The Original Curse (16 page)

As the players bantered, fans kept piling in. The war was raging, the order that all men should work or fight was official, and baseball might soon be ruled a nonuseful occupation. But it was Cubs–Giants weekend, and Weeghman Park was packed.

With a solid early-season record and signs of a good club, the Cubs had been looking ahead to the series against the Giants (slated to start May 24 but delayed by rain) for two reasons. First, Cubs fans considered John McGraw’s bunch the arch nemesis, going back to the thrilling 1908 pennant race. The Cubs won in part because of a controversial play in which Giants rookie Fred Merkle—now a veteran Cub—failed to run to second base on an otherwise game-winning hit. The other reason the Cubs bugs were worked up was that the series was a measuring stick. The Giants were champions. At 19–11, the Cubs were good, but they trailed New York by four games, and if they wanted to prove they were championship class, this weekend offered the opportunity.

Just before the series started, though, everything changed. Now that America had plunged into the war, more soldiers were needed, and more men were needed to work jobs that supported the soldiers. On May 23, General Crowder made it a legal obligation, as of July 1, for men of draft age either to work in a useful industry or to be drafted immediately. Crowder noted the impetus behind the order: “One of the unanswerable criticisms of the draft has been that it takes men from the farms and from all useful employments and marches them past crowds of idlers and loafers away to the army,” he said. “The remedy is … to require that any man pleading exemption on any ground shall also show that he is contributing effectively to the industrial welfare of the nation.”
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Idlers and loafers were, in most cases, easy to define. If a young man was hanging around a poolroom, he was obviously loafing and would have to answer for why he was not employed in a useful trade. Those who held jobs as bartenders or hotel doormen, too, would be collared and required to get essential work. But what about baseball players? Was theirs a useful industry? Baseball did not contribute directly to the war effort, and when Johnson made his plea for the exemption of 288 players, Crowder had laughed him down. Baseball had, however, helped raise money for the Red Cross and contributed to the purchase of Liberty Bonds. Fans attending games paid a war tax, which was useful. Besides, actors were granted exemption so that the population could continue to get much-needed diversion at theaters and in the movies. Shouldn’t baseball players, too, be exempted because of the entertainment they provided?

Baker and Crowder had considered baseball before writing the order. Neither felt sure enough about the game to take a definitive stance on baseball’s status—Baker was under the mistaken belief that most players were older than draft age—so they decided to wait until an appeal of an actual case could be made. Which put baseball and its players in a precarious position. From May 23 until Crowder’s order would take effect on July 1, baseball would continue with no inkling as to whether the government approved or disapproved, no inkling of whether players were considered slackers, that most dread label in 1918 America. Whenever Crowder did rule on the subject, it was understood that there were three possible outcomes. Crowder could call the game nonessential, and owners could end the season abruptly. Or Crowder could call the game nonessential, baseball could lose all
of its players of draft age, and owners could sign up teams of players outside draft age, younger than 21 and older than 31. Or Crowder could smile upon the sport, recognize its usefulness to a country at war, and exempt its players. There were signs that the government would rule in favor of baseball. Wilson had, in the summer of ’17, expressed his support, and two days after the work-or-fight order was handed down, Wilson threw out the first pitch at a Senators game in Washington.

Still, the future was questionable. If all players of draft age were forced to find useful work, according to one estimate, 70–80 percent of rosters would be gone. Frank J. Navin, president of the Tigers, said, “Such an order would cause us to close our park. The order would leave me [41-year-old Bill] Donovan as a pitcher, [35-year-old Oscar] Stanage behind the bat, [34-year-old Tubby] Spencer at first and [49-year-old manager Hughie] Jennings at short. How does that sound for a pennant winner?”
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But, for Giants–Cubs weekend, work-or-fight was easily pushed aside. There were 14,000 on hand for the opening of the series on Saturday, and it was a tense crowd as things got off to an iffy start for Lefty Tyler. Leadoff man Ross Youngs rapped a single, and Benny Kauff (who would be drafted in late June) drove a Tyler pitch deep to left for a double, scoring Youngs. George Burns followed with a single, and just like that, Tyler let up three hits and two runs to the first three men he faced. But he braced himself, getting two infield outs before striking out Walter Holke. In the bottom of the first inning, with Barnes taking the mound for the last time before he joined the army, Flack scored on a double by Mann. When Merkle crushed a Barnes fastball foul past third base, McGraw pulled out Barnes, sparing him the embarrassment of getting knocked around in his final start. Al Demaree took the slab, and the Cubs built a 5–4 lead before Demaree was replaced by Floridian reliever Red Causey. Here’s how the
Tribune
’s James Crusinberry described Causey: “Mr. Cecil Algernon ‘Red’ Causey is six feet in height, ten and a half inches wide, has ambitions, is too young for the war, and too old to stay on the Everglades…. The Cubs didn’t do much in the way of prowess after he entered the arena in search of fame.”
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The Cubs had enough prowess to wind up with a 7–4 win, though.

