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Home Field Disadvantage

Team USA and Canada face off during the super round of the Women's Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Kelsey McKinney | Longreads | November 2018 | 24 minutes (6,164 words)

The moment the members of Team USA disembarked their plane in Orlando, their fears were realized. This was the first Women’s Baseball World Cup ever played on United States soil, and they expected to be ignored.

At the last World Cup, played in 2016 in South Korea, Team USA didn’t make it to the final round of the only competition they ever play in. But at least in Korea they had been acknowledged. More than that, they’d felt important and beloved, barraged by reporters’ questions at every turn and hounded by fans: fans holding handmade signs with sparkling lettering, fans who knew their names and numbers, fans who sent love notes down to the dugout in the middle of their games.

For every day of the past two years each woman had trained, practiced, and dreamed about playing baseball. According to USA Baseball, the members of the U.S. women’s national baseball team are among the top 20 players in the country, but here at home, almost no one knows they exist.

“Everywhere we travel [in the States] we are in our USA jumpsuits and matching stuff, and everyone just thinks we’re the soccer team,” Marti Sementelli, a pitcher for Team USA, said before the tournament. “Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.”

They were the hosts, after all, to 11 teams of women just like them, women who fought their way into a sport that constantly tried to push them out. As talented as any professional, they’d asked for time off work and school to play. They deserved a crowd. But they knew better than to expect one. No games sold out, and only two had more than 600 people in attendance.

Everyone on our team is worried about what the atmosphere at the World Cup will be like.

The World Cup took place over 10 days of oppressively muggy, late August Florida heat about an hour southeast of Orlando. Viera, Florida, is a sleepy, suburban town built on a swamp, where preteens drive around in golf carts. This is where the best women’s baseball in the world was played — not in Orlando or Miami, but in a town even people from Florida have never heard of.  

Team USA hadn’t won the gold since 2006, and had flopped in 2016, but this was home territory. Despite a lifetime of roadblocks, Team USA knew they were good enough to beat all the odds. Win gold here, several players hoped before the tournament began, and maybe — finally — Americans might pay attention, might notice how hard they are working for so little.

The USA women’s baseball team prepare to face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Before Team USA played Team Japan, the defending, five-time World Champions, on the first night of the tournament’s second round, a five-year-old girl threw a ball back and forth with her father just outside the stadium. She wore a glove, and he caught her lobs with his bare hands. She said she wanted to play baseball. Her father said “hell yeah,” he’d let her play. “If she wants to fight for it, I’ll fight with her.” But to play baseball as a woman in America, you have to be willing to fight your entire life, because at every phase, you’re set up to fail.  

The Women’s Baseball World Cup is a relatively new tournament. Inaugurated in 2004, it takes place every two years. In the first week, 12 teams compete in groups and the top half of each group moves on to the Super Round. Every team in the Super Round plays the others once, and those standings determine which teams go to the gold medal and bronze medal games. This year, Japan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Chinese Taipei, and Team USA made the Super Round. Ranked third coming into the tournament, Team USA hoped to medal after a disappointing performance in 2016.


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But they were at a disadvantage compared to teams like Japan and Canada, who practice together more than a month a year. The members of Team USA meet each other at tryouts, and train for five days together before the 10-day series. Returning players remember each other from past years, and a few weekends a year some former players fly to a common location to work together. But self-funded trainings aren’t officially organized, they’re the product of ambition and frustration.

It’s no wonder when Team USA played Japan on the first night of the Super Round, they made a couple mental errors: a ball not thrown on a steal, a miscommunication at second base. They are a team in uniform, but not in time spent on the diamond. They haven’t been given the time or resources to become a team the way Japan has.

In 2009, Kenichi Kakutani, a wealthy Japanese business owner, invested heavily in women’s baseball in Japan after watching a baseball tournament for high school girls. He formed what would eventually be called the Japanese Women’s Baseball League (JWBL), a tiny, four-team league that has made Team Japan an absolutely dominant force, taking gold at every WBWC in the past decade. Because more than 25 private high schools in Japan had women’s baseball teams, the talent was there to fuel the league, and the league itself encouraged more private high schools to start teams.

At first, it can seem easy to be a girl on the big diamond in the United States. Malaika Underwood, who has been on Team USA for more than a decade, grew up in San Diego playing tee-ball with kids in her neighborhood. Her team, the Brown Bears, had girls and boys on it, at least for a little while. Through tee-ball, machine-pitch, coach-pitch, even kid-pitch, no one questioned that Underwood was a baseball player; she was great.

“About age twelve or thirteen, D-Day came,” she says. “I had to decide whether I was going to try and play baseball in high school, or switch to softball.” Many people pressured her to switch, to try and hit the bigger, yellow softball thrown underhand on a smaller field. “They weren’t doing it with any malintent; they wanted to support me,” she says. “But at the same time, softball was a totally different sport. No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.”

Federal courts have ruled under Title IX that baseball and softball are separate sports and that girls cannot be excluded from baseball teams just because a softball team exists at the same school. Softball is played on a smaller field, with a different ball, and different rules. In softball, runners cannot take a lead off bases. With a runner firmly on base, an infielder has to change her entire job, watch the pitcher for a throw-over, watch the runner for a steal, maybe even change her positioning. Without lead offs, there are far fewer steals, no balks, and far less nuance. “People come up to me and tell me on a daily basis that I should switch to softball,” Sementelli says. “You have to be the only girl on the team, or you have to switch to softball. It takes a lot for a little girl to fight to play on the big field.”

No disrespect to softball, but I didn’t want to play that.

Many girls do leave baseball for softball, often because there doesn’t seem to be any other choice. Unlike women’s basketball or women’s soccer, there aren’t national leagues for women’s baseball in the United States at any level: not Little League, not in high school, not in college, and not professionally. There are very few teams for girls to play baseball on together. Former player Justine Siegal runs an organization called Baseball for All, which coordinates tournaments and programs for girls to play. Sunrise, Florida, has a girl’s travel baseball team. Washington, D.C., has a team of all girls that plays in a boys’ league. Major League Baseball introduced a Trailblazers series in 2017, which offers competitive play and coaching for about 100 girls under age 13. “We believe these were necessary steps to send a message to our larger baseball audience that softball isn’t the only option for girls and women to play our game.” Tony Reagins, who is the executive vice president of baseball and softball development for Major League Baseball, wrote via email.

According to data gathered by Baseball for All, approximately 100,000 girls play baseball at the junior level making up about 2 percent of total players. Girls are playing baseball, or at least they want to. The problem isn’t demand; it’s supply. There are only a handful of opportunities for girls to play in the United States.

“The Trailblazers series is a great start,” Jennifer Ring, professor of political science at the University of Nevada and author of Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, says. “[MLB] needs to make it known publicly that they want girls to play baseball. Not to play baseball in the major leagues, but to play professionally. I think if MLB really developed girls Little Leagues and youth leagues and added their brand to various tournaments throughout the country, it would take off.”

