More than a Game: The Carlisle Indians Take to the Gridiron, 1893-1917
Author(s): David Wallace Adams
Source: Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 25-53
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650836
Accessed: 20-03-2018 13:43 UTC
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MORE THAN A GAME:
THE CARLISLE INDIANS TAKE TO THE GRIDIRON,
1893-1917
DAVID WALLACE ADAMS
When students at Carlisle Indian School asked to play football, Superintendent
Richard Pratt agreed, believing that the sight of Indians competing against the
best college teams in the country would advance the school's assimilationist
vision. But as this essay makes clear, Pratt was unable to control the meaning
that journalists, spectators, and players read into Indian-white football.
OMETIME IN 1893 MORE THAN THREE DOZEN young
men crowded into the office of Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the Indian
school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for the purpose of making an impassioned request:
they wanted to play football. The background to the situation Pratt knew only too
well. Once before he had sent an Indian team onto the gridiron, but when one of his
players broke his leg, Pratt suspended the program. And now this new appeal. The
group had selected their most eloquent spokesman to make their case. "While they
stood around my desk, their black eyes intensely watching me," Pratt later remembered, "the orator gave practically all the arguments in favor of our contending in
outside football... and ended by requesting the removal of the embargo." After listen-
ing to the group's plea, Pratt relented. He would allow a resumption of the football
program, but only on two conditions: that the Indians always play fairly and never slug
an opponent, and that they whip the best football teams in the country. The group
readily agreed to both conditions. So began the Carlisle Indians' legendary 24-yearlong struggle on the gridiron.1
DAVID ADAMS is a member of the history department and the College of Education at
Cleveland State University. He thanks Barbara Landis and Genevieve Bell.
1 Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian,
1867-1904, ed. Robert M. Utley (New Haven, 1964), 317-8 and Richard Henry Pratt to Boston
Herald, 5 November 1896, Pratt Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT(BRBML).
Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Spring 2001): 25-53. Copyright ? 2001, Western
History Association.
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26 SPRING 2001
26SPRING
2001
Western
Wes
Historical
Quarterly
Pratt
had
Carlisle
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David Wallace Adams
27
Buffalo Bill." In contradiction to the spectacle of the Wild West Show, Carlisle's victory over Cornell demonstrated the potential of football to win white friends for the
cause of full Indian acceptance into the American system. The proof was in the fact
that local white citizens were telephoning by the score to congratulate Pratt on the
great victory. Pratt reminded students how times had changed. Only a few decades
before, if the townspeople of Carlisle had gotten word that Indians were coming into
town, "they would have been badly scared. The women would have run down ... and
locked the cellar doors and the men would have got their guns ready to shoot." But
now it was a different story altogether. "Our friends and neighbors, the white people,
join in our rejoicing when we succeed even though those we overcome are their own
race." Such was the promise of football.3
By any measure, the gridiron record of the Carlisle Indians was remarkable. Be-
tween 1899 and 1914, years during which the team was primarily coached by Glenn
"Pop" Warner, Carlisle dazzled the fans with their victories, defeating such football
giants of the day as Harvard, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton.4 But
what of Pratt's hope that his players' performance on the football field would project
an image of the "new Indian"? As this essay will demonstrate, Pratt's expectations
were to be only partially realized. And one reason his expectations were not met
stems from an ironic miscalculation, the fact that in the minds of many observers the
spectacle of Indian and white teams locked in violent struggle for territory could not
help but evoke images of Fallen Timbers, Beecher's Island, and the Little Big Hornimages of what spectators considered red savages resisting the advance of white civilization.
This essay explores the complex and multiple meanings of Indian-white football,
including its connection to the history of frontier conflict. First, it analyzes how the
legacy of Indian wars shaped the response of both the popular press and white fans to
the Indians' gridiron feats. In this regard, the paper conjoins two resonate narrative
frameworks in turn-of-the-century America-the Frontier Myth and football. On the
one hand, it assumes, like Richard Slotkin, that the Frontier Myth was at the heart of
American identity, and that at the very heart of that myth was the heroic Indian war.5
3 Red Man, November-December, 1895, 7 and Red Man and Helper, 24 October 1902,
1. At various times, the Carlisle School newspaper was published under several names, including:
Redman, Red Man and Helper, and Carlisle Arrow. The newspapers cited in this essay are all readily
available on microfilm through interlibrary loan. The Carlisle newspapers are available through
the University of Idaho. For Richard Henry Pratt's expectations surrounding football see his letters to: Abram R. Vail, 10 December 1896, the editor of the Boston Herald, 5 November 1896, the
editor of Illustrated American, 23 November 1896, General John Eaton, 25 November 1896. All
letters are in Pratt Papers, BRBML.
4 For a year-by-year account of Carlisle's football record, see John S. Steckbeck, The
Fabulous Redmen: The Carlisle Indians and Their Famous Football Teams (Harrisburg, PA, 1951).
Most studies on the subject focus on the legendary Jim Thorpe or Glenn Warner.
5 The role of the Indian war in the Frontier Myth figures prominently in Richard
Slotkin's works. See Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-
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28 SPRING 2001
28
SPRING
2001
On
Western
Western Historical Quarterly
Historical
the
being
text"
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other
that
that
upon
the
in,
social
anew.7
off
Fron
gridiron,
the
h
pla
sa
dram
Second,
themselves.8
mensions
of
meanings
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th
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concerned-Pra
white
In
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mental
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1860
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in
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an
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8 For the significance of sport in Indian education see John Bloom, "Show What the
Indian Can Do: Sports, Memory, and Ethnic Identity at Federal Indian Boarding Schools," Journal
of American Indian Education 35 (Spring 1996): 33-48 and Philip Deloria, "'I Am of the Body':
Thoughts on My Grandfather, Culture and Sports," South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Spring 1996):
321-38.
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David Wallace Adams
coach, Glenn Warner. In 1912, at the height of Carlisle's glory years, Warner explained the connection with the precision of a military strategist:
A football game is very similar, in many respects, to a war, and good
generalship is as important in one as in the other. Each scrimmage repre-
sents a battle, in which the opposing forces are lined up opposite each
other, one side defending itself against the attack of the other. The lines
represent the infantry, and the backs can be likened to cavalry, quick
moving, and able to charge the enemy at any spot, or rush to the support
of any position attacked. The quarterback or the general of the side mak-
ing the attack should study well the defense of the enemy, and decide
whether to force through their center, turn their flank by a quick move-
ment, deceive them with a fake movement in one direction while the
real attack is made at another spot, or transfer the battle to a more favor-
able locality by a punt. In making this decision, he should take into
consideration the condition of the field, the direction of the wind, and
especially the position on the field, with reference to the goal or side
lines, and the number of the down and the distance to be gained. If the
wind is favorable, and the ball is near the goal line which his team is
defending, the battle should by all means be transferred to the enemy's
territory by a punt, reserving ammunition and strength for the attack
when an opportunity is gained within striking distance of the enemy's
goal.
It is impossible to imagine that Warner did not inject the war-football analogy into his
locker room talks with his Indian players.9
A second connection between football and frontier conflict can be found in those
factors underlying the game's growing popularity in Victorian America. As John Higham
has observed, it was in the 1890s that a "master impulse" transformed colleges into
"theaters of organized physical combat." While the dramatic rise of football on college
campuses cannot be reduced to a single factor, much of the game's appeal can be explained by what historians have come to call the "cult of manliness." As the argument
goes, the growing industrialization and mechanization of turn-of-the-century America
produced, particularly among the middle and upper classes, severe anxiety with respect to their loss of time-honored attributes of masculinity. In an older frontier
America the opportunities for physical labor, wilderness adventure, and primitive
expressions of violence, were not only available but frequently a precondition
for survival. Denied these experiences, the rising generation of males were in
danger of becoming over-civilized, if not feminized. Anemic replicas of their
9 Caspar Whitney, "The Athletic Development at West Point and Annapolis,"
Harper's Weekly 36 (21 May 1892), 496 and Glenn Warner, A Course in Football for Players and
Coaches (Carlisle, 1912), 89. See also, Walter Camp and Lorin F Deland, Football (Boston, 1896),
278-83.
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29
30 SPRING 2001
30
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David Wallace Adams
photographs. Situated between the game and their readers, sports journalists, as
mediators of meaning, constantly struggled for ways to enhance their narratives. A
Yale-Princeton football game was not just a game but a titanic struggle of historic
significance, where players, like medieval knights or Roman gladiators, performed
mythic feats of heroism. Interestingly, until the 1890s the latent narrative possibilities
of football as a metaphor for frontier war remained unexploited.14
But after the Indians took to the gridiron, sports writers immediately made the
connection. Writing for the New York Journal, sportswriter Harry Beecher began his
description of the 1900 Thanksgiving Day game between Carlisle and Columbia, in
which the Indians were defeated by a score of 17 to 6, with the observation that the
two races had a long history on the field of battle. "Now it is brawn, muscle and speed
scrapping over a slippery football. Then it was tomahawks and rifles with lives at stake.
Of course, the redskins were beaten. They always were." When the Indians fell to
Brown in 1897, readers of the New York Herald were told that it was the "victorious
paleface who lured the wily redskin into the open, and there scalped him with his own
tomahawk." No longer, the account continued, would the Carlisle Indian "leap forth
from his well chosen ambuscade, and, with terror diffusing whoop, remove the cranial
canopy from his ... enemy." Vanquished on the gridiron, the Indian, "with disjointed
whoop and blunted tomahawk, goes back to recuperate upon his reservation." Similarly, in 1896, an article in New York World (reprinted in Red Man), set the scene for
the contest between Yale and Carlisle in 1896 this way: "On one side were the undergraduates of an old and great university. They represent, physically, the perfection of
modern athletics, and intellectually, the culture and refinement of the best modern
American life. On the other side was the aborigine, the real son of the forest and plain,
the redskin of history, of story, of war, developed or veneered, as the case may be, by
education." New Yorkers had their first opportunity to see Carlisle players in 1895.
