The Way It Was, and Wasn’t, 1947-1957: The Dodgers of Brooklyn

Essay review of Carl E. Prince, Brooklyn’s Dodgers: the Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-19-509927-3, i-xiv, 202 pages, $23.00 ($12.95, softcover).

Carl Prince is both a fan and a historian of considerable distinction. As a result, he has produced a remarkable book which offers great insight into a number of important subjects related to the sport and the business of baseball, a book that is always fun and often provocative. Do not, however, anticipate yet another nostalgic re-telling of “The Boys of Summer” saga. Prince offers us pretty much the same cast of characters, but he looks past the afterglow and the myths and lays bare the reality of this great Dodger team in the context of its social, gender, and political milieus.

The decade Prince has selected to write about began, of course, with Jackie Robinson’s first year with the Dodgers, when the team — under the ownership of and with the will of Branch Rickey — broke the “color line” and brought about the integration of major league baseball. In a book that is chock-a-block with colorful, fascinating, and controversial characters, Jackie Robinson

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stands out as the most formidable and complex individual in baseball during that historic era. Indeed, Robinson himself is the perfect nexus for three of the topics that most concern Prince: major league baseball as a part of the male culture of the fifties; baseball as a vehicle for the militant anti-Communist culture of those years; and the relationship between owners and the ballplayers whose careers they totally controlled during the era of the monopolistic reserve clause.

Prince reminds us that the decade of the Dodgers’ greatness — 1947-1957 — was also the era of the Cold War, the Korean War, and McCarthyism. It was an era that believed “nice guys finish last” and imposed macho masculinity both on and off the ballfield — when “playing hardball” was a way of life. To “stick it in his ear” meant that you not only wanted to defeat your opponent but you also wanted to destroy him. To win, you attacked your opponent’s manhood: physically, with your spikes high as you slid into second; and verbally, for trash talk wasn’t invented on the basketball courts but by baseball’s “bench jockeys.”

It is Prince’s thesis that a major reason Robinson succeeded both in the role of Branch Rickey’s integrationist point man and the Dodgers’ premier money player was because Robinson epitomized both the macho male social culture and the militant anti-Communist political culture of the era. A recent biographical article on Robinson took note of Jackie’s “hyperactive, aggressive, full-throttle approach to the game.” (Kenneth Shouler, “Here’s To You, Mr. Robinson,” A&E Biography, July 1991, pp. 54-60.) As Prince observes, Robinson regularly “challenged the manhood” of players on the other team, especially the New York Giants and most especially team manager Leo Durocher (himself a master of the art). Interestingly, both Shouler and Prince employ the same incident as an example of Robinson’s approach to the game (Shouler, pp. 59-60, and Prince, pp. 50-51).

During the 1955 season, Giants pitcher Sal “the Barber” Maglie was regularly “sticking it” in the ear of the Dodger stars with beanball pitches. Robinson, a burly, former college football star, tried to retaliate by bunting down the first base line, planning to crush Maglie with a body block as he covered first. Instead, he nailed the smallish second baseman, Davey Williams, who suffered a serious spine injury that nearly ended his career. Prince asserts that Robinson, running head down, didn’t know it was Williams he was leveling until after the play is over. Shouler is less sure. He cites Giants’ star Monte Irvin, another great player from the Negro League. Irvin called Robinson’s play “a cheap shot,” adding that many of the problems Jackie suffered were those he created for himself because of “his aggressive, abrasive nature.” But Shouler also cites Jackie’s former teammate Ben Wade who asserted that the problems Robinson experienced were “for no other reason than he was black.” Prince ultimately embraces both these points of view, making clear that Robinson would have been a target no matter what his attitude, but that his natural acceptance and embodiment of baseball’s macho male culture added to his problems even while making it possible for him to triumph in the end. In psychohistorical terms, Robinson was a delegate — for his teammates, for the Brooklyn fans, for African-Americans throughout the country, and for the macho American male culture of his time.

Another way Robinson served as a delegate, Prince’s argument makes clear, was through his militant anti-Communist beliefs. Later a Nixon Republican, Robinson (at Branch Rickey’s behest) appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1949. He was invited there to respond to Paul Robeson’s allegation that “African-Americans would never fight for, or shed their blood in, a war against the Soviet Union.” But, anti-Communist though he was, Robinson had larger purposes than merely serving as a foil against Robeson. Prince writes: “strip away his tepid criticism of Robeson, and what remains is an impassioned demand for social justice that was pure Robinson (p. 37).” Prince adds that Jackie later came to regret even his mild denunciation of Robeson and to feel that his own belief in the inevitably of social justice for the African-American from the dominant white political culture had been betrayed. Again, psychohistorians will see in Prince’s painstaking and empathetic treatment of Robinson’s “double bind” the ways in which one can be bound as delegate. Psychohistorians know the personal price that can be paid when a one is caught between the conflicting group fantasies of the various societal segments for whom one is serving as a delegate. Robinson died at the very young age of 53 from a diabetes-induced heart attack after becoming blind and barely able to walk.

There is so much else to recommend Prince’s book. For one thing, the fascinating

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character of Branch Rickey, in some ways a Neanderthal conservative, in other ways a moral man of conscience and conviction, and always a miser who exploited his ballplayers. Rickey traded away established Dodger stars like Dixie Walker, racists who would not accept Robinson as a teammate, but he could do so because he could replace them out of farm system well-stocked with players kept in the penurious slave system called the reserve clause (a clause in each player’s contract that gave the club exclusive rights to his services for the entire life of his playing career.) Prince demonstrates that Rickey, like the justifiably-despised Walter O’Malley after him, was not above using a willing sports press to destroy the reputations of Dodger stars like Duke Snider, Billy Loes, and Don Newcombe in order to help keep their salaries in line.

Prince has shrewd observations to offer also on the role of women in the macho male-dominated baseball culture. There were the “baseball annies” of the sort that shot Phillies star Eddie Waitkus in a hotel room (if you don’t remember the incident, rent The Natural again). There were the madly-devoted female fans such as the one-of-a-kind, poverty-stricken Hilda Chester, who became the media symbol of the wacky, abrasive Brooklyn fans. (Chester deserves immortality for her exquisite ridicule of the racist Eddie Stanky, as fondly recalled by Prince.) And there were the players’ wives, who had to endure being patronized by management, press, and fans alike.

Prince also offers insights into the special role played by the Dodgers in binding together the self-segregated neighborhoods of the various ethnic groups that populated post-War Brooklyn (Irish, Italian, Jewish, African-American, etc.), often serving as the vehicle for the “Americanization” of second-generation youngsters. Indeed, Prince feels that the club’s move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles (master-minded by O’Malley) was one of several factors that contributed to the explosive, divisive Brooklyn of the sixties and seventies.

Prince correctly points out that for all of its evils, the reserve clause helped to make major league teams such psychically-binding forces within the local communities, since it kept teams intact for a decade or more at a time — the

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Yankees of the thirties, forties, and fifties, for example. One recognizes, then, the irony that arises from the Rickey-Robinson integration of baseball. For Prince accurately reports that some of the opposition to Robinson was not racist, but economic. White ballplayers feared the competition from black players for the relatively few major league berths. But, we can now see, it was the influx of a huge pool of talented black players that enabled the leagues to expand and made inevitable the death of the reserve clause, thus making millionaires of journeyman .250 hitters and billionaires of the endlessly greedy owners whose morality is far more dubious than that of the protean Branch Rickey.

A terrific, and wonderfully provocative, book!

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