Abstract

"From Scrutiny to Subsidy: Sport, the State, and Making New Monopolies"

Evan Brown, Columbia University (e.d.brown@columbia.edu)

This paper examines the legal and political history of North American professional sports from 1949 to 1961, a critical interval in which antimonopoly pressure threatened to restructure the industry. Labor disputes and conflicts between leagues led to challenges in the courts and Congressional hearings. Most consideration of this history emphasizes the supposed exemption granted to baseball as a legal question, shortchanging the ensuing political contest. Through sustained engagement with state institutions, sports leagues converted debate over monopoly into a vehicle for securing new privileges. All involved, in their own way, developed the novel claim that professional sport served the public interest—an interest that demanded the protection of the private monopolies that supplied it. The most direct outcome of this process, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, supercharged the market power of sports leagues in the growing sphere of television. Beyond its notable consequences for the sport industry, this history makes two broader suggestions. The first concerns the possibilities and pitfalls of antitrust as a resource for labor: professional athletes, seeing few other prospects, took an imperfect tool about as far as it could go with mixed results. The second illustrates how an appeal to the public good, when attached to sports and their audiences, slid almost effortlessly into a notion of consumer welfare. These outcomes underscore some of the capacities and limitations of antimonopoly as a political instrument for shaping American economic life in the mid-twentieth century.