The Sporting News During World War II

“No nation that has had as intimate contact with baseball as the Japanese,” The Sporting News wrote in an editorial shortly after Pearl Harbor, “could have committed the vicious, infamous deed of … December 7, 1941, if the spirit of the game had ever penetrated their yellow hides.”1 Today, 60 years removed, the writing is racist and the message ridiculous, promoting a notion that a collective national understanding of a game, even baseball, could instill a value code that would morally preclude a nation from a military sneak attack. It’s ludicrous and jingoist. And it’s consistent with the wartime tone and agenda of America’s baseball newspaper.

Sandwiched around Pearl Harbor, 1941 and 1942 form the period when America first confronted the second World War, a time of preparation and patriotism, unbridled enthusiasm and uncertainty. They were also the final years when The Sporting News covered only one sport, a time when the so-called “Bible of Baseball” presented the nation’s pastime as both essentially American and essential to America’s war efforts.2 This article will examine the different ways in which The Sporting News (hereafter TSN) conveyed that message in the year before and after America’s entrance into the fighting, embracing a tone and style aimed at selling the game of baseball as patriotic and vital—a time when the pages of TSN were laden with an air of importance, for the idea that baseball might be fatuous would mean a threat to the survival of the game and the very newspaper itself during wartime.

Sportswriter Alfred Henry Spink founded TSN in St. Louis in 1886, covering everything from American baseball to British wrestling. By the turn of the century, though, TSN had turned itself exclusively to baseball, establishing a position not merely as documenter of and commentator on the game, but also as essential player in the inner workings of the national pastime; by the 1920s it had become sufficiently ingrained as part of the establishment to earn the sobriquet “Bible of Baseball.”3 As promoter of the sport, it offered news, features, and commentary on baseball in a self-conscious fashion; the front-page flag billed it as “The Base Ball Paper of the World,” while a box in the upper corner sandwiched BASEBALL between “From All Points of Compass” and “News • Gossip • Comment.” In the pre-television dawn of U.S. involvement in the war, TSN was unquestionably the leading source for all things baseball. And as such, it relied entirely on baseball for its own existence.

As the war approached, professional baseball faced an apparent crossroads; after years of struggling to recover from the throes of the Depression and achieve stability, 1941 finally saw a return to the kind of prosperous season that major league baseball had known during the Roaring Twenties. Now, though, baseball’s immediate future was in question: How would the sport handle the inevitable loss of many of its top players? Would interest in baseball wane during the war? Would it be able to continue during wartime as a nonessential industry? TSN wasted little time in embracing the war effort, seizing an opportunity to transmit a message of baseball as an integral part of American culture and a key to patriotism; at the same time, it promoted the sport as something not merely tangential to the war effort but crucial to an American and Allied victory.

Examining issues of TSN one full year before Pearl Harbor reveals some foreshadowing of what would lie ahead. An unsigned editorial on December 19, 1940, stated that:

Baseball, like the remainder of the nation, faces many grave and troublesome problems. It casts an anxious eye toward Europe’s battlefields, it realizes the delicate situation in Asia and it hears rumors and threats that on some front the United States will be drawn into an international war. Already it is preparing to send many of its finely trained young men to the colors for a year’s training in the nation’s armed forces, wants to do its duty, willing and to the full. It joins with the country as the selection of its motto, “Be Prepared.”4

Although the grammar in the third sentence is awkward, the message is clear: Baseball is aligned with the rest of the nation in its fears and concerns; baseball must gird itself to lose many of its stars to the looming war; and baseball is ready to do its patriotic duty to the fullest.

