The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Even by Walsh’s energetic standards, the schedule was ambitious, with visits to three orphanages (two white, one black), two newspapers, and one hospital in addition to a noontime parade downtown with the usual ball scramble, all before the 2:30 P.M. game at Muehlebach Field.

  At the Kansas City Star, Ruth rolled up his shirtsleeves, donned an editor’s green eyeshade, and affected to tinker with copy. It was a favorite Walsh move, a way of rewarding—and ensuring—the loyalty of newspapers that bought Ruth’s stuff. The caption under his studious mien read:

  BABE RUTH EDITS STAR SPORTS PAGE.

  NOTED BEHEMOTH OF BASH TOILS OVER UNFAMILIAR TASK, SAYS PUTTING OUT A SPORTS PAGE IS HARDER WORK THAN HE THOUGHT. NEXT TIME HE’LL HAVE MORE RESPECT FOR THE ENERGETIC EFFORTS OF THE GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS.

  At the rival Kansas City Post, Ruth thanked assembled staffers for sponsoring that afternoon’s game, a benefit for Mercy Hospital for Children, the next stop on the hectic itinerary, where they presented a $650 General Electric Monitor Top refrigerator to an assemblage of doctors, nurses, and children who gathered on the hospital steps trying to look grateful. “This is a big, fine refrigerator,” Babe ad-libbed.

  A residential version of the refrigerator was just coming on the market. A Kansas City appliance salesman named M. A. Glueck was responsible for the donation. He had run into Ruth in New York earlier in the fall and suggested the giveaway. “The Babe was all for it,” Glueck told the newspaper years later, “and the kids were tickled to death.”

  Next up: the St. Vincent’s Home in Leavenworth, Kansas, the Gillis Home, the Kansas City Orphan Boys’ Home, and the Guardian Angel Home for Negroes—all before a scheduled luncheon at the Kansas City Athletic Club. But somewhere, somehow, between Leavenworth and downtown Kansas City, someone representing the Wheatley-Provident Hospital for Negro Children reached Ruth and asked him to make time for them.

  Wheatley-Provident was the first black-owned and -operated teaching hospital in the Midwest. It was founded in 1916 by Dr. J. Edward Perry, with the help of Dr. Katherine B. Richardson, who, along with her late sister Alice, had founded Mercy Hospital. Unable to persuade Mercy’s board of directors to admit black children, Richardson led a fund-raising campaign for Wheatley-Provident, securing five thousand dollars in ten days, Perry noted in a 1927 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association.

  At Wheatley-Provident, George Cauthen took the most important and enduring image of the day: a portrait of a sleeping baby snuggled in Babe Ruth’s arms. It is a study in opposites, black and white, stark and tender: the infant, eyes closed, pressed against the bulk of Ruth’s chest; while the Babe, his face turned fully toward Cauthen’s lens, smiles broadly and without inhibition for his camera. The white of the baby’s hospital gown vibrates against Ruth’s dark brown jacket—his favorite color. The child’s furrowed brow underscores Ruth’s untroubled gaze. Tiny fingers splayed across his wide lapel, reaching for security the way babies do, the Babe securing the baby’s bottom in one large paw.

  The lead story in the Post made no mention of the visit except in the caption: “Although not on the original schedule, the Babe answered an urgent invitation to visit the children’s ward at Wheatley-Provident hospital and missed lunch as a result. He is shown with a little Negro sufferer in his arms.”

  When Cauthen made up the page that night, he put that image in the center of the two-page spread.

  II

  The photo was available to twenty-five Hearst newspapers read each day by three million Americans, nearly 10 percent of the population, through Hearst’s International News Photos. Within weeks, it appeared in two of the nation’s most prominent African American newspapers—the Chicago Defender and New York’s Amsterdam News.

  The image was powerful, too powerful perhaps, which may explain why it could not be found in any of the white newspapers currently digitized by the Library of Congress or by those on the online databases newspapers.com and newspaperarchives.com. Nor is it surprising, given the mores of the times, that the white children photographed with Ruth and Gehrig at Mercy Hospital are named by the Post but not the black infant in Ruth’s arms.

