Hollocher’s steady fielding, hitting, and enthusiasm helped pull the Cubs out of their July rut, but the roster was boosted by reinforcements. In the wake of the work-or-fight order, the Pacific Coast League had broken up, and Mitchell plucked a pair of useful players in the aftermath: infielder Charley Pick and right-hander Speed Martin. Pick, who had been playing for San Francisco, was a decent hitter, but in his only full big-league season, with the Athletics in 1916, he had committed 42 errors in 108 games at third base. With the more sure-handed Charley Deal at third, Mitchell inserted Pick at second base, where the Cubs had lost Pete Kilduff to the draft and had been trying to get by with Rollie Zeider and Bill McCabe (a pair who combined to hit .216). Pick was lacking in the field but hit .326 in 29 games with the Cubs. Martin, signed from Oakland, also had value. With Hendrix and Douglas sliding, Mitchell needed another right-hander. Martin served well. Tall and thin, his nickname was ironic—he mostly used curveballs delivered from a variety of arm angles, as well as a slowball. “Pick and Martin are delighted to be with the Cubs,” Oscar Reichow wrote in the Daily News. “It is not often that many players join a ball club in time to ‘horn in’ on a World’s Series as they have.”7
After the Giants series, it seemed inevitable that Pick and Martin would, indeed, horn in on the World Series. If it was played, that is. As August passed, the question of whether baseball would put on a World Series continued to go unanswered. Players would have until September 1 to find useful work, and Baker had given baseball that much time to settle its business affairs. But just how to finish the business was a puzzle. The pleasant unity the magnates had shown in making their final plea to Baker and Crowder at the end of July didn’t even last till August 1. Ban Johnson, sticking to the letter of Baker’s revised ruling, proposed a plan to end the season on August 20 and play a World Series that could be over by September 1. But again, the magnates coalesced into factions. Johnson got no support from the National League (even good friend Garry Herrmann panned Ban’s plan), plus a thumbs-down from Clark Griffith, Charles Comiskey, and, of course, Harry Frazee. When AL leaders met in Cleveland on August 3, Comiskey delivered a rousing speech that swayed the other magnates to vote against Johnson’s August 20 arrangement and support finishing the season on Labor Day (September 2), with a World Series starting on September 4. The NL agreed.
Johnson, not accustomed to being so freely defied, issued a statement: “If the club owners wish to take a chance on acting contrary to the ruling of the War Department, that is their business.”8 That brought a scathing rebuke signed by Frazee, Griffith, and Comiskey, accusing Johnson of bungling the work-or-fight situation and adding something like an AL magnates’ declaration of independence: “From now on, the club owners are going to run the American League. We criticise [sic] Mr. Johnson merely as an official. We have nothing against him personally, but from now on we intend to take a hand in the management of the league. His rule or ruin policy is shelved.”9 A week later, though, Comiskey and Griffith said they did not authorize the statement.10 This is what a mess the game’s leadership had become. Even the anti-Johnson faction had factions.
But Johnson was right. Baseball’s owners were taking a chance defying Baker. It was a reasonable guess that the War Department would allow two teams an extra 10 days to play out the championship. Players, though, were not willing to abide by guesses. They wanted Baker’s written approval. “It may be all right for the magnates to assume the government will not object to a world’s series after Sept. 1,” one Cub told the Tribune. “They won’t be taking any chances, because no penalty will be imposed on them. The players are the ones who will get it in the neck if the work or fight order is not obeyed, and I for one am going to obey it.”11
All haggling and convulsions about the World Series caused a stir among the two league leaders—the Cubs in the NL and the Red Sox in the AL. Through it all, though, Hollocher was a touchstone. He just kept hitting. When the Cubs left the Polo Grounds, having won 4 of 5 from the Giants, Hollocher had hit in seven straight games. Arriving in Pittsburgh to play a one-day series—one of the odd contortions of the newfangled schedule—Holly had hit in 11 straight. Over a 6-game, four-day series at home in Chicago, Holly kept playing and hitting, running his streak to 18 straight. In a doubleheader against Philadelphia on August 17, Hollocher tallied five hits and pushed his hitting streak to 20 games.
