Mural Painting, Pageantry, and the Art of Civic Life in Progressive America

MODEL CITIZENS: MURAL PAINTING, PAGEANTRY, AND THE ART OF CIVIC LIFE IN PROGRESSIVE AMERICA

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ART & ART HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Annelise K. Madsen May 2010

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/sy486tp5223

Includes supplemental files: 1. Complete Figure Set (including images outside the public domain) (0-AMadsen-DissFinal- eSubmission-rev-supp.pdf)

ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Wanda Corn, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Scott Bukatman

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Caroline Winterer

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Bryan Wolf

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.

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ABSTRACT

The rise of a civic art movement in Progressive America (1890s-1910s) is a story about the role that monumental art played in both stabilizing and reshaping the meanings of communal expression during a dynamic period of aesthetic, cultural, and political transformation. This dissertation focuses on the related arts of mural painting and pageantry and considers how civic artists participated on a grand scale in the era’s campaigns for reform. A kinship developed among the two art forms with respect to aesthetics, leadership, and pedagogy, as practitioners came to see themselves as agents of Progressive change. Muralists adorned public institutions including state capitols, courthouses, libraries, and schools. Pageant-masters (as pageant directors called themselves) orchestrated hundreds—and oftentimes thousands—of cast members and contributors in performances that narrated a local origin story or the ideals of a socio- political cause through a series of scripted episodes, combined with dancing interludes, tableaux, and finale processions. Like social and political reformers of the period, mural and pageant leaders worked within Progressivism’s consensual vocabulary—speaking, making, and acting in the name of community—in order to materialize a range of agendas, styles, and visions of civic improvement. This study investigates how civic artists became civic reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, and the ways they made reform into something visible, dramatic, and vital. It asks: What did Progressivism look like? What civic lessons did murals and pageants activate, and for which publics? How did civic art’s classical forms and consensual narratives resonate with its viewing communities, and how did those communities respond? I argue that civic art represented an active and contested site where makers and viewers negotiated modernity through monumental forms of communal expression. Artistic Progressives positioned their art forms at the center of the era’s broader campaign to expand participatory democracy, improve social conditions, and impose a sense of order. Through paint and playacting, they entered into cultural and political debates on Americanization, immigration, citizenship, suffrage, and the new pedagogy of learning by doing. As the nation grew increasingly diverse, murals and pageants materialized collective public histories and values on a

grand scale. While civic art amplified narratives of a unifying Americanism, it likewise opened up cultural discussions on the myths and assumptions—racial, social, and gendered—that structured such pictorial storytelling. Communal expression represented an aesthetic working through of the meanings, boundaries, and responsibilities of civic identity in Progressive America. Mural painting and pageantry served as collaborative meeting points for art-minded citizens as well as contested zones of cultural agency. Engaging in close readings of individual mural compositions, I also attend to mural spaces, and to the cultural activities that transpired within sight of a particular institution’s adorned walls. Similarly, I understand pageantry as a constellation of events that included an official performance designed by the pageant-master as well as a set of alternative visions framed onstage, offstage, and in the press. The first two chapters consider murals, the next two consider pageants, and the final chapter examines the art forms together at a common venue. Chapter one examines the beginnings of the American mural movement at the Library of Congress and the ways its decorative program (1895-1897) launched a Progressive identity for muralists as aesthetic reformers. In chapter two, I focus on the Massachusetts State House, examining how its mural program (1900-1904) functioned as a pictorial arm of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanization movement. Turning to pageantry in chapter three, I examine the Pageant of Illinois (1909), staged near Chicago on the campus of Northwestern University, to show how pageant leaders, like muralists, used monumental visualizations of local history to secure their position as Progressive reformers. Chapter four considers the 1913 Suffrage Pageant-Procession in Washington, D.C., and the ways that women activists realigned pageantry’s pedagogy from that of civic uplift to a specific, political curriculum. The final chapter examines how mural painting and pageantry in and around the new Wisconsin State Capitol helped construct the Wisconsin Idea as well as how civic art’s educational campaign was institutionalized in the university community of Madison in the years leading up to America’s entrance into World War I.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While researching and writing this dissertation, I have encountered healthy doses of kindness, enthusiasm, and support from numerous individuals and institutions. It is with great joy that I thank many of them here. My advisor, Wanda Corn, has taught me how to be an art historian—to look closely, to use historical evidence wisely, to assert my own voice, to show my reader how and why, and to tell a good story. Wanda has done so with attentiveness, engagement, academic toughness, and patience. I heartfully thank her for embracing her role as teacher and mentor at all stages of this journey of mine from student to scholar. Bryan Wolf, Scott Bukatman, and Caroline Winterer also deserve much thanks for reading drafts of this study as members of my dissertation committee, helping me to refine my arguments with their questions, suggestions, and expertise. Ellen Todd and Jennifer Marshall also offered encouragement and guidance at crucial points along the way. Additionally, I wish to thank my first teachers in art history at Washington University, especially Angela Miller, who saw potential in me as an undergraduate and nurtured my first strides in the field. She has been my biggest cheerleader ever since. Elizabeth Childs has likewise shared her scholarly advice and warmth over the years. With fondness, I also thank William Wallace, who captured my attention as a first- semester freshman in his survey course, lecturing with unbounded energy on the history of Western art. Sitting in the auditorium in Steinberg Hall during the fall of 1995, I discovered my intellectual home; my eyes opened to the field of art history. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of institutional fellowships and grants that enabled me to be a fulltime graduate student for several years. Such support gave me the necessary time and resources to think, research, write, and refine each and every day until the project was thoroughly done. My research has been assisted by a Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art (2009-2010); a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2008- 2009); a Graduate Fellowship, Stanford University (2003-2008); Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Funds, Vice Provost for Graduate Education, Stanford University (2008); a Dissertation Grant, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe

Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2007); a United States Capitol Historical Society Fellowship (2007); a Graduate Research Opportunity Grant, School of Humanities & Sciences, Stanford University (2007); and Graduate Research Funds from the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University over the course of my graduate career. I owe many debts to the librarians, curators, and specialists who have helped me navigate the historical evidence, at moments when the archival sandbox appeared both plentiful and slim. For their time, efforts, and acumen, I would especially like to thank Peter Blank, Art & Architecture Library, Stanford University; Lorna Condon, Historic New England; James Hughes, Visitor Services, Library of Congress; Susan Greendyke Lachevre, Massachusetts Art Commission; Barbara Natanson, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division; David Null, University of Wisconsin- Madison Archives; Janet Olson, Northwestern University Archives; Bart Ryckbosch, Ryerson & Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago; Jay Satterfield, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; Andrew Stevens, Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Barbara Wolanin, Jennifer Pullara, and Andria Field at the Architect of the Capitol. I extend my thanks as well to the helpful and friendly staffs at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division; Sewall-Belmont House and Museum; John Hay Library, Brown University; Wisconsin Historical Society; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; University of Arizona Library Special Collections; Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University; New- York Historical Society; State Library of Massachusetts; Rare Books & Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library; and the Newberry Library. I appreciate the kindness of those who welcomed me into their homes and lives when my research took me to new places for weeks at a time. I would especially like to thank Nancy and John Pielemeier, who gave me a place to stay in D.C.—offering so much warmth, curiosity, and good conversation—simply because they knew my parents. I am a beneficiary of the enduring bonds of Knox College. Adrienne Jamieson and Stanford in Washington, graciously hosted me during an early research

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trip to the capital, giving me a chance to meet a spirited group of Stanford undergrads. I also thank both Lori Kipnis and Nora Niedzielski-Eichner for opening their homes to me, and for their years of friendship. After the libraries and museums had closed, they offered company, comfort, and laughter at just the right moments. Thanks are also due to my fellow graduates at Stanford University, who have shared their ideas and wit, kept me on track, and become both colleagues and friends, especially Nora, Rhonda Goodman, Mary Campbell, Sara Levavy, Amanda Glesmann, and Susee Witt. I also thank the organizers and participants of the Newberry Library Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture (2009-2010), who have provided me with an Americanist community in Chicago. For her good spirit and generosity, Jill Davis, Student Services Administrator in the Art & Art History Department, deserves special mention. My graduate years have been free of logistical hiccups and stress because of her. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my family, who has surrounded me with so much love, happiness, motivation, and sense of purpose. My parents, Paul and Diane, have given me an emotional and intellectual grounding that I no longer take for granted. I cannot thank them enough for teaching me how to approach the world around me with lifelong curiosity, and for always finding the right balance between their own expectations for their children and the value of independence. As my siblings and I grew up, our parents gave us the creative space to aim high, take risks, follow through, make mistakes, and craft our own opportunities and successes. To my brother, Erik, and my sister, Julie, I thank you for being there at every step. I am so fortunate to have you both so near. Extended circles of Madsen, Koeppel, and Stipanuk families have likewise given me much love and support. To my grandmother, Helen Koeppel, who sadly did not live to see this project’s conclusion, I am grateful for many things, and for two things in particular: for making family history a vital and enduring component of our shared sense of community and for teaching me through her example that higher education is a rewarding pursuit, no matter the obstacles. And to my husband, Jason, I say simply, with a full heart: I love you. After each day of work, I come home to you. And that is the best part.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

Acknowledgments vi

List of Figures x

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Picturing Civic Lessons at the Library of Congress (1895-1897) 19

Chapter Two: Scaling Up an American Past at the Massachusetts State House (1900-1904) 64

Chapter Three: Performing Progress as Art and History at the Pageant of Illinois (1909) 108

Chapter Four: Recasting Allegory as Modern Womanhood at the Suffrage Pageant- Procession (1913) 153

Chapter Five: Teaching the Art of Citizenship in Madison, Wisconsin (1908-1917) 199

Conclusion 235

Figures 242

Bibliography 306

LIST OF FIGURES

1-1 Great Hall, Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. Photograph by author.

1-2 Detroit Photographic Company, Exterior view of the Library of Congress, 1902, photochrom. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

1-3 Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG-highsm- 03187.

1-4 Edwin Blashfield, The Evolution of Civilization, 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG-highsm-02067.

1-5 Edwin Blashfield, The Evolution of Civilization, detail with lantern painting (Human Understanding), 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG-highsm-02070.

1-6 Edwin Blashfield, The Evolution of Civilization, detail of America, Egypt, and Judea, 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG- highsm-02070.

1-7 Edwin Blashfield, The Evolution of Civilization, detail of Greece, Rome, and Islam, 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG- highsm-02070.

1-8 Edwin Blashfield, The Evolution of Civilization, detail of Middle Ages, Italy, and Germany, 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG-highsm-02070.

1-9 Edwin Blashfield, The Evolution of Civilization, detail of Spain, England, and France, 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG- highsm-02070.

1-10 Scaffolding, designed by Bernard Green, 1896, Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, J0044063.

1-11 Robert Reid, Understanding, 1896, North Corridor (second floor), Library of Congress. Photograph by author.

1-12 Edward Simmons, Nine Muses: Terpsichore, 1896, Northwest Gallery, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG-highsm-03124.

1-13 Elihu Vedder, Corrupt Legislation, 1896, Main Reading Room Lobby, Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, LC-DIG-highsm-02035.

1-14 John White Alexander, The Evolution of the Book, 1896, East Corridor, Library of Congress. Reproduced in Harper’s Weekly, 23 January 1897, pages 84-85.

1-15 John White Alexander, The Evolution of the Book: The Printing Press, 1896, East Corridor, Library of Congress. Photograph by author.

1-16 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Cooking class, #353, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-26380.

1-17 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Schoolchildren at the Smithsonian, #210, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4544.

1-18 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Students at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, #179, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-53866.

1-19 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Students at the fountain outside the Library of Congress, #176, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4546.

1-20 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Human respiratory class, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-45704.

1-21 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Schoolchildren near Charles Sprague Pearce’s murals on The Family at the Library of Congress, #385, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4550.

1-22 Detroit Photographic Company, Library of Congress, North Hall, Entrance Pavilion (with Charles Sprague Pearce’s Family series), 1900, photochrom. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

1-23 Charles Sprague Pearce, The Family: Religion, 1896, North Corridor, Library of Congress. Photograph by author.

1-24 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Schoolchildren near John White Alexander’s murals on The Evolution of the Book at the Library of Congress, #247, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

1-25 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Students near the bronze doors of the Library of Congress, #246, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4542.

1-26 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Schoolchildren at the statue of George Washington by Horatio Greenough, outside the Capitol and near the Library of Congress, #355, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsc-04904.

1-27 Frances Benjamin Johnston, Schoolchildren in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, with Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam, #354, D.C. School Survey, 1899. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-4541.

2-1 Charles Bulfinch, “Bulfinch Front,” Massachusetts State House, 1798. Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph by author.

2-2 Memorial Hall before mural installations, ca. 1900-1901, Massachusetts State House. State Library of Massachusetts Special Collections Department, Burrill File.

2-3 Edward Simmons, The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth, 1902, Memorial Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-4 War flags in niche below murals in Memorial Hall, Massachusetts State House. State Library of Massachusetts Special Collections Department, Burrill File.

2-5 Edward Simmons, Battle at Concord Bridge, 1902, Memorial Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-6 Henry Oliver Walker, The Pilgrims on the Mayflower, 1902, Memorial Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-7 Henry Oliver Walker, John Eliot Preaching to the Indians, 1903, Memorial Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

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2-8 Robert Reid, James Otis Arguing against the Writs of Assistance in the Old Town House, 1901, Senate Staircase Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-9 Robert Reid, Paul Revere’s Ride, 1904, Senate Staircase Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-10 Robert Reid, The Boston Tea Party, 1904, Senate Staircase Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-11 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, 1818, placed 1826, Rotunda, United States Capitol. Washington, D.C. Architect of the Capitol.

2-12 Robert Reid, The Boston Tea Party, detail, 1904, Senate Staircase Hall, Massachusetts State House. Photograph by author.

2-13 John Rogers, John Eliot, the Puritan Missionary, Preaching the Gospel to the Indians. Reproduced in Harper’s Weekly, 7 June 1890, page 440.

2-14 Detroit Publishing Company, Postcard of Robert Reid’s The Boston Tea Party, ca. 1905. State Library of Massachusetts Special Collections Department, Burrill File.

2-15 Charles Yardley Turner, Burning of the Peggy Stewart at Annapolis in 1774, 1905, Baltimore Courthouse. Reproduced in Charles Caffin, The Story of American Painting, page 317.

2-16 Edwin Blashfield, Westward, detail, 1905, Iowa State Capitol. Des Moines, Iowa. Reproduced in the Craftsman, April 1906, page 56.

3-1 Site of the Pageant of Illinois, Oak grove near Sheridan Road, between Foster Street to the north and University Place to the south, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Photograph by author.

3-2 Episode 1, Father Marquette preaching to the Potawatomis, Pageant of Illinois, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 7-9 October 1909, written and directed by Thomas Wood Stevens. Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago. Reproduced in Outlook, 22 January 1910, page 188. Special Collections, University of Arizona Library, Thomas Wood Stevens Papers, box 31, folder 1.

3-3 “Life in Evanston, Just at Present,” Chicago Daily News, 8 October 1909, page 1, drawing by Bradley.

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3-4 Harry L. Gage at work on his mural for the Felsenthal School, The Departure of Columbus from Palos, student in Thomas Wood Stevens’ mural painting course at the Art Institute of Chicago, ca. 1908. Reproduced in School Arts Magazine, January 1913, page 300.

3-5 Frank Makowski, La Salle, mural decoration completed as student at the Art Institute of Chicago, in Thomas Wood Stevens’ mural painting course, ca. 1911. Reproduced in the AIC Circular of Instruction, 1911-1912.

3-6 White Cloud (Donald Robertson), Monologue introducing the last half of the Pageant of Illinois, Evanston, Illinois, 7-9 October 1909. Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago. Reproduced in Outlook, 22 January 1910, page 186. Special Collections, University of Arizona Library, Thomas Wood Stevens Papers, box 31, folder 1.

3-7 Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois, written by Thomas Wood Stevens, cover art by Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1909.

3-8 Torchlight procession of participants in reverse chronological order, middle of line, conclusion of the Pageant of Illinois, Evanston, Illinois, 7-9 October 1909. Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago. Reproduced in Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry, page 52. Special Collections, University of Arizona Library, Thomas Wood Stevens Papers, box 31, folder 1.

3-9 Torchlight procession of participants in reverse chronological order, back of line, conclusion of the Pageant of Illinois, Evanston, Illinois, 7-9 October 1909. Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago. Reproduced in Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry, page 53. Special Collections, University of Arizona Library, Thomas Wood Stevens Papers, box 31, folder 1.

3-10 Cast members of the Pageant of Illinois, Chicago Daily News, 7 October 1909, page 4. Photographs by the Daily News and Burke & Atwell, Chicago.

3-11 Cast members of the Pageant of Illinois, Chicago Daily News, 8 October 1909, page 2. Photographs by the Daily News.

3-12 Unmarked photograph, probably the Pageant of Illinois, colonial camp, likely Virginia. Northwestern University Settlement Association Records, Photographs, Northwestern University Archives, box 5, folder 1.

3-13 Pageant of Illinois spoof, Northwestern Hysterical Pageant, illustrated by H. Parker Lowell, Syllabus yearbook, 1911, page 237. Northwestern University Archives.

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3-14 Pageant of Illinois spoof, Northwestern Hysterical Pageant, illustrated by H. Parker Lowell, Syllabus yearbook, 1911, page 238. Northwestern University Archives.

3-15 Pageant of Illinois spoof, Northwestern Hysterical Pageant, illustrated by H. Parker Lowell, Syllabus yearbook, 1911, page 239. Northwestern University Archives.

3-16 Pageant of Illinois spoof, Northwestern Hysterical Pageant, illustrated by H. Parker Lowell, Syllabus yearbook, 1911, page 240. Northwestern University Archives.

4-1 Glenna Tinnin (left) and Hazel MacKaye (right) on the steps of the Treasury Building, Washington, D.C., 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, LC-DIG-hec-01958.

4-2 Inez Milholland, Lead herald, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG- ggbain-11374.

4-3 Eleanor Lawson as Peace on the steps of the Treasury Building, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913, written and directed by Hazel MacKaye. Reproduced in Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry, page 29.

4-4 Hedwig Reicher as Columbia on the Treasury plaza, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-70382.

4-5 Columbia (Hedwig Reicher) and the pageant crowd, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Edmonston, SB000628. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-6 Cover, Official Program, Woman Suffrage Procession, Washington, D.C., March 3, 1913. Illustrated by Benjamin Moran Dale. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-12512.

4-7 Dreams, MacDowell Memorial Pageant, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 16, 18, and 20 August 1910, directed by George Baker. Reproduced in Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry, page 19.

4-8 Hedwig Reicher as Columbia, profile view, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant- Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Taylor Studio. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-83815.

4-9 Justice (Sarah Truax Albert) and her attendants, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Harris & Ewing, SB000567. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-10 Charity (Violet Kimball or Emma Ostrander) and her attendants, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Harris & Ewing, SB000561. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-11 Florence Fleming Noyes, studio portrait, ca. 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-12520.

4-12 Liberty (Florence Fleming Noyes) and her attendants descending the Treasury steps, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Reproduced in Report of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage for the Year 1914, page 6. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

4-13 Peace attendants carrying olive branches, followed by Plenty attendants with cornucopia, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Harris & Ewing, SB000570. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-14 Hope (Mildred Anderson), her attendants, and the children of Hope descending the Treasury steps, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Harris & Ewing, SB000569. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-15 Panoramic view of the Treasury plaza, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant- Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Reproduced in “The Revived Art of Rhythmic Expression,” pamphlet on Florence Fleming Noyes’ dance studio. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

4-16 Eleanor Curtis as Ethiopia, Star of Ethiopia, performed in 1913, 1915, 1916, and 1925, written by W. E. B. Du Bois. Reproduced in the Crisis, December 1915, page 90.

4-17 Banners along the parade line, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC- DIG-ggbain-11365.

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4-18 Liberty’s attendants, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Harris & Ewing, SB000565. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-19 New Zealand float (Isabel Mellen), First Section, Subsection “Countries Where Women Have Full Suffrage,” Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG- ggbain-11358.

4-20 American Nurses, led by women in caps and gowns, Suffrage Pageant- Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-35138.

4-21 “Suffragists Rehearsing Pageant Tableau; photograph made yesterday afternoon of members of the woman suffrage organization on the south steps of the United States Treasury building preparing for the spectacular entertainment in connection with the suffrage parade tomorrow,” Evening Star, 2 March 1913, page 8.

4-22 Crowds, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. Photograph by Underwood & Underwood. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-58972.

4-23 Crowds at Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street as cavalry troops attempt to clear a path for the marchers, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. SB000371. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-24 Cartoon showing parade marchers meeting the allegorical figure of Hope at the Treasury steps, New York Herald, 4 March 1913, page 3.

4-25 Liberty (Florence Fleming Noyes) and her attendants, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913, postcard. Photograph by L & M Ottenheimer. Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Digital ID mnwp 276006.

4-26 Columbia (Hedwig Reicher) with the cast of The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant- Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. SB000634. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

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4-27 Second performance, The Allegory, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913. SB000633. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-28 Line of marchers on Pennsylvania Avenue, Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913, postcard. Photograph by W. R. Ross, SB000700. Courtesy of the National Woman’s Party Collection, The Sewall- Belmont House and Museum, Washington, D.C.

4-29 Photographs showing contrast in scenes on Pennsylvania Avenue during suffrage and inaugural parades on March 3 and 4, Evening Star, 5 March 1913, page 12.

4-30 “The Spirit of Paul Revere,” illustration for flier on the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Amendment, which would be voted down on 2 November 1915. Drawing by Johnquill. Mary Hutcheson Page Papers, Woman’s Rights Collection, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

5-1 View of A Pageant of Education on grounds of the University of Wisconsin with the state capitol in the background, Madison, Wisconsin, 28 July 1915. William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 2, page 30.

5-2 Wisconsin State Capitol, South-facing exterior, Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph by author.

5-3 View of the Wisconsin State Capitol from Bascom Hill on the University of Wisconsin, ca. 1915. Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-51929.

5-4 Edwin Blashfield, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, 1908, Assembly Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-5 Edwin Blashfield, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, detail of right side, 1908, Assembly Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-6 Edwin Blashfield, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, detail of far right side, 1908, Assembly Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-7 Edwin Blashfield, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, detail of left side, 1908, Assembly Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-8 Edwin Blashfield, Study for the figure of the Future in Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, 1908. Reproduced in Year Book of the Architectural League of New York, 1909, figure 64.

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5-9 Edwin Blashfield, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, detail of mural before badger painted in, 1908, Assembly Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Reproduced in Scribner’s Magazine, January 1913, page 134.

5-10 Edwin Blashfield, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, detail of badger, added after installation in 1908, Assembly Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-11 Crowds at the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, 21 October 1914, Capitol Park, Madison, Wisconsin, written and directed by Ethel Rockwell. Reproduced in Atlantic Educational Journal, January 1915, page 10.

5-12 The Spirit of Washington, Interlude I, Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, 21 October 1914, Capitol Park, Madison, Wisconsin. Reproduced in Atlantic Educational Journal, January 1915, page 9.

5-13 Allegorical figures, Interlude I, Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, 21 October 1914, Capitol Park, Madison, Wisconsin. Reproduced in Atlantic Educational Journal, January 1915, page 10.

5-14 Kenyon Cox, The Marriage of the Atlantic and the Pacific, 1915, Senate Chamber, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-15 Charles Yardley Turner, Transportation by Indians with Horses, 1915 (installed 1916), North Hearing Room, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-16 Charles Yardley Turner, Trappers in Canoe, 1915 (installed 1916), North Hearing Room, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-17 Charles Yardley Turner, By Stage Coach, 1915 (installed 1916), North Hearing Room, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-18 Charles Yardley Turner, Modern Transportation by Steam and Motor, 1915 (installed 1916), North Hearing Room, Wisconsin State Capitol. Photograph by author.

5-19 Yearbook page with photographs of the Wisconsin Pageant, 24 May 1913, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, written and directed by Thomas Wood Stevens. Badger yearbook, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 29, 1915, page 423.

xix

5-20 Episode 1, Phoenicians, A Pageant of Education, 28 July 1915, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, written and directed by the UW Class in Pageantry (Lotta Clark, instructor). William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 2, page 32.

5-21 Episode of the Future, including the World Spirit (right) and Love (child), A Pageant of Education, 28 July 1915, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 2, page 31.

5-22 Episode 2, Scene 4, “The War,” A Pageant of the University, 29 July 1914, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, written and directed by the UW Class in Pageantry (Lotta Clark, instructor). Reproduced in Wisconsin Alumni Magazine, February 1915, page 243.

5-23 Page of album catalogue showing prints of A Pageant of Education. William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 2, page 31.

5-24 Episode 1, Hebrews, A Pageant of Education, 28 July 1915, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 2, page 31.

5-25 John Singer Sargent, Frieze of Prophets, 1895, from Triumph of Religion, Sargent Hall, Boston Public Library. Courtesy of www.johnsingersargent.org.

5-26 Episode 1, Hindus, A Pageant of Education, 28 July 1915, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, volume 2, page 32.

