Passing From Light Into Dark John F. McClymer Part 1 | Part 2 | Historiographical Essay [Note: This discussion began as a paper, co-authored with Charles W. Estus, Sr., for a conference at the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 1996. It grew out of our work, supported by a Public Programs grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in curating an exhibition on "The Swedish Creation of an Ethnic Identity for Worcester, Massachusetts" at the Worcester Historical Museum. That paper looked at how Swedes appropriated other racial and ethnic identities as ways of affirming their own American and Swedish-American identity. In its present form, "Passing from Light into Dark" incorporates much of the evidence and argument of that early version but looks beyond Worcester and Swedes. "Passing from Light into Dark" is a companion to a discussion of The KKK in the 1920s. Both deal with race, ethnicity, and nationality as foci of the "culture wars" of the 1920s. "The KKK in the 1920s" looks at politics, broadly defined. "Passing" looks at culture, defined equally broadly. Both argue that pre-emptive attempts to define who was or was not a real American, so characteristic of the years immediately following World War I, failed, despite such significant initial successes as Prohibition, immigration restriction, and the Red Scare. At the same time, racial boundaries held firm. The failure to limit "real" Americans to those of "Nordic" stock is of a piece with the success in excluding people of color. In making this argument, I have taken issue with a number of historians from whom I have also learned much. I have decided to put the historiographical discussion into a separate appendix rather than carrying it on in footnotes, as is the more common practice. This is because of the extended nature of the discussion. I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Charles Estus to this essay and also the suggestions of Lucia Knoles and Gerd Korman. All are friends as well as colleagues.]
"Passing from Light into Dark" was the caption of a cartoon in a special issue of the Spirit promoting the show. "Passing" normally referred to African Americans seeking to live as whites. It was, both in this sense and in the ironic sense intended by the Norton Spirit artist, a basic trope of American popular culture. "Showboat" is a prominent case in point. Universally acknowledged as the first great American musical, it fused story and music as it explored the meaning of race and racism. Central to the plot is the attempt of Julie, the "greatest leading lady on the river," to "pass." [2]
"Showboat" challenged all of the settled beliefs about race. Almost miraculously, it persuaded white audiences to empathize with Julie, to echo Magnolia's cry that Julie was still the same person she had always been, and to applaud Cap'n Andy's view that such a cry proved Magnolia was "a damn fine girl." Yet Julie's story ends unhappily. Alone, alcoholic, and in despair, she sees Magnolia years later in Chicago. She keeps her presence hidden but does Magnolia one last good turn by sacrificing her own chance at employment as a singer. Passing from dark into light ends in tragedy. This was the received wisdom of the day, and it provided the context within which all of the variations on passing from light into dark detailed here took place. Minstrels Are We What sort of Americanization effort was a minstrel show? Norton Company records explain. George N. Jeppson, son of one of the founding partners, had succeeded his father as Production Manager, and he spearheaded Norton's Americanization efforts. There were some within the Company, he wrote in a memo, who criticized the time and money devoted to these programs. They believed "that a fellow ought to work and choose his own recreation after work." That might be fine for "the Average American who is born here" but not for the "many young men who come here as immigrants and are away from a home or church influence." They needed the assistance of "their American-born fellow employees." They needed "to feel at home in their company." Then, but only then, would they be ready for formal instruction in English and Civics in "organizations like the YMCA." The Minstrel Show was a way of getting Swedish-born and other immigrants to rub elbows with their "American-born fellow employees," helping them "to feel at home in their company." Jeppson's father was himself an immigrant from Sweden. Minstrel shows had toured the United States since the 1840s. They had lost some of their audience to vaudeville and then to the movies but remained popular as amateur productions. Church groups, fraternal organizations, companies like Norton, all continued to put them on. Further, elements of minstrelsy lived on in vaudeville and in movies. In "passing from light into dark," as a result, Norton employees participated in long-standing -- and ongoing -- American tradition. [3] In 1917 The Norton Spirit published a special edition dedicated to the show. It both indicates the significance the company attached to the show and provides a wealth of detail. Here is the program. It included the expected, songs like "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia." But "Little Coal Black Rose" and the Plantation "Orchestra" shared the stage with Italian opera, a skit satirizing Norton Company policies and procedures, and a patriotic salute to U.S. troops stationed along the border with Mexico. The show closed with cast and audience joining in "The Star-Spangled Banner."
