Baseball Diaries I: Jackie Robinson

Note: I have decided to edit and redo my previous post and replace it with two posts.  The first one is this one - more serious, about Jackie Robinson.  The next one will be more playful - perhaps.

                                                                                                                                                                 

I am no fan of baseball.  I consider it a very boring game and can't really watch it with any interest.

But I do follow baseball's history and watch some of the films about it, usually skipping most the scenes where baseball is being played for the sake of baseball being played.

And today,  April 15, is "Jackie Robinson Day", which is an important commemoration, not just for baseball, but also (and especially) for American society in general.  It is also a reminder for all of us non-Americans how things can be horrible at one time, but then they can actually (slowly) improve, due to the efforts, sacrifices and bravery of dedicated individuals.  In some cases, even flawed individuals.

Montreal  played a significant, positive role in this story and should be proud of its legacy.

Side Note

I apologize for the occasional lecture-like repeating of facts already known to many.   I like collecting facts and anecdotes, because collecting all those details and having to think about how to bring them together calms me down.  I need that.  But, more importantly, this is written with the (vain?) hope that my children 🙈🙉🙊 - and perhaps other readers, too - will gain something from it.  Something like the wisdom we slowly acquire by continuously studying the past and examining its relation to the present? 😬

 

Note: "wisdom" is derived from the Old English wīs ("sure/certain", also wise) and dōm (“judgment”, also doom), which is the exact opposite of what I imagine wisdom should mean: it should mean "don't be so sure" and "don't judge too quickly".   Nevertheless, a big part of wisdom does come from examining history.  As Santayana's oft-repeated saying goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

Note to that note : George Santanaya (1893-1952) is known for his aphorisms.  The one mentioned is important. It has been used as a warning to future generations, for all visitors to see, at a plaque installed at the Auschwitz concentration camp (German prison/extermination camp located in today's Poland), where millions were sent to death because of a perverse race theory.

That quote is to the point.  In the 1940s, there was a big, planned, organized genocide of Jews by the Germans.  But it was not the first such genocide in modern times.  There was one just before, in 1915-1917, the genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Turks.  However, people do not remember the past.  Hitler knew it and counted on it when he said, in 1939, already preparing for the next genocide: "Who remembers now the extermination of the Armenians?"

So fighting against those who view themselves and judge others using their race as an argument is important.  And knowing history helps.

Jackie Robinson Day

On April 15, the opening day of the 1947 US major league baseball season, the lineup of players for the Brooklyn Dodgers  included a black player for the first time, Jackie Robinson.  That broke the so-called color barrier (race segregation) in the American baseball league.  The year after that, in 1948, the US military and all federal agencies were desegregated, too.

In 1997, in his honour, the league retired his jersey number, 42.   No player will ever wear it, except on April 15, "Jackie Robinson Day", when every player will wear it - and the umpires (referees), too.

Breaking the colour barrier was a big deal.  It greatly, positively affected US society in general even though further progress has been slow, perhaps incredibly slow.  But the barrier had been broken, and Montreal  did play a significant part in it.

After the war (WWII), Wesley Branch Rickey, the boss of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had had enough of the unwritten rule of baseball that blacks do not play in the league, and wanted a change.  The time was right: the baseball commissioner, who had been an obstacle to progress, had just died.  Rickey knew that to break the colour barrier, he could not sign just any good baseball player.  The task would require a great deal of discipline, dedication and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.  So Rickey sent out his scouts to search for such a player, and they found Robinson.

Montreal

After Robinson  agreed (fully knowing what that meant), he was first sent to a "farm club",  the minor league Montreal Royals, to gain more experience.  Only then he would be signed with the major league Brooklyn Dodgers.  (Farm clubs were minor league clubs, lower in the hierarchy, which were used by major league clubs, in a  system developed by Rickey,  for developing players' skills, or, as he put it, for "growing players down on the farm like corn".)

