We Are Not a Nation of Softies

Although the Great Depression limited funding for athletics, New Deal programs helped build infrastructure that contributed to making football a ubiquitous sport in high schools across the United States. With the end of World War II, high school football surged in the context of increasing prosperity, high school attendance, and suburbanization. Football’s expansion to increasingly include pre-pubescent children renewed critiques of the “big business” aspects of the sport. The participation of younger children also fostered a new range of concerns about physical injuries, as well as the emotional pressures of competitive collision sports for elementary and middle school children. Yet calls for limits on tackle football were ultimately obscured by the political and social culture of the Cold War. Football safety concerns were discounted as the anxieties of overly protective mothers. From the claims of coaches to the promotion of competitive sports by American presidents, tackle football was widely celebrated as a physically and morally beneficial sport for boys.