Motor City Champs: Mickey Cochrane and the 1934-1935 Detroit Tigers by Scott Ferkovich

Abstract

132 The Michigan Historical Review guided Henry Ford’s abiding interests in “making men.” Throughout the book, she challenges other historians’ conclusions that Ford was racially progressive since he hired large numbers of African Americans. The company’s relationship to black workers was actually more complex. Inside the Rouge, which employed most of Ford’s African American workers, managers relegated them to dangerous jobs in the foundry. At the same time, Ford furthered racial apartheid in Dearborn by relegating black homebuyers to the underdeveloped and underserviced community of Inkster. At the company’s Richmond Hill plantation in Georgia, Ford officials tested malaria drugs on local African Americans and pursued a vision of racial uplift that only allowed for rural occupations in the manual arts. While the company did employ blacks at the Rouge, the Ford plant in Port Elizabeth excluded them completely, as the company honored South African color-bar rules of employment. While Esch skillfully and engagingly reconstructs Ford’s global history, the book neglects the significance of union struggles—especially the campaigns of the United Auto Workers (UAW)—in the company’s history. Why did Henry Ford’s power ultimately waver and give rise to organized worker resistance? Why did the UAW fail to take on the transnational scope of Fordism? What were the implications of the union’s limited view for the labor movement in the US and abroad? Despite these unanswered questions, Esch’s study is a great achievement. Gregory Wood Frostburg State University Scott Ferkovich. Motor City Champs: Mickey Cochrane and the 1934-1935 Detroit Tigers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland (McFarlandBooks.com), 2018. Pp. 236. Bibliography. Illustrations. Notes. Paper: $29.95. “We Want Tigers, Not Tame Kittens,” roared a Detroit Free Press headline of 1933 that echoed the public opinion of the city’s atypically maligned major-league baseball team. As the following year’s season dawned, it was twenty-five years since the Detroit Tigers had played in a World Series, and the club had never won the Fall Classic, not even when superstar Ty Cobb was in tether. Such complaints roiled a populace already bothered by real-world worries, and they made Frank Navin, the team’s owner since 1902, determined to achieve the supremacy for which he dearly longed. When Navin acquired Mickey Cochrane, the Book Reviews 133 Philadelphia Athletics’ heady, hard-hitting catcher, and made him Detroit’s player-manager for 1934, he set the wheels in motion for the Tigers’ two greatest back-to-back seasons—a period capped by Detroit’s first major sports championship of any kind. In Motor City Champs: Mickey Cochrane and the 1934-1935 Detroit Tigers, Scott Ferkovich takes us through the two American League pennantwinning seasons—and their climactic World Series outcomes. The Tigers were edged by the St. Louis Cardinals in the maximum seven Series games in 1934, but they defeated the Chicago Cubs in six 1935 contests, the last of which was played in Detroit and sent the city into a frenzy. As Ferkovich relates in his strongly researched book, the Tigers featured a cast of distinctive characters—a “bevy of smart, aggressive position players who fought for every inch the opposition would allow” (p. 2). Among the stars were Lynwood “Schoolboy” Rowe, a homespun pitcher from Arkansas who came out of nowhere to reel off sixteen victories in a row in 1934 (and whose “How’m I doin’, Edna?” quip to his sweetheart back home during a network radio interview became a national catchphrase); soft-spoken, saxophone-playing second baseman Charlie Gehringer, nicknamed the “Mechanical Man” for his reliability; fanfavorite outfielders Leon “Goose” Goslin and Jo-Jo White; and slugging first baseman Hank Greenberg, the game’s first great Jewish star. Under the guidance of the intense Cochrane, the Tigers kept even the New York Yankees and their fading superstar, Babe Ruth, from the top of the standings with their dynamic brand of ball. Relying on primary-source material, including many seldom-seen photographs, Ferkovich’s book smoothly takes the reader through the peaks and valleys of each season without bogging down with overuse of statistics and play-by-play accounts. His nuts-and-bolts approach makes Motor City Champs a nice...