Infinite Inning 351: The World Series and the Surplus of Piggies

We spend the episode in 1933. First, Will Rogers comments on the broadcasts in a way which suggests that not much has changed between the start of on-air baseball commentary and its current state. Then we turn to the World Series and the government anti-hunger programs that arose at the precise moment that the Washington Senators were about to make their last bellyflop off the championship high-dive, and what each says about their time and ours, when we are (as we speak) fighting about some of the same issues. 

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Writing to The New York Times during the World Series
in nineteen thirty three, actor and observer of the American scene,
Will Rogers said, these announcers of the World Series in
both the radio systems did a great job. I got
a radio in my stable. Well, they made it seem
so real that half a dozen times I started into

(00:22):
a box stall to buy a hot dog and a
bottle of beer. I like the way they announced where
the batter come from, his hometown, his weight age, batting average,
and who he had been keeping company with. And that's
what should be done with radio singers. This crooner is
from Adenoid New Jersey. He sings left handed, weighs one

(00:43):
hundred and eighteen pounds with his tonsils. He sang three
hundred and thirty five songs last year with nothing to
remember him by but his manuscript. He was first with Claremore,
Oklahoma in the ok League, divorced three times, and is
looking for a break. Yours, Will Rogers, It's fascinating to
note that nothing has changed when it comes to baseball broadcasting.

(01:05):
For me, the quintessential example of informational overkill that Will
Rogers seems to have been responding to at least informational
overkill compared to what he was used to, which was nothing.
Baseball on the radio being a relatively new thing, the
language of the effort was still being figured out. But

(01:26):
for me, you have to go back to the career
of catcher Mike Piazza. It happened at least nine hundred
and fifty six times, because at least once in every
single game that Piazza played, everyone the broadcasters felt obligated
not sure which side. So maybe we could multiply this
by two. Maybe it was more like three nine hundred

(01:48):
times if it was both sides. It's just that Vin
Scully was the announcer for a lot of those games,
and I trust that Vin Scully had more discretion here
every game. We should maybe count pre and postgame hosts
as well. Every game someone mentioned that Piazzo was drafted
in the sixty second round as a favor to Godfather
Tommy Lesorda. Every single time. Now that happened that draft

(02:14):
in nineteen eighty eight. Piazza reached the majors in nineteen
ninety two and played until two thousand and seven, So
even nearly twenty years after the fact, we still had
to be reminded of that, even though we never had
a chance to forget it. That total one nine hundred
and fifty six includes regular season, postseason, and All Star games,

(02:36):
but doesn't include exhibitions, and cannot account for the possibility
that in some games the broadcasters fell back on that
story more than once, maybe in extra innings they felt
like it had been refreshed and they could go back
to it. For me, growing up in the New York area,
this was my second trip down low draft pick road.
I got a low key preview of the Piazza story

(02:58):
during the height of Don Mattinglee's career, when in about
one third of his games, And again I cannot account
for both sides of the broadcast. Maybe the opposition's broadcasters
hit this even more often, but you would hear about
a third of the time that the Yankees had selected
Mattinglee in the nineteenth round of the nineteen seventy nine draft,
and oh my god, what a steal. How badly had

(03:20):
this guy been overlooked and disrespected? And this was irritating
because first, as with Piazza, we got it, we heard
you the first nine thousand times. The other part of
it was it It just wasn't true. Yes, Mattinglee was
kind of a little guy. He had small stature compared
to some of the giants who played baseball. Seeing him
stand next to Dave Winfield, you would never be confused

(03:42):
as to which of the two was the more likely
to be selected as a model for a statue of
a classic Greek discus thrower or something that said he
was a nineteenth round pick, not necessarily because he was
a little guy and scouts wanted to buy low on him,
but because, first, in the nineteen seventies and eighties, there
were creatures with tentacles sucking on rocks on Mars that

(04:05):
cared more about the amateur draft than the Yankees did,
so if he landed with them, it was not as
the result of pure insight. They were just throwing darts
at the wall. And secondly, he was actually a pretty
well regarded high school player, but teams thought he was
going to college, So why blow a pick higher up
when you can get someone who actually is going to

(04:26):
sign with you. There was so much less to that
maddingly story than his being underestimated, and long before the
sixteen years of his career had passed, it had become
more than tedious, it had become oppressive. Maybe just to
give certain broadcasters the benefit of the doubt, they really
felt like there would have been someone out there who
just hadn't heard those matting Le or Piazza stories. But

(04:51):
having said that, having admitted that possibility, if you listen
to or watch enough baseball, you can tell which broadcasters
really enjoy their jobs, which are over it just like
the rest of us, and which over or underprepare just
like the rest of us. One now broken up radio
team I listened to was kind of forced to listen
to for a long time, could often be heard to exclaim,

(05:13):
we've got to change for the seventh The Red Sox
have just inserted Luke Bungibong at shortstop. I've never heard
of this guy. Have you heard of him? Ralph? No
mystery to me. And of course, the correct response to this,
if you're sitting at home in your chair, relaxing listening
to the ballgame is oh, yeah, well so's your mother.
My friends, my dear friends. It's your job to look

(05:35):
at the roster before the game and figure out just
who the hell Luke Bogiebong is because your listeners probably
haven't heard of him. Either, and it falls to you
to inform them. Worse, Sometimes they would say this not
about the team's ninety eighth best prospect, who is really
not a prospect at all, but still Jermaine still relevant.
Why because he's on the field right now and he

(05:57):
just might get the game winning hit. Imagine if Luke
Bogibong walks it off with a Grand Slam and you're
in the position of doing an old Lone Ranger broadcast.
Who was that masked man? I don't know, but I
think he goes by Bungie Bong. I didn't even get
the chance to thank him. Well, that's because no one
had identified him for you. Not every fan has the capability,

(06:19):
the time, the money, the energy to follow the minor
leagues the way that someone who is engaged in talking
about baseball should. You do it for them, not only
because you love it, but so they don't have to.
And I was about to say, sometimes it's not the
journeyman in the organization that gets the whole treatment, but
rather the team's second or third or fourth best prospect.

(06:41):
And that was really frustrating, because all of baseball has
been watching this guy, at least to some extent, except
the people paid to watch him and talk about him,
and be aware that Luke Bangibong is a comer. He
was a first round draft pick two years ago. He
was hurt right after being drafted, so some people wrote

(07:03):
him off. But last year he won the Sally League
batting title, has jumped up two levels this year and
presently leads the International League in home runs. There's a
big industry around that kind of information nowadays, it's pretty
easy to come by. And you know, the funny part
somewhere on some broadcast on September eighth, nineteen eighty two,

(07:26):
I don't know who it was. I don't know if
it was on television or radio, but someone said, we
go to the bottom of the ninth Yankees ahead ten two.
Can Griffi has come out. Don Mattingley has taken over
in right field. Who Don Mattinglee. I've never heard of
that guy. Now, extrapolate this same concept of over preparing,

(07:47):
under preparing, of sedulous study and detached indolence of just
phoning it in to commentators in every other field, including
those who we rely upon to explain what it's really
happening in our world. You know, it's funny, I happen
to come across this half anecdote about old Dodgers manager

(08:07):
Wilbert Robinson this week Uncle Robbie and his scout Spencer Abbot,
for having a discussion during which Abbot felt called upon.
And I'm quoting here from the original story to assert
in a loud tone, even in baseball, truth is mighty yes, sir,
interrupted Uncle Wilbert, mighty scarce. So who can you trust yourself?

