THE THREE NEW YORK CITY ballclubs drew more than five million fans in 1949, despite a disappointing finish by Leo Durocher’s evolving Giants. Durocher had uttered one classic comment on his well-liked predecessor at the Polo Grounds, stumpy, congenial, uncomplicated Mel Ott. “Nice guys finish last,” Durocher said.
“Right,” pronounced the Daily News’s tart-tongued Dick Young when the 1949 baseball season ended. “And not-so-nice guys finish fifth.”
Both the Yankees and the Dodgers battled through pennant races that turned and twisted and blossomed until Sunday, October 2, the very last day of the season. The Giants, who finished twenty-four games behind the Dodgers, made news somewhat more subtly. On the eighth of July, the team was integrated.
Earlier the Giants had signed two distinctly different black athletes and assigned them to the Jersey City farm team in the International League. During a barroom brawl somewhere in Texas, Henry Curtis “Hank” Thompson, an infielder who stood a broad-beamed five feet, nine inches, had beaten a man to death. “The way things worked in the South then,” reported Garry Schumacher of the Giant front office, “when one colored guy killed another colored guy, it didn’t count. The white cops wouldn’t even make arrests.” Thompson proved pleasant enough, except when an occasional rage gripped him, and not notably bright. Baseball integration was proceeding at a most lethargic pace. But history often moves unevenly. Just two years after Robinson’s first Brooklyn season, the stern character barrier to blacks — no drinkers, no rowdies — was coming down. Henry Curtis Thompson was a bibulous man.
Along with Thompson, the Giants signed a black of faultless character and keen intelligence, Monford Merrill Irvin, an outfielder who had graduated from Lincoln University, a small Negro college in Pennsylvania, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Irvin was thirty years old. Racism kept big Monte Irvin out of the major leagues during most of his prime playing seasons. Irvin was courteous, thoughtful, soft-voiced. To Robert Creamer of Sports Illustrated, perhaps unconsciously mouthing some prejudice of the time, “Monte Irvin sounds like a Latin professor.”
Into July, Thompson hit .303 for Jersey City. Irvin hit .373, with fourteen steals and fifty-two runs batted in across sixty-three games. They were then promoted to the Polo Grounds. “Of course we knew segregation was wrong,” says Charles “Chub” Feeney, vice president of the Giants at the time. “My uncle [Giant president Horace Stoneham] knew it and I knew it, but pure idealists we were not. Competing in New York, against the Yankees and the Dodgers, the resource we needed most was talent. Whatever Durocher told you, Leo’s brain alone was not enough. In 1949, the Negro leagues were the most logical place in the world to look for ballplayers.”
Still, the best young player in Negro baseball, indeed the best young player in the world, was not allowed into white baseball for another season. Quite simply, Willie Howard Mays, the eighteen-year-old center fielder for the Birmingham Black Barons, was a wonder. But opportunities for blacks, even wonder-blacks, remained restricted.
With the addition of catcher Roy Campanella and the very large, very fast right-hander Don Newcombe, the Dodgers of 1949 were solidly integrated. Some days a third of the starting Brooklyn lineup was black. For the time being, that was enough, Branch Rickey decided. The Giants wanted to see how things went with Thompson and Irvin before they undertook further black hiring.
Three major league teams were integrated — Cleveland, the Dodgers, and the Giants. Three teams were integrated and two of them were based in enlightened New York. The Yankees felt a certain pressure.
Between them, Dan Topping and Del Webb had no discernible social conscience. Topping was comfortable in an all-white, all-wealthy Southampton social world. Webb’s construction company had built one of the concentration camps used to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. With some drinks in him, Webb boasted that he had completed the concentration camp “ahead of schedule.” Citing his responsibility toward his employers’ investment, George Weiss was determined to keep the Yankees white. Besides, personally Weiss didn’t care for blacks and didn’t trust them. (In later years Weiss unloaded an outstanding black Puerto Rican prospect, Victor Pellot Power, informing people at the Times and the Herald Tribune, “Maybe he can play, but not for us. He’s impudent and he goes for white women.”)
