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“Human nature” appears to be one of the few constants in a world of rapid social change. We assume that an American transported from, say, 1900 would have pretty much the same character, instincts, impulses, and mind as an American today. But on at least one important dimension of human nature, there is considerable evidence of major and rapid change in the last century: cognitive skills. In a recent column for the Boston Review — linked here – I expand an earlier blog post on how people seem to have been getting “smarter” over recent generations.

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Charles Fischer [no relation to your blogger] arrived in New York City in 1890. A well-educated clerk from Stuttgart, Germany, he struggled in America, failing in real estate, in the saloon business, and finally in china plate decorating. He divorced and lost touch with his only child. Fischer wrote his mother, “I cannot stand this much longer. If I don’t get work within two weeks I will have to go out on the street and work as a laborer.” At 10:00 pm on a Saturday evening in 1896, he entered his small rented room on East 3rd Street, sealed up every crack, and turned on the gas without lighting it.[1]

Fischer’s suicide puts into historical context news reports from this past week of a “startling” (to quote the PBS Newshour) rise in suicides among the middle-aged over the last ten years. (Actually, it’s not such new news; essentially the same story was reported three years ago.) Fischer’s case illustrates that suicides often come in waves – his was one of many committed by immigrants in late 19th-century American cities. It also illustrates the role of technology – gas became a common tool of suicide. And it illustrates the importance of financial strains – he took his life in the middle of the Panic of 1896. The 21st-century suicide spurt has an additional twist, however: Boomers.

Long View

Suicide fascinated the great social thinkers of Charles Fischer’s day. They observed the rise in suicide rates in Europe and America during the 19th century and many believed that suicides were a cost of modern life. Over the 20th century in America suicide rates fluctuated up and down, but they did not, in net change, over the century. (See discussion in Made in America, pp. 231ff.) Suicide rates for the elderly dropped a lot; rates for young men rose. In any case, modernity does not seem to have been the issue.

Suicide rates rise and fall in response to several factors. One is simply how accurately we determine and count which deaths are suicides [2].

Another is the technology of suicide. The introduction of gas lines to homes in the 19th century made “taking gas,” as Fischer did, a new and easier means of suicide. When the British phased out coal gas for less lethal natural gas several decades ago, their suicide rate dropped by a third.[3] Technology can matter because many, if not most, suicides are impulsive. Thus, the easy availability in the U.S. of guns to the depressed helps elevate our suicide rates, and restricting access to the tools of suicide tends to reduce the rates.[4] (And, of course, responders can use life-saving technologies to turn some would-be suicides into failed suicide attempts.) Last week’s CDC report speculates that the wider availability of powerful painkillers has made suicide easier in recent years and thus more frequent.

A third factor is economics. Bad times leads people like Charles Fischer to take their lives. Suicides spiked in the United States during the Depression and they generally rise, at least among Americans of working age, during recessions.[5] One estimate is that each increase of a point in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession produced a one percent increase in suicides.[6] Even before, in the first half of the 2000s, the economy was mediocre for less-educated Americans. Suicide rates among middle-aged people without college degrees rose then; they did not rise for college grads.[7] That suicide rates among the elderly have dropped so much in recent decades is explainable in terms of their improving economic (and probably, health) circumstances.[8]

Many other factors foster suicides, as well. For example, disrupted families, religion (lack of it), and having family, friends, or celebrities commit suicide elevates individuals’ risks of trying suicide. [9] But an intriguing twist in the latest reports is cohort or generation, particularly the generation of the Baby Boomers.

Boom

Aside from all of these factors, it appears that Americans born during the Baby Boom are especially at risk of committing suicide. As I wrote the last time this suicide news was news, in 2010 (Boomer Blues), “It appears . . . that Americans – especially the men – born between roughly 1948 and 1960 have had a particularly hard time during their youth, or during their later adulthood, or during both” with respect to drugs, marital problems, crime, and unhappiness. On suicide, in particular, some research suggests that the experience of crowding – so many people, especially men, trying to squeeze through the same school doors and the same job openings in the same few years – had lasting depressive effects ending in elevated rates of suicide even decades later.[10] Add to this crowding the historical experience of Vietnam, violent civil disorders, and rapid cultural change just as these Boomers were becoming adults and the resulting mix is certainly stressful.

