Baseball: America's Diamond Mind, 1919-1941 (review)

Richard Crepeau. Baseball: America's Diamond Mind, 1919-1941. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 240 pp. Paper, $13.95.

The University of Nebraska Press is to be congratulated for issuing an attractive reprint of Richard Crepeau's America's Diamond Mind. Originally published in 1980, Crepeau's work uses periodical literature focusing on baseball, especially the sport's self-proclaimed bible, The Sporting News, to examine American cultural values during the interwar years of 1919-41. The author, currently history department chair at the University of Central Florida, argues that baseball sheds considerable light upon a period when "Americans were entering the urban-industrial world and attempting to adjust their largely small-town and rural values to that world" (p. ix).

As Crepeau acknowledges in an updated preface for the Nebraska Press edition, when America's Diamond Mind was initially published, few models existed for a scholarly approach to baseball as cultural history. Crepeau's well-received work played a significant role in altering academic perceptions of baseball as a topic worthy of serious intellectual discourse. In the twenty years since America's Diamond Mind was published, a plethora of distinguished scholarly work--such as the recent collection of essays Pastime: Baseball as History, by Jules Tygiel--has poured forth from the nation's university presses.

In his pioneering work, Crepeau perceives the Major League Baseball establishment as the embodiment of traditional agrarian values during a period of rapid industrial growth and challenge to orthodoxy. While America was confronted by postwar disillusionment, labor unrest, a red scare, and a xenophobic reaction to immigration, baseball complacency in 1920 was shattered by revelations that gamblers had conspired with members of the Chicago White Sox to fix the 1919 World Series. Baseball responded to this crisis with the selection of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the first commissioner of baseball. Landis and the baseball establishment then embraced the traditional agrarian values of competition, individualism, and equal opportunity as contained in the American ethos of democracy, which the United States and baseball sought to export to Latin America and Asia.

Baseball, thus, was opposed to the corruption of an urbanized and industrialized order. Babe Ruth, the sport's greatest hero, was extolled as an American "innocent" and the personification of rugged American individualism. While recognizing that Ruth was a complex symbol, embodying elements of agrarian as well as modern America, Crepeau fails to consider to what extent Ruth may have embodied the values of consumption in contrast to the nineteenth-century ideas of production found in a figure such as Ty Cobb, who is largely ignored in Crepeau's analysis.

Wrapping itself in the mantle of traditional values, professional baseball opposed unions and class antagonism, maintained women in the passive position of spectators, and, while often perpetuating ethnic stereotypes, championed the sport as exemplifying equal opportunity for America's immigrants. Nevertheless, baseball and many other institutions in America never appeared to acknowledge the hypocrisy of egalitarianism when applied to African-Americans. But the times were changing.

Crepeau asserts that, in dealing with the economic challenge of the depression, professional baseball moved toward endorsing the values of a more business- oriented nation: adopting night baseball, selling radio broadcast rights to games, and celebrating the corporate player. With the corporate player personified by the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio, Crepeau terms the player's coming, like night baseball, as leading toward the "synthetic, mechanical, expressionless, and artificial" (p. 191). Crepeau concludes that baseball would face even greater changes in the post-World War II world as the rural game sought to survive in a "world of automation and atomic power" (p. 217). And it is interesting to note that as Major League Baseball enters the twenty-first century with its highest-paid player earning an astronomical $25.2 million a year, the sport still seeks to identify with an older America in the creation of the "retro...