The '46 Montreal Royals are sometimes considered to be the greatest minor league team of all time.  (Interestingly, Charles Trudeau, the father of Pierre,  the former Canadian Prime Minister, and the grandfather of Justin, the current Prime Minister, was on the board of directors of that club.)

As the story would have it, the colour barrier of American professional baseball broke on 1947, when Robinson  started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Except it did not.  The colour barrier of the American baseball league had actually already been broken the year before on opening day of the 1946 season, in Jersey City, New Jersey, when Robinson  played second base for the visiting Montreal Royals. 

The home of Montreal Royals  was the Delorimier stadium, which does not exist any more.  (In the photo, you can see the Jacques Cartier Bridge,  built in 1930.  There is no Champlain Bridge - it hasn't been built yet.)

In Montreal, Robinson  was treated well and was celebrated by fans, who did not hide their anger at those US teams and US fans that attempted to humiliate and dehumanize him because of his skin colour.

His family lived at Avenue de Gaspé (near Jarry Park), where there is a commemorative plaque at 8232 (and there is also a statue at the Olympic Stadium and a dedication at the site of the former baseball stadium).  To her surprise, Robinson's pregnant wife was given extra rationing cards by her neighbours (to "eat more meat"), helped to make maternity clothes by the women, and had her groceries carried by their kids.

Robinson

Robinson was a very talented overall athlete.

In high school, he played baseball, football, basketball and managed to win a Pacific coast tennis singles championship.  At UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, he did track, baseball, football and basketball and was the first to earn varsity letters (which means you are "really good") in all four sports.  He also won the NCAA Championship  for the long jump.  (NCAA is the league of US university athletes.)  He was so good at everything, that, at some point, he actually considered baseball, the sport that gave him fame, to be his "worst sport".

When the war came, he became an officer in the then-segregated US Army, in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion, also called the Black Panthers.  The battalion was assigned to training at Fort Hood, Texas, which is a well-known US Army base.  It is named after a US general that fought on the side of Confederacy   to keep blacks enslaved and who did not mince words when expressing his views on their supposed racial inferiority.  Not a great place.  

When a bus driver wanted him to move, as a black person, to the end of the bus, Robinson  refused and was arrested and charged with, ehm, riding a bus while black, I guess.  His (white) commander refused to court-martial  him, so he was transferred to a different battalion, whose commander was of a weaker character.  Thankfully, Robinson  was declared not guilty, by an all-white jury, because, you know, sometimes there actually are decent enough people around, here and there.

Eventually, Robinson  did not  go fighting with the Black Panthers, because of an injury.

After the war, he played some professional football and coached college basketball, but ended up playing professional baseball.  There, he was found by Branch Rickey.  Robinson's talent, education and military career, courage coupled with reason, and overall charisma and demeanor convinced Rickey  that Robinson  was the right man for the job.  And, as they (who's "they"?) say, "the rest is history". 

Note: The "rest is history" is a figurative phrase, or an idiom, as we sometimes say in a more pretentious tone, which is a formulaic language that people use when more precise description is either more difficult to develop, less likely to be understood, or because "they" are just the formulaic type of people.  They often don't understand that idioms are actually much harder to be understood by others who did not grow up with the same language and in the same cultural environment. They.

I don't want to be formulaic.  I should have explained that this phrase is used when the speaker doesn’t want to tell a complete story and feels the ending is either too obvious or boring.  But that would be too obvious and  boring, so I didn't.

Truman

In 1948, President Harry S Truman desegregated the military and federal agencies by a presidential order, which was transformative for future race relations in the whole of US society.  That action was shocking to some observers, who (rightly so) considered Truman to be an unsophisticated racist opportunist who could be easily manipulated.  He redeemed himself.

Truman was raised in a southern family of former slave owners (his grandparents) and held deep-seated white supremacist views.  Some of the language in his letters is very harsh and might be difficult to read aloud today, even with a disclaimer. 