Playing baseball as a girl after puberty is even more difficult, because the game becomes entrenched in the school system. Underwood wrote letters to five high school baseball programs at magnet high schools she could attend with her baseball stats, and a single request: that she be given a fair chance to tryout for the team. Some coaches said no, the school had a softball team and she could play there; but a few schools said yes. Underwood went to the high school where she thought she’d have the best chance to play hardball. She played on the JV team her freshman and sophomore years, and her senior year started at second base on the varsity team.

“At ten years old, they tried to lie to keep me from playing in the league,” Ila Borders, a pitcher who was the first woman to win a game in a men’s professional baseball league, says. “I can tell you an instant where someone tried to keep me from playing every single year. When I was playing … I would have death threats.”

The USA women’s take batting practice ahead of their game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

By high school, most women still playing baseball are the only woman on their team. “Regardless of how much support you get, if you’re the only girl out there on the field, it’s pretty lonely,” Underwood says. “I had a supportive team and coaches all the way through high school, and it was still lonely.” According to a survey of high school athletics conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, almost half a million boys play baseball at the high school level. In the 2017–2018 school year, only 1,762 girls played baseball.

Puberty can also put girls at a disadvantage on teams and in leagues overwhelmingly populated by boys. “Growing up I was the fourth hitter and played shortstop, and now their testosterone has gone through the roof so I hit like seventh [or] eighth and play second,” Mia Valcke, who plays on Team Canada, says. “That’s the reality of being female in this sport. I’m still fighting and I’m competitive for sure, but it’s not the same.” When the only option is to play with boys, that isolation can kill a girl’s career.

Let’s say a young girl is willing to face all those battles and she wins. She plays varsity baseball in high school, loves the game. Maybe she even gets to attend the new Trailblazer series for women. “We have seen tremendous success in getting young men who have participated in our Breakthrough Series to play collegiately and so we wanted to apply the same approach for young women,” MLB’s Reagins says. There are no women’s baseball teams at any level of the American college system.

If a woman can reach the college level, she often can’t afford to fight her way onto a men’s team. Anna Kimbrell, a catcher for Team USA, played baseball through high school but switched to softball in college because she was offered a big scholarship to play. She returned to baseball after graduation. “You have to be pretty stubborn to refuse to play softball,” Ring says. “If you’re being rational and you want a college scholarship, it’s softball.”

Borders played baseball in college and describes it as “the toughest time in my life,” but also believes it taught her good instincts. “When girls switch over to play softball in college, they aren’t getting those four solid years of playing baseball,” she says. “Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.”

Underwood tried out for the national team for the first time in 2006. “I had no idea that this many girls and women played baseball,” she said when asked about her first tryout. She hadn’t played on a baseball team with another woman since Little League. That’s true for most of the women on Team USA. There are only 20 spots on the women’s national team. “One thing that hurts our team is we have these 16-year-olds that have so much potential [competing against] 28-year-old women who have trained and played college ball,” Veronica Alvarez, a coach for the 2018 Team USA and former player, says. “We lose them because they don’t make it at sixteen and then, because of the lack of opportunity, there’s nowhere else for them to go and play.”

For many ballplayers, the lack of funding keeps them from continuing their career. Borders played professional men’s baseball in independent leagues for three years. She had more than 50 innings, a 1.67 ERA, and a win: major league numbers. She could almost feel her name in blocky MLB uniform letters across her shoulder blades, but she was also poor. “I was homeless because I couldn’t afford rent. I couldn’t eat. I was sick and tired of it. I was tired of being broke,” Borders says. “Here I [was] doing all this really cool stuff, doing a lot of media, but they didn’t know that in the background I was dying.”

Give me six collegiate teams in the U.S. and you can grow the sport, you can grow the talent right now.

Borders did not play in this year’s World Cup because of a late injury, but doing so wouldn’t have earned her a paycheck anyway. None of the women on Team USA are paid to play. In fact, they lose money. They take vacation time from their jobs as firefighters and P.E. teachers, grad students and groundskeepers. Because there is no professional league for women in America, they have to earn paychecks from other jobs. Though most of Team USA’s baseball budget comes from MLB donations, it doesn’t go to the players. “We all make so many sacrifices to play,” Sementelli says. She notes that MLB players get paid millions of dollars to play baseball. “We would all play for a couple thousand dollars a month, just anything that would be some kind of income.”

No single entity is to blame for the century of decisions that have shut American women out of their own country’s pastime. But that also means that no one has to shoulder the responsibility to make this sport work for its players. The only institutions with the money and power to make a real, dramatic change in women’s baseball right now, though, are the WBSC and MLB.

By my count there were 42 people in the stands, not including press, to watch the Dominican Republic play Venezuela for the first game of the second day of the 2018 Super Round. It was 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, 90 degrees outside and almost 90 percent humidity. In the stands, Venezuela’s team chants ricocheted across sections of empty seats. The same was true for the 11 a.m. game, and again for three games on Thursday.

The Canadian women’s baseball team prepare for their game against Team USA during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Throughout the World Cup, the stadium remained  depressingly mostly empty. According to the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC), the total official attendance for all 50 games was 17,969. That puts the average attendance for each game at 359 people. The USSSA Space Coast stadium seats approximately 8,000 people.  I attended the 11 Super Round games, and counted fewer than 100 people at six of them. There were two billboards for the event off the highway nearby but no flyers in local bars or grocery stores. No one I spoke to over six days in the surrounding area had any idea the tournament was going on. Girls who do play baseball around the country, on travel teams and boys teams, cannot come to watch these games because they are held during the first weeks of school.

“There were 5,000 people in the stands [at the 2015 Pan-American Women’s Baseball Tournament held in Toronto]. So, I expected at least that many here,” Carol Sheldon, who played women’s baseball for more than 20 years and is in the online-only National Women’s Baseball Hall of Fame, says. Despite several sold-out games in its first and last year to include it, the Pan American Games dropped women’s baseball from their bill for 2019 because of a “lack of interest.” No one on Team USA understands why the game was dropped when it had sell-out crowds, and the Pan American Games did not return multiple requests for comment.

“Obviously, you want a bigger crowd. Ideally, you want every game to be sold out,” says DJ Wabick, a national program director for the host organization, the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), which is a sanctioning body for more than 85,000 baseball and softball teams in the country. USSSA provides rule guidelines and organizational support, but does not have power over the leagues. The WBSC sent the trophy on a tour of MLB stadiums to try to drum up attention. “We tried to share the stories of these players. That’s how you make a real connection with [the general public] and get them to care,” Wabick says.

Personal stories may help, but the same sort of yarns are told by announcers and PR offices in every sport to get fans to invest in individual players. But the sport sells itself. Baseball is a sport that people watch and love. The general public, everyone who cares about women’s baseball says, has no idea that women’s baseball exists.

