TY - JOUR
AU - Vasquez, Joseph, Paul
AB - Abstract I argue that constructivism can help us understand the political dimension of sports generally and specifically the norms, meaning, and social identity of American football. More specifically, I contend that football’s development in the United States built it into a cultural force associated with militarist and patriotic norms that politicians could leverage for political support when deep domestic divisions existed concerning national security. This phenomenon resulted from the game’s social transformation from a primarily civilian, leisure-time form of recreation and entertainment into a socially constructed symbol for military recruitment by a reinforcing “gridiron triangle” comprised of actors from the military bureaucracy, football teams and leagues, and the sports media. Because of this social phenomenon, American presidents such as Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have attempted to use football as a cultural asset for bolstering support when their national security credentials were seriously questioned. In the case of Nixon, it happened when the United States was divided over the Vietnam War. As for the Trump administration, a similar situation emerged amid investigations of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign and the subsequent manipulation of military aid designed to contain Russian expansion in Ukraine for partisan, electoral gains. constructivism, militarism, patriotism, sports, football During World War II Harold Laswell warned that international threats could produce hypermilitarized, dictatorial, national security-oriented states where leaders governed through “compulsion” and “symbolic manipulation” (1941, 485–89). Friedberg (1992) argued that did not transpire in the United States because of its open political system and interest-group resistance to governmental socioeconomic intervention. However, critics argue that American politics and culture have increasingly moved toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and militarism. For example, in 2014, Giroux argued that President Dwight Eisenhower's concern with a “military-industrial complex” had been surpassed by America's militarized socioeconomic system with cultural trends in entertainment, including movies, television, and video games, appearing to support this claim (50, 188–194).1 While scholars touch briefly on sports in this process (Bacevich 2013a, 236; Bacevich 2013b, 4–5; Giroux 2014, 186), much more could be said about sports’ role in the militarization of America and its politics and the politicization of sports, especially football, which has co-occurred with this broader slide toward militarization and authoritarianism. Specifically, American football's development of a socially constructed militarist and nationalist identity has allowed politicians to use it to appeal to voters inclined to right-wing politics when concerns about national security have been prominent. I contend that such behavior occurred in 2017 when President Donald Trump defended patriotic conformity by lambasting athletes kneeling during the playing of the national anthem as a way of burnishing his patriotic image while being scrutinized for alleged collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government. During the previous year as the Black Lives Matter movement lamented police brutality, professional football player Colin Kaepernick of the National Football League's (NFL) San Francisco Forty-Niners team started kneeling in solidarity with Black Lives Matter instead of standing for the national anthem. By the time Trump lashed out rhetorically at Kaepernick and others while campaigning for Alabama senatorial candidate Luther Strange, Kaepernick was without a team, but many others were emulating his example. By not standing for the anthem, Trump asserted that players were disrespecting the country and the military, and he fantasized aloud about them being cursed and fired by their bosses. He also lauded football violence despite accumulating scientific data linking the game to traumatic brain injury (TBI) (Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru 2013). Shortly thereafter, Vice President Mike Pence walked out before a game in Indianapolis symbolically rejecting similar protests. After the NFL threatened to fine teams with players who do not stand for the national anthem unless they remain in their locker room, Trump quickly applauded that move (although the policy was suspended).2 More recently, as the House impeachment investigation of President Trump intensified in fall 2019 over delayed military aid to Ukraine, the former television personality attended several sporting events apparently seeking a vociferous, public display of support. After being booed at the last World Series game in Washington, DC, and getting a mixed reception at a martial arts competition in New York City, observers speculated that Trump finally got the enthusiastic public welcome he sought when he attended a nationally televised football game when the team from Louisiana State University (LSU) visited the University of Alabama (Armour 2019).3 Nevertheless, Trump's interaction with sports has been conspicuously nonrandom. In the Kaepernick case, he curiously immersed himself as the American president in an unprecedented way in labor-employer relations within a sports league when doing so could have risked alienating more fans than it would win over. Furthermore, his appearance at sporting events and the ensuing crowd reactions suggest that he feels more comfortable with fans of football compared to baseball, basketball, ice hockey, or soccer. To understand this behavior, I examine why presidents—even before Trump—indulged in the sport's militarization by exploring its socially constructed image resulting from the interaction of the US military, civilians affiliated with football teams and leagues, and members of the sports media. By militarization, I mean the degree to which activities are characterized by militarism, or the “vast array of customs, interests, prestige, actions, and thought associated with armies and wars and yet transcending true military purposes [‘marked by a primary concentration of men and materials on winning’ in combat]” (Vagts 1937, 13). While extreme militarization may evoke images of Nazi rallies or military coups, militarization need not be so menacing to represent a movement away from demilitarization. It is worth noting that “[m]ilitarism is often incompatible with the military way, because it rejects the scientific character of modern war” that “emphasizes efficiency and results” in favor of superficial trappings associated with military identity (Ambrose 1966, 293). Below I begin by arguing that constructivism can help us understand the political dimension of sports generally and specifically the norms, meaning, and social identity associated with American football. Next, I argue that football's development in the United States built it into a cultural force associated with militarist and patriotic—albeit superficial and overly conformist—norms that politicians could leverage for political support when deep domestic divisions existed concerning national security. This process involved the game's social transformation from a primarily civilian, leisure-time activity into a socially constructed symbol for military recruitment by a “gridiron triangle” comprised of actors from the military bureaucracy, football teams and leagues, and the sports media. Because of these processes, American presidents such as Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have attempted to use football as a cultural asset for bolstering support. In the case of Nixon, it happened when the United States was divided over national security issues during the Vietnam War. Regarding the latter, it was amid investigations of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign and the subsequent manipulation of military aid designed to contain Russian expansion in Ukraine for purely partisan, electoral gains. A Constructivist Analysis of Politics and Sports Because internalized norms “are often not the centerpiece of political debate” and tend to be ignored by political scientists (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 904), it is no surprise that sports militarization has rarely been discussed in journals of political science, international relations, or security studies. However, the use of sports by political leaders is not new. The Ancient Roman poet, Juvenal, claimed that corrupt leaders used competitions involving gladiators and chariot races to divert public attention from political fiascos with “bread and circus” (Sperber 2000, xiv-xv), and latter-day critiques persist (Veblen 1912, 271–2; Herman and Chomsky 2002, xviii). Also, sports were deployed politically when Germany used the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics to positively represent fascism, and Sino-US relations improved in the 1970s with ping-pong diplomacy. Similarly, candidate identification with sports can increase relatability to voters facilitating “political manipulation” (Lipsky 1979, 35). This may be possible partly because individuals identify with athletes and teams to compensate for insufficiently satisfying interpersonal relationships or status (Cialdini et al. 1976; Lipsky 1979). Moreover, the venerable political journalist James Reston observed that sports offered certainty, pageantry, unity, and dignity often lacking in politics (1969, 12). Thus, it is unsurprising that politicians would embrace athletes and coaches who are often lionized on such a noble platform. In fact, American college football success has been found to boost vote share for nearby incumbents by roughly 1.5 