This kind of pro-baseball propaganda was hardly confined to TSN’s op-ed page. Simply by reporting the deeds of baseball players and personnel, TSN was able to let the game do the talking, with the news stories selling the game as patriotic without need for editorializing. In January 1942, after America had entered the war, Tigers manager Delmar Baker faced the prospect of preparing for the season without knowing which members of his team would be showing up for spring training and which players would be drafted; rather than complain, though, he accepted the facts in an upbeat manner. “The country comes first,” he said. “We’ll have to do the best we can with the boys who are left after the government’s needs are taken care of-and no squawkin’.”5

Likewise, those players eligible for the draft but deferred or rejected—particularly before direct U.S. involvement, when 4-F medical rejections were far more common—were quick to assert that the army was where they wanted to be. Giants outfielder Morrie Arnovich, removing his bridge work as evidence, maintained that he had actually tried to volunteer but was rejected for his lousy teeth. “He never at any time asked for a deferment and, on the contrary, he tried to enlist. As a Giant, he doesn’t like being called a dodger, particularly a draft dodger.”6

Finally, TSN depicted baseball players as patriots through their onfield actions as well. Legendary foul ball hitter Luke Appling, a TSN writer predicted, would make “life brighter for the [soldiers], sailors and marines” thanks to the American League’s policy of collecting foul balls and sending them to the camps: “Now that there will be a worthy cause to support, you can depend on ‘Butterfoot’ to go ‘all out’ and chip off probably a boxful every time he comes up.”7 Worthy? Collecting foul balls amounted to a highly visible but minimally efficient act on the part of the American League; simply shipping boxes of balls to the camp without the production of collecting foul balls would have been simpler and easier but far less dramatic. Still, TSN found plenty of opportunities to mention the donations.

More often than not, though, TSN did not simply report and present the news so much as massage and mold it in baseball’s image. In some cases, this meant editorials that were prescriptive in nature. On March 6, 1941, TSN wrote, “The draft, like rain, falls on the just and unjust, on those prepared for it and those unprepared, and baseball, as one that stands or falls on the attitude of public opinion, cannot and must not ask for special favors.”8

The following year, during the war, it advised players not to expect the usual sympathy from fans when butting heads with stingy owners: “The fans of this country are definitely in no mood for holdout squabbles. The fans are in no frame of mind for reading about extended scraps relating to sums which these fans could not earn in five years—some of them in a decade. LET’S HAVE NO MORE OF THIS NONSENSE!”9 At times these advisories dipped into the realm of the sentimental or maudlin. In one of the few signed editorials by publisher J.G.T. Spink, fans were asked not to be too harsh in their outbursts should a player make a gaffe, as his mind may be on other, more pressing matters.

Rather, fans should be appreciative of baseball’s war efforts and “be glad to accept the run of [the] 1942 baseball season as the product of the gods.” Thus, “look well at these heroes, for they go. They go to make a fairer, a brighter, a safer world. … They go, hoping to return. But if, on some distant shore, they meet their Maker—and so many doubtless will—Baseball will do no less than canonize the spirit with which these combatants went from fields of peace to the charnel house.”10

Spink’s editorial appeal is mawkish and overdone. But while it may not have weathered the decades well, it must be considered that such lines, when they rolled hot off the presses, undoubtedly set the hairs standing on the back of more than a few readers’ necks. Whether Spink believed this in his soul and bled it out through his typewriter, or simply thought it made good copy, the intention is clear—to elevate baseball onto a sacred, God-given pedestal, a sport played by men devoted to their country.

This prescriptive piece from Spink broaches the realm of another slate of TSN editorials, those crafted to equate baseball with patriotism and make it seem integrally associated with everything that is good and just about America and being American. Likewise, TSN promoted a sense that baseball was duty bound to do whatever was asked of it and more to aid the war effort. In an editorial written immediately after Pearl Harbor, TSN exclaimed: “The message—to which all in the game, from the majors to the smallest minors, will give their whole-hearted endorsement—will be: ‘Uncle Sam, we are at your command!”’11

In an editorial on April 9, 1942, TSN touched upon a theme it would revisit frequently—that baseball could provide both entertainment for the American people at home and a healthy, clean diversion for soldiers overseas, particularly as an alternative to the vices which might distract young men away from home for the first time. As TSN was wont to do all so frequently during this period, the editorial utilized capital letters for emphasis: “BASEBALL CAN PLAY A USEFUL ROLE IN THIS WAR. THIS IS NOT MERELY A TRITE WINDUP TO AN EDITORIAL IN A PUBLICATION DEVOTED TO BASEBALL. IT IS A SINCERE CONCLUSION BASED ON INCONTROVERTIBLE FACT.”12

Clearly, TSN was serious about promoting the perception that baseball had a duty in the war, yet this editorial offered little by way of fact or evidence. The capital letters make the piece seem particularly self-conscious, as if TSN knew what it needed to do, and knew that there were those who might criticize baseball, but could nonetheless not come up with concrete reasons; instead, they simply dressed up and reinforced the same message of baseball as vital.

