Infinite Inning Reissue 17 (076): Sammy Sosa and the Illuminati

Before we go back to 2018 for a discussion of the only Cubs general manager who was moonlighting from his job at the fish-market and a non-baseball tale, one of the more obscure and unflattering episodes of America’s westward expansion, we discuss our need for a shared reality and one of the earliest conspiracy theories. How are you going to be here with us if you believe that we’re being controlled by them?  

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, America's brighter mirror, often reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman discusses the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect history, politics, stats, and frequent Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and welcome to another Infinite Inning reissue episode.
I am, as ever, your host, Steven Goldman. This episode
revisits number seventy six from twenty eighteen. The Cubs are
headed back to the postseason this year, so it seems
like a safe time to make fun of one of
their worst general managers, a fella who knew his fish,

(00:48):
by which I don't mean the Marlins, but because his
main line was not in ballplayers, but in seafood or
maybe lake food, given that.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
It was Chicago. Is that save?

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Hey, we have some invasives gabra muscles for y'all. Tasty
treat y'all don't mind a little hepatitis between friends? Do
you write this way? This also seems like an appropriate
story for a week in which the Washington Nationals seem
to have hired themselves a new general manager for the
first time since the Taft administration. I'll say a little
bit more about that later. This reissue is coming out

(01:21):
a day later than I usually get to it, in
part because I realized I wanted to write about it
at Baseball Perspectives before I spoke about it here. The
second tale of the episode goes outside of baseball for
a little American history. My springboard back then was the
Tomahawk chop, a subject I've written about and talked about
quite a bit I fear too much, perhaps so much

(01:42):
so that Saber, possibly to their regret, asked me to
contribute an essay on the origins of the chop to
a book that is coming out, I believe around Christmas
this year. When I wrote it, I spent a great
deal more time on Tammany Hall than the Bravest Ball Club,
cause ultimately that's where the Braves name comes from, and

(02:03):
therefore that's the grandpa of the chop, so to speak,
and Tammany itself the name is taken from a semi
mythical chief named taman In. So to really get to
the point of the whole thing when we start talking
about appropriation, we have to go all the way back
to when William Penn first showed up in his Pennsylvania

(02:24):
not Colony proprietorship and started making deals with the local
Native Americans of whom taman End was one. And from
there you somehow end up in New York and Democratic
Party machine politics. As you know, my thesis is baseball
is everything. Everything is baseball. It's all intertwined. Baseball is
representative of America, and that is one way that the

(02:48):
strands of our political and sports history tend to weave together.
So that the Democratic Party sort of annexed this Native
American iconography. Then the ball club annexes the political iconography
from Tammany Hall and doesn't really disclose that. So a
lot of people who are ignorant of its past say

(03:09):
to themselves, well, we're either honoring Native Americans or we're
parodying them, and when really it could be either or
both or neither. Finally, more recently, people say, well, wait,
these are real people we're talking about, and Commissioner Manfred
comes out and says, it's not people, it's marketing, which
that is America to me. That is the whole problem.

(03:29):
In a nutshell, he spoke quickly and drank a glass
of water. Well, the story in this episode is not
squarely on the subject of the chop because al right already,
but on something adjacent. An episode from what we call
the Indian Wars, which makes Our Gun's first Western expansion
sound a little less one sided than it was. It
starts with a guy named Meeker and the job he

(03:51):
had Indian agent. The Indian agents were supposed to manage
relations between Native Americans and settlers in their locations in
a kind of even handed way, but often it was
an exploitative graft position. In short, many of them were crooks.
In Melbrook's Western Blazing Saddles, there's a little speech given
by the bad guy played by the late great Harvey Korman,

(04:11):
in which he lists out all the bad people he
wants to bring in to harass the good guys. I
won't do this, just as Corman was great, but he says,
I want you to round up every vicious criminal and
gunslinger in the West. I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, bugs, thugs,
n it wits, halfwits, dimwitz, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents,

(04:36):
Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, train robbers,
bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers, and methodists. Note that
I left out one thing from Corman's list, which was
just a slur on lesbians. It seemed unnecessary for me
to repeat it. That film both was and is politically incorrect,
whether today or when it came out in the seventies.

(04:58):
That's some of the point, but there's no need for
me to upset anyone here in context. Maybe it's fine,
as are all the other slurs in the movie, but
I don't want it on my podcast. More to the point,
Indian Agents is so specific compared to the rest of
the list that it always jumps out at me so
much that I tend to miss most of the rest.

(05:18):
I think this is the first time I noted that
particular slur I just mentioned. It's just so blunt about
these guys who are often bigots with a license to steal.
Right now, today, the administration is engaged in a campaign
to eradicate anything that might not celebrate the greatness of
America or Americans, certain Americans anyway, and they are going

(05:42):
after the signage in our national parks and historical monuments.
I guess Fort Pillow Historic Park in Tennessee is a
state park, so our great White father can't touch that
one without complicity from the governor. But that's the site
where after a battle fought on April twelfth, eighteen sixty four,
Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a guy who shall

(06:05):
be foot repeatedly called a genius back in Kenburn's Civil
War documentary, massacred over two hundred Black troops when his
men overran the site after the battle Forrest, wrote to
his bosses, it is hoped that these facts, the facts
of what he called the slaughter, will demonstrate to the
northern people that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners, because, yeah, well,

(06:26):
who can cope with anyone when the battle has been lost.
You've put down your guns, You're relying on the protections
afforded prisoners of war, and instead the opposition just cuts
you down. That's not coping only if murder is not coping.
And then he went home and founded the KKK. I
don't know why you would have a Fort Pillow Historic
Park and Cemetery if you couldn't faithfully represent what happened

(06:50):
there and what we might need to take away from
the fact that it happened. Hell, I don't know why
you would have a Chicago Cubs if you couldn't faithfully
represent them either. Cap Ed wasn't there. He didn't do it,
He didn't say it. King Kelly didn't drink it or
sleep with it or have it cough on him. Ross
Barnes wasn't just a fair foul vake. Ned Williamson wasn't

(07:10):
just a parkavect fiend. Al Spaulding wasn't part of a cult.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Honest.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Frank Chance was a pussy cat. Evers was a noble heart,
and Tinker a mensch. Rogers Hornsby was kind to children
and animals sometimes. When that woman shot Billy Jerge's, he
had only gone to her hotel room to return a book.
Ed Bouchet exposed himself to those kids because there was
fluorite in the water and he thought it would be
educational for someone involved in the transaction. Ralph Kinder had range,

(07:35):
Larry Boa had range, Bill Buckner had range. Sammy Sosa well,
never mind. I still don't understand that whole thing. Did
he juice? Yeah? Probably, But a lot of players did,
and they weren't disavowed the way that he seems to
have been until fairly recently. My point is that if
there's no such thing as an objective truth, some large

(07:56):
set of facts somewhere that most of us can agree upon,
then you or I or he or she or they
do not share the same world. That sounds histrionic, but
it's true. And here's a random example. And I'll say
in advance, my knowledge about this is pretty thin, and
for good reason. I have no idea if anyone today
really believes this particular conspiracy theory. But hang with me

