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

Defending the American Way of Life, an entry in the "Sport, Culture, and Society" series of the University of Arkansas Press, is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on the intersection of sport and politics during the Cold War. This volume, edited by Toby Rider and Kevin Witherspoon, contains thirteen essays, plus an introduction and conclusion, by a mix of luminaries in the field of sport history along with some promising emerging scholars. The essays consider such issues as the links between governmental and non-governmental efforts to present the United States positively through sport while challenging Soviet propaganda; questions about amateurism and various kinds of cheating; gender roles and the importance of "real women" and "real men" to the conduct of the Cold War; and race as the "Achilles' heel" of the United States in its quest to win hearts and minds around the world. (Disclosure: Wither-spoon was the editor of a prize-winning article I wrote, and I also have been on panels with Rider and several of the contributors. In addition, I contributed to an earlier volume in this series.)

This collection does an impressive job of treating selected topics and largely provides a coherent understanding of the impact of the Cold War on international sports. Chapters are concise and well suited for classroom use. Readers will come away recognizing that U.S. athletes were not as innocent when it came to doping as journalists and spectators imagined at the time. Readers also will see that in many ways adherence to "white, middle-class" norms of femininity, a tortured racial history, and the preference for private action rather than government imperatives all hindered U.S. efforts to prove the superiority of U.S. democracy to Soviet-style Communism. It is a small point, but Mark Dyreson gets top marks for correcting an error about Olympic hockey at Lake Placid found in an exhibit on the U.S. flag at Fort McHenry (p. 220).

Readers will see how an array of impressive individuals represented the United States through sports during the Cold War. Dennis Gildea tells the story of Millard Lampell, a one-time college athlete who became a successful writer and a performer in the Almanac Singers—which included such notables as Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, and Burl Ives—and who was later blacklisted. Damion Thomas insightfully describes the challenges facing the African-American professional tennis player Arthur Ashe in taking a stand against apartheid in South Africa. In one of Witherspoon's two chapters, he tells the story of track athlete Mal Whitfield, the first African American to win the prestigious Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States. Whitfield had a career as a sporting diplomat that started before Jackie Robinson integrated baseball and continued well past the crest of the Black Power movement. Witherspoon explains how Whitfield "transformed from 'good Negro' to black radical" (p. 140). In a chapter with one of the best section subtitles ever—"The Tennessee State Tigerbelles Join the Cold War"—Cat Ariail explains the diplomatic effectiveness of the greatest Tigerbelle track star, Wilma Rudolph, who was a triple gold medalist at the 1960 Rome Summer Olympics. She later visited Africa "as a lone representative of the United States, an assignment that suggests that the State Department recognized that Rudolph seemed to singularly embody an idealized image of American democracy" (p. 151). In addition to speed and determination on the track, Rudolph had a charm and beauty that enhanced her effectiveness as a sports diplomat—and earned her 75 marriage proposals after the Rome Olympics, plus another 50 on a subsequent trip to Africa. John Gleaves and Matthew Llewellyn, in their chapter on "The 'Big Arms' Race," cite the U.S. weightlifter Ken Patera, who, in anticipation of a 1972 Olympic matchup against a Soviet counterpart, memorably said...