THE BASEBALL LEGEND AND THE PURPLE MOTHER
On the morning of September 11, 1915, students from the Raja Yoga School stood on both sides of Lomaland Drive and silently saluted the hearse carrying Albert G. Spalding’s body as it passed through the campus of the Theosophical Society. Moments earlier, the leader of the Society, Katherine Tingley (nicknamed the Purple Mother), delivered a funeral oration under the amethyst dome of the Temple of Peace, praising Spalding as “an inspiration for those of us who live for the betterment of humanity.”
The hearse then headed 10 miles east to Greenwood Cemetery. In a ceremony eerily reminiscent of Harriet Patterson’s funeral five years earlier, Clark Thurston (Mrs. Patterson’s widower) and Dr. Lorin Wood (who was present at her death in Newburyport, Massachusetts) were among the pallbearers who carried Spalding’s coffin to the crematorium. Tingley and Spalding’s widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Churchill Spalding--president of the Women’s Theosophical Society and musical director at Point Loma--looked on as his body was cremated.
The cremation took place less than 36 hours after Spalding died from a stroke, just a week after his 66th birthday. His death, the New York Times reported, “came as a shock to the sport loving public.” The Times said most of the good in baseball “is a result of his initiative, for he is unique in combining ability as a player with positive genius as a manager, executive ability of a high order, and sufficient magnetism to hold men together when disasters of all sorts threatened organized baseball in its earlier tribulations.” The Los Angeles Times called Spalding “one of the most famous and greatest men produced by the game” whose record as a pitcher was unequaled and who “kept crookedness out of the sport.”
Spalding’s son Keith from his first marriage and his adopted sons, Albert Jr. and Durand Churchill, were not notified of his death until he was cremated. Four days later, Mrs. Spalding filed a claim in probate court to become executrix of her late husband’s estate, valued at between $2-2.5 million ($60-75 million today). Spalding bestowed the majority of his assets to Mrs. Spalding.
On October 5, 1915, Keith Spalding contested the will in San Diego Superior Court, claiming his late father had been feeble-minded in his final years and was “under the complete control and domination” of Elizabeth Churchill Spalding and Katherine Tingley. A few weeks later, Albert Goodwill Spalding Jr., Spalding’s adopted son, joined the lawsuit.
Albert Jr., who lived in London, amended the complaint in January 1916, alleging that “it was morally impossible for A.G. Spalding (the deceased) to detach himself from the Theosophical Society or quit his residence therein.” He claimed that the conspiracy to seize his late father’s assets had begun four years before his death when Tingley and Mrs. Spalding attempted to enlist him (Albert Jr.) “in support of a will not yet made but plainly being conspired for by them.” The two women, along with Mrs. Spalding’s son from her first marriage, Durand Churchill, “knew for a long time before Spalding’s death that he was in a precarious condition and was likely to die,” but did not inform Albert Jr., the complaint added.
Durand Churchill was later declared mentally incompetent and placed under his mother’s guardianship. Albert Jr. joined the British army during World War I and was killed in action at Flanders on July 1, 1916.
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Much like the game of baseball he represented, Albert Goodwill Spalding was shrouded in myth. “Deception was part of his lifeblood,” Mark Lamster noted in Spalding’s World Tour, “a way of thinking and acting and framing the world to meet his own ends and desires.” Lamster wrote:
His career, his most intimate personal relationships, his businesses, the sport he would champion…all of Albert Spalding’s successes—and they were legion—were built on deceptions, some of them small, others spectacularly elaborate. He was a master of misrepresentation in all of its forms, from essentially harmless exaggerations that seemed a practical necessity in nineteenth-century business to outright and occasionally malicious fabrication. It is both the great irony of his life and a testimony to his mendacious genius that Spalding managed to make his own name virtually synonymous with transparency, square dealing and rectitude.
He traced his ancestry to Edward Spalding, who had sailed from London to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Albert was born in Byron, Illinois on September 9, 1850, son of James and Harriet Spalding. His sister Mary was born in 1854 and brother James Walter in 1856. Spalding’s father owned two large farms and several houses; he spent most of his time managing investments and buying and training horses. His mother had inherited a sizeable estate after the death of her first husband and filled her home with expensive mahogany furniture and fine china.