(08:18):
on this for a sec. In the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, there was a German cat named Adam Weischoft,
a college professor at you Ingelstadt. One biographer characterized him
as a familiar hazard of academic and collegiate life, the clever, cantankerous,
self absorbed, and self deceiving bore. My sense of his

(08:38):
story is that he wanted to be a Freemason, which
was a fattish thing to do back then. It was
and is a fraternal society, but with a frisson of
ritual and mysticism. I don't know if Faischaft was frustrated
with the Masons they did charge high initiation fees, or
just wanted to have his own version of the same,
with his own rituals and sashes and aprons. But whatever

(09:01):
his motive, he went off and he founded his own
group in seventeen seventy six, the Illuminati. They came into
being in Bavaria. This is the dawning of the Age
of Bavaria. The Freemasons, who, as I said, are still
a thing, have some very impressive buildings around the country.
The Great Big Temple across the street from City Hall
in Philadelphia, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial and House

(09:25):
of Pancakes in Alexandria, Virginia, which just towers over the landscape,
which it should because it is a tower, and it
does have ample parking. Maybe thirty years ago or so,
I wandered in there, it contains an impressive statue of
our flawed national Papa, George Washington, who was a member.
The statue has him holding his hammer and his trowel

(09:45):
and wearing his apron, and it is just not what
you're used to seeing in depictions of George Washington. It's
as if you went to the Lincoln Memorial and his
statue was wearing a party hat. Four score and seven
years ago. These secret societies had something in common with
modern video games or scientology. The more levels you play,

(10:08):
the more upgrades you get. It should be a perpetual
motion device for adherents. But hair Weischaft was not the
greatest administrator. He failed to make up a lot of
the lore that would have to be revealed as adherents
climb the ladder. Next issue, there is no next issue.
I don't know how to resolve this cliffhanger. You know, men,
I would say, I'm sorry, but the German language lacks

(10:31):
a word for that. The members got fed up, so
he decided that rather than trying to gather new members
of his own, he would kind of have his guys
infiltrate the Masons and be a cuckoop within Masonry, take
it over from within. I have no patience with this story. Ultimately,
the Illuminati somehow got crossways with the Bavarian monarch, the Elector,

(10:52):
Charles Theodore. No one called him Chuck Teddy, I don't think.
And they were officially suppressed and hair weischaft skidaddled Alminnati
were over. They were done. Yet the idea that there
was a secret society infiltrating a larger secret society got
into people's heads. The Illuminati could be anywhere doing anything.

(11:14):
I don't know if this is the first conspiracy theory,
but it's one of the earliest and most successful and
long lasting. They could be puppeteering the American government even now.
You know, when you look at Weishoff's portrait, he bears
a pretty good resemblance to George Washington. Who's to say
that when he absquatalated from Bavaria, he didn't come here

(11:37):
bunk the good general on the head and take over.
They had already done it in France. You know, the
revolution was all they're doing. The part of this that's
kind of hilarious in retrospect is what the Illuminati's supposed
goals were. They wanted, wrote one John Robeson, and I
quote from his essay of seventeen eighty six, long time ago,

(11:58):
to abolish the laws protecting proper party and plant a
democracy or oligarchy on its ruins. The Illuminati accounted all
princes usurpers and tyrants, and all privileged orders as there
are betters. They intended to establish a government of morality,
as they called it, where talents and characters should alone

(12:19):
lead to preferment. They intended to establish universal liberty and equality,
the imprescriptible rights of man. That sounds pretty good. Actually,
I want to quote this tract a little more because
it really starts to sound familiar and as necessary preparations
for all this. They intended to root out all religion

(12:41):
and ordinary morality, and even to break the bonds of
domestic life by destroying the veneration for marriage vows, and
by taking the education of children out of the hands
of the parents. Great Scott, really, I've never heard anything
like that before. When we see how eagerly the Illuminati

(13:02):
endeavored to insinuate their brethren into all offices which gave
them influence on the public mind, and particularly into seminaries
of education, we should be particularly careful to prevent them,
and ought to examine with anxious attention the manner of
thinking of all who offer themselves for teachers of youth.

(13:22):
Best watch the colleges and test the teachers. We know
that the enemy is working among us. The vocabulary of
the Illuminati is current in certain societies among us. We
should discourage all secret assemblies which afford opportunities to the disaffected,
and all conversations which foster any notions of political perfection

(13:44):
and create hankerings after unattainable happiness. These only increased the
discontents of the unfortunate, the idol and the worthless. Above all,
we should be careful to discourage and check immorality and
licentious business in every shape, for this will of itself
subvert every government, and will subject us to the vile

(14:07):
tyranny of the mob. Who is this us? I don't
think he's talking about everyone. He's talking about the aristocracy,
the people in charge. The threat is always the same,
and the prescription is always the same. Robert Welch Junior,
the founder of the John Birch Society guys who saw
communist conspiracies everywhere, was still talking about the illuminati being

(14:32):
bent on world domination in the nineteen sixties. And again,
the proposed fix is always the same. Somehow, the answer
to infiltrators who want to control you, supposedly is always
for you to control everyone else. Assuming you are a wealthy, conservative,

(14:53):
heterosexual capitalist. I am not criticizing three of the four
things I just named. I am not wealthy, by defen
but I have done okay by capitalism and vice versa.
I happen to be a heterosexual. Everyone else can be
who they want to be as long as they do
it with love and yes, according to community standards too,
because that is the real limit to what is right,

(15:14):
what is legal, and indeed what is possible, And like
everything else, community standards are a question of education and persuasion,
not compulsion. The people who fear being compelled for whatever
reasons of their own psychology, also believe in compelling others.
They can't see that the community might evolve and change,

(15:36):
and they fear that change, even if it is organic
and not the result of subversion. And sometimes it's an
understandable thing that fear that change can be as small
and insignificant as something I think most of us experience
at one point or another in our lives, which is
the music of our youth going out of style and

(15:57):
being replaced by something radically different that might not appeal
to us as much. That can be dislocating, so dislocating
that sometimes Old Strew's team up and formed panels to
condemn satanic rock and roll and burn records or question
whether the song We're not going to take It is
going to cause the cities to burst into flame? Did
they see the video? It features the bad guy from

(16:19):
Animal House, not Vladimir Elitch Lennin. I started out by
mentioning that the Nationals are hiring a new general manager
as of this date, the Nationals have lost ninety four games.
That they are not going to lose one hundred seems
like a matter of luck. Because their pitching staff is
just short of historically bad. It's certainly as bad as
any we've seen this century with an era over five

(16:42):
in a league which has an era closer to four.
Their defense is not great center fielder Jacob Young notwithstanding,
so the pitchers have had help. But the bottom line
is what it is. Imagine and this is where I
went for my Baseball Prospective column this week. If we
couldn't tell the truth about the Nationals, or that they
could suppress the truth about themselves, how could we judge

(17:04):
the approach the new boss is taking to getting better?
How would we even know that they needed to get better.
That's why you tell the truth about your country. If
you can say your mom isn't perfect and the old
gal has developed some flaws, hasn't she, Then you can
say your country isn't perfect and how, why and when?

