Chief Blackhawk: A Violent Anti-American Icon Much Beloved in Chicago
Here in Illinois Chicago is going bonkers for the Blackhawks, its hockey team which just won the Stanley Cup. Some years ago there was a frenzy motivated by goofy liberals with nothing else to do to remove the Chief Illiniwek figure as the symbol of the University of Illinois athletic teams. Stupid, utterly stupid. The Chief was a fictional figure and the sanctimonious Lefties thought it was demeaning for the Chief, attired in colorful costume and headdress, dancing up a storm on the field before games. They were going to protect the Indian race against “exploitation” and “racism.” You’ll find that among people who usually don’t believe in higher causes and ameliorate their secularism by making a big case against “racism.”
Enter Rev. Jackson to Save The Day battling fictional characters, acting as Grand Pooh-Bah, and being a general nuisance.
I lived through with Quaker Oats with Aunt Jemima, the fictional character on our pancake mixes and syrups.
Then the big pro-feminist Pooh-bah the Rev. Jesse Jackson met with me and…striding about with his famous pout, his chest puffed out for maximum effect… ordered curtly that the portrait of a smiling woman be eliminated forthwith…as symbol of a southern female slave who was exploited by cruel white men. His passionately oracular sermon about preserving black womankind by Jackson…prompted tables full of black male ministers shouting “yeah! Yeah! Yes, Lord!” ala the Amen Corner in black churches…
The room was filled to the gills with black men—and only one tiny, even then elderly, black woman who sat deferentially in the back, the Rev. Willie Barrow. When King Jesse called for coffee to serve him and his pompously oracular ministerial colleagues, the kitchen door opened and the trays were carried in with no male help at all by shy, spindly teen-age black women. The men gulped up their coffee, demanded some cream and sugar and asked where the sugar rolls were in curt tones signifying chop-chop, all the while some rose and spoke at their places, continuing to bewail the sorry state of black women exploited by Whitey.
They kept the Aunt Jemina figure after I pointed out the anomaly…also the fact that what they should be doing instead of trying to remove a black female figure which stood for $100 million in marketing identification, should be to go to Minneapolis’ General Mills and crusade to make Betty Crocker black. Whereupon a few days later I got a call from General Mills’ CEO saying, “thanks, you sonuva bitch! They’re in my anteroom right now!” Betty Crocker’s still white; Jemima’s still black. The so-called civil rights movement is still dominated by black and white men with the exception of PUSH being headed for a time by Rev. Barrow, now 86. If she has a successor, I haven’t heard of her. All is well, and the issue is resolved by decree!
Unlike Chief Illiniwek, Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker, Sauk Chief Black Hawk [1767-1838] was a real person and a fearsome one. He was leader by virtue of election not via inheritance. When the War of 1812 started the Brits collected a good-sized force of Indians at Green Bay, Wis. to help the Brits in operations around the Great Lakes. After Chief Black Hawk brought 200 warriors with him, he was given command of the entire Indian army. He participated in battles against the Americans, helping to push them for a time out of the entire Mississippi River Valley at the battle of Credit Island and the Battle of Sink Hole, leading a daring ambush of a group of Missouri Rangers.
After a treaty between the governor of Indiana territory and his army, Black Hawk and his troops vacated their lands in Illinois in 1828 but they came to dispute the treaty, leading about 1,000 warriors into Illinois precipitating the so-called Black Hawk War in which Abraham Lincoln participated as a captain of the Illinois militia. Lincoln never saw combat however. Chief Black Hawk (the only individual after whom a war is expressly named) was captured and imprisoned at Fortress Monroe but then released and died in 1838. The best remembrance of him is the magnificent statue done by sculptor Lorado Taft in a park overlooking the Rock River in Oregon, Illinois.
Not…for God’s sake…that I want Blackhawk dumped but I marvel at the moral selectivity here: liberals rail and rage at a fictional Indian chief and take it as a matter of course that our hockey team is named after a warrior enemy who reputedly butchered with his troops hundreds of Americans—and we returned the violence in kind. The name came to us through the first hockey club owner, Frederic McLaughlin (who later started McLaughlin’s Manor House Coffee).
He had been commander of the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion of the 80th Infantry in World War I which was named the Blackhawk Division. Later of course the U. S. Army named the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter after him.
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Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer
image Chief Wapello, ally of the United States during the Blackhawk War and the progenitor of Wapello, Iowa, Wapella, Saskatchewan, Wapella, Illinois
I am visiting Champaign-Urbana this weekend and saw the Chicago Blackhawks victory celebration on television here.
