Surveys continuity and change in the business of baseball, 1903-2003. The New York Yankees, the first to operate as a corporation rather than a lifestyle business, have set the standards for commercial operations and, accordingly, on-field success. From the 19th century, although the game was played nationwide, the Major Leagues were confined to the Northeast and Midwest, owners pruned weaker teams and behaved as a cartel as regards player employment via the reserve clause. Revenue depended on daytime attendance; Sunday games, which enabled the working public to attend, fully arrived only in the second decade of the 20th century; the ‘Chicago rule’ ensured one team in a two-team town was always on the road. 1903’s consolidation abandoned the southern frontier cities of Baltimore, Washington, and Louisville, leaving Cincinnati and St. Louis as the outposts. This geographic arrangement worked well for the first half of the century. The Yankees’ rise past the Boston Red Sox and the Giants was based on management’s willingness to reinvest in the team, and also exemplifies the contemporary ‘managerial revolution’, or administrative hierarchy as a source of performance and durability. (1960s-era ownership by CBS demonstrated limits to corporate efficiency.) St. Louis and Branch Rickey sought to overcome New York’s edge via a network of emerging players, but the farm system was ultimately ineffective: the Cardinals rose and fell with Rickey’s judgment, and the Yankees continued to predominate the World Series. Problems in established markets, rather than visionary expansion, prompted relocation of Boston’s Braves to Milwaukee, St. Louis’ Browns to Baltimore (renamed the Orioles), and Philadelphia’s Athletics to Kansas City. The Dodgers and Giants also left New York for domestic reasons, although Los Angeles and San Francisco were new markets. Walter O’Malley is portrayed as unwilling to compromise on Flushing Meadows, where the Mets were born, while the Giants panicked in moving by result of their cross-town rivals’ departure. As is true elsewhere, too much time is spent on intramural New York affairs, and not enough on the decision making in the Californian cities. Integration brought exciting new players into the game, following the Dodgers, most often in the National League sides; but New York continued to predominate in the 1950s, particularly the Dodgers. Baseball’s business model began changing with the debut of radio and then television. But the game missed an opportunity to equalize ‘small’ and ‘big’ market teams, underscoring its tendency to react than to plan for major junctures. Not Curt Flood by Jim ‘Catfish’ Hunter and Andy Messersmith – not the reserve clause but free agency – set off the player salary escalation which reshaped baseball. In the face of predictions that big market teams would collect the best talent, parity emerged while the Yankees fell to consecutive losing seasons. But there began 25 years of labor strife. While concerned with New York – the author notes the Mets and the Yankees took decade-long turns in winning the metropolitan attendance battle, roughly corresponding with the teams’ playing success – the author omits discussing the abandonment of the first and second divisions in favor of East and West, and then into three groups as well as the introduction of inter-league play. Fetter’s treatment of the 2000 ‘blue ribbon’ panel on baseball is unconvincing; he does not understand equality of opportunity. The conclusion is tepid. An interesting book that does not quite deliver.
Book abstracts
13. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft (15 Aug 2018)
America’s founders underestimated civic virtue. Government is more likely to do justice if it aims to promote a moral citizenry. By ignoring ancient precepts of the Western political tradition, the US focuses on individualism to the detriment of society. Will surveys political philosophy and mid-20th century intellectual currents before making the positive case that ‘statecraft as soulcraft’ is necessary for the community’s cohesion. In the first regard, Will observes that Aristotle thought human nature provided a moral compass, which workings pointed to an orderly society. To accept natural law is to hold that individuals reach better decisions through common judgment. Decision making is a source of cohesion. Hobbes and Locke asserted the privacy of self-interest, rooted in human passions; Hobbes said reason is but a ‘spy’ for passion (contra Kant). In this view, decisions are a source of tension; society is held in check by tolerance; government is a referee. So oriented, moderns have further refocused natural law away from virtue and perfection toward regularity, away from duty toward rights. Turning to contemporary thought, Will demonstrates the leveling characteristics of Freudian psychology, relativism, the academy, and so on, while working his way back to Madison’s founding precept for the Constitution – factions holding one another in check as the ‘defect of better interests’. Madison was one-dimensional, in Will’s view, in thinking that passion trumped all. He shows that if rights rest on convention rather than natural law, then changes in opinion can change these rights. FDR, a social democrat, and Reagan, a Manchester liberal, were each moderns. Burke was the greatest contemporary to side with the ancients. The argument for soulcraft is overtly made with the assertion that the basic goal is not self-government but good government. Neither popularity nor tradition is by itself a guarantee of effectiveness; as regards the latter, this is the distinction between conservatism and reaction. Government promoting virtue is not a question of what to think but how to think. This points up the difference between soulcraft and (Nazi) totalitarianism, of natural law versus the Romantic will to power. But teaching cannot regard all outcomes as equal. Some questions (e.g., slavery) ought to be above the enthusiasms of popular sovereignty. Learned and soundly constructed, but suffers from too many asides and seeming changes of direction, which undermine concentration and depth. As an example, the observation that Plato thought Thucydides failed the first test of statesmanship, to improve the citizenry, ought to have featured in the conclusion, not early on.
