ON THE AVENUES: He's questioning the call.

ON THE AVENUES: He's questioning the call.

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

My early childhood coincided with the centennial of the American Civil War, and summers were consumed with baseball, a testament to my father’s passion for the sport.

Appropriately, two non-fiction books I’ve recently finished reading are set in the transformative era of 19th-century America: “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,” by John Thorn, and “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” by Adam Goodheart.

These excellent and recommended narratives, which you can order from Destinations Booksellers, are linked by the unlikely, middling figure of Abner Doubleday (1819-1893), a career military man and oddball transcendentalist.

Thorn’s volume enjoyably traces the roots of American baseball, both pastoral and urban, and although at this point in time there’s really no need to disprove yet again that Doubleday “invented” the game in Cooperstown, Thorn does so convincingly.

Moreover, he illustrates that while numerous societal elements always have conspired to use baseball as a convenient sporting analogy for patriotic myths of the country’s founding, the professional game in its infancy was just as prone to skullduggery, dishonesty and the corruption of money as we persist in suspecting it is now – rather like the country itself.

Naturally, Doubleday never even knew of his seminal role in devising the American game. He died several years before the self-serving and unctuous Albert Spalding gathered an early 20th-century cabal of self-important baseball oligarchs to assign the game its proper American credentials, the chest-thumping tenets of which reflected the political dreams and social mores of the creators, rather than observing the relative inconvenience of historical record.

But Doubleday already enjoyed a genuine place in the historical record book of the United States, having found himself stationed with the tiny, inadequate garrison of Fort Sumter in 1861. After the South Carolina secessionists swung first, initiating the bloody aggression of America’s brutal Civil War with an opening cannonade, Doubleday lobbed the first Union artillery shot back toward Charleston.

Unfortunately, like a weak dribbler down the third base line, the cannonball bounced harmlessly off the Confederate fortifications.

Goodheart’s overall premise is an effort to convey the uncertain mood in the United States (generally, in the North) before and after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, as the socioeconomic and political dominoes stacked precariously for four score and five years begin falling, culminating with the South’s counter-revolution and subsequent conflagration.

Interestingly, as one aspect of the tinder box, Goodheart points to the information explosion of the antebellum age: Competing newspapers, better mail service and the advent of the telegraph, all combining to shape and move public opinion in a way not possible previously.

One cannot get more American Heritage than debating baseball and the War Between the States, and most of us assume we know the rest of these stories, but do we?

Consider just these two lingering notions of utter falsehood handed down to us by our elders: Doubleday “invented” baseball in a summer’s afternoon, and the Civil War was about “states rights.” Not gospel truth in any sense or in either case, but rather complete fabrication, serving only to buttress the insupportable to appease other, less savory motivations.

In fact, bat ‘n’ ball games are depicted on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and cricket remained vibrant in the former colonies of North America until after the Civil War. Numerous other sporting endeavors of like dimension, from rounders to town ball and varying forms of “cat,” serve to make the point that while baseball as we know it evolved here (primarily, in the North), it cannot have been born stateside.

And: “States Rights” actually meant nothing outside of a narrow confine wherein a state had the “right” to enslave human beings. The intrinsic conflict of the institution of slavery came from the tortuous context bequeathed to future generations by the compromises of the Founders: “All men are created equal,” or in slavery’s case, decidedly not equal, a stumbling block ingeniously passed on to Doubleday’s generation to resolve.

They did so, and in just as prevaricating a fashion as their deal-cutting forbearers, first by fighting a catastrophic internecine war to define the principle of freedom, and then sheepishly waiting another century before (tepidly) enforcing the lessons learned, which meant that after a few 19th-century appearances by African-American baseball players during Doubleday’s lifetime, they were excluded from participation until Branch Rickey propelled Jackie Robinson through the color barrier – yet only after two additional cataclysmic world struggles had been fought and won to prove the same point, all over again.

All this is to say: Much of what we’re raised to believe is bunk, and this is precisely why it is fitting and proper to ask questions as often as possible.

Whether these questions have to do with baseball, the Civil War, the forever clandestine maneuverings of New Albany’s elected officials, or the predetermined imperatives of the economic oligarchy buttressing the Ohio River Bridges Project doesn’t so much matter. We must ask them nonetheless.

We must continue asking them, even when the answers coming back are grudging, evasive and not particularly helpful, because in the end, the mere act of asking questions openly challenges belief systems constructed to serve as unassailable dogmas. Most are not. Recent examples in the community have been instructive to me.

I’ll get back with you.
(She didn’t)

That’s a great idea, and I’ll push for it.
(He never bothered)

I’m unaware, having no clue what you mean.
(You aren’t, and you do)

You and your questions are toxic.
(But that’s not an answer, is it?)

Next in the reading rotation is another dose of Americana, this one fictional: “Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith," a novel by William T. Vollmann.