Category Archives: U.S.

by | 27 November 2013 · 5:10 pm

Global Causes of the Singapore Mutiny of 1915

Heather Streets-Salter brings a lot of fascinating historical threads together in The Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915, in Journal of World History 24 (2013): 539-576 (Project MUSE subscription required). Here is her summary of the mutiny:

On the early afternoon of 15 February, about half of the 850 soldiers in the 5th Light Infantry had risen against their British officers while loading ammunition at the Alexandra regimental barracks. After firing shots to signal the start of the mutiny, the rebels split into three groups. The first headed straight for a German POW camp at Tanglin—where the officers and men of the German ship Emden, which had been sunk off the coast of Malaya, were being held—and released the prisoners, in the process killing fourteen British and Indian officers and men. The second headed toward the center of Singapore, killing six soldiers and civilians along the way. The third proceeded to the barracks of the Malay States Guides artillery unit, where they attempted to force the soldiers there to join them. At various points along the way, this third group killed ten British civilians—nine men and one woman.

As news of the mutiny spread in Singapore, panic broke out among the Europeans. They realized with horror that a significant portion of the only regular army regiment garrisoned for the defense of Singapore was now in open rebellion, which of course meant that the colony was almost completely undefended. A year earlier there had been a British regiment—the King’s Own Light Infantry—stationed there, but those troops had been shipped back to Europe at the start of the war in 1914. There was a civilian volunteer force (the Singapore Volunteer Corps, or SVC), which in August 1914 was composed of about 450 Malay and Chinese men but no European corps. In any case, the SVC troops were not well trained. At the outbreak of the war a European infantry corps, called the Singapore Volunteer Rifles, was formed, but since all of the men who joined were professionals with full-time positions, their training had been sporadic. Finally, Singapore maintained a police force of about 1,200 strong, which was comprised of Malay, Chinese, and Indian men who were not trained to routinely carry arms. The only contingent of the police who were trained in the use of arms was a group of about 220 Sikhs. In any case it was Chinese New Year, and thus nearly all of the Chinese volunteers and police were in the midst of celebrating. There were no regular Malay regiments, partly because British authorities disparaged the military potential of Malay men and partly because officials had long been confident that troops from the vast Indian Army would more than suffice for defending Singapore. So when the 5th Light Infantry—ironically called the “Loyal 5th” for their role in suppressing the Indian Revolt of 1857—mutinied on 15 February, the colony appeared to be in real danger.

And here are some of the global threads she weaves together:

Prior to being sent back to Malaya, however, a corporal in the [Malay States] Guides persuaded Kasim Mansur, a pro-German Indian nationalist merchant living in Singapore, to write a letter to the Turkish consul at Rangoon indicating that the Guides were ready to turn against the British, and asking the Turkish authorities to send a warship to Singapore to support them. The letter was intercepted by British authorities in Rangoon, and on 23 January 1915 Mansur was arrested in Singapore….

Moreover, statements made by individuals within the Guides clearly demonstrate that they conceived their discontent not only in terms of local, individual problems within the regiment, but also in terms of global events outside the immediate orbit of Singapore. One of the most important of these was the fate of the Japanese ship Komagata Maru. The ship had been chartered in early 1914 by an Indian man, Gurdit Singh, to carry 376 Indian passengers (of whom 340 were Sikhs and 24 Muslim) from Hong Kong to Vancouver, with the purpose of deliberately challenging Canadian laws restricting Indian immigration. However, once the ship arrived in the port of Vancouver it was not allowed to dock, nor were its passengers allowed to disembark. The passengers were forced to wait on board ship for two months in difficult conditions while their fate was decided, only to discover at the end that the entire ship had been ordered back to India. The ship left Vancouver under escort by the Canadian military on 23 July 1914. When it finally reached Calcutta on 26 September, the outraged and weary passengers tousled with British authorities, who were intent on treating them as prisoners. The altercation resulted in gunfire by the authorities, during which nineteen of the Indians on board were killed.

The Komagata Maru incident galvanized anti-British sentiment among many Indians around the world, particularly Sikhs and Punjabis. Soldiers in the Indian army were particularly outraged, since many of the potential settlers aboard the ship had served in the army themselves. News of the Komagata Maru easily reached the Malay States Guides, who informed their officers that the treatment of Sikhs and other Punjabis on the ship indicated that the colonial government did not hold the service of Indians in high regard and that they therefore were not willing to sacrifice their lives abroad….

The likelihood that the events of the Komagata Maru helped sow the seeds of discontent among Indian sepoys in Singapore was greatly enhanced by the actions of individuals associated with a radical Indian nationalist movement known as Ghadar. The movement itself began in 1913 with Indian expatriates in California—many of them Sikhs from the Punjab—who had come to the western coast of North America in the early years of the twentieth century to escape conditions of poverty. In both the United States and Canada, however, these expatriates experienced increasingly hostile discrimination, not only at the state level but also from white communities….

