Dealing with the Imperfections of Historical Heroes
Jim Thorpe, runaway winner of gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was described often as “the world’s greatest athlete.” An Oklahoma Native American sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in the age of the forcible assimilation of an already decimated native population, Thorpe excelled as well in amateur and professional football and in baseball. His Carlisle football team, coached by the legendary Pop Warner, beat West Point in a game that he dominated and may well have offered a little karmic payback for what the U.S. Army had done to his people.
In mid-life and later years, as extensively chronicled in David Maraniss’s thoughtful biography, A Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, this “perfect athlete” championed the rights of Native Americans, used his own meager earnings to help many and argued they should get roles and recognition in the Hollywood films that instead used white actors to portray them.
Thorpe was idolized and celebrated not only in his youth but for most of his life. He seemed to many a role model and the perfect embodiment of athletic prowess. Yet, as Maraniss carefully documents, Thorpe was a very imperfect man. He was too often a heavy drinker and always on the road to earn a living in a succession of failed business ventures once his playing days ended. He married three times, had eight children he seldom saw, and was divorced twice by wives who could no longer tolerate his drinking and long absences. Jim Thorpe was the perfect athlete who was also an imperfect man.
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant once observed, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Yet we need not ignore Thorpe’s achievements as we recognize his failings. One thing that emerges from Maraniss’s book is the picture of a man driven by the desire to excel but inevitably a symbol of human imperfection at the same time. In that, he is like all of our public heroes.
We have a tendency to put our public heroes on pedestals. Then, as historians (or political opponents) tell a fuller tale, we inevitably find flaws in the statues we’ve erected. Disappointed or even outraged by their imperfections, we may become cynical, determined to ignore their accomplishments in the face of their mistakes.
Thomas Jefferson was a lifelong slaveholder, yet his words “all men are created equal” would force in time the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing that abominable crime. James Madison shared Jefferson’s racist practices, yet the Constitution he helped birth was cited by escaped slave Frederick Douglass as a “great liberty document” because it contained that amendment process. Abraham Lincoln ended slavery but never quite believed in the social equality of African Americans. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ignored the fate of European Jews for too long yet led the nation to victory in World War II.
Uncomfortable with the ambiguity of human lives, we are prone to take sides. We venerate or vilify. This fosters divisions, especially in the hands of artful politicians with their own agendas. The Left and Right often choose different heroes, demons and histories. They can find nothing wrong with their heroes and nothing right with their opponents. This distorted view and their anger leads to conflicts that may get people to the polls but only weakens the polity.
While there is no need to search for redeeming behavior in a Hitler or someone who has committed treason or crimes of war – we might be better citizens and create a better America if we could acknowledge any gifts as well as the faults of our public historical figures. We need not excuse their failures. We need to know the truth and learn from it. We should use that knowledge in correcting the problems they left behind, in raising our expectations for those we choose to lead us and in how we raise future generations. This might help us to stop making the teaching of American history a battleground, confusing students and frightening teachers and school administrators.
Jim Thorpe’s life also offers a lesson for our own. It beckons us to use the insightful eye of an historian and the humility that comes from acceptance of human imperfection in dealing with ourselves and our relationships. Unlike a Thorpe, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln or Roosevelt, we have the potential for redemption and still-unrealized greatness. We have the ability to learn, to understand and perhaps forgive the mistakes we and others make. As the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle put it: “Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.”
Photo Credit: Jim Thorpe, wikimedia.commons.org
