Between 1947 and 1957, a stretch bracketed by the arrival of Jackie Robinson and the departure of the Dodgers and Giants, New York was the nation’s baseball capital.
—JAMES HIRSCH, Willie Mays
Nicknamed the “Mistake on the Lake,” the much-maligned city [Cleveland] on the shore of Lake Erie has long had a reputation for crime, pollution and corruption.
—NANCY KEATS, “Hotter in Cleveland,” Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2014
Cleveland or New York? Charles Dickens’s recitations of the titanic events taking place in London and Paris in the late nineteenth century are the background for A Tale of Two Cities. In terms of either historical or literary importance, a New York–Cleveland duel in the 1950s pales by comparison. More dramatically, while New York has always been world class, the Cleveland, Ohio, of more recent times does not even make the category of “also ran.”
This, however, is a book about baseball. It has been argued that Larry Doby and his achievements as a Major League center fielder have remained so long in the shadows because Doby played in Cleveland. During the same period, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Duke Snider, center fielders as well, the “kingly triumvirate,” played in New York, dominating all baseball and media coverage of it.1 “The coincidental ascendancy of Mays, Mantle and Snider announced a golden era in baseball and ratified New York’s sense of itself as the center of things.”2 “[Baseball] was played more frequently, and with greater competitive fire, in New York than anywhere else. New York was the only city that claimed more than two [Major League] teams.”3 So New York versus Cleveland is a tale of two cities, simply one without capital letters.
But it is not that simple. While the Cleveland of today has engineered a makeover, including even the procurement by Cleveland of the 2016 Republican National Convention, what may be the modern reality is not the image most Americans have.4 To them, Cleveland remains “the mistake by the lake,” the city whose main waterway, the Cuyahoga River, caught fire in 1969 because the water was so polluted by chemicals and oil. It is a city losing population, a rust-belt town equidistant from Detroit and Buffalo. Back when Doby was playing, however, Cleveland was a vibrant city that through the twenties and thirties had been the fastest growing town in America. Then, in the late forties and the fifties, Cleveland was still in the hunt and the “Larry Doby not New York” story may realistically have been a tale of two cities.
The thesis, that Doby played in the shadows and that it was New York that cast some of those shadows, has to be reexamined in light of what Cleveland, Ohio, was back then, not what Cleveland may have become in its degraded state of the sixties, seventies, or eighties. That process requires that first the author and then the reader delve into not-so-ancient history.
“New York had the Broadway Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, the best museums [and] the tallest buildings.”5 And there was significantly more: the New York and the American Stock Exchanges; the Statue of Liberty; the garment district; leadership of the fashion industry; the Brooklyn Bridge; the financial center with the country’s leading investment banks; Columbia, Fordham, Hunter, NYU, and many other colleges and universities; law firms and financial service firms; the best restaurants. “New York had everything any cosmopolitan would want.”6
New York also was the center of the baseball universe, at least in the 1950s. It had, of course, Mantle, Mays, and Snider, along with the three Major League teams on which they played, the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers. “New York had . . . the self-assurance of a town used to winners. It had the Yankees [which were] the perennial pennant winners. Before the Giants and the Dodgers departed [in 1958] New Yorkers had grown accustomed to an almost annual inter-borough World Series.”7 In the twelve years Casey Stengel managed the Yankees, 1949–61, the team won the American League pennant ten times, including five consecutive times (1949–53).8
Over in the National League, in the twelve years after World War II ended and before the moves to the West Coast, the Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant six times (1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956) and the New York Giants twice (1951and 1954).9 The New York Major League teams were ascendant.
The Yankees also have had further winning streaks. Under Joe Torre, who took over as Yankees manager in 1996, and managed for twelve years, the Yankees won ten divisional titles, six American League pennants, and four World Series.10 Since their move to New York from Baltimore, as the New York Highlanders (christened the Yankees in 1913) and one of the charter members of the American League, the Yankees have won forty pennants and twenty-seven World Series.11 As of 2014 forty-four New York Yankee players and eleven managers (twelve with Joe Torre in 2014) are in the Hall of Fame.
