College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era. By Kurt Edward Kemper. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xvi, 265 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03466-4.)

Abstract

Using the buildup to the 1962 Rose Bowl football game as his central backdrop, Kurt Edward Kemper admirably highlights the many ways that college football revealed tensions in American Cold War culture. Plumbing countless pieces of correspondence and sifting through numerous newspapers, magazines, and public speeches, Kemper perceptively reveals college football as an especially apt “touchstone” for discussions regarding American values (p. 4). Although this book overstates college football's uniqueness in this regard, it does illuminate important debates in American life about the role of higher education, student activism, and, especially, racial segregation. Kemper adeptly shows how the military and the executive branch of the government pushed college football as a builder of American manhood to face the threat of Communists. Illuminating examples include the “V-5” program of the 1940s, a training regimen that used athletics, principally football, to build toughness and camaraderie among troops, and the fanatical employment of sports metaphors by presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Kemper then focuses on the 1962 Rose Bowl, when a confluence of factors engendered considerable debate about the teams invited to the game. The responses of the university communities spotlighted—the Ohio State University (osu), Louisiana State University, the University of Alabama, and the University of California at Los Angeles (ucla)—showcase intriguing connections between football and Cold War culture. When osu faculty refused to allow the school's team to play in the contest because of their concerns that athletics were being overemphasized, their supporters argued that a focus on education would help the United States design “the rocket that would put us in space,” while opponents labeled the faculty members “Commies” (pp. 73, 74). Kemper's analysis is especially sharp in tracing the intersection of race, college football, and the Cold War. Kemper shows that even hardcore segregationists in Louisiana were willing to play an integrated squad to fit in with a national culture that lauded competition as a virtue of capitalism. As many civic leaders focused on consensus building in the midst of the Cold War, organizers of the game and administrators could ill afford to invite Alabama, whose all-white team caused a media frenzy.