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Censoring Racial Ridicule
Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890-1930
M. Alison Kibler
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eBook - ePub
Censoring Racial Ridicule
Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890-1930
M. Alison Kibler
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About This Book
A drunken Irish maid slips and falls. A greedy Jewish pawnbroker lures his female employee into prostitution. An African American man leers at a white woman. These and other, similar images appeared widely on stages and screens across America during the early twentieth century. In this provocative study, M. Alison Kibler uncovers, for the first time, powerful and concurrent campaigns by Irish, Jewish and African Americans against racial ridicule in popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Censoring Racial Ridicule explores how Irish, Jewish, and African American groups of the era resisted harmful representations in popular culture by lobbying behind the scenes, boycotting particular acts, and staging theater riots. Kibler demonstrates that these groups' tactics evolved and diverged over time, with some continuing to pursue street protest while others sought redress through new censorship laws. Exploring the relationship between free expression, democracy, and equality in America, Kibler shows that the Irish, Jewish, and African American campaigns against racial ridicule are at the roots of contemporary debates over hate speech.
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Chapter One: The Minstrel Show and the Melee
Two theatrical traditionsâthe minstrel show and the musical comedy meleeâcapture the histories of racial caricature as well as the social and political relationships between Irish, Jewish, and African Americans. Theatrical productions and early films repeated racial caricatures of these groups; Irish, Jewish, and African American characters frequently jostled with each other on stage; and Irish and Jewish performers specialized in imitating African American characters. First, minstrelsy stands for the hierarchy of immigrant groups over African Americans and the ways that Irish and Jewish citizens alienated African Americans as they improved their own status in the United States. Significantly, Irish and Jewish performers specialized in blackface performance in their successful careers in minstrel shows and movies. Second, the melee represents the interaction of Irish, Jewish, and African Americans. The melee in popular theater featured different races together in rollicking comic scenes that often erupted into fights on stage. The various racial types were chaotically thrown together through pratfalls, fisticuffs and other stage gagsâlike dynamite, greased stairs, and flying furniture. The melee often diffused violent tensions between groups, as participants wielded rubber chickens rather than switch blades.1 Even though these routines often disparaged African Americans most severely and sometimes featured white performers in blackface, they still presented a fluidity of racial characters that were more fully developed than figures in the minstrel show. While the minstrel show asserted racial hierarchy, the musical comedy melee presented a more playful multiculturalism. This chapter explores each theatrical tradition to introduce racial caricatures on stage and to trace the histories of exploitation and mutuality in the relationships between these three groups.
The minstrel show reveals the persistent racist themes of American theater and film as well as the role of immigrant performers in denigrating African Americans. The minstrel show and blackface entertainment thus symbolize a hierarchy among Irish, Jewish, and African American performers in which immigrant groups propelled themselves ahead of black people, beyond a solidifying, biracial color line. The minstrel show grew out of the interactions between Irish and African Americans in places like Five Points, New York, and river towns, where African Americans and Irish lived and worked close to each other.2 The Irish learned music and dance steps from African Americans, so that new cultural forms, such as tap dancing, emerged. In the minstrel show, a diverse groups of whites, but particularly Irishmen, were able to emphasize their common whiteness to antebellum urban masses in the creation of an abject but fascinating blackness.3 The minstrel show mocked almost everyone: Irish and German immigrants, Native Americans, and all types of authority figures came under fire in its polyglot humor, but the âcentral jokeâ of minstrelsy remained the âsmug whitenessâ beneath the black makeup.4 To impersonate African Americans, white performers wore ragged clothes and recited dialogue filled with malapropisms. In the mid-nineteenth century, the minstrel show tended to denigrate slaves as docile and free blacks as incompetent, presenting many images of peaceful plantation life in which âOld Massa to us darkies am good.⊠For he gibs us our clothes and he gibs us our food.â5 Popular among urban northern white men, the minstrel show seems to have assured the working-class audiences of their racial superiority, while also allowing some identification with the rebellious fun of blackness.
