Freedom’s Just Another Word for Something New to Sell

“Everyone always has the fanciest reasons for what they do.” –Lillian Hellman

The headline atop the Times sports page June 21 was a sanctimonious lie: “In Homage to Mays and the Negro Leagues, MLB Heads to Birmingham.” The online hed said “Baseball Returns to the ‘Hallowed Grounds’ of a Negro Leagues Stadium.” 

Yes, a game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals has been scheduled for June 20, 2024 at Rickwood Field, where Willie Mays played for the Birmingham Black Barons before he joined the Giants. But no, the venue was not chosen by way of homage to Mays and the Negro Leagues (which disbanded in the wake of integration). MLB is a consortium of capitalists who see a large revenue stream to be tapped. It’s not just the money to be made by televising an otherwise ho-hum mid-season game to the nation and the world, but think of all those jerseys to be marketed! The Homestead Grays, The Detroit Wolves, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Cab Calloway…

John Lardner was a great sportswriter who, like his famous father, Ring, drank too much and died too young. In 1953 he wrote a piece questioning the practical value of “spring training,” two months in a warm clime for which players did not get paid and risked injury while the owners made money from exhibition games. “One of the players’ major complaints against spring training,” Lardner wrote, “is night games. They dislike night ball at all times, but especially when they are meant to be acquiring health and strength in the winter and early spring.”

Explaining why the Dodgers, who trained in Vero Beach, would be playing exhibition games at night in Miami, vice-president Buzzy Bavasi explained, “It’s a difference between a seven-thousand crowd and a two-thousand crowd. How else are we going to get the money to pay these boys’ expenses?”

Lardner: “A further way to try to get money back, for Brooklyn, is to sell out towns where Jackie Robinson has not been seen before. This spring there is a game scheduled in New Orleans, 1,000 miles out of the homebound line, to pick up exploited Robinson dollars from Negro fans there. Robinson is the greatest single baseball drawing card of the last five years, as Babe Ruth was before him. It never increased the happiness of Ruth or Robinson, or their teammates, as their clubs wandered about the land beating the bushes for virgin funds, to reflect that neither the ‘gate attractions’ nor the players were paid, in salary or percentage for those wearisome and sometimes physically dangerous junkets.” 

Getting back to the Times’s reworking of the corporate media advisory: “MLB said that the date of the Rickwood Field game was intended to coincide with Juneteenth and that the game would feature a variety of activities to celebrate the history of the Negro leagues and Mays, the game’s greatest living player.”

Juneteenth, indeed! I watched the news that day, oh boy, and didn’t hear a single mention of the fact that the great state of Texas held back news of the Emancipation Proclamation for two years!

The Times “homage” story by David Wallstein was not devoid of information: “With a seating capacity of almost 11,000, Rickwood Field was built by the Birmingham industrialist Harvey Woodward, who was known as Rick, and it was modeled after Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. When it opened, on Aug. 18, 1910, businesses in Birmingham were shuttered to celebrate the grand occasion.

“In its early years, the park hosted exhibition games with teams from the American and National Leagues, including the Yankees, but Rickwood was home to the Barons, a Southern League institution that featured stars like Pie Traynor and Burleigh Grimes. In later years, Bo Jackson played for the Barons at Rickwood, as did Michael Jordan during his 1994 sojourn into baseball.

“A great deal of the most significant history at the park, however, came from the Black Barons, a Negro leagues team that featured stars like Mule Suttles and Satchel Paige, who won more games for Birmingham than he did for any other professional team.

“In 1948, the Black Barons — with Mays in tow — faced the Homestead Grays in the final Negro World Series. While the Grays won that Series, William Greason, who went on to be the first Black pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, picked up Birmingham’s lone victory. Greason, 98, still lives in Birmingham and is the pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, less than two miles from Rickwood Field.”

