Free markets today are in somewhat ill repute, having been tarnished, I think, by eight years of mishandling by a Republican administration that essentially shit on the Libertarian wing of the party at every opportunity. This has allowed proponents of managed capitalism or welfare state capitalism to stage an intellectual comeback of sorts, arguing that all we've see from the market is a massive transfer of wealth upward: the rich get richer, the middle class gets worried, and the poor get poorer.
I want to point out a different perspective on free markets, but I will warn you ahead of time that I'm not going to provide a bunch of easy URLs to check out the facts behind my reasoning, mostly because it comes from studies in those most antiquated of sources: books. There will be a bibliography at the end; do your own homework.
Here's my thesis: it is sometimes the case that unfettered free markets lead rather than follow with respect to positive social change.
Case in point: Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka KS (1956) laid the groundwork for ending decades of separate but equal public education in America. The NAACP had filed multiple lawsuits over the previous decade seeking this result, and it came as a huge shock to everyone concerned that it was Chief Justice Earl Warren (who, as governor of California during WW2, had spearheaded the internment and property seizure of Japanese-American citizens) who put together that majority. Throughout my youth, when we were driving to visit my maternal grandmother (no Interstates!) in Powhatan, Virginia, we would always pass a huge IMPEACH EARL WARREN billboard, erected courtesy of the John Birch Society.
Segregated education required a Supreme Court decision to abolish it.
Ironically, market dynamics had forced professional baseball in 1946, followed by minor league baseball in the early 1950s, to de-segregated without benefit of court orders, strikes, or massive resistance. It can be argued that the integration of professional sports (minor league being equally important here because there was no major league team south of DC or Baltimore) helped create the atmosphere that made school integration a possible outcome for the Supreme Court.
Why did it happen?
African-Americans had played professional ball in small numbers going back into the 1870s, but soon after the turn of the century (certainly Plessy had something to do with it), they began being systematically excluded from pro teams. Since the games were also segregated (or at least the Black fans were crowded into small stands far away from the whites), there was a demand in the African-American community for their own teams. Traveling teams developed into teams affiliated with certain cities (often owned by the richest Black businessman in the area): the Homestead Grays, the Newark Eagles, the New York Cubans....
Though never as tightly organized as the majors (and operating under the handicap of having no reserve clause) the Negro Leagues had organized into an ongoing business by the early 1920s, with both a Negro National and Negro American League.
During the off-seasons, the very best players like Josh Gibson would head to Cuba to play. Others stayed home and joined traveling teams. One or two legitimate Negro League stars and a bunch of wannabes would barnstorm around the country playing exhibition games against white teams composed of (you guessed it) one or two legitimate Major League stars and a bunch of wannabes (Bob Feller was big on the barnstorming tour). So people began to get used to watching Black and White players compete under certain conditions. By this time there were also universities in the north that fielded integrated teams (although they usually left the Black players at home when playing below the Mason-Dixon Line).
Ironically, if you peruse the team photographs of the mid to late 1930s you will see a lot of apparent Black guys--aha, you fool, they're all Cubans, not Negroes, so we can play them! Plus, they play cheaper than real white guys.
Had all things been equal the draw of big Negro League stars like Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Satchel Paige would probably have led to baseball's integration in the late 1930s. Washington Nationals owner Clark Griffith gave tryouts to several Negro league stars then, but didn't sign any of them partly because (ironically) he was making more money renting DC's Giffith Field out to the Homestead Greys that he was making from his own franchise. He was actually afraid that he'd scuttle the Greys and his own income. Bill Veeck came up with a plan to buy last place Cleveland, fire all the players, and replace them en masse with the Negro League Newark Eagles. There were a variety of other attempts, mostly because the Negro League teams even drew some white fans, and their stars were widely known.
But all of these foundered on the Commissioner of Baseball, Keenesaw Mountain Landis, a dedicated segregationist who killed every single idea that crossed his desk. Not until Landis died in 1944, to be replaced former Tennessee Senator Happy Chandler. Chandler--like Earl Warren--would have been nobody's bet to allow baseball to integrate. As a Senator he had repeatedly rejected the attempts of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP to get him to support a Federal anti-lynching law. But World War Two had convinced Chandler, baseball's owners, and the fans that the talent pool among white players was pretty damn thin, and everyone knew national expansion of the sport was on the horizon. So when Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers floated a plan to have Jackie Robinson play for a year in AAA ball in Canada and then come to the Dodgers in 1946, Chandler accepted it. The rapidity with which other teams scooped up the available Negro League stars from 1947 on suggests that they'd been scouting the territory for some time.
Interestingly enough, Branch Rickey was not just significant for Jackie Robinson, he also essentially created the modern farm-team system, linking specific minor league teams at different levels to a parent pro team. Because the pros started by cherry picking the all stars from the Negro Leagues, professional baseball ironically integrated from the top down--the minors were the last to have Black players.