But social pressure remained and, besides, it was illegal for an employer in New York State to discriminate. Seeming to bow to the law, but actually sidestepping, Weiss sent Bill “Wheels” McCorry, sometime scout and full-time road secretary, to look at Mays in a few Negro League games in Alabama. Although McCorry was born in upstate New York, he had the attitudes of a southern Klansman, which he made little effort to conceal. He reported back to Weiss that Willie Mays could run some and could throw a little but wasn’t worth signing because “the boy can’t hit a good curve ball.”
“That’s just about the worstest scouting report I ever heard of,” Roy Campanella says. “Willie couldn’t hit the curve! He was eighteen years old. No way an eighteen-year-old kid is ever gonna be a good curve ball hitter. That takes time. Mickey and Duke, great as they were, they didn’t hit good curve balls when they were eighteen.
“The onliest thing McCorry had negative on Willie was something else: the color of Willie’s skin.”
The Yankees could have signed Willie Mays in 1949 for a bonus of $5,000. They made no offer. If they had signed Mays, the Yankee outfield through the 1951 pennant race would have been remembered through the corridors of time: DiMaggio, Mantle, and Mays.
One has to conclude that bigotry is not simply wicked. It is also pretty damn dumb.
Two absolutely extraordinary episodes in 1949 removed the baseball focus from the field. One was a deed of psychopathic violence that wrecked at least two lives. The other, less obviously violent, haunted and troubled Jackie Robinson until his death.
Both the Dodgers and Yankees broke training camp in fine style. Robinson was back to a good playing weight of 190 pounds. With the arrival of Campanella, he was no longer the only black regular in the National League. His teammates increasingly felt more comfortable with him and he felt increasingly comfortable with himself.* Robinson flowered throughout the summer of 1949. With a batting average of .342, he led the league, outhitting Musial by four points. Robinson batted in 124 runs and hit 38 doubles and 12 triples. In a period of cautious base running, he stole 37 bases. That is almost routine for a good base runner today, but it was 11 more than anyone else in the majors stole in 1949. And he stole in punishing ways.
Somebody wrote a song:
Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?
Did he hit it, man, and that ain’t all.
He stole home!
There was no musical background for Stengel’s platoons in the Bronx, but without Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio — who had been sanctified in song (“Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio”) eight years before — they performed wonderfully well. Vic Raschi won nine of his first ten decisions. Tommy Henrich hit sixteen home runs across three months. In June the Yankees had a four-game lead.
The integrated Dodgers against the dominantly southern Cardinals. The Yankees and Casey Stengel against the world. A gripping time for baseball, with excitement aplenty, when suddenly, on June 15, gunfire exploded into the major leagues.
A tall, rather drab, black-haired Chicago woman named Ruth Ann Steinhagen, daughter of a hard-working die maker, had become infatuated with a graceful but quite ordinary-looking first baseman named Eddie Waitkus, a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waitkus had fought in the South Pacific during World War II and been awarded the Bronze Star for courage under fire. He was quiet, in no way a hell raiser, and he sometimes mentioned that he had turned down a Harvard scholarship to play pro ball. He was a bachelor, a fact not lost on Ruth Ann Steinhagen.
Ruth Ann noticed Waitkus when he was playing for the Cubs at Wrigley Field in 1946. He was a smooth fielder who hit for a .304 average, without much power, but he moved well around first base, a slick fielder; in the argot, a fancy Dan. Ruth Ann Steinhagen began spending whatever spare money she could find to buy tickets to Wrigley Field. She always sat as close as possible to first base. She was sixteen and gawky; after a time she felt she was in love. She saved newspaper photos of Eddie Waitkus and Cubs ticket stubs. She wrote to the ballclub and obtained more photographs of Waitkus. She graduated from high school and found work as a typist. There is no record of a serious boyfriend in her life.
Ruth Ann was a gay and happy child who changed markedly on reaching adolescence. She became quite prim, fastidious about her hair and fingernails. She worshiped regularly in a Lutheran church. But suddenly, her parents said, as an adolescent, she announced that she did not want people to look at her.
She grew interested in music, in a pop singer named Andy Russell, who sang love songs in English and Spanish. Then she turned to Franz Liszt, the great romantic pianist and composer; she confessed to a girlfriend that she had a “crush on Liszt.” Franz Liszt died in 1886.
