Opinion: Washington NFL team's origins connect to Jim Thorpe

The National Football Association was formed in 1920. In 1921, the league’s name was changed to the National Football League. That was the year, the inaugural year of the NFL, that Walter Lingo purchased a franchise, locating it in the small town of LaRue, Ohio.

Football mirrored America’s highest ideal. It was a meritocracy. In professional football, the Indians would be permitted to defeat the cowboys, if they were better, something that never happened in Buffalo Bill’s shows. The game combined strategy, planning, determination, and physical prowess in a contest over ground, in a perfect allegory for post-aristocratic America. Immigrants were pouring into New York and dispersing in the mills and factories of the heartland to profit by the sweat of their brow. They and theirs, especially, embraced this game.

Thorpe was on the downside of his career and he chose to join Lingo to coach and captain the Indians and, as aging athletes sometimes do, to get into the business side of the operation. Because the town did not have a football field, games would be played ten miles away at Lincoln Field in Marion, Ohio. Marion also happened to be the hometown of Warren G. Harding, who had just succeeded Woodrow Wilson as president. He was a big fan of the team, and invited players to the White House on a swing through Washington, the first such team visit in NFL history.

The story of the Oorang Indians becomes uninteresting from there. They barnstormed the country selling dogs, performing feats of hunting skill at halftime. They were disbanded by 1924. The fact of the Oorang Indians, though, is as relevant as football itself, a game about aristocratic conquest that consumed its own allegory.

The Oorang Indians remind us that history moves slowly, by autonomous actors, and not by the pretensions of those who wish to visit their perfections upon the rest of us. Football is crass. And it is commercial. And it is loved because it is both. There are no aristocrats. Field generals are second guessed, as they should have been in the Great War. The NFL is a constant reminder of the failure of aristocracy. Because it is a meritocracy.