In Cooperstown, What Do Baseball, Havana, and Blackfeet Couture Have in Common?

The famed village’s museums practice good diversity, and here’s how.

T oday I’ll take you out to the ball game in spirit and prose. I’d never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame in leafy, pretty Cooperstown in upstate New York. It’s more than a museum of baseball history. It’s the Olympus for players, umpires, managers, owners, and pioneers who have unmatched talents, love of the game, and a storied career. But first, there’s more to be said about the Fenimore Art Museum down the road. The subject there is diversity, front of mind at the Hall of Fame, too.

I’ve written over the years about the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) cancer running wild in our universities and, to a lesser extent, in our art museums. It’s ebbing, unevenly. One thing to remember, though, is “diversity” hasn’t always been a dirty word. Once upon a time, it didn’t involve quotas, oppression theater, and cratered standards. The Fenimore, like all good museums, practiced “diversity” long before it was perverted. It means, in part, creating a balanced exhibition program that appeals to those of us with catholic tastes — I’m curious about most things — as well as those with more focused interests. It means spotlights on overlooked artists from the past, emerging artists, and offbeat art. All these things serve the public well and make curating fun. But DEI, run by psychos, makes diversity torture.

The absorbing show Faded Elegance: Portraits of Havana by Michael Eastman is now at the Fenimore. It’s peak elegance. Eastman (b. 1947) is a master photographer of architecture, and the Fenimore is displaying 22 of his 90-by-72-inch color photographs of Havana interiors, once grand but most in various states of decrepitude by 2010. Diversity? Isn’t Cuba-comes-to-Cooperstown diversity?

The photographs depict spiral staircases, chandeliered reception rooms, a Moorish façade, and a room with a Star of David window. Fidel hated Jews, so they had to keep it quiet. On view are photographs of an old theater and wrought-iron railings, as well as dining rooms worn to the bones from neglect. It’s a twist on the thousands of American views of the Noble Savage – forlorn and of the past but still lofty and proud.

One or two include signs of the monster Fidel: a mounted photograph of him, and a wall in a shabby public building painted with a bromide about fallen comrades. He’s a driver of decay but also peripheral and relegated to the past tense. The art startles because of the spooky spaces and the deep color, especially jungle-green.

There are two versions of Isabella’s Two Chairs. One, photographed during an early Havana visit, depicts a ruin of a house, still occupied by an elderly woman but resoundingly lonely. In another, of the same room months later, after Isabella died and the space had become the home of her niece, there’s life. The niece has hung her laundry, moved the chairs closer to suggest a couple in conversation, and added bulbs to the chandelier. Eastman shoots rooms for color juxtapositions, too: orange against green, red against yellow, blue against green. He’s not juicing the colors. Havana always had a different taste in color from, say, icy Tribeca White, where you couldn’t spot a polar bear sitting on a sofa. Light from the windows turns saturated Cuban colors into tones.

I loved the mirage of paint on the surface of what I knew were photographs, though they seemed to have texture. It’s the paper, which isn’t made anymore. Would I have been happy to see Castro spit-roasted along with Che, both murderers? It wouldn’t be relevant. Unlike the Smithsonian, which will tell us a dozen times, a hundred times, that Washington owned slaves, I’ve got perspective and discernment.

Another must-see at the Fenimore is the first-rate Thaw Collection of American Indian art, a gift from the visionary art dealer and collector Eugene Thaw, who had a house near Cooperstown. I spent lots of time in the Native galleries, beautifully presented, and in open storage. The new wing opened in 1995. It’s diversifying the collection in action.

Thaw is famous for his Old Master drawings collection, now at the Morgan Library, and his high-end sales of art to Paul Mellon, Norton Simon, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, and many museums. He was introduced to New Mexico while appraising Georgia O’Keeffe’s estate. He loved it there, eventually moved to Santa Fe, and bought handsome, riveting Native art for aesthetics rather than anthropology — not what he called “bow-and-arrow stuff” but objects where he could apply the same eye for quality that he used for Old Master drawings.

I’ll admit that pots and baskets, Native or gringo, leave my fire unlit. I studied classical Greek pots so, as the English hangman said after sending a duke to his Maker via the rope, “Once you’ve used silk, it’s hard to go back to hemp.” I focused instead on Native fashion in the Thaw Collection, such as a Blackfeet shirt from 1870 made of a bison hide, porcupine quills, glass and gourd beads, tin cones, and rabbit fur, with stripes on the left side in alternating shades of blue, and stripes on the right side in mustard-yellow and salmon. A Nez Perce dress from 1850 is very snazzy. It’s made of two deerskins — the hindquarters form the top, while the neck and forelegs form the bottom. The yoke has large red, cream, and black beads. And a seal-gut parka lined with polar-bear fur and decorated with inverted V-shapes in red and purple must’ve been made by the Prada of the Central Yup’ik Natives. The shapes might represent mountains or harpoons or wolf teeth. No doubt about it. They had style. Salish, Nootka, Tlingit, and Kwakiutl masks and helmets from Canada and Alaska excel in curdling the blood. They’re to be considered sculpture, and Thaw thought they were the best things he bought.

