The Aesthetics of Austerity - 1939 Play Ball & The Energetics of American Transformation
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So this episode is going to be called The Aesthetics of Austerity, 1939 Play Ball. I want to discuss this specific issue. And the card I'm going to use here is the Arky Vaughan, card number 55. I want to talk about distilled essences;
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the baseball card really being drilled down into something absolute and fundamental.
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1939 in the US: still recovering from the Great Depression and grappling with isolationist sentiment while witnessing the early stages of World War II in Europe. Slowly recovering economically with New Deal programs still in effect. Many Americans favored remaining neutral and growing European conflict.
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This is the start of World War II, Germany invading Poland. Initial declaration of neutrality, Roosevelt prepares for potential war.
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The Manhattan Project is on the way. Gone with the Wind.
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I really love this issue.
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And it's just really deeply meaningful to me because it's nothing.
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There's just nothing about it. And it's something that I think is to its benefit in that sense — it hasn't really caught on anywhere because you can see the sheer emptiness of this set. When I look at it it's like this void.
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An absence. And as you can see here, I think the Arky Vaughan is a good example with the highly blurred background. It takes it out of time and place, similar to the 34 through 36 Batter Ups. There's a couple of cards in that set that just, they totally disappear the background. It's like they're in this Dust Bowl storm or a sandstorm or an absent environment. And that's something that's common to baseball cards,
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even going back to the early Caramels or the T206s or even before — with the Carl Horner portraits. It's an abstraction from the environment and abstraction from the backdrop. The figures are torn away into oblivion and limbo. And I think in a lot of ways that's what baseball represents and represented during these critical time periods of American identity formation. It was
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something explicit and grounded within a abstract void of an environment that was undefined, unclear, and moving in 15 or 20 different directions at once, whether that was economically, socially, industrially, politically, and globally. The early modern periods of American identity formation…
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the one thing, really, when you look at American history that remains stable and constant is baseball. So it's no surprise that out of these voids, whether they're colorless voids, grayscale voids, as in 39 Play Ball, or colorful voids, as in E90-1, or the Anonymous set, the early Caramels; going into the Goudeys, as well as the US Caramel set — these are red, green;
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you have the purple void of the 1941 Play Ball Joe DiMaggio. We're talking about an aesthetics of identity formation, which eventually culminates in the pop art movement of the 50s with these bright colored backgrounds in the Warhols as well as the 1954 Topps set, or the end of the 40s Leaf and Bowman sets for baseball cards.
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The 39 Play Ball though, in particular, to me is the quintessential baseball card because it's just so void of any sort of attempt to create a theatrical representation or artistic creative representation. These cards, when I look at them,
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the moment they’re made it's almost like they're a memory. And I look at the Paul Wainer too — another good example. That's card number 112 in the set. Again, abstracted background. He's the only figure; he's mid swing.
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These are very documentary bare-bones cards. It's basically what you would see in terms of a newspaper photo. The entire front of them, it's just the image of this photograph. Nothing else. And then on the back, you have the basic statistics — kind of player cards, so to speak — words of the different styles of batting, where they're born, when.
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And a very, very, very simple, simple, simple, simple player bio.
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The language is very clear, very straightforward, non-metaphorical. He has never hit under .300 in the major leagues. Was the leading batsman in the National League in 1935.Vaughn led the National League in runs scored with 122. And then at the bottom, you have the Play Ball - America. Gum Inc. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Save to get them all.
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This is interesting to me when I think in terms of the economic situation in the United States compared to the onset of the Great Depression with the Goudeys and the Diamond Stars. It's almost like the Goudey and the Diamond Star sets are a sort of reactionary attempt to create meaning or power or beauty in the midst of this very, very bad social, political and economic situation —
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which is the United States’ total collapse of the economy between the first and the second world wars.
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And then when I look at 1939 Play Ball, there's something so grounded about them. There's nothing flashy. There's no flashy language. There's no flashy poses. There's nothing dynamic. It's almost like they're just, they're this faded memory of a dream, so to speak, to use a funny old quote there. And they just exist. It's, to me,
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one of if not the most understated baseball card releases ever. Of course, you have cards with a similar tone to this in terms of the Goudey Wide Pens or the...
