SOURCE: Wittke, Carl. “The Immigrant Theme on the American Stage.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 2 (September 1952): 211-32.

[In the following essay, Wittke classifies the representation of immigrants in American theatre in the last half of the nineteenth century, including Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish Americans.]

The contact of successive immigrant waves with a New World environment is one of the central themes of American history, for the United States represents the experience of many peoples from many lands, speaking many tongues, in a republic with political unity and cultural diversity, and where there are other tests for a patriot than a man's accent, birthplace, or the color of his skin.

One of the still largely unexplored phases of the history of American immigration is the characterization of the immigrant for purposes of comic relief and dramatic entertainment on the American stage, and the emergence of certain immigrant stereotypes which still affect the thinking of many Americans about their fellow countrymen from other lands. Americans have not only been concerned about immigrants, but amused by their deviations from the standard American pattern. By 1850, when the American melting pot boiled over for the first time from the immigrant tide from Europe, the American stage began to exploit the peculiar and the ludicrous in the lives of the newcomers for purposes of public entertainment. Character actors and so-called “comics,” in a time when theater standards were low and slapstick comedy popular, created certain easily recognizable stereotypes of nationality groups which the average American readily accepted as authentic because of his own daily associations with the people he saw on the stage.

Early American comedy had portrayed familiar native types, such as the frontiersman or the Negro, to provide comic relief in more serious plays, but by the latter half of the nineteenth century playwrights and actors shifted to the humor which they found in the lives of the foreign-born, and they have continued to exploit its possibilities to the present day, in theater, screen, and radio. In almost every case, the comedy of the situation depended largely upon dialect, racial speech characteristics, and the unusual customs, folk habits, and character traits which actors mimicked with greater or less authenticity. In these stage presentations, however crude, exaggerated, untrue, and even unjust they may have been, we have the beginnings of a certain realism in the American drama, for they were based on actual observation of life experiences.

Such immigrant caricatures suggest a close parallel with the Negro of the American minstrel show. A unique American institution which could have originated in no other country, minstrelsy had only moderate success when it was exported to Europe, for foreigners had no understanding of the peculiar conditions from which it developed. The sources of American minstrelsy were the singing and dancing of slaves in the Southland; and on the humor and pathos, and the peculiarities of dress, manner, and speech of the Negro, the white minstrel built his performance.

In adapting the Negro folk figure to the stage, a stage type of Negro was evolved for purposes of comic effect. The Negro of the minstrel jokebook tradition became a shiftless fellow with unusual weaknesses for chicken coops, watermelons, big words which he only partially understood, crap games, and razors used primarily for social purposes. The burnt cork performers “made up” with large mouths to reveal rows of shining white teeth and exaggerated grins, and dressed in outlandish and gaudy costumes. Their songs revealed “the white man in the woodpile” and many were composed by white men who had never seen a cottonfield.¹

As the Negro came into his own after the Civil War, as a self-respecting and progressive citizen, he resented such ludicrous caricatures, which became steadily worse as the professional minstrel show tapered off into atrocious imitations by present-day amateurs, both male and female. Negro leaders felt that the stage Negro did immeasurable damage to race relations by creating an inaccurate and unjust stereotype of a whole people, and their resentment extends to such modern portrayals as “Amos and Andy.”

In the late nineteenth century the minstrel show degenerated into a tired businessman's variety bill, and minstrel men began to clutter up their programs with sentimental Irish ballads and “Dutch” slapstick comedy. Dan Bryant, for example, one of the minstrel “greats,” as early as the 1860's washed off the burnt cork and appeared with great success in Handy Andy, Rory O'More, and The Irish Emigrant. Johnny Allen, another popular minstrel, turned to low Dutch characters and advertised in the Clipper for engagements for his “Schneider, or, Dot House von der Rhine,” and Joseph Murphy left the minstrel semicircle for such Irish plays as Kerry Gow and Shawn Rhue, and “Dutch, Irish and Ethiopian delineations of character.”² As early as 1859 Bryant's minstrels featured songs like “MacFadden Fadden Trio,” written by J. H. Unsworth, author of “eccentric specimens of Ethiopian Hibernicism.”³ In 1875 the Cincinnati Enquirer referred to D. L. Morris as “‘the black Dutchman’ of the minstrel stage who was ‘infinitely ludicrous in his murdering and misapplication of the Queen's English,’”⁴ and Carncross' Minstrels, playing in Philadelphia in 1889, introduced the song, “Down Went McGinty,” in a travesty known as McGinty in Town.⁵

The Irishman, “as an insistent figure” on the American stage, emerged in the 1850's when thousands of Irish arrived in the New Canaan with empty pockets but high hopes and were left stranded in the eastern port towns. For the most part they were marginal, unskilled laborers and were forced to live in tenements that were “human rookeries.” The drink evil hounded the early Irish in America and saloons and gang politics were closely intertwined. Irish immigrant boardinghouses, closely allied with grogshops, were notorious for overcrowding and lack of cleanliness. When Paddy arrived, clad in caped and high-waisted coat, brimless caubeen, knee breeches, woolen stockings, and rusty brogues, he was herded by immigrant runners and “shoulder hitters” into the broken-down shacks of Irish “shanty towns.” In the second generation this type of Irishman largely disappeared, and as Orestes A. Brownson predicted, “out from these narrow lanes, blind courts, dirty streets, damp cellars, and suffocating garrets” would come men and women whom the country would delight to own and honor.⁶ The playwright and actor, however, found his material for the theater in the congested areas of the first generation Irish, and before the end of the 1850's the stage Irishman had become a full-grown giant of the American stage and threatened to dwarf all other types, including the Negro and the Yankee.