INTRODUCTION

In a 1914 article on American pageantry in the Craftsman, a journal of reform that promoted the integration of art and life, musical composer Arthur Farwell declared to readers: “Art is not something you buy and hang on a wall. It is not something you get; it is something you do.”1 Farwell valued pageantry precisely because of its emphasis on doing and making. Outdoor community drama on a grand scale, pageants gave artistic, living form to a version of public history through the collaborative talents of fine artists, writers, dancers, musicians, and scores of amateur residents. In the early years of the twentieth century, creatives like Farwell invested in civic art as an active site of reform, as aesthetic experiences that activated broader cultural and political agendas for change. During the Progressive Era, civic pageantry and the related art of mural painting shaped ideas and behaviors concerning local and national identity, the responsibilities and boundaries of citizenship, new educational practices, and the place of the arts in a democratic society. Recollecting his encounter as viewer of a recent performance in rural Vermont, Farwell celebrated pageantry as a dreamlike space at once emotive, communal, and constructive wherein “everyday people of the town” participated in the aesthetic telling of “their own story.” With a U.S. pageantry craze then in full swing, he fashioned for his Craftsman readers a grassroots vision of a civic-minded, democratic art: “The people are waking up to the fact that there is something which they want, and which they have not been able to get, and so, from their own need, they are making it.”2 At the turn of the twentieth century, communal artistic expression emerged as a civic project of monumental proportions. Despite Farwell’s harmonious and spirited tone, communal expression in these years was far from a self-evident, universally shared, or democratically accessible exercise, but rather a contested zone where various constituencies of makers and viewers vied to control the artistic forms that materialized collective narratives, values,

1 Arthur Farwell, “Community Music-Drama: Will Our Country People in Time Help Us to Develop the Real American Theater?” Craftsman 26 (July 1914): 421; emphasis original. 2 Ibid., 419 and 424.

and cultural practices. The rise of a civic art movement in Progressive America is a story about the role that monumental art played in both stabilizing and reshaping the meanings of communal forms during a dynamic period of aesthetic, cultural, and political transformation. Taking hold in the 1890s and flourishing in the years before the country’s entrance into World War I in 1917, this movement for civic art unfolded within a nexus of modern forces—from rising immigration, imperialist aims, urbanization, and incorporation, to interlocking campaigns for equal rights (across gender, racial, ethnic, and class lines), for protection of the public welfare, and for participatory democracy. The period also marks the arrival of European modernism in America, and with it a new investment in stylistic individualism, fragmented visions of the contemporary world, and a rebellious stance toward traditional forms and institutions. While many scholars of American art history have focused on the turn of the twentieth century as the moment when artists cultivated an individualist mode of modernist expression, this study explores instead how period artists negotiated modernity through collective expression—through the large-scale, civic art forms of mural painting and pageantry. Painted or performed, the two arts functioned as stylized storytelling on a grand scale, the mural movement taking root in the 1890s and that of pageantry in the first years of the twentieth century. A kinship developed among the two fields with respect to aesthetics, leadership, and pedagogy, as practitioners came to see themselves as agents of Progressive change. Muralists adorned public institutions including state capitols, courthouses, libraries, and schools across the country, from Washington, D.C., New York City, and Pittsburgh, to Chicago, Austin, Pierre, and San Francisco. Pageantry was likewise a national phenomenon. Pageant-masters (as pageant directors called themselves) orchestrated hundreds—and oftentimes thousands—of cast members and contributors in performances that narrated a local origin story or the ideals of a socio-political cause through a series of scripted episodes, combined with dancing interludes, tableaux, and finale processions. A performance was given between one and four times over consecutive days, typically staged in an expansive outdoor setting like a local park, school, or civic center. The

makers of murals and pageants employed similar subjects and forms, scaling up allegorical figures personifying abstract concepts such as Justice, Civilization, and the Arts, alongside historical heroes like local settlers, Paul Revere, and Civil War soldiers. Despite the formal differences between static, two-dimensional painting and time-based, embodied performance, mural painting and pageantry adhered to common aesthetic rules, particularly those of compositional harmony, decorative flatness, and simplified forms. Part of a comprehensive scheme of artistic unity, murals needed to resonate with surrounding architecture, sculpture, and decorative ornamentation, just as pageants were expected to bring together the arts of dancing, music, and costuming. A mural should “lie quietly and flatly in its place,” in the words of Edwin Blashfield, a leading muralist of the day. Accordingly, an artist worked to distill a wealth of natural details to essential components so that the painted decoration would “tell as a whole.”3 Similarly, the authors of a period handbook on pageantry considered elements such as line, spacing, massing, and proportion when discussing theatrical techniques of grouping: “The object in grouping is to enable the spectators to view the whole scene as a single composition—to comprehend it in its entirety.” 4 Some leaders looked directly to mural painting as a visual resource for pageantry: “Inspiration could be gained from a study [of] mural decorations,” advised another guide.5 Occasionally, pageant participants recreated a specific mural composition, translating paint to playacting and repositioning a civic narrative from wall to stage. To materialize communal expression, artists in both fields employed a classical vocabulary, fashioned progress narratives rooted in the period’s evolutionist model of culture, and collaborated with fellow creatives across media and disciplines. As such, leaders of mural painting and pageantry contributed to the prevailing spirit of the “American Renaissance,” a period term used to describe a moment of widespread

3 Edwin Howland Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” Municipal Affairs 2 (March 1898): 99. 4 Mary Porter Beegle and Jack Randall Crawford, Community Drama and Pageantry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 136. 5 Esther Willard Bates, with introduction by William Orr, Pageants and Pageantry (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1912), 24-25.

artistic renewal in the U.S. between the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and World War I. Artists saw the present in the past, finding in the art of ancient Rome and Greece and of Renaissance Europe a means to contextualize (and validate) the grandiose visions of an American culture coming of age at century’s end. Like their predecessors, they valued aesthetic unity, professional training, and collaboration. Embracing the American Renaissance’s academic vocabulary, painters and dramatists joined architects, sculptors, landscape designers, and city planners in crafting a civic art that proffered aesthetic harmony as symbol of and salve for broader social and cultural cohesion.6 I neither dismiss the aspirations of this harmonizing aesthetic nor take such a consensual gloss at face value, but instead focus on the era’s desire for collective expression as a point of departure, examining how a mural or pageant launched a particular version of shared history and ideals as well as the ways in which various communities took up, revised, or challenged such messages within an expanding arena of civic art-making. While adhering to a vocabulary of the past, mural and pageant leaders worked to modernize their art forms, to shape large-scale painting and playacting into citizen- building experiences for early-twentieth-century American audiences. Both murals and pageants were old art forms. From antiquity through the sixteenth century, American Renaissance enthusiasts traced a profusion of architectural adornments in government buildings, palaces, churches, and the like, as well as that of ritualistic celebrations in the form of processions and festivals. More recently, the mural movement in France, which took hold in the 1870s and 1880s when many Americans were training at artistic schools in Paris, provided an important model for painters eager to undertake civic assignments at home. Progressive-Era pageants grew, in part, out of the nineteenth-century fad for tableaux vivants—“living pictures” performed in domestic or semi-public settings wherein amateur participants (typically female) reenacted compositions of famous paintings or sculptures through stilled and silent

6 Another term, “City Beautiful,” describes the turn-of-the-century campaign to adorn urban spaces with architecture, sculpture, and painting, yet also encompasses the efforts to make cities more efficient and functional through city planning, landscape and park design, and infrastructural improvements. See William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

poses, accompanied by rather elaborate stage sets and special effects.7 More directly, American pageants developed alongside the contemporary pageantry movement in England, where the art’s modern form took shape. U.S. artists capitalized on the genealogies of murals and pageants, using and revising traditional aesthetic forms in an effort to make those older arts tell new histories. The rise of a civic art movement coincided with the rise of Progressivism in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. In the wake of the bitter depression years of the mid-1890s, a spirit of change and renewal gained momentum among various communities who shared a belief that better lives for Americans were possible when an engaged citizenry confronted problems, harnessed expert knowledge, and worked toward specific solutions. Broadly defined, a Progressive supported “a politics of social justice and civic engagement over a politics of patronage and power” and advocated reform, not radicalism.8 Government, Progressives believed, needed to protect the welfare of its residents. In a system that upheld individual rights, they searched for ways to ensure the public good, discerning a collectivity of interests within their communities. In an effort to protect these community interests, reformers advocated a larger role for both federal and local government, recognizing that the lines between public and private would be redrawn in the process. From the 1890s to the 1910s, support for government regulation increased, bringing capitalism under a degree of federal supervision. Regulatory agencies, armed with professional experts in fields such as social science, economics, health, and education, enacted public policies to curb business monopolies, to secure interstate commerce along railways, to ensure pure food and drugs, to create a central system of banking, to protect natural resources, among other reforms. Alongside new governmental authority over business practices and social welfare, individual citizens gained new points of entry into the mechanisms of politics during the Progressive Era. For example, they participated in the legislative process through direct primaries, the direct election of senators (the

7 See Robert M. Lewis, “Tableaux Vivants: Parlor Theatricals in Victorian America,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 36 (April 1988): 280-291; and Robin Veder, “Tableaux Vivants: Performing Art, Purchasing Status,” Theatre Annual 48 (Fall 1995): 14-29. 8 Alan Dawley quoted in Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s-1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28.

Seventeenth Amendment), the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. Additionally, residents formed local civic and issue-oriented organizations to lobby for new laws and regulations protecting common interests like public ownership of utilities, transparency in municipal governance, parks and infrastructure, and voting rights. Importantly, although participatory democracy expanded during these years, its effects did not reach all communities evenly or fully. The category of citizenship itself faced growing scrutiny at this moment. While an enlarged group of U.S. residents had become eligible for citizenship by the turn of the twentieth century, an increasingly restrictive system of pre-qualifications, including legal citizenship, poll taxes, literacy, and voting registration requirements presented new obstacles, especially for African Americans, Chinese Americans, poor European immigrants, and women.9 In the name of community, Progressives intrinsically acted for some, not all. The variety of civic reforms enacted during the Progressive Era did not further a singular vision or consistent ideology that fits tidily within the term “Progressivism.” Defining Progressivism and its constituents has proven a matter of debate among historians throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.10 What has emerged in the scholarship of the 1990s and of recent date is an understanding of the fluid, plastic nature of Progressive ideals. Scholars speak of Progressivisms, acknowledging the many, often competing agendas of reform and engagement undertaken by sometimes-overlapping, sometimes-diverse communities. 11 Progressives could be middle-class, native-born male professionals; African American women leading church organizations in the South; working-class labor leaders and

9 For a concise political history of the Progressive Era, see Lewis L. Gould, America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1914 (Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2001). On the establishment of citizenship prerequisites, see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998), 182-185; and Julie A. Reuben, “Beyond Politics: Community Civics and the Redefinition of Citizenship in the Progressive Era,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Winter 1997): 406-410. 10 For a historiography of Progressivism, see Robert J. Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (January 2002): 68-92. 11 Important revisionist scholarship includes James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

ward politicians; female settlement-house reformers; businessmen with conservative leanings; activist women fighting for the vote; muckraking journalists; and more.12 Support for Progressive ideals and agendas crossed party lines among Republicans, Democrats, Progressives (after the party’s founding in 1912), and occasionally Socialists. On the whole, radicals, anarchists, hard-line socialists, and strict conservatives stood outside Progressive circles; those who wished to overturn capitalism or, conversely, uphold laissez-faire governance were at odds with the Progressive investment in incremental change through reform. A malleable concept of Progressivism acknowledges the era’s complexities and embraces a certain level of dissonance as necessary. What period reformers held in common was a flexible vocabulary of Progressivism—ways of speaking, thinking, and acting collectively that forwarded a vision of the public good while also obscuring individual or interest- group biases.13 This study focuses on the circle of civic-minded creatives who worked collectively to visualize reform on a grand scale at the turn of the twentieth century. Artistic Progressives included painters, dramatists, critics, educators, and others— those who crafted murals and pageants as well as those who reproduced, broadcasted, interpreted, and implemented the arts’ reform aesthetic. Clusters of members within this circle formed friendships, professional partnerships, institutional ties, or lasting collaborations, while other creative wings never met. Muralists like Edwin Blashfield, Kenyon Cox, and Charles Yardley Turner undertook decorative commissions at numerous common venues over the course of their careers and also participated in the field’s professional organization, the National Society of Mural Painters, each serving a term as its president during the early twentieth century. Pageantry collaborators heralded from a variety of artistic fields. Annual summer programming at the University of Wisconsin, for instance, brought together Thomas Wood Stevens, Peter

12 For example, see the compilation of essays in Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002). 13 This flexible vocabulary enabled Progressives to shape an “imagined community,” as described by Benedict Anderson in his study of nationalism. Created within a discrete set of historical forces, the concept of nationalism quickly became “modular”—adaptable to a variety of locations, ideological beliefs, and political contexts. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (1983; London: Verso, 2006), 4.

Dykema, Blanche Trilling, Lotta Clark, and Ethel Rockwell, combining expertise not only in pageantry, but also in mural painting, writing, music, dance, education, and theatre. Some players moved in both mural and pageant circles: Stevens taught mural painting in the same years that he wrote and directed pageants; dramatist Percy MacKaye planned a pageant in Pittsburgh with painter John White Alexander; and muralist Violet Oakley was an active member of the American Pageant Association. Other creatives enriched civic art projects with their specialized talents. Photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston, for example, framed newly completed murals at the Library of Congress in her documentary survey of D.C. public schools and Daniel Burnham, architect and city planner, helped organize a pageant in his hometown near Chicago. This large circle of artistic reformers was made up of two generations, with many of the muralists, born in the late 1840s through the 1860s, forming the older generation and most of the pageant leaders, born in the 1870s and 1880s, part of a younger generation. Collaboration nevertheless bridged the generational divide. This study investigates how civic artists became civic reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, and the ways they made reform into something visible, dramatic, and vital. It asks: What did Progressivism look like? What civic lessons did murals and pageants activate, and for which publics? How did civic art’s classical vocabulary and consensual narratives resonate with its viewing communities, and how did those communities respond? I argue that civic art represented an active and contested site where makers and viewers negotiated modernity through monumental forms of communal expression. Artistic Progressives positioned their art forms at the center of the era’s broader campaign to expand participatory democracy, improve social conditions, and impose a sense of order. Through paint and playacting, they entered into cultural and political debates on Americanization, immigration, suffrage, and the new pedagogy of learning by doing. As the nation grew increasingly diverse, murals and pageants materialized collective public histories and values on a grand scale. While civic art amplified narratives of a unifying Americanism, it likewise opened up cultural discussions on the myths and assumptions—racial, social, and gendered—that structured such pictorial storytelling. Communal expression

represented an aesthetic working through of the meanings, boundaries, and responsibilities of civic identity in Progressive America. Mural painting and pageantry served as collaborative meeting points for art-minded citizens as well as contested zones of cultural agency. My theoretical approach to the civic art of the period builds on the revisionist scholarship of historian James Connolly, who has argued that Progressivism represented a political style, a tool for framing a particular version of the public good through the lens of consensus. 14 I expand this idea of Progressivism as style by considering how Progressivism functioned as an artistic strategy—as a conceptual framework through which muralists, pageant leaders, and their adherents claimed authority as stewards of a so-called democratic art; tied art-making to citizen-making; and expanded the role of civic art in everyday life. Like political Progressives, artistic Progressives used a harmonizing vocabulary to shape and stabilize a particular vision of civic uplift, scaling up in aesthetic terms the era’s “consensus model,” as I name it here. Forwarding a range of reforms, Progressives of all sorts fashioned themselves as representative leaders of a communal response to modern life’s corrupt forces. Business leaders, for example, nominated themselves as the efficiency experts who could clean up graft and corruption; middle-class clubwomen claimed to speak for an entire female community in their efforts to secure such measures as food safety and public playgrounds, even as they left immigrant and working-class women largely outside of their ranks; and dramatists, as Arthur Farwell declared, culled a community’s “own story” out of a shared desire for “self-expression,” while oftentimes denying minority groups a participatory role in a given pageant’s overwhelmingly Anglo, celebratory story. 15 Throughout this study, I use the term “Progressive” to describe the artistic, political, and cultural players who adopted collective modes of thought, action, and expression in the name of reform and the public welfare during the 1890s through the 1910s. My usage of the term, therefore, is

14 See Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism, especially 8-9 and 39-76. 15 Farwell, “Community Music-Drama,” 419 and 420.

broader than party affiliation or platform, and is not tied specifically or narrowly to the founding of the Progressive Party in 1912. Many in this circle of artistic Progressives pursued common professional paths. Broadly speaking, they came from comfortable means and predominantly lived and worked in the East or Midwest, sometimes shuttling between the two regions. Muralists Blashfield, Cox, Alexander, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, and Henry Oliver Walker congregated in New York and its environs, while undertaking assignments in such places as Boston, Newark, D.C., Cleveland, Madison, Des Moines, and St. Paul. Turner taught in Baltimore, painting both there and in New York. Pageant activity bubbled first in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, particularly in Boston, neighboring towns in New Hampshire and Vermont, and in Philadelphia. Many joined the field with teaching credentials: Stevens, for instance, designed his first pageants while an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago; Dykema taught at the Ethical Culture School in New York and then at the University of Wisconsin; Clark was a high school teacher near Boston and taught university courses during the summer; and Florence Fleming Noyes headed her own dance school. Pageantry soon migrated west, with leaders Clark, Dykema, Rockwell, Hazel MacKaye, and her brother Percy MacKaye helping to cultivate a pageant hub in the Midwest, centered in Wisconsin and nearby Chicago. Born in northern Illinois, Stevens established his career in the Midwest before making a move east to Pittsburgh. For this group of civic artists, transatlantic training proved important. Most painters had studied in European academies for several years and dramatists like Stevens and Clark had witnessed English pageantry firsthand before the stateside movement took hold. Further, both muralists and pageant-masters saw their field through a nationalist lens, working to define distinctly “American” modes of mural painting and pageantry, which were not beholden to European subjects or styles and communicated widely. Although civic artists were not a unified or monolithic group—pursuing varying reforms, styles, and publics—the broad contours of their intellectual vision and artistic goals reveal considerable common ground. The makers of murals and

pageants believed that in order to engender, shape, and project a sense of community, one must visualize it, make it tangible. They constructed their own reformer identities, seeing civic art-making as a mode of public action. Investing in the building of an artistic civic culture, creative Progressives wished to use their talents to make a difference. They envisioned themselves as stewards of monumental, shared experiences that localized and defined civic identity through aesthetic forms. Shaping their leadership roles, painters and dramatists worked to professionalize their fields. Founding the National Society of Mural Painters in 1895, muralists aimed to ratchet up their status as public artists, to establish best practices concerning commission procedures and decorative techniques, and to promote their field through exhibitions and educational outreach. Similarly, pageant artists organized the American Pageant Association in 1913 to standardize forms, build networks, accredit members, and educate the swelling ranks of amateur enthusiasts about pageantry’s “proper” techniques and procedures. While civic artists forwarded this professionalizing agenda, they also worked to broaden the reach of civic art into everyday and amateur contexts. Murals and pageants vivified local histories through paint and playacting; attracted crowds of tourists, casts, and spectators; entered school curricula; circulated as art reproductions, including photographs, prints, and souvenirs; and reached a larger (oftentimes national) public through newspaper and journal accounts. Leaders regarded the creation of communal expression as a democratizing exercise and spoke of murals and pageants as democratic arts. Emphasizing access, legibility, and participation, they made claims for the forms’ inclusive aesthetic. In this effort, civic artists were not alone. Players in the emerging arts of film and advertising likewise used democratic rhetoric to assert artistic authority and to frame their particular artistic practice in decidedly American terms. 16 Through this democratic tone, painters and dramatists masked crucial assumptions about the makeup of their publics, the universality of their

16 On film as a “democratic art,” see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 63-79. On advertising, see Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 212- 221; and Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 96-131.

chosen narratives, and the power of communal expression to harmonize (or drown out) dissenting voices. Civic artists at the turn of the twentieth century shaped complicated, conflicting visions of democratic art—visions that oscillated between culturally progressive and conservative, popular and genteel, accessible and out of reach. Further, artistic Progressives, broadly speaking, negotiated the conditions of modernity by negotiating their own relations to the past. They searched for aesthetic responses to the new circumstances of industrialism, urbanism, immigration, imperialism, and incorporation as well as to the unstable categories of citizenship, gender, and national identity. Artists mined classical vocabularies, older art forms, and evolutionist narratives of progress, seeing the past as a rich resource for the present.17 They shaped long histories to give foundation and momentum to their civic projects, fashioning, for example, the past as American contribution to Western civilization, the past as freedom fighters, the past as frontier triumph, or the past as struggle for justice. While calling on the past, artists also aimed to reform it—to literally form it again in paint and performance and also to make it do cultural work for the Progressive-Era present. As such, civic-minded creatives embraced their roles as public history-tellers, crafting selective pasts that blended myth with history. They also experimented with classical forms, revising and updating their artistic vocabulary for turn-of-the-century contexts. Finally, the group’s intellectual vision and artistic goals included a pedagogical mission. Group members equated civic art with civic education. They drew clear lines between their role as teachers and the public’s role as students. Artistic

17 In this sense, artistic Progressives were part of the circle of antimodernists described by Jackson Lears. They took an ambivalent stance toward modern life, fusing accommodation to and retreat from new social and cultural conditions. Yet the story I tell here differs from Lears’ story in that artistic Progressives actively looked for ways to make their vocabulary of the past harmonize with and promote reform agendas for the present. Lears’ protagonists sought private refuge in “authentic” experiences, which produced “ironic, unintended consequences” in the public realm. Civic artists, in contrast, negotiated modernity not privately, but in the public realm, working within modes of collective expression. See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xv-xx. Additionally, artists were “inventing traditions” through their engagement with forms of the past. See Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-14.

Progressives considered the act of viewing a mural or participating in a pageant as a point of contact between themselves and the broad, diverse population they wished to edify, often focusing on audiences of immigrants, rural and urban workers, and schoolchildren. Modeling contemporary lessons on national identity, progress, and democratic values through classical forms, creatives saw their art as both enduring and timely. Aiming to create a cohesive body of American citizens, they fashioned a visual curriculum that combined elements of the New Education (the emerging Progressive methods of learning by doing) and the Americanization movement with varying kinds of citizenship training, from behavioral modes of good citizenship to campaigns for suffrage. The visual strategies of civic artists were akin to other reform-minded strategies adopted by political and social Progressives. To enact change, Progressives of all sorts invested in ways of knowing through seeing; they sought to show, expose, make legible, model, materialize, and publicize. The early twentieth century was an era of statistics, surveys, muckraking, documentary photography, and hands-on learning. From Theodore Roosevelt’s regulation of industries and Lincoln Steffens’ journalistic investigations of municipal corruption, to Jane Addams’ participatory programming at Hull-House, John Dewey’s active-based pedagogy, and Edward Ward’s social centers movement, Progressives approached reform in visual, tangible terms. While artistic, social, and political players alike worked within a consensual language of Progressivism—speaking, making, and acting in the name of community—they did so for different aims, materializing a range of agendas, styles, and visions of civic improvement. Among artists, for instance, Hazel MacKaye and W. E. B. Du Bois overtly politicized the pageant form, putting civic art to work for the rights of female and African American citizens, while Ethel Rockwell shaped pageantry into a vehicle for melting-pot Americanism and patriotism. Artist and critic Charles Shean and muralist Edwin Blashfield held sharp disagreements about decoration’s appropriate forms and subjects for a democratic society, leading debates in the press on the place of allegory and historical realism in American mural painting.

Political and social Progressives with ties to civic art activities promoted varying reforms, including James Frederick Hopkins, an educator who advocated the use of art reproductions for classroom study; Carlos Montezuma, a Native American who agitated for modern Indian rights; Reuben Thwaites, a librarian and historian who worked to open institutional archives to the general public; and Alice Paul, leader of the woman suffrage movement’s militant wing. In this study, I approach murals and pageants as layered Progressive-Era experiences, as sites where both makers and viewers negotiated collective meanings of history, identity, cultural progress, and model citizenship.18 Engaging in close readings of individual mural compositions, I also attend to mural spaces, and to the cultural activities that transpired within sight of a particular institution’s adorned walls. Similarly, I understand pageantry as a constellation of events that included an official performance orchestrated by the pageant-master as well as a set of alternative visions framed onstage, offstage, and in the press. The visual culture of murals and pageants, in turn, represents an important interpretive resource for recovering the cultural work of civic art for various Progressive communities. I use an expanded mural archive of photographs, art reproductions, art criticism, guidebooks, and school curricula. In addition to a pageant’s published script and any extant photographs documenting specific episodes, my archive includes press accounts of rehearsals and performances, publicity photographs of the cast, spoofs or imitations of the official pageant, and illustrated handbooks and essays on the art form. This research contributes to scholarship on American mural painting by situating muralists within the developing ideas of Progressivism. I see large-scale decorators as constituent players in emergent, conflicting agendas of reform that fused a new investment in democratic inclusion with the class and racial biases of an Anglo, evolutionist view of culture. Mural scholarship by David Cartwright and Sally

18 I am indebted to art historians Michele Bogart and Kirk Savage, whose scholarship on nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American public sculpture demonstrates the importance of reading a civic artwork as the negotiated product of many forces—artistic, institutional, professional, political, as well as those of production, reception, and use. See Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (1989; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); and Kirk Savage Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Promey in particular has informed my own work; both Cartwright and Promey have demonstrated the importance of reading wall paintings in relation to their institutional contexts, turn-of-the century viewing publics, and changing interpretive communities. I have also relied on the prodigious and thorough archival research of the late Richard Murray, whose papers, including his unpublished catalogue of American Renaissance murals, offer an unparalleled resource for scholars of U.S. civic art.19 Within pageantry studies, I hope to open a discussion on the form’s aesthetic elements and what they can tell us about how artists made Progressive reform into something visible—something to be witnessed, performed, composed, and refashioned. Pageantry scholarship has typically resided within the disciplines of U.S. history, drama, women’s studies, and race and ethnicity studies, and falls largely into two camps—those that offer a taxonomic component and those that examine pageants as struggles for agency. Scholars in the first group have catalogued types of pageants across the field, among subgroups of artists, or within the career of an individual. These are archivally rich studies that have helped recover the breadth of the movement, including the work of William Rambin, Jr., Martin Tackel, Naima Prevots, and Dorothy Olsson.20 Other historians have interpreted pageants as sites where dominant and marginalized groups vied for cultural agency, such as David Glassberg, Karen Blair, S. E. Wilmer, and Michael McNally. 21 My scholarship contributes

19 See Derrick Randall Cartwright, “Reading Rooms: Interpreting the American Public Library Mural, 1890-1930” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994); and Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). The papers of Richard Murray, former curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, are at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 20 See William Robert Rambin, Jr., “Thomas Wood Stevens: American Pageant Master” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1977); Martin Sidney Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry, 1908- 1918” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1982); Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990); and Dorothy Jean Olsson, “Arcadian Idylls: Dances of Early Twentieth-Century American Pageantry” (PhD diss., New York University, 1992). 21 See David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Karen J. Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913-1923,” Theatre Survey 31 (May 1990): 23-46; S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98-126; and Michael D. McNally, “The Indian Passion Play: Contesting the Real Indian in Song of Hiawatha Pageants, 1901-1965,” American Quarterly 58 (March 2006): 105- 136.

especially to this second camp, locating such struggles for agency in pageantry’s pictorial traces. Further, this study builds on recent scholarship in American art history that argues for a range of modernisms. Turn-of-the-century murals and pageants do not reside comfortably either in the story of the American Renaissance as the last gasp of Gilded-Age gentility or in the story of early modernism as a decisive turn away from the academy toward stylistic individualism, subjectivity, and contingent ways of knowing the contemporary world. 22 Rather, the two art forms materialized accommodation alongside experimentation. Enriching our understanding of modernisms, scholars including Elizabeth Hutchinson, Michele Bogart, Rebecca Zurier, and JoAnne Mancini have expanded the sites of American art history to include Indian handicraft, commercial art, and art criticism and publishing; I add the dramatic art of pageantry to this broader vision.23 Art historians before me have considered pageantry in article-length studies spanning the 1970s to the 1990s; the work of Linda Nochlin, Trudy Baltz, and Sarah Moore has inspired my own.24 I owe a special debt to Baltz, who in 1980 first made a connection between turn-of-the- century American murals and pageants. While Baltz focused on the period taste for allegory, my study contextualizes murals and pageants within Progressivism, expands the aesthetic analysis to historical realism, and establishes organizational and educational ties between the two forms.

22 For an example of such a narrative, see David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). Civic art (represented by architecture, sculpture, and mural painting) appears in a chapter on the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. In the next chapter, “Modernist Art and Politics,” academicism begets modernism, which is framed as realist, individualist, radical, and inspired by the European avant-garde. The period’s civic artists, in turn, are largely expunged as participants in early modernism. 23 See Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art; Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and J. M. Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 24 See Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America 62 (May-June 1974): 64- 68; Trudy Baltz, “Pageantry and Mural Painting: Community Ritual in Allegorical Form,” Winterthur Portfolio 15 (Autumn 1980): 211-228; and Sarah J. Moore, “Making a Spectacle of Suffrage: The National Woman Suffrage Pageant, 1913,” Journal of American Culture 20 (Spring 1997): 89-103.

