Posts Tagged ‘immigrants’
“If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in”*…
Perhaps… but as Laurie Winer explains in an excerpt from her Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical, at a time when immigrants were pouring into the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe, the vaudeville circuit became a venue for the expression of those arriving cultures– and ultimately gave us so much more…
The term ‘melting pot’ comes from the theater — it was popularized by a 1908 drama with that title about a Russian composer who loses his family in the 1903 Bessarabia pogroms, emigrates to America, and falls in love with the daughter of the officer responsible for his family’s murder. Such was the compression of migrants in the first decades of the new century. In fact, about fifteen million eastern and southern Europeans arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1915. In 1907 Ellis Island received its highest number of immigrants in a single year, processing more than one million arrivals. In the public sphere, all these cultures introduced themselves on the stages and in the audiences of vaudeville, the American equivalent of the British music hall.
Willie Hammerstein managed the country’s premiere vaudeville house from 1904 until 1913, so his son Oscar II grew up at the epicenter of a cultural mashup unlike anything that had come before. In an oral history he recorded for Columbia University, Oscar remembered going to his father’s theater, the Victoria, every Sunday, where the performers taught him everything he needed to know about comedy and pacing.
Ticket prices were low and audiences comprised many nationalities. Since a good number of performers and spectators alike had escaped famine or pogroms or the social rigidity of the Old World, their evenings together at the theater were fueled by a giddy sense of possibility, both for themselves and for their new country. For instance, ‘It Isn’t What You Used to Be, It’s What You Are Today’ was a staple song for comedian Al Shean, born Abraham Adolph Schönberg in Germany in 1868.
From the 1880s to the early 1930s, peaking from 1905 to 1915, vaudeville presented a unique parade of cultures. Here is where theater became integral to constructing a multihued American identity, a space to figure out who we were and who we wanted to become. A dictionary defines vaudeville as ‘a comedy without psychological or moral intentions,’ and it was this very insignificance that lent the form its power.
With political correctness a concept far in the future, ethnic stereotyping was the entire point of acts like ‘Harry Harvey, the Quaint Hebrew Comedian,’ ‘The Original Wop,’ ‘The Wop and the Cop,’ ‘9 Orientals 9,’ ‘Two Funny Sauerkrauts,’ and ‘The Sport and the Jew.’ Al Shean’s sister Minnie managed and sometimes acted with her five sons, later known as the Marx Brothers, who presented several nationalities in one family. Their first stab at ethnic comedy was an act from 1911 or 1912 called ‘Fun in Hi Skule’: Groucho, playing a thickly accented German teacher, tried, and failed, to control his students, including Harpo (representing the Irish in a bright red wig), Gummo (with a Yiddish accent), and Paul Yale, who played a gay man with a limp wrist. (Chico, who would play the Italian, had not yet joined the act.) Groucho remembered the skit as a big hit, evoking lots of laughter.
In 1905, journalist Hartley Davis wrote an appreciation of vaudeville in Everybody’s Magazine, declaring it to be the ‘most significant development in American amusements of the last decade’:
There is a cheerful frivolity in vaudeville which makes it appeal to more people of widely divergent interests than does any other form of entertainment. It represents the almost universal longing for laughter, for melody, for color, for action, for wonder-provoking things. It exacts no intellectual activity on the part of those who gather to enjoy it; in its essence it is an enemy to responsibility, to worries, to all the little ills of life. It is joyously, frankly absurd …. Vaudeville brings home to us the fact that we are children of a larger growth. It supports the sour Schopenhauer theory — one of those misleading part truths — that life consists in trying to step aside to escape the immediate trouble that menaces us.
Later, when the musical evolved to embrace virtually any subject that could be broached by a play or novel, it kept something of this cheerful frivolity. Even tragic and historically illuminating musicals, like The Scottsboro Boys (2010) or Shuffle Along (2016), employ the percussive delights of tap or the offhand elegance of a hat-and-cane number, if only to emphasize the cruel distance between representation and reality. That these songs are performed on the very stages that hosted legends like George M. Cohan and the Nicholas Brothers adds a visceral link between the past and present.
An era’s popular culture can tell us more than its high art, though critics at the time often have trouble seeing it. About vaudeville, most contemporary commentators sniffed. For instance, critic and playwright Channing Pollock wrote in 1911 that vaudeville ‘addresses itself to amusement seekers incapable of giving, or unwilling to give, concentrated or continuous attention.’ For his part, J. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times enjoyed the Yiddish-accented vaudevillians Potash and Perlmutter’s 1926 play Abe and Mawruss (God Forbid!), but allowed that the act ‘makes no pretense to mental clarity.’ Audiences, less exacting, showed up to absorb the jabs and jokes, and the country expanded itself nightly in their laughter. In this way vaudeville provided context and backstory to the progressive nature of American theater and its playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
In Willie’s day, a typical vaudeville bill consisted of nine acts, the order of which spilled over into the Broadway musical of the 1920s. First up was a ‘dumb act,’ mimes or dancers or animals, so that latecomers would not annoy fellow audience members too much, just as, on Broadway, the introductory song was a throwaway having little to do with story, such as it was. The biggest names-acts like Will Rogers, the Three Keatons, or Mrs. Patrick Campbell — took either the third slot or the penultimate place, just as, on Broadway, songwriters reserved their most rousing treat, known as ‘the eleven o’clock number,’ for second to last. And the evening ended with something graceful or otherworldly, like an equestrian or trapeze artist, an act that sent the audience out into the night feeling buoyant or revived…
On one of the under-appreciated gifts that immigrants have given America: Vaudeville, from @lauriewiner.bsky.social via @delanceyplace.
