Bingo Row 1 – Migrant
When some other book challenge wanted me to read a nonfiction sports book, I found The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game by Edward Achorn. I didn’t expect it to crossover with the cbr17bingo because I didn’t expect to have anything to say about it. Clearly, I was wrong.
The very long title summarizes the book. In the 1800s, baseball was reaching some sort of crisis due to the players’ crimes and contagious moral illness. Baseball split into two groups over this. A hilariously bitchy fellow named William Hulbert decided to straighten up baseball through a zero tolerance policy and raising prices on games to keep out the riff raff in the National League (Temperance League as I called them as I read). In contrast, the American Association – Immigration Association in my head – offered cheaper tickets and booze on Sundays. And also player bans.
A lot of the book presupposed the reader’s knowledge of baseball, which is fair. The vast majority of readers would only read because they’re interested in the subject. There were many times when I finished a paragraph and realized I had no idea what I just read. Then I realized the paragraph was just about playing baseball and I followed about as much as I do when I go to baseball games. At these baseball games, I usually just have a very expensive beer or two and read a book, but I get the gist of what’s going on. And it’s thanks to German immigrants that people like me get to drink at baseball games.
German immigrants didn’t see Sunday as a serious religious holiday that happens weekly like the puritans in the Temperance League (possible exaggeration). And one of those immigrants, Chris van der Ahe, saw baseball as a way to sell beer. So he bought a baseball team and sold beer and baseball tickets, often to other immigrants looking for americana.
The record shows van der Ahe as a silly caricature and while I was amused by the anecdotes, I also thought he sounded like a guy who thinks he’s funny and isn’t. But then the author pointed something out that I really should have realized and made me feel bad for thinking I wouldn’t like him:
Nineteenth-century newspaper reporters, handed the priceless gift of this oversized personality, transformed him into something approaching a pure ethnic stereotype: the German immigrant as a bombastic rube, known as a ‘Dutchman,’ who must be constantly corrected by his smarter, American-born associates. Yet the historical record reveals a much more complex character than the one constantly lampooned in the papers.
Retrospectively, duh. Of course 19th century newspapers exaggerated a German immigrant’s Germanness. And of course a savvy businessman will play those things up too. Although he couldn’t have been that savvy if he went broke. Which he did.
All together, it was a surprisingly engaging book about a topic I don’t care about (sport) and a few that I do (immigration, beer, original source usage and interpretation).