Forget Me Not: Archives, Museums, Memory, and Nostalgia ...

Forget Me Not: Archives, Museums, Memory, and Nostalgia

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ELLY KOERWER graduated cum laude in 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Program of Liberal Studies and Medieval Studies. She has since moved to Dublin, Ireland for two years of service as a member of House of Brigid at the Notre Dame-Newman Centre for Faith and Reason. Kelly would like to

extend gratitude to her thesis advisor Dr. Joseph Rosenberg for his guidance and wisdom throughout the writing process and the steady supply of source material to read. Her thesis was made possible in part by a grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

K

JOURNAL OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

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ABSTRACT

Humans have a fascination with the past. From archeological digs to time capsules, humans attempt to grapple with the past through its objects. These objects are memories. Society, then, depends on memory. With the prevalence of museums and various ways of collecting things for posterity, it comes as no surprise to think of memory as important. Even going about daily lives requires the use of memory. Why is it so special? Memory preserves. Memory educates. But most importantly, memory motivates. This thesis explores the motivating power of memory and its effect on society through the study of archives and museums. Looking at works of literature, philosophy, and film, the paper uses varying ideas of memory, collections, and souvenirs to explore nostalgia, the means by which memory motivates. Looking at the purpose of archives presents the idea that humanity, and therefore society, longs to understand the origin point and does this through collecting things. The paper concludes with the idea that while archives preserve the past to understand the origin, they also preserve the past in the hope that future generations will do the same, although this can never be perfectly realized.


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PART I: THE PAST

The world is filled with collectors. I collect ticket stubs and playbills. My mom collects teapots. My friend collects rocks. It seems ridiculous that we would do these things. To anyone else these objects have minimal value, but to the collectors, the collections are priceless. The collections tell a story to anyone who will listen. The collectors compile the collections over years, with each individual piece having a unique significance and memory attached to it. Collections are memories embodied in objects; they are the means by which we tell ourselves we will never forget that one trip or that one theatre show or that one person. Like a string tied around a finger, collections gently tug on people’s memories, helping them to recall why they have the objects in the collection. Sometimes the memories come rushing back to the forefront of the collector’s mind, and other times a collector struggles until finally the memory arrives like a long-awaited friend for a visit. We tell our life stories with our collections, with each piece acting as a prop in the plays that are our lives.

If humans have a tendency toward collections, then it only seems natural that society too would have collections—and lots of them. These collections come in the forms of archives and museums. They tell the story of society and humanity itself, with such a variety of objects from all sorts of places and times it seems like every era has representation. That is why the purpose of this thesis is to explore the connection between archives, museums, and memory.

In terms of the investigation method, I will not limit myself to the study of a particular archive or museum. Instead I will construct an argument with philosophy, literature, and even film. The sources and examples may seem haphazard, but therein lies the order of it all. Museums and archives bring together different mediums of objects to create an overall portrait of the past. So too does this meditation on memory combine seemingly unrelated sources to create a comprehensive image and understanding of the role of memory in archives and museums.

The difficulty in a subject such as this one comes with the subject itself. Memory is a nebulous concept that has all sorts of connotations and denotations, so trying to limit the inquiry to only a fraction of memory’s full meaning will inevitably raise more questions than answers. The hope is that the answers that do come will assist in gaining a better understanding of the resulting questions.

Memory, depending on how one defines it, could be many things. It could be retained knowledge or emotions connected to a particular event. Or, maybe the memory I speak of is the greater fabric of a culture or society. Maybe still, memory is particular to a person rather than a thing, as several people can attach different memories to the same object. In terms of


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memory, then, an archive is a very peculiar thing. In essence, it takes many particular things with possible ambivalent meaning and puts them in a single place under the guise of joining them together under one universal concept. It would appear then that an archive could be a possible fallacy of memory, especially since an archive appears to take things out of their original contexts. One could argue, though, that an archive is the only means by which certain things get remembered.

It is curious to examine what happens to the memory of a thing once it is taken out of the context in which it was created. Yes, an archive serves to preserve things, but one could argue against the idea that the things preserved mean the same once they are in the archive. In one sense, an archived object does maintain, at least in part, its original meaning. A book will contain the same pages it had when it first entered the archive. The reason for its creation, however, sometimes becomes lost and thus the meaning of the work is lost when it is taken out of context. This, however, can be argued for almost anything that enters the public sphere. So then the question becomes what happens to memory once it enters the public sphere. A tradeoff appears to exist between the knowledge gained from something archived and the knowledge that came from the object existing within its original context.

This thesis explores archives and museums as technologies of memory. Both archives and museums seem to exist for the purpose of preserving things from the past so that people of the present and the future can understand them. As I suggested earlier, archives and museums can be thought of as societal collections. Collections are one means by which people can preserve memories, but the collections in archives and museums differ from a personal collection of memories. Archives and museums institutionalize memory and turn it into a tool. Memory becomes a method for satisfying certain senses of desire and longing, specifically the longing of nostalgia.

Before understanding these technologies, one must first understand memory. Understanding memory is a complicated task to ask of anyone, but it is possible to achieve an understanding of memory, to a degree. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary provides several definitions of memory. First and foremost, memory can reference “[s]enses relating to the action or process of commemorating, recollecting, or remembering.”1 This definition also includes the subset of “[a]n act of commemoration, especially of the dead.”2 The first definition outlines the abstract idea of memory as a storehouse. The memory is the part of the brain or consciousness that holds all the information a person has ever gathered in his or her life. It keeps all the moments that make up a person’s life and puts them in one centralized place. Without memory, humans would be unable to recall anything. The second definition denotes the action of memory. The purpose of storing away information and personal

1 “Memory, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/116363. 2 Ibid.


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moments is not to keep them locked away forever in a box in the corner, never to be thought of again, but rather the purpose lies in the ability to bring back the information for use in daily life at a later point in time. The action of memory has just as much importance as the place of memory; the two work together to uphold the flow of information within the greater field of the consciousness of a human being.

With the first two aspects of memory in mind, there is still a third aspect that must be addressed. This definition is “[t]he perpetuated knowledge or recollection (of something); that which is remembered of a person, object, or event; (good or bad) posthumous reputation.”3 This denotation elaborates on the third aspect of memory: the knowledge being retained. The place of memory would have no purpose if not for the tidbits of a person’s experience it was storing. Furthermore, the objects of memory play a significant role in the lives of humans. As previously noted, the memory stores things so that it might later recall those things. These things of which I speak can relate to anything. They have significance, however, for the person who is remembering them. Whether stored consciously or unconsciously, a memory has an inherent usefulness that is realized later when a person recalls it. The place, action, and object of memory work together as an inherent part of the human experience. Without memory, after all, humans would be doomed to forever making the same mistakes because they would have no method by which they could learn from mistakes in order to improve. Learning from mistakes, of course, is only one of the many applications of memory in a life.

There seems to be no set blueprint for making memories or the types of memories that exist. The varieties of memory include, but are not limited to, emotional, sensory, societal, cultural, and informational. Emotional memories contain strands of intense feelings, whether they are pleasant, such as a deep fondness for a deceased pet, or agonizing, such as the heartbreak a person once suffered from the untimely conclusion of a romantic relationship. Good and bad, memory does not discriminate. While many people would jump at the chance of eliminating their painful memories and maintaining only the pleasant ones, most recognize the value of remembering pain. Whether a break-up or a glaring mistake made at work, painful memories serve as a method of educating oneself so as to know how to avoid similar situations in the future. The other types of memory function in similar ways. Societal and cultural memory assist a person in navigating the complex streets of society through his or her culture. Informational memory includes all the tidbits of facts and figures a person stockpiles during his or her education, whether formal or informal, within the school or workplace or without. Essentially, one possible definition of a memory is this: something stored within a person’s mind that can be put to later use in some way, shape, or form, whether it is for entertainment or education. This memory can be voluntary or involuntary—sometimes a person cannot help

3 Ibid.


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from remembering something and sometimes no matter how hard a person tries, he or she cannot remember something he tried to put to memory.

Where there is something remembered, there is also something forgotten. One cannot have memory without forgetting, and forgetting is often connected with oblivion.4 This oblivion is not a total oblivion as it is merely the loss of a select piece of information. Harald Weinrich deals almost exclusively with the concept of forgetting in his book Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. One compelling definition of forgetting comes in the form of a metaphor. Weinrich writes:

In another way and once again in correlation with the memory-metaphorics that from Plato onward also favored the illustrative image of a book and writing materials, forgetting appears as a gap in the text, which must be filled in by means of efforts of writing and thinking but which perhaps also makes the text really enigmatic and interesting in the first place. At the end of the text (the inclination to) forgetting draws a broad line, a bottom line.5

Most simply put, forgetting is a lapse in memory in which something that should be there is missing and may or may not return, depending on the circumstances. Just as a missing line of text can be compared to the action of erasing, so too can the act of forgetting be seen as an erasure of memory, a negation. Forgetting can only ever be defined through memory. In sum, this thesis will act as a reflection on memory, and as a result, forgetting. Forgetting is neither inherently good nor bad. It serves a function just as memory does and in doing so can be helpful or create more problems.

How then do memory and forgetting work in terms of an archive? In order to determine the relationship between memory and archives we must first define an archive and its purpose. In its most simple form, an archive is a place in which items of interest are stored. As defined by Carolyn Steedman in her work Dust, an archive “[i]n a proper and expanded definition of ‘archive’ this system of recording (listing, in particular), storage and retrieval, is an aspect of the history of written language, and the politics of that history.”6 Not only is an archive a storage unit for literature, but it is also a perpetuation of the social and political constructs of the periods that are represented in the unit.

In one sense, an archive is created the moment a person decides to preserve something from a past event for a future moment. Take, for example, a typical Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) student. This person will more likely than not keep the books he or she read in the seminars in his or her possessions. The miniature library of PLS books is actually an archive in which the memories of PLS are stored physically and symbolically in the books—from 4 “Forgetting, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed November 4, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/73328. 5 Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 5. 6 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), x.


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highlights and underlines, to jokes scribbled in the margins and tears on and tears in the pages. The personal collection of things becomes an archive because it is record of the typical PLS education held in one central location. In another sense, an archive is created when a person in a position of power deems it necessary to compile information on a particular subject and store it in a single place, which makes the information more accessible in that a person no longer needs to search far and wide for most (or all) of the relevant information on a particular subject.

Archives can contain information on anything a person feels has importance. They collect and store all different sorts of paper memories. From books to letters to manuscripts and scrolls to scraps of paper with grocery lists, archives collect them all. Archives are inherently a gathering together of things. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida describes the gathering together as a consignation,7 or as a committing to a state or condition, or the turning over into another person’s custody.8 The archive then collects a number of materials and transfers their ownership to the archive. The materials no longer exist outside of the sphere of the archive. They have a unity, an identity, and a classification that is inherent within the archive and in relation to each other. The purpose of the archive is to bring together the many materials pertaining to a certain subject so as to create a complete image and understanding of that subject. Yes, there may be items that do not necessarily appear to relate to each other, but the key aspect of the archive is that the materials actually do relate to each other. Otherwise, they would not be in the archive.

Derrida’s first image of an archive connects well with the idea of consignation. In Archive Fever, Derrida outlines the etymology of the word archive and equates it with a place, a house according to the original Greek.9 The idea of an archive as a house brings about interesting connotations. When an archive is a house, there exists the idea that the items in the archive are actually residents. The documents, the manuscripts, the many scraps of paper all come together under the roof of the archive to create a family, in a sense. The residents of the archive actually live there. They take on another meaning when someone compiles them under the same roof, whether they have anything to do with each other or not. The archivists, then, are the heads of the household. The original archivists, according to Derrida, are archons, “superior magistrates…who commanded.”10 The archons have the ultimate power in not only housing and protecting the documents of law, but also interpreting them. The archons have complete power over the law; what they say goes. For some, this could be considered as having far too much power over something so very important. The archons had the ability to make a certain document disappear if they had so chosen, though it is highly 7 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Paperback ed., [Nachdr.], Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008), 3. 8 “Consignation, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed November 4, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39614. 9 Derrida, Archive Fever, 2. 10 Ibid.


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unlikely that every archon had such diabolical plans regarding the laws of the ancient Greek city-state. Furthermore, Derrida highlights the importance of the localization of the laws. In order to have sufficient protection, it was best that they all remained in one central location, that is, the house of the archon. Thus, an idea similar to the modern archive exists.

The beauty of the modern archive lies in the centrality of the materials. More often than not, the materials have an overarching theme that binds them together. This allows the visiting researcher to make the most of his or her time in sifting through the many materials needed for his or her research. The workers at the archive have a similar purpose that the archons had: protect and interpret. Those who work in an archive have a duty to preserve the materials that lie within the stacks. This means regular maintenance as well as a secure place to stay. The workers in an archive also have the task of acquiring new material for the archive. The archivists search around the world for items that may add more meaning to their current collection. In a way, this search for materials is the archivist’s method of interpretation. He or she has a distinct idea of what the current archive provides researchers, and he or she thus works to further expand the idea through procuring new materials.

Though the thesis will focus primarily on archives, it will also discuss museums, specifically, museums as a comparison to archives. This difference first becomes apparent in the definition of museums: “[a] building or institution in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are preserved and exhibited.”11 This definition pairs well with our working definition of memory. In essence, a museum acts as a storehouse for things of the past, such as art, papers, clothes, etc., and organizes them in a coherent way for people to enjoy and learn. This may seem a tad technical, but for the purpose of the creation of a museum it works just as well. A museum is created when a person of means brings together items of the past in order to display them for the instruction of people in history.

The purpose of a museum, upon first thought, is to preserve the past so that present and future people can attain knowledge. The key words in the purpose of a museum are past, present, and future. Essentially a museum takes something from that past and preserves it. Often this process involves quite literally digging something up from the depths of the forgotten layers of the earth. Then, the museum gives someone the task of dating the specimen and accurately recounting its history for anyone who might visit a museum in the form of a plaque next to the object of interest. In the exhibition, the museum appears to provide portrayals of the past for the benefit of the people of the present and the future.

The final part of this thesis engages in a discussion of the role nostalgia plays in archives and museums through memory. The traditional definition of nostalgia is a longing for home or a

11 “Museum, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed November 4, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/124079.


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feeling of homesickness.12 This longing can be a longing for a past time. This feeling of nostalgia also results from a memory full of regret. Susan Stewart expands that definition into something far more complex in On Longing. Nostalgia, then, becomes an ideology:

Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as a narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality. This point of desire which the nostalgia seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire. As we shall see in our discussion of the souvenir, the realization of re-union imagined by the nostalgic is a narrative utopia that works only by virtue of its partiality, its lack of fixity and closure: nostalgia is the desire for desire.13

Nostalgia in On Longing takes the concept of homesickness and transforms it into a greater longing for a past that never happened, except in the mind. This nostalgia is a deep desire for something that a person never had in the first place. It is an insatiable longing that actually can never be met, as that would go against the entire concept of nostalgia. The ideas of memory, archives, and nostalgia all can be brought together in the form of “The Aspern Papers,” a novella written by Henry James.

Henry James paints an intriguing portrait of just what a person will do in the quest for fulfilled desire, specifically the desire for a poet’s personal papers. What might appear as ridiculous and useless to someone of the unscholarly tradition, some consider it an accurate portrayal of the emotions an archivist can feel in pursuit of a new element to add to his or her collection. “The Aspern Papers” recounts the story of a scholar who specializes in Jeffrey Aspern, a deceased American poet. The narrator, who remains nameless, travels to Venice in an attempt to secure an additional source for his latest book. This source is a set of letters that were written between Aspern and his lover. Julianna Bordereau, the owner of the letters and the lover, however, wishes to avoid any and all exploitation of the thoughts she and Aspern shared. The narrator struggles to ingratiate himself into the lives of Julianna and her daughter Tita so that Julianna might permit him to read the letters. In the end, Julianna dies, Tita destroys the letters, and the narrator comes away with nothing but a miniature portrait of Aspern.

12 “Nostalgia, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/128472. 13 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1st paperback ed (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 23.


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None of the characters in “The Aspern Papers” are by any means archivists. Though, the behaviors of the characters can be connected to those of an archivist. The number one rule in archiving is never throw anything away. After all, one never knows what might prove useful given enough time. Juliana Bordereau certainly follows this rule with Jeffrey Aspern’s letters, though not from scholarly interest. Instead she keeps the letters from her love as a way of preserving her pleasant memories of Aspern. In a way, one can argue that people can relate to Juliana to some extent. More than a few people keep little notes and trinkets from family and friends who have long passed through their lives. Furthermore, many people find themselves in Miss Tita’s position, coming into an inheritance of papers that are meaningless to everyone save the original owner. Enter the archives, the one institution that collects papers and other materials of both great and little value, the significance of which lies in the relationship of the owner with the materials. An archive sets about obtaining said valuable materials in several ways, one of which may be an employee ingratiating him or herself into the lives of the owners of potential materials. Another method is the owner of the materials reaching out to an archive to see if the archive is interested in the materials. This, of course does not happen in “The Aspern Papers,” and instead it is the narrator who asks the owner of the materials to part with them.

What is the narrator’s role in all of this? He plays the part of the scholar trying to obtain more information. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and money trying to see the Aspern papers, only to resort to rifling through Julianna’s secretary in an attempt to find the papers himself. He even thinks he causes the death of Julianna after he gives her a fright while sneaking about her room. While the narrator seems to feel plenty of guilt for his role in Juliana Bordereau’s death, his final words express regret not at his actions toward the deceased woman, but instead at the loss of the papers saying, “When I look at [the picture of Aspern] my chagrin at the loss of letters becomes almost intolerable.”14 In the end, it always is and was about the letters. It would appear that the search for knowledge knows no bounds. The narrator lets his desire for something he never had drive him to do wretched things. His story could be meant as a cautionary tale against over-enthusiastic archivists.

For all the collecting that an archive does, it also does a lot of speaking. The outdated tomes housed within may not have the ability to physically speak, but they speak through their contents. The materials that lie within an archive scream for attention and even love from someone just as they once received attention when their original owners still possessed them. Still, they speak out for the materials that are not present, slowly but surely making the missing pieces known to whomever it is that wades into the depths of the stacks of knowledge. One may think that the archive has a duty to the scholar to try to complete the collection. One would also hope that the archive would operate within an ethical system, though the example of the narrator of “The Aspern Papers” would do very little in furthering 14 Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, ed. Michael Edward Gorra, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 145.


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that hope. After all, the narrator, while possessing ethics, did not possess them in such a high degree that he was unwilling to find the papers himself even after it became quite clear that Julianna did not want him to see them. The narrator went through extensive pains and frustrations only to fail in completing his goal.

Archiving can be one of the most frustrating yet rewarding things a person can decide to do as a career. The narrator in ‘The Aspern Papers’ demonstrates the mysteries of archives—though he is interested in the papers for his own publishing purposes and not archiving—when he describes the difficulty with which he comes to discover Juliana Bordereau, her existence, and location, as well as the existence and location of the papers from Miss Tita. He spends months trying to finagle a situation in which it was safe for him to mention the papers of Jeffrey Aspern. All of his efforts literally go up in flames when Miss Tita set the letters ablaze, believing them to have no value for her. Thus, the narrator experiences the never-ending frustrations connected with archiving. There is a particular skill set necessary for archiving, as the process of archiving takes puzzles to a whole new level. To work in an archive, a person must have unbreakable patience and a meticulous nature if he or she hopes to achieve anything. The particularly frustrating aspect of archives is that unlike a puzzle, many collections lack a picture to guide the overall creations and putting together of the materials. So, it is difficult for an archive to know what it is compiling if it does not have a guide; however, a type of guide may exist in the purpose and layout of the archive.


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PART II: THE PRESENT

Museums and archives, upon first thought, seem extraordinarily similar. Upon closer examination, though, one can see that the two physical memory vaults are quite different. First and foremost, the two institutions differ in organization. When a person visits a museum, he or she is given a map with the locations and titles or topics of the hundreds of exhibits the museum has to offer. The exhibits themselves have little signs with blurbs of information relevant to the exhibit, with just enough information to capture the interest of an onlooker, but not so much that anyone could consider himself anything close to an expert. In an archive, however, a person must request the exact materials he wishes to study. One of the archivists on staff will obtain the materials and bring them to the person, and then he is left alone to his own devices to peruse the materials to his heart’s content.

The administration of a museum also varies from that of an archive. Museums have a board of trustees that is comprised of people who make decisions regarding the overall administration and mission of the museum. Then, there are museum directors, curators, and educators. The directors and curators have the power of selecting the organization of the museum as well as the pieces that are put on display. The educator has the role of actually educating the patrons of the museum in conjunction with the exhibits. The administration of a museum includes many other roles, but the aforementioned ones are the most important. Archives, on the other hand, are run almost entirely by the archivists who work there. There is, of course, a director or a head archivist, but each archivist has a hand in researching, gathering, and selecting materials for the archive. If an archive is part of a library or another organization, the director of said organization will probably have control over the archive’s budget, but it is ultimately up to the archivists to decide what types of materials are housed in the archive.

Just as the organizations and layouts of museums and archives differ, so too, do their audiences. Museums cater to anyone and everyone. Most museums nowadays are public and as such, anyone who can afford to pay the entrance fee (if there is one) is welcome to explore all the museum has to offer. Museums seek to educate the public, so their audience includes both the young and the old. Scholars and non-scholars alike can enjoy the wonders of the museum. Archives, however, tend to cater to scholars and historians. The nature of the archive is one of preservation. This means locking the materials away in a secure place until someone comes asking for them. More often than not, the only people interested in archived materials are scholars and historians, or lawyers if the archive focuses on law. An archive educates, but it is an individual, self-driven education whereas the museum education is more akin to that of a typical classroom.

Finally, we must draw our attention to the differences in materials of museums and archives. Museums have the benefit of lots of space and a wide audience for their materials. They have


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several rooms of things, of objects ranging in sizes all placed together in a mesmerizing display. Museums collect and exhibit objects from insects to dinosaur skeletons and models of airplanes and spaceships. Meanwhile, an archive contains rows and rows of books and boxes of papers. While museums house memories in the form of objects, archives house memories in the form of papers. From scraps of paper to entire treatises, archives have a place for each and every one. These materials are pieces of people and ideas long since passed. While there is the possibility of an archive housing objects other than papers, such as a coin collection, most of the time archives focus solely on paper materials.

In The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Tony Bennett demystifies the common history museum in order to understand what it is that a museum truly accomplishes. In his chapter entitled “Out of which past?” Bennett stipulates that “the past, as it is materially embodied in museums and heritage sites, is inescapably a product of the present which organizes it.” 15 Here he argues that the past presented in museums is no past at all, but actually is the present. To emphasize this point, Bennett continues:

Its existence as ‘the past’ is, accordingly similarly paradoxical. For that existence s secured only through the forms in which ‘the past; is publicly demarcated and represented as such, with the obvious consequence that it inevitably bears the cultural marks of the present form which it is purportedly distinguished. 16

Once again, Bennett hesitates to give the classification of ‘the past’ to objects on display in museums. For it is museums that take the objects and give the context, though the context is created from a person entrenched in the present looking back toward the past. As such, it is an imperfect relation of significance, one that cannot separate itself from the present. This lack of separation implies that the displays in museums are false memories, similar to how people can trick themselves into believing something happened a certain way when, in truth, something different occurred.

Bennett grapples with several definitions of memory, one of which can be articulated as the time within which past events can be or are remembered. The museum experience is extraordinarily similar to this definition. First, one commonly accepted idea of museums is that they exist to showcase the past. ‘Showcasing the past’ is another way to say ‘remember the past.’ So, museums provide a space for remembering the past. The time spent within a museum taking in the displays can then be considered memory, as it is “the time within which past events can be or are remembered.” A person need not have been present for the original event, particularly if the museum provides context for said event. Museums then both are and are not memory, if we are to take Tony Bennett seriously.

15 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Culture (London, England) (London ; New York: Routledge, 1995), 129. 16 Ibid., 130.


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As far as museums are memory, they also are physical manifestations of memory. For the most part, museums serve an educational purpose, teaching the public about the evolution of culture and society throughout time. These museums come in all shapes and sizes: there are farming museums, natural history museums, music museums, medical museums, etcetera. The list of subjects goes on and on. In each case, the museum sets out to present concentrated fragments of the past, all brought together as a cohesive narrative of the history of the chosen subject. People flock to museums to learn more about the past and, in turn, are simultaneously educated and entertained. Museums are a storehouse for physical memories just as the mind is a storehouse for mental memories. Memories, however, can be manipulated.