In the chapters that follow, I do not offer a comprehensive history of the civic art movement, but rather five case studies that demonstrate how civic art functioned as a contested creative zone wherein various communities sought a role in shaping large- scale collective expression. I focus on sites in the East and Midwest, hubs of activity for both mural painting and pageantry at the turn of the twentieth century. Players in this circle of artistic Progressives weave in and out of the chapters as key protagonists, collaborators, critical voices, or professional colleagues. The first two chapters consider murals, the next two consider pageants, and the final chapter examines the art forms together at a common venue. Chapter one examines the beginnings of the American mural movement at the Library of Congress and the ways its decorative program (1895-1897) launched a Progressive identity for muralists as aesthetic reformers. I consider how the library served as a site of civic instruction for its earliest visitors and the ways that its adorned spaces were used, promoted, debated, and pictured by several communities. In chapter two, I focus on the Massachusetts State House, examining how its mural program (1900-1904) functioned as a pictorial arm of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanization movement. With this capitol commission, artists reformed the look of American mural painting, embracing a vocabulary of historical realism to model lessons on national identity formation for the ethnic and immigrant communities of turn-of-the-century Boston. Turning to pageantry in chapter three, I examine the Pageant of Illinois (1909), staged near Chicago on the campus of Northwestern University, to show how pageant leaders, like muralists, used monumental visualizations of local history to secure their position as Progressive reformers. Looking at pageant activities both onstage and offstage, I contextualize the performance’s consensual, official narrative of white (male) triumph and Indian defeat on the frontier within a thicker, noisier field that accounts for the ways that various pageant players negotiated what a shared history should look like. Chapter four considers the 1913 Suffrage Pageant-Procession in Washington, D.C., and the ways that women activists realigned pageantry’s pedagogy from that of civic uplift to a specific, political curriculum. Dramatizing a female- centered vision of citizenship, suffragists fashioned pageantry into a striking, effective

mode of gender politics. The final chapter examines mural painting and pageantry in Madison in and around the newly-built Wisconsin State Capitol and considers how civic art’s educational campaign was institutionalized there in the years before America’s entrance into World War I (1908-1917). Between the capitol and the nearby University of Wisconsin, civic-minded creatives trained an expansive university community on the techniques and lessons of aesthetic reform, producing a remarkably rich environment of collaborative art-making during the height of the Progressive Era. Looking closely at mural painting and pageantry, my aim is to activate these civic art forms for twenty-first-century eyes, to restore the push and pull of meanings, agendas, and authority that pulsed through communal expression at the turn of the twentieth century, a moment when artists and viewers worked interdependently to visualize reform on a monumental scale.

CHAPTER ONE

Picturing Civic Lessons at the Library of Congress (1895-1897)

Even before it officially opened in November 1897, the new Library of Congress building had become the showpiece of a growing civic art movement in America. A corps of artists transformed the nation’s book palace into an art palace, adorning the entire structure with murals, mosaics, sculptures, and architectural ornamentation. With little decoration yet underway in December 1895, critic Royal Cortissoz named the building “our national monument of art” in the pages of Harper’s Weekly. He proclaimed optimistically: “[As this] example is recognized it will act as a leaven, helping communities to realize the value of artistic work in their public buildings, encouraging painters, sculptors, architects, and bringing those men into closer and closer relations with the civic and national progress.”1 Painters responded on a grand scale to this call for a public art in service to the nation, the new library catalyzing an American mural movement at the turn of the twentieth century. With the Library of Congress commission, muralists began to think big about painting big. The library offered enormous opportunity for the country’s aspiring muralists. The federal government commissioned over twenty painters to create more than one hundred murals for the structure’s vast interior surfaces. The sheer density of decoration focused attention on mural painting as never before (figure 1-1). A team of painterly hands, a lasting structure of national importance, and widespread publicity were the vital ingredients for an emergent mural movement. Artists lifted monumental painting to new prominence in the U.S. at century’s end. Trained as easel painters in European academies, many of these artists first tried their hand at large-scale public decoration a few years earlier at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, adorning the fair’s temporary exhibition halls. As a national and permanent structure, the Library of Congress raised the stakes, enabling fledgling muralists to gain critical

1 Royal Cortissoz, “Our National Monument of Art: The Congressional Library at Washington,” Harper’s Weekly (28 December 1895): 1240-1241.

experience, to sharpen their professional identities, and to conceptualize their art- making as a vitalizing component of civic life. This campaign to shape an American field of mural painting unfolded at the national library, an institution whose own meanings developed with the building’s design, construction, decoration, and early use. With the opening of its doors in 1897, the Library of Congress gained a distinctly public mission, the symbol of a new, accessible library—free to all—where learning transpired. Since its establishment in 1800, the Congressional Library had been housed in the nearby Capitol, serving primarily as a resource for legislators. Initially, private collections formed the core of the library. After the British burned Washington in 1814, the government purchased Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of more than six thousand volumes to begin anew a national collection. With the centralization of copyright registration in 1870, the Library of Congress expanded dramatically, as two copies of any registered work had to be deposited in its collections. Overstuffed and nearly inoperable, the library desperately needed an independent space, specialized facilities, and a larger staff to organize the massive influx of materials. Heeding the repeated calls of Ainsworth Spofford, Librarian of Congress (1864-1897), legislators allocated funds for a grandiose, Renaissance-inspired building directly east of the Capitol (figure 1-2). The idea of a national library as the people’s workspace took shape here, triggering debates about how the library should serve its citizen-patrons and how they, in turn, should behave within its spaces. Adorning the national library, muralists stitched their art-making into these larger cultural debates. This chapter considers how the Library of Congress served as a site of civic instruction in the early years of the Progressive Era and the ways that its mural program taught an ideology of cultural progress through pictures. At century’s end, muralists began to think of themselves as aesthetic reformers—artistic leaders with civic responsibilities. A principal spokesman for the field and creator of the library’s most prominent decoration, Edwin Blashfield championed murals as “painted lessons,” monumental pictures that could teach Progressive-Era values to American viewers. According to Blashfield, mural painting’s educational function had a long

historical precedent. From ancient Rome to modern-day Paris, murals “made living upon the walls” a commonwealth’s history. Such decorations gave tangible form to abstract ideas about country, culture, and communal identity in a supposedly accessible, visual vocabulary. A mural’s viewers were “immediately taught,” in Blashfield’s words.2 The educational frame used by Blashfield and fellow artists to shape the emerging practices of American mural painting corresponded to larger ideas of Progressivism then developing. Broadly speaking, Progressives regarded education as the pathway to cultural uplift; an educated, engaged citizenry could improve themselves and the common welfare. Further, Progressives worked to broaden the avenues of participation in civic life, granting citizens more points of access to their government. The adorned national library represented a novel kind of civic experience in the U.S., where visitors could mine shared resources, in print and in paint. Finally, Progressives believed that expertise should guide the terms of this new democratic engagement. Muralists saw themselves as the educated specialists most qualified to visualize a civic curriculum, harmonizing their artistic practice with the purposes of a public institution like the Library of Congress. These ideas of Progressivism structured the national library as a site of learning for its earliest visitors. Muralists, educational reformers, and library professionals led a coordinated effort to create American citizens within the adorned spaces of the Library of Congress. Beginning in the 1890s, artists and educators expanded the cultural dimensions of civic engagement, repositioning the activities of American citizenship from the voting booth to classrooms, public institutions, and everyday experiences. These self-appointed cultural stewards drew clear distinctions between teachers and students—between those who interpreted and imparted knowledge and those who should receive it. As the U.S. rapidly grew more diverse, they aimed to Americanize immigrant newcomers and minority populations—to inculcate middle-class mores and tamp down seeming peculiarities—desiring to erase, not celebrate, cultural differences. Eyeing the nation’s grandest public library as a

2 Edwin Howland Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” Municipal Affairs 2 (March 1898): 100, 102, and 103.

driving agent of change, artists and educators infused melting-pot lessons into the viewing experiences of murals—especially for the nation’s schoolchildren, its citizens in the making. Looking at murals in the Library of Congress served as an important pictorial component of Progressive-Era educational methods, which came to be known as the New Education. Reformers valued experiential knowledge over and above strict book-learning and recitation by rote of facts and figures. They expanded the spaces of pedagogy at the turn of the twentieth century to include not only the schoolroom, but also the library, museum, kitchen, laboratory, studio, workshop, or park—the particular places where students’ active participation in a problem-solving assignment would gain traction. According to John Dewey, who led such pedagogical initiatives at the University of Chicago at the time, a school should not be “a place set apart in which to learn lessons,” but rather a “form of active community life.”3 Crucial to this Progressive approach to education were the behavioral lessons embedded in the activities of learning by doing. Proper comportment during a class fieldtrip to a library or art museum, for instance, accompanied the day’s subject-specific objectives on literature or painting. Muralists enriched the new methods of learning by doing, making “learning by looking” a fundamental component of Progressive instruction.4 Learning to become good citizens began at an early age, as artists alongside educators tethered the ABC’s to a visual mode of instruction that modeled good behavior. In the early years of the twentieth century, U.S. educators formalized the link between citizenship and proper comportment when they developed a new citizenship-education curriculum called community civics or “new civics.” Through this curriculum, educators re-conceptualized citizenship in largely non-political terms. They promoted a revised definition based on behavior, attitude, and lifestyle in lieu of politics or rights, foregrounding themes of cooperation and community. The “new

3 John Dewey, “The School and the Society,” in The School and the Society and The Child and the Curriculum, introduction by Philip W. Jackson (1900 and 1902; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 14. 4 “Learning by looking” is scholar Jeannene Przyblyski’s term. See Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Photographs,” Art Journal 57 (Autumn 1998): 63.

civics” reached younger schoolchildren, not just high-schoolers as the old civics had done. From an early age, then, the curriculum aimed to relate civic instruction to students’ daily lives through the learning-by-doing methods of the New Education. As such, even elementary schoolchildren learned to think of themselves as citizens. Teachers prompted them to develop good civic habits more so than civic knowledge, inculcating attitudes and behaviors in line with a Progressive-Era vision of Americanism. Thus, the concept of citizenship broadened, encompassing all of life’s activities and becoming synonymous with good behavior.5 The mural program at the Library of Congress gave tangible, vivid form to citizenship training, serving as an alternative classroom for a Progressive education rooted in visual learning. Not only did the library’s decorative program support the New Education, but other spaces within its adorned walls hosted artistic object lessons for students. For instance, Librarian Spofford and Bernard Green, Superintendent of Construction, set aside certain second-floor galleries and pavilions for rotating art exhibitions. During the building’s planning stages in October 1894, Spofford told the Washington Post: “In this we will display a graduated system of the art work of the country in photographs, chromos, lithographs, chromo-lithographs, photo-engraving, and the like, making a most instructive display and one that will be of infinite value as a public art education to the people at large and especially to the public schools.”6 The visual culture of the Library of Congress represents an important interpretive resource for understanding how the mural program served as a pictorial curriculum for the New Education. I use an expanded mural archive of photographs, guidebooks, art reproductions, and exhibits from the library’s early visual culture to reactivate the murals as learning experiences, recovering a critical dimension of their cultural work for Progressive-Era audiences. Examining the “painted lessons” of a particular mural composition, I then shift my focus to mural spaces, and to the cultural

5 Julie A. Reuben, “Beyond Politics: Community Civics and the Redefinition of Citizenship in the Progressive Era,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Winter 1997): 399-406 and 411-416. 6 “Into the New Library, Problem of the Moving of 700,000 Books. Librarian Spofford’s Plans,” Washington Post, 6 October 1894; clipping in Bernard Green’s scrapbook, Bernard R. Green Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 3 (hereafter cited as Green Scrapbook, Bernard Green Papers).

activities that transpired within the newly adorned library. Scholars David Cartwright and Sally Promey have demonstrated the importance of reading murals in relation to their institutional contexts, turn-of-the century viewing publics, and changing interpretive communities. 7 Both bring in visual culture to enrich their understandings of library murals; I build on this approach, using such material as a key interpretive archive. The Library of Congress artists were constituent players in emergent, conflicting agendas of reform that fused a new investment in democratic inclusion with the class and racial biases of an Anglo, evolutionist view of culture. Rather than the last gasp of Gilded-Age gentility and academicism, I see turn-of-the-century muralists as civic artists on the cusp of modernism. To be sure, their forms were classical—allegorical females symbolizing Justice and Enlightenment alongside historical figures celebrating Western achievement. Yet muralists used this classical vocabulary to create a Progressive-Era vision, stitching monumental painting into period debates on new educational methods, citizenship training, and Americanization programming. At the national library, artists initiated a movement to make mural painting matter for modern American life. The Library of Congress interior is a bejeweled space. In a rich palette of reds, blues, yellows, and greens, mural paintings adorn expansive surfaces throughout the building, harmonizing with surrounding sculptures, architectural ornamentation, and mosaic patterning. Artist and spokesman Edwin Blashfield, who years later would be called the “dean of mural painters,” created the library’s signature jewel, The Evolution of Civilization.8 His mural crowns the dome of the Main Reading Room, a massive rotunda rising from the center of the structure (figure 1-3). Upon entering this soaring space, the visitor’s first inclination is to look up. We see massive columns of colored marble, arches nestled one atop another, freestanding sculpture punctuating

7 See Derrick Randall Cartwright, “Reading Rooms: Interpreting the American Public Library Mural, 1890-1930” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994); and Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 8 Anne Lee, “Our Dean of Mural Painters Toils On,” New York Times Magazine (9 December 1928): 12-13, 20.

architectural arabesques in every direction, and the geometric splendor of the octagonal chamber’s coffered dome. Blashfield’s Evolution of Civilization serves as the crescendo to this visual experience, its monumental painted forms wrapping the collar of the grandiose dome (figure 1-4). The mural depicts twelve seated figures spaced at equal increments, pivoting from the circular composition’s center. Arranged like the hours on a clock- face, each figure anchors itself at a thirty-degree angle from its neighbor. No matter where we stand in the room, then, one of the figures engages us at its proper orientation. Each of the six male and six female forms represents a country, a religion, or an epoch. Accompanied by symbols of their contributions to human progress, the figures embody worldly accomplishment in steady, harmonious, and equal portions. In a counter-clockwise sweep, Egypt brings civilization Written Records; Judea, Religion; Greece, Philosophy; Rome, Administration; Islam, Physics; the Middle Ages, Modern Languages; Italy, Fine Arts; Germany, the Art of Printing; Spain, Discovery; England, Literature; France, Emancipation; and America, Science (figure 1-5).9 A second painting by Blashfield, Human Understanding, occupies the dome’s lantern, filling the central space of the disc-shaped collar from thirty-five feet above, at the structure’s apex. In the lantern composition, a female form posed against a blue sky personifies intellectual progress, the ideal to which the collar’s twelve figures below aspire. From the floor of the Main Reading Room, the rhythmic poses and colossal forms of Blashfield’s roundtable protagonists capture our attention. Our eyes move, for instance, from a statuesque Egyptian Pharaoh with his hieroglyphic slab, to an exacting Spanish explorer who navigates his maritime course, to a dynamic French Marianne who heralds the virtue of liberty. While 125 feet above us, the figures’ outlines are clear, the names on their masonry-like placards legible. The cool colors

9 In his initial sketch, Blashfield proposed twelve figures for the collar design. He later suggested modifying the design to eight figures, which he felt would be more “architectural,” as each figure would be aligned with one of the rotunda’s eight ribs. Blashfield eventually executed the twelve-figure design. See Edwin Blashfield to Bernard Green, 21 January 1895, Library of Congress Archives, Building and Grounds Series, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 87 (hereafter cited as LC Archives, B&G Series).

of Blashfield’s palette—creams, blues, and greens—lend serenity to the room, an apt visual complement to the quiet, intellectual activity brewing below. Despite the distance between viewer and mural, the painter rendered his human figures in great detail. Upon closer inspection—from the rotunda’s viewing balcony and with the aid of photographs—we can see the intricacies of faces, attributes, and garb (figures 1-6 to 1-9). Each seated figure, whose body spans the height of the collar, sports enormous wings, which silhouette heads, shoulders, and torsos with a creamy patterning. Our reading of this backdrop oscillates between planar, decorative surface and sculptural, angelic mass. A mosaic of blue and green pigment fills the lower half of the disc, enabling the clothed legs of the figures to legibly project forward from a common surface. The mosaic also anchors the stony name placards, such as Judea or England, as well as the entity’s contribution (here, religion or literature), scripted on a scroll running along the mural’s bottom border. From behind the placards, large leaves of green punctuate the spaces between figures, also marking the central zone between the band’s top and bottom. With the same blue from the mosaic, Blashfield outlines the muscular shape and flowing drapery of his figures. Color and form interlace and repeat. If we orient our clock-face to align with Blashfield’s lantern painting centered above the collar, The Evolution of Civilization’s tight compositional order quickly crystallizes (see figure 1-5). The figures occupying the cardinal coordinates—Egypt at twelve o’clock, England at three, Italy at six, and Rome at nine—are all seated frontally, one arm extended. The two figures between each of these points strike more dynamic poses, twisting their bodies to varying degrees in one direction or the other. Further, Blashfield has assembled a roundtable that seemingly puts gender on an equal footing; six males and six females gather, paired off two by two.10 Overall, aesthetic principles of harmony and balance structure the composition.

10 This is in contrast to the all-male team of muralists who worked at the Library of Congress; the cultural contributions of turn-of-the-century artists executing public commissions were decidedly male. Female muralists working at the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago proved one exception; see Wanda M. Corn, with Charlene G. Garfinkle and Annelise K. Madsen, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (University of California Press, forthcoming). Further, Violet Oakley had a successful career as a muralist, completing an extensive commission for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in the early twentieth century.

Why did Edwin Blashfield employ an artistic vocabulary of classicism? In what ways did the mural’s winged allegories, ample drapery, proportional design, and cultured subject suit the needs of America’s new library? How might The Evolution of Civilization have gained traction for its 1890s viewers, including government officials, students, evening readers, and tourists? In other words, as the crowning jewel of the Library of Congress, what was The Evolution of Civilization supposed to teach? Blashfield indeed painted several Progressive-Era lessons, which gain definition once we examine his composition in relation to larger artistic and cultural ideals, strategies, and practices at the turn of the twentieth century. First, as an icon of the American Renaissance, Blashfield’s reading-room mural materialized the era’s ideals of progress and cultural evolution. “American Renaissance,” which refers to the period roughly bounded by the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and the country’s entrance into World War I in 1917, describes a moment of earnest artistic renewal in the U.S. The term, which entered artistic parlance in 1880, signaled an affinity on the part of native artists with the traditions and history of Europe, particularly with the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. 11 Identifying with their counterparts four centuries earlier, artists and other cultural leaders embraced the Renaissance and its classical principles of artistic collaboration, humanism, aesthetic harmony, and professional training. U.S. artists saw the present in the past, finding in the history of European art and civilization a means to contextualize (and validate) the grandiose visions of an American culture coming of age. Paris, Rome, Munich, and other old cities on the Continent paved the way forward. In the late nineteenth century, American artists who trained abroad in European academies gained new respect for artistic tradition as well as technical skill

11 Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne Pilgrim, and Richard N. Murray, The American Renaissance, 1876- 1917 (New York: Pantheon Books, for the Brooklyn Museum, 1979), 63. This exhibition and accompanying catalogue in 1979-1980 revitalized and reframed scholarly interest in the American Renaissance. According to Wilson, the first use of the term appeared in print in the Californian in 1880; see “The American Renaissance,” Californian 1 (June 1880): 571-572. The author of the Californian essay credited William Brownell with the term, who used it the previous month in Scribner’s Monthly; see William C. Brownell, “The Younger Painters of America,” Scribner’s Monthly 20 (May 1880): 1-15.

in the working methods and forms of a classically-inspired art. Students mastered a figurative art first from the study of plaster casts and later from life drawing of the human body. Learning from nature, students then explored the expressive possibilities of the human form, translating their careful renderings of the body into idealized visions with loftier aims—classically-draped allegorical forms embodying didactic concepts such as Truth, Peace, Poetry, or Agriculture. French training proved most desirable to Americans, who flocked to the École des Beaux-Arts and to a handful of independent studios in Paris. Blashfield, for example, studied under the tutelage of Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1860s and 1870s.12 In France, American artists practiced the language of Italian Renaissance art through the Paris-inflected vocabulary of their instructors.13 Importantly, U.S. artists encountered a layering of classicism. They learned Renaissance forms from their nineteenth-century French teachers; Italian Renaissance artists had studied their Greek and Roman predecessors. Although recognizing a lineage of classicism from antiquity to modernity, American artists did make a distinction between Renaissance and antique models. Kenyon Cox, a muralist at the Library of Congress as well as an art critic, positioned fellow American artists as the heirs of the Italian Renaissance—its “legitimate successor[s]”—discerning in such forms a level of suggestiveness and individuality that Greek and Roman artists never achieved. Asserting that the “artists of the Italian Renaissance struck out on a new road for themselves,” Cox made clear that Americans’ classical training in the fine arts should root itself “in the spirit of the Renaissance.”14 Notably, the Renaissance classicism of the Library of Congress, both

12 For more on Blashfield’s artistic training and professional career, see Mina Rieur Weiner, ed., Edwin Howland Blashfield: Master American Muralist (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). 13 H. Barbara Weinberg, “American ‘High’ Renaissance: Bowdoin’s Walker Art Building and Its Murals,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860-1920, ed. Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), 121-124. 14 Kenyon Cox, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” Century Illustrated Magazine 35 (November 1887): 30. See also Cox, “Sculptors of the Early Italian Renaissance,” Century Illustrated Magazine 29 (November 1884): 62-66; and Lois Dinnerstein, “Opulence and Ocular Delight, Splendor and Squalor: The American Renaissance as a Concept,” Arts Magazine 54 (November 1979): 162-163.

architectural and decorative, stood in contrast to the Greco-Roman classicism of official Washington, including such structures as the nearby Capitol.15 Cosmopolitan and self-confident, many American artists, including Blashfield, Cox, and John White Alexander, eventually returned home, helping to cultivate a new attitude towards national art and culture by century’s end. American enthusiasm for the Renaissance greeted foreign-trained artists upon their return stateside. Beginning in the 1870s, interest in the Renaissance grew among historians, art collectors, art critics, and the reading public.16 Further, an increased cosmopolitanism characterized American culture in the late nineteenth century, as immigration, travel, global imports, mass marketing, and the burgeoning press all contributed to a growing, eclectic interest in foreign cultures.17 Alongside Renaissance Europe, Americans focused their attention on Japan, the Middle East, and ancient Greece. The American Renaissance not only encapsulated an international outlook, but nationalist sentiment as well. For U.S. artists and cultural leaders, the Renaissance provided an instructive model for how art could cultivate an environment of stability, beauty, innovation, and cooperation. With an unwavering faith in progress, they believed America to be the rightful inheritor of the past, the crest of civilization. Rooting an American art in the worldly traditions of art—rather than in the virtues of the self-taught, homegrown artist of an earlier generation—turn-of-the-century artists claimed participation in the march of Western civilization. The era’s prevailing

15 Yet neither the Library of Congress nor the Capitol represents a faithful example of Italian Renaissance or Roman classicism styles. While the interior of the library is Renaissance-inspired in design and decoration, the exterior is more of a High Victorian, picturesque structure reflective of its initial conception in the 1870s. The Capitol’s design was modified over the years by the several architects who worked on the building. Benjamin Latrobe, for example, changed William Thornton’s “British distillation of the Italian Renaissance” in favor of a Neoclassical design. And the extension of the Capitol in the 1850s brought a new, Italian Renaissance-inspired dome modeled on St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome; the first dome had been based on the Roman Pantheon. See Wilson, et al., The American Renaissance, 105; and Pamela Scott, Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3-43; above quote from 5. 16 Wilson, et al., The American Renaissance, 39-40; Lillian B. Miller, “Celebrating Botticelli: The Taste for the Italian Renaissance in the United States, 1870-1920,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1-22; and Howard Mumford Jones, “The Renaissance and American Origins,” Ideas in America (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1944), 140-151. 17 For an examination of the ways in which cosmopolitanism permeated domesticity, see Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

understanding of cultural development as an evolutionist story of improvement accommodated this America-at-the-pinnacle view, fueling an intense nationalism circa 1900. With its classical vocabulary, the showpiece mural of the country’s new public library gave monumental form to this nationalism, picturing American success within a sweeping cosmopolitan frame.18 While fashioning his Evolution in a circular composition, Blashfield nonetheless signaled America’s position at the culmination of civilization’s steady march forward. Beginning with Egypt at twelve o’clock, our eye tracks counter-clockwise through the ages until we reach the figure of America at one o’clock, a brooding engineer in the guise of Abraham Lincoln. With each successive figure in this visual journey, the afterimage of the previous contributor accumulates one atop the next, endowing the American engineer with the civilizing accomplishments of the eleven figures that came before him. Our pensive Lincoln, with a miniature electric dynamo at his feet and a scientific text in hand, embodies the collective knowledge, refinement, and skill of Western civilization (see figure 1-6). With his head in profile facing Egypt, America looks to the past, taking in its representative lessons and directing us, as library readers and visitors below, to do the same. Secondly, Blashfield’s mural pictured an American history lesson on cultural development for its 1890s viewers. Teaching “Civilization” gained new attention in the late nineteenth century through the work of Charles Eliot Norton, the Harvard professor who introduced art history into the American university curriculum with his first classes in 1874. Understanding artworks as records of civilization, Norton offered a decidedly historical approach to art, stressing the lessons of history, above those of individual genius, to be found in such material traces of ages long past. Norton helped foster the rise of the humanities as a discipline, recognizing the

18 In an interview in 1927, Edwin Blashfield recollected on his experience at the Library of Congress. While at work on his mural in the Main Reading Room, Blashfield recalled, he received a visit from critic William Coffin, who commented that the decoration looked like one from the European Renaissance. See interview with Edwin Howland Blashfield, DeWitt McClellan Lockman Papers. Owned by the New-York Historical Society; microfilmed by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 502, page 49.

importance of the history of culture in a liberal education. With a new curriculum called Western Civilization, Norton advocated a broad education that cultivated intellect through the integrated study of ideas and history, as expressed in art and literature. Aiming to give students a long perspective, he fashioned an ongoing story of humanity, one which emphasized continuities through the ages.19 Blashfield’s mural models in visual terms Norton’s pedagogical theories.20 The artist, like Norton, envisioned progress as a grand narrative of accumulation—the contribution of each protagonist is fully understood only in relation to his or her pictorial neighbors. This is a comparative approach to history-telling, one which inserts America into a long, thick world history (a decidedly Western, not Eastern, history). The Evolution of Civilization reinforced in paint the Progressive ideology of cultural uplift driving Norton’s educational model. Like students in Norton’s classroom, those at work underneath Blashfield’s mural in the library reading room would develop intellectually and morally by mastering civilization’s teachings. The activities of reading and looking reinforced one another at the heart of the new national library. Further, The Evolution of Civilization taught a consensual public history, a singular and seamless progress narrative. Blashfield helped shape an aesthetic Progressivism, giving visual form to developing ideas that linked cultural improvement (or reform) to notions of communal identity. My understanding of Progressivism builds on the revisionist scholarship of historian James Connolly, who has argued that Progressivism represented a political style, a tool for framing a particular version of the public good through the lens of consensus. Rather than a tight ideology, Progressivism was a malleable language open to disparate groups (with some measure of access to the public sphere), who emphasized cohesiveness to promote specific reform agendas. Business leaders, for example, worked to centralize

19 James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 243, 253-269, and 377-388. 20 While curriculum and mural painting shared pedagogical goals, Norton’s investment in fine arts did not extend to contemporary, nineteenth-century art. Norton concentrated his teachings on the ancient world, touching on the Renaissance, and ignoring the art thereafter. Blashfield, in effect, extended Norton’s lineage of civilization to include present-day artists like himself. See ibid., 261-263.

their local government, nominating themselves as the efficiency experts who could clean up graft and corruption. Middle-class clubwomen claimed to speak for an entire female community, even though they oftentimes failed to include immigrant and working-class women in their ranks as they pushed for social changes like food safety, housing inspections, and public playgrounds. Ethnic community members positioned themselves as alternative leaders to ward bosses and to the kind of politics that mired municipal affairs in partisan clout and favoritism. Fashioning themselves as representative leaders of a communal response to modern life’s corrupt forces, Progressives of all sorts obscured their group biases—class, race, gender, region, or party—through the consensual language of civic reform.21 Muralists like Blashfield scaled up in visual terms the era’s “consensus model,” as I call it, developing a civic art vocabulary that fit into the rhetorical strategies of Progressivism. Painters at the Library of Congress assumed an identity as aesthetic reformers, transforming the era’s political style into an artistic one. The Evolution of Civilization models a consensual narrative. Blashfield’s compositional weaving of figures, gestures, and colors allies his twelve participants, leaving little room for alternative histories or actors to (imaginatively) disrupt Western civilization’s emblematic timeline. The figure of Rome, for instance, bridges the distance between Greece and Islam (see figure 1-7). An axial figure, he steadies himself on a marble column and the fasces, gesturing leftward with a baton in hand. At left, the female figure of Greece leans his way, holding her gaze all the while upon her other neighbor, Judea, and resting her hand on the adjacent placard. To the right of Rome, the male figure of Islam poses pensively, twisting in Rome’s direction as he thumbs through a text that rests in the palm fronds of his neighbor. The reading-room mural pictures civilization in harmony. Blashfield did not envision debate as part of mural painting’s cultural work. As mural spokesman, he drew clear lines between himself as teacher and the viewing public as students, conceptualizing public decorations as painted versions of accepted

21 See James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), especially 8-9 and 39-76.

history that citizen-students would both understand and emulate. Yet debate did structure Progressive-Era murals and their meanings as collective expression. At the Library of Congress, such discussion centered less on the particular subjects or style of mural paintings than on the behavioral lessons embedded in their forms, particularly how cultural uplift should manifest itself in library spaces as well as who were public culture’s rightful teachers and who were its intended pupils. In the immediate years after the Library of Congress commission, muralists themselves focused increasingly on questions of style, debating in pictorial terms how to be successful Progressive reformers. The seeds of this identity took root at the national library. With The Evolution of Civilization, Edwin Blashfield scripted a visual manifesto for U.S. mural painting, one which positioned the muralist as the orchestrating hand of a Progressive initiative to educate citizens through the arts. Like Italy, his allegory of Fine Arts, who commands a miniature statue of Michelangelo’s David, Blashfield himself brought the grandeur of the Renaissance within the American muralist’s grasp (see figure 1-8). He sought to ratchet up the artistic status of the muralist, also called a decorator, who played a critical role in his opinion in bringing an understandable, cultivating art to the American public. Professionalizing muralists, including Blashfield and other artists then at work at the Library of Congress, founded a national society in 1895 (later named the National Society of Mural Painters) to promote their field, standardize the commission process, and ensure that trained decorators executed public commissions.22 Muralists saw themselves as disciplined artists whose skills helped advance larger, programmatic goals. Working in concert with its architectural surroundings, sculpture, and decorative ornamentation, mural painting should follow what Blashfield termed “the law of harmony.” The composition must “be consonant with its surroundings,” “cling to the wall,” and “lie quietly and flatly in its place.” The artist must learn to simplify, to distill a wealth of natural details to the essential components which will, in Blashfield’s words, “tell as a

22 “Mural Painters Form a Society,” New York Times, 14 April 1895, 9; and “Constitution of the Mural Painters,” in 1915 brochure, National Society of Mural Painters Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel D-248, frames 87-96.

whole.” 23 Art critic Royal Cortissoz praised The Evolution of Civilization for adhering to the rules of mural painting while also achieving a “delicately decorative effect.” According to Cortissoz, Blashfield’s “figures grow out of the architecture,” as good decorations should. He concluded, “It is original, it is dignified, it fulfils its mission, and is throughout well done.”24 A leading voice of the movement, Blashfield spoke as a reformer, advocating mural painting outside of artistic circles, such as in the pages of Municipal Affairs, a new Progressive journal published by the Reform Club in New York. In his theory of mural painting, Blashfield entwined his professional ambitions with art’s enlarging role in turn-of-the-century civic life, promoting the muralist as an expert public educator who created a democratic art. Writing in 1898 in Municipal Affairs, he asserted that mural decoration was “the property of all men; it belonged to every citizen who had eyes to see it; it was ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’” His rhetoric hinged on the assumption that murals communicated transparently and universally. “Every one is more or less impressed through the eyes, especially so are the masses,” he claimed. To fellow cultural leaders of the middle and elite classes, Blashfield pitched mural decoration as a “useful” art that could broadcast civic lessons to immigrant viewers in particular.25 Championing mural painting as an art for the everyman, Blashfield fashioned the era’s tenets of cultural uplift into a supposedly shared, accessible, and American exercise in learning by looking. As a public classroom for the New Education, the Library of Congress represents an important, early workspace where the Progressive ideas of mural painting were staged and, in turn, tested.

