RUBE FOSTER AND THE PLAN TO INTEGRATE BASEBALL IN 1926 by Russell Streur

 

RUBE FOSTER AND THE PLAN TO INTEGRATE BASEBALL IN 1926

 

   

 

Left:  What Could Have Been, Card WCB5, Topps, 2001.

Right:  Father of Black Baseball, Stars of the Negro Leagues, Card 16, 1990.

 

 

Cy Young won 32 games and lost 11 in 1903.  Andrew Foster, better known now as Rube, pitched some ball that year.  He started out slow, losing his first decision—then won the next 44.

 

The Bible of Baseball says that Babe Ruth could conjure up a homerun by simply pointing the head of his bat out toward the bleachers.  Rube Foster called a shot once.  The ball didn’t survive the swing.  Horsehide, thread and cork rained down on second base.

 

Managers, club owners and league presidents are in baseball’s Hall of Fame. 

 

Miller Huggins led his New York Yankees to three league titles and a .591 winning percentage. Rube Foster led his team to three league titles and .617 winning percentage.

 

Charles Comiskey owned one of Chicago’s historic baseball clubs.  Foster owned another.

 

Harry Wright built the National League and Ban Johnson built the American League.  Rube Foster built the Negro National League.

 

Henry Chadwick is often called the Father of Baseball.  The paternal ancestor of the game we play today is Rube Foster.

 

Until the 2020 Negro Leagues Legends set traced his career in fine art, Rube Foster wasn’t on many baseball cards.  He was Black, and his playing days were mostly over by 1915.  But no one ever played the diamond fields any better than Foster, and the legacy he left to baseball is as rich a gift as any man ever gave the game.

 

The son of a preacher, Andrew Foster was born, according to traditional sources, in Calvert, Robertson County, in east Texas, on September 17, 1879.  According to conflicting scholarship, Rube named LaGrange in Fayette County as his birthplace.  And one census document seems to place the nativity in the nearby Fayette County town of Winchester. It is without dissent that baseball took hold of Andrew in at a young age, made him a pitcher, and pulled him north out of the cotton lands.  In 1902, Foster took the mound in Philadelphia against Connie Mack’s Athletics.  Facing Rube Waddell, Foster won the contest 5 to 2, and is said to have carried Waddell’s nickname off the field.

 

 Clockwise from upper left:  with the Royal Poinciana of the Florida Hotel League, 1905, Negro Leagues Legends, Card 22, 2020; with the independent Philadelphia Giants, 1906, Negro Leagues Legends, Card 113, 2020; with the independent Leland Giants, 1909, Negro Leagues Legends, Card 144, 2020; with the independent Chicago American Giants, 1914, Negro Leagues Legends, Card 109, 2020.

 

For the next ten years, Foster ranked as one of the great pitchers of the game.  After his playing days, he took control of the Chicago American Giants together with John Schorling, son-in-law of Charles Comiskey.  Under Foster’s leadership, the American Giants became one of the top clubs in Black Baseball.  Foster was a visionary whose ability matched his ambition.  He dreamed of integrating baseball, and for that, he needed a league.  In 1919, he summoned a group of Midwestern independent club owners to Kansas City and hammered out the agreement that produced the Negro National League at the Paseo YMCA on February 19.

 

Foster wanted a showdown with the major leagues and set out to repeal ”the gentleman’s agreement” barring Black players.  His league’s slogan was “We are the ship…All else the sea.” It might just as well have been “we have to be ready when the day comes.”

 

 Remembering the Negro Leagues, Rube Foster and the 1919 Chicago American Giants, Card 7, Tuff Stuff Magazine, September 1992.

 

The owners elected Foster president of the league and placed teams in Cincinnati, Detroit, Dayton, Indianapolis, Kansas City and St, Louis.  Two teams were based in Chicago—Foster’s American Giants and Joe Green’s Chicago Giants.  Green was a tough customer in a tough town, and once had tried to score from third on a broken leg

 

The Negro National League also benefited from the robust owners C. I. Taylor of the Indianapolis ABCs and J. L. Wilkinson of the Kansas City Monarchs.

 

Left: Charles Isham Taylor, with the independent Indianapolis ABCs, 1916, Negro Leagues Legends, Card 67, 2020.  Right:  James Leslie Wilkinson, with the variously affiliated Kansas City Monarchs, 1920-1946, Negro Leagues Legends, Card 177, 2020. 

 

With the team still carrying the vestige of a past sponsorship with the American Brewing Company, Taylor joined the ABCs in 1914.  He may have been Black baseball’s finest manager.  He’s certainly the one of the few men to ever argue an umpire’s decision on a close play—after being called safe.  Taylor once declared himself out on a steal of third when the umpire’s safe call offended his Taylor’s sense of honesty and fair play.