(08:29):
But only if you listen carefully to discern who is
checked in and who's checked out. If you don't, the
one who's checked out might be you, having turned in
your key and been misled into enlisting in the Gray
Army of the Infinite Inning. Well, hello there, and welcome

(09:22):
back to the show, Infinite Inning number three fifty one.
I am, as always your non confrontational how's that for
a change up on convivial host Steven Goldman, as ever,
for this trip to the past on a mission to
better understand the present, the vehicle being the national pastime,

(09:43):
the game of baseball. Now, I am coming to you
prior to the World Series or really, and try not
to picture this. We're sort of straddling it in that
I'm recording the bulk of this episode beforehand, prior to
the evening of October thirty first and Game six, And
so I have no idea if the thing will end

(10:04):
tonight or if we will get a seventh game. And
I'm kind of rooting for the seventh game. Not kind of,
I am. The winters are long and cold, and there
is vanishingly little baseball in it. At least, we get
so much more baseball information now during the off season
than we used to. When I first started out writing

(10:26):
about baseball professionally, people would ask me, so, are you
still employed during the winter. They didn't realize they had
to be told, oh, yeah, it's a year round thing.
But it wasn't always like that. I mean, if you
subscribe to the Sporting News back in the day, I
mean they covered it year round, and if you were
lucky enough to have access to the Boston Globe during

(10:47):
the eighties and nineties, Peter Gammons would put out about weekly,
not every week. Sometimes it was really disappointing because it
wasn't easy for me to get hold of the Boston
Globe in New Jersey at that time, before everything was online.
I mean, he would put out as I've said many times,
a whole page of broadsheet filled with rumors, most of
which did not come to fruition, but they tided you over.

(11:09):
And I don't know if you'll recall this, but for
a while, I'm not sure for how many years, Pepsi
or maybe it was Pizza Hut or both, because I
think one on the other. At one point, I mean,
Pepsi owned Pizza Hut sponsored a softball game just before
spring training began, so towards the end of January, which
starred then current Major leaguers, and that was so close

(11:31):
to the real thing. I went to that like a junkie.
Just to see Wade Boggs pop up a softball to
a roamer would do something to satisfy my need to
have the game back again. And this was at about
the same time that collusion was throttling the Hot Stove League,
So boy were we thirsty. I have a lot to

(11:53):
say to you and act to the show today, so
I'm going to progress quickly through this segment. This week,
I talked about manage serial follies in the World Series.
That's a baseball perspectus, and specifically Bucky Harris's decision to
intentionally walk a batter who was suffering from vertigo and
torn ankle ligaments in Game four of the nineteen forty
seven World Series, a decision that led directly to a

(12:16):
Yankees loss. I didn't quite finish my thought before Visa VI,
straddling that I will wrap up the episode after the
game concludes, and by then, well we'll know whether we
get more baseball or not, and I will be able
to briefly remark upon that at the very end of
the program, which again, I have a lot to say
in the second act, so I won't need to add more,

(12:37):
but I might. A quick promotional note last week or
report from the environmental group Coffee Watch, and I'm not
making fun of that pointed out that Brazil is increasingly
deforesting itself to grow more coffee, yet the climate change
that results from us murdering the planet's lungs, not to
put too fine a point on it, makes it harder

(12:58):
to grow coffee. Coffee essentially punched a Hondura sized hole
in Brazilian forests, said Ettel Higginette, Coffee Watches founder and director,
to NPR. And that's why I agreed to endorse Afueracoffee
dot Com on this program because not only do I
sincerely love coffee, I sincerely love air. I love the rainforest.

(13:21):
I love creatures like the loris, which lives in the rainforest.
They live in Southeast Asian rainforests, not Brazilian rainforest, but
they were the first rainforest critter that came to mind.
So forgive me. How about the sloth? I dig sloths.
And since Afuera Coffee sources its beans from Rainforest Alliance
certified farms, I'm hopeful that no sloths were harmed in

(13:45):
the production of this brew. I'd like to think that
in this small way where at least supporting responsible capitalism
versus a business that turns orphans into chimney sweeps and
then runs away when they get stuck in the flu
or Timmy scream a clumsy oaf Jim, Jim and E Chim.
If you go to a Fuerracoffee dot com and type

(14:05):
in infinite inning at checkout, you'll get fifteen percent off
those wholesome beans. And by the way, yesterday on this
week's reissue episode, I mentioned an old radio show that
Chase in Sanborn Hour starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy
was actually a good show. First of all, it's where
the Bickersons came from, which was kind of a sketch
within it, which became its own thing. It starred Doni

(14:27):
Michi and Francis Langford as a married couple that just
despise each other, and if you don't get enough of
that in your own life, then well, I guess you
might find that sort of thing entertaining. Second of all,
Edgar Bergen was not the world's greatest ventriloquist. He was funny,
but he moved his lips a lot, so radio was
really the perfect environment for him. Can I share a

(14:48):
very dumb thing I think about sometimes? This is the
kind of trivia that obsesses me. In the seventies, there
were a couple of dumb superhero themed specials on NBC
that were not written like true comic book stories. They
were written like bad vaudeville shows, with creaky old mother
in law jokes and that sort of thing, and they
were called the Legends of the Superheroes. They did bring

(15:10):
back Adam West and Burt Ward, although they put the
Batman costume on West wrong, which has always driven me nuts.
But on one of those specials. When I was a
very little kid, I heard Burt Ward and Adam West
do this joke. It's sort of a funny joke. And
then years later, through the time machine of radio, I
heard it again done on an episode of the Edgar

(15:31):
Bergen and Charlie McCarthy radio show, The Chasing Sanborn Hour,
which was roughly thirty to thirty five years older than
the Batman and Robin thing that I just described to you.
And what I wonder is did they originate it their
writers or is it just ancient, so ancient that it's
kind of authorless because whoever originally came up with the

(15:52):
gag has been lost to time. But it involves a car.
It involves borrowing a car. In the Batman and Robin version,
borrowed the Batmobile. In the Charlie and Edgar version, Charlie
apologizes to Edgar for borrowing his car and having a
slight accident with it. Well where did you leave it,
Edgar asks, Between fifth and eighth. Charlie replies, well where

(16:14):
between fifth and eighth, All the way between fifth and eighth.
Big laugh. I laughed when they did it. I didn't
laugh at Adam West and Burt Ward unfortunately. But then
the whole thing kind of made me mad. I'm a purist,
you see. The whole reason I bring this up is
I did go back to the Chasing Sanborn Coffee Hour
to see how they handled their ad. Since I'm now
in the world of this sort of sponsorship and you're

(16:36):
in the world of listening to it, I want to
at least make it entertaining for you. But I was
disappointed because they just handled it like straight ads. And
in fact, the main ad that I heard was actually
for a non coffee product, tender leaf tea balls. I
think ball in the tea was a wartime expedient, but
either way, it sounded almost indistinguishable from a lucky Strike
ad of the period where they talked about buying only

(16:57):
the finest leafs. Speaking of ads, it is time for
us to take a break. On the other side, we
get to encounter synchronicity, which is a strange force. It's
good when it happens, but not so good when it
happens for bad reasons. When something negative is happening that
crosses over into my little ambit here, that corner of
the multiverse we call the infinite inning and baseball, and

(17:19):
the way baseball used to be intersects with the way
we live now. There's this little fission that takes place
when that happens, at least for me on the other side,
we go back to nineteen thirty three because of things
that are happening now. On Friday, October thirty first, two

(17:58):
different federal judges enjoined our duly elected government from as
a supposed consequence of our current constitutional crisis. Said crisis
being that the Constitution has been poisoned, murdered, killed, abandoned
in the alley, and Congress has abdicated from shutting off SNAP,
which is not a baseball acronym standing for support neutral

(18:19):
adjusted Pitching, but rather the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which
used to be called in a less sensitive time unofficially
food stamps. It is meant to ensure that those who
cannot work, or who cannot work at a high enough
rate of pay, do not go hungry. The government has
a rainy day fund established for just this purpose, for
just this sort of emergency, but the lords and ladies

(18:42):
at court do not want to use it, saying let
him eat Paul Room. Now, assuming the lords and ladies
honor the court orders. People who most need help will
continue to receive it, at least to some extent. Stay tuned,
because you can't take anything for granted. These days. There
are forty two million Americans who receive SNAP. A lot
of people demagogue that number and ask how is it

(19:05):
we have so many people on this program? Some of
them must be stealing. It's pretty simple. This is a
country of about three hundred and thirty five million to
three hundred and forty million people. The poverty rate is
a shocking twelve and a half percent, or so, twelve
percent of three hundred and forty million is forty two million.

