I wish to know more about Tom Yawkey

absintheofmalaise

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We have at least one article that will be coming out soon on the .com about Yawkey. Until then, Google is a good place to start. Lots of info on him out there.
 

lexrageorge

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Expect this topic can become controversial.

Bigot: Sure. Well documented, and I will not defend his reprehensible views in any way. However, he was hardly alone along MLB owners during the era stretching from the 1930's to the 1960's. Part of the problem is that Yawkey stuck around until 1976, and his wife was no better. Then there were so many Yawkey hold overs running things in the front office that it really took the sale of the franchise to truly cleanse the team's culture, although by some accounts things had improved during the Duquette years.

Savior of the franchise: Well, the fact remains that Yawkey did buy the Red Sox at a time when the survival of the franchise was in question. It was during the height of the Great Depression, Fenway had been badly damaged in a fire, the team had long ago sold off their stars. The team had lost more than 100 games 5 times in 8 years, and more than 90 in those other 3. Could another wealthy white male business with more enlightened views bought the franchise at the time and rescued the franchise in the same way? I guess it's theoretically possible, but I'd be skeptical that such folks were lining up to buy anything given the economics of the time.

I sometimes wonder if Yawkey would have been given a pass on the bigotry front, no matter his actual views and behavior, had he died or sold the team in the 1960's.
 

Al Zarilla

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Expect this topic can become controversial.

Bigot: Sure. Well documented, and I will not defend his reprehensible views in any way. However, he was hardly alone along MLB owners during the era stretching from the 1930's to the 1960's. Part of the problem is that Yawkey stuck around until 1976, and his wife was no better. Then there were so many Yawkey hold overs running things in the front office that it really took the sale of the franchise to truly cleanse the team's culture, although by some accounts things had improved during the Duquette years.

Savior of the franchise: Well, the fact remains that Yawkey did buy the Red Sox at a time when the survival of the franchise was in question. It was during the height of the Great Depression, Fenway had been badly damaged in a fire, the team had long ago sold off their stars. The team had lost more than 100 games 5 times in 8 years, and more than 90 in those other 3. Could another wealthy white male business with more enlightened views bought the franchise at the time and rescued the franchise in the same way? I guess it's theoretically possible, but I'd be skeptical that such folks were lining up to buy anything given the economics of the time.

I sometimes wonder if Yawkey would have been given a pass on the bigotry front, no matter his actual views and behavior, had he died or sold the team in the 1960's.
I see your point. Still, the sham that supposedly was the "tryout" for Jackie Robinson, and passing on Willie Mays, who purportedly could have been had first by the Red Sox for $5,000, those things were so overwhelmingly damning, no matter what else he did. I guess you could say he did save the franchise, but, another one of his philosophies, concentrating on bringing in or developing right hand power hitters like Foxx, York, Vern Stephens, Gernert, Stuart, etc. while mostly ignoring pitching (some exceptions, like Lefty Grove and Wes Ferrell early on) hurt the Sox' chances (not that Foxx, in particular, wasn't one to lust after any time you could get someone like him). My God, the 1950 team hit .302 and OPS'd .848, and they finished in third place! Bringing in Schilling and Foulke to go with Pedro and the others, finally broke the curse.
 

chrisfont9

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I'm with Al Zarilla. His only beneficial contribution was being rich. I'm sure lots of people felt a strong personal connection to him, but his approach to team construction was the real "curse," and the fact that it was based in part on confederate-style bigotry just makes me sick. I'm old enough to remember how "beloved" he was, officially, but not old enough to remember why. Shut Out by Howard Bryant is a good re-telling of the bad old racist days.
 

barbed wire Bob

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I see your point. Still, the sham that supposedly was the "tryout" for Jackie Robinson, and passing on Willie Mays, who purportedly could have been had first by the Red Sox for $5,000, those things were so overwhelmingly damning, no matter what else he did. I guess you could say he did save the franchise, but, another one of his philosophies, concentrating on bringing in or developing right hand power hitters like Foxx, York, Vern Stephens, Gernert, Stuart, etc. while mostly ignoring pitching (some exceptions, like Lefty Grove and Wes Ferrell early on) hurt the Sox' chances (not that Foxx, in particular, wasn't one to lust after any time you could get someone like him). My God, the 1950 team hit .302 and OPS'd .848, and they finished in third place! Bringing in Schilling and Foulke to go with Pedro and the others, finally broke the curse.
Was it Yawkey's philosophies or was it the philosophies of the people around him? My impression is that Yawkey considered the team to be more of a hobby and not a business and he really didn't know that much about roster construction. I also got the impression that he hired people based upon likability and not on ability.
 