Her lonely passion for Waitkus took hold across the seasons of 1947 and 48. Waitkus wore number 36. Ruth Ann bought every phonograph record she could find that was produced in 1936. Since Waitkus was born near Boston, Ruth Ann began eating baked beans. Her parents said she “wanted Boston baked beans all the time.”
At length her parents convinced her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Abraham A. Low, who reported later that Ruth Ann appeared “very disturbed and confused.” Her mother disputed that version saying, “The doctor told us there was nothing wrong with Ruth, except she should forget about Eddie Waitkus.”
Ruth Ann could not forget Waitkus, whose background was Lithuanian. She began giving herself lessons in the Lithuanian language. In December 1948, the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies for Walter “Monk” Dubiel, a right-handed pitcher who lost as often as he won. It was a roundly bad deal for Chicago, a poorly run ballclub playing in handsome Wrigley Field, where ivy vines climbed the outfield walls. Ruth Ann took to bed and cried for several days and nights.
She moved into a rooming house, near her parents’ home, and worked as a typist. Her obsession with Waitkus sometimes elated her but sometimes depressed her so severely that she thought of suicide. Early in the 1949 baseball season, Ruth Ann Steinhagen conceived a bizarre plan.
The first week in May she went to a pawnshop and ordered a .22-caliber rifle that was on sale for twenty-one dollars.
“What do you want the gun for, miss?” the pawnbroker asked.
“Father’s Day is coming,” Ruth Ann said. “I want it as a present for my father.”
The pawnbroker showed her how to disassemble the rifle and gave her two boxes of shells. The Phillies, with Eddie Waitkus at first base, were coming to Chicago for a three-game series starting on Tuesday, June 14. The Phillies and Eddie Waitkus would stay at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, close by Lake Michigan on the North Side of Chicago.
On about June 10, Ruth Ann Steinhagen made a three-day reservation for “a nice room” at the Edgewater Beach. Then she went to her bank and withdrew eighty dollars, all she had in her savings account.
On Monday, June 13, Ruth Ann packed a suitcase with three days’ clothing, the bullets, the rifle, and a knife with a blade that was five inches long. She checked into the Edgewater Beach at four P.M. and was given a room on the twelfth floor. She was feeling agitated and ordered a daiquiri from room service. Then she ordered another. She wanted to be able to think clearly, but she felt very strange. At one minute, she wanted to use the rifle to kill herself. In the next minute, she wanted to use it to kill Eddie Waitkus, whom she had never met but who tomorrow night would be sleeping under the same roof as she.
The Phillies traveled to Chicago by overnight Pullman car. The team stopped at the Edgewater Beach Hotel just long enough for check-ins. Then the ballplayers rode a bus for the fifteen-minute trip to Wrigley Field.
Ruth Ann had a light breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. Then she went to Wrigley Field and bought a general admission ticket. She arrived at noon when the gates opened and moved to a seat close to first base.
The baseball calendar was full for Tuesday, June 14. Back in New York, the Yankees maintained a three-game lead in first place by defeating the Chicago White Sox, 15 to 3. That was Vic Raschi’s tenth victory.
At Cincinnati, Larry Jansen pitched a four-hitter and the Giants defeated the Reds, 2 to 0. Trying to create a team that could run, Durocher had gotten the Giants to trade massive, muscular, immobile Walker Cooper, his slugging catcher, to Cincinnati and call up young Wes Westrum. “He’s thirty pounds smaller but twice as quick,” Durocher said.
“I ain’t gonna answer Durocher with no words,” Cooper told Ed Sinclair of the Herald Tribune. “But tonight, he better watch it. I’m fixing to bust some fences.”
That night Westrum contributed a clutch single for New York. “Cooper wound up with no hits at all,” Sinclair wrote. “He looked the same as ever, or somewhat worse, when he grounded into a game-ending double play.”
“Yeah,” Durocher said, merrily. “I told ya he couldn’t run. My wife coulda beat the fucking relay to first base. Cooper couldn’t, and yeah, yeah, I know. Laraine’s legs are better looking, too.”
In St. Louis the Dodgers moved three games ahead of the Cardinals on the pitching of their skinny left-handed ace, Elwin “Preacher” Roe of Ashflat, Arkansas. The Dodgers won, 7 to 2, and would have won by more if the Cardinals had not executed a triple play.
