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Japanese-America’s Pastime: Baseball

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. In recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, he explores the role of baseball in the nation’s Japanese-American community. For more about baseball, check out our blog series counting down the weeks until the June 29 opening of “ Baseball Americana ,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition.

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Japanese-Americans play baseball in Nyssa, Oregon, in 1942. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese-Americans were forcibly evacuated from their homes and sent to government-run camps. Members of this team resided at a Farm Security Administration mobile camp. On Sundays, they came in a supervised group to play on the town ball field.

Few sports are as entwined with the American identity as baseball. The sport, its early proponents argued, promoted teamwork, individualism and meritocracy and gave immigrants a way to participate in and lay claim to their own piece of American culture. By the late 19th century, writes historian Samuel A. Regalado, it had become “the watchword for democracy.”

Especially on the West Coast – though never producing a luminous icon on par with a Jackie Robinson, Joe Dimaggio or Ted Williams – baseball for Japanese-Americans served as a critical force in shaping identity, binding ethnic enclaves, forging ties with Japanese culture and promoting civil rights. Moreover, in the face of debilitating World War II internment policies, baseball mitigated the trauma of forced incarceration.

Japanese immigrants to the United States were deeply familiar with baseball: Japan had embraced it in the late 1800s. In 1871, Hiroshi Hiraoka established the Shimbashi Athletic Club, the first of its kind in the nation, and soon the sport expanded in the Japanese imagination.

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A team from Japan’s Waseda University in 1916.

During the Meiji Restoration, which lasted roughly from 1880 to 1910, leaders promoted baseball as a way to transform the image of Japan while facilitating international connections. In particular, the Japanese viewed the sport as a means to correct racist stereotypes casting Asians as sensuous, feminine and irrational. Baseball, in its inherent masculinity, helped Japan move away from exoticism to masculine competitiveness, to paraphrase historian Akira Iriye.

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Okuma Shigenobu (left), the prime minister of Japan, shakes hands with Paul Raymond “Shorty” Des Jardien, a U.S. baseball, football and basketball player, who visited Japan in 1915.

From 1885 to 1907, as Japan’s economy modernized, leaving some Japanese behind, 155,000 traveled east to Hawaii and the American West Coast. Nearly 25,000 of these immigrants had settled in Hawaii by 1896. Unsurprisingly, Japanese-American baseball leagues first emerged in the U.S. territory and often featured multi-ethnic and -racial competition, as Caucasian, Filipino, Japanese and Portuguese laborers demostrated their skills on the diamond.

As more Japanese immigrated to California, Washington and Oregon, the leagues followed. By 1900, more than 24,000 resided on the mainland, with just over 10,000 in California alone. Banned from playing in segregated mainland leagues, Japanese-Americans developed their own. San Francisco fielded the first U.S. mainland team of Japanese-American players in 1903, with the creation of the Fuji Athletic Club. The sport helped bring together the community’s urban-rural diaspora across California and the West Coast.

In Southern California, the weather enabled year-round play, helping to give coherence to the Japanese-American community. In this way, baseball clubs cultivated Japanese-American civil society in an era of “yellow peril” and anti-Japanese legislation, which ranged from discriminatory state laws prohibiting Asians and newcomers from land ownership, to immigration legislation like the 1924 Johnson and Reed Act, which more or less banned citizenship for Asian immigrants. Clubs soon emerged in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose and Stockton, and beyond California in Portland, Seattle and their hinterlands.

Part of the game’s power lay in its appeal across generations: “Baseball allowed each generation to interpret the meaning of the sport,” noted writer Wayne Maeda. First-generation Japanese immigrants, known as Issei, saw it as a means to connect their American-born children with Japanese culture, and believed it emphasized Japanese values of loyalty, honor and courage. In contrast, Nisei – second-generation immigrants – saw baseball as more modern than Kendo or Judo. Both generations believed the sport testified to their dedication to American ideals.

For parents, a simpler explanation also existed: It kept their kids out of trouble. More than a few older Issei worried about their children boozing, drugging or gambling their lives away in American environs.

The 1930s represented the high-water mark of Japanese-American baseball, particularly in California – by 1930, 70 percent of America’s Japanese population resided in the state. In 1936, Northern California communities started the first July 4th baseball tournament, a clear attempt to display attachment to American traditions and ideals.

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The sports page from the Oct. 20, 1943, issue of the Poston Chronicle, produced by occupants of the Poston, Arizona, internment camp.

Tragically, such gestures meant little in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, after which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that allowed the forcible removal of nearly 120,000 U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese descent from their homes to government-run camps across the West.