The New York Times responded: "There was an uprising of Indians in the northern part
of Manhattan Island yesterday afternoon. A band of eleven full-blooded warriors, with
their war paint and feathers, attacked a band of men from the Young Men's Christian
Association."15
One is reminded at this point of James Oliver Robertson's assertion that Ameri-
can football has been the least exportable of the nation's sports because "the entire
game is built around the frontier, the line, the boundary. Football ritualizes the moving
14 Football's narrative possibilities are discussed in Oriard, Reading Football, 9-20. For
the increased role of newspapers and sports journalists, see the same book, 57-133 and John
Rickards Betts, "Sporting Journalism in Nineteenth-Century America," American Quarterly 5
(Spring 1953): 39-56.
15 New York Journal, 30 November 1900, 9; New York Herald, 14 November 1897, 4;
Red Man, November 1896, 7; New York Times, 29 November 1895, 6. For other examples see Kentucky Post, 16 November 1896, 7; Cincinnati Inquirer, 25 November 1897, 2; Philadelphia Inquirer,
13 November 1898, 1; Philadelphia Inquirer, 16 November 1902, 1; Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 November 1911, 1; Minneapolis Tribune, 15 November 1907, 8.
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31
32 SPRING 2001
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Western Historical Quarterly
SPRING
2001
Ca
(C
Pr
(K
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to
fr
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ti
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posed:
Never was there a spectacle so calculated to impress an imaginative mind.
All the manifold interests of the present and the past, the near and the
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33
David Wallace Adams
far, were collected on the
instant on Soldier's field.
Over 500 years of education ''
were represented by the '
young palefaces in crimson,
while centuries of fire and "1
sun worship, medicine men
incantations, ghost dances
and mound building were
flashed before the inner vi-
sion by the appearances of
the young men from .
Carlisle. Every glance at
their swarthy faces and "::;...
crow-black hair wafted the it
mind back to the days of m ;
Pontiac, King Philip, :
Samoset, the time of
Hannah Dustin's escape, to
Lovel's war and Marquette's i E
trips of discovery in a fabric :":
of birch bark.16
For this writer, at least, Soldier's Thaddeus Redwater, a northern Cheyenne from the
Field had assumed the attributes Tongue River reservation in Montana, was on the Carlisle
football team from 1897 to 1900, ca. 1900. Photo cour-
of mythic space where Indians tesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle,
and whites were reliving their Pennsylvania.
dramatic, age-old encounters on
the American landscape.
Nowhere is this connection clearer than in a New York Herald article on the YaleCarlisle contest in 1897 in which Yale players were miraculously transformed into the
"Leatherstockings" and the Carlisle players into Cooperesque versions of the noble
savage. This imaginative journalist even manages to put words into the mouths of
Indian players. "Ugh!" Carlisle's Thaddeus Redwater mutters before the game gets
underway, "Pie Belt white man no good. Shoulders bend like willow tree." The Yale
players, another Carlisle warrior pronounces, "dare not shut their eyes in the night.
Their scalps will be so plenty that Indian [sic] shall burn them." For this journalist, the
moment the Carlisle players stepped onto the gridiron dressed in their football "war
paint" nose guards, leg splints, and shoulder pads they could not help but conjure
16 James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American Reality (New York, 1980), 256
and Boston Globe, 1 November 1896, 1-2.
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34 SPRING 2001
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SPRING
2001
Western
up
Wes
Historical
Quarterly
image
peculiar
with
the
t
the
"twin
two
races
came
the
unbroken
savages
They
like
w
look
stam
"The
Indi
prostrate
seemed
as
Leatherst
Indians,
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in
the
a
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Newspape
newspape
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5;
Cin
Philadelphia
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David Wallace Adams
35
9r 7fl ^ k, i'
SZAbE I SnrINCW BULL-- IWMojvl IT
''Vn (.OT^ //^ ?ac %^:
InJ.nus lick Pa7e fices .
According to this Minneapolis Tribune cartoon of the 1907 Minnesota-Carlis
the contest as yet another opportunity for achieving symbolic revenge for defe
field of battle. Newspaper available through Minnesota Historical Society.
raising a football to the heavens with the other. The caption
INDIAN DISCARDS THE TOMAHAWK FOR THE DEADLIER FOOTBALL AT
THE CHICAGO COLISEUM."
Visual references to scalping was another common theme. "HOW AM I GOI
TO GET THAT FELLOW'S SCALP?" a savage-looking Indian wonders as he
fronts a helmeted University of Michigan player in 1901. After the Harvard vic
over Carlisle in 1899, a much-relieved Harvard player clutches his head and re
"I STILL HAVE MY SCALP." The situation is somewhat reversed in a closely-fou
game between the University of Minnesota and Carlisle in 1907. In this instan
Carlisle player's hair is literally exploding off his cranium, the caption reading,
WHAT A SCARE! Well, if the Gopher didn't scalp Mr. Indian, he scared him b
headed." Exploiting another familiar stereotype, a cartoonist for the New York J
sketched a Carlisle player tipping a whisky bottle over the caption, "An Appe
The Great Spirit."18
These illustrations and captions raise a question: Amid all such referenc
Indian savagery, just how successful was Pratt's grand vision of translating Carl
victories on the gridiron into greater public appreciation of the Indian's capacit
assimilation? The answer to this question is complex. Certainly, on one level, P
must have been disappointed. The objective of the football experiment was to aw
the public to the Indians' possibilities; it was not to provide an opportunity to r
18 Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 October 1899, 13; Minneapolis Tribune, 17 November 1907,
1; Boston Herald, 28 October 1899, 12; Minneapolis Journal, 20 November 1908, 1; Chicago Tri-
bune, 20 December 1896, 1; Detroit Evening News, 2 November 1901, 1; Boston Herald, 29 Octobe
1899, 6; Minneapolis Journal, 17 November 1907, 1; New York Journal, 27 November 1896, 3.
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36 SPRING 2001
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2001
Western
Western Historical Quarterly
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Quarterly
"HOW AM I GOING TO GET THAT FELLOW'S SCALP?"
In this 1901 Detroit Evening News item, the cartoonist employed the familiar f
the scalping, blood-thirsty, savage, in this instance, frustrated in his design by
protective helmet. Newspaper available through Harvard University.
images of tomahawk-chopping, scalp-hungry savages. Still, Pratt
not altogether unsuccessful. The success of the Indians on the foo
prompted journalistic pronouncements that the old racial stereo
and wrongheaded. After the Harvard-Carlisle game in 1896, the
juxtaposed the historic image of the Indian with that presented by
"The Indians have invaded the East, and the people have not bee
alive or tomahawked," began the reporter's account. Quite the co
skillful play and civilized bearing in a game that might have spark
savageness offered a strong counter argument to the oft-repeated
only good Indian is a dead one" and, in doing so, lent proof to C
that the race was fully capable of civilization. Similarly, the New Yo
spectators' support for the Indians in a contest with Yale, obser
fellows, who would have been with Rain-in-the-Face and Sitting
Horn if they had been born thirty years before, were standing up n
men who had five centuries the advantage of them in training an
the immense sympathy of the crowd "signified the hearty welco
redskins [were] received when they turn[ed] from the customs of
suits of civilization." After Carlisle's 1895 football season, a repor
Leader wrote that the school's record on the football field demon
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David Wallace Adams
37
"fitness for the most modem achievements of American civilization." The Indians
had performed magnificently against some of the finest universities in the country. It
could no longer be assumed that the race was headed for "hopeless decline." Indeed,
"in every sense, the Indian is a shining success as a football player. And if football is
not the final test of the fitness of a race for the world's struggles and labors, things
must be sadly askew, somewhere and somehow." Because the above accounts were also
reprinted in Red Man, students as well as the general public were treated to these
optimistic assessments of the Indians' future.'9
The Indians also scored big in their off-the-field appearances. Press accounts of
the team's arrival, their pre-game activities, and their attendance at various social
events lent further support to the transformative influence of a Carlisle-like education. In city after city, journalists took note of the players' smart-looking uniforms and
their thoroughly civilized demeanor. One reporter commented on the arrival of the
Indians at a San Francisco hotel: "There is no loud talking, no smoking, no drinking,
no profanity; there is not even slang in their conversation." This exemplary behavior
was attributed to the school's emphasis on rules and military discipline. When the
Indians strode into the lobby of Detroit's Hotel Cadillac in 1901, according to the
Detroit Free Press, "there were no blood-curdling whoops, no war dances, no streaming
ribbons." When the hotel clerk had the bad taste to ask a player in the process of
signing the hotel register, "Where's your ribbons, and war whoops and-and tomahawks?" the Indian "just smiled and continued to write in a hand that would be a
credit to a bank clerk." Prior to a game with the University of Denver, a reporter from
the same city went out of his way to disabuse readers of old frontier stereotypes. Those
who had shown up at the Brown Palace, one of Denver's finer hotels, expecting to see
savage-looking Indians dressed in blankets and feathers, went away sorely disappointed.
