Baseball and Industrialism Rickwood Field, Birmingham Alabama
That baseball became more business-like following World War II is not to deny its distinctive role in the business culture of the early part of the century. Woodward and men like him surely loved baseball for the sport of it, but the game, especially in professional form, held a distinctive place in the reweaving of the social fabric during the transition to corporate capitalism. The game, the men who played it, and the fields it was played on were used to prescribe racial, social, and class barriers and reinforce then acceptable patterns of behavior in the social order.
By the first decade of the twentieth century baseball's popularity had grown rapidly. What once had been considered a gentleman's game had grown in popularity among the working class only to take on pariah status in the business world. Many expressed concern about the supposed moral degradation and lewdness associated with the game. Eighteen grown men gathered around a bat, a ball, tobacco, and liquor surely could not add up to a healthful environment. Woodward, a third-generation iron manufacturer in the Woodward Iron Company, had a taste of this himself in his younger days, while watching the mining and manufacturing leagues in Birmingham (and later as a player while a attending the DuBose Academy and at Sewanee College [The University of the South]). He recalled that when it looked like a visiting club was on the brink of victory, fisticuffs were a near certainty. But if the home team won, then it was craps and beer for everyone at the local tavern. Like many boys growing up in the heart of industrial America, Woodward took a fancy to baseball and locomotives. Unlike other children though who quickly aborted their fantasy lives in the face of a life of labor, however, Woodward could and did live out his boyhood dreams by becoming a locomotive engineer and by buying his very own baseball club.
Farsighted industrialists recognized that the game naturally lent itself to all the burgeoning principles of Taylorism and scientific management while at the same time retaining an element of leisure and fun that gave the game its near universal appeal. Baseball became a proper leisurely diversion for the working class. These industrialists-turned-baseball-club investors also recognized the growing popularity of the game and the potential profits to be earned by commodification. While the direct evidence is uneven (at best) it is probable that businessmen like Rick Woodward who were the financiers behind major ballpark construction in the early twentieth century began to see the benefits in a game that in many ways replicated and reinforced the work patterns, ethic, and desired characteristics of a productive business environment. The game encouraged and necessitated teamwork, precision, orderly functioning, quick judgment, a strict division of labor, fair-mindedness, and respect for authority (at least bosses, if not umpires): all the desired characteristics of an efficient and productive laborer. The nature of baseball as a game and a task could have a two-fold effect on the fan; by deifying athletes fans would internalize the behavior patterns of their favorite players, while the trip to the ballpark itself became an effective means of relieving stresses that might otherwise "discharge themselves in a dangerous way."
If the game itself was not as rousing as today's football, it carried a steady pace of action, since many more games were played, the ballpark became a central social gathering place for all Birmingham residents, though not necessarily between the classes. The arrangement and comfort of seating broke down distinctly along class lines. The 500 box seats at Rickwood, filled with comfortable wooden opera-style chairs18, hugged the field from dugout to dugout, with an aisle to separate them from the grandstand seating behind. The original drawings indicate that the area underneath the grandstand, what is now a concession area, carried the label "privilege man." Fitted with a crown molding (the only interior space like it) this space presumably served as a club area for Birmingham's elite to mingle in the shade before taking in the game from the comfort of their box seats. The grandstand presumably held the merchants, clerks, skilled labor, and lower level business people, while the open-air bleachers seated the working class. Originally, the far section of the bleachers down the left field line seated black patrons. A 1914 photograph reveals that during games with overflow crowds fans sat in temporary wooden bleachers laid out along the wooden outfield wall, while black patrons stood along the left field foul line.
Recognizing the advantages of secure leisure time activities, the businessman also realized that the structure of the social space surrounding the field needed clearing up. In the mix of Birmingham's population growth, the expansion of leisure time culture, and people's declining buying power, baseball competed with amusement parks, vaudeville, moving pictures, and circuses in an effort to meet the public's increased desire for inexpensive comfort. Careful attention had to be paid toward establishing who controlled this public space and how people would be managed inside the ballpark. Whereas at one time fans crowded along the lines of the field and freely interacted with players, coaches, and umpires, the new grandstand created a buffer zone between spectator and player. The steel magnate and the puddler might share the same experience but would not have to sit along side one another while doing so. Contrary to popular belief, the ballpark did not represent democracy in action; rather, it gave the middle-class and upper-middle class a chance to cut themselves loose and enjoy the informal, physically intimate structure of a working-class game within the confines of genteel experience. For some a trip to the ballpark meant "going slumming" while for others it meant a chance to watch good sport.
Finally, one cannot overlook the showmanship of a man who would name a field after himself, as in Rick Wood(ward). As much as Rickwood Field became a symbol of civic pride to the community at large, it also secured Woodward's place in the community as a businessman, entrepreneur, and civic activist. Combining business interests with the idea of play, Woodward could legitimate his own standing and that of the business culture in an era of muckrakers, labor strife, robber barons, and monopoly capital. The game developed in an era that saw the emergence of corporate liberalism, the attempt to co-opt the state's (meaning municipal government's) social agenda into an order that protected corporate interests and preserved what they viewed as the common good while at the same time keeping workers immobilized.
