Baseball: Why It Connects to Our American Story

By Chuck Arning

Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century.

—Mark Twain, Speech in New York City, April 1889

During the spring of 1907, Big Bill Haywood, secretary-treasurer for the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and a leader of the International Workers of the World (IWW), went on trial in Boise, Idaho, for planning the assassination of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg, a strong supporter of mine owners. The long and contentious trial brought world-wide recognition to the Snake River Valley. Newspaper reporters streamed into town. The famous Clarence Darrow was the leading defense attorney. The trial was international news—labor against mine owners and big business. Tales of scandal and murder in the American West caught everyone’s attention.

At the time, Idaho’s new Sunday Closing Laws had forced the closing of all forms of entertainment for working men and women, with one lone exception during the late spring and summer—the game of baseball.

Every Sunday and on holidays as well, stands at baseball fields in towns throughout the Snake River Valley were packed with spectators watching their town’s “nine” exert their will over the opposition. When a raw-boned 19-year-old kid from California named Walter Johnson pitched for the Weiser City nine against the Caldwell County seaters, the entire community of Weiser took a train to Caldwell to see the game. To quote one of the reporters covering the Haywood trial, Jim Nolan of the Denver Post, “A baseball game at Caldwell, 20 miles away, almost denuded the town of its male inhabitants….”

The proximity of the mill to the ball field demonstrates the classic relationship between baseball and industrial life. The crowd of “fanatics,” the original term for baseball fans, was an important part of the game, showcasing the energy each mill team could muster to root their players on to victory. Courtesy of Worcester Historical Museum, Worcester, MA

On the other side of this sprawling, contentious, complex nation, situated among the mills of the Blackstone Valley in Rhode Island along the banks of the Blackstone River, was the Berkeley Oval. It was a picture of contrasts; in the midst of this industrial landscape of massive brick, five- and six-story mills was a baseball diamond, the very image of a pastoral, agricultural setting. Historians looking at the mill villages of the Blackstone Valley were surprised to find baseball fields as integral a part of the mill village landscape as the church, the company store, and mill housing.

The story goes that when the Berkeley Mill team took on the Ashton Mill nine, both mills of the Lonesdale Company, delivery men would not deliver goods or produce to the mill villages of Berkeley or Ashton for the simple reason that no one would be home to receive them. They would all be at the Berkeley Oval cheering their village favorites on to victory. Why baseball you ask? The answer, quite simply, was that baseball was America.

While there were flourishing baseball contests prior to the American Civil War, it was the initiation of thousands of soldiers during the endless drudgery of camp life that brought baseball to the forefront of American life. Jacques Barzun, an observer of American life, once said that if you wanted to understand America, you first needed to understand the game of baseball.

From the mill villages in the east to the mining camps of the west, baseball was a part of each community. A town that supported a team that played with competitive drive was a town that was regarded as an up-and-coming place—a place where future investment would be rewarded, a place where community character was seen as strong and hardworking. Through baseball a town could develop its own identity. In the competitive world of America in the 19th century, that was everything.

For a moment, stop and consider the element of work. What was the daily life of a worker like in the late 19th century? The lyrics for one of the most popular labor songs of the late 1800s, “Eight Hours,” provides us with a sense of the worker’s state of mind:

Walter Schuster, owner of several mills and friend of Hall of Fame baseball team owner Connie Mack, added former pro players and up-and-coming stars. Courtesy Worcester Historical Museum & the Douglas Historical Society

We mean to make things over;
We’re tired of toil for naught;
We may have enough to live on,
But never an hour for thought.

We need to feel the sunshine;
We need to smell the flowers;
We are sure that God willed it;
We mean to have eight hours!

Eight hours for work;
Eight hours for rest;
Eight hours for what we will!

The common element was work—how hard it was, how dangerous it was, how long it was; one’s life was defined by work. The metal trade workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, were agitating for a 40-hour work week—eight hours a day for work. But just a few miles down the Blackstone River, an eight-hour day was but a wisp of a dream for the factory worker. Beginning in January 1895, annual reports were made to Rhode Island’s general assembly by the factory inspector in his “Hours of Labor” report:

The Factory Inspector is required by the Act to report the number of hours performed by the help in the establishment inspected. No authority is confirmed upon the Inspector to enforce the law limiting the employment of women and minors to 60 hours per week. I have found the 60 hour law conformed to in nearly all establishments inspected. Exceptional occasions arise where exigencies of business seem to necessitate its temporary violation.

