Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is the second part of our three parter on Jim Thorpe, one more part than we often have in our multi part episodes. Last time, we talked about his childhood and how he joined the track and field and then the football team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. When we left off in our last episode, he had just finished the nine nine football season, and that is where we're going to pick things up again. One of the reasons that Jim Thorpe had decided to go to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in nineteen o four was that things had been difficult for him in Oklahoma after the deaths of so many family members. But by the end of the nineteen o eight nineteen o nine school year, he was starting to feel really homesick. He asked for leave to visit his family, something that the administration seems to have thought was just for a summer break, but it was not. Although Thorpe clearly excelled at football and track and field in the early twentieth century, unless a person was working as a coach, the only sport that might actually allow them to earn a really reliable living was baseball. That was thanks to the existence of multiple year major league contracts. So like you could make enough to support yourself in other sports, maybe, but like not with any kind of reliability or long term stability. In the summers of nineteen o nine and nineteen ten, Thorpe played semi pro baseball in North Carolina, spending the rest of those years back in Oklahoma, living with various family members, working on farms and ranches and hunting. These baseball teams paid Thorpe about fifteen dollars a week, which was described as meal money, and he was not the only Carlysle student playing semi professional baseball at the time. His Carlyle classmates Joe Libby and Jesse young Deer did this as well, all three of them having been encouraged to do so by Pop Warner. Thorpe's long term goal seems to have been to break into the major leagues from this semi professional play. He had decided that the only job that really suited his temperament and his interests was to just be an athlete, but in nineteen eleven, he ran into his former track mentor, Albert Exen Dine, who was now a coach at Carlisle. Ex and Dine encouraged him to come back to the school. During his years away, Thorpe had gotten a little taller and had also filled out some more. X and I described him as being big as a mule, so ex and Dine thought that Thorpe would make a really good addition to the football team at Carlisle, and then Pop Warner also promised Thorpe not only a chance to play for Carlysle again, but also a shot at the nineteen twelve Alympic team. Although athletics were what drew Thorpe back to Carlisle, he did keep up with his class work as well, and he was overall a good student. One of his teachers was Maryanne Moore, not yet a famous poet. He was apparently one of her favorite students, but she did not teach him poetry. She was teaching a class in commercial law, intended to help indigenous students protect themselves in legal and land dealings after they finished school. In his earlier time on the Carlisle football team, Thorpe had become one of the most skilled and recognizable players. They were write ups about him in local papers, and there were always fans who were eager to buy him drinks. That continued in the nineteen eleven season. That year, Walter Camp, who was known as the father of American football, named Thorpe a first team All American and that is an honor that he would earn for the second time in nineteen twelve. Thorpe's return to the school was not without problems, though we talked in Part one about how conditions at Carlisle and other boarding schools for indigenous students were often insufficient at best. As an athlete, Thorpe was shielded from a lot of this, and later on he often talked fondly of the school. But he did contract a bacterial eye infection called tracoma after the nineteen eleven football season was over. Tracoma outbreaks were a frequent problem at Carlisle and at other residential schools. This infection can cause the eyelid to turn inward, which causes the eyelashes to scrape the surface of the eye. It is incredibly painful. This happened to Thorpe and he had to have surgery to correct it. This may have affected his vision, but it's not something that he ever mentioned again after leaving Carlisle. Although Thorpe loved to play football, a much bigger focus for him going into the spring of nineteen twelve was track and field. In preparation for the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee had added to all around event to the Summer Games, the Classic pentathlon and the decathlon. These were the events that Thorpe started training for with an eye toward tryouts in New York on May eighteenth. Also representing Carlisle was Hopie runner Lewis Tauanama, who was preparing for the ten thousand meter race and the marathon. This was relatively early in the history of the Olympic Games. We've walked through that history in a lot more detail in our episode on Pierre de Cooperton, who was the father of the modern Olympics. The first modern Olympic Games had been held in eighteen ninety six, and the nineteen twelve games were only the fifth Olympic Games in the modern era. It had only been a few years since the United States had seriously started trying to select and train Olympic contenders, with the American Olympic Committee being established in nineteen oh six, but at the same time this was still the Olympics, meant to showcase the best amateur athletes from nations around the world, and Thorpe was trying to qualify for them, not only without an Olympic level track and field coach, but also without having ever done some of the events involved in the pentathlon and the decathlon at all. For example, he got to the Olympic tryouts without knowing that you take a running start when throwing a javelin. At tryouts, Thorpe sort of hopped mostly in place and still managed to throw the javelin a hundred and thirty six ft and seven point five inches. Yeah, he uh qualified for that knowing not what he was doing at all. I feel bad because I'm sure there were athletes there who had been training and training and training, and he just kind of dusted them. And like, how for us, we have all been in that moment where you're like, I'm prepared of doing it. This person doesn't know what they're doing and they're ten times better. Yeah. So, because they were indigenous, Thorpe and Tawanama were considered wards of the Federal government and not US citizens, but even so, they were selected to represent the United States at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. They set sail aboard the s S Fenland on June fourteenth, nineteen twelve. News reports from the time and early biographies of Jim Thorpe claim that he refused to train on the ship, but this was untrue. Multiple teammates have confirmed that he