Why Jackie Robinson's Path To Integrating Baseball Was The Only Way It Could Have Worked

 

Something that I truly loathe about many of the revisionist historians everywhere – and that’s not limited to this site – is that they almost universally seem willing to condemn anybody who doesn’t have the values that they are universally accepted now but have only become accepted in this century.  I acknowledge the fact that so many people in positions of power across the country and the world are so rigid that feel the values that were established hundreds of years ago are still the only standard we should live by is ridiculous. But I also think that condemning those same people who lived hundreds of years for not being able to see the future is equally ludicrous. Hindsight is always 20/20. I never heard anyone ever say that foresight should be as well.

And yet that’s the argument that so many people across the ideological spectrum seem not only to hold too, but simultaneously blame all of the people in power for not having. This level of conceit is irrational, not only because it blames people for not having values that – to repeat – almost no one, not just these historical figures  - had.  The fact that Lincoln managed to free the slaves – something no one else of his time was willing to consider – is somehow not good enough because he didn’t believe black people were the equal of whites. There were some politicians at the time who did think so – Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler among them – but they were in a decided minority of the entire population.

Furthermore, so many of this things seem to almost by design condemn so many of those crusaders for not doing enough. All of them did the best they could at the time under the structures that they had available and often in a system and society that firmly rejected change. But in the eyes of future generations, incremental changes are never enough. That actually brings me to the purpose of this article.

While watching a documentary this week on Willie Mays, the story of integration of baseball was brought up. There was a commentator who attacked the way Jackie Robinson was signed and the integration of baseball as a whole by saying the ‘right’ way to do it would have been to sign entire Negro League Teams and put them in the majors. I’ve actually seen a version of this argument before in Howard Zinn’s writings on baseball, and this blanket statement demonstrated both the magical thinking of so many revisionists with complete and utter denialism of the reality of the situation at the time. So in this article, I will make it very clear why such an idea, as ambitious and as much of a panacea as it sounds to moderns was utterly and completely implausible at the time, almost certainly could never have worked in practice and at the end of the day could have been far more destructive to integration in major league baseball and perhaps American race relations as a whole.

And let’s start this decision with a story about baseball that involves a certain kind of magical thinking. For a while, it was believed to be true and is now most likely apocryphal. But because it plays into this scenario that they are discussing, let’s act as if it was.

In 1942 Bill Veeck, on his way to becoming baseball’s greatest showman and iconoclast was planning to buy his first major league team: the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies had spent the better part of that century in last place, and Veeck intended to change that. He intended to stock the entire roster with Negro League stars. He wouldn’t have had to go far to find them, either: two of the greatest franchise in that league, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays were practically the Phillies neighbors. And unlike Branch Rickey did with Jackie Robinson, he intended to fully compensate all the teams for their value. Given the quality of baseball during World War II, he was certain this would take the Phillies from eighth place to a pennant contender overnight: a safe assumption.

According to him, he made one mistake. Before purchasing the Phillies, he informed Commission Kennesaw Mountain Landis of his intentions out of respect for his office. Landis then went out of his way to make sure the Phillies were purchased by someone far less competent: less than a year after buying the Phillies, he would be suspended from the game for betting on baseball.

Veeck told this story in his autobiography and it was repeated as truth by various sources, including Ken Burns’ Baseball.  Research has led some historians to believe it is apocryphal, but the reason it sounds believable is when you consider both individuals involved. Veeck’s real history on the integration of baseball is one of the best of any owner in history. When he bought the then Cleveland Indians in 1946, he would integrate the American League, first by purchasing outfielder Larry Doby, then signing the legendary Satchel Paige. Their contributions led to Cleveland setting American League attendance records and winning the World Series just two years later. When he purchased the White Sox in 1958, he was responsible for signing several excellent Latino ballplayers, among them Luis Aparicio one of the greatest fielding shortstops in history. In his last stint as owner, when he ran the White Sox in 1976 to 1979, he made a different kind of history, hiring Doby to manage the team in 1978. Doby was the second African-American to manage a baseball team.

