Baseball Boom

Patrick Eisele
4/28/13
AMS 367
Comprehensive Essay
The Boom Throughout the course of America’s history, baseball and has been able to reflect the changes. Racism, urbanization, immigration, the growth of big business, labor problems, etc. has been reflected in the game of baseball. Unlike the other sports that were being played at the same time as baseball, no other sport came close to showing relationships at all crossroads of America and baseball. To do it justice the biggest point in time for not only baseball would be America during and post World War II. After making it through the Great Depression and the threat of German domination going on over in Europe, baseball at this point of time does not come to mind with all of the life events going on. But on that very fateful morning of December 7th, 1941 is when everything changed, following Pearl Harbor, overwhelming patriotism spread throughout the nation, causing many young men to enlist, some among those were baseball players. With the men going overseas to help fight on the front against the Germans and Japanese, something had to be done at home for everything to keep going, which meant women of the households had to leave the house and leave their former domestic lifestyles and begin working in factories to help build anything that was needed for the war effort. With the men going off to fight baseball was up in question if it should go on or hold off for the time being but, baseball is a part of American life, it is America’s life in a nutshell, you take away something so closely intertwined that the ones at home in the factories could lose the morale of the America and the morale of the soldier. Between the years of 1941 to 1945 the number of employed women grew to sixty percent, three out of every four women were married and were mothers at fourteen years or younger. With the age of a woman being vastly young, it was because of either the men leaving for the war or the men had come back and they married and began families which led to the baby boom in the 1950s. During the depression a poll was taken and eighty percent of males said that they objected to women working outside of the home, by 1942 that number had decreased to around thirteen percent. When the women went into the workforce there was a big applaud from the popular culture and various propaganda sprang up and showed how much of an asset the women were to helping back in the states. As the major league’s attendance dropped about a million, a women’s league of baseball started and it was a sport for women that came from traditional softball but baseball rules were slowly integrated to meet baseballs needs.
During the year of 1947, the racial barriers of baseball fell when Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He endured years of racial remarks from him making it into the major league of baseball where only one black man before him had played for the minor league team in Toledo and that was Moses Fleetwood Walker, but Jackie made it to the big club after spending a year in the minor league team for the Dodgers. Although Robinson was loved by the Black population and Dodgers Fans, he endured an immense amount of abuse from the rest of the baseball’s audience. At first, his own teammates, many of them southerners, didn’t want to play with him and signed a petition that said they’d rather be traded. Some examples of the Threats towards him and his family, pitches thrown at his head and base runners would try and cut him with their cleats. Then the baby boom came, the first generation post mushroom cloud. After the men came home from the war a new way of life came about, families began to spring up in the suburbs instead of the city. The new families did not want to live how they used to and as they moved out and were in these new subdivisions the birth rate increased and everything seemed to evolve into the notion of “suburbanization”. Even businesses started up to adapt to the new way of

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