Women’s baseball still has the diving catches, the home runs, and the bunts that make baseball a great sport, but it isn’t given the resources, financial or institutionally, to find fans.The infrastructure that pushes women out of baseball and into softball has also shaped the way the public thinks of the game. “It’s just ingrained in everybody’s head that when you think of a girl throwing a ball it’s a softball,” Sementelli says.“People just assume that we play softball even when I tell them that I throw overhand. It’s so frustrating.”

Fourteen current and former players at the Women’s World Cup told a version of the same anecdote. “I tell people all the time that I play for the USA women’s national baseball team,” Underwood says. “Ninety-five percent of the time they say ‘Oh, you mean softball?’”

That stereotype exists despite the fact that women have played baseball since the very beginning of its existence. Jennifer Ring argues in Stolen Bases that women played (and potentially even invented) an early ball-and-bat game called rounders that involved rocks being thrown at players to call them out. The first women’s professional team was the Dolly Vardens, one of two all-black women’s teams to play under the name in Philadelphia in the 1880s. Hall-of-famers Rogers Hornsby and Smoky Joe Wood received their first paychecks as professional players on teams with women. The full, 1908 version of the baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is about a girl named Nelly Kelly who loved baseball.

American women had been playing baseball in organized leagues for three decades before softball was created in the 1890s. Organized semi-pro women’s baseball leagues in the 1920s were successful across race, class, and geographical lines. Women’s colleges like Smith and Wellesley easily filled teams to play each other. Only when the game became worth money in the late 19th century were women pushed out of the sport.

Pitcher Michelle Cobb warms up ahead of Team USA’s game against Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite this deep history of women playing the game, though, the only reference point most Americans have for women in baseball is the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, which depicts the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which existed from 1943 to 1954 and had more than 600 female players. By my count, about a dozen former AAGPBL players attended the World Cup in Viera, Florida. They love women’s baseball. A few refused formal interviews because, they said, they wouldn’t have very many nice things to say about how the tournament was being run.

The two most prominent former AAGPL players to attend were Maybelle Blair, who played for the Peoria Redwings, and Shirley Burkovich, who played for the Rockford Peaches, the team popularized in A League of Their Own. At 91 and 85 years old, respectively, they were by far the most popular people at the tournament. They were constantly giving out hugs and signatures, and sat behind home plate to watch almost every game of the Super Round. They came, Blair told me, because they “wouldn’t miss women playing baseball for the world. There’s nothing like it.” From her seat behind the plate, Blair joked that she was going to go out there and pitch, that maybe she ought to go down to the dugout and talk to a team that couldn’t seem to stop making mental errors.

Before the United States played Canada on the second night of the Super Round, Blair and Burkovich made their way down to the field. Surrounded by a huddle of beaming Team USA players, holding her cane made out of a baseball bat, Blair pointed her finger up in their faces. “I flew all the way out here from California to see you guys win,” she said. “And I haven’t seen it yet.” That night, Team USA beat Canada 5–1.

Maybelle Blair, of the Rockford Peaches, gives the USA women’s baseball team a peptalk before facing the Canadian team during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Despite Burkovich and Blair’s popularity, and the excellent level of play on the field, women’s baseball still doesn’t get the media attention players feel they need to reach the next level. Every player past and present that I spoke with said that their number one concern for the future of the game is the lack of general awareness that they even exist. This year the Women’s Baseball World Cup made the SportsCenter Top 10 plays for the first time when Team USA second baseman Amanda “Red” Gianelloni snatched a smashed line drive out of the air and turned a hit into a double play. Before that play, the only time the tournament had been mentioned on the program was when a player was struck in the leg by a stray bullet during the 2010 Cup in Venezuela, a year Team USA won bronze. No plays from any medal games have ever been featured on SportsCenter.

All media loves when one woman plays baseball. As a child, Sementelli says, there were always reporters who wanted to talk to her, media on the sidelines of her Little League game. As soon as she got out of coach-pitch, her dad molded her into a pitcher. “I didn’t know any other girls playing,” she says. She went on CBS News and Jimmy Kimmel. “I say yes to every media outlet because I want people to know that there are women in this game.” She found a small college where she could play college baseball, and gave interviews there too. Alone, she’s been in the spotlight since 5 years old.

Borders’s story is even more extreme. She was covered so intensely and constantly by news outlets that the amount of media attention she received actually kept her from an opportunity to go to a MLB spring training camp. An MLB team wanted to give her a chance to tryout, but they didn’t want the cameras. Stories about women playing in men’s baseball leagues are constant. But when the women are successful together, the lights dim, the headlines fall away, and no one seems to care.

There’s no better example of this than Mo’ne Davis, who became the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series in 2014 despite baseball not even being her favorite sport. She received massive media attention, but few stories mentioned that other girls had played in the LLWS before her. “If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it,” Borders says. “Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.” On August 19, 2014, Mo’ne Davis was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. On September 1, about two weeks later, Team USA competed in the Women’s Baseball World Cup in Japan and won silver. They did not get any cover stories, or even national recognition.

This is despite the reality that women’s baseball is just as exciting, and often more engaging, than the men’s game. “Baseball is the perfect sport for women if you really understand the game,” Borders says. “We like technicality, and the game within the game.” Women’s baseball is faster than men’s both because they only play seven innings and pitchers don’t wield as much control over the pace of the game. The women’s game is less ego-driven, and more democratic. It’s not a game fixated on home runs and shutouts. “Women have to play the game much more technically correct,” Sheldon says. It is a game of sacrifice — the sacrifice bunt, the sacrifice fly. The focus is on team success instead of individual feats.

If one more person says ‘in a league of her own’ I’m going to lose it. Women have played baseball forever. Girls are playing now.

But it still has fireworks. Before the tournament, WBSC constructed a mesh fence inside the stadium to shorten the field’s depth. Instead of playing on the world tournament–size field set by WBSC’s own regulations (275 and 290 feet in left and right field, 400 in center), the World Cup was played on a field 325 feet in every direction. According to a spokesperson from the WBSC, the field size was shrunk to make sure that the tournament had home runs. It didn’t need to be. On August 25 versus Venezuela, Megan Baltzell hit a ball 363 feet over both right field fences. That ball went further than two home runs hit the same night in Major League Baseball ballparks.

On the last night of play before the medal games, Team USA played the Dominican Republic. There was nothing they could do to make the gold medal game after Canada’s afternoon loss to Chinese Taipei. But they came out, scored six runs in the first inning, and beat the Dominican Republic 8–1. As the teams shook hands, the on-field announcer came on the p.a. system. “We hope to see you tomorrow for one or both games,” he said. “Should be some great softball tomorrow.”

“We were all shaking hands with our mouths gaping open,” Sementelli says. “He watched seven innings of baseball and then said softball. That was something that stuck out really firmly. I don’t know if that’s something that will ever change.”

