with the authorities has been often demonstrated. His operations on the
turf have led to suggestions that he be ruled off.
Alfred S. Austrian, hereinbefore mentioned, was the legal adviser of
Rothstein during the baseball scandal.
Hugh S. Fullerton, the able sport writer of the New York _Evening Mail_,
writing on July 28, 1921, made a plea that “a person guilty of crooked
work on a race track should be expelled not only from the race track but
from ball parks, tennis courts, football fields and every place else
where sport is promoted. These sport spoilers must be barred from every
sport.”
And in the same paper, referring specifically to Rothstein, Mr.
Fullerton writes:
“There is in New York a gambler named Rothstein who is much feared and
much accused. His name has been used in connection with almost every big
thieving, crooked deal on the race track, and he is openly named in this
baseball scandal. There has been no legal proof advanced against him
beyond the fact that he is the only man in the entire crowd who had
money enough to handle such a deal. At least $200,000 was used in actual
cash, and no one concerned could command that much money excepting
Rothstein, who is either the vilest crook or the most abused man in
America.
“Rothstein sits in the box with the owner of the New York Giants. He has
the entrée to the exclusive clubhouses on race tracks; he is prominent
at fights.”
Then, after naming Abe Attell and Bennie Kauff, who also enjoy
exceptional privileges around the New York club, Mr. Fullerton makes his
plea for the exclusion of “sport spoilers” from every ground where sport
is promoted.
Then there is Charles A. Comiskey, who is one of the most impressive
examples in the country today of a good Irishman being entirely eclipsed
by a Jew. Comiskey was one of the staunchest supporters of honest
baseball in this country and he gave great assistance in erecting the
major league game to the position it occupied just before the scandal.
He used his best endeavors, also, to get the truth about the “throwing”
of the World Series by his men. But his efforts were thwarted and even
he, perhaps, has not the ghost of a suspicion how it was done.
So that, instead of Mr. Comiskey, we look at the Jew behind him who is
Harry Grabiner. With Comiskey in failing health, Grabiner is in charge
at Comiskey Park. More than that, he appears to be in charge of Comiskey
himself, preventing him from making public statements and otherwise
dictating to him—pushing himself forward in a manner that has indelibly
and unpleasantly impressed nearly every sport writer in America.
Chicago’s support of the White Sox began to slump even before the
scandal and it was helped on by the unpopularity of Grabiner’s methods
which were wholly characteristic of what the Americanized Jew calls the
“kikes.” As secretary of the club, Grabiner has grabbed the headship,
and if Comiskey had power enough to unseat him he would do more than the
courts have done to purge the White Sox from its most serious remaining
blemish.
There are shady spots at Chicago that neither the grand jury nor the
court trial brought out, one of which is now related:
At all ball parks in the American League, and in the National, for that
matter, officials of the “home club”—that is, of the club in whose home
city the game is being played—“take the gate.” To “take the gate” is to
collect the tickets and render a report of the attendance. Tickets are
designed and numbered for the different gates—box gate, pass gate, grand
stand gate, bleacher gate, and the rest. The accounts are made up
showing the number of people who passed through each gate. When all the
reports are in, it can be seen at a glance what the paid attendance is,
and the shares of the contesting clubs.
In former times it was the custom for the visiting club to assign a
secretary to watch the gates and thus insure an honest count, but years
ago the “honor system” was adopted, leaving the entire accounting to the
“home club,” and this “honor system” was strictly observed. No one
suspected cheating. The count was made during the sixth and seventh
innings of each day’s game, the officials of the home club visiting all
the gates, taking the turnstile count, and making the record. Three
slips were then prepared showing the home club’s share, the visiting
club’s share and the grand total.
Under Grabiner’s régime the “honor system” as practiced at the Chicago
park began to be suspected. It began to be mysteriously suggested that
visiting teams were not getting their full share. Through a system of
false accounting, it was said, money was being held out. Naturally, with
all the other secret investigations that were proceeding in baseball,
this clue was not left untouched. Detectives were hired. Watchers were
stationed. Secret counts were made. Not only one club nor only two clubs
adopted secret methods of finding out what was occurring under
Grabiner’s secretaryship. They discovered that the “honor system” was
not in vogue at that park. Their suspicions were confirmed, the
mysterious rumors were verified. It would probably be highly
objectionable to pro-Jewish persons to mention the Jewish management
with these methods—but there are the facts.
