While songs could easily sell a million or more copies in sheet music form, music publishers and songwriters at the time were being short-changed in another area, that of performing-rights revenue. Although there was a statutory basis for copyright owners to collect royalties for public performances of their songs at the time “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was first published in 1908, music publishers were unable to collect these monies. An amendment to the U.S. copyright law in 1897 granted copyright owners the exclusive right of public performance, which meant that no one could perform their songs in public without their permission— and payment of a fee. But restaurant, hotel, and other venue operators felt that by having songs performed on their premises, they were promoting and popularizing the songs, and they shouldn’t have to pay for providing this service. Thus there was virtually no compliance with the statutory mandate. Music publishers and songwriters were initially afraid to fight the owners of premises where their music was performed for fear of having it boycotted. But eventually, in 1914, the music community banded together to form the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), whose goal it was to test and enforce the performing-rights provision of the copyright law so they could collect revenues for performances of their songs in clubs and hotels and by other types of music users, as well as later from radio and TV stations.
In the early 1940s, more than three decades after he had celebrated the sport in song, Jack Norworth reportedly went to his first baseball game. Even though he hadn’t attended a game until this time, he nevertheless had developed into an avid fan of the sport, and of his home team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the 1950s, after moving to Laguna Beach, California, the onetime vaudeville performer even helped start a Little League for young ballplayers. A true-blue baseball fan, even residing all the way across the country, he never lost his passion for his home team. In a letter dated October 10, 1953, to Alexander G. Law of Englewood, New Jersey, to whom he had transmitted his original draft of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for conveyance to what became its permanent home, Norworth couldn’t help but complain about the Brooklyn Dodgers losing to the New York Yankees in the recently completed World Series. “I was rooting for the ‘Bums’ to win the World Series,” he wrote. “Doggone it. Maybe they will turn the trick next year.”
The “Bums” were soon moved to Los Angeles, where Norworth himself was acknowledged for his contribution to the game of baseball. On a July day in 1958, fifty years after “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” first inspired the baseball fans of America, Norworth was honored by the Los Angeles Dodgers on the field at the Los Angeles Coliseum with a lifetime pass signed by the presidents of the American and National baseball leagues.
Jack Norworth died at the age of eighty, three years after his “Ball Game” collaborator, Albert Von Tilzer, passed away. But the two writers left a legacy for baseball fans of all time. In its joyous simplicity, the song captures the affection of the baseball fan for the game, the yearning to be in the ballpark enjoying the game with masses of people, to munch on snacks, and to cheer for one’s home team.
By popular accord, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is indisputably the most famous song associated with the sport, but it has never been accorded any official title of “theme song” or “anthem” of Major League Baseball. Still, there is no refuting its status, even if unofficial, as the musical ambassador of the baseball world. Over the years Norworth was continually asked how he could pen a baseball hit without ever having attended a game. He never thought this should be an impediment, noting that authors frequently wrote stories about fictional places and that his buddy, Harry Williams of Manhattan, wrote the smash hit, “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,” probably without ever having seen “a blade of grass.” It was the imagination, Norworth insisted, that enabled creation without personal experience.
Who’s to argue with such blockbuster success? While some people over the years have maintained that the lyric doesn’t postulate the narrator’s love for baseball, that does not seem to matter. “Ball Game” is a standard that has transcended the literal meaning of its lyrics. It has become for all time a clarion call of fans’ love for the sport. It even spawned in 1949 an MGM motion picture with an eponymous title, which starred Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Esther Williams, and was directed by Busby Berkeley.
When Jack Norworth wrote his baseball song, he undoubtedly hoped it would be successful, but he couldn’t have imagined that for untold decades to come baseball fans would be gleefully singing his words, as second nature to them as the national anthem, during the halcyon days of spring and summer in ballparks across America. Yet in a sentimental sense every rendition by young and old alike is a tribute to Norworth’s creativity, which gave birth to a musical gem in a New York City subway car in 1908. Because Jack Norworth took care to preserve his original writing, we have today the actual handwritten draft of the immortal tune.
LOCATION: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York.
Footnote
*Royalties earned by Norworth’s songs were bequeathed by the writer and his second wife, Amy, to the ASCAP Foundation, which assists young composers and songwriters in their work.
MARK TWAIN’S ORCHESTRELLE
DATE: 1909
WHAT IT IS: A musical instrument owned by the American writer that gave him great pleasure in his last years and which figured prominently in one of the most poignant scenes of his life.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The orchestrelle measures 8 feet 4 inches high; 6 feet 6 inches wide; and 3 feet 3 inches deep. Its exterior is made of dark-stained wood.
The Yuletide season is traditionally a joyful time for people around the world, but on Christmas Eve, 1909, one of the world’s most esteemed humorists was confronting disaster of the worst kind. Having over the years lost two children and his wife, and now old and infirm himself, Mark Twain had managed to stay active in his work, continuing to amuse the public with his brilliant wit; indeed, over the past few months he had penned, as he put it, several “bubbling and hilarious articles for magazines.” But now tragedy had struck again—deep, piercing tragedy—and his personal world was shattered. Standing at a window on the second floor of his home, Mark Twain looked out at the snowy street scene below, struggling to come to grips with the event while music filled his house from his orchestrelle—which, ironically, he had purchased to help him overcome just such an earlier tragic happening.
Five years previously, in 1904, Mark Twain had taken his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, who had been ill, to Florence, Italy. It was while on a European jaunt several decades earlier that Twain had become enamored of Olivia when he saw a miniature portrait of her in her brother’s room, and he later met, courted, and married her. But alas, Olivia died in Italy. To help him overcome his grief, Twain’s daughter Clara, a trained musician, encouraged him to buy an orchestrelle, a kind of pump organ.
Twain finally agreed that the instrument might be therapeutic, and for the then-hefty sum of $4,600, he ordered a wall-sized Aeolian with a large range of octaves and many instrument pairings.
Twain installed the instrument in his Redding, Connecticut, home (which he called “Stormfield” after his science fiction story, Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, about a man who pilots a cometlike conveyance to the holy firmament). By the time Twain built the house in 1907, he was one of the most celebrated writers in the world. His oeuvre was substantial, including articles for newspapers and magazines and numerous books, and he was the author of some of the most popular works of fiction ever published, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and The Prince and the Pauper. Indeed, Twain, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, infused his writings with so much wit and satire that he was renowned as a humorist. His whimsical aphorisms alone could fill a volume or two. Among them are such classics as:
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good e
xample.
— Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
— Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
— Mark Twain in Eruption
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
— Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
— Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
— Mark Twain’s Notebook
This musical instrument, an Aeolian orchestrelle, brought humorist Mark Twain comfort in some of the most grievous moments of his life.
Stormfield was a large stone house with spacious rooms and a porch, and Twain put the orchestrelle in the first-floor library. The orchestrelle could either be played manually, or a music roll could be inserted that churned out a piece of music mechanically, like a player piano. Twain derived much delight from his orchestrelle, not only from playing it himself—he often entertained guests by playing Negro spirituals he had learned in the Midwest*—but from listening to others play it. Many evenings he would sit back in a chair and listen while his maid, Katie Leary, or secretary, Isabelle Lyon, pumped the orchestrelle for him. Ever the jester, Twain was not above using the orchestrelle to pull off a prank. There was the time, for example, that a young girl named Dorothy Quick (whom Twain had met and befriended while on a ship returning from England, where he had received a Doctor of Laws honorary degree from Oxford University) was sitting at the orchestrelle, pretending to play a complex piece of music as the roll was turning behind its closed cabinet. Just then, a visitor entered the room and was enraptured at the sight of this brilliant young organ player moving her fingers over the keyboard with such virtuosity. When Mark Twain appeared, the stunned woman exclaimed, “It doesn’t seem possible a child could play the organ like that!” Twain admiringly acknowledged the young girl’s extraordinary talent, and before the roll end could snap off and reveal the secret of the canned performance, he coaxed the woman out of the room.
Twain was a doting and devoted father and was saddened when his daughter Clara, who had married concert pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch (later the conductor of the Detroit Symphony), moved to Europe in 1909. But with his daughter Jean by his side, he felt the reassuring comfort of familial warmth. Jean would be his only surviving child to live at home with him. Twain and his wife, Olivia, had had four children. The first and only boy, Langdon Clemens, was born on November 7, 1870. Then came Olivia Susan, commonly called Susy, in 1872. Clara Clemens was born in 1874, and the youngest child, Jane Lampton, called Jean, was born on July 26, 1880.
Mark Twain in 1903.
Twain would survive the first two children. Langdon Clemens died on June 2, 1872, at the age of nineteen months. And when Twain, accompanied by his wife and daughter Clara, arrived in England at the conclusion of his round-the-world lecture tour in 1896, a cablegram was waiting for them stating that Susy had contracted spinal meningitis and was very ill. Mrs. Clemens and Clara immediately left by ship to return to the United States. Mark Twain was alone in England when he received word that Susy, twenty-four, had died.
Jean had epilepsy, but her malady did not prevent her from embracing life with zest and compassion. Indeed, Twain was proud of Jean’s endearing qualities and good-hearted nature, and in his autobiography he wrote about how she crusaded for animal rights, donated her allowance to charities, and diligently answered all letters to her famous father, even those he had read and discarded. But tragedy struck on Christmas Eve, 1909, when Jean suffered a seizure while taking a bath. It was a devastating episode; she went into shock and drowned in the bathtub.
