Showing posts with label Good Questions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Good Questions. Show all posts
As is quickly becoming an annual tradition, media outlets are reporting widespread violence and general chaos in retail outlets across the nation as Americans pack into stores early in the morning in an effort to capitalize on the so-called “Black Friday” sales that begin the holiday shopping season. In Los Angeles, a woman injured twenty people when she used pepper spray in an effort to deter other shoppers and “gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store,” in what police referred to as an act of “competitive shopping.”
Meanwhile, shootings were reported in Northern California, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Iowa; brawls broke out in New York, Arizona, and Ohio among others; a young girl was trampled in Michigan; and chaotic, frenzied scenes were widespread across the nation. How did it get to this point? How did the day after Thanksgiving morph into the unhinged quasi-holiday known as “Black Friday”?
Despite the valiant efforts of multiple generations of historians, most Americans still speciously assume Thanksgiving to be a largely unbroken American tradition that spans four centuries from the Pilgrim’s bountiful feast with the Wampanoag Indians to our contemporary football-infused turkey holocaust. To be sure, days of thanksgiving were observed frequently in many American colonies and during the early republic, but they were less bountiful celebrations of abundance than they were ascetic days of fasting and prayer. Most of the “traditional” Thanksgiving we celebrate today, from the food to its mythical origin story, was in fact the creation of mid-nineteenth-century moral reformer Sarah Josepha Hale. Within her widely read magazine Godey’s Lady Book, Hale promoted the potential holiday as a means through which the nation could gather, celebrate, and model loving ties and moral life for the nation. After decades of unsuccessful lobbying, and with the help of Abraham Lincoln, Hale succeeded in creating a national holiday as a mechanism to help reunite the nation after the tumult of the Civil War. The idea spread quickly and by the beginning of the twentieth century, Thanksgiving was widely celebrated throughout the North (Southerners initially distrusted it as a “Yankee holiday”), second only to Christmas.
Thanksgiving developed during a period in which, as historian Leigh Eric Schmidt has shown, most American holidays became thoroughly consumer-oriented, which was particularly true of Christmas. To a certain extent, of course, this applied to Thanksgiving, not only in its focus on certain foods, but also in its strong tie to American football. Indeed, already by 1893, one columnist could grump that “Thanksgiving Day is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given… It is a holiday granted by the State and Nation to see a game of football.” Yet, suggests Matthew Dennis, Thanksgiving was simultaneously (though however imperfectly) an expression of Americans’ growing ambivalence or even “aversion to commercialization and capitalist excess,” particularly in its de-emphasis on gift-giving and the simple preindustrial vision of America it celebrates. As a result, even in the nineteenth-century, it was considered in poor taste for retailers to begin the holiday shopping season until after Thanksgiving. In 1924, Macy’s created its annual Thanksgiving Day Parade to mark the transition into the Christmas shopping season. So the day after Thanksgiving has served as the transition into the Christmas shopping season for nearly as long as there have been Thanksgivings.
In fact, by 1939, this tradition had become so firmly entrenched that it precipitated one of the great and largely-forgotten political scandals of the twentieth-century: Franksgiving. Locked in the midst of the Great Depression, and with Thanksgiving falling on November 30th and therefore allowing a particularly short holiday season, Roosevelt acted on the advice of national retailers and—in an effort to boost the national economy—moved Thanksgiving ahead to provide an extra week of shopping days. The decision was widely panned, with over sixty percent of Americans disapproving (in large part because it screwed up football games scheduled for Thanksgiving). An Indiana shopkeeper protested with a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas,” while the Oklahoma attorney general wrote:
April June and November
All the rest have thirty-one.
Until we hear from Washington”
The unpopular decision resulted in a joint Congressional resolution designating the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, which Roosevelt signed into law in 1941.
If the day after Thanksgiving has marked the rather abrupt transition into the Christmas shopping season, and been one of the busiest retail days of the year, since the nineteenth-century, it only became associated with the name “Black Friday” during the 1960s, when Philadelphia police officers and bus drivers used it to refer to the traffic jams and crowded sidewalks resulting when mobs of shoppers descended into downtown stores. The term spread slowly across the United States until it began capturing some national exposure and a double-meaning, reflected in a 1982 ABC News World News Tonight Broadcast: “Some merchants label the day after Thanksgiving ‘Black Friday,’ because business today can mean the difference between red ink and black on the ledgers.”
Yet, despite the often frenzied atmosphere and outside a few cultish die-hards who camped outside stores in advance of mostly normal openings, Black Friday remained a largely normal shopping day into the mid-1990s. By 1995 and 1996, however, the term “Black Friday” appears to have become a massive marketing campaign itself, used extensively in national advertisements and covered with increasing vigor by the news media, thus precipitating the ongoing race to the bottom we see today. In an effort simply to draw consumers into stores, corporations began advertising lower and lower sale prices each year of limited-supply items in an effort to encourage more and more people to camp outside earlier and earlier, actively cultivating an atmosphere of sport and competition.