During internment, baseball once again took center stage, providing an outlet for the trauma of incarceration. At the Merced County Fairgrounds, internees transformed an empty landscape into a diamond. “We had to make the baseball diamond, and there were no stands, no seats, no nothing, so the crowd just stood around the field and watched the game,” remembers internee and baseball standout, Fred Kishi. Camp newspapers devoted nearly as much coverage to baseball as to Nisei serving on the front.

Internment robbed many of the best Japanese-American players of the opportunity to compete at the professional level. Eventually, Japanese nationals became a common site in Major League Baseball, no doubt facilitated by earlier transnational connections. But their American counterparts failed to achieve such success.

The fact remains, however, that baseball shaped Japanese-American identities, stitched together communities and generations and provided solace in the face of unjust incarceration. If the journey matters as much as the destination, baseball took Japanese-Americans across oceans and cultures while rooting them more firmly in American soil on their own terms.

Baseball Americana: When Jackie Met Rickey

Welcome to week four of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the fourth of nine posts—we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. As a bonus, we’re counting down the innings to the exhibit’s launch by asking baseball fans a question each week. Your third question is at the bottom of this post. Join the conversation!  

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Branch Rickey

When Jackie Robinson walked onto the Ebbets Field diamond in 1947 and broke baseball’s color barrier, he made history and remade America’s game, forever changing the sport, the culture and the country.

The Library of Congress holds the papers of both Robinson and the man who helped him break that barrier, Branch Rickey—two great figures linked in baseball history.

Rickey flopped as a player and achieved only modest success as a manager. Yet, as an executive, he helped reshape the game. He invented the farm system and the batting helmet, encouraged the use of batting cages and pitching machines and hired a full-time statistician, foreshadowing modern “sabermetrics.”

Player development was a special Rickey talent—the Cardinals teams he built won four World Series. “He could recognize a great player from the window of a moving train,” sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote. His skill as an evaluator is captured in the 29,400 items of the Library’s Rickey Papers: Among the letters, speeches, memos and scrapbooks are some 1,750 scouting reports he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, assessing prospects and current players.

“His work on the hill itself has an unusual amount of perfection. … It is probable that this chap is worth whatever it takes,” Rickey wrote about future Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale in 1954, two years before his major league debut.

Others are brutally to the point: “Can’t throw. Can’t run. Can’t hit”—Rickey’s six-word assessment of a prospect who would last only a year in the majors.

One of his great legacies was his work to integrate baseball—he signed Robinson as the right man for the job.

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Jackie Robinson comic book, Fawcett Publication, 1951.

Robinson had lettered in four sports at UCLA, was drafted into the Army in 1942 and, following his discharge, joined the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs in 1945.

That year, Rickey, then a co-owner and the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Robinson to a minor league Dodgers affiliate with an eye to eventually breaking the majors’ color barrier. Robinson, he felt, could handle the abuse sure to come—he had “guts enough not to fight back.”

Two years later, Robinson joined the Dodgers and made history. Playing under intense scrutiny and often open hostility, Robinson proved to be one of baseball’s best players: He earned the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1949, competed in six World Series in 10 years, compiled a .311 lifetime batting average and, in 1962, six years after he retired, was elected to the Hall of Fame—the first black player inducted.

Robinson’s widow, Rachel, gave his papers to the Library in 2001—more than 7,000 items that chronicle his early life, college years, military service, baseball career, civil rights work and corporate career. An extensive speech file covers the entire range of Robinson’s interests, complete with his handwritten notes. Letters document correspondence with wide range of figures: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins and Walter White, other players, ordinary fans.

After his Dodgers debut, Robinson’s story quickly captured the nation’s imagination. Other Library collections illustrate his place in popular culture: the 1951 Jackie Robinson comic book bears his likeness on the cover, a script bears signatures of Robinson and his fellow cast members in the 1950 biopic, “The Jackie Robinson Story.”

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Film still from “The Jackie Robinson Story.” Jackie Robinson, second from right, played himself.

In 1950, Rickey sold his stock in the Dodgers and joined the Pirates. In a letter, Robinson bid him a sad farewell.

“It has been the finest experience I have had being associated with you and I want to thank you very much for all you have meant not only to me and my family but to the entire country and particularly the members of our race. … I hope to end my playing in Brooklyn as it means so very much but if I have to go any place I hope it can be with you.”

In history, and in the Library’s collections, they’re still together.

BONUS QUESTION

What is your go-to baseball food?

“ Baseball Americana ” features items from the Library of Congress collections and those of its lending partners to consider the game then and now – as it relates to players, teams and the communities it creates. The Library is partnering with ESPN, Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in presenting the exhibition, made possible by the Library of Congress Third Century Fund, the James Madison Council and Democracy Fund.