This should have been a big story. But there was bigger news in Chicago on August 17, and Hollocher’s run was pushed to the inside pages of the newspapers.
While Hollocher was pushing his hitting streak to 20 games on Chicago’s North Side, down in the Loop high drama was playing out in the Federal Building courtroom of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The biggest court case of 1918—the federal government’s arrest and trial, on charges of sedition and undermining the draft, of 100 members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World labor union—was coming to a sudden close. Indeed, it may have been the biggest case in the history of the American courts, believed to be the largest group of defendants ever tried before a federal jury. The estimated cost of the trial, which began with jury selection back on April 1, was $1 million. By the time it was over, more than 30,000 pages of records had been typewritten, and stenographers had entered 7.5 million words into the court log.
The trial of the Wobblies—the nickname of the IWW—had loomed over Chicago throughout the spring and summer. It was expected to be a tense affair, especially after Landis was assigned the case. Few judges were as far away from the IWW on the political spectrum as Landis. The Wobblies were strongly antiwar and differed from the mainstream labor movement, headed by Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, in that they were not looking for moderate, incremental improvements to the condition of workers but for a wholesale overthrow of the wage system as it existed. The AFL had actually been very supportive of the war effort and had leveraged the overall shortage of labor into widespread improvements for its members. The IWW, though, pushed its members to resist the war. This was not a stance appreciated by Landis, who had been making strongly pro-war speeches around Chicago and had a son, Reed Landis, serving at the front as one of America’s first fighter pilots.
But Landis had been surprisingly respectful and even indulgent when it came to the Wobblies. At the start of the trial, Landis, a chewer himself, made a tobacco concession to the largely foreign-born and generally rough-hewn defendants. “I think we will have a row of spittoons moved in tomorrow,” he said. “We must not deprive these men of their comforts.”12 Landis listened to complaints about the food that the IWW defendants were being served and ordered them to be well fed. He also ordered they be given razors and a place to shave each day. Over the course of the trial, Landis allowed about 70 of the defendants out of jail on their own recognizance.
The case presented by the government, though, was not so kind. Federal prosecutors presented the IWW as an extremely violent organization bent on the overthrow of the U.S. government. Prosecutors freely mixed truth and fiction. The Wobblies were antiwar and sought to fight against the war through the sabotage of industry. An IWW tract read during the trial described the use of sabotage: “It may mean the destroying of raw materials destined for a scab factory or shop. It may mean the spoiling of a finished product. It may mean the destruction of parts of machinery or the disarrangement of a whole machine.… In the case of wars, which every intelligent worker knows are wholesale murders of workers to enrich the master class, there is no weapon so forceful to defeat the employers as sabotage by the rebellious workers.”13
The government wove in actual words and pamphlets from the Wobblies with grotesque exaggerations. It was charged that IWW was plotting to replace President Wilson with Kaiser Wilhelm, that they were funded by Germany, that they were planning to invade Arizona with the help of Mexico, that they had plotted with the Irish rebel group Sinn Fein in Butte, Montana, that they were run by the Russian Bolsheviks. No actual evidence of any of these plots or associations was p
resented, but merely mentioning them in court helped the government accomplish its real aim in the case—to make the Wobblies look so scary that no one could sympathize with them.
It worked. Though many around the country supported the goal of workers’ rights, the labor situation was tricky during wartime. Even unions that were members of the AFL were subject to public scorn, because strikes threatened to slow down production to support the Allied armies. And there were plenty of strikes across the country. Around Boston at least 10 groups were on strike in August alone—shoe cutters in Brockton, followed by shoe lasters in Brockton, Bridgewater, and Rockland; city workers in Lawrence; General Electric workers, twice, in Lynn; blacksmiths in Watertown; operators of the Middlesex & Boston Street Railway; bellboys in Swampscott; employees of E. A. Henchley and Co., makers of life rafts, in Cambridge.