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As we tread the boards, we might send entertaining bitrthday greetings to George M. Cohan; he was born on this date in 1878. A playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer, wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards “Over There,” “Give My Regards to Broadway'” “The Yankee Doodle Boy” [AKA “(I’m a) Yankee Doodle Dandy”], and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
Known in the decade before World War I as “the man who owned Broadway,” Cohan is considered (with Oscar Hammerstein II) one of the fathers of American musical comedy. He got his start performing with his parents and sister in a vaudeville act known as “The Four Cohans.”
“The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be”*…
From the annals of temperance, a particularly tasty (albeit tasteless) tidbit…
Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.
Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoid breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.
The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.”
New York City at the time was home to some 8,000 saloons. The seediest among them were “dimly lit, foul-smelling, rickety-chaired, stale-beer dives” that catered to “vagrants, shipless sailors, incompetent thieves, [and] aging streetwalkers,” Richard Zacks writes in Island of Vice, his book-length account of Roosevelt’s reform campaign.
The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns. It stipulated that saloons could not open within 200 feet of a school or church, and raised the drinking age from 16 to 18. In addition, it banned one of the late 19th-century saloon’s most potent enticements: the free lunch. At McSorley’s, for example, cheese, soda bread, and raw onions were on the house. (The 160-year-old bar still sells a tongue-in-cheek version of this today.) Most controversial of all was the law’s renewed assault on Sunday drinking. Its author, Finger Lakes region senator John W. Raines, eliminated the “golden hour” grace period that followed the stroke of midnight on Saturday. His law also forced saloon owners to keep their curtains open on Sunday, making it considerably harder for patrolmen to turn a blind eye…
Behind this lifestyle tug-of-war lay a cultural conflict of national proportions. Those in favor of the Sunday ban, generally middle-class and Protestant, saw it as a cornerstone of social improvement. For those against, including the city’s tide of German and Irish immigrants, it was an act of repression—an especially spiteful one because it limited how the average laborer could enjoy himself on his one day off. The Sunday ban was not popular, to say the least, among the city’s Jews, who’d already observed their Sabbath the day before.
Opponents pointed out that existing Sabbath drinking laws were hypocritical anyway. An explicit loophole had been written into the law itself: it allowed lodging houses with ten rooms or more to serve guests drinks with meals seven days a week. Not incidentally, wealthy New Yorkers tended to dine out at the city’s ritzy hotel restaurants on Sundays, the usual day off for live-in servants.
Intentionally or not, the Raines Law left wiggle room for the rich. But a loophole was a loophole, and Sunday was many a proprietor’s most profitable day of business. By the following weekend, a vanguard of downtown saloon-owners were gleefully testing the law’s limits. A suspicious number of private “clubs” were founded that April, and saloons started handing out membership cards to their regulars. Meanwhile, proprietors converted basements and attic spaces into “rooms,” cut hasty deals with neighboring lodging-houses, and threw tablecloths over pool tables. They also started dishing up the easiest, cheapest, most reusable meal they could get away with: the Raines sandwich.
…
The Raines Law debacle was merely a prelude for what was to come. New York reformers had long allied themselves with the Anti-Saloon League, a civilian organization with Midwestern origins that would morph into one of the most powerful pressure groups in U.S. history. By 1919, the efforts of the ASL made nationwide Prohibition the law of the land, putting an end to such quaint half-measures as the Raines sandwich and replacing the Raines hotel with the speakeasy.
Ubiquitous– and inedible: “To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created the World’s Worst Sandwich.”
* Laozi
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As we reach for the beer nuts, we might recall that today is National Liqueur Day.
The word liqueur comes from the Latin liquifacere, which means to liquefy. A liqueur is an alcoholic beverage made from a distilled spirit. Distillers flavor the spirit with fruit, cream, herbs, spices, flowers, or nuts. Next, they bottle it with added sugar or other sweeteners. While liqueurs are typically considerably sweet, distillers do not usually age their product long. They do, however, allow a resting period during production, which allows the flavors to marry.
With the broad selection of spirits available in seasonal, fragrant, and often curious flavors (vodkas and rums in particular), there is often confusion of liqueurs and liquors. In the United States and Canada, spirits are frequently called liquor. The most reliable rule of thumb to follow suggests that liqueurs comprise a sweeter, syrupy consistency, while liquors do not. Most liqueurs also have a lower alcohol content than spirits. However, some do contain as much as 55% ABV.
