The Betrayal: A well researched and written, but not flawless, account of baseball's great scandal

Northeastern University professor Charles Fountain’s The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball retells the story of the 1919 World Series “fix” and explains its ramifications for the game’s development.  He relates the known facts, helpfully clarifying between which is known, which is speculated and even that which is “known” but not really true largely thanks to previous accounts that are as much fiction as fact.  The result is a more accurate account and deeper understanding of how and why the scandal unfolded as it did.

To do this, Fountain takes us back to the 19^th century so we can appreciate baseball’s complicated relationship with gambling (and to some extent game fixing).  For “behind the Black Sox story,” he writes, “stretches a long history of organized dysfunction and incorporated hypocrisy.”   Only after a period of toleration did baseball’s powers that be come to recognize that fixed games alienated spectators and threatened owners’ financial interests.  Efforts to clean the game of dirty players were largely successful by the 1880s.

Hal Chase: one of the early game's most gifted players was
also one of the most dishonest to ever play major league baseball;
his antics fixing games and the Commission's failure to deal with
him helped create an environment that made the fix possible

But the events of 1903 would undo this progress, recreating an environment conducive to gambling and fixing.  For it was in this year, Fountain explains, peace was achieved between the warring National League and the upstart American League.  With peace came an end to competition for players and the higher salaries that went with it.  Instead, the reserve clause and their depressed salaries would rule.  In addition, a new owner dominated governing structure would be created and it promptly failed its first test in dealing with allegations of game fixing, choosing to look the other way instead.

In the early 20^th century, players’ gambling on the outcome of games was not seen as problematic.  It was even encouraged to show confidence, perhaps like a CEO who takes a large share of their pay as stock options rather than cash.  But so long as there was gambling, there would always be losers seeking to shift the blame.  Allegations of a “fix” would follow each World Series, and when similar allegations surfaced in 1919 even before play began they were not illogically dismissed out of hand.

Fountain spends considerable time on the politics of baseball management, focusing on the rivalry between White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and AL President and de facto baseball CEO Ban Johnson.  By 1919 the two were locked in blood feud, and each would try to use the fixed series as a tool to gain the upper hand.  The result would be a new Commissioner with dictatorial powers. And Commissioner Mountain Kennesaw Landis would react much differently when the 1919 fix became common knowledge than the National Commission had in 1903.

Colorful profiles help keep the readers’ interest.  Besides Comiskey and Johnson, Arnold Rothstein (the gambler who would remain at an elusive center of the fix), “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Judge Landis and Hal Chase are profiled at length. Although one of the “Black Sox,” as guilty players were tagged, Jackson’s actual role was also very small (he admitted taking money on the understanding he was supposed to be throwing games, but there is no evidence that he did so) but Fountain goes on at considerable length about his life and legacy.

The most famous of the
"Black Sox"; one of baseball's all
time greats.  He took the money, but
may not have kept up his end.

There are some flaws with Fountain’s account.  Many threads, such as the profile of Chase and the relationship between Comiskey and Johnson just to cite two examples, are much longer than necessary to explicate the book’s central story.  As a result the reader frequently finds herself in an alleyway of baseball history, often very interesting but also largely beside the point. Fountain also makes several rather egregious errors when it comes to discussing Jackson and the Hall of Fame.  For instance he writes that it was Commissioner Bart Giamatti who proclaimed that no one on baseball’s eligible list was eligible for election to the Hall of Fame.  In fact, it was an ex post facto rule change in 1991 by the Hall’s governing board in reaction to the Pete Rose case.  Fountain also asserts that writers never had the chance to elect Jackson to the Hall.  In fact, Jackson was on the 1936 and 1946 ballots, but received only two votes each time.

1919: The Great Betrayal contains a great deal of very interesting history about different aspects of the baseball’s early period and brings many of its characters to life even if it is not all strictly related to the 1919 World Series fix. The story is not really complete, however.  Nothing about Babe Ruth, the livelier baseball or the phenomenon of the home run” that began to appear in 1920 and would change the game dramatically appears in Fountain’s account, all of which are necessary to understand the “modern” (or post dead ball) game.  But fans of baseball history will find much to enjoy, ponder and argue with in Fountain’s retelling.

The only winner was Baseball's new Commissioner Kennesaw
Mountain Landis: a publicity hungry judge whose love of the game
led owners to give him carte blanche, which he would exercise
like a czar for over two decades.

Woodrow Wilson's Place and Ours

The School of Public and International Affairs is one of two buildings on campus named for Woodrow Wilson, whose "Princeton in the Nation's Service" speech recalled its previous greatness and helped set the stage for its renaissance.

Ever since Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber agreed to reconsider "how the University recognizes [President Woodrow] Wilson's legacy" in response to a student protest that had occupied his office, magazines, newspapers and the Internet have been flooded with thoughtful debate over the answer.  Most prominently at stake is the eponymous Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

I'm not a Princeton graduate and I think it's mostly a question for the Princeton community to decide for itself. But, as a supporter of historic preservation who studies American history as a long standing hobby, it's hard not to think about such matters, especially given that the debate about how to judge our forebears is not limited to the Princeton campus. Every generation takes a fresh look at past ones, so its useful to consider Wilson's case in a broader context.

