Vaudeville Stage Research Articles

Gangster Cinema on a Vaudeville Stage: George's Mediated Perception of Reality in Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers"

To be specific, through situating Hemingway's media-embedded narrative in a larger media environment of the 1920s, I argue that the killers construct their earlier menacing situation via performing conventions of cinematic gangsters, which indeed intimates Nick and George. However, their failure of performance in the later part of the story triggers George's reframing of them as the comic duo common in vaudeville that was thematically, stylistically, and spatially interconnected with crime cinema. Such a George-centered rereading supplements Nick's limited reception of the terrifying incident by disclosing it as a construct, and even a bluff. In foregrounding George's mediated framing of the incident in the underdiscussed passages, I intend to highlight the often-overlooked connection between Hemingway's writing and the (multi)media environment and, by extension, to further the study between modernist literature and the first media age beyond the familiar narrative of technique imitation.

Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

Smears, Laughs, and Barnyard Hokum: Early Jazz Trombone and the Problem of Novelty

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: Seven-Eleven and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Navigating Black Identity and White Desire: <i>Seven-Eleven</i> and the 1920s Crossover Musical Comedy

Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Reviewed by: Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez Gina Benavidez Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña. Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. In Empire's Mistress, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez weaves together the beautiful narrative of a mixed-race woman's struggle to define herself against the waves of empire in the early twentieth century. From her early vaudeville stage days in the Philippines to a fleeting romance with General Douglas MacArthur, the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper has typically been identified as one of tragic heartbreak and defined only by her relationship with MacArthur. However, in her later life she also remarried, pursued acting in the United States, and tried to forge her own path. Born to an American father and a Filipina mother, Cooper was not only a product of empire but also a participant in its currents as she performed onstage for the cosmopolitan audience of twentieth-century Manila before trying to launch a Hollywood career in Los Angeles. Facing failure after failure, from romances to job prospects, Cooper's name faded away from the spotlight until she killed herself, with speculation that she died of a broken heart. Gonzalez successfully brings Cooper's life back to the foreground, relying on trace archival documents to tell her story independently of MacArthur, with very little mention of their story aside from the relevant historical details. The book includes many of these documents, including birth certificates, death certificates, and newspaper articles along with images and film stills of Cooper herself. The fragments of the archival puzzle that Gonzalez uses to piece together Cooper's life brings a microhistorical approach to the work, adding to the [End Page 239] engagement of the reader and depth of the piece. Gonzalez, who researches transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, among other specialties at the University of Hawai'i, demonstrates her expertise in the intersections of gender, tourism, and militarism between Asia and the Pacific. She follows a mostly chronological order, organizing the chapters by different stages of Cooper's life. Gonzalez situates her story within the imperial twentieth century, after Spain's loss of the Philippines in 1898 and during the US occupation through World War II. She begins with the story of Cooper and MacArthur "in order to move him out of the way," while tracing their five-year relationship from Manila to Washington, DC, in the 1930s (15). She then takes the narrative back to the early twentieth century, as American Isaac Cooper meets and marries Cooper's mother. Already a product of empire, their daughter Isabel is born in Maricopa, Arizona, but moves back to colonial Manila, "a city being made comfortable for family-friendly imperialism," as her mother remarries (55). In Manila, young Cooper begins a stage career, eventually headlining as "Dimples" in her teen years at a vaudeville club. She makes a name for herself as the first Filipina to kiss onscreen, acting in three small movies by the time she meets MacArthur. After their romance ends, Cooper remains in Washington and remarries, but does not disappear into obscurity as she eventually moves to Los Angeles to pursue acting once again. The book's strength lies in the final chapters, when Gonzalez analyzes the minuscule roles Cooper is hired to play in postwar Hollywood. Cast most typically as an extra and a woman of Asian descent, Cooper plays a Siamese wife, a Chinese secretary, a Native American woman, and a variety of war nurses—all roles haunted by the real-life echoes of empire and, in some cases, MacArthur himself. Cooper even plays roles in movies that take place in the Pacific Theater during World War II, following MacArthur's historical moves. As Gonzalez notes, for Cooper "the constant and swift transformation of real-time events into cinematic material blurs the line between fact and fiction and illuminates the strange intimacies at the heart of imperial war" (121). A potential drawback for some readers lies in the writing structure of the book, as it departs from a traditional historical monologue and includes a higher degree of first-person narrative along with a variety of...