was training with everyone else, and there are also photos that show him running laps on the deck. This news coverage was connected to racist stereotypes of indigenous people as lazy, and it's simultaneously worked to undercut Thorpe's achievements as an athlete by suggesting that they came from some kind of innate ability as a Native American and not from his having worked at it. It is true that he didn't train a lot on the last leg of the voyage, but at that point he was tapering or cutting back on his physical activity as part of the preparation for the endurance events that he was about to undertake. That is something people do still today. Yeah, it is a real thing that the other entrance athletes were also doing. We will get to what happened during these actual Olympic events after a quick sponsor break. The pentathlon at the nineteen twelve Summer Olympic Games took place on July seventh, which was the second day of the Games. Thorpe placed first in four of the five events. That was the running broad jump, he had a distance of twenty three ft two and seven tenth inches, the two hundred meter dash, which he had a time of twenty two and nine tenths seconds, a discus throw he threw it more than a hundred and sixteen feet, which was three feet farther than the next competitor, and a fifteen hundred meter run. He did that in four minutes, forty four and eight tenths seconds. The only events of the five that he did not win was the javelin throw. He had improved a lot since qualifying in tryouts and not knowing at all what he was doing. He's still placed third. Classic pentathlon is scored with one point for first place finish, two points for second place, three points for third, and so on, so a lower score is better. With his four first place finishes and one third, thorpe score was seven. The second place winner had a score of twenty one. I would call that blowing the competition out of the water. They got dusted. Because I don't follow any sport, I did not know how classic pentathlon was scored, and I was looking at the rankings on the Official Olympic Games website and I was like, how does he have a score of seven and the next competitors I'll have scores have like twenty one three, like an entire more digits. Were these all the same games? What's happening? So the Decathlon started on July thirteenth, and in the interim to keep himself active but without overtaxing himself, Thorpe participated in a few smaller events. He didn't earn medals in any of these, but also he was really conserving his energy. On the first day of the decathlon, it was raining. As we mentioned in Part one, Carlyle's athletic team had a reputation for not being at their best in bad weather, and this was true for Thorpe as well. The events that took place on that first day were the one meter dash, the running broad jump, and the shot put. This was tougher than the pentathlon. On the broad jump that was the first event and Thorpe faulted on his first two tries, so it took him three tries to even do it. The only event he won that day was the shot put, which he threw forty two ft five and which was more than two ft ahead of the next competitor. It was very good it, throwing things many feet farther than the next competitor. He joked that the only reason he did as well as he did at the shop put was because he got to change into some dry clothes first. On the second day of the decathlon, the weather was great, but Thorpe's shoes were missing. Thorpe and Warner had to scrounge up another pair, finally finding one shoe that was too small and another that was too large. This sounds very comical, but also was surely stressful. The events for the day were the running, high jump, the four hundred run, the one hurdles. He came in first in the high jump, second in the four d and first in the hurdles, setting a record of fifteen point six seconds. Yeah, we do not know what happened to his shoes. The common conclusion from a lot of people is that somebody stole his shoes to try to keep him from being an efficient competitor in these games, like we really, we really don't know. Day three included the discus, the pole vault, the javelin and run. He placed third in the pole vault and fourth in the javelin and run. He came in first, and he even beat his time from the mentathlon earlier in the games. This time he ran up in four minutes forty point one seconds. This is incredible to me because number one, he would have been more tired at this point than he was earlier. Number two, he was still in his mismatched shoes. Reading this makes me feel like I have not been running in a while, but like I was the prissiest, least coping runner on the planet. Because it's like my sock feels two millimeters off of where it should sit. I can't possibly and yet this dude choose that don't fit trucking along. Uh. In the end, Thorpe had placed in the top four of all ten decathalon events and had placed first in four of those events. This scores differently, so the scores here Bigger is better. Just keep that in mind versus what we talked about earlier. So out of a possible total score of ten thousand points. Thorpe scored eight thousand, four hundred twelve. The second place finisher, Hugo Wiselander of Sweden, earned seven thousand, seven hundred twenty four. Thorpe's score stood as a record until nineteen thirty two, and because the Classic Pentathlon was retired from the Games in ur, Thorpe is the only person to have won both the Classic Pentathlon and the decathlon at the Olympic Games. I just want to take in a moment to just point out that there were six hundred and eighty eight points separating Thorpe and the next competitor in these scores. So one of the more memorable stories about Jim Thorpe in these Olympic Games, aside from his incredible performance and both of those two events, that centers on his appearance at the awards ceremony. After having awarded Thorpe gold medals for both the decathlon and the pentathlon, King Gustave, the fifth of Sweden's told him quote, sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world. It is widely reported that Thorpe replied to him, thanks, King, I say widely, like almost every article about this mentions it uh The drunk history about this mentions it, but biographer Kate Buford contends that it probably never actually happened and was just another way to kind of undermine Thorpe's accomplishments and his personality. Writing quote a flippant reply would have been out of character for a man who was highly uncomfortable in public ceremonies and hated to stand out. In addition to his medals, Thorpe was awarded a life size bust of the King of Sweden, as well as a bejeweled chalice shaped like a Viking ship, which was from zarn Nicholas the second of Russia. Before returning to the US, Thorpe and his tea mates took part in exhibition games and Europe. As we mentioned in part one, Thorpe had some French ancestry, and he spent some time in France to get a little sense of that