Ty Cobb

by Charles Leerhsen

  • • •

  Cobb’s mother—though she would be tried for first-degree voluntary manslaughter one day—was never known to be a quarrelsome or aggressive person. So we must ask: was it from his daddy, William Herschel Cobb—born on February 23, 1863, a time when the smell of gunpowder and rotting corpses fouled the Southern air—that Ty got his fighting ways?

  That, too, does not seem likely.

  In most books and biographical sketches of his famous son, W. H. Cobb makes a cameo appearance as the stern old-fashioned nineteenth-century dad, utterly stock in his celluloid-collar stiffness. That W. H. Cobb surely would have been fanning the flame of Ty’s pugnaciousness, and showing him how to stick and move and keep his elbow in when he threw the left hook. Son, I just heard the fifth-grade girls won the spelling bee—someone is going DOWN! But that W. H. Cobb never existed. The real Professor was something very different. From his speeches and writings and the testimony of his contemporaries—resources that have never been examined in much depth before, perhaps because they lead to inconvenient truths—we can see the outlines of what looks like a tall, dark, handsome humanist, or at the very least a well-turned-out, physically imposing man out of sync with the fighting spirit of his times. In the Cobb household, the mother, Amanda, was the disciplinarian. “I’d always heard that she carried around a sapling switch,” Ty’s grandson Herschel Cobb told me, “and used it on the children whenever she felt it was needed.” W.H. was a more typical twentieth-century parent. “He had,” said Joe Cunningham, his student for six years, “a very cosmopolitan mind.” The only letter of W.H. to Ty that survives is sweetly affectionate, and obviously concerned about his elder son’s quick-tempered ways. “Be good and dutiful,” W.H. wrote in early 1902, when his fifteen-year-old boy was visiting his beloved “Grandpa Johnny” Cobb in North Carolina, and the Professor was looking out on a January snowfall from his writing desk (“It is two inches, I reckon. . . . Hardly a sound has been heard today. It is six o’clock.”), and missing him so. “Conquer your anger and wild passions that would degrade your dignity and belittle your manhood. Cherish all the good that springs up in you. Be under the perpetual guidance of the better angel of your nature. Starve out and drive out the demon that lurks in all human blood and [is] ready and anxious and restless to arise and reign. Be good.”

  The paternal side of Ty Cobb’s family tree can be traced ultimately to Ireland, but it has deep roots in America, and many tangled branches. One section, known within the clan as “the Georgia Cobbs,” produced Howell Cobb, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, secretary of the treasury under James Buchanan, and governor of his state, as well as his younger brother Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, a Confederate major general. But William Herschel Cobb descended directly from a different and fairly distant line, which ran back into the hills of North Carolina. His people were more iconoclastic than their fancy Georgia kin, especially regarding the Peculiar Institution. W.H’s grandfather, William Alfred Cobb, was a Methodist minister who tested the patience of his parishioners by preaching to Indians and whites alike, then pushed the congregation around the bend by preaching against slavery. In 1848 he and his family were run out of Haywood County for their abolitionist beliefs; they resettled in Union County, a more mountainous region where slaves, being less vital to the economy, were not such a hot-button issue.

  The one child of William A. Cobb whom we know much about, John Franklin Cobb—Ty’s beloved “Grandpa Johnny”—was an antislavery Republican who joined Robert E. Lee’s army when his state seceded, but failed to consistently report for duty. He seems to have exuded a palpable air of intelligence, a certain oracular presence which conveyed to his Cherokee County neighbors that he was a man of principle, a conscientious objector rather than a common deserter. Indeed by his middle years John had become known as “Squire Cobb,” for his service as an all-purpose sage and adjudicator of local disputes. Although not an educated man, he strongly believed in book-learning and made sure all four of his sons and both of his daughters went to college, at least for a while, an amazing feat of nineteenth-century parenting.

  His firstborn, Ty’s father, W.H., got the furthest in school, taking a BA in liberal arts in 1892 from North Georgia Agricultural College in Dahlonega, the first coeducational college in the state. Although he was already a married man with three children and a full-time teaching job, W.H. graduated first in his class. In an unpublished family memoir Ty’s Aunt Norah remembered that as her older brother W.H. received his diploma, she felt “her mother’s tears splash upon her hand” and saw her father “run his finger around his collar to give the lump in his throat more room to dissolve.” Amanda, wearing “white satin with filmy lace like moonbeams around her neck,” waited stage right to present her husband (whom she would shoot and kill one day) with a bouquet of budded roses. Six-year-old Ty, she said, slept through the ceremony.