percentage points in state and national elections, apparently due to perceived general satisfaction with the status quo (Healy, Malhotra, and Mo 2010). Despite the relative inattention from political scientists, scholars suggest an important intersection between sports, politics, and national identity. For example, sports allow politicians to strengthen ties to geographic regions by associating with particular teams (Lipsky 1979)4 because objective and subjective elements influence identity formation (Anderson 1999; Bairner 2009, 225). Furthermore, constructivists (Brubaker et al. 2006; Goode and Stroup 2015) have encouraged readers to “take social constructivism seriously” by widening the analytical lens beyond elites to study aspects of ordinary people's lives in the constructivist process (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 554), including the use of communal rituals and symbols, such as songs and flags, as well as athletic events (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 545–48). To understand how football stadiums became venues likely to highly favor militarized displays, identity, and rhetoric, I explore how three groups of important actors cooperatively constructed its militarized social identity. I do so recalling important constructivist insights about how social institutions can shape norms, attitudes, and actor identity in ways that influence behavior (Onuf 1989; Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein 1996; Katzenstein 1996; Kowert and Legro 1996; Wendt 1999, 207–9, 224–26, 235–36). Unlike Wendt's analytical framework for studying systemically constructed interstate relations, my analysis emphasizes the development of domestic norms and culture, which Wendt acknowledges has a much stronger potential than international processes to shape norms and culture (Berger 1996; Wendt 1999). Once social structures are constructed, they often become self-reinforcing as individuals and groups interact consistent with cultural and social norms (Hopf 1998), such as the enduring influence of postwar antimilitarist culture on security policy in Germany and Japan (Berger 1996). To clarify, by norms, I mean “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors within a given identity” (Katzenstein 1996, 5). Most broadly, sports communicate social values and norms (Geertz 1972; Sage 1979), and American sports promote US soft power by communicating values such as individualism and freedom, along with materialism and violence (Nye 2004, 47). Others might also add characteristics such as discipline, heroism, loyalty, persistence, and unselfishness. More specifically, different sports can reflect particular values and norms such as baseball and America's agrarian roots, basketball and postindustrial innovation, and football and militarism (Mandelbaum 2004, 17–18). Norms often dovetail with the development of a unique “logic of appropriateness” that flows from intersubjective understandings (March and Olsen 2004, 1–2, 7, 11; Houghton 2012, 150–51), which guide social roles, such as professions (Sunstein 1997, 37), in realms such as “democratic politics, science, and sports” (March and Olsen 2004, 11). Such unwritten rules can be important in leisure activities such as sports where participating or spectating is unconstrained by political or party identification. Especially relevant given Trump's criticism of Kaepernick and others is Sunstein's observation that norms can extend to seemingly mundane matters such as “when to stand, when to sit” (1997, 39). Nevertheless, the fact that spectator compliance in such regards is not mandated has probably helped the sport win supporters because general and ambiguously defined norms tend to grow because they are more readily interpreted in socially acceptable terms (Kowert and Legro 1996, 470–71). Similarly, because football was ensconced in civilian institutions such as universities and professional leagues for public entertainment, its promoters in the gridiron triangle could laud the game's national benefits infusing them with a militarism more subtle, persuasive, and acceptable to American citizens than state-sponsored displays associated with totalitarian governments that might have been dismissed as crude, heavy-handed propaganda. Moreover, football's association with military preparedness and American nationalism today allows fans to identify with and revel in combative entertainment in a country without conscription, reliant on military volunteers for its national defense.5 Norms are often constructed by key figures or norm entrepreneurs, who can lead campaigns that start norm bandwagons rolling past tipping points resulting in norm cascades in which other actors internalize norms and behave accordingly (Sunstein 1997, 36, 38; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 895). In such pioneering efforts, norm entrepreneurs often require leadership skills and an organizational platform to blaze previously untrodden trails so new and different norms can be embraced broadly (Sunstein 1997, 38; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 896–97, 905). While scholars have written about how iron triangles comprised of interest groups, congressional committees, and executive agencies play an important role in crafting government policy, a different trio with organizational resources—a gridiron triangle—has primarily perpetuated football's militarist orientation. Within these gridiron triangles that have contributed to football's militarized patriotic norms are members of the civil-military establishment, members of football teams and their leagues, such as coaches and players, and members of the media. Because governments typically have the resources to establish and maintain norms (Sunstein 1997, 37), actors from the US security bureaucracy can be especially powerful when involved in “an ongoing process of socialization and ritual enactment” (Wendt 1999, 163, 203–4). Thus, it is unsurprising that civil-military officials have served as the foremost entrepreneurs of football's militarization within the gridiron triangle. This has transpired through the military's use of football to promote unit readiness, cohesion6 and morale, as well as recruitment. Along with civil-military leaders, members of the athletic community, especially coaches, often perpetuated football's militarism by extoling its value for national security purposes. In the coaching ranks, such claims have shielded rhetorically a profession that has often been assailed, especially in the collegiate ranks, where extracurricular athletics were sometimes criticized as tangential or counterproductive to their institutions’ fundamental educational mission. Finally, since constructivists point to the power of discourse, rhetoric, media, and entertainment to shape intersubjective understanding of culture, identity, and norms (Onuf 1989; Anderson 1999, 44–48, 155–59; Levy 2009), members of the media constitute the third side of the gridiron triangle. Their inclusion reflects the fact that “people must not only make sense of the world, but must then communicate those mental representations to others . . . and that process of communicating is a process of making sense” (Kowert and Legro 1996, 480). The Battle in the Trenches, the Gridiron Triangle, and Political Football Football's militarized identity is apparent in its rhetoric.7 Members from the civil-military establishment, the football community, and the media have contributed to football's militarized discourse and jargon replete with references by coaches, players, and spectators to “the war in the trenches,” “field generals,” “blitzes,” “sacking” quarterbacks, etc. (Ross 1971; Jenkins 2013, 36–39; Gambrell 2015). Similarly, reporters have written about how coaches applied blitzkrieg tactics derived from Hitler's Wehrmacht, and Earl “Red” Blaik, the legendary head football coach at the US Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, described General Douglas MacArthur's approach to the Korean War with a football analogy (Furlong 1986; Maraniss 1999, 117). Likewise, Army officers used football jargon to promote shifting to a volunteer force in 1973 (Bailey 2009, 61–62) and to describe Iraq's defeat in 1991 (Jenkins 2013, 246). As militarized references boost the perceived importance of coaches and players, dramatic warlike rhetoric by sports journalists boosts consumer interest in their coverage.8 Such discourse suggests a cognitive connection that could shape perceptions of war and sport that cannot be easily dismissed, but linguistic common ground is just the tip of a historically rich iceberg. Given its current popularity, it might appear inevitable that the United States would embrace football, but its trajectory was far from certain. For example, the US Military Academy, which would become closely identified with the game's patriotism, had a noteworthy critic. In 1893, West Point's Superintendent General John Schofield criticized the game writing: While it is undoubtedly true that experience in actual war is the best military training, modern civilization does not confirm the making of war simply for the purpose of training an army. For like reasons, the practice in peace of those [athletic] operations which most resemble war must be condemned notwithstanding the fact that they are manifestly beneficial as military training. (Clary 1965, 29) Based on data from that year, West Point's Board of Visitors echoed concerns about football's dangers compared to other athletic activities, including horseback riding, and speculated that changes in the game were necessary (Secretary of War 1894, 624–26). Nevertheless, Schofield's replacement, Colonel Oswald Ernst, allowed football to continue because he thought it was useful on balance in disarming