An Academic View

books:


	• Brooklyn's Dodgers: The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957 Carl E. Prince Oxford University Press, USA, 1997 - 224 pages view larger image
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An Academic View

This addition to the considerable literature about the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947-1957 is by an academic historian who seeks to place the Dodgers within the broader social and political context of the era. The book captures the atmospherics of the time with a mostly credible and readable account of one of the great teams of all time.
Academic history today means race, gender, class and some of that in this context seems a bit forced. There certainly is an important race story here in the person of Jackie Robinson. The author, consistent with the academic perspective, has difficulty coming to grips with both Robinson's and Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey's support of integration with their views on the Cold War. This reader did not find it unusual that people opposed to the Soviet Union would also support, and take considerable risks in supporting, integration in baseball. Much of the race angle in this volume is familiar territory. Some which is not familiar is questionable. The author brands a player of the era, later a prominent broadcaster, as a racist and does so on what appears to be very thin evidence - a not unusual on the field scrape with Robinson. Similarly forced, on the gender angle, is the characterization of the colorful Dodger fan Hilda Chester as a "single mother", even though her child was an adult. That women were vastly outnumbered by men watching baseball games in bars in the 1950s seems to have little to do with the Dodgers.
The author's best point is his explanation of why the hatred of Walter O'Malley has lasted though successive generations, a phenomena not associated with other franchise moves. The Reason: the Dodger move did not just re-locate a baseball team, it destroyed a distinct culture, which is probably the best explanation.
There are some factual errors in the book, one of them particularly surprising coming from an academic American historian. Perhaps the aversion to "right wing" politicians explains it. In 1952, Richard Nixon made a TV speech which came to be known as the "Checkers" speech - it saved his career in the face of charges of fiscal impropriety. Checkers was a dog given to Nixon's daughters as a gift. The author asserts that the dog was present on the TV set as Nixon gave the speech. That did not occur.
The author also attempts to "deconstruct" the common wisdom about Dodger pitcher Billy Loes. Loes had the reputation as something of a flake, but the author asserts that he was a chess-playing intellect who knew exactly what he was doing. The account given here has Loes planning to make enough money in five years and then quit, having made his fortune and "that is exactly how long his career lasted". The deconstruction does not stand up. Loes' major league career lasted eleven years.
For those who cannot get enough of Dodger literature, this short volume is worth reading if only to see how an academic would view the story. Those who want to read just one book on the subject should stick to Roger Kahn's classic The Boys of Summer or Peter Golenbock's Bums.

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During the 1952 World Series, a Yankee fan trying to watch the game in a Brooklyn bar was told, "Why don't you go back where you belong, Yankee lover?" "I got a right to cheer my team," the intruder responded, "this is a free country." "This ain't no free country, chum," countered the Dodger fan, "this is Brooklyn." Brooklynites loved their "Bums"--Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and all the murderous parade of regulars who, after years of struggle, finally won the World Series in 1955. One could not live in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club.
In Brooklyn's Dodgers, Carl E. Prince captures the intensity and depth of the team's relationship to the community and its people in the 1950s. Ethnic and racial tensions were part and parcel of a working class borough; the Dodgers' presence smoothed the rough edges of the ghetto conflict always present in the life of Brooklyn. The Dodger-inspired baseball program at the fabled Parade Grounds provided a path for boys that occasionally led to the prestigious "Dodger Rookie Team," and sometimes, via minor league contracts, to Ebbets Field itself. There were the boys who lined Bedford Avenue on game days hoping to retrieve home run balls and the men in the many bars who were not only devoted fans but collectively the keepers of the Dodger past--as were Brooklyn women, and in numbers. Indeed, women were tied to the Dodgers no less than their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons; they were only less visible. A few, like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore and working class stiff Hilda Chester were regulars at Ebbets Field and far from invisible. Prince also explores the underside of the Dodgers--the "baseball Annies," and the paternity suits that went with the territory. The Dodgers' male culture was played out as well in the team's politics, in the owners' manipulation of Dodger male egos, opponents' race-baiting, and the macho bravado of the team (how Jackie Robinson, for instance, would prod Giants' catcher Sal Yvars to impotent rage by signaling him when he was going to steal second base, then taunting him from second after the steal).
The day in 1957 when Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, announced that the team would be leaving for Los Angeles was one of the worst moments in baseball history, and a sad day in Brooklyn's history as well. The Dodger team was, to a degree unmatched in other major league cities, deeply enmeshed in the life and psyche of Brooklyn and its people. In this superb volume, Carl Prince illuminates this "Brooklyn" in the golden years after the Second World War.

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