Spalding’s father died when he was eight years old. His mother sent him to live with an aunt in nearby Rockford when he was 12 and the family joined him a year later. It was there that Spalding discovered baseball. He was a tall, gawky boy, too shy to join others in their games on a local diamond. As Spalding tells it, he was watching a game one afternoon from a small hill beyond centerfield when a batter hit the rubber ball over the field. Spalding caught the ball with one hand, held it for a moment and then threw it all the way across the field to the catcher. The next day, he was invited to join the game.
By age 15, Spalding was the star pitcher for the Forest City’s, Rockford’s semi-professional baseball team. In the early days of baseball, pitchers stood in a box 45 feet from home plate and threw the ball underhanded. Batters could call for a low ball or a high ball and it took nine balls for a walk. Spalding learned to confound batters by varying the speed of his pitches.
In 1866, the Nationals from Washington, D.C. toured the country, overpowering local teams in every city they visited. Before taking on the Chicago Excelsiors, the best team in the Midwest, the Nationals played a warm-up game against the Forest City’s. Spalding, age 17, led his team to a 29-23 win and his reputation spread. He moved to Chicago to pitch for the Excelsiors (who had lost to the Nationals 49-4) but later returned to play for the Forest City’s, winning 45 of the 58 games he pitched.
The Boston Red Stockings signed Spalding to a $2,500 contract in 1870, making him the highest paid player in the new National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBB). In his 1911 book, America’s National Game, Spalding claimed that he at first rejected the offer because owner Harry Wright planned to maintain the Red Stockings as an amateur team. Spalding apparently invented the story; Wright was the leading promoter of professional baseball. The Red Stockings won four consecutive championships and Spalding won 157 games. In his final year with the team, he went 55-5 with a 1.52 earned run average.
In the early days of professional baseball, owners frequently signed players from other teams and drove up salaries. (The Pittsburgh team was notorious for raiding players and became known as the Pirates.) It was common for gamblers to pay players to throw games. Baseball also was plagued by drinking and fighting, both among players and spectators.
During the 1875 season, Spalding contacted the president of the Chicago White Stockings and agreed to a contract for $2,000 a year and a quarter of the team’s profits as well as a secret rider providing him with another 30 percent of the team’s profits. Spalding also was named manager and helped recruit top players from competing teams. That year, he married Sarah Josephine Keith (known as Josie) near her family home in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. They had met when Spalding was playing for the Boston team. Their son Keith was born in 1876.
The White Stockings joined teams from Philadelphia, Boston, Hartford, New York, St. Louis, Cincinnati and St. Louis to form baseball’s National League and compete with the NAPBB. The new league banned players from drinking and gambling and limited owners’ ability to raid players from other teams. (Spalding later exaggerated his role, asserting the new league was solely his idea.) Between 1880 and 1886, the White Stockings—featuring Spalding and Cap Anson, one of baseball’s greatest hitters--won five National League titles. The team later became the Chicago Cubs.
Spalding had bigger goals in mind. He founded a Chicago-based sporting goods company with his younger brother, James Walter, and borrowed $800 from his mother. With the backing of his sister Mary’s husband, banker William Thayer Brown, Spalding purchased production facilities and bought out competing companies. Like other barons of the Gilded Age, Spalding seized a monopoly of the sporting goods market.
The company produced the official baseball for the National League and published its yearbook. Spalding also published Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide which was filled with advertisements for his company’s products.
In 1886, Spalding announced plans for a world tour to promote baseball and his company. “In undertaking such a trip,” he told columnist Harry Palmer, “I do so more for the purpose of extending my sporting goods business to that quarter of the globe and creating a market for goods there, rather than with any idea of realizing any profit from the work of the teams I take with me.”