youthful, trouble-making impulses (Ambrose 1966, 306–8). Another challenge emerged in 1893, after a football game between teams from West Point and the US Naval Academy at Annapolis nearly prompted a duel between a general and an admiral, and President Cleveland's cabinet followed advice from West Point's top officer and discontinued the rivalry for several years to avoid interservice strife (Ambrose 1966; Anderson 2005). The game was also disdained around the turn of the twentieth century by influential Southern conservative Protestant leaders who thought football elevated the body and physical strength over the soul and humility counter to Christian Gospel teachings (Doyle 1997, 332). Thus, conservative religious leaders and lay people successfully thwarted—albeit only temporarily—football programs at Southern academic institutions known today as Auburn, Duke, Emory, Furman, and Wake Forest (Doyle 1997, 330–31).9 Beyond the South, educational leaders at the University of Chicago ended its previously renowned football program in 1939, and schools of the Ivy League resisted temptations of “big-time” college football by banning football scholarships in 1945, wary that the game distracted from more important intellectual pursuits (Lawson and Ingham 1980; Wood 2005, 1032–35). The fact that football overcame these challenges as the game became increasingly militarized suggests the surpassing of a tipping point regarding its normative allure as discussed by Finnemore and Sikkink (1998, 901). The similarities between football and combat (that fostered militarized metaphors) enabled the US military to use football to advance its mission,10 which helped to expand acceptance and appreciation of the game (Vasquez 2012). Football supported military training in developing physical fitness, teamwork, resilience, tolerance of violence, and willingness to sacrifice for others. Given that football is not so much a “contact sport” as a “collision sport” as one legendary coach observed (Maraniss 1999, 366), it would be naïve to ignore that football requires not merely the ability to withstand violence but also to inflict violence. In the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was perhaps the first president to understand football's ability to develop soldiers (Gambrell 2015, 46), making him the earliest notable entrepreneur of its militarized virtue. He once remarked, “I would rather my boys play it [football] than see them play any other sport.” Amid the Social Darwinism of his era, he thought football would “revitalize an effete population physically and mentally unprepared to defend themselves or take their place on the world stage” (Watterson 2000, 74, 77–78). As assistant secretary of the Navy in the McKinley administration before the war with Spain, Roosevelt lobbied Secretary of War Russell Alger to resurrect the Army-Navy football rivalry game, which eventually happened in 1899 after its multiyear hiatus. Whether due to his divided loyalties or to promote interservice civility, he initiated the tradition whereby presidents attending the game sit on both teams’ side of the field at some point during the contest (Ambrose 1966, 310–11; Cameron 2017, 105–6). Those loyalties were divided due in part to his leadership during the war in Cuba of the Army's “Rough Riders,” for which Roosevelt sought football-playing recruits (Mandelbaum 2004, 143). Writing a year after that war, Thorstein Veblen criticized violent sports as inhibiting the process by which men peacefully mature (1912, 251–75). Unsurprisingly, a German officer serving in the Caribbean shortly thereafter claimed that America's use of sports such as football “harden the body and strengthen self-confidence,” thereby promoting “military efficiency” (Office of Naval Intelligence 1900, 8). One recent former Israeli commando and son of an Israeli military chief of staff claims, “the mentality of [American] football is very similar to what you try to instill in elite combat units” and has produced effective soldiers (Heller 2015, A9).11 As a politician with progressive, reform-minded instincts, Roosevelt pressured college and university presidents to adopt rules changes to the game in 1905 when several years of grisly injuries and deaths put the sports’ popularity and continuation in doubt (Watterson 2000, 64–79). Those activities led an Army officer at West Point, Palmer Pierce, to help lead the forerunner of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which would regulate intercollegiate athletics for many higher educational institutions across the country (Watterson 2000, 74, 77–78). 12 Roosevelt may best be remembered regarding sports for his association with football, boxing, or hunting partly because he stopped the media from photographing him playing tennis, which he considered to be an elitist game that would distance himself from working-class voters. Similarly, he admonished Vice President William Howard Taft from being photographed golfing (Cooper 1983, 70).13 The phrase “hurry up and wait” has long described military life with long stretches of inactivity punctuated by frenzied action. On the eve of World War I, the War Department and the Navy Department promoted sports, especially football and boxing, to protect unit morale and combat readiness from problems associated with leisurely garrison life, such as drinking and gambling that often led to fighting, as well as prostitution and venereal disease (prior to penicillin's development). The armed forces’ emphasis on football during World War I was led by famed Yale University football coach Walter Camp (Mennell 1989, 252), the reputed “Father of American Football,” who strongly shaped the game's rules and future (Cavanaugh 2014, 19). During this era, compulsory military service in the United States exposed many young men to this sport that had been largely confined to elite college campuses where the game was played (Mennell 1989). 14 As such, it spread interest in the game as rising civilian radio ownership further popularized it during the 1920s. This timing was likely important because sports that usually dominated twentieth-century industrial societies gained a foothold between 1870 and 1930 due to modernizing processes and their subsequent ability to shape tastes due to factors such as “major demographic change . . . uniformization, large-scale commodification . . . and growing public participation of an ever-increasing percentage of the population” and sports entrepreneurs (Markovits and Hellerman 2014, 13–23) such as Roosevelt and Camp. Several of these dynamics in the United States were perpetuated by the doughboy's embrace of football. In the years leading up to World War II when most Americans were entertained in movie theaters, the teams from the Army and Navy service academies, followed by the University of Notre Dame, dominated the sports newsreel coverage shown prior to feature films (Oriard 2005, 51–52). This tendency was probably due to the national audiences that those three teams developed during the 1930s when their universities alone allowed radio stations to broadcast their games for free. Thereafter, during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt capitalized on the popularity of Army and Navy football (Sperber 1998, 82–83). In 1942, Roosevelt tried to encourage voluntary military recruitment and boost morale when he insured that the annual Army-Navy football game was played when similar events were cancelled because of bans on “nonessential travel” (Clary 1965, 141–43). Furthermore, in 1944, FDR relented in allowing both service academies to travel to an off-campus game in Baltimore, based on the recommendation of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Revenue from that game, which required war bond purchases with game tickets, yielded $58.6 million, exceeding Morgenthau's expectations. As for the NFL, its wartime patriotism was evident by selling $4 million in war bonds, which was more than any other professional league, while also raising $680,000 for war-relief efforts (Clary 1965, 155–56). Within the US Armed Forces, football's importance had been boosted during the Interwar Years. After World War I, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, who led West Point as its superintendent, had engraved into the walls of the school gym his declaration associating sports victories with military triumph reminiscent of a quote attributed to the Duke of Wellington (Maraniss 1999, 103).15 In those years under MacArthur, the school's fierce intramural football games were commonly called “intramurder” (Ambrose 1966, 275). Moreover, in 1920, MacArthur deviated from common practice by allowing USMA cadets to play intercollegiately even if they had already played college football previously for four years (Clary 1965, 65). Later during World War II, MacArthur, who “was a football man through and through, regarding it as another form of wargaming,” communicated about West Point football regularly with Coach Blaik (Maraniss 1999, 98, 103; Betros 2012, 23). Blaik, who was reputed to have a win-at-all-costs mentality, built a juggernaut with intense commitment and various unique advantages. Even before he was lured away from Dartmouth to coach his alma mater in 1940, Blaik was assured by West Point Superintendent General Robert Eichelberger that following a forty-eight-point Army loss Eichelberger had successfully lobbied the War Department for more lenient officer candidate standards that would allow Blaik to field a bigger team than before. This coincided with Eichelberger's commitment to developing a winner believing that “graceful losing” was counterproductive to military aims (Roberts 2011, 8–12, 16, 31) and that coaching West Point football was a “a top-flight project in our war