Branch Rickey (2 page)

Rickey is here just a few months from St. Louis, where he put together the Cardinals teams that won six National League pennants and four World Series, one of them just last fall against the Yankees. The only thing he couldn't do in St. Louis was move black fans out of the broiling one-hundred-degree sun of the bleachers and into the shaded grandstand. When Rickey asked the Cardinals' owner Sam Breadon to get rid of the segregated-seating rule, Breadon, from Greenwich Village in Manhattan, knew Rickey was right, but not as right as the gasoline that people in that near-Southern city would splash over the wooden stands in order to burn them to the ground. “Business is business,” he told Rickey, turning him down.

In no calling, craft, profession, trade, or occupation was color in America accepted. The annals of the purported greats show that everyone was paralyzed with the national disease: color fear.

But here on this street corner stands Branch Rickey, a lone white man with a fierce belief that it is the deepest sin against God to hold color against a person. On this day he means to change baseball and America, too. The National Pastime, the game that teaches sportsmanship to children, must shake with shame, Rickey thought. Until this morning in Forest Hills, there has been no white person willing to take on the issue. That is fine with Rickey. He feels that he is at bat with two outs and a 3-2 pitch coming. He is the last man up, sure he will get a hit.

 

At 7:00 a.m. on this same morning, George V. McLaughlin leaves his duplex at 35 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. The great park lawns across the street brittle with frost. He still hasn't the slightest idea of what beyond team finances Branch Rickey wants to discuss. Right away there is the pealing of bells from St. Saviour's Catholic Church nearby. They ring for what he would accomplish on this day.

McLaughlin had climbed a ladder of religion, politics, and hard work. His father was a ferryboat captain and young McLaughlin's schooling in Brooklyn stressed showing up on time for work. One of his early jobs was at a bank and simultaneously he got a degree at night from New York University. Then he went to law school and taught accounting after hours before becoming a lawyer, police commissioner, state banking superintendent, and now president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, to which the Dodgers owe $800,000. He wants to get paid.

McLaughlin and Rickey were raised to call to God from under different roofs. Rickey was a proclaimed Methodist, devout conservative, and Prohibitionist. George V. McLaughlin had heard of people other than Roman Catholics but couldn't tell you if he had met many. His temporal belief consisted of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. He said that anyone in Brooklyn who didn't vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt should be committed. McLaughlin was called “George the Fifth” because he was in charge wherever he went and if he took a drink of Scotch that was none of your business.

Rickey is from the hills and swamps of southern Ohio, and was raised singing Methodist hymns in a wagon going to church on Sunday. Wesley Branch Rickey was named after John Wesley, who founded Methodism in England in 1739, a precept of which was “Think and let think.” The scriptures mention a “branch” that helped make Wesley a saint. Rickey's religion and politics were inseparable, and made it only natural for him to campaign for the Eighteenth Amendment, which was Prohibition. Get out there and break all those whiskey bottles that cause men and, yes, women, too, to become filthy pigs and wallow in the worst of sins. He finally stopped supporting the amendment but only because it didn't work. He told the Brooklyn Rotary Club, “The cause of prohibition, a most worthy one, was thrown back a hundred years by the Volstead Act.”

Even in a ballpark where everybody but the third baseman drank big cold beers, Rickey remains openly against drink. There is the night when sportswriter Arch Murray of the
New York Post
sees Rickey in a box at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and runs through the stands to get to him. Every day of his life, Arch wears a Princeton tie in honor of his old school and conducts a one-person tailgate party. His breath requires corking. Rickey inhales once in his presence and immediately begins talking vigorously, waving his hands. Arch nods and listens intently. Seeing this, the other reporters become anxious, saying, look, Rickey is giving Arch an exclusive. Arch returns from his private audience muttering, “He's right. He's right. He's right.”

“What is he right about?” someone asks.

“I should stop drinking.”