In a similar vein, while TSN had long been known as the “Bible of Baseball” for its reporting on the hallowed pastime, during the war it actually went so far as to paint baseball with the brush of religion. But TSN began conjuring up an image of baseball as sacred and virtuous and even blessedly thankful without calling attention to the change; take, for example, this editorial from 1942’s Thanksgiving issue, in which “Baseball” thanks: 

A benevolent Providence which placed the game’s natal setting … in this, our grand America. Just think of the situation if somebody in Germany had evolved this sport and today its virtues were confined largely to the terrain over which Adolf and his Gestapo terrorize. Baseball thanks a heavenly Protector for having given it to America, and to the sort of people who are in this, our country …. Baseball thanks the fans, the players, the club owners, the baseball writers …. Baseball thanks an all-pervading Providence for its clean face, its clean body, its splendor and its outlook, its abiding faith in God …. And as Baseball thanks the Lord and thanks America, this great country of ours thanks our Heavenly Father for the glories of its achievements, the justice of our cause, the might of the right—and Baseball.13

Here, Spink & Co. have elevated the game of baseball into Baseball, a proper noun, and one which has the ability to issue its own thanks to a higher authority. Furthermore, the piece acknowledges the importance of everyone involved, from fan up through sportswriter and all the way to owner, not wanting to alienate any readers—each one a current or prospective subscriber.

In some senses, the message is a bit ambiguous. Is TSN thankful for the fact that baseball had not been squandered on Germany, never to reach beyond a Third Reich divide to the United States, or is TSN suggesting that had the game been played in Germany, a set of cultural values and mores might have developed that would have prevented Hitler’s rise? Of course, prompting the reader to scour for subtext was never the point. This was all about wrapping baseball in a distinctly American banner, advancing the notion that a game, in other hands, might have meant national virtues that would have steered the world in a more peaceful direction.

In addition to presenting baseball as a positive diversion for the troops overseas or a morale booster for the home front, TSN also made apparent efforts to trumpet the game as a force more closely linked even to the actual fighting effort. In an April 2, 1942, editorial entitled “The Game and That Old Navy Spirit,” TSN quoted Jack Troy, sports editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who said, after watching a game at the Jacksonville, FL, Naval Air Station: ‘AND I KNOW NOW FOR CERTAIN THAT THOSE WHO CRITICIZE BASEBALL JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT.” The editorial clearly highlighted how the game provided entertainment for the soldiers and also built their spirit.

But this was more than a mere matter of morale, as Troy wrote, “They’ll carry this same spirit into battle—and the Japs will remember Pearl Harbor.”14 In yet another editorial, this one coming almost a year after Pearl Harbor, TSN endorsed baseball for the well-suited physical training it provided, citing an Italian “broadcast explaining the debacle in North Africa,” which declared the “Americans threw too many baseballs.” This was “grudging tribute from an enemy,” explaining how “skill developed on the diamond has been transformed into hitting and pitching power, as well as teamwork, that will help our soldiers, sailors and marines contribute to victory for the United States.”15 Could the Americans’ baseball training have meant the difference in battle? Impossible to prove, but unlikely. Still, the mere fact is that this Italian quote snippet surfaced, and TSN embraced it as a means of heralding baseball as integral to preparing American soldiers for war.

