Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 324

April 16, 2015: New AmericanStudies Books: Chinese Yankee

[Another entry in my biannual series on interesting and impressive new releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]On the book that helps correct a significant historical omission—and why that’s not its best effect.In the first of a series of Veteran’s Day posts I wrote for the great We’re History site, I highlighted a number of stories of Chinese Americans who fought in the Civil War. As I highlighted in that post, I had been led to that topic by (among other texts, but hers was certainly the most prominent) historian and novelist Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s book Chinese Yankee: A True Story from the U.S. Civil War (Design Enterprises of San Francisco, 2014). As of that writing I hadn’t had a chance to read McCunn’s book yet (it was released on Veteran’s Day); now that I have, I can confirm that she tells the truly remarkable story of Thomas Sylvanus (Ah Yee Way) with power and skill, employing both a historian’s skill at providing details and contexts and a novelist’s talents for story and suspense. And indeed, I would argue that both the historical and the novelistic sides to McCunn’s work are worth highlighting—but that the latter is particularly noteworthy.Historically speaking, McCunn’s book can help fill in some serious gaps in our collective memories. One of the central arguments of my Chinese Exclusion Act book was that Americans don’t remember at all our originating multicultural community and identity, as exemplified by our collective sense of the Chinese American community as a 20th and 21st century one (as opposed to its continuous presence here since the late 18th century); remembering prominent individual mid-19th century Chinese Americans like Sylvanus would be an important first step in correcting that broader omission. Similarly, I think we’ve been terrible at remembering the multicultural histories and stories connected to our wars and conflicts—that would include the hugely diverse army that fought and won the Battle of New Orleans, for example; and is likewise illustrated by Chinese American Civil War soldiers such as Sylvanus and the others about whom I wrote in that aforementioned post. Given the prominent role and status which we accord military leaders and heroes in our national narratives, better remembering these multicultural soldiers and stories would be a particularly effective way to broader our understandings of American identity overall.It’s not enough just to say we have to better remember figures or histories, however—we also have to find ways to highlight and narrate them compellingly enough to draw and sustain our collective interest and engagement. And on that note, McCunn’s novelistic side offers a potent illustration of the importance of finding and telling good stories in achieving those effects. I’m far from the first observer to note that academic writing would benefit from a far more consistent and central role for storytelling, but I would most definitely agree with that assessment. I know that story can seem the antithesis of analysis: simple and streamlined rather than complex and layered, for example. But it’s not either-or, as McCunn’s historically rich and layered yet novelistically narrated book nicely illustrates. And by keeping the story and its telling central to her purposes throughout, she does the thing that all writers hope and need to do: engage with her audience, draw them into her work and guide them through its different moments, elements, and ideas. I can think of no more crucial effect for any book, AmericanStudies or otherwise.Last new book tomorrow,Ben
PS. What AmericanStudies books would you recommend? 

