How The Melting Pot Stirred America: The Reception of Zangwill's Play and Theater's Role in the American Assimilation Experience

Abstract

Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot caused quite a stir in its initial run across the United States in 1908 and 1909. With Zangwill then regarded as one of the leading writers in Britain,1 the play appeared in a succession of large theaters before varied audiences. It opened in Washington, D.C. before President Theodore Roosevelt and went on to tour Chicago and the West for several months before coming to York a year later. Initial reviews praised it as an entertaining and serious examination of American culture; Roosevelt himself was among its most extravagant boosters. In York, however, it met with a different sort of reception: popular enough to have a lengthy run, it was generally panned; critics called it formally flawed, a play that simply did not work. There is nothing unusual about a play's receiving mixed reviews, of course, but the nature of the mixed reviews of The Melting Pot is striking. The play itself is heterogeneous; with a sentimental love story at its center, it also boasts symphonic music, ethnic stereotyping, slapstick, melodramatic descriptions of dead fathers and sisters, and pointed political criticism. The Washington and Chicago critics were able to see the political philosophy in the midst of the other elements and they praised it, along with the performance of the actors, as a powerful articulation of the promise of America. Critics in York, however, saw little but its formal messiness. As one York Times headline ran, New Zangwill Play Cheap and Tawdry: A Sentimental Story Poorly Built on the Structure of a Fine Idea (7 September 1909, 9). The same play, therefore, with the same lead cast evoked such different reactions across the country that it seems as if it were a different play altogether.2 One as yet unconsidered reason for the play's uneven reception, I argue, is that it played before an America that was renegotiating the aesthetic conventions of theater as one means of articulating what it