The New York Yankees As an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970

The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970 By William C. Bishop Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. __________________________________ Chairperson James Carothers __________________________________ Co-Chairperson Jonathan Earle __________________________________ Ben Chappell __________________________________ Henry Bial __________________________________ Charles Marsh Date defended: April 18, 2014 ii The Dissertation Committee for William C. Bishop certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970 ____________________________ Chairperson James Carothers ____________________________ Co-Chairperson Jonathan Earle Date approved: April 18, 2014 iii Abstract The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970 The New York Yankees baseball club, arguably the United States’ most successful and well-known sports franchise, have acquired many cultural connotations over the years, meanings transcending the immediate world of on-field sporting contest. This study argues that by the 1940s, the Yankee’s success in the previous decades and their representation in popular culture caused a coherent set of cultural meanings to crystallize around the club to create an American icon. This icon served as an emblem for a set of interrelated mid-century mainstream American values, namely the American dream of upward mobility, heroic masculinity, and a narrative of national success. The meanings, perspectives on, and uses of this mid-century Yankees cultural icon have not been homogeneous, but have shifted generally with the team’s on-field performance and broader historic changes, as well as with the perspectives of individual cultural producers and audiences. In particular, increasingly throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, a general shift towards a negative perspective on the Yankees icon emerged in cultural texts of the era, one that increasingly saw the American values they embodied in a negative light. In these texts, representations of the Yankees as elitist, greedy, racist, too-tradition-bound, and overly-corporate are utilized to convey a critique of these values. This general shift in perceptions and uses of the Yankees icon parallels and is part of the broader cultural conflict and shift occurring between World War II and the end of the 1960s. Methodologically, this study draws on Roland Barthes application of semiotic theory to cultural communication in a broader sense. It draws on baseball history and general cultural iv history and seeks historical readings of texts from literature, film, popular music, journalism, and sports fan culture. In particular, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Joe DiMaggio’s autobiography Lucky to Be a Yankee (1946), Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Mark Harris’s The Southpaw (1953), Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), Damn Yankees (1955 Broadway, ’58 film), Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” (1968) and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four (1970) are analyzed for the way they represent and use the Yankees. v Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jonathan Earle, Ben Chappell, and Henry Bial for their insight and expertise in understanding, investigating, and analyzing American culture and history as well as for their timely advice about academic life and careers. I would especially like to thank my advisor James Carothers for his patience, his English professor’s eye for good writing, and his vast knowledge and even vaster enthusiasm for baseball literature, history, and culture. I’ll miss his endless supply of baseball stories and I hope he had as much fun as I did with this. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my friends in the University of Kansas’s Department of American Studies for their commiseration and support. I am similarly grateful for the unflagging support and occasional expressions of interest from other wonderful friends I’ve made in Boise, Provo, or, more recently, the Lawrence University Ward. Worthy of special thanks are my brothers and sisters, their growing families, and most especially my parents. My family has never questioned or ceased to support me through the long process of creating this document, even when they probably should have. For that, they deserve my most sincere appreciation and love. vi Table of Contents Introduction . 1 Chapter One—Theoretical Groundwork and Literature Review . 15 Chapter Two—“Let Me Tell You About Heroes”: The Pride of the Yankees and the Crystalization of the Yankees Cultural Icon . 43 Chapter Three—“Remember the Great DiMaggio”: Joe DiMaggio and the Mythic Dimension of the Yankees Icon in the Postwar Era . 86 Chapter Four—“Wall Street Brokers and Haughty Businessmen”: The Yankees and Brooklyn Dodger Fan Identity . 130 Chapter Five—“Damn Yankees”: The Popularization of Yankee Hating in the 1950s . 171 Chapter Six—“Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?”: Decline, Cultural Change, and the 1960s . 218 Conclusion—Towards the New Millennium . 257 Bibliography . 261 Appendix: Timeline of Key Moments in Yankees History through Steinbrenner Purchase . 274 1 Introduction There is no shortage of evidence for the strength of Americans’ devotion to following collegiate, Olympic, and particularly, professional sports. Most local newspapers have an entire six-to-eight-page section devoted to sporting events. ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network), a twenty-four-hour sports channel, has become easily one of the most popular networks on cable television since its 1979 inception. The National Football League’s annual championship game, the Super Bowl, has become the most-watched television broadcast every year. Following Raymond Williams’s suggestion that “culture is ordinary” (6), the sheer ubiquity of sports consumption and fandom since the turn of the century suggests that sport is certainly a topic worthy of academic inquiry as part of the pursuit to understand the shifting and varied values and experiences of the American past and present. While the working-class, populist connotations of American sport in the twentieth century delayed scholarly examination for several decades, the study of sport has ridden the wave of change in the academy’s approach to culture, pioneered by scholars such as Williams and Stuart Hall forty years ago, to become an important and growing scholarly field. Within this field, significant attention has been devoted to prominent athletes—such as baseball’s Babe Ruth or boxer Muhammad Ali—as cultural icons representing the values of a particular historical moment, geographic place, or subculture. Somewhat overlooked, however, is the way that entire sports teams or franchises have done similar cultural work, acquiring connotations and meaning 2 to become icons in their own right, often representing certain ideals, values, and experiences across a longer chronological period than a single athlete could. This study explores one of the United States’ most prominent and successful sports franchises, the New York Yankees, and the popular meaning they have amassed as a cultural icon. Between 1920 and the mid-1960s, this New York baseball team rose to a level of unparalleled success and prominence. During this time period, the word “Yankees,” the images of the team logos and their famous pin-striped jerseys, as well as the names and images of their prominent players all acquired, more so than any other baseball team, and perhaps any sports team in general, certain cultural connotations. In other words, if a man in a bar in 1952 overheard a stranger mention the Yankees, not only the specific team and it players would come to the man’s mind, but an idea as well. To better understand the iconic status the team acquired, I will analyze mass-media baseball narratives for the cultural meanings they attribute to the Yankees. While the Yankees iconic cultural status obviously is rooted in the team, its players and their performance on the field, it is often in texts peripheral to on-field performances and their immediate journalistic reporting—that is, baseball-related films, novels, popular biographies, and popular music—that the link between the team and values or ideas that transcend sport is most clear. Broadly speaking, I will argue that in the 1940s, a coherent set of cultural meanings associated with the Yankees crystallized in popular texts whose portrayals of the club and it players were built on the foundation of their on-field success of the 1920s and ‘30s. In these texts, the Yankees stand as an icon of a collection of related mid-century American values: heroic masculinity, the American dream of upward mobility, and the pursuit and celebration of success that paralleled the nation’s own political, military, and economic victories in the twentieth century. 3 During the following decades, however, an increasing number of baseball-related mass media texts take an oppositional perspective on the Yankees icon, frequently using negative portrayals of the baseball club as a way to critique one or more of the mid-century American values with which they have been affiliated. This trend became particularly prominent in the later 1960s as part of the broader cultural shift and generational transition that saw the “Baby Boom” generational cohort rejecting many of the values of their parents’ World War II generation. Throughout the

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