WAHOOING BETSY ROSS

Betsy Ross Nike Recall was ‘Corporate Caving’ to Colin Kaepernick and the Left

By Daniel Henninger

The Wall Street Journal
July 10, 2019

The remarkable thing about Colin Kaepernick’s banning of Nike ’s Betsy Ross flag sneaker to commemorate the Fourth of July isn’t that it happened, but how easily it happened. Nike’s management simply folded over “concerns that it could unintentionally offend.”

Translating this waffly phrase into odds, I’d put “concerns that it could” at about a million to one. But because the thought found its way into Mr. Kaepernick’s head that the shoe was about slavery, Nike’s senior decision-makers nodded without dissent: We’ve gotta pull it.

No one has ever thought to go looking inside corporate headquarters for profiles in courage, but the lurch toward timidity in our time by individuals at the top of America’s private and public institutions is something to behold. Pusillanimity has become a plague.

The ownership of the Cleveland Indians engaged in several years of passive resistance before finally caving in this season to pressure from New-York-based Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to ban the team’s mascot and logo, the joyfully smiling Chief Wahoo. The Indians’ cap now bear a nondescript C, which hereafter should stand for “craven” instead of Cleveland.

Banning Chief Wahoo—a constant presence in the city’s life since the 1950s—meant baseball’s factotums could get through Tuesday night’s All-Star game in Cleveland without the possibility that the logo might be seen on an Indian player’s uniform, forcing baseball’s leadership to endure apparently unbearable Twitter torture.

In April, the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers caved in to pressure to stop playing a recording of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” because it emerged that Smith recorded a song called “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” in 1931, when she was 24. The Flyers even removed a statue of Smith, erected in 1987, from outside their arena. If the Flyers players crumbled as quickly as their management, they’d be laughed out of hockey.

In a saner world, the Yankees and Flyers might have worked out a modus vivendi. Yes, it’s worth knowing now that racist songs were recorded in the U.S. in the 1930s. And it is good and useful if major institutions such as the Yankees and Flyers condemn them.

But it is also a fact that listening to Smith’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” has been an experience of pure patriotic exhilaration for millions of people, most of whom by now have never heard of Kate Smith, whose life and career were stellar in every respect beyond two songs. Criticize the condescending songs she recorded in the 1930s—and move on.

One feels almost ridiculous getting pulled into arguments about things like baseball mascots or Kate Smith. But the Betsy Ross flag incident suggests something’s happening that is not ridiculous. It is insidious. It is insidious because with prominent American leadership falling over like empty plastic bottles, the bannings are coming too quickly and too easily. They’re starting to look like a slippery slope to institutionalized suppression.

Political disagreement is supposed to be about argument. But the proponents of these claims don’t bother to make an argument anymore. Instead, they posit assertions, such as that Kate Smith had to be held “accountable,” or mascots such as Chief Wahoo are “hurtful.” The Betsy Ross flag has to disappear because slavery existed in 1777 and, as bad, some white nationalists on the far fringe recently waved it in public somewhere.

Since about 1970, when the cultural divide in America was still just a fissure, an enduring reality of our politics has been the phenomenon of a Silent Majority, which never quite goes away. It mostly pops up in presidential elections to the always wide-eyed surprise of the East Coast media, which then sends out teams to rediscover why these people are upset.

The rest of the time when a Chief Wahoo or Kate Smith happens, most people find space inside themselves to absorb it. But for the increasingly Mao-like American left, even this choked-down acceptance of their political assaults isn’t enough. They no longer seem content with winning. The left today has a compulsion to force obedience again and again. Thus, You didn’t like Wahoo and Kate Smith? Try this: We’re getting rid of your racist Betsy Ross flag, and you’ll shut your face and take it.

What they want from their opposition isn’t agreement with their ideas but submission—a kind of political lobotomization. And disturbingly, a lot of contemporary leaders—at Nike , the Yankees, the Flyers, almost any university—are volunteering to assist in the procedure.

Anytime thought suppression goes too far, people look for ways to resist. One thinks of the determined objectors in Ray Bradbury’s now barely fictional novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” evading the firemen who exterminate the possessions of people who read books. Today, the firemen are burning any symbol of American life they say has become unacceptable—to them.

Outside a baseball game this season at the Cleveland Indians stadium there was a guy with a sign: “Make Chief Wahoo Great Again.” Who could possibly be surprised, or pretend to be offended?