ancestry. Once the team had arrived back in the United States, they were really treated as heroes. There were banquets and receptions and ticker tape parades and multiple major cities. Thorpe also got a letter of congratulations from President William Howard Taft he found a lot of this attention really overwhelming, though he did not always enjoy being in a spotlight. Thorpe's incredible performance at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games sparked a renewed interest in the Games as people waited for the next Jim Thorpe to arrive on the scene, and his success continued after he got back home. At the Amateur Athletics Union All Around Championship in New York in nineteen twelve, Thorpe set a new record of seven thousand, four hundred seventy six points, in spite of the fact that the weather was terrible and he was actually recovering from food point pasoning. Thorpe returned to Carlisle after the Olympic Games, and by this point he had also enrolled some of his siblings at the school since both of their parents had died. He really seems to have been trying to keep as many of them together as much as he could. The Carlisle football team also had a strong season in nineteen twelve, with Thorpe scoring a hundred and ninety eight of the team's five hundred and four total points and twenty five of its sixty six touchdowns. Carlisle finished the nineteen twelve season with twelve wins, one loss, in one tie. One of Carlyle's most memorable games in the nineteen twelve season was against the US Military Academy at West Point. This game was hugely symbolic, as Pop Warner told them, quote, I shouldn't have to prepare you for this game. Just go read your history books. Your father's and grandfathers fought their fathers. One of West Points players that this game was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would later be the President of the United States. Eisenhower and another player, Leland Hobbs, teamed up to try to tackle Thorpe hard enough that it would put him out of the game. Thorpe saw what was coming and stepped out of the way, which caused Eisenhower and Hobbs to collide. It is widely reported that Eisenhower was seriously injured enough when he did this that it ended his football career, but his injury happened at a different game later in the season and not at the one against Carlisle. In my head, that plays out as a tech savery cartoon like the Smooth Bugs bunny side step while your enemies clunk into each other. Yeah. Uh. In the end, Carlyle won the game against West Point twenty seven to six. The New York Times right up of this game is illustrative not just of the game and Thorpe's place in it, but also of how newspapers in general wrote about the Carlysle team. Quote. Jim Thorpe and his redoubtable band of Carlyle Indian gridiron stars invaded the planes this afternoon to match their prowess against the mole skin gladiators of Uncle Sam's military Academy. And when the two crossed in the semi darkness of late afternoon, the Cadets had been shown up as no other West Point team has been in many years. They were buried under the overwhelming score of twenty seven to six. This article went on to describe Thorpe quote, he simply ran wild while the Cadets tried in vain to stop his progress. It was like trying to clutch a shadow. In addition to football and track and field, Thorpe also competed in the Thing that Wins My Heart in his story, ballroom dancing, and in nineteen twelve he won the Intercollegiate ballroom Dancing Championship. But in January of nineteen thirteen, everything fell apart, and we're going to get to that. After a sponsor break. In January of nineteen thirteen, the Wooster Telegram ran an interview with coach Charles Clancy reporter Roy Ruggles. Johnson had been interviewing Clancy and had noticed a picture of Jim Thorpe on the wall, and the conversation that followed, Johnson learned that Thorpe had been paid to play baseball. The published story claimed that Thorpe had been paid to play baseball for a team in Winston Salem, North Carolina. That was not true, but as we talked about in Part one, Thorpe had been paid about fifteen dollars a week to play baseball and rock him out in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the summers of nineteen o nine and nineteen ten. By the strictest reading of the rules, the Olympic Games were for amateur athletes. Thorpe had been paid to play baseball, which meant the most technical sense, he was a professional. At the same time, these rules had a lot of gray area, like college athletes who received free tuition or room and board were still consider amateur, and that actually had a whole lot more monetary value than Thorpe's fifteen dollars a week playing baseball. Only baseball, boxing, and horse racing were formally recognized as professional sports at the time. Semi professional ball, where players were paid quote meal money, was also kind of a gray area. He basically was making a subsistence to keep playing at that point. Also, while it does seem as though Thorpe was hoping to translate that time in semi pro baseball into a shot at the major leagues, it does not seem to have occurred to him at all that being paid to play baseball in nineteen o nine and would have qualified him as a professional athlete in track and field. Two or three years later, on Pop Warner's advice, Thorpe wrote a letter to Mr James E. Sullivan, the American Commissioner to the Olympic Games and secretary of the Amateur Athletics Union, and this letter Thorpe wrote, quote I was not very wise to the ways of the world and did not re aalized that this was wrong and it would make me a professional in the track sports. Although I learned from the other players that it would be better for me not to let anyone know that I was playing, and for that reason I never told anyone at the school about it until today. I never realized until now what a big mistake I made by keeping it a secret about my ball playing, and I am sorry I did so. I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they had not used their own names. In the same letter, he wrote that he hadn't been doing it for the money, but because he liked to play ball, and he noted that he had turned down many lucrative offers after the Olympic Games were over because he wanted to remain an amateur. In terms of this language about being simply an Indian schoolboy from this letter, Thorpe was about when he wrote it, and he was in his very early twenties during those baseball seasons, so it doesn't really seem like a schoolboy as one would think of it. At the same time, though Federal Indian policy was largely treating Indigenous people as wards of the government and not as full citizens capable of handling their own affairs, And even in his twenties, Thorpe was being treated as a dependent by everyone from Carlisle to the federal government. He was simply not being treated as an adult, fully capable human person. This letter was Thorpe's only opportunity