I’ve gotten really interested in the ways that popular performance in NYC responded to the Great War. (This is what I almost always try to call WWI because, as I point out to students, that’s what people who lived through it called it because they didn’t know there was going to be a second one.) One of the chapters in my Gertrude Hoffmann biography talks about the response in vaudeville. Historian David Monod has an awesome article about American neutrality before the nation joined the war, particularly as that attitude was embodied in songs like “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” I suspect that Gertrude Hoffmann pulled her son Max Jr. out of military school to go on tour with the family not only because her chorus boys kept joining the military but because she thought her kid would too.
The New York Hippodrome spectacles leading up to the war ended up being very influential in stirring up patriotism and getting men to enlist. I have an article under review about the ways that the drama critic at socialist periodical The Masses charts the show’s evolution from perfunctory to full-throated nationalism during the lead-up to US involvement. The Masses got in a lot of trouble because of its anti-war stance, something that this Brooklyn Rail article describes. This cartoon by Art Young, called “Having Their Fling,” is pretty intense:
An editor, capitalist, politician, and minister dance onstage, showered with money and pro-war slogans while Satan conducts the orchestra of war in a box above them.
The newest Great War/Hippodrome artifact I came across was an essay in the African American newspaper The New York Age. James Weldon Johnson, one of the most important American writers and civil rights activists of the time, had a fairly regular column that frequently touched on the theater. (Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond wrote a number of Broadway songs, as well as the iconic “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”) Johnson went to a fundraiser for the United War Work Campaign of the YMCA that took place in October 1917. Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder delivered the keynote speech. What motivated Johnson to write a full column about this speech titled “Harry Lauder as an Orator?” Lauder tried to assert a kind of international white brotherhood; surprisingly, the rhetorical tactic fell flat. Here’s the full column:
James Weldon Johnson, Harry Lauder as an Orator.” The New York Age, October 25, 1917, sec. Views and Reviews.
I want to transcribe the end of the column, both because it’s so striking and because I hope this makes it accessible to more people.
Then it was that Mr. Lauder said the thing which was the cause of this article being written. In driving home the sentiment that in spite of past misunderstandings and antagonisms, American and Britons can now stand together, he shouted:
“We are all white!” (Pause).
“We are all white!” (Pause).
Undoubtedly, the speaker expected applause during his first pause. It did not come. In place, a chill seemed to sweep over the immense crowd. The speaker then shouted the phrase with greater force, but the words found no echo, the great audience that had risen to every stirring sentiment remained silent and unresponsive. It was curious. After the first, cold blast of the words had struck and passed over me, I tried to analyze the psychology of the crowd and to understand why the audience had not showered down when Lauder had shouted “We are all white!”
Was it because in the same instant there flashed across the minds of the men present a picture of black men from India, black men from North Africa, West Africa and South Africa, black men from the West Indies fighting and dying to save England and France?
Was it because in the same instant there rose in their minds the consciousness of the fact that in every war in which this country has fought it has had to depend in now small degree upon those who are now its black citizens?
Was it because there is at bottom a sense of fairness in the average white American which, in spite of the occasion and tense enthusiasm, made Mr. Lauder’s remarks sound small, mean and unfair?
Whatever the reason, there is satisfaction in the fact that this portion of the speech failed to arouse applause, and fell in silence.
I’m not yet sure how to process this moment, but I wanted to make sure it got recorded. I know that the drumbeat of war can rouse even latent white nationalism. It’s nice to hear about one moment where that attempt didn’t work. (Even if it was just because people in the audience hated the English.)