Intelligence, Please…

Cover of the March 1980 issue of Sports Illustrated (credit: Heinz Kluetmeier)

Little did Heinz Kluetmeier know when he snapped the photograph above that his artistic vision would encapsulate one of the greatest feats in the history of amateur sports.  He would also make a powerful political statement about the strength of American resolve found in ordinary men.  Team USA Men’s Ice Hockey victory over the Soviets at the Lake Placid Winter Olympic Games in 1980 was a defiant action toward a nuclear-capable Communist/Socialist aggressor.  American sentiment toward the Soviets prior to 1980, the history of the 1980 Team USA Men’s Hockey Team, and the visual components and compositional elements of Kluetmeier’s work reveal a timeless truth about American valor: America does not need superheroes or super weapons to prevail in its struggles; it needs only patient and consistent principled competition among good men to prevail.

Note: For a complete list of outside works referenced in this series, please click here.

In 1989, the New York Times’ Robin Toner reported that in 1947 “…two out of three Americans saw the Soviet Union as aggressive and warlike.”  This sentiment prevailed as Harry Truman adopted George Kennan’s strategy of containment of Communism abroad as official US foreign policy, as well as adopted the Truman Doctrine, which said essentially that the US would intervene in South and Central American countries if the Soviets attempted to interfere in the West.  Further, she asserts that a 1947 Roper Poll demonstrated that “…68 percent saw [the Soviet Union] as aggressive.”  Toner also reported that a Gallup Poll taken in 1981 revealed that “…47 percent saw a nuclear war as a likely part of the decade to come.”  Although this Gallup Poll was conducted after the Games, we can surely speculate that prior to the Games, a higher percentage of Americans believed nuclear war to be imminent between the two nations.

Irving Goldman analyzes world-renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research on predicting political behavior in a 1952 edition of The American Slavic and East European Review.  Mead argued that “…Soviet leaders are systematically creating for themselves a picture of reality as they wish to see it,” and that she “liken[ed] them to the lady who sent herself flowers.”  Soviet education at the time, in Mead’s words, attempted to build a state servant “who is driven by his own internalized deep involvement in the never-ending struggle, by his deep dissatisfaction with things as they are.”  This method and attitude stands in diametric opposition to the “Anglo-American notion of finding a mid-point between two positions.”  Mead suggests that during the time period between WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Americans viewed themselves as peaceful diplomats who were interested in working together to find a common solution.  By contrast, Americans regard the Soviets as narrow-minded, tunnel-visioned warmongering bullies who were bent on exercising their newfound nuclear capabilities on Western culture.

Kluetmeier’s “Miracle on Ice” demonstrates the American ideal that Mead postulated.  The subjects in the photograph are all Team USA hockey players.  Clearly wanting to make the winners the subject of his work, Kluetmeier allows us to partake in their jovial on-ice celebration.  With the foreground of the picture accentuating the figures embracing each other, and the crowd dissipating into the darkness of the stands in the background, Team USA is frozen in the spotlight, as if actors in a black box theater.  Only the player wearing number nine on his sweater has his name “Broten” visible to us, the viewers.  By and large, the players on the ice are nameless faces; but they are distinctly American faces, with the letters “USA” emblazoned on two of their sweaters.  Perhaps Kluetmeier meant to suggest that these players represented the millions of nameless faces scattered across the country, looking for hope in a seemingly irreconcilable nuclear arms race, and who finally found repose in the arena of sport?

The team celebrates under Old Glory, flying in the center-background, and its triangular shape seems to provide an umbrella of shelter for her jubilant foot-soldiers.  Yes, these particular Americans found a midpoint between the involvement in a class struggle and complacency about an untenable situation: they banded together and defied the Soviet Union. But like the Cold War, they did so without eradicating cities from the face of the planet.  The use of color film and printing provides a quintessential element to American celebrations: the repetition of red, white, and blue.  With the players being the central focus of the work, and Old Glory providing the canopy under which they celebrate, the use of these red, white, and blue colors instill in us a sense of national pride.  The player uniforms, in fact, are adorned with stripes and studded with stars, just like Old Glory.  It is as though each player is wrapped in the warm embrace of Lady Liberty herself.

Robert Dallek writes in The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs:

Advocates of the idea that there is no substitute for victory in the contest with communism and that we may have to fight a nuclear war which we could survive see [individualistic policies] as ultimately restoring a nineteenth-century world of greater personal freedom.  The destruction of Communist power would end the Cold War, partly eliminate the need for a powerful centralized government, reduce the pressure for conformity, and allow the individual more leeway to follow his own star…

According to Dallek’s account of individualism, defeating communism meant more to the American people than simple physical security.  It meant freedom and self-determination.  Yet no American, it seems, wanted to actively engage in all-out combat.  He continues:

When Eisenhower entered the presidency, the Korean War was more than two and a half years old, with no clear end in sight.  The heavy cost of human life, money, and domestic tension made continuation of the status quo ‘intolerable…’

To better describe the types of “domestic tensions” of which Dallek writes, “…acute anxiety and self-doubt gripped the United States.  Talk of a ‘missile gap’ and of a shift in the military balance of power to Moscow became commonplace.”  How, exactly, was the United States going to defy the growing threat overseas, which had the ability to attack America from afar, without engaging in an all-out conventional war; or worse yet, a nuclear war which would inevitably result in mutually-assured destruction?  This was a difficult question for American policy-makers to answer, and it was no easier to answer through the lens of sport.

A protracted struggle against communists in Vietnam further shaped American foreign policy narratives.  American involvement in foreign wars no longer meant providing for the safety and security of free peoples around the globe; involvement mean power-posturing in different corners of the globe, seeking a psychological dominance or superiority over Soviet Russia.  Dallek writes:

Vietnam echoed the point.  Like Eisenhower and Kennedy, Johnson could not think of Vietnam as a local struggle between Vietnamese; rather, it was a contest for all of Southeast Asia and a major test of American staying power in the Cold War.

In Walt Disney’s MIRACLE, a somewhat fictionalized account of the 1980 U.S. Men’s Ice Hockey Team, segments of actual speeches given by former President Jimmy Carter occur in the background throughout the film.  Regarding the nature of the internal turmoil of the American soul:

This is a crisis of confidence.  It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will…For the first time in our history, the majority of people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the last 5 years…We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking.  Working together with our common faith, we cannot fail.

To be continued…