Does this fig leaf make me look gay? Strongmen, statue posing and physique photography

ABSTRACTStudies of the male nude in photography assume a necessity to ‘desexualize’ early physique photographs, which they treat as evidence of proto-gay sensibilities, by reference to classical sculpture. The satirical prints of Thomas Rowlandson inspired in the antiquarian craze of the late eighteenth century, including that of Emma Hart who helped to establish the conventions of the modern living statue genre, indicate that audiences of that time understood the underlying sexual nature of her fully clothed performances and the potential homosexual implications associated with representations of male classical statuary. The adoption of statue posing by itinerant strongmen of the same period provided a context within which male living statue performances could be seen as reinforcing ‘classical’ masculine attributes. Their subsequent popularization by English-born equestrian acrobat Andrew Ducrow furthered their normalization on the popular stage. The nineteenth and early twentieth century reception of living statue performances by strongman Eugen Sandow and dancer Ted Shawn, along with other living statue acts on the vaudeville stage, suggests an enduring social acceptance of male statue posers that did not extend to their female counterparts, at least within the United States. Their repertory and the performance conventions, including their lighting, descended directly from living statue performers who flourished before the invention of photography. Rather than interpret physique photographs as images intended for a homosexual audience, this essay argues they are better understood as souvenirs of a durable popular entertainment tradition intended for a mass audience.

Restructuring Respectability, Gender, and Power: Aida Overton Walker Performs a Black Feminist Resistance

Author(s): Jackson, Veronica | Abstract: Aida Overton Walker, a premier vaudeville entertainer, engaged in a calculated, career-long process to restructure and re-present how African Americans, particularly black women in popular theater, were viewed and perceived in American society. Through a feminist lens this essay will demonstrate her awareness of her visual presence to perform black resistance by embodying the ideological practice of racial uplift—the response delivered by the African American, educated, middle-class elite to the anti-black racist environment prevalent in the early 1900s.The goal of this essay is to elucidate Overton Walker’s understanding of her image and her onstage performance career—choreography, dance, comedy, and drama—as powerful, subversive tools that countered the virulent racist portrayal of blacks rendered on the vaudeville stage through minstrelsy, and the damaging imagery persisting from slavery, white supremacy, and the prevailing Jim Crow regime. She enacted her brand of feminism to utilize her onstage and offstage likenesses to perform and proselytize for racial uplift, work traditionally designated almost exclusively for the black male elite.Overton Walker’s transnational forms of black resistance reside in her direct engagement in Britain and her indirect and imagined connections with the African continent. She is an understudied figure in the era of the New Negro. This essay will illuminate and consider her contributions to racial uplift in context to the US and abroad. Overton Walker’s transnational links between the African continent, Great Britain, and America were transformative performances in popular culture, and in context of an emerging American modernity.

A Wife for a Life

A Wife for a Life

A Professional Body

Physical fitness demands repetition. Achieving a bodily ideal compels the subject to return day after day to the same designated place and repeat the same set of movements. For this reason, the practice of fitness, especially in regards to the participation of male-identifying subjects, has often been read as a form of discipline, surveillance, and ideological interpellation. In this article, I offer an alternative understanding of this repetition by reading fitness as a deeply performative practice. My focus is physical culture, a movement that emerged at a crucial transitional moment of Western modernity and which systematized men's fitness as we know it today through a popular media apparatus of magazines, postcards, books, film, and theatre where the male body could be viewed, examined, and. Exposing the entwined histories of fitness and theatre in the ‘body of work’ of the Edwardian strongman, wrestler, and physical culturist George Hackenschmidt, I argue that the performative repetitions of physical culture actually reveal the incomplete inscription of ideology upon the site of the body by demonstrating how a certain masculine norm must be continually re-cited. The performance of the built up and stripped down male body is thus an anxious performance of masculinity during a period of great industrial transformation. Hackenschmidt's body of work, both as a performer of built masculinity on the vaudeville stage and the wrestling ring, and as an author of numerous books, suggests that when men today re-enact the moves and lifts of physical culture in their fitness practices, they are (to adapt Freud's phrase) remembering, repeating, and working out, though perhaps not working through, the contradictions of modernity.

Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America AndreaMost. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America Andrea Most. New York: New York University Press, 2013.From the vaudeville stage to the cinema screen, we tend to assume American popular entertainment is unencumbered by religion: a free and easy realm reinvention. However, in Theatrical liberalism, Andrea Most argues for the Judaic dimensions of twentiethcentury popular entertainment.While historians have outlined the role of American Jews in establishing entertainment industries, Most argues the more radical proposition that American popular entertainment's celebration of the is a type of Jewish secularism. She seeks to identify and dissect the presence of, what she terms, theatrical within American popular culture, revealing its partial origins in Jewish faith. However, the project never fully convinces its reader because Most does not explore the personal beliefs of the cultural workers behind the scenes, making widespread claims about the influence of their faith ultimately unpersuasive.The most definitive summary notes that liberalism involves the embrace of theatricality as a viable social mode, the prioritizing of external action over internal intention, the celebration of self-fashioning as a uniquely American form of freedom, and the construction of a community based on obligations rather than rights (39-40). The author argues that liberalism arose as a distinctly American form during the turn of the twentieth century, which was enabled by the rise of entertainment industries and was concurrent with waves of Jewish immigration.For Most, the Judaic dimensions of liberalism are spiritual rather than ethnic. Although for centuries doctrinal reasons meant Jews lacked a distinct tradition, nevertheless, theatricality and reinvention have consistendy been read into some of the faith's central texts, as illustrated in Most's summary of the Genesis story of Jacob and Esau. Allegedly a product of this religious tradition, liberalism combined the salient features of Protestantism, liber alism, Judaic rituals and attitudes, and the inherent theatricality of a nation in formation (39). However, these other dimensions go underexplored. Most's discussion of liberalism feels imprecise and Protestant influences are largely overlooked.Chronological chapters reveal the transformation of liberalism through several case studies across the twentieth century. In her most convincing chapter, she analyses a range of Depression-era plays and films that celebrated the freedom of the theatrical, from the writing and adaptions of Edna Ferber's novels through to the backstage musicals of Warner Bros, and the freewheeling antics of Bugs Bunny. …

The Making and Re-making of Winsor McCay’s Gertie (1914)

In addition to creating legendary comics like Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay was a pioneer of animation. His Gertie (1914) was the first American masterpiece of animated film. Two versions are known to have existed: the original in which McCay appeared on the vaudeville stage with an animated dinosaur named Gertie projected on screen, and a later one that contained a live-action prologue and epilogue filmed and distributed by William Fox’s Box Office Attractions Company. The Fox version is still extant as original nitrate prints, but McCay’s vaudeville version was lost. However, an examination of 334 of McCay’s original drawings reveals that near the end of the vaudeville version there was a ‘Curtain Call’ sequence not included in the Fox version. Fifteen drawings from the lost segment allowed its reconstruction by the Gertie Project applying digital technology. The authors have dated Gertie’s vaudeville chronology more precisely and have demonstrated McCay’s animation techniques, including his ‘split system’, by decoding his original annotations. The authors examine the filmmaker’s claim that he had made 10,000 drawings for Gertie. The resulting historic analysis of a milestone in silent film animation discusses the artistic mastery of Winsor McCay, issues of historical authenticity, and the archival implications of digital reconstruction.

