42. The Fight Against The Clansman, Part One

COPYRIGHT 2022 Peter Schmitz. All Rights Reserved.

[AITH OPENING THEME]

As ticket holders arrived to see the evening’s show on Monday October 22nd, they had to make their way through a huge angry crowd gathered outside Walnut Street Theatre. By curtain time, according to many Philadelphia newspapers, in their headlines the next day, the city was experiencing a ‘race riot’. Wrote a reporter:

“Two thousand shouting negros and white persons completely blocked the streets. Although fifty policemen hurried to the scene, the mob at times threatened to get beyond their control. At all times, the situation was dangerous.”

“One negro in the gallery got into a fight, and was badly beaten up . . his head was bleeding profusely as he was led from the theatre. White waiting for the patrol wagon to come and take the man to City Hall, a hundred or more excited persons surrounded the policeman and the bleeding negro, threatening trouble unless the man was released.”

“Hisses and hoots resounded on all sides. Fresh fuel was added to the disturbance when a policeman fired three shots at a little colored boy who was running away. When a third negro was arrested, the crowd for a moment started to hem in the policemen, but the timely arrival of another patrol full of bluecoats averted any outbreak.”

“  . . . Hurried ‘phone calls were sent to different police stations for more  .  . . and the order was given to clear the streets. Back and forth the mob surged, excited and needing only a single spark to set them off into hysterical violence. Numerous fights were in progress . . [and] the trolleys were powerless to move. . . Everybody was expecting trouble. . . .One excited negro yelled ‘Let’s go inside and wreck the house!’ ”

[‘DRAMA IS CONFLICT’ THEME]

Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. We continue our season #2, “Drama is Conflict,” with yet another story about an angry crowd - thousands of people - filling the street outside a Philadelphia theater. Sounds familiar, if you’ve heard our recent series about the play The Quaker City back in 1844. But this disturbance was the year 1906, and we have now arrived at a different time in Philadelphia history.

Seventy-two years on from our last tale, though we’re still in Philadelphia, and though the old Chestnut Street Theatre that we talked about before was long gone, we’ve literally moved only a few blocks away from where most of the action of our last episode was set. But really we’re in a different universe, in terms of Philadelphia’s overall story.

Because by now, by 1906, Philadelphia was a modern industrial city. From a population of just under 100,000 back in the early 1840s and just a few square miles in size, Philadelphia had now expanded to over 140 square miles and had a population of a million and half people. Factories belched smoke all over town, the Cramp shipyard along the Delaware churned out enormous steel vessels every week, Baldwin locomotives built near Logan Square ran swiftly along the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads, and hundreds of trolley cars ran along every major street, competing for space both with horses and even those new-fangled automobiles. And if you stood and looked from the peak of the tallest central tower of the recently completed City Hall, on Center Square - the homes - Philadelphia now called itself the City of Homes - stretched to the horizon.

Most importantly, Philadelphia’s demographics had changed. The old animosities between Catholics and Protestants had largely been abandoned. The Catholic Church hierarchy, in fact, was extremely influential in many Philadelphian’s lives, even though the old WASP and Quaker aristocracy still ruled in the highest levels of society. In fact, many of the old line families that led the city in the 1840s were still quite prominent, although few were directly involved in politics anymore. But there had been a huge influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Italy, from Ireland, and from the Austrian and Russian Empires. The factories, warehouses, and office buildings were hungry for workers, and the city hummed night and day with activity.

The benefits of economic expansion were not necessarily equally shared. And although in 1906 we are JUST before the beginnings of what is usually termed the Great Migration, the city’s long-established Black community was definitely attracting many new migrants coming up from the South. The number of African Americans in Philadelphia, which stood at nearly 32,000 in 1880 had almost doubled to some 63,000 in 1900. By 1906 the number was still only somewhere around 70,000 - just around 5 percent of the overall population of the city. There were hundreds Black-owned businesses, including the Philadelphia Tribune newspaper (established in 1884) and the Douglass Hospital, opened in 1895, which served the African American population and trained Black nurses and doctors. The Philadelphia Colored Directory was a publication, and in 1910 it listed 78 men as being physicians, 16 dentists and 13 lawyers. 143 were professional musicians, and 169 were ministers at Black churches - remember that last fact, it becomes important later.

