LANDIS, Kenesaw Mountain

(b. 20 November 1866 in Millville, Ohio; d. 25 November 1944 in Chicago, Illinois), lawyer, federal judge, and first and most powerful Commissioner of Baseball who is credited with earning the public's respect for the integrity of professional baseball.

Landis was one of seven children of Abraham Landis and Mary Kumler Landis, a homemaker. Abraham Landis, a physician who had been a Union soldier during the Civil War, had a leg injured during a battle at Kennesaw (with two n 's) Mountain in Georgia on 27 June 1864. When his son was born, he named him after the place of the battle, misspelling Kenesaw with one n. Young Landis was a roustabout, a high school dropout whose ambition to work the railroads ended when Vandalia and Southern Railroad rejected his application to become a brakeman. He then became a bicycle racer at fairs, earning some fame in the Midwest. For a time he seemed to have found his calling as a journalist, working for the Logansport Journal in Indiana from 1889–1891.

While working as a reporter, Landis became interested in the legal proceedings he covered, and he enrolled in the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Law School of Cincinnati. He transferred to the Union Law School (later the law school of Northwestern University) in Chicago, graduating in 1891. After practicing law in Chicago for a few years he joined President Grover Cleveland's administration as secretary to the Secretary of State. Landis married Winifred Reed on 25 July 1896. The couple had two children.

Landis's work was highly esteemed, and in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him a U.S. District Court Judge for the district of northern Illinois. He became well known for his antitrust rulings, especially those enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act, but his rulings were often overturned by higher courts. Landis came to the attention of Major League Baseball team owners in 1915, when he presided over the lawsuit filed against the National League (NL) and the American League (AL) by the Federal League (FL), which was trying to establish itself as a major league and had raided major league ballplayers. NL and AL teams had been forced to increase the salaries of their ballplayers in order to keep them from jumping to the Federal League; thus the owners were unhappy and anxious about the FL's potential for success. The Federal League sued to have the major leagues declared a monopoly that violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and trustbuster Landis was probably the last judge the major league owners wanted to have preside over the case. However, Landis confused everybody by delaying the case, insisting that the leagues negotiate. "Both sides must understand that any blows at this thing called baseball would be regarded by this court as a blow to a national institution," he said. The Federal League caved in, settled out of court, then folded. Landis was seen as the savior of "Organized Baseball," that is the major and minor professional leagues, for having prevented their breakup as monopolies.

In 1917 Landis garnered more national attention when he presided over several treason cases. America was fighting in World War I, and those who hindered the war effort were charged with sedition. In one case Landis sentenced labor leader William D. Haywood to twenty years in prison, only to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn his ruling. Later he sentenced seven socialist antiwar activists, including Congressman Victor Berger, to prison for trying to harm the war effort. He jailed more than ninety people for impeding America's war mobilization. Even in cases in which Landis's rulings were overturned, most of the public thought he was morally right.

During the World Series of 1919 between the Cincinnati Reds of the NL and the Chicago White Sox of the AL, eight players for the White Sox conspired with gangsters to rig games. The White Sox lost the series to a Reds club that was good but not their equal. There were hints from the start of the series that something criminal was going on, and all through 1920 news reporters were finding evidence of a fix. By the final month of the season the evidence was overwhelming, and the owner of the White Sox suspended the offending players. Shaken by the sudden loss of public faith in professional baseball that resulted from the bribes, team owners tried to find a way to restore confidence in their game. The three-man board of governors that oversaw league operations had become ineffective. A new leader was wanted, and out of several possibilities arose the name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, savior of the major leagues in 1915. Landis insisted that he be given sole and absolute authority over organized baseball and that no team owner be allowed to publicly criticize any of his decisions. His terms were agreed to on 12 November 1920 and formally ratified on 12 January 1921.