(19:26):
Maybe smaller numbers would make it easier to imagine the
number of us who are on this program. The current
seating capacity of Dodger Stadium is fifty six thousand people.
If you watched any of the three World Series games
prior to this evenings, then every time the camera showed

(19:46):
a crowd shot, you were seeing some portion of fifty
six thousand people. If that crowd were representative of the
American public, and of course it isn't because the World
Series is an expensive ticket. But stay with me, then
forty nine one thousand of the attendees would have incomes
at least a little above the poverty level, and seven
thousand would not or at least wouldn't be too far

(20:09):
above it. Remember, one can qualify for assistance if they
have an income at or below one hundred and thirty
percent of the federal poverty level for their household, which
is a tasked acknowledgment that the poverty level is set
too low. As for their stealing, quote unquote, it's not
a lot of money. According to a recent New York

(20:29):
Times article, it comes to about three hundred and fifty
six dollars a month per household. That's on average summer,
more some or less. Multiplying that by twelve, you get
four thousand, two hundred and seventy two dollars a year.
If my numbers are off, you'll tell me, but that
works out to twelve dollars a day. You think anyone's
laughing all the way to the bank on twelve dollars
a day. I also want to share a good line

(20:52):
about another aspect, while several lines regarding an aspect of
nutritional assistance, which has often been demagogued, and here I
want to quote from the great leftist writer Meredell Lessour
who wrote a piece of reportage, a very good piece
about women trying to find jobs in the depths of
the Great Depression. It was nineteen thirty two. The piece

(21:13):
was titled Women on the Breadlines, and spoiler, you didn't
find women on the breadlines. I've often wondered about that,
because there are plenty of pictures of men lining up
for soup kitchens and the like. You don't see a
lot of women. And that is addressed in her story
and the different sorts of shame that women felt compared

(21:34):
to men that prevented them from seeking that sort of assistance.
In Women on the Breadline, she profiles a bunch of
women of all ages sitting in a jobs office at
the YWCA, hoping against hope they would just get some
kind of position that would keep them whole. Now, one
of the things we have often heard over the years

(21:56):
about snap recipients is that they were taking advantage of
the pre either by eating too well or eating too poorly.
They can't win either way. And what I mean by
that is that Ronald Reagan, for example, going back to
his first run for president, attempted to stigmatize people of
color who were recipients by saying that they were getting
prime rib and lobster on food stamps. Conversely, you often

(22:19):
hear that people are buying too much junk food with
their nutritional support, and in this passage from Women on
the Breadlines, she addresses both of those accusations in a
sense as if they were true, which obviously they generally
are not. But the part in the expression flavor of
this particular emergency had a particular effect on the recipient

(22:44):
of funds for buying food, a psychological effect, and I
have no reason to believe that that's changed. And I
want to also include the conclusion to that section of
her story, because she talks about one of the hazards
of not having Sophia funds to eat. These are knock
on effects of degradation that you'd think a moral society

(23:07):
would care more about. She wrote, sitting here, waiting for
a job, the women have been talking in low voices
about the girl Ellen. They talk in low voices with
not too much pity for her, unable to see through
the mist of their own torment. What happened to Ellen?
One of the masks. She knows the answer already. We
all know it. A young girl who went around with

(23:29):
Ellen tells about seeing her last evening back of a
cafe downtown outside the kitchen door, showing her legs so
that the cook came out and gave her some food.
And some men gathered in the alley and threw small
coin on the ground for a look at her legs.
And the girl says enviously that Ellen had a swell
breakfast and treated her to one too, that costs two dollars.

(23:53):
A scrub woman whose hips are bent forward from stooping,
with hands gnarled like water soaked branches, clicks her tongue
in disgust. No one saves their money, she says, a
little money in these foolish young things buy a hat,
a dollar for breakfast, a bright scarf, and they do.
If you've ever been without money or food, something very

(24:13):
strange happens when you get a bit of money, a
kind of madness. You don't care. You can't remember that
you had no money before that the money will be gone.
You can remember nothing but that there is the money
for which you have been suffering. Now Here it is
a lust takes hold of you. You see food in
the windows in imagination, you can eat hugely. You taste

(24:37):
a thousand meals. You look in the windows, colors are brighter.
You buy something to dress up in, and excitement takes
hold of you. You know it is suicide, but you
can't help it. You must have food, dainty, splendid food,
and a bright hat. So once again you feel blithe,
rid of that ratty, gnawing shame. I guess you'll go

(24:58):
on the street now, a woman says faintly, and no
one takes the trouble to comment further. Like every commodity. Now,
the body is difficult to sell, and the girls say
you're lucky if you get fifty cents. It's very difficult
and humiliating to sell one's body. Perhaps it would make
it clear if one were to imagine having to go
out on the street to sell, say one's overcoat. Suppose

(25:21):
you have to sell your coat so you can have
breakfast in a place to sleep, Say for fifty cents.
You decide to sell your only coat. You take it
off and put it over your arm. The street that
has before been just a street now becomes a marked
something entirely different. You must approach someone and admit your destitute,
and are now selling your clothes, your most intimate possessions.

(25:45):
Everyone will watch you talking to the stranger, showing him
your overcoat. What a good coat it is. People will
stop and watch curiously. You will be quite naked on
the street. It is even harder to sell one's self,
more humiliating. It is even humiliating to try to sell
one's labor when there is no buyer. I want to

(26:05):
talk about why we have these programs. Food assistance goes
back to the nineteen thirties when Meridell Lasour wrote that piece,
and it has been the subject of attack pretty much
since day one, because someone somewhere might be cheating and
getting something for nothing, even though that nothing is just
twelve dollars a day. And let's just get that part
out of the way. In a country that's so large,

(26:28):
a nation of millions, even back in the nineteen thirties, sure,
over time there have been cheats, but as a percentage
of recipients they would be insignificant, and you would find
them in every ethnic or religious group, in every population. Definitionally,
there are people of above average or below average ethics

(26:49):
and morality and patriotism too, And of course there's all
kinds of cheating. If you avoid your income tax, if
you pay less than you should have, then you are
scared I'm the government and betraying your fellow citizen, in
the precise same way that someone who is taking too
much out of the snaptrough is scamming and betraying them,

(27:13):
although your proportions of doing so are probably higher, given
that if you're not in that ladder bucket, you are
probably making more money than they are. Are you making
more than twelve dollars a day? So let he or
she are they among us who are without sin cast
the first stone. From my point of view, let's feed
people first and means test them later, investigate them to

(27:34):
your heart's content, because you can always stop a cheater
from cheating a second time, but you can't repair the
damage done to a child via malnutrition. As miss Lesour
wrote in nineteen thirty two, you can't feed a child
cream tomorrow to make up for his not having milk today.
That was from a separate piece on the same subject.