To summarize a pertinent facts regarding Woodrow Wilson that are most pertinent to the current debate:

* He was born in Virginia in 1856, five years before the Civil War.  The war itself, fought between 1861 and 1865 (and much of it in Virginia) would have been something very real to Wilson.
* Wilson taught Constitutional Law (despite not being a lawyer) at New York Law School and government at Princeton before becoming Princeton's President in 1902.
* Wilson had delivered a famous speech lambasting Princeton for its failure to achieve its full potential.  Later, as the University's President, he would go on to radically reform the school, fighting entrenched interests to put it on the path to the academically elite institution it is today.
* He was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, where he again took on entrenched and corrupt bosses.
* He became President in 1912, served two terms in office, and personally attended the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War One, which established the League of Nations.  Largely due to his intransigence, however, the US would not join the League.
* As President he purged African Americans from the federal government and re-segregated its departments. As President of Princeton also maintained Princeton as a "whites only" institution.

The arguments for keeping Wilson fall into different camps:

1. History is complicated.  Great men sometimes do very bad things as well.  Getting rid of Wilson will encourage us to avoid such ambiguity (the American Interest) to the detriment of the educational experience.
2. On a similar note, all great leaders have some terrible flaws so there wouldn't be anyone left to honor if we remove Wilson and apply that precedent to others (Princeton history professor Julian Zelizer).
3. Or that Wilson's accomplishments are so significant that they outweigh the bad, which has itself been overblown (Liberal Oasis's Bill Scher; NYU's Jonathan Zimmerman).
4. With regards to his horrible record on race relations, he was a product of his time and place (see above) for which we as 21st century Americans should be at least somewhat understanding (Star Ledger).

On, the other side the augments for dumping Wilson are:

1. his record on race is so awful it overwhelms all else and that as times change so do our values allowing us to reappraise who we wish to honor (New York Times).
2. His Presidential actions were do detrimental that he shouldn't be honored anyway, and the racial issues just make it worse (the Federalist).

100 years after his presidency, Woodrow Wilson is back in the news.

Some of the defenses of Wilson resonate with me.

Love him or hate him, there's no doubt that he was one of our most significant presidents.  The Federal Reserve owes its existence to him.  He led us during World War One.  Even his failure to obtain entry for the US into the League of Nations had hugely important consequences.  His views on government and the Constitution may be pernicious to some, but they still drive much of the contemporary debate. Finally, I agree with those who believe that people should be judged in the context of their own time and place rather than contemporary standards.

However, I don't buy the "getting rid of Wilson would hurt history" argument.  We don't name buildings to promote debate and understanding, but to honor the person named.  No one would forget Wilson if his name was removed.  So long as Wilson's name is on the Princeton campus there is at least some ongoing honor bestowed upon him.  I don't think it's possible for Wilson defenders to hang one's hat on the "protection of history" argument.

On the other hand, what I have yet to see is a defense of Wilson centered around the situs of the monuments to him, which I think is highly relevant to this debate, which is about honoring Wilson at Princeton as opposed to honoring him generically.

As a former Senate staffer who once worked in a building named for Senator Richard Russell I recall an effort to remove Russell's name from that building. I instinctively thought it was a bad idea. Russell, who represented Georgia in the US Senate from 1933 to 1971, opposed Civil Rights laws and was a firm supporter of his state's segregationist system, one which I despised.  Yet one had to consider that no Senator from Georgia could have possibly done otherwise (unlike Wilson's purge of African-Americans from the federal government, which followed great progress by his predecessors) and his career in the Senate was in many ways a magnificent one.  While I wouldn't go naming anything else in Washington, DC after him, I felt strongly that Russell's name should remain on the Senate office building where his colleagues had placed it.

Senator Richard Russell (D-Georgia) still stands in the rotunda
 of the Senate office building named after him

Similarly, Wilson belongs at Princeton, but perhaps only at Princeton.* He was not only a distinguished professor of government, but as President fought hard to alter it from being a school for lazy kids of privilege to what has indisputably become one of America's elite educational institutions, modeled after Oxford and Cambridge.  If many of the students who protested in President Eisgruber's office would not have been allowed into Princeton in Wilson's day, none of them would likely have even wanted to be at Princeton had it not been for Wilson.  For that, I don't blame the Princeton community for honoring him in the manner it does today.

*Interestingly, no one so far as I can tell has brought up the Wilson Center in Washington DC, the Smithsonian think tank named for the nation's only PhD President, for criticism.  

The other institution named for Wilson at Princeton is Wilson College:
one of Wilson's innovations as Princeton's President was to establish
on-campus facilities for students so that they could live and eat
together outside the college's traditional "eating clubs," which Wilson disliked.

Review of John Bacon's Endzone

Endzone: The Rise, Fall and Return of Michigan Football

John U. Bacon

St. Martin's Press, 2015

480 pages

Several years ago, I realized that I had lost my passion for college football.  It was not a sudden process.  The arrival of baseball in Washington D.C. in 2005 and the explosion of new information via the saber-metrics revolution consumed most of my sports bandwidth as I sought to reacquaint myself with the sport of my youth.  In the wake of NCAA's miserable handling of the Penn State affair, I decided I was pretty much done with college football except at a very casual level.

In the past year or so, though, several things have happened to bring me back around.  First, the NCAA largely reversed its position on Penn State, restoring to it 112 wins that had been vacated.  For reasons I explained earlier, I find the vacating of wins to be an unacceptable means of enforcing rules.  Perhaps it's the history buff in me, but I'm not good at pretending what happened didn't happen and I don't want to invest my time in a sport where the game is never really over.