There appears now to be a confluence of factors: the Baby Boomers are aging; an unusually high percentage of them had rocky youths that may still disturb them; some of them are now encountering the hard economic times of the Great Recession; and easy access to drugs on top of the easy access to guns is probably making those moments of despair too common and too easily acted upon.

——————————–
NOTES

[1] “Poverty Drove Him to Suicide,” New York Times, Apr. 20, 1896. On the late 19th century wave, see, e.g., Lane, Violent Death in the City, 1979.
[2] E.g., Pescosolido & Mendelsohn, “Social causation or social construction….,” Am. Soc. Rev., 1986.
[3] Anderson, “The Urge…,” New York Times Magazine, July 6, 2008. See also here.
[4] Guns: e.g., Bearman and Moody, “Suicide..,” Am. J. Pub. Health, 2004.  Other means restriction: e.g., Pirkis et al., “The effectiveness of structural interventions…,” Int. J. Epidemiol., 2013; Yip et al., “Means restriction…,” Lancet, 2012.
[5] Luo et al., “Impact of business cycles…,” Am. J. Pub. Health, 2011.
[6] Reeves et al., “Increase in state suicide rates….,” Lancet, 2012.
[7] Phillips et al., “Understanding recent changes…,” Pub. Health Reports, 2010. On such education differences, see this earlier post.
[8] Cutler and Meara, “Changes in the Age Distribution….,” NBER WP#8556.
[9] One review is Wray et al., “Sociology of suicide,” Ann. Rev. of Sociol., 2011.
[10] See, e.g. Pampel, “Cohort size….,” Demography, 1996; O’Brien & Stockard, “A common explanation….,” Soc. Forces, 2006.

(This column was cross-posted on The Berkeley Blog on May 7, 2013.)

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Others thought the similarity in positions was terrible for democracy. Conservatives demanded A Choice, Not an Echo. Leftists bemoaned a “choice of a tweedledee as against a tweedledum” and liberals’ timidity to go to a third party. [3] In 1950, the American Political Science Association complained (pdf) that the parties’ differences were too poorly defined against one another and that they were insufficiently cohesive. Beware of what you ask for.

As is well-known, the political positions of the two parties have divided sharply since those days. This animation

[3] shows visually how members of the House separated out on a left-right dimension from roughly 1950 to 2000. Most of the shift has been due to the GOP moving right, exactly opposite to James Reston’s recommendation. Early analyses of this ideological polarization stressed that it seemed to be exclusive to politicians and the politically active, that average Americans were not drawn into this ideological fight. Recent work suggests that, while average Americans have still not gotten more ideological, they have become more tightly loyal to their parties as the parties have become more distinct. Party identification has almost become almost tribal. (See this earlier post.) Three new studies underline the power of party loyalty.

Team Colors

The three studies suggest how strong party identification can counteract what people know or even what they experience.

One: Respondents to surveys tend to describe conditions, especially economic conditions, in accord with their political affiliations. When a Republican is president, Republicans tend to say the economy is fine and Democrats tend to say that it is lousy; when a Democrat takes over the White House, the evaluations flip. To which Markus Prior and his colleagues at Princeton responded, “You Cannot be Serious…,” the title of their recent paper (pdf). In 2004 and 2008, a web survey asked a scientifically-drawn sample to describe current economic conditions. As would be expected with George W. Bush in office, Republicans were much more positive than Democrats. However, the researchers offered another set of respondents either some money or some strong encouragement to give the factually correct answers. The gap between Republicans and Democrats in evaluations of the economy was notably smaller for this group. The authors say that this shows that respondents know more than political scientists give them credit for. Another interpretation is that, without the incentive of money or pride, many respondents would rather cast a vote for “their side” than give a correct answer to a survey. (By the way, this is how I interpret the high percentage of Republicans who have said that Obama is a Kenyan or a Moslem — that many do not actually believe it, but saying so is a way of saying that they hate the guy.)

Two: James Druckman and his colleagues (here; gated) set up another survey experiment that pits party and knowledge. They developed pro and con arguments, both strong ones and weak ones for each side, on two issues – oil drilling and the immigration DREAM Act. They presented various combinations of the arguments to respondents. As you would expect, Democrats tended to be more resistant to drilling and more approving of the immigration bill than Republicans were. Still, when presented with stronger arguments for one side or other of an issue, respondents tended to move their opinions in the direction of the strong arguments. Ah, sweet reason. The researchers, however, told another set of respondents who read these arguments that officeholders from each party were very unified in opposition to the other party on the issues. These respondents, alerted to party polarization on the topics, moved their opinions toward the positions of their own parties, largely neglecting the quality of the arguments. Ah, sweet … something else.

Three: Yotam Margalit at Columbia compared party loyalty not to knowledge, but to experience (here, gated). He tracked thousands of respondents across four interviews conducted between July, 2007 and March, 2011. Given what happened to the economy, some folks lost their jobs during this period. A notable portion of the job-losers changed their opinions on a question asking whether they would support more government spending to help “the poor and unemployed” even if that meant raising taxes. Some Republicans became more favorable in the year after they had lost their jobs. However, Margalit also found that once respondents regained employment, their opinions reverted; it was a passing liberal moment. Party position mattered more.

None of these three studies can tell us whether this kind of polarization and party loyalty has increased over time. They do, however, show how deep the party commitments are in era when the parties are so far apart. Makes the Tweedles seem perhaps alluring.

NOTES
[1] Lane, “Politics of Consensus,” Am. Pol. Sci. Rev., 1965.
[2] Reston, “Washington: On Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1965.
[3] http://www.apsanet.org/~pop/poole.gif (from McCarthy, Poole, and Rosenthal)

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One clear social change of the last half-century is Americans’ increasing support of sexual freedom. It is all around us: magazines at the check-out counter blaring advice about orgasms, easy-access pornography on the web and soft-core pornography on cable, hooking-up culture on tv programs, and nonchalance about couples “living together” before (or after) marriage (see this earlier post).

Sexual restraints loosened over much of the twentieth century, but the great release, so to speak, occurred in the late 1960s. As I noted in a post three years ago, the hinge of change seemed to between the time that Diana Ross and the Supremes’ hit song “Love Child” made the charts in 1968 – “My father left, he never even married mom / I shared the guilt my mama knew / So afraid that others knew I had no name” – and 1975, when First Lady Betty Ford described the possibilities of her daughter having a premarital affair as “perfectly normal.”

The rise in the proportion of Americans who had such “normal” premarital affairs slowed down in the 1980s. Similarly, the public’s growing acceptance of premarital sex slowed down. [1] Still, Americans’ approval of sexual liberation across a variety of fronts continued even after the late ‘60s hinge. For many observers, it just shows how hedonistic and morally unstrung our society has become. But there is an interesting pattern to changing public views on sex that suggests a more complex story.

Liberalizing?

I’ll draw here, as I often do, on the General Social Survey, for 40 years the benchmark survey of Americans’ views. For almost all those years, the GSS has asked Americans their opinions about a variety of sexual issues and often, as well, about their sexual behavior. In the graph below, I show the trends since 1972 in Americans’ answers concerning four issues. It shows the percentage who said that homosexuality is wrong, that pornography should be illegal, that premarital sex is always wrong, and that there should not be sex education in the schools. (For the texts of these questions, see note [2].) Remember: The major change in Americans’ opinions on these matters except homosexuality occurred in the decade or so before this series starts. Nonetheless, change continued after the early 1970s.

Reading from the bottom up, we see that the percentage of Americans objecting to sex education, already low in 1972, dropped 10 more points to negligible in 2012. The percentage who said that premarital sex was “always wrong” also dropped by an additional 10 points. Those who said that all pornography should be outlawed shrunk as well by about 10 points. Finally, we see the dramatic change in opinions about homosexuality, from about 72 percent saying it was “always wrong” around 1992 down to about 46 percent saying that twenty years later.

