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This chapter chronicles the long history of activism that made it possible for Jackie Robinson to break baseball's color line. Sportswriters for more than a dozen African American newspapers led the effort. They were supported by three Jewish sportswriters for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker. Lester Rodney, Bill Mardo, and Nat Low argued for baseball's integration beginning in 1936. They organized tryouts with major league teams for Negro League players; conducted letter-writing campaigns, protests, and boycotts; and provided the only consistent coverage of Negro League games in the mainstream press. The chapter also looks at the strategic role played by Bill Benswanger, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the only Jewish owner of a major league team during this era. It examines the roles Ed Gottlieb and Abe Saperstein played in the legendary stories about purchasing and integrating the Philadelphia Phillies when the team declared bankruptcy in 1943.

Chapter 2 focuses on the period during which Crouch became a Communist ideologue, beginning with his time in the U.S. Army and his participation in the Hawaiian Communist League. That participation led to his arrest as well as to the arrest of fellow League member Walter Trumbull. The Workers (Communist) Party of America used their arrests as a propaganda windfall, and the Party's paper, Daily Worker, kept the two in the headlines for years as evidence of the evils of American capitalism. Crouch spent three years in Alcatraz, but when he was released in 1927 he was fully confirmed in his adherence to Communist ideology and set out on a fifteen-year career as member of the Communist Party.

This chapter provides an overview of how professional baseball, defined as America's national pastime, was an entryway for immigrants, including Eastern European Jews, to become American. At the same time, an unwritten rule kept African Americans out of organized baseball and compelled them to create separate venues to play. In order to explain how Jews found themselves involved in black baseball, the chapter examines Jewish racial identity and anti-Semitic stereotypes prevalent in the first half of twentieth-century America. This chapter also introduces the various protagonists who were integral to the business of black baseball. The Jewish businessmen who owned and promoted black teams, Ed Gottlieb, Abe Saperstein, and Syd Pollock; the political radicals who were sportswriters for the communist newspaper Daily Worker, Lester Rodney, Bill Mardo, and Nat Low; and the baseball team from the Hebrew Israelite community of Temple Beth El, the Belleville Grays.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt so dominated the American political scene from the fall of 1932 through the end of the Depression decade that historians refer to these years as the Age of Roosevelt. He won the 1932 presidential race in one of the greatest landslides in American history, trouncing Hoover—who the electorate blamed for the Depression—by almost seven million votes. FDR then presided over the extensive New Deal recovery, relief and reform programs, whose popularity helped keep him in the White House longer than any other president. But Roosevelt’s great popularity with the general public did not initially carry over onto college campuses. During most of his first term, neither FDR nor his major programs captured the imagination of the American student body. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932 failed to generate much excitement on campus, and from 1933 to 1935 the cause that most inspired college youth was world peace rather than the New Deal. If the choice had been left to college students, the straw polls show, Franklin Roosevelt would not have been elected president in 1932. FDR ran far behind Hoover in the campus polls taken shortly before election day. Only 31 percent of the collegians polled supported Roosevelt, while 49 percent endorsed Hoover. Roosevelt even did badly on campuses where he had direct, personal connections. At Harvard, FDR’s alma mater, the Democratic candidate lost to Hoover by a margin of more than three to one: 1211 students there voted for Hoover, while only 395 cast their ballots for Roosevelt. Support for Roosevelt was also weak among undergraduates at Columbia University, despite the fact that several of his key advisers, popularly known as the New Deal “brain trust,” including Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolph Berle, were Columbia professors. With almost two thirds of Columbia undergraduates voting, FDR attracted only 221 votes, losing not only to Hoover, who drew 307 votes, but also to Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate, who won 421 votes. This enabled Columbia socialists to boast at the Norman Thomas rally at Madison Square Garden that “Columbia Professors May Write Roosevelt’s Speeches But Columbia Students Vote For Thomas.”

