Mr. Speaker, this week the U.S. Congress is honoring one of the true giants of sports history, Jackie Robinson. There is a little-known chapter in Mr. Robinson's career that is chronicled in the attached narrative. That chapter details an…
Mr. Speaker, this week the U.S. Congress is honoring one of the true giants of sports history, Jackie Robinson.
There is a little-known chapter in Mr. Robinson's career that is chronicled in the attached narrative. That chapter details an act of courage and creativity in the political life of Boston by Isadore Muchnick, a Boston City Councillor who served in the 1940s in the city. He deserves recognition for his achievement in obtaining a tryout for Jackie Robinson with the Boston Red Sox.
It also puts in context the courage and determination that Jackie Robinson displayed throughout his long and illustrious career in baseball.
It is a privilege for me to place this excerpted chapter, from the book ``Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston'' by Howard Bryant, into the Record.
Jackie Robinson's Tryout With the Boston Red Sox, April 1945, Excerpted From ``Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston,'' by Howard
Bryant
Virtually everything about Boston baseball is conditional.
What would have happened if. . .
So who knew that on April 16, 1945, the Red Sox would once
more approach history's intersection? With FDR on his
deathbed and World War II winding down, fate and the last
vestige of a city's social conscience conspired and put the
Red Sox in a historic position.
At the end of World War II, the question of black rights in
America was again relevant. Asking black soldiers to fight
and die for the liberty denied them at home created renewed
dialogue.
Now, baseball found itself at the center of the argument.
Black soldiers could not die on the battlefield and still be
prohibited from playing center field in the major leagues.
Segregation was an unbreakable rule. That blacks played in
separate leagues was a practice that went largely
unquestioned. When debate was stirred, either from a
relentless black press or from the few mainstream white
reporters who made integration a cause, there was always a
reason why the time was not prudent for the majors to open
their doors to blacks. The only groups that were truly
vociferous in their appeals stood on the fringes of the
mainstream.
But during the latter half of 1944 and in the early months
of 1945, Eddie Collins was uncomfortable. He was the vice
president and general manager of the Red Sox and was now
being pressured by Isadore Muchnick, a liberal Jewish city
councilor, who demanded the Red Sox begin offering some form
of talent evaluation of black players.
It was a threatening concept. Baseball prohibited black
players from the major leagues in 1884, and no serious
challenges to that authority had arisen. The desire to keep
blacks out of the major leagues existed in great degree from
the players all the way to the commissioner's office.
Shunned, blacks created their own leagues, and the races
played the same game on patently uneven tracks. To some, the
very existence of the Negro leagues was proof that blacks
didn't care to play in the big leagues.
Yet here was an emboldened Muchnick, potentially unsettling
the balance. For emphasis, he approached Collins with a
hammer. In those days in Boston, a permit was required to
play baseball on Sundays. The city council required a
unanimous vote for the permit to be granted. Muchnick told
Collins he would withhold his vote unless the Red Sox agreed
to sponsor a tryout for black players, a potentially
crippling financial blow.
This was a new pressure. Led by Muchnick's threat and with
consistent commentary in the black press (and to a lesser
degree the mainstream), integration advocates pushed baseball
as they hadn't before the war.
Dave Egan from the Boston Record pushed in his column for
the Red Sox or the Braves to be consistent with the Boston
pedigree and lead the major leagues into a new, integrated
era.
Wendell Smith, columnist from the black weekly Pittsburgh
Courier, joined Egan in challenging Collins as well as other
general managers across the league to offer tryouts to black
players. Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American had vainly
tried to push for integration in 1939. In 1945, Lacy and
Collins began corresponding about integration.
It was, however, Muchnick's voice and clout that turned a
cadre of disparate voices into something of a movement.
Mabray ``Doc'' Kountze, perhaps the preeminent black reporter
in Boston, referred to Muchnick as a ``white modern
abolitionist.''
Muchnick was the first person in the modern era to pressure
baseball's power structure and come away with a tangible
result. The Boston Red Sox would be the first team in the
twentieth century to hold a tryout for black players.
``I cannot understand,'' Muchnick wrote to Collins in late
1944, ``how baseball, which claims to be the national sport
and which . . . receives special favors and dispensation from
the Federal Government because of alleged moral value can
continue a pre-Civil War attitude toward American citizens
because of the color of their skins.'' What Collins did next
was a clear reflection of both the unassailable mindset of
baseball as well as the arrogance of the Red Sox.
``As I wrote to one of your fellow councilors last April,''
Collins replied to Muchnick in a letter, ``I have been
connected with the Red Sox for twelve years and during that
time we have never had a single request for a tryout by a
colored applicant. It is beyond my understanding how anyone
could insinuate or believe that all ball players,
regardless of race, color or creed have not been treated
in the American way so far as having an equal opportunity
to play for the Red Sox.''
Collins' cordial inaction insulted Muchnick, who pressed
further. Collins had no intention of even granting the
tryout, but he had badly underestimated Muchnick's tenacity.
Collins was used to being in a position of strength when he
dealt with baseball issues, but it was clear that he couldn't
say a few positive, encouraging words to rid himself of
Isadore Muchnick, a man who was determined to see tangible
progress. When he received no satisfaction from their written
correspondence in 1944, Muchnick alerted Collins to his
intention to block the Red Sox from playing baseball on
Sundays. It was a potentially crippling blow. In the 1940s,
baseball clubs were almost completely dependent upon gate
receipts as a revenue source. To infringe on that would
surely get the attention of any baseball owner.
Jackie Robinson was fatalistic about the tryout. He didn't
believe the Red Sox were serious about integration and wasn't
especially thrilled about his own situation. He had only
played for the Negro League's Kansas City Monarchs for a few
weeks and was already disappointed by the league's air of
gambling and disorganization.
When Robinson arrived in Boston, the tryout was delayed for
two more days in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt's death.
[It] finally took place at Fenway Park at eleven on the
morning of April 16, 1945. Two above-average Negro leaguers,
Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams, joined Jackie Robinson. The
players fielded, threw, and took batting practice. [Manager
Joe] Cronin sat, according to one account, ``stone-faced.''
Another depicted Cronin barely watching at all. Muchnick
marveled at the hitting ability of Robinson, whose mood
apparently darkened. Joe Cashman of the Boston Record sat
with Cronin that day and reported that the manager was
impressed with Robinson. He wrote cryptically, with virtually
little comprehension, that he could have been witnessing a
historic moment. ``Before departing, Joe and his coaches
spent some 90 minutes in the stands at Fenway surveying three
Negro candidates. Why they came from such distant spots to
work out for the Red Sox was not learned.''
Robinson himself was satisfied with his performance,
although by the time he left Fenway he was smoldering about
what he felt to be a humiliating charade. As the three
players departed, Eddie Collins told them they would hear
from the Red Sox in the near future. None of them ever
heard from the Red Sox again.
Eighteen months later, the Dodgers signed Robinson, who
would begin a legendary career a year and half later.
Jethroe, at age thirty-three, integrated Boston pro baseball
with the Braves in 1950 and would become the National League
Rookie of the Year. Williams would stay in the Negro leagues,
never again coming so close to the majors.
The remaining details of that morning are completely
speculative. Robinson never spoke in real detail about the
tryout. Joe Cronin never offered a complete account about the
tryout except to say that he remembered that it occurred,
although he and Robinson would never speak.
Thirty-four years later, Cronin explained the Red Sox
position as well as the game's:
``I remember the tryout very well. But after it, we told
them our only farm club available was in Louisville,
Kentucky, and we didn't think they'd be interested in going
there because of the racial feelings at the time. Besides,
this was after the season had started and we didn't sign
players off tryouts in those days to play in the big leagues.
I was in no position to offer them a job. The general manager
did the hiring and there was an unwritten rule at that time
against hiring black players. I was just the manager.
``It was a great mistake by us. He [Robinson] turned out to
be a great player. But no feeling existed about it. We just
accepted things the way they were. I recall talking to some
players and they felt that they didn't want us to break up
their league. We all thought because of the times, it was
good to have separate leagues.''
Clif Keane would give the day its historical significance.
A reporter for the Globe, Keane said he heard a person yell
from the stands during the tryout. The words--``Get those
niggers off the field''--were never attributed to one person,
but they have haunted the Red Sox . . . Numerous Red Sox
officials have been credited with the taunt, if it was ever
said at all.
