Once in a while it's worth a diversion from the bad news (and good news) of the day for a look at a bit of forgotten leftist history. For the beginning of the baseball season, it's appropriate time to have a look at a fascinating piece of Americana that most sports fans (let alone non-fans) know anything about-- the role of the Communist Party (CP-USA) in the integration of major league baseball.
At a time when the mainstream (white) media was actively ignoring black atheletes, and the black press was working hard to end Jim Crow in sports but had little to no white readership, the Communist Daily Worker pushed strongly in New York for the integration of major league baseball. Below the fold, please find my overview of the role of the CP-USA in Brooklyn, a fascinating read for sports fans, New Yorkers, and leftists alike! (More below)
Though sometimes forgotten today, the American Communist Party played a central role in the struggle to end Jim Crow on the baseball diamond. Communist journalists reported, Communist writers agitated, and Communist activists petitioned in the push to integrate the major leagues. There are several factors worth considering when studying the role of the CP-USA and its party organ, the
Daily Worker, in the fight for athletic equality. It is important to understand how the Communists came to baseball and why they mattered in Brooklyn, what the Communists actually contributed to the effort itself, and finally why they have been forgotten far too often in the history books.
To understand the CP-USA and baseball, one must first understand the CP-USA. It was founded shortly after the Russian revolution, and was largely an immigrant party. At its founding, barely 10% of its membership spoke English as their native language. This number would rise to 40% by 1930, but it remained something of a non-native phenomenon. The largest ethnic groups in the CP-USA were Finns, Jews, and South Slavs in that order.
Through the 1920s and until the mid-1930s, the party did not view sport favorably. It considered athletics a bourgeois distraction, and consequently did not report on them in the Daily Worker. The youth division of the party paper, Young Worker, called baseball "a method used in distracting...the American workers from their miserable conditions." Occasionally the Daily Worker would report on union athletic leagues and community sports, but never anything remotely resembling professional baseball.
Nineteen thirty-five was a watershed year for the global outlook of the Communist Party, and therefore for the Daily Worker. With the rise of Hitler and the civil war in Spain, the party decided it could no longer stand apart from mainstream liberal politics; committees in Moscow established the United Front and committees in the United States set about implementing it. This amounted to an effort to "nativize" Communist parties, having them trumpet their nations' respective democratic traditions instead of merely broadcasting the virtue of Soviet Russia.
Part of the goal was to get the party out of its immigrant niche. One way of doing this was to expand the Daily Worker from a party newssheet to an American paper. A sports section was the key. Mike Gold, a Daily Worker writer, later said: "When you run the news of a strike alongside the news of a baseball game, you're making American workers feel at home. It gives them the feeling that communism is nothing strange or foreign, but is as real as baseball." With this new approach, not only would the Daily Worker reach out to a more American audience, but it could also help the immigrant base of the party to assimilate. A 1936 poll of Daily Worker readers, asking whether the paper should run a daily sports page, garnered a resounding response of YES by a margin of better than 5-1.
Following this decision, the Daily Worker devoted a page or two a day to sports, including "capitalist" sports like baseball. Despite the fact that it was an official newspaper of the Communist Party, the readership was surprisingly wide-ranging. At its height in the 1940s, the CP-USA had 70,000 members. This seems like a drop in the proverbial bucket, barely enough to fill a decent college football stadium. The circulation of the Daily Worker topped out around 40,000, tiny compared to the New York Times or Post. These numbers, however, are deceptive.
First off, the party was not truly national. Various cities had branches, but an overwhelming majority of the action took place in New York. Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem contained most of the party membership within this 70,000. In this small area, the Communists had a vibrant political community of intellectuals, artists, and two city councilmen, including Ben Davis of Harlem. If a baseball owner anywhere was going to hear from Communist agitators, it had to be in Brooklyn.
The Daily Worker's circulation numbers also undersell its importance. Unlike other papers, it did not rely on advertising to support itself. Consequently, circulation numbers were poorly kept, and far more people read it than subscribed. Also, like the CP-USA itself, it was disproportionately influential in liberal-minded New York. As Daily Worker managing editor Alan Max joked, "It was the least read and most quoted newspaper in the United States."
