The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 1997 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 1997 (Jackie Robinson) Lee Lowenfish (bio) Peter M. Rutkoff , ed. The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 1997 (Jackie Robinson). Ser. ed. Alvin Hall. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2000. 275 pp. Paper, $35.00. As the title suggests, this book consists largely of papers from the 1997 Symposium on Baseball and American Culture at Cooperstown, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's arrival in the Major Leagues. The essays run the gamut from the excellent and provocative to the pedestrian and pedantic, but when they are good, they are very good. Editor Peter Rutkoff's introductory essay is a fine piece of social history, beautifully re-creating the community of Brooklyn in the days of Jackie Robinson's Dodgers. "The years 1945-1957 were truly golden for New York's professional teams," Rutkoff writes, "but sadly tragic as well." By the end of 1950, Branch Rickey was gone; by the end of 1956, Jackie Robinson was gone; and by the end of 1957, the Dodgers and the Giants as franchises were gone to the West Coast. The book is divided into three parts: "Before Robinson," "Robinson and Social Change," and "The Legacy of Robinson." One highlight comes early in Karl Lindholm's excellent essay on William Clarence Matthews, an all-around black athlete from Alabama who starred at Harvard in the early twentieth century. Matthews played one stormy season in the "outlaw" Northern League in Vermont before succumbing to the presence of the color line. Lindholm has done a meticulous job of restoring to the historical record a fascinating athlete and man, who became a prominent lawyer in the Republican Party of the 1920s after a flirtation with the black nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey. Gai Ingham Berlage's monograph also does a fine job of bringing back to [End Page 171] life the women baseball players Toni Stone, Mamie "Peanut" Johnson, and Connie Morgan, who got a chance to play in the last years of the Negro Leagues, as the star black players headed to the greener pastures of white organized baseball. The bulk of the volume deals with the familiar story of Jackie Robinson's on- and off-field courage and Branch Rickey's careful planning of racial integration in the most conservative, if not reactionary, baseball business. But there is not much new insight in this volume into the exciting but wrenchingly short period of the late 1940s, when baseball integrated racially, giving the false hope that the country might act similarly. Anthony Pratkanis and Marlene Turner's essay, "Nine Principles of Successful Affirmative Action," is reprinted in the Rutkoff volume (it originally appeared in a 1993 NINE). While the research and writing are exemplary, I doubt whether either Rickey or Robinson would have liked the term affirmative action. They were both all about a fair field and no favor and may the best man win. There is also a minor flaw when Pratkatis and Turner designate Branch Rickey as "The Mahatma" because he espoused Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. While Rickey believed in reason and had a favorite Victorian motto framed in his office—"He who will not reason is a bigot, he who cannot reason is a fool and he who dares not to reason is a slave"—he was not a pacifist. In fact, as a thirty-six-year-old father of four young children, he volunteered for service in the Chemical Warfare Service in World War I. It was influential New York sportswriter Tom Meany who dubbed him "Mahatma" because he reminded Meany of John Gunther's portrait of Gandhi as a combination politician, guru, and paternalistic father. The book concludes with the republication of Jules Tygiel's afterword to a new edition of his trailblazing book Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. Tygiel, too, doesn't shed much new light on his subject, choosing instead to pontificate "that the Jackie Robinson story is to Americans what the Passover story is to Jews: it must be told to every generation so that we never forget." The rhetoric that the Jackie Robinson story appeals...