It’s official. The headlines in the Washington Post screamed: “Washington’s NFL team is retiring the Redskins name; new name to come later.” My first thought was what next? That name has graced (or disgraced) the team for almost a century.
It was in 1933 when the name was first used by a team that used to call itself the Boston Braves. The owner of the team, George Preston Marshall, said in demonstration of his appreciation of the intelligence of the sports fans that: “So much confusion has been caused by our football team wearing the same name as the Boston National League club that change appeared to be absolutely necessary. The fact that we have in our head coach , Lone Star Dietz, an Indian together with several Indian players, has not, as may be suspected, inspired me to select the name Redskins.”
You may want to decide whether Lone Star was an Indian or not. One article said the FBI investigated his claim in 1918. At that time the FBI did not exist.
Lone Star was put on trial for claiming a false heritage. He did though play football for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School with Jim Thorpe which was coached by Pop Warner. That school’s goal was sort of like the the conversion places where gay men were supposed to be made straight. It was run by a guy named General Richard Henry Pratt who reportedly said: “Carlisle meant to turn the school into the ultimate Americanizer.” Or, as one said, “to kill the Indian to save the man.”
The owner Marshall was an avowed segregationist. His team did not have an African-American player, the last in the NFL, until 1962 and then only after it was pressured. He owned the team until 1969. A sportswriter called him “the last of the small-time spenders.”
Listening to Marshall’s explanation for naming the team Redskins he looked upon it as something that would please Indians. I don’t think he would have wanted to alienate his coach or players. But times change tastes and what’s good for the goose is not necessary good for her grand children.
Obviously the name Redskins is going to be killed, rather than retired, and thrown into the trash barrel of history. It will no longer be accepted as a proper word although the R word will not have the evil connotations associated with the N word.
Of course you do recognize that not is only the name Redskins when associated with the National Football League that has been killed. So has the name Boston. I’m not sure what the problem with Boston is although there is a book that has been written called “The Problem of Boston” which I have not read which may explain why the NFL killed the name Boston.
As I said when I first heard this I thought “what next.” I did that in the context of my own life experience. One of the joys of my youth was when I took the trolley out of Park Street on my way to Boston Latin School. It went over Huntington Avenue. I would stare out the window waiting anxiously to see the beautiful and dignified 1908 Indian statue in front of the Museum of Fine Arts called “Appeal to the Great Spirit.” It made me admire the Indian, showing his beauty and courage. It still does when I bring my grandchildren to see it.
The sculpture was done by Cyrus Dallin who grew up in Utah and witnessed the mistreatment of Indians. He “created his work during intense ambivalence about Native Americans, and his work honors the indigenous response to colonizers.” In a letter to The Boston Globe, Dallin wrote that “Native American land claim settlements were a diabolical invention, and destroying human beings.”
I have read the museum is under pressure to remove it because it was done by Dallin, a white man. Hopefully that will not be done. Why does the race of the sculptor matter. Martin Luther King’s sculpture in Washington D.C. was done by a person who lives in China; the Statue of Liberty by a man from France.
As I see it the least intelligent American zealots (sort of like the Taliban) with the loudest voices are dragging our country down to the level of the dumb. From those who arm themselves to preserve the right to spread Covid-19 to those who want to eliminate a statue or painting which doesn’t meet their ever changing ahistorical standards we are being whipped around by our tails.
It is time for us Americans to say enough. Not because one may gain political points as is being done by some who seek to curry favor; but because we want an educated population that can look at a statue and be free to decide for themselves what it intends to convey and not what they are demanded to understand of it by other people.
wa-llahi! Robert E. Lee used to beat his slaves. Indeed, he urged other slave holders to do the same. Lee’s family were major slave owners in Virginia. Their patrician lifestyle was supported by unfree labor. It was a rotten system that kept people in a bondage no different than that which Pharaoh used to keep the Jews in servitude. That must be why Jews were in the forefront of the civil rights movement back in the fifties and sixties.
All praise to the Litvak revolutionists (Trotsky). All power to the dialectic.
Lets face it, Khalid. There’s a really good chance that if you owned slaves back in the day they would feel the lash on occasion. Its not like the Lee family said, “Hey! I have a good idea. Lets ship some Africans over here and enslave them.” When you are born into a world where slavery is common you don’t do much questioning about who is picking the cotton. Some did and here in Virginia most did not.
Abe, European-style plantation chattel slavery required regular fresh infusions of unfree laborers. Folks like the Lee and his in-laws went up to New York once a year and borrowed the capital to replenish their slaves. It was a complex business, and, the Wall Street bankers were deeply involved. In 1815 a field laborer cost fifteen hundred dollars at the Richmond slave market. After the British out-lawed slavery, and, made it a capital offense, the price of slaves went through the roof. By the eve of the Civil War, that same field hand went for forty-five hundred dollars. You are correct most of the folks in Virginia didn’t own slaves .They couldn’t afford them, but, if they were a tradesman, store-keeper, mechanic, blacksmith, etc., their living depended on serving the needs of the big plantations, where, slaves toiled raising tobacco, and, cotton, for the international markets. Despite owning no slaves, the lives of regular folks were still deeply dependent on the peculiar institution.
wa-llahi! Let’s rename DC’s baseball franchise the “Washington Savages.”