Landis, by contrast, was considered an autocrat, and while he might not have agreed with the racial policies that governed baseball, he did nothing to change it. This is critical because Landis was the only commissioner who the owners obeyed rather than the other way around. If Landis had said at any time that Negro Leagues should play the game, the owner might have acquiesced. His actions speak otherwise. During the 1920s, he made it a rule that barnstorming teams could take the names of professional ball clubs. He didn’t want any Negro club to be able to say that they beat the Yankees or the Giants even in exhibitions. He stopped the signing of Josh Gibson by multiple teams. And when during the war, black reporters pressed Landis for integration, he bluntly said: “I’ve said everything I’m going to say on the subject. The answer is no.” So I fully accept why this story would ring true.

Now let us look briefly at the record. Branch Rickey was smart enough to wait for Landis to die in 1944 and for the war to end before he began his process of scouting the Negro Leagues. There was an unofficial straw polls of the sixteen clubs about signing black players before the 1945 season. Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers were the only team to vote yes.

The only hope there was that the tides might turn was with the new commissioner Happy Chandler.  Chandler’s claim to fame in baseball is that he basically said that it was all right for black people to play baseball. There is no evidence on the record that he did anything to make it easier for Robinson or other teams to integrate. But the implication that the commissioner was behind this may have given Rickey enough motivation to go forward. The other owners did not support this – indeed, many of them called them to condemn him for doing so and would be among his greatest adversaries in this struggle – but as long as the Commissioner was not directly on their side, Rickey could say that he had backing.

(It’s interesting to consider why Chandler might have done this, and it might have been due to his political aspirations. Chandler had been a Senator from Kentucky before taking the job, and it is possible he thought leading the way on the integration might lead to higher office. When he left baseball, he became Governor of Kentucky, ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1956 and was, in a situation filled with irony, considered by George Wallace to run with him as an Independent. Chandler eventually lost the job because Wallace thought his racial record was too inclusive for him to add the ticket, while Wallace’s eventual choice of Curtis LeMay ended up being the biggest drag on his run.)

Repeating the struggles that Robinson went through in his rookie year is almost superfluous at this point, so I’ll just mention that none of the owners wanted to experiment to succeed. The Phillies manager went out of his way to racially bait Robinson the first time they came there. The St. Louis Cardinal threatened to boycott the team. And in their club meetings, Rickey was privately and publicly ridiculed. It was not until the Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant and at the gate that the owners began to change their mind. Even then, they might have considered otherwise had not Veeck’s Indians won the AL pennant and World Series that year.

Even after all that, the progress was incredibly slow for some teams to even go through with token integration. I wrote in an article last week about how reluctant the New York Yankees were to go through with it, but they were just among the most extreme example. It was not until 1959, when the Boston Red Sox hired the utility infielder Pumpsie Green, that baseball was completely integrated.

Now that one is reminded of all of this history and these struggles, the idea that somehow an entire team could have been signed and integrated should be acknowledged would have been impossible. But let’s indulge that magical thinking and try to play out that scenario that so many smart people think could happen.

 

First of all, I don’t believe for a second the owners would have allowed this happen even if he’d done this after Landis had died. Given how litigious and conservative ownership was basically in every aspect of the game prior and after this, they would have moved heaven and earth to stop it. They would have gone through the courts and found sympathetic judges to stop the sale from every happening.  They would have gone to every big name in Philadelphia – including Connie Mack, who ran the crosstown Athletics, who was still the games biggest icon in his eighties and who vocally opposed integration. And most importantly, they would have issued blanket statements that none of their teams would ever play a professional team run by Veeck. (Most of them would end up hating Veeck when he actually became an owner because he viewed all of them pretension elites, which was an accurate assessment of the whole bunch.)

But say Veeck was capable of doing what he said he did. Say he filled a team with Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, etc. How would he have managed to get them to spring training in Florida and Arizona? He sure as hell wouldn’t have received any backing from his fellow owners, who had absolutely no problem putting Jackie Robinson through the ringer a few years later. They would allow for the cancellation of as many exhibition games as possible, refuse to let them take warmups on their fields, not let them use the dugouts. Hell, they’d probably pay extra for hecklers to do their worst.