The other major development was the return of 49ers head coach and former University of Michigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh to coach at Michigan, one of my two alma maters.  For those unfamiliar with Michigan football it's hard to fathom the depths of exactly precisely how big of a phenomenon this was.  Among other things, the story of how Harbaugh returned to Michigan engendered a new book before he had coached a single game there.

So intense was the interest in Harbaugh's return,
  Endzone was published before Harbaugh
hadcoached a single game at Michigan.

The story begins in 2007 when tiny Appalachian State shocked the collegiate football world by coming into Michigan Stadium and knocking off the Wolverines.  The following week saw Oregon humiliate Michigan 39-7.  Although the "Maize and Blue" would win nine of its last 11 games to finish 9-4 with a Citrus Bowl victory, coach Lloyd Carr was done.  West Virginia head coach Richard Rodriguez was brought in to coach in 2008.  But under "RichRod" and successor Brady Hoke, Michigan football would average less than seven wins a season from 2008-2014.

The results on the football field, however, were only the manifestation of years of decline, according to John Bacon's Endzone: The Rise, Fall and Return of Michigan Football.  Bacon, author of numerous books on the Michigan football program and now its leading scribe, describes how and why Michigan Football declined, what it meant to the University and those who are part of it, and finally how it "returned."  To do this, Bacon takes his reader back to the founding of the Michigan athletics program in the late 19th century and provides a guided tour through its highlights.  It was out of this history that Michigan's traditions emerged, none more important than the enigmatic concept of the "Michigan Man."

The Michigan Man (or as Bacon acknowledges Michigan Woman as well these days) is someone who values community, putting the needs of the University of Michigan before their own.  Excellence at Michigan is a given.  But it must be coupled with a strong ethical core as well.  Cutting corners is unacceptable.  Excellence, ethics and community are at the heart of the concept of the "Michigan Man/Woman" to Bacon.  After the retirement of revered coach Glenn "Bo" Schembechler, the University's leaders largely lost touch with these values.

Jim Harbaugh (left) and his mentor, Bo Schembechler

By 2014, the entire Michigan community had come to realize this.  As Bacon astutely notes, when students marched over to President Mary Sue Coleman's House, they did not demand the firing of the head coach (as they would have had they simply been concerned about wins and losses).  It was the Athletic Director, Dave Brandon, they were after, and most of Endzone is concerned with his tenure as A.D. and its legacy.

Although just a bench warmer, Brandon himself had played football at Michigan under Schembechler.  He became in his own words an "All American" at business however, amassing a multi-million dollar fortune as CEO of Domino's Pizza, and served on the University's governing body.  On paper he appeared to be a "Michigan Man" par excellence.

Bacon documents carefully, though, that Brandon had not learned what the concept truly encompassed.  Stories abound of how Brandon put himself about the community and ran the Athletic Department like a business, forgetting as Bacon notes that college football is more akin to religion than business despite the big bucks involved at the highest levels.

Through numerous missteps, Brandon antagonized and alienated virtually all of his constituencies. Long time employees were let go.  Former Michigan athletes alienated by the failure to extend trivial, customary courtesies.  Students were forced to pay greatly inflated prices for games featuring lower and lower quality opponents and  suffered under Brandon's policy of seating students by general admission leaving it nearly impossible to enjoy games with friends.  As demand for tickets dropped, the department began to virtually give away seats, diminishing their value and hurting loyal long term season ticket holders.  As a result of these missteps, when Michigan began losing games Brandon found himself without a lot of friends willing to stand by him.

Many of his mistakes seem to have been driven by Brandon's maniacal pursuit of the "Director's Cup," awarded to the collegiate athletic director for overall athletic performance.  Millions were spent in pursuit of excellence in relatively obscure sports to the detriment of those with greater interest among the alumni and fan base whose support was vital to keep up with Brandon's growing levels of spending.  It was as if Brandon was trying to make up for not being an All-American football player at Michigan by being an All-American Athletic Director.

An antihero but not a villain, Dave Brandon lost sight
 of what it meant to be a "Michigan Man" pursuing
reputation at the expense of the greater Michigan community.

In 2011 Brandon's insecurity with his legacy would lead to his biggest failure of all. After deciding to let Rodriguez go, Brandon bungled the pursuit of Jim Harbaugh, who many felt should have been hired as Michigan's next head coach.  But Brandon set difficult conditions, in effect telling Harbaugh that Brandon would be the face of Michigan.

In Harbaugh's words, the negotiations left him "not feeling the love."  The man who had put first San Diego State and then Stanford Football on the map would choose the NFL instead, guiding his team to the NFC Championship in his first year as a pro coach and the Super Bowl the next.  Michigan meanwhile would endure a four year slide under Brady Hoke, culminating in a 5-7 season.

By late 2014, however, things had changed.  Brandon was out, seemingly as the result of a P.R. miscue involving an injured Michigan player he failed to contain.  Another A.D. would likely have survived, but Brandon had burned through all of his good will.  On the other side was a determined, fired up group of students, regents and alumni more than ready to show him the door,  With Brandon gone, Harbaugh was back in play.  This time, there would be no miscues.  Every possible button was pushed to recruit him and his wife by letting them know how badly they were wanted in Ann Arbor.

It's telling that Bacon's declared that Michigan football had "returned" occurred before playing a single down under Harbaugh.  Michigan football isn't about wins, but doing things a certain way, the "Michigan way" with the belief that the wins will eventually follow.  Bringing in a coach who understood this and embodied the school's values was all that was needed to constitute "return."