1. Ward Farnsworth, Classical English Style (15 January 2022)
The selection of words, the arrangement of sentences, and cadence are primary determinants of classical English style. In contrast to catechism which seek to avoid mistakes via brevity, the author outlines patterns which create forceful prose.
• English is an amalgam of multi-syllable, formal Latin words and shorter, ‘common sense’ Saxon ones. Contrast is therefore readily achieved. Latin is frequently better for complex sentiments, Saxon for plain truth – particularly at the end of sentences. Alternately, Latinate for the false, Saxon for truth
• Express concrete metonyms (surrogate images) in Saxon, the associated abstraction in Latin. Again, movement between the two arrests attention
• Sentences expand ‘to the right’ when detail follows the predicate, and to the left when detail precedes. Expanding to the right creates a crush of action, to the left tension, mystery, surprise. Sometimes the preamble is the main point after all. Branching too can be paired for effect
• So too varied sentence length. One long sentence can support a succession of shorter ones. Also, sentences without adverbs will call attention to those with
• Rhetorical power is created by opposition and movement between poles; simplicity is overrated
• The passive voice gets the narrator / author ‘off the stage’
• Inviting the reader to try something (‘look for’, ‘show me’) enlists him in the author’s project
• Cadence, premised on the pattern of weak and strong syllables, is a way of training the reader’s expectations. A strong ending is decisive, a weak one can be a flourish, and so on
• Detail can add verisimilitude to hyperbolic claim or intent
14. Manville, Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (28 Aug 2018)
Traces the evolution of Athenian citizenship in the late seventh and early sixth centuries. The Kleisthenian reforms catalyzed Attica’s transformation to a powerful democratic state. The author begins by sketching Aristotelian concepts of the polis and democracy: justice is the essential condition of the state, and citizens are shareholders in a company whose purpose is moral excellence. Poetry, archaeology, and other remnants of Ancient Athens demonstrate these ideas, but citizenship lacked precise, shared understanding. Kylon’s attempted coup d’etat in 630 provoked aristocratic defense of privilege, as well as Drakon’s subsequent codification of customs such as penalties for killing Athenians (versus foreigners). But interstate warfare played a greater role than socioeconomic factors; scarcity of land was more important in undermining tribal affiliations. The reforms of Solon initiated more precise ideals of membership, inheritance, immigration; he also canceled debt, thus ending the possibility of citizens being sold into slavery, which won many different adherents. Further, several of Solon’s laws transformed formerly private concerns such as marriage, orphanage, weights and measures, and public festivals into public concerns. Yet his foremost concern was the process of justice: the well-ordered society is the just society. His controversial policies, particularly the cancellation of debt, led to tripartite factional warfare and the dictatorship of Peisistratos. The overall effect of his 25-year rule was positive for democratization (a la Pinochet or Kirkpatrick). Then followed 510’s diapsephisis, the judgment of fitness for citizenship on the basis of tribal descent. Kliesthenes’ rise to power dispelled this reign of terror; further, good order became equal order. He revised definitions of citizenship and enhanced participation in the legal system, and his reforms benefitted from foreign threats. Citizens were encouraged to work together domestically and in warfare. The inclusion of anthropology elongates the study, relegating some interesting material to the footnotes. In all, a useful historical work.