(17:25):
And then you roll up your sleeves and you pitch
in to help make it better, and you demand the
leadership makes it better. And yeah, they hate when you
do that, But that's the point, all right, That's all
for me for this reissue episode. I'll be back periodically
to patch over the brakes, which we're going to take
now one of them anyway. And on the other side,

(17:47):
join me six years at seven years ago, poor episode
seventy six and the cub's making kind of a poor
decision regarding their general manager's position.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
What else is new?

Speaker 1 (18:07):
One of the things that we all must learn as
we go through life is a healthy respect and disrespect
for expertise. Imagine a then diagram containing two circles. On
the left hand side is people who are experts in
a particular subject, anything really, from plumbing to physics and

(18:27):
sure baseball. We can label that circle subject smart. On
the right hand is a circle containing people who have
a general intelligence that is applicable to most situations in life,
not just plumbing or physics or sure baseball. We can
label that circle wisdom. Now note where the circles overlap.

(18:50):
It's actually a very small slice. We can venerate the
man in the left hand circle who knows physics when
he describes to us his work with the particle accelerator
at CERN. We may learn to despise him as an
idiot when we ask him to comment on baseball or politics,

(19:10):
or simply to say something nice about his wife. He
may not be capable of that. Thus, expertise is not
necessarily the same as wisdom. It's the anglerfish luring us
in with a glowing light that says, respect me, I
know what I'm talking about. But we really have to
know the basis of that light and what it really

(19:31):
pretends for us when we're drawn in towards it. When
chewing gumb magnate William Wrigley came down with a fatal
case of death in nineteen thirty two, ownership of the
Chicago Cubs passed to his son, Philip K. Wrigley, still
in his thirties. PK wasn't too interested in running a
baseball team, so he arranged to have the club's second

(19:51):
largest shareholder, William M. Walker, takeover. Walker had been co
owner of the Federal League Chicago Wales with Charles Weigman,
the fellaw whose name initially went on what is now
Wrigley Field, and the two had been allowed to buy
into the Cubs really buy the Cubs as part of
the resolution of the conflict with the Federal League. As

(20:14):
all professional sports leagues have found over time, rich people
tend to lose interest in suing you for your monopolistic
practices if you just let them be part of the monopoly.
William Wrigley was part of that group too. Overtime, Wigman
had to sell out to him, but Walker stayed in.
William Wrigley's death and Phil Wrigley's disinterest didn't harm the

(20:36):
baseball side all that much at first, because the team
president was Bill Veck Senior, who knew what he was doing. Unfortunately,
he had leukemia and he passed away in early October
nineteen thirty three. That meant Walker kind of by default
became team president and in effect general manager. Walker had

(20:56):
gotten rich on seafood. He had been in the fish
wholesaling business going back to nineteen hundred. As one newspaper noted,
he had learned the fish, the oyster, the clam, and
the shrimp. He also figured he had learned baseball. Why
shouldn't he have, having been in the game for about
twenty years at that point, Well, he hadn't. One thing

(21:19):
Walker didn't know about for sure was home road splits,
the division of a player's performance into how he pitched
or hit at home, which may be subject to distortion
based on the idiosyncrasies of his home stadium and how
he hit or pitched on the road. Where we assume
or hope that the quirks of each park will kind

(21:41):
of come out in the wash after you've combined everything
into one big lump. Now those kinds of stats were
not generally circulated, then I'm not aware of them being
generally circulated prior to Bill James, who used to publish
them in the annual abstracts. So you only learned about
them after the season was over. But that doesn't mean

(22:02):
that baseball people were not aware of such things. Just
a couple of episodes back, I talked about how Ty
Cobb visited the new Braves Field in nineteen fourteen and
immediately observed that the fences were so distant that no
one would ever hit a home run there, and for
the longest time that was true. That is an awareness
of park effects. When Joe DiMaggio would complain about just

(22:24):
how far it was to the left center field fences
at old Yankee Stadium, that too, is an awareness of
park effects. And when Larry McPhail and Tom Yankee got
roaring drunk and agreed to trade Demagio for Ted Williams,
so that Williams could take advantage of Babe Ruth's porch
in Yankee Stadium and Demagio could pop balls over the

(22:46):
Green Monster. Guess what also, park effects? They didn't have
the stats, but they knew how it worked. Similarly, when
they talked about, and please pardon this expression, it's just
what they called it, players hitting Chinese home runs down
the two hundred undred and seventy nine foot left field
foul line where the two hundred and fifty eight foot
right field found line at the Polo Grounds, That too,

(23:08):
was an awareness of park effects. So they knew about
the Baker Bowl for sure. The Baker Bowl was the
home park of the Philadelphia Phillies from eighteen ninety five
through nineteen thirty eight. It was a weird little park
packed into a small block in North Philadelphia. It could
hold only depending on which period of that span we're
talking about, eighteen to twenty thousand fans. The dimensions of

(23:31):
left field and center field were more or less normal
three hundred and forty one feet down the line, three
hundred and seventy nine feet to the alley, four oh
eight to center, but right field was ridiculous. It was
three twenty five to the alley. Some sources say three
hundred and I'm kind of inclined to believe them, and
about two eighty to the right field wall. Since that
distance was so short, there was a forty foot ten

(23:52):
wall topped by a fifteen foot screen. On the wall.
Famously was a deodoran at the Phillies use life buoye
why because they stink. This has nothing to do with
what we're talking about. But the other weird thing about
the park was that the Reading railroad had a tunnel
under center field, so the park bulged in the middle.
I've tried really hard to discern that in photographs and

(24:14):
I can't quite see it, but many sources attest to
the fact that it was there, And in old overhead
shots you can see the rail yards right next to
the park, so it kind of makes sense. It must
have been kind of odd to play center field and
find yourself running uphill after certain flyballs. But as I said,
that's just a note. The main thing is that if

(24:35):
you look at a diagram of the ballpark or those
aforementioned overhead views, it looks like the Vincent van Go
of Stadia it's had its ear lopped off. It's just
two thirds of a ballpark. Observers at the time were
not any less aware of the park's bandbox nature than
people were aware that the leaning tower Appieza leaned, even

(24:57):
though they might not have had a protractor handy. When
they look at it, you could see the angle, just
as you could see the short walls in Philadelphia. Just
wait until I get into that bandbox, Babe Ruth said
in nineteen thirty five when visiting Philadelphia with the Braves.
If I don't hit at least one home run a day,
I'll give you well, I'll make you a present of something,

(25:18):
and you can name it. From what I've heard, it
will be a cinch. And here's Kalmnistan Bumgardner in the
Philadelphia Inquirer in nineteen thirty eight, as the Phillies were
about to move out. The shift of the Phillies from
the Baker Bowl to Ship Park will make itself felt
in the batting averages of the entire National League clubs.
With such slow footed but big muscled men as Lombardi

