1920 Joe Jackson Type III Photograph

Why this print, and why Type III

Underwood & Underwood built this as a composite for newspapers: a close-up of the batting grip pasted beside a full-figure White Sox portrait, then re-photographed onto a new negative. Every print of that layout comes from the copy negative, which is why PSA typed it Type III — and why that is not a knock. There was never an original-negative print of this composite.

The typed caption on the reverse headlines “MEN OF 1000 SWATS!” and frames Jackson among the era’s batting marvels. The left half is the grip (“how the best batsman holds his bat”); the right half is Jackson in the SOX uniform, smiling, glove on, in front of the grandstand. Goldin and others have called the bat Black Betsy; nothing on the print itself proves which bat it is.

Dating

The caption credits Jackson with 1,751 “slugs” (hits). He entered 1920 with 1,554 and reached 1,751 on September 14, 1920, at home against Washington. That puts the typed caption in about mid-September 1920 — the same narrow window when the Black Sox scandal was about to break. Jackson’s grand jury testimony became public on September 28, and the club suspended the eight that week. A feature calling him the American League’s best batter had roughly two weeks in which an editor might still have run it.

Getty / Corbis metadata and contemporary captions date the underlying photographs to May 25, 1920. The composite and caption were almost certainly assembled later, in September, for the “Men of 1000 Swats” series. Promotional lines calling him the league’s best batter were copy, not a literal batting-title claim — Sisler won the 1920 title at .407; Jackson hit .382.

Early state of the layout

Compared with a later online/archive version of the same composite, this print shows a little more of Jackson’s sleeve on the right and does not carry the inked S-282324 box that appears on the numbered negative. Underwood typed that serial on the caption, but this file print appears to predate the numbered form of the negative — an early agency print with original stamps and caption, still Type III by definition.

Confirmed June 1920 newspaper uses of the image

Versions of the composite ran that June (before the September caption’s hit count), including:

• East St. Louis Daily Journal (IL), June 1, 1920, p.6 — “Old Timer Joe Jackson Ranks Near Top Among A. L. Batters.”
• Janesville Daily Gazette (WI), June 4, 1920, p.12 — same layout, Underwood credit.
• Evening Times-Republican (Marshalltown, IA), June 7, 1920, p.3 — same feature.