Ghadar activists did not just send literature from North America: they also sent people. The specific purpose of Ghadar agents was no less than to foment revolution in India and to overthrow colonial rule, using whatever means possible. Beginning in September and October 1914—just months before the Singapore Mutiny—Ghadarites left San Francisco for India and the Far East. Specific target areas included Hong Kong, the Malay States, Rangoon, and Singapore—each of which had Indian Army garrisons that Ghadarites were eager to penetrate….

We know that German agents in the United States did offer material support for the Ghadarites, including the transport of Ghadar propaganda from San Francisco to points east. In recognition of their shared program of British destruction, the Ghadar paper explicitly and regularly exhorted Indians to support Germany in any way possible during the war. On 18 August 1914, an article titled “O Hindus, Help the Germans” encouraged Indians to take the opportunity of Britain’s weakness to mutiny….

In addition to appealing to Indian sepoys’ potential sense of exploitation as colonized Indians more generally, both the Germans and the Ghadarites made special efforts to appeal to Indian Muslims—especially after the Ottoman Empire’s entrance into the war on the side of Germany in November 1914. Indeed, Germans, Turks, and Ghadarites worked together in a self-conscious program of encouraging disloyalty among the Allies’ Muslim subjects—of which the largest population in the world was Indian. Upon entering the war, the Ottomans declared the liberation of occupied Muslim lands as a specific war aim. Almost immediately, on 11 November 1914, the Ottoman sultan extracted from the highest religious authority in his empire a declaration of jihad, in which all loyal Muslims were to fight on behalf of their religion against the Allied infidels….

News spread through these propaganda channels that Kaiser Wilhelm had converted to Islam and that large segments of the German population had converted as well. That these or similar efforts had an impact on at least some men of the 5th Light Infantry can be gauged by several letters intercepted by the censor in the days surrounding the mutiny. As Lance Naik Fateh Mohammed wrote to his father in the Punjab: “The Germans have become Mohammedans. Haji Mahmood William Kaiser and his daughter has married the heir to the Turkish throne, who is to succeed after the Sultan. Many of the German subjects and army have embraced Mohammedism. Please God that the religion of the Germans (Mohammedism) may be promoted or raised on high.”

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Filed under Britain, Canada, Germany, Islam, migration, military, nationalism, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Turkey, U.S., war

by | 23 November 2013 · 9:26 am

Antarctic Cuisine: Skua Piles

From Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine, by Jason C. Anthony (U. Nebraska Press, 2012), p. 185:

Skua piles, named for the kleptoparasitic gull, are a USAP tradition and the clearest sign that we are a transient community. Simply put, departing people leave behind their excess stuff in a heap near their dorm recycling area, and arriving people grab what they need for their season. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you can find anythings: homemade bookshelves, insulated work clothes, flannel sheets, half-filled shampoo bottles or, less usefully, broken pencils, used batteries, and sex toys. Skua piles are so fundamental to the local culture that “skua” is as common a verb as it is a multipurpose noun. Stuff is skuaed, the wise go skuaing, and so on. Much of the food is condiments people are too lazy to return to the galley or odd items that no one really wants to eat but are unwilling to throw away. I saw the same can of fiddlehead ferns from Maine disappear and reappear over several years. Dusty jars of nearly flavorless spices that I twice claimed, never used, and returned years ago may still be snatched excitedly each summer by a desperate home-cooker. But again, anything is possible in the skua piles; I have stumbled upon rafts of cooking supplies and a new electric teakettle that someone didn’t feel like mailing home, as well as quick-cook oats, rice, and other staples there for the taking.

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by | 19 November 2013 · 7:49 pm

U.S.-Japan Prewar Missionary Internationalism

Here’s a nice bit of historical revisionism from Robert Shaffer, “A Missionary from the East to Western Pagans”: Kagawa Toyohiko’s 1936 U.S. Tour, in Journal of World History 24 (2013): 579-583 (Project MUSE subscription required):

In order to explain how World War II in the Pacific between the Americans and the Japanese became so infused with racial hatred, John Dower in 1986 characterized their prior interactions as a virtually unrelieved set of hostilities, misunderstandings, and worse. Walter LaFeber’s more narrowly political analysis showed some elements of sympathy at times between the two nations, though very few between 1920 and 1945, and he expressed clearly his thesis about such relations in his book’s title: The Clash. While compelling in many respects, and certainly influential, the perspectives of Dower and LaFeber downplay, especially for the interwar years, the respect that some people in each society had for those in the other. Recent historians have sought to fill in these gaps, bringing to light, for example, the enthusiasm with which Americans greeted the first ambassadors from Japan in 1860 as they toured the United States, and the respect that many American missionaries in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century had for both Japanese tradition and its embrace of modernity. Although Kagawa’s 1936 visit could not forestall the growth of tensions between the two nations that soon led to World War II, this study demonstrates that a tradition of friendship persisted between elements of both nations within the more dominant atmosphere of mistrust and hatred.

