THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

VolumeV
Spring 1993
Co-Editors
Vera Mowry Roberts
CUNY Graduate School
Managing Editor
Edwin Wilson
Assistant Editor
James Masters
CASTA Copyright 1993
Number2
Walter J. Meserve
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is
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University of Missouri
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Bruce A. McConachie
College of William and Mary
Margaret Wilkerson
University of California,
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Don B. WUmeth
Brown University
Editorial Comment
With this issue of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre I will
end my tenure as co-editor. Encouraging the study of American
drama and theatre has been my pleasure for more than four
decades, and I know that there are now many capable minds to con-
tinue the mission. During the interim year before my replacement is
appointed, Distinguished Professor Judith Milhous, fresh from her
editorship of Theatre Survey, will assume my Profes-
sor Emeritus Vera Roberts will continue to serve as co-editor.
Walter J. Meserve
2
VolumeV
Tim Fort
Mark E. Mallett
Samuel L. Leiter
Melanie N. Blood
Barry B. Witham
Table of Contents
Spring 1993 Number 2
Three Voyages of Discovery:
The Columbus Productions
Of lmre Kiralfy, E. E. Rice,
And Steele MacKaye ....................... 5
'ihe Game of Politics": Edwin Forrest
And the Jackson Democrats ........ 31
Theatre on the Home Front:
World War II on New York's
Stages, 1941-1945 ........................ 47
Ideology and Theatre at Hull-House
Under Jane Addams ..................... 71
Pandemic and Popular Opinion:
Spirochete in Seattle .................... 86
Contributors ... ..................... ........................ ... ....... .......................... ..... 96
3
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Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University
of New York.
4
THREE VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY:
THE COLUMBUS PRODUCTIONS
OF IMRE KIRALFY, E.E. RICE, AND STEELE MACKAYE
Tim For1
While the qulncentenary of Columbus's 'Voyage of discoverY
has brought with It a widespread questioning of the nature and
results of his journey, the four-hundredth anniversary of the event
was more notable, In the American theatre at least, for Its
enthusiastic experiments In pictorial storytelling. In 1892, three of the
late nineteenth-century's most ambitious entrepreneurs-lmre Kiralfy,
Edward E. Rice, and Steele MacKaye--set out to mount theatrical
spectacles that in some way depicted Columbus's voyage in search
of the "New World. While the three resulting productions were quite
different, they serve as useful examples of the variety of theatrical
opportunities and visions prevalent in this period. In comparing the
production theories and practices of Rice, Kiralfy, and MacKaye, the
initial similarities are striking. Each man first came to prominence in
the 1870's as a producer of major American commercial hits; each
participated in both the writing and staging of many of their major
works; and each had an Impressive prcx:Jucing career that was near-
ing its final phase as the 1890's began. As marked as these
similarities, however, were the disparate views that Rice, Kiralfy, and
MacKaye had of the most useful way to portray Columbus's voyage
of discovery to suit both the subject matter and America's theatrical
tastes. In approaching the material, the three prcx:Jucers ultimately
would reveal more about their diverse skills in structuring theatrical
spectacle than they would serve to provide insights into the story of
Columbus or his contribution to cultural history.
lmre Kiralfy, born in Budapest in 1845, began his American
prcx:Juclng career in 1875 when he and his brother Bolossy mounted
a version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days at New
York's Academy of Music. He had become interested In staging
while directing civic fetes in Brussels in 1868, but claimed that his eye
for pageantry had developed much earlier:
I loved colour. I had a passion for prismatic effects. AJI
kinds of spectacle fascinated me, and I saw too often the
weakness of many of the organizers of such entertainments.
5
I saw how much better could be done If they would only
study the harmonious arrangement of the prismatic colour
combinations (1. Klralfy, 646).
In 1869, the Kiralfy brothers arrived in the United States as fea-
tured dancers in the lavish fantasy Hiccory Diccory Dock at New
York's Olympic Theatre. The show was a sequel to the popular
pantomime piece Humpty Dumpty (1868), which in turn was Indebted
to the success of the prototypical American musical extravaganza
The Black Crook (1866) with Its odd mixture of Mephlstophelian
melodrama and dancers In skin tights. The Kiralfys proved to be
shrewd observers of the burgeoning taste for spectacle on the
American stage, acquiring the exclusive staging rights to both The
Black Crook and Around the World in Eighty Days by 1875 and
thereby controlling two of the most long-lived and frequently pro-
duced musical entertainments of the nineteenth century. Over the
next decade, the Klralfys went on to produce a series of popular
diversions at Niblo's Garden Theatre--including Azurine, Enchant-
ment, The Black Venus, Excelsior, and The Ratcatcher--before finally
parting company in a dispute over costumes in 1886 (B. Kiralfy, 230-
243). By then, the Kiralfy name above the title had become
synonymous with lavish spectacle, and both brothers continued to
produce large-scale entertainments well into the first quarter of the
twentieth century.
One of lmre Kiralfy's first solo productions, the 1888 Nero; or
the Burning of Rome, was responsible for bringing him together with
P.T. Barnum. The aged showman (Barnum died In 1891) decided to
take Nero to London in 1889 as a companion piece to his Greatest
Show On Earth." Kiralfy and Barnum had a natural affinity, and as
soon as Kiralfy's new spectacle, Venice in London, began filling the
London Olympia with scenes of gondola races and sea battles in
December 1891, he turned his attention to a production that would
prove a worthy companion piece to Barnum and his partner James
Bailey's 1892 edition of the "Greatest Show On Earth. His new pro-
duction was to be called Columbus and the Discovery of America
and seemed an Ideal project for Kiralfy. It was both a commercially
sound idea--given the topicality of Columbus's voyage on its four-
hundredth anniversary--and sufficiently spectacular in scope to
appeal to Kiralfy's taste for retelling historical events using music,
choral singing, dance, processions with menageries, and huge
scenic backings.
As accomplished a promoter as he was a producer, Kiralfy
had large color posters depicting the planned tableaus distributed as
early as 1891 and began releasing production reports from London
in February 1892. In one such report he claimed to have been at
work for two and a half years "picking up data and haunting the
6
museums and picture galleries of the towns of Spain" to create a
"grand dramatic-operatic-ballet-spectacle" featuring "the voyage of
ships, of which exact reproductions appear to be moving and rolling
in the sea, the change of scene being supplied by a moving
panorama in the rear, 640 feet long and 60 feet high" ("Great").
Because Columbus was to follow more than an hour of circus acts, a
reconfiguration of Madison Square Garden would be necessary dur-
ing the intermission. Uke medieval mansions, the three rings of the
circus were to be transformed into three simultaneous settings dis-
playing the cities of Granada and Barcelona, the Alhambra palace,
and the port of Palos, standing together across the entire Fourth
Avenue side of the Garden. Ironically, Steele MacKaye, whose later
World Finder production in Chicago would display striking simUarities
to Kiralfy's Columbus, had set the stage for Kiralfy in Madison Square
Garden by initiating the use of moving panoramas there during his
1886 remounting of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show titled The Drama of
Civilization.
The staging of Columbus posed many logistical problems.
With its cast of 1,500 performers, it resembled Kiralfy's recent pro-
duction of Nero with its attendant crowd-management difficulties:
I had to create a special system of control, so that I could
communicate with the performers and "heads. To do this I
caused thirty electric bells, invisible and inaudible to the pub-
lic, to be placed on the stage at intervals and so, by a code
of signals operated from a gigantic keyboard, I was master
of the situation (1. Kiralfy, 647).
While Kiralfy claimed that his company was nearly all
engaged in the capitals of Europe" ("Great") and, indeed, one back-
stage view confirms that there was "one room for the fiery Italians
that form the first row, and the syllables are thrown about like
stilettos" (Tompkins); it is clear from a review in The World that the
back rows of the stage were filled with local favorites:
It nearly dispelled the illusion when a young miss in one of
the boxes recognized in the person of a Spanish cavalier
one "Peter Bar1ow, .. an acquaintance and shouted his name .
. . So, too, when Columbus landed in America, and a pretty
little Indian came on the broad stage to get a peep at him, it
brought one suddenly back to New York to hear the cry,
"Isn't Emma White lovely as an Indian!" f 'Columbus .. )
Backstage was understandably chaotic. Not only was there
inevitable confusion through the intermingling of professional and
amateur performers (many speaking different languages), but also
7
there was hardly enough dressing room space to house the 1,200
actors and 300 dancers when put with dozens of horses and the
more than 3,000 costumes that had been provided by Kiralfy's long-
time collaborator Alfred Edel. These costumes, to be designed and
executed in Milan, were said to cost almost $155,000 of the $225,000
that James Bailey was putting into the production ("Great"). A
reviewer for The New York Times invited to the dress rehearsal was
certainly more impressed with the "magnificence" of the costumes
than the spectacle of Kiralfy and his disheartened ballet master chas-
ing hundreds of historical characters around the arena into their
places ("Chased"). Indeed, not a single performer was mentioned by
name in the reviews, but the costuming was praised extensively.
Kiralfy made sure that his expensive costumes were shown off to
good effect, employing 38 calcium limelights and 2,800 incandescent
lights that "reflected in a thousand different ways from the shining
breastplates and rich armour of the Spanish and Moorish soldiers"
("Rehearsing").
By the time Kiralfy's Columbus opened on 21 March 1892, It
was composed of five major scenes that portrayed key moments in
the Columbus story through music, dance, and minimal dialogue.
Scene one began in the Court of the Alhambra Palace in January
1482 and opened dramatically with 300 "Moorish maidens" dancing
in the moonlight for King Boabdil (played by "a large Irishman").
Kiralfy's strong, almost garish, color sense was evident from the start
as the wave of whirling ballet dancers, many dressed in serpentine
skirts of yellow, pink, white, and purple, danced before the Moorish
king:
Up rolled the walls of Granada. In a mellow golden light the
court of the Alhambra was discovered ... even the fancy of
Washington Irving never clothed the red walls of the Alham-
bra with so roseate a kaleidoscope of color as that with
which the Kiralfy calciums clothed them last night. . ..
Where the three rings of the modern circus had been were
three centres of flashing color, which moved in and out and
swayed up and down till the eye ached with following its
mazes, and it seemed as if there would be some kind of
chromatic explosion ("How").
As with each of the later scenes, the opening scene was laced with
songs and grand processions in addition to dance numbers. In the
first section alone, the program promised events including a "Sub-
lime and Picturesque Ballet," "War Songs, .. "Mounting of the Battle-
ments," "Songs for Victory," "Flight," "Triumphal Occupation," and a
"Grand Victory Procession," all followed by "Columbus Urging his
Scheme," and Queen Isabella agreeing to "Pledge her Jewels for the
8
Voyage. It should be noted that Columbus's entrance Into the
activities of the first scene came rather late, and the relationship of
the events portrayed In this scene to Columbus's voyage were
tenuous at best. Elizabeth Tomkins, a free-lance columnist who
joined the company for an evening performance, described the back-
stage confusion attending the opening scene:
You couldn't have forced a sheet of paper between the men
and horses. Our pink satin tiaras and our gauze veils, that
were beautifully spread out behind us on the horses, were
twisted and pulled about, and our feet were wedged In so
firmly, that we felt as if we were wearing tight shoes. And
such yelling and shouting, such hauling about of one thing
and another, and then all of a sudden, a melting away of the
blockade down the Incline, and we swept into the arena a
splendid, well-arranged pageant, meeting a burst of
applause. We slipped off our horses and formed Into. some
sort of tableau, the meaning of which I haven't discovered
yet, and, as the curtain fell, escaped into the dressing room
again (Tomkins, 5).
The four remaining scenes fell into a more predictable pattern
of broad Illustration--portraying in large, visual strokes the most
famous incidents surrounding Columbus's voyage. The second
scene detailed Columbus's preparation for the voyage at Palos in
August 1492. This section, land-locked and expository in nature, fea-
tured three songs and a small, relatively unglamorous progression of
blessings, farewells, and flag-wavings. Scene three employed
exact" reproductions of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to
portray the famous voyage with all attendant effects. Storms, mutiny
attempts, sunrises, nightfalls with meteor showers, distant lights, and
a final sighting of land occupied both Columbus and the busy stage
crew. According to The New York Times, the vividly realistic thunder
and lighting of the ocean storm claimed the wildest applause
rcrowds). It should be stressed, however, that all the ocean bound
events took place not in a water tank, but on a stage--where lighting,
sound, and the moving panoramic drops were responsible for creat-
ing all the major effects.
In scene four, Columbus approached the coast in a small
(probably castored) boat where he knelt to kiss the shore before
Indians crowded around him to exchange gifts. Once again, shifting
scenery (despite some opening night difficulties) was called upon to
produce the major effect of movement:
The island of San Salvador had a good deal of first night
trouble in getting in sight of Columbus. When it got between
9
....
0
"The Triumphal Entry of Columbus at Barcelona Upon His Return from the Discovery of America"
Souvenir program for Columbus and the Discovery of America; Theatre Collection, New York Public Ubrary
him and the audience, the Santa Marta presumably having
run into its lee, it got hitched and showed the manly outline
of the form of the super who was bringing two worlds
together rHow").
The final scene portrayed the triumphal return to Barcelona with
several songs and a huge final procession and lighting effect. As
described in the program: wrhe city now becomes brilliantly illumi-
nated. The people appear with lamps, torches, and other modes of
festival illumination, and the scene becomes one of animated gaiety."
The New York Tribune reviewer joined many others In singling
out the magical effect of Columbus's final lantern ballet:
Over 300 performers, each bearing a brass rod on which
were fixed firelights, blue, green, red and gold, trooped into
the darkness and performed graceful evolutions. It was no
show, no mere spectacle, then, but a fairyland, and no better
ending for a show could be imagined ('Wonders").
An electrical ballet as grand finale was certainly not a new idea
to Kiralfy. As early as 1883, the brothers had teamed with Thomas
Edison to provide an extraordinary "electrical scene" with 500 glass
globes to close their production of Excelsior at Niblo' s Garden
Theater. This EdisonjKiralfy experimentation with electrical effects
was particularly noteworthy in coming just weeks before the intro-
duction of the first full electrical installation in a New York theatre (at
The Third Avenue, 3 September 1883). In a sense, it is quite
appropriate that Columbus should end with this Kiralfy signature
'wall of light" providing an apt reminder that the evening had as much
to do with Kiralfy's theatrical sleight-of-hand as with Columbus's
story.
Both the critics and the audiences were suitably impressed
with Columbus. With more than 5,000 people attending opening
night, the production did "turn-away business in its first week, setting
attendance records. The Sun proclaimed it "the biggest spectacle of
its kind probably ever shown in New York" ("Circus"), and The Eve-
ning Telegram confirmed it as "the grandest spectacle yet given by
this organization" ("In the Local Theatres"). Reviewers tended to be a
bit uncritical in assessing the piece. Clearly no one thought of the
structure of the show as worth serious dissection. Comments were
almost exclusively addressed toward the verisimilitude of the stage
pictures and effects:
The only objection that anybody made was that there was
much to see. There was some comment, too, on the amount
of clothing the Indians wore. Their costumes were gor-
11
geous, and there wasn't anything wild looking about them.
Columbus himself was the wUdest looking man of the party,
and he was addicted to posing ("Circus).
Although the profusely Illustrated program credits Kiralfy with
the conception and producing responsibilities, other Important
laborators Included Nero's Ettore Coppinl (staging and
choreography), composer Angelo Venanzi, and lyricist Angelo
notti. Typically, these collaborators were not mentioned outside of
the program. Both the reviews and the advertising mentioned only
Kiralfy, Barnum (then deceased), and Bailey.
Over Its run In Madison Square Garden, new
costumes were introduced and the Moorish ballet continued to
improve rBig Show). After a week In Brooklyn and some time on
the road, Klralfy cannibalized the highlights of the piece and placed
them in his next production America, which was to play Chicago In
1893 at the same time Steele MacKaye was working on his Spec-
tatorium. As was true of MacKaye's World Finder, America seemed
destined to be a victim of an overly ambitious vision. Columbus's
departure, voyage, and triumphant return served only as a prologue
to an evening that also featured scenes from the American
tion and Fulton's invention of the steam boat. According to the
Chicago Sunday Tribune:
"Chaos" would have been a more suitable title than America"
for the spectacle which was given at the Auditorium last
night as a sort of prelude of folly to the amusements of the
World's fair season. . . . [lmre Kiralfy] appears to have
designed everything connected with the show except the
music, and judging by the confusion last night he has
essayed the stage management Even the
libretto may be his work, for it is evidently by some one who
is imperfectly acquainted with the English language or the
sequence of American history ("America").
Invariably, Kiralfy had trouble when he failed to delegate or when he
strayed from his visual formula to rely too much on dialogue.
Kiralfy was clearly at home with the visual language of the
theatre, and it is on the basis of his visual motifs that he was most
often judged. The Columbus story seemed to lend itself readily to
Kiralfy's broad strokes with little need for verbal development of
character or situation. Although there was some emphasis on
"research" in the promotion of the show, and the events portrayed
did follow the Columbus chronology, the appeal of this Columbus
was clearly in its epic size and colorful theatricality. Audiences
drawn to the circus, particularly "The Greatest Show on Earth,"
12
Invariably wanted to see Columbus's adventures not as a serious
study but as a worthy adjunct to a three-ring animal act. This
Columbus was theatrical In that It was scripted, rehearsed,
costumed, and directed, but It could not be contained In a formal
theatre buDding. It was part living tableau, part coliseum show.
E. E. Rice, a native of Brighton, Mass., had a short,
undistinguished career as an actor and an even shorter career as an
advertising agent for the Cunard lines before he collaborated (In
1874) with a journalist friend, J. Cheever Goodwin, on Evangeline,
one of the era's most popular shows. Evangeline, a musical bur-
lesque of the Longfellow poem, started Rice on not onty a compos-
Ing career, but also a producing one. Either alone or as Rice's Sur-
prise Party, he was seldom without a hit production performing In
the northeastern United States over the next twenty-five years.
Like several of his contemporaries In American burlesque,
Rice was drawn to the comic possibilities of the Columbus story. In
fact, one of the first American burlesque productions was John
Brougham's Columbus el Filibustero (1857) at Burton's Theatre In
New York ("Old"), which was subtitled: A New and Audaciously
Original Historico-Piagaristic, Ante-National, Pre-Patriotic and Omni-
Local Confusion of Circumstances Running Through Two Acts and
Four Centuries." Comedienne Lydia Thompson was also drawn to
play Columbus (in breaches) surrounded by a bevy of cross-dressing
beauties in George Dance's (1889) historical burlesque Columbus.
As early as 1890, Rice himself produced a "musical caricature" called
World's Fair that brought Columbus ("his voyage having nearly come
to a full stop") and Dame Partlett ("aspiring to Columbus's better
hair) to Chicago to participate In the upcoming Exposition. Partlett
was played by female impersonator George Fortescue, who was a
popular personality in Rice's troupe. Evident in this piece, as well as
in such major early successes as Evangeline (1874), Hiawatha
(1880), Adonis (1884), and The Corsair (1888), was Rice's commit-
ment to developing the form of American burlesque. In an 1893
interview In the Morning Journal, Rice defined his vision:
An extravaganza permits any extravagances or whim-
sicalities, without definite purpose. A burlesque should bur-
lesque something. It should be pregnant with meaning. It
should be pure, wholesome, free from suggestiveness. It
should fancifully and humorously distort fact. It should have
consistency of plot, idealization of treatment in effects of
scenery and costumes, fantastic drollery of movement and
witchery of musical embellishment. It should be performed
by comedians who understand the value of light and shade,
and the sharp accenting of every salient point (Jackson,
158).
13
Rice's guidelines sound a bit highhanded coming from a producer
who unrepentantly Introduced dancing girts into a dramatization of a
Longfellow poem, but his overall approach was not dissimilar to the
Victorian burlesque of the previous fifty years. His productions were
generally inspired by a literary work or historical event that became
the starting point for an evening of comic and musical variations on a
theme. Rice would invariably interpolate popular variety acts or cur-
rent songs into whatever vague narrative framework held his produc-
tions together. The resulting evening of comic Improvisation
primarily revealed his savvy understanding of popular tastes, but also
fell within his purported goal of creating burlesque with an
appropriate level of historic or literary parody. Rice's productions
were also famous for their beautiful chorines, who often appeared In
skin tights (or less in tableau vivant), and for their cross-dressing
men, who frequently played leading tadies or paraded across the
boards as blonde-wigged Amazons. At least one Brooklyn reviewer
became so tired of the Rice formula that he came to look on such
melodramas as Steele MacKaye's French Revolutionary potboiler
Paul Kauvar {1888) as a welcome relief from Rice's ubiquitous pro-
ductions:
The passive watching of gyrating women in a Ricesian
march does get tiresome. . . . To be ushered Into the Fourth
of July booming of a whizzing melodrama after the soggy
dumps of Amazonian burlesque and Tennysonian funeriality,
Is as bracing as the tail end of a Dakota blizzard after a Sixth
Avenue thaw rlnvigorating).
In February 1892, an ideal property for Rice's production
approach first appeared In Boston when a local amateur troupe, the
Cadets, presented an original musical diversion called 1492 for a
week-long run at the Tremont Theatre. This parody of Columbus's
voyage of discovery featured music by Cart Pflueger and a libretto by
R.A. Barnet, who also appeared as the feisty, but Impecunious
Queen Isabella. Rice got involved a few months later, briefly
remounting the play in May at Boston's Globe Theatre using a mixed
amateur and professional cast. By September 1892, Rice's Surprise
Party had reopened 1492 at Boston's Park Theatre in a revamped
version that would play thousands of performances throughout the
United States over the next five years. The piece had the sort of flexi-
ble structure that perfectly suited Rice's approach. In the first of
three acts, Ferdinand and Isabella (now played by Richard Harlow)
were revealed in their throne chamber bemoaning the recent deple-
tion of their treasury through gambling at the local racetrack.
Columbus entered and, after singing four songs, finally cajoled Is-
14
abella into pawning her watch to finance his trip to the New World. In
the second act. Columbus and a bevy of dancing girls found them
selves on a boat that deposited them. after more singing and dane
ing, in New York City, where they discovered Broadway, the Bowery
(where "they say such things and they do such things"), and the
Statue of Uberty. The act ended with a torchlight parade to Madison
Square where Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland squared off
on the eve of the current U.S. presidential election. The third act
began with Isabella scrubbing the palace tub, but she soon joined
the rest of the Spanish court In welcoming Columbus back to Spain
with a procession that culminated in an electrical transformation
scene and the presentation of New York City to the waiting
monarchs.
While It Is clear that audiences were not drawn to 1492 for an
accurate depiction of Columbus's voyage, Rice's ability to present a
strong balance of three elementsattractive performers. popular
novelties, and firstrate scenery and llghtingassured the long
running success of the work. Rice was particularly shrewd in his use
of the "star" system in the marketing of his productions. Before 1492,
he had been instrumental in advancing the careers of such
nineteenth.century stars as Henry E. Dixey (Adonis was his first suc
cess) and Ullian Russell (who went from the chorus in Evangeline to
her first major triumph in Rice's Polly, Pet of the Regiment). His wUI
ingness to accord his performers a pre.aminent position in his pro.
ductions distinguishes the work of Rice from that of Kiralfy. In
Kiralfy' s spectacles, the actors stood in a secondary position to the
costumes, the scenery, and the special effects. Most of his com
panies were nameless and interchangeable, publicly subordinate to
the Kiralfy name above the title. Rice, on the other hand, both
through his production methods and scripts, gave his performers a
prominent role in the ultimate success of the work.
From its earliest versions, the star roles In 1492 had been
those of Isabella and Columbus. Richard Harlow, the first profes
sional to play Isabella, was probably the actor most associated with
the piece. He toured with the production for years, superseding
George Fortescue as Rice's primary female impersonator, and was
still performing in the show as late as its Boston revival in 1908. His
distinctive cavorting in a blonde poodle wig with a matching mink
neck wrap and his rendition of "I'm in Love with the Man in the Moon
apparently "had a charm that almost lifted the part out of burlesque
f'Theatres"). On the other hand, G. Perugini, who played Columbus,
was cast more for his vocal than histrionic abilities, and, as one
Boston critic noted, he carried himself with a melodramatic dignity
of manner which seems a bit out of place" ("Theatres"). Much of
what Perugini sang was excerpted from wellknown operas, including
. his secondact specialty number, the Intermezzo from Cavalliera
15
16
Rusticana. But even Perugini's voice was not without its detractors.
