The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [9]
It is remarkable that baseball wasn’t integrated a decade earlier than it was. It’s not that there weren’t innovative and open minds among baseball team owners—including maverick owner Bill Veeck in the 1930s. It’s not that teams weren’t playing in cities with large black fan bases (Philadelphia, Washington, and Brooklyn, to name three), or that the country wasn’t embracing black sports heroes. Joe Louis was a beloved heavyweight boxing champion, and there were many black college football stars, including the young Jackie Robinson at UCLA.
By the end of World War II, the conspirators—which included the commissioner and the owners—were facing problems far beyond what liberal Communist papers or black newspapers were calling for. Quite simply, their talent pool had been diminishing. I found a column by legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice from February of 1945, concerning his conversations with college football coaches about finding football talent for the National Football League. “For one reason, the supply of young stars that the colleges once turned out is running thin—almost running out,” Rice wrote. “They will have no such supply as they formerly had to draw on. In the second place, there will be returning stars—but quite a number of them won’t return, and many of those who do will be too incapacitated from wounds or too battle-worn to help a lot. As kids turn eighteen now, they are headed for active war service . . .”
Baseball not only faced the same problems as the NFL, but baseball was also facing competition from other sports for the first time. And baseball risked losing some of the best young athletic talent to football, if it held on to its antiquated color line.
Once Judge Landis passed away in late 1944, some of the owners—especially Landis foe Branch Rickey of the Dodgers—seized the moment. Until a new commissioner was named, Landis’ administrative aide Leslie O′Connor, along with the League Presidents, formed a Baseball Council to run the game. Prominent black journalists wrote to the Council, urging that action be taken. A committee was formed to explore ways that integration could take place. In the spring of 1945, Happy Chandler was named Baseball Commissioner. Red Barber’s book, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball quotes extensively from a 1971 Sports Illustrated interview that Chandler had given to sportswriter John Underwood. “Jackie Robinson came into baseball in 1947 as the first black Major-Leaguer in modern times,” Chandler told Underwood.
Many of the owners didn’t want the change. I wasn’t asked for a decision, so I never gave one. The dissenters had to think they were on firm ground because Judge Landis had been in office twenty-four years and never lifted a finger for black players. He always said, “The owners have a right to hire whom they please.” Obviously, Branch Rickey [owner of the Dodgers] thought so, too. He came to see me at my home in Versailles. He may already have made up his mind by then. He said, “I can’t bring Robinson in unless you back me.” “Can Robinson play baseball?” I asked. “No question about that,” Rickey replied. “Is he a Major Leaguer?” “Yes, sir.” “Then bring him on.”
Chandler, in the same interview, went on about the long-held conspiracy that prevented blacks from entering the majors. “I do not mean this account of the integration of baseball as a criticism of Judge Landis for not having ordered it before. The owners simply didn’t want it, and Landis washed his hands,” Chandler continued. “If he did nothing to help the Negro, it can be argued that neither did he do much . . . to improve the sorry conditions the umpires worked under in those days or help to introduce a pension