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the ice cream cards of the late 1920s,
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things along those lines. But this is a very, it's very quintessential and it's well wrapped within the traditional baseball card format and size. These are not redemption cards with a strange size or a strip card with a strange size. Nor are they oversize issues such as the Goudey Pens or image postcards. You've already reached the point where we understand what the conventional baseball card size is going to be. And we have an understanding of what the front and back of the baseball card represents —
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where you have the bio, the statistics, and the kind of signature of the gum company or the cigarette company or whatever company produces these. And so what Play Ball did in 1939, and it's different than the 1940 release as well as obviously the 41 with color, is that there is no decoration. It's almost like you have a type one photo on
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cardboard with the background that's been edited out, similar to as you would see in a documentary newspaper cycle. And you've been given the distilled abstracted representation of the figure and just the absolute utter essential statistics and signifiers of said player on the back of the card.
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And what this represents to me is an aesthetics of austerity. It's almost like there's a moment of brutal clarity that happens in American civilization and American culture. And it happens as the sort of horrible drug of the depression is wearing off. And meanwhile, you have this second world war beginning to rage in Europe, right? There's this
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slow fomentation of the war in terms of what's going on in Germany all throughout the 30s and then the invasion of Poland. And there's this sense, this looming sense that the United States is preparing to get involved. It almost seems inevitable despite these isolationist attempts at declaration of policy. And there's this moment of brutal clarity that is represented to me in the artlessness
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of the 1939 Play Ball set. Brutal sobriety of tone and production vision. The image of baseball just flatlined. Dead toned. And what I mean by artlessness is just a total lack of the attempt to manufacture anything. Beauty, meaning, power, something to distinguish these cards, which is so contradictory to the whole project of the baseball card as a marketing device. Art as marketing and sales as endemic to the so specific brand of American capitalism. These are the gum cards for Play Ball.
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I believe the owner of Play Ball was Jacob Bowman. He goes on to found the Bowman card company. And you can see these design aesthetics transfer over to the early Bowman cards, particularly 1948 Bowman — which I think is also an underrated release — but I do think the 39 is better because the poses capture more of the sport of baseball, as opposed to
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a lot of the close-ups in portraiture that happens in 48. 48 is just a little closer, if that makes sense. The lens and the frame of the cards are more portraits than they are environmental style action shots that you would more traditionally see in a newspaper.
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So you have almost a 10-year layover between the resumption of this...
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Play Ball design narrative with Jacob Bowman’s 1948 Bowman set, and then it changes and becomes colored images in 49 and 50, 51, 52; into 53 with the color photography.
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A lot of the 1939 Play Ball cards, like the Ted Williams card for instance, is against a void backdrop. There's this blackness and then there's a slight, I don't know if it's like a stairwell or a barrier wall. Its a stark gradient. A contrast of light and form. It’s barren. Geometric.
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Some of them are less blurred out. Like the Bob Klinger card, card number 90 from the set. You retain a level of environmental awareness, with a subtle focus shift artistic quality that fades to the borders. This is something often observable in the type one photographic techniques of the time — used to prepare photographs for publication in the formal limitations of a newspaper.
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I really enjoy the unadorned nature of this issue because it's almost like the one moment that America is off some sort of collective dream drug, a dream drug of idealism or the attempt to paint over reality with a beautiful narrative or a mythic narrative. I mean, this is wartime baseball, but it's also baseball at one of the lowest and most difficult points in American history.
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But it's a couple of years into this process; just years time away from the domestic impact of WWII. 32 is the crash, and then you have these years where it's difficult to grapple with the truth of the situation. The collective psyche is shaken, stunned — in a state of collective disbelief. You get towards 38, 39, and then you're getting into World War II territory; the rise of global involvement, Germany’s emboldened moves on the global stage. And it's a moment to me of critical sobriety between two huge collective, social moments: one more-so domestic and direct in the financial impacts of the crash; one more-so envisioned, distant, a global world war that shifts America’s entire mode of cultural participation, production — but one that happens abstracted, in foreign territories.