The first Black players hit the minors in about 1950, and were, for the most part, guys who were near the end of their careers in the bigs, who'd been picked up for a season or so, and then shipped down to AAA. Most of these assignments took place north of the Mason Dixon line, and some of these players enjoyed long, successful twilight careers in places like Rochester NY or Milwaukee WI. The real integration of the minors didn't start until the Negro Leagues had been pretty well mined of ready talent, and there was a need to recruit rookies from high schools and colleges and bring them up through the farm system. Problem was--most of the A and AA leagues were in the South.
This was a pretty painful process, as documented in an incredible book by Jim Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow, The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South, that documents--league by league--the story of sports integration in the Jim Crow South during the 1950s. What's interesting is that roughly two-thirds of the Southern minor leagues had already been thoroughly integrated by the time of Brown v Board of Education.
Amazingly, major league--and then minor league--baseball achieved integration without a single lawsuit (OK, maybe there were one or two nuisance suits against integration in the South). How? A mixture of the profit motive and the supply & demand of true big league talent. World War Two [when the best players were away in uniform] convinced the owners thoroughly that people would not come out to see mediocre players. Two decades of integrated non-league play and the sharing of some stadiums convinced them that Blacks could play, no matter what white supremacists said.
Why did baseball manage to integrate well in advance of the public schools? I'd offer the explanation that the public schools, being government organizations, were covered under Plessy v Ferguson, and had no market incentives whatsoever to change until the courts ordered them to do so. This seemed such an unlikely event that no one--not even people who actually wanted integration ever did any serious planning for what would happen in a court decision's aftermath.
Moreover, once the basic decision to integrate baseball happened, the other professional sports fell rapidly into line. Admittedly there remained a definite ambient racism (no Black quarterbacks or coaches for a long time) behind the scenes, but contrast that to the truly messy, divisive process of implementing the Brown decision and you have a critical contrast.
I wonder seriously if, writing in another two decades, a future historian will attribute the sea change that has taken place with respect to gays and lesbians in this country since the late 1980s to Affirmative Action and government programs or market forces. (Note that I am certainly not saying discrimination has ended, but you cannot deny there has been a huge movement in this area.)
My conclusion? The comparative study of integrating professional baseball and public education suggests that at least in some cases the market is a more effective agent for positive social change than government and the law.
This is something we would do well to remember.
Partial bibliography
Jim Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow, The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South
Brad Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays
Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams
Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer
Peter Golenbock, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers
I want to point out a different perspective on free markets, but I will warn you ahead of time that I'm not going to provide a bunch of easy URLs to check out the facts behind my reasoning, mostly because it comes from studies in those most antiquated of sources: books. There will be a bibliography at the end; do your own homework.
Here's my thesis: it is sometimes the case that unfettered free markets lead rather than follow with respect to positive social change.
Case in point: Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka KS (1956) laid the groundwork for ending decades of separate but equal public education in America. The NAACP had filed multiple lawsuits over the previous decade seeking this result, and it came as a huge shock to everyone concerned that it was Chief Justice Earl Warren (who, as governor of California during WW2, had spearheaded the internment and property seizure of Japanese-American citizens) who put together that majority. Throughout my youth, when we were driving to visit my maternal grandmother (no Interstates!) in Powhatan, Virginia, we would always pass a huge IMPEACH EARL WARREN billboard, erected courtesy of the John Birch Society.
Segregated education required a Supreme Court decision to abolish it.
Ironically, market dynamics had forced professional baseball in 1946, followed by minor league baseball in the early 1950s, to de-segregated without benefit of court orders, strikes, or massive resistance. It can be argued that the integration of professional sports (minor league being equally important here because there was no major league team south of DC or Baltimore) helped create the atmosphere that made school integration a possible outcome for the Supreme Court.
Why did it happen?
African-Americans had played professional ball in small numbers going back into the 1870s, but soon after the turn of the century (certainly Plessy had something to do with it), they began being systematically excluded from pro teams. Since the games were also segregated (or at least the Black fans were crowded into small stands far away from the whites), there was a demand in the African-American community for their own teams. Traveling teams developed into teams affiliated with certain cities (often owned by the richest Black businessman in the area): the Homestead Grays, the Newark Eagles, the New York Cubans....
Though never as tightly organized as the majors (and operating under the handicap of having no reserve clause) the Negro Leagues had organized into an ongoing business by the early 1920s, with both a Negro National and Negro American League.