For anyone who wishes to understand this episode in collegiate athletics, Endzone is really "must reading."  It eschews simple explanations, delving deeply into Bacon's seemingly endless reservoir of Michigan history to produce a compelling and highly thoughtful analysis. Even those with no connection to the University will be fascinated with the story of how a great institution loses it way and what it must do to restore itself by remaining true to its values.  As such it would make a great case study for business school.  Finally, Bacon's loving portrayal of Michigan is so compelling that any high school student who reads it will likely make it a first choice.

Things are looking bright at the "Big House" these days.

Washington Times review of The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership that Transformed the New York Yankees

My review of Steinberg and Spatz's The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership that Transformed the New York Yankees can be found here.

Weekly Standard Review of Edward Larson's Return of George Washington

can be found here...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/The-Return-of-George-Washington-1783_1789

Other reviews of the same book:

The Wall Street Journal:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-return-of-george-washington-1783-1789-by-edward-j-larson-1412365252

The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/books/review/edward-j-larsons-the-return-of-george-washington-1783-1789.html?_r=0

Back To School

Several months ago I went "back to school" (virtually speaking) to study something I actually WANTED to learn.  My portal is the website Coursera, which is a consortium of universities offering free online courses in a wide variety of topics (the acronym fashionable among academics for this phenomenon is MOOC (massive open online course) pronounced "MOOK").  Now that I'm at the half way mark through the 14 week class, I thought it would be useful to record my thoughts and impressions.

The course I'm taking  is offered by the University of Virginia (UVA) and titled The Modern World: Global History Since 1760. Taught by Philip Zelikow, White Miller Burkett Professor of History, the course is being taught simultaneously on the UVA campus (see here for a news clip about the course).  For his online students, Professor Zelikow delivers roughly seven tutorials per week in the form of videos recorded in his office that last between six and 35 minutes.  At the end of each week there is an online quiz.  There are also electronic bulletin boards for students to open discussion threads in which Zelikow and his teaching assistant will occasionally comment.

The weekly quizzes are multiple choice and there are no exams or papers.  This is certainly understandable given the work that would be involved to read essays and papers (about 40,000 students around the world have registered; it would be interesting to know how many stick it through all 14 weeks).  All that is really tested, then, is the student's aggregation of knowledge, with no real evaluation of understanding (which would involve essay questions) nor the ability to apply what is actually learned (which would involve writing papers).  UVA does not offer credit for completion of the course, although students receive a certificate upon its successful completion.

Different schools have a different approach to MOOCs, even those under the same umbrella.  For instance, this course runs the same period as the "live" version and is about as good a virtual reproduction as can be afforded to the university with minimal cost.  Other courses offered by Coursera last as few as six weeks, and seem more like advertisements for their extension school courses.  One course (not through Coursera) is actually a barely disguised vehicle for selling a book the school publishes.

So far, I don't see MOOCs as being quite as revolutionary as some hope (or fear).  They are better oriented towards more technical, quantitative material.  The only interaction with other students occurs through bulletin boards (Coursera does provide some networking for local meetups but this seems little used) without the give and take of a live class.  Absent a serious commitment by universities to hire many more TAs, there seems to be a limit on the quality of learning that a MOOC can provide as mentioned above.  If a university were to hire the quantity of graders needed, student fees would likely be involved, and that would probably curtail participation dramatically, especially for international students.  For those seeking such an option, there are already extension schools even at big name universities.

At the end of the day, what such courses might do is force universities, many of whom are convening committees to study the challenges posed by MOOCs, to reexamine the classroom and academic environment they are providing their own students.  In many cases, e.g., intro to accounting, I'm guessing they're really offering in-person MOOCs with massive student packed halls, materials taught mostly by TAs, and grading by problem set.  It's these sorts of experiences that are most easily replicated by MOOCs and therefore most threatened by them.  The small history seminars and English lit. classes, not so much.  

If competition from MOOCs force universities into bringing back quality, interactive learning as opposed to one way lecturing, they will have contributed significantly to higher education.  What really needs to happen in education is that employers, students and parents need to start focusing on education rather than credentialing.  There is significant evidence that higher education teaches too little and costs too much, but so long as the premium is placed on the paper (and the institutional name on the paper) rather than demonstrated learning, this situation won't get any better.

The "live" version of my class is taking place here: Nau Hall at the University of Virginia

This is where the virtual version takes place...

Baseball, Steroids and the Hall of Fame

The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY: As simple and stately as the game itself

Tomorrow the Baseball Hall of Fame announces its newest members. This year’s ballot is particularly interesting because two of the game’s unambiguously greatest players are on the ballot, but they are also strongly believed to be steroids users. They are Barry Bonds, aka baseball’s all time home run leader, and Roger Clemens, one of the greatest pitchers ever to take the mound (another big name user, Sammy Sosa, is also on the ballot for the first time this year).  The debate that began several years ago when Mark McGuire first reached the ballot will reach its apex. One could make at least make a case against McGuire and several other suspected players on non-steroids grounds. Anyone voting against Bonds or Clemens, however, will definitively need to take their stand against ever voting for someone strongly suspected of steroids use.

Baseball fans, players and journalists are split on the role steroids use should play in Hall of Fame voting.