(25:41):
of Cincinnati, who used to enjoy a Roman Holiday hitting
the fences at Baker Bowl, we'll find their averages cut
in half. At Ship Park. The old catcher Jimmy Wilson,
who managed the team in the nineteen thirties, said, a
pitcher goes along well for four or five innings and
then a couple of pop flies, which would be easy
out there, and other parks hit that wall for doubles

(26:02):
or triples. I have to yank my pitcher and use
maybe a couple more during a game after one homestand
the staff is coming apart at every seam. Thus, baseball
men may or may not have known that when Philly's
right fielder Chuck Kline hit three eighty six in nineteen
thirty that was a combination of hitting three thirty two
on the road and four thirty seven with twenty six

(26:24):
of his forty home runs at home. But they understood
it in a and please forgive the pun ballpark way. Similarly,
when first baseman Don Hurst hit three point thirty nine
there in nineteen thirty two, driving in a league leading
one hundred and forty three runs, they probably had the
sense that he hit four h two with sixteen of

(26:44):
twenty four home runs at home two seventy four with
eight on the road. They also understood when he slumped
to two sixty seven with eight home runs total in
nineteen thirty three, despite playing in the park, that his
performance was even worse than it appeared on the surface.
They didn't know for sure that Hurst had hit two
sixty eight with a three to eight on base percentage

(27:05):
in a three eighty slugging with just two home runs
on the road. But, as Irving Berlin wrote in the
song doing what comes naturally, my tiny baby brother who's
never read a book, knows one sex from the other.
All he had to do was look. William M. Walker
pro Fish Vender didn't look. He traded for both Klein

(27:27):
in November nineteen thirty three and Hurst in June of
nineteen thirty four. The Hearst trade, one of the worst
in team history, cost the Cubs first baseman Dolph Camilli,
an older prospect he was twenty seven, who would later
win an MVP for the Dodgers. Think of the way
things went for Luke Voight this year, and you kind

(27:47):
of have the idea on Camille. Whereas Voight may yet
proved to be a flash in the pan, we just
don't know. Camilli turned out to be the real thing.
Regularly knocking twenty five home runs a season, posting four
one hundred on base percentages, and driving in one hundred
runs a year. The team that Walker was responsible for,
the nineteen thirty four Cubs, they weren't exactly bad. They

(28:09):
went eighty six and sixty five and finished thirty eight
games back of the Cardinals. They were in the race
for two thirds of the season, though they never did
take it over the final third. They were just a
couple of games over five hundred, and even that was
probably a little lucky, as they were outscored during that period.
It's worth noting that with Hirst on the team he
came over in June, the Cubs were two games under

(28:30):
five hundred. In fifty one games with the team, Hurst
hit one ninety nine with three home runs. He was
kind of the self destruct weapon of the Cubs. His
ops plus was forty two and that was it. That
was the end of his career. They gave up a
good player for him and he was gone. Klein was
a very good all Star level player with the Cubs,

(28:50):
just not an MVP candidate. He was a three win player,
not a five or seven win player. That he was
in the Baker Bowl where on a case he literally
not only hit the ball over that wall for home
runs or off the wall for doubles, but he hit
it through the wall. I don't know what they ruled

(29:11):
the ball that was hit through the wall. It was gone,
all right, it just wasn't gone in the traditional sense
that we think of it. I hate to invoke John Sterling,
who may be my least favorite regular broadcaster, but I'm
just thinking, it is high, it is far, it is
through the wall. The reason it went through the wall

(29:33):
is that the Phillies were perpetually broke, in no small
part due to the fact that the park was such
a decrepit small bathtub of a stadium, and so they
put no money into it whatsoever. Bathtub's not a bad description. Actually,
Red Smith once said that the Baker Bowl looked like
a rundown men's room. If a fly ball hit off

(29:55):
the roof, there'd be rust raining down on the customers.
You had coal dust coming in from the Redding Railroad.
I suppose this didn't affect the fans or the players particularly,
but they were too cheap to hire somebody to mow
the lawns, so they had cheap grays on it, and
on two occasions parts of it actually collapsed with spectators
in the park, resulting in injuries and yes, deaths. One

(30:19):
other thing that diminished Chuck Klein's value away from the
park was that he could no longer play and shallow
right field and throw runners out at first base. Quite famously,
in nineteen thirty that big offensive year I mentioned, he
threw out forty four runners from the outfield. You never
see that, and he had two other seasons in the twenties.
That's because, unlike say the Green Monster, the supports for

(30:43):
the wall were such that if a ball hit them
just right, they were solid enough that the ball would
rebound almost all the way back to the infield. So
if you had a right fielder with a good arm
who understood how to play the wall, he could camp
out behind first base whirl and make a peg to
the first baseman to turn what should have been a

(31:04):
hit into and out. The other problem with KWin as
a Cub was that he became injury prone, and he
missed about forty games in nineteen thirty four with a
bad hamstring. Poll The Cubs had several other good players
who were of Hall of Fame or near Hall of
Fame quality, including their other outfielders Kai Kai Kyler and
Babe Herman, Gabby hart Knett behind the plate, Billy Herman

(31:26):
at second, Stan Hackett third. The pitching staff wasn't quite
as talented, although it was good, and there was a
not Hall of Fame, but hall of very good pitcher
as the staff ace Bond Wernike, who went twenty two
to ten with a three point two to one ERA
that year. That's a one twenty two ERA plus a
five war season. They were just a little short. They

(31:47):
were right in diagnosing that they had a problem at
first base, which was initially staffed by their manager, Charlie Grimm,
who was a light hitter. And they also tried Kamille,
and if they had given Kamillion or time, chances are
things would have worked out better for them, certainly in
the long term, if not the short term. But Walker
went for Hurst instead, and the decision punished them badly

(32:10):
in the short term and in the long term. The
Cubs had gone to the World Series in nineteen thirty two,
and now having missed two seasons in a row, there
was some rumor that Walker would be on the way out.
The more I see a baseball the more I think
of the fish business, he said. But I am not
going to quit because I am in a hot spot.