North-central Ohio formed the Western Reserve for colonial Connecticut, one of the original colonies, of course. Each of the original thirteen colonies reserved tracts of land to the west. Connecticut’s was in what would in 1803 become the state of Ohio.
In 1796 the Connecticut Land Company sent General Moses Cleaveland, one of its thirty-six founders, to explore and map the company’s holdings, Connecticut’s “Western Reserve.” In his one and only foray into the Northwest Territory, as it was then known, Cleaveland did so, and he named the “capital city” after himself. The city did not drop the extra A and become “Cleveland” until 1831.
The area remained largely unsettled until Connecticut citizens whom the British burned out in the War of 1812 relocated there. For that reason many north-central Ohio towns have the Connecticut town names that the settlers of 1814–15 bestowed on them: Norwalk, New Haven, Greenwich, New London, Plymouth, Fairfield, and so on. The Western Reserve, after which Cleveland’s principal university was named, also took on a second name: the Firelands.
During and after the Civil War, Cleveland became an industrial powerhouse. It also became a kingmaker. James A. Garfield, who was to become the twentieth president of the United States, served as pastor of the Franklin Christian Church and is buried in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. William McKinley, from nearby Niles, Ohio, became the second U.S. president to hail from Cleveland, his campaign the masterwork of Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna.12 John D. Rockefeller spent his life in Cleveland, managing his far-flung Standard Oil Trust from there. He died in 1937 and is buried in Lake View Cemetery as well.
By 1920 Cleveland had become the fifth largest city in the country, ranking behind only New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Led by Hall of Fame center fielder Tris Speaker, in that year the Cleveland Indians defeated the Brooklyn Robins, forerunner of the Dodgers, in the 1920 World Series. During the 1920s Cleveland was the fastest growing city in the nation, ranking fifth again in 1930. Cleveland hosted the Cleveland Air Races, in which international aviation stars Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post flew. The city was the first home of the National Space and Aeronautics Agency (NASA), than named the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and home to one of the early aerospace companies, TRW.
The most colorful narrative from those days is the history of two brothers from rural Ohio. Born in 1879 and 1881, Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Swerington moved to Cleveland in 1890. The brothers made their first fortunes in land development and building. In 1909 they purchased a 1,399-acre tract east of the city, which they later expanded to 4,000 acres. The Society of True Believers, better known as the Shakers, had owned the property that the Van Sweringtons purchased. As early as 1822, the Shakers had bought the land for one of the nineteen communities they planned for America. They damned up Doan Brook, which ran through the Ohio property, creating millponds later know as Upper or Horseshoe, and Lower, Lakes, which still exist.13
Early in the twentieth century, the Vans laid out the enlarged Shaker tract as a planned upper-class community with curved streets and boulevards. A strict set of restrictive covenants and building specifications, known today as the Shaker Standards and dictating every detail of houses to be built, prevailed. The resulting community, Shaker Heights, remains today Cleveland’s ritziest large suburb, the haven of the upper class.
Nothing weird so far had occurred, but it was soon to happen. The Vans decided that their suburb needed a rapid interurban railway. In turn, the “Rapid,” the interurban they created, need a fitting terminus. So beginning in 1924, the Van Sweringtons caused to be constructed Cleveland’s Terminal Tower (fifty-two floors, 708 feet high); when completed in 1927, it was the second tallest building in the United States and, until 1967, the tallest building outside New York.14 Taking as their inspiration the elegant Woolworth Building in New York, the Van Sweringtons erected an elegant skyscraper that has stood the test of time, facing a large public square laid out by Moses Cleaveland in 1796.15
Building such a colossus for a suburban interurban evinces a touch of weirdness (megalomania?), but that touch pales by comparison with the Vans’ personal lives. Neither brother ever married. The two shared a common bedroom, even though that bedchamber was in a fifty-four-room mansion, Roundwood Manor, on the grounds of Daisy Hill, their estate. They seldom gave interviews or made public appearances, but when they did, they always appeared together.
Mantis Van Swerington died in 1934. Subject to the forces of the Great Depression, their fortunes were already dwindling. The bereaved Oris was crestfallen and lost: “I don’t know what to do, or how to do it, or where to go from here.”16 Two years later, he died of a coronary thrombosis.
