JACKSON, Joseph Jefferson Wofford ("Shoeless Joe")

(b. 16 July 1888 in Pickens County, South Carolina; d. 5 December 1951 in Greenville, South Carolina), major-league baseball player and third leading all-time hitter, barred from professional baseball because of his participation in a scandal involving eight Chicago White Sox players who conspired with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.

Jackson was the oldest of eight children of George Elmore Jackson, a sharecropper, farmer, and mill hand, and Martha, a housewife. Jackson received no formal education and began working in cotton mills before he was thirteen years old. In 1908, at the age of twenty, he married fifteen-year-old Katie Wynn. They had no children.

Jackson began playing baseball for the Brandon Mills team when he was thirteen, earning $2.50 per game. By the time he was twenty he signed to play for the Greenville Spinners. It was there that he earned the nickname "Shoeless Joe" after playing a game without shoes because of bad blisters caused by a new pair of spikes. In August 1908 he signed with the Philadelphia A's and played there sporadically in September 1908 and again late in 1909. In 1910 he was traded to the Cleveland Indians, and in the middle of the 1915 season he was traded to the Chicago White Sox.

A gifted hitter, Jackson was described by his contemporaries as having the most natural hitting stroke in the game. His .356 career batting average trails only Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby in best lifetime averages. Jackson's career statistics are more significant because he seldom played in his first three years and in 1918 he worked in a war industry most of the season. In his nine full seasons he had 1,774 hits, drove in 785 runs, and scored 873 runs. He batted .408 in 1911, losing the championship to Ty Cobb, who hit .420. In the troubled 1920 season, Jackson hit .382, drove in 121 runs and scored 105 while striking out only fourteen times.

The Black Sox scandal of 1919 blemished Jackson's reputation forever. Jackson was the most notable of eight White Sox players involved in a conspiracy to lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Gamblers Arnold Rothstein, Abe Attell, and Sport Sullivan offered $20,000 to each of the eight players in exchange for fixing the games. The signal that the players had accepted the offer centered on the first batter of Game One of the World Series. Ed Cicotte, the White Sox pitcher, was to hit the first batter, which he did.

The origins of the scandal are traced to the penurious manner in which White Sox owner Charles Comiskey managed his players. He paid just $3 a day for meals while most teams gave players $4, and charged his players twenty-five cents to launder their uniforms. With such a small allotment for laundry, players refused to wash their uniforms, and the team became known as the Black Sox. Furthermore, the salaries Comiskey paid to notable players such as Jackson, Cicotte, Eddie Collins, and Buck Weaver were far below those paid for high-quality players on other teams. Adding to the money issues were the cliques on the White Sox team; members were divided into those who had a college education and those who did not.

Jackson batted .375 during the series, but the extent of his role has never been fully clarified. Like many of the eight, Jackson never received the promised $20,000. At most he received $5,000, left in his room by a fellow player, for his part in throwing the series. Though Jackson did report the money to the White Sox, Comiskey did not report this information to baseball authorities.

Rumors of the scandal circulated immediately, but it was not until late in the next season that details surfaced as reporters dug into the story, which broke in August 1920. By September a grand jury was chosen to investigate the matter. Comiskey immediately suspended the eight suspected players, and the White Sox fell out of the 1920 pennant chase.

Jackson and the seven other players appeared before the grand jury. By the end of October the jury filed nine counts of fraud and conspiracy against the indicted players. The trial took place in Chicago in June 1921. The circumstances of the trial were bizarre. Documents disappeared; baseball was in turmoil with the election of Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the commissioner on 11 November 1920, replacing the three-member commission that had governed the game since 1903; and charges about the duplicitous role of Comiskey persisted. The jury eventually found the players and gamblers innocent. Commissioner Landis, however, ruling "in the best interest of the game," barred all eight players from the game for life. This action was taken to remove the stigma of fixed games that had arisen as early as the 1910s and reached its apogee with the Black Sox scandal.

With no education, a drinking problem, and few resources to rely on, Jackson played semiprofessional baseball, first in the Midwest and then in the South. While playing for the White Sox, he had opened a poolroom in Greenville, South Carolina. With his wife as manager, he became a small businessman, running a Greenville dry-cleaning business, a barbecue restaurant, and finally a liquor store. He frequently coached teams and continued through the 1930s to play baseball wherever he could. In 1934, at the age of forty-five, Jackson applied for reinstatement to baseball so that he could play in the minor leagues, but Landis refused his request.

Jackson died of a heart attack caused by arteriosclerosis and cirrhosis of the liver in 1951. He is buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Greenville.

In the 1990s Jackson became a cult figure. A strong campaign to reinstate Jackson and to allow his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame began after the publication of W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982) and its film adaptation Field of Dreams (1989).

Players, notably Bob Feller, Ted Williams, and Pete Rose, supported Jackson's inclusion in the Hall of Fame. Politicians from South Carolina and Iowa (the location of the Field of Dreams––the baseball field in the middle of a cornfield in Dyersville that was used in the filming of the movie) also voiced support for Jackson's election. The city of Greenville and the Jackson family have profited from his notoriety. An automated auction of his memorabilia, including his famous bat, "Black Betsy," sold in August 2001 for $577,610.

The best sources on the life of Jackson include Warren Brown, The Chicago White Sox (1952); Eliot Asinoff, Eight Men Out (1963); Bill Veeck and Edward Linn, The Hustler's Handbook (1965); Harvey Frommer, Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball (1992); Donald Gropman, Say It Ain't So, Joe! (1999); and David Fleitz, Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson (2001).

Harry Jebsen, Jr.