What cannot be disputed about the events of that April day
are the final results and the consequences that followed. It
was an episode from which the reputation and perception of
the franchise have never recovered.
``I still remember how I hit the ball that day, good to all
fields,'' Robinson later said. ``What happened? Nothing!''
Thus the tryout ended bitterly for Jackie Robinson. But
that evening, he accepted a dinner invitation at 9 Powelton
Road in Dorchester. It was the home of Ann and Isadore
Muchnick, the city councilor who pressured Eddie Collins and
arranged the Boston tryout. Why young Robinson, who was 26 at
the time, would be invited to dinner made perfect sense to
Ann Muchnick. Fifty years later, she would recall the reason
with a warm smile. ``Because no one else asked him.''
Isadore Harry Yaver Muchnick was born on January 11, 1908,
in Boston's West End, on a residential neighborhood that no
longer exists. There existed among the four children of
Joseph and Fannie Muchnick strong beliefs in justice,
fairness, competition, accomplishment, and the power of
education. All four children of these Russian Jewish
immigrants would attend college. Izzy received the first
double promotion at the renowned Boston Latin School since
Benjamin Franklin. He played goal in college hockey and
lacrosse, lettering in lacrosse for Harvard in 1928.
Activism was a trademark for Izzy Muchnick from almost the
very beginning. [H]e and his wife Ann were active in HIAS,
the Hebrew Immigrants in America Society, and Hadassah, the
women's Zionist organization, as well as numerous other
Jewish organizations in Boston.
Izzy Muchnick commanded a principled, homespun rhetoric and
possessed a natural political sense that would serve him well
throughout his life. He taught his children lessons laced
with humor, always containing morals of family and simple
decency.
Being Jewish in 1940s America carried a considerable weight
of prejudice, but Muchnick possessed a skill and integrity
that led him to be respected by both the Irish, who
controlled city government, and the entrenched Yankees, who
dominated Boston's cultural, legal, and financial world. He
did this without becoming an outcast from his own community,
and such a balance required real political skill.
Muchnick graduated from Harvard College in 1928 and from
Harvard Law in 1932. The Yankee law firms that wanted [to
hire] him also wanted something else in return for their
lucrative offers: A name change. ``Muchnick'' was too ethnic,
too Jewish. It wasn't a request that Muchnick was asked to
think over. That was a condition of employment. Muchnick
responded by opening up his own law firm.
If there existed in Isadore Muchnick the indignant streak
of a person straddling two entrenched worlds, it was in the
political realm where he felt he could best remedy
injustices. [A]fter being elected to the city council in
1941, Muchnick found himself in constant opposition to the
majority. He fought for equal pay for women in the city's
patronage jobs and supported a redistricting of the city's
schools that would have created some integration of public
schools long before the eruptions of the 1970s. He was a
classic East Coast liberal.
There was something about Muchnick, something both
admirable and self-destructive about his unfailing adherence
to his principles. Both of his children would marvel at the
number of times their father would align with the underdog.
In her personal papers, his wife Ann would note how much her
husband gave of himself, often at the expense of more
lucrative prospects. He consistently found himself on the
minority side of issues.
Perhaps even had he wanted to opt for safer ground, his
personal convictions wouldn't allow it. In this regard he
found kinship with the uncompromising Robinson.
The duplicity of baseball angered Izzy Muchnick. He was a
Red Sox fan, but the game's contradictions conflicted with
his worldview. If it was the game that was supposed to
represent the goodness of America, the ultimate arena of
fairness, how could it be staunchly segregated? How, he
wondered, could this impregnable line of segregation--which
baseball maintained did not exist--go unchallenged for so
long? Blacks were relegated to the inferior Negro leagues,
went the baseball rhetoric, because they liked it there.
Perhaps even more than the game's obvious contradictions,
it offended Muchnick that its government-endowed protection
against competition and uncontested national standing
produced in team owners a certain kind of arrogance. Their
dance around integration was especially off-putting to a man
of his credentials. No law prohibiting black players
existed in the league's charter, although no team had
fielded a black player since 1884.
