Revisionist History

In Chicago's Grant Park there is a statue that was commissioned in 1933 by the Italian community of this city, devoted in the words inscribed on the front of its pedestal: "To Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of America"

In Humboldt Park about five miles to the northwest, there is another sculpture, this one commissioned by the Norwegian community of Chicago, devoted, in the words inscribed on its roughly-hewn granite base, to  "Leif Erikson, Discoverer of America."

This city also has a significant Native American community, most of whom would more than likely dispute either claim, as their ancestors lived in the Americas tens of thousands of years before either European explorer set foot upon these shores.

Depending upon your definition of the word "discovery", any one of these claims could have merit. Such is the challenge of history, the narrative depends upon who is telling the story.

In 1893, Chicago hosted a tremendous World's Fair, held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first journey across the Atlantic. (Actually the 401st anniversary as the city couldn't quite pull off the event in time). Ninety nine years later on the 500th anniversary of the event, there was barely any mention of the milestone. And today, nearly thirty years after that, while Columbus Day is still an official holiday, mostly I think out of deference to the Italian-American community, there are plans afoot to keep the holiday but swap the recognition of it from Columbus to Indigenous Americans.

"It's about time", says one segment of society, while another segment indignantly shouts: "revisionist history."

I found a wonderful quote about that old bugaboo "revisionist history" from a noted historian. James McPherson, the author of several books on the American Civil War such as The Battle Cry of Freedom writes that far from something to be avoided, revisionism:

...is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past.

I didn't find the quote in a story about the Civil War or the "discovery" of America, but in a recent Chicago Sun Times article about the founder of the Chicago White Sox. The article titled Pop History Gave a Bad Shake to 1919 ‘Black Sox’ owner Charles A. Comiskey, written by Richard Lindberg, tells the story of how Comiskey's bad reputation comes from the characterization of him in the novel Eight Men Out by Eliot Azinov, the story of the notorious Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The book was made into a popular movie in the eighties.

Quoting myself from a piece I wrote about this very subject four years ago:

The book and especially the film depict Comiskey as a real bastard; imagine a pre-redemtion Ebeneezer Scrooge mixed with old man Potter and Simon Legree without the good side, and you get the picture.

Without understanding (or caring) that Eight Men Out is essentially a work of fiction with a few historical facts thrown in for good measure, popular historians such as Ken Burns have taken the book to be the definitive source on the scandal that rocked baseball in the second decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, they have perpetuated the myth that Comiskey was a notoriously greedy tightwad who all but forced his players to take money from gangsters to throw the 1919 World Series. Research in the past decade has shown this to be pure rubbish, as is another popular myth also perpetuated by Burns and others about the character of one of baseball's greatest players, Ty Cobb.

Yet despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, many people still hold on to their strong biases against the two men, claiming the serious research that went into discovering irrefutable facts that ended up clearing both their names, is not to be trusted as it is merely "revisionist history". In my piece about Ty Cobb, I quoted the estimable baseball writer and statistician Bill James who speaks eloquently not only about the ballplayer, but also about the general public's attitude about history:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

Why is it so hard to let go of our historical biases, especially when confronted with compelling facts to the contrary? In his book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Author Charles Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical bad guys Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not as bad as those two. In other words, if we like the story, it becomes a part of us and we stick with it, come hell or high water.

In the past couple of years, the interpretation of history has been at the center of a controversy involving the removal of century old monuments to Confederate leaders in the American South. The argument against the removal of the statues is that by doing so, communities are practicing their own brand of revisionism by "whitewashing history." In a sense the critics are right, but the history being removed is the history of the statues themselves, NOT the history of the event they were intended to commemorate. Decades after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA., marking the end of the Civil War, a movement that would become known as the "Cult of the Lost Cause" took it upon themselves to revise history by portraying the Confederacy in a kinder, gentler light. According to members of this group, which included historians responsible for much of the understanding of the Civil War for many subsequent decades, the Confederate States fought not to preserve slavery, but to defend states' rights over what they viewed as a tyrannical federal government, to preserve the noble "southern way of life", and to defend their land from the onslaught of Northern aggression.  Union leaders were portrayed, not always wrongly, as drunken, incompetent fools, and the institution of slavery was quite wrongly explained away as one of benevolence, not oppression. Capping it off. the leaders of the Confederacy were portrayed as heroic defenders of the lost cause and tributes and monuments to them went up all over, some even in the north.

No matter how fair-minded the observer, debunking the revisionist history Cult of the Lost Cause is not difficult. All one has to do is read the Articles of Confederation of the states who seceded from the Union (you can find them all online) and right there in black and white, usually near the top of  the documents, is the mention of slavery and its importance to that particular state. The truth, at least as best as we know it today, is that the Civil War did not begin as so many assume, with the Union demanding that slavery be abolished in the South. The issue was the expansion of slavery into the western territories which President Lincoln vehemently objected. Had the Southern states not pressed the issue of expansion, the Civil War may have been delayed or avoided altogether and slavery may have continued for a while until it one way or other, it would have most certainly faded away.


Unlike the popular misconceptions of the causes of the Civil War and the legacies of Ty Cobb and Charles Comiskey, the history of Columbus's voyages to the Americas were not clouded in false assumptions, diversions and outright lies. There was never any question that the results of the European invasion, or expeditions depending upon your point of view, of the Americas initiated unwittingly by Columbus (he never realized that he didn't actually accomplish his goal of reaching Asia), greatly benefited the conquerors, and all but destroyed the conquered, the indigenous people of the so called "New World." What we once viewed as a magnificent accomplishment that ushered in the dawn of the modern age and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit, is now generally viewed as a dark point in history that triggered unconscionable suffering, genocide and the destruction of ancient civilizations. The difference between the way we view the legacy of Columbus today and they way we viewed it in the past is a matter of changing values. Today we are telling the same story but from a different point of view. The truth is that both views of Columbus's legacy are essentially correct.

The most vilified term in academic circles today, next to racism, is colonialism. It's almost impossible to get into any deep conversation about politics, current events, history or just about anything that concerns how we live our lives these days, without the issue of the evils of colonialism coming up. Merely implying that anything good may have come out of colonialism is grounds for at the very least a stern lecture from the rarified world of the cognoscenti. Having just said that, lest you think I am a defender, apologist, or someone who is trying to make a case for colonialism in any form, let me assure you I am not.

The following is my litmus test for judging the merits of anything, asking myself to argue the pros and cons of a particular topic and comparing their merits. Here is my most compelling argument against colonialism:

How would I feel if my country were invaded by another country which enforced its system of rules and government upon us, subjected my people to second class citizenship or worse, and denied us our basic rights? 

You're right I wouldn't like it, not one bit. So why on earth would I advocate subjecting someone else to colonization? On the other hand, here's my best argument in favor of colonialism:

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That's right I don't have any argument supporting colonialism. In my head, the Golden Rule (or whatever you prefer to call the universal gold standard for distinguishing right from wrong), trumps all the fringe benefits that may occur as a result. Wrong is wrong and extenuating circumstances cannot make a wrong a right.