But Wobblies were different from East Coast strikers, who had specific and reasonable goals. Wobblies were plain scary to many. The union’s headquarters were located at 1001 W. Madison Street in Chicago—that’s why the trial was now before Landis’s court—but the Wobblies were not a strong presence among Chicago workers. The rank-and-file IWW generally worked in mining and logging companies of the West and were almost always unskilled laborers. Some measure of the Wobblies’ scary reputation was earned. Violent outbursts between employers and the IWW were common (often initiated by employers), but in big cities those violent outbursts were just distant legends, taking place in far-flung locales such as Colorado, Arizona, and Washington. The IWW trial brought those tales to life in Chicago. There was fear that the city would become the scene of Wobbly vengeance. On April 14, a Tribune editorial warned, “Farther West, on the coast, there is a different idea of the I.W.W. There people know what the virtual terrorization of a town by the incursion of violent revolutionaries can be.… The indulgent humor of this region is not found where the I.W.W. has been felt as an applied force and where it is not known solely as a ludicrous vagary, pink whiskered and long haired.”14
This was not unjustified alarmism. Bombs linked to labor—some to the IWW, some to other unions—were being found all over Chicago. In January, a girl was arrested at Union Station, armed with 50 pounds of dynamite and a loaded automatic pistol. Known as “Dynamite Girl,” she had IWW connections and, according to the Tribune, “With the great I.W.W. trial coming up next month, the police saw a possible motive in the efforts to bring contraband explosive to Chicago.”15 (Dynamite Girl was actually anarchist Ella Antolini, 18, who was sent to a Missouri prison, where her cellmate was famed anarchist Emma Goldman.) In March a bombing campaign that was part of the strike against the Lyon & Healy music company led to murder indictments for union officials. Also in March, a bomb had been found in the Federal Building office of attorneys Frank Nebeker and Claude Porter, who would be prosecuting the IWW trial. It was the second bomb found in the building in the previous two months. In April a man believed to be an anarchist or a Wobbly was arrested for making bombs in his South Side home. In July, as part of an internal dispute in the Cobblers Union, a bomb on the North Side exploded at 1:00 A.M., driving hundreds of locals into the street. There was paranoia when it came to domestic terrorism, but it was rooted in daily headlines. The presence of the IWW made Chicagoans nervous.
The climax of the IWW trial came with the testimony of the union’s leader, massive, one-eyed organizer “Big Bill” Haywood. On the stand, Haywood lobbed his own sensational accusations, including the claim that lumber bosses were getting black workers hooked on cocaine and heroin so that they’d become addicted and agree to work for low wages. Haywood stridently denied the government’s assertion that the Wobblies supported the kaiser and made a pretty good point in response: if the IWW was antiwar, how could it be pro German? “I regard the German socialists as more responsible for the war than any other body,” Haywood said. “They refused to vote for the general strike against the war. If they had refused to fight in August 1914, this war would never have been.… I have learned to despise autocracies of all kinds and that includes governmental autocracies. Germany today is the worst autocracy in the world.”16
Haywood’s testimony ended August 13. Four days later, as Hollocher hit in his 20th straight game, the trial jolted to a stop. The prosecution made its final argument, and the defense, in a move that sent a wave of surprise through the courtroom, declined to present a final argument. Just after 4:00 P.M., with the trial having dragged over four and a half months, the jury retired for what was expected to be a proportionately long deliberation. But they returned in just 65 minutes. All 100 defendants were found guilty. “It had been feared by court attaches that, were the 100 convicted, there would be a riot in court,” the Tribune reported. “Instead, there was a dead, almost breathless silence.”17
Shock fell over the room. Haywood, in a move to calm his disciples, praised Landis and agreed that the IWW had gotten a fair trial. If there was outrage over the guilty verdict, it would apparently be expressed another time.
THE ORIGINAL CURSE: CHARLEY HOLLOCHER
Charley Hollocher batted .316 as a rookie, fourth in the NL, and by the end of the year he seemed destined to become one of the greatest shortstops the game had known. But Hollocher’s story would take a strange, tragic turn.
