November 30, 2020 • 38 mins
The conclusion of our three-parter on the life of Jim Thorpe covers his time as a professional athlete, and his life after the end of his athletic career – including two pieces of his story that have tragically continued long after his death.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
have the third part of what I think is our
first ever three parter on the show. There may have
(00:24):
been three parters by briar hosts that I'm not remembering,
but for Holly and me, it's the first sort of
trilogy of podcast. In part one, we talked about Jim
Thorpe's early life and his upbringing in boarding schools for
Native American children, including his time on the track and
football teams at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and then in
(00:45):
part two we talked about his just incredible performance at
the nineteen twelve Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm, and then
how he was later stripped of the medals that he
had earned in those games. And are concluding episode, we're
going to talk about his time the professional athlete and
then his life after the end of his career as
an athlete, including two weiss of the story that have
(01:07):
just tragically continued for a long time after his death.
One aspect of it I find particularly heartbreaking, which we
will get to After being stripped of his Olympic medals,
Jim Thorpe publicly tried to downplay things, saying he knew
that he had earned them, but really he was heartbroken
at the loss of his medals and the fact that
he was now barred from being an amateur athlete. He
(01:31):
started trying to figure out what he was going to
do next after the Olympics. Thorpe had turned down offers
to box and to appear on vaudeville. After his medals
and amateur status were revoked, he started looking for opportunities
as a professional baseball player. In Thorpe signed with the
New York Giants, which was the top ranked team in
(01:51):
the league. His contract was for six thousand dollars a
year for three years. He had never been as strong
at baseball as he had been in football or track
and field, and there were also some rumors that he
was being brought onto the team basically to bring in
fans and not to actually play. Running alongside that was
(02:11):
the idea that the expense of paying him was going
to be worth it as long as his presence on
the team sold tickets. One of the reasons that Thorpe
had wanted to qualify for the Olympics was that he
wanted to prove that he was worthy of marrying Iva Miller,
also called Ivy, who was his longtime sweetheart from Carlyle.
(02:31):
Ivy's background is a little bit complicated. She had been
born in Cherokee Country and her mother was reportedly part Cherokee,
but there's no evidence to back that up. Her father
seems to have fabricated an indigenous ancestry for her and
her siblings so that he could enroll them in a
boarding school after their mother died. It is not entirely
(02:53):
clear how much or what indigenous ancestry she had, if any,
and whether or not Jim knew about any of this.
Jim and Iva got married after the nineteen thirteen World Series,
which the Giants lost to the Philadelphia Athletics four games
to one. They got married at the Catholic Chapel that
they had attended while they were at Carlisle, and their
(03:13):
honeymoon was the Giants White Sox World Tour, in which
the Giants and the White Sox traveled west across the
United States and then to Japan, with stops all over Asia, Europe,
and Northern Africa. Jim and Iva would go on to
have four children, Jim Junior, Gayl, Charlotte, and Grace. Back
at Carlisle, students were petitioning for an investigation into poor
(03:37):
conditions at the school. The results of this investigation were appalling,
detailing deprivation, beatings, and virtually the entire school being quote
made subservient to football and athletics. The report also leveled
numerous charges against Pop Warner, who had been the coach
of the athletics there and one of the people who
(03:58):
really encouraged Jim Thorpe, from abusive treatment of players to
financial corruption. Warner denied these charges, claiming that they were
the work of a vendetta by disgruntled former athletes. He
left Carlisle and took a job with the University of Pittsburgh.
The Carlisle School closed in nineteen I think this report
(04:18):
is like it's indicative of one of the truths about Carlisle,
which is that Jim, as an athlete and other athletes
there were shielded from some of the worst things about
the school in their position of being athletes, And like
this report brought a lot of that to like for
people who didn't know about it. On December fifteenth of
nineteen sixteen, Thorpe got a letter that he was now
(04:40):
qualified to be a US citizen and closed was the
deed for his land allotment. As we talked about earlier,
there was a whole process where if somebody had been
able to maintain a land allotment for a long enough time,
they were qualified to become a citizen. That same year,
he also started playing and coaching the Canton bull Dogs,
which is a professional football team based in Canton, Ohio.
(05:03):
So he was playing professional baseball and football at the
same time. There their seasons didn't entirely overlap, but he
was going from one professional sport to another, and then
going back to Oklahoma to support himself and his family,
primarily by hunting when neither of those sports was in season.
As all of this was happening, Thorpe was still under
contract to the New York Giants, although his baseball career
(05:27):
involved being repeatedly sent down to the minor leagues or
loaned out to other teams. When the Selective Service Act
of nineteen seventeen was passed to allow the United States
to conscript an army for World War One, many Native
American men registered, and about twelve thousand served in the
military during the war. Because he was married and supporting
(05:48):
his wife and children, Thorpe was exempt. Apparently. The Giants
manager John J. McGraw also discouraged Thorpe from volunteering, arguing
that as an internationally famous fleet he could become a target.
In nineteen eighteen, Jim and Iva's son, Jim Jr. Died
of polio, and it was only three Jim was obviously bereft,
(06:11):
absolutely grief stricken. People who knew him said that he
was just never the same afterward. But McGraw really did
not have a lot of patience for Thorpe's lack of
focus on the field in the aftermath of his son's death.
He already thought that Thorpe was too prone to goofing around.
Thorpe's nickname back at Carlisle had actually been libbling, which
(06:33):
meant coursing around. Jim's relationship with Iva had already been
kind of strained over the issue of alcohol. Jim's drinking
was comparable to that of his teammates, but Iva would
have much preferred him to be a teetotaler. In the
wake of Jim Junior's death, both Jim's relationship with his
wife and his performance at work really started to suffer. Then,
(06:55):
in nineteen nineteen, Thorpe left the New York Giants. Report
worded Lely McGraw had called him a dumb Indian after
he missed a signal, and Thorpe, outraged, had chased him
down the field until his teammates intervened. Thorpe was traded
to the Boston Braves, and he played with them for
one season before going back to the minor leagues. Thorpe's
(07:16):
career in professional football was going somewhat better, though. The
American Professional Football Association was formed in nineteen twenty and
Thorpe was named its first president. This organization would later
become the National Football League, or the NFL, so you'll
see a lot of times Jim Thorpe was the first
president of the NFL. In the nineteen twenties, Thorpe also
started to move from playing and coaching in existing teams
(07:39):
to starting new ones. In nineteen two, Thorpe helped Canton
fan and dog breeder Walter Lingo start the All Indigenous
Urrang Indians football team. As part of this arrangement, Lingo
paid Thorpe to start and coach the team and to
manage his kennel for five hundred dollars a week. This
may sound like an out of the blue arrangement, but
(08:00):
Thorpe had a lot of years of experience training and
caring for hunting dogs. In addition to so many other
things we've talked about him being good at, he was
very good with animals. Carlisle Indian Industrial School had aggressively
recruited and then trained many of the best indigenous football
players in the United States, had sort of sucked up
all of the football talent, and then it had closed
(08:22):
down four years before all of this happened, So a
lot of the players on this team were actually older
than Thorpe was. Although the team did not do particularly
well in its first season, Lingo seemed to enjoy it
and funded it for a nineteen twenty three season as well.
In nineteen twenty three, Jim and Iva separated. Their marriage
had just never recovered from the death of Jim Jr.
(08:43):
They legally divorced in n that same year. Jim remarried
to FRIEDA. Kirkpatrick, who was eighteen years his junior and
who he had started getting to know as his marriage
to Iva was crumbling. They went on to have four sons,
carl Bill, Richard, John, who was known as Jack. Jim's
relationships with Iva and Frieda, and with the children that
(09:05):
he fathered during those two marriages could be a little complicated,
as was the case with Iva. Frieda did not really
approve of Jim's drinking, which was kind of hit or miss.
