Today in Labor History September 28, 1920: Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted by a grand jury for conspiring with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series in what became known as the Black Sox Scandal. The players were acquitted by the jury, but they were still banned for life from professional baseball by Major League Baseball’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, thus ruining their careers. Yet New York gangster, Arnold Rothstein, who orchestrated the Black Sox scandal, was never punished. The biggest loser in the Black Sox case was probably Shoeless Joe Jackson. Had he not been banned for life, he might have gone on to become one of the greatest hitters of all time, possibly even better than Ty Cobb. Jackson hit .408 in 1911, his rookie year. Babe Ruth said he modeled his batting style after Jackson. Landis was a virulent racist, but with the power to actively upheld the league’s ban on black players. It should be pointed out that the players had no union back then and wages were incredibly low, particularly on the White Sox, so low, in fact, that most players had to have other jobs to support their families. White Sox owner, Charlie Comisky, was particularly hated for his miserliness. Yet he had previously helped organize the Players League, in the late 1800s, as a rebellion to the greed of the other major leagues. The Players League was a worker-run cooperative, operated entirely by the players, with the players earning a direct stake in the profits.
Landis was also famous for fining Standard Oil $29 million (that would be nearly $1 billion in today’s dollars). John D. Rockefeller, owner of Standard Oil, said Landis would be dead long before he paid the fine. He was right. A court of appeals reversed the fine in 1908. Landis was also infamous for persecuting leftists and labor leaders (mostly foreign-born socialists, anarchists and Wobblies), including Big Bill Haywood, of the IWW, for resisting World War One. Landis referred to the leftist defendants as "scum," "filth," and "slimy rats." Haywood received a 20-year sentence, jumped bail, and fled to the Soviet Union, where he remained until his death. He is one of two Americans buried in the Kremlin wall, along with communist journalist John Reed. Haywood kept a portrait of Landis on his apartment wall, in Moscow, quite likely so he could spit on it each day. Reed, who covered the war resisters’ trial, wrote the following about Landis:
“Small on the huge bench sits a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment-like skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead ... Upon this man has devolved the historic role of trying the Social Revolution. He is doing it like a gentleman. In many ways a most unusual trial. When the judge enters the court-room after recess, no one rises—he himself has abolished the pompous formality. He sits without robes, in an ordinary business suit, and often leaves the bench to come down and perch on the step of the jury box. By his personal orders, spittoons are placed by the prisoners' seats ... and as for the prisoners themselves, they are permitted to take off their coats, move around, read newspapers. It takes some human understanding for a Judge to fly in the face of judicial ritual as much as that.”
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