In line with this notion, one also discovers a wealth of headlines, stories, and feature photos that on one hand described baseball in military terms and on the other wrote about the military effort (and players turned soldiers) in terms once employed only for baseball. In the case of the former, this was done both by analogy and by direct description. For example, the lead to a spring training story in the pre-war year of ’41 likened baseball’s biggest-ever spring training program to “Uncle Sam[‘s being] engaged in the biggest preparedness campaign in the history of the nation.”16

Meanwhile, TSN frequently employed headlines like “New Pelican Leader Has Army of Backers,” or “Conscripted for Service • In Game’s Big Tent,” to preface such innocuous and non-war-related stories as the hiring of a popular new manager or a bevy of minor league call-ups.17 On the flip side, by 1942 one item had seemingly become a weekly fixture—a feature photo of an ex-player in military uniform accompanied by a caption employing baseball terminology to describe war. For example, under the headline “Hitting High in Tough Loop,” TSN ran a photo of former Senator Buddy Lewis leaning against a fighter jet; he wrote to his teammates to tell them he was “aiming at a new slugging record against the Japs.” TSN added, “Lewis doesn’t see how the little brown men can be any harder to hit than some of the American League’s southpaw chunkers,” and that Lewis will be taking to the sky in flight school as his teammates try to “take off from the sixth rung” of the American League ladder.18

The single most classic example of mixing baseball and military metaphors, so to speak, occurred in the January 22, 1942, issue, in which President Roosevelt’s now famous “Green Light” letter urging organized baseball to continue during the war was reprinted front and center. The banner headline, “Stay In There and Pitch—F.D.R.,” ran across the top of the page, while “Player of the Year” and “‘Green Light’ from No. 1 Umpire Rallies Game Throughout Nation” prefaced accompanying stories, celebrating Roosevelt while beating the analogy into overuse.19

Meanwhile, the quintessential example of this type of writing being employed not just for a headline but for a standard news result can be found in the write-up of the fund-raising all-star extravaganza held between the American League All-Stars and a team of service all-stars in 1942, which the AL team won 5-0. Frederick Lieb’s final sentence reads: ”As for the servicemen—they lost, but their training had been for a bigger game! Their victory will come later.” This story actually embodies severa1 of TSN’s tactics; Lieb wrote, “The game, and its attending spectacle, proved conclusively the value of baseball as a wartime activity,” and also its patriotic significance: ”As though it were a contagion, one could feel the patriotic fervor of the entire 65,000 … it made one murmur to one’s self: ‘I’m proud to be an American!”’20

One of the most interesting aspects revealed in studying TSN over this period is the way in which the publication, prior to U.S. entry into the war, tried to present baseball as something uniquely American that served to differentiate the U.S. from war-tom nations. In April 1941, before the U.S. entered the war, TSN ran an opening-day editorial proclaiming: “War broke loose on many fronts in America this week—war in which no quarter is asked and none expected—but instead of a war of rifles, bayonets, cannon, machine guns and airplanes, it is a battle of bats and balls. . . . That is the American way—the Baseball way …. God has blessed America in many ways and, happily, baseball is one of His numerous manifestations … it offers a common meeting place, where freedom of expression is unfettered, class distinctions are leveled and rivalries can be settled without bloodshed or slaughter of innocents. PLAY BALL!”21

But then the United States went to war, and TSN did not skip a beat, reconciling the fact that America was now involved in both a “battle of bats and balls” and a “war of rifles” by promoting baseball as something the Japanese could and would never understand but the people of the Allied nations could doubtless grow to appreciate. This Japanese situation, however, presented baseball-equals-American advocates with a particularly vexing dilemma. American missionaries had introduced the game to Japan in the 1870s; by the early 1930s the Japanese had erected huge facilities for their college teams rivaling all but Yankee Stadium in size, and even TSN was proclaiming that Japanese acceptance of baseball proved “we wear the same clothes, play the same game and entertain the same thoughts. In other words that we are all brothers. “22 Post-Pearl Harbor, TSN’s editors directed a new spin:

In this strange land, where militarists are as strong as the old Samurai of the Hermit Kingdom before Commodore Perry, and where college-educated men believe their humorless, sallow-faced Emperor to be the Son of Heaven, baseball became the outstanding sport of the colleges …. Having a natural catlike agility, the Japanese took naturally to the diamond pastime. They became first-class fielders and made some progress in pitching, but because of their smallness of stature, they remained feeble hitters … it was always a sore spot with this cocky race that their batsmen were so outclassed by the stronger, more powerful American sluggers. For despite the brusqueness and braggadocio of the militarists, Japanese cockiness hid a national inferiority complex. 

The editorial continues, saying that in retrospect, “this treacherous Asiatic land was really never converted to baseball,” citing the evidence that the Japanese never grasped the concept of good-natured American bench jockeying and umpire razzing—apparently, as TSN claims here, “the very soul of baseball.” The editorial suggests that this is much preferred to “stab[bing] an ‘honorable opponent’ in the back” or “crush[ing] out his brains while he is asleep.” Finally, it concludes that although the Japanese may have acquired some baseball skill, they were never touched by the soul of the game, because (as stated earlier) “no nation that has had as intimate contact with baseball as the Japanese, could have committed the vicious, infamous deed.”23 This is pure racist pap, a revisionist history reinterpreting the effects and questioning the embrace of baseball in Japan. But it also served as a powerful way for TSN to instill pride among readers that baseball was ingrained in the spirit of Americans but proved a maddening enigma to the treacherous Japanese.

Meanwhile, TSN frequently asserted the growing understanding of the game among Allied nations. Under the British banner, Canada entered World War II well before Pearl Harbor. Thus, in May 1941, TSN revealed that Montreal Royals games had a decidedly military flavor, with hundreds of soldiers in attendance. Air Vice-Marshal L. S. Reader said, “[Sport] is the life of our people, stands for everything we’re fighting for, and its value right now can’t be overestimated,” adding, “I don’t think anything appeals to [ our men] like baseball.”24

Furthermore, TSN published a slew of letters from British readers, some writing on scraps of wallpaper, others mentioning bombs falling overhead, who had become avid fans of the game and cherished the copies of TSN that made it through to England. One classic three-paragraph sketch, set in a front-page box, told how RAF squadron leader James G. Hanks had taken in a Buffalo Bisons game; catching on quickly, he was cheering, “Well done, blighter!” by the seventh inning—the first time he had cheered, or let go of his emotions, since the war started.”25

During this period TSN’s editorials typically did not engage in any true editorializing, any defense or criticism of an issue. By and large, they either praised something baseball had done, predicted what would happen, or prescribed some course of action that baseball should, and most likely would, take. On occasion, though, TSN’s editorials did venture into a defensively critical mode, springing to attention if anyone dared suggest that baseball was not of utmost consequence to either winning the war or feeling patriotically American.

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Cleveland fireballer Bob Feller enlisted in the Navy. According to TSN, some “arm-chair critics” saw fit to snipe at Feller nonetheless, grumbling that he “failed to select as especially hazardous brand of the service.” Given that Feller enlisted for training as a physical instructor, one would think it was a legitimate gripe to suggest that his status as a major league star may have facilitated his entry into a non-life-endangering role. But TSN wrote: “Perhaps these criticisms are to be expected … about those who have attained prominence in any walk of life. Some persons resent any success attained by others and search for flaws in their armor.” The piece went on to paint baseball in a humble, just-doing-its-duty light, seeking no cheers or expecting any “unjustified criticism of the patriotic efforts of its members.” 26

As stated above, on July 7, 1942, the American League All-Stars met a team of service all-stars, with Feller pitching, in a contest at Cleveland that drew 62,000 fans and netted $193,000 for the Army and Navy Aid Funds.27 But to former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, then serving as the director of the Navy’s physical fitness program, such activity was purely fatuous; he labeled these Army-Navy sports extravaganzas as “athletic boondoggling” and a return to an “era of wonderful nonsense.”

While it would be hard to argue against such a tremendous fund-raiser and public morale booster, a practical thinker like Tunney could conceivably have viewed a group of soldiers spending valuable time flying around the country to play games as frivolous or in-essential to the war cause. Nonetheless, TSN thoroughly skewered the once venerable champ, mocking him for having recently delivered “a violent pronunciamento against the humble cigarette” which so many millions of troops cherished; they also suggested that “the Commander” would be better served spending his time mastering navigation and naval combat than wrongly painting service athletes as shirkers of duty.28

Finally, TSN never failed to barrage the reader with a bevy of subtle and not so subtle house ads, promotional gimmicks, staged photos, and press releases. In a moment of pure, unadulterated propaganda, TSN ran a small box on the bottom of its back page just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, entitled “$50,000 Lick by Babe.” Explaining how the ultimate baseball icon, Babe Ruth, had purchased defense bonds, the “story” said, “Babe Ruth drove another home run out of the park … one worth $50,000,” and featured the following (obviously manufactured) quote from the Babe: “One safe and sure way of knocking the other boys out of the league is to buy defense bonds.”29

