The Original Curse (12 page)

Though 36 years old, center fielder Dode Paskert was one of the hot-hitting Cubs who carried the team throughout the early part of the season. (C
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There was plenty of cheer to go around for the Cubs. Asked early in the season for the secret of the Cubs’ success, Mitchell responded, “The hitting of Merkle, Mann, Hollocher, Flack and Paskert has been most excellent, especially in the pinches. Killefer’s catching has been wonderful, the fielding steady and the pitching great.”
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Quipped columnist Ring Lardner, poking fun at Mitchell’s reputation as a master strategist: “So the mystery no longer exists. But it does seem rather foolish for Mitch to reveal his strategy at this stage of the race, for if the other managers read the interview, there is nothing to prevent their taking advantage of the tip and applying it to their own teams…. All that’s required to land on top is five hitters hitting most excellent, one catcher catching most wonderful, one team fielding steady and one team’s pitchers pitching great. But the other managers evidently didn’t think of it.”
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The pitching staff got a boost on May 12, when Shufflin’ Phil Douglas wired Mitchell from Tennessee, telling his manager he had recuperated from his February appendectomy and was ready to report. Four days later, Douglas showed up in Chicago, though he would need a few weeks to get himself ready. Douglas was no star, but he was durable and would give the Cubs a solid fourth pitcher to go with Vaughn, Tyler, and Hendrix. Things were, indeed, cheerful on the North Side.

The perseverance of the Cubs was a comforting story in the spring of 1918, in a city that was in need of comfort. These were stressful, confusing days for Chicagoans, a time of gray areas. America was fighting a war for freedom and democracy but was trampling the First Amendment in support of that war. Citizens were being told of German atrocities, yet Chicago’s mayor (pandering to the German vote) had come out as pro-German and antidraft. The federal government was clamping down on vice districts, but the city’s police department was loosening the reins on those districts. Inflation had prices skyrocketing, but citizens were pressured to buy Liberty Bonds. Working men were demanding increased rights but in doing so were hindering the
war effort. There wasn’t much that could be said to be surely right and surely wrong.

One of the great symbols of this moral confusion was the Reverend Billy Sunday, a ballplayer-turned-preacher whose unorthodox style and use of off-color language and violent imagery rankled the religious establishment, even as he drew massive crowds across the country. Sunday had no formal training but packed his speeches with energy—he was accompanied by two thunderous pianos and, as a former athlete, would hurl his lithe body all over the stage, turning somersaults and smashing chairs. He was at his most skillful when he wove the issues of the day into his sermons. That spring, Sunday’s travels took him back home to Chicago, and onstage in his massive temporary tabernacle on Lake Michigan there was no question what the issue of the day was: the war in Europe.

War fit Sunday perfectly. First, it gave him a suitable backdrop for his primary aim: outlawing alcohol in the United States. Already, 19 states had backed prohibition, and the war was fueling the dry argument. Not only could alcohol ruin American soldiers, but its manufacture took away resources from the war effort. Besides, most American brewery owners were of German descent. The argument that being antibooze was patriotic gained acceptance, and at one point an amendment that would mandate prohibition during the war was slipped into an agricultural appropriations bill.
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These were not the moral arguments that people like Billy and other temperance backers favored, but they were effective.

The war also paired well with Sunday’s fire-and-brimstone style. The violence of war hit Americans psychologically, and Sunday’s inflammatory sermons appealed to that violence. Preaching about pacifists, he said, “Do you know what a pacifist is? He is one too damned cowardly to fight and too damn cowardly to run. He ought to be stood up against a wall with a firing squad in front of him.”
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He said of Germany, “She has used her power to burn cities, sack cathedrals and slay men, murder children, rape women, starve people and inoculate with typhoid and tuberculosis germs. The religion of Germany is the roar of the cannon, the spit of the machine gun, the shrieks of the dying, battlefields drenched with blood. She is happy when she sees these horrors.”
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The previous December, in Atlanta, when a German pacifist harangued Sunday during a sermon, Sunday
invited him onto the stage and punched him. A fistfight ensued. Some in Sunday’s audience piously shouted, “Sock him! Kill him! Lynch him!”
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Sunday’s sermons were tracked daily in Chicago’s newspapers, and given the contradictions between praising God and executing pacifists, it’s little wonder that citizens were having a hard time setting their moral compasses. Sunday was just one symptom of that problem, which was not exactly a new conflict in Chicago. The city’s early-20th-century experience, like that of many major American cities, was marked by a back-and-forth between lax moral standards and sporadic campaigns against immorality. The war only intensified that back-and-forth.

When it came to moral laxity, prostitution was a Chicago specialty, but thanks to the efforts of Mont Tennes, Chicago also was a national gambling headquarters. Tennes was the head of the General News Bureau, but the only news the bureau generally disseminated was horse racing information. After a bloody war fought in spurts in 1907–08, Tennes emerged with control over the racing wires in Chicago and eventually across the country. That meant that in the back rooms of hotels, poolhouses, saloons, and “cigar stores” that never sold cigars, men could bet on races across the country—with 50 percent of the take going to Tennes, who also sold police protection. This made Tennes wealthy.

