New York Sports: Glamour and Grit in the Empire City

    New York City’s sports culture can tell you a lot about the people, and also how they changed over the years. In the first essay of this book Steven Reiss describes the dynamic (and conflict) of the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, in terms of the product and consumer. The Dodgers, Brooklyn’s “lost” team, usually had inferior players, and in the eyes of the press, inferior fans. There was a pervasive stereotype of the Dodgers fan as a loudmouth working-class Brooklynite, be it a Jew, Italian, Irishman, Pole, or any of the vast ethnic groups in the borough. The Yankees, however, were cartooned as pinstriped players and pinstripe-suited wealthy fans. The Dodgers  became symbolic of working-class manners, criminal behavior, and Bugs Bunny speech. The author theorizes that Brooklyn had low self-esteem; thanks to consolidation, they were no longer a city, just the poor little brother of Manhattan, which got the privilege of being called “the city.” But no matter how low-class it seemed, The Dodgers were Brooklyn’s team, and few in the borough wanted to trek all the way to Yankee Stadium.

New York had another baseball team, for which the next author, Harry D. Fetter, titles The Team That Time Forgot. He writes how the New York Giants, of the now-demolished Polo Grounds, recruited more Black players than other teams, yet were not as ethnically entrenched as the Dodgers. Yet according to Steven Reiss, the Giants and Yankees had several things in common, the most obvious was the wealthy fans. The Giants scheduled their games after the last bell of the stock exchange, so they could get the wealthy Wall Street brokers who would drive up via the highway, and both had parking. Fans included the local Democrat politicians, and thanks to the recruitment of Jewish players, they had a sizeable Jewish following as well. Both teams had New Jersey fans, but the Yankees had more; they used the Newark Bears as their farm team to recruit players.

The authors aren’t especially nostalgic for the teams that the city lost. The Yankees and Giants had fancy lounges, but not Ebbets field, which unlike Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds did not have parking. Baby-Boom era fans went to Yankee Stadium to see Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and all the other Italian-American players whom they considered their own. But the Dodgers didn’t fare well after WWII. First there was Leo Durocher’s divorce, which the Catholic clergy didn’t like, and then there was the pervasive stereotype working class Jew/Italian/Irish which people wanted to be rid of. The fans were all moving out to Long Island, they couldn’t get to Ebbets field by any way but the car, and there was almost no parking. Brooklyn’s politicians couldn’t give the Dodgers any perks, and Los Angeles had more land. The move to LA would hurt Brooklyn sorely, both in terms of economics and self-esteem.

Football in New York City ended when the New York Giants moved to New Jersey. It wasn’t much of an attraction before WWII, but in Stephen Norwood’s essay, it had a huge post-war following because of the violence! The combat veterans of WWII and Korea saw the rough, all-weather game as a show of toughness, and the Giants had a sizeable number of ex-marines. They liked the boot camp atmosphere of the training camp, and for suit-wearing salaryman, the all-weather game was their way to show how manly they were. Basketball, on the other hand, appealed to inner-city youth who grew up with YMCA sports. Basketball was a great sport when you had no budget, or if you lacked big fields for baseball and football. The early football stars were from the Midwest, where schools all had huge fields. The New York youth, especially a poor one from Harlem, would be relegated to an empty lot and a peach basket. However, it wasn’t until giants (physical and metaphorical) like Lew Alcindor came along that pro basketball would have a huge following.

New York has always been a sports-loving city, with two major league baseball teams (we once had three) plus the NYC Marathon and whatever sports events we can get into Madison Square Garden. Sports teams are always a source of pride for a city, but they can also put the mayor on a bind over funding and tax breaks. Some towns may have had an incident, where in the middle of the game, they all hear on the loudspeaker “Mayor Greasypalm, report to the owner’s skybox, mandatory, I repeat, mandatory.” The mayor goes up to see the owner, and the tycoon grabs the mayor by his shirt, blows smoke in the mayor’s face, and what does he roar? Something in the way of “You will build me a brand-new ballpark, or I will move the team!” Will the mayor think about it? Will he bend down and kiss the team owner’s feet? Will he say “fine, don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” like Rudy Giuliani did with George Steinbrenner? Sports can be an anchor for a city, or a money pit, white elephant, den of vice, but whatever they are for New York, these pages will show.