The Carlisle players not only spoke perfect English, they would "stack up well with the
white brother in point of intelligence, wit, and manly bearing."20
Occasionally Pratt had his more articulate players address local gatherings. In
1896, after a disheartening game with Yale, Pratt and a dozen or so players attended
Plymouth Congregational Church, the services conducted by the Reverend Lyman
Abbott, one of the nation's leading advocates for Indian assimilation. After disclaim-
ing intimate knowledge of the intricacies of football, Abbott pronounced that the
Carlisle players' skill and cool-headedness in the hard-fought contest with Yale surely
proved that the Indian was capable of rising above "degradation and ignorance." The
highlight of the occasion were the remarks of halfback Frank Cayou, an Omaha from
Nebraska and one of Pratt's prize students. Cayou told the congregation how he had
19 Red Man, November 1896, 6; Red Man, November 1896, 2; Red Man, September-
October 1895, 6.
20 San Francisco Chronicle, 23 December 1903, 2; Detroit Free Press, 2 November 1901,
1; Denver Post, 5 December 1908, 3. For other examples, see Cincinnati Inquirer, 14 November
1896, 9; Minneapolis Journal, 18 November 1906, 6; Minneapolis Journal, 15 November 1907, 20.
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38 SPRING 2001
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SPRING
2001
Western
Wes
Historical
Quarterly
attended
plishment
of
his
rac
Drunken
ans
on
tion,
and
they
for
a
re
but
they
though
had
don
raise
my
whites,
The
b
follow
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wa
Indian
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last
continued
system.
T
civilizatio
civilized
m
One
thin
when
side.
dent
the
18
repo
game
that
Car
In
with
"the
India
crowd
"ch
reporter
the
crowd
out
thro
opposition
in
1900,
least
21
of
to
Red
the
that
Ma
Chic
the
onstrate
noticed
22
Mi
th
tha
New
Boston
"
ti
Yo
Hera
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David Wallace Adams
39
Why were white spectators so quick to root for the Indians? It is not easy to answer this question. The exercise of exploring the nature and meaning of fan psychology is a risky enterprise. Any such attempt must necessarily be based on limited and
mostly circumstantial evidence, and must be framed in the context that Indian-white
football, whether viewed as social drama or deep play, struck the psychological and
mythic consciousness of fans at different levels. Carlisle's white fans, it turns out, had
several reasons to cheer for the Indians. First, some found the Carlisle team living
proof of the proposition expoused by Pratt and other reformers-namely, that Indians,
while products of a savage heritage, were fully capable of making the transition to
civilized life. Adherents of this view accepted, uncritically, the belief that policymakers'
definition of the Indian problem had been accurate: savagism and civilization were
irreconcilable states of existence in the progressive flow of historical time. Indians,
fated for extinction as savages, might expect and surely deserved complete integration
into the American polity once they were civilized. In a letter to the New York Sun,
reprinted in Red Man, following Carlisle's game with Yale in 1896, one fan pointed out
that the enthusiastic response of the 10,000 spectators seemed to signal a new day in
Indian affairs: "It is safe to say that not one in one hundred of these ten thousand was
not continuously, enthusiastically, and vociferously in sympathy with the Indians. It is
the first time that this has been so. Never before has a great crowd of white Americans
openly applauded the prowess and the deeds of a company of red Americans." The
contest, the writer said, signified "a new appreciation of the possibilities of the red
man, and it expressed, albeit without definite intention, a new hope for the Indian.
Football is a scientific game, and the fact that these young red men have attained such
proficiency in it demonstrates their capacity for the more useful and practical training
which they receive at the Indian Industrial school."23
A second reason for spectator support was the growing acceptance of the idea that
Indians, while fated by historical circumstance to surrender their wilderness domain to
a superior civilization, still had been terribly wronged, that the nation's original prom-
ise of "expansion with honor" had too often given way to betrayal and hypocrisy. If
most fans had not read Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor, written just ten
years before the Indians took to the gridiron, many embraced the sentiment of the
book's title. "It is said that an Indian neither forgets nor forgives an injury," Clarke
McAdams began his editorial following Carlisle's smashing victory over St. Louis
University in 1908. The game's hero had been young Jim Thorpe. "Mr. Thorpe is a Sac
and Fox. No Sac and Fox can either forget or forgive St. Louis. It was St. Louis that
made the head men of the Sac and Fox nation drunk and induced them in this condition to sign away the tribal lands." Here, McAdams suggested, was the secret to Thorpe's
New York Journal, 25 October 1896, 3; Detroit News, 3 November 1901, 1-2; St. Louis Globe
Democrat, 27 November 1908, 10-1.
23 Red Man, November 1896, 2.
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40 SPRING 2001
40
SPRING
2001
Wester
Western
Historical
Quarterly
stunning
Indian
perfo
mom
manner
in
less
ued.
his
"Nor
young
coul
Sac
and
humiliated
No
than
the
us
situation
the
Yale-C
Indians
but
only
fro
after
touchdown
Hickok
ers
and
scalp
the
the
committed
r
who
un
agai
should
responsible
reservation
false
to
his
reprinted
note:
find
him
him
regular
Helen
if
w
out
on
Hunt
t
to
t
J
1908,
York
Rochester
appears
R
thing
November
New
tr
in
"Now
cheat
25
sh
the
"wards."
viewed
24
h
thems
saw
Indian
the
th
conclusi
on
cause
s
jeered,
game's
field
M
their
amongst
was
C
related,
simply
crowd
a
the
halted.
porter
men
run
later
thought
been
n
w
Jou
Advert
have
b
haps
the
basis
for
coach
for
most
of
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David Wallace Adams
41
A third explanation for spectator support is much more nuanced and takes us into
a realm that may be described as deep play at its deepest. At the very heart of this
explanation is the idea that many white spectators cheered for the Indians, not because they were civilized, nor because they had been wronged, but merely because
they were Indians. Like the reporters who cast their stories of the racial clash on the
gridiron as a metaphor for the real frontier Indian wars of the past, so too did Carlisle
fans attribute to the spectacle a significance of mythic proportions. I am suggesting
that at some level of consciousness, the thousands of white fans cheering for Carlisle
must have realized that Indians and American identity were inextricably intertwined.
But in this instance, the Frontier Myth told them they should root for the Indians.
Without Indians there would have been no Frontier Myth, or at least a myth stripped
of much of its symbolic meaning. To imagine the American story without the Indian
was, in effect, to imagine an America not worth imagining. In this sense, the villain in
the American drama was as vital to the play as the hero. Then too, in post-frontier,
industrial America, the "vanishing American" was increasingly becoming associated
with the ideals and longings seemingly absent in the new social order-aboriginal
freedom, primordial community, philosophical primitivism, mystical transcendence,
connection to nature, and manly physicality. While some might applaud Carlisle players for their newly acquired civilized natures, others imagined nature's noblemen, innocent children of forest (and) plain, symbols of a lost Eden, what an earlier America
had once known and must not forget. It was time to cheer for the Indians.26
"And the spectators were with them," remarked a reporter for the Boston Globe
covering the Carlisle-Harvard game in 1900, "the yodels of the crowd in the bleachers
rising above the cheers." Similarly, in the New York Sun's 1896 account of the Carlisle-
Yale contest, reprinted in Red Man, the reporter noted that every time the Indians
made forward progress on the field their supporters "broke loose in a wild medley of
sounds. Everybody seemed to have heard that the peculiar noise produced by rapidly
and repeatedly clapping the hand over the mouth while in the act of shouting was
a characteristic Indian way of yelling." During such times the exhilaration of the
athletic contest meshed with the mythic space of the gridiron, transporting fans, if
only for a fleeting moment, into the intoxicating and blurry world of "betwixt
and betweeness" where the dichotomy of their white and Indian selves might be
26 Victor Turner describes social dramas as "units of aharmonic or disharmonic process,
arising in conflict situations," which typically involve four phases: breach (confrontation), crises
(mounting conflict), redressive action (adjustive mechanism brought to bear on the "disturbed
social system"), and reintegration (reconciliation). The last phase, reintegration, is an "opportunity for taking stock," with one result being that "oppositions may be found to have become alli-
ances, and vice versa." See Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 37-42 and also Process, Performance and
Pilgrimage, 92-3. For discussions of long-standing, as well as tur-of-the-century, images of Indians,
see Slotkin's, Regeneration through Violence, 561 and The Fatal Environment, 53; Mark C. Cames,
Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, 1989), esp. 83-104; Dippie, The Van-
ishing American, 197-242; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, 1998), 95-127.
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42 SPRING 2001
42
SPRING
2001
Western
Western Historical Quarterly
Historical
Quarterly
temporaril
charged
what
atm
Philip
whites
to
tities."
space,
enter
r
In
t
they
a
lan
savagism,
or
at
what
had
might
that
I
least
b
play
is
to
tion.27
Meanwhile, the Carlisle warriors tackled, bucked the line, and ate up the yards on
the way to the "twin saplings." But what goal post? What meaning did Carlisle players
read into the social drama of Indian-white football? Some reporters were quick to
ascribe Indian enthusiasm on the gridiron to the natural desire of a vanquished people
to settle an old score. Writing for the New York Journal, Stephen Crane surmised that
players in the midst of game battle were thinking about how whites "have stolen a
continent from us, a wide, wide continent which was ours, and lately they have stolen
various touchdowns that were also ours.... It is too much. Let us, then, brothers, be
revenged. Here is an opportunity. The white men line up in their pride. If sacrifice of
bone and sinew can square the thing, let us sacrifice, and perhaps the smoke of our
wigwam camp fire will blow softly against the dangling scalps of our enemies." In the
1895 game with Pennsylvania, a game in which "war waged fast, and war waged
furious," an anonymous poet-reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer imagined the
inner-thoughts of Carlisle's center as he spied the stalwart William Bull on the other
side of the ball: "Oh, did I but have my long bow / Groaned the melancholy Lone
Wolf / Then I'd do that sturdy man Bull / Do him up all right and proper / As my
fathers did up Custer."28 Carlisle students must have found the reporter's poetic
analysis, which was reprinted in Red Man, interesting. It is difficult to know
what meaning Carlisle players gave to Indian-white football. Still, newspaper
accounts and Carlisle school records on individual players, offer a fascinating
27 Boston Globe, 28 October 1900, 1 and Red Man, November 1896, 2. This paragraph
has benefited immensely from my reading of Deloria's Playing Indian, esp. 35-7, 181-91. Also see
Victor Turner's essay, "Variations on a Theme of Luminality," in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally E Moore
and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Assen/Amsterdam, 1977), 36-52; Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols:
Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, 1967), 59-92 and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
(Chicago, 1969), 94-130.