World history as a discipline has been developing in tandem with the “internationalization of U.S. history,” an effort to show, among other things, how events and ideas that developed outside of the United States affected this nation. Daniel Rodgers, for example, has shown that many of the reforms in the United States from the Progressive Era and the New Deal developed first in Europe, and he explains how Americans traveling or working in Europe or meeting with European visitors adapted these ideas for implementation in the United States. Thomas Bender has extended geographically the study of such interconnections in reform movements to Asia and Latin America, but his treatment of the 1930s is merely suggestive. Kagawa’s economic reformism manifested itself by the mid 1930s primarily in building producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives in Japan, and the Protestants who sponsored his 1936 visit to the United States sought to use his knowledge and his prestige to stimulate the development of such co-ops in this nation. Thus, an analysis of his visit deepens our understanding of the interaction between American and foreign reform movements in the case of economic cooperatives, and highlights this oft-neglected effort during the Depression to fashion what its backers conceived of as a Christian economic order distinct from both capitalism and communism.

Kagawa’s visit to the United States also challenges us to look more closely at American involvement in missionary activity. In her recent survey of the historical literature on American overseas missionary activities, Dana Robert pointed to the interpretive sea change that occurred in the 1960s. By the end of that turbulent decade, she notes, “there was scarcely a work written on American Protestant missions that did not focus on their role in promoting imperialism.” However, Robert emphasizes that much of the most recent work, from the 1980s onward, sees “the significance of missions for American history … in international relationships,” in how indigenous peoples and religions shaped American Protestant mission work, and not just the other way around. In a study of the impact that American overseas missionaries had on U.S. society, Daniel Bays and Grant Wacker also reject the 1960s paradigm, suggesting that many missionaries spurred “self-reflection and self-criticism” about American society itself, and helped “their compatriots to see the United States as outsiders saw it.”

An examination of Kagawa’s under-studied U.S. tour corroborates the analyses of Robert, Bays, and Wacker that in some cases the missionary enterprise did not support American empire or the ideology that the United States and the West had the unquestioned right and obligation to inculcate religious truth and civilization on others. Indeed, this investigation reveals an instance in which American Protestants wanted their compatriots to learn from a foreigner—indeed, from someone from a predominantly non-Christian land—and from someone who had previously made well-publicized and highly critical comments about the United States. Those Americans responsible for planning Kagawa’s tour, including many with long experience as missionaries, had become what I have elsewhere called “critical internationalists”—Americans who believed that in order to engage productively with others a critical approach toward the American role in the world had become necessary. Thus, this study provides background for David Hollinger’s recent argument that ecumenical Protestantism in the United States, bolstered by its encounters with predominantly non-Christian peoples, became after 1945 an important proponent of anti-racist and multicultural perspectives in both the domestic and international spheres.

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by | 19 October 2013 · 3:55 am

Legacy of the Birmingham Barons, 1964

From Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race, by Larry Colton (Hachette, 2013), Kindle Loc. 4817-4852:

[Paul] Lindblad was not a complicated man, just pure Midwestern stock. But as he thought back on the season and his teammates, he knew it had been something special: the grace and speed of Bert Campaneris, who’d risked his life to flee Fidel Castro’s Cuba… the power and determination of Tommie Reynolds, who two years earlier had filled out his last will and testament prior to hoisting his combat gear onto an army truck in Germany as the world waited on the precipice of ruin… the physical stamina of Hoss Bowlin, who grew up on an Arkansas tenant farm and spent much of the season hunched over in pain from having one of his testicles removed… the raw talent of Johnny Blue Moon Odom, who started the year washing dishes for the minimum wage at Macon’s Dempsey Hotel, where he was expected to use only the rear entrance… and the calm leadership skills of Haywood Sullivan, who grew up down the road in Dothan and knew all about the South’s history of lynchings and the hard-edged racial protocols but treated his players as equals.

Of course Lindblad hadn’t come to Birmingham to study family trees. In a sense, he and the rest of the team were poorly paid mercenaries, bringing to Birmingham their arsenal of skills and talent. They had applied those skills to winning ball games, and now it was time to move on. Other than Stanley Jones, none of them would stay around. They would all retreat, hurrying back to their hometowns, families, friends, and jobs in the warehouse for a buck twenty an hour. A few would return to Florida for Instructional League. From his time in Birmingham, Lindblad would preserve some newspaper clippings and a few Kodak moments taken by the apartment pool, but little else.