TSN also frequently ran reproductions of self-serving letters, such as the following: from Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, calling it the “only real baseball publication we’ve had,” and signing up for a lifetime subscription at the special rate of $25; and from Hank Greenberg, a hero TSN had previously milked as the subject of as many as four stories a week during his initial conscription, writing once to say how much the troops cherished TSN and again later to sign up for his own lifetime subscription. At times TSN filled space in random sections—between box scores, perhaps, or set off by a border within an unrelated story—with photos or thumbnail notes that were not quite house ads but not quite true news either.

Take, for example, the feature photo on June 4, 1942, of baseball equipment juxtaposed over a warehouse; the headline stated “Game’s Gift to Fighters,” while the image itself bore the words: “For Our Armed Forces: Baseball Equipment Fund.” The caption told how the recreation needs of the fighting men are not being forgotten, thanks to organized baseball’s Ball and Bat Fund. Examination of the photo, however, reveals that all of the products can be identified—Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Sluggers, baseballs by Wilson and Spalding—as frequent advertisers in TSN; meanwhile, TSN-produced rule books were also included in the photo of items being mailed.30

Technically, such a photo is newsworthy in the sense that it feeds readers information about the Ball and Bat Fund, but there is also an underlying ulterior motive, innocent or not—that hyping patriotism was good for the game and consequently healthy for TSN; images of sponsors and of TSN itself were also far from harmful to the publication.

Last, TSN continuously ran promotions aimed both at bolstering its image as a desirable propagator of feel-good American patriotism and at improving its circulation figures. Promoted as “How We Can Do Our Bit,” TSN offered readers a chance to order gift subscriptions at reduced rates for soldiers; on November 20, 1941, atop the front page, on a line normally alluding to a story inside, TSN advertised that a free carton of Chesterfield cigarettes would be sent with every gift subscription headed to a military base; and a full-page ad in 1942 aimed at getting companies, teams, and organizations to order blanket subscriptions covering all of their men who had or would enter the service featured testimonies from base librarians on how much the soldiers enjoyed reading TSN.

It is clear that TSN embraced the war effort from the earliest moments of American preparation through the country’s full-fledged entrance into the fighting. Beginning with the first volunteers from the professional ranks and the impact of conscription on those ball players with low draft numbers, TSN began running a regular column updating the whereabouts and happenings of baseball players and the military, entitled “From Army Front.” By January 29, 1942, with the U.S. at war, the column had been replaced for good by a full-page dubbed “In the Service.” The same format as “From Army Front” was maintained with the addition of several new features. Every week TSN ran one or two photos of former ball players now in the service; space was also devoted to an increasing number of war-related baseball briefs and, on occasion, a lengthy feature looking back at baseball, patriotism and World War I for those nostalgic older fans.

But the war’s influence on the pages of TSN hardly remained fixed under the “In the Service” banner. A disproportionate number of letters in the “Voice of the Fan” section, even those free of war content, seemed to come from servicemen. Perhaps this is just a reflection of the demographics of TSN readers, many of whom were young men, and thus many of whom were in the armed forces. But given that when a letter from a soldier was printed, the header would make that known (e.g., an April 10, 1941, letter regarding Grover Cleveland Alexander was prefaced: “Soldier Goes to Bat for Alex”), while TSN never tagged “Civilian” above the equivalent letters, it is more than an educated guess to suggest that TSN favored running letters from soldiers, war content or not, because it played to the image of baseball, and consequently TSN, as a diversion and a morale booster at the military base.

It is worth noting that in 1942 every single issue but one had at least one editorial relating to the war, baseball’s duty, or patriotism; that one war-free page came on August 6, 1942, when the lead editorial was a lengthy piece entitled “No Good Raising the Race Issue,” which stated that baseball was better off without integration because the current system was satisfactory—integration would only undermine black businesses in the form of the Negro Leagues while creating inevitable riots when so many blacks and whites came together.