Vaughn took the mound for the second game, on Sunday. Chicago was bustling in anticipation. Tickets were sold out by 3:15, for a
game that was to start at 4:00. The Cubs kept selling tickets, though—fans stood in the aisles, they packed under the stands and peeked out when they could, and ushers lined up fans along the outfield wall and behind the plate in foul ground, technically in the field of play, forcing the managers and umpires to agree on ground rules for balls that struck fans. The rooftops and windows of the apartment buildings across Clark Street were packed.
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A throng of about 25,000 showed up, the biggest crowd the Cubs had ever drawn to Weeghman Park. They saw a mint performance from Vaughn, who allowed two hits and a run in the first, but shut the Giants down after that, giving up only two more hits and grabbing a 5–1 win.

The Sunday fans also heard the band play “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the seventh inning. The
Chicago Herald Examiner
reported, “All hands, with the exception of one rash youth, stood up and saluted. He probably will stand up for a week with or without music. Indignant patriots grabbed the slacker, rushed him down the center of the aisle of the stand and into the street. Other patriots stepped into the aisle behind the procession and landed a series of swift kicks where they would do the most good.”
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By the third game the Giants were deflated and frustrated—particularly ex-Cub Heinie Zimmerman, now New York’s third baseman, who was alternately cheered and booed throughout the series. The Giants grabbed a quick lead, but the Cubs scraped back. As the Cubs were pulling even, Mann went hard into third base and Zimmerman gave him a forceful tag to the stomach. Mann grabbed Zimmerman’s knees, pulling him to the ground. The two exchanged blows before being separated without ejections. But the Cubs kept up their assault, giving Claude Hendrix a 7–3 win. After the game, a ticked-off Zimmerman waited for Mann in street clothes on Addison Street. A group of fans watched eagerly. Alas, Zimmerman’s pugilistic intentions were short-circuited by the fairer sex. “Later Mann came out,” Crusinberry reported, “but Mrs. Mann had been waiting for him and walked alongside of him, past Heinie and the expectant crowd. Strong arms weren’t needed this time. Mrs. Mann marched her husband home, and Heinie grabbed a taxi and beat it.”
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The Cubs had humiliated the NL champs. In three games they outscored the McGraws, 19–8, outhit them, 40–24, outplayed them in the field, and showed far more class on the mound. Mann’s bout with Zimmerman might have been exactly what the Cubs needed.
The Giants had a bullying reputation that reflected the disposition of McGraw, their hard-boiled manager. The Cubs would not be cowed. Later in the week, Bill Killefer got into a dustup after Cincinnati’s Greasy Neale—future Hall of Fame football coach—delivered a sucker punch to Killefer’s jaw, laying out the sturdy catcher in the middle of a game. An onrush of Cubs players came to their catcher’s defense, and Neale was thrown out for the punch. Incensed Cubs fans threw glass soda bottles at Reds outfielder Rube Bressler, thinking he was Neale, and showing that these Cubs and their fans were not afraid of rough play.