The ideology of pictures and progress drove the entire mural program at the Library of Congress, and also structured the public’s experiences of the institution during its first years. From Blashfield’s mural in the Main Reading Room, we turn

23 Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” 99. 24 Royal Cortissoz, “Painting and Sculpture in the New Congressional Library, I: The Decorations of Mr. Edwin Blashfield,” Harper’s Weekly (11 January 1896): 35. 25 Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” 100-104 and 108. See also Edwin Howland Blashfield, “A Word for Municipal Art,” Municipal Affairs 3 (December 1899): 582-587.

now to the larger decorative commission. How did mural painting fit into period ideals about libraries and learning, and what did debates concerning the uses of the national library at the time of its opening reveal about the relationship of “painted lessons,” Progressivism, and model citizenship? Calls for a new Congressional Library arose in the early 1870s, as the current library space in the Capitol proved overcrowded and insufficient for a rapidly growing collection. After prolonged disagreements over design, Congress finally approved a plan in 1886 by architects John Smithmeyer and Paul Pelz, slated for a lot adjacent to the Capitol on its east side. Subsequent construction delays and investigations into contracts led to the dismissal of Smithmeyer in 1888 and to the appointment of General Thomas Lincoln Casey, Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, to head the project. With the assistance of engineer Bernard R. Green, Casey marshaled the project forward, overseeing construction of the six-million-dollar structure until his sudden death in March 1896. At that time, Green took full charge of operations while also continuing his day-to-day duties as superintendent. Architect Edward Pearce Casey, the general’s son, who had joined the project in 1892 when Pelz was dismissed, supervised the overall design and decoration of the library’s interior. Under the leadership of Casey and Green, the new library was completed within the appropriation. 26 The scope of artistic assignments and a national venue assured muralists that the Library of Congress would be a landmark commission. Importantly, the construction budget included the costs of all murals and sculptures—to the credit of General Casey—ensuring that a complete decorative program would be realized in time for the building’s inauguration in 1897. The first mural contracts were handed out in January 1895, continuing through April 1896. Edward Casey, in consultation with his father and with Green, selected the muralists for the project, soliciting them

26 For a detailed account of the construction of the Library of Congress, see Helen-Anne Hilker, “Monument to Civilization: Diary of a Building,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 29 (October 1972): 234-266; and John Y. Cole, “The Main Building of the Library of Congress: A Chronology, 1871-1965” (ibid., 267-270). See also the catalogue entry on the Library of Congress in Richard Murray’s unpublished manuscript, “Hope and Memory: Mural Painting in the United States, 1876-1920,” Richard Murray Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 21 (hereafter cited as “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers).

directly in lieu of holding open competitions. Superintendent Green had final say on all artistic matters.27 The young Casey also sought advice in 1894 from Charles McKim, architect of the Boston Public Library, a structure with mural assignments already in progress by John Singer Sargent, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Frenchman Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.28 Several artists on Edward Casey’s short list declined to participate due to previous commitments or to disagreements over appropriate payment for their work, including James McNeill Whistler (who was flatly uninterested in working for “Uncle Sam”), Sargent, Abbey, John La Farge, Robert Blum, Abbott Thayer, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing. Other artists lobbied hard to gain a spot on the roster, including Charles Sprague Pearce, who secured a commission, and Charles Reinhart, who did not. Artists who did participate were paid between two thousand and eight thousand dollars, depending on the amount of artwork under contract, a comparatively low sum for their efforts.29 “As a rule the artists employed on this Building are believed to be sacrificing something for the opportunity offered them,” wrote Green to Pearce when the artist requested a higher payment.30 Contributing to the adornment of the new library, supervisors believed, was in part a public service—a service to the nation, in turn, which rewarded artists with professional visibility and public acclaim. The twenty-two muralists—all men—who accepted and fulfilled commissions were John White Alexander, George Barse, Frank Benson, Edwin Blashfield, Kenyon Cox, Frederick Dielman, Robert Dodge, William Dodge, Elmer Garnsey, Carl Gutherz, Edward Holsag, George Maynard, William Mackay, Walter McEwen, Gari Melchers, Charles Sprague Pearce, Robert Reid,

27 Cartwright, “Reading Rooms,” 188. 28 Alongside the Library of Congress, the mural program at the Boston Public Library captured the nation’s attention. Although the commissions were handed out before those in Washington, the murals were not ready when the Boston Public Library opened in 1895, debuting instead on a rolling basis as the artists completed their compositions. John Singer Sargent would continue working on his program for another two decades. 29 The total cost of the murals was about $100,000, which represented about half of the budget for the library’s sculpture and roughly equaled the budget for the Boston Public Library’s mural decorations; Boston employed fewer artists and paid them more handsomely. See Cartwright, “Reading Rooms,” 191. 30 Bernard Green to Charles Sprague Pearce, 15 May 1895, Record Group 217, Library of Congress Contracts, National Archives, copy in Richard Murray Papers, box 1.

Walter Shirlaw, Edward Simmons, William Van Ingen, Elihu Vedder, and Henry Oliver Walker. Several more painters worked at the library, some as assistants to commissioned artists and others hired to execute the ornamental designs painted throughout the interior.31 Bernard Green proved an able and efficient superintendent. He kept meticulous records of the progress of the building and its decorations; his multi- volume “Journal of Operations,” preserved today in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, provides a detailed timeline of the planning and installation of the murals, mosaics, and sculpture. Most painters prepared murals in their studios, the majority in New York and others in Paris, Rome, or Boston. Completed compositions were then shipped to Washington, often followed up with a visit by the artist to oversee the placement of his murals in situ. Artists tended to paint on canvas, which could then be stretched and permanently affixed to the wall (by a technique called marouflage). A handful of artists painted their murals onsite directly on the plaster wall, including Blashfield, who tackled the curved surfaces of the dome collar and lantern from atop a multistoried and movable scaffold, designed by Green (figure 1- 10).32 The library’s interior took shape throughout 1896, as numerous artists fulfilled their commissions in a timely manner. All paintings were in place by February 5, 1897, and with the installation of Elihu Vedder’s mosaic of Minerva on the staircase landing near the Visitor’s Gallery on May 28, the entire mural program was completed months before the official opening on November 1. (The project of transferring the

31 Elmer Garnsey, who painted a ceiling panel in the Southwest Pavilion, also designed the interior color scheme and directed the painted ornamentation. Holsag served as foreman of the ornamentation project with Charles Caffin preparing the cartoons and Frederick Martin and William Mackay executing most of the painting. Other assistants included William Thompson, Herman Schladermundt, Arthur Willett (Blashfield’s assistant), and a Mr. Hesselbach (assistant to Gutherz and Cox). See “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers; and Cartwright, “Reading Rooms,” 220, note 7. 32 See the Bernard Green journals, entitled “Journal of Operations on the Building for the Library of Congress,” LC Archives, B&G Series, boxes 17 and 18 (hereafter cited as Journal of Operations, LC Archives, B&G Series). For a list of artists and their studio locations, see “America’s Pantheon,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 8 August 1896, Green Scrapbook, Bernard Green Papers. Robert Dodge also painted his murals directly on the wall in the Southeast Pavilion; see “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers. Blashfield recalled that the scaffold was seventy feet high. See Edwin Howland Blashfield Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, reel 1117, frame 1040.

national library’s monumental collection of books extended from April to November 1897.)33 The predominant artistic vocabulary used for the library’s decorations was classical allegory, as both painters and sculptors scaled up their European training for American eyes. While the forms recalled the Old World, both library designers and the press emphasized that such classical visions were the product of American temperament and skill; all of the decorations in the new Congressional Library were created by native hands. U.S. citizenship proved a prerequisite for participation as a muralist. Carl Gutherz, for instance, who was born in Europe, had to submit an affidavit to General Casey and Superintendent Green attesting to his status as an American citizen before securing a commission to paint the ceiling panels in the Members of Congress Room.34 Formal unity or an overarching narrative did not characterize the program in any strict sense. (Such decorative eclecticism mirrored the practices of contemporary mural programs in Paris, including those at the Hôtel de Ville and the Panthéon; the public art of the Third Republic proved an important training ground for aspiring American muralists.) Yet, as a whole, the adornments did proffer decidedly classical visions in support of expressly civic, secular, and national themes. Like Blashfield in the rotunda, artists working throughout the library sought to convey abstract meanings, such as the ideals of Civilization, Justice, Science, and Understanding, through the human form. Overwhelmingly, female figures served as the carriers of meaning, classically-draped, monumental in scale, and often accompanied by attributes that signaled their identity—Fame with her trumpet, Justice with her scales, Poetry with her lyre, and Art with her palette.35 In the upper story of the densely adorned Great Hall, for example, Robert Reid painted four rondels, representing Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, and Philosophy. Each depicts a half-length, seated

33 Journal of Operations, LC Archives, B&G Series, box 17. 34 “Home of the Books,” Evening Star, 4 March 1897, 19; Carl Gutherz to Bernard Green, 4 February 1895, LC Archives, B&G Series, box 88; and Cartwright, “Reading Rooms,” 203, 217, and 230. 35 While female forms dominate the spaces of the library, Edwin Blashfield’s composition is notable for its gender equality, so to speak. Blashfield employed male forms to express abstract ideals alongside his female forms.

female wrapped in colorful garments who holds an implement of her learned pursuit— a book, scroll, or tablet (figure 1-11). In the Northwest Corridor on the first floor, Edward Simmons created a series of mural lunettes on the Nine Muses. Terpsichore, for instance, personifies the art of dancing, striking her cymbals as she poses dynamically with one foot elevated, drapery in tow (figure 1-12). Many artists at the library allied pictures and progress by using the forms of classical allegory to shape narratives of cultural development. While Blashfield depicted progress within a single mural for the dome collar, others tracked progress through a series of murals. For the Southwest Pavilion on the second floor, for instance, George Maynard composed four lunettes celebrating Western exploration as a civilizing force—from Adventure and Discovery, to Conquest and Civilization. Enthroned female figures with armature and maritime tools anchor each composition, depicting the stages of colonization in abstract terms that visually deny the cultural and human destruction accompanying territorial expansion. In the Members of Congress Room, Gutherz painted a set of allegorical ceiling panels on the Spectrum of Light, with each of its seven colors representing a phase of achievement, such as the Light of Poetry (red) and the Light of Research (green). Other artists complemented progress cycles by structuring their mural sets through comparisons, a pictorial strategy akin to Norton’s comparative approach to teaching the history of culture. Gari Melchers, for instance, painted War and Peace for the two ends of the Northwest Gallery. Kenyon Cox composed companion lunettes on The Arts and The Sciences for the Southwest Gallery, subjects also taken up by William Dodge in the Northwest Pavilion (alongside two more lunettes on Literature and Music).36 Elihu Vedder combined these two approaches for his allegorical cycle on Good and Bad Government, prominently located in the lobby of the Main Reading Room, just outside the rotunda on the first floor. To the left and right of a central panel, entitled Government, are four lunettes—two showing the devolution of government into Corrupt Legislation and Anarchy, and the other two picturing virtuous government in Good Administration and Peace and Prosperity (figure 1-13).

36 The murals by Melchers, Cox, and Dodge are all on the second floor.

There were exceptions to the allegorical formula. John White Alexander, in particular, chose not to use classical allegory, shaping a progress narrative instead through a vocabulary of historical realism for his mural cycle on The Evolution of the Book, located in the East Corridor on the first floor near the Main Reading Room (figure 1-14).37 While historical personages appear in other library decorations—or, more precisely, the guises of noted individuals are discernible in largely allegorical compositions, such as Abraham Lincoln for Blashfield’s American engineer—no cycle except for Alexander’s treats a historical subject with entirely earthly, versus allegorical, actors. The Evolution of the Book plots six episodes in the advancement of writing: The Cairn depicts “primitive” men raising a monument in stone; Oral Tradition features an Arabian storyteller spinning a tale aloud for an encircling audience; Egyptian Hieroglyphics shows a workman inscribing a temple wall with pictorial text as an Egyptian woman looks on; Picture Writing depicts a Native American male painting a tribal story on deerskin, also with a female onlooker; The Manuscript Book depicts the dim-lit interior of a monastery where a monk in the foreground labors on an illuminated folio page; and The Printing Press features Gutenberg examining a proof sheet with an assistant, alongside his invention.38 Despite stylistic differences, Alexander’s murals reinforce the ideological and pedagogical themes visualized in Blashfield’s Evolution of Civilization. Both muralists painted progress narratives that trace a long history of civilization, placing present-day U.S. achievement at the culmination of that international story. The Evolution of the Book represents the acquisition of one of the tools of civilization— written language and its dissemination. If we extend the cycle’s evolutionary logic, the new national library itself functioned as the next (American) step forward; the

37 Alexander actually pitched three schemes—one “Ideal,” another “Historical,” and a third “Realistic”—eventually executing the Historical option. Of the other two options, he wrote to Bernard Green: “The Ideal would admit of something purely decorative; figures symbolic perhaps – History – Law – Astronomy, etc., all subjects to be found in the books of the library.” Continuing, “For the Realistic could be done the Making of the Book – which would be a series of strictly modern work, show different views of paper making – printing – binding, etc. – the machinery would be suppressed as much as possible as the pictures would be strictly figure subjects.” See John White Alexander to Bernard Green, 22 February 1895, LC Archives, B&G Series, box 87. 38 The Cairn, Oral Tradition, and Picture Writing lack historical specificity, however, in comparison to the other three lunettes.

Congressional Library was the country’s monumental storehouse of books, the legacy of Gutenberg’s ingenuity (figure 1-15). Blashfield featured the printing press in the dome collar as well, the innovations of the book marking an important contribution to civilization. The figure of Germany, a printer, examines a proof sheet, a miniature press at his back and an ink roller at his feet (see figure 1-8). Notably, while this figure allegorizes the Art of Printing, it also pays tribute to a contemporary individual, as Blashfield painted Germany in the guise of General Casey.39 Alexander placed the book at the heart of his narrative of progress, conceptualizing it as an engine of culture. The Evolution of the Book stages pictorially the expanding role of the library as an agent of cultural uplift—an apt adornment for the nation’s grandest book repository. By the late nineteenth century, the public library movement had gained momentum in America. The movement began in the 1850s with the establishment of the Boston Public Library, the country’s first large, tax-supported municipal library. In the years following the Civil War, public library growth continued, aiding by a burgeoning publishing industry, a new taste for reading, an up-tick in school attendance, and improved literacy rates. With the founding of the American Library Association in 1876, librarians organized professionally and sought ways to modernize library procedures and accessibility. Additionally, the philanthropy of industrialist Andrew Carnegie secured the construction of new libraries in communities large and small, particularly in the Midwest and West. From 1890 to 1917, Carnegie funded over sixteen hundred libraries for more than fourteen hundred towns, spending upwards of forty-one million dollars on the project.40 The growth of public libraries nationwide brought with it new questions about the purpose of the library and its proper uses. The institution’s professionals as well

39 Herbert Small, et al., Handbook of the New Library of Congress (Boston: Curtis & Cameron, 1897). Small’s text in the Handbook is reprinted in full in The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building, eds. John Y. Cole and Henry Hope Reed (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 78-171, above reference to General Casey on 137. 40 John Y. Cole, “Storehouses and Workshops: American Libraries and the Uses of Knowledge,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, eds. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 365-369; Carl F. Kaestle, et al., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 25; and Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 22.

as Progressive educators conceptualized the library as a space of learning, as an environment that should nurture and mold its citizen-patrons. The late nineteenth century marks a fundamental change in the conception of the library from a “storehouse” to a “workshop,” in the words of historian John Cole.41 Library professionals shifted strategies, no longer viewing their mission as simply one of accumulation and preservation, focusing instead on the use of their collections. Librarians took on a new role, from that of watchmen, who had guarded the collection, to trained public servants, whose research skills opened up the collection to patrons and facilitated the dissemination of knowledge. In a report to John Russell Young, Librarian of Congress (July 1897 – January 1899), in March 1898—just months after the national library had officially opened—the Superintendent of the Reading Room, David Hutcheson, wrote: “The service of the public is the end and object of the Library, and the usefulness of the Library must be gauged by the manner in which it fulfills that purpose.”42 Yet the nature of that service and how to evaluate usefulness proved a matter of debate among library professionals, cultural critics, and patrons. Was the library’s principal objective educational or recreational? Should libraries, for instance, satiate the public’s growing appetite for popular fiction? And what practical measures should be taken in the effort to improve access, such as evening hours, Sunday hours, and open shelves? Further, librarians disagreed on how staff should assist readers. Was the librarian’s job to point the reader in the right direction, suggesting sources that might answer his or her questions? Or, should the librarian do the research for the reader, providing the sought-after information? Herbert Putnam, appointed Librarian of Congress in 1899, was responsible for marshaling the “workshop” mentality at the nation’s library, developing comprehensive tools to aid readers in their research, such as detailed bibliographies and catalogues, as well as providing assistance from subject specialists, who could point the way forward as well as offer counsel on authoritative

41 Cole, “Storehouses and Workshops,” 364. 42 David Hutcheson to John Russell Young, “Report on the Reading Room Department of the Library,” 1 March 1898, LC Archives, Reading Room & Stack & Reader Series, box 1.

works and key resources.43 Not only did the Library of Congress set a standard for assisting readers in finding the books they needed, but the national library also established a comprehensive system for cataloguing books, and developed a technological infrastructure for storing and retrieving them.44 Mural painting visually reinforced the public library movement’s cultural goal of Americanizing foreign-born patrons via books and the spaces of reading, an assimilationist campaign driven in particular by the influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants then arriving from southern and eastern Europe. Debates about library accessibility, use, and mission stemmed from larger cultural and political debates about community welfare and social control, which at their core addressed the role of agency—that of the library and its leaders as distinct from the agency of patrons. Although the ideal public for the modern library, according to leaders, was the immigrant, actual patronage was often largely middle class. Library benefactors and professionals envisioned their institution as a secular mechanism of reform, as an investment in the leisure and education of the working classes in particular that would foster moral uplift and social mobility. Yet, as a space where individuals were encouraged to practice self-culture, a library could not direct such lessons with complete authority. For its users, the library offered an exploratory space, and for some, a pathway to individual identity formation. The ideology of cultural uplift— directed by elites and ascribed to by middle-class readers—gained practical form in the decorated spaces of the library as well as in the activities of reading that transpired there. A library’s aesthetic experiences, behavioral rules, shared spaces, and shared texts orchestrated social interactions among diverse groups. According to scholar

43 The fiction debate shifted emphasis in the first decade of the twentieth century, as the recreational use of libraries gained acceptance. As popular fiction had entered library collections by this time, the question turned to how much to include. Cole, “Storehouses and Workshops,” 368-369, 373, 376, and 381-382. On Putnam’s vision of the modern library, see Herbert Putnam, “The Public Library in the United States: Some Recent Phases and Tendencies,” International Monthly 3 (January 1901): 57-70. 44 Ainsworth Spofford, Librarian of Congress, and others published essays on the marvels of engineering that supported the modern operations of the Library of Congress—its book stacks, pneumatic tubes, electricity, air circulation system, and immense collection of volumes. See Spofford, “The Nation’s Library: I. The New Building; II. Special Features of the Congressional Library,” Century Magazine 53 (March 1897): 682-694; and William L. Fletcher, “Our National Library,” Critic 27 (13 February 1897): 107-108.

Thomas Augst, public libraries at the turn of the century represented “a physical space where social difference became visible.”45 Importantly, this visualizing of social difference was also motivated by a desire to erase or contain such difference, by a belief that visual contrasts, over time, would cultivate visual harmony. A hub of melting-pot thinking, the public library represented an educational space where the practices of learning by doing and learning by looking structured the experiences of its citizen-patrons. This Progressive commitment to the instructive potential of the Library of Congress faced challenges. Several debates about the uses of the national library at the time of its opening demonstrate that an ideology of pictures and progress structured its spaces not only in the eyes of muralists and educators, but also for other groups claiming a stake in the country’s new public institution. Such debates illuminate contested visions of “the people,” class tensions between elite control and democratic participation, and a pervasive tendency to tangle good citizenship with good behavior. One case concerned whether or not the Library of Congress should extend its hours to accommodate evening patrons. “If the Library is to be of any practical utility it is absolutely necessary that it should be open at night. The vast majority of people are occupied during the day, and their only chance of getting any benefit from the Library is during the evening, when the labor of the day is over,” voiced a contributor in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post in January 1898.46 Many government officials agreed, initiating legislation after the Joint Committee on the Library made a report to Congress advising that the necessary appropriations be secured to extend weekday hours until ten o’clock (instead of four o’clock). John

45 For an examination of the aesthetic and spiritual experiences of public libraries in the wake of secularization, as well as the role of libraries in individual identity formation, see Thomas Augst, “Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion,” in The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, eds. Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 148-183; above quote on 172. 46 “The Library Open at Night,” letter to the editor, Washington Post, 25 January 1898, 6.

Russell Young, Librarian of Congress, strongly supported night hours. In February 1898, the appropriations bill passed the Senate.47 Calls to keep the library open in the evenings threw into relief a larger question about who the library was really meant to serve. Debate in the press on night hours functioned not so much as a struggle to convince legislators to act (as they addressed the matter in a timely fashion), than as a public forum for asserting the rights of the people. This demand for democratic access, however, melded with the middle-class discourse of cultural uplift. A local pastor, for instance, wrote to the Post: “Fling open the doors and lift up all classes of our people. This is the people’s age.”48 The campaign to Americanize working-class and immigrant readers hinged on increased accessibility, granting a place for larger publics within the national library while also aiming to structure such experiences as civic (and civilizing) lessons.49 The new policy met with immediate approval from library officials as well as the general public. The Library of Congress hosted its first night hours on October 1, 1898, drawing throngs of visitors through its open doors. For the first time, electric lights illuminated the Main Reading Room for patrons, who utilized the evening hours in greater numbers than the average daytime attendance. The extended hours brought in both readers and tourists. About 1,500 people used the library that evening, 186 of whom studied in the reading room, while the rest toured the building’s “brilliantly illuminated” decorations. As the reporter for the Washington Post affirmed, “visitors were everywhere.”50

47 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1898, 55th Cong., 3d sess., 1898, Doc. 24, 42-43; and “Open the Library,” Washington Post, 2 February 1898, 4. 48 G. V. Leech, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 3 February 1898, 4. 49 For an examination of the library’s mural program and contemporary issues of labor, see Janet Marstine, “Working History: Images of Labor and Industry in American Mural Painting” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1993), 128-301. 50 “Its Treasure for All, Throngs Visit Congressional Library at Night,” Washington Post, 2 October 1898, 1. Notably, the library had kept its doors open at night earlier that summer on July 8 and 9 in conjunction with the National Education Association conference. The illuminated library was a success at this evening “preview” of sorts. Bernard Green recorded 13,386 visitors on July 8 and 10,944 on July 9, 1898, in his Journal of Operations, LC Archives, B&G Series. See also “Visit to Library at Night, Ten Thousand Visitors Fairly Awed by Its Splendors,” Washington Post, 9 July 1898, 6.

