 19
to 21…
No, that’s not how many people have been given credit for
inventing baseball (but it’s close…)
Volume 7, #19, June 23, 2009
Book Review: “Alexander Cartwright”
Real historians will tell you that much of “history”
is a mixture of fact, fiction, legend, supposition, misunderstanding
and mistakes. For example, it is a fact that Aaron Burr shot and
killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, not far from what would
later be called the Elysian Fields. However, it is supposition as
to exactly what happened that day. Did Hamilton deliberately miss?
Who fired first? Did Burr mean to kill his opponent?
Or, take Andrew Jackson. It is a fact that he was president of
the United States, that there was an assassination attempt on him
on the steps of the Capitol, and that he killed a man in a duel.
But… was he legally eligible to be president (legend has it
he was born on a ship at sea), what happened to the would-be-assassin’s
gun (did it misfire, if so, how many times, was it defective, did
he just miss), and why did Jackson (who dueled so much it was said
he rattled when he walked) fight Charles Dickinson? Did he insult
Jackson’s wife? Jackson’s war record? Both?
Perhaps you prefer labor relations. Jimmy Hoffa was most certainly
the head of the Teamsters Union, and he most certainly hasn’t
been heard from for something like 20 years. But, is he really residing
underneath one of the end zones of a football stadium in the Meadowlands?
(Also not far from the former site of the Elysian Fields.
The point is that, while history may not change, our understanding
of history does change, and hopefully for the better. Now, “the
better” can mean a lot of things, but for historians, who,
like archaeologist Indiana Jones are seekers of fact, does not “the
better” mean a better, more correct understanding of history?
Even if the facts (or some of the facts) may remain elusive, just
the knowledge that what may have been considered facts are, actually,
supposition, is a revelation that moves forward our understanding
of history.
In this case, the subject is early baseball. And the historian
in question is Marcia Nucciarone, who has tackled the daunting task
of try to sort out myth from reality in the case of Alexander Cartwright…
bank clerk, bookseller, early baseball player, Knickerbocker, 49er
(sounds like he went in for baseball, basketball and football),
“Johnny Appleseed” for the National Pastime, Hawaiian
civic leader, confidant to royalty, businessman, importer, fireman,
leader of the Hawaii annexation movement that eventually led to
the Sandwich Islands becoming the 50th state, and legend. And his
legend… you know his legend… he’s in the Hall
of Fame as, essentially, the true inventor of the game of baseball,
or at least the codifier (if not creator) of the game’s seminal
rules as first played by the Knickerbocker club in the mid 1840s
(at the Elysian Fields.) But, just because Cartwright; not Abner
Doubleday, not William Wheaton, not Duncan Curry, not Daniel “Doc”
Adams, is in the Hall of Fame, does that make him the Father of
Baseball? And, if not, how did he get in the Hall in the first place?
Nucciarone, a faculty counselor advisor at the Pierce College Fort
Steilacoom campus in Lakewood, Washington, has written the first
true scholarly biography of the elusive (at least in an historical
fact sense) Mr. Cartwright. The result of her countless hours (over
a period of eight years) pouring over everything from 1849 gold
rush journal entries (hence, the 49er reference), to letters, to
old clippings of various sorts, “Alexander Cartwright”
(2009, University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 978-0-8032-3353-9) is
an essential work for anyone interested in the origins of baseball.
And, it is much more. A snapshot of life in the United States in
the 1840s. A quick look in at the California gold rush. Possibly
the best popular book that deals with the kingdom of Hawaii in the
latter half of the 19th Century since James Michener wrote “Hawaii.”
Nucciarone brings a momentous task under control. Think about it…
she undertook to write a bio of someone who died more than 100 years
ago and who lived the last 42 years of his life in a land far removed
from the mainstream of the U.S., to say nothing of the mainstream
media of the day. (Why do you think the early years of baseball
are so relatively well-documented… they took place in what
was already the media capital of the land, New York.) To do so,
Nucciarone splits her story into two parts. The first part tells
the story of Cartwright’s life, from Manhattan to Honolulu,
1820 to 1892. Part Two specifically looks at Cartwright and baseball’s
founding, if indeed baseball can be said to have been founded, let
alone founded by one man, or even a group of men in a single club.
