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2 “Baseball as America” Nostalgia and Public Memory through the National Pastime If a baseball park can serve as a site for the daily affirmation of faith in America, then it stands to reason that the “national pastime” would designate a sacred site for believers to pilgrimage in honor of the game. Accordingly , the National Baseball Hall of fame and Museum recognizes the game’s greatest figures and celebrates the American game as an embodiment of the American Dream. Its location in Cooperstown, New york, marks the purported birthplace of baseball, and the adjacent Doubleday field, which opened in 1930, assures that the game is forever granted pure, pastoral origins. for baseball followers, the Hall of fame and Museum is hallowed ground, the most sacred site in the “church of baseball.” Thus, as Benjamin Rader declares, “As Jews and Christians have their Jerusalem and Moslems their Mecca, baseball fans [have] their special place, the pastoral village of Cooperstown.”1 A visit to Cooperstown is, indeed, a kind of pilgrimage. It is not accessible by a major interstate, and even the ubiquitous tourist signage that dots America’s roadways is nearly absent as one approaches the rural village. In other words, visitors know they are embarking on a special journey; they must seek it out for themselves. As Roberta Newman remarks, “That Cooperstown is remote actually adds to its power as the locus of baseball’s ideal, its spiritual magnetism.”2 upon arrival, the Hall of fame building could easily be missed, perhaps mistaken for a bank or post office, if not for the hundreds of people gathered in and around its entrance. It can be found on Main Street, a name that appropriately symbolizes the idyllic downtown that is central to American mythology. The remoteness of its location and the quaintness of the town make the trip to Cooperstown as much about the nation’s past as it is about the nation’s pastime.visitors can stroll a treelined main street, wander in and out of baseball-themed restaurants and shops, and strike up friendly conversations with strangers, all while cele- 52 / Chapter 2 brating the American game. Thus, the National Baseball Hall of fame and Museum invites its visitors to acknowledge and celebrate American identity in a way that no other sports hall of fame can claim. This spirit of nostalgia demonstrates the essence of baseball’s place in American culture. until recently, however, only those dedicated enough to make the trip to rural New york could experience this national narrative firsthand. In November 2001, less than two months after the attacks of 9/11, “Baseball as America” was announced as the first exhibition in which “Hall of fame treasures will leave their legendary home in Cooperstown, Newyork.”3 The four-year museum tour was scheduled to begin in March 2002 in New york and conclude in September 2006 in Detroit.4 As the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis described it, “Baseball as America” provided “a groundbreaking exploration of how a game with roots in the 19th century serves as both a beloved national pastime and a reflection of America’s ever-evolving culture.”5 In this way, the traveling exhibition brought the church of baseball to millions of Americans, both reaffirming the faith of its many adherents and inviting new members into the fold. This evangelical deployment of baseball as a metaphor for the nation articulated with the rhetorical production of the “war on terror.” Although no mention of September 11 was made in the announcement of the “Baseball as America” tour, the timing nonetheless suggests that the exhibition can be understood as at least a partial response to the shocking events of that day. from this perspective, the museum exhibition participated in baseball ’s rhetorical production of national character and unity in the wake of 9/11. As a metaphor, “Baseball as America” presented a “way of seeing” the united States in the twenty-first century.6 Read this way, the museum exhibition contributed to the public memory of a population reeling from national tragedy, rhetorically reproducing America’s past(time) in order to accommodate the anxieties of a post-9/11 world. I argue in this chapter that “Baseball as America” constituted a site of public memory that sought to contain anxieties about national security during the “war on terror” and simultaneously reinvented the past to assert the benevolence and purity of the American experience. The selection and organization of the displayed artifacts suggests that...

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