The Baseball Commissioner and the Mennonites

by Steve Nolt

Mennonites seemingly always have been intrigued by famous or powerful people with Mennonite connections._ We speculate about celebrities with “Mennonite-sounding” surnames, or remark on newsmakers connected to international Mennonite Central Committee projects or domestic Mennonite Disaster Service work.

In 1914, Chicago Mennonite businessman C. B. Schmidt was curious about the genealogical ties between noted federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1866-1944) and the Swiss Brethren martyr Hans Landis. Hans Landis had given his life for his faith three hundred years earlier in Zurich, becoming – it turned out – the last Anabaptist executed in Europe and marking an end to a bloody era begun in 1526._

Schmidt made a copy of the Hans Landis story recorded in the Martyrs Mirror and sent it to Judge Landis, who responded with the following letter:

Judge’s Chambers
United States District Court
Northern District of Illinois
Chicago

February 10, 1914

Dear Mr. Schmidt: —
I certainly appreciate the courtesy of your favor of January 30th with the enclosures. This is a subject that has long been a matter of curiosity in our family, and until the receipt of your letter I had seen nothing definite on the subject. I have transmitted a copy, including your letter, to each member of the family, and again assure you, with my best wishes, of my appreciation.

Kenesaw M. Landis_

Immediately, an excited Schmidt sent the judge’s letter to John F. Funk (1835-1930) whose Elkhart, Indiana Mennonite Publishing Company had translated and issued the Martyrs Mirror._ Judge Landis, it seemed, might assign some significance to his Mennonite roots.

Having enforced new antitrust laws in a high-profile case against the Standard Oil conglomerate, Judge Landis was already famous when Schmidt contacted him. A few years later Landis’ name became a household word when he was appointed the first commissioner of major league baseball. Charged with cleaning up a game stained by scandal, Judge Landis ruled the sport for almost a quarter century, until his death.

But how was the baseball commissioner connected to the Mennonites? Judge Landis’ authorized biographer, Taylor Spink, celebrated his subject as a real American patriot, but mixed in some garbled facts from the story Schmidt had passed on. “The Landises were born and bred in the American traditions,” Spink insisted, even if “the family originally was Swiss, and an early ancestor, Pete Landis, a Mennonite, was decapitated at Geneva for his religious convictions back in the sixteenth century.” The story placed the judge’s ancestors “in France, and then a whole boatload of them came to this country before the American Revolution.” The Landis family, according to Spink, “settled in the fertile farm country near Lancaster, Pa.” near the “town of Landisville” which was “named after these Swiss settlers.”_

However much Judge Landis may have enjoyed the Martyrs Mirror account of martyr Hans, the judge’s personal connection to his past and his forbearers’ faith had been tenuous. A descendant of Pennsylvania Landises from Chester County (not Lancaster, as he told his biographer), Judge Landis had been born in Butler County, Ohio where his grandparents Philip (1764-1838) and Catherine Beary (1776-1847) Landis had moved. The judge’s father, Abraham H. Landis (1821-96) had joined the Northern Union army during the American Civil War, a move that may have strained whatever ties he still had to Butler County Mennonitism. Returning home Abraham named his next child after the Georgia battlefield – Kenesaw Mountain – where he had been wounded, and moved the family to Logansport, Indiana.

When it came to any Anabaptist religious heritage, there was, as the judge had written to Schmidt, “nothing definite on the subject” among the Logansport Landises. Ken Landis would grow up in a home where identification with the American nation was strong; his own name was a constant reminder of military action. Two of his brothers became Indiana congressmen and another represented the United States government in Puerto Rico after the American takeover of that island.

Ken Landis’ journey as judge and baseball commissioner made him, by the early 1940s, one of the most recognized people in America. A self-styled “Progressive,” he worked to control dissent and defend a vision of society in which the “better sort” of people managed the affairs of everyone else. Despite his power and influence, as the years wore on Landis became an increasingly discouraged and isolated man, unable to manage change and frustrated with the country that had given him his identity.

The same year that Judge Landis received the copy of the Martyrs Mirror story a child who shared his surname was born near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Unlike the Judge, Miriam Landis did not have to rely on C. B. Schmidt to tell her about her connection to her heritage. Her parents David L. (1882-1961) and Annette H. Esbenshade (1883-1926) Landis passed on their faith in the context of a living, breathing community that took it seriously. Miriam attended Mellinger Mennonite Church where her father was a minister.

Yet the tradition of faith handed on to her was not simply a static thing only to be received and preserved. Indeed, Miriam’s childhood coincided with a period of local debate over what sorts of changes and innovations faithfulness might actually require. What did faith mean for one’s commercial, social, and community relationships? How might it grow and change to include other people? For their part, Miriam and her husband W. Ray Wenger (1910-45) were committed to extending their faith story to others when in 1937 they left Pennsylvania to live with the people of Tanganyika, in East Africa._

But if a living tradition had provided some of the resources for a pioneering move halfway around the world, it would itself be transformed by the new experiences and cultures in Africa. As African Christians joined the story and made it their own, the Landis, Wenger, Stauffer, Shenk and other missionary families found their heritage enriched, but often challenged. In the early 1940s, for example, Miriam Landis Wenger was among those who experienced the “East African Revival” – a spiritual revolution that broke down racial barriers and allowed white missionaries to see as equals their African brothers and sisters in Christ._ In those same years back in the United States, Judge Ken Landis was spending his last lonely and bitter days fighting a racist battle to exclude black players from major league baseball and keep the game “respectably white.”_

Heritage had meant different things to Ken Landis and Miriam Landis. In one case, it was an antiquarian curiosity. A distant past, it joined colonial patriots and wartime heroes to form a tale of American progress and imperial dominance. In the other case the past was a resource, a calling, and a debt that supported a living community which passed on its promise. The faith of martyrs and ministers and ordinary folks possessed a vitality even of self-criticism and the ability to reproduce itself, cross racial and cultural lines, and include new people into its very meaning. The orientation and outcomes could hardly have been more different.

Nevertheless, it is quite likely that even today more American Mennonites recognize the name Kenesaw Mountain Landis than can identify correctly the East Africa Revival.

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Steve Nolt teaches history at Goshen College. He has related the story, above, in a number of church and other story-telling settings. Those audiences have provided some evidence for the suggestion in the concluding sentence.

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Notes
Mennonite Historical Bulletin July 2001 Nolt, p. _ PAGE _1_

_ See the commentary provided by the poem “How the Deck is Stacked in the Mennonite Game,” by Nina Forsythe, theMennonite, Oct. 6, 1998, 5.
_ “Landis, Hans,” Mennonite Encyclopedia, V. 3.
_ Kenesaw M. Landis to C. B. Schmidt, Feb. 10, 1914, Hist Mss. 1-1, John F. Funk Papers, box 36.
_ C. B. Schmidt to Rev. John F. Funk, Feb. 13, 1914, Ibid.
_ J. G. Taylor Spink, Judge Landis and Twenty-five Years of Baseball (New York: Thomas and Crowell Co., 1947).
_ Joseph C. Shenk, Silver Thread: The Ups and Downs of a Mennonite Family in Mission (1895-1995) (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books,1996), 12-114.
_ Ibid., 75-83; Mahlon M. Hess, Pilgrimage of Faith: Tanzania Mennonite Church, 1934-83 (Salunga, Pa.: Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities, 1985), 55-85; Louise Stoltzfus, Quiet Shouts: Stories of Lancaster Mennonite Women Leaders (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1999), 109-10.
_ Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Baseball: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 282-83.

 

Mennonte Historical Bulletin