WWI vet and sports activities pioneer John Griffith impressed American Legion Baseball

Main John Griffith envisioned a people made higher, fitter and more potent — extra powerful and patriotic — and solid through younger pageant that preached just right citizenship. 

To this past, his legacy flourishes on baseball gardens throughout The united states and within the easiest ranges of intercollegiate pageant.

Griffith, a World War I veteran, impressed the foundation of American Legion Baseball. 

It’s the people’s oldest arranged adolescence baseball league, based just about a century in the past in the summertime of 1925.  

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About 100,000 youngsters within the United States ages 15 to 19 play games American Legion Baseball every summer season on 3,500 groups from coast to coast.

“Fitness and health posed problems for military personnel in World War I,” Jeffrey Stoffer, writer of American Legion Album, instructed Fox Information Virtual.

“The veterans who came back and started their Legion posts remembered those problems vividly.”

Via some accounts, part of all Global Warfare I enlistees failed to satisfy modest bodily health necessities. 

Griffith on the future used to be a nationally known college sports administrator, the primary commissioner of the convention now referred to as the Fat Ten. 

“Fitness and health posed problems for military personnel in World War I.” — Jeffrey Stoffer, American Legion Album

He presented a method to give a boost to the people’s adolescence: Play games ball!

“There is nothing in our national life that stresses the qualities that are stressed in our athletics,” Griffith stated in an impassioned pronunciation ahead of the South Dakota American Legion surrounding conference on July 17, 1925.

“The qualities of intelligent courage, the fighting instinct, cooperation, promise and the ability to carry out that promise, all of these are things … are stressed in our athletic games.” 

Ted Williams, at bat, and Yogi Berra, catcher, are a number of the 82 Nationwide Baseball Corridor of Status legends who performed American Legion Baseball as teenagers. (Getty Pictures)

He steered the American Legion “could well consider the advisability of assisting in the training of young Americans through our athletic games.” 

American Legion Baseball fielded groups in 15 states refer to season. It has since grown to all 50 states. 

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Griffith, an athlete himself, saw competition as the key to a fit, fighting youth and a critical cog in the Arsenal of Democracy. 

The American Legion was the perfect partner. The patriotic organization itself was founded in the immediate aftermath of World War I; the first American Legion caucus of veterans met in Paris in March 1919.  

John L. Griffith, a World War I veteran and commissioner of what’s now the Big Ten, inspired the creation of American Legion Baseball when he issued a call to action at the South Dakota American Legion convention of 1925.  (Courtesy American Legion)

Griffith’s belief in national strength through sports found advocates in the highest levels of the military.

“At the gardens of pleasant strife are sown the seeds which, in alternative years and on alternative gardens, will undergo the culmination of victory,” Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously said, the words chiseled in granite today at West Point. 

Griffith, it turns out, was preparing the youth of America to fight in World War II. 

In the service of Uncle Sam

John Lorenzo Griffith was born on Aug. 20, 1877 in Mount Carroll, Illinois, to Hugh Jordan and Lucy Luella (Cummings) Griffith. 

He attended tiny Beloit College in Wisconsin, where he became the sports editor of the school newspaper before graduating in 1902.

John L. Griffith from the Drake University yearbook, published 1918, where he served as dean of men and was a prominent sports coach.  (Drake University Archives & Special Collections)

He maintained an interest in sports journalism throughout his life. Among other accomplishments, he founded the influential publication “The Athletic Magazine.”

Griffith became a nationally recognized college sports coach and administrator, most notably in track and field at Drake University. 

“Operating and farmland occasions have been … a technique to retain troops well-dressed generation in France.”

He was well into his career and nearing age 40 when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. 

He dutifully enlisted in the service of Uncle Sam. He served stateside at Camp Dodge, Iowa, as an officer in a U.S. Army machine gun unit. 

It was there that he earned the rank of major — and was later often called by his military rank when back in civilian life.

World War I saw advances in training troops. Yet that was not enough for Griffith. 

Soldiers find ingenious ways to scale a wall during training at Camp Wadsworth, South Carolina, circa 1918. American Legion Baseball founder John L. Griffith, and other World War I veterans, were dismayed by the overall fitness of American troops entering the conflict. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Legion ball fuels the Big Leagues

After the war, Griffith returned to his career as a college sports coach and administrator, carrying with him a renewed belief in the need for a fitter American youth.

The American Legion members, almost all of them fellow World War I veterans, enthusiastically embraced his 1925 call for a stronger, more competitive youth of America — teenagers of both sound mind and body instilled with the virtues of good citizenship. 

The Oakland, California, boys baseball team defeated the team from Worcester, Massachusetts, 4-0, in the opening game of the American Legion’s Junior World Series at Oomiskey Park on Aug. 1, 1928.  (George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images)

“They arranged and backed groups, drafted native schedules and carried out championship tourneys,” The American Legion writes in its online history of the baseball program.

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American Legion Post 9 in Milbank, South Dakota, where Griffith issued his call to action, fielded one of the organization’s very first baseball teams. 