effort” (Cavanaugh 2014, 9). Also, Blaik recruited two national championship teams and outstanding players that allowed them to remain undefeated from 1944 to 1946 using Army officers nationwide as talent scouts. He also capitalized on student-athletes’ desire to pursue officer training and delay active duty military service (and possibly avoid wartime combat altogether if the war ended prior to their graduation) (Sperber 1998, 140; Oriard 2005, 8; Cavanaugh 2014, 98).16 Moreover, like Annapolis during the war, West Point allowed students to transfer in and play, while the Army still allowed men to play even after doing so elsewhere for four years (Betros 2012, 176; Cavanaugh 2014, 40, 98, 160). Like other coaches who will be discussed later, Blaik's social influence expanded through the media with a syndicated newspaper column and a coauthored book that extolled football's spartan nature (National Football Foundation 2019). Beyond the service academies, the military's embrace of football for training continued to shape public tastes in places such as Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago and the Navy's V-5 aviator training program on college campuses around the country at the flagship state universities in Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina. From military training programs such as these came a generation of successful football coaches who would socialize their players and assistants with an aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach that would shape football's future (Rominger, Jr. 1985, 253, 256, 263).17 During the war, football's martial dimension was represented in Hollywood films and game programs sold to spectators. An advertisement in one such publication summarized American progress in the war with the reductionist observation: “Hitler never played football” (Sperber 1998, 102–9, 126–36). After the war, games involving either West Point or the Naval Academy gained prominence in the print media (Oriard 2005, 51), and it would be hard to underestimate the popular postwar prominence of Army football. Betros writes: The coincident fortunes of the West Point football team and the United States Army were hard to miss. Blaik's first national championship season occurred in the fall of 1944, as Eisenhower's armies pursued German forces in Northwest Europe and MacArthur landed in the Philippines. The pride and enthusiasm that Americans felt for their fighting men carried over to the army's football at West Point. The fusion of heroic images—military and athletic—was an easy mental leap for millions of Americans. Henceforth, the football team would be the most visible face of West Point, which in turn was the most visible face of the army. (2012, 186) With national championships in 1944 and 1945 co-occurring with military victories in Europe and Asia, “[t]he result was to mythologize football at West Point and ultimately to transform intercollegiate athletics—football in particular—from a component of the physical program to an institutional goal unto itself” (Betros 2012, 164). Because Nixon and Trump's sports politicization has a subtext involving the American South, it's worth noting a heavily Southern dimension to football's militarized identity. This angle is important because of the South's strong, longstanding military heritage (Huntington 1957, 211–21; Maley and Hawkins 2018, 199). In the decades following the Confederacy's defeat in the American Civil War, generations of Southern sports journalists and fans often viewed football games against teams from Northern states as opportunities to reclaim regional honor and glory that were lost after that war (Borucki 2003). Furthermore, World War II appears to have further cemented football's militarized identity, especially in the South. For example, not only were there Navy Pre-Flight Training teams in Georgia and North Carolina, but Southern football fans would have had unique reasons for following the victorious service academy squads. Seven of the fourteen West Point and Annapolis students from the World War II years who played their way into the College Football Hall of Fame were born or raised in states of the old Confederacy, and two others had played for Southern universities before enrolling at the academies. One of those men, Felix “Doc” Blanchard of Army, who won the Heisman Trophy, was born in South Carolina and raised in Mississippi. Additionally, West Point graduates and later Hall of Fame Coaches Bob Neyland and Bill Yeoman built winning programs at the Universities of Tennessee and Houston, respectively, with the former amassing four national championships for the Volunteers (Army/West Point Football Media Guide 2017, 110). Service academy football success was not without potential drawbacks, however, that had to be carefully managed. West Point officials feared its intensifying rivalry with Notre Dame would undermine Army support from (and, by extension, recruitment of) America's sizeable Roman Catholic population. Thus, early in the Cold War and after a famous tied game with Notre Dame in 1946, Army opted to discontinue for several years its football games with the Fighting Irish (Ambrose 1966, 317; Sperber 1998, 157–62, 165–66). Moreover, Blaik's drive to win contributed to the notorious West Point cheating scandal involving many football players in 1951, which shocked America (Sperber 1998, 344–57) and resulted in efforts to temper and direct the team's motivation (Betros 2012, 187–89). Nonetheless, interest in service academy football remained intense. Whereas the fall of Atlanta to General William Sherman in 1864 was heralded at West Point simply with celebratory gunfire, the hullaballoo surrounding the Army's football victory over the Navy a century later in 1964 included cancelling punishments and erasing demerits against cadets and extending Christmas vacation (Ambrose 1966, 303). During the Cold War two presidents used sports—and football, especially—for great political effect. The first president to do so was John Kennedy, who aspired in 1960 to succeed President Eisenhower, whose military leadership was instrumental in defeating Germany and Italy during World War II. However, first Kennedy had to defeat Eisenhower's staunchly anti-Communist vice president, Richard Nixon. For his part, Kennedy, who played football at Harvard, was often depicted on television playing touch football games with family and friends. Pierce (2003) contends, “[f]ootball was an integral part of Joseph Kennedy's grand plan—a demonstration of muscular Americanism that would help break down the prejudices his children would face for being rich, Irish, and Catholic.” While certainly different in degree, style and tone from Nixon and Trump, who will be discussed later, Kennedy may have set the example for using football to appeal to voters to compensate for political liabilities. Beyond health problems, which were unknown to the public, Kennedy lived in the shadow of his father's support—while the elder Kennedy served as the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom in the 1930s—for appeasing Hitler at Munich, which failed to satisfy Nazi ambitions. Moreover, when JFK campaigned for president, the most recent Democratic president had been Harry Truman, who was berated by Republicans for having “lost China” to Mao's Communists. Thus, Kennedy's public embrace of football's tough and assertive identity would have symbolically reinforced his firm condemnation of Communist leaders in Moscow and Havana. The Cases of Nixon and Trump Of all American presidents, few more closely embraced sports than Kennedy's rival, Richard Nixon. Nixon launched his 1960 presidential campaign from Whittier College's field where he played football, and he thanked his old high school coach from the rostrum of the Republican Party's National Convention in 1968 (Berrett 2017). Nixon's sports interest was evident in media coverage both at sporting events and when he phoned to congratulate winning teams after noteworthy wins (Lipsky 1979; Sage 1979). When he addressed the National Football Foundation (NFF) in 1969,18 which was founded by MacArthur, Blaik and renowned sportswriter Grantland Rice (Army/West Point Media Guide 2017, 110)—representing each side of the gridiron triangle—Nixon extolled football's development of character and teamwork. Additionally, he often interacted with Washington's NFL team (Berrett 2017). Benefitting from American football's militarized social identity, Nixon used football during the Vietnam War to align himself with hardline traditionalists amid increasing antiwar protests. Upon his inauguration in 1969, Nixon began with Gallup Poll approval ratings at 59 percent, and over the next seven months that number averaged around 60.5 percent. Alternatively, his disapproval ratings started at only 5 percent and over the next seven months averaged 13.5 percent. Between August and October, however, his support declined by 5.5 points to an average of 55 percent, while his disapproval rating average increased 8.5 points to 22 percent (Woolley and Peters. n.d.), as college students returned to campuses eager to protest. In October, Nixon attended an NFL game in Miami at which he received a standing ovation shortly after a major nationwide protest, the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Though it was reported by some, the White House used Newsweek magazine's omission of the event to criticize the press and boost its support ahead of another pending major protest in Washington, DC, in mid-November. In the interim, Nixon delivered his speech extoling the conservative “silent majority” during the first week of November and declared the week before the next looming protest as National Unity Week. To celebrate it, the administration wanted football