Proponents of a return of colonialism in our time point to liberal democracy, the advancement of science, liberation theology, racial, ethnic and sexual equality, freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and a slew of other ideas and values that have spread throughout the world as a direct result of western colonialism.  Are they wrong? Well those things are all good in my opinion anyway, and whether you like it or not, have all come to us part and parcel as a result of European colonialism.  Yet as far as using those values and attributes as excuses for the continued violation of human rights, then, no, I have to draw the line there.

Which brings to mind this chilling scene from the classic film from 1948, The Third Man, where the character of Harry Lime, as played by Orson Welles, tries to rationalize his evil deeds to his boyhood friend played by Joseph Cotten. Make sure you watch the entire clip as the payoff is at the very end:





Here is a link to an article that chastises as dishonest, a historian favorable to the re-birth of colonialism who happily lists all the glad tidings it has brought to the world, yet failed to note any of the horrors and atrocities of which there were countless.

I get it, but isn't it equally dishonest to only point out the injustices of something we don't like while avoiding any mention of the positive? It is an inescapable fact that our world would be a very different place today, for the worse AND the better, were it not for colonialism. The inconvenient truth historians must accept is this: civilizations of all stripes, both good and evil from time immemorial have been built upon the backs of unfortunate people who suffered greatly in one way or other. This is something we needn't celebrate, nor model our own civilization upon, but need to accept just the same.

I'll give you a personal example of a very inconvenient truth regarding my own life. Had it not been for the events surrounding World War II, a time that witnessed some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known, and the subsequent Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe that was the direct result of that war, my father would not have left his home of Czechoslovakia, come to Chicago, and met my mother. In other words, I owe my very existence, and by extension my children's and God willing that of their children, to World War II.

Do I wake up every morning thanking my lucky stars for the suffering of tens of millions of people in the thirties and forties and advocate for a return of the conditions that led to that terrible time? Of course not. And while I am never unaware of this terrible truth, I do not dwell upon it because it would drive me insane.

Nonetheless it is still a very real fact.

My point is that we should avoid the telling of history simply to fit our own needs, ideologies and belief systems. There is an old adage that says those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But it is essential that we not just know history, but continually question our understanding of it, reject verifiable falsehoods no matter how appealing they may be, and understand the point of view in which that history was told or written. Finally, hard as it may seem, we must learn to appreciate that different tellings of the same history need not be mutually exclusive, but serve to paint a fuller picture of the past, how it relates to the present, and how we can use it to shape the future.

Like everything else in life, context is essential.

Enjoy the movie but...

For those of you eagerly awaiting Ken Burns's documentary on the Vietnam War as I am, consider this. Burns is a fabulous storyteller, that much is certain. Unfortunately he has a problem with not letting facts get in the way of a good story. One of the central characters in his 1994 film "Baseball" was one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, Ty Cobb. In his film, Burns cast Cobb as the villain: "a great black mark on the history of the game" and "an embarrassment to baseball." Over and over again, Cobb comes up as a mean spirited racist who hated black people and "deplored the integration of the game." Burns and quite honestly just about everyone else who wrote about Cobb after his death, based everything they said about the man, on the work of Al Stump, who ghost wrote Cobb's autobiography, and later, three scurrilous pieces, a magazine article, another book, and the screenplay for a movie, on the ballplayer which portrayed the man as a nothing less than a racist monster, on his good days. Burns's treatment of him was in fact, quite tame by comparison.

Two of the greatest ballplayers of all time, Willie Mays and Ty Cobb

Looking at this picture of Cobb and Willie Mays, it's a little hard to imagine there's much credibility behind Stump's and Burns's characterization of Cobb. In fact, their version of Ty Cobb is a lie. Far from "deploring the integration of the game", Cobb was one of its champions. Commenting on the subject in 1955, when only half of MLB teams had yet to sign a black player, Ty Cobb said this:

"The Negro should be accepted whole-heartedly and not grudgingly into baseball. The Negro has the right to professional baseball and who’s to say he has not?"

At the time the Associated Press called Cobb's comments " a home run for the negro ballplayer." In his excellent 2015 biography: "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty" Charles Leerhsen debunks virtually everything Stump wrote about Ty Cobb. Stump it turns out, was simply bent on making money on the by then, dead ballplayer to recoup for the lackluster sales of his original "autobiography", Leerhsen makes a very compelling case that Stump's portrayal of Ty Cobb was a terrible injustice that ruined Cobb's good name..

But Leerhsen was not the first to call out Al Stump, there are many pieces of evidence from other sources that the myth of Ty Cobb we have so whole heartedly accepted for so many years, in entirely the imagination of one unscrupulous man.

As the newspaper man of old once said, "when facts get in the way of a legend, print the legend." Despite the plethora of evidence to the contrary, even back in 1994, Ken Burns stuck with the legend. What has Burns to say about his treatment of Ty Cobb, after Leerhsen's very strong evidence that it was all false? So far nothing.

Another reputation who is the victim of Burns's baseball documentary is that of the former owner and founder of the Chicago White Sox, Charles Comiskey. You can read about him here.

So enjoy Burns's story of the Vietnam War tonight and the rest of the week, but
bear this in mind: take in all the information you hear with a huge lump of salt.

Moving Statues Around

It's hard to give up long held ideas and beliefs. My father, God rest his soul, went to his grave, eighty two years of age, still believing things he learned in the second grade. Neither logic nor empirical observation could sway him from the basic facts and ideas he learned in school as a child. 

Unless scientific findings challenge one's deeply held existential beliefs, I think it's safe to say that most people, unlike my father, accept the premise that scientific facts are facts, only until someone proves them otherwise. However I think many of us are more like my father when it comes to history. To them, the definition of history is the following: something happened, someone wrote about it, we read it, and that's that. Attempts to correct misconceptions about the past are usually met with suspicion, or even contempt. Any time someone tries to re-shape our concept of history, we call it "revisionist" or in our current Trump era parlance, "fake" history. 

This was made crystal clear to me a couple years ago when Charles Leerhsen wrote a biography of the great ball player, Ty Cobb. Now it was "common knowledge" that despite his prowess on the field, Cobb was a racist and all 'round nogoodnick. Leerhsen was prepared to write a book exploiting Cobb's misdeeds, and found several, (as the man had quite the temper). But he was surprised to discover that much of what we think we know about Ty Cobb, including his relationship with and his feelings toward black people, were never mentioned (at all, anywhere), until a biography of him was published shortly after his death. Through scrupulous research, Leerhsen could not find one shred of evidence that Cobb had racist tendencies, at least for a man of his time. On the contrary, Cobb, the descendant of Southern abolitionists, was a vocal supporter of the integration of the game of baseball, and a generous benefactor of charities that supported African American people in his home state of Georgia. After very serious consideration, Leerhsen came to the conclusion that the author of Cobb's biography, Al Stump, was an unscrupulous man who looking to create sensation where there wasn't any, made up most of the stuff that destroyed Ty Cobb's good name. Unfortunately it was Stump's work that would become the story of record on the life of Cobb.

As a result of his hard work, Leerhsen's book, Ty Cobb, A Terrible Beauty, was met with incredulity by many who refused to accept that their assumptions and prejudices about Cobb could be wrong. Its critics called the book, revisionist history. After all, it was none other than the de facto authority on American history, Ken Burns, who told us on public TV no less, that Cobb was "the great black mark on the history of baseball." If he said it, it had to be true, right? Well it turns out that Burns's description of Ty Cobb, as well as just about everybody else's, came straight out of Stump's work, virtually word for word.