We’ve already noted in this podcast, in our episodes about John Arneaux, or “The Black Booth,” that by the late 1880s, the Republican Party of Philadelphia was actively courting the vote of these Black men in local elections, and indeed their votes often proved critical to keeping the GOP political machine in power in City Hall. So the Black community had some scope and influence, and by the 1890s it was even the subject of an extended formal academic sociological investigation, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous 1899 book entitled The Philadelphia Negro. But as DuBois discovered, the overwhelming majority of Black people were confined to lower-level positions in the city’s economy, and a great number worked as servants in other people’s houses. 

But let’s return to our own particular little bailiwick - what about the city’s theaters? How had they changed? Instead of the four Philadelphia theaters of the 1840s, in the beginning of the 20th century there were dozens of large theaters, all over the city - from the Academy of Music and Grand Opera House, to legit theater which hosted large touring shows like the Broad Street Theatre, the Garrick Theatre and the Walnut Street Theater, to vaudeville houses like Keith’s Bijou and the Adelphi, the whole grand panoply of American show biz, all the way down to the burlesque and minstrel shows and dime museums in the Tenderloin neighborhood. Even a smattering of nickelodeons and moving pictures. Most Philadelphians went to live theaters multiple times a year. But, I’m very sorry to tell you that the somewhat remarkable free mixing of the races in the audience that in Season One we noted was the general rule in the 1870s and 80s, had now reverted back to the situation closer to that of 1844. The post Civil War advances in rights to public accommodations had been largely lost in Philadelphia, and elsewhere in America.  After the decisions by the US Supreme Court in such cases as Plessy v. Ferguson, most Philadelphia theaters would once again only sell Black people tickets to the highest upper balconies - if they sold them tickets at all. In fact, due to the common practices of box office managers, Blacks often had to wait to buy even these few balcony tickets until just before curtain time - to make sure no white people wanted those seats first. DuBois was quite pointed in his study about race prejudice generally hindering African Americans in just about every part of their civic life, and theaters were certainly no exception to that rule.

Were Black Philadelphians coming to the theaters? Well, yes, but not a lot. According to DuBois, most of the working class Black people of the city, though they might occasionally attend a theater or a concert, mostly got their entertainment through their churches or church social functions. In fact, many of the more conservative and religious blacks, like many other American Christians of all races in that time, rather distrusted theaters entirely. There was, however, about an upper tenth of the Black population, he observed, especially of the old Philadelphia families of the Seventh Ward, that might have the inclination, education, and income to attend the theater. And indeed we saw that in 1887, when the opportunity to see serious Black actors doing Shakespeare had presented itself, they had flocked to do so at the Academy of Music. And as we also learned Black actors and theater artists had huge barriers, and often found it impossible to even work regularly on the stage. Indeed the efforts of our old friends - R. Henry Strange and Major Teagle - to found a black Shakespeare company in the city had fallen short. Another group’s effort to start a black theater in South Philadelphia, at a former hall at 5th and Gaskill, had been quickly outbid by a group of Yiddish theater artists who wanted to serve the city’s burgeoning Jewish immigrant population. Soon the great Boris Thomashevky himself was running a theater company in Philadelphia. But hopeful black theater artists in the city, once again, found themselves without a home.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

So, if there was interest, but not much participation, by the city’s African Americans in the world of the theater, what exactly was going on at the Walnut Street Theater in October of 1906. What suddenly had gotten so much of their attention? Why were 3000 people - which would have been an astoundingly large percentage of the entire Black community in the city, out on the street, and why were they rioting. But, wait . . .  Was it thousands of people? Were they rioting - in the way that word is usually used? Do we really trust that narrative? In the newspaper story we quoted at the beginning of the episode, there certainly were a lot of sensational hints at potential violence, but there were also many instances of Black people gathering around and calling for peace, and discussion and temperance. Only the white policeman who fired those shots did something truly alarming, and he reportedly was soon surrounded and met only with stern looks and words of reproof, not blows. But still something quite major was clearly going on.

So, let’s first step back a bit and question whether the account that we just heard, taken from a major White newspaper, the Inquirer, was really accurate. I have gone into the archives of other big Philadelphia papers of the day, including The North American and the Evening Bulletin, and found that their accounts, well they largely track with the description in the Inquirer. The headline in The North American read:  “3000 Negroes Start Riot Trying to Stop Objectionable Play. Three are Arrested and One Clubbed by Police. Women Faint, following Wild Yells of Disturbers in Gallery.” Even The Sun, the main newspaper down in nearby Baltimore, Maryland, reported that “a negro mob menaced the theater where the The Clansman was played.” Furthermore, The Sun editorialized: “Things have reached a pretty pass, indeed, if the American stage is to be left in any degree at the mercy of mobs - if religious or racial fanaticism is to make our theatres the scene of rioting and bloodshed.” The Baltimorean editor urged the Philadelphia authorities to act “sternly and strongly.” My goodness, had things reached that point - were we back in the bad old days of the 1840s? Did we need to call out the militia and shoot into crowds?