games to emphasize patriotic themes, and Washington's team, coached then by Vince Lombardi, the successful coach of the Green Bay Packers football dynasty, cooperated by providing a patriotic halftime show, which elicited Nixon's thanks (Maraniss 1999, 477–78). After protests the following weekend, Nixon himself attended a professional game in the District of Columbia. While football ceremonies alone did not account for all the change in the polls during National Unity Week, they did occur during that time as requested by the administration (Berrett 2017), and Nixon's disapproval rating shrank in the Gallup Poll thereafter, and his approval rating rose to 64 percent in the second week of November, despite subsequent war protests. This constituted his best showing since March, which he would only surpass by two points around the time of his second inauguration. After National Unity Week, Nixon continued to play offense using football. Most audaciously, Nixon broke tradition by declaring as America's top team the winner of a regular-season game between undefeated teams from the Universities of Arkansas and Texas. Nixon attended that nationally televised game encouraged by aides who thought it would help him solidify Southern support. Nixon's declaration that the winning team from Texas was America's top collegiate football team when games remained to be played and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) also had an unblemished record elicited criticism from its students, alumni, and Pennsylvania Republicans (Sarantakes 2006). Beyond the college game, Nixon and Vice President Agnew were advised to attend a Super Bowl game claiming “the president's association with athletics is a major asset in relating to sports fans as not only a strong leader, but a ‘regular guy’” (Berrett 2017). Nixon's game attendance served as a way of identifying with what Time magazine described as “[m]iddle America in the raw . . . the [s]ilent [m]ajority at its noisiest” (Paolantonio 2008, 148). On the anniversary of his inauguration, Nixon's Cabinet gave him a unique gift: a photograph of a football team with his cabinet secretaries’ faces placed over those of the actual players (Ross 1971, 38). More importantly, Nixon also considered prominent players and coaches for positions in his administration. In 1973, Nixon drafted Representative Gerald Ford, a former University of Michigan football star, to be his vice president after Agnew resigned (Ross 1971, 38; Mandelbaum 2004). When Nixon teamed up with Ford, Ford's playing days were over. However, in 1968, Nixon contemplated selecting Vince Lombardi, then coaching in Green Bay, to be his running mate before discovering Lombardi was a Democrat (Maraniss 1999, 118; Crepeau 2014, 90).19 Nixon's interest in Lombardi grew from the successful coach's traditional worldview and rhetoric that contrasted starkly with the 1960’s counterculture. While coaching collegiately at Fordham University and later West Point, Lombardi's tough, hard-nosed style meshed well with young student-athletes or coworkers back from the Second World War (Maraniss 1999, 91, 101–4, 445). Moreover, Lombardi's philosophy, based around the importance of character, competition, discipline, leadership, and pursuit of perfection, was widely circulated in his books and speeches that were promoted to corporate audiences, helping him become the most popular sports figure of his time with the business world (Maraniss 1999, 397–406, 445, 476, 487; Crepeau 2014, 89–91). Lombardi's drive to win, which was memorialized in the naming of the NFL’s Super Bowl Trophy, had been reinforced while working at West Point for Coach Blaik. Lombardi was also apparently influenced by his visits with Blaik's mentor, Douglas MacArthur, who claimed, “[t]here is no substitute for victory” (Maraniss 1999, 102, 105).20 After details about Watergate emerged, observers saw Nixon's overzealous embrace of Lombardi's philosophy in signs reading “Winning in Politics isn't Everything, It's the only thing” (a modified version of a quote often attributed to Lombardi), hung in the headquarters of Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (Maraniss 1999, 365–70). Nixon thought of football coaches for more than just potential running mates. When looking for someone to lead the Selective Service System and implement the draft in 1970, Nixon considered John Pont and Paul Dietzel, coaches at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina, respectively, before selecting Curtis Tarr for the post (“Former College Head named Selective Service Chief” 1970, 1).21 Furthermore, Charles “Bud” Wilkinson helped Nixon devise an approach for “selling draft reform to the public” (Flynn 1993, 239). Since Coach Wilkinson's 1947 Oklahoma Sooner team included three men who had earned Purple Hearts and twenty-eight World War II veterans (Jay 2004, 39) and his later teams won three national championships, it was probably assumed that he could assist with recruiting. Most visibly, in 1972, the Pentagon used aerial bombing campaigns dubbed Operations Linebacker and Linebacker II “in honor of Nixon's love of football” to coerce Hanoi into a diplomatic resolution (Kimball 1998, 315, 324–25, 363, 368; Paolantonio 2008, 155). Nixon also found a kindred spirit in the frequent political battleground state of Ohio where Woody Hayes coached teams to two national football titles during his tenure from 1951 to 1978 at Ohio State University (OSU). Hayes, who had commanded naval vessels during World War II in the Pacific Theater, was a fiery disciplinarian, who was captivated with military history (Rosenberg 2009, 5–6, 14, 30, 84). Blending the roles of coach and media personality, Hayes was shown offering historical commentary during broadcasts of military movies televised locally in Columbus, Ohio (Greenberg and Ratermann 2004). According to Nixon, who eulogized Hayes at his funeral, the coach preferred to talk about international security and foreign policy matters more than football. Hayes had derided peaceful antiwar protesters during the Vietnam War and called Nixon to express support as angry waves of public outrage flooded in during Watergate (Rosenberg 2009, 131–32). When delivering the 1986 spring commencement address at OSU, where he had been fired previously for punching an opposing player, Hayes referred to both MacArthur and Nixon as examples of “great men [who had been] fired” and discussed the Battles of Salamis, Britain, and Midway (Hayes 1986). More importantly, as “[a] loyal Republican,” Hayes “was not content to remain on the political sidelines, especially in his home state of Ohio. He was a vocal supporter and friend to many Republican presidents, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush” and, thus, “frequently invited to the White House for events and celebrations” (Ohio State University Libraries n.d.). Before examining Trump's political use of football, it is necessary to consider football's militarization since the Nixon years, as well as football's association with the national anthem. The playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” began at baseball games during the First World War before it was designated as the national anthem in 1931 (Mandelbaum 2004, 77–78), and it became an enduring football ritual during the Second World War (Jenkins 2013, 247–48; Crepeau 2014, 31–32). Much later during the Vietnam War in 1968, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle directed players to salute the flag (Waxman 2018). Earlier that January, military jets conducted the first fly-over of a professional football game in Miami for Super Bowl II (Gambrell 2015, 44). Players who opposed the war and declined to salute the flag as directed, such as David Meggyesy of the St. Louis Cardinals, found themselves ostracized by management for their activism and left the sport (Zirin 2005, 13, 105). These patriotic displays were living manifestations of militarized rhetoric and images that would become a recurring theme for NFL Films, whose early years coincided with America's Vietnam War. One of the cofounders of NFL Films acknowledged providing professional football with “a mythology” that highlighted “the struggle, the combat, the warrior ethos of it” (Butterworth 2014, 207–25). These practices heighted football's martial image during Nixon's presidency even though football had contributed less directly to that effort than in previous wars. In World War II, nearly one-third of NFL players served in the military in 1942, and twenty-three were killed during the war (Crepeau 2014, 31). By contrast, during the Vietnam War, National Guard and military reserve units as well as the Selective Service helped professional football franchises find military assignments that would keep players out of active military duty and combat (Baskir and Strauss 1978, 48–49; Maraniss 1999, 287, 347). Had conscription been implemented less selectively during the latter, the burden might have given football franchises and fans another reason to reconsider their support of the war. In 1973, under Nixon, the United States ended military conscription—a practice that has powerfully shaped cultures and societies (Shaw 2013, 25), including those in Russia (Golts and Putnam 2004, 121) and Israel (Helman 1997), as well as American society as discussed above. Indeed, the close association between the Pentagon and football has continued nearly half a century after the draft ended as a cultural bridge to the manpower pool that has facilitated America's longest war to date in Afghanistan fought only by volunteers. Without Uncle Sam requiring military service, the Pentagon has used football to recruit young people to volunteer. This marketing strategy has long helped the Department of Defense attract