Scotch and Irish characters were seen on the American stage as elements in the melting pot as early as 1767, in a poor musical comedy known as The Disappointment, or The Force of Credulity,⁷ and an able student of early American drama has found Irish characters in twenty-two American plays before 1828. Some already suggested the “disturbing presence” of the Irishman in the United States,⁸ and Irish airs, jigs, reels, and brogue were not unknown before the flood of Irish came in the 1850's.⁹

Tyrone Power, famous portrayer of comic Irish characters on the English stage who made three tours of America to introduce comedies in the 1830's with Irish settings, dances, and songs, generally avoided the grosser caricatures of Irish character. O'Flannigan and the Fairies, or a Midsummer Night's Dream, not Shakespeare's, a musical fairy story in which Power appeared in 1837, was based on the Irish belief in fairies and preached a vigorous lesson in temperance, because the entire action turned out to be the creation of a wild Irishman's brain, fired with too much whisky.¹⁰ During the 1840's the struggle for Irish freedom stimulated plays that were both historical and nationalistic. By 1850 a whole series of “Mose and Jake” plays portrayed the life of Bowery boys and city loafers in which “fightin' Mose,” a broth of a “b'hoy” in red flannel fireman's shirt, chewed tobacco like a virtuoso, spoke in extravagant Irish speech, wore “soaplocks,” and outraced all others “with the machine.” “Mose” strongly suggested an Irish ancestry, and was the forerunner of the full-grown stage Irishman of the next decade. By the middle of the 1850's “Mose” had given way to the urban Irishman, who remained the standard character in the theater for nearly two generations.¹¹ Costumed in ragged and dirty clothes, he usually was portrayed as an impudent, pugnacious, and eloquent character who swung a wicked shillelah for the protection of widows, children, and Irish maidens about to be seduced, revealed an unquenchable hatred for “dirty peelers,” otherwise known as policemen, and got off “Irish bulls” which became a part of American folk humor.

Playwrights like James Pilgrim, Samuel D. Johnson, John Brougham, and Dion Boucicault turned to mass production of farces and melodrama on Irish themes and characters; and outstanding actors like Barney Williams and John Drew introduced their plays to American theater audiences from the Atlantic to the Pacific.¹² A six months' tour of California netted Williams and his actress wife a profit of $40,000.¹³ W. J. Florence toured the country as an early specialist in Irish comedy parts,¹⁴ and in 1858 he joined the temperance league and gave “a series of lectures on that topic, with Hibernian illustrations.”¹⁵ The Irish skits of Mr. and Mrs. F. S. Chanfrau were presented to packed houses on New York's East Side before the Civil War.¹⁶ Less well known, but comedians of considerable talent, were John T. Kelly, a star on Broadway in Irish vaudeville and musical comedy;¹⁷ the Russell Brothers, famous for their “Irish Servant Girls” act;¹⁸ and Barney Gilmore, an Irish singer and dancer of the Chauncey Olcott type, who did Hibernian specialties in vaudeville and melodrama.¹⁹

From a reading of the lines of these Irish specialists, one must conclude that their success depended primarily on their powers of mimicry, make-up, and dialect, for neither the plot nor the jokes seem funny by modern standards. In terms of box office receipts, however, Irish comedy was a paying proposition. The Florences earned more than $500 a week in Chicago in the 1850's, and stars like Barney Williams and John Drew presented Irish plays in the same city to houses which sometimes netted nearly $600 a night.²⁰ From the Civil War to World War I, the American variety stage exploited Irish and other foreign-born groups for comic effect with continuing financial success.²¹ The Gold Rush made San Francisco “a theatrical suburb” of New York, and Chanfrau, Florence, and other Irish comedians played to large audiences in youthful California, where theaters were still close enough to saloons to permit the audience to drink before, during, and after the performance. Plays about Mose, the Irish firefighter from the Bowery, and other Irish-American comedy patterned largely on the performances of Barney Williams, were as popular on the Pacific coast as in the large eastern cities.²²

The popularity of Irish songs which helped to reinforce certain features of the Irish stereotype began nearly a century ago. They ran the whole gamut from the comic to the sentimental and heroic. In recent decades some of the best have been written by Jewish tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley. “Billy” Scanlan, singer and Irish dialect comedian, popularized “Peek-a-Boo” and “Moonlight on Killarney,”²³ and the constantly expanding Irish repertoire not only gave Americans such timeless favorites as “My Wild Irish Rose,” “Sweet Rosy O'Grady,” and “My Isle of Dreams,” but such forgotten leaders in the American hit parade as “There Never Was a Coward Where the Shamrock Grows.”

Plays on Irish themes featuring Irish immigrant characters were so numerous after 1850 that for forty years only the blackfaced minstrel could compete with the stage types from the land of brogue and “bulls.” Many of these Irish plays which were extraordinarily successful at the box office had little merit as literary or dramatic productions, but two Irish-American playwrights, Dion Boucicault and John Brougham, ranked among the most prominent American dramatists of their time.

Boucicault came to New York in 1853. Although he used other themes, he achieved his greatest popularity as an interpreter of Irish characters. With the talented actress Agnes Robertson, his second wife, Boucicault toured the country for many years. He never hesitated to help himself generously to the work of others, although he revised and frequently improved what he borrowed. His The Poor of New York, for example, first played in 1857, and later reissued in several forms, as The Poor of Liverpool and The Streets of London, was based on Les Pauvres de Paris, which in turn had been presented in New York as Fraud and Its Victims. Boucicault copyrighted it as his own.²⁴ The play depicted the suffering in the metropolis from the Panic of 1857, and the New York Herald pointed out that the “only real local character [was] Dan, the firebug.” The author and star was urged to take the play to Washington for the education of congressmen.²⁵ Boucicault's “The Colleen Bawn” (1860), dealing with Irish gentlefolk, had more than three thousand performances. The Shaughraun (1874), full of Irish bonhomie, was a more authentic portrayal of the Irish type. Boucicault wrote or adapted 124 plays, and thrilled his audiences with melodramatic effects for years, yet he lived long enough to see his own plays become old-fashioned.²⁶

John Brougham spent fifty years on the stage and wrote about seventy-five plays, all of which have been forgotten. He made his debut at the Park Theatre in New York in 1842, and his reputation rested largely on his portrayal of comic Irish characters. Laurence Hutton thought he “deserves a colossal statue in [the] Pantheon” of American burlesque.²⁷ W. J. Florence starred as Tim O'Brien, an honest Irish laborer, in Brougham's The Irish Emigrant, a play which stressed the more bizarre features of Irish life.²⁸ Among his other notable plays were Life in New York; or Tom and Jerry on a Visit, The Irish Yankee; or the Birthday of Freedom, and a farce, Take Care of Little Charley, modeled on the French, LaFille bien Garde, in which Brougham played a funny Irishman.²⁹ By the close of the 1850's Irish farces, with their practical jokes, rough comedy, and absurd characters, had become “the most favorite class of modern dramatic entertainment,”³⁰ and their simple, romantic plots usually were generously interspersed with Irish songs, jigs, and reels.³¹

A brief description of several Irish immigrant plays will indicate the character of these productions. They do not read well to the modern reader; they follow a standard pattern which permits virtue and honesty to triumph in the end, and their success apparently depended almost entirely on the character actors who performed in them.