All of that would be colorful enough, but the Van Sweringtons’ railroad interests must be added to the mix. Their flagship railroad was the Nickel Plate Road, 523 miles of rail reaching New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. The brothers owned 51 percent of the Nickel Plate. At their zenith the Van Swerington brothers controlled not only the Nickel Plate and its 523 miles of track but also 30,000 miles of railroads that included the Lake Erie and Pittsburgh, the Pere Marquette, the Hocking Valley, and the Chesapeake and Ohio.17
The Van Sweringtons gained control of other railroad corporations by perfecting the practice of pyramiding, using only enough of their own capital to obtain control of a railroad, meaning control of the board of directors. That percentage varied from railroad to railroad but could be a low as 14–15 percent of the stock. The Van Sweringtons would then cause the directors of that railroad to expend the railroad’s assets to obtain “working control,” as opposed to numerical control, of a second railway. The second railway would then obtain and maintain working control of a third railway and perhaps a fourth railway as well. At the end of the day, the railroad structure resembled a pyramid, with the Van Sweringtons at the pinnacle. Three or four layers spread out below them, each layer wider than the layer above it, in a pyramidal display.
The practice became widespread in other sectors as well, for instance, in public utilities. By pyramiding, the rapacious Samuel Insull of Chicago came into control of scores of utility companies. In 1935, in fact, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which was recently repealed, to curb abuses associated with pyramiding.
In 1950, when Doby played, Cleveland, then, was still on an ascending arc. Its population stood at 914,808. A necklace of suburbs surrounded the central city, taking the metro area population close to 2 million. The city was home to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the oil trust that monopolized the country’s oil and gasoline production.
Back then Cleveland was also home to a number of the nation’s railroads: the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Nickel Plate have already been mentioned. Others included the Erie Lackawanna, the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, and the Baltimore and Ohio. Cleveland Cliffs and Pickands Mather and Company, among others, maintained large fleets of Great Lakes steam ships. Pickands Mather alone operated thirty-eight Great Lakes cargo ships, iron mines in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and several steel mills.
Those ships would load iron ore (taconite pellets) from Minnesota’s Mesabi Range and then carry their cargoes across Lake Superior to the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. Down bound from there, ore ships would head through the St. Mary River to Lake Huron, then Lake St. Clair, opposite Detroit, Michigan. Turning east, the freighters would cross half of Lake Erie, stopping at Cleveland. From Cleveland the city’s railroads would transship raw materials, including iron ore, to steel mills in Fort Wayne, Toledo, Middletown, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Johnstown, and all the other points in what has now become the rust belt.
In 1947–48 Cleveland was a vibrant place. In sports it had the Cleveland Browns, who dominated the All-American Football Conference and then finished atop the National Football Conference from its formation in 1950 until 1956. In fact, Larry Doby credited Cleveland Browns players with helping ease his transition as the first African American in American League baseball. The Browns had integrated their roster after World War II, adding fullback Marion Motley and lineman Bill Willis to their 1946 squad.18 The two black players met the Indians’ train when it arrived back from the 1947 Chicago road trip in which Doby had broken into big league baseball. Doby, and the two professional football players remained friends and formed a support group for several years.19 More importantly perhaps, Motley’s 1946 debut and ensuing stardom had accustomed Cleveland sports fans to the notion of black professional athletes, assuring that fans were less harsh toward Doby, at least in Cleveland.
In fact Clevelanders had accepted black athletes as their idols earlier. Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in Berlin’s 1936 Olympics, dramatically disproving Hitler’s notion of a superior race, grew up in Cleveland and graduated from Cleveland’s East Technical High School.20 Starring at Ohio State and later in the Olympics, Owens became a national hero. “One of the most significant athletes of the twentieth century,” he maintained his connections with his home town.21 He knew Larry Doby and rooted for the Indians.
We can see, then, that Cleveland still pales by comparison with New York City, in professional sports as well as everything else, but not as much as one would imagine, at least in the late 1940s and the 1950s, the decades when Larry Doby played there.