I bring him up because Ty Cobb's name has been mentioned along with those of other notable Americans, whose monuments, some people believe should be removed from places of honor because those individuals had flawed characters of one kind or another. 

This all comes on the heels of the movement to remove Confederate monuments from public places across America. Taking advantage of the moment, some folks going well above and beyond the motives of the movement's original intent, are demanding the removal of likenesses of presidents who owned slaves, and any other historical figure who may have at some point in his or her life, displayed bigotry of one kind or another. As if on cue, the right wing "don't remove any monument anywhere, anytime" crowd, are in ecstasy over their disgust of the "liberal snowflakes" who would dare remove monuments to cherished Americans, simply because they are "offended" by them. 

The right wing sentiments could be summed up by a Donald Trump tweet he posted after the tragedy in Charlottesville two weeks ago: 

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....

...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson... So foolish! 

As I've said time and again, there are good arguments to be made for both sides of the Confederate monument debate, but changing history is not one of them. Other than being an injustice (if you buy into Charles Leerhsen's premise as I do), taking down the likeness of Ty Cobb in Comerica Park in Detroit would not erase Ty Cobb from baseball history. No one is talking about expunging his stats from the record books, removing him from baseball's Hall of Fame, or burning the millions of copies of the dozens of books about him. No one is suggesting wiping clean the memories of Cobb from millions of baseball fans or members of his family. 

The same can be said of the Confederate monuments. Taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee won't make people forget who he was, what he did, and what he fought for. It certainly wouldn't change the outcome of the Civil War, or everything that has happened since. Besides, no one is suggesting melting down the bronze likeness of General Lee and recasting it as Al Sharpton, (although I'd love to see the reaction of the rightist snowflakes if that were ever suggested). The plan is for these statues to be moved to institutions such as museums or cemeteries, where they can be viewed as historical artifacts, rather than as icons of devotion, which many have become in their current settings. 

As promised at the end of my last post, I'd like to point out some examples of local monuments which I am very familiar with, that illustrate what happens when monuments and the values of the community in which they stand, are no longer in sync.

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Chicago could at one time boast more Polish people than any other city in the world with the exception of Warsaw. By the 1890s the city boasted dozens of churches and countless institutions and organizations serving the community and preserving Polish culture. One of those organizations, the Kosciuszko Society endeavored to erect a monument in then heavily Polish Humboldt Park, to their namesake hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a military engineer who served with distinction in both the American Continental Army during the US Revolutionary War, and with the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania during their conflict against Russia. 

Polish Constitution Day rally at the foot of the Kosciuszko Monument in Humboldt Park
photographer unknown

For eight years, the society collected funds for the $30.000 necessary to construct the monument. Everything from pennys donated by laborers, to a $500 gift from the great Polish pianist turned politician and advocate of Polish independence, Ignacy Paderewski, went into the coffers. The resulting equestrian statue of Kosciuszko in the role of brigadier general, is the work of Kasmir Chodzinski, who was selected out of many Polish artists in a competition held by the Society. Standing in the northeast corner of Humboldt Park's great lawn, it is said that 100,000 people showed up for its unveiling in 1904 and that President Theodore Roosevelt sent a wire of congratulations. From then until the late 1960s, the statue served as the terminus for Chicago's Polish Constitution Day parade, held at the beginning of May each year, as politicians and performers of all ethnicities gathered in its shadow to address and entertain Chicago's Polonia. On a personal note, at one of those gatherings, while sitting atop my father's shoulders, I caught my one and only glimpse of Robert F. Kennedy who before his assassination in 1968, made a regular pilgrimage to the parade.

The Kosciuszko monument was a great source of pride in that community until the neighborhood began to change. By the end of the sixties, the parade moved Downtown and the equestrian statue, no longer relevant to the people who now lived in the neighborhood, became the target of graffiti and other vandalism. The great lawn designed for public gatherings, became the site of baseball fields and the Kosciuszko monument became controversial for one reason only, it was in the way.


By the mid-seventies, the monument was removed for the construction of another ball field. Few Poles were still around the neighborhood to mourn its loss. The statue found new life, restored to good as new, and relocated to Burnham Park on the peninsula between the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium. It is now in an arguably more prominent site downtown, yet it has lost its context as the focal point of Humboldt Park, literally the crossroads of Chicago's Polonia. Today it is part of a pan-Slavic ensemble, forced to share its glory on the street now called Solidarity Drive, with a monument to the Czech man of letters Karel Havlicek, also moved from its original location, and the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus.

Kosciuszko, his glory just a little faded, as today he stands watch over Burnham Park

Despite that bit of a comedown for the statue, the legacy of Tadeusz Kosciuszko the man, lives on, along with the society named after him. 

As I said, there wasn't much controversy over the Kosciuszko monument, it was moved for practical reasons. The same can't be said for two monuments that depict tragic episodes in Chicago history.

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No statue in Chicago has suffered more indignities than the wobegone policeman atop the original Haymarket Riot Monument. It's been kicked at, spit upon, covered with graffiti, hit by a streetcar, moved at least six times, and blown up, twice. The riot which the monument commemorates, and the events that followed, are famous the world over as one of the pivotal moments in the international movement for workers' rights. Here is my account of the Haymarket Affair from a 2011 post.

After the May 4, 1886 riot which began after police moved in to break up an otherwise peaceful workers rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, most of public sentiment favored the police, who lost eight of their own (many of whom died from indiscriminate shots fired from other policemen), over the demonstrators,  (who lost several of their own), the majority of whom were immigrants from Central Europe. In fact anti-immigrant hostility in this city was so high at the time that the man commissioned to create the monument, Danish artist John Gelert, was asked to re-work the face of the police officer, because it looked "too Irish." Gelert refused. The pro-police sentiment of the time explains why the loss of the policemen, not the workers, was commemorated by a statue, while the injustice of the execution of several of the organizers of the rally who had nothing to do with the violence, was overlooked. It would take over a century for the city to rectify that.

The original Haymarket Memorial in its second location in front of Union Park
photographer unknown

The police statue originally stood at the site of the riot on Desplaines Avenue between Lake and Randolph Streets, but it proved to be a nuisance as streetcar tracks had to be re-routed to avoid it. After it had been vandalized on numerous occasions, the statue was moved west to the edge of Union Park in 1900. Then on May 4, 1927, the forty first anniversary of the riot it commemorates, irony struck in the form of a streetcar going full speed which jumped its tracks and rammed into the statue, knocking it from its pedestal. After that, the statue was moved inside the park where it enjoyed thirty one years of relative peace and obscurity. In 1958 it was moved back to the Haymarket area which is where I first encountered it as a child. 

Then came the Days of Rage in the late sixties when battles with the police again became part and parcel of life in Chicago. On October 6, 1969, the statue was blown up by members of the Students for a Democratic Society, (the S.D.S.).

As Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok would have said on "Farm Film Report" during the late seventies SCTV comedy program: "Whoo boy they sure blowed that statue up real good." The legs of the policeman ended up on the Kennedy Expressway twenty feet below while hundreds of windows in the neighborhood were blown out. The Chicago Police were none too amused. The act prompted this bit of hyperbole from a police department spokesperson:

The blowing up of the only police monument in the United Sates by the anarchists ... is an obvious declaration of war between the police and the S.D.S. and other anarchist groups. We feel it is kill or be killed regardless of the Jay Millers, (director of the Illinois ACLU), Daniel Walkers (who investigated the clashes between the police and rioters during the 1968 Democratic convention and later became Illinois governor), and the so-called civil rights acts.

The statue was duly restored and returned to its perch above the expressway where it stood exactly one year to the day of the first explosion, when it was again, blowed up real good. After that, it received round-the-clock police protection until it was removed into police custody where it has remained ever since. Currently it resides in the courtyard of the Chicago Police Department Headquarters at 35th and Michigan, where you can see it but only if you look real hard from the street.

This is the public view of original Haymarket Monument today
 as seen from 35th Street in front of Chicago Police Headquarters

More irony about the monument can be found in the words on the pedestal:

I had to sweet talk an officer into allowing me access to photograph the statue up close. As you can probably guess, the base of the monument is not original. it's the work of local artist Mike Baur and
made its debut as the pedestal for the 1889 sculpture in 2007 when the monument made its latest move to CPDHQ.

Fro 32 years, visitors coming to Chicago from all over the world were shocked to find that the site of of one of the most important moments in the history of the labor movement, stood without any reminder of the significance of the place, not even a commemorative plaque. According to Chicago's official historian Tim Samuelson,

I can remember that in my own lifetime, not long ago, bringing up the idea of commemorating Haymarket was impossible because it revived emotions that were too strong. It took a long time to get historical perspective, to be able to look back at Haymarket and see that it was everyone's tragedy.

Mary Brogger's Haymarket Memorial, unveiled in 2004

In 2004, a new monument by Chicago artist Mary Brogger was unveiled at the Haymarket site, precisely where the speakers' platform, a wagon, stood on that fateful evening. Bragger's work features a disassembled wagon upon which several semi abstract figures are engaged in various activities related to either constructing or dismantling the wagon. The author of a New York Times piece described the work as "ambiguous." Brogger wanted it that way. She told the Times reporter:

I was pretty adamant in my own mind that it would not be useful to depict violence... The violence didn't seem important, because this event was made up of much bigger ideas than one particular incident. I didn't want to make the imagery conclusive. I want to suggest the complexity of truth, but also people's responsibility for their actions and for the effect of their actions.

Whether or not she was successful is up to the mind's eye of the beholder. Perhaps for a memorial commemorating an event as tragic and complicated as the Haymarket Affair, neutrality is exactly what the doctor ordered. After all, the facts are all out there, it's up to us to process them, not for a statue to decide for us.

Troubled as its history was, the original Haymarket Memorial was not the most controversial monument in Chicago history, not by a long shot.

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In 1812 the United States was at war with Great Britain. The Brits found a useful ally in Native Americans whose lands and ways of life were quickly being usurped by the ever expanding settlement of white Americans. In that year, Chicago was a small settlement with homes scatted along the main branch of the Chicago River, all of them a stone’s throw from Fort Dearborn. 

Before the war there was a relatively peaceful coexistence between the white settlers in Chicago and the Indians, mostly members of the Potawatomi and Miami peoples who freely traded and even intermarried with the settlers. But as news of the new allegiance spread, there was discord between members of the tribes, mostly along generational lines. The elders perhaps realizing the hopelessness of their situation, looked to maintain peace with the settlers while the young “turks” were eager to cut their teeth in battle and join forces with the British. 

Fort Dearborn, built nine years earlier, was the United States’ westernmost Great Lakes encampment, built at the strategic point near the mouth of the Chicago River. In July of that year, a similar fort along the Straights of Mackinac, connecting Lakes Michigan and Huron, was captured by the British with the help of their Native American allies. With that garrison gone, the Commandant of Fort Dearborn, Captain Nathan Heald received word from his superiors that the defense and re-enforcement of Fort Dearborn was no longer tenable and to prepare for evacuation. 

Joined by Captain William Wells who volunteered to assist in the effort, Captain Heald and a group of 55 soldiers, 12 civilian militiamen, 9 women and 18 children began the perilous journey from Chicago to Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

As the group marched along the lake shore, unbeknownst to them, obscured by sand dunes to the west, a group of perhaps 500 Potawatomi warriors were waiting for them. When the warriors were spotted, Captain Heald made the fateful decision to attack, thereby separating the civilians and soldiers. As the vastly outnumbered soldiers approached, the Indians fell back, allowing the hapless Americans into their flanks, where they didn't have a chance. After the soldiers were neutralized, the Indians went after the wagons containing the civilians. They made quick work of the militiamen and then proceeded to slaughter many of their wives and children. Wells by all accounts, fought valiantly to the death. So impressed by his efforts, some the warriors cut out the heart of the fallen captain and consumed it, so as to absorb some of his courage. Wounded but still alive, Heald surrendered after receiving promises that the few remaining survivors would be spared. The following day Fort Dearborn was burned to the ground and the captive survivors were eventually ransomed. 

Much of what we know of that event comes to us through the writings of Juliette Kinzie, whose memoirs of frontier life called Wau-bun, contains a chapter devoted to what would become known as the “Fort Dearborn Massacre.” But Mrs. Kinzie was a generation removed from the events of that day; her accounts based upon the testimony of some of the survivors. As one can imagine, Kinzie’s story is told from the viewpoint of the settlers. Despite numerous inaccuracies and dramatic flourishes, Kinzie’s account would be the story of record of the dreadful event for most of the nineteenth century. 

Another version of the story that would emerge some eighty years later, was told by Simon Pokagon, the son of a Potawatomie Chief who was present at the attack. Where Kinzie spoke of Indian treachery preceding the attack, Pokagon spoke of white treachery. Pokagon places the blame directly on the shoulders of Captain Heald for being foolish enough to go through with the march knowing full well of its dangers, However, few of the details regarding the actual battle differ in the two stories. 

Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument
on its original site at 18th and Calumet

The site of the attack at present day 18th Street and Calumet Avenue, would become the property of industrialist George Pullman who commissioned another Danish sculptor, Carl Rohl-Smith to create a monument commemorating the horrific event. The subject of the sculpture is based directly upon a story taken from Mrs. Kinzie’s account. In the tableau, one of the women in the group, Margaret Helm, grabs for a knife of an Indian while he holds a tomahawk aimed at the woman’s head, about to strike. Meanwhile another Indian, Black Partridge, a chief who had opposed the attack, intervenes to save the woman's life. At the feet of the three principal characters in the scene are the bodies of victims either killed or mortally wounded in the massacre.

Pullman willed the monument of the grizzly event to the Chicago Historical Society where it stood in that institution's lobby for many years. But the statue proved even too problematic for the museum after Native American groups protested its simplistic depiction of their people and the event. The statue briefly returned to it original site at 18th Street in the 1990s until it was removed by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, ostensibly for conservation. Since then is has sat in a Chicago Park District warehouse where it will likely remain for a long time, perhaps even perpetuity.