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And this is something that…
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you have some of the issues like Morehouse Baking in the 19-teens that are kind of similar to this. However, this is still a period of what the baseball card is undefined. On the backs of those cards, they're usually either blank backs or they're advertising backs. It’s not a iconographic distillation of the player. It’s not that multidimensional. The 39 Play Ball is a fully formed, modern baseball card. The format and mode is what you would see on a current baseball card today. You'd have the player portrait, or the player pose on the front.
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Then on the back, you'd have essential statistics as well as a player biography and some of the data on the company that produced it. This is the modern baseball card. And for me, this is really the first time where you see that synthesis. You have the Goudey Wide Pens and the premiums of the 1930s that have a similar design ethos of austere, high contrast photography, but they're still not this fully formed modern baseball card with the cardboard dimensions; the handheld aspect — as well as
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the fully detailed and laid out back. This is a unity of the design conventions in its most distilled and minimalist form. Stripped of color, complete with the essential player identifiers and context. And in that, it mirrors, I think, the sentiment at the time at a cultural level in one of the clearest ways. These cards could almost do with…
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I almost want to say more blurring and more abstraction — but it would, again, that would bring these cards into art more, if you see what I'm saying. Because it would, you would begin to be messing with the foreground-background dynamics to remove the character from the natural environment. Artificial displacement. That's why this Arky Vaughn is such an interesting one to me, because it's like a fog. Not yet liminal or broken from the plane of existence or reality yet, but obscured.
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You can still see — it looks like there's people in the background and he's standing on this baseball field. And it looks like you're kind of looking at it through glass, like through layers. There's like layers of glass that's behind him. You're seeing this refracted scene that's occurring.
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It's a really beautiful, just fundamental, basic shot — but obscured and made complex and fascinating with this glass refraction or fragmentation. This is a psychic thing. You have to think about and view these artifacts and cultural art objects through the lens of a collective unfolding that is being seen, felt, heard and experienced as a collective social, political, spiritual, and mythic-psychic condition. These cards speak it.
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That's the thing about these, there's not too much to say about them because they are so distilled and they are so drawn down to the fundamental and the essential. And that's what makes them so beautiful. But it's also, I think, what makes them so forgotten as a set. There's no humor or cartoon aspect that you would see in the 38 Goudey Heads Ups. You can see how quickly the mode and tone shifts. That’s one year’s time. There's no beauty or attempt to make art as you'd see in the Diamond Stars or the Goudey sets of just half a decade prior.
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It's not commercial at all and yet it's supposed to be. This is the marketing, the yearly manifesto for baseball. And its drawn in a tone that strikes the most somber and yet quietly elegant chord. And that's the beauty of these aesthetics of austerity because the allow for the assertion of something true because there's no real ability to lie. It's almost like the lie either is just not possible from a manufacturing standpoint and or
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it's not something that would be received. In the case of the ‘39 Play Balls, it is the latter. The marketing and the cultural art vision or mythos of baseball has been returned to the real in a way that communicates the deep psychic unease and fragmentation of the nation at large between two massive political ruptures in a way that social realism can barely touch. And they do this through this delicate, subtle jarring of the fade; the high contrast of the player poses — some of them almost unrecognizable due to the wide focus of the zoom.
The country is not in a mode or in a moment to receive a colorful, poppy, bubblegum set of cards that betray an untruth about the nation at the time. And neither is it in a frantic, dissociative mythic mode in which something like the ‘33 Goudey set becomes a way out of terror. The color, the mythic mode becomes utterly necessary as a way to survive.
Baseball becomes a stage for the necessary, dissociative escapism of absolute political turmoil, fragmentation, chaos, and destruction. This sets the stage for one of the more critical and fundamental observations of this talk — the idea and concept that art and the mythic mode of creativity and creation itself is a method of the fractured, traumatic state. And entire cultures can descend into this myth-making.
And as history reveals, insofar as our understanding of the source and function of religions and collective cultural and social mythologies allow — this is actually the root and foundation of all cultures. And as they enter into periods of intense contraction, they regress deeper and deeper into dissociative myth-making as a coping mechanism in the face of real, political reality. When we look at all art and creative thinking — whether at a civilizational or personal level — this is really what we are observing.
