1919 World Series – GEORGE ROTHERT

The Red Summer Centennial

Military service had “probably given these men more exalted ideas of their station in life than really exists, and having these ideas they will be guilty of many acts of self-assertion, arrogance, and insolence . . . this is the right time to show them what will and what will not be permitted, and thus save them much trouble in the future.”
– newspaper editorial

The only good thing that occurred in 1919 was the birth of my mother. Otherwise, in the aftermath of the Great War, the United States was in the midst of the influenza pandemic that killed 675,000 people — more than fifty-million world-wide. Gamblers paid the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series and ever after be known as the Black Sox. 1919 was also the Red Summer of race riots, three dozen, mostly in cities, but the most deadly in rural Elaine, Arkansas, where more than two-hundred African-Americans and five white men were killed.

100 Years Ago: Black Sox

As Major League Baseball takes a break for its annual All-Star game, let’s take our time machine back to 1919. A year after the end of the Great War, the U.S. was recovering from the Great Influenza Pandemic and beginning a decade of prosperity. Baseball was truly the national pastime. But a hundred years later, the 1919 World Series is still remembered in infamy for the “Black Sox” players who conspired with gamblers to lose the Series.

The White Sox were World Series champions in 1917. The following year several of their players, including star outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, went off to war and the Sox fell to sixth place. Back to full strength in 1919, they won the American League pennant and faced the Cincinnati Reds in the Series. Several Sox players followed the lead of ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte: In exchange for $10,000 each ($146,000 in 2019 dollars) they made a deal with gamblers to lose.