By the time he arrived In Philadelphia In March 1893, he appeared
out of all form to one critic:
For a man to persistently and even heroically sing out of
tune-if such Is needed anywhere--we must commend Signor
Perugini. . . . When the great caravel crossed upon the heav-
Ing mechanical sea, and the Signor, with the ghostly glare of
an electric moon falling upon his fine Neapolitan head,
entered into a fierce combat with Mascagni's "Intermezzo:
out of which finally and triumphantly he ejected the com-
poser and dumped each separate measure Into the pit of
discord, the audience felt that it had not come entirely In vain
("1492").
Another of the main attractions of any Rice show was the
appearance of a beautiful chanteuse. Theresa Vaughn was the fea-
tured singer In 1492--appearing several times over the course of the
evening In picturesque tatters to deliver such standards as "Annie
Rooney- or "Ben Bolt" whUe exhorting the audience to sing along. In
the second act, she was called upon to deliver the popular song "The
Bowry" disguised as a German street singer and accompanied by a
banjo. Edward M. Favor, the comedian who played the Royal Treas-
urer for several years, also provided musical Interludes, Including a
version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" Introduced at the Boston opening
and "hummed all over town" soon after ("Plays").
It was the dancing, however, particularly the interpolation of
the serpentine, that distinguished the musical elements of this partic-
ular Ricesian production. In February 1892, Loie Fuller introduced a
spectacular version of a serpentine dance that she had created in the
New York production of Uncle Celestin. Within weeks this style of
dance, which involved whirling gauze skirts flung into the air to be
bathed in pools of colored light, became a popular novelty, spawning
hundreds of imitators. By May 1892, Rice had inserted a serpentine
dance Into 1492, and when the show reopened In September,
Isabella Florence led five "fluttering sylphs" in a climactic third-act
serpentine. Within weeks further "improvements" were made in the
dance specialties of the show with the addition of the "La Regalon-
cita," a seven-year-Qid Chilean dancer. "La Regaloncita" (whose real
name was Mildred Ewer) had stimulated controversy since her New
York debut at age six had produced a challenge to laws prohibiting
children from performing on stage ("Child"). By the time 1492 was
running in New York, the serpentine itself was parodied by Walter
Jones (who played King Ferdinand) when he appeared as "La Loie
Joneseroso" presenting "The Turpentine Dance in three movements
by special permission of Loie Fuller" (Program, 1 OOth Anniversary) .
1
17
....
(X)
'\.
"::)
\)
. ;
GRAND FINALE- ;_:
. - """' - , ___ ,\
,...,._ . i -... '---.'"':r ... ", - ..,.,.;... -- :J.J
Grand Finale-Rice's Production of Barnet's 1492
Handbill for 1492; Theatre Collection, New York Public Ubrary
Scenically, though lacking the scope provided by the grand
arena staging of Kiralfy's Columbus extravaganza, 1492 had a visual
richness and diversity that took full advantage of contemporary
theatrical stock elements. Its scenery synopsis (Program, 1492)
details ten different drops "painted expressly for the piece by four
different scenic artists. One novelty of the production was a series of
transition drops that displayed exterior views of the Chicago Wortd's
Fair during the act breaks. These replaced .the stock drops normally
on view during Intermission and helped maintain the atmosphere of
the piece throughout the evening. The production's elaborate physi-
cal business Incorporated everything from livestock to vision scenes
and included:
The conspirators trotting Into Broadway on donkeys . .. .
Columbus singing to Isabella in historically correct costume .
. . gorgeous gowns and extraordinary stage setting. The
prismatic fountain In the background. . . . The boat on which
Columbus sails across the ocean ... true to life ... a filmy
vision ... colored signs on Broadway ... working horsecars
. . . the torchlight procession ... a gorgeous scene, the
Spanish palace up to date. . . . The calcium lights ... vivid
effects ... changing colors; rich rugs and rare furnishings ..
. and the whole extravaganza terminates with a novel electri-
cal display rPiays"). .
Rice, like Kiralfy, capitalized on the public taste for electrical
novelties in ending his production with an electric scene featuring
several thousand tiny lights. A second light-related novelty, the
candidate's torchlight parade, which initially featured presidential
nominees Cleveland and Harrison, went through several further
manifestations during the run. When the presidential election was
over in November, Rice introduced transparencies featuring
likenesses of the candidates in the Massachusetts gubernatorial
race. Finally, when it appeared that "speculation on political results
[were] no longer uppermost in the public mind" rAmusements"), he
created a more timeless procession honoring Columbus.
1492 proved to be an extraordinarily popular hit, playing well
beyond the era of the Columbian celebrations into the twentieth
century. There were productions running throughout America con-
tinuously between 1892 and 1895 with a run of 462 nights in New
York alone. Rice continued to keep the production fresh (the show's
subtitle was "Up to Date") by regularly changing the novelties to
encourage repeated viewings. He also stimulated sales in New York
by adding Kilanyi Troupe Tableaus between the acts. These "living
pictures," billed as Queen Isabella's Art Gallery, included such visions
as "The Surprised Bathers, "Pysche at the Well, and "The Dancing
19
Hour In the Temple of Dionysus, and featured a "potpourri of the
female form divine (Clippings). Perhaps the production was so suc-
cessful, however, because it had so little to do with the historical
Columbus. It did not rely on any continuing public interest in the
anniversary of Columbus's voyage. Instead, Rice's great sense of
theatrical opportunism was merely stimulated, but never limited, by
the historical story that provided the framework for his evolving pop-
ular entertainment.
Ironically, the most extensively chronicled2 Columbus produc-
tion of the nineteenth century was its least successful one. Indeed,
Steele MacKaye's World Finder was never produced In the forum for
which it was intended--the MacKaye Oater Chicago) Spectatorium.
MacKaye, like both Kiralfy and Rice, had begun writing and produc-
ing theatre pieces in America during the 1870's. His enormously suc-
cessful romantic melodrama Hazel Kirke (1879) went on to become
the longest-running play of its era after opening In New York's
Madison Square Theatre--a playhouse that MacKaye had remooeled
with a unique elevator stage to facilitate scene changes and a horse-
shoe arch to eliminate footlighting. This production typified Mac-
Kaye's career-long practice of providing innovative staging elements
in support of his generally undistinguished dramatic texts. The World
Finder project--intended as the theatrical centerpiece of Chicago's
Columbian Exposition of 1893--would prove instead to be the cul-
minating folly of MacKaye's troubled career.
MacKaye was first encouraged to develop a theatrical spec-
tacle for presentation at the Exhibition while dining with several of the
board members in London during September 1891. By November of
that year, he had moved to Chicago and had begun building a model
of what he proposed to be a $800,000 building that could seat 10,000
spectators. This "Spectatorium, as MacKaye described it in his
unpublished "Introduction" to The World Finder, was to provide a
form of art, combining the realism obtained by progress in Scenic
mechanism with music of an Oratorio character. In his "Introduc-
tion, Mac Kaye set forth the case for his new ,abernacle of the fine
arts":
During a practical experience with the public, as an author
and manager of nearly twenty-five years, f have been taught
that the tendency of our modern public taste was toward
realism rather than idealism .... In consequence, there has
been, of fate years, a much greater development of the
sensuous than of the spiritual side of theatric art. . . . As the
realistic is that element in art most thoroughly com-
prehensible to the crowd, f have bent all my efforts, first to
perfecting the element of realism in stage art, and then to so
combine that with the marvellous and the mysterious as to
20
1' h .v J,
-
;,_llll"'' .. . . ...
The Chicago Spectatorium--Architect's Elevation
Inland Architect and News Record, XXI, 3, (March 1893), after p. 4
Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago
21
make the fascinating force of realism a means of popu-
larizing idealism.
MacKaye was an extraordinarily persuasive speaker, and by
August 1892, his Columbian Celebration Company--with the help of
George Pullman and other capitalists--had raised more than
$500,000 in bond subscriptions. Ironically, the main selling point of
MacKaye's scheme was not the "idealism of his mission statement
above, but the "mechanical realisms provided by more than fifteen
new inventions that he proposed to install in the Spectatorium.
These devices, many of them conceived as early as 1884 for his
Lyceum Theatre in New York but never Installed there (Inventions),
included moving lighting-effect machines, shifting stage
mechanisms, and a proscenium adjuster. By December 1892, the
architectural firm of Jenney and Mundie had begun construction of
the Spectatorium just north of the Exhibition grounds, where the pro-
ject had been forced to relocate through a combination of late plan
submissions and high rental rates.
Although the Spectatorium was one of the largest theatre
building projects ever to be begun, MacKaye's temperament was art-
istic, not architectural. He approached the process of preparing the
massively expensive theatre building in the same fluid manner he
approached the creative task of devising the production that it was to
house. He quickly fell behind on both. A letter from Murry Nelson,
the Managing Director of the Columbian Celebration Company, to his
board of directors in February 1893 (three months before the Exhib-
ition's opening) demonstrates the problem:
The scenario, or libretto, of our performance has not yet
been deposited with this Company, and I have so far
received only the first act. It is my judgment that the entire
Scenario, the costume, property and music plots, and
whatever other literature pertains to the play, should be
deposited with the Company. The organ for which there was
an immediate necessity two months ago, has not yet been
obtained, and should be contracted for at once, if it is still
desired to have it by May 1st. The engines and boilers,
pumps, etc., should be contracted for at once. The seats for
the Spectatorium should be decided upon and contracted
for, as the one who supplies the seats will probably loan us
the required chairs for our school and costume work shop.
The elevator contract has been long pending and no report
of it has been made. The Hoffman contract? Pending. The
Petty Concessions? Pending. It may be that too much work
has been put upon Mr. MacKaye and that it should be a little
more equally distributed (Minutes).
22
Clearty, MacKaye was overworked and overextended, at one point
writing to his wife: 1f I were not made of iron I should be dead.
The World Finder production concept was close In spirit to
Kiralfy's Columbus in its dependence on nonverbal elements to pre.
sent the story. There was to be no spoken dialogue except for the
words land, land, land called by the lookout on board the Santa
Maria. Instead, spectacular stage pictures were to be set in motion
by MacKaye's patented Inventions and explained by titles on snent
unfolding announcers built Into the proscenium walls. Originally
intended as a four-act scenario,3 the first two acts of The World
Finder chronicled Columbus's preparations and first voyage, and the
last two acts detailed his return, subsequent voyages, and eventual
death in poverty. As the project ran short on time, Mac Kaye
developed the first two acts into the most finished form, eventually
condensing Columbus's subsequent voyages and death to a few
narrative pages.
All versions of the text featured many opportunities to present
spectacular scenery and events. In the first act, a weary Columbus,
beset by visions, proceeds from elaborate sunsets at Rabida to battle
scenes and royal processions in Santa Fe, before finally departing
from Palos as: oawn approaches and the quaint old town slowly
issues from the concealing shadows of the night; the caravels grow
clear, as the first tints of the rising sun gild, with delicate gold, the old
fashioned hulks of these historic ships. The caravels themselves
were accurate three-quarter scale models of the Nina, the Pinta, and
the Santa Maria afloat in the enormous Spectatorium staging area
(as recalled by Murry Nelson):
The stage was excavated several feet below the level of the
auditorium and was in effect a large tank of horseshoe
shape. The proscenium opening of the Spectatorium was
150 feet across at what would be the toe caulk of the horse-
shoe, the audience sitting within the ends of the shoe sur-
rounded by the stage. At the bottom of the tank were driven
piles which were the foundation for a series of railroad tracks
in equally distant half-circles, concentric upon a point in the
middle of the auditorium. Upon these tracks ran specially
designed flat cars which carried various sections of the
scenery which was not painted upon flat surfaces but built
up and in comparatively high relief . . . . This design was
mainly useful to show ships in motion on the water and pro-
ductive of vividly realistic effects when the stages carrying
the ships or boats were moved slowly out of the line of vision
In one direction, while the stages carrying the land and fora.
shore scenery were moved slowly out of the line of vision in
23
24
the opposite direction, giving a panoramic effect of remark-
able beauty of ships leaving a harbour, for instance, or sight-
Ing land.
In the second act, as continents drifted in and out of frame, the
caravels were to be besieged by winds, heavy seas, and more light-
Ing effects until : At last the storm passes and the blessed light
returns, and with it the celestial voices waft to our ears, revelations of
their promises to the unfainting heart of this great leader-and as the
Rainbow Choral comes from the sky, the mystic bow itself gradually
appears in space.
The celestial voices were part of an elaborate music
scenario, including chorals and orchestral interludes, that MacKaye
had conceived to complement The World Finder's strong visual
Images. With hundreds of orchestral pieces envisioned (more than
15 for the opening scene alone), he contracted many composers,
Including Antonin Dvorak (who later dropped out), Victor Herbert,
and Frank Archer, to create an original score to his specifications.
MacKaye described his grand scheme to his wife in a letter (17
March 1892):
You see the whole story Is told in pantomime with orchestral
accompaniment of the action explanatory of the sentiment of
each actor as it occurs, with great opportunities of describ-
Ing the night--the stifling days--the cruel mutinies--the
showers--the rainbows--the dawns and sunsets, the sublime
starlight--the grand constellation of the southern
Hemisphere--reflected in the depths of the ocean. . . . The
choral department is a magnificent adaptation of the old
Greek chorus idea--put into music. As the grand leading
events in the life of Columbus reach their climatic expression
in the spectacle these grand choruses voice the doubts,
fears, hopes, of humanity from the audience--and to these
questionlngs come replies from the mystic voices behind the
scenes proclaiming the promise, rebuking the wrong--
exalting the night--explaining the meaning of these
movements-and prophesying the future they import.
The chorals were intended to be performed by two large
choruses (with the possible addition of a children's chorus) singing
both accompanied and unaccompanied. The choruses were to be
placed in the large orchestra pit before the Spectatorium stage and
behind the scenes near special backstage seating sections. In a let-
ter to Murry Nelson {14 November 1892), MacKaye talked of his plan
to ask the twelve greatest American poets to write twelve choral
poems for the Spectatorium. A good measure of the loss of perspec-
25
- - - ~
1. I , ~ I
.. , . - ~ . '
... ' '1 ..
. ' ' .t
' ~ ' 1 . .
. ..&!'
~ ~
l
1\)
a>
The Convent at Rabida
MacKaye Spectatorium Magazine-Prototype; MacKaye Collection, Dartmouth College Ubrary
tive that MacKaye experienced in trying to finish The World Finder is
Indicated by his decision ~ s s than a month later) to assign his 17-
year-old son Percy the task of completing the choral libretto. Percy
felt overwhelmed and wrote his father in January 1893: '1"he quality
of writing Is not 'strained' any more than that of mercy. It's
Impossible for me to write anything worthy of the Spectatorlum, you,
or myself In so short a space of time. But Is it really necessary, Papa
dear?" (Percy MacKaye letter)
A financial panic In May ended all further questions about the
artistic necessities of The World Finder. The financing for the entire
Spectatorlum project suddenly dried up, and the building was left as
a $550,000 skeleton haunting the fairgrounds until it was sold as
scrap metal for $2,250 in October 1893 ("Razing"). While the
bankruptcy proceedings and accusations of blame for the fiasco
would continue untH 1907, MacKaye was determined to vindicate
himself and his artistic vision. In February 1894, In the remodeled
Chicago Fire Cyclorama, now rechristened the Scenitorium, a
seriously ill MacKaye presented his World Finder on a twenty-foot
wide model stage. The critics were Impressed with his mechanical
and lighting innovations, but generally found the text lugubrious:
"Take it all in all, and one cannot better describe it than as the 'De
Profundis' chanted to accompaniment of the stereopticon ("Music").
Meanwhile, a Columbus-weary public was unwilling to support what
had become a textually overlong diorama show. In the end, Mac-
Kaye, three weeks from his death and narrating the production from
a chair in front of the stage, received $9.49 for his first week's efforts
(Reed).
The World Finder's brief run as an actorless novelty produc-
tion at the Scenitorium was an important vindication of MacKaye's
technical production vision, but less than satisfactory as a true
theatrical performance. The theatrical collaborators--singers,
musicians, scenic artists, and technicians--would remain as
anonymous as those in Kiralfy's Columbus, subordinate to Mac-
Kaye's controlling vision. The scenario of The World Finder itself
would have no aftertHe without the inventions that were conceived to
illustrate it. Its production history remains interesting primarily as a
result of the scope of the project, the important figures involved in it,
and the theatrical appliances that it inspired. Although MacKaye's
press releases would compare his project to that of Wagner's at
Bayreuth--signHying the dawning of a new age of theatre where "will
be realized what Wagner dreamed or (Press)--lt might be more aptly
described as a project that signified the twilight of the gods of
realistic theatrical spectacle.
Overall then, the most noteworthy attempts to present
Columbus on the American stage during the four-hundredth anniver-
sary of his voyage seem to have been exercises in reinforcing the
27
commercial convictions of three producers whose established styles
of production needed little reinforcement. They saw in the story a
timely opportunity for presenting more of the visual and aural
extravagances that they all had substantial experience In creating.
There were to be no attempts at psychological drama, no raising of
cultural issues, no focus on the historical legacy of Columbus's jour-
ney. Klralfy regarded the 'Voyage of discovery" as another excuse
for extravagant spectacle; Rice found It a useful popular myth to bur-
lesque; and MacKaye hoped that it would allow him to meld his
peculiar blend of romantic idealism and mechanical realism Into a
career-culminating feat. In doing what they understood best, Rice
and Kiralfy also achieved popular and financial success. Perhaps
they succeeded where MacKaye failed because they created port-
able spectacles. MacKaye tried to build a monument to both
Columbus and his own design ideas in the Spectatorlum, but
ultimately needed better collaborators and more resources than
those he had assembled. In the end, however, all three undertakings
seemed to represent a last, and not wholly satisfactory, drive toward
reinvigorating an unwieldy theatrical genre. Certainly the creators of
large-scale spectacle would soon need to discover their own new
wortds of presentation in the face of such emerging forms as film and
the modem musical theatre.
Works Cited
"'America' is Chaos." Chicago Sunday Tribune, 23 April1893, 2.
"Amusements. The (Boston) Sunday Herald, 13 November 1892,
10.
"The Big Show's Second Week." The New York Times, 29 March
1892,3.
"Chased by Mr. Kiralfy." The New York Times, 19 March 1892, 5.
"The Child Drama Revived." The (Boston) Sunday Herald, 4 Septem-
ber 1892, 28.
"Circus and Two Farces. The (New York) Sun, 22 March 1892,3.
Clippings File, 1492, Harvard Theatre Collection (H.T.C.).
"Columbus is 'in it,' Too." The (New York) World, 22 March 1892, 5.
"Crowds See Great Show." The New York Times, 22 March 1892, 2.
Curry, Wade. "Steele Mac Kaye: Producer and Director. Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1958.
'" 1492' at the Walnut Street Theatre, Uncredited Philadelphia
newspaper review, March 1893, H.T.C.
A Great Spectacle of 'Columbus.'" New York Herald, 20 February
1892, 4.
"The Greatest Show on Earth." The New York Times, 27 March 1892,
17.
28
Hannon, Daniel L. -rhe MacKaye Spectatorium: A Reconstruction
and Analysis of a Theatrical Spectacle Planned for the
World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 with a History of the
Producing Organizations. Ph.D. Dissertation, Tulane, 1970.
How America Discovered Columbus. New York Herald, 22 March
1892,7.
tn the Local Theatres: The (New York) Evening Telegram, 22
March 1892, 4.
Inventions List, for installation in Lyceum Theatre, New York, with
cost estimates, H. T. C.
Invigorating Anarchy. The Brooklyn Eagle, 15 January 1888, Scrap-
book, MacKaye Collection, Dartmouth College Library
(D.C.L).
Jackson, Allan S. E.E. Rice and Musical Burlesque: Players
Magazine 51:5 (1976), 154-06.
Klralfy, Bolossy. Bolossy Kiralfy, Creator of Great Musical Spec-
tacles: An Autobiography. Ed. by Barbara Barker. Ann
Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.
Kiralfy, lmre. "My Reminiscences: Strand Magazine 37, June
1909, 643-50.
MacKaye, Percy. Epoch: The Life of Steele MacKaye. 2 Vols. New
York: Boni & Liverwright, 1927.
MacKaye, Percy. Letter to Steele MacKaye, 14 January 1893, Mac-
Kaye Collection, D.C.L.
The MacKaye Spectatorium Magazine, prototype with many blank
pages, MacKaye Collection, D.C.L
MacKaye, Steele. Introduction to The World Finder, unpublished,
MacKaye Collection, D.C.L.
---. Letter to Mary Medbury MacKaye, 17 March 1892, MacKaye Col-
lection, D.C.L.
--. Letter to Mary Medbury MacKaye, 13 August 1892, MacKaye Col-
lection, D.C.L
. Letter to Murry Nelson, 14 November 1892, MacKaye Collection,
D.C.L
Music Scenario of The Great Discovery, handwritten, MacKaye
Collection, D.C.L
---. The World Finder, various scenarios, MacKaye Collection, D.C.L.
Minutes of Columbian Celebration Company, Director's Meeting, 1
February 1893, MacKaye Collection, D.C.L
Music and Drama. The Chicago Tribune, 6 February 1894, 6.
Nelson, Murry. Statements Regarding the Spectatorlum, given to
Percy MacKaye, MacKaye Collection, D.C.L
"An Old Columbus Extravaganza. Oipping file, H.T.C.
"Plays Last Night. The (Boston) Sunday Herald, 4 September 1892,
6.
29
Press Releases for the Spectatorium, March 1893, MacKaye Col-
lection, D.C.L
Program, Columbus and the Discovery of America. Introduction by
I mre Kiralfy. At Madison Square Garden, March 1892.
Theatre Collection, New York Public Ubrary, (N.Y.P.L).
Program, 1492, Park Theatre (Boston), 10 October 1892. 50th
Anniversary Performance. H.T.C.
Program, Nero; or the Burning of Rome. At various New York area
locations, 1888-90. Theatre Collection, N.Y.P.L
Program, 100th Anniversary, 1492. Palmer's Theatre, 16 October
1893. H.T.C.
Program, World's Fair by Paul M. Potter. Produced by "Rice's
Surprise Party. At Chicago Opera House, September 1890.
Theatre Collection, N.Y.P.L
"Razing an Elephant. The Chicago Evening Journal, 12 October
1893,5.
Reed, Isaac. Letter to Steele MacKaye, 13 February 1894. Reed was
Treasurer of the Scenitorlum. MacKaye Collection, D.C.L
"Rehearsing for 'Columbus. New York Daily Tribune, 21 March
1892, 7. .
"Theatres and Concerts. Boston Evening Transcript, 6 September
1892,5.
Tomkins, Elizabeth A. "An Amateur in a Circus." (New York) Sunday
Advertiser, 27 March 1892, 5.
wonders of Barnum & Bailey. New York Daily Tribune, 22 March
1892, 7.
Endnotes
1
For a more complete discussion of variations in the New
York mounting of 1492, see Jackson, 162-5.
2Among the detailed studies of the Spectatorium are those
contained in Epoch, Percy MacKaye's biased biography of his father;
Daniel Hannon's excellent thesis, rhe MacKaye Spectatorium .. ;
Wade Curry's thesis, "Steele MacKaye: Producer and Director"; and
my discussion of MacKaye's lighting in Nineteenth Century Theatre,
18, 1-2 (Summer /Winter 1990).
3Many scenarios for The World Finder exist in Dartmouth's
MacKaye Collection. One entire box in the collection is filled with
manuscript versions, fragmentary lighting and mechanical plots, and
a music scenario. A second box contains records of the Columbian
Celebration Company, correspondence, illustrations, and other use-
ful records. For a speculative recreation of the scenario as it might
have been presented in May 1893, see Hannon's thesis.
