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CHAPTER 1
THE GLORY DAYS OF 1957
Glory days, well, they'll pass you by Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye Glory days, glory days
— Bruce Springsteen, "Glory Days"
Henry Aaron was well established as a baseball legend when, at the age of forty, he beat Babe Ruth's career home run record on April 8, 1974, and reached what some consider the pinnacle of accomplishment. But it is 1957 that Aaron recalls as his most memorable year. Just twenty-three years old at the time, he helped the Milwaukee Braves win the National League pennant and go on to defeat the seemingly invincible Yankees and capture the 1957 World Series. His lightning-fast wrists, impeccable eyesight, and ability to understand pitchers were in top form that year. Even Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Yankees, was forced to admit so — especially after game four of the World Series at Milwaukee's County Stadium.
With temperatures in the fifties, gusty winds were blowing off Lake Michigan on that Sunday. It was the fourth inning and the Yankees had led 1–0 since the first inning. But suddenly they were in trouble: there was a walk, then a double by Milwaukee's ever-popular third baseman, Eddie Mathews. Henry Aaron stepped up to the plate. Yankee pitcher Tom Sturdivant, knowing Aaron's ability, wanted to walk him. Stengel disagreed. "No, pitch to him," Stengel said during a huddle at the pitcher's mound. "With this wind, Babe Ruth couldn't get one out of here."
Sturdivant did as he was told, and Aaron hit a three-run homer. By the inning's end, the Braves were ahead 4–1, winning the game 7–5. The Yankees, who had hoped to wrap up a third win and destroy the Braves' confidence, instead found the series even at two games apiece. Sturdivant entered the dugout after that fourth inning and said to Stengel, "I thought you said Babe Ruth couldn't get one out of here." To which Stengel reportedly replied, "Well, that wasn't Babe Ruth you were facing."
It was the pennant race, however, where Aaron found the most glory, with an extra-innings homer that clinched the pennant for a city not yet fully accustomed to playing in the major leagues. Time magazine explained Aaron's feat by referencing the Israelites' journey into the Promised Land. Quoting from Exodus 8:17, Time wrote: "For Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth."
In his autobiography, Aaron recalls both the World Series and being named Most Valuable Player of the National League that year: "All of those things made 1957 the best year of my baseball life, and it went along with the best year of baseball that any city ever had. It doesn't get any better than Milwaukee in 1957."
A surprising number of Milwaukeeans, even today, would agree with that assessment. Beneath the surface of 1957, however, two separate and unequal realities existed — as Aaron himself realized.
The morning after his home run won the pennant, the Milwaukee Sentinel printed a front-page photo of Aaron being carried off the field by his jubilant teammates, under a banner headline: "We're the Champs! Bring on the Yankees." To the left of that photo, relegated to second-place coverage, a modest headline noted: "I'll Send U.S. Army, Ike Warns." In Little Rock, Arkansas, white mobs were beating on black students attempting to integrate Central High School.
In his autobiography, I Had a Hammer, Aaron speaks of his conflicted feelings on seeing that day's newspaper. "The morning after, there was a picture in the paper of me on the shoulders of my teammates," he writes. "Most of them, naturally, were white. On the same front page was a picture of a riot in Little Rock, Arkansas. It seemed that Little Rock, like much of the South, wasn't leaping into the spirit of Brown vs. Board of Education."
Little Rock became a symbol of southern resistance to school desegregation. Its historical significance was amplified by the media attention that zoomed in on what was a little-known southern city, foreshadowing the nonstop news cycles of the future. With a population of just over 100,000 people in 1957, Little Rock was a small city that became a big story.
Ernest Green never considered Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of the Deep South, where opposition to desegregation was the strongest and not a single black student attended school with whites during the 1955 school year. When Green was a junior in the spring of 1957, he put his name in as a student interested in integrating Central. He didn't anticipate the raw racism that would greet him the following September. After all, he recounts, "the year before we went to Central, both the city buses in Little Rock and the public libraries were integrated without any problems."
Although he attended the all-black high school Horace Mann, Green was familiar with Central. Horace Mann students often got Central's hand-me-down textbooks, with the names of the students still inside. He knew that the all-white Central had better facilities, a better curriculum, and better science labs. Shortly before school started he was told he wouldn't be able to be in the band, play football, or go to the prom. But he figured helping to integrate Central was more important than continuing to play tenor sax, as he had done for five years.
Green, the only senior among the black students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, never made it to Central on the first day of school. The night before, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus warned that "blood will run in the streets" if black students entered Central. When the school doors opened on September 4, 1957, troops from the state's National Guard were on hand — not to protect the nine black students but to stand guard, bayonets and all, to keep them out.
