Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball by Roger Kahn (review)

Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, now gives us Rickey & Robinson and the breaking of baseball’s color line. A more precise title would be “Rickey, Robinson, and Me,” for this is Kahn’s very personal take on events, more a memoir than a history. A 1982 book with a similar title, Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier (Harvey Frommer, Taylor, reprinted 2003), and based on extensive interviews, is more objective, while Kahn’s version emphasizes his interactions with the protagonists, beginning in 1952 when he covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune. His narration is not linear, often circling off to include anecdotes, background history, and speculation. However, the text is so readable that one bears with Kahn’s ramble from one memory or anecdote to another. There is much warmth, as well as more than a little bile, in Kahn’s rendition.

The story of baseball’s integration, however, is hardly “untold.” Among many books dealing with the subject are Chris Lamb, Blackout (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, expanded ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jonathan Eig, Opening Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007); Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson (New York: Ballantine, 1997); and Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Perhaps sensitive to these “told” stories, Kahn dismisses Tygiel’s classic as “earnestly researched but ultimately plodding” (254), while Eig “does not understand what went on in 1947” (254). What Kahn brings to the table are his relations with Rickey and Robinson over many years and his judgments on their character, motivation, accomplishments, and contemporaries. Unfortunately, the text is not footnoted, sometimes making it difficult to disentangle facts from assertions.

Although Rickey is seen as “greed-driven” (2) and “a practicing feudal lord” (10), Kahn holds that, in the matter of integration, Rickey performed a “monumental deed of moral courage,” (13) defying “centuries of whites-only tradition . . . against wide and ferocious opposition” (15) and the negative front presented by fifteen other team owners. Earlier, when Rickey ran the Cardinals, he did nothing about integration. St. Louis was a southern city; the time and place were not right. Brooklyn was different: “Baseball should lead by example because it is a quasi-public institution,” said Rickey, “and, particularly in Brooklyn, I am not so sure about the quasi” (25). Robinson himself was eloquent on Rickey: “He spoke of barriers to be broken and how to break them. He spoke of bigotry and hate and how to fight them. He spoke of great things to be done and how to do them” (104). Robinson stated another time, “Vicious men may insult him, foolish men may make fun of him and petty men may not understand him. But when the vicious, the foolish and the petty men are forgotten, Mr. Rickey will be remembered” (185).

Notwithstanding these paeans, Kahn details the relentless attacks on Rickey by Daily News columnists Dick Young and Jimmy Powers, both of whom he rightly castigates. Bizarrely, however, he questions whether Rickey, building the Pirates in 1954, might have expressed antisemitic tendencies in not tendering Sandy Koufax a more competitive contract than Brooklyn.

Athletes like Jesse Owens, Mack Robinson (Jackie’s older brother), and Joe Louis prepared the nation for integrated sports, but it was the death of obstructionist commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that enabled the integration of baseball. One year after his death, Rickey signed Robinson in 1946 and sent him to Montreal. Opposition came from the Sporting News, which editorialized that Robinson was too old and unskilled; from Bob Feller, who maintained that Jackie would not hit; and from various nimby (“not in my backyard”) team owners.

In Montreal, Robinson paced the International League in hitting (.349) and stolen bases (50) and led the Royals to victory over Louisville in the Little World Series. Kahn maintains that Robinson’s Montreal season...