Path lit by lightning, p.50
Path Lit by Lightning, page 50
Enraged by it all, Thorpe dispatched letters to the two most powerful people he could think of: President Roosevelt in Washington and Louella Parsons in Hollywood. When Parsons received the letter from “Indian Jim,” she took note of it in her syndicated column. “Lady luck hasn’t smiled very generously on him lately, but Jim has never wavered in his interest to his people, and he enclosed a letter of protest to President Roosevelt against The Last of the Mohicans and The Plainsman,” she wrote. “Whether Jim is right or wrong, he’s really sincere in his feeling that only bona fide Indians should be permitted to portray Indian tribes on the screen, and not the proverbial Hollywood extras.”
Variety, the Hollywood trade publication, blended its own peculiar lexicon with the usual Indian stereotypes in describing the same scene: “Hollywood’s 250 Po Lo’s Making Tepee: Allege Films Go-By. Producers of sagebrush symphonies have the Indian sign on poor lo’s who make a living out of pictures, and their spokesman, Jim Thorpe, wants something done about it. Jim’s squawk is that palefaces are getting jobs that should go to McCoy Indians. There are 250 of the vanishing Americans around and Jim kinda looks after their studio welfare.”
* * *
EVERY FEW YEARS, Grantland Rice wrote a column about the greatest football players of all time. New names would be added to the list, but the one at the top stayed the same. In the 1936 version he said he talked to a dozen of his buddies, most of them coaches, a few fellow scribes. They mentioned Ernie Nevers of Stanford and the Chicago Cardinals, Red Grange of Illinois and the Chicago Bears, Dutch Clarke of Colorado and the Detroit Lions, and Bronko Nagurski of Minnesota and the Bears. But “the vote for number one was practically unanimous—Jim Thorpe, ball carrier and blocker, linebacker and broken-field star, passer and pass receiver, punter, drop kicker and placekicker, defense wrecker, a half dozen recalled the practically impossible things they had seen him do.”
Thorpe the athlete was man and myth. Grantland Rice saw the first and helped create the second. In the age before television, sports columnists spun images that shaped the public imagination, none more than Rice, who worked in prose and doggerel. He was fifty-six now, eight years older than Jim, and determined to keep the two old-timers alive. “We’ve left a lot of years behind us,” he wrote in an ode to Thorpe:
But reading mem-ry’s slate
You still can play for me, big red man,
And let the others wait.
Yes I’ve seen other guys who had it.
Guys with a double share:
They knew their way above the scramble,
With something else to spare:
But when I start in to remember
Lost years that knew their flame,
I’ll ride with you till hell starts freezing—
The red ace of the game.
Rice wrote his ode not long after the 1936 Olympics ended that August in Berlin, where Jesse Owens won three gold medals in the sprints and another in long jump, putting on a display of all-around skill that embarrassed the Aryan supremacist Hitler and had sportswriters harkening back to Thorpe’s performance in Stockholm. The question of whether Owens was better than Thorpe resumed. In an editorial, the New York Daily News called it “an argument we won’t undertake to settle,” but noted that Owens competed against specialists to win his medals, while Thorpe competed against other all-rounders.
Along with the American press corps’ disdain for Hitler—“It probably galls Hitler to see his racial theories, as they relate to physical superiority, conspicuously disproved,” wrote the Daily News—they also spoke disparagingly of Avery Brundage, the U.S. Olympic potentate who had championed the Hitler games. It was not just his coddling of Hitler and the Nazis that bothered them, but the prudish and dictatorial way he lorded over athletes, a behavior they connected back to how Thorpe was treated when his medals were stripped after the 1912 Olympics. The Olympic bosses were “old maidish” then just as Brundage was now. Then it was imposing aristocratic standards of amateurism against Thorpe. Now it was kicking Eleanor Holm Jarrett off the team because the brilliant swimmer, who also happened to be a gregarious nightclub performer, was seen drinking champagne and shooting craps late into the night with scribes in the bar of the SS Manhattan carrying the American contingent across the Atlantic. Some suspected that Brundage, a notorious womanizer, was motivated by sexism, hypocrisy, and jealousy more than prudishness, just as jealousy and hypocrisy seemed to be factors in his refusal to restore Thorpe’s medals.
