Chief Wahoo: A Timeline
As I've done for “Washington Redskins,” I’ll try to stick to an objective timeline for the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo mascot (although my general opinion of “Indians” teams is apparent elsewhere).
“What, me worry?”
1889: The treasurer for Cleveland’s National League team comments on the disproportionate number of lanky players at practice. They’ll often be called “Spiders” thereafter ... but as I must constantly remind, there’s nothing “official” about almost any pro or college team name until the post–World War I era. (See note 3 here.)
1897: Louis Sockalexis, a multi-sport Holy Cross star from Maine’s Penobscot tribe, signs with the Spiders in March. He has a good start, but carousing and drinking lead to a July ankle injury. During Sockalexis’s short career, “Indians” and “Red Men” were sometimes used for distinction when the Spiders played split-squad games, but outside of those ad hoc circumstances, Sockalexis was never on any “Indians" team [note 1].
1899: Never the same player after his injury, “Socks” is cut seven games into his third season. How bad does that look? The ’99 Clevelanders at 20-134 are generally considered the worst major league team of all time, owing largely to the phenomenon of syndicate baseball. They fold up at the end of the season.
1901: The brand-new American League has a side in Cleveland, the blue-suited Blues.
1903: The Blues (also the Bluebirds or Bronchos) sign Hall of Fame second baseman (and eventual player-manager) Napoleon Lajoie away from the rival NL’s Philadelphia Phillies. In his honor, they are usually “Naps” in the press.
1913:
24 December: In only his early 40’s, Sockalexis dies in Maine from heart disease (obituary).
1915: Before the season, Cleveland trades former Phillie Nap Lajoie back to Philly, this time to the AL Athletics. (The AL and NL had agreed to a peaceful coexistence after the 1903 season.) It no longer makes sense to call Cleaveland’s Nap-less boys the “Naps,” so the 1915 team would be “Indians.” One likely explanation is that team owner Charles W. Somers wanted a Native American theme to compare his 1914 Naps to that season’s last-to-first world champs, Boston’s “Miracle” Braves [note 2]. In announcing the name, a cartoon in the Plain Dealer is accompanied by this observation: “We’ll have Indians on the warpath all the time and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts” [note 3].
1932: A nameless daffy Indian mascot appears on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
1940s:
• The press starts calling the Indian on the team patch “Chief Wahoo,” already an unflattering name for Native Americans (example from 1936 here).
• Pitcher Allie Reynolds’s mother was of the Muscogee/Creek tribe. His stint with the Indians (1942–46) ended with a trade to the Yankees, after which Cleveland’s press took to calling him “Chief Wahoo.”
• Late in the decade (perhaps 1947), the chief makes it onto Cleveland’s uniform sleeve.
1951: The Wahoo logo is pretty much finalized into the one today’s fans recognize.
1968: For the first time and pretty much out of nowhere, the team media guide claims the Indians were named in 1915 to honor Louis Sockalexis, who’d died in late 1913 [note 4]. This launches the “Sockalexis Myth.” (Refer again to Staurowsky, note 3.)
1990:
The Indians introduce “Slider” as a mascot. He’s one of those fuzzy-whatzit-muppety things we must tolerate in our post-Philly Phanatic reality. We can’t find anywhere in which the team identifies Slider (still available for bookings) as any more or less an “official mascot” than Mr. Wahoo (or is he not a mascot at all but a “performance character”?).
1994:
4 April 1994: Sitting president Bill Clinton throws out the inaugural pitch at the Indians’ Jacobs Field, but he’s apparently careful to wear a rarely seen block-C cap instead of one sporting Wahoo’s mug.
A famous 28-foot-high, 32-year-old neon Chief Wahoo sign has apparently not made the one-mile trip to the “Jake,” instead finding its own new home at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Perhaps unintentionally, this answers those who think that Wahoo (like Nazi flags and "whites only" signs) belong in museums.
1995: A discussion of Indian themes for sports teams is a national one when the World Series sees the Indians face the Atlanta Braves. The former display one of the most clearly racist mascots in sports (Mr. Wahoo), while fans of the latter practice the “Tomahawk chop,” a robotic hacking that some Native Americans find mocking (justified here by the Braves).