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Leonard Bernstein Centennial: The Mind of a Maestro

This is a guest post by Mark Horowitz of the Music Division. It is reprinted from the May–June issue of LCM, the Library of Congress magazine. Titled “ Brilliant Broadway ,” the entire issue is available online.

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Leonard Bernstein in 1956.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, the Library has dramatically expanded – by some 2,400 items representing tens of thousands of pages – its online Bernstein Collection , which, for the first time, includes musical sketches and scrapbooks as well as many more letters, photos, scripts, recordings and other material. 

It’s been 27 years since Leonard Bernstein passed away, yet he seems more omnipresent and influential than ever. The doings related to his centennial are staggering, dwarfing the centennial celebrations of any previous American musician – including titans John Philip Sousa, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland or Richard Rodgers.

More than 2,000 concerts are scheduled on six continents, along with exhibits, including a Grammy Museum touring exhibit; several books; two documentaries in Germany alone; a 25-CD box set of just his musical compositions; and a 100-CD box set of him conducting. And, Steven Spielberg is planning a film remake of “West Side Story.”

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A manuscript for the unproduced ballet, “Conch Town,” from about 1940. It includes music for the song that became “America” in “West Side Story.”

Contributing to all this is the Library’s extraordinary Leonard Bernstein Collection, estimated at 400,000 items – one of the largest in the Music Division. Those items go far beyond the expected music manuscripts. The collection also includes, but is far from limited to, his writings, personal correspondence, fan mail, business papers, photographs, datebooks, scrapbooks, recordings and objects that range from passports to batons to the suit in which he conducted his New York Philharmonic premiere. The Bernstein Collection long has been among the most heavily used in the Music Division, but this year it seems to eclipse all others.

Bernstein arguably was the most prominent musical figure in America in the second half of the 20th century. A polymath – a Renaissance man – he was a composer, conductor, pianist, educator and social activist. He composed musicals, ballets, operas, a film score, a mass, chamber music and symphonies.

He conducted the New York Philharmonic during 40 seasons, most as music director – its first to be American-born and American-trained. All told, he conducted more than 75 orchestras. He virtually invented musical education on television, mostly with his Young People’s Concerts – 53 concerts from 1958 to 1972. Those broadcasts and subsequent showings in music classes inspired generations of musicians. Bernstein also was politically involved and a passionate advocate for peace and nuclear disarmament, racial equality and AIDS research.

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A letter Bernstein wrote to his mother, Jennie Bernstein, while on a trip to Israel in 1948.

The Bernstein Collection holds, among many other things, more than 50 boxes of his music manuscripts and sketches alone, including an anthem he wrote when he was a student at Boston Latin in 1935; “It’s Not So Hotsy Totsy Being a Nazi,” a song he wrote during World War II; and his notes for a Holocaust opera (tentatively titled “Babel”) he was working on the year he died.

There have been wonderful discoveries along the way, such as a manuscript for an unproduced ballet, “Conch Town,” he wrote circa 1940 while staying in Key West. On examining the score, librarians discovered it included the music for what became the song “America” in “West Side Story” some 17 years later. There’s also the tender “A Valentine (for Jamie and Alexander),” written for two of his children, which became the majestic finale to “Candide,” “Make Our Garden Grow.”

The correspondence includes all the things one might expect – and the unexpected. There’s an extraordinary letter from Jackie Kennedy written at 4 a.m. the day after Bernstein conducted the funeral mass for Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “It was so much more appropriate for this Kennedy – my Kaleidoscopic brother-in-law – and his wife who loved him mystically,” she wrote of Bernstein’s musical selections.

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The conductor at a rehearsal in 1988, two years before his death.

In the fan mail was discovered a letter from the composer John Adams, while a student at Harvard in 1966. Having just heard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” he expresses frustration in understanding how Bernstein can “turn his back on the future.” Bernstein’s thoughtful reply is written on the back: “One writes what one hears within one, not without. Lord knows I am sufficiently exposed to the ‘influences’ of non-tonal music; but obviously I have not been conditioned by them. … I cannot conceive music (my own music) divorced from tonality.” That response seems to have changed Adams’ life. In a follow-up letter in 1968, Adams writes: “You replied to my letter with a patience and wisdom which did a great deal towards shaking me out of my inertia.”

Learn More

View two presentations recorded at the Library of Congress: “Bernstein’s Life in Letters,” featuring musicologist Nigel Simeone, and an interview of Bernstein assistant Charlie Harmon by Mark Horowitz.

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On Exhibit: Herblock Looks at 1968

This is a guest post by Sara W. Duke, curator of popular and applied graphic art in the Prints and Photographs Division. She highlights three of the 10 new cartoons installed this spring the Herblock Gallery of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building. New drawings from the Library’s extensive Herbert L. Block Collection are introduced into the exhibition every six months.

