In this first episode of the season, David and Sarah begin 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/
Sarah 0:07
We're back to talk about my dad's latest book, "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe." Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation has been called the greatest athlete the world has ever seen. He went gold in the decathlon and Pentathlon of the 1912 Olympic Games. He mesmerized fans and sports writers on the football field, and he traveled the world with professional baseball. This book on Jim Thorpe is my father's third sports biography. He wrote of course, "When Pride Still Mattered
A Life of Vince Lombardi," Clemente, the Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero," and now "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe." Athletic myths my dad writes are made by the desire to rise above life's ordinariness and associate with the transcendent myths at once distort a specific reality and fill a human need, revealing a larger truth. That truth is what we're going to talk about in these podcasts. Well, Dad, it feels like it's been about 10 years since we did the last podcast.
David 1:25
What was it two years? One?
Sarah 1:28
I don't know. Yeah, ya know, you've created a book, I guess, since we last talked. And so today we're going to talk about how you how you researched and wrote the book, which is on Jim Thorpe, titled Jim Thorpe path lit by lightning for the path lit by lightning life of Jim for the life of Jim Thorpe, got it? You know, I was going to start by asking you, who was Jim Thorpe to to help, you know, put it all in context. And then I thought the question really is who is Jim Thorpe. Even though he's no longer living, it seems like this is a case where myth and man are so interwoven. And each has its purposes, that it's not just, you know, the sort of the finite life of an individual but the, the meaning of the life which is continuous. So, who is Jim Thorpe?
David 2:36
Jim Thorpe is an American myth and a great American figure. He was the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century, arguably the greatest American athlete ever. He was a Native American, a member of the SEC and Fox nation, from Oklahoma. He was from the same clan, and perhaps a descendant of the famous second Fox, Indian Black Hawk. His mother told him that he was the reincarnation of Black Hawk. And he did things on the athletic fields that no one has ever done since he was an Olympian who won two gold medals in 1912. He was an all American football player, one of the first great star and founding president of the National Football League, and a major league baseball player. So in that sense, he could do anything. And he transcended sports, and became a mythic figure in American life for all of those reasons.
Sarah 3:50
So, for this podcast, we're going to talk about how you wrote the book, which I suppose people can start to order. It comes out in August of this this summer, so that's exciting, but it's already on Amazon. Okay, Aug. Nine. Wow, that really is soon. About almost a full month from today as we record this, in fact, so pretty cool. You know, before we get into how you wrote the biography of Jim Thorpe, I thought it was kind of interesting that you said that as you talk to people of your generation, many of them will say, Oh, I read a book about him in fourth grade. So did you read a book about him when you were in fourth grade?
David 4:37
I haven't been able to find the library card but I'm pretty sure that I did. I read books about Babe Ruth Jackie Robinson. And Jim Thorpe sort of the mythic figures of American sports. That's, that's what I love to read when I was in elementary school. But I really Didn't know that story. I remember. I remember that I knew that he was an American Indian, and that he was sort of cool looking in that he was a great athlete. So, yes, I mean, I was one of those kids who read about him in fourth grade. But fourth grade for me was a long time.
Sarah 5:20
Right? Yeah. Well, it but it can be. I think one of the reasons it's significant in this story is that sometimes in terms of our knowledge of these bigger than life figures, the first impression comes when we're young. And then everything else either fits into that mold or disproves it. And one of the things you've done with your research is, look into the veracity of these stories, that that might have been in some of those books for fourth graders, you know, and, and so for contemporary readers, there might be that interest in how their first impression and first introduction to Jim Thorpe, you know, is confirmed or changed,
David 6:07
like goes out to sort of, I mean, in one way, you know, for a lot of reasons, especially in that era, when I was growing up. Books for Children were sort of sanitized. So that the story of Jim Thorpe was one just of, of heroism, of his athletic accomplishments, without really dealing in any sort of contextual depth of the struggles that he went through both in his personal life and dealing with American society. So that's one part of the myth. The other part is to not just glorify Jim Thorpe but but repeat stories about him, like, sort of like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, or, or Babe Ruth, pointing to where he was going to hit his home run in the All Star game, you know, things that that likely did not happen, but but reflect sort of the way that someone is revered by society in retrospect.