2008: The Indians introduce an alternate cap on which the chief is replaced by a block-C logo, similar to a design used on and off between 1902 and 1920 and again from 1978 to 1985 (according to the Hall of Fame’s usually reliable Dressed to the Nines database). The chief remains on the shoulder patch.
The same season, irony freaks throw a party when Chief Wahoo’s home stadium is renamed Progressive Field, after an insurance giant secures the naming rights through 2023.
2009: Chief Wahoo is noticebly absent from the Indians’ spring training facilities in Arizona, which incidentally is the U.S. state with the second-largest number of actual Native American residents.
2011: Chief Wahoo remains on the home-game hat, but the block-C gains prominence as the default cap insignia of the road grays.
The National Congress of American Indians releases an Onion-esque graphic of three baseball hats that speaks volumes.
We invite visiting aliens to figure out which two of these hats are fake. (HInt: The real one is “respectful.”)
2012:
25 April: The cover of Cleveland’s Scene magazine is a succinct and hilarious comparison of Chief Wahoo and a black character reminiscent of the days of grinnin’ minstrels or black lawn jockeys.
Presumably, one is “cool.” (Artist: Aaron Sechrist.)
2013: The block-C replaces Wahoo on home and away batting helmets.
2015: The team starts its 100th season as Indians as protests by Native Americans continue.
2016:
Spring: The Indians elevate the block-C to the primary team logo, saying they are “clearly ... using it more heavily than we are the Chief Wahoo logo,” thereby assigning of value of 2 to the variable WAHOO_banana/fiddle_status.
Fall: The Indians’ post-season run comes with a price. Politically sensitive nicknames languish best in the league cellar, while on-field success tends to shine unwanted light on such imagery (a point made by Dave Zirin in the Nation and in this PBS Newshour story). Facing Toronto in the ALDS, it is widely noted that Jerry Howarth (the Blue Jays’ play-by-play guy since 1981) hasn’t said “Indians” or “Braves” on air since the 1992 World Series (Toronto v. Atlanta).
14 October: Blackfoot descendent Douglas Cardinal files a human rights complaint in Ontario Superior Court to block Canadian television from broadcasting that night’s game 1 of the ALDS, which would show Toronto face a team of Indians and their grinning mascot. (If successful, the suit would block live coverage only in Canada.)
17 October: It’s time for ALCS game 3, but first a judge dismisses Mr. Cardinal’s lawsuit in a 1 p.m. hearing. The case, however, spurs Major League Baseball to address the nickname issue with USA Today Sports the same day: “Major League Baseball appreciates the concerns of those that find the name and logo of the Cleveland Indians to be offensive. We would welcome a thoughtful and inclusive dialogue to address these concerns outside the context of litigation. Given the demands for completing the League Championship Series in a timely manner, MLB will defend Cleveland’s right to use their name that has been in existence for more than 100 years.” It seems MLB has decided to continue with the ALCS rather than immediately halt play until such time that absolutely nobody has a problem with name-logo tandem.
19 October: In an interview with Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, archeologist Chris Sockalexis, a descendent of Louis Sockalexis, says, “I guess first and foremost they should lose the logo. ... The mascot is really not an honour. ... “Indians" is still a stereotypical name, but it’s better than [Washington’s NFL] “Redskins” ... so I’m not totally offended by the name “Indians," just the logo.”
25 October: The Indians take game 1 of the World Series at home, trying to win their first title since 1948. Earlier in the day, MLB commish Rob Manfred appears on ESPN’s Mike & Mike show (audio at 1:10:13 here) and says this when asked to compare Chief Wahoo to the Washington Redskins: “I think that after the World Series, at an appropriate point in time, [team owner Larry] Dolan and I have agreed we’ll have a conversation about what should happen with that particular logo [Wahoo] going forward.”
28 October: Striking while the Clevelanders are hot, the National Congress of American Indians makes news on this mid-series travel day by formally requesting that MLB commissioner Manfred give them a seat at the table for any alluded-to discussion about “the offensive imagery and cultural misappropriation conveyed by the use of the ‘Chief Wahoo’ mascot and [Cleveland] team name.”
3 November (11:47 p.m. CDT): The Cubbies beat the Indians in game 7 to win their first World Series in 108 years, leaving Cleveland with the longest drought (68 years ... and counting). While fans celebrate the breaking of the utterly fabricated (aren’t they all?)