So, it looks like the moral wraps on sexuality were coming off. But, consider two more series from the GSS below. One question is about whether extramarital sex is wrong and the other about whether young-teen sex is wrong. [3]

Here the sexual trend is either absent or is actually a conservative trend. There is no net change in approval of teenage sex; about 70 percent still think it is always wrong. And on extramarital sex, Americans objected to it more, the percentage saying it is always wrong going up more than 10 points from about 71 percent in the early 1970s to about 82 percent recently.

Perhaps this is just talk. Or maybe not. Since 1991, the GSS has asked respondents to privately answer the question (the interviewer cannot see), “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” The percentage saying “yes” was unchanged: 15.4 percent in the early 1990s and 16.6 percent around 2010 (even though, one might speculate, the stigma of adultery had eased post-Clinton). [4] As to teen sex, rates have declined since the 1990s (p. 13, pdf). But the behavior is besides the present point, which has to do with Americans’ attitudes toward sexuality. And there seems to be a contradiction.

I will suggest one possible explanation for these contradictory trends, especially the premarital versus extramarital. What we see is the development of a sexual code consistent with American “voluntarism”: An individual is free to pursue his or her personal desires against any group pressures except when that individual has entered into a voluntary compact; then, the freely-chosen “contract” must be adhered to. (See discussion in Made in America.) Marriage is one especially critical such compact. Every adult American is free to enter and free to leave a marriage – these days, freer to leave than ever – but so long as he or she chooses to stay in the marriage, true fealty is expected and straying is morally wrong. (The teen sex issue has to do, I suspect, with the notion that young teens are too immature to responsibly make such compacts.)

Other explanations are possible, but whatever the reasons for this seeming contradiction in attitude trends, it complicates any simple story of growing sexual license.

…………………….

NOTES

[1] These trends are discussed in Made in America, pp. 141-2, 225-28.

[2] “Would you be for or against sex education in the public schools?” (percent against); . . . “There’s been a lot of discussion about the way morals and attitudes about sex are changing in this country. If a man and woman have sex relations before marriage, do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?” (percent always wrong); . . . “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” (percent always wrong); . . . . “Which of these statements comes closest to your feelings about pornography laws: 1. There should be laws against the distribution of pornography whatever the age. 2. There should be laws against the distribution of pornography to persons under 18. 3. There should be no laws forbidding the distribution of pornography” (percent answering 1).

[3] “What if they [a man and a woman] are in their early teens, say 14 to 16 years old? In that case, do you think sex relations before marriage are always wrong, almost always …” (percent always wrong);” . . . “What is your opinion about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner? [Always wrong, almost always, etc.]” (percentage always wrong).

[4] A New York Times article reported researchers finding in the GSS data a trend toward more extramarital affairs (“Love, Sex …,” October 28, 2008), but I have crunched the numbers and don’t see it. You can do it yourself on the GSS website (variable EVSTRAY).

(The column was cross-posted on The Berkeley Blog on April 15, 2013, and cross-posted on LAProgressive.com on April 25, 2013.)

Pushcarts in New York (Source)

In 1779, Philadelphia artisans mobilized to demand that merchants’ prices on “necessaries” be restrained. A free market was dividing the city into rich and poor, they charged, and they wanted “a just and regulated price.” The merchants association replied that “the limitations of prices is … unjust … by compelling a person to accept less in exchange for his goods than he could otherwise obtain, and therefore acts as a tax upon one part of the community only.” Moreover, they argued, allowing the market to dictate prices meant less hoarding and more efficient distribution of necessities. [4] The debate about price justice continued in Philadelphia that year (more below), but it largely ended in America over a century ago – the housewives’ riot of 1917 notwithstanding. The merchants won.

What is Unjust

To the Philadelphia merchants’ reply in 1779 that price limitation was unjust, the artisans answered, “claiming a right to an unlimited extortion, … because the … necessaries of life are in the hands of a few … is a principle far more unjust ….” They furthermore rejected the idea that “the limitation of prices is in the principle unjust” (emphasis in original), pointing out all sorts of price controls that had been common in colonial America – for example, limiting fees of certain occupations, such as ferrymen, “who would take an unjust advantage of the immediate necessity of others.” The principle, they claimed, should be that “every right or power claimed or exercised by any … set of men should be in subordination to the common good.” While we all support the principle of free trade, they went on, the merchants’ “idea of a free trade is, for every man to do what he pleases; a right … repugnant to the very principles on which society and civil governments are founded.”

