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Does international sport make the world a better place? This volume critically examines the claims that global sports events promote peace, mutual understanding, antiracism, and democracy, and exposes repeated shortcomings in human rights protection, from the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games to Brazil's 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

"Sport has the power to change the world," South African president Nelson Mandela told the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo in 2000. Today, we are inundated with similar claims—from politicians, diplomats, intellectuals, journalists, athletes, and fans—about the many ways that international sports competitions make the world a better place. Promoters of the Olympic Games and similar global sports events have spent more than a century telling us that these festivals offer a multitude of "goods": that they foster friendship and mutual understanding among peoples and nations, promote peace, combat racism, and spread democracy. In recent years boosters have suggested that sports mega-events can advance environmental protection in a world threatened by climate change, stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty in developing nations, and promote human rights in repressive countries

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction: Enter Human Rights -- 1. The Postwar Marginality of Universal Human Rights -- 2. Managing Civil Rights at Home -- 3. The Trauma of the Vietnam War -- 4. The Liberal Critique of Right-Wing Dictatorships -- 5. The Anticommunist Embrace of Human Rights -- 6. A New Calculus Emerges -- 7. Insurgency on Capitol Hill -- 8. The Human Rights Lobby -- 9. A Moralist Campaigns for President -- 10. "We Want to Be Proud Again" -- Conclusion: Universal Human Rights in American Foreign Policy -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliographical Essay -- Acknowledgments -- Index.

The American commitment to international human rights emerged in the 1970s not as a logical outgrowth of American idealism but as a surprising response to national trauma, as Barbara Keys shows in this provocative history. Reclaiming American Virtue situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its tumultuous aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left alike looked outward for ways to restore America's moral leadership. Conservatives took up the language of Soviet dissidents to resuscitate a Cold War narrative that pitted a virtuous United States against the evils of communism. Liberals sought moral cleansing by dissociating the United States from foreign malefactors, spotlighting abuses such as torture in Chile, South Korea, and other right-wing allies. When Jimmy Carter in 1977 made human rights a central tenet of American foreign policy, his administration struggled to reconcile these conflicting visions. Yet liberals and conservatives both saw human rights as a way of moving from guilt to pride. Less a critique of American power than a rehabilitation of it, human rights functioned for Americans as a sleight of hand that occluded from view much of America's recent past and confined the lessons of Vietnam to narrow parameters. It would be a small step from world's judge to world's policeman, and American intervention in the name of human rights would be a cause both liberals and conservatives could embrace.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Sport, the State, and International Politics -- 2. The Rise of International Sports Organizations -- 3. Democracy and International Sport: The United States -- 4. "Americanizing" the Olympic Games: Los Angeles, 1932 -- 5. Dictatorship and International Sport: Nazi Germany -- 6. Between Nazism and Olympism: Berlin, 1936 -- 7. The Soviet Union and the Triumph of Soccer -- Conclusion -- Abbreviations Used in the Notes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index