Mistakes Were Made

All the trouble really started when they played up here. In 1932, George Preston Marshall, a truly odious fellow, was awarded a National Football League franchise after the Newark Tornadoes folded. He set up shop in Boston in the same stadium that was home to the Braves baseball team, so, naturally, Marshall gave his franchise the same name. A year later, when it moved into Fenway Park, Marshall, operating out of the involuntary reflexes common to all bigots, changed the team’s name to the Redskins and hired a man named Lone Star Dietz to coach.
Dietz remains something of a historical puzzlement, even though Dan Snyder, the equally obnoxious current owner of the Redskins, insists on calling him an “Indian athlete.” There exists compelling historical evidence that this is all hooey. Lone Star was actually a white man born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. He first attached himself to Native American culture as part of an exhibit at the monumentally weird 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Even though the fair was memorialized in the Judy Garland movie, it may have been one of the strangest episodes in the history of American popular culture. Among its other attractions, it included various Polynesian, Inuit, and Congolese people as living exhibits to be gawked at.
That, apparently, is where Lone Star became a Native American.
(The only thing stranger than the fair was the 1904 Olympic Games that were rigged to coincide with it. For one thing, they took four and a half months to complete. The marathon alone featured Félix Carvajal, a Cuban national who showed up at the starting line in long trousers and street shoes. He cut off his pants and finished fourth, even though he stopped at an orchard along the way. The first runner into the stadium was Fred Lorz, who’d dropped out at the nine-mile mark, jumped in a car, and ridden 11 miles until the car broke down in the summer heat. The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was a Brit who was running for the U.S. and had to be carried across the finish line because his trainers had been dosing him with strychnine and brandy throughout the race. This is not even to mention that an entirely different set of events was set up so the Polynesian, Inuit, and Congolese people could compete against each other.)
Lone Star got canned in 1934. Two years later, after losing the league championship to the Green Bay Packers, Marshall packed up his phobias, his team, and its ghastly mascot, and hauled the whole lot down to Washington, where, as is so often the case, things got worse. And the curse of Lone Star Dietz dogs his franchise to this very day.