Kelelain

Help?

I'm researching the 1942 Negro leagues baseball season, a time when The Daily Worker's campaign to integrate the white Major Leagues (or at least to allow tryouts for prominent black players) hit its first tentative victory; this was when Lester Rodney publicized a comment that Leo Durocher had made to Wendell Smith that he would happily hire Negro ballplayers if not for the owners and Commissioner. When that story hit, the Commissioner famously announced on 16 July 1942 that "there is no rule, formal or informal" barring black players.

Having read your CV (and having already read "Sickening Red Tinge", I wanted to ask whether you could identify two things: (1) precisely when was that article printed (I'm guessing 15 July, but I haven't found it yet), and (2) who was Nat Low? I find his name all over the DW sports page in '42, and see him quoted in black weeklies as the sports editor of DW, but I find no bio data on him anywhere. Was he a short-timer, or was that just a pseudonym for Mr. Rodney, whose name doesn't seem to show up on the pages I've examined?

Thanks. -- Couillaud 16:02, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

I just saw this message - I need to look through my thesis to get you the info for your first question, so give me a little time (maybe later today or tomorrow, depending on if I can locate it, a lot of things are in storage). As for Nat Low, he was another writer. While Lester did write under pseudonyms to make it look like they had more writers than they did, he assured me that Nat Low was an actual person. I'll have to look up more about him, too, in my thesis. But I wanted to let you know as soon as I could that I finally saw this, and will get this info to you, I hope it's not going to be too late for you. Kelelain (talk) 18:10, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm sorry it took a few extra days for me to hunt my thesis down.

As an aside, while I'm reading my thesis, just want to add this tidbit, in 1945, the sports editor for the New York black newspaper, Amsterdam News, Joe Bostic, teamed up with Nat Low to take two Negro League players to Dodger's spring training, unannounced. They weren't high quality players, though, just ones who were willing to go through with this. Rickey was furious at what he felt was a disrespectful blindside, and turned them away. He also didn't want to be associated with the Communists. Kelelain (talk) 17:27, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

To answer your first question: The article in the Daily Worker that related Landis' comments to Durocher was printed 17 July 1942, p. 1 (that it was a first page article, and not a sports page article, means it was big news, because it was rare that the sports news made the first page of the Daily Worker). To answer your second question: Nat Low was a reporter with the Worker, but when Lester Rodney, who was the editor from the institution of the sports section in 1936, went to serve in the military during the war, Low became interim editor, until Rodney's return. Low was actually pretty active, though didn't have scoops like Lester did. Well, Lester reserved those for himself.

But here is a more full history of the issue of who said what concerning any "unwritten rule" about keeping out blacks from MLB, leading up to that statement. Some of it is significant background info that you can see between the lines of Landis' assertion.

In the 23 Aug 1936 Sunday Worker, National League President Ford Frick told the Worker's Ted Benson, "Beyond the fundamental requirement that a major league player must have unique ability and good character and habits, I do not recall one instance where baseball has allowed either race, creed or color to enter into the question of the selection of its players." You can see the slight against black players glaring there. But Ford went on to say that hiring was the responsibility of club owners, and that racism was a sociological problem for the US to solve, not baseball.

In the 17 Jan 1937 Sunday Worker, another Worker sportswriter, Mike Kantor, who was working closely with Lester on bugging the Dodgers, got the President of the Dodger, Judge Steven McKeever, to say, "as for me, I've got nothing against having Negroes play major league baseball." But, he added, the decision was up to the club manager, Burleigh Grimes. When Kantor tried to get a word out of Grimes, he said they would have to ask Ford Frick.

The 10 Jan 1938 Daily Worker reprinted in its entirety an article by Sam Lacy, sportswriter for the Washington Herald (a black newspaper), in which Lacy interviewed Clark Griffith, president of the Washington Senators. Griffith told Lacy that he believed that one day colored baseball players would play in the major leagues. However, Griffith spouted the same ridiculous argument as Frick, "It is unreasonable to demand of the colored baseball player the consistent peak performance that is the requisite of the game as it is played in the big leagues." Keep in mind, he told this to a black reporter. Also, the Worker is interspersed, by this time, with articles by major leaguers, from Dizzy Dean to Joe Dimaggio, that they barnstorm against and with black players in the off season and in the Caribbean leagues, and they are equal or superior to major league all-stars.

The 23 July 1941 Daily Worker had an interview Lester did with Cleveland Indians' club manager, Roger Peckinpaugh (which would be the second baseball club to integrate, just weeks after the Dodgers, in 1947). Peckenpaugh said the same as McKeever, he would love to have some of the Negro League talent on his club, "But it's not up to the managers--you know that."

It wasn't Landis' statement to Durocher, however, that lead up to the desegregation of Major League Baseball. It was a double-whammy of legal decisions: first, in early-1945, Mayor LaGuardia commisioned a study on discriminatory hiring practices by the New York major league baseball clubs; completed in November 1945, it found them guilty of discrimination against blacks for no reason except color of skin, Then, the New York state legislature passed the Ives-Quinn Bill, that made it illegal to discriminate due to race, creed, or color, in hiring in all of New York. It was during the Ives-Quinn debate that Landis died, and Happy Chandler became baseball commissioner. So, Landis never had to deal with the legal implications of open discrimination, and Chandler said, either out of true emotions or legal requirements, that he would be very open to the integration of blacks in baseball, if clubs would start to hire them. The Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees had to start considering it by the end of 1945; Branch Rickey beat them to the punch by signing Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract in October 1945.

I hope this information helps, and if you need more information, please feel free to email me, kellyrusinack@outlook.com, I'm sorry it took me a while to see your question, I read my email about 20 times a day (not exaggerating) so I would get that more quickly.Kelelain (talk) 19:37, 1 March 2014 (UTC)