Faubus had thrown down the gauntlet. He made clear he was not about to obey the U.S. Supreme Court and its decision three years earlier in Brown v. Board that separate schools were inherently unequal and violated the U.S. Constitution. And he was backing up his defiance with National Guard troops under his command.
The drama of the Little Rock Nine seized the nation's attention. "The prolonged duration and the military drama of the siege made Little Rock the first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era," Taylor Branch writes in his seminal work, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. There were important legal issues as well. Faubus was using armed forces to oppose the federal government, creating what some considered the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War.
President Dwight Eisenhower, never a strong supporter of civil rights, hemmed and hawed. For weeks the crisis went unresolved. On September 23, Faubus seemed to comply with White House demands and withdrew the National Guard — only to leave the Little Rock Nine at the mercy of white mobs. "By mid-morning," Branch writes, "angry whites had beaten at least two Negro reporters, broken many of the schools' windows and doors, and come so close to capturing the Negro students that the Little Rock police evacuated them in desperation."
Eisenhower was furious. A military man, he decided to send in his own troops, and enough of them to crush any thought of defiance. Forget U.S. marshals, he told the Pentagon. Call up riot-trained units of the 101st Airborne Division. By the end of the day, fifty-two planeloads had brought more than one thousand federal paratroopers to Little Rock. The next morning, the Little Rock Nine were transported via military convoy to Central High and protected by federal troops. Once inside, the paratroopers transferred the nine students to military personnel who would accompany each student to their classroom so that they were never alone.
The troops were gradually withdrawn, and by the second semester they were gone. For Green, those were the roughest months, as hostility from white students increased. That spring, he became the first black ever to graduate from Central. During the graduation ceremony, he had a space on both sides of him inside the auditorium "because nobody wanted to sit next to me."
History, however, embraced the Little Rock Nine, and they became a beacon of courage for generations to come. It was a young senator from Illinois who acknowledged his debt to the nine on the fiftieth anniversary of Little Rock, saying: "They proved that Brown could work, signaling the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, and making a life of hope and opportunity possible for someone like me." Barack Obama again recognized his gratitude in January 2009, inviting the Little Rock Nine to Washington for the inauguration of the first African American as president of the United States.
At the time of the Little Rock crisis, Milwaukee media coverage was overshadowed by what was deemed a more important event: the World Series. After all, Little Rock was a faraway place, a minor-league town somewhere down south.
Located on the shores of Lake Michigan in a state known for its lush farmlands and bucolic landscape, Milwaukee has always been a blue-collar city. If you had the good fortune in the 1950s to be on the top floor of one of downtown's tall buildings (what remains the tallest skyscraper, at forty-two stories, was not built until 1973), to the east was a never-ending line of blue water. City residents bragged Lake Michigan was better than the ocean because it was fresh water. In all other directions, the skyline would have been dominated by symbols of the city's foundational institutions — the belching smoke of factories, well-maintained multistory schools, and church steeples reaching to the heavens. Nearby would have been another Milwaukee trademark, the neighborhood tavern, where the typical order was a draft beer and a shot of bourbon.
The population of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest city, has hovered around 600,000 in recent decades. For generations, the city has lived in the shadow of Chicago, ninety miles to the south. As a result, Milwaukee has developed a personality that both resents and boasts of its image as a small-town big city. Spend a day strolling along Milwaukee's lakefront or go to one of its many summer festivals where strangers may treat you as a long-lost friend, and the small-town description is easy to understand. But it has always been difficult for Milwaukee to claim that it is a big city able to compete with the big boys. Over the years, Milwaukee has consistently resorted to one surefire way to bolster its big-city ambitions: host a major-league baseball team.
Milwaukee briefly had such a team, back in 1901, known as the Milwaukee Brewers (a name also used by the city's current National League team). But that moment of glory didn't last, and after one season the team moved to St. Louis. For the next fifty years, the city's team was still called the Milwaukee Brewers, but it was a minor-league team. Which meant that Milwaukee was a minor-league town. It stung. The term "minor-league" became an enduring source of shame, hauled out by critics to describe not just Milwaukee's status as a baseball town, but also the city's shortcomings in every imaginable sphere.
Even Cleveland and St. Louis were major-league towns. But not Milwaukee. "It was fun to go to Borchert Field on a hot afternoon and sit on the wooden bleachers, pulling out splinters and drinking beer and yelling for the Brewers," Robert W. Wells recounts in his book This Is Milwaukee. "But when the game was over, Milwaukee was still in the minor leagues."