For a man for whom standing on the right side of an issue
was an absolute must, history would not be kind to Isadore
Muchnick.
[H]is reputation, in fact, would be destroyed by one [myth]
that would be repeated so often that it became fact. Instead
of being known as the first politician to use his clout
courageously and confront a resistant power structure,
Muchnick emerged as something worse than forgotten, as the
opportunistic, oily politician who sought to exploit both
Robinson and the black struggle for civil rights.
Al Hirshberg, one of the first Jewish sportswriters in
Boston, wrote in his 1973 book What's the Matter with the Red
Sox? that Wendell Smith was the architect behind the tryout
and that Muchnick saw a solution to a precarious political
future:
``Wendell Smith, a television news announcer in Chicago
before his death, had been fighting the color line for years
as sports editor of a Negro newspaper in Pittsburgh. Because
of a quirk in Boston's Sunday baseball law, he saw a chance
to force one of the Boston clubs to give black players a
tryout in the spring of 1945.
``At the time, although Boston had had Sunday baseball for
some years, the law Smith found was that it had to be voted
on unanimously for renewal every year by the Boston City
Council. One of the council members, Isadore H.Y. Muchnick,
represented Roxbury, originally a Jewish stronghold but
becoming predominately black. Smith suggested to Muchnick
that he could insure a big black vote in his district by
withholding his vote for Sunday baseball until one of the two
ball clubs tried out a few black players.''
In Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His
Legacy, Jules Tygiel wrote that in Boston, ``The Red Sox and
Braves found themselves in a curious position as they
prepared to start the new season. The city council, under the
leadership of Isadore Muchnick, a white politician
representing a predominately black district, was
pressuring the two teams to employ blacks.''
Arnold Rampersad's thorough Jackie Robinson: A Biography
stated, ``behind the tryout was the action of a Boston city
councilman and Harvard College graduate Isadore H.Y.
Muchnick. In 1944, seeing his constituency change steadily
from mainly Jewish to mainly black, Muchnick joined the
ragtag band of critics fighting Jim Crow in baseball.''
These historical accounts were not only inaccurate but were
also a reflection of the crudity of the conventional
thinking. The only reason Muchnick would become involved, so
went the thinking, was to win a political prize. In the eyes
of his children, it was not an innocent journalistic mistake
that snowballed. Rather, the result, thought Fran Goldstein,
was the permanent besmirching of her father's name. Muchnick
was accused of acting to ingratiate himself to a new black
constituency, but in 1940, Izzy Muchnick's Mattapan district
was 99.69 percent white. In 1950, it was 99 percent white.
During that year, 439 nonwhites lived among the district's
51,170 residents. In two of his elections, Muchnick ran
unopposed. In short, there was no black vote for Muchnick to
exploit, nor was there during the 1940s any difficult
election year for him. It wasn't until the middle to late
1960s, after Muchnick was dead, that his old district turned
from Jewish to black, which occurred long after Muchnick
traded bitter letters with Eddie Collins. Hirshberg once
apologized to Muchnick's son David for the error.
Outside of his personal commitment to fairness, Izzy
Muchnick had no political motive to act on behalf of blacks.
There weren't yet many blacks to work for in the first place.
How Muchnick's name was not only omitted from the Robinson
tryout but was also subsequently brutalized in the retellings
of the event is open to troubling interpretations.
The truth, however, is that the first American politician
to disrupt the idea of segregated baseball and emerge with a
result was Isadore Muchnick, the former Hebrew School teacher
who could have made a fortune in a Yankee law firm had he
only changed his name.
Muchnick pressured the Red Sox to integrate because he was
the rare person who--like Robinson--often placed principle in
front of political or personal pragmatism.
Glenn Stout, who along with Dick Johnson would write the
most complete book ever on the history of the Red Sox
franchise, never believed that Muchnick approached the Red
Sox with the intention of receiving anything.
``It's much more the opposite. Looking at what he did I'm
sure was not very popular. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been
the only one hanging out there. You could say that what he
did was political suicide.''