The USA women’s baseball team face Canada during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

The day before the medal games the media room smelled like spray paint. In the middle of the room stood a wooden box a little more than four feet tall, the sides still shiny with black paint. Around it, a pile of small gauge PVC pipes was scattered. “There are posters going on these. Don’t worry,” A WBSC employee told me. The next morning, the posters — printed in a dulled out yellow and maroon — had been sloppily pasted onto the box, crinkled at the corners. The top paper had an X drawn on it. It needed to be replaced. This was the podium for the trophy.

The medal games took place on a Friday. At 1 p.m. Team USA played Canada for the bronze medal. At 6 p.m. Chinese Taipei played Japan for the title of World Champion.

The USA vs. Canada game started off mild. After four innings, USA was up 2–0. But Canada staged a comeback, scored three runs, and in the bottom of the 7th, the United States came back to tie. The game went to extra innings where (according to rules of the Women’s World Cup) each half-inning started with runners placed on second and third. Still, the game went ten innings before Canada clinched the bronze medal, winning 8–5.

This was baseball at its best: incredible defensive plays, starting pitchers being brought in as relievers, a true rivalry that goes back a decade. To watch it, you would have either had to travel an hour outside of Orlando on a Friday in August, or have known to visit the WBSC’s YouTube page. None of the games of the Women’s Baseball World Cup were televised in the United States.

“I wish people could see this,” Sementelli says. “I shouldn’t have to worry about this…Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?”

“We tried very hard to get the games on television,” says the USSSA’s Wabick. “That was the thing I wanted to accomplish most. I think there needed to probably be a little more runway to get it on TV, because by the time we were calling, TV schedules were already set.”

USSSA learned that they had won the bid for the 2018 World Cup in October 2017. Because of that, they had less than a year to coordinate when, where, and how the event could take place. The timeline, Wabick says, also made it difficult for him to get major advertisers to sign on, since they had to move so quickly. Because the host country and organization was decided so late, USSSA only had space for the two-week tournament in their schedule in late August. This timing has not been a problem in other countries where games have been located in cities and local populations value women’s baseball. “If we are fortunate enough to have another opportunity, we’d probably shift the dates.” Wabick says.

Do you think Bryce Harper is worried about whether or not his game will be on TV?

USSSA has a history of putting on good tournaments. The stadium had beautiful facilities. The players raved about getting to go to the Kennedy Space Center and being treated like professionals. But at the same time, no one seemed to know the tournament was happening despite the fact that the professional women’s softball team (the USSSA Pride), which normally plays in that stadium, average around 2,500 fans at each of their 25 home games every year. Only one shirt — a white shirt promoting the tournament with a smudged Canadian flag — was available to purchase. There was no merchandise available for any of the national teams: no hats, no jerseys, no rally towels.

(L-R) Buddy Brown, Owen Clarke, and Pierre Aubin support team Canada from he stands during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Team USA lost to Canada, a country where parents and coaches have only recently begun to build a Little League structure for all-girls baseball. After the game, none of the players were brought to the press room for the general press. “I leave it to their discretion,” the WBSC spokesperson said, mentioning that it was a tough loss and that he couldn’t make them do press because they weren’t professional athletes. “It was a very emotional loss,” the spokesperson said. One of the biggest criticisms of female athletes is that they are too emotional to play.

This gave Team USA the appearance of extremely poor losers, despite a more complex reality. Later, a player told me that they were scheduled so tightly they barely had time to do interviews after the game. They had 30 minutes from the minute their game ended to be on the bus back to their hotel — 30 minutes to eat, shower, say hi to loved ones, and maybe do media.

“It’s almost like sabotage,” Ring says when asked about whether the tournament could indeed increase awareness of the sport as everyone hoped. “They were set up for failure.”

I think we had the most talented team,” Coach Alvarez says. “I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.”

Losing a chance to medal, though, felt like more than just a personal loss for many players and fans of women’s baseball. It felt like a missed opportunity for the sport of women’s baseball overall. “The [United States medaling] would have been something that would have helped us get the United States sports people to go, OK. Let’s start girls baseball.’ Instead, of just having a tournament here or there for girls to come and play in,” Sheldon says.

Of the more than 25 people involved at all levels of women’s American baseball I spoke to, all agreed that the best thing that can be done for the sport is the creation of girls baseball leagues. They would love for something like what happened in Japan — a wealthy benefactor creating a small pro league — to happen in the States. But even if that were to happen there has to be a pipeline for women to reach that league. Right now there’s next to nothing.

As it relates to a women’s professional league, we have to ensure that a sustainable infrastructure is in place.” MLB’s Reagins says. In order to make this sort of investment a success, we need to make sure that what is put together will not only survive, but thrive. We don’t believe we are there yet, but who knows what could ultimately happen as women’s baseball gains more momentum.”

There is a village of people fighting for women’s baseball in America: the Rockford Peaches, the players, the parents of players, the fans. Former players are creating teams for girls and tournaments with their own money. “I have been involved as a player at every level, and I have never seen the amount of passion for this game as I did with the people I met in women’s baseball,” Wabick says. “If the right people get in the room, they can bring the right attention.”

I think our downfall is that we only get one week together before playing and then its game time. I wish that we had more time together.

But who are the right people? Currently, there are many proponents of the women’s game, but no real leadership. Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather series, was at the World Cup. He has consistently financially supported women’s baseball, pushing the Sonoma Stompers, a men’s professional team, to recruit and play women. There are no women on the Stompers roster at the moment, although two members of this year’s Team USA (Kelsie Whitmore and Stacy Piagno) played on the Stompers in the past. Coppola, though, is just one man. USSSA is a governing body, so while they could support girls Little Leagues financially and logistically, the organization doesn’t have the capability create them. USA Baseball could create a 14U — short for ages 14 and under — or a 20U team for women, but without WBSC tournaments (which exist at 23U, 18U, 15U, and 12U for men) there would be no one for them to play. According to WBSC spokesperson Oscar Lopez the “feasibility and rollout [of creating programs for girls are] under review” currently. There is no timeline for that decision to be made.

The vast divide that exists between the resources being given to men’s baseball and those being given to women’s baseball are almost cartoonishly illustrated at the only level where both exist: the World Cup. The 2017 Men’s Baseball World Championship game was played in 2017 in Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, averaged just over 27,000 attendees per game, and aired on MLB Network in America. Championship hats were immediately handed out to Team USA when they won the gold. On an erected blue stage, the team of men stood behind a shining circular podium that held their trophy.

A year later in Viera, Team Japan hoisted their trophy above their head. A platform less than a foot off the ground had been constructed for them to stand on, and each player warily eyed it as she stepped up, as if worried it might collapse. It is the same platform used for WBSC  tournaments except for the men’s World Championship, which has a real stage, champion hats, and confetti. The announcers mispronounced even the names of the players on the Canadian team for their bronze medal. And the posters on the spray painted podium were starting to peel from the humidity.