Jean’s body was removed from her room on Christmas afternoon and placed in the library, clothed in the bridesmaid’s dress she had worn at her sister Clara’s wedding. “Her face was radiant with happy excitement then,” Twain wrote. “It was the same face now, with the dignity of death and the peace of God upon it.”
Twain, unfortunately, knew only too well himself the personal pangs of death and was compelled to repeatedly gaze upon his daughter’s beloved face as she lay there before being taken away. Here is how he describes that experience in his autobiography:
I went into Jean’s room at intervals and turned back the sheet and looked at the peaceful face and kissed the cold brow and remembered that heart-breaking night in Florence so long ago, in that cavernous and silent vast villa, when I crept downstairs so many times and turned back a sheet and looked at a face just like this one—Jean’s mother’s face—and kissed a brow that was just like this one. And last night I saw again what I had seen then—that strange and lovely miracle—the sweet contours of early maidenhood restored by the gracious hand of death! When Jean’s mother lay dead, all trace of care and trouble and suffering and the corroding years had vanished out of the face, and I was looking again upon it as I had known and worshipped it in its young bloom and beauty a whole generation before.
It was a sleepless night for Twain, who wrote of “wandering about the house in deep silences, as one does in times like these, when there is a numb sense that something has been lost that will never be found again.”
The writer drifted into Jean’s study to look at her things. He found a stack of books she had been saving for him to autograph for people unknown to him, and vowed to save them, for “her hand has touched them—it is an accolade—they are noble now.” He found hidden in the closet a present for him, something he had frequently expressed a desire to have—a large globe.
At about six P.M. on Christmas Day, a horse-drawn hearse came to take away Jean’s body. It was a grim scene as the undertakers carried her casket out of the house. Twain stood at a window on the second floor, knowing it would be the last time he would see her.
As he stood gazing at the removal of his daughter’s body on the street below, snow falling from the sky, music from the orchestrelle filled the house. The man to whom he was dictating his autobiography, Albert Bigelow Paine (who later penned his own Twain biography), sat at the pipe organ on the first floor and played Schubert’s Impromptu, Mascagni’s Intermezzo, and Handel’s Largo. Twain had asked Paine to play the pieces in honor of his two deceased daughters and his wife. The music, its reedy tones floating from the pipe organ, provided a mournful but elegant sound track to whatever thoughts were swirling through the humorist’s mind on this sad occasion.
Twain was old and in poor health, and Jean’s passing no doubt exacted a further toll, for the next year, 1910, the literary legend followed his daughter to the grave. He left behind not only his inimitable legacy of words, but his splendid orchestrelle, an elaborate instrument which for six years had brought him pleasure and joy, and which had provided a measure of comfort on one of the most terrible days of his life.
LOCATION: Mark Twain Museum, Hannibal, Missouri.
Footnotes
*Twain learned Negro spirituals in Hannibal, Missouri, where he lived until he was seventeen, and at his uncle’s farm, which had slaves, in Florida, Missouri.
THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM
DATE: 1917
WHAT IT IS: The Zimmermann telegram was a secret German World War I telegram whose interception had a profound effect on the course of the war. This is a photostat of the telegram as filed by the German ambassador to the United States for transmission to Mexico City.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The photostat measures 8 inches high by 6 inches wide and has the State Department file number, 862.20212/82A, in the right-hand margin. The message it contains is encoded in seventeen rows of three-, four-, and five-digit numbers.
Neither the British propaganda campaign, the German sabotage of American munitions factories, nor the invasion of neutral Belgium by German forces was able to wrest America from her self-imposed pol
icy of isolation during the early years of World War I. Not even the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania, with more than 125 Americans aboard, was sufficient to rouse the country to military action. But a one-page Western Union telegram consisting of a series of numbers was enough to trigger a chain of events that burst America out of its cocoon of neutrality and launched the country into the deadly arena of warfare, resulting in the deployment of millions of soldiers and the expenditure of millions of dollars to fight on the side of the Allies.
Shortly after World War I broke out in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made it clear that America would not take the side of either the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and Turkey, or the Allied forces of France, England, and Russia. First came his Proclamation of Neutrality, in which he beseeched citizens of the United States to be “neutral in fact as well as in name,” echoed two weeks later by a personal plea for Americans to be neutral in thought as well as in deed. Save for a period of colonialism after the Civil War, America had historically embraced isolationism, a policy that had been urged by its departing first president. In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington declared, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.”
The threat of European powers reconquering for Spain the former Spanish colonies in Latin America, and of Russia’s expansion to the northwest coast of the American continent (it had already claimed Alaska), led in 1823 to the Monroe Doctrine. An extension of America’s isolation policy, the Monroe Doctrine stated that the American continents “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The doctrine stated that the United States would consider any attempt by European powers “to extend their system to any portion” of the Western Hemisphere as dangerous to its peace and safety, but that it would not interfere with existing European colonies or the internal concerns of any of the European powers.
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