9 - Emissaries of Toughness: How Coaches Teamed with U.S. Presidents to Politicize College Football during the Cold War

Summary

Football became a national game unlike ever before during the 1950s and 1960s. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon helped to transform the game into a national obsession and its leaders into critical figures in America’s international and domestic conflicts against deviant insubordination, soft youth, and leftist ideas. The game represented discipline and toughness; it taught obedience and loyalty. College football leaders also recognized their outsized influence on society. Coaches cultivated relationships with political leaders, and football organizations developed close ties with politicians to establish the sport as an essential element of Cold War culture, which would eventually give rise to the United States’ deeply partisan Culture Wars in the 1970s and 1980s. In their statements, these presidents extolled the virtues of college football and its coaches, polarizing the game into an institution that stood opposite both the ills of communism and, later, the perceived excesses of liberalism.

As the scholar and former professional football player Michael Oriard has argued, college football has always been political. Countless scholars have made similar arguments, pointing to Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the game, its place in military training during the world wars, and the sport’s role in assimilating ethnic minorities into American society. The Cold War era, however, made college football even more political. “During the 1960s football became marked for the radical Left as fascist and imperialist and for the radical Right as superpatriotic,” Oriard explained. A number of factors account for and explain this transformation, including the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, anticonformist groups, and the rise of the New Left. Yet college football leaders and U.S. presidents also aided in this cultural development. This chapter explores how the sport’s leaders further politicized the game by selectively honoring presidents and using presidential rhetoric to attach political meaning to the game.

Between 1958 and 1975, the National Football Foundation (NFF) and the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) presented awards to several presidents, providing them with a platform to reflect on the game’s importance to American culture, particularly during the height of the Cold War.