28 New York Journal, 1 November 1896, microfilm page no. unclear. Also, Red Man,
September-October 1895, 5.
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s
David Wallace Adams
43
glimpse into the players' attitudes.29 Two generalizations emerge from these sources:
first, that Carlisle players read not a single but rather multiple meanings into their
football accomplishments, and second, players viewed time spent on the gridiron as
just one element in their overall Carlisle experience.
Some players simply loved the game itself, the exhilaration of performing heroic
acts on the athletic field. Listen to Jim Thorpe recalling one of those special moments
in the game with Harvard in 1911.
As long as I live, I will never forget that moment. There I stood in the
center of the field, the biggest crowd I had ever seen watching us, with
the score tied and the game depending on the accuracy of my kick. I was
tired enough so that all my muscles were relaxed. I had confidence, and
I wasn't worried. The ball came back square and true, and I swung my leg
with all the power and force that I had, and knew, as it left my toe, that
it was headed straight for the crossbar and was sure to go over.... When
the gun was fired and we knew that we had beated [sic] Harvard, the
champions of the East, a feeling of pride that none of us has ever lost
came over all of us, from Warner to the water-boy. As we meet now and
then in our different fields of work, we no more than start to recall old
times when the remembrance of that Harvard victory comes back and
we smile again as we did on that day.30
Some players clearly relished the public attention and material rewards that came
with being a member of one of the nation's most distinctive football teams. In addition
to being cheered by Indian and white fans, Carlisle players traveled the country and
stayed in the finest hotels. Players also enjoyed a special status as one of the school's
athletic elite, a status that manifested itself in a special "training table," separate living
quarters, occasional gifts from the athletic fund, and being honored at the annual
football banquet. The importance of these privilges is revealed in two letters team
captain Pete Calac wrote to superintendent Oscar Lipps in the summer of 1915. Writing from Highland Park, Michigan, where Calac and several team members were gaining work experience with Ford Motor Company under the school's "outing" program,
Carlisle's star running back expressed the team's concern and disappointment over
rumors that Lipps was going to eliminate the special treatment that players had received in the past: "The training table and the building is the main talk among the
boys here. They want a place where they can live and have the honor of living." Also
29 Carlisle student records contain some 80 football players' files. (I was able to identify
50 other players by name for which files no longer exist). The contents of the 80 files are of un-
even quality, some merely containing basic enrollment data, others including completed returned
student surveys, and occasionally, student correspondence. See Records of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives, Carlisle Indian Industrial School Student Records,
1879-1918, Entry 1327 (hereafter cited as CIISSR, E-1327).
30 Charley Paddock, "Chief Bright Path," Collier's (12 October 1929): 81.
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44 SPRING 2001
44
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David Wallace Adams
Another by-product of the football experience appears to have been a growing
sense of ethnic pride. One manifestation of this can be seen in the efforts of several
players to remove and replace Glenn Warner as the team's coach. The relationship
between Carlisle players and Warner seems to have been a rocky one from the very
first, stemming in large part from Warner's penchant for subjecting players to all man-
ner of verbal abuse. "Having been coached by some rather hard-boiled gents during
my years as a player," Warner later recounted, "I took a fairly extensive vocabulary
with me to Carlisle, and made full use of it." As Warner goes on to relate, his use of
rough language so inflamed team members' sensibilities that at one point several of his
star players threatened to quit the team until he altered his ways. Realizing his mistake, Warner apologized "profoundly and profusely," and this ended the strike.33
In fact, Warner's mistreatment of players would surface as one of the major themes
in a special investigation of the school conducted by the Office of Indian Affairs in
1914. Particularly significant was the role played by football players in marshalling
evidence against coach Warner. Several of the team's leading players-among them
Gus Welsh, Elmer Bush, John Wallette, Edward Bracklin, Joe Guyon, and Pete Calacsubmitted affidavits that Warner regularly mistreated players, heaping upon them not
only verbal, but physical, abuse as well. Bush offered: "Mr. Warner is kind of rough to
the football players, using profane language to them. I heard him curse a boy named
William Hodge; called him a son of a bitch." Others testified that they had seen Warner
strike or kick players on occasion. Inspector E. B. Linnen's description of Gus Welsh's
complaints sounded a common theme in the charges: "He believes Mr. Warner is a
good football coach, but a man with no principle; that he does not have the right
influence over the student boys; that his is detrimental to their cause; that so long as
he can use you he is all right with you; but the minute you voice your own sentiments
and speak up for them he abuses you." The bottom line was that Warner no longer
possessed the moral authority to coach the team and the players felt he should be
removed-which subsequently occurred.34
Who would replace him? And why shouldn't Indian players have an Indian coach?
Actually, the latter question surfaced in a theoretical way at the 1898 football banquet
when A. J. Standing, assistant superintendent, in the midst of praising the team, added
that the Indians "still need a white man to coach, and to manage their finances." Later
in the evening, team captain Bemus Pierce, Carlisle's star lineman, publicly rebuked
Standing for his unfounded pessimism as to Indian ability. If the Indians' skill on
the gridiron proved anything, Pierce offered, it proved that the race could "do most
Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America," Contemporary Native American Cultural Issues, 45; J. Milton Yinger and George Easton Simpson, "The Integration
of Americans of Indian Descent," American Academy of Political and Social Sciences Annals, 436
(March 1978): 137-51.
33 Glenn Warner, "Heap Big Run-Most-Fast," Collier's 88 (24 October 1931): 19.
34 Hearings, 1340-3.
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45
46 SPRING 2001
46
SPRING
2001
Western
Weste
Historical
Quarterly
anything."
wanted
ing
is
the
Frank
saw
In
perma
fac
Cayou
fit
to
rem
stead
of
War
white
man
w
favor
ing
for
I
their
majority,
cants
So
if
team
were
pa
levels
at
for
W
Superin
Carlisle
all
st
own.
wrote
at
he
among
of
what
le
gaining
Huizinga.
Play
turns
contest
s
Mor
to
when
consciousness
larly,
anthrop
render
confli
mirroring
is
that
an
player
Indian-white
Certainly
the
cartoonists
w
little
to
Carlisle
sent
for
to
many
his
school's
the
dispe
band,
topic
"med
Universit
whipped
their
belonged
in
p
support
the
I
too
much
for
35
Red
CIISSR,
Man,
J
E-1327,
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David Wallace Adams
formation will not go/ Wheelock and Johnson swift are rushing/ To the front to fight
the foe."36
Glenn Warner certainly thought his players were after more than a football victory. "They did not manifest a school spirit, but they did have a racial spirit," Warner
later recalled. "They seemed to recognize the fact that it was upon the athletic field
that the Indians had an even chance against their white brothers, and they wanted to
show that given an even chance they were the equal of their paleface brothers." Warner
noticed, for instance, that his players never displayed the same spirit playing other
Indian schools as when it was strictly "Indians against the White man." In keeping
with this spirit, "if there was one team that the Indians liked to beat more than an-
other, that team was the Army." Gus Welsh, quarterback in the 1912 game against
Army, one of the best football teams of the era, confirmed Warner's contention. Still,
as Welsh remembered it, Warner did his best to exploit players' embittered memories
of Indian-white struggles on a much deadlier plain: "Warner had no trouble getting
the boys keyed up for the game. He reminded the boys that it was the fathers and
grandfathers of these Army players who fought the Indians. That was enough!"37
On several occasions-and in some of the most unlikely of circumstances-players were known to make pointed historical and cultural references. In 1895, Red Man
reported that when Pennsylvania's center, William Bull, was knocked flat, a Carlisle
player pointed at the prostrate player and quipped to a nearby Indian, "Sitting Bull."
According to Glenn Warner, in the midst of another game, when Indian fullback Pete
Hauser was unfairly kneed by the opposition, he responded, "Who's the savage now?"
And then there is this intriguing incident reported in 1907, when the Indians were in
Chicago to play the University of Chicago: The day before the game, owing to the
heavy rain, Carlisle prepared by playing an indoor basketball game at Lake Forest
College. According to the reporter, during halftime the Indians "spotted a student
whom they thought should belong to their race. They immediately grabbed him and
proceeded to initiate him into the secrets of the various tribes. The Indians all came
on the floor clad in blankets and made this youngster run the gauntlet and subject
himself to an initiation of scalping, after which they danced their famous war dance."
When the ceremony was over, the news item concluded, the initiate was presented to
the crowd of onlookers with his new name-Blossom Berkheiser. What is one to make
of this episode? There is much to doubt about the account. Was the subject of the
team's attention part Indian, or simply an unsuspecting spectator? The comment that
36 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 27, 32-3; Sutton-Smith and Roberts, "Play, Games, and
Sports," 454; Red Man and Helper, 12 December 1902, 1; Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 November 1901,
13.