This prompted a discussion about the banning of Chief Illiniwek as the University mascot for the “Fightin’ Illini.” We decided that the “Chicago Blackhawks” name and logo live on because it takes some self-righteous university liberals to kill a tradition.
Blackhawk was Sauk, and it was the Sauk along with the Fox who slaughtered the Illiniwek too not so many years before Blackhawk. So the Illinowek first driven off by Blackhawk’s fathers and uncles, and then their memory driven away by Liberals a few years ago.
Bill,
That’s that there ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide that Progressives claim to be the sole property of Europeans and Dead White Men. Fancy that. The same swell logic of the geniuses who would argue that BP stocked Asian Carp in Illinois waterways.
It is strange indeed that Chief Blackhawk has never been a target of the PC crowd. Perhaps its because the Blackhawks’ franchise has languished in obscurity for so long….maybe the crowd that did away with Illiniwek and wants to eliminate the Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, and Atlanta Braves simply hasn’t been paying attention to the Hawks. I don’t believe that Chief Blackhawk’s relative success in attacking American forces in the War of 1812 is the reason that he has been ommitted from the opprobrium of the armchair bolsheviks who control our institutions of higher learning. They weren’t bright enough to make that distinction when they (specifically the NCAA) attempted to get the Florida State Seminoles to divest themselves of their tribal nickname and emblem. The Seminole tribe prides itself as being “undefeated,” the only American Indian tribe never vanquished by the American military. The Seminoles as well as Florida State had to mount quite a campaign to point this out to the NCAA so that the school could retain the Seminole emblem and the Seminoles could retain the royalty they receive from the school. And talk about a stirring on-field pageant…Florida State Football games are preceded by a ceremony where a student dressed as the legendary Seminole Chief Osceola rides a horse named Renegade to mid-field and then hurls a flaming spear at the opposing end zone! This makes Illiniwek’s dance look like a soft shoe. Unlike Osceola, Old Chief Blackhawk ultimately was defeated in what Lincoln referred to as “a neighborly sort of war….we mostly killed mesquitos.” But Chief Blackhawk did find an interesting form of immortality. Maybe now he’ll get the perverse respect of the academic left who’ll now seek to eliminate him.
As for Aunt Jemima, although she survives as a product emblem and remains black, she long ago disposed of her plantation garb and now appears on the pancake package wearing a June Cleaver dress and an upsweep hairdo. As Arsenio Hall once said, “she looks like she’s on her way to have lunch at the Country Club with Betty Crocker.” I remember the grand opening of the A & P at 79th and Pulaski circa 1956. Our new little neighborhood, surrounded by swamp and “prairie” now had a real grocery store and all of the living totems of the American grocery industry were there to proffer their wares. A petite and comely blonde with a crozier passed out small samples of Bo-Peep Cleanser. The dairy case was honored by the presence of Elsie the Cow, Elmer the Bull and their kids, Beuhlah and Beauregard, hawking Borden’s Milk, Lady Borden Ice Cream and Elmer’s Glue All (PETA would have a field day with that).The actors who played the Bordens should have been paid overtime for their service which required that they wear rubber bovine masks. In the soup aisle a courtly middle-age black gentlemen ladled out small samples of College Inn soup… I wonder if it was the same guy who played the piano on College Inn’s 15 minute show on late Saturday night? And, of course in the breakfast food aisle sat Aunt Jemima, portrayed by a large pleasant black woman bedecked in full plantation regalia handing out miniature
samples of her pancakes. I wonder how things went for her that day, seeing that my neighborhood, later to be known as The Bogan Area, wasn’t the friendliest to black folks. Seated a few feet away from Aunt Jemima was The Quaker himself, the guy who appears on all of the Quaker cereal products, wearing his Quaker hat. He was a middle aged man of pallid complexion, who I found a bit frightening. I can’t remember what he was handing out. Little Oscar showed up in the parking lot, emerging from his Weiner Mobile in all of his dwarflike splender, passing out cheese smokies or some other such culinary garbage of the type that would scandalize any 21st century school board. It was quite a day. I doubt that these symbols of American commerce would have the same almost mythological impact on a six year old kid today as they did on me. But don’t kid yourself….our logos and emblems and nicknames, particularly our sport’s team logos do have a strangely satisfying and binding effect upon us. They cultivate the loyalty and the shared experience of different generations, ethnic, racial, geographic and religious groups and they should not be lightly tampered with.
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