This Month
Michael Street Reviews Irwin Silber's
Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney
Sunday, March 9, 2007 3:00pm
Quick-who did more than anyone else to break the color line in baseball? Branch Rickey, right? The guy who brought Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers, exhibiting the courage to flaunt both public sentiment and the "gentleman's agreement" among owners to exclude many of its best players. Right?
Wrong. It was a man named Lester Rodney.
Lester who? You're asking. Actually, baseball fans should be aware of this long-time baseball writer (and lifetime member of the BBWA) who covered sports for more than twenty years. If you don't know about him, it's probably because he wrote for the Daily Worker, the newspaper arm of the Communist Party in America. Not the kind of guy who gets a lot of recognition, certainly not about one of the most important moments in the history of America's game.
Rodney came about his job in the most extraordinary-and unideological-fashion. As a student at NYU in 1936, when the country was awash with radical ideas to end the Great Depression, he got a copy of the Daily Worker and saw its weekly sports section. Soaked in party dogma and focusing more on the "oppressed" players slaving for their capitalist owners, the sports section was unique, but not something Rodney wanted to read. The writers didn't write from a love of the game, he felt, something that should permeate all good sportswriting, and so he wrote a letter to the editor to tell them as much.
That letter would change his life, as it led first to a job offer to be a sportswriter at the Daily Worker and, nine months later, when the paper began daily sports coverage, an offer to become its sports editor. Rodney brought to the new section his love for sports, one which was informed by Communist ideals without being dominated by them. Although he was not initially a Party member, Rodney was sympathetic to many of its ideas, and soon joined.
As he says, "I never thought of myself as a 'Communist sportswriter,' no more than I thought of Jimmy Powers as a Republican sportswriter . . . I was a sportswriter who happened to be writing for a Communist newspaper." Regardless, the ideas of egalitarianism and the rights of the oppressed workers affected both him and the subjects he covered. It wouldn't be long before the sports page would turn its eye towards one of the most blatant examples of inequality in American sports-the color line. To him and the Daily Worker, the color line was another slap in the face of the players (workers enslaved by the reserve clause), as well as a deliberate exclusion of a large portion of potential players.
In the same year that he began working for the paper, Rodney began writing about the absence of black players from this quintessentially All-American game. Though papers at the time would occasionally cover Negro League games, no other sportswriter dared to raise the issue the way Rodney did. None of them wanted to challenge the status quo and ask the owners the uncomfortable questions that Rodney loved to bring up. No other white sportswriter, anyway. As part of his campaign to bring down the color line in baseball, Rodney worked with sportswriters from black newspapers, and his columns on the subject ran in those papers as well.
Begun with an "expose" on the "Crime of the Big Leagues" on August 23, 1936, Rodney's campaign to desegregate baseball had no set agenda, although as he explains, "A strategy did evolve." Beginning by simply discussing the taboo subject, Rodney and the Daily Worker soon moved to systematically covering the Negro Leagues and their stars, in a way that only the black newsweeklies were doing. Then, he began asking players and managers if they would accept black players, in order to expose the true reason behind it: the reluctance of owners to break the "gentleman's agreement" they had about keeping baseball lily-white. Finally, he put those same questions to the league owners and commissioners, pressing them to explain why no black players were on the field, if no written ban was in place.
By 1939, Rodney's campaign had reached a momentum that he felt was unstoppable. With its alliance with black newspapers, who shared stories and series about the color line with the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper seemed to be about to break through that line. The obstacle, however, was the immovable Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the autocratic commissioner of baseball who had been placed there to "clean up the game" after the Black Sox scandal, and had only amassed more power in the twenty years since. And Landis was, by all accounts, an adamant racist. No color line would be broken on his watch.
In spite of increasing pressure from Rodney and his coalition of papers, no hope was held out for desegregation until Landis died of a heart attack after the 1944 season. Eight years had passed since Rodney had begun his campaign, but the largest obstacle was suddenly removed. The new commissioner, Happy Chandler, would have quite a different take on race than Landis, and soon made it known that "everybody should have a chance to play its favorite pastime." Jackie Robinson was signed to a minor-league contract later that year.
Rodney would have a similar effect on the color line in other sports, but his prescient stance on baseball would mark his legacy. He remained faithful to his principles, instead of being a straight Party-line man, ultimately resigning his membership in the Party (and therefore his job) along with other Daily Worker writers and editors in 1958, after the atrocities committed by Stalin first began to surface. Disappointed with this failure of Communism in the Soviet Union, Rodney decided to begin his life anew, although his political affiliations would later cause some waves in his life. He moved to California and began work as a religious editor at a local paper, the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, whose editor would stand up for him when the local "Red Squad" came seeking Rodney's ouster based upon his past. Rodney retired from the paper of his own free will in 1975, leaving behind a rich, egalitarian legacy, albeit a largely unknown one.
The beauty of Press Box Red is not only the surprising (and surprisingly unknown) story of Lester Rodney, but also the ease with which Irwin Silber meshes his own historical notes and commentary with the voice of Rodney himself. Most of the book appears in the form of oral reminiscences from Rodney, who is every bit as elegant with the spoken word as the written one. It is always tempting for a biographer to place himself and his prose above the subject, but Silber never submits to this temptation, while remaining steadfast in his obvious admiration for the iconoclastic Rodney. Still, Silber offers important structure and background to Rodney's life story.
Silber divides the book into several sections, most of them dealing with his influence on Rickey's eventual decision to bring Jackie Robinson to the majors; the other sections explain Rodney's similar influences on boxing and basketball and his perspective on the 1950 point-shaving scandal at City College of New York. The first team to win the NIT and NCAA tournaments, the multi-racial basketball team at CCNY was later found to be involved in a point-shaving scheme, along with many of the other best basketball teams in the country. While they'd never thrown any games, players took bribes from gamblers to keep games within the point spread, and in the end, thirty-three players and one referee were involved.
Of the four CCNY players involved, the two white players (along with most of the other teams' players) got off with suspended sentences. Only Sherman White and Ed Warner, the two black players on the team, did any time and neither of them played professional basketball again. This injustice also prevented the NBA from employing two early non-white standouts at a time when the racial barriers were beginning to fall. Rodney speaks with passion not only of these injustices, but also of the lack of culpability ascribed to the gamblers or the newspapermen whose papers regularly printed the gambling spreads on the games, tacitly allowing the gambling to happen.
Here, too, his sympathies towards egalitarianism and the plight of the underclass shine through, and we understand that Rodney isn't so much a Communist in the way that many of us have been taught to understand—angry revolutionaries who despise America-but a socialist in the truest sense of the word. Wherever he went and whatever he did, Rodney simply wanted everyone to have a fair shot at success. From this simple passion for equality came the impetus that would pave the road for Branch Rickey to walk upon as he triumphantly brought Jackie Robinson to the major leagues and changed baseball-if not America-forever.
The one tragedy in the Hollywood story of Rickey and Robinson is that Rodney's name is entirely excluded, in no small part because of the newspaper for which he worked. Silber has done his part to ensure that Rodney's story lives on and that, in today's post-Cold War world, we might be able to better understand the reasons behind desegregation in sports, and give credit where credit is due.
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