On three
different ways to interpret what remains one of sport’s most stunning scandals.
When a group of
players on the White Sox conspired with gamblers to “fix” (or rather, from the
players’ perspective, throw) the 1919 World
Series, a story that unfolded over the following two years and culminated
in the 1921 “Black
Sox trial,” the scandal seemed to exemplify ideas of lost innocence and
purity (which were already in the air in that post-World War I, “lost
generation” moment). Nothing summed up those ideas better than the mythic but enduring image of a
young boy confronting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson outside the courthouse with the
words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” And in Eight
Men Out (1963), his seminal book on the scandal, Eliot Asinof
helped reiterate and enshrine those images of the scandal’s corrupting effects
and meanings on America’s national pastime and perspective.
There was
another side to Asinof’s portrayal of the scandal, however—one that didn’t
necessarily take hold of the popular consciousness in his era, but on which John Sayles’ 1988 film
adaptation of the book focuses at length. This interpretation focuses less
on the effects of the scandal and more on one of its key causes: the striking
yet representative greed and selfishness of Charles
Comiskey, the White Sox owner, in an era when professional athletes had
(compared to their employers, at least) no power or say in their careers and
fates. Sayles, for whom
labor history is one of the defining American issues and stories, pulls no
punches in his portrayal of Comiskey specifically and the era’s labor dynamics
more broadly—he likes to say that he tries to push beyond black and white in
his films and engage with the grey areas in between, and I believe he
has done so to great success on many occasions, but to my mind his Eight Men Out is at its heart a clear
and ringing indictment not of corrupt baseball players, but of a corrupt
capitalist system that uses and then scapegoats them.
There’s another
way to characterize that system, though: to focus on how much, to quote Denzel
Washington’s character in Glory, “We
all covered up in it, too. Ain’t nobody clean.” To see, that is, the Black Sox
as emblematic of unifying American goals and desires, however much we might
like to locate them outside of us instead. It’s to that end, I would argue,
that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Jay Gatsby’s closest New York associate the
mysterious Meyer Wolfshiem, a fictional version of Arnold
Rothstein, “the man who fixed the World’s Series” (as Gatsby puts it). One
could of course argue that Gatsby’s association with Wolfshiem reveals his
shadier and more shameful side, the kinds of gangster connections that Tom
Buchanan scornfully critiques. But to my mind, Gatsby ultimately embodies
nothing less than the American Dream—there’s a reason Fitzgerald
nearly changed his title to Under the
Red, White, and Blue—and so too, in its own dark and twisted way, does
making a fortune by fixing the nation’s most significant sporting event and
spectacle.
Next diamond
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on the Black Sox? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
As entertaining as they are, Asinof's and Sayles's Eight Men Out are flawed and fictionalized accounts of the Black Sox scandal. The baseball researcher Gene Carney worked extensively to unearth the facts behind the scandal, and he published his preliminary findings in Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. Unfortunately, Mr Carney passed away in 2009, but the work he began continues through SABR (see http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/al/whitesox/2009-07-28-BlackSox_N.htm). Also of interest (particularly for American Studies scholars) is Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal by Daniel A. Nathan, which examines the manifold ways the scandal has been represented (and twisted) in American popular culture.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment and info, T.S.! Will add to the weekend post as well.
ReplyDelete