The Original Curse (23 page)

Hollocher’s consistency and ebullience rubbed off on his older teammates. He did not miss a game, even after the magnates—who were coping with the shortened season that had been decided on after Baker’s ruling—began compacting the schedule, squeezing in as many doubleheaders as they could during a brutally hot August. The Cubs, for example, played 10 doubleheaders in the month, and under those conditions managers had to rest their players frequently. But not Hollocher. In the
Tribune
, Crusinberry wrote, “[Hollocher] has struck such a merry stride he has inspired confidence in all of the others. As a result, they are going at top speed in every inning of every game.”
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Once August hit and the magnates finally settled the rest of the season, the Cubs and Hollocher reclaimed that merry stride. Just in time, too, because the team was in New York to face the Giants, who had overcome player losses at nearly every position to pull within 3.5 games of the Cubs, heading into a crucial 5-game series. But if there was a hallmark of the Cubs’ 1918 season, it was the way they were consistently able to rip through the defending NL champion Giants. This key series in early August would be no different. Hippo Vaughn tossed a one-hitter in the opener, not letting a batter past second base in an easy 5–0 win. The second game of the series—Sailors Day at the Polo Grounds, with a box of cigars for the batter who notched the first hit—showed what a mess the Giants’ pitching staff had become in the absence of regulars Jess Barnes, Jeff Tesreau, and Rube Benton. Starter Pol Perritt was knocked around for three runs in the first three innings, and the best reliever McGraw had handy was Ferdie Schupp. The Cubs battered him for 14 hits and 8 runs, giving Lefty Tyler an 11–1 win.

On a warm August 3 afternoon, the Cubs and Giants split a doubleheader in front of 25,000 fans. But warm turned hot. Temperatures topped 90 for four days, and a record was set on August 7, when thermometers in New York registered 102 degrees. It was especially humid on August 5. “Furnace is right,” the
Tribune
reported, “for the mercury went up without making even the express stops, and the humidity hugged the century mark all day, making a mammoth stew pot of the Polo Grounds.”
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This would be a key game for the Cubs, because by now the Giants had fallen 5.5 games out of first. A win
would almost seal the pennant. Fred Mitchell had an idea—he would use the heat to his advantage. Hippo Vaughn was to start against the Giants’ Fred Toney, a matchup that tickled fans, because in a head-to-head matchup the previous summer Toney and Vaughn had both thrown no-hitters through nine innings, with Vaughn and the Cubs finally losing in the 10th. There would be no no-hitter for Vaughn today, though, because Mitchell entered the game planning to pull him after five innings, before the heat could wear him down. Then he’d insert Paul Carter for two innings and Douglas for two more.

When the Cubs were at the plate, Mitchell wanted to exploit a known weakness of Toney’s: fielding. Toney had been a notable player in 1918, and not because of his talent. He went 24–16 for the Reds in 1917 but became a pariah after he was arrested for attempting to dodge the draft. Facing nonstop virulence from Cincinnati fans, Toney started 6–10, and the Reds traded him. Typical of McGraw’s acquisitions, Toney got back on track, notching a record of 58–30 over the next three and a half years. Mitchell, though, knew that Toney struggled to field bunts. After the Cubs fell behind, 3–0, Chicago’s batters began bunting, sending Toney scampering all over the infield. The Cubs did not score, but the bunts had Toney drenched in sweat. With two outs in the eighth, the tactic paid off as the Cubs rallied for five runs off Toney and won, 5–3. The Cubs left the Polo Grounds with a 6.5-game lead. The pennant was all but theirs.