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“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions”*…
The C.B.P. considers rosaries to be potentially lethal, non-essential personal property, and agents dispose of them during intake.
Tom Kiefer was a Customs and Border Protection janitor for almost four years before he took a good look inside the trash. Every day at work—at the C.B.P. processing center in Ajo, Arizona, less than fifty miles from the border with Mexico—he would throw away bags full of items confiscated from undocumented migrants apprehended in the desert. One day in 2007, he was rummaging through these bags looking for packaged food, which he’d received permission to donate to a local pantry. In the process, he also noticed toothbrushes, rosaries, pocket Bibles, water bottles, keys, shoelaces, razors, mix CDs, condoms, contraceptive pills, sunglasses, keys: a vibrant, startling testament to the lives of those who had been detained or deported. Without telling anyone, Kiefer began collecting the items, stashing them in sorted piles in the garages of friends. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he told me recently. “But I knew there was something to be done.”
Kiefer, who is now fifty-eight, had moved to Ajo from Los Angeles, in 2001, hoping to simplify his life, purchase a home, and focus on his passion: taking pictures. (Previously, he’d been a collector and dealer of antique cast-iron bed frames, and, before that, a graphic designer.) He took the C.B.P. job, in 2003, for purely practical reasons: it paid ten dollars and forty-two cents an hour, and it seemed unlikely to steal mental space away from his photography projects. Now he began photographing his C.B.P. collection in his studio, arranging and rearranging items, sometimes putting a single stuffed animal or T-shirt in the frame, more often capturing like with like: dozens of roll-on deodorant sticks, hundreds of nail clippers. Today, he has taken hundreds of photographs of objects he brought home from the processing center. Together they make up “El Sueño Americano” (“The American Dream”), an ongoing project that, thanks to its unconventional perspective on U.S. migrant policies, has launched Kiefer into a photography career he’s dreamed of for decades…
The extraordinary story in full at: “A janitor preserves the seized belongings of migrants.”
* George Washington
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As we put out the mat, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that an executive order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a United States government agency established to handle the internment, i.e. forced relocation and detention, of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The WRA operated 10 camps, mostly on tribal land, that ultimately “housed” 110-120,000 people.
The program was initially headed by Milton Eisenhower, younger brother of Dwight and a New Deal stalwart who had opposed relocation. Eisenhower did his best to limit the program and to protect the property and rights of those interned. But his efforts were largely thwarted. He was replaced after only 6 months on the job by Dillon S. Myer, who ran the WRA until its dissolution at the end of the war.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $41,000 in 2016) to each camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $3,240,000,000 in 2016) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned and to their heirs.
See: “A ten-year old Japanese-American girl in an internment camp.”
Dust storm at the Manzanar War Relocation Center
“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here”*…
The United States of America is a country of immigrants. That’s the cliche we know, but don’t always take to heart. Especially, during this political season…
Helpful background at “Where Are All the People in the United States From?”
* Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
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As we ruminate on roots, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 (though some sources locate it on March 7 of that year), that The New York Times revised its style sheet to normalize the capitalization of “Negro” in its pages, a change that it memorialized in a editorial…
The New York Times now joins many of the leading Southern newspapers as well as most of the Northern in according this recognition. In our “style book” “Negro” is now added to the list of words to be capitalized. It is not merely a typographical change; it is an act in recognition of racial self-respect for those who have been for generations in “the lower case.”
[More here]
Sociologist, historian, activist, and author W.E.B. Du Bois, who led the fight for capitalization
“Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me”*…
The British Library has recently digitized part of a multi-authored play, “The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore,” written between about 1596 and 1604. Three pages of this draft of the play are apparently written by William Shakespeare, and they represent the only available sample of his handwriting in a play script.
Another playwright, Anthony Munday, wrote the bulk of the play, about the life of Henry VIII’s chancellor Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare was apparently called in to add a single scene to the middle of the script: a speech the historical More gave on May Day 1517, calming rioters who were looting and destroying property in an attempt to expel foreigners from London…
“Though proving that More’s words were indeed written by Shakespeare is not straightforward, in their keen sympathy for the plight of the alienated and dispossessed they seem to prefigure the insights of great dramas of race such as The Merchant of Venice and Othello,” the British Library’s Andrew Dickson writes. “Whoever wrote them had a fine ear for the way rhetoric can sway a crowd … but also a sharp eye for the troubled relationship between ethnic minorities and majorities.” …
The complete text of the speech, with more of the backstory, at “A Plea on Behalf of Immigrants, Written (Most Likely) in Shakespeare’s Hand, Now Digitized.” Watch it delivered beautifully by Sir Ian McKellen in this short video:
* Carlos Fuentes
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As we marvel that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, we might send absolutist birthday greetings to Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; he was born on this date in 1588. A father of political philosophy and political science, Hobbes developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be “representative” and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid– all this, though Hobbes was, on rational grounds, a champion of absolutism for the sovereign. His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.
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