The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation

Military Review,  May-June, 2008  by Thomas A. Bruscino

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THE REAL ALL AMERICANS: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation, Sally Jenkins, Doubleday, New York, 2007, 343 pages, $24.95.

Sally Jenkins's The Real All Americans is a fascinating history of the U.S. Army-founded Carlisle [Pennsylvania] Indian Industrial School and its stellar turn-of-the-century football team. The book describes the origins and development of Carlisle football through the lens of important individuals at the school, particularly founder and first director Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt, coach Glenn "Pop" Warner, and an assortment of students and players, including Delos Lone Wolf, Bemus Pierce, Albert Exendine, Gus Welch, and the legendary Jim Thorpe. The research on these subjects is impressively deep. Jenkins mined the appropriate archives, interviewed the available descendents of key figures, and cited important secondary sources on the events and characters specific to her story. But for all its depth, the work lacks breadth.

There are several examples of this shortcoming, ranging from the superficial to the essential. Jenkins asserts that Carlisle revolutionized the game of football with trick plays and the forward pass, but her descriptions of how the Indians' style departed from the rest of the sport lack key specifics to make the point clear. She paints a negative, brief, and largely uninformed portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, simply because her protagonist Pratt did not like the president. And her descriptions of the Indian Wars of the late 19th century tend to rely too heavily on the perspectives of individual Indian participants, and thus it suffers from the biases common to autobiographical accounts.

Most importantly, Jenkins never engages fully with the questions of tribal, Indian, and American identity that are at the core of understanding Carlisle's history and legacy. For sure, some of her individual characters expressed their dismay over lost identities and incomplete assimilation, while others embraced the way Carlisle gave them new and productive lives in America. But Jenkins never attempts to synthesize the various experiences into a more coherent whole, balancing what was gained and lost and putting those summations into the context of changes wrought by the modernization, industrialization, and nationalism of the progressive era.

For all that, The Real All Americans is still informative and highly readable. And possibly Jenkins's ambivalence on the most important matters is instructive for the contemporary military. Because she writes from the more narrow perspective of the participants, one gets a clear feel for the struggles in the relationships among the United States, the Army, and the conquered Indians. Any attempts to democratize those who have no experience with democracy, particularly in the aftermath of war, are bound to yield glaring failures and quiet successes, the loss of traditions, good and bad, and the acquisition of habits, destructive and productive. All of this should sound familiar--a cold comfort, perhaps, but a comfort nonetheless.

Thomas A. Bruscino, Jr., Ph.D., Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

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