What does Nucciarone accomplish? Nothing less than the furtherance
of the study of history, the search for facts (“If it’s
truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class
is right down the hall.”), in regards to both Cartwright and
the origins of baseball. Some may say this has been done already,
back in 1973 when Sports Illustrated’s Harold Peterson followed
up his 1969 SI article on Cartwright with a full-length bio, “The
Man Who Invented Baseball.” This is the kind of thing that
writers do on occasion – they write an article that draws
enough attention, and has enough promise for both further investigation
and book sales, that they expand the article into a full-length
book. (I’m doing the same thing with my essay on “The
Mount Rushmores of Baseball.”) However, expanding an SI article
into a true and accurate bio of Alexander Cartwright was a function
that ultimately eluded Peterson. Indeed, it is hard to fairly judge
the accuracy of Peterson’s work on the surface – he
did not footnote his sources and he died shortly after the book
was published. Although I have not read his book, it is clear, notably
from reading Nucciarone, that Peterson made a lot of suppositions
on Cartwright and his baseball background, suppositions that he
did not, and could not, back up with more than what have turned
out to be (as indicated by Nucciarone’s research) third-hand
or third person oral histories. However, as she notes in her Introduction,
Peterson’s book became THE source for information on Cartwright.
Regarding baseball, that means such tales as Cartwright’s
role in the founding of the Knickerbocker club, the primacy of the
Knickerbocker club, his authorship of the Knickerbocker rules, his
spreading the game across the Great Plains as he journeyed to California
in 1849, and his introduction of baseball to the Kingdom of Hawaii.
As it turns out, and as Nucciarone makes perfectly clear, much of
this is, if not legend, certainly supposition, and is best described
in Arlen Specter’s terms in his vote in the Clinton impeachment
trial… not proven.
As Nucciarone also explains in the Introduction (and this is a
real strong point of the book… in effect, she tells us what
she’s going to do, and then does it) although Cartwright’s
involvement in baseball in described in Part One, it is a surprisingly
brief description, as far as factual evidence is concerned. In Part
Two, she goes in depth inside the various Cartwright baseball legends
– were the Knickerbocker the first organized baseball club,
were they founded by Cartwright, did the Knicks play the first true
match game, did Cartwright create or establish any of the “Knickerbocker
Rules,” was he the “Johnny Appleseed” of baseball
as he went west, and, did he introduce baseball to Hawaii (eventually
giving us the 2008 Little League World Series champions and Shane
Victorino)?
How does it all play out? Just how important a figure in baseball
history is Alexander Cartwright? According to his biographer and
the most careful researcher we have on the subject, it’s hard
to say. As she notes at the start of Part Two (“The Mythography
of a Man”), “we know very little from primary sources,
or from Cartwright himself.” Most of the Cartwright story
that Peterson told, and has been considered “history”
for some 35 years, is at best taken from second- and third-hand
accounts (that often conflict with one another) and, at worst, from
what sounds an awful lot like a good PR job after the fact by the
Cartwright family, notably his grandson Bruce Cartwright, Jr., whose
intervention with the Hall of Fame basically got granddad so-inducted
some 70 years ago. Nucciarone’s research has, in point of
fact, turned up exactly one original document pertaining to baseball
that was written in Cartwright’s hand, one document that wasn’t
copied by someone else, or in some other fashion has a murky provenance.
That one document is a letter from Cartwright to fellow Knickerbocker
Charles DeBost, written from Hawaii on April 6, 1865, in response
to a letter that DeBost had sent him. A letter written some 16 years
after Cartwright left New York to seek his fortune in the (far)
west.
As for the answers to the questions Nucciarone poses at the start
of Part Two, it’s probably better not to spoil the secret
(and you owe it to yourself to read the book in any case), except
to say that hard evidence remains scanty and the truth of Cartwright’s,
and the other Knicks’ (to say nothing of the club itself),
involvement in the evolution (a better word than creation) of the
National Pastime are still matters of debate.
“Alexander Cartwright” makes it clear to the reader
that Alexander Cartwright’s seminal involvement in the formation
of baseball is, at this time, not proven. Note that Nuccciarone
does NOT say flatly that Peterson’s assumptions, and the myth
and legend that has been built up around Cartwright, is a lot of
hogwash. No, it is to her credit as an historian that she checked
her ego in either the state of Washington, or Lincoln, Nebraska.
It’s simply a matter, she says, that we don’t really
know, because there are so few reliable original documents on the
subject, and they don’t say very much. Might we learn more
some day? Sure, but in 2009, this is the here and now, the latest
word on Alexander Cartwright and baseball. More than once in her
book Nucciarone states the honest fact along the lines that she
is giving the most complete picture as is possible at the present
time, or she refers to a document as the only one “that we
have at this time.” Clearly, there may be more history out
there waiting to be discovered, (or there may not be… no one
knows for sure) but, for now, on the subject of Alexander Cartwright
and the founding of baseball, Monica Nucciarone has written the
last word, and we are all indebted to her.
-- John Shiffert
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