In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6.1 (2003) 186-188



[Access article in PDF]
Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender, and the National Pastime. Edited by Robert Elias. Armonk, N.Y.: M. D. Sharpe Press, 2001; pp xviii + 264. $45.95 cloth.

The essays in Robert Elias's volume present the development of baseball and of America as linked, perplexing, and rife with ambiguities. A diverse group of authors explores the social, political, and economic connections between baseball and American culture, illuminating incongruities between reality and the persistent dream in both. The book's three sections are evident in its subtitle. The first investigates how, within the context of the "American dream," race and ethnicity have functioned historically in baseball and the United States; the second looks at the increasing corporatization, changing material conditions, and technological improvements that have created the same disparities of wealth in the sport as in the society; the third examines the historical relationship between women and baseball, and illuminates the broader social implications of gender in American culture.

Elias presents the "American dream" as a mythic vision of "the land of opportunity where . . . dedication and hard work" guarantees success to everyone (5). Arguing for a critical reevaluation of the dream, Elias points to some of its obvious contradictions: hard work is no guarantee of financial reward, gender and racial equality remain fictions, and injustice, political repression, and limited economic choices are reality for many Americans. Baseball represents the "American dream" and reflects "both the successes and failures of the American way" (6-9). Just as it validates the notion of the "self-made man," demonstrates "the racial and ethnic mobility that occurs in an egalitarian . . . society," and emphasizes "positive values such as honesty, fair play, wholesomeness" (11-12), baseball limits minority opportunities, excludes women, and displays the same economic inequalities and corporate values endemic in America. Because of its cultural importance, however, Elias [End Page 186] claims that baseball could help create a more egalitarian society. Thus, baseball's links to the American dream and the contradictions and potential inherent in both constitute the framework for the book's subsequent essays.

Roger Kahn argues that Jackie Robinson's 1947 baseball debut transcended the sport and enabled many Americans to accept racial integration, thereby contributing to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Sociologist Peter Drier then explores Robinson's changing political consciousness, the corporatization of baseball and America and the decline of unionism, and the "failure of baseball's high-salaried [unionized] ballplayers . . . to engage in today's political and social struggles" (56-57), and reminds us that Robinson's legacy is the "unfinished agenda of the civil rights revolution—a more equal society for all" (58). Next come the reminiscences of San Francisco Giants manager Dusty Baker and Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda, an essay by historian Samuel O. Regalado discussing the experiences of Sammy Sosa and other Latin American ballplayers within the context of the Horatio Alger myth, poet Andrei Codrescu's exploration of baseball's relationship to American democracy, and an overview by historian Joel Franks of the diverse ethnic and cultural groups playing "bush-league" baseball in California between 1900 and the 1940s. The importance of baseball to Japanese Americans trying to overcome xenophobic attitudes during the 1920s and 1930s, and to retain their culture during the internments of the 1940s, is highlighted by filmmaker Kerry Yo Nakagawa. Concluding this long first segment are a biographical essay on former major league player and umpire "Babe" Pinelli by his grandson and a piece by sociologist William Edwards discussing ways that baseball "affirms, in part, [America's] creed that any boy can rise above the lowliest situation to become a national hero" (141).

The book's material segment opens with an essay by historian Paul Zingg that offers a biographical sketch of Hall of Fame outfielder Harry Hooper, a college graduate who rose from poverty to middle-class status thanks to baseball. Following Zingg come two of the collection's most thought-provoking pieces. Literary critic Suzanne...

pdf