  Major-league baseball remained a bastion of white privilege, ignoring the views expressed in a December 6, 1923, editorial in the Sporting News: “It matters not what branch of mankind the player sprang from with the fan, if he can deliver the goods. The Mick, the Sheeney, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap, the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, or hit, or field. In organized baseball there had been no distinction raised—except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible—the wisdom of which we will not discuss except to say by such rule some of the greatest players the game has ever known have been denied their opportunity.”

  The same day Ruth was photographed cuddling a sickly black child in Kansas City, the Pittsburgh Courier reported that commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had banned white minor-league players from participating in the integrated Southern California Winter League Baseball season, scheduled to begin play the following week.

  The ban carried “the threat of expulsion from organized baseball.” The season was canceled.

  Landis would brook no chink in the color line that had banished African American players from major-league baseball since 1887 and would remain in effect under his fiat until Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson ended it in 1947.

  Ruth had to have known that posing with the baby in the city where the Ku Klux Klan had held its national convention three years earlier would rekindle all the talk and the whispers about him and the cruel epithet that took root on the playgrounds at St. Mary’s. The name, a confabulation of childhood cruelty and crude stereotype, had jumped the fence at St. Mary’s and spread to other precincts where baseball was played. Benjamin Gorfein, a young Jewish boy growing up in Baltimore when Ruth was a teenager playing ball at Druid Hill Park, told his grandson that everyone knew Ruth as Nigger Lips. Nor did it die with Babe Ruth’s family. “I got that when I was growing up,” said Harry Pippin, a distant cousin, who bears a striking resemblance to Ruth in the shape of his face and his girth. “Boys are unmerciful.”

  The epithet followed him to Boston, where Red Sox teammates called him Nig, Nigger, and Tarzan, an allusion to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 Tarzan of the Apes.

  “What’s this Tarzan stuff?” Ruth asked one day. “Ape? You’re calling me an ape?”

  In conversation, Marshall Hunt and Ed Barrow casually referred to him as the Big Baboon. “He wasn’t human,” his teammate Joe Dugan said. “He fell out of a tree.”

  He meant it kindly.

  Stories spread by Red Sox teammates about his gluttony and lack of personal hygiene—toothbrushes he borrowed, underwear he eschewed, baths he didn’t take, and body odor he exuded—fed a collective impression of piggishness that found expression in caricature.

  Paulo Garretto’s 1929 drawing for the New York World, loaned to the National Portrait Gallery by the Ruth family for a 2016 exhibition, turned his head into a bloated baseball, suggesting with a few sleek art deco lines a tautological truism: Ruth was baseball and baseball was Ruth. But Garretto also gave Ruth a nose as wide as the downturned corners of his mouth and nostrils as big as the pupils of his eyes—eyes squinched shut by weight and gravity—not a pretty portrait. In fact, it is porcine.

  Six years later, when Ruth was voted into the Hall of Fame, the sculptor Alexander Calder created a grotesque wire figure of the man with a pig’s snout and ears.

  In this way, art gave expression to the sotto voce whispers and intimations that Ruth was something other than human, deviant even, a man unable to control his temper, his urges, and his appetites. Later, those whispers would be made explicit and held against him when he wanted to become a major-league manager. How can he control others when he can’t control himself? This was the coded language of racial prejudice.

  Louder voices in opposing dugou
ts at the Polo Grounds and Wrigley Field impugned his mother’s reputation, ridiculed the breadth of his nose (broken in a fight, daughter Julia says), and the shape of his body, all that chest balancing on kindling legs. Never seen a white man looks like that. Press-box chatter, never elevated, devolved into predictable racial stereotype, gossip about the size of his genitals, and whispers, Fred Lieb shared with Jerome Holtzman, that Ruth had fathered a Negro child. When he ran into a fellow parolee from St. Mary’s at a prizefight at Madison Square Garden, Ruth’s greeting was preemptive: “Now don’t call me Nigger Lips, or I’ll break your arm.”

  So the buried one-line item in the next-to-last paragraph of Rollo Wilson’s three-dot sports column in the Pittsburgh Courier on April 9, 1927, was as significant as it was unusual, giving voice to a possibility greeted in black neighborhoods with knowing glances and hopeful smiles and expectorated from big-league dugouts with venom and spittle. “What is Babe Ruth’s racial origin?”

