Cooperstown Confidential (4 page)

At first, the villagers of Cooperstown were bemused by the discovery that they were living in the Bethlehem of baseball. It had been almost eighty years since Abner Doubleday had been in town—if he ever was in town—and nobody remembered him. But it gradually began to dawn on folks that there might be money in the baseball connection. In 1917, five villagers kicked in a quarter of a dollar apiece to set up a Doubleday Memorial Fund. Their idea was to establish a “national baseball field” and a players’ retirement home, which would attract tourism to the town. The Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce sent a delegation to New York City to ask the blessing of Major League Baseball, and National League president John Hey-dler promised his support. By 1919, a little cash was raised, enough to begin—but not complete—the construction of Doubleday Field in a swampy area on the exact spot Abner Graves had cited in his letter. The project might never have come to fruition if it hadn’t caught the attention of the Clark family.

The years after World War I were tough on Cooperstown. A blight destroyed much of the hops crop, the agricultural mainstay of the area. Young people began leaving for the city, as they were doing all across small-town America. The depression hit hard. Cooperstown had once been a summer destination for wealthy New Yorkers, but with the economy in shambles, fewer and fewer could afford the excursion.

By the early thirties, the war between the Clark brothers had come to a close. Sterling was preparing to pack up and leave his stodgy younger brother and the village of Cooperstown to each other. Stephen, it seems, had won the war, and Cooperstown seemed to have gotten the better end of the stick, too. The younger Clark was a generous and civic-minded man and felt a sense of noblesse oblige toward his village. If Cooperstown was to fulfill the prophecy of James Fenimore Cooper and become a substantial town, it had to find a reliable source of income.

It was Alexander Cleland, one of Clark’s se nior executives, who came up with the idea of cashing in on baseball. Cleland had immigrated to the U.S. from Scotland at the age of twenty-six, and he neither knew nor cared much about his adopted country’s national pastime. But he saw that Cooperstown’s claim to be the birthplace of baseball was worth something. In 1934, he wrote Clark a letter proposing to establish a baseball museum that would draw fans. “Hundreds of visitors would be attracted to the shopping district right in the heart of Cooperstown, each year,” he predicted.

The idea appealed to Clark. He didn’t care much for baseball, either, but he saw the possibilities of tourist attraction. In the spring of 1934, he dispatched Cleland to New York City to discuss the matter with Ford Frick, newly installed as the president of the National League.

Frick was a former baseball writer and publicist, a man who thought big. As far as he was concerned, if Cooperstown got some tourists, fine, but the real goal was to build baseball’s brand with something that would engage the imagination of fans everywhere, even the ones who didn’t have the money to reach a museum way out in the sticks. What about a place that celebrated the players themselves—a baseball hall of fame? And what better place to build it than alongside the baseball museum in the hometown of Abner Doubleday?

Frick’s hall of fame idea wasn’t original. It was inspired by a recent visit to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, founded in New York City in 1900 by Henry Mitchell MacCracken, chancellor of New York University. Its goal was to celebrate the eminent men and women of the world’s ascending economic and cultural colossus. The constitution of the hall specified the sort of people who would be eligible: authors and poets, educators, men of the cloth, missionaries, social reformers, scientists, engineers and architects, physicians, inventors, captains of industry, military figures, statesmen, lawyers and judges, artists and musicians.

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans no longer adds members or draws many visitors. It’s still open for business, though, on the grounds of what is now the Bronx Community College in New York. (The campus once belonged to NYU.) It commands a high bluff overlooking the Harlem River, and its main feature is a 630-foot open-air colonnade designed by the great American architect Stanford White. Bronze busts of the immortals are placed in niches along a walkway. Some of the likenesses were produced by Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln was among the hall’s first class of inductees, along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, U. S. Grant, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a cast of now-forgotten jurists and ministers of the gospel. In 1910, the hall inducted Cooperstown’s favorite son, James Fenimore Cooper.

“By happy chance,” Frick writes in his autobiography, “I had visited the National Hall of Fame at New York University a few days before [his meeting with Cleland]. I was much impressed and had the notion that a Baseball Hall of Fame would be great for the game.”