There were times when he gave it up, but there
were times that it became heavier as their marriage went on.
As a professional athlete playing two different sports, he was
also away from home a lot when his children were young.
(09:27):
His grandson Michael D. Koehler, writing in an article and
Educational Digest, wrote that his mother, Charlotte, had sometimes felt
like Thorpe didn't even know her name. At the same time, though,
Thorpe's children really seemed devoted to him, although that devotion
could take somewhat different forms, which we will get to
in a bit. In ninety six, Thorpe played his final
(09:49):
season with the Canton Bulldogs. In seven, he played and
coached a season with the all Indigenous World Famous Indians
basketball team. By this point, though his career is a
professional athlete was really winding down. He played his last
professional football games, which ended his time as a pro
athlete in Thorpe was about forty at this point, which
(10:11):
would be a little older for a pro athlete, like
it's hard on your body, but it also wasn't entirely
what he was planning. In nineteen twenty nine, the Carnegie
Foundation published a report called American College Athletics, which revealed
all kinds of issues. There were payments to players and
secret funding and just corruption in college athletics. This report
(10:35):
framed college athletics as a threat to education, and the
suspicions that it raised trickled over into professional sports as well.
In the ninety nine stock market crash and the Great
Depression also seriously reduced the number of opportunities for pro
athletes and coaches. So regardless of what Thorpe may have
wanted to do as an athlete at this point, there
(10:57):
just were not many opportunities in professional sports at all
for him to try to pursue. We're going to talk
about Jim Thorpe's life after professional sports. After we first
pause and have a sponsor break between n and Jim.
(11:20):
Thorpe did all kinds of jobs to make ends meet.
He worked as a laborer and a movie extra. He
eventually started a casting agency to advocate for Indigenous actors
to be cast as indigenous characters on screen. This, of course,
is a little bit of a tangle because a lot
of the roles that were available at the time were
(11:41):
really heavily stereotyped. But his goal was really to help
indigenous actors get a foot in the door in Hollywood,
including stuff like helping them find housing, helping make sure
they had enough to eat. He was doing a lot
of work to just help, especially other Indigenous people in Hollywood.
By the mid nineteen thirties, Thorpe was most supporting himself
through speaking engagements and acting as well as odd jobs.
(12:04):
He appeared in more than seventy films as an actor
or an extra. His busiest year on that front was
nineteen thirty five, when he appeared in seventeen films. He
also sold the rights to his life story to MGM
ahead of the nineteen thirty two Olympic Games. He also
collaborated with Thomas F. Collison to write Jim Thorpe's History
(12:24):
of the Olympics, and then he followed up the publication
of that book with public readings and signings. The nineteen
thirty two Summer Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles,
and that's actually where Thorpe was living at the time,
but he couldn't afford a ticket. When his fans heard
about this, people offered to buy one for him, and
then he wound up getting a press pass for the
(12:45):
press box. During opening ceremonies, Vice President Charles Curtis, member
of the car Nation and the first person of color
to serve as Vice President of the United States, read
an article about Thorpe being moved to tears from the
press box, and he invited Thorpe to sit in the
presidential box. The next day. The crowd gave sorp a
standing ovation as he took his seat. As all of
(13:06):
this was going on, the United States federal government was
really shifting its policies toward Indigenous people. The Wheeler Howard Act,
also called the Indian Reorganization Act and later nicknamed the
Indian New Deal, was passed in We talked about this
a little bit and sort of how it fits into
the overall context of of federal Indian law in our
(13:30):
two part on the occupation of Alcatraz. This act moved
the federal government away from re allotting indigenous lands to
individual people and trying to assimilate indigenous people's into white culture.
It returned a lot of the so called surplus lands
back to indigenous nations, and then also tried to move
(13:51):
those nations toward a state of sovereignty rather than Indigenous
people being managed by the federal government. This act and
fluted provisions for funding as well. If an indigenous nation
adopted a written constitution, it was eligible for loans to
pay for things like new infrastructure and educational programs. For
people in Jim Thorpe's generation, who had spent most of
(14:14):
their lives in schools that systematically tried to strip them
of their Indigenous identity and force them to assimilate with
white culture, and being told that their nation's cultures and
practices were inferior to white culture, this shift could be
profoundly disorienting. Different tribes also responded really differently to the
federal government's encouragement to draft and vote on a new constitution,
(14:37):
and there were also differences of opinion within those tribes
and nations about how best to move forward. As we
say on the show, a lot no group is a
monolith and not everybody agreed with all of this. For example,
there were members of the Second Fox Nation who wanted
to approve a tribal constitution under the terms of the
Wheeler Howard Act. Then there were others who just totally
(14:58):
distrusted this entire idea you and saw the requirement for
a constitution as just another way for the federal government
to try to control indigenous nations. It was this faction
that recruited Jim Thorpe to advocate on their behalf. Ultimately,
the Sac and Fox Nation did approve a new constitution,
although it has taken decades and a series of court
(15:20):
battles for the nation to put many of the terms
of that constitution into practice. In the words of Jim's son, Jack,
who was principal chief of the Second Fox Nation for
seven years beginning in nineteen eighty, quote, the Sac and
Fox went through eleven major lawsuits to exercise our right
to control our destiny. We are still in court battles.
(15:41):
Jack Thorpe, by the way, died in eleven at the
age of seventy three. He will come up again in
just a bit. Jim Thorpe's position in the middle of
all this was that indigenous people should be able to
manage their own affairs rather than being perpetual wards of
the United States government, and in his mind, this included
things like being able to follow their own religions and
(16:03):
observe their own cultural practices. But he also generally disagreed
with legislation that was targeted specifically at Indigenous people, even
if that legislation was meant to be helpful. He thought
that indigenous people experienced lots of hardships, but so did
people of other races and ethnicities, so he thought that
legislation that set indigenous people apart in some way was
(16:27):
really infantilizing and controlling. In nineteen thirty seven, Burton K. Wheeler,
who was one of the legislators who the Wheeler Howard
Act had been named for, had actually come to oppose it,
and he introduced a bill to try to repeal it.
Jim Thorpe actually supported this repeal bill, which ultimately failed.
In one Jim's wife, Frieda, filed for divorce. As we
(16:50):
noted earlier, she had never really approved of Jim's drinking,
and while he had given it up at one point,
he did still drink from time to time, and as
time went on. When he did choose to drink, he
then drank more heavily and he was more likely to
get into some kind of altercation while under the influence.
Frieda also thought that Jim was not careful enough with money,
(17:10):
and he also spent long stretches of time away from home.
That was something that was normal for him, but it
was really a strain on her. Jim did not contest
the divorce, Yeah, like he there were there are two
things here. One is that even though he had spent
so much of his upbringing in boarding schools, like he
also grew up in a culture where it was normal,
especially for men to like go on prolonged hunts away
(17:31):
from the family like that. That was just sort of
a thing that happened, and it was not what Frieda
was expecting or about at all um. And then the
other thing was he gave a lot of money away
to people that needed it, especially other indigenous people, and
so he would be broke. Were like, why don't you
have any money, and it was because he gave it away,
And that was like another thing that caused a big
rift in between them. When passing through Dearborn, Michigan in
(17:54):
the early nineties. On a speaking tour, Thorpe was offered
a job as a secure guard at the Ford plant there.
He wound up taking it, and then while he was
living in Dearborn, he had his first heart attack. Then,
during World War Two, he was too old to be
accepted into the Armed forces, so he joined the US
Merchant Marine. He sailed aboard the USS Southwest Victory, and
(18:17):
then when people realized who he was, they got him
to start doing things like hospital visits and public appearances
to try to boost you know, soldiers and other people's morale,
which is a thing that I kind of love. Like.
That was not what he had gotten on board for.
