The Summer of Beer and Whiskey by Edward Achorn

Author:Edward Achorn [Achorn, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781610392617
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Cap Anson

(Library of Congress)

Blacks, in particular, stirred Anson’s feelings of supremacy. In his 1900 ghostwritten autobiography, the retired baseball legend wrote unblushingly of Clarence Duval, batboy and mascot of the White Stockings, as a “little coon” and a “no account nigger.” Such virulently racist comments appeared frequently in baseball books and articles of the time—as acceptable, if not entirely respectable, public language. Sportswriter Henry Clay Palmer wrote at length about “the little darkey” Duval in such books as his 1892 volume Sights Around the World With the Base Ball Boys. With sadistic relish, Palmer described in detail the various humiliations the players inflicted on the friendless boy, from pelting him with food to dressing him up like an organ grinder’s monkey, then taking him out in public on a leash.

St. Louis Browns manager Ted Sullivan shared Anson’s fondness for reducing blacks to crude comic stereotypes—much like the producers of the minstrel shows that had made Lew Simmons a star. In Sullivan’s memoirs, a collection of the stories he loved to tell to get laughs, Ted wrote of local men who attended an autumn exhibition game in 1883 in Pensacola, Florida. “In center field the cedar trees were packed with coons, so thick were they on the trees that they resembled a flock of blackbirds or crows.” Serving up some of the dialect humor that was immensely popular in the nineteenth century, Sullivan quoted one “big coon” who was initially unimpressed when One Arm Daily stepped up to pitch against the home club: “Why dem St. Louis babies thinks so little of our white club, dat they are putting in one-armed men on dem.” When the crowd saw Daily neatly pick up a ball as if he had two arms, another man supposedly turned and cried, “Which of you niggers said dat dat one-armed man couldn’t play?” Later in the game, Daily drove a line drive into the trees that struck one of the spectators painfully in the back, to the amusement of his fellow African Americans. “O Lordy, if dat man had two hands I would have been killed,” the victim cried, according to Sullivan.

As of that 1883 exhibition, a mere twenty years had passed since President Abraham Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation, theoretically freeing all slaves in states still at war with the Union, as a matter of military necessity. Yet even Lincoln longed to be rid of African Americans altogether, having concluded that whites and blacks could never get along. “You and we are different races,” Lincoln told black leaders during a White House meeting in August 1862. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.” Most blacks refused, justly insisting they were Americans as much as anyone. As the war went on, some 200,000 African Americans, with Lincoln’s strong encouragement, joined the fight to save the Union and win the freedom of their race. Their strength turned the tide of the war and added enormous impetus to the movement for equal rights.

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