The White Sox of Comiskey’s palmy days have certainly ridden to a sorry
finish under the Jewish control that has been foisted upon it. And it is
typical; for there is no surer clue by which to trace a certain type of
Jew than by the near certainty that even with honest money rolling in
upon him, he will try to increase the flow by petty dishonesty which,
once discovered, declasses him forever. It is typical. There is a lure
in trickery that appeals to some men more than sound and satisfying
achievement does. Think of a world-famous baseball club allowing a
system that cheated the guest club of a few hundred admission fees!
Then next in this gallery of notables in the background of baseball is
the Jew gambler, Abe Attell, whose connection with sports has been of a
questionable character ever since his dethronement from his pugilistic
pedestal. Attell is known as the “king bee” of the scheme to “throw the
games” in the World Series. He knows all about underhanded “throwing” of
contests, because he has “thrown” his own fights, now feigning to be
beaten when it involved gambling bets and easily winning when the same
reasons prompted. Attell is of such a character that he ought to be
barred from the grounds of any sport, as Mr. Fullerton suggests. He is
the Morris Gest of sport, without Gest’s success. All the players named
Attell as the “fixer.” Even Rothstein named Attell as the “fixer.” It
seemed unanimous—with perhaps Attell’s own consent—that he should be
regarded as the “fixer”: it made it so much more comfortable for others.
Attell went so far as to say that he approached Rothstein with the
proposition to raise a pool to bribe the players to “throw the games,”
but Rothstein declined. And yet Maharg, another Jew, whose name spelled
backward is “Graham,” says that a telegram came through signed “A. R.”
which promised $20,000. The “A. R.” was supposed by some to mean Arnold
Rothstein, but others say he is too shrewd even to sign his initials.
However, it was asserted that 10 gamblers, all Jews, cleaned up $250,000
on the games and that nearly as much money was used to manage it.
Attell was the “goat,” the unanimity being rather startling. It has been
known, of course, that men have been so deep in sin that they have been
chosen to bear the sins also of their friends on promise that
“influence” would be exerted, or on threat that if they didn’t stand as
“goat” certain past indiscretions would be advertised. Whatever Attell’s
case might have been, he stood the gaff.
Attell told the ball players that Rothstein was putting up the money.
And Attell was never brought to book. It was even testified that Abe
Attell was not Abe Attell at all. Certain moneys lost in a bet had been
repaid and the expected testimony in a certain matter turned out to be
other than was expected. Attell was held in New York for an extradition
hearing. Sammy Pass, a Jew, was one of the witnesses. So was Johnny
Seys. The hearing resulted in New York refusing the extradition of Abe
Attell.
Then came the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, in Jersey, which Abe Attell
attended. Chicago officers were in attendance, too, with extradition
papers signed by the governor of New Jersey. They intended to take
Attell back with them, though without passing through New York. Attell
attended the fight, but the underground wires, so active in this entire
case, were working, and Attell eluded the western officers.
The next name in the roster will be that of Barney Dreyfuss, a Jew,
owner of the Pittsburgh National League Club. Mr. Dreyfuss appeared in
the public eye during the conduct of the grand jury inquiry into the
shady games, with an insistent demand that the National Commission, the
ruling body in baseball, of which Ban B. Johnson is the acknowledged
leader, should be abolished, and another plan, the “Lasker Plan,”
substituted. It was intended to discredit the National Commission under
cover of the rottenness that had been discovered between the Jew
gamblers and the venial Chicago players. It was primarily an
anti-Johnson move and nothing else, and it was led by a Jew whose
principal followers were the rapidly increasing group of Jewish
controllers of American baseball. What they have against Ban B. Johnson,
impartial investigators have been unable to discover. Mr. Johnson’s
chief characteristic, with reference to the Jewish side, has been his
implacable enmity to crookedness of any kind. That ought not to be a
disqualification if baseball is to be saved. Yet the Jew-conceived,
Jew-named and Jew-advocated “Lasker Plan” won out.
