Zangwill's The Melting Pot Plays Chicago

Abstract

Chicago great social alembic of this republic, grand consolidator of diversity into unity. To what may be generously called refined and semi-refined product of this distillation, city holds alluring prizes of citizenship. - Loren H.B. Knox, Impressions from Chicago Faces is mistake in this notion that New York, Chicago, and other principal cities are racial and national smelting plants? - Henry Pratt Fairchild, Melting-Pot Mistake Israel Melting Pot opened in Washington, D.C. on 5 October 1908. As final curtain came down that Monday night, Theodore Roosevelt leaned over his box and shouted to Zangwill: That's great play, Mr. Zangwill, that's great play (qtd. in Leftwich 252). president's words were ready-made for hands of play's promoters and blurb-meisters; his endorsement came to head countless ads and reviews. But, if his words and week-long Washington tryout launched play's publicity, they did not initiate impending arguments over existence of the pot. That debate soon followed, taking on contagious power far outside Washington's Columbia Theater. During subsequent weeks and months of play's extended run in Chicago, throughout fall and winter of 1908 and 1909, city's drama critics, social reformers, religious leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary theater-goers debated what the pot was - and sought to say if it was anything more than fanciful invention. story of Melting Pot in Chicago remains largely untold one, despite much recent and important scholarship on and ideas of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity that it is said to have framed. Werner Sollors could once charge that since beginning of twentieth century, debates about American ethnic interaction have been conducted in terms of read, yet universally invoked play (66). Thanks to his scholarship on rhetoric of ethnicity, thanks to Philip Gleason's Speaking of Diversity and Arthur Mann's One and Many, charge that is rarely seems bound to lose much of its original force and truth. If is unlikely, anytime soon, to be revived on Broadway, given such scholarly labors it most certainly will be read and studied closely. What continues to escape net of scholarship is debate over the pot generated by play's promotion, performance, and reception during its five month run in Chicago. Leibler & Co., New York managers, succeeded in soliciting endorsements from city's reform clergy, civic leaders, and certain Chicago writers: Hamlin Garland, Jane Addams, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, and Clarence Darrow among them. Such endorsements, however disparate, were packaged in ads under banner headings that suggested spoke in single, powerful, uplifting voice. In bid to stir profit-making controversies, Leibler & Co. also compressed and printed most provocative lines of endorsement as catch slogans. As one of their regular Tribune ads grandly stated, this was Zangwill's Great Play on Amalgamation of Races, a worthy evangelist to growth of national pride (17 January 1909: II, 2). Taken together, reviews, endorsements, and sloganeering lead to no single or unified interpretation, but they do outline some of early, critical conflicts over the pot. play's multiple expressions of melting pot - with trailing clouds of patriotic rhetoric, poly-ethnic sentiments, and sacred imagery - have made for grab bag of contradictory readings and responses. Recognizing this, Philip Gleason once titled study of symbol and reflexive terminology of ethnicity The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion? Werner Sollors, even while asserting central importance of to discussions of ethnic interaction, denounced vague and self-conscious literary symbolism (66). …