teddywingman

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I can't remember where I read this, but apparently Yawkey used to sit in a lawn chair on the field at Fenway, with a transistor radio when the Sox were on the road.
I like to think of him that way, not to excuse or ignore the bigotry, but to remember that he did love baseball.
 

scotian1

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As a southern man growing up in that time period being a bigot would not be unusual. I do believe he was instrumental in keeping the franchise alive in Boston. Look at the average attendance at Fenway during the 1930s and 40s. Many owners might have been tempted to move the franchise, Yawkey held fast. I certainly don't excuse him employing management that turned a blind eye to the talents of Jackie Robinson or Willie Mays and that will forever haunt the team's history. Like most individuals there are good and negative points about him but looking at him through the eyes of today's standards can be misleading. If we apply today's standards to these things the city of Boston doesn't come out well. in this regard, either.

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/teams/rsoxatte.shtml
 

Al Zarilla

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Was it Yawkey's philosophies or was it the philosophies of the people around him? My impression is that Yawkey considered the team to be more of a hobby and not a business and he really didn't know that much about roster construction. I also got the impression that he hired people based upon likability and not on ability.
Maybe that's right. I have read that Eddie Collins, Yawkey's first GM and the guy who recommended to Yawkey that he buy the Red Sox, was very adamant about signing no black players (Wiki says Howard Bryant wrote he was the same way toward Jews and Catholic (seriously?). As for Yawkey letting his minions do all the roster construction, etc., I've always felt that the guy at the top is ultimately responsible for everything major that goes on in an organization. The Red Sox being the last to sign a black player, Pumpsie Green in 1959, who wasn't even good, has to be a reflection on Yawkey himself.
 

mauf

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Zero MLB teams moved or folded between 1920 and 1950. The Red Sox, too, would have found a way to muddle through the Depression in Boston without Tom Yawkey. And with the team's five championships being very much a living memory in those days, I don't see any way the Braves (who didn't exactly set the world on fire in the 30s and 40s) would have supplanted the Red Sox as Boston's favorite team.

It does seem likely that we wouldn't have Fenway Park in its present form (or at all) without Yawkey. That's not nothing, but it's dwarfed by the darker side of his legacy.
 

Rasputin

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One can be both the hero and the goat, and Tom Yawkey is. He helped the team when it was at its worst and worsened the team when it got better. He treated it cavalierly and let it be run by racist douchebags.
 

threecy

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Let's not pretend that Tom Yawkey was a bigot sitting alone on an island. Fingers can be pointed at a lot of other prominent people when it comes to race issues in Boston, which was in the midst of busing problems when Yawkey died.
 

lexrageorge

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I agree that Tom Yawkey is ultimately responsible for the views of those under him. At the same time, Yawkey's views were hardly unique among his fellow owners in major league baseball during his era. To think otherwise is just turning a blind eye to the realities of the times. It's not clear that the views of Topping, Webb (NYY), Carpenter (Phillies) or Briggs (Detroit) were any more enlightened.

Teams did move in the 1950's. The Red Sox would not have been immune to the same pressures that affected the A's, Browns/Orioles, Braves, Dodgers, and Giants. Those pressures probably would have been greater had Yawkey not invested a lot of money into the team and ballpark starting in the late 1930's and 1940's. There were not a lot of fans going to Fenway by the mid-1950's.
 

