POPULISM'S GRAND OLD GAME.

AuthorGehring, Wes D.
PositionAthletic Arena - Baseball

"The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball. America has [rollicked on] by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again--but baseball has marked this time. This ... game is a part of our past.... It reminds us of all that once was, and that could be again."

CELEBRATED film director Frank Capra was a pivotal architect of the feel-good movie genre now known as populism, which cherishes the people, families, second chances, and traditional American icons like small town pastoral life and baseball. However, populism's beginnings are tied to the birth of the U.S. and the country's seminal comedy type--the crackerbarrel hero, a father figure of benevolent common sense.

The crackerbarrel populist lives in a methodical, one-thing-at-a-time linear world where conflict eventually will be worked out because life still is perceived to be rational. This old-fashioned American mindset is equally applicable to baseball. As political columnist and baseball author George Will has noted: "Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it involves a lot of compromise.... Baseball is the game of the long season, where small incremental differences decide who wins and who loses."

Baseball historian Michael Shapiro has said that the "long season" is central to understanding why baseball--as compared to other sports--is more integral to the fabric of American life: "Almost every day brings another game for the home team, week after week, month after month, all with the power to approximate painlessly the sensation of life--anticipation, joy, sadness, uncertainty."

This pervasiveness undoubtedly was a factor in why references to baseball turn up so frequently in the writing of Will Rogers, the most celebrated of the crackerbarrel populists. His multifaceted persona (encompassing syndicated daily columnist as well as star of stage, screen, and radio) made him the genre's most beloved single character and a leading influence on Capra.

After Rogers' 1935 death in an airplane crash, Capra began to focus on his own unique blend of populism--interweaving traditional values of the genre with a younger, more-vulnerable hero, starting with "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936). The resulting phenomenon, Caspraesque populism, has had an ongoing and unique impact upon both American pop culture in general and a smaller but no less important variety of baseball movie, such as the director's own "Meet John Doe" (1941), with Gary Cooper as a washed-up pitcher ultimately fighting fascism.

Be that as it may, Rogers merits a brief pause, as a populist most taken with baseball, as well as an articulate spokesman. For instance, at the heart of populism is the belief in the underdog common man (symbolic of the people). Thus, during the 1929 World Series...

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