Baseball and American Culture

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By Jill Moss

Broadcast: August 9, 2004

(THEME)

VOICE ONE:

Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA, in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Gwen Outen. This week on our program -- baseball and American culture.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

The game is traditionally known as America's national pastime. The men who play it professionally are "the boys of summer." Baseball is considered part of the American spirit. Books, songs, movies, plays, poems and lots of baseball terms have become part of the American experience.

An exhibit called "Baseball as America" is currently on show at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It contains more than five-hundred historical items. Most come from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Many people believe that baseball first started in this small town in eighteen-thirty-nine.

VOICE TWO:

In nineteen-oh-five, a committee was appointed to study the history of baseball. It was called the Mills Commission. Three years later, the Mills Commission reported its findings. The report declared that a Civil War hero named Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown.

Evidence collected by the commission showed that Doubleday modernized what started as a game of catch with as many as fifty players. The evidence showed that he reduced the number of players, added bases and created a playing area in the shape of a diamond.

No one knows for sure exactly how baseball began. But a copy of the commission report can be seen in the exhibit at the Natural History Museum. So can one of the first baseballs used by Abner Doubleday. The ball was found in a farmhouse near Cooperstown in nineteen-thirty-four.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

Organized professional baseball started with the National League. Teams formed this league in eighteen-seventy-six.

Baseball was supposed to stand for American beliefs like equality and the chance to succeed. But the sport was representative of society at the time. The National League was for white players only.

By eighteen-eighty-eight, more than sixty black players were on minor league teams. Barred from the National League, black players joined what were called the Negro Leagues. Teams began to appear in black communities throughout the country.

VOICE TWO:

The unofficial ban against black players in the National League lasted seventy years.

 

Jackie Robinson's Dodgers' Jersey

World War Two and the civil rights movement in the United States helped end the racial divisions in professional baseball. Jackie Robinson became the first black player to break the color barrier. The Brooklyn Dodgers accepted him to their team in nineteen forty-seven. Soon, other black players began to join major league teams.

The "Baseball as America" exhibit includes a shirt, hat and glove that Jackie Robinson wore as a Brooklyn Dodger. Also included is an example of the hundreds of death threats and hate letters that he received.

Blacks were not the only group excluded. Hispanic and Japanese players were also among those rejected.

Yet white Americans were not the only ones who enjoyed baseball. The museum exhibit includes baseball equipment used by Japanese-Americans held at an interment camp during World War Two.

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VOICE ONE:

In nineteen-ten President William Howard Taft started a custom. President Taft threw out the first pitch on opening day of the baseball season that year. Almost every president since then has continued the tradition of the opening day pitch.

Signed baseballs thrown by Presidents Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower as part of the exhibit. So are baseballs thrown by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the first President George Bush.

VOICE TWO:

On December seventh, nineteen-forty-one, Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the American Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a result, the United States entered World War Two.

The baseball season was suspended after the attack. Five weeks later, the head of Major League baseball asked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt if the season should continue. The president said yes. He wrote the baseball commissioner that the game was a way to raise American spirits.

That letter from President Roosevelt is part of the "Baseball as America" exhibit. Other items from World War Two include objects from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. This league was formed to help keep American spirits high during the war. At that time, some of baseball's most famous male players were away as pilots and soldiers.

The war ended in nineteen-forty-five. The women's league ended in nineteen-fifty-four after it lost popularity.

VOICE ONE:

Major League baseball postponed games for one week after the terrorist attacks of September eleventh, two-thousand-one. Several weeks later, a New York City firefighter discovered a baseball in the ruins of the World Trade Center. That ball is also in the "Baseball as America" exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Washin