Early American towns often set price and, for that matter, wage controls. Even the Continental Congress declared in 1774 that “all manufactures of this country be sold at reasonable prices” and that if shortages arose, merchants had to keep prices at levels that “we have been respectively accustomed to do, for twelve months last past.” [5] If courts would or could not enforce low prices, protests and public shaming sometimes did. And sometimes vigilantes did. For example, in 1779, “a mob of 100 women raided the [Boston] store of Thomas Boylston and marched away with coffee he refused to sell for less than 6 shillings a pound.” [5]

Philadelphia Harbor 1790s (source)

To be sure, price controls typically failed miserably, were subject to political manipulation, and were quickly dropped by the authorities. Price controls generally create great distortions. The issue I address here is not the utility of price controls, but how the moral debate changed in America after these years of debating justice in the market.

New Notions

The laissez-faire ideology of the free market spread rapidly in the commercially booming America during the early nineteenth century. In part, changes in ideas followed changes in transportation. Controlling prices and wages, whether to keep them down or to keep them up, became more difficult when buyers and sellers outside the community were now so easily and cheaply reached. Legal changes also spurred Adam Smithian views. Across a range of fronts, politicians and courts increasingly supported the right of free enterprise over other sorts of rights, one kind of justice over another. For example, farmers’ rights to the streams flowing through their lands and the fish in those streams succumbed to mill- and factory-owners’ right to dam up those streams for power.[6] Communities holding out for market controls, like the Moravian town of Salem, NC, gave up by mid-century.[7] By the end of the nineteenth-century, courts were ruling that any kind of public interference in the market – say, a minimum wage or a law barring child labor – was an injustice.

Today, Americans are the least likely, among the citizens of affluent nations, to support price controls or generally any interference in the market.[8] We and our laws seem to be bothered more by limitations on property-owners’ use of their property or business owners’ decisions than by the “externalities” of those uses and decisions — over, say, how industrial discharges affect drinking water or how the sudden shutdown of a plant can devastate a community.

Of course, we have in fact interfered with the market in many ways. Environmental rules, for example, impinge on business decisions. And we have even controlled prices: rationing during wars, government purchasing of agricultural surpluses to keep up crop and dairy prices, laws limiting “cut-throat” pricing, stipulating what Medicare will pay hospitals, and so on. Each of these steps, however, seemed a practical compromise, a necessary evil, to handle a particular circumstance. Each was just an exception carved out of a “free market” system. What Americans have not done in many generations is widely debate the principle of whether markets in general ought to be controlled, whether there ought to be, say, a price ceiling on food and other staples. The discussion over what was the greater injustice largely ended in the nineteenth century.

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NOTES

[1] New York Times, Feb. 20, 1917.
[2] New York Times, Feb. 22, 1917.
[3] See, e.g., Nash, The Urban Crucible.
[4] Schultz, “Small Producer Thought,” Penn. Hist., 1987.
[5] Grossman, “Wage and Price,” Monthly Labor Review, 1973.
[6] E.g., Kulik, “Dams, Fish,” in Hahn and Prude, eds., The Countryside, 1985.
[7] Shirley, “The Market,” J. Early Republic, 1991.
[8] E.g., Haller et al., “Leviathan,” in Alwin (ed.), Attitudes to Inequality, 1990. See any international comparisons of attitudes on the topic.

(Crossposted on The Berkeley Blog on April 18, 2013.)

Salt Lake Tribune

Two hot-button social issues seem to be moving to some sort of political resolution rather quickly. Their stories tell us something about the nature of attitudes Americans hold on such topics and also about the nature of American politics. One issue is gay marriage. It appears that, whether de jure or de facto, most gays will be able to marry or to “marry” relatively soon. This outcome seems to be driven in great measure by strong shifts in public opinion. According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of American adults agreeing that “homosexual couples should have the right to marry” rose from 11percent in 1988 to 49 percent in 2012, a strikingly rapid shift in public opinion.  Although young people and more liberal Americans are leading the cultural shift, this rush to accept gay couples is evident virtually across the board. (A recent Pew study shows the same.) Politicians are now tripping over one another to declare that they have “evolved” on this issue.