30
"THE GAME OF POUTICS:
EDWIN FORREST AND THE
JACKSON DEMOCRATS
Mark E. Mallett
The day may come when I shall make the game of politics
my study . . ..
-Edwin Forrest, to the New York
Democratic Party, 1838
In October 1838, the New York State Democratic party
created quite a sensation by offering its nomination for a seat In
Congress to the popular tragedian Edwin Forrest. This extraordinary
move stunned the political establishment, and one editor drolly
opined that it would give character and hue to the election.1 For-
mer New York mayor Philip Hone lamented that the actor could
make no claim that I ever heard of ... but that of exciting . .. the pit
of the Bowery Theater ... .
2
Forrest had no agenda or public posi-
tion on the issues of the day, nor had he any experience in running
for or serving in elective office. What he did have, and what the lead-
ers of Tammany Hall hoped his name would bring to their ticket, was
his celebrity, his star quality. Forrest was what Orrin Klapp Identifies
as a symbolic leader, a personality 'Who functions primarily through
his meaning or image. 3
Forrest's symbolic potential for the Democrats was
inseparable from his renown as a theatrical star, and sheds some
light on the process by which performers became stars in Jack-
sonian America. The ascendancy of Itinerant stars over the stock-
company system in the early nineteenth century has been marked as
a turning point in American theatre history. As such, it has been sub-
jected to extensive research into its aesthetics, practices, and impact
on its own and succeeding periods. Studies of this sort are con-
centrated on the gross effects and changes wrought and too often
overlook the entrepreneurial nature of the early star system, the
individual Innovations that fostered its success.
4
Behind the roles,
the performances, and the dramatic appetites of the age (the cus-
tomary Issues of theatre history) lie the pragmatic career-buUding
steps and day-to-day choices that the quest for stardom entailed. In
31
Forrest's case, many of these decisions were bound up with the
political currents of his day, what he called 'he game of politics. 5
Alexander Mackay, a journalist for the London Morning
Chronicle, noted that in Jacksonian America,
[t]he political arena is filled with those who plunge into it
from the very depths of society, as affording them a shorter
road to consideration than that which they would have to
pursue in the accumulation of property. 6
Like many European visitors, he was struck by the ubiquity of politics
in American society. His arrival in 1846 coincided with the matura-
. tion of a political culture based on strong national parties dedicated
to the use of patronage and political spoils.
7
In the absence of class
distinctions, and at a time of emerging entrepreneurial commerce,
Americans looked to political achievement as a measure of success
and consideration.
Did Edwin Forrest take Mackay's shorter road to further his
career, as so many of his peers did? Did he play the game of
politics: as he called it, to his own advantage? Jackson's Demo-
cratic party clearly benefited from contemporary dramatic aesthetics
from 1825 to 1850. Forrest, in his pursuit of stardom, seems to have
derived as much benefit from the political turmoil of the period as
from changing theatrical practices and tastes. His career track and
the Democrats' paralleled one another remarkably, crossing on
several occasions. On close examination, it is clear that the actor
and the party found mutual advantage in these parallels, and that a
closer relationship than has previously been acknowledged existed
between them.
I.
In the late 1820s, Edwin Forrest was an ambitious young actor
who heard the call for native arts and artists and recognized the
opportunity it presented. a Americans were developing a powerfully
positive sense of themselves. Their rapidly expanding national
boundaries and increasing prosperity In international markets
appeared to them the result of providential promise. They were also,
after their second successful war with England, eager to affirm a
cultural independence that matched their mercantile and military
accomplishments.9 A uniquely American culture proved much more
elusive, however, both to define and to identify. A lingering sense of
inferiority, especially notable in its theatres, haunted the country.
Theatre managers were sensitive to these changes and
attempted to respond appropriately, but a perception of pro-English
32
bias persistect.
1
0 The majority of plays and players avaUable or, per-
haps more important, salable, were from abroad. They had adjusted
to the popular demand for star players and to the dramatic tastes d
the merchants and tradesmen who made up an ever-increasing seg-
ment of their audiences. These changes presented a new dUemma,
however. Audiences demanded charismatic name actors, but
nationalist sentiments and a chronic animosity toward England were
beginning to cause the reigning stars problems. Edmund Kean's dif-
ficulties In Boston in 1821 and 1825 had required published
apologies to his audiences. During the 1826-27 season, angry
Philadelphians demanded a similar apology from WUiiam Macready.
The time was ripe for an American actor who could match the for-
eigners' presence and drawing power.
The second quarter of the nineteenth century was also a
period of radical change in American politics, especially in the area d
presidential elections. Andrew Jackson was the first president to be
elected as a result of these changes, and his name marks the period.
Jackson was also the first president not of the generation that fought
the Revolution, and therefore the first to rely on symbolic rather than
personal links to that mythic period.
11
While presidents had always
had a symbolic function, the symbol had, previously, effectively
defined the man. Beginning with Jackson, symbolic elements were
deliberately manipulated to enhance a candidate's personality. This
new tactic signalled a restyling of American politics that resonates to
the present.
A second significant change was the participation of broad
segments of the population who had been excluded from the political
process. Suffrage was greatly extended in several states, effectively
removing presidential selection from the immediate control of legisla-
tive caucuses and giving rise to national political parties.12 The
parties, in turn, were faced with the necessity of organizing and per-
suading the electorate to support their candidates. Like the
managers of the nation's theatres, political leaders were forced to
respond to new political tastes and demands by a new electoral
audience. Presidential contenders could no longer be chosen or
elected on the strength of their support by the leaders of state parties
or congressional factions. They had to be identifiable by and accept-
able to the mass of voters--charismatic, or symbolic personalities: in
other words, .. stars.
Jackson first stood for election in 1824, but lost to John
Quincy Adams in a decision by the House of Representatives. Jack-
son's supporters, appropriating the name Democrat Republicans, or
simply Democrats, saw themselves as upholders of democratic prin-
ciples, and representative of the newly enfranchised. They were
determined, In the wake of their 1824 defeat, to see their man tri-
umphant in the next contest. They consolidated their strengths In the
33
states they had carried In 1824 and set out to conquer the rest. From
his childhood in Philadelphia, Forrest found himself in the midst of
these changes. Pennsylvania, together with New York, had led the
way in developing a consistent two-party political structure.13 Home
of the first and second Banks of the United States, Philadelphia was
also the site of the first central labor union in America, as well as the
first Workingmen's Party.14
In 1822, after a brief stint at the Walnut Street Theater, Forrest
left Philadelphia to learn his trade "from the bottom up.15 Whereas a
few years eartler such a sojourn would have meant London, it now
meant Albany, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.16 Among the farmers, mer-
chants, and adventurers of the frontier, the young actor came Into
direct contact with the political forces abroad in the country. His
apprenticeship brought him increasingly prominent roles; the Individ-
ual attention he drew from editors and critics awoke Forrest to his
potential for stardom and the advantages of being Identified with the
Democrats. 17 In Cincinnati, Sol Smith, then the editor of the Inde-
pendent Press, paid special attention In his reviews to Forrest's
native origins and the promise he showed for American drama.
1
8
Moses Dawson, the editor of the Advertiser and a leading Democrat
in the West, became Forrest's tutor and patron, giving him theatrical
advice, political counsel, and an introduction to the city's political
and business elite.19
In 1826, after a season as a leading man in New Orteans, For-
rest arrived in Albany and joined Chartes Gilfert's company at the
Peart Street Theater. He performed supporting roles to such travell-
ing stars as Thomas Hamblin and Edmund Kean, and Gilfert
occasionally assigned him well-received leading roles. Forrest
enjoyed the acclaim of Albany's theatre-going society, and its
citizens considered him a "favorite son" throughout his career.2o
Albany, in 1826, was also the center of the new Democratic party
coalescing around Andrew Jackson. Its principal architect, Martin
Van Buren, anticipated nomination as Jackson's vice-president in the
1828 election and was turning the energies of his "Albany Regency"
to the construction of a new party. 21
In its drive to make Andrew Jackson the next president, the
Regency and its counterparts in Virginia and Pennsylvania effected
several profound changes in American politics that have left a
permanent stamp on American political and popular culture.
Championing individual liberty and political equality, the emerging
Democratic party embraced the common man. Forrest's earlier
experiences in the West had introduced him to Democratic senti-
ments. Now, in Albany, and later in New York, he found himself at
the geographic center of the changes that were beginning to
dominate American politics. Forrest could not have missed the
importance of these changes or the effect they were having on the
34
audiences that he was increasingly considering his own. Allying him-
self with the Democrats would have appeared obviously
advantageous to Forrest's ambitions and career, as Forrest's own
successes would later benefit the party.
The principal feature of Van Buren's scheme was its transfer of
politics to a theatrical plane through opportunities for active partici-
pation by broad segments of the electorate and the use of dramatic
Imagery to sustain participants' excitement and enthusiasm. 22 The
dramatic metaphor has been frequently noted by historians of the
Jackson period, but little notice has been given Its deliberate origin.
Van Buren recognized the efficacy of the dramatic appeal, and his
notes confirm his determination to effect changes at the grass-roots
level: "Those who have wrought great changes In the world never
succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multi-
tude.
2
3 Politics was no longer to be the privileged preserve of legis-
lative caucuses and the wealthy. Instead, it would become a popular
activity that was, not coincidentally, a form of entertainment as well.
The Democrats recognized early the political potential of con-
temporary dramaturgy.
The Democrats also recognized the value of a perceptible
opponent as a focal point for solidifying party unity. Jackson's rivals
were cast as the antagonists In a political drama in which his sup-
porters were active payers. 24 The Democrats, through their associa-
tion with the old general, made themselves the protagonists. Their
villains were the aristocracy-: those who had not supported Jack-
son in '24, bankers, old moneyed families, Federalists. The
aristocracy- might hold the levers of power; strength of numbers
was the Democrats' weapon. 25 The party promoted partisanship,
which overlooked Issues and, occasionally, reality. Instead, they
offered a contest In which their hero fought a designated vUiain, good
struggled with evil, and right strove against corruption and oppres-
sion.26
In many significant ways, the Democrats' appeal--unity,
empowerment of the common man, the defense of fundamental
values--and the men to whom they directed It foreshadowed the
melodramas of the following decades. Like the Democrats'
dramaturgy
[t]he melodrama reflected and supported what Is perhaps
the key element in democratic psychology: the sense which
individual men have of their ability to decide, and hence of
their right to participate vitally in the wielding of power.27
At center stage stood the Democrats' hero, Andrew Jackson, already
a legend by dint of his military exploits and services to his home state
of Tennessee. 28 The Democrats carefully potted their fiction around
35
the immensely popular image of Jackson as old Hickory, ,he Hero
of New Orleans, and Adams's ,heft of the 1824 election.29 They
emphasized their protagonist's most favorable aspects, avoiding par-
ticulars that didn't fit; Jackson himself was Insulated from the hurty-
burly of the campaign. 30 When pressed to respond to specific
issues, Jackson followed a middle course, reiterating the party line
and suiting his answer to prevailing regional biases. The Democrats'
hero was a persona, a figure of Ideology who transcended policies
and programs.
The Presidential campaign of 1828 was the stage on which the
Democrats played out their drama. Borrowing liberally from the
stagecraft of the period--spectacular rallies and processions, songs,
emblems, banners, colorful personalities and emotionally charged
oratory--they introduced an electioneering style that was also a
cultural expression.3
1
The political arena subsumed the theatre's
domain, effectively blurring the distinction between them. The per-
formances were stage-managed by such local party organizations as
the Tammany Societies of New York and Ohio. The plot focussed on
the hero's labors to supplant a powerfully established foe by force of
his virtue and the faith of his followers. In this metatheatrical strug-
gle, voters--especially Democrats--were both participants and
audience.
II.
The city of New York was a Jacksonian stronghold when For-
rest arrived in 1826. Following the relaxation of suffrage restrictions,
the city's tradesmen and shop workers, and much of its middle class,
were organizing In various unions or social clubs with Democratic
tendencies. 3
2
Walt Whitman would later recall these same alert,
well-dress'd, full-blooded young and middle-aged men, the best
average of American born mechanics, In his frequently quoted des-
cription of Bowery Theater audiences. 33 Gilfert had come from
Albany to manage the newly-opened Bowery, and Forrest was his
leading man.
Adopted by the Bowery audiences, Forrest also played regu-
larly at the more aristocratic Park Theater; New York's cultural
arbiters quickly noted the new talent.34 Key Democratic editors also
recognized early Forrest's potential as both an actor and a symbol of
their political agenda. The party controlled a number of presses in
New York, from small-circulation penny dailies to William Cullen
Bryant's powerful Evening Post, their principal organ. William Leg-
gett, Bryant's assistant editor and one of the party's intellectual lead-
ers, solicited an introduction to Forrest after his first New York per-
formance. 35
36
Forrest found In Leggett, like Moses Dawson in Cincinnati, a
political tutor, counsel, and critic, as well as a life-long friend.
Besides his work for Bryant, Leggett also published a weekly drama
review, The Critic. He loaned Forrest books and offered advice on
repertory, interpretation, and performance; they passed countless
hours in Impassioned discussion of theatre and politics. A former
actor, Leggett also must have seen the stage as a forceful platform
for his views and Forrest as a powerful embodiment of them, a role
the actor gladly adopted. For example, advising Forrest on a per-
formance of Coriolanus, Leggett wrote, ,hat Insolent patrician ...
was not quite so much of a democrat as you and I are; but that Is no
reason why we should not use him If he can do us a service. 36
Forrest, however, recognized a need for a distinctly American
repertory, suited to his Individual talents and patriotic appeal. He
had witnessed firsthand the changes wrought by the new political
practices and experienced the strength of the nationalist sentiment In
the theatrical market. Forrest's goal was an Image like the Demo-
crats' image of Jackson, one that combined his common-roots
audience identification with an Idealized stage persona. A shrewd
businessman, he also sought the maximum publicity that might
derive from such an image, as well as from his encouragement of
native talents. 3
7
Fortunately, his stature and income permitted him to
commission the plays he required. On 22 November 1828, he
announced the first of his famous playwriting contests In Leggett's
magazine.
Forrest's enterprise was calculated to capitalize on a major
effort by the Democrats to identify themselves with the call for native
arts and artists. Many Important authors, artists, and journalists, In
what Arthur Schlesinger calls a desertion of the intellectuals, were
attracted to the Democrats' standard by the party's ideology and the
excitement of the campaign. 38 Besides Forrest, Bryant and Leggett,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, M.M. Noah, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman,
James K. Paulding, and George Bancroft all Identified themselves as
Jacksonians. The Democrats, In response, welcomed the attention
and the prestige that endorsements by such Individuals brought.
Within ten years, they and the party were so closely linked that the
Boston Post stated editorially,
It is a fact well known, that with few exceptions, our first
literary men belong to the democratic party. Almost every
man of note in letters, -- historians, poets, indeed nearty all
who have acquired fame ... are, as might be expected,
favorable to democracy. 39
Over the next thirteen years, Forrest sponsored nine contests
that yielded winning plays; his idea also inspired a host of imitators. 40
37
The competitions produced a body of plays that were uniquely his
own, tailored to his talents and patriotic image.
41
The tremendous
attraction of that image, embodied In this repertory, set Forrest apart
from the other stars, unchallenged and unequaled. A critic for the
New York Albion, looking back over Forrest's career In 1848, wrote,
We are inclined to believe that Mr. Forrest Is not to be judged
by the ordinary standards of criticism . . . He has created a
school in his art, strictly American, and he stands forth as the
very embodiment, as it were, of the masses of American
character.
4
2
Forrest's plays brought the Democrats' message back Into the
theatre, mirroring the drama staged by the politicians. They also
completed the metatheatrical cycle that had started with the election
campaign, presenting
the persistent images of Forrest In the theater and Andrew
Jackson in the political arena-the defenders of the common
man, heroic caretakers of Individual liberty. 43
The plays alluded to and echoed dramatically the current political
scene. The question of the land grants for veterans in Caius Marius
was a direct reference to contemporary debates over the allocation
of public lands in the Southwest. The Almagrist plotters of
Ora//oossa were likewise an allusion to the "plotters of 1824 (i.e.,
Henry Clay's support of Adams), who had denied Jackson his "right-
ful" place in the White House.
For his own part, Jackson astutely grasped the power of
government -as-theatre to shape events and emotions. He used his
presidency to dramatize social values and goals, establishing himself
as the people's guardian and direct representative.
44
Jackson also
shrewdly characterized many of his programs in dramatic terms. In
his campaign against the Bank of the United States, for instance, he
portrayed himself as a champion of liberty fighting the oppression of
privilege. Conversely, contemporary drama complemented adminis-
tration policies. For example, such romanticized portrayals of the
"Noble Savage" as Forrest's Metamora effectively distracted public
attention from the horrors of the government's Indian removal
campaign. 45
As his dramatic identification with Jackson and his promi-
nence as America's pre-eminent tragedian solidified, Forrest's per-
sonal involvement with New York Democratic leaders became more
public. He had been accepted into the fold of artists and celebrities
identified with the party shortly after his arrival, and its press had
steadfastly championed his rise. Forrest drew the prize committees
38
for his playwriting contests largely from a circle of authors and
editors connected one way or another with Jackson or Tammany
Hall. Equally at home at the Park Theater as at the Bowery, In con-
stant demand In other cities, Forrest was enjoying the success he
had begun to pursue at the end of the previous decade.
On the eve of Forrest'-s 1834 tour to England, the New York
political and social elite gathered to bid their star farewell. Among
those who offered numerous toasts were the present and past
mayors. the district attorney, Tammany nobility. and many celebrities
of the stage and literary worlds. In acknowledgement of both For-
rest's theatrical prowess and symbolic stature, they presented him
with a medal struck for the occasion,
a token which may at once serve to keep him mindful that
Americans property appreciate the genius and worth of their
own land, and which may testify to foreigners the high place
he holds in our esteem. 46
Ill.
With Jackson's second term drawing to a close, Forrest's
celebrity and reputation suggested him to many as the natural heir of
the old Hero's symbolic mantle. Such identification must have
seemed natural to the Democrats, given Forrest's Immense popu-
larity and acclaim. The theme of Forrest as a symbol of America was
frequently repeated, and not just in the press. His return from
England in 1837, Lawrence Barrett wrote,
was the signal for ovations of every kind, professional and
social. He enjoyed that public estimation which transfers to
objects animate and inanimate the name of its idol; and
horses, steamers, and carriages were adorned with the
name of America's greatest actor.47
Forrest was soon tapped for his new calling. In 1838 he was
invited to deliver the Fourth of July oration at the New York Demo-
cratic party celebration. Four thousand people, as great a number
as the building would contain, gathered at the Broadway
Tabernacle for the occasion, and "as many more remained out-
side.48
Forrest's performance was masterful. In a speech that lasted
approximately an hour, he declaimed the fundamentals of Jack-
sonian democracy. The deftly wrought oration warned the listeners
of the need for constant vigilance against the encroachment of their
liberties by unscrupulous leaders. It extolled the virtues of traditional
39
policies while urging them not to fear new enterprises or methods:
Yet deem me not governed by a narrow sentiment of hostUity
to traffic. On the contrary, I am its friend. I regard it in all its
legitimate influences as a benefactor of mankind ... the
cultivator of amity between the distant portions of the globe,
knitting them together by a constant Interchange of kindly
offices In a thousand ties of Interest and affection. . . . But
once violate the great principle of equality, once Invest it with
political Immunities, and, from a benefactor, it becomes an
oppressor of mankind, perverting the true end of
government, snatching Its advantages with a greedy and
monopolizing hand, and leaving its burdens to fall with aug-
mented weight on other necks. Beware, then, of bestowing
under any name, or for any purpose, exclusive prlvUeges on
any portion of the people; for it Is the nature of power to
enlarge itself by continual aggregation, and like the snowball,
which, by Its own motion, becomes an avalanche, and buries
the hamlet in ruins, it may fall, ere we dream of danger, and
crush us with its weight. 49
Those assembled in the Tabernacle were carried away by For-
rest's delivery, and the enthusiasm was not limited to New York. The
full text of the oration was immediately published, and the party's
principal organ, the Washington-based Democratic Review carried
the news and excerpts of it nationwide. In particular, the magazine
praised Forrest's emphasis on fundamental democratic virtues:
[t]he delivery of this address, by a man whose genius had
made him the Idol of the populace, in his own profession ...
developed the majestic strength of the popular cause In
gigantic vastness and repose, and proved the unshaken
sway of the cardinal principles of democracy over the minds
and wills of which the simple exertion can place our cause in
triumph .... the graces of an accomplished elocution, utter-
ing in a nervous and manly style, the sublime and simple
truths of the creed of democracy, enchained a vast city in
admiration, In their delivery, and drew shouts of responsive
enthusiasm from the largest assembly that it ever saw. It Is
something memorable, too, that the art of the orator did not
expire with the occasion that called it forth, but that his
words, winged by the press, have been diffused in every
corner of the land . .. evidencing a strength and popularity in
these principles, that form the most significant and cheering
sign of their wide diffusion and their correct appreciation by
the public. 50
40
Van Buren had succeeded Jackson politically In the 1837 elec-
tion, but the party press clearly saw Forrest as the inheritor of the Old
Hero as their symbolic figure.
Party leaders also speculated greater possibilities for their
orator, which the New York Herald voiced in Its coverage of the
event:
Mr. Forrest ... is in a position of becoming one of the
greatest champions of democratic principles the world has
ever known, and H he does not seize upon his advantage
and place himself at the head of [the Democratic] party, he
does not know his own powers. 51
Rumors immediately began to surface intimating that Forrest would
run for Congress. The Herald conspicuously hinted that, "the Demo-
crats mean to . . . pick up Edwin Forrest to send to the next Con-
gress ... . 52 His candidacy had been discussed before the Inde-
pendence Day oration, but Forrest had refused to endorse the
notion. Not to be put off, especially after the sensational response at
the Tabernacle, party leaders continued to press him.
After brief consideration, he wrote the nominating committee
to decline, citing his unpreparedness and the loss of income that
leaving the stage would cause among his reasons.
The duties of legislation, I thought could not be adequately
discharged without more peremptory study and reflection
than I had yet found time to bestow upon the subject, and I
felt unwilling to owe to the unwilling partiality of my fellow-
citizens, an honor due to the merits of some worthier man in
the cause of democracy as myself, and more able to do it
service. My plans had also been arranged to pursue my pre-
sent profession for a few years longer, during which time I
hoped that the sedulous devotion of my leisure to political
study and observation, might render me more capable,
should I hereafter be called to any public trust, of filling it
with credit to myself and advantage to the community.53
His letter included detailed responses to questions that had been
posed with the nomination offer, however, and left the door clearly
open for future nominations.
Whether Forrest ever seriously considered entering the politi-
cal arena in earnest is debatable; his biographers are unclear on the
point. There are hints that he showed interest in the nomination
again in 1843, but that his chances were blocked by a Tammany
leader, Michael Walsh, who was promoting his own candidate.
54
Forrest's disastrous association with the Astor Place riot in 1849 and
41
his protracted divorce from Catherine Sinclair obviated any further
chance he might have had.
Forrest's failures as a politician in no way diminish his Impact
as a political symbol, however, or his proficiency in turning the power
of that symbolism to his advantage. Gauging the public sentiments
and political winds as skillfully as any office-seeker, he negotiated his
talents and patriotism through a quarter of a century of national
transformation to become the pre-eminent actor of his age. He
embodied the new America that the Democratic party had shaped
around the figure of Andrew Jackson, and gave It a cultural voice.
For many, he represented the answer to the call for a truly American
theatre, one that could stand as an equal with those of the old world.
The Democratic Review proudly proclaimed, during his second
English tour:
Mr. Forrest Is . . . struck out of the very heart of the soU ...
as a creature of its institutions, habits, and dally life. His
biography is a chapter In the life of the country ... we shall
find him American every inch; the growth of the place, its
representative in the acted drama; and well entitled to make
a stir among the smooth proprieties of the Princess
Theater.55
In their individual ways, Forrest and Jackson established a
theatrical populist symbology that Is indelibly stamped on American
politics and American drama.