to defend himself, and it did not sway the Amateur Athletics Union. The a A used response acknowledged that it had no direct authority over the sport of baseball, before going on to say quote, the American Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union feel that while Thorpe is deserving of the severest condemnation for concealing the fact that he had professionalized himself by receiving money for playing baseball, they also feel that those who knew of his professional acts are deserving of still greater censure for their silence. The a AU apologize to the International Olympics Committee and to the nations of the world for entering Thorpe into the Olympics, before continuing quote, the Amateur Athletics Union regrets that it permitted Thorpe to compete in amateur contests during the past several years, and we'll do everything in its power to secure the return of prizes and readjustment of points won by him, and will immediately eliminate his records from the books. The a AU retroactively reclassified Jim Thorpe as a professional athlete. He had to return his medals and the other trophies and awards that he had been granted at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games. The rankings for the events he had won were then adjusted, with the previous silver medalists now in first place, the bronze medalists in second, in the fourth place finishers in third. Although the newly designated first place winners did suggest that they would not object to being returned to their former ranking if this decision were overturned, they did not, as has been widely reported, refused to accept on the grounds of fairness. Although there were some supporters of the A a U and I s U S decisions here, in general, this was a wildly unpopular decision. Editorial cartoons lampooned the io C. One, for example, illustrated Thorpe as a sacrificial goat, being held down by a knife wielding Amateur Athletics Union with a herd of other goats labeled summer ball players off in the distance. This also led to a larger discussion about what professionalism meant, with people noting the disparity between athletes like Thorpe and college athletes on scholarships. There was also a lot of discussion about things like purity within the world of sports and it people should be playing only for the sake of the sport itself and not for money, and that led people to point out that those kinds of definitions meant that the only people who could pursue athletics or play in the Olympic Games were the ones who were rich enough to do it without getting paid for their work. Those that sided with the a a U and IOC argued that American athleticism in general was becoming too commercialized and professionalized. So this decision has come to be viewed as a huge miscarriage of justice, one that was influenced by racism and which did not give Thorpe a real chance to defend himself, and afterward his life changed dramatically. So this is to me a real bummer of a place to take a break, but we are going to talk about his life after he could no longer be an amateur athlete in part three? Do you have listener mail? Hopefully slightly more peppy. I do have listener mail. Um. I would say it's peppier because it's it's related to our Unearthed episodes, which tends to be favorites. Uh. This is from Nan, and Nan writes about the thing that we talked about in the Unearthed episode about how the Norman Conquest affected people's diets, um, which I didn't. We talked about it in the behind the scenes, not in the Unearthed episode itself, because the coverage of that report included some articles saying this change diets dramatically and others that said this changed diets hardly at all. Nan so helpfully did something I just did not have the time and capacity to do, which is to analyze the original paper. So Nan says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, at some point in the Autumn Unearthed you mentioned a study of diet across the Norman Conquest that you didn't report on because you couldn't find popular articles that gave you a clear story. Curiosity peaked. I looked it up. Here's the skinny data from Oxford. Analysis of lipids fat residue on pottery shows that before and after folks were mostly eating cows deeping goats, however, rarely dairy before but not after, rarely chicken and pork after but not before. Speculation is that dairy might have shifted form cheese or been stored and specialized vessels after conquest. Cabbage, onions and friends, rassica, and alliums were important both before and after the conquest. Toilet remains, pollen and charred stuff indicate a wide variety of plant foods, including a variety of cereal grains, broad beans, celery apple, black gray plums, and summer savory. This didn't change with the conquest. Analysis of heat exposure of pots and patterns of soot on cooking surfaces suggests that post conquest pot cooking was slower, that lower temperatures, pot placed above the fire rather than in it, and roasting became a thing. Preconquest pigs were mainly herbivores and apparently sourced from different places and raised using different practices. Post conquest piggies were omnivorous and had more consistent diet. It's perhaps due to more consistent common practice in their husbandry. Not much changed for cows across the conquest. They were raised on all different kinds of pasture before and after. Pre conquest, sheep and goats likely came from all over to Oxford, with perhaps more local sourcing afterwards, but there are other interpretations of the isotope data, including more leaves in their diet. Based on herd demographics pre conquest, sheep were raised first for wool, but afterwards somewhere raised specifically for the meat market more single cohort demography. Analysis of human diet from carbon and nitrogen isotopes show much less varied diet post conquest, which the author's interpret is greater control of the market economy by Norman authorities and intensification of agriculture fertilizing with manure. Nitrogen values hint at more meat consumption or just more pork consumption post conquest. A number of individuals showed evidence of food and security during growth, but that couldn't be linked directly to the conquest or distinguished from thamine before or after the conquest. Human dental disease and other diet related pathologies didn't change much across the intervals, so you can see why different someone's might report that the conquest changed things and didn't love the show. Cheers, Nan, Thank you so much, Nan. I do love to read original papers when I'm working on these unearthed episodes. But um that it it. There was just a lot, yes uh so, thank you so so so much for putting together just such a lovely and concise synopsis of what the paper was talking about so we can share with everyone. Um, if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, we are at History Podcast at I heart radio dot com and also all over social media ad miss in