Carl Zork, the St. Louis Jew who was indicted, is variously described as
a shirt-maker and a silk-broker. There are no variations, however, in
his description as a gambler. He is part of the Jewish national net of
gamblers which acts nationally and makes “killings” on a national scale.
It should be observed that the principal Jewish abuses are nation-wide.
This was shown in the United States Government’s investigation of the
white slave traffic; the bootlegging business is nation-wide; so is race
track gambling; baseball pools also are a national network for the
catching of “suckers.” There is, therefore, nothing unusual that a
shirt-maker from St. Louis and a horse-trader from East St. Louis, and a
bootlegger from Albany—together with clever high-ups and hopelessly
declassed low-downs—should all be involved in a baseball scandal that
breaks in Chicago. They are all really part of a national group.
Carl Zork, for example, staged the fight between Attell and a
third-class boxer in which Attell welched in the sixth round in order to
“throw” the fight, because his friends had all bet on the third-rate
man, getting tremendous odds. His friends would never have made the bet,
or having made it could never have won it, without Attell’s deliberate
quitting and feigned whimpering. It was one of the rawest of many raw
deals witnessed in Jew-controlled sports, but Attell is that kind of
man. He is a servant for that kind of scheme. It was not by accident
that Zork, the silk-broker, and Attell, an ex-prize fighter, should be
linked together in the baseball scandal. They had been linked in crooked
work before. They are part of the national machinery organized and
operated for the purpose of separating “Gentile boobs” from their money.
If there were no “Gentile boobs,” or if the “Gentile boob” would only
take a square look at the man behind the nation-wide spider web, the
gamblers and the Jewish sport purveyors would be in another kind of
business, with perhaps less money to flaunt in the faces of honest
people.
If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in
three words—too much Jew. Gentiles may rant out their parrot-like
pro-Jewish propaganda, the fact is that a sport is clean and helpful
until it begins to attract Jewish investors and exploiters and then it
goes bad. The two facts have occurred in pairs too frequently and under
too many dissimilar circumstances to have their relationship doubted.
When you contrast the grand stands full of Americans supposing they are
witnessing “the only clean sport,” with the sinister groups playing with
the players and the managers to introduce a serpent’s trail of
unnecessary crookedness, you get a contrast that is rather startling.
And the sinister influence is Jewish. So patent was this that even
newspapers could not cover the facts this time.
Years before this public scandal broke, involving a whole team, it was
noticed that certain Jewish gamblers formed the habit of rooming with
certain baseball players. It worried the managers. The fact that the
gamblers coddled in among the players was fraught with a suggestion of
disturbing unusualness. Managers tried the experiment of trading such
players—getting them out of their teams as quickly as possible. However,
the snuggling game was continued until it honey-combed the whole of
baseball, with the result that it was with no trepidation at all that
the Jewish gamblers could walk up and suggest to players that a game be
thrown for a price. The occurrence which formed the basis of the
investigation was not the first of the kind—far from it; the approach of
the gamblers was too easy, the reception given them by the players was
too casual, to warrant that view. Nor were the men whose names were
given to the public the only men involved.
The only fact of value brought out of all the trouble is that American
baseball has passed into the hands of the Jews. If it is to be saved, it
must be taken out of their hands until they have shown themselves
capable of promoting sports for sports’ sake. If it is not taken out of
their hands, let it be widely announced that baseball is another Jewish
monopoly, and that its patrons may know what to expect.
——
Issue of September 3, 1921.
XLVI.