It was in this context that the Daily Worker began its campaign for baseball integration. It could be said that "only in Brooklyn" would the Communist paper have played such a central role. That role consisted both of agitation for the integration of baseball and constant pushing for awareness of talented black players.
The Daily Worker sports pages pushed for athletic equality. They prodded not only for an end to Jim Crow in baseball, but elsewhere, including in the Big 6 football conference, the predecessor to today's Big 12. Bill Mardo and Les Rodney wrote scathing indictments of the racism of the major leagues, in the editorial column parked appropriately on the left edge of the sports page.
The Daily Worker also tried to publicize black stars. Part of their goal was to break down the myth of black inferiority on the diamond, so as to eliminate the "not good enough" excuse for the lily-white face of pro ball. It was the Daily Worker that ran box scores and articles about the Negro Leagues, and it was the Daily Worker to which Joe DiMaggio famously called Satchel Paige "the best pitcher [he'd] ever faced"--a fact of which no white papers made note.
The Daily Worker was prescient with its talent scouting. Before the war, no one on the national scene had the name "Jackie Robinson" in mind as a man who would potentially break the color barrier. Robinson was still considered a multi-sport athlete, and had not yet even played in the Negro leagues. Dave Farrell was a writer for People's World, the West Coast equivalent of the New York/Chicago Daily Worker, when he specifically named Robinson in 1939: "Of the many fine Negro ballplayers I've seen in recent years, Jackie Robinson strikes me as having the best chance to cut the buck in organized ball."
In addition to writing provocative and prophetic articles, the Daily Worker worked with black newspapers to pressure owners. Whether or not they were merely publicity stunts, attempts by Communists and others to get tryouts for black players were symbolically important, including the Bear Mountain audition in 1945. Even if tryouts for washed-up ballplayers were admittedly a publicity stunt, they mattered--the cause of integration in baseball needed publicity badly, given the blackout of the issue in the mainstream white press. Also, the Daily Worker ran editorials insisting that baseball management address the presence of a color line. Les Rodney wrote articles with titles like "Can You See, Judge Landis?" and famously asked the color line question to both Landis and Ford Frick.
The quality of the Daily Worker sports page cannot be understated. It is easy in hindsight to dismiss it as a Communist paper, and assume that sports coverage was therefore framed as propaganda. However, it was possible on most days to pick up the Daily Worker and get all the necessary sports news without feeling assaulted by ideology. The front page might carry a scathing indictment of the Truman Doctrine from Henry Wallace, but the box scores, game reviews, and betting lines on the World Series were usually apolitical.
There was also a level of connection with the black press. Though sometimes skeptical of the Communists' motives, black writers frequently shared stories and sources. This often came down to personal preference: Sam Lacy distrusted the Communists; Wendell Smith worked with them constantly. Sometimes, the Daily Worker would reprint entire stories from black newspapers verbatim, and, though less common, it went the other way as well.
It was important to keep a top-notch sports page, as it guaranteed access to players and managers. Though there were certainly hostile individuals, (such as the appropriately named Dixie Walker who once called integration of baseball "a Communist plot," ) the Daily Worker had no problem getting interviews and access to major leaguers. Most ballplayers were either ignorant of the newspaper's leanings or ambivalent to them. Many just assumed it was a trade union paper of some sort. Occasionally, they would grudgingly admit to the quality of the writing. Leo Durocher, never soft-spoken, once remarked to Les Rodney, "For a fucking Communist, you sure know your baseball."
Interestingly, it was the Daily Worker that ran the only real column by an athlete. Often, staffers wrote articles and athletes' names were put on them to give the illusion of authorship, as was regularly the case with Jackie Robinson and Wendell Smith. Red Rolfe however wrote a daily column reflecting on each 1937 World Series game, and it ran unedited. Rolfe was an anomaly in the largely Southern baseball world, as he was a Dartmouth-educated liberal Democrat. Though certainly not a Communist, he had no hesitation in writing for the Daily Worker sports page.