37 Glenn Warner, "The Difference between Red and White Football Material," Literary
Digest 65 (11 May 1920), 78-9; and Warner, "Heap Big Run-Most-Fast," 46. Welsh is quoted in
Wheeler, Jim Thorpe, 128.
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47
48 SPRING 2001
48
SPRING
2001
West
Western
this
Historical
Quarterly
"captiv
ludicrous.
M
impromptu
adverse
to
then
And
master.
was
at
At
t
Spe
stake
this
the
r
sch
white
understand
I
assert
th
grasping
dian
s
learn
being
inva
thee."
And
will
say
sand
the
th
warri
Indian
reoccupy
takes
by
the
Pratt
nism
t
brain
Ind
alway
for
ad
references
we
have
proved
"We
has
bee
it
have
b
ta
helped
gathering,
confirmed
Carlisle;
onl
probably
38
Red
cago
39
40
of
Man,
Daily
Red
ex
Tri
Man,
Redman,
how
dered
a
J
succes
great
Adams,
Educa
Institute
and
and
"An
Expe
1908,"
Ethnoh
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David Wallace Adams
49
experience to good use. For some,
football was a stepping stone to
further educational and athletic
opportunites at the college level.
Either as players or coaches,
former members of the football
squad would at various times ap-
pear on the rosters of the Uni-
versities of Illinois, Minnesota
and Wisconsin, Geogia Tech,
Dickinson College, Washington
University, West Virginia
Wesleyan, and Ohio University.
Along the way, a select few became Indian school superintendents, lawyers, and in at least one
instance, a dentist.41 Several
players-among them Jim
Thorpe, Joe Guyon, and Pete
Calac-returned to the gridiron
in the early years of professional
football.42 Most, however, returned to their reservation homes
to take up allotments, entered
the Indian service, or took their David McFarland, a Nez Perce, was on the Carlisle team
from 1894 to 1897, ca. 1897. Photo courtesy of the
chances in the labor market as
semi-skilled laborers.43
Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
41 See CIISSR, E-1327, file nos. 436, 1647, 4213, 4550, 5234, 5299, and 5425.
42 Thorpe, Guyon, and Calac were members of the 1919 "World Championship" Canton Bull Dogs. See Jim Thorpe, Joe Guyon, and Pete Calac files, Pro Football Hall of Fame Library, in Canton, OH. In the early 1920s, in one of the most bizarre chapters in sports history,
some 21 former Carlisle players joined the all-Indian professional team termed the Oorang Indians. The brainchild behind this venture was Walter Lingo, who was looking for a new way to
showcase and peddle a special breed of Airedale dogs. Based in LaRue, Ohio, Lingo purchased an
NFL franchise in 1922 and hired Thorpe to organize and coach the Indian team. The Oorang
Indians traveled from city to city playing, and mostly losing, to other NFL teams, and in elaborate
half-time ceremonies the players dressed up like "wild Indians," tossed tomahawks and knives, and
performed Indian dances. The highlight of the theatrics was a World War I battle scene between
German soldiers and the Indians (several of whom were, in fact, veterans) while Lingo's prize
Airedales dashed across the field to rescue wounded Indians with parcels of medicine. See Robert
L. Whitman, Jim Thorpe and the Oorang Indians: N.F.L.'s Most Colorful Franchise (Defiance, OH,
1984); Shelby Strother, "Airedales, Indians and Pro Football," Oorang Indian file, Pro Football
Hall of Fame Library; and Deloria, "'I Am of the Body,"' 333-4.
43 For example, see CIISSR, E-1327, file nos. 356, 643, 890, 1021, 1650, 1870, 3502,
5278, 5305, 5406, 5563, and 5756.
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50 SPRING 2001
50
SPRING
2001
Western
But
West
Historical
Quarterly
once
aw
for
existenc
Friedman
re
ball
wars
Dear
of
Frien
successful
but
the
I'll
if
I
g
don
school
try
deal
to
of
wards
this
clerking
New
From
b
goo
on
Year
a
other
alma
mater
regards
his
other
occasi
wished
"to
member
In
the
b
of
t
proce
commented
Shawnee,
O
I
am
gettin
Carlisle.
Th
out
in
the
the
school,
him
physic
zen
of
Ame
Glad
to
Carlisle.
William
River
season
If
g
this
lation,
mize
Hod
and
many
played
kno
y
for
not
on
the
a
Ca
mo
44
CIISSR,
E-
45
CIISSR,
E-
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David Wallace Adams
51
married, took up his allotment,
and within a couple of years,
secured the coveted position
of agency farmer. Lone Wolf
was also a life-long advocate of
Indian education, and as a promi-
nent tribal leader, continually
pressed for increased funding for
Rainy Mountain Boarding
School. In his advocacy of both i . i:i i
agriculture and education, then,
the Carlisle-trained returnee ap-
peared to be playing the role of
the classic culture broker, help-
ing his fellow Kiowas adjust to ... .
the cultural forces swirling
around them. But in two other
respects Lone Wolf deviated t i
from the Carlisle assimilationist
vision. In 1900, on the
Congress's ratification of the le-
gally suspect Jerome Agreement, 04l W
which for all practical purposes
liquidated the Kiowa landbase, iv
Lone Wolf assisted his uncle
Lone Wolf wassstie i hian Delos K. Lone Wolf, a Kiowa, was a member of the Carlisle
(also named Lone Wolf) and football squad from 1894 to 1897. ca. 1897. Photo courother traditionalists to launch a tesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle,
legal assault designed to forestall Pennsylvania.
the dissolution of the tribal estate. While the litigation would eventually meet with
disastrous consequences in the form of the 1903 Supreme Court ruling Lone Wolf v.
Hitchcock, the episode reveals the former lineman's willingness to transfer his legendary skill at defending Indian turf on the gridiron to the real contest for Kiowa land on
the Southern Plains. Indeed, in 1910, when Delos failed to fill out Carlisle's returned
student survey, the agent responded for him: "Delos Lone Wolf is not up with the
times; he has ambitions to be head of his tribe and lead them in the old tribal ways,
which is a thing of the past in Oklahoma." By now, Lone Wolf was also a known user
of peyote. In 1916, at a meeting of the Pan-Indian Society of American Indians in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was to ardently defend the new religion in open debate against
his old school superintendent, Richard Pratt. Two years later, Lone Wolf was listed as
one of two trustees of the Kiowa branch of the Oklahoma Native American Church.
But Lone Wolf was still remaking himself. By 1923, he had joined the Methodist church,
and by 1934, he was protesting John Collier's "Indian New Deal" as being anathema to
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52 SPRING 2001
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David Wallace Adams
53
gridiron in an Indian-white football contest, like the arena of the Wild West Show,
became a mythic space where one of the defining chapters of the nation's history could
be revisited anew. And if for some reporters the temptation to construct game narratives around the theme of the savage Indian war was simply too great to resist, others
found reason to praise Carlisle players as symbols of the "new Indian." Meanwhile,
white crowds cheered enthusiastically for the Indians. And why not? What was America
without the Frontier Myth? What was the Frontier Myth without Indians? So much to
win, so little to lose.
As for the players themselves, the rewards of the game were also substantial. At
various times, football offered Indian players opportunities for testing their athletic
ability, attaining status, seeing the country, advancing the cause of Indian reform, ac-
quiring further education, working out issues of personal and cultural identity, and
finally, for metaphorically settling old scores. The meanings that Carlisle players read
into their gridiron battles were at once imposed and constructed, derived from their
individual efforts to find firm footing on uncertain terrain, to make sense of a chang-
ing world where both Indian survival and identity were contingent on the ability to
simultaneously resist and adapt, sometimes defending, always reconstructing the bound-
aries of their cultural selves. Carlisle Indians were forging identities-Pan-Indian iden-
tities at that- defying the simplistic and dichotomous categories of cultural essence
in which Pratt or others might wish to consign them.
In the last analysis, both the degrees and kinds of symbolic weight that Carlisle
players attached to their football experience can never be fully known. One wonders,
for instance, what John Flinchum was thinking in 1918 when he traded his football
jersey for a United States Army uniform. (Whether he enlisted or was drafted isn't
clear.) Perhaps his thoughts were on winning military honors on a real field of battle.
Or, perhaps Flinchum, who was by blood quantum just one quarter Choctaw, accepted
gladly a patriotic duty as an American to "make the world safe for democracy." On the
other hand, his thoughts just may have been closer to home-to make America safe
for universal Indian citizenship. In any event, just before departing for France, the
former football captain wrote to Carlisle with this request. He wanted to order a school
sweater, a letter "C" that he planned to stitch on the sweater, and a subscription to the
Arrow. "I wish you would send me two of those football seals and colors, one to put on
my football certificate and one for my commission as Lieutenant."48 Precisely what
significance Flinchum attached to these articles is not revealed, but it is evident that
they mattered to him. The gridiron warrior-turned-soldier, it appears, was getting his
symbolic ducks in order.
48 CIISSR, E-1327, file no. 5638. Flinchum was referring to the Carlisle Arrow, the
school newspaper. Over the years, this newspaper alternately used the name Red Man and Carlisle
Arrow. For other Carlisle football players who joined the armed services, see CIISSR, E-1327, file
nos. 436, 1447, 4941, 5234, 5619 and Pete Calac file, Pro Football Hall of Fame Library. Thomas
H. Britten makes the point that off-reservation schools were a significant source of Indian recruits.
See Britten, American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque, 1997), 65.