Current research has produced exciting insights and greater
understanding of the workings and impact of the theatre and popular
entertainments in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Some his-
torians have pointed to the blurring of the line between the drama of
the stage and the drama of the political arena as one explanation of
the social violence that erupted in America's cities during the Jack-
sonian period. 56 Forrest himself was involved in at least two riots
that were centered specifically on the theatre: the Ferren Riot In
1834, which he helped to defuse; and the Astor Place Riot in 1849, in
which he was a precipitating player. 5
7
Whatever else these incidents
indicate, they confirm Forrest's identification with the nationalist
politics of the age.
The political arena's appropriation of theatricality and
celebrity, and the theatre's active participation in current events, are
typical features of modern American culture. In our own time we
have seen sports celebrities seriously considered for the presidency,
and a Hollywood actor twice win it. Edwin Forrest, the first American
star, was one of the earliest of a long line of politically active
celebrities. The degree to which his stardom was built on his political
activities is a testament to how well he played "the game of politics.
42
Endnotes
1New York Herald, 17 October 1838.
2Bayard Tuckerman, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 2 vols.
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1889), vol. 1, 270.
3Qrrin E. Klapp, Symbolic Leaders: Public Dramas and Pub-
lic Men (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1964), 7.
4
Many elements of the distinctions I am trying to draw are
based on the models offered by Annallste historiography, though I
am reluctant to claim a perfect fit. In particular, I believe that the
theatre is too heterogeneous, and to a large extent, too transitory to
bear description in terms of durees. See J.H. Hexter, Fernand
Braudel and the Monde Braudellien . . . Journal of Modem History
44 (1972), 480-539, and E.J. Hobsbaum, "From Social History to the
History of Society" Daedalus 100 (1971), 20-45.
5Quoted in Francis C. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life
of an Actor and Manager (New York, 1847), 324.
6Aiexander Mackay, The Western World, or Travels In the
United States in 1846-47, 3 vols. (London, 1849), vol. 1,.198.
7
See, for example, Carl Russell Fish, The Rise of the Com-
mon Man, 1830-1850 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929);
Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (Lex-
ington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973); Lewis Saum, The Popular Mood of
Pre-Civil War America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); and
Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social His-
tory from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944).
sunless otherwise noted, details of Forrest's life and career
are based on: William Rounsaville Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, 2
vols. (Philadelphia: J.B. Uppincott Company, 18n); Lawrence Bar-
rett, Edwin Forrest (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1881);
Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960); Montrose J. Moses, The Fabu-
lous Forrest (Boston: Uttle, Brown, and Company, 1929); and James
Rees, The Life of Edwin Forrest, With Reminiscences and Personal
Recollections (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Bros., 1874).
91mpressions of pre-Jacksonian America are extracted from,
among other works, Thomas C. Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early
Industrialism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);
Frances D'Arusmont (Fanny Wright), Views of Society and Manners
in America (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orne, and Brown, 1821:
reprinted. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms Inc., 1986); Louis B.
Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1955); and. Everett S. Brown, "The Presidential Elec-
tion of 1824-25" Political Science Quarterly 40 (Sept. 1925), 384-403.
10Harold J. Nichols, "The Prejudice Against Native American
43
Drama from 1778 to 1830, Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974),
279-288. Nichols argues that, although a prejudice against native
drama had developed during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth
century as a result of the public's disappointment at weak early
efforts, much of the prejudice against native plays had subsided by
1830. even so, Nichols admits, American plays did not
immediately force British ones from the boards. Imported pieces stUI
composed the greater part of the repertory and were welcomed by
the public."
11Jackson was a youth at the time of the Revolution and was
t he sole member of his family to survive it. Jackson bore a wound
from the struggle, however, having been slashed by a British saber
for refusing to clean an officer's boots. See John William Ward,
Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1962), 212, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), 36.
12Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The
Growth of the American Republic, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1962), vol. 1, 461-67.
1
3Richard Hofstadter, Toward a Party System: The Rise of
Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970), 213.
14Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 201.
15Sol Smith, The Theatrical Journey Work and Anecdotal
Recollections of Sol Smith (Philadelphia, 1854), 15.
16Arthur Hornblow, A History of the Theater in America from
Its Beginning to the Present Time, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1919), vol. 2,
32-33.
17Moody, Edwin Forrest, 27.
181bid, 26.
19Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 208.
20Henry Dickinson Stone, Personal Recollections of the
Drama: or, Theatrical Reminiscences, Embracing Sketches of Promi-
nent Actors and Actresses, Their Chief Characteristics, Original
Anecdotes of Them, and Incidents Concerned Therewith (1873;
reprinted. , Bronx, NY: Benjamin Blom Inc., 1969), n-96 and 270-76.
21Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 50-54.
22Robert V. Remini, "The Triumph of the Politician, .. In Pes-
sen, New Perspectives, 29-31 .
23Martin Van Buren, Notebooks, Van Buren Papers, cited in
Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 51. See also Schlesinger's Note 12 on
the same f:ge.
2 See Max M. Mintz, "The Political Ideas of Martin Van
Buren, .. New York History, 30 (1949), 422-48.
25Richard Hofstadter, "Toward a Party System, .. ed. Felice A.
Bonadio, Political Parties in American History, 3 vols., Winfred E.A.
44
Bernhard, Felice A. Bonadio, and O.L Murphy, eds. (New York: G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1974), vol. 2, 1828-1890, 536-37.
26See Richard P. McCormick, New Perspectives on Jack-
sonian Politics, American Historical Review, LXV (Jan.1960), 288-
301, for an analysis of voter participation and the Impact of party
organization In the first half of the century.
2
7
David Grimstead, Melodrama as Echo of the Historically
Voiceless, ed. Tamara K. Hareven, Anonymous Americans: Explora-
tions in Nineteenth-Century Social History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall Inc., 1971 ), 89.
28See Ward, Andrew Jackson.
29Remini, -rriumph, 27 -29;
301bid, 23.
3
1
Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party
System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 349-50.
32Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (1917;
reprint eel., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 69-76.
33Walt Whitman, -rhe Old Bowery, Complete Prose Works
(New York, 1914), 429.
34Moses, Fabulous Forrest, 77-87.
351bid, 69.
361bid, 184.
37 Jeffrey D. Mason, -rhe Politics of Metamora, ed. Sue-Ellen
Case and Janelle Reinelt, The Performance of Power: Theatrical Dis-
course and Politics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991 ), 99.
38Schleslnger, Age of Jackson, 369.
39Boston Post, 11 October 1838.
40Several actors sought to emulate Forrest's success. The
first of many competitions was announced within a few months of his
first contest. James Hackett, George Handel Hill, Josephine Oifton,
and James Wallack all offered prizes ranging from $200 to $1,000 for
dramas suited to their needs, and many of the contests stipulated
that the scripts submitted center on native characters and themes.
See Walter J. Meserve, Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the
American People during the Age of Jackson, 1829-1849 (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1986), 45-46.
41
Of his prize-winners, six proved useable for production:
Metamora; or the Last of the Wampanoags, by John A. Stone (1829);
Caius Marius, by Robert Penn Smith (1831); The Gladiator, by
Robert Montgomery Bird (1831) ; Ora//oossa, Son of the Incas, by
Bird (1832); The Broker of Bogata, by Bird (1834); and Jack Cade,
by Robert T. Conrad (1841). The other prize-winners were Bird's
Pelopidas; or the Fall of the Polemarchs and G.H. Miles's
Mohammed, the Arabian Prophet, which were never produced, and
Stone's The Ancient Briton, which was never repeated after its open-
45
ing performance. Jack Cade, which entered Forrest's repertory In
1841, had earlier been performed under the title Aylmere; or, the
Bondsman of Kent, with Augustus Addams In the title role.
42AJbion, 2 September 1848, cited In Barnard Hewitt, Theater
U.S.A., 1665-1957 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc.,
1959), 109.
43Meserve, Heralds of Promise, 68-69.
44
Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., Ideology and Power in the Age of
Jackson (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company Inc.,
1964), "Introduction."
45See Mason, "Politics of Metamora," 100-102, and Mary E.
Young, "Indian Removal and Land Allotment: The Civilized Tribes
and Jacksonian Justice, American Historical Review, LXIV (Oct.
1958), 31-45.
46Aiger, Life of Forrest, 181-87. Alger lists the guests at the
banquet, many of whom can be directly associated with Tammany
Hall or the Democratic party of New York state. See Myers, History
of Tammany Hall, and James K McGuire, ed., The Democratic Party
of New York (New York: United States History Company, 1905).
4
7
Lawrence Barrett, "Edwin Forrest; An Actor's Estimate of a
Great Artist," Galaxy, 24 (Oct. 18n), 531.
48New York Herald, 6 July 1838.
49Edwin Forrest, "Oration Delivered at the Democratic
Republican Celebration of the Sixty-second Anniversary of the Inde-
pendence of the United States, in the City of New York, Fourth July,
1838," (New York: J.W. Bell, 1938).
50United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 3 (Sept.
1838), 56.
51 New York Herald, 6 July 1838.
52New York Herald, 15 October 1838.
53Nifes' National Register, 24 November 1838, 206.
5
4
See Moses, Fabulous Forrest, 180-82, and Myers, History
of Tammany Hall, 130-31.
55"Mr. Forrest's Second Reception in England," United
States Magazine and Democratic Review, 16 (April1845), 385.
56Bruce A. McConachie explores the relationship between
the popular drama of the ear1y nineteenth century and the many riots
of that period in" 'The Theater of the Mob': Apocalyptic Melodrama
and Preindustrial Riots In Antebellum New York," in Theater for
Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 183D-1980, ed. Bruce
A. McConachie and David Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1985). See also David Grimstead, "Rioting In its Jacksonian
Setting," in The Underside of American History: Other Readings, ed.
Thomas R. Frazier, 2 vols., (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Inc., 1974), vol. 1 --to 1877.
57Meserve, Heralds of Promise, 33.
46
THEATRE ON THE HOME FRONT:
WORLD WAR II ON NEW YORK'S STAGES, 1941-1945
Samuel L Leiter
Few topics have been as fertile an Inspiration for the American
theatre as Wortd War II. Just as the spread of AIDS has led to many
new plays dealing with the ramifications of that scourge, the second
wortd war and the rise of fascism sparked dozens of dramas. Many
were written and produced before America itself was drawn into the
war, which had begun earty in 1939, and, of course, many more were
created in the war's aftermath. There were, however, many patriotic
plays and musicals produced during the very period of America's
active involvement In what were, essentially, two principal conflicts,
one in the Pacific and Asia and one in Europe and North Africa.
American participation in the former lasted from 8 December 1941 to
14 August 1945, approximately three years and nine months. The
latter was some three months shorter, from December 1941 to 7 May
1945. When the time and effort required to write and produce a play
is considered,
1
and when it is further realized that the public tended
to prefer plays that did not remind them of the war, it is indeed
remarkal>'e that more than ninety plays that were in some way tied to
the war were staged on and off Broadway during this brief era. 2
Wortd War II inspired several significant works which retained
their value for many years, among them Watch on the Rhine {1941),
Mister Roberts {1948), and the musical South Pacific (1949), to men-
tion only those produced during the 1940s. Few of the more widely
known plays, however, were seen during the actual period when
America was at war. Only a smattering of the war-related plays of
these few intense years had any but topical interest, and, despite
warm critical approval for several, most were quickly dated. Yet it Is
surely of Interest to see how the war affected the theatre of the day
and how playwrights turned the political and military events to their
own purposes.
Broadway, although its activities were curtailed by rationing,
brownouts, and blackouts, contributed extensively to the war effort,
and not only by the thematic concerns of its offerings. It took part in
many fund-raising activities (including benefit performances), pro-
vided free or cheap seats to millions of armed forces personnel, sent
artists--at the risk of their lives--to play in USO revues, and toured full-
47
scale productions to training camps and the fighting front. The war
created an economic boom for New York's theatre, with thousands
of free-spending war workers and mUitary personnel, many of them
restricted from traveling because of wartime conditions, crowding the
city and looking for entertainment to help them escape a world in
flames. Long-run hits became more frequent than ever, and pro-
ducers often had trouble finding a theatre free for a new production.
Plays that reflected the war came in every shape and style,
from farce to tragedy to musical comedy. Some were by foreign
writers with first-hand knowledge of their material. War-inspired
works--including several written earlier, but not produced in New
York until after America became involved--were somewhat slow in
arriving at first, but one managed, by coincidence, to open on
December 8, 1941, the day America declared war on the Japanese.
It was William Jay (Uonel Aldous) and Guy Bolton's unexceptional
Golden Wings, set in England and concerned with romantic
entanglements among RAF flyers and their women friends, with a
jealous pilot charged with murder when his rival's plane is shot down
in a dogfight. 3
A similar background supported Terence Rattigan's unexciting
Flare Path (23 December 1942), whose London production was still
on when the play opened in New York. Romantic tensions among
the RAF fliers and their wives at a hotel near the Uncolnshire flying
field are heightened by the women's anxieties as they await their hus-
bands' return from missions. Alec Guinness made his American
debut In this play.
As with the majority of war plays, the fighting in Golden Wings
and Flare Path was essentially a dramatic background to personal
conflicts. They were representative of the many plays dealing with
the war's effect on the indigenous population of a European country,
with American characters generally nonexistent. Although sexual
and romantic issues occasionally complicated the action, the focus
of the plays was usually on the actual events or implications of the
war. Most plays were serious and usually tended toward melodrama,
with the Nazis and Japanese depicted as easy-to.,hate enemies. In
several, the action centered on the activities of underground or
resistance fighters. In others, the plot revealed the conflict's effects
on civilians.
Two meager plays set in England dealt with potential Nazi
invasions. One was David Millman's critically lacerated The Last
Generation (15 December 1942), done Off Broadway, and dealing
with a 1940 farm family who capture German spies and help keep the
Nazis_off British soil. James Edward Grant's spy melodrama, Plan M
(20 February 1942) presupposed a British chief of staff who is mur-
dered by his German-spy physician and replaced by a double who
shares his personality and military knowledge. His attempts to com-
48
mence a potentially catastrophic plan designed to aid the Invaders Is
discovered at the last moment.
Naturally, conditions in Great Britain during the blitz were
theatrically promising, with one or two plays on the subject making it
to New York even before America went to war. Those produced dur-
ing our war activity Included Lesley Storm's Heart of a City (12 Febru-
ary 1942). The thinly plotted backstage drama, performed by a
largely British company, was Intended as an uplifting piece about
how the performers at London's Windmill Theatre carried on bravely
with their Revudevine shows despite the rain of horror falling from
the skies.
The sound effects suggesting the blitz were frightening In
Emlyn Williams's hackneyed British drama, The Morning Star (14
September 1942), set In August 1940. Fortunately, no spectators
needed the resuscitatory effects of young Dr. Clifford Parrllow's
(Gregory Peck) new Invention for victims of cardiac bomb shock.
Rebuffed by his colleagues, he turns to writing and extramarital dal-
liance, but the death of his brother, a pilot, brings him to his senses,
and he devotes himself to helping his fellow Londoners with his
device.
Scotland suffered the blitz as well, as depicted in Irish
dramatist Paul Vincent Carroll's The Strings, My Lord, Are False (19
May 1942), still being performed in Dublin when it opened in New
York. This was an unconvincing morality play about the unification of
people, no matter how diverse, when threatened by a common
danger. A cross-section of Scottish characters, many with conflicting
political and religious beliefs, gather for protection in a steel town
church presided over by a liberal priest (Walter Hampden); they
include a pregnant woman whose childbirth Is midwifed by a
prostitute. (A somewhat similar play, Andrew Hawkes's labored
Tinker's Dam [28 January 1943), produced Off Broadway, concerned
a cross-section of American characters seeking protection In an air
shelter during an imaginary blitz of New York.)
The blitz was only a scary proposition in 1939, the time of
Walter Livingstone Faust's innocuous comedy, This Rock (18 Febru-
ary 1943). Billie Burke starred in this story about stuffy British upper-
crusters living in a manor on the river Tyne who take in a ragged
band of London East End urchins for the duration. Zachary Scott
was a working-class RAF pilot who swallows his class hatred when
he falls in love with the couple's daughter.
There was more topicality in Lifeline (30 November 1942) by
Norman Armstrong (Norman Lee and Barbara Toy), still running in
London at the time of its Broadway opening. The all-male drama,
intended as an idealization of the merchant marine, takes place on a
British tramp steamer carrying gasoline in a convoy enroute to Liver-
pool from Nova Scotia. After sinking a German submarine, the
49
steamer is set afire by a bomber, causing the crew to abandon the
ship. A small group reboards several days later, extinguishes its
fires, and, despite serious damage, guides it safely to England.
The problem of anti-Semitism was confronted In only three
plays dealing with European responses to the war. One, the sole
play set In France, is among the best-remembered works of the
period, Franz Warfel's 415-performance character comedy,
Jacobowsky and the Colonel (14 March 1944), based on a true story.
The action is set in 1940 France, just before the Nazi occupation, and
tells of the efforts of a small group to flee the invaders. Chief among
them are a cultured Jewish polyglot from Eastern Europe,
Jacobowsky (Oscar Kar1weis, himself a Jewish refugee) and an anti-
Semitic Polish colonel (Louis Calhern). Along the route traveled by
their automobile, Jacobowsky uses his improvisatory cleverness to
extract them from various scrapes; the colonel, never entirely shed-
ding his prejudices, comes to love and respect the Jew; and the lat-
ter admits to warmer feelings for the officer, despite their rivalry over
a woman companion. When only two can cross to England, the
colonel chooses Jacobowsky and leaves the woman behind.
Another work In which the Jewish question was raised--the
period's single drama confronting conditions in Germany--was Eric
Bentley's translation of Bertolt Brecht's episodic The Private Life of
the Master Race (12 June 1945), shown Off Broadway a month after
the German surrender, which some felt weakened its topical appeal.
The famed Marxist author was then living in exile in the United States.
Only nine of the original's twenty-four scenes were shown. The play,
experimental by contemporary New York standards, attacked Nazi
thinking by placing, within a framework of a German tank rolling
across Europe, such scenes as the pressures on the German judici-
ary to act justly In an oppressive atmosphere; a couple's fears about
the possibility that their child is an informer; and, in the scene con-
cerning anti-Semitism, the telephoned farewells of a Gentile doctor's
Jewish wife as she prepares to flee her homeland. Known as "The
Jewish Wife" scene, it is often performed as a one-act and remains
one of the most effective expressions of its subject.
The other play relating to the problems of European Jews was
one of four plays set mainly in the USSR and dealing with the effect
on the Russians of Hitler's hordes. Leo Birinski's The Day Will Come
(7 September 1944) was also the only drama of the era to depict Hit-
ler himself, although Brandon Peters's portrayal was more caricature
than character. The implausible story blended fantasy and reality in
telling of a Wandering Jewlike old man whose small town is razed by
the invaders, but whose preternatural powers are employed by
sympathetic Prussian generals to convince Hitler not to march on
Moscow. Hitler and the old man debate the future of Jews and
Christians, and, after the Jew is killed, his spirit drives Hitler mad.
50
The Nazi march on Moscow also preoccupied Dan James's
award-winning Winter Soldiers (29 November 1942), produced Off
Broadway.
4
A number of refugees from Hitler (Including Herbert
Barghot) acted in the production, which told of the Interference, In
November 1941 , of underground fighters In the deployment of a
German regiment headed to Moscow from Yugoslavia, leading to the
Nazis' first major setback.
Originally produced during the siege of Leningrad, The Rus-
sian People (29 December 1942), was written by Soviet author
Konstantin Simonov and adapted by Clifford Odets. This posterllke
melodrama, which had received many Soviet productions by Red
Army troupes, takes place in 1941 in a Nazi-occupied Russian town
officiated over by a quisling mayor, whose house is commandeered
by a psychopathic Nazi. The focus Is on a cross-section of
resistance fighters in a nearby outpost waiting for the Russian forces
to arrive (which, like the cavalry, they do). The local spies and
heroes include a doomed woman reconnaissance scout whose mis-
sions require her to swim an Icy river three times.
Counterattack (3 February 1943), Janet and Philip Stevenson's
adaptation of a propagandistic Russian political melodrama by llya
Vershinin and Mikhail Ruderman, concerned two Red Army soldiers
(Morris Carnovsky and Sam Wanamaker) who must interrogate eight
captive Nazis held in a filthy cellar; the Germans' wily attempts to
gain the upper hand must be vigilantly suppressed. When an explo-
sion closes all exits, the action explores the difference between com-
munist and fascist ideologies, with the former emerging as by the far
the more humane.
Occupied Greece was the background for two plays: God
Strikes Back (26 February 1943) by Paul Nord, a Greek ex-journalist,
and Albert and Mary Bein's Land of Fame (21 September 1943).
Nord's amateurish piece was set near Athens in a home taken over
by the Nazis and used to hold hostile Greeks captive. The title
derives from the revelation that the evil Nazi major is half-Greek and
that a resistance fighter he kills is his brother. The Beins' drama, in
which Ed Begley made his Broadway debut as a bullying German
general, takes place in the rural hills. It shows peasant guerrillas in
conflict with the Nazis quartered In the town of Talom, with the Nazis
threatening the locals unless the guerrilla leader surrenders. The
leader dies in a successful raid following the Nazis' betrayal by a
sympathetic, Byron-quoting German.
Critics were finding such plays increasingly common and
unappealing. The best example was John Steinbeck's The Moon Is
Down (7 April 1942), based on his respected book of that name. This
work raised controversy when it attempted to humanize its leading
Nazi figure as a civilized victim of a distorted ideology. Steinbeck set
the action in a mining village in a neutral country (some believed it
51
was Norway) invaded by Nazis seeking coal. Although the Nazi
leader Is essentially a gentleman, the citizens violently resist his
demands to mine for the Germans, who are finally rputed by British
bombers.
Norway was definitely the site for Thomas Duggan and James
Hogan's labored melodrama, The Barber Had Two Sons (1 February
1943). Blanche Yurka played a Norwegian village barber, one of
whose sons is a resistance fighter, the other a traitor who is planning
to run off with a self-centered girl also loved by his brother. When
the mother learns of her traitorous son's character, she leads the
Nazis, who are searching for the other son, to him, knowing he wUI
be killed. She also shoots the girt
Czechoslovakia, too, provided a backdrop for a play during
this period, H. S. Kraft's Thank You, Svoboda (1 March 1944), a
humorless comedy based on a novel by John Pen. It starred Sam
Jaffe as a hapless village porter whom the pillaging Nazis blame,
without cause, for blowing up a bridge and send to a concentration
camp. Quickly released as a useless idiot, he gets revenge by
actually destroying a bridge as a trainload of Germans is passing
over it.
Finally, neutral Switzerland proved a suitable setting for put-
ting the international dimensions of the war into macroscopic per-
spective. Fritz Rotter and Allen Vincent's Letters to Lucerne (23
December 1941) was set at a wealthy girls' finishing school in 1939,
and brought together English, German, Polish, French, and American
students, all of them close friends. When war breaks out, some girls
reject the German, others remain loyal. Only the revelation in a letter
to the gir1 that her family is anti-Nazi and that her brother crashed his
plane and killed himself rather than bomb Warsaw (where the Polish
girl's parents died) brings everyone together again.
While the above plays concentrated on the wartime tribula-
tions of Europeans, another play observed the difficulties of people in
China, and ten more looked at Americans at war, both in
Europe 1 Africa and the Pacific.
Victor Wolfson's adaptation of Nina Fedorova's novel The
Family {30 March 1943) went back to 1937 to observe the impact on
a group of White Russian immigrants running a boarding house in
Tientsin, China, as the Japanese invaders are approaching. Among
the house's many inhabitants are a Chinese secret agent, five
Japanese, and a Jewish refugee from Hitler. Some flee and others
await the onslaught.
