Originally published on Medium on December 16. 2018
Curt Flood was a solid outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals between 1956 and 1969. Flood fashioned a respectable career OPS of .732 in almost 7,000 plate appearances while winning 7 Gold Gloves for his play in the field.
In 1970, Flood decided he didn’t want to play for the Phillies after a trade, and filed a lawsuit against the MLB, asking the MLB to allow true free agency for the first time. The lawsuit argued that baseball teams were violating federal anti-trust legislation by not allowing players to choose which teams they would play for. Flood sat out the 1970 season as the case proceeded, played 13 games in 1971, and then never played in the MLB again. It has long been rumored he was blackballed by the MLB owners and commissioner in retaliation for threatening their power. In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled against Flood. Despite this setback, his lawsuit eventually led to the seminal “Seitz decision” in arbitration. The1976 Seitz Decision was the genesis of the modern free agency system, which generated millions of dollars for players while granting them the freedom to choose their employer.
Flood was reportedly bitter about his treatment by the MLB, and struggled in for years with alcoholism, before a happier latter quarter of his life.
Flood’s courageous stance cost him dearly. But it benefited hundreds of players after him. Flood was a martyr to the cause of shifting the Overton window.
“The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, describes the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who, in his description of his window, claimed that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences.[1][2] According to Overton’s description, his window includes a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.”
Many important contributors to our modern, liberal order are under-appreciated or unknown; they, like Curt Flood, successfully shifted the Overton Window but at the cost of their standing in society, their fortunes, or, in some cases, their life.
Conversely, the coarsening of public discourse can be attributed to those martyrs who shifted the acceptable range of speech away from what society has historically tolerated.
Overton postulated that acceptable discourse existed on a spectrum, with no room for radical or unthinkable speech.
Martyrs of the Overton Window state a radical (or even unthinkable) fact. They often pay a dear price for doing so, but, in the act of stating the unthinkable, they force the public to unwittingly accept a new Overton Window. The downstream impact of their very public stance and crucifixion is acceptance of their idea as sensible, popular, or even policy.
Examples of Overton Window Martyrs are below. They all took a public stance on an issue that was deemed unacceptable at the time, suffered for the stance, then saw their ideas move into the mainstream soon after.
(Moving the Overton Window is not always or even often a good thing, nor am I endorsing the direction in which these martyrs shifted the window; I am merely observing a phenomenon):
The Dixie Chicks and the Iraq War
Colin Kaepernick and Police Brutality
Early Protestants (Who are also martyrs sans Overton shifting)
Rene Girard’s theories explain the scapegoat mechanism used in these cases, but I think linking his ideas to the Overton Window and public discourse is new.