The Power Within Man: The Archetype of the Agrarian Farmboy with the Rocket Arm at the Turn of the Atomic Modern Age

A 1930s studio portrait of the flamethrowing Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians, likely taken while he was still in high school; just before his major league debut. Part of the Bob Feller Collection.

The American mid-century was a time of technicolor; a bursting of the fulfillment of the promise of the Industrial Age; a V-Day of wartime — as America and the Allied powers emerged victorious from the greatest war in world history; a war fought with the most advanced technologies, many of which had just emerged into global prominence over the span of the prior fifty years, thanks to the industrial revolution of modernity.

Mankind and America were at a crux — leaning ever moreso on the technologies it had created to advance its domestic and political powers. However, it was at this moment that a critical American spiritual, religious, and psychological archetype reached full fulfillment in the mythic lexicon of American baseball: the farmboy with the rocket arm — whose powers were born from the salt of the earth; the humblest beginnings of America’s rapidly fading agrarian past — whose powers astonished, astounded, and amazed this new machine democracy, even in the face of its steel and coal revelations and revolutions of the social and cultural milieu.

There were two men who most fully embodied this archetype: the first was Dizzy Dean, America’s Depression salvation, trickster clown and speedball wizard, who was born as a poor sharecropper in Arkansas in the early century and emerged in the fullness of his powers precisely when America needed him most — an irreverent farmboy at the face of the St. Louis “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals, a dirtbag bunch equipped to beat any team on either side of the American and National Leagues. Dean won 30 games and a title at the height of American collective economic misery and societal collapse; at the cultural bridge moment just before the second World War. As Dean’s mythic arc too collapsed due to an unfortunate injury suffered in an All Star Game match with a line drive to his toe, the fulfillment of the archetypal promise of Dean rose.

His name was Bob Feller, Iowa farmboy — raised on farm chores, a nearly completed high school education; bearer of a fastball which required military study to measure. His was a speed that was organic: practiced with his father on their makeshift farm ballfield; a speed that was raised on what would later be culturally categorized as the “All American” way of life — a bizarre 1950s ethos that was caught in the absurd stretching of the American consciousness between a near to come digital world of abstract speed, efficiency, and fracturing of perception into screens; the fuzzy recollection of an American world where radio and the town car barreled forth out of the works of the Wright brothers in a field in North Carolina.

Everything was faster. The cars became sleek; the planes became equipped to drop atom bombs on countries around the world. The atom bomb itself grew out of Feller’s time; yet, it was Feller’s uncaptureable fastball which most captivated the American public. He was simply unhittable. In his debut start as a seventeen year old at the tail end of the 1930s, he struck out 15 St. Louis Browns hitters. After Feller returned from the war, the U.S. military attempted to measure the speed of his fastball using the Lumiline Chronograph, a machine used to measure shell velocity during the war.

Feller embodied the mad paradox of his fulfilled industrial age of the mid-century, serialized in the literature by Absurdist playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, and Samuel Beckett. Stoppard and Albee in particular wrote about the insane contradictions of mid-century American society — a world embroiled in propriety and mannerisms that were outstripped by the explosion of technology and consciousness expansion of the era which culminated in the man on the moon project of 1969 — the year the improbable expansion New York Mets won their first World Series with the aid of the impeccable Tom Seaver.

Feller was the farmboy from humble beginnings, the prototypical corn-fed Midwestern sports star with preternatural athletic talent — fostered in his practice at the art of pitching with his father on the farm; supplemented by his exercise and diet tending the tasks and chores required of him therein. And yet, his speed was unhittable; hitherto unseen. Throughout his career his fastball was measured anywhere upwards of 98.6mph to an astounding 107mph. The nature of the technology still struggled to wrap its mind around him. His fastball beat a police motorcycle. He was nicknamed “Rapid Robert”.

Feller’s legend was a legend born in a time where the world was being captured and conquered with the imaging clarity of modern devices of increasing exactitude: surveilling and cornering the world; naming and numbering it with increasing precision. And yet it was his farm born fastball of America’s lost agrarian past which was uncategorizable and unhittable. He was, as it were, the last American myth in a world and age where photography became television; man went to the moon; America engaged in a world war documented with immense clarity on the big screen.

The world was becoming known through technology in ways which began to refuse myth; the tall tales which enabled the mythic beginnings of early baseball. There was no more hearsay and word of mouth. Now there were metrics, measurements, yardsticks; multiple levels of documentation. America became policed terrain: a terrain of solid identities, fully documented backstories, clear paperwork; the camera eye of a cultural and social government which had colonized the backwoods and the darkness of the historical mystery of the pre-modern world into organized order and form. Now there would be, in just a few decades, credit, the digital world; archives which no longer relied purely on paper, but could be conjured up instantaneously.

What occurred here was America’s loss of mythic self and the institution of a historically documented and thus solidified self. A self trapped by record; refused of change by the stasis of a mass cultural trap of an inescapable, documented historical past and present, which assured a stasis of futurity. Feller’s uncaptureable fastball functioned as a profound anomaly; it spoke directly to the American subconscious: out of the ground and the earth; the flesh and the body of our dying agrarian world — there was still the unconquerable in nature. And it emerged directly from the American heartland, as a representative force of the American spirit which was rapidly being paved over, financialized, abstracted, digitized, and mechanized into an oblivion of repetition; the presumption of knowledge via colonized definition of nature, space, and time.

“Rapid Robert” performed the dying rite of the mythic function back to the American public: a mythic function of the unconquered possibilities within man that escaped and evaded precise knowledge and constitution. With his efforts and physical expression alone, wordlessly, Feller exhibited that the modern world still could not stretch to know and pronounce that which escaped the bats of even the game’s greatest hitters; the measuring methods attempted — most notably here by the state and federal government — to corral his internal powers; by letter or by number define them and thus know them, own them, possess them; absorb them into the institution of the game of technological information.