1924
in the public life of Worcester, Massachusetts, and in the rest of the United
States What did it mean to use St. Patrick's Day as the theme for the 1924 show? 1924 witnessed a battle for control of Worcester's streets between the Ku Klux Klan and its opponents, organized around the Knights of Columbus, an Irish-dominated Catholic fraternal order. By allowing first and second-generation Swedes to join in Worcester, something that did not happen elsewhere, the Worcester Klan explicitly affirmed that American nationality and ethnicity could reinforce one another. So did its arch antagonist, the Knights of Columbus, which regularly labeled the Klan unAmerican. [5] The Klan had two centers of strength in the city -- Quinsigamond Village, Worcester's largest Swedish neighborhood, and Greendale, home of the Norton Company. The Village was so thoroughly dominated by Swedes that residents used to joke that one needed a passport to cross the bridge on Millbury Street which marked its entrance. The Village had half a dozen Swedish churches, all Protestant, and no Catholic churches. The Norton Company, also a Swedish bastion, sponsored a new club for its employees in 1924, the Ericson Lodge, named after the Swedish-American inventor whose Monitor duelled the Merrimack in the Civil War. The Lodge was a KKK klavern. Some of the Norton workers who "corked up" to "salute" St. Patrick's Day also donned white robes and hoods to protest the Irish influence in Worcester's politics and schools and to denounce their opposition to Prohibition. It was highly unusual for immigrants to join the Klan. Indeed Klan regulations forbade it. Instead Klan organizers, aka kleagles, would create parallel organizations for Welsh or Scots-Irish or other immigrants who wished to join. The Worcester kleagle, however, opened the Klan to Swedish immigrants. Those who joined proclaimed their Americanism. So did those who attacked them. At the same time, Swedes who joined the Klan via the Ericson Lodge simultaneously proclaimed their ethnicity, as did those who opposed the KKK by joining the Knights of Columbus. In joining the Klan's "Fight for Americanism," in the words of Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, as Swedes, the new Knights of the Invisible Empire were enacting a fusion of acculturation and ethnicity which is one of the central themes of this discussion. So too were the Irish Americans who opposed the "unAmerican" KKK by means of a Catholic fraternal order. Their dispute was over both the meaning of "Americanism" and over which ethnic groups were entitled to claim American nationality. When KKK members in Worcester put on their robes, they became marked men, literally. Anti-klan activists often lay in ambush outside their gatherings. Those opposed to the Klan took down the license plate numbers of those attending; friendly police then supplied them with information about who owned the vehicles. This led to the creation of a listing of Klan members, to its publication, to boycotts of Klan-connected businesses, and to other forms of retaliation, some of them violent. [6] In October, 1924 there was a Grand Konvocation held at the Agricultural Fair Grounds which adjoined the Norton Company. Thousands of new Knights assembled for a mass induction ceremony. After the meeting, as Klansmen and their families drove away from the Fair Grounds, an anti-Klan mob attacked. Young men jumped upon the running boards of cars, pulled occupants out of them, set some of the vehicles on fire, overturned others, and beat up whomever they got their hands on. Worcester police, most of them Irish, did what they could to prevent actual loss of life. One policeman on a motorcycle drove it into a small mob beating Klan members and rescued them. The police made few arrests, much to the indignation of Worcester's two Republican newspapers, both of which supported the Klan. Those few included several Klan members on weapon possession charges and one Irish-American teenager. 1924 also witnessed an epic struggle within the Democratic Party over the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan endorsed William Gibbs McAdoo, the frontrunner for the nomination. McAdoo was a Southerner by birth who had become a successful New York City lawyer and businessman. During World War I he had served as Secretary of the Treasury. He had also married Woodrow Wilson's daughter. He was Wilson's political heir. And that included Klan support. It was Wilson who agreed to have the initial showing of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" at the White House and who endorsed its heroic portrait of the first Klan during Reconstruction. "It's like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true." McAdoo in 1924, for his part, issued a statement affirming his support of freedom of religion for all Americans. He did not repudiate the KKK' s endorsement, however. This led Oscar Underwood, Senator from Alabama, and Al Smith, Governor of New York, to challenge him for the nomination. Both denounced the Klan and urged the party to include a plank in its platform condemning it by name. Instead the party, led by the McAdoo supporters, rejected the plank by four votes. Party rules stipulated that a nominee gain two-thirds of the delegates' votes. The bitter division over the Klan showed that none of the leading candidates could muster that number. 102 ballots later there was still no nominee. Finally, exhausted delegates agreed upon John W. Davis of West Virginia. McAdoo's political star waned. So did Underwood's, and Davis's. Anti-Klan activists in Worcester and elsewhere found a champion in Smith. [7] The Norton Company Minstrel Show, cont. America is God's
crucible, the Great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and
re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, your 50 groups, with your fifty languages
and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries... A fig for your feuds
and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians
- into the crucible with you all! God is making the American. This
vision of multual adaptation quickly gave way to demands for complete conformity.