Maxwell Anderson, a major American dramatist of the period,
received governmental permission to travel to North Africa as
preparation for writing Storm Operation (11 January 1944). It was the
first play to treat its topic (suggested by General Dwight D. Eisen-
hower), the invasion of North Africa, signified by the title's code
52
name. Many of Anderson's realistic touches, however, Including a
nurse's pregnancy and the abuse by Americans of a Muslim and of
German POWs, were removed by War Department command. The
drama, buoyed by realistic by-play and dialogue but damaged by
sentimentality and a preoccupation with its romantic subplot, told of
the reaction by a group of young recruits to the rigors and meaning
of war and of a love affair between an Australian nurse and an
arrogant but capable English captain. The latter, because of circum-
stances, must take orders from a less-experienced American
sergeant (Myron McCormick), the nurse's jilted lover. At the end,
before going into battle, the sergeant tells his men to carry a dear
one's photo to remind them of what they are fighting for.
A one-act, Ralph Nelson's Mail Call, presented on a fund-
raising program of five one-acts called The Army Play-by-Play (14
June 1943),5 takes place behind the lines in a war-ruined European
village and tells how the buddies of a deserter who was shot write to
his relatives to extol his bravery. A Gl refuses to thus memorialize a
coward, but when he himself subsequently proves timid under fire,
the others force him to sign the letter.
Mary Hayley Bell 's British war melodrama, Men in Shadow (10
March 1943), was another piece still playing In London when its
American version opened. It attempted to rouse emotions with Its
tale of downed American fliers hiding out in the mill of a French farm-
house from which they engage in sabotage operations and send sig-
nals to allied airplanes. One of them has broken legs; another turns
out to be a German spy. There were some very realistic scenes,
such as the setting of the injured man's bones without anesthetic as
he sings off-color limericks, the use of jujitsu to break the spy's neck
with a crack heard throughout the house, the stabbing of two invad-
ing Germans, and the use of occasional French and German
dialogue, but the play was blood-and-thunder claptrap.
Edward Chodorov's Common Ground (25 April 1945) was also
about characters whose plane had crashed. They were not com-
batants, however, but an ethnically diverse troupe of USO performers
touring Italy's military camps when forced down behind enemy lines
shortly before Naples fell to the Allies. They are ruthlessly Intimidated
by their Italian and German captors, aided by a traitorous, anti-
Semitic American reporter. The Jewish comic (Philip Loeb) is to be
sent to a concentration camp and the others must choose between
becoming turncoats or being shot; they sing as they march off to
martyrdom.
Americans captured by the Germans also figured in Kurt
Kasznar's First Cousins, a one-act on The Army Play-by-Play
program. A Nazi submarine's captain (played by the author) Is con-
vinced by one of his prisoners that they are related; this leads to the
53
captain being killed by his cousin and to the Americans gaining
control of the submarine.
Much more effective was Paul Osborn's adaptation of John
Hersey's Pulitzer novel, A Bell for Adana (6 December
1944). This success used the war background to
strike a ringing blow for democracy. It recounted the salubrious
effect of American occupation in 1943 on the eponymous SlcUian
lage. The leader of the occupation, Victor Joppolo, a Bronx-born,
Italian-American major (Fredric March), manages to have the town's
symbolic bell--melted for weaponry--restored. Joppolo's behavior,
typifying the highest American standards, teaches the suspicious
townspeople how democracy Is superior to fascism In Its goal of
serving the people. The play also reveals the dangers of narrow-
minded army bureaucrats when Joppolo, whom the locals have
grown to love, is transferred for revoking a superior's stupid orders:
Joppolo Is ironically defeated by the Ideals for which he has been
fighting.
The sole naval-related play of this group was Herbert Kubly's
Men to the Sea (3 October 1944), with one of its six scenes set
aboard a destroyer in the Atlantic. The other scenes concern a
group of sailors' wives in a shabby boarding house near the Brooldyn
Navy Yard, where they are beset by loneliness and sexual longing. A
raucous Christmas celebration In Brooklyn is contrasted with a scene
showing the men gathered on the gun deck discussing God.
Only a handful of productions focused specifically on the
Pacific war. One was Allan A. Kenward's garishly melodramatic
Proof Thro' the Night (25 December 1942), called Cry Havoc in an
earlier West Coast production. It had an all-female cast of twelve,
most of them playing American nurses in the Philippines in 1941,
shortly before Corregidor fell. As the bombs explode nearby and the
womens' initial excitement turns to fear, their personal problems are
exposed, including those of a lesbian (Carol Channing). The main
action concerns the rooting out of a German spy in their midst. All
the women are eventually shot by the arriving Japanese.
Melodrama mingled with religious mysticism in Laurence Stall-
ings's murky The Streets Are Guarded (20 November 1944). Most of
the action occurs in a flashback as remembered by a naval officer
recuperating in a military hospital. He recalls events occurring on a
tiny Pacific island earlier in the war when he was trapped there with
others. As if in response to his prayers, a resourceful but mysterious
character called the Marine arrives after escaping the battle at
Bataan, raids a neighboring Japanese installation to bring back sup-
plies, and alerts an American submarine, leading to a rescue and a
successful attack on the enemy. During the attack, the Marine-savior
disappears, prompting questions about his reality.
Six years before the famous musical of the same name,
54
Broadway hosted another South Pacific (29 December 1943), this
one by Howard Rigsby and Dorothy Heyward. The disappointing
drama used the war as a springboard for a disquisition on race rela-
tions by placing the action on a small, Japanese-occupied island on
which two shipwrecked merchant seamen, one black and one white,
have found a haven. Sam, the black man (Canada Lee), turns his
back on the war as a racial conflict between the. white and yellow
races and assumes a position of power on the island. Circum-
stances prove him wrong, however, and he realizes the nonracial
character of the fight for liberty. As the American navy begins an off-
shore bombardment, Sam arms himself and leaves to join the fray.
The most commercially successful play about war In the
Pacific (306 performances) was Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St.
Mark (7 October 1942). Whereas previous World War II plays had
dealt with the war problems of foreigners or had only shown the
domestic side of American involvement, this was the first to actually
picture American soldiers from a combat point of view. The play was
dedicated to Anderson's nephew, one of the first Americans to die In
the war. To famUiarize himself with American servicemen, Anderson
spent time at Fort Bragg, where he met Pvt. Marion Hargrove,
dramatized as Pvt. Francis Marion, the play's memorably humorous
character and ultimately famous as a best-selling author. Anderson's
episodic drama moves from April 1941 to June 1942 and from a New
York farm to the Philippines to portray the tale of Quizz West (William
Prince), an everymanlike draftee who leaves parents and girt friend
behind to encounter life in a military barracks, temptation in the eyes
of a pretty cafe waitress, malaria in the Pacific, and the Japanese,
who kill him. As his experiences are enacted, the audience learns of
the war's impact on those at home. Essentially realistic, with its
idiomatically believable soldiers' dialogue and its authentic-sounding
offstage explosions and artillery fire, the often sentimental,
chauvinistic play also took advantage of its author's fondness for
poetic drama by incorporating two controversial blank-verse dream
sequences.
The Eve of St. Mark shared part of its action with material
played out in training camp, as did Winged Victory (20 November
1943), Moss Hart's successful paean to the air force. This outstand-
ing propaganda piece's $1 million or so in profits--including Hart's
royalties--were reserved for the Army Emergency Relief Fund, and all
its male participants were members of the armed forces whose ranks
were affixed to their program credits. A good number were budding
stars (including Pvt. Edmond O'Brien, Pvt. Barry Nelson, Pvt. Red
Buttons, Sgt. Kevin McCarthy, Cpl. Gary Merrill, Pvt. Philip Bourneuf,
Pvt. Anthony Ross, Sgt. Ray Middleton, Pvt. Alfred Ryder, Pvt. Karl
Malden, and Pvt. Peter Und Hayes, among others) but most were
unknown. Hart, who hated flying, traveled more than 28,000 miles In
55
a bomber to gather material and wrote the play In three weeks. The
epic-scaled, sixteen-scene play, with a cast of nearly ninety, 8 used
five revolves to follow the fortunes of three small-town friends and
would-be pilots-Allan, Pinky, and Frankie--after they are accepted to
flight-training school and leave their loved ones behind. Incidents
show their training difficulties, during which the disappointed Pinky Is
classified for gunnery school and Frankie is killed In a training acci-
dent; the departure for the Pacific of Allan and Pinky, assigned to the
same plane ('Winged Victory"); their Christmas party on a tropical
island in a scene similar to the men's show staged In the musical
South Pacific; the nonfatal wounding of Pinky; and the news that
Allan's wife has had a son, to whom he sends off a note wishing for
him to grow up In a world at peace. On opening night, Hart spoke to
the glowing audience: -rhank you, ladies and gendemen. Tonight I
heard over the radio that we were bombing Berlin again. This Is what
this play Is about: Tears streamed down faces as the star-
Sj>angled Banner was played, although some participants-notably
Hart and Hayes--maintained a healthy sense of irony when they
spoofed the show at the opening night party on the Astor Hotel Roof
in a routine called singed Victory.
There were also more than half a dozen shows that employed
the possibilities of men stationed at military camps in the United
States and that never moved their action overseas. Tangentially
related to this group was Carmen Jones {2 December 1943), Oscar
Hammerstein's revision of Bizet's tragic opera, Carmen. This highly
popular musical (502 performances, plus several return engage-
ments) transferred the action from Spain to South Carolina, made all
the characters black, cast Carmen as an operator in a parachute fac-
tory, and turned Jose (called Joe) into a corporal from a nearby bar-
racks stationed to guard the factory, from which the action soon
shifts.
The romantic element of having many uniformed men based
nearby In otherwise dull .small towns sparked Josephine Bentham
and Herschel Williams's 642-performance hit comedy, Janie {10 Sep-
tember 1942). Teenager Janie, who has a crush on a boy stationed
at Camp Longstreet, throws a small party for a few of the soldiers'
pals while her parents are at a country club dance, but 200 men
show up instead, leading to hilarious chaos.
Parties for soldiers stationed nearby also figured in Alice Ger-
sten berg's Victory Belles (26 October 1943), about a suburban
mother who, fearing the man shortage at the war's end, invites local
servicemen over for parties before they go overseas, hoping to land
one for her daughter. The butler is an FBI agent in disguise who
bags a Nazi spy in the person of an army colonel.
Like these examples, most shows in which a military base was
important took place, not on the base itself, but nearby in civilian
56
quarters. For example, Ruth Gordon's (221 performances) comedy,
Over 21 (3 January 1944), was set in a bungalow near a Miami base.
The play, which took s s u ~ with the belief that mature people rover
21 .. ) have difficulty absorbing new information, was influenced by the
recent experiences of the star's husband, writer-director Garson
Kanln, who had enlisted in the army at twenty-nine. The amusing but
insubstantial piece, replete with Gl wisecracks and topical
references, concerned fortyish Max Wharton, a famous newspaper
editor married to a popular Dorothy Parker1ike Hollywood screen-
writer (Gordon). Max wants to get Into Officer Candidate School but
his publisher tries to lure him back to civilian life. Eventually, Max
makes OCS, the publisher re-enlists as a major, and Polly assumes
her husband's editing job.
A training camp also figured peripherally in the Ethel Merman
vehicle (422 performances), Something for the Boys (7 January
1943), its score by Cole Porter. Merman, Paula Laurence, and Allen
Jenkins played showbiz types and distant relatives who inherit a
Texas ranch located next to the army's Kelly Field. They rent the
place to fliers' wives and start up an airplane parts factory. A
romantic complication involving Merman's character of Blossom with
a staff sergeant leads to the ranch being declared out of bounds for
military personnel, but all turns out fine when Blossom receives radio
signals through the fillings in her teeth and helps a plane without a
radio make it safely through a storm. This was the kind of show that
made wartime audiences happy, especially with such numbers as
.. By the Mississinewa, eould It Be You?, and Hey, Good Lookin':
One more such show was Howard Lindsay and Russel
Crouse's Strip for Action (30 September 1942). Bur1esque having
recently been outlawed in New York, several shows attempted to
make use of its bawdy humor for their more "legitimate purposes,
one being this farce set near a Maryland military camp where Pvt.
Nutsy Davis (Keenan Wynne), a former burlesque comic, is sta-
tioned. Despite army regulations to the contrary, he endeavors to
put on a show--including a striptease by a shy young performer-at
the local town's theatre. When the nervous brass cancel the show,
Nutsy and friends wangle a permit from higher-ups in Washington.
In only three plays did all or most of the action occur on
bases. One was Martin Bidwell's serious drama, Lower North (25
August 1944), about boot-camp buddies at a California naval training
station preparing to receive their quartermaster rating. The ups and
downs of barracks life for a cross-section of stereotypical American
youth was depicted, as was the attempt of their leader to unify them.
When one of the men goes AWOL to visit his pregnant wife, his bud-
dies try to convince him to return to camp. Ultimately, he realizes
that the nation's concerns come before his own.
The other two plays set on bases were comic one-acts on The
57
Army Play-by-Play program. John B. O'Dea's Where E'er We Go
takes place at Fort Lewis, Washington, and focuses on a private who,
thinking that his company Is being sent to the tropics, sells his warm
coat to finance a final furlough to Los Angeles, but discovers that the
men are being sent to Alaska. The barracks washroom at Camp
Downey Is the background for Irving Gaynor Neiman's Button Your
Lip, about a rookie who keeps getting tripped up by camp regula-
tions. He brags about knowing film star Myrna Loy, and his boast is
validated when the film star herself, given a single line, appears at the
end.
7
Alfred Geto's Pack Up Your Troubles, also on the Army Play-
by-Play program, is related to these works, aJthough it takes place at
a receiving station instead of a base. Its hero Is a Gl trying to call
home long distance to find out If his wife had a boy or a girl and run-
ning into various complications about phone numbers and correct
change. He does, however, manage to prevent a pair of saboteurs
from dynamiting a troop train.
There was clearly something romantic about a soldier, sailor,
or marine in uniform, as various plays about the mingling of serv-
icemen with the civilian population attested. Witness, for example,
. Edward Burbage's The Years Between (6 February 1942), which was
mainly about family life in small-town America, but included two
enlistees and one draftee who landed the girts of their dreams only
after they joined up. When the crusading editor in Peter Sheehan's
Off Broadway comedy, Inside Story (29 October 1942), saw her
assistant In uniform before he went off to war, she realized for the
first time that she loved him. In What's Up? (11 November 1943), a
musical with songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, an air
force plane carrying an oriental potentate (Jimmy Savo) to Washing-
ton in order to confer about providing the war effort with a unique
mineral discovered In his country is forced to land near a girts' finish-
ing school in Virginia. The plane's crew members are compelled to
remain in quarantine at the school after measles breaks out, throwing
the girl-hungry fliers and boy-hungry girls together in romantic confu-
sion.
There were two other musicals that might be set down in this
grouping. The best was the musical comedy blockbuster (882 per-
formances), Follow the Girls (8 April 1944), with a book by Guy
Bolton, Eddie Davis, and Fred Thompson, music by Phil Charig, and
lyrics by Dan Shapiro and Milton Pascal. More burlesque or night-
club show than legitimate musical comedy, it was set largely at the
USO's Spotlight Canteen (based on the Stage Door Canteen), fre-
quented by Gls on leave. Overweight, draft-rejected Goofy Gale
(Jackie Gleason) endeavors--despite his nonmilitary standing--to get
in to see his stripper girl friend, Bubbles La Mar (Gertrude Niesen).
58
At one point he disguises himself in drag as a WAVE. Among the
standard complications was the discovery of a German spy.
Not on the same level was Jackpot (13 January 1944), with a
score by Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz, in which three marines win
a war bond lottery whose prize is $50,000 and defense worker Sally
Madison (Nanette Fabray). When the handsomest of the trio (Allan
Jones) wins Sally's promise of marriage, the others (Jerry Lester and
Benny Baker) settle for a couple of military ladies (Betty Garrett and
Mary Wickes).
The proclivity of some women to bestow their favors
unreservedly on furloughed servicemen prompted several comedies,
such as Milton Herbert Gropper and Joseph Shalleck's Good Morn-
ing, Corporal (8 August 1944), in which an air force corporal, a saUor,
and a marine are each persuaded, when drunk, to marry the overly
patriotic heroine, eventually forcing them to compete for her conjugal
favors.
Another patriotically compliant young woman figured Impor-
tantly In Luther Davis's Kiss Them for Me (20 March 1945), a roughly
crafted comedy based on a novel by Frederick Wakeman. It
revolved around three navy pilots on four days of shore
leave in San Francisco after three years in the Pacific. Their plan to
celebrate with sexual and alcoholic revelry brings Into their midst
Alice, a no-strings-attached worker at a defense plant; the role
brought Judy Holliday wide attention. Their refusal to accept a ship
manufacturer's exploitation of them as heroes lands them in a mili-
tary hospital and threatens to prevent their rejoining their ship.
Civilian life proves so nettlesome that they stow away on a plane that
will allow them to resume their flying missions. The play was one of
the earliest to suggest the psychological problems of battle-weary
servicemen returning to civilian life.
Some home-front females expressed their romantic fantasies
by becoming avid penpals with servicemen overseas. This was the
premise for Norman Krasna's 683-performance, smash hit comedy,
Dear Ruth (13 December 1944). This gag-filled play had to do with a
precocious teenager from Queens in New York, Miriam Wilkins, who
carries on epistolary love affairs with American fighting men, includ-
ing Lt. William Seawright, but signs her letters with her older sister
Ruth's name and even uses Ruth's picture. Confusion erupts when
Lt. Seawright arrives on twenty-four-hour leave, expecting to marry
the very surprised Ruth, who is engaged to someone else. Ruth falls
in love with the lieutenant and even has her father, a traffic court
judge, marry them at the last moment. Just before the final curtain, a
sailor pops in searching for a Miss Ruth Wilkins.
Marriage on leave was a plot component of other plays, too, a
forgettable example being Conrad Westervelt's Down to Miami (11
September 1944), in which two feuding New England families, one
59
Jewish and one Gentile, learn that the latter's furloughed marine son
has rescued the former's daughter from drowning on Miami Beach,
and that, despite the availability of young people of their own faith
whom each may marry, they have decided to wed each other.
F. Hugh Herbert's Kiss and Tell (17 March 1943) was a
bonanza of 962 performances based on the radio series, "Meet Cor-
liss Archer." Teenager Corliss's brother Lenny (Richard Widmark)
comes home on seventy-two-hour leave and secretly marries MOdred
Pringle before shipping out. Mildred's pregnancy leads to amusing
mlxups when Corliss, covering for her because of family conflict
between the Archers and the Pringles, Is mistaken for the mother-to-
be. Later, Lenny becomes a war hero after downing three Nazi
planes, and the truth about the marriage Is happily revealed.
The pregnancy fib idea was not far removed from the spring-
board for Slightly Married (25 October 1943), in which a lamebrained
girl and her equally dumb soldier boyfriend think they are married
because they have signed a marriage license. When she gets preg-
nant, it Is her embarrassed mother who pretends to be expecting.
After the usual mishaps, the soldier goes AWOL and announces that
he and the girl are getting married.
Marriage was not the first thing on the mind of cynical aviator
Lt. Hank Trosper (Zachary Scott) in Edward Chodorov's Those
Endearing Young Charms (16 June 1943). Just before going Into
battle, he seduces a virginal young woman (Virginia Gilmore), who
gives herself to him remembering how her mother regretted not
having done so with a man she loved who was killed during World
War I. But Hank realizes that he loves the girl and proposes.
Rose Simon Kohn used similar possibilities for her heavy-
handed Pillar to Post (10 December 1943). Reminiscent of the popu-
lar movie It Happened One Night, the play divulges what happens
when a cosmetics saleswoman, unable to find a room near an army
camp, talks a young lieutenant going on leave into driving her to a
local motel, where the lack of vacancies forces them to spend the
night together. This leads to romance and a promise to get hitched.
The most famous of such plays, and the longest running war-
related work of the period (1 ,557 performances), was John van
Druten's expert, three-character, romantic comedy, The Voice of the
Turtle (8 December 1943). It is set entirely in the Manhattan apart-
ment of struggling actress Sally Middleton (Margaret Sullavan). She
is visited by Sgt. Bill Page (Elliott Nugent), who has a date there to
meet Sally's brassy actress friend, Olive Lashbrooke (Audrey
Christie), on hi s weekend furlough before leaving for the front.
Sally's simple charms--in sharp contrast to Olive's--overwhelm Bill.
They sleep together, fall in love, and decide to marry.
The classic servicemen-on-leave musical was On the Town (28
December 1944), by Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard
60
Bernstein. This lighthearted, 462-performance show, In which Com-
den and Green both performed and which produced such songs as
"New York, New York," "Lonely Town, and "Lucky to Be Me, was
partly Inspired by choreographer Jerome Robbins's 1944 ballet,
Fancy Free, which also featured three white-garbed saUors on leave
In the Big Apple. In On the Town, the three sailors have twenty-four-
hour furtoughs during which they determine to track down the girt In
the subway picture of "Miss Turnstnes (Sono Osato). Various New
York landmarks become part of the action during their quest, and
each sailor finds romance along the way. It is Interesting that
Japanese-American dancer Sono Osato was cast as a Caucasian In
an earty example of nontraditional casting, and that no critic men-
tioned her ancestry despite America's being at war with Japan.
A sailor on leave was a principal character in A B. Shiffrin's
Love on Leave (20 June 1944), which tried to come to terms with
youthful sexuality In a story about a young girl from Queens who
dresses provocatively and sneaks out of the house to go to Times
Square where she tries to seduce an Innocent young sailor. The
clean-minded boy takes her home instead, only to be accused of
seducing her, a lie disproved by the family physician.
Fitting loosely into this grouping is Rattigan's While the Sun
Shines (19 September 1944), a British drawing-room comedy that
was a West End hit but a Broadway failure. It dealt with romantic
complications surrounding an aristocratic seaman, his aristocratic
WAAF fiancee, an American bombardier, and a Free French officer.
The difficulty of returning servicemen trying to readjust to
civilian life was touched on in many plays, Including Kiss Them for
Me (described above). In the easily dismissed farce by Les White
and Bud Pearson, Too Hot for Maneuvers (2 May 1945), veteran Col.
Steve Hadley (Richard Arten) keeps his uniform In order to run the
military academy he was in charge of before the war but which has
become run-down in his absence. The play is little more than an
account of the mlxups--lnvolving a local massage parlor misinter-
preted as a brothel--attendant on the attempts to restore the school
to its prewar condition.
The sixteen-year-old leading character in Louis Solomon and
Harold Buchman's moderately amusing Snafu (24 October 1944)
should have been in such an academy but, wanting to join the armed
forces and fight the Japanese, lied about his age and even was pro-
moted to sergeant. William (Billy) Redfield portrayed the boy who is
discovered and retrieved from the Pacific by his worried mother. The
action transpires back home, where he struggles to handle domestic
and romantic life and confuses his folks by his newfound maturity
and hard-to-break military habits, like blowing reveille at dawn. After
a teenage mixup, in which the boy is unjustly implicated, he Is
61
awarded the Purple Heart, and aJJ demobilized soldiers' parents are
advised to trust their sons.
Winged Victory emphasized the problems of an overseas
character who learns that he is a new father. Many men returned not
only to babies they had never seen but to wives who had become
independent in their absence. This dramatically pregnant situation
was handled In Elmer Rice's A New Life (15 September 1943} and
Rose Franken's 253-performance comedy, Soldiers Wife (4 October
1944). In the former, Capt. Robert Cleghome, believed to be lost In
the Pacific, comes home after his wife, Edith (Rice's wife, Betty Field,
actually pregnant at the time), has given birth (enacted In a con-
troversial scene). The rest of the play concerns the baby's future,
symbolic of the future of postwar America. Uberalism, represented
by the feisty wife's ideas, prevails over reaction, represented by the
husband's parents. As did both Winged Victory and A New Life,
several plays ended with platitudes about the future of the wortd into
which babies were being brought.
