Hail to the Muscogee

I Grew Up Loving the Sport of Gridiron

As a native of Washington D.C., born in the city and raised in its suburbs, I was lullabied in fight songs about victory and swaddled in burgundy and gold. The then-named Redskins won a Super Bowl shortly before I was born, and then the team won two more in my formative years, including a performance against the Denver Broncos in January of 1988, that will forever be etched in my memory as one of the greatest football games ever. My team had success on the field, and were one of the most successful franchises in terms of valuation. The owner, Jack Kent Cooke, was a fine and fair football team owner; wealthy, philanthropic, and while famous enough, rarely seen. Things were going well.

Certainly, there was criticism even then about the choice of the team name. But it was not something that had a lot of traction. There’s a locker room truism: winning is the best deodorant. No matter how offensive the name was, in actuality, everything came up smelling roses as the team rumbled into another Super Bowl win in Janaury, 1992 and a fair bit of success in the mid-1990s.

Then in 1997, Jack Kent Cooke died and his will indicated that the team be sold, not passed down to his heirs. After a time, the winning bidder was our now infamous Dan Snyder. I have zero love lost for Snyder and won’t bother to recount what others have better written about why he has been a terrible owner for the franchise–both for the valuation of the team as well as the performance of the product. Nor has he been a good neighbor for the area the franchise rests in. But these are old wounds. At the time of the purchase, I didn’t know any of this, and I welcomed Snyder warily, but openly. He was asked, even then, about the name of the franchise. And as a lifelong fan of the team, he was strongly against renaming it.

To me, that seemed good. I wasn’t in favor of renaming it either. This was my team. My history. It was also in 1997 that another local franchise, the Washington Bullets, decided that they needed to rebrand as well, so name changes were in the air. I was opposed to that was well. I wasn’t even invested in the Bullets. I have never been much of a fan of basketball. But the new name, Wizards, seemed absolutely terrible. Even now, 23 years later, I still don’t like it. But 23 years later, Dan Snyder is being forced to change the name of his franchise. And now, I’m OK with it. A lot has changed in 23 years.

A Brief History of the Team

This won’t be the first time the franchise name is changed. The Washington Redskins started as neither. They were founded in Boston, perhaps my least favorite American city, and with the team name of “Braves.” It was a new franchise added to the already existing NFL, owned by George Preston Marshall. Marshall will remain an important figure in this story for quite a while. He retained ownership of the team until his death in 1969.

How much of a bastard Marshall really was may be in doubt, but that he was a bastard is undeniable. Marshall’s decision to name the team first the Braves and then the Redskins is steeped in the history of the relationship between Native Americans and the rest of society by the 1930s, as well as the sports environment of Boston. Marshall was a racist, through and through, and worked hard to try to prevent the NFL from racially integrating. So his decision, decades before, to name the team what is certainly a racist name is not in the least surprising.

One of my favorite Marshall-bastard stories is how in the late 1950s, the NFL was looking to expand further. The Redskins were the only NFL team south of the Mason-Dixon line, and Marshall used this to gain a huge audience throughout the American South. Therefore, any new teams in the South would impact his bottom line. So the fact that the NFL was going to create a franchise in Texas meant potential lost revenue for Marshall, and he worked hard to stop it, including by playing dirty. He’d promise support for a bid, then back out at the end so as to play rope-a-dope for as long as possible. Eventually, one prospective owner got wise and ran an end-round. Clint Murchison realized that the copyright of the fight song, “Hail to the Redskins,” had never been acquired by the team. They played it at every game, but didn’t own the rights! So he purchased them and held the rights over Marshall’s head to get his franchise. It’s no wonder he named the franchise the Dallas Cowboys.

There is no doubt that the history of the Washington football team name is racist, and it’s current existence is both out of step and at least a little embarrassing. The only reason to continue with it is because history matters. And as far as that goes, it’s worth noting that there isn’t much history to the franchise right now. For years I’ve looked at the team and wondered, if I were in charge what I would do to fix things. There seemed to be very little worth saving. Every single point I have checked in it looked like the very beginning of a rebuilding process. With such poor continuity between players, and very little on-field success, it’s hard to have an argument about how the history of the team name matters. The continuity is just Dan Snyder these days.

Dan Snyder is a Bigger Bastard than George Preston Marshall

It’s questionable how much of Snyder’s ultimate decision has been forced and how much is a change of mind, both his and mine, along with everyone else’s in that intervening time. But the timing and process definitely indicates that Snyder is still not entirely on board with this decision. There has been no replacement announced, just the statement that the “Redskins” name would be dropped. Snyder may not be a racist, and he could be excused for not seeing the history of the team the same way I did, since so much of my opinion of the history is now an opinion of him. But he has chosen at every stage, until this moment, to retain the racist name.

Ultimately, though, Snyder’s potential racism is not his biggest issue. As a NFL franchise owner, he has been far too visible, particularly for someone without a winning record. Even the franchise owners with winning records usually seem to regret being in the spotlight. Hello, Mr. Kraft. Yes, we see you. Unfortunately.

Snyder’s presence has been harmful to the Washington D.C. area. The relationship between the current franchise and the city is unhealthy, and Snyder’s ownership has directly harmed the franchise, and many of his employees. The recent allegations against the franchise, and Snyder himself of sexual harassment and worse are harrowing, and I see no reason to disbelieve them. In fact, everything that I know to be true about the franchise practically requires me to believe them.

Change is in the Wind (talkers?)

It’s worth looking at the changes in relations with Native Americans in the past 90 years, in light of this moment. In the 1930s, Marshall could get a new team and name it the Braves, but because that conflicted with an existing franchise in the same city, he felt the need to change it to something more unique. Now, there are relatively few elements of native imagery anywhere in sports. Few enough that we could probably enumerate all of them on our hands and have fingers leftover. Meanwhile, in my memory there have been dozens of name changes, many of them high profile, away from those names.

But it’s not just on the playing field that this matters. For generations the U.S. government has not done right by the tribes it subjugated. The colonies fought bloodily with the tribes. And the United States did as well. Every step along the way the native people lost lives and territory. Finally, the performance of Andrew Jackson sealed the fate of most tribes forever. But at the end of war come treaties, and these treaties gave the tribes the shortest end of a short stick you could ever imagine. But it left them with one important thing: sovereignty.

As much as most Americans tend to wrongly think that Puerto Ricans are not United States citizens, they also tend to assume that Native Americans are just United States citizens, rather than also citizens and members of their tribes. And since our legislators and governors tend to be fairly average Americans, it doesn’t surprise me that they largely ignore and forget the fact that these tribes still exist and still exert their own legal influence.

I’m happy to say, though, that the courts have not forgotten. A recent court case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, demonstrated just how much legal authority a tribe really does have. The case is about whether a tribe member found by a United States authority to be violating United States law is subject to United States judicial punishment, or if he is subject to tribal policing. The location of the alleged criminal activity turns out to matter quite a bit for determining jurisdiction. And the court found that the tribal lands are not abridged, despite the development of surrounding areas by the United States and its citizens.

As a result of this ruling, the tribal lands and policies of the Muscogee tribe in particular, but of all tribes, has been reinforced. As a vote for sovereignty, I cannot be happier.

The Washington Franchise is Dead, Long Live the Washington Franchise

The juxtaposition of these two elements is interesting to me. Even as the Washington franchise does away with the name, the name remains emblazoned in the fight song. But for right now, I think that fight song belongs more to the tribes than it does to the franchise.