The Irish way: becoming American in the multiethnic city

In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and workplaces of the American city. This process of Americanization from the bottom up was deeply shaped, Barrett argues, by the Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to Boston's North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast. By 1900, there were more people of Irish descent in New York City than in Dublin; more in the United States than in all of Ireland. But in the late nineteenth century, the sources of immigration began to shift, to southern and eastern Europe and beyond. Whether these newcomers wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job, or just take a stroll in the neighborhood, they had to deal with Irish Americans. Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic deadlines across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed, and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish American literature, The Irish Way illustrates how the interactions between the Irish and later immigrants on the streets, on the vaudeville stage, in Catholic churches, and in workplaces helped forge a multi-ethnic American identity that has a profound legacy in the USA today.

Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture Anthony J. Stanonis (bio) Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. By Karen L. Cox. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 210. $34.95 cloth) The popular image of the American South between the 1890s and 1950s receives insightful and entertaining treatment by Karen Cox. With chapters devoted to literature, advertising, popular song, radio, film, and tourism, Cox offers a pioneering critique of how northern businessmen and consumers constructed an idyllic image of Dixie. In their hands, the South became a “mythological region” (p. 33). Dixie emerged as a romantic, leisurely, agrarian paradise that served as an antithesis to the rushed, urban, and industrial North. Cox’s study perceptively demonstrates how different media based in the North popularized particular dreams of Dixie, allowing consumers to “psychologically escape” modern society (p. 9). Each reinforced stereotypes about the plantation past of the region, agricultural fecundity, and tranquil race relations—ignoring the growing cities, expanding textile mills, and lynching. Novels allowed readers to fantasize about the region. Fictional accounts led visitors to seek the fabrications in the real world, from happy darkies working the fields to stately plantations reminiscent of Margaret Mitchell’s Tara. Music, often penned or performed by Jewish immigrants associated with Tin Pan Alley, celebrated the tranquility and friendliness of Dixie. Performers like Al Jolson reinvigorated minstrelsy for the vaudeville stage. Although radio broke the Tin Pan Alley monopoly over popular [End Page 123] music, the airwaves echoed already-established associations. Radio brought home the sounds of Dixie, complete with steamboat whistles, black dialect, and hillbilly chatter. Film (un)reconstructed the southern past as movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915) reinforced stereotypes of blacks as ignorant brutes, thereby justifying vigilante violence by whites immediately after the Civil War. Advertisers celebrated black servility and the agricultural richness of the South through the promotion of Aunt Jemima’s pancakes, Rastus’s cream of wheat, and Uncle Ben’s rice. All of this publicity spurred southern boosters to cater to the growing ranks of northern vacationers by promoting images of smiling black waiters and hoop-skirted belles. Cox uses an impressive range of primary sources. Analysis of ads, films, and other media presented to the public are balanced with the corporate records and memoirs of those involved with preparing these materials. Professional surveys undertaken by food companies and radio stations reveal valuable information about audiences. Cox offers a particularly striking argument when suggesting that the celebration of Dixie was as much about white Northerners’ anxiety over the great migration of African Americans into northern industrial centers as about sectional reconciliation. The message of black servility and white civility in Dixie mitigated white Northerners’ own racial anxieties about the demographic shift. Cox provides a launching point for further study of these tensions and their cultural manifestations. Yet more attention to the equally dramatic migration of white Southerners to northern industrial centers would also be valuable. Although Cox convincingly shows that Northerners rather than Southerners largely consumed the South packaged in branded food products and radio programs, certainly white Southerners in Chicago, Detroit, or other northern urban centers longed for reminders of home as well. Detailed attention to these arrivals and possible points of agreement or conflict with white Northerners’ expectations promises future scholarly dividends. According to Cox, the immediacy of television along with the brutal imagery of attacks on civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the stereotypes promulgated about the South. The [End Page 124] days of black-face and dialect were numbered, though the promotion of plantations, hospitality, and black performance—whether of street music or tap dancing—remained strong through the twentieth century. Cox provides a vibrant, richly illustrated, and highly readable study of Dixie as a “cultural commodity” (p. 129). The rigorous research is complemented by an accessible style ideal for scholars and general readers alike. Anthony J. Stanonis Anthony J. Stanonis is a lecturer in modern American history at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. He is author of Creating the Big Easy (2006) and is currently working on the...