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But even when you get into the 1940 and 41 Play Balls, in contrast to the 39 set, you see this attempt to adorn. And this is when it becomes clear the United States is going to enter the war. It almost seems to be a matter of time. And you can see again this myth instinct and myth impulse rising. And I almost want to say… I was reading this quote earlier.
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It was — the attempt to mythologize is the entry into a false world. Or it's like the attempt to deal with real, serious psychological or collective cultural trauma in a way that is digestible. It's a dissociative method. The realm of the mythic is the realm of the traumatic rupture or fragmentation. This becomes the creative realm — populated with mystical creatures and fantastical legends and summons of narratives. It’s the abstracted dream world of imagination and of representation. And the baseball card is a collective, civilizational level aperture for this. It is made at the level of corporations, mass produced; is itself a prism for a collective sort of cave-art visionary state in the cultural depiction of reality through the fracture of representation through image production at and en masse.
People that enter the mythic realm usually enter it
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through a period of great trauma and disturbance, even in a mystical sense, in terms of if you want to talk about the path of the mystic or the path of the shaman. They enter into it through a form of psychological or even physical wounding because it reveals to them the contrast between everyday life and this realm of disturbance. The wound is the breach; the breach is the break or rupture in life which is the pain or the suffering that necessitates the mythic mode as a coping mechanism for said pain and suffering. That's why it's interesting to see
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this 1939 Play Ball set appear how it does and when it does — because if you look at the graph of energetic fluctuations, so to speak, in American history between periods of profound traumatic impact — whether that's the Depression or World War One or World War Two — you're hitting this very weird downward sloping in terms of the digestion of the real impacts of the Depression; the attempt to create New Deal initiatives to spark
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an economic boom in the country, and then this rapidly rising almost immediately after the production of this set of resumption into World War time. Again, this sentiment of this impending chaos or rupture. It rises subtly and suddenly first through the mythic awareness and visual, vision based image mode of the baseball card. A way of thinking of this is the subtle, intuitive awareness that animals have before a storm or a natural change in fronts. So you have this very short period of time between 1932 and 1939 into 40, 41, 42, where
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You have this downward-sloping graph into the digestion of this profound rupture that happens culturally and economically with the Great Depression; the country is still trying to digest this and recover from this through the New Deal initiatives. And then World War II starts, right? And the US ends up having to get involved. The inevitability breaks into the reality of another onslaught of traumatic rupture — interestingly enough, emergent from a different fabric or form. The Depression strikes domestically and is entirely contained in real national scenes of presence with this financial rupture; WWII strikes internationally and strikes American soil only in the rare instance — most notably with Pearl Harbor; several other encroachments upon US soil.
This contradiction of internal and external tensions and pressures is fascinating — again, to observe this like an expanding and contracting ecosystem of breaths, or a breathing microorganism of nations. Where and how are these contractions happening — and how do they spark? The US recoils from WWII, but it is crippled from within by the collapse of its economies. You attempt to trace these origins and realize they are really fluid; products of colliding and intersecting domestic and global phenomena — going back to our conversations about industrialization and globalization — as collective psychic phenomena that transcend and bypass borders into collective human intiations into profound new ruptures which are windows into new paradigms of realities.
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So when you see that energetic graph, it's really interesting to look at those moments, that moment of the dive, which is the digestion or ingestion; then there's another ascent into a critical moment of rupture. This is such a profound time of transformation at the global human level that these dives and ascents are happening in matters of months, not years or decades. This is a rapidly fluctuating environment and psychic collective weather system. You really look at that moment of 1939 Play Ball, I think it's a really profound documentary news — like it's a newspaper in cardboard.
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And I really appreciate that and respect that about this set. It's a newspaper and cardboard in a way that nothing else touches. 1941 double play comes close, but its far more abbreviated. It’s not a baseball card, its a telegraph. A short bio, everything is on the front; shared by two players. Often cut to separate the cards into each individual player.
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The 1939 Play Ball is like a handheld newspaper card.