Further, a debate about whether to host President-elect McKinley’s inaugural ball at the Library of Congress drew attention to the disconnection between library ideals and their practical application. William McKinley’s swearing in and celebration would take place on March 4, 1897, coinciding with the public preview of the library that same month, its decorative program nearly complete. The festive tone of the events, both of national importance, seemed a fitting convergence. After formally considering the idea, however, the Inaugural Committee chose not to host the event at the new library, but instead at the Pension Building, site of several previous balls. While the chair of the Inaugural Committee championed the library venue, widespread opposition grew quickly among committee members, congressmen, and library officials, who all voiced deep concern about the consequences of opening the library’s doors to a throng of guests.51 Although they believed that such an institution “should aid in educating the people,” instilling respect and decorum in its spaces, they also expressed mistrust of both the so-called unwashed masses and “prominent citizens.”52 Librarian Spofford advised against the proposal, noting that the structure provided a “commodious accommodation for a vast congregation of books and not of people.”53 While the beauty of its adornments would fittingly add to the spectacle of the ball, Spofford conceded, the library’s murals, sculptures, and other ornamented surfaces would be “all within the reach of everybody” and “completely exposed to defacement.”54 Should the plan go ahead, Superintendent Green advised policing as a necessary counterforce to the public’s carelessness and curiosity: “Of course it is

51 Logistically, the library was not a fit venue for such an event, with its limited entrances, bathroom facilities, and kitchen equipment. Holding the ball in the rotunda, underneath the splendors of Blashfield’s Evolution of Civilization, would have required disassembling the room’s reading desks, bolted to the floor. 52 “The New Library: Evidence Before the Joint Committee of Acknowledged Experts, Possibilities of the Institution, How It Should Aid in Educating the People, The Force Required,” Evening Star, 1 December 1896, 1; “Cases of Vandalism: Injury That Has Been Done to Public Buildings,” Evening Star, 12 December 1896, 1. 53 “The New Library: Opposition to the Building’s Use for an Inaugural Ball,” Evening Star, 8 December 1896, 2. See also “The New Library: Librarian Spofford and Superintendent Green Both Examined…Unfit for an Inaugural Ball,” Evening Star, 26 November 1896, 1; and “The Inaugural Ball: Considering the Place in Which It Shall Be Held,” Evening Star, 28 November 1896, 2. 54“The New Library: Opposition to the Building’s Use for an Inaugural Ball,” Evening Star, 2. The language employed in this article alone is decidedly negative, including words such as vandalism, injury, endangering, broken, marring, and destroyed.

possible to prevent wanton destruction of decorations. A proper system of espionage would do this, together with the proper selection of guests to be present….It is a mere question of selection and watchfulness.”55 Officials regarded “the public” or “the people” with a wary eye, focusing not on the educational force of the adorned environment, as spokesmen of mural painting and of the New Education had done in their theoretical treatises, but on the potentially destructive agency of individuals among a crowd. Some members of the public echoed this bleak assessment, while others dismissed such fears of vandalism and claimed the right of access to their public institution. In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post on December 12, 1896, an anonymous spokesman wrote in favor of hosting the ball in the new library. “We cannot follow those who hold that it would be desecration to devote the new library building to the purpose of a reception tendered by the American people to the President they have just elected. After all, these public buildings belong to the American people.” In response to “[a]ll this talk about desecration, destruction, vandalism,” the writer pressed the plan’s opponents: “Is it seriously proposed that the gentlemen and ladies who are invited to the function will go there…carrying hammers wherewith to destroy the sculptures and the statuary, gnawing at bones which they will subsequently throw upon the floor and bearing blackberry pies to hurl at the friezes and the walls?”56 Like opponents, this supporter of the library venue reinforced standards of comportment, believing that when granted democratic access, the people would display model citizenship—behave properly— within the institution’s adorned spaces. Finally, an incident concerning liquor sales on the grounds of the Library of Congress represents the flipside of the inaugural ball debate, as temperance leaders called out library officials for failing to uphold exemplary behavior at the public’s new institution. Temperance leaders voiced outrage in March 1899 when they discovered that the lunch-room staff would discreetly serve beer to patrons who made such a

55 “Opposed to the Library, Supt. Green Says the Inaugural Ball Would Injure It,” Washington Times, 6 December 1896, clipping in Green Scrapbook, Bernard Green Papers. 56 “The Library Building and the Inauguration Reception,” letter to the editor, Washington Post, 12 December 1896, 6.

request. Leaders submitted affidavits to library officials that documented the unlawful “beer-joint” in operation under Superintendent Green’s nose. Green fired back: “As a matter of fact, there were a few bottles of beer sold in the restaurant during the last week or so of Congress.”57 Green insisted that he followed up on the matter as soon as he had learned of it, discovering that many members of Congress who ate lunch in the library while researching there were accustomed to having a glass of beer with their meal. And as the library functioned as part of the legislative department, Green understood their request to be in keeping with the policies of the Capitol lunch room, where beer was served. Green’s response did not satisfy opponents. A public institution where educational and civic goals came together, temperance leaders eyed the Library of Congress as a classroom for their own particular lessons of reform. Alongside muralists, educators, and library professionals, other communities of readers, voters, and reformers understood the adorned library as a site where cultural progress should be measured. As a component of these debates on civic instruction and behavior, mural painting circulated beyond the library’s walls, its role as a pictorial agent of progress taking shape in the press, in commercial art reproductions, and in Progressive-Era classrooms. The spaces of pedagogy expanded significantly at the turn of the twentieth century. Proponents of the New Education moved the classroom into the library (and other institutions of learning) through school fieldtrips, where lessons of art, culture, and civic life would visually cohere in a student’s mind. In a complementary strategy, educators also brought the adorned library into the classroom. Large print reproductions of murals, such as John White Alexander’s cycle, were distributed to U.S. schools in an effort to expand the reach of the fine arts into the experiences of everyday life. In fact, a 1909 survey conducted by the

57 “Still After the Library Blind ‘Pig’, Dr. Crafts Presents Sworn Affidavits of Beer-Selling in the Congressional Library,” The New Voice, 18 March 1899; and “Our National Library’s Liquor-Joint,” The New Voice, 1 April 1899; both clippings in Records of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C., Scrapbook for the Library of Congress (1887-1905).

American Federation of Arts found that The Evolution of the Book was the most popular historical mural for schoolroom decoration.58 The use of art reproductions in the classroom formed part of a larger commercial enterprise at century’s end that mixed art and education with entertainment. The library’s murals not only served as object lessons for schoolchildren, they also caught the eye of adult consumers. Although the Library of Congress did not officially open until November 1, the building welcomed the public beginning in the spring of 1897, during the last few months of preparation. Tourists flocked to the library to see the decorations first-hand. 59 Companies specializing in guidebooks, photographs, and art souvenirs like postcards and prints capitalized on the public’s growing taste for mediated experiences of their new national library, marketing art products to visitors at the building and to armchair tourists afar. The Boston publishing firm of Curtis & Cameron, for instance, assembled propriety photographs of the library for their line of Copley Prints and also produced a guidebook written by journalist Herbert Small, Handbook of the New Library of Congress, which included an essay by Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford.60 The firm published the guidebook in time for the library’s first tourists, delivering copies to Bernard Green’s office in February 1897. 61 Small’s handbook became a

58 Richard Murray, “Painted Words: Murals in the Library of Congress,” in Cole, et al., The Library of Congress, 222. 59 During the spring of 1897, the building’s watch officers reported an average of 1,500 visitors each day. On Thanksgiving Day of that year, 4,778 visitors toured the library during special holiday hours. See the entry on 25 November 1897 in Green’s Journal of Operations, LC Archives, B&G Series; Russell Sturgis, “The New Library of Congress: A Study in Decorative Sculpture,” Architectural Record 7 (January – March 1898): 295; “All May Visit the Library, New Structure Will Be Open to the Public on Thanksgiving Day,” Washington Post, undated clipping in Edward Pearce Casey scrapbook, Casey Family Papers, Historic New England. A decade later in 1907, muralist Will Low noted that the library had more visitors per year than the Capitol. Will H. Low, “The Field of Art: The Mural Painter and His Public,” Scribner’s Magazine 41 (February 1907): 253. 60 Critic Charles Caffin also contributed an essay. See Small, et al., Handbook of the New Library of Congress. For an example of Curtis & Cameron’s print offerings, see The Copley Prints: Reproductions of Notable Paintings Publicly and Privately Owned in America—also of the Mural Decorations in the New Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library and Other Public Buildings (Boston: Curtis & Cameron, 1902). Other companies that marketed library mementos include the Detroit Photographic Company (later the Detroit Publishing Company), the firm of Howard Grey Douglas, and the publishing house of Foster & Reynolds. 61 Entry on 24 February 1897 in Bernard Green’s untitled journal (1893-1897), LC Archives, B&G Series, box 18.

quasi-official guide to the new library, as the government had not commissioned a comparable text. During the first few months after the building’s opening, Librarian John Russell Young (Spofford’s successor) fielded numerous requests for an official guide to the library from citizens around the country, consistently directing them to the Curtis & Cameron text.62 A guidebook to the Library of Congress brought together in pocket form the experiences of art, leisure, education, and reading. Guidebooks offered both actual and armchair tourists an itinerary, a textual decoding of the images (a key), and souvenir photographs of the library’s details. The Curtis & Cameron Handbook is representative of the genre. The structure of Herbert Small’s text narratively moves the reader from the library’s exterior, inside, and then systematically through all of the adorned halls and pavilions. At each itinerary stop, Small identifies the artist, principal subjects, and attributes, and typically remarks on a decoration’s success or importance. A guide such as this one assured its owner that a certain level of comprehension was at one’s fingertips. Looking at The Evolution of Civilization, for instance, may not have been the transparent, self-evident exercise that Blashfield claimed it to be, but by wedding the acts of looking and reading, a visitor could make sense of a mural’s civic content. Consulting their guidebooks, tourists parsed and distilled the densely-packed visual splendors of the library into constructive (or at least more manageable) lessons of art and culture. Creating new moments for learning, guidebooks were a pocket, self-serve curriculum that reinforced the idea of the Library of Congress as a civic classroom. While guidebooks offered text-based cues, another piece of library ephemera framed the murals’ lessons in visual terms. We turn finally to an 1899 photography assignment that grants us a novel point of access to the decorative encounters of some of the Library of Congress’ earliest, and youngest, visitors.

62 Young to Miss Marie A. Weaver, 11 December 1897; and Young to J.A. Callahan, 7 December 1897, LC Archives, Librarian Letterbooks (1843-1899) Series, reels 13 and 14.

In May 1899, Frances Benjamin Johnston undertook an assignment for the Washington public schools, photographing students of all ages, from primary to high school, engaged in the activities of learning. As part of her D.C. survey, Johnston traveled with schoolchildren to the Library of Congress, composing several photographs that frame students in relation to the new decorations. The intersection of Johnston’s educational assignment, the mural paintings, and the library’s visual culture provides us with an important opportunity to examine the Progressive ideal that pictures teach. The educational force driving the Congressional Library’s mural program comes into focus when we view the structure’s adorned interior through Johnston’s lens. A prolific professional photographer and a Washington local, Johnston captured lessons that stitched together mural, student, nation, and photograph, making visible Progressive-Era programs of Americanization and citizenship training. With her camera, Johnston activated Blashfield’s painted lessons, broadcasting a how-to vision of the American muralist as civic reformer to national as well as international audiences. In the spring of 1899, school administrators, led by Superintendent William Powell, commissioned Johnston to document the New Education practices of the D.C. public school system, as learning by doing had become the call sign of modern pedagogy. Johnston had six weeks to complete at least 350 studies of schoolchildren. That spring, she traveled throughout the District, working with supervising principals of area schools to capture an average of fifteen posed photographs each day. Exposing two plates for each composition, Johnston amassed approximately 700 negatives by assignment’s end. 63 The results pleased school officials, who sent the survey of photographs as planned to the Paris Exposition the following year as part of the U.S. Educational Exhibit. The U.S. Commissioner of Education proclaimed the survey “the best expression, to date, of the new idea in education.”64 The photographs depict students

63 Osborne I. Yellot, “Miss Frances B. Johnston,” Photo Era 4 (April 1900): 112; on reel 34, Frances Benjamin Johnston Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as FBJ Papers). 64 “The New Idea in Teaching Children, As Followed in the Public Schools of Washington,” Ladies’ Home Journal 17 (January 1900): 20-21.

engaged as a group in a problem-solving exercise, such as using their math and science skills in a cooking class; employing both measuring and drawing onsite at an architectural structure; visiting a local quarry for a geology lesson; combining physics and physical exercise; or examining cultural artifacts in a local museum (figures 1-16 and 1-17). Johnston accompanied students on their frequent fieldtrips to local D.C. attractions, including such art venues as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Capitol, and the new Library of Congress (figures 1-18 and 1-19). While such venues were local destinations for area schoolchildren, they also held national meanings for those who viewed Johnston’s photographs, as a visit to the capital city and its cultural attractions represented an act of civic tourism, an exercise in the New Education for both adults and children alike. Frances Benjamin Johnston is best known today for another school survey project, that of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a trade school and teachers’ training institution in Virginia for African Americans and Native Americans (figure 1-20). Like the D.C. survey, the Hampton assignment traveled to the 1900 Paris Exposition, in this case as part of the American Negro Exhibit, which was displayed in the Social Economy building and not within the context of the Educational Exhibit. The D.C. project marked the beginning of a series of educational assignments for Johnston (D.C. in May and Hampton in December 1899). She became a specialist of sorts in this “documentary” genre, later photographing students at the Carlisle Indian School and at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Over the course of her long career, spanning the 1890s to the 1950s, Johnston also secured numerous commissions covering world’s fairs, portraiture, U.S. architecture, and gardens. Notably, she served as the first official White House photographer, documenting five consecutive administrations, those of Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft.65 For Johnston, the Library of Congress must have presented an appealing locale for the pictorial staging of Progressive educational methods. Library professionals,

65 Anne E. Peterson, “Nineteenth-Century Profile: Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Early Years, 1888- 1908,” Nineteenth Century 6.1 (1980): 59.

educators, and muralists had shaped the institution as a site of learning, as a space where the activities of reading and looking coalesced. Centering these activities within her photographic frame, Johnston put into practice Blashfield’s assertion that murals could teach civic lessons. She made visual pedagogy itself the subject of several survey photographs, tying monumental painting to the citizen-building agendas of the New Education. Johnston pictured murals as formative experiences, which instilled in American schoolchildren that good citizenship began with good behavior. Embedded in Edwin Blashfield’s claim that a mural’s viewers could be “immediately taught” was an assumption that the visual language of murals communicated both universally and transparently. 66 Working in a documentary mode, Frances Benjamin Johnston likewise relied on this idea of transparency, capitalizing on the nineteenth-century notion of photography as a truthful medium. Yet, in her school survey, Johnston did not simply record the New Education practices as they unfolded before her; she orchestrated a vision of how these educational practices worked, or could work—a vision laden with the values of white middle-class culture that positioned experts of art, culture, and education with the authoritative task of civic uplift. Johnston offered her client (the D.C. school board) and her audience (Washington locals, Paris fairgoers, and readers of the national press) a picture of assimilation at work, a composite “document” of national cohesion in the making. From behind the camera, Johnston exercised a heavy hand, constructing a vision of Progressive education “as it had meaning for the dominant culture,” in the words of scholar Laura Wexler.67 Looking closely and critically at some of Johnston’s photographs, we can begin to make connections between actual murals in the spaces of the Library of Congress and the elevated rhetoric about their civic value. In her survey, Johnston repeatedly employed a set of formal strategies: Well- behaved students strike fixed, deliberate poses, accompanied by their school mistress or master who stands at a position of authority, framed at middle-distance by a wide

66 Blashfield, “A Word for Municipal Art,” 586. 67 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 151.

angle of vision, with a point of entry for us as viewers to imaginatively inhabit the space of instruction (see figures 1-16 and 1-18). For the D.C. assignment, Johnston took at least eight photographs of students of various ages at the Library of Congress, part of about two dozen survey images that picture students in relation to works of art. This subset of images visualizes not only the practice of learning by doing, but especially that of “learning by looking,” a term that scholar Jeannene Przyblyski has used in her analysis of Johnston’s Hampton photographs. 68 Only a handful of Johnston’s survey images depict African American students from local schools, including one of the eight photographs taken at the Library of Congress (figure 1-21).69 (According to Washington’s Superintendent of Public Schools, of the forty-five thousand pupils enrolled in 1899, about two-thirds of them were white.)70 In the composition, about a dozen figures stand in profile facing to the left, adjacent to a large expanse of white marbled wall. Their heads tilt ever so slightly upward, as they collectively gaze at a mural lunette above them, of which only a small triangular wedge is visible at the top left. Johnston situates herself near the taller students at the rear of the line at a skewed position that opens up the patterned floor from right to left, and dramatizes our sense of perspective. All of the schoolchildren stand upright with their arms at their sides and their feet together, or barely parted. Holding their hats, the boys sport jackets and knee breeches, the left- most figure at the front of the line striking a particularly graceful pose. The girls, in their light dresses and blouses don ruffles and lace, with bountiful hats perched atop their heads. The rhythmic verticals of the stilled students in profile echo the marble pilasters behind them; the girls’ hats even mimic the vegetal forms of the capitals. As the students take up only half the height of the composition, it is the architectural arabesques of the library itself that fill the space of the photograph and surround the

68 Przyblyski, “American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900,” 63. 69 Johnston numbered her sample prints. Numbers 171, 176, 246, 247, 334, 335, 354, and 385 were all taken on the grounds of the Library of Congress. Number 385 depicts African American students. The complete D.C. school survey is in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as FBJ Photo Collection). 70 “Mr. Powell’s Schools Defended,” School Journal 60 (3 March 1900): 278.

figures in all directions. With their quiet and attentive demeanor, the students render the photograph both voiceless and immobile. At what, exactly, are these students looking? A photochrom published by the Detroit Photographic Company in 1900 affords us a particularly good view of the space (figure 1-22). We are standing in the North Corridor, adjacent to the Great Hall, and looking at a series of murals by Charles Sprague Pearce, whose large lunette at the far end takes as its subject, The Family. The smaller lunettes from left to right include Religion, Labor, Study, and Recreation, with a fifth small lunette, Rest, located opposite Recreation. The schoolchildren in Johnston’s photograph stand in line with the second pilaster from the left, between the first two benches. So the object of their gaze is Pearce’s panel entitled Religion (figure 1-23). In this mural, a young man and woman kneel before a lit, stone altar, surrounded by the spring colors and forms of a pastoral landscape. According to Herbert Small in his handbook: “The series…illustrates the main phases of a pleasant and well-ordered life. The whole represents the kind of idyllic existence so often imagined by the poets—showing a people living in an Arcadian country in a state of primitive simplicity but possessing the arts and habits of refined cultivation.”71 Library visitors relied on guidebooks like Small’s, despite claims by Blashfield and other spokesmen that mural paintings were universally legible; perhaps the school mistress near the front of the line in figure 1-21 holds such a guide. Additionally, an inscription appears in the space itself, opposite The Family panel. Painted by Pearce, it quotes Confucius: “Give instruction unto those who cannot procure it for themselves.” Once we gather that Pearce and the library designers specifically conceived of this corridor as a space of instruction, Johnston’s photograph begins to reverberate.72 Johnston overlaid the survey’s mission of picturing the New Education onto the physical space in the library most suited to support (and enrich) such pictorial claims. That she chose this setting for a group of African American students reinforces how

71 Small, reprinted in Cole, et al., The Library of Congress, 99. 72 Further, inscribed in the mosaic vaults of the North Corridor are “the names of men distinguished for their work in furthering the cause of education: Froebel, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Comenius, Ascham, Howe, Gallaudet, Mann, Arnold, Spencer,” according to Small (ibid.).

entwined were the cultural understandings of race and education at century’s end, revealing, in turn, the powerful role art could play in shaping the terms of the debate. Here, according to Johnston, is Progressive thought in action. The coupling of this mural series and these schoolchildren sets up, rather quietly, a visual analogue, which goes something like this: Like the pastoral inhabitants of Pearce’s images of family life, these black students subsist contently by simple means, possessing a penchant for cultivation when guided by the right hand. Within the borders of Johnston’s photograph, the schoolchildren model an idealizing vision of assimilation, performing their role as model citizens. At the day’s preeminent national institution, which swelled with the sentiments of democracy and cultivation, young African Americans exhibit their Americanness, according to the gentile codes of white, middle-class culture. Another guidebook author wrote of Pearce’s murals: “There is a charm in this idealism which defies criticism and pleases every eye.”73 Arguably, such a glossing statement applies as well to Johnston’s composition. In a quiet, matter-of-fact way, she attempts to charm her viewer, quelling anxieties of racial progress achieved through any means besides the nonviolent ones pictured here.74 In another survey photograph, one that frames a group of white schoolchildren in relation to the library’s murals, Johnston pictured learning by looking as a catalyzing activity (figure 1-24). In this image, students gather near John White Alexander’s murals on The Evolution of the Book, taking in the cycle’s historical lessons. The final panel in the series, depicting Gutenberg and the printing press, appears above them. According to critic Royal Cortissoz, Alexander excelled as a visual storyteller, making good selections as a decorator: “[T]he pictorial narrative flows on in the most lucid stages, and the history of book-making is disclosed at once comprehensively and with conciseness.”75 The task for these student-visitors, then, is

73 Mrs. John A. Logan, Thirty Years in Washington; Or, Life and Scenes in Our National Capital (Hartford: A. D. Worthington & Co., 1901), 427. 74 On the role of photography in visualizing race and racism at the turn of the twentieth century, see Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 75 Royal Cortissoz, “Painting and Sculpture in the New Congressional Library IX: The Decorations of Mr. J. W. Alexander,” Harper’s Weekly (23 January 1897): 82-83.

to look closely, parsing the lessons within Alexander’s forms. Johnston, however, chose not to stage these schoolchildren standing in rapt attention before the murals; instead, they congregate informally around their school mistress at the left, individually exploring the space. The students all hold notebooks and pencils, most looking not at the murals but at their own words, as the notebooks provide each student with an active space of reflection. Two schoolboys at left and right gaze upward at the murals, directing us as viewers to do the same. Our eyes then track from Alexander’s series back to the students, who are attempting to put this visual exercise into words. Appropriately, the students write in a space that visually tells the history of writing. Capturing the students in the act of transcribing their individual thoughts—presumably after they have just examined Alexander’s murals—Johnston visualizes the pivotal moment of comprehension, when learning by looking and learning by doing come together, triggering a mental formation of ideas. The bustle of thoughts captured in Johnston’s photograph of the white schoolchildren has been denied (at least pictorially) to the African American students, whose eyes all remain fixed on Pearce’s mural. I do not mean to suggest here that the D.C. survey as a whole should be read strictly in tidy comparisons of black and white. In other photographs, Johnston has posed white schoolchildren in stilled, attentive positions. In the eyes of educators and artists, the lessons of model citizenship and Americanization embedded in New Education practices, mural painting, and Johnston’s photographs applied to white pupils as well, particularly to the children of European immigrants. Yet this comparison does illuminate the differences of agency Johnston granted to her various pupils at the Library of Congress through a “documentary” lens. While the African American students in front of Pearce’s mural model the initial “looking” stage of the New Education, the white students near Alexander’s series model a later stage of comprehension, once the activities of looking have been put to good use. In her D.C. survey, Johnston sometimes posed white schoolchildren unencumbered, looking attentively at art or artifacts, but more often she depicted them with notebooks and pencils in hand, signaling a connection between visual exercises and intellectual development (figure 1-25). Although Johnston took

only one known photograph of black students at the Library of Congress, she did take others at a nearby artistic venue that likewise modeled the first, “looking” stage of learning. For instance, she framed an image of young African American schoolchildren gazing upward at Horatio Greenough’s monumental statue of George Washington as a Greek ruler, which at the time was located outdoors between the Capitol and the new library (figure 1-26).76 Johnston privileged President Washington as a bestower of knowledge and civic virtue. Without notebooks at the ready to visually signify the act of comprehension—especially for the group’s elder pupils— the students in the photograph model a comparatively passive mode of pictorial instruction. The Progressive practices of learning by looking framed through Frances Benjamin Johnston’s lens gained new currency at the turn of the twentieth century. While the D.C. public school district contracted Johnston to photograph local schoolchildren, her commission circulated among much larger constituencies as well, reaching both national and international audiences. For her own profit, Johnston commercially marketed her 350 survey photographs in two ways. She arranged for select photos to appear in a series of pamphlets geared towards teachers entitled The New Education Illustrated, to be sold in sixteen volumes at thirty-five cents apiece and issued semi-monthly between 1900 and 1901. Johnston assigned her two photographs of students in front of the Pearce and Alexander murals as part of the pamphlet on History. Sales remained disappointing and the venture barely made expenses.77 Second, Johnston, from her D.C. studio, marketed eight-by-ten inch platinum prints of

76 The statue was originally designed for the Capitol rotunda. It was moved outside to the east lawn of the Capitol in 1843. Today, it is located at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. For more on the statue commission, see Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S. Capitol, 1815-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 62-88. 77 Contract in FBJ Papers, reel 22. Negative numbers 247 and 385 listed on a memorandum entitled “School pictures sent to B. F. Johnson Co.” in her Wanamaker Diary for 1900, reel 1. For disappointing sales, see Pete Daniel and Raymond Smock, A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1889-1910 (New York: Harmony Books, 1974), 87. See also Brownwyn A. E. Griffith, ed., Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris, 1900-1901 (Hanover: University Press of New England, for the Musée Art Américain Giverny, 2001), 31-32. The New Education Illustrated, vols. 1-4, are in the FBJ Photo Collection.

the photographs for sixty-five cents each.78 Additionally, the project secured press coverage in conjunction with its showing at the Paris Exposition in April 1900. Essays with photo spreads ran in the Evening Star, St. Nicholas (a children’s magazine), Ladies’ Home Journal, and Photo Era. The article in the Evening Star, appearing on November 11, 1899, indicated that a duplicate set of the survey photographs were then on view at Veerhoff’s galleries, offering a local venue for those who could not travel to Paris. 79 At the Paris Exposition in 1900, U.S. exhibitors paid keen attention to the aesthetics of display, and photographs played a large role in their efforts to visualize America’s progressive instruction. According to a Bureau of Education official, “Pictorial representations, which were lavishly employed, [gave] an adequate idea of school buildings and equipments, and a vivid sense of school life and activities.”80 Visitors did not encounter Johnston’s D.C. photographs as a cohesive survey, as the U.S. educational exhibits on view in the Palace of Letters, Sciences, and Arts were organized by grade. All of the grammar school artifacts were shown together, all of the high school artifacts, and so on. Johnston’s survey, while broken into smaller groups, did garner praise and the D.C. Board of Education was awarded a gold medal for its display. 81 Notably, the U.S. Educational Exhibit also included displays specifically on the Library of Congress, one as part of the American Library Association exhibit, for which the organization sent Copley Prints of the building’s architecture and decorations, as well as the Library of Congress’ own display next to the high school section.82 Such photographs featuring library mural paintings and

78 FBJ Papers, reel 28. 79 “School Children, Pictures of Them to Be Exhibited at the Paris Exposition,” Evening Star, 11 November 1897, 14; Elizabeth V. Brown, “Out-of-Doors Schools,” St. Nicholas 27 (January 1900): 256-263; “The New Idea in Teaching Children” Ladies’ Home Journal, 20-21; and Osborne I. Yellot, “Miss Frances B. Johnston,” Photo Era 4 (April 1900): 108-114. 80 Anna Tolman Smith, “Educational Lessons of the Paris Exposition,” in NEA Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Fortieth Annual Meeting Held at Detroit, Michigan, July 8-12, 1901 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1901), 440. 81 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900, 56th Cong., 2d sess., 1901, Doc. 232, 2: 369. 82 Florence Woodworth, “A. L. A. Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900,” Library Journal (March 1900): 116-117; and “U.S. Educational Exhibit at Paris,” School Journal 60 (30 June 1900): 749.