RG33

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He really wasn't Southern, though. His family had an estate (plantation?) in South Carolina where Yawkey would spend time, but he was born in Detroit, moved to New York as a kid, went to a prep school in Westchester, N.Y., and then to Yale.
I had no idea about most of this. It was interesting reading about him. The Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center in South Carolina is the largest preserve ever gifted to the State. On top of being a bigot, he apparently liked birds and alligators.

http://discoversouthcarolina.com/articles/see-coastal-landscape-and-habitat-at-tom-yawkey-wildlife-center
 

SumnerH

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Gagliano

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....(Wiki says Howard Bryant wrote he was the same way toward Jews and Catholic (seriously?)....
I think our recently dearly departed Frank Malzone would agree with that. New England folk like to make a lot of fun about the south, but it was no picnic being Italian, Irish, Catholic, French, Black, or Native American even until very recently.

Take a look at some late 70's Red Sox team pictures to see how the policies and attitudes of the previous decades held over.
 

Mighty Joe Young

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I think our recently dearly departed Frank Malzone would agree with that. New England folk like to make a lot of fun about the south, but it was no picnic being Italian, Irish, Catholic, French, Black, or Native American even until very recently.

Take a look at some late 70's Red Sox team pictures to see how the policies and attitudes of the previous decades held over.
For sure .. Virtually all the black American stars the RedSox had post 67 ended up being traded .. Reggie Smith, Cecil Cooper, George Scott , Ferguson Jenkins,Tommy Harper to name just a few obvious ones.
 

glasspusher

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Thanks. I more or less was asking for people's personal opinions on him. Sorry, I should have clarified.
Hey Opes,
Jim Rice was my hero when I was growing up in NJ in the late '70s (thank you WTIC Hartford!). Hearing about Yawkey's racist ways and those who took over after he left really frosts me. The combination of racism in the Sox organization at that time, added to the front office incompetence? I guess I'm glad I only found out the full story after 2004.
Things weren't perfect in NJ in the late 1970s either- my mom told me a few years back when the Hortons moved into the neighborhood, some parents told their kids not to play with us because "we played with the black kids".

I take what I've learned from the past and try to make the future better.
 

MtPleasant Paul

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I don't think Yawkey was uniquely racist or bigoted among major league owners of that era. It took an imaginative and courageous executive in Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson, and the Red Sox were neither imaginative nor courageous during the 1933-1966 era. Not mentioned so far in this discussion is the role of alcohol in the management of the Red Sox. Yawkey was an alcoholic who did not stop drinking until the mid-sixties. (In fact he fell off the wagon at the Red Sox pennant winning party in 1975, according to Pete Gammons, and he was dead a year later.) The incompetent (I think) GM Joe Cronin and the truly racist Mike Higgins were his drinking buddies, which is why they hung on so long. The one competent executive who might have changed things - Billy Evans who built a good farm system in the early 1940's - was fired over the phone by Yawkey while in a drunken stupor. Evans always believed that had he showed up for work they next day, Yawkey would have forgotten and he would have kept his job.

The fundamental change in the Red Sox attitude toward signing black players came when Yawkey, now a recovering alchoholic, replaced Higgins with Dick O'Connell in the mid-sixties. It was under O'Connell and not Duquette nor John Henry that the basic change occurred.

There were quite a number of African-American families living on Yawkey's plantation near Georgetown, SC. He was remembered fondly by them and was generous to black and white charities in the area. One can tour the Tom Yawkey Wildlife Center one day a month. I took the tour with 15 other people, and our black guide, the son of one of Yawkey's tenants drew a very favorable picture of Yawkey's relations with local blacks. He also told of Yawkey's role in relocating a whorehouse to Georgetown, allegedly patronized by Yawkey and Red Sox players one year coming back from spring training. The brothel, which was not closed down until the 1960's, is mentioned in Bradley's recent biography of Ted Williams.

Yawkey needs a good biography, which should focus not just on his Red Sox connection but also his life in Georgetown where he had many friends and his business career in which he may have been very active, not just a passive legatee. I think it would reveal that his racial attitudes were much more complex than widely believed.
 

John Marzano Olympic Hero

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I don't think Yawkey was uniquely racist or bigoted among major league owners of that era. It took an imaginative and courageous executive in Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson, and the Red Sox were neither imaginative nor courageous during the 1933-1966 era.
You didn't have to be "courageous" or "imaginative" in 1955 to have a black guy on your team. Just not so racist, or maybe not have your obviously racist buddies run your organization.

