My previous article, "What If Jackie Robinson Had Been a Bust?", included the notion in my title here, that he might have been even more of a superstar, rather than less of one, than he actually was, so I’m not actually going to consider Robinson’s career specifically here. Just playing around with the title (I considered "What If Jackie Onassis Had Had a Bust?" among other variations—that’s just how my mind is miswired) which led me to the larger topic of Alternate History in general.

I’m not much of a fan of the genre, taking refuge in the "If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley-car" school of Alternate History—what’s the point, in other words, of speculating on things that never happened? Are we changing only one small event in world history here, or are we changing entire complex historical events? Are there limits on our alternative scenarios, or are we going completely nuts here? What if human nature itself were different? Seems kinda wasteful to explore in depth. The butterfly effect says that a tiny change in the path of a butterfly in China could start a chain reaction of events resulting in sweeping changes across the globe that we cannot possibly foresee, making no end to speculation.

But sometimes, with tight parameters, our speculated consequences lead to intriguing scenarios: my previous article limited the speculation to the careers of ten untried ballplayers who played successfully in MLB from 1947 through early 1951 being less successful than they were. I justified this speculation on the basis of "small sample size": with only ten players, almost any outcome is within the realistic limits of possibility.  Likewise with these pioneers bursting onto the MLB scene with far greater powers of domination than they did historically: what effect would that have had? Again, we now know exactly what these players actually did, but in 1947, it was unknown and wide-open to possibilities.

The response has been, as I noted in the "Comments" section, very conservative, for understandable reasons. "Things would have happened pretty much as they did" either way, is the general tone people have taken, and maybe they’re right. MLB was only one factor in desegregation, and there was lots of other stuff going on for decades if not centuries leading up to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, so maybe Jackie Robinson’s on-field success had little to no effect on the bigger picture, didn’t speed up the movement, and wouldn’t have sped it up any more if early black MLBers were more uniformly successful and wouldn’t have slowed it down if they’d all been busts.

But I don’t think so. Because it happened the way it did, I think we all have gotten just a little complacent in thinking that it HAD to happen the way it did. Which is the main virtue of Alternate History, to my mind: it makes us consider other scenarios by spelling out in detail how they could have unfolded.

It happens that I’m reading Ron Chernow’s biography of U.S. Grant right now. (Don’t tell me how it ends—I’m only up to his first administration.) Grant was a strange cat, as Chernow tells it. He was deeply committed to giving the newly freed slaves full U.S. citizenship, but he also felt strongly that he could not shove that status forcefully down the throats of white Southerners whom he hoped to return soon to reconciliation with the North. So as I read this account, I find myself rooting for Grant to impose, say, Federal troops on various Southern troublespots to enforce the newer amendments to the Constitution, and going "Oh! Missed opportunity, Ulysses!" when he doesn’t. Sure enough, the KKK grows powerful, as he allows them to terrorize black citizens, and his administration seems headed to ineffectiveness. (Again—don’t tell me how it ends! I’m only up to page six-zillion and ten.)

Was there nothing Grant (or Lincoln, or Jefferson, or anyone) could have done that would have significantly changed the course of race relations in this country? Was there one moment where a major choice could have been made differently that would have had that effect?

Or was racism just far too ingrained in our character? This is a difficult proposition to accept, mainly because other countries seem to have overcome their racial issues more easily than the U.S. has. One moment, to give an example from Chernow’s book, that I never heard about before (my knowledge of U.S. history is stunningly limited), was that Grant was obsessed with the idea of acquiring the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti), and turning it into a territory and then into a state (or states). He was a nut on the subject, felt very strongly that this must be done, immediately, in part because it would act as a safety valve on his pressing mainland problem: it would allow former slaves to migrate voluntarily to Hispaniola, where the racial mix was such that they would feel (and be) protected and free there.

Would this solution have fixed racism in the U.S.? Would it have accomplished anything? Would it somehow have made the problem worse?

It didn’t happen, mainly because the U.S. (Grant’s cabinet) was concerned that acquiring the island (from Spain) would lead to war with Spain, though I can see from this remove plenty of ways that Spain could have been mollified, mainly money. If Grant would have committed enough cash being funneled Spain’s way for the real estate, I can imagine that they could have felt satisfied enough to avoid a war. We certainly found the money to buy other countries’ territories during this period (e.g., Alaska) and we did have a President who was gung-ho on the acquisition, so the question remains "Would this have changed anything?"

And by "this," I mean the dozens of points I keep encountering where Grant wanted to, tried to, worked tirelessly in order to reconcile former slaveowners and former slaves to living peaceably side by side in the post-Civil War U.S. It just never took. Was this because it was impossible? Or just bad luck?

I don’t mean to focus here exclusively on the black/white problems: in many ways, the problems Grant faced in reconciling the rights of American Indians to those of settlers in the Western Territories were even more horrific. Again, I was surprised to read how generously Grant felt inclined towards the Indians (he was the first President to appoint an Indian to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a former officer under his command during the Civil War) yet he oversaw some of the most brutal encounters in our history. Was the genocide of Native Americans inevitable? Could he, or anyone, have acted differently? If so (and I think "so"), how? What would the effects of a far different policy have been?

Again, I don’t think this is far-fetched speculation: Grant wanted to treat the Indians fairly (at least at times). He wanted to assimilate former slaves as full-fledged first-class citizens. I’m not changing his essential character in speculating on what he might have been able to do. (The previous President, Andrew Johnson, had a character that seems from my reading to be committed to racism and oppression—it seems pointless and fruitless to speculate on his desire for reconciliation in a way that speculating on Grant’s is tempting.)  Can we isolate a point at which a different decision would have resulted in a sweepingly different outcome?

I think that’s why we study history, and why we examine baseball history. Not just to memorize facts and trivia and records for their own sake—I had committed to memory U.S. Grant’s place in the catalogue of U.S. Presidents and the dates of his administrations by fourth grade, I believe. But this stuff only gets truly interesting when we consider events as near-misses, and the possibilities of events unfolding differently than they did historically. There’s a world of possibilities out there, and some of them are still achievable, if we understand where we went wrong in the past, and why.