By 2005, this manufactured frenzy began turning particularly violent—beyond the already widespread pushing and shoving—as companies began opening their doors even earlier while offering even lower prices and more short-supplied items like Wal-Mart’s $300 computer. In 2006, widespread violence was reported as consumers waited for the PlayStation 3, of which there was a worldwide shortage. As the New York Times noted at the time, “Many merchants angered shoppers by trumpeting huge discounts—like $70 portable DVD players and $600 flat-screen televisions—only to announce they were sold out moments after they opened.”
Then, in 2007, Jdimytai Damour was killed in a stampede of 2,000 customers who managed to break down the doors of a New York Wal-Mart at 4:55 in the morning, trapping him in a vestibule where he died of asphyxiation. A temporary employee working at a company infamous for low wages and poor benefits, Damour spent the evening with his family before rushing off to guard a “blitz” line for a “door-busting” sale, only to be trampled by a frantic mob of consumers, many of whom reacted in anger when informed that the store would be closing and continued to shop. Although many Americans expressed horror and anger and Damour’s senseless death, it precipitated few cultural changes or even much sympathy for the underpaid workers forced to endure such madness.
This year, when many of the major American retailers opened at midnight, it drew significant pushback from their disempowered employees. Although one petition to stop the decision received 190,000 signatures, most Americans appeared to adopt a stance similar to the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s: be grateful you have a job—you’re free to quit if you don’t like it. To suggest that workers with little economic security, and who are faced with daunting unemployment rates, are “free” to quit is, of course, a bizarre and elaborate fiction. To suggest that corporations should have the right to make any unreasonable demand they please from workers living in a state of such unfreedom is a disturbing reminder of how far Americans have strayed from the principles of charity and compassion the season is alleged to represent. It is only very recently, then, that Black Friday has taken on its third meaning as the darkest day in the American calendar.
The Baseball Hall of Fame remains perhaps the most venerated sports institution in the United States, filled not only with the greatest players in the sport’s long history, but also with virulent racists, noted cheaters, drug users, and your everyday run-of-the-mill sociopaths. The process and guidelines for selecting which former players deserve induction into the Hall of Fame are notoriously ambiguous and contentious, leading each year to hilariously exhaustive exegeses or truly bizarre ruminations on the meaning of the word “fame” in “Hall of Fame.” For some writers, though, the real problem with the induction process has less to do with the vague guidelines than with the fact that each player remains eligible for fifteen years; for such writers, it should be immediately obvious whether someone is a Hall of Famer or not.
While having to debate the merits of Jim Morris or Tim Raines (no and yes, by the way) every year is no doubt frustrating, there’s a certain historiographical wisdom to this system that is too often overlooked as voters must constantly review and rethink baseball history in light of new knowledge. This was perhaps best demonstrated earlier this month with the selection of Bert Blyleven, a former pitcher whose reputation has grown substantially over the course of the past ten years as advanced statistical analyses (known as “Sabermetrics”) have become increasingly accepted within the notoriously stodgy baseball community.
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| Bert Blyleven: Hey, "taste" isn't a criterion. |
In his second year of eligibility, Blyleven captured just 14-percent of the vote (75% is necessary for induction) and was widely understood as a solid pitcher with a long career that was nonetheless distinctly unworthy of the Hall of Fame. Sabermetrics have, however, over the course of the past decade, revealed Blyleven to have been one of the greatest pitchers of his generation, chronically underrated, both while he was playing and in the present, because he was consistently saddled with terrible teams that masked his dominance. As a result, beneath the dry numbers in his voting record lies a fascinating shift in the way baseball history is understood and interpreted:
1998: 17.5 % 2002: 26.3% 2006: 53.3% 2010: 79.7%
1999: 14.1% 2003: 29.2% 2007: 47.7%
2000: 17.4% 2004: 35.4% 2008: 61.9%
2001: 23.5% 2005: 40.9% 2009: 62.7 %
At the conclusion of his career, most would have understood Blyleven to have been obviously unworthy of the Hall of Fame. In the intervening period, neither the facts about his career nor his statistical accomplishments changed. Yet the way we understand and periodize baseball has shifted so dramatically that he now seems an obvious Hall of Famer.
The wisdom of this system, I suspect, will be demonstrated even more fully in the next fifteen years as more and more players tainted with proven or unproven associations to steroids become eligible for induction. This year, for instance, at least four candidates’ cases likely suffered because of their alleged ties to steroids:
Jeff Bagwell 41.7%
Larry Walker 20.3%
Mark McGwire 19.8%
Rafael Palmeiro 11%
Had the steroid scandals of the previous decade never occurred, each of these players likely would eventually enter the Hall of Fame, but now their cases seem in increasing doubt. Bagwell, in particular, probably would have gained entry this year as one of the greatest first basemen in history. But even though there is no concrete evidence linking him to steroids, Bagwell’s skill-set as a home run hitter, his hulking body, and the time period within which he played was enough for a substantial number of writers—posing as moral guardians of a sacred institution—to conclude that he might have used steroids and could therefore tarnish the Hall of Fame. Rob Neyer points out that, by 2015, there could be as many as 22 entirely deserving candidates who played during the “steroid era” up for election and therefore could be considered suspect.