In the far superior Franken play, John Rogers (Myron
McCormick) returns from the Pacific, where he was wounded, to his
Manhattan apartment to reunite with his wife (Martha Scott), who has
had a child in his absence. John has to deal not only with a spouse
who has learned to manage on her own, but also with the possibility
of his wife's letters to him overseas being published and made into a
film. John sees the possibility of becoming a useless appendage as
his wife considers the lure of money (more than John will ever make)
and celebrity, but her old-fashioned domesticity re-emerges and, to
John's relief, she settles for a more conventional future as a
homemaker.
A closely related topic informed Courtenay Savage's talkative
Home Is the Hero (18 January 1945), produced Off Broadway. A
soldier returns on a medical discharge to confront a wife who does
not wish to abandon her war job, which has given her a liberating
Independence and a higher salary than he earns. When he threatens
to leave, however, she agrees to quit her job. Neither of these plays
was willing to come to terms with the idea of a married woman enjoy-
ing a career and income of her own, especially one that dwarfed her
husband's.
Montgomery Clift brought great sensitivity to his portrayal of
two scarred young veterans in the 1944-1945 season, first in Lillian
Hellman's interesting but muddled The Searching Wind (12 April
1944), a success with 326 performances. Clift played twenty-year-old
Sam Hazen, wounded in Italy and requiring amputation of a leg. He
listens to his upper class, politically connected parents (Dennis King
and Cornelia Otis Skinner) and a visiting longtime friend (Barbara
O'Neil) discuss the compromises that have affected their personal
interrelationships and their political beliefs during a quarter of a
62
century that Includes the rise of Mussollni and Hitler. Their talk
shames Sam, who speaks up on behalf of America.
Even deeper psychological scars marred the postcombat life
of Oift's other character, Dennis Patterson, In Elsa Shelley's Foxhole
in the Parlor (23 May 1945), a play with a fuzzy antiwar message.
Dennis has been rendered neurotically unstable by his war experi-
ences and Is unable to shake the memory of a Jewish friend who
taught him the meaning of Passover before being killed beside him In
a foxhole. Despite a sister who wants Dennis committed to an
asylum, the message of peace he bears Is so urgent that a friend's
politician father takes him along to speak at the San Francisco Peace
Conference.
Edward Chodorov's Decision (2 February 1944) was a
respected but problematic drama about Tommy, a wounded soldier
who returns to his small town on furlough from duty in Sicily only to
become enmeshed in a conflict regarding accusations by his
honorable father that a reactionary senator is stirring up racial con-
flict at the local aircraft factory. When his father Is jailed on trumped
up charges and found dead in his cell, Tommy opts to leave town,
but his fiancee and the workers convince him to remain and fight the
local fascists.
Not all the returning veterans in these plays were male;
Ladislas Bus-Fekete, Sidney Sheldon, and Mary Helen Fay's wooden
romantic comedy, Alice in Arms (31 January 1945), deals with a
WAC named Alice (Peggy Conklin) who arrives In her small
hometown after three years in France. Her problem focuses on the
rival claims to her affections of a local lover and the two mUitary men
(one of them played by Kirk Douglas) who pursue her from overseas.
Some veterans never made it home, spending their final days
in military hospitals (which, as noted, was the frame for The Streets
Are Guarded). The quintessential treatment of hospitalized soldiers
was John Patrick's touching The Hasty Heart (3 January 1945). This
204-performance, sentimental, yet emotionally potent comedy-
drama, was set in the tropical surroundings of a British hospital on
the Assam-Burma front. A Scottish soldier named Lachlan (Richard
Basehart) lies here, surrounded by servicemen from various Allied
nations. The bitter Scot, who does not at first know he is dying,
refuses the friendship-which he takes for pity--of the others, and the
play chronicles his being gradually won over. Learning the gravity of
his condition, he refuses the chance to go home and chooses to die
amid his newfound pals.
How families at home dealt with news of a loved one's death
was a promising topic, although bound to be plagued by potential
problems of mawkishness, as happened to Ralph Nelson's fantasy
The Wind Is Ninety {21 June 1945). Nelson himself gave an opening-
night speech dedicating the drama to the relatives of those who died
63
in the war. Fighter pilot Don Ritchie (Wendell Corey), killed In action,
comes home as a ghost to try to soften the blow that news of his
death will have on his family. Accompanying him is the ghost of
World War l's Unknown Soldier (Kirk Douglas). When the fateful
telegram arrives, each of the loved ones recalls his or her personal
memories of Don, who somehow manages to convey his message
that whenever the wind Is ninety, I.e., coming from the northwest, he
will be near.
A familiar twist on plots about people responding to the news
of a dear one's death Is the Enoch Arden treatment In which he is not
dead after all. This precipitated Philip Barry's comedy-drama,
Foolish Notion (13 March 1945). Tallulah Bankhead was In top form
as Sophie Wing, the star-actress wife of Jim Hapgood (Henry Hull),
who has been missing in action since 1939, when he joined a Scot-
tish regiment. Five years later, Jim is declared legally dead and
Sophie is planning to marry her costar Gordon (Donald Cook). A
phone call reveals that Jim is alive and soon wUI be there. Sophie,
Gordon, Sophie's father, and Jim and Sophie's adopted daughter
who dislikes Gordon and prays for Jim's return, fantasize about what
Jim will be like, each picturing him in a highly personalized way. He
turns out to be like no one's preconceptions and releases Sophie
from her obligations so he can wed someone else.
In B. Harrison Orkow's Star Spangled Family (10 April1945),
the dead husband is truly dead and his wife, like Sophie Wing, is
preparing to remarry. Once again, their child, who idealizes the
departed father, Is opposed to the marriage, partly because the new
man's military career was confined to a domestic installation. The
drama emphasized the child's psychotic father-fixation and the
neurotic reactions of the dead man's mother, who ends up in a men-
tal institution.
The war sometimes served as an escape valve for men frus-
trated by domestic or personal problems. This was a secondary
mechanism in a couple of plays, including llka Chase's drawing-
room comedy, In Bed We Cry (14 November 1944), in which the
bored husband of a fashionable cosmetics executive leaves her to
find some meaning in the army medical corps, where he is killed.
Paul Burton-Mercur's cliche-soaked Love Is No Heaven (15 March
1943), Off Broadway, pictured the lover of a married woman who
hates her unfaithful husband but will not leave him because she is
pregnant. She fails to relate this fact, however, to the lover, who
departs to fight the Japanese. And the hero of Charles Schnee' s
Apology (22 March 1943) is a greedy businessman who evades the
draft to become a war profiteer but is eventually overcome with guilt
and heads for combat in Africa.
The war brought out aspects of civilians not visible under more
placid circumstances. Sometimes they were too zealous, the point
64
of S.M. Herzig's mindless farce, Vickie (22 September 1942). It
starred Jose Ferrer as an engineer who has interested the War Pro-
duction Board In one of his Inventions. His wife, Vickie (Uta Hagen),
is an active volunteer in the American Women's Camp Service, an
inept bunch who manage to wrap her army-bound sandwiches in the
inventor's plans. Among the subplots was one about a visiting
government official being mistaken by the ladles for a spy. The title
character (Katina Paxinou) in George Ross's Sophie (25 December
1944), a Czech Immigrant widow with a son in the army, organizes
local European women to prepare fund-raising dinners to benefit War
Relief, but must overcome the obstructionism of an xenophobic bigot
and demonstrate her Americanism. 8 The volunteers in Gladys
Hurlbut's Yankee Point (23 November 1942) were intended as
glorifications of female civilian defense workers searching the skies
off Amagansett, Long Island, for enemy planes. Interesting material
involved the discovery of a German spy in the dunes (based on an
actual incident), an air raid, and a man whose abandonment of his
pacifism disturbs his pregnant daughter, although she changes her
mind when she realizes the need for a better world in which to raise
her chUdren.
Another mother who believes in the future is the central
character in Irwin Shaw's Sons and Soldiers (4 May 1943). This
woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald), living in 1916 and given a choice
between a one-in-ten chance of dying in childbirth or having an abor-
tion, faints and dreams of the next twenty-five years, foreseeing what
hardships her offspring will encounter, with one dying In World War II
and the other (Gregory Peck) enlisting to fight for a brighter tomor-
row. She decides to give birth.
There were six plays set entirely in earfier times that used his-
tory to point up contemporary political themes related to the nation's
fight for world freedom. Three weeks after Pearl Harbor came
Howard Koch and John Huston's In Time to Come (23 December
1941 ), a biographical work about Woodrow Wilson which strikingly
reflected current events, particularly a prologue in which Wilson
asked Congress to declare war against Germany and her allies. Sid-
ney Kingsley's stirring The Patriots (29 January 1943) tells of Thomas
Jefferson's political problems with Alexander Hamilton, thus reflect-
ing the conflict between President Roosevelt and current reactionary
forces. Nat Sherman's War President (24 April 1944), on the other
hand, attempted to express the conflict between President Lincoln
and General McClellan as a mirror of presumed difficulties between
President Roosevelt and General MacArthur. Alfred Neumann, Erwin
Piscator, Harold L. Anderson, and Maurice Kurtz's Off-Broadway
adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace (20 May 1942) demonstrated
parallels between Napolean and Hitler, while also stressing the con-
temporary relevance of Pierre's transition from pacifist to fighter.
65
Less Interesting were Herbert B. Ehrmann's Under This Roof
(22 February 1942) and Elliott Nugent's A Place of Our Own (2 April
1945). The first covered the years from 1846 to 1873 and faced the
national conflict between complacency and Idealism via the plight of
a woman (Barbara O'Neil) whose marital choice of a right-wing
businessman over his Abolitionist brother comes back to haunt her.
The second, set in 1919, used a story about a small-town Ohio news-
paperman's conflict with his ultraconservative In-laws over his pro-
League of Nations idealism to point up postwar America's need to
strongly support the incipient United Nations.
Politically Influenced plays primarily dealing with con-
temporary civilians included two in which fantasy played a significant
role. One was Edward Peyton Harris's Off-Broadway Homecoming
(16 November 1942), which showed no faith in postwar mankind and
posited a Bible-Influenced situation in which a poor Southerner, upon
his son's return at the end of the war, builds an ark In hopes that the
coming rains will wash away mankind's sins. When the waters
recede, however, sin returns. Thornton Wilder's famous philosophi-
cal comedy, The Skin of Our Teeth (18 November 1942), relates the
allegorical history of mankind, and the play's third act discloses a
war-decimated world and the Hitlerian behavior of Henry (Mont-
gomery Clift), who is prepared to kill his father, Mr. Antrobus (Fredric
March).
On a more realistic level William McCleery's drawing-room
comedy Hope for the Best (7 February 1945), cast Franchot Tone as
a successful, folksy columnist who Is inspired by the war to become
a serious political journalist, despite the condescension of his
fiancee, a reactionary political columnist. Lucille Prumbs's rejected
comedy I'll Take the High Road (11 November 1943) dealt with a
female war factory worker (Jeanne Cagney) who wins a contest as
"Miss Average Girl, entitling her to be escorted by a movie star
(Michael Strong) to the premiere of an inspirational movie about her
factory's supposedly benevolent boss. She blows the whistle on the
boss by revealing him to be a dangerous fascist and promises to wait
for the actor, who loves her, until he returns from the war. Marc Con-
nelly's The Flowers of Virtue (2 February 1945), set in a Mexican
town, was about the overthrow of a local Hitler by a Nazi-hating
American tycoon and a Mexican worker. And Philip Barry's high
comedy, Without Love (10 November 1942), set in Washington, D.C.,
pitted Katharine Hepburn as a senator's daughter, symbolizing
England, against Elliott Nugent as an ex-foreign correspondent, sym-
bolizing Ireland, in a romantic plot during which the housing shortage
forces them Into a marriage of convenience (which blossoms into a
marriage of love) as he strives to get the Irish Republic to abandon Its
neutrality and join England as a partner in the war effort.
One of the best-remembered works in this group is James
66
Gow and Arnaud d'Usseau's Tomorrow the World (14 April1943).
This drama, which had 500 performances, brought the problems of
fascism home in an unusually immediate way by basing Its story on a
situation in which an indoctrinated Nazi twelve-year old (Skippy
Homeier}, a member of Hitler's Youth, was brought to America to be
raised by American relatives (Shirley Booth and Ralph Bellamy). The
child behaves like an anti-Semitic hate machine, but love and kind-
ness finally begin to break through. Tomorrow the World Is intended
to ask what was to be done with the 12 million Indoctrinated youth
who would remain after Germany was defeated. It was based on a
true case in which a chUd proved too far gone for rehabHitation and
was sent back to his homeland.
All of these plays were very serious, but the longest run of a
politically inclined play about IHe on the home front was a satirical
comedy, Joseph Fields's The Doughgirls (30 December 1942}, which
had 671 showings and made ribald comic capital out of the problems
of wartime overcrowding in Washington, D.C., when hotel rooms
were nearly Impossible to b o ~ k The action, stretching over six
weeks, satirized Washingtonian and military mores by displaying a
maelstrom of activity centered in one room, occupied by three secre-
taries, who share it--illegally--with their beaus, two servicemen and a
scientist. The girls, moreover, have their eyes on a trio of wealthy,
already married, older men. Complications arise from such charac-
ters as a famed Nazi-killing female Russian sniper (Arlene Francis),
based on an actual figure In the news; a little man who keeps Intrud-
Ing in his search for sleeping quarters; a busy hotel staff; and others.
The war was briefly reflected in a pair of musical collages
about American history, Off Broadway's Johnny Doodle (18 March
1942) and Sing Out, Sweet Land! (27 December 1944). The former
used well-known folk songs to tell of America's struggle for freedom
from 1n6 to 1942. A similar concept prevailed in the second show,
with Walter Kerr's book built around a compilation of American folk
music and involving many spectacular scenes, one on the deck of an
aircraft carrier.
The musical form was also intrinsic to two revues entirely
devoted to patriotic purposes. The successful one was Irving Berlin's
This Is the Army (4 July 1942), employing an all-soldier cast and crew
totalling over 300, including blacks as well as whites, making it the
only integrated army unit of the time. All proceeds (more than $2 mil-
lion) from the Broadway and subsequent touring version were
donated to the Army Emergency Relief Fund. Berlin himself, dressed
in an old uniform, performed his World War I classic, oh, How I Hate
to Get Up in the Morning, but new material Included This Is the
Army, Mr. Jones, 1 Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen, and
others. There were minstrel routines, vaudeville specialties, drag
routines, soldiers impersonating male and female stars (including
67
Noel Coward, the Lunts, and Gypsy Rose Lee), soldiers dressed as
Japanese and Germans singing Aryans Under the Skin, and so on.
The flop was the low-budget Let Freedom Sing {5 October
1942), begun in Brooklyn by a group of talented young players, who
revised it considerably before it hit the Great White Way. Its numbers
included Mitzi Green performing prtvate Jones; Grandpa GuerrUia
(a 'Russian killer-diller Pancho Villa'); '1'he Lady Is a WAAc- (a revi-
sion of '1'he Lady Is a Tramp, which she had Introduced In Babes in
Arms); 1 Did It for Defense (a double-entendre song about her
giving a young solder her most priceless possession, a ball of tinfoil);
and "Women in Uniform, .. a spoof of What Price Glory? shared with
Betty Garrett. The men were In such bits as .,. actlcs, about guys on
the street debating war strategy; the still familiar antibigotry song,
The House I Live ln .. ; a sketch demeaning Mussollnl, Hitler, and
Hirohito; and another about the room shortage in Washington, D.C.
Billy Rose offended some people by ostentatiously opening
his lavish Seven Lively Arts revue on the third anniversary of Pearl
Harbor (7 December 1944) and publicly announcing that, to
demonstrate the nation's strength, it had no topical relevance. It did,
however, have a sketch starring comedienne Beatrice Lillie as a
British lady at a serviceman's canteen trying to be friendly by
innocently using the off-color slang she found in soldier's hand-
books. 9 And Bert Lahr performed a routine about an English admiral
on a battleship singing a drinking song whose lyrics alone made him
tipsy.
Many less pretentious revues made it their business to include
at least some war material, such as Chauve Souris of 1945 (12
August 1943), which had a sketch about a female Russian sniper and
an American WAC; For Your Pleasure {5 February 1943), which had a
black spiritual chorus singing "Stalin Wasn't Stallin', about Hitler's
withdrawal from Russia; Harlem Cavalcade (1 May 1942), a black
show in which .Fiourney Miller did a number about filling out a draft
questionnaire; Keep 'Em Laughing {24 April 1942), which featured
chanteuse Hildegarde singing something About a Soldier, in which
she used servicemen In the audience; Laffing Room Only {23 Decem-
ber 1944), an Olsen and Johnson madhouse opus that had a bit in
which a soldier and sailor ran around the audience in bra and
panties, and another in which three Russian soldiers' rifles went limp
on trying to shoot a spy but stiffened when a scantily dressed beauty
walked between them and the spy; New Faces of 1943 {12 Decem-
ber 1943), which had a sketch about the wartime shortages that
made finding a cook impossible; Of V We Sing {11 February 1942), a
topical left-wing revue which included Ivan the Terrible," a bit con-
cerning Hitler on the radio, and a satirical strip routine, -v ou've Got
to Appease with a Strip-Tease .. ; Showtime {16 September 1942), a
vaudeville show in which Jack Haley scored with a routine about
68
receiving a draft notice; Top Notchers (29 May 1942), which featured
British music-hall star Gracie Fields, one of whose uproarious num-
bers, "The Biggest Aspidistra In the World, had a line about 'anging
old 'itler from the 'lghest bough of the biggest aspidistra In the
world, which caused British sailors in the balcony to carry on with
raucous approval, leading patriotic Americans to noisily join them;
and The Ziegfeld Follies of 1943, a resuscitation of the lavish old
revue series, In which Milton Berte spoofed meat rationing In "The
Merchant of Venison, about a butcher protected by tommy-gun
wielding bodyguards as he deposits a steak in a safe.
There was also The Canteen Show (8 September 1942), pro-
duced at the Stage Door Canteen, established on West Forty-fourth
Street to provide a congenial eating and entertainment place for serv-
Icemen, and staffed by volunteer theatre professionals. A group of
them produced this hour-long revue featUring Impersonations of
famous performers, songs, and several skits. Civilians wishing to see
it had to fork over $100.
The list of war-related plays could be extended by mentioning
those that do not fit Into any of the above categories and In which the
only connection to the conflict was that one or more characters were
in uniform. For example, the musical A Lady Says Yes (10 January
1 .945) was about a naval lieutenant who has historical-romantic
fantasies while under ether for a nose operation. Stanley Young's
Ask My Friend Sandy (4 February 1943) had an eccentric soldier
whose Thoreauesque ideas influence the play's hero to give away all
his money.
This was a unique period on Broadway, during which the
theatre responded to a national crisis in a way such as it never had
nor ever would again. Even if America were to engage in another
war in which the nation was similarly united against a common
enemy, the economics of production would automatically prevent the
presentation of so many works reflective of the nation and world's
Involvement. It is hard to conceive of another earth-shaking event
that could stimulate so many plays in so short a time. Given the diffi-
culties and expenses of filmmaking, the major burden would
presumably be assumed by television, which simply was not
generally available from 1941 to 1945.
Endnotes
1This holds true even for the early 1940s, when the com-
plexities and costs of production were considerably less than they
are today.
2The research on which this survey relies is more extensively
represented in my The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1940-
69
1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), where all the plays
mentioned here are fully described in individual essays, including
details of critical response (kept here to a minimum). In this essay, I
have identified actors selectively and have given performance totals
only for works that accumulated a minimum of 200. Most of the
remaining plays were commercial failures, many with fewer than ten
showings apiece. Unless otherwise specified, all productions
described were given In Broadway theatres.
3'fhe authenticity of several plays was heightened by authors
who were themselves on active duty. This play's co-author Jay was
on active duty In the Middle East; Terence Rattigan, the author of
Flare Path, was then an RAF flight lieutenant; John Patrick, the author
of The Hasty Heart, wrote it as he returned from duty In South Asia;
and Sidney Kingsley was in the military when he wrote The Patriots.
4
The play won the $1 ,500 Sidney Howard Memorial Award,
granted by the Playwrights' Producing Company. A move to Broad-
way was contemplated but the 42-member cast made the Idea too
expensive.
5The cause for the fund-raising was the Army Emergency
Relief Fund and the plays were selected from 115 entries in a serv-
icemen's playwriting contest. The judges included dramatists Russel
Crouse, Kenyon Nicholson, Elmer Rice, and producer John Golden.
All the plays were war-related and, except for a brief appearance by
film star Myrna Loy In one, had all-male, all-servicemen casts. At the
opening, Eleanor Roosevelt, the duke and duchess of Windsor, and
the mayor of New York were called onto the stage. Between the
one-acts, entertainment was provided by such servicemen as Jules
Munshin. The program was offered for a single performance but was
so well-received it returned at another theatre on 2 August 1943,
where it had forty showings.
6Actually, with an orchestra and choral singers, there were
more than 300 performers involved.
7
Prior to the Broadway return engagement, a private per-
formance was given for President Roosevelt at his Hyde Park home,
and the Myrna Loy reference was changed so that Eleanor Roosevelt
could appear in the play. During the second Broadway run, a variety
of different female celebrities, such as Glenda Farrell and Gertrude
Lawrence, appeared, with someone different every night.
srhe play contains a subplot about Sophie's soldier son
having an illegitimate child by a local girl and temporarily spurning
her before agreeing on marriage, so the play might also be added to
the grouf. of those about furloughed servicemen.
Lillie was making her first appearance on Broadway in ftve
years. Her only son, Robert Peel, was killed in action on 5 April1942
when his ship was dive-bombed.
70
IDEOLOGY AND THEATRE AT HULL-HOUSE
UNDER JANE ADDAMS
Melanie N. Blood
At the Hull-House Players' American premiere of John
Galsworthy's Justice In 1912, Maurice Browne cited the following
exchange between the director of the Players, Laura Dainty Pelham,
and an audience member:
She was asked at the close of the performance by a wealthy
Chicago woman if she were not afraid of stirring up dissen-
sion among the classes; she answered, 1 don't know--l'm
trying to.
Browne continued, Perhaps that is why she succeeds artistically"
("The Hull-House Players in 'Justice,' The Theatre Magazine, June
1911, 90). Three years after this statement, a rebellion against Pel-
ham's autocratic directorship by the working class Players caused
her to take actions diametrically opposed to her suggested attempt
to foster class dissension. She reinstated herself as leader, unbound
by the constitution that the Players had drawn up; further, she
appealed to Jane Addams to transfer her support from the Players to
herself, which Addams did. Although settlement houses and their
artistic programs were centers of progressive ideology and were per-
ceived by much of the country as radical--even pro-communist after
World War l--as Browne's rhetoric suggests, their overall effect on
American power structures was conservative, as exemplified in Pel-
ham's and Addams's actions in 1914.
In this paper, I will examine ideological aspects of Jane
Addams's work at Hull-House, specifically focusing on the role of the
theatre in her overall project. Although Addams was never directly
involved in the arts, as Hull-House's head resident she actively sup-
ported the arts and stressed their social function over aesthetics. To
work under the Hull-House umbrella, the directors of artistic clubs
had more or less to uphold her vision of the relationship between art
and social service. Next, I will distill Addams's complex concept of
Americanization down to three major stages. Since most of Hull-
House's neighborhood consisted of recent immigrants, a large part
of the settlement's work was aimed at acculturation. A basic three-
71
part pattern of Americanization is evident in theatrical, as well as
many other artistic, educational , and recreational activities
sponsored by Hull-House. Finally, I will look at the result of this
process of Americanization using the example of the Hull-House
Players. Having graduated from the third stage. they experienced a
crisis in 1914 that anticipated a crisis of the entire settlement move-
ment in the 1920's. At the center of the crisis was the settlements'
contradictory stance on class hierarchy: They Intentionally Ignored
class differences between settlers and local people; yet the settlers'
bourgeois American values permeated all settlement activities. In
response to artistic differences with Pelham, their settlement-
appointed director, the Players attempted to change their
government to a democratic organization run by elected officers and
appointed committees, but Pelham, supported by Addams, thwarted
their democratic rebellion.