By 1923, Hollocher was in his prime. He was team captain, coming off a year in which he had hit .340 for the Cubs and, incredibly, struck out just five times in 592 at bats. At spring training in California, though, he suffered an attack of the flu. He went back to St. Louis and was examined by Dr. Robert Hyland, who sent Hollocher to a specialist. Hollocher never explained what was wrong with him but later said, “They advised me that I would ruin my health if I played baseball that season.”18 Still, Bill Killefer, who was by then manager of the Cubs, persuaded Hollocher to rejoin the team. Hollocher hit .342 in 66 games but continued to have stomach pain. Finally he left a note saying, “Feeling pretty rotten, so made up my mind to go home and take a rest and forget baseball for the rest of the year. No hard feelings, just didn’t feel like playing anymore. Good luck.”19 And that was it. Holly left.
He returned for 76 games in 1924, but his stomach still hurt, and he quit for good. He worked at a number of odd jobs around St. Louis and spent a year as a scout for the Cubs. But he did not play ball again. Hollocher might have been a hypochondriac, might have had a legitimate but undiagnosed stomach condition, or—as has been more recently speculated—might have been suffering from depression. The latter reasoning makes sense in light of what later became of Hollocher.
On August 14, 1940, at age 43, Hollocher, who had been complaining to his wife about abdominal pains, slid into the front seat of his car and parked in a driveway near Lindbergh Boulevard in St. Louis County. He took off his sunglasses and took out his membership card for the Association of Professional Baseball Players. He pulled out his new shotgun—so new that the tag was still attached—scrawled out a note, and placed it on the dashboard. The note read: “Call Walnut 4123, Mrs. Ruth Hollocher.” He then put the barrel of his shotgun to his neck and pulled the trigger.20
THIRTEEEN
Death: Carl Mays
FENWAY PARK, BOSTON, AUGUST 10, 1918
Carl leaned back on the bench in the corner of the home dugout, watching George Mogridge hurl for the Yankees. Another southpaw, and everyone in Beantown knew what that meant: the Red Sox would not score—they could not beat lefties at all—and they would lose. Carl’s arms were folded against his chest. The heat wave had passed, and now it was a chilly Saturday at Fenway, maybe 60 degrees. Fans wore overcoats. Carl’s teammates were not bothering him, which was customary. Carl was pitching the second game of that afternoon’s doubleheader against New York, and most players steered clear of the boxman on the day he was pitching, leaving him time to get his focus. But the truth was Carl’s teammates steered clear of him even when he was not pitching.
It was OK, though. Carl had other worries on his mind.
Babe Ruth was coming to bat, and Carl heaved
a sigh when the crowd went into the usual convulsion of cheering. After the run-in with Barrow in the beginning of July, Ruth’s temper had cooled, and he was now pitching his turn in the rotation and playing the outfield when he was not on the slab. And even Carl had to credit him—Ruth had been performing quite well. Still, Carl had never liked the man, though they’d been acquainted for a long time. He hadn’t liked Ruth when they both joined the Providence club in 1914, hadn’t liked him when they came up to the Red Sox together later that year, hadn’t liked him when they were battling for a spot in the pitching rotation as rookies in 1915, and did not like him now that they were big-league stars. Carl could not explain why. Ruth was big, loud, and brash; he did not seem to care a whit about anything except satisfying whatever desire happened to grab him at that moment. What baffled Carl was that people seemed to love the big ape for it. Ruth would do something childish—steal a car, eat two raw steaks, punch a man on the train, fight with Barrow—and he’d get that dumb grin on his moon face, and everyone would laugh and say, “Oh, Babe.”
Maybe this was the reason Carl disliked Ruth. Babe was popular. Carl was not. One thing Carl knew was this: there is such a thing as popularity. We all know people who are popular without being able to explain why they should be. We also know people who are not popular, and yet they may be even more deserving of respect. Popularity does not necessarily rest on merit. Nor is unpopularity necessarily deserved. It was long ago made very apparent to Carl that he was not one of those individuals who were fated to be popular. It used to bother him some, for he supposed there are none of us who wouldn’t prefer to be well thought of.1
The Original Curse Page 17