So to get a different point of view, the obvious thing to do would be to check how the Philadelphia Tribune, the major Black newspaper of the city, reported on that same incident. Unfortunately, we can’t see that week’s editions of the Tribune anymore, as a fire at their offices in 1912 would destroy all the archives from their early years. But we do have an account from another Black newspaper in a nearby city, in Baltimore, the Baltimore Afro American, where a reporter on the scene related events transpiring in a less alarming manner:

Philadelphia PA, Oct 24th - This has been a week of excitement in this city. The play  . . . which opened here at the Walnut St. Theater on Monday evening, has had a strenuous time. A demonstration was made by the colored people in front of the theater . . and a crowd, variously estimated to be from 300 to 3000 was present, to voice their objection to this race-strife creating play. The crowd was orderly, and but for the interference of some hoodlums, there would have been no trouble. As it was only two persons were arrested, both of them being boys.  . . . As usual the press dispatches sent out from this city stated that the colored people were riotous and that there was a riot call sent in . . .but there is no truth in the statement that there was a riot - for there was none. .

So, by our terms today it seems there was more of what we would call a protest or a mass demonstration. Today, of course, everyone would have their cellphones out, recording everything. Back then, everybody rushed to get their hot takes printed in the newspapers, and “Race Riot” was a buzzword of that day, used to describe almost any public confrontation where race was an issue at all.

And I also ought to tell you that going into the microfilm archives and looking at the all the font pages of Philadelphia’s many daily newspapers that week in October 1906, the Inquirer, the Public Ledger, The Press, the Evening Bulletin, and the North American - a crusading liberal newspaper of the day - we don’t even find that this “race riot” story placed by their editors at the top of the front page. It wasn’t the day’s biggest story, in other words. Though in there was a drawing of rioting people at the very top of the North American on Oct. 23rd, a political cartoon of a  marching group of angry citizens carrying a huge black flag with skull and crossbones on it with the words “LET US END THIS TALK OF CIVIC RIGHTEOUSNESS”. But this drawing showed all white people, not black. They weren’t protesting what was going on in theaters. This was all about something bigger - according to the editors - the ongoing battle within the Republican Party about reforming the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia city government. For you Philadelphia political history fans, this was the time of the Municipal League and the Committee of Seventy. For those of you who don’t know anything about that period of Philly history, well, let’s see . . .  it was kinda like the Russian Revolution of 1905, which was happening at the same time on the other side of the world! Just as in Russia, for about a year there was huge agitation and action, the forces of Reform seemed to triumph for a while, and then, just when the day seemed won, there was a gradual dissipation of energy, as the Old Guard regained power once again. 

Speaking of the Old Guard, or “Gang” as the reforming newspapers called them. The ostensible leader of the city was Mayor John Weaver, a Republican lawyer who had been elected Mayor in 1903. The real power brokers remained in the background, collecting graft. And by 1906 Weaver had been mostly dealing with the fallout over a huge scandal about crooked contracts involving Philadelphia’s municipally owned natural gas company. Weaver, to his credit, had turned against the bosses and prosecuted the malefactors. For over a year, there had been mass public meetings, angry demonstrations outside City Council members homes, huge marches in the streets. But not, we should note, about civil rights, and certainly not about plays. But - here’s my point - just as we saw back in 1844, when controversial plays are put on in theaters in an otherwise overheated political climate, dangerous things begin to happen.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

So returning to our story, what was the object of this mass demonstration outside the Walnut Street Theatre?  What was the play inside the Walnut? What mere drama could have possibly caused this much outrage? Was it because all the black characters were played by white actors in blackface? Because that was definitely happening.

Well, it wasn’t just an ordinary minstrel show, believe me. As we noted in our podcast about the history of minstrel shows in Philadelphia, those were a long-established institution at the time. Black Philadelphians may not have cared much for them, but they were not, on the whole, something that Black people got very exercised about - not back then. There were still some vestiges of Black minstrel companies, after all, and even a major African American musical star like Bert Williams himself was still working in blackface, and people were quite proud of him.

