[With another
autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first
month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments,
please!]
Three contexts
for William
Kashatus’ book September Swoon: Richie
Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration (2004).
1)
Baseball and public scholarship: In this
2013 post on Daniel
Okrent’s Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a
Baseball Game (1985), I made the case for that great baseball book as also
a model of public scholarly writing. That’s even more overtly the case for September Swoon, both because Kashatus is in fact an
academic historian and because his book does a masterful job connecting its
baseball stories (both the 1964 National League pennant race and the rookie
season of African American star player Richie [later Dick] Allen) to multi-layered
American histories and debates from the 1960s.
2)
Baseball and race: I’ve written
a good deal in this space about the intersections
between those two worlds, but there’s certainly more to say. That’s
particularly true because every team dealt
with integration in its own way and because those team and individual histories
continued to unfold long after the initial moments of integration. Those
realities are reflected in the very title of Kashatus’ book: more than 15 years
after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby’s debuts, Richie Allen experienced a great
deal of racism during his 1964 rookie season with the Phillies. In many ways,
as Kashatus argues, baseball offered and continues to offer a perfect microcosm
of these national issues.
3)
Baseball and collective memory: On the other
hand, there’s at least one striking difference between baseball and those
national histories. I’ve argued many times, in many ways, that we Americans are
quite bad at remembering
our darkest histories, such as those of racial conflict and oppression. When
it comes to sports histories, the opposite is true—we tend not only to remember
them well, but to do so with passion, with clear perspectives and ideas. I’m
willing to bet most Philadelphians who were alive in 1964 have strong memories
of and an opinion on what happened with the Phillies’ September swoon. Which
makes for a particularly good starting point for connecting those sports
memories to national histories, of course…
September Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?
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