H U M a N It Ie Svolume 15/Number 4
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HUMANITIES VOLUME 15/NUMBER 4 EDITOR'S NOTE Baseball The poet Walt Whitman tells us "it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life." The "it" is baseball. If the rhetoric sounds extravagant to the modern ear, many find it nevertheless true. "Baseball is a thousand morality plays," filmmaker Ken Burns tells Endowment Chairman Sheldon Hackney in this issue. For Burns, whose nineteen-hour documentary on Baseball premieres this fall, the game is a mirror of American history, particularly of the long struggle over race. Seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, he points out, it was baseball that grappled with the Sliding into home plate. St. Louis Cardinals versus Brooklyn Dodgers, 1939. issue of race with the arrival of Jackie Robinson. When St. Louis — Courtesy of Dennis Goldstein Collection. Cardinals players threatened to strike rather than take the field if Robinson were on it, Ford Frick rose majestically as National League president: "I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended, and I don't care if it Humanities wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of A bimonthly review published by the America and one citizen has as much right to play as another." National Endowment for the Humanities. Baseball has many such moments, Burns tells us. "You have the ever Chairman: Sheldon Hackney present tension between labor and management, between owners and Director of Communications Policy: players. You have the exclusion of women. You have the question of Gary L. Krull what a hero is, and also what a villain and a fool is... .we convince ourselves over and over again about who we are." In this issue of Humanities we make a brief visit to the nine innings of Editor: Mary Lou Beatty Assistant Editors: Constance Burr Burns's series and to the world of Caribbean and Mexican baseball and Susan Q. Jaffe of ballfields past and present. Ellen Marsh The ballfield of my own childhood is one of those now gone. There is Writer-Editor: AmyLifson a park just across the street with the same name, but it is not the blue- Editorial Assistants: Nicole Ashby trimmed pennants-flying wedding cake of a Comiskey Park that I Steven Snodgrass grew up with. When my brothers and I were young, baseball was a voice on the Editorial Board: Marjorie Berlincourt, radio and Comiskey was Valhalla. For most of the season, the voice on George F. Farr, Jr., Guinevere Griest, the box took us to the park and filled our heads with breathstopping Marsha Semmel, James Herbert, play-by-plays. Hating the Yankees, fiercely loyal even when our father Carole Watson told us about Shoeless Joe Jackson and the shame of the 1919 World Marketing Director: Joy Evans Series, we waited for the one day a season when my mother would pack an empty cracker box with homemade sandwiches and my father Design: Crabtree & Jemison, Inc. would take us on the pilgrimage to the South Side to see the Sox play. We would spend the blazing hot afternoon pencilling in the putouts on The opinions expressed in Humanities are those our scorecards, cheering, chanting "Come on, L-u-u-ke" with the rest as of the authors and do not necessarily reflect Endowment policy. Material appearing in this Luke Appling fouled off ball after ball waiting for the right pitch, and publication, except for that already copyrighted, my father would tell us how cheap the Comiskeys were and how losing may be freely reproduced. Please notify the all those baseballs would give them fits. In the twilight we would make editor in advance so that appropriate credit can be given. Humanities (ISSN 0018-7526) is pub the long trip home, noisy in jubilation, quieter in defeat, back to our lished bimonthly by the National Endowment radio and the rest of the season. I remember seeing Joe DiMaggio once, for the Humanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Ted Williams, but the strongest memory is the heat and the haze N.W., Washington, D.C. 20506. Telephone: 202/606-8435; fax: 202/606-8240. and the hollering of a distant summer afternoon. If baseball is what easily comes to mind on a sunny day, it is not the Second-class postage paid at Washington, D.C., only institution of summer. We visit another, almost as old in American and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to United States tradition, in which the focus has been spiritual and intellectual enrich Government Printing Office, Superintendent of ment. The institution is chautauqua, and we look at its modern counter Documents, Washington, D.C. 20402. New part in the Midwest and West. The occasion is the beginning of a new subscriptions and renewals: U.