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Path Lit By Lightning Thoughts and Review: A Hero's Life, Long Obscured by One Set of Politically Correct Myths, Now Obscured by Another
TLDR CW Thesis: The life story of Jim Thorpe was long built around easy racial stereotypes of the shiftless, dumb, unsophisticated, alcoholic but immensely talented Indian. This telling obscured a lot about Jim, his achievements, skills and values and those of the other players in his story. Path Lit by Lightning set out to demolish these myths and offer a revisionist take on the Jim Thorpe story, but in his effort to tell Thorpe's tale "correctly" Maraniss overshoots the mark, refusing to tell the honest truth about Thorpe. This undermines the narrative flow of the biography unless one reads critically between the lines knowing what the author is setting out to achieve.
-- The life and times of Jim Thorpe {Wiki link for the unfamiliar} provide ample material for any biographer to work with. I'm really curious to what extent, if at all, Winston Groom was inspired to create the character of Forrest Gump in his novels by Thorpe's life story, or if the resemblance is purely coincidental because most people didn't realize just how crazy Thorpe's life was. Here he is, growing up hardscrabbled on the Res; then suddenly he's coached by Pop Warner (the coach for which youth football would be named), competing against and defeating Harvard and Army in College Football; young cadet Dwight Eisenhower tries to knock Thorpe out of the game with a dirty hit, only to be run over and sent to the sideline by an injury himself; his wife appears at the world's fair at an Indian exhibition with Indian Chiefs who fought against the US Army before being shepherded onto reservations, then off to the Olympics to be called "The Most Wonderful Athlete in the World"and replying "Thanks, King," competing alongside a young Lt. George Patton; then out of college sports in obscure scandal and off to play Major League Baseball with McGraw and Mathewson, rubbing shoulders with Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth along the way; becoming the founding president of what would become the NFL; circling the world on an exhibition tour with the Big Train and the Big Six, getting a special award from Mr. Lipton, the founder of Lipton Tea!; befriending Hollywood stars like John Wayne and Bob Hope. It goes on and on! He was, if not responsible for, present at the event of, so many important events, in sport and in the world in general. Maraniss does a great job of using the material to jump off into bigger discussions of American history. But at times he suffers from blind spots...
-- A frequent flaw of progressive historiography of subaltern groups, racial or religious minorities and women, is their failure to place the historical group oppression in the context of how much life in general sucked back then. Here, Maraniss spends a lot of time talking about the tragedy of Indian life, the Indian school system and how it was designed to destroy their culture, kill the Indian and save the man. But, within that context, we keep seeing Pretendians pop up. Thorpe's first wife was a fake Indian, sent to the "oppressive" Indian Boarding Schools by her father after her mother's death. One of his Carlisle teammates was also a pretendian*, who found his way into Carlisle more or less in order to sneak his way into a prominent football team without having to get into Harvard or Yale or West Point. As oppressed as Indians may have been, they were also, even in the early 1900s, given privileges by the Federal government, funded educations and boarding schools, and there were white people poor enough to be willing to fake Indian histories in order to get access to those resources. Reading Maraniss critically, it does undermine his argument: if things were really so bad at Carlisle, why were whites sneaking in? It's a more complex narrative. I'm reminded of one of my favorite passages from Frederick Douglass: how he would steal bread, which he had unlimited access to in his master's kitchen, and trade it to young white street kids, who were hungry but knew how to read, and were willing to befriend and teach the young slave in exchange for food. We have to contextualize historical oppression narratives in the larger narrative of class oppression and poverty in early America, which cared little for race when it came to living standards, even if it cared greatly for race when it came to political and cultural power.
-- Maraniss clearly sets out to write a revisionist history of Jim Thorpe's life, seeking to puncture myths like Pop Warner's nobility and Thorpe's playing into Indian stereotypes of Alcoholism. The problem is, Pop Warner was a pretty great coach, and Thorpe was an alcoholic. So at times, the pitch he gives to the stories tends to make the whole story seem irrational, because parts are missing. Only by critically taking stock of the history, and considering the bias of the author, is the narrative legible. Pop Warner was no saint, Maraniss is convincing arguing that Warner lied about his knowledge of Thorpe's semi-pro baseball career, but he was a great coach, a titan of the early game, and it was largely his influence that built those great Carlisle teams. (See below for more discussion of this) Thorpe's alcoholism, meanwhile, lurks like a kind of nameless terror for much of the book, then suddenly his wife will divorce him for his alcoholism. I understand the desire not to dwell on it, not to reduce Thorpe's later life to booze and fecklessness, but well, the guy was a drunk who never took care of his many kids. And painting him as this noble, gentle soul who was always doing his best makes the episodes when the drunkenness becomes apparent feel like glimpses of a deeper truth. It feels rather like when people write American-Centric histories of the second world war, and all of a sudden you realize that the Soviets have been doing most of the heavy lifting the whole time. Maraniss seeks to write away from the Alcoholism, only to have it reemerge because it may have been the defining fact of Thorpe's life. To what extent has the genetic basis for alcoholism become a solved question today?
