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Sport, Culture & Society Series
Defending the American Way of Life: Sport, Culture, and the Cold War
Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology.
The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism.
In Defending the American Way of Life , leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism.
In Defending the American Way of Life , leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
- GenresSports
280 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 29, 2019
***Winner of the North American Society of Sports History Book Prize, anthology; 2019***
Much as it is claimed, falsely, that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, a more truthful claim is that the Cold War was fought on global playing fields as sport became a measure of the relative merits of the USA and the USSR, of capitalism and communism, of claims to democracy and dictatorship. Be it the 1st Olympic medal table, in Helsinki in 1952 that featured only the USA and USSR, or the deployment of athletes as diplomatic weapons in the quest for soft power, superpower rivalry was contested in sport as it was in myriad other cultural, social, economic and political spheres. This impressive collection of essays by established and emerging scholars casts light on many aspects of this contestation.
The articles cover a wide range of issues – from images of the USA to diplomatic wrangling over the composition of the West German National Olympic Committee in the late 1940s, from the presence of African-American athletes in cultural diplomacy to policy, and from Reagan’s use of football to present an image of American masculinity through a blacklisted former college football player turned novelist and screenwriter. Rider and Witherspoon have done a good job in pulling them into a coherent collection exploring and laying out the multiple layers and sites of sporting struggles over image and status. Many of the papers have a decidedly revisionist tone: John Gleaves and Matt Llewellyn debunk the innocent Americans forced in drug use by the evil Soviet’s narrative, while Witherspoon and Cat Ariail, in separate papers impressively unravel the contradictions of both Mel Whitfield and Wilma Rudolph’s complex relations with State Department sports programmes.
As impressive and useful as the collection is, however, it is perplexingly inward looking – that is, with the exception of Heather Dichter’s piece on the West German sport system and readmission to the IOC the chapters are almost totally reliant on US sources and perspectives. In some cases this is understandable given the focus – Dennis Gildea’s essay on novelist Millard Lampell for instance – but I can’t help thinking that many of the papers would have benefitted from a look from the outside, at how the defence of the American Way was perceived from afar. In particular I would have liked to have seen essays that explored the Soviet perceptions of these defences of the USA. To be fair to Rider & Witherspoon, they make clear in the introduction that the collection cannot be comprehensive and they that it will stimulate further work – which I hope Soviet scholars will take up.
That said, this is a valuable collection shining light on proxy struggles, on the cultural contest that was Superpower rivalry and on the way the world of politics seeped across the supposed boundary between politics and sport to fill the playing field with meanings well beyond the game itself. It is an important contribution to a growing field of study, making clear that it is increasingly impossible to consider the Cold War without considering its cultural, including sport, fields of action.
Much as it is claimed, falsely, that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, a more truthful claim is that the Cold War was fought on global playing fields as sport became a measure of the relative merits of the USA and the USSR, of capitalism and communism, of claims to democracy and dictatorship. Be it the 1st Olympic medal table, in Helsinki in 1952 that featured only the USA and USSR, or the deployment of athletes as diplomatic weapons in the quest for soft power, superpower rivalry was contested in sport as it was in myriad other cultural, social, economic and political spheres. This impressive collection of essays by established and emerging scholars casts light on many aspects of this contestation.
The articles cover a wide range of issues – from images of the USA to diplomatic wrangling over the composition of the West German National Olympic Committee in the late 1940s, from the presence of African-American athletes in cultural diplomacy to policy, and from Reagan’s use of football to present an image of American masculinity through a blacklisted former college football player turned novelist and screenwriter. Rider and Witherspoon have done a good job in pulling them into a coherent collection exploring and laying out the multiple layers and sites of sporting struggles over image and status. Many of the papers have a decidedly revisionist tone: John Gleaves and Matt Llewellyn debunk the innocent Americans forced in drug use by the evil Soviet’s narrative, while Witherspoon and Cat Ariail, in separate papers impressively unravel the contradictions of both Mel Whitfield and Wilma Rudolph’s complex relations with State Department sports programmes.
As impressive and useful as the collection is, however, it is perplexingly inward looking – that is, with the exception of Heather Dichter’s piece on the West German sport system and readmission to the IOC the chapters are almost totally reliant on US sources and perspectives. In some cases this is understandable given the focus – Dennis Gildea’s essay on novelist Millard Lampell for instance – but I can’t help thinking that many of the papers would have benefitted from a look from the outside, at how the defence of the American Way was perceived from afar. In particular I would have liked to have seen essays that explored the Soviet perceptions of these defences of the USA. To be fair to Rider & Witherspoon, they make clear in the introduction that the collection cannot be comprehensive and they that it will stimulate further work – which I hope Soviet scholars will take up.
That said, this is a valuable collection shining light on proxy struggles, on the cultural contest that was Superpower rivalry and on the way the world of politics seeped across the supposed boundary between politics and sport to fill the playing field with meanings well beyond the game itself. It is an important contribution to a growing field of study, making clear that it is increasingly impossible to consider the Cold War without considering its cultural, including sport, fields of action.
Displaying 1 of 1 review