The biggest baseball story of the day unfolded in Chicago. The Cubs had won the pennant in 1945 under manager Charlie Grimm, a genial, storytelling midwesterner nicknamed Jolly Cholly who liked to sing, accompanying himself on the banjo, which he played left-handed. After 1945, the Cubs began a drift (which some suggest continues to this day). Jim Gallagher, the general manager who had made the mindless Waitkus trade, now fired Grimm and replaced him with Frankie Frisch, the old Fordham Flash, who was every bit as easygoing as a drill sergeant.
Frisch met with his new team, players named Verban, Ramazzotti, Jeffcoat, Reich. “We’re going to hustle just like my ballclub in St. Louis,” Frankie Frisch said, “that great club they called the Gashouse Gang.”
A morning drizzle wet Wrigley Field. It was hard to hustle, even in spikes, without slipping. The Phillies scored five runs in the third inning and defeated the Cubs and Frisch, 9 to 2. Eddie Waitkus made eleven putouts at first base, in his graceful way, and got a hit.
Waitkus went back to the Edgewater Beach on a cheerful team bus. The Phillies were coming along. They would win some games.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen returned to the hotel in a taxi. She felt a little breathless. She ordered a few more drinks. She still felt breathless. She had been properly brought up. She was a proper person. She was conscious of a sense of sexual arousal, without understanding much about it, and she felt acutely uncomfortable. She loved Eddie Waitkus, but he had done this to her. In a careful hand, she wrote a note:
Dear Eddie:
It’s extremely important that I see you as soon as possible.
Please come soon. I won’t take up much of your time. I promise.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen
She called for a bellhop and told him to deliver the note to Waitkus. She tipped the bellboy fully five dollars. (One dollar was a healthy tip in 1949.)
Now Ruth Ann waited in her room. When she heard nothing by 9:30, she became angry and depressed. When and if Eddie Waitkus did call, she would stab him to death and then turn the gun on herself. Then she felt calmer. If Waitkus called, she would simply show him the knife and the gun, tell him of the murder-suicide plan and let him call the police. After a while, Ruth Ann undressed, put on a nightgown, and went to sleep.
The phone woke her at 12:40 A.M. “This is Eddie Waitkus. What’s so darned important?”
Ruth was startled. (“He was so, you know, informal.”) She said she could not discuss anything on the phone. “Can you come up tonight for a few minutes?”
Waitkus said he could.
“Give me a half hour to get dressed.”
When Waitkus knocked at 1:10, Ruth Ann hid the knife in the folds of her skirt and let him in. Waitkus moved past her quickly. He said something, but Ruth Ann later told a psychologist that she was so excited she did not hear the words.
Waitkus dropped into a chair near the window. “What did you want to see me about?” he asked, staring at her.
“Wait a minute,” Ruth Ann said. “I have a surprise for you.”
She went to the closet where she had hidden the rifle. Then she turned and pointed it at Waitkus. He said, “Baby, what’s this all about?” He rose from the chair. “What’s this all about? What have I done?”
“You’ve been bothering me for two years,” Ruth Ann Steinhagen said. “Now you are going to die.” She pulled the trigger.
Waitkus slammed backward against a wall, a bullet in the right side of his chest. He rolled to the floor. “Oh, baby, what did you do that for?” he said.
Ruth Ann knelt beside the broken ballplayer. She took his hand. “You like doing that, don’t you?” Waitkus said.
Ruth Ann withdrew her hand. She thought, Now is the time to shoot myself. But she suddenly felt frantic and couldn’t find the box of bullets. Waitkus began to moan.
Ruth Ann called the hotel operator and said someone had been shot. “Please send a doctor.”
Waitkus continued to moan. Ruth Ann couldn’t stand his cries of pain.
She was standing in the hall with her hands over her ears when a doctor and a house detective arrived.
An ambulance took Waitkus to Illinois Masonic Hospital. He had lost a great deal of blood and was “deeply critical.” Two days later, he began slowly to rally. Surgeons performed a series of operations, cutting away part of Waitkus’s right lung and chest musculature. After excruciating rehabilitation, he was able to resume his baseball career with good success in 1950.
The hospital bill, $4,000, was sent on to the Philadelphia ballclub. The Phils declined to pay and eventually took Waitkus to court, forcing him to settle the bill.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen was arrested on the charge of “assault with intent to kill.” Psychiatrists and psychologists diagnosed her condition as “acute schizophrenia in an immature individual.” At an Illinois state mental hospital, clinicians called her neat, cooperative, and generally cheerful. Only twice did they record intense emotional outbursts, once when she described the trade that sent Waitkus to Philadelphia and once when she was required to undergo a complete physical examination, disrobing in front of a male physician.
In 1952, Ruth Ann was found to have recovered her sanity. The charge against her was dropped because when she shot Waitkus, doctors said, she had not known right from wrong. In 1955, she was released into society, a free woman. Her present whereabouts are not known.
Waitkus suffered recurrent episodes of pain. “So bad,” he once remarked, “that I wished that the girl had finished the job.”
After his major league career ended in 1955, he worked in several department stores as a public relations man. “By then,” says his teammate Russ Meyer, “he was in pain all the time and drinking too much. He’d go out for a three-hour lunch, get stewed, and come back and be rude to the customers.”
Waitkus entered a Boston hospital in 1972, suffering from cancer in the lung that had been torn up by Ruth Ann’s bullet. He died on September 15, at the age of fifty-three.
The shooting fired the imagination of Bernard Malamud, who fictionalized the episode in his famous novel The Natural. Ballplayers were troubled by the incident, but only briefly. Their patterns of behavior did not change. Ballplayers on the road were a heedless, wanton lot; they still are, risks be damned.
Besides, I doubt that one major leaguer in a hundred has heard the story of Ruth Ann Steinhagen and poor, dead, reckless Eddie Waitkus.
OUT FRONT, pages ahead of the sports sections, headlines bannered the Great American Red Scare. “The scare had been unsettling the country for some time,” Gordon J. Kahn, a historian and the author’s father, summarized in an early edition of the Information Please Almanac: “Back in 1939, Representative Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat, threw suspicion on little Shirley Temple, who was eleven. Maybe she was a Red! Now ten years later it became a favorite sport for eager-eyed legislators to hunt for communists in government, schools, movies, even the clergy.
“Bigger Red Scares were developing abroad. In September of 1949, a fourteen-word White House announcement broke the news that Russia had exploded an atomic bomb.
“The ‘secret’ was no longer ours.”
Some who confused baseball with Shangri-La assert that the game transcends politics. It did not in the tortured summer of 1949.
Across an epic life, Paul Robeson was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, an All-American end, a lawyer, an actor, a singer, and an orator of unforgettable power. During the 1930s he came to admire the socialist ideal, and later the Soviet Union. There is no evidence that he ever joined the Communist party in the United States or anywhere else. He was an American radical, strong, sensitive, outspoken, headstrong, and described to this day in Harlem as “the tallest tree in the forest.”
In 1943 Robeson’s basso rang across Broadway in a performance of Othello that was dark thunder. He was forty-five years old and at his very peak. “I marvel,” he said, “about the patience and the patriotism of my own Negro people. They cannot vote in some places, but they buy bonds. They cannot get jobs in a lot of places — but they salvage paper, metal, and fats. They are confronted in far too many places with the raucous, Hitleresque howl of ‘white supremacy’ — but they give their blood and sweat for red, white, and blue supremacy.”
A few weeks before Christmas 1943, Robeson and several black newspaper publishers presented themselves at the winter meetings of the sixteen men who owned major league ballclubs. Robeson’s prestige and presence were such that he was permitted to address the owners and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
“I come here,” he began in the matchless basso, “as an American and as a former athlete. I come because I feel deeply.” He spoke first to the theme of disturbance — riots in the stands — which some argued would inevitably follow baseball integration. He had played football at Rutgers, three varsity seasons of integrated games. There were no disturbances at all. Now on Broadway, he was Othello, a Negro protagonist who seven times a week strangled a white heroine, played by the beautiful, young Uta Hagen. There had not been a single disturbance at the Royale Theater, either. Robeson’s voice rose in passion. Negroes were fighting for America on distant seas and far-off continents. They were fighting for their country. Some were dying for their country. It would be a fine thing, would it not, to give these self-same Negro soldiers, and every other Negro who was good enough, a chance to play baseball in the major leagues?