The other issue concerns undocumented immigrants. Most Washington observers are saying, as of this moment, that some reform is likely to come to fruition this spring. This political development, however, does not seem to be riding on a rushing wave of popular support.

Public Opinion

A just-published paper by Christopher Muste (gated) compiles public opinion data on immigration over about the last 20 years. The general thrust of Americans’ attitudes remains largely negative toward immigration, any future immigrants, and undocumented immigrants currently within our borders. Survey organizations have asked several different questions on the topic. Overall, there has been little change in recent years. The only major shift, recorded by the CBS/New York Times poll, was on a question asking whether “Overall, … recent immigrants …  contribute to this country, or do most of them cause problems?” Before 2000, about 50 percent said most cause problems and after 2000 about 30 percent did, but there’s been no further net change on this question since 2000. And that is the message we get from the other survey questions, as well: bits of fluctuation, but no surge, by any means, in favor of immigrants.

The chart below summarizes three of the questions analyzed in the Muste article. I added a fourth from the Pew organization.  The graph shows the percentage of respondents to each question who expressed an anti-immigrant or anti-undocumented immigrant attitude. (Item sources and question wording are in the notes at the end of the post.) The blue and purple lines show a modest rise and then a modest fall in hostility. The blue is the percentage who say that immigration generally should be decreased and the purple is the percentage who say that immigrants are an economic burden. The red line shows essentially no change in the percentage who say that immigration is bad for the country. The short, green line represents the percentage who say that current “illegal immigrants” should have to leave their jobs and the U.S. Here we see negligible change, as well.

There has not been much change in Americans’ views. Perhaps Americans are a bit more positive since about 2005 about the idea of immigrants generally, but they remained as concerned about the burdens of immigrants and as hostile to undocumented ones as before. So, what explains the move toward immigration reform?

Politics

The answer, clearly, is the power of the Latino voting bloc. The election results of 2012 struck Republicans especially hard. It reaffirmed what Democrats had been saying – that Latino Americans will come out to vote, not exclusively but to a great degree, mobilized by the immigration issue. The fates of their family and friends who are undocumented at stake; even more deeply, a politician’s stance on the topic marks his or her respect for Latinos. (Recall Mitt Romney’s strong preference to have the undocumented “deport themselves.”)

Thus, the politics of immigration may have become like the politics of several other issues: the vital interests and passion of a numerical minority allows it to “own” the issue, because the group votes overwhelmingly, sometimes only, on that issue. Other such blocs are gun fanciers on registering firearms, farmers on keeping agricultural supports, and religious conservatives on restricting abortion. (For a general analysis of how public opinion does or does not affect legislative outcomes, see Paul Burstein here and forthcoming.) Energy plus focus times voting equals disproportionate political influence.

Of course, focused organization and money can also be effective, even when the number of voters are relatively few. Both, for example, allow the so-called one percent to have unusually strong leverage (see, for example, here and pdf). But in this quite different case, the case of Latinos forcing movement on immigration reform, it is passion that owns the issue.

………………………………………………

NOTES: Data sources: All the numbers are from Muste, except the Pew series. Blue: Gallup, “Thinking about immigrants—that is, people who come from other countries to live here in the United States—in your view, should immigration be kept at its present level, increased, or decreased?”  Purple: Pew, Agree with “immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care” rather than with “immigrants today strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents.”  Red: Gallup, “On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?”  Green: CBS/New York Times: “Which comes closest to your view about illegal immigrants who are currently working in the United States? 1. They should be allowed to stay in their jobs, and to eventually apply for U.S. citizenship; OR 2. They should be allowed to stay in their jobs only as temporary guest workers, but NOT to apply for U.S. citizenship; OR 3. They should be required to leave their jobs and leave the United States.”

(The column was cross-posted on The Berkeley Blog on April 10, 2013.)