Clarification re Ellsberg

Somebody thought I was dissing Daniel Ellsberg by questioning whether “whistleblower” was the right word to describe his role. I certainly wasn’t. There was nobody in the peace movement for whom I had so much respect (except for Dave Dellinger and Don Duncan and Howard Levy and Donna Mickleson and Corinna Fales and Judy Olasov and Steve Kline and Bob Tater). Ellsberg lived in the East Bay and 20 years ago I had a chance to meet him through George Zimmer, a backer of the medical marijuana movement (“I guarantee it!”). I declined because what could I say? “Thank you for your service to our country?” Now I wish I had seized the opportunity.

After Ellsberg died June 16 I caught some re-runs of his interviews on “Democracy Now.” The screen dubbed him “Whistleblower,” while he was providing background and analysis. 

The point I meant to make in the AVA was that Ellsberg hadn’t exactly blown the whistle about US government perfidy in Vietnam, he had provided the evidence that proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. Young people learning about Ellsberg’s role from the media might get the impression that we, the people, didn’t know that the US military was upholding corrupt, unpopular regimes in Vietnam until Ellsberg so informed us in April, 1971. In fact, millions of us knew. The documentation provided by Ellsberg and Anthony Russo convinced millions more. Ellsberg’s great act of courage should not be held up as proof that Great Men or Great Women make history. It’s history that calls on individuals to step up and accomplish great things.

In one of his interviews with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Ellsberg expressed regret that he hadn’t gone public with what he knew in 1964. He paused a few beats, then added “Or 1961.” By 1969 –even though Ellsberg and Russo knew they were risking life imprisonment – they also knew they would have massive popular support when they released the documents that came to be known as The Pentagon Papers. Such support would not have been there in ‘61 or even ‘64. 

It was in 1967 that Defense Secretary McNamara commissioned a detailed history of US involvement in Vietnam. Some 36 “analysts” took a year to compile a 47-volume “study” that McNamara probably never read. Ellsberg, then an analyst at the RAND Corporation, read it all. So did his friend Anthony Russo, a former RAND employee. For several weeks they discussed photocopying the 7,000 pages and releasing them to the media. In his memoir, “Secrets,” Ellsberg’s credits Russo with saying, “Let’s do it!” They did it in a Hollywood ad agency above a flower shop owned by Russo’s girlfriend. 

As an example of the exposés from underground sources that presaged release of the Pentagon Papers, I quoted the “VN Primer,” a chronology in Aboveground, a newspaper/leaflet produced in the fall of 1969 by GIs back from Vietnam. After the VN Primer (by “This Reporter”) there was an article about the extent of marijuana use by GIs in Vietnam (by “That Reporter”). He generalized: “The ‘wet’ culture is comprised of the officers, senior NCOs and a small number of lower ranking EM (enlisted men). The Pot Culture, on the other hand, encompasses as high as 85 percent of all troops 18-26 years of age, including a number of Officers (mostly company grade).” 

The piece was illustrated by Ron Cobb’s brilliant cartoon, “Pacification.”

In a moving tribute to Ellsberg on substack, his close friend Seymour Hersh recalled that in the early days of their friendship “late at night — we were both night owls — he and I would walk the dog and find time to sit on a curb somewhere and smoke a few Thai sticks. How Dan always managed to have a supply of these joints from Southeast Asia I chose not to ask.” 

So Sy Hersh, the bravest, coolest, most intrepid and worldly reporter of our time, shied away from asking his comrade Dan Ellsberg how he obtained marijuana — as if being a pot partisan was even heavier, somehow, even more fraught with danger than having purloined the Pentagon Papers! 

It would be interesting to know when and where Ellsberg started smoking the herb and to what extent the absurdity of prohibition accelerated his transition from hawk to dove. During the Vietnam war years there was a strong synergy between the two causes — ending the war and ending marijuana prohibition. Seeing the absurdity and futility of one opened your eyes to the absurdity and futility of the other.

How the so-called left squandered its ownership of the marijuana issue is a long, sad story.