The New Humor in the Progressive Era

Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian

R. DesRochers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137357427
• eBook ISBN: 9781137357182
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

By tracing the effects of unprecedented immigration, the advent of the new woman, and the little-known vaudeville careers of performers like the Elinore Sisters, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers, DesRochers examines the relation between comedic vaudeville acts and progressive reformers as they fought over the new definition of "Americanness."

1. Americanization: Progressive-Era Reformers, Cultural Critics, and Popular Comic Entertainments

In 1921, “the Four Marx Brothers and Company” presented a “musical revuette” titled On the Balcony.¹ The theatrical poster billed the show as “the comedy hit of the age; quaint characterization; humorous episodes; every type of vaudeville talent.” The opening scene, simply called the “The Theatrical Agency,” features the four brothers trying to persuade an agent to hire them for his latest vaudeville show. The scene was repeated for a film trailer with this added exchange featuring Groucho Marx: Speaking in a heavy Russian accent, Groucho entreats the theatrical manager with, “I vant to play a dramatic part, the kind that toucha a woman’s heart, to make her cry for me to die.” Chico Marx, portraying his now-iconic Italian-immigrant peasant character, cuts Groucho off in accented English: “Did you ever get hit with a cocoanuts [sic] pie?” Groucho, dropping character and his accent, turns to the camera and says, “There’s my argument. Restrict immigration.”² The seemingly absurd commentary on immigration inserted into a vaudeville scene—later re-created for the trailer of their 1931 Hollywood film Monkey Business—speaks to vaudeville comedians’ ability to comment directly on their status as ethnic immigrants, and to the xenophobia that attended Americanization during the early twentieth century.

Groucho was always aware of his status as the son of eastern European Jewish immigrants. This seeming non sequitur about restricting immigration was an overt criticism of the bigoted and hypocritical US immigration policies during the Progressive era. Groucho was directly affected by these restrictions that contradicted the very notion of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty.³ While traveling from England to the United States in 1931, Groucho joked that he was a smuggler to a customs officer. After a lengthy search of his family, his belongings, and himself, and several hours of detainment, Groucho was enraged at how he was treated and that he had been suspected as a criminal simply for telling a joke. He let loose his ire on immigration and customs officials, saying: “How about the Pilgrims, were they bothered with all this landing card and visa business? Did a guard stand on Plymouth Rock waiting for them?”⁴

Groucho Marx’s humor stemmed from his self-conception as an outsider in his own country. He pointed out the hypocrisy of discrimination and the marginalization of ethnic immigrants and their families, who had to prove that they were as American as their Anglo-American neighbors. The irony is that Groucho and the Marx Brothers would achieve unprecedented success on the comic stage as well as in the new media of film, radio, and television, becoming internationally famous examples of fulfilling the American dream of success, even through they did not fit the dominate ideal of Americanness.

It was during the Progressive era that a particular ideal of Americanness came to dominate middle-class ideals, thanks to the attempt by reformers, cultural critics, politicians, and local authorities to Americanize the newest citizens of the United States. How did Americanization take hold so successfully? Why was it deemed so essential in the formation of American identity during the first two decades of the twentieth century?

It began with the formation of a new middle class of Americans, precipitated by the expansion of a nonmanual working class and the repurposing of manual labor under the increasing advances in industry away from an agricultural and artisanal culture. This shift in the workforce created many factory-based, unskilled jobs that increased tedium in the workplace as well as leisure time and disposable income. Coupled with the unprecedented immigration of some 13 million new immigrants from 1886 to 1925, divisions between the working and middle classes arose along with the social marginalization attributed to ethnic heritage. This restructuring of the American workplace and the subsequent economic disparity raised questions with regard to cultural inclusion and national belonging.⁵

