46. Bill Veeck

 “Color is the thing they have done everything in their power to get rid of." -Bill Veeck with Ed Linn

            

            “The great [P.T.] Barnum was tireless in the practice of autobiography,” writes Constance Rourke in Trumpets of Jubilee, her 1927 study of five 19th century originators of American mass culture. The same could apply to Bill Veeck, the man referred to in the ad copy of my edition of his first memoir as “the Barnum of Baseball.” This tirelessness in the case of Veeck, the flamboyant showman and serial baseball franchise owner, though, comes not from the number of autobiographies he published (a mere three, all co-written with Ed Linn), but from the thoroughness and obsessiveness of detail included in each volume.

            This exhaustiveness can make his 1962 debut literary effort, Veeck As In Wreck, a tiresome read—particularly during the seemingly endless dissections of every one of Veeck’s team purchases and attempted team purchases—but it also results in a lively portrait of a man committed to the untapped entertainment potential of baseball. Taking evident pleasure in tweaking the “old-timers who look upon baseball not as a game or a business but as a solemn ritual, almost a holy calling,” Veeck is constantly dreaming up promotions—handing out absurd door prizes (ridiculous amounts of live lobsters), staging circus performances before games, and rigging up an “exploding scoreboard” in Chicago’s Comiskey Park, an audiovisual assault that shoots off fireworks every time the home team goes deep.

            Veeck’s nose-thumbing at the baseball purists extends to the game itself, both as he unsuccessfully attempts to introduce innovations to the game that would later become standard (some of his then-dismissed suggestions include interleague play and automatic intentional walks), or employs what he euphemistically calls “gamesmanship” and what many other people would call cheating. Whether it’s strategically moving the outfield fences in and out depending on which team is batting, having the grounds crew raise or lower the pitcher’s mound to the home team’s advantage, or instituting a high-tech sign stealing scheme for the 1948 world champion Indians that almost exactly presages the machinations of another Series winner some six decades later, Veeck’s manipulations are either all in good fun or an outright assault on the game’s integrity, depending on your level of piety. Either way, Veeck, with his commitment to providing the home fans with a memorable experience, is not a bit ashamed of any of it.

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            “In any sort of exhibit,” writes Rourke, “[P.T.] Barnum was always to find pleasure; there was the happy combination of a public appearance and of pulling off a feat… of producing some preposterous object for public wonder or acclaim.” All of this, of course, describes Veeck as well, constant public speaker and seeker of the next big stunt, but it’s perhaps his “gamesmanship” that most aligns him with the 19th century showman. For Barnum’s spectacles were not merely displays of oddities but full-fledged hoaxes. The master showman stitched a monkey’s upper body to a fish’s tail, called it a Feejee Mermaid, and made it a star attraction at his American Museum. He displayed a possibly microcephalic Black man named William Henry Johnson and billed him as a primitive African creature. And, in a particularly dubious gesture, he exhibited a former slave named Joice Heath, falsely claiming she was 161-years old and had been the wet nurse of George Washington.

            These hoaxes, though, were not received by their audiences as mere con jobs. Rather, they operated in an epistemological middle ground between belief and skepticism. As Kevin Young writes in Bunk, his 2017 study of two centuries of American imposture, “Nineteenth-century America regularly reveled in the contradictions of what famed showman P.T. Barnum called humbug, his many audiences taking pleasure in hoaxing and being hoaxed. What folks wanted was a show.” It isn’t that people necessarily fully believed in what Barnum was telling them; it’s that they were willing to suspend their disbelief, at least to the degree necessary to privilege entertainment over mere verisimilitude. Further, those viewers who did allow themselves to be fooled took a sort of pleasure in the humbling. As Young notes, “Those who paid to see the humbug surely experienced a number of things,” which included, “a feeling of being fooled, but also a not unpleasant realization at how foolish they had been to be so eager.”

            Veeck’s “gamesmanship” occupies a similarly ambiguous middle ground between mere entertainment and betraying his audience’s expectations. I’m not sure what the public reaction was like when Veeck revealed his World Series sign stealing scheme in his memoir, but as he points out, such machinations are nothing new in the world of baseball. With such venerable figures as legendary Giants manager John McGraw having employed men with binoculars in center field to decipher the catcher’s finger movements (or at least so Veeck claims), these moments of competitive advantage have long been part of the game and have been, presumably, at least moderately tolerated throughout most of baseball history. Similarly, Veeck is careful to note his adherence to the letter, if certainly not the spirit, of the law. He observes, for example, that when he first started moving the outfield fence in and out, there was no rule on the books that specifically forbade the practice. Nonetheless, he knows what he’s doing is not exactly kosher. “We didn’t buy television time to make a public announcement of what we were doing because we didn’t want to disturb the Commissioner’s office or upset the opposition,” he writes with a touch of irony. “We moved the fence stealthily, in the dark of night.”