Brougham's The Irish Emigrant told in two acts the simple story of a truckman and a poor, hungry, ragged Irish immigrant who found $5,000 but was too honest to keep the money.³² James Pilgrim's Shandy Maguire dealt with oppression in Ireland, in which the revenue man and the landlord were the villains, the squire's worthless son lusted for the old miller's daughter, and the characters and the audience were reminded that “there are hearts across the big waters, in the New World, that have stretched forth a helping hand to poor Ireland, and will do it again.”³³ The farce, Brian O'Linn, was specially written for Barney Williams, the hero of the play. Williams appeared in dark brown breeches, gray stockings, a frieze coat and red vest, and the cast included several Irishmen, a Catholic priest, a British army officer, and women in Irish peasant dress. As the curtain rose Williams was seen in his mother's humble cottage, trimming his shillelah and singing an Irish love song. The dialogue was full of witticisms and extravagant Irish blarney, but the plot stumbled along through absurd and tumultuous scenes in which the hero made love to the girl Sheelah, and fought periodically with the police. The action is so preposterous that it strains both the patience and the credulity of the modern reader,³⁴ but the play was a great success.

Irish Assurance and Yankee Modesty was a comedy built around the desires of Pat, “the devil after the girls,” and his amorous pursuit of a “tigress Yankee girl.”³⁵Ireland and America, another special creation for Barney Williams, opened with an Irish fair and a chorus, singing

The flowers of all Europe
Are the pretty girls of Paddy's land.

The villains were the excisemen, who interfered with the Irishman's harmless desire to distill “the mountain dew,” and the hated redcoats whose captain was intent upon seducing the hero's (Jimmy Finnegan's) Peggy. While under the influence of liquor, Finnegan was impressed into military service by “kidnappers that crawl through the lanes and valleys of our beloved country.” He escaped to “the home of the stranger—America,” and Act III found him in New York, breathing “the free air of that glorious land of liberty,” where after three years of honest toil he was doing pretty well financially. For melodramatic effect, the playwright contrived to have him meet his ancient enemy, the British captain, who had been expelled in disgrace from the army, and now was engaged in robbing new arrivals from Europe as a New York immigrant runner. The beloved Peggy arrived with her mother on an immigrant ship in time to fall into the clutches of the erstwhile captain, who steered her party to an immigrant boardinghouse where he planned to divest her of both her money and her virtue. Meantime, the hero, now a successful Irish-American businessman, had resolved that it was his duty to rescue his fellow countrymen from their unscrupulous exploiters. He donned his old clothes to visit the dens where Irishmen were being fleeced, and the outcome was inevitable. In a final scene, in an old house where the villain held Peggy under lock and key, there was a terrific fight, and after the hero had cracked a sufficient number of heads with his trusty shillelah, the girl rushed into his arms.³⁶

The action of A Day in New York (1857) opened with immigrants landing at Castle Garden, and was likewise concerned with an Irishman's beautiful daughter, who was imprisoned by an immigrant runner in one of the Bowery's dens of iniquity.³⁷ Brougham's The Irish Yankee; or the Birthday of Freedom, sounded the patriotic, nationalistic note. Its characters included Washington, costumed as he was when he crossed the Delaware; Lord Howe, Israel Putnam, and the Irishman O'Donahoo, a name “with a real good potato flavor,” dressed in pantaloons and entrusted with carrying a secret letter to the Commander in Chief. Before the play ended, the audience saw the Boston Tea Party and a tableau of Bunker Hill, and listened to “The Star Spangled Banner” (not yet written at the time of the Revolution). In the final scene,

The soldier, tired of war's alarms
Beat a retreat to beauty's arms.(38)

William Kelly's The Harp Without a Crown, or Mountcashel's Fair Daughter belonged in the same general category. It opened with the defeat of the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne, and dealt with the continuing struggle of Irishmen to maintain their liberty and their faith. It featured much marching, many flags, and hair-breadth escapes; the lines abounded with “achuslas” and “ashtore machrees,” and the play ended with the dying hero kissing the green flag and sighing for Ireland with his last breath.³⁹ In The Hills of Erin, or Ireland's Last Struggle (1866) the hero's experiences took him from Libby Prison to all the “woes beyond the seas.”⁴⁰

Although Irish plays were still being produced throughout the 1870's, and many of the earlier favorites revived, their vogue began to decline in the 1880's. Bridget and Pat ceased to be major characters, and were retained, if at all, primarily for comic relief, and Irish skits were confined largely to the shorter performances of the vaudeville stage. By 1900 Irish plays were still romantic, but less realistic; the actors no longer dressed in rags; and scenes of extreme poverty no longer symbolized the Irish stage character. The Irishman had become Americanized and with Americanization Irish caricatures had become less popular; yet vaudeville actors, until the movies dealt their craft a knockout blow, continued to portray Irishmen working on a scaffold, or carrying mortar on ladders, throwing bricks at each other, or falling into mortar boxes, and counted on rapid, crossfire conversation and a knockabout kind of rough humor, based on misunderstanding and violent argument, for their applause. Kelly and Ryan, a popular vaudeville team, billed as “The Bards of Tara,” did their act as coal heavers with scoop shovels; and such vaudeville acts frequently began and ended with a song and dance and clever improvising about events and issues of the day.⁴¹

Harrigan and Hart, two of the most successful delineators of Irish character in theater history, deserve a final word of comment, for in their day they made a genuine contribution to the American stage. Both started in vaudeville and expanded their acts into full-length plays. During the decade of the 1870's Harrigan composed no less than eighty sketches, and his material gradually evolved from a song to a duet, dialogue, and full-length plays, including not only characterizations of the Irish, but of Negro, German, Italian, and Chinese immigrant types as well.⁴²

