45. The Fight Against The Clansman, Part Three

COPYRIGHT 2023 - Peter Schmitz. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History! This is the third episode in our series, “The Fight Against the Clansman.” If you haven’t heard Part One and Part Two yet, I would recommend finding them and listening to them first. But it’s not required. As I always like to remind people, this podcast isn’t like school, you don’t have to do all the assignments to pass the class. But I just think it would be more fun and more exciting for you to understand the complete context - and fun and excitement is what we’re all about here at Adventures in Theater History, after all! I really meant it when I came up with that title for the show.

I also want to explain what I meant by the title of these series of episodes. Notice it’s not “The Clansman”, but instead “The Fight AGAINST the Clansman.” Although I had to discuss the play and its author in order to provide the full context for this story, as it relates to Philadelphia’s theater history, that's not really our core mission here. I won’t spend a lot more time discussing Thomas Dixon Jr.,- there’s been quite a lot written and said about him already. There are entire books and PhD dissertations about him if you want to know more, believe me.

Dixon will, of necessity, come back into the story at times. But I don’t want to fall into the old History Channel Problem. You may remember, back in the day, when that cable TV network was still actually showing documentaries about actual, you know, History. But after a while A LOT of their programming always seemed to be about World War II. And not about WWI that happened in the Pacific against Japan - it kept doing programming like “Hunting Hitler”, or stuff about General Rommel’s armored warfare strategy. After a while, you began to feel that anyone watching the History Channel just really liked looking at Nazis and footage of swastikas on the sides of rumbling tanks. That was their core audience, at the time. And I don’t think I have catered to such an audience before, and I have no intention of catering to such an audience in the future.

But there’s been less attention given to what I think are equally compelling historical figures who stood up against people like Dixon - people often who lived and worked here in Philadelphia. Though W.E.B. Dubois, I think, certainly has been given his due, and we talked a bit about him earlier. In this episode I’m going to try to talk about some other historical figures whose names are less well known, but even so I can’t quite give them all the time and space they deserve in this episode - they are such compelling characters that whenever I tried to tell all their life stories here, it tended to take us far away from out main narrative. Much of that history lies far outside the bounds of theater history, properly speaking. Fortunately, as I was agonizing over this and preparing this episode someone reminded me that I have a blog post section, on our website www.aithpodcast.com! I always put extra contextual information and images there to share with our listeners, and so that is what I’ve done again. And I’ve called this post “The Learned Professions.” Go look for it, if you want to, the link is in the show notes for this episode. Or just go right to our website and you’ll see the tab for Blog Posts at the top of the page.

We began, in Part One, with a description of the protest against The Clansman, out on the street in 1906, because that’s the part of the story that’s unique to Philadelphia - one that would have long-lasting consequences for the way the theater world was shaped in this city. I want to talk about the people living right here who pushed back, who fought this play's message, and who were determined to ultimately prevail.

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” THEME]

So,we’ve established that Thomas Dixon was, frankly, a White Supremacist and what we would call nowadays A Troll. He was looking to provoke attention, and then fundraise and organize off the response. I mean he used to show up outside lecture appearances by the most famous Black man in America, in his day, the educator Booker T. Washington, and offered to pay him to debate in public (Washington simply ignored him, by the way). And when Dixon’s play The Clansman first opened for its initial run in theaters in New York City in December of 1905, just before Christmas, here is what Dixon did: He sent anonymous Special Delivery packages to dozens of the leading Black clergymen in the city, as well as prominent African American businessmen. These packages were timed to arrive just before midnight, waking most of these men and their families out of their beds. Inside was the pamphlet by Dixon that we have already quoted from in earlier episodes, entitled “Why I Wrote The Clansman.” So what did these gentlemen do in response to this disturbing intrusion? Naturally they were all justifiably angry. But then they kinda fell right into Dixon’s trap, actually - that Sunday there were a lot of sermons in New York’s Black churches about the evils of Dixon’s racial theories, and about the perils of allowing this play to be produced at all, and there were a lot of indignant letters written to the New York Times, and of course The Times and other newspapers ran with the so-called ‘controversy’. The title of the play, already well known because of the novels (The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman) that it was based upon, were being printed everywhere.

