Tom Swift Chief Bender’s Burden

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They called him Chief. Of course. Nearly every man of Native descent who stepped onto a ball field during the first half of the century was called Chief. The moniker, some have likened it to calling a black man “boy,” was a tidy way for whites to place a race of people under their thumb. As scholar Jeffrey Powers-Beck said, the tag was a means to “appropriate” Bender in the “manner of the cigar-store Indian or the Wild West how Indian.” Historian John P. Rossi called the epithet “a perfect reflection of the naïveté and racism of the age.” Bender resented the constant bigotry. “I do not want my name to be presented to the public as an Indian, but as a pitcher,” he said almost a decade before. The newspapermen didn’t listen.

There was scarcely a time when Bender was written about when his race was not prominently mentioned. Bender didn’t win games. He scalped opponents. Bender wasn’t a talented pitcher with an impressive repertoire. He pitched in his best Indian way. Bender wasn’t a player with guile. He was Mack’s wily redskin. The prejudiced descriptions were almost unyielding. Consider a lead sentence following Bender’s effort in Game 4 of the 1911 World Series: “Charles Albert Bender, a child of the forest, pitched the Athletics to victory …” After Bender’s sterling performance in the 1905 World Series, Sporting Life writer Charles Zuber said that “Bender, according to reports, is a typical representative of his race, being just sufficiently below the white man’s standard to be coddled into doing anything that his manager might suggest, and to the proper exercise of this influence on the part of manager Connie Mack much of the Indian’s success as a twirler is due. Like the Negro on the stage, who … will work himself to death if you jolly him, the Indian can be ‘conned’ into taking up any sort of burden.”

Bender was often portrayed as a caricature and was the subject of myriad cartoons–many exhibits of narrow-mindedness. After he threw one of the most dominating games of the early years of the American League, Bender was depicted wielding a tomahawk and wearing a headdress as though he was a happy warrior. Other examples made him appear as a predator. During his rookie season, as the Athletics were traveling by train en route to St. Louis, Bender’s wallet was apparently stolen. The wallet contained one hundred dollars, no chunk of change for a nineteen-year-old in 1903. Although he was the victim, newspaper cartoonist Charles Nelan portrayed Bender, then a somber young Ojibwe man trying to fit in, as a redskin on the warpath. With white passengers looking on in horror, as though Bender might soon take their heads, he was depicted on all fours–looking for his “wampum belt” in an incident writer Charles Dryden said “entailed no end of trouble” as “all hands were routed from sweet dreams”–with facial features so distorted he looked something less than human. Never mind that Bender likely had more education than the average person who held the very newspaper in which such coverage appeared.

The incident was indicative. The press assumed Indians were stony and oblivious. The press thought the taunts and slurs had no effect on Bender. The press was wrong.

Baseball players of the time represented an ethnic mishmash, but the game was as racist as the public that supported it. African Americans, of course, were banned. American Indians were allowed on the field, but they were expected to withstand racially charged ridicule as part of day’s work. Bench jockeying was as much a part of the era as the sacrifice bunt, and the banter was not sanitized for political correctness. Back to the reservation! Grab heap much wampum! Nig! Often when Bender pitched, baseball fans wore out their lungs with renditions of Indian battle cries and war whoops. He often looked at such displays with a still face. Sometimes, as the mockery continued, he grinned. Or, after a particularly effective inning, he would make a half-circle coming out of the box and yell, “Foreigners! Foreigners!”

But some incidents could not be finessed with wit. In 1907 the Athletics were playing in Washington, and the swarthy Bender walked into a café run by an intolerant owner. Dressed well, he quietly asked for a beverage. The proprietor, standing near, remarked softly, “Screw, dig–you ought to know better.”

Bender looked surprised. “I ordered a seltzer lemonade.”

“Get out now. Go quietly. You’re not allowed.”

Bender was confused. He repeated his order.