15. Will, Bunts (8 Sep 2018)
A collection of baseball essays written over 1970-2000, reflecting on the sport’s seminal figures and movements, and how ‘America’s pastime’ reflects the country’s life. Games are a ‘space for ordered living’, according to Bart Giamatti, made not by nature but by free choices. Unlike football or basketball, baseball is played with a rhythm alternating between concentration and relaxation, as befits a 162-game season. Since teams will generally win and lose 40 percent of the time regardless, it’s the habit of the quotidian athletic performance that helps them achieve results in the balance – the thesis of
- Men at Work
. Donald Kagan denigrates the thesis as unheroic in a
- Public Interest
review republished herein; Will responds this is a Romantic fallacy, lionizing will without disciplined, sustained effort. (Elsewhere he comments that because sport compresses life’s trajectory, sports writers often display facile pathos.) As the author notes, the Greeks considered sport a moral undertaking: by witnessing grace, the soul learns to beauty, by seeing fair competition, the passions are educated. In ‘Good Character, Not Good Chemistry’, he sets forth the case against steroids (and other types of cheating). Winning is valued for praiseworthy attributes, while becoming better (self improvement) implies not only improvement but also the loneliness of the individual regimen. The purpose of umpiring is to regulate striving, not to eliminate violent effort but to regulate it, enabling excellence to prevail. Fans, for their part, are to derive enjoyment for the whole of the contest since pleasure cannot be predicated on outcomes (i.e., losing) that will so often be negative. Will often makes the case that the game has in fact improved. New York teams won 41 of 102 pennants from 1903-53, and 20 of 50 World Series, while there were no teams south of Washington DC or west of St. Louis, whereas since the fall of the reserve clause, very few teams have been repeat champions. As further evidence, he cites attendance: in strike-shortened 1995, 5 teams outdrew Cleveland’s record 2.6 million in 1948; average game attendance [probably tickets sold] in 1954 was 13,000. But the case mainly rests on the feats of the players, which are generally comparable – notwithstanding ‘live balls’, the introduction of the designated hitter, and steroids. There are sociopolitical essays on Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, the former including the observation that Larry Doby may have been more important than Robinson because he was ‘merely’ talented (by comparison with the surreal Robinson). Will echoes the view that blacks are ‘underrepresented’ in baseball because of the game’s historic connotation with the color line – similar to rugby and apartheid – but does not observe that this helped opened the door to Latin Americans. On Pete Rose-Bart Giamatti, he writes that the important result was baseball’s institutions (i.e., the commissioner’s office) maintained its integrity rather than succumbing to supervision of federal judiciary. Less predictably, he is generally hard on owners during the labor turmoil of the 1990s. John Miller, then broadcasting for the Orioles and Washington DC layer Earl Bennett Williams, is lauded for attention to details: his ‘respect for listeners’ includes fastidious scorekeeping and absence of hyperbole. By contrast, Billy Martin (and Rose) is excoriated for violating baseball’s equipoise – he couldn’t sustain a winning culture. Some nuggets: the introduction of better fielding equipment in the 1880s change the game from a contest between fielder versus hitter to pitcher versus hitter, as prior to, 1 in 2 runs was unearned; players left gloves on the field through the 1940s; the Penn Law Review found the infield fly rule would be superfluous if baseball were to emulate cricket’s sporting ethic – but in America the purpose is to win; a winning team scores more runs in 1 inning than the loser does in 9; the end of the American League umpire’s chest protector lowered the strike zone, but the AL zone remained smaller than the National League’s. In all, the columns hold up well some 30 years later, and Will’s Aristotelian thesis (‘we are what we repeatedly do’) looks no worse for the wear either.
17. Davis, Crucible of Command (15 Oct 2018)
A dual biography of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant which serves to portray the primary military campaigns of the Civil War. Lee, 15 years older, sought to prevail by making Northern opinion give up, albeit through winning a Napoleonic, climactic battle; Grant, the most offensive-minded of Northern commanders, was tasked to win in the Confederacy’s spiritual homeland. Defeating Lee helped Grant become ‘second to Lincoln’ as man of the century. Both were Whiggish West Pointers, Lee the scion of a Revolutionary War hero who was forced to become head of the household, and was made by the Mexican War. Grant was hard-working but left the army to become an indifferent businessman. Although Lee was a prized recruit to the Confederacy, because of rivalries and state sovereignty, he didn’t become primes inter pares until May 1863 – months before his failure at Gettysburg. Grant worked his way up through Mississippi Valley wins at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg, shrugging off a reputation for drunkenness and officer rivalries. Both Lee and Grant preferred surprise, indirect moves, and forceful follow-ups. In summer 1863, as he was charged to clear western Tennessee of Southern cavalry, he grasped the broader potential for destroying Southern resource base in Alabama and Georgia. His planning along with his successes made it inevitable he would be brought east to face Lee (which happened in April 1864). Also that summer, Grant came to appreciate the need to abolish slavery, though he was generally minded to avoid politics and in fact left the niceties to George Meade. When asked by politicians in March 1865 to recommend surrender, Lee declined; a month later he conceded to Grant’s generous terms at Appomattox. Swept to the presidency in 1868, he suppressed the KKK and was the first two-term president to display a modern approach. Lee, elected president of a struggling Virginian college, helped a Republican become governor of the state, thus enabling the Old Dominion to regain admission to the union in 1870 and side with Reconstruction (the only Southern state to do so). Lee, a fatalist, believed God’s intentions practically eliminated risk since events were preordained. Grant, the late bloomer, was prepared to take the good with the bad, to live life all over again.