(32:32):
I will be president of the Cubs next season and
have made my plans. Accordingly, Phil Rigley changed his plans.
He bought out Walker and took over the team presidency himself,
for better and worse. He held that position through his
death in nineteen seventy seven. According to the Chicago Tribune
in August nineteen thirty four, William M. Walker, president of

(32:54):
the Cubs, can look any fish straight in the eye
and tell how many hours it is it's been away
from its watery home. It was probably true, and Walker
sounds like he would have been a great guy to
take with you to the docks to meet the shrimp
boats as they came in, so that you might safely
begin your career as an amateur sushi chef. But it

(33:15):
wasn't true for baseball. He couldn't look the first basement
in the eye and know what would happen to him
if he got away from his watery home. I'm Steven Goldman.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
This is the infinite inning hell there.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
I feel that it cannot must not be beyond the
power of statesmanship to avert the awful disasters with which
we appear to be threatened.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
A five thought, mister Private, has started lovely, wonderfully expressed.
But I'm afraid that the shivering army is already nearly
at the gates, and so we must flee and hide
and shelter. Number seventy six. Put on your pants now
like a good boy. Welcome back to the show. Few

(35:04):
words on another subject, one that came to mind this
past week as we watched the Atlanta Braves make a
similarly quick exit from the twenty eighteen postseason. The Braves
were tremendous fun this season. They took their seventy two
and ninety record of a year ago and they reversed it.
That allowed them to win a National League Geese division
that no one really wanted. I mean, nineteen seventy two

(35:26):
record is good by the standards of where they just
come from, but not great by the standards of a
team heading for the postseason. Ron Akunya was obviously one
of the stories of the season, and not just for
the Braves but for all of baseball. That was probably
my favorite aspect of the team. As I imagine it
might have been yours. My second favorite aspect of their

(35:47):
season was either Charlie Coulberson randomly having this big year
off the bench, or Annimal Sanchez coming back to post
a two point eight three ERA in about one hundred
and forty innings after putting up a five point six
seventy over the previous three years. The Detroit Tigers, They're
gonna get you. I also was amused when Nick Markakis

(36:07):
got off to a hot start and suddenly everyone seemed
to notice that he has a real chance for three
thousand hits, something that I've been thinking about for quite
a while, just observing his pace over the last couple
of years. He's now seven hundred and sixty three away
heading into his age thirty five season. He'd be further
along and a better bet if he hadn't slumped badly

(36:30):
over the last two months. He hit a powerless two
fifty six over the last two months of the season,
and he's going to be an interesting case if he
makes it. Because three thousand hits, like five hundred home
runs or three hundred wins, is accounting stat it doesn't
necessarily indicate quality, and in his case, he's just sort
of been in most seasons decently solid, better than the

(36:54):
alternative if the alternative is nothing. That kind of guy.
I don't mean to put down his career. He's someone
I actually have enjoyed watching, but I don't think anyone
has mistaken him for a Hall of Famer before, and
he's never even gotten an MVP vote. So it's going
to be interesting to see how people react, because the

(37:16):
only thing that has bent the voters in the Baseball
Writers Association or the Veterans Committee away from those big
round numbers that signify nothing has been the Peds era,
so Bond's and Clemens and so on. They don't go
into the Hall of Fame even though they have those

(37:37):
numbers that would automatically stamp your ticket. And I hope
that this has freed them to think for themselves and
not just let the numbers do the thinking for them.
That's not the reason that I wanted to talk about
the Atlanta Braves, though. The reason that I wanted to
talk about them is this. Here the Steve of twenty

(37:59):
twenty five must in to say, I played a clip
of the Tomahawk Chop music here once again, kind of
fair use. Once again, I don't feel like getting in
trouble for it, or at least hassled over it. So
you're going to have to imagine that it's still here.
I'm pretty sure you know what it sounds like, and
you can look it up for yourself, as it has

(38:19):
been played by dozens of other people who also do
not own the copyright on said inside Indian quote unquote
music from countless Westerns, and you know what, I find
the whole thing so darn vexing. I would prefer to
take a break before we resume, So give me a
moment to compose myself, and on the other side, I'll

(38:39):
continue the story of what came to be known as
the Meeker massacre spoilers tomahawk chop in Atlanta tradition that
goes all the way back to nineteen ninety one, which
is to say, it's not really a tradition at all.

(39:01):
I find it disturbing. I know that others do too,
from social media and other articles. And at the same time,
I imagine that many practitioners of the Tamahawk chop view
it as the Atlanta Braves director of public Relations, then director,
I should say, said way back in a nineteen ninety
one New York Times article. We consider it a proud

(39:22):
expression of unification and family. Were they or are they right?
I had to think about that a bit on a
personal basis. I think part of what bothers me is
that I'm suspicious of any crowd activity mass activity, even
one is innocuous, is say, doing the wave, which doesn't
seem to me to make any statement that's negative at all.

(39:45):
It's just that I don't like the idea of subsuming
myself into some kind of mass organism. It just runs
counter to every instinct I have, both as kind of
a prideful individual and also of this thing that's wired
into me. It's the same thing that Graucho Marx had
wired into him when he said that he refused to
belong to any group that would have him as a member.

(40:07):
It's kind of a self punishing thing in a way,
but like I said, it's also proudly individual. It might
also be that the site of a whole stadium of
people making this weird bending arm gesture, which could also
signify pouring a bucket of oatmeal over your head or
touching oneself in a really aggressive way, has fascistic Nuremberg

(40:29):
Rally like qualities, but I do think that there are
more serious reasons that it is truly offensive. I think
it's simultaneously a cultural appropriation and racially reductionist, and yet
also fictitious. It's not racist in the same sense that

(40:50):
the name of the Washington Redskins is just a straight slur,
but rather it's racist in the same way that Chief Wahoo,
now formally retired with the conclusion of Cleveland Season. Thank
Goodness is racist in that it's a reductionist caricature. The
music is a pastiche of some Native American theme that

(41:14):
might have come out of a movie, and the gesture
itself is a travesty of Native American culture. They were
and are a widely varied group, not a monolithic culture.
That's one of the reasons that the white settlers were
able to give them such a hard time, even though
at least at the outset they were outnumbered. Well. Another

(41:36):
reason is that the Spaniards and other Europeans showed up
much earlier and infected them with lots and lots of
diseases that they had no immunity to. So there was
this massive die off, a catastrophe that we can only
imagine in the sense of apocalyptic movies about rapidly spreading contagion.

(41:58):
But the other part, as they weren't one group. They
were many distinct tribes with many different kinds of relationships,
and we played them off against each other. They played
each other off of each other, and they for certain
weren't all going about in big groups waving tomahawks and
threatening to scalp people. I believe they learned the scalping
from settlers. Even had they not, there were some on

(42:21):
the other side who went a great deal further with it.
And when you read about some of the confrontations between
American soldiers and Native Americans in the West, you will
read horrifying tales of American soldiers riding away from those
battles with Indian body parts on their saddles, right down
to and including genitalia. Propaganda is propaganda, though, and that

(42:44):
image of the wild engine waving his tomahawk at the
innocent white settlers was used to justify so much violence
and appropriation. When President Andrew Jackson died, a guy who
did as much to image the Native Americans is anybody
in history. The guy eulogizing him said, among other things,

(43:07):
summing up his career. He survived the tomahawk, and yeah
he did, but he went looking for the tomahawks sometimes too,
and he went looking for freed black people. He went
looking for them as well. And one thing that's really
awkward about the whole tomahawk chop thing is that it
happens in Georgia, a state that conducted a campaign of

(43:27):
ethnic cleansing against the Cherokee, a campaign in which they
had the help of that same Andrew Jackson. Then many
years later, they adopted the tomahawk chop from Florida State
University with their team the Seminoles, a tribe an Indian
tribe which also got very harsh treatment from that same
Andrew Jackson, who invaded Florida just to teach them and

(43:49):
those freed black guys a lesson. He didn't invade them
as president, by the way, he didn't order the army
to invade. No, he personally invaded. And there's still some
debate as to whether he was freelancing it or not.
He just did it on his own authority. The Cherokee,
they weren't tomahawking anyone. They were by and large assimilated
farmers doing exactly what they had been asked to do.

