Tales of Santa Anna (from STEALING HOME)

We're sharing an exclusive excerpt of STEALING HOME about Manifest Destiny, prosthetic legs, baseball, and chewing gum.

Dear Sports Stories readers,

Yesterday STEALING HOME was published! The book was written by me, Eric, and illustrated by Adam, so if you like this newsletter, we really think you’ll dig the book too. We also thought you might like a sneak preview of some of the most “Sports Stories” sections in the book. These have to do with the mythical origins of baseball, the Mexican American War, and, of course, gum.

Please consider picking up the book from your local indie bookseller, and please please go ahead and share this excerpt with someone who might like it. Thank you for your support. Back to regularly-ish scheduled programming next week.

-Eric

In March 1847 the US Army, under Winfield Scott, landed in Veracruz and took the city following a bloody siege. Old stone walls crumbled. Women and children starved and crumbled beside them. Scott had 13,500 men in his command: officers, enlisted soldiers, volunteers, slaves. He had President James K. Polk and the wind of manifest destiny at his back. Winfield Scott thought that invading Mexico was both reckless and immoral. Unlike Polk, Scott did not believe that the US had a God-given mandate to conquer the entire continent. But Scott was also America’s most decorated and respected general: if his country was going to fight a war, he was going to goddamn lead it. Scott’s idea was to land in the port city of Veracruz and march his troops across the humid, soft countryside, up over the rocky volcanoes, and finally into the Valley of Mexico, nestled seven thousand feet above sea level.

Scott was an ornery commander. He was big and vain and brilliant. Ulysses S. Grant once called him “the finest specimen of manhood my eyes had ever beheld.” He had no formal military education and was largely self-taught as a tactician, but he had always been a keen student of history. Three centuries earlier, another conquering army had landed in Mexico, marched through the same countryside, and traversed the same mountains. It was from them that Scott took his inspiration.

Scott’s adversary, the Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna, must have felt the weight of this history. He must have known that what began with Hernán Cortés would certainly not end with Winfield Scott. Santa Anna was a proud and mercurial person, and he had recently declared himself president of Mexico (not for the first or last time). Santa Anna called himself the Napoleon of the West. But for all that, his countrymen were unsure how to feel about him. His career had been as jagged as the terrain in his country, filled with soaring peaks and desolate valleys. When he lost his leg in battle almost a decade earlier, Santa Anna ordered it buried with full military honors.

Determined not to let Mexico fall to another conqueror, Santa Anna met the US Army in the hills just outside of Xalapa. His troops appeared to have the invaders overmatched. They equaled the Americans in size and firepower and held a superior defensive position on familiar terrain: Xalapa was Santa Anna’s hometown. But an American captain discovered a mountain trail that allowed Scott’s troops to outflank Santa Anna and catch him by surprise from above. The battle was devastating and short. It ended with Santa Anna escaping on horseback, in such a desperate hurry that he left his wooden leg behind on the battlefield.

The path to Mexico City was now clear for the Americans. They pushed the Mexican Army deeper and deeper into their country, into themselves. In Puebla the Americans rested and gathered their strength for the final phase of the conquest. All that remained was for the Mexican troops to make their last stand and for Scott’s army to drive all the way to the Mexican heart, barely beating, the city that was once called Tenochtitlan. On September 12, 1847, the Americans finally turned their attention to Chapultepec Castle.

The castle looms on a hill high over Mexico City. This hill has been a sacred place since pre-Columbian times. Aztec priests used to climb it in rituals. Emperors vacationed there. The castle, constructed by lackeys to the Spanish crown in an exercise of colonial vanity, had been abandoned in the decades following Mexican independence. Eventually it was converted into a military college. Scott’s troops launched their cannonballs and bullets at dawn and sustained the barrage until nightfall. Holding the castle as their countrymen escaped to a nearby fort was a motley group of just four hundred men and boys. They were Mexican soldiers, and they were unrelenting military cadets who refused to surrender. Teenagers dying alongside wary veterans.

The story goes that after every other Mexican soldier was run down or run off by the invaders, only six cadets remained. They were children, really. As young as thirteen years old. Their names were Juan de la Barrera, Agustín Melgar, Juan Escutia, Vicente Suárez, Francisco Márquez, and Fernando Montes de Oca. Eventually they would come to be known collectively as los Niños Héroes.

After Santa Anna’s army was routed by the Americans outside of Xalapa, the general fled without his wooden leg, which fell into the hands of the Fourth Regiment of Illinois Volunteers. The Illinois men would gain acclaim during the war for their drunkenness and their willingness to murder civilians. They kept the leg and brought it home with them as a souvenir. It still sits in a glass case in a museum in Springfield.

This much is true, factually. But there is another story about the Illinois soldiers and Santa Anna’s leg. It’s a myth. It did not happen. 

But for many years, people told it like it did.

According to the story, at Xalapa the Illinois men met a US officer by the name of Abner Doubleday. Doubleday was an enterprising West Point graduate who, like many of the soldiers in Scott’s army, would go on to great fame in the Civil War. He would, in fact, fire the first shot by a Union soldier at Fort Sumter. But in Doubleday’s case, soldiering would only be a small part of his legacy. Doubleday would gain greater fame as the anointed inventor of baseball, America’s national pastime. The Baseball Hall of Fame would eventually be constructed in his hometown of Cooperstown, New York.