Sarah 7:08
And that makes me think, too, that
sometimes, books are written after a life has already been defined in the sense of the greatest athlete in the world. And one thing that I think most of your biography, biographies do, but of course, this one is, it's sort of show the, the way in which someone becomes an athlete, or becomes named the greatest athlete. And the idea of becoming, and the uncertainty involved in the sort of the struggle, that it's, you know, that a person's ultimate accomplishments aren't a given, but that they, in a sense,
unfold. And you talk about potential a lot and the idea of his potential as a young man. But I want to start with talking about how you doing any of those things, you have to become obsessed with the subject, as you say, So when did the seed or the sort of obsession and desire to to spend the next couple of years of your life working on this happen? And how,
David 8:21
sir, I'll answer that. But let me first get back to what you said about, about sort of not knowing what's going to happen in someone's life. And that's the first key to understanding how to write biography that lives are lived forward. But biographies are written from looking backward. So you have to try to write looking forward not knowing what's going to happen next. There are occasions when I will foreshadow something but for the most part, the way I have to approach it, and the way the reader has to approach it is that you don't know what's going to happen next, and there's no Givens in anyone's life. All of it is uncertainty until it happens. But it all seems certain after you've written it. So to get back to your question about sort of what obsessed me about Jim Thorpe, it took a long time for this to happen. I you know, I'd written two other sports, or biographies about sports figures, which I would only write because they're about more than sports. The first was about Vince Lombardi. And we pride still mattered. And in that case, my obsession was looking at sort of the mythology of competition and success in American life, what it takes and what it costs. And also, how does someone become a leader? Why is someone a leader? What were Lombardi skills as a leader, and using his dramatic life as the great football coach, perhaps the greatest in NFL history to examine those questions and also American society during the period of his life from from now between 13 to 1970, Roberto Clemente was my chance to write about the Latino experience in America. And about that rare athlete who was growing up as he was getting older as talents might have been diminishing. And he offered so much more than just sports. He liked Lombardi transcended sports. It died in a row, a truly heroic figure. I'm trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after an earthquake. You know, so many sports figures are called heroes. But what did they do off the athletic fields. So Thorpe index sets is sort of the third part of my trilogy of American sports figures. And for me, I saw it, not just as an opportunity to, to, to write about this incredibly dramatic life, but to use his life as a means of, of really exploring the Native American experience. Through his accomplishments and his struggles, his perseverance and his difficulties. The seed was planted. Almost two decades ago, I was in Denver on a book tour. And one of the people at the Denver press club that day, was a man named Norbert Hill, in Oneida in from the United Nation in Wisconsin. And he came up to me after my presentation and said, Dave, I've got your next book for you. You gotta write about Jim Thorpe. And I think he even handed me some documents that he had about Jim. But that was almost done 20 years ago or so. And at the time I was, I had several other books lined up, and it wasn't really on my radar screen. But the seed was planted, and it grew and grew. And finally, I realized that this was the book that I wanted to write, and it took another almost 20 years before I started.
Sarah 12:04
Wow, so the seed was planted. And then it grew. Jim Thorpe, if I have this right, was born in 1887. And he died in 1953. You were born in 1949. And I think he died early enough in 53, that you were not yet. Four. So you were somewhere in your threes as a toddler. Such as putting that in context. You've written about other figures, obviously, who, sort of fading into the past the memories of them, people who were contemporaries, with them dying, and so forth. So to write this book, you would have to start your research, in a sense, with, obviously, more than a half century after he died, Jim Thorpe died, and most people who knew him intimately no longer alive. So where do you start? Where do you literally start?
David 13:11
Well, you're absolutely right, that none of his family members, none of his children are alive when I started this book, most of his grandchildren were not around. So we're dealing with great grandchildren. But, but I almost I never start with the family in a situation like this. So where do I start? Before I literally started, I wanted to sort of, sort of understand the grounds that I was going to be covering. And so my first call was to Patty Lowe, who I had known from her days in Wisconsin, as a great journalist here. And Professor at the University of Wisconsin, and she had gone out to, to found the Indigenous Studies Research Department at Northwestern University, your own school, Sarah. So, you know, I wrote to Patti and said, I'm thinking of doing a book on Jim Thorpe. How do you feel about that? And one of my sensibilities is, you know, I'm a white male, I'm writing about Native American. You know, am I the one to do this book? And she wrote back? Yes, yes, yes. She was very excited that I would undertake this, read some of my other books. So that encouragement really meant an enormous amount. If she had said, No, I might not have done this book, to be honest with you. And then from then on, Patty was sort of a resource for me as I was doing my research in terms of understanding certain nuances of the Native American experience. So I could always go to her if I had a question about that. My next call, again, was not really directly related to the Thorpe biography. But it was to Suzanne Shawn harjot, who lives in Washington, who I had known for more than probably 40 years. I remember she used to come to the post back when I was a young reporter there and talk to one of my bosses, Howard Simons, who she was very close with, about Native American issues. And particularly she'd been campaigning for decades, against the name of the Washington football team. She was the leader of that movement, to to eliminate the disparaging mascots and nicknames for so many athletic teams, Suzanne, Shawn Arjo, was at the forefront of that movement. So I called her up and said, I am doing a think I'm writing a biography about Jim Thorpe. And I'd love to talk to you. And she immediately and so much information for me about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School where Jim went to school and gained his fame as a football player there. She had relatives who had attended Carlisle she knew all about the founder of the school. Richard Henry Pratt, and