Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession

Read an Excerpt

Mint Condition

Atlantic Monthly Press

Chapter One

Although an estimated five thousand Union soldiers would eventually die of starvation and disease inside its wooden stockades, the Confederate-run prison camp at Salisbury, North Carolina, was a great place for a ball game. Created seven months after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861, Salisbury was one of the primary destinations for Yankee prisoners of war early in the Civil War. The only war prison in the state, the modest sixteen-acre compound included a cotton factory, a blacksmith's shop, and enough of an open field to accommodate a pair of baseball nines when weather and the warden permitted.

The first 120 Union detainees arrived at Salisbury shortly before Christmas 1861, and by the following spring there were a still manageable fourteen hundred prisoners sleeping in the camp's tenements. In these early days Salisbury, with its oak trees and water barrels and ample breathing room, was a rather pleasant place to suffer one's wartime capture. One Yank remarked that it was "more endurable than any other part of Rebeldom." As several prisoners' memoirs bear out, this agreeable atmosphere had a lot to do with baseball. According to the diary of imprisoned doctor Charles Carroll Gray, prisoners played ball nearly every day that rain or cold didn't prevent it. They even celebrated the Fourth of July of 1862 by reading the Declaration of Independence aloud and playing a few innings on their makeshift diamond.

Baseball took hold at other encampments in both the South and the North, especially during the first half of the war. The game provided a respite from the wretchedness of battle and camp, with regimental soldiers routinely playing ball among themselves, their games sometimes broken off by the fire of cannons, muskets, and carbines.

J.G.B. Adams, a member of the Nineteenth Regiment of Massachusetts, wrote that during his stay at Falmouth, Virginia, "baseball fever" broke out among both Yanks and Rebs, with Adams and his comrades close enough to their enemies across the river to cheer them on. "We would sit on the bank and watch their games, and the distance was so short we could understand every movement and would applaud good plays."

The war would temporarily cripple organized baseball as players in the North left their clubs to enlist, but it also helped to spread the game to new parts of America. As the New York Clipper noted in 1865, "When soldiers were off duty, base ball was naturalized in nearly every state in the Union." What had been a Northern gentleman's game closely associated with Brooklyn became a fixture in many cities in the South and West, with new clubs sprouting in pockets of the former Confederacy, such as Richmond, Virginia, and Galveston, Texas, where the best local team took the name of Robert E. Lee. After the war, the game began to blossom not only as a professional, revenue-churning entertainment but also as a fixture of blue-collar urban life. In his landmark 1911 book about early baseball, America's National Game, Albert G. Spalding, the pioneering pitcher and latter-day sporting-goods mogul, traced the sport's dawn to the war, arguing that the spirit of the game was inextricably linked to military conflict-and relief from it. The game, he wrote, "had its early evolution when soldiers, North and South, were striving to forget their foes by cultivating, through this grand game, fraternal friendships with comrades in arms.... And then, when true patriots of all sections were striving to forget that there had been a time of black and dismal war, it was a beacon, lighting their paths to a future of perpetual peace."

Among those Northern patriots returning from the war in 1865 was a baseball enthusiast named Andrew Peck. His parents having died when he was a baby, Peck was raised in a New York City orphanage and later sent upstate to work for a shopkeeper. After the start of the war, he enlisted with the Union army and was sent to the front with the federal Army of the Potomac, which included Major Abner Doubleday among its ranks and was renowned for its fondness for baseball. One soldier described the camp as "alive with ball-players, almost every street having its game." Once home, Peck started working as a street salesman in Manhattan, hawking baseball equipment, knickknacks, and games he created himself, some of which he managed to sell to the entrepreneur and showman P. T. Barnum. He also began manufacturing baseballs on the top floor of a building at 109 Nassau Street, where the following year he opened a sporting-goods store with his partner, W. Irvin Snyder.

Before being bought by competitor A. G. Spalding & Bros., the Peck & Snyder Base Ball and Sportsman's Emporium would have a profound impact on the leisure culture of nineteenth-century America. The company not only produced some of the very first baseball bats ("fine stock, clear of knots," a catalog proclaimed) and molded rubber baseballs ("which for finish, durability and superior workmanship are not surpassed"), it also put out the first modern canvas tennis shoe and helped make the magic lantern slide projector a fixture in American homes. And with its small series of cards depicting ball clubs, the sporting-goods company is believed by many to have given America its first baseball cards.

