Westbrook Pegler
Logansport Press/September 16, 1956
(What has happened to the “Black Sox” who were banished from baseball when the 1919 World Series erupted into a scandal that rocked the nation? To get the answer to that “Hot Stove League” question, Westbrook Pegler, famous columnist, put on his baseball writer’s cap again. The result is this revealing series on the “Black Sox Scandal — 36 Years After.”)
(First Of Five Articles).
The World Series of 1919 between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds was a clumsy fake.
A few of the White Sox kicked away ball games for the profit of underworld gamblers who had sent them offers of bribes. The Reds won, 5 games to 3.
The scandal stunned the nation when it exploded a year later for the World Series was a spiritual and patriotic ecstasy, blessed by the holy hosts of heaven. This illusion was a little overdrawn. The proprietors of the major and minor league clubs included no idealists and the moral standards of the business were greedy, brutal and sanctimonious.
CHARLES A. COMISKEY, the owner of the Sox, testified that he, alone, decided how much he paid each player, subject to neither dispute nor appeal. Yet he glorified in the title of “The noblest Roman of them all” and a sport-page reputation for often-handed generosity and sportsmanship. The title of “Noblest Roman” referred to his aquiline nose. Few stars in all the game got more than $5,000 a year.
It must be conceded that the guilty athletes of the mockery of 1919 betrayed Comiskey. But actually, he had no claim to loyalty from any of his players. He was simply an employer who missed few chances to humiliate and grind them. Legally, they were just pioneers in the slow-down technique which the CIO later imported from France when Leon Blum, as premier, was preparing that wretched republic for the slaughter of 1940 by restrictions on the “production” of treacherous loafers in the war works. Three, and four, of Comiskeys’ players did take bribes, but we will never know whether all seven of the players who were dumped out accepted dirty money. The provocation was great in all cases.
THE ATMOSPHERE of the World Series now pervades the land again, it is a sort of pagan spirit. In those days, before radio, crowds stood for hours in the streets near newspaper shops a thousand miles away watching the progress of the games in the movements of little figures on green boards. The obsession is as strong today; millions still palpitate who never had seen a major league ball-game, rarely go to their hometown minor league games and wouldn’t know Mickey Mantle if he sat on the adjoining stool in Joe’s Lunch.
There were rumors of corruption throughout the 1919 series. I never had seen as much loose money as I saw in a marathon crap-game among Texas roughnecks from the new oil fields in a suite in the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati, three nights running. They shot for hundred-dollar bills and they had sheaves of them. A few years later, at another World Series, Oswin King, of the Dallas Journal, writing hay-seed humor under the name of Uncle Jack, reported that they all were back skinning mules or tossing flapjacks in grease-joint beaneries.
SUPERSTITION PROBABLY will insist as long as this, case is remembered, that Arnold Rothstein devised the fix. He was a New York swindler and underworld figure with cordial social acceptance among Tammany politicians and the editorial councils of the old New York World. Profanation of the sacred world series was not beneath him but the known facts never established complicity in his case. Some of the underworld hustlers who had whispered to Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson and Chick Gandil, outfielder and first baseman of the Sox, did go to Rothstein at Belmont Park and try to persuade him to put up $100,000 to underwrite the fix. But they told him enough to assure him that all he need do was bet the Reds. The fix was in already. So why should he contribute to the cause? He later said he could not believe the truth and therefore, backing his judgment of ball-clubs, had lost on the Sox in the first two games. Thereafter he switched and lost further bets when the Sox won three to make the fake look less brazen. It is possible that altogether he lost money. He said he did.
ROTHSTEIN WAS murdered in a poker game in the old Park Central Hotel. Fat Walsh, his bodyguard who killed him, was liquidated in a gambling room in the tower of the Miami Biltmore hotel. Walsh had been “hot” for some time and had splashed green water on Bill Corum one night as shots rang out and a large corpus in a white suit plunged into one of the decorative canals on Miami Beach. After Fat was terminated, Mr. Corum sadly surmised that Fat had not been living right.
Joe Jackson was illiterate. Risberg said he had to quit school in the third grade in San Francisco because he “refused to shave.” Eddie Cicotte, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, was reasonably learned in the “Rs” but not educated. Buck Weaver was a chew-tobacco sand-lot kid from the region of the White Sox’ park in Chicago. To his dying day last year, he mournfully insisted that he accepted no bribe, saw no bribe passed, and played his best all the way. He hit .300 and fielded 1,000. But Jackson, who did receive $5,000, also went through the series, without a chargeable error yet admitted that on some plays he did not do his best. In one of his innocent errors he played short on a Cincinnati hitter who then popped a fly over his head for a triple.
JACKSON COULD NOT write his name. He signed his paycheck with a design taught him by his wife which was just a symbol to him. She was 15 when they were married in Greenville, S. C. and he was 21. She made a practice of reading his contracts for traps because he could not read at all. On the road, Ring Lardner would read her letters to Joe—over and over.
Jackson, Fred McMullin, a substitute infielder, and Weaver are gone. American public opinion buried them in a quick-lime of moralistic scorn, although Weaver had beaten his way back to a certain level of public respect in Chicago and Ray Schalk, the honest catcher of the ’19 Sox, was one of his pall-bearers.
CICOTTE, the economic aristocrat of the club, got $10,000 in 1919. Jackson’s pay was $6,000. Risberg got $3,500; McMullin, less than $3,000. Claude Williams, a left-handed pitcher, named among the Black Sox, was low man at $2,600. Dick Kerr, a little Texan probably not very good over a long haul, but an honest man who pitched and won two games with most of his own team against him, also was under $3,000 and when, in 1921, he “held out” for a raise, the management drove him out of baseball for his impudence.
Comiskey broke up the team in September, 1920. They were regarded by many respectable authorities as the greatest ball-team ever assembled. They still are so esteemed. The nation gibbered and blathered in holy horror.
THE COVERAGE OF the fake by the press was awful. Sages of the sport page wrote casually about rumors of bribery but nobody did any city-side reporting and the one who came up with anything remotely worthwhile was Hugh S. Fullerton, one of the “Deans.” Hugh erroneously predicted that seven of the White Sox would never play another major league game and advocated abolition of World Series. He seemed to think this would cure the moral wrong. He later admitted that he had nothing but unconfirmed, unchecked rumors to go on and had made no injury. He did not name the seven men and the whole roster played until the next September.
Then all accused were thrown out of baseball and the American people damned them to hatred and contempt forever.
(Tuesday: Eddie Cicotte’s famous pitching arm now guides a plow.).
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