By 1935, Clark and Frick had a plan for a Cooperstown baseball multiplex—Doubleday Field, where construction, which had been going on in a desultory fashion since 1919, was now being completed by the WPA; a museum; and a hall of fame. Now all they needed were artifacts to put in the museum, a game to play on the field, and some players to enshrine in the hall.

Stephen Clark had a solution for the first problem, and it only cost him five bucks. Abner Graves’s old home in nearby Fly Creek was being prepared for demo lition and, in the process, an old trunk was found in the attic. It contained a small, weather-beaten ball stuffed with cloth. Walter Littell, editor of the local
Otsego Farmer,
decided that this must be a ball that had belonged to Graves. Perhaps it had been used by Doubleday himself. In fact, it might be the
very first baseball.

Stephen Clark, one of America’s great art collectors, understood the value of such a relic. He paid the farmer who owned the ball five dollars, put the ball on display in the Cooperstown Village Building, and sent out word that the new museum would be glad to accept donations to its collection.

The timing was perfect. Baseball was due to celebrate its centennial in 1939, just a few years hence. Frick went to the commissioner of baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and proposed that the birthday be celebrated in Cooperstown with an all-star game on Doubleday Field.

Judge Landis was an imperious and vain man whose main qualification for the job of commissioner of baseball was cosmetic; he looked like an actor playing a figure of judicial rectitude. He didn’t much care for ideas that originated with subordinates, but this one was too good to turn down. Clark would take care of building the museum. Washington, courtesy of the WPA, was providing the stadium. The Hall of Fame was a publicity bonanza for baseball, and it wouldn’t cost him or his bosses, the team owners, a cent. It had been generally accepted that the centennial festivities would take place in Washington, D.C. But Cooperstown would make an even better venue for the commissioner; no elected officials would be able to crowd him off center stage. And so he gave the entire enterprise his blessing, which is when things really took off.

Stephen Clark appointed himself chairman, president, and CEO of the Hall of Fame, in which capacities he served until his death in 1960. This was an act of civic responsibility on his part. Clark was in his early fifties and art, not baseball, was his passion. Actually, passion might be the wrong word. Even his admiring biographer, Nicholas Fox Weber, concedes that Clark was seen by the world as a prim, cold, taciturn fellow. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he was president and chairman of the board between 1939 and 1946, some people referred to him as “the mortician.” Clark ran his businesses and philanthropies with a high hand, but no one questioned his rectitude. “He was formal and aloof,” writes Weber, “but he was driven by his morality, his perpetual wish to do what was best, to advance a good cause and to serve others.”

When it came to modern art, Clark was no dilettante: he was a true expert, and he put the stamp of his collector’s taste and judgment on the museum he led. Baseball was a different story. He lacked the expertise—and the desire—to act as a super curator.

What he did do was to make sure that the new museum to be built on Main Street next to Doubleday Field—a two-story, colonial redbrick edifice—would be a tasteful and elegant addition to the village. The museum had 1,200 square feet of exhibition space, large enough to house an initial collection that included a baseball from Cy Young’s 500th win, one of Christy Mathewson’s gloves, a uniform donated by Ty Cobb, and a pair of Babe Ruth’s shoes, as well as the centerpiece Doubleday Baseball, a lopsided icon stitched from poor rags and a very rich imagination.

On June 12, 1939, the Hall of Fame held its grand opening. Frick had done a tremendous job of public relations. Special trains were engaged in New York City to bring fifteen thousand fans to Coopers-town. Baseball heroes roamed the town signing autographs (nobody dreamed at the time of charging for them) and chatting with the crowd. Babe Ruth bought cigars at the village drugstore and stopped at the local barbershop for a shave, but was too impatient to wait his turn. Over at the post office, a team of seventy, led by James Farley, the postmaster general of the United States, sold three-cent stamps commemorating baseball’s hundredth birthday. Microphones for a national radio hookup stood on a high platform in front of the museum door. At the stroke of noon, Charles J. Doyle, president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, opened the proceedings: “Today in Cooperstown, New York, home of baseball, we gather in reverence to the game’s immortals—living and dead . . .”