(27:57):
There are a lot of children on supplemental nutrition, of
old folks who are past the age of retirement, and
a lot of members of the working poor, which is
to say, people who have jobs, but the job doesn't pay.
That's a lyric, isn't it. Now I've got a job
but it don't Ah, yeah, it's the clash. It's trained
in vain so alone. I keep the wolves at bay,
but you don't keep them at bay without three squares

(28:17):
and maybe some beaty treats to throw at those canines. Actually,
we're going to get back to that thought. It was
the administration's goal, our current administrations to cut funds for
this program. But with Republicans and Democrats unable to agree
on a budget because the administration and its party also
wants to undercut healthcare, and in any case, they have

(28:37):
renegged on many other aspects of budget agreements in which
the White House has impounded funds illegally, the government is closed.
There is literally no incentive for the Democrats to make
a deal when the administration's word is not worth a
damn thing. Weirdly, the Speaker of the House is keeping
his half of Congress closed too, and the constitution and

(28:58):
the way the House has been run historically sets the
Speaker up to be a very powerful man in some instances,
and at sometimes more powerful than the president. The current
Speaker isn't interested in all that. He doesn't want to
work at all. He is a lot like that imaginary
welfare recipient they're always talking about. And so, prior to
today's court orders, snap benefits were scheduled to stop as

(29:21):
of November first, and again we're not out of the
woods yet. Let's talk about when this program arrived. It
arrived at a moment of inspiration that struck concurrently with
the nineteen thirty three World Series, which, by another coincidence,
happened to be held in Washington, the last time that
would happen until twenty nineteen, eighty six years long time

(29:43):
for Washington fans to go without, and that gap from
nineteen thirty three to twenty nineteen, and the extinction of
Washington in this narrow sense, that is the point of
this juxtaposition. Things wouldn't be the same again, in ways,
both good and bad. I'm not going to put charred
on that. I'm not going to underscore it for you
every time I show you an example from that time

(30:06):
and say, well, it's not like that anymore. I'll do
it once, I'll maybe do it twice. I'll try to
resist it the rest of the time because I'm confident,
I know that you will see it for yourself. It
was to borrow from a Star Wars title crawl. A
dark time for the Republic. The Great Depression had brought
the world economy to a halt amidst a deflationary spiral

(30:26):
and a credit crunch. Individual Americans were broke, cities were broke.
Chicago stopped paying teachers who were known to faint in
front of their classes from lack of food. There was
a lot of that going around, not just in teachers. Simultaneously,
or almost simultaneously, the ecological disaster that came to be
called the dust Bowl was afflicting the middle of the country,

(30:48):
creating an almost literal scar of desiccated farmland that practically
ran from the Canadian border down to the Gulf. Crop
failures meant not only a loss of income for farmers
and a loss of food for well everyone, but it
meant a lack of fodder for livestock, which meant dying animals,
whether those animals were around for labor or to become

(31:11):
meat or to provide milk. And that meant that farmers
who had been in bad streets for years because of
falling prices were starving too. Let me quote one more time,
Meridell Lassour, who was one of many reporters to file
from inside that scar. When you drive through the Middle
West droughty country, you try not to look at the

(31:32):
thrusting out ribs of the horses and cows, but you
get so you can't see anything else but ribs, Like
hundreds of thousands of little beached hulks. It looks like
the bones are rising right up out of the skin.
Pretty soon, quite gradually, you begin to know that the
farmer under his rags shows his ribs too, and the

(31:52):
farmer's wife is as lean as his cows, and his
children look tiny and hungry. On Decoration Day, the wind
started again, blowing hot as a blast from hell, and
the young corn withered as if under machine gun fire.
The trees in two hours looked as if they had
been beaten. The day after Decoration Day, it was so

(32:13):
hot you couldn't sit around looking at the panting cattle
and counting their ribs and listening to that low cry
that is an awful asking. We got in the car
and drove slowly through the sizzling countryside. Not a soul
was in sight. It was like a funeral. The houses
were closed up tight, the blinds drawn, the windows and
doors closed. There seemed to be a menace in the air,

(32:35):
made visible. It was frightening. You could hear the fields
crack and dry, and the only movement in the down
driving heat was the dead writhing of the dry, blighted
leaves on the twigs. The young corn, about four spears
up was falling down like a fountain being slowly turned off.

(32:55):
There was something terrifying about this visible sign of disaster.
It went into your nostrils, so you couldn't breathe the
smell of hunger. It made you count your own ribs
with terror. You don't starve in America. Everything looks good.
There is something around the corner. Everyone has a chance.
That's all over now. The whole country cracks and rumbles

(33:19):
and cries out in its terrible leanness, stripped with exploitation
and terror, and as sign and symbol, bones bones showing
naked and spiritless, showing decay and crisis, and a terrific
warning air and lean in mid America. The whole countryside

(33:39):
that afternoon became terrifying, not only with its present famine,
but with the foreshadowing of its coming hunger, no vegetables now,
and worst of all, no milk. The countryside became monstrous
with this double doom. Every house is alike in suffering
as in a flood, every cow, every field, mounting in

(34:00):
hundreds and thousands from state to state. You try not
to look at the ribs, but pretty soon you were
looking only at ribs. Starvation stands up in the blazing sun,
naked at last, and bare and lean ribs for all
the coming winter. I'm jumping around a little because the

(34:20):
way I want to order my examples isn't identical to
the timeline. And I should point out that even before
the farms dried up, there was hunger in the cities
due to incredibly high unemployment. How do you get into
a deflationary spiral? Everyone in America had bought everything they
might have wanted in the nineteen twenties, ice boxes, radios, cars,
off and on. Credit factories kept churning them out anyway,

(34:42):
but no one was buying. Prices dropped, profit margins thinned
and vanished. The factories closed, jobs went away, banks started
calling in their loans. The end, although there was actually
a lot more to it than that. This was a
huge international calamity. It had a lot of fathers, a
lot of mothers. And again there are whole books still
to this day. One just came out written about the

(35:04):
origins of the crisis, and they don't all agree simultaneously.
Our government, both under President Hoover and initially under President Roosevelt,
tried to figure out what was appropriate for the federal
government to do when the people were hungry. Hoover felt
very strongly that it was the government's job to help
banks and major companies like railroads so they could return

(35:27):
to employing people. But individual relief was a job for
your local food pantry or place of warship. What you
were supposed to eat between now and when he got
the factories reopened, if he got them reopened, especially with
millions of Americans needing help from that local food pantry,
which only started with three cans of beans to begin with,

(35:49):
we're still waiting on him to answer that one. He was,
in all seriousness willing to purchase fodder for those starving
farm animals, but not fodder for the people who owned them.
There was a great painful line in a report filed
to the Bureau of Government Research in June nineteen thirty
seven that highlighted the consequence of this sort of thinking.

(36:10):
Many a relief recipient receives less for one day's food
than is spent in some households for a dog. And
although children like monkeys and zoos bead fresh lettuce, bananas, oranges,
and spinach, only the monkeys are assured these necessities. Note
I said that was in nineteen thirty seven. Hoover had
been out of the picture for almost five years at

(36:31):
that point. But the Roosevelt administration, because of the traditional
American avoidance of helping people out directly because it allowed
them to be shamed by the opposition, kept stepping back
from these programs, the main program that I'm about to discuss,
which was the Grandpa of Snap. At times Franklin Roosevelt

(36:53):
would say, Okay, wind it up, and the government would
start pulling people off of assistance, even if they weren't
in a place where they could do without it. Well,
there are consequences. People don't just magically have money because
you say they should. Thus, after visits to thirteen hundred
families who had been on relief, I think in Philadelphia,

(37:15):
investigators said of the families they saw several. Some of them,
including children, were reduced to the point of actual hunger.
Much of the time, they had practically nothing to eat
except occasional surplus products, food supplied by friends or neighbors,
and fruit salvaged from garbage at the markets. Another found

(37:35):
one family whose chief subsistence had been on scraps supplied
them from the tables of a nearby restaurant, whose proprietor
thought the family was getting them for the dog. Here's
a similar thought from Hitting Home, edited by Bernard Sterscher,
a collection of pieces exploring the local impact of the depression.

