ABSTRACT
Historian Peter Bjarkman has written that baseball is a game which surely does not mean half of the things we take it to mean. As John Thorn has argued, The national pastime became the great repository of national ideals, the symbol of all that was good in American life: fair play; the rule of law; equal opportunity; the brotherhood of man; and more. For all historical preoccupation with the American dream, rarely have the author examined very closely its true meaning and implications. Baseball has been classist, in the economic sense, and yet, through Curt Flood and Marvin Miller, it also pioneered the end to wage slavery not only in baseball but in all professional sports, and it might yet serve as a model for America's broader labor movement. The increasing attempts to impose the American way abroad seem correlated with an increasing tendency for Americans to question their society at home.
