◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Part One A Plain Man I am Stan Musial. Stan the Man, they called me — though I never asked for it. Brooklyn fans used to groan "here comes the man" every time I came to bat, and it stuck. I want to talk to you about that word. The Man. Because you use it now to mean nearly the opposite of what it meant when they hung it on me, and that difference is most of what has gone wrong. But first let me tell you who I actually was. I was a plain man. A coal-town boy from Donora, Pennsylvania, son of a Polish immigrant who worked the wire mill. I played twenty-two years, all for one team, the St. Louis Cardinals, and never went looking for a better deal in a bigger city. I got three thousand six hundred and thirty hits — and here is the number I liked best: exactly half at home and half on the road. Eighteen hundred and fifteen each. The same man wherever I was. That was the whole of what I was trying to be. I handed out little cards of myself to anyone who wanted one. I played the harmonica, badly, for anyone who would listen. I sat with sick children in the hospitals before games, and did not call the newspapers to tell them I had done it. None of this made me a great man. It made me a decent one — and I have come to think, watching you from here, that you have started to confuse the two, and the confusion is dangerous. Now the one thing I did that touched the trouble of my time, and I will tell it smaller than you might want. In 1947 a young man named Jackie Robinson came into our league, the first Black man to play, and some of the men on my own team did not want to take the field against him. There was talk of refusing to play. I did not give a speech. I did not lead a march. I was not a brave man in the way the times deserved. I just thought it was foolish. The man could hit. The man could run. He belonged on the field, and that was the end of it for me. So I played, and I was decent to him, and later people said it helped warm things between the Black players and the white ones. But understand what it was, and what it was not. It was one man deciding to treat another like a man. It was not courage. It was just not being a coward. And in an ordinary time, that would be enough. In the second of these I will tell you why your time is not an ordinary one — and what the word they gave me was always supposed to mean. Part Two The Man I am Stan Musial again. In the first of these I told you who I was — a plain man who stayed in one town, handed out his own cards, and treated the person in front of him like a person. Now let me tell you what they meant when they called me the Man, because you have lost it, and losing it is most of what has gone wrong. Greatness was never bigness. The word man, the way they meant it, never meant the one who dominates the room. It meant the one who stays the same whether you are watching or not. The same to the batboy as to the president. The one who lifts his cap to the people in the cheap seats, because they paid their dollar and drove the family in from the farm to see him. Real strength is gentleness that has power and does not use it to make anyone small. And you have turned it upside down. You cheer for the big man now — the one who mocks and takes and struts and calls his cruelty strength. You have made the man into the bully, when for my whole life the man was the one who would never dream of being one. That is not a change in politics. It is a change in what you admire, down where a country keeps its heart — and it frightens me more than any single leader could, because leaders pass, and what a people admires is what it becomes. Let me be honest about myself, because I owe you that. I was quiet. I led by example and let the example do the talking, and there is a limit to that, and I know it. A man given as much love as I was maybe owed more than a good example. Maybe he owed a voice. Whether the example is enough for what you are facing now, I honestly do not know. That may be the one thing I cannot teach you, because I never had to learn it. But I can tell you where to start, because it is where I started. Be the same man in the road as at home. Be kind to the one who can do nothing for you. Treat the person in front of you like a person — even, especially, the one they are telling you to hate. And do not cheer for the big man. Cheer for the good one. That is what the Man was supposed to mean. See if you can give it back its meaning.