Customer Reviews

The American Indian Integration of Baseball

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Jeff Powers-Beck's The American Indian Integration of Baseball is an impressive - no, make that an incredible piece of work. I have close to 1,000 volumes in my personal baseball library and this is without a doubt the most well-researched one. As a member of the Society for American Baseball Research's biographical committee for over 20 years, I can attest to the incredible amount of work the author went to in obtaining this vast collection of biographical facts on obscure cup-of-coffee major league players, most of whom played nearly a century ago.

While the author did the obligatory - yet still remarkable - research on the well-known Native American players like Louis Sockalexis, Albert Bender and Jim Thorpe, it is his chapters on Louis Leroy, George Howard Johnson and Moses Yellow Horse that stand out so impressively.

Powers-Beck is a professional academic and it shows in his bibliography and selected appendices. The reader will also find a complete record of baseball at the famous Carlisle Indian School.

Summing up by using the author's own words, "the American Indian integration of baseball, unlike the African American integration, has never been fully appreciated," will no long be true for anyone who reads this book. It is a must for any historian of the game.

Dick Thompson

Jeff Powers-Beck goes much further than previous treatments of Native American ballplayers in his seminal work, "The American Indian Integration of Baseball." The book is extremely well-researched and examines the mixed legacy of Native American ballplayers as well as the roots of discrimination against them.

Surveying the careers of more than 120 athletes of Indian ancestry, Powers-Beck argues that professional baseball was "a crucible of both racial and cultural prejudices" against Native Americans. Caroonists made them popular objects of derision on the sports pages. Fans taunted them with war whoops and vitriolic jeers. Even teammates insulted them with nicknames like "Chief," "Nig," and "Squanto." "This was not simply a 'cultural prejudice' towards someone who looked differently," insists Powers-Beck. "It was a starkly racist prejudice towards someone who looked different."

Powers-Beck adds that the roots of discrimination can be traced to government-sponsored boarding schools, like Carlisle and Haskell. These off-reservation boarding schools used baseball as "a tool for assimilation as well as for the prestige and profit of the school." His coverage of Carlisle, in particular, offers insightful information that rivals only David W. Adams' work, "Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1923."

The biographical vignettes of Charles Albert Bender, John Meyers and Jim Thorpe, culled from a wide variety of sources demonstrate the kind of painstaking research Powers-Beck completed. Like the larger biographical treatments of Louis Leroy, George Howard Johnson, and Moses Yellow Horse, Powers-Beck offers a refreshing new perspective of these Native American ballplayers as "integrators" who not only survived the discriminatory treatment of the white baseball establishment, but largely succeeded in shaping the game on their own terms.

As a result, the book is more of a celebratory treatment of the Native American participation and contribution to baseball, rather than a retelling of the "tragedies" of such players as Jim Thorpe and especially Louis Sockalexis, which have become all too popular in recent years.

My only criticism of the book is that it reads more like a collection of esays than a narrative history of this important topic. To be sure, each essay makes a very significant contribution to the larger story of the American Indian Intregration of Baseball, but not a "seamless" one. The danger here -- and my fear -- is that an excellent piece of research will be dismissed as a "reference work" and not be given the kind of credit it is due as a seminal work on the topic.

Powers has written a fine book about the Indian experience, showing many parallels with the later integration of black players. He gives a good deal of detailed biographical information on a half-dozen prominent Indian players, and mini-bios on a couple of dozen others. There is an explanation of how Jim Thorpe might have done better with a friendlier environment, also a list of over 100 full-blooded and part-Indian major leaguers. Finally, he makes an eloquent case for the abolition of current team nicknames that demean the Indian culture.

Pete Palmer, co-editor of The Baseball Encyclopedia by Barnes and Noble

This is a book that is long overdue. The author's research provides the most comprehensive account yet written about the integration of American Indians into baseball. I found the similarities with the Black Experience to be especially intriguing. This book will serve as a valuable resource for baseball historians and will stimulate interest in casual readers.

The subject of Native Americans and the integration of baseball is often overlooked due to the prejudice of Academics to cover the more popular african-american integration of sports. But this wonderful books finally brings to life the characters and times that led to Native american success in Americas past-time, baseball. This is a thorough account of the subject and a great addition to t =he meek amount of academic resources on it. Highly recommended as an enlightening read, especially for anyone concerned with Native American rights in recent times.

Seth J. Frantzman

I have not read this book in its entirety as of yet, but have previewed it. A friend suggested I purchase this book, and I'm glad I have done so. However, the cartoon the author chose depicting pitcher Louis Leroy was in poor taste. Perhaps Powers-Beck had his own reasons for choosing this particular graphic. However, it portrays the pitcher in a negative way and it is likely many readers will find it an offensive stereotype. In light of the fact that there were other examples of period graphics the author could have chosen, one must wonder if this decision was made in haste.