young, age-eligible recruits for military service, with valuable above-average test scores (Elig et al. 1984). Thus, the active duty Marine Corps and Reserve marketing approach from 1986 to 2003 placed “emphasis on television, especially sports programming” (US General Accounting Office 2003, 7–8). Military and patriotic game-time displays have also accompanied such efforts. As US forces prepared for the ground war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq's occupation in 1991, Super Bowl festivities, including an iconic rendition of the national anthem by singer Whitney Houston, were described as a “giant pep rally” for Operation Desert Storm (Morris 1991, quoted in Gambrell 2015, 49). One military veteran described the technologically upgraded outdoor displays for twenty-first century audiences using military aircraft fly-overs as efforts by a contemporary “version of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's old military-industrial complex” designed “to make militarism look good and normal and even cool.” Moreover, he continued, they could perpetuate “the idea that massive ‘national-security’ investments (to the tune of roughly a trillion dollars annually) are good and right and patriotic” (Astore 2018). During the post-9/11 era, US sports teams have eagerly promoted patriotism during their games, probably most notable in the NFL after the death of former player Pat Tillman, who was killed while serving as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan in 2004. While teams may often promote such activities to express concern for troops and veterans, they can also promote a hypermilitarism that is not inconsequential. Though sports is often considered to be apolitical in Western countries where fans might be simply encouraged to “support the troops,” politico-military leaders consider public support for military operations to be an important element for achieving missions with clear political goals (Reiter and Stam 2002; Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler 2009; Kelly 2017, 277). On television, the military-football recruiting linkage was probably most visible in 2014 when the US Army debuted recruiting commercials that attempted to “blur the line between sports teams and the Army team” with images and sounds synonymous with football (Business Wire 2014). Beyond televised advertising, the US Army-Pro Football Hall of Fame Award for Excellence started giving money to outstanding high school student-athletes in 2012 (US Army n.d.). This focus is understandable because physically active youth are more likely to enlist, and such decisions are usually determined during high school (Bachman et al. 2000, 3, 26). In 2015, acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Brad Carson admitted that voluntary recruitment had become more challenging. However, he claimed, [s]porting events are an important component of this [recruiting] process and provide a neutral environment where potential applicants and/or influencers have an opportunity to engage Service representatives on their own terms. These direct one-on-one engagements have proven to be a cost-effective means of engaging and encouraging target markets to consider military service. (McCain and Flake 2015, 100) Not all efforts, however, have been equally fruitful. In 2018, the US Army announced the end of its eighteen-year sponsorship of the All-American Bowl, a national high school all-star game played in San Antonio's Alamodome, which cost $9.7 million in fiscal year 2016, but did not produce sufficient return on investment for recruiting (Myers 2017; Coffee 2018).22 A recent policy change, however, could also boost the competitiveness and recruiting value of service academy teams by allowing them to attract high school star players. Following Trump's lead, the Defense Department declared in November 2019 that athletes from the service academies could petition to play professionally before rendering required military service (Baldor 2019) even though professionally incurred injuries could complicate fulfillment of service obligations. Beyond recruitment, the football community has also attempted to boost troop morale at home and overseas. As early as 1951, West Point's coaches visited US troops in Korea at Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgeway's behest following their goodwill tour to export American culture to postwar Japan (Maraniss 1999, 118–19). In 1966, during the Vietnam War, such trips became more routine when the United Services Organization (USO), which promotes troop morale and welfare, partnered with the NFL to have players, coaches, and cheerleaders visit US troops. More recently, between 2005 and 2015, at least seventy-two former or current professional football players or coaches visited bases on such tours. Also, players have practiced for its Pro Bowl all-star game on military bases so troops could attend, and it has donated to help injured veterans through the Wounded Warriors Project (McCain and Flake 2015, 119). In recent years, ceremonies have increasingly honored service members and veterans to perpetuate positive relations with fans. However, without conscription and with “a pronounced aversion to collective service and sacrifice,” Bacevich claims that the foundational commandment of “America's civic religion” has been to “support the troops” through militarized public displays at sporting events, albeit designed for “easing guilty consciences” (2013b, 4–5). In that process, professional sports franchises have benefitted from generous government payouts (Jenkins 2013, Gambrell 2015; Kelly 2017). In 2014, the US Army spent $10 million a year on advertising during NFL broadcasts, which were also carried to US troops worldwide by the Armed Forces Network. Furthermore, the military provided personnel for use in game ceremonies as flagbearers, singers, or precision drill, airborne, or aviation teams (“Pentagon Reviewing Relationship with NFL” 2014). A year later Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake (both of Arizona) revealed that the Pentagon had paid more than $6.1 million to the NFL to host events honoring military service members and other patriotic activities between fiscal years 2012 and 2015. Over the same period, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) received only $1.6 million, and US-based major leagues for baseball, basketball, and hockey collectively were paid less than half of what went to NFL franchises combined (McCain and Flake 2015). Given the need of football leagues and military organizations to respond to the effects of common violent dangers, they have unsurprisingly become allies in scientific endeavors. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Pentagon, and the NFL have partnered to promote brain injury study and improve helmet construction to protect their people from such risks (Paige 2017; Maske 2018). Similarly, in 2018 the US Army awarded a development contract to VCIS, Inc., hoping they could incorporate features of their highly rated football headgear to military helmets (Stapleton 2018). Before exploring President Trump's political motives, it is helpful to examine his sports background. Trump has recalled that his youthful athletic exploits generated media attention, which “were formative because they made him locally famous and because they instilled in him the habit of winning.” Moreover, his high school coach, a hard-charging World War II veteran, claimed Trump fully embraced his “win-at-all-costs” mantra (D'Antonio 2016, 42–43, 46–47). Later in 1984, Trump's desire to win probably contributed to his questionable judgement as owner of the New Jersey Generals (note the name) of the upstart of the United States Football League (USFL) when he persuaded the league to hold their season concurrent with college and NFL teams, which led to declining profits and the USFL's demise (Jay 2004). As an owner who unsuccessfully banked on substantially profitable litigation against the NFL that yielded less than $10 and later unsuccessfully attempted to purchase the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, some might wonder if Trump's criticism of anthem protesters was simply a vengeful assault on the NFL. However, he could have more easily assailed the sport's high-profile head-injury problem, but instead Trump criticized NFL efforts to make the game less violent and safer. I argue that Trump's criticism of NFL anthem protesters in 2017—like Nixon's moves in 1969—was designed to navigate politically turbulent waters related to issues of security. While Nixon used football to counter a wave of antiwar activism, Trump faced more turbulent waters, despite Republican congressional control. Whereas Nixon took office with a Gallup approval rating of 59 percent, Trump entered with only 45 percent approval. Furthermore, while only 5 percent of respondents disapproved of Nixon from the outset, 47 percent did so of Trump, whose inauguration sparked widespread protests. Furthermore, Nixon's disapproval rating did not reach Trump's level of disapproval on day one until Nixon's second term after the Watergate cover-up had resulted in criminal convictions, key resignations, and televised Senate hearings (Woolley and Peters. n.d.). When Trump criticized the NFL anthem protesters in 2017 while stumping in Alabama for Luther Strange's unsuccessful US Senate bid, some observers might have thought his criticism was simply an attempt to play to a local crowd that he might have assumed to be unsympathetic with the Black Lives Matter movement. After all, the University of Alabama Crimson Tide football team, a longtime source of pride in a segregationist bastion, was not integrated on the playing field until 1971—despite the preferences of its legendary