This guest post is by Manuscript Division historian and military and diplomatic history specialist Sherri Sheu.
On June 14, 1912, a delegation of 164 American athletes boarded the SS Finland in New York City, bound for Stockholm, Sweden, and the fifth iteration of the modern Olympic Games.
The delegation included three men representing the furthest stretches of American empire. One was the grandson of a Confederate officer, who had just begun his own military career. Another hailed from Hawai’i, then a territory. The third came from Oklahoma by way of Pennsylvania. In Stockholm, the paths of George Patton, Duke Kahanamoku, and Jim Thorpe intersected. Their lives before and after the Games represented the complexity and contradictions of American history.
Native Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku entered the Olympics as the world record holder in several events. He had already dealt with the sting of discrimination. Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) officials scoffed when he first set the records at a meet in the Hawai’i Territory. They could not believe that anyone could swim as fast as he did, much less someone from a Pacific island. During a trip to the mainland, Kahanamoku replicated his times in the pool and easily made the Olympic team. However, he ate many of his meals alone because mainland restaurant staff refused to serve him, believing he was either Black or Native American.
Jim Thorpe, a Native American and a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, grew up in Oklahoma before his father sent him to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. He walked onto the Finland that day not only as a two-time All American in football, but also as the intercollegiate ballroom dancing champion.
To win in Stockholm, Thorpe had to tap into the sort of athletic versatility that translated between the ballroom and the gridiron. Thorpe would compete in the new disciplines of the decathlon and the pentathlon, which added up to an exhausting program of fifteen different individual track and field events during the Games. Thorpe would need to demonstrate speed, endurance, explosiveness, and strength in throwing, running, and jumping.
George Patton, the least-heralded athlete of the three, would compete in a new event, the modern pentathlon. Consisting of equestrian riding, fencing, shooting, swimming, and cross-country running, the new event was meant for competitors to demonstrate the skills a military officer might require in war. A hypothetical military officer would need to deliver a message by horse, fight off an enemy with both sword and pistol, swim a river, and then run across a battlefield.
Though he had only begun training in earnest in early May when the American Olympic Committee named him to the team, the events suited the West Point graduate and active-duty Army lieutenant well. As a soldier, Patton had ample access to practice time and space for shooting, and he was an avid fencer and polo player. However, he had to scramble to get in shape for the running and swimming portions of the competition.
The three men’s participation at the Olympics reveal a nation in transition.
Thorpe and Kahanamoku’s participation under the American flag at the 1912 Olympics reflect the painful process of the nation’s expansionist policies during the nineteenth century.
The U.S. government had forcibly removed the Sac and Fox peoples from their traditional homelands in the Western Great Lakes, with several stops before reaching Oklahoma in the 1870s. Born in 1887, Thorpe would have grown up around adults who were relocated to Oklahoma. He lived through the Oklahoma Land Run of 1891, where the Sac and Fox lost much of their Oklahoma reservation lands to so-called “Sooners” who camped out waiting until the federal government opened the reservation lands to white settlers. At Carlisle, he entered an educational institution designed to assimilate him into white society at the expense of his Native roots.
Wealthy white sugar and pineapple planters supported the overthrow of Hawai’i’s monarchy in 1893. Despite initial efforts by the U.S. government to reinstall Queen Liliʻuokalani, planters soon convinced the mainland government to annex Hawai’i as a territory in 1898. Duke Kahanamoku, born in 1890, would have witnessed the transition as Hawai’i became part of the United States empire.
In contrast, the California-born Patton grew up admiring his grandfather, a Confederate colonel who died in the Civil War. Patton’s father, a young boy when the colonel died, continued to think of himself as part of Virginia gentry, imparting feelings of racial and class superiority to his son, born in 1885, twenty years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
As each man walked up the gangplank to the SS Finland on that Friday morning in June, surrounded by American flags, their lives illustrated the complexities of the nation sending them to the Olympics. In 1912, Native Americans did not hold birthright citizenship and were barred from voting in many places. Without statehood, U.S. territories had no voting representation in Congress. What did it mean to each of them to compete for the United States?
Onboard the Finland, the three men tried to stay fit over the course of the two-week journey.
The American Olympic Committee outfitted the ship with equipment to help them practice, as much as one could practice on a moving ship.
With the bevy of competitors onboard, the steamer became a buzzing hive of activity. On the upper deck, sprinters used a one-hundred-yard-long cork track, while other track athletes ran around the deck. Nine cyclists pedaled in place with their bicycles lashed fast to the Finland. The lone tennis player on the team used a backstop with a painted line for a net. Even fencers got work in as they commandeered unused dining spaces.
Swimmers such as Kahanamoku practiced in a fifteen-by-five foot canvas tank where they swam in place, suspended from an overhead rope. Patton found the setup “much more distressing than ordinary swimming.” When Kahanamoku asked Thorpe why he didn’t add swimming to his repertoire, Thorpe grinned, telling him, “Duke, I saved that for you to take care of.”
The Olympic team arrived in Stockholm two weeks after they departed.
Off the ship, the three Americans would go their separate ways.
Misfortune nearly struck Kahanamoku when he was nowhere to be found for his event. A notoriously sound sleeper, Kahanamoku had escaped back to the Finland for a nap that left him in deep slumber. A panicked teammate found him in a bunk, and they raced off to the pool deck on foot. Still in street clothes, Kahanamoku begged race officials to give him time to change into a swimsuit. They obliged and delayed the event’s start. Despite the run from the ship to the pool, Kahanamoku easily won his race and the gold medal. He also earned a silver medal as a member of the 4×200 relay.