April 15, 2015: New AmericanStudies Books: Belligerent Muse

[Another entry in my biannual series on interesting and impressive new releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]On a classic work that has endured, a new one that complements it, and what they offer us together.In those moments when I wonder how on earth I’m going to keep writing six blog posts a week for, well, as long as the interwebs will have me, I take comfort in reflecting on just how many topics of significance to me I have yet to cover (to say nothing of all those I continue to discover). A prominent example would be historian George Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union (University of Illinois, 1993). While not Frederickson’s most prominent work (that would have to be White Supremacy , his comparative study of America and South Africa that was nominated for a Pulitzer), Inner Civil War was a particularly seminal book in my own development; I read it during my first year of college, as part of my first American History and Literature Tutorial, and it gave me one of my first glimmers of the breadth and depth possible in genuine AmericanStudies scholarly analysis. In his combinations of intellectual history, literary analysis, use of historical primary documents, and sweeping arguments about American culture and identity, Frederickson helped push both our understanding of the Civil War and the possibilities of our scholarly endeavors forward.It’s much too early to say whether Stephen Cushman’s Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina, 2014) will similarly influence and endure in our scholarly conversations. But in his book, Cushman (who is, full disclosure, a long-time colleague of my Dad and family friend) considers his handful of historical and literary subjects (Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Chamberlain) through a multi-layered, interdisciplinary lens that is just as sweeping and as successful as was Frederickson’s. Just the act of bringing together those five figures and considering them through the same two-part lens—the way they tried to make sense of the war through writing, and the role that their writing has played in shaping our own subsequent narratives of the war—is a striking and significant one, and forces us to rethink our conceptions of not only the figures themselves, but of our categorizations and distinctions between such roles as politician and poet, military leader and creative writer, actor and reflector. For that reason, among others, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cushman’s book did indeed endure as Frederickson’s has.As is so often the case, I believe these strong individual works have even more to offer our collective perspective if we put them in conversation with one another. For one thing, their chronologies are nicely complementary—Frederickson begins before the war and moves his subjects and readers into and through it, whereas Cushman begins in the war and moves us into the post-bellum era. For another, Frederickson’s focus on a group of intellectuals (including philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison) likewise complements the more political and literary figures and writers in Cushman’s frame; while both, interestingly enough, analyze Walt Whitman through their respective lenses, providing a bridge between these approaches. Finally, and to my mind most compellingly, the two books offer an interdisciplinary combination that extends and amplifies that element within each: Frederickson starts from the perspective of an intellectual historian and then extends to military and political history, literary analysis, and more; whereas Cushman is first and foremost a literary scholar, and then weds that approach to historical analysis, military and political history, and more. Taken together, the two have even more to tell us about the Civil War and the 19th century, American ideas and narratives, and the way we remember and engage with our histories and writers.Next new book tomorrow,Ben
PS. What AmericanStudies books would you recommend? 

April 14, 2015: New AmericanStudies Books: States of Trial

[Another entry in my biannual series on interesting and impressive new releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]On a book that exemplifies two important scholarly trends.Over the last few years, without any overt plan to do so, I’ve devoted a significant portion of my scholarly work to Philip Roth. That has included both part of an American Literary Realism article and (even more fully) an essay in an edited collection analyzing Roth’s masterpiece American Pastoral (1997), and culminated in my work on the Oxford Bibliographies entry on Roth. I’ve greatly enjoyed the chance to research and write all those pieces, and hope that they have added a bit to our scholarly conversations about the ongoing career of this seminal American novelist; but perhaps the most significant effect of this focus on Roth has been how much it has exposed me to the international community of scholars working on him and his texts. I wrote in a long ago post about one such international Roth scholar, Velichka Ivanova; and through my connection to Ivanova, I was introduced to a book manuscript by another such scholar, Ann Basu.Well, with a bit of feedback (and a back-cover blurb) from me and a few other scholars, and mostly a lot of great work from Basu herself, that manuscript became States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America (Bloomsbury, 2014). Like Ivanova’s edited collection Reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (2011), which includes that aforementioned essay of mine but also contributions from scholars from around the world, I believe that States of Trial exemplifies the benefits of an international American Studies community and approach. For one thing, there’s the way in which Basu includes and employs theoretical concepts without losing her clear focus on the texts and histories with which she’s concerned—at times, in American scholarship, theorizing can seem like a separate choice from close reading or historicizing, but Basu weds them all in a way that feels to my mind distinctly European. And for another, there’s the outsider-insider dynamic of her approach not only to Roth but to American culture and identity, one that allows her to perceive through a new lens the prominence of a theme like “trial” across the second half of the 20th century.In the way she deploys that thematic thread, Basu’s book also exemplifies a truly, potently interdisciplinary approach to literary analysis. Through her close readings and historical and cultural contextualizations of five principal novels (Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America), as well as the few that both preceded and followed this period of Roth’s career, Basu brings that lens of “trial” to bear on a wide range of different subjects: masculinity and gender studies, the Cold War and law/justice, race and ethnicity, disease and studies of the body, the Constitution and theories of democracy and governance, and religion and morality, among others. Which is to say, Basu’s book is interdisciplinary not simply in the works on which she focuses or the historical and cultural connections through which she contextualizes them, but also and even more strikingly in the methodologies through which she analyzes them and the conversations into which those analyses enter. For that reason, as I put it in my back-cover blurb, even those American Studies with no specific interest in Roth will find a great deal to learn and take away from Basu’s impressive book.Next new book tomorrow,Ben
PS. What AmericanStudies books would you recommend? 