  Wilson hid the question in a list of otherwise innocuous and seemingly random inquiries—space fillers columnists use when they’re hard up for something to write. “What does the referee say when he calls the fighters together for a conference before the bell starts ’em off?” “Why does anyone run 26 miles?” “Would you call Tiger Flowers a tiger lily?” and “Why will thousands of colored baseball fans cheer Ty Cobb this year? Or will they?”

  He promised “a slightly soiled press pass good at all press gates at the Sesqui to the correct guesser.”

  In 1927 America, there were two competing narratives about the Babe, divergent creation myths: one the white Horatio Alger myth; the other, the story of a secret brother whose words and deeds, especially involving “race players,” were reported religiously in the black press:

  When he supplied batting tips for readers of the Baltimore Afro-American on June 10, 1921, including details of his off-season training regimen: “Between seasons I keep fit by hunting, fishing, hiking, and keeping out in the open and getting as much exercise as I can.”

  When he was the honored guest at a benefit for the Mother AME Zion Church in Harlem in 1923, and, the Amsterdam News reported, he was the highest bidder on autographed balls he himself had signed.

  When that same year, he refereed a boxing match between a black and white fighter, the Chicago Defender reported that he ended up with so much blood on his shirt that it had to be thrown away—this at a time when many white Americans wouldn’t dream of drinking from the same water fountain.

  When he played against Negro Leaguers in exhibition and barnstorming games, and happily shared a chaw of tobacco, these things were noticed.

  When tickets went on sale for the first World Series game at Yankee Stadium in 1927, the twice-weekly Associated Negro Press (ANP) news agency in Chicago reported that second in line, arriving at 6:00 the night before, was a one-legged African American man who had hitchhiked from Washington, D.C.

  When Ruth either did or did not call his shot by pointing to the outfield bleachers in Wrigley Field during Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, the ANP account and African American papers offered an alternate history: “Babe Ruth Socks a Homer for Loudmouth Latimer, Cub Rooter, Taunts of Fan in Bleachers Irks Bambino, So He Smacks One into the Bleachers, Missing His Tormentor by Three Feet.”

  The story did not appear in the white press until E. M. Swift wrote it for Sports Illustrated in 1980: “The Bleacher Bum version is that he was pointing to a black man named Amos (Loudmouth) Latimer, traveling secretary for the Chicago Negro League’s Forty-seventh Street team. The story, which Loudmouth told for years afterward on Forty-seventh Street, goes that Latimer had been provoking Ruth from the centerfield bleachers by throwing lemon rinds at him and called him ‘brother,’ a reference Ruth had heard before because of his facial features.”

  Loudmouth that he was, Latimer rooted loudly for the Cubs, shouting after Ruth’s first inning home run off Charlie Root, “Aw, the big bum, he ain’t no good,” the ANP reported. “That was just an accident. Get him a pair of crutches.”

  The ANP charged “the irrepressible colored bleacherite with unwittingly” bringing about the Cubs’ downfall.

  When the Babe came to bat in the third, he took off his cap and waved it to his tormentor in the center-field bleachers. He also unburdened himself of a couple of choice remarks to Guy Bush, pitcher in the home dugout. . . .

  Loudmouth could be heard yelping all over the field. The Babe held up one finger, signifying that it took only one swing to hit the apple.

  Root shot the ball in. The Babe caught it square on the nose and sent it more than 440 feet beyond the score board in the center-field bleachers. It missed Loudmouth by just three feet.

  Among the many witnesses at Wrigley Field that day were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president; Chicago mayor Anton Cermak (who was assassinated four months later while riding in an open-top car with FDR); and a twelve-year-old boy named John Paul Stevens, who would become one of the longest-serving justices on the United State Supreme Court.

  Stevens was sitting with his father and two brothers in box seats behind the third base line, from which he could see Ruth jawing with players in the Cubs dugout, most especially with Bush, a swarthy Mississippi boy who had lost Game 1 of the Series. Like most of the eyewitnesses, Stevens assumed the dispute was “about the Cubs being cheapskates, giving [former Yankee] Mark Koenig only a half share” of their World Series earnings.