The small community proudly embraces its heritage as the birthplace of American Legion Baseball.

“Baseball is a interest and a keenness for the family of Milbank.” 

“Baseball is a interest and a keenness for the family of Milbank and the climate segment,” Tim Jurgens, past commander of Miller-Birch American Legion Post 9 in Milbank, told Fox News Digital.

“Major League Baseball has backed Legion Baseball nearly since its inception,” notes the American Legion in its history of its baseball program.

A monument marks Milbank, South Dakota, as the birthplace of American Legion Baseball on July 17, 1925. The organization, the monument reads, “used to be first proposed as a program of provider to the adolescence of The united states.” (Courtesy Birch-Miller American Legion Post No. 9)

“And Legion Baseball has returned the bias, churning out Main League potentialities for the reason that alumni bottom has been used plethora to be scouted.”

The American Legion says the collection of its baseball avid gamers who’ve long past directly to the Fat Leagues is just too diverse to chart.

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On the other hand, it notes that “greater than part of stream major-leaguers performed Legion Baseball. So did nearly each and every running Main League Baseball supervisor, together with a number of former commissioners.”

American Legion Baseball has produced 82 players who have gone on to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. 

Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Bob Feller finds plenty of volunteer catchers as he exits the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II. Feller is among 82 National Baseball Hall of Fame performers who learned the game and civic service playing American Legion Baseball as a teenager. He volunteered for the Navy the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. (Getty Images)

Many of the nation’s greatest baseball players were also among its most distinguished soldiers. 

Red Sox slugger Ted Williams served as a fighter pilot in both World War II and Korea. 

“Greater than part of stream major-leaguers performed Legion Baseball.”

Yankees catcher Yogi Berra fought at Utah Beach with the U.S. Navy on D-Day. Lawrence Peter Berra actually earned his famous nickname from a teammate while playing American Legion Baseball.

Indians pitcher Bob Feller was six years into his Hall of Fame baseball career when he risked his future as an athlete to enlist in the U.S. Navy on the darkest day in its history: Dec. 7, 1941. 

‘He was a patriot’

John L. Griffith died in Chicago on Dec. 7, 1944, three years to the day after the nation was plunged into World War II with the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

He reportedly succumbed to heart failure. 

Major John L. Griffith was a leading figure in American youth and collegiate sports in the first half of the 20th century. (Drake University Archives & Special Collections)

He was 67 years old. 

He is buried today at Oak Hill Cemetery in his hometown of Mount Carroll, Illinois.

The tide of World War II had clearly turned in favor of the United States and its Allies at the end of 1944.  

“Via the future he died he’s smartly conscious that (his efforts) to advertise health have been enjoying a good-looking weighty function within the battle aim.” 

“Via the future he died he’s smartly conscious that (his efforts) to advertise health have been enjoying a good-looking weighty function within the battle aim,” Winona State University professor Dr. Matthew Lindaman, author of the 2018 biography, “Are compatible for The united states: Main John L. Griffith and the Quest for Athletics and Condition,” instructed Fox Information Virtual.

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“He most certainly would have recognized that the desires he noticed next Global Warfare I for athletic coaching would have produced some luck.” 

Griffiths’ death left a huge hole in amateur athletics across the nation. 

The 1930 American Legion Baseball team from Post 9, Milbank, South Dakota. American Legion Baseball was born in Milbank in 1925 — and the community still embraces its baseball heritage today.  (Courtesy Birch-Miller American Legion Post 9)

“For an extended future to come back, it’s going to be tough to think about the Fat Ten with out Main John L. Griffith,” Ohio State University athletic director Lynn St. John wrote in the days that followed.

“It is going to be similarly parched to visualise the Nationwide Collegiate Athletic Affiliation with out him.”

The work of American Legion Baseball that he inspired continues today. 

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The American Legion in Milbank, South Dakota, is feverishly working to raise millions of dollars to build a new state-of-the-art facility for Legion ball and major baseball competitions. 

John L Griffith, right, challenged the American Legion to support youth sports at a convention in Milbank, South Dakota, on July 17, 1925. The 1930 Milbank American Legion Baseball team is shown at left. (American Legion Post 9/Public Domain)

The goal is to open in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Griffith’s vision in the town where American Legion Baseball began in 1925. 

The hope is to include an American Legion Baseball museum, said Jurgens, the former Post 9 commander. 

Patriotism remains essential to the mission of American Legion Baseball. 

“The American Legion must stand for patriotism,” Jake Comer, past American Legion national commander and current member of the American Legion World Series Board of Directors, told Fox News Digital. 

“In lots of senses of the oath, he used to be a patriot.”

Patriotism, he said, is much more than waving the flag. 

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Patriotism, in keeping with the American Legion Baseball creed, stands for “a pitch soul, a blank thoughts and a wholesome frame.” 

It additionally stands for just right citizenship. 

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“Griffith legitimately idea communism used to be a significant ultimatum next Global Warfare I and some of the techniques to cancel it used to be to develop a people of health,” said Lindaman. 

“In lots of senses of the oath, he used to be a patriot.”