As early as the 90s, Thaw complained about academics who judged art by racial and gender biases rather than as the objects that the artist conceived. He had zero interest in oppression as a measure of value — moral, aesthetic, and certainly financial. He supported the Fenimore in part because of what he called its “political neutrality,” but what he meant was practice of foregrounding quality and art. Of course, the last thing DEI ideologues — they’re mediocrities as well as mentally ill — want to hear about is quality.

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What’s a visit to Cooperstown without time at the Baseball Hall of Fame? I’m not a baseball fan, though as a child I was a great hitter. “Keep your eye on the ball” was a mantra at home, but that’s only part of the game. I was lousy in everything else. “Right field” might as well have been my last name, and not because I was a member of the local Go Go Goldwater Club. I loved Pride of the Yankees. “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth” is the one sentence every American should take as Scripture, especially those who vie for the World Series in bitching.

The Hall of Fame delivered so many revelations. I didn’t know that “switch hitter” is a baseball term! I thought it simply described one among many banes of gay life. So I went to the Hall of Fame as a naïf, possibly an intergalactic tourist.

The Hall of Fame opened in 1939 in a Georgian Revival brick home that evokes honesty, old values, and sleek modern lines. It’s one more of Stephen Clark’s doings, that Stephen Clark with the Singer sewing machine fortune. Its mission and motto is “preserving history, honoring excellence, connecting generations.” Take note, Smithsonian: It’s a better mission than the in-the-news cultish social justice agenda of your history museum.

To the Hall of Fame’s great credit, the first thing it does is debunk baseball’s Cooperstown origin. The game has many ancestors, and it sets the record straight with aplomb. We learn about the evolution of the rules of the game and about jabs as early as the 1890s that “America’s Pastime” was less a game of joy and more a business, but that’s background, as it should be. Production values are superb. The early galleries’ objects and interpretation are set against lovely, deep-red wallpaper in a Victorian pattern made at Cooperstown’s farm museum. The interpretations are crisp and smart.

The main history floor alternates between big issues such as the Negro Leagues — pro baseball wasn’t integrated until 1947 — and spaces for Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and other big personalities. Ruth’s gallery, though, was too packed. Yes, hardcore fans are relic-crazy, but thinning things out makes riveting stories more so. He’s the Sultan of Swat for his many home runs but also a human-interest-story nonpareil, from his start in Baltimore’s Pigtown — and, no, there was nothing twee about Pigtown — to a school for delinquents and then his teen-year hits, powerful enough to break windows. There’s also his “say it ain’t so” trade from the Red Sox to the Yankees and his Murderers’ Row of sluggers. Vaudeville, womanizing, his fraught farewell, and his three-day funeral add to a very American story of peaks and sloughs. His farewell uniform had plenty of eyes fixed on it in the gallery, as did a case about his charity work.

A wing called A Whole New Ballgame starts in 1970 and is heavy on video — it’s the media age on steroids, and everyone had color TV by then. It’s also heavy on how the game became more legalistic, with players as stars and Hall of Fame inductions that were more glittering each year. I enjoyed seeing the gloves — lots of wear from base-grabbing — that Rickey Henderson wore for most of his steals. I love stealth. Videos of a behind-the-back catch impressed me for acrobatics, and Willie Stargell’s 500-foot hit out of the ballpark soared like a bird. Much of the third floor is devoted to baseball in Japan, where people are insane about the game. There’s lots of space given to the Negro Leagues and recent black players. That’s good. I don’t look at it as atonement but as reality. No grinding axes allowed.

I didn’t expect to enjoy The Art of Baseball, but it has plenty of good moments. For Tough Call, from 1948, Norman Rockwell used professional players and umpires. The tension isn’t only with the umps, hands out, looking at the sky, thinking about what to do, and players anticipating the winning or the losing, with the state of play on the scoreboard. Joel Libby’s 2018 portrait of Christy Mathewson is big, bold, and brazen with color, just far enough from schlock to be good. I’d never heard of Mathewson, but he was a player in the 1910s renowned for intellect, discretion, and clean living, rare among baseball stars in those days.

The Hall of Fame space is like a church, but it avoids the look of a mausoleum with columbaria niches by how it adds spacing, pillars, lots of Vermont Verde marble, speckled tile floors, golden oak walls, and light from a round glass roof. Each Hall of Famer gets a 15.5-by-10.75-inch bronze plaque, 80 to 100 words on key achievements, and a bas-relief portrait set in an arched frieze frame with two baseball bats and garlands in the background. Players are wearing caps. Tom Tsuchiya is the artist. He starts with vintage photographs — inductees have to be out of baseball for ten years — and does a good likeness. But not Saint Gaudens, alas. The vast gallery is hushed and solemn.

“Baseball’s 90 percent mental and the other half’s physical,” Yogi Berra said. I would tweak that by saying that baseball’s drama appeals to those who think as well as those who feel. It’s intellectual, physical, and laced with pathos. Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfectly pitched game, Jackie Robinson stealing home in the 1955 World Series, Hank Aaron’s 715 home runs, the Miracle Mets in 1969, “The Catch,” courtesy of Willie Mays, Gehrig’s farewell speech, the Chicago Cubs’ “lovable losers” who finally get a win. Grinders, grit, and gumption abound. There’s Joe DiMaggio’s poise and smooth moves. A visit to the Hall of Fame makes for goosebumps aplenty.