During the 1869 baseball season, Peck & Snyder produced a small advertising card, measuring just three-and-a-quarter inches by four-and-a-half inches and bearing a glue-mounted photograph depicting the ten members of the first explicitly professional baseball team-the Red Stocking Base Ball Club of Cincinnati, whose president was Union army veteran Alfred T. Goshorn and whose catcher, Doug Allison, had reportedly learned to play as a soldier in war encampments. On the back of the card is a cartoon showing a ballplayer with sagging eyes and a wispy beard, his back hunched as he hauls an armful of baseball bats, cleated shoes, and uniform belts. The cartoon is signed at the bottom: "Yours Respectfully, Andrew Peck." The ballplayers on the front of the card, lined up five to a row, were dour, hairy fellows with nearly all-white uniforms. Save for the knee-high socks, they looked like a group of convicts. Under the guidance of their British-born center fielder and team captain, Harry Wright, the Red Stockings recruited players from across the country, signed them to exclusive contracts, and instituted organized team practices at which the club developed innovations such as the relay throw. Traveling some twelve thousand miles by rail and boat to play before a couple of hundred thousand people, the Red Stockings logged a 57-0 record and a net profit of $1.39 on the season.

Peck & Snyder produced at least half a dozen baseball cards between 1865 and 1870, though they were hardly the first manufacturer to dole out free "trade cards" to promote its products. The advertising technique had originated in London and been growing for more than a century before hirsute American infielders started popping up on cards. Pushing household items such as Merchant's Gargling Oil Liniment and Lautz Bros. Soaps, trade cards featured either photographs or drawings of everything from actresses and war heroes to comic scenes and pastoral settings; either woven into the image or on the back of the card would be an advertisement for the company's wares. The earliest baseball-themed cartoon trade cards reflected the rough-and-tumble style of the post-Civil War game. Players are carried off the field battered and in bandages, as they were in real life. On some cards, umpires are shown being attacked by mobs of fans who hadn't liked their calls.

Baseball cards may well have been just one more piece of forgotten ephemera had it not been for another novel activity made popular by the war: cigarette smoking. Pioneering cigarette manufacturers would soon discover that coupling their smokes with the likenesses of ballplayers was an exceptional way to move tobacco. The card-collecting hobby had no innocent beginnings. It was the by-product of a marketing technique used to establish the cigarette in the lives of Americans, particularly young boys. And within just a few years of first appearing in cigarette packages, baseball cards would help spur the creation of the greatest tobacco monopoly in American history.

Before the Civil War, Americans had been availing themselves of more tobacco per person than any other country in the world, thanks in large part to an agreeable climate for growing and a massive supply of slaves to work the fields. The tobacco capital of Richmond, Virginia, alone laid claim to some fifty factories devoted to its production. Yet the tobacco that many Americans enjoyed went either into their pipes or between their jaws as plug chew, for the cigarette was considered a bastardized form of the cigar suited only to the lower classes. That perception persisted until pipes and cigars proved too cumbersome for soldiers on the move. As the war progressed, more and more cigarettes made their way from factories in the Southern states to military encampments. Pre-rolled smokes continued to grow in popularity after the war, inspiring a good deal of hysteria among the guardians of public health. Weighing in on an 1884 proposal to criminalize the sale of cigarettes to minors, a New York Times editorial suggested a ban on selling them even to adults: "The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes, and if this pernicious practice obtains among adult Americans the ruin of the Republic is close at hand."

Such pronouncements had no effect on James Buchanan "Buck" Duke, who recognized the massive sales potential of cigarettes better than anyone. His father, Washington Duke, had fought for the Confederacy and served time at a POW camp before walking 135 miles to his Durham, North Carolina, home after the war's climactic close at Appomattox. The elder Duke sent young Buck to New York City in 1884 to help open an additional factory for the family tobacco company. Even then, Buck Duke's ambition was to make the cigarette America's go-to form of tobacco. Although he personally preferred a substantial plug to the dainty sticks, he viewed cigarettes as his family company's only chance to wrest American tobacco dominance from rival Bull Durham. Managing the Manhattan plant by day, he was known to spend nights walking the city streets picking up discarded cigarette packs of all brands, studying their packaging and trying to calculate what percentage of the market Duke Bros. had managed to secure. By all accounts he worked ungodly hours obsessing over advertising and marketing. "I hated to close my desk at night," he once said. "There ain't a thrill in the world to compare with building up a business and watching it grow before your eyes."