“If you insist on trouble, all right.” The proprietor gave a signal. Two waiters rushed over and then a bartender joined them. By the time the owner was done ranting several others had crowded around. Five minutes later Bender was tossed onto Pennsylvania Avenue, his clothes messed up. He brushed himself and walked away.

Many other whites saw Indians as exotic novelties, and Bender was their noble savage. It became en vogue to nickname teams the Braves or Indians. The club Bender was about to face was one example. As Powers-Beck pointed out, teams all over the country began calling themselves Indians and recruiting American Indian players as gate attractions. In describing such teams’ fortunes the press had easy, colorful verbs, and readers gobbled them by the spoonful.

Children who loved to “play Indian”–How to Play Indian: Directions for Organizing a Tribe of Indians and Making Their Teepees in True Indian Style was published some dozen years before–often approached Bender when he was in public and greeted him mimicking “war whoops and rain dances.” Bender didn’t become angry with them, but supposedly he always signed his name on their baseballs and bats as Charles or Charley. Over time he acknowledged the nickname was indelibly linked to his baseball fame. He was called Chief so often–and so often with affection–that he allowed the name to be etched into his tombstone. Marie, his wife, too, identified herself as “Mrs. Chief Bender.” But whether on the field doing his job … in his home reading a newspaper … on his way to the market … at nearly every point at which Charles Bender engaged the world he was viewed through a lens filtered by prejudice.

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Perhaps the unrelenting duress is what caused Bender’s face to often seem devoid of life. In several surviving photographs his stare advances the notion that he knows something you don’t–and that something isn’t good. Maybe, though, the empty looks were offered to cameras simply because of an aversion to having his picture taken. “One day an intrepid sharpshooter defied the Chief’s warning,” William E. Brandt wrote in a 1930 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. “Chief, who was warming up at the time, gave his control a little practice by bouncing a ball against the camera’s eye, thus ending picture taking for the day.”

Contemporaries called Bender among the brightest players in baseball. This was because of the way he approached hitters, often breaking from convention, using whatever he could think of–including a pitch he may have invented–to get them out. Bender’s demeanor also had something to do with the impression others formed. Especially in the early years of his career, he was seen more often than he was heard. His mouth moved deliberately beneath his long straight nose. His words were few but they were articulate. His height–six-foot-two-inches carried erect, like a military man, but with ease, like a diplomat–commanded respect. Plus, with his stern expression and focused eyes, he was one of those guys who just looked smart.

He always seemed in control, and that was part of his game, too. Billy Evans, a prominent umpire during Bender’s career and later a baseball executive, called Bender “a master workman” who “knows how to pitch.” Evans said Bender “takes advantage of every weakness, and once a player shows him a weak spot he is marked for life by the crafty Indian.” Bender cared more than most that his pitches found a piece of home; perhaps that was because he knew more than most how much the rest of life is outside human control.

His face’s default setting was serious. But by 1914 Bender had forged a more demonstrative and playful identity. His trademark smile was never wider than when he was trying to work out of jam. Perhaps as a way to endear himself, or maybe just because he liked to make others smile, too, he would needle people. According to the Philadelphia Press, after throwing warmups to catcher Ira Thomas at Shibe Park during an afternoon in which he was scheduled to pitch, he went to the dressing room, put on a double-breasted suit and a fuzzy, soft felt hat, and took up a crooked-handled cane. In this outfit he boarded a car at Twenty-second Street and Lehigh Avenue on its way downtown.

He placed his crooked stick carefully between his knees, then passed one gloved hand first above and then below the other. When the car stopped before it was about to turn onto Arch Street, he moved his hands back and forth, a dozen quick, deceptive movements while maintaining a wild smile.

“Is that man crazy over there?” whispered a woman to the person in the next seat.

“Don’t know,” the person replied, smiling, “but it looks that way to me.”

Bender’s costume and his gyrations had everyone thinking he was nuts, everyone except a friend who had boarded the car with him. As Bender detrained at Twelfth and Arch he turned around and grinned, while his friend announced, “That’s Chief Bender!”