April 13, 2015: New AmericanStudies Books: Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution

[Another entry in my biannual series on interesting and impressive new releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]On a book that helps us understand a complex, crucial Early Republic question.First, I’ll ask you to check out this long-ago post of mine, on the complex question of whether we progressive AmericanStudiers can and should support more noble nullification efforts (such as Thomas Jefferson’s resistance to the Alien and Sedition Acts or William Apess’s arguments in favor of the Mashpee Revolt) and yet oppose more ignoble ones (such as John C. Calhoun’s South Carolina nullification fight) without hypocrisy. Of course I believe that specific contexts matter, and that absolutist perspectives very rarely make sense; but on the other hand, in all three of these cases the arguments were in favor of states or communities having the ability to resist and even nullify federal laws and thus the Constitution itself, and that is, to say the least, a slippery and dangerous slope that seems to end quite clearly at secession.However we answer those vexed questions, the overarching takeaway from all those histories is that the Constitution, like America itself, remained an entirely living and evolving entity throughout the Early Republic period (and still does to this day, but I’d say that it was even more fragile and in-progress in that post-Revolution era). In his impressive Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution: Eight Cases, 1848-1856 (McFarland, 2013), Professor Gordon S. Barker goes one step further, arguing that the Revolution itself was still unfolding through such national and Constitutional crises. Beginning and ending with two of the most famous fugitive slave cases (William and Ellen Craft, whose racial and gender passing was just as revolutionary as their legal status; and Margaret Garner, whose choice of infanticide became the starting point for multiple cultural works including Toni Morrison’s Beloved), Barker moves through eight such historical moments, arguing for what each contributed to these evolving debates over law, justice, and America.
I’m not going to summarize or paraphrase Barker’s arguments—as with every post in this week’s series, one of my main points is that, to quote LeVar Burton’s magnum opus, if you want to know the rest, read the book! Instead, I’ll end by connecting these arguments to one of my favorite Americans, Quock Walker, the Massachusetts slave whose petitions, along with those of fellow slaves—and all based directly on the language and ideas of the Declaration and Revolution—contributed significantly to that state’s Revolutionary-era abolition of slavery. Edmund Morgan’s magisterial book American Slavery, American Freedom argues that the founding of America was inextricably tied to, and even required the existence of, the system of slavery—but what Walker and all of Barker’s cases (and his impressive analysis of them) illustrate is how much debates over that system helped shape and reshape our national identity and ideas, in the Revolutionary moment and long after. Next new book tomorrow,Ben
PS. What AmericanStudies books would you recommend? 

April 11-12, 2015: Tim McCaffrey’s Guest Post on Jackie Robinson

[As I’ve done each of the last couple years, this week I shared an Opening Day series—this time focused on AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up to this repeat of one of my favorite Guest Posts, on one of my favorite Americans!]I’ve written about Jackie Robinson in almost every post this week, and for good reason—his is perhaps the most famous (and certainly the most influential) baseball life in American history. So it might seem like we know the key moments and details of that life very well. Yet there’s always more to learn, and in one of my favorite Guest Posts to date, my great former student, friend, and fellow AmericanStudier Tim McCaffrey highlighted one such amazing story from Robinson’s pre-baseball service in the Army. Check it out:http://americanstudier.blogspot.com/2012/02/february-18-19-2012-tim-mccaffreys.htmlNext series starts Monday,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?