But as soon as they realized that they had Jim
Thorpe on their ship, they were like, WHOA, okay, we
gotta work out a way for you to make people
feel better. On June two, n Thorpe got married for
(18:40):
the third time to Patricia Gladys ask you. She went
by Patsy. They got married in Tijuana, and apparently Thorpe
was inebriated enough not to remember the ceremony when he
woke up next to her the next day. Patsy acted
as Thorpe's manager in addition to being his wife, for
example getting him to start charging five hundred dollars for
(19:01):
speaking engagements rather than doing most of them for free.
She also led an attempt to get his Olympic medals
restored in the late nineteen forties. But Patsy has also
been described as opportunistic, controlling, and even cruel, with expensive
tastes that burned through the money that she was helping
Jim bring in. Their relationship was often stormy. By this
(19:23):
point in his life, Thorpe had become an advocate for
athletics programs to try to curb juvenile delinquency, including a
plan to develop a Junior Olympics program. He also advocated
for the Sac and Fox Nation to be compensated for
land that the government had bought in eighteen fourteen, which
later turned out to contain oil fields. It's a whole
(19:44):
different topic of like land rights versus the mineral rights
that are associated with them. After World War Two was over,
he started appearing in exhibition games, and also inspired by
the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, he started a
baseball team for girls. In ninety nine, Weren't Brothers announced
that a film was in the works about Jim Thorpe's life.
(20:05):
This became the first mainstream Hollywood movie about a living
Indigenous person rather than a Western or a movie about
an Indigenous historical figure or event. This announcement brought him
a new wave of fame, including offers to work as
a coach. In the early nineteen fifties, Thorpe noticed a
sore on his lip that turned out to be cancer,
(20:27):
and as he was undergoing treatment, Passy made a tearful
televised plea for help, saying that they were penniless. They
definitely were not wealthy. They were not penniless, though, but
this allegation led people to do things like send outrage
letters to Warner Brothers under the idea that Thorpe had
not been compensated for his life story, even though he
(20:49):
had sold the rights to this story like way earlier
on this film, Jim Thorpe All American came out in
nineteen fifty one, and it started Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe.
Thorpe also worked as an adviser on the film, including
teaching Lancaster how to kick a football. The movie premiered
in Carlisle in Oklahoma City on August Also in nineteen
(21:11):
fifty one, the Associated Press called on sports reporters to
compile lists of the best athletes of the first half
of the twentieth century. It's like the same thing that
happens at the end of every year and decade now.
Jesse Owens was named the best track and field athlete,
with Jim Thorpe coming in second. And then the greatest
(21:32):
athlete overall was Jim Thorpe, with two hundred and fifty
two of three hundred nine voters placing him in that
top spot. Coming in second was Babe Ruth. Jim Thorpe
spent the last couple of years of his life trying
to start various projects, but none of them really took off.
He died on March nifty three at the age of
(21:54):
about sixty four, shortly after he had had a third
heart attack. In the words of his New York Times
obituary quote, his memory should be kept for what it deserves,
that of the greatest all around athlete of our time.
There's more to Jim Thorpe's story, though, uh in part
because the Olympic medals that we have talked about a
few times, but then also because of a dispute over
(22:16):
his body, and we're going to talk about that after
a sponsor break. After Jim Thorpe died in his body
lay in state in California and it was viewed by
hundreds of mourners. Family received condolence letters from public figures,
(22:38):
including President Dwight Eisenhower. His body was then taken to Oklahoma,
and the plan was for both a Catholic funeral and
a Sacking Fox ceremony followed by a Sacking Fox burial.
The Oklahoma legislature had passed a bill a lotting funds
for a monument that would serve as his final resting place.
(22:59):
Thorpe had not left a will, but his sons reported
that he told them and others that he wanted to
be buried on sac and Fox Land. However, without really
explaining why, Governor Johnston Murray vetoed the legislation that set
aside funding for a memorial to Jim Thorpe. On April twelfth,
ninety three, the thunder Clan of the Second Fox Nation
(23:22):
started a two day funeral ceremony. Patsy Thorpe arrived at
the ceremony with police interrupting the proceedings and saying that
it was too cold. She had Jim's body loaded into
a hearse and take into a mortuary. A Catholic funeral
mass followed at St. Benedict's Roman Catholic Church in Shawnee.
(23:42):
Patty Thorpe didn't consult with Jim's children or other family
members or the sac and Fox Nation about what happened. Next,
she started looking for a place that was willing to
provide a final resting spot for Jim's remains, one that
she thought would be befitting of his life and his legacy,
and that turned out to be the towns of mock
(24:02):
Chunk and East mock Chunk, Pennsylvania. The towns were struggling
after the collapse of the mining industry in the area,
and town leaders hoped that this decision would make them
a tourist attraction. The town's merged renamed themselves Jim Thorpe
and started planning for the construction of a tomb that
would house Thorpe's body. As this was happening, in nineteen
(24:25):
fifty five, the NFL named its m v P Award
the Jim Thorpe Trophy. Jim Thorpe's body was entombed in
Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. In nineteen fifty seven, soil from four
locations was placed at the tomb. This included Thorpe's family
farm in Oklahoma, the Carlisle Athletic Field, New York's Polo Grounds,
(24:46):
and the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden. The memorial was
inscribed with King Gustav the fifth of Sweden's statement that
Thorpe was the greatest athlete in the world, and also
adorned with medallions that depicted Thorpe's athletic feet. Thorpe's children
did not attend this ceremony. This memorial did not, however,
become a tourist attraction as the town had hoped. When
(25:09):
Thorpe biographer Bob Wheeler visited as a child years later,
no one in the town could even tell him about
Jim Thorpe, and he found the tomb neglected and hidden
among overgrown weeds. Yeah, I watched to talk that he
gave at the Museum of the American Indian and he
talked about like he he was just such a fan
of sports in general. And he was on this trip
(25:31):
with his parents, and by total coincidence, they had driven
past Jim Thorpe, and he was like, let's stop, and
he sort of saw this spot. He was like, I
feel like there's something there. We should look at whatever
this is. And it turned out that that was like
Jim Thorpe's. It was Jim Thorpe's barial place, totally overgrown
and would not have known it without stopping there to
go look for it. To fast forward a bit in
(25:55):
the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGRA,
was en into law by President George H. W. Bush.
This law was passed quote as a way to correct
past abuses to and guarantee protection for the human remains
and cultural objects of Native American tribal culture. Among the
(26:15):
provisions of this law is the right to repatriation of
indigenous cultural items, including human remains that are quote controlled
by museums or federal agencies. The law basically paved the
way for Indigenous people in nations to have the remains
of their ancestors returned to them from museums where they
(26:35):
are held. Jim Thorpe's youngest son, John again known as Jack,
filed suit to have his father's remains repatriated to the
Sac and Fox Nation under Nagpra on June. He thought
that because his father's funeral ceremony had been interrupted, and
because he had not been buried on Sac and Fox Land,
that his soul was not at rest. As we mentioned earlier,
(26:58):
Jack Thorpe died in eleven and after his passing, his
surviving brothers, Bill and Richard were added to the suit,
along with the Sac and Fox Nation. In United States
District Court Judge Richard Caputo found in favor of Thorpe's sons.
He ruled that NAGRA applied to the town of jim Thorpe.
It could be defined as a museum receiving federal funds
(27:21):
because the town had gotten money under the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act of two thousand nine. But by that
point the town of jim Thorpe had become more of
a tourist attraction, although not specifically because of the Jim
Thorpe Memorial. The town had started hosting birthday celebrations and
other Thorpe memorials, and even though the memorial where he
(27:42):
was laid to rest wasn't its key tourist attraction, jim
Thorpe had become a core part of the town's identity.
Many residents, and at this point some of Thorpe's daughters
and grandchildren objected to the repatriation and filed an appeal.
