David and Sarah continue the conversation about David's research into his new book, "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe" which is available at bookstores or online at: https://davidmaraniss.com/library/path-lit-by-lightning-the-life-of-jim-thorpe/
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In our first episode this season, we talked about how my dad wrote this book, path lit by lightning the life of Jim Thorpe today and in our next episode, we're going to talk about Jim Thorpe's life and some of the details in the book itself. Okay, Hey, Dad, how are you? It's a beautiful day, Madison, I'm doing well. And I've got the book finally so
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I see it.
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As they say, I R L in real life.
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How many pages is that one dad. So longest book I've written. So total pages is 657. But that goes up by 659. And that goes all the way to the index. So the actual story
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is 568 pages.
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would Obama? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I think the most of the sunlight was my lungs, but before this one. Okay.
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But as you said it, it reads swiftly. And today, we're going to talk about
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the book itself, not as how you wrote it. But because it is a 659 page book. And I've read it, I was thinking about how to, you know, talk about it in about an hour or so. There's no way to cover it all.
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But what I think is interesting, whenever I read your books, is how you choose to start them, especially the biographies, because I was thinking it's a bit like a painting, because it's a slice of life. But you're the artist in you, you sort of guide the focal point, you tell us where to start, where to look first. And then and then from there, we fill in the scene in a way. So how do you start this book?
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Were actually started in two ways there. You know, I'm not big on introductions or prefaces, it's matter of fact, in one of my books, I think it was like one paragraph
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immersed in the sunlight. This one I, I started
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in media res when Jim Thorpe is home from Stockholm, after the Olympics, and he's being paraded around the East Coast. And he's at the height of his fame. A world famous figure, the greatest athlete in the world. So I started there, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. But after I'd written the whole book, I decided, well, this one needs a little bit more of a preface than some of my other books. And so I went back and wrote a three page preface, which gives you a little fuller understanding of why I wrote the book and what Jim Thorpe represents in what he endured. And sort of my take on him at the end, which is that, yes, there was a lot of different there were a lot of difficulties in his life, but I didn't view it as a tragedy. I viewed it as a story of perseverance that sets up where the story begins, which is at the height of his fame. And I did that for two reasons. One is, I know, that's what if people know about Jim Thorpe, that's what they know. And I wanted to set them right there at a place that they're familiar with Jim Thorpe, the greatest athlete in the world.
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But I also wanted to use it as a way of connecting him to his native American history. And, you know, he was from the second Fox Indians, he was a member of the thunder clan. And the greatest member of that clan in history was Black Hawk, the world famous Black Hawk for whom the Chicago Blackhawks are named. There's, you know, Black Hawk just runs throughout American history in so many ways that name and that person. And so
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once I researched Black Hawk and the notion that Jim Thorpe's mother told them he was the reincarnation of the great warrior Blacklock. Then I saw this incredible parallel between Jim Thorpe at the height of his fame after he won his gold medals, and Black Hawk at the height of his fame after what was called the Black Hawk war, which is really a massacre of his of his tribe,
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when he was captured and paraded through the East Coast, as the most famous in the world, just as Jim Ferb was some eight years later, and so I was able to both present Jim Thorpe at the height of his fame and what happened, as he was hailed
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I'm in New York City and Philadelphia and Carlisle where he was in school, and Blackhawk as he was taken through many of the same places as a prisoner of war. And so that's how I started the book both in the moment of Jim Thorpe's fame, and then connecting him back to his most famous ancestor. Yeah. I think that is so useful because then
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in a sense that the idea of mythmaking and the duality of his existence in his in his with his heritage, and the dominant cultures, expectations for him and so forth. Like, we've already been introduced to those things from the beginning, with the way you started, and you talk about the Olympics, and it was the 1912 Olympics being in a sense, the height of his fame. And I just want to talk about that particular experience, because I loved this part of the book where you describe the Olympic team setting sail from New York. And I think you describe it June 14 1912 8am, YMCA corner of Sixth Avenue and 23rd, blue blazers, white slacks, white shoes, and white straw voters. Is that right? With black silk bands anyway, it's just a gorgeous image of the whole, you know, group of athletes about to set sail and then participate in this historic, it's the fifth fifth Olympiad of the fifth modern Olympiad
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and a person want to ask you how you research that, but
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I also want you to walk us through what he was about to do, what was his event? How did you train for it? And you know, why? How did he become the greatest athlete in the world during that Olympics? Well, it Carlisle Indian Industrial School for a Star Trek star, you know, in most most college track of that era, and even today, I'm the event that he was brilliant at the decathlon, which is 10 events, from running to lates, to jumping. I'm really a test of your incredible of all of your athletic skills on a track and field.
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That wasn't most of most
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meats didn't have the decathlon in it. But they did have many of the events from the decathlon. And so he was, you know, it Carlisle, he would compete against Penn at the Penn relays, which was the most famous track beat on the East Coast, against Syracuse and, and all of the really good track schools in the East. And he and his little teammate, Louis, to Alabama, would win every meet. I mean, they were they were terrific in so many different events from the hurdles to the shotput.
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To some of the races, I would try them I was a long distance runner, in any case, so he was
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the they didn't have an actual tryout for the decathlon to get onto the Olympic team. But everybody knew that he was good at so many events that he would be one of the decathletes.
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And the way I wanted to start that chapter.
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And the way I try to write, everything I do is to make the reader feel that they're there. You know, I'm not a documentarian, but, but my writing style, it tends to be sort of in that style, so that I come in and out of that, but the reader always feels that they're part of, of that time and place, which was, which is everything. Time in place allows you to go to so many other things into your own thoughts and assessments, and then the nuances of a story. But as long as you set it in a time and place in the reader fields that are there, they're willing to go with you towards other places. So that was the morning that they boarded the ship. And when I found it as a way, not only to make the reader feel that the readers feel they were there, but also to introduce some of the other characters who were on board that ship. And that was the way to do that. So that as they're boarding the ship, and as they're going across the Atlantic, you become more and more familiar with that moment with the characters and what's to come.
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And I just want to say that
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some of the descriptions of his journeys
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are the kind of the most magical and there's a part of me as I read the book, knowing that he endured a lot of loss. There were some exquisite moments of opportunity and joy to that you captured there and then later when he does the the world tour with the giants, and is in his new book
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I, you know, and I just thought most people never have that in their life at all, you know, and, and I don't know, when we look at people who have great fame. And we sometimes then feel sadness for the losses they endure, it's nice to see in such detail descriptions of the height, you know, of the moments
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that most of us never have in our lives. That's a very important point, Sarah, and it's one thing I wanted to emphasize in the book. That yes, as the as the story progresses, you see some low points. But my feeling about life, something I actually learned from my big brother, Jim was that life is basically built on sensations and memory. And Jim Firth had some amazing sensations and memory in his life, which in the totality, and examining that life, raises it,
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you know, not just in sort of a, an athletic, heroic standard, but also just in what one can enjoy out of life and remember from it, which is more universal than the heroic. And so yeah, the both both of those journeys, and then starting with the, with the,
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the journey across the Atlantic to Stockholm, were incredible in just so many rich moments about that, that I wanted to capture.
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Yeah.
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And when you describe his success, and you know, when we say he was the greatest athlete in the world,
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and, and then you look at it, you say, Thorpe, finish 700 points ahead of his nearest competitor. Okay, so
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he didn't just win, he won by a lot. You was no contest. And he won two gold medals, the first in the pit athalon, which is kind of like a shorter decathlon. It's five events instead of 10.
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In the scoring system, and that was a little, I mean, scoring systems, and all of those multi event events are kind of alluding. In the Teflon, you actually, the fewer points you had, the better you were, you know, because if you have one point, I mean, you want the event Kathlyn had, you know, went into the 1000s of points, and even great Olympic historians can't even fully explain some of the point systems. But in any case, if both of those are multi sport events, he blew the competition away, and especially in the decathlon.
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And most of the competitors, I think, there were maybe 29, one or two off press and 29 competitors in the decathlon. And more than half of them couldn't, couldn't make it all the way through the 10 of x, including his great future nemesis, Avery Brundage, the future president of the International Olympic Committee, who quit after performing poorly in the first several events.
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One of the things you do with describing the Olympics is also the coverage of the Olympics back in the States. And how did you start to notice the way that Thorpe was talked about? In the sense of I think you referenced that at first, he's an Indian, he's performing as an Indian. And then as he wins, the press starts to describe him in a different way. Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, he was already he wasn't world famous before the Olympics, but he was incredibly well known in the sporting world, in the United States before the Olympics, largely because of his football skills. He had been an All American football player, in 1911, at Carlisle had defeated Harvard and Penn and he had, you know, he was brilliant, a first team all American. So and I had seen him being described in the press for many years before the Olympics, always as the big Indian, or the great aborigine or, you know, various
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racist or borderline racist descriptions of him. And that was the case as he was going to the Olympics. And then all of a sudden, when he won, he was the great American. You know,
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you're not even the Native American but just the the, you know, the country adopted him with pride. So much so that the President of the United States then, William Howard Taft, wrote a telegram congratulating Thorpe and saying that he represented the best of Americans. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but that is what every American citizen should want to live up to the best of American citizenship.
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And the truth is, Jim Thorpe was not you
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Even American citizens because most Native Americans were not given citizenship yet.
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And you talk about that in the book, obviously. Is it 1916 That he's granted citizenship or that he applies for? He's 20? Yes, it's not yet after 25 years of, of him being treated as a second class citizen, all of his royalties, and all of that came due. And he was then granted citizenship, yes. After it already reached his the height of fame, right?
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Came to Native Americans, indigenous peoples, at different times over the course of a long period of time, some, some were citizens in the 1800s. A few, and most didn't get their citizenship until the teens and even 20s of the 20th century.
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Well, you're right, the first half of Jim's life, the central issue in the relationship between Native Americans and the federal government involved how Indians were to be assimilated into the dominant white culture, once they were no longer being tracked down and killed by the US Army.
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And the first half of his life, you place in context, not only in his education, or his exploitation at the Carlisle school, but also
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of, of the greater population of Native Americans and losing their land and so forth. And
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children being sent to Carlisle and you talked about that just now. But for those who haven't read the book, I think one of the fuzzy things in our head is okay, he's at Carlisle, which is a school it's not a college per se, but he's playing against, you know, the teams. Harvard, you know, they play football against and this will come up again, in terms of how old is he anyway, we're gonna use playing against college students and this or that, and then obviously, this affects when he works during the summer and ends up playing professional ball, right? And then that has a consequence on his Olympic medal. So how can we understand what it meant to go to Carlisle for Jim Thorpe and to play sports for Carlisle in terms of
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who they competed against, and also what was expected of of the students for part of the year when they weren't being educated? Well, there's a lot there. I mean, Carlisle
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was not a college. And it wasn't a high school, but it was a school. It was called an industrial school. But its main purpose was education was part of it, but only education in a specific sense, which was acculturation and assimilation. The point of those schools was to try to drum the Indian this out of Indians and make them as white as possible.
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That's why they existed. That was the entire philosophy of the American government, really starting. In some ways the year Jim Thorpe was born in 1887. When the Dawes Act effort was to basically strip the Indians of their communal land and make them individual property owners, making them more white in that sense. I mean, Indians lived communally white America lived individually, privately as owners of land, to the, to the Native Americans, the land was nature's and we were just, you know, the stewards of it. And AK, so that's started in 1887. And then, then the schools, of which the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the flagship School of the entire fleet of Indian schools, some of which were government run, some of which were run by Catholic, the Catholic Church or other churches.
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Those were the acculturation efforts
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on the education front and to take the young, Native Americans away from their reservations away from their past, away from their religion away from their culture, and teach them the other way, the white mainstream way. So it was, in some ways, it was very cruel and cruel and,
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and in other ways.
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It was successful for certain of those people, including Jim Thorpe, in the sense that that's how he became famous than a football team. He was a brilliant athlete. The football team competed as you say against
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All the big colleges of the East Coast, even though it wasn't exactly a college, but this is way before the NCAA existed before there are really
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sort of organizational structures and rules about college football. And the Carlyle school was a great attraction was kind of like, you know, while while Bill HCA Buffalo Bill Cody, you know, bringing his Wild West show, but this was these were Indian football players, they were considered exotic. They're a great, great attractions, gate attractions. So all of the colleges, put them on the schedule for home games for the colleges, because it made the money Harvard made money off at Penn made money off at Syracuse, West Point. And so that's how the football team grew in stature. They also had a coach who was very successful, who came from Cornell, Pop Warner, who was in many ways, not the greatest individual, but was a excellent football coach, and very widely and creative. And he saw Jim Thorpe, sort of a way to reach the heights of football, which you did with a team of Native Americans.
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In that era, in particular,
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were terrific athletes, and, and used as great athletes in sports that were not their traditional sports. It wasn't lacrosse or a running as much as football and baseball at Carlisle. So that's how Jim Thorpe
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got to Carl at age 17. Stayed there often on is much offense on on through 1912. So that's eight years
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where he was affiliated with Carlisle and finally reaching that pinnacle of success and then Team 12.
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He comes back from the Olympics and returns to Carlisle. That's correct. And I believe it was in November of 1912, that Carlisle would play army. Is that right?
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Yeah, it was one of my favorite football games of all time.
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Yeah, at West Point.
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On the plains at West Point where their field was that it was before Mikey stadium was built, overlooking the Hudson River.
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It would, it was the chance for the Indians to face their old nemesis the US Army on a level playing field for the first time. Of course, it was football, it wasn't life or death.
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But it was an amazing moment. And
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the Carlisle Indians prevailed 27 to six against an army team that was stocked with good players, including a running back and linebacker named Dwight, David Eisenhower, the future president.
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And Thorpe was the star of the game, I would say that the two games in his college career made him a national figure.
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And considered the greatest football player of that those years but also one of the greatest of all time. And one of those games was against Harvard in 1911. Where he was brilliant, both running the ball and tackling and kicking, and Army in 1912. And really, the army game sort of was magical. For the for those historic reasons. You describe it for this one afternoon on the plane of West Point within a short March of Custers tomb.
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And you say it was payback. the rattling of bones, I think you say Gus Welch called it later. A character. So the the players from Carlisle could it was probably a palpable feeling for them as they took on army. And as you said, trounce them, essentially.
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The coach played it up, I mean, he went to every player before the game, about what this sort of payback was all about. As a smart football coach might, you know, generally speaking, as I think I say in the first paragraph of that chapter, football players are thinking about origin issues. You know, they're thinking about tackling and blocking and running and thinking your girlfriend in the stands and not much else. But this this case was different. It was it was special because of that. Historical resonance.
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You
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And you know, one of the fun things I think for sports fans, especially football fans, actually, Jim Thorpe played so many sports, baseball fans, football fans.
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I guess you name it, he played it or touched upon it. But you talk about what football was like in 1906. You talk about it, as the years go on, you'll say what was football like in 1907, and so forth. And they're such as like, or even with the grid iron was and the pigskin and the size of the ball. But
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just to get a sense of the type of play that they had, then you say, in 1906, and again, I know that the game against Army was 9012. But still,
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you say the rules in football were few.
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And you talk about the number of injuries from 1901 and 1905 71 recorded deaths in football.
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And you say the unofficial casualty count of 1905 read like a military after action report. And that's just in that one year 18 deaths one paralyzed one eyes gauged out to intestines ruptured. You have four arms, broken seven legs, 11 ribs, I mean, it goes on and on. And two concussions, which there presumably were more but
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but then the irony, Christian reformers encouraged Native American boys to play football, the game of Harvard and the Ivy League boys, because the indigenous game of lacrosse was to Savage, exactly. That tells you all about the perceptions and avoid America versus the Native American perceptions.
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But football was, was a brutal Avenue. It still is a brutal sport. But it was so
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violent and deadly in that era that it was almost banned, like boxing would later be in colleges in the early 1960s. And it was such that Teddy Roosevelt, the President had to call an emergency meeting of all of the leaders of college football, and urged them to sort of modify some of the rules to make it a little bit safer.
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You know, that's been an ongoing process ever since. Right? I mean, even in the last 10 years, there have been those changes to try to
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slow down the onslaught of concussions and other injuries. But even in its earliest days,
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it was even more brutal than more apparent that it could be a deadly sport.
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Absolutely. And it was also relentless, am I right that there was only the players played offense and defense, it wasn't like, go off the field for a while and warm up and have Gatorade.
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There's not an offensive team and a defensive squad, there were 60 minutes, players. If the game was 60 minutes, that's another thing. It could be a lot of different times of games in that period. But in any case, if you went off the field, you couldn't get go back on. If you were substituted for that was the end of your game. So it's more like
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European football, or soccer, as we call it here in that sense. And it really evolved from rugby and a little bit of soccer. I mean, that's where football came from mostly rugby. And so when you were describing the differences in that era, another one was the shape of the football. It wasn't as spherical and so it wasn't as sharply pointed. So it was harder to throw a spiral was a little harder, it's easier to drop kick it, meaning you let the ball hit the ground, and then you kick it
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than it would be when when it had that sharp point and who knows where how it would bounce. There was so many differences in the shape of the football, the shape of the field, at first was 110 yards. And that I didn't know you know, there's so much that I learned about the game we researching this book, but the the reason it's called a grid is because in those days, the chalk lines went both horizontal and vertical creating a real grid and that's that's why I got that name. Of course, the vertical lines disappeared after a moment after at some point
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and I know that Pop Warner is a you know he he enters Jim's life in you know different moments has different purposes and
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comp complicated certainly but, but it is interesting to hear how he tinkered you know that he had sort of an inventor's mind with certain things and
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shoes and,
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or sewing, I think you said he had hidden pockets sewn into uniforms and things like that. I mean, he's a character I know. He is a character. And I love the way you can do things to
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that effect. When I set the first copy of that chapter to my editor by vendor and Simon and Schuster, he circled that said, Oh, God, I wish we could do that today. And it was about a play they had where one of their ends disappeared behind the
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knot, he didn't go to the stands, but he went behind the players on the opposite team sidelines, he came out on the other side, they threw up the ball.
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And there was another player, right, where he designed sort of a kangaroo pocket and in one of the players, so they can hide the ball in there, and then opposition would know who had the ball, he scored a touchdown that way as well.
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Whatever was, but more than even those trick plays, he was also an innovator, he, he was the originator of not the inventor of the forward pass, but one of its first strong proponents,
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the the innovator of the of this doubling formation and many other formations, he was constantly tinkering with that, you know, he would take your good sit, sit down at a, at a cafe near the school and, and you salt and pepper shakers, and design plays and write them on the side of a napkin.
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And in that era, you know, everything hadn't been decided yet. And, you know, there, there were 14 coaches on a team, you know, staying up all night, watching film of the other team. So it was much more basic than that. And in that basic way, Pop Warner was a true innovator.
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We don't have a lot of time to go into it. But it is also interesting how certain things
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are, in a sense, you know, sometimes we feel like, Oh, we're so modern now, or things are different now than they were then. But even then, it sounds like relatively quickly, once the football team, you know, earn money and became a fan help the school become famous. You even mentioned special dormitories for the football players. There's nothing new under the sun in terms of football, money, and corruption. It's been there from the very beginning in different ways. You know, it's sort of petty corruption, but it is a corruption of the what might be called the amateur ideal. So yeah, football players were given special treatment. They were paid by Pop Warner, not much, but they were they were getting a lot months.
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And they were getting, you know, clothes from the close us in downtown Carlisle. And, and, you know, all the special things that that football players get, you know, much larger scale in later decades when they're getting cars and, and big chunks of cash from, from rich alumni. But that system of corruption has been there. It was there in 19, the early 19 678 period. It was there in the 1920s when there were huge scandals, and several teams were banned because of that, all the way through. I remember when I was in Texas, the Southwest bureau chief for The Washington Post.
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Southern Methodist University, you know, this great religious Methodist University was given what was called the death penalty because they were cheating so much and paying players so much. But yes, it goes all the way back. And I've written about that. And in my other book about the deals with football, we tried to do Manna above gets the learning. But I sort of call it the fallacy of the innocent past. The past was never as innocent as people want to believe, right.
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path led by lightning. The life of Jim Thorpe is available online and at bookstores on August 9. Visit DavidMaraniss.com To order your copy.
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This has been an episode of the "David Maraniss, Ink in Our Blood" podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and that you'll subscribe to the ink in our blood podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or whichever podcast service you prefer. If you loved it, we'd love it if you left a rating and review
34:36
ink in Our Blood is produced by Metamorphosis Agency, LLC. Music has been written and provided by Monika Ryan. Ink in Our Blood is hosted by Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff. Thank you for listening.