It was left to Damon Runyon, the inimitable chronicler of rakes and rogues, to put this incident in perspective. Eleanor Holm Jarrett, he reported, after being “heaved off the Olympic team for doing a bit of guzzling one evening of the old sparkling, was now Telling All. She says that not only was elbow-bending somewhat profuse on the Manhattan, but that the Olympic officials themselves cut up no little.”
The incident, Runyon wrote, reminded him of “teapot tempests” in past Olympics. “We saw a movie short the other night in which a fat Indian had a small part, and the appearance of the Indian brought back memories of another tumultuous Olympic year marked by species of scandal. It was the Stockholm year of 1912 and the Indian in the movie short was then the greatest athlete that ever lived. He was Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox tribe, who grabbed all the honors of the Olympic Games, then had to give up his medals when it was discovered afterwards that he had played a bit of professional baseball down south before going to the Games. Of course, his Olympic disqualification didn’t keep Jim out of the unofficial title as the greatest athlete, but it caused a rumpus beside which the Jarrett incident is just a mild zephyr. And to this day, Jim Thorpe’s place in athletic history is undisputed, which may be some consolation to the pretty Mrs. Jarrett.”
* * *
THE FIRST WEEK of a new year, January 1937. Ernie Pyle had left his job as managing editor of the Washington D.C. Daily News to work as a roving reporter for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. He drove across America, often accompanied by his wife, Jerry, known in his popular six-days-a-week column as “that girl who rides with me.” His columns were called the “Hoosier Vagabond,” an homage to his small-town Indiana roots, or “Rambling Reporter.” Living out of suitcases and a satchel, steering his Ford coupe along the back roads, Pyle wrote about “anything interesting I bump into along the way”—from the midnight shift of a Pittsburgh steel mill to the “nation’s best soda jerk” in Evansville, Indiana. Most of his subjects were salt of the earth types; only a few had known fame.
When Pyle reached southern California, he put out word that he wanted to see Jim Thorpe. Jim, alerted by a friend that Pyle was on his way, stayed home from the studios that day. Following a twenty-mile drive from downtown Los Angeles to the bungalow on the edge of Hawthorne, Pyle arrived to find Jim burning trash in the backyard. The clapboard house seemed a bit shambled, the vines overgrown. An old four-cylinder Ford sedan was parked out front. When Jim invited Ernie inside, Pyle searched for clues to the man he was about to interview. Small rooms. Modest furniture. A few photos of the athlete in his prime hanging on the walls. The home of a workingman, Pyle thought. About as well off as the average husky longshoreman, like the men who worked at the Port of Long Beach thirty miles down the road.
Jim told Pyle the story of how he got to Los Angeles. By coincidence, it was another Pyle of a different disposition, Cold Cash Pyle, who led him to the coast by getting him to serve as the master of ceremonies for the 1929 Bunion Derby. “The Bunion Derby promoter left him stranded here, and he has been here ever since,” Ernie Pyle wrote. “He says [C. C.] Pyle still owes him the money.” And that was not the only time. Jim recalled how he played baseball for Harjo’s Indians in 1933, traveling from town to town across America sort of like Ernie was doing. “He didn’t get all his pay from that, either. He seems to have bad luck collecting.”
Pyle observed that Jim liked newspapermen and that he was a good conversationalist who enjoyed talking. That depended on the company; Ernie had a way of making him relax. Jim confessed that he had stopped taking regular exercise and his weight was up to about 225 and he wished it were 190. Ernie noticed his stomach. “But he’s still a fine figure of a man.”
“How do you feel about getting old and being out of the sports limelight?” Pyle asked.