Fellers power was not statistical, nor was it mechanical — it was born within the practice in the fields of the farms with his father in the most unassuming of all American places: not New York City, not on a military base — but an Iowan family farm. He emerged from the heart and center of the American territories and proclaimed the wild (his fastball too, as a youth was quite wild — producing a league leading 208 walks in 1938) in the midst of a pseudo-colonized terrain of the natural, agricultural roots of America’s rapidly becoming-mythic past. He was history that refused to die; the primordial that refused to die: in that what he produced and expressed through him could not be quantified, even by the greatest endeavors of the American technological, military, industrial machine.

This was the nature of the rocket armed farmboy that Feller advanced from Dean. Dean performed the purgative function of the consciousness grounded in the play and poverty; the inner conquering of hardship to produce a character capable of metabolizing America’s greatest Depression with joy and ineffable lightness, effort, quip, and skill upon the field of baseball. He was the early and first figuration of what Feller was to represent and become — the American spirit, indominable in the face of a presumed progress which was rapidly reducing the human to a statistic, a number, a device that could be measured and thus “known” in a hyper-materialistic sense as a performance metric or a cog in the industrial machine of Dean’s youth — a machine that could now, through technological advancement, be reported on through measurements; thus, the civilizational mechanism could claim to know it.

It was the very joy and irreverence of Dean’s youthful participation and fire-armed enthusiasm which Feller transmuted through the discipline and focus that produced a refined version of the direction and foundation of what the masterful agrarian pitcher could and would provide to the American public: a continually reified and perfected vision of what it meant to emerge from the American heartland, equipped with the medicine of the age. In Dean’s case — a humor, ballast of character; skill to match which could captivate the American economic misery of his time — and in Feller’s, a speedball that could outrun the technological devices which his time revered for their ability to increasingly turn the substance of life into a material statistic. Both iterations and revolutions of the archetype were affirmations of the profound existential humanity of the proletarian American agrarian worker; the young agrarian man — raised not on the reportage of steel machines becoming conscious — but on the fat and straw of the purple mountain majesties of America’s still yet untamed natural world; the broad and healthy devices which affirmed the body; like Whitman said of the game in 1888:

“I like your interest in sports–ball, chiefest of all–baseball particularly: baseball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen–generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race.”

Feller, the young man from Van Meter, showed the American people that there was still yet flesh and blood unconquered by the mature and maturing industrial and war machinery of the three generations past. Even as the United States and the world were achieving full modernity, there were still capacities within man that evaded capture, codification, and knowledge — broad and deep feats from within the well of the human that would astonish, astound, amaze, and resist formalization and knowledge. And as such, maintain and assure the possibility of magic, spirit, and religion within the populace and species at large.

It was this, the uncaptureable, which was fundamentally the spirit of Whitman, America’s poet, who proclaimed: I am large; I contain multitudes. The American spirit was dependent upon this premise. And this was Whitman’s excitement with baseball: the perennial possibility of the emergence of the American spirit through the profound capacity of the body which would astound, amaze; renew faith in the grand and powerful nature of the deep cosmic unknown which penetrated everything from the blade of grass to the star. It was upon that premise that baseball was best fulfilled; furthermore, the field of baseball which enabled it to be thus.

Feller as a man at the crux of this time was a critical emergence: precisely when America most needed affirmation of this central Whitman-esque principle — in the face of the anxiety of the conquered unknown. As man geared up for launching toward the moon; shell speeds were measured by military technology; the atom bomb was detonated just prior to Feller’s return to the big leagues from the war as a grown man, the American public and the world feared that mankind had been outmoded, conquered; even destroyed by the very technologically modified beast it had created within the heart of its civilization. As Robert Oppenheimer said, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds , as he witnessed the first atomic bomb test in 1945, the year before Feller — as he returned from war — struck out an impossible 348 hitters.

As Oppenheimer’s technologies and mankind’s narrowing window of numbers and functional systems and grids and machines generated from the metals and fossil fuels of the earth continued to destroy and whittle away possibilities and registers by way of material colonization and the attempt to stringently, materially identify and thus “know” phenomena, Feller was the elucidation and renewal of the authentic, organic, emergent creative American spirit through direct physical expression. If Fermi could split the atom, but no one could measure the titanic speed of Feller’s fastball — what did this mean for the truth of science and material philosophy in the face of the perennial wisdom of America’s soul, grown from the farmer’s heart and dedicated, discipline and practice?

Feller was not formally nor classically trained to become a baseball legend. He pitched with his father. He was not engineered to become great, yet was raised steeped in the passionate familial and ancestral lineage of the love of the game. He was no lab, or was he a lab coat or an experiment. He was no machine or machine mind — in the words of Chaplin. Feller was raised on the rhythms of sun and moon; sea and stars. He was, and is, the return of Whitman’s original American premise in the midst of technological turmoil and conquering number and letter: the beating heart and immediacy of the possibility of the fantastic, emergent directly from the very unknown, spiraling form which Oppenheimer’s derivative quotation, too, emerged from — The Bhagavad Gita , an ancient Hindu text on the missives of the soul and the spiritual journey of life incarnate.

Feller’s work in the world was about more than an autopsy of the flesh. It was about, at last, the flesh as a vessel; the unconquerable, deep, profound powers that astonish and amaze — powers of the soul; powers that emerge directly, unmediated by symbol. Directly through it. As expressions of the unknown fabric of the mysteries of the incarnate soul at work through, in, and as — beneath all material surfaces and quantities — the body of the world.