As I understand it, by this point in the story,
the memorial was a lot better maintained than it had
(28:04):
been when his biographer found it as a child. On October,
a three judge panel of the US Third Circuit Court
of Appeals reversed the lower courts ruling under the absurdity doctrine.
The basic idea was that a literal reading of the
plain text of Nagar's provisions here would be in this
(28:27):
context absurd. The ruling had two key parts. One was
that Nagpra could not have been intended to overrule the
intent of the decedent's legal next of kin and passy Thorpe,
as the next of kin of Jim Thorpe had legally
made the decision for where he would be buried. The
other was that upholding the lower courts ruling would allow
(28:49):
Nagpra to become a tool to settle family disputes among
indigenous people, and in this case, the question of whether
to repatriate Thorpe's remains was at its heart of family
dispute and one that was complicated by centuries of indigenous history. Yeah. Again,
as I understand it, when the court dispute started, Jim
(29:10):
Thorpe's children were pretty unified in there. They're feeling that
his remains should be returned back to the Second Fox Nation.
But over time not all of them agreed anymore. And
this is where to me, this just becomes so heartbreaking
because you see these things play out in families where
people start to disagree about something that important, and like,
that is where we were at this point. On October five,
(29:34):
the U. S. Supreme Court elected not to hear this case.
While the sound of Jim Thorpe and some of Thorpe's
descendants were satisfied with that outcome, it was heartbreaking for
his surviving sons, Richard and Bill, both of whom were
in their eighties and had hoped to see their father
buried in Second Fox Land before their own deaths. Also
heartbreaking for the Second Fox Nation as a whole. Bill
(29:56):
Thorpe died at the age of ninety nineteen and Richard
Thorpe died in January of this year at the age
of seven. The ruling from the Third Court of appeals
has been controversial, though nag press still applies when a
museum's acquisition of a person's remains was done legally, so
the legality of Patsy Thorpe's decision does not really apply.
(30:18):
NAGPRA also includes specific language about mediating disputed claims. It
has to since remains, burial objects, and other items being
repatriated are often very old and can be connected to
multiple families, tribes, or nations, and the years between Jim
Thorpe's death and the court cases related to his burial place,
there was a whole other effort going on that was
(30:40):
related to his legacy, and that was an attempt to
have his amateur status reinstated from the nine twelve Olympic
Games and his medals returned to his family. In nineteen
seventy three, after ongoing advocacy, the Amateur Athletics Union restored
Thorpe's status as an amateur athlete for the time covering
those games, but the IOC did not take any further
(31:02):
action about his medals or his record. Thorpe biographer Robert
Wheeler and his wife Dr Florence Ridland, who founded the
Jim Thorpe Foundation in two were a big part of
this effort. Ridland managed to find a copy of the
official by laws of the nineteen twelve Olympic Games sandwiched
between two shelves at the Library of Congress, and one
(31:24):
of its provisions was that any review of the game's
outcome had to take place within thirty days of the games.
The article that widely publicized Thorpe's time in semi professional
baseball came out more than six months after the games
were over. Yes, so, regardless of the question about whether
semi professional baseball professionalized an athlete in a different sport
(31:45):
three years later, the IOC had not followed its own
rules in terms of this, basically the statute of limitations
on how much time could pass before something like this
could happen. So, based on this new information, on January
nineteen three, the IOC presented Thorpe's descendants with replicas of
his medals. It did not, however, alter the adjusted placements
(32:08):
of the other finishers to reflect that Thorpe really had one. Instead,
Jim Thorpe and Ferdinand By are both listed as gold
medalists in the men's pentathlon, with Thorpe's score of seven
and Buys score of twenty one. Jim Thorpe and Hugo
Vicelander are both listed as winners of the decathlon, with
(32:29):
Thorpe's score of eight thousand, four hundred twelve point nine
five five and Vicelander's score of seven thousand, seven hundred
twenty four point four nine five, so they are all
listed as sort of co gold medalists. The organization Bright
path Strong started a petition to fully restore Jim Thorpe's
(32:51):
Olympic record in July of Multiple indigenous tribes and organizations
are involved, along with Picture Works Entertainment, which is working
on a forthcoming biopic. Yeah that is all at bright
paths strong dot com if you would like more information
about it. Um that is Jim Thorpe. What you got
(33:15):
in the way a listener mail this time around? I
have listener mail from Rose and Rose wrote in after
our recent episode on Cecilia Panga Poshkin and Rose says, Hello, First,
I love your podcast and I've been listening since sometime
in While staying up to the down new episodes, I've
also been going methodically backward through the archive and am
(33:35):
currently in December two thousand nine. I'm just gonna say soon,
the episodes are going to get a latch shorter if
you're going backwards in that way. The ones from oh eight,
some of them are like four minutes. I caught your
exasperation about the off handed suggestion that Cecilia Panga Poshkin
could take over managing the glass plates collection if she
(33:56):
went to work at the Harvard Observatory. That was made
because she was female and interested after googling to make sure.
I'd like to point out that the collection is still
managed by women, and I am not sure if a
man has ever been in charge of it. The fact
seems now to be a point of pride for the collection.
If you poke around that site, Rose included a link
to the plate stacks at Harvard. If you poke around
(34:19):
that site a bit, you'll see that there is an
effort to digitize the place that has been going on
since two thousand three or so, which men have been
involved in. But the curator of the collection is currently
still a woman. I agree with your exasperation from the story,
but generally speaking, the management of this collection staying in
the hands of women as the fields of archives and
library science professionalized, is actually kind of impressive. Often women
(34:41):
get pushed out of prestigious positions as fields professionalized, and
I am not quite sure how that managed to be
avoided in this case, especially with the added factor of
the collection being scientific in nature. Uh. We've talked before
about how when we came on as hosts, we got
a lot of criticism about what our voices sounded like
(35:02):
in the fact that we were ruining the podcast, And
so Rose sort of talks about the experience of going
backward in the archive in in the way of continuing
to keep up with new episodes, but then also going
back through them in sort of a first order, and
the sort of jarring experience of suddenly having different hosts
(35:22):
who don't sound the same. UM. I'm not going to
read that whole bit, but thank you so much Rose
for sending this on. UM. This is a really great
point about how, UM, like a lot of fields that
were considered to be women's work, women got pushed out
(35:43):
of as it became more a thought of as a
professional field and not like a more clerical one. So
we saw the same kind of things with like computer coding,
like women were a lot of the first coders, and
then that gradually came a field that was seen as
one that was for men. UM. So that is a
totally fair point about the fact that the collection of
(36:08):
Harvard is still being created by women, even as the
field of museum curation UM and and collections curation became
more and more professionalized. UM. In terms of back when
Cecilia paying Kapashkin came on to Harvard as part of
that collection, it was not regarded as like a professional
(36:28):
field that required any kind of professional ability or training
at all. UM. The very first person to start cataloging
all of those glass plates at Harvard had really been
uh Pickerings housekeeper, who he basically hired because he was like,
you seem generally competent, you could probably do this, And
(36:50):
then it just sort of just became how it was
like that some competent woman could probably do this was
sort of the attitude. UM. We've also talked in previous
sisodes before about how Pickering recruited all of these women
to work with him, and they got derisive nicknames about
being his harem for example. So thank you so much, Rose,
(37:12):
We're for sending UM this email. That is a great point.
