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White Sox owner Charles Comiskey bought Jackson’s contract from the Cleveland Indians late in the 1915 season. The move paid dividends, as Jackson led the 1917 White Sox to a World Series championship. World War I limited Jackson to just seventeen games in the war-shortened 1918 season. Jackson didn’t enter the army, though, as he was the sole supporter of his wife, mother, and brother. Instead, he accepted draft exemption and spent most of the year working in a ship-building plant. His employer, Comiskey, sent him a contract for $6,000 for the 1919 season, despite calling him a coward, in published remarks, for not fighting overseas. The entire White Sox team had a payroll of only $85,000, which was so low that there was much bitterness between Comiskey and the players. Second baseman Eddie Collins made $15,000 that season, by far the most of any player on the team. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte made only $5,000 and another hurler, Lefty Williams, made just $3,000. Despite their meager salaries, Cicotte won twenty-nine games and Williams twenty-three more in the 140-game season of 1919.

It is little wonder that Collins was not approached by gamblers to fix the World Series, for several reasons. First, he made the most money on the team. Second, he was sharp. The eight players indicted for fixing the 1919 World Series (Eddie Cicotte, Happy Felsch, Chick Gandhil, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, and Jackson) were all uneducated, and therefore prone to being taken advantage of.

Chick Gandhil, the White Sox first baseman, made the initial contact with gamblers, which got the ball rolling. Eddie Cicotte, who had received $10,000 before the first game of the World Series, let the gamblers know the fix was on by hitting the very first batter he faced. He was knocked out of the game in the fourth inning of Game One. In Game Four, Cicotte committed a pair of suspicious fielding errors. The World Series was a bestof-nine series then, and Cicotte won Game Seven to cut the Reds’ lead to 4-3. The gambling syndicate must have gotten nervous, and it was later revealed that Lefty Williams was told that his wife’s life would be in danger if he didn’t lose Game Eight. Williams saved a life by getting knocked out in the first inning of Game Eight. Risberg, the shortstop, did his part and more. He committed four errors in the World Series, and batted just .080. Weaver and Jackson both played well. Weaver took no money, but like Jackson, knew too much.

In the middle of the World Series, Lefty Williams came into Jackson’s room at the Lexington Hotel and threw an envelope with $5,000 in it down on the ground. (This is information from Jackson’s grand jury testimony.) Williams apparently told Joe that the conspirators had told the gamblers that Jackson would play crooked, too. It makes sense that they would have wanted the .351 hitting outfielder to cooperate. Jackson told Williams that he didn’t want the money, and that he was going to go to the owner and inform him of the fix. Williams, however, left Jackson’s room, with the envelope with the $5,000 still on the floor. After the fourth game, Jackson went to ringleader Gandil and told him that he wasn’t going to be in on any fix. Jackson testified that he told Gandil that he was going inform Comiskey of what was going on. But when Jackson went to Comiskey’s office, Comiskey refused to see him, and Joe was sent home after waiting several hours. This leads me to believe that either Comiskey was part of the fix, or he wanted the whole thing swept under the rug.

The underdog Cincinnati Reds won the 1919 World Series five games to three. There were rampant rumors of the series being fixed. Comiskey, at this point, was trying to cover it up. When Harry Grabiner, an executive with the White Sox, was sent to Jackson’s off-season home to negotiate a contract for 1920, Jackson brought up the fix and the bribe, but was told to keep the money. (At this point, it was to Comiskey