 

Wilkinson was the only white owner in Foster’s circuit, and his Kansas City Monarchs proved vital to the success of the new league.  The Monarchs were the direct descendants of the All Nations team, which Wilkinson had established in Des Moines in 1912 and moved to Kansas City three years later.  The All Nations simply ignored the Jim Crow notions of the day by fielding a team of Black, Chinese, Cuban, Hawaiian, Italian, Mexican and white players.

 

Foster’s Negro National League began play in 1920, the same year Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was selected to become commissioner of the major leagues following the Black Sox scandal.  While the white leagues suffered the consequences of the thrown World Series, Foster’s league flourished.  Plunk Davis, pitcher with the St. Louis Giants, was one of the league’s stars.  He is credited with the responsibility for the invention of the batting helmet—not the invention of the helmet, just the need for it.  Some batters found Drake’s habit of throwing warmup pitches into the batting screen and yelling ‘Look Out!’ unnerving.

 

Bill “Plunk” Drake, Negro League Baseball Stars, Card 69, Larry Fritsch Cards, 1986.

Maintaining the Chicago American Giants year after year as one of the country’s best Black baseball teams as its chief executive and field manager would have been enough for most men in a workweek.  But not Foster.  He ran the Negro National League with the same commitment, settling disputes between the ball clubs and balancing books and roster strengths among the teams.  He was described as “the heart, soul and uncompromising guiding light” of the league.  It took long hours. 

 

By the end of the 1925 season, Foster’s contributions to baseball equaled any man’s accomplishments, white or Black, before or since.  Foster had succeeded in each of his roles as player, manager, owner and league president.  But Foster’s dream of achieving equality between the white and the Black game was unfulfilled.  One way or another, he was going to force baseball to find the common ground.

 

 

Rube Foster, with the Philadelphia Giants circa 1905,  The American Game, Card 31, Upper Deck, 1994.

 

 

It wasn’t going to be easy. Landis, the game’s Imperial Wizard himself, stood in Foster’s way.  Landis’ standard reply to the question of Blacks in baseball did not permit further discussion: “The answer is no.”  When Landis laid down law, few argued.  Make no mistake—the law was specific to Blacks.  It did not exclude other American minorities or foreign nationalities. The door was wide enough for Big Chief Bender and Jim Thorpe and other Native Americans, and for Cuban and Mexican players.

 

But Landis had no sympathy for Blacks.  The Judge even banned white major league players from wearing their team uniforms when playing exhibitions against Black teams.  Landis tried to eliminate Black-white exhibitions throughout his reign as commissioner, but the barnstorming circuits were too lucrative an opportunity for players to surrender to the Judge. 

 

A lot of the country was outside the bounds of Landis’ authority anyway.  Half of Landis’ clubs were concentrated in a narrow corridor running up the Eastern Seaboard from Washington D.C. to Boston.  Major league baseball reached no further south than the railroad tracks running west from the nation’s capital to Cincinnati and on through to St. Louis. 

 

Semi-pro circuits paid little attention to Landis’s ban.  During the early 1930s, the Berkeley (CA) International League began to field Black, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and white teams drawn from the multi-cultural neighborhoods of the Bay area.

 

In 1934, the Denver Post’s baseball tournament dropped its restriction against participation by Blacks, and the newspaper invited the Kansas City Monarchs to play.  The Monarchs finished second to that year’s mixed zealots of The House of David, whose congregation Satchel Paige joined long enough to win three games in five days at the event.  The tournament remained open to Blacks.  The Pittsburgh Crawfords won the tournament in 1936, as did the Black barnstorming Trujillo All-Stars in 1937.

 

The Wichita Tournament, sponsored by the National Baseball Congress, opened its field to Black players and teams in 1935.  The American West had a history of tolerance on its diamonds.  In the early 1900s, Black players dotted lineups alongside white players across North Dakota.    In 1915, the civic leaders of Brinsmade hired Plunk Drake off the touring Black Tennessee Rats team to help the city compete against local competition and the all-star teams that toured the plains.

 

Also beyond Landis’ reach was the California Winter League. For decades, some of the finest players in the country—Black and white and Mexican—toured up and down the California coast.  Others played winter ball on freely mixed teams in the Caribbean liberty of Havana’s Tropical Stadium, a showcase of desegregated talent sure to have given Judge Landis nightmares.

 

Clearly, the opportunity existed to break the major league color line years before Jackie Robinson stepped across the chalk in 1947.  Foster thought it could happen in 1926.

 

 

Negro National League President in his rocking chair, 1921.

Right: Rube Foster, Negro League Baseball Stars, Card 18, Larry Fritsch Cards, 1986

Left:  Rube Foster, Greats of the Game, Card 111, Fleer, 2001.  