Henry Ford, for example, sponsored his own "Melting Pot," as described in the
Ford Times in 1916: This
is not how George N. Jeppson saw matters. Norton Company under his leadership
held an annual folk festival whose centerpiece was a parade of festooned wagons
and cars representing the various nationality groups which made up the work force.
Jeppson
himself headed the Swedish Republican Association of Massachusetts, by far the
largest ethnic political association in the state. He helped organize the annual
Midsummer celebration, a city-wide orgy of Swedish ethnic breast-beating. And
he promoted Swedish folk culture, especially song. In 1920 he brought the first
postwar national convention of Swedish singing societies to Worcester. Norton
Company's Americanization efforts were anything but attempts to stamp out all
traces of ethnic group subcultures. Instead the company openly extolled ethnicitiy.
But it did not regard ethnic groups as all equally valuable. Here are the lyrics
from a comic song written for a company dinner, circa 1908, to be sung to "Tramp,
Tramp, Tramp, The Boys Are Marching," and printed on the menu: In our Norton Foremen's corps, The
song ended with a Swedish-American toast to Jeppson, sung by Swedes and Yankees: A skoal for our leader, George
N. J., Any
version of the "melting pot" is an ideal type, not a description of what actually
happened over the course of the century between the burning of the Charlestown
convent and the Smith-Hoover presidential contest. For that period becoming "American"
meant entering a culture in which European and other nationality groups contended
with each other � as well as with their Yankee "hosts" � for pride of place. [8]
[8] It was a culture which insisted upon the salience of ethnic stereotypes. In
1883, for example, the first Swedish Directory, a compilation of all the
names, addresses, and occupations of Worcester's Swedes, contained this joke,
in Swedish. The priest asks: Patrick,
the widow Murphy says you stole one of her best pigs. Few
of the Directory's readers had been in the United States for more than
a couple of years. Yet they were already learning "Pat and Mike" jokes � in Swedish!.
This suggests that ethnicity itself was a form of acculturation
rather than an alternative to it. To think otherwise � to assume that as members
of a group became more "American," as Norton's Swedish employees leaned to "feel
at home," for example, they became less ethnic, less insistent upon their Swedish
identity � is to adopt the arithmetic of the nativists of the 1910s and 1920s
with their calls for "100% Americanism." Acculturation
and ethnicity could reinforce each other in complex ways. They could also, and
did, work against each other as when American-born children rejected their parents'
"Old Country ways." There was an equally complex interplay between the emerging
national popular culture, as expressed in vaudeville, popular songs, and movies,
and grassroots cultural expressions, as in the Norton Company's Foremen's Dinner
appropriation of "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching." A
Jewish-American View of Acculturation: "The Jazz Singer"
"Years
later - - and three thousand miles from home," a title reads, "Jakie Rabinowitz
had become Jack Robin - - the Cantor's son, a jazz singer. But fame was
still an uncaptured bubble. . . ." Jack is auditioning before a live audience
in a San Francisco cabaret. He sings one song and then says to the crowd:
Wait
a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell ya,
you ain't heard nothin'! Do you wanna hear 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie!'? All right,
hold on, hold on. Lou [the band leader], Listen. Play 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie!' Three
choruses, you understand. In the third chorus I whistle. Now give it to 'em hard
and heavy. Go right ahead! [Real Player video available at the Al Jolson Society Official Website. Click
on Works and then on Film.] "You
ain't heard nothin' yet" was a Jolson trademark, a line he had used countless
times, as was the song "Toot, Toot, Tootsie." In the audience is a beautiful woman,
a dancer, who befriends Jack Robin and gets him a job on the same vaudeville circuit
as herself. Jack falls in love. He has not, however, forgotten his first love,
his mother. He writes her regular letters. A title reads: "Dear Mama: I'm getting along
great, making $250.00 a week. A wonderful girl, Mary Dale, got me my big chance.