History so you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio app and Apple podcasts and any else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is the second part of our three parter on Jim Thorpe, one more part than we often have in our multi part episodes. Last time, we talked about his childhood and how he joined the track and field and then the football team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. When we left off in our last episode, he had just finished the nine nine football season, and that is where we're going to pick things up again. One of the reasons that Jim Thorpe had decided to go to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in nineteen o four was that things had been difficult for him in Oklahoma after the deaths of so many family members. But by the end of the nineteen o eight nineteen o nine school year, he was starting to feel really homesick. He asked for leave to visit his family, something that the administration seems to have thought was just for a summer break, but it was not. Although Thorpe clearly excelled at football and track and field in the early twentieth century, unless a person was working as a coach, the only sport that might actually allow them to earn a really reliable living was baseball. That was thanks to the existence of multiple year major league contracts. So like you could make enough to support yourself in other sports, maybe, but like not with any kind of reliability or long term stability. In the summers of nineteen o nine and nineteen ten, Thorpe played semi pro baseball in North Carolina, spending the rest of those years back in Oklahoma, living with various family members, working on farms and ranches and hunting. These baseball teams paid Thorpe about fifteen dollars a week, which was described as meal money, and he was not the only Carlysle student playing semi professional baseball at the time. His Carlyle classmates Joe Libby and Jesse young Deer did this as well, all three of them having been encouraged to do so by Pop Warner. Thorpe's long term goal seems to have been to break into the major leagues from this semi professional play. He had decided that the only job that really suited his temperament and his interests was to just be an athlete, but in nineteen eleven, he ran into his former track mentor, Albert Exen Dine, who was now a coach at Carlisle. Ex and Dine encouraged him to come back to the school. During his years away, Thorpe had gotten a little taller and had also filled out some more. X and I described him as being big as a mule, so ex and Dine thought that Thorpe would make a really good addition to the football team at Carlisle, and then Pop Warner also promised Thorpe not only a chance to play for Carlysle again, but also a shot at the nineteen twelve Alympic team. Although athletics were what drew Thorpe back to Carlisle, he did keep up with his class work as well, and he was overall a good student. One of his teachers was Maryanne Moore, not yet a famous poet. He was apparently one of her favorite students, but she did not teach him poetry. She was teaching a class in commercial law, intended to help indigenous students protect themselves in legal and land dealings after they finished school. In his earlier time on the Carlisle football team, Thorpe had become one of the most skilled and recognizable players. They were write ups about him in local papers, and there were always fans who were eager to buy him drinks. That continued in the nineteen eleven season. That year, Walter Camp, who was known as the father of American football, named Thorpe a first team All American and that is an honor that he would earn for the second time in nineteen twelve. Thorpe's return to the school was not without problems, though we talked in Part one about how conditions at Carlisle and other boarding schools for indigenous students were often insufficient at best. As an athlete, Thorpe was shielded from a lot of this, and later on he often talked fondly of the school. But he did contract a bacterial eye infection called tracoma after the nineteen eleven football season was over. Tracoma outbreaks were a frequent problem at Carlisle and at other residential schools. This infection can cause the eyelid to turn inward, which causes the eyelashes to scrape the surface of the eye. It is incredibly painful. This happened to Thorpe and he had to have surgery to correct it. This may have affected his vision, but it's not something that he ever mentioned again after leaving Carlisle. Although Thorpe loved to play football, a much bigger focus for him going into the spring of nineteen twelve was track and field. In preparation for the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee had added to all around event to the Summer Games, the Classic pentathlon and the decathlon. These were the events that Thorpe started training for with an eye toward tryouts in New York on May eighteenth. Also representing Carlisle was Hopie runner Lewis Tauanama, who was preparing for the ten thousand meter race and the marathon. This was relatively early in the history of the Olympic Games. We've walked through that history in a lot more detail in our episode on Pierre de Cooperton, who was the father of the modern Olympics. The first modern Olympic Games had been held in eighteen ninety six, and the nineteen twelve games were only the fifth Olympic Games in the modern era. It had only been a few years since the United States had seriously started trying to select and train Olympic contenders, with the American Olympic Committee being established in nineteen oh six, but at the same time this was still the Olympics, meant to showcase the best amateur athletes from nations around the world, and Thorpe was trying to qualify for them, not only without an Olympic level track and field coach, but also without having ever done some of the events involved in the pentathlon and the decathlon at all. For example, he got to the Olympic tryouts without knowing that you take a running start when throwing a javelin. At tryouts, Thorpe sort of hopped mostly in place and still managed to throw the javelin a hundred and thirty six ft and seven point five inches. Yeah, he uh qualified for that knowing not what he was doing at all. I feel bad because I'm sure there were athletes there who had been training and training and training, and he just kind of dusted them. And like, how for us, we have all been in that moment where you're like, I'm prepared of doing it. This person doesn't know what they're doing and they're ten times better. Yeah. So, because they were indigenous, Thorpe and Tawanama were considered wards of the Federal government and not US citizens, but even so, they were selected to represent the United States at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. They set sail aboard the s S Fenland on June fourteenth, nineteen twelve. News reports from the time and early biographies of Jim Thorpe claim