Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball

Chapter 2: The Color Line Is Drawn

CHAPTER 2 THE COLOR LINE IS DRAWN Alfred Henry Spink published the first issue of the Sporting News on March 17, 1886, in an office building at 11 North Eighth Street in St. Louis, Missouri. The entrepreneurial Spink saw the opportunity to capitalize on the growing popularity of baseball in the United States. Spink wanted to duplicate the success of the sports weekly the Sporting Life, which was published in Philadelphia. He had a vision of how to make the Sporting News the best sports publication in the country, and he had the ambition and the drive to accomplish it. Spink had once worked as a newsboy for iconic newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer ’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “When we were young boys, working for the St. Louis dailies for $5 a week,” Spink later said, “Joe used to say, ‘Given a good business manager and an editor who can really write, any newspaper should fast become a good paying institution.’” Spink became editor, and his brother Charles served as business manager. Within two months of his first issue, the eight-page Sporting News 29 30 the color line is drawn proclaimed it had “the largest circulation of any sporting paper published west of Philadelphia.”1 Within two years its circulation had increased from three thousand to sixty thousand subscribers.2 By July 1889 the Sporting News’s circulation approached one hundred thousand .3 In relatively little time, the Sporting News became the most circulated, best-read, and most important baseball publication in America . The Sporting News publishing anything and everything about the national game, including controversies, trades, box scores, and stories about players and managers and their teams, whether they were in the Major Leagues or in some distant outpost in the isolated West. Al Spink saw himself as the chronicler, conscience, arbiter, and protector of baseball. From the first issue, Spink took seriously his self-professed role as the game’s official scorekeeper and made the publication baseball’s “paper of record.” To those involved directly in the game or those who merely followed it, the Sporting News would be “the Baseball Bible.” It is unlikely any publication approached the Sporting News in its coverage of baseball. Al Spink later sold his interest in the Sporting News to his brother Charles, whose son J. G. Taylor succeeded him in 1914 and remained publisher and editor for the next half century. The Spinks saw themselves as part of the baseball establishment, and their publication reflected the opinions and attitudes of the baseball establishment. J. G. Taylor Spink served as the official scorer during the World Series. During World War I J. G. Taylor Spink, in hopes of shoring up his publication’s declining circulation, convinced American League president Ban Johnson to purchase 150,000 copies at a reduced rate to send to soldiers overseas. When the soldiers returned from the war, many subscribed to the publication. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis later awarded the Sporting News a lucrative contract to publish the Official Baseball Record Book.4 When it came to matters relating to baseball, Landis and J. G. Taylor Spink, while their relationship was often strained because each considered himself “Mr. Baseball,” were usually on the same page, especially regarding matters of race. Spink, like Landis and the baseball establishment, professed that every 31 the color line is drawn little boy could grow up to be president of America, or they could at least play in the American League—providing they had the requisite “ability,” “character,” and skin color. Al Spink understood perhaps intuitively the symbiotic relationship between baseball and the press. Baseball needed sportswriters as much as sportswriters needed baseball. Spink’s view was far from universal—among sportswriters or players, managers or owners. As sportswriting developed, sportswriters became baseball’s greatest publicists and its greatest critics. “While often behaving like petty, carping critics, the reporters of this era helped to make public heroes out of good players and paying customers out of many urbanites,” David Quentin Voigt wrote in his book American Baseball: From Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System. “By catering to public demand for news about baseball, the sportswriter became an important factor” in the rising popularity of baseball. Baseball players and managers liked it when articles praised them. They liked it far less when sportswriters criticized them. The Sporting News reported that the president of the International League had rebuked Syracuse...