MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: ON HANK GREENBERG
Although an unobservant Jew who considered his religion “an accident
of birth,” Greenberg said at the end of his life (he died in 1986)
that he was startled to find himself “wanting to be remembered not
only as a great ballplayer, but even more as a great Jewish
ballplayer.”
On a central Illinois baseball field in 1931, a 20-year-old minor
leaguer named Hank Greenberg was heckled by the opposing team’s third
baseman with anti-Semitic insults — language that we in 2014 would
call hate speech. When Greenberg could no longer stand the
provocations, which were echoed by an angry, roaring crowd, he
confronted the third baseman and was rushed out of the park by local
police for protection. Greenberg later said the fracas was “scary.”
Born in New York’s Greenwich Village, Greenberg, standing a little
under 6 feet 4 inches, spent most of his major league career as a
first baseman playing for the Detroit Tigers. He hit 58 home runs in
1938, only two short of Babe Ruth’s 1927 record, and he was twice
chosen as the American League’s most valuable player. He achieved this
against a recurrent aural backdrop of “Christ killer!” and other
anti-Jewish taunts.
“Every ballpark I went to, there’d be somebody in the stands who spent
the whole afternoon just calling me names,” Greenberg recalled in a
1980 oral history. “If you’re having a good day,” he said, “you don’t
give a damn. But if you’re having a bad day, why, pretty soon it gets
you hot under the collar.”
There had been Jewish baseball standouts before, but in the 1930s,
Greenberg was by far the most accomplished. (He remained the most
famous Jewish player until the rise of Sandy Koufax, who, like
Greenberg, declined to play on Yom Kippur.)
Soft-pedaling his achievement, Greenberg later noted that, by contrast
with African-Americans, Jews had never been systematically banned from
Major League Baseball. Nor, he added, had Jewish players endured
widespread threats of murder like those made against Jackie Robinson
when he entered the majors.
But Greenberg had to know that there was always the lurking danger
that one of those fevered anti-Semites in the stands might someday
turn to violence against him. For the 1930s were the high solstice not
only for Greenberg’s career but also for anti-Jewish anger in the
United States.
Fearing some of the social repercussions of the Great Depression and
the domestic political struggle over fighting Adolf Hitler, President
Franklin Roosevelt privately warned a friend that if a demagogue like
Huey Long (the Louisiana governor and senator who was assassinated in
1935) took up hatred of the Jews, “there could be more blood running
in the streets of New York than in Berlin.”
Greenberg was playing for a team whose hometown, Detroit, was shared
by two of that era’s most famous anti-Jewish rabble-rousers: the radio
star Father Charles Coughlin, and the auto magnate Henry Ford, onetime
publisher of the notoriously anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent and a
booklet called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”
For most of his 12 years in Major League Baseball (he interrupted his
career to fight in Asia during World War II), Greenberg displayed a
gritty, dignified refusal to be rattled. His biographer Mark Kurlansky
felt that Greenberg came to realize that “public displays of anger
only provoked anti-Semites and gained him neither respect nor peace.”
Still, after one game, Greenberg took off his spikes, marched over to
the Chicago White Sox clubhouse and declared that he wanted the player
who insulted him with a slur “to get on his feet.”
Greenberg participated in at least one early foreshadowing of modern
penalties for hate speech. During the 1935 World Series against the
Tigers, as Greenberg recalled, members of the Chicago Cubs loudly
called him “Jew this and Jew that.” A few weeks after the commotion
that followed when the umpire tried to get them to stop, the baseball
commissioner, the ex-judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, fined three Cubs
players $200 (about $3,480 today) each for using “vile, unprintable
language.” Although outraged that the umpire had also been fined,
Greenberg endorsed the sanction.
When Greenberg retired from baseball in 1947, he knew he had become a
symbol of how Jews were moving into the American mainstream. “Every
home run I hit,” he once said, “was a home run against Hitler.”
Although an unobservant Jew who considered his religion “an accident
of birth,” Greenberg said at the end of his life (he died in 1986)
that he was startled to find himself “wanting to be remembered not
only as a great ballplayer, but even more as a great Jewish
ballplayer.”
Greenberg’s teammate Birdie Tebbetts observed, “There was nobody in
the history of the game who took more abuse than Greenberg, unless it
was Jackie Robinson.” Robinson, the first African-American in the
major Leagues in the modern era, joined the Brooklyn Dodgers the same
year that Greenberg retired.
“They will keep needling Jackie,” Greenberg told a reporter that year,
“and he will react by forcing himself to play over his head.” Speaking
from his own experience, Greenberg predicted, “The more they ride him,
the more they will spur him on.”
Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine
books and a contributor to NBC News and “PBS NewsHour.” Follow him on
Twitter at @BeschlossDC.
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