Edward Harrigan was born in New York in 1845. The veteran actor and producer, Leavitt, recalled meeting him in Sacramento where he worked as a caulker before going on the stage. Harrigan met his partner, Tony Hart (Anthony Cannon) while the latter was playing in a variety theater in Chicago, and formed a partnership which lasted for several decades.⁴³ Harrigan wrote the songs, dialogues, and plots for their skits. Originally they ran only from thirty-five to forty minutes. His plays, chronicling the adventures of Dan Mulligan and the Mulligan Guards, and known as the “Mulligan Series,” were realistic, good-natured portrayals of New York Irish. Dan, a veteran of the Civil War, was irascible, intemperate, impulsive, but generous, loyal, and honest. His wife Cordelia, originally portrayed as a prudent, frugal, simple Irish woman, developed into a social climber, and Cordelia's Aspirations recounted her rise, fall, ruin, and return to the old grocery and boardinghouse, and to her Dan, for whom she had a genuine motherly affection. Harrigan's Squatter Sovereignty satirized the conflict for prestige between two clans in the social caste structure of New York's Irish Shantytown. Other plays in the series were built around the rivalry between Dan Mulligan and Gustav Lochmüller, the German butcher who was his competitor and the foil for his quick Irish humor. The Mulligan Guard burlesqued the outings, riots, and target practice of New York's volunteer militia companies; The Mulligans and the Skidmores contrasted Irish and Negro character; and The Mulligan Guard Ball, which ran for a hundred nights in New York, described the complications that arose when a Mulligan fell in love with a daughter of a Lochmüller. Mrs. Annie Yeamans, her daughter Jenny, and Tony Hart played the female roles in the Mulligan Series, and Harrigan's father-in-law, David Braham, wrote the songs and marches which the nation whistled and sang from the 1870's to the end of the century.⁴⁴

Harrigan's inspiration was the local color of New York's immigrant communities. He wrote about the common people—and

Murphy's tenement, in the First Ward near the dock,
Where Ireland's represented by the Babies on Our Block.

His humor was clean and good-natured, his plots not without significance for American “social history” and the melting pot, and they were pleasantly relieved by tuneful and clever musical numbers. The characters included street cleaners, contractors, grocers, shyster lawyers, politicians, policemen, truckers, and washerwomen;⁴⁵ and the scenes, dives, shantytowns, the water front, the clothes stalls of the Jews, the German Turnvereine, picnics, barber shops, and the corner grocery. Few of Harrigan's plays were published. Their success depended almost wholly on their genial satire and comedy types. They lived on the stage, not in the library. Reilly and the 400, which opened in Harrigan's Theatre in December, 1890, was his last great success. In it he played an Irish pawnbroker, opposite Annie Yeamans, a society leader. The song hit of the show was “Maggie Murphy's Home,” which contained the lines

There's an organ in the parlor, to give the house a tone,
And you're welcome every evening at Maggie Murphy's home.

The catchy “Danny By My Side,” a tune from The Last of the Hogans, written in 1891, was a favorite of the late Jimmie Walker, and Al Smith sang it in 1933 at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.⁴⁶

By that time American audiences had almost completely forgotten the Mulligans and the Lochmüllers, and the early immigrant communities which produced them, but no less a critic than William Dean Howells believed that Harrigan and Hart were unsurpassed in the fidelity and refined perception of their portrayals of American immigrant types, and that their sociological and psychological studies constituted true American art.⁴⁷

After the Revolution a few Dutchmen with long pipes served as foils for Yankee wit in several American stories and plays, but with the exception of Rip Van Winkle, the early Dutch character was quickly forgotten.⁴⁸ The Pennsylvania “Dutchman” (German) who by the nineteenth century represented a petrification of an American colonial stock with practically no further contacts with Europe, was represented in an occasional play, such as Son and Father, or the Dutch Redemptioner (1830), and in the character of the patriotic Krout, in Blanche of Brandywine, but such stage roles were exceptional.⁴⁹ Only comparatively recently has there been renewed interest in the art, customs, and language of the Pennsylvania Germans. They have been the inspiration for the stories of Helen R. Martin and Elsie Singmaster, plays like Erstwhile Susan and Papa Is All, and radio skits of Pennsylvania German characters, somewhat after the fashion of “Lum and Abner” from Pine Ridge. Such portrayals provoked the usual controversy about their accuracy and fairness, and the extent to which they stress only the queer and unattractive qualities of this extraordinary early German group.

The large German immigration of the nineteenth century was of a different kind and made “Dutch slapstick” a favorite of vaudeville audiences. King Lager, or Ye Sons of Malt, produced in 1857, indicated the inroads this exhilarating beverage already had made on the American palate.⁵⁰ By the 1870's variety bills featured Irish and “Dutch” acts and songs, whose comic effects depended largely upon the contrast between the nimble, quick-witted, coleric Irishman and the slow, phlegmatic, heavy-footed German. The actor, Lewis Mann, was a master of several German dialects, and Gus Williams, a German comedian for nearly half a century, is credited with introducing the first German dialect song, “Kaiser, don't you want to buy a dog.”⁵¹ German comedians generally made up with chin whiskers and padded stomachs, wore long vests, short pants, and bowler hats, and spoke German with an emphasis on the guttural “r,” and used the “z” sound for “th.” Henry L. Mencken's The American Language points out to what extent they influenced the average American's vocabulary.

Eddie Cantor did “Dutch” acts, as well as blackface and Jewish comedy, at the beginning of his notable career. Sam Bernard sang German songs in the New York Turner Hall and in a “Concert Hall” in the notorious “Five Points” area and on Coney Island for $2.50 a performance, before he became the stage's most popular German comedian.⁵² Joseph K. Emmett was best known for his portrayals of “Fritz, Our German Cousin,” and there were other Irish performers who excelled in so-called “Dutch” acts.⁵³ Gus Williams twisted his lines into a ludicrous mixture of English and German in a skit of the 1880's, entitled “The German Senator.” Vaudeville favorites, like Lizzie Wilson, introduced the “Schnitzelbank” song, still a midnight favorite of lager beer saloons, and in 1879 Mary Fiske's English Blondes, the forerunners of the modern burlesque show, featured a court scene, entitled “Dutch Justice,” with Irish and German comedians doing pure slapstick.⁵⁴ John W. Ransome, a pioneer in American vaudeville, toured in the 1880's as a Dutch comic,⁵⁵ and later, as the German brewer in The Prince of Pilsen, made nationally famous the line “Vas you effer in Zinzinatti?”