The irony here is thick; these same editors so valiantly trumpeting patriotism and making claims of baseball as a God-given blessing, of baseball epitomizing America’s greatness as a land of democracy, and of baseball serving as notice of our stark differences from the dreaded, narrow-minded Axis peoples, are also casting their vote for the maintenance of a Jim Crow, “separate but equal” America. In an unaware editorial less than two months later (one Spink himself wrote entitled, “Look Well at These Heroes, for They Go”) TSN praised baseball players going off to war; Spink wrote “[they] go to make sure the playgrounds of the future, that men may not be slaves and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation may envelop the white races too, as well.”

What, then, should one make of this particular case of hypocrisy? What about other, lesser contradictions appearing in TSN during this period? Alternately, the newspaper condemned publications using photographs depicting ballplayers holding bats as if they were rifles, then ran a cartoon of its own depicting Ted Williams in this very pose, and then later ran an almost identical editorial condemning photos of that nature.31

Likewise, some of the claims they made—that night ball games drawing 30,000 people were conservation-minded because the lights consumed less electricity than would 30,000 people at home all using reading lamps; that being at a modern stadium was safer than being at home in the event of an air raid—seemed to be trying too hard to make baseball appear in line with the war effort on the home front.32

Was it all just a journalistic charade? The defensive nature of some of the writing suggests that the TSN editors were well aware of the potential threat of baseball being deemed inessential to the war effort; furthermore, the TSN staff worked calculatedly not only to promote the game but to ensure their own livelihood. After all, if baseball was to suddenly take on the stigma of insignificance, of being frivolous in a time of war, and the game were to be put on hold, TSN would have no reason to exist. It was in the best—and only—interest of TSN to promote baseball as integral to American identity, as a key to maintaining morale on the home front, and as a consequential piece in the formula aimed at winning the war. Helping to establish baseball’s validity would solidify the publication’s claim to existence during the war; constantly trumpeting a voice of patriotism could also boost readers’ morale and lead those newsstand purchasers to feel good enough to opt for subscriptions. Take TSN’s “how we can do our bit” campaign; while undoubtedly patriotic, such direction to readers could also be construed as a calculated maneuver to tug at the reader’s patriotic strings and lead to increased subscription sales, for fear of a reader missing the next installment on how to aid the war effort through the national pastime.

But the mere act of documenting TSN in the early years of the war does not necessarily mean to condemn it, not by any means. If there was an ulterior motive at play, it was a love of the game of baseball. Through the lenses of history, the writing seems over the top, even comically so at times. It veered into ugliness and racism, in the name of baseball and America. But this reader believes that the editors and writers firmly believed in and stood behind what they were printing. A true passion for the game of baseball pours forth from the dusty old pages, a spirit that cannot accurately be conveyed here through selective quoting and extraction but which comes through in viewing the entirety of the newspaper.

Though the prose was often exaggerated, the pages of TSN in 1941 and 1942 form a gold mine of baseball history and literature, rich in heartfelt infatuation with the game. Did the writers actually buy into the extremist nature of what they were writing when it came to Japanese baseball and Pearl Harbor? That can’t be surmised from the text itself. But it should not be forgotten that the same passages that seem ludicrous and offensive today could well have raised goose bumps on the flesh, and put stars and stripes in the eyes, of readers during the war.

At times TSN’s rhetoric capitalized on a hatred of the enemy as subhuman, but it also was predicated on a sense of baseball as divine gift. Yes, the writers of TSN depended on baseball for their livelihood and relied on transmitting pro-America, pro-baseball propaganda, but that does not mean that it must be dismissed as phony. There is a reason that these men were writing about baseball for TSN; they cared about the game sufficiently to make a life of it.

More than that, although TSN required baseball to stay afloat, some of the words and themes on the sports pages of independent newspapers were no different. As evidence, see the “Scribbled by Scribes” column in TSN that ran every week on page four; decades before the Internet provided access to every major paper in the country, “Scribbled by Scribes” offered a “best of” compilation of poignant excerpts from baseball beat reporters and sports editors at newspapers around the country-pieces culled from papers that reported on all subjects, with wartime circulation figures and revenues hardly tied to a game. And yet across the nation, writers embraced this style of sheer baseball promotion—albeit perhaps with fewer capital letters and exclamation marks—that the reporters and editors of TSN adopted in attempting to elevate the status of the game of baseball as patriotic, as fundamentally American, and as crucial to the Allied effort. And baseball, The Sporting News and America survived the war. 