Team USA celebrate a home run during the super round of the Women’s Baseball World Cup 2018 against Canada in Viera, Florida at USSSA Space Coast Stadium on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. (Cassi Alexandra for Longreads)

Most of the women on 2018’s Team USA won’t get to play again until the next World Cup in 2020. Underwood, at 37, is still deciding whether or not she’ll keep playing. They will return to their lives and their real jobs. They will dream about playing on the diamond again and wake up disappointed. Each year, thousands of girls will switch over to softball, or quit playing the game entirely because no one has made a path for them to go forward.

“That’s the story of women’s baseball,” Underwood said. “We don’t get to play in the same facilities. We don’t get the same attention. We don’t get the same opportunities.”

***

Kelsey McKinney is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

***

Editor: Ethan Chiel
Photographer: Cassi Alexandra
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Decolonizing Knowledge: Stefan Bradley on the Fight for Civil Rights in the Ivy League

Yale cheer leaders Greg Parker (L) and Bill Brown give the Black Power salute during the National Anthem starting the Yale-Dartmouth football game in the Yale Bowl. November 2, 1968. Bettman / Getty

Jonny Auping | Longreads | November 2018 | 19 minutes (5,155 words)

Being steeped in tradition, by nature, requires a resistance to change; and, as Stefan Bradley points out in the introduction to his new book Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, seven of the eight Ivy League schools — often referred to as the “Ancient Eight” — existed before the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, making them perhaps “more American than the nation itself with respect to culture and history.” Attending an Ivy League school is and always has been a marker of status in this country, one boasted by many U.S. Presidents, judges, and world leaders. Racial equality was not something that came naturally to these institutions; it had to be fought for. Upending the Ivory Tower documents the struggles of early black Ivy League students as well as the demonstrations and building occupations students in the 1960s took part in to hold these elite universities accountable for their prejudice.

Dr. Bradley is currently chair of the African American Studies program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (and years ago he was also a professor of mine at Saint Louis University). In 2012, he published Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the 1960s, a book about how, as some white student activists worked to radicalize and restructure the university, black students, joining with local activists in Harlem, sought to stop the university from paving over a public park to build a private gymnasium. The perspective of outsiders allowed them to see beyond internal campus politics; to recognize the university as a force in the world which sometimes must be opposed, not just reorganized. Upending the Ivory Tower covers similar ground but has an expanded scope, covering the postwar period through 1975 and all eight Ivies, adding a new layer of nuance to our understanding of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and recounting the stories of young people who had everything to lose but were righteous in their demands for what they had yet to gain. Read more…

The Lasting Effects of the Lolita Complex

Florence Sally Horner, 1950 and Dominique Swain, 1997. Philadelphia Bulletin / Associated Press, Andrew Medichini / Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Lacy Warner | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,431 words)

It feels like I’m watching porn. The video is grainy and cheap looking, like an old daytime soap shot with Vaseline over the lens. In the corner there is a grey couch that sits against a wall painted the desperate sand-beige color of every strip mall in America. This is a six-minute, twelve-second YouTube video of Dominique Swain’s screen test for the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. At the four-minute mark, director Adrian Lyne gives a line reading of the word, “slut.” He says it over and over again. Jeremy Irons, 49 years old at the time, had already been cast as Humbert Humbert. In the video, Swain is 15 years old, playing 14, though in the novel, Lolita is 12. Seconds before the end, she looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a bad, mock-English accent, “I’m a conniving little slut.”

***

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” In 1954, Lolita was rejected by five American publishing houses. Eventually, the down-market French publisher Olympia Press agreed to publish the first edition. Riddled with errors, this initial printing would be Nabokov’s albatross for the next three years. In 1958, Lolita finally saw its American debut, and became a bestseller overnight. Critics and readers alike have called Lolita many things: the great American novel; the great road novel; an allegory for the alienation caused by exile; a satirical tale of the incompatibility between European and American cultures; a great detective novel; smut; high-brow porn — but what it has never been called, until now, is true.

Last September saw the publication of Sarah Weinman’s nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. Weinman investigates the 1948 case of Horner, who was abducted as a child by the con-artist and pedophile, Frank La Salle. Horner lived with La Salle as his captive for two years, spending her 12th and 13th birthdays on the road as he took her from her New Jersey hometown across the US to California. Horner’s story is also Dolores Haze’s story. Through careful critical investigation, Weinman maps out how Nabokov learned of, and developed Lolita around, reports of Horner’s kidnapping and abuse.

Read more…

George Washington Lived in an Indian World, But His Biographies Have Erased Native People

Etching of the original silver medal presented by George Washington to Red Jacket. Library of Congress.

Colin G. Calloway | an excerpt adapted from The Indian World of George Washington | Oxford University Press | 23 minutes (6,057 words)

On Monday Afternoon, February 4, 1793, President George Washington sat down to dinner at his official home on Market Street in Philadelphia. Washington’s dinners were often elaborate affairs, with numerous guests, liveried servants, and plenty of food and wine. On this occasion Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, Governor of the Northwest Territory Arthur St. Clair, and “the Gentlemen of the President’s family” dined with him because they were hosting an official delegation. Six Indian men, two Indian women (see Author’s Note on use of the word “Indian”), and two interpreters, representing the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Piankashaw, Potawatomi, and Mascouten Nations, had traveled more than eight hundred miles from the Wabash and Illinois country to see the president. Before dining, they made speeches and presented Washington with a calumet pipe of peace and strings of wampum. Thomas Jefferson took notes.

Just one week later, Monday, February 11, Washington’s dinner guests included several chiefs from the Six Nations — the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois — a Christian Mahican named Hendrick Aupaumut, and Akiatonharónkwen or Atiatoharongwen, the son of an Abenaki mother and an African American father, who had been adopted by Mohawks but now lived in Oneida country, and who was usually called “Colonel Louis Cook” after Washington approved his commission for services during the Revolution. Before dinner the president thanked his Indian guests for their diplomatic efforts in carrying messages to tribes in the West.