City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York

    Mason Williams gets right down to business, and portrays Franklin Roosevelt as a lazy, callow WASP, with zero understanding of life. According to the author, Roosevelt’s upper-class airs, lack of knowledge or work experience, combined with his showiness, annoyed everyone in the New York State Senate. Aside from a six-year tenure in a law firm – where he was mainly a clerk – he really hadn’t accomplished all that much with his life. Then Williams makes an unusual suggestion; when Roosevelt contracted Polio, and lost the use of his legs, the urgency to hide his disability taught him to hoodwink. He would go from a pampered playboy to master manipulator.

Roosevelt’s partner in crime (at least in this book) was Fiorello LaGuardia, a man with a short stature, towering Napoleon complex, and from a boyhood in Arizona, a strong awareness of rampant corruption. His father died from contaminated army food, yet he still had the opportunity to live in Europe, learn lots of languages, and put them to good use on his return; Ellis Island interpreter, lawyer for immigrant cases, labor unions, and respected by both Jewish and Italian working-class people.

In the earlier non-fiction book Machine Made, were shown how Tammany Hall dominated New York politics by appealing to the Irish Catholic workers, a situation that was changing when LaGuardia came along. In Machine Made, it was a combination of radio – which could reach a greater audience – and the influx of non-Irish that weakened the Tammany Hall power broker. Where once you had the Tammany Hall politician walking around handing out coins, you now had the ability to speak on radio, and people could hear you from miles away. You no longer had to go through the local politicians. The other advantage, which LaGuardia undoubtedly learned as an interpreter, was that people appreciate hearing their own language. If you could speak Italian, you were likely to get Italian voters on your side. Furthermore, the Irish were no longer the majority, and there were others who were hungry for change. A similar move would occur in Chicago, with Anton Cermak, a Slavic immigrant and Roosevelt supporter, appealing to non-Irish voters.

Williams gives some credit to Robert Moses and the Parks Department, but a lot of the credit really goes to the inspiration of confidence. One example is Bryant Park, which was transformed from a bus-parts dump to a seeded lawn. It showed New Yorkers that ugly industrial spaces could be made to look beautiful in only a year. The Works Progress Administration, another confidence-builder, is something we have not seen in years. It had full transparency in budgeting, and the Federal money was allocated through local governments. For this to have work, it would require an authority that would be free of corruption. Even after the Federal Theater program ended, LaGuardia and Roosevelt persuaded the actors, dancers, and singers to stage a free version of Carmen. It was spartan, but good quality, and LaGuardia persuaded David Dubinsky, of the garment workers union, to get the workers to attend. Though not mentioned in the book, a lot of the corruption-free aspect of the Federal Theater program had to do with the backgrounds of the people involved; the actors and artists tended to be from a different mindset than politicians, plus didn’t expect to get payoffs. Since they were more interested in artistic integrity than living large, they did not have the motivation to steal.

Mason Williams picks up where Supreme City left off, writing about how New York City could set a standard not only in buildings, but also in governance. The great public works that made the city shine were still there and running, but the so-called Roaring Twenties were over, and Mayor Jimmy Walker had left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. The people wanted change, and Roosevelt and LaGuardia were the kind of leaders they wanted. Despite the Great Depression, things weren’t really depressing; crime didn’t skyrocket, and there were no riots in the streets (except in Harlem). It was nowhere near as bad as it was in the 1970’s, where “Ford to City, Drop Dead!” would become the catchphrase. The politicians of the LaGuardia era knew where to draw on social welfare and they respected local sovereignty. It was an era where the local and Federal governments worked together without become interdependent, and gain the cooperation of both the voters, businesses, and the unions.

May We Forever Stand by Imani Perry

    If you look at the anthem (or unofficial anthem) of minorities (or formerly disenfranchised minorities) you’ll find that they’re not that complicated. Hatikvah (the Israeli anthem) is kind of short compared to others (at least compared to the Star-Spangled Banner) and The Star-Spangled Banner is simple, with a melody lifted from a common bar song. In the days before 1776, the Continental Army didn’t even have an anthem; their marching songs were all Irish. Even Britain’s God Save the Queen is short, and the Brits were not a disenfranchised minority.

    Imani Perry, of Princeton University, begins with Booker T. Washington, James Weldon Johnson, and other Black leaders looking to create greater influence. Johnson wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing for Lincoln’s birthday, which was two days before that of Frederick Douglass. The song is famously optimistic, and the author suggests that JW Johnson, and his brother Rosamond (who composed the melody) had a lot to be optimistic about, given that they both fled (racist) Jacksonville, Florida. Still, the positive outlook of the song contrasts to the troubles of the time.