Settlement houses sprang up in major urban centers across
America In the last two decades of the nineteenth century. They
were a response on the part of wealthy, educated people. many of
them women. to the social problems of urban centers caused by
rapid industrialization, a widening gulf between the rich native born
and poor Immigrant Americans, and the inefficiency of standard
charitable organizations. Previous nineteenth-century charities
viewed poverty and its attendant problems as caused by character
defects In Individual people rather than by social conditions. The
settlement Idea began with workers self-consciously crossing what
they saw as arbitrary class distinctions by living in poor neighbor-
hoods, meeting residents face to face, and determining from this
experience what the urban Ills and their causes really were. This
one-on-one contact led the settlers to identify systemic problems that
perpetuated poverty and caused social disorder. By the early
twentieth century, settlement workers such as Jane Addams of
Chicago's Hull-House were In the forefront of many reform move-
ments aimed at changing social conditions that they had identified as
causing poverty. Acting as channels between the poor and those in
power. they lobbied for shorter working days, restrictions on child
labor. safer work conditions. educational and housing reforms. state
supported recreational programs, and women's suffrage. While the
figureheads of the settlements gained national reputations working to
improve Institutional care for the poor, the majority of settlers con-
tinued to work as residents inside the communities, continuing the
settlement ideal of one-on-one contact.
Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents represented a lib-
eral trend within the Progressive movement: They advocated social
and cultural as well as political democracy among Americans of all
classes. Many settlement workers, including Addams's cofounder of
Hull-House, Ellen Gates Starr. moved from this democratic Ideal to
72
espouse socialism, but Addams and the dominant, vocal majority of
settlers upheld democracy within a capitaHst economic system. The
ubiquitous melting pot Image of American society was understood
variously by settlers: Addams envisioned a mixture In which the
bourgeois, "White Anglo-Saxon Protestanr values of ear1y America
would remain dominant and educational and political authority would
be maintained by an educated, moneyed elite, who In tum had a kind
of patrician responsibility to serve the good of all Americans. Rlvka
Shpak Ussak, in her Pluralism and Progressives, explains that pro-
gressives such as Addams saw themselves as members of a middle
class that represented a majority of Americans and were capable of
mediating between the upper and lower classes, both of which were
relegated to special Interest status. In fact, most Influential progres-
sives were more elite than middle class, but they saw themselves
only as a better elemenr among the middle-class majority fitted to
make decisions affecting others, especially the helpless' and
Ignorant lower classes, due to their own merit and virtue. 1n a
democratic society the elite should be recruited from what Progres-
sives termed the middle class rather than the upper class (Ussak,
19). Within Addams's melting pot American character, diversity
would be a kind of eccentricity, and she assumed a high level of
immigrant assimilation to existing American values.
Within Hull-House, although the heritages of the various
immigrant groups were celebrated, the primary goal of settlement
activities was to introduce the urban, mainly immigrant poor, one by
one, to 'the values and traditions of educated, elite America. As
Addams wrote to Albert Kennedy: -rhe only goal of the settlement Is
to bring the inspiration and resources of the higher life to a larger
number of people (Carson, 195). A not unintentional side effect of
this policy was to discourage groups of working class people from
organizing any direct response to injustices in their environments.
Settlers represented the poor to authorities and filled workers' free
time with artistic and recreational activities chosen and led by them-
selves.
Addams believed that the settlements could help ease
immigrants' inevitable transition to American values. For the pur-
poses of this paper, I have condensed ideas on Americanization from
her many books and articles into three distinct stages. First, by
respecting and promoting In a limited way Immigrants' old country-
traditions, immigrants maintained self-respect, trusted their new
environment, and became open to new American Ideas. Addams
opposed the more active approach taken by other settlements of
replacing old cultural traditions as quickly as possible, because such
forcing would create an unnecessary conflict between old and new.
Rather she chose to emphasize the similarities, the common classi-
cal roots, and the possibility of continuity between old country and
73
new American values. She felt that immigrants would be wUiing to
accept new American ideas more quickly and easily when allowed to
choose old and new Instead of choosing between old and new.
Theatrical examples abound of Hull-House's practice of this first
stage during the first two decades of its existence. It sponsored or
rented stages to various ethnic groups to present plays in their native
languages. Children were encouraged to form clubs to study the
achievements of their ancestors, their study often taking the form of
staging plays and pageants. Addams saw art as one of the positive
contributions of foreign cultures to the American character and
hoped that activities such as these would distill the best .of old worid
cultures for the American melting pot. In a 1902 article, she wrote
about the increased pride and self-respect of a Greek Immigrant cast
of Odysseus over their theatrical work and the new respect
engendered In the settlers:
The actors were drawn from the street vendors and
tenement -house population of the neighborhood. Those In
charge of the production were greatly surprised to find that
some of these seemingly ignorant people already knew the
lines which were assigned to them, having studied the clas-
sics as a part of their early education In Greece {Charities, 29
March 1902, 285).
This group then decided that their half of the earnings should be
given to Hull-House, saying that they had been amply repaid by the
opportunity, as they said, of 'upholding the honor of Greece
(Charities, 285).
Second, Addams encouraged integration of social and educa-
tional activities to begin to break down strict ethnic identification.
Since all three stages were on-going processes and overlapped each
other in time, especially as new waves of Immigrants moved into the
neighborhood, this stage began as the first continued. One of the
earliest successful instances of an integrated club was the Hull-
House Dramatic Association, as reorganized In 1900. Laura Dainty
Pelham, the group's director from 1900 until her death in 1924,
described their formation in a 1916 article: Miss Addams called
together twelve young people, all of whom had achieved distinction
either in Hull-House Clubs or In the Dramatic Association ... (Pel-
ham, 249-50). It was an honor to be chosen by Miss Addams, and
her group consisted of two settlement residents, nine local working
class people, and Mrs. Pelham. The nine local people were all Hull-
House club members and were of primarily Irish and French
parentage, groups that, by 1900, were being replaced In the neigh-
borhood by the New Immigrants, mainly Italians, Greeks, and East
European Jews. Pelham, born to well-to-do New England parents,
74
had been an actress for many years and then entered management
with Fred Pelham, whom she married in 1892. By 1900, she was
comfortably retired from theatrical activity and was the president of
the Hull-House women's club. She was appointed director by
Addams at the October 1900 meeting, though she had not partici-
pated in Hull-House production work up to that time.
Several Hull-House Bulletins over the next few years discuss
the club's constant activity and mention that the club was full and
maintained a waiting list for membership. Several factors helped the
success of this pioneering interethnic club. First, its members were
bound by a common Interest In theatre, In which they had all
developed some skill. Second, they were from ethnic groups estab-
lished for a couple of generations In America and were more ready to
accept the next step in Americanization. Finally, the continued suc-
cess of the group, even as it Incorporated some New Immigrants,
was due to a great extent to its continued selectivity: It was an honor
to be chosen to participate. Pelham explained the group's standards
for selecting new members as codified In their 1906-7 season:
The company had ruled ... that the membership should be
limited to fourteen, and that no one should be admitted until
he had played at least two parts acceptably and had proved
himself to be socially agreeable to the members (Pelham,
252).
Inherent In this second stage is the plan for group members to
put aside biases of ethnicity and class in order to work together: the
settlement ideal of face-to-face contact was efficient at breaking
down groups' prejudices. This part of Americanization also began
the adoption of a common ground among the members of various
backgrounds, which inevitably was to be found in American culture
and traditions. In their choice of plays, the Dramatic Association
reveals American and increasingly upper-middle-class values.
Records of children's dramatic activities demonstrate even more
clearly the move from the first to the second stage of Americaniza-
tion. The theatre as an activity seems particularly well-suited to
accomplishing the social goal of this part of the Americanization
process because it usually requires that many people with various
skills work together toward a common goal.
In the third part of Addams's Americanization, an integrated
group was encouraged to adopt American values more and more
completely, until ethnic survivals were evident only in private family
situations, If at all. The social democracy advocated at Hull-House
made the benefits of assimilation clear: It increased an individual's
range of economic, social, educational, and artistic choices. For a
few highly talented Individuals, scholarships or settlement connec-
75
tions to power centers provided a direct means of mobility from the
slums to whatever heights their abilities would take them. Some Hull-
House performers ultimately made careers in the mainstream
theatres; many more went to college, joined various professions, and
moved into middle-class neighborhoods. Addams saw that dramatic
activity led to the natural acquisition of many skUis necessary for the
educated American. In an essay in her 1909 book, The Spirit of
Youth and the City Streets, she enumerated the benefits of theatrical
training. Students learn classic literature, the characteristics that
make quality In drama, proper pronunciation and more advanced
elocutionary skills, and polite deportment. On the more esoteric
side, theatre provides patterns for the order and beauty of life, and
It afford[s] the young a magic space in which life may be lived in
efflorescence (p. 89-90). Addams's article contrasts the dangers of
moving-picture houses with the benefits of theatrical activity In Hull-
House clubs, which, since they were aimed at education and not
profit, avoided the pitfalls of the movies while offering all of the bene-
fits listed above.
The Hull-House Dramatic Association did Improve steadily
along the social lines that Addams suggested, and it also grew art-
istically. The members' progress through this third stage of
Americanization and their artistic growth can be traced through peri-
odical articles, their play selection, and their reaction to their 1911
meeting with the Abbey Players. Records from this stage of the
Dramatic Association's history, supplementing Pelham's account, are
available in Hull-House publications and have been collected In a
1983 dissertation by Stuart Joel Hecht, all of which are combined in
the following summaries. The Chicago press began to notice Hull-
House in 1904, and national theatre publications in 1911; it is inter-
esting to read reviews not only as records of theatrical achievement
but also of an increasing mastery of an American cultural tradition.
Such reviewers' comments as "The acting was uncommonly good for
amateurs, (Hubbard, 1903, in Hecht, 119) and These amateurs
show surprising perception and skiW (Hammond, 1910, in Hecht,
121) began to be replaced by Mrs. Pelham's players acted with
admirable simplicity and restraint, and in some cases with an author-
ity and technique not often encountered even on the professional
stage. (Hammond, 1911, in Hecht, 123-4). In 1911, when the group
had just changed its name to the Hull-House Players, a more
ambitious sounding name (Pelham, 253), one reviewer commented
on their improvement:
At first, and that was not many years ago, the diction of
some of the players was either extremely snuffy or extremely
stuffy. Those faults have been wonderfully mended. Move-
ment, too, grows easier, the attack upon scenes is more
76
exact and the grip of climaxes firmer. Not many meanings
now slip through the fingers of the players, and occasionally
they direct a fine flash of illumination upon a big passage
(Bennett, 1911, in Hecht, 124-5).
Maurice Browne, in his 1911 review cited ear1ier, recognized the Hull-
House Players as one of the most important theatres In America, and
he later credited them as the pioneers of the American Uttle Theatre
Movement.
Another gauge of the Dramatic Association's increasing
acceptance of American elite values Is its choice of plays. Admit-
tedly, Pelham, guided by Addams's social and artistic Ideals, was
most likely responsible for the plays chosen, but the group showed
remarkable continuity over its first twelve years, suggesting that
opposition to play selection could not have been too strenuous.
When the group reorganized under Pelham in 1900, its first produc-
tion was a melodrama, The Mountain Pink, In which Pelham had
toured with her own professional company in the 1880's. This play
was a popular success in the immigrant neighborhood, being essen-
tially a live version of the moving-picture melodramas with which they
were familiar. However, Addams could not have been pleased with
this production, because she denounced melodramatic moving pic-
tures in her essay on movies and drama In The Spirit of Youth and
the City Streets. The Dramatic Association produced only a few
more melodramas, moving to mainly comedies for the next several
seasons. In her 1916 essay, Pelham apologetically justified these
early productions as useful in building the skills lacking in her com-
pany (Pelham, 251 ). In 1904, the Dramatic Association produced
Ben Jonson's pastoral The Sad Shepherd, revived by the Elizabethan
Stage Society in London in 1896 but new to America. The Associa-
tion gave the American premieres of several European dramas: they
presented several Ibsen plays and Shaw plays along with some by
Pinero, Hauptmann, Galsworthy, Synge, and Lady Gregory. By
191 o, local audiences had all but lost interest in these theatrical bills,
but they were increasingly popular with reviewers and progressive
uptown audiences.
In 1911, the Hull-House Players began a set of performances
of Irish plays that met with enormous success, credited by Mrs.
Pelham--at least in part--to the Irish parentage of six of the Players.
During the 1911 tour of the Abbey Players to Chicago, the groups
saw each others' work and a mutual respect and friendship
developed between the two companies, culminating In an invitation
to the Hull-House Players to come to Ireland. The influence of the
Abbey Theatre on American theatre in general and on Hull-House
specifically was great. The Hull-House Players admired the Irish style
of playing, the amateur commitment (Pelham, 255-6), and, perhaps
77
most Important, the dedication to creating a national drama. The
Hull-House Players, as have many contemporary theatre scholars,
became acutely aware of the lack of, and consequent need for, an
American national theatre. By their 1911-12 season, the Hull-House
Players considered themselves to be American. Even the Irish-
Americans among them were reinforced In their American Identity by
meeting the Abbey Players. The Players also recognized their posi-
tion on the cutting edge of American theatre and began to consider
courses of action. The reviewers' responses, the play selection, and
finally the 1912 self-Identification as a leader in American theatre are
all signs of the Players journey through Addams's third stage of
Americanization.
These three steps--validating old-country traditions and
alliances, ethnically integrating groups by Interest and abUity, and
finally promoting elite American values-were the central ideological
process supported by all of Hull-House's activities. Crucial to the
democracy that Addams promoted was the consent of the governed.
Although she saw Americanization as inevitable, the only effective
way to speed the process was to teach the immigrant groups to want
Americanization themselves. Then Individuals' self-respect could be
maintained along with the best aspects of foreign cultures as groups
moved through the stages and became integrated into American life.
But what was the next step for settlement groups having com-
pleted the Americanization process? The example of the Hull House
Players is interesting because it reached this point early, perhaps by
1912. Mina Carson In her Settlement Folk describes a contradiction
in the nature of the settlement that was brought into focus by artistic
achievements. Arts were endorsed by all settlements for their use In
Individual development, to replace the lure of city streets, to provide
moral education, to guide healthy social interaction, and to bring
high culture for its own sake to the urban poor.
As the settlement workers put their ideals of art into practice,
they stumbled once again into a contradiction that became
an open debate by the 1920's .... They eventually had to
confront the consequences of toppling one kind of
aristocracy in favor of another (Carson, 117).
One level of this contradiction appeared In the guise of the artistically
gifted, whose needs were not met by social arts programs, while
courses designed for the gifted could not bring the arts to all people.
Because settlers believed in both the mobility granted to the very
best by artistic achievement and the general ownership of the arts by
all people, they were forced to adopt, in Carson's words, bifurcated
arts programs: -rhe performing arts were refractory to 'demo-
78
cratization'; they stubbornly Imposed their own hierarchy (Carson,
117).
Within the artificial, surface equality existing In settlements
between resident workers and local residents, hierarchy was always
disguised or made benign by its supposed status as a temporary
guardianship until the poor were fit to make good choices for them-
selves. Significantly, this endpoint was not defined. By the end of
the 1920's, due In large part to conflicts that emerged over special-
Ization In the arts, social settlement workers had to abandon the
charade of their equality with their clients. Social work became
professional, with paid staff replacing volunteers, Institutions taking
over the experimental, shifting settlement programs, and staff living
in their own neighborhoods while working in slums.
Although the formation of the Hull-House Dramatic Associa-
tion as an advanced theatrical group In 1900 seemed to be an effec-
tive solution for two different artistic tracks, a new conflict question-
ing settlement hierarchy arose in 1914. The Hull-House Players now
saw themselves as capable of participating In artistic democracy
without a settlement-provided, elite guardian, and they perceived
their leader Pelham as falling behind the times. Although the group
had for many years elected officers to the positions of president, sec-
retary, and business manager, Pelham, as the appointed director,
seemed to wield the real power over policy. In May 1914, Mrs. Pel-
ham sent notices of disbandment to the Players, who were surprised
to receive them and appealed to Addams, who responded that the
House held no opinion on the matter but that they could not be dis-
banded without [their] consent (Hale letter, Jane Addams Papers, 5
November 1914, 2). The conditions leading to Pelham's letter are not
documented, but on 10 June 1914, the Players submitted a Report
of Special Committee on Constitutional Revision and Pol icy, drafted
by a committee (the names of the members are lost) after consulting
with all members. The report referred to artistic and policy disagree-
ments with the director. Partly to avoid any personal attacks, it
focused on changing artistic standards:
[Today] the standard of acting demanded is higher, the fin-
ish and the polish must be greater, the staging more in
harmony with the production. Crudities of acting and mount-
ing that five years ago passed muster because they were
naturalistic to-day writhe under the reviewer's lash. No
longer are good intentions accepted for good productions
\Report ... , 3).
The report further advocated the emerging modern theatrical princi-
ple of the fusing of every part, every line, every property, every set-
ting into one composite whole. The goal of these artistic changes
79
was to "occupy a unique place In the dramatic life of the city" and to
"strive to approach the best professional standards" ("Report ... , 3).
The members' view of their mission had clearty expanded from being
a Hull-House educational vehicle to participating in civic life as
experts and innovators in the field of theatre.
The committee's report began by giving a history of the Hull-
House Players that covered the years before Pelham took over, but
were never mentioned in press releases. It continued by cataloguing
a universal feeling of discontent with the season of 1913-14.
Although "it has not endeavored to fix the blame":
on the one hand, we have the director declaring that the
"temperament Is gone and seeking to disband the present
organization. On the other, we have the members of the
company willing, anxious to continue their work, but
thoroughly disgusted with the slovenly, slip-shod way In
which the company has drifted the present season ("Report .
. . 4).
In spite of the disclaimer, it is hard to see the last sentence as any-
thing but an indictment of Pelham's leadership. The report
addressed several specific disagreements with Pelham. First, it sug-
gested that her "unwarranted assumption of authority" was as much
the Players' own fault for acquiescing ("Report ... , 5). The report
also disapproved of Pelham's proposal to enlarge the company,
claiming that the current members did not get enough work In the
last year and disagreeing with her that new "types were needed. It
argued against the validity of types In the theatre on both mental and
physical grounds. The former it saw as an Insult:
It implies that only some are mentally endowed to play the
gentleman: that some have the Intelligent earmarks of the
crook or the rowdy; that only some can portray the lady of
breeding and refinement, while the brains of others can
understand only the feelings and actions of a school girl or
parlor maid \Report . . . 6-7).
Physical types were mere stereotypes, with many exceptions,
claimed the report writers. Pelham's desire for more actors in the
Players was summed up as a slur on the training we have received"
("Report ... ," 8), a remark that turned the perceived insult back on
Pelham herself.
Much of the discontent of the previous year was attributed to
the lack of a goal, in stark contrast to the season of 1912-13 during
which the Players were working to earn money for their European
trip. Members of the company suggested a new goal for future sea-
80
sons: fostering American drama. The committee recognized the
diversity of American culture as a necessary part of any native
drama, and recommended that the Players should search for any
type of American play that Is true to the section of life It represents
and above all--plays with an idea (Report ... : 10). Invoking the
name of Hull-House as social laboratory, the committee believed that
its theatre should simllarty be a native drama laboratory.
In order to effect all of these changes, the report recom-
mended a radical restructuring of the Players' government and
policies. The Players had assimUatec:l the Hull-House Ideal of democ-
racy so efficiently that they were now ready to exercise It fully in the
area of their expertise. The new Constitution they drew up named
five officers, including the director; all but the director would be
elected, but the appointment of the director by Hull-House would be
subject to the Players' approval. Also, the director would serve on
no committee and have no voting rights. Many of Pelham's powers
were redistributed to committees, Including the choice of numbers
and titles of plays each season. Three other committees were pro-
posed: Business, Publicity, and Extension (Outreach); Robert's
Rules of Order were suggested as the parliamentary guide; and a
greater financial responsibility to Hull-House-twenty-five percent of
all proceeds-was recommended.
Hecht, In his analysis of this situation, wrote:
Intentional or not, the recommended reforms challenged the
artistry and authority of Laura Dainty Pelham. . . . She pen-
cilled Into the report corrections which, while agreeing to
present more American dramas, otherwise aborted the revi-
sions. Pelham thus prevented the Players from wresting art-
istic control from her (p. 137).
The penciled corrections in the extant copy of the Constitution were
most likely written by Pelham, since they exempt the director from
the rules binding other members, take away the group's authority to
overturn the appointment of a director, restore the director's vote,
place the director on the Play Production Committee, and limit the
president's authority.
The Players reaction to Pelham's editing of their Constitution is
undocumented, but they evidently felt strongly about their own ability
and need to guide the group's next actions. In the summer of 1914,
while Pelham was vacationing In Europe, the Players issued a press
release announcing a playwriting contest for new American plays,
the best of which they would produce In September; they hired a
director for the summer; they produced four native one-acts with the
apparent blessing of Hull-House; and they announced a tabor pia(
for later In the fall . Hecht suggests that this frenzy of activity was an
81
attempt to build proof of the justness of their demands In order to
convince Pelham on her return. However, when Pelham arrived In
Chicago, Addams reinstated her as leader in spite of the Players'
summer Initiative.
As a final gesture toward self-determination, the Players voted
to disband In the first week of November 1914 and give the contents
of their bank account directly to Jane Addams rather than to the new
group that would continue with the same name under Pelham's lead-
ership. They also issued a press release about the dissolution of the
group, ostensibly to update the earlier ones, In which they said that
.. the majority of the members are planning to continue their work of
producing original American plays under other auspices. This plan
does not seem to have materialized. A reporter for the Chicago
Herald smelled a scandal and wrote an expose titled Real Scenario
at Hull-House .. in which he quoted Sidney Hale, the author of the
press release, as saying .. Many players were dissatisfied with Pel-
ham's rule and quoted Pelham as saying: Hull-House Players dis-
banded? Not that I know of. They will be here In one hour for
rehearsal; that doesn't look as if they had disbanded (5 November
1914). Hale claimed in a letter to Addams that he spoke to the
reporter only off the record and even so was misquoted, and he
protested his loyalty to Hull-House.
Pelham, in her 1916 account of the Players, makes no mention
of the incidents of 1914, In spite of the fact that half the Players there
before and during 1914 never worked at Hull-House again and some
formerly consistent members returned gradually or worked sporadi-
cally with her afterwards. The next Hull-House Yearbook, the 1916
issue, does not mention officers of the Players and refers to the
rebellion of 1914 with the line .. Following the European tour a
reorganization of the company was effected (p. 43). Also, Pelham's
name was moved to the top of subsequent playbills. Because of
Addams's Intervention, Pelham's refusal to admit the discontinuity,
and the dulling effects of time, the rebellion was all but erased.
The Players' rebellion was understandably a threat to Laura
Dainty Pelham. She had put fourteen years of service Into the group
and, through her skills as an artist, a manager, and a publicist, had
certainly brought them to the point where they were in 1914.
Addams's support of Pelham instead of the Players is less easy to
understand. Hecht says, It is ironic that Hull-House, while recog-
nizing the Players' artistic accomplishment, proved unable to accept
the social equivalent of that accomplishment (p. 140), and he sug-
gested that the best explanation for Addams's choice to keep Pel-
ham In her old role is that the Players no longer balanced artistic and
social concerns, but justified their work, in their constitutional com-
mittee report for example, in strictly artistic terms (p. 142). One
might easily disagree with that conclusion, since developing
82
American theatre was as much a social as artistic goal. and their
press releases of the summer of 1914 worded their choices as much
socially as artistically. for example In their decision to perform a
"labor play for their next bBl. Rather. Addams's inability to side with
the Players might have stemmed from her unwUiingness to give up
her model of settlement workers as the guides for a class unable to
make its own decisions. It seems to be a case of settlements' demo-
cratic and hierarchical tendencies coming into conflict, which
became an openly debated problem In the 1920's.