I also enjoyed reading the story about the sort of
jarring experience of of suddenly getting to the prior episode
hosts part of the podcast, even though I did not
read that whole thing on this episode. I hope everyone
has enjoyed hearing about Jim Thorpe. Uh enjoyed is maybe
(37:34):
not always the best work, because some parts of that
history are really difficult. Um, but yeah, I think Jim
Thorpe is amazing. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, we are a
history podcast at i heeart radio dot com and then
we are all over miss in History, which is where
you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can
subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
(37:57):
and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you get 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 Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
have the third part of what I think is our
first ever three parter on the show. There may have
(00:24):
been three parters by briar hosts that I'm not remembering,
but for Holly and me, it's the first sort of
trilogy of podcast. In part one, we talked about Jim
Thorpe's early life and his upbringing in boarding schools for
Native American children, including his time on the track and
football teams at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and then in
(00:45):
part two we talked about his just incredible performance at
the nineteen twelve Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm, and then
how he was later stripped of the medals that he
had earned in those games. And are concluding episode, we're
going to talk about his time the professional athlete and
then his life after the end of his career as
an athlete, including two weiss of the story that have
(01:07):
just tragically continued for a long time after his death.
One aspect of it I find particularly heartbreaking, which we
will get to After being stripped of his Olympic medals,
Jim Thorpe publicly tried to downplay things, saying he knew
that he had earned them, but really he was heartbroken
at the loss of his medals and the fact that
he was now barred from being an amateur athlete. He
(01:31):
started trying to figure out what he was going to
do next after the Olympics. Thorpe had turned down offers
to box and to appear on vaudeville. After his medals
and amateur status were revoked, he started looking for opportunities
as a professional baseball player. In Thorpe signed with the
New York Giants, which was the top ranked team in
(01:51):
the league. His contract was for six thousand dollars a
year for three years. He had never been as strong
at baseball as he had been in football or track
and field, and there were also some rumors that he
was being brought onto the team basically to bring in
fans and not to actually play. Running alongside that was
(02:11):
the idea that the expense of paying him was going
to be worth it as long as his presence on
the team sold tickets. One of the reasons that Thorpe
had wanted to qualify for the Olympics was that he
wanted to prove that he was worthy of marrying Iva Miller,
also called Ivy, who was his longtime sweetheart from Carlyle.
(02:31):
Ivy's background is a little bit complicated. She had been
born in Cherokee Country and her mother was reportedly part Cherokee,
but there's no evidence to back that up. Her father
seems to have fabricated an indigenous ancestry for her and
her siblings so that he could enroll them in a
boarding school after their mother died. It is not entirely
(02:53):
clear how much or what indigenous ancestry she had, if any,
and whether or not Jim knew about any of this.
Jim and Iva got married after the nineteen thirteen World Series,
which the Giants lost to the Philadelphia Athletics four games
to one. They got married at the Catholic Chapel that
they had attended while they were at Carlisle, and their
(03:13):
honeymoon was the Giants White Sox World Tour, in which
the Giants and the White Sox traveled west across the
United States and then to Japan, with stops all over Asia, Europe,
and Northern Africa. Jim and Iva would go on to
have four children, Jim Junior, Gayl, Charlotte, and Grace. Back
at Carlisle, students were petitioning for an investigation into poor
(03:37):
conditions at the school. The results of this investigation were appalling,
detailing deprivation, beatings, and virtually the entire school being quote
made subservient to football and athletics. The report also leveled
numerous charges against Pop Warner, who had been the coach
of the athletics there and one of the people who
(03:58):
really encouraged Jim Thorpe, from abusive treatment of players to
financial corruption. Warner denied these charges, claiming that they were
the work of a vendetta by disgruntled former athletes. He
left Carlisle and took a job with the University of Pittsburgh.
The Carlisle School closed in nineteen I think this report
(04:18):
is like it's indicative of one of the truths about Carlisle,
which is that Jim, as an athlete and other athletes
there were shielded from some of the worst things about
the school in their position of being athletes, And like
this report brought a lot of that to like for
people who didn't know about it. On December fifteenth of
nineteen sixteen, Thorpe got a letter that he was now
(04:40):
qualified to be a US citizen and closed was the
deed for his land allotment. As we talked about earlier,
there was a whole process where if somebody had been
able to maintain a land allotment for a long enough time,
they were qualified to become a citizen. That same year,
he also started playing and coaching the Canton bull Dogs,
which is a professional football team based in Canton, Ohio.
(05:03):
So he was playing professional baseball and football at the
same time. There their seasons didn't entirely overlap, but he
was going from one professional sport to another, and then
going back to Oklahoma to support himself and his family,
primarily by hunting when neither of those sports was in season.
As all of this was happening, Thorpe was still under
contract to the New York Giants, although his baseball career
(05:27):
involved being repeatedly sent down to the minor leagues or
loaned out to other teams. When the Selective Service Act
of nineteen seventeen was passed to allow the United States
to conscript an army for World War One, many Native
American men registered, and about twelve thousand served in the
military during the war. Because he was married and supporting
(05:48):
his wife and children, Thorpe was exempt. Apparently. The Giants
manager John J. McGraw also discouraged Thorpe from volunteering, arguing
that as an internationally famous fleet he could become a target.
In nineteen eighteen, Jim and Iva's son, Jim Jr. Died
of polio, and it was only three Jim was obviously bereft,
(06:11):
absolutely grief stricken. People who knew him said that he
was just never the same afterward. But McGraw really did
not have a lot of patience for Thorpe's lack of
focus on the field in the aftermath of his son's death.
He already thought that Thorpe was too prone to goofing around.
Thorpe's nickname back at Carlisle had actually been libbling, which
(06:33):
meant coursing around. Jim's relationship with Iva had already been
kind of strained over the issue of alcohol. Jim's drinking
was comparable to that of his teammates, but Iva would
have much preferred him to be a teetotaler. In the
wake of Jim Junior's death, both Jim's relationship with his
wife and his performance at work really started to suffer. Then,
(06:55):
in nineteen nineteen, Thorpe left the New York Giants. Report
worded Lely McGraw had called him a dumb Indian after
he missed a signal, and Thorpe, outraged, had chased him
down the field until his teammates intervened. Thorpe was traded
to the Boston Braves, and he played with them for
one season before going back to the minor leagues. Thorpe's
(07:16):
career in professional football was going somewhat better, though. The
American Professional Football Association was formed in nineteen twenty and
Thorpe was named its first president. This organization would later
become the National Football League, or the NFL, so you'll
see a lot of times Jim Thorpe was the first
president of the NFL. In the nineteen twenties, Thorpe also
started to move from playing and coaching in existing teams
(07:39):
to starting new ones. In nineteen two, Thorpe helped Canton
fan and dog breeder Walter Lingo start the All Indigenous
Urrang Indians football team. As part of this arrangement, Lingo
paid Thorpe to start and coach the team and to
manage his kennel for five hundred dollars a week. This
may sound like an out of the blue arrangement, but
(08:00):
Thorpe had a lot of years of experience training and
caring for hunting dogs. In addition to so many other
things we've talked about him being good at, he was
very good with animals. Carlisle Indian Industrial School had aggressively
recruited and then trained many of the best indigenous football
players in the United States, had sort of sucked up
all of the football talent, and then it had closed
(08:22):
down four years before all of this happened, So a
lot of the players on this team were actually older
than Thorpe was. Although the team did not do particularly
well in its first season, Lingo seemed to enjoy it
and funded it for a nineteen twenty three season as well.
In nineteen twenty three, Jim and Iva separated. Their marriage
had just never recovered from the death of Jim Jr.
(08:43):
They legally divorced in n that same year. Jim remarried
to FRIEDA. Kirkpatrick, who was eighteen years his junior and
who he had started getting to know as his marriage
to Iva was crumbling. They went on to have four sons,
carl Bill, Richard, John, who was known as Jack. Jim's
relationships with Iva and Frieda, and with the children that
(09:05):
he fathered during those two marriages could be a little complicated,
as was the case with Iva. Frieda did not really
approve of Jim's drinking, which was kind of hit or miss.
There were times when he gave it up, but there
were times that it became heavier as their marriage went on.
