Cleveland Indians: Another look at the hated Chief Wahoo

Another look at the Cleveland Indians hated Chief Wahoo mascot conversation.

For the Cleveland Indians, it was a long time coming, but the shoe has finally dropped. No, wait, check that. The shoe will be mid-air for months. After the coming season, the Indians will stop using the now infamous Chief Wahoo logo. This means it will be stripped off team game day uniforms and warm-up gear. It is not clear the team will stop selling merchandise featuring it at Progressive Field or elsewhere in the Cleveland area.

Major League Baseball will not sell Wahoo gear on its website, but the New York Times article on this change was not definite on when the chief will disappear from MLB’s site.

In this quite polarized time regarding “political correctness,” one could go on here for 2000 words on this logo. It touches on freedom of speech, tradition, racially offensive language, and probably the cost of replacing the beloved cap you wore when dear old dad took you to see the Jim Thome Indians. The Times’ David Waldstein pretty much let that all go with a single clause: “for many of the team’s fans it is a cherished insignia.”

Disclaimer here: The Cleveland Indians were the last publicly traded team in the majors, and your Philadelphia writer here is a former stockholder in the club. At the turn of the century, my thought was to buy a piece of the team, which would surely appreciate in value, and leave that piece to my daughter, a very young child then. Unfortunately, Mr. Jacobs decided shortly thereafter to sell his majority share in the club to a group that yanked the team off the public market. So, I have reason to be annoyed with that Cleveland club. I believe my profit was between seven and eight dollars.

Do I have a hat with a Chief Wahoo logo on it? Yes. Do I wear it now? No. Am I going to throw it away on the wild chance that a Native American might somehow, one day, be going through my closet? No.

It’s Offensive, and It’s Still Here for a Year

The Chief Wahoo logo is on the face of it offensive. It suggests a racist view in the same way, whatever the intention, the old Aunt Jemima logo suggested Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, whatever her character’s name was. Oscar winner McDaniel is the singular reason I have never watched that film past her first few scenes.

The more significant problem, however, is the Indians team name. As Waldstein reported, the director of the American Indian Movement of Ohio not only questioned the delay in deep-sixing the logo but also, the remaining team name.

This sort of thing is sticky. “Indians” is obviously the wrong term in the 21^st century. However, it is not the most offensive name demeaning Native Americans (Redskins), nor is it arguably acceptable (Braves). At least Cleveland isn’t the “Red Heathens.” Not to make careful distinctions.

Moreover, while it might not be 100 percent correctly argued “Braves” is an apparently positive name, the Tomahawk chop chant is not positive.

I’m getting a headache. This whole word thing is complicated. Let’s move on to other facts.

Two Interesting Things for the Cleveland Indians

The first matter is for Cleveland Indian executives: Are you guys at least thinking about the team name? What’s wrong with the ancient, now retired designation “Naps”? It honors your best player ever, probably, Nap LaJoie. Why not just get rid of this Indian/Native American issue entirely?

The other matter has to do with the fairly disgraceful manner of the announcement of what amounts to a wardrobe alteration. On Jan. 29 the Indians apparently didn’t announce this logo change first. That day they told the MLB commissioner’s office about it. Not only the Times but other publications, including the Washington Post, announced this as such.

OK, nobody likes to be accused of being a racist, even racists. However, no one even wants to discuss the actual reality of a racist myth Cleveland’s team name and logo helped to create, and this explains baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, not the Indians, telling the Times about the change.

A racist myth? Well, not quite. In other words, the myth is sort of true. For years, even knowledgeable fans assumed the Indians logo represented the legendary 19th-century player Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot tribe Native American. Sockalexis was literally Jim Thorpe before Jim Thorpe and a better baseball player. Those fans making the connection between Sockalexis and Chief Wahoo were right for all practical purposes – meaning, that’s what a lot of people believed.

Cleveland Indians Sockalexis

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Sockalexis ruined his career when he injured himself in a drunken mishap, creating this somewhat undiscussed myth. In the popular mind, certainly until about 1980, Chief Wahoo wasn’t just a grinning “Indian” caricature. He was a “drunken Indian,” a drunken Native American, one of the enduring, most unpleasant caricatures in American history. (Even as a child in Pittsburgh, I knew Chief Wahoo is grinning for some wrong reason.) This is why the Cleveland Indians, while recognizing Sockalexis as the player who gave his team their current name, do not admit that Sockalexis is Chief Wahoo.

Also, it takes some digging to undercover the actual truth about the team name, the larger problem. It turns out sportswriters thought it was great “fun” to refer to the club as “Indians” when Sockalexis played for them, even though the team was the Spiders, formally. When the team became the Indians (1915), the Cleveland Leader brought in the notion of savagery explicitly, noting the club would be “on the warpath all the time, and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts.” Other Cleveland papers did likewise at the time.

Yikes! Why doesn’t the Cleveland Indians franchise want to get rid of this baggage?

Next: Jim Thome should not be a first ballot Hall of Famer

Wouldn’t it have been more painless to announce January 29 the disappearance of the Chief Wahoo logo immediately and the change of the Indians’ team name to the Naps, or the Brawlers, or even the Poodles?

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