(44:10):
The seminole situation is a little more complicated, and there
was violence, but violence on both sides. And I can't
tell you without making more of a study of it,
who started it, if that's even clear. But in any case,
they massacred some people, and we massacred them back. And
the fact is that what one group of Seminoles did
to another group of white people doesn't say anything about

(44:33):
all Seminoles or all white people. And yet that's the
way that we typically end up extrapolating from such incidents.
They certainly did. Then can we pause and zoom in
on that point for a second. This may be the
best example of racism I know. It's the method by
which people talk themselves into living in a world without mirrors.

(44:54):
When in the Old West or the Old South, wherever
you want to locate things, whenever a Native America and
got drunk and killed someone, the white people said, all
of those Indians are bad, we must drive them out.
But you know, nobody has a monopoly on getting drunk
and killing somebody. White people get drunk and murder others

(45:16):
all the time. But yet no white person ever seems
to say we're bad we should all rush to the
river and drown ourselves. Or feeling that, move to Oklahoma.
We'll call it white territory. No, what they say is
a shame about Johnny. He's just a bad egg. And
they're right to say that, because generalizations are stupid. They're

(45:36):
for stupid people who can't think. I realized that too,
is a generalization. But it's the exception that proves the rule.
And of course there were reasons for their thinking that way.
There were things underneath the racism, in part that they
coveted lands that they didn't have because maybe the railroads
wanted them to put a railroad through there without interference.

(45:57):
Maybe they wanted to dig for minerals there. And in fact,
some of what I'm about to talk about, because I
still have a little bit more to tell you, involves
the fact that there was silver lying around in some
of these places that Native Americans happened to be hanging out.
Where they ended up hanging out after that was not
where they had started. But in as I alluded to

(46:18):
just a few moments ago, with White Territory, Indian Territory,
which the federal government set up in what is now
present day Oklahoma, Oklahoma is actually the Oklahoma Territory smashed
together with Indian Territory, Indian Land like a theme park
where they sent everybody that they didn't want. The Cherokee
ended up there, the Seminoles ended up there, And it's

(46:41):
the exact same idea that the Russians had. Just to
give you one example, by establishing the Pale of Settlement,
a designated area in the West to which Jews were restricted.
They couldn't live anywhere else. It does not reflect well
on a people. But we did exactly that. By we,
I mean Americans. I have noticed from my listeners statistics
that I have various listeners from overseas. Thank you, by

(47:04):
the way, But you are innocent and excused from the
inclusive we that I have been using throughout and I
apologize you did nothing. Then again, I'm sure someone in
the history of your country did something nasty to somebody,
because you're still a human beings, even if you're not Americans,
and we're just wonderful, wonderful critters. I was going to

(47:24):
talk more about Georgia and the Cherokee and the trail
of tears now to underscore how ridiculous it is to
appropriate this not even real symbol of our vanquished foe.
And to speak yet again of how we learn to
disrespect people, by which I mean first, an opponent, a competitor,
is a conflict partner. They have something like equal power

(47:47):
to you and self determination, and so you have to
respect them. As the balance of power shifts in your favor,
you can start to take them a little more lightly.
In fact, you can take their name and name your
town or your football team, or you're by the Slight
pizza shop after them. Anyone want to go get some
crazy horse pizza. That's how you name your football team
and your baseball team. Braves and Indians and Redskins. They

(48:10):
used to be scary. Now they're safe, and so it's
safe to invoke the scary without really feeling scared. You
conquered their name, you own it. No one would call
their football team the Atlanta Terrorists because it would be
in bad taste. Why because they're still a going concern
that kills people. Conversely, none of these tribal or generally

(48:31):
Native American references started showing up in sports teams until
not long after the Army slaughtered the Lakota Sioux at
Wounded Knee, an event that is generally felt to have
brought the Indian Wars for the West to a close.
But it occurs to me that you don't need to
hear it, and no one in Georgia needs to hear it,
because they know and they don't care. I want it

(48:54):
instead to just, very briefly, in outline form, tell of
a different moment in what came to be called the
Indian So before we paused for a coffee and a snack.
If I say snack like that to my cat, he
gets very happy. I hope you are not affected the

(49:17):
same way and didn't have to pause this and rush
off for a cookie. If so, I apologize. I was
talking about the tomahawk chop and the idea that a
reductive pastiche or parody of someone else's culture is inevitably racist.
And I don't know if what I'm about to say

(49:37):
is a precise analogy, but I feel like it's close
enough because it shows just how destructive one sided thinking
can be. That is, when you formulate and portray a
feeling about someone or a group of someone's and don't
let reality puncture the bubble of what it is you

(49:58):
have conceived. This happened in eighteen seventy nine, and as
I said before the break, it's one of the smaller
corners of the conflicts between whites and Native Americans that
happened continually throughout the nineteenth century, particularly after the Civil War.
This is not Custer, this is not Geronimo. You don't

(50:21):
hear about it a lot. And this isn't the only
measure of things. But just before recording this bit, I
went through as many Westerns as I could think of
that hit on these themes. And I don't have an
encyclopedic knowledge of Westerns by any means, but so many
corners of this conflict have been dramatized by Hollywood, whether

(50:42):
in television or movies, and you'd think that there was
no corner to obscure. I mean, in the nineteen fifties,
the Modoc War, which took place in northern California slash
southern Oregon and was just a tragedy for the most part,
still got a film with Alan Ladd and Charles Bronson,

(51:03):
of all people, as the Native American antagonists. As far
as I can tell, that hasn't happened for this event,
and it's probably for the best. So as told briefly
and virtually without notes. And I know I always say
briefly and it's not true, It's going to be true.
This time. We're in Colorado in eighteen seventy nine, about
a year earlier, a fellow named Nate Meeker got himself

(51:25):
appointed via political connections as the Indian agent for the
Ute Reservation, or one of the Ute reservations that existed
in Colorado at that time. Now, when I talk about
the Utes, and yes, Utah, that's where that comes from.
It was a large and disparate group of Native Americans
that was spread around that area Colorado to Utah, and

(51:49):
they had already come under a lot of pressure from Colorado,
which had just become a state. Original Colorado's really wanted
those Utes out of there. I'm not sure why, because
the particular group that we're talking about didn't seem to
bother too many people as far as I can tell.
I mean, not that they didn't have a right to
be there bothering people or not, but they were in

(52:10):
primarily what was, and as far as I can tell,
is a very sparsely populated part of the state, mostly
at high elevation. That was their lifestyle. They prized horses.
They had prized horses since the Spanish introduced them, and
a lot of their culture revolved around how many horses
you owned, and racing horses was a big part of

(52:30):
their leisure time activities. They hunted buffalo and the rest
of the time, as far as I can tell, they
largely kept to themselves in places where you would have
needed an escalator to get at them. They had already
been restricted to reservations by treaty, and because silver had
been discovered on the southernmost reservation, they'd already had to

