Shipyard Draft Dodgers
Entering the 1918 season, the White Sox were expected to defend the A.L. championship, but Chicago’s roster took an irreparable hit in mid-May when outfielder Joe Jackson was bumped up from Class 4 to Class 1A. At that point, Jackson did something controversial. Rather than continuing to play for the White Sox and simply waiting to be called up to the army, Jackson accepted an offer to paint ships for the Harlan and Hollingsworth Shipbuilding Company in Delaware. Jackson was hitting .354 at the time, and his departure was a severe blow to the White Sox’s hopes of repeating.
Jackson’s move brought attention to a brewing problem. Once he punched in for his shipyard job, Jackson was supposed to paint ships, which qualified him for a draft 
The departure of White Sox outfielder Joe Jackson to a shipyard outfit created a stir around baseball. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.) exemption on the grounds that he was employed in a field useful to the war effort. It’s unlikely, though, that Jackson so much as fingered a brush. See, it so happened that Harlan and Hollingsworth had a competitive baseball league. All six of the government’s shipbuilding yards had baseball teams—Bethlehem, Lebanon and Steelton in Pennsylvania, Wilmington in Delaware, Fore River in Massachusetts and Sparrows Point in Maryland.
The shipyards pursued big-league players, like Jackson, who were in Class 1A, offering hefty wages to top players, plus exemption from army service. The Boston American reported that, “As much as $900 a month has been offered to more than one star player, while propositions of $500 are numerous.” Jackson was, essentially, a ringer as well as a draft-dodger. He wasn’t the first ballplayer to bolt from the big-leagues in the face of the draft—after Jackson departed, A.L. president Ban Johnson claimed that 20 players had already been taken by shipyards. But Jackson was the most prominent, and the fact that he joined the shipyard the day after being placed in Class 1A reflected badly on him, and on baseball.
There was bluster and outrage from baseball higher-ups. When two more White Sox players, Claude Williams and Byrd Lynn, jumped to the shipyards the following month, an angry Charles Comiskey said, “I don’t consider them fit to play on my ball club.” Brooklyn owner Charles Ebbets, who lost pitcher Al Mamaux to a shipyard, wrote, in a letter to Baseball Magazine, “I would not care to re-employ any of our men who enter such plants, preferring to leave them to their fate and work out their future without the aid of base ball.” Columnist Hugh Fullerton wrote, “The recent movement of the players to the shipyards of private companies, where the majority are to play on ball teams rather than drive rivets, is a sad commentary on the patriotism of the players.”
The shipyard lure was strong. The money was good, the competition tough and the war distant. That winter, Red Sox pitcher Dutch Leonard nearly signed up with a naval yard team, but was talked out of it by owner Harry Frazee. Eventually, on June 22, Leonard signed with the Fore River shipyard in Quincy, Mass. Two days later, he was moved up to Class 1A—though he claimed that he did not know he would be Class 1A when he left the Red Sox.
Eventually, the War Department cracked down on the shipyards’ practice of giving ball players soft jobs and big paychecks—Leonard himself was actually drafted. Still, once the season was over, many players sought out shipyard jobs in hopes of avoiding the war.