The human mind is far from perfect. As a result, neither is memory. Some people have better memories than others, but all people are liable to forget things throughout their lives. The forgetting process can be partial or complete. That is, people can remember the general outline of a memory, but can falter on the specifics of the details. Likewise, a person can forget something entirely. While the complete erasure of a memory is unfortunate and presents problems of its own, the partially forgotten memory can prove more harmful under certain circumstances. For instance, a person can replace the forgotten bits of a memory with something else entirely that has been constructed by his or her own mind. This newly created memory leads to the incorrect recall of information, which can steer a person in the wrong direction. It would seem, then, that the museum has a duty as a place filled with memories to make sure the memories are presented as complete. If not, then the museum is responsible for the miseducation of millions of people.

A museum is a type of memory storehouse. Most memories are recalled when a person specifically searches for them within his or her mind. This process could take part of a second, several minutes, or longer. The entire collection of memories lay at the disposal of the person. The museum changes the recall process. Instead of a person actively scouring his mind for a memory, the museum presents a select type of memory for a person to enjoy. In essence, once a person enters a museum, he relinquishes his power of recall. He is under the power of the museum. The museum retains complete control over what information gets transmitted to the patrons and how it is transmitted.

The museum’s control plays a larger role in the possibility for mistaken or incomplete memories. Most people who visit a museum accept the museum’s information at face value. Therefore, few people actively search through varied historical sources to fact-check. While one would hope that a museum would do its own fact-checking, there always remains a potential for bias. Just as a person can convince himself that his memory of an event is true when in reality it is not so, so too can a museum present only one side of history without providing the complete details, some of which may change the truth of the narrative.


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The idea of a museum changing the historical narrative can be found in Phillip Fisher’s Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. In his work, Fisher explains the four stages of an object’s existence, going from the original purpose of the object to eventually having the object as part of a showcase in a museum. Fisher explains the final purpose as [Objects] might undergo resocialization or vanish, but to remove them from this one space [(the one location in the world that would work at all)] is to silence them and to efface within them a cluster of attributes that only exist because of the socialization that this one location brings out. 17

The socialization of which Fisher speaks is the relocation of an object and the process by which its purpose changes. The final resocialization of an object is in a museum, where the people may or may not know the original purpose. The object acts as a representation for all objects similar to it instead of being its own subject. Specifically, Fisher gives an example of a samurai sword that once was used to kill enemies which, upon the death of its owner, transformed into a memorial of the owner and then a ceremonial sword used by the rulers to bestow honors to others. Finally, a museum obtained it and it became an object of history. It could be said that the object was always a ceremonial sword, or the curator of the museum could rightly have dated it as a genuine samurai sword. Either way, the sword no longer kills enemies. Instead it creates new memories and becomes part of the collection of the museum.

Another aspect of narrative is desire. Even historical narrative is prone to desire. Susan Stewart engages with this desire when she begins her book On Longing with a definition of the title. “Longing,” she states, “has a number of meaning which, taken together, in fact encompass this story of narrative, exaggeration, scale, and significance: yearning desire, fanciful cravings incident to women during pregnancy, belongings or appurtenances.”18 All three definitions fit the word well. I will, however, only discuss the first definition: yearning. The yearning desire most closely describes what people most often think of when discussing longing. But for what is this yearning desire? Where is the object of affection? Before defining longing, Stewart explains her use of narrative in the text: “Narrative is seen in this essay as a structure of desire, a structure that both invents and distances its object and thereby inscribes again and again the gap between signifier and signified that is the place of generation for the symbolic.”19 Here Stewart argues that narrative is the action of desire. It creates a distance between the person who desires and the object desired and transforms that distance into something transcendent. With this in mind, “the direction of the force in the desiring narrative is always a future-past, a deferment of experience in the direction of origin and this eschaton, the point where the narrative begins/ends, both engendering and

17 Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15. 18 Stewart, On Longing, ix. 19 Ibid., ix.


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transcending the relation between materiality and meaning.”20 In short, desire moves toward an object’s origin. It could be a physical object, or it could be an object of knowledge or culture.

After defining longing and narrative, Stewart goes on to discuss the souvenir and the collection, both important points in the text. While the souvenir and the collection may appear rather similar, they are totally different. According to Stewart, “[t]he souvenir…contracts the world in order to expand the personal”21 whereas “the collection marks the space of nexus for all narratives, the place where history is transformed into space, into property.”22 One might say that the souvenir creates connections and the collection removes connections. The souvenir also has great importance in relation to the concept of nostalgia.

The souvenir is an object that many people know. After all, people have a tendency to pick up trinkets from experiences or trips on which they have gone. The souvenir would appear to be a straightforward thing; it is an object that represents an experience. Stewart argues that the souvenir is “emblematic of the nostalgia that all narrative reveals—the longing for its own place of origin.”23 In a sense, the souvenir compacts the entire memory of an experience and places it in a single object. This object then assists its owner in the recollection of that experience, which can be considered as an attempt to return to the origin of that experience. This return to the origin, however, will never happen, as the original experience has already passed by and only the memory remains. This memory of the experience can become idealized, since with time details of memories can change slightly. As Stewart notes:

[t]he souvenir replica is an allusion and not a model; it comes after the fact and remains both partial to and more expansive than the fact. It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those origins.24

In essence, a souvenir permits the continuation of nostalgia in a person’s life by continuing the narrative of the experience. The origin of the narrative changes from its actual origin lying in the outset of the experience to its origin lying in the souvenir itself.25

The idea of the collection differs from that of the souvenir. Stewart puts it best: “While the point of the souvenir is remembering, or at least the invention of memory, the point of the collection is forgetting—starting again in such a way that a finite number of elements create,

20 Ibid., x. 21 Ibid., xii. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., xii. 24 Ibid., 136. 25 Ibid.


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by virtue of their combination, an infinite reverie.”26 The souvenir constantly looks back to the experience that drives the person into purchasing the souvenir whereas the collection is a conglomeration of things taken entirely out of their context and brought together for the purpose of the collector. A souvenir is metonymy, or using the part for the whole, and the collection is metaphor, bringing unlike objects into similarity with each other.27 The souvenir is the extension of the experience while the collection is the extension of the self through objects.28 Stewart connects the collection to a museum when she states, “Yet it is the museum, not the library, which must serve as that central metaphor of the collection; it is the museum, in its representativeness, which strives for authenticity and for closure of all space and temporality within the context at hand.”29 For Stewart, the museum does not look toward the past in its many collections of objects. In this way, Stewart agrees with Bennett. Instead of looking to the past, the museum takes the objects of its collection entirely out of context and brings them all together in a place where time does not go. Context is lost within a museum, no matter how many cards with relevant origin information surround the objects in question. The museum creates a deadening of emotions in that there is no true longing for the origin: “In the collection such systematicity results in the quantification of desire. Desire is ordered, arranged, and manipulated, not fathomless as in the nostalgia of the souvenir.”30 In essence, the beauty of the souvenir lies in the uncontrollable nature of the desire, the nostalgia. There is a distinct lack of beauty in the collection, though its mode of presentation may have beauty.

If the museum is the representation of the collection, then an archive is the representation of the souvenir. Stewart asserts that “[w]e go to the souvenir, but the collection comes to us.”31 If a museum is a collection and the collection comes to us, then it comes to us in the form of exhibits. When you go to a museum, you look at prepared exhibits of material. There is no looking through the stacks, waiting for something to jump out at you, as one does in a library. So then an archive can be a souvenir in the sense that everything is hidden away in an archive; you must search through the immense contents to find what you are looking for. Just as a person consciously chooses a specific object as a souvenir, so too does a person choose a document to peruse in the archive. In the end, “[i]n the souvenir, the object is made magical; in the collection, the mode of production is made magical.”32 The archive creates feelings of excitement when people visit in search of an item while the museum creates that same excitement in how it presents the objects of interest. The souvenir brings a person’s attention from the present into the past. This “displacement”33 is the work of the nostalgia inherent in

26 Ibid., 152. 27 Ibid., 151. 28 Ibid., 157–59. 29 Ibid., 161. 30 Ibid., 163. 31 Ibid., 164. 32 Ibid., 165. 33 Ibid., 151.


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the souvenir. The collection, on the other hand, uses the past as its servant as a means for creating authenticity.34 While the souvenir constantly works to keep its owner in a state of remembrance, the collection takes the viewer outside of time to a place without time, as a collection can have objects from all different places and times that have no connection except in the fact that they all reside in the same collection.

The ideas of desire, particularly desire attached in some way to an archive, is not unique to Stewart. Derrida also discusses the desire inherent to an archive when he reflects on a few different types of desire. One of the most pressing desires he describes is the desire for the origin, the desire to return to the point at which everything began. He links this desire to memory.

An archive, in one sense, is a memorialization of something. It is a preservation of some past for the sake of some future. When you think about it, it is quite bizarre that humanity seems to be made up of a society of packrats. After all, how certain can we ever be that tomorrow will come? Stranger things have happened and it would not be completely and totally out of place for a world-ending disaster to strike. The most certainty that anyone can have in terms of the future, according to Derrida, is a sense of hope and this hope is the desire of which he speaks. Hope is the feeling that underlies the creation of the archive. Hope for the existence of a future drives people to preserve the offerings of a cultural past and present. Thus, an archive is an act of faith that there will be a future and that future will want to know about its greater cultural past. As Derrida discusses in his “Theses,” to have archive fever is “to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.”35 The draw of the archive, then, is the draw that every human being possesses for the knowledge of the greater beginning. This draw, this desire for the origin, is the nostalgia of which Susan Stewart speaks.

Carolyn Steedman also picks up on this theme in Dust. Steedman, reading Derrida, says that

Derrida had long seen in Freudian psycho-analysis a desire to recover moments of inception, beginnings and origins which — in a deluded way — we think might be some kind of truth, and in ‘Archive Fever,’ desire for the archive is presented as part of the desire to find, or locate, or possess the moment of origin, as the beginning of things.36

The desire intrinsically associated with archives comes in the form of a desire for the knowledge of the beginning. Humans are constantly striving to understand things. More often than not, complete understanding comes in the form of knowledge of the starting point of a

34 Ibid. 35 Derrida, Archive Fever, 91. 36 Steedman, Dust, 3.


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thing or how that thing came into being; to understand is to know the origin. Archives then can be seen as an attempt by humanity to discover its origin. Within archives there exist the origins of millions of things, whether they are books, poems, loves, intellectual movements, or pieces of art. These origins are hidden away in the many stacks of things, waiting to be discovered by the wandering historian. Some people may see the archive as the closest thing to the origin of humanity, as it contains some of the oldest origins of parts of humanity. Is this longing logical? Can humanity ever obtain knowledge of its precise origin? Many would say that is why there is religion; religion explains the seemingly unexplainable, such as the origin of man. Does this idea transform archives into sacred sites? It is entirely possible that the fever of the archive is a fever of an archival religion.

Steedman returns to the concept of a longing for beginnings throughout the chapter. She goes on to discuss how “Derrida sees in Freud’s writing the very desire that is Archive Fever: the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings.”37 The fever of the archive thus becomes the yearning for knowledge of the beginning. History can be seen as an attempt to construct origin stories for humanity. Many people understand history to be the complete and continuous study of the human race. The more people wish to understand themselves, the more they question where they came from and how they ended up in that exact moment of time. Archives cater to that wish to know by providing “moments of inception” whether they are relevant to the person visiting the archive or not.

This longing for the beginning then brings about the emotion of melancholy, or nostalgia, in people who are under the feverish influence of the archive. Melancholy, an emotion people usually define as a general depression, is more akin to the German word sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, which cannot be properly defined in English, most nearly means a deep longing or yearning for some sort of thing, whether it is from the past or an idealized sense of the world.38 Sehnsucht, then, has a definition nearly identical to our working definition of nostalgia. The feeling of nostalgia is a yearning for something that one never had in the first place, an idealized past that one never experienced. The fever of archives, the wish to know the origins of things, then can be seen as a type of nostalgia as people can never fully know their personal origins, much less the origins of the entire human race.

How then does memory come into the equation? Memory, after all, is not an accurate portrayal of the moment in time that has been preserved. A recent study by Northwestern University suggests that when a person remembers something, he or she is actually recalling the moment of the last time he remembers the thing in question.39 That is, the memory is an

37 Ibid., 5. 38 “Sehnsucht, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press), accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/174907. 39 Donna J. Bridge and Joel L. Voss, “Hippocampal Binding of Novel Information with Dominant Memory Traces Can Support Both Memory Stability and Change,” Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 6 (February 5, 2014): 2203–13, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3819-13.2014.


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image of an image of the original. Even in the act of remembering, the person is unable to arrive at the origin. Perhaps that is why humans have such a longing for the origin—even in their minds they cannot grasp the true beginning. This, then, places a responsibility on the archive. In one sense, the archive is the compilation of primary sources. So, in theory, a person can travel back to the origin of something if he has the thing itself.

The potential to travel back to the origin, however, is not the case as something is lost in the act of memorialization within an archive. The thing becomes closed off from its world and as such loses parts of its origin, which can then be compared to the transformation objects in museums undergo throughout their lifetimes until they finally arrive at a museum. People think they know the origin of the object, but they only ever get a glimpse of a possibility. In an archive the desire for the object is so much stronger because, unlike in a museum where there are at least words to describe the possible primary nature of the objects on display, the objects have very little background information. Depending on whether the previous owner took copious notes on the reasons behind every object in his or her collection, the archivist must determine for him- or herself the meaning hidden within the pages of the book he is studying. The memories must be drawn out of the object.

Derrida dedicates a brief moment in Archive Fever for the discussion of Freud’s interaction with ghosts and phantoms. The concept of a ghost is directly tied to the concept of memory. A ghost is commonly thought of as a shadow of a person who has died. It is a living memory of the past. Living, though, is perhaps too strong a word for a ghost. Existence, then, properly describes a ghost. This memory of the person exists in an in-between state, neither fully in the corporeal world, nor fully in the land of the spirit. Derrida discusses the “grain of truth” found in phantoms and ghosts.40 In essence, the phantom is indicative of the distorted memory that the archive resents. There exists part of the truth of the subject in the archive, just as a phantom contains part of the essence of the dead person. The phantom also showcases the inability to grasp the origin of things in the archive. As the archive attempt to keep alive the objects of the past, so too does the phantom try to keep alive a person of the past. The phantom is inherently untouchable, as it is not a physical being, rather it is a spiritual being. The origins of things are similarly incorporeal. One cannot grasp ideas of things, as ideas themselves slip in and out of the consciousness of men and can only be pinned down in the physical act of writing.

If the act of writing pins down thoughts and ideas, what then pins down the phantom? One argument is the desire for it to complete a task that it left unfinished before its passing. This burning passion for completion ties it to the earth just enough so that it cannot pass on to the afterlife. The phantom seeks its own destruction. The phantom, one could say, dooms itself to a partial existence for the sake of a memory. What then is an archive? The contents of the archive are themselves trapped in a half existence for the sake of a memory. They live within 40 Derrida, Archive Fever, 87–88.


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and without their times, parts of the past yet parts of the present and future. Just as the ghost of King Hamlet wishes for the truth of his death to be known and Prince Hamlet wishes to know the secrets from his father, so too do the contents of an archive wish to impart their secrets and humans wish to glean those secrets from the archive. In short, the archive is a place haunted by the ghosts of the origins of every last material, containing hints and whispers of the actual object of the archivist’s desires, the origins, without fully revealing themselves to the archivist.

Just as a phantom seeks its own destruction through its exorcism through the completion of the task holding it to earth, so too does an archive have a destructive desire according to Derrida.

Even when it takes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself (gefarbt ist) in some erotic color. This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin. In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death.41

Derrida comments on Freud’s concept of the death drive in this passage. It is something that, according to the passage immediately preceding it in Archive Fever, leaves no traces, except in exception. That is, it does and does not leave a trace. The death drive, the drive of destruction, is one of archive destruction. In its desire to destroy, it destroys that which is being preserved and any traces of destruction. In this passage, Derrida explores the instances in which the death drive leaves something behind. Even when the destruction is incomplete, the remnants of the destruction are not clear; the destruction takes care to mask its effects. These effects then can sometimes be identified in the traces of the beautiful. Freud suggests that the remnants of the death drive are what give beauty to the beautiful. The beauty, then, are memories of death, as Derrida so eloquently describes.

What comes from this death drive, this desire to destroy? How does it make things beautiful? Do we find things beautiful that we think has some other part of it to which we can connect? Is it that we recognize the destruction desire within the beauty as something alike to us and in that likeness we appreciate the object of beauty even more? Essentially, archives can demonstrate the beautiful aspect of the death drive. The objects themselves are tinged with death: they come from a time long passed and from an owner long since dead. The objects convey information that was once important and could still be of value, depending on the person who interacts with them. While the archive works to preserve the physical

41 Ibid., 11.


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components of the object and the intellectual parts of the object, it is impossible to preserve everything. At the very least, the death drive erases the understanding obtained from looking at the object through its original context. The harder the archive works to keep the object in the present and for the future, the harder it works to wash away any and all understanding of it in terms of the past. The death drive is present without the archive being fully cognizant of it. The nostalgic desire works in tandem with the death drive. As the archivist searches more and more frantically for the clues of the true origin of the object, so too does the death drive work to erase any and all possible traces of the origin, making the object a more distinct part of the present than of its past. Just as the narrator of “The Aspern Papers” worked harder and harder to obtain the letters, even convincing himself to agree to a marriage proposal, the letters moved farther and farther out of reach, eventually turning to dust.

Derrida accounts for the nostalgic desire, the destructive desire, and, finally, a desire to possess and interpret. This possessive desire is best explained by Carolyn Steedman, author of Dust. In the first chapter titled “In the archon’s house,” Steedman discusses Michel Foucault, Antoinette Burton, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. She weaves the many works of the philosophers into an all-encompassing reflection on archives in and of themselves as well as archives as a part of a greater whole. She asserts:

The fever, or sickness of the archive is to do with its very establishment, which is at one and the same time, the establishment of state power and authority. And then there is the feverish desire — a kind of sickness unto death — that Derrida indicated, for the archive: the fever not so much to enter it and use it, as to have it, or just for it to be there, in the first place.42

Thus, Steedman discusses the nature of the fever. For Derrida, archives are deeply connected to a greater institution, more often than not the government. There is power in controlling an archive. After all, the person or persons controlling an archive have the ability to decide what goes in and what stays out. That is, the people who control the archive essentially write history. Thus, one of the fevers of an archive comes from the power of the archive. The second fever is a wanting: a yearning for the archive itself. As Steedman puts it, the want is for the possession of the archive, rather than the actual use of the archive. In a sense, this fever goes hand in hand with the fevered power. The possession of the archive is another example of control over an archive and with control of the archive comes the control over its interpretations and information itself.

The duality of the third desire of the archive is similar to the double nature of the archive. The archive is both the law and the power of the law. This seems peculiar. Should the law have the ability to secure people’s cooperation? That is, should the law interpret itself or should it have a third-party interpreter? It would seem that, for Derrida, the archive has no outside interpretive source. The archive is the information and it is simultaneously the 42 Steedman, Dust, 1–2.


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interpretation of that same information. This dual nature results in the archive interpreting its information merely with the choice of included materials. There are two types of interpretation. There is interpretation through analysis, which is taking the information and coming to a conclusion based on the evidence. There is also interpretation through negation, that is, arriving at an understanding of something by realizing what is missing. The archive uses both types of interpretation in its presentation of information. It conserves the information and puts a spin on the information. Since the archive is thus both the interpreter and the interpreted, it lacks a check to its power. Instead of being a storehouse of knowledge, an archive determines what knowledge is. The archive places importance in certain intellectual works and events and thereby professes that those things and those things only are worthy of study, as they are the things that are being preserved within the walls of the archive. This connects well with the aforementioned Derrida quote. Insofar as archives are fevers, they are fevers for control. This control then leads people to making decisions about what has an inherent worth as an object of study and history. In a sense, archives write the script for intellectual thought because they limit the subjects of the conversations to what resides within the archive.

The archive has such a fever that the format of an archive has moved from being solely institutional to becoming something more personal. The idea of an archive as representing memory has influenced popular culture and personal ideation of memory. A particularly compelling example is the recent Disney Pixar film Inside Out. It provides an excellent working image of memory and its purpose in human life. The film portrays memories as glowing orbs that have particular moments attached to them. The great majority of memories are housed in long-term storage that consists of shelves and shelves of memories. This image is akin to the storage of the boxes of materials in an archive. Workers peruse the shelves and pick certain memories to send to headquarters (Riley’s consciousness) for Riley to remember. These workers also select memories that the consciousness has forgotten consistently for some time. These memories are thrown into the “memory dump” which gets portrayed as a literal dump, a hole in the ground, of the subconscious where memories go to die, in a sense. The memories are destroyed (forever forgotten) in order to make room for new memories. All that remains of the old memories are piles of dust, ashes of a time from long ago that can never be brought back to life.43 In essence, Inside Out demonstrates several themes of memory and forgetting and employs an archive as its medium of choice to explain these concepts. Furthermore, the memory dump exemplifies Harald Weinrich’s ideas. Weinrich suggests in his work Lethe, “Perhaps forgetting is also only, in trivial terms, a hole in memory into which something falls or disappears (entfällt).”44 One viable image of forgetting, then, can be that of Inside Out, of thoughts, hopes, fears, and anything else that can be remembered as falling away into the abyss that may or may not be oblivion. After all, 43 Inside Out, film, directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen, (2015; Burbank, CA; Emeryville, CA: Disney Pixar, 2015). 44 Weinrich, Lethe, 4.


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some memories, no matter how long it has been between moments of recollection, can never be completely forgotten.

The systematic destruction of memories in Inside Out also brings to light another habit in the creation of history, particularly in the creation and maintenance of archives, and museums to a certain extent. This habit is the destruction of information that is not deemed important enough to maintain. One of the first instances occurred in Roman law where it was customary to treat a traitor as never having existed. For example, if an emperor were to commit crimes against the state, upon his death any and all mention of him would be erased from the collective cultural memory of Rome.45 Statues were destroyed and documents were scrubbed of any mention of his name. it would be as if he never existed. While the memory workers in Riley’s mind in Inside Out did not seek to actively destroy memories because they were seen as harmful, they destroyed memories so completely that Riley’s consciousness would lack the ability to ever recall them. This process then connects to “the systematic destruction of documents”46 in an archive which is known to archivists as annulment.

The reason for annulment is just the same as the reason for the destruction of most things in a storage area: a need for space. In effect, archivists choose materials that have been determined as possessing the least use for the present-day and projected future needs of the archive and they destroy them. Essentially, annulment stems from the archive needing space and trying to predict the future. This prediction comes from a hope similar to the hope expressed by Derrida: one that believes that the materials of the archive will provide some insight to future humans about moments of origin in our present and past. Hope for the future, then, is a reverse nostalgia. Instead of longing for an idealized past, hope longs for the future. This future though is a fallacy. It does not and can never exist. In the human preoccupation of longing for an origin, we create idealized versions of the past in museums and archives. We choose which parts of the narrative of humanity get remembered. The selective nature of the process of history in museums and archives presents partial images. History, then, is created from a set of incomplete pictures. History becomes a mosaic of all the incomplete parts and is an image of the hopes of humanity imposed upon the past. Events may have occurred the way the image suggests, but the chances are high that reality is not as clear as a single, continuous mosaic. The ideal image of the past this drives people in the present to preserve things according to this false narrative for the future. One’s impressions of the future, however, stem from one’s impressions of the past. The future, then, just like the past, becomes idealized. If we work under the belief that time flows in a line, then the future from the idealized past is false. It comes from an origin that never existed and as such the future that springs from it will never exist. In a sense, humanity longs for a false origin and hopes for an impossible future. Humans desire to create a collective narrative of humanity

45 Ibid., 33. 46 Ibid., 209.


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that shows where we have been and points to where we are going and we accomplish this by creating archives and museums.


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PART III: THE FUTURE

“The Aspern Papers” finishes in annulment. Miss Tita completes her mother’s final wish—that of destroying the letters she and Jeffrey Aspern wrote to one another. She systematically destroys the letters, just as an archivist does for annulment; she burns them one by one in her kitchen.47 When she reveals what she did to the narrator, his hopes are dashed. He had returned to Miss Tita’s home to accept her proposal and in doing so gain custody of the letters and instead discovers that the letters are no more. His arrival only brings him anguish. Despite losing the papers, though, the narrator does not lose his love of Jeffrey Aspern.