Hull-House promoted Individuals' rise In the social ranks, but
the first group to want to determine Its own direction appeared to be
a possible threat. Whereas an individual talent In music or visual arts
could be encouraged to advance and be assimilated Into middle-
class America, the Hull-House Players as a group challenged upper-
middle-class authority and took artistic control into their own capable
hands, immediately suggesting production of American dramas and
a labor play. There is perhaps a parallel In settlement response to
unions: Addams and other settlers promoted unionizing but also
promoted legislation to limit the powers of unions, leaving them
under governmental contra and the government under the control of
the "better element, in other words, upper-middle-class, white Anglo
Saxon Protestants (Ussak, 23).
Theatre at Hull-House could not help but lead toward greater
Americanization of its participants. In its nature as a group activity
combining many peoples' talents, it was extremely effective in
moving quickly through the three stages of the process. It also
inevitably became stratified into its educational and social com-
ponents on the one hand and its highly talented, rapidly developing
minority on the other. But, as a group, the Players eventually came
to challenge the leadership and propose democratic self-
determination. The Hull-House Players, by 1914, were no longer
safely under the ideological thumb of Hull-House. though Addams
still had enough power to silence the voices that she had cultivated,
which she effectively did by reinstating Pelham in the fall of 1914.
Ironically, Browne, In his 1911 review of Justice cited at the top of
this essay, credited Pelham with having ,he power of making genius
articulate" (p. 90). Pelham and Addams also retained the power to
silence genius where it proved Inconvenient for their limited demo-
cratic goals.
Works ConsuHed
Addams, Jane. "Child Labor on the Stage. Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Supplement, vol.
38, July 1911 , 60-65.
83
--. Forty Years at Hull-House. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1935 .
. Jane Addams on Education. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, ed.
Classics in Education, no. 51. New York: Teachers College
Press, 1985.
"Public Recreation and Social Morality. Charities and the
Commons,18, 3 August 1907,492-94.
---. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1972. Reprint of 1909 edition.
---. "Stage Children. The SuNey, 3 December 191 0, 342-43.
Browne, Maurice. "The Hull-House Players In 'Justice. The Theatre
Magazine, June 1911, 89-90.
Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, ed. The Jane Addams Papers. University
Microfilms International, 1985, Reel7.
Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American
Settlement Movement 1885-1930. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1990.
Collier, John. "The Stage, a New Wortd." The SuNey, June 3, 1916,
251-260.
Davis, Allen F. American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane
Addams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
---. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the
Progressive Movement 1890-1914. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967.
Hecht, Stuart Joel. Hull-House Theatre: An Analytical and Evaluative
History. NU Dissertation, 1983.
Hull-House Bulletins and Yearbooks, 1896-1916. Hull-House
Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago. See especially
"Hull-House Players," p. 37-39 in 1913 yearbook and p. 43-45
In 1916 yearbook.
The Jane Addams Papers. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, ed. Copyright,
University of Illinois, Chicago. University Microfilms Interna-
tional, 1985. Series 1, Reel 7, frames 543-3, 1680-3, 1693.
Originals in Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
Lasch, Christopher. The Social Thought of Jane Addams.
Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965.
Lissak, Rivka Shpak. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and
the New Immigrants, 1890-1919. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989.
Levine, Daniel. Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition. Madison,
WI : State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971.
Pelham, laura Dainty. "The Story of the Hull-House Players. Drama
Magazine, May 1916,249-263.
"Real Scenario at Hull-House." Chicago Herald, 5 November 1914,
City News Ticker page.
84
"Report of Special Committee on Constitutional Revision and Polley"
and "(Proposed) Constitution of the Hull-House Players. 10
June 1914. Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Collec-
tion also contains letters from Pelham to five rebelling
Players inviting them back, dated 29 September 1914.
Rich, J. Dennis. Art Theatre In Hull-House." In Women In American
Theatre. Eds. Helen Krich Chinoy and Unda Walsh Jenkins.
Rev. and Exp. ed. New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 1987.
85
PANDEMIC AND POPULAR OPINION:
SPIROCHETE IN SEATTLE
Barry B. Witham
In the midst of the pandemic AIDS, it may be instructive to
recall how the theatre in the United States responded to a similar
pandemic, syphilis, fifty years ago. And how the Federal Theatre pro-
ject's "Living Newspapers, which prided themselves on their social
relevancy, undertook to dramatize the history of that plague as well
as to educate their audiences about Its terrifying consequences. This
paper will focus on the production of Arnold Sundgaard's
Spirochete, which was produced under the auspices of the Seattle
Federal Theatre in February-March 1939.
Spirochete originally was staged by the Chicago unit of the
WPA theatre in April 1938 during a nationwide "war" on syphilis that
had been announced in December 1936 by Thomas Parron, the
Surgeon General of the United States.
1
The campaign Included a
national conference on venereal disease, newspaper and magazine
articles, state laws requiring premarital blood tests, and a huge
increase in the number of health clinics and treated cases of syphilis.
In Chicago, the blood-test campaign, which had been Initiated In
1937, was conducted in the lobby of the Blackstone Theatre where
Spirochete was being performed. The campaign also included
parades, radio programs, and an official unlucky day for syphilis on
13 August (a Friday). Later, officials estimated that, between 1937
and 1940, 31 percent of the population in Chicago was tested, result-
ing In the discovery and treatment of 56,000 cases of syphilis, all at
public expense.
2
The reason for this war, was the epic proportions that
syphilis had reached by the 1930's, thanks In part to public
ignorance. Like AIDS, syphilis was a major killer aided In its lethal
contagion by sexual taboos, notions of what constituted decorum,
and a widespread view that the disease was ghettoized among per-
verts and Negroes. So fearful was the general population about
syphilis that the word itself did not appear In print in commercial
magazines until1937 (Colliers). Newspapers, politicians, physicians,
and others who undertook to educate the public ran the risk of an
enormous backlash of popular opinion. In the Philadelphia produc-
tion of Spirochete, for example, Christopher Columbus, a character
86
in the play, was not Identified by name because of heavy pressure
from the Knights of Columbus, who did not wish him to be be-
smirched.3
In Seattle, the situation was typical of other regions of the United
States. Incidents of reported syphilis cases had risen during the
decade (from 847 in 1931 to 1,232 in 1939), and deaths averaged
more than fifty a year.
4
There were inadequate clinical facUlties to
identify and treat Infected persons--only two In the entire city In
1930--and syphilis was routinely perceived by a large portion d the
population to be a problem among the lower classes, Negroes and
prostitutes. Washington, like many other states, had no laws requir-
ing premarital or prenatal blood tests, and monthly reports about
communicable diseases from the King County Medical Society did
not have a category for venereal diseases.
By 1938, however, things had begun to change. The medical
profession, in spite of fears of socialized medicine and public
health, was beginning to support a more enlightened view about
venereal disease, and state legislators were preparing bills to require
mandatory blood tests for both expectant mothers and marriage
applicants. Senate BUis 373 and 374 were officially entered Into the
debate of the Washington Senate in the fall of 1938 and made their
way through the legislative process concurrently with the Federal
Theatre run of Spirochete.
It was not a journey without controversy because Seattle, like
other communities in the United States, also was embroiled in the
debate about private vs. public medicine, and syphilis was the ideal
field on which many of the issues were played out. The Seattle
Provisional Health Committee, for example, recently had been
organized to raise support for the Wagner National Health Act, which
was bitterly opposed by the American Medical Association. s And the
records of the King County Medical Society reflect the tension
between organized private practice and the need to have an active
public health presence to fight venereal disease.
Because syphUis was perceived as an Immoral disease (or fre-
quently as punishment for sin) doctor-patient confidentiality was
paramount for many patients, and they and their doctors were totally
opposed to government or public health interference. However, as
Thomas Parran had argued so eloquently in his book, Shadow on
the Land, the only way to wipe out the epidemic was to track down
all the infected parties.6 In addition, the economic aspects of the
private-public debate were also consequential. Syphilis was expen-
sive to treat and private practitioners could charge up to $25 per
treatment, whereas an ordinary office visit might be three dollars.
Treatment was cheaper at clinics where the medication Salversan
was available, but the patient lost anonymity. Moreover, the
laboratory fees for such procedures as the Wasserman test could be
87
set by the private doctors as opposed to the determined rates at the
public laboratories. It would be unfair to characterize all doctors as
profiting from this situation but, for many, syphilis was clearty a cash
cow:
An examination of the records kept at the King County Medical
Society in Seattle as the premiere of the Federal Theatre's
Spirochete approached provides some Interesting facts. In February
1939, the Society Bulletin reported on the recent meeting of the
Ladies Auxiliary of the Society, at which time there was a discussion
of Senate Bills 373 and 374 {for prenatal and premaritaJ syphilis test-
ing). Dr. Raymond Zeck Is quoted as telling the members that, ,he
bill requiring blood tests before marriage will be backed by the medi-
cal profession but not pushed too hard as we might lose all In an
attempt to accomplish too much.
7
This conservative position Is very
telling because it illustrates the dilemma of the medical profession
when confronted with both the need to eradicate syphilis and the
threat of government control and socialized medicine. The Wagner
National Health Act, which had been Introduced the year before and
which provided, among other things, for nationwide subsidized
health care, was still very much under discussion and attack by the
AMA.
The King County Medical Society, however, supported the
syphilis bills and pushed for both education and understanding
among its members. A February editorial in the Bulletin argued that
for some time perceptions about syphilis had been changing and
that the medical profession should do everything in its power to
assist this spreading of information and education of the public.a
Furthermore, under its Legislation column, the Bulletin assured
readers that neither the prenatal bill nor the premarital bill is
intended to regulate the practice of medicine and that the bills
should be of considerable interest to the medical profession and
merit its consideration, thought and constructive criticism (p. 15).
The Bulletin also discusses Spirochete and alerts its readers to the
fact that the production has the full support of the various depart-
ments of health and that tickets have been reserved by the Ladies
Auxiliary for a special eighty-seven cent price on Monday, 13 Febru-
ary. There was considerable anticipation about this play from the
Federal Theatre that would address in honest terms the plague of
syphilis.
For the Seattle unit, it was an apt moment. The theatre had
struggled after the 1937 WPA cuts and the subsequent loss of some
of its most inventive members. Its move to an out-of-the-way movie
house had restricted the audiences, and the project was struggling
to stay vital In spite of the work of Esther Porter Lane, the personal
emissary of Hallie Flanagan. Fortunately, the new State Director,
Edwin O'Connor, was a tireless and motivated leader who believed
88
that he could revive the project and that Spirochete was the ldnd of
production that would be very successful in Seattle. O'Connor, who
was planning an ambitious season that Included An Evening With
Dunbar, See How They Run, and Ah Wilderness, borrowed a young
director named Richard Glyer from the Los Angeles project to direct
Spirochete and began an aggressive campaign to mount local sup-
port and sponsorship for the production. O'Connor enlisted the state
and local medical associations and boards of health and the
Women's Auxiliary of the King County Medical Society. Although
many of the records of those groups are no longer extant, it is pos
sible to piece together an interesting picture of the ways In which the
various agencies worked together to promote the production.
O'Connor's principal concern was that the promotion of the
pl ay not concentrate on the sex angle. At the same time, he
wanted to attract large audiences and instructed the publicity depart-
ment "to prevent the impression being formed that this was merely a
kind of educationallecture.9 Approximately 35,000 handbUis were
distributed throughout the city--many through doctors' offices and
hospitals--which stressed that this was not a show for ,he prurient
nor the prude. The handbill also stressed that the syphilis plague
had been allowed to spread because of a confused moral code.
Audiences were assured, however, that they would experience stage
effects that have taken months in the building, with the best that can
be brought to the stage of music, lighting, acting and stagecraft.10
O'Connor also had 3,500 posters placed on utility poles and in
store windows throughout the city, and both the Board of Health and
the medical associations bought air time for local radio programs.
Ten programs--each fifteen minutes long--were produced using
scenes from the play, while other stations made spot announce-
ments. Streetcar advertising was also used, and special discount
tickets were included in the pay checks for all King County WPA
employees. O'Connor pointed out that this was the first time that the
whole WPA work force was targeted in this manner.
The dramatic strategy" of Spirochete Is to lead the viewer
through a history of syphilis from the voyage of Columbus to the
action of the Illinois legislature in 1937 via an Everyman character
called the Patient. While the historical scenes are interesting in
illustrating the pernicious nature of the disease, the play is most
effective when it addresses contemporary notions of syphilis and
tries to lay the groundwork for the passage of legislation affecting
marriage laws. Consider, for example, the following scene between
Dr. Metchnikoff and an indignant reformer, which is set in 1906 but
which resonates very clear1y in the 1930's.
REFORMER: Syphilis is the penalty for sin! You are about
to remove that penalty and plunge the wor1d into an
89
orgy of sinful living. Man will be free to pursue his lust-
ful impulses with no thought of any physical wrath being
Inflicted on him.
METCHNIKOFF: And it's a horrible, ghastly penalty, you'll
admit. A more horrible one could never be devised,
could it?
REFORMER: I could think of none worse.
METCHNIKOFF: Then why in God's name hasn't it put an
end to sin? . . . When all your moral prophylactics have
failed to prevent the spread of this disease you wish to
suppress a chemical one.
REFORMER: That's not the way to look at it.
METCHNIKOFF: Telling people it's sinful hasn't stopped it
from striking one out of every ten persons you meet on
the street!
REFORMER: Yes, but if they wouldn't sin ...
METCHNIKOFF: If they wouldn't sin! The real sin would be
to keep this discovery from the world. The real sin
would be withholding a cure when one was available!
REFORMER: You must think of people's morals.
METCHNIKOFF: Morals be damned! You think of morals
and I'll think of their illnesses. 11
As the play attempts to demolish popular prejudices about the
disease, it confronts the many taboos that had prevented the word
"syphilis" from even being spoken In public. The following sequence
is from the first legislature scene, which is based on actual delibera-
tions from the Illinois legislature in 1933.
FIRST LEGISLATOR: The proposition Is to add an amend-
ment to the law In relation to marriage. This modern
amendment to an old law would require persons of both
sexes to present a medical certificate stating that they
are free from venereal diseases. In submitting this
amendment I wish to call attention to the great damage
done by syphilis and gonorrhea each year. Statistics
show that syphilis and gonorrhea ...
90
SECOND LEGISLATOR: Mr. Speaker, I object to the terms
being employed in this discussion.
FIRST LEGISLATOR: To what terms do you refer?
SECOND LEGISLATOR: It should be quite obvious to what
terms I refer.
FIRST LEGISLATOR: Unless you can be more specific I
shall continue the speech begun. I see nothing objec-
tionable in it.
SECOND LEGISLATOR: Well, I do. I may be old-fashioned
and come from a small town, but I still believe that the
dignity of the legislature should not be besmirched by
anything so patently revolting. The diseases to which
references have been made are incompatible with any-
thing above the level of bar-room talk. Furthermore,
most of us are fathers of children who would sooner or
later be subject to this Infamous law. How many of
us would wish them to be humiliated by an examination
before the most sacred, the most holy moment of their
lives? . . . In the name of decency I demand that this
discussion be dropped at once!
FIRST LEGISLATOR: Mr. Speaker, with all ~ u respect to
my sensitive colleague, I insist that the greatest menace
confronting public health today Is syphilis. Each year
its deadly effect on the social structure becomes more
apparent.
SPEAKER: Pardon me, but are you really serious In what
you're saying or is this some sort of joke?
FIRST LEGISLATOR: I've never been more serious In my
life! (pp. 74-5)
At this point, a long scene Illustrating how undiagnosed
syphilis results in job loss, broken marriages, and even blindness in
children interrupts the debate In the Illinois legislature, which in 1937
reached a climactic decision--a decision that was being anticipated
in the state of Washington even as the events were unfolding on the
stage of the Seattle Federal Theatre in 1939. The "Second Legis-
lator," who figured so prominently in opposing the idea of premarital
bills, now--four years later--has seen the light.
91
I admit it. I admit my own former blindness to facts that
ought to have been obvious to all of us. . . . During the past
four years I have learned many things. My eyes have been
opened to the flagrant weakness of any system that allows
its people to suffer year after year. Let's be truthful with our-
selves .... Nice people do get syphUis. And I say that the
difference between those who do and those who don't Is
misfortune and nothing else (pp. 89-90).
The legislation Is passed unanimously and the Speaker of the House
urges the people and the audience to take up the battle, to stop
whispering and begin talking about It . .. and talking out loud (p.
90).
In spite of the fervor of Spirochete, there Is a curious absence
in the text that is important to note in placing this production in a
larger cultural context. There is virtually no critique of the medical
profession in the play; in fact, doctors are portrayed as heroic figures
struggling against public ignorance. Nowhere Is there reference to
the battle lines that were being drawn between the AMA and New
Deal social-welfare policies, or the difficulties of fighting syphilis
because of the anonymity of doctor-patient confidentiality. The
closest thing to a villain in the piece--other than Ignorance--Is a capi-
talist system that does not prize the worker, only the amount of labor
that a worker can produce.
In Seattle, Spirochete was performed by 37 cast members,
with a great deal of doubling to fill out the 79 speaking parts. In an
effort to create a stronger sense of flow, a Hammond organ was
placed in the orchestra pit with speakers flanking the stage, and
Howard Biggs composed an original score to link the scenes and
underscore action. Several sections in the text were rewritten or
restructured to intensify the drama although, once again, Christopher
Columbus was not identified by name. According to the Production
Report, however, we indicated the time, place and Columbus' rank
as well as the type of his ship--a caravel (p. 4).
The biggest change from previous productions was the treat-
ment of the legislative scenes. Uke many of the Living Newspapers,
Spirochete brought the events up to the present day and concluded
with the legislators voting on the premarital bill. Glyer and O'Connor
felt that the first legislative scene had to be rewritten so that the
audience would not sympathize with the legislator who is arguing
against passage of the bill. 'We decided to satirize such a character,
and in fact all the legislature. . . . The entire scene was rewritten into
a sort of doggerel blank verse of a rather low-comic variety. . . . The
pillars, the rostrum and even the legislators themselves were set off
the vertical (Production Report, p. 6). The final scene was also
92
rewritten, but the satire was softened In order to stress the final
important speech.
The satire may have been lost on some viewers, or perhaps It
was not as broad as O'Connor suggests. Z.A. Vane, the House Rep-
resentative from the Twenty-ninth District, wrote to O'Connor that
"the Legislative scene naturally made quite an appeal to me and I
must say quite authentic and effective. . . . This scene was quite typi-
cal and very unique.
1
2 Vane also sent along several prop bHis so
that the actors could have added authenticity.
Spirochete was the biggest hit in the history of the Seattle pro-
ject. Its total attendance-2,956--exceeded by nearly a thousand any
previous production that the project had done In the Metropaitan
Theatre.
1
3 The project grossed slightly more than $1 ,000, which was
$400 more than It had made on any other show. People who were
employed by the WPA were admitted for ten cents, and they
represented a large part of the turnout. Their total of 941 was more
than the combined attendance of the three previous productions in
the Metropolitan. Edwin O'Connor wrote that It was ,he most suc-
cessful thing in every respect that the Seattle Federal Theatre has
ever done."
14
The newspaper reviews were less-enthusiastic. Most com-
mented on the structure of the piece or the technical production and
praised many of the performers. J. Willis Sayre in the Seattle Post-
lntelligencer reported that it was very entertaining but that rather
than a play it is an historicallecture.
1
5 And Gilbert Brown remarked
that it was an important play but "infernally dull and rather sloppily
acted."
1
6 Particularly interesting are the reactions of the medical
profession to Spirochete. In April 1939, the Bulletin of the King
County Medical Society reported on the event in its Woman's
Auxiliary column.
On Monday, February 13, the auxiliary took over a block of
seats at the Metropolitan Theatre to see the Federal Theatre
production of Spirochete. We sold 150 tickets which netted
our treasury $37.50.
In asking a number of those who attended that evening
how they liked the play, I received a great difference of
opinion. I did not enjoy it at all. It seemed to be an
uninteresting play, very amateurishly done and accompanied
by organ music that drowned out the voices and nearly split
my ear drums with the constant vibration of the loud speaker
hook-up. And I agreed with several who said, 'if that man
says 1n the Year of our Lord" once more, I'll simply scream!'
I must confess that, although there were a number of
people who seemed to be of the same opinion as I, there
were also quite a few who said that they thought it was good
93
for us to see It and even some said they really enjoyed it.
So, maybe It was my dinner and not the play that was no
good.17 .
Apparently, Hallie Flanagan, the National Director of the
Theatre Project, would have agreed with this last remark. She saw a
rehearsal of Spirochete and was so Impressed that she could not
believe that this was the same company that she had seen a year
before.
18
Legislation to mandate syphilis testing was passed by the
Washington State House and Senate and signed by the governor In
March 1939. In order to give physicians time to familiarize them-
selves with the new laws, their effective date was set for 2 January
1940. The Bulletin of the King County Medical Society urged its
members to comply with all aspects of the law and cautioned, 1f the
medical profession cannot prove itself willing and able to reduce the
incidence of these diseases by a sincere effort in the public health
phase of control, then some government agency will take over. It is
up to us:
19
Invigorated by the success of Spirochete, the Seattle unit of the
Federal Theatre Project began writing and rehearsing a new Uving
Newspaper based upon the lumber industry and vanishing forests.
But Timber never opened. In August 1939, the United States Con-
gress refused to continue the nationwide project, and America's brief
experiment with a subsidized theatre was over. Spirochete was not
revived; its mission had been accomplished. But a re-reading of this
plague drama Is disquieting. It took nearly 500 years to find a cure
for syphilis. Its ravages were accompanied by silence and prudery
about sex, ignorance and prejudice about illness, and greed and
sexism about medicine. The Surgeon General of the United States,
an otherwise enlightened man, refused on moral grounds to recom-
mend condoms to prevent the spread of syphilis. 20 Fifty years later,
the resonances are sobering.
Endnotes
1
For an excellent review of the Chicago and Philadelphia
productions, see JohnS. O'Connor, spirochete and the War on
Syphilis, TDR, (March 1977), 91-98.
2Aifan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet (New York: Oxford,
1985), 152.
3John O'Connor, p. 96. In subsequent FTP productions and
the printed text of the play, there Is reference to a sea captain in
1493.
94
4Annual Report and Survey, Seattle Health and Sanitation
Department, ed. Ragnar T. Westman, Seattle, 1939.
ssee letter from Harriet Silverman of the New York Con-
ference to Cynthia Ulrich of the Seattle Committee outlining plans for
New York support of the Wagner Act, dated 28 April 1939, In Robert
E. Burke Collection, University of Washington Ubraries, Folder 128
Health.
6Thomas Parron, Shadow on the Land (New York: Keynal
and Hitchcock, 1937).
7 Bulletin of the King County Medical Society, 6 February
1939, p. 21.
8Bulletin, p. 4.
9Edwin O'Connor quoted In Production Report on
Spirochete, Seattle, Federal Theatre Archives, George Mason
University.
10HandbHI from Spirochete, Seattle, 1939.
11 Arnold Sundgaard, Spirochete, 1938, p. 62.
12Letter from Z.A. Vane to Edwin O'Connor, 21 February
1939, Federal Theatre Archives, Production Report on Spirochete,
George Mason University.
13These figures and subsequent statistics are taken from
Edwin O'Connor's letter to Howard J . Miller, 28 February 1939,
National Archives, Record Group 69, Washington State.
14
1bid.
15Seattle Post-lntelligencer, 14 February 1939.
16Seattle Star, 9 March 1939, p. 8.
17 Bulletin, April 1939, p. 19.
18Hallie Flanagan, Arena, p. 309.
19Bulletin, November 1939, p. 7.
20The New Republic, 8 July 1991, p. 40.
95
CONTRIBUTORS
Tl M FORT is an assistant professor in the Department of Drama at
Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.
MARK E. MALLETT is a member of the Ph.D. program of the Depart-
ment of Theater at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
SAMUEL L. LEITER Is a professor In the Department of Theater at
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
MELANIE N. BLOOD is an assistant professor in the Department of
Drama at the University of Georgia in Athens.
BARRY B. WITHAM is a professor in the School of Drama at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
96