other civic art treasures demonstrated that the U.S.—like the host country of France, the training ground of American muralists—had adopted the educational and nationalist possibilities of public decorations. The logic of pictures and progress, synthesized in Blashfield’s Evolution of Civilization and staged in Johnston’s survey, likewise infused the pedagogical discourse of the U.S. Educational Exhibit in Paris. For example, Nicholas Murray Butler, professor at Columbia University (and its president beginning the following year in 1901), prepared a series of monographs entitled Education in the United States. The texts were displayed at the exhibit and also available as free pamphlets to fairgoers. Isaac Edwards Clarke of the Bureau of Education in Washington contributed an essay on “Art and Industrial Education.” Clarke drew connections between the Congressional Library, public art, and classical culture. He noted that the “vitality of classic art” not only comprised the “ideal images of the Olympian divinities,” but also the “every-day life of the people.” Moreover, Clarke framed classical art within an educational discourse—Americans were the schoolchildren of Europe: “So past and present meet and blend, taking no thought of the thousand intervening years! Here to-day, the thought, the art, of Athens and Rome, shape our thoughts and arts; so that we, consciously or unconsciously, are the children of that elder civilization.”83 For educators, the American Renaissance represented an artistic progress narrative as well as a visual curriculum that reached wide audiences through everyday experiences. Johnston’s lens offers us a how-to lesson on the ways that public murals performed their cultural work in the eyes of educators, library professionals, and artists. Employing a documentary mode, Johnston pictured the New Education as a self-evident, effective, and modern pedagogy, naturalizing its practices of doing and looking as well as her own role as directing force of the D.C. survey’s vision. Another survey image demonstrates how carefully she constructed the layers of pedagogical agency in play within the adorned library. This photograph brings us back to where

83 Isaac Edwards Clarke, “Art and Industrial Education,” in Education in the United States: A Series of Monographs Prepared for the United States Exhibit at the Paris Exposition, 1900, ed. Nicholas Murray Butler (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1900), 755-757.

we began the chapter, in the library’s Main Reading Room (figure 1-27). A class of students gathers along two rows of desks, which curve gently to the left as part of the three concentric circles of reading desks beneath the rotunda. Seated at a desk, each pupil concentrates on a book in hand while striking varied poses. The girl in the foreground on the left-hand side, for instance, sits upright in her chair, holding a volume above her lap in her left hand while resting her right hand inquisitively on her shoulder. Alternatively, the boy next to her leans forward, positioning himself close to the desk and to his text, which fully captures his attention. Johnston stands at center between the two rows, her adult gaze in line with that of the only adult framed within her photograph. Herbert Putnam, the new Librarian of Congress (1899-1939), poses with the students, standing at middle distance right next to the young readers, seemingly monitoring their work from above. As a leader of the public library movement, who headed the efforts to make the modern library a site of activity and use, Putnam emphasized that the institution must serve and train “its adult constituency of the future,” the nation’s children. He asserted in 1901 that “[The public library] is developed by coöperation with that other institution where the children are subject to organization and control, the public school.” Putnam’s declaration that “the best hope lies with the children,” carried with it an assumption that such hope resided in the yet-to-be-molded character of the library’s youngest users.84 Although Johnston did not position her camera to include a glimpse of The Evolution of Civilization, she nevertheless invoked mural painting as a pedagogical component operating within the frame. Johnston’s photograph renders clear the ideology of cultural uplift at work within this space of art and learning. Seated at desks on the floor of the Main Reading Room, the students take direction from above. From the crown of the dome, Blashfield’s twelve protagonists model Western Civilization’s steady progress, the muralist aggrandizing the pursuit of knowledge through the ages as well as America’s position as inheritor and torchbearer of cultural innovation. As Librarian of Congress, Putnam directs a vision of the public library as

84 Putnam, “The Public Library in the United States,” 62-63.

a disciplining environment that helps mold young citizens. Such a vision works in concert with that of the students’ teacher, a facilitator of the New Education. And Johnston, in staging this photograph, charges the students within her frame with the task of assuming the role of surrogate teacher—they too must direct a civic lesson for the photograph’s many viewers. As such, the stilled students continually enact the part of good citizens in the making. Framing mural painting as a component of the New Education, the D.C. survey helped launch a Progressive identity for muralists as artistic reformers. The seeds of this identity took rook at the Library of Congress, where a corps of painters gained professional experience designing large-scale compositions for a new kind of national institution widely understood to be a site of civic instruction. With her photographs of a visual pedagogy at work in the library’s adorned spaces, Frances Benjamin Johnston constructed a learning-by-doing object set for local, national, and international audiences that reinforced Blashfield’s conception of murals as painted lessons. Johnston staged the Library of Congress as a Progressive-Era classroom, activating the building’s decorations through the eyes of schoolchildren. She gave ground-level traction to the murals, putting their ideology of pictures and progress within intellectual reach of some of the library’s youngest visitors. With her photographs of students in relation to Pearce’s Family, Alexander’s Evolution of the Book, and Blashfield’s Evolution of Civilization, Johnston made visible mural painting’s role in the entwined agendas of the New Education, Americanization, and behavioral citizenship training. For Blashfield and his colleagues, the decorative commission at the Library of Congress represented an early opportunity for muralists in the making, whose identities and ambitions as civic teachers took shape alongside the institution’s own educational mission. In the immediate years after the national library assignment, muralists would solidify their role as aesthetic reformers and debate how best to make their art form a practical, visual component of the nationalist agendas of Progressivism. Looking to Americanize and modernize mural painting, artists as well as critics began to scrutinize the vocabulary of classical allegory that predominated on

the walls of the Library of Congress. Muralists learned at the national library that by tethering pictures and progress, they could craft a place for themselves in broader political and cultural discourses at the turn of the twentieth century. With their painted lessons, they aimed to transform viewers into model citizens.

CHAPTER TWO

Scaling Up an American Past at the Massachusetts State House (1900-1904)

During the first decade of the twentieth century, state governments initiated elaborate decorative programs as part of capitol construction projects, hiring painters who by then had established credentials as mural specialists. In the years following the opening of the Library of Congress, mural painting in America flourished. Artists fulfilled commissions for major decorations at private residences and clubs, hotels, banks, libraries, schools, courthouses, and state capitols. Adorning a political entity, muralists at state capitols became public educators of a new sort, shaping a distinctly political vision in addition to a cultural or artistic one. In this chapter, we turn to the Massachusetts State House, an early capitol commission wherein artists reformed the look of American mural painting and enlarged its influence upon Progressive-Era life. Monumentalizing American history, the mural program at the Massachusetts State House functioned as a pictorial arm of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanization movement. The decorations by Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, and Henry Oliver Walker focus on pivotal moments of transition in the Commonwealth’s past—when colonist becomes patriot, when citizen becomes soldier, when soldier reassumes his role as citizen, when Indian espouses Christianity. Depicting historical moments centered on such figures as the Pilgrims, Paul Revere, and Civil War soldiers, the state house murals modeled lessons of Roosevelt’s “Americanism” for contemporary residents of Boston, particularly for the ethnic and immigrant communities of Irish, Jews, and Italians that then shaped the city. For immigrant eyes, the structure’s historical murals presented scenes of civic identity made anew, celebratory moments when individuals expressed commitment to a larger community. By picturing a history of the process of becoming American, the Massachusetts State House murals represent a visual component of the broader campaign to assimilate newcomers at the turn of the twentieth century. Framing the nation’s history as a story of Americanization was a Progressive strategy, a way for artists and their government sponsors to reinforce present-day agendas with the weight of the past.

The look of American mural painting changed with the Massachusetts State House commissions, 1900-1904. State officials mandated local historical subjects for the structure’s murals, hiring three Massachusetts natives and effectively requiring them to use historical realism as their artistic vocabulary. Reid, Simmons, and Walker, before this time, had all worked in an allegorical mode, creating draped and floating females, for example, for their murals at the Library of Congress.1 The desire for historical subjects in Massachusetts echoed calls by artists, critics, and civic boosters nationwide for homegrown landscapes peopled by recognizably American heroes. The growth of the U.S. mural movement engendered pointed debates during the twentieth century’s earliest years about what the nation’s murals should look like and what civic lessons they should teach. Mural talk in newspapers, popular magazines, and art journals revealed significant disagreement among practitioners and spokesmen about the look and function of the medium. Within these debates about style were the elements of Progressive-Era thinking among reform-minded creatives. Muralists wanted their art to make a difference, to model responsible citizenship. The turn to historical realism cultivated a distinctly national art of mural painting and fastened civic art to the nationalist agendas of Progressivism. At the Massachusetts State House, muralists became aesthetic reformers. They modernized mural painting for U.S. audiences and fit their art-making into the era’s Americanization campaign. This chapter examines how the capitol decorations visualized a Progressive-Era curriculum for Boston’s multi-ethnic communities, painting a pathway to citizenship in Roosevelt’s America. To understand the ways in which Reid, Simmons, and Walker embedded reform in a new kind of monumental

1 Reid, for example, painted allegorical murals for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (Ornament, Design, Metal, and Textiles), at the Library of Congress in 1896 (The Five Senses, Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, and Philosophy), at the Appellate Courthouse in New York in 1899 (Justice), and for the U.S. Government Building at the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris (America Unveiling Her Natural Strength). Simmons painted allegorical murals for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Stone, Iron, Hemp, and Wood), at the Criminal Courts Building in New York in 1895 (Justice), at the Library of Congress (The Nine Muses), and at the Astoria Hotel in New York in 1897 (The Months of the Year and the Seasons), among others. Walker painted allegorical murals at the Library of Congress (Lyric Poetry) and at the Appellate Court Building in 1899 (Wisdom). See Richard Murray’s unpublished catalogue, “Hope and Memory: Mural Painting in the United States, 1876-1920,” Richard Murray Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 21 (hereafter cited as “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers).

history painting, I contextualize their compositions within contemporary mural debates, educational programming in local schools, and discourses on national identity. The decorative program at the Massachusetts State House represented a shifting of gears in the field of mural painting. Artists moved away from the general and universal forms of allegory to the more specific and historical forms of realism. Reid, Simmons, and Walker still engaged in an essentially classical vocabulary— investing in the human figure as a stable carrier of meaning, rendering such figures convincingly, and placing them in balanced compositional spaces. Yet with historical realism, they also fashioned mural painting into an expressly Progressive practice. Muralists staged a reform vision in concrete terms, doing on their own in paint what Frances Benjamin Johnston had helped them do with her camera at the Library of Congress. Massachusetts proved an apt site for this mural transformation. With its cast of Pilgrims, Revolutionary leaders, and soldiers, the state’s local history contained origin stories of national import. One art critic claimed that “Massachusetts can probably show in her history more world-famous events worthy of commemoration than any other State of the Union.”2 Artists rooted the subject of mural painting in events that transpired near the capitol building itself, giving modern-day palpability to narratives of America in the making. Picturing a local past for the Commonwealth, artists likewise scaled up mural painting as a national art that could shape a civic identity for Progressive-Era viewers. What began in Boston would soon be replicated in other state houses across the country. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a surge of capitol building projects for expansion or restoration in states both old and new.3 Government officials hired artists to adorn these new, grand halls of political power. In the immediate years after the Massachusetts commission, painters created decorations for such capitols as Minnesota, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,

2 Hamilton Bell, “Recent Mural Decorations in Some State Capitols,” Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine 7 (June 1906): 724. 3 See Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Seale, Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the USA (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 204-264.

monumentalizing stories of transformation that featured local history, people, and landscapes. Muralists solidified their role as history-tellers and civic teachers at the Massachusetts State House, negotiating new ways to visibly participate in Progressive reform. From the heights of Beacon Hill, architect Charles Bulfinch’s state house, with its distinctive dome and brick façade, had anchored the Boston skyline since 1798 (figure 2-1). Throughout the 1890s, the building underwent an extension to the north side as well as a restoration of the original, south-facing structure, known as the Bulfinch Front.4 Overseeing construction, the state house commissioners envisioned decoration as an integral part of the capitol’s renewed appearance. In 1898, Chairman William Endicott and the commissioners requested appropriations from the state legislature (jointly called the General Court) for four mural paintings in the new Memorial Hall and one in the adjoining Senate Staircase Hall.5 Securing funds and stipulating the terms for the mural commissions proved a tricky task. Twice—to the consternation of local painters—open competitions for mural designs were quashed by officials who favored the direct selection of artists, assuring legislators that “artists [with] established reputation will be a guarantee that the result will be a source of pride to the citizens of the Commonwealth.” 6 After the commissioners visited the Library of Congress in 1899, they sought out Edward Simmons, Henry Oliver Walker, and Abbott Thayer for the proposed murals. (Thayer had been asked to participate at the national library, but eventually relinquished the offer. He would do the same at Boston, with Robert Reid later securing the assignment.) Despite the commissioners’ numerous requests to proceed, legislators dragged their heels, delaying a decision on the necessary appropriation. In his annual report for 1899, Endicott urged the General Court to act, as “the commissioners have been compelled, to their infinite regret, to

4 Ibid., 206-210. 5 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Annual Report from the State House Construction Commissioners, January 1899, H. Doc. 157, 1-2. Senate Staircase Hall is known today as Nurses Hall. 6 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Annual Report from the State House Construction Commissioners, January 1900, H. Doc. 77, 1. See also the catalogue entry on the Massachusetts State Capitol in “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers; and Charles H. Caffin, “Proposed Competition for Mural Paintings in Massachusetts State House,” Artist 25 (May-June 1899): 14.

complete their work, leaving five vacant panels in mute appeal to the members of the General Court.”7 Construction completed, Memorial Hall and the Senate Staircase Hall remained unadorned (figure 2-2). Endicott and the commissioners finally moved the project forward by securing the passage of a legislative act on May 31, 1900, that authorized the use of unexpended monies remaining in construction loan funds. Importantly, the act stipulated that the murals depict local historical subjects: “The decorations herein provided for shall consist, so far as paintings are concerned, of subjects connected with the history of Massachusetts.”8 By mandating historical subjects, state legislators (and, in turn, the commissioners overseeing the project) set the stage for muralists to become part of the Progressive campaign to shape—and stabilize—American identity. President from 1901 to 1909, Theodore Roosevelt led this effort to structure a unified sense of national belonging amid a burgeoning multi-ethnic society. Roosevelt’s concept of “Americanism” was based on a belief that citizens should share national ideals and that American identity was formed from a combination of physical strength, moral character, and earned equality. Prior to his presidency, the process by which foreign-born inhabitants adopted the customs and values of the U.S. was generally thought to unfold naturally, without prompting by government or cultural institutions. Facing a tremendous rise in immigration and fearing that foreigners would choose to keep to their native ways, Roosevelt launched a campaign to Americanize newcomers—putting his ideas of Americanism into practice. Roosevelt aimed to inculcate social behaviors and civic ideals that he and his Republican party thought to be at the core of American identity. 9 During his

7 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Annual Report from the State House Construction Commissioners, January 1900, H. Doc. 77, 1. 8 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves Passed by the General Court of Massachusetts in the Year 1900, Chap. 362 (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1900), 286. The above sentence stipulating historical subjects was a House amendment to the initial Senate bill (No. 147); see Journal of the House, 25 April 1900, clipping in mural files, folder “Battle at Concord Bridge,” Massachusetts Art Commission (hereafter cited as Concord Bridge folder, Art Commission). 9 At the time of the decorations, the Massachusetts state legislature was decidedly Republican, while municipal affairs had recently shifted to Democratic control. An Irish democrat, Patrick Collins, was elected mayor in 1901 and reelected in 1903. See Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Manual for the Use of the General Court (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Company, 1903), 381-381 and 398-403;

administration, right-leaning Progressives formalized the processes of citizen-making. They consciously programmed ways to Americanize immigrants and to assimilate Native Americans and African Americans through government agencies, public schools, churches, unions, businesses, and communal associations. 10 Muralists working on public commissions like the Massachusetts State House became part of this larger national effort. As historian Leroy Dorsey has shown, although Roosevelt held trenchant prejudices against non-whites and immigrants, he moderated a middle ground between equality and exclusion through his public discourse, bringing race, ethnicity, and citizenship into the national conversation. As distinct from nativists who employed assimilation and Americanization as forceful correctives to cultural differences deemed incompatible with American ways, Roosevelt navigated an alternative that seemingly empowered the individual to willingly participate in national identity through self-transformation. No matter one’s origins, Roosevelt affirmed, the ideas of Americanism offered a pathway to inclusion. By demonstrating brute strength, moral fiber, and a willingness to shed former allegiances, foreigners who embraced the new nation and identified themselves with it could earn membership as Americans.11 Importantly, Roosevelt did not uproot the discriminatory assumptions of the nativist agenda, but instead reframed them within a language of inclusion. The eradication of cultural difference would be a project of individual agency, as Roosevelt envisioned it. The president asserted: “We should keep steadily before our minds the fact that Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of character; that it is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent....Representatives of many

and Constance K. Burns, “The Irony of Progressive Reform: Boston 1898-1910,” in Boston 1700-1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics, eds. Ronald P. Formisano and Constance K. Burns (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 136-137. 10 Leroy G. Dorsey, We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 4 and 17; Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 71-72; and Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 54-56. 11 Dorsey, We Are All Americans, 3 and 17-18.

[races]...will be combined in one; and of this new type those men will best represent what is loftiest in the nation’s past.”12 While Roosevelt cast the American story of nation-building in distinctly ethnic terms, he did so with the goal of promoting (and stabilizing) a uniform national identity. Americanism was about shedding the old in favor of the new, a transformation that provided no room for dual allegiances. Roosevelt’s nationalism held up one standard of behavior and a common set of ideals as the all-or-nothing parameters of American identity. The melting pot, in his view, did not fuse diverse nationalities into a new nationality, strengthened by its constituent parts. Rather, Roosevelt understood the melting pot as an agent of purification that shaped non- whites into an Anglo vision of the worthy American citizen.13 The sense of agency that Roosevelt built into his idea of Americanism came at a heavy price for immigrants. Other Progressives, more left-leaning in their views, saw Americanization in a different light, emphasizing a cohesive nationalism with pluralist roots. Educator and philosopher John Dewey and journalist Randolph Bourne, for instance, advocated a sense of American belonging that turned not on the eradication of immigrant identities, but on their successful combination. This version of Americanization aimed to assimilate newcomers, but, unlike Roosevelt’s, it acknowledged immigrants’ contributions to national identity, valuing cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism as vitalizing components in an ongoing process of national self-definition. 14 Theodore Roosevelt set the predominant tone for the Americanization movement in its early years, expanding national authority over matters of U.S. citizenship. Federalizing naturalization procedures and citizenship training, Roosevelt propagated his concept of Americanism through the levers of bureaucracy. Roosevelt’s Americanization initiatives reflected his sense of optimism that a uniform national identity could absorb the disparate cultures flowing into the U.S. With a faith in conversion, Roosevelt and like-minded Progressives sought to mold newcomers

12 Theodore Roosevelt, “Sheridan, November 25, 1908,” quoted in ibid., 32. 13 Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance, 89-90. 14 Ibid., 71-84.

through a host of educational programs that focused on inculcating the behaviors, beliefs, and skills required in the president’s singular nationalism. Muralists at the Massachusetts State House created a painted curriculum that expressed Roosevelt-think and reinforced Americanization initiatives. They engaged in a kind of history-telling that celebrated moments of conversion, when the state’s own men and (albeit rarely) women demonstrated physical strength, moral certitude, and allegiance to a larger American community. Picturing subjects from local political, military, and religious history that spanned seventeenth-century colonialism to a civil war barely a generation old, the mural program catalogued the story of Massachusetts as an ongoing, shared test in identity formation. Although we do not know whether the three artists conferred with one another about subject choice or composition, they all generated designs that cultivated the Progressive ideals of a singular nationalism. Robert Reid painted three murals on Massachusetts’ political past, Edward Simmons painted two military themes, and Henry Oliver Walker created two murals focusing on the state’s religious beginnings. A closer look at one of Simmons’ paintings helps us discern the ways in which this pictorial history-telling looked Progressive. In Memorial Hall, four mural lunettes dominate the upper half of the grand rotunda, situated in each of the cardinal directions above the ground floor’s archways. In the east panel by Simmons, a series of colorful, windblown flags stretch across the composition from the bottom right to the upper left (figure 2-3). The flags are carried by soldiers outfitted in blue overcoats and caps who march up an exterior staircase, their backs to us as they recede into the composition’s middle distance. Near the top of the steps on the left, a sturdy gentleman faces the procession, holding his civilian hat in hand as he prepares to greet the approaching troops. Other citizens have gathered on the steps as well as on the building’s balcony to witness the event. The bright blues, reds, and yellows, along with the snowy rooftops at right, suggest a clear, yet crisp winter day. The heavy garments worn by all and the dynamic, wind-whipped flags provide further seasonal clues. Upon inspection of the building’s façade—its tall, narrow arches, double columns above, and yellow bricks—we discover that this soldierly procession leads to

the Massachusetts State House itself.15 The east mural in Memorial Hall depicts an event that took place just outside its walls. In The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth, Edward Simmons chose to imagine an important ceremony that had transpired at the state house nearly four decades earlier. His mural pictures local volunteer regiments as they returned their Civil War battle flags to the governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, on December 22, 1865. At the outbreak of war, Union troops had received their flags on these very steps, marching back at war’s end to the communal origins of their call to duty. The ceremony marked a changing of the guard, as soldiers ritualistically surrendered their colors to the state and thus resumed their identities as local citizens. Three thousand citizen-soldiers participated, returning some 250 flags to the governor in a procession that began in Boston Common, traveled through crowd-lined city streets, and culminated at the state house.16 While a parade, the event was not all pomp and celebration. This was a solemn affair, a ritual acknowledgment of the collective pain accompanying war and a bid for healing in its wake. On the steps of the capitol, Governor Andrew accepted the flags as “relics” of civic sacrifice brought home by a “grand column of scarred and heroic veterans.” The flags rendered tangible the conflicted memories of valor and strife, virtue and grief, victory and sacrifice—memories embedded in the “splintered staves, weav[ing] themselves along the warp and woof of these familiar flags, war- worn, begrimed and baptized with blood.”17 Still nursing the open wounds of war, the state (as well as the reunited nation) heralded its newly returned relics, installing them after the ceremony inside the state house in Doric Hall, the entry space adjacent to the building’s exterior steps.

15 Throughout the years, the building’s façade has changed color—its red bricks painted white in 1825, then yellow in 1855, white again in 1918, and finally cleaned of paint in 1928 to reveal the original red brick, which endures today. See A Guide to the Massachusetts State House (Boston: John Hancock Financial Services, Inc., 2001), 28. 16 Untitled, Farmers’ Cabinet (Amherst, NH), 28 December 1865, 2. 17 “Forefathers’ Day in Boston,” Daily Citizen and News (Lowell, MA), 23 December 1865, 2; and Ellen Mudge Burrill, The State House, Boston, Massachusetts, 3rd ed. (1901; Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Company, 1907), 38-48.

A sense of nearness and materiality characterizes this public narrative. Simmons’ mural memorializes a memorial ceremony, visually re-narrating through the art of large-scale decoration a fleeting moment of immense communal pride, fastening the ritual’s culminating moment to the wall of the homecoming site itself. Likewise sheltered within the state house were the actual battle flags, moved in 1900 from Doric Hall into the newly-built Memorial Hall. Displayed in niches beneath Simmons’ painting, the artifacts functioned as material traces of Civil War sacrifices as well as of the Return of the Colors ceremony, buttressing the mural above with the weight of history (figure 2-4). Simmons structured his painted reenactment through an early-twentieth- century lens. The Return of the Colors visualizes Roosevelt’s Progressivism, shaping local history into a pictorial primer on Americanism. First, the artist composed a common origin story—this is the site where soldiers collectively embarked on their journey to war. Massing his figures in a single file, Simmons signals that a unity of purpose has carried the soldiers home from the battlefield to the state house steps. Focusing on blue-uniformed backs versus the particularities of faces, he privileges group over individual, stressing the soldiers’ common sacrifices for a larger public good. Further, the anonymous veterans literally hold their allegiance to the nation, supporting the large battle flags that dominate the center of the composition. The battered flags make tangible the soldiers’ physical tests and moral courage on the battlefield, indexing their earned status as members of the American community. Creating a column of unfurling colors and uniformed veterans, Simmons fuses national identity to martial valor, in keeping with the singular and masculinist thrust of Roosevelt’s Americanism. Finally, Simmons articulated a Progressive vision by aggrandizing a conversion ritual. Celebrating the moment when the soldiers become citizens, he models identity formation as an engine of national progress. Alongside Simmons, Reid and Walker painted conversion narratives, together creating a mural program at the Massachusetts State House that shaped a cohesive image of the “past as freedom fighters,” as I will name it here, an artistic strategy suited to Roosevelt’s reform agendas. This vision of the past featured predominantly

male protagonists in the act of defending principles, liberties, and local terrain. In contrast to the decorative program at the Library of Congress, where artists interpreted the past as a set of contributions to Western civilization, muralists in Boston laid aside a cosmopolitan frame for an emphatically nationalist one instead. Reid, Simmons, and Walker fashioned monumental history paintings that heroize the common man versus the great man (like a statesman or general); root national identity formation in local narratives; privilege the public good above individualism; and celebrate turning points wherein historical figures express commitment to a larger, American community. For the rectangular panel spanning the top of the Senate Staircase Hall, Robert Reid composed a scene focusing on one man’s heroic resistance to the mother country. His mural depicts an event that unfolded in February 1761 at Boston’s Old Town House in which lawyer James Otis argued at trial against recently imposed writs of assistance, general search warrants granted by British authorities that colonial merchants thought unjust. This appears to be the only mural for which the state house officials selected the subject in advance. They had first offered the commission to Abbott Thayer, who declined because he felt the assigned subject lacked “any promising decorative possibilities.”18 Reid thought otherwise and accepted the commission to paint the Otis panel in May 1901.19 While the state legislators mandated subjects drawn from Massachusetts history, they do not appear to have selected specific subjects in advance for either Simmons or Walker, who had signed contracts on September 15, 1900, each to paint two murals for Memorial Hall. The commissioners probably assigned the broad subject of “war” to Simmons and “religion” to Walker, with the muralists then responsible for selecting and sketching two suitable scenes from the state’s history. The contracts indicate that a first payment would be received after the artist had

18 At the commissioners’ 413th Meeting on June 19, 1900, they approved a measure to extend contract offers to Simmons, Walker, and Thayer. See transcript of meeting minutes in folder “James Otis Arguing against the Writs of Assistance in the Old Town House,” Art Commission (hereafter cited as Otis folder, Art Commission). Above quote in “Reid’s Mural Painting: The Latest of State House Decorations,” Boston Transcript, 20 December 1901, unpaginated clipping in Otis folder, Art Commission. 19 Reid signed a contract on May 24, 1901. See transcript of contract in Otis folder, Art Commission.