No this was something different altogether. Although in many ways it had the plot elements of many a melodrama, in other ways this was a startling new type of play. It was called The Clansman, by novelist and former clergyman named Thomas W. Dixon. I bet as soon as you heard that title, The Clansman, that you immediately intuited that it was pretty awful. Only, guess what - it was even worse than that, that thing that you just thought of. Just unspeakable. And yet, here I am to speak about it. This is the job that I’ve assigned myself.

And I think it’s important that I do, because what was going on in that awful play, back in 1906, was the real progenitor to much of the worst of political discourse and white supremacist rhetoric and racist imagery that are cropping up all over America again today. Many of us had thought, once, that they had long been defeated and discredited, but no. Not at all, as it turned out. They rise again, stronger than ever. We should know where that comes from, so we can fight it. That’s the way that we can honor the people who stood out on Walnut Street in protest that evening, in 1906, even as the many of their fellow Philadelphians eagerly trooped inside to see the show.

So, again: what happened in this play, The Clansman? Okay, here we go.

As the curtain rose, the first scene opened in the town of Piedmont, South Carolina, on November 20th, 1867. It is Election Day, and Reconstruction is in full swing. The black troops of the Union Army occupy the former territory of the Confederacy. Now, as the playwright, Thomas Dixon, paints the action, that means that newly-freed Southern slaves are exulting in at last having power over white people. Especially power over the Camerons, the local gracious family of former planters, whose house is at center stage, overlooking a cliff. A river valley is seen off in the distance.

The stage directions read: “Characteristic crowd of negroes, grouped in the roadway, some lined up along the cliff fence, a straggling few below the hedge rows enclosing the Cameron House, all laughing, talking, shouting with noisy enthusiasm. Pocket flasks are passed from hand to hand. Two or three, with bunches of ballots in hand, circulate in a purposeful was among the throng - negro troopers pass, joyously saluted by the crowd. Two or three white males make their way through the crowd, one exits R. by way of the road. Two come forward, and, with dubious shaking of heads and exchange of meaning looks, exeunt to Cameron House.”

Now at this point the spoken dialogue begins. The very first person to speak, in fact, is a Negro Preacher, who is haranguing the gathered crowd of Black voters promising them all Forty Acres and a Mule if they vote right. “Bottom rail on top!” exults a black peddler in the crowd. “While your old master works your land and pays you his rent in corn!” Another negro voter named Alec reveals that he is a member of a secret society called “The Black League” who is sworn to keep the vote from the white man and keep Blacks in continual power throughout the South, forever.

Now all of these lines were written in the worst kind of stage negro dialect, and I won’t quote them directly, because I absolutely decline to subject all of your ears to it. It’s been published, you can find the play yourself, I’ll put the reference in the Bibliography on the episode blog post on our web page. Go look it up, if you need to read that. But of the white people who were gathered in the Philadelphia audience that night in 1906, not one of them rose in protest to stop the show. This was not out of line with many other Southern melodramas of the day, after all. They all would have heard that dialect many times, not just in minstrel shows - heck you could read jokes in colored dialect in the Philadelphia papers every day! But importantly though they had seen similar scenes on the stage before, and many had even read the best-selling novel the play was based upon, none of them had ever seen it mixed with such blood curdling and emotionally laden political messaging. The impact of this play was clear, the story of its plot was pointed - black people and their white liberal enablers had humiliated and degraded the white people of the South during Reconstruction, and white people had rightfully fought and seized their dignity and protected their women folk from forced interracial marriage. That’s what the play was about.

Now, fearing trouble, the management of the theater had lined the back of the house with Philadelphia policemen. But almost as soon as the curtain rose on this appalling spectacle one young Black man, named Henry Jenkins, had already seen enough. Soon after the curtain rose, he reached under his seat where he had stashed a box of eggs, and began hurling them at the stage, scattering all those white actors pretending to be Black.

Jenkins was quickly spotted by one Officer Rooney, of the 19th District. Here’s the description from a report in the papers:  “The gallery, which was filled with colored men, cheered Jenkins on and when Rooney, with three other fellow policemen, went to arrest the colored man, the onlookers were in an angry mood. Jenkins fought desperately, assisted by his friends, and after clubbing him the policemen had to fight their way through the crowd to the exit. Meantime the house was in turmoil.”

