War On the Gridiron

PETER: We’ll begin with a story from the late 19th century, the very same era in which the first of those museum dioramas we just heard about were starting to show up. It begins in 1893 at the Carlisle Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania. The superintendent of that school, a man named Richard Henry Pratt, had banned the game of football a few years earlier after one student had broken his leg in a game. But now, at the urging of a number of young men at the school, Pratt was beginning to see football in a new light.

DAVID ADAMS: What he saw in it was a very sort of modern sport.

BRIAN: This is historian, David Adams, author of a book about Indian boarding schools. David says that in the 1890s, football was widely thought of as a complex, strategic, and modern sport. This image was helped along by the fact that the most advanced schools, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Brown, also had the best football teams.

DAVID ADAMS: So his idea was that if Indians could display their equality on a football field, they in fact would display their ability to totally assimilate into the culture. And so Pratt saw this as a way of advertising his model of Indian education.

BRIAN: Pratt’s model of education had one core objective– to Americanize Indians by removing them from their family cultures.

DAVID ADAMS: I guess we would call him a radical assimilationist. He believed that Native American cultures were worthless. But he believed that there was not any inherent genetical defect in Indians. And so he believed they could be fully integrated into the American scene. And he saw football as a means of doing that.

BRIAN: So Pratt agreed to create a team with two conditions, one, that his boys play fair, and two, that they whip the best teams in the country. It worked. The Carlisle Indian School team took to the gridiron and consistently beat college football juggernauts for the next 24 years. They were fast, strong, and strategic, working within the loose rules of the early game.

DAVID ADAMS: Carlisle was famous for out-foxing the opposition. One of the trips when they were playing Harvard, for example, in one year, they actually shoved the football up the jersey one of one of their players. And all the players could rush down the gridiron. And Harvard didn’t know who had the ball. And so they scored a touchdown that way.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: But if Pratt’s main objective with all of this was to make the general public view his students as regular Americans, well, that just didn’t happen. That’s because the press took the spectacle of an Indian football team playing white teams. And they ran with it.

DAVID ADAMS: They began to see football in a sense as a re– sort of a replaying of frontier conflict.

MALE SPEAKER 2: All the manifold interests of present and the past, the near and the far, were collected on the instant on Soldier’s Field.

BRIAN: This is from the Boston Globe, when Carlisle took on Harvard in 1896. Over 500 years of education were represented by the young palefaces in crimson, while centuries of fire, and the sun worship, medicine men, incantations, ghost dances, and mound building where flashed before the inner vision by the appearances of the young men from Carlisle.

PETER: The number of cartoons in which they were displaying football players going after scalps, for example, was cer–

BRIAN: Oh, come on. They literally were going after scalps?

PETER: Yes. There’s one cartoon, in fact. And it shows an Indian with headdress and scalping knife. And he’s looking at a Michigan player with a helmet on. And under the cartoon, the Indian is saying, how am I going to get that fellow’s scalp? And that’s, of course, because of the helmet. So–

BRIAN: Oh, boy.

DAVID ADAMS: So yeah, they were fighting things like that.

BRIAN: In spite of the setback, in public, Pratt celebrated the immense popularity of his team. After all, it turned out athletic legends like Jim Thorpe. And it toured the nation, marching in parades and staying in the nicest hotels all over the country.

DAVID ADAMS: Anytime that the games were played on neutral territory, in other words, not on the college campus of Yale or Harvard, but a neutral territory, and they were often played in New York City and Boston, the white crowd, they were always cheering for the Indians.

PETER: The grand irony of all of this, says Adams, is that the team was popular precisely because it mapped so neatly onto a storyline that cast Indians as noble savages who had been vanquished in the march of Western civilization.

DAVID ADAMS: This is the sort of the romantic image of nature’s noblemen. And so there was this tendency for many the fans to identify with the Indians. And the beauty of it was that you already had the land, OK. So I mean– because football’s a game about territory. And so you could cheer–

BRIAN: I hadn’t out of that.

DAVID ADAMS: Yeah, lines, and boundaries, and territory. And so fans could watch this game, cheer for the Indians who’d been terribly wronged. In the meantime, they had lost the land. So there was– it was sort of a win-win situation.

BRIAN: After some of the best seasons that any team of the era racked up, Carlisle’s successes on the field eventually faded away. But the 19th century warrior image that was so associated with the team most certainly did not. You’re probably aware of the controversy swirling around today’s Washington Redskins.

Well, team owner, Dan Snyder, has defended the continued use of the name by saying it was coined by a Carlisle football alum, a guy named Lone Star Dietz. Here’s Snyder on ESPN’s Outside the Lines.

DAN SNYDER: Coach Dietz was Native American. He named the team. The historical facts are the historical facts.

BRIAN: It’s not clear that that was the case. Scholars have suggested that Dietz faked a native identity for himself in order to take advantage of various opportunities for Indians at the time. But Adam says that by invoking Lone Star Dietz to defend the name, Dan Snyder is playing on the same romanticized notions that fans and sportswriters held in the heyday of the Carlisle football team.

DAVID ADAMS: He’s tapping in, I think, into the sportswriters’ desire or a tendency to sort of want to replay [? Indians ?] of another age, which is in contradiction to what Carlisle was trying to do.

BRIAN: David Adams is a Professor Emeritus at Cleveland State University and author of Education for Extinction, American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875 through 1928.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER: It is time for a short break. We get back, we’re going to talk about how English colonists used Native Americans to market the new world.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.