There are men in the United States who say that baseball has received its death wound and is slowly dying out of the list of respectable sports. There are other men who say that American baseball can be saved if a clean sweep is made of the Jewish influence which has just dragged it through a period of bitter shame and demoralization.
Whether baseball as a first-class sport is killed and will survive only as a cheap-jack entertainment; or whether baseball possesses sufficient intrinsic character to rise in righteous wrath and cast out the danger that menaces it, will remain a matter of various opinion. But there is one certainty, namely, that the last and most dangerous blow dealt baseball was curiously notable for its Jewish character.
Yet only lesser Jews were indicted. Inevitably the names of other Jews appeared in the press accounts, and people wondered who they were. A Jewish judge presided. Jewish lawyers were prominent on both sides of the cases. Numerous strange things occurred.
But strangest of all is the fact that although American fans felt that something epochal had happened in baseball, few really know what it is.
There has been time enough for others to tell the truth if they were so disposed. Many sport editors have come as near telling it as their newspapers would permit them. But it becomes daily more evident that if the whole matter is to be laid bare, so that Americans may know where to look for danger, THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT will have to do it.
And this is not of our own choosing. Baseball is a trivial matter compared to some of the facts that are awaiting publication. Yet it is possible to see the operation of the Jewish Idea in baseball as clearly as in any other field. The process is the same, whether in war or politics, in finance or in sports.
To begin with, Jews are not sportsmen. This is not set down in complaint against them, but merely as analysis. It may be a defect in their character, or it may not; it is nevertheless a fact which discriminating Jews unhesitatingly acknowledge. Whether this is due to their physical lethargy, their dislike of unnecessary physical action, or their serious cast of mind, others may decide; the Jew is not naturally an out-of-door sportsman; if he takes up golf it is because his station in society calls for it, not that he really likes it; and if he goes in for collegiate athletics, as some of the younger Jews are doing, it is because so much attention has been called to their neglect of the sports that the younger generation thinks it necessary to remove that occasion of remark.
And yet, the bane of American sports today is the presence of a certain type of Jew, not as a participant, but as an exploiter and corrupter. If he had been a sportsman for the love of sport he might have been saved from becoming an exploiter and corrupter, for there is no mind to which the corrupting of a sport is more illogical and even unexplainable than the mind of the man who participates in it.
There will be a very full case made out in justification of the use of the above terms “exploiter” and “corrupter” with regard to baseball. But it would be just as easy to make out the same sort of case with regard to wrestling and horse-racing. Wrestling is so completely ruled by Jews as to have become an outlawed sport. The story of wrestling is not only the story of the demoralization of a sport, but also the story of the wholesale bunkoing of the public.
The same is true of horse-racing. The whole atmosphere of this sport has been tinged with dishonesty. The horses remain almost the only well-bred creatures connected with it. Yet why should the art of breeding and training and testing fine horses be debasing? Only because a certain class saw in it a chance to play upon the weaknesses of men for the sake of gain.
That, indeed, explains the presence of the Jew in modern sports and it also explains why the Jewish Idea in sport, instead of being preservative, is corruptive. The Jew saw money where the sportsman saw fun and skill. The Jew set out to capitalize rivalry and to commercialize contestant zeal.
This is not necessarily the only course the Jew could have taken with regard to sports, but it is the course that he most notably has taken, and as scandal follows scandal it would seem to be high time that organized Jewry should undertake to control or repudiate those Jews who have been most instrumental in corrupting and nearly destroying our cleanest, most manly public sports.