10/28/19
A history of booing the president at MLB games, from ‘we want beer’ to ‘lock him up’
Breaking Newstags: baseball, public opinion, presidential history, World Series, booing
President Trump got booed during the Nationals-Astros World Series game in Washington on Sunday night, with fans adding in a chant of “lock him up” for good measure. It was either a full-throated demonstration of free speech or an unseemly display of incivility, depending on whom you’re asking.
It was not, however, the first time that has happened.
President Herbert Hoover played baseball at Stanford and was said to have read the sports section before any other in the newspaper each morning, and he continued the tradition of throwing out the first pitch during Opening Day for the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium. Hoover also made it to the World Series in 1929, 1930 and 1931, each time to watch the Athletics in Philadelphia.
As told by the White House Historical Association, Hoover’s final trip to Shibe Park in 1931 occurred during the worst of the Great Depression, yet Hoover felt the need to make an appearance at the game as “a gesture of reassurance to a country suffering from a severe attack of ‘jitters,’ ” he noted in his memoirs. Those jitters manifested themselves when Hoover got up to leave and was met with “a resounding chorus of boos … the president of the United States was accorded the bird, or razzberry,” according to an account in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. Thirsty fans suffering through Prohibition also chanted “We want beer” at the president.
“Perhaps Philadelphia is tired of whiskey and gin,” Westbrook Pegler wrote in the Arkansas Gazette.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of