Lester Rodney, the onetime sportswriter who in the 1930’s and 1940’s was one of the fiercest and most insistent white advocates of the integration of major league baseball, died on Sunday, his family has announced. He was 98 years old.
Rodney’s advocacy found its forum in the pages of The Daily Worker, the house organ of the American Communist Party, from which he resigned in 1958. In 1936, he talked the paper into changing its paucity of sports coverage into a full-fledged section, of which he was hired as editor, even though he was not yet a member of the party. His writings consistently underscored a parallel few were willing to recognize, especially in sports: that the growing marginalization of the Jews and other religious and social groups by the Nazis in Germany and later Europe, had a too-close-for-comfort parallel in this country’s marginalization of African-Americans.
...Moving to California about the same time the Dodgers did, Rodney became, of all things, the religion editor of The Long Beach Press-Telegram. Ever the athlete, he was still playing competitive tennis at the age of 87. His children report that he passed away on the morning of the 20th, at home, and in what may be no surprise to anyone who knew him or knew of him, “he was with it until just before the end and thanks to hospice he had a pain free week.”
Robinson’s role in the integration of the game is obvious and Rickey’s has been lauded. Pressure from the great black sportswriters of the ‘30s and ‘40s, like Sam Lacy of The Baltimore Afro-American, is even acknowledged. Lester Rodney - writing in the most unlikely setting and advocating what was then the most unlikely of societal changes - was as important as any of them to the eventual righting of this extraordinary wrong.
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1. Pasta-diving Jeter (jmac66) Posted: December 24, 2009 at 02:45 PM (#3421529)I am amazed that he was still alive.
I have to imagine Rodney's comeback involved the words "capitalist", "Laraine Day" and "bourgeois".
I know I shouldn't but ... by calling him an apologist, you imply that he was aware that millions of people were being starved and shot and consciously excused such crimes against humanity. Do you have any basis to think that's the case?
Seems like a pretty stand-up guy to me...
I have absolutely no idea who or what you're talking about here.
And then, LargeBill decides to dump gasoline all over the thread! Wheeeeeeee!!!!!!
Socialist and Communist parties have won electoral success and the reins of power in Western Europe, and not engaged in mass murder and starvation.
Do we define homelessness and starvation deaths and violent crimes amongst the marginalized in the United States as victims of capitalism?
Well, LargeBill doesn't care about that. It's Christmas Eve and he's got an axe to grind.
Whatever his politics, Rodney was absolutely right about his stance regarding segregation in baseball and elsewhere. Got to give him kudos for that.
Here's a far more detailed interview with the guy discussing segregation. http://www.counterpunch.org/zirin04032004.html
What unreformed communist party has had the reins of power in a Western country?
Also, if some leftist think the social democratic parties of Western Europe is swell, great and all, but that doesn't excuse them if they're lauding brutal dictatorships espousing the same general ideology (if you want to paint with a really broad brush, at the time the socialists and communists were mortal ideological enemies).
He quit the party after the Stalin crimes started to come out so I'll cut him some slack about being a communist.
Note that the truth was available long before. He changed his tune when the ####### general secretary told him about them.
Man, just think of all the Ukranians and Kazakhs who could have been saved if Mr. Rodney and those other American lefties hadn't been such apologists! Stalin would have been so embarrassed!
Well, he might have gotten around to it earlier if he hadn't been so busy fighting the Nazis in WWII...
Yeesh. Tough crowd.
The Wham guy or the Sports Machine dude?
My lord what a stupid argument.
What does the "unreformed" modifier mean? The French Communist Party has been part of the French government at least three times -- during and just after WWII, in the early 80s, and during the late 90s/early 00s.
The British Labour Party was unabashedly socialist until very recently. Neil Kinnock, in the speech Biden famously plagiarized, called himself and his party "socialist" several times. Clement Attlee, who the British electorate chose over Churchill before WWII was over, was a socialist and presided over nationalization of many of Britain's major industries, and a major expansion of state activity, including the NHS.
Well, that settles it then.