He was proud to have been part of Birmingham’s first integrated team. But sports had already provided a blueprint for breaking down barriers. For years black athletes had gotten white fans to suspend their prejudices in the name of team or national pride, as they had for Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, and Joe Louis. Although these black athletes couldn’t belong to elite country clubs or send their children to the schools of their choice, their exploits on the playing fields and arenas had pulled down a few pickets of the fence guarding the house of bigotry. The Barons had just invited all the neighbors to join them in the backyard.

“See ya next spring,” said Lindblad, shaking Hoss’s hand.

“Now, don’t you be going and drinking out of any strange toilets,” replied Hoss.

“My biggest regret this whole year,” said Lindblad, “is not getting to see you in that grass skirt.”

“You can thank Mr. Finley for that.”

For the second-sacker named Lois, it was back to Paragould, Arkansas. His wife, Madelyn, had a job teaching school, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Maybe take a few college classes. Maybe drive a school bus. In a few days, the disappointment of losing out to Lynchburg would subside. He would start thinking about where he would play next year. His slump at the end of the year had dropped his final average to .242, not exactly a punched ticket to move up, but he knew Sullivan liked the way he played the game. He led the team in games, at-bats, walks, and ugly scars. Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d get invited to the big-league training camp. That was the dream anyway.

Neither Lindblad nor Hoss, nor anyone else on the team, had volunteered to come to Birmingham—they’d been assigned by the baseball gods. Before the season started, none of them had said, You know, I think it’s deplorable what has happened in Birmingham this past year and I would like to go there and make a difference.

They were not social activists. They didn’t volunteer at soup kitchens or in school programs. Basically, they lived in their apartments, drove their Malibus, Bonnevilles, and Impalas to the ballpark, played the games, and then went home and watched Johnny Carson and got ready to do it all over again the next day. They did not carry signs to end Jim Crow. They did not march on City Hall. They did not speak out on the issues. Some of them didn’t know Bull Connor from Strom Thurmond… or care about either one of them.

They just showed up and played integrated baseball, which, according to Alf Van Hoose, was the way baseball was supposed to be played, even in Birmingham.

In 1964, the culture of minor-league baseball—or for that matter, the ethos of all sports—didn’t encourage the mixing of social justice and athletic competition.

It was supposed to be about what happened on the field. And Birmingham was better for it.

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by | 19 October 2013 · 3:22 am

Haywood Sullivan at the Red Sox

From Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race, by Larry Colton (Hachette, 2013), Kindle Loc. 4869-4895:

In 1965, [Charlie] Finley fired his manager Mel McGaha and named [Haywood] Sullivan the [Kansas City] A’s newest manager. At thirty-four, he was the youngest skipper in the big leagues. His meteoric ascension had taken only a year.

He didn’t have any better luck than Finley’s previous managers, however, either in winning games with his inept team or in curtailing Finley’s constant meddling. When he got a call in the off-season from Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, offering him the position of vice president of player development, he said yes.

Over the next twenty-seven years, he would become the first person in the history of the major leagues to be a player, manager, general manager, and owner… and one of the most respected men in the game.

His time as general manager and owner, however, wasn’t without controversy. For years, the Red Sox faced repeated charges of racism, and Yawkey’s response to the team’s lack of black players didn’t help:

I have no feeling against colored people. I employ a lot of them in the South. But they are clannish, and when the story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club.

As general manager, Sullivan incurred the ire of Red Sox Nation for letting go of popular players such as Luis Tiant, Bernie Carbo, Fred Lynn, Carlton Fisk, and Bill “Spaceman” Lee. And it was under his watch that the Red Sox blew a fourteen-game lead and lost in a one-game play-off to the evil Yankees on Bucky Dent’s homer.

When Yawkey died in 1976, his widow loaned Sullivan a million dollars, and he became a third owner of the team. After he and Mrs. Yawkey survived an attempted coup by co-owner Buddy LeRoux, he took over running the team, and although the fans had grown increasingly impatient for a championship, he became one of the most respected owners in the game. He served on the Major League Executive Council, the committee that basically runs baseball. In 1981, he was named by the Sporting News as the top executive of the American League.

Around Fenway, Sullivan had a reputation for dignity and decency, treating the grounds crew and the ticket takers with the same respect he afforded his players and fellow American League owners. There was discussion among the other owners of naming him the league president.

Perhaps the criticism of Sullivan’s tenure as general manager–owner that stung the most was regarding his older son, Marc, the little boy whom Hoss and Tommie Reynolds used to push around the [Birmingham] Barons’ locker room in a laundry cart. In 1980, the Red Sox selected him in the second round of the draft. Some said his skills didn’t merit being drafted that high, and he’d been picked only because his father owned the team. Marc was good enough, however, to play parts of five years in the big leagues, mostly as a backup catcher, although his career .193 batting average did little to quiet the doubters.