Jewish Degradation of American Baseball
Every non-Jewish baseball manager in the United States lives between two
fears, and they are both describable in the Biblical term “the fear of
the Jews.” The first fear concerns what the Jews are doing to baseball;
the second fear concerns what the Jew would do to the manager if he
complained about it. Hence, in spite of the fact that the rowdyism that
has afflicted baseball, especially in the East, is all of Jewish
origin—the razzing of umpires, hurling of bottles, ceaseless shouting of
profane insults; in spite of the fact that the loyalty of players had to
be constantly guarded because of the tendency of individual Jewish
gamblers to snuggle up to individual players; in spite of the evidence
that even the gate receipts have been tampered with—the managers and
secretaries of baseball clubs have been obliged to keep their mouths
closed. Through fear they have not dared say what they know. As one
manager said, “Good God, man, they’d boycott my park if I told you!”
This in free America, and in the “cleanest game”! It is time for
baseball fans to begin to look round.
Incidentally, the fans have been looking round. The fans _know_. If
managers only knew how much the fans have observed, they might feel more
certain of support in the event of a move toward a clean up.
All that a Jew needs to make him eligible to baseball or any other sport
on the same terms with other people, is to develop a sportsman’s spirit.
The Jew has crowded into all the lucrative sports, but only on the
commercial side of them, seldom if ever in sympathy with the sport as a
real sportsman. The Jews referred to as gamblers in these articles are
not really gamblers: they take no chances; they are not sportsmen enough
to gamble; they are “sure thing” men. The “Gentile boobs” who walk into
their traps are the people who provide the money. Even in the field of
money, the Jew is not a sport—he is a gangster, ringing a gang of his
ilk around his victims with as much system as a storekeeper supplies
clerks and delivery boys.
Lately the Jews have been endeavoring to prove that they are sports.
Venial sport editors are sometimes induced to write certain laudatory
articles along that line, and frequently the name of Benny Leonard is
used—Benny Leonard, the light-weight fighter. Benny forms an instructive
illustration just along this line. Benny declares that he went into the
ring without a scar and that he will leave the ring without a scar. Why?
Because he will let no one hit him. He will go a long way to avoid pain.
The true wrestler risks and often suffers physical pain. So does the
true ring fighter. But it is a Jewish characteristic to avoid, if
possible, the pain of contest, just as it is a characteristic to avoid
unnecessary effort.
Look at the other light-weight champions and fighters. Kid Lavinge
carries scars; his hearing is affected by the blows he took. Battling
Nelson was so badly shattered by his fights that operations were
necessary. Ad Wolgast, as a result of the honest straight fighting he
endured, went into a sanatorium. Imagine Willie Ritchie and Freddie
Welsh boasting that they never took a blow! But Benny Leonard is still
unscarred. It may be boxing, but it is not fighting.
Wrestling is so tightly controlled by Jewish managers, that a real
wrestler is absolutely barred out, for fear he will be able to show that
the handful of wrestlers hired by the Jewish trust are not wrestlers at
all, but only impositions on the good nature of the public. In order
that the statement just made may not be misunderstood, it is repeated:
the wrestling game at present is like the chariot race in a circus—the
performers are hired men and the race is only a sham. The Jewish
controllers of wrestling will not permit a real wrestler to
appear—indeed, they go to infinite pains to bar him out—because a real
wrestler would immediately show up the game. Wrestling is as much a
Jewish _business_, controlled in its every part, as the manufacture of
clothing, and its hirelings are mostly Gentiles.
That is what baseball was coming to. The whole sport was getting down to
an “exhibition game” status. The overtone of “money, money, money” grew
louder and louder. The sport aspect of the game was beginning to give
way to the “show” aspect. There were numerous signs that an attempt was
being made to “star” certain persons, to run “headliners,” and to pull
off a game with a sensational ending—just like a ballet is staged, or a
pageant. Thrills were being offered—not as the give and take of the
game, the accident of tensest action, but as practiced acting.
That is, baseball was slowly being brought under the level of the
box-office idea.
There were forces against this metamorphosis of the game. Certain men
saw what was coming. There were also forces favoring the change, and
wanting it to come. Curiously enough, the forces that favored turning
baseball into afternoon vaudeville were Jews, and those who favored
keeping the game as part of American outdoor sports were non-Jews.
