the Hotel Chase until 1953.) The stands at Sportsman’s Park were segregated until 1946. St. Louis newspapers, from the conservative
Globe Democrat
to the more liberal
Post-Dispatch
, routinely identified individuals in news stories as Negro. “John Walters, 58, Negro, was injured when fire swept through his residence. . . .”
Playing amid this white-supremacist climate in the south-western corner of the major leagues, the Cardinals evolved into a team of fire and primitive élan. Branch Rickey, vice president and business manager for twenty-one years, devised baseball’s first farm system, and soon strings of minor league teams in Rochester, Columbus, Houston, and smaller towns were developing young players for the big club. Rickey’s boss, Sam Breadon, had eastern roots. He began as a garage mechanic, worked hard, saved his money, and somehow acquired a Rolls-Royce dealership. Breadon obtained a controlling interest in the Cardinals for $20,000 in 1920. Like so many old-time baseball owners, Breadon was a flinty businessman, but he was also capable of small kindnesses, and the old garage mechanic was shrewd enough to let Rickey run his baseball team.
The famous Gashouse Gang, performing in St. Louis during the 1930s, included such uninhibited characters as Jay “Dizzy” Dean, Johnny Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin, and “Lippy” Leo Durocher. The manager, Frank Frisch, was a Fordham graduate, but the slant of the team was hillbilly and southern. During the 1934 World Series, which the Gashouse Gang won from Detroit, Dean and some others shouted nasty stuff at Hank Greenberg, whom Dean insisted on calling “Mo.” The Cards for decades were the Ku Klux Klan’s favorite team, an image that changed only slowly and grudgingly over many years with the ascent of Stan Musial, the greatest hitter I have ever seen — and a liberal Democrat.
The Cardinals won pennants in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1946 and won three of those four World Series. The Cards were strong and tough and raucous and dominant. Before leaving St. Louis for Brooklyn, Branch Rickey had put together a dynasty in the Mississippi Valley. Mickey Mantle remembers rooting for the Cardinals as a child, sitting beside a radio in Oklahoma. Fans came to Sportsman’s Park from Arkansas and Tennessee. The Cardinals were an absolute down-home triumph.
But in 1947 Sam Breadon felt beset. Rickey was gone. A pair of Mexican banditos — actually oil megamillionaires — Jorge and Alfonso Pasquel, were starting an “outlaw” league south of the Rio Grande. They had “stolen” the fine left-handed pitcher Max Lanier. Breadon worried obsessively about money. St. Louis, he told friends, really wasn’t big enough to support two major league teams, his
The final spasm of baseball racism, hurled forth against Robinson, quite the most serious, comes down to us in several versions. As I write these pages early in the 1990s, some of the principals from 1947 survive. But their memories, even the memories of those who want passionately to be honest, have grown blurry. Unlike the Christopher Isherwood heroine, an old ballplayer, an old newspaperman, is not a camera. Besides, not all
want
to be honest.
During the 1940s, the St. Louis Cardinals were the closest thing in the major leagues to a team representing the Old South. Born in another time, Jefferson Davis would have been a St. Louis Cardinal fan.
St. Louis, the “Mound City,” is mostly flat. It sits on the western bank of the Mississippi River, a major manufacturer of aircraft today and a colossal brewer of beer, no more racially troubled or racially tranquil than New York or Boston. But in the 1940s, St. Louis was militantly southern.
All
the hotels were segregated. (Robinson was not permitted to join his Dodger teammates at the Hotel Chase until 1953.) The stands at Sportsman’s Park were segregated until 1946. St. Louis newspapers, from the conservative
Globe Democrat
to the more liberal
Post-Dispatch
, routinely identified individuals in news stories as Negro. “John Walters, 58, Negro, was injured when fire swept through his residence. . . .”
Playing amid this white-supremacist climate in the south-western corner of the major leagues, the Cardinals evolved into a team of fire and primitive élan. Branch Rickey, vice president and business manager for twenty-one years, devised baseball’s first farm system, and soon strings of minor league teams in Rochester, Columbus, Houston, and smaller towns were developing young players for the big club. Rickey’s boss, Sam Breadon, had eastern roots. He began as a garage mechanic, worked hard, saved his money, and somehow acquired a Rolls-Royce dealership. Breadon obtained a controlling interest in the Cardinals for $20,000 in 1920. Like so many old-time baseball owners, Breadon was a flinty businessman, but he was also capable of small kindnesses, and the old garage mechanic was shrewd enough to let Rickey run his baseball team.
The famous Gashouse Gang, performing in St. Louis during the 1930s, included such uninhibited characters as Jay “Dizzy” Dean, Johnny Leonard Roosevelt “Pepper” Martin, and “Lippy” Leo Durocher. The manager, Frank Frisch, was a Fordham graduate, but the slant of the team was hillbilly and southern. During the 1934 World Series, which the Gashouse Gang won from Detroit, Dean and some others shouted nasty stuff at Hank Greenberg, whom Dean insisted on calling “Mo.” The Cards for decades were the Ku Klux Klan’s favorite team, an image that changed only slowly and grudgingly over many years with the ascent of Stan Musial, the greatest hitter I have ever seen — and a liberal Democrat.
The Cardinals won pennants in 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1946 and won three of those four World Series. The Cards were strong and tough and raucous and dominant. Before leaving St. Louis for Brooklyn, Branch Rickey had put together a dynasty in the Mississippi Valley. Mickey Mantle remembers rooting for the Cardinals as a child, sitting beside a radio in Oklahoma. Fans came to Sportsman’s Park from Arkansas and Tennessee. The Cardinals were an absolute down-home triumph.
But in 1947 Sam Breadon felt beset. Rickey was gone. A pair of Mexican banditos — actually oil megamillionaires — Jorge and Alfonso Pasquel, were starting an “outlaw” league south of the Rio Grande. They had “stolen” the fine left-handed pitcher Max Lanier. Breadon worried obsessively about money. St. Louis, he told friends, really wasn’t big enough to support two major league teams, his
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