“Why, I’m not old,” Jim said, though he was now fifty. “I’m as good as almost any man at thirty and I don’t feel old. If I’d take off some of this meat and limber up a little, I’d be good as ever.” Probably not. It was characteristic of Jim to believe in his restorative powers. True, he had hit remarkably well for a forty-six-year-old playing for Harjo’s Indians four years earlier, but his last feeble effort on the football field was nearly a decade past, and no amount of lost weight could restore his football prowess.
Pyle was a practiced listener burdened with his own level of naïveté in describing his subject. “Thorpe is a Sauk and Fox from Oklahoma. He says he’s about five-eighths Indian. He has an Indian face but speaks without an accent. He can speak Sauk and Fox fluently, and a little of three or four other dialects. He separated from his first wife and married again 11 years ago. He has three boys ranging from 4 to 9. Mrs. Thorpe has no Indian blood, but all three boys have slight Indian features. The whole family works in the movies—Mrs. Thorpe just a little, the boys fairly often, and Jim all the time he can get work.”
His work in the movie business had disillusioned Jim in two ways, he told Pyle. First, it took the magic out of it. “It has killed going to theaters for me. I go to sleep watching movies now,” he said. “A movie is all pretending to be somebody else. It spoils the illusion when you realize that. Indians aren’t good actors anyway. An actor has to exaggerate. It’s against an Indian’s nature to exaggerate or be emotional.” Second, though he still helped fellow Indians, he’d given up his casting agency because it was draining him financially, he said. So many Indians were calling him collect to inquire about studio work that it cost him about $25 a month. That explained why Pyle could not call to say he was coming but had to rely on one of Jim’s friends. To save money, he had had his house phone disconnected.
Pyle approached his subjects with empathy but did not romanticize Jim as Grace Wilcox had a year earlier. He assessed Thorpe as a man struggling to find a secure place in his post-athletic life. Like many retired athletes talking about the good old days, Jim disparaged the modern style of football and said he rarely watched it. When not hustling for studio jobs, he told Pyle, he read magazines, fished off the nearby ocean piers, and went coon hunting alone late into the night. He still wanted to be a coach but regretted that he had not polished his coaching skills more instead of continuing to play baseball and football after his prime. He’d applied to be an umpire in the Pacific Coast League but did not get the job. Money was harder to make than it had been during his playing days, Jim said. “But you know how it is. Easy come, easy go. I thought it would last forever, I guess.” One reason he welcomed Pyle’s visit was that he was starting to feel isolated. It was so arduous to get down to Hawthorne from LA that people were no longer coming to see him. “Jim sits around the house or goes on his daily search for movie work, just as though he never were a world-famous figure.”
Easy come, easy go. A popular movie dealing with an Indian football star was produced in Hollywood that year, but it was not about Jim Thorpe. It was a musical comedy titled Life Begins in College, starring the Ritz brothers, a zany variation of the Marx brothers. In this fictional account, the actor Nat Pendleton, who was white, played Little Black Cloud, also known as George Black, the only Native American enrolled at Lombardy College, an institution that was said to have been founded in the mid-1800s to give Indians access to higher education. It was as though Carlisle still existed but now catered to white students. Through various inane plot twists, Little Black Cloud leaves the football team after an embarrassing hazing ritual but then returns and leads the team to a series of victories, until… it is discovered that he once played football for money and is booted from the team.
Perhaps the idea came from elsewhere, but the most likely origin was the story of what had happened to Jim. He had nothing to do with the movie, not even as an extra. Two of the musical numbers were “Big Chief Swing It” and “Our Team Is on the Warpath.”
* * *
FOR THE FIRST half century of Jim Thorpe’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 U.S. Army. In 1887, the year Jim was born, the legislative answer came in the Dawes Act, which broke up and privatized communal lands as a means of forcing Indians to dissolve into society as individual farmers. The effect over fifty years was devastating. Tribes lost an estimated ninety million reservation acres to white settlers, dropped further into poverty, and were in danger of losing their traditional cultures along with their land. Land and the traditional ceremonies and ways of life were inextricably linked; when one was taken away, the other was endangered.