Write me c/o State Theater in Chicago. Last time you forgot and addressed me Jakie
Rabinowitz. Jack Robin is my name now. Your loving son, Jakie" Signing
the letter in which he reminded his mother of his new name "Jakie" emphasizes
the competing claims on his identity. Is he really Jack Robin or still Jakie Rabinowitz?
In Chicago he attends a concert of sacred songs by a famous cantor. Soon after
he gets his big break, an offer to star in a new show on Broadway, "April Follies."
The titles read: "NEW YORK! BROADWAY! HOME! MOTHER!" He arrives in New York on
his father's sixtieth birthday and rushes from the station to their tenement apartment.
His father is out, but he has a joyful reunion with his mother. He gives her a
diamond necklace, promises that, if the show proves a hit, he will move his parents
up to the Bronx, and sits at the piano and sings for her. It is an Irving Berlin
tune, "Blue Skies." As he finishes the song, his father enters. They renew their
old quarrel. "You dare to bring your jazz songs into my house! I taught you to
sing the songs of Israel � to take my place in the synagogue!" Jack retorts: "You're
of the old world! If you were born here, you'd feel the same as I do � tradition
is all right, but this is another day! I'll live my life as I see fit!" All
of the dichotomies dissolve. The Yom Kippur service and the Broadway show both
go on. Cantor Rabinowitz's son fulfills the family tradition and realizes his
ambition to live his own life. Jakie Rabinowitz can be Jack Robin and Jakie Rabinowitz
can be Jack Robin. He can please his Jewish mother and his gentile girlfriend. The
exchange between Jakie and his father on the latter's birthday is especially sailent
in this context: Cantor
Rabinowitz: You dare to bring your jazz songs into my house! I taught you to sing
the songs of Israel � to take my place in the synagogue! Jack:
You're of the old world! If you were born here, you'd feel the same as I do �
tradition is all right, but this is another day! I'll live my life as I see fit! Jack's
retort that, if his father had been born in the U.S., he'd feel as Jack does,
directly contradicted one of the most important anti-semitic claims of the time.
This was that, as Hiram Wesley Evans, Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard, phrased it,
"not in a thousand years of continuous residence would he [the Jew] form basic
attachments comparable to those the older type of immigrant would form within
a year." Evans explained in a Klan Day address at the Texas State Fair in Dallas,
October 24, 1923: As
a race the Jewish are law abiding. They are of physically wholesome stock, for
the most part untainted by immoralities among themselves. They
are mentally alert. They are a family people, reverently and eugenically responsive
to God's laws in the home. But their homes are not American but Jewish homes,
into which we cannot go and from which they will neverr emerge for a real intermingling
with America. [9] The
adverb "eugenically" is particularly revealing. Evans hitched the Klan's claims
to intellectual respectability to the emerging science of Eugenics. Historians
pay too little attention to the eugenics
movement of the first third or so of the twentieth century
and less to the biological research upon which it was based. [10]
But Eugenics, the study of how to identify good and bad "stock," was taught in
high school and college curricula across the country. Virtually every biology
textbook devoted at least a chapter to it. At its core was the notion, borrowed
from the early nineteenth-century thinker Lamarck, that acquired characteristics
could be inherited. Thus, in Frederick Jackson Turner's celebrated "frontier thesis,"
the experience of "opening" the frontier shaped the American character. In Evans'
view, thousands of years of persecution had similarly but more deeply imprinted
certain traits upon the Jews. The "indelible impress" of persecution "is there,
marked by generation after generation of unchanging and unchangeable racial characteristics."