Many of the deaths Stalin is "credited" for were secondary and tertiary effects of communism, not caused by his hand or even desired. If you want to get all Rotarian and read into that an apologia for the barbarian POS, feel free.
He collectivized the farms in pursuit of an economic ideology, and people starved. How is that, really, any different than the inevitable and accepted poor social outputs, including deaths, of unfettered capitalism?
The latter. He died of cancer today.
Loved his contributions for SABR's Baseball Research Journal.
reformed=renounced communism as an ideology, which most have done by now.
Ah, yes, and the french communists were very stalinist during the first two periods. Thankfully they were not allowed any real power.
The British Labour Party was unabashedly socialist until very recently.
And people could sympathize with Labour and still see that the Sovietunion was hell. I don't see your point, does the existence of Labour in any way excuse the blind faith in a totalitarian regime?
Oh great, who let the Freeper in? Yawn.
The latter. He died of cancer today.
Loved his contributions for SABR's Baseball Research Journal.
Wow, that's real shock. George Michael used to be a disk jockey in Philly before he was a sportscaster in DC, and about 10 years ago he sold me thousands of his old LPs. Of all the public figures I ever had dealings with in my book shop, George Michael may have been the sweetest and most down to Earth of them all. Even though he got shoved out of the public eye when his local weekly talk show was canceled, this is still a big, big loss to the sports world.
Oh like you developed your own school of political philosophy like an Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson.
Nihilism is not a political philosophy.
I developed my political philosophy in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
You have to understand about Rodney and American Communism that when he joined the paper in the 30's, it was during a period when the Party was trying to reach out to as many people as possible, not just Party members. Just to show you how broad its reach was, during the 1937 World Series, and for several months beyond that, they had the Yankees' third baseman, Red Rolfe (nicknamed for his hair color, not his politics) writing a column, with the full acquiescence of Jake Ruppert and Ed Barrow. The American Communist Party was always a mixed bag of misguided idealists, dupes and outright traitors, but from everything I've read about Rodney he was far more in the first category than either of the other two. IMO he deserves a spot in Cooperstown every bit as much as some of the MSM hacks who are often granted entry.
Too bad, I wouldn't mind being prime minister on a nihilistic platform. No need to push through tough reforms if it's all meaningless anyway.
I love the smell of Chomsky in the morning!
Many of the deaths Stalin is "credited" for were secondary and tertiary effects of communism, not caused by his hand or even desired. If you want to get all Rotarian and read into that an apologia for the barbarian POS, feel free.
Suggesting that those deaths were not "caused" by Stalin is probably a reach as it was his dictate that lead directly to their fate. Likewise, the notion that he wasn't deliberately starving huge swaths of people is also pretty controversial because of spiffy programs like dekulakization. More importantly, even if you grant both of those points, you've still got Uncle Joe rockin an 8 figure body count- that's just not sexy.
And I loved me some George Michael back in the no-cable era.
Too bad, I wouldn't mind being prime minister on a nihilistic platform. No need to push through tough reforms if it's all meaningless anyway.
Nihilists! #### me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
A couple of excerpts:
Not surprisingly, neither Rickey nor Robinson ever credited Rodney for helping to end segregation in baseball. Both were strident anti-communists who rejected the idea that the Daily Worker had played a role, according to both Tygiel and Rampersad.
"Rickey had said that the identification with communism was getting in the way and that baseball wouldn't support a communist-inspired plot," Tygiel said.
"Robinson was a Republican, a big supporter of (New York Gov. Nelson) Rockefeller," Rampersad said. "He didn't give credit due to communists who worked for social change."
And . . .
As was the case with many blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters, Rodney was forced to use pseudonyms to publish two popular books on baseball for children. "The First Book of Baseball" (1950) was written under the name Benjamin Brewster, and "The Real Book About Baseball" (1951) listed Lyman Hopkins as its author.
All that's true, but on a 1 to 100 scale of evil, Lester Rodney couldn't carry the jock strap of the countless number of Dixiecrats of his era who were proactively promoting human suffering in their own back yards, not just ignoring it half a world away. That doesn't excuse Rodney's willful blindness to the horrors of Stalinism, but it does bring a bit of perspective to his legacy.