  Ty Cobb’s father was ambitious in the modern way: eager to better himself through education and willing to relocate. He was also religious in the modern way, which is to say not terribly (Royston in general was not known as a particularly pious place), although, seeming unable to turn down any job involving blackboards and desks, he did serve as superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School. Like many in the postwar generation who took part in the great migration from family farm to city or town, he felt . . . well, a bit disoriented, no doubt, but also liberated from eons of ignorance. Said Cunningham: “He lived before his time.” W.H. had no interest in singing the same old hymns, and making the same old mistakes, until he expired in the bed where he’d been delivered. He was especially outspoken about race. “History teaches that three systems of controlling the people have been tried: slavery, serfdom and education,” he said before a meeting of the Georgia Agricultural Society in 1901, “and that the first two have been dismal failures.” Like his father, he saw education as the key to individual and societal progress, and disdained Jim Crow brutality. He once turned up in a local hardware store where a small mob had gathered to discuss the lynching of a Negro then in the town jail. Reminding them that they lived in a country of laws, and that he would personally make sure they answered to those laws if they continued with their plotting, he sent his neighbors home grumbling. In the same speech he made to the state’s most prominent farmers in ’01, W.H. said, “As a way of teaching people to control themselves, schooling is the greatest political discovery of the ages. . . . The slate and pencil are more efficient implements of true weal than the hangman’s knot and the policeman’s club.”

  When W.H. spoke like this—which is to say a bit like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird—few people in Franklin County, Georgia, jumped to their feet and shouted, “You’re damn tootin’!” Still, his idealism and personal magnetism led him to believe for a while that he might have a future in politics. “All my efforts shall be exerted toward harmony among our people,” he said when he announced his intention of running as a Democrat for a seat in the State Senate in late 1899. If that was code for “I’m not anti-Negro,” it went over most folks’ heads because he won election to the Atlanta House by a wide margin. During his time in the Senate he fought doggedly for school funding and, on the politically tricky question of alcohol prohibition, drew a wavy line, saying gin mills were fine for big cities, but not in places where farmers had to get up early and stand in the sun.

  The defining issue of the Professor’s two-year term, though, was a bill introduced by one of his Senate colleagues that would have meant the death of Negro schools in segregated Georgia. Cranky old Confederate Army captain Hiram Parks Bell, saying he was tired of seeing white children laboring in the field while black kids “traipsed” by them on their way to their publicly funded schools, called for an amendment to the state constitution that forbade tax revenue generated by Caucasians from being used to support Negro education. Of course the black population, having been systematically denied education and employment opportunities, was not generating enough tax money to support e
ven its inferior schools. Bell’s proposal was yet another example of post-Reconstruction cruelty—and Cobb’s father would have none of it. Rising to showcase his impressive physical stature (he stood a shade under six feet, tall for the times), he called the measure “Unnecessary and unjust,” and, said the Atlanta Constitution, produced “figures that showed that the negroes did not get more than their just proportion now.” He also pointed out that “the negro had contributed to the upbuilding of the state, and that he had an interest in our government. He said that the negro had been loyal to the white man and that the white man ought to be grateful to him for what he had done. He said that we ought to be generous with the negro and help him to become a useful and helpful member of society.” When it was called to a vote, Hiram Park’s mean-spirited proposal was defeated by a narrow margin.

  Putting his Senate colleagues in occasional touch with their better angels was no doubt satisfying for the Professor. “Even my boyish mind,” said Ty’s childhood friend Joe Cunningham, “realized that the Professor had a keen and enlightened mind which caught a vision of the future.” But despite (or perhaps because of) the blow he struck for Negro education, his long-range political prospects looked grim. W. H. Cobb was out of necessity a Democrat (Republicans simply didn’t win elections in those parts), and the Southern Democrats were essentially the party of men like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the South Carolina governor who said of black voters, “We have scratched our head to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” Daunted by the prospect of thriving in that environment, in 1902 the Professor returned to the business of education, and was soon elected commissioner of the Franklin County schools, a position he held while serving as principal of Royston High School and teaching classes there. A few years later he ran successfully for mayor of his town, and at some point also became its postmaster. In 1905 W.H. added yet another job: editor of the Royston Record. No copies prior to 1939 seem to have survived, so we can’t speak with certainty about the Record’s political bent. But based on the beliefs of those most closely associated with the weekly we can guess at it. The paper was owned by the Universalist minister J. M. Bowers, who forty years after Appomattox still described himself as an abolitionist, and it was printed on a press owned by J.M.’s older brother, “Uncle Billy” Bowers, who boasted of having been “the only man in Georgia who voted for Abraham Lincoln.”

  • • •

  By now it should be clear that while plenty of North Carolina hills and hollers featured in Ty Cobb’s family history, there was no hint of the hillbilly, as other biographers and journalists have suggested or outright said. Rare indeed is the redneck whose mother descended from relatively genteel, upper-middle-class stock and whose father was, in Ty’s words, “a scholar, state senator, editor and philosopher,” not to mention an advocate for the oppressed. With allowances for time and place, the household run by Amanda and William Cobb appears much more yuppie than yokum. The couple strove ever upward, obsessed about their children’s education, and tended to view local events as a function of real estate values. As Cobb himself said, “I knew which fork to use.”