Indian visits halted when yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793. Five thousand people died, and twenty thousand fled the city, including, for a time, Washington, Jefferson, Knox, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who survived a bout of the fever. A Chickasaw delegation on its way to see the president turned back on hearing of the epidemic in the fall. But the visits resumed the next year. On Saturday afternoon, June 14, 1794, Washington welcomed a delegation of thirteen Cherokee chiefs to his Market Street home in Philadelphia. They were in the city to conduct treaty negotiations, and the members of Washington’s cabinet, Jefferson, Hamilton, Knox, and Colonel Timothy Pickering — were also present. In accordance with Native American diplomatic protocol, everyone present smoked and passed around the long-stemmed pipe, in ritual preparation for good talks and in a sacred commitment to speak truth and honor pledges made. The president delivered a speech that had been written in advance. Several of the Cherokee chiefs spoke. Everyone ate and drank “plentifully of Cake & wine,” and the chiefs left “seemingly well pleased.” Four weeks later, Washington met with a delegation of Chickasaws he had invited to Philadelphia. He delivered a short speech, expressing his love for the Chickasaws and his gratitude for their assistance as scouts on American campaigns against the tribes north of the Ohio, and referred them to Henry Knox for other business. As usual, he puffed on the pipe, ate, and drank with them.
Read more…

Celebrating a Profound Literary Inheritance: Glory Edim on the Well-Read Black Girl Anthology

Authors Jesmyn Ward, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lynn Nottage. Tina Fineberg / Associated Press, Jessica Gow / Associated Press, Charles Sykes / Associated Press

Joshunda Sanders | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,718 words)

More than three years ago, in July 2015, Glory Edim sent her first Well-Read Black Girl newsletter, describing how she came to personally experience Black Girl Magic for the first time: through an “enchantment with storytelling” that began with Eloise Greenfield’s Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems.

Greenfield’s first book of poems, Honey, I Love was initially published in 1978 before subsequent reissues and has become a modern-day classic. Long before renewed calls for representation and increased diversity in children’s literature, Greenfield wrote a picture book inspired by the title poem alone. It was illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon and features a Black girl on the cover — in part because, though Greenfield went on to write 40 books, she was unable to find books for her own children to read and see themselves in before she wrote her own.

“I liked that phrase, ‘Honey, let me tell you,’” Greenfield said in a 1997 National Council of Teachers of English profile. “It was a phrase that was used a lot by African American people, but it had not reached the point where it had become stereotyped. So I wanted to use that, and that’s where the title came from. And I wanted to write about things that children love, about childhoods where there may or may not be much money, but there’s so much fun.”

These sentiments from Greenfield — taking a Black expression usually uttered with intimacy between women and making it a public affirmation of love centered on children — shaped for Edim a landscape of possibility. “I recognized myself immediately on the page;” Edim writes, “a Black girl with wide eyes, full lips, and thick braided hair. The book was my first introduction to poetry that was full of rhythm and everyday language. I was delighted to learn that my trip to the grocery store could be a poem.”

At five years old, Edim was proud to be Black. It set her on a path that would lead her to establish a lifelong ritual of reading as self-discovery — from Greenfield to “authors like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou – and many more…their books and profound literary legacy have become my inheritance.” Read more…

After World War I, Horror Movies Were Invaded By an Army of Reanimated Corpses

"J'accuse!" 1919.

W. Scott Poole | an excerpt adapted from Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror | Counterpoint | October 2018 | 23 minutes (6,219 words)

The murderous folly of the Great War chilled western Europe to the bone, and the new, gruesome entertainment of the horror film became neither escape nor catharsis but rather a repetition of trauma. Telling these stories sometimes had the effect of ripping the scab from the wound so that it never became healthy, or grieving until grief became an end in itself. At times, the stories included social criticism. In all cases, the horror film included a long, angry procession of unquiet corpses.

Not everyone would agree, or at least believe, that horror films carry so much weight. “You are reading too much into the movies” is a fairly common response to such claims. “They’re just entertainment.” This idea of course has its own history and, paradoxically, it begins with a writer who thought that the films made after the Great War did contain coded messages about the era. He saw in them a dangerous message that explained the path from Germany’s defeat in 1918 to its resurgence as a threatening power twenty years later.

Siegfried Kracauer left Germany in 1933, emigrating to Paris the same year that Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. After the beginning of World War II and the invasion of France, he fled for the Spanish border with the renegade essayist Walter Benjamin in the summer of 1940. Unlike Benjamin, however, Kracauer found a way to make it to the United States, where a Rockefeller Fellowship awaited him in the spring of 1941, thanks to his fellow exile the philosopher Max Horkheimer. New York City’s Museum of Modern Art offered Kracauer a position that involved studying the German films made between 1918 and 1933, a task he hoped might yield some clue as to what had become of his homeland. Read more…

The Masterless People: Pirates, Maroons, and the Struggle to Live Free

Leonard Parkinson, Maroon Leader, Jamaica, 1796 / Wikimedia Commons

Joseph Kelly | an excerpt adapted from Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America’s Origins | Bloomsbury | October 2018 | 16 minutes (4,192 words)

The English word maroon did not yet exist in 1607. The Spanish word from which it derives, cimarrón, was first coined to describe domesticated cattle brought to Hispaniola that escaped into the wild parts of the island. Most scholars today accept some form of this derivation, which dates at least to 1535, just forty years after Columbus landed on Hispaniola. By 1540, cimarrón was applied to Africans who, like the chattel before them, fled to the remote, wild places behind Spanish coastal colonies. Maroon first appeared in English in 1666 when John Davies, translating a history of Barbados, wrote that slaves, like those animals, would “run away and get into the Mountains and Forests, where they live like so many Beasts; then they are call’d Marons, that is to say Savages.” Sometimes, these escapees formed new communities in the wilderness, a phenomenon that anthropologists call grand marronage. Cimarrón and eventually the shortened word, maroon, carried a heavy metaphoric or perhaps even literal sense that these fugitives devolved to an animal ferocity, wildness, and savagery. That is to say, they left civilization to live like Native Americans.

Indians were often midwife to marronage. Siouan tribes or Yuchi Indians living on South Carolina’s coast helped the first maroons on the soil of what is today the United States. In 1526, five hundred Spanish with one hundred African slaves settled near the mouth of the Pee Dee River. The summer “seasoning,” mosquito-borne illnesses like yellow fever, began to carry off the settlers. In the midst of this crisis, several slaves escaped into the hinterland, taking refuge among the Indians, and when in October the 150 surviving Spanish abandoned the settlement and sailed for Hispaniola, they left behind those escapees. Eighty years before Jamestown, the first intercontinental settlers on the East Coast of the United States were maroons: Africans who had escaped Spanish slavery.