It doesn't matter if there was some boogeyman across the world killing millions of people--you don't destroy American values and lives to push your political platform. If the rabid anti-communists emulated people like Rodney more and fought for good values, we would have a lot less problems.
This type of ######## is exactly what's wrong with our country. Republican, libertarian, democrat, socialist, green, who gives a ####? Instead of picking a team, why not vote for and support decent human beings rather than rooting interests?
Which means picking a team, since the liberals think the conservatives are evil and nuts, while the conservatives think the liberals are nuts and evil (and enough people on both sides of the aisle despise the libertarians). ;-)
I think values are a little more than mere "rooting interests," and I think people who have bad values are probably not wise people to vote for regardless of how nice and polite they are and how many little old ladies they help cross the street.
Does it follow that one who subscribes to communism as an ideology necessarily supports every regime that tries to implement it?
You're right, David. At first, I thought people who wanted the government to steal a trillion dollars from taxpayers like me to finance a pointless war in the desert halfway around the world just had different values from me. But now I see that they're just plain evil.
If you make the decision not to notice, sure, they're imaginary. OTOH, capitalism as actually practiced leads directly to deleterious social impacts, including deaths, beyond any real doubt. All flow from the fundamental fact that if the owners of capital choose not to pay a person for work, that person is idled.
The other is that Stalin's murders were not unintended consequences of adopting a particular "economic ideology," but were a deliberate part of his plan.
Many were. My dog in the fight is the historical truth that many weren't. Well, that and the point that socialists and communists have gained power in Western European governments without mass murder and starvation ensuing -- belying the tendentious claims upthread that "the people in charge" have nothing to do with how events unfold.
You had to know there was going to be a food fight in progress before you entered, Larry. :-)
Well no, but that person would then be a Trotskyist, and he could look forward to a sudden date with a pickaxe.
Didn't you look at the title? This thread was just destined to be a #### storm.
And just in time for the hollidays!
Yeah, except that they weren't actually "duped." Stalin's crimes were widely known; it's just that communists (and of course the New York Times) refused to admit it, until Khrushchev denounced Stalin, and that made it acceptable in their circles to acknowledge those crimes.
All of which is true, and it's certainly a black mark on Rodney's career.
But I'm curious: At what point did segregationists and their fellow travelers (Buckley & Co.) get a lifelong sentence of societal ostracism for their part in actively promoting, ignoring, aiding and abetting the caste system in our own country, one that they---unlike Rodney---were in a direct position to influence?
Mind you, I'm not saying or implying that we should tear down the statue of Richard Russell, or rename the Russell Building on the Senate side of the Capitol, or spit on the graves of every person who promoted and defended segregation. That kind of revisionist history should be left to ideologues. But at what point do we extend that same sort of grace to people like Rodney, and recognize that they, too, were often little more than a product of their own "time and place"? And that overall, the world was much better off for their presence.
So acceptable, apparently, that they purged the members of the newspaper staff who wanted to write about it.
Including the editor (John Gates) who for a brief and glorious period allowed the letters pages of the DW to open itself up to a full debate on both the legacy of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. In fact it was only the criticism of the latter event that really brought down the axe on the paper---after all, Khrushchev himself was denouncing Stalin right and left and wouldn't have punished the editors for agreeing with him on that limited subject.
He's not a "stand up guy" for it any more than George Wallace was (*) for apologizing for his segregationist past decades too late.
(*) Yes, I know.
It's one thing to argue for mitigation on that basis; it's another to declare him a "pretty stand up guy" for it, which was the actual comment I was responding to.
Fair enough. In the context of that original comment you were responding to, "stand up guy" wouldn't exactly have been the words I would have used to describe a Party member whose defection only took place in 1956. Mitigation of that way too late defection within the context of the rest of his life's work was much more the point I was trying to address.
The US Communist Party was controlled by Stalin (revealed after the USSR fell and its books were opened up), and was pro-Stalin during his life. I don't know that there were no members who were anti-Stalin, but they should have voted with their feet if they know what was going on and saw they were having no effect on the party position.