The Herblock Gallery in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress now offers visitors an opportunity to examine the heady year 1968 through the eyes of a cartoonist. Herb Block – better known to newspaper readers as Herblock – drew editorial cartoons for the Washington Post from 1946 to 2001. Fifty years ago, he reacted to events and issues we continue to wrestle with today: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the election of Richard M. Nixon.

Refusing to shy away from controversy, Herblock used the power of his pen with bitter anger six days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968, to lambast the National Rifle Association and gun dealers.

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“Choose Your Weapons, Folks,” published in the Washington Post on April 10, 1968. India ink, graphite and opaque white over graphite underdrawing. A Herblock Cartoon, copyright the Herb Block Foundation.

While one might expect cartoons on Vietnam, civil rights and poverty in an exhibition about 1968, Herblock also addressed the issue of trade protection. The textile industry was pushing Congress to pass protective tariffs, much to the dismay of President Lyndon Johnson and his administration, which feared international retaliation aimed at other American products.

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“We’ll Cleverly Seal the Door Closed from Just One Side,” published in the Washington Post on March 29, 1968. Graphite, India ink and opaque white over graphite underdrawing. A Herblock Cartoon, copyright the Herb Block Foundation.

The biggest issue of 1968 was the presidential election. Democratic Party candidate Eugene McCarthy’s surprising upset in the New Hampshire primary led President Johnson not to seek a second term. Instead of coming together and uniting behind one candidate, the Democratic Party split – a fracture that did not heal after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy during the California primary on June 5, 1965. Richard M. Nixon emerged as the leader of the Republican Party during the primaries. From the time Nixon was elected to Congress in 1948, Herblock had portrayed him with a five o’clock shadow, a symbol of his mud-slinging politics. When he refused a televised debate with the Democratic Party candidate Hubert Humphrey, Herblock extended his shadow metaphor.

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“Right – We’ve Completely Overcome the Old Five o’Clock Shadow,” published in the Washington Post on October 25, 1968. Graphite, India ink and opaque white with overlay over graphite underdrawing. A Herblock Cartoon, copyright the Herb Block Foundation.

To learn more about the Herbert L. Block Collection – and to view many more examples of Herblock’s work – view the collection online.

Pic of the Week: Strads in the House

[image error]Library of Congress photographer Shawn Miller captured this stunning photograph of 10 Stradivari instruments – and Italy’s esteemed Quartetto di Cremona – during a special “Strad Shoot” in the Great Hall of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building on May 11. The occasion was a prelude to a concert that evening by the Quartetto, co-presented by the Library, the Embassy of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute of Washington, D.C.

The Quartetto performs regularly on four beautiful instruments made by Antonio Stradivari – the “Paganini Quartet,” named for virtuoso violinist Niccolo Paganini, who once owned them. The concert offered a unique opportunity to bring the Paganinis together with the Library’s six priceless Strads, for a record-setting display of the great maker’s art.

Baseball Americana: Playing Behind Barbed Wire

Welcome to week three of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the third of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. This week, in recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we’re highlighting Library collections that document baseball as played by Japanese-Americans incarcerated in World War II internment camps.

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Observers watch a baseball game underway at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in 1943. Photo by Ansel Adams.

In 1943, Ansel Adams, America’s most-renowned photographer, turned his lens from rugged Western landscapes to a new and tragic subject: the plight of Japanese-Americans held in internment camps during World War II.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that allowed the forcible removal of nearly 120,000 U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese descent from their homes to government-run camps across the West—desolate places such as Manzanar in the Sierras’ shadow, Heart Mountain in the Rockies, Poston in the Arizona desert.

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The entrance to the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Photo by Ansel Adams.

Adams went to Manzanar to photograph daily life in the camp, where residents, housed in temporary barracks and surrounded by barbed wire, built wartime communities and organized governing bodies, farms, schools, libraries.

They also played: Adams’ images capture internees competing in football, soccer, volleyball, softball and, of course, baseball—described in the camp newspaper as Manzanar’s “king of sports.”

Across the camps, internees organized leagues, played regular season and championship games, kept box scores and statistics and chronicled it all with stories in newspapers they themselves produced.

Today, those newspapers are held by the Library, a collection that includes more than 4,600 English- and Japanese-language issues published in 13 camps and later microfilmed by the Library. In 2017, the Library placed them online.

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The sports page from the July 27, 1942, issue of The Manzanar Free Press highlights batting statistics, game results and more.

Like those newspapers, Adams’ Manzanar photos also are part of the Library collections.