The historian Michael Rogin argues that through minstrelsy, âblacked up ethnics entered, even as they helped to create, the American melting pot.â6 The Irish dominated minstrelsy when it became the first distinctively American theater form in the antebellum period. In fact, Dale Cockrell argues that âminstrel shows became, to a certain extent, a product by and for Irish Americans.â7 Performers mocked the Irish on stage; Irish songs with a nationalist theme, such as âThe Bonny Green Flat,â were popular in the minstrel show, and Irish and African American music and dance styles were often interwoven in songs and sketches.8 Along with the popularity of Irish themes and the intermixture of Irish and African American cultures, the Irish dominated the blackface impersonation of African Americans. The most famous minstrel show stars were IrishâGeorge Christy, Dan Bryan, Matt Peel, and Ned Harrigan. In addition, Dan Emmett, a member of the Virginia Minstrels and the author of âDixie,â was born in 1815 to an Irish immigrant family (from County Mayo) who had settled in a Mount Vernon, Ohio, a racially integrated city where he allegedly learned music from free blacks. One performer from CorkâBernard Flahertyâwho specialized in ânegro songs and negro dancesâ in the 1830s and 1840s, was known for his strong accent, âwhich always clung to him and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.â9
Jews took center stage when blacking-up reemerged in early-twentieth-century film and peaked on stage around 1910. Jewish women became the premiere âcoon shoutersâ in the first decade of the twentieth century. The so-called coon songs featured Negro dialect, ragtime syncopation, and plantation themes; performers often put on blackface to sing them, but not always. Prior to Jewish womenâs rise to prominence in the field, May Irwin, an Irish American singer, led the way for female coon shouters in the 1870s. Although she did not perform in blackface, she often acted as the âmammyâ to a young African American male performer taking on a âpickaninnyâ role in her act. Several decades later, the Jewish stars Sophie Tucker and Anna Held built their careers as coon shouters, Tucker in blackface, Held without.10 Eddie Cantor got his start singing coon songs written by Irving Berlin, and he went on to play an effeminate African American character, in blackface, with prominent white-rimmed glasses. He also played âSonnyâ in a sketch with the West Indian star Bert Williams as âPapsy.â11 Around 1904, Al Jolson began to play a hospital orderly in blackface in a new vaudeville sketch. In 1908, Jolson was a regular in Lew Dockstaderâs minstrel show, which specialized in reenacting famous white scenarios in blackface. In âBoo Hoo Landâ Jolson played âAcie,â the assistant to Professor Hightower, played by Dockstader. They set out to explore the North Pole, but end up in a âtribal soup pot.â12 Jolson went on to star in The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928), which involved prominent blackface routines. By the time of these movies, blackface was fading on stage.13
In the late nineteenth century, musical comedies that specialized in the interactions of immigrant and African American communities became popular. Although they featured performers and producers who had honed their skills in the minstrel show and also involved white performers in blackface, the musical comedy differed from the minstrel show by offering immigrant characters with more depth within clearer story lines.14 The foibles surrounding marriages between German, Irish and Jewish immigrants were often themes of these musical comedies. The melee scene formed a regular part of the racial diversity and interaction in tenement neighborhoods in these musical comedies. For example, The Yellow Kid Who Lives in Hoganâs Alley (1897), a burlesque centered on the jabs between Schultz, a German shoe repairman, and Hogan, an Irish tinker, featured a multiracial melee in which German and Irish characters slip down a set of greased stairs, flipping and rolling over each other.15 Similarly, in McFaddenâs Row of Flats (1903), an Irish child throws a firecracker into a German bar. The explosion sends the German proprietor and customers topsy-turvy into the street, knocking over Levi, the Jewish tailor, as they rush out.16
The main proponents of this theatrical style were Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart, who began to write and perform in full-length musical comedies after their experience in the minstrel show. Their Mulligan Guard plays of the 1870s and 1880s featured Irish, German, Jewish, and African Americans (played by whites in blackface), and, less often, Chinese and English characters in competing military clubsâor guards. One song, from McSorelyâs Inflation (1882), described the diversity of the city:
Itâs Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany,
Oh, Chinamen and nagurs, and a paradise for rats,
All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather,
They represent the tenants of McNallyâs row of flats.17
Harrigan and Hart reinforced the âcommonâ racial caricatures of the day, but they also emphasized the âdemocracyâ and the âshared plightâ of the various racial minorities in these poor city neighborhoods.18 Harrigan and Hart depicted the entire spectrum of the Lower East Side: here, the Germans are industrious and thrifty, but fat and drunk; the Irish are sometimes clever and joyful, but also combative, oafish, and drunk; Jews (though a smaller part in Harrigan and Hartâs productions) are struggling street vendors, focused on squeezing every penny out of their businesses; African Americans pulled out razors in fights and seemed foolish when they tried to convey any kind of sophistication.19 Harrigan and Hart were not entirely evenhanded in their multiracial representations, however. They tended to put the Irish at the top of their urban hierarchies, giving their Irish characters more depth and also showing their political power, whereas African Americans stayed close to minstrel show stereotypes and appeared menacing toward other characters.20
Harrigan and Hartâs multiracial productions included at least one âmerry melee,â and other musical comedies also incorporated this convention. In The Mulligan Guard Ball, Tommy Mulligan, the son of Dan and Cordelia Mulligan, falls in love with Kitty Lochmuller, the daughter of German immigrants, but Dan Mulligan strongly objects. One setting of the play is a barbershop owned by the African American Simpson Primrose who jokes about the Irish drinking rubbing alcohol. The African American group, the Skidmore Guard, falls through the ceiling onto the Irish group, the Mulligan Guard. Even though the groups squabble and try to separate themselves, they share similar raucous behaviorâloud dancing and singing that collapses the floor, which divides themâand the comic frenzy diffuses racial tensions. In the chaos, it was âoften impossible to tell who is on top.â21 But the âplayfulnessâ still subjugates African Americans, as white actors in blackface portray the blacks on stage and the Irish Americans take charge in the end and âcelebrateâ Irish community.22
The heterogeneous comedy of the racially diverse melee was also prominent in vaudeville, an explosive theatrical venue that drew together a wide variety of acts, from jugglers to acrobats. The vaudeville aesthetic aimed to produce a quick, intense reaction in the audience; thus its quintessential style was slapstick comedy, with grotesque costumes and crude jokes. At the turn of the twentieth century, a vaudeville program of seven to nine acts regularly included several examples of âracial caricaturists,â such as the Dutchman, the Hebrew, the Celt, and the âdarkey.â23 White performers could impersonate any racial type, with qu...