There was also a pamphlet published by Kelly Miller, a professor at Howard University, entitled “As to the Leopard’s spots, an open letter to Thomas Dixon” in which Professor Miller demolished, one by one, all of Dixon’s theories about the supposed horrors of miscegenation and the inability of the Negro to ever reach true accomplishments of intellect and civilization. I highly recommend it for a guidebook if you’re ever in a situation where you need to argue with racists yourself. Dixon, as far as I can tell, did not really respond to it, perhaps because he couldn’t.

But there were live public debates held with a number of these prominent Black ministers, just the sort of forum in which Dixon thrived - he held the floor for hours - and these meetings were well attended by large mixed-race crowds who were angry and curious about the entire affair. Reading in the newspaper archives all the impassioned and dignified words of the preachers who replied to Dixon is pretty inspiring - although also in another way dispiriting, because you can hear these same sort of speeches today, and we don’t seem to have shifted things much. “I want to tell you that I am surprised that a man in this year of 1906 will get up in a public meeting and say the things you did,” was actually a sentence one white man in the audience said to Dixon. Let me tell him about 2023, I think, reading that. But then that same man, to his credit, refused to shake Dixon’s proffered hand, told him: “You’re a pretty slick gentleman, you are, you’re very eloquent. You’ve chosen a fine way to advertise your book and your play, you have.” So, he and other people at the time saw what was going on.

But again, on the whole Dixon clearly got what he wanted here - the response - because although his show was only tepidly received by New York critics and only fairly well attended by audiences, he was able to leverage all this publicity for the subsequent national tours of the show - his Southern Production company announced it was sending out TWO complete Clansman casts. And our old pals Klaw and Erlanger announced that one of the first stops on this tour, in late April 1906, would be the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But wait, you say, April of 1906 – wasn’t the huge demonstration of thousands of people outside the Walnut, the one we talked about in Part One - wasn’t that in October? Well, yeah, exactly it turned out, there was no big reaction to The Clansman coming to Philadelphia - not the first time! How could that have happened?

As near as I can make it out, the story goes like this: While one touring Clansman company of the show went out to the cities of the Ohio Valley and then onto other towns in the Midwest, while the Eastern company had stopped first at Scranton, PA, where the Mayor of that city had refused to forbid its performance, over the pleas of Black leaders of the city - audiences had flocked to see it, demonstrating how Dixon’s publicity tactics were in fact working. A return booking was scheduled in Scranton immediately following the one in Philly. It ran for a week - again, at the Walnut, starting on the 23rd of April.

But it was the other touring cast that was actually meeting with more resistance. A recent deadly race riot in Springfield, Ohio had shocked many people in local and state governments there, and the state legislature across the river in Kentucky quickly passed a bill that outlawed any performance of ANY play that might be “calculated to inspire race prejudice” - which was apparently intended to mean both The Clansman (which upset Black Kentuckians) AND Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which, you know, seemed to upset white ones). Furthermore, there was a lot of sort of guerilla protest and resistance from the Black working class people against the play. An actor in the cast reported that in Columbus, Ohio, waiters at the hotel restaurant turned their backs on him and refused to serve him, once they found out what play he was doing, and so did the waiters and porters on the train.

So what was happening over here, back here in Philadelphia? Didn’t anyone say anything, or make any protest? Well, yes they did, but at first it didn’t make the papers. It takes a little digging to find out what happened. As we detailed in part one, there was a fairly substantial body of Black businessmen, lawyers, doctors and clergymen in the city, and they were rather well connected to the dominant Republican Party. So the initial efforts against the play were done sort of through back channels. A delegation of these men, led by Dr. Nathan Mossell (moh-SELL), went to call on Mayor John Weaver.

Dr. Nathan Francis Mossell was one of the most prominent African American men in the city of Philadelphia of that day, the first Black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the founder and leader of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in South Philadelphia. Handsome, erudite and dynamic, Mossell was usually deferred to by others as the default leader of the African American community for all issues involving civil rights and anti-lynching advocacy. And, like most prominent Black men of his day, he was a Republican, a loyal member of the Party of Lincoln and of the current President of the US, Theodore Roosevelt, who had famously invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House.

Mayor John Weaver, as we mentioned previously, had alienated the Republican political bosses by refusing to participate in a City Council scheme to dole out contracts for the Philadelphia gas works to friends and cronies. Weaver was not known for his interest in the theater arts, but was devoted to proper procedure and the law. Like Teddy Roosevelt, he was determined that the African American citizens of his city should be fairly served by the legal system.