Agitation by the CP-USA also extended beyond the newspaper itself. There were May Day parades of hundreds of thousands of people in New York, complete with "End Jim Crow in Baseball" banners in the late 1930s. Even more widespread was the famous petition to end baseball segregation, started by the Young Communist League, which expanded beyond the party membership. Starting in 1939, the petition was taken to major league ballparks as well as Negro league games and elsewhere. It soon came to total a million and a half signatures, a stunning number far beyond the Communist Party's membership, and including names of Negro leagues stars such as the incomparable Josh Gibson. Eventually, it was sent to the desk of Judge Landis.
Again, this showed the power of the Communist Party. On the right side of an important social issue, they had an appeal beyond their numbers. This was both a credit to the party and a testament to the relevance of baseball in society. Lillian Burd, who grew up in Brooklyn in that period, in reference to the push for integration on the left said, "It was strongly promoted in the groups I was part of when I was in Junior High School [in] 1940, '41. There was the beginning of it with the American Student Union and other student alliances, leftists certainly, but not Communists. It was also an issue to get support in wider circles...baseball was everybody's baby."
With skillful writers, close ties to the black press, and a surprisingly broad appeal, the Communist role still managed in a large part to be written out of history. Although there are several reasons for this, Branch Rickey deserves much of the blame.
Rickey was two important things: fiercely anti-Communist, and shamelessly self-aggrandizing. It was in his interest to minimize the role of far-left agitators, both politically and for the sake of his own legacy. Arthur Mann was authorized by Rickey to write the press release for the Robinson signing. His original version included the following excerpts: "Rickey was besieged by telephone calls, telegrams, and letters of petition on behalf of black ballplayers," and later "this staggering pile convinced him that he and the Dodgers had been selected as a kind of guinea pig." Rickey told him that those statements had to be omitted. They were. As the victors write the history, Branch Rickey, who was quickly made the hero of the story, wrote the reds out of the narrative.
Rickey also had the black press in his pocket by 1947. Knowing that things had come to a point where only his ill will could prevent Robinson's promotion, they were willing to do whatever he needed, as attested to by Wendell Smith. Smith had worked with the Communist Press for years, sharing stories, lobbying for player tryouts, and acting as something of a "fellow traveler" with Les Rodney and other Daily Worker writers. In 1947, Smith contradicted all previous friendly interactions with the Communist Press when he said, "The Communist Party did more to delay the entrance of Negroes into major league baseball than any other single factor." The black press hailed Rickey's role, knowing that he had the final say on all things Jackie. Though it does not negate their tireless and magnificent efforts in the struggle for integration, it must be said that the black press bailed on their Communist allies when it became apparent that Branch Rickey, not the Daily Worker, was buttering their bread.
It was the strongest opponents of Communism who knew better. Larry MacPhail, owner of the New York Yankees, blamed "certain groups in this country, including political and social-minded drumbeaters," for forcing baseball to confront "the race question." The FBI, referring to one public meeting on the integration of baseball, stated: "Pressure is being exerted for the purpose of lifting the ban upon Negro players participating in organized ball ... all of the individuals involved have been reliably reported as members of the Communist Party." As mentioned earlier, Dixie Walker was utterly convinced that the Communists were behind the integration movement.
Whether or not opponents could dismiss their efforts as merely "communist agitation," the CP-USA played an admirable role. They worked with the black press, and brought the struggle to the progressive white audience. They reached out to the broader left, and pushed the envelope. They had close relations with players, and never sacrificed their journalistic quality for political pandering when it came to sports. Mark Naison, author of "The Communist Party and Sport" in the book Sport in America, New Historical Perspectives, probably has the most accurate outlook on the role of the party: Integration would have come eventually, but the agitation of the Communist Party and the Daily Worker accelerated it. For this, baseball fans and all Americans owe them at least the debt of remembrance.
(This originally had footnotes, but I can't format them. For more, I would reccomend the following.)
-Barra, Allen, "The Best Red Sportswriter," The Village Voice, Oct. 21, 2003.
-Lamb, Christopher. "Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training"; University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
-Naison, Mark, "Lefties and Righties: The Communist Party and Sports During the Great Depression," (in Donald Spivey's Sport in America: New Historical Perspectives,
Greenwood Press, 1985.)
-Silber, Irwin, "Press Box Red", Temple University Press, 2003
The archives of the Daily Worker are available at the Labor Department in Washington.