  Stevens couldn’t hear the Cubs calling Ruth old and fat and far worse. Nor could he hear the Yankees yelling back, “Who are you calling a nigger? Look at your pitcher.”

  He was still yakking at Bush when he pointed to the bleachers. “I always interpreted his pointing at the scoreboard as ‘I’m going to knock you to the scoreboard,’ rather than ‘I’m going to hit a home run,’” Stevens said.

  Ruth said nothing about intent immediately after the game; nor did most of the reporters, save Westbrook Pegler and Joe Williams. But, as the legend of the Called Shot gained currency, he was quick to take ownership of it.

  You read the newspapers, don’t you?

  African American readers, meanwhile, were treated to a news item, courtesy of ANP, about Ruth’s guest aboard the Yankee special en route to New York. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the tap dancer remembered chiefly for four movies he made with Shirley Temple, danced through the aisles, having bet two thousand dollars at 6-to-1 odds that the Yankees would sweep the Cubs.

  Back in Manhattan, Ruth was invited to a swank dinner party with his friend and golfing partner Grantland Rice. Also in attendance: Walter Lippmann, the political commentator, and his wife, who were unaccustomed to the Babe’s vernacular. When Mrs. Lippmann politely inquired about the home run, Ruth replied with newfound gusto. “After the second [censored] pitch, I point my bat at these [censored] bleachers—right where I aim to park the [censored] ball,” Rice reported.

  The Lippmanns quickly made their farewells.

  The following summer, when the Yankees were in Pittsburgh for an exhibition game, Ruth was interviewed by the Pittsburgh Courier about the inaugural East-West Negro League All-Star Classic, which was played at Comiskey Park in Chicago two months after the first major-league All-Star Game was played there. “The colorfulness of Negroes in baseball and their sparkling brilliancy on the field would have a tendency to increase attendance at games,” Ruth said. “The [All-Star] game in Chicago should bring out a lot of white people who are anxious to see the kind of ball that colored performers play.”

  The story was reprinted in the Chicago Defender with a large photograph of the Babe, proclaiming him “a friend of the race.”

  III

  Ruth wasn’t the only white player to barnstorm against Negro Leaguers, but he was the most important and the only one suspected of “passing.” In so doing, he sanctioned the quality of play and also provided fodder for further speculation about his ethnicity among whites and blacks.

  His appearances were meaningful ev
en if the games were not. “He gave them a stage to play on,” said Negro League Baseball historian John Holway, not to mention a good payday, which was no small thing.

  Ruth was not yet a full-time outfielder the first time he competed against a mixed-race team at the end of the abbreviated 1918 season. He had, nonetheless, tied for the American League in home runs with eleven. After leading the Red Sox to the world championship with his pitching arm, Ruth joined the New Haven Colonials of the Eastern League, owned by future Yankee general manager George Weiss, for a game against the Cuban All-Stars from Havana.

  No official statistics from his games against Negro and mixed-race teams exist. (No official records of Negro League competition were kept.) The closest thing to it is the ledger compiled by baseball historian Bill Jenkinson, author of The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs. Jenkinson has documented sixty-five at-bats in sixteen games in which Ruth batted 25 for 54 with eight strikeouts, ten walks, and eleven home runs, including the three he hit off Dick Redding in Trenton in 1927 when Cannonball was allegedly grooving his pitches. To Jenkinson, the walks and strikeouts are proof that “there was no regular ‘grooving’ by black pitchers” in exhibition games against Ruth.

  To John Holway, the encounters—and the statistics Jenkinson has tabulated—are meaningless. “He didn’t face the best players in America,” Holway said. “In an integrated league, he might not have hit 60 homers and he might not have hit 714.”

  After Ruth retired in June 1935, he made his first New York appearance in an exhibition game at the Dyckman Oval in Harlem against the New York Cubans. Also, in the thirties he faced Satchel Paige in Chicago, a story Buck O’Neill, the gregarious and accomplished first baseman for the Kansas City Monarchs, loved to tell. In fact, he loved telling it so much, he told it a variety of different ways. “Babe hit the first pitch over the seats,” O’Neill said at Hofstra University’s 1995 Babe Ruth Symposium. “Satch followed him as he ran around the bases and when he got to home plate, Satch shook his hand.”