So when in April of 1906, when a delegation of African American men went to Mayor Weaver and asked him to forbid the local performances of The Clansman, the Mayor was sympathetic and gave them a respectful hearing. But, he asked them, on what legal grounds could he intervene? To prevent unruly demonstrations and mobs endangering public safety, they replied, pointing to the long-ago example of the play The Quaker City back in the 1840s, as a matter of fact. In addition, they feared what might be inspired by the play in Philadelphia among the city's white population. And they cited the example of the horrific lynching and burning of a Black man which had taken place in nearby Wilmington, Delaware just three years earlier. Nonetheless, replied Weaver, there are no such demonstrations or mobs outside the theater right now, therefore, legally he felt he could take no action. The delegation went away unmollified and deeply frustrated with Weaver, but with a valuable lesson learned about what they might need to undertake themselves in the future.

And so, this first visit of The Clansman just didn’t really cause much of a stir in Philadelphia. Local theater critics attending opening night wrote that it was rather a poor play, and the cast was only adequate, frankly. There were plenty of other noteworthy and sensational shows in town that week, including a spectacle called A Yankee Circus on Mars (A YANKEE CIRCUS ON MARS, ladies and gentlemen! Wouldn’t you go see that show? I know I would) at the Grand Opera House on North Broad, with a cast of 500 people on the stage. Who cared about the few horses galloping once or twice around the Walnut in The Clansman? At Nixon and Zimmerman’s five other main theaters, there were much more prominently promoted shows, including Philadelphia composer Willard Spenser’s new operetta Rosalie at the Chestnut. And anyway, the papers were filled with news of something else, that week, the horrible aftereffects of the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. So there was plenty going on to keep everyone’s attention elsewhere. No one was really too much worried about what was going on at the Walnut Street Theatre. At the end of April, The Clansman company left town, and made their way back up the pike to Scranton.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But over the subsequent months of 1906, as that company of the production spent the summer in Chicago (quite successfully, by the way), while the other one played mainly in Southern cities, news of the outrage and violence that the play was sparking in local communities kept making it back to Philadelphia. As it turned out, Black audiences in the South would attend the show along with white ones - of course in the racially segregated theaters of the day - and the cast of the show increasingly noticed a distinct partisanship out in the house. All of the lines in The Clansman that detailed the supposedly nefarious plots of the so-called “Black League” to give Negroes political power during Reconstruction [SFX, under Applause and shouts of ‘YEAH!’]  were met with ironic enthusiasm and raucous applause from the African Americans up in the balcony, while the many white folks down on the main floor would [SFX, under Applause and foot stomping]  cheer on the efforts of the Klansmen who were fighting Reconstruction. Unrest and protests and newspaper editorials, both by Blacks and white papers, were made in many cities. Although the press agents and publicists for the show continued to crow about its continued commercial success in both Northern and Southern cities, there were continuing outbreaks of interracial violence for various reasons throughout the country. And by September, the mayors of Macon, Georgia and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama had forbidden The Clansman’s performances, citing the interest of public safety.

Now lynching, sadly continued to happen throughout the South that autumn - famous cases in Alabama, and in Arkansas. In McCormick, Georgia on September 21st, it was reported that a woman who was traveled by rail from South Carolina to see a performance of The Clansman (in Augusta, Georgia) had her arm squeezed too tightly for her tastes by a negro porter on the train who was attempted to help her get up the steps. She complained to everyone around her, and eventually an organized gang of white men came and seized the unfortunate porter, took him off the train and savagely whipped him 100 times, before throwing him back on, telling him never to come back into town again. Other disturbing incidents took place as far north as Blackwood, New Jersey and elsewhere near Philadelphia, although it’s not always clear exactly what the immediate cause was. (It wasn’t all about The Clansman, surely.) But sometimes if you search for that very suspect and amorphous term “RACE RIOT” in the archives, the stories you can see in the archives involve Black violent resistance against the play. In Roanoke, Virginia, for instance, a white worker who was tacking up publicity posters for The Clansman on walls and fences around town, (which included photos of Thomas Dixon, by the way) - this billsticker was attacked and beaten by a group of Black men and every single poster was ripped up and thrown to the winds.