During the off-seasons, the very best players like Josh Gibson would head to Cuba to play. Others stayed home and joined traveling teams. One or two legitimate Negro League stars and a bunch of wannabes would barnstorm around the country playing exhibition games against white teams composed of (you guessed it) one or two legitimate Major League stars and a bunch of wannabes (Bob Feller was big on the barnstorming tour). So people began to get used to watching Black and White players compete under certain conditions. By this time there were also universities in the north that fielded integrated teams (although they usually left the Black players at home when playing below the Mason-Dixon Line).
Ironically, if you peruse the team photographs of the mid to late 1930s you will see a lot of apparent Black guys--aha, you fool, they're all Cubans, not Negroes, so we can play them! Plus, they play cheaper than real white guys.
Had all things been equal the draw of big Negro League stars like Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Satchel Paige would probably have led to baseball's integration in the late 1930s. Washington Nationals owner Clark Griffith gave tryouts to several Negro league stars then, but didn't sign any of them partly because (ironically) he was making more money renting DC's Giffith Field out to the Homestead Greys that he was making from his own franchise. He was actually afraid that he'd scuttle the Greys and his own income. Bill Veeck came up with a plan to buy last place Cleveland, fire all the players, and replace them en masse with the Negro League Newark Eagles. There were a variety of other attempts, mostly because the Negro League teams even drew some white fans, and their stars were widely known.
But all of these foundered on the Commissioner of Baseball, Keenesaw Mountain Landis, a dedicated segregationist who killed every single idea that crossed his desk. Not until Landis died in 1944, to be replaced former Tennessee Senator Happy Chandler. Chandler--like Earl Warren--would have been nobody's bet to allow baseball to integrate. As a Senator he had repeatedly rejected the attempts of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP to get him to support a Federal anti-lynching law. But World War Two had convinced Chandler, baseball's owners, and the fans that the talent pool among white players was pretty damn thin, and everyone knew national expansion of the sport was on the horizon. So when Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers floated a plan to have Jackie Robinson play for a year in AAA ball in Canada and then come to the Dodgers in 1946, Chandler accepted it. The rapidity with which other teams scooped up the available Negro League stars from 1947 on suggests that they'd been scouting the territory for some time.
Interestingly enough, Branch Rickey was not just significant for Jackie Robinson, he also essentially created the modern farm-team system, linking specific minor league teams at different levels to a parent pro team. Because the pros started by cherry picking the all stars from the Negro Leagues, professional baseball ironically integrated from the top down--the minors were the last to have Black players.
The first Black players hit the minors in about 1950, and were, for the most part, guys who were near the end of their careers in the bigs, who'd been picked up for a season or so, and then shipped down to AAA. Most of these assignments took place north of the Mason Dixon line, and some of these players enjoyed long, successful twilight careers in places like Rochester NY or Milwaukee WI. The real integration of the minors didn't start until the Negro Leagues had been pretty well mined of ready talent, and there was a need to recruit rookies from high schools and colleges and bring them up through the farm system. Problem was--most of the A and AA leagues were in the South.
This was a pretty painful process, as documented in an incredible book by Jim Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow, The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South, that documents--league by league--the story of sports integration in the Jim Crow South during the 1950s. What's interesting is that roughly two-thirds of the Southern minor leagues had already been thoroughly integrated by the time of Brown v Board of Education.
Amazingly, major league--and then minor league--baseball achieved integration without a single lawsuit (OK, maybe there were one or two nuisance suits against integration in the South). How? A mixture of the profit motive and the supply & demand of true big league talent. World War Two [when the best players were away in uniform] convinced the owners thoroughly that people would not come out to see mediocre players. Two decades of integrated non-league play and the sharing of some stadiums convinced them that Blacks could play, no matter what white supremacists said.
Why did baseball manage to integrate well in advance of the public schools? I'd offer the explanation that the public schools, being government organizations, were covered under Plessy v Ferguson, and had no market incentives whatsoever to change until the courts ordered them to do so. This seemed such an unlikely event that no one--not even people who actually wanted integration ever did any serious planning for what would happen in a court decision's aftermath.
Moreover, once the basic decision to integrate baseball happened, the other professional sports fell rapidly into line. Admittedly there remained a definite ambient racism (no Black quarterbacks or coaches for a long time) behind the scenes, but contrast that to the truly messy, divisive process of implementing the Brown decision and you have a critical contrast.
I wonder seriously if, writing in another two decades, a future historian will attribute the sea change that has taken place with respect to gays and lesbians in this country since the late 1980s to Affirmative Action and government programs or market forces. (Note that I am certainly not saying discrimination has ended, but you cannot deny there has been a huge movement in this area.)
My conclusion? The comparative study of integrating professional baseball and public education suggests that at least in some cases the market is a more effective agent for positive social change than government and the law.
This is something we would do well to remember.
Partial bibliography
Jim Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow, The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South
Brad Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays
Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams
Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer
Peter Golenbock, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers
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