It was under O'Connell and not Duquette nor John Henry that the basic change occurred.
Perhaps. But it went into a severe hibernation until Duquette and Mo Vaughn came along.
 

lexrageorge

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The fundamental change in the Red Sox attitude toward signing black players came when Yawkey, now a recovering alchoholic, replaced Higgins with Dick O'Connell in the mid-sixties. It was under O'Connell and not Duquette nor John Henry that the basic change occurred.
...
First, excellent post detailing some of the contradictions behind Tom Yawkey. I don't disagree with your overall points. However, there is more that goes beyond the history you described. Yes, it is true the Red Sox started to scout and sign black players in the 1960's. But some notable black players did express the difficulties they had in playing for Boston during the 1960's and 70's: Reggie Smith and Tommy Harper being two notable examples. There were rumors that black players from other teams would nearly always put Boston on their "no trade" list, or tell their agents that they would not go to Boston as a free agent. And that occurred even during the 1980's; Harper was fired for simply mentioning the fact that the Red Sox associated with a whites-only chapter of the Elks club in Winter Haven in 1985. Tom Yawkey was long dead, but many of his racist cronies were still in key roles up through the 1980's.

By the time Dan Duquette was named GM, Jean Yawkey had died, and Haywood Sullivan had been bought out by John Harrington. It's around that time that the team's reputation among black players had truly begun to change.
 

chrisfont9

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The (in)famous busing photo taken three months before Tom Yawkey died.

Boston was a much different city back then. Tom Yawkey was not alone.
OK but the Celtics were the complete opposite. So you have two teams and their leaders, one giving in to either personal racial animus or that of his associates, and generally sucking at their primary objective, and another completely ignoring barriers, the context of racially charged Boston, and blazing a trail for black athletes. And winning at a level not seen outside of UCLA hoops, as it happens. Maybe the Celtics suffered financially or in some other way, but I would guess not. To me, you have the enlightened team-building actions and the utterly unenlightened ones, side by side, in stark contrast.
 

WalletTrack

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Tom Yawkey was fine man for his times. His contemporaries(owners) in Baseball thought ol Tom was solid keep the old ways the longest. Being the last team to intergrate after Jackie,Roy, Hank, and Willie means your ownership hewed to a certain ethic. And that was more important than winning.
Tom Yawkey save the team in the Thirties. But it cost Red Sox Fans 80+ year of heartache and Yankee teabagging.
On the the Yawkey Plus side.
1.Jimmy Fund-Tom's love of Ted give it momentum.
2.Yawkey Foundation- my family can't be the only folk who's had a family or friend visit the Yawkey Center at MGH.

But that's easy stuff to be for.

It's harder to the person stand up against the prevailing racism at the time and make a strong statement for racial equality,
Unfortunately Tom Yawkey was not that person.
 

smastroyin

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You should definitely read Bryant's book. However, there are some pretty important caveats. First, the book was written with an agenda. An agenda earned by being a black dude growing up in a racist city, but an agenda nonetheless, and the truths that support the agenda are given big neon highlights. Rumor and innuendo that support the agenda are treated as truths. In short, while what he presents may not ever be strictly counterfactual, you should treat the work like you would a Michael Moore documentary or any story on Breitbart.

I think the fundamental element of the story is this. Yawkey and company were bigots, but their bigotry was the distilled bigotry of baseball and Boston. This statement is not meant to excuse them, and in some ways it condemns them a bit more, for not having the courage or conviction to make any kind of stand.

As for the Celtics, Boston hated Bill Russell and Bill Russell hated Boston. This is well documented and remained true until recently. Obviously you can still praise the Celtics approach, but don't for one minute think that the Celtics success somehow disproves the idea that Boston was racist, or that the Celtics success made Bostonians think fondly of black people in the 60s.
 
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curly2

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I wrote an article about Yawkey for SABR. Short version: I am much more sympathetic than the current prevalent view.
http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/6382f9d5
No offense personally, but this seems like a pretty big whitewash, no pun intended. You briefly touch overall on the issue of race, but made no reference to "Get those n-----s off the field!" at the sham Jackie Robinson tryout -- if Yawkey himself didn't say it, apparently somebody did -- no reference to the fact they passed on Willie Mays and none to the fact that Yawkey hired Pinky Higgins, a proud racist who made no bones about that fact to the press, both as manager and later GM.
 