When Robeson finished, the owners erupted in applause. Cold-eyed, thin-faced Kenesaw Mountain Landis spoke to reporters later. “No law,” he said, “written or unwritten, exists to prevent blacks from participating in organized baseball.” This was not true. Apartheid was the greatest unwritten law in baseball history; it was baseball’s First Commandment.
When Jackie Robinson was permitted to join the Dodgers four years after this speech, Robeson attended a small reception and promised Robinson whatever support he could provide. Robinson thanked Robeson and moved on.
By 1949, with feral Red baiting abroad, Robeson took certain extreme positions. On a tour of Europe, he spoke against the cold war. Should hot war break out between the Soviet Union and the United States, Robeson added, blacks would not or should not fight for America. They had nothing to fight for.
Robeson amplified in Harlem on June 19. “I love the Negro people from whom I spring. . . . Yes, suffering people the world over — in the way that I intensely love the Soviet Union.
“We do not want to die in vain anymore on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia.
“Let it be wherever we are lynched.”
The New York Times headline the next morning read: LOVES SOVIET BEST, ROBESON DECLARES.
Each of thirty-seven newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, from the New York Journal-American to the Los Angeles Examiner, published an editorial labeled AN UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN. “It was an accident unfortunate for America that Paul Robeson was born here.”
Representative John S. Wood, a conservative southern Democrat from Georgia, who was chairman of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, decided to convene a special hearing. The issue: loyalty of American Negroes. The NAACP wired Wood in protest: “There never has been any question of the loyalty of the Negro.”
Wood responded that he had not meant to imply that there was. His committee was merely answering requests from Americans of “the colored race” for a forum to “express views contrary to the views of Paul Robeson.” Wood sent a telegram to Jackie Robinson inviting him to testify.
This was a request, not a subpoena, but it was weighty. If Robinson declined to testify he could, in the perfervid climate, stand accused of agreement with Robeson’s politics and indeed with the politics of Joseph Stalin. Robinson went at once to Branch Rickey.
In a highly emotional meeting, Rickey told Robinson that it was an honor to testify in the Congress of the United States. This was indeed a wonderful opportunity to speak out beyond the world of baseball. Some might oppose his testifying. Such men might well be secret Communists themselves.
“I’m not sure, Mr. Rickey. I’m not a politician. I’m not a speech maker. You know. I’m a ballplayer.”
“And an uncommonly fine one,” Rickey cried. “Don’t worry about the speech. The congressmen expect a prepared statement, of course. Don’t worry about that. I know you pretty well, Jackie. I’ll write the statement.”
Rickey enlisted the help of two former newspapermen who worked for him: Arthur Mann and Harold Parrott. Neither had any idea how to write what Rickey envisioned: the credo of an American Negro.
Rickey tried himself. The result was flowery, wordy, preachy. It was not in Rickey’s nature to concede that he had failed, but he admitted to me long afterward, “I was a bit presumptuous to believe that I, as a white, could speak for a Negro.”
More meetings followed, and Robinson expressed serious doubts about testifying. Some congressmen leaked the plan to invite Robinson to the Capitol, and scores of letters arrived at Ebbets Field urging Robinson “not to be a tool of witch-hunters.” Phone calls to the Robinsons’ tidy brick home in St. Albans, Queens, warned him that to speak out against Robeson was to be “a traitor to the Negro.” Robeson himself sent a letter to Robinson saying, “The press badly distorted my remarks in Europe.”
But Rickey persisted in trying to sweep away Robinson’s doubts.
“To tell you the truth,” Robinson told his employer, “I don’t like having to defend the patriotism of Negroes. It’s like having to defend my own patriotism, when you think about it.”
“Not at all, Jackie,” Rickey argued. “The issue here is not patriotism. It’s your sense of social responsibility.
“The issue is how best can an enlightened Negro right the glaring wrongs in America?
“To say, as Mr. Robeson has said, that Negroes everywhere are waiting to betray Americans in mortal combat against the Reds?
“To suggest, as Mr. Robeson suggests, that the only hope for freedom American Negroes possess is a bloody Red revolution?
“Your triumphs on the ballfield give the lie to that.