“goat curse,” there’s never been anywhere near that measure of speculation over a racist mascot that might inevitably generate some seriously bad karma.
2017:
27 January: Major League Baseball awards the 2019 All Star Game to the city of Cleveland. On the same day, it is reported that the Indians have been in not-really-secret-but-not-much-publicized discussions with the MLB commisioner about the future of the Wahoo logo.
12 April: It is becoming clear that MLB is applying genuine pressure to the Indians to “transition away” from the chief.
21 July: A couple of sabrmetricians (notoriously fascinated with the details) notice that the 2017 collection of Topps baseball cards does not include an image of Wahoo anywhere, presumably at the behest of Major League Baseball. (Compare the 2016 and 2017 cards for All-Star Francisco Lindor.)
2018:
29 January: Commissioner Manfred announces that the Indians have “agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball.” You can still get Wahoo merch at souvenir shops, but not at www.mlbshop.com. An inevitable pivot is indicated by this CNN headline: “Chief Wahoo has been sidelined. Redskins, you're up.”
Notes:
1. Brian McDonald, Indian Summer: The Forgotten Story of Louis Sockalexis (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, Inc., 2003): 57, 174.
2. Terry Pluto, Our Tribe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999): 50-51.
3. Ellen J. Staurowsky, “Searching for Sockalexis: Exploring the Myth at the Core of Cleveland’s ‘Indian’ Image,” in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 1998, Thomas L. Altherr (ed.), (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002): 147.
4. Bruce E. Johansen, The Native Peoples of North America: A History, Vol. 2 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005): 430.
••••••••••••••••••••
Click here to return to the Naming Rites Blog table of contents. Glenn Arthur Pierce is the author of Naming Rites: A Biographical History of North American Team Names, now available at Amazon.com . (Click “Read Excerpt” here.)
••••••••••••••••••••
© Glenn Arthur Pierce, 2016/2017/2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Glenn Arthur Pierce and the book Naming Rites with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
short URL: http://bit.do/Wahoo-Timeline
originally posted: 29 October 2016
“What, me worry?”
1889: The treasurer for Cleveland’s National League team comments on the disproportionate number of lanky players at practice. They’ll often be called “Spiders” thereafter ... but as I must constantly remind, there’s nothing “official” about almost any pro or college team name until the post–World War I era. (See note 3 here.)
1897: Louis Sockalexis, a multi-sport Holy Cross star from Maine’s Penobscot tribe, signs with the Spiders in March. He has a good start, but carousing and drinking lead to a July ankle injury. During Sockalexis’s short career, “Indians” and “Red Men” were sometimes used for distinction when the Spiders played split-squad games, but outside of those ad hoc circumstances, Sockalexis was never on any “Indians" team [note 1].
1899: Never the same player after his injury, “Socks” is cut seven games into his third season. How bad does that look? The ’99 Clevelanders at 20-134 are generally considered the worst major league team of all time, owing largely to the phenomenon of syndicate baseball. They fold up at the end of the season.
1901: The brand-new American League has a side in Cleveland, the blue-suited Blues.
1903: The Blues (also the Bluebirds or Bronchos) sign Hall of Fame second baseman (and eventual player-manager) Napoleon Lajoie away from the rival NL’s Philadelphia Phillies. In his honor, they are usually “Naps” in the press.
1913:
24 December: In only his early 40’s, Sockalexis dies in Maine from heart disease (obituary).
1915: Before the season, Cleveland trades former Phillie Nap Lajoie back to Philly, this time to the AL Athletics. (The AL and NL had agreed to a peaceful coexistence after the 1903 season.) It no longer makes sense to call Cleaveland’s Nap-less boys the “Naps,” so the 1915 team would be “Indians.” One likely explanation is that team owner Charles W. Somers wanted a Native American theme to compare his 1914 Naps to that season’s last-to-first world champs, Boston’s “Miracle” Braves [note 2]. In announcing the name, a cartoon in the Plain Dealer is accompanied by this observation: “We’ll have Indians on the warpath all the time and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts” [note 3].
1932: A nameless daffy Indian mascot appears on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
1940s:
• The press starts calling the Indian on the team patch “Chief Wahoo,” already an unflattering name for Native Americans (example from 1936 here).
• Pitcher Allie Reynolds’s mother was of the Muscogee/Creek tribe. His stint with the Indians (1942–46) ended with a trade to the Yankees, after which Cleveland’s press took to calling him “Chief Wahoo.”
• Late in the decade (perhaps 1947), the chief makes it onto Cleveland’s uniform sleeve.
1951: The Wahoo logo is pretty much finalized into the one today’s fans recognize.
1968: For the first time and pretty much out of nowhere, the team media guide claims the Indians were named in 1915 to honor Louis Sockalexis, who’d died in late 1913 [note 4]. This launches the “Sockalexis Myth.” (Refer again to Staurowsky, note 3.)
1990:
The Indians introduce “Slider” as a mascot. He’s one of those fuzzy-whatzit-muppety things we must tolerate in our post-Philly Phanatic reality. We can’t find anywhere in which the team identifies Slider (still available for bookings) as any more or less an “official mascot” than Mr. Wahoo (or is he not a mascot at all but a “performance character”?).
1994:
4 April 1994: Sitting president Bill Clinton throws out the inaugural pitch at the Indians’ Jacobs Field, but he’s apparently careful to wear a rarely seen block-C cap instead of one sporting Wahoo’s mug.
A famous 28-foot-high, 32-year-old neon Chief Wahoo sign has apparently not made the one-mile trip to the “Jake,” instead finding its own new home at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Perhaps unintentionally, this answers those who think that Wahoo (like Nazi flags and "whites only" signs) belong in museums.
1995: A discussion of Indian themes for sports teams is a national one when the World Series sees the Indians face the Atlanta Braves. The former display one of the most clearly racist mascots in sports (Mr. Wahoo), while fans of the latter practice the “Tomahawk chop,” a robotic hacking that some Native Americans find mocking (justified here by the Braves).
2008: The Indians introduce an alternate cap on which the chief is replaced by a block-C logo, similar to a design used on and off between 1902 and 1920 and again from 1978 to 1985 (according to the Hall of Fame’s usually reliable Dressed to the Nines database). The chief remains on the shoulder patch.
The same season, irony freaks throw a party when Chief Wahoo’s home stadium is renamed Progressive Field, after an insurance giant secures the naming rights through 2023.
2009: Chief Wahoo is noticebly absent from the Indians’ spring training facilities in Arizona, which incidentally is the U.S. state with the second-largest number of actual Native American residents.
2011: Chief Wahoo remains on the home-game hat, but the block-C gains prominence as the default cap insignia of the road grays.
The National Congress of American Indians releases an Onion-esque graphic of three baseball hats that speaks volumes.
We invite visiting aliens to figure out which two of these hats are fake. (HInt: The real one is “respectful.”)
2012:
25 April: The cover of Cleveland’s Scene magazine is a succinct and hilarious comparison of Chief Wahoo and a black character reminiscent of the days of grinnin’ minstrels or black lawn jockeys.
Presumably, one is “cool.” (Artist: Aaron Sechrist.)
2013: The block-C replaces Wahoo on home and away batting helmets.
2015: The team starts its 100th season as Indians as protests by Native Americans continue.
2016:
Spring: The Indians elevate the block-C to the primary team logo, saying they are “clearly ... using it more heavily than we are the Chief Wahoo logo,” thereby assigning of value of 2 to the variable WAHOO_banana/fiddle_status.
Fall: The Indians’ post-season run comes with a price. Politically sensitive nicknames languish best in the league cellar, while on-field success tends to shine unwanted light on such imagery (a point made by Dave Zirin in the Nation and in this PBS Newshour story). Facing Toronto in the ALDS, it is widely noted that Jerry Howarth (the Blue Jays’ play-by-play guy since 1981) hasn’t said “Indians” or “Braves” on air since the 1992 World Series (Toronto v. Atlanta).
14 October: Blackfoot descendent Douglas Cardinal files a human rights complaint in Ontario Superior Court to block Canadian television from broadcasting that night’s game 1 of the ALDS, which would show Toronto face a team of Indians and their grinning mascot. (If successful, the suit would block live coverage only in Canada.)