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, section of the magazine devoted to state humanities council activities P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954. around the country. Annual subscription rate: $13.00 domestic, — Mary Lou Beatty $16.25 foreign. Two years: $26.00, $32.50. For subscription questions or problems, telephone: 202/512-2303; fax: 202/512-2233. 2 JULY/AUGUST 1994 HUMANITIESTHE MAGAZINE OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Page 4 Page 28 Page 24 B aseball Around the Nation Other Features 4 A Conversation with... 28 Chautauqua 24 The 1930s: Prelude to War Filmmaker Ken Burns and NEH In the Great Plains, the theme By Janis Johnson Chairman Sheldon Hackney is the Gilded Age of Twain While shaping public opinion, discuss how baseball mirrors and Crane. newsreels entertained. who we are. 30 State by State 8 The Lineup 39 A Year of One's Own Activities around the country A film history of the game in By Constance Burr sponsored by state humanities nine "innings" will air this fall. Teacher-Scholars forge a councils and foundations. new national climate. 12 A Daughter's Reminiscence 30 Breaking Down Prison Walls Departments "How Hans Became an American"— By Elinor Nauen By David Remund A Native American teaches 23 In Focus Lakota culture to fellow inmates. 13 Baseball and the Meaning By Nicole L. Ashby of America Diana Natalicio: A Voice 32 Paul Laurence Dunbar for the Unheard By Christian K. Messenger "The beauty of play is that we By Therese Nolan can begin again... " Poet Herbert Woodward Martin 35 Noteworthy captures Dunbar's character 18 The Game Endures and cadence. 36 Calendar A Civil War Diary The Humanities Guide 19 The Houses That Baseball Built By John Pastier 38 The Dissertation Paradise lost, paradise not Grants Program quite regained. By Kathleen Mitchell 44 Beisbol in El Norte By Samuel O. Regalado 54 Deadlines Latino ballplayers energize the big leagues. HUMANITIES 3 A Conversation With KEN BURNS On BASEBALL How THE SPORT OF baseball reflects the American character was the topic when Chairman Sheldon Hackney’ met recently with filmmaker Ken Burns, whose new Baseball series premieres on public television this fall. 4 JULY/AUGUST 1994 Sheldon Hackney: Does the Baseball the good of mankind. His example is Hackney: Americans like—maybe all narrative provide the answer to the the best kind, one of the most com human beings like—morality plays. question of what holds us as Ameri plete examples of heroism in the Baseball shows you morality plays. cans together? twentieth century. And the story Bums: Baseball is a thousand morality Ken Burns: I don't think in the end baseball offers is a precise mirror of plays. You have ancient heroes com that we ever answer that question. I this country's struggle with the ques ing back for one last quest. You have think that we seek a kind of dialogue tion of race throughout its long his young and potentially limitless talent with ourselves which deepens the tory. That is the primary central ten destroyed by greed or corruption or pursuit of that question; so that we are sion. But there are others: You have temptation. You have lives cut short enriched by tilting towards it and the ever present tension between by tragedy. You have those seemingly never really, in fact, attaining it. labor and management, between less fortunate blessed by longevity. But I regard baseball as a bellwether owners and players. You have the You have almost every classic form of of who we are. By studying its past, exclusion of women. You have the Aristotelian poetics play themselves we have a model, a scien out on the baseball field. tist would say, to pursue And they do so in a game the larger sense of where which is not like any other we've been, where we are, game. I think we forget to and perhaps where we're say this, but this is why we going. That's what I like are drawn to the game of about baseball. baseball. This is a game without a clock. This is a Hackney: It's really more game where the defense than a metaphor. It's a has the ball. This is a game prism through which you with a rigid set of rules, but see various kinds of Amer where every baseball field ican social history. Race is different from every has its roots there. other. That cannot be said Burns: Absolutely. The of a basketball court or a underlying theme of base football field; they are all ball would be the story of the same.