November 23, 2020 • 35 mins
Jim Thorpe was an incredible all-around athlete, famous around the world. In part one, we’ll talk about his life before and during his time at Carlisle, including some context about Carlisle and similar boarding schools.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we
are going to talk about Jim Thorpe, who was just
an incredible all around athlete. During his lifetime. He was
(00:24):
famous around the world, and he topped a lot of
lists of the best athletes of the twentieth century or
even the best athlete of all time. At the same time,
though news stories and early biographies and in some cases
stuff that still floats around today, managed to simultaneously praise
his accomplishments and also minimize them through racist stereotypes and
(00:46):
other falsehoods. Thorpe made an amazing name for himself in
track and field and football at Carlisle Indian Industrial School,
and then he became internationally famous of the nineteen twelve
Olympic Games. We were going to tell his story in
three parts, which is not the number that normally comes
in that sentence. I am not I don't think we've
(01:11):
ever done a three part or before we've done four.
We've well, yeah, we did that four part mini series
on China Chairman Mouth and we do too. On occasion
we do too periodically. This time we got three, so
to yes, I was today I was going to give
people the peek behind the curtain, which is that we
do that because we have two new episodes a week,
(01:33):
and if you break it to three, it gets into
some scheduling, you know, just like carefulness, you have to
do UM. I also really felt like with this one,
once I got to the point that I had turned
my notes into actual sentences, I looked at it and
kind of went, if I try to get this down
into two, we're going to have to cut out some
(01:54):
stuff that's really important, and I didn't want to do that.
So this time we're going to talk about Jim Thorpe's
life before and during his time at Carlisle, including some
of the context about Carlisle and other similar boarding schools.
Then next time we will talk about his incredible performance
at the nineteen twelve Summer Olympic Games, and then in
(02:16):
part three, we will talk about his career after his
time as an amateur athlete had ended, and then two
big pieces of his story that continued on for decades
after his death. According to Jim Thorpe's own account, he
and his fraternal twin brother Charlie, were born on May twelfth,
south of Belmont in what was at the time Indian Country.
(02:38):
Today that is near Prague, Oklahoma. But there's also a
christening record for the twins that list their birthday as
May twenty eight seven, so the year before Thorpe was
saying his birthday was. The boys were baptized at the
Benedictine Sacred Mission Church using Latin versions of their name
Carolus for Charlie and Jacobus Francisca's for Jim. Their five
(03:00):
Hiram was sac and Fox and Irish, and their mother,
Charlotte View was Potawatamie, Kickapoo and French. The boy's ancestors
included Sack Leader and war Chief black Hawk. After Jim
and Charlie were born, they were enrolled as members of
the sac and Fox nation, and Charlotte gave them traditional
sac and Fox names. Jim's was what though hook and
(03:23):
that means light after the lightning or bright path. Hiram
Thorpe was a farmer and a rancher. The family raised horses, hogs,
and cattle, as well as growing a lot of crops.
They lived on land that the thorpes had been allotted
under the General Allotment Act of eighteen eighty seven that's
also called the DAWs Act. We've talked about the DAWs
(03:43):
Act on the show before. It was the act that
broke up land that had been held for Indigenous nations,
collectively assigning it out to individual tribal members as part
of the US federal government strategy of allotment and assimilation. Overall,
this Act was devastating for the vibes and nations that
were affected. Once the land had been allotted, so called
(04:05):
excess land was open up for sale to non Indigenous people,
so each member that was eligible would get this allotment
and anything left over could be sold. Then, huge numbers
of people who were allotted land later wound up losing
that land for a range of reasons. Some people sold
the land because they wanted to or because they needed
(04:25):
the money. Others were defrauded out of it, or were
assigned allotments that just could not be maintained through any
reasonable means, so they weren't able to meet the standards
of keeping this land and it was taken from them.
This whole process was also geared towards getting indigenous people
to assimilate with white culture, including granting people US citizenship
(04:48):
once they'd successfully maintained their allotment for twenty five years.
Although the Sac and Fox Nation lost a huge amount
of land as the so called excess during allotment, the
sorp family le specifically seems to have fared better with
this than a lot of other people, including getting an
additional allotment in eighte This may have been because they
(05:09):
already had some connections to the culture that indigenous people
were expected to assimilate with. Along with about fifteen percent
of the Second Fox Nation, the Thorpes were regarded by
the federal government as progressive. They had adopted, to at
least some extent, a more white way of life. They
were Christian, they spoke English, they lived in a log house,
(05:30):
and they wore settler style clothing. At the same time,
they were still an active part of their indigenous community,
taking part in festivals and observances, and following indigenous traditions
and methods for various parts of their day to day lives,
like grinding corn into flower. Their home was fairly isolated,
and they didn't have a lot of contact with white
(05:51):
people until Jim and Charlie were about six years old.
Gemina's twin brother grew up hunting, fishing, riding and training
horse says, and playing outdoors a lot. Their father also
loved sports and physical activity, especially swimming, wrestling, and riding,
and he really taught his sons about physical fitness and
fair play. Jim was bigger and more athletic, and Charlie
(06:15):
was smaller and more bookish. But in Jim's words, quote,
we were never in the house when we could be
out of it. One of their favorite pastimes was to
play an almost extreme version of Follow the Leader. The
Leader would do things like climb all the way to
the top of a tree and then jump out, or
like jump into a really fast moving river and swim
to the other side. It's like follow the Leader and
(06:37):
Dare had a baby. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is
way more physically involved than any Follow the Leader I
played as a child, and their parents wanted them to
be educated, so when the boys were six, Jim and
Charlie were sent to the Second Fox Boarding School that
was a residential school that had been established by Quaker
missionaries on the edge of Second Fox Territory in eighteen
(06:59):
seventy two. The school's purpose was to convert and assimilate
children from the Second Fox Nation, or, in the words
of the eighteen nineteen Act that provided federal funding to
these types of schools, to quote civilize them. We'll be
talking more about these schools more over the course of
this episode, and there is also a lot about their
(07:19):
history and development in our two part podcast on the
Fort Shaw Indian School Girls basketball team. Those episodes came
out in t seventeen. Jim and Charlie started at the
Mission school in eighteen ninety three when they were about six.
In the mornings, they and their classmates were taught basic English,
reading and writing, arithmetic, and history, along with religion and
(07:40):
white etiquette and social customs. And then in the afternoon
they had vocational training, with a lot of that vocational
training geared toward keeping the school itself running. So the
girls cleaned and did laundry and made new uniforms. The
boys did manual labor and worked on the school's farm.
Students also wore military style uniforms and did military style drilling.
(08:03):
All of this was pretty standard in these kinds of schools,
and it was all meant to just erase any trace
of their indigenous heritage or culture. Since Jim and Charlie
already spoke English, they had a little bit of an
easier time at the Mission school than many of their peers,
most of whom spoke only indigenous languages, which were forbidden
from being used at the school. But between the two
(08:25):
of them, Charlie was definitely the better student, and he
helped Jim through the more difficult parts of their studies.