The tour began in the fall of 1888. Spalding’s White Stockings and the “All-Americas” he had recruited from other teams first played exhibition games throughout the western United States, beginning in Chicago and ending in Los Angeles. Spalding was accompanied by his mother Harriet, his wife Josie and their 12-year-old son, Keith.
The tour included Clarence Duval, a black minstrel who had been the White Stockings’ mascot. (Some teams employed black mascots to serve as good-luck charms and to entertain spectators, echoing the racism that prevailed among all-white rosters.) The teams also were accompanied by “Professor” C. Bartholomew, a one-eyed aerialist who performed stunts as he parachuted from a hot-air balloon. The two baseball teams played sixteen games against each other in the U.S. In December, they sailed from San Francisco on their way to New Zealand and Australia. It was originally billed as Spalding’s Australian Base-Ball Tour. But on the voyage, Spalding revealed plans to bring the tour to India, Egypt, Palestine, Italy, Germany, France, England and Ireland, followed by a series of games back in the United States.
In December and January, the teams played one game in New Zealand and eleven games in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Ballarat. They then sailed for three weeks, arriving in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in late January and played a game at Galle Face Green. The Spaldings and the players also visited tourist sites during their travels. In Colombo, they traveled seven miles by cart, rickshaw and horse-drawn wagon to Kelaniya Temple, a Buddhist shrine founded before 500 B.C.E. and purportedly visited three times by Buddha. One of the correspondents accompanying the tour, Newton MacMillan, was not impressed. He used the occasion to take a swipe at Theosophy, a cult which Spalding would later embrace. MacMillan wrote:
It may interest those intellectual persons in Boston and New York who affect Theosophism to learn that these priests wore dirty brown robes, went barefooted, and chewed disgusting betel nut; that their hands were dirty, their nails black, and their faces unwashed; and that they did not disdain, but rather solicited a rupee all around (including their high priest) as a return for their services.
After they arrived in Cairo in February, 1889, the tour members rode a procession of donkeys and camels through the city on a 3 ½-hour journey to the pyramids. In Giza, they climbed up the Sphinx for a ceremonial photograph. The two teams then played baseball on the sand between the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx as hundreds of Arab and English spectators looked on. After the game, the players raced to the top of the Great Pyramid. They later threw baseballs at the Sphinx. Only one player hit their target, the right eye of the limestone statue.
The tour sailed for Italy in February 1889 and played a game at a military parade ground in Naples as smoke rose from Mt. Vesuvius on the horizon. Spalding had hoped to play a game at the Coliseum in Rome and offered city officials $5,000 and half the ticket proceeds. But since the floor of the Coliseum was an open archeological site, the city declined. The players visited there as tourists then played baseball on the grass of the Villa Borghese, a landscaped garden estate built in the 17th century.
In Paris, the teams played baseball at the Parc Aérostatique, a sandlot near the construction site for the Eiffel Tower. They then crossed the channel to play thirteen games in two weeks in England, Scotland and Ireland. For one of the London games, Spalding sat with Prince Albert Victor and Prince Christian in the royal box, enthusiastically explaining the rules of baseball to the royals. In Liverpool, the American teams competed in a game of rounders against an English national rounders team then played them in a game of baseball.
British-born Henry Chadwick, baseball’s leading journalist who was known as the “Father of Baseball,” had long argued that baseball derived from rounders. The rules of rounders are similar to baseball but batters hit one-handed with a short paddle and circle stakes instead of bases. A player is out after being struck with the ball.
Spalding disagreed with Chadwick and hoped the tour would prove that baseball was an American game. In an 1889 magazine article, Spalding wrote that watching the game of rounders in Liverpool convinced him that Chadwick was wrong. “I am satisfied that baseball has no connection with rounders whatever,” he wrote.
Years later, Spalding appointed a commission to investigate the game’s origins. The commission received two letters from an Abner Graves of Denver who claimed that in 1839 Abner Doubleday, later a Union general in the Civil War, sketched out a baseball diamond in front of Cooperstown, N.Y. tailor shop and he and Doubleday joined two schoolboy teams to play a game. His origin story was a fabrication. At the time, Graves would have been five years old and Doubleday, who was born in Cooperstown, was attending West Point. (Not coincidentally, Doubleday later became a loyal Theosophist.) Graves had a history of making false claims and spent several years in mental institutions. In 1924, he shot his wife to death.
