My proto-blogging has been on my mind of late as I watch the Cleveland Indians on the cusp of finally winning a World Series. Apologies, Cubs fans, I know you've waited longer. I became an Indians fan as a kid growing up in Ohio in the 70s, when they were a perennially terrible team in the midst of a three-decade slump (affectionately known by fans wanting to imitate a Red Sox tradition by referring to it as the "Curse of Rocky Colavito" even though such a wildly overblown comparison to Babe Ruth's departure from Boston only underscored the hopelessness of being an Indians fan in those days). Anyway, they got better--a lot better--in the mid-1990s, and finally got a crack at winning a World Series, but lost to a great Braves team in 1995. (They lost again, to the Marlins, in 1997, but that tragedy is a story for another day.)
The following is a letter I sent to the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer that year, taking a look at the team name and its logo. Given the current political climate, it seemed appropriate to dust off a piece I wrote half a lifetime ago, and as I look at it for the first time in decades, I think that young Billy and old Billy aren't so different, as it is largely the same argument I would make today. Thus, I give you thoughts on racism and Chief Wahoo. I made only one small edit; my language was a little more charged back in the day and I've elided some racial examples that strike me now as in very poor taste. Otherwise, it's a voice from the past.
One small point of explanation: the greed of the players and owners mentioned below is in reference to the baseball strike of 1994 and 1995, which led for the first cancellation of a World Series since 1904 and significantly depressed fan interest when the playing resumed.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
July 10, 1995
To the Editor,
As I near the end of my 25th
year of life here in Boston, I find that I may have, perhaps, a surprising
birthday present in store for me on September 10. My Cleveland Indians, whom I
followed religiously throughout my youth in Mansfield, Ohio (and in my college
years and beyond here in Boston), are currently not only in first place in
their division, are not only first in the American League, but are the best team in baseball by five or so
games. It seems plausible, from the vantage of the all-star break, that by the
time I turn 26 they will be well on their way to their first pennant in a very
long time. I’m told it last happened somewhere in the mid-fifties, but I’ve
never been too concerned about the specific year, since the general drift for
me as a fan is that they’ve never come close in my lifetime. Unless they choke only
in as grand a manner as the baseball team that plays where I now reside, the
Indians are assured of the playoffs, and are the favorite to take the Series.
The success of the Tribe this
particular year is at once unfortunate and appropriate. Major League Baseball
has insisted on demonstrating what fans have been trying heroically to ignore over
the past ten years: that the players and owners alike are selfish, venal, and
shortsighted. Finally, the fans, having gotten the message, have given up on
the game. Overall attendance is down 20 percent, and except for the first-place
teams, the fans do not appear to be returning anytime soon. How apropos that
Cleveland, whose burning river became a symbol for the myopic greed of Big
Industry and earned it a reputation as the national laughingstock, is in this
year baseball’s glory team.
The metaphor of Cleveland’s success
(an ugly city winning in an ugly year) brings to my mind, as a lifelong fan of
the Indians, another, less talked about wart on the face of the team. Literally
on the face—for the face is the
embarrassment itself. Cleveland’s team name, obviously, symbolizes the Native
American tribes from the Cuyahoga area. The icon of the team, Chief Wahoo, is a
grinning, wide-eyed character with a lone feather poking up from behind his
head. Apparently the team name of “Indians,” along with Chief Wahoo, instill in
the fan a feeling that the actual players possess heroic qualities of the
Natives: savage, fierce, uncompromising.
Although the sports media has never
been known for its sophistication or talent in thinking in the abstract, one
would figure that a serious debate about the potential offensiveness of Chief
Wahoo could be had. After all, sports commentators—at least the ones that I
have read over the past few years here in Boston and in Cleveland—simply love the concept of the symbol,
understand its power, and use it all too often in their articles. Anyone who
plunks down $150 for a pair of Nike shoes is willing to pay that price in part
because of the outline of a certain basketball player’s body that appears on
the shoe. That player and his awesome abilities symbolize excellence, beauty,
and the illusion of flight—a seductive symbol, and the NBA (and a host of other
businesses) nets hundreds of millions of dollars on it. But Air Jordan is the
exception (the man symbolizing his own mythical status); team mascots serve
just as much a purpose.
The suggestion that Cleveland’s
mascot might be regarded as racist,
however, has never been taken seriously, at least in the Cleveland media (and I
have seen no other media market even mention it—except in Atlanta, whose Braves
made the pennant race in recent years, drawing attention to a similar protest).
I remember while I lived in northern Ohio during the past two years, watching
the eleven o’clock news on Opening Day, where there would be a story on the
small group of protesters who each year ask the fans to boycott games so that
the team symbol can be changed. I also remember the anchor snorting derisively
about the trivial nature of the protest. “Why don’t they do something better
with their time?” would be the quip, and then the news would continue with the
homicides of the day.
The challenge the protesters
issued, apparently, seemed as esoteric as left-wing academic parlor talk. I
find that a simple name change, however, highlights the simplicity and beauty
of the protesters’ contention. We would blanch, for instance, were the front
office to decide to start calling the team the Cleveland Dagos or the Cleveland
Wops in honor of its Eastern European immigrants. Immediately our ears
would send a message to our brains to go on high alert, not because these names
are any worse in nature than a Native American slur, but instead because we are
tuned into that brand of racism. Why then do we ignore this slight on Native
American culture?
One simple reason is that there
aren’t many Native Americans left to raise much of a fuss, and the vast
majority of citizens do not have to face an insulted Native in their day-to-day
lives. The reason why this has happened is because of the dirty little American
secret of genocide. Perhaps, just perhaps, what is unnerving about the debate
over Chief Wahoo is that we must be put face-to-face with an ugly history for
which our generation is not responsible (though we reap the benefits of our
forebears’ actions) and cannot possibly rectify. Perhaps we like to think of “Indians”
as that mythical animal, described with the above cardboard cutout adjectives, who
roamed the American wilderness and then somehow mysteriously disappeared,
instead of realizing that they were simply a group of nations—more than one—that
got crushed under a society hell bent on conquering the land on which we live
today, and committed to systematically marginalizing (i.e., killing) anyone who
opposed that goal.
All of this debate has nothing, so
far as I can discern, with my being a fan. Nor does this have anything to do
with Eddie Murray’s 3,000th hit, and hopefully his eventual 500th
home run, or the pennant that is within their reach. The debate has to do with
understanding that symbols sometimes do
represent things, and that they can
be used to perpetuate stereotypes that are inaccurate and harmful. Surely we as
a citizenry must take the protesters
and their argument seriously. In a year when baseball’s ugliness is in the fan’s
full view, the Indians have it in their power to right a wrong, if only as a
symbolic gesture, in the brightest moment of their organization and at the
height of the city’s pride in them.
--Billy
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