In 1965, Adams offered the images to the Library for safekeeping for posterity, to ensure that a record of the internees’ experiences behind barbed wire would forever remain accessible to the public.

“The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment,” Adams wrote in making the offer. “All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.”

“ Baseball Americana ” features items from the Library of Congress collections and those of its lending partners to consider the game then and now – as it relates to players, teams and the communities it creates. The Library is partnering with ESPN, Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in presenting the exhibition, made possible by the Library of Congress Third Century Fund, the James Madison Council and Democracy Fund.

Inquiring Minds: Decoding the Design of America’s Libraries

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Kenneth Breisch discusses “American Libraries” at the Library of Congress in April. Photo by Shawn Miller.

For more than two centuries, American library architecture aspired to accommodate the physical dimensions of books and the furniture and spaces designed to store and display them. “American Libraries 1730–1950”—a new book by Kenneth Breisch—celebrates the history of that architecture, from classical temples to ivy-covered campus citadels to modern glass boxes—whose roofs now house more than just books, as technology continues to reshape our ideas about what a library can be.

Breisch is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, where he founded the university’s graduate program in heritage conservation. Previously, he worked for the Texas State Historical Commission and taught at the University of Texas, the University of Delaware and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He has a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan.

Breisch started visiting the Library of Congress in the 1980s to research his first book, “Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America,” in the Prints and Photographs Division. Several years ago, Ford Peatross, the now-retired curator of the division’s architecture, design and engineering collections, approached Breisch to write “American Libraries” for the Visual Sourcebook Series, a collaboration between W.W. Norton and the Library of Congress. Published in 2017, the book includes more than 500 images from the Library’s collections.

Here Breisch answers questions about his research on library design and his work at the Library of Congress.

When did you become interested in library design and architecture?

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, one of my professors suggested that I write my senior honors thesis on the Hackley Public Library in Muskegon, Michigan, where I had gone to high school. In researching the library, I became aware of a vast amount of material on library planning and design in the Michigan Library Science Library that had been produced over the decades by American librarians. It had never been carefully examined by architectural historians and led to my Ph.D. dissertation, “Small Public Libraries in America 1850–90: The Invention and Evolution of a Building Type.”

How did American library design evolve?

The earliest libraries in America date to the late 17th century and were associated with the country’s first colleges. They were relatively small—enclosed in a single room—and were typically located in buildings that also housed classrooms, offices and the college chapel.

Toward the middle of the 18th century, wealthy American gentlemen, such as Thomas Jefferson, began to collect books, amassing private libraries of several dozen or occasionally even several thousand books. About the same time, other gentlemen pooled their money to form private library associations, which often formed the foundation for the first public libraries. These began to appear during the middle of 19th century. While some of them erected book halls to house their collections, it was not until later in the century that the public lending library, as we know it today, began to emerge as an important American institution. But books were still stored in closed rooms away from the public, and their use was usually restricted to the adult population.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American librarians began to promote the “modern library idea,” stressing the need for utilitarian design and open planning. These features became hallmarks of public library building during subsequent decades. Library patrons benefited from associated concepts supported by progressive librarians, such as public accessibility to previously closed bookshelves and children’s reading rooms, as well as the later introduction of computers and other new technologies.

How has the design of libraries reflected the aspirations of patrons or builders?

During the 19th century, in particular, library-building patrons were often local industrialists, or the widows or children of these businessmen, who were interested in giving back to the communities where they had accumulated their wealth. These institutions were often named for their donors and thus acted as permanent family memorials. This pattern was eclipsed in the late 19th century by Andrew Carnegie’s offer to fund the erection of library buildings all across the United States, a program that continued until the onset of World War I. Whatever his personal motives, his philanthropy introduced the American public library to hundreds of small communities, which would never have had such cultural institutions. Based on this foundation, the public library emerged as a central component in the establishment of American civic life, a position—although now occasionally under siege—it has not surrendered.

How does the Library of Congress fit into this mix?

When the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress was being planned in the late 19th century, its engineer, Bernard R. Green, introduced monumental metal book stacks to house the Library’s vast collections and conveyor belts and book elevators to efficiently deliver books to readers. In this respect, the building became the model for the modern and efficient library. Librarians, however, were less than pleased with what they viewed as the overly extravagant (and expensive) ornamentation of the Jefferson’s public spaces, so the Library also became for them a prime example of architectural excess, which they pointed to in promoting economy in library planning.

Which library buildings in the book do you find especially compelling?

Well, I have written books on the libraries of Henry Hobson Richardson and, more recently, on Bertram Goodhue’s Los Angeles Central Library building, so I have to admit being partial to these structures. But several more recent libraries such as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, which was designed in 1961 by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or Louis Kahn’s Phillips Exeter Academy Library (1969–71), certainly stand out as two of the most beautiful buildings in the country.