Among these is an inherited inability to feel patriotism. "For ages . . . he has
been a wanderer upon the face of the earth. . . .Into his life has come no national
attachment. To him, patriotism, as the Anglo-Saxon feels it, is impossible." To
this "The Jazz Singer" offers a dramatic rebuttal. It does so by making Jakie
want to sing "American" songs. Who wrote this "American" music? Irving Berlin,
another immigrant Jew, for one. Purists
have been quick to point out that Jolson was not a "jazz singer" and that neither
"Waitin' for the Robert E. Lee" nor "Blue Skies" were jazz songs. Louis Armstrong,
they note, was inventing a whole new way of singing in the late 1920s, as he had
of playing, which would shape jazz for decades. Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats
Waller, James P. Johnson and others were inventing jazz music. Irving Berlin did
not write jazz. On the other hand, the movie took the time to indicate exactly
what a "Jazz Singer" was. Jakie gave his mother a demonstration. He sang the Berlin
song straight and then "jazzed it up," i.e., speeded up the tempo. [An extended
digression on the early use of "authentic" jazz in the movies is here.] There
is another dimension to the way the movie used the term "jazz." A few years earlier
Henry Ford, as part of his crusade
to eliminate the Jewish influence in American life, singled out Berlin and jazz
music as especially pernicious threats. Jews, led by Berlin, now controlled the
music publishing houses, he charged first in the pages of his Dearborn Independent
and then in The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. They used
this power to drive out genuine "American" music and to substitute the "mush"
and "slush" of jazz which appealed only to the "basest" tastes and instincts.
Just as Jakie's outburst about being born in America and therefore wanting to
sing "American" music was a riposte to eugenics advocates who claimed Jews could
not feel patriotism, the film's choice of a title and of a Berlin song to exemplify
American music directly challenged Ford's anti-Semitic claims. Jerome Kern, himself
a Jew, put the matter succinctly. Asked to comment on Irving Berlin's "place"
in American music, he responded: "Irving Berlin doesn't have a 'place' in American
music. Irving Berlin is American music." Becoming
"American," "The Jazz Singer" asserted, does not require the repudiation of one's
ethnic heritage. Acculturation can, and should, accommodate ethnicity. This is the
same claim Norton Swedes and Worcester Irish Catholics made, the former in joining
the KKK via the Ericson Lodge, the latter in opposing the KKK by joining the Knights
of Columbus. Both saw their actions as asserting their essential American identity
even as they continued their long and bitter rivalry. Both also routinely staged
minstrel shows. "Passing from light into dark" was a way of staking the claim
that ethnic identity was no obstacle to being a real American. Race was. An
extended digression on another "jazz singer": Eddie Cantor and making "Whoopee!"
Cantor,
like Jolson, was the son of Jewish immigrants. He too grew up in the "ghetto"
on the Lower East Side and then went into vaudeville. He too became a star. While
Jolson specialized in the big sentimental ballad, like "Mammy" or "Sonny Boy,"
Cantor's forte was comedy, usually slightly risqu�. In "Whoopee!" for example,
his nurse has followed him to a nearby settlement. Henry is disguised in blackface,
thanks to a comic accident with a stove. She too is in disguise, as a cowboy complete
with mustache. She immediately recognizes Henry and accuses him of loving Sally.
