The Boston Red Sox are the newly crowned champions of Major League Baseball. For most of the 20th century, that sentence would have been an odd one to write — the denizens of Fenway Park not having won the World Series since 1918 when the team’s owners inexplicably sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees.
Why were they so futile? New Englanders blamed the “curse” of selling the Babe, but the real reason was that most seasons they lacked sufficient talent and luck. Another factor played a role, too: For years, the axiom ascribed to the Red Sox was “25 guys, 25 cabs.” They all went their own way before and after games, in other words. On the ballfield, too, they weren’t a well-bonded unit. That’s certainly not true of this year’s version of the Red Sox, the fourth to win the World Series in the past 15 years.
To be sure, they are talented: The Sox won the most games in spring training, the most in the regular season, and the most in the postseason. And when they faltered, they picked each other up. Mookie Betts, Boston’s best player, said exactly that after the final game in Los Angeles. Until he finally homered last night, Betts’ bat had gone cold in the warm Southern California air. No matter. “They picked up the slack I left,” he said. “That’s what a team does.”
It’s what this team did. It’s what we need in the U.S. as a whole right now. It was a brutal week in this country, with murders and threats against democracy seemingly spinning out of control. An unspeakable crime took place in Pittsburgh, where a hate-spouting intruder shot 11 Jews in a place of worship. In Kentucky, another gunman was thwarted trying to enter an African-American church, but still killed two black people he’d never met in a supermarket.
The debate was immediately joined as to whether these killings — and the mailing of bomb-like devices to Democrats — were hate crimes or the product of mental illness (as if those traits are mutually exclusive).
Many Americans were wondering: How do we become a team again? I have some thoughts about that, borrowing from the words of an immigrant or two.
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Five years ago, the last time the Red Sox won the World Series, it coincided with the departure from these shores of a Washington correspondent for the named Simon Wilson. As he prepared to head back home, he wrote a love letter of sorts to the country he’d been covering. Headlined “,” it captured the essence of baseball, noting how much failure is embedded in its fabric, and applied that notion to the nation that created this great game. “Just as baseball players do, Americans are adept at picking themselves up,” Wilson wrote.
That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Picking yourself up, and dusting yourself off, and endeavoring to prevail also implies figuring out how to get better.
More than a century-and-a-half ago, another visitor came to these shores — a permanent pilgrim named Carl Schurz. On this date in 1855, and again exactly five years later from the Abraham Lincoln campaign trail, this German immigrant wrote two letters that describe the essence of the American identity, one which we’re struggling to recapture now.
“The sun has risen bright and clear,” Schurz wrote his wife from Watertown, Wis., on October 29, 1855, “and the view spread out before me presents so cheerful and sweet a picture that I am distinctly encouraged to hope we shall be very happy here.”
Although Schurz and his wife, Margarethe, would prosper in Wisconsin, when it came to being “very happy,” Carl Schurz was not the kind of person who could be content while other people were in bondage. He‘d escaped social unrest in Europe, and was about to re-enter politics. His career would take him to Washington and Spain, to many Civil War battlefields, and later to the U.S. Senate and a Cabinet position in Washington, and ultimately into the New York publishing business.
As a college student in Bonn, Schurz joined the fighting in a democratic revolution sweeping Europe in 1848. Crushed in the streets by Prussian troops, and branded enemies of the state who would be imprisoned or executed, these “Forty-Eighters,” as they came to be known, dispersed as best they could.
Schurz escaped to Switzerland, then worked at a newspaper in Paris and taught school in England before leaving for the nation that beckoned from across the sea. As he told his brother-in-law, if he could not “be the citizen of a free Germany,” he would “be a citizen of free America.”
He landed in New York in 1852 before making his way to Philadelphia. Heeding a call to keep heading west, he set out for Chicago and then Milwaukee in the autumn of 1855. Finally, he alighted in Watertown, a new burg being settled by Germans, before sending for his family.
Both he and Margarethe would make their marks there. The Schurzes became prosperous farmers, and she started the first kindergarten in the United States. But her husband’s passion was politics — specifically the politics of liberation — and he immersed himself in the formation of a new entity that would alter the governmental equation in this country. That entity was the Republican Party.
Carl Schurz campaigned in 1856 for John C. Fremont, the Republicans’ first presidential candidate. Undaunted by Fremont’s defeat, he was heavily involved four years later. After initially supporting William H. Seward as the party standard-bearer, Schurz enthusiastically embraced the man chosen as the party’s nominee.
“I shall carry into this struggle all the zeal and ardor and enthusiasm of which my nature is capable,” he wrote to Abraham Lincoln. “The same disinterested motives that led me and my friends to support Gov. Seward in the Convention, will animate and urge us on in our work for you, and wherever my voice is heard and my influence extends you may count upon hosts of true and devoted friends.”
Schurz lived up to that promise. On this date in 1860, with the election only a week away, he wrote his wife a letter that reminds contemporary Americans fretting over the state of our self-governance that politics has never been, as the saying goes, a game of bean bag.
It seems that some 200 members of a Republican group called the Wide-Awakes gathered to hear Schurz speak at a pro-Lincoln rally. The Wide-Awakes, who existed throughout the Midwest, were all-male groups that weren’t above the occasional brawl. The tipoff that this particular rally might not end completely amicably is that the boys assembled a few nights beforehand at a place called Rieber’s Saloon.
There they were set upon by an equivalent group of Democratic Party rowdies headed by a man named Emil Rothe. Apparently, many knuckles were bloodied in this encounter — noses, too. But punches aren’t bullets, and when Rothe was captured by the Wide-Awakes, they decided to let him go, thereby enhancing the Republicans’ reputation for charity.
“By this incident,” Schurz wrote to his wife, “the Wide-Awakes have gained great respect, and since then nothing more has been heard about any kind of disturbance. But it is said that even the Democrats — that is, the decent ones — were so angered by the conduct of their fellows that many of them have come over to the Republican Party.”
Schurz never stopped caring about the party or its cause. After Lincoln’s election, the president sent Schurz to Spain as an ambassador. In March of 1862, however, he made a personal appeal to Lincoln to come home and fight in the Union Army. He didn’t feel he could avoid combat, he told his commander-in-chief, while his adopted nation was “fighting for its life.”
Surprised by this request, and admiring of it — and also in need of generals who would engage the enemy — Lincoln appointed the 33-year-old immigrant as a brigadier general. In the ranks of the officer corps Schurz would find several other Forty-Eighters. He himself would command troops at Manassas, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.
After the war and Lincoln’s assassination, Schurz was sent as an emissary to the South by President Andrew Johnson. Afterward, he returned to the Midwest, this time to St. Louis, where he became a newspaper editor and then a U.S. senator from Missouri. Disillusioned by the Reconstruction policies of President Grant, Schurz briefly helped form the Liberal Republican Party, but re-entered the fold after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, who named him secretary of the interior.
Four years earlier, Schurz gave his adopted country an evocative phrase, one that is occasionally shortened in a way that alters its meaning. “My country, right or wrong,” he said in a February 29, 1872 Senate floor speech. But it’s the second part of his quote that carries the moral weight and defines this country at its best: “If right, to be kept right,” he added. “And if wrong, to be set right.”
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Bureau Chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter .