When All Heaven Rejoiced: Branch Rickey and the Origins of the Breaking of the Color Line

He really leads a double life—one with his conscience and the other with the employer who pays him one of the top salaries in baseball.... Perhaps the most moral man in private life in the sports field, Rickey is an ardent churchman, a volunteer, non-professional missionary.

Stanley Frank,New York Post

 

If our aim is to make Brooklyn the baseball capital of America, by Judas Priest, we'll do it! The Yankees made New York the capital of the American League and they didn't do that by any chance or any luck. They did it by personnel, industry and program. They have been winning not because God has been smiling on them and on no one else. They toiled and they sweated to get something and they got it. ¹

It was a vintage Branch Rickey speech, extolling the virtues of hard work and competition on this earth while never forgetting to mention that there was a God above overseeing it all. Rickey was addressing one of his favorite audiences, a Rotary Club in Brooklyn, shortly before the beginning of the 1943 baseball season, which would be Rickey's first as president and general manager of the local heroes, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The great orator was just getting warmed up. "Brooklyn has more industries than New York, but most of the executive offices are in Manhattan. What happens then?" Rickey asked rhetorically. "The Brooklynites resent Manhattan getting all the credit. They have a real pride in their own and refuse to become parasitical. When anything comes along distinctly Brooklyn, they rally behind it because it is an expression of themselves, even an entity as lowly as a baseball club." ²

Rickey professed to understand the Brooklynites' hatred of their fat cat rivals across the East River. "'Poo on the Giants,' they [the Dodger fans] say, and they are right," he exclaimed. "It is the pooling of support behind the team, by George, which makes it successful." He concluded with a folksy story that was as much a trademark of a Rickey presentation as the highs and lows of his dramatic cadences and the waving of his ever-present cigar.

I can remember once a superannuated minister in a town where McKendry College is located in Illinois [a school that had granted Rickey's first honorary degree in 1928]. When his wife died he had her buried in the cemetery near the college. I'll never forget the inscription on the tombstone. It said, 'She was more to me than I expected.' I never was able to figure out exactly what he did expect, but I can echo his sentiments in so far as Brooklyn is concerned. ³

While Branch Rickey did admire the special, defiant quality of Brooklyn's fans, in fact he had moved east at age sixty-two with a certain reluctance and trepidation. He was a lifelong midwesterner, a genuinely religious farm boy who grew up in straitened circumstances in Scioto County, a "particularly bleak region of southern Ohio," to quote Lee Allen, one of baseball's first and best historians. ⁴ Rickey had gotten used to living the life of a country gentleman twenty miles outside of St. Louis, where he and his immensely supportive wife, Jane, his mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, and the six Rickey children had resided since 1929 on a twenty-three-acre estate that Rickey grandly named Country Life Acres. It featured a mansion-sized house, a smaller guest house, horses, farm animals, numerous dogs and cats, fruit orchards and, in the vivid description of Murray Polner, author of the last Rickey biography, in 1982, "Jane's vegetable garden guarded by a possessive bantam hen;... and especially for the children, a lake with an island that could be reached by...