But then in Charlie contracted pneumonia. Hiram and Charlotte came
out to the school to try to nurse him back
to health, but he died at the age of about
eight or nine. Charlie and Jim had really been just inseparable,
(08:45):
and Jim, of course was heartbroken and bereft. Compounding all
of this, Hiram and Charlotte had also been struggling in
their marriage. They went through a series of separations and
reconciliations that was all pretty tumultuous for their children. They
had eleven children total, five of whom survived to adulthood.
After his brother's death, Jim started spending a lot of
(09:08):
time in the woods alone. He repeatedly ran away from school,
making his way back home on foot. That was a
trip that took about twenty miles that's roughly thirty two kilometers.
This was not, by the way, unique to Jim at all.
Conditions at these schools were often really poor and students
just missed their families, so it was fairly common for
students to escape and then flee back home or somewhere else.
(09:32):
Hiram kept taking Jim back to school, only for Jim
to leave again. At one point, Jim even left the
school immediately after his father had dropped him off, taking
a short cut that put him outside the door of
the family home for his father even got back. So
Hiram decided to send Jim to a school that was
farther away, and that was Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas.
(09:56):
That was about three hundred miles or four two kilometers
from where they were living. Two biographies of Jim Thorpe
interpret this somewhat differently. In Jim Thorpe, World's Greatest Athlete
by Robert W. Wheeler, part of the goal was definitely
to make it harder for Jim to return home, but
it was also an act of compassion on Hiram's part,
(10:18):
as he recognized that Jim was having a hard time
staying at a place that he associated so strongly with
his late brother. On the other hand, the book Native
American Son, The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe
by Kate Beauford describes jim siblings as being terrified of
their father and Hiram, framing this whole decision as almost
(10:38):
a threat, saying quote, I'm going to send you so
far away you'll never find your way back. Yeah. Having
read both of these books, it's presented as a much
crueler decision to me in in Kate Beauford's book than
in Robert W. Wheelers. Regardless, though, in Jim and his
older brother George were both in rolled at Haskell Institute,
(11:01):
and we will get to Jim's time there and then
later on at Carlisle after a sponsor break. Jim Thorpe
was about ten years old when he was enrolled at
Haskell Institute, and his brother George was sixteen. At the time,
more than a thousand students were enrolled at the school,
(11:23):
and they represented between eighty five and ninety different indigenous
tribes and nations. Like the Sac and Fox Mission School,
Haskell Institute was established to assimilate indigenous children into white culture,
separating them from their families and their cultures and customs
and languages, with classroom instruction in the morning, vocational instruction
that kept the school running in the afternoon, and military
(11:46):
style uniforms and drilling. George left this school not long
after they arrived. One of Jim's favorite pastimes at the
school was watching football practice. He was such a constant
presence on the sidelines that team captain Shahn the Archiquette,
took notice of him and decided to encourage him. Chauncey
went to the school's harness shop and stitched together a
(12:07):
football out of pieces of leather and then stuffed it
with rags, and Jim started using this homemade football to
organize games among the students who were his own age.
After a while, Jim started to do pretty well at Haskell.
There are reports that you'll read that he was not
a great student, and his report cards say otherwise. In
(12:27):
nineteen o one, though he heard that his father had
been shot while hunting and was gravely injured. Jim decided
to go home and he hopped a train. When he
was found on board and removed. He also found out
the train had actually been going the opposite direction of
where he needed to be. It took Jim about two
weeks to walk home, and by that point hyram Thorpe
(12:50):
was out of danger, and while he wasn't exactly pleased
to see his son Amenda, Jim was able to help
around on the ranch while his father was convalescing. One
of Jim's friends also reported that he had really been
expelled from school for drinking as all this happened, so
it wasn't just that he was going home to see
his sick father. The school records are unclear. They don't
(13:11):
confirm or refute this. Yeah, they just pretty much say
he was not there anymore. Although Jim's father recovered from
this injury, while Jim was still at home, his mother
died from blood poisoning. This might have been a complication
of childbirth. It was not too long after she had
given birth to her eleventh child. Her land allotment was
(13:31):
divided up among her heirs, with Jim getting about twenty acres.
So with all of this going on, Jim stayed at
home rather than being returned to Haskell. He attended nearby
Garden Grove Public School, and he worked on the family ranch,
but one day he and his brother decided to skip
their chores and go fishing, and when they got back,
(13:51):
their father whipped them, something that Jim Leader said he
deserved but didn't feel like taking, so he ran away
from home, this time going to Texas, where he worked
on a ranch until he had earned enough money to
buy himself a team of horses, and he described this
as wanting to prove himself to his father before he
went home again. Garden Grove didn't really have much of
(14:14):
an athletics program, although it was starting track and field
and baseball teams, and Jim found once he was back
that he just really really missed football, and at this
point among the indigenous population of the US, the school
most known for its football program was Carlisle Indian Industrial
School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Like the Second Fox Mission School
(14:36):
and Haskell Institute, Carlisle Indian Industrial School was part of
this whole system of schools that were set up to
assimilate indigenous children. It opened in eighteen seventy nine and
was actually the first of these schools to be run
by the US government rather than by missionaries or other organizations.
Carlyle's founder and the architect of the federal approach toward
(14:57):
these boarding schools was Lieutenant Kern Richard Henry Pratt. He
had formulated his approach to Indigenous education while working with
Indigenous prisoners of war after the Red River War in
eighteen seventy five. He set up a program that involved
English language and vocational instruction, followed by outplacement into jobs
(15:17):
for the incarcerated POW's. They made what he viewed as
rapid progress learning English and adapting to a more white
way of life. In Pratt's mind, the only way that
Indigenous people were going to survive the United States ongoing
western expansion was to abandon their cultures and their languages
and all of their tribal ties, and instead to fully
(15:40):
assimilate into white society. His slogan in this was killed
the Indian and save the Man. Pratt tried to convince
the federal government to fund a program for students and
teenagers similar to what he had done with these POWs.
He started by teaching a small group of Indigenous students
at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute IT in Virginia. He
(16:01):
later got funding to convert an abandoned cavalry barracks in
Pennsylvania into a school. Like the other schools we've already
talked about, Carlyle combined academic and vocational instruction with military
style drilling and discipline. On arrival at the school, students
who didn't already have English names were given new ones.
They were also given haircuts and new clothes, with before
(16:24):
and after pictures taken to highlight this idea that they
were being civilized. Unlike the Second Fox Reservation School, which
was on the edge of Second Fox territory, Carlyle was
hundreds or thousands of miles away from where most of
its students lived. The point was to create as much
separation as possible between students and their cultures and families.
(16:47):
Both physical and emotional conditions at Carlyle and other similar
schools were often just appalling. Illness outbreaks were common, and
students often didn't have enough to eat. Class Room instruction
was threaded through with the idea that indigenous cultures were
backward and even evil. Punishments for rule breaking, including rules
(17:09):
that forbade children from speaking their native languages are following
their own cultural or religious observances, could really be abusive
Today Carlyle and similar schools in both the US and
Canada are rightly seen as horrific and intentional attempt at
cultural genocide that tore a hole through the cultural ties
and lineages of thousands of Indigenous people. Just at Carlyle,
(17:33):
nearly two hundred students died of disease, malnutrition, and neglect. Typically,
these children's bodies were not returned to their families. They
were given Christian funeral rights and buried there at Carlisle.