(52:52):
give up a huge chunk of it. They had done
this peaceably, in part because they were guided by one
of their chiefs, a man named Urey, who was a
highly adept diplomat and negotiator. And ure seemed to understand
that fighting was not the best tactic for a people

(53:14):
so badly outnumbered and out gunned, so he gave ground
where he had to and tried to get what concessions
in return that he could. He doesn't make for as
dramatic a hero as someone who fights to the last
man and dies with a pile of bodies around him,
but he makes for a better hero than that. Guy
in a majority of cases. Nevertheless, his efforts don't stop

(53:37):
the local white Coloradons for blaming the Utes for every
bad thing that happened in Colorado, including forest fires, or
from staging the odd massacre, most infamously the Sand Creek attack,
which involved killing lots of women and children, because, as
the man who led the attacks said in disgusting terms,
that would have pleased any Nazi knits make lice. I've

(53:58):
lost track of how many I've mentioned that horrible line
on this show over the years. But as you know,
I firmly believe that we're only as strong as our
willingness to confront the deep, dark, truthful mirror, as Elvis
Costello called it. I'm calling this the final break of
the episode. On the other side, Who Meeker was and

(54:19):
what happened? Meeker was about sixty and he was a
failed writer and had also had a history in utopian communes,
which was a thing in the middle of the nineteenth century.
That's a whole other topic. I'd be interested in investigating

(54:42):
where that movement comes from, which is sometimes called Furianism.
It's a combination, I think of reaction to the second
grade Awakening and the industrial Revolution. You combine the tune,
you have a whole lot of people thinking about how
they can kind of change prevailing social trends which are
dragging people off of their farms in small community and
into cities and factories and so on, and so they

(55:03):
build large houses and practice open marriage. I don't think
Meeker was an open marriage guy, but anyway, he makes
a decision about the utes he is going to practice
his theories on them. You know, there's this movie from
about nineteen seventy with Dustin Hoffman called Little Big Man,
which is kind of a travesty of the whole settling

(55:24):
of the West and the Indian Wars. And Dustin Hoffman
plays this kid who kind of pingpongs back and forth
between being a ward of the Native Americans and award
of the white settlers, and so he gets a perspective
on both. And it's a pretty good film. If you
haven't seen to check it out. Some aspects I think
of dated a little bit. It can be pretty funny

(55:44):
in places. Anyway. There's a sequence where Jack played by
Hoffman runs into General Custer played by Richard Mulligan, kind
of the way Richard Mulligan played Everybody, which was completely insane,
and Custer in this depiction feels he has an almost
omniscient way of determining who a person is and what

(56:07):
he does just by looking at That's impossible.

Speaker 4 (56:10):
I have never said eyes in you before.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Well, I wouldn't figure you to marry me, sir.

Speaker 4 (56:15):
Thurn them all. You don't look like a scout to me.
Not a bit scout has a certain appearance kit Coss him,
for example, But you don't have. You look like a
mule skinner.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
Well. I don't know anything about you for a multiple.

Speaker 4 (56:31):
Thing, but I can tell the occupation of a man
merely by looking at him. Notice the bandy legs, strong arms.
This man has spent years with mules. Isn't that correct? Well, yes,
Sir Hi had a mule skinner's.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
That was kind of Meeker. He looked at the utes
and said, you are not hunter gatherers. You are farmers.
Farmers you will be. And he didn't really stopped to
ask how the utes felt about it. I'll tell you
how they felt about it. They had absolutely zero interest
in becoming farmers. A few of them tried it, got
made fun of by the other utes and quit, and

(57:13):
Meeker's reaction was to call in the army continually. Dear
General Sherman and General Sheridan, these Indians are making fun
of me. They laugh at me when I hand them
ahoe and tell them to plant colliflower. Please bring the
army and make them farm, or shoot them. Love Nate Well.

(57:33):
Even Sheridan and Sherman, who were generally pretty eager to
deploy their soldiers on the western frontier, tended to laugh
at these and crumple them up and throw them in
the waste paper basket. So Meeker, in an act of
purely suicidal non brilliance, decided to make a point. He
plowed up the racetrack, which was centrally important to the

(57:57):
Utes in the area, because, as I said, horse racing
was a big part of their lives, their culture. It's
a bit like deciding to plow up Fenway Park or
Wrigley Field just because you don't like that so many
people quote unquote waste their time at baseball games. When
Meeker proposed doing this, the local medicine man shoved him

(58:19):
around a bit. Note I do not say that he
thrashed him within an inch of his life or beat
him until he had to go to the local Frontier Hospital.
Know what I'm saying is and this is as best
as I can tell from the several accounts that I read,
that he kind of shoved him around a little bit
and knocked him out of his own front door. So

(58:40):
Meeker writes the Army again, Dear General Sherman, In General Sheridan,
my life has been threatened. I have been driven from
my own home over this whole racetrack thing. Please send
the army. Well, this time they kind of had to
take it seriously, so they write to the local General,
the local General dispatch, which is a troop of about

(59:01):
one hundred and fifty people from the nearest fort, which
is still like one hundred and seventy five miles away,
and they start coming down. Now the Utes get word
of this, and this makes the Utes very very twitchy
because they know what has happened to other people. When
the army shows up to it, some of them end
up dead and the rest end up in Oakla freaking Homa,

(59:23):
which is a hall from Colorado. And if you like Colorado,
you don't really want to live in nowhere, Oklahoma. No
offense to the Oklahomas. Well, I take some offense at
James enhoff, so let's just call it even a group
of ute leaders headed by a chief named Jack. At
least the Americans called him Jack. The modoc leader in

(59:43):
the affair I mentioned earlier was named kin Pouash, but
was called Jack by everybody. I think Americans tended to say,
what's your name, kin Pouash? Yeah, that's too hard, you're Jack.
So I'm not one hundred percent sure what this Jack's
real name was. It was probably something along those lines.
Too many syllables for we lazy folks to deal with,

(01:00:05):
so he was called Jack. Well, Jack and the gang
say to the army, Look, the northern boundary of our
reservation is Milk Creek. Please don't cross that. We don't
want to have any kind of conflict. And it makes
us kind of edgy when you bring a lot of
guys with guns onto our reservation. Why don't you just
come down with a small group, see what's going on,

(01:00:28):
and then we can make a determination as to what
to do. But this way there's no great, big armed confrontation.
And the man in charge on the army side, a
young major named Thomas Tip Thornberg, appears to have said,
you know, that's a pretty good point. That's good advice.
That's what I'll do. I will not bring the army

(01:00:49):
across the creek. I will just come with a couple
of guys. He lied. He brought them all anyway, And
when Jack and his men saw the army coming, they said,
this game has been fixed. And it's not clear exactly
who started shooting. It could have been that a friendly

(01:01:10):
wave from the army side was misinterpreted as a signal
to attack. In any case, Thornberg ends up dead, as
do an additional ten soldiers. They're about fifty wounded. All
the horses get killed, and the survivors end up in
the quintessential theatrical wagon circle, hoping like hell that someone

(01:01:32):
will come along and bail them out. And that's what happened.
The army eventually sent reinforcements. Simultaneously, a separate group of
utes goes down to the reservation headquarters, murders Meeker in
fairly violent fashion, murders every other male who's there, which
is about an additional ten people, and kidnaps the three
women who are on the premises, including Meeker's wife and daughter.