Before Miss Tita burns the papers, she gifts the narrator with a miniature of Aspern. Even though the narrator tells her later that he sold the portrait, he instead keeps it and sends Miss Tita not the money he gained from the sale but his own money. The portrait hangs above the narrator’s writing desk and acts as a reminder of the papers that were almost his.48 The narrator does not let the reader know whether he has stopped writing about Aspern altogether. It seems highly unlikely that he would give up his life’s work, especially since he keeps the portrait of Aspern so close to him. The final few scenes of “The Aspern Papers” present an interpretation of archiving, its apparent futility, and its perseverance.

The narrator’s final few moments of perseverance in his study of Aspern, even though he has lost part of Aspern’s writings, can connect well to the archive. As I stated earlier, the archive creates an idealized past in which society roots itself and hopes for a future. The future can be understood, in a sense, to be an impossible future since it comes from an idealized, i.e. unreal, past. It would seem, then, that the purpose of the archive, of collecting and preserving the past for the use of the present and the future, is futile. One could question why people continue to archive. If the future the archive hopes toward is an impossible dream, then it makes very little sense for people to continue collecting and categorizing and telling this idealized story of the past. The narrator of “The Aspern Papers” experiences this same futility after Miss Tita burns the letters. Despite the setback, though, he continues to study Aspern and does not allow himself to forget about the letters. Despite the clear loss of something that would have made his studies even more comprehensive, the narrator writes about Aspern nonetheless. He remembers the papers by way of the portrait, a souvenir, if you will, from his failed trip to Venice to secure the use of the papers.

Insofar as the portrait is a souvenir, the narrator has encapsulated his entire experience of the joy and the sorrow of the existence and destruction of the papers. As he admits in the final sentence of “The Aspern Papers,” “when I look at [the portrait] my chagrin at the loss of the

47 Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Tales, ed. Michael Edward Gorra, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 144. 48 Ibid., 145.


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papers becomes almost intolerable.”49 The memories of the papers become almost too much for the narrator to handle, but still he persists. He writes. He looks. He remembers. After all, memories serve a purpose, even the memories a person would rather forget. It is entirely possible that the chagrin the narrator feels stems from that deep longing of nostalgia which makes him wish that instead of running away from Miss Tita’s marriage proposal he accepted it right then and there. Had he done so the papers might still have existed and he might have finally known what was in their contents. Or still he might wish that he arrived back at Miss Tita’s home the very same evening instead of waiting until the next morning to return. At the very least he would have had a chance to save the papers. Either way, the narrator probably longs for a past that never happened, though he is well-aware of the true past. Throughout it all the nostalgia persists.

It would appear as if I am besmirching the name of nostalgia and the purpose it has in the lives of humans. This is in fact the opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish. The truth is, nostalgia seems just as involuntary as memory sometimes. When confronted with objects of the past, it only seems natural for a person to imagine this great and wonderful existence for it when in reality the existence was not quite as wonderful. A person functions by the ever-changing array of memories at his disposal.

Though I have compared the narrator of “The Aspern Papers” to an archivist, he remains a writer. While he is not an archivist, his motivations are similar. The narrator and an archivist share a desire to understand and to procure all sorts of knowledge. While an archivist seeks knowledge of the origins of things, the narrator seeks to know an origin of Jeffrey Aspern through his relationship with Julianna Bordereau. While this desire for the origin is common to most people, the narrator and an archivist fulfill their desires in distinct ways. The narrator remains, until the very end, a “publishing scoundrel,”50 resorting to rooting through an old woman’s secretary in the hopes of finding precious letters. Whereas, an archivist appears to acquire his information by far less questionable means. In a certain sense, then, an archive is the means by which society fulfills its desires for origins and prevents people from turning into the narrator of “The Aspern Papers.” The archive satisfies society’s desires and that is why, despite the apparent futility in archives, society continues to archive. Archives persist because they fulfill the human desire to remember and to know what once happened, no matter how long ago. Each piece archived is another piece fit into the puzzle that is humanity’s origin, or what society thinks is humanity’s origin.

49 Ibid., 145. 50 Ibid., 127.


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WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. 1st Schocken paperback ed. . New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Culture (London, England). London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Bridge, Donna J., and Joel L. Voss. “Hippocampal Binding of Novel Information with Dominant Memory Traces Can Support Both Memory Stability and Change.” Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 6 (February 5, 2014): 2203–13. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3819-13.2014.

Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. “Consignation, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed November 4, 2016.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39614. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz.

Paperback ed., [Nachdr.]. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008.

Fisher, Philip. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

“Forgetting, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed November 4, 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/73328.

Inside Out. Film. Directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen. 2015. Burbank, CA ; Emeryville, CA: Disney Pixar, 2015.

James, Henry. The Aspern Papers and Other Tales. Edited by Michael Edward Gorra. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books, 2014.

“Memory, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed October 19, 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/116363.

“Museum, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed November 4, 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/124079.

“Nostalgia, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed October 19, 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/128472.

“Sehnsucht, N.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed October 19, 2016. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/174907.

Steedman, Carolyn. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the

Collection. 1st paperback ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Weinrich, Harald. Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 2004.

Qui Profert Nova et Vetera: A Commentary on the Carmen de Iona and its Place in the Biblical Epic Tradition

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NN GALLAGHER Ann Gallagher graduated from the University of Notre Dame Summa Cum Laude in 2017 with a double major in Classics and the Program of Liberal Studies. She grew up in Little Compton, RI and developed a love of literature and classical languages at the nearby Catholic, Benedictine boarding high

school which she attended as a student and where she is now living and working as a teacher, houseparent, and coach. Thanks to the generosity of PLS alumnus Michael Cioffi and his Monteverdi prize as well as the guidance of incredible faculty mentors in both PLS and Classics - particularly that of her advisor, Professor Hildegund Müller - Ann’s work on her senior thesis was one of the most enriching and rewarding projects she has ever undertaken.

A


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ABSTRACT

This essay is dedicated to a translation, commentary, and analysis of the biblical epic Carmen de Iona. The genre of the Latin biblical epic, through which a poetic rendition of a biblical narrative is constructed according to the strict parameters of classical epic poetry, is a controversial one by its very nature. The liberal interpretation of sacred scripture and the alteration of its precise language have drawn many critics to the poets’ attempts. Such criticism, however, cannot deny the incredible difficulty of the undertaking. These poems demand of poets a great mastery of the Latin language and of the technical skills involved in composing dactylic hexameter. The Carmen de Iona is no exception; it is a work of impressive poetic prowess and, though it is anonymous and unfinished, its lines are a remarkable demonstration of linguistic skill and creativity.

The first part of this essay provides the Latin text of the Carmen de Iona, derived from the earliest surviving edition, as well as an original English translation. Difficulties in textual transmission and manuscript variations made this translation process an extremely enlightening one. They also revealed the multitude of interpretive possibilities within the poem itself. Readers of Latin poetry will sympathize with the difficulty of articulating the countless nuances of the original language through translation alone. Thus, the second part of this essay is devoted to a commentary. I have done my best to highlight some of my discoveries in the poem whose implications for the meaning of the text and the genre of biblical epic as a whole make them most intriguing. By discussing textual problems and the implications of differing manuscript readings, I hope to bring to light the complexity of the poem and to lift the Carmen de Iona from its relative obscurity.


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PREFACE

My journey to biblical epic and the Carmen de Iona began in 2013, when I first encountered the genre of the cento. This type of poem allows creative readers to compose unique poems while simultaneously relying upon the verbal genius of the greatest Greek and Latin poets. The Virgilian centos, for example, were often poems of about one hundred lines and told stories by arranging (and thereby recontextualizing) countless lines and half-lines from all across the corpus of Virgil’s works. In particular, I became fascinated by the early Christians’ use of this form of poetry as one means of “cleansing” or “baptizing” the pagan Virgil, whose poetry, though full of countless, anthropomorphic gods, was too beautiful and was the source of far too much literary and artistic inspiration to merely discard. The most well-known of the Christian, Virgilian centoists is the 4th century female and Christian convert Faltonia Proba, whose Cento Virgilianus de Laudibus Christi is composed of nearly 700 hexameter lines and explores many of the familiar narratives of the Old and New Testaments alike.

As I explored further this tradition of Christian reappropriation of Virgilian poetry, I discovered the genre of the biblical epic. Less explicitly Virgilian in its content, these poems demanded of poets a far greater mastery of the Latin language and the technical skills involved in composing Latin, epic poetry in dactylic hexameter. When I first began working on the obscure, anonymous, and unfinished Carmen de Iona during my summer in Monteverdi, Italy, the majority of my effort was devoted to the faithful translation of the poem into English. Difficulties in textual transmission and manuscript variations made this an extremely enlightening, rewarding and educative experience – albeit a tedious one. My final translation comprises the majority of the first part of this essay.

The second part of this essay is devoted to a commentary on the poem. Readers of Latin poetry will sympathize with the difficulty of articulating the countless nuances of the language through English translation and commentary. I have done my best, however, to highlight some of my discoveries in the poem that I found most intruiging, given their implications for the poem itself and the genre of biblical epic as a whole. By discussing textual problems, the implications of differing manuscript readings, the possible sources of inspiration for the text, and the varying degrees of freedom in which the poet indulges when paraphrasing the Bible, I hope to bring to light the complexity of the poem, to lift the Carmen de Iona from its relative obscurity, and ultimately to inspire appreciation for this genre of poetry.

This essay is the first installment of the entire commentary, in fulfillment of the requirements for the senior thesis in the Program of Liberal Studies. Thus, readers will find in the following pages a discussion of only one third of the 105-line Carmen de Iona. As my work


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on the commentary proceeded, it became clear that it would be necessary to tackle the issues underlying the textual variations I was finding in the text. The most recent edition of the Carmen de Iona, already over 120 years old, is in serious need of emmandation. With the help of my advisor, Professor Hildegund Müller, therefore, I am currently undertaking paleographic work by collating the manuscripts of the poem and composing a critical edition of this text for publication along with the completed commentary on the Carmen de Iona.

– A. Gallagher, March 2017


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PART ONE: THE POEM

1. Introduction

“A spring enclosed in a narrow space is more abundant and pours its flow by more streams over a wide countryside than any single one of these same streams however long its course. Similarly the writing of the dispenser of Your word, since it was meant to be of service to many who later should preach it, sets flowing in its brevity of utterance torrents of clear truth from which each may draw such truths as he can, one man this, another that, but with far lengthier windings of words.”1

The paradoxical idea of the eloquentia dei, advanced both by Origen of Alexandria and St. Augustine, suggests that the relatively simple biblical Latin prose is, in fact, a language with its own complexities and “a depth of meaning far beyond the poor capacities of human language.”2 In particular, St. Augustine defended the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate from attacks against their purportedly unsophisticated prose style by providing Christians with an education or training in biblical exegesis in his de Doctrina Christiana and de Catechizandis Rudibus. The development of the biblical epic genre during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, however, arose in part as a separate and very different response to this distaste for biblical prose. By reappropriating the metrical forms, linguistic styles, figures of speech, and themes of popular classical poetry, the poets of biblical epic composed more “sophisticated” narrative versions of Old and New Testament stories.

In her essay “The Biblical Epic and its Audience in Late Antiquity,” Judith McClure distinguishes between two categories of Christian poets: “on the one hand, there are the poets who clearly wanted to present a hexameter version of the biblical text which would be as close as possible to its original, shunning for the most part the addition of interpretive expansions.”3 On the other hand, “the second group of texts is distinguished by the fact that the author’s conception of the book or theme he is treating, and the explanation of its contents he includes, are just as significant as his handlings of the texts.”4 McClure claims that this form of paraphrase first emerged with Paulinus of Nola’s Laus Sancti Iohannis at the end of the fourth century. The process of paraphrasing biblical narrative, however – even the work of those poets in McClure’s first category – can never be done without some mark of

1 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Frank J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 12.27. 2 Judith McClure, “The Biblical Epic and its Audience in Late Antiquity,” in Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar, vol. 3 of ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 7, ed. Francis Cairns (Liverpool: Cairns, 1981), 308. 3 Ibid., 307. To this category belong Juvencus and Cyprianus Gallus. The former, a Spanish priest, is considered the first of the biblical epic poets. He composed a hexameter paraphrase of the Gospel during the reign of Emperor Constantine around 330 C.E. Cyprianus Gallus undertook the paraphrase of the historical books fo the Old Testament. Only his Metrum super Heptateuchum and several other fragments from his paraphrase of the Book of Kings and Chronicles have survived (McClure, 305). 4 Ibid.


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the poet’s personal interpretation. According to Michael Roberts, “it is now clear that none of the biblical poems, however faithful they are to their original, can properly be described as a grammatical paraphrase.”5 Every choice the poet makes while re-telling the biblical narrative, including the expansion of certain passages or the exclusion of certain details, will inevitably convey a certain interpretation about the importance and meaning of each element in the story.

The Carmen de Iona stands in defiance of McClure’s claim that among the extant biblical epics “there was no attempt to deal with any of the prophets of the Old Testament.”6 Because its text is unfinished, its author unknown, and its date of composition unclear, this poem has often been overlooked by scholars. The poem deserves attention, however, for the success of its effort to beautify the biblical narrative – in this case, the Book of Jonah. With its subtle blend of exegetical commentary in the story, and its complex and remarkable weaving of sacred texts with the poetry of Virgil and Ovid, the Carmen de Iona draws scripture’s “torrents of clear truth” from a wide, new stream.

2. Carmen de Iona: Text and Translation7

Post Sodomum et Gomorum viventia funera in aevum, Et cinerum senio signata incendia poenae,

Et frustra solis oculis nascentia poma, Et pariter facti mortem maris et salis illic,

Si quid homo est poenam mutato8 corpore servans, 5 Paene alios ignes superi decusserat imbris

Urbs aequi iustique viam transgressa Ninive. Nam quis subversae menti metus? Omnia vulgo

Poenarum documenta vacant, ubi possidet error. At bonus et nostri patiens et plectere serus 10

Omnipotens dominus nullam iaculabitur iram, Ni prius admoneat durataque pectora pulset,

Praesagos agitans augusta mente prophetas.

5 Michael Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Antiquity, in ARCA Classical and Medieval Texts, Papers and Monographs 16, ed. Francis Cairns (Liverpool: Cairns, 1985), 2. 6 McClure, 306. 7 The Latin text of the Carmen de Iona here hollows the Oehler edition unless otherwise specified (Oehler, 1854: 764-71). All translations of Latin text throughout this essay are my own, unless otherwise specified. 8 Oehler’s edition here reads mutati, but according to the apparatus in Peiper’s CSEL edition (vol. xxiii), none of the manuscripts use this version. Every manuscript reads mutato, the perfect passive participle in agreement with corpora.


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Namque Ninivitum meritis mandarat Ionan Praefari exitium dominus; sed conscius ille 15

Parcere subiectis et debita cedere poenae Supplicibus, facilemque boni, cessabat obire,

Ne vanum caneret, cessura pace minarum. Mox fuga consilium, si qua est tamen ista facultas,

Evitare deum dominique evadere dextram, 20 Quo subter totus trepidans compescitur orbis.

At ratio est quod agit sancto de corde prophetes? Littoris in labio portu celeberrima fido

Urbs oras Cilicum contra libratur Ioppe. Inde igitur Tarsos properus rate poscit Ionas, 25

Eiusdem per signa dei; nec denique mirum, Si dominum in terris fugiens invenit in undis.

Parvula nam subito maculaverat aera nubs Vellere sulphureo, de semine concita venti,

Paulatimque globum pariens cum sole cohaesit, 30 Deceptumque diem caliginis agmine clusit.

Fit speculum caeli pelagus, niger ambitus undas Inficit, in tenebras ruit aether et mare surgit.

Nec quicquam medium est, fluctus dum nubila tangent, Gloria ventorum quos omnes turbine miscet. 35

Diversus furor in profugum frendebat Ionan. Una ratis certamen erat caeloque fretoque,

Tunditur hinc illinc, tremit omnis silva sub ictu Fluctifrago, subter concussae spina carinae

Palpitat, antennae stridens labor horret ab alto, 40 Ipsa etiam infringi dubitans inflectitur arbor.

Nauticus interea genitus clamor omnia temptat Pro rate proque anima, spiras mandare morantes

Oblaqueare mithram, clavorum stringere nisus, Vel reluctantes impellere pectore gyros. 45


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Pars maris interni puteum gravem odore vicissim Egregie rapiunt. Tum merces atque onus omne

Praecipitant, certantque pericula vincere damnis. Sunt miserae voces ad singula fragmina ponti,

Expanduntque manus nullorum ad numina divum, 50 Quos maris et caeli vis non timet, haud minus illos

Puppibus abstrusos irato turbine mergens. Nescius haec reus ipse cavo sub fornice puppis

Stertentem9 inflata resonabat nare soporem, Iam tunc in somno domini formando figuram. 55

Hunc simul undisecae qui cogit munia prorae, Pace soporatum placida, requiete superbum

Institit impulsans: Quid, ait, discrimine in isto Somnia nare canis? Tantoque in turbine portum

Solus habes? En unda operit, spes unica divum est. 60 Tu quoque, quisque tibi deus est, dic vota precesque

Indigetans patrium supplex inflectito numen. Exin quis culpae propior, quis causa procellae,

Discere sorte placet, nec sors mentitur Ionan. Tunc rogitant, quis, et unde hominum, quis denique rerum, 65

Quo populo, qua sede cluis? Famulum ille fatetur Praetimidumque dei, qui caelum sustulit alte,

Qui terram posuit, qui totum corpore fudit, Ipsius sese profugum causasque revelat.

Diriguere metu. Quid nos igitur tibi culpae? 70 Quid fore nunc? Quonam placabimus aequora facto?

Namque magis multoque magis freta saeva tumebant. Tunc domini vates ingesta spiritus infit:

En ego tempestas, ego tota insania mundi, In me, inquit, vobis aether ruit et mare surgit, 75

In me terra procul, mors proxima, nulla dei spes. 9 I prefer stertentem, found in manuscripts V and T, rather than Oehler’s sternentem, which can be found in manuscript p.


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Quin date praecipitem causam, navemque levantes Unum onus hoc magnum pelago iactate volentem.

Ast isti frustra nituntur vertere cursum In reditum, nec clavus enim torquere sinebat, 80

Dura nec antennae mutari libra volebat. Postremo ad dominum: Ne nos in mortis hiatum,

Unam animam propter dederis, ne sanguine iusti Respersisse velis, si sic tua dextera ducit –

Iamque illic imo exoriens de gurgite cetus 85 Squamosum conchis, evolvens corporis agmen,

Urgebat propius concusso marmore fluctus. Sponte dei praedam rapiens, quam puppis ab arce

Provolutatam limosis faucibus hausit, Viventemque dapem longam properavit in alvum, 90

Cumque viro caeli rabiem pelagique voravit. Sternitur aequoris unda, resolvitur aetheris umbra.

Hinc fluctus, illinc flatus redduntur amici, Securamque viam placida signante carina

Candida caeruleo florent vestigia sulco. 95 Nauta at tum domino leti venerando timorem

Sacrificat grates, tum portus intrat amicos. Navigat et vates alio susceptus Ionas

Navigio fluctumque secat sub fluctibus imis, Viscera velificans, anima inspirata ferina, 100

Conclusus, neque tinctus aquis, maris intimus exter, Inter semesas classes resolutaque putri

Corpora digestu, sua iam tum funera discens In signum sed enim domini quandoque futurus,

Non erat exitii, sed mortis testis abactae. 105


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After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, living on in memory forever

And after those fires of punishment were sealed in a decay of ash,

And after the useless fruit, growing for the eyes alone,

And after the death of sea and salt, created there together,

– If there is anyone still preserving the mark of punishment on his disfigured body – 5

The city of Nineveh, having transgressed the way of the right and just,

Should have shaken down another rain of fire from heaven.

But what fear is there in a perverse mind?

All demonstrations of punishment are vain for the masses wherever error has a hold.

But, being kind and patient with us and slow to punish, 10

The all-powerful Lord shall not cast down His anger

Unless He first warns and stirs up the hardened hearts

By raising up prophets, diviners with sacred minds.

For this reason, the Lord had commanded Jonah

To foretell destruction for the deserving deeds of the Ninevites. But that prophet, 15

Aware that God spares the humbled and withdraws the owed punishment

To those who beg Him, and tends toward the good, was reluctant to obey,

Lest he should prophecy in vain with a resolution of his threats ensuing.

Soon flight becomes his plan – if however, that power exists

To avoid God and to escape the right hand of the Lord, 20

Under which all the world is held trembling in check.

Or is it possible that the prophet acts according to a holy heart?

A city, renown for it trusty port, Joppa, is balanced equally

On the lip of the shores directly opposite the coast of Cilicia.

From there then, Jonah climbed aboard a boat hastening to Tarsus 25

According to signs from the same God; no wonder then,

If fleeing the Lord on land, Jonah discovered Him amidst the waves.

Suddenly a small cloud stained the air,

Stirred up with sulphurous fleece by the seed of the wind.

And gradually, forming a ball, it clung to the sun 30


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And obscured the deceived day in a column of fog.

The sea becomes a mirror of the heavens; a dark periphery dies the waves.

The upper air rushes down into the darkness and the sea surges upwards

And there is nothing in the middle while the waves, all of which

The glory of the winds mix into a whirlpool, touch the clouds. 35

Warring furies were gnashing their teeth against that fugitive, Jonah.

One bark was a game for both skies and seas.

It is tossed here and there; the entire wooden frame trembles

Under each wave-breaking blow. Underneath the spine of the battered keel

Shakes, and the grating distress of the sail yards shudders above. 40

Even that mast, hesitating to break, is bent over.

Meanwhile the shouts, born of the sailors, attempt all things

For the sake of the ship and for their lives. They bid the delaying coils

To tie down the sails, to secure the struggling tiller,

Or they fight against the struggling circles with their chests. 45

Others, in turn, skillfully snatch everything out of the hull,

Heavy with the rank waters within it. Then they throw overboard their goods

And every burden, struggling to overcome the dangers by means of these losses.

There are wretched cries at every breaking of the sea.

They stretch out their hands to the divine power of non-existent gods, 50

Whom the strength of the sea and sky, sinking no less

The submerged parts of the deck in that angry whirlpool, do not fear.

Unaware of these things, the guilty man himself, in the hull of the ship,

Was resounding snoring sleep with the flaring of his nostril,

Now in his sleep already forming the shape of the Lord. 55

At the same time, he who drives forward the walls of the wave-cutting prow

Confronted Jonah, sleeping in peace, insolent in his rest.

And, shaking him, he said: “Why do you sing your dreams out your nose

In such a crisis as this? Do you alone have shelter


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In this great upheaval? See! Waves cover us and our only hope is in the gods. 60

You also – whoever God is to you – speak the rites and prayers.

As a suppliant, importune the divine power of your native god.”

Then they decided to determine by lot who is closest to fault, who the cause of the storm.

Nor did the lots speak falsely concerning Jonah.

Then they asked him: “Who are you and whence? Of what class? 65

From what people are you and where is your dwelling?”

Jonah confessed that he was a fearful servant and believer of the God,

Who raised up the heavens, who placed down the Earth, who poured out the seas;

He revealed that he was a fugitive of God and his reasons for flight.

They stiffened with fear. “Then what have we to do with your fault? 70

What will be now? By what means shall we pacify the waters?

For the fierce seas are swelling more and more.

Then the prophet, inspired by the spirit, began:

“Behold! I am the storm. I am the whole madness of the world.

Toward me, the sky rushes downward and the sea rises upward for you. 75

Because of me, land is far off, death is near at hand, there is no hope of God.

You had better cast headlong the cause and, lightening the ship,

Throw off this one, great burden who wills it.

In vain they struggled to turn back their course,

But neither was the rudder allowing them to turn, 80

Nor was the crossbeam of the yardarms willing to be changed.

At last they cried to the Lord: “Do not deliver us into the chasm of death

On account of the one soul, nor wish to scatter the blood of the just

If thus your right hand leads!”

And then, just there, rising up out of the deep abyss, a sea monster, 85

Turning the coiled ranks of his body scaly with shells,

Was rolling over the nearby waves and striking the surface of the sea.

Freely seeking the prize of God who slid forward from the edge of the prow

The monster inhaled him into his slimy throat


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And consumed the living feast in his long belly. 90

Along with that man, he devoured the rage of the sky and of the sea.

The waves of the ocean are smoothed out, the shadows of the sky are dispersed.