“Haim Afen Range”: The Jewish Indian and the Redface Western

I take my title from a 1947 recording by Mickey Katz, a Yiddish parody of Home on the Range. Here are the first few stanzas of the original song: Oh give me a Where the buffalo roam And the deer and the antelope play Where seldom is heard A discouraging word And the skies are not cloudy all day Katz's version (on the left below) offers a uniquely Yiddish take on this dream of the American West, as we can hear in the Yiddish itself and in his substituted lyrics (translation on the right): Oy gib mira haym Mit a vaybele shayn Ver der shepsn und di tsigelakh loyfen Oy gib mir a hoys Mit gisinten cowboys Und a couple hundert kettle tsu farkeyfen Oh give me a With a beautiful little wife Where the sheep and the goats run around Oh give me a house With healthy cowboys And a couple of hundred cattle to sell (1) Like so much American Jewish humor from this time period, Katz's humor considers the place of the Jew in the American landscape: were Jews really home on the range? As we see in his version of the song, the complexity of the joke lies in its equivocation, particularly in the interweaving of Yiddish and English and mockery and self-mockery, and also in the Yiddishizing of the western experience. Jews could not really be called Americans, the song implies, because the very notion of Jews as westerners was laughable, and westerners, as we all know, are archetypal Americans. At the same time, by satirizing postwar America's hypocritical flirtation with ethnicity, the song implies the reverse: through the polyglot faux-ethnic world of American popular music of the 1940s (the era of the mambo craze), Jews could become Americans precisely because they were ethnic. In a characteristic Jewish mode of diasporic commentary, the song has it both ways, critiquing and enacting the western mythos as a mode of Americanization. Jews can be on the range, it seems, by transforming that range into a vaudeville stage, or, more precisely, by revealing the range to have been a vaudeville stage all along, a performative space open to Jewish appropriation as a vehicle for inclusion. (2) This essay looks at one particular strand of this performance: the figure of the Jewish Indian. I am interested specifically in how Jewish performers and writers from Fanny Brice to Bernard Malamud created a viable American Jewish identity by identifying with, parodying, and distancing themselves from the imagined figure of the Indian. Jewish redface, in this sense, worked similarly to Jewish blackface, marking the Jew's racial otherness only to dismiss it as illusory, a performance begetting the authenticity of whiteness: the Jew that emerged from the blackface mask was revealed to be white, and not racially after all. Unlike blackface, though, redface did not seek to efface Jewish difference altogether, but rather to insist upon it in a different form. Through both the choice of the Indian figure and the unique manner of impersonation, Jewish performers and writers transformed racial difference into ethnic difference and used the latter position to stake a claim upon American identity. In taking this perspective, I participate in recent criticism in Jewish Studies that seeks out what one critic describes as alternate genealogies of Jewish-American (Kun, Bagels 51). Specifically, in concert with critics such as Joseph Kun, Rachel Rubinstein, and Eric L. Goldstein, I posit a history in which the drive toward assimilation did not entail an effacement of Jewishness but rather an exploration of new ways of preserving and adapting it. (3) The conventional perception has been that during the first half of the twentieth century, Jews sought to become American by becoming white. However, the redface genealogy I explore here suggests that there were other Jews, even in some case the same Jews, who pursued a more ranging trajectory, one that allowed them to be both Jewish and American differently (Bagels 65) through the retention and refinement of certain visual, verbal, and cultural Jewish markers. …

African American dance: an illustrated history

This pictorial history of African American dance traces its roots back to a time of slavery and lists the characteristics that now dominate American dance. The photographs offer compelling glimpses into the world of slavery, the minstrel show, the honky-tonk and jook, the vaudeville stage, dance halls, nightclubs, movies, and much more. Most of these images are culled from hundreds of rare items in the author's collection of black dance memorabilia.

Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times

The sensational title trivialises what is in fact an in-depth study of homosexual lives in late nineteenth-century England, thoroughly documented by original archival research and engagingly told with humane good humour. Kaplan's traditional employment of historical narrative, or ‘storytelling,’ focuses on three main stories: the trials of the cross-dressers Frederick William Park and Ernest Boulton (a.k.a. Fanny and Stella) in 1870–71; the hothouse of pedagogic eros at Eton in the 1870s through the 1890s, featuring William Johnson Cory and Regy Brett (later 2nd Viscount Esher); and the West End scandals of 1889–90 featuring Lord Arthur Somerset, Equerry to the Prince of Wales, and the clients and staff of a male brothel on Cleveland Street. Kaplan's retellings of trials are especially compelling and dramatic, and his character sketches are perceptive and acute. These central stories are supplemented by the stories of two men with full homosexual self-knowledge, the cultural historian John Addington Symonds at the high end of the spectrum, and, at the lower end, the male prostitute Jack Saul, whose fictionalised autobiography fleshes out the action at which newspapers could only hint. Last comes the Oscar Wilde débâcle, a story perhaps too familiar to need retelling, but Kaplan's account is nevertheless an accomplished précis, based on secondary sources. The separate stories do not quite combine into a whole, despite some connections: the artist Simeon Solomon (some years before he would be arrested in a urinal) joined Boulton and Park for lunch during an interval of their trial; and Viscount Esher, the old Etonian, was a close friend of Lord Arthur Somerset, who exiled himself to France after the Cleveland Street affair in order to protect the reputation of Prince Eddy. The one solid link between all the stories is class conflict: Victorian society was heavily inflected with class antagonisms, and homosexuals were most severely reviled when they engaged in cross-class relations, which they regularly did. Kaplan rightly refrains from throwing weak bridges across the gaps between the hermaphroditic demi-monde of female impersonators, the underworld of telegraph boys and rough trade, and the romantic entanglements of schoolboys and their sentimental masters. Each group of self-identities remains distinct, testifying to the range of self-understandings available to Victorian men whose desires were misaligned with conventional sexual or gender identities. Kaplan's greatest virtue is to portray his subjects with affection and sympathy. He even succeeds in recreating the wistful nostalgia of boy-love by concentrating on diaries and letters without letting analysis intervene, allowing the language of love to speak for itself (however cloying we may find it) rather than reducing it to the language of lust or the discourse of theory. For his three central stories, Kaplan has carefully mined several archives of trial records and personal correspondence, supplemented with contemporary newspaper reports. The Esher Archives have never been tapped so deeply and effectively. However, Kaplan does not venture far from the narrow vein of his archives, not fully appreciating that his subjects continued to lead their lives beyond the archives. Boulton and Park simply disappear from his book when their trial ends, but a more determined historian would have pursued them to America, where they continued to appear on the vaudeville stage as female impersonators. Kaplan makes the occasional error when he ventures outside the Victorian period: for instance, in 1631 Lord Castlehaven was convicted, not ‘for buggering … his wife’ as well as his household servants, but for assisting one of his servants to rape his wife (as he liked watching his menservants in action), and for buggery with two of his menservants; Castlehaven was not a polymorphous libertine ‘willing to use anyone at his disposal to obtain sexual satisfaction’, but clearly preferred men. Several photographs of Boulton and Park in drag are very welcome and illuminating; illustrations of homoerotic statues by Hamo Thornycroft and Lord Leighton are also welcome, but the reader will be bemused by their presence, since neither man is ever mentioned in the text. In the introduction and epilogue, Kaplan pays an obligatory nod towards queer theory, but his historical narrative easily eclipses queer theory. Kaplan recognises that narrative challenges theory, and is far more nuanced and faithful to the historical evidence than theoretical discourse.