sort of his, what she called civilization is philosophy. As opposed to what earlier had been an extermination is philosophy of just kill the Indians. Practice philosophy was kill the Indian save the man, which meant to take all of the Indians out of them as the only way for them to survive, you know, a completely racist and disparaging philosophy but nonetheless, one that that very progressive white progressives at that time I held on so Suzanne taught me about the Carlisle school, she she had just a wealth of history about about Oklahoma, she was your family was from Oklahoma, and the Indian territory there. So I grounded myself first, if I wanted this book, I want all my books to be written as much as possible, not from me imposing a viewpoint onto the book to understand it from the inside out. And so I had to talk to as many Native Americans as they could first. And Suzanne was very key to that. I also went up to Yale very early in my my first research trip really was to Yale, and Yale University. I'll explain why. But first of all, to say that while I was there, I met with another
important Native American scholar dead Black Hawk, who teaches Indigenous Studies at Yale and talked to him about about what I was doing in what he knew about Thorpe and so on. And so, so I grounded myself first, in that sort of place before I did any of my, my real research. Then, because COVID hadn't hit yet, Sarah, so I was able to travel some I was able to get to Yale, I was able to get to several other archives, but I always try to learn as much as I can before I talk to, to anybody who will have specific knowledge about events. And so I started with the research.
Sarah 18:54
You know, the reason I asked Yale isn't there a town Yale also that's prominent in the book?
David 18:59
Absolutely. That's, I guess, sort of an irony but yeah, for a while Jim Thorpe lived in El Oklahoma. So this is this is. This is the final key, Rare Book, archive and library at Yale, which had several very important documents for me. It had all of the papers of the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, Richard Henry Pratt,
Sarah 19:26
which were not because he went there, or why were they
David 19:29
one of his daughters decided to give them to Yale, she lived in Connecticut. I mean, that that by Nikki library has enormous it's a great resource for things all over the world really adapted to have those papers. It also had the papers have a great Native American writer, or just a great writer who happens to be Native American, and Scott Momaday, who is from southwest, but was fascinated by the Carlyle school. And by Thorpe and wrote, you know, he wrote a lot of great things about the boarding school experience nationally. But he wrote a specific play that was not produced and a screenplay for a movie sort of built around Carlisle during the Jim Thorpe era. So to read everything that he had researched, you know, at that archive, really get grounded again in Carla, which I considered sort of the heart of my book, The boarding school experience. Um, that was very, that was the first research I did. And then there's another connection that came through. Suzanne, Shawn heard you all that you might want to ask me about?
Sarah 20:59
Yeah, I was gonna get to that later. But I'll do that now. So in speaking with these experts, who you turned to, to understand from the inside out the Native American Experience, I'm sure that led to other experts from there. And I know you've said that Suzanne shown harjot opened the door to someone else who was that?
David 21:27
Yes, she really did. We were talking and she said, you know, my, my dad, she said, once met the great man, Jim Thorpe. And there was someone who was interested in writing about Thorpe, who had interviewed my father about that experience. So, you know, I thought that's a little teeny bit, but I want to find out who that was. So I said, Well, who was that she said, it was David Hearst Thomas, who was a great anthropologist archaeologist who worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It turned out that David has Thomas was also on the board of directors of the National Museum of American Indians in Washington at the Smithsonian, which was also Susan was also on and that's how they met. In any case, I contacted David, up in New York, and told him that, you know, I'd heard that he did have viewed Suzanne's father about Jim Thorpe. And, you know, did you have a transcript of that interview? And he said, Well, you know, I might have it somewhere. But why don't you know, if you're out there in New York, stop by and we can talk. So I went up to New York. And you know, what a grand old building that museum is, you know, a Central Park West. And he's, his office is up on the fifth floor and sort of a turret like part of the, of the building. And I went into his office and it was lined with artifacts of his life as a as a anthropologist and archaeologist and just a student of Native American life. And there are books everywhere, and globes and maps and, and he had this old desk and he had is, he was wearing cowboy boots or boots, and he had his boots on the desk. And he told me, it turned out it was the desk that it belonged to Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist who also worked at that museum. He once was her boss anyway. So we're talking for about an hour or two. And this experience had happened to me once before in my life. But in any case, you know, he told me about meeting about interviewing Suzanne's father and meeting Jim Thorpe. And then he said, You know, I was obsessed with Jim Thorpe. I spent years wanting to write a biography of Jim Thorpe. But for various reasons, I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't do it. And I've read your book on Vince Lombardi. You know, he said that he that he David had once worked for Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders and he loved football. And he thought it was just incredible serendipity that I would come along and be interested in Thorpe. And he said, I have eight boxes of material that I accumulated, researching a book that I never wrote. Wow. I would love for you to have them. If you can write this book, that would be great. So Something like that it happened to me with Roberto Clemente book, the lawyer documents and Michael Manny's plane crash anyway. So, you know, I was I went up to New York that time on the train, so I didn't have any means of taking all those boxes. But very shortly thereafter I called my friend chip Brown, another writer who lives in New York and told him what I was doing, I was coming up to New York with my station wagon and what he helped me load all these boxes. And he, of course, jumped at the chance to go up to the fifth floor of the museum and see all these things. And so we loaded everything up. And I inherited, at least temporarily, the David Hearst, Thomas archive, and Jim Thorpe, which was invaluable to me. I mean, one of you know, I tried to treat it just like any other archive, like the vitae key or any of the others that I went to. But that material was really, you know, very early on in my research, I had sort of the, the gold that I needed for the book.
Sarah 26:09
Well, that reminds me also of the Bill Clinton research when you would go round, and someone would serve you some sort of homemade concoction and then go up to the attic and bring down letters I if I'm recalling that
David 26:21
Oh, Park, it's a woman who quit. She was built great and was built great. And all right. Yeah, took me home because she felt sorry for me, because I had I was allergic to the Mimosa trees blooming in the springtime of southwest Arkansas. And after talking, she brought down this box of, of letters of Bill Clinton's, ma'am, ah, it's grandma. So yes. You know, I consider that, you know, I've written about in various books, including this one, a baseball figure in the Branch Rickey, whose most famous say was luck is the residue of design. And they know each and all of my books, I've been lucky. But I do consider it a residue of the design of what I do. Yeah, sorry, getting those boxes from David Thomas.
Sarah 27:17
I think a big part of that design is your motto, if we could use that word to go there. And going there that there is not always the geographical place where your main subject lived, but the individual people who are connected, so you go to the Natural History Museum, or you go to these offices and then or the houses and then someone there is invaluable. But let's talk a little bit about that. There's so going there. Besides, in a sense, sort of the the human there's of going to the Native American experts after that, and the library and the archives. Carlisle, Pennsylvania is a significant part of the story of Jim Thorpe, and many, in many ways, also a window into I think, the treatment of Native Americans during a certain period of time. So how did you go to Carlisle? And also how did you then find the record of what Carlisle was when Jim Thorpe was there? Which was that in the just the turn of the century that he got there?
David 28:37
He got there in 1904. He was there until 1912. And most of that period, he was at Carlisle. There was some gaps. Interesting gaps one, well, I think nificant. So, yes, in this case, you know, this book for me, Sarah was different than any one I've done in terms of the go there experience, because of COVID. This was really my COVID book. I was able to get to most of the archives before COVID arrived in March of 2020. But I wasn't able to get everywhere. So I got to most of the places of Jim's Thorpe's life except I never got to Stockholm where he was in the Olympics. But good Carlisle I didn't get to and it was turned COVID that I got there very carefully. But there's a wonderful you know, everywhere I go, there's they're always sort of people who unlock the doors for me. And in this case, it was a great historian and archivist from the Cumberland County Historical Society they Barbara Landis. Who knows, you know, she's still walking encyclopedia of knowledge about At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. And so when I went up there, she was my tour guide, you know, it both, you know, in terms of knowledge and of looking around and seeing it. And the interesting thing about that school is that, you know, it's been closed for more than 100 years of the close to the 1918 when the army which had originally been an army barracks, wanted it back to make it a hospital for during World War One. And, you know, so So soldiers went there to recuperate from from wounds. So that's when the Indian school closed. And yet, more than a century later, almost all of the remnants of that school are still there. The the dorm where Jim Thorpe, slept, the superintendents house, the gym, the playing field, most of the buildings were the house where his coach Pop Warner lived. All of that is still there. So when you tour those grounds, you can almost feel the you can almost hear the voices from 100 years past. And then, by far, the most haunting experience at that school, is the Indian cemetery. The first students who went to Carlisle, in 1879, when it was founded, were fraught were Lakota Sioux, South Dakota. And this was only three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where customers had been wiped out by by the Sioux and some of their allies, and Native American allies. And so, the idea was, the government's idea was to bring the many of the sons and daughters of those rebellious quote unquote, rebellious Indians east and reform, train them, take the Indian, you know, kill the Indian save the man. One of those Indians Luthor Standing Bear, who later became a writer said he thought he was going to Carlisle to die, he thought he was being sent there to show his bravery and that he would die. It turns out, he did not die. But so many of those young students did die over the course of, of the, from 1879 to 1980. And that whole period when the school was there, so there's the cemetery with more than 180, tombstones of the children of the Indians who were,
you know, the children who were sent there. And it's, it's truly a haunting experience to look at that cemetery. And, and think about, not just the reality of what it meant for those young people to be sent away from their families often have taken against their will, against the will of their families to this place. Not always, but often that was the case. Living in a completely alien environment, their hair short, their, their clothes, change that they had to wear, you know, ironically, uniforms that mimic to the US Cavalry and then chased and killed their, their ancestors. They weren't allowed to speak their native languages. They could not practice their own religions, they're all you know, tree, you know, inculcated in Protestantism. All of that sort of is evoked in this cemetery where their bones are, and only in the last six or seven years or even not even that long. Have any of them been repatriated, though the the US government resisted. The military resisted the idea of, of the native nations, taking those children back home to where they came from. It till recently had not started in the last few years. But I would say that going to that cemetery and really sort of infusing myself in that was one of those moments that I've had in all of my books where I really feel the history sort of soaking through.
Sarah 34:57
You mentioned this being the You know, your first and hopefully only COVID book and not being able to go to Stockholm, which is obviously where the 1912 Olympics took place. But also Is it correct that that's where the metals that Jim Thorpe one are they in their in Switzerland, aren't they the actual metals.
David 35:24
The metals are in Lausanne Switzerland, the were the International Olympic Committee headquarters are. I wished I could have gotten to Stockholm. The stadium still stands. It's a it's a beautiful old brick stadium. You know, it's still there. The Swedish have a wonderful Sports Museum, I was able to get some material from that long distance, but I would have loved to have gone there. Sorry. But once again, in this case, I did go there. I went there virtually in an incredible way I, I discovered that the International Olympic Committee had conscripted a wonderful documentarian, Adrian wood to find the old film from that Olympics, and there was tons of it, done by a Swedish show film company, and the path News, News real company, hours and hours of film and he found it all accumulated it, took it out to Burbank, California, put it through these. Well, I you know, I have no idea about the technical aspects of it, but somehow he was able to, to sort of re vivify that film and translate it into what would look like a modern film where it's not so Herky jerky, but you can actually see what's going on in real time. And there was hours and hours of it, including some film of, of Jim Thorpe, getting his medals from the King Gustaf, the fifth of Sweden. But just watching you, I watched everything, all two hours of that of the documentary that he made. And from the opening scenes where you see the people in the streets of Stockholm, parading down to the stadium, you know, the businessman in their, in their way to, you know, tuxedos, white tie tuxedos and the women in their incredibly sort of bull arts, dresses and hats. Every now and then all of the athletes, for the swimmers and divers to equestrians, there was even a tug of war in the Olympics in 2019 12. I got to feel all of that I felt like I was there watching those Olympics, which I couldn't have done by going to Stockholm in 2021, or 2020. But going back to 9012, into that documentary, really made me feel that I was there.
Sarah 38:27
I was gonna say you actually went, you went there, you went to 1912, Stockholm, I watched part of that documentary after you mentioned it. And the just as a woman, I noticed what the women were wearing this, you know, spectators, remember, you get the Summer Olympics, and you talk about the heat, you know, and it's so interesting to see these. Part of it is the the time 1912 And the formality, which is marveling at the spectators, and even some of the men assisting, you know, recording time and that sort of thing. They're dressed in such heavy garments, it looks like and you obviously there were some athletes who suffered because of the heat. But you wonder about the, the other people then?
David 39:20
Well, no one was wearing shorts and T shirts.
Sarah 39:23
Except I wanted you to explain your T shirt and its connection to 1912. Do you have the cover of the book?
David 39:30
I do. Yes. This is
Sarah 39:37
there you go. Yeah, pull it back a little bit now. Okay, that's
David 39:41
the same T shirt and the same. Yes, he's wearing the t shirt that I'm wearing. It was the official shirt of the American athletes at the Olympics. Yeah.
Sarah 39:54
And we'll talk about this in the in another podcast but one of the parts of the Olympics That was so interesting. And I don't know where you found the research for this. But the the idea that the American teams or the athletes would travel to Switzerland on a steamship, right. Yes, Sweden, Sweden sorry, on a steamship, and then that it had to be outfitted to help them train while they were on the ship for that was it about six days or so
David 40:30
harbor to Antwerp threw up into Scandinavia to Stockholm. So, you know, one of the things that's happened, Sara, since I research, my first book, which was about Bill Clinton, in the 1990s was the, the digitization of so many newspapers that are accessible online. In the old days, I used to go to libraries and crank out the microfilm for hours on end for days on end to get what I was looking for. And now, you know, I can go to this to, you know, newspapers.com, or genealogy bank.com. And type in a name and a date or a series of dates, and come up with, you know, just scores of stories from that period, about what I'm looking for. So, you know, there, there were probably, there were so many newspapers in that era, you know, probably 15, just in New York City alone. And many of them were covering those Olympics. Many of the journalists were on board that ship at that time. So I got, you know, I'm seeing reports of what was going on in that ship from, from the newspapers of that era, mostly awesome from some diaries that people kept replaying interviews, oral histories of people who were athletes then and, and one key one for me. A key throughout the book was Avery Brundage, who later became the president of the International Olympic Committee was truly sort of Jim Thorpe's Damasus throughout his life constantly refusing to to acknowledge that Thorpe deserved to have those medals and trophies back. But in 1912, Avery Brundage was a mediocre athlete who somehow made the Olympic team as a decathlete the same event the Jim Thorpe competed in and Brundage has an incredible archive at the University of Illinois, which he attended. I went I went there before COVID, and spent a significant amount of time there, going through his archive. And one of the things there is a unpublished autobiography or memoir. And there's a whole chapter on him going to Stockholm for those listeners. And so that was very helpful as I was sort of constructing that chapter on the Olympics.
Sarah 43:32
So Avery Brundage was finally helpful. Person who seems to be never helpful in
David 43:43
at least two of my books, that'd be great, you know, as you know, and notorious. First of all, for conspiring with the Nazis to disparage any attempts to boycott the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, spreading a lot of false propaganda, you know, Gamble's propaganda about how great Germany was, and it was treating its Jews. Well, in all of this, you know, complete fake news of that era. Maybe Brundage was part of that, buying into it 1912 Interestingly, he made two close friends in Stockholm, where they were both Germans who were then instrumental in 1936, in developing the Berlin games and the propaganda of those games. So he bought into it from from an early age. But yes, he was very helpful in my creating the Stockholm Olympics.
Sarah 44:44
I think the other interesting thing about the 1912 Olympics, and you placed it in context of Jim having already played football at Carlisle and against Army and so you say after the 1912 Olympics, within a few months, Jim Thorpe hadn't come 103 men who become the most famous American generals of World War Two, so there was another guy at the Olympics to well know who else was at the Olympics that Jim Thorpe.
David 45:12
There was another event called the modern pentathlon, which was an event that tried to sort of recreate what it'd be like to be a soldier of an earlier era. So it was horse equestrian, running, swimming, and, and rifle shooting. And the American entry was George S. Patton, who was on the ship with Jim. And, you know, he, he wrote about his experience in Stockholm. In a less than accurate fashion, I'll say and, you know, when you read that chapter, you can see how he sort of fudged what happened to him and what he did there. But yes, so Georges Patton, you know, one of the great generals of World War Two was an Olympian with Jim Thorpe. And earlier or later that year, in the fall of 1912, Jim Thorpe played his greatest football game, the most meaningful in the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was Carlisle against West Point, Indians against the army. And Carlisle whupped him 27 to six. There was an incredible game and a linebacker and halfback on that Army team was Dwight David Eisenhower, who actually spent much of the game trying to injure throw up and knock him out of the game. As it turned out, it was the other way around. And Eisenhower is the one who suffered an injury that helped sort of was the start of the end of his football career. On the bench, in that game, for army was a freshman, Omar Bradley. So you had the three great generals of World War Two of all encountering Jim Thorpe, and losing to various ways in 1912. Well,
Sarah 47:18
we'll talk about this in the next podcast when we talk about more of the substance of the book and not how you wrote it. But I created a separate list basically of cameos with famous cultural touchstones. And it's, it's a huge list is and it's everything from, you know, King Gustaf, the fifth, Dwight Eisenhower, and then, you know, obviously, well, like, Babe Ruth, you know, Jim, Bob Hope. It just goes on and on. And so you see Jim Thorpe navigating this era. It's so fascinating that, as is today, athletes often intersect with celebrities of the time, but not just celebrities, but soldiers or other people who would go on to big things. And there's Jim Thorpe, as you say, sort of indefatigable, never giving up and just kept going and going into the Hollywood phase as well. And I, at what point in your research did you finally watch or I should say, maybe you'd watched it before? But when did you watch the Hollywood movie with Burt Lancaster, playing Jim Thorpe?
David 48:32
It was one of the first things I did so really surprises me, ya know, I watched it early. But it didn't really I didn't know. You know, I was just watching it as a movie at that point. And then after I actually studied what happened with that movie, and knew everything about Pop Warner is coach and the, the contradictions of that complexities of that relationship. Because in the movie pop order is presented as the Savior, the Wise Man, if only Jim Thorpe had followed his directions, he would have been much more successful in his later life after athletics. And I didn't know much when I watched the first time then I watched it, probably 10 or 11 times after that, as I was writing the chapter. There's a whole chapter in the book called Have you seen the movie, which is about that movie? Jim Thorpe, all American, which came out in 1951. And I deconstruct it, and it's very important in the deconstruction of that movie. To understand Pop Warner is hypocrisy. And we'll talk about that in the next podcast but but Pop Warner was one of several important influential white leaders who turned away from Jim throughput is low, it was most difficult moment when the, when the medals were about to be taken from an ally to save their own reputations.
Sarah 50:12
That seems like almost a sort of a professorial way of approaching the movie to have your students watch it in the beginning of a, you know, a class and teach them the history and then have them watch that same movie at the end and see how their perceptions have changed.
David 50:29
Of yes, definitely did. I mean, you know, I like Burt Lancaster, he, I consider him a real movie star, you know, in the old fashioned sense. And he was a Lancaster was also a really very good athlete. So he could portray thorpes athletic skills, even though he was, I think, 36 or 37, when they film the movie, and Jim Thorpe, supposed to be at least a decade, younger than that, or more. But he still pulled it off in that sense. So but he's not Native American. even close. So, you know, in a lot of ways, it was typical of Hollywood of that era, the movie and, and one of, you know, would, we'll talk about Jim Thorpe and Hollywood next time, but his whole effort there was to try to persuade the powers that be to hire real Indians to play real Indians. And that was the case so often.
Sarah 51:38
You know, you talk about Native Americans, and you talk about Indians and through your work and your conversations with the experts you refer to, as the rest of us are catching up. In our in a sense, our sensibility and understanding of this big story. Where do you fall in these words, and even the museum is the Museum of the American Indian, if I'm not mistaken, so. And we'll talk more about, you know, the other uses, in other words that are starting to change, but, but how are we integrating both words? Or do we are what's what
David 52:21
question? I haven't fully resolved it, to be honest with you. I mean, the most radical Indian Movement was the American Indian Movement of the 1970s and 80s. And that they call themselves Indians. Suzanne Shan Harjo, who I greatly respect calls herself, an American Indian. Many people wanted to be called, you know, indigenous, I use that a lot in the book. We did them as people with a capital I. First Nations is used in Canada especially. And, you know, I tried to respect people for what they would like to be called. But in a book, you have to be faithful to the time you're writing about. And in the time I'm writing about, you know, really Native Americans wasn't even that common. It was He was Indians. And so I'm not going to, you know, if I'm writing about, in general, I'll use indigenous or Native American, if I'm writing about putting something in a specific time. It's, it's Indian. And so, you know, I try to be sensitive but also not be unfaithful to the reality of what I'm writing about at that moment. And that's, that's the sensitivity that authors have to deal with. And I, I try to respect all the different perspectives on it, never use it. I mean, there's so many disparaging ways of labeling your needs, which are, you know, apparent throughout my book, when you read about how the press was characterizing during that the era of thorpes all the world through Thorpe's life. When it's more respectful,
Sarah 54:21
I wanted to actually quote the press in in a certain section, you include a quote from the I think it is the Louisville courier journal. Once in a while, across the vistas of the passing years, a dying race startles those who are measuring it for the shroud by giving a kick that grabs the entire funeral proceedings. The football season of 1911 has brought out prominently in the public eye, another of these athletic marvels of a dying race and the greatest of them all. It goes on. Of course, this is Jim Thorpe And this is from 1911. What do you think? You know, you placed these types of summations, I guess. Two things strike me one is that does sports writers still consider themselves? Or do they write with this type of like writing for history or to make pronouncements about the significance of things at this exact moment? Do you think is that still a sort of a style or, you know, quite
David 55:32
I mean, I think sports writers today have other flaws. But that was a, that was an era of grandiose purple prose. And so it was, you know, there were some, there were some writers who could get away with it, and many who mimicked it and came off, you know, like that. But it was fairly common. The reason I love that quote, is because it's wrong. The, one of the central threads of my book, is how Jim Thorpe's perseverance, echoed the perseverance of his people, that they did not die, they found a way to survive through all of what they endured over the centuries. And so, you know, that quote, sort of captures the that feeling of, of that era, which was also evoked a little bit later. In a statue called The end of the trail, which was very popular, of an Indian sort of sluice, stooped on a horse, looking to completely defeated, and that was supposed to evoke the end of the, you know, that American Progress Manifest Destiny had left this, these people behind. And they were, you know, it was the end for the Native American Indians. And it wasn't true. And it didn't happen, thank goodness.
