Defending the American Way of Life

Toby C. Rider is assistant professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton and the author of Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy.Kevin B. Witherspoon chairs the Department of History at Lander University. He is the author of Before the Eyes of the Word: Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games.

Toby Rider, Kevin Witherspoon, and their collaborators have crafted a focused, thoughtful, and illuminating set of essays that dissect sport's Cold War arena. They reveal just how intensely the US and the USSR waged the Cold War in a fifth dimension—not via military alliances, economic pacts, political doctrines, or global bodies like the IMF—but via sport. It's history at its best—explaining sport's past while showing how that past continues to affect sport today." - Rob Ruck, author of Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL

• Introduction1. Sport and American Cold War Culture —Toby C. Rider & Kevin WitherspoonThe War of Words: Presenting and Contesting America Through Sport2. Projecting America: Sport and Early U.S. Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 —Toby C. Rider3. Millard Lampell: From Football to the Blacklist —Dennis GildeaWinning the “Right” Way: High Performance, Amateurism, and the American Moral Compass4. The “Big Arms” Race: Doping and the Cold War Defense of American Exceptionalism —John T. Gleaves & Matthew P. Llewellyn5. Preserving ‘the American way’: Gerald R. Ford, the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports, and the Fight Against State-Funded Sport in America —Nevada Cooke & Robert K. BarneyMaking Men and Defining Women: Femininity, Masculinity, and the Politics of Gender6. “Wolves in Skirts?”: Sex Testing in Cold War Women’s Sport —Lindsay Parks Pieper7. America’s Team: The U.S. Women’s National Basketball Team Confronts the Soviets, 1958-1969 —Kevin B. Witherspoon8. To Win One for the Gipper: Football and the Fashioning of a Cold Warrior —Katelyn AguilarAddressing the “Achilles Heel”: Race and the Cold War at the Periphery9.“An Outstanding Representative of America”: Mal Whitfield and America’s Black Sports Ambassadors in Africa —Kevin B. Witherspoon10. “One of the greatest ambassadors that the United States has ever sent abroad”: Wilma Rudolph, American Athletic Icon for the Cold War and Civil Rights Movement —Cat Ariail11. Defying the Cultural Boycott: Arthur Ashe, the Anti-apartheid Activist —Damion L. ThomasManipulating the Five Rings: Public Diplomacy, Statecraft, and the Olympic Games12. Sport is Not so Separate from Politics: Diplomatic Manipulation of Germany’s Postwar Return to the Olympic Movement —Heather L. Dichter13. Sport and American Foreign Policy During the 1960s —Thomas M. Hunt14. In Defense of a Neoliberal America: Ronald Reagan, Domestic Policy, and the Soviet Boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games —Bradley J. CongelioConclusion: A Post- Cold War Perspective15. Olympic Spectacles in the Next “American Century”: Sport and Nationalism in a Post-Cold War World —Mark Dyreson