As a professional athlete playing two different sports, he was
also away from home a lot when his children were young.
(09:27):
His grandson Michael D. Koehler, writing in an article and
Educational Digest, wrote that his mother, Charlotte, had sometimes felt
like Thorpe didn't even know her name. At the same time, though,
Thorpe's children really seemed devoted to him, although that devotion
could take somewhat different forms, which we will get to
in a bit. In ninety six, Thorpe played his final
(09:49):
season with the Canton Bulldogs. In seven, he played and
coached a season with the all Indigenous World Famous Indians
basketball team. By this point, though his career is a
professional athlete was really winding down. He played his last
professional football games, which ended his time as a pro
athlete in Thorpe was about forty at this point, which
(10:11):
would be a little older for a pro athlete, like
it's hard on your body, but it also wasn't entirely
what he was planning. In nineteen twenty nine, the Carnegie
Foundation published a report called American College Athletics, which revealed
all kinds of issues. There were payments to players and
secret funding and just corruption in college athletics. This report
(10:35):
framed college athletics as a threat to education, and the
suspicions that it raised trickled over into professional sports as well.
In the ninety nine stock market crash and the Great
Depression also seriously reduced the number of opportunities for pro
athletes and coaches. So regardless of what Thorpe may have
wanted to do as an athlete at this point, there
(10:57):
just were not many opportunities in professional sports at all
for him to try to pursue. We're going to talk
about Jim Thorpe's life after professional sports. After we first
pause and have a sponsor break between n and Jim.
(11:20):
Thorpe did all kinds of jobs to make ends meet.
He worked as a laborer and a movie extra. He
eventually started a casting agency to advocate for Indigenous actors
to be cast as indigenous characters on screen. This, of course,
is a little bit of a tangle because a lot
of the roles that were available at the time were
(11:41):
really heavily stereotyped. But his goal was really to help
indigenous actors get a foot in the door in Hollywood,
including stuff like helping them find housing, helping make sure
they had enough to eat. He was doing a lot
of work to just help, especially other Indigenous people in Hollywood.
By the mid nineteen thirties, Thorpe was most supporting himself
through speaking engagements and acting as well as odd jobs.
(12:04):
He appeared in more than seventy films as an actor
or an extra. His busiest year on that front was
nineteen thirty five, when he appeared in seventeen films. He
also sold the rights to his life story to MGM
ahead of the nineteen thirty two Olympic Games. He also
collaborated with Thomas F. Collison to write Jim Thorpe's History
(12:24):
of the Olympics, and then he followed up the publication
of that book with public readings and signings. The nineteen
thirty two Summer Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles,
and that's actually where Thorpe was living at the time,
but he couldn't afford a ticket. When his fans heard
about this, people offered to buy one for him, and
then he wound up getting a press pass for the
(12:45):
press box. During opening ceremonies, Vice President Charles Curtis, member
of the car Nation and the first person of color
to serve as Vice President of the United States, read
an article about Thorpe being moved to tears from the
press box, and he invited Thorpe to sit in the
presidential box. The next day. The crowd gave sorp a
standing ovation as he took his seat. As all of
(13:06):
this was going on, the United States federal government was
really shifting its policies toward Indigenous people. The Wheeler Howard Act,
also called the Indian Reorganization Act and later nicknamed the
Indian New Deal, was passed in We talked about this
a little bit and sort of how it fits into
the overall context of of federal Indian law in our
(13:30):
two part on the occupation of Alcatraz. This act moved
the federal government away from re allotting indigenous lands to
individual people and trying to assimilate indigenous people's into white culture.
It returned a lot of the so called surplus lands
back to indigenous nations, and then also tried to move
(13:51):
those nations toward a state of sovereignty rather than Indigenous
people being managed by the federal government. This act and
fluted provisions for funding as well. If an indigenous nation
adopted a written constitution, it was eligible for loans to
pay for things like new infrastructure and educational programs. For
people in Jim Thorpe's generation, who had spent most of
(14:14):
their lives in schools that systematically tried to strip them
of their Indigenous identity and force them to assimilate with
white culture, and being told that their nation's cultures and
practices were inferior to white culture, this shift could be
profoundly disorienting. Different tribes also responded really differently to the
federal government's encouragement to draft and vote on a new constitution,
(14:37):
and there were also differences of opinion within those tribes
and nations about how best to move forward. As we
say on the show, a lot no group is a
monolith and not everybody agreed with all of this. For example,
there were members of the Second Fox Nation who wanted
to approve a tribal constitution under the terms of the
Wheeler Howard Act. Then there were others who just totally
(14:58):
distrusted this entire idea you and saw the requirement for
a constitution as just another way for the federal government
to try to control indigenous nations. It was this faction
that recruited Jim Thorpe to advocate on their behalf. Ultimately,
the Sac and Fox Nation did approve a new constitution,
although it has taken decades and a series of court
(15:20):
battles for the nation to put many of the terms
of that constitution into practice. In the words of Jim's son, Jack,
who was principal chief of the Second Fox Nation for
seven years beginning in nineteen eighty, quote, the Sac and
Fox went through eleven major lawsuits to exercise our right
to control our destiny. We are still in court battles.
(15:41):
Jack Thorpe, by the way, died in eleven at the
age of seventy three. He will come up again in
just a bit. Jim Thorpe's position in the middle of
all this was that indigenous people should be able to
manage their own affairs rather than being perpetual wards of
the United States government, and in his mind, this included
things like being able to follow their own religions and
(16:03):
observe their own cultural practices. But he also generally disagreed
with legislation that was targeted specifically at Indigenous people, even
if that legislation was meant to be helpful. He thought
that indigenous people experienced lots of hardships, but so did
people of other races and ethnicities, so he thought that
legislation that set indigenous people apart in some way was
(16:27):
really infantilizing and controlling. In nineteen thirty seven, Burton K. Wheeler,
who was one of the legislators who the Wheeler Howard
Act had been named for, had actually come to oppose it,
and he introduced a bill to try to repeal it.
Jim Thorpe actually supported this repeal bill, which ultimately failed.
In one Jim's wife, Frieda, filed for divorce. As we
(16:50):
noted earlier, she had never really approved of Jim's drinking,
and while he had given it up at one point,
he did still drink from time to time, and as
time went on. When he did choose to drink, he
then drank more heavily and he was more likely to
get into some kind of altercation while under the influence.
Frieda also thought that Jim was not careful enough with money,
(17:10):
and he also spent long stretches of time away from home.
That was something that was normal for him, but it
was really a strain on her. Jim did not contest
the divorce, Yeah, like he there were there are two
things here. One is that even though he had spent
so much of his upbringing in boarding schools, like he
also grew up in a culture where it was normal,
especially for men to like go on prolonged hunts away
(17:31):
from the family like that. That was just sort of
a thing that happened, and it was not what Frieda
was expecting or about at all um. And then the
other thing was he gave a lot of money away
to people that needed it, especially other indigenous people, and
so he would be broke. Were like, why don't you
have any money, and it was because he gave it away,
And that was like another thing that caused a big
rift in between them. When passing through Dearborn, Michigan in
(17:54):
the early nineties. On a speaking tour, Thorpe was offered
a job as a secure guard at the Ford plant there.
He wound up taking it, and then while he was
living in Dearborn, he had his first heart attack. Then,
during World War Two, he was too old to be
accepted into the Armed forces, so he joined the US
Merchant Marine. He sailed aboard the USS Southwest Victory, and
(18:17):
then when people realized who he was, they got him
to start doing things like hospital visits and public appearances
to try to boost you know, soldiers and other people's morale,
which is a thing that I kind of love. Like.
That was not what he had gotten on board for.