Sarah 57:18
You talk and write a lot about the duality of the dominant culture in trying to both mythologize and claim connection to Native Americans at the same time diminishing and, you know, taking from and that's a thread that you do talk about, and also, as with a lot of your other books about sports, are sort of the what it what they are these figures, teach us about our our sort of understanding of race or color, and I wonder if you might talk a bit about what, how this was different than when you wrote about Roberto Clemente, or even the changes going on with what Lombardi as a coach saw with segregation and so forth. And so here we have an athlete from, you know, whose heritage is Native American and then navigating professional sports in a different way, what what was going on there?
David 58:29
You know, that's, that's a really fascinating subject, and American Indians, Native Americans, indigenous people were treated separately from any other other, you know, in quotation marks in American history. They were romanticized and diminished at the same time. They suffered genocide, horrible cruelty, at the same time that the people were killing them, or trying to make them white. Were romanticizing Their nobility, you know, the noble savage, they were treated completely differently from African Americans suffered. But, you know, it's fair to say in the racist sensibility of white America, that many white Americans want to claim some Indian ancestry of some sort. You would never hear them doing that trying to claim some African American ancestry, it'd be the opposite. What that means is sort of the complexity of American history. But for instance, Black Hawk in 1832, Jim Thorpe's ancestor, when he was captured after the quote unquote Black Hawk war He was taken as a prisoner of war all the way through the United States from from Illinois to Washington, DC, to Virginia, and then up to New York and Baltimore. And, and he was paraded as this exotic figure. And the American press followed every move that he made, and hordes of people would turn on in every city to gawk at him. And you can't imagine any black figure of that era being treated in that similar way. Frederick Douglass is a separate issue. And that was a little later. But but so so there's always this sort of, you know, American Indians could do things that black Americans could not, they can play baseball in the major leagues. There were several American Indians who play Jim Thorpe was one of them. At a time when, when there was a color line, and no, though black players can play Jim Thorpe, in the 1940s, during the heat of the Jim Crow era, could travel through the south and be, you know, be toasted by the touchdown club of Jackson, Mississippi. No African American can ever get in there except as a waiter. So there was that distinction. As much as, as Native Americans were discriminated against, in so many other ways, subtle and not subtle. It was different from the African American experience. But now it's one of the one of the many threads that I sort of explore throughout the book.
Sarah 1:01:51
I want to circle back to the title of your book path lit by lightning, the life of Jim Thorpe and the significance of path lit by lightning.
David 1:02:05
Well, it is a second Fox phrase. And it is a poetic variation of his Indian name. Often shorthand and too bright path, which I don't find interesting. But when I saw that it was more accurately path lit by lightning. I said, Well, that's my title. So it's, you know what? So Hawk is the second Fox language of petulant by lightning.
Sarah 1:02:41
And then, in a way, it's kind of, I guess, a metaphor of his life. But it's also Is it fair if I remembering correctly literal in the sense of when he was born? Yeah, it's
David 1:02:53
literal in that sense. I mean, there was a thunderstorm when he and his twin brother Charles were born. And so that's how we got that name. But it also I mean, lightning, you look at that face, and you see thunder and lightning.
Sarah 1:03:11
Yeah. And there's one other person that you talk to who's related to this big topic. Jim. Kossakowskii. Yes, right. Jim Thorpe Kossakowski.
David 1:03:28
Right. James Kossakowski. A great grandson.
Sarah 1:03:34
How did you find? Yeah, well,
David 1:03:37
there's several credit great grandchildren who are still alive. Most of them don't you know, they know the mythology of Jim Thorpe. They don't know the details of his life. But Jim Kossakowski grew up in in Elgin, Illinois. And his grandmother. Gail was was one of Jim Thorpe's daughters. And she had Kossakowski and his brother were both really good athletes. They were wrestlers, not football, not football or baseball players so much. But Jim sort of became a repository for for his great grandfather's maybe memorabilia in archives and some of that so it was, you know, he was the one descendant that I found was important for me to keep in touch with.
Voiceover 1:04:48
"Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe" is available online and bookstores on August 9. Visit DavidMaraniss.com To order your copy. 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 ink in our blood is produced by Metamorphosis.Agency. Music has been written and provided by Monika Ryan. "Ink in Our Blood" is hosted by Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff. Thank you for listening.
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