(37:56):
This is characterizing a survey of four hundred representative families.
These people lived from one day to another with no
dependable income. A common source of food was the docks,
where fruit and vegetables were sold for market. People gathered
around stalls and snatched at anything cast out. Hunger occasionally

(38:16):
motivated street begging and petty thievery of milk and groceries
from doorsteps. Playing on the sympathy of storekeepers, children forced
tears down their cheeks to induce them to offer a
little food. After citing these examples, the study concluded families
visited did not starve to death when relief stopped, they
kept alive from day to day. Catches catch can reduced

(38:39):
for actual subsistence to something of a stray cat prowling
for food, for which a kindly soul sets out a
plate of table scraps or a saucer of milk. We're
going to turn to the baseball of all this in
just a couple of minutes. Do you mind if I
give you a few more examples. I've got dozens, and
I can't give them all to you, but I do
want to give you just a few more. I want

(39:01):
to highlight the role of school lunches in all of this.
There's a reason we have school lunches. It's not just
that kids get hungry being in school for six hours
and you got to feed them something, but because society
worried that they weren't getting enough food at home. Here
I quote from The Invisible Scar, which is about the
long term impact of the Depression on those who lived

(39:22):
through it. A teacher in a mountain school told a
little girl who looked sick but said she was hungry,
to go home and eat something I can't. The youngster said,
it's my sister's turn. To eat. In Chicago, teachers were
ordered to ask what a child had had to eat
before punishing him. Many of them were getting nothing but potatoes,

(39:43):
a diet that kept their weight up but left them listless,
crotchety and sleepy. Teachers worried about the children who came
to school to get warm. They organized help for youngsters
who needed food and clothing before they could learn. Sometimes
boards of education diverted school funds to feed them. Often
the teachers did it on their own. In nineteen thirty two,

(40:04):
New York City school teachers contributed two hundred and sixty
thousand dollars out of their salaries in one month. Chicago
teachers fed eleven thousand pupils out of their own pockets
in nineteen thirty one, although they had not been themselves
paid for months. For God's sake, help us feed these
children during the summer. Chicago's superintendent of schools begged the

(40:25):
governor in June it was not true that no one starved.
The author put that in quotes because it was something
that Herbert Hoover insisted. No one has starved. People starved
to death, and not only in Harlan County, Kentucky. The
New York City Welfare Council counted twenty nine deaths from
starvation in nineteen thirty three. More than fifty other people

(40:46):
were treated for starvation in hospitals. An additional one hundred
and ten, most of them children, died of malnutrition. A
father who had been turned away by a New York
City welfare agency was afraid to apply for help. After
public relief had been set up, social workers found one
of his children dead another two week to move lay

(41:08):
in bed with the mother. The rest huddled shivering and
hungry around the desperate father. Like I said, I have
pages and pages of notes like this, but I'm going
to stop here. The point is that this really happened
here in America, not that long ago, and that's why
we started these programs, not to abandon capitalism, not to

(41:29):
become socialistic, not to become communistic, but actually to save capitalism,
to round off some of its rougher edges at the
time that it can't support all of us, which is
pretty much all the time. It just happened that in
the nineteen thirties that included a lot more people than usual,
and that required us to rethink how we do things.

(41:50):
And then subsequently to forget why we changed them, to
have our hearts hardened again. It's foolish and it's shortsighted.
But I'm overdue to take a break, so I'll complete
that point in just a minute. I hope you'll hang
with me. Just after that, we'll turn to the World
Series of nineteen thirty three. You all won't see this,

(42:21):
but my podcast platform, if I don't put in enough breaks,
they would kind of threaten to do it for you.
I don't think I've ever gotten into that situation to
just have them randomly appear rather than where I've indicated
they should be. But when I started the show, their
attitude was that, yeah, break every twenty minutes or so,
that would be okay, and I've more or less kept

(42:43):
to that. But I don't know. The last couple of years,
maybe with our own economic stresses, with the decline of
the ad market, they're slightly more aggressive about that. What
I mean is on my page that shows how I've
set up each episode, I get kind of this scarlet
a accept as a dollars and it seems to be suggesting, you, idiot,
you're leaving money on the table. I kind of doubt it.

(43:05):
But more to the point, as I explained last week,
I'm very sensitive to taxing you, so to speak. I
don't want to overfill the show with interruptions. As a listener,
I would find that annoying, just another glimpse into how
the sausage is made around here. Returning to the subject
at hand, what's fascinating to me is that you can
justify these programs on a humanitarian basis, or you can

(43:29):
justify them because you know your history and you're aware
that hunger leads to unrest and revolution. It still might
be so conservative you don't want to do too much
less the underclasses get lazy and dependent, but you know
that doing it is for your own good. In the
book The WPA and Federal Relief Policy, author Donald S.

(43:49):
Howard highlighted in exchange from an old radio show you
can still find these called the town Hall of the Air,
a political discussion program which as far as I know,
did not have good coffee ads. In a nineteen forty episode,
these same questions were asked, as Howard wrote, although from
a legal point of view, the question appears to be

(44:10):
settled that relief giving is a proper function of the
federal as well as of state and local governments. The
terms self preservation and general welfare are much too vague
to be of material help in determining how far government
should carry these responsibilities. From what is the state to

(44:30):
preserve itself? Starvation, robbery, riot revolution? Or must Sutler aspects
also be taken into account? Does the preservation of the
state call for measures that will prevent malnutrition, forestall public
resentment over the relative resourcelessness of millions of citizens, safeguard

(44:51):
against the deterioration of morale, or preserve families and homes.
The term general welfare is no easier of definition than
reservation of the state, and provides no better objective basis
for measuring the extent to which governmental relief measures could
or should be carried. Concrete illustration of how consideration of

(45:11):
relief measures is clouded by uncertainty as to how far
these should go was provided in a radio broadcast in
which Henry Asked Denison, president of Denison Manufacturing Company, declared,
at the hard minimum, enough must be paid to avoid
hunger marches piling on top of each other to social revolution.
Any form of government would do that much. The difficulties

(45:34):
and differences of opinion begin when, for one reason or another,
more than preventative policy measures are to be undertaken, and
questions as to just how much someone else should be
able to live on provoke fantastic disagreements to my own preferences.
If we are to go beyond the minimum based upon
prevention of revolution, we should choose such higher levels as
relief as will save us from serious deterioration in the

(45:57):
character and morale of those in need. The other speaker,
AA Ballantine, new York attorney and one time Under Secretary
of the Treasury, declared, we shouldn't let anybody starve, and
we shouldn't let anybody be unclothed. We all agree on that,
but the question of just what is adequate is a
question that we have to discuss a great deal for
this is very elastic, and we're still arguing about that,

(46:21):
because if we are, in the view of some people,
overly charitable, we're enabling people, and if we're not sufficient
in what we give them, then we're not just hurting them,
we're hurting ourselves. And one very concrete example of that
that I've pointed out many times on this program is
that when we needed to draft American boys for World
War II service. A lot of them had to be

(46:43):
turned down due to the effects of the malnutrition they suffered.
In this exact period, American League baseball in the nineteen
thirties was dominated by four teams. The Browns were, as
was typical, lost, The Red Sox needed until the end
of the decade to shake off their post frizzy torpor
under new owner Tom Yackey, and the White Sox floated
between mirror competence in last place. Cleveland had nine First

(47:06):
Division finishes without ever getting close to winning, which is
to say they were entertaining but not highly competitive. That
meant the A's, having already won the pennant in nineteen
twenty nine, repeated in nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one
before tearing down in part in reaction to Connie Mack's
stock market losses after the crash. The Yankees snuck in
in nineteen thirty two, but then needed to reload because

(47:29):
Babe Ruth began to age out at the same time.
The pitching staff thenned doubt badly. The Senators took advantage
of that in nineteen thirty three, and the Tigers in
nineteen thirty four and nineteen thirty five, and at that
point the Yankees came roaring back into the age of
Joe DiMaggio and won four straight Pennants and indeed four
consecutive World Series from nineteen thirty six through nineteen thirty nine.