But as soon as they realized that they had Jim
Thorpe on their ship, they were like, WHOA, okay, we
gotta work out a way for you to make people
feel better. On June two, n Thorpe got married for
(18:40):
the third time to Patricia Gladys ask you. She went
by Patsy. They got married in Tijuana, and apparently Thorpe
was inebriated enough not to remember the ceremony when he
woke up next to her the next day. Patsy acted
as Thorpe's manager in addition to being his wife, for
example getting him to start charging five hundred dollars for
(19:01):
speaking engagements rather than doing most of them for free.
She also led an attempt to get his Olympic medals
restored in the late nineteen forties. But Patsy has also
been described as opportunistic, controlling, and even cruel, with expensive
tastes that burned through the money that she was helping
Jim bring in. Their relationship was often stormy. By this
(19:23):
point in his life, Thorpe had become an advocate for
athletics programs to try to curb juvenile delinquency, including a
plan to develop a Junior Olympics program. He also advocated
for the Sac and Fox Nation to be compensated for
land that the government had bought in eighteen fourteen, which
later turned out to contain oil fields. It's a whole
(19:44):
different topic of like land rights versus the mineral rights
that are associated with them. After World War Two was over,
he started appearing in exhibition games, and also inspired by
the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, he started a
baseball team for girls. In ninety nine, Weren't Brothers announced
that a film was in the works about Jim Thorpe's life.
(20:05):
This became the first mainstream Hollywood movie about a living
Indigenous person rather than a Western or a movie about
an Indigenous historical figure or event. This announcement brought him
a new wave of fame, including offers to work as
a coach. In the early nineteen fifties, Thorpe noticed a
sore on his lip that turned out to be cancer,
(20:27):
and as he was undergoing treatment, Passy made a tearful
televised plea for help, saying that they were penniless. They
definitely were not wealthy. They were not penniless, though, but
this allegation led people to do things like send outrage
letters to Warner Brothers under the idea that Thorpe had
not been compensated for his life story, even though he
(20:49):
had sold the rights to this story like way earlier
on this film, Jim Thorpe All American came out in
nineteen fifty one, and it started Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe.
Thorpe also worked as an adviser on the film, including
teaching Lancaster how to kick a football. The movie premiered
in Carlisle in Oklahoma City on August Also in nineteen
(21:11):
fifty one, the Associated Press called on sports reporters to
compile lists of the best athletes of the first half
of the twentieth century. It's like the same thing that
happens at the end of every year and decade now.
Jesse Owens was named the best track and field athlete,
with Jim Thorpe coming in second. And then the greatest
(21:32):
athlete overall was Jim Thorpe, with two hundred and fifty
two of three hundred nine voters placing him in that
top spot. Coming in second was Babe Ruth. Jim Thorpe
spent the last couple of years of his life trying
to start various projects, but none of them really took off.
He died on March nifty three at the age of
(21:54):
about sixty four, shortly after he had had a third
heart attack. In the words of his New York Times
obituary quote, his memory should be kept for what it deserves,
that of the greatest all around athlete of our time.
There's more to Jim Thorpe's story, though, uh in part
because the Olympic medals that we have talked about a
few times, but then also because of a dispute over
(22:16):
his body, and we're going to talk about that after
a sponsor break. After Jim Thorpe died in his body
lay in state in California and it was viewed by
hundreds of mourners. Family received condolence letters from public figures,
(22:38):
including President Dwight Eisenhower. His body was then taken to Oklahoma,
and the plan was for both a Catholic funeral and
a Sacking Fox ceremony followed by a Sacking Fox burial.
The Oklahoma legislature had passed a bill a lotting funds
for a monument that would serve as his final resting place.
(22:59):
Thorpe had not left a will, but his sons reported
that he told them and others that he wanted to
be buried on sac and Fox Land. However, without really
explaining why, Governor Johnston Murray vetoed the legislation that set
aside funding for a memorial to Jim Thorpe. On April twelfth,
ninety three, the thunder Clan of the Second Fox Nation
(23:22):
started a two day funeral ceremony. Patsy Thorpe arrived at
the ceremony with police interrupting the proceedings and saying that
it was too cold. She had Jim's body loaded into
a hearse and take into a mortuary. A Catholic funeral
mass followed at St. Benedict's Roman Catholic Church in Shawnee.
(23:42):
Patty Thorpe didn't consult with Jim's children or other family
members or the sac and Fox Nation about what happened. Next,
she started looking for a place that was willing to
provide a final resting spot for Jim's remains, one that
she thought would be befitting of his life and his legacy,
and that turned out to be the towns of mock
(24:02):
Chunk and East mock Chunk, Pennsylvania. The towns were struggling
after the collapse of the mining industry in the area,
and town leaders hoped that this decision would make them
a tourist attraction. The town's merged renamed themselves Jim Thorpe
and started planning for the construction of a tomb that
would house Thorpe's body. As this was happening, in nineteen
(24:25):
fifty five, the NFL named its m v P Award
the Jim Thorpe Trophy. Jim Thorpe's body was entombed in
Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. In nineteen fifty seven, soil from four
locations was placed at the tomb. This included Thorpe's family
farm in Oklahoma, the Carlisle Athletic Field, New York's Polo Grounds,
(24:46):
and the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden. The memorial was
inscribed with King Gustav the fifth of Sweden's statement that
Thorpe was the greatest athlete in the world, and also
adorned with medallions that depicted Thorpe's athletic feet. Thorpe's children
did not attend this ceremony. This memorial did not, however,
become a tourist attraction as the town had hoped. When
(25:09):
Thorpe biographer Bob Wheeler visited as a child years later,
no one in the town could even tell him about
Jim Thorpe, and he found the tomb neglected and hidden
among overgrown weeds. Yeah, I watched to talk that he
gave at the Museum of the American Indian and he
talked about like he he was just such a fan
of sports in general. And he was on this trip
(25:31):
with his parents, and by total coincidence, they had driven
past Jim Thorpe, and he was like, let's stop, and
he sort of saw this spot. He was like, I
feel like there's something there. We should look at whatever
this is. And it turned out that that was like
Jim Thorpe's. It was Jim Thorpe's barial place, totally overgrown
and would not have known it without stopping there to
go look for it. To fast forward a bit in
(25:55):
the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGRA,
was en into law by President George H. W. Bush.
This law was passed quote as a way to correct
past abuses to and guarantee protection for the human remains
and cultural objects of Native American tribal culture. Among the
(26:15):
provisions of this law is the right to repatriation of
indigenous cultural items, including human remains that are quote controlled
by museums or federal agencies. The law basically paved the
way for Indigenous people in nations to have the remains
of their ancestors returned to them from museums where they
(26:35):
are held. Jim Thorpe's youngest son, John again known as Jack,
filed suit to have his father's remains repatriated to the
Sac and Fox Nation under Nagpra on June. He thought
that because his father's funeral ceremony had been interrupted, and
because he had not been buried on Sac and Fox Land,
that his soul was not at rest. As we mentioned earlier,
(26:58):
Jack Thorpe died in eleven and after his passing, his
surviving brothers, Bill and Richard were added to the suit,
along with the Sac and Fox Nation. In United States
District Court Judge Richard Caputo found in favor of Thorpe's sons.
He ruled that NAGRA applied to the town of jim Thorpe.
It could be defined as a museum receiving federal funds
(27:21):
because the town had gotten money under the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act of two thousand nine. But by that
point the town of jim Thorpe had become more of
a tourist attraction, although not specifically because of the Jim
Thorpe Memorial. The town had started hosting birthday celebrations and
other Thorpe memorials, and even though the memorial where he
(27:42):
was laid to rest wasn't its key tourist attraction, jim
Thorpe had become a core part of the town's identity.
Many residents, and at this point some of Thorpe's daughters
and grandchildren objected to the repatriation and filed an appeal.