Khalid:
Not a bad recommendation. Forward it on.
I understand there is a church in Boston near the Common (I’ve never seen it) that displays an affectionate expression of gratitude from Oliver Cromwell for their support. Can I burn it down?
Next to go is Cady Stanton and the rest of that gang. Ms. Stanton referred to my great grandmother as “subhuman” i.e Irish.
I’ll work on the list. After going through the Louisburgh Square, I’m sure I’m going to need more matches.
Good post. Works of art should not be destroyed. Ignorant people can’t cancel our history and culture. Your analogy to the Taliban or ISIS is accurate. After destroying statues what is next? Churches, Temples or Museums? Vandals should be jailed not tolerated or indulged. As Cicero said to be ignorant of history is to always be a child. No one shall be deprived of Life Liberty or Property without Due Process of Law. Antifa, BLM and the Anarchists completely ignore that concept.
I agree 100%, which disproves the allegation that I always disagree with Matt.
I will paraphrase but in my book/pamphlet/storylet Spiritual Glue I refer to two future works entitled “The War of the World’s Words” and “Hum”. In both futuristic works, which are in fact descriptive of the Orwellian present, the New Illuminati (Antifa, Black Cougars (the successors of the Black Panthers) and AOC-Bernie Sanders Types, unite to rewrite the meaning of many English words. Counter-New-Cultural Words are altered or words are simply banned. The futuristic world will ban the use of my friend’s nicknamed Redskin who has red hair and skin which turns red under the slightest sun, and is also wild and free and brave like many Native Americans. No Redskin; no Cleveland Indians, No Chicago Blackhawks (cultural appropriation) . . .you get the drift No Boston Bruins (Boston, according to the Boston Globe, is a racist city, and Bruins shows animal insensitivity.)
Also banned are paintings of Tahiti by Frenchmen, the playing of the Brazilian song the Girl from Ipanema by non Latinos, the wearing of kimonas by non Japanese (cultural appropriation) or the wearing of mini-skirts (sexist) or doing Mexican dances or playing the samba, by non Latinos. Everything that offends must be banned or removed. Moreover, offensive, heterosexually normative words like he and she, male and female, are banned.
In my second futuristic book HUM, folks are so afraid of saying anything or doing anything that offends anyone that they only hum and wear tan shirts and blue jeans. They hum lest the FEDs record them and accuse them of obstruction of justice or lying to a FED or disparaging the New World Order.
Naturally, Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” has foreseen this as have others who have written about the Soma-induced dumb doped up society which is descending upon us today. It is here. Dallin’s magnificent Indian statute outside the MFA and magnificent Indian sculptures inside the MFA’s American Rooms (three stories) will be banned, especially if sculpted by a white man.
Music, classical, rock, country-western, jazz by Dave Brubeck “Take Five”, and others must be banned because they are the works of European Centric White Men. Medicine must be purged of white doctors and nurses, who have oppressed minorities for millenium, since Greco Roman times. Sabin and Salk anti-polio white vaccines must be banned.
Martin Luther King’s ideal to judge men by the content of their character not the color of their skin, is eradicated from history, because it is passe and it denies the inherent structural racism that exists in the heart of every European Centric and Asian Centric person, and those 80% of Latinos that have European genes and those 24% of African Americans that have European (white genes). MLK with his Ph.D. from Boston University and is brilliant speaking and compositional skills, was blind to the true roots of American history, Judaeo-Christian history, and the English language, infested with barbaric Germanic origins and slave owning Greco Roman influences. Jesus was born in a country and place, Bethlehem, and preached in place, Jerusalem, under slave owning Greco Roman rule, for heavens’ sakes. Almost all his apostles and disciples were white, or if tan, at least infected by Greco-Roman Civilization and Judaeo-Christian religious centric views. Women were excluded from the Last Supper, and few but Mary Magdalene visited his tomb. These were sexist, slave-centered, Greco-Roman dominated times, and no one who lived in them and certainly none who thrived in them or preached in them or wrote in them or created art works in them, sculptures, murals, should be celebrated in the New World Order coming down under the Aegis of Antifa and Black Lives Matter’s anti capitalistic anti euro-centric pro socialistic pseudo philosophies which deny the reasoning or relevance of the philosophers who existed throughout the history of Western Civilization. Why listen to their bigoted words, to their bigoted music, to their bigoted science, to their bigoted medicine. Tear it all down as AOC and the Squad say, and when all the laws and artworks are torn down . . .well read or see the play A Man for All Season, for the punch line . . .it is an evil wind that is blowing in America, fueled by the main stream media, and leftist elements in academia and leftists in political positions of power, and those who kowtow to the mindless masses, the mob.
