October 29, 2004

Pile of Coats

I'm experiencing election-related angst today. If it all shakes out the way I fear it will, I may have to spend the next four years in Canada, or hiding under a pile of coats. I wonder if I’d feel any different if I could vote. I did give some money to the good guys, which made me feel better about my place in the world for a few seconds—par for the course for most consumer transactions. If Jaffe & Jaffe only existed, I’d be calling for an appointment as we speak.

Here’s the New Yorker's endorsement of Kerry. (The New Yorker endorsed Kerry? Shocking, I know.)

Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate.

…While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

Not just citizens.

Edit: My buddy Bryant managed to cheer me up later in the day, with a little help from blogger-pundit Al Giordano, a cute toddler on the steps of Memorial Church, and the rays of Earth's yellow sun.

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October 27, 2004

More or Less Bunk

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
—Henry Ford, 1916

I don't believe in curses. I believe we make our own destination.
—Manny Ramirez, 2004

A little more baseball history bunk for you today, as the Red Sox roll over the Cardinals in an anticlimactic World Series that makes it seem like they do this every week:

A Curse Born of Hate?

This article, probably not news to the Sox nuts among you, tells the history of the “Curse of the Bambino,” which, it turns out, was largely created in the 1980s by sportswriters George Vecsey and Dan Shaugnessy (with a little help from Bill Buckner and the Mets).

Until that moment, no one ascribed Boston's failure to win a World Series since 1918 to anything resembling a curse connected to Babe Ruth and Harry Frazee. ... In truth, apart from a few brief seasons after World War II from 1918 until 1967 nobody gave a damn about the Red Sox.

More interesting than the recent history of the Curse is the backstory, in particular the vilification of Harry Frazee, the Red Sox owner who invoked the Curse by selling Babe Ruth to New York in 1919. In making Harry Frazee the villain of the tale, Shaugnessey & Co. apparently resurrected elements of an old anti-Semitic smear campaign. Frazee wasn't Jewish, but many in the 1910s and 1920s believed him to be, because he had (very suspicious) “a New York-based theatrical background.” And so he was pilloried by W.J. Cameron, Henry Ford's anti-Semitic attack dog, in a series of essays on “The Jewish Degradation of Baseball.”

“Baseball,” opined Cameron for Ford, “was about as much of a sport to Frazee as selling tickets to a merry-go-round would be. He wanted to put his team across as if they were May Watson's girly girly burlesquers. Baseball was to be ‘promoted’ as Jewish managers promote Coney Island.” When Frazee bought the Red Sox “another club was placed under the smothering influences of the ‘chosen race.’” The article concluded that baseball's essential problem was that Frazee and other Jews were “scavengers [that] have come along to reduce it [baseball] to garbage. But there is no doubt anywhere, among either friends or critics of baseball, that the root cause of the present condition is due to Jewish influence . . . If baseball is to be saved, it must be taken out of their hands.”

“Promoting” baseball as if it were Coney Island! Imagine!

The ESPN article I linked to here is a little odd. It lays out the (I hope widely-known) story of Henry Ford's anti-Semitism quite well, but then it takes such pains to point out that Frazee wasn't actually Jewish, it comes off a bit like the movie Gentlemen's Agreement: “Anti-Semitism is wrong because sometimes the people you're bigoted against aren't really Jewish.” (See also: Black Like Me.) But it's all a fascinating story, and a great example of the way knowing a little history adds complexity and strangeness to everyday life.

Even if Henry Ford thinks that it's more or less bunk.

Memo to myself: Find out more about “May Watson's girly girly burlesquers.”

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October 21, 2004

The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant

How about that local sports team?

So, the Red Sox made history last night. Sports history, anyway. And since this weblog is about history, I guess it’s OK for me to talk about it.

Yes, I jumped on the bandwagon. I know I'm one of those October fans that real Sox diehards despise: last to get on the wagon, first to get off. When you consider the exquisite agony of being a true Sox fan, the dues paid in long years of suffering and heartbreak, I probably have no right to cheer them on at all. Watching the game last night, I kept expecting some nice Catholic boyos from Southie to kick down my door, pound the crap out of me, and then change my TV over to Smallville or Lost. But what a series, what a comeback, what a story! And if I get a second-hand contact high from the rest of the city’s excitement, is that really so wrong?

I’m also a little blue about it, though, because the Sox’s triumph gets me thinking about one particular fan. I may not have known Johnny Damon from Pokey Reese before last week, but I do and did know a fair chunk of baseball history, thanks primarily to Bill Gienapp. Professor Gienapp was one of my very favorite professors in the Harvard history department. He wasn’t on my committee; his area of expertise was antebellum political history and the U.S. Civil War. I did get the opportunity to teach with him a couple of times, though, and I just thought the world of him. And he was a true Red Sox fan, one of unshakable loyalty and nobility.