In the 1950s, Major League Baseball mirrored the nation's mood and was eager to expand. Although no team had relocated since 1903, Milwaukee believed that its fantasy of a major-league team could become a reality. The city had such faith that in 1950 it decided to build Milwaukee County Stadium, three years before it was even sure it could woo a major-league team. "The decision to build County Stadium was a staggering leap of faith for a community that no one has ever mistaken for impetuous," notes historian John Gurda in his book The Making of Milwaukee.
With a stadium in place, deals and dreams were bandied about. On Thursday, March 19, 1953, it all came together: league owners okayed the transfer of the Boston Braves to Milwaukee. At the time, the Boston Braves were playing a spring training game in Bradenton, Florida. It was the fifth inning, the game more than half over. Suddenly the scoreboard was changed: the home team switched from BOS to MIL. The Braves were now officially from Milwaukee.
Milwaukee was ecstatic. The following Sunday, three days after the transfer — while the team was still in Florida — ten thousand people showed up at County Stadium just to sit in the stands and imagine the future. There was no team, just an empty field, and it was raining. But the crowd didn't mind. It basked in the glory that Milwaukee was no longer a minor-league town.
Not all the slurs ended, however. Four years later, when the Yankees arrived in Milwaukee for game three of the World Series, Milwaukee tried to extend a hand of friendship. Prominent civic leaders and hundreds of people formed a welcoming committee to greet the Yankees' train as the players arrived and transferred to a chartered bus. But the Yankees gave them the cold shoulder, a slight reported on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal on Friday, October 4: "'This,' said an unidentified Yankee spokesman, shoving a group of reporters and photographers off a chartered bus, 'is strictly bush league.'" The paper did not need to translate. Everyone knew that "bush league" was a synonym for "minor league."
Milwaukee rubbed the snub back in the Yankees' nose. When the Braves won the World Series, deliriously happy fans unfurled a banner that read, "Bushville Wins." Back in Milwaukee, dancing broke out on the streets of downtown. "No single event in the community's history — not V-J Day or the end of World War I or even the return of legal beer — has ever caused such a spontaneous outpouring of joy," Gurda notes.
Milwaukee's attention in 1957 was on the World Series, but the world was not standing still. Joe McCarthy, the anticommunist demagogue from Appleton, Wisconsin, died that year. Osama bin Laden was born. Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union, ushering in a cold war "space race" and fostering demands for better math and science education. On the pop charts, Elvis Presley ("All Shook Up") and Pat Boone ("Love Letters in the Sand") had the year's top songs. John Lennon, meanwhile, was a teenager forming his first band.
Television started the decade as an upstart challenge to radio but soon came to dominate the nation's living rooms. The share of U.S. households with TV sets rose from about 10 percent in 1950 to 90 percent by the decade's end — what social scientist Robert Putnam calls "probably the fastest diffusion of a technological innovation ever recorded." It was television that, two decades later, crowned Milwaukee as the quintessential 1950s all-American city of hard-working, everyday people.
Milwaukee was chosen as the locale for the Happy Days sitcom, followed by the spin-off Laverne & Shirley. The shows, surviving for decades through reruns, featured a romanticized 1950s that specialized in saccharine scenes from a white working-class perspective, complete with ice cream floats and sock hops. The Fonz — sporting a leather jacket and greased pompadour but otherwise reduced to a cardboard caricature of James Dean or Marlon Brando — was as edgy as the characters would get. (More than thirty years later, many Milwaukeeans still bask in the glow of such TV-based reality. In 2008, the city's tourism booster organization sponsored a bronze statue of the Fonz in downtown, even convincing the actor who portrayed the character, Henry Winkler, to attend the dedication. The statue became an instant hit, scene of many a tourist photo.)
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Milwaukee was rebounding in the 1950s from the combined effects of a depression followed by a world war. Its spirits were high, the economy was booming, and support for the public schools was strong.
From buildings to staff and students to extracurricular offerings, the city's public schools expanded and never once seemed to doubt what had been commonly accepted wisdom for large-city districts since the 1920s: they were unquestionably superior to small-town or rural schools. Forty-four major school district building projects were completed in the 1950s, from new high schools and junior highs to eighteen new elementary schools and sixteen major elementary additions. Three citywide votes were held in the 1950s and two more in the 1960s to approve necessary bonds for school construction. In every instance, the voters approved by a significant majority.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lessons from the Heartland"
by .
Copyright © 2013 PS1.
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