John R. Tunis - Themes

Themes

Leonard Marcus in Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature, says "Tunis's books were never only about sports", noting "the author's determination to offer his readers basic lessons about good citizenship and fair play, and a chance to reflect on such rarely discussed social issues as racial equality and anti-Semitism". A doctoral study at Oklahoma State University in 1996 analyzed all of Tunis' juvenile sports books. The predominant value found both in the books and their main characters was Courtesy/Fairness/Respect. The second most identified value was Compassion/Kindness. The study found that "the values are not portrayed didactically, as part of lessons, but rather as a natural part of the stories". In his book What Would Frank Merriwell Do?, Ryan Anderson also pointed out the recurring theme of fairness and sportsmanship over winning in both Tunis' fiction and non-fiction, saying "The common thread winding through all his writing became his dismay over the nation's tendency to value winning above common decency." In turning from primarily writing non-fiction for adults to juvenile fiction Tunis did not abandon his emphasis on values over victory, but it did give him an audience that seemed more willing to listen.

Rather than emphasize winning, Tunis believed that values like hard work and perseverance could be taught through sports. The 1951 football brochure for the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Athletic Scholarship committee cites Tunis, saying "The athletic department would like to feel that the existing program can do for the engineer what John Tunis had in mind when he said, 'The deep objective of games really is to train one’s reflex of purpose to develop a habit of keeping steadily at something you want until it is done.'" Many of Tunis' biggest heroes find themselves eventually brought low, like Roy Tucker in The Kid Comes Back, whose wartime service injury may have destroyed his career, or Iron Duke Jim Wellington at Harvard, ostracized and lonely, who perseveres by running track. The real victory is in the character's refusal to give up against long odds. "My heroes are the losers" he once said. "All my books have been in that vein. Every book I've ever written." In the Introduction to The Kid from Tomkinsville, Bruce Brooks writes "for Tunis a win was what happened at the ballpark some of the time, usually just before a loss. It didn't make you a good person, anymore than a loss made you a jerk."

Tunis did not exclude the social issues of the times from his writing. In 1936 Foreign Affairs published “The Dictators Discover Sport", about Hitler, Mussolini and their use of sports to influence, exploit and control their youth. Tunis also took on issues closer to home. He believed in the concept of "Democratic Sport", that games open to any person "regardless of ethnicity, class, or skill" promoted the values America needed, and he used his stories to demonstrate those values, taking racism head on. According to the Child Study Association of America, in Keystone Kids "the issue of anti-Semitism in American democracy is squarely faced and courageously met". The 1942 Northwestern University radio program "Of Men and Books" featured All American in its episode titled "Children's Books and American Unity".

In 1945 writer and reviewer Howard Pease wrote: "Only at infrequent intervals do you find a story intimately related to this modern world, a story that takes up a modern problem and thinks it through without evasion... of our hundreds of authors, I can name only three who are doing anything to fill this void in children's reading. These three authors—may someone present each of them with a laurel wreath—are Doris Gates, John R. Tunis, and Florence Crannell Means."