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“A Blond, Broad-shouldered Athlete with Bright Grey-blue Eyes”: German Propaganda and
Gotthardt Handrick's Victory in Modern Pentathlon at the Nazis' Olympics in 1936
Author(s): Sandra Heck
Source: Journal of Sport History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 255-274
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jsporthistory.38.2.255
Accessed: 20-08-2018 11:52 UTC
REFERENCES
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HECK: “A BLOND, BROAD-SHOULDERED ATHLETE”
“A Blond, Broad-shouldered
Athlete with Bright Grey-blue
Eyes”: German Propaganda
and Gotthardt Handrick’s
Victory in Modern
Pentathlon at the Nazis’
Olympics in 1936
SANDRA HECK†
Faculty of Sports Science
Ruhr-University Bochum
Modern pentathlon requires mainly military skills and historically attracted the
attention of officers only. Appropriately, the country that provided the best modern pentathletes simultaneously demonstrated its military strength. Gotthardt
Handrick who interrupted a long-lasting Swedish hegemony over the modern
pentathlon developed into Germany’s national pride. Surprisingly, his victory in
†
Correspondence to sandra.heck@rub.de. The quotation in the title comes from Carl Graf Norman,
“Der Fünfkämpfer muß sich selbst besiegen,” Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 7 August 1936, ID 017/3.2.6,
Carl und Liselott Diem-Archive, Cologne, Germany. The author would like to thank Chad Seifried,
Assistant Professor at the Department of Kinesiology of Louisiana State University, for checking the
English of her text.
Summer 2011
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255
JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY
the 1936 Olympics modern pentathlon competition is relatively unknown and
under-investigated.
This paper investigates how Handrick’s performance at the 1936 games
was presented in Germany in various press documents and thereby gives insights
into the Nazis’ instrumentalization of the sport. By analyzing different articles
in German newspapers and journals it is aimed to detect the propaganda that
possibly contributed to the construction of Handrick’s heroic image in an up-tothat-date minor sport. It is argued that the often criticized military links of
modern pentathlon never turned out to be so true than in the pre-war atmosphere of the 1936 Olympics.
“L
IEUTENANT HANDRICK’S TRIUMPH.”1 This headline was used by the contemporary German newspaper Neue Berliner Zeitung to highlight the gold medal Karl Hermann
Gotthardt Handrick (1908-1978) earned in the Olympic modern pentathlon of 1936.
Achieving recognition as an Olympic champion always involved great honor, especially
for athletes belonging to the host country. Many of the Berlin Olympians emerged as
successful athletes in Germany by bringing in a total of thirty-three gold medals to the
German Reich. However, only some of these sportsmen developed into contemporary
heroes. Gotthardt Handrick, one of Germany’s best fighter pilots, succeeded in modern
pentathlon, a multidisciplinary sport composed of horse-riding, fencing, shooting, swimming, and running, and thus was amongst the country’s most adored athletes in 1936.
The admiration that the German press addressed to him in 1936 was surprising, as the
sport he practiced had generally not been in the center of media attention before.2
This paper investigates how Gotthardt Handrick’s performance at the 1936 games
was presented in Germany in various press documents and thereby gives insights into the
Nazis’ instrumentalization of the sport. By analyzing different articles in German newspapers and journals it is the aim of this work to detect the propaganda which possibly contributed to the construction of Handrick’s heroic image in an up-to-that-date minor sport.
Whereas the Nazi emphasis on sport is generally well documented, historical research
endeavors have not paid much attention to modern pentathlon, neither to the course of
the competition nor to Handrick’s victory in particular. American sport historian Richard D.
Mandell, for instance, describes the 1936 Olympic modern pentathlon on less than one
page, while German sport historians Arnd Krüger and Hajo Bennett focused on international relations and did not develop the topic.3 Historians likely failed to explore the
subject because they traditionally focused only on those sports of high public interest like
the track and field competitions of 1936 and Jesse Owens’ performances.4 Modern pentathlon, a continuous part of the Olympic program since 1912, was largely ignored by
spectators and the media. Handrick’s presentation by the German media in 1936 remains
relatively unknown, and modern pentathlon is still marginalized in comparison to other
Olympic activities.
This research gap is even more surprising as the media coverage of the 1936 games
was in general much higher in comparison to earlier sporting events. Moving pictures,
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HECK: “A BLOND, BROAD-SHOULDERED ATHLETE”
radio broadcasts, and films were produced to highlight German achievements, and many
of them are still well preserved. Diverse German newspapers mirrored the political ideology that had dominated Germany since Hitler’s takeover in 1933. The National Socialists
valued the inclusion of German athletes within the perspective of their dogma. As an
example, a particular Olympic propaganda board was assembled and affiliated with a
sport advertisement office to create sport-associated propaganda.5 In June of 1936, two
months before the games opened, the Reichsverband der Deutschen Zeitungsverleger (Reich
Association of the German Newspaper Publishers) clarified that “the newspapers should
‘increase’ their scope during the Olympic Games to be able to accommodate the appropriate propaganda.”6
The Carl und Liselott Diem-Archive in Cologne, Germany; the Archives of the Institute of Sport Science of the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany; the
Municipal Archives of Zittau in Saxony, Germany; and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Archives in Lausanne, Switzerland, provide numerous German print media
reporting on the Olympic competitions of Berlin. In 1936, more than two thousand
newspapers plus special booklets and journals were published.7 Because of this extensive
coverage of Olympic topics I have chosen to review special issues of the Olympia-Hefte,
edited by the Propaganda-Ausschuß für die Olympischen Spiele Berlin 1936-Amt für
Sportwerbung (Propaganda Commission for the Olympic Games of Berlin 1936-Office
for Sports Advertisement) in cooperation with the Reichssportführer, because they dealt
with twenty-six different Olympic sports, among them the modern pentathlon. Concerning the written press, two main newspapers deserve special recognition. From July 21 until
August 19, 1936, the Reichssportverlag published thirty volumes of the Olympia-Zeitung,
containing a daily report about recent Olympic happenings. Already four weeks before the
publication of the first edition it had 115,000 subscribers and hence was named “the news
transmitter of the Olympic Games.”8 The weekly Reichssportblatt additionally functioned
as the official Olympic voice during the Berlin Olympics. With a circulation of over 160,000
spread across over forty different countries, it was the biggest contemporary German sport
media.9 Interested citizens could also trace the recent sport incidents through several regional newspapers, like the daily 12-Uhr-Blatt of the Neue Berliner Zeitung, the weekly
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, and the Münchner Illustrierte Presse, which frequently included
inserts about the Olympic games.
Predictably the content of the sport-related articles, including both the texts and the
photos, was never free of Nazi influence in 1936. The Ministry of Propaganda generally
concentrated on diffusing propaganda material during the time of the games and preselected
the publications. Even the texts of actually politically neutral newspapers like the Berliner
Illustrirte Zeitung were relegated to the hands of National-Socialist propagandists during
the Hitler’s regime. The Olympia-Zeitung, for instance, was sponsored by the Ministry of
Propaganda itself, another obvious sign of the apparent National-Socialist influence. Above
all, the Ministry sent out several thousands of press orders—already 15,000 between the
summer of 1933 and the beginning of the war—including the presentation of the Olympic games and its sports with which all German media should (and usually did) comply.10
Due to this lack of political independency, the chosen media are only partly used to reflect
reality—for instance when the course of the competition is described—but mainly
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JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY
contextually analyzed to mirror the National-Socialist instrumentalization of both the
sportsmen and their sport performances.
High Expectations—The Ideal Pentathlete and the Nazi Regime
Success in the Olympic modern pentathlon was considered as especially important by
the National Socialists, as it was regarded as an officers’ sport and supposed to mirror a
country’s military strength. Accordingly, the German press demonstrated the modern pentathlon competitors not only as all-around athletes but also as respective officers. In contrast, when IOC president Baron Pierre de Coubertin succeeded in implementing modern pentathlon in the program of the Stockholm games in 1912, he apparently aimed at
creating a sport for complete athletes who should possibly belong to different social classes.
However, due to its military-based disciplines, the social range of modern pentathlon’s
competitors was right from the beginning limited to the military domain. Horse-riding
was restricted to officers or soldiers with a high rank—at least lieutenant—and within the
Olympics to gentlemen amateurs. The same applied to modern pentathlon, which included a horse-riding event and hence had developed as a pure masculine and military
sport.11 Even though Coubertin never clearly admitted this last point, he also never denied that he indeed brought together the soldiers of the world.12 The skills required by a
modern pentathlete—“the quick eye and the great agility of the fencer, the steady nerve of
the shooter, the knowledge of the horse and the developed muscles of the swimmer, runner and jumper”13 —were too obviously corresponding to those of a good officer to be
denied.
With respect to this point, Germany was no exception. When the sixth Olympic
games were planned to be held in Berlin in 1916, the organizers agreed that the program
should include the modern pentathlon that had just been newly introduced at the previous games in Stockholm in 1912. German lieutenant Walter von Reichenau (1884-1942)
was chosen as responsible for the athletes’ Olympic preparation and for the organization
of the competition.14 However, due to the Great War, the Olympics and thus also the
modern pentathlon did not take place. Nevertheless, the experiences of wartime influenced the further development of modern pentathlon in its aftermath by emphasizing the
value of a proper physical preparation for possible future battles. Accordingly, modern
pentathlon’s strong bound with the army continued after 1918 so that the social class of
the sport’s athletes remained largely the same.
In the course of the twentieth century the growth of technology demonstrated that
the cavalry was increasingly losing its importance within the army. Before the end of
World War I armored tanks had already replaced cavalry units and thereby totally changed
the soldiers’ profile. The cavalry unit was thus relegated to representative displays and
parades in Germany and other countries like Great Britain, France, and Sweden. Still, the
modern pentathlon continued to promote traditional military ideals. Furthermore, although the sport had lost its direct correspondence with military activities, the practice of
those military relics was still virtually confined to the army and to a lesser extent to the
police who provided the sportsmen with the required coaches and facilities.