Henry, who does not recognize her, protests that he does not. Relieved and overjoyed,
Mary offers to kiss him. "Hey, what sort of cowboy are you anyway?" is Henry's
startled reply. Like
Jakie Rabinowitz, Cantor, born Edward Israel Iskowitz, changed his name when he
went into show business. The name he chose identified both his ethnic background
and his ambition to be a singer. Yet Henry Williams was supposed to be a WASP
with inherited millions. When Henry gets into trouble, he too passes "from light
into dark," first pretending to be African American and then Indian. In the latter
guise, to keep from being found out, he adopts a thick Jewish accent. A Jew, playing
a Yankee pretending to be an Indian, spoke a combination of broken English and
Yiddish. And the audiences loved it. This came as no surprise. Fanny Brice, another
Jewish-American vaudeville star, who, like Cantor, often headlined with Ziegfeld's
Follies on Broadway, was almost as well known for her "Look at Me, I'm an Indian,"
sung in a thick Jewish accent, as for "Second-Hand Rose." Giving
the bit a further spin, Henry Williams spoke like a Jewish immigrant peddler as
he bargained over the price of a rug. Had a gentile played Williams, the scene
would have proved highly offensive to Jewish members of the audience. But everyone
knew Cantor was "passing" as a gentile. In case they didn't, the show incorporated
several jokes where Cantor's background is made explicit. In one, Wanenis is lamenting
that, despite all of his attempts to adopt the white man's ways, Sally's father
will not accept him. "I even went to your schools," he says. "You went to Hebrew
School?" Henry responds. Following
the stock market crash, Cantor collaborated with artist Sid Hydeman on Caught
Short, a set of comic sketches about buying stock "on the margin" during the
great bull market and then watching one's investments turn to dust. In one cartoon,
Cantor books a hotel room on the nineteenth floor. The clerk asks: "Do you want
it for sleeping or jumping?" Cantor described himself on the title page as "comedian,
author, statistician, and victim." The subtitle puns on the "Wailing Wall," a
place sacred to Jews. The cartoon on the facing page is a pun as well, a "coon"
joke which also pokes fun at a well-known Jewish investment bank. It was the sort
of "fresh material" the minstrel in the Norton Spirit cartoon of 1917 was
seeking. Consider
in this context the "Parade of the Horribles" at the annual Field Day sponsored
by the American Steel and Wire Company in Worcester in the years surrounding World
War I. Who were the "Horribles"? They were employees dressed up in bizarre costumes,
often with ethnic and/or racial themes. The most "horrible" won a prize. In 1921
the winners were the "South Works Cannibals," complete with grass skirts, spears,
cork make-up, and earrings, pictured here as photographed for the Company newsletter.
The
South Works were located in Quinsigamond Village, the most Swedish section of
Worcester. Some of the "Cannibals's" sisters, members of the Swedish Women's Gymnastic
Club, put on semi-annual shows for charity in the much more refined precincts
of Tuckerman Hall, home of the Worcester Women's Club. The first portion of these
shows, which attracted large audiences and significant coverage in the English-language
newspapers, consisted of an exhibition of Swedish gymnastics. After intermission
came a musical review, loosely modelled upon Ziegfeld's Follies. The gymnasts
too were attracted to the South Seas. On other occasions, they chose to be geishas,
or Swiss
Misses, or Little
Dutch Girls. Like their brothers among the "Cannibals," they
presumably harbored no malice toward the Japanese or the Swiss or the Dutch or
South Sea Islanders. They were simply looking for colorful costumes and a theme
for their performances. [11]
Where
did the "Horribles" get their notions of "Cannibals"? From the same sources the
gymnasts got theirs of South Sea maidens. They appropriated the grass skirts,
the ukeles, the leas and floral headdresses from the movies and popular literature.