The waves here and the breezes there are restored to friendliness,

and as the peaceful keel marks out a safe path,

the dazzling tracks gleam in blue furrows. 95

But then the happy sailors, by worshipping the Lord,

Offer thanksgiving …

Jonah the prophet, taken up into another vessel, also sails

and cuts the wave under the deepest waves.

The bowels serve as his ship, propelled along by the beastly breath. 100

Surrounded but not touched by the waters, deep within the ocean but outside of it,

among half-digested ships and bodies dissolved by putrifying digestion,

he was already seeing his own death.

But as he would become a sign of the Lord,

he was not a witness of destruction but of banished death. 105


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PART TWO: THE COMMENTARY

1. Some Preliminary Considerations

Although the 105-hexameter Carmen de Iona traditionally has been attributed to either Tertullian or Cyprian, modern scholars have often rejected both of these attributions as impossible. Instead, they argue that the Carmen de Iona is almost certainly a diptych with the Carmen de Sodoma, but that the author of both these poems remains anonymous.10 In his dissertation on the life and works of Tertullian, which was edited and published by Francis Oehler in 1853, Petrus Allix argues:

Ultimum est Carmen de Iona et Ninive, quod solet Terulliano tribui … Non esse Tertulliani, est certo certius. Tamen quisquis est, antiquus auctor est, quem dicas imitatos Prudentium in Hymno 7. Cathemerinon, et Paulinum Nolanum episcopum in Carmine ad Cytherium, nisi contra dicere malis eum Prudentii et Paulini magni nominis poetarum fuisse imitatorem. Certe iudicet aliquis, ad eundem auctorem, qui Sodoma scripsit, esse referendum hoc carmen, si ex serie MSS. codicum possit tuto aliquid colligi: fuit enim in eodem Pithoei codice MS. quo habebatur Sodoma…11

The last one is the poem about Jonah and Nineveh, which is often attributed to Tertullian… But it is most certainly not by Tertullian. Whoever it is, however, he is an ancient author whom you could say Prudentius imitated in his Hymn 7, the Cathemerinon, and the bishop Paulinus of Nola imitated in his Song to Cytherius – unless however you prefer to say that he was the imitator of the poets of the greater name, Prudentius and Paulinus.12 One could certainly judge that this poem was written by same author who wrote the poem about Sodom – if any information can be gathered with certainty from the order of the manuscript codex, for it was in the same Pithoeian codex in which the Sodom poem was held…

Allix continues by stating that it is possible to consider the Carmen de Iona as a continuation of the Carmen de Sodoma, but he cautiously refrains from committing himself to this assertion. In these murky waters of conjecture, Allix states, “it is just as easy to deceive as to be deceived” (tum fallere tum falli aeque facile est) and he therefore makes no definitive claims about the truth of the matter.

10 The term “dyptich” – a term used to describe any two-paneled work of art – implies that these two poems together form a whole. It may, however, have been the case that the de Sodoma and de Iona are simply two parts of a epic poem which was actually (or at least intended to be) composed of many more episodes. 11 Petrus Allix, “Dissertatio de Tertulliani: Vita et Scriptis,” in Quinti Septimi Florentius Tertulliani Quae Supersunt Omnia, Tomus III, ed. Francis Oehler (Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1853), 78. 12 Allix refers here to Prudentius’s Liber Cathermerinon, Humn VII, the text of which can be found in the Corpus Christianorum, series Latina CXXVI, and to Paulinus’s Carmen XXIIII, found in CSEL vol. XXX. Both of these poems contain explicit references to Jonah.


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Similarly, in her 1996 essay “Storm and Stress: The Natural and the Unnatural in De Sodoma and De Iona,” Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit asserts that neither Tertullian nor Cyprian can be the author of either poem, but that some other poet must have composed both poems:

Stylistic considerations make the attribution to Tertullian or to Cyprian impossible. We can, however, assume the same authorship for both poems, for they form a diptych: the unrepentant Sodomites perish, with the exception of pious Lot, who has tried to admonish them; the people of Nineveh repent and are saved, despite the temporary lapse from righteousness on the part of their warner, Jonah.13

Pavlovskis-Petit mentions in a very brief footnote to this argument that the stylistic peculiarities of the Carmen de Iona’s opening lines are reminiscent of the Carmen de Sodoma and are therefore evidence that the former poem is in fact a continuation of the latter – hence her argument for the diptych.

It is possible, however, to observe that the opening lines of both poems serve as evidence that they were composed as successive episodes within one, larger poem, complete with many more biblical episodes. Although it is common to begin epics with an invocation of a muse (often replaced by an invocation to the Holy Spirit in Christian poetry), no such invocation appears in either of these texts. Instead, the de Sodoma begins by referring to the great flood, described in the Book of Genesis, in such a way as to imply that this event had been described in a preceding passage of the poem:

Iam deus omnipotens primaeui tempora saecli Uindice diluuio cunctis aboleuerat undis. Quas caelum sparsit, terrae, maris expuit aequor14

Already had the all-powerful God wiped away the times of the first age By means of waves together with a vengeful flood, Which heaven had scattered and the surface of the sea had cast onto the land

In this way, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is juxtaposed with the great flood described in Genesis 7-9; both events are examples of a just God’s dealings with the sins of the human race. Likewise, the opening lines of the de Iona juxtapose the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah with that of Nineveh:

Post Sodomum et Gomorum uiuentia funera in aeuum Et cinerem senior signata incendia poenae, Et frustra solis oculis nascentia poma,

13 Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit, “Storm and Stress: The Natural and the Unnatural in the De Sodoma and De Iona,” Classica et Mediaevalia 47 (1996): 281. 14 Rudolf Peiper, Cypriani Galli Poetae Heptateuchos, vol. XXIII in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vindobona: Bibliopola Academiae Litterarum Caesarae Vindobonensis, 1891), 212. Poem hereinafter cited by line number: de Sodoma, 1-3.


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Et partier fact mortem maris et salis illic15

After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, living eternally in memory, And after those fires of punishment were sealed in a decay of ashes, After useless fruit, born but for the eyes alone, And after the death of sea and salt, created there together

The poet thereby prompts readers to contrast God’s treatment of man’s sins in each scenario and develop a better understanding of justice as it is depicted in the Old Testament.

This explicit reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as the implied repetition of post in these opening lines, demonstrates that the poem about Jonah was meant to be a sequel to the previously composed de Sodoma. Unfortunately, the unfinished nature of the de Iona cannot make it clear whether the end of the de Iona and intended, subsequent episodes have been lost or whether they simply were never composed.

In his essay “Alcimus Avitus as the Author of the De Resurrectione Mortuorum, De Pascha (De Cruce), De Sodoma and De Iona, formerly attributed to Tertullian and Cyprian,” Marcel Dando attempts to solve the problem of anonymity in each of these poems. He traces the linguistic similarities between the text of Avitus’s Libelli de Spiritalis Historiae Gestis and the four smaller poems, and he conjectures that Avitus himself wrote each of these. In particular, Dando asserts that Avitus copied pieces of his own Carmen de Sodoma and Carmen de Iona while composing the fourth book of his Libelli. He outlines a detailed conjecture about the process by which Avitus used the smaller poems to compose the major one:

…to introduce novelty in the manner of utilization of earlier material, Avitus begins at the end of the De Iona and works back to the beginning of the De Sodoma. In that way…he is enabled only to reach line 365 of his new composition. Consequently, he repeats the process, working back from the end of the De Iona to the beginning of the De Sodoma. This has now carried him to line 52. It would then seem that he decided that for the 130 or so remaining lines of his book this device was no longer necessary…16

While tracing similarities between the texts, he asserts that Avitus would not have drawn systematically from any poems unless they were his own. In the case of the De Resurrectione Mortuorum, Dando explains:

Although the views on literary property in the 5th century were considerably more fluid than in our modern era, it is hard to believe that Avitus systematically pillaged the

15 Ibid., 221. Poem hereinafter cited by line number: de Iona, 1-4. 16 Marcel Dando, “Alcimus Avitus as the Author of the De Resurrectione Mortuorum, De Pascha (De Cruce), De Sodoma and De Iona, formerly attributed to Tertullian and Cyprian,” Classica et Mediaevalia 26 (1965), 270.


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poetical wealth of a work such as the De Resurrectione Mortuorum which cannot have been composed much before his time, when the name of the author was presumably known to his contemporaries. The imitation becomes plausible and legitimate if the De Resurrectione Mortuorum is also by Avitus.17

Dando himself, however, undermines his theory by admitting that some of the similarities between the texts might be explained by mere coincidence. Moreover, a large percentage of the similarities he highlights are common phrases that can be found in countless other Latin poems – both Christian and non-Christian. If one is convinced that the parallels between these texts are significant enough to indicate that re-appropriation did occur in the process of the composition of the Libelli, Dando still provides very little evidence that the smaller poems necessarily were the inspiration for the larger one or that Avitus necessarily drew on his own poems rather than another poet’s.

Rudolf Peiper, whose edition of both the Carmen de Sodoma and Carmen de Iona can be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum series, includes these poems among his collection of Cyprian’s works. But after explicitly stating that the de Iona and the de Sodoma cannot have been written by Cyprian, Peiper, like Allix and Pavlovskis-Petit, assigns both poems under the heading Incerti.18 Peiper explains his decision thus:

…longe superior est Cyprianus, qui…nullam admittit obscuritatem nullisque difficultatibus impeditos versiculos decurrere iubet. Sodomae contra et Ionae auctor minus est elegans minusque dilucidus, neque quae sunt obscura apud eum, a narrationis sacrae difficultatibus veniam habent, sed distorto ingenio auctoris omnia debentur.19

Cyprian, who allows for no vagueness and orders the verses to run entangled by no difficulties, is greater by far. On the contrary, the author of Sodom and of Jonah is less elegant and less clear. And whatever is obscure in his text is not excused by the difficulty of the sacred narrative [i.e. the Biblical] but instead all of these problems are the responsibility of twisted nature of the author.

The obscurity in these texts to which Peiper refers has been exacerbated both by manuscript variations and by the corrections that have been applied to the text over the millennia. Peiper himself has offered more than a few corrections to various lines in the poems throughout his edition.

Despite the textual variations and anonymity of the author of these poems, however, the stories are derived from familiar biblical narratives. In a full 105 hexameters, the Carmen de 17 Ibid., 265. 18 Cyprian probably lived around the beginning of the 5th century and is known for his versification of the Pentateuch and many other Od Testament books. This work is often called the Heptateuchos. These poems are primarily composed in dactylic hesameter and, while following the biblical prose narratives closely, they also integrate echoes of classical poetrs (particularly Virgil and Ovid) in style (Siegmar Döpp and Wilhelm Geerling, eds, Dictionary of Early Christian Literature (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2000), 153.) 19 Peiper, Cypriani Galli Poetae Heptateuchos, xxviii.


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Iona expands upon the first 17 verses of the biblical Book of Jonah – which is itself a mere 48 verses long. The unfinished hexameter poem breaks off as Jonah is swallowed by the great fish and never reaches the segments of the story dedicated to Jonah’s “resurrection” and preaching in Nineveh. Therefore, each of these 105 hexameters elaborates on these first verses of the biblical narrative in complex and fascinating ways. While retelling the familiar story of Jonah, the Carmen de Iona offers a new interpretive lens through which to understand the biblical book and a great work of art in and of itself.

2. Lines 1-9

Post Sodomum et Gomorum viventia funera in aevum, et cinerum senio signata incendia poenae, et frustra solis oculis nascentia poma, et pariter facti mortem maris et salis illic, si quid homo est poenam mutato corpora servans, paene alios ignes superi decusserat imbris urbs aequi iustique viam transgressa Ninive, Nam quis subversae menti metus? Omnia vulgo poenarum documenta vacant, ubi possidet error.

Although these first lines do allude to several basic details from the Genesis 19 account of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction, the Carmen de Iona here employs vocabulary and narrative details particular to the account in the de Sodoma poem. In its 167 hexameter lines, the Carmen de Sodoma retells the story of the two angels who visit Lot, God’s destruction of the two cities with a rain of fire, and the salvation of Lot and his daughters. The poem, however, strays from the end of the Genesis account by omitting the story of incest between Lot and his daughters. Instead, the de Sodoma omits these narrative details and ends the poem with an etiological explanation for the unusual saltiness of Dead Sea and its production of black bitumen. It is to this discussion that line 4 of de Iona refers. The “death” of the sea and salt metaphorically refers to that chemical process described in the de Sodoma, by which the sea foam and salt are heated and mixed together until they form the black bitumen on the water’s surface. The choice of words such as mortem, maris, and salis, echo their use in lines 140 and 147-8 in the de Sodoma, where the death of sea and the chemical process are both described.

Likewise, the “useless fruit, growing for the eyes alone” (frustra solis oculis nascentia poma) mentioned in de Iona 3 effectively brings to mind de Sodoma 131-138, where the poet describes the ashen, infertile earth and the apparently-beautiful fruit which crumbles to ash at the slightest touch. The meaning of line 5 of the Carmen de Iona is much more obscure, but it is possible that it refers to Lot’s wife, who is transformed into a pillar of salt in the de Sodoma. Words such as mutato, corpora and servans recall the passage in the de Sodoma, where the transformation of Lot’s wife is described as an Ovidian metamorphosis. Each of


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these direct illusions to the de Sodoma in the opening lines of the de Iona remove all doubt regarding the connection between these sister poems.

The transition to the Nineveh story occurs in lines 6-7, where the city is introduced as a place equally deserving of Sodom and Gomorrah’s fate. But line 6 begins with paene in order to remind readers that this familiar biblical story has a different ending; here God will forgive these sinful people. Even though the Ninevites did not initially receive the example of Sodom and Gomorrah as a warning (which, the poet notes in lines 8-9, is not surprising since the mind perverted by sin will never be swayed by any such example), yet God will eventually bring them to repentance and will therefore have mercy upon the city. This intended contrast between Sodom and Gomorrah and Nineveh supports the theory that the Carmen de Iona is an unfinished poem because the poet never does describe the God’s act forgiveness toward the Ninevites. In his essay on the poems of Pseudo-Cyprian, Josep Escolà Tuset explains the reasoning behind this theory:

…taken together, [the de Sodoma and de Iona] present a clear message: God saves the just and the unjust who repent, but he punishes those who remain obstinate in their sin, as happens to the inhabitants of Sodoma and Gomorrah. It is indeed this contrast which allows us to consider the hypothesis that De Iona has come down to us incomplete, since it ends with Jonah in the interior of the whale without narrating the return of the prophet to Nineveh and the later repentance of its inhabitants, an attitude that would contrast to that of the inhabitants of the cities punished with the devastating fire.20

The pairing of the Sodom and Gomorrah episode and the Nineveh episode in this biblical epic forms a sort of character study of the God of the Old Testament. But because the poem never reaches the discussion of God’s dealings with the Ninevites, it is reasonable to assert that the de Iona is an unfinished poem.

3. Lines 10-15

At bonus et nostri patiens et plectere serus Omnipotens dominus nullam iaculabitur iram, Ni prius admoneat durataque pectora pulset, Praesagos agitans augusta mente prophetas. Namque Ninivitum meritis mandarat Ionan Praefari exitium dominus…

The characterization of God in these lines contrasts sharply with that of the God in the Carmen de Sodoma – the God who just previously had utterly destroyed both Sodom and Gomorrah. Here the poet describes God in the words of Psalms 102 and 144 – “merciful and

20 Josep Escolà Tuset, “Cuestiones varias sobre los Carmina Pseudocyprianea,” trans. Roger Pearse, Analecta Malacitana Electrónica 6 (2000).


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compassionate Lord” (Miserator et misericors Dominus, Ps. 102:8).21 The language used in both of these Psalms corresponds directly with the narrative of mercy and forgiveness that is at the heart of the biblical Book of Jonah. While the mercy of the Lord is emphasized in both Psalm 102 and 144, the language of de Iona 10 (bonus et nostri patiens et plectere serus) and the general narrative of the Ninivites’ fate follows the former Psalm more closely:

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward

those who fear him; As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those

who fear him.22

The language used to describe God’s act of punishing in line 11 also places the Christian God in direct comparison with the pagan gods; it simultaneously draws upon classical images and rejects them in an attempt to demonstrate that the true, Christian God is far greater and more perfect. The poet declares that “the all-powerful Lord shall not cast down His anger, unless He first warns” (omnipotens dominus nullam iaculabitur iram, / ni prius admoneat). This vivid depiction of God “cast[ing] down His anger” brings to mind the common descriptions of a wrathful Zeus who hurls thunderbolts upon mortals as a form of punishment. Although God has already demonstrated His ability to do such a thing in the de Sodoma by casting a “rain of fires” (ignis…imbres) upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, yet, the narrative of the de Iona emphasizes His far more wonderful patience and benevolence. In His mercy, God forewarns His people and sends to them “divining prophets” (praesagos…prophetas) before acting upon His anger and causing such destruction. The image of the Olympian god is thus challenged by the mysterious co-existence of mercy and perfect justice in the Christian God.

4. Lines 15-22

…Sed conscious ille parcere subiectis et debita cedere poenae supplicibus, facilemque boni, cessabat obire, ne vanum caneret, cessura pace minarum. Mox fuga consilium, si qua est tamen ista facultas, Evitare deum dominique evadere dextram, quo subter totus trepidans compescitur orbis. At ratio est quod agit sancto de corde prophetes?

21 I have referred to the Psalms here according to their respective numbers in the Vulgate. Hebrew versions as well as modern translations based on the Hebrew text will be off by one number. 22 Ps. 102:8-13 (ESV).


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The characterization of God in the de Iona also interacts with classical forms in explicit references Virgil’s Aeneid. The poet describes Jonah’s hesitation to warn the Ninevites and incorporates a direct quote from the Aeneid to describe the nature of the Christian God:

…sed conscious ille Parcere subiectis et debita cedere poena Supplicibus facilisque bonis cessabat obire.23

But the prophet, aware that God spares the humbled And withdraws his forespoken punishments from those who beg Him, And is inclined to do the good, was hesitating to obey.

The use of parcere subiectis here re-contextualizes Anchises’ advice for Aeneas and all Roman rulers in Book VI of the Aeneid (6.851-53):

‘Tu regere imperio populous, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.’24

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power The peoples of the Earth – these will be your arts: To put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, To spare the defeated, break the proud in war.25

In light of the fact that Aeneas fails to follow his father’s advice when he decides to kill the defeated Turnus in the last lines of the epic, the author of the de Iona suggests that the attribute of perfect justice can belong to the Christian God alone, not to mortals or to the classical gods. The Christian God alone is the ultimate fulfillment of that perfect authority which the Roman leaders had vainly sought to attain.

5. Lines 23-27

Litoris in labio portu celeberrima fido urbs oras cilicum contra libratur Ioppe. Inde igitur Tarsos properus rate scandit Ionas eiusdem per signa dei: nec mirum denique, si dominum in terris fugiens invenit in undis.

The flight of Jonah begins at line 23 with the description of Tarsus and the port of Joppe (modern day Jaffa). The geographical description of the port’s location is a strange one: “A city, renowned for its trusty port Joppe on the lip of the shore, / Is balanced directly opposite the shores of Cilicia,” (Litoris in labio, portu celeberrima fido, / Urbs oras Cilicum contra 23 de Iona, 15-17. Emphasis mine. 24 Virgil, Aeneid, ed. Randall T. Ganiban et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012), 6.851-53. 25 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 6.981-84.


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libratur Ioppe). The most difficult word in these two lines is the verb libratur. Peiper has conjectured that this word might be libatur instead.26 Libatur is translated literally “is poured out,” evoking images of a liquid being drained. On the other hand, libratur (“is balanced”) creates an image of the port city being weighed on a scale against the shores of Cilicia. In either case, the verb must be translated in a metaphoric sense. I prefer libratur to Peiper’s conjecture here because it seems that the geographic picture being drawn here is that of Joppe, the port of Tarsus, lying on a coast perfectly opposite to the shores of Cilicia.

Another peculiarity of this geographical description is the identification of this port city in relation to the region of Cilicia. The latter is located on the coast of Asia Minor, due North of Cyprus. Joppe is indeed located directly opposite to Cilicia on the other side of the Mediterranean, Southeast of the island of Cyprus, but the use of Cilicia as a landmark initially seems strange in the context of this narrative. There is, however, a notable reference to Cilicia in the New Testament. The passage in Acts describes the beginning of St. Paul’s journey to Rome:

And when it was decided that we should sail for Italy, they delivered Paul and some other prisoners to a centurion of the Augustan Cohort named Julius. And embarking in a ship of Adramyttium, which was about to sail to the ports along the coast of Asia, we put to sea, accompanied by Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica. The next day we put in at Sidon. And Julius treated Paul kindly and gave him leave to go to his friends and be cared for. And putting out to sea from there we sailed under the lee of Cyprus, because the winds were against us. And when we had sailed across the open sea along the coast of Cilicia and Pamphylia, we came to Myra in Lycia...27

Although it appears to be a mere passing reference to Cilicia, what follows in St. Paul’s story is an incredible sea storm, not unlike that which is described in the de Iona beginning at line 28. The narrative similarities include the descriptions of the unprecedented power of the storm, the helplessness of the sailors, the supernatural will behind the natural storm, and finally, the resolution (according to God’s plan) that every man is ultimately saved from destruction. Even details such as the attempt to lighten the ship by throwing overboard all the cargo can be found in both narratives (see de Iona, 28-52).

Jonah’s connection to St. Paul, which is highlighted by these narrative parallels between the Carmen de Iona and Acts 27, runs even deeper than the set of similar circumstances in their respective sailing adventures. The de Iona subtly suggests that Jonah might be understood as a forerunner of Saul and a foil to the transformed St. Paul. The familiar story of the dramatic conversion of the pagan Saul of Tarsus (the same city to which Jonah is fleeing) into the Christian Paul serves as a remarkable sign of hope that foreshadows Jonah’s own conversion

26 Peiper, Cypriani Galli Poetae Heptateuchos, XXIII, 222. C.f. apparatus for line 24. 27 Acts 27:1-5 (ESV).


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after being in the belly of the whale.28 Both men find themselves running from God in some manner – Jonah because he refuses to prophesy to the Ninevites and Saul because he is persecuting the Christians – and yet both encounter God in the midst of their flight. The poet of the Carmen de Iona comments on this phenomenon shortly after describing Jonah’s decision to sail to Tarsus: “No wonder then, / If fleeing from the Lord on land, the Lord found Jonah amidst the waves” (nec denique mirum, / Si dominum in terries fugiens inuenit in undis). It is not the pagan Saul to whom Jonah is likened in the Carmen de Iona; it is rather St. Paul, traveling to Rome as a prisoner and as an obedient servant of God. The poem here foreshadows the conversion which Jonah will experience after being swallowed by the fish and turning back to the Lord for forgiveness.

The narrative action of the poem finally begins at line 25 when Jonah decides to climb aboard a boat to Tarsus rather than follow God’s instruction to go to Nineveh (an event which occurs before the fourth verse of the Book of Jonah). After the geographical description of Joppe, the poem turns to Jonah’s flight: “from that place, Jonah climbed aboard a boat hastening to Tarsus” (inde igitur Tarsos properus rate scandit Ionas). There are several variations of this line in the manuscripts. Most notably, the verbs conscendit, poscit, tendit, and pergit may be found in place of scandit in particular manuscripts of the de Iona or in corrections to them. Conscendit and scandit both fit the meter of the dactylic hexameter and maintain a similar meaning of climbing aboard the ship. Moreover, the verse corresponding to this event in the Vulgate makes use of similar terminology:

Et surrextit Iona ut fugeret in Tharsis a facie Domini et descendit Ioppen et invenit navem euntem in Tharsis et dedit naulum eius et descendit in eam ut iret cum eis in Tharsis a facie Domini.29

And Jonah rose in order to flee into Tharsis away from the face of the Lord and he went down to Joppe and he found a ship going to Tharsis and he paid his fare and went down into the ship in order to go with them to Tharsis away from the face of the Lord.

Although the Vulgate uses a term indicating a climb down into the ship, the closest option in the manuscripts that reflects this action is the conscendit or scandit ˗ albeit a climb upwards.