“decided upon the general scheme for the picture” and started the work.20 For his first mural, Simmons executed The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth. For the second, the artist painted Battle at Concord Bridge, representing common soldiers fighting during the first armed resistance to British aggression on April 19, 1775 (figure 2-5). Henry Oliver Walker thematized the pursuit of religious freedom in The Pilgrims on the Mayflower, showing the fatigued emigrants aboard their ship as they first sight land off Cape Cod in 1620 (figure 2-6). For his other mural, Walker composed John Eliot Preaching to the Indians, which depicts the Puritan missionary in his efforts to convert the local Algonquian natives to Christianity during the mid-seventeenth century (figure 2-7). The artists enjoyed rather agreeable terms in their contracts. Paid $6,000 for each mural, they received installments as work progressed, as well as the final payment upon completion. They were also given significant time to execute the murals. Walker and Simmons had fifteen months to finish a first canvas and then another six months for the second canvas. (At the Library of Congress, they were paid $5,700 and $8,000, respectively, for an entire series of eight or nine murals, executed in roughly the same amount of time.21 At Boston, they fared more handsomely, each earning a total of $12,000 for two paintings.) Both Walker and Simmons missed their

20 In his autobiography, Simmons stated that his “subject was War” and indicated that he chose the Return of the Battle Flags subject; see Edward Simmons, From Seven to Seventy: Memoirs of a Painter and a Yankee (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1922), 272. See also Bailey Van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 137-138. During deliberations on the bill that would fund the decorations, there was an amendment proposed in the House stipulating that “the selection of subjects and designs for such paintings” be made by a joint commission composed of the state house commissioners, three members of the Senate, and three members of the House; the amendment was voted down. See Journal of the House, 23 May 1900, clipping in Concord Bridge folder, Art Commission. According to Susan Greendyke Lachevre, Art Collections Manager at the Massachusetts Art Commission, it is not known whether the state house commissioners or the artists selected the mural subjects (appointment, 23 July 2008). A reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript remarked on the selection of Walker’s Pilgrim subject in a review of the mural, but his comments are not conclusive: “We think [Walker’s] version of the historical event abundantly justifies the wisdom of the State House Commissioners in choosing him as the painter of this theme.” See “The New Mural Paintings in the State House by Walker and Simmons,” Boston Evening Transcript, 31 May 1902, 19. The transcript of Simmons’ contract is in folder “The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth” and Walker’s contract is in folder, “The Pilgrims on the Mayflower,” Art Commission (hereafter cited as Return of the Colors folder and Pilgrims folder, respectively). 21 See the Library of Congress entries in “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers.

deadlines by several months, but without penalty.22 Reid, who signed his contract for James Otis Arguing against the Writs of Assistance in the Old Town House at a later date, made his deadline, and the painting was the first to be installed in the state house (figure 2-8). Pleased with Reid’s work, the commissioners contracted the artist three years later in March 1904 for two smaller paintings to be placed on either side of James Otis. Both depict Revolutionary-Era acts of resistance to British rule: Paul Revere’s Ride and The Boston Tea Party (figures 2-9 and 2-10).23 As with Roosevelt’s Americanism, a faith in conversion structures the mural program at the Massachusetts State House. Reid, Simmons, and Walker pictured a usable past, selecting turning-point narratives that frame state history as an ongoing story of Americanization.24 In turn-of-the-century Boston, a political environment of ethnic conflict tested this faith in conversion. Coupled with the city’s rising diversity, the late-nineteenth-century decline of partisanship as the primary mode of political action led to ethnic hostilities during the Progressive Era, as Boston residents were encouraged to identify with their ethnic, class, or neighborhood communities and then to act politically according to that group loyalty. This climate of ethnic antagonism stirred beneath a language of Progressive reform stressing consensus and a shared vision of communal response, as historian James Connolly has shown.25 Alongside President Roosevelt, local settlement workers, Brahmin businessmen, Irish politicians, education officials, and muralists at the state house all employed a consensus model as

22 Introduced as a pair, Simmons’ Return of the Colors (east panel) and Walker’s Pilgrims on the Mayflower (north panel) were publicly unveiled on May 29, 1902. Their other two compositions were also to debut together, but delays by Walker prevented it. Battle at Concord Bridge (west panel) went on view on December 17, 1902, and John Eliot Preaching to the Indians (south panel) on April 8, 1903. 23 The Otis mural was installed in December 1901 and unveiled to the public on January 1, 1902. Reid was paid $6,000 for this first mural and then another $6,000 for the two side murals. 24 Van Wyck Brooks developed the idea of a “usable past” during the following decade, exhorting American writers and fellow literary critics to mine the past for a creative spirit that could nurture native cultural production in the present. Brooks’ personal vision of a usable past, however, did not include the kind of official history that Reid, Simmons, and Walker depicted. In contrast to this heroic past, Brooks looked to folk, vernacular, and non-traditional narratives. See Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial (1 April 1918): 337-341. 25 See James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

a means to style their particular agendas for change in unifying terms, a strategy used both despite and because of the ethnic hostilities threatening such claims to cohesion. Progressive educators, for instance, linked reform with civic consensus, looking to modernize the Massachusetts public school system so that it better served its diverse population, while also refashioning the school as an agent of Americanism. With compulsory attendance laws, school board centralization, and the standardization of curriculum, public education by the late nineteenth century had become a pervasive institution, through which Boston reformers attempted to remake their environment by tasking the school with specific socializing objectives. School officials employed the classroom to teach English to foreign-born residents; to instruct newcomers on cultural mores and social systems, such as personal hygiene, job seeking, and naturalization procedures; and to instill immigrants with a sense of patriotism for their new homeland through lessons in American history. This was an explicitly behavioral approach to citizenship education. Like the schoolchildren at the Library of Congress in Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photographs, immigrant children and adults in Boston learned that being a good citizen meant following a genteel code of conduct prescribed by Progressive educators. Teaching behavior as the pathway to becoming American, in Theodore Roosevelt’s vision, infused curricula at Massachusetts public schools, evening schools, and social centers (schools opened during off hours for recreation and civic programming, supported by public financing). The textbooks used by working-class immigrants at state-funded night schools, for instance, functioned as “handbooks for life in America,” in the words of historian Marvin Lazerson.26 With the outbreak of World War I in Europe, the strategies of conversion set forth during Roosevelt’s administration (and practiced by Boston educators) would

26 See chapter 8, “The Quest for Citizenship,” in Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 202-240, especially 204 and 219-220; quote on 219. A 1907 committee of the Boston Public Schools created a “civic primer” for newcomers attending night schools, with the aim of assisting “in the work of teaching American citizenship.” Its chapters were to “deal concretely with those phases of municipal government with which the foreigner first comes into contact,” offering how-to instructions on Americanism. See “School Document No. 13,” in Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Boston, July 1907 (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1907), 36-37. See also Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance, 90-106; and Burns, “The Irony of Progressive Reform,” 137-144.

give way to more aggressive, coercive means of Americanizing foreign-born residents. Instead of persuading immigrants through a network of government and cultural agencies to adopt Americanism, fervent nativists along with moderate Progressives employed that network to compel immigrants to change their ways and demonstrate loyalty to their new nation.27 At the time of the Massachusetts State House commissions, it was the pre-war faith in conversion that guided both political and artistic Progressivism. Painters at the state house fused their own efforts to define an American style of mural painting with broader reform goals to Americanize ethnic communities. Cultivating a Progressive identity, muralists looked to reform their field of art (to modernize an older art form) and to fit their practice into the era’s reform agendas. The shift from allegory to historical realism marks a change in aesthetic vocabulary as well as an intellectual retuning of spirit and mission, as U.S. muralists shaped an enlarged civic role for monumental painting during the twentieth century’s earliest years. Edward Simmons’ murals at the Library of Congress and at the Massachusetts State House, for example, stand in stark contrast—one divine, schematic, timeless, and feminine, the other earthly, circumstantial, temporal, and masculine. For the library, he created a series of lunettes depicting the Nine Muses of art, poetry, and science. His allegorical maidens, wrapped in flowing drapery and accompanied by symbolic attributes, each float in a lofty, ethereal zone (see figure 1-12). Five years after his Muses, Simmons rooted mural painting in the hard realities of soldiering and sacrifice. No longer did he paint Clio, the muse of history, as he had at the library, but Massachusetts history itself. 28 The period’s critical discussions on the art of mural painting help illuminate the ways in which such stylistic revision registered as a mark of Progressivism. Simmons, as well as Reid and Walker, navigated a reformist identity through this mural discourse.

27 On the coercive practices of Americanization during and after World War I, see Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance, 107-123; Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 90-115; and Gerstle, American Crucible, 88-95. 28 Simmons painted a mythologizing history of Massachusetts, which I address later in the chapter.

Talk about mural painting in the press, spanning the 1890s to the 1910s, proved particularly fiery at the moment of the Massachusetts decorations, as enthusiasm for the medium, kindled at the Library of Congress, turned to more heavy- handed instruction regarding how to deliver on the promise of a national art of mural painting. Participants in the conversation expressed a diversity of opinions. Aside from concurring more or less on the rules of decoration—how wall painting harmonizes with its architectural surroundings—they discussed the subjects, styles, professional best practices, and audiences for public mural painting. The debates boiled down to two key elements. First, spokesmen agreed that Europe provided the model for mural painting, but they disagreed about how that model should inspire an American movement. Second, most spokesmen shared an understanding of murals as a public educator, but differed on what form murals should take to meet that need in a democratic society. Through these debates about style, muralists engaged in larger questions about how they could be successful Progressive reformers. More than simply internal discussions about the look and practices of the medium, such aesthetic wrangling was steeped in the broader cultural transition from Gilded-Age cosmopolitanism to Progressive-Era nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Stylistically, mural leaders argued whether a democratic art of mural painting in the U.S. should look European. In other words, did the academic forms of allegory and their abstract meanings serve the needs of public art in an American context? Concerned with creating a mural movement that both looked American and spoke to native viewers, leaders debated whether such terms limited muralists to one painterly mode. To what extent did historical realism offer muralists an innovative, native path forward, a means to shake their imitator status as students of Paris and Rome? Did painting an American art mean painting an American past? A growing contingent of mural spokesmen made this case. Muralist and critic Charles Shean led the charge, strongly advocating a public art that celebrated America’s own history and found inspiration in the traditions of its native land. “The artist must learn to make the walls of our public buildings splendid

with pictured records of American exploit and achievement, of American industry and commerce, of American life and culture,” insisted Shean in Municipal Affairs in 1901.29 In his plea for local, historical subjects, Shean castigated those who remained “old in spirit and feeble in invention” by recycling European forms of “well worn and over-used allegories and personifications, characterless figures of no particular age or clime.” In 1904, he pointed to recent, successful examples of history painting writ large, such as the murals at the Baltimore Courthouse, whose subjects narrate the history of Maryland, as well as those at the Massachusetts State House. According to Shean, once muralists and their civic patrons discovered that America indeed had a history of her own—worthy of commemoration—American art “will speak with no foreign accent.”30 In his pitch, Shean constructed allegory as European and historical realism as American, painting a tidy vision of old verses new, weak versus bold, theirs versus ours. Yet, Europe’s long shadow of influence proved more nebulous. American painters negotiated a rather tricky relationship with their European teachings, as the Old World offered a source of legitimacy for decoration as a viable public art while it also threatened to trap U.S. muralists, many believed, within stale artistic conventions. Those artists who had studied abroad witnessed firsthand the decorative splendors of France, whose government had launched a grand campaign in the late nineteenth century to adorn its civic institutions. In Paris, lavish mural programs at the Opéra (1860s-1870s), the Panthéon (1870s-1890s), the Hôtel de Ville (1880s-1890s), and other structures inspired U.S. painters and provided a vivid model of emulation for a homegrown movement. While allegory was in no short supply at such venues, some French muralists had begun to paint historical subjects. Artists and critics in France were having their own debates about the merits of idealism and realism; those discussions unfolded in the 1880s and 1890s during the height of the country’s mural movement, a decade or two before Americans found themselves entrenched in the

29 Charles M. Shean, “The Decoration of Public Buildings: A Plea for Americanism in Subject and Ornamental Detail,” Municipal Affairs 5 (September 1901): 712. 30 Charles M. Shean, “Mural Painting from the American Point of View,” Craftsman 7 (October 1904): 25 and 26.

same issues.31 The look of mural painting was not a settled issue in France or in the U.S. By insisting that the American mural movement had reached a critical phase, when artists would have to recalibrate their academic training for an American context, Charles Shean shifted the terms of mural debate in the U.S. from the art form’s mode as “decoration” to its teaching of civic lessons. Instead of focusing on the technical and compositional elements of harmonizing wall painting to surrounding architecture, Shean placed new emphasis on mural painting’s effectiveness in transmitting nationalist narratives. Through questions on style and subject, he positioned mural painting as an agent of Progressivism, a means to uplift, inspire, and instruct viewing communities by scaling up a shared, usable, American past. Shean’s call for national subjects, realist forms, finding the national in local stories, and Americanizing a supposedly un-American (i.e. European) genre served as a ready- guide for muralists to participate in Roosevelt’s Americanization campaign. Shean’s ideas took hold in artistic communities. Several critics, for example, revised their assessment of the Library of Congress murals in the early years of the twentieth century, recasting classical allegory as an overdone and ineffectively painterly mode. The mural program’s floating females, which initially garnered praise for being culturally uplifting and artistically sharp, registered as dull and out of touch by the next decade.32 In 1906, architectural critic Russell Sturgis yawned in response

31 For a short history of the French mural movement and its importance for American artists, see Annelise K. Madsen, “The Mural Movement in Paris,” in Wanda M. Corn, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (University of California Press, forthcoming). See also Marie Jeannine Aquilino, “Painted Promises: The Politics of Public Art in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Art Bulletin 75 (December 1993): 697-712; and Le triomphe des mairies: Grand décors républicains à Paris, 1870-1914 (Paris: Musée du Petit Palais, 1986). For a period review of French murals by an American artist, see Will H. Low, “The Mural Paintings in the Panthéon and Hôtel de Ville of Paris,” Scribner’s Magazine 12 (December 1892): 661-677. Shean did look to Europe as a worthy model in instances where murals of historical realism adorned city walls; the lesson for Americans was to paint indigenous subjects. In this case, taking artistic cues from Europe meant turning one’s eyes away from the Continent. See Shean, “The Decoration of Public Buildings,” 713- 716. 32 Sarah Moore has suggested that a growing divide in the American mural movement among the “cosmopolitan universalists” and the “cultural nationalists” is discernible in the critical reaction to the Library of Congress and in the debates over allegorical and ideal subjects versus national and historical subjects. I agree with Moore; however, I wish to emphasize that such a divide becomes discernible, more precisely, in the revisionary or retrospective critiques of the national library—those that come

to “the rather wearying sequence of metaphorical, symbolical, non-natural subjects in our mural painting.”33 Charles Caffin, who had contributed an essay to Herbert Small’s handbook to the library, also changed his tune. In 1897, he discerned a “clearness of purpose and certainty of accomplishment” in the murals by Kenyon Cox. Ten years later, Caffin replaced praise with contempt: “[Cox’s] conception displays no imagination and offers little interest to the visitor. In this threadbare affectation of classicalism there is evidence neither of American inspiration nor of the painter himself having any participation in the fulness of our modern life.”34 Like Shean, Caffin had come to expect murals to reflect and relate to contemporary American viewers, seeing allegory as a stumbling block to that objective. Other critics did not dismiss the Library of Congress as readily as Caffin, but simply reframed the art- historical narrative, positioning the mural program as a decidedly formative stage in a maturing movement.35 While Shean represented a Progressive voice in mural circles, other spokesmen for the field offered competing visions of what a civically-minded and modern mural painting should look like. Notably, Edwin Blashfield and Will Low tried to navigate alternative paths that did not entirely abandon European training or cosmopolitanism. Artist of the classically-inspired Evolution of Civilization in the Congressional Library, Blashfield resisted Shean’s demand for strictly historical subjects, while not overturning his conception of allegory as a foreign mode. In contrast to Shean’s assertion that “the tiresome collections of classical paraphernalia” would “fade and vanish away,” Blashfield claimed both realism and idealism for the field of mural painting. 36 He asserted: “There are people who say, when we decorate American over the course of the next decade, once such tensions have already found material form on the walls of other public spaces, such as the Massachusetts State House. See Moore, “In Search of an American Iconography: Critical Reaction to the Murals at the Library of Congress,” Winterthur Portfolio 25 (Winter 1990): 231-239. 33 Russell Sturgis, “Mural Painting,” Forum 37 (January 1906): 368. 34 Charles H. Caffin, “The Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting,” in Herbert Small, et al., Handbook of the New Library of Congress (Boston: Curtis & Cameron, 1897): 120; and Charles H. Caffin, The Story of American Painting (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1907), 324. 35 See for example Samuel Isham, The History of American Painting (1905; New York: MacMillan Company, 1927): 556-559. 36 Shean, “Mural Painting from the American Point of View,” 26.

buildings, we want the celebration of American history, we do not want foreign decoration of symbolical figures; we want realistic painting, not idealistic. There I beg to contradict flatly. We want both kinds, and we want them very much.”37 Blashfield advocated American subjects such as settlement and exploration, the steamboat and electricity, and the history of finance, envisioning these realistic subjects working in combination with ideal ones. American painting, Blashfield insisted, could rightfully speak in lofty terms: “The grand people of allegory, the men and women with swords and scales and trumpet of Fame and all that, belong to us as much as to the Renaissance.”38 The drive to cultivate a national art with American roots also preoccupied muralist Will Low, whose ideas bridged the distance between Shean and Blashfield. Low acknowledged the role of Europe as an artistic measuring stick, insisting that a mastery of foreign forms had equipped artists to take on the still pressing task of painting American subjects with homegrown innovation. He wrote in International Monthly in 1901 that “art is a foreign language which we speak with fluency and expression; but we still lack a method of expression which is unmistakably our own.” Discerning decorative possibility in Native Americans and their “mythology,” southern everglades, western mines, the frontiersman, and the American woman, Low envisioned a national mural painting no longer beholden to classical precedents. “Not that we should be...limited to subject[s] indigenous to our soil...but the complacent acceptance of threadbare allegory or conveyance of ready-made solutions of problems, which we should solve for ourselves, should no longer prevail,” he cautioned.39 Low emphasized that the crux of the matter was not so much the influence of European- inspired forms as it was the complacency of American artists to regurgitate those forms without thought or invention. With no conventions to lean on, national subjects would spur the country’s muralists to find “national expression,” in Low’s words.40

37 Edwin Howland Blashfield, “A Word for Municipal Art,” Municipal Affairs 3 (December 1899): 583. 38 Edwin Howland Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” Municipal Affairs 2 (March 1898): 104. 39 Will H. Low, “National Expression in American Art,” International Monthly 3 (March 1901): 234 and 248-249. 40 The search for national expression, and the debates about the role of European training in American artistic practice, began decades earlier with the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. See Linda Jones

Although Blashfield and Low had their differences with Shean about the forms of and pathway to an American brand of mural painting, they, like Shean, framed their arguments through the question of relevancy versus technical skill. This was not a debate about how to make public decorations or about the proficiency of American artists, but about how to communicate nationalist messages. While Blashfield looked for a way to hold on to ideal forms, claiming a place for them in American murals as conveyors of abstract principles appropriate to a U.S. context, Shean flatly rejected allegory in favor of realism. And it was Shean’s ideas that resonated most strongly with Theodore Roosevelt’s singular nationalism. For both Roosevelt and Shean, making Americanism visible proved a pressing objective in the early twentieth century. Such debates over subject and style were also rooted in a shared expectation that murals in a democratic society communicate to broad audiences in a plainspoken manner. As discussed in chapter one, Blashfield championed mural decoration as an art “of the people, for the people, by the people” that could influence a community through its “painted lessons.”41 Such democratic rhetoric hung on assumptions that murals communicated universally and transparently, glossing over conditions of access and control that inevitably shaped what version of history became public history (or what version of culture became public culture) and which communities would interpret or embrace that painted narrative. Despite these short circuits in thinking about mural painting as a democratic art, such talk nevertheless signaled a desire on the part of artists to be useful, to effect change in American civic life. This investment in democracy harmonized with Progressive reformers in social and political circles, who believed that coalitions of ordinary men and women could make a difference. Like other groups working to purify milk or to transform privately- owned utilities into public ones, painters aimed to build a national art of mural painting into a form of public action.

Docherty, “A Search for Identity: American Art Criticism and the Concept of the ‘Native School,’ 1876-1893” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1985). 41 Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” 100 and 102.

Muralists saw their contribution through a pedagogical lens—murals represented a visual form of public education. As such, they tied their artistic practice to the broader Progressive belief in education as a critical, democratizing instrument for the common good.42 Blashfield pointed to Europe as a model for the civic aims of the American movement: “When the uneducated French peasant visiting the city happens to come into the presence of these wall paintings he is immediately taught something about things very desirable indeed to know, yet which would never have occurred to him if he had not seen them pictured.”43 According to Blashfield, monumental painting as public educator acquainted the viewer with local history; instilled a sense of pride and patriotism; celebrated such values as courage, innovation, and service; and imparted a sense of art’s worthiness for the community. 44 Blashfield may have set his sights high in looking to murals to teach ideals such as justice and charity, but that idealizing frame did not render murals timeless. Murals could direct lessons on common origins and civic duty, for instance, befitting the agendas of Progressivism. Anxiety concerning “uneducated” populations (read immigrants) motivated many reform initiatives in early-twentieth-century America, and spokesmen like Blashfield positioned murals as a timely curriculum in paint. The idea of a democratic art also preoccupied Charles Shean, who stressed that mural painting’s status as such was not inherent, but earned. Because decorations in the U.S. resided in a democratic society, they had particular obligations to their audiences. Concerned with the practical uses of mural painting, Shean dismissed stale compositions that continued to “bedizen and bedeck,” as he put it, through idealizing forms. In order to modernize their field, U.S. painters needed to set their sights not on the heavens, but on the earth, “savor[ing] the soil” and planting “roots” in American life and culture. Reminding his readers that the country’s people “have a history,”

42 Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s-1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 66 and 230. 43 Blashfield, “A Word for Municipal Art,” 586. 44 Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” 102-104.

Shean called on native muralists to attend to “the walls of America’s public monuments” which were then still “bare and innocent of America.”45 At the Massachusetts State House, Reid, Simmons, and Walker scaled up an American “past as freedom fighters,” investing like Shean in a historically-rooted mural painting as a way to visualize Progressive reform and to make their art instrumental to citizenship training in Roosevelt’s America.46 In their creation of a Progressive mode of mural painting, the artists experimented with subject, form, and composition, designing decorations that emphasized the common man, collective struggles, transformative moments, and American identity formation. Edward Simmons, for example, focused on anonymous soldiers in both of his war paintings. The Return of the Colors and Battle at Concord Bridge feature the backs of soldiers, moving away from the viewer (see figures 2-3 and 2-5). In the Battle at Concord Bridge, an arc of charging patriots extends from the bottom left to the upper right. He places the viewer within the pursuit, as a soldier among soldiers, advancing collectively toward the British-held bridge in the distance. Simmons resisted making his new realist mode a kind of monumental portraiture, a painted hall of honor. For The Return of the Colors, the artist insisted that he “did not wish to do a group of portraits, but a decoration.”47 By placing battle-worn flags at the heart of the composition, held aloft by color sergeants marching with their backs to the viewer, Simmons escaped the conventions of portraiture and skirted expectations by veteran officers and their families that the mural would include their likenesses. Not even the governor secured a prominent position in the composition, as “he was about five feet high, ‘pot-gutted,’ bald headed, and not an attractive object from a painter’s point of view,” Simmons later recalled.48

45 Shean, “Mural Painting from the American Point of View,” 21; and Shean, “The Decoration of Public Buildings,” 712 and 716. 46 Existing murals in Boston did not picture expressly American subjects, such as John La Farge’s Trinity Church paintings and those by Edwin Austin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes at the Boston Public Library. 47 Simmons, From Seven to Seventy, 273. 48 Ibid.

Simmons’ murals at the Massachusetts State House represent a departure from the one prominent example of historical mural painting that Americans could claim— those by John Trumbull and other artists for the U.S. Capitol, dating from the early and mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on subjects of early exploration, settlement, and the American Revolution, the eight panels in the rotunda depict turning points in American history through a different set of compositional strategies than that used in Boston.49 In The Declaration of Independence, for example, Trumbull featured a cast of great men, not common men, painting a kind of hall of honor that Simmons expressly resisted doing (figure 2-11). Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams anchor the composition, which Trumbull filled with the exact likenesses of dozens of founding fathers at Independence Hall. Moreover, for each of his battlefield scenes, The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga and The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Trumbull focused on a peaceful exchange among officers—George Washington ever present—creating centralized, balanced compositions that celebrated nationhood through the orderly, rational, and tranquil actions of heroic men. Notably, in his plea for national subjects, Charles Shean pointed to the U.S. Capitol as an example of decoration “whose motive and inspiration is American.” Yet, like Simmons, he found its paintings “lacking in mural qualities.”50 Shean encouraged early-twentieth-century muralists to look to the Capitol program for its nationalist spirit, and then to find new ways of doing monumental history painting that put their generation’s technical training in the service of teaching locally-rooted civic lessons for Progressive-Era audiences. While refocusing history painting largely on the common man, the artists at the state house nonetheless cultivated a sense of grandeur and idealism in their murals, an expectation held by both commissioners and critics. Picturing a history of Massachusetts also proved an exercise in personal expression, as the artists had to

49 The five artists were John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Robert Weir, John Chapman, and William Powell. For more on the eight rotunda paintings and how they express nineteenth-century visions of nationhood, see Ann Uhry Abrams, “National Paintings and American Character: Historical Murals in the Capitol’s Rotunda,” in Picturing History: American Painting 1770-1930, ed. William Ayers (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 65-79. 50 Shean, “Mural Painting from the American Point of View,” 25.

capture “the typical essence of the motive, and make it representative, historical in a large and grand sense,” in the words of one critic.51 Simmons, Reid, and Walker made choices about what moments in the state’s past to scale up, what historical artifacts to consult, which protagonists should tell the story, and how their own painterly style would shape that story. For James Otis Arguing against the Writs of Assistance in the Old Town House, the one subject commissioners had decided upon in advance, Robert Reid crafted a mural solution to a subject that his colleagues had dismissed as “undecorative” and “almost unpaintable” (see figure 2-8).52 After reading a letter by John Adams, who witnessed the event and recalled its details over fifty years later, Reid determined that he could create a mural that both honored the historical evidence and worked pictorially as monumental painting. The story suggested to Reid that he could use color to structure his composition. Adams’ description revealed that the judges wore scarlet robes and powdered wigs, and that the event in the council chamber took place by firelight. Applauded for his daring use of vivid pigment in earlier allegorical assignments like at the Library of Congress, Reid approached his historical subject at the state house as a colorist.53 Heightening the dramatics of the event with theatrical lighting and bright pigment, Reid gave monumentality and force to the obtuse procedures of litigation. In the composition, which viewers can see at eye level from the second-floor balcony of Senate Staircase Hall, Otis stands in profile just left of center, gesturing upward dramatically with his right hand as he orates before Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and four other judges on the unjust nature of the Crown’s writs of assistance in February 1761. Draped in crimson robes and long white wigs, the judges sit nearby at their bench, stoically listening to Otis’ impassioned arguments as the flickering light of an open fire casts shadows of their forms on the chamber’s rear

51 “The New Mural Paintings in the State House by Walker and Simmons,” Boston Evening Transcript, 19. 52 “Reid’s Mural Painting: The Latest of State House Decorations,” Boston Transcript. 53 Ibid.; and William A. Coffin, “Robert Reid’s Decorations in the Congressional Library, Washington, D.C.,” Harper’s Weekly (17 October 1896): 1028-1029.

wall. On the left behind Otis, a crowd of local officials has gathered near the doorway to witness the trial. An adjacent window reveals the cool light of a winter’s day, contrasting with the warm reds and oranges of the interior firelight.54 Reporters and art critics often quoted Adams’ letter at length in their reviews of the mural, the founding father’s animated prose bolstering Reid’s portrayal with a sense of grandeur. Just as Otis’ raised finger acts pictorially as the fulcrum for the lawyer’s assertion of independence, Adams’ recollection of the event reinforces its pivotal role in American history: “But Otis was a flame of fire!—with a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates…American independence was then and there born; the seeds of patriots and heroes were then and there sown…Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”55 Critics discerned harmony between Reid’s painted vision of Otis and Adams’ verbal description, calling the mural “a veritable triumph” and giving its creator solid marks as a decorator.56 Painting two companion panels three years later in 1904, Paul Revere’s Ride and The Boston Tea Party, Reid constructed a vision of progress rooted in acts of resistance—acts which performed national identity in the making. On the left, Paul Revere rides on horseback through a Middlesex village on the eve of April 18, 1775, warning a farmer and his wife who stand ready at their doorstep of the imminent conflict with British troops (see figure 2-9). Revere lunges from his horse with a dramatic gesture whose force echoes Otis’ pose nearby. On the right, colonists aboard a docked vessel in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, throw its cargo of tea

54 In the hundred years since Reid’s canvas was installed, the colors have grown dim due to dirt and aging varnish. Conservation of the mural was attempted in 1994, but abandoned after tests revealed the difficulty of cleaning the varnish without removing paint, according to Susan Greendyke Lachevre at the Massachusetts Art Commission (appointment, 23 July 2008). For a period description of the painting’s color, see Charles Henry Hart, “Robert Reid’s Mural Decoration in the New State House at Boston,” Era 9 (April 1902): 446. 55 John Adams’ letter cited in “Reid’s Mural Painting: The Latest of State House Decorations,” Boston Transcript. Adams wrote the letter to William Tudor in order to preserve the details of the event for a commemorative painting, which Adams thought desirable. 56 Ibid. See also Hart, “Robert Reid’s Mural Decoration in the New State House at Boston,” 446; Bell, “Recent Mural Decorations in Some State Capitols,” 724-725; and Royal Cortissoz, “The Work of Robert Reid,” Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine 6 (December 1905): 742.

overboard, protesting the tax levied by the Crown (see figure 2-10). Attempting to disguise themselves as American Indians, each of the eight figures sports feathers in his hair; the full-length figure with his back to us is dressed in fringed pants. As colorist, Reid skillfully wove the central panel’s “fire motive,” in the words of critic Irene Sargent, into the other two, with lantern light glowing through the doorway in the left panel and with light emanating from the hold of the ship in the right panel (figure 2-12).57 Unlike the sweeping narratives of progress that Edwin Blashfield and John White Alexander constructed on the walls of the Library of Congress in The Evolution of Civilization and The Evolution of the Book, respectively, Reid’s triptych charts progress chronologically on a much smaller scale. Here, the rise of nation-building transpires in fourteen compact years of a political history rooted in Massachusetts, beginning with Otis’ argument in 1761 and reaching a crescendo with Revere’s ride in 1775. Instead of picturing progress as a long, steady trek from ancient to modern society, Robert Reid rendered progress in distinctly local terms—the seminal events of America’s formation unfolded on Massachusetts soil—crafting a common origin story that bypassed any reference, for instance, to Spanish exploration, Christopher Columbus, settlement in Virginia, or Native American resistance to colonization.58 Look no further than the state history of Massachusetts for the seeds of Americanism, Reid’s murals proffered. The artist depicted three successive catalysts of political freedom: “[T]he Boston Tea Party and the Ride of Paul Revere are the two facts in the colonial history of Massachusetts best emphasizing the progress of the spirit of liberty which germinated in the plea of Otis,” in Sargent’s words.59 Together, they model Americanization as an act of self-transformation, in keeping with Roosevelt’s vision, rooted by Reid in the country’s revolutionary beginnings.