In 1879 The Emigrant Train, or Go West, playing at Tony Pastor's in New York, combined Irish, Dutch, and Italian immigrant dialect comedians and four blackface performers in one play.⁵⁶ The next season produced “The Emigrants,” with Baker and Farron and characters known as Ludwig Vinkelsteinhausenblauser and Christina Waldhauser.⁵⁷ Further proof of the low comedy of such performances may be gathered from the inane patter of Cliff Gordon, who played a stupid, kindly German as late as the early 1900's, and included the following in a monologue on the scarcity of money.

Efferbody says there iss a shortness of money. Who shortened it? I didn't done it. Who has got all dis money? I ain't got it. … We neffer had dese things when people like George Lincoln and Abraham Washington vas superintendencing the gufferment.⁵⁸

Like Harrigan and Hart in Irish comedy, Weber and Fields were without a peer in the “Dutch” dialect comedy of their day, and their knockabout, slapstick act was imitated by many lesser talents. Both had appeared earlier in blackface, and as Irish comics. Joseph Weber was a product of the New York Ghetto. His family came in steerage from Poland. Lew Fields was the son of a Polish Jewish tailor. The boys met on the sidewalks of the Bowery, and at the early age of nine made their debut as a blackface acrobatic song and dance team in the New York Turner Hall. Weber was five feet four, and dumpy; Fields was tall and thin, a good combination for a vaudeville act. Their German accents were easily acquired for both heard Yiddish at home. When they sang such songs as “Ireland for the Irish,” their pronounced Semitic faces added greatly to the comic effect.

Weber and Fields abandoned blackface and Irish parts to concentrate on the German dialect comedy which carried them to fame and fortune. They had a standard technique which they used throughout their career. They came shouting and gesticulating out of the wings. They dressed at first in loud, checkered suits, later in dress clothes. They mangled the English language with German words and accents, pushed each other around, hooked each other with canes, kicked each other in their padded stomachs, and usually ended their act by kissing each other. Fields frequently sank a hatchet in Weber's head which was protected by a steel-plated wig, or kicked his partner with a shoe that exploded, and they had other crude tricks which sent their audiences into gales of laughter.

It is impossible to reproduce the acts with which they entertained the American public for decades. They might begin their patter with “I am delightfulness to meet you,” followed by “Der disgust is all mine.” On a somewhat higher artistic level were such skits as the quarrel of two Germans in a poolroom in Düsseldorf, in which Weber played the trusting little man and Fields the bully; or their burlesque of a German Schützenfest in which they fired, blindfolded and at all angles, at electric lights revolving back stage, and never missed. From this they went on to the clever travesties which made Weber and Fields's Music Hall famous, and produced such burlesques as Quo Vass Is? (Quo Vadis); Barbara Fidgety (Barbara Frietchie); Sing Bad, the Tailor; The Stickiness of Gelatine (The Stubbornness of Geraldine); The Corn Curers, a travesty of Guy De Maupassant's Franco-Prussian War story, “The Conquerors,” in which the major of German Uhlans spoke with an Irish brogue and drank beer from a trick stein that refilled itself; Cyranose de Bric-a-Brac (Cyrano de Bergerac) and Sapolio for Sappho.⁵⁹ Some of their routine was pure slapstick, including the periodic smashing of the orchestra leader's violin, but much was remarkably clever burlesque and satire.⁶⁰

The German immigration developed theaters of high quality of its own where the best of the German classics were presented, but the language barrier shut out average Americans from an appreciation of the culture imported by the leaders of the German element, so different from the Weber and Fields stereotype, and that of other vaudevillians who had come up through the beer halls and dime museums. The continuing popularity of Jack Pearl's radio portrayal of Baron Munchhausen indicates that this earlier conception of the American “Dutchman” has not yet completely lost its attraction.⁶¹

Although occasional plays introduced Jewish characters and their old clothes and pawnshops at an earlier date, the Hebrew stereotype did not make its formal entry upon the American stage much before the turn of the century. In the 1850's, when Irish and German characters became popular, the Jewish element was still too small to attract much attention. The most prominent and successful actors from this group belong to the early twentieth century, and by that time Irish and German characters had lost much of their popularity. Many earlier Jewish performers did blackface and “Dutch” acts before turning to the portrayal of the Jew of the tenement districts.

Frank Bush, a blonde German, did some of the first stage representations of the “Hebrew Drummer” and the Jewish pawnbroker and was regarded in the 1890's as a great Jewish comic. His vaudeville acts combined humor and pathos, and depicted Jewish characters in grotesque make-ups, with derbies or plug hats pulled far down over their ears, long black coats, long tapering beards, large spectacles, and hands crossed in an obsequious gesture. Bush intended to give an honest imitation of the kindly, humorous, shrewd, and philosophical East Side Hebrew pawnbroker whom he knew from real life.⁶² One of his songs dealt with “Solomon Moses,” “a bully Sheeny man,” and ended with the chorus,

Solomon, Solomon Moses,
Hast du gesehen der clotheses?
Hast du gesehen der kleiner Kinder?
Und der sox iss in der vinder?(63)

and apparently theatergoers understood enough German and Yiddish to follow such musical gibberish.

The team of Bent and Leon in 1878 used a store front as a setting for a vaudeville act in which they sang “The Widow Rosenbaum,” a parody on “The Widow Dunn,” about “a hock shop” with three balls over the door, “Where the Sheeny politicians can be found.”⁶⁴ Joe Welch specialized on the crestfallen, unhappy Jew; his brother Ben featured the fast-talking pushcart type, and Julian Rose made the monologue, “Levinsky at the Wedding,” famous as an act and a recording.⁶⁵ Joseph Lateiner's play, Emigration to America, opened with a scene of Jewish persecution in Europe, and ended with a Jewish wedding in New York.⁶⁶ Jewish vaudeville acts became a feature of American burlesque shows, and have remained standard equipment for the strip-tease companies. As early as 1896 Charlie Burke achieved burlesque fame as an Irishman who did a Jew act and sang “Rachel Goldstein.”⁶⁷ In melodrama “Levi” or “Solomon” usually were only minor characters in the plot.