By mid October 1906, it was announced that soon the show would return to the Walnut Street Theatre later in the month. And ominous teaser ads began to appear in the Philadelphia newspaper theater sections. “THE CLANSMAN IS COMING!” they read. Now imagine you are a Black reader of the newspaper. Even though the word in the title of the play was spelled with a C, not a K, this would seem more like a threat than an enticement to buy tickets. Furthermore, there was apparently a repeat of the tactic that Dixon had used in New York City the previous year, and promotional material about the play was sent to the homes of many leading figures in the Philadelphia Black community at midnight - and by whom it was never clear, but it was likely Dixon himself, or at least was done at his direction.

But due to the propensity of American newspapers of the day just to let theater publicists and advance men insert copy about plays arriving in town directly into their columns, the articles in most major publications read like this:

“The remarkable business done by this play everywhere shows that it possesses a remarkable appeal to the public!”

And even on Sunday October 21st, a day before the play was to begin its second run of performances at the Walnut, the morning editions of The Philadelphia Inquirer read: “That much discussed play ‘The Clansman’ comes to the Walnut tomorrow night . . Lovers of American drama at its best will look forward with pleasant anticipations to this engagement, which promises to be the red letter event of the season.”

But despite this breezy assertion, shall we call it, some people in Philadelphia  clearly were NOT looking forward with pleasant anticipations to the engagement, not at all. After a series of quiet organizational meetings and planning sessions, a document was released, with the title on the top that read at the top: A CALL TO ACTION.

[MUSIC, UNDER - Florence Price, Symphony #1]

“We, the colored citizens of the city of Philadelphia, do unanimously and most positively protest against the play to be given in this city in the Walnut Street Theatre, as announced for next week, commencing Monday evening, the 22nd instant.No agency has done more to arouse a spirit of antipathy against the negro and to bring about a war of races than this play. Lynchings have been encouraged by the play, and because of its dangerous influence it has been driven out of a number of cities in the South and also in the West.”

“We, the citizens, have determined that it shall not play in the Walnut Street Theatre during the coming week. All citizens are called upon to appear at the doors of the theatre on Monday night to make an effectual protest.”

Signed, “Dr. N.F. Mossell, Rev. E.W. Moore, Rev. Mathew Anderson, Rev. G.L.P. Taliaferro, Rev. R.W. Fickland, Algernon B. Jackson, M.D., Thomas D. Coates, M.D., H.M. Minton, M.D., William A. Davis, PhD, and W.M. Sloane, D.D.S.”

If Mayor Weaver required an actual public disturbance in order to finally take action against The Clansman, well, he was going to get one.

[MUSIC OUT]

In Part One, we covered what happened outside and inside the Walnut on the night of October 22nd, although I neglected to mention that Dr. Mossell himself was in the audience that night, when asked by a reporter what he planned to do with the 2000 men gathered outside, Mossell replied calmly, “Wait and see, if this play is objectionable to our race we will be heard from.” But before the play actually began he was asked to leave the house by Director of Public Safety McKenty, and he consented to join McKenty out on the street and keep order. At the end of the night, McKinty promised Mossell, as well as Reverend Moore, Anderson and Taliaferro that there would be a hearing about possibly banning the play in front of the Mayor himself the next day at Philadelphia’s City Hall.

When the next day came, there was quite a show in the recently opened Beaux Arts building in Center Square, with a delegation of a hundred Black clergy, business and professional leaders arriving, as well as representatives of the Walnut Street Theater’s management, and dozens of newspaper journalists taking down everything that was said. Mayor Weaver met this formidable crowd in his large outer office, sitting behind a table, flanked by Director of Public Safety McKenty and City Solicitor Kinsey.

Mayor Weaver led off the proceedings: “If it is a fact that this play incites Race Prejudice, it should be suppressed. All races are equal, and one must be protected as much as another. I will protect the colored citizens of this city as far as I am able. I am strongly of the opinion that this agitation was first started by the promoters of the show, and it is now evident that the agitation went too far. I have been informed that the promoters even went so far as to send booklets of the play to several of our leading colored citizens at midnight.”

Now representatives of the show disputed Weaver’s last assertion, and the delegation led by Dr. Mossell himself rather dismissed the midnight deliveries’ importance, saying that his group was already planning to take urgent action anyway. “The play incites to riot. It is not the colored people who are the rioters,” Mossell declared. He then brought forth evidence that their demonstration was entirely peaceful, that it had dispersed when it became necessary, and that the only real violence the night before had been on the part of the Philadelphia police. Most importantly, he stressed that the play was in fact doing active harm to his community, just by the way it was written and presented, and action needed to be taken against it.