That’s just the pre-season. Assuming they got through all that, can you imagine a season actually happening? Robinson spent his rookie year being spiked, thrown at, jockeyed unmercifully by players, coaches, and managers. Multiply this by twenty-five and try to imagine all twenty five players getting through a single game with no incidence. And that’s only in the home games; I don’t want to think what would happen when they went on the road. The entire team would have to stay in separate hotels, eat at separate restaurants and then come to the stadium and witness a torrent of booing and garbage being thrown from the entire stands. It would not surprise me if a riot broke out – which the owners would have wanted.

And of course the ownership would want this experiment to fail and would do everything to isolate the white management and owners who worked for the team. I’m pretty sure Veeck would not have been able to negotiate a single deal with the front office team as long as he owned the Phillies.  Not that many of the white players would object to this, given how many Dodgers signed a petition against Robinson joining the team in 1947.

Now I imagine there would be a counterbalance: turnout among African-Americans would surge in every city they played. Does anyone see a scenario where that could work out particularly well? There had been fighting in the stands and brawls well before this, but by the twentieth century had basically eliminated. I could very well see owners encouraging this kind of behavior as well to make everything uncomfortable for any black person who dared to attend a game.

I imagine the owners would let something like this happen for a season and then go to Chandler, or whoever was Commissioner, and say with straight faces: “You can’t let this continue. Veeck is doing everything possible to destroy the integrity of the game and its existence as a business. You have to remove him as owner.” And the Commissioner would do it. Without blinking. Every commissioner has to protect the business of baseball, which was shaky after the Depression and the Second World War.  They would argue it was for the good of the game.

Now consider the ripple effects of all this.  The owners now have a justifiable reason to put off integration even longer. “Well, we tried to let those people into the game and they nearly destroyed it. It’s better for baseball that they stay in their own leagues.” The ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ would go back into effect. Any attempt at integration would be put off for at least another decade, maybe longer. And here’s one more pleasant thought: what if the ripples didn’t stop there? What if black people, having seen what happen when the National Game gets full integration, now decide to pull back from trying to integrate more important movements? Is the civil rights movement itself delayed for longer as a result? Does the argument for racial equality, which was powered by the defeat of Hitler, lose momentum after this among the rich and powerful?

I admit this last bit might be purely dystopian thinking on my part, but I’d make the argument is far more grounded in the reality of 1940s and 50s America than the magical thinking that says that the best way to have integrated baseball was by putting an entire Negro League Team as part of it.

Now I grant you that the death of the Negro Leagues was a tragedy, but it was also an inevitable and I’d say necessary one. One black sportswriter wrote at the time: “Nothing was killing black baseball but democracy.” The law of the supreme court for half a century in America, not just baseball, was ‘separate but equal’. And those two are, and have always been, mutually exclusive.  I don’t deny that the institutions of America are dominated by white supremacy, I don’t deny it’s unfair that so many qualified minorities of every race, gender and sexual orientation have to work so much harder to get what a white cis man has. But that’s the thing about democracy: it’s about compromise. And that is the price of compromise. If you want to participate in all of the major institutions of America, you have to be willing to do the work. That change is incremental at times – the actual process of the integration of baseball demonstrates that. There are inevitably, counter-reactions to this, and there are definitely occasions where the needle moves in the other direction – the fact that there were no black players born in America in this year’s World Series for the first time since 1950 is a clear sign that the institutions can reverse themselves. Institutions by definition are imperfect, but the idea that they are irreversibly flawed, deserved to be abandoned and could only have worked properly if they’d done the impossible is one that too many people genuinely seem to believe.

I don’t expect this article to change many people’s point of view: it is the nature of the revisionist to view everything their way regardless of the facts. But I want you to just take this one small case and put it in context. Was the method that brought Jackie Robinson to the majors flawed? Yes. But even in hindsight, it is impossible to imagine any other way integration would have worked. It is a credit to both Robinson and Rickey that it worked at all.