So here this morning is Rickey, a man of total abstinence and an active member of the St. Louis Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, with strong ties to the St. Louis City Evangelical Union, taking his dreams to a Brooklyn banker. This man, Rickey thinks, doesn't agree with me on everything. Still, Rickey is sure where George V. would be in a decent fight. George V. had a great aversion to moving backward. You could find him at lunch each day in Room 40 of the Bossert Hotel, where anybody who was a name in Brooklyn business or politics came to show respect. When George V. raised a thumb on your behalf, you had unbeatable support.

At the Brooklyn Trust Company, McLaughlin had in his hands the accounts of the large pharmaceutical company started by Charles Pfizer, and sprawling real estate empires and construction companies, too. As the head of the financially creaky Dodgers baseball team, McLaughlin walked through a world of smiles, claps on the back, and congratulations. If you were prominent enough, you could get players' autographs from George V. and become a towering figure with your kids. In his Brooklyn, only rosary beads blessed by the Pope could mean more.

For the meeting with McLaughlin, Rickey arrived on crowded Court Street, which sloped down to the East River and the big, brawling Brooklyn Navy Yard, source of thousands of warships with crews as white as their uniforms. Rickey and George McLaughlin held their meeting four years before the armed forces were desegregated by Harry Truman, years before
Brown v. Board
, decades before the Civil Rights Act and the great American law, Lyndon Baines Johnson's Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and that is exactly how it should be printed in the books). On this day Martin Luther King, Jr., was a junior at an Atlanta high school.

McLaughlin was not famous for working with or socializing with blacks. This was no surprise to Rickey, and so he looked right past it to find any strength that could get him home. Usually he judged a man's ability to hit behind the runner; this time he was measuring a guy at a desk. Going in, his scouting report on McLaughlin was brief: a crackerjack. Where is he on civil rights for blacks? It doesn't matter where he is when it starts. Look for where he'll be at the finish.

Rickey figured it would be best to let McLaughlin extol Democrats while he listened avidly. Keep low opinion of Roosevelt out of the conversation, he warned himself. At some point in the business talk, Rickey mentioned to McLaughlin that he wanted to make a large expenditure for scouts. These men would find good players who were too young to be drafted into the war now but would serve someday soon, and then, God willing, come home strong and swift and eager to play. Some of the prospects now were as young as fifteen and sixteen; there was this boy in Compton, California, everybody called him Duke, last name Snider. Rickey's plan would bring all that young talent to play alongside returning Brooklyn veterans. McLaughlin was in favor.

“By the way, all these scouts would cost a lot of money,” Rickey said.

McLaughlin still loved the idea. “We'll get a march on all of them.”

Rickey now made a careful choice of his words and tone. Be passionate. No, entirely inappropriate. Be nonchalant. Not that, either. Why not just try the truth? This is no coward we have here. This is a secure man. So he told McLaughlin that by looking for all this new talent, the scouts might come across “a Negro player or two.”

McLaughlin showed nothing. Of course he knew exactly what this meant. Rickey was not just throwing out a casual idea. The man would bring a stranger under the roof, a black who should be mowing lawns and instead would be running bases in this white national sport.

Then George V. started to count.

His friend Bill Shea remembered: “He figured that at the least there were a million blacks who played baseball. He knew right there in that room that it was only sensible to look for players who could make the Dodgers. And fill seats at Ebbets Field and all over the league. The players who could do it were out there.”

McLaughlin had an old style of reasoning that came from years in police stations and bank negotiations. “If you want to do this to get a beat on the other teams and make some money, then let's do it,” he told Rickey. “But if you want to do this for some social change, forget it. We want to win and make money. Don't try to bring principle into this. If this doesn't work for money, you're sunk.”

Rickey tingled inside. He had found a man whose seemingly flat indifference to the enormity of the subject, reducing it from a religious calling to a way of making more money, gave hope. What these two men had just done was agree to put their hands into the troubled history of America and fix it, starting in a baseball dugout.