Will Rogers’s Indian Humor

By the time of his death in 1935, political humorist Will Rogers had become one of the most famous personalities in the United States. Through his syndicated weekly articles and daily telegrams, films, and radio broadcasts, Rogers reached an estimated audience of forty million. Because of his deft use of the venues of mass enter tainment?from the vaudeville stage to Hollywood?and the con sequent mainstreaming of his act, it may be easy to pass over the side of Rogers that was not so mainstream: born in 1879 in Indian Territory, Rogers was a member of the Cherokee Nation for the first twenty years of his life. He became a naturalized American citizen after the 1898 Curtis Act brought the disbanding of tribal govern ment and the allotment of land in severalty to the Five Tribes. Billed as a cowboy from Oklahoma and as a self-made diplomat to the president, nominated for the presidency because of the broad appeal of his home-spun humor and common Rogers's commercially crafted all-American public identity is a simplification of a complex personal and national history. Rogers's humor has been discussed as the American-grown cracker-barrel humor originating with Benjamin Franklins Poor Richard. Horse sense, as Walter Blair wrote in 1942, is that good, sound, practical that Will Rogers shares with Franklin, Josh Billings, Davy Crockett, and an assortment of other American humorists (vi). While Blair sees horse sense as peculiar to North America, he does not attribute any part of Rogers s humor to the part-Cherokee identity Rogers claimed as his own. This failure to

Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915 (review)

Reviewed by: Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915 Monica Stufft Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915. By Andrew L. Erdman. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004; pp. ix + 198. $39.95 cloth. In Blue Vaudeville, Andrew Erdman explores the co-existence of sex and morality in vaudeville at the turn of the twentieth century, observing that criticism of vaudeville as "rife with vulgarity" coexisted with the notion that vaudeville was "wholesome" and "fit for the whole family" (2). A theatrical genre that hovered between the legitimate theatre and popular amusements, vaudeville competed for its audience with a wide array of urban amusements. Attempting to diversify the potential audience base, producers and managers put respectable European operatic singers designed to appeal to middle-class women on the same bills as double entendre–wielding comedians and suggestively clothed female performers intended to satisfy more traditional audience members: men seeking a glimpse of the female form and the kind of bawdy entertainment previously found in saloons and concert halls. While public outrage over immoral urban amusements grew and governmental involvement increased, vaudeville flourished thanks to the appeal of highly sexualized attractions such as Annette Kellerman and Eva Tanguay. Despite this, Erdman argues that vaudeville not only remained relatively untouched by censorship but that it also became the nation's first mass entertainment industry. In order to unpack this seeming contradiction, Erdman begins by comparing the social standing and effects of censorship on vaudeville and the motion picture industry in his first chapter, "'Dressed in the Form of Art': The Censorship and Curtailment of Popular Entertainments." While vaudeville stages competed with other popular amusements for the increasing presence of sexualized material, they did not suffer the same degree of censorship as did the motion picture industry and even the legitimate theatre. To explain this, Erdman points to the ethnic backgrounds of the producers. Unlike the motion picture industry, which was run primarily by European-born Jewish immigrants, vaudeville producers were allied with, or at least were more familiar to, the Catholic and Protestant elite. Furthermore, Erdman situates vaudeville in relation to larger cultural trends toward censorship and governmental control of leisure-time amusements. He demonstrates how both pro- and anticensorship positions used heightened rhetoric to argue for high(er)-minded ideals. Reformers, religious leaders, and governmental officials tended toward demands for moral purity, while theatrical managers and directors argued for free-market determination under the banner of [End Page 380] national pride. In his next chapter, "'Clean, Great, and National': The Mass Marketing of Amusement," Erdman contends that the most successful vaudeville magnates deployed the rhetoric of moral and sexual purity and, by doing so, were largely responsible for vaudeville's avoidance of censorship and its nationwide success. The evolution of vaudeville from a chaotic and unpredictable collection of local individual artists and managers to an industrially organized, financially motivated national conglomerate of businessmen is an oft-noted change. Erdman, however, links the advertising strategies of Edward Franklin Albee and Benjamin Franklin Keith to those used in the national mass marketing of products such as face cream, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola. Erdman argues that Albee and Keith responded to the growing threat of censorship by aggressively advertising moral purity and claims of cleanliness both in terms of the subject matter and the physical site of the theatre. Of course they still needed to fill the seats, and sexualized material continued to be the biggest draw, so in actuality the vaudeville stage was not nearly as clean as their rhetoric suggested. The insincerity of these purity claims is by no means an original observation, but Erdman's most significant contribution lies in his well-documented discussion of how the notion of vaudeville's moral purity was crafted. Drawing on an impressive and thorough array of secondary materials from cultural studies, histories of advertising, and theories of mass marketing to back up his claims, Erdman points to specific vaudeville advertising campaigns and contextualizes the rhetoric in relation to larger mass marketing trends of purity, cleanliness, and authenticity. In the following chapters, "'Of Pleasing Face and Form': The Sexual and the Sensual" and "'Wild Woman': Eva Tanguay...