Once the wounded had been cleared off the battlefield at Xalapa and the dead had been buried, Doubleday suggested that the leg found by the Illinois regiment was the perfect size and shape to put to use in playing the sport he had recently conjured up. He gathered the Illinois men into a huddle and explained the rules, charting out the positions and lecturing on the most effective techniques. He marked off foul lines and bases in the marshy long grass of Xalapa’s Parque Los Berros and divided the troops into two sides. And thus, according to mythology, the first baseball game on Mexican soil was played on a sunny April afternoon in 1847. For a ball, the players improvised, wrapping a small rock in leather. For a bat, they used the wooden leg of General Antonio López de Santa Anna.

In 1867 Antonio López de Santa Anna was broke and living in Staten Island, New York. It is remarkable that only two decades after the US invasion of Mexico, the commander of the Mexican Army found himself in exile in the country that had caused so many of his problems. Yet that is what happened.

How Santa Anna got to New York is a book unto itself: there was a chance meeting with US Secretary of State William Seward on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, there were South American revolutionaries turned grifters, there was a ship purchased and a brief stay in New Jersey, and there was a great deal of money lost. After all that, there was another misadventure in Veracruz and a near execution, and finally the sweet relief of exile.

During his time in New York, Santa Anna hoped he could reamass his fortune. One of his schemes for doing so involved a substance he brought with him from Mexico. It was a sticky latex that oozed from the bark of the sapodilla trees that grew in his native Veracruz, and it was called chicle. Pre-Colombian societies in Mexico had been chewing chicle for thousands of years. But Santa Anna thought it could be used for more than that. For instance, it might make a good alternative, or additive, to the vulcanized rubber from which buggy tires were then being made.

Santa Anna showed the chicle he brought to a local inventor named Thomas Adams. Adams tried for years to turn the chicle into something of industrial use: tires, shoes, anything that might make them a buck. Finally, after watching Santa Anna chew on the chicle as he tinkered futilely in his laboratory, Adams decided to try something simpler. He molded the chicle into little balls, wrapped them in colorful packaging, and began selling chicle at drugstores. By then, Santa Anna had departed from New York and left behind his dreams of chicle entrepreneurship. And so the chewing-gum industry began in earnest without him.

The plain chicle balls were a success, but Adams’s company really took off when he began to experiment with flavoring. His licorice- flavored gum, Black Jack, was an especially big hit. He built a factory and put his gum in vending machines and started selling it in packs of precut slices. Suddenly, by the turn of the century, there were gum companies all over the country.

In Philadelphia, brothers Robert and Frank Fleer put out a product called Double Bubble: the first bubble gum. In Chicago, William Wrigley Jr. built an empire out of Juicy Fruit. In 1921 Wrigley became the majority owner of the Chicago Cubs and, with the Cubs, their Pacific Coast League affiliate, the Los Angeles Angels. In 1925 Wrigley opened a stadium for the Angels in Los Angeles. It had Spanish-style roof tiles and a clock tower behind home plate. Two years before the Cubs’ iconic park in Chicago was renamed in his honor, Los Angeles had its own Wrigley Field.

As committed as American consumers were to chewing gum, they may have been even more obsessed with baseball. The 1920s were the time of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig: outsized heroes whose deeds were brought into homes for the first time over the radio, players who captured the imagination but who could still seem distant without the benefit of television or even color photos. For decades, cigarette companies had been including trading cards as promotional items. Cards offered the intimacy and urgency of color. They gave you that tactile sense of connection. That connection deepened as baseball became something more than just a game you played or watched people play: it became a realm for mythology and hero worship. You could hold Babe Ruth in your hands. You could look into his eyes and see the lines on his forehead.

In 1933 the Goudey Gum Company released a line called Big League Chewing Gum and became one of the first gum manufacturers to include baseball cards in its packs. The cards were beautifully rendered, with intimate portraits looming over bold colored backgrounds and short player biographies printed on the reverse side. Babe Ruth was marked card No. 1 in the set. Fleer, Bowman, and ultimately Topps would follow Goudey into the trading-card promotion, which would grow and grow until the card itself was the thing, the object of worship, and the player on it was an afterthought and the hard pink stick of gum itself a novelty, leaving only traces of white powder on the cardboard before disappearing altogether.

But this would all come later. This would all come a hundred years after Antonio López de Santa Anna brought his chicle to Staten Island and accidentally gave birth to an entire industry, a hundred years after Santa Anna once again became part of the weird, amorphous story that is baseball.

Related Reading

Yesterday, Time Magazine was kind enough to publish a more serious excerpt of the book, on Jackie Robinson’s testimony in front of HUAC during its investigation of Paul Robeson.

Additionally, there have been a couple reviews. Here’s one at Baseball Prospectus, and here’s another from longtime LA sportswriting legend Tom Hoffarth (which also features a brief Q&A). There was also a Daily Mail story on the book today.

I also have appeared on some podcasts, including The Athletic’s Scribes of Summer with Pedro Moura and Andy McCullough, and the Romantic About Baseball Podcast.