In more recent years, there have been efforts, sometimes taking years,
to have those bodies repatriated to their tribes. Now we've
(17:54):
talked about a few of them on some of our
Unearthed episodes. Many of the children who went to Carlisle
and other boarding schools, including Haskell and including the Sac
and Fox School, they weren't going of their own free will.
Often their parents were coerced or threatened into sending their
children there, or federal policies toward Indigenous people had created
(18:15):
really desperate economic conditions for them that just left families
with no other choice. Federal officials also took custody of
the children of indigenous leaders who were seen as difficult
or threatening. Keeping those children at boarding schools, essentially as hostages.
At the same time, though, in the late nineteenth and
(18:35):
early twentieth century, Carlyle also had a certain level of prestige,
especially when it came to its athletics program, including among
Indigenous people. There were parents who sent their children to
Carlyle or other boarding schools willingly because for a range
of reasons, they thought it was the best option, and
in some cases there were students who chose to attend
(18:58):
Carlyle or another board school for themselves. Jim Thorpe fell
largely into that last category. He already knew about Carlyle
and its reputation as an athletic powerhouse, and Carlyle had
actually also already heard about Jim. Lieutenant Colonel Pratt had
asked the Federal Indian Agent for Second Fox Nation to
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be on the lookout for athletic talent as far back
as eighteen. Jim made the decision to go to Carlisle
in nineteen o four, and when he told his father
about it, Hiram reportedly said, son, you were an Indian.
I want you to show other races what an Indian
can do. On April twenty second, nineteen o four, not
(19:39):
long after Jim arrived at Carlysle Indian Industrial School, Hiram
Thorpe died of blood poisoning, possibly as the result of
a snake bite during a hunting trip. Jim was not
able to return home for his father's funeral. At this point,
by the age of about sixteen, Jim had lost his
twin brother, other siblings, and both of his parents. The
(20:00):
staff at Carlysle became concerned for him, not so much
for the sake of his mental health, but because he
wasn't really participating understandably, and as the school administration saw it,
if a student wasn't participating, they also were not assimilating.
So Jim was put into Carlyle's outplacement program, which was
(20:21):
more typically used for older students. During summers or other breaks,
students would be sent to live with white families out
in the community, where they would work as domestic or
agricultural help. In June of nineteen o four, Jim was
sent to live with a family in Somerton, Pennsylvania, where
he would cook and clean in exchange for room and
board plus five dollars a month. Considering that Jim had
(20:44):
a lot of experience in farming and Ranching. This placement
didn't entirely make sense, and the family expected him to
eat in the kitchen rather than with them in the
dining room, which made it clear that they did not
see him as their equal. He was moved to a
different family in Pennsylvania, where he worked as their gardener,
and then he was moved to a home in New
(21:04):
Jersey where he worked as a foreman for Native American
workers on a local farm. He returned to Carlisle in
nine seven, and that is when he got involved in
the school's athletic program. We will get back to his
time at Carlisle athletics after a quick spotsor break. We're
(21:28):
gonna talk a little bit about the history of sports,
especially football, at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school established
a collegiate football program in eight and then not long
after that, Lieutenant Colonel Pratt briefly banned the sport after
a player broke his leg during a game. When students
(21:49):
banded together to try to get football reinstated, Pratt finally
agreed under two conditions. The first condition was that they
had to play fair. There would be no fighting, no
slug other players, even if the white teams were doing
it because their behavior, the Carlisle team's behavior was going
to be seen as a reflection on all indigenous people.
(22:10):
The second condition was quote that in the course of two,
three or four years, you will develop your strength and
ability to such a degree that you will whip the
biggest football team in the country. To that end, Carlyle
hired Glenn Warner as coach in eight Warner had been
nicknamed Pop while serving as team captain at Cornell because
(22:30):
at the age of five, he was the team's oldest member.
He had coached college teams before starting at Carlisle, and
with the exception of a brief break between nineteen o
four and nineteen o six, he worked as a football
coach at Carlisle until nineteen fourteen. There are all kinds
of ball games that play really important roles in indigenous
(22:51):
cultures all over North America, But when Pop Warner arrived
at Carlysle, most of his players really did not know
much about grit iron football. Specifically, a lot of them
had also been living through years of deprivation. Warner's told
Pratt that most of his prospective players should really be
trying out for beds in a hospital rather than spots
(23:12):
on a football team. Warner was genuinely afraid that there
was no way that he could shape them into a
team that would justify his twelve hundred dollar a year salary.
American football itself was a fairly new sport at this point,
having grown out of rugby and soccer. The Intercollegiate Football
Association was established in eighteen seventy seven and was the
(23:33):
first intercollegiate athletic conference until eighteen ninety three. It established
and refined the rules of play among its member schools.
Other organizations and associations followed, gradually refining a sport into
one that was at least hopefully interesting to watch, but
not so violent that it killed in an inordinate number
of players dads. There were times in early American football
(23:58):
history when player deaths were a big problem. Under Pop
Warner's direction, Carlisle played a huge part in that overall
process of refining the rules of football. In general. Carlisle's
players were smaller and lighter than the players on their
opposing teams, which included the powerhouses of the day like
Harvard and Yale. The team itself also tended to have
(24:20):
fewer players, so each player spent more time on the
field and had less time to rest during a typical game.
Those reduced numbers of players also meant that each player
needed to be able to play multiple positions. Since Carlisle
had no football stadium, nearly all of their games were
away games, and since the team was largely funded through
(24:41):
ticket sales, it maintained a really grueling schedule to get
to all those games. So Warner coached the team to
be quick, coordinated, and creative, writing new plays to take
advantage of the other team's weaknesses. Some of these were
straightforward football plays meant to be coordinated and agile, but
others were trick plays. It were not strictly speaking against
(25:02):
the rules, at least not until whichever governing body was
in charge at the moment meant to adjust the rules
for the following season. So here are some of the
trick plays that Pop Warner used at Carlisle. He had
straps sewn to the halfbacks and fullbacks uniforms so that
their teammates could literally throw whoever got the ball when
(25:23):
the play started. He added what he called a breast
protector to the team's uniforms, which he said was to
protect their breastbone if a player was blocked or tackled,
or just fell. This breast protector was padded an oval,
and it sure did look like a football if you
put your arm over it. And there was also the
(25:44):
hidden ball trick. In a game against Harvard in three
the team gathered into a huddle, only they were facing
outward instead of in, and then one of the players
shoved the ball up the back of another's jersey before
the huddle dispersed and ran in different directions, so the
Harvard players did not know who had the ball. Warner
was not the only coach and Carlyle not the only
(26:06):
team incorporating this kind of trickery. For example, the car
Lysle players were generally not at their best during bad
weather or in poor field conditions. Warner's interpretation of this
was that the other teams were often highly driven by
a sense of school pride, so they played their best
in any weather to avoid letting their school down. But
the car Lysle players were more about the love of
(26:29):
the game, and the game was just not as much
fun in the mud, in freezing weather or in the
middle of a downpour. As early as fans from Canton
Athletic Club started fire hosing the field to muddy it
up before Carlysle games. As another example, Harvard started using
footballs that were the same color as their jerseys so
(26:49):
it would be harder to see who had the ball.
Over time, the rulemaking bodies, it would be like, no,
you can't, you can't be shoving the balls that plays
jerseys to hide them. So the played an overall part
and how the rules of football evolved over the years.
Within a few years of its establishment, Carlisle Indian Industrial
(27:12):
Schools football team was recognized as a force to be
reckoned with among the opposing teams and within the Indigenous community. Consequently,
Carlisle was able to recruit the most athletically skilled players
from indigenous nations all over the United States. They were
doing the same thing that other football teams were, picking
the best and brightest athletes wherever they were. A November two,
(27:35):
nineteen o eight, right up in the Philadelphia Public Ledger
sums up the team Carlisle grew into quote, the Indian team,
if not the best in America, has a most distinguishing factor.
It is always fit. At one stage of the season, Yale,
West Point, Harvard, or Princeton might defeat the Indians. It
is nearly always necessary for each of these teams to
(27:57):
be at their best when they meet the Indians, but
the Indians can always, in any season, beat almost any
team at any time of the season, the Indians displayed
the most remarkable form and football prowess. To get back
to Jim Thorpe and his part in all of this,
not long after he got back to Carlisle after his outplacements,
(28:17):
he was walking to an intermural football game with some
of his intermural teammates. He wasn't on a varsity team yet,
and he saw members of the varsity track and field
team practicing the high jump. He watched as they kept
raising the bar an inch at a time, and the
players tried to jump over. Although most of them were
able to clear the bar when it was set to
(28:38):
five ft eight inches, none of them could clear it
at five nine. Thorpe asked if he could try, which
the varsity team found laughable. In his words quote, I
had a pair of overalls on, a hickory shirt and
a pair of gymnasium shoes that belonged to someone I
looked like anything but a high jumper. The track athletes
snickered a bit as the bar was set up for me.
(29:00):
I cleared the barrow my first try, and, laughing at
the astonished group of athletes, went on down to the
lower field for the game. The next day, he was
called into Pop Warner's office. When Warner asked if he
knew what he had done, Thorpe said, nothing bad, I hope.
Warner told him that he had just broken the school
record in the high jump, and Thorpe replied that he
(29:21):
thought he could probably do better if he was actually
wearing a tracksuit. This feat earned Thorpe a spot on
the varsity track team, with Warner telling him that he
might want to coach one day, and if he did,
he would need to know about track and field to
do a good job at it. We have really focused
on football so far, but by this point Carlyle's athletic
(29:43):
reputation involved multiple sports, including track and field, and that
reputation had also drawn some criticism, including allegations that Carlyle
was fielding players who were not actually students. And while
it was true that some of Carlyle's players were older
than the typical college player and that some of them
barely attended classes, the school maintained that all of its
(30:06):
players were legal. It did, however, implement a four year
limit to how long players could remain on a varsity team.
In an effort to deflect criticism, Albert exen Dine, who
was about to age out of the varsity track team,
was assigned to Thorpe kind of as a mentor. At
the time, exen Dine held most of the school's medals
(30:27):
in track and field, and at a meet at the
end of his first season, Thorpe broke all of those records.
When the varsity football season started in the fall, Thorpe
insisted that he be allowed to play, but Warner objected
that he didn't want to put his track star at risk.
As a compromise, Warner tried to put Thorpe on the
football team as a kicker, and Thorpe would not accept
(30:49):
that as being good enough. Finally, exasperated with Thorpe's insistence,
Warner basically made him the target for tackling practice, But
as his teammates tried to tell backle him, he just
kept dodging them and flipping them over and then out
running everyone who was left standing. The descriptions of this
for multiple people are really like. Pop Warner was like, fine,
(31:12):
you want to be on the football team, They're gonna
be the target for this practice. And they did not
work out the way Pop Warner was expecting. So Pop
Warner finally relented and allowed Thorpe onto the varsity football team,
although he was inexperienced enough as a football player that
he spent most of that first season on the bench.
He was a backup player to Albert Payne. I think
(31:34):
in one of the biographies I read, it said that
his first varsity football practice was the first time he
had worked with an actual football, rather than the one
that had been stitched together from leather scraps and stuffed
with rags. Carlile finished that season, though, with ten wins
and one loss, and Thorpe started a scrapbook of press
(31:56):
clippings about his games. Thorpe returned to both track and
fee field and football at Carlisle in and he started
to get a lot more time on the field in
football games. One reason was that a lot of Carlyle
players had reached their four year limit and had aged out,
but also Thorpe was just flat out amazing. For example,
(32:17):
in Carlyle's game against Conway Hall, Thorpe scored five touchdowns
and through a thirty yard pass that led to another score.
During the first half of the game, Warner finally pulled
him out of the game because he felt like they
were just humiliating the other team. The final score there
was fifty three to zero. At this point Thorpe temporarily
took a break from Carlisle. So that seems like a
(32:39):
good point to also take a pause on this episode.
We will pick it up next time. Do you have
a little bit of listener mail for us? Sure? Do?
This listener mail is from Gene and Jean sent the
most wonderful picture. Jean wrote in after our episode where
I interviewed Dr Catherine Sharp Landeck about Jackie Cochrane, and
(33:02):
Jean says, Hi, Holling and Tracy, thank you so much
for presenting such a thoughtful and entertaining interview with Dr
Landeck about Jackie Cochrane. As a retired Air Force pilot
and Air Force Academy graduate, I feel a deep debt
of gratitude to Jackie and the other women's Air Force
Service pilots. At the same time, I was surprised to
find that my career path may not have met with
(33:24):
her approval, especially considering I'm married to another military pilot
and had two children while actively serving. As with many
of your podcast episodes, you dealt honestly with Jackie's integrity,
neither downplaying her accomplishments nor glossing over her shortcomings. Thank
you for presenting women and all your subjects as authentic
human beings with faults and flaws that coexist with their
(33:45):
impressive feats and important events. Listening to your podcast as
one of the highlights of my day, and I can't
wait to hear what you'll be talking about next. Cheers
Gane from Tampa. And then the attachment UH says ps.
Here's the picture that would probably have Jackie rolling in
her grave. It was taken about two weeks before my
second son was born. My aunt said that I looked
(34:08):
like a cross between a South American dictator and a
pregnant Catholic schoolgirl. UM. So Jean is in her uniform, UM.
She has all these medals pins to her her chest area.
She's holding a certificate that presumably she has just been
(34:29):
awarded UM and is definitely UH in the late time
of pregnancy. I love this picture. UM. I love the
extremely happy look on on Gene space and I love
I mean, we didn't talk about this specifically in the episode,
but I mean we talked a lot about Jackie Cochrane
thinking that women needed to have babies and raised children,
(34:52):
and we didn't really talk about the fact that a
lot of women who serve in the military and who
flies pilots also have children and raise them. Um, that's
definitely true. So thank you Gene for this great picture
and the great email. UH. Thanks to everybody uh for
listening to the show today. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, we
(35:14):
are at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com,
and then we are all over social media at missed
in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the Apple podcast app, the iHeart radio app, anywhere else
you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(35:37):
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we
are going to talk about Jim Thorpe, who was just
an incredible all around athlete. During his lifetime. He was
(00:24):
famous around the world, and he topped a lot of
lists of the best athletes of the twentieth century or
even the best athlete of all time. At the same time,
though news stories and early biographies and in some cases
stuff that still floats around today, managed to simultaneously praise
his accomplishments and also minimize them through racist stereotypes and
(00:46):
other falsehoods. Thorpe made an amazing name for himself in
track and field and football at Carlisle Indian Industrial School,
and then he became internationally famous of the nineteen twelve
Olympic Games. We were going to tell his story in
three parts, which is not the number that normally comes
in that sentence. I am not I don't think we've
(01:11):
ever done a three part or before we've done four.
We've well, yeah, we did that four part mini series
on China Chairman Mouth and we do too. On occasion
we do too periodically. This time we got three, so
to yes, I was today I was going to give
people the peek behind the curtain, which is that we
do that because we have two new episodes a week,
(01:33):
and if you break it to three, it gets into
some scheduling, you know, just like carefulness, you have to
do UM. I also really felt like with this one,
once I got to the point that I had turned
my notes into actual sentences, I looked at it and
kind of went, if I try to get this down
into two, we're going to have to cut out some
(01:54):
stuff that's really important, and I didn't want to do that.
So this time we're going to talk about Jim Thorpe's
life before and during his time at Carlisle, including some
of the context about Carlisle and other similar boarding schools.
Then next time we will talk about his incredible performance
at the nineteen twelve Summer Olympic Games, and then in
(02:16):
part three, we will talk about his career after his
time as an amateur athlete had ended, and then two
big pieces of his story that continued on for decades
after his death. According to Jim Thorpe's own account, he
and his fraternal twin brother Charlie, were born on May twelfth,
south of Belmont in what was at the time Indian Country.
(02:38):
Today that is near Prague, Oklahoma. But there's also a
christening record for the twins that list their birthday as
May twenty eight seven, so the year before Thorpe was
saying his birthday was. The boys were baptized at the
Benedictine Sacred Mission Church using Latin versions of their name
Carolus for Charlie and Jacobus Francisca's for Jim. Their five
(03:00):
Hiram was sac and Fox and Irish, and their mother,
Charlotte View was Potawatamie, Kickapoo and French. The boy's ancestors
included Sack Leader and war Chief black Hawk. After Jim
and Charlie were born, they were enrolled as members of
the sac and Fox nation, and Charlotte gave them traditional
sac and Fox names. Jim's was what though hook and
(03:23):
that means light after the lightning or bright path. Hiram
Thorpe was a farmer and a rancher. The family raised horses, hogs,
and cattle, as well as growing a lot of crops.
They lived on land that the thorpes had been allotted
under the General Allotment Act of eighteen eighty seven that's
also called the DAWs Act. We've talked about the DAWs
(03:43):
Act on the show before. It was the act that
broke up land that had been held for Indigenous nations,
collectively assigning it out to individual tribal members as part
of the US federal government strategy of allotment and assimilation. Overall,
this Act was devastating for the vibes and nations that
were affected. Once the land had been allotted, so called
(04:05):
excess land was open up for sale to non Indigenous people,
so each member that was eligible would get this allotment
and anything left over could be sold. Then, huge numbers
of people who were allotted land later wound up losing
that land for a range of reasons. Some people sold
the land because they wanted to or because they needed
(04:25):
the money. Others were defrauded out of it, or were
assigned allotments that just could not be maintained through any
reasonable means, so they weren't able to meet the standards
of keeping this land and it was taken from them.
This whole process was also geared towards getting indigenous people
to assimilate with white culture, including granting people US citizenship
(04:48):
once they'd successfully maintained their allotment for twenty five years.
Although the Sac and Fox Nation lost a huge amount
of land as the so called excess during allotment, the
sorp family le specifically seems to have fared better with
this than a lot of other people, including getting an
additional allotment in eighte This may have been because they
(05:09):
already had some connections to the culture that indigenous people
were expected to assimilate with. Along with about fifteen percent
of the Second Fox Nation, the Thorpes were regarded by
the federal government as progressive. They had adopted, to at
least some extent, a more white way of life. They
were Christian, they spoke English, they lived in a log house,
(05:30):
and they wore settler style clothing. At the same time,
they were still an active part of their indigenous community,
taking part in festivals and observances, and following indigenous traditions
and methods for various parts of their day to day lives,
like grinding corn into flower. Their home was fairly isolated,
and they didn't have a lot of contact with white
(05:51):
people until Jim and Charlie were about six years old.
Gemina's twin brother grew up hunting, fishing, riding and training
horse says, and playing outdoors a lot. Their father also
loved sports and physical activity, especially swimming, wrestling, and riding,
and he really taught his sons about physical fitness and
fair play. Jim was bigger and more athletic, and Charlie
(06:15):
was smaller and more bookish. But in Jim's words, quote,
we were never in the house when we could be
out of it. One of their favorite pastimes was to
play an almost extreme version of Follow the Leader. The
Leader would do things like climb all the way to
the top of a tree and then jump out, or
like jump into a really fast moving river and swim
to the other side. It's like follow the Leader and
(06:37):
Dare had a baby. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is
way more physically involved than any Follow the Leader I
played as a child, and their parents wanted them to
be educated, so when the boys were six, Jim and
Charlie were sent to the Second Fox Boarding School that
was a residential school that had been established by Quaker
missionaries on the edge of Second Fox Territory in eighteen
(06:59):
seventy two. The school's purpose was to convert and assimilate
children from the Second Fox Nation, or, in the words
of the eighteen nineteen Act that provided federal funding to
these types of schools, to quote civilize them. We'll be
talking more about these schools more over the course of
this episode, and there is also a lot about their
(07:19):
history and development in our two part podcast on the
Fort Shaw Indian School Girls basketball team. Those episodes came
out in t seventeen. Jim and Charlie started at the
Mission school in eighteen ninety three when they were about six.
In the mornings, they and their classmates were taught basic English,
reading and writing, arithmetic, and history, along with religion and
(07:40):
white etiquette and social customs. And then in the afternoon
they had vocational training, with a lot of that vocational
training geared toward keeping the school itself running. So the
girls cleaned and did laundry and made new uniforms. The
boys did manual labor and worked on the school's farm.
Students also wore military style uniforms and did military style drilling.
(08:03):
All of this was pretty standard in these kinds of schools,
and it was all meant to just erase any trace
of their indigenous heritage or culture. Since Jim and Charlie
already spoke English, they had a little bit of an
easier time at the Mission school than many of their peers,
most of whom spoke only indigenous languages, which were forbidden
from being used at the school. But between the two
(08:25):
of them, Charlie was definitely the better student, and he
helped Jim through the more difficult parts of their studies.
But then in Charlie contracted pneumonia. Hiram and Charlotte came
out to the school to try to nurse him back
to health, but he died at the age of about
eight or nine. Charlie and Jim had really been just inseparable,
(08:45):
and Jim, of course was heartbroken and bereft. Compounding all
of this, Hiram and Charlotte had also been struggling in
their marriage. They went through a series of separations and
reconciliations that was all pretty tumultuous for their children. They
had eleven children total, five of whom survived to adulthood.
After his brother's death, Jim started spending a lot of
(09:08):
time in the woods alone. He repeatedly ran away from school,
making his way back home on foot. That was a
trip that took about twenty miles that's roughly thirty two kilometers.
This was not, by the way, unique to Jim at all.
Conditions at these schools were often really poor and students
just missed their families, so it was fairly common for
students to escape and then flee back home or somewhere else.
(09:32):
Hiram kept taking Jim back to school, only for Jim
to leave again. At one point, Jim even left the
school immediately after his father had dropped him off, taking
a short cut that put him outside the door of
the family home for his father even got back. So
Hiram decided to send Jim to a school that was
farther away, and that was Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas.
(09:56):
That was about three hundred miles or four two kilometers
from where they were living. Two biographies of Jim Thorpe
interpret this somewhat differently. In Jim Thorpe, World's Greatest Athlete
by Robert W. Wheeler, part of the goal was definitely
to make it harder for Jim to return home, but
it was also an act of compassion on Hiram's part,
(10:18):
as he recognized that Jim was having a hard time
staying at a place that he associated so strongly with
his late brother. On the other hand, the book Native
American Son, The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe
by Kate Beauford describes jim siblings as being terrified of
their father and Hiram, framing this whole decision as almost
(10:38):
a threat, saying quote, I'm going to send you so
far away you'll never find your way back. Yeah. Having
read both of these books, it's presented as a much
crueler decision to me in in Kate Beauford's book than
in Robert W. Wheelers. Regardless, though, in Jim and his
older brother George were both in rolled at Haskell Institute,
(11:01):
and we will get to Jim's time there and then
later on at Carlisle after a sponsor break. Jim Thorpe
was about ten years old when he was enrolled at
Haskell Institute, and his brother George was sixteen. At the time,
more than a thousand students were enrolled at the school,
(11:23):
and they represented between eighty five and ninety different indigenous
tribes and nations. Like the Sac and Fox Mission School,
Haskell Institute was established to assimilate indigenous children into white culture,
separating them from their families and their cultures and customs
and languages, with classroom instruction in the morning, vocational instruction
that kept the school running in the afternoon, and military
(11:46):
style uniforms and drilling. George left this school not long
after they arrived. One of Jim's favorite pastimes at the
school was watching football practice. He was such a constant
presence on the sidelines that team captain Shahn the Archiquette,
took notice of him and decided to encourage him. Chauncey
went to the school's harness shop and stitched together a
(12:07):
football out of pieces of leather and then stuffed it
with rags, and Jim started using this homemade football to
organize games among the students who were his own age.
After a while, Jim started to do pretty well at Haskell.
There are reports that you'll read that he was not
a great student, and his report cards say otherwise. In
(12:27):
nineteen o one, though he heard that his father had
been shot while hunting and was gravely injured. Jim decided
to go home and he hopped a train. When he
was found on board and removed. He also found out
the train had actually been going the opposite direction of
where he needed to be. It took Jim about two
weeks to walk home, and by that point hyram Thorpe
(12:50):
was out of danger, and while he wasn't exactly pleased
to see his son Amenda, Jim was able to help
around on the ranch while his father was convalescing. One
of Jim's friends also reported that he had really been
expelled from school for drinking as all this happened, so
it wasn't just that he was going home to see
his sick father. The school records are unclear. They don't
(13:11):
confirm or refute this. Yeah, they just pretty much say
he was not there anymore. Although Jim's father recovered from
this injury, while Jim was still at home, his mother
died from blood poisoning. This might have been a complication
of childbirth. It was not too long after she had
given birth to her eleventh child. Her land allotment was
(13:31):
divided up among her heirs, with Jim getting about twenty acres.
So with all of this going on, Jim stayed at
home rather than being returned to Haskell. He attended nearby
Garden Grove Public School, and he worked on the family ranch,
but one day he and his brother decided to skip
their chores and go fishing, and when they got back,
(13:51):
their father whipped them, something that Jim Leader said he
deserved but didn't feel like taking, so he ran away
from home, this time going to Texas, where he worked
on a ranch until he had earned enough money to
buy himself a team of horses, and he described this
as wanting to prove himself to his father before he
went home again. Garden Grove didn't really have much of
(14:14):
an athletics program, although it was starting track and field
and baseball teams, and Jim found once he was back
that he just really really missed football, and at this
point among the indigenous population of the US, the school
most known for its football program was Carlisle Indian Industrial
School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Like the Second Fox Mission School
(14:36):
and Haskell Institute, Carlisle Indian Industrial School was part of
this whole system of schools that were set up to
assimilate indigenous children. It opened in eighteen seventy nine and
was actually the first of these schools to be run
by the US government rather than by missionaries or other organizations.
Carlyle's founder and the architect of the federal approach toward
(14:57):
these boarding schools was Lieutenant Kern Richard Henry Pratt. He
had formulated his approach to Indigenous education while working with
Indigenous prisoners of war after the Red River War in
eighteen seventy five. He set up a program that involved
English language and vocational instruction, followed by outplacement into jobs
(15:17):
for the incarcerated POW's. They made what he viewed as
rapid progress learning English and adapting to a more white
way of life. In Pratt's mind, the only way that
Indigenous people were going to survive the United States ongoing
western expansion was to abandon their cultures and their languages
and all of their tribal ties, and instead to fully
(15:40):
assimilate into white society. His slogan in this was killed
the Indian and save the Man. Pratt tried to convince
the federal government to fund a program for students and
teenagers similar to what he had done with these POWs.
He started by teaching a small group of Indigenous students
at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute IT in Virginia. He
(16:01):
later got funding to convert an abandoned cavalry barracks in
Pennsylvania into a school. Like the other schools we've already
talked about, Carlyle combined academic and vocational instruction with military
style drilling and discipline. On arrival at the school, students
who didn't already have English names were given new ones.
They were also given haircuts and new clothes, with before
(16:24):
and after pictures taken to highlight this idea that they
were being civilized. Unlike the Second Fox Reservation School, which
was on the edge of Second Fox territory, Carlyle was
hundreds or thousands of miles away from where most of
its students lived. The point was to create as much
separation as possible between students and their cultures and families.
(16:47):
Both physical and emotional conditions at Carlyle and other similar
schools were often just appalling. Illness outbreaks were common, and
students often didn't have enough to eat. Class Room instruction
was threaded through with the idea that indigenous cultures were
backward and even evil. Punishments for rule breaking, including rules
(17:09):
that forbade children from speaking their native languages are following
their own cultural or religious observances, could really be abusive
Today Carlyle and similar schools in both the US and
Canada are rightly seen as horrific and intentional attempt at
cultural genocide that tore a hole through the cultural ties
and lineages of thousands of Indigenous people. Just at Carlyle,
(17:33):
nearly two hundred students died of disease, malnutrition, and neglect. Typically,
these children's bodies were not returned to their families. They
were given Christian funeral rights and buried there at Carlisle.
In more recent years, there have been efforts, sometimes taking years,
to have those bodies repatriated to their tribes. Now we've
(17:54):
talked about a few of them on some of our
Unearthed episodes. Many of the children who went to Carlisle
and other boarding schools, including Haskell and including the Sac
and Fox School, they weren't going of their own free will.
Often their parents were coerced or threatened into sending their
children there, or federal policies toward Indigenous people had created
(18:15):
really desperate economic conditions for them that just left families
with no other choice. Federal officials also took custody of
the children of indigenous leaders who were seen as difficult
or threatening. Keeping those children at boarding schools, essentially as hostages.
At the same time, though, in the late nineteenth and
(18:35):
early twentieth century, Carlyle also had a certain level of prestige,
especially when it came to its athletics program, including among
Indigenous people. There were parents who sent their children to
Carlyle or other boarding schools willingly because for a range
of reasons, they thought it was the best option, and
in some cases there were students who chose to attend
(18:58):
Carlyle or another board school for themselves. Jim Thorpe fell
largely into that last category. He already knew about Carlyle
and its reputation as an athletic powerhouse, and Carlyle had
actually also already heard about Jim. Lieutenant Colonel Pratt had
asked the Federal Indian Agent for Second Fox Nation to
(19:18):
be on the lookout for athletic talent as far back
as eighteen. Jim made the decision to go to Carlisle
in nineteen o four, and when he told his father
about it, Hiram reportedly said, son, you were an Indian.
I want you to show other races what an Indian
can do. On April twenty second, nineteen o four, not
(19:39):
long after Jim arrived at Carlysle Indian Industrial School, Hiram
Thorpe died of blood poisoning, possibly as the result of
a snake bite during a hunting trip. Jim was not
able to return home for his father's funeral. At this point,
by the age of about sixteen, Jim had lost his
twin brother, other siblings, and both of his parents. The
(20:00):
staff at Carlysle became concerned for him, not so much
for the sake of his mental health, but because he
wasn't really participating understandably, and as the school administration saw it,
if a student wasn't participating, they also were not assimilating.
So Jim was put into Carlyle's outplacement program, which was
(20:21):
more typically used for older students. During summers or other breaks,
students would be sent to live with white families out
in the community, where they would work as domestic or
agricultural help. In June of nineteen o four, Jim was
sent to live with a family in Somerton, Pennsylvania, where
he would cook and clean in exchange for room and
board plus five dollars a month. Considering that Jim had
(20:44):
a lot of experience in farming and Ranching. This placement
didn't entirely make sense, and the family expected him to
eat in the kitchen rather than with them in the
dining room, which made it clear that they did not
see him as their equal. He was moved to a
different family in Pennsylvania, where he worked as their gardener,
and then he was moved to a home in New
(21:04):
Jersey where he worked as a foreman for Native American
workers on a local farm. He returned to Carlisle in
nine seven, and that is when he got involved in
the school's athletic program. We will get back to his
time at Carlisle athletics after a quick spotsor break. We're
(21:28):
gonna talk a little bit about the history of sports,
especially football, at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school established
a collegiate football program in eight and then not long
after that, Lieutenant Colonel Pratt briefly banned the sport after
a player broke his leg during a game. When students
(21:49):
banded together to try to get football reinstated, Pratt finally
agreed under two conditions. The first condition was that they
had to play fair. There would be no fighting, no
slug other players, even if the white teams were doing
it because their behavior, the Carlisle team's behavior was going
to be seen as a reflection on all indigenous people.
(22:10):
The second condition was quote that in the course of two,
three or four years, you will develop your strength and
ability to such a degree that you will whip the
biggest football team in the country. To that end, Carlyle
hired Glenn Warner as coach in eight Warner had been
nicknamed Pop while serving as team captain at Cornell because
(22:30):
at the age of five, he was the team's oldest member.
He had coached college teams before starting at Carlisle, and
with the exception of a brief break between nineteen o
four and nineteen o six, he worked as a football
coach at Carlisle until nineteen fourteen. There are all kinds
of ball games that play really important roles in indigenous
(22:51):
cultures all over North America, But when Pop Warner arrived
at Carlysle, most of his players really did not know
much about grit iron football. Specifically, a lot of them
had also been living through years of deprivation. Warner's told
Pratt that most of his prospective players should really be
trying out for beds in a hospital rather than spots
(23:12):
on a football team. Warner was genuinely afraid that there
was no way that he could shape them into a
team that would justify his twelve hundred dollar a year salary.
American football itself was a fairly new sport at this point,
having grown out of rugby and soccer. The Intercollegiate Football
Association was established in eighteen seventy seven and was the
(23:33):
first intercollegiate athletic conference until eighteen ninety three. It established
and refined the rules of play among its member schools.
Other organizations and associations followed, gradually refining a sport into
one that was at least hopefully interesting to watch, but
not so violent that it killed in an inordinate number
of players dads. There were times in early American football
(23:58):
history when player deaths were a big problem. Under Pop
Warner's direction, Carlisle played a huge part in that overall
process of refining the rules of football. In general. Carlisle's
players were smaller and lighter than the players on their
opposing teams, which included the powerhouses of the day like
Harvard and Yale. The team itself also tended to have
(24:20):
fewer players, so each player spent more time on the
field and had less time to rest during a typical game.
Those reduced numbers of players also meant that each player
needed to be able to play multiple positions. Since Carlisle
had no football stadium, nearly all of their games were
away games, and since the team was largely funded through
(24:41):
ticket sales, it maintained a really grueling schedule to get
to all those games. So Warner coached the team to
be quick, coordinated, and creative, writing new plays to take
advantage of the other team's weaknesses. Some of these were
straightforward football plays meant to be coordinated and agile, but
others were trick plays. It were not strictly speaking against
(25:02):
the rules, at least not until whichever governing body was
in charge at the moment meant to adjust the rules
for the following season. So here are some of the
trick plays that Pop Warner used at Carlisle. He had
straps sewn to the halfbacks and fullbacks uniforms so that
their teammates could literally throw whoever got the ball when
(25:23):
the play started. He added what he called a breast
protector to the team's uniforms, which he said was to
protect their breastbone if a player was blocked or tackled,
or just fell. This breast protector was padded an oval,
and it sure did look like a football if you
put your arm over it. And there was also the
(25:44):
hidden ball trick. In a game against Harvard in three
the team gathered into a huddle, only they were facing
outward instead of in, and then one of the players
shoved the ball up the back of another's jersey before
the huddle dispersed and ran in different directions, so the
Harvard players did not know who had the ball. Warner
was not the only coach and Carlyle not the only
(26:06):
team incorporating this kind of trickery. For example, the car
Lysle players were generally not at their best during bad
weather or in poor field conditions. Warner's interpretation of this
was that the other teams were often highly driven by
a sense of school pride, so they played their best
in any weather to avoid letting their school down. But
the car Lysle players were more about the love of
(26:29):
the game, and the game was just not as much
fun in the mud, in freezing weather or in the
middle of a downpour. As early as fans from Canton
Athletic Club started fire hosing the field to muddy it
up before Carlysle games. As another example, Harvard started using
footballs that were the same color as their jerseys so
(26:49):
it would be harder to see who had the ball.
Over time, the rulemaking bodies, it would be like, no,
you can't, you can't be shoving the balls that plays
jerseys to hide them. So the played an overall part
and how the rules of football evolved over the years.
Within a few years of its establishment, Carlisle Indian Industrial
(27:12):
Schools football team was recognized as a force to be
reckoned with among the opposing teams and within the Indigenous community. Consequently,
Carlisle was able to recruit the most athletically skilled players
from indigenous nations all over the United States. They were
doing the same thing that other football teams were, picking
the best and brightest athletes wherever they were. A November two,
(27:35):
nineteen o eight, right up in the Philadelphia Public Ledger
sums up the team Carlisle grew into quote, the Indian team,
if not the best in America, has a most distinguishing factor.
It is always fit. At one stage of the season, Yale,
West Point, Harvard, or Princeton might defeat the Indians. It
is nearly always necessary for each of these teams to
(27:57):
be at their best when they meet the Indians, but
the Indians can always, in any season, beat almost any
team at any time of the season, the Indians displayed
the most remarkable form and football prowess. To get back
to Jim Thorpe and his part in all of this,
not long after he got back to Carlisle after his outplacements,
(28:17):
he was walking to an intermural football game with some
of his intermural teammates. He wasn't on a varsity team yet,
and he saw members of the varsity track and field
team practicing the high jump. He watched as they kept
raising the bar an inch at a time, and the
players tried to jump over. Although most of them were
able to clear the bar when it was set to
(28:38):
five ft eight inches, none of them could clear it
at five nine. Thorpe asked if he could try, which
the varsity team found laughable. In his words quote, I
had a pair of overalls on, a hickory shirt and
a pair of gymnasium shoes that belonged to someone I
looked like anything but a high jumper. The track athletes
snickered a bit as the bar was set up for me.
(29:00):
I cleared the barrow my first try, and, laughing at
the astonished group of athletes, went on down to the
lower field for the game. The next day, he was
called into Pop Warner's office. When Warner asked if he
knew what he had done, Thorpe said, nothing bad, I hope.
Warner told him that he had just broken the school
record in the high jump, and Thorpe replied that he
(29:21):
thought he could probably do better if he was actually
wearing a tracksuit. This feat earned Thorpe a spot on
the varsity track team, with Warner telling him that he
might want to coach one day, and if he did,
he would need to know about track and field to
do a good job at it. We have really focused
on football so far, but by this point Carlyle's athletic
(29:43):
reputation involved multiple sports, including track and field, and that
reputation had also drawn some criticism, including allegations that Carlyle
was fielding players who were not actually students. And while
it was true that some of Carlyle's players were older
than the typical college player and that some of them
barely attended classes, the school maintained that all of its
(30:06):
players were legal. It did, however, implement a four year
limit to how long players could remain on a varsity team.
In an effort to deflect criticism, Albert exen Dine, who
was about to age out of the varsity track team,
was assigned to Thorpe kind of as a mentor. At
the time, exen Dine held most of the school's medals
(30:27):
in track and field, and at a meet at the
end of his first season, Thorpe broke all of those records.
When the varsity football season started in the fall, Thorpe
insisted that he be allowed to play, but Warner objected
that he didn't want to put his track star at risk.
As a compromise, Warner tried to put Thorpe on the
football team as a kicker, and Thorpe would not accept
(30:49):
that as being good enough. Finally, exasperated with Thorpe's insistence,
Warner basically made him the target for tackling practice, But
as his teammates tried to tell backle him, he just
kept dodging them and flipping them over and then out
running everyone who was left standing. The descriptions of this
for multiple people are really like. Pop Warner was like, fine,
(31:12):
you want to be on the football team, They're gonna
be the target for this practice. And they did not
work out the way Pop Warner was expecting. So Pop
Warner finally relented and allowed Thorpe onto the varsity football team,
although he was inexperienced enough as a football player that
he spent most of that first season on the bench.
He was a backup player to Albert Payne. I think
(31:34):
in one of the biographies I read, it said that
his first varsity football practice was the first time he
had worked with an actual football, rather than the one
that had been stitched together from leather scraps and stuffed
with rags. Carlile finished that season, though, with ten wins
and one loss, and Thorpe started a scrapbook of press
(31:56):
clippings about his games. Thorpe returned to both track and
fee field and football at Carlisle in and he started
to get a lot more time on the field in
football games. One reason was that a lot of Carlyle
players had reached their four year limit and had aged out,
but also Thorpe was just flat out amazing. For example,
(32:17):
in Carlyle's game against Conway Hall, Thorpe scored five touchdowns
and through a thirty yard pass that led to another score.
During the first half of the game, Warner finally pulled
him out of the game because he felt like they
were just humiliating the other team. The final score there
was fifty three to zero. At this point Thorpe temporarily
took a break from Carlisle. So that seems like a
(32:39):
good point to also take a pause on this episode.
We will pick it up next time. Do you have
a little bit of listener mail for us? Sure? Do?
This listener mail is from Gene and Jean sent the
most wonderful picture. Jean wrote in after our episode where
I interviewed Dr Catherine Sharp Landeck about Jackie Cochrane, and
(33:02):
Jean says, Hi, Holling and Tracy, thank you so much
for presenting such a thoughtful and entertaining interview with Dr
Landeck about Jackie Cochrane. As a retired Air Force pilot
and Air Force Academy graduate, I feel a deep debt
of gratitude to Jackie and the other women's Air Force
Service pilots. At the same time, I was surprised to
find that my career path may not have met with
(33:24):
her approval, especially considering I'm married to another military pilot
and had two children while actively serving. As with many
of your podcast episodes, you dealt honestly with Jackie's integrity,
neither downplaying her accomplishments nor glossing over her shortcomings. Thank
you for presenting women and all your subjects as authentic
human beings with faults and flaws that coexist with their
(33:45):
impressive feats and important events. Listening to your podcast as
one of the highlights of my day, and I can't
wait to hear what you'll be talking about next. Cheers
Gane from Tampa. And then the attachment UH says ps.
Here's the picture that would probably have Jackie rolling in
her grave. It was taken about two weeks before my
second son was born. My aunt said that I looked
(34:08):
like a cross between a South American dictator and a
pregnant Catholic schoolgirl. UM. So Jean is in her uniform, UM.
She has all these medals pins to her her chest area.
She's holding a certificate that presumably she has just been
(34:29):
awarded UM and is definitely UH in the late time
of pregnancy. I love this picture. UM. I love the
extremely happy look on on Gene space and I love
I mean, we didn't talk about this specifically in the episode,
but I mean we talked a lot about Jackie Cochrane
thinking that women needed to have babies and raised children,
(34:52):
and we didn't really talk about the fact that a
lot of women who serve in the military and who
flies pilots also have children and raise them. Um, that's
definitely true. So thank you Gene for this great picture
and the great email. UH. Thanks to everybody uh for
listening to the show today. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, we
(35:14):
are at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com,
and then we are all over social media at missed
in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the Apple podcast app, the iHeart radio app, anywhere else
you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
(35:37):
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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