April 10, 2015: Baseball Lives: Maria Pepe and Mo’ne Davis

[As I’ve done each of the last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]On two young stars who reflect how much has changed, and why we must remember both.In 1972, a Hoboken, New Jersey Little League team quietly contributed to sports and American history—the team’s coach, Jim Farina, invited 12 year old Maria Pepe (a baseball fanatic with many friends on the team) to join the team, and she pitched in three games, becoming one of (if not the) first girls to play Little League baseball. Pepe’s presence didn’t remain quiet for long, however—the league threatened to revoke the team’s charter unless she left the team; and although she agreed to do so, the National Organization for Women (NOW) took up the cause, eventually bringing the case to the New Jersey Superior Court which decided in favor of girls having the ability to try out for Little League teams. Unfortunately, Pepe was 14 by the time the case was decided, and thus above the age limit for Little League play. But thanks to her three-game performance and all that followed it, future girls have received the chance to participate in a youth sport that is, as Superior Court Judge Sylvia Presser put it in her decision, “as American as the hot dog and apple pie. There is no reason,” Presser added, “why that part of Americana should be withheld from girls.”More than 40 years later, Pepe watched with what she admits is a mixture of admiration and pain as the most famous female Little Leaguer to date (and one of the most famous youth athletes in American history), PS. One more time: what do you think? Other baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?

April 9, 2015: Baseball Lives: Cuban and Japanese Stars

[As I’ve done each of the last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]On two relatively recent communities of international Major Leaguers, and the divergent strains of immigration to which they connect.As this week’s earlier posts have no doubt reflected, to my mind the most interesting way to frame the 20th and early-21st century histories of baseball (not from the sport’s earliest 19th century moments, that is, but over at least the last hundred years) is through the lens of diversification. Although Monday’s subject, Hank Greenberg, helps us consider that trend’s longstanding presence, many of the most famous and striking moments on the diversification timeline relate to African American ballplayers: the rise of the Negro Leagues, the stories of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, the inspiring and uglier sides to Hank Aaron’s record-setting career, and so on. But in the last few decades, paralleling of course the nation’s expanding and evolving multi-cultural community, baseball has grown far more diverse still: with the explosion of Hispanic and Latin American ballplayers, for example, but also with the increased presence of the two groups of international stars on whom I want to focus in this post, Cuban and Japanese players.These two groups share a couple of core similarities: both have to this point featured mostly players who were already successful professional ballplayers in their home countries (a very different dynamic from young Latin American players drafted in their teens and brought to the US minor leagues, for example); and both became particularly prominent with the mid-1990s arrivals of especially legendary such national stars, including the brothers Livan and Orlando “El Duque” Hernándezfrom Cuba and Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu from Japan. But due to the drastically distinct situations in those home nations at the time, such stars came to the United States and the Major Leagues in very different ways: the Cuban players generally defectingand escaping from the then closed-off island nation, and thus often leaving family and friends behind in the process; and the Japanese players generally being publicly courted through high-priced bidding wars, and thus often leaving their prior teams and leagues as conquering heroes. Of course I can’t speak for any of these individuals, but it seems clear that the move from their home country to the majors was far more fraught, diplomatically and personally, for the Cuban than the Japanese stars.Those Cuban professional athletes are not, of course, directly equivalent in any way to other potential refugees from that nation or similar situations—not least because their prior prominence and unquestioned talents all but guarantee them employment upon their successful arrival in the US—but they can remind us that even in a high-profile world like major league baseball, the very different cultural and historical paths to American identity and community remain. Similarly, while the Japanese stars are not in the identical situation as immigrants who come to the United States to (for example) study at elite universities or perform high-skilled occupations, they can be connected to such experiences, and to the complex narratives of national and immigrant need that both link and contrast those immigration stories with arrivals who find themselves instead at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Professional sports can feel like a fantasy world, and in many ways they do fit that description; but as with any part of our culture and society, they’re full of exemplary lives and identities, histories and trends, and ripe for AmericanStudying.Last baseball life tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?