Even though different nations could afford to establish frequent training sessions, the
sport remained dominated by Swedish officers in postwar times. Thus, until Amsterdam
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HECK: “A BLOND, BROAD-SHOULDERED ATHLETE”
1928 other countries had not won a single Olympic medal in the event. Germany was not
allowed to compete at the first two postwar games of Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924
as a consequence of the Great War. However, national ambitions to improve competitive
skills in modern pentathlon had not stopped, as Berlin policeman Helmuth Kahl notably
proved by reaching third place and achieving the first non-Swedish medal at the Olympic
games in 1928. This possible national turnabout at Germany’s first interwar participation
in the Olympic games proved that the support of all-round skills in school and university
physical education during the Weimar Republic functioned as a counter to the prohibition of any military training by the Treaty of Versailles.15
Nevertheless, in 1932 (Los Angeles) again the Swedes were in front, and no German
modern pentathlete emerged to secure a position among the best on the medal stand. The
German competitors, police constables Willi Remer and Conrad Miersch, took fifth and
sixth places. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, the gold medalist of Los Angeles, did not belong
to the cavalry like the majority of the competitors but instead served the Swedish marines.
The social background of both Oxenstierna and the German athletes demonstrated that
the modern pentathlon had slowly begun to widen its social range, at least among the
military participants.16 The 1932 Olympics also increased the ambitions of the National
Socialists in Germany because Fascist Italy’s great medal tally in general (even though not
in the modern pentathlon in particular) was interpreted as proof of the legitimacy of their
political regime.
When the Fuehrer came to power in 1933, the preparations for the coming Olympic
games had already started. At the beginning of the new political leadership it was not clear
whether the plan of organizing the games in Germany could be kept because at first glance
National-Socialist aims seemed to be incompatible with Olympic ideals. However, Adolf
Hitler finally agreed to support the ongoing Olympic preparations, even though this decision was based on rationalism rather than on a true change of mind.17 Advised by his
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the German chancellor reinterpreted and repackaged the Olympic competitions as a “splendid opportunity to demonstrate German vitality and organizational experience” and initiated a general Olympic enthusiasm.18 Moreover, the “ideological compatibility” between the members of the International Olympic
Committee and the Nazis was found to be higher than originally expected. Both parties
shared for instance “the value system that derived from their glorification of the physically
perfect male as the ideal human being.”19 The ideal man was, according to Coubertin and
to the National Socialists, a completely trained athlete who was ready to take on the
struggle of life and overwhelm the weak.
A comparison between Coubertin’s and Hitler’s opinion on ideal athleticism highlights the strong parallelism. In his famous monograph Mein Kampf (1924) Hitler called
the Greek ideal “immortal” as it was in his eyes a “wonderful combination of the most
glorious physical beauty with a brilliant mind and the noblest soul.”20 Coubertin likewise
referred in his Mémoires Olympiques (1931) to antiquity when he talked about “contracting a legitimate marriage between until now divorced powers, muscle and mind.”21 In
both cases, ancient athleticism functioned as model and as justification that a diversified
training regimen was required. The Fuehrer’s advice that “no day should pass without
young people being at least in the mornings and in the evenings one hour physically
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JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY
educated, namely in every kind of sport and gymnastics,”22 underlined the claim for frequent multi-disciplinary training. The Nazis considered a regular physical education not
only as a necessity to build a healthy and vital nation but moreover as a means to produce
efficient soldiers.
As modern pentathlon was, in regards to its participants’ composition, still considered as a contest among officers, the increase of medals in this sport was an important issue
for Hitler. The fact that he generally liked to merge military and athletic struggles came
out not only in Mein Kampf but also through obvious symbolical gestures. Prior to the
opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics, for instance, when he visited the adjacent
Langemarck Memorial Hall, “he paid silent tribute to the German youth who had sacrificed their lives during the First World War.”23 In Hitler’s eyes, both the soldier and the
athlete “sought victory not just for themselves, but for the greater glory of the nation.”24
Consequently, a high medal outcome in the coming Olympics was considered important
to prove national superiority. Furthermore, success in modern pentathlon in particular
was a chance for Hitler—who generally aimed to condition men for the life of a warrior—
to demonstrate the strength of the military. The army thereby functioned as the school
that still taught the individual German to seek the salvation of the nation, not in the
mendacious phrases of international fraternity between “Negroes,” Germans, Chinese,
French, British, etc., but rather in the strength and the unity of his own nationality.25
In the same way as the competitors in all different kinds of sports, German modern
pentathletes contributed to their country as “a community of fighting men,” ready to
“avenge the defeat and humiliation of the First World War.”26 Physical training and the
resulting military dominance were consequently the primary national concern and not a
question of individual success. Thus, propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Interior
Minister Wilhelm Frick proclaimed the games with the catch-phrase “Olympia—a National Issue” as sportive preparation and above all as mobilization for the extension and
defense of the Third German Reich. Von Reichenau, meanwhile promoted to the rank of
general lieutenant, became a member of the National Organizing Committee for the Berlin Olympics. At the same time he was the president of the Modern Pentathlon Committee and responsible for the training of the German modern pentathletes.27
How did the press demonstrate modern pentathlon during the time of competition
preparation in the years before 1936? In the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, German press
articles told a history of modern pentathlon’s origin, a story based on soldierly necessities:
An officer has to deliver an important message; he has to chase on an unknown
horse through impassable territory, has to pass through hostile lines with the
sword and the pistol, then swim across a river and finally run several kilometers
in order to reach the goal and perform his task.28
Created to explain the discipline choice and order, the legend emphasized the traditional
model of a good soldier and thereby underlined modern pentathlon’s military links.
The German press also supported the obvious relation between modern pentathlon
and military necessities by using images of a reinvented tradition.29 Headlines like “Modern Pentathlon Equates to Antique Pentathlon”30 adorned the news coverage and corresponded to both Hitler’s and Coubertin’s sports perception. Journalist Joachim Fernau
(1909-1988) who published about the sport’s characteristics in different contemporary
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HECK: “A BLOND, BROAD-SHOULDERED ATHLETE”
German journals and newspapers described the modern pentathlon as follows:
It is not a battle with the sensation of a pole vault, a 100-meters-run, a javelin
throw, a steeplechase, a marathon, but nevertheless the pentathlon winner is a
true successor of the classic pentathlon-winner, the king of the Olympians of
old Hellas.31
The difference from the antique pentathlon was reduced only to the kind of instruments
that were used. The modern pentathlete was transformed into a “modern knight” fighting
“with the weapons of the modern era,” weapons which were supposed to exemplify the
five chosen disciplines.32 Tracing the modern pentathlon’s line of tradition back until the
time of chivalry or even further was common.
The international press covered the modern pentathlon, too, and tried to create a
connection between individual success and the respective national history. For instance,
when a Swedish journalist argued why their athlete Ebbe Gallenstierna had a good chance
of winning such a knightly sport, he interpreted the sportsman’s inherent family connection to the Wasas as a positive precondition.33 In contrast to previous Olympic reports,
Fernau and his German colleagues for the first time assigned a high value to the combined
event, which became evident through titles like “the Crown of the Sport.” Functioning as
a model, modern pentathlon was even supposed to educate “the man to the ideal of a
fighter.”34 This “soldierly tenor” of the event was never neglected and probably led to
Fernau’s deflating statement that among the citizens actually “nobody talks[ed] about pentathlon.”35 However, despite the general high recognition of war preparation and the clear
links between modern pentathlon and military necessities, “people in Germany’s wider
sports circles . . . [had] so far paid precious little attention to this modern pentathlon.
Many sportsmen, otherwise good in the shot, . . . [had] no idea what it was actually
about.”36
Whereas before 1936 civilians were not aware of the rules and practice of the sport, it
was already highly valued by fanciers and by beneficiaries from the army circles. Thus, the
German propaganda department did its best to change public ignorance and thereby to
widen the social group attracted by modern pentathlon. The series Olympia-Hefte included a special issue on “Pentathlon and Decathlon” that generally aimed to contain
“what every German needs to know about Olympic sport” or better yet, what the Nazis
wanted every German to know and believe about Olympic sport.37 On the whole, most of
the ten pages were spent describing the modern pentathlon as a sport of great importance
and manliness, belonging to “the most difficult competitions of the Olympic program,”
and considered by Coubertin as a “sacrament of the sport.”38 No efforts were made to
possibly change the one-sided athletes’ composition by introducing modern pentathlon as
sport for all parts of society. The “soldierly athlete” was clearly promoted as the best adapted
sportsman in the past, present, and future.39 Consistent with the legend of the sport’s
origin, officers’ duties were considered similar to that required by sport. For instance, the
specific “soldierly skills,” “resolution, courage, masculinity, quick-wittedness, self-control,
self confidence, strong will” were highlighted.40 Special emphasis was furthermore put on
the Swedish modern pentathlete Sven Thofelt and his remarkable performance in Los
Angeles in 1932 when it was noted that the brave sportsman continued competing with a
broken rib and even was ranked first in the fencing and second in the swimming despite
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his injury.41 However, the question of the following Olympic modern pentathlon champion should not be left totally unresolved. Thus, at the end of the Olympia-Heft a glance
was thrown on the great efforts made in the German army and police department after
1932 and how they aimed to train future excellent modern pentathletes armed for the
Olympics to come.
The modern pentathlon events following the 1932 Olympics formed clear expectations in regards to the outcome of the following Olympics. Besides estimating the respective national status of the training achievements, names of new promising athletes filled
the headlines, amongst them a German fighter pilot.
