Johnny Weissmuller and the Old Global Capitalism: The Origins of the Federal Blueprint for Selling American Culture to the World

Abstract

Recent scholarship has acknowledged the power at the turn of the twenty-first century of American sport in promoting US products in the new global capitalism. American designs to use sport to promote American commerce and American culture actually date to a much earlier period. Beginning in the 1920s, as the US surpassed Great Britain as the world's most powerful nation, the federal government hatched a plan to use sport to Americanize the globe. Trading on the prowess of American teams at the Olympics, this scheme sought to harness the power of American statecraft and American industry into a program to convert the world's masses to American ways of life. Faced with the problem that the sport which had become the ‘world's game’, soccer football, was not an American national pastime, federal bureaucrats surprisingly settled on swimming as the most viable option for their Americanization campaigns.