Although maroons escaped from slavery, it was no Exodus. No God tendered them a land of milk and honey as reward for keeping faith. They retained no orthodox hegemony. They were heterodox. Typically, they came from various districts in Africa, and although they might share a creole language and common suffering, they shared little else. They entered no promised land. The wildernesses to which they fled were not their natural element, though the Europeans often thought they were. The mountains of Jamaica were just as inhospitable to Africans as they were to Europeans. The jungles of Suriname and the swamps of Carolina posed the same dangers for blacks as for whites. These places terrified the escaped slaves as they would terrify you or me were we suddenly hurled into them with only the resources we could steal and carry. Maroons embraced these dangers in desperation, preferring them to the certain dangers and degradations of slavery. They pledged faith to each other, formed communities according to their own liking, and kept sacred above all else the principal of freedom. Read more…

On Blackface, Bert Williams, and Excellence

Publicity still portrait of American stage actor and Vaudeville comedian Bert Williams, 1915. (Photo by John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Images)

“Who doesn’t wanna look like Diana Ross?” journalist Megyn Kelly asked panelists Tuesday morning on her news show, during a segment about Halloween costumes. She was defending former Housewife Luanne de Lesseps, who dressed up last year in a crude costume that looked nothing like the glamorous Ross, with a white jumpsuit, a tower of a curly wig, and darkened skin. “She wants to look like Diana Ross for the day — I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween,” Kelly said. Her claim to the harmlessness of blackface betrayed an empathy problem, but also an ignorance that was too much to ignore; NBC’s top brass reacted swiftly. It seems for that and, (likely, mostly), the show’s lackluster ratings, the commentator’s morning show was canceled. At least publicly, blackface is universally condemned now, and understood to be borne of racist intentions. But Kelly’s comments reveal several truths about a complicated anxiety at the heart of American entertainment and the tradition of minstrelsy upon which it all resides.

* * *

I caught a screening of the silent film Lime Kiln Club Field Day earlier this fall, at an independent theater in Brooklyn. Possibly the oldest surviving set of moving images with a cast of Black actors, Lime Kiln has made rounds on the independent circuit since 2014, when it first released to the public. It was made a century earlier, in 1913, and restored from a trove of negatives found in MoMA’s film department. Legendary vaudevillian Bert Williams, born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1874, stars. He plays a lovable, almost clever oaf who competes with three other gentlemen for a local woman’s favor.

The actors in Lime Kiln filmed scenes of leisure: sitting in a local club and at tables in their homes, walking on sidewalks, and, at a raucous field day, dancing a cakewalk. Bert Williams is excellent in the role. His impressive comic timing, flexible, open face, long-limbed stature and commanding posture make it impossible to look anywhere else. He plays the role in blackface — a mask of burnt cork, a kinky wig, long black gloves. The rest of the cast does not. MoMA’s associate curator Ron Magliozzi called this “a sop to the white audience,” and noted “the fact that the lead wore blackface allowed the rest of the cast not to wear blackface before white audiences.” Camille Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Star told me in an email that the mask for Black performers of that era “might be considered the price of admission to the entertainment world,” and that fair skinned Blacks, especially, were under pressure to cork up.

It is because minstrelsy, the theatrical practice that began in the urban North in the 1830’s, in which white men ridiculed southern Blacks, “established the representation of blackness, in the society at-large and entertainment in particular,” said Forbes. Its singular popularity fueled its influence. According to the scholar Eric Lott:

Minstrel troupes entertained presidents (including Lincoln), and disdainful high-minded quarterlies and rakish sporting journals alike followed its course. Figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bayard Taylor were as attracted to blackface performance as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany were repelled by it. From “Oh! Susanna” to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have figured significantly in the white Imaginary of the United States.

When Williams filmed Lime Kiln Club Field Day, America’s motion picture industry was not yet two decades old. Production on D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation began the same year. When it released in 1915, it became the first blockbuster, and its direct nods to minstrelsy (white actors blacking up to play one-note, not-quite-human black characters and blatant Confederate nostalgia) reinvigorated the Klan. Lime Kiln Field Day lingered in post-production and, despite its shortcomings, forms a contrast, an alternate history —one of  Black excellence in American performance. It showed Black characters struggling toward their own goals, with back stories.  Lime Kiln’s cast of 50-100 actors haven’t yet been all identified, but we know some performers had previously worked in the Harlem-based musical revue, “Darktown Follies,” which drew white audiences uptown. “Darktown Follies” anticipated the all Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along, which played a part in Harlem’s artistic flowering of the 1920s and 1930s and helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.

Williams had been a working actor since starting out in 1893 in minstrels. He was a featured performer at Zeigfield’s Follies for nearly a decade starting in 1909. He also became a legitimate star of the record industry, composing and recording songs for Columbia Records. Once he started, he never abandoned blacking up, and he played several variations of the long-suffering “Jonah Man” throughout his career.

At my Brooklyn screening of Lime Kiln, a piano accompanist followed the drama in a jaunty ragtime. The reconstructed film lays out alternative takes of many scenes, arranged with an estimated chronology of the storyline, based on the feedback of lip readers MoMA hired to study the actors’ encounters. There’s also footage of the cast and crew between scenes. It is dizzying to watch some of the scenes in public space — there’s the blackface, as well as other humiliations like a wrestling match for discarded shoes and a watermelon eating contest. The audience was mostly white, with a smattering of Blacks, and sometimes, during close ups of Williams’ facial contortions, I felt a simmering discomfort at the laughter of my white neighbors. Still, Williams was known to have performed in only two other films, both shorts — A Natural Born Gambler and Fish — both released in 1916. The multiple takes in the Lime Kiln restoration reminded me how rare it is to see these particular actors in this particular way, how invaluable is every frame.

* * *

Williams stated in an interview that blacking up allowed him to find his actual humor, to conceive of himself, finally as a character. It explains the unsettling mix of feelings I had watching him being excellent, yet, still, to my eyes, debasing himself. By most accounts, he was an apolitical artist in a politicized age. During his professional life, the U.S. formalized rollbacks to Reconstruction and institutionalized Jim Crow; concerned citizens created institutions in response. W.E.B. Dubois’s Niagara Movement, the NAACP, Black Greek Letter Organizations, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs all arose during this era. What the scholar Imani Perry calls Black formalism — ritual practices “internal to the black community,” concretized. Some of the new Black organizations and associations that employed these rituals were purely social, with no explicit connection to politics, yet had an implied, vested interest in the sustenance and uplift of Black people in an apocalyptically difficult time.

Williams made no formal statement of protest, expressed no pro-Black sentiments on the record. He did chafe at the racist treatment he could not avoid, and claimed concern for racial uplift. He and ten other Black men in entertainment started the Frogs, a social club for Black artists based in Harlem. Williams led the art committee. Their aims were philanthropic, and also, to create an archive collection for a theatrical library. They held a popular annual social event, “The Frolic,” with a ball and vaudevillian revue. Many Black people held Williams’s accomplishments in esteem. The Black press assiduously and soberly covered his performances and business dealings. When he died in 1922 at age 47, after working through illness and collapsing near a stage after performing in Detroit, Forbes says Black critics “assess[ed] his role as a black man as well as his influence as a performer.” (Emphasis mine).

Eric Lott described the pull of minstrelsy as a combination of “love and theft,” which suppressed “the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed.” It was an attempt, in the anxious antebellum period, to enforce a social order, and in various eras of rampant social confusion, its tropes and formulations, which never really disappear, become lightning rods again. Kelly’s comments about walking in the skin of Diana Ross mirror this “love and theft,” and our current era is one where we may be approaching another nadir, another near-apocalyptic, broad loss of hard-won rights and access to the privileges of citizenship, similar to the cascading losses of Bert Williams’s time. It’s probably why our discourse is so contentious, even among friends and comrades. It helps explain our interest in relics like Lime Kiln. 