In 1993, a year after the death of Mrs. Yawkey, Sullivan sold his share of the team and retired from baseball after five absorbing decades. He confessed to friends and family that as much as he loved the game, he no longer wanted to be part of the direction it was taking, with strikes, labor disputes, skyrocketing salaries, and agents and players who cared too little about the history and integrity of the game. According to the New York Times, he received $36 million for the sale.

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by | 1 October 2013 · 7:22 am

First National Baseball Congress in Wichita, 1935

From Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line, by Tom Dunkel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 2945-86:

In the nightcap, which dragged on till nearly 1 a.m., the Texas Centennials slipped by Stockton, California, 4–2. The Wichita Eagle sports department didn’t have much experience handling ethnic news, but muddled through. “The colored boys took a lead in the fourth,” the paper’s story said, but then “the Japs tied it in the sixth” only to watch helplessly as “the Texas colored club went in the fore again in the seventh” after Stockton’s center fielder collided with the flagpole, turning a long fly ball into an even longer triple and go-ahead run. Then came the hard part. The editors had to write a headline about a black team winning a ball game in Wichita. They’d never been called on to do that before. Could readers handle it? Was there a way to break the news to them gently? Under pressure, an Eagle wordsmith engineered a solution: Japanese Lose In Pitchers’ Battle Against Texans.

Grappling with issues of race was a Jayhawk tradition. Kansans fought what amounted to a guerrilla war (with wild-eyed John Brown emerging as the most notorious provocateur) over whether to enter the Union in 1861 as a slave or free state. The Free Staters prevailed, but that didn’t end discrimination. In 1906 Wichita implemented a segregated school system, adopting a kind of reverse busing policy: black children from majority-white neighborhoods were transported to all-black schools to prevent commingling. Most aspects of civic life were similarly regimented. Dockum Drug Store served as the National Baseball Congress box office. Blacks could buy tickets there for games, but they knew better than to sit down at the lunch counter and expect service. A black team had applied to play in the city’s adult baseball league in 1933, but the request was denied. Generally, black teams were confined to their own ball field on Twelfth and Mosely streets, although some were able to arrange pickup games with whites.

The public venue where blacks and whites interacted with the fewest restrictions was Lawrence Stadium. Up in the grandstand, seating was open to everyone. Down on the field, black teams competed in Hap Dumont’s Kansas state tournament and, now, the National. This had repercussions beyond the Wichita Eagle sports department. The desk clerk at the Hotel Broadview was thrown into a tizzy when Neil Churchill checked in late Tuesday night. Churchill had reserved eight rooms for a party of sixteen people. Only when the team walked through the front door of the hotel together did it become evident that eight of those would-be guests were . . . black men. Big black men standing in the lobby waiting for room keys. The desk clerk hemmed and hawed, refusing to register them. Churchill raised hell. The hotel manager came over and apologized, but there was nothing he could do: company policy, sir. For the first time, the Bismarck baseball team had to settle for separate accommodations. The white players, plus Churchill and trainer Roy McLeod, got to sleep in style at the Broadview. The black players went off searching for rooms in a black neighborhood on the northeast side of town.

Double Duty Radcliffe didn’t say anything to Churchill, but he actually preferred staying elsewhere. It would be far easier to sneak a lady, especially a white lady, into his room if that room were someplace other than in a snooty downtown hotel. Black ballplayers knew through the grapevine where a bed could be found in most sports towns. Radcliffe and Paige recalled a Miss Jones who ran a Wichita boardinghouse where they could crash for $3 a night, two home-cooked meals included. Radcliffe claimed that the fallback plan worked to perfection. He shacked up for the next two weeks with Juanita Baldinado, a half-Mexican dream girl. Double Duty promised to marry her someday, but of course he didn’t mean it and of course she probably knew that. He was an incorrigible hoochie-coochie man. And a flimflammer. “Double Dubious” Radcliffe. It’s certainly possible his tournament nights were, indeed, spent wrapped in the warm embrace of lovely Juanita. It’s also possible that he killed time reading the Wichita Eagle, front to back, alone in his room. One never knew with him. Radcliffe could simply have eaten Tex-Mex for dinner and fed his fantasies: a steak fajita became a sultry señorita.

Hotel snubs aside, it didn’t take long for race to become the talk of Dumont’s delicately balanced tournament. All of one day. The Eagle’s Pete Lightner rode that horse right out of the gate. He covered the National from start to finish and his columns became a running conversation with himself as much as with his readers. Lightner named four teams in attendance from the South—“the old South, Dixie”—as if he were listing bomb-making materials: Gadsden, Alabama; Rossville, Georgia; Shelby, North Carolina; and New Orleans, Louisiana. It looked to him as though Hap Dumont had a big problem in the offing: “To wit: How to run a tournament without having the southern boys clash with the colored teams.” Could they be kept at arm’s length? If not, could a truce be negotiated? Lightner had his doubts. Blacks and whites competed for the same trophy and the same prize money; there were no parallel separate-but-equal brackets. There could be only one winner.

