It’s taken me some time to read The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation
The Real All Americans tells the story of the Carlisle Indian School and their (in)famous football team. It touches on the lives of many of the men who were associated with football at Carlisle, including player Jim Thorpe and coach “Pop” Warner. It also gives a brief history of the school and of football in general. It’s a lot to pack into a (relatively) short book, but it’s well-managed. The story felt natural, without a lot of extraneous information shoe-horned into it.
Jenkins sets her story in the context of Carlisle, a boarding school set up to educate American Indians by the federal government. Carlisle, founded by Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt, is commonly viewed, through the lens of history, as a tool of oppression and assimilation. And, in many ways, it was. Carlisle took its students aways from their parents, cut off their braids, took away their traditional dress and then forced them to speak english. Their own beliefs and values were thrown out in favor of more “modern” (read: white) ideals. The ultimate goal was to help them to integrate into American society. The price of that integration was their cultural heritage.
Of course, there’s more than one side to every story and Jenkins does an excellent job of showing us some nuance here. Captain Pratt founded Carlisle in large part because he saw how the American Indians’ lack of education was causing them irreparable harm. Indians who couldn’t speak english were at the mercy of translators who didn’t always give them the straight story. Indians who couldn’t read would often sign treaties that said the opposite of what they were told. Pratt wasn’t looking to annihilate his students’ culture, he was trying to give them the tools to fight back. In fact, many of his students went on to go to law school. Several of them used the skills that they learned at Carlisle to fight for their rights on Capitol Hill.
Unfortunately, they weren’t all that successful in their efforts.
The conditions at Carlisle were tough. Picture the roughest, toughest, meanest boarding school you can imagine. Then, cut the rations. That, in a nutshell, was Carlisle. The kids in Never Let Me Go had it better off. Well, if you discount that whole organ harvesting business. I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear that Carlisle students ran away all the damn time. Even still, former Carlisle students tended to look back at their school experience rather fondly. Probably because it did prepare them well for future careers and trades. For the most part, former students fared well in their post-school lives.
The Carlisle football team manages to be the stuff of legends at the same time that it doesn’t get nearly enough credit for its accomplishments. Lacking the advantages of most of its competitors, it still managed to compile an impressive record. Carlisle was a small school with an even smaller population of young men to draw football players from. Carlisle students were incredibly disadvantaged in terms of size and heft in comparison to their elite, Ivy counterparts. But, they were hard-working, determined and smart. They couldn’t sustain the type of smash-mouth football that was played at the time, but they managed to outwit and outmaneuver the majority of their opponents. They were one of the first football teams to feature the forward pass, something that they are almost never given credit for. Pop Warner, in conjunction with his players, designed plays that we see as commonplace now, but that were revolutionary at the time.
Of course, the person who gets credit for all of their success and innovation is Pop Warner, their white coach. Even in victory, the Carlisle Indians couldn’t catch a break.
Football at Carlisle was important in the way that it’s important at high schools across the country today. It gave young men an outlet for their physical energy and an opportunity to prove themselves on the field. But, it was also important because it gave the Carlisle Indians a chance to say to America, “Look at us. Look at what we can do. We’re not stupid or weak or lazy. We can take you on at your own game and we can beat you.” It’s not like Americans suddenly fell all over themselves to give the Indians back their rights and their land. But the Carlisle Indians did earn some measure of respect. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Check out this book if you like American Indian or football history. It’s strong on both.