What did emerge after the failed tryout of 1945 was a
legitimate friendship between Jackie Robinson and the
Muchnick family. When Robinson was signed by the Dodgers,
Muchnick wrote him a letter that read in part, ``My
congratulations and best wishes to you on your well-deserved
promotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers! Since the day when you
first came here with Wendell Smith of The Pittsburgh Courier
and I arranged for you and two other boys to get a tryout
with the Boston Red Sox, I have naturally followed your
career with great interest. I have every confidence you will
make the grade.''
The Muchnick house became a regular stop for Robinson when
the Dodgers came to town to play the Boston Braves. After
Robinson retired, he sent Muchnick a copy of his
autobiography with journalist Carl Rowan with the
inscription, ``To my friend Isadore Muchnick with sincere
appreciation for all you meant to my baseball career. I hope
you enjoy `Wait Til Next Year.' Much of it was inspired by
your attitudes and beliefs.''
Izzy and Jackie remained in frequent contact over the
years. Robinson and one of his sons came to Boston at
Muchnick's invitation to speak at a father-and-son breakfast
at Muchnick's synagogue. The two men engaged in heated debate
about the 1960 presidential election. Muchnick was a lifelong
Democrat, and Robinson, in a move he would later regret,
backed Nixon.
There was a clear spiritual connection between Robinson and
Muchnick. Robinson, battered and weary from the fight, died
too young of a heart attack in 1972. He was only fifty-three
years old. Isadore Muchnick died nine years earlier, in 1963,
but he was just as young, fifty-five at the time. His will to
live, David Muchnick believed, was enormous. Over his final
five years, Muchnick suffered seven heart attacks. On a rainy
night in 1957, Muchnick received a frantic call at 5 A.M.
from a former city councilor's wife. Her husband had gone
out drinking and had not come home that night. Muchnick
crawled out of bed and went out into the drizzly Boston
night to look for his old colleague. At 9 A.M., Ann
Muchnick received a phone call of her own. Izzy had
suffered a major heart attack and had been rushed to
Massachusetts General Hospital, which sits in Boston's old
West End near Izzy Muchnick's boyhood home.
It was Muchnick who used his influence to push the door
open, to force the Red Sox and baseball to publicly face
itself. Even if Joe Cronin and Eddie Collins weren't paying
attention, Branch Rickey most certainly was. Slowly, the
landscape began to change.
In 1998, Ann Muchnick died. She was eighty-nine. In prior
years, the daughter asked for family information and the
mother obliged with poignant recollections. She wrote that
her husband ``was a wonderful man . . . helped so many, so
many abused his help, took advantage of him. I could name
dozens, but better forgotten.'' They also spoke of Jackie
Robinson not as the man spurned by the Red Sox, but as their
friend.
``It was the Red Sox's loss,'' Ann Muchnick said of the
whole tryout affair. ``It wasn't his loss. Look at the career
he had. He lost nothing. It was the Red Sox who lost
everything.''
In Robinson's autobiography with Carl Rowan lay another
tribute to Muchnick. ``Without the pushers and the crusaders,
the waiters wait in vain; without people like Damon Runyon,
and Branch Rickey, Wendell Smith and Isadore Muchnick, Jackie
and the Negro might still be waiting for their hour in
organized baseball.''
In the end, the Robinson tryout failed because the Boston
Red Sox were reticent from the outset. Led by Eddie Collins,
the club had no real intention of acting beyond that April
morning or as history would show for more than a decade
thereafter. Within the organization, there was no guiding
force, no catalyst with the vision to make integration a
reality, and in years to come this would become the critical
characteristic of the Boston Red Sox regarding race. Had
there been a central figure in Boston, a Branch Rickey or
even a Gussie Busch, who provided some form of vision, the
Red Sox script would indeed have been different. It is more
than a little damning that the months before the tryout and
even after, it was Collins who represented the club and not
Tom Yawkey, who stood invisible. At a time when the Red Sox
stood at the precipice of baseball history, the team's owner
lay deep in the background. Tom Yawkey was the only figure in
the organization with the power to act boldly, and whether or
not he harbored a personal dislike for blacks is secondary to
his silence. That silence, in effect, would become a closing
indictment. No different than the curved maze of streets in
its city, the Red Sox lacked a clear-cut moral direction on
race; against this, the combined pioneering spirit of Isadore
Muchnick and Jackie Robinson never stood a chance.