The story of the event and fate of the Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument is a good example of the way history can been hijacked by special interest groups bent on promoting their ideology. In 2009, a new park opened at the site of the attack. Pondering over what to name the park, Park District officials harkened back to the words of Simon Pokagon, who over one hundred years earlier said:  “When whites are killed, it is a massacre, but when Indians are killed, it is a fight.” It was decided that the park would be given the somewhat awkward name, "The Battle of Fort Dearborn Park." That appellation has now become the default label for the tragic event. Here is an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune written on the 200th anniversary of the attack, that tries to explain why what happened on that scorching hot day 205 years ago was not a massacre. The article's author Patrick T. Reardon has this to say:

Calling the battle a "massacre" cast the engagement in stark black-and-white terms and demonized the Indians. Good guys and bad guys. Heroes and villains. Indeed, at the dedication of the Fort Dearborn Massacre sculpture in 1893, the director of the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) described the attackers as "invaders" and "barbarians."

The truth, however, is that, at that moment 200 years ago, the Americans were the invaders, and ....Chicago was "a symbol of an imposed colonial presence." 

OK I get it. It is without a doubt that Native Americans were subjugated by and suffered greatly at the hands of white settlers who stole their land and their livelihoods. It's not hard to understand why Native Americans sided with the British against the Americans, and we can grasp that an attack of a military unit is part of war. I think everyone today understands the loaded meaning of the word "massacre", and it is safe to say that the insistence of using that word to describe the events that unfolded on August 15, 1812, went a long way to seal the fate of the Native American people who once called this area home.

That's all well and good, but despite going into great deal about the events of the attack, what Reardon fails to mention anywhere in his article is the inconvenient truth that innocent women and children were brutally killed that day. The same is true for the plaque that currently marks Battle of Fort Dearborn Park.

Simon Pokegon did not ignore the victims. Describing the atrocity he said: “the Angel of Mercy seem(ed) to have been asleep” as a lone warrior entered their wagon and bludgeoned them all to death. For those actions that warrior "was hated by the tribe ever after" according to Pokegon.

The Battle of Fort Dearborn Park
I suspect few of the hundreds of residents of Chicago's new South Side walking their dogs everyday in this 1/2 acre park
understand the full magnitude of what took place here 205 years ago.
The plaque at the opposite end of the park only tells part of the story. 

It does not serve history to leave out or minimize that critical part of the story.  Whether we like it or not, whether or not it it fits into our world view or not, by any definition of the word, what happened on August 15, 1812 on the shore of Lake Michigan was a massacre. Rebranding the incident as a "battle" is not going to change that fact.

On the other side of the ideological divide, here is an article from a right wing publication that advocates the return of "Chicago's Forgotten Masterpiece" to the site of the attack.

By 1970, a new generation of Chicagoans turned to forgetting and rewriting history. The American settlers and soldiers who died at the Fort Dearborn Massacre in 1812 were transformed into "white invaders." Carl Rohl-Smith's masterpiece was removed from the Chicago History Museum and hidden from view.

In researching this piece I came across a wonderful quote from John N. Low, visiting assistant professor in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois and a a member of the Michigan-based Pokagon Potawatomi. Regarding the change of terms from massacre to battle, Mr. Low said this: 

History is not truth; it’s memory, And a part of remembering is considering what we forgot. 

What some of us forgot is that the white people really were invaders. History wasn't re-written to make that so. Others forgot about the innocent victims of the "Battle of Fort Dearborn." Those same people may have forgotten that white settlers paid dearly for the right to call this land theirs, but the other side forgets that white people were here by choice, knowing the risks of taking over land that for centuries was occupied by someone else.

Tim Samuelson's argument about the Haymarket Affair being too painful for many years to come to grips with it, is even more compelling regarding the events that took place on August 15, 1812 on the shore of Lake Michigan. With the Haymarket Affair, eventually the police came to the realization they they too were part of the labor movement that protesters fought and died for at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact everyone of us who lives off a paycheck must be thankful for the actions and sacrifices of those people.

However the history of the relationship between Native American people and the European settlers who supplanted them in this country remains complicated and painful. It's true that the murder of the innocents during the "Battle of Fort Dearborn" was an atrocity. There were also many atrocities against Indians committed by the hands of white people.

Unfortunately the story of post-Columbian Native American history continues to be told from at least two sides. While the Fort Dearborn Monument attempts to tell two sides of the story by showing Black Partridge saving Margaret Helm while another Native American tries to murder her, it nevertheless falls short. Perhaps it is impossible for a work of art to put everything into its proper historical context. On the other hand, the plaque at Battle of Fort Dearborn Park, while also attempting to tell more than one side of the story, still leaves out a very critical component. Neither does a very good job of putting the story into proper context.

As we've seen, history is not served without the proper context.

Perhaps it is fitting that Carl Rohl-Smith's Monument to the Fort Dearborn Massacre will not see the light of day until we are able to reconcile all sides of the story, and give up our tenaciously held beliefs, assumptions and prejudices about the past.

Until the day comes if ever, history will not suffer its loss. 

Nest up, two Chicago monuments that may be soon headed for the chopping block, stay tuned...

The Georgia Peach

Ty Cobb, left, and Joe Jackson.
Contrary to the quote from the movie, the two had a great mutual admiration.

Ty Cobb wanted to play...but none of us could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it.

-the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson from the film Field of Dreams

Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls then Babe Ruth could with a home run.

-Roger Birtwell

Yes, he's a prick, but he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit!

-Babe Ruth



The greatness of Ty Cobb was something to be seen... and to see him was to remember him forever.

-George Sisler


In 1994, Ken Burns released his epic, reverential ode to the national pastime, a documentary film titled simply, Baseball. It aired on PBS serendipitously at the same time as the longest strike in baseball history, the strike that forced the cancellation of the World Series. Consequently tens of millions of baseball-starved fans tuned in to watch the eighteen and one half hour film which covered the history of the game up to that point, broken up into nine chronological segments or innings as Burns called them, each inning devoted to a specific era of the game.

As is his custom, Burns employed several on camera "experts" who added bits and pieces of detail to the narrative of the story. One of those was writer, editor and passionate baseball fan, Daniel Okrent.

In the episode titled, Third Inning: the Faith of Fifty Million People, a segment was devoted to one of the greatest players in the history of the game. On that player, Okrent sanctimoniously proclaimed that Ty Cobb was "the great black mark on the history of baseball." Speaking matter-of-factly as if he personally knew the man, Okrent called Cobb "brutal" and " a terrible racist."

He continued: "The more his fires burned, the more that provoked him on the field, and I suppose one could say that the happy byproduct was the extraordinary baseball that he gave the fans at the time, but ... there's a moment when you have to say it's not worth it. I think that Ty Cobb in his totality is an embarrassment to baseball."

Much later in Burns's film, he has narrator John Chancellor proclaiming that Cobb was so despised, only three people associated with the game attended his funeral. "If I had to do it over again..." said Chancellor quoting Cobb, "...I'd have made more friends."

That last comment closing the final chapter on Cobb I suppose was an attempt to give a trace of humanity to the man after portraying him as the most inhuman person to ever set foot on a baseball diamond.

