BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS50 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020ball field. Imagine Cobb’s pugnacity
joined to the fabled good manners and
sportsmanship of Walter Johnson. The
Good Man possessed both qualities and
married the opposites in his soul. It was a
theme in the sports culture of the day.
Perhaps it’s perennial. We see it in the
“band of ferocious gentlemen,” Rickey’s
description of the ideal baseball team.
Beer takes pains to correct what he
insists is a mischaracterization of his sub-
ject. “Barbaric on the basepaths” and “a
great big snarling bear of a man with glar-
ing eyes and a temper that periodically
drove him beyond the edge of sanity” is
how a biographer of Negro Leagues leg-
end Josh Gibson, whom Charleston both
managed and played alongside, described
Charleston more than 40 years after
Charleston’s death. Colorful language, but
might it be closer to the truth to say that
Charleston was button-down and old-
school? He neither smoked nor drank,
as Beer points out, and was committed
to such bourgeois values as punctuality.A disciplined man who as a manager
“expected discipline from others,” he
immersed himself in “a close study of the
game.” He ran a tight ship.
Born in 1896 to parents who had just
migrated from Nashville, Charleston
grew up on the mean streets of Indiana -
polis and came to know the inside of a jail
cell, as did at least one of his five broth-
ers; another two spent time in reformato-
ries. At 15, Oscar enlisted in the U.S.
Army (lying about his age). He played on
his regiment’s baseball team in the
Philippines, shone, and earned fame in
the Manila press. Discharged in 1915, he
returned to Indianapolis and tried out for
the ABCs, managed by the estimable C. I.
Taylor, a pioneer of black baseball.
The Army had taught Charleston disci-
pline; Taylor took him to graduate school
in the virtue. College-educated and the
son of a southern minister, Taylor
“detested rowdiness, drunkenness, and
gambling.” He advocated “scientific”
baseball. His idea of losing his cool was
to stride onto the diamond and say, “Mr.
Umpire, I’ve been watching you for thelast twelve innings.... If I was a cursing
man, I’d curse you.”
O’Neil in his autobiography wrote of
black baseball as “atraditionof profes-
sional men, going back to the 1800s,”
adding that “people don’t realize the
Negro Leagues were filled with college
men, maybe more than were in the white
big leagues.” Charleston’s formal educa-
tion stopped at the eighth grade, but he had
aspirations. At 20, he married the daughter
of a high-school principal. They soon
divorced and he married... a school-
teacher. “His scrapbook and photo album
make clear that throughout his life
Charleston maintained an interest in music
and ideas,” Beer reports. “He tended to
seek relationships with those who shared
these interests and who were striving to
rise socially.”
The book is organized chronologically
and is more chronicle than story, which is
in there, but the reader has to make some
effort. Every page is testimony to the
heavy, heavy lifting undertaken by theauthor at archives and libraries. The chal-
lenge he faced was not only to discern
and then communicate who Charleston
was but even to spell out what he did—to
talk statistics, the natural language of
baseball. Outside the major leagues, they
weren’t kept consistently, and so the
record that Negro League researchers
have patiently, over many years, compiled
from newspaper box scores and the like
will probably remain forever incomplete.
Their work continues. Beer estimates that
the statistical record he has compiled for
Charleston—the largest yet, 6,757 plate
appearances in professional ball at various
levels, including exhibition games against
major-league teams—represents only
about a third of his playing career. We’ll
take what we can get: The few pages of
statistical appendix at the back of the book
are baseball gold.
What we can know of the prodigy
that was Oscar Charleston will always
be fragmentary, like the writings of
some pre-Socratic philosopher. Mourn
the irredeemable loss. Celebrate the per-
manent mystery.as much detail as can be gleaned and
organized into a comprehensive big
picture of the “life and legend” of
“baseball’s greatest forgotten player,”
Charleston’s designation in the subtitle
of this first book-length biography of
him. It’s more a landscape than a portrait,
though Beer depicts him to the degree
that the extant evidence allows. We
have no video or audio of Charleston.
Con temporary newspaper coverage of
baseball outside the major leagues con-
sisted mostly of game accounts.
“Neither Oscar nor his close relatives
were ever really interviewed at any
length, and neither Oscar nor his family
ever wrote anything about his private
life,” Beer confirms. Charleston married
twice. He and his second wife, Jane,
never divorced, but they separated—
permanently, it turned out—in the 1930s.
He had no children.
So a scrapbook and a photo album be -
come Beer’s Dead Sea Scrolls. Charleston
left them behind. They were passedfrom Jane to his sister Katherine to her
niece Anna to Negro Leagues historian
Larry Lester. They’re now in the posses-
sion of the Negro Leagues Museum in
Kansas City, Mo. They include photos,
personal letters, and clippings from
American and Cuban newspapers. The
material represents the last 40 years of
Charleston’s life. From that handful of
dust, Beer strives to conjure his person-
ality and character.
Charleston had a reputation for in-
game brawling. He “really enjoyed a
good fight,” in the words of teammate
Ted Page. Bear in mind, though, Beer
cautions, that “fighting and violence
were integral to the game” back then. He
cites Texas League rules that “allowed
players who engaged in an on-field fight
to finish it; the only ones to be penalized
were teammates who interfered.” In
Beer’s telling, Charleston was a self-
made gentleman with a temper that he
subordinated to rigorous self-discipline
and unleashed only now and then, on
occasions that might be deemed appro-
priate in the context, competition on theThe record that Negro League researchershave patiently,
over many years, compiled from newspaper box scores and
the like will probably remain forever incomplete.
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