ERIC MOSKOWITZ is a newspaper reporter at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. In 2001, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania, earning honors in American History.

 

Notes

1. “It’s Not the Same Game in Japan,” The Sporting News, December 18, 1941, p. 4.

2. From the “The Vault: History of The Sporting News” at The Sporting News Web site (http://www.sportingnews.com/archives/history/).

3. “The Vault: History of The Sporting News”.

4. “The Game’s Own Unity Program,” The Sporting News, December 19, 1940, p. 4.

5. “Uncle Sam ‘Piloting’ Tigers for Present,” The Sporting News, January 1, 1942, p. 6.

6. ”Arnovich Sets Fans Right on Army Aims,” The Sporting News, February 27, 1941, p. 3. Italics added for emphasis.

7. ”Appling ‘Foul’ Friend of Service Men,” The Sporting News, January 15, 1942, p. 4.

8. “In the Service of their Country,” The Sporting News, March 6, 1941, p. 4.

9. “Fans in No Mood for Holdout Debates,” The Sporting News, February 26, 1942, p. 4.

10. “Look Well at These Heroes, For They Go,” The Sporting News, September 24, 1942, p. 4.

11. “Uncle Sam, We Are at Your Command!” The Sporting News, December 11, 1941, p. 4.

12. “Here We Go Again; May Best Teams Win,” The Sporting News, April 9, 1942, p. 4.

13. “The Game Has Cause for Thanks,” The Sporting News, November 26, 1942, p. 4.

14. “The Game and the Old Navy Spirit,” The Sporting News, April 2, 1942, p. 4.

15. ”America Threw Too Many Baseballs,” The Sporting News, November 19, 1942, p. 4.

16. The Sporting News, February 13, 1941, p. 5.

17. The Sporting News, October 23, 1941, p. 1, and October 9, 1941, p. 5.

18. “Hitting High in Tough Loop,” The Sporting News, April 16, 1942, p. 6.

19. The Sporting News, January 22, 1942, p. 1.

20. The Sporting News, July 16, 1942, p. 5.

21. “Battling Begins on the American Front,” The Sporting News, April 17, 1941, p. 4.

22. As quoted in Richard C. Crepeau’s Baseball: America’s Diamond Mind 1919-1941 (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1980), p. 198. Interestingly, Zoss and Bowman write (p. 98) that National League President John Heydler went so far as to say that he hoped to see a Japanese World Series winner in the near future.

23. “It’s Not the Same Game in Japan,” The Sporting News, December 18, 1941, p.4.

24. “Montreal Has a Mixed Program; It’s Game in Army, Army at Game,” The Sporting News, May 8, 1941, p. 3.

25. “RAF Vet Now a Fan,” The Sporting News, July 9, 1942, p. 1.

26. “Sniping at a Patriotic Action,” The Sporting News, December 25, 1941, p. 4. Surprisingly, TSN did not mention the fact that Feller enlisted only after being deferred from the draft because his father was dying of brain cancer.

27. The Sporting News, July 16, 1942. To put that figure in perspective, a state-of-the-art Flying Fortress bomber cost $300,000 at the time (according to Diamonds in the Rough).

28. “Commander Tunney Shoots Wide of Mark,” The Sporting News, September 3, 1942, p. 4. Of course, this was an era of smoking naivete, when magazine ads declared, “More doctors recommend Camels than any other brand.”

29. “$50,000 Lick by Babe.” The Sporting News, December 25, 1941, p. 12.

30. The Sporting News, June 4, 1942, p. 11.

31. The Sporting News, May 1, 1941, p. 4, January 29, 1942, p. 1, and March 12, 1942, p. 4.

32. “Throw the Right Switch,” The Sporting News, June 12, 1941, p. 4, and “In Case of Air Raid,” The Sporting News, February 5, 1942, p. 2.