Abstract
Jeffrey Montez de Oca’s book, Discipline and Indulgence, provides a new generation of readers with a concise, intriguing introduction to the politics and social history of the Cold War during the fifteen years following World War II. Its lens is college football as the unifying force, and source, of inspiration and examples of a heightened national character of fitness and rugged teamwork from 1946 to 1964.
The author documents that the United States had been showing concerted commitment to physical fitness in schools, in tandem with an emphasis on football in high school and college, since the late 1930s. This starting point creates a historical puzzle when one picks up the story in the five to ten years immediately following World War II. If the United States was so emphatic about its supremacy, including its association with college football and physical strength, why is it that American youth in the 1950s were deficient in physical fitness compared to other nations, many of which had been devastated by war? Was the United States broadcasting its supremacy or trying to chase it? The resolution is that this confirms the author’s underlying hypothesis: during the Cold War, American culture was fraught with contradictions. The brash, bold success of college football as a spectator sport provided a convenient ploy to mask this contradiction. Ironically, the United States would face a comparable illusion in academics, as suggested by the rude awakening caused by Sputnik in 1957, which brought attention to the flabbiness of our physics and mathematics test scores as well as our physical fitness deficits in contrast to the tests results for school-age children in the allegedly decadent Soviet Union.
Since the book’s text is concise (174 pages), one goes away understanding the author’s summary findings yet still hungry for the details that make the episodes both fascinating and frightening. For example, the cover photograph features legendary West Point football coach Earl “Red” Blaik. It’s a wonderful choice as a graphic image of the power that college football held in American life of the era. It also captures the contradictions of college football and military leadership as exemplars of the American values that Montez de Oca analyzes. But I did not find much on the important, underlying stories. The gap between academics and athletics became most glaring in the wake of the infamous West Point cheating scandal of the 1950s: a sophisticated and widespread scheme that included numerous star players, many of whom were expelled and transferred to play football at other colleges. Further, Coach Blaik had used West Point football as a convenient way to spare football players from military service and combat. They were more likely to be drafted by the NFL than by the U.S. Army. The contradictions in college football and American values often were merely hypocrisy.
A complementary work to accompany Discipline and Indulgence is Kurt Edward Kemper’s College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (2009). The hypotheses of both books are very similar. Kemper’s historical research has more depth and original archival sources than does Montez de Oca’s work. Probably the defining characteristic of Montez de Oca’s book is his presentation, organized around sophisticated theoretical analysis. For example, one of his most distinctive sections is an analysis of the early years of the national-circulation weekly magazine, Sports Illustrated. This is a good reminder for readers too young to have recalled that publication’s format when it started in 1954. But Sports Illustrated was clearly not the path breaker in connecting media and sports and culture. Why not also mention Sport magazine, which was successful at its start in 1946 in providing nationwide mass circulation and expert color photography along with coverage of several sports: major league baseball, college football, NFL, boxing, horse racing, basketball, hockey, track and field, and tennis. Some have argued that Sport surpassed Sports Illustrated by introducing reflective pieces, book reviews, and retrospectives into the public forum. In contrast, Sports Illustrated gave attention to the sports headlines and stories of the week. Montez de Oca does make a good case for Sports Illustrated’s contribution of taking sports journalism uptown, with a direct appeal to an educated, affluent, and metropolitan male readership. Nowhere was this more evident than in its headline coverage and hero worship of football and baseball players along with sophisticated engraved drawings of golf lessons and tips from professional golfers.
Montez de Oca relies on a “here-there and there-here” framework for interpreting the images and icons of media and magazines. There is another strategy that could have cut through the smoke and mirrors of inferences and images: a researcher could delve into the memos and files of the magazine’s editors and publishers. This is what Murray Sperber did in distilling the real and imagined strategies of a nationwide publisher of weekly football program covers that were used each week by hundreds of colleges, high schools, and NFL teams. Montez de Oca acknowledges one of Sperber’s influential books on college sports, Beer and Circus (2000). Yet, surprisingly, he overlooks the truly pertinent and most substantive of Sperber’s works: Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports (1998), especially Parts Four, Five, and Six on the post-World War II era.
From time to time the author draws from his autobiography, especially his recollection of boyhood, when he attended home football games for the University of California-Berkeley’s “Golden Bears.” This includes his important aside that he watched more games on television than at the stadium. And that’s an important distinction—and historical change, as one estimates that he came of age as a young college football fan in the late 1980s. What a difference a half-century makes! The University of California football team was a frequent conference champion and Rose Bowl participant in the early Cold War era, but has not been since then. It also may be difficult for readers today to believe that the NCAA grip on college football television (acquired by 1953) meant that until 1982 there were only eight college games broadcast per weekend, and even these were confined to two games for each of four national regions. An unexpected historical development was that television—the medium that was feared as the death knell of college sports attendance in 1950—turned out to be its golden goose. Discipline and Indulgence succeeds in fusing history and sociology to narrate and explain the peculiar place of college football in American culture that was consolidated in the latter half of the twentieth century.