Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson—A Baseball Mystery
"The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject. ..." Ernest Hemingway By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches from Four Decades Spring comes early to baseball. For most people living in the Northern Hemisphere, spring arrives officially on or about March 21, but for professional baseball players it starts in February when they gather to begin training for the upcoming season. Nowadays, major-league clubs train in Florida or Arizona, but years ago, trips to more exotic places were not unusual. Thus it was that in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers and their top minor-league club, the Montreal Royals, found themselves training in Havana, Cuba. This was not the Dodgers' first excursion to the island nation. After making brief visits to Cuba in 1900, 1913, 1921, and 1931, they had trained there full-time in 1941 and 1942. But this trip was unusual, with a purpose much greater than getting players into shape. (1) The 1947 Dodgers were on the verge of doing something truly historic. Just before Opening Day, April 15, Brooklyn's president, Branch Rickey, announced that Jackie Robinson was being promoted from Montreal to the parent club, making him the first African American to play major-league baseball since 1884. The Dodgers had signed Robinson to a contract in the fall of 1945 and assigned him to the Royals. In 1946, both Brooklyn and Montreal had trained in Florida: the Dodgers in Daytona Beach, a relatively progressive southern city thanks to the heroic work of civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune, and the Royals in Sanford, a small town forty miles south and considerably less enlightened. Despite Rickey's hopes, the Montreal club ran into legal segregation every step of the way. Law enforcement officials cancelled a number of Royals games in several Florida cities and also in Savannah and Richmond as the team traveled north to open the season in Jersey City. Robinson encountered few problems once he and his wife Rachel reached Montreal. They were welcomed into the community, and he had a terrific season. His manager, Mississippian Clay Hopper, and his teammates adjusted. They had little choice. (2) Rickey wanted 1947 to be different. He kept Robinson on the Montreal roster, but he knew that the former UCLA student and Army veteran would be a Dodger when the season began. Aiming for spring training to be free from racial strife, he picked Cuba, a country where he believed the color of a player's skin would not be an issue. Still, when the players arrived in Havana, they noticed a peculiar housing arrangement. The players on the major-league roster stayed at the Hotel Nacional, a stately structure designed in an Andalusian-Moorish style and built in 1930. White members of the minor-league club stayed at the nearby Havana Military Academy. But Robinson and three other black players trying to make the Montreal roster were housed separately, away from their white teammates, in "a musty, third-rate hotel in the heart of town." Robinson, catcher Roy Campanella, and pitchers Roy Partlow and Don Newcombe endured this humiliation together. Robinson at first blamed the Cuban government for the segregated housing, but he soon learned that the idea was Rickey's. "I can't afford to take a chance and have a single incident occur," said the Dodgers executive. "This training session must be perfectly smooth." He was wary, he said, that some white Royals new to the club or American tourists staying at the Nacional might raise a stink. "I wasn't even allowed to go in the lobby of the Nacional to see Mr. Rickey on baseball business," Newcombe remembered. "I had to get permission from the bellhops. In fact, one [white] bellhop put me out of the lobby." (3) Rickey also wanted spring training to make a profit. He enticed three other major-league clubs--the Boston Braves, New York Yankees, and St. Louis Browns--to come to the Caribbean for exhibition games. …
Hemingway: The Final Years
Ernest Hemingway's triumphs as a writer during the 1940s and 1950s accompanied a life of risk and danger. Michael Reynolds discovers the truth about Hemingway's activities during the war years, including running a counterintelligence operation in Havana and riding a landing craft into Omaha Beach on D-Day. The post-war period, when he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea", was the most productive time of Hemingway's writing life but his physical and mental health deteriorated. In 1961 he committed suicide. Using interviews, letters, memoirs and previously classified documents, Reynolds brings his eyes to Hemingway's later years, recreating his life and the atmosphere of post-war America.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.