Understandably, many do not want the Hall to be tainted by those whose inclusion is based on their deliberate use of an illegal and dangerous substance. Still can we imagine a Hall of Fame without Bonds or Clemens? (Perhaps – baseball’s all time leading hits leader is Pete Rose, barred forever for his gambling) Some argue that no one even suspected of steroid use should get in. After all, if we find out they did use after their election, there's no precedent for removal. Better safe than sorry if the Hall is to remain clean. If Mike Piazza, the great Mets and Dodgers catcher, does not make it this year that will be why. It’s the only explanation for last year’s failure of Jeff Bagwell to gain admission. They were just “big guys” during the steroids era.

No doubt about these guys:
Ruth, Wagner, Johnson et al. 

Others would just look at the stats and ignore steroid use. Each generation has its own "steroids" or form of cheating whether it's spitballs, amphetamines, etc the logic goes. We don't even fully understand to what degree steroid use even really benefitted the players who use them. They would ignore the issue all together.  Some would place a sort of asterisk on their plaques noting that they played during the steroid era (presumable all players from this era, clean or not, would have such a mark) and have some sort of exhibit explaining how steroids affected play during this time period.

My own (perhaps over-lawyerly) view: apply a "but for" test.

But for the player's steroids use, should he be in the Hall of Fame? I think this is the ideal test on paper, but the hardest to actually administer. After all, what do we really know about a player's use? What do we know about how his use affected his performance? What if we find out later that a player's admitted use in the twilight of an otherwise Hall of Fame career or only brief use during an injury was actually career long? (The A-Rod question). These are difficult questions, and require much investigation and supposition. For me, I'd rather engage in such detective work than simply ignore the issue all together or bar every guy who shot up at only one stage, perhaps well after his Hall of Fame career was established (the Roger Clemens scenario). We'll get plenty of arguments applying such a “but for” test, but hey, isn't that what the Hall of Fame voting is all about anyway?

N.B.: This year, I’d like to see Bonds, Clemens, Bagwell, Piazza, Schilling and Trammel make the cut. The last two are more sentimental, but not undeserving.

When it was still a game: actually that period lasted about 5 minutes
before people started placing bets, which was the only thing
that drew crowds in the 19th century.

.

Amazon Review of an Honourable Englishman

An Honourable Englishman

Adam Sisman

2012, pp. 672

Adam Sisman’s biography of English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper harkens us back to a time when the writing and teaching of history mattered.  From the 1930s through the 1980s the world was highly ideological, and the interpretation of even the distant past was hotly contested as being intimately relevant to contemporary events surrounding the rise of first fascism and then communism.  As the gladiators in this particular coliseum, certain historians became celebrities in a manner not seen before or since.  Appearing on television and the radio, and writing in newspapers and journals both academic and popular, they were much in demand to provide perspective on events such as trials of Nazi war criminals, the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission. 

Country homes, fancy cars, and exotic foreign travels play as large a role in the Trevor-Roper story as journal articles, conferences and books.  The reader is invited into the arcane world of Oxbridge and the vicious politics that consumed its scholars.  Flamboyant, brilliant, garrulous and out spoken, Trevor-Roper is a particularly engaging protagonist.  One author likened him to a “pop star” in terms of his standing with the public.  Although his academic work focused mostly on the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Trevor-Roper’s framework for understanding “his” period was in competition with those offered by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm.  Which interpretation prevailed was not seen as irrelevant at a time when a Marxist superpower was claiming that “the West” was irrevocably doomed because of natural historical forces.

Trevor-Roper with his wife:
a passionate yet stormy
relationship

Sisman does a particularly fine job covering the historical issues about which Trevor-Roper and his colleagues discussed and debated, sometimes in vituperative terms.  At the same time, he avoids turning the book into historiography.  The reader will understand just enough about the historical controversies to understand Trevor-Roper, and the controversies in which he engaged with relish, without getting too bogged down.

A typical "young man in a hurry" Trevor-Roper
would come to be frustrated later in life with his inability
to create a masterwork on the 17th century.  His inability
to navigate between complexity and narrative still eludes
many in academia.

Sisman’s generally sympathetic portrayal does not lead him astray when recognizing his subject’s shortcomings.  For example, his summation of Trevor-Roper’s involvement in the controversy surrounding the Warren Commission’s report is particularly harsh (“rashness,” “poor judgment,” “ obstinacy,” “arrogance”).  Trevor-Roper habitually separated the personal from the professional in a manner many others could not and consequently was frequently caught off guard at how personally colleagues took what he intended to be purely professional criticisms.  Sisman’s reliance on Trevor-Roper’s voluminous correspondence reminds us of the daunting challenge that will be met by anyone attempting to chronicle the life of the historians of today.

One final note: the American title of the book is a curiosity (it was not used in England where readers would recognize Trevor-Roper’s name more readily).  Trevor-Roper was not particularly honorable (except that he was incapable of keeping his honest opinions to himself, a sort of academic integrity perhaps) and he might wince at being identified as being more “English” than any other historian of the period, as he was very critical of those who failed to look beyond England’s borders when chronicling events.  Still anyone looking for a biography of Trevor-Roper in particular or for exposure to the world of Oxford dons and historians during their golden age will enjoy Sisman’s book tremendously.

Amazon Review of The Union War

The Union War
Gary Gallagher
2011, 256 pp.

Link to the Amazon review

An often neglected topic of Civil War literature is the role preserving the Union played in motivating the North. Even when the importance of preservation of the Union is acknowledged, it's often relegated to second tier status in favor of emancipation.