As they were now partners in this undertaking, Rickey asked McLaughlin to get the other directors together and clear this sudden and large scouting expenditure. McLaughlin said sure, why not? He put together a luncheon with George Barnewall, a close friend of McLaughlin's at the Brooklyn Trust, Joe Gilleaudeau, who represented the Ebbets family, and James Mulvey of the McKeever interest.

The luncheon was at the New York Athletic Club, on the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. McLaughlin said that if they had tried to meet in Brooklyn, the first fifty people seeing them would spy or hound the subject out of them. The AC, as it was known whenever decent Catholics gathered, was an unlikely site to introduce a black into anything; the club didn't even have one caring for the garbage. Sportswriters who might be hanging around the club would be easy to shoo away. McLaughlin knew what to do if any Catholics might wander by: Give a look that said, “I'll have you in detention pens.” And there would be no Jewish sportswriters disturbing the secrecy because there were no Jews allowed inside the club, either. Once, Norton Peppis, the great Queens gambler, was pursued by Ruby Stein, a racket guy who wanted his money, right up to the doorway of the AC, which Peppis, with a smattering of Irish blood, jumped through while Stein stood on the sidewalk and caterwauled about anti-Semitism.

At the meeting, George V. McLaughlin opened the conversation by saying he thought that Rickey had a great idea about scouting that could mean blacks would be signed to play for the team. Because it was George V. saying this, nobody choked, as they might have if anybody else was talking. McLaughlin lectured the table that this was about the greatest virtue, making money. Barnewell said, “We probably haven't tapped the Negro market enough.” The others agreed.

I am playing with children
, Rickey thought. George V. then turned it over to Rickey, whose bushy eyebrows were bunched. His voice was low and rolled on without pause. The cigar in his right hand provided the smoke and his waving left hand was the mirror.

“Prejudice,” Rickey told the table. “It reflects an attitude of a great many people in this country who don't introspect themselves very closely about their own prejudices. . . . You can't meet it with words. You can't take prejudice straight on. It must be done by proximity. Proximity! The player alongside you. No matter what the skin color or language. Win the game. Win all. Get the championship and the check that goes with it.”

Rickey and McLaughlin were probably the only men in the room who actually worked for a living. How do we handle these owners if they oppose us, McLaughlin remembered thinking.

On the way back to his Montague Street office, Rickey had the driver stop at Ebbets Field, the home of the Dodgers. A watchman let him in and he went past the closed hot dog and beer stand and out to the seats behind home plate. He still was new and had never before noticed the sign running along the bottom of the scoreboard on the right field fence. It was a delight to Brooklyn fans. The sign was knee high and it called out the hallowed name of the clothing store owned by Abe Stark. In the bottom left and bottom right corners of the long sign, inside circles, was a message: “Hit Sign Win Suit.” Only a freak low line drive would put Abe's threads on you.

Rickey was delighted by the sign. There was also a big, bold ad for whiskey: “Schenley's. That's All.” Rickey imagined this sign being ripped down and scrubbed away and the space sold to some decent business that believed in fighting sin. He also wanted a ban on beer at the ballpark. He would let the fans face summer heat with only vile Coca-Cola as a defense.

Staring at the infield in empty Ebbets Field, Rickey suddenly saw in the gray winter afternoon a player tearing past second on the way to third. The player's short sleeves were whipping in the wind. Little clumps of dirt shot up from his spikes.

Now Rickey saw the unfamiliar figure dancing down the line from third. His head threatened a race for the plate, the most exciting play of all, stealing home. He was rocking joyously off the base and ready to explode with the pitch.

When it comes, the catcher leaps as if electricity has hit him. He is ready to fire to third. The runner goes back to the base.

Now the pitcher is ready again. He has his leg coming up and his arm in a windup, and down the third base line comes the runner. Running furiously. Good Lord, is he going all the way?

No. He stops dead, halfway down the line.

Rickey is so excited that he is talking to himself.

“Why is the pitcher winding up?” he asks. “Why doesn't he just stretch and hold the runner on? Good Lord, he is making it easy. Oh, see. Here it is this time.”