Is Baseball A Racket?

The American Communist Party thought it was. Through the 1920s and until the mid-1930s, the party considered athletics a bourgeois distraction, and did not report on sports in the Daily Worker. The youth party paper, Young Worker, called baseball “a method used in distracting … the American workers from their miserable conditions.” In the ’30s, however, as the otherwise unidentifiable mischaDC wrote in 2006: “Part of the goal was to get the party out of its immigrant niche. One way of doing this was to expand the Daily Worker from a party newssheet to an American paper. A sports section was the key. Mike Gold, a Daily Worker writer, later said: ‘When you run the news of a strike alongside the news of a baseball game, you’re making American workers feel at home. It gives them the feeling that communism is nothing strange or foreign, but is as real as baseball.'”

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