Immediately after Jonah climbs onto the boat, the text contains notable theological implications. Manuscripts, however, render the text (particularly in line 26) differently, and each one leads to a different interpretation. In Peiper’s edition, lines 25-27 read: Inde igitur Tarsos properus rate scandit Ionas: / eiusdem fert acta deus: nec denique mirum. / si

28 In Acts 9, Saul of Tarsus describes how he, while on the road to Damascus in pursuit of the Christians (Saul was a notorious persecutor of Christians at the time) was suddenly blinded and knocked off his mule. He heard the voice of God say to him, “Saul, Saul! Why are you persecuting Me?” Saul converted to Christianity, took the name Paul, and, after years of training in the faith, became one of the greatest preachers of Christianity until he was eventually beheaded in Rome. 29 Jonah 1:3. Emphasis mine.


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dominum in terris fugiens inuenit in undis (“From that place then, Jonah climbed aboard a boat hastening to Tarsus. God suffered the deeds of that man: no wonder then, if fleeing the Lord on land, Jonah discovered Him amidst the waves”). Here the logical connection which is suggested by nec denique mirum seems either to be lost or twisted. In order to claim that it is “no wonder then” that God pursues and finds Jonah in his flight, one must understand revenge as the motivation for God’s actions here – i.e. God pursues Jonah in his flight because He has had to suffer that man’s misdeeds. Given the description of God in lines 10 and 11 (At bonus et nostri patiens et plectere serus / Omnipotens dominus, “But, being kind and patient with us and slow to punish”) this seems to me to be an impossible interpretation.

Oehler’s edition of the poem offers the alternative and preferable version of per signa dei in place of fert acta deus. The translation then becomes: “From that place then, Jonah climbed aboard a boat hastening to Tarsus, according to signs from the same God; no wonder then, if fleeing the Lord on land, Jonah discovered Him amidst the waves.” The per signa dei brings an entirely new meaning to this passage and thereby resolves the logical connection introduced by nec denique mirum. It is a paradoxical meaning – while running away from God’s commands, Jonah still acts according to signs from God. Here the poet’s aside offers theological insight in the mysterious nature of God’s relationship with man. The poet suggests that despite Jonah’s conscious disobedience of God’s commandments, he was nevertheless, in some sense, acting in accordance with God’s will. The suggestion here is that the divine plan of Providence accounts for all of man’s sins even before they have been committed. In His omniscience, God already knew that Jonah would choose to act against His will and yet, in His Mercy, God incorporated Jonah’s actions into His divine plan. Now indeed it is “no wonder then” that Jonah finds God amidst the waves.30

6. Lines 65-72

Tunc rogitant, quis, et unde hominum, quis denique rerum. Quo populo, qua sede cluens? Famulum ille fatetur Praetimidumque dei, qui caelum sustulit alte, Qui terram posuit, quique aequora fudit: ipsius sese profugum causasque revelat. Diriguere metu. Quid nos igitur tibi culpae? Quid fore nunc, quonam placabimus aeqora pacto? Namque magis multoque magis freta saeva tumebant.

After having vainly petitioned their imaginary or non-existent gods (nullorum ad numina divum), the sailors resort to the practice of choosing lots in order to determine the cause of the disastrous storm. Although the poet emphasizes the futility of seeking help from the 30 I would also point to line 22 as evidence that the poet has suggested such a thing before. This line reads an ratio est, quod agit sancto de corde prophetes? (“Or is it possible that the prophet did this according to a holy heart?”). Again the poet steps outside the narrative to ask whether Jonah’s decision to disobey God might be understood as fitting within some divine plan.


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pagan gods, he notes that choosing lots does, in fact, reveal the truth of the matter: “nor did the lot speak falsely about Jonah” (nec sors mentitur Ionam). Immediately the crew accosts Jonah with a series of questions: “Who are you, and from what people, to which class do you belong? From what people and native place?” (quis, et unde hominum, quis denique rerum / quo populo, qua sede cluens?). The asyndeton in these lines as well as the ellipsis of verbs effectively heighten the drama of the scene and reflect the urgency of the situation.

Jonah then responds to the hostile inquiries by identifying himself in a manner which attempts to conceal his guilt:

…Famulum ille fatetur Praetimidumque dei, qui caelum sustulit alte, Qui terram posuit, quique aequora fudit: ipsius sese profugum causasque revelat.31

Jonah confessed that he was a fearful servant and believer of the God, Who raised up the heavens, who placed down the Earth, who poured out the seas; He revealed that he was a fugitive of God and his reasons for flight.

Despite labeling himself as a profugum here, Jonah also describes himself as “a servant and believer of God” (famulum… Praetimidumque dei). The contradiction caused by the juxtaposition of profugum and famulum reflects the disorderliness of Jonah’s decision to flee from God despite his duty as a prophet of the Lord. The sailors immediately recognize this contradiction and, ignoring the justifications (causas) that Jonah gives for his actions, the men accuse and rebuke him for having involved them in this conflict.

The most fascinating aspect of Jonah’s personal identification, however, is not his endeavor to conceal his transgression. Rather, it is the fact that Jonah describes himself in relation to a Creator God. He names God in a tricolon as the Being “who raised the heavens aloft, who established the Earth, and who poured out the oceans” (qui caelum sustulit alte / qui terram posuit, quique aequora fudit). These three elements – earth, heaven, and waters – are the first things that God creates in the very first lines of the Book of Genesis: “in the beginning God created heaven and Earth…and the Spirit of God was carried over the waters” (in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram…et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas).32 God then proceeds in Genesis to separate the heavens from the Earth and the Earth from the land:

Et fecit Deus firmamentum divisitque aquas quae erant sub firmamento ab his quae erant super firmamentum et factum est ita…dixit vero Deus congregentur aquae quae sub caelo sunt in locum unum et appareat arida factumque est ita.33

31 de Iona, 66-69. 32 Gen. 1:1-2. 33 Gen. 1:6-7.


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And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from those which were above the firmament. And it happened thus…And God said, “let the waters under the sky be gathered together in one place and let dry land appear. And it happened thus.

This depiction of God as an organizer of elements, in addition to His attribute as the Creator, has particular resonance with many classical conceptions of God. Ovid depicts God as a demiurge who forms the world by shaping preexisting materials. In Book I of his Metamorphoses, he describes a unity of substances, called “chaos,” which, at a particular moment in time, God divided, organized and reshaped in order to form the distinct regions of the Earth:

Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, quem dixere chaos … Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit. nam caelo terras et terris abscidit undas et liquidum spisso secrevit ab aere caelum. et liquidum spisso secrevit ab aere caelum. quae postquam evolvit caecoque exemit acervo, dissociata locis concordi pace ligavit

Before the seas, and this terrestrial ball, And Heav'n's high canopy, that covers all, One was the face of Nature; if a face: Rather a rude and indigested mass: A lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd, Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd. … But God, or Nature, while they thus contend, To these intestine discords put an end: Then earth from air, and seas from earth were driv'n, And grosser air sunk from aetherial Heav'n. Thus disembroil'd, they take their proper place; The next of kin, contiguously embrace;34

Again, earth, air and water are named as the three elements that are distinguished from one another only after a demiurge god had separated them from one another (erat tellus illic et pontus et aer).

This organization of chaos and the deliberate separation of the heavens, the Earth and the waters is a particularly fascinating reference here in Jonah’s narrative. It is of this God that

34 Ovid, Metamorphoses trans. John Dryden et al. (New York: R M’Dermut and D.D. Arden, 1815), 1.5-7; 21-25.


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Jonah announces himself to be a famulus. Yet the sea storm that God has created in response to Jonah’s disobedience is described in directly opposing terms. The sea and sky are described as rushing together so that no gap is left between them: “the sky rushes into shadows and the sea rises / and there is nothing in between them while the waves touch the clouds” (in tenebras ruit aether et mare surgit / nec quicquam medium est, fluctus dum nubila tangent). Thus, this depiction of the sea storm, in conjunction with this description of the God “who raised the heavens aloft, who established the Earth, and who poured out the oceans” (qui caelum sustulit alte / qui terram posuit, quique aequore fudit), becomes an apocalyptic depiction – the storm is literally an undoing of the act of creation.

When the sailors realize that the cause of the storm is the very God from whom Jonah is running, they respond again with a series of questions. First expressing indignation, they cry, “What do we have to do with your sin?” (quid nos igitur tibi culpae?), and immediately on the heels of this indignation follows a great sense of dread. Because they are not guilty of the sin that this danger is intended to punish, the men realize that they possess no agency in controlling or putting an end to the storm and God’s anger. In despair they shout “What will be now? By what means shall we pacify the waters?” (quid fore nunc? Quonam placabimus aequora pacto?). Jonah, recognizing that he alone has the power to appease God and save the crew from danger, finally confesses his guilt and urges the men to cast him into the sea.

7. Lines 73-78

Tunc domini vates ingesta spiritus infit: En ego tempestas, ego tota insania mundi, in me, inquit, vobis aether ruit et mare surgit in me terra procul, mors proxima, nulla dei spes. Quin date praecipitem causam, navemque levantes Unum onus hoc magnum pelago iactate volentem.

Interpretation of Jonah’s confession in lines 74-8 is affected by a textual problem – line 73 is entirely missing from manuscript P, and neither of the different versions of the line found in manuscripts V and T will fit the hexameter line. Where the line is present in manuscript V, it reads: tum domini vates ingestus spiritus infit. The only variation in T is the reading of ingesta rather than ingestus. In each of these cases the word spiritus and its long syllable in the genitive ending –us derails the meter of the line. The meter can be resolved only by reading spiritus as a nominative (thereby making that final syllable short), in which case vates must be a plural direct object. This, however, cannot be the case; the vates in question can be no one other than Jonah (a fact that becomes especially clear through the anaphoric repetition of ego and in me in lines 74-76). Moreover, Jonah must be the subject of infit because the direct speech that follows is his own confession. The lack of the line in manuscript P seems ultimately to be the only unproblematic version, the only “resolution.”


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Whether or not line 73 is present in the text significantly affects interpretation of the poem as a whole and of the message that the poet intends to convey by retelling this biblical story. At stake here is the idea that Jonah’s confession has been directly inspired by an outpouring of the Holy Spirit (ingestu spiritus). The description of this scene in the Vulgate contains no such observation: “and he said to them, ‘pick me up and throw me into the sea and then the sea will be calm for you, for I know that it is on my account there is this massive storm above you’” (et dixit ad eos tollite me et mittite in mare et cessabit mare a vobis scio enim ego quoniam propter me tempestas grandis haec super vos).35 Thus, the addition of tum domini vates ingestus spiritus infit to the narrative in the de Iona acts as the poet’s own commentary on the text. He suggests that God Himself prompted Jonah to confess his guilt and repent of his sin. This assertion would not be unprecedented. Just as in lines 22 and 26, in which the poet claims that God ultimately makes use of man’s sins for good, the line in question contributes to an ongoing theological commentary on the mysterious relationship between free will and divine providence.36 Given the metrical problems here, however, and the fact that the poet seems to be following the narrative in the Vulgate extremely closely otherwise, manuscript P’s rejection of the line altogether may ultimately be preferred to V or T with the consequence that this potential insight is discarded and that the transition to the speaker of the following lines is abrupt and unclear.

The confession that Jonah gives in lines 74-6, whether inspired by the Holy Spirit or not, marks the climax of the poem. The anaphora of ego in line 74 symbolizes the shouldering of responsibility hitherto denied. No longer is there doubt about the verdict of the lots drawn in lines 63-4. The audience of the poem, familiar with Jonah’s backstory, knows immediately that the lots did not lie when they indicated the prophet’s guilt – a fact which is noted in line 64 (nec sors metitur Ionam) – but the members of the ship’s crew do not receive confirmation until this moment. And when Jonah finally admits his guilt, he does not simply describe himself as the cause of the storm as he does in the Vulgate account (scio enim ego quoniam propter me tempestas grandis haec super vos); rather he goes so far as to identify himself as the storm itself: “Behold! I am the storm. I am the whole madness of the world” (En ego tempestas, ego tota insania mundi). This statement, while conveying the obvious sentiment that Jonah is responsible for the storm, also alludes to the perversion within Jonah (which he now verbally acknowledges) caused by the juxtaposition of profugum and the famulum in lines 66-69. He has torn himself in two different directions by opposing his own will with that of God and has thereby made himself into a sort of tempestas.

Anaphora with personal pronouns again in lines 75 and 76 reinforces the emphasis on Jonah’s guilt, but here, the repetition contains slightly different nuances and is inevitably lost in English translation. The first instance of in me conveys a sense of literal direction – Jonah

35 Jonah 1:12. 36 C.f. discussion of per signa dei (de Iona, 26) on page 32 and of an ratio est, quod agit sancto de corde prophetes (de Iona, 22) in footnote 29


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perceives himself as the target against whom the natural elements converge. Jonah states, “Toward me, the sky rushes downward and the sea rises upward for you” (in me…vobis aether ruit et mare surgit). Here again is the apocalyptic image of the degradation of creation back into Chaos; the juxtaposition of me and vobis poignantly reminds the audience of the innocent lives who have been unwillingly complicated in Jonah’s crime. On the other hand, the second use of in me expresses a more causal relationship to the storm. Jonah states “because of me, land is far off, death is near at hand, there is no hope of God,” (in me terra procul, mors proxima, nulla dei spes). Asyndeton and the tricolon structure of this phrase form an attractive, poetic image quite contrary to the terrifying reality being described – the safety of land is procul (“far off”) while the horrors of death are personified as proxima (“near at hand”). Finally, after repeating these personal pronouns and dramatically shouldering guilt and responsibility, Jonah concludes that, because of his disobedience, God will have no mercy (nulla dei spes). He falls into what sometimes is considered the greatest of all sins – despair.

Jonah’s subsequent request that the crew throw him into the sea is a slight expansion of the Vulgate’s version that also neatly references an earlier part of the de Iona. In lines 77-78, Jonah cries: “you had better cast headlong the cause and, lightening the ship, throw off this one, great burden who wills it” (quin date praecipitem causam, navemque levantes / unum onus hoc magnum pelage iactate volentem). By contrast, his words in the Vulgate are simply: “pick me up and throw me into the sea and then the sea will calm for you” (tollite me et mittite in mare et cessabit mare a vobis). The Carmen de Iona version captures the entire meaning of this line in the Vulgate but it also looks back precisely 30 lines earlier to 47 and 48: “they seize everything and throw overboard their goods and every burden, struggling to overcome the dangers by means of these losses” (egregie rapiunt, tum merces atque onus omne / praecipitant certantque pericula vincere damnis). Jonah has compared himself subtly here to the merces (“goods”) that had been carried in the hull of the ship until the crew cast them overboard in the hopes of lightening the ship. He objectifies himself and offers to take the place of those goods volentem (“willingly”) – despite the fact that the damnis (“losses”) cannot be recovered again. Jonah considers himself to be the true onus – in a theological sense – that is sinking the ship.


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CONCLUSION

The unfortunate fact that the Carmen de Iona is unfinished may present itself as an obstacle to readers’ appreciation of the poem, especially considering that Christ’s own discussion of the “sign of Jonah” in Matt. 12:38-40 depends primarily upon the parts of the biblical Book of Jonah which are not discussed in the poem. Christ prophesizes His own death and resurrection by explaining that “just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Nevertheless, the poem undoubtedly enriches the biblical narrative through its artistic retelling and illumination of new interpretative possibilities. Moreover, its poetic rendition makes the text a valuable and impressive work in and of itself.

The genre of biblical epic and its imitative nature demonstrate the truth in that counter-intuitive idea that forms and boundaries can in fact increase creativity and, particularly in the poetic realm, can enhance the beauty of language. The biblical epic necessarily confines its narrative to the most familiar stories – those of the Bible and those that define classical epic, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and to the familiar metrical form of dactylic hexameter. The simple school exercise of the paraphrase, through which a young child learns to compose Latin or Greek poetry by re-working the texts of the masters, is the fundamental tool used in the composition of biblical epic. But, as the Carmen de Iona demonstrates, it is within these constraints that creativity thrives and countless windows, never before noticed, are suddenly thrown open to the reader. Thus creativity cannot be defined by a pure newness or originality, but rather by a creation of some beauty which finds its source and inspiration in what is most familiar.


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ONOR MURPHY graduated in 2017 with a double major in history and

political science. With the help of a research grant to the National Baseball Hall of

Fame and Museum, he wrote his honors history thesis under the advisement of Prof.

Dan Graff and the additional valuable guidance of Profs. Paul Ocobock and

Rebecca McKenna. On campus, he was a proud four-year resident of Siegfried Hall, where

he helped lead the Ramblers' B2 basketball team to zero wins and one tie in two years. In the

fall he will matriculate at the University of Delaware to study for his master's in history in the

Hagley Program in Capitalism, Technology and Culture.

C

The Baseball War:

The Federal League, Organized Baseball, and the Battle for the National Pastime

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ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the so-called "Baseball War" that raged from 1913 to 1915, framing it

as a discrete case study to help forge a link between baseball and ideas of leisure, labor,

business, and American identity. The turn of the twentieth century saw “Organized Baseball”

management consolidate power over its players and over would-be competitor leagues. The

Federal League, however, sprung up in defiance of Organized Baseball's monopoly, and the

ensuing clash for supremacy roiled the baseball-loving nation. While nominally the two

leagues struggled for primacy via legal and procedural means, the sentimental myth attached

to baseball charged this conflict with import beyond questions of management-labor relations

and intra-industry competition. The outpouring of passionate opinion generated by the war

elucidated how closely baseball, and the virtues imputed to it, was woven into the fabric of

American identity, and how a debate ostensibly on the business structure of the sport

morphed into a referendum on America's values. This thesis concludes that while the Federal

League likely had a legitimate legal case against Organized Baseball, its quest for primacy

was derailed by the prevailing belief that an attack on the baseball establishment was an

attempt to poison the irreproachable national pastime and therefore the entire well of virtuous

American exceptionalism. In other words, the Baseball War cut to the heart of the bundle of

notions that formed the concept of America.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many hands helped shape this project. My parents have provided me love and support as well

as a terrific education. Mr. Joseph Carmichael helped spark my love of American history.

Professor Paul Ocobock first believed in my ability to write a thesis. Professor Daniel Graff,

my advisor, was instrumental in providing direction and lent a critical eye to my many drafts.

Without a generous undergraduate research grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the

Liberal Arts I would not have been able to access the archive that was so critical to my

thorough understanding of this topic. The archivists at the National Baseball Hall of Fame

Library were more than helpful in their preparation of the documents I requested. This thesis

would not have been possible without the help of those listed and many others. Thank you.

The Baseball War:


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INTRODUCTION

The year is 1915. A continent is engulfed by a war that seems bent on destroying all that is

held in reverence. Raids are met by fervent resistance. Counteroffensives are launched and

then beaten back. Spies silently creep behind enemy lines. Peace settlements are proposed

then discarded. A venerated old order seems to be on the precipice of disintegration.

The year is 1915 and the continent is North America. While the First World War is raging in

Europe, America is engaged in a conflict of its own. The United States may not have

formally entered the First World War until 1917, but from 1913 to 1915 Americans, without

guns, tanks, or poison gas, are battling over the fate of their beloved national pastime,

baseball.

This is not to say that a baseball quarrel was on par with a gruesome war that left millions

dead. Rather, it is to illustrate that the conflict dominating the baseball world was seen as

more than a dispute between differing opinions; it was war, and its outcome could have

implications on America’s image. In what contemporaries dubbed the “Baseball War,” a

rebellious upstart clashed with an entrenched behemoth. Sportswriters littered their columns

with evocative martial language. The rivals raided each other’s players. Bold declarations

were treated as if blasts from artillery. Clubs invaded cities. Even the man tasked with

adjudicating between the warring factions in the courtroom was named after a Civil War

battlefield.

On one side of the war was Organized Baseball, the umbrella under which fell nearly all

viable professional baseball leagues, including the two recognized as major leagues. In the

other corner was the Federal League, the challenger to Organized Baseball’s supremacy. The

Federal League yearned to become a major league, but not if it had to play by Organized

Baseball’s rules. For the Baseball War was more than just a fight over how many major

leagues there should be. It was a battle over the very organizational structure of the sport

itself, one whose main features had more or less been in place for decades. Sportswriters

were not necessarily coming out of left field when they described the struggle as a war. The

Federal League invaded cities that already had major league teams. Organized Baseball hired

undercover investigators to spy on their rivals. The Federal League challenged and then

flouted the provision perhaps most responsible for Organized Baseball’s dominance, and in

what they hoped to be their coup de grace, even put their nemesis on trial in federal court.

While the Federal League shook up the baseball world with its mixture of bravado and pluck,

it did not win the war. Buffeted by oceans of red ink and Organized Baseball’s institutional

advantages, the insurgents finally capitulated in late 1915 and failed in their quest to become

a prosperous, accepted major league. The sport’s structure was not overturned and Organized

Baseball regained its dominance. For two years, though, baseball had experienced significant

turbulence.


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This was more than a conflict between rival business interests, though. The popular reaction

to the war transcended commentary on baseball statistics or ledger sheets and cut to the heart

of the very concept of America. Baseball was seen to edify the national character. As a

pastime that imbued a moral rectitude in its participants, steered them away from avenues of

dissipation, maintained fit and healthy bodies, and served as a badge of national pride, there

could be no better representative for an early twentieth century nation. Americans had always

maintained they were different from and superior to the powers of Europe and baseball was a

prime vessel for the expression of that exceptionalism.

An attack on baseball, then, could be considered an assault on America and its ideals. The

sport of baseball was so closely entwined with Americans’ concept of their country that any

act committed during the war that seemed to besiege cherished American values was treated

as a threat to the purity of America itself. When the Federal League broke Organized

Baseball contracts in order to sign players, they were bringing dishonesty to the game.

Ballplayers disregarding their written agreements moving from one team to the next in search

of better salaries were not seen to be doing so for legitimate concerns of financial security.

They were considered disloyal, tainting the national pastime with a patina of avarice and

caprice. The Baseball War was not only disrupting baseball, a salutary enterprise, but it was

also corrupting American virtue. If the sport’s integrity fell to the withering Federal assault

and left baseball a desiccated, amoral shell of its former self, America and its ideals would

similarly turn into hollow platitudes. America might not be any better than the powers

mowing each other down across the Atlantic.

Many other scholars have noted the linkage of baseball to ideas of America. Historian Steven

Riess argues that in the early twentieth century baseball was perceived as an embodiment of

old American values that animated the founding of the republic and its expansion into the

frontier. The old frontier had passed away, but baseball was seen to carry forward the hardy

American ethic of yesteryear.1 Baseball could cultivate strong twentieth century citizens in

the traditional American mold. In a country flooded by massive waves of immigration,

baseball was seen to be an ideal agent of assimilation.2 It could imbue immigrants with

traditional American values, stripping new arrivals of their strange Old World heritages and

ensuring the survival of the distinct American culture and character.

Much of the mythology surrounding baseball, though, was just that: myth. The sport was not

exactly the moral exemplar it purported to be. In his book Baseball in the Garden of Eden:

The Secret History of the Early Game, John Thorn avers that those involved with the early

development of baseball in the nineteenth century deliberately concocted an aura of gentility

1 Steven A. Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era

(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 223. 2 Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana, IL:

University of Illinois Press, 1989), 84.

The Baseball War:


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and moral rectitude around the sport, seeking to create a mythos for an American secular

religion.3 As baseball in the late nineteenth century was marred by gambling scandals and

ballplayers’ indecorous conduct its image needed to be tidied up. Thorn acknowledges

gambling’s role in helping to elevate the game to one of national popularity, but he maintains

that it was seen to be a national pastime due largely to its ability to, despite its warts,

“symbolize all that was good in American life.”4 Riess agrees with Thorn that baseball’s

image was a cultural fiction manipulated to appeal to its conscientious audience. During an

uncertain age of rapid change and an evolving national demographic, Americans craved a

game that hearkened back to purer, simpler times. They believed in a game that embodied a

pastoral idyll in an industrial urban age. Baseball was not a pastoral idyll; it was a city game

more than anything else and had its fair share of unsavory characters. But Americans desired

a wholesome narrative and those in the media obliged them by crafting idealized depictions

of the national pastime.5

Warren Goldstein posits that the language used by early baseball club owners and executives

to refer to the players shaped popular feeling about the sport. He argues in Playing for Keeps:

A History of Early Baseball that owners, “[r]ather than appeal[ing] to the ideology of

capitalist business … appealed to familial feeling.”6 Framing baseball as a pastime or family

rather than a business was a conscious effort to separate the sport from labor. By portraying

ballplayers as “boys in the man’s world of salaries, contracts, lawyers, and big business”

owners were able to exercise their power over the players.7 Whenever ballplayers stepped

“out of line” in demands for better salary or more freedom, owners could count on the public

being on their side, as ballplayers would be treated as unruly children who had dared to defy

their wise fathers. The emotional language of the game that endears it to fans has also

hindered ballplayers’ workplace agency. Goldstein uses strong language to describe the

baseball workplace, likening it to a “benign plantation, or perhaps a company town.”8 Those

who played baseball professionally most certainly worked; they labored to earn a salary.