I knew about the great Detroit Tiger outfielder's bad reputation twenty one years ago when I first watched Burns's series in its entirety with my friend in his home in Brooklyn, but I never knew he was THAT bad. Not that there was anything original in Burns's portrayal of Cobb, I just had yet to read the biography of him by Al Stump.  Burns's treatment of Cobb made him look practically saintly compared to Stump who portrays Ty Cobb as a paranoid, sadistic, psychotic, racist, sociopath, who probably murdered one or two people along the way.

And that was on his good days.

Then there was the ridiculous bio-pic based loosely upon Stump's work where Tommy Lee Jones's portrayal of Cobb is virtually indistinguishable from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Fortunately for Cobb's reputation I suppose, Burns' film was seen by far more people than all the other scurrilous works on Ty Cobb combined, and for those like me, the final word on Cobb was that he was merely a run of the mill racist-asshole, rather than a bona fide monster.

I became intrigued with the idea that there was more to Cobb than meets the eye after reading the entry on him in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. While not denying the racist-asshole part, James's portrayal of Cobb is nuanced. He concludes his section on Cobb with this bit of home brew psychology:

Ty Cobb's racism and his anger I believe, were fueled not by smugness or even resentment, but by an unusually intense fear of his own limitations, No one is more macho than a man who feels inadequate,; no one walks straighter than a man who is half drunk. When Ty Cobb felt threatened he lashed out at the world. He felt threatened a lot-but as long as he wasn't challenged, he was a very nice man.

Nice man or not, in today's world we can forgive the occasional asshole, but there is zero tolerance for the racist.

Here's a little more insight into Ty Cobb's racism from the great Buck O'Neil:



Notice how Mr. O'Neil puts the interviewer in her place when she asks him why he doesn't condemn Ty Cobb for his racist ways.

Ty Cobb got into a lot of fights in his life, brutal, inexcusable bursts of violence, where his rage, along with his fists, feet or any other part of his body he could flail about, were directed sometimes even at women. Seldom did he pick a fight, but when he felt offended even in the slightest, he went ballistic. Some of his rage was directed at black people. Far more often it was directed at white people. Buck O'Neil was right, Ty Cobb could be mean to anyone, not just blacks. "That was Ty Cobb" he said.

Despite all the wisdom in O'Neil's comments, he did get a few things wrong. Ty Cobb did not come from a poor background, nor did he have only a fifth grade education. Cobb's family was comfortably middle class, and his father was an educator and later a state legislator who placed a very high value on his children's education. He pushed his firstborn, Tyrus Raymond, in the direction of either law or medical school, and discouraged young Ty from his passion of becoming a ballplayer, which at the time was considered a disreputable profession.

No one can say exactly what Ty Cobb was taught as a child about what his relationship with black people should be. True, he grew up in the post-Reconstruction South where anti-black sentiment was especially rampant, but his father in his role as legislator, fought for the rights of black people, and other ancestors were conscientious objectors during the Civil War because of their abolitionist beliefs.

After I saw this clip and read James's piece, I became interested in what made the man called "The Georgia Peach" tick. Searches on the web turned up numerous sites which addressed the question: "Was Ty Cobb a racist?" I thought, "well of course he was, everybody acknowledges that, even Bill James and Buck O'Neil."

Then I came across a quote from Ty Cobb. In 1952, reporters asked his opinion of African American Americans playing baseball with whites. This is what he said:

I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man. In my book, that goes for baseball but for all walks of life...

The Negro should be accepted whole-heartedly and not grudgingly into baseball. The Negro has the right to professional baseball and who’s to say he has not?

To today's ears, Cobb's language sounds archaic, condescending and patronizing. Some claim his words are disingenuous as they were uttered twenty five years after Cobb retired from the game, and was no longer threatened by black players taking his job away. Others claim the words are meaningless because by the time Cobb made his comment, Jackie Robinson had been in the major leagues for five years and the integration of baseball by 1952 was a fait accompli.

But it must be remembered that in 1952, fewer than half of the teams in the major leagues had brought up a black player. It would be another seven years before every major league team had a black player on its roster. Several minor leagues in 1952 had yet to integrate at all. In 1952, the integration of baseball was still a hotly debated, emotional topic.

When Cobb made his comment, he was no longer affiliated with baseball, he was financially well off, and perfectly free to speak his mind. In 1952 there was hardly the stigma of being viewed as a racist as there is today. Personally Ty Cobb had little to gain by expressing his support of integration, while he had plenty to lose in terms of respect from many of his fellow Southerners. He chose not to mince his words or equivocate; his comments in support of the integration of baseball came out loud and clear, blasting, in the words of the Associated Press at the time, "a home run for the Negro player."

Cobb also was known to have attended several Negro League games often throwing out the first pitch and sitting in the dugout with the players. He also lavished praise on many of the black players who came up to the big leagues in the fifties and saved the biggest praise of all for Willie Mays who he said was the only ballplayer of any race he would pay to see play.

Cobb's are not the words and actions of a virulent racist. Considering the source, given the fact that they were uttered before most of the major milestones in American Civil Rights history, his words could be considered downright revolutionary. So what gives? Was Cobb trying to prove something, perhaps showing the world his softer side? Was he mellowing in old age, or was he in fact not as bad as we thought?

In his painstakingly researched new biography, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, author Charles Leerhsen attempts to answer that question by separating fact from fantasy.

Leerhsen's conclusion, and I don't think I'm giving too much away here, is that while a complex man capable of excessive violence as well as considerable benevolence, most of the really bad stuff that we associate with Cobb today, especially concerning his relationship with and feelings about black people, did not come to light until after he died in 1961. Ironically, the propagator of the ill will attributed to Ty Cobb after his death was none other than the man whom Ty Cobb hand picked to help write his autobiography. Cobb would learn shortly before he died that he picked the wrong man for the job.

That man was Al Stump.

Cobb's so called autobiography, My Life in Baseball: The True Record, ghost written by Stump, was published shortly after Ty Cobb died. Cobb's intention was to write a book that would set the record straight about his career, and put aside the common notion that he was a dirty ballplayer who routinely slid into bases sharpened spikes high, with the intention of maiming his opponents. In the end however, with little actual contact with Cobb, Stump wrote the book he (Stump) wanted to write, with a few concessions to his subject. Once he got hold of the manuscript after a long struggle with Stump, Cobb hated it and tried to sue to stop its publication. But it was too late, Cobb's health failed him and he died before he could do anything to stop the book.

At the time of his death, Ty Cobb, according to Leerhsen, was not a controversial figure and the sales of his ghost written autobiography were mild to say the least. Most of the comments on the book were about its inaccuracies. Then there was the book's voice. Leerhsen sites one passage from the Cobb autobiography which to him sounds more like the words of a "jaded sportswriter than an old ballplayer." You decide for yourself from this little tidbit about an alleged incident that was reported in the Ken Burns film as if it were God's honest truth:

No I didn't once attack Nap Rucker the pitcher in the bathroom and try to throw him out of the tub in which he was relaxing. That phony fable has dogged me for more than half a century and I doubt there are enough fans to fill a broom closet who don't believe it happened--which it never did. I don't know who constructed that particular piece of Limburger, but it has an odor I first concocted with certain New York writers--never exactly simpatico to me--who've made certain it appeared in every language but the Sanskrit.