(47:53):
The nineteen thirty two Senators when ninety three and sixty
one under Walter Johnson. That was only good enough for
third place, fifteen games behind a Yankees team that won
one hundred and seven games. That winter. Owner Clark Griffith,
who would suffer from extreme lethargy later in his career,
made a bunch of trades that paid off. In nineteen

(48:13):
thirty three, he took journeyman righty Dick Kaufman and traded
him to the Browns for younger lefty Carl Fischer, then
put him together with veteran swingman Fred Furpo Marberry and
sent them on to Detroit in return for veteran lefty
Earl Whitehill. Whitehill, just five foot nine, had been up
and down for the Tigers in his ten year run

(48:35):
with the team, but he pitched extremely well for the
Senators in nineteen thirty three, going twenty two and eight
with a three thirty three RA. The same day Griffith
made that trade, he made a much bigger one, sending
two of his starting outfielders, Sam West and Carl Reynolds,
as well as starting pitcher Lloyd Brown and twenty grand
to the Browns in return for old pal Goose Goslin,

(48:55):
the outfielder. He was normally a left fielder, and he
had a permanently injured arm, but he'd play a lot
of right in nineteen thirty three because another future Hall
of Famer Heimi Mnush was in left. That deal also
brought center fielder Fred Schulte and left handed starter lefty Stewart.
Goslin would not be at his best in nineteen thirty three,
but Shulti played a good defensive center field while hitting

(49:17):
two ninety six with sixty one walks, and Stuart would
go fifteen and six with a three eighty two ERA.
West was a real loss, and Griffith knew it, but
he needed to let go of him to make the
package work because there was an overarching goal here. The
goal was to get the lefties that would beat the Yankees.
The next day, Griffith sent first base prospect Elmer Harley

(49:38):
lefty Boss to Cleveland and got pitcher Jack Russell in return.
He would take over Marberry's fireman role and go twelve
and six with a league leading thirteen saves in a
two sixty nine era. It was a fluke year for
one thing. He allowed a two sixty seven average on
balls in play against a career average of three zero five.

(49:58):
But if fluke years or championship ships made. Finally, in January,
Griffith made another trade with Cleveland. Washington's catching had been
offensively and defensively poor in nineteen thirty two, and so
he swapped veteran catchers, sending out Roy Spencer and getting
back Luke Sewell. Sewell couldn't hit much, although he would
be near the top of his range in nineteen thirty three,

(50:20):
but he was a good glove and was regarded as
a brain. Cleveland's manager, Old Washington star and goat Roger
Peckinpah didn't get along with Sewell and so made the
disadvantageous deal. By then, Griffith had also let Walter Johnson go.
As a player, Johnson was a pussycat, but as a
manager he was an out of touch grump. His replacement

(50:41):
was twenty six year old blockhead, shortstop and son in law,
while future son in law Joe Cronin. Cronin's a scrapper,
Griffith said, he thinks nothing but baseball. I like these
young fellas who fight for everything managing a side. Cronin
would be a seven win player in nineteen thirty three,
hitting three on nine with a three to ninety eight

(51:02):
on pace percentage and a four to forty five slugging
percentage with forty five doubles, eleven triples, five home runs,
and one hundred and eighteen RBIs. Johnson would eventually end
up in Cleveland, just like his former catcher. The nineteen
thirty three World Series, which lasted only five games, spanned
October third to October seventh. The regular season had ended

(51:24):
on October first, so no ceremony, no delay. Neither race
was close, so the likely World Series match had been
set since August. The Giants went into first place to
stay in mid June and pulled away in mid August.
The Senators hit the approximate one third point of the season,
six games behind, trailing the Yankees and White Sox, but

(51:45):
they came together at that point, going twenty four and
six over the next month. By the end of that stretch,
they had gone past the leaders into first Their lead
narrowed to one game in early August, but a thirteen
game winning streak in the mid of the month put
paid to the race. With their good South pause, they
had gone fourteen and eight against the Yankees as well.

(52:07):
One of the great plays in Senator's history, which was
also one of the worst plays in Yankees history, at
least until Del Bera and Bobby Meecha matched it in
nineteen eighty five, took place in nineteen thirty three. On
April twenty ninth, the Senators were playing the Yankees in
New York. Senators Raady Monty Weaver was on the mound
trying to finish out a six two win. Babe Ruth

(52:29):
led off with a single and left in favor of
pinch runner Sammy Byrd, remembered as Babe Ruth's legs. Blue
Garrig singled, moving Bird to second, and Dixie Walker lined
to single the other way, scoring Bird and pushing Gerrig
running on his own legs to second base. Weaver clearly
had nothing left, but you already know how I feel

(52:49):
about Cronin. Tony Lazzeri was up next, and he too singled,
this time to right field. That's four consecutive hits to
open the ninth. However, big However, Lazari's hit. They looked
like a line drive in the box score, as the
cliche goes, But depending on which description you believe, it
was either a looping fly or a high pop that

(53:11):
just dropped in. Garrig held second, while Walker, thinking it
would drop, ran up his back. Seemingly everybody in the
ballpark knew the drive would fall safe, wrote Shirley Povich
of The Washington Post, with the exception of Garrick. By
the time he took off, said the Daily News, Walker
wasn't any further behind Gerreg than his flying shirt tails.

(53:33):
Goslin got the ball in quickly despite his bad arm,
and Cronin acting as the relay man, made a perfect
throw home. Sewell was able to tag Gerrig and Walker
in quick succession, pinwheeling from one to the other double play.
Bill Dickey made the last out and the Yankees lost
six to three. Yankees Steel Dodgers act was the headline,

(53:54):
Wasn't I just talking about the three men on third
thing on this show about a week ago? That's the
kind of stunt. They were referred to rud Rennie, who
was with the New York Herald Tribune forever and was
very much an above average baseball raider, began his gamer
this way. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky,
he may see a play like that with which the

(54:15):
Washington Senators took the Yankees out of a rushing ninth
inning rally in the stadium yesterday afternoon. It was a
double play at the home plate. Luke Sewell, the catcher,
flinging himself from one runner to another as they came
piling in. At one minute, the Yankees rally was in
full swing amid the noisy encouragement of thirty four, four

(54:36):
hundred and fifty five fans. The next minute, both base
runners were out at the plate, and a moment later
the game was over. Scrutinizing this sudden termination of what
might have been a winning inning, the blaming finger points
to Lou Garrig, who delayed his start just long enough
for the speedy walker to be at his heels before
he rounded third base. Further explanation, Confronted with these two

(55:01):
runners going full speed, third base coach Art Fletcher was helpless.
I wanted to send Garrigan and stop Walker, he explained later,
but Walker took the come on signal to include him,
so he came on. Like the Senators, the Giants had
a player manager, Taciturn Saturn nine first baseman Bill Terry.