In a piece from the New York Times Magazine’s culture issue, Wesley Morris laments, “Everything means too much now.” He bemoans how “we’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.” It annoyed Morris that he couldn’t pan Insecure the way he wanted, without blowback, because it feels so “necessary” to see a Black woman beautifully shot, performing irreverent messiness and coming into her own. He’s right — we’re all entitled to art for its own sake. But everything has always meant a lot, and excellence has always been a factor, and the threads of politics and aesthetics rub up against each other all the time. Probably, we need to imagine even more lenses through which to think and talk about art and culture, and demanding the best, from everyone, on all fronts, may be the way we get through the difficulty that could be coming.

 

 

Tax the Rich

Getty Images / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Livia Gershon | Longreads | October 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

In May, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, declared that, if Democrats win power in Congress this fall, they will work to repeal the $1.5 trillion tax cut package passed last year by Republicans. Sen. Cory Gardner, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, responded with apparent glee. “I wish Nancy Pelosi the biggest platform ever to talk about her desire to increase tax revenue,” he told NBC News. “I hope she shouts it from the mountain top.”

Read more…

Why Are We Still Ignoring Lee Krasner?

(Photo by Tony Vaccaro/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

According to art critic Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock was “the most radical alcoholic [he] had ever met.” At the same time, though, Pollock’s paint splattered-and-dripped canvases, a method he pioneered and honed for a three-year period in the late 1940s, “broke the ice,” says Willem de Kooning, who added a postscript-like qualifier, “It was another step in space‐time.”

More than 60 years after Pollock rammed his green 1950 Oldsmobile-88 convertible into a tree off an East Hampton, Long Island road, Vox considers whether Pollock’s stature as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century is truly deserved. Or, more bluntly, how he “became so overrated.” That’s a bold stance for Phil Edwards, host of Vox’s Overrated video series, to take, but Edwards posits that without Greenberg and his writings for the Partisan Review, ArtForum, and others, Pollock’s stature wouldn’t have achieved the same heights. Which, as a premise, has some merit: though not the only art critic opining at the time, Greenberg was not only the loudest voice in favor of “modern art,” he immersed himself in the world in which the artists lived.

As he explained in his seminal 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg felt that there was nothing more avant garde than abstract expressionism, an art movement fueled by emotions, that resisted politicizing art (which had consumed art during the period after World War I). Through Greenberg’s embrace of Pollock, whom he indeed hyped up in his writings, the artist became an emblem of the Ab-Ex movement. A by-product of Pollock’s rise was the increasing shift of the art world’s gaze away from Paris and towards New York City, where artists like Pollock, De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and others (including Greenberg) were living. The group of artists involved in Ab-Ex were a huge force, and thus NYC transformed into art’s epicenter.

So while Vox addresses how Greenberg’s influence within art criticism greatly benefited Pollock, effectively branding the artist as “the most powerful painter in contemporary America,” the video glaringly sidesteps any mention of Lee Krasner, a brilliant artist in her own right who just so happened to be married to Pollock. Krasner elicits one mention in the video, a throwaway reference during the captioning of a photo of Pollock and Greenberg at the beach, which is not only astonishing, it is frankly dismaying.

The video’s narrative is marred by a tunnel vision approach to explaining Pollock’s rise and enduring importance — yes, Greenberg boosted him, but Krasner, with her management and stability, sustained him. It was Krasner whom Pollock first turned to when his art began to radically depart from norms at the time, asking her upon completing Lucifer in 1947, “Is this a painting?” Prior to Lucifer, writes critic Jerry Saltz, “All seemed lost for him. I love his early work, but much of it is labored, muddy and glutted. Pollock is in hell. Then it happens.” And it was Krasner who convinced Pollock to agree to an interview with Life magazine in 1949; the article’s headline — “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” — and a spread featuring Pollock’s painting introduced the artist to mainstream America (and to those who didn’t regularly read Greenberg — or even know the critic’s byline). And finally, it was Krasner who managed Pollock’s estate for nearly twenty years after his death; under her stewardship, prices for Pollock’s works tripled and quadrupled, setting the standard for modern American art. More so than Greenberg, Krasner deserves credit for maintaining Pollock’s relevance and importance — without Krasner, Jackson Pollock doesn’t become Jackson Pollock.

As she told the New York Times in 1981,

Look, they don’t take de Kooning and put him up that way. And if de Kooning or Motherwell takes from Pollock, nobody even breathes a word about it. But with Lee Krasner, wow, wow. It’s been a heavy, heavy number. It’s hard for them to separate me from Pollock in that sense, you know.

Which is why omitting her from a video on Pollock’s legacy is so discouraging, especially with the wealth of research, reporting, and examination of Krasner as an artist and a person in recent years. Krasner attended the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union and then later studied with Hans Hoffman, and in the years following Pollock’s death, her own abstractions evolved, earning not only acclaim but also space in museum collections worldwide. She derisively dismissed being labeled as Pollock’s widow, which many had saddled her with: “I may have resented being in the shadow of Jackson Pollock, but the resentment was never so sharp a thing to deal with that it interfered with my work…By and large, people look at my work and it is connected with me, and a lot of those old hurts are no longer there. I have utter confidence in what I’m doing.”

In Mary Gabriel’s recently published Ninth Street Women, Krasner is a main character — she was one of the 11 female artists whose work was selected to be displayed at the historic 1951 Ninth Street Show, and over the course of a thousand pages, Gabriel highlights how the artist’s experiences and work align with those of her peers (and, if some cases, veer from drastically). Krasner once told the Times that she wished feminism “should have come along 30 years earlier…We could have used it then.” But Gabriel’s impressive work doesn’t seek to explore the import of these artists merely on their gender — as Elaine de Kooning (another central figure in Gabriel’s text) said, “To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.”

Without Krasner, Vox’s video is incomplete. There is no point to any argument that questions Pollock’s artistic worth that neglects to mention Krasner’s own contributions. And while Greenberg did give Pollock a boost, Krasner remained with Pollock after the photographers from Life left. To ignore Krasner 34 years after her death is frustrating, especially in this day and age. In the most recent New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont delves into both Gabriel’s work and Krasner’s own legacy:

The real advance has come through the dedication of feminist scholars, such as Linda Nochlin, Hayden Herrera, and Kellie Jones, who have revitalized the discipline of art history and expanded the protest against exclusion to consider race along with gender. Gabriel’s firsthand sources are extensive, but her work stands on the shoulders of biographies by other women with a mission: Gail Levin on Krasner, Patricia Albers on [Joan] Mitchell, Cathy Curtis on de Kooning and [Grace] Hartigan. (There is no biography of [Helen] Frankenthaler, as yet.) Perhaps the tipping point will come when men write about women artists as easily as women have always written about men.

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