With the New Deal administration of President Franklin Roosevelt and his progressive commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, there was an attempt to reverse that trend, though in many ways it was still a case of white authorities telling Indian nations what they should or could do. The Indian Reorganization Act, also known as the Indian New Deal, was meant to return land to the tribes, promising them more representation within the Indian bureau and granting them more autonomy in running local affairs through tribal constitutions and governments. But the tribal governments were defined by Washington, imposing the language of “chairman” instead of “chief” or “sachem.” And even though there was a superficial expression of democracy, with tribes voting on whether to adopt new constitutions, the end result was often new governments dominated by puppets for Washington, which still controlled most of the finances.
Jim Thorpe opposed part of this new deal as it would be applied to his Sac and Fox people in Oklahoma and was recruited by elders to campaign against it. His reasoning went back to his acculturation at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the lasting influence of its founder, Richard Henry Pratt. Like Pratt, Thorpe had negative feelings about reservation life and believed that a return to any system that separated Indians from the economic mainstream was a step backward. Also like Pratt, he distrusted the Indian bureau and wanted nothing to do with it even as it proposed reforms. There was one important area where Jim’s thinking diverged from the Pratt philosophy: Carlisle’s foundational motto Kill the Indian, save the man. Jim honored traditional Indian culture and never bought into the school’s attempts to drain the Indianness from his people. He wanted to be judged and accepted on his own terms.
Jim returned to Oklahoma on December 5, 1937, two days before the Sac and Fox tribe vote on reorganization and a new constitution. He came to tribal headquarters in Shawnee as a favorite son, the most illustrious member of the Sac and Fox Nation since Black Hawk. When he spoke, the press listened, and the measure’s opponents considered his voice the best way to make their case. Jim acknowledged that his role was as front man, not campaign manager.
“It would put Indians back to the blanket days,” he told reporters tailing him before the vote. “What is the use of educating an Indian and training him for citizenship and then forcing him to live under a separate constitution?” When a reporter pressed him on what was intrinsically wrong with a new constitution, he said his real issue was with the federal government. “The government insists on special legislation for the Indian. It is all done under the guise of… offering him protection. But that’s a lot of hooey. There are poor down-and-out Indians, sure there are. But there are poor down-and-out Irishmen, Scotsmen, and Germans, too, aren’t there? And listen, there hasn’t been a single poor Indian helped by any of this legislation. The Indian who has the money is the Indian the government is always trying to protect.”
Among those who disagreed with Thorpe was Paulette Lewis, a member of the Sac and Fox election board who happened to be Jim’s cousin. Lewis was a prominent figure in her own right, a craftswoman whose “character dolls” of famous tribal leaders, including a Ponca medicine man and Chief Bacon Rind of the Osage, were coveted by collectors of Native American art, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. However popular Thorpe was, he did not have the clout to prevail. The new constitution and tribal reorganization passed by a 210 to 120 vote. Jim’s involvement was a sideshow, but nonetheless became the main focus of the press.
“SIC TRANSIT JIM THORPE,” read a headline in the Kansas City Times, and the story was a familiar chronicle of a fallen star. “By a large majority the Sac and Fox tribe of Indians has voted to change its tribal constitution…. This would not deserve much comment were it not for the fact that the leader—on the losing side of the election—was Jim Thorpe. Jim Thorpe? You remember him…. At the height of his power, he not only was a national hero, but among the people of his tribe he was almost a God. Today not even the Sac and Fox are so humble as to do him reverence.”
The press accounts only worsened when Jim returned later in the month in an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Sac and Fox decision. “Jim waddles his 235 pounds in and out of offices of local bigwigs, quotes theories and impressive sounding figures and teases off jokes like a professional baby-kisser,” wrote Arthur Edson for the North American Newspaper Alliance. “He’s fat and fiftyish now, his jowls flapping lazily when he walks. For it has been 30 years now since this wild young Oklahoma buck was picked up and ran east to Carlisle for taming.”