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And I think there's a clarity with that. Clarity in the delivery of the newspaper. A groundedness that’s actually quite meditative and calming. None of the frills. It's like a form of documentary social realism. And I talked a little bit before about WPA photography. I think this is a really great example of that here — distilled in providing information, as a photograph would be integrated into news communication. Whereas in other sets, you have subtle attempts to enhance or create theater or create spectacle. Even 41 Play Ball,
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1940 Play Ball — it's much more decorative, on the front in particular with the decorative framing, as well as the player name on the plaque at the bottom. And then in 41, you have this colorization and cartoonization again. The photograph from the 1940 set is transposed into this alternate world and reality filled with unrealistic color gradients and strange interpretations of the faces. This is the pattern observable in the ‘33 Goudey and mid 30s Diamond Stars sets. It's interesting to see this happen, especially when you look at 1932 specifically. 32, there's only U.S. Caramel, but then you look at 33 and 34 Goudey.
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It's this, again, this manufacturing of the cartoonic, mythic, abstracted color, lush environments. And you can see that phenomenon as it fluctuates — emerges prominently, recedes, and returns — throughout the 30s and into the 40s, based on these critical moments of traumatic rupture that are happening in United States history. It's like a civilizational, subconscious impact
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that's influencing the way that these cards are produced and the way that they're attempting to perform — whether that's art or theater or this sense, America's pastime being this abstracted cartoonish, almost other world. The way that baseball functions as a collective reservoir of psychic force. It's like a form of cultural escapism that occurs there. And I think it's something that's very clear when you look at these sets through the 30s and how they dip;
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how they ascend in terms of the construct of the card, how it looks, what it's saying, and what it's doing in real time. I think it's something that's very, very clear in the 30s because it's such a crux, it's such a turning point as the United States is re-entering World War time; grappling with the brutal collapse of its markets. It is gutted from within; collapsed in the homeland, and is struggling to pick itself up as the pitch of world war rises in a fervor just outside its borders.
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I look at what happens in the early 1900s with the tobacco cards and the caramel cards going into the 19-teens and they become very standardized — still influenced by the affluent art of the American Tobacco cards — but very standardized advertising or blank back cards like Morehouse in the later teens headed into World War I. The images are re-used, unadorned; the backs are reserved either entirely for an advertisement for a company or else entirely blank.
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So there's another example of this phenomenon at hand. Then throughout the 20s, you really just have the strip cards and the Kashin set; cards like the American Caramel E120s and E121s. Black and white photographic representations. Blank backs, or advertising backs. A brief adornment in terms of the ornate border of the E120 set — but this adornment was not limited to the American Caramel release. It was used elsewhere. Repurposed as a design template. But again, these are all still early formations of the baseball card. There's not yet the fully biographical back as well as the statistics of the player — ie, infielder, Pittsburgh Pirates.
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I think that formation really starts to happen as you hit the 30s with the Goudey cards. The Goudey card is really the first modern baseball card in my eyes.
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Diamond Stars is also a great one, but Goudey is there first in that 33 set. It's just a huge, definitive, declarative statement. The biggest one, I would say, that happens after the T206. And the Cracker Jack, interestingly, is the proto-Goudey in terms of how the front and back of the Cracker Jack function.
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It provides that template of cartoonized player dissociated and unmoored from ‘real place’ with biographical back; then Goudey takes it and expands the whole world and universe of it into this multi-colored, multi-environmental, very dynamic, almost like jungle of baseball forms. This is also, quite interestingly, when Disney starts producing color cartoons. 1932. So when you look at the baseball card like that, it's interesting to track it side by side with American
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cultural and historical developments. And you can see that influence in terms of how the baseball card is establishing and conveying itself and its attempt to either heighten the sensory experience of the icons of baseball, the legends of baseball, or the idea of baseball as a cultural form — or to have it be this very grounded, fundamental, essential, stripped back, minimalist form —
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as I said with the Morehouse Baking cards as well as with 1939 Play Ball. These are things that you can track because they're cultural developments of excess and dreaming and austerity and sobriety that are not separate, they're not mutually exclusive. They're part of this larger ecosystem that's breathing, it's contracting and expanding;
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creating this whole environment of influence based on the current cultural, social, and political factors of the time. These factors are visual; visible; made visible by the vision of the collective the fluctuates with its digestion, metabolism, and portrayal of its experience of political reality. So I hope you enjoyed this one. I will catch you on the next one. See you.