However, the owners’ paternalist attitude reduced ballplayers to boys playing a game. The

owners could better promulgate their view to the public through the press, so the popular

American view grew to equate baseball with wholesome play, not wearying labor.

The historiography of early baseball grants keen insights into the sport’s relation to American

culture. None of these scholars, though, give more than a cursory glance to the Federal

League. Riess, whose book Touching Base is entirely about baseball in the Progressive Era,

3 John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2011), xii. 4 Ibid., 195. 5 Riess, Touching Base, 228. 6 Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1989), 153. 7 Ibid., 152. 8 Ibid., 150.


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devotes a scant two paragraphs to the Federal League’s challenge of Organized Baseball, an

event which was arguably the defining episode of Progressive Era baseball. The Baseball

War, remarkably controversial in its time and consequential in its legacy, has faded from the

American memory and the field of history. Books and journal articles have been written

about the Federal League’s insurgency, but their primary focus has been the play on the field,

the chronological narrative, or legal interpretations of the Federal League’s lawsuit.9 While

valuable resources for learning the mundane details of the conflict., these works are largely

devoid of any exploration of its historical context or its cultural significance.

The Baseball War offers a defined window through which to view the public sentiment on

baseball’s relationship to virtue and to nation. Newspapers’ sports sections daily spun stories

of what appeared to be vice seeping into the purity of the national game. At a time when it

was more important than ever for Americans to distinguish themselves from their warring

European cousins, a shining emblem of their ideals was in the midst of its own war. The

Baseball War was perhaps the greatest challenge the sport had yet faced. Baseball’s glory

and all the upright principles it stood for seemed to be at stake. If the national game could

succumb to the advances of greed, disloyalty, and dishonesty, then who could tell what was

to come of the moral fiber and international image of America as a whole. In short, by

amalgamating questions of business, labor, virtue, and nation into one episode, the Baseball

War offers a discrete case study through which this thesis will analyze the marriage of

baseball and America.

By examining contemporary press reports, legal documents, and the words of ballplayers and

magnates, the following chapters will delve deeper into the war and the way it was viewed by

contemporaries. As the conflict has fallen into obscurity, Chapter One will sketch a

chronological narrative of the development of baseball to 1913, the ascent of the Federal

League, the war, and its aftermath. Chapter Two will engage the themes of business and

labor and how Americans’ idealized conception of baseball’s integrity contradicted the

sport’s stark realities. Lastly, Chapter Three will explore why the Baseball War elicited so

many impassioned defenses of baseball. It will postulate that the linking of baseball and

American identity, carefully cultivated over many decades, heightened the gravity of the

Federal League’s incursion and the outcome of the conflict. At stake was more than a game’s

internal organization; a national institution and the ideals it represented seemed to hang in the

balance.

9 For a detailed day-to-day account of the play on the field during the Baseball War, see: Robert Peyton

Wiggins, The Federal League of Baseball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-1915.

(Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009). For a history focused more on the behind-the-scenes dealings

of the magnates, see: Daniel R. Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball

(Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2014). For a legal analysis of the Federal League’s antitrust lawsuit

against Organized Baseball, see: Nathaniel Grow, Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball’s Antitrust

Exemption (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

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CHAPTER ONE

“IT IS A MERRY WAR”: BASEBALL IN CONFLICT

The upstart Federal League’s challenge of the primacy of the Organized Baseball major

leagues from 1913 to 1915 was not unique; leagues had sprung up and died off with

regularity throughout baseball’s history. The challenge posed by this "outlaw league,"

though, proved to be the most formidable the major leagues had faced in at least a decade and

the last serious one Organized Baseball would ever encounter. Despite the fact that the

Federal League ceased to exist after 1915, its short yet turbulent lifespan rocked baseball to

its core. In order to understand the significance of the Baseball War it is necessary to first

outline the history of baseball to 1913, the events that transpired from 1913 and 1915 that set

the baseball world and the nation ablaze, and the war’s aftermath. The main issues that

animated the war, namely questions of monopoly and players’ rights, will help explain why it

sparked such spirited discussions of baseball and its place in American culture.10

I. Baseball to 1913

While games similar to baseball have been played for hundreds of years in America, the

sport’s founding is typically dated to 1845, when Alexander Cartwright organized its first

written rules in Hoboken, New Jersey.11 It quickly spread across the country, becoming

nationally popular by the end of the 1860s.12 Originally rooted in a spirit of amateurism,

baseball began to shake off its nonprofessional trappings in the Civil War decade and turned

decisively toward professionalism in 1869 when the Cincinnati Red Stockings fielded the

first club composed entirely of salaried players.13 The first national professional baseball

league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, soon followed.14 The

NAPBBP governed the rapidly growing sport and as its name suggests was controlled largely

by the players. The NAPBBP, though, suffered from loose organization, corruption, and

instability.15 As baseball’s popularity soared and the potential for increasing profits became

apparent, club owners sought to wrest control of the game away from the players.

In 1876, several NAPBBP club owners formed the National League of Professional Baseball

Clubs (NL), which was more centrally organized and, as the name suggests, structured for

the benefit of the club owners rather than that of the players.16 To gain complete control of

10 The terms “ballplayer” and “player” will be used interchangeably throughout this thesis. There is no

substantive difference in meaning between the terms – both will be used in order to avoid repetition. 11 Though the notion of Cartwright “inventing” baseball is disputed, it is generally accepted that he played an

important role in the development of the game of baseball from its more primitive forebears. 12 Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, 72. 13 Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, 103. 14 Baseball was spelled as two words at that time. 15 Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 159. 16 Ibid., 161.


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the game and combat the instability rampant in the still-fledgling league, in 1879 club owners

inserted a clause in players’ contracts that bound the player to his club for one year after the

expiration of his contract. Known as the reserve clause, it was used by owners to effectively

tie a player to a club for perpetuity unless the owner traded or released him.17 Garry

Herrmann, a central player in the Federal League drama to come, claimed in 1915 that the

“principal purpose of [the reserve clause] is…the maintenance of the game’s popularity with

patrons by permitting teams to retain their players from season to season at salaries amicably

agreed upon, and enabling the clubs in smaller cities to maintain their teams.”18 Indeed,

Herrmann continued, the reserve clause was a “prominent factor in the success and stability

of professional baseball” as it propped up the faltering league by stabilizing its constituent

clubs.19 The best players could not all sign with the richest clubs that offered the highest

salaries and leave the poorer, small city clubs in tatters. While proving to be a steadying force

for professional baseball, the reserve clause also unmistakably tilted baseball’s balance of

power toward management. The player had lost the struggle for control of the baseball

workplace.20

Players bridled under the strictures of the reserve clause, feeling that they had precious little

leverage to seek a raise in pay or the opportunity to play for a club of their choosing. In 1890,

many of them, including star performers, formed a breakaway league called the Players’

League that challenged the NL for supremacy.21 While the players’ gambit failed after one

season, the hatred for the reserve clause did not die.

The National League, operating under a “National Agreement” that all professional leagues

and their constituent teams were obliged to adopt, had entrenched its position as “Organized

Baseball’s” preeminent professional league by 1900. It was not without weaknesses, though.

The NL held a reputation for allowing a rowdy, brawling, almost dangerous brand of

baseball, which, when combined with anticlimactic pennant races, drove down attendance

and created an opportune moment for another league to emerge.22 The American League

(AL) bolted in through the NL’s unguarded back door. Though founded as a minor league in

1900, the AL challenged the NL as a major league the next year. Priding itself on its

enforcement of a clean game, the AL made inroads into the NL’s supremacy.23 Seeing the

adverse effect the competition was having on its finances, the NL agreed in 1903 to

recognize the AL as an equal major league partner and crafted a new National Agreement

17 Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, 149. 18Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 9, affidavit of Garry

Herrmann. 19 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 9, affidavit of Garry

Herrmann. 20 Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, 150. 21 Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 239. 22 Ibid., 255-260. 23 Ibid., 246.

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that provided for a World Series championship and governance of the sport by a National

Commission. Organized Baseball was now composed of two recognized major leagues.

The NL-AL accord cleaned up Organized Baseball to a considerable degree. Betting

“remained a constant feature of the game,” despite league and municipal anti-gambling

statutes, but players behaved with much more decorum on the field.24 Major league

attendance grew substantially and baseball’s popularity and profitability resumed its general

upward march through the first years of the new century.25 By 1913 the NL and AL had

successfully cornered the market on major league baseball. They exercised considerable

control over the professional minor leagues and were faced with fewer and fewer challenges

to their supremacy. Club owners and the league presidents controlled baseball, while players’

rights and salaries were severely curtailed by the reserve clause. It was in this milieu that the

Federal League arose.

II. “This League Should be Sneezed at…”

A baseball war could not have been foreseen in February 1913 when the Federal League was

founded in an Indianapolis law office.26 The league was formed as an outlaw league outside

of the auspices of the National Agreement, the governing rules of organized baseball. Most

Organized Baseball grandees dismissed the league as a foolhardy venture that would soon

collapse, as so many other incipient minor leagues and would-be major league competitors

had done in the recent past. The new minor league, composed of six teams grounded in

midsize, Midwestern cities, initially posed little threat to the National and American Leagues.

Federal League clubs struggled to compete with the quality of play offered by Organized

Baseball minor league clubs, to say nothing of the major league outfits, resulting in poor

attendance and financial distress. 27 It appeared the Federal League might be just another

league that flitted out of existence almost as soon as it was established.

But in spite of the Federal League’s tumultuous inaugural season, some Organized Baseball

officials foresaw a dangerous enemy rising in their midst.28 Bob Quinn, an OB minor league

executive, wrote to Ban Johnson, the powerful president of the American League, on May

29, 1913 to express his fears about the new league. He claimed he was “not an alarmist, but I

24 Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 287. 25 Riess, Touching Base, 14. 26 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Baseball Magazine,

“Is There Room for a Third Big League?,” date likely sometime in 1914. The press reports accessed from this

archive are mostly clippings of newspaper articles. Many do not list a source or date. When no date is given, the

author does his best to surmise the general timeframe from the article’s context. 27 Daniel R. Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball (Lanham, MD: Taylor

Trade Publishing, 2014), 39. 28 For the sake of concision, from this point on I will often refer to Organized Baseball as “OB” and the Federal

League as the “Federals.” Both abbreviations were used by the historical actors and are not inventions of the

author.


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really do believe that this league should be sneezed at…A little attention to the matter now

might save a lot of trouble later on.”29 Quinn’s letter was passed on to Garry Herrmann, the

chairman of the National Commission that governed Organized Baseball and the owner of

the National League’s Cincinnati Reds. Herrmann, a flashy, gregarious scion of the

Cincinnati Republican political machine30, scoffed at Quinn’s distress, calling his

information “certainly not reliable” and proclaiming “I am of the opinion that the league will

soon collapse.”31 The National Commission, composed of Herrmann, Johnson, and National

League President John Tener, continued to express confidence in the hegemonic power of the

OB major leagues. Johnson and Herrmann admitted that the Federal League might pose a

threat to several of the dozens of OB minor leagues, but the major leagues appeared

invulnerable.32

Around the same time that Johnson - the dour, haughty, autocratic founder of the American

League33- wrote to Herrmann that the “Federal League at this period cannot create any

anxiety among the club owners of the Major Leagues,” the Federals took actions that put

Johnson’s optimism to the test.34 James Gilmore, an affable, enthusiastic sales professional,

ascended to the Federal League presidency midway through the 1913 season and went on the

offensive. The new leader declared in August 1913 that the Federal League would henceforth

compete as a major league in defiance of the National Agreement.35 The Federals expanded

from six to eight clubs for the 1914 season, invaded the major league metropolises of

Brooklyn, Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, and touted newly-recruited wealthy owners.

Organized Baseball could no longer dismiss the upstart outlaws.

III. Defiance and War

The Federals meant business for the 1914 season. Clubs scrambled to erect new ballparks

befitting major league teams, the most famous being Weeghman Park in Chicago, known

today as Wrigley Field. In order to be a true major league, however, the Federal League

needed major league-caliber ballplayers. To acquire that level of talent, the Federals deemed

it necessary to sign players from NL and AL clubs. In the period between the 1913 and 1914

29 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 2, National Commission

correspondence. 30 John Saccoman, “Garry Herrmann,” Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) BioProject,

https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/d72a4b39. 31 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 2, National Commission

correspondence. 32 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 2, National Commission

correspondence, letter from Ban Johnson to Garry Herrmann, Aug. 2, 1913. 33 Joe Santry and Cindy Thomson, “Ban Johnson,” Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) BioProject,

https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/dabf79f8. 34 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 2, National Commission

correspondence, letter from Ban Johnson to Garry Herrmann, Aug. 2, 1913. 35 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle That Forged Modern Baseball, 43.

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seasons the upstarts wooed fifty major league players to their standard.36 With a few

exceptions, such as future Hall of Famers Joe Tinker and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown,

these players were not star performers. However, the fact that the upstarts could pilfer

legitimate major leaguers showed that the Federal League was a serious competitor. The

Federals had fired a warning shot across the bow of Organized Baseball when they declared

their intent to compete as a major league; the initiation of player raids signified war had

commenced.

Organized Baseball was game for the fight. As the Federals continued to induce players to

jump during the 1914 season, OB clubs worked to lure their players back, often turning to the

courts to nullify Federal League contracts signed by OB players. At the heart of the matter

was the reserve clause, the stipulation that had been written into Organized Baseball

contracts since the 1880 season. Not seriously challenged since 1890, the reserve clause

would become the target of the aggressive Federals. The Federals treated any player kept to

his team by only the reserve clause as a free agent eligible for acquisition, for if the reserve

clause were unlawful, every player would be a free agent after his contract expired and free

to dispose of his services where he wished. Cases regarding the reserve clause were brought

before several courts. The results were mixed; some judges found the clause to be legally

binding while others did not.37 As these courts did not have jurisdiction over the entire

country the reserve clause continued to live on in legal limbo. The Federals continued their

raids.

Federal League clubs initially ignored players under OB contract, restricting their targets to

players tethered to their OB clubs only by the reserve clause. They hoped that by respecting

OB contracts, OB would reciprocate with respect for Federal League contracts.38 It was a

false hope. OB clubs disregarded Federal League contracts and reacquired players they had

lost to the Federals. Gilmore had hoped for some kind of accommodation with Organized

Baseball, but its contempt for Federal contracts dashed any thoughts of compromise in the

headstrong Federal leader. Gilmore declared to the press that it would be “war to the end”

and permitted Federal League clubs to sign players under OB contract, especially those

whose contract contained the legally murky “ten-day clause,” whereby a team could release a

player with ten days notice.39 OB contracts would no longer be respected by Gilmore and the

Federals. Full-scale conflict had erupted.

36 Nathaniel Grow, Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption (Urbana, IL: University of

Illinois Press, 2014), 25. 37 See the cases of Bill Killefer and Hal Chase for examples of courts ruling the reserve clause invalid. See the

case of Chief Johnson for an instance where the court ruled in favor of Organized Baseball contracts. 38 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 92. 39 Ibid,, 104.


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IV. “Isn’t Worth a Chew of Tobacco”

The 1914 baseball season was a disaster from the perspective of club owners in both

Organized Baseball and the Federal League, as the hot conflict wreaked havoc on the

finances of clubs from all three leagues. The Federal League clubs continued their assault on

major league rosters, enticing numerous players to cross over. Organized Baseball clubs,

their blood up, responded by continuing to take their Federal League counterparts to court for

their alleged misdeeds. As the Federal League offered higher salaries as incentive for OB

players to jump, OB clubs were compelled to also raise their players’ salaries to retain their

services and their loyalty. Major league attendance fell by as much as 30% from 1913 as the

Federal League clubs located in major league cities stole fans from their OB counterparts.40

Fans not lost to the Federals waned in their support of OB clubs because they tired of the

constant barrage of legal and financial news overshadowing the performance on the field. In

the days before massive advertising and television contracts, baseball clubs drew nearly all of

their revenue from ticket sales.41 In the preceding decade or so major league teams could

reliably expect to make money, with some clubs surpassing $100,000 in annual profits.42

However, evaporating gate receipts, coupled with the rising costs of player salaries and legal

fees, spelled doom for almost all clubs in 1914, as virtually every major and minor league

club lost money.43 George Stallings, whose “Miracle” Boston Braves won the 1914 World

Series after being in last place the first half of the season, complained that the average major

league club lost $500-$1,000 a week, quipping that a “major league franchise today isn’t

worth a chew of tobacco.”44 Similarly, in August of 1914 Gilmore acknowledged that the

Federal League could lose $200,000 for the season, the equivalent of nearly $5 million today.

Still, he crowed that Organized Baseball found itself in a similar predicament and that his

league had proved it was a major league.45

Magnates from all three leagues recognized the severe toll the Baseball War was exacting on

their clubs and agreed to negotiate for peace. Back-channel bargaining produced a tentative

agreement whereby the wealthiest Federal League owners would be permitted to purchase

OB major league clubs while the other Federal clubs would be amalgamated into the high-

level OB minor leagues.46 Most baseball officials “believed that peace was at hand.”47 When

the Federal League tried to make a deal on more advantageous terms, however, the pact fell

40 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 145. 41 Ibid., 31. 42 Ibid., 31. 43 Grow, Baseball on Trial, 62. 44 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, source unknown,

date likely summer of 1914. 45 Ibid., source unknown, Aug. 25, 1914. Inflation statistic calculated using the United States Department of

Labor’s CPI inflation calculator. 46 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 156. 47 Ibid., 157.

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through. The war would continue. Daniel R. Levitt contends that “[i]n retrospect, neither side

had yet suffered enough to reach a settlement.”48 Each side had enough resources to weather

another year of war.

As the calendar flipped to 1915 the Baseball War had not yet been resolved and no end was

in sight. The Federals, however, had one more trick up their sleeve to secure their place as a

major league. The leagues had been fighting over legal cases regarding individual players for

the past year, but those were small potatoes compared to the Federal League’s audacious new

plan: to haul Organized Baseball into court. Baseball itself was to be put on trial.

V. War by Another Means

On January 5, 1915 the Federal League rang in the New Year with a bang, filing a suit

against Organized Baseball in United States District Court alleging that OB was a trust in

restraint of trade. In its bombshell lawsuit the Federals petitioned the court to void the

National Agreement, invalidate all player contracts made under that agreement, and order OB

clubs to cease taking Federal League clubs to court over individual players. They requested

that the court order a preliminary injunction to prevent OB clubs from tampering with players

under contract with Federal League clubs until the lawsuit could be adjudicated on its

merits.49

Even in an era replete with high-profile “trust busting”, the Federal League’s charges were

dynamite and set the nation abuzz. Newspapers across the country blared sensational

headlines despite baseball season still being months away. The editors of the Philadelphia

Inquirer delighted in headlining the newspaper’s sports section with “Some War-like Chatter

to Warm Up Old Baseball World Before Summer Comes Again.”50 Even the newspapers of

cities where major league baseball had not yet penetrated, such as New Orleans and Portland,

Oregon, carried the wire report that exclaimed the “Federal League today fired its heaviest

gun” in a move that “threatens the entire fabric of organized baseball.”51 This was no

ordinary antitrust lawsuit. It was one thing for an oil monopoly to be branded as a trust, but it

was another thing entirely for the beloved national pastime to be frontally assaulted.

Amidst the hubbub generated by the headline-grabbing lawsuit, National Commission

Chairman Herrmann worked to compile what he believed to be exonerating evidence from

major league club owners. Herrmann, despite private doubts about the legality of the reserve

48 Ibid., 160. The Federals also sought other more minor redresses, including a request that the court forbid

Organized Baseball from impugning the Federal League in the press. 49 Grow, Baseball on Trial, 68. 50 Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 6, 1915. 51 Boston Journal, New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Morning Oregonian, Jan. 6, 1915.


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clause and the ten-day clause52, publicly welcomed the chance to take the case on its merits,

convinced that this would be the ultimate battle that would vindicate Organized Baseball.53

OB would defend itself against the Federals’ charges by arguing that baseball and its players

were not engaged in interstate commerce.54 As all involved wished to adjudicate the matter

before baseball season, the hearing was scheduled for January 20, a mere fifteen days after

the lawsuit was filed.

The eyes of the country were fixed on Chicago as the hearing for The Federal League of

Professional Baseball Clubs v. The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, et al.

convened on the prescribed day. Presiding over the case was Judge Kenesaw Mountain

Landis, a histrionic, hot-tempered jurist who had a reputation of being tough on trusts.55

Interestingly, though, Organized Baseball executives anticipated Landis to rule in their favor,

as Landis was reputed to be a “dyed-in-the-wool” baseball fan who attended many Chicago

Cub games.56 Arguments were heard for four days before a packed courthouse and a giddy

press corps. At the hearing’s close, given the eagerness of all parties to resolve legal

proceedings before spring, most observers expected Landis to expeditiously deliver his

decision on the Federal League’s petition for a temporary injunction. Landis, though,

appeared to be in no hurry and withheld a verdict for weeks that turned into months.

VI. 1915 – The Futility of War

The war continued in the absence of a legal decision. The Federal League and Organized

Baseball continued to engage in player raids and counter-raids, with scores more players,

including future Hall of Famers Eddie Plank and Chief Bender, jumping to the outlaws in the

1915 offseason. President Gilmore recruited wealthy oil tycoon Harry Sinclair to buy the

Federal League’s sputtering Indianapolis franchise and move it to Newark, New Jersey.57

The bold move put another club (to join the one in Brooklyn) in the metropolitan area of the

nation’s largest city and another challenger on the doorstep of major league territory. Now,

all but three Federal League clubs shared a city with one or two established major league

clubs. The addition of the Newark market and the proposal to create a Federal minor league

signaled that the outlaws intended to continue the fight. The splashy off-field moves,

however, could not distract owners from an impending financial disaster.

52 Herrmann had so little faith in the ten-day clause’s ability to withstand legal scrutiny that in 1914 he

instructed owners to begin to remove the clause from their player contracts. 53 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 1. 54 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 185. 55 Grow, Baseball on Trial, 68. 56 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 1, letter from C.H. Thomas

to Garry Herrmann, Jan. 11, 1915. 57 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 199.

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The action on the field during the 1915 season, especially as the calendar turned to August

and September, must have thrilled fans. The American League pennant race came down to

the final week while that of the Federal League came down to the final day, with three teams

within a half game of each other. But the financial battle being waged at the turnstiles proved

to be too draining for the three leagues. There were not enough paying customers to be

spread among twenty-four purportedly major league clubs. Oversaturation of the baseball

market and clubs’ proximity to each other spelled financial doom for both OB and Federal

League clubs. Greater New York City now had five clubs claiming to be major league

outfits, Chicago and St. Louis counted three, and smaller cities such as Pittsburgh struggled

under the weight of two. With that many clubs in the same area scheduling conflicts were

inevitable and each club siphoned off fans from the others.

The 1915 attendance figures tells a dismal story. Federal League clubs routinely drew fewer

than 1,000 spectators per game.58 OB clubs did not suffer as badly as they did in 1914 but

were still losing money.59 Many observers complained that a lower quality of baseball was

being played because there were not enough major league-caliber players to span twenty-four

clubs.60 The 1915 season ended much as the 1914 season did. Most clubs posted financial

losses with some suffering severely. Herrmann claimed to have lost $5,400, the equivalent of

over $129,000 today, operating his Cincinnati Reds, while among Federal League clubs only

the champion Chicago Whales could claim to have had success both on the field and in the

ledger book.61 With both Organized Baseball and the Federal League suffering serious

financial losses (and still no ruling from Judge Landis) the urgency to reach an agreement

intensified. All parties understood that the 1916 season would be financially untenable if

hostilities did not cease. The two sides once again convened at the negotiating table.

VII. Peace at Last

Both camps entered negotiations bruised and bloodied, but the Federals’ situation was far

worse. In addition to their severe financial losses, the death of Robert B. Ward, the wealthy

owner of the Brooklyn club who had helped bankroll several of the struggling Federal

League clubs, deprived the Federal League of one of its most vital advocates.62 Both sides

publicly bluffed about the strength of their respective positions and haughtily declared that

the other side would have to come begging for peace, but ultimately neither side got all it

wanted. A settlement was finally agreed to on December 22, 1915. The Federal League

agreed to withdraw its antitrust suit and cease its operations. In exchange, Organized

Baseball agreed to pay Federal League club owners several hundred thousand dollars and

58 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Boxes 102 and 103. 59 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 212. 60 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 122. 61 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 1. Inflation statistic

calculated using the United States Department of Labor’s CPI inflation calculator. 62 Grow, Baseball on Trial, 101.


