Plague Journal (66): Poppycock!

Cleaning off the back porch yesterday, I found a book lying on the floor behind a chair that I had actually begun reading last summer. I hadn't gotten very far when I set it aside and then (apparently) completely forgot about it. 

Anyhoo, it's a baseball history book: David Halberstam's Summer of '49. Yesterday I started over, and I know I'm going to like it. This category, baseball as social history, is one I always enjoy, and in fact after this I'll probably read Halberstam's October 1964. And his book The Teammates is one of the best of this type ever written.

With all that as prologue, I just want to get snarky about something Halberstam says early in this book. He is talking about the resurgence in baseball's popularity after WWII, when all the great players who had been drafted into the war-effort came back to the game. Attendance doubled! Passions, team allegiance, were running high. Anyway, in the midst of all this Halberstam says something about America that seems to me to be essentially false, and the perpetuation of an unexamined myth that you hear from time to time from liberal commentators. So, speaking of the attitude of owners then, and implicitly comparing them to today's class of owners, Halberstam writes:

Rich businessmen, thinking about becoming owners of sports teams, did not yet talk about the entertainment dollar, for America was a Calvinst nation, not much given to entertaining itself.

I think the word for this is "poppycock." I'll set aside the clearly mistaken notion that America was a Calvinist nation (it was anything but) and focus on the odd notion that America was "not much given to entertaining itself."

You wonder how Hollywood ever made it big with all these Americans spurning entertainment. In a world that had, by the late 40s, produced Swing music, dance marathons, the phenomenon of families gathered around the radio to hear the latest from Fibber McGee and Molly, pin-up girls, and the highly successful careers of Mae West, Clark Gable, the Three Stooges, Bing and Frank and jazz and Busby Berkeley, songs like Baby It's Cold Outside and I Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl, not to mention the massive popularity of horse racing, boxing, college football, and yes, baseball. [This list can be expanded by millions, but in the interest of brevity, I'll stop there.]

Halberstam seems to contend that the popularity of baseball, rather than being of a piece with America's constant search for distraction, was somehow a new indicator, a seachange in the American character. He makes this assumption about America being a nation of entertainment-averse people without providing a scintilla of evidence, because truisms never require evidence. They're just supposed to be self-evident. This particular truism, that America is a Calvinist (or sometimes "Puritanical" nation) is one I've heard from time to time over the years, often from smart people like Halberstam, and it is never accompanied by evidence.

Because, as I said, it's poppycock!