Cleveland later had some rough times. In 1966, following race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles (Watts), Cleveland’s eastside Hough district erupted. Cleveland’s Millionaire’s Row, Euclid Avenue, became a thoroughfare of weed-choked vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. With white flight to the suburbs, the central city’s population dwindled to 396,000, propelling the city, which once had been the nation’s fifth largest, to forty-fifth and still losing population.
Seemingly the nadir was in the 1980s. “Cleveland became the joke on Johnny Carson. A dull comic would coax a laugh from a bored audience by mentioning [Cleveland].” Things had become so bad that comedians “re-wrote the old Philadelphia jokes and made them Cleveland jokes. First prize, a week in Cleveland. Second prize, two weeks in Cleveland.”22
Cleveland has enjoyed a comeback, as a university town (Case Western Reserve, Cleveland State, John Carroll) and as home to one of the nation’s premier medical centers, the Cleveland Clinic. Two new sports stadia, the Cleveland Browns Stadium for football and Jacobs Field (now renamed Progressive Field) for baseball, have replaced the cold, wind-whipped Municipal Stadium, “the old crypt by the lakefront.”23 Today the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dominates the lakefront. Designed by I. M. Pei, the hall opened in 1995. Because Cleveland music promoters, particularly disc jockey Alan “Moon Dog” Freed, played such a key role in the early days of rock, city powers mounted an ultimately successful campaign to bring the proposed hall of fame to Cleveland.24
Things seem to be on the rise again in Cleveland, reminiscent of what the city must have been like in the 1940s and 1950s, when Doby played: “Cleveland’s fortunes seem to be turning around. Le Bron [James] is headed home!” to the Cleveland Cavaliers, along with all-star Kevin Love. “The 2016 Republican Convention is coming. The Browns nabbed [Heisman Trophy–winning] quarterback Johnny Manziel in the draft! There is lots of exuberance and chest thumping in Cleveland, accompanied by lofty predictions of the positive economic impacts of these events.”25
The Cleveland Indians’ fortunes have been much the same as those of the Forest City itself, since World War II almost to a “T.” The Indians trace their roots to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where in 1894 the team began its existence as the Rustlers. In 1900 the team moved east and slightly south to Cleveland, evolving through a succession of names: Cleveland Lake Shores (1900); Cleveland Bluebirds (1901), whose nickname “Blues” was preferred by fans as well as players; Cleveland Broncos (1902); Cleveland Naps (1903–4). The latter team took its moniker from its All-Star second baseman, Napoleon Lajoie (.332 BA over a twenty-one-year career), one of the greats of all time. Contrary to the Naps’ namesake,” the team’s performance was less than stellar, prompting one wag to refer to the team as “the Napkins—because they fold so easily.”26 After Lajoie departed, the team briefly became the Cleveland Molly McGuires before settling on “Indians” in 1915.
One other significant fact from the Indians’ more ancient history dates from 1915, when manager Lee Fohl traded players to the Boston Red Sox for center fielder Tris Speaker, (.345 over a twenty-two-year career), another all-time baseball great. Speaker, later Larry Doby’s mentor, became Indians player-manager in 1919. Speaker led the Indians to an American League pennant and a World Series victory over the Brooklyn Robins, later Dodgers, in 1920. It was Cleveland’s one and only postseason triumph until Larry Doby came along.27 In the interim, the Indians endured twenty-eight years of near nothingness.
The other bookend to the Doby years and Cleveland Indian history has been termed “the thirty-year slump.” After Hank Greenberg and Al Lopez traded Doby to the Chicago White Sox following the 1955 season, the Indians entered another prolonged and dismal slump. The team’s slump actually spanned thirty-five years, beginning in 1958 (fourth place), 1959 (second), and 1960 (fourth). From 1960 to 1993, on twenty-seven occasions the Indians finished at or near last place in the eight-team American League.
Just as Cleveland began to resurge in the early 1990s, so, too, did its baseball team. In 1994 Jacobs Field, a new, modern, and cozy ballpark, opened. Jacobs replaced the cavernous lakefront Municipal Stadium (the Crypt), in which chunks of concrete fell from pillars and walls, crowds of forty thousand felt dwarfed, and wild winds whipped off the lake.
