Out of the blue, and out of left field, comes the story of Lester Rodney. Oops - right field, wrong color. Rodney, an unapologetic Communist until he quit the party in 1958, has, up to now, been no more than a footnote in books about Jackie Robinson. Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, The Communist Who Helped Break The Color Line In American Sports fills a gap in American sports history.
There was much agitation for the major league baseball owners to break the color line in the 1930s, but Rodney, a 24-year-old New York University night school student from Brooklyn when he became the sports editor and columnist for the Daily Worker, the largest and most influential Communist newspaper in the country, was the most persistent agitator.
Rodney's second biggest problem was convincing the capitalists who owned the teams and other sportswriters that he was a legitimate sportswriter; the first was persuading his editors to cover sports at all. Before Rodney, sports coverage for the Daily Worker consisted of diatribes like, "Are these "bad elements'? Many are workers who have so identified themselves with their team that they cannot sleep or eat when the team loses. The leanness of American life under capitalism drives them to this fever."
Rodney shook up his comrades and the rest of the country. He was "the hardest working sportswriter in the United States," scrambling for access to athletes and officials, not always because of his politics: "Most ballplayers weren't sure what the Daily Worker was. Maybe they thought it was a trade union paper." the Daily Worker's clout was out of proportion to its circulation. Rodney was free to talk about issues like Jim Crow. After a while, even conservatives like the New York Post's Dick Young would slip Rodney items they couldn't use but which they wanted to see in print. Rodney says, "We were the conscience of the trade."
Rodney had some influential readers. When a colleague from the Brooklyn Eagle introduced him to Herbert Hoover, who was heading the Finnish Relief Fund, the former president exclaimed with a nervous laugh, "Your paper has been belting my brains out lately." Rodney shrugged, "Because you're helping the Finns, I guess." "You forget this," Hoover told him, with a slight raise in choler, "in 1923, when Russia was starving, I raised $75-million for its people." "They must have been White Russians," Rodney replied.
Another reader, though he never admitted it, was baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. (In Rodney's words, "a stone racist.") He wrote open letters to Landis, challenging him to integrate baseball. Rodney wrangled complimentary quotes about great Negro League players from Joe DiMaggio and from one-time St. Louis Cardinals Gas House stars Leo Durocher and Dizzy Dean. (Dean, a white Southerner, participated in several black vs. white "barnstorming" tours with his Negro League counterpart Satchel Paige.) Landis continued to ignore the color barrier, but his successor, "Happy" Chandler, was as eager to jump across it as Branch Rickey.
Press Box Red is a terrific read. Journalist Irwin Silber combines a narrative of Rodney's life and work with stories that could have come from no one else, such as the time in 1937 he walked into the New York Yankees clubhouse and saw players reading the Daily Worker. "If Colonel Ruppert (the Yankees owner) had walked in then, he would have had a heart attack." One would love to see George Steinbrenner's reaction.
-- Reviewer Allen Barra, author of "Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends," writes for slate.com.
-- "The Story of Lester Rodney, The Communist Who Helped Break The Color Line In American Sports," by Irwin Silber, Temple University Press, $19.95, 256 pages.