Head Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant to do so sooner (Borucki 2003, 486–87; Scarbinsky 2013). Bryant only got his way once Governor George Wallace was out of office (Barra 2013). However, Trump's criticism of anthem protesters continued beyond Alabama, suggesting he assumed his attacks would solidify his national base, which data show to be more racially resentful, masculinist, and traditionalist than their fellow citizens (Smith 2016a; Setzler and Yanus 2018). While some might attribute this to simple racism, Trump's inclusion of African Americans in his administration such as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson and Omarosa Manigualt Newman, as well as his outreach to celebrities of color such as Kanye West and retired football star Jim Brown, complicates such claims. By criticizing players he alleged were disrespecting the flag and the country, Trump played the patriotism card to overcome vulnerability on national security issues as well as domestic political stumbles. Despite decrying foolish wars, Trump won election by chastising the Obama administration for its pace in pursuing Islamic militants, which resonated with Republicans (Smith 2016b) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's communication security vulnerabilities from using a private e-mail. While on the campaign trail, at times he even hugged the American flag. Furthermore, Trump appealed to patriotism by surrounding himself with active or retired generals serving as Secretary of Defense (James Mattis), National Security Advisor (Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster), and Secretary of Homeland Security and the eventual White House Chief of Staff (John Kelly). Trump also pushed for an unusually large military parade in Washington, and, in November 2019, he expressed his desire to campaign with pardoned US war criminals, which both concerned military professionals. Before criticizing anthem protesters in September 2017, Trump had engaged in saber-rattling with Kim Jung-Un's North Korea through much of August and September of 2017, which unnerved large segments of the American public. By the second week in August, Trump's approval rating across three days had slumped to its lowest (34 percent) until that date, and he was also at his lowest weekly approval ratings average among Republicans (79 percent) and independent voters (29 percent) until that point (Newport 2017). However, most explosive were allegations about collusion between Trump's campaign and Russians, which, along with his uniquely strong criticism of America's European allies and abnormally muted criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, questioned Trump's loyalty and patriotism. During this period it was also disclosed that Trump talked with Putin with only a Russian government translator present during that year's G20 Summit (Davis 2017), that Trump had been involved in crafting a misleading statement about a meeting between family members and Russian intermediaries, and that former campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos had been arrested. Relatedly, it was first reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had received documents from Trump's team and was seeking interviews with the White House concerning his investigation. Additionally, Trump complained to Senator Mitch McConnell about the Senate Majority Leader's inability to insulate the Oval Office from the Senate's Russia investigation (Burns and Martin 2017). As if those events preceding Trump's comments of protesting players were not enough, Trump may have anticipated forthcoming reports that revealed—reminiscent of his criticism of Hillary Clinton—that his senior administration officials, including presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, had used private e-mail accounts for official business. Also, the Trump administration would fail to meet the October 1 deadline for imposing sanctions on Russia that he signed into law in early August. Trump's criticism of anthem protesting football players appears to have been an attempt to maintain support from his right-wing base. For example, ESPN’s “Sunday Night [Football] Countdown” show's ratings jumped 10 percent in 2003 when conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh joined the show for a few weeks (Sandomir 2003). Later in 2008 and 2009, studies from the Columbia Broadcasting System and National Media Research, Planning & Placement revealed football fans to be much more inclined to be Republican and conservative than Democratic and liberal (Matamala 2012). Also, during the 2010 midterm elections, Republican political advertising constituted roughly 70 percent of political ads run during Saturday and Sunday night football telecasts, whereas Democrats advertised more during situation comedies (Ridout et al. 2012). Moreover, the top five cities in televised college football viewership in 2013 were all in states Trump won in the 2016 election: Alabama and Arkansas, as well as the states of Ohio, Oklahoma, and Tennessee (Master 2014), where Coaches Hayes, Wilkinson, and Neyland all left college football legacies. Predictably, while 25 percent of Americans indicated that they would not watch NFL games because of the Kaepernick-led protests, 50 percent of Trump supporters said they would not. Moreover, 90 percent of Democrats disapproved of Trump's criticism of the protesters, but less than 25 percent of Republicans surveyed did (Hetherington and Weiler 2018, 112–13). Even before Trump's election, criticism of anthem-kneelers was also likely to be well received by Republicans, who registered higher scores on authoritarianism than Democrats (Pettigrew 2017, 109). Moreover, Trump's stark rhetoric often has been described as typically authoritarian and domineering, and Trump backers register highly on this dimension (Pettigrew 2017, 108–9, 113; Womick et al. 2018, 647–48). Given the likely attractiveness of football to conservatives who adhere to dominant social norms extending to rituals such as the performance of national anthems and symbols such as flags (Altemeyer 1988, 5–6), patriotic appeals in a football context could be powerful. Regarding Trump's visit to the Alabama-LSU football game as House impeachment hearings intensified, it is useful to consider how Trump's presidential involvement with sports has varied according to the audiences involved and his expected payoff. Early in his term he lauded patriotic displays in NASCAR and stood on the field for the national anthem before the National College Football Championship game in Atlanta in January 2018. Similarly, with pressure rising from legal investigations in December 2018 and perhaps in anticipation of his announced decision to roll back sanctions on Russia, Trump attended the football game between the teams from the US Army and Navy service academies for the first time during his presidency. By contrast, Trump's conspicuous unwillingness to deliver baseball's ceremonial first pitch—a presidential tradition going back to 1910—led some to infer that Trump believed Washington Nationals’ baseball fans, including many civil servants, federal contractors, and Democratic voters, might not warmly welcome him (Roberts and Smith 2018). Thus, Trump's visit to the World Series game in Washington might have been driven by concern that his absence at such a long-awaited community event would have signaled his unpopularity and political weakness. Conclusion Sports and politics intersect because sports promotes social values, candidate relatability, and communal identity and helps satisfy psychological needs. Thus, when dogged by national security concerns nipping at their heels, it makes sense that right-wing American leaders would resort to seeking haven from institutions closely associated with militarized patriotism, as Nixon did during the Vietnam War and Trump did more recently. This approach was possible because, not only was it widely used to promote unit readiness and troop morale during periods of conscription, but it was used later to recruit for an exclusively voluntary force and to honor veterans and those still in uniform. As was evident, norm entrepreneurs such as Theodore Roosevelt, Camp, MacArthur, and Blaik clearly boosted football under the banner of national security. Subsequently, Nixon and Trump emulated JFK's example and modified it for their own ends, and the sports media frequently promoted football as contributing something vital to the nation. American Civil War generals once warned about war's glorification. Sherman remarked “War is Hell” and alluded to it as intoxicating “moonshine” (Grossman 1996, 73). His Confederate counterpart Robert E. Lee said, “[i]t is well this (war) is terrible; otherwise we should grow fond of it” (Weaver 1948, 298). However, the gridiron triangle's constructivist actions that infused football with civic nobility and heroism may have spoken louder than older cautious words. Football's militarization abounds from the game's martial rhetoric to easing players’ military duty so they could continue playing the game to taxpayer-financed NFL gestures honoring military service. Such behavior coincides with Vagts’ definition of militarism as actions associated with the military, but inconsistent with inherently military aims. In the short-run, since Trump's dealings with Russia and Ukraine will likely be reelection issues in 2020 and given that US presidential elections occur in the middle of football season, it seems likely that Trump will continue to try to use that sport to his political advantage. In the long-run, if polarized worldviews are in fact becoming increasingly solidified along with the personal and political preferences that flow from them (Hetherington and Weiler 2018, ix-xxii, 90) and represented in key governing officials, then it seems likely that sports will continue to be highly politicized. Whether athletes can use this to benefit their own sociopolitical aims will likely depend upon to what degree their agendas coincide with their professional audiences. In terms of future research, several topics come to mind. First, scholars might examine under what conditions politicians will resort to different forms of domestic, sociocultural appeals to cope with political adversity. Second, scholars might profitably examine whether militarized or highly nationalistic sports have been used by national leaders in countries beyond the Untied States to overcome similarly contentious episodes threatening national security. Additionally, scholars might consider whether the rise of women's sports in the United States due to Title IX legislation of 1972 has facilitated women's greater participation in the US military. 