So too the spears and the blackened skin of the "Cannibals." The idea of staging
a "revue" in exotic � albeit decorous � costume came from Broadway. During the
1920s "revues" overshadowed musical comedies. In 1928, for example, Time
chose Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. as its "Man of the Year." [For an extended discussion
of "revues," see "Revues and Other
Vanities: The Commodification of Fantasy in the 1920s." This is part of a
project on "American History and Culture on the Web," supported by a grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities.] Some
forms of ethnic and racial play hit closer to home. One was a "Comic Boxing Match,"
also staged during the 1921 Field Day and described in the American Steel and
Wire newsletter. It pitted "Swen Sullivan of Italy" against Patrick Mohammed,
the Polish Wonder." On the face of it, this might appear a playful representation
of the Company as a melting pot � a fusion, perhaps a confusion, of Swede, Irish,
Italian, Syrian, and Pole. But Patrick and Swen were comic figures precisely because
everyone on the field that day knew there could never be an Irish Syrian from
Poland. And a Swedish Irishman? About as likely as a Native American speaking
Yiddish. The referee was "Jack Johnson," who strode into the ring carrying a three-foot
razor with which to enforce his decisions. Here was one
stereotype upon which all others could agree. The real Jack Johnson had been the heavyweight champion
against whom a succession of "great white hopes" had contended. He would have
needed no razor. [12] His presence,
however, reminded everyone � Swedes, Irish, Italians, Syrians, and Poles alike
� that just like "Jack Johnson" and "Rastus," they too were first and foremost
perceived as stereotypes before they were individuals. Perceived by whom? Instead
of answering "by the host culture," we should recall that everyone attending the
Field Day was familiar with the ethnic stereotypes sent up in the "Comic Boxing
Match." This
makes Cantor's use of Yiddish while playing a WASP pretending to be an Indian
so daring. In playing with stereotypes he was playing with fire. It also explains
the "Kuhn/coon" joke and the pun on "wailing Wall Street." Jews, like other nationality
and ethnic groups, had to come to terms with stereotypes, often highly insulting,
about themselves. Jews stereotypically worshipped money. They also controlled
international finance, if Henry Ford were to be believed. So Cantor, self-described
"victim" of the crash, wore his ethnicity on his sleeve. He also reminded white
readers of the difference between "Kuhn" and "coon." "Swen Sullivan of Italy"
and "Patrick Mohammed, the Polish Wonder" represented a similar form of play. Cantor
moved into radio with a long-running comedy program the year after he made "Whoopee!"
A few years later another second-generation Jewish comedian, Jack Benny, scored
an even greater success. Like Cantor in "Whoopee," Benny played a gentile, and
also one with a character trait stereotypically associated with Jews. He worshipped
money. Benny got the longest laugh in radio history with this gag: Stick-up man: "Your money or your life!" Benny,
unlike Jolson and Cantor, did not appear in blackface. Instead he cast Eddie Anderson
as his black valet, Rochester. Over the decades, Rochester became less and less
a stereotype. But Benny's miserliness became more pronounced each season as his
writers looked for new ways to tell the same jokes. In one episode, a Treasury
official from Fort Knox visited Benny to observe his security measures. These
included surrounding his vault with a moat complete with alligators. Here again
the jokes worked because the audience was complicit. They knew that Benny was
Jewish. They knew through fan magazines and newspaper gossip columns of his personal
generosity. Benny, like Cantor in "Whoopee!" and Jolson in "The Singing Fool,"
"passed" as a gentile. None used makeup. Benny did turn his blue eyes � in the
1920s, '30s, and '40s used in Nazi propaganda as a sign of Aryan origin � into
a standing joke. His character was as vain as he was greedy. And he was especially
vain about how blue his eyes were. Benny,
in addition, affected distinctive vocal rhythmns along with matching gestures,
facial expressions, and walk. These too involved the audience
as accomplices as all were stereotypes associated with gay men. Benny employed
them in his character's endless efforts at seducing women. This too stood "passing"
on its head. [13] Michael
Rogin is right, I think, to argue that blackface provided
a way for Jewish immigrants from Europe and their American-born children to claim
membership in American nationality. [14]
Yet, their appropriation of minstelsy is part of a much wider phenomenon as the
examples of the shows put on by Norton Company and by Irish-Catholic parishes
suggest. Nor was blackface solely or even primarily a way for ethnic groups to
assert their own place in American public life, even though it certainly could
fulfill that function. We
still think the "Perfect Song,"
which was written for "The Birth of a Nation," a perfect song for the theme melody
of "Amos 'n' Andy." � Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, "If
we had it to do OVER AGAIN": A Great Radio Pair Look Back Over Their Career
on Their Fourteenth Anniversary, Movie Radio Guide, March 1942 [For a midi
recording, click here. For a image
of the cover of a 1937 edition of the sheet music with Gosden and Correll in blackface,
click here.] Part
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Essay
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