    The fourth chapter of this book (The Bell Tolls for Thee) recounts the widespread airplay of the song in WWII, thanks to the increase in the African American presence on American radio. The author describes the extreme patriotism in the contribution to the war effort, though some historians would suspect that it had to do more with the desire to avoid racial unrest. The song would now be heard not just in schools or churches, but at union rallies too, thanks to A. Phillip Randolph.

   The final chapter, however, is a bit bleak. Though the song Lift Every Voice and Sing was played at the inauguration of African American mayors, it couldn’t mask the realities; the goals of these mayors were not possible, not with high unemployment, rampant crime and drug use, and loss of property tax. The Reagan-era move to the right didn’t help things either. Dallas politician Sam Attlesley called the African American voters an “army with no general,” and the author questions whether the media ever really cared about the Civil Rights struggle. She also suggests that the wealthier African Americans had become a petty bourgeois who looked down on their less-successful brethren.

    Let me conclude by questioning the use of ANY anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner is a song about 1812, and that’s it. The song is not about the people who toiled to make the colonies successful, nor about the constitution, or any of the Supreme Court cases. Then you have the Israeli anthem, Hatikva, with a melody lifted from an Italian opera. Britain’s God Save the Queen is all about the Queen, and not the people. If you look at all the anthems, you’ll find that none of them truly represent the people or their accomplishments.

New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition

    Michael O. West refers back to Booker T. Washington, a man who some might consider anti-intellectual, and his speeches that disapproved of academics. Washington made his opinions clear, in that there was no use in a man studying French if his home and farm were neglected. After Washington’s death I 1915, W.E.B. DuBois would become the new voice for Black American education, and the push for industrial training would be replaced by Pan-Africanism. The introduction makes clear that that there were those who favored industrial education, those who favored regular academics, and those who favored Afrocentrics, and they would all come to blows.

    Celeste Day-Moore, of Hamilton College, provides the first essay in the book, and explores the early Black intellectuals as Francophiles. Maybe they saw French as an entry ticket into a world of beautiful things? Did DuBois, who’d been to Europe, see the French bohemian life as a way of living cheap with plenty of time for study? Black intellectuals, on arriving in Paris, used to find themselves free of all the racism they’d known at home. They brought their love of all things French back to the USA, and Black colleges were now a hotbed of Francophilia.

    Day-Moore titles her essay “Every Wide-Awake Negro Teacher of French Should Know” and recounts how the Black colleges all taught French. It would be a way of making a window into the outside world, away from all the racist confines of American life. She suggests that the Black US troops in WWI experienced the color-blindness in France, and that is a perfectly intelligent suggestion. However, she doesn’t mention, and nor did the Black troops see, the amount of hostility towards the Senegalese troops who were fighting in France. My only real problem with her essay is that she name-drops a huge number of Black luminaries whom I’ve never heard of. The footnotes take up as many pages as the essay itself! Perhaps she should create a course based entirely on this essay?

    Next comes Reena Goldthree, with her essay on Bernardo Ruiz Suarez and his 1920’s studies of the Latino versus American Black man. Her study, like that of Suarez, explore the contact between the Black American and the Spanish-African, and whether there would be any progress through unity. Ruiz Suarez had faced racism in his native Cuba, as one of only three men of African ancestry to graduate from law school in Havana. He would also have been aware of an earlier movement in Cuba called The Independents of Color (unfortunately unknown to most US students) who were massacred by US-backed forces. One of the questions of the author, and that of Ruiz Suarez in the 1920’s, was whether the Black man would lose his identity through encounters with Whites, and whether the Spanish-Black man would lose HIS identity through absorption with the English-speakers. Though not quoted by Goldthree, the memoir Down These Mean Streets explores this topic as well; the author, a dark-skinned Latino, is both drawn in the Black underworld, and at the same time pushed into it, by both racist whites and his own family’s shame of having African ancestry.

    This book contains essays on the Black American response to hate, the refuge in the Black churches, and (as studied by DuBois) how those Black churches may have held progress back. A strong theme in this book is how the Black intellectuals, desperate to escape racism, were on the lookout for new ways of expansion. Prior to the 1970’s (most of these essays focus on the pre-radical era) there was greater emphasis on exploring fields normally occupied by Whites. Ruiz-Suarez wanted to learn what made 1920’s America great, and tried to break from the confines of anti-Black racism in Cuba. Then there was DuBois, the Ivy-League educated academic, and the various Pan-Africanists in the USA. I’ll give this book credit for unbiased reporting, but also for unearthing a trove of writing that I would otherwise never have known.