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With all the fuss around Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In book and campaign, the argument over whether women can “have it all” and, if not, why not, and do they really want it “all” anyway, and so on and so forth is back on magazine front covers and  all over the blogosphere. A related but different question is whether the women who might potentially “have it all” are chasing it all. What, in fact, are young, college-educated women deciding to do?

This was the subject of an earlier post (here). I have updated the evidence for my latest column in the Boston Review, available here.

Shoeless (?) Joe Jackson [Source]

The Look Back

Baseball appears in some modern literature as a journey back to a sepia-colored America of the author’s youth, when he was a player of sorts. John Updike wrote a poem about “the mothers on the sidelines / your own among them, hold their breaths / and you whiff on a terrible pitch . . . Baseball was invented in America /where beneath the good cheer and sly jazz the chance of failure is everybody’s right / beginning with baseball.” And Exeter-educated poet Donald Hall wrote about Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball).

There’s also the baseball nostalgia for the early days of the professional game, like Updike, again, in “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”: “ My personal memories of [Ted] Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company.” The standard trope about the professionals of an earlier time was that their paychecks were smaller, they lived in the neighborhood – usually near Ebbetts Field, or playing stickball with the local kids – and their hearts were presumably purer. Irish-Canadian author W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe became the film Field of Dreams, a classic of that genre.

The glow around early baseball is, of course, historically wrong in many ways. Men who played before the modern era were no less mercenary and no more scrupulous than today’s players; they were exploited more by owners and were less skilled.

Much of this writerly baseball is authors musing on the loss of personal innocence as they became adults, mixed with, perhaps confused with, their sense that the nation, too, lost its supposed innocence. (“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?/ A nation turns its lonely eyes to you /(Woo woo woo).”) This is, in some senses, an anti-modern genre.

A Look Ahead

Yet, there is another baseball literature in which the game is not a stand-in for pastoral days, but a near-sinful joyride into an exciting, enticing modern America. I am thinking here of baseball in the writings of early-to-mid 20th-century immigrants’ kids and grandkids. Learning to play and learning to watch the pros play was how to become an American, a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy – sometimes in spite of, or perhaps because of, parents’ disapproval. And instead of baseball being the 19th century game, it is 20th century go-go-go. Here’s a small list of examples that comes to mind (no doubt, with some errors.)

There’s Philip Roth, whose Portnoy’s second greatest desire was “to be a ball player: ‘Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder-and nothing more!’” (quoted here). There’s Bernard Malamud’s classic, The Natural, and Mark Harris’s set of novels, including Bang the Drum Slowly. Touching a baseball is like grabbing an American identity in Mario Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim, in Cahan’s David Levinsky. There’s biologist Steven Jay Gould’s baseball obsession, a known ailment among the professoriate. And there’s many a second- or third-generation sportswriter like Roger Kahn (Boys of Summer).

Baseball biographer Jonathan Eig once explained, “Baseball is an urban game” – somehow forgetting all those cornstalks and players with names like Country Enos Slaughter – “a game that was played by immigrants,” Eig said. “A lot of the novels of the early 20th century were immigrant novels, and baseball fit in really well . . . .”

Sergio Romo (source)

The professional game was a route (along with, to be sure, boxing) for immigrants’ sons and grandsons to make it in America – Hank Greenberg, the DiMaggio brothers, Joe Garigiola, and many Irish and German kids before them. Today, for all the attention to those newly-arrived, made-for-tv sports, baseball is still an important route to American success.

It’s not just the Latin and Caribbean players who are making it into the pros (see last year’s Opening Day post), but also the American children of immigrants from such nations. U.S.-born of Mexican parents Sergio Romo, for example, is notable not only for closing out the 2012 World Series for the San Francisco Giants, but also for wearing a tee-shirt during the championship celebration that declared “I just look illegal” and playing for Mexico in the 2013 World Baseball Classic. Again, baseball as the ticket forward, rather than as a nostalgic look back.

Speaking of Romo: It’s a new season! Go Giants!

NOTES

[1] The Library of Congress lists about 1380 books of baseball and fiction, compared to about 880 for football and 630 for basketball.

(This column was cross posted on the Berkeley Blog on March 26, 2013.)

Tagged: baseball, immigrants, literature ]]>