April 8, 2015: Baseball Lives: John Rocker

[As I’ve done each of the last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]What the three distinct and even contradictory stages of John Rocker’s public disintegration reveal about contemporary American sports and society.As a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, I was, in the fall of 1999, a John Rocker fan as well—Rocker was the young relief pitcher with the near-100 mph fastball who had blazed onto the scene during that season, helping the Braves reach the World Series in the process, and it was hard not to like the kid (despite, or perhaps even partly because of, his over-exuberant mound presence and antics). And then came the December 1999 Sports Illustrated profile piece, an article on Rocker’s extreme personality and perspective that included some of the most bigoted and disgusting quotes (about New York City, about one of Rocker’s own Caribbean American teammates, and more) I’ve seen outside of an anonymous internet comments thread. The article tore away any pretense that sports or America were free of old-school bigotry and hatred (such as that faced by the subjects of Monday’s post, Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson) at the turn of the new millennium.Rocker was suspended by the Braves for a good bit of the next (2000) season, but during that same period a second, very different and even contradictory set of stories and narratives about Rocker began to emerge. PS. What do you think? Baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?

April 7, 2015: Baseball Lives: Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige

[As I’ve done each of the last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]On what we don’t know about some of the all-time greats, and what we do.There are lots of reasons why the Negro Leagues comprise a hugely compelling American history, but near the top of the list would have to be the “what if?” questions and arguments they create. Take titanic slugger Josh Gibson, for example. The introductory paragraph in that linked Hall of Fame piece on Gibson says it all: “The applause Josh Gibson received should have been louder. He was considered the best power hitter of his era in the Negro baseball leagues and perhaps even the majors.” Ah, that eternal “perhaps,” the stories and histories denied to us because of discrimination and exclusion. Later in the same piece, fellow Negro Leaguer Alonzo Boone argues, “Josh was a better power hitter than Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, or anybody else I’ve ever seen.” To be clear, such an assessment is no less valid because Gibson was not allowed to play in the majors (just as the Negro Leagues were no less authentic than their counterpart)—but the gap remains, exemplified by one more quote from the piece: “Negro Leagues statistics of the time are largely incomplete. But the legend of Gibson’s power has always been larger than life.” So was Babe Ruth’s legend, of course—but it was accompanied by a career in the majors, one denied to Gibson and his peers.As that Hall of Fame piece notes, Gibson would by the end of his career become the “second-highest paid player in black baseball, behind Satchel Paige.” And Paige, whom sportswriter Joe Posnanski has argued was the hardest thrower in baseball history, offers an even more complex and tantalizing “what if?” scenario, because the legendary hurler did in fact get the chance to pitch in the majors—but not until he was 42 years old (for the Cleveland Indians in July 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson’s debut), making Paige’s the oldest debut in major league history. While his brief major league service (he finished that season and pitched the next before being released and returning to the barnstorming circuit) was a mixed success, Paige’s long baseball career provided another unique opportunity for competition against major leaguers: in 1946 and 1947, major league star Bob Feller organized an extensive, nationwide barnstorming tour, and recruited Paige to lead a team of Negro League all-stars that would compete against Feller’s major league all-star team. As that linked article notes, the tour greatly advanced the overall cause of integration in baseball, and undoubtedly contributed to Branch Rickey’s decision to sign Robinson the following year. But Feller also emphasized the tour’s more specific contribution to perceptions of Paige himself: “the case for Satchel Paige,” he argued, “has been made in part by what baseball people saw in his outstanding performances against my barnstorming team.”The fact that a “case” had to be made for Paige’s greatness at all, and will to a degree always have to be made (although both Paige and Gibson were voted into the Hall of Fame, the sport’s highest measure of success), reflects once again those eternal gaps in our stories and histories. But no athlete (or person) is summed up solely by such professional judgments in any case, and Paige’s liferepresents an amazing, 20th century American story on many other levels: his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, the son of two domestic workers; his own youthful work to help support that family, carrying bags at the train station (one possible source for the nickname Satchel); the truancy and theft charges that landed him in an Industrial School for Negro Children, where ironically he first developed the pitching skills that would take him far from that place; and his truly nationwide and globe-trotting experiences as a semi-pro and barnstormer (often pursued alongside his service in the Negro Leagues), including stints in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. While we cannot forget the racism and exclusion that denied men like Paige and Gibson many opportunities, we at the same time can and must remember the amazing, legendary, inspiring lives (in and out of baseball) they and many others led just the same. Next baseball llife tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?