MtPleasant Paul

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Lots of good stuff here, and an excellent SABRE piece.

No question that the racial insensitivity persisted. The Elks Club episode was unfortunate. But who were these "racist cronies" who were still there in the 1980's?

I don't know how tight that second marriage was. Yawkey and Jean had separate sky boxes at Fenway. At the Georgetown property our guide pointed out two old mobile homes. When Yawkey brought her there after their marriage, Jean supposedly refused to move into the big house where the first Mrs. Yawkey had lived. Yawkey blew up, refused to move into the manor house and had the two humble mobile homes brought in where the two lived separately thereafter.
 

chrisfont9

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As for the Celtics, Boston hated Bill Russell and Bill Russell hated Boston. This is well documented and remained true until recently. Obviously you can still praise the Celtics approach, but don't for one minute think that the Celtics success somehow disproves the idea that Boston was racist, or that the Celtics success made Bostonians think fondly of black people in the 60s.
That's true! It's also a 100% different point than the one I made, and I doubt anyone would ever suggest for a second that the Celtics' behavior disproved the existence of racism in Boston. It disproved the existence of racism in the Celtics' locker room, but that's it. Did you think that's what I was saying???
 
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WalletTrack

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Boston was the hotbed of the abolition momentum that lead to the Civil War. So there is actually a great force of black history entwined in Boston's civic history.
When the time came many men responded to the Union's call for from 1861 on...the reason for Boston's racism in later 19th century was more economic than color based.
Remember Boston never went "Kings of New York".
Of course by the 1960's the coarseness of the Irish experience had ingrained a generational prejudice.
 

LahoudOrBillyC

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No offense personally, but this seems like a pretty big whitewash, no pun intended. You briefly touch overall on the issue of race, but made no reference to "Get those n-----s off the field!" at the sham Jackie Robinson tryout -- if Yawkey himself didn't say it, apparently somebody did -- no reference to the fact they passed on Willie Mays and none to the fact that Yawkey hired Pinky Higgins, a proud racist who made no bones about that fact to the press, both as manager and later GM.
No offense taken. I acknowledge that your view has become the dominant one on this issue. This is hard issue for me to "argue" since the facts of the situation are largely open to interpretation. I will add a few things.

First, on the Robinson tryout. I researched this issue pretty thoroughly a few years ago when I was researching my book on Joe Cronin. Basically, I do not believe that anyone ever yelled "Get those n----s off the field." This is not a unique position -- most people who have looked in to it don't believe it, but the people who keep repeating it kind of want it to be true. To save myself a lot of typing, I will just quote the text from my book.


Before the start of the 1945 season Joe Cronin played a small role in a notorious historical event, an event more important than he or anyone else thought it would be at the time. On April 16, a Monday morning, the Red Sox conducted a tryout for three players from the Negro Leagues--Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, Sam Jethroe of the Cleveland Buckeyes, and Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars. Robinson had just begun his first year with the Monarchs, but was already famous as a college football star at UCLA before the war. There had not been an African-American player in the major leagues in 60 years, though not because of any public or written policy.

The Red Sox' decision to hold the tryout was neither serious nor well-intentioned. They were pressured into staging the tryout by Boston City Councilman Isadore Muchnick, who had been pressing the issue for a few years. While there had been a few voices fighting for integrating baseball for many years, the cause began to gather momentum during the war, in which black men lost their lives fighting for the freedom of oppressed people in other nations. In 1944 Muchnick threatened action that would disallow the Red Sox and Braves from playing home games on Sundays unless the teams held tryouts for Negro Leaguers. Eddie Collins was taken aback, claiming, "We have never had a single request for a try-out from a colored applicant."

With the aid of Wendell Smith, a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier who was familiar with the players in the Negro Leagues, Muchnick spent a year working on his plan. In March 1945 Muchnick again threatened to revoke Sunday baseball in the city, and this time he had players ready and willing to try out. The Red Sox reluctantly agreed. The tryout was supposed to be on April 12, but it took four days and some additional prodding before it actually took place. The Red Sox were to open the season in New York on April 17, the following day.

