Year 1947

__________ 

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” 

President Harry S. Truman

__________

Jackie Robinson breaks the color line.

  

March 1: Eugene Le Bar, a 47-year-old businessman, and his wife arrive in New York City after a long bus ride from Mexico. The couple plans to go on to Maine; but he is feeling ill, and they check into a Midtown hotel. Four days later, Le Bar is in a hospital, with a fever of 105° and an unidentified rash on his face and hands. 

Lining up to be vaccinated.

Since he had already been vaccinated for smallpox, based on the tell-tale scar on his arm, doctors ruled out smallpox. He was transferred to a hospital, Willard Parker, for infectious diseases; but by March 10, he was dead. The New York Times explains what followed: 

Soon, more patients at Willard Parker began exhibiting symptoms similar to Mr. Le Bar’s: first, a 22-month-old baby from the Bronx named Patricia, then a 27-year-old man from Harlem, Ismael Acosta. A 30-month-old toddler, John, followed. The doctors thought they were looking at chickenpox, but were flummoxed by the patients’ rashes, which didn’t fit the diagnosis.

 

Health officials had to act quickly, for smallpox had always been one of the great killers of human beings. 

All it takes for smallpox to spread is a cough, a sneeze or a touch. After that, it’s only a matter of days before the virus triggers fever, aches, pains and nausea. A rash appears on the face and soon covers the body, sprouting into fluid-filled pustules. Three out of 10 cases are fatal. Those who survive are often left deeply scarred, blind or both.

 

Most New Yorkers had been vaccinated as children; but the vaccination did not always take, or protection might in rare cases wear off. 

Health Commissioner, Dr. Israel Weinstein, had been on the job for only ten months. When he got lab results on April 4, identifying the disease, he decided to warn the public immediately and begin a program of inoculations.  At 2 p.m. that day, and in a series of daily radio announcements that followed, “Dr. Weinstein focused on transparency and a consistent message. The vaccine, he said, was free, and there was, in his words, ‘absolutely no excuse for anyone to remain unprotected.’ In a calm, clear voice, he promoted the rallying cry that would appear on posters throughout the city: ‘Be Sure. Be Safe. Get Vaccinated!’” 

At first, people were slow to get in line; but news of a second death, and the appearance of three fresh cases, changed minds. 

President Truman traveled to the city – for other reasons – but set an example by being re-vaccinated. Volunteers helped inoculate 889,000 school children. In the end 6,350,000 people were given the vaccine and by early May, health experts could announce that the danger was past. 

 

* 

March 12: Truman addresses Congress, and calls for $400 million to be provided to Greece and Turkey. American military and civilian personnel would be sent to administer the funding. “I believe,” Truman said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This became known as the Truman Doctrine. (1/60)

 

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April 15: Major League baseball finally erases the color line. Jackie Robinson suits up for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Goldman tells his story: 

Amid it all, a powerful, lithe Negro was turning the base paths of Ebbets Field into a holy war. For Jack Roosevelt Robinson living had always been fierce competition. Growing up in a Pasadena slum, he made his first money by sneaking onto golf courses, retrieving lost balls, and outrunning the cops. Given athletic scholarships to Pasadena Junior College and U.C.L.A., Jackie Robinson drove himself to stardom in so many different sports that West Coast writers were rhapsodizing about the new Jim Thorpe….Now the sensitive, quick-tempered young Negro faced the most brutal kind of contest; this time he had a battle by not battling at all.

 

[Branch] Rickey drove at the matter hard the first time Robinson came to his office. At the height of the emotional talk, the Brooklyn owner moved behind his big desk. He posed as a clerk in a southern hotel, insultingly refusing Robinson a room; as a prejudiced sports writer, twisting a story to make the Negro look bad; as a foul-tongued fan jostling him in a hotel lobby or railroad station. Rickey took off his coat and charged out in front of the desk. “Now I’m playing against you in the World Series I go into you, spikes first. But you don’t give ground. You stand there and you jab the ball into my ribs and the empire yells, ‘Out!’ I flare – all I see is your face – that black face right on top of me. So I haul off and I punch you right in the cheek.”

 

A white fist barely missed Robinson’s sweating face. The head did not budge.

 

“What do you do?” Rickey roared. “What do you do?”

 

The heavy lips trembled for an instant and then opened. “Mister Rickey,” Jackie Robinson said in a taught whisper, “I’ve got two cheeks.”