-- Pop Warner's appearance at Carlisle Indian School was a sort of coincidence, a random stroke of luck for a government boarding school that was trying to do a lot of things at once. His presence there brought Indian athletes to the forefront of the national athletic conversation. Once there, as racial minorities, they were the subject of constant theorizing around how their heritage had granted them a genetic edge. Thorpe in particular, but equally the dominant Carlisle football teams of Warner's tenure, were viewed as proof positive of the superior athletic ability of the Red Man, a part of his natural dominion of nature, his ancestral upbringing in the chase and the woods. That is a stereotype that hasn't held since Warner's day. In fact, it was largely a product of the peculiar circumstances of those great Carlisle teams. Carlisle wasn't really a four year college, though it would play against Universities as equals. It had students enrolled as young as nine, and as old as 26 when Thorpe was playing there. A lot of its athletes were in their mid 20s, rather than 18-22 like most of the Ivy League. Thorpe was 25 at the time of his great Olympic triumphs and his greatest College Football seasons, and because of Carlisle he was able to devote himself to athletics without having to worry about room and board in a way few competitors could. Carlisle offered a unique opportunity for athletes in their prime to avoid self-supporting work, while focusing on athletics. This created the illusion, for a decade or so, that Indians were athletically superior to other races. When we consider HBD in sports, we need to consider the graveyards of other HBD theories of sports, and have some humility as to what we really know. At one point, Basketball was considered the perfect sport for the Jew, with its manifold opportunities for trickery and scheming. Heavyweight boxing championships went from belonging to the Irish in the deep past, to when I was growing up where the common wisdom was that there might never be another white heavyweight champion outside of the movies, to the period when it was thought that the Russians (actually, mostly Ukrainians) would dominate the field in perpetuity, to today where the last five champions were a Ukrainian, an Irishman, a Nigerian-Brit, a Mexican-American, and a Samoan-Kiwi. During each period of ethnic dominance, there were numerous genetic and cultural explanations offered for why it would never end. When blacks dominated between Ali and Lewis, the common sense was that we would never see another white champion, blacks were simply too fast. When the Russians/Ukrainians dominated, they were built tougher, and raised meaner, than Americans ever would be. We don't always know everything we think we know, contingent and ever-changing cultural contexts are so important to producing champions in any sport, and we should be hesitant to buy into easy genetic narratives of superiority.
-- Overall, the book was excellent, immensely enjoyable and instructive, exhaustively well researched and sourced. There's scenes to thrill, to teach, to inspire; and scenes to stir the soul. It was truly a perfect beach read, while also being truly first class work. I'd endorse it, on the whole, for anyone interested in old timey athletics or American history in a readable package.
Great summary, sounds like an interesting book about a guy I know almost nothing about.
I've heard some arguments that alcoholism actually has a strong and also long-lasting culturally inheritable and transferrable component, though to some extent the genetics also come into play (as a point of fact I think the evidence gets stronger every year on the genetic side, I see 60% bandied about). The social and cultural and even historical side is more fun to talk about of course. It's also hard to totally disentangle these perspectives, including evolutionary one's. One illustration: it's easy to forget that early colonists had very, very potent alcohol, and actually boozed it up a LOT themselves at the time. Native Americans only had access to weaker, allegedly often ceremonial beers (had some form alcohol like literally every human society). But strength of alcohol is not everything. I've seem some claims for example that even how violent you get while drunk is often intertwined with cultural and societal expectations more so than actual biology, though some tendencies in certain people are hard to miss. There are definite patterns that seem to occur with drinking, such as binge drinking, anxiety drinking, drinking alone, purely social drinking, and more, some of which are not possible with certain alcohols. As a nondrinker myself, not even once (religious reasons), some of the context is a bit inscrutable to me, though others might say this is actually a helpful lack of personal bias. And to be perfectly honest, though I appreciate alcohol has a sometimes helpful social role, overall I just look at the people whole lives are ruined by it and I can't really say I think it's a good trade, in a vacuum, when we weigh the pros and cons. Like, if alcohol didn't exist, and I said "hey so I'd like to introduce this thing which is pretty fun and helps socially for 70% of people, 20% won't touch it, and 10% will become alcoholics, I don't think I'd make that trade, would you? I'm not really an abolitionist for practical reasons, but I certainly sympathize.
As an aside, from a culture war perspective, it's pretty interesting that Native American Indians drinking way, way too much is actually not at all a taboo in the way some other negative minority group traits are. Though maybe this author considers it to be. And some really interesting factoids about ethnic theories in sports over the years.
Pete Brown claims, in Man Walks Into a Pub, that at Burton Abbey c. AD 1000, that the daily allowance for each monk was one gallon of strong ale and one gallon of weak ale.
I wonder what the life expectancy there was.
How did they avoid passing out and sleeping through Matins?
Nine liters of liquid daily doesn't sound realistic for any value of ABV down to zero.
Maybe gallons were smaller back then.
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This sounds reasonable. Russia, the UK, Japan all expect you to get absolutely smashed when you're out drinking and your inability to control your intoxication is seen as your personal failing. Whereas, say, Germany or Georgia have a more healthy attitude of "we've gathered here to have good fun together and if we let one of us get sloshed and make a fool of himself it's our common failure", which results in both different approaches to the drinking in general (different drinks and different rituals) and to the management of individual members that can't hold their liquor.
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