The history of America must be rewrote to begin with 1609 when the first black slave came, not to the early 1500s when the first black Moroccan man aboard a Spanish ship wandered from Florida to Texas with some Spanish shipmates, and certainly not from Columbus and certainly not from the Pilgrims, the white men who settled places from Virginia to Massachusetts to Maine to Newfoundland. Free blacks in the colonies must be purged from history as were the free black men at the Boston Tea Party and the free black sharpshooters who served at Bunker Hill and other free black men (African Americans) and free Indians (Native Americans) who served in Washington’s Army, because Washington owned slaves, like folks did in every country in the world back then, except Ireland.
All art, all music, all dance (Ballet), all writings, all medicine, all laws, must be purged of Euro-centric (White) influence until America, at least and at last, is a non-racist, non-sexist, non Judaeo-Christian, non Greco-Roman centered society, a culturally normative society which guarantees equal outcomes for all. The word Obesity is especially banned even though it is one of the five co-morbidities associated with Covid deaths, because it is a fat shaming word no longer allowable in euro-centric medicine practice in America. In the War of the World’s Words, obesity is now defined as a socio-cultural-biologic good, a noble goal, to be fed, fat and indolent and get free college and free paychecks every month. After all did not Milton say that they also serve who are idle or didn’t someone else say idle hands are the devil’s workshop and didn’t bob dylan (banned) pray that our hands always be busy . . .why not elevate idleness to a societal good, like sloth, like gluttony . . .what is wrong with these white philosophers/theologians who invented words like sin . . .what is wrong with destroying art works or destroying other peoples properties or looting? These Western European, Middle Eastern, Asiatic, Tao-centric, Buddhist centric concepts? All must be purged to make way for the New World Order.
Let’s face it, to redress the wrongs of the past, George Orwell’s insightful nostrum in Animal Farm must be adopted and universally recognized and universally applied. “All people are equal; except some people are more equal than others.”
So, let us purge the past and purge those White documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United State Constitution. Too white. Half the guys . . .all men, what a revolting disgraceful sexist document . . .half the guys who wrote these screeds lived in slave states.
Down with the Republic, up with the culturally normative anti-Capitalistic, every one gets a trophy, Socialistic Utopia envisioned by the Bolsheviks . . .oh no, the Bolshevicks were White . . .god damned micks . . .thick micks . . . .oh no, there is no god . . .we hate god, we hate traditions, we hate hard work, we hate to study, we hate art appreciation, what is there to appreciate in Western Civilization anyway . . .tear it all down
Signed,
The Twenty First Century No Nothings, the Anti-Capitalistas, Free Stuff for everyone, except no Free Speech, no Free Expressions, no Free Artwork which offends Antifa and BLM. Is BLM now a sacred cow in America, to which we all must yield and kneel? Have you read the platforms and demands of the Black Lives Matter gurus, of the Antifa leaders, of the Squad and its spawn. Where is the spine of the silent majority. I will tell you where it is: It is in Bari Weiss who courageously resigned from the New York Times and in women and men like her who are not cowed into silence, who are not afraid to speak out against the dying of the light: Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light.
I have about a dozen friends that are Native Americans. (They aren’t crazy about that name either. Amerigo Vespucci?) The ones that do follow gridiron football detest the name redskin. One of them, a Full Blood that lives in Maryland, has been a Dallas fan since boyhood. He was a country boy and has the same facial features as the man on the horse in front of the MFA. In his youth, his antagonists called him a redskin. That was the worst thing they could call him. He hates the word and can’t imagine ever rooting for a team with that name on its shirts. It would be like me rooting for The Holyoke Hitler Youths.
I can live without the Stars and Bars on a flag, but I would never demand that people keep it out of sight. It just doesn’t bother me. I know it bothers some people, but does it really?
Taking down statues of Confederate soldiers does not sit well with me. I’ve lived in the South for 26 years and really knew little about the Civil War before I moved here. I don’t believe any American can really know our history without an understanding of that war. The statues are of Americans, like it or not. They tried to break away and lost the war. And Robert E. Lee was a graduate of West Point and was asked by Lincoln to lead the Northern army. It was his loyalty to his home state, I believe, that made his decision. I never heard a Black person, and I lived in Grove Hall before I moved to Milton, ever say anything negative about a statue of a Southern soldier on a horse. Where was this sentiment 20, 30 or 40 years ago? OK. A person can learn something new and develop a different attitude, but will removing the statues change anything for the people that want them gone? Is it just that they need some kind of victory to feel good about themselves? If that is the case, it is a weak argument.