Sport, Development, and the Cold War

Abstract

The use of sport in an era of development bookended by Harry S. Truman’s Point Four and John F. Kennedy’s call for citizens to consider what they could do for their country was heavily influenced by Cold War tensions. As Russell Crawford has noted, “sports became the primary vehicle for reifying the Cold War” (Russell E. Crawford, “Consensus All-American: Sport and the Promotion of the American Way of Life During the Cold War, 1946–1965,” cited in Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York: The New Press, 2010), 86). American aid initiatives, still dominant in this period, responded to perceived Soviet threats but also reflected domestic policy priorities. Both US and Soviet Union leaders saw interventions in the developing world, including sport aid, as a way to secure alliances and conduct foreign policy. “Diplomacy, the spreading of ideas through every medium of communication … friendly contacts through travel and correspondence and sports, these,” argued a third US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, “represent some of the political means to support essential programs for mutual military assistance and collective security” (cited in Damion L. Thomas, Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 90). While the state was a significant actor in this period—on both sides of the Cold War divide—non-governmental organizations would remain instrumental in shaping the delivery of aid in the era of modernization theory. By the time of President Kennedy’s inauguration, the decision to help develop the underdeveloped world in the spirit of Western progressivism, often through sport programs, had become firmly entrenched.