23 Several lines of psychological inquiry could also be studied. For example, experimental designs might test whether military ceremonies involving advanced military hardware (such as is often seen displayed at football games) contribute to perceptions of military efficacy limited to conventional warfare or more generalized perceptions of military superiority that might be less applicable for operations such as counterinsurgency operations.24 More fundamentally, future researchers might profitably investigate whether characteristics of different sports shape psychological factors as well as the worldviews and political dispositions that flow from them (Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Hetherington and Weiler 2018). Though not written specifically about sports, psychologists observe that “[f]raming cruelty as essential for the achievement of noble collective goals thus appears to be a critical strategy for mobilizing people to hate others in theatres of conflict both small and large” (Haslam, Reicher, and Van Bavel 2019, 29). If true, it raises the possibility that football could assist in conditioning people for inflicting and supporting violence that would usually otherwise be considered antisocial, dangerous, and deplorable. Alternatively, sports may not so much shape worldviews as attract people with preexisting psychological dispositions and political worldviews. Regardless, such work might advance our understanding of how social identities and norms take root in the minds of individuals (Houghton 2007; Houghton 2012; Shannon and Kowert 2012). Acknowledgments This manuscript was prepared exclusively for submission to the Journal of Global Security Studies. Some of the research included in this manuscript was previously presented at the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society-Canada Conference 2018, which was held in Ottawa, Ontario, and the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society 2019 International Biennial Conference, which was held in Reston, Virginia. Thanks to Aaron Rosenthal for his research assistance and Deborah Avant, Despina Barton, Melissa Butler, Richard Crepeau, David Houghton, Jonathan Knuckey, Richard Lapchick, Yagil Levy, Charlotte Vasquez, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this project. Funding This manuscript was supported by conference travel funding from the University of Central Florida's School of Politics, Security and International Affairs, as well its Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence. Footnotes 1 " Thanks to Yagil Levy for suggesting Giroux's work on what might be described as “soft militarism.” 2 " Since that occurred, Kaepernick reached a confidential settlement with the NFL over claims that he had been ostracized for his protests by colluding team owners, although he remains without a team. 3 " Admittedly, variation in crowd reaction was probably due more to regional differences than the sporting venues visited. 4 " Occasionally, it can also operate along sectarian dimensions (Sperber 1998, 14–23). 5 " Michael Mann describes wars fought by volunteer forces as resulting from “spectator-sport militarism,” where the vast majority of citizens are engaged as observers, not participants (1988, 184–85). 6 " Since civilian recreational associations can build social capital (Putnam 2000), it is understandable that sports could have a similar impact within military institutions. 7 " Comedian George Carlin (1997, 52–53) humorously juxtaposes such metaphors with the less militaristic ones from baseball. 8 " Economically motivated identity construction has also been influenced before in commercial activities related to the design and sale of consumer goods, such as clothing (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, 550–51), and international tourism (Wood 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). 9 " While the ideology of Muscular Christianity rehabilitated football's image among believers for teaching the importance of self-sacrifice and discipline, it lacked the broad organizational structure of the military and the media that could promote the sport's militarization. 10 " Governments also used civilian institutions such as mandatory public education to build communal identity and literacy, which increased group cohesion and willingness to sacrifice in the conscripted, mass-based armies that emerged with World War I (Posen 1993, 83–85, 122). 11 " American football's popularity has grown in Israel due to support from Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots (Heller 2015, A9). 12 " Football was resurrected thereafter at Wake Forest (1908), Furman (1913), and Duke's nominal predecessor, Trinity (1920) (Doyle 1997, 336). 13 " In 1908, President Roosevelt allowed a former West Point player serving on active military duty to be detailed to his alma mater, Harvard, contrary to War Department preferences so the officer could prepare the Crimson squad to defeat Yale's team, which it did (Ambrose 1966, 311). 14 " The US military used sports to promote physical conditioning, teamwork, and troop morale even earlier (Pope 1995, 435–56). For example, the US service academies had emphasized athletics during the mid-to-late nineteenth century also to counter problems associated with alcohol, drug, and venereal disease (Charlston 2002, 74, 77). 15 " MacArthur had observed, “[u]pon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days will bear the fruits of victory” (Maraniss 1999, 103). Similarly, Wellington reportedly declared, “[t]he Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” However, the Wellington quote was probably incorrect since “organized sports at Eton and other British public schools began a generation after [emphasis in the original] the Battle of Waterloo” (Sperber 1998, 100). 16 " In later years, a plaque was erected in West Point's football stadium containing a quote attributed to Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall from World War II: “I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point football player” (Kozak 2016). Incidentally, their stadium was named after Dennis Michie, the school's first football team captain who perished in Cuba during the war with Spain (Ambrose 1966, 315). 17 " Six coaches in the College Football Hall of Fame (Earl Blaik, Paul “Bear” Bryant, Bernie Bierman, Don Faurot, Jim Tatum, and Bud Wilkinson) and three coaches in the Professional Football Hall of Fame (Paul Brown, George Halas, and Vince Lombardi) had wartime military football coaching experience (Rominger 1985, 261). More recently, college championship-winning coach Nick Saban coached at the Naval Academy with the father of New England Patriots Super Bowl winning coach Bill Belichick (Vrentas 2018). Likewise, Super Bowl–winning coach Bill Parcells coached at West Point and the Air Force Academy (Parcells and Demasio 2015, 33, 61). 18 " The NFF was the organization that established the College Football Hall of Fame that is now located in Atlanta. 19 " A member of the Democratic National Committee had also promoted Lombardi as a Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1968 (Maraniss 1999, 241, 446–47, 476). Lombardi had a warm personal relationship with John and Robert Kennedy, both of whom he had endorsed, and he got help from Kennedy's administration and the US Army so key players could get military leave and play in his team's championship-winning season in 1961 (Maraniss 1999, 284–94, 446–47). 20 " As a West Point staffer, Lombardi had witnessed MacArthur's testimonials about competitive sport's importance in America while providing the retired general with personal screenings of Army football game films for Blaik (Maraniss 1999, 145–46, 402). 21 " Dietzel coached under Blaik at West Point, where he later became head coach in the 1960s after coaching at LSU. 22 " However, postseason college bowl games remain sponsored by defense contractors Northrop Gruman (the Military Bowl, 2010–present) and Lockheed Martin (the Armed Forces Bowl, 2014–present), which took the baton from Bell Helicopter (2006–2013). 23 " It should be noted that males’ disproportionate cross-cultural exposure to “rough sports” helps account for their historical dominance in and over war-making (Goldstein 2003). 24 " In the post-9/11 world, West Point leaders believed in the power of entertainment and culture to shape behavior. 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TI - Patriot Games, War Games, and Political Football: A Constructivist Analysis of Militarization in an American Sport
JF - Journal of Global Security Studies
DO - 10.1093/jogss/ogaa015
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/patriot-games-war-games-and-political-football-a-constructivist-d5Y02xd3hO
SP - 299
VL - 5
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -