HALLOWED GROUND Part II

Jul 12, 2007, 12:17:32 AM

THE REAL ALL-AMERICANS: THE PEOPLE THAT CHANGED A GAME, A PEOPLE, A NATION, by Sally Jenkins. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 343pp., Illustrations. $24.95

The author begins by taking readers into the Carlisle locker room just prior to the Indians 1912 game with Army. And in doing so, masterfully sets the stage for all that follows. As for their opponent, of the many memorable games played by Carlisle that year, the Army game was easily the one that meant the most. And for fairly obvious reasons. All week long Glen S. “Pop” Warner had advised his players to read their history books. Come game time, he boiled it down to this: “Your grandfathers and fathers are the ones who fought their fathers. These men playing you today are soldiers. They are the Long Knives. You are Indians. Tonight we will see if you are warriors.”

Jenkins then fleshes in the context of Warner’s remarks with battle episodes from the late Indian Wars, paying special attention to the 1866 Fetterman Fight and the 1874 Red River War. These scenes introduce notable warriors such as American Horse and Lone Wolf, whose sons and relatives would later attend Carlisle, in addition to Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the dynamic young cavalryman whose energy and vision would bring the Carlisle school into being.

Following the Red River War, Pratt escorted a number of hostile Kiowas to prison at Florida’s Fort Marion. While on duty there he began nurturing plans of becoming the Indians’ teacher; and, within four years was able to engineer the establishment of an Indian School on the site of the old military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Crucial to his success had been the endorsement of Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. With Schurz’ backing, Pratt was able to obtain indefinite leave from his regiment, and have the school up and running by October 1879. There had been, however, one irksome condition: Congress had insisted that Pratt’s pupils include some children of principal Sioux chieftains as unofficial hostages. This put Pratt in a bind, but he was able to overcome the skepticism of Chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail with the argument that it was in their practical interest to have some of their children trained to read, write and negotiate in the white man’s English.

In reality, Pratt’s educational philosophy was best expressed in his pet maxim: “Kill the Indian, save the Man”. In other words, he hoped to strip his students of as much of their Indian identity as possible while educating them in the ways and means of the dominant white culture. His benign intent was to equip them to stand on their own and compete as individuals in the great egalitarian American melting pot. Though initially coercive, this policy was merely a harder variant of the assimilative philosophy being preached to millions of eastern European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and elsewhere. Nonetheless, as Jenkins makes clear, despite its latent idealism, Pratt’s methodology had its blind spots and cruel side, and his program drew increasing criticism as years rolled by.

While tracing the early evolution of Carlisle, Jenkins keeps readers abreast of football developments on the post-Civil War collegiate scene. A variant of British rugby, the game of football made its first serious splash among the elite universities of the east. The first official game took place between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869, and in the autumn of 1876—[only four months after the Little Big Horn]—representatives of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia met to form the Inter-collegiate Football Association. By the 1880s the game had become a craze round the Ivy League, where there’d been fears of Gilded Age youth becoming soft and overcivilized. To some, football seemed more than just an anti-dote against decadence. Echoing British poet Rudyard Kipling, Harvard coach W. Cameron Forbes [grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson] called the sport nothing less than “the ultimate expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority.”

Jenkins makes her transition from frontier to modern times in a chapter titled “Last Fights and First Games.” The “last fight” refers, of course, to the sad confrontation that took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890. Alarmed by reports of a ghost dance craze sweeping the northern plains tribes that summer, the army responded by assembling six to seven thousand troops at the Pine Ridge agency. Tragically, the standoff ended with troops firing with Hotchkiss guns on a few hundred dissidents, whose numbers included a great many women and children. Back at Carlisle, news of the debacle struck fear and caused considerable anguish—fear of local white hostility, and anguish over relatives and former Carlisle students caught up in turmoil at Pine Ridge. The Ghost Dance War marked the end of Indian warfare, and 1890 saw the close of the frontier.

In the meanwhile, Carlisle students were being caught up the new football craze, and superintendent Pratt began wondering what might be done with it. Not that Pratt was terribly enthusiastic about the game itself, which struck him as sheer savagery. On the other hand, football might be a means of attracting attention to his school and a way of fighting the sterotypical impressions of Indians being spread by Buffalo Bill Cody’s “Wild West Show”, which Pratt despised. He was prepared to let Carlisle to play football on two conditions, the first being that his boys would agree to forgo the universal practice of “slugging.” His second condition was a very modern one, a condition concerned with winning. Pratt would allow football at Carlisle, if his boys would agree…in two, three, or four years to “whip the biggest team in the country.”

It would take longer than or two or three years to whip the biggest team in the country, but by the end of the 1896 season, Carlisle had made a name for itself by taking on the Big Four of college football—Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Pennsylvania—and giving them all a good game. The team closed the season in style by playing a Christmas season game against University of Wisconsin at the Chicago Coliseum—the first game ever played under electric lights, which the Indians won 18-8. Then in 1899 Pratt took the fateful step of hiring Glen S. Warner, a young coach from Cornell with a reputation for creative razzle dazzle. Under the guidance of “Pop” Warner, the Carlisle Indians began taking off. Literally.

Along with Amos Alonzo Stagg and John Heisman, “Pop” Warner has long been acknowledged as one the supreme innovators in early American football. So effective were Warner’s turn-of the-century innovations that some remained on the scene well into 1950s. For example, the venerable but still useful single wing formation. [Although too sore in ‘54 to dropkick against the Belle Plaine juniors, my soreness hadn’t prevented me from taking a handoff from ‘Burg tailback “Dude” Petz on a classic single-wing reverse cooked up fifty years earlier by Pop Warner.] Along with other of Warner’s inventions, this formation had been devised to open the game up and away from the “Flying Wedge” and other mass power formations of the 1890s.

The new Carlisle coach was attuned to speed and mental agility, qualities that his players had in spades. The hard driving, chain-smoking Warner delighted in strategems designed to make opponents look silly, and so did they. As for example, Harvard. In 1903 Carlisle stunned the Crimson by returning a kick for a touchdown with the ball hidden up under a jersey specially sewn for the occasion. Though Harvard recovered sufficiently to win the game 12-11, and though Warner later felt sheepish about the stunt, Carlisle players were delighted to have pulled a nationally-publicized prank on one of the big four Ivy powerhouses.

But, it was in the development of the passing game that the Indians left their mark, a development which many football historians still mistakenly credit to Notre Dame. Marshalling the facts, Jenkins effectively demolishes the myth that the Fighting Irish unveiled the first serious passing attack in their 1913 rout of Army. The fact is, “Pop” Warner had helped invent the spirally thrown pass, and had devised the screen and quarterback rollout passes long before Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais started playing catch in South Bend. Moreover, by then the Carlisle Indians were indelibly on record as the first team to throw regularly…..and deep.

As for example in 1907 against Penn in Philadelphia. On the second play of that game the Indians whipped a forty yarder over the middle that was caught on the dead run, and Carlisle’s 26-6 route of Penn was on. Following the game, the New York Herald reported that Carlisle’s use of the forward pass was “child’s play… they tried it on first down, on the second down, on the third down….and it was seldom that they didn’t make something out of it.” The New York Times concurred, adding that the Indian’s explosive use of the pass had “put all the coaches at the large universities at sea.”

Jenkins pinpoints this game as “one of the three or four signal moments in the evolution of football.” In her view, the spectators watching the arc of that forty yard bomb were watching the “sporting equivalent the Wright Brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk.” Moreover, Carlisle had arrived. “In the past,” she writes,” the Indians had been a novelty act, a plucky little team that played over their heads. But now they were a powerful and undefeated machine, and they had made a major opponent look slow and stupid.” Coincidently, this landmark game also marked the debut of a Carlisle reserve who became so excited in his first chance with the ball that he ran the wrong way and got buried. Next time he ran it right and got forty five yards. Yes, Jim Thorpe had arrived too.

****

“We were just proud of them, the whole town was..“
- Marianne Moore Carlisle Native, Indian school faculty

The four Jim Thorpe seasons were unquestionably Carlisle’s golden years, with its 1912 team being its best. Prior to the 1907 the Indians had been very good, much better in fact than most commentators had been willing to admit. Moreover, between 1904-06 they proved they were quite capable of functioning without Pop Warner, who’d gone to coach Cornell for three seasons before returning to Carlisle to install the 1907 Carlisle passing attack. In his absence, with Indian coaches, the school had won 28 against only 8 losses. But, of course, with Warner back aboard and Thorpe now on hand, things began heating up. During the Thorpe years—1907-08, 1911-12—Carlisle won 43, lost 5, with three ties, and the 1913 Indians, under the leadership of holdover quarterback Gus Welch, finished 10-1-1.

The 1911 and 1912 Carlisle seasons are at the heart of the book, and Jenkins’ two concluding chapters are the equivalent of a pair of superb fifty yard line seats for both. Thrown in extra for the price of the admission is a front row seat at the 1912 summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, from which readers can take in Jim Thorpe’s amazing gold medal winning performances in the pentathlon and decathlon…...along with his equally amazing response to the King of Sweden’s accolade—”Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world”. [”Thanks, King”]

The 1911 season highlight is easily the game in which Thorpe’s toe gave Harvard cause to re-reconsider the notion of football as “the ultimate expression of Anglo-Saxon superiority.” The 1912 highlight is of course the game toward which the book has pointed from the very beginning. Army, with but one loss to Yale, still had a shot that November at finishing number one in the country. Undefeated Carlisle, the highest scoring team in the country, had been waiting all year for this one, with a surprise kept on ice specially for Army.

Though the contest was freighted with frontier overtones, it is difficult to believe that Army players seriously gave it much thought. For any Cadet thoughts of war likely ran to the future, and there would be plenty of war awaiting them. The West Point backfield that day contained four future World War II generals, including a yearling halfback named Eisenhower. On the Carlisle side, however, memories of the old frontier were still fresh and quite personal. It had been, after all, only twenty two years since the Ghost Dance War and the Hotchkiss guns and the Sioux women and children found frozen in the snow. For Carlisle quarterback Gus Welch, as for many others, the old times were the “real war”.....and Welch had just the offensive weapon to turn the game into a replay of Little Big Horn.

Readers are invited to consult Jenkins’ fine narrative for the particulars. To convey a general sense of the outcome, it is enough to quote the New York papers on the effect of the Indians’ ultra-modern double wing formation. For example, the Tribune noted that “The shifting, puzzling, and dazzling attack of the Carlisle Indians had the Cadets bordering on a panic…..After a few minutes of play none of the Army men seemed to know where the ball was going or who had it.” The normally understated Times observed that Carlisle had fielded “one of the most spectacular aggregations of football players, especially in the backfield, ever assembled, ” and that as a whole, Carlisle played “the most perfect brand of football in America.” Yale’s Walter Camp joined the remarkable Indians to talk football with them on their train ride home. Jenkins notes that every member of the team considered this victory the most satisfying they had ever won. ” ‘The rattling of the bones,” Welch called it.’ ”

But sadly, the Army game closed a chapter. In the next one Carlisle blew its chance for undefeated 1912 season with a flat performance against Pennsylvania, although it recovered to handily win the finale against Brown. Weeks later Jim Thorpe was engulfed in scandal concerning his semi-professional baseball play, a scandal that not only cost him his Olympic medals but touched Pop Warner as well. Within a few months the school was embroiled in congressional investigations prompted by a petition of Carlisle students angered by Warner’s and superintendent Friedman’s failure to stand by Thorpe. To save their reputations, both men had denied any knowledge of Thorpe’s 1909-10 baseball activities, and Carlisle students, led by student body president Gus Welch, weren’t believing a word of it.

From here, Jenkins skilfully guides readers through the investigations that eventually led to the school’s shuttering and conversion in 1918 to a hospital for the wounded returning from France. She also does a fine job of analyzing the storm clouds that had been slowly gathering over Carlisle, first in area of educational policy, and secondly in the area of football finance and athletic governance.

In the matters of educational policy, the climate of opinion had slowly shifted against the network of Indian boarding schools of which Carlisle was the government’s flagship institution. By Theodore Roosevelt’s time the Indian Bureau was skeptical of boarding school education and weary of Superintendent Pratt and his outmoded “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” pedagogical philosophy. Indeed, the well-meaning old soldier had been axed in 1904, his place taken by a woefully mediocre Indian bureau functionary, followed quickly by another after the first got in trouble. In truth, many of Carlisle’s well-meaning critics welcomed the 1913 congressional investigation as a chance to put an anachronistic institution out of its misery, quite apart from any football irregularities.

Of which there were many. “Pop” Warner was a hustling entrepreneur whose off-the-field activities could be as creatively irregular as the hidden ball trick he’d sprung on Harvard. In lieu of government funding, Carlisle athletics had been financed out of the thousands of dollars of football gate receipts, along with much else on campus, including a house for Warner. He’d paid $9,223 in cash payments to players in 1907-08 (roughly $300 apiece), but then backed off, and instead set up an account from them at Mose Blumenthal’s clothing store in town. Though Warner managed to escape charges, he was effectively censured by the committee recommendation that he resign—which he obstinately refused to do, leaving Carlisle only after the 1914 team, whose respect he’d forfeited, won only four games against seven losses and one tie.