Before 1880 the vast majority of European immigration came from its northern and western countries. A major shift, however, occurred between the 1880s and 1900s, and the dominant immigrant groups now came from southern and eastern European nations. Until the early 1880s, almost 63 percent of European immigrants came from Belgium, Britain and Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Switzerland, compared to only about 37 percent from the southern and eastern regions. In 1882, almost 650,000 European immigrants entered the United States, with more than 13 percent coming from Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, and Turkey—countries that were then relatively unknown to Americans. By 1907, more than 80 percent of some 1.2 million European immigrants had come from these countries.⁶ The fear attending this new influx of immigrants was characterized by Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was quick to point out that the new immigrants were responsible for the “greatest relative increase from races most alien to the body of the American people,” and that “the shifting of the sources of the immigration” was “unfavorable,” bringing people who were “very difficult to assimilate” and did “not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States—a matter as serious as the effect on the labor market.”⁷

In addition to this new wave of immigration from these “unfavorable” countries, major paradigm shifts occurred during the first two decades of the twentieth century that contributed to the anxieties of a nation in flux and experiencing revolutionary changes in composition and character. Referring to a visit to the United States in 1900, an Englishman remarked, “Life in the States is one perpetual whirl of telephones, telegrams, phonographs, electric bells, motors, lifts, and automatic instruments.”⁸ From 1900 to 1910, Americans were inundated with new technologies and innovations with the advent of electric sewing machines, fans, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners. In addition they could purchase new inventions like irons, stoves, heaters, and phonographs. Telegraphs and telephones, with their instantaneous messaging, connected people all over the country. Movies began in earnest to attract mass audiences, and electric trolleys and elevated trains allowed consumers efficient and faster travel from rural and residential areas to enjoy new forms of leisure and entertainment in the urban core. By 1920, over eight million automobiles were sold, and the percentage of Americans living in cities increased dramatically from 35 percent in 1890 to more than 50 percent in 1920.

The post–Civil War era had given rise to large corporations and with them conflicts between management and labor. Resentments and anxieties were exacerbated when industrialists displaced independent small businessmen, farmers, and craftsmen. In response, the reforms of the Progressive movement began to influence local government in the 1890s, later expanding its influence to state and national government by the turn of the twentieth century. In 1915, Benjamin Parke De Witt, professor of English and government at New York University, wrote in his book The Progressive Movement that beginning in the late nineteenth century, “complex conditions that were bringing wealth to the magnate and the railroad king were bringing difficult social and economic problems to the masses of people . . . The individual could not hope to compete with the wealthy corporation which employed him.” He also noted with grim finality that “men became economic slaves . . . Slowly, Americans realized that they were not free.”⁹ Thus began an antagonism between capital and labor, working and bourgeois classes, new immigrants and nativist Americans.

De Witt, a member of the original Progressive Party, clearly articulated its agenda and that of the movement that took its name. Progressive-era reformers, he argued,

propose to regulate the employment of women and children in factories; to impose a maximum number of hours of work a day for men under certain conditions; to provide for workingmen in their old age and for their widows and orphans when their support is taken from them; to reduce or remove the tariff and substitute in its stead a system of taxation which will fall most heavily on those best able to bear it; to adopt a minimum wage law to strengthen the needy against temptation; to strike at poverty, crime, and disease; to do everything that government can do to make our country better, nobler, purer, and life more worth living.¹⁰

This political agenda, which countered that of the dominant Democratic and Republican parties, was noble in its intentions. It advocated for the underclasses of ethnic immigrants, as well as for women and children, and promoted the ideal of equal rights and treatment under the law for all American citizens regardless of their class, ethnicity, or gender. It should be noted that race and the rights of African Americans were not considerations for most Progressives.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a fundamental shift took place from small-town American cultural values of the 1880s to those of the new urban middle class. Industrialization and incorporation created a new bureaucratic, white-collar middle class that enforced productivity and the practical concerns of business and raising a family. The Progressive movement, according to social historian Robert H. Wiebe, produced “the need for a government of continuous involvement” and an emphasis on executive administration and regulation.¹¹ This need for a paternalistic government was reflected in the many reform organizations that developed during this period of middle-class ascendency. The values of the rural farms and small towns of the nineteenth century were being replaced by those of an urban, professional class of managers and supervisors. Reformers, cultural critics, and politicians, with the aid of law enforcement, called for changes in social and moral structures and legislation that would support industry and discourage individualism. The “company man” became the socioeconomic ideal of “making it” in America, along with moving from the working classes to the middle classes. Loyalty to bosses, corporate interests, and the bureaucracy that sustained this new “productive” system became more important than the pride in individual ownership and craftsmanship that characterized the US economic ethos only a few decades earlier.

