Thorn: ‘Baseball is a racket,’ from 1934
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on December 17, 2014:
Is baseball a racket? The American Communist Party thought it was. Through the 1920s and until the mid-1930s, the party considered athletics a bourgeois distraction, and did not report on sports in the Daily Worker. The youth party paper, Young Worker, called baseball “a method used in distracting … the American workers from their miserable conditions.” In the ’30s, however, as the otherwise unidentifiable mischaDC wrote in 2006: “Part of the goal was to get the party out of its immigrant niche. One way of doing this was to expand the Daily Worker from a party newssheet to an American paper. A sports section was the key. Mike Gold, a Daily Worker writer, later said: ‘When you run the news of a strike alongside the news of a baseball game, you’re making American workers feel at home. It gives them the feeling that communism is nothing strange or foreign, but is as real as baseball.’” [http://goo.gl/XmfLb6]
In 1936 the American Communist Party hired Lester Rodney as a sportswriter, and he went on to have a profound influence on baseball’s eventual racial integration. But that is a story for another day. Today I’d like to focus on Michael or “Mike” Gold–either way, a pen name for Itzok (Isaac) Granich (1894-1967). He first wrote for the radical monthly The Masses under the name Irwin Granich, and adopted the nom de plume of Mike Gold in 1919, reportedly from a Jewish veteran of the Civil War whom he admired for having fought to “free the slaves.” In 1930 he published his first and only novel, Jews Without Money, which was widely read and translated into other languages; with this he became America’s most famous proletarian writer. Sinclair Lewis praised him–in the same sentence with Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Dos Passos–upon receiving his Nobel Prize in Literature that year.
Three years later Gold became a columnist for the Daily Worker, a role he would retain until the end of his life. His unflagging dedication to the Soviet Union led him to some uncomfortable policy decisions (to uphold, for example, the invasion of Hungary in 1956) and to some grim, humorless prose.
He wrote one baseball column for the Daily Worker, evidently in October 1934, which holds archaeological interest for readers of Our Game: “Baseball Is a Racket,” offered below. For what it’s worth, I agree with him about Mother’s Day.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/12/17/is-baseball-a-racket/
Originally published: December 18, 2014. Last Updated: December 18, 2014.