 

People who should have known were openly skeptical. “Players on the road live close together,” one baseball veteran expressed the feeling. “It just won’t work.” Rickey was saying very little. Instead he was organizing in each city of the National League a how-to-handle-Robinson committee, composed of leading Negro citizens. Jackie Robinson, it was agreed, would stay away from night spots, endorse no products, leave the ball parks by a secret exit to avoid displays of Negro adulation as well as pop bottles, and, at least for a period, turn down social invitations from blacks or whites.

 

Robinson took his position at first base and more than occasionally players came smashing against him, at times with spikes out; the Negro ground his teeth and said nothing. Hotels in St. Louis and Philadelphia registered the rest of the Dodgers and refused Robinson a room. He turned away without a word and slept at a friend’s home. Some members of his own team walked past without saying hello; some members of other teams poured verbal filth from the dugout or yelled insults as he rounded the bases. “I’d get mad,” Jackie Robinson said. “But I’d never let them know it.”

 

The 1947 season rushed ahead. The first baseman’s dazzling hitting and running were heading him for sure Rookie-of-the-Year honors, teammates began inviting him for a poker session. Baseball commissioner Albert Chandler cracked down on the rowdies, national popularity polls showed Jackie Robinson running a close second to Bing Crosby. Down the home stretch in September, with the Dodgers and the Cardinals first and second in the National League, the Cardinals catcher hurtled into the Negro at first base. Next time at bat Jackie Robinson suddenly was Jackie Robinson. He turned to the catcher and let fly with all the furious language of a rhubarb and the Cardinal, in the routine tradition, rhubarbed back. The stands hushed, then broke into a vast murmur of approval. A newspaper man said to a friend: “By God, there’s a black boy squawking just like everybody else and nothing happening. I don’t mean to be silly but somehow I think this is one for the history books.” (1/50-52)

 

* 

May 14: “What is Europe now?” Winston Churchill declares. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” France and Italy are threatened by a Communist takeover from within. (1/66)

 

* 

June 5: In a speech at Harvard University, Sec. of State George C. Marshall announces a plan for the U.S. to help rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II. 

“Our policy,” he declared…is “directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy…so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist....Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States government.”

 

No one in the State Department anticipated immediate important results from the speech. The haste was to get the idea in circulation, to begin what was expected to be a slow process of having it sift through the minds of European leaders. But the State Department had not reckoned with British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin. The foreign minister first heard of the speech when already in bed and leaped out, elephantine frame and all, to put his office to work with the words: “This is the turning point.” … Just twenty-two days after the Marshall speech, a meeting was assembled in Paris to discuss the American idea. (1/75-76)

 

The proposal asked for Congress to appropriate $17 billion, to be spent over four years, starting in 1948.

 

* 

July: In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, George F. Kennan lays out a policy he believes will best allow the United States to meet the challenge posed by an aggressive Soviet Union. This comes to be known as the “containment policy.” Stunned by their heavy losses at the hands of the Germans, Kennan believed the Russians would never chance being attacked from the same direction again. The U.S. must deal with Stalin and his regime accordingly: 

the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies  ... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.

 

Goldman explains that Kennan had decided to apply to Princeton in 1921, after reading This Side of Paradise. “Shy, oversensitive, sure that he was crude in manner, he was probably the most obscure and lonely student on the Princeton campus.” Kennan would later craft what he called the diplomacy of “reality.” (1/69) 

Kennan, “Saw the Soviet as dominated by a ‘neurotic view,’ a ‘traditional and instinctive sense of insecurity’ stemming from the days when the Russians were an agricultural people living on a defenseless plain amid fierce nomadic tribes.” (1/70) 

Kennan and his policy group believed that Stalin would die in ten or fifteen years and the leaders of the Soviet dictatorship would be fighting among themselves or their rule would be mellowed into a more tractable form. “They concluded that China, under the corrupt and inefficient rule of Chang Kai-shek, lacked the kind of economic system which could be saved by American aid and that further help from the United States would simply find its way to the Red armies.” (1/72)

 

* 

September 30: Jackie Robinson stands at attention as the national anthem plays at Yankee Stadium. It’s game one of the World Series, Yankees vs. the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

He would describe the experience in I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography, written in 1972. “There I was, the Black grandson of a slave, the son of a Black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The band struck up the national anthem. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words … poured from the stands.”  

In that moment, and writing later, Robinson’s feelings were the same. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem,” he wrote. “I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.” 