Led by sluggers Albert Bell, Manny Ramirez, and Jim Thome, along with pitchers such as Orel Hersheiser, Jaret Wright, and Jose Mesa (“Senior Slam”), the Indians won seven divisional crowns in thirteen years. They appeared twice in the World Series (1995 and 1997), unfortunately losing on both occasions. Beginning in 1995 they reeled off five straight divisional championships. Attendance was over the moon: between June 12, 1995, and April 4, 2001, the Indians sold out 455 consecutive home games, drawing a total of 19,324,248 fans to Jacobs Field. The sellout streak was a Major League record, broken by the Boston Red Sox in 2008, for whom a sellout may be termed easier because of the much smaller capacity of Fenway Park.
The 1949 Indians team numbered on its roster seven future Hall of Fame inductees (Lou Boudreau, Larry Doby, Bob Feller, Joe Gordon, Bob Lemon, Satchel Paige, and Early Wynn). Al Rosen, a power-hitting third baseman who won both American League batting and home run championships should be there as well. With Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Mike (“The Bear”) Garcia, the Indians had the best starting rotation in all baseball from 1949 until 1958, when the Indians traded Wynn to the White Sox and Feller had retired (see chapter 5). In the nine years Larry Doby played for the Indians, 1947 excluded, the Indians appeared in two World Series and finished second five times, always to the dreaded New York Yankees. They finished a disappointing third in 1949, after which Bill Veeck conducted a ceremony in which he and the team buried their 1948 pennant in centerfield.
But that era was not only an apotheosis for Cleveland, then a large and fast-paced city. It was an apotheosis for the Cleveland Indians baseball club as well. One of the undisputed leaders of those Indian teams then was Larry Doby.
Among other things, in addition to being the baseball capital of the universe, New York was the media capital as well. Features on Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, and other New York teams’ players and managers appeared in many of the leading magazines of the day: Look, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, Time, Newsweek, and others, all of which had editorial offices in Manhattan. Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays’s visages each appeared on either the cover of Time or Newsweek.28
By contrast Larry Doby appeared in a national magazine once, in Jet, a magazine by and large marketed to and read by the African American population.29 And that piece appeared only after most of Doby’s playing days were behind him, in 1957.
New York City then also was the epicenter of the publishing and broadcasting worlds. Baseball, to be more precise New York City Major League Baseball, figured prominently in that world. A litmus test for just how marked the broadcasting presence was might be gleaned from a review of the popular television program What’s My Line? Through the 1950 and 1960s, every Sunday night all across America families tuned in their sets to this popular show: “Each program . . . featured the appearance of at least one mystery guest, a celebrity whose face and voice were known to the masses, and who was quizzed by the blindfold-wearing panelists.”30 The panelists, who were celebrities in their own right, had to determine the identity of the mystery guest. Many of the mystery guests were baseball stars or managers. All, or almost all, of the baseball mystery guests were from the New York teams (Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, later Mets). None was from the Cleveland Indians.
Not quite all the mystery baseball celebrities were from New York. Dizzy Dean, the star St. Louis Cardinals pitcher of the 1930s, appeared, but in 1950, long after Dean’s playing days. Ten members of the Cincinnati Reds team appeared, by chance being in New York after having swept a doubleheader from the New York Giants earlier that Sunday.31 All the other baseball mystery guests, though, appear to have been players and managers from the New York teams. A partial list would include the following:
Yankees: Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Houk, Phil Rizzuto (twice), Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Casey Stengel
Dodgers: Charlie Dressen, Chuck Connors, Leo Durocher, Carl Furillo, Branch Rickey, Duke Snider (twice)
Giants: Leo Durocher, Sal “The Barber” Maglie (twice), Willie Mays (twice).
Mets: Casey Stengel32
The litmus test may be an unscientific one, but it is another indicator that in a tale of two cities, Cleveland, even as it was in those days, finished a distant second to New York. Part of what Larry Doby accomplished in baseball and on the field has been masked from the view of subsequent generations because Doby starred in far-off Cleveland, Ohio.