 

 

The general idea of the time was that baseball would be integrated not by an individual, but by an entire black club joining one of the leagues, if the right team could prove its worth.  Foster had been down this road before.  The Leland Giants, for whom Foster managed and pitched, was a charter member of the integrated Chicago City League and won the Windy City championship in 1909.  The Leland Giants were also the first Black club to join the California Winter League, during the 1910-1911 season.  Foster undoubtedly believed his perennially powerful American Giants fit the present bill, and Foster had friends in the major leagues who he thought might help.

 

One was American League President Ban Johnson, the man who broke the National League stranglehold on major league status and one of Foster’s best friends in the game.  Foster thought Johnson might approve a plan for the American Giants to play exhibitions against clubs on their off dates during road trips to Chicago. A kind of associate affiliation for the American Giants would open the door to full major league status for the rest of the Negro National League down the road. 

 

Foster also counted New York Giants manager and National League hothead John McGraw as a friend.  The two had known each other for more than 20 years. McGraw once had tried to sneak a Black player—second baseman Charlie Grant—across the color line by passing him off as a Native American.  McGraw’s attempt wasn’t based on the pursuit of social justice.  He wanted Grant for his glove. 

 

On February 11, 1926, Foster met with Johnson and McGraw.  It’s a testimony to the high regard his white peers had for Foster that the meeting took place at all.  Johnson and McGraw had been blood enemies for nearly a quarter-century, ever since McGraw jumped the American League ship to take over the helm of the National League New York Giants in 1902.  Fred Lieb, who knew a thing or two about the subject, said that Johnson carried his anger toward McGraw from that summer to the grave.  “The pair never spoke again.”

 

Johnson and McGraw were big names in the game, but Johnson didn’t have the kind of pull he used to have.  Loser of a half-dozen knife fights with Landis, Johnson would be pushed out of the American League presidency by club owners in mid-1927.  McGraw didn’t wield the clout of his younger days, either.  And while McGraw often lauded the ability of Black players and bemoaned the unwritten law that prevented him from signing any, there may have been less to his quotes than met the ear.  New York Daily News sportswriter Jimmy Powers conducted an informal poll of baseball executives in 1933 to measure support for integration, and Powers reported that only McGraw was openly opposed to the idea.  

 

Little of substance is recorded about Foster’s meeting with Johnson and McGraw.  There isn’t even agreement on where the meeting occurred.  One account states the meeting was held in Philadelphia during a conference between the Negro National League and the Eastern Colored League.  A different account places the meeting at the Chicago Beach Hotel.  But even as a young man, Foster claimed equality with white baseball.  He spoke his mind in 1902 when he joined Leland’s then-named Chicago Union Giants.  “If you play the best clubs in the land, white clubs you say,” Foster told a club backer who warned the Texan of northern competition, “it will be a case of Greek meeting Greek.  I fear nobody.”

 

In Foster’s mind, the color line was a door that swung both ways.  If he couldn’t come through one way with the American Giants, he would break the color line the other way by finding a white player to enlist on his team. Foster always told his players to never let the last pitch pass by without a swing.  He believed that a baseball game was won by getting the one right hit at the one right time.  In 1926, Foster was going to swing away and get that hit off Landis.  One way or another, the color line was going to break in 1926.  Rube Foster was going to see to that.

 

Except, to put it bluntly, Foster went crazy.

 

A diagnosis is impossible from this distance.  What’s certain is that Foster was almost asphyxiated by a gas leak while drawing a bath at an Indianapolis boarding house in May of 1925.  It is also certain that Foster overworked himself for years keeping the Negro National League afloat.  “Oft times I have felt that the task was hopeless: I felt ready to give up,” Foster wrote in an article for the Chicago Defender early in the 1923 season.  “The strain placed upon me has proved great almost beyond endurance.” 

 

Rube’s son, Earl, said that McGraw turned him down at that February meeting, and Earl said the refusal broke his father’s spirit.

 

Some say Rube’s health began to fail as early as 1924.

 

Rube took his usual seat on the bench as manager of the American Giants to start the 1926 season but he clearly wasn’t well. Third baseman and Foster acolyte Dave Malarcher took over managing the club in mid-summer.  In September, Foster was arrested after brandishing an icepick and chasing a friend.  He was committed to the Illinois state asylum for the insane in Kankakee that same month and spent the last four years of his life in the hospital.

 

Urging an invisible team toward a distant flag, the last ball got by Foster on December 9, 1930.  A cold rain fell in Chicago and turned to snow as funeral hymns were sung over Foster’s casket.  Eulogies were spoken and thousands of mourners attended the final services. With his passing, baseball lost a singular man, the likes of which the long, green seasons of the game have only seen once.

 

 

 

 

 Rube lived 51 years.  An equal lifetime passed from the date of his death to his induction in the Hall of Fame in 1981.

 

 ---Russell Streur