Over at the track and field events, Jim Thorpe gave a legendary performance. Thorpe demolished the field, finishing in the top five of every event of the decathlon, and winning four of the events. In the athletic pentathlon, he won every event except for the javelin throw, where he finished third. The feats were even more impressive considering Thorpe wore mismatched shoes for part of the competition after someone stole his shoes. He won gold medals in both events, cementing himself as an Olympic icon. As biographer David Maraniss argues, the victories brought the Native American Thorpe some degree of acceptance back in the United States. Part of the media claimed Thorpe as an American only upon his victories. While many headlines referred to him by race through headlines such as “Indian Triumphs in the Pentathlon,” his victories were reported as national achievements. “Craig and Thorpe Uphold Yankee Colors Brilliantly,” read one headline.
In a field that consisted almost entirely of European military officers, Patton acquitted himself well, finishing fifth overall and coming in behind four Swedish officers. Patton dug himself into an early hole when he missed two pistol targets completely, putting him in a dismal twentieth place. He made up ground in the other events and held strong in the competition until the final event. Before the cross-country run, Patton took a shot of “hop”—opium—for stamina. Combined with the high heat and humidity, the opium left him staggering to the finish, where he passed out. In spite of the opium overdose, Patton enjoyed the camaraderie with his fellow military officers, writing glowingly about the composure of the military men. More than thirty years later, months after the end of World War II, Patton reunited with some of the Swedish officers from the Olympics. The old competitors shot pistols in a cave. Patton recorded in his diary that he improved significantly from his Olympics performance, finishing second.
After the Stockholm Games, the three men’s lives diverged in starkly different ways.
Kahanamoku and Thorpe continued their lives as athletes, which often meant a precarious existence.
Duke Kahanamoku continued his athletic career in both swimming and surfing. He went on to compete in two more Olympics, earning two more gold medals and another silver to go with his Stockholm medals. He defended his title in the 100-meter freestyle at the 1920 Games after World War I canceled the 1916 Olympics. In 1924, he finished second to Johnny Weissmuller, who later played Tarzan on-screen. Honolulu residents elected Kahanamoku as their sheriff in 1934, and he served as the sheriff until the city abolished the position in 1961. Kahanamoku also dominated surfing competitions and toured for demonstrations, popularizing the Hawaiian sport in places as far away as Australia. The gold medalist envisioned surfing as another potential Olympic event. Kahanamoku’s dream finally came true at the 2020 Tokyo Games. There, Native Hawaiian Carissa Moore won the first gold medal in the sport popularized by Kahanamoku.
In a cruel development, the International Olympic Committee stripped Jim Thorpe of his medals when it was reported that he had played semi-pro baseball before the Olympics for $25 a week. Thorpe spent the rest of his life trying to get his gold medals returned. The International Olympic Committee would not fully reinstate Thorpe’s Olympic record until 2022. Thorpe would apply his athletic prowess to both professional baseball and football. For his athletic exploits, Associated Press sportswriters crowned him the Greatest Athlete of the Half Century in 1950. Yet, Thorpe—who struggled at times with an alcohol addiction—often faced financial difficulties.
Unlike Thorpe or Kahanamoku, Patton would not face the same stressors of racism nor the need to find another career after the Stockholm Games. While the Olympics brought some recognition of his athletic talents, Patton soon returned to life as a junior officer in the Army. He eventually earned much greater renown as a military commander in World War II than he had as an Olympic athlete. Patton died in 1945, following a car accident in Europe, just a month after his reunion with competitors from the 1912 Games.
The Stockholm Games marked the beginning of the transition of the Olympics from an amateur festival of sport into the world’s preeminent sporting event. Organizers introduced several modern technologies at the Games, including electronic timing, photo finishes, announcers, and result boards. As the lives of Thorpe, Kahanamoku, and Patton show, it was also the convergence of three distinctly American life stories.
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“On June 14, 1912…” James E. Sullivan, ed., The Olympic Games, Stockholm, 1912 (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1912), 37.
“refused to serve him…” Joseph L. Brennan, Duke: The Life Story of Hawaiʻi’s Duke Kahanamoku (Honolulu: Ku Paʻa Publishing, 1994), 34, 43.
“Jim Thorpe…” David Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 42.
“Thorpe…” Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, 164.
“Patton…” Terry Brighton, Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War (New York: Crown, 2009), 19.
“He lived through…” Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, 28-29.
“At Carlisle…” David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, second edition, (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2020).
“Patton’s father…” Brighton, Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War, 18-19.
“Even fencers…” Sullivan, ed., The Olympic Games, Stockholm, 1912, 37-41.
“found the setup…” George Patton, “Report on Modern Pentathlon,” September 19, 1912. Box 75, Folder 7, George S. Patton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“telling him…” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 23, 1965, as quoted in Sandra Kimberley Hall and Greg Ambrose, Memories of Duke: The Legend Comes to Life: Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, 1890-1968 (Honolulu, HI: Bess Press, 1995), 4.
“Despite the run…” Brennan, Duke: The Life Story of Hawaiʻi’s Duke Kahanamoku, 51-55.
“read one headline…” Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe,165-166.
“the opium…” Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 134.
“writing glowingly…” Patton, “Report on Modern Pentathlon.”
“served as the sheriff…” Brennan, Duke: The Life Story of Hawaiʻi’s Duke Kahanamoku, 184-185; 217.
“envisioned surfing…” Duke Kahanamoku and Joe Brennan, Duke Kahanamoku’s World of Surfing (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 37.
“not fully reinstate…” Victor Mather and Tariq Panja, “Jim Thorpe Is Restored as Sole Winner of 1912 Olympic Gold Medals,” New York Times, July 15, 2022. Available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/sports/olympics/jim-thorpe-olympics-medal-restored.html
“crowned him…” Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, 491.
“modern technologies…” David Goldblatt, The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 85.