that he refused to train on the ship, but this was untrue. Multiple teammates have confirmed that he was training with everyone else, and there are also photos that show him running laps on the deck. This news coverage was connected to racist stereotypes of indigenous people as lazy, and it's simultaneously worked to undercut Thorpe's achievements as an athlete by suggesting that they came from some kind of innate ability as a Native American and not from his having worked at it. It is true that he didn't train a lot on the last leg of the voyage, but at that point he was tapering or cutting back on his physical activity as part of the preparation for the endurance events that he was about to undertake. That is something people do still today. Yeah, it is a real thing that the other entrance athletes were also doing. We will get to what happened during these actual Olympic events after a quick sponsor break. The pentathlon at the nineteen twelve Summer Olympic Games took place on July seventh, which was the second day of the Games. Thorpe placed first in four of the five events. That was the running broad jump, he had a distance of twenty three ft two and seven tenth inches, the two hundred meter dash, which he had a time of twenty two and nine tenths seconds, a discus throw he threw it more than a hundred and sixteen feet, which was three feet farther than the next competitor, and a fifteen hundred meter run. He did that in four minutes, forty four and eight tenths seconds. The only events of the five that he did not win was the javelin throw. He had improved a lot since qualifying in tryouts and not knowing at all what he was doing. He's still placed third. Classic pentathlon is scored with one point for first place finish, two points for second place, three points for third, and so on, so a lower score is better. With his four first place finishes and one third, thorpe score was seven. The second place winner had a score of twenty one. I would call that blowing the competition out of the water. They got dusted. Because I don't follow any sport, I did not know how classic pentathlon was scored, and I was looking at the rankings on the Official Olympic Games website and I was like, how does he have a score of seven and the next competitors I'll have scores have like twenty one three, like an entire more digits. Were these all the same games? What's happening? So the Decathlon started on July thirteenth, and in the interim to keep himself active but without overtaxing himself, Thorpe participated in a few smaller events. He didn't earn medals in any of these, but also he was really conserving his energy. On the first day of the decathlon, it was raining. As we mentioned in Part one, Carlyle's athletic team had a reputation for not being at their best in bad weather, and this was true for Thorpe as well. The events that took place on that first day were the one meter dash, the running broad jump, and the shot put. This was tougher than the pentathlon. On the broad jump that was the first event and Thorpe faulted on his first two tries, so it took him three tries to even do it. The only event he won that day was the shot put, which he threw forty two ft five and which was more than two ft ahead of the next competitor. It was very good it, throwing things many feet farther than the next competitor. He joked that the only reason he did as well as he did at the shop put was because he got to change into some dry clothes first. On the second day of the decathlon, the weather was great, but Thorpe's shoes were missing. Thorpe and Warner had to scrounge up another pair, finally finding one shoe that was too small and another that was too large. This sounds very comical, but also was surely stressful. The events for the day were the running, high jump, the four hundred run, the one hurdles. He came in first in the high jump, second in the four d and first in the hurdles, setting a record of fifteen point six seconds. Yeah, we do not know what happened to his shoes. The common conclusion from a lot of people is that somebody stole his shoes to try to keep him from being an efficient competitor in these games, like we really, we really don't know. Day three included the discus, the pole vault, the javelin and run. He placed third in the pole vault and fourth in the javelin and run. He came in first, and he even beat his time from the mentathlon earlier in the games. This time he ran up in four minutes forty point one seconds. This is incredible to me because number one, he would have been more tired at this point than he was earlier. Number two, he was still in his mismatched shoes. Reading this makes me feel like I have not been running in a while, but like I was the prissiest, least coping runner on the planet. Because it's like my sock feels two millimeters off of where it should sit. I can't possibly and yet this dude choose that don't fit trucking along. Uh. In the end, Thorpe had placed in the top four of all ten decathalon events and had placed first in four of those events. This scores differently, so the scores here Bigger is better. Just keep that in mind versus what we talked about earlier. So out of a possible total score of ten thousand points. Thorpe scored eight thousand, four hundred twelve. The second place finisher, Hugo Wiselander of Sweden, earned seven thousand, seven hundred twenty four. Thorpe's score stood as a record until nineteen thirty two, and because the Classic Pentathlon was retired from the Games in ur, Thorpe is the only person to have won both the Classic Pentathlon and the decathlon at the Olympic Games. I just want to take in a moment to just point out that there were six hundred and eighty eight points separating Thorpe and the next competitor in these scores. So one of the more memorable stories about Jim Thorpe in these Olympic Games, aside from his incredible performance and both of those two events, that centers on his appearance at the awards ceremony. After having awarded Thorpe gold medals for both the decathlon and the pentathlon, King Gustave, the fifth of Sweden's told him quote, sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world. It is widely reported that Thorpe replied to him, thanks, King, I say widely, like almost every article about this mentions it uh The drunk history about this mentions it, but biographer Kate Buford contends that it probably never actually happened and was just another way to kind of undermine Thorpe's accomplishments and his personality. Writing quote a flippant reply would have been out of character for a man who was highly uncomfortable in public ceremonies and hated to stand out. In addition to his medals, Thorpe was awarded a life size bust of the King of Sweden, as well as a bejeweled chalice shaped like a Viking ship, which was from zarn Nicholas the second of Russia. Before returning to the US, Thorpe and his tea mates took part in exhibition games and Europe. As we mentioned in part