Reading that made me sadly realize that my all time favorite Cobb quote also came from the autobiography and was written in exactly the same voice as the above passage:

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded man. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, survival of the fittest.

Maybe it's the mollycoddle in me but I've read and listened to several interviews of Ty Cobb and have to say, as much as I want that to be Cobb himself speaking, that's just not him coming through those words.

Not satisfied with the paltry amount he made off the Cobb autobiography, Stump forged ahead with a new project that was sure to milk some money out of the dead ballplayer. That move, Leerhsen contends, "is the key to the destruction of Cobb's good name."

Stump followed up the book with the publication of an article describing his relationship with Cobb while the two men supposedly worked together on the "autobiography." If the public wants dirt, one can hear Stump's thoughts going through his head, "I'll give them dirt"

In the introduction to Stump's article reprinted in an anthology called "The Greatest Baseball Stories ever Told", the editor complained that the Cobb autobiography was "self-serving... a white wash from cover to cover..." and that "Cobb wrangled final approval over everything" (which come to think of it, as Cobb's supposed autobiography, wasn't that his prerogative?). Stump himself claimed that his conscience compelled him to show the public the "true" Cobb.

In 1962, Stump's article, Ty Cobb's Wild Ten Month Fight to Live, appeared in True, a men's adventure magazine. The article portrays Cobb in the last year of his life as a paranoid, pill popping, half-insane drunkard who never left home without carrying a huge amount of cash in a paper bag and a pistol. Stump claimed that when he told people of his book deal and his plans to spend time with Ty Cobb, in no uncertain terms he was told that he was taking his life into own his hands.

Stump's Cobb terrorized everyone he came in contact with, including the doctors and nurses who tended to him during his frequent visits to the hospital. Stump's Cobb also proudly boasted to the author that he killed a man in Detroit, one of three assailants in an armed robbery. In his story, after the three fled from an enraged Cobb after they stabbed him, the ballplayer followed one of his attackers into a dead end alley where proceeded to use his Belgian pistol (which wouldn't fire) to pistol whip the hapless would-be villain until:

 ...he had no face left. Left him there not breathing, in his own rotten blood. 

From there the ballplayer proceeded to catch a train for a ballgame he next day, where he happened to get three hits. It was only after the game when he got medical treatment for his stab wound.

On and on the article went relaying tales of hair-raising middle of the night journeys through snow covered mountain passes in order to satisfy one of Cobb's many whims like visiting Joe DiMaggio, or contest a payment on a measly check. Despite being a millionaire many times over, Stump's Cobb is a mean spirited tightwad who would remove (and re-use) the stamps on the self-addressed return envelopes from countless fan letters, before tossing the rest of the letters into the fire, as it saved on firewood.

In his article, Stump also elicited comments from contemporaries of Cobb, fellow ballplayers who insisted that Cobb was indeed as dirty a player as the rumors had him to be.

By doing so, Stump refuted virtually everything he wrote in his previous book on Cobb.

The article is a barn burner, a real page turner. The only problem according to Charles Leerhsen is that Al Stump made most of it up. Leerhrsen methodically debunks much of what Stump writes:

• According to Leerhsen, the doctors and nurses who treated Cobb during the last year of his life had nothing but good things to say about him. 
• Police reports from the city of Detroit have no record of a faceless body found in the city on the day Stump claimed Cobb killed the robber. 
• Ty Cobb was known for answering virtually all of his fan mail, sometimes even apologizing for being overly verbose in his responses. 
• Cobb also was very generous with his money, founding an educational fund and a hospital which both benefit the disadvantaged. 
• The ultimate debunker of the piece is that Stump more than likely only spent a couple of days alone with Ty Cobb, not the several months claimed in the article.

The above mentioned film titled Cobb, was loosely based upon the True article. It's maker, Ron Shelton, admitted that he added scenes that were not in the article. One particularly ghastly scene has Cobb attempting to rape a woman in Las Vegas, but is thwarted by his own impotence. When Charles Leerhsen asked Shelton about the scene, the writer-director told the author that he and his screenwriter (Stump), made the scene up because "it sounded like something Cobb would have done."

Another biography of Cobb came from a more respected source, professor of history Charles Alexander whose book, Ty Cobb, (where DO authors come up with such original titles?) was published in 1984. Unlike Stump's work, Alexander's is thoroughly researched and extensively foot noted. Unfortunately, many of Alexander's cited sources come from you guessed it, Stump's Cobb autobiography, which Stump himself refuted shortly after he wrote it. Alexander also cited numerous passages from the True article

Stump still wasn't done with Ty Cobb. He went on to write yet another biography published in 1994 called Cobb: The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball. Stump begins that book by reprinting the True Magazine article, then goes on with the body of the book which brings up many of the ugly incidents in Ty Cobb's life but with a significant twist. The victims of virtually all of Cobb's violent acts in the new biography are black.

Leerhsen goes through all of the incidents cited by Stump and also Alexander, and finds that in the majority of them, the victims of Cobb's assaults were actually white. Leerhsen got his information either from checking birth certificates or by deducing that the lack of specific details of their race in news reports from the time (i.e.: no mention of them being black which  in those days, was always the case if they were black), strongly implies that they were in fact, white. This is not to excuse Cobb's transgressions, he had many; but it does bring up yet again Alexander's and Stump's credibility by asking the question, why would they claim Cobb's victims were black when there is no evidence of that?

An obvious answer is that by 1984 and beyond, race had become a contentious issue, far more than it was in 1961. By portraying Cobb as a racist, whether or not it was really true, the authors created sensational interest in their works where it wouldn't have existed before.

Charles Leerhsen was not the first person to discredit Al Stump. In an article first published in 2010 in The National Pastime, Wiliam R. Cobb, no relation to the ballplayer, writes a very detailed account about a shotgun that once belonged to Ty Cobb which ended up in the possession of a famous baseball memorabilia collection. The shotgun was claimed to be the weapon that killed Ty Cobb's father. It also had an interesting provenance as it once was in the possession of Al Stump.  In Stump's works on Cobb, he claims the ballplayer told him that his father's head was blown off by a shotgun. (Cobb's mother accidentally shot and killed her husband, mistaking him for an intruder). But William Cobb checked press accounts around time of the incident, police and court records from the trial of Amanda Cobb which all point to her having used a pistol to accidentally kill her husband, not a shotgun.

In none of the accounts of the death of Ty Cobb's father written before Stump's, was there any mention of a shotgun.

Why would Stump insist that Mr. Cobb was killed with a shotgun, and not just any shotgun but the one he happened to have in his possession? You don't think it could have been so he could sell the gun for a vastly inflated chunk of change do you? Well Stump did happen to put a good deal of Cobb's personal effects in his possession up for sale, many that supposedly had Cobb's signature, which later were proven to be forged. Eventually the auction houses refused to list any piece of Cobb memorabilia with the name of Al Stump listed on the provenance. Small wonder.