This is not the same as saying that Rodney was an evil person. I think David was accurate above in saying that many of the CPUSA chose to ignore evidence of the crimes going on the USSR because the concept of communism was too dear to them.
After each successive showcase trial and each zig and zag in the Party line, the casual Party member's faith began to shake, just as the fans in Section 34 started to wonder what was going on when the likes of Ken Dixon and Floyd Rayford started being promoted as the keys to the O's revival. The return of Earl Weaver was kind of like the German invasion, since it brought many of these waverers temporarily back into the fold, but by the time of the invasion of Hungary and that 21 game losing streak, there was little left of the respective fan bases other than the 50% true hard core, and the 50% paid informers. It was sometimes not that easy to tell these two groups apart.
Or from the faction made cynical by the pickaxing of Wild Bill Hagy in the mid-80s, who continue to yearn for what was and what might have been.
The two biggest things that drove me away from the Orioles as even a backup team were this pickaxing of Wild Bill and the forcing out of Jon Miller. That last one was what sealed it for me.
What about the collectivization of Ripkens?
It's also insane to deny that in capitalist countries some people die who wouldn't have died if they had been living in socialist countries--everyone who froze to death last night in our nation's capital, for starters. It's not murder, of course; the government didn't care one way or the other whether those people survived. But just because it isn't a direct analogue doesn't mean that it's perfectly fine.
Just out of curiosity, what makes you think that our sources of information are necessarily that limited and parochial? Why would you assume that we're not trying to sift through many conflicting reports to sort out the underlying truth(s) as best we can? We're not all Limbaughites or Commies here, in spite of what you seem to be implying.
And who's in denial about not only homeless deaths, but the tens of thousands of deaths we have here each year that are due to lack of affordable health care? I certainly don't think of those deaths as "perfectly fine," and I'd like nothing better than to address that with a single payer health care system a la France, but I don't see the connection between those deaths and what went on in the Soviet Union under Communism. Why can't we just acknowledge whatever evils and shortcomings there are in all systems?
The first paragraph is a defense of people who were members of the American Communist Party in the '30s, not well-read people of today who are able to take a nuanced view in light of the information that's filtered out since then. When I was young, I assumed that reports of Soviet mass murder were right-wing propaganda, regardless of the source. It was only later, when I began to encounter that sort of report from sources I already trusted and intellectually respected, that I understood differently.
The second paragraph is directed at the staunch defenders of all things capitalistic who showed up to attack SugarBear for his admittedly flawed analogy.
Without diving into the jockstrap transport debate, I'll just say that I don't have an opinion on Rodney as I wasn't even aware he existed until he did not. My comment was on the efforts of Uncle Joe. As someone who will be sharing dinner with a 94 year-old Ukrainian lady tomorrow evening, suffice to say I'm not a huge fan.
Merry Christmas everybody!
Funny thing I just read a book about Romania in the 80's. It has a bit about people freezing to death in the Ceascescus final economic madness.
But what you mean by socialist country is probably some very well off western capitalist country.
"James Unknown," unless mentally ill, would have had a job under socialism and not been on the streets waiting for (and, unfortunately denying) a handout. If the economies of any of the EU, Switzerland, or the US were socialized tomorrow, people wouldn't freeze to death -- other than from getting too drunk in a blizzard or something.
Under capitalism, people without capital are subject to the whims of people with capital, or people that administrate bureaucratically-held capital. There's nothing gained from denying that fundamental fact. People who are capable, but idled, and wind up freezing to death because they're idled did so, yes, because of capitalism.
The Centrist Party: We've studied both sides of every issue, and on some issues we feel very strongly both ways.
And on other issues, we really couldn't care less.
DB
The Centrist Party: It tastes great and it's less filling.
DB
before being instructed that it will cost $31.50 to read the whole damn study. Friggin' fee-for-service medical system...
P.S.: Not to be a butt head, but could we have more links to our "facts" overall? Can you tell I'm a teacher on Winter Break?
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