In the event, the proceedings lasted about 90 minutes. The three players first met briefly with Eddie Collins, then batted and fielded under the direction of coach Larry Woodall and scout Hugh Duffy. Joe Cronin watched from the stands, and was particularly impressed with the play of Robinson. "He's good and fast--fast as, well, Jack Robinson," said Cronin, using an expression of the time. All three men were thanked for their time and sent on their way. None of them ever heard from the Red Sox again. A few months later Robinson signed a contract with the Montreal Royals, the International League affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Thirty-four years later, Boston Globe writer Clif Keane claimed that he had attended the tryout, and that he had heard a booming voice yell out, "Get those niggers off the field." Keane did not identify the voice, although he suggested it belonged to one of three people: Yawkey, Collins, or Cronin. This stunning claim rejuvenated the story, and has led to 30 years of speculation as to the speaker.

In fact, Keane probably made the story up. There were reportedly several other people present that day, including a few white players who were also trying out, other reporters, coaches, and the three black players--none of whom ever mentioned hearing anything like what Keane reported. Jackie Robinson wrote about the tryout many times, and he was quite bitter about the Red Sox' actions for the rest of his life. One can be sure that Robinson would not have kept this story quiet, and the same could be said for many of the other people there.


And what of Clif Keane? Just prior to making his claim in 1979, Keane had referred to Red Sox first baseman George Scott as a "bush nigger" in the Red Sox clubhouse, and had joked about Scott's diet of watermelon and fried chicken on a local radio show. Art Rust, Jr. had recently written a book on black baseball, Get That Nigger Off The Field, bringing to light a profane exclamation used by Cap Anson in 1888. Keane's use of a strikingly similar phrase just a few years after Rust's book, in the midst of his own bigoted comments, should be enough to dismiss, or at least seriously doubt, his bold claims.

We know what Joe Cronin was doing during the tryout. He was sitting with Wendell Smith, who wrote about their lengthy interaction in his newspaper a few days later. According to Smith, Cronin and Collins spoke cordially with the players when they arrived at Fenway Park, and the men were treated well by the team. Cronin sat with Smith while the players practiced, and was particularly interested by Robinson. "I saw him play football at UCLA, and he was great," Cronin told the writer. Both Duffy and Cronin praised the players, but Cronin would not say for certain that they were major-league ready. He cautioned Smith that the club's minor-league affiliates were mostly in the South (Scranton, Pennsylvania was the lone exception) and would not allow black players. Smith did not mention, either then or later, anyone shouting racial invective.

In America's shameful history of segregation, this story is not particularly noteworthy. The tryout was largely a sham. The Red Sox, like the other 15 major league teams, and all big-time professional football and basketball teams, were all-white and were content to stay that way. Recent historians have tried to present this story as a shocking display of racism on the part of the Red Sox, but there was nothing shocking about it. In the context of 1945 it would have taken an act of courage and moral leadership for the Red Sox to sign Jackie Robinson or one of the other applicants in 1945.

The ill-fated tryout took on a much larger significance in the years ahead, when the Red Sox dragged their feet on integration for many years beyond the point at which courage was necessary. But in April 1945, the Red Sox behaved as major league baseball teams had been behaving for many years. They had the chance to right an egregious wrong, and they did not. This action, coupled with many unfortunate actions in the years ahead, haunted their franchise for decades.
 

LahoudOrBillyC

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My take on Yawkey is that he wasn't particularly smart or enlightened, and he was willing to go along with what everyone else was doing. Bryant talked to lots of people, and did not find anyone who accused Yawkey of any sort of nastiness. The Red Sox signed their first black player in 1952 (Earl Wilson), which was before a few other teams. Wilson should have made the team in 1957, sparing the Red Sox from being the last major league team to integrate, but he was drafted into the Army in March and missed the next two years. The Red Sox made a few high profile attempts to acquire black players -- they made a public offer for Larry Doby in 1954, and another one for Charlie Neal in 1956. Both GMs talked about this in the press. They ended up being last. This sucks, but Yawkey did not stand out in any way I have been able to determine.