Spalding’s tour played its final foreign game on March 27, 1889 in Dublin before dignitaries including Prince Albert Victor, the lord mayor of Dublin and U.S. Consul James McCaskill. Then, after six months abroad, the tour sailed across the Atlantic to New York where they were greeted by a brass band and dozens of friends and family members. They took carriages to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The next day, Spalding greeted reporters in the hotel lobby.
“Well, I’m glad it’s over,” Spalding said. “The trip was a success financially and every other way. I didn’t make much money, but I have the proud consciousness of having established our game throughout the world and feel certain that many countries will adopt baseball as a game.”
Spalding had once again embellished the truth. The tour had lost money and baseball would remain almost entirely an American game well into the 20th century.
The next night, Spalding hosted a celebratory dinner at Delmonico’s. The walls of the banquet room were covered with photographs of the players on their journey to Ceylon, Egypt, Rome and London. The guests included Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt. After an elaborate dinner with dishes commemorating the stops on the tour, Spalding rose to speak and was greeted with a long ovation as the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.”
Spalding reviewed the trip at length. Baseball, he said, is the “very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, the push, and rush, and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century” and said he and his men had “carried the American name to the outermost parts of the earth, and covered it with glory every time.”
The tour almost immediately set off for another series of exhibition games in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Indianapolis. They played their final game on April 20, 1889 at West Side Park in Chicago before 5000 fans.
Despite Spalding’s optimism, American baseball was fragmented over disputes between players and owners that had erupted as the tour circled the world. Owners had introduced a “reserve” system in 1879 to control salaries and put an end to players switching teams, effectively locking players into their contracts. (The system remained in place for nearly a century; in 1975 an arbitrator struck it down and permitted players to become free agents.)
John Montgomery Ward, president of the Brotherhood of American Base Ball Players, argued that the system was being “used as a handle for the manipulation of a traffic in players, a sort of speculation in livestock by which they are bought, sold and transferred like so many sheep.” The Brotherhood announced plans to form its own league. National League club owners asked Spalding to quell the rebellion. He called the leaders of the Brotherhood “hotheaded anarchists” who were out to overthrow “the established business of baseball.” After the owners failed to stop the new league in court, Spalding promised a battle of “dog eat dog” and said the National League would hold on until the new league “is dashed to pieces against the rocks of rebellion and demoralization.” The battle lasted only one year.
The Players’ League outdrew the National League early in the 1890 season. Spalding juggled club schedules, inflated attendance figures for the National League and told club owners to offer free tickets to attract more fans. Both leagues were losing money. Spalding invited the owners of the Players’ League to New York and offered to buy them out. The players were not invited. The owners from the rival league were more interested in profits than in empowering the players and their league folded.
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Spalding and Elizabeth Minot Churchill met in Rockford when they were young adults. Elizabeth married George Mayer in 1875 and their son Durand was born three years later. George Mayer died in 1888 and Elizabeth and Spalding became lovers before Spalding left on the world tour with his wife Josie. After he returned, he and Elizabeth had a child together, Spalding Brown Spalding, who went to live with Spalding’s sister Mary. Elizabeth was an early devotee of Theosophy and joined Tingley on her crusade abroad in 1896-97. She later became vocal director for the colony at Point Loma and president of the Women’s Theosophical Society.
Spalding’s wife Josie died suddenly in July 1899 after an operation for appendicitis while she was on vacation at their New Jersey estate. Spalding then adopted his son born to Elizabeth and rechristened him as Albert Spalding Jr. Spalding married Elizabeth at Point Loma in June 1900 and they spent their honeymoon in Paris. When they returned, they moved into an elaborate white stucco home Tingley had designed with an amethyst dome, hand-carved mosaics and frescoes and an external spiral staircase. Spalding paid $10,000 (about $360,000 today) for the house. Although he lived in the community for the rest of his life, Spalding claimed he was not a practicing Theosophist. He did, however, serve on the Society’s board. Spalding later told the Chicago Tribune that he was sympathetic to the work of the Theosophical Society but was not “so ardent a Theosophist as Mrs. Spalding.”