 University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher's latest work replaces preservation of the Union as the primary goal for which the North fought, helping 21st century Americans understand why it was so beloved by those willing to die for it. He differentiates this Northern GOAL from the war's CAUSE, which was "beyond dispute...controversies related to slavery." The Union War provides insight into subjective Union views on topics related to the war's aims, although it does not offer an objective assessment of their accuracy (e.g., whether the Union really afford its citizens, particularly those in urban slums and factories the economic opportunities often claimed). At the same time, it disputes the thesis that emancipation emerged as a goal equal to or greater than Union by the war's conclusion. To the vast majority of the North, emancipation remained a necessary tool to prosecute the war, and restoring the status quo ante was unthinkable given how slavery had nearly destroyed their beloved Union.

Gallagher explains the link between the Union and
 liberty and why northerners, particularly immigrants
cherished it for the opportunities it afforded

In a day when we debate concepts such as "American exceptionalism" there was little doubt that it was exceptional in 1861 in terms of popular government, or self-rule by the common (white) man. As flawed as American republicanism was in the middle of the 19th century, it still stood out as the most progressive form of government (if practiced imperfectly), especially when compared to the aristocratic and even more repressive forms of government found in Europe, which had fought, successfully, against republican inspired uprisings only a few years earlier. Fighting for the Union meant, in their view, fighting for the survival of self government and the rule of law in the world (recall Lincoln's "last best hope" rhetoric). To Union soldiers it also meant preserving the legacy of the founding generation, and protecting the inheritance of future generations of Americans.

Most likely he fought to
preserve the Union rather
than end slavery

 Gallagher reviews recent scholarship on the Civil War that denigrates the concept of Union as a worthy war aim, explaining why the Union was so important to Northerners. Another interesting theme is Union soldiers' hatred of slaveholders and oligarchs who threatened "liberty," but primarily the Union soldiers' own through their non-free labor economy. He discusses the link that Northerners placed between the Union and economic liberty, something Lincoln and others continually stressed, although, again, he does not evaluate its accuracy (he does, interestingly, cite Karl Marx for the view that Union victory would preserve the most progressive form of government heretofore existent and provide many oppressed Europeans with the potential for a small degree of economic autonomy in the form of western lands).

 Overall, Gallagher's work is a "most read" for students of American history. It stands as a reminder that ideas have consequences, and provides us with exactly what good history does: a window into a time period as seen through the eyes of those who lived it, rather than through the distorting lens of time that has led some to condescending, ahistorical conclusions about those who fought and died to preserve the Union.

Amazon Review of Fenway 1912

Amazon Review of Fenway 1912

Fenway 1912
Glenn Stout
2011, 416 pp.

Link to the Amazon review

Note: Fenway 1912 was recently awarded the Society of American Baseball Research's Seymour Medal (best book on baseball history) and Larry Ritter Award (best book on the deadball era). 

Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, A Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year is the latest in a string of books celebrating the storied ballpark's centennial next year. Three other books about Fenway have already been released this year and another six are on the horizon. In Fenway 1912, Glen Stout, the author of numerous team histories and other sports related books, covers "all the bases," surrounding the park's construction and the 1912 Boston Red Sox championship season.



The 1912 World Series between the Red Sox and Giants was
so monumental it earned the title "The First Fall Classic"

To read Fenway 1912 is to travel back to New England at the dawn of the 20th century. Readers will meet not only the players, but Fenway architect James McLaughlin and head groundskeeper Jerome Kelly while learning something about the early, pre-1920 game both on the field and from a business perspective. Another major character is Boston itself, and Stout spends some time discussing the spate of buildings that had gone up near Fenway Park that still stand, enjoying iconic status in their own right. The Irish pols that took over the reins of city government before the turn of the century and were comfortably ensconced by the time the book opens also play an important role that Stout does not neglect. Street cars weren't just used for travel downtown, but in between towns as well. "Nuf Ced" McGreevy and the Royal Rooters make their appearances as well throughout.

Michael "Nuf Said" McGreevy
The Sox's  most ardent supporter

Fenway is, of course, iconic - its odd shape instantly recognizable to even the most casual baseball fan. Stout opines, however, that Fenway has actually changed so much in its 100 year history that today's Fenway regular, transported back in time to the days of Howard Taft and Smokey Joe Wood would not recognize the ball park he was sitting in. This constant change, not its unchanging image, is the real reason that Fenway has survived while other stadiums from the same era such as Ebbets Field, Shibe (Connie Mack) and Tiger Stadium have fallen victim to the wrecking ball, he writes. Besides dispelling the myth of a timeless, never changing Fenway, Stout demolishes some other myths. For instance, Fenway's shape was dictated by the shape of the land parcel purchased by the owners. There was still undeveloped area around the stadium. Given how far the ball flew in 1912, however, Fenway's dimensions were considered more than adequate and few home runs were anticipated. Of course, the city grew up around Fenway, closing it in and making expansion difficult once the game changed in 1920 with the livelier ball and free swinging, homer seeking batsmen.

Stout demolishes the myth that Fenway's odd shape was
attributable to the scarcity of available land

The Red Sox themselves come alive in Stout's description of the 1912 season and World Series, and the epilogue fills in the rest of their story after 1912. Still, the book's largest character is the park itself. Fortunately, an enlightened ownership and fan base has made the concessions and changes necessary to preserve Fenway, so its story is still being written. While Red Sox fans and Frequent Fenway goers will enjoy 1912 the most, any fan of the game and its history will want to give Fenway 1912 five stars.

