Quote:
Originally Posted by Hankphenom
Do you recall what Davy Jones answered when Ritter asked him why they pulled tricks on him? Cobb was getting into fights his whole life. And I'll take the evidence I heard on the tapes over the "thin gruel" that has been presented so far on the other side. I have no problem calling the entire country racist during that period, in fact there's still a lot of that going around. You can believe whatever you want, but let's not sugarcoat our history or start putting revisionist spins on it, it is what it is.
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The problem I have with this line of thinking is that it merely perpetuates the unfounded talking point that he was "constantly fighting the civil war". This connotes that his pugilistic attitudes were simply a product of his Southern upbringing. Just because Sam Crawford said it and many newspapers of the time said it does not make it so. That is way too simplistic and lazy for this exceedingly complicated man. "He is a Southerner and he is combative therefore he"... X y and z. Sorry not buying it. The revisionist history you describe is what has been written about Cobb since he arrived in Detroit. He was very hard to understand and frequently played into what was written about him during his playing career so as to use it to his advantage on the field of play. The press was all too eager and lazy to oblige.
And again, the mention of Cobb and "racist" together simply continues another lazy talking point that is unproven and actually contradicts much of the known facts about his life. What we know as fact shows that his lineage is that of Southerners who were sympathetic to the cause of blacks, that his quotes show a man supportive of the integration of baseball, and his actions show a great financial support of those less fortunate of all races. As you say, it is easy to show most all people from that era as being racist, especially using today's definition of the term. But he was certainty no moreso than the general public at large, and the facts show that he was likely less so.
The revisionist history is what Al Stump and other authors have done to his legacy. It's a lazy way of looking at a complicated man. Certainty no saint as you say. Hard to know and hard to like by many. But he obviously was also misunderstood even by many of those closest to him such as Sam Crawford who said in the Ritter tapes that he hadn't a friend in baseball. That is incorrect to the extreme and is contradicted by others on the tapes as well. So as to these firsthand accounts of Crawford and Jones which seem to be perhaps a bit clouded by personal feelings of animosity, possible jealousy, and the decades since the events had happened by the time they were interviewed by Ritter...always with a grain of salt.