22. Sampson, Mandela (5 Dec 2020)
An authorized biography, bolstered by the author’s contemporaneous journalism, seeking to assess the political temperament and performance of Nelson Mandela. Prepossessing the demeanor of a tribal chieftain and educated by Wesleyans, Mandela’s prison years instilled discipline and broadened vision, the crucial step toward peaceful revolution and African statesmanship par excellence. Taking to Johannesburg in the 1950s, where he practiced law and politics making expert (if ‘vicious’) use of the Socratic method, Mandela discovered a cultural energy comparable to the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. He was impulsive and of two minds, torn between multiracial communism and black nationalism. Mandela opposed the socialistic element of 1956’s Freedom Charter, but contemporaries thought that if he wasn’t a member of the South African Communist Party, it was ‘merely tactical’. Less enamored of nonviolence than Oliver Tambo or Walter Sisulu, he abandoned the approach after the Sharpeville riots failed to catalyze political change. Following his capture and trial, Robben Island isolated Mandela from daily tactics: the African National Congress inmates turned to collegial development of strategy while learning to master animosity toward the Afrikaners. Meanwhile, the author tends to jump ahead consistent with contemporary left-liberal views, blaming the CIA and Thatcher for opposing sanctions, being slow to reconcile to the ‘inevitable’ ascendancy of Mandela and the ANC (soon coming to power in 1987?!), and failing to anticipate the end of the Cold War (in 1978!). Sampson notably overlooks that the Cold War’s end made it safer for the Nationalist government to retrench. But the dynamics of Mandela’s negotiations with Botha and deKlerk read more reliably, particularly in the portrayal of his views on renouncing violence, as do his thoughts on opposing general amnesty in exchange for commencing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela misapprehended the cost of the ANC’s historic alliance with the USSR, and was slow to grasp the prospect of nationalization as deterring Western investors. In office, modeling is mixed (i.e., antagonistic) cabinet on Clemenceau’s, he displayed a quiet dignity, his forgiveness establishing moral supremacy, in contrast (the author says) to aggressive black American politicians. A persistent themes is the tension between the demands on a politician (i.e., winning power, projecting ideology) and the vision of a statesman (long-term good of the community). The last word: ‘You don’t lead by position but by the strength of your ideas’ (p. 529).
18. Morgan, Genuine Article (23 Oct 2018)
A collection of book reviews treating Colonial and Revolutionary era topics, often revealing the author’s views of 1980s-90s historiographic fashion. Following Perry Miller, Morgan asserts the value of taking people (i.e., evidence) at their word; socioeconomic approaches are disparaged in that ‘hidden meanings’ can’t be interrogated and so tend to reveal what the historian is looking for’; reliance on statistics for obscuring the big picture, a la Lewis Namier’s structure of politics. Whereas the main value of written evidence is the ability to show changes in how people thought about themselves. As to the 18th century, Morgan sides with the thesis that the America’s was a revolution was not made but preserved. He writes the position of the revolutionaries was to trust men in power no more than necessary: the crowd (‘the mob’) held the same mistrust of Parliament and colonial governors, who were gaining in power as the century went on – notwithstanding the efforts of neo-Marxist historians to find an independent, class agenda. In separate essays, written at different times, he appears of two minds regarding the political position of the Antifederalists and also the legitimacy of popular sovereignty. John Winthrop is convincingly portrayed as pragmatic, the ‘first great American’, for leading the quasi-surreptitious transformation of the English joint stock company into a colonial charter for Puritans. The Puritans’ devolution of sexual morality to civic government is the first sexual revolution. Franklin is like Burke albeit quicker to recognize to the breach with England was irreparable; Hutchinson a man of Burkean principle who nonetheless ended a simple apologist for power. (In an aside, Morgan shows how absolute right was converted to parliamentary sovereignty: from the king can do no wrong to the king wants what is right; what we want is right; the king must want what we want.) The essay on Gordon Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution is strong. Those on Southern culture are learned but less gripping, perhaps because of the topics; as Morgan notes, the South became self-conscious of its culture only after it lay in the ruins of the Civil War. The co-authored essay on a successor to the Dictionary of American Biography is poor. Generally crisp and learned, yet Morgan often accommodates contemporary, fashionable liberalism.