Police then dragged their detainee, bleeding from his head, out onto Walnut Street, and  another man, Butler Williams, attempted to lead a rescue of Jenkins, only to be beaten and arrested himself. A boy pulled away a pole supporting an overhead trolley electrical line, and as he ran away, one officer fired three shots - fortunately, his aim was poor and amazingly no one was hit by one of his stray bullets in the crowded streets.

After this interruption the play inside on the stage continued, though occasional  paper missiles, likely folded up theater programs, descended on the stage from the upper balcony. As the first act ended, some white people in the lower orchestra sections got worried and began to leave. But when they did, they missed a lot of what The Clansman still had to show them. They missed the scenes in Act Two where the biracial son of a white northern politician arrives to take over the South Carolina government. They missed when the young men in the play are recruited into an Southern White army of resistance, an organization based upon the Scottish highland clans described in Sir Walter Scott’s novels. They missed the scenes in Act Three where the Ku Klux Klan assembles in an eerily lit cavern to interrogate a black man accused of murdering a young white girl, and decide he is guilty based upon the evidence of  a microscope’s image of the murder victim’s horrified face embedded in his eye. Yes, that was a plot point. The black man then confesses his crime and describes how the girl jumped off a cliff to escape him. They missed a speech by an actor playing Nathan Beford Forrest himself! They missed the final scene where the whole Klan rides to the rescue - actual horses on the stage!  - to save young Ben Cameron from execution, the family mansion from being sold off to the evil villain, and as a comic faithful black retainer strikes down a fiendish black politician, while ironically yelling: “Ain’t I yo’ equal!” And they missed the enthusiastic applause from the Philadelphia crowd at the final curtain.
 
During all this, the Philadelphia director of Public Safety Robert McKenty stood outside the theater on Walnut Street, directing the police. Three prominent Black clergymen, Reverend Matthew Anderson, E.W. Moore, and Dr. Taliaferro of the Holy Trinity Baptist Church, who had earlier been ejected from the house, walked up to him and asked him that the show be immediately stopped.

‘I can’t arbitrate this here, gentlemen,” responded McKenty, keeping a watchful eye on the surging and angry crowd and on the departing audience members threading their way out of the front door. Only the mayor could do that. But he promised the ministers that, if they would meet with him and Mayor Weaver tomorrow morning, they could draw up together an order forbidding The Clansman from ever being performed in the City of Philadelphia, ever again.

[MUSIC: “DRAMA IS CONFLICT” CLOSING THEME]

Well, that’s quite enough for today. I can only marvel at the group of Philadelphia preachers who all bought tickets and sat and watched a play, or tried to, that they knew was written to offend them and defame their race, and maybe drive the white audience around them into a frenzy.

After all, that is what the author, Thomas Dixon, was intending to do. In an essay published earlier that same year, entitled “Why I Wrote The Clansman” he wrote:

“The production of this, my first play, has been the most thrilling work of my life.” And then he cited with glee a review of a New York reporter who had seen an earlier performance of the play in Charleston, South Carolina: “ ‘As a means of sowing the seed of revulsion for the black man, this play cannot be well ignored.  . .  to those who have the future harmony of the two races at heart, the presentation of “The Clansman must come as a crushing blow.’ . . .I believe that the stage is the best medium for placing this tremendously vital question before the whole people. My play cannot be misunderstood. In the fierce glare of the footlights, its purpose and the lesson it conveys becomes clear to every man and woman in this broad and fair land of ours. It is indeed ‘the writing on the wall.’ Will the American people heed its warning?”

Yeesh. Well. .  what will happen next? Was this play’s further performance banned? Would Dixon’s disgusting and offensive production continue its tour? Would further uproar and protest result? Would there be actual race riots? Who was this man, this Thomas Dixon, and why did theater producers of the day give him such an open public platform to spread his racist views? 

All that, and more will be in our next two Episodes. Continue to listen in and support our podcast as we continue the story. Write us, and let us know what you think. aithpodcast@gmail.com . . .  I want to hear from you. As I have often said, sometimes theater history is not a pretty story, but it's never not an important one.

I’m Peter Schmitz, and our music and sound engineering are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thank you, once again, for your kind attention, please check out our social media feeds on Facebook and Instagram, (not Twitter, not anymore). Please visit our website www.aithpodcast.com for additional images and information and to listen to earlier episodes, and then like us and subscribe to our feed on whatever platform you are using to get  your podcasts. Most of all, please join us again in a few weeks time, when we continue this Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]