The 1938 Phillies went 45-105 for last place where they remained> several years. Suppose right after the 1938 season a vey rich very> determined and vey lawyered up man buys them, signs up Josh Gibson,> Satcel Paige and many Negro League stars and does his darnedest to play> them in 1939? What happens?>
The most HBP for any team, ever, and that's just through three months.
The 1938 Phillies went 45-105 for last place where they remained>several years. Suppose right after the 1938 season a vey rich very>determined and vey lawyered up man buys them, signs up Josh Gibson,>Satcel Paige and many Negro League stars and does his darnedest to play>them in 1939? What happens?
Judge Landis would force him to sell the team. Being lawyered to the hilt won't do him any good because "separate but equal" is still the law of the land.
-- Roger Moore | Master of Meaningless Trivia | (raj@alumni.caltech.edu) There's no point in questioning authority if you don't listen to the answers.
Tom MacIntyre 8 October 2005 17:43:56 [ permanent link ]
On Sat, 08 Oct 2005 09:40:07 -0400, Steve <smalpert@hackmit.edu> wrote:
john0714@aol.com wrote:>
The 1938 Phillies went 45-105 for last place where they remained>> several years. Suppose right after the 1938 season a vey rich very>> determined and vey lawyered up man buys them, signs up Josh Gibson,>> Satcel Paige and many Negro League stars and does his darnedest to play>> them in 1939? What happens?>>
The most HBP for any team, ever, and that's just through three months.
Sad, but possibly true...we have a TV vignette here in Canada, about Jackie's start with the Royals, and the first pitch (shown) thrown to him beans him on the hip.
Craig Richardson 8 October 2005 22:02:31 [ permanent link ]
On Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:43:56 GMT, Tom MacIntyre <tom__macintyre@hotmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 08 Oct 2005 09:40:07 -0400, Steve <smalpert@hackmit.edu>>wrote:>
john0714@aol.com wrote:>>
The 1938 Phillies went 45-105 for last place where they remained>>> several years. Suppose right after the 1938 season a vey rich very>>> determined and vey lawyered up man buys them, signs up Josh Gibson,>>> Satcel Paige and many Negro League stars and does his darnedest to play>>> them in 1939? What happens?>>>
The most HBP for any team, ever, and that's just through three months.>
Sad, but possibly true...
You think they'll survive Spring Training? In the pre-WWII Deep South? I don't necessarily mean in a metaphorical sense, either...
It was still the law of the land in 1947 as well, wasn't it? Did World War>II have that much influence on accepting blacks in baseball?
Two things happened between 1939 and 1947 that affected integration. One was WWII. The performance of black soldiers during the war made the public much more sympathetic toward all attempts at integration. The other was the death of Judge Landis. Landis did many positive things for the game, but he was a major supporter of the color line and wasn't going to let integration happen on his watch. Happy Chandler, OTOH, was willing to back Branch Rickey against the other owners. It's unlikely that Rickey would have succeeded without a concrete assurance of Chandler's support.
I'd think that while Rich Philly Owner was tying up Landis in court, the >fact that Philadelphia's sudden leap into contention using Negro League>stars would be noticed, and someone other than Branch Rickey might get >the idea that playing black stars might be a good idea.
It wouldn't have happened that way, though. Landis would have blocked the Negro League players from playing- he certainly had the power and would have been backed by most, if not all, of the other owners- so the Negro Leaguers would have had no chance to play while the legal matters were being resolved. If the owner had tried to play Negro Leaguers anyway, it would have been within Landis's power as commissioner to forfeit any game in which the Phillies tried to play them. Being "lawyered up" wouldn't have gotten the Phillies anywhere because under the law (and legal environment) of the time Landis would have been completely within his legal rights in doing so. It's great to have good lawyers, but they can't win a case when the facts and the law are obviously against you.
-- Roger Moore | Master of Meaningless Trivia | (raj@alumni.caltech.edu) There's no point in questioning authority if you don't listen to the answers.