Can you comment on your experience researching the book at the Library?

Due to the Library’s early and robust initiative to place images from the Prints and Photographs Division online, I was fortunate—since I live in California—to be able to develop much of my preliminary research over the internet. Because the division’s holdings are so vast, many images I used had not yet been scanned, so I also made numerous trips to Washington to look through the collections. Other images had not yet been cataloged, or had been very recently acquired, so I was introduced to still more “undiscovered” material through the encyclopedic knowledge of Ford Peatross. The result is a book that owes much to him, as well as many other generous members of the Library’s staff.

Pic of the Week: Uncovering Hidden Text in Documents

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Middle- and high-school students visited the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division on May 9 as part of hands-on pilot program focusing on preservation science. Here, alongside Library scientists, the students use the Library’s hyperspectral camera system to discover concealed writing in documents.

For the past decade, the Library has relied on increasingly sophisticated hyperspectral imaging technology to elicit a trove of information the human eye cannot detect from manuscripts, maps and other artifacts. Imaging involves digitally photographing an object at multiple wavelengths spanning the ultraviolet through the visible and into the near-infrared. Discrete components in an object—inks, glues, parchment—respond in unique ways to the different wavelengths. So at one wavelength, one ink may almost melt away, revealing another ink below.

The Preservation Research and Testing Division is conducting its pilot with the Library’s Educational Outreach Office. The goal is to introduce students to preservation science and its importance to protecting cultural and historical heritage within the Library’s collections. In the fall, the program will be offered on a monthly basis.

For the story behind how the Library used hyperspectral imaging to detect hidden text in a 1780 love letter from early American statesman Alexander Hamilton to his future wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, read this blog post.

Baseball Americana: Baseball’s Greatest Hits

Welcome to week two of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the second of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening, then we’ll feature posts about different topics related to the yearlong exhibition. As a bonus, we’re counting down the innings to the exhibit’s launch by asking baseball fans a question each week. Your second question is at the bottom of this post. Join the conversation! 

Baseball and music go together like the Yankees and championships, like history and Fenway Park.

[image error]No sport has inspired as much music: Pop songs and polkas, quicksteps and two-steps, mambos and marches, waltzes, foxtrots, rags, quadrilles, schottisches, cantatas and even operas have been written in celebration of America’s game.

The Library of Congress, through its copyright function, holds one of the world’s largest collections of baseball sheet music – a chronicle of more than 150  years of passion for the national pastime.

“Hundreds of examples reside among our general and special collections,” said Susan Clermont, a senior specialist in the Music Division. “But what makes our collection of baseball music unique is the works that came into the Library via the U.S. Copyright Office as copyright deposits. Here lie some of the most elusive examples of lesser-known published songs and unpublished works for which we hold the only copy.”

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Sheet music cover for “Base Ball Polka.” This version, by Jas. M. Goodman, was copyrighted in 1867, nine years after Blodgett’s composition of the same name.

Most of the music celebrated the pleasures of a day at the ballpark, great players, a hometown team or, as in the case of the earliest known baseball-related composition, a rival club. J.R. Blodgett, a player for the Niagara Base Ball Club of Buffalo, N.Y., wrote “The Base Ball Polka” and dedicated it to an opposing team, the Flour City Base Ball Club of Rochester.

Blodgett’s tune was submitted for copyright registration at the Library on Oct. 21, 1858, and, like many early baseball compositions, was an instrumental.

Those polkas, marches and waltzes fit the social nature of the game in the years just before the Civil War and in the decades that followed, says Tim Wiles, director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Players wore festive uniforms, celebrated at banquets after the game and sometimes staged parades to and from the grounds. The run-over-the-catcher, win-at-all-costs mentality didn’t yet exist.

“To understand it, we need to lose the notion that it was just about beating the other club, which is part of baseball today,” Wiles says. “It was a bit of a celebration – of baseball, of civic pride and also of this newfound leisure activity these middle-class gentlemen in the clubs were able to have that maybe their fathers and grandfathers didn’t.”

Baseball Meets Tin Pan Alley

The game grew up, and the music grew with it. The American League began play in 1901, joining the National League. The first World Series was played in 1903. Big stars like Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson and, later, Babe Ruth emerged. Music publishing was changing, too.

“More and more people had the means to acquire sheet music, more and more people had the means to afford a piano upon which to play it. Making music in the home became very important,” says George Boziwick, chief of the Music Division at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts and the curator of the 2008 exhibition “Take Me Out to the Ball Game: 100 Years of Music, Musicians, and the National Pastime.”