‘It is perhaps, difficult,” Mark Lamster wrote in Spalding’s World Tour, “to reconcile Albert Spalding, the Machiavellian sporting-goods magnate and champion of American values, with the man who allowed himself to become intimately involved with a barmy camp of spiritualist eccentrics.”
The Spaldings socialized with Lyman Gage, a Chicago native and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and Clark Thurston, former president of the American Screw Company who would soon marry Harriet Patterson. The Spaldings enrolled their son Albert Jr. in Tingley’s Raja Yoga School.
Many of the children at the school were Cuban orphans. When Tingley did relief work in Cuba after the Spanish-American War (assisted by Elizabeth), she befriended Emilio Bacardi, mayor of Santiago and member of the rum dynasty. Bacardi helped her bring orphans, one or two at a time, to her school at Point Loma.
In October 1902, Bacardi chose nine boys and two girls between ages 5 and 10 to send to Tingley’s school by way of New York City. Bacardi “must have had great faith in the regenerating power of Theosophy,” Emmett Greenwalt wrote in California Utopia, “because a shipboard photograph reveals a wild-looking band of urchins.” At Ellis Island, authorities locked them in a six-by-twelve-foot room for immigrants with infectious diseases.
After the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) objected to sending the children to California, federal officials established a board of inquiry. The president of the SPCC claimed that Point Loma was not suitable for children and that Tingley’s cult was financially irresponsible and immoral. The Spaldings, whose son was enrolled there, testified in support of the school. San Diego’s mayor and school superintendent sent telegrams praising the Raja Yoga School.
Spalding visited the children at Ellis Island and told reporters the SPCC was “acting on information that is certainly inaccurate.”
The board voted to send the children back to Cuba but U.S. Commissioner of Immigration Frank P. Sargent questioned the decision and ordered a re-hearing. At the second hearing, Elbridge Gerry, the founder of the SPCC, cross-examined Spalding and attempted to expose Tingley as an eccentric mystic. Spalding was enraged at the questions, pounded on his desk in frustration and eventually walked out of the hearing.
Spalding telegraphed the mayor of San Diego. “It is time for men to act,” he wrote. “I have decided to take…this case into my own hands…I am determined that these eleven little Cuban children should soon be on their way to Point Loma, and all the Gerry societies this side of Hades can’t stop them.”
Commissioner Sargent, who was in California at the time, conducted his own investigation and visited Point Loma. He interviewed students and staff and was favorably impressed. On December 6, immigration officials reversed the earlier decision and ordered the children released. Spalding immediately chartered tugboats and special Pullman cars, as well as a dozen private detectives, to bring the children to Point Loma. They were greeted by a grand procession when they arrived.
In the following years, Spalding was active in local politics in San Diego. He was named to the Panama-Pacific Exposition board that planned to bring a world’s fair to the city in 1915. Spalding also joined department store owner George W. Marston and newspaper publishers John D. Spreckels and E.W. Scripps to purchase the site where Father Junípero Serra had founded San Diego in 1769. In 1908, San Diego County appointed Spalding, Spreckels and Scripps to a highway commission. After a year of study, they successfully promoted passage of a $1.25 million bond issue to repair roads and build 450 miles of new county roads. Some critics claimed the upgrades only benefited the properties of the “the three millionaires.” Spalding resigned from the commission saying he was “tired of the abuse.”
Spalding continued to promote improvement in his own neighborhood, including plans to connect Point Loma with Ocean Beach, Roseville, and San Diego as well as build a federally-funded extension of Catalina Drive (he owned major portions of it) to the tip of Point Loma, now the site of Cabrillo National Monument. He also spent $2 million to construct Sunset Cliffs Park on his beachfront property. The site eventually included benches with palm-thatched roofs, Japanese-style arched bridges over narrow ocean cliffs and a 15- by 50-foot pool carved into the sandstone.