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allow all Federal League players, managers, and umpires to return to OB clubs without

penalty; that is, they were not blacklisted from the game. In addition, the owners of the

Chicago and St. Louis Federal League clubs were permitted to purchase the Chicago

National League and St. Louis American League franchises, respectively.63 The war had

ended and the Federal League was dead. None of its clubs gained the coveted status of a

stable major league franchise, either within the framework of the National Agreement or

outside it.

The Federal League clubs in Baltimore and Buffalo, though, balked at the terms of the deal.

Both cities considered themselves “major league” and neither was eager to see their chance at

having a major league club fall by the wayside. So, without jeopardizing the agreement, both

continued to independently fight for their inclusion in major league baseball. Buffalo soon

backed down, but Baltimore took its grievances all the way to the United States Supreme

Court in 1922, where the court unanimously ruled in Federal Baseball Club v. National

League that baseball was exempt from antitrust legislation because it was an amusement that

did not constitute interstate commerce.64 The ruling stands to this day.

VIII. Aftermath and Significance

Organized Baseball regained its footing after the Baseball War and consolidated its hold on

the sport. It would never face another serious challenger to its supremacy. As a result of the

1919 Black Sox scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players conspired with gamblers

to throw the World Series, major league owners dissolved the National Commission and

recruited Judge Landis to be the sport’s first commissioner. Landis, vested with extraordinary

power and ruling with an iron fist, unilaterally governed Organized Baseball for twenty-four

years. The reserve clause, the object of so much Federal venom, remained intact. Free agency

would not become a reality in Organized Baseball until 1975. Since 1968, Major League

Baseball has recognized the Federal League as having operated as a major league for the

1914 and 1915 seasons, but by all accounts the outlaw league failed in its bid to become a

stable and prosperous major league.65 In order to succeed as the American League did in

1901 the Federals needed favorable circumstances and some luck. If Judge Landis had ruled

in their favor they may have been able to establish themselves in a new baseball framework.

As it were, Organized Baseball’s strong response to the Federals’ insurgency drove up costs

and prevented the outlaws from acquiring enough major league-caliber players. OB’s strong

initial position and Landis’ silence conspired to kill the Federals’ chances.66

63 Grow, Baseball on Trial, 102. 64 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 261. 65 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, xi. 66 Ibid., 267.

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Though it failed, the Federal League’s foray into major league baseball thrust the question of

baseball’s role in American culture into the national conversation. Especially prevalent was

the worry that greed was infesting the national pastime. Money dominated the coverage of

the Baseball War. The principals involved in the Baseball War essentially fought over how

many rich men could own a major league baseball club. Rising player salaries, dwindling

gate receipts, escalating legal costs – a newspaper reader could not escape talk of money in

baseball. Though Organized Baseball had been in the business of making money for decades,

the apparent newfound reduction of the American game to dollars and cents galled

contemporary commentators. The corruptive power of money had been a watchword of the

Progressive Era. Now it was about to put the integrity of the national pastime to the test.


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CHAPTER TWO

“THERE IS SOMETHING IN BASEBALL BESIDES DOLLARS AND

CENTS”: BASEBALL AS A BENEVOLENT BUSINESS

The finely attired baseball player imperiously called for his chauffeur as he strode out of his

$125,000 home perched on his sprawling country estate. As he took a ride into the city in his

luxurious new automobile he boasted of his massive six-figure salary and haughtily

interacted with the city’s mayor and the president of its largest bank. Finally, after advocating

the striking of wayward pedestrians, he admonished his driver for nearly colliding with a

sports editor, claiming that sportswriters were responsible for ballplayers’ exorbitant salaries.

So went a story from a contemporary newspaper.67 The tongue-in-cheek article opined that if

the Baseball War were still being waged by 1920 ballplayers would be affluent,

sanctimonious prigs who had gained their enormous wealth not by hard work but by playing

a boy’s game.

This vignette illustrates the fear that the Baseball War and the rapacity it engendered would

corrupt the sport’s intrinsic goodness. The country’s increasing urbanization and lurch

toward corporate monopoly in the early twentieth century struck many Americans as

developments that imperiled cherished virtues. In response, conscientious citizens touted

baseball as a prime vehicle for combating moral dissipation and cultivating ethical, robust

values like integrity, diligence, teamwork, and loyalty, into America’s male youth.68 The

Baseball War, however, caused a great number of Americans to worry about the fate of their

beloved pastime. Suddenly, lurid tales of deception and greed, rather than on-field exploits,

filled the headlines of America’s newspapers and charged the conversations of millions of

fans nationwide. Money and its corruptive power seemed to have finagled its way into the

incorruptible pastime. This chapter will explore the extent to which baseball was understood

to be a business and how that affected the public’s perception of ballplayers, the work (or

lack thereof) they performed, and the money they earned. What was ostensibly a dispute

between competing business interests morphed into a referendum on the business itself.

To access the public's perception, this chapter relies on newspapers, magazines, and other

print media. Admittedly, these are inexact barometers of public sentiment, but as the Baseball

War took place before the advent of public polling, such materials are effective sources for

gaining insight into the collective thinking of Americans in the early twentieth century.

Media, as they do today, set the parameters of public dialogue and shaped individual and

popular opinion. So while print media sources might not capture the opinions of all men and

67 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, “In A.D. 1920

(Presuming That the Baseball War Between the Feds and Organized Baseball Is Still Being Waged.),” source

and date unknown. 68 Riess, Touching Base, 223.

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women in the nation, they do reveal the topics that rose to the level of popular discussion and

consumption. The print media serves as the best of the available imperfect lenses through

which to view the popular reaction to the Baseball War.

I. Baseball as Business?

In the period immediately following the Civil War, business in America grew from local

enterprises to sprawling, national conglomerates. As corporations gobbled up smaller

businesses, eliminated competition, and accumulated fantastic wealth during the so-called

“Gilded Age,” government had neither the capacity nor the inclination to effectually rein in

the powerful trusts. But starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century sentiment grew

that the “old political and governmental structures were incapable of meeting the needs of a

new urban-industrial society.”69 Reform impulses swept the nation in the early twentieth

century, a period that has come to be known as the “Progressive Era.” “Public outrage

against the evils of industrialism…set in motion the development of government machinery

to regulate business corporations” and in so doing dramatically widened the scope of

government’s powers and responsibilities.70 Government was given the power and the

mandate to regulate corporate trusts.71 At the time of the Baseball War, government

intervention in private business practice was no longer foreign to the American political

system.

By 1913, Organized Baseball had become a de facto monopoly exercising near-universal

control over the sport. In theory, baseball was an open marketplace. Leagues were not

prevented from springing up outside the aegis of OB, just as players not under contract were

technically free to join a league outside the National Agreement. In practice, though, OB

exercised a stranglehold over the baseball marketplace. The practice of blacklisting, whereby

players who jumped their contract to sign with a team outside the auspices of Organized

Baseball were deemed ineligible to return, served as a deterrent powerful enough to keep OB

leagues as the only real options for enterprising players.72 The threat of the blacklist actively

stifled any competition to OB leagues; there was little incentive for players to jump to a

fledgling league when they knew they could not return to OB in the likely case the new

league disintegrated. As players lacked viable alternatives to the restrictive rules of the

National Agreement, the baseball industry was for all intents and purposes monopolized by a

single entity.

Organized Baseball, however, was not eyed with the same level of suspicion as trusts of

other industries. Prior to the Federal League’s lawsuit, the only attempt by Congress to

69 Arthur S. Link, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983), 28. 70 Ibid., 66. 71 Ibid., 37. 72 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 30.


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regulate baseball came in 1912 when Representative Thomas Gallagher of Illinois proposed

an investigation into Organized Baseball to determine if it was in violation of the Sherman

Antitrust Act. Gallagher’s resolution failed; his contention that OB stifled competition, fixed

prices, artificially capped salaries, and “enslaved” players fell on deaf ears in Congress

because most lawmakers felt “little reason to investigate what they felt was simply a sport.”73

Their response typified the contemporary mainstream thought laid bare by the upcoming

Baseball War: that baseball could not possibly be a malignant monopoly because it was

merely a form of amusement that represented America’s greatest qualities.

Baseball may not have been viewed as a typical monopoly, but that is not to say Americans

were so mawkish as to separate baseball entirely from business. By the time of the Baseball

War one could not seriously deny that baseball was a business. Rising profits and six-figure

club values were not signifiers of a simple, amateur pastime, but rather of an organized

national operation. The Sporting News averred that “every sport has… a governing body, and

a sport that is likewise such a big business is more in need of supervision than other

pastimes.”74 The New York Press echoed a similar sentiment, declaring that “baseball, in

order to succeed, must be conducted exactly the same as any other business.”75 David Fultz,

president of the Baseball Players’ Fraternity, a nascent players’ union, acknowledged that

“[p]rofessional baseball without proper organization and control…would result in complete

disruption of playing and business standards. Such conditions would be the forerunner of

baseball chaos.”76 Baseball in 1914 was almost incomparable to its amateur ancestor a half

century previous. The sport was inextricably linked to money.

But while baseball may have been increasingly understood as business, it also embodied

something more ineffable than a balance sheet. As one newspaper put it, “there is something

in baseball besides dollars and cents – that is sportsmanship… It is the honesty of baseball

that makes it attractive.”77 Baseball was a benevolent business, one whose main ends were

not profit and exploitation but cultivation of Americans’ character. Historian Steven Riess

argues in Touching Base that baseball was perceived to embody values of a bygone, frontier

America that taught fair play, loyalty, local pride, and other wholesome values. As the nation

underwent massive social and economic transformation due to industrialization and

demographic change, baseball offered a haven in which traditional American values could be

safely preserved. Children learned to respect authority by accepting the call of an umpire

with equanimity. A playing field with nine players required teammates to depend on each

other, while at the plate the batter exercised his individual skills in a one-on-one battle with

73 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 29-30. 74 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, The Sporting News,

Jan. 21, 1915. 75 Ibid., New York Press, May 27, 1914. 76 “Fultz Fears Disruption,” Boston Journal, Jan. 6, 1915. 77 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Manassas

Telegraph, date unknown.

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the pitcher, upholding the American tradition of self-reliance. Baseball imprinted values in a

way that a schoolmaster or textbook could not.

Riess posits that the perception of baseball in the early twentieth century was anachronistic;

its mythos did not match its reality. The rules of the game may still have been able to teach

lessons, but the pastoral idyll of baseball was divorced from its actuality by the 1910s. The

only place baseball epitomized rural, traditional America was in its lore. By the time of the

Baseball War, it had become an urban game played mostly by city dwellers and by a growing

number of new immigrants. Baseball, while still played by a large number of old stock, rural

Americans on verdant town commons, was increasingly the game in which city kids with

surnames like McNamara and Wisniewski designated a manhole cover as second base. Still,

Riess maintains that baseball’s pastoral aura held sway over much of the population.78 While

he overplays American’s willful ignorance of baseball as business, Riess’ contention that

baseball was seen to be the protector of national virtue against greed and foreign influences is

largely corroborated by the coverage of the Baseball War.

Coverage of the Federal League varied across the country. It tended to sympathize with the

outlaws in metropolises like Kansas City where the Federal League club was the only

putative major league team. However, in cities like New York that touted major league clubs

before being invaded by the Federals the press tended to side with Organized Baseball. Both

camps actively tried to influence the press in their favor. In the aggregate, though, the Federal

League was attacked for injecting an unseemly amount of avarice into an otherwise salutary

enterprise. In his humorously named column “Hot Snowballs,” the Boston Journal’s R.E.

McMillin lambasted the Federals’ greed, proclaiming that “[n]o business proposition ever

gathered a greater flock of human vultures.”79 The Philadelphia Inquirer railed that the

Federals “seek to destroy that which has been the means of fostering the best interests of the

game…not for the good of baseball but for their own gain.”80 One contemporary cartoon

depicted OB in a boat, oblivious to an impending attack by a Federal League torpedo. 81

Another portrayed the “national pastime” as a ballplayer being pelted by rocks, the most

prominent of which read “Federal lawsuit,” while a third rendered the Federals as a

highwayman training a rifle on Organized Baseball.82 Critics of the Federal League, under

the sway of baseball's amateur myth or OB's patronage, depending on who you asked,

generally overlooked the reality that plenty of money was already in baseball and most of it

found its way into the pockets of the OB magnates. They instead fretted that the pestilence of

cupidity had finally infested the prized pastime. In an era of swift change, the resolute

78 Riess, Touching Base, 228. 79 R.E. McMillin, “Hot Snowballs,” Boston Journal, Jan. 9, 1915. 80“The Old Sport’s Musings,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 25, 1915. 81 “Another Torpedo Attack,” Kansas City Star, Jan. 10, 1915. 82 Jim Nasium, “A Popular Pastime,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 12, 1915.

Jim Nasium, “The Baseball Dick Turpin,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 15, 1915.


209

tradition of baseball and all the values Americans bound up in it appeared to be imperiled by

the Federals’ uprising.

In other words, Americans could accept baseball as a business, but could not stomach the

prospect of it operating like any other trust. The perception of baseball as a business distinct

from and morally superior to all other industries muddied the status of ballplayers. They did

play baseball to make their living, but to call them a labor force seemed preposterous to an

American imagination instilled with the notion of ballplayers as “the boys.” Players might

gripe about their working conditions, but their complaints were scoffed at because

ballplayers were seen to be playing a game that many other Americans would gladly play for

the “sport of the thing.”83 Baseball was business, but not such as its workers could really be

considered labor. The issues raised by the Federal League challenge, namely the legitimacy

of the reserve clause and the players’ general powerlessness, were viewed by the public

through a lens distorted by their idealized notion of baseball as something that transcended

dollars and cents. Baseball’s status as a vessel for American virtue conferred great honor but

also unrealistic expectations on those playing it. The public perception of baseball players

and the work (or lack thereof) they did lends great insight into why the Federal League and

its players attracted so much derision.

II. “I Am Shocked Because You Call Playing Baseball ‘Labor.’”

It is important to distinguish our conception of baseball players today from what they were

over 100 years ago. Usually one of the first associations one makes with a modern day

baseball player is the massive salary he draws. An average major leaguer in 2017 makes

upwards of $4 million per year, outpacing the average American’s income many times

over.84 A contemporary major league ballplayer does not have to pick up a second job in the

offseason to make ends meet and should be able to retire in comfort. The same could not be

said of major leaguers of the 1910s. On the eve of the Baseball War the average starting

player made approximately $3,000 a year, with the legendary Ty Cobb claiming the highest

salary of $12,000 per year.85 Adjusted for inflation, those numbers translate to roughly

$74,000 and $295,000 in today’s money, respectively.86 Major leaguers clearly were not

relegated to penury, but they were also not living in luxury and had little leverage with which

to bargain for a market value. The abbreviated nature of the baseball season meant that many

had to work second jobs in the offseason. Retirement pensions were unheard of. While most

major leaguers earned more than their average fellow Americans, they did not outstrip them

at the astounding pace that players do today. Now, there is much more money to be made in

83 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame, New York Globe, date

unknown. 84 Associated Press, “MLB average salary is $4.38M,” espn.com, Apr. 4, 1916,

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/15126571/study-mlb-average-salary-44m-44-pct-rise. 85 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 61. 86 Inflation statistic calculated using the United States Department of Labor’s CPI inflation calculator.

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baseball in 2017 than there was in 1914. The colossal amount of revenue flowing in from

advertising and television contracts combined with the competitive bidding engendered by

free agency has produced lucrative contracts. The upshot is that when conceptualizing the

early twentieth century ballplayer, one should imagine his standard of living to be more

similar to that of one’s next door neighbor than to that of Alex Rodriguez.

While it is helpful for the current day reader to compare the circumstances of ballplayers past

and present, Americans in 1914 did not have the luxury of peering into the future. They saw

men getting paid handsomely for what they considered to be a pastime. Judge Landis

captured the feeling when he reacted with incredulity upon hearing OB attorney George

Wharton Pepper apply the word “labor” to ballplayers. Landis thundered that “[a]s a result of

thirty years of observation, I am shocked because you call playing baseball ‘labor.’”87 Men

who worked in factories or construction or some other manual trade were engaged in labor.

Ballplayers – well, they played ball. The very appellation of “player” connoted an activity

that fell under the purview of recreation, not work. Laborers toiled in adverse conditions

while ballplayers enjoyed the opportunity to ply their wares in recreational settings. Baseball

was not understood to be labor in the traditional sense but to be merely an activity enjoyed by

millions of Americans. How could ballplayers harbor any complaints while playing a game

they should feel privileged to play and one that brought them fame and a healthy paycheck?

The increased salaries brought about by the Federals’ bidding war dismayed those who

touted baseball’s purity. The sportswriter may have been responsible for the ballplayer’s

handsome earnings in the story that opened this chapter, but most actual sportswriters

publicly decried what they saw to be extravagant ballplayer salaries. The anonymous author

of “The Old Sport’s Musings” column in the Philadelphia Inquirer bristled at the players’

audacity to thumb their nose at Organized Baseball, complaining that “for six months’ effort”

ballplayers make “about ten times as much money as countless numbers of the common

people are glad to get for a whole year’s work.”88 Players already made more than they were

worth, but now the huge piles of cash they were receiving were corrupting their moral fiber.

Reports of exorbitant contracts offered to well-known players like Roger Bresnahan stoked

fears that baseball’s virtue was under siege.89 Jack Ryder of the Cincinnati Enquirer reproved

players for showing “themselves as mercenary businessmen, utterly forgetful of their duty to

their supporters out in the bleachers, whose constant attendance at the games makes their big

salaries possible.”90 James Jerpe of The Sporting News decried ballplayers’ rapacity,

inveighing that the “sporting pages contain enough daily to show of what duplicity some ball

87 “May Throw the Case Out,” Kansas City Star, Jan. 22, 1915. 88 “The Old Sport’s Musings,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 18, 1915. 89 Bresnahan swore in his affidavit that he was offered a three year contract for $50,000 by the Brooklyn

Federal League club, an astounding figure for a player in his mid-thirties on the downside of his career. 90 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cincinnati

Enquirer, Jan. 24, 1915.


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players are capable in the wild scramble to get what they can.” Stronger governance was

necessary to “curb just such a money madness and season of betrayal as at present.”91 The St.

Louis Post-Dispatch’s Ed Wray fumed that the players’ demands were ridiculous and that the

“ball player is putting the screws to the treasuries of the O.B. magnates.”92 The Federal

League, by aggressively courting OB players to jump their contracts for higher salaries,

appeared to have turned those players into wild beasts that sold their services to the highest

bidder with little regard for virtues like honesty and loyalty. Herrmann commented on what

he saw to be the general reaction to the bidding wars of 1914 and 1915, noting that there was

a “widespread impression that the players have subordinated their love of the game and

loyalty to their clubs to mercenary motives.”93 Ballplayers were not supposed to be in the

game for promises of riches. They played because they loved the game and it made them

better men.

Ballplayers’ reckless greed was seen not only to be casting a black shadow on the game’s

reputation but also affecting the play on the field. John McGraw, the tenacious manager of

the National League New York Giants, lamented that “[t]here are more indifferent, lazy ball

players drawing salaries on long term contracts in the big leagues this year than ever before

in the history of the sport.”94 Observers believed that players were resting on their laurels

once they obtained long-term, lucrative contracts, and not giving full effort on the playing

field. Fans were jaded by what they perceived to be players acting disloyally and performing

lackadaisically. Thomas M. Chivington, president of the American Association, an OB minor

league, remarked that “[r]epeated [contract] jumping has disgusted patrons of baseball.”95

Walter St. Denis of the New York Globe wrote that “the fans, after a year of reading about

inflated salaries and contract-jumping, have sickened of the whole affair.” He likely

hyperbolized when he claimed that fans were “on the verge of turning their backs on their

favorite pastime,” but clearly, judging by tumbling attendance numbers and the indignation

directed at the warring factions by the press, Baseball War’s circus-like atmosphere irked the

sport’s patrons. 96

The general perception was that vice was triumphing over virtue in baseball. One newspaper

fulminated that whether one supported the Federals or OB, “no man with real red blood in his

veins has any use for men… [who] have broken their written agreement.” It went on to

castigate the deceitful ballplayers, sermonizing that the “one field of endeavor in which the

91 Ibid., The Sporting News, Jan. 21, 1915. 92 Ibid., St. Louis Post-Dispatch, date unknown. 93 Ibid., Box 106, response of Garry Herrmann to Federal League’s bill of complaint. 94 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 106, source and

date unknown. 95 “Baseball Retrenchment,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 24, 1915. 96 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, New York Globe,

date unknown.

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honesty and integrity of the participants must predominate is in the field of sport.”97 Virtuous

men did not break their word or their signed agreements, but now contracts were constantly

being flouted by dishonest players. Both the Federal League and Organized Baseball were

breaking each other’s contracts with abandon, but the players who signed those contracts

were the ones who received the brunt of the backlash. Baseball was supposed to be a sport

that promoted a strong work ethic and a moral compass, but the Baseball War appeared to

have softened the will and conscience of its participants.

The increasing disregard for contracts and the rapid escalation of salaries seemed to signal

not only baseball’s moral demise but also an impending financial doom. Apocalyptic visions

of baseball’s future swirled through the nation’s newspapers. The Philadelphia Inquirer

paraphrased Connie Mack as saying that “organized ball could not afford to pay the price the

player today demands. Ball players of today are getting 90 [percent] of the profits.”98 Former

NL president Thomas Lynch also groused that the players were scooping up all the profits

and that “[t]here will be no money left for the magnates.”99 Gilmore and the Federals, though

determined to win the war, also recognized that the drawn-out conflict was draining

resources from the game and was an untenable state of affairs. The forecasters of doom may

have exaggerated their tales of woe, but they were not operating out of a false sense of

reality. There probably was not enough money in the game for it to be sustained in the face

of bidding wars among three major leagues. Those living during the height of the conflict had

no way of knowing it would end with baseball’s basic structure intact. While the fears of

baseball’s demise may seem overstated in hindsight, if the Federals had stubbornly continued

the fight past 1915 or Judge Landis had ruled in their favor, baseball’s organization may have

been drastically reconfigured.

Many players themselves also worried about the effect rampant contract jumping would have

on the future of the sport. The Baseball Players’ Fraternity straddled an interesting middle

ground during the Baseball War, neither unequivocally backing management nor advocating

for the complete overthrow of the Organized Baseball structure. The Fraternity was

organized in 1912 by David Fultz, a former major leaguer who had become a lawyer, as a

“professional solidarity” meant to curb the club owners’ worst abuses and “help the players

achieve a measure of control over their own contracts.”100 Fultz’s choice to designate the

Fraternity a “professional solidarity” as opposed to a players’ union indicates his and many

players’ reluctance to challenge the established baseball order. The Fraternity’s aims, which

included a call for clubs to furnish uniforms at management’s expense and to provide players

with a copy of their contract, were modest, suggesting a strategy of maneuvering within the

97 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, source unknown,

date likely around June of 1914. 98 “Mack Claims No Room for Feds,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 16, 1915. 99 “Ex-President Says Leagues Should Get Together,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 14, 1915. 100 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 71.


213

bounds of an accepted general status quo.101 Even one of their more radical proposals, free

agency for players after ten years of major league service, seemed tame in comparison to the

demands of other contemporary labor unions. Strong postures were adopted and strikes were

threatened in order to bring the owners to heel, but the Fraternity never expressed a wish to

overturn the established order. Ballplayers’ treatment could only be ameliorated by working

with management within the confines of Organized Baseball.

The Fraternity’s aim to play by the accepted rules put it at odds with the Federal League.

Organized Baseball had agreed to some of the Fraternity’s demands so that they might curry

favor with the players. The cordial relationship with OB that Fultz believed was the key to

righting player grievances could be strained by the advances of the interloping Federals. As

such, the Fraternity did not encourage players to jump to the outlaw league, instead

admonishing them that “once a binding contract is entered into it should be lived up to, no

matter what the salary is. The success of the baseball business hinges upon the public’s belief

in the integrity of the players.”102 In other words, management had to profit in order for

players to reap rewards, so players had better stop acting in a way that brought public

disfavor upon them. Contract jumpers might gain short-term monetary advantages, but the

Fraternity emphasized that their deceit would diminish public interest in baseball, thereby

destabilizing the sport and jeopardizing ballplayers’ long-term financial prospects.