Next to speak was George H. White a Black Philadelphia attorney who, interestingly, was originally from North Carolina and in fact had served as a representative in the US Congress for the state. The play, White stated, was a gross misrepresentation of the historical facts of Reconstruction, and was doing great damage to incite white men around the country to commit lynchings. In fact, amazingly, he had met the playwright Thomas Dixon Jr. years before, when they both were serving their first terms in the North Carolina legislature. It had not been a pleasant experience, he said, and he recalled that Dixon was mistrusted and shunned by every other legislator, Black and white, back then he and his play should meet the same treatment now. “The gathering of our people last night was but an expression of righteous indignation of an outraged race.”

After this speech, three clergymen - Taliaferro, Minton and Anderson - all spoke, attesting to the insults that were being made to their community, and that there was already backlash by white people in Philadelphia against Blacks that was directly attributable to it. At one oyster warehouse on Dock Street example, white workers who had been to seent the play had gone on strike, demanding that their Black coworkers at the oyster house be fired. Fortunately the owner of the business had refused to do so. But still, that was what was going on at the time.

Then, the representatives of the theater itself had their chance to protest that the play contained no matter insulting or injurious to the reputation of Black people in general, and certainly not in the city of Philadelphia - an assertion so patently untrue that Weaver quickly dismissed it out of hand, and after just a few short minutes, the Mayor issued his ruling: The play known as The Clansman tended to incite racial hatred and animosity, it was a threat to public peace and safety, and from that point it was banned from further performance in the city of Philadelphia. It could never be done there, ever again.

[“DRAMA IS CONFLICT” Closing theme]

Of course the theater managers, and the representatives of Nixon and Zimmerman, immediately appealed to a Philadelphia city judge for an injunction to stay the mayor’s decision. Thomas Dixon himself by that point had arrived in Philadelphia and attempted to sway the court with his usual line of palaver. But the two local judges hearing the case immediately rejected his pleas, and refused to overturn the ban on the play. Police were then dispatched to stand in front of the Walnut Street Theater again that evening, and turn away all people who attempted to enter the doors, mostly - as it turned out - irate ticket holders who apparently hadn't gotten the news the show was canceled. And reported the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Negroes in all sections of the city were jubilant last night over the action of the Mayor and the courts on their behalf.”

And indeed, in the long run, the ban against the play in Philadelphia held. Some other cities’ mayors followed suit, though of course most did not. The play The Clansman continued to make big profits for the producers and for Thomas Dixon, Jr. All I can say to console you is that Dixon apparently was a bit of a fool with all this money that he earned, invested it rashly, and immediately lost it in the Stock Market Panic of 1907. He actually lost control of the play itself as a property. When another producer attempted to bring the play to Philadelphia to the Chestnut Street Theatre in 1910, it was stopped again after giving just one performance.

But, but - and I know many of you are thinking now - what about Birth of a Nation? Doesn’t this play The Clansman get made into that infamous D.W. Griffith movie? Wasn’t it openly supported by Thomas Dixon’s old college friend, now the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson? Was the ban against the play in Philadelphia also applied to the film when it came out in 1915? Well, yes, it was, but only briefly, and then the ban was quickly overruled and the movie ran for three solid months at the Forrest Theatre on Broad Street - as well as everywhere else in America. But we’re going to talk about that in our next episodes. Because although I would agree the banning of the play The Clansman was a victory for political decency and public standards in the City of Philadelphia, during a period of otherwise really appalling racial discrimination and endemic violence against Black people - on the whole, this new tendency to demand that the local governments police the content of plays on moral and political grounds was going to take some surprising turns over the next few decades in Philadelphia. This particular battle was won, yes - but a whole new war had just opened up. We’re on the cusp, ladies and gentlemen, of the Era of Censorship.

But, that’s all for today. I’m Peter Schmitz. Our theme 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. Please visit our website www.aithpodcast.com for additional images and blog posts and information and to listen to earlier episodes if you need to, and then - and this is important - like us and subscribe to our feed on whatever platform you are using to get  your podcasts. And then of course, we ask you again: Please please please leave 5 star ratings and write a brief review of the show on Apple Podcasts or on Overcast! Most of all, we ask you to please join us again in a few weeks time, for the next Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]