David Warfield began with low comedy and East Side Jewish caricatures in San Francisco and New York before he was discovered for the legitimate stage by David Belasco. In his characterization of Simon Levi, in The Auctioneer, the stage Jew reached perhaps his highest and most sympathetic portrayal, yet Warfield's characterization merely represented the perfection of a role which he had begun to play in his early music hall days.⁶⁸ Israel Zangwill's The Children of the Ghetto was staged with great effect in 1900. More recent Jewish caricature, of the Abe Potash and Mauruss Perlmutter variety, and such characters as Mrs. Feitelbaum with her “Nize Baby” to whom the mother tells “a Ferry Tail from de Pite Piper of Hemilton,” remain favorites with vaudeville, screen, and radio audiences. “The Goldbergs” and the Sam Levenson program are current favorites on television. Eddie Cantor, a product of New York's East Side slums, began his career as an entertainer with Yiddish and blackface acts and German and Irish comics, and like his contemporary, George Jessel, has never hesitated to draw comedy effects from the life of the American-Jewish community and to rely heavily on Jewish content for his humor. Much of current American public humor still is of Jewish origin. The nature of that humor can perhaps be explained in part by its philosophical overtones, and the fact that a people that suffered economic and social frustration for centuries took it out in making fun of each other, in a kind of verbal exhibitionism.⁶⁹

America also has had its flood of Jewish popular songs which appeared some ten to twenty years after the high tide of Jewish immigration and helped develop and perpetuate the Jewish stereotype. Irving Berlin's “Yiddle on Your Fiddle” marked the beginning of a new interest in the Jewish type in American song literature, and it was followed by such so-called “Yid” songs as “Yiddische Rag,” “Yiddische Eyes,” “How's de Mamma,” “At the Yiddish Ball,” “Maxie, Don't Take a Taxie,” Fannie Brice's renditions of “Second Hand Rose” and “It's Tough When Izzie Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone,” and the less well-known “Rocky Rifkowitz, Tell Me Witz is Witz.”⁷⁰

Other immigrant groups have figured to a lesser degree on the American stage. French farce, popular at the turn of the century, supported the popular notion that “Frenchy” somehow suggested something naughty and relatively licentious. “Gus” Hill, a professional club swinger who turned to the variety stage, has been credited with inventing the characters of Alphonse and Gaston.⁷¹ Beginning with Our American Cousin, in which Edward A. Sothern played Lord Dundreary hundreds of times throughout the United States, the stage Englishman has generally been represented as something of a vacuous, self-confident fop, a silly “English swell,” with a strange sense of humor and long side whiskers which once were known in America as “Picadilly weepers.” In addition, there was the English low comedian who usually was outlandishly dressed and spoke in broad cockney.

By the 1890's the Swede fared no better than his Irish and German predecessors, and there was a short vogue for ludicrous Swedish-American stage characters such as “Ole Olson,” “Yon Yonson,” and “Hans Hanson.”⁷² The song, “Ay Vant to Go Back to Sweden,” was written in 1904, and the Swedish maid was introduced as a minor character in many plays. Arthur Donaldson, a Swedish immigrant boy who came to New York in 1882 as a lad of thirteen and worked as typographer and watchmaker, and acted in Swedish plays while learning English, became a star of musical comedy, light opera, and screen. At the turn of the century he was playing the name rolls in the Swedish dialect comedies, Ole Olson and Yon Yonson, in the Swedish theater in Chicago.⁷³ On the vaudeville stage the Swede usually was depicted as a person of rather slow and heavy mentality. Kathryn Forbes's “Mama's Bank Account,” popular on the stage as “I Remember Mamma,” dealt with a Norwegian-American family in California, whose folkways were those of the mid-nineteenth-century immigration.

Italian characters were introduced early for purposes of comic relief, in such plays as Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, whose cast included “an Italian organ grinder from Cork” named “Raffardi, neé Rafferty.” Harrigan occasionally played Italian immigrant roles, and produced The Italian Padrone, or, the Slaves of the Harp.⁷⁴ The first decade of the twentieth century brought a flood of Italian “Mariuch” songs, such as “Mariuch, She Taka da Steamboat” and “Mariuch Makea-de-Hootch-a-ma-Cooch,”⁷⁵ and Italian character actors still appear occasionally in burlesque shows. “Life with Luigi,” the popular radio program glorifying America as a land of opportunity and free enterprise, not only describes the Italian Luigi's adventures with Pasquale and his marriageable daughter Rosa, but from time to time introduces other immigrant characters, such as Jews, Germans, and Swedes. The Eddie Cantor radio show introduced Parkyakarkus, purported to be a Greek caricature.

Finally, in the period when popular priced melodrama flourished, stereotypes of the foreign-born figured in many popular thrillers. The Hebrew usually represented a mercenary character who was the butt of many jokes, but seldom a villain, and he frequently blundered into saving the hero or heroine. Irish and German types were stupid, and dressed to be funny, but generally on the side of virtue. The “bad” foreign types, represented as the villain's henchmen, were the French, Chinese, or Italians. The Chinaman of melodrama was often cruel and almost always connected with either the opium or laundry business; the Italian was hired to do the bloody work; while the Frenchman was the well-dressed, debonair, and smooth lover, who plotted his villainy with more refinement. Chinatown Charlie, the Opium Fiend was written by Owen Davis who produced scores of melodramas and other plays about the Chinese, but the action was really more concerned with melodrama than with the Chinese.⁷⁶ Charles H. Hoyt wrote a comedy of manners entitled A Trip to Chinatown,⁷⁷ and in Francis Powers' The First Born, a story of San Francisco's Chinese quarter, one of the leading characters was a learned Chinese and another a Jewish peddler.⁷⁸ The Chinese caricature remains popular in murder mysteries, and in such radio portrayals as Fred Allen's Chinese detective.