Reggie Smith loved Yawkey. In 1972 when the players went on strike, the Red Sox were one of the only teams that did not vote unanimously to strike because Yaz and Reggie did not want to go against Yawkey, and a few of the other guys went along with them. There were a total of 10 "no" votes in all of the player's association. During the 1981 strike, when Smith was a militant, he was very open about this. "I did not want to vote against Tom Yawkey." For those of who old enough to remember Smith, he openly complained about Boston being a racist town and it was one of the reasons he was traded. But he still loved Yawkey.

Both the 1967 and 1975 Red Sox had several important black players, and Yawkey loved all of them -- he loved his winning teams.

Yawkey was a strange man. He did not have many friends. He bought the Red Sox, and that became the love of his life. I suspect that the "race" issue just caught him off guard. I am not going to claim he was enlightened. He was certainly slow to adapt, and deserves to be faulted for this. But his actions, in my opinion, do not rise to the level of shameful. America was filled with people who were proactively working to stop integration, and there is no evidence that Yawkey was one of them. He integrated his major league team later than he should have, and then he presided over an integrated team for the last 17 years of his life.

I have no interest in whitewashing the story. I also realize that this battle is basically lost. This is unfortunate, in my view.
 

LahoudOrBillyC

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no reference to the fact they passed on Willie Mays and none to the fact that Yawkey hired Pinky Higgins, a proud racist who made no bones about that fact to the press, both as manager and later GM.
I guess I will tackle these two points as well. Yes, they passed on Mays. But you could also write Team X passed on Hall of Famer Y for dozens of combinations of X and Y. It sucks. One thing I wrote about this years ago. The people most blamed for this issue are the people who are dead. First it was Higgins, then Yawkey, then Cronin. The last man standing was George Digby, a Red Sox scout who basically said that he found Mays, called Cronin (or Yawkey) and was told "no, we can't sign him." Maybe this happened, but did you have to wait until everyone else was dead before bringing this to our attention?

Christ, I wish they had signed Mays.

Higgins was the guy who died first. He was the manager who supposedly said "There will be no niggers on this team as long as I am around." Again, we learned this in a book Al Hirshberg wrote in 1972, when Higgins was dead. Higgins did, of course, end up with black players on his team -- Pumpsie Green, Earl Wilson. He traded for Willie Tasby, for Roman Mejias, for Felix Mantilla, for Joe Christopher. At the time people were more concerned that the team sucked, and these players were not helping.

Was Higgins a racist? I don't know. Some people thought he was, at least later on. He was very popular with the team and the press in his early years -- he was Manager of the Year his first year. Ted Williams (an old teammate) liked him. Dan Shaugnessy wrote a story about Higgins a number of years ago and he talked to Earl Wilson who told him "he looked at me like I smelled" or something like that. But to Shaugnessy's credit, he did not end it there. He talked to Yaz, who told him basically the same thing -- "He did not say two words a year to me". 99% of reporters, or book writers, just report Wilson's comments and go "A HA!"

The evidence that Higgins did not like black players is not huge, but there are a few quotes in Hirshberg's book, which have been repeated. It might be true.

But we should also allow for the situation, like that of many people of his generation, that he grew on the topic over the years. I don't know and I doubt I ever will.
 

curly2

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 8, 2003
4,887
Lahoud, thanks so much for all your posts. You obviously know a lot about this.

I think the racist case is strongest against Higgins. I didn't know Clif Keane's sordid history, and saying he heard a quote that might have been said by any one of three people is not a strong case. Hirshberg going on record as saying Higgins specifically said that quote to him is really damning. And with the racial outcry getting its loudest in 1959, Higgins sent Pumpsie Green out after a strong spring. It was only after Billy Jurges became manager that Green made his debut.

It's interesting that Cronin supposedly spoke highly of Jackie Robinson. When a dying Robinson was honored at the 1972 World Series, Cronin, who was there as AL president, supposedly went for a hot dog when Robinson was giving his final public words.

In the Willie Mays case, what made it worse was that the Sox passed on Mays and instead made a show of signing Piper Davis, who was already in his 30s, show they could show they signed a black player.

The point people have made that Bill Russell and the Celtics' success didn't change racial attitudes in Boston is true. Russell was seen as "moody" -- in reality he was probably just thoughtful. Mays, who played with the smile on his face and didn't rock the boat, might have become a transcendent star in Boston and moved the racial needle, at least a little.