Progressive-era reformers were members of this forward-looking new middle class who were touting their beliefs in the progress of America as a leader in industry, and economic prosperity in a “classless” society where opportunity was available to all. This idealized United States was meant to become a role model for the rest of the world. Progressive-era presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and later Woodrow Wilson—were determined to bring this moral and social authority to other nations under the guise of progress, which would become more and more like imperialism. The new immigrants would pose a threat to this Progressive agenda with their Old World values and customs. The new wave of immigrants was thought to undermine a forward-looking American culture with their presumed ignorance and backwardness. In reaction, a nativist movement began to permeate American middle-class society that appeared to have the new immigrants’ best interests at heart. Paternalism, however, began to set in as an effort to elevate and transform these new Americans began in earnest. Israel Zangwill, an Englishman who directed an emigration society for Russian Jews from Britain, wrote a play, The Melting-Pot, in 1908 that promoted the assimilationist ideal of Americanization. As Progressive-era historian John Higham notes, the moral of the play was that America was “God’s fiery crucible, consuming the dross of Europe and fusing all of its warring peoples into ‘the coming superman.’” In 1907, University of Wisconsin sociologist E. A. Ross wrote, in Sin and Society, that American culture must “establish righteousness” through an activist government. His tract would become a call for immigration restriction and the Americanization of already-established immigrants.¹²

A more benevolent attitude toward immigration and the future of Americans came in the form of Randolph Bourne and Walter Lippmann, who would become the intellectual spokesmen of liberal and Progressive politics and culture in the United States during the early twentieth century. As Lippmann’s fellow cofounder of the New Republic, Herbert Croly, recommended in The Promise of American Life (1909), America’s future “will have to be planned and constructed rather than fulfilled of its own momentum.”¹³ Bourne and Lippmann attempted to construct that plan.

One of the central conflicts of the Progressive era was the concept of Americanization and how it was to be achieved. From Bourne and Lippmann, we can examine the notion of the constrained and confined social values that were part of the Americanization process promoted by Progressive-era reformers and authorities. The public intellectuals’ response to sociocultural paradigm shifts before World War I was to form a new vision of politics and a new culture for Americans. As cultural conditions changed with the development of corporate trusts, the new labor movement, and the continued domination of institutional needs over that of individuals, theorists like Bourne and Lippmann began to formulate new philosophies of politics and culture that would embrace a progressive liberal agenda.

Such thinkers came out of the upheaval that would produce a pragmatic philosophy through progressive education. Various schools of thought emerged, including the Chicago school of sociology led by John Dewey, the Chicago school of architecture, the new liberalism as articulated by the founders of the New Republic, and the “new paganism” of The Masses. All originated as a conscious rejection of outmoded traditions and beliefs. Intellectuals embraced the idea that a new society needed a new cultural philosophy. Through the Seven Arts magazine, an attempt was made to create an aesthetic forum for such a culture to develop. The magazine was established on the premise that the United States required a literature, music, architecture, painting, philosophy, and performing arts that reflected the changes of the Progressive era and that it would help provide the United States with an “indigenous culture.” Randolph Bourne wrote, “whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become something utterly different from the natio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Americanization: Progressive-Era Reformers, Cultural Critics, and Popular Comic Entertainments
• 2.  Putting It Over in American Vaudeville
• 3.  The New Humor: Ethnic Acts and Family Acts
• 4.  The Marx Brothers Go to School
• 5.  The New Woman and the Female Comedian as Social Insurgent
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index