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            “Color is the thing they have done everything in their power to get rid of,” writes Veeck halfway through the book, once again inveighing against the staid powers-that-be atop the league hierarchy. He is specifically referring to the game’s unwritten rules of on-field behavior that ensure that all players must entirely suppress their personality, but the use of the word “color” here, whether intentionally or not, can’t help but carry an extra meaning. For those same opponents of flamboyant behavior also did everything they could to enforce the unofficial color line, beginning with the league’s now controversial first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and including most of the game’s owners. Veeck is quick to present himself as being—unlike his peers—an unabashed champion of integration (and all credit due for his signing of Larry Doby, the first Black player in American League history), but his showmanship was often based on some rather dubious tribalist distinctions.

            As Young notes, the hoax, both in its 19th century heyday and in its more contemporary incarnations, was almost always predicated on a sense of difference, usually between the implied white viewer and a nonwhite object of display. For Young, one of the most significant things about the hoax is what it reveals about the viewer’s prejudices and worldview. What is it about these racialized hoaxes that the viewer wants to believe, that confirms their way of looking at the country and its hierarchies? And what does this say about how the country sees itself? As Young writes, articulating the process by which a coherent American identity first crystalized, “The grotesque in America centered on Black figures starting in the nineteenth century as a way not just to claim them uncivilized but to create civilization and conceive of a new nation.”

            For Veeck, operating a century after Barnum, it’s the nation’s current state of maturity that has put an end to the old type of entertainment and introduced a staid climate that he must constantly fight against. “There’s no doubt,” he writes, that the lack of flamboyant personalities in baseball is “part of the conformity that has dropped over the country… I suspect it goes back… to the feeling that we are no longer a new country, with open frontiers, but a world power which has to operate carefully according to carefully planned policies and procedures.” In bringing back a 19th century sense of showmanship to counteract this tendency, though, Veeck can’t help but fall into many of the same traps that characterized Barnum’s reliance on the “dark double” to achieve his effect.

            Veeck insists, for example, that his signing of legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige in 1948 was no mere gimmick but a gesture made with an eye to helping his team. And, although Paige was at least 42 that year (and, according to Veeck, likely a lot older), he did prove a valuable addition to the World Series squad, but it’s clear that Paige’s entertainment value—he was a showman every bit Veeck’s equal—was largely on the owner’s mind in bringing in the player. Veeck would re-sign Paige in 1951 at his next stop as the owner of the St. Louis Browns and Paige would pitch for Veeck until he was probably at least 50. (Kansas City Athletics’ owner Charles O. Finley, taking a page from Veeck’s book, would bring Satchel out of retirement for one final appearance in 1965.)

            The signing of Paige was, at least arguably, a mutually beneficial arrangement. Less savory was what seems like a proper obsession, on Veeck’s part, with little people. While Veeck (who was disabled for much of his career) mulled hiring an all-little person crew of ushers and used little people in other various stunts, the most notorious moment in his entire career came when he signed 3’ 7’’ Eddie Gaedel and sent him up for a single at-bat. Because Gaedel was so short and his strike zone so small, he drew four balls on four pitches, after which he quickly trotted down to first base where he was removed for a pinch runner. In Veeck’s recounting of the promotion, which constitutes the entire first chapter of Veeck as in Wreck, he defends himself from charges of exploitation by noting that Gaedel was a professional performer and that his lone plate appearance led him to receive many subsequent high paying offers of work. Still, Veeck certainly adds to the humiliation by making Gaedel jump out of a cake before his at-bat and then wear a uniform with the number 1/8 stitched to the back. And the crowd reaction, which was no doubt lively, and apparently uncritical, was very much predicated on a sense of physical superiority.

            If a certain American identity had long been fixed by the middle of the 20th century, established as one of difference, the ideal polity defined by what it was not (Black, queer, disabled), then the coming decades would go some ways towards unraveling this seeming consensus. Veeck may have seen himself as a mere entertainer, but like Barnum before him, he would continually rely on the figure of the double, what Young calls the “grotesque in America,” to define the American people against a negative counterexample. This unraveling of any kind of American consensus, the result of the various civil rights movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the inevitable backlash among those who felt left behind by these movements, would come to define Veeck’s final stunt, the infamous Disco Demolition Night.

            In 1979, at the end of his career, Veeck arranged, in conjunction with his son, Mike, and local Chicago DJ Steve Dahl, a promotion in which fans would bring in their old disco records which would then be blown up by explosives between games of a White Sox-Tigers double header while the crowd chanted “disco sucks!” The evening quickly got out of control, with 50,000 fans directing their pent-up racism and homophobia at the popular musical genre known for celebrating race mixing and queerness, leading to a riot, the forfeiture of the night’s second scheduled game, and plenty of criticism from writers who knew exactly what the event signified. It also essentially ended Veeck’s career. He would sell the White Sox a year and a half later and succumb to lung cancer in 1986. In the introduction to Trumpets of Jubilee, writing about P.T. Barnum and other transformative 19th century figures, Constance Rourke noted that “the popular leader is nothing less than the vicarious crowd.” For better and often for worse, no more so than in his final disastrous public gesture, Bill Veeck was a true inheritor of that tradition.