Say It Ain't So, 'Biscuit!

If the revisionist take on Seabiscuit in the Wall Street Journal wasn't enough. I read somewhere that Charles Howard — the Biscuit's owner — fixed Seabiscuit's final race. What next? No Weapons of Mass Destruction? No Osama bin Laden? No Saddam Hussein? What is so important about the Saudi government that all information about them is classified in the interests of national security? What is a poor guy supposed to believe?

Was Seabiscuit the Hero of the 1930s? (posted 7-30-03)

Allen Barra, writing in the Wall Street Journal (July 30, 2003):

Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller and with narration by historian David McCullough, the film version of "Seabiscuit" seems destined to become the official version of the rags-to-riches horse and his place in the history of the Depression. If you picked up a newspaper or magazine or switched on an entertainment program last weekend, you heard that Seabiscuit was "the most beloved athletic figure" or even "the most famous icon" in America in the late 1930s, surpassing (to cite just three names pulled out of last weekend's stories hooked to the film's release) Clark Gable, Lou Gehrig and Franklin D. Roosevelt in popularity.

There might be something to those comparisons. In 1938, Gable's biggest film, "Gone With the Wind," was a year from release. Gehrig had an off-season and was in fact a year from retirement. As for FDR, well, racehorses have no political or ideological opposition.

Seabiscuit certainly is, as the subtitle of Ms. Hillenbrand's book states, "An American Legend." But was he truly, as both movie and book seem to suggest, the real-life "Rocky" of the down-and-outers?

First, there's the question of his pedigree; given his ancestors, the case could be made that Seabiscuit was as much an underachiever as an underdog. His granddad was Man o' War, probably the greatest racehorse of all. His father, Hard Tack, broke numerous speed records (though his temperament was so difficult that he was quickly put out to stud). His mom was Swing On, who, though she was not much of a racehorse herself, was descended from the legendary Whisk Broom II. Though he was a misfit, Seabiscuit's bloodlines were more like FDR's than Tom Joad's.

Neither the movie (which glosses over the hardships and brutality of horse racing for both jockeys and mounts) nor, for that matter, Ms. Hillenbrand's book really comes to terms with the paradox of a Depression hero emerging from The Sport of Kings. (The film tosses a lump of sugar to the average man when Jeff Bridges as Charles Howard, Seabiscuit's owner, tells the track officials to "Open up the infield. You shouldn't have to be rich to enjoy this race.")

The film takes as a given Seabiscuit's affinity with the downtrodden, their affinity with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as their savior, and, hence, Seabiscuit's validity as a symbol of the New Deal. (In case we miss the connection, a black-and-white photo of FDR is flashed on screen shortly after one of Mr. Bridges's Roosevelt-style speeches.) The more interesting possibility that Charles Howard, a progressive Republican and a bit of a good-natured huckster, wasn't above using a populist twang to sell tickets is never explored.

It's a common fallacy for popular historians to confuse something that entertains people with something that actually touches their lives. Seabiscuit was certainly a hero during the Depression, but was he the hero of the Depression? Thumb through any number of books on the 1930s and on sports heroes from that decade, and you're likely to find much more on Jesse Owens and his spectacular victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics than about any racehorse.

© The Wall Street Journal, 2003