Duke soon came to understand the promotional power of celebrities, particularly buxom stage women. Duke Bros. salesman Edward Featherston Small, an advertising mastermind who is credited with inventing the cigar-store Indian, had obtained permission to use a lithograph of Madame Rhea, a curvy French actress on tour in the States in 1884, for advertising in Georgia. The company superimposed a pack of Duke smokes into her extended right hand, above the caption "Atlanta's Favorite," a ploy that helped Duke sell nearly a million cigarettes in what had previously been an impenetrable market for him. The front office was thrilled with Small's tactic, dashing off a letter to him: "We think you made a happy hit with Rhea. Give the Bull's tail another twist." Small procured many more comely ladies to promote Duke cigarettes, putting them on advertising posters and having them sell cigarettes on streets around the country. But the next big twist to Bull Durham's tail would come in the form of picture cards. Duke and Small wanted to put the likes of Madame Rhea inside their cigarette boxes, not just in their ads.

The idea was simple: give the buyer a collectible card to go with his pack of smokes, and he'll buy more cigarettes in hopes of completing the set. Duke and the other tobacco makers who followed him wisely numbered their collectible cards, usually twenty-five or fifty to an issue, which hadn't been done with earlier trade cards. It helped to create brand loyalty, and as a bonus, collector-smokers would be advertising the company to anyone they showed their cards to. It was one of the most ingenious marketing ploys of the nineteenth century. And advertising aside, the cardboard served a practical function by stiffening soft packs so that the cigarettes wouldn't be damaged while stuffed into a smoker's pocket.

To make sure that the country was blanketed with his cigarette packages and trading cards, Duke dispatched employees to New York's Castle Island immigration station, where they handed out free smokes to newly landed immigrants, who would then carry Duke's name off to all corners of America. Duke's competitors were quick to follow, and the cards they issued gave many Americans their first glimpses of exotic animals, far-off lands, and celebrities they'd read about in the newspaper, including ballplayers. They also helped the public equate tobacco with anything and everything American: state governors, heroes of the Civil War, river steamers, Indian chiefs, billiards stars, race horses, yacht clubs, and (in what must have been the dreariest of sets) newspaper editors. As one collector of such cards later recalled, "There were no newsreels, no roto sections, no picture newspapers. A good cigarette picture was no mere plaything for a boy. It was life. No wonder Mr. Munson, next door, would pore over my scrapbooks of a winter evening, using his reading glass under the parlor lamp." Still, some cards were of particular interest to kids, who pined after such sets as the Horatio Alger-esque Histories of Poor Boys Who Have Become Rich and the Terrors of America, which depicted all-American boys causing mischief.

Duke and his fellow card makers grasped the fact that children, then as now, have a say in where the household's discretionary income goes. Even though adults collected tobacco cards, the pursuit appealed primarily to kids. The children, Duke recognized, would beg their parents to buy whichever cigarette brand issued the card series they desired most. And with a foresight that would reshape popular advertising Duke determined that, of all potential tobacco-card images, two could unfailingly shill for a product that even then was known to kill people: scantily clad women and great athletes.

When it came to the former, simple headshots wouldn't suffice. The full-body photos on tobacco cards showed robust young women in elaborate yet meager tasseled dresses and calf-high boots. The models and actresses were thrown across chairs and sofas, fanning themselves, arms placed unnaturally behind their heads and cigarettes dangling from their mouths. The cards featuring these "cigarette beauties" inspired an 1888 ode in the Chicago Tribune: "Who are these beauties, fresh and fair with ebon locks and sun-kissed hair! Whose that brow of alabaster that makes the heart thump quick and faster! What their names! Where their abode!"

The sexual nature of the cards prompted the wrath of religious leaders and public-morality groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Society for the Suppression of Vice. A Methodist minister in Washington, D.C., decried them as "indescribably fiendish. To defile the body with tobacco is vile enough, but when all the processes of modern ingenuity in printing and picture-making are brought into use to stimulate and start the fires of unholy passion in innocent children, the crime becomes inhuman in its baseness."

Perpetrators of the card craze even earned a rebuke from the White House when a tobacco maker had the gall to print a card featuring the comely Frances Folsom Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland and then the youngest first lady ever. Another inflammatory card was erroneously believed to depict Jeannette Halford, the daughter of E. W. Halford, the president's secretary. Cops raided the studios where cigarette beauties were shot and sometimes hauled photographers away to jail. When a reporter for the New Orleans Daily Picayune asked a young woman on the street if she'd ever allow her photo to be taken for a "cigarette picture," she bridled, "What a horrid suggestion! Only actresses, baseball players, and other dreadful people have such things taken."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Mint Condition by DAVE JAMIESON Copyright © 2010 by Dave Jamieson . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---