A veteran of World War II, Robinson returned to play ball, heading for spring training in 1946. On the trip to Sanford, Florida, he had to sit in the back of the bus. He and Johnny Wright, a pitcher signed out of the Negro Leagues, were riding together. Robinson remembered their nervousness. One day, Babe Hamburger, a front office man for the team, told the two men to go out every day and “do your best.” 

“Just be yourselves,” he added. 

Robinson remembered thinking, 

Here in the heart of the race-conscious South? … Johnny and I both realized that this was hostile territory – that anything could happen any time to a Negro who thought he could play ball with white men on an equal basis. It was going to be difficult to relax and behave naturally. But we assured Babe we’d try.

 

Jon Meacham, writing in The New York Times Book Review describes one key moment in Robinson’s first season in the big leagues: 

One day in Robinson’s inaugural big-league season in 1947, the Philadelphia Phillies, led by their manager, Ben Chapman, were assaulting the Dodger first baseman with especially virulent racist taunts and epithets. “For one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment,’” Robinson recalled. “It’s clear it won’t succeed. … I thought what a glorious, cleansing thing it would be to let go. To hell with the image of the patient Black freak I was supposed to create. I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised Black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.”

           

A subsequent photo op with Chapman to show that all was copacetic hit Robinson hard. “There were times, after I had bowed to humiliations like shaking hands with Chapman, when deep depression and speculation as to whether it was all worthwhile would seize me.”

 

There were supportive letters from fans, too, and a few bright moments. Robinson kept going. A rumor spread that the St. Louis Cardinals were considering boycotting games against the Dodgers. Ford Frick, president of the National League, stepped in to warn the Cardinals, and any like-minded players on other teams, that they’d face stiff suspensions. “I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years,” Frick said. “This is the United States of America.”

 

Robinson went on to an illustrious career, of course. He was a good Republican for many years. John F. Kennedy started winning him over. Barry Goldwater finished him as a member of the GOP. Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a breaking point. 

Meacham explains: 

“A Barry Goldwater victory would insure that the G.O.P. would become completely the white man’s party,” Robinson argued in a piece he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in early 1964. At the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Robinson watched in horror as the right-wing delegates roared their disapproval of Rockefeller, a supporter of civil rights. “It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for,” Robinson recalled, “including his enlightened attitude toward Black people.” To Robinson, the party of Lincoln was no more. After San Francisco, he wrote, “I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

 

The romantic version of Robinson’s triumph over racism, Meacham explains, is not real. It was  partial triumph, and came at cost. “I was a Black man in a white world,” Robinson wrote in 1972. “I never had it made.”

 

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In 1947 more than four million young men and women were benefiting from the G.I. Bill. (1/49)

 

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NFL football - 1947.

 

December 28: The NFL Championship Game is played at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Behind their star, Charley Trippi, the Chicago Cardinals go on to a 28-21 win over the Philadelphia Eagles. Trippi is famous, in that era, for his diverse skills as runner, passer, receiver, punter, punt and kickoff returner, and defensive back. 

The Cardinals are eventually moved to St. Louis in 1960, then to Phoenix in 1988. 

They have not won another championship since. 

The son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, Charley knew early that he didn’t want to mine coal for a living. Instead, he poured his energies into football. “I wanted to get out of the area,” Trippi told a reporter years later. “I couldn’t visualize mining coal eight hours a day for the rest of my life.” 

It was a good decision. Trippi starred in college for the University of Georgia. During World War II, he remained stateside, playing for an Army Air Force team. In January 1947, he signed a $100,000, four-year contract with the Cardinals, a result of a bidding war with the New York Yankees of the upstart All-American Football Conference. (That league, which included the Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns, later merged with the NFL.) 

In the championship game, Trippi, clad in tennis shoes, on an icy field, scored once on a 44-yard run, and again on a 75-yard punt return. 

During his NFL career, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547, and caught passes for another 1,321 yards – the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category.  

As The New York Times explains, 

The Cardinals met the Eagles again in the 1948 championship game, but were defeated, 7-0, in a snowstorm at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.

 

“It was a disgrace,” Trippi told The Augusta Chronicle of Georgia in 2012. “The commissioner should have postponed the game. You couldn’t see the lines on the field. You couldn’t see the safety. It wasn’t football. It was just a bunch of pushing.”

 

…

 

Jim Thorpe, considered one of America’s greatest all-around athletes, called Trippi “the greatest football player I’ve ever seen.”

 

“Trippi is an excellent runner, punter and passer,” Thorpe told The Associated Press in 1949. “He blocks well and is a sure tackler. Guess that covers the field.”