His rise to power was conditioned on those roots, as well as his known affiliations to corrupt officials and his overall lack of sophistication and understanding of international politics.  For those (poor) qualities, he was selected to replace Henry Wallace as the vice president for the 4th term of Franklin D Roosevelt's presidency.  FDR  was feared to die in that term and Truman  was much more acceptable to the southern wing of the Democratic party, because they thought that if he ever became the president, he could be manipulated and would follow their views on how the US should function.

They were wrong.  He changed his views and he changed his ways.  After the war, Truman  tried to push for Civil Rights legislation with federal anti-lynching and anti-poll tax laws.  However, the US Congress rejected his pleas, so Truman decided force the issue with an executive order.  That was a big surprise for those thinking that he was their puppet.  There were other significant decisions and actions in his presidency (the Marshal Plan, United Nations, NATO), but, for the US, the Executive Order 9981  that ended racial segregation in the US military and in federal agencies might be the most important one.

Note: On Truman's desk there was a sign "the buck stops here", meant to indicate that Truman, as the boss, was willing to accept the ultimate responsibility.  That phrase is used for that purpose to this day.

Why that phrase?  In politics, people often try to defer to others the responsibility for dealing with difficult issues.  In the US, they refer to this as "passing the buck", which is a reference to the rules of the card game of poker  (very popular in the US).  The "buck" does not mean "dollar", which would be its usual meaning in American lingo.  It means the "dealer's button", which is a marker that indicates who is the dealer of the cards in poker.

Unlike today, when the button is just a plastic or wooden chip, people originally used other objects, often a basic hunting knife.  Those knives commonly used handles made of a horn of a buck (male deer).  So the marker was also called a buck.

Note:  The buck  knife of those days should not be confused with the Buck knife  of today, which is a folding knife manufactured by Buck Knives, a company operated by the Buck family since 1902 and maker of the famous Model 110 Folding Hunter, a large, sturdy 4" lockblade, revolutionary at its time - well, maybe not as famous as I imagine it to be... 😕

Truman  never liked the idea of passing responsibility to others.  Thus "the buck stops here", at his desk.

Patton

The Black Panthers, later also known as Patton's Panthers, waited long to be sent into battle.  Black soldiers were seen to be suited more to be cooks and drivers than warriors.  However, eventually, the battalion was  sent onto the battlefield and became one of the most effective units in the European war theater.

The top army commander, General George S Patton, had misgivings about black soldiers.  Overall, he was somewhat of a bigot, especially originally.  Nevertheless, he was also a pragmatist and he did value soldierly qualities in his soldiers, no matter what their background might be.  In his speech to the Black Panthers, Patton expressed his pragmatism thusly:

"... I don’t care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsabitches!" 

He did change course and ended up actually doing more to accept and accommodate  black soldiers than many of his peers.  He was the first general to integrate his riflemen, years before the US military became integrated overall.

The colour of the skin of some of his soldiers actually came to be quite handy, too: in the Battle of the Bulge  (at the Ardennes, Belgium), Germans occasionally employed the tactic of dressing up as Americans pretending to be sentries.  When an American vehicle passed by, they attacked.  To solve this problem, Patton  ordered all sentry posts to be manned exclusively by black soldiers.  Then he ordered any white soldiers found standing in such places to be shot on the spot, because, obviously, they would be the German pretenders.  That apparently worked, even though I did not find any information on the rate of false positives.

Patton was known for his uplifting speeches, which were often a part of his portrayal in various movies.  In the movies, the speeches are usually just uplifting.  However, in reality, they were of a much cruder variety, liberally sprinkled with profanities.  As he would put it, "You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity.  An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag."   And then he would continue, "Sometimes I ... get carried away with my own eloquence."

At the end of his famous speech to the 3rd Army, on June 5th, 1944, he described how proud the soldiers would be when they were going to describe their service to their grandchildren.   They would not  have to confess that "Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana"  when talking to their grandson, he said, but instead they could

 ... look him straight in the eye and say, "Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton!"