Sociologists and social psychologists probably would have much to say about the “minority caricatures” described in this paper, and would account for them by “the ethnocentrism of the majority,” and explain the inaccuracy of stage stereotypes of the foreign-born in terms of “ethnocentric” majority attitudes.⁷⁹ The historian must be content with a description of the phenomenon, and a few simple deductions. The popularity of immigrant types in the theater followed in rough chronological order the major waves of immigration to the United States, for the group must be large enough and still sufficiently unassimilated to invite caricature. In the 1880's much of the comedy of the variety theaters still was racial; today it is much less so. There has been almost no reference to Slavs in the theater, probably because they did not come until the whole American entertainment pattern had outgrown the crudity of its adolescent years. The complex and difficult Slavic languages may be another factor, for they do not lend themselves easily to borrowing and mutilation for comic stage effects. Harrigan, in 1908, made the additional suggestion “that only Irish and Anglo-Germanic peoples know how to laugh,” and that Latins and Slavs “want to laugh not with you but at you,” and represent an entirely different kind of humor.⁸⁰

American audiences saw these inaccurate stage immigrant characters and heard these dialects so long that many accepted them as completely authentic, although character traits, overplayed for comic effect, obviously emphasize idiosyncrasies and deviations from the general folk pattern. Though most of the humor and comedy was good-natured and kindly, the aim of each minority group as it rises in the American social and economic scale has been “to clean up the caricature.” Resentment of stage stereotypes grows more pronounced as each group becomes more Americanized, and senses the difficulties of dislodging such misconceptions from the public mind. The Irish, German, and Jewish-American have been steadily moving out of caricature on the stage, and today are no longer the stilted stage comics of old, but diversified, complex personalities, like other Americans. Such productions as Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1908) which described the United States as “God's Crucible,” The Gentile Wife (1918), and Abie's Irish Rose (1922), which had its greatest popularity during the Ku Klux Klan frenzy of the 1920's, made moving and effective appeals for reconciliation and tolerance among diverse religious and national groups.⁸¹ The older immigrant drama and stage stereotypes have now become historical documents of sorts, illustrating how the creative artist responds to the social milieu of which he is a part, and at the same time has some part in reshaping it.

Notes

1. See N. I. White, “The White Man in the Woodpile,” American Speech (Baltimore), IV (February, 1929), 209-10.

2. See George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927-), VII, 546-47; Robert Grau, Forty Years Observation of Music and the Drama (New York, 1909), 312; Michael B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (New York, 1912), 189; New York Clipper, March 11, May 27, 1871.

3. Porter's Spirit of the Times, February 5, 1859.

4. Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones, A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, 1930), 90.

5. Ibid., 108. See also for the American stage Negro and “Ethiopian Drama,” Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York, 1891), 89-144; and Robert F. Roden, Later American Plays, 1831-1900 (New York, 1900), 119-20.

6. Boston Pilot, July 1, 1854.

7. Margaret G. Mayorga, A Short History of the American Drama; Commentaries on Plays Prior to 1920 (New York, 1932), 29. See also Perley I. Reed, The Realistic Presentation of American Characters in Native American Plays Prior to Eighteen Seventy, Ohio State University Bulletin, XXII, No. 26 (Columbus, 1918), 22.

8. See Catherine Sturtevant, “A Study of the Dramatic Productions of Two Decades in Chicago, 1847-1857 and 1897-1907” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1931), 34-37.

9. Constance M. Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York, 1931), 78. See also Arthur H. Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War (New York, 1928), 375.

10. Arthur H. Wilson, A History of the Philadelphia Theatre, 1835 to 1855 (Philadelphia, 1935), 64-65; Oral S. Coad and Edwin Mims, Jr., The American Stage, Ralph H. Gabriel (ed.), The Pageant of America, 15 vols. (New Haven, 1925-1929), XIV, 163.

11. See Rourke, American Humor, 138-39, 141; Reed, Realistic Presentation of American Characters in Native American Plays, 120; Wilson, History of the Philadelphia Theatre, 80, 82-83; and Kenneth H. Dunshee, As You Pass By (New York, 1952).

12. See Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War, 376-77; Porter's Spirit of the Times, April 11, 1857.

13. Edmond M. Gagey, The San Francisco Stage, A History (New York, 1950), 57.

14. Samuel P. Orth, A History of Cleveland, Ohio, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1910), I, 438. Irish plays presented in Cleveland from 1854 to the Civil War included, among others, Irish Assurance, The Irish Doctor, The Irish Tutor, The Irish Immigrant, Brian O'Linn, Paddy the Piper, Irish Assurance and Yankee Modesty, The Irish Mormon, The Irish Huzzar, The Green Banner of Erin, Ireland and America, and The Lake of Killarney. See William S. Dix, “The Theatre in Cleveland, 1854-1875” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1946), 11, 26, 55, 70, 124, 129.

15. See Porter's Spirit of the Times, April 10, 1858; also June 27, 1857, and September 4, 1858.

16. Ibid., February 5, 1859.

17. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 152.

18. New York Tribune, January 18, 1890.

19. Lewin A. Goff, “The Popular Priced Melodrama in America, 1890 to 1910, with Its Origins and Development to 1890” (Ph.D. dissertation in Dramatic Arts, Western Reserve University, 1948), 176.

20. See Napier Wilt, “A History of the Two Rice Theatres in Chicago from 1847 to 1857,” University of Chicago, Abstracts of Theses, Humanistic Series, IV (Chicago, 1926), 411-17.

21. See also Arthur H. Quinn, “The Perennial Humor of the American Stage,” Yale Review (New Haven), N. S., XVI (April 1, 1927), 553-66; and Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville, Its Life and Times (New York, 1940), 397 et seq., for vaudeville acts from 1880 to 1930.

22. Gagey, San Francisco Stage, 3, 13, 28, 118-19; Porter's Spirit of the Times, February 5, 1859.

23. Fred J. Beaman, Pearls from Past Programs (Boston, 1931), 24-27.

24. The Poor of New York is in French's Standard Drama (New York, n.d.), CLXXXIX.

25. Porter's Spirit of the Times, December 19, 1857.

26. See Jesse May Anderson, “Dion Boucicault: Man of the Theatre,” University of Chicago, Abstracts of Theses, Humanistic Series, V (Chicago, 1928), 439-42; Kenneth R. Rossman, “The Irish in American Drama in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” New York History (Cooperstown), XXI (January, 1940), 39-53.

27. Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage, 204.

28. Porter's Spirit of the Times, June 13, 1857.

29. Ibid., December 4, 1858. See also Wilson, Philadelphia Theatre, 109.

30. Porter's Spirit of the Times, December 27, 1856.

31. The list of Irish plays runs into hundreds. In addition to those already mentioned, the 1850's produced Fitz James O'Brien's The Gentleman from Ireland, The Irish American; or The Lost Keepsake (anonymous); John Brougham's The Irish Fortune Hunter and Irish Stew; James Pilgrim's Paddy the Piper, Shandy Maguire; or, The Bould Boy of the Mountain, and Robert Emmet, the Martyr of Irish Liberty; Boucicault's Andy Blake; or the Irish Diamond and The Irish Broom Maker; and S. D. Johnson's Brian O'Linn. Some of these and other Irish plays can be conveniently found in French's Standard Drama, French's Standard Plays, French's American Drama (New York, n. d.), and French's Minor Drama (New York, n. d.).