In analyzing Carlisle’s demise, Jenkins concedes that much of the school’s history is extremely bleak; characterized by “tribal capitulation, cultural destructions, and endless racial axegrinding.” On the policy side, she quotes an Indian commissioner’s telling observation that the government’s decades-long attempt to “civilize” the tribes had failed through a series of “well-meant” mistakes. In assessing Richard Henry Pratt, she seems willing to give the school founder possibly a C plus for effort, and for being genuinely committed to Indian welfare, despite the damages done.

In football matters, Jenkins observes that the 1914 congressional committee was delving into “ethical issues that the NCAA continues to agonize over today, without very satisfactory answers.” She goes on to provocatively wonder “whether a coach should be the highest paid and most powerful employee on campus? Is he a teacher, or should he be purely concerned with winning? The academic performance of Carlisle football players tended to be excellent, and many of them went on to success in the professions. Did they deserve some kind of competition in return for the huge profits, credit, and rich enjoyment they gave to Carlisle?”

As with founder Pratt, the author seems willing to cut Carlisle coach “Pop” Warner some slack. Though she finds it impossible believe that he was unaware of Jim Thorpe’s 1909-10 baseball activities, she seems willing to look past his ethical lapses to his overall contribution. She does this partly out of respect for his football genius, I suspect, and partly because she feels that where Carlisle was concerned, his heart was generally in the right place, even when his itch for a buck was leading him astray. Then too, if Warner was a rascal, as indeed he was—-he was an immensely entertaining one, of the kind that Sally Jenkins’ father has always delighted in writing about. Something in her journalistic genes may have also contributed in giving Warner a pass.

As for Jim Thorpe, Big Jim is given his considerable due, in due proportion to his role within the larger Carlisle narrative. Jenkins provides the basics of his career while remaining focused on the old Indian School. Which is likely the way the modest Thorpe would have wanted it, to be presented as one of the many players who wore Carlisle red and old gold between 1894 and 1913. And it is the author’s deft sketches of these other players that make the book sing. Hanging with them year after year, imbibing the Carlisle spirit and lore, you find yourself in the end agreeing with the title quote remarks from “Pop” Warner: ” Whenever I see one of those All-America teams, I cannot help but think what an eleven could have been selected from those real [italics] All Americans who blazed such a trail of glory…..They never gloated, they never whined, and no matter how bitter the contest, they played cheerfully, squarely, and cleanly.”

****

On the heritage side, Jenkins’ discriminating use of Indian War history lends considerable weight to the tale. The revelation that the initial Carlisle enrollment included “congressional” hostages from the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies gave me pause. As did tombstones in the children’s cemetery that Barbara Landis pointed out on the walk back from our bout of dropkicking on Indian Field. Before driving over from Gettysburg that day, I’d remarked to a friend that I was going to Carlisle to dropkick on the “hallowed ground” of the Indian Field. In using the phrase “hallowed ground”, I’d intended it ironically, as a sports writer might, and not seriously, as Gettysburgians are wont to do. After glimpsing the gravestones, however. and after reading Jenkins’ account of other little ones breaking out of their dorms to sail in their night shirts, I began feeling that Indian Field is as hallowed as any American ground going.

And, after finishing this excellent book, I began feeling that the field deserves something more in the way of commemoration than its name and a grandstand plaque. Plaques and names are fine, but Indian Field needs something more. Something currently missing. Something to facilitate old Thorpe-style dropkicking. Perhaps author Sally Jenkins would join me and the Kansas City Chiefs in suggesting that the Army War College install a set of uprights to honor all Carlisle teams, and especially their “real” All-Americans listed below:

1899: Isaac Seneca, First team All-America, Frank Hudson, Second team All-America (a dropkicker’s dropkicker)

1901: Martin Wheelock, Second team All-America, James Johnson, Third Team All-America

1903: James Johnson, First Team All-America, Charles Williams, Honorable mention

1904: Wilson Charles, Honorable Mention

1905: Frank Mount Pleasant, All Eastern Team

1906: Leroy Hunt, Third Team All-America, Albert Exendine, Second Team All-America

1907: Albert Exendine, Second Team All-America

1908: James Thorpe, Third Team All-America

1911: James Thorpe, First Team All-America, Sam Burd, Honorable Mention, Possum Powell, Honorable Mention

1912: James Thorpe, First Team All-America

1913: Joe Guyon, Second Team All-America, Elmer Busch, Second Team All-America, Gus Welch, Honorable Mention, William Garlow, Honorable Mention

1917: George Gardner, All-Army service team - Also Ben American Horse, Delos Lone Wolf, and Bemis Pierce

Hallowed Ground Part I


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John S. Peterson is a bookseller and sales associate at the Horse Soldier in Gettysburg. His essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s Magazine and other national publications including kcchiefs.com.