April 6, 2015: Baseball Lives: Hank Greenberg

[As I’ve done each of the last couple years, an Opening Day series—this time focused on AmericanStudying some particularly interesting baseball identities. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a particularly important baseball life!]On why we should better remember one of the first and greatest Jewish American athletes.Like Jackie Robinson, in whose story Greenberg played a small but important role (on which more below), Henry “Hank” Greenberg wouldn’t need anything outside of his baseball talents and successes to be remembered as a titan of the sport. One of the greatest sluggers in baseball history, in an era when home runs were pretty hard to come by (and despite losing four prime years of his career to military service, on which more below), Greenberg was a two-time AL MVP in his nine seasons with the Detroit Tigers (1933-1940 and 1945-1946), a four-time AL home run champion, holds the American League record for the most RBIs in a single season (183, in only 154 games), and was the first player to hit 25 or more home runs in a single season in both leagues (doing so with Pittsburgh in the NL in 1947, his final season in baseball, at the age of 36), among many other accomplishments. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and again, should be remembered first and foremost as one of his sport’s premier stars for a decade.Yet also like Robinson, Greenberg was a pioneer as well as a star: the first Jewish American baseball player, and the first Jewish American star in any of the major sports. One of four children of David and Sarah Greenberg, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Romania who owned a New York textile plant, Greenberg was born Hyman Greenberg in Greenwich Village in 1911. Although he was not denied entrance to the major leagues because of his ethnicity (indeed, he made his debut at 19, the youngest player in the league at the time), Greenberg did face persistent bigotry and discrimination; in one particularly striking incident, during the 1935 World Series an umpire had to clear out the entire Chicago Cubs dugoutbecause they would not stop yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Moreover, his religion and culture presented unique challenges over the course of his career, as exemplified by his famous 1934 decision not to play in a game on Yom Kippur; he balanced that decision by choosing to play on Rosh Hashanah, in a game in which he hit two home runs and led the Tigers to a 2-1 victory, and Detroit Free Press columnist Edgar Guest honored Greenberg’s talents and Yom Kippur decision with a celebratory poem.Greenberg was more than just a star and a pioneer, however; he was also an inspiring American, on multiple levels. Most obvious, and certainly noteworthy, was his World War II service: initially deemed 4F for flat feet, Greenberg requested a reexamination and was allowed to enlist in 1940; when he was honorably discharged a year later due to age, he re-listed; and by the war’s end he had served a total of 47 months, the longest of any major leaguer. Yet just as inspiring were some of Greenberg’s deeply American moments on the homefront. Not only was he one of the only opposing players to welcome Jackie Robinson to the majors in 1947 (Greenberg’s last season), Robinson also credited Greenberg specifically with helping him through that particularly challenging first season. And long after their retirements, Greenberg and Robinson were two of the only players (past or present) to testify on behalf of Curt Flood’s efforts to eliminate the reserve clause, efforts that led to the creation of free agency and a far more equitable system for players. For all these reasons, I would put Hank Greenberg alongside Jackie Robinson as two of baseball’s most influential and inspiring as well as greatest stars.Next baseball life tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Baseball lives or stories you’d highlight?