Read Online Everything They Had by David Halberstam - Free Book Online
Authors: David Halberstam
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unique preeminence. The 1941 season was a historic one: Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and Ted Williams hit. 406. Soon both were in the service, and baseball, like other sports, went on essentially a four-year vacation.
If World War I had been the first act of Americaâs emergence as a world power, World War II would be the defining act. If there had been fears in America on the eve of the entry of the United States into the war that a democracy might not be able to stand up to powerful totalitarian military powers, those fears soon proved completely invalid: Rarely had a democratic societyâs power been so brilliantly mobilized. America rose to true superpower status during the war; its industrial base, secure from enemy attack because of the two oceans, became the arsenal of democracy. When the war was over America stood alone, rich in a world which was poor. The change in the balance of power had taken place with a startling swiftness.
For the war changed the balance of power in the world with a certain finality: In Europe the old powers had been bled white by two wars; America, by contrast, had been brought kicking and screaming to the zenith of its power. No bombs had fallen on America; its lossesâroughly 350,000 men on two frontsâwere slight in comparison with other nations.
All of these factors had given the nation a startling boost in affluence, household by household, and equally important, a critical increase in personal confidence. Not only had America as a nation played a decisive part in the war, not only had it been, in contrast to most wars, considered a good war, but millions of Americans, whose professional careers might in an earlier part of the century have been proscribed by class, had left their small towns, had learned that they could lead men, and now had a chance to continue their careers through the G.I. Bill. If one of the things which distinguished America from the old world was its concept of social fluidityâthe fact that in only one generation ordinary citizens could rise significantly above the level attained by their parentsâthen nothing made that concept more muscular than the G.I. Bill.
In the postwar era America had to face the domestic consequences of its own wartime rhetoric. For the war had generated its own powerful propaganda, that of the democracies taking on two totalitarian powers, Germany and Japan, and in the case of Germany a racist, genocidal nation. But there were important domestic consequences to that. If America was the driving force of a new, more democratic world, then it was still a nation divided racially, not just in the South, where feudal laws imposed state-sanctioned legal and political racism, but in the North as well, its major professional sports events still lily white. In the courts a large number of cases trying to end the doctrine of separate but equal were working their way to the Supreme Court. But it would be the world of sports that became the most important postwar laboratory of racial change and where black Americans finally got their first true chance at showing their real talents. That their sports were segregated was singularly unjust, and no one knew this better than the professional baseball players themselves. For they often barnstormed with black players from the Negro League after the season, and they knew exactly how good the black ballplayers were, that only racial prejudice prevented them from playing.
Jackie Robinson, whose terrible responsibility it was to be the first, the man in the test tube, his abilities and conduct to be scrutinized by an entire nationâwas nothing less than historyâs man. He was a superb athlete, strong, quick, and wildly competitive. He had been a four-sport star at UCLA before he played professional baseball, and he could probably have played professionally in three major sports. Before he entered the service in World War II, though professional basketball and
If World War I had been the first act of Americaâs emergence as a world power, World War II would be the defining act. If there had been fears in America on the eve of the entry of the United States into the war that a democracy might not be able to stand up to powerful totalitarian military powers, those fears soon proved completely invalid: Rarely had a democratic societyâs power been so brilliantly mobilized. America rose to true superpower status during the war; its industrial base, secure from enemy attack because of the two oceans, became the arsenal of democracy. When the war was over America stood alone, rich in a world which was poor. The change in the balance of power had taken place with a startling swiftness.
For the war changed the balance of power in the world with a certain finality: In Europe the old powers had been bled white by two wars; America, by contrast, had been brought kicking and screaming to the zenith of its power. No bombs had fallen on America; its lossesâroughly 350,000 men on two frontsâwere slight in comparison with other nations.
All of these factors had given the nation a startling boost in affluence, household by household, and equally important, a critical increase in personal confidence. Not only had America as a nation played a decisive part in the war, not only had it been, in contrast to most wars, considered a good war, but millions of Americans, whose professional careers might in an earlier part of the century have been proscribed by class, had left their small towns, had learned that they could lead men, and now had a chance to continue their careers through the G.I. Bill. If one of the things which distinguished America from the old world was its concept of social fluidityâthe fact that in only one generation ordinary citizens could rise significantly above the level attained by their parentsâthen nothing made that concept more muscular than the G.I. Bill.
In the postwar era America had to face the domestic consequences of its own wartime rhetoric. For the war had generated its own powerful propaganda, that of the democracies taking on two totalitarian powers, Germany and Japan, and in the case of Germany a racist, genocidal nation. But there were important domestic consequences to that. If America was the driving force of a new, more democratic world, then it was still a nation divided racially, not just in the South, where feudal laws imposed state-sanctioned legal and political racism, but in the North as well, its major professional sports events still lily white. In the courts a large number of cases trying to end the doctrine of separate but equal were working their way to the Supreme Court. But it would be the world of sports that became the most important postwar laboratory of racial change and where black Americans finally got their first true chance at showing their real talents. That their sports were segregated was singularly unjust, and no one knew this better than the professional baseball players themselves. For they often barnstormed with black players from the Negro League after the season, and they knew exactly how good the black ballplayers were, that only racial prejudice prevented them from playing.
Jackie Robinson, whose terrible responsibility it was to be the first, the man in the test tube, his abilities and conduct to be scrutinized by an entire nationâwas nothing less than historyâs man. He was a superb athlete, strong, quick, and wildly competitive. He had been a four-sport star at UCLA before he played professional baseball, and he could probably have played professionally in three major sports. Before he entered the service in World War II, though professional basketball and
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