“Speaking responsibly to the Congress of the United States can be your greatest triumph of all. It will forever establish the Negro’s place in baseball and all America.”
Years later Robinson said, rather glumly, “With Mr. Rickey putting it that way, what the hell could I do? I didn’t know everything I should have known about the cold war. I had a sense that anti-Communist stuff, the witch-hunts, were dangerous. They came out of a lynching mentality. I didn’t think this white congressman from Georgia, Wood, was any hero. My mother, who grew up in Georgia, got out as quickly as she could.
“I wasn’t politically smart but I sensed — and my wife, Rachel, sensed — some of what was going on.
“Hell, we weren’t idiots. But Mr. Rickey demanded that I go. At that point in my life, if Mr. Rickey had told me to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, I would have said ‘Head first or feet first?’”
Rickey enlisted Lester Granger of the Urban League, the most conservative of the national Negro organizations, to help Robinson in his dilemma. Granger and Robinson finally put together a twenty-three-paragraph statement.* Granger did the actual writing, but Robinson was no voder, simply sounding programmed words.
His voice was high-pitched. He was not a dramatic public speaker. The force of his delivery in Congress — and it was forceful — came from the pain and the sincerity with which he spoke.
Robinson flew to Washington and testified on Monday, July 18. “It isn’t very pleasant,” he began in a crowded hearing room,
to find myself in the middle of a public argument that has nothing to do with the standing of the Dodgers in the pennant race — or even the pay raise I am going to ask Mr. Branch Rickey for next year. [Laughter.]
So you’ll naturally ask, why did I stick my neck out by agreeing to be present and why did I stand by my agreement in spite of advice to the contrary? It isn’t easy to find the answer but I guess it boils down to a sense of responsibility.
I don’t pretend to be any expert on communism or any other political “ism.” . . . But put me down as an expert on being a colored American, with thirty years’ experience at it.
Like any other colored person with sense enough to look around, I know that life in these United States can be tough for people who are a little different from the majority in their skin color or the way they worship. . . .
I’m not fooled because I’ve had a chance. . . . I’m proud that I’ve made good on my assignment to the point where other colored players will find it easier to enter the game. But I’m well aware that even this limited job isn’t finished yet. There are only three major league clubs with only seven colored players signed up,* out of close to four hundred major league players on sixteen clubs. . . .
A start has been made. Southern fans as well as northern fans like the way things are working. We’re going to make progress in other American fields, if we can get rid of some misunderstanding.
The white public should start appreciating that every single Negro worth his salt resents slurs and discrimination. That has absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not be trying to do. . . .
White people must realize that the more a Negro hates communism because it opposes democracy, the more he is going to hate any other influence that kills off democracy in this country — racial discrimination in the army, segregation on trains and buses, job discrimination because of religious beliefs.
If a Communist denounces injustice in the American courts, or police brutality, or lynching, that doesn’t change the truth. . . .A lot of people try to pretend that the issue [of discrimination] is a creation of Communist imaginations. . . . But Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist party and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared. . . .
I’ve been asked to express my views on Paul Robeson’s statement to the effect that American Negroes would refuse to fight in any war against Russia. The statement, if Mr. Robeson actually made it, sounds silly to me. But he has a right to his personal views and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that’s his business, not mine.
There are some colored pacifists and they’d act like pacifists of any color. Most Negroes and Irish and Jews and Swedes and Slavs and other Americans would do their best to keep their country out of war; if unsuccessful, they’d do their best to help their country win, against Russia or any other enemy.
The public is off on the wrong foot when it begins to think of radicalism in terms of any special minority group. Thinking of this sort gets people scared because one Negro threatens an organized boycott by 15 million members of his race.
I can’t speak for 15 million, but I’ve got too much invested for my wife, my child, and myself in the future of this country to throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass. . . .
That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop fighting race discrimination. It means we’re going to fight it all the harder.
We can win our fight without Communists and we don’t want their help.
Robinson put down his papers in the hearing room. Someone shouted “Amen!”
There followed tumultuous applause.
Robinson flew back to New York in time for batting practice before a night game against the Chicago Cubs at Ebbets Field. He took over the Brooklyn ballpark in the sixth inning. Bob Rush, a hard-throwing right-hander, walked him with one out. Robinson stole second and went to third when catcher Mickey Owen threw the ball into center field. Robinson led far off third base, bluffing a break for home. With one out, the percentage demanded that he stay at third. A fly ball or a grounder would score the run.