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by | 29 September 2013 · 8:01 am

Being Black in North Dakota, 1930s

From Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line, by Tom Dunkel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 1692-1722:

Out-of-state semipros like Ringhofer revolutionized North Dakota baseball. Blacks, however, had a disproportionate impact. They were game changers. Negro League refugees brought with them speed, big-time experience, and often charisma: a combination of qualities seldom found in farmboy ballplayers. Quincy Troupe pegged out runners from his knees during games and at practices amazed wide-eyed kids by chucking baseballs over the left field fence while standing at home plate. Double Duty Radcliffe, who was catching (as well as pitching and playing outfield) for Jamestown, would bet batters $1 they couldn’t steal a base off him. After leaving Bismarck to pitch for the town of New Rockford, Roosevelt Davis paid homage to Paige when he faced his former team. He deliberately walked the bases loaded twice just to see if he could squirm his way out of those innings without giving up any runs. Side bets on his chances of succeeding were probably being taken in the grandstand. Davis escaped both jams unscathed, but Bismarck got the last laugh by cuffing him 13–3.

Many spectators at a Jamestown, Valley City, New Rockford, or Bismarck ball game had never before seen anyone who looked like Roosevelt Davis or Quincy Troupe. They were as rare a sight as winter rainbows. The population of North Dakota in 1930 was 680,845. The census listed 377 “Negro.” Jamestown had two blacks adrift in a sea of 8,187 inhabitants. The towns of Beulah, Valley City, Washburn, and Turtle Lake were 100 percent white. Bismarck seemed wildly multicultural with 11,000 people, of whom 46 were black. Era Bell Thompson graduated from Bismarck High School in 1924, then went to college and became an editor at Ebony magazine in Chicago. Growing up, she felt like an exotic species. White classmates marveled at her pale palms, asked to touch her hair. Whenever the topic of slavery was slated for discussion in history class, Thompson cut school.

Bismarck in the 1930s was not much different from the Bismarck of the 1920s—Era Bell Thompson’s time. Black ballplayers moved freely about town, but they were advised to confine their socializing to the lower-class South Side. You couldn’t safely assume that every proprietor on the North Side would be as ecumenical as Jack Lyons, who even allowed Indians to patronize his hamburger stand. If Troupe, Haley, Paige, and Davis wanted to eat at a restaurant, they knew how the game was played: find one that didn’t mind selling black customers takeout meals at the back door. Beyond the orbit of the state capital, the racial climate tended to be more unstable. During the Depression, Moose Kay, a black drifter, wandered through McLeod, an unincorporated village in the sparsely settled southeast corner of North Dakota. He liked baseball and stopped to watch a game between McLeod and the town of Milnor. Afterward, he offered his services on a barter basis: in exchange for meals and a place to stay, he’d be willing to coach McLeod’s team for the rest of the summer. Moose knew his baseball. Things went swimmingly until the Fourth of July, when a white man, who’d likely done too much celebrating, verbally attacked Kay, who’d also been celebrating. Kay floored him. That punch instantly ended his coaching gig and put his life at risk, as was duly recorded years later in McLeod’s official centennial history: “Moose got scared and crawled on a night freight train. The ball team felt pretty bad over this.”

The veneer of civility could crack under even the slightest stress. Third baseman Joe Desiderato cringed at the way hecklers hounded his black teammates during road games. “I saw the kind of abuse that those guys took,” he told relatives back in Chicago. “Way beyond what people should tolerate.” When the team crossed the border into Canada, the hostility didn’t necessarily diminish. At times, it got worse. Whatever city they were in, Churchill had an all-or-nothing policy. If a hotel or restaurant turned away or disrespected a single Bismarck player, everybody turned on their heels and left together. Said Desiderato, “We always stayed as a family.”

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by | 28 September 2013 · 10:29 pm

Gopher Days, 1935

From Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line, by Tom Dunkel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 2253-2265:

Gopher Days were popular events on the northern plains calendar, even though they amounted to glorified community pest control. No one dressed in furry costumes. Children didn’t amuse their parents by impersonating bucktoothed rodents. People simply had great fun cutting the tails off all the gophers they could catch and kill—live gophers being the bane of every farmer’s and rancher’s existence—and competing for medals and cash prizes. Towns planned street festivals to coincide with the purges, amassing piles of as many as 100,000 gopher tails. On June 14, 1935, the ball teams from Bismarck and Devils Lake played a doubleheader in Brinsmade, North Dakota, as part of its Gopher Day celebration. (Back in Bismarck, state and federal agents were busy chasing bootleggers. They seized 3,397 bottles of moonshine in two raids.) Paige rested in Brinsmade. Bismarck still won both games. Desiderato and Troupe handled the pitching. Neil Churchill had his own cause for celebration, which had nothing to do with gophers or beating Devils Lake. Determined to ease the strain on Paige, he’d put out feelers for additional pitchers. Double Duty Radcliffe—who had landed with the Brooklyn Eagles after Jamestown jettisoned its black players—was willing to return to North Dakota, but couldn’t get released from his Brooklyn contract. On Gopher Day Churchill succeeded in coming to terms with Barney Morris, who’d gone back to Louisiana after the 1934 season. When Bismarck hosted the Kansas City Monarchs the following weekend, Morris was on the mound for the first game of a Sunday doubleheader. He got saddled with a hard-luck 2–1 defeat, but his fastball, curve, and changeup were in fine form. Churchill saw enough to be convinced he had a solid backup to Paige.

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by | 28 September 2013 · 11:05 am

25th Infantry Regiment Black Baseball Champs

From Black Baseball Out of Season: Pay for Play Outside of the Negro Leagues, by William McNeil (McFarland, 2007), pp. 52-55:

The famous 25th Infantry Regiment was the all-black company popularly known as the Buffalo Soldiers. The regiment was formed in 1869 and saw service in the United States, Hawaii, the Philippine Islands, and Mexico. Its baseball tradition had its beginnings in Missoula, Montana, where the first team was formed in 1894 by Master Sergeant Dalbert P. Green, who was instructed to form a regimental team after an informal baseball game between an interracial infantry team and an all-black cavalry team created such interest and enthusiasm that Col. Andrew S. Burt believed that organized teams would be good for morale and would relieve the boredom that existed during periods of peace and quiet on the frontier. Green, who was named team captain, noted that “Players generally furnished their own uniforms and shoes: these consisted of canton flannel drawers (altered by company tailors), a dark blue flannel shirt, and a pair of barrack shoes (heels cut off), stockings, and caps furnished by the players. Practice was held in the evening after retreat, games being played on Sundays and Holidays. The ‘Old Timers’ didn’t take to the game as they do at the present time. An athlete, to be considered, had also to show soldierly qualities of the very highest type.” He considered the 25th Infantry Regiment teams that were stationed in Hawaii between 1914 and 1918 to be among the greatest teams he was ever associated with. As he said, “During my connection with the team it has played against players in different parts of the United States and foreign possessions and who have become famous in both the National and American Leagues, not mentioning the minor leagues at all….

The 25th Infantry baseball team rose to prominence after it was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. They established themselves as the best team on the island of Oahu, and began to compete against college teams and teams of the high classification Pacific Coast League….

The leader of the team was Wilbur Rogan, better known as “Cap,” short for Captain, to his fellow soldiers because of his leadership qualities, not only on the baseball field, but also in army matters….

Rogan seemed to carry the 25th on his back for much of the decade, but he did have help. His teammates included four players who would later follow him to the Kansas City Monarchs—Dobie Moore, Lem Hawkins, Bob Fagan, and Oscar “Heavy” Johnson—plus Fred Goliath, who would play with the Chicago Giants in 1920, and William “Big C” Johnson, who would join the Dayton Marcos in 1920.

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by | 26 September 2013 · 9:04 am

When Baseball Was Everywhere

From Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line, by Tom Dunkel (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013), Kindle Loc. 357-410:

There is no big bang theory of baseball. It evolved, like the blues and the miniskirt. Bat-and-ball games were being played in Massachusetts in 1735 and in Pennsylvania in 1831. The New York Knickerbockers put baseball rules down on paper in 1845, but nine innings weren’t the norm until 1857 and overhand pitches wouldn’t gain acceptance until 1884.

Through every modification, baseball’s popularity swelled. By the end of the Civil War, America finally had a pastime with mass appeal; somehow square dancing and rail splitting had never quite captured the public imagination. A pair of milestones marked the transition to commercialism. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings put ten players on salary, a luxury the team seemingly couldn’t afford, since the Stockings unraveled within two years. In 1876 the eight-team National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs began play; this was the first entity with the resources and the leadership to survive over time. (That’s the same National League still going strong today.) The 52–14 Chicago White Stockings won the 1876 championship, finishing six games ahead of the spunky Hartford Dark Blues and St. Louis Brown Stockings.

Poet Carl Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, in the 1880s on a steady diet of Chicago sports pages, which fed his fantasy that he would someday wake up a big-league outfielder. “What is this fascination about making a hickory stick connect with a thrown ball . . . or running for a fly and leaping in the air for a one-handed catch?” he mused in his memoir Always the Young Strangers. “These questions have gone round and round in the heads of millions of American boys for generations.” Adulthood didn’t necessarily bring definitive answers to such questions.