In 1910, business leaders in San Diego recruited Spalding to run for the United States Senate. At the time, progressives were challenging the Southern Pacific Railroad’s political domination of California and had formed the Lincoln-Roosevelt Leagues. They nominated John D. Works, a former justice of the California Supreme Court and president of the Good Government League in Los Angeles, as their Senate candidate. The San Diego businessmen hoped Spalding could defeat him.
In the months before the election, Scripps’ San Diego Sun reprinted excerpts from a magazine article that described Spalding as an unscrupulous, unethical and self-serving capitalist. The article claimed Spalding forced the Amateur Athletic Union to use his company’s products (the president of the AAU also worked for Spalding’s company) and even dictated which athletes could represent the United States in the Olympics. The next day, Spalding told the San Diego Union the article was “scurrilous, false and malicious.”
In a non-binding primary, Spalding carried the majority of California counties although he narrowly lost the popular vote. At the time, the state legislature controlled the final decision and they voted overwhelmingly for Works. Spalding’s campaign manager William Page (his wife’s uncle) objected to the vote. In a 1911 issue of the Spalding Guide he published a three-page diatribe criticizing the “rape of people’s direct primary law” and accusing the progressives of making deals to influence the election.
It was the end of Spalding’s political career and he resigned from the Panama-Pacific Exposition board. In 1912, Spalding built a nine-hole golf course three miles from his home that later became part of San Diego Country Club; he continued to supervise construction at Sunset Cliffs Park. Ocean tides eventually reclaimed the entire park.
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Less than a month after Spalding’s death, his son Keith contested his will in San Diego Superior Court. Keith, who lived in Chicago and worked for the family’s sporting goods company, argued that his father was “under the complete control and domination” of Tingley and Elizabeth Churchill Spalding “for several years before his death.” Spalding, Keith claimed, was not in his right mind and the will was written under the “undue influence” of the two women. Keith also said his father had promised to name him as his successor.
Tingley contested the charges in an October 5 court hearing. “This afternoon,” the San Francisco Examiner reported, “Mme. Tingley electrified the subject with a few verbal counters. These, converted into pigments, would have painted the sky over the Point Loma temple a flaming vermillion.” Tingley argued that all of Keith Spalding’s claims were “absolutely false” and any suggestion that Albert Spalding was not in his right mind for several years prior to his death was “far-fetched and untruthful.”
On October 10, the Theosophical Society held a special meeting at the Isis Theater to dispute Keith Spalding’s accusations. Members spoke for two hours in praise of Tingley and announced the appointment of a committee to investigate possible legal action to combat the attacks against her. The following June, Tingley unsuccessfully sued Keith Spalding and other members of his family for $250,000 in damages, claiming they had conspired to injure her and destroy her educational and religious work.
Proceedings on Keith Spalding’s lawsuit were delayed for nearly two years as attorneys collected depositions from witnesses in San Diego, New York, Boston and abroad. Tingley submitted a lengthy deposition but refused to sign it. Keith Spalding’s attorneys asked the state Supreme Court to jail her for contempt and she finally agreed to sign it.
The suit was settled in July 1917. Keith Spalding accepted about 42 percent of his father’s estate, with the remainder going to Elizabeth Spalding. The Theosophists got none of it. Tingley, who had lavishly praised Spalding at his funeral, had a less sanguine appraisal after the lawsuit was settled. “I want you, wherever you can,” she wrote later, “to knock the statement into smithereens that Mr. Spalding was a great benefactor to this institution. We have been looking over the books and we find that in the fifteen years he lived here he did not donate, on the average, over two hundred dollars a year.”
It was actually worse than Tingley thought. After Elizabeth Spalding died in 1926, her estate held a mortgage on the Point Loma property and the Society owed her heirs $400,000. That wouldn’t be the last debt for Tingley and her Society.
Sources:
A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball, Peter Levine, Oxford University Press, New York (1985)
Spalding’s World Tour, Mark Lamster, PublicAffairs books, New York (2006)