Students in the 1939—1940 academic year had more reason than ever to worry that they might soon be carrying rifles instead of textbooks. With the start of classes in September came news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, followed by the British and French declarations of war against Germany. Before the first month of classes had ended, the Nazi conquest of Poland was complete. The great European war, which American student activists had spent much of the decade trying to prevent, was at hand. There followed several tense months without hostilities, Europe’s “phony war.” But any hopes that this was more than a temporary lull were shattered during the spring semester when Hitler struck again, launching Blitzkriegs which defeated Denmark and Norway in April and the Low Countries in May. The most shocking blow of all came at graduation time, when American students learned that France had fallen to a Nazi invasion. Although this news from Europe was horrible, it should have strengthened the student movement in the United States. After all, the movement’s most influential organizations—the ASU and Youth Congress—had spent years warning Americans of the threat that Nazi Germany posed to world peace. Hitler’s aggression had borne out those warnings. America seemed on the verge of adopting the anti-fascist position long advocated by the student movement. Even Congress began to move away from strict neutrality and rigid isolationism by repealing the arms embargo so as to aid Great Britain. All of this could have enhanced the student movement’s prestige, conferring upon its activists a prophetic cast. Hitler’s march through Europe should also have boosted the American student movement because it gave students an added impetus for turning out at rallies, lectures, and other movement events to protest Nazi aggression. At a time of surging student anxiety about a potential United States entry into the war, the student movement might have expanded greatly by continuing to carry its hopeful message that America could stay out of war by supplying Hitler’s foes in Europe. But instead of growing in this new crisis atmosphere, the American student movement began to crumble.

The epilogue appraises the state of radical labor and Civil War memory surrounding the war’s semisesquicentennial. What Eric Hobsbawm terms “the patriotism of the Left,” including the cultural symbols of the Civil War era, was critical to political fights against right-wing nationalism and anti-liberalism. Emancipationist memory was especially central to the political culture of the Communist Party USA, as well as to the broader “Americanization” movement within the Popular Front. However, the “Good War” against fascism provided powerful nationalist mythologies surrounding “Victory Culture” that were less bound by class. Further, the Cold War--and a mass culture of domestic anti-communism--scuttled the revolutionary memory of the Civil War as a precursor to broader class emancipation.

No sooner had the student movement emerged than speculation began about the sources of campus activism. Since such large scale student protest was unprecedented in the nation’s history, it was natural that a variety of theories would evolve as Depression America sought to explain this new phenomenon. An assortment of conservatives—which included superpatriots, redbaiting editors, and politicians— wrote the most and screamed the loudest about the causes of student radicalism during the 1930s; they did so because of their outrage at the growth of Left-led organizations and student anti-war demonstrations on campus. Their most frequent explanation for this unwelcome upsurge of student activism centered on the faculty, whom they blamed for corrupting and radicalizing youth. The conservative press depicted college faculty as dangerously subversive. Professors emerged in these pages as a sort of academic branch of the Red Army. “There are few colleges or universities where parents may send their sons and daughters without their being contaminated with some phase of the vilest of Communistic and allied teaching,” warned Roscoe J.C. Dorsey, in the The National Republic, a superpatriot magazine which crusaded against faculty and student radicalism. In this same journal E.D. Clark, president of the Indiana State Medical Association, diagnosed “Red Microbes in Our Colleges,” evoking fears of political and sexual radicalism. The Hoosier doctor claimed that “under the guise of” academic freedom’ many professors . . . are not only teaching communism, socialism, anarchy . . . but are also endorsing” free love’ and unrestricted sex relations between unmarried people.” This rightwing indictment of the faculty was not confined, however, to the college level. Conservatives hurled similar charges against teachers in secondary and even elementary schools. The Hearst press, which did so much to give such charges national circulation, claimed in 1935 that thanks to the work of subversives in the nation’s school systems “two hundred thousand Soviet schoolbooks have been imported into America.” According to these rightwing critics, youths’ support for radicalism in college derived from exposure to subversion by teachers at all levels of the American educational system.

John T. Edge, longtime director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, links an unattributed image of Lewis featured on a postcard to the all too frequent omission of black labor from serious conversation about the culinary arts. He writes of his battle to protect and advocate for underprivileged food workers.