Blue vaudeville: sex, morals and the mass marketing of amusement, 1895-1915

This work reveals the often racy, ribald, and sexually charged nature of the vaudeville stage, looking at a broad array of provocative performers from disrobing dancers to nude posers to skimpily dressed athletes. Examining the ways in which big-time vaudeville nonetheless managed to market itself as pure, safe, and morally acceptable, this work compares the industry's marketing and promotional practices to those of other emergent mass-marketers of the vaudeville era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Included are in-depth examinations of important figures from the vaudeville stage such as Annette Kellerman and Eva Tanguay. The work attempts to address historical context as one means of understanding these performers with an appreciation for their rebelliousness. It discusses censorship and content control in the vaudeville era, and concludes with an analysis of film's part in the fall of vaudeville. Many photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations are included.

How I Became a Socialist

The story of how Helen Keller (1880-1967), struck blind and deaf while a toddler, overcame her disabilities with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, is a familiar one. William Gibson's drama, The Miracle Worker, made into a movie, popularized that part of her story. She is remembered for accomplishments such as graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College; as an internationally famous advocate for the deaf and blind; and as a celebrity, writing books, appearing in films and on the vaudeville stage. Her friend Mark Twain described her, along with Napoleon, as one of the two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century. What is usually forgotten, however, is that she was also a prominent, articulate, and passionate voice for socialism. From a condition of profound isolation she grew into an inspired communicator, fully engaged with the world around her. She joined the Socialist Party in 1909 (later she'd join the Industrial Workers of the World, too) and championed her socialist vision while lecturing and writing on the issues of her day—in support of worker's struggles, the Russian Revolution, and women's suffrage, and against the First World War. There was no separation in her mind between her struggle on behalf of the disabled and her struggle for socialism. She attributed the greater portion of the ills experienced by the disabled, and the cause of these disabilities in many cases, to capitalism and industrialism. After 1921, she focused her energies on raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind but she remained a supporter of radical causes for the rest of her life. This essay appeared in the New York Call, a daily newspaper of the Socialist Party, on November 3, 1912.—The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 1884-1914

What is culture and who has the authority to define it? If culture is composed of shared hierarchies, who determines what their standards should be, and how? What are the stakes involved in conceiving some forms of culture as good and others as bad? These may sound like questions from late-20th-century American culture wars, but they were already in vigorous dispute a century earlier. This work is an exploration of the intersection of religion, vaudeville and class in the era of the new immigrant, focusing on the careers of two seemingly different, yet interestingly similar, characters - Irish-born socialist Alexander Irvine and Italian-American entertainment mogul, Sylvester Poli. Using these two tour guides, who established varied and far-flung connections within the arenas of religion, popular culture and class politics, Oberdeck leads readers through a period of evangelical upheaval in America's intellectual history when religion and entertainment combined to produce meaningful cultural debate. The main narrative follows Irvine, Protestant minister, labour activist, socialist, and popular author who eventually did a stint on the vaudeville stage, and Poli, who used his skills as a wax sculptor to establish himself as a theatrical entrepreneur with a circuit of vaudeville houses. Oberdeck traces cultural trajectories, mapping influences and alliances that shaped the careers of men whose contributions to public sphere helped to transform the intellectual arguments taking place there. Since both men sought to attract, increase, persuade and conjure their audiences, the author writes, their messages invite us to consider and explain the success of various class, gender and ethnic appeals.