A famous photo captured ten of the eleven living players inducted into the Hall of Fame that day: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napoleon Lajoie, George Sisler, and Walter Johnson. Ty Cobb arrived late and missed getting into the picture. Christy Mathewson and Wee Willie Keeler were dead. Connie Mack was in the photo, too; he was one of thirteen foundational figures inducted.
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Naturally, Henry Chadwick and A. G. Spalding were among them. Their dispute, more than thirty years earlier, was responsible for Cooperstown’s selection as the venue of baseball’s nativity. Alexander Cartwright was selected, too. This was a matter of some delicacy for the Hall. Everyone knew that Cartwright had been the founder of one of the earliest formal baseball teams, the New York Knickerbockers, in the 1840s—reason enough to include him in the Hall. But in the run-up to the centennial celebration, Commissioner Landis received a letter from Cartwright’s grandson Bruce, pointing out that his grandfather had written the rules for baseball in 1845, and he had diagrams and written notes to prove it. This came under the heading of news Landis couldn’t use; he already had his creation story, and he was sticking to it. Landis kept the story hushed up and tried to pacify the Cartwright camp by making sure their candidate was among the earliest inductees. But even this might not have been enough to prevent a scandal at the ceremony itself had Cartwright’s grandson and loudest booster not died three months before the Hall’s dedication. Oddly, Doubleday himself was not inducted in 1939, and never has been.

Over the years, the implausibility of the Doubleday scenario became obvious. In 1953, Cooperstown skeptics convinced Congress to officially cite Alexander Cartwright as the founder of baseball. Like most efforts to legislate history, this was not entirely convincing, either. The best assessment is found on the Web site of the Hall of Fame circa 2008: “We may never know exactly where baseball was invented, and it’s possible it was not invented in any one place, but rather evolved in several areas over several years. We do know that some of the earliest forms of organized baseball that we are aware of took place in settings similar to that of Cooperstown. In that sense, the village serves as a fitting repre senta tion of the heritage of the game, and a fitting home to the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

No such agnosticism was in evidence in Cooperstown on June 12, 1939. Ken Smith, who covered the first induction ceremony for the
New York Mirror
(and later wound up running the Hall), gave a fair account of the general feeling. “Cooperstown . . . now a bustling little village and a shrine to the pioneering spirit of one Abner Doubleday, whose ingenuity conceived the first game of baseball on a pasture, only a few yards from where the remains of the author, [James Feni-more] Cooper, were to be laid years later . . .

“For while the pioneering Cooper may have created a greater thing, his literary inventions reached fewer people. The product of Abner Doubleday’s fertile brain was embraced by millions, accelerating through generations, creating national heroes, wealth, industries, careers and unpre cedented recreation.”

Earlier that year, the New York Yankees and Washington Senators had kicked off baseball’s centennial at Arlington National Cemetery, by attending a memorial service at the graveside of Major General Abner Doubleday. Representative James Shanley, a Connecticut Demo crat, introduced a bill making June 12 National Baseball Day. President Franklin Roo sevelt sent a letter to Stephen Clark in which he declared it “most fitting that the history of our perennially pop u-lar sport should be immortalized . . . where the game originated and where the first diamond was devised a hundred years ago.” Given FDR’s mischievous sense of humor, it is not impossible that he got a smile out of sending this public blessing to the estranged brother of his would-be nemesis. But he had a serious purpose, too. The United States, in 1939, was preparing itself for a world war. The nation would be called upon to rally around the symbols of its own best self. Thirty years earlier, in the age of Theodore Roo sevelt, A. G. Spalding, and the Mills Commission, baseball had been given a forged birth certificate and a war hero for a father, and invited millions of immigrants to learn real American values at the ballpark. Now the sons of the immigrants were preparing to go to war. Nations at war need a sense of shared history, sacred shrines, and heroic symbols. Coopers-town fit the bill perfectly.