Defending the American Way of Life: Sport, Culture, and the Cold War ed. by Toby C. Rider (review)

Toby Rider and Kevin Witherspoon have assembled a collection of enlightening essays on the subject of Cold War sport. The contributions to this volume demonstrate that although private sporting organizations and the U.S. government saw sports as a way to enhance the profile of America’s social, political, and economic system, internal divisions, international pressures, and the unpredictability of sport limited their ability to prove the superiority of American values and culture over its communist rival during the Cold War.

The book is divided into five sections, each tackling a specific aspect of the U.S. attempt to promote the “American way of life” through sport. In section one, Toby Rider examines how the U.S. Information Agency propagandists touted an American approach to sport that valued “competition and endeavor,” “fairplay,” and “social justice” in contrast to the oppressive dictatorships of the Soviet bloc whose state-run sports systems achieved athletic success at the expense of personal freedom. Dennis Gildea complicates this message through the life and career of Millard Lampell, whose controversial novel The Hero exposed the seedy side of college football. Lampell’s resulting blacklisting during the McCarthy era demonstrates the gap between the propaganda message of freedom with the reality where criticism was squelched and punished.

Section Two addresses how U.S. sports and government officials tried to counter the Soviet threat in sports without adopting the methods of their ideological rivals. John Gleaves and Matthew Llewellyn show how the enduring myth that American athletes represented a proper “clean” approach to international sports while members of the Eastern Bloc doped and cheated their way to victory originated with the Cold War. Despite the fact that performance-enhancing substances were just as commonly abused by American athletes, the association in the public consciousness of doping with the communist East endured. Nevada Cooke and Robert Barney argue that the Amateur Athletic Act of 1978 helped solve jurisdictional disputes over amateur sport and counter Soviet international sporting dominance without adopting a Soviet-style state-run system, thus preserving the “American Way” of limited federal role in sports favored by the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Parts Three and Four address gender and race, exposing stark contradictions inherent in U.S. Cold War sports policy and propaganda. Lindsay Parks Pieper argues convincingly that sex testing in international sports emerged out of the perceived need to defend white, middle-class gender norms against Soviet women whose athletic prowess challenged “US notions of conventional femininity” (p. 98). In chapter six, Kevin Witherspoon shows how such entrenched sexism of a “male-dominated leadership of diplomatic and sporting circles” sealed the fate of women’s AAU basketball that could not keep pace with the state-funded Soviet athletes. In the final chapter of this section, Kate Aguilar highlights the role of football in Ronald Reagan’s self-fashioning as the embodiment of white, masculine, American nationalism uniquely suited to project American strength and unity.

The essays in Part Four address the enduring “Achilles Heel” of American Cold War policy: racial inequality. Through the lenses of three of America’s most important African American cultural ambassadors, the authors in this section demonstrate that while U.S. officials tried to use black athletic success and talent to counter negative perceptions of U.S. race relations and attract developing countries to the American orbit, the realities of racial inequality and discrimination in the United States and its South African ally ultimately could not be overcome through cultural diplomacy. Kevin Witherspoon shows how Mal Whitfield “transformed from a ‘good Negro’ to black radical” as lack of progress toward racial equality convinced him and many other black athletes that they could no longer serve as propaganda tools for a government that “failed to live up to the [projected] image of equality, freedom, and harmony” (p. 140). In an enlightening examination...