Hollocher’s steady fielding, hitting, and enthusiasm helped pull the Cubs out of their July rut, but the roster was boosted by reinforcements. In the wake of the work-or-fight order, the Pacific Coast League had broken up, and Mitchell plucked a pair of useful players in the aftermath: infielder Charley Pick and right-hander Speed Martin. Pick, who had been playing for San Francisco, was a decent hitter, but in his only full big-league season, with the Athletics in 1916, he had committed 42 errors in 108 games at third base. With the more sure-handed Charley Deal at third, Mitchell inserted Pick at second base, where the Cubs had lost Pete Kilduff to the draft and had been trying to get by with Rollie Zeider and Bill McCabe (a pair who combined to hit .216). Pick was lacking in the field but hit .326 in 29 games with the Cubs. Martin, signed from Oakland, also had value. With Hendrix and Douglas sliding, Mitchell needed another right-hander. Martin served well. Tall and thin, his nickname was ironic—he mostly used curveballs delivered from a variety of arm
angles, as well as a slowball. “Pick and Martin are delighted to be with the Cubs,” Oscar Reichow wrote in the
Daily News
. “It is not often that many players join a ball club in time to ‘horn in’ on a World’s Series as they have.”
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After the Giants series, it seemed inevitable that Pick and Martin would, indeed, horn in on the World Series. If it was played, that is. As August passed, the question of whether baseball would put on a World Series continued to go unanswered. Players would have until September 1 to find useful work, and Baker had given baseball that much time to settle its business affairs. But just how to finish the business was a puzzle. The pleasant unity the magnates had shown in making their final plea to Baker and Crowder at the end of July didn’t even last till August 1. Ban Johnson, sticking to the letter of Baker’s revised ruling, proposed a plan to end the season on August 20 and play a World Series that could be over by September 1. But again, the magnates coalesced into factions. Johnson got no support from the National League (even good friend Garry Herrmann panned Ban’s plan), plus a thumbs-down from Clark Griffith, Charles Comiskey, and, of course, Harry Frazee. When AL leaders met in Cleveland on August 3, Comiskey delivered a rousing speech that swayed the other magnates to vote against Johnson’s August 20 arrangement and support finishing the season on Labor Day (September 2), with a World Series starting on September 4. The NL agreed.

Johnson, not accustomed to being so freely defied, issued a statement: “If the club owners wish to take a chance on acting contrary to the ruling of the War Department, that is their business.”
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That brought a scathing rebuke signed by Frazee, Griffith, and Comiskey, accusing Johnson of bungling the work-or-fight situation and adding something like an AL magnates’ declaration of independence: “From now on, the club owners are going to run the American League. We criticise [sic] Mr. Johnson merely as an official. We have nothing against him personally, but from now on we intend to take a hand in the management of the league. His rule or ruin policy is shelved.”
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A week later, though, Comiskey and Griffith said they did not authorize the statement.
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This is what a mess the game’s leadership had become. Even the anti-Johnson faction had factions.

But Johnson was right. Baseball’s owners were taking a chance defying Baker. It was a reasonable guess that the War Department would allow two teams an extra 10 days to play out the championship. Players,
though, were not willing to abide by guesses. They wanted Baker’s written approval. “It may be all right for the magnates to assume the government will not object to a world’s series after Sept. 1,” one Cub told the
Tribune
. “They won’t be taking any chances, because no penalty will be imposed on them. The players are the ones who will get it in the neck if the work or fight order is not obeyed, and I for one am going to obey it.”
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All haggling and convulsions about the World Series caused a stir among the two league leaders—the Cubs in the NL and the Red Sox in the AL. Through it all, though, Hollocher was a touchstone. He just kept hitting. When the Cubs left the Polo Grounds, having won 4 of 5 from the Giants, Hollocher had hit in seven straight games. Arriving in Pittsburgh to play a one-day series—one of the odd contortions of the newfangled schedule—Holly had hit in 11 straight. Over a 6-game, four-day series at home in Chicago, Holly kept playing and hitting, running his streak to 18 straight. In a doubleheader against Philadelphia on August 17, Hollocher tallied five hits and pushed his hitting streak to 20 games.

This should have been a big story. But there was bigger news in Chicago on August 17, and Hollocher’s run was pushed to the inside pages of the newspapers.

While Hollocher was pushing his hitting streak to 20 games on Chicago’s North Side, down in the Loop high drama was playing out in the Federal Building courtroom of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The biggest court case of 1918—the federal government’s arrest and trial, on charges of sedition and undermining the draft, of 100 members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World labor union—was coming to a sudden close. Indeed, it may have been the biggest case in the history of the American courts, believed to be the largest group of defendants ever tried before a federal jury. The estimated cost of the trial, which began with jury selection back on April 1, was $1 million. By the time it was over, more than 30,000 pages of records had been typewritten, and stenographers had entered 7.5 million words into the court log.