Officers on Red Alert—Preparations and Inferences
Between 1932 and 1935 several modern pentathlon competitions were held to test
the athletes’ competences and create a first national pre-ranking before the big event. In
Germany the Nationalsozialistische Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL), the contemporary umbrella organization of sport in Germany, organized the national modern pentathlon championships in the frame of the Kampfspiele in Nürnberg from July 23 to 29,
1934. Besides including Reichskämpfe um den Preis des Vaterlandes (Realm Contests for
the Prize of the Fatherland), different forms of multi-disciplinary events emerged among
variations of a triathlon, quadrathlon, and pentathlon for boys along with a military team
competition composed of different sports like running, shooting, swimming, throwing,
and jumping. Parts of modern pentathlon’s discipline scope (i.e., fencing, cross-country
running, and swimming) were also included in the sport of the SA (Sturmabteilung),
Hitler’s paramilitary combat organization, which made it easier to recruit new talented
modern pentathletes.42
The most famous German military sports school, however, was located in Wünsdorf
(south of Berlin) where among others also Lieutenant Gotthardt Handrick had received
an excellent physical and moral education. That is why, when pentathlon champions were
honored, the Heeressportschule Wünsdorf was always mentioned in the same breath.
Naming the military rank of the winners developed as a matter of course and mirrored
what usually only higher-ranked military men could reach.43 Sport and high performance
were so entirely dedicated to the army that the pre-Olympic press coverage also functioned
as an advertisement for the military service, attracting those who aimed to be the Olympic
champion of tomorrow. It is unclear as to whether this increasing role of sport in the
military training also contributed to his decision to serve in the army, but it is documented
that Gotthardt Handrick, born in Zittau in Saxony, Germany, already practiced different
sports, gymnastics, swimming, and skiing as a pupil.44
After his final secondary school examinations, he joined the German armed forces,
the Reichswehr. Due to his multi-faceted skills he was seconded early on to the sports
school of Wünsdorf. His training under a Captain Heigl—himself a pentathlete and champion of the army for many years—began before the Los Angeles Olympics, in 1930. At
first, Handrick belonged to the infantry but in the spring of 1935 he moved to the air
force, being squadron leader of the battle group “Richthofen.” From a sportive perspective, he proved his versatility, for instance, when he won the German military ski championships with the team of the Jägerbataillons 10 in 1932. The Berliner Illustrirte published
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HECK: “A BLOND, BROAD-SHOULDERED ATHLETE”
Handrick’s memories: “In 1931 I started for the first time in the pentathlon, and in 1934
I became winner of the Kampfspiele.”45 To achieve this success, the ambitious sportsman
used to train two to three times a week besides the normal military service.46
In preparation for the Berlin Olympics, international level championships were organized, bringing together the best modern pentathletes of the world. Handrick remembered that his “first international competition was the encounter in Sweden in 1934.”47
Sweden was generally very active in preparing its athletes for modern pentathlon and
hence attentively observed by the German press. Lieutenant Gallenstierna developed into
the expected new national hope for Sweden, as he beat his compatriots Thofelt, the pentathlon champion of Amsterdam, and Oxenstierna, the pentathlon champion of Los Angeles, just before the 1936 Olympics. Still, one year before at an international modern
pentathlon competition in Stockholm, German Lieutenant Birk already indicated by his
second place that the Germans athletes had obviously caught up with their Swedish opponents.48
“Germany’s competitors while shooting at the International Pentathlon
in Budapest (3-7 July 1935).” From
the left: Handrick, Bramfeld, Lemp.
REICHSSPORTBLATT, 6 JULY 1935, PHOTOGRAPH: SCHERL.
Another chance to reorder the preliminary national ranking occurred at the European
Championships, held in Budapest, Hungary, from July 3-7, 1935. German athletes presented themselves as well prepared, even though the high temperatures must have increased their exhaustion—all of them took their shirts off while shooting.49 The headlines
of the German press were filled when the results of the event came out. One year before
the Olympic games, Lieutenant Handrick achieved the first rank and thus proved to the
world that the German athletes had “diligently trained in Wünsdorf ”50 and, moreover,
that one had to watch out for German modern pentathletes in the future.51
Summer 2011
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JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY
As soon as Hitler realized the opportunities for the German Reich through staging the
Olympics, his expectations with regard to the German athletes were high. The fact that
Handrick proved in Budapest that he belonged to the very best fueled national expectations concerning modern pentathlon. The same or even better results were expected of
him and his teammates for Berlin. Moreover, Germany was supposed to put an end to the
Swedish winning streak. Those high aims were mirrored in press articles like “Our German Hope—Lieutenant Handrick.”52
The concrete preparations for the 1936 Olympics demonstrated the importance accorded to modern pentathlon, too. For instance, German Major Edgar Feuchtinger, who
was responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies, was chosen as main organizer of
the modern pentathlon competition.53 He found support in the form of the army who
“made the arrangements for the riding tournament and modern pentathlon”54 and an
IOC sub-committee called Comité International du Pentathlon Moderne, which was
headed by IOC President Henri de Baillet-Latour.55
Even though officially it was said that this time Germany “had broken with the international habit of providing officers only for the modern pentathlon,”56 nothing changed
because the best athletes still belonged to the army: “All three members of the team, Handrick
as well as [Hermann] Lemp and [Herbert] Bramfeld, are soldiers in the best sense. That is
also the absolute precondition for this chivalric battle.”57 A glance at the list of competitors for Berlin proved also internationally that the soldierly image had not significantly
changed. In total nineteen nations—Austria, Greece, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland,
France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal,
Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States—took part. Amongst them was, however, for the first time one single civilian athlete, Alexandros Baltatzis-Mavrokorlatis from
Greece.58
Especially after the German athletes had proved their current high-performance level,
speculations about who would be the possible next champion and who the favorites arose.
Besides the former competition results that clearly posted the Swedes and newcomer Germans, attempts were made in the national press to identify specific winner characteristics.
Concerning Handrick, for instance, the Berliner Illustrirte wrote: “The 1.86 meter tall,
about 170 pound heavy pilot officer already marks from the outward appearance the type
of a complete sportsman.”59 The Olympia-Zeitung tried to fix the most appropriate modern pentathlon body, too, by suggesting that “pentathletes do not necessarily have to be
musclemen,” even though “the layperson is apt to imagine a modern pentathlete as massive, muscular.”60 If in a few cases the German athlete stood in the foreground to function
as model, it was “the tall, matured, blond, bright man of the North,” an image that seemed
to be embodied in the Olympic champion of 1932, Count Oxenstierna, but at the same
time corresponded to Handrick’s appearance.61 An analysis of the press releases on 1936
shows that the German press generally was cautious in promoting Aryan-sportive relations. The one and only published press order that dealt directly with the modern pentathlon competition quoted from the book Sport und Rasse (1936) by Lothar Gottlieb Tirala,
the director of the Institute of Race Hygiene at the University of München in 1936, and
criticized the inappropriate use by contemporary journals to emphasize the superiority of
Teutons.62
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HECK: “A BLOND, BROAD-SHOULDERED ATHLETE”
Swedish success in the past led to further speculations about why the Swedes were so
outstanding in their performances. Oxenstierna himself believed that besides the great
interest in his country the main reason was that their “officers . . . [were] in a training, in a
school of pentathlon, that . . . [was] probably indeed harder than the German one.”63
From a German perspective, the Swedes and especially former Olympic champion Thofelt
were still considered as favorites for the gold medal, even though possibilities for other
nations increased while former Swedish heroes like Oxenstierna, Thofelt, and Lindman
“were slowly becoming old, and the young ones have [had] not enough routine yet.”64
Among the main opponents other promising newcomers like “USA, Hungary, Holland,
France and Italy” were also mentioned.65 As other nations like Mexico figured out winning chances, too, the outcome of the event actually seemed open. The experienced
Oxenstierna also failed to provide a proper hint, even though he actually knew the participating athletes very well. He was not sure “how far men like the German Handrick . . .
[had] already moved up to us [them] or maybe . . . [had] already left us [them] behind.”66
Due to the uncertain competition outcome, the excitement was kept high. Around
two weeks before the official opening of the Olympics, the Germans Lemp and Handrick
were listed among the athletes with good national medal prospects.67 The good reputation
of the Heeressportschule Wünsdorf, underlined the new positive outlook: “We may have
confidence in our ‘Wünsdorfer.’”68 Their previous performances and their high ambitions
made them finally into the most promising candidates.69 However, the uncertainty whether
“the glorious sportsman Handrick would succeed in breaking Sweden’s hegemony in this
field” remained.70 The results coming out on August 6 would put an end to speculations
and either lead to a military and sportive victory or to a national defeat. Even though it
was uncertain whether Handrick would fulfill these national expectations, the press coverage on modern pentathlon’s five competition days prepared the climax of the hero stylization and left no doubt on the anticipated champion.
Fuehrer’s Proud and Germany’s Hero—Handrick’s Victory
On August 2 the first competitions of the Games of the XIth Olympiad started early in
the morning with modern pentathlon’s horse-riding event.71 Even though modern pentathlon had been less popular for spectators in the past, the propaganda seemed to have
worked as “thousands marched out on the Sunday morning to witness the start of the first
Olympic competition.”72 “The spectators’ interest in a pentathlon had never been as great
as on August 2, 1936.”73 Thus, already before the outcome of the event became clear, the
press coverage of modern pentathlon in Germany was exceptionally high in comparison
to former Olympics. The sports event itself was named in an exaggerative way as being the
“most difficult modern pentathlon that has probably ever...
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