(55:21):
Unlike the Senators, he went with his best pitcher, lefty
screwball master Carl Hubble, who during the regular season had
had one of the best seasons in modern baseball history.
Still I think he had gone twenty three to twelve
with a one sixty six ERA, which was like half
the league average. He pitched three hundred and eight and

(55:42):
two thirds innings. He threw ten shutouts and struck out
one hundred and fifty six while walking only forty seven.
He was ridiculously good. Now here's what's strange hearing Terry
say that he would start Carl Hubble in Game one,
which had to be like the worst kept secret in
two hemispheres, not just one. He acted like it was

(56:05):
a total surprise. What Terry is going to start his
staff ace the guy who's going to be a by acclamation, MVP,
are you nuts? I can't believe it and refuse to
name a Game one starter. I've really gotta think about this, fellas.
I just don't. This Carl Hubble thing changes everything. Mother.
He eventually chose his third best starter, Lefty Stewart, instead

(56:28):
of either of his aces, Alvin Crowder or the aforementioned
mister Whitehill. Before Game one, Babe Ruth had said, the
Senators have too much punch. It may not be as
much as the Yankees had last year, but it will
be enough to give the Giants trouble. And don't overlook
that the Senators have a strong defense too. We found

(56:48):
that out. But I'm not underestimating the Giants, who have
a great pitcher in Hubble. If he wins the opening game,
it may mean a six or seven game series. And
if Hubble can beat the Senators off often enough, the
Giants have a chance. But if he loses the opener,
it will practically be all over that. Babe Ruth, he
knew his apples. Hubble won the first game four to two,

(57:11):
allowing no earned runs and striking out ten, including the
side in the top of the first Master Melvin Ott
hit a two run homer in the bottom of the inning.
And we'll talk about this a little more in a second,
but Hubble came back in Game four and allowed one
run in eleven innings. That two was unearned walked for
wift five. Terry backed him with a homer that was

(57:33):
twenty innings in the World Series with an era of
zero point zero zero. And now after a quick break,
we're gonna rewind half a second and knit all of
this together, at least, I hope. So do you think
I can do it? I think we can do it together,
and we will begin on the other's side. Stay with
me through this last break of the episode, please, and

(57:55):
I'll catch you then. The first game of the World Series,
the Hubble Start, which Babruth was so prescient about, took
place on October third. That day, Harry Hopkins, the head

(58:18):
of the Federal Emergency Relief Program, a social worker by trade,
was in New York City announcing the beginning of a
new program he had just met with President Roosevelt. Now,
Hopkins' goal as Federal Emergency Relief administrator was to get
jobs for the unemployed, food to the hungary, and cold
to the cold. He did this without regard to political affiliation,

(58:43):
As his colleague Robert Sherwood later wrote, he was specifically
instructed by the President never to ask whether a person
needing relief is a Republican, Democrat, socialist, or anything else.
Confident of Roosevelt support, Hopkins continued for a law long
time on the principle that relief was entirely nonpartisan. For

(59:04):
that was a period of soaring altruism. Sherwood wrote that
because of former President Hoover's antipathy to public support of individuals,
when Franklin Roosevelt came into office and took over relief programs,
I quote, the main burden of cost and of administration
was still on the local authorities, to whom the needy

(59:25):
must go cap in hand to accept charity. That is
precisely where Hopkins came in and produced a profound change
in the whole conception of governmental responsibility and function. That is,
I and Roosevelt felt that it was the government's responsibility
to deliver aid to citizens and crisis. Earlier, I quoted
you an author who said, well, it seems to be

(59:46):
a settled matter. It wasn't, and it isn't. Hopkins, Sherwood said,
spoke out in favor of relief as an obligation of
the federal government to the citizens without any pretense of
private agencies interposed, thereby putting into effect the Roosevelt doctrine
that this relief was a sacred right rather than an

(01:00:07):
act of charity, an obligation of government to its citizens,
rather than a mere emergency alleviation of suffering in the
form of alms. Again, not everyone even today would agree
with that. A lot of people would disagree with it.
As the World Series was about to start, Hopkins proposed
to Roosevelt that in terms of dealing with the food shortage,

(01:00:29):
the government should be taking farm animals that it wanted
to kill off and actually fatten them up as food.
I should have mentioned this before, even before the soil
dried up and just quit blowing all over the country.
Just like the millions of kids then riding the rails
looking for work, they too were blowing all over the
country looking for food. The government was trying to figure
out how to raise farm prices, and one possibility which

(01:00:51):
they pursued and upset a lot of people, was slaughtering, say,
thousands of young pigs to bring up the price of pork.
This was upsetting both because it was wasteful and well
because piglets are cute. Initially, Secretary of agriculture. Henry Wallace,
who had a farm background and therefore probably wasn't real
sentimental about animals, complained that people felt that every little

(01:01:14):
pig has the right to attain before slaughter, the full
pigginess of his pig ness. To hear them talk, you
would have thought that pigs were raised for pets. Here's
the thing about the federal government, even in nineteen thirty three,
when it works right, it is very large, because this
is a very large, continent sized country with a lot

(01:01:34):
of people in it who needed to run well and
need a lot of services. And one consequence of that
is that sometimes the left hand of the bureaucracy doesn't
know what the right hand is doing, even someone is
highly placed as the Secretary of Agriculture, and so the
left hand says something that's really tone deaf. In this case,
it really wasn't that the people were thinking of the

(01:01:55):
three little pigs, but the three little lunches that they
and others had been forced to skip. And Hopkins made
that point to the president. Wherever there were food surpluses,
he said they should be shifted to where there was
a food deficit. He put it in political terms. If
there were great food surpluses while people went hungry. He said,

(01:02:16):
the public could rightly be revolted. Roosevelt was sold and
drafted an executive order starting up the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation.
Will be going in a week, Hopkins said, which is
to say, the program began at the same time as
the World Series, would be set up by the time
it was over, and would keep going afterwards. Hopkins was

(01:02:38):
especially conscious that winter was coming. We are going to
get enough coal to see that these people are warm
this winter, and that goes all along the line. He
also insisted the food would be healthful and good and
not refuse like salid park and beans. And a bonus
was that the program would assist in raising commodity prices

(01:02:59):
by the placement of surpluses through channels that otherwise could
not purchase them. A great example of this, by the way,
that kind of vexes me, even though it's so many
years later later in the history of this program, the
government was picking up, among other surplus items, the materials
that could go into making mattresses, and the mattress companies

(01:03:19):
got upset because the federal government was competing with them. No,
said Harry Hopkins, We're giving them to people who are indigent.
They're not your market. They are not going to buy
your fancy mattress with the topper on it. Ah shucks.
Well fine, but it's so reflexively greedy. And maybe the
program started with those pigs who otherwise would have been

(01:03:40):
thrown away. But as Nick Taylor wrote in his WPA History,
American Made in nineteen thirty four, as the operation grew
more sophisticated. It expanded to include beef and veal, butter
and cheese, wheat and flour, potatoes and rice, cereal, apples, cabbage,
sweet potatoes, sugar and corn syrup. It distributed heating fuel,
most in the form of coal. It bought raw wool

(01:04:02):
and had it processed into blankets that went to relief families.
In almost one hundred and twenty thousand bales of surplus
cotton was made into clothing or bedclothes at federal emergency
sewing operations. The corporation also purchased feed and seed that
allowed drought stricken farmers to maintain their stock and to
plant again. More than six hundred and fifty million pounds