Professor Gienapp was hugely popular with Harvard undergraduates. It didn’t matter that he was probably the toughest grader in the history department; they beat down the doors to get into his two big classes, on Baseball in U.S. History and on the Civil War. He was even more popular with his grad students. I have friends who started grad school with no particular interest in the Civil War, who changed the whole direction of their careers in order to work with him. Teaching with Prof. Gienapp was great. He loved to talk about history, and he hated to talk about course policy and sectioning and administration trivia—and that is rare, let me tell you. He seemed to me absolutely immune to the kind of red tape and fussiness that just infects academia, and I admire that more than I can say.

This may sound goofy, but the way I usually described Prof. Gienapp to those who didn’t know him was to say he reminded me of Jed Bartlett, the president on The West Wing. I’m not saying he looked like Martin Sheen, or saying anything about his politics—I’m just describing his manner. He was both gruff and sweet, he was a great spinner of stories but had no tolerance for bullshit, he was smart and upright and kind and had a twinkle in his eye.

Tangent: Even when I wasn’t teaching for Prof. Gienapp, I felt his impact, since every year I’d end up reading one or two junior or senior papers on baseball history by a student who caught the bug in Gienapp’s class. I’d sometimes plead for equal time for other sports. The history of football! It raises all sorts of cool issues around class and Gilded Age manliness and class. Basketball! Come on, race and commerce and urban America. Hockey! … Well, I can’t think of anything, but I’m sure there’s some great hockey history yet to be written. But it was never any use. All anybody ever wanted to write about was baseball. Partly this was because baseball’s history seems close to the surface in a way that football or basketball’s doesn’t. (Watch a 21st-century NFL game and it seems inconceivable this sport even existed before television. Watch a Red Sox game and if you squint right you can easily imagine it’s 1918.) But mostly, this was because Professor Gienapp had cast his spell on them.

Bill Gienapp died almost exactly a year ago, way too young, after a long fight with cancer. The department was gutted. I was gutted, and I’d just taught a few classes with him. I can’t imagine how all those closer to him felt.

There were a lot of Civil War touches at his funeral. A Lincoln impersonator that knew Professor Gienapp came, in full beard and stovepipe hat, and stood at the back. That sounds funny, I know, but it wasn’t. It seemed eminently reasonable to me that Honest Abe should come pay his respects to the man who wrote Origins of the Republican Party and This Fiery Trial. And when we sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, there was not a dry eye in the house. Not mine, that’s for sure.

I don’t think there was much if any Red Sox talk at the funeral. The Sox had just lost the ALCS to the Yankees and really, who wanted to think about baseball at a time like that?

But now, a year later, the Red Sox have made baseball history, returning from the very brink to defeat the Damnyankees in a comeback so improbable as to make the Bad News Bears hoot in derision. And the Sox are off to the World Series, but it almost seems like an afterthought. How could any series be more dramatic or cathartic than that seven-game slugfest against the hated Yankees?

I expect that every real Sox fan out there has a father or a grandfather or an uncle or an aunt or a whole family tree of them that should have been around to see last night’s game. (Edit: Yes, they all do, and here’s eloquent confirmation from Sports Guy Bill Simmons that none of what I've written here is original in the slightest.) But me, I’m thinking about Professor Gienapp, and his wife and his sons, and how it’s just wrong that he wasn’t there to see this series with them.

Here’s to Red Sox Nation, and here’s to the torches we all carry and to the different things we all choose to make us happy, and here’s to the people that impress us and make a difference in our lives, and here's to Bill Gienapp.

Go Sox.

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October 18, 2004

Two Turntables and a Cactus Thorn

This made me think of my good buddy Gamma Fodder, who is DJing his first real club gig in Toronto this week. It's a magazine article on messing with the phonograph from 1917. Scratching and needle-dropping sixty years before Grandmaster Flash? “The street finds its own uses for technology,” indeed.

Before I got my phonograph, I suspected that the advertisements might be exaggerated. But I found that they had not even mentioned its most interesting features. They tell how you can play on it but not a word about how you can play with it. They do not hint that by moving the speed regulator back and forth you can make a monolog into a dialog and a solo into a duet ... They do not tell you how you can quite transform a record with little drops of water and little grains of sand and little spots of candle grease scattered over it. They mention various needles, steel, fiber, tungsten, and jewels, but not a word about how you can cut up your old combs, be they rubber, celluloid, ivory, or tortoise shell, to make needles. A hard wood toothpick, suitably sharpened, will turn a ten cent record into a seventy-five cent one. A friend from Utah tells me that the progressive people of the West have discarded the boughten needles and are using cactus thorns, with the end rubbed off on sand paper. I wish I could try it, but cactuses don't grow in New York City except in the Botanical Garden, and there is a policeman on guard there.
—Edwin Slosson, The Independent, October 27 1917.

Go, go, Grandmaster Edwin.

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