Incidentally, the shotgun in question was engraved with Ty Cobb's name and Stump claimed Cobb used it on numerous hunting trips. Not only would it be quite bizarre for Cobb to have his name engraved on the weapon that killed his father, not to mention use it to shoot ducks, but it seems unlikely that a murder weapon would have left been in the possession of the family of both the deceased and the perpetrator. Nonetheless, Stump went with the story probably assuming if his readers would buy all the other crap he wrote about Cobb, they'd buy this cockamamie story too.

Ken Burns obviously bought Stump's story, lock, stock and barrel. In his film he got off a final dig at the ballplayer, describing Ty Cobb's last days with words that came straight out of the pages of Stump's True Magazine article, including an interesting revelation that Cobb "deplored" the integration of baseball.

Maybe it's just me, but I'll take Ty Cobb's word on that matter over Al Stunp's any day.

Why wouldn't Ken Burns? As much as I enjoyed his baseball film, with its incessant sentimentality combining images of long lost players and fields of dreams, backed by a soundtrack of The Star Spangled Banner and Take Me Out to the Ballgame played on every conceivable instrument from a marching band to a flageolete, I couldn't help be struck by how much the story he told resembled a fairy tale. Just as every good Brothers Grimm story needs a witch who eats little children, Ken Burns's baseball tale needed a dark, despicable villain as the perfect foil to heroes such as Christy Mathewson and Jackie Robinson. The mythical Ty Cobb created by Al Stump perfectly fit the bill, while the complex, real people behind those myths would never cut the mustard. A reasonable Ty Cobb advocating near the end of his life for the inclusion of African Americans in baseball, would never do, any more than a Christy Mathewson taking time off from spring training to witness the public hanging of a black man in Alabama, or a Jackie Robinson taking time off from being a demigod to act like a prima donna.

In his book, Leerhsen recalls the famous movie line: "When legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Much has been written about Charles Leerhsen's book being "revisionist history", an attempt to rehabilitate the image of a man about whom much has been written. Bill James begins his piece on Ty Cobb this way:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

He's probably right, so ingrained is our image of the man as a monster, we're afraid to let go, even when confronted with the truth. Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not a violent racist prick like Ty Cobb.

Leerhsen pulls no punches in describing Ty Cobb's many shortcomings. His book does not attempt to rehabilitate the man by giving us a new window into those shortcomings in order to understand them. Instead he addresses Cobb's real-life issues in detail while at the same time making a very good case that much of what we think we know about Ty Cobb is dead wrong, a contrived set of falsehoods set in motion by one unscrupulous man whose motivation was nothing more than his own fame and fortune. In that vein, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty does not attempt to revise history;  it tells the story of a real man while at the same time puts to rest an outrageous lie.


CODA

Now that's out of the way, what makes Charles Leerhsen's Cobb biography such a great read are the accounts of Ty Cobb the ballplayer. It's true that he did spike a number of infielders who made the foolish mistake of getting in his way on the base paths, but not with any greater frequency than other ballplayers of his era. While he spent much of his post-career, trying to clear his name as a dirty player, when he actually played, he didn't seem to mind his opponents thinking that he actually sharpened his spikes before each game (he really didn't). He readily admitted being a "mental hazard" to his opponents while running the bases, as the seed that he might do something crazy, planted in the minds of his opponents, was sometimes all it took. Part of his success stemmed from the fact that Ty Cobb was probably the most opportunistic ballplayer in the game's history.

Here's a quote from one of his teammates if not one of his biggest fans, Sam Crawford:

...Ty was dynamite on the base paths. He really was. Talk about strategy and playing with your head, that was Cobb all the way. It wasn't that he was so fast on his feet, although he was fast enough. There were others who were faster, though, like Clyde Milan, for instance. It was that Cobb was so fast in his thinking. He didn't outhit the opposition and he didn't outrun them. He outthought them!   

A lot of times Cobb would be on third base and I'd draw a base on balls, and as I started to go down to first I'd sort of half glance at Cobb, at third. He'd make a slight move that told me he wanted me to keep going -- not to stop at first, but to keep on going to second. Well, I'd trot two-thirds of the way to first and then suddenly, without warning, I'd speed up and go across first as fast as I could and tear out for second. He's on third, see. They're watching him, and suddenly there I go, and they don't know what the devil to do. 

If they try to stop me, Cobb'll take off for home. Sometimes they'd catch him, and sometimes they'd catch me, and sometimes they wouldn't get either of us. But most of the time they were too paralyzed to do anything, and I'd wind up at second on a base on balls ....

In his epilogue Charles Leershen recounts a story that pretty much sums up Ty Cobb. On a hot miserable day in Detroit with two out in the last of the ninth and the Tigers down by a bunch, Ty Cobb reached first on a single. Even the home town fans groaned. Wally Pipp the Yankee first baseman suggested to Cobb that he put an end to everyone's misery by letting himself get picked off. Cobb agreed, and took an "accommodating" lead off first. When the pitcher threw to Pipp, Cobb took off for second and got himself in a rundown. Needless to say, after a few bobbled balls, Cobb ended up on third. The next batter popped up to end the game. Now the ump at first heard the conversation between Cobb and Pipp and asked Cobb why he crossed up Pipp. Cobb, surprised as anyone in the ballpark said he didn't mean to do it, but as soon as he saw Pipp reaching to tag him out, "something exploded inside of me. I just couldn't stand there and take it without a fight."

I thought of that the other day while attending a major league game with my kids. The home team was down by a bunch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The batter was a weak hitting infielder, batting from the left handed batters' box. The infield played this guy with a significant shift towards right field where this batter was most likely to hit the ball, a move usually reserved for power hitters. They would never have played Ty Cobb, another left handed hitter that way because he would have had a field day against such a shift. But today even weak hitters swing for home runs rather than trying to place a hit in the spot vacated by the infielders. Cobb would have been appalled. Sure enough, the batter struck out, but the catcher dropped the ball. While he fumbled around for what seemed an eternity looking for the ball, instead of taking off for first base as he was entitled, our batter just stood there looking perplexed as if to say, "what do I do now?" Finally the catcher found the ball and tagged the batter out as he never left the box, game over.

Ty Cobb's fight for every base style of baseball died out when Babe Ruth came along and popularized the home run. The so called "deadball era" style of baseball survived in the Negro Leagues where players routinely scored from second base on a bunt, ended up on second after a walk, and executed the most exciting play in all of baseball, the stealing of home, incidentally a record for which Ty Cobb holds to this day.

Once the Negro Leagues became absorbed into the major leagues, that style of play died out altogether in professional ball.

Ty Cobb became a dinosaur while he was still a player, as the fans and later the analysts deemed it should be so. They all seemed to believe that every player, even weak hitting middle infielders are better off swinging for a home run, even if it means a greater likelihood of striking out, rather than choking up on the bat and trying to place the ball, "hitting it where they ain't" for a base hit. (Cobb by the way was no weak hitter, he proved time and again that he could hit home runs when he wanted to. Even then he hardly ever struck out).

Sabrmetrically speaking, this all or nothing approach may be a more prudent strategy in the long run, but it sure is a heck of a lot less fun to watch.

Oh to have the chance to see Ty Cobb play again, if only once.

Fortunately, reading Charles Leerhsen's superb book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, is the next best thing.