  Still, the environment in which he was raised can tell us only so much about who Ty Cobb was. The question is, how far did the Peach fall from the family tree? Did young Ty emulate his father, whose status as a community leader and something of a public intellectual made the family special? Or did he resent and rebel against a parent who might just as easily be seen as every adolescents’ worst nightmare—a man who represented the ultimate authority figure in Ty’s own high school, who called attention to himself when he ran for public office, and who brought at least a measure of disapproval on the family for his softhearted views on Negroes. W.H. was not the sort of man who settled matters with his fists, and that is admirable. Yet it’s easy to imagine that with a more “normal” and less Negro-friendly father, Ty might have gotten in a lot fewer fights. He might have had a very different self-identity and, in turn, a very different life.

  The average adolescent views his parents with a mix of pride and embarrassment that is subject to daily, unpredictable tides, and there is no reason to suspect Cobb did not have the usual feelings in the usual proportions until the very last days of his youth. But when Amanda shot and killed W.H. on the evening of August 8, 1905, a little more than halfway through Ty’s eighteenth year, all normal relations with his parents abruptly ceased and a curtain fell heavily on the first act of Cobb’s life. Whatever their relationship had been before, from that day onward, Ty’s devotion to his father burned, to borrow Walter Pater’s perhaps over-borrowed phrase, with a hard gemlike flame, and he became very suddenly a man with certain strong characteristics. Still, let’s not rush past turn-of-the-century Royston, the way most trains once did. One cannot fully understand Ty Cobb without considering the happy but sensitive boy who preceded the wary, nervous hero.

  — CHAPTER THREE —

  Ty COBB ALWAYS INSISTED THAT he had been a normal boy, from “a small country town of the old type,” and in fact the more reliable stories from his early years support a character not unlike that literary sensation of 1885 Huckleberry Finn—a seemingly carefree, somewhat school-averse child content to live in the dogwood-scented moment. Both Ty and Huck liked to fish and hunt and otherwise be outdoors incessantly, and from both the fictional and real child we can learn something about the interaction between the races in the nineteenth-century American South. Among the chief differences between the boys are that Cobb’s father was a pillar of the community, and not the town drunk, and that while Huck was almost impossible to corral in a classroom, Ty would go more often than not, but spend the day with his hands down below his desk, furiously winding twine around hunks of old ink erasers to make baseballs.

  Little Royston, incorporated in 1879 and situated in the northeast corner of the state, was a bustling agricultural hub in Ty’s youth. The peaches hung so heavy in a good year that they broke all but the very biggest branches of the trees, it was said, the sharp cracks resounding like gunshots—and yet peaches weren’t where the real money was. Royston’s success was as a center of the cotton and corn trade, and the home of the Ginn chicken, a toothsome but feisty bird—even the poultry was pugnacious in Royston—bred by the Cobb family’s friend, Stephen A. Ginn. With two hotels, the Johnson and the Royston House, and numerous shops and eating places, the town typically contained more traveling salesmen and farmers’ daughters than your average joke book. Downtown streets were often gridlocked with wagons full of cotton bales, although by the 1890s cattle was already starting to push out crops. A survey in 1904 showed that not one house in Royston was vacant. Farmland went for about $5.32 an acre circa 1900, which was not bad.

  There were plenty of peach baskets but no basketball hoops in Royston when Cobb was a kid, not surprising since James Naismith didn’t invent the game until 1891. No one played football then in Franklin County, either. Apart from competitive running and what Cobb called “hop, skip and jumping races,” it was all ball, though not necessarily the kind involving four bases arranged in a diamond pattern.

  When Tyrus first showed interest in sports in the early 1890s, Franklin County kids still played town ball and cat, as well as the more evolved game of base-ball, as it was then rendered. Cat, or old cat, was a relatively simple pastime based on an English game called tip cat in which the batter struck a wooden spindle—probably detritus from the textile mills—instead of a ball. It could be played with just two bases, if only a few players were available, or as many as four bases if school was out, no one had chores to do, and eighteen or so boys could be conscripted into a match. “In this crude game, you could hit two balls without running if they did not suit you,” Cobb wrote in a newspaper article. “You could hit them anywhere, too, there being no foul lines or anything of that sort, but on the third smash you were forced to run.” Although it seems in some ways like a benign game—instead of an opposing pitcher t
here was a kind of neutral expediter who stood near home base and gently tossed the ball up for the batter to strike on its descent—cat was considered dangerous because to get a runner out you had to hit him with the thrown ball. The practice was called “soaking” or “plugging,” and players often used the opportunity to drill an opponent in the head or ribs, hoping, as a matter of strategy, or personal vengeance, to put him out for the game or even the season.