There was more involved in that Chicago trial—that curious medley of
Jewish defendants, witnesses, lawyers and judge—than the mere trial of
baseball players accused of unlawfully taking money.
The players were the “Gentile boobs.” The players were not a whit
different than a candidate for the United States Senate who plays the
game according to the Jewish method. Every player on trial was there
because he had listened to the suggestions of a Jew. The Jews who made
the suggestions were not on trial. Some of them were not even indicted.
Some who were called before the grand jury were not required to testify.
Others who were indicted were acquitted. The spotlight of the whole
scandal was centered on the non-Jewish players who were pushed out in
front to do the job and who were known to any number of Jewish witnesses
as having been mixed up in whatever shady work there may have been. The
“Gentile boobs” had no witnesses; the Jews had all of them.
This is not a whitewash for the players. They deserved all they got for
mixing op with the low hangers-on; but they did not deserve it alone.
Had they been half men there would have been a few Jewish gamblers cured
for life of the little habit of approaching ball players with a shady
proposition. The players are Jewish dupes. To be such a dupe is
punishment enough.
It would be erroneous, however, to hold the opinion that corruption in
baseball began with the matter which was aired in court. Reference was
made at the beginning of this article to the fear which the managers
feel. This fear is of long standing. The managers had observed certain
manifestations of evil years before. They had heard rumors which they
did not repeat to their closest friends. They had started quiet
investigations, the results of which they did not reveal even to their
partners in the clubs. Everybody acquainted with the true situation,
lived in deathly fear of emitting a whisper that might give a clue to
the truth. But the truth is stronger than walls and doors and steel
vaults—the truth was known at every stage of the game, by somebody.
Fans may recall that several years ago one of the eastern teams began to
get rid of most of its men. It was a strange proceeding and occasioned
much discussion. The sport pages speculated about it and the “wise” ones
doped out plausible or fantastic explanations. The true explanation has
never yet been given, and it is this: the manager of that club had seen
certain things in the World Series of that year which turned him cold.
He knew that he saw them; morally he was convinced that something was
wrong; he exhausted every available method to get at the truth, and
failed; so, unable to bring the men to public punishment, he simply got
rid of them one by one, and the next season he had practically “rebuilt”
his team. That was not more than ten and not less than five years before
the 1919 World Series which formed the basis of the Chicago scandal.
It may be stated also that this which follows is the consensus of Jewish
opinion as regards baseball: “You can’t kill baseball as a _business_.
It will always draw a gang on an afternoon, particularly a Sunday
afternoon. It can be ‘pepped’ up and ‘jazzed’ up in a way that will make
it quite a show.”
The Jews are probably right, that baseball cannot be killed as a
business. But it can be killed as a sport. And the American baseball
fans who value the game as a sport should wish its utter destruction
rather than consent that it become a rendezvous for the gangs that now
fill the Jew-controlled burlesque houses. Baseball as a business will
become a danger in American life, a mob-center, a hang-out of the
disorderly and criminal classes.
There is another peculiar Jewish story regarding baseball which has not
been told and it necessarily brings in the name of Judge Landis, of
Chicago, an upright man with a wise head, whom the Jews would better not
try to fool.
When the story is told, however, even the Jews will agree that Judge
Landis is too shrewd for them.
Before the baseball scandal the situation was this: Ban Johnson was the
head of organized baseball, through the National Commission. He had
brought the sport from a minor place to its position as the national
game. Ban Johnson was something of an autocrat, as all leaders must be,
because as old General Booth of the Salvation Army said: “If the
Children of Israel had been managed by a committee, they never could
have crossed the Red Sea.” Autocracy has its uses, especially in
striking out new lines. Ban Johnson used his power for baseball, not for
personal aggrandizement. He saw the game grow great, he wanted it kept
clean. In his efforts to keep it clean, he made certain enemies. One of
those enemies, the Jewish owner of a baseball club, threatened to “get
Johnson.” As far as the National Commission as the head of organized
baseball is concerned, they did “get” him. But so far as his prestige is
concerned, so far as his character and reputation are concerned, they
did not “get” him.