Tin Pan Alley, the popular-music publishing industry, produced thousands of tunes for the public around the turn of the century, many about baseball. The subject matter expanded, too: Baseball songs weren’t always just about baseball anymore.

After World War I, Bertha Stanfield Dempsey published “America’s Pinch Hit March,” a tribute to the Allies’ victory. The tune is an instrumental, but the sheet music’s cover illustration tells the story: Uncle Sam drops his bat and heads toward first, German troops futilely chase the ball in the outfield, the Allies round the bases, and the Kaiser stalks the mound in frustration after surrendering a war-ending base hit.

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“Base Ball Game of Love” (1909). Songwriters frequently used baseball as a metaphor for romance.

Most often, baseball is a metaphor for romance.

Love was in the air, on the field and in the stands: “You’re Hitting a Thousand in the Game of Love,” “If You Can’t Make a Hit in a Ball-game, You Can’t Make a Hit with Me” and “I Can’t Get to First Base with You,” a tune with lyrics credited to the wife of Yankees great Lou Gehrig.

“I’ve sacrificed and bunted my heart,” Eleanor Gehrig wrote. “The game is over … I can’t get to first base with you.”

Berlin, Sousa and Ruth

Baseball also attracted composers and lyricists with greater musical pedigrees: Irving Berlin, John Philip Sousa and George M. Cohan all wrote baseball songs now in the Library collections.

The first tune published by British playwright and songwriter Noel Coward was about baseball. In “The Baseball Rag,” copyrighted on Nov. 1, 1919, the composer of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” went a little mad himself about America’s game: “It’s a dope, it’s a dream, it’s a yell, it’s a scream, Gee! That baseball rag.”

The music often celebrated favorite teams and great players: “Oh, You Red Sox” and “The A’s are the Craze,” Cobb (“King of Clubs”) and Ruth (“Babe Ruth: He’s a Home Run Guy”). Before the Babe, there was a King. In 1889, J.W. Kelly paid tribute to baseball’s first superstar, Mike “King” Kelly, with a hugely popular tune, “Slide, Kelly, Slide!”

“He was Babe Ruth before Babe Ruth came along. Kelly was immensely popular,” Wiles says. “That phrase, ‘Slide, Kelly, slide,’ still is in the baseball lexicon many years later. People will throw that phrase around in baseball circles without necessarily knowing who Kelly was or what it means.”

George J. Gaskin recorded “Slide” on wax cylinders for play on Edison phonographs – and produced the nation’s first pop hit single.

Some topics in baseball, and baseball music, are timeless.

“Don’t Kill the Umpire Until the Last Man is Out” (1963) followed “The Umpire’s Revenge” (1888), “The Umpire Is a Most Unhappy Man” (1905) and “Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat” (1909) – the musical story of a clerk who invents a death in the family so he can leave work, attend a game and harass the umpire.

“Go somewhere and die, back to the bush, you’ve got mud in your eye,” Croker yells.

Nothing spurred the popularity and production of baseball songs more than the tune that put peanuts and crackerjack together and, 105 years after its creation, still is sung at ballparks across America.

Baseball’s Greatest Hit

On May 2, 1908, the U.S. Copyright Office received two copies of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” submitted by composer Albert von Tilzer and lyricist Jack Norworth.

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“Take Me Out to the Ball-Game” (1908) inspired imitations and a horde of other songs about baseball.

In the song, diehard fan Katie Casey asks her beau to take her to a game, not a show. After the second verse, Katie leads the crowd in the famous chorus. The song was immensely popular and, Boziwick says, struck a blow for women. Previous songs, he says, treated women at the ballpark in a condescending way: “She’s a regular fan, like a regular man. She knows just what to do and say.”

“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was different. “The song is a welcoming experience,” Boziwick says. “It’s not a putdown, like other songs. It allows a woman to be at the ballgame and also to be knowledgeable and to participate. People don’t realize how important that was at the time.”

The tune also inspired a huge number of baseball songs – and imitations: “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game,” “Follow the Crowd to the Ball Game,” “Root! Root! Root!”

Much baseball music still is created today. “There are, by my estimation, about 1,000 baseball songs that have been written and published on record albums and CDs since World War II,” Wiles says.

The game might have been popular in any age. Sportswriter Ring Lardner in 1911 published a song in which he imagines Christopher Columbus sitting in the stands at a baseball game.

He’d have said, ‘Boys, I’m glad

I discovered this land.

Gee! It’s a wonderful game!’

A bibliography of published baseball music and songs in the collections of the Music Division is available on the Library’s website.

BONUS QUESTION

What would be your walk-up song?