17 October: It’s time for ALCS game 3, but first a judge dismisses Mr. Cardinal’s lawsuit in a 1 p.m. hearing. The case, however, spurs Major League Baseball to address the nickname issue with USA Today Sports the same day: “Major League Baseball appreciates the concerns of those that find the name and logo of the Cleveland Indians to be offensive. We would welcome a thoughtful and inclusive dialogue to address these concerns outside the context of litigation. Given the demands for completing the League Championship Series in a timely manner, MLB will defend Cleveland’s right to use their name that has been in existence for more than 100 years.” It seems MLB has decided to continue with the ALCS rather than immediately halt play until such time that absolutely nobody has a problem with name-logo tandem.
19 October: In an interview with Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, archeologist Chris Sockalexis, a descendent of Louis Sockalexis, says, “I guess first and foremost they should lose the logo. ... The mascot is really not an honour. ... “Indians" is still a stereotypical name, but it’s better than [Washington’s NFL] “Redskins” ... so I’m not totally offended by the name “Indians," just the logo.”
25 October: The Indians take game 1 of the World Series at home, trying to win their first title since 1948. Earlier in the day, MLB commish Rob Manfred appears on ESPN’s Mike & Mike show (audio at 1:10:13 here) and says this when asked to compare Chief Wahoo to the Washington Redskins: “I think that after the World Series, at an appropriate point in time, [team owner Larry] Dolan and I have agreed we’ll have a conversation about what should happen with that particular logo [Wahoo] going forward.”
28 October: Striking while the Clevelanders are hot, the National Congress of American Indians makes news on this mid-series travel day by formally requesting that MLB commissioner Manfred give them a seat at the table for any alluded-to discussion about “the offensive imagery and cultural misappropriation conveyed by the use of the ‘Chief Wahoo’ mascot and [Cleveland] team name.”
3 November (11:47 p.m. CDT): The Cubbies beat the Indians in game 7 to win their first World Series in 108 years, leaving Cleveland with the longest drought (68 years ... and counting). While fans celebrate the breaking of the utterly fabricated (aren’t they all?)
“goat curse,” there’s never been anywhere near that measure of speculation over a racist mascot that might inevitably generate some seriously bad karma.
2017:
27 January: Major League Baseball awards the 2019 All Star Game to the city of Cleveland. On the same day, it is reported that the Indians have been in not-really-secret-but-not-much-publicized discussions with the MLB commisioner about the future of the Wahoo logo.
12 April: It is becoming clear that MLB is applying genuine pressure to the Indians to “transition away” from the chief.
21 July: A couple of sabrmetricians (notoriously fascinated with the details) notice that the 2017 collection of Topps baseball cards does not include an image of Wahoo anywhere, presumably at the behest of Major League Baseball. (Compare the 2016 and 2017 cards for All-Star Francisco Lindor.)
2018:
29 January: Commissioner Manfred announces that the Indians have “agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball.” You can still get Wahoo merch at souvenir shops, but not at www.mlbshop.com. An inevitable pivot is indicated by this CNN headline: “Chief Wahoo has been sidelined. Redskins, you're up.”
Notes:
1. Brian McDonald, Indian Summer: The Forgotten Story of Louis Sockalexis (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, Inc., 2003): 57, 174.
2. Terry Pluto, Our Tribe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999): 50-51.
3. Ellen J. Staurowsky, “Searching for Sockalexis: Exploring the Myth at the Core of Cleveland’s ‘Indian’ Image,” in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 1998, Thomas L. Altherr (ed.), (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002): 147.
4. Bruce E. Johansen, The Native Peoples of North America: A History, Vol. 2 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005): 430.
••••••••••••••••••••
Click here to return to the Naming Rites Blog table of contents. Glenn Arthur Pierce is the author of Naming Rites: A Biographical History of North American Team Names, now available at Amazon.com . (Click “Read Excerpt” here.)
••••••••••••••••••••
© Glenn Arthur Pierce, 2016/2017/2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Glenn Arthur Pierce and the book Naming Rites with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
short URL: http://bit.do/Wahoo-Timeline
originally posted: 29 October 2016
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Naming Rites: A Team Name and Mascot Blog
Glenn Arthur Pierce is the author Naming Rites: A Biographical History of North American Team Names. This companion blog continues to track trends and controversies pertaining to team names past and p
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