All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe by Bill Crawford.
John Wiley & Sons, 2004. $24.95 — 288 pp.

Ulysses S. Grant by Josiah Bunting. Times Books, 2004. $20 — 208 pp.

Although we fight battles and win victories in our lives — capturing the affections of another, winning job promotions, earning the respect of our fellow human beings — statistics and plain common sense dictates that most of us will not gain the great triumphs and the consequent honors that make the history books. Few of us will likewise suffer the great defeats and consequent public ignominy of, say, a Richard Nixon or a Michael Jackson.

Two men who, like Nixon, Jackson, and hundreds of other cultural icons or historical figures, won grand victories and suffered equally thunderous downfalls are Jim Thorpe, the great athlete in the early twentieth century, and Ulysses Grant, the general who won the war for the Union but whose presidency became synonymous with scandal and shame. Recent biographies of these men deserve both praise and recognition.

All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe not only tells the story of Jim Thorpe’s glory days as a running back for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and as an Olympic champion — he won the gold in both the decathlon and pentathlon, earning from King Gustav of Sweden the title “the greatest athlete in the world” — but it also recounts the subsequent scandal that stripped Thorpe of his Olympic medals.

Bill Crawford’s study of Thorpe deserves commendation on several levels. First, he shows us the good and the bad side of Native American education in the early years of the 20th century. Thorpe, as Crawford points out through numerous documents and interviews, was a fairly typical product of the Carlisle Indian School, taking both academic subjects and classes designed to help him adapt to mainstream America, being farmed out on various jobs for vocational training, and in Thorpe’s case, being given an opportunity to excel in sports. Crawford takes a balanced approach toward the training of Thorpe and hundreds of other Native Americans, pointing out the positive aspects of the system — the fact that these students received a high school education, for example, when nearly 90 percent of Americans left school by the eighth grade — while at the same time attacking the brutality and the excesses of the system.

Crawford reserves his broadest criticism for the system of athletics devised by Pop Warner, Thorpe’s coach at Carlisle, and for its direct descendent, our collegiate athletics programs. Although Warner contributed immensely to football both in terms of field strategy and in popularizing the game, he was, as Crawford reveals, a scoundrel who paid his players, recruited ineligible players, put his players above the other students on campus, and lied frequently to protect his own interests. In the case of Thorpe, for example, who lost his amateur status and forfeited his Olympic medals for having played minor league baseball in North Carolina, Warner denied knowing of Thorpe’s involvement, denied that he himself had paid football players, and even drafted Thorpe’s confession in which one of the greatest of all American athletes took sole responsibility for playing for wages.

Crawford ends his biography with a quick look at college athletic programs today and the flaws built into those programs. As Crawford points out, the same inconsistencies and privileges that plagued Thorpe remain in play today: favoritism, payments to athletes in kind if not in money, the failure to address the issues of the enormous revenues raised by collegiate programs. His book stands as both a well-told story of a fascinating man and a warning about the future of athletics.

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Josiah Bunting’s Ulysses S. Grant is fascinating not so much for its subject — Grant’s military and political careers are well-documented — but for its author. All of Bunting’s books (my own favorites are An Education For Our Time and All Loves Excelling) are so different from one another and so finely written that each offers delight and excitement in the reading.

In Ulysses S. Grant, which is part of The American Presidents series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Bunting covers the usual ground with few surprises in regard to Grant’s war record. We visit familiar territory: the rapid elevation of Grant to high command; the victories in the West; the assumption of command of the armies; the final and bloody victories in the East. Where Bunting departs from conventional wisdom regarding Grant’s career is in regard to his presidency, which was, as Bunting astutely points out, surely one of the most difficult in American history because of the position of the Southern states in regard to the Union and because of Northern economic expansion. By looking at other present-day biographers of Grant, Bunting makes us aware of the man’s greatness not only as a general, but even as a president. Though Bunting probably goes too far when he writes that by the criterion of common sense “the Grant presidency, so far from being one of the nation’s worst, may yet be seen as among its best,” he does give readers a glimpse of this president that is lacking in most history books.

Like Lee, Grant, as Bunting reminds us, remains a mystery. This tiny biography, however, does much to shed light on that mystery.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)