To this day, the 1912 team is the winningist in Red Sox history. While fans will be celebrating Fenway's 100 year anniversary with the gorgeous coffee table books spewing forth, they'll also want this excellent history of the stadium's birth and the team that inaugurated it.

Why I Don't Follow College Football (any longer)

Until the late 1950s collge football was much bigger than pro football

Dating my lack of interest in college football is difficult.  Growing up in Michigan, a state with not one but two NCAA Division One FBS football programs, I loved following the Big 10 (historical side note: there really were only 10 teams in the Big 10 once upon a time).  With its passionate student fan bases, marching bands, fight songs and a more exciting style of play than the National Football League, it was always much more fun to watch the Wolverines and Spartans than the Detroit Lions (ok, just about anything was).  Despite the debacle that was his brief presidency of the Detroit Tigers, longtime Michigan head coach Bo Schembechler remains one of my heroes (as does, for some reason not fully understood by me, Alabama coach Bear Bryant).  Yet today I rarely do anything more than check the scores every now and again.  When I do read something about college football in depth it’s usually because of some scandal with deeper societal impact, such as Penn State’s implosion.


Bo Schembechler: he turned down a truckload of
 money to stay at Michigan and became an even bigger legend:
 where are today's Schembehlers?

I think there are a number of culprits, originally having to do with the overregulation of the game and the way it deals with violations.  For the sin of “excessive celebration” for a late go-ahead touchdown, the opposing team will likely get the ball with good enough field position to kick a long game winning field goal, nullifying the heroic long run or 80 yard “bomb.”  A late night out with the teammates that leads to some cheap tattoos?  Goodbye national championship.  With a mindset that would have made perfect sense to Joseph Stalin and at which George Orwell would have salivated to parody, the NCAA has taken to declaring players retroactively ineligible and any games played with them forfeit no matter what the score on the field was or how long ago the final whistle blew.  In short, there’s no guarantee that the outcome of the game you just spent three hours watching won’t be altered by lawyers years later and the $75 Rose Bowl sweatshirt you bought your son to commemorate your alma mater’s gridiron glory rendered an embarrassing reminder best left at the bottom of the drawer.

When there were still ties in college football:
 the 1966 10-10 game between MSU and Notre Dame
 (both undefeated) is one of the true classics

The recent story regarding how Texas Tech head coach Tommy Tuberville walked out of a recruiting dinner and, having just accepted his new position at the University of Cincinnati, simply never returned started me down a new, separate line of reasoning why I’m just no longer interested in college football.  Too many of the game’s most important personas simply lack commitment to their schools.  This wasn’t even the first time Tommy Tuberville let down the program he coached.  Nor is he the first coach to leave his program in the lurch, swearing lifelong fealty to whichever school just hired him only to have already compiled a short list of what constitutes the next rung on their career ladder.  This is certainly not behavior restricted to college football.  Perhaps we have even come to expect this from the head coaches of the college football world, a small band more closely aligned with Machiavelli’s Condottiere than their more immediate predecessors by such behavior.  But that behavior can only exist in the long run because it is countenanced by the college administrators who hire them despite their track records.  In short, there’s simply no longer any “adults in the room” when it comes to college football. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the world we knew when we were young was a better one, but I’m convinced that the college football one that I knew from the 1970s and 1980s was such a world.  The sport I follow most closely, baseball, certainly had its share of troubles with steroids and imbalance of play, causing me and many others to lose interest in the 1990s.  Somehow, though, baseball came back and by virtually every metric is in great shape.  With all of the recent health issues surfacing about former NFL players and the epidemic of violence becoming associated with pro football both on and off the field, baseball has even arguably reclaimed its place atop the US sports world.

College football has faced an existential crisis in its history that was even more serious than what it faces today.  In the early 20^th century the game had become so rough that there were several fatalities each year and a movement to put an end to it.  It was able to clean up its act only after a Presidential intervention by Theodore Roosevelt, whose son played for the Harvard varsity squad.  The NCAA, whose governing status was one of the Roosevelt era reform, seems to have lost its way. 

Perhaps it is time for another outside intervention?



Teddy Roosevelt helped fix college football before: Is there another TR out there?

 

 

Review of The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

Amazon Review of The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction
Gil Troy
2009, 168 pp.

Link to the Amazon review

In THE REAGAN REVOLUTION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION professor Gil Troy asserts that Ronald Reagan is our most significant President since FDR.  Trying to explain seeming contradiction of a so-called right wing conservative President pursuing a “revolution” leads Troy to reinterpret Reagan and what his administration was about, analyze the extent to which Reagan succeeded, and evaluate how much of his legacy remains with us today.  Troy is mostly persuasive in his judgments but can occasionally make grandiose claims both for and against Reagan without always convincing his readers, many of whom will likely be disposed toward their own strong views on the subject.

"The PATCO showdown... a
turning point in America’s
economic, psychic, and
patriotic revival."
 

Troy does a nice job of setting the stage by explaining Reagan’s upbringing and personality (a task so daunting to official biographer Edmund Morris that Morris felt the need to invent a fictional character who could interact with Reagan as a character in a work of supposed non-fiction).  Reagan was a “loner who knew how to charm a crowd,” concludes Troy, the result of an upbringing in a lower middle class household that was constantly on the move.  His father’s alcoholism and the other turmoil in his youth led him, out of necessity, to create the sunny optimism that sometimes only he could see, but also could blind himself to others’ struggles.  Troy also provides a succinct history of the trajectory of American government in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and how Reagan came to view those events, that led America to the sorry state in which it found itself in 1980.  Such history is important, in Troy’s view, because Reagan was not so much trying to revolutionize America so much as “recover” a period in our history before he thinks we took a wrong turn.