(01:01:57):
These two events, insofar as I can tell, were not
coordinated and They result, I think from a group of
people who were very frustrated with Meeker and were simply
taking their revenge from having brought all the hell in
the world down on them and for having in general
been so disrespectful. Meeker was writing the Senator who got
him his job, saying that if he wasn't going to

(01:02:19):
get these guys to be farmers and he was just
going to starve him out, that was his plan. Great guy,
and subsequently, by the way, a hero of the story.
There are towns named after this guy. Everything that happened
after that was an anti climax, and I say that
not to diminish any of the tragic events that followed.
Sherman and Sheridan poured in about four thousand soldiers and

(01:02:42):
were just awaiting word to wipe these northern utes off
the face of the earth. They didn't get to do
that because the women had been kidnapped. The Secretary of
the Interior decided to put the brakes on the whole thing,
the Interior Department being responsible for Indian affairs they still are,
and they sent a team to negotiate their release, which

(01:03:04):
did happen. That they were returned alive is great that
they had been sexually violated is not so great. And
as part of the subsequent negotiations to end this whole standoff,
prosecution of roughly twelve of the Utes that were implicated
in that crime was demanded by the American side. It

(01:03:27):
kind of happened, and then they let it peter out
because the greater goal was to get the Utes out
of there, and as they thought would happen, as was
inevitable from the very beginning, from when Meeker showed up
with his big ideas, they did end up not in
Colorado but on a reservation in Utah. I'm not defending

(01:03:51):
anything that the Utes did in this situation, with the
exception of the envoy to Major Thornberg saying please don't
bring a lot of armed guys with guns onto the
premises because that tends to have bad results for us.
I just want to point out how much of the
whole experience of the white government versus the Native Americans

(01:04:16):
was predicated on ignorance, one sided thinking, and coercion with guns.
Even when the Native Americans complied, as the Cherokee did
in Georgia, it didn't have a great outcome. So in
Georgia they said farm or die, and the Cherokees farmed,
and they still wound up in Oklahoma, and Meeker said

(01:04:36):
farm or die, even though there was no real reason
for him to say so. It was just a whim
of his and once again everyone wound up either dead
or in Utah, which is sometimes tantamount to the same thing.
And when it comes to the Tomahawk chop, we need
to think about that. In Richard White's recent history, The
Republic for Which It Stands, which covers the post Civil

(01:04:56):
War period, he points out the army tact and discipline
non citizen Indians in ways the government never attempted with
citizen Southerners after the Civil War. That's very true, and
it's a purely racist dichotomy. The government faced just as
much violence in the post war South as they did

(01:05:17):
in the West, and in the South it was at
the hands of actual no different than al Qaeda terrorists,
who were determined to deprive groups of people of their
civil rights, sometimes often by killing them. President Ulysses Grant,
whose administration is presently being rehabilitated, acted very tentatively and reluctantly.

(01:05:38):
Congress had to pass no less than three different bills
empowering him to suspend the right of habeas corpus and
outlawing the Ku kus Klan activities that were being so
destructive towards establishing a national government with uniform rights for everybody.
In the aftermath of the war, they finally did, through

(01:05:59):
the Attorney General, prosecute some clan members broke the clan
in South Carolina, but as a result of the whole thing,
the Attorney General's resignation was asked for. Grand issued pardons
or commutations to many of those convicted, and Congress critters
on both sides of the aisle started talking about how
the federal government had too much power. This was at

(01:06:21):
the exact same time that Phil Sheridan was going around
saying more or less it's misquoted that the only good
Indian was a dead Indian, and the Grand Administration was
repudiating a treaty with the Sux that gave them in
perpetuity the Black Hills of the Dakotas. But you know,
Custer had found gold there, so never mind that, And
as a result, Custer ends up dying fighting Native Americans

(01:06:45):
when he could have been in the South fighting terrorists.
It's not just the Grand administration. By the way, all
of this business extends for more than twenty five years
after the end of the Civil War. Really, the upshot
of the Civil War is that African Americans get the
end of slavery, but virtually no other civil rights for
one hundred years, and with the slavery question settled in
terms of political power between the North and South, Native

(01:07:08):
Americans get to face a American polity that is uniformly
focused on the wonderfulness of westward expansion, backed by an
army that has been enlarged and professionalized against which they
have absolutely zero chants. And one hundred and fifty years later,
we do the Tomahawk chop, and by itself, maybe it's
a small thing, but it is racist because it misrepresents

(01:07:31):
and dismisses an entire history for a holy, mythical gesture
that has nothing to do with them whatsoever. Early in
his career the Comittee in George Carlin had a line
where he said the Indians were good fighters. Just because
they started in Massachusetts and ended up defending Malibu doesn't
mean they weren't. And it's a funny line, but you

(01:07:51):
have to understand that these folks got hit by History's truck.
So when you sit in the ballpark and pump your
arm up been down, hoping that Dansby Swanson delivers a
game winning single, and you think you're participating in a
group activity that invokes some scary triumphal Native American gesture,

(01:08:13):
what you're really evoking is a tragedy and a long
lasting period of genocide. About the most benign thing you
could call it is insensitive. But really we should all
know better, We should all be better educated, we should
all be more empathetic than Nate Meeker was. By Dinard
Spans rapidly graying Beard. We have come to the end

(01:08:36):
of another episode. You can as always here is where
I used to tell you where the guests could be
found on Twitter and how you could follow me. But
of course there is no more Twitter gone just doesn't
exist anymore, and for the purposes of this reissue episode,
the guest has not joined us. Therefore, I need only
remind you that you can follow me at Stephen Gooldman

(01:08:58):
dot best Guy dot social. Also write us, by which
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wolves are welcome. We love wolves at the Infinite Inning,

(01:09:19):
and if you have a spare moment, please go to
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but nevertheless, this episode is brought to you by the

(01:09:41):
Number two. Our producer is Throckmorton K Skippy. Our theme song,
which you are listening to now and have been listening
to throughout the episode, was a co composition of myself
and doctor Rick Moring. It's called The Infinite Man. Doctor
Rick could not be reached for comment this week, but
I well remember the time that he marveled at our
limited capacity to be limited, and that therefore entropy is

(01:10:03):
not our enemy but our greatest friend. Well, if the
pacoderm parade down Main Street doesn't direct traffic to the
Flamingo Falls and thereby caused so much congestion that you
missed the birthday party that you didn't want to have.
I'll be back next week with more tales and discussion
from inside the Infinite Inning. That's all from past Steven,

(01:10:24):
all from present day Steve two for this reissue episode.
I will see you this weekend for a brand new
Infinite Inning three forty six. Thanks for joining me for
this reissue episode, and I'll look forward to seeing you
then