32. Dick's Standard Plays (London, n. d.), No. 621.

33. French's Standard Drama, CCXLIII, 24.

34. French's American Drama, LXIII.

35. Ibid., LXIV.

36. French's Minor Drama, LXXIII.

37. Porter's Spirit of the Times, December 5, 1857.

38. French's American Drama, LXXXVIII.

39. William Kelly, The Harp without a Crown, or Mountcashel's Fair Daughter (New York, 1867).

40. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, VIII, 222. Professor McEvoy's “The Hibernians,” or “Tour of Ireland,” a panorama described as a grand pictorial and musical exhibition, which explained the inspiration of Irish poets and orators and the attachment of the Irish for the homeland and purported to give a correct portraiture of “auld Ireland,” was shown to large audiences in New York, Boston, Montreal, and many other cities. New York Clipper, April 4, May 2, 1863.

41. See the original Pat Rooney's “Is that Mr. Riley” sung in the 1880's; and Bradford and Delaney's song about the Knights of Labor, Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 62-72.

42. See Mayorga, Short History of the American Drama, 200.

43. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 233, 309-10.

44. See Grau, Forty Years Observation of Music and the Drama, 100, 201, 360; Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage, 52; Arthur Hornblow, A History of the Theatre in America, 2 vols. (New York, 1919), II, 344-45; Arthur H. Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day, 2 vols. (New York, 1927), I, 82-96.

45. Edward B. Marks, They All Sang, from Tony Pastor to Rudy Vallée (New York, 1934), 45-46.

46. Ibid., 45-48.

47. See Harper's New Monthly Magazine (New York), LXXIII (July, 1886), 316; Harper's Weekly (New York), XL (October 10, 1896), 997-98; and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, LXXIX (July, 1889), 315-16. See also Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley (New York, 1930), 66-83.

48. Rourke, American Humor, 78.

49. Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War, 275, 281.

50. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, VII, 67; Porter's Spirit of the Times, October 17, 1857.

51. Grau, Forty Years Observation of Music and the Drama, 225, 240-41. As an example of such songs, and as an indication of how much German-American audiences apparently understood, we may cite the idiotic lines about

    “Give a listen to the Mocking Bird …
    Die mocking bird ein grosser macher ist.
    Vas macht die mocking bird? …
    Es mox nix ous vas macht die mocking bird.”

    See Claude T. Martin, Handbook for Adeline Addicts (Cleveland, 1932), 54-55. For skits about German immigrants in vaudeville in the 1880's, see Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, XI, 544.

52. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 529-30.

53. Beaman, Pearls from Past Programs, 28-31; Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 74.

54. Bernard Sobel, Burleycue (New York, 1931), 38.

55. Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 4, 6. See also ibid., 401, 403, 407, 409-10, for other “Dutch acts.”

56. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, XI, 102.

57. Ibid., 387.

58. Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 294.

59. See Gagey, San Francisco Stage, 198; Mayorga, Short History of the American Drama, 208; Grau, Forty Years Observation of Music and the Drama, 192, 229.

60. See especially Felix Iman, Weber and Fields (New York, 1924), passim.

61. For German and French plays adapted to the American stage, and for a history of the German theater in the United States, see Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present, I, 20-33; Quinn, History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War, 89-112; and Esther M. Olson, “The German Theatre in Chicago,” Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblätter, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Historischen Gesellschaft von Illinois (Chicago, 1937), XXXIII, 68-123; Ralph Wood, “Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters von Cincinnati,” ibid., XXXII (1932), 411-522; Alfred H. Nolle, “The German Drama on the St. Louis Stage,” German-American Annals (Philadelphia), XV, 28-65; and Fritz A. H. Leuchs, The Early German Theatre in New York, 1840-1872 (New York, 1928).

62. Marks, They All Sang, 14.

63. Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 287-90.

64. Ibid., 72-73.

65. Ibid., 290-92.

66. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, XIII, 313.

67. Sobel, Burleycue, 120-27. In some cities, like Cleveland, objections to the use of Jewish material led producers to eliminate it from their burlesque bills.

68. Gagey, San Francisco Stage, 194; Coad and Mims, American Stage, 307.

69. Eddie Cantor, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York, 1938), passim; also Nathan Ausubel, A Treasury of Jewish Humor (New York, 1951).

70. See Marks, They All Sang, 174-76. When the craze for ragtime was at its height, we had the “Italian Rag,” “Irish Rag,” “Yiddische Rag,” “Deutschen Rag,” “Indian Rag,” and finally, the “International Rag.” An example of the good-natured comedy between immigrant types is the story of the Irish priest who found a Jewish soldier dying in the trenches, and asked him whether he believed in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, to which the Jew replied, “I'm dying, and he asks me riddles.” The story appeared in an American jokebook as early as the 1870's. See Iman, Weber and Fields, 275.

71. Grau, Forty Years Observation of Music and the Drama, 274.

72. See George M. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Minneapolis, 1932), 417.

73. Henriette C. K. Naeseth, The Swedish Theatre of Chicago, 1868-1950 (Rock Island, 1951), 95. Miss Naeseth refers to a number of Swedish immigrant plays that were produced in Chicago.

74. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, X, 264; and IX, 465.

75. Marks, They All Sang, 132.

76. See Lewin A. Goff, “Popular Priced Melodrama in America, 1890 to 1910,” 345-56, 290-94.

77. Gagey, San Francisco Stage, 196.

78. Ibid., 175-76.

79. See, e.g., an excellent paper by Harold E. Adams, “Minority Caricatures on the American Stage,” George P. Murdock (ed.), Studies in the Science of Society (New Haven, 1937), Chap. I, 1-27. See also Carl Wittke, “Melting-Pot Literature,” College English, VII, No. 4 (January, 1946), 189-97.

80. Quoted in Gilbert, American Vaudeville, 111.

81. See also George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The American Way (New York, 1939), for the German-American problem in World War I.