Free The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Roger Kahn

Cardinals and the Browns. He talked of moving the Cardinals to Los Angeles.
    The Cardinals of 1947, defending world champions, were a gifted group, but not a happy one. Almost everyone on the team felt underpaid. Cliques were developing. Some players were drinking heavily. The world champion Cardinals lost nine of eleven games in April and played no better than . 500 ball in May.
    Except for Musial and the bibulous third baseman, George “Whitey” Kurowski, the team had a Confederate cast. Shortstop Marty Marion, captain and center fielder Terry Moore, and right fielder Enos Slaughter were all southerners. The manager, Eddie Dyer, was a native of Louisiana. The promising young catcher, Joe Garagiola, raised on “Dago Hill” in St. Louis, was not as enlightened as he would become.
    These were the ‘47 Cardinals: losing, underpaid. They did not seem able to do much about either. What they
could
do was conspire. Several did.
    “I heard talk,” Stan Musial says. “It was rough and racial and I can tell you a few things about that.” Musial is seventy as we speak at breakfast in St. Louis. He has been grand marshal of a parade in Tennessee the day before and is traveling to Washington tomorrow, but he has rearranged his schedule to make time to talk about something significant that makes him uncomfortable.
    “First of all, everybody has racial feelings. We don’t admit it. We aren’t proud of it. But it’s there. And this is big league baseball, not an English tea, and ballplayers make noise. So I heard the words and I knew there was some feelings behind the words, but I didn’t take it seriously. That was baseball.
    “I had no trouble myself with integration. I’d played with a black kid in high school,* for one thing. Second, I knew that integration was overdue.
    “I make jokes now and then about being Polish. Actually my father, Lukas, was born in Poland but my mother, Mary Lancos, was Czech. They both came to America for the same reason. They wanted economic opportunity. Dad worked in a steel mill and he sweated but he made a decent living. I knew these things. My parents came to America for economic opportunity. That was the first thing Jackie Robinson was asking for, it seemed to me. An economic opportunity. That’s something of what America is about.
    “For me at that time — I was twenty-six — saying all that would have been a speech and I didn’t know how to make speeches. Saying it to older players, that was beyond me. Besides, I thought the racial talk was just hot air.”
    The leaders of the anti-Robinson movement on the Cardinals did not take Musial — who was in pain much of the time from appendicitis — into their confidence. They did talk to several Dodgers, including Dixie Walker. Some later claimed that Walker developed the idea of a general strike throughout the league. At first the Cardinals thought of striking on May 6, when the team was scheduled to play at Ebbets Field.
    But Brooklyn was, after all, Robinson’s home turf. It made more sense, the conspirators decided, to wait until May 20 when the Dodgers played their opening game at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. Walker said he might go on strike himself then and enlist some other Dodgers to join. It began to look as though on the sixth of May seven Cardinals and several key Dodgers would refuse to take the field with Jackie Robinson.
    Nor did the scheme stop there. Some Phillies might join the strike. Ben Chapman did not stand alone. The best pitcher in baseball, Ewell “the Whip” Blackwell of Cincinnati, didn’t care for integration. He could be recruited. As the Cardinals traveled about the circuit, the redneck ballplayers began loosely to organize a league-wide strike.
    The Cardinals’ team physician, a doctor named Robert Hyland, liked to hear himself described as the surgeon general of baseball. Like most team physicians, Hyland was a ball fan and he enjoyed the camaraderie of major league athletes. Someone, no one