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Using the readings on Carlisle, Ring Lardner, Nazi propaganda, Joe Louis, and the Washington Redskins, as well as class discussions, trace the story of how the meaning of sports, politics, nationhood, and race intertwined in the first half of the twentieth century. How did politicians, sports writers, social reformers, novelists, and others write the meaning of sporting events and sports heroes? Who became heroes, who became villains, and why?

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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 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650836?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Western Historical Quarterly This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 26 SPRING 2001 26SPRING 2001 Western Wes Historical Quarterly Pratt had Carlisle In reformers tion, with question their b days expansion of whites was to dem plishing t savagery lizing w Ind reservatio "to civiliz Pratt beli demic ins internaliz tribal heri Sending C derful opp "dosed to and depict ans" the of "The use a a white India his good Go acc Altering Celebratin dents just travels all particular 2 Pratt, reform cant Ba incl studies bering the Everett Art of the Assim "Nineteenth Studies 33 ( and the Boa education f J. Child, K. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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- This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 SPRING 2001 28 SPRING 2001 On Western Western Historical Quarterly Historical the being text" Quarterly other that that upon the in, social anew.7 off Fron gridiron, the h pla sa dram Second, themselves.8 mensions of meanings A th they concerned-Pra white In football turn-of-th football contes factors, quite of these game mental which 1860 53. Industriali in For an A Geert introdu Study The o Ambig Interpretation erts, "Play, ogy, vol. Sports ed. concept A Created of an of A Study from lens H Athleti Symbolic grimage: taken Games 4, and The phors: the Twent Clifford Smith, 7 p one (Middletown of Ludens: An the No Frontier 6 fo journali order." Age th quic level, sports on was were i Slotki cultur Ameri 181-91. 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 29 30 SPRING 2001 30 SPRING 2001 Wester Western Historical pioneer Quarterly ancesto debilitating only of the loss fittest exercise try needed "Building their and no savage which in world," ne the were increase explains in Football's be at num its modem sp their gro spec its e cooperation, an lence, was in physica an ideal ath indigenous to t man-half Boon Part what of footbal stories? simply in football volved role of this this in points: the John trial and Ja Alienation, United in the Gail States, American the sket Higham, 78-88 discussed For In game" sensational 10 c newspap "big 1970), ne players, regard. the W texts 1 Be 188 Middle-C fear of the Transformatio 11 Price 12 Reasons Sports Collier, and Patriotic for th Freedom Games: Sp 100; Oriard, Readin History (New Yor 13 Oriard, Reading This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 31 32 SPRING 2001 32 Western Historical Quarterly SPRING 2001 Ca (C Pr (K M to fr th vi h of vi ti or al of ju W 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 34 SPRING 2001 34 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, Indian field, in the a "sc "Th sno Newspape newspape dian," an "savage" Indian Big a sit Injun smoking seen pale to cially THE we BALL while a Indian the ond tea the " TH helme cultural and 17 see m word 1848" his m faces t feath New Yo Boston 1898, 5; Cin Philadelphia This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 36 SPRING 2001 36 SPRING 2001 Western Western Historical Quarterly Historical 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 38 SPRING 2001 38 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 Illinois, Cayou wa Indian seum t is 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 44 SPRING 2001 44 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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, This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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- This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 52 SPRING 2001 52 SPRING 2001 Western Wes Historical Quarterly Indian pr students the accult As Lone gests, Pra reponses Sioux can fro Horse girl, and laborer. M land, a farm wag What that wou one irony first in go of plac the savage W In American Bill's show added: "I forget along Ca O.K football p post-grid athletic The f vario themselv Pratt's m and tion Pratt of cou Indian 46 These s Hugh D. Co iam T. Haga 4; Blue Clark Century Rainy Search 261, (L Mou for 264, (Tucson, 27 1 47 CIISSR, "show India This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:43:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms “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 Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jsporthistory.38.2.255?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. 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Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Sport History This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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, 256 Volume 38, Number 2 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 Summer 2011 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 257 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 258 Volume 38, Number 2 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 Summer 2011 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 259 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 260 Volume 38, Number 2 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 Summer 2011 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 261 JOURNAL OF SPORT HISTORY 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 262 Volume 38, Number 2 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 263 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.62 264 Volume 38, Number 2 This content downloaded from 198.30.60.34 on Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:52:45 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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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Running Head: HISTORY ESSAY 2

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History Essay 2

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HISTORY ESSAY 2

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History Essay 2

Racial disparity significantly molded American political past and influenced aspects of
nationality and sports. American colonies founding fathers and later the United States were
motivated by the search for liberty, religious and political freedom. The beginning of the American
civilization was occupied with cruel systems of control, absence of equality, domination and
complete denial of slave liberty. This is among the leading contradictions of the United States of
America whereby a nation supported by ideals of freedom and equal rights was dominated with
slavery and racism. Racial boundaries are drawn differently in many societies and in the United
States, they referred to a person as Black if they had any African ancestry. This was a “one-droprule” that evolved into a racial identification standard in the America especially after the end of
the Civil War. Racial policy emerged in all areas in the American society excluding other races
from equally participating in major events. The racial policies dominated the war departments
during the World War where war agencies declined the notion of a combined army. Many southern
values were dominant in the military system during the war stonewalling Blacks from acquiring
equal opportunities as their white counterparts.

There was a lot of political ideologies in play during the struggle to having an integrated
army in the United States especially during the Second World War. Policies that were implemented
made it difficult for Black leaders to raise the morale of Black Americans. Historians have over
the years tried to examine racial discrimination and black agency in the armed forces, industry and
electoral activity which has brought greater understanding on the dynamics of racism. The heavy
weight boxer Joe Louis played an integral part in raising warfare confidence and publicity in the
Black groups and he was the most celebrated Black person who embodied ideals of nationalism,

HISTORY ESSAY 2

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humbleness and sacrifice in the 19...


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