The Fraternity by no means spoke for all players. Its membership did not comprise all major

leaguers and Fultz was such a willful leader that his sentiments are difficult to disentangle

from those of the players. But its conservative approach to advocating for the rights of

players indicates that while ballplayers fought for what they believed was their due, most saw

it necessary to maintain the prevailing order to obtain their rights. A sudden overturning of

the system could have led to a chaotic environment where nobody got paid.

Despite the fact that the players’ demands of redress were fairly anodyne, their inequitable

relationship with management did not gain much sympathy in the court of public opinion.

Many took issue with the Federals’ explosive contention that players were treated as “slaves

and human chattel.”103 How could men who seemed to be making money hand over fist

playing a boys’ game seriously believe they were enslaved? The Cincinnati Enquirer blasted

those who accused OB of being slave drivers, caustically exclaiming that “such attacks as are

made on organized ball on the ground that the player is a ‘practical slave’ and all that sort of

thing are the veriest [sic] rot.” Further, “the players of the present day are getting vastly more

101 Ibid., 73. 102 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 9, Baseball Players’

Fraternity newsletter. 103 “The Decision in a Week,” Kansas City Star, Jan. 23, 1915. Quote attributed to the Federal League’s chief

counsel, Edward Gates.

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than their share of the receipts of the game, and this was true before the Feds broke in.”104

The Kansas City Star, usually a defender of the Federal League, agreed with the Enquirer,

sarcastically speculating on a Federal legal victory that would “free [ballplayers] from the

thralls of slavedom.”105 The shocking assertion that ballplayers who earned substantial

salaries and were the subject of popular adulation were veritable slaves in hock to their

owners probably did more to turn people away from the Federal cause than it did to enlist

their support of it. It was just too sensational a claim for many people to take seriously.

The Federals’ claim that ballplayers were victims of a broken system did not resonate with

many baseball fans, especially considering most Americans made far less money than major

leaguers. It especially ruffled the feathers of OB magnates. C.H. Thomas, president of the

National League Chicago Cubs, protested to Herrmann that “[w]e do not (Thomas’

emphasis) sell, nor trade, ball players, the same as was done to slaves before the Civil War.”

He emphasized that the magnates’ control over their players was for the good of the game

and the fans, making the dubious argument that players were only traded to “give patrons

new faces and to add interest to the sport.”106 Herrmann employed a more credible argument

to paint OB as the guarantor of player security. In his affidavit, he averred that the “salaries

of ball players have advanced every year since the National Agreement was put into

operation” and that “none of the clubs operating under the National Agreement assert any

property rights in the players whatsoever.”107 He contended that Organized Baseball aided in

the uplift of the ballplayer rather than serving as his master.

The reserve clause, the feature the Federals contended made magnates masters, found very

few people advocating for its complete abolition during the Baseball War. The Philadelphia

Inquirer wrote that “[n]early everyone concedes that a contract with a reserve clause and a

ten-day release provision in it is non-enforceable in a court of equity, yet every well informed

baseball man holds the opinion that these clauses are necessary for the success of the

game.”108 Herrmann and other OB magnates also expressed doubts over the legality of the

reserve clause and the ten-day clause. They feared Organized Baseball contracts could be

declared null and void because they lacked mutuality between player and management.109 In

spite of their private worries, OB magnates maintained that baseball could not prosper

without enforcement of these two clauses. Despite their bluster about the reserve clause’s

illegitimacy, the Federals did not wish to completely eliminate it, either. Federal League

104 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cincinnati

Enquirer, Jan. 31, 1915. 105 “The Umpire,” Kansas City Star, Jan. 25, 1915. 106 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 1, C.H. Thomas letter to

Garry Herrmann, Jan. 11, 1915. 107 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 104, affidavit

of Garry Herrmann. 108 “Expect Courts to Deny Feds’ Motion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 26, 1915. 109 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 104.


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contracts contained a reserve clause that, while much more favorable to the players than

Organized Baseball's version, still limited players’ freedom.110 Even the players could not

agree to advocate for the abrogation of the reserve clause. The Baseball Players’ Fraternity

won the right to negotiate directly with the owners several years before the Baseball War.

They were successful in reaching an agreement that achieved some minor victories, but they

made no effort to demand the removal of the reserve clause.111 Many observers may have

agreed in principle that the reserve clause was an arrangement that unfairly beheld workers to

their employers. But the public perception of ballplayers as something other than workers

prevented all but the most fair-minded citizens from sympathizing with their plight. However

reprehensible the reserve clause might seem in theory, most commentators agreed that it was

needed in practice, lest the players run roughshod over the game’s financial health.

Not all coverage of the Baseball War slammed the Federal League for intruding on a

reputable business or admonished players for squeezing unseemly amounts of money out of a

limited resource. F.C. Lane, distinguished editor and writer for the influential Baseball

Magazine, believed there to be enough space for three major leagues and was a consistent

supporter of the Federal League’s foray into major league baseball. Others pointed at the

hypocrisy of baseball management condemning the avarice of its players while practicing it

themselves. For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper whose coverage generally

favored OB, put the spotlight on Ban Johnson’s wealth, musing that “[o]ne of the

incongruities of life is Ban Johnson, at a salary of $25,000 a year for looking wise, claiming

that the ball players are unreasonable in their financial demands.”112 Ballplayers were not

universally cursed for their “exorbitant” salaries both before and during the Baseball War.

However, the exceptions serve to prove the rule. The general response was one of disgust

with the increased prevalence of money in baseball. Contract jumpers were perceived to have

committed an affront to the sanctity of the game. Baseball players, who were supposed to be

the exemplars of good American men, had succumbed to the temptation of lucre.

Ultimately, Americans simply were exasperated by the entire affair. The considerable decline

in attendance as well as the vitriol in the press indicates that resistance to change in baseball

was real. People did not want to have to consider questions of monopoly or labor when they

watched a ballgame. To most, it was a way to relax and be entertained after a long week of

hard work. Americans believed that baseball ought to reflect their nation’s finest attributes

and as such wanted to segregate the sport into an idyllic world untainted by the serious issues

that roiled their everyday life. The attacks on the baseball establishment generated by the

Baseball War, no matter the legitimacy of the aims, seem to have pricked a common nerve,

prompting Americans to make impassioned defenses of their cherished pastime. Management

could not be as craven as the Federals alleged. Well-paid, famous ballplayers could not

110 Grow, Baseball on Trial, 24. 111 Levitt, The Outlaw League and the Battle that Forged Modern Baseball, 74. 112 “Punts and Bunts,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 28, 1915.

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possibly be victimized. The game was not as broken as the headlines might lead one to

believe. In the end, fans just wanted to enjoy their pastime as they always had, and they did

not want to upset the whole applecart to right some distant and ambiguous wrongs.

Americans were not necessarily picking sides in the fight. They just wanted normalcy, with

all its inherent issues, to return to baseball.


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CHAPTER THREE

“THE HURRAH GAME OF THE REPUBLIC”:

BASEBALL AS NATIONAL IDENTITY

The perceived cultural effects of the Baseball War caused much of the American public great

consternation. But why should it have been as controversial as it was? Yes, Americans bound

up values they held dear in the sport they cherished. But baseball in its organized form, at its

core, was a form of entertainment for fans. If the sport had not been entertaining to a large

number of people it never would have become so greatly organized and profitable. A

prospective third major league did not threaten to substantively affect fans’ well-being. How

then could a baseball conflict prompt such impassioned outcry, especially considering that no

matter the outcome of the war baseball, in one form or another, would continue to be played

as it had for decades past?

One need not look further than the sport’s most enduring moniker: the national pastime. It

was a pastime because it was a game played for fun, perceived to be outside the confines of

everyday working life. But it was not just a popular pastime that happened to be played in

America. It was the national pastime. Baseball represented America; it helped define its

image on the world stage. Baseball was seen as a shining symbol of a national American

identity, transcending local differences and distinguishing America from its more dissolute

counterparts in Europe. Baseball did not simply serve as a guardian of values and virtues. It

was seen to be the embodiment of distinctly American ethic. Those reacting to the Baseball

War did not merely offer opinions on the state of a game they appreciated or recognized as

enjoying some popularity. Baseball was understood as the “national game” or another

linguistic variant that got at the same point; baseball was an intrinsic part of the American

ethos and its status as such conferred added gravity upon the conflict ravaging the sport.

The Baseball War was not just two businesses competing against each other, nor was it an

idle debate on ill-defined, theoretical values. The whole affair appeared to be a very real

assault on America and its ideals. This chapter will examine why America’s national identity

held such great import in the early twentieth century. Then, by examining the language used

in reactions to the Baseball War, it will explore how baseball was seen to be an integral pillar

of Americans’ national identity. Finally, it will explain how Americans, with their idealized

conception of baseball, conflated an attack on the sport with an assault on America itself.

Nationalism, a doctrine that has its roots in early nineteenth century Europe, pervaded the

Western world by the beginning of the twentieth century.113 Promoting a strong individual

attachment to one’s nation, which was defined by a shared language, race, and culture,

113 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 1.

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nationalism was a defining feature of geopolitics by the time of the Baseball War.114 The

fierce devotion to one’s nation also bred international discord; a nationalist issue provided

the immediate spark that grew to engulf Europe in the conflagration of the First World

War.115 The importance of the concept of national identity grew at the same time that

baseball was developing. Baseball would come to shoulder the awesome responsibility of

representing America both in its citizens’ hearts and on the global stage.

As nationalist sentiment began to animate Americans, baseball staked its claim to being the

national game. Baseball spread like wildfire across America in the immediate aftermath of

the Civil War, so much so that “by the end of the [1860s] it had probably begun to deserve to

be called the national game.”116 It was a game that could bind the wounds of the nation after

it had been torn apart by the great sectional conflict.117 Baseball, as a sport that enjoyed

nationwide popularity and was perceived to embody values that transcended the playing of

the game itself, stood poised to be an exemplar of a unified American identity. In an age that

was permeated by expressions of nationalism, baseball’s status as a symbol of American

identity lent the sport additional ideological heft. Who would dare challenge baseball if it

stood as a representation of America’s greatness? In an age when many Americans perceived

their way of life to be under threat from the hundreds of thousands of immigrants flowing

into the United States every year, the concepts of “America” and “nation” were freighted

with even more meaning. Baseball was “viewed as a means to promote ‘Americanism.’”118 It

was seen as an effective way to assimilate immigrants into the American way of life. As John

Thorn put it, “[b]aseball seemed to offer a textbook on how to be an American.”119 If you

wanted to consider yourself a true American in the early twentieth century, you had better

appreciate baseball.

Contemporaries of the Baseball War recognized baseball as occupying a special place in

American society. Writers and magnates alike fell over themselves trying to portray baseball

as the national game. Ban Johnson declared that “[s]ince the Civil War, the playing of

baseball…has been the national pastime of the children, youth, and young men of this

country.”120 Cubs president C.H. Thomas described baseball as the “chief outdoor sport of

the American people.”121 Herrmann, in his court affidavit, claimed that the National League’s

founding constitution from 1876 included as its first object “(1) To immortalize baseball as

114 Ibid., 67. 115 Ibid., 124. 116 Goldstein, Playing for Keeps, 4. 117 Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 141. 118 Riess, City Games, 84. 119 Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 286. 120 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 9, affidavit of Ban Johnson. 121 Ibid., Box 1, C.H. Thomas letter to Garry Herrmann, Jan. 7, 1915.


219

the national game of the United States.”122 While Herrmann took some liberty with his

recapitulation (it actually reads “To encourage, foster, and elevate the game of base ball”),

the fact that Herrmann, ex post facto, inserted a line about protecting baseball as the national

game into the NL constitution indicates the ubiquity of that notion by the 1910s and the

allure of conceiving baseball as a sport ordained to a higher purpose than mere

entertainment.123

Lest one think it was only OB executives who trumpeted baseball as the hallowed national

game while the Federals were iconoclastically bent on destroying sacrosanct baseball

tradition in the pursuit of money, Federal League president Gilmore also genuflected to

baseball’s national mythos. Gilmore, in a 1914 letter to the National Commission entreating

the Organized Baseball champion to play the victor of the Federal League in a “World’s

Championship,” described baseball as the “great American sport, the National Game.”124 He

vouched that the Federals are “believers in the great National Sport and stand for every

principle which leads to the improvement of the game of Base Ball [and] the purifying of the

Sport.”125 Gilmore was certainly putting on a show for his OB counterparts, just like OB

magnates were for the general public, but they were not lying through their teeth. Both sides,

while seeking victory, acknowledged baseball to be more than just a business proposition. Its

status as the national game with all the significance that entailed necessitated a certain type

of decorum that was consistent with American standards.

The press also praised baseball as America’s foremost sport. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in its

write-up for Opening Day 1915, expressed joy that the “great national game” had returned to

the field after a tumultuous winter.126 Jack Ryder of the Cincinnati Enquirer, echoing C.H.

Thomas, called baseball America’s “greatest outdoor amusement enterprise”, acknowledging

the sport’s dual nature of entertainment and business.127 No less an authority on America as

Walt Whitman is reputed to have said some twenty-five years before the Baseball War that

“[b]aseball is the hurrah game of the republic!... it’s our game… America’s game: has the

snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere – [it] belongs as much to our institutions, fits into

them as significantly as our constitutions [and] laws; [it] is just as important in the sum total

of our historic life.” 128 Baseball was not just a game of some national importance; it was the

122 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 9, affidavit of Garry

Herrmann. 123 Official Constitution and Playing Rules of the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, accessed

from hathitrust.org, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000017896689;view=1up;seq=12. 124 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, letter from James

Gilmore to National Commission, Sept. 15, 1914. 125 Ibid. 126 “Where the Lids Pop Off This Afternoon,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 14, 1915. 127 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12 National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cincinnati

Enquirer, Jan. 24, 1915. 128 Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, 231. Several variations of this quote are attributed to Whitman. This

version is by far the most boosterish.

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national game. Baseball occupied a plane above other contemporary American sports. It did

not merely exist within the bounds of American society; it actively shaped America’s

character. Baseball and all the values it embodied were woven into the tapestry of American

identity.

Baseball not only epitomized the American spirit but it also distinguished it from that of

other nations. The idea of an “American exceptionalism”, whereby the United States had a

character superior to that of other nations, had existed long before the Baseball War.

Baseball’s popularity combined with the carnage raging in Europe, though, presented another

perspective on America’s prideful isolation. One cartoon from April of 1915 best captured

baseball’s role in elevating America above the flawed characters of other nations. Printed in

the Philadelphia Inquirer and drawn by someone under the delightfully corny pseudonym

“Jim Nasium”, the cartoon depicts a benevolent, grandfatherly Uncle Sam bestriding the

United States with a baseball bat in his right hand and a ball in his left. Looking self-assured,

he peers across the Atlantic to war-torn Europe, limned with a dark shadow called “war

cloud,” with royal crowns and German spiked helmets flying as shrapnel. Uncle Sam boasts

to Europe in a folksy American accent, “now, yew guys kin go ahead an’ fight. I’m gonna

play ball!”129 This cartoon implies that the United States can stay above the ruinous fray

ravaging the rotting Old World. America’s character was too strong for it to be drawn into

destructive wars caused by petty squabbles and monarchical maneuvering. The cartoon

makes clear that baseball is an integral component of America’s exceptionalism. As its title,

“Something Better to Do,” suggests, Americans will not fall victim to senseless violence

when they have an edifying and entertaining pastime with which to fill their free time. The

cartoon was unmistakable in its message: baseball’s significance transcended balls and

strikes and spilled into the realms of nationalism and geopolitics.

Considering baseball’s powerful association with Americans’ conception of their national

identity, it is not surprising that the Baseball War elicited such impassioned reactions. Many

worried that the Baseball War, and more specifically the Federal League’s apparent devil-

may-care attempt to upend the well-established system of organized baseball, endangered the

standing of the national game and concomitantly threatened to sully America’s national

image. Judging by the vitriol directed at contract-jumping, “greedy” players and the

significant decline in attendance from 1913 to 1915, a great number of Americans perceived

that those involved in the enterprise that most closely mirrored and epitomized the ideal

American character did not live up to the virtuous behavior expected of their position.

Baseball, the aspect of the American character that Uncle Sam used to demonstrate to Europe

that his people were upright and peace-loving, had fallen into civil war.

129 Jim Nasium, “Something Better to Do,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 13, 1915.


221

Despite the inequities inherent in baseball’s traditional framework, that structure had

provided fans with a relatively clean, wholesome version of the national pastime in which

Americans could take national pride. As Herrmann put it, “under this system the sport has

become a national institution [and] civic pride has been created in teams.”130 Herrmann’s

contention certainly had merit. Without the organization brought about by the National

Agreement and the crackdown on gambling and rowdy play in the decade before the Baseball

War, baseball probably could not have developed into a national institution and, at least

superficially, have mirrored American values.

The Baseball War endangered that structure. New Orleans’ Times-Picayune reported a

concern that the Baseball War would “[tear] down a structure which organized ball took forty

years to build.”131 The Philadelphia Inquirer echoed the Times-Picayune when it asserted

that the Federals were “kick[ing] the props from under the system that has built up baseball

into a national institution as well as a national pastime.” Tom Terrell of the Cleveland Leader

warned of a prevailing fear from the “[t]wenty or thirty million Americans who pay humble

allegiance to base ball” that if the Federals won the Baseball War “it will mean the complete

disruption and ruination of the national game.”132 The Boston Journal was similarly weary of

the conflict and eager for baseball to “resume its high place in America’s national life.”133

Implicit in these tales of woe was a distress for America’s fate. Baseball was so strongly

identified as a “national institution” that degrading the sport seemed to put America’s very

soul at risk. The Uncle Sam cartoon illustrated how baseball differentiated the United States

from the decadent, belligerent European powers. A descent into chaos for the national game

would seem to imply that America was in fact no better than her Old World cousins.

The Baseball War, then, was more than a battle over the reserve clause or the acceptable

number of major leagues. To the American people, it was a conflict that cut to their nation’s

very core. The virtue of America itself seemed to be at stake. The question of what a nation’s

values were was not an idle one in 1914 and 1915 as newspapers across the United States

splashed grisly reports of the slaughter that was ravaging Europe on their front pages.

Americans who could previously tout baseball’s integrity as an example of American

superiority had to wonder if the Baseball War was a sign that their nation’s values were

eroding.

130 Federal League Suit, BA MSS 85, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Box 9, response of Garry

Herrmann to Federal League’s bill of complaint. 131 “Federal Case Now Under Advisement,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans,), Jan. 24, 1915. 132 August “Garry” Herrmann papers, BA MSS 12, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cleveland Leader,

date unknown. 133 R.E. McMillin, “Summons in Each Office,” Boston Journal, Jan. 9, 1915.

The Baseball War:


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CONCLUSION

America was undergoing rapid change at the time of the Baseball War. The countryside was

disappearing, foreign tongues filled the air, and a ghastly melee that had erupted in Europe

threatened to spill over the Atlantic. But baseball remained. Baseball was something

Americans clung to as a bastion of tradition in unsettled times. It could preserve the ethos of

a rapidly fading era. It instilled in the hearts of the younger generations a sturdy American

character that could weather the unforeseen storms to come. Baseball was America’s keeper.

The Baseball War seemed to put baseball’s sturdiness to the test. Could the venerable

pastime withstand the assault of the Federals and all their attendant vices? On the surface, the

answer seems simple. Of course baseball triumphed – the Baseball War did not destroy the

sport. It survived the conflict and remains popular today more than 100 years after the

Federals capitulated. But, as was the case with most questions posed from 1913 to 1915, the

actual answer is more nuanced than that. Many of the issues highlighted by the Baseball War

persist to this day. Is baseball’s mythic narrative still a critical part of the American identity,

or has the Baseball War and the passage of time minimized the sport’s cultural relevancy?

Baseball is perhaps the American sport most oriented toward nostalgia and tradition. If you

talk to a baseball fan, chances are you come away with the impression that the game was

better at some point in the past. How many times do you hear people today lament that “they

don’t play the game like they used to?” It seems to be a baseball fan’s birthright to chide a

ballplayer for chasing an inordinately high salary and follow it with a declaration somewhere

along the lines of “I’d play the game for free!” This is not a new development.

Commentators chagrined by the rampant greed that seemed to accompany the Baseball War

yearned for the “good old days” when players were loyal, disciplined, diligent, and played

for the love of the game. Surely one can dig up a newspaper article, letter, or diary from the

1860s in which a curmudgeonly old man bemoans the new professionalism infiltrating the

game of “base ball” and pines for a return to the days when all ballplayers were gentleman

amateurs. As it always has, baseball’s appeal still relies heavily upon the sport’s tradition.

Baseball is simultaneously just a game and more than a game. It is just a game when fans

deride ballplayers for pursuing their personal interests at the expense of the public enjoyment

of the game. It is just a game when fans complain about labor unrest disrupting play or nine-

figure contracts dominating the headlines. Baseball is just a game in that it is seen to occupy

a fantasy space buffered from all real world considerations. It is more than a mere game,

however, when issues of business, labor, or greed are seen to infringe on the mystique of the

national pastime. It is not just recreational play when a high-paid player is perceived to be

giving less than full effort, or a player celebrates himself at the expense of his teammates or

his opponent. Then, it is as if he is committing an affront to the cherished values of a national

institution. Fans admire a player performing with spirit and gusto, but if he plays with too


223

much emotion he is breaking baseball’s unwritten code. In other words, Americans of today

still endow baseball with values as did their forebears and harbor the same disgust for those

who dishonor them. Baseball War commentators railed against contract-jumpers’

deceitfulness and disloyalty, chastising them for contaminating baseball’s purity. One can

look to the steroid scandal of the mid-2000s for a recent baseball analog. Fans love seeing

baseball players perform at herculean levels. However, if they find out that players cheated to

attain that level of performance and subsequently lied about doing it, their goodwill vanishes.

Fans would rather see clean, ordinary play than outstanding performance brought about by

illicit means.

Baseball’s connection to the American identity remains strong. Phrases like “national

pastime” or “American as baseball and apple pie” have not faded from the American lexicon.

It still has the ability to galvanize the nation. A vivid recent example of baseball’s unifying

power is its presence after the horror of the September 11 terrorist attacks. After a ten day

hiatus in the aftermath of the attacks, baseball returned to New York. In a contest that took

on meaning beyond its immediate import to the standings, star catcher Mike Piazza hit an

iconic home run to help win the game for the hometown Mets. A reeling nation found a

refuge of normalcy in baseball’s return and a symbol of strength in Piazza’s home run.

Americans, intent on showing they would not be cowed by acts of terror, rallied around

baseball as an emblem of their nation’s resiliency. Though the sport lost its title of America’s

most popular game to football in the decades before 2001, it remains a powerful

representation of American ideals.

The Baseball War is at once peculiar to the age in which it took place and common to all

American history. The sport has changed dramatically since the Federal League signed its

death warrant in December of 1915. The relationship between players and management is

much more equitable, there are now thirty major league clubs, and revenue pours in at a rate

unimaginable in 1915. Yet much has remained the same. The National and American

Leagues are still the only major leagues, a player’s rights are still reserved to his original

club, albeit for a much shorter time, and Americans still revere baseball’s mythic creed. The

upshot of the Baseball War is twofold. One, that baseball is deeply woven into the fabric of

American culture. The second is that, though baseball’s myth may be comforting and one

should never be too cynical in life, one must recognize that baseball’s aura is a carefully

cultivated construction. Its mythic veneer should not cloud the fact that the game does not

exist in a dimension separate from the American life it represents. Baseball is not immune

from contentious issues of business and labor. Rather, it is its participation in the real matters

of American life that should distinguish baseball as the national pastime.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000017896689;view=1up;seq=12.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 4 – Apr. 15, 1915.

Times-Picayune, Jan. 6 – Feb. 3, 1915.

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APPENDIX

Federal League clubs, 1914

Indianapolis Brooklyn

St. Louis Buffalo

Chicago Baltimore

Kansas City Pittsburgh

Federal League clubs, 1915

Newark Brooklyn

St. Louis Buffalo

Chicago Baltimore

Kansas City Pittsburgh

Organized Baseball major league clubs, 1914-1915

AL

Detroit New York

St. Louis Philadelphia

Chicago Boston

Cleveland Washington

NL

Pittsburgh New York

St. Louis Philadelphia

Chicago Boston

Cincinnati Brooklyn

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