As I understand it, by this point in the story,
the memorial was a lot better maintained than it had
(28:04):
been when his biographer found it as a child. On October,
a three judge panel of the US Third Circuit Court
of Appeals reversed the lower courts ruling under the absurdity doctrine.
The basic idea was that a literal reading of the
plain text of Nagar's provisions here would be in this
(28:27):
context absurd. The ruling had two key parts. One was
that Nagpra could not have been intended to overrule the
intent of the decedent's legal next of kin and passy Thorpe,
as the next of kin of Jim Thorpe had legally
made the decision for where he would be buried. The
other was that upholding the lower courts ruling would allow
(28:49):
Nagpra to become a tool to settle family disputes among
indigenous people, and in this case, the question of whether
to repatriate Thorpe's remains was at its heart of family
dispute and one that was complicated by centuries of indigenous history. Yeah. Again,
as I understand it, when the court dispute started, Jim
(29:10):
Thorpe's children were pretty unified in there. They're feeling that
his remains should be returned back to the Second Fox Nation.
But over time not all of them agreed anymore. And
this is where to me, this just becomes so heartbreaking
because you see these things play out in families where
people start to disagree about something that important, and like,
that is where we were at this point. On October five,
(29:34):
the U. S. Supreme Court elected not to hear this case.
While the sound of Jim Thorpe and some of Thorpe's
descendants were satisfied with that outcome, it was heartbreaking for
his surviving sons, Richard and Bill, both of whom were
in their eighties and had hoped to see their father
buried in Second Fox Land before their own deaths. Also
heartbreaking for the Second Fox Nation as a whole. Bill
(29:56):
Thorpe died at the age of ninety nineteen and Richard
Thorpe died in January of this year at the age
of seven. The ruling from the Third Court of appeals
has been controversial, though nag press still applies when a
museum's acquisition of a person's remains was done legally, so
the legality of Patsy Thorpe's decision does not really apply.
(30:18):
NAGPRA also includes specific language about mediating disputed claims. It
has to since remains, burial objects, and other items being
repatriated are often very old and can be connected to
multiple families, tribes, or nations, and the years between Jim
Thorpe's death and the court cases related to his burial place,
there was a whole other effort going on that was
(30:40):
related to his legacy, and that was an attempt to
have his amateur status reinstated from the nine twelve Olympic
Games and his medals returned to his family. In nineteen
seventy three, after ongoing advocacy, the Amateur Athletics Union restored
Thorpe's status as an amateur athlete for the time covering
those games, but the IOC did not take any further
(31:02):
action about his medals or his record. Thorpe biographer Robert
Wheeler and his wife Dr Florence Ridland, who founded the
Jim Thorpe Foundation in two were a big part of
this effort. Ridland managed to find a copy of the
official by laws of the nineteen twelve Olympic Games sandwiched
between two shelves at the Library of Congress, and one
(31:24):
of its provisions was that any review of the game's
outcome had to take place within thirty days of the games.
The article that widely publicized Thorpe's time in semi professional
baseball came out more than six months after the games
were over. Yes, so, regardless of the question about whether
semi professional baseball professionalized an athlete in a different sport
(31:45):
three years later, the IOC had not followed its own
rules in terms of this, basically the statute of limitations
on how much time could pass before something like this
could happen. So, based on this new information, on January
nineteen three, the IOC presented Thorpe's descendants with replicas of
his medals. It did not, however, alter the adjusted placements
(32:08):
of the other finishers to reflect that Thorpe really had one. Instead,
Jim Thorpe and Ferdinand By are both listed as gold
medalists in the men's pentathlon, with Thorpe's score of seven
and Buys score of twenty one. Jim Thorpe and Hugo
Vicelander are both listed as winners of the decathlon, with
(32:29):
Thorpe's score of eight thousand, four hundred twelve point nine
five five and Vicelander's score of seven thousand, seven hundred
twenty four point four nine five, so they are all
listed as sort of co gold medalists. The organization Bright
path Strong started a petition to fully restore Jim Thorpe's
(32:51):
Olympic record in July of Multiple indigenous tribes and organizations
are involved, along with Picture Works Entertainment, which is working
on a forthcoming biopic. Yeah that is all at bright
paths strong dot com if you would like more information
about it. Um that is Jim Thorpe. What you got
(33:15):
in the way a listener mail this time around? I
have listener mail from Rose and Rose wrote in after
our recent episode on Cecilia Panga Poshkin and Rose says, Hello, First,
I love your podcast and I've been listening since sometime
in While staying up to the down new episodes, I've
also been going methodically backward through the archive and am
(33:35):
currently in December two thousand nine. I'm just gonna say soon,
the episodes are going to get a latch shorter if
you're going backwards in that way. The ones from oh eight,
some of them are like four minutes. I caught your
exasperation about the off handed suggestion that Cecilia Panga Poshkin
could take over managing the glass plates collection if she
(33:56):
went to work at the Harvard Observatory. That was made
because she was female and interested after googling to make sure.
I'd like to point out that the collection is still
managed by women, and I am not sure if a
man has ever been in charge of it. The fact
seems now to be a point of pride for the collection.
If you poke around that site, Rose included a link
to the plate stacks at Harvard. If you poke around
(34:19):
that site a bit, you'll see that there is an
effort to digitize the place that has been going on
since two thousand three or so, which men have been
involved in. But the curator of the collection is currently
still a woman. I agree with your exasperation from the story,
but generally speaking, the management of this collection staying in
the hands of women as the fields of archives and
library science professionalized, is actually kind of impressive. Often women
(34:41):
get pushed out of prestigious positions as fields professionalized, and
I am not quite sure how that managed to be
avoided in this case, especially with the added factor of
the collection being scientific in nature. Uh. We've talked before
about how when we came on as hosts, we got
a lot of criticism about what our voices sounded like
(35:02):
in the fact that we were ruining the podcast, And
so Rose sort of talks about the experience of going
backward in the archive in in the way of continuing
to keep up with new episodes, but then also going
back through them in sort of a first order, and
the sort of jarring experience of suddenly having different hosts
(35:22):
who don't sound the same. UM. I'm not going to
read that whole bit, but thank you so much Rose
for sending this on. UM. This is a really great
point about how, UM, like a lot of fields that
were considered to be women's work, women got pushed out
(35:43):
of as it became more a thought of as a
professional field and not like a more clerical one. So
we saw the same kind of things with like computer coding,
like women were a lot of the first coders, and
then that gradually came a field that was seen as
one that was for men. UM. So that is a
totally fair point about the fact that the collection of
(36:08):
Harvard is still being created by women, even as the
field of museum curation UM and and collections curation became
more and more professionalized. UM. In terms of back when
Cecilia paying Kapashkin came on to Harvard as part of
that collection, it was not regarded as like a professional
(36:28):
field that required any kind of professional ability or training
at all. UM. The very first person to start cataloging
all of those glass plates at Harvard had really been
uh Pickerings housekeeper, who he basically hired because he was like,
you seem generally competent, you could probably do this, And
(36:50):
then it just sort of just became how it was
like that some competent woman could probably do this was
sort of the attitude. UM. We've also talked in previous
sisodes before about how Pickering recruited all of these women
to work with him, and they got derisive nicknames about
being his harem for example. So thank you so much, Rose,
(37:12):
We're for sending UM this email. That is a great point.
I also enjoyed reading the story about the sort of
jarring experience of of suddenly getting to the prior episode
hosts part of the podcast, even though I did not
read that whole thing on this episode. I hope everyone
has enjoyed hearing about Jim Thorpe. Uh enjoyed is maybe
(37:34):
not always the best work, because some parts of that
history are really difficult. Um, but yeah, I think Jim
Thorpe is amazing. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast, we are a
history podcast at i heeart radio dot com and then
we are all over miss in History, which is where
you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You can
subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
(37:57):
and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you get 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
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