Indeed, baseball was not a game for the meek in 1918, on the field or in the stands. Not until the 1923 season did baseball, tired of seeing umpires attacked with projectiles, ban glass bottles in parks. During the ’18 season, after two women were injured by fans who threw seat cushions during Cubs games, Charley Weeghman pushed Chicago’s aldermen to make it a crime to throw bottles and other objects from the stands. He failed. The aldermen decided that “the enraged fan was within his rights in heaving a bottle at Catfish the umpire.” One alderman, incredibly, argued, “Our ancestors fought and died for certain unalienable rights. Just now our boys are fighting in France for freedom and democracy. Why should not the baseball fan have freedom to innocently express his sentiment?”
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The Cubs were 23–12 when they left the friendly, flying-bottle confines of Weeghman Park to set out on the road for a 23-day junket to the East on May 31. The train ride was miserable—it was hot, and war restrictions meant all 30 members of the Cubs traveling party were crammed into one car, which made even grabbing a seat a challenge. Teddy Roosevelt was on the train, with a car to himself. Several players stopped to visit the ex-president, who had been a loud critic of the administration’s war effort. Roosevelt’s disdain for Wilson and Baker was widely known (rooted in the fact that they hadn’t allowed Roosevelt, 59 years old and not exactly in peak shape, to put together his own fighting division to take to France). When players asked what Roosevelt thought about the work-or-fight order and how it would affect ballplayers after July 1, they were probably expecting T.R. to deliver a scathing rebuke. They were disappointed. Roosevelt told them he had been too busy to think about baseball’s situation.
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The Cubs swept the Braves and Phillies to start the trip, which boosted them to the top of the standings. They were greeted in Philadelphia
by Bill Wrigley, who gave each player a first-place reward—$5 to spend on new clothes, which they gladly did the following day. “Haberdashers on Chestnut Street did some business,” the
Daily News
reported. “The boys came back with new ties, hats, socks and shirts, which they sported on the Sabbath.”
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To close the trip, the Cubs split the rematch with the Giants, won two of three from Brooklyn, and split with Pittsburgh. They went 13–5, returning to Chicago with a 36–17 record and a tight grip on first place.

It was just after 4:00
P.M
. by the watch of K. B. Lowry, the Brooklynite captain of the
Texel
, a Dutch steamship that had been loaded up with 42,000 tons of sugar from the Caribbean. The sea was calm, the afternoon was warm, and Lowry had the boat about 60 miles from its destination, New York harbor. That’s when he saw ripples radiate in the water, just yards from the
Texel
’s bow. The smooth surface of the ocean convulsed and split, and suddenly Lowry was looking at the massive gray deck of a submarine. Without warning, the sub aimed its gun and fired a shell packed with shrapnel at the clumsy body of the
Texel
. Panic set in among the crew.
What was a submarine doing firing shells on an unarmed sugar boat 60 miles off the New York coast
? The men took cover. One of the crew, Frank Ryan, scrambled back on deck to rescue the ship’s mascot, a Maltese cat. Just in time. The sub’s guns fired again, a rain of debris spraying the
Texel
’s deck. And then a third blast. Lowry pulled the
Texel
to a stop. The U-boat’s captain boarded, demanding to see the ship’s papers. Looking them over, he said to Lowry, “We will give you time to get off. Then we shall sink your vessel.”
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The 36-man crew crammed into two lifeboats. The cat too. They began to row to shore, a two-day ordeal. Behind them, the U-boat blasted the
Texel
, which tipped to its side and slowly eased into the water.

June 2 was a bad day for ships in American waters. The
Texel
was one of six ships sunk off the East Coast that day. In the past, German submarines had occasionally slipped into U.S. waters to cause mischief and create a scare, but this was different. Between May 25 and May 28, four nonmilitary ships had been mysteriously sunk, and the June 2 tally brought the total to 10 in a span of just eight days. This wave of U-boat marauding would end in mid-June, with ships attacked from the waters of Massachusetts down to Virginia, but in the wake of the sinking of the
Texel
and others, there was no way to tell what, exactly, was going on or when it would stop. It very much appeared that the United States was under German assault. Word spread that there were as many as five U-boats off the coast, and a mother ship, maybe even disguised under an American flag, supplying them.
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It was easy to tie these rumors to another rumor, which held that a shipment of one million Mauser rifles and a billion cartridges had reached American shores and was hidden in storage in the United States, waiting for a German-American uprising. Both rumors had credibility. New York’s deputy attorney general held hearings on the Mauser rifle shipment,
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and the U.S. Congress thought enough of the U-boat threat that it passed a $16 million appropriation for balloon and seaplane stations to track enemy subs. In New York, fear spread that the submarine attacks could be a precursor to German air attacks. For the first time, the city established an air raid siren and required businesses on major thoroughfares—such as Broadway and Fifth Avenue—to dim their lights at night to make the streets harder to see from above.
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