The trial of the Wobblies—the nickname of the IWW—had loomed over Chicago throughout the spring and summer. It was expected to be a tense affair, especially after Landis was assigned the case. Few judges were as far away from the IWW on the political
spectrum as Landis. The Wobblies were strongly antiwar and differed from the mainstream labor movement, headed by Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, in that they were not looking for moderate, incremental improvements to the condition of workers but for a wholesale overthrow of the wage system as it existed. The AFL had actually been very supportive of the war effort and had leveraged the overall shortage of labor into widespread improvements for its members. The IWW, though, pushed its members to resist the war. This was not a stance appreciated by Landis, who had been making strongly pro-war speeches around Chicago and had a son, Reed Landis, serving at the front as one of America’s first fighter pilots.

But Landis had been surprisingly respectful and even indulgent when it came to the Wobblies. At the start of the trial, Landis, a chewer himself, made a tobacco concession to the largely foreign-born and generally rough-hewn defendants. “I think we will have a row of spittoons moved in tomorrow,” he said. “We must not deprive these men of their comforts.”
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Landis listened to complaints about the food that the IWW defendants were being served and ordered them to be well fed. He also ordered they be given razors and a place to shave each day. Over the course of the trial, Landis allowed about 70 of the defendants out of jail on their own recognizance.

The case presented by the government, though, was not so kind. Federal prosecutors presented the IWW as an extremely violent organization bent on the overthrow of the U.S. government. Prosecutors freely mixed truth and fiction. The Wobblies were antiwar and sought to fight against the war through the sabotage of industry. An IWW tract read during the trial described the use of sabotage: “It may mean the destroying of raw materials destined for a scab factory or shop. It may mean the spoiling of a finished product. It may mean the destruction of parts of machinery or the disarrangement of a whole machine.… In the case of wars, which every intelligent worker knows are wholesale murders of workers to enrich the master class, there is no weapon so forceful to defeat the employers as sabotage by the rebellious workers.”
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The government wove in actual words and pamphlets from the Wobblies with grotesque exaggerations. It was charged that IWW was plotting to replace President Wilson with Kaiser Wilhelm, that they were funded by Germany, that they were planning to invade Arizona
with the help of Mexico, that they had plotted with the Irish rebel group Sinn Fein in Butte, Montana, that they were run by the Russian Bolsheviks. No actual evidence of any of these plots or associations was presented, but merely mentioning them in court helped the government accomplish its real aim in the case—to make the Wobblies look so scary that no one could sympathize with them.

It worked. Though many around the country supported the goal of workers’ rights, the labor situation was tricky during wartime. Even unions that were members of the AFL were subject to public scorn, because strikes threatened to slow down production to support the Allied armies. And there were plenty of strikes across the country. Around Boston at least 10 groups were on strike in August alone—shoe cutters in Brockton, followed by shoe lasters in Brockton, Bridgewater, and Rockland; city workers in Lawrence; General Electric workers, twice, in Lynn; blacksmiths in Watertown; operators of the Middlesex & Boston Street Railway; bellboys in Swampscott; employees of E. A. Henchley and Co., makers of life rafts, in Cambridge.

But Wobblies were different from East Coast strikers, who had specific and reasonable goals. Wobblies were plain
scary
to many. The union’s headquarters were located at 1001 W. Madison Street in Chicago—that’s why the trial was now before Landis’s court—but the Wobblies were not a strong presence among Chicago workers. The rank-and-file IWW generally worked in mining and logging companies of the West and were almost always unskilled laborers. Some measure of the Wobblies’ scary reputation was earned. Violent outbursts between employers and the IWW were common (often initiated by employers), but in big cities those violent outbursts were just distant legends, taking place in far-flung locales such as Colorado, Arizona, and Washington. The IWW trial brought those tales to life in Chicago. There was fear that the city would become the scene of Wobbly vengeance. On April 14, a
Tribune
editorial warned, “Farther West, on the coast, there is a different idea of the I.W.W. There people know what the virtual terrorization of a town by the incursion of violent revolutionaries can be.… The indulgent humor of this region is not found where the I.W.W. has been felt as an applied force and where it is not known solely as a ludicrous vagary, pink whiskered and long haired.”
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