Workers in one part of the Blackstone Valley were pushing for a 40-hour week while those in the other part of the valley were saddled with a 60-hour (or more) work week.

Yes, work was long, but what about the danger of work? In 1894, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a law mandating inspections and yearly reports from the factory inspector regarding mill conditions with a focus on under-age mill workers. These reports contained narratives of the various mill injuries. Indeed, mill work was dangerous. It was common knowledge that working conditions throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries were appalling.

While rivers, waving fields of grain, and majestic mountains separated the coastal watersheds of the Blackstone Valley of Massachusetts and Rhode Island from the distant Snake River Valley in Idaho, the construct of the mill village was the same. And the owners, whether they spun cotton, built machines, or dug deep in the earth for precious metals, seized upon one common thread that would keep their communities happy and their workers in line. That common thread, baseball, helped develop a keen sense of place and connect workers and communities in such a manner that pride in one’s town became sacred. As various immigrant groups found their way to the mills of the Blackstone Valley, mill owners saw baseball as the key to “civilizing” their newly diverse workforce.

Loyalty, teamwork, pride in one’s skill, and pride in community—all of these were important factors in building an efficient and productive work force on the mill floor. Mill workers working together made for an efficient mill. And where could you practice such teamwork? The baseball oval was the answer. Whether workers were Armenian, Polish, French-Canadian, Irish, or Italian, teamwork was the essential ingredient to success when you were practicing on the ball field, turning double plays, and playing hit and run. Whether it was the Rubber League, the Triangle Industrial League, or the Blackstone Valley League, baseball proved to be an effective way for the mill owner to reduce labor turnover, control his work force, and create a greater sense of community, all the while inculcating basic American values in their workers.

Company newspapers like The Heald Herald were a key part of management’s strategy to build team work and company loyalty among its worker population.

The superintendent of the Central Falls (Rhode Island) General Fabric Company was quoted as saying, “Everything being done here is with the idea of encouraging our people to stay with us. These sports are the best thing we have to bring employees together. They create a spirit of neighborliness and good friendship throughout the plant.”

Another mill owner captured the progressive paternalistic view common to the owner class when he said:

Let the worker get outdoors as a participant or spectator and when the whistle blows he will return refreshed both mentally and physically, adding to the life of the worker and to his period of productivity. Both the worker and the company benefit.

And there were definite reasons for the need to keep workers in the mill, focusing on the job at hand, being productive and reasonably content. As noted earlier, work was hard, long, and dangerous, and the push for worker rights was growing stronger and louder with the advent of various labor organizations.

Consider the contrast in the pace of work versus the pace of the game of baseball. Whether building a railroad, digging for ore, or running a textile machinery, productivity was based on speed. You worked to the speed of the machine. But baseball was different. Each inning consisted of six outs, three per side; however long it took to get those outs was the length of an inning. There was no time limit.

What about working conditions? In the mill, it was a raging din at all times. It was hot, dank, smelly, and incredibly dirty—cold in the winter, impossibly hot in the summer. The flow of work was constant. Out on the baseball oval, it was different. A soft summer breeze blowing in from left field on a late afternoon refreshed your skin. You could hear your teammates giving you encouragement or your sweetheart cheering you on from the stands. The smells were of fresh-cut grass or the blooming flowers of the season. Then there was the smell of leather and the feel of that leather as you pounded it into submission.

Between pitches there was time to soak in this relaxing, yet charged atmosphere, for there was a lot on the line. Winners were rewarded, losers were forgotten. Being on the team of the winning company or the winning town carried weight. It meant you had earned recognition and had a future as a town, company, or as an individual.

The next time you agonize over developing an interpretive talk, think about baseball, think about sports and how you can build a story at your site around that classic American competitive drive. For to understand America, you better understand baseball.

For More Information
Lukas, J. Anthony. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1997.

Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1983.

Hudson, J. Ellery. 16th Annual Report of Factory Inspections Made to the General Assembly (RI). State of Rhode Island. 1910.

Rockwell, Elisha H., and Palmer, Fanny Purdy. 2nd Annual Report of Factory Inspections Made to the General Assembly. State of Rhode Island. 1896.

Reynolds, Doug. 1991. Hardball Paternalism, Hardball Politics: Blackstone Valley Baseball. Labor’s Heritage: Quarterly of the George Meany Memorial Archives (3)2. p. 32.