The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

This volume represents an unusual collaboration, between the late Matthew Bentley and a member of his doctoral committee, John Bloom. Bentley sadly passed while preparing his dissertation for publication; Bloom then continued Bentley’s revisions and finalized this volume. The result is a detailed examination of the intersections of football and manhood at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918), the first and largest off-reservation boarding school run by the federal government for the purpose of educating and assimilating Indigenous youth. Bentley and Bloom posit that football was started at Carlisle to publicly demonstrate the success of the school’s “civilizing” mission by modeling restrained sporting manliness amongst the team’s players (xiii). It later became a purely financial and public relations venture that overshadowed and controlled the school itself. Linked to these developments were ideological changes within the federal government, reflected in changes to school superintendency and the coaching of the football team.Arranged in five chronological chapters, The Imperial Gridiron starts by outlining Carlisle’s early history (1879–1903) under its founder and first superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. Intertwining secondary and published primary sources, the authors pinpoint how Pratt’s mixed curriculum of liberal arts academic and industrial training was firmly rooted in Victorian era concepts of Protestant manliness. Using the school’s curricular and extracurricular activities to illustrate Pratt’s ideologies, this chapter lays out the general contours of gender, masculinity, and manliness at Carlisle without significant discussion of football. This is left for chapter 2, which discusses Pratt’s reform of football at the school from an intramural hobby to an interscholastic team. Pratt’s motivation for this move, and for supporting the football team during the ensuing decade, was linked to a mandate that the Carlisle team demonstrate a level of manly self-control rarely seen among White collegiate players at the time. Contrasting ideas of white supremacy, “savagery,” and masculinity that reigned in collegiate football programs to Pratt’s demand for “civilized” play, the authors effectively link Pratt’s football legacy to the large assimilationist aims of the school (70–72).Chapter 3 focuses on 1904 to 1913, after Pratt left the school. During this decade, football at Carlisle transitioned away from polite, tame play to instead focus on highly publicized victories—first against local colleges, and eventually against Big Four Ivy League teams. Beyond serving as a public relations tool for the school, Bentley and Bloom argue, football became “an institution in its own right . . . and in many respects, the school became a prop for the team” (75). Relying again on published primary sources, the authors assert that the national press covered Carlisle’s team in ways that praised the school’s mission while reinforcing racist stereotypes regarding Indigenous savagery and masculinity. Under notable coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, football heavily influenced the school, with special treatment for athletes supported by an Athletic Fund financed by ticket sales. Olympian Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox) was recruited and trained during this time, and, along with fellow Carlisle student Louis Tewanima (Hopi), brought significant acclaim to the school after their successes at the 1912 Olympics. According to Bentley and Bloom, this special treatment came at a cost, as some students came to see Carlisle as deviating from its “civilizing” mission. These critics petitioned Congress for intervention, using the language of “savagery” against the school, and inculpating the football team in the school’s degradation.Chapter 4 represents the biggest single scholarly contribution of this monograph, and the authors’ biggest use of archival primary source materials. This section focuses on the 1914 Congressional investigation into the Carlisle Indian School and is the first significant analysis thereof. Using recently digitized archival records from that investigation, Bentley and Bloom unpack the public trial of both Carlisle specifically and the Native American boarding schools more generally. They highlight how student complainants “aimed to establish a strong critical voice toward an institution that exploited and abused them” (111), while Congressional investigators and politicians instead focused their ire on immorality at the school, particularly amongst football players. This, according to the authors, created a backlash which student-critics did not intend, transforming the football team from a source of pride into a symbol of shame for the school. This argument is supported by extrapolation of oral histories from former Carlisle students, in which they speak positively about the football team’s victories of the Jim Thorpe era.The concluding chapter focuses on the aftermath of the 1914 investigation, including the swift decline of the school’s football team and the school itself, which closed in 1918. Carlisle as an institution struggled with its damaged reputation after the investigations, and students were negatively impacted as a result. According to Bentley and Bloom, the final two short-lasting superintendents returned to a focus of Protestant, “civilized” manliness at the school and for the football team, going so far as to invite Pratt to revisit Carlisle and share his ideologies with a new generation of students.The Imperial Gridiron’s greatest strength is its detailed treatment of changes at Carlisle over time. Most scholars of the school treat it as an unchanging monolith over its thirty-nine-year tenure; Bentley and Bloom effectively outline how, even beyond questions of football and manliness, Carlisle was a complex and dynamic school in which students’ experiences were not the same from year to year, and from superintendent to superintendent. The authors’ examination of the 1914 investigation is similarly invaluable to the scholarly corpus on the Carlisle Indian School and the Native American boarding school era. That said, the volume is impacted by the inevitable tensions between two co-authors who, due to circumstance, did not actively collaborate. Chapter sections sometimes meander through arguments or veer from the central thread of conversation, and at times distinct authorial voices are detectable. Some readers will find this further complicated by the publisher’s use of endnotes instead of footnotes. Bloom notes in the Preface that the notes contain personalized, initialed commentary from both him and Bentley, a subtlety of authorial perspective lost to most readers who will not flip back and forth.Individually, each author brings a unique perspective to this important and timely concept: Bloom’s established scholarship on sports within Native American boarding schools, and Bentley’s focus on tracing ideological developments. Combined, these create a nuanced examination of one of the most famous Indigenous football teams in American history, one which earns a place in the bibliographies of sports history, the Native American boarding school era, and the Carlisle Indian School.