The White Sox conspirators were tried for taking bribes and found not guilty. A fire had been deliberately set in the prosecution's evidence room, destroying all the evidence against the White Sox, including confessions from three conspirators. The fire was almost certainly set by cronies of one of the gangsters who had bribed them. After the acquittal the players celebrated with the jurors, raising suspicions about the jurors' impartiality. Despite the acquittal, there was and is ample reason to believe the players were guilty, including public confessions by conspirators such as pitcher Eddie Cicotte. Landis banned all the conspirators from baseball for life, including Hall of Fame possibilities Cicotte and Joe Jackson. On 4 August 1921, two days after the trial, Landis declared, "Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball." The standards Landis outlined in his statement in August 1921 have been gospel for the commissioners who succeeded him.

The decision to ban the players was Landis's most controversial decision, but he had other severe problems with which to contend. He found that Major League Baseball was rife with bribery, cheating, and thrown games, and in a few years he banned fifteen ballplayers and suspended more than fifty, including the game's greatest star, Babe Ruth. Ruth and teammates Bob Meusel and Bill Piercy were suspended on 16 October 1921 until 20 May 1922 for playing exhibition games against Negro League teams (Landis wanted to avoid the embarrassment of major leaguers losing to African Americans).

During the 1920s and 1930s Landis became a popular folk figure, a symbol of rectitude and a comfort to those who wanted baseball to be more than a business. He said: "Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy. It is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart." Landis gained a reputation for looking out for the well-being of players, often declaring minor leaguers to be free agents because their teams were unfairly keeping them buried in farm clubs. In 1938 he freed more than ninety Cardinals minor leaguers from their contracts, including Pete Reiser, who signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers for a big bonus and would become the National League's batting champion in 1941. In 1940 Landis did the same for Detroit Tigers farmhands. He always opposed major league teams' having farm systems, asserting that independent minor league teams would be driven out of business and that major league–quality players were unfairly denied a chance to play in the majors.

Although Landis did much good by restoring public confidence in professional baseball and should be forgiven for grandstanding and enjoying being commissioner of baseball, he had a dark side. He was often arbitrary, and his decisions did not always make sense. Worse, he was racist. In 1942 he said to a reporter for the New York Daily Worker, "There is no rule, formal or informal, against the hiring of Negro players." In 1943 he declared to Paul Robeson at the annual meeting of Major League team owners, "There is no rule, formal or informal, or any understanding—unwritten, subterranean or sub-anything—against the hiring of Negro players by the teams of organized baseball. Negroes are not barred from organized baseball—never have been in the twenty-one years I have served." In both instances, he lied. In private, he had vowed from the start that African Americans would not be allowed to play in the major leagues while he was in charge.

Efforts by New York Giants manager John McGraw to play African Americans were squelched. In 1935, when Clark Griffith tried to sign Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson to his Washington Senators, he was threatened with financial ruin by other club owners, a majority of whom had throughout Landis's service opposed allowing African Americans into their leagues. In 1940 eccentric baseball man Bill Veeck led a group of investors that tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies; when word got out that he would include African Americans on his club, Veeck's offer was discarded in favor of a lesser one from William D. Cox (whom Landis later banned from baseball for gambling). Veeck blamed Landis's prejudice against African Americans for his group's failure to buy the Phillies.

Landis's term as commissioner had been extended to 1953, but he died of a coronary thrombosis in 1944. He is buried in Oakwoods Cemetery in Chicago. Landis had always been a fervent supporter of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and in 1944 he was voted in by the Hall's veterans committee.

For many years Judge Landis and Twenty-Five Years of Baseball (1947), by Sporting News reporter J. G. Taylor Spink was the best account of Landis's life, although it had errors and obscured some of the darker side of his character. A better account is David Pietrusza, Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1998), which is rich in baseball history and its depiction of Landis. Leonard Koppett, The New Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball (1991), offers an historical perspective on Landis's contributions to baseball. Jerome Holtzman, The Commissioners: Baseball's Midlife Crisis (1998), places Landis in the context of the lives of the other commissioners, showing how Landis's often arbitrary conduct actually weakened the powers of his successors. An obituary is in the New York Times (26 Nov. 1944).

Kirk H. Beetz