"Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: An Essay About Major Media and Boyhood During the Black Sox Scandal
... York gambler known as “The Big Bankroll,” had agreed to finance the fix for $80,000 dollars. As he placed bets on the Reds to win, rumors of a fix circulated among other gamblers. The odds shifted from 8-5 favoring the White Sox to even money, as the “smart money” was going on the Reds (Ginsburg, p. 117). The New York Times covered the betting, but the media seemed to think the change in odds was because of Chicago’s ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte’s possible arm injury. Many baseball insiders, including many in the sports media, were in denial that a World Series could possibly be fixed. Christy Matthewson, a former player who analyzed the series for the New York Times, declared baseball was not crooked and the World Series could not have been fixed in the October 16, 1919 issue (Christy Matthewson, p. 14). Hugh Fullerton published his suspicions in the New York Evening World. His December 15, 1919 column did not explicitly state that the series was fixed, but denounced corruption in baseball. The New York paper only agreed to publish Fullerton’s work if he “toned down” his accusations. Chicago papers refused to publish Fullerton because they worried that baseball would take legal action if they did (Ginsburg, p. 131). On September 2, 1920 the Chicago Herald and Examiner reported that the August 31 Philadelphia Phillies-Chicago Cubs game had been fixed (Solomon, p. 238). Cubs’ President William Veeck, Sr. received six telegrams and two phone calls before the game indicating gamblers tampered with the game. Veeck ordered Cubs’ manager Mitchell to bench the scheduled pitcher, Claude Hendrix because of the suspicions (Ginsburg, p. 3 133). A member of the chapter, Jim Crusenberry, published a letter on the front page of the Chicago Tribune sports section calling for an investigation of the August 31 Phillies-Cubs game and the 1919 World Series. The letter resulted in public outrage and Wharton 3 demanded attention (Ginsburg, pp. 133-134). Five days after the Herald and Examiner report of the fix, a grand jury of Cook County, Illinois convened to investigate the game. During the initial investigation the grand jury expanded the investigation to include the 1919 World Series (Solomon, p. 238). Suspicion also fell on Cubs first baseman Fred Merkle, infielder Buck Herzog, and pitcher Paul Carter, involving the Cubs-Phillies fix. There was no conclusive proof uncovered against Hendrix and no evidence at all against Carter, Herzog or Merkle (Ginsburg, p. 134). The Chicago Herald and Examiner reported the reaction of a young fan to “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s confession on the front page, September 29, 1920: As Jackson stepped out of the building, one little urchin in the crowd grabbed him by his coat sleeve. “It ain’t true is it, Joe?” he said. “Yes, kid. I’m afraid it is,” Jackson replied. “Well, I’d never have thought it,” the boy exclaimed (“Eight White Sox Indicted,” p. 1). When we consider the ways in which the Big Fix memories continued during its time, it’s important not to ignore individual or personal memories of the event. After all, as Maurice Halbwachs notes, “it is individuals as group members who remember” (Halbwachs, p.48). And although private memories are necessarily all your own, choosy, and changeable, they are not unimportant or devoid of meaning. Of course, they are also very difficult to document. Unless the are transcribed or frequently expressed, they are usually lost to history. One may suspect that one way the Black Sox scandal was maintained in American memories was a kind of masculine narrative that was passed from one generation of baseball fans to the next. From one perspective, it was a story about men behaving badly, corruption, and its consequences. As the film critic Richard Schickel puts it: “There was a time when the Black Sox Scandal was central to the moral education of young American males. The fact that it involved baseball players--members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox--who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series struck at the very center of boyhood. The fact that the consequence of the act was so dire--permanent banishment Wharton 4 from baseball--in comparison with paltry rewards (a few thousand dollars to each man) imparted ironic force to the story.” “Haunting in its humanity and unambiguous in its morality,” Schickel continues, “this story was turned by fathers into a parable that helped set several generations of sons on the path of righteousness” (Shickel, p. 63). There is some evidence to support this idea. For example, Alf Walle’s “‘I’m Afraid it Is, Kid’: The Social Dynamics of a Baseball Story” (1979) suggests that the Black Sox scandal narrative was indeed a common (and gendered) folk tale (Walle, pp. 197-202). Unfortunately, no none recalled being told about the episode as a masculine cautionary tale or as an explicitly gendered narrative. Bill Gleason said, “I was born two years after the scandal broke, but my father and all his friends were White Sox fans and they talked about it quite freely” (Gleason). Bill Jauss, a Chicago Tribune reporter came the closest to telling the story which most have expected: I lived on the North Side, so my Dad introduced me to baseball by taking me to Wrigley Field when I was seven or eight years old. But my uncle Harry, even though he lived down the street from us, was an unreconstituted South Sider. He took me to my first White Sox games, and he took me to my first Negro Leagues games, when the leagues were segregated . . . Uncle Harry is the guy who first told me about the Black Sox scandal. Now you got to understand, you know how kids are that age. “Why did they fake the World Series, Uncle Harry?” And Uncle Harry says, “Because old man Comiskey was so cheap.” This was around World War II, [when] I was eleven or twelve years old. And this is my uncle telling me that old man Comiskey was cheap. Later on I learned and I read that a...