But Robinson was all adventure, all surprise. As Rush went into a high-kicking windup, Robinson broke for the plate. Hurrying, Rush threw a fastball over Owen’s head. Robinson had stolen two bases in the inning; he’d stolen home.
Finally, in the eighth inning, he tripled to drive in Brooklyn’s third run. The Dodgers defeated the Cubs, 3 to 0, moving three and a half games ahead of the second-place Cardinals. Robinson had manufactured two of the three runs. That night he was batting .363 and leading the league in hits, runs, runs batted in, and stolen bases.
In an arch sidebar story, Louis Effrat of the Times focused on Robinson’s remark to Congress that he was going to ask Rickey for more money the next season.
“No comment” is all Rickey would tell Effrat.
Actually, Rickey’s cold frugality did not extend to Robinson, who had already moved up to a salary of $19,000, fine for the time. And, of course, Rickey knew in advance everything that Robinson would tell Congress and approved in advance everything that Robinson would tell Congress.
Teasing Effrat in the Ebbets Field press box, Dick Young of the Daily News said, “What would you do with a guy playing as great as Robbie? Give him a pay cut?”
“It’s a fresh angle,” Effrat protested. “They love the way I do that at the Times. They call me the Kid with the Twist.”
“Aaff,” Young said. “For God’s sake, Jackie’s got to get a raise.” He thought for a moment. The Dodgers were still having trouble finding accommodations for Robinson in Cincinnati and St. Louis. “He leads the league,” Young said, “in everything but hotel reservations.”
Viewed objectively, or with as much objectivity as I can muster, Robinson’s statement seems an outstanding articulation of an informed 1949 centrist position, black or otherwise. Segregation and implicitly segregationist congressmen were rebuked in an extraordinary way. Newspapers applauded with headlines:
JACKIE HITS ROBESON’S RED PITCH
JACKIE ROBINSON HITS A DOUBLE —
AGAINST COMMUNISTS AND JIM CROW
The only immediate criticism appeared in a cartoon published by the Baltimore Afro-American. A little boy labeled Jackie Robinson was pictured carrying a huge gun and tracking the gigantic footprints of Paul Robeson.
Robinson’s wife Rachel conceded years later “we didn’t fully understand what was going on with the House Un-American Activities Committee.” In essence, she says, right speech, wrong forum.
Robinson went further to me in 1972. Blinded by virulent diabetes, but more insightful than ever, Robinson said across morning coffee at his sunlit home in Stamford, Connecticut, “I would never criticize Paul Robeson today.”
“You disagreed with him,” I said.
“That was between us,” Robinson said. “We both had and have a larger disagreement with white society.
“Whites took away Paul’s career. They took away his wealth. Then white men called this a blacklist. . . .
“The salient fact of my life and the salient fact of Paul Robeson’s life is the same. We are black men in a prejudiced white country.”
Robinson died that October. Paul Robeson died in 1976. Two brave men had borne frightful pain.
*Robinson traced a certain amount of this comfort back to August 24, 1948, in Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. During the fourth inning of a Dodger-Pirate game, umpire Walter J. “Butch” Henline called a questionable strike on outfielder Gene Hermanski. The Brooklyn bench yapped at Henline and continued jeering after a warning to stop. Suddenly Henline whirled, ripped off his mask, and shouted: “You! Robinson! You’re out of this game!” Robinson recalled, “That made me feel great. Henline didn’t throw me out because I was black. He threw me out because I was getting on his nerves. It was wonderful to be treated like any other ballplayer.”
*I collaborated with Robinson on a series of articles that ran under his byline in the black magazine Our Sports during 1953. Robinson came to our meetings with a vivid sense of what he wanted said. I typed, organized, punctuated, and spelled and occasionally questioned. Robinson provided the ideas. That was about how he had worked with Granger, Robinson said, “except Granger’s questions and suggestions were more than occasional, since we were dealing with a tremendous topic.”
*Robinson, Newcombe, and Campanella with the Dodgers; Thompson and Irvin with the Giants; and Larry Doby and Satchel Paige with Cleveland.