(01:04:25):
of dressed canned beef went to relief families, along with
countless blankets and pairs of shoes. Hopkins' speech in New
York announced and defended the program. It's indefensible to have
food rotting on the ground or packed up in warehouses,
some of it belonging to speculators while people don't eat.
Of all the absurd things in the world, that's the

(01:04:46):
most absurd I ever heard. Now, we intend to get
those surpluses. We intend to get them right away. There
are some people who still think that these people on
relief are naturally or entirely made up of the unemployables,
the bums, the drunkards, people who could never get on
you know perfectly, well, that's absurd. You've got a cross

(01:05:08):
section of the American people on this relief role, the
finest people in America, mainly working people, because in the
main it's been the workers that have taken the beating
in this depression. I know, I promised I wouldn't say
this too often, But when was the last time you
heard that kind of common sense and it got any
kind of play whatsoever. The Giants won the second game

(01:05:30):
of the World Series behind Hal Schumacher, their second best
pitcher and a very good one. The Senators took Game
three when Whitehill out pitched Freddy Fitzsimmons fourd to nothing.
He held the Giants white Hill did to five hits
and two walks. As I said earlier, Hubble's second start
came in Game four. The Senators nearly came back in

(01:05:50):
that one. After the Giants went up by a run
in the top of the eleventh, the Senators loaded the
bases against Hubble with one out in the bottom of
the inning. Today, the starters would have been long gone,
but it was a different time. With the pitcher spot up,
Cronin sent in reserve catcher Cliff Bolton to pinch hit.
The Senators thought so little of Bolton's catching abilities that

(01:06:12):
they barely let him play in the field. They hardly
let him play at all, but he had hit four
to ten on the season, going nine for twenty one
as a pinch hitter. At the last second, as Bolton
was stepping in, Giants coach Chuck Dressen called time and
repositioned shortstop Blondie Ryan. He knew Bolton from the Miners
and thought the left handed hitter should be played more

(01:06:33):
to pull. Bolton hit it right to him six, four
to three. Double play and the game was over the
guy who practically couldn't make it out. During the regular season,
Game five was tied at three to three through nine
Al Schumacher versus General Crowder, but it was settled by
other pitchers in extras so a more modern game, Ott

(01:06:54):
homerd off of Jack Russell in the latter's fifth inning
of work, landing a ball in temporary bleachers Griffith had
set up in anticipation of overflow ticket sales that didn't
happen due to the sheer amount of poverty going on.
Former Red's Great Dolph Luke, working in relief for the Giants,
pitched four in the third scoreless innings to keep the
Senators off the board. After the sixth the Giants win.

(01:07:16):
The Giants win, and the Senators in terms of winning
penance were history. But did America win. To this day,
there are books coming out arguing about whether the New
Deal ended the Great Depression. Publishers loved to put those out,
and conservatives love to write them. It's been ninety three
years since Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, but some folks

(01:07:36):
are still not over it. I've always been fine with
the idea that The New Deal was only a partial
success because it was only a partial fix, as we
discussed earlier, because of the American prejudice against government intervention
in the economy, against aid to the poor, even if
they're middle class people who are temporarily poor. Because of
the Supreme Court blocking some of the program, not everything

(01:07:59):
that could have been done or should have been done,
was done. They were afraid, those New Dealers, in the
sense that what they were doing was, as Sherwood wrote,
a redefinition, a reinvention of government, and they didn't know
how Americans would take it. People kept telling them they
had to stop, and so sometimes they did. It was
World War Two that solved the problem of employment in

(01:08:21):
America because then the government really started spending money on employment. Hopkins,
before that sometimes gave people jobs counting butterflies, just so
they could have the dignity of work. He got a
lot of grief for that. Now the government was paying
those same people to make ball bearings for tanks, and
that was cool with the anti butterfly people. Hopkins argument

(01:08:42):
that sometimes you just got to count butterflies. Okay, the
scientists say this is a beneficial program, Okay, didn't wash
with them, But guns and bombs were all good, even
if some of them were or still are. I'm sure
if we were fighting the right people at that time,
he also had people painting pictures and writing plays and
things of that nature. Why because those people had to

(01:09:03):
eat too, So why discriminate. There's a simpler, narrower question
to ask. Then, did the New Deal and the depression?
It's simply this, Did it keep people from eating garbage
or starving? The answer to that is yes, and that's
a huge moral, humanitarian victory that should be sufficient unto itself.
That's why, long after the depression did end, we continue

(01:09:26):
to offer assistance to those in need. And although the
government is no longer grabbing pigs and packaging them up
in cans for the poor, the vouchers that the poor receive,
whether the old style food stamps or the debit type
cards that they now have, is exactly what Harry Hopkins
was doing, in the sense that he was taking a

(01:09:48):
surplus of pigs somewhere, or shirts or mattresses and sending
them across this big land of ours to a place
where there was a paucity of those things. So instead
of going to waste, they would do some one some good.
And what we do now is we take money where
there's a surplus of that and we move it to
people who don't have enough, and for them it does

(01:10:09):
some good. Again, it's not a lot. In my state
per household member per day, six dollars and thirty eight cents,
topping out at one hundred and ninety four dollars per
household per month in Kansas, just to pick a state
at random, one hundred and eighty two dollars per household
per month, or five dollars and ninety eight cents for

(01:10:29):
each household member per day. It's good for them to
receive it, it's better for us to give it. It
lifts both the giver and recipient in different ways, and
only a sociopath would fail to understand it. It lifts
the entire economy and the safety and security and stability
of the nation. Say you wanted to make America great again.

(01:10:50):
I don't know when you noticed that it wasn't. I
don't agree that it wasn't. But in any case, say
you were supposedly dedicated to that, then you wouldn't balk
at feeding America for a moment. On October thirty, first
Georgia's Senator, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, said, it's a sad
day when a judge has to order the President of
the United States to feed vulnerable families and hungry children,

(01:11:12):
with funds already designated for that very purpose. It's also
a sad day when a pennant winning manager saves his
best picture for game three. But the ship sailed on
that decision a long time ago. We can't affect it. However,
we still have time to demand that our fellow Americans
are old ones and young ones in particular, not go

(01:11:33):
hungry because those in power not only lack common sense
like Joe Cronin did, but lack human feeling. As you
no doubt know by now, the Dodgers escaped by the
skin of their teeth and we will have a game seven.
It's amazing how bullpen issues are like a chronic disease
that were cursed. It's like malaria. You think you're past it,

(01:11:53):
and then it's back. You know what else is back?
Social media and you can back me on it by
following me at Stephen Goldman dot Bui dot social. You
can also write a spy which I mean me at
Infinite Inning at gmail dot com, and there's a Facebook group.
Simply go to Facebook search on Infinite Inning. That's all
there is to it, And should you wish to back
the show, you can do so at patreon dot com

(01:12:14):
slash the Infinite Inning, and I thank you very kindly
for helping to keep me and my family in pancakes.
As ever, there is gear of a rudimentary kind available
at the hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com.
Original soundtrack available gratis at Casualobserver Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,
please go to the podcast of your choice and rate, review,

(01:12:37):
and subscribe. And if your podcast doesn't let you do
those things, go donate to your local food bank. Our
themesong which you are hearing now and have been listening
to throughout the episode, was a co composition of myself
and doctor Rick Mooring, who reminds us that Montesquie wrote
that republics tend to end through luxury and monarchies through poverty.
So ain't it a kick in the head when you

(01:12:58):
reap what someone else's sown? Well, if I can get
through just one more World Series game, and then survive
the inevitable, deflating feeling that comes with the sunsetting of
a baseball season. I'll be back next week and all
winter long with more tails from inside the Infinite Inning