At some point, I think, we will really have to question: what was the “steroid era” anyway, how does it differ from what preceded it, and how does it fit into the broader history of baseball?
The most common interpretation is helpfully illustrated here, which understands steroids to have been introduced into baseball in 1988 by outfielder Jose Canseco, spread like wildfire while home runs flew out of the park at a record pace, and finally exploded into public consciousness with the BALCO case, becoming the single greatest embarrassment in the sport’s history since the Black Sox Scandal (and that whole segregation thing) .
Canseco is a reviled, bumbling, and bankrupt former star who was recently beaten into a whimpering fetal position in a schadenfreude-laden boxing match and, as such, makes for a convenient scapegoat. But, I think, there is good reason to be skeptical of this interpretation. Baseball, particularly if Ken Burns is to be believed, has always been approached as a representation of American identity and, as a result, the narrative of a "Steroid Era" draws upon--and feeds into--a popular narrative of national purity and innocence corrupted by modern excess--where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? But, of course, neither baseball nor America was ever as pure and simple as people like to believe.
The first known use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball was not by Canseco, but instead by Hall of Fame pitcher “Pud” Galvin who used the “elixir of Brown-Sequard"--made by draining a monkey’s balls--to improve his performance, a decision which yielded accolades from the Washington Post: “If there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue of the elixir, they are respectfully referred to Galvin’s record… It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery.”
More seriously, though, performance-enhancing drugs were widespread in baseball by at least the 1950s, particularly in the form of amphetamines. Pitcher Jim Brosnan first revealed the widespread use of amphetamines by baseball players in his 1959 memoir, recounting how players believed it gave them a physical and emotional boost during the grueling baseball season. And boy howdy were amphetamines popular, used by everyone from Hank Aaron to Willie Mays (who was reputed to have kept a bottle of “red juice”—a mix of speed and fruit juice—in his locker).
But it wasn’t just amphetamines—players were dabbling with nearly any drug or cocktail they believed could give them a leg up on the competition or quell their physical pain. Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford, for instance, was alleged by one teammate to use dimethylsulfoxide to fight is aches and pains: “you rub it on with a plastic glove and as soon as it gets on your arm you can taste it in your mouth. It’s not available anymore though. Word is it can blind you.” And by 1970s, of course, everyone was on cocaine and Dock Ellis was (hilariously) throwing no-hitters while tripping balls on acid:
If amphetamines were widely believed (even if such a belief was false) to improve player performance in terms of reaction and hand-eye coordination, it’s worth asking what precisely the ethical distinction between Barry Bonds using anabolic steroids and Willie Mays using Hi-C from hell is.
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| This was my performance-enhancer back in my T-ball days. Laced with speed, of course. |
Steroids were also known to be widely used in nearly every other sport throughout the 1960s. In 1969, a lawsuit by a former defensive lineman revealed that the San Diego Chargers gave their players—and sometimes forced their players to take—anabolic steroids and amphetamines in an attempt to enhance their performance. Indeed, steroids were casually placed on the training table along with amphetamines, pain killers, and sleeping pills. The use of steroids was so prevalent that, by the summer of 1973, both the Subcommittee on Investigations and the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency held hearings to determine the extent of drug use within American athletics.
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| Actually not about this year's Vikings team. |
But not everyone was satisfied with this assessment.When Senator Birch Bayh tried to get Jack Scott, the founder of the Institute for the Study of Sports in Society, to praise baseball's anti-drug initiative,Scott adamantly refused. Instead, he suggested such anti-drug programs were merely a coverup that fixated on drugs like heroin and LSD instead of those that were actually in widespread use by athletes: “Here, for example, is a book that is put out by the office of the Commissioner of Baseball. The “Baseball vs. Drugs” and this is an education prevention program. There is not one mention of anabolic steroids in the entire booklet—one of the chief drugs athletes are using to help their performance."
So by the 1950s and 1960s, American athletics were saturated with a culture of drugs, which were widely available; admitted users have suggested they were in widespread use; baseball players were widely accepted to be using amphetamines and other newfangled elixirs to gain an edge. Is it really a stretch to believe some of the greatest players of the 1960s and 1970s may have been using anabolic steroids in addition to amphetamines? Would it even be possible that steroid use has declined overall since the 1960s, but merely become more effective? Lastly, what precisely is the ethical distinction between using drugs one thinks will yield performance-enhancement and using drugs that actually yield such enhancement?
I suspect such questions will be asked in upcoming years, as more and more people delve begin to challenge the romantic narratives of baseball's simple past. How will it change the way we think about baseball history over the past 20 years? It will be interesting to see if, and how, our analysis of the last thirty years begins to change.
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