Attempts to expose Tennes were fruitless. He even managed to best Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. In October 1916, Landis was investigating a blackmail scam when he stumbled onto witnesses involved at a low level in Tennes’s gambling business. Over the course of two days, Landis pressed several hapless witnesses into revealing the inner workings of the General News Bureau. Finally, Tennes himself showed up in court with his lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who had held a conference with those Tennes underlings who had been so loose-lipped in front of Landis. “As a result of this conference,” the
Tribune
reported, “the fear of self-incrimination took a strong hold on all the gamblers.”
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Thus ended Landis’s confrontation, with no consequences for Tennes. The investigation only fortified the view of the city once expressed by muckraking journalist George Kibbe Turner, who wrote, “Chicago, in the mind of the country, stands notorious for violent crime.”
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In the early 1910s, Mayor Carter Harrison Jr. tried to stamp out Chicago’s crime and graft, but only until William Hale Thompson was elected mayor in 1915. Thompson reverted Chicago to a “wide-open” form of government, with little oversight of vice districts. A little more than a year after Thompson took office, his chief of police, Charles Healey, fired seven of the city’s eight morals inspectors. Healey himself was brought up on charges of corruption, facing allegations that he peddled protection to lawbreaking businesses. (One captain complained that because of Healey’s influence “he had not been allowed to interfere with all-night cafes in which whites and blacks danced and drank together.”
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) Healey’s replacement, John Alcock, picked up the slack, firing tough-minded morals inspector Major M. L. C. Funk-houser—well liked by foes of vice—in May 1918 on flimsy charges.

But while Thompson was loosening the city’s oversight of vice, the war gave the federal government, concerned about the moral standards of soldiers, a stake in the vice struggle around the country. Under pressure from the Anti-Saloon League, the sale of liquor to soldiers was banned. The army confronted the widespread problem of venereal disease in the ranks and went to great lengths to ensure its men stayed clean—either by keeping the soldiers clean themselves with extensive prophylaxis inspections or by hitting them with propaganda, such as camp posters that read “A German Bullet Is Cleaner than a Whore” and pamphlets that wondered “How could you look the flag in the face if you were dirty with gonorrhea?”
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In wide-open cities like Chicago, federal agents bypassed police and attempted to shut down vice districts, even threatening to take over police forces themselves. Cities across America were undergoing such moral struggles, but Chicago was an especially raucous cauldron, and polarizing figures such as Billy Sunday ensured that it stayed that way. For citizens exposed to this moral back-and-forth, it was increasingly difficult to figure out just what was right and what was wrong.

Boston, though certainly not without its vices, was an older, wealthier city than Chicago and, thus, more morally stable. Or at least the city’s advanced age had given it time to find places in which to keep its immorality hidden. Back in 1828, writer and teacher Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father) declared Boston “The city that is set on high.” Its morality, he said, “is more pure than that of any other city in
America.”
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That self-image stuck. As morality increasingly became a war issue, Boston prided itself on its cleanliness. At a party on April 20, Boston’s ex-mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald proudly approached Josephus Daniels, secretary of the navy, with a newspaper clipping citing a study that “showed less vice in Boston than ever before and the best moral conditions in the history of the city.”
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(Fitzgerald would go on to serve in Congress and had a grandson who bore his name: John Fitzgerald Kennedy.)

Massachusetts passed the prohibition amendment in early April, cracked down on bootleggers who sold alcohol to soldiers, and passed a law to regulate hotels and lodging houses, keeping them free from prostitution. When the weather warmed, officials at popular Revere Beach (a Babe Ruth favorite) did their best to keep girls pure by “strictly enforcing” the ban preventing men at the beach from lying on their backs, which was apparently too suggestive.
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The city was much more attuned to the repressed, Puritan attitude of the nation than Chicago. All the wrangling over prostitution and venereal disease in the army, for example, was a strictly American problem. French prime minister Georges Clemenceau offered what he thought was a logical solution: He wrote a letter offering American soldiers use of clean, licensed French brothels. Raymond Fosdick, with the Commission of Training Camp Activities, showed the letter to Secretary of War Newton Baker, upon which Baker said of the prudish Wilson, “For God’s sake, Raymond, don’t show this to the President or he’ll stop the war.”
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Boston’s reconstituted American League team, meanwhile, got off to an even better start than the Cubs. The Red Sox arrived home from spring training to find snow covering the field at Fenway Park but were offered a day of training at the Harvard batting cage, where Boston baseball legend Hugh Duffy coached. Duffy had spent 17 years in pro ball, posting a record .440 batting average for Boston’s Beaneaters in 1894, and would later take over the Red Sox as the manager. Fittingly, the Red Sox were to open the season against Connie Mack’s Athletics and featured two ex-A’s in the starting lineup—Stuffy McInnis at third and Amos Strunk in center. One of the big unknowns for Boston was its cleanup hitter, and Barrow, after much consideration, finally settled on Hoblitzell. “But when he said that [Hoblitzell] had just the nerve that a cleanup hitter required, he was not scaling any asparagus at any of the other boys,” Ed Martin of the
Globe
explained.
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The other boys were, presumably, relieved not to have any asparagus scaled at them.

John Evers was in the stands at Fenway on Opening Day, but he was no longer with the team as a coach or an infielder—in his place, the Red Sox had acquired capable veteran second baseman Dave Shean, a native of Belmont, Massachusetts, from the Reds and brought back well-liked coach Heinie Wagner, who had been fired to make room for Evers. Wagner knew the American League and could help Barrow with strategy. On the mound, Babe Ruth got the nod in the opener and, in front of 10,000 fans, threw a four-hit complete game, driving in two runs for a 7–1 win.

Carl Mays threw a one-hitter in the second game, barely missing a no-hitter when Shean was too slow to get to a grounder (which surely drew the ire of Mays). In the third game, with Mary Pickford on hand to push for the sale of Liberty Bonds, ex-A’s catcher Wally Schang knocked in two in the ninth to pull out a 5–4 win. With that, the Red Sox—who had rebuilt their roster by sending $60,000 and some good young players to the A’s—started 1918 with a sweep of Mack’s bunch.