Perhaps I'm looking at this with the blinders of having watched integrated>baseball all of my life and thus am somewhat prejudiced in favor of it, but>it seems strange to me that Landis could get away with forfeiting every >single game Philadelphia played for very long. At some point the question>of what his legal basis for doing so actually was, outside of a de facto>Jim Crow law. I'd think a determined owner willing to flush a good part>of the season down the drain could either force an injunction allowing the>Phillies to field a team that included the Negro Leaguers to stop the >forfeits, or drag the issue into court to challenge Landis's stance on>refusing to integrate.
I'm not any kind of expert on Judge Landis or the social mores of the time,>though, so your summary may well be correct.
The social, political, and legal environment was completely different back then. It wasn't for another quarter of a century after this hypothetical scenario that it became illegal for a business to openly discriminate in hiring. The thing that many people miss is that segregation was politically popular. It wasn't crammed down the throats of an unprejudiced populace by a handful of fanatics; it was the result of widespread racism in the population at large.
The key point is that Judge Landis had a very strong position in protecting baseball's racist policies. He could have shot down an owner who tried to hire Negro Leaguers by explicitly stating that doing so was against Major League rules. He clearly had the contractual power to do so, since he was given essentially unlimited power by the owners as a condition of becoming Commissioner. It seems quite likely that the remainder of the owners would have backed him, too. He had a strong legal position, since racial discrimination in hiring was perfectly legal. He also would have had a strong public position; there's every reason to think that more people would have supported him than opposed him.
-- Roger Moore | Master of Meaningless Trivia | (raj@alumni.caltech.edu) There's no point in questioning authority if you don't listen to the answers.
David Wallace 19 October 2005 03:11:33 [ permanent link ]
According to Roger Moore <raj@alumnae.caltech.edu>:> jimnospam@starprobe.net writes:>
It was still the law of the land in 1947 as well, wasn't it? Did World War> >II have that much influence on accepting blacks in baseball?>
Two things happened between 1939 and 1947 that affected integration. One> was WWII. The performance of black soldiers during the war made the> public much more sympathetic toward all attempts at integration. The> other was the death of Judge Landis. Landis did many positive things for> the game, but he was a major supporter of the color line and wasn't going> to let integration happen on his watch. Happy Chandler, OTOH, was willing> to back Branch Rickey against the other owners. It's unlikely that Rickey> would have succeeded without a concrete assurance of Chandler's support.
Even more significant than the performance of black soldiers, I think, was the liberation of the death camps, which gave the world an object lesson in what can happen when racism is taken to an extreme, and tied it firmly to the ideology of the recently-defeated enemy. Racism didn't die overnight, by any means, but it became significantly weaker.
-- Dave Wallace(Remove NOSPAM from my address to email me) It is quite humbling to realize that the storage occupied by the longest line from a typical Usenet posting is sufficient to provide a state space so vast that all the computation power in the world can not conquer it.
John Thacker 20 October 2005 01:14:59 [ permanent link ]
On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:11:33 +0000, David Wallace wrote:
Even more significant than the performance of black soldiers, I think,> was the liberation of the death camps, which gave the world an> object lesson in what can happen when racism is taken to an extreme,> and tied it firmly to the ideology of the recently-defeated enemy.> Racism didn't die overnight, by any means, but it became significantly> weaker.
Certainly true, just as the liberation of the death camps really killed the movement behind eugenics and compulsory sterilization (or even killing) of the disabled. In 1942, the American Journal of Psychiatry featured a debate between neurologist Foster Kennedy, who argued that the "defective" and "feebleminded" should be euthanized at the age of five, after being examined by a medical review board, and psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who argued against euthanasia, though he agreed that sterilization was appropriate for those "intellectually or emotionally unfit to rear children." For what it matters, the unsigned editorial in the Journal sided with Kennedy, arguing that parents' opposition to euthanasia was a subject of psychiatric concern.
