The baseball franchise drew inspiration from a historic location in the city to abandon the controversial Indians name.
The Indians of baseball they became Cleveland Guardians: With the start of the 2022 MLB season, the Ohio team has (finally, according to some) changed its historic name, abandoning the controversial denomination that in recent years has been increasingly the subject of controversy. But why was Indians no longer good, and what references of art and architecture can we find in the name Guardians?
The debate over the word “Indians” had become problematic for several decades now. The name was considered offensive towards Native Americans, as was the logo (the caricature face of the Indian Chief Wahoo)and was seen for some time as unacceptable by public opinion, a thought strengthened in recent years in particular in the light of an increasingly sensitive approach on the subject, in the United States, and definitively cleared through the media by the movement Black Lives Matter.
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The Cleveland Indians name was official since 1915(1) but the controversy about whether to continue using it had been going on in various ways since the 70s, and then returned topical both because of the protests after the murder of George Floyd, in 2020, and shortly after on the occasion of the change of name made official by the Washington Redskins football team, involved in controversies complementary to those addressed to the Indians, given that the word ” redskins ”was a historical reference to the presence of Red Indians in the Virginia area (but also seen here as offensive by many).
Also for Cleveland the decision in the end was to change, also by virtue of the concern revealed by the sponsors of the franchise, in those that are increasingly dynamic strictly linked to marketing and image in contemporary sport.
The management confirmed that they had evaluated nearly 1,600 proposals before choosing the name Guardiansthinking about aesthetic elements, about names already used more or less in the past and about the cultural identity of the city.
Cleveland Guardians, a story that goes from Italy to Art Deco
The main inspiration for the new Cleveland baseball name is the monumental statues Guardians of Traffic (the Traffic Guardians), placed on either side of the east and west entrances of the Hope Memorial Bridge (who) which leads right to Cleveland’s Progressive Field, crossing the Cuyahoga River.
The Guardian statues were drawn together with the bridge (which was called Lorain-Carnegie Bridge at the time) in 1932, in Art Deco style, by sculptor Henry Hering (1874-1947) and architect Frank Walker. And, fascinating detail, they were carved by a group of immigrant Italian stonemasons who lived in the Little Italy neighborhood of Clevelandand who had already been arriving in the city of Ohio for some time to work under the guidance of Giuseppe Carabelli (1850-1911).
The sculptor, originally from Porto Ceresio, arrived in Cleveland in 1880 and there he opened his business, “Lake View Granite and Monument Works”. The Italian immigrants who went to work for Carabelli they were all artisans of the highest level and began to settle in houses near the company, until they formed an agglomeration that soon became the embryo of the future city district of Little Italy.
The Guardians statues are the most important Art Deco monument in the northeastern area of the State of Ohio: originally called Guardians of Transportation (Guardians of Transport), each of the four monoliths incorporates two statues, placed on both opposite faces of the single vertical element, suitably finished with decorative geometric moldings. The guardians are therefore 8 in total and each protects a different means of transport of the time holding it tight to the chest.
In the early thirties of the twentieth century, in the United States, there was in fact a great fervor around the development of locomotion, and it is precisely in these statues that the testimony is found: the Guardians carefully hold a horse carriage in their hands, a first car specimen, and four different types of trucks and lorries.
The statues were carved directly from the four main stone blocks and they are just over 13 meters high. If you look more closely, you can also notice them various aesthetic elements borrowed from antiquity: the two small wings that adorn the guardians’ helmet refer to the figure of the god Mercury – which is the main subject that gave the basis for the aesthetic inspiration – while some geometric moldings on the front recall the decorative style of ancient Egypt ( in the wake of the revival of the 1920s) and the large side wings are a symbol of protection for those who pass on the bridge, in deference to the mythology of the Assyrians.
The Guardians name thus becomes the fifth in the history of Cleveland, since the franchise is part of the American League of baseball.: Bluebirds (1901), Broncos (1902), Naps (1903-1914), Indians (1915-2021). Furthermore, technically, the first baseball team in the city were the Cleveland Spiders (1887-1899), a name that had also been proposed for the current change of name precisely by virtue of the identity roots to which it can be easily traced.
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(1) the name Indians was introduced in 1915 in fact “formalizing” the nickname already in use for the Spiders in the three years in which there was in the team Louis Sockalexis, first Native American to play in the United States baseball league. In fact, at the time, the term “Indian” was used in a deliberately derogatory way by the public, and Sockalexis was often the victim of insults and discrimination. Cleveland made the term official as the team’s denomination and it certainly did so in good faith, perhaps in an attempt to somehow honor its history, but over time the word Indians has been seen more and more as a mere caricature, completely unrelated. from any concept of inclusiveness (the Chief Wahoo logo, moreover, had already been eliminated in 2018).
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