19. Howard, Lessons of History (1 Nov 2018)
The French Revolution spurred the rise of nationalism in 19th-century Europe, a phenomenon which proved the major impetus for statecraft and warfare over the succeeding two centuries. More than simply self-conscious culture, nationalism in the 1800s was ideological, entwining a loose worldview with a defined sense of universal (often cultural) mission. It complemented economic modernization while overshadowing Marxism, which in its early phase had no conception of statecraft. Nationalism complicated life for Eastern Europe’s Jews, but (in its imperial guise) looked in colonial lands like routine military conquest. For social Darwinians cum nationalists, war was the ultimate test of folk strength – a view which died out after the carnage of World War I. In the 19th century, the Prussian mindset conflicted with German nationalism; Treitschke’s view that the essence of the state was power (macht), which required an army, bridged the two; ultimately, Nazism replaced Preussentum. Little is said of the interwar era. Howard coopts Churchill to makes a case for postwar British nationalism – as way to consensually accommodate postwar British decline – while giving the Russians a pass because the victorious Soviet army was ‘popular’ in postwar Eastern Europe! They and the Americans were the century’s inheritors of the universal mission, and in the current (when published) century, nationalism rather than social justice or economic equality remained the driver of public spirit. It provides the state apparatus with legitimacy: if unmoored (for example by supranational elites), the structure becomes alienating and oppressive. Turning to warfare, in which the author specializes, Howard’s primary insights are that 1) pre-WWI army doctrines failed to grasp the impact of mechanization despite the evidence of late-19th-century warfare – maneuver was ignored, and 2) in the greatest military literature, the hero cannot win, as abundantly demonstrated in WWI. As to history, the field is meant to train laymen – not professionals – to understand precedents of the contemporary. Howard asserts all ages of are equal interest to the historian, although the book fairly omits the developing world, and is comfortable with historicism though not polemical. In a ranging essay on ‘structure and progress’, he surveys why history has been held valuable and himself settles on its role in tracing society’s movement from the realm of necessity to the realm of choice. Such progress looks a leftward ratchet. The volume is not representative of his professional achievement and perhaps understates his contribution to understanding the relationship of warfare, society, and politics; however, it evinces the postwar bien pensant, the elite who could not see through the Soviets and uphold the enduring value of the liberal society.
20. Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell (4 Nov 2018)
Democracy has successfully established itself worldwide, but its record is poor. The author contends democracy is a formula for ‘direction of legitimate coercion’ over territory and population, for the citizen’s subjection to power without sacrificing dignity. Its good name owes to success of Western governments, particularly the USA, and its strengths are in the capacity to harness sociopolitical struggle; monarchy and aristocracy cannot allow for the possibility of conflict. However, democracy as commonly understood ‘equivocates’ between authoritative standard of right conduct and describing the political character of the regime. In an extended treatment of authoritarian China’s coming to terms with democracy, he shows that Chinese hierarchy includes an obligation to instruct the population. But his alternate example of good government rests on the country’s post-1980 economic growth (the real cost of which is not yet known to the West), and ignores that hierarchy has no tides to the commonweal. (Separately, he adds the true exemplar of democracy is India because of its size.) Dunn does not like democracy’s lack of alignment to egalitarian and leftist outcomes, which he dresses up as ‘reliable’ ties to justice and utility. He equates self-government with egalitarian outcomes, instead of opportunity. Ultimately, he seems to dislike Western (especially American) democracy because Americans don’t listen to their betters. He laments the failure of progressives to make the case for the folly of the Iraq invasion or the necessity of climate-change legislation, and proposes the university can steer the world out of its problems. He shows no concept of Thucydidean (or Lincolnian) persuasion (i.e., to know what to do and to be able to explain it), of knowing and representing the group. Dunn appears most concerned power that elites don’t hold power; it’s revealing that his critique lacks Fukuyama’s treatment of accountability and order (i.e., rule of law). The polemic scores a few points but abstruse language muddies the argument, which at any rate fails to really address the important questions of who should rule in the 21st century.