The professional ranks expanded in 1901 with the spawning of an American League to compete with the National League, but their combined sixteen teams occupied only the top floor of what historian Harold Seymour referred to as the sprawling “House of Baseball.” There was plenty of action below and it wasn’t confined to schoolyards or playgrounds. Industrial and recreation leagues flourished. Grown men by the tens of thousands laced on spikes and lost themselves in takeout slides and doubles that split the gap. Indian reservations had hardball teams. Employees of coal companies, trolley car manufacturers, police departments, funeral homes, and local Communist parties took to the field together in off-hours. As baseball became the language of leisure, it collided with another cherished American tradition: the will to win. The result was predictable. Dollar bills got stuffed into uniform pockets, usually because a company or a town or some civic-minded pooh-bah had lost patience with losing. This semipro ethos infused the farthest fringes of the sport. Dwight Eisenhower earned spending money patrolling center field for a team in the Kansas State League in 1910, registering under the phony surname “Wilson” in order to protect his amateur status. Young Mr. Eisenhower had his eyes on an appointment to West Point and—who knows?—maybe a career in the military. On a summer day in 1915 an estimated 100,000 fans flooded Cleveland’s Brookside Park to watch a game between the White Autos and Omaha Luxers, two regional semipro superpowers.

The WPA Guide for Alabama made mention of “a semi pro team in nearly every town.” Some of the teams courted a broad audience. When Nashville, [Alabama Arkansas], hosted Dierks, [Alabama Arkansas], for a game in 1924, the Nashville News reported, “Ladies will be admitted free, as will one-armed and one-legged men and children under 6 years old.” Up north in New York, the Brooklyn Bushwicks installed lights on their field in 1930, five years before the Major Leagues took the plunge into night baseball.

Family-owned Bona Allen, Incorporated, of Buford, Georgia, had several thousand employees. It primarily produced shoes but also supplied the raw leather used to make baseball gloves. The semipro Bona Allen Shoemakers crisscrossed the Southeast with players earning a princely $300 to $400 a month. The company mounted a giant shoe on a Chevrolet chassis and an advance man would drive from town to town, handing out leather key chains to drum up interest before ball games. There was a standing offer: every member of an opposing team that beat Bona Allen received a free pair of dress shoes. The company didn’t give many away. In 1936, for example, the Shoemakers stomped to a 73–6 record, peeling off a 35–game winning streak. Their ballpark in Buford was a gem. Crowds turned out even when the Shoemakers weren’t there. In-progress summaries from important road games were relayed by Teletype to the Bona Allen plant. Somebody would read the updates over a loudspeaker while hundreds of fans sat in the stands outside cheering a deserted field.

Major League baseball held the line at just sixteen teams until 1961, but a crazy quilt of minor leagues got stitched together by independent hands. As far back as 1909 there were 246 minor league teams loosely tied to 35 leagues. These were rogue operators that sold their best players to the highest-bidding big-league club. In 1921 the Major Leagues chose to take more direct control of their destiny and adopted the farm system. American and National league teams were free to own and operate multiple minor-league affiliates that would feed talent up the organizational chain. Branch Rickey, then running the St. Louis Cardinals, was the visionary godfather of this new business model. The New York Yankees followed a few steps behind him. Those two teams set about assembling well-funded farm systems that would give them a competitive advantage for decades to come. Other teams dragged their feet and paid the price as the Yanks and Cards made regular trips to the World Series.

By 1932 the minor leagues had contracted to 102 teams and 14 leagues, but they were still a vibrant enterprise and still predominantly independent. However, the country remained largely rural and provincial. The automobile was duke, not yet king, of the culture. Fans wanted to cheer for a home team that was only a few blocks from home; all the better if they could walk to the ballpark. Since most major and minor league teams were many miles away, local semipro teams bridged that sports gap, although the definition of “semipro” was elastic. At the “light” end of the semipro spectrum, players received a token salary or passed the hat for donations during games. They’d often put in a full day’s work before slipping on their uniforms. At the opposite, “heavy,” extreme were generously subsidized clubs like the Bona Allen Shoemakers. They charged admission to games, the quality of play was high, the pay was excellent, and work obligations generally minimal. A player’s “job” might be to read the newspaper or to hopscotch bars at night chatting up fans. In 1930 the average minor leaguer earned about $65 a month. It was not unheard of for prospects to turn down a pro contract in favor of sticking with their company or town team. The money was likely to be better and there was the added security of year-round employment, no trifling consideration with the economy a shambles.

This book is far, far better by every measure than the very poorly written Barnstorming Hawaiian Travelers book I’ve just finished. I had to force myself to finish the last one. But once I began reading Color Blind, I couldn’t put it down. It reads well, but unfortunately appears to be very poorly fact-checked in places.

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