"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." That was the pronouncement of Columbia history professor Jacques Barzun several decades ago.
Today, says Duke history professor John Thompson, "Baseball is no longer America's sport. I would say whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America should hang out in a bar on Sundays and watch professional football."
Still, baseball was king for more than a century. And according to Thompson, we have much to learn from the sport. In fact, he's teaching a history course this spring called Baseball in Global Perspective. "It's a way to teach international history and connections between the United States and the world," Thompson says. "Baseball has become a world sport."
Baseball had its origins in an English children's game that came to North America with migrants in the 1700s. It the early 1800s, it became popular among young men in colleges and the military in the northeast and in Canada. The rules were still evolving and varied from league to league: some teams used five bases instead of four, and others counted a ball caught on one bounce as an out. Between 1857 and 1864, the National Association of Baseball Players standardized the rules, and modern baseball was born.
Soon thereafter, baseball came to be thought of as America's sport. "The other country that invented baseball was Canada, but in the late 19th century, baseball became the quintessential Americanism," Thompson says. "The people who sold sporting goods and owned baseball teams worked hard to associate baseball with Americanism." Baseballlater spread throughout the world on the heels of economic contact.
Thompson is a Canadian himself, having grown up on the prairies outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. He played baseball as a boy, and later picked up the saxophone. In high school, he performed with a couple of different bands and was acquainted with another young man his age from Winnipeg who fronted a band called Neil Young and the Squires.
While Young followed his calling to become a rock ‘n' roll star, Thompson followed his calling to become a historian. His office on the third floor of Carr is crammed with books, framed photographs, and memorabilia relating to history, baseball, and Canada and he's happy to talk at length about any combination of these.
In addition to teaching the baseball class, Thompson is working on a book about North Carolinian baseball player Enos "Country" Slaughter. Slaughter was born in Person County in 1916 and played for the St. Louis Cardinals for years. He coached Duke's baseball team from 1971-1977, and died in 2002. "He is an interesting lens for looking at celebrity, masculinity, gender and race," Thompson says.
In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in the major leagues. The Cardinals, the story goes, planned to strike in protest. The strike never happened, but when the Cardinals played the Dodgers, Slaughter spiked Robinson on the leg with his cleat as he ran past first base.
That story may be common knowledge, but Thompson is digging for facts. Northern newspapers published rumors of a boycott, but Thompson says, "I have not found a shred of evidence that the Cardinals considered striking." Was Slaughter's spike a statement? It's hard to say, as Slaughter spiked opposing players frequently. ("The circumstantial evidence indicates that a better nickname for Enos than ‘Country' would have been ‘Spike,'" Thompson says.)
"Enos became the bad guy to Jackie Robinson's heroic good guy," Thompson says. "You can't have a good guy if you don't have bad guys. He spent the rest of his life trying to demonstrate he was not racist."
To some, baseball is just a game. To Thompson, it's a sport and a business that mirrors America's history and culture. "Baseball can tell you about race," he says. "Baseball can tell you about gender. Baseball can tell you about class. Baseball can tell you about the history of business in America."