57 Irene Sargent, “The Mural Paintings by Robert Reid in the Massachusetts State House,” Craftsman 7 (March 1905): 711. Along with the Revere and Tea Party murals, Reid was commissioned to paint two ornamental panels, which were installed between the three murals, each separated by Ionic pilasters. These depict medallion portraits of John Hancock on the left and Samuel Adams on the right, accompanied by colonial flags. Painter Edward Trumbull assisted Reid on the 1904 commissions. 58 For an examination of the ancient/modern vision of progress in nineteenth-century public art, see Corn, et al., Women Building History. 59 Sargent, “The Mural Paintings by Robert Reid in the Massachusetts State House,” 711.

Henry Oliver Walker took a different tack toward history painting in his first of two murals for Memorial Hall. For The Pilgrims on the Mayflower, Walker employed a hybrid mode that placed allegorical and historical forms in the same picture, but in separate planes (see figure 2-6). In the lower register, he composed a group of Pilgrims gathered on the deck of their ship at the moment they sight land off to the left. Sitting, kneeling, and standing, the figures express a range of emotion, from fatigue to resolve. In the upper register, Walker stuck to the allegorical vocabulary that characterized his previous mural assignments, depicting two angelic figures holding a Bible, who spiritually guide the immigrants across the Atlantic in their pursuit of religious freedom. Given Blashfield’s assertion that modern American mural painting needed both lofty and earthly figures, Walker’s design provided a plausible solution. But overall, the painting did not read as historical enough for viewers. Critic Russell Sturgis, for instance, was jarred by the “superhuman beings” floating above the Pilgrims, and the reporter for the Boston Herald found the allegorical group more convincing—“more real”—than the historical figures below. 60 Walker’s somewhat awkward composition signaled a rather conservative gesture toward mural history-telling in comparison to Simmons and Reid, artists of a younger generation. (Simmons was nine years younger than Walker; Reid was nineteen years younger.)61 That Simmons’ military compositions (the east and west panels) hung adjacent to The Pilgrims on the Mayflower (the north panel) only highlighted the artists’ stylistic differences. Yet like his fellow muralists, Walker did construct a transformative, group-centered event, which focused on the sacrifices of unnamed Pilgrims. Similar to Simmons, Walker chose not to paint portraits of specific Pilgrim leaders. In this, he differed from Robert Weir at the U.S. Capitol, who structured his early-nineteenth-century mural of the same subject around the figure of the ruling elder, William Brewster, encircled by other prominent Pilgrims. 62

60 Sturgis, “Mural Painting,” 376; and “Two Paintings in Memorial Hall at the State House Unveiled and the Other Two of the Four Are Still Being Painted,” Boston Herald, 30 May 1902, 12. 61 Henry Oliver Walker was born in 1843, Edward Simmons in 1852, and Robert Reid in 1862. 62 Placed in the U.S. Capitol in 1844, Robert Weir’s Embarkation of the Pilgrims depicts the moment of departure from Holland, in contrast to Walker’s setting close to American (and more specifically, Massachusetts) shores. See Abrams, “National Paintings and American Character,” 75.

Walker’s second try fulfilled more successfully the state officials’ mandate for historical mural painting. Criticized for delivering a mural that was not historical enough, Walker modified his stylistic approach in his next painting. There are no allegorical forms in John Eliot Preaching to the Indians, which depicts the missionary preaching to a group of attentive Native Americans in a forested landscape on the banks of the Charles River (see figure 2-7). Reviewers deemed the elimination of allegory a positive move.63 In the composition, Eliot stands on a rocky pulpit, arms outstretched, as he addresses his Algonquian audience. Walker aligns the idea of mural as teacher with that of Eliot as teacher. The activities of listening, looking, and thinking enacted within the space of the mural would be mirrored by those of Progressive-Era visitors in Memorial Hall. Picturing Eliot endeavoring to Christianize the native populations of Massachusetts, Walker thematized education as a tool of conversion. At the Massachusetts State House, history’s vitality for the present gained force in the murals by Reid, Simmons, and Walker, with local terrain serving as the footing for these momentous events—Cape Cod, Boston, the banks of the Charles River, and the state house’s very steps. Edward Simmons, of “good old Massachusetts stock,” grew up a stone’s throw from Concord Bridge, painting a scene, in turn, whose landscape and history signified personally, locally, and nationally. 64 The decorative program reinforced Charles Shean’s assertion that a realist vocabulary could give worthy, monumental form to stories rooted in the country’s past. Yet by investing in historical realism at the state house, the muralists did not completely lay aside Edwin Blashfield’s ideas, particularly his appeal to fellow Progressives to embrace mural

63 See “Decorative Scheme for Memorial Hall Completed with Last of Its Paintings,” Boston Herald, 9 April 1903, 8. The debate over allegorical and historical forms in a single composition did not end here at the Massachusetts State House. There were more hybrid compositions to come in later state capitol commissions as well as at other civic venues. Blashfield made the hybrid mode his specialty; see chapter five for an examination of his hybrid design for the Wisconsin State Capitol. 64 Arthur Hoeber, “Edward Emerson Simmons,” Brush and Pencil 5 (March 1900): 241. See also Sumner Crane and Susan Lehman, “Daniel Chester French and Edward Emerson Simmons: The Minute Man and the Battle at Concord Bridge,” American Art Review 8 (June-August 1996): 104-107 and 160. The historical content of the murals even resonated with one another as, for example, the Return of the Colors ceremony on the steps of the state house in 1865 transpired on Forefathers’ Day, which commemorated the 245th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. It thus seemed fitting for these two paintings to be unveiled together to the public, taking place on May 29, 1902.

painting as a public educator. Civic art enthusiasts eyed the audiences in Boston and throughout Massachusetts that would take in the capitol’s “painted lessons.”65

The turn to historical subjects by muralists in the early years of the twentieth century bolstered Progressive-Era practices of citizenship formation with the weight of the past. The murals at the Massachusetts State House visualize the process of becoming American. On the capitol’s walls, the defining moments of American history play out, keyed to the eyes and interests of the Commonwealth’s citizenry: Pilgrims sight (local) land and a new beginning, James Otis asserts the rights of American colonists before a court of the Crown, Paul Revere rides through the night calling on fellow patriots to take up arms against the British, the men of Concord and Lexington answer that call. Collectively, these turning points in U.S. history— constructed as pivotal through both myth and monumentality—model acts of citizens in the making. Civic identity comes into focus through the agency of past Americans who responded to a call to duty, placing their individual intellect and grit at the service of the nation (or future nation). Pictured, stilled, and aggrandized, the process of becoming American is celebrated here not only as Massachusetts’ proud past, but also as the source of civic behaviors and beliefs worthy of emulation for both the present and future. As aesthetic reformers, the muralists created a painted curriculum that resonated beyond the walls of the state house, teaching civic lessons that tangled history with myth. The Progressive drive toward Americanism was powered by a myth of common origins, a belief that extraordinary episodes of certain individuals or groups in the past could serve as representative narratives for the experiences and values of present-day, multi-ethnic society. Myths are stories that help organize the society that produces them. Told and retold over generations, such narratives gain symbolic meanings that ground a community’s values, beliefs, and identity in historical experiences. According to Richard Slotkin, myths represent a set of metaphors, or keywords, that contain ideological lessons intended to shape both behavior and

65 Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” 100.

perceptions: “Myth is invoked as a means of deriving usable values from history, and of putting those values beyond the reach of critical demystification.”66 In the process of putting the past to good use for the present, myths elevate universal rules at the expense of the particularities of history. “What is lost when history is translated into myth is the essential premise of history—the distinction of past and present itself. The past is made metaphorically equivalent to the present; and the present appears simply as a repetition of persistently recurring structures identified with the past.”67 This collapsing of chronology served Theodore Roosevelt well during the Progressive Era, as mythic retellings of the frontier, for example, became immigrant success stories for a new generation. The rough environment of the western frontier held the potential to transform character—to forge new identities—as “outsiders” braved new experiences, gaining an opportunity in the process to demonstrate their moral fiber as well as their allegiance to the nation. 68 Collapsing past and present, myth also overlays history with nature. Myth, according to Roland Barthes, “has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.”69 While myths seemingly render history tangible, they use that historical frame to impose a set of ideas as shared and self-evident, obscuring the nexus of political, social, and cultural forces that secured those ideas at the expense of others. In Barthes’ words, “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them...it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.”70 In giving monumental form to national myths of colonization, revolution, and Union, the realist murals at the Massachusetts State House provided a vehicle through which history could do ideological work for the Progressive-Era present.

66 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 16 and 19. 67 Ibid., 24. 68 Dorsey, We Are All Americans, 38-45. 69 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957; New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 142. 70 Ibid., 143.

The nearness of history, its palpability, for state house visitors obscured all the while the encodings of myth and gender at work within the murals. The painted myths tell resolutely male stories of heroic citizenship, in keeping with Roosevelt’s rugged Americanism. Theodore Roosevelt propelled his political career by masculinizing his image. To assuage late-nineteenth-century fears of decadence and effeminacy, he countered genteel manhood with a virile manhood that couched civilizing advancement in agendas of imperialism and white racial health.71 His concept of Americanism hinged in part on male muscle, as physical strength proved a prerequisite in forging a new identity. Designing gendered myths for the state house, Reid, Simmons, and Walker formulated messages for contemporary viewers in Progressive- Era Boston.72 By mythologizing history, the muralists empowered Shean’s brand of earthly subjects to do idealizing work. While Robert Reid invested in historical research for the lesser-known story of James Otis, he more expressly embraced myth in his side panels, Paul Revere’s Ride and The Boston Tea Party. The legend of Paul Revere and his famous midnight ride, for instance, developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, nearly fifty years after the event. Revere was one of many messengers on horseback who set out from Boston to alert nearby militias on the eve of the American Revolution. Yet, with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” first published in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, a mythic Revere

71 See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170-215. In addition to Roosevelt, journalists such as Lincoln Steffens promoted their agenda through a masculine lens, privileging the actions of men who stood up against the forces of corruption and acted boldly as citizens to protect their communities. See James J. Connolly, “The Public Good and the Problem of Pluralism in Lincoln Steffens’s Civic Imagination,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (April 2005): 131. 72 Decorative programs at other state capitols in the early twentieth century also employed historical realism in combination with myth. For an examination of how such a move helped states reconcile regional and national identities, see Emily Fourmy Cutrer, “Negotiating Nationalism, Representing Region: Art, History, and Ideology at the Minnesota and Texas Capitols,” in Redefining American History Painting, eds. Patricia M. Burnham and Lucretia Hoover Giese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 277-293.

became the singular citizen-hero of April 18, 1775, whose midnight call prepared Lexington and Concord for the first battle of the war.73 Reid depicts Revere ardently relaying his message to a soon-to-be citizen- soldier. This is the crux of the Revere myth, the communicative transaction whereby the hero prompts a community to answer its call to duty. Charging through the village, Revere’s strenuous pose gives form to Longfellow’s line that “by a steed flying fearless and fleet...The fate of a nation was riding that night.” Not portraying a specific village or street, the composition serves as a representative encounter along Revere’s ride. That the myth of Revere infused Reid’s painting was confirmed in the official guidebook to the Massachusetts State House, the second edition published in 1905. Author Ellen Mudge Burrill, who corresponded with the muralists about their works, quoted a portion of Longfellow’s poem in her description of Paul Revere’s Ride. Concluding, Burrill wrote: “The artist represents [Revere] dashing through a village street, rousing ‘the country-folk to be up and to arm.’”74 Reid’s decoration, along with Burrill’s explanation, embraced myth as a structuring component of history, a means to stress civic duty to early-twentieth-century viewers. Similarly, in The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth, Edward Simmons helped construct the myth of the Civil War, crafting a vision of the recent past that honored a history Progressives wished to remember. Simmons’ mural was part of a movement beginning in the late nineteenth century to memorialize the common soldier, paying tribute to living veterans alongside the ample heroic

73 This popularized story of the midnight ride was full of historical inaccuracies. Revere, for example, did not wait for the signal at the Old North Church, “One, if by land, and two, if by sea.” The tower lights were a backup plan, in case Revere did not make it on the first leg of his journey, via rowboat to Charlestown. Further, Revere never reached Concord as Longfellow indicated. Detained by the King’s soldiers, who spotted him and his two companions as they traveled from Lexington toward Concord on horseback, Revere eventually managed to get himself released, walking back to Lexington before the first shots were fired there. See Edmund S. Morgan, “The Making of Paul Revere,” introduction, in Paul Revere’s Three Accounts of His Famous Ride (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1968), n.p.; David Arnold, “Paul Revere Legend Adjusted: Historian Sets ‘Midnight Ride’ on Straight Course,” Boston Globe, 17 April 1995, clippings in folder “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Art Commission. The Massachusetts Historical Society book reprints Longfellow’s poem; it was first published in the Boston Transcript in 1860 and then in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1861. 74 Burrill, The State House, Boston, Massachusetts, 35; and Burrill to Robert Reid, 31 January 1905, and Edward Trumbull (Reid’s assistant) to Burrill, 2 February 1905, Papers of Ellen Mudge Burrill, Secretary to the Sergeant-at-Arms, State Library of Massachusetts Special Collections Department, “Robert Reid – Murals,” folder 1 (hereafter cited as Burrill File).

depictions of generals, colonels, and Abraham Lincoln. While this pictorial emphasis on the citizen-soldier seemingly expanded the roster of historical actors worthy of commemoration, it likewise promoted a narrow vision of who that soldier could be. He was native, white, and an “American” type, as art historian Kirk Savage has shown in the public sculpture of the nineteenth century’s late decades. Imaging this ordinary soldier as a model of manhood, turn-of-the-century artists like Simmons celebrated the Progressive values of civic duty and national cohesion. In turn, they masked out the memory of slavery, as well as that of the black soldier, from the Civil War myth then taking form.75 Although Simmons skirted portraiture for his war scene in favor of anonymous soldiers, he did place value on historical accuracy as a necessary component of his realist vocabulary. While preparing his composition, Simmons sought out Civil War artifacts to aid in his depiction of artistic details.76 He engaged in a prolonged search, for example, for an authentic army overcoat. Learning finally that he could travel from his New York studio to Washington to examine coats in the army archives, he nonetheless was not satisfied. “I must have one in my studio so that a model could pose in it,” he later recalled.77 By chance, Simmons soon discovered that a veteran lived nearby; and so by buying the vet a new coat, the painter secured his treasured prop. Additionally, he visited the Boston Athenaeum to read Revolutionary-Era publications and manuscripts. This quest to get the details right served as a strategy of realism, a means to mark his mural with an aura of archival truth. Such details naturalize the mythic components of his Civil War story. Further, in John Eliot Preaching to the Indians, Henry Oliver Walker crafted myth by distilling the historical details of Eliot’s missionary efforts into a pastoral

75 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 162-208. Notably, one monument that does picture civic duty through the body of the black soldier is the Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint- Gaudens, which is located in Boston Common directly across from the Massachusetts State House. It was erected in 1897, just five years before Simmons’ mural was installed inside Memorial Hall. For an analysis of the sculpture, the project’s Brahmin patronage, and the role of race in Saint-Gaudens’ composition, see ibid., 193-207. 76 Simmons, From Seven to Seventy, 270-274. 77 Ibid., 274.

scene in which Algonquian natives quietly contemplate the merits of his oration. Progressive-Era New Englanders may have been familiar with the pictured tale of John Eliot and the Indians, as it was the subject of a statuette group in 1890 by John Rogers, a sculptor and Massachusetts native who specialized in popular art for the commercial market (figure 2-13).78 Walker expanded Rogers’ three-figure composition (Eliot, male Indian, female Indian) into a larger community of nine Indians, predominantly male, who listen to Eliot.79 With heads posed in three-quarters view, gazing introspectively either downwards or into the distance, Walker fashioned his Algonquians as dignified and deliberate. What the mural does not communicate is the scope of Eliot’s campaign to Christianize Native Americans in the area. Having learned the Algonquian language (Massachuset), Eliot preached in the local tongue, published translations of the Bible for his audiences, and established fourteen “praying towns” between 1651 and 1674—self-governing Indian settlements wherein natives adopted both Christianity and the Puritan lifestyle. Also absent from Walker’s picture are the consequent hostilities English settlers faced from King Philip (Metacomet), who martially resisted such missionary endeavors in his territory. During King Philip’s War, as it came to be called, Eliot and other Massachusetts officials, fearing that Christianized natives would not adhere to their English allegiances, relocated praying-town inhabitants to Boston Harbor’s Deer Island, whose harsh conditions killed many. 80 Unfettered by such historical circumstances, Walker’s mythic depiction of conversion foregrounds a moment of individual deliberation, when

78 See “A Monument to John Eliot,” Harper’s Weekly (7 June 1890): 440. In literature, the subject of Eliot made an appearance in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852. In a chapter of the book entitled “Eliot’s Pulpit,” the main characters travel to the forested site of Eliot’s famous rock, engaging in spirited discourse that recalled the moments of conversion enacted at the spot two hundred years earlier. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852; New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 134-144. 79 The two seated figures who wear blankets or animal skins, as well as the standing figure with a blanket draped around its head, are identified as “old men” and “squaws” by the reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript. Whether females or older males, these figures contrast the muscled manhood exhibited by the standing Indians. See “Mural Pictures in Place: Henry Oliver Walker’s Painting Unveiled,” Boston Evening Transcript, 8 April 1903, 1. 80 Mary Rhinelander McCarl, “Eliot, John,” American National Biography Online, www.anb.org/articles/01/01-00260.html (accessed on 30 July 2008); Jill Lepore, “When Deer Island Was Turned into Devil’s Island: A Historian’s Perspective,” Bostonia 2 (Summer 1998): 16, clipping in folder “John Eliot Preaching to the Indians,” Art Commission.

members of an Indian community weigh the decision to join a larger, American community. By employing myth in their state house decorations, Reid, Simmons, and Walker naturalized the principles of Roosevelt’s Americanism.81 Their realist vocabulary did allegorical work, marshaling the forms of Revere, soldiers, Eliot, and Algonquians to model how American citizens are made. Put simply, picturing history served as an aesthetic strategy for picturing Americanization. The painted narrative of common origins on the capitol’s walls visually reinforced Roosevelt’s idea of a uniform nationalism with a concreteness that traditional allegory could not offer. The muralists’ earthly forms do not overtly present themselves as carriers of abstract meaning, but the forms co-opt that function by infusing myth into the pictorial act of history-telling. Further, the state house murals naturalize a gendered history that leaves little or no room for female citizens. Reid, Simmons, and Walker visually assign agency to the historical actors who would teach good citizenship to Progressive-Era audiences. According to their painted compositions, heroic citizenship is overwhelmingly active, white, and male. Gone are the floating allegorical females that dominated the walls of the Library of Congress. Even Walker, who attempted a hybrid composition of real and ideal forms for his first mural in Memorial Hall, chose to use male rather than female angels for the allegorical portion of The Pilgrims on the Mayflower. The few women to be seen at all in the mural program take secondary roles—a draped and statuesque farmer’s wife in Paul Revere’s Ride, two female Pilgrims (a young mother and another figure with her back to us) placed as bookends in Walker’s composition, one or two Indian women in John Eliot, and the faint suggestion of female forms in dresses along the balcony in Simmons’ Return of the Colors. The turn to historical realism in American mural painting made it clear that monumental storytelling, both in practice and in subject, was a masculine endeavor. Male muralists celebrated heroic male citizens of the past.

81 Barthes, Mythologies, 129-131.

Mural criticism of the twentieth century’s first decade confirmed this gendered tone. Critic Charles Caffin, for instance, worried that neither allegorical nor historical decorations of recent years had enough vigor or force in their designs. Although the shift to historical realism, in his opinion, represented a step in the right direction, Caffin criticized historical murals of late, including Reid and Simmons at the Massachusetts State House, writing in 1908: “I doubt if any of these mural paintings makes one’s blood run swifter.” Caffin chafed, “And from this it may be inferred that neither the realistic, illustrative motive, nor the symbolic, has any virtue or disability in itself; but that the ultimate result must depend entirely upon the presence or absence of creative force in the painter. And it is just this creative force, kindling itself with the fire of modern American conditions, pride and aspirations, that seems lacking.”82 American murals, according to Caffin, still needed a healthy dose of gritty manhood.83 This embrace of masculinity in the aesthetic telling of history at the state house also permeated the curriculum of Boston public schools. Like muralists and state officials, educators turned to historical realism. In the early years of the twentieth century, Boston educators placed a growing importance on the teaching of American history. New civics courses in elementary and secondary schools taught behavior as the core of good citizenship, framing civic duty through male action. Investing in the heroic narratives of yesterday, instructors merged history lessons with civic lessons, calling on a shared vision of the American past to model behavior for present-day citizens in the making. Progressive pedagogies emphasized biography as a framework for “making the past real,” according to a 1907 Boston Public Schools report on curriculum. Collapsing past and present, the heroes of U.S. history—as the

82 Charles H. Caffin, “The Beginning and Growth of Mural Painting in America,” Bookman 28 (October 1908): 137. This Bookman article is adapted from Caffin, The Story of American Painting. When reviewing Reid’s Otis panel shortly after its debut, Caffin offered only lukewarm praise, believing that in “securing a decorative effect” Reid had not expressed the narrative forcefully enough. See Charles H. Caffin, “Mural Decorations in the State House, Boston,” International Studio 17 (July 1902): 81. Notably, Caffin’s masculine tone in his discussion of American mural painting coincided with similar talk by critics about the rising figures of the Ashcan school (and their easel paintings) during this period. 83 Similarly, the Boston Evening Transcript critic found Battle at Concord Bridge a disappointment in comparison to Simmons’ Civil War panel, seeing “studio models,” not soldiers, fighting in a scene that “fails to move” the viewer. See “The Concord Fight as a Mural Painting,” Boston Evening Transcript, 19 December 1902, 10.

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protagonists of a mythic, universalizing vision of Americanism—were summoned as exemplary guides for civic action in contemporary Boston.84 Reinforcing these classroom lessons, the state house mural program monumentalized American history, giving painted form to the biographical male heroes of school textbooks with the likes of Pilgrims, Otis, Revere, and citizen- soldiers. As part of the revised history curriculum of 1907, Boston Public Schools committeemen recommended visits to historical places for fourth and fifth graders, with the state house as a likely venue.85 For immigrant eyes, the structure’s historical murals presented scenes of identity in transition, celebratory moments in the Commonwealth’s past when individuals embraced a new civic role. The framing of the nation’s history as a story of Americanization—in school textbooks and on the walls of the capitol—functioned as a Progressive tactic to position Americanization as integral to the way of life in the U.S., traceable through centuries of the nation’s past. In their contemporary efforts to assimilate newcomers in Boston, Progressives were simply taking cues from the annals of American history—that is the assertion brewing beneath the historical actions of the state house’s painted protagonists. As the visual component of citizenship training, the state house murals wed history and art. The decorations aggrandized the lessons of heroic male citizenship found in early-twentieth-century textbooks, modeling Americanism in aesthetic form. As public art, the murals offered educators a site of instruction, where the qualities of artistic composition would imbue young viewers with habits of good taste and

84 Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School, 232-240; and Boston Public Schools, “School Document No. 5: A Provisional Course of Study for the Elementary Schools” (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1907), 78-81, quote on 79. For an example of a period textbook, see John Fiske, A History of the United States for Schools (1894; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899). Fiske, for instance, wrote of Revere: “But [Gage’s] plan was detected, and Paul Revere galloped on far in advance of the soldiers, shouting the news at every house that he passed.” (204). As an educator who worked to create a revised history curriculum during the Progressive Era, Fiske also served as the first president of the Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894, whose ranks were filled with prominent educators. The League viewed public education as one of its principal concerns. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 197-200. 85 Boston Public Schools, “School Document No. 5” (1907), 79. The report does not provide a suggested list of historical places. Yet, as the newly installed murals exemplify the teachings of civics and history curricula of the period, it seems probable that the state house would have been on the short list of area field trips.

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behavior. A belief that exposure to art would nurture proper comportment permeated the New Education. Boston was home to a growing art education movement, which encouraged teachers to use art reproductions in the classroom and to visit local art venues with their students (figure 2-14). As such, art served as a subject of study in and of itself as well as a (pictorial) method through which pupils would acquire knowledge, taste, and behavioral skills.86 The civic mission of art education entwined with the business interests of art reproduction firms like Curtis & Cameron, Louis Prang, and the Perry Pictures Company, which all had main offices in Boston.87 For example, Perry Magazine, published by the Perry Pictures Company beginning in 1898, offered teachers and parents advice on how to bring pictures into the school and home, while also serving as a promotional organ for Perry products.88 “Make art education as universal as the public school system itself,” wrote one enthusiast in the magazine’s pages.89 Contributors included several professionals in Massachusetts schooling, who counseled readers on two activities in particular—schoolroom decoration and picture study. The schoolroom decoration movement took root in the 1890s, a project premised on the belief that