Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game Debra A. Shattuck John Thorn . Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. 365 pp. Cloth, $26.00. "There is nothing new under the sun," a wise king once opined. Just when you think there is nothing new that could possibly be added to the history of baseball, John Thorn, the long-acknowledged sage of baseball past and recently-crowned historian of Major League Baseball present, comes along and turns that Solomonic wisdom on its head. A recent internet query for "baseball books" returned 25,203 hits with over 5,300 of those falling into the category of "baseball history." Undaunted by the challenge of providing fresh insights on a topic that has been endlessly written about by reporters and participants, philosophers and pundits, poets and scholars for the past century and a half, Thorn invites us to join him on a tour of baseball's "Garden of Eden"-a place where myths reign supreme and facts are relegated to fuzzy footnotes discernible only to the most determined detectives. Thorn prefaces our journey into baseball's Edenic garden with a reminder that the game we think we know may never have existed. "Baseball has been blessed in equal measure by Lincoln and Barnum," he writes. "And in no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than in baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play. The game's epic feats and revered figures, its pieties of racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business-all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nod" (ix). Far from mourning this state of historical affairs, Thorn suggests we may learn more about ourselves and our national game by focusing on how and why we constructed our national baseball myths. Though Thorn does set a number of these myths straight in his book, his central focus is to explore why "so many individuals expended so much energy trying to shape and control the creation myth of baseball" (x). He suggests that baseball is "a family album," compiled over generations by those anxious to "create a [End Page 126] national mythology from baseball"-a reflection not of what we were, but of what we wanted to be as a nation. Over the course of three hundred pages, Thorn describes the evolution of several prominent myths of baseball's past: that the game was a wholly American invention, springing ex nihilo in 1839 at Cooperstown, New York, from the mind of future Major General Abner Doubleday; that the early game was exclusively a sublime haven of rural peacefulness for middle- and upper-class businessmen anxious to escape the pressures of their hectic and unhealthy urban environments; and that baseball was the great equalizer-engendering harmony and good will across social classes and races while enabling downtrodden immigrants to become true Americans. All of these myths are featured prominently in the pages of our national family album, and Thorn carefully and gently peels back the surface of these pages to reveal the hidden truth beneath the myths: that class warfare, racism, gambling, greed, and immorality are as much a part of baseball's past as they are a part of our national past. In revealing these uncomfortable truths, Thorn does not advocate we discard the debunked pages from baseball's family album; instead he invites us to consider these pages from a different perspective-to contemplate the motivations of those, like Albert Spalding, Abner Graves, Bruce Cartwright, and A. G. Mills, who pasted them into the album in the first place. He wants us to honor "baseball's road not taken" (xiii) and to appreciate how the seemingly unseemly (gambling, for example) was as important to the development of our modern game as were the mythologized noble and heroic elements. Ultimately, Eden is an enjoyable foray into baseball's past. As Thorn promises in his introductory comments, we come away from our visit to Eden with...