While Troy seems to like Reagan personally and freely credits his political savvy (strongly rejecting the “amiable dunce” caricature popular during Reagan’s presidency), he also seems sympathetic to the views of Reagan’s opponents on many issues.  For instance, Troy credits the New Deal with helping to lift the working class into enough economic comfort that it would eventually become the base for Reagan’s triumph, the so-called “Reagan Democrats.”  Both Reagan critics and admirers will find much to like and dislike in Troy’s account, which does a very nice job covering every significant aspect of the Reagan years in the very limited space allotted by the “Very Short Introduction” format.

Reagan remained an ardent fan of
FDR -"The press is trying to paint me
 as trying to undo the New Deal.… I'm
trying to undo the Great Society"
 - Ronald Reagan.

Troy can contradict himself however, particularly when it comes to Reagan’s true goals.  Sometimes he is sensitive to Reagan’s continued support for New Deal fundamentals, but other times he notes that Reagan was unable to undo the New Deal.    Troy also asserts at length Reagan’s policies and values “personified” a “consumer-driven, celebrity-oriented, and selfish society” but then he points out that such trends both pre and post dated Reagan, undercutting such criticism.  He also seems surprised that Reagan and crew did nothing to roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s when the only assertion that they would try came from Reagan’s opponents.  There proof may be there for some of Troy’s conclusions but he does not always “show his work.”  He does a better job explaining the seeming contradictions in Reagan’s foreign policy and in explaining how in both domestic and foreign policy, Reagan would surprise both his supporters and critics, proving himself more flexible and pragmatic than the rigid caricature that both sides saw him as.

"Love him or hate him, Ronald Reagan remains
 the most influential president since Franklin D. Roosevelt."
.

 

Review of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

MAYFLOWER: A STORY OF COMMUNITY, COURAGE AND WAR
Nathaniel Philbrick
2006, 480 pp.

Link to the Amazon review

Nathaniel Philbrick’s MAYFLOWER: A STORY OF COMMUNITY, COURAGE AND WAR is essentially a retelling of the story of the settlement on Plymouth Colony in 1620 and the history of that colony though the end of what became known as “King Phillips War.” That conflict, which stretched throughout New England, came close to snuffing out the presence of English settlement in that part of North America. Despite our knowledge of how it all came out, Philbrook manages to create many moments of drama leaving the reader not wanting to put the book down as he recounts many of the individual narratives that make up the dramatic history of 17th century Plymouth and its surroundings.

The traditional story
 of the Pilgrims' first
 Thanksgiving is surprisingly
accurate

 Early on, Philbrick tackles “two conflicting preconceptions.” The first is that the Pilgrims “symbolize all that is good about America”. Its counter is that “evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans.” His research led him to a much richer, more interesting story: “real-life Indians and English of the seventeenth century were too smart, too generous, too greedy, too brave—in short, too human—to behave so predictably.” In short, there are heroes and villains among both the English and the Native Americans they encounter. This may upset some readers who prefer their preconceptions unblemished, but for the rest of us it makes for a much more interesting story and rings truer to our own experience in everyday life that courage, decency and wisdom are not traits endemic to one group or utterly lacking in another.

Generally, the group Philbrick refers to as the “Leideners” or those separatist English who had left England and moved to Holland because they could not, in good conscience, remain in the Church of England (a legal requirement at the time) come off well. They were extreme in their religious beliefs, and would later deny others the freedom to practice their religion that compelled them to sail to America in the first place. Still, they were dedicated to their God, incredibly brave and determined to establish a place for themselves where they could live the way they thought proper. For the most part, their dealings with the Native Americans they encountered were judicious and wise, and the Thanksgiving story we’ve come to know is, surprisingly, mostly correct if incomplete.

The David Patraeus of
his day, Benjamin Church
revolutionized the New
Englanders' way of war

Philbick’s telling leaves a little to be desired when explaining precisely how the Native Americans came to find themselves in the desperate position they were in when Phillip decided to war against the English. In fact, it sounds as though they were desperate to keep purchasing English goods but unwilling to engage in the sorts of work necessary to earn them. Finding that their agricultural way of life no longer sustainable they chose to sell their capital (land), leaving them in an even worse position. Philbrook lays this out but can’t quite bring himself to say that it was the Natives changing in some ways (longing for English goods) but not others (a willingness to adapt to the changing economy) that forced their hand. He also fails to go into any detail as to how the English governed themselves, mentioning their ultimate decisions but skimping on the decision making processes.

Hardly the benign savage
of legend, Squanto was a
shrewd go between who
exploited the Pilgrims and
Natives' ignorance for his
own purposes.

Philbrick's judgment of Englishmen and Natives is balanced and he carefully analyzes the judgments and misjudgments that led to a war no one wanted or expected that proved so catastrophic for the region and all of its peoples. Readers will likely see parallels to the War on Terror in many aspects of how the English initially fought but then came to adapt when their traditional methods proved unsatisfactory. In sum, MAYFLOWER stands as a very good introduction to the story of the English settling of New England and the first period of the New England colonies’ history.