Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Bender, Chief

(1883-1954)

Ojibwa professional baseball player and coach

Charles Albert "Chief" Bender was one of the finest pitchers in major-league baseball during the first two decades of the twentieth century—a period that put a premium on outstanding pitching. His teammates included the future Baseball Hall of Fame pitchers Rube Waddell, Herb Pennock, and Eddie Plank, while surrounding him in the big leagues shone such stars as Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, "Three-Finger" Brown, and "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity. Connie Mack, the longtime Philadelphia manager for whom Bender played twelve seasons (1903-14), wrote in 1950 that Bender was one of the top half-dozen pitchers in the history of the game; Mack is also reported to have said that Bender was the greatest "money pitcher" he'd ever coached.

Like many American Indian athletes (the most famous of whom was Jim Thorpe), the Minnesota-born Bender graduated from Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He was the son of a German-American farmer father and an Ojibwa mother. After Carlisle he attended Dickinson College, also in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, though not for long. At the age of twenty, and without a day in the minor leagues, Bender began pitching for Connie Mack's A's in 1903, the third year of the new American League.

Although baseball was enormously popular in the early decades of this century, the reputation of the game, and particularly that of baseball players, was not terribly respectable. While Christy Mathewson—or "the Christian Gentleman," as he was known—was the best-known exception to this rule, Chief Bender also belonged to the small group of unusually upstanding players. Suspended briefly in 1911 for having succumbed to the hard-drinking atmosphere of professional baseball, the pitcher mostly appears to have resisted such pressure.

His onetime roommate on the A's, the pitcher Rube Bressler, described Bender as "one of the kindest and finest men who ever lived," and credited the veteran with helping him face the inevitability of defeat early in his career. Others described Bender as "classy," or "one of the nicest people you'd ever meet." As a result, in an era peopled by such characters as John McGraw, Ty Cobb, and Rube Waddell (Bender's teammate and one of the strangest people ever to play professional baseball), little attention has been paid to Bender as a person.

Bender was not the first American Indian to play in the major leagues. That honor goes to Lou Sockalexis, who played just three years for Cleveland in 1897-99 (and is considered by some to be the inspiration for the club's name in later years—the Indians). Several dozen American Indians came into the big leagues in the next two decades, and although Jim Thorpe was certainly the best known of these, Chief Bender was the finest baseball player of the group, and the only one in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

It is worth pointing out that while American Indian ballplayers were nearly always called "Chief," this nickname was used much less often among Indians themselves. John "Chief" Meyers, for example, a Mission Indian who played against Bender, referred to him as Charlie.

At least in baseball, the question of discrimination directed at American Indians in the early twentieth century is not entirely simple. On the one hand, according to one historian of the game during those years, Indian ballplayers received "substantial attention" in the press for two reasons. First, they were unusual. But at the same time, the game's promoters emphasized the Indians' background to argue—falsely—that baseball was a genuinely democratic sport.

To further complicate matters, some managers tried to sneak African-American ballplayers into the segregated game by calling them Indians, Cubans, or Mexicans. In 1901, for example, Giants manager John McGraw claimed that his new second baseman, Charlie Grant, was an American Indian, and gave him the name Chief Tockahama. McGraw's rival manager Charles Comiskey blew the whistle on what had become an open secret, and Grant's career in the majors was finished before it started. Bender's friend Chief Meyers (who played for McGraw's Giants) had to endure taunts of "nigger" from fans who thought him black.

Bender himself seems not to have suffered this fate. He explained once:

The reason I went into baseball as a profession was that when I left school, baseball offered me the best opportunity both for money and advancement.... I adopted it because I played baseball better than I could do anything else, because the life and the game appealed to me and because there was so little of racial prejudice in the game.... There has been scarcely a trace of sentiment against me on account of birth. I have been treated the same as other men.

There was in fact an enormous amount of racial prejudice in major-league baseball. The game had successfully banished African Americans from playing, and some of its biggest stars, such as Ty Cobb, were vicious racists. Bender, however, generally somewhat quiet and aloof, was well known for handling racial taunts gracefully. When fans heckled him or greeted him with war whoops on the field, he would answer them by cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting, "Foreigners! Foreigners!"

Although Bender rarely led his league in pitching statistics, he played key roles in five Philadelphia pennants and pitched extremely well in the World Series. In ten games he compiled a six-four record, with fifty-nine strikeouts, just twenty-one walks, and an excellent 2.44 earned run average.

Bender left the A's in 1914 to join the upstart Federal League club in Baltimore; the following year he came back to Philadelphia, where he played with the Phillies for his last two seasons in the majors, 1916-17. In 1918 he worked in World War I shipyards. Thereafter he either played, managed, coached, or scouted in baseball (mostly in the minors, but occasionally in the majors) until his death in 1954 at the age of seventy-one. Bender married Marie Clements in 1904. They had no children. His sister Elizabeth married the Winnebago educator Henry Roe Cloud, linking the ballplayer to another prominent Native American from the early twentieth century. Bender was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953, a year before he died.





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