“ Baseball Americana ” features items from the Library of Congress collections and those of its lending partners to consider the game then and now – as it relates to players, teams and the communities it creates. The Library is partnering with ESPN, Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in presenting the exhibition.

Inquiring Minds: Bringing Radio’s Golden Age Back to Life

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Karl Schadow works with radio dramas deposited with copyright registrations. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Karl Schadow began his lifelong love affair with radio drama in the 1970s when, as a youth in Schenectady, New York, he became a fan of “CBS Radio Mystery Theater.” The program was a surprise hit between 1974 and 1982, appealing to an audience that included many who remembered radio drama fondly as a form of family entertainment.

Schadow went on to become a microbiologist, working at universities across the United States. But he maintained his interest in radio drama, researching it as time allowed. His hobby took him to the Library of Congress for the first time in 1994 to investigate holdings from the 1920s through the 1950s—considered radio’s Golden Age.

Schadow has continued to visit the Library regularly ever since. Now based in Virginia, he is a full-time independent radio history researcher. He estimates that his quest has taken him to most, if not all, of the Library’s divisions and reading rooms. But he most often works with the Copyright Drama Deposit Collection in the Manuscript Division and recordings and scripts from the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

“Mr. Schadow’s work in the Library of Congress’ sound archives represent the best of radio research,” comments Josh Shepperd of the Catholic University of America, director of the Library’s Radio Preservation Task Force.

Created in 2014 as part of the Library’s National Recording Preservation Plan, the task force encourages preservation and research of radio history. Among its current projects, it is developing a national database to identify and make searchable information about historical recordings, beginning with radio broadcasts.

Here Karl Schadow answers questions about his research and his experience at the Library.

Tell us about favorite radio programs you’ve researched.

My fancy is mystery and horror. A favorite program is “Dark Fantasy,” which aired over NBC in 1941–42. It was produced at station WKY (Oklahoma City) and thus not by one of the “big three” (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles). There are recordings and scripts of this series housed in the Recorded Sound Division. Another similar program is “Murder at Midnight,” recorded in 1946 by Louis G. Cowan, an independent radio producer. All 52 scripts of this series are available in the Copyright Drama Deposit Collection. A third favorite is “Stay Tuned for Terror,” the scripts of which (by Robert Bloch of “Psycho” fame) are purported to be held at the Library. There is an ongoing search for the set of these elusive beasts.

What is your goal in reconstructing the history of radio’s Golden Age?

I want to enlighten as many people as possible as to the significance of radio’s history, especially dramatic series, often called “the theater of the mind.” Radio is an important part of popular culture along with literature, film, stage and television. Another objective is to continue to promote the legacy of all of those individuals who participated in these ventures.

What discoveries stand out from the Copyright Drama Deposit Collection?

There are literally thousands of radio scripts in the Copyright Drama Deposit Collection. While many well-known programs are to be found there, such as “Lux Radio Theatre” and “The Green Hornet,” it is the more obscure series, including those mentioned above, that offer the radio enthusiast the greatest opportunity for discovery.

How do copyright records generally support your work?

Copyrighted scripts may be the only source (print or otherwise) that is extant for a given radio program. The script identifies the author (whether an individual or a firm) and may also include names of the cast and production crew. Sometimes only an audition or first episode is registered for copyright. In other instances, entire seasons or broadcast runs have been preserved. Scripts submitted for copyright may also function as an additional copy or source for comparative study. For example, there are sets of scripts for “The Chase and Sanborn Program” featuring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, in both the Recorded Sound Section (NBC Collections) and the Manuscript Division (copyright dramas).

What radio broadcasts in the collections have especially fascinated you?

The OWI (Office of War Information) audio is one of the more fascinating collections in the Recorded Sound Division. The OWI collected many programs aired on networks for distribution during World War II. For example, there are recordings of “Camp Grant in Review,” a variety program from an army installation in Illinois, which aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System. There are also recordings made in San Francisco of a daytime serial (soap opera), “Sparks of Friendship,” which aired only in the Midwest. They are contained in the George Garabedian Collection in Recorded Sound Division.

How do you share your findings?

My research has appeared in publications of the radio (“Radio Recall”) and pulp-magazine (“Blood ‘n’ Thunder”) fields, and also online at www.mysteryfile.com. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to write the program guides (liner notes) for several CD sets released by Radio Spirits. I’m now preparing presentations for meetings of the Metro Washington Old Time Radio Club and the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention.

What has your experience been like conducting research at the Library?

The staff of both the Recorded Sound Section and the Manuscript Division continue to go the extra mile in making materials available for research. The focus here, however, should be the subject matter of the research rather than my personal experiences.

For information about the Library’s efforts to preserve radio history and encourage its study, visit the website of the Radio Preservation Task Force.