one, Thorpe had some French ancestry, and he spent some time in France to get a little sense of that ancestry. Once the team had arrived back in the United States, they were really treated as heroes. There were banquets and receptions and ticker tape parades and multiple major cities. Thorpe also got a letter of congratulations from President William Howard Taft he found a lot of this attention really overwhelming, though he did not always enjoy being in a spotlight. Thorpe's incredible performance at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games sparked a renewed interest in the Games as people waited for the next Jim Thorpe to arrive on the scene, and his success continued after he got back home. At the Amateur Athletics Union All Around Championship in New York in nineteen twelve, Thorpe set a new record of seven thousand, four hundred seventy six points, in spite of the fact that the weather was terrible and he was actually recovering from food point pasoning. Thorpe returned to Carlisle after the Olympic Games, and by this point he had also enrolled some of his siblings at the school since both of their parents had died. He really seems to have been trying to keep as many of them together as much as he could. The Carlisle football team also had a strong season in nineteen twelve, with Thorpe scoring a hundred and ninety eight of the team's five hundred and four total points and twenty five of its sixty six touchdowns. Carlisle finished the nineteen twelve season with twelve wins, one loss, in one tie. One of Carlyle's most memorable games in the nineteen twelve season was against the US Military Academy at West Point. This game was hugely symbolic, as Pop Warner told them, quote, I shouldn't have to prepare you for this game. Just go read your history books. Your father's and grandfathers fought their fathers. One of West Points players that this game was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would later be the President of the United States. Eisenhower and another player, Leland Hobbs, teamed up to try to tackle Thorpe hard enough that it would put him out of the game. Thorpe saw what was coming and stepped out of the way, which caused Eisenhower and Hobbs to collide. It is widely reported that Eisenhower was seriously injured enough when he did this that it ended his football career, but his injury happened at a different game later in the season and not at the one against Carlisle. In my head, that plays out as a tech savery cartoon like the Smooth Bugs bunny side step while your enemies clunk into each other. Yeah. Uh. In the end, Carlyle won the game against West Point twenty seven to six. The New York Times right up of this game is illustrative not just of the game and Thorpe's place in it, but also of how newspapers in general wrote about the Carlysle team. Quote. Jim Thorpe and his redoubtable band of Carlyle Indian gridiron stars invaded the planes this afternoon to match their prowess against the mole skin gladiators of Uncle Sam's military Academy. And when the two crossed in the semi darkness of late afternoon, the Cadets had been shown up as no other West Point team has been in many years. They were buried under the overwhelming score of twenty seven to six. This article went on to describe Thorpe quote, he simply ran wild while the Cadets tried in vain to stop his progress. It was like trying to clutch a shadow. In addition to football and track and field, Thorpe also competed in the Thing that Wins My Heart in his story, ballroom dancing, and in nineteen twelve he won the Intercollegiate ballroom Dancing Championship. But in January of nineteen thirteen, everything fell apart, and we're going to get to that. After a sponsor break. In January of nineteen thirteen, the Wooster Telegram ran an interview with coach Charles Clancy reporter Roy Ruggles. Johnson had been interviewing Clancy and had noticed a picture of Jim Thorpe on the wall, and the conversation that followed, Johnson learned that Thorpe had been paid to play baseball. The published story claimed that Thorpe had been paid to play baseball for a team in Winston Salem, North Carolina. That was not true, but as we talked about in Part one, Thorpe had been paid about fifteen dollars a week to play baseball and rock him out in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the summers of nineteen o nine and nineteen ten. By the strictest reading of the rules, the Olympic Games were for amateur athletes. Thorpe had been paid to play baseball, which meant the most technical sense, he was a professional. At the same time, these rules had a lot of gray area, like college athletes who received free tuition or room and board were still consider amateur, and that actually had a whole lot more monetary value than Thorpe's fifteen dollars a week playing baseball. Only baseball, boxing, and horse racing were formally recognized as professional sports at the time. Semi professional ball, where players were paid quote meal money, was also kind of a gray area. He basically was making a subsistence to keep playing at that point. Also, while it does seem as though Thorpe was hoping to translate that time in semi pro baseball into a shot at the major leagues, it does not seem to have occurred to him at all that being paid to play baseball in nineteen o nine and would have qualified him as a professional athlete in track and field. Two or three years later, on Pop Warner's advice, Thorpe wrote a letter to Mr James E. Sullivan, the American Commissioner to the Olympic Games and secretary of the Amateur Athletics Union, and this letter Thorpe wrote, quote I was not very wise to the ways of the world and did not re aalized that this was wrong and it would make me a professional in the track sports. Although I learned from the other players that it would be better for me not to let anyone know that I was playing, and for that reason I never told anyone at the school about it until today. I never realized until now what a big mistake I made by keeping it a secret about my ball playing, and I am sorry I did so. I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they had not used their own names. In the same letter, he wrote that he hadn't been doing it for the money, but because he liked to play ball, and he noted that he had turned down many lucrative offers after the Olympic Games were over because he wanted to remain an amateur. In terms of this language about being simply an Indian schoolboy from this letter, Thorpe was about when he wrote it, and he was in his very early twenties during those baseball seasons, so it doesn't really seem like a schoolboy as one would think of it. At the same time, though Federal Indian policy was largely treating Indigenous people as wards of the government and not as full citizens capable of handling their own affairs, And even in his twenties, Thorpe was being treated as a dependent by everyone from Carlisle to the federal government. He was simply not being treated as an adult, fully capable human person. This letter was Thorpe's only opportunity to defend himself, and it did not sway the Amateur Athletics Union. The a A used response acknowledged that it had no direct authority over the sport of baseball, before going on to say quote, the American Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union feel that while Thorpe is deserving of the severest condemnation for concealing the fact that he had professionalized himself by receiving money for playing baseball, they also feel that those who knew of his professional acts are deserving of still greater censure for their silence. The a AU apologize to the International Olympics Committee and to the nations of the world for entering Thorpe into the Olympics, before continuing quote, the Amateur Athletics Union regrets that it permitted Thorpe to compete in amateur contests during the past several years, and we'll do everything in its power to secure the return of prizes and readjustment of points won by him, and will immediately eliminate his records from the books. The a AU retroactively reclassified Jim Thorpe as a professional athlete. He had to return his medals and the other trophies and awards that he had been granted at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games. The rankings for the events he had won were then adjusted, with the previous silver medalists now in first place, the bronze medalists in second, in the fourth place finishers in third. Although the newly designated first place winners did suggest that they would not object to being returned to their former ranking if this decision were overturned, they did not, as has been widely reported, refused to accept on the grounds of fairness. Although there were some supporters of the A a U and I s U S decisions here, in general, this was a wildly unpopular decision. Editorial cartoons lampooned the io C. One, for example, illustrated Thorpe as a sacrificial goat, being held down by a knife wielding Amateur Athletics Union with a herd of other goats labeled summer ball players off in the distance. This also led to a larger discussion about what professionalism meant, with people noting the disparity between athletes like Thorpe and college athletes on scholarships. There was also a lot of discussion about things like purity within the world of sports and it people should be playing only for the sake of the sport itself and not for money, and that led people to point out that those kinds of definitions meant that the only people who could pursue athletics or play in the Olympic Games were the ones who were rich enough to do it without getting paid for their work. Those that sided with the a a U and IOC argued that American athleticism in general was becoming too commercialized and professionalized. So this decision has come to be viewed as a huge miscarriage of justice, one that was influenced by racism and which did not give Thorpe a real chance to defend himself, and afterward his life changed dramatically. So this is to me a real bummer of a place to take a break, but we are going to talk about his life after he could no longer be an amateur athlete in part three? Do you have listener mail? Hopefully slightly more peppy. I do have listener mail. Um. I would say it's peppier because it's it's related to our Unearthed episodes, which tends to be favorites. Uh. This is from Nan, and Nan writes about the thing that we talked about in the Unearthed episode about how the Norman Conquest affected people's diets, um, which I didn't. We talked about it in the behind the scenes, not in the Unearthed episode itself, because the coverage of that report included some articles saying this change diets dramatically and others that said this changed diets hardly at all. Nan so helpfully did something I just did not have the time and capacity to do, which is to analyze the original paper. So Nan says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, at some point in the Autumn Unearthed you mentioned a study of diet across the Norman Conquest that you didn't report on because you couldn't find popular articles that gave you a clear story. Curiosity peaked. I looked it up. Here's the skinny data from Oxford. Analysis of lipids fat residue on pottery shows that before and after folks were mostly eating cows deeping goats, however, rarely dairy before but not after, rarely chicken and pork after but not before. Speculation is that dairy might have shifted form cheese or been stored and specialized vessels after conquest. Cabbage, onions and friends, rassica, and alliums were important both before and after the conquest. Toilet remains, pollen and charred stuff indicate a wide variety of plant foods, including a variety of cereal grains, broad beans, celery apple, black gray plums, and summer savory. This didn't change with the conquest. Analysis of heat exposure of pots and patterns of soot on cooking surfaces suggests that post conquest pot cooking was slower, that lower temperatures, pot placed above the fire rather than in it, and roasting became a thing. Preconquest pigs were mainly herbivores and apparently sourced from different places and raised using different practices. Post conquest piggies were omnivorous and had more consistent diet. It's perhaps due to more consistent common practice in their husbandry. Not much changed for cows across the conquest. They were raised on all different kinds of pasture before and after. Pre conquest, sheep and goats likely came from all over to Oxford, with perhaps more local sourcing afterwards, but there are other interpretations of the isotope data, including more leaves in their diet. Based on herd demographics pre conquest, sheep were raised first for wool, but afterwards somewhere raised specifically for the meat market more single cohort demography. Analysis of human diet from carbon and nitrogen isotopes show much less varied diet post conquest, which the author's interpret is greater control of the market economy by Norman authorities and intensification of agriculture fertilizing with manure. Nitrogen values hint at more meat consumption or just more pork consumption post conquest. A number of individuals showed evidence of food and security during growth, but that couldn't be linked directly to the conquest or distinguished from thamine before or after the conquest. Human dental disease and other diet related pathologies didn't change much across the intervals, so you can see why different someone's might report that the conquest changed things and didn't love the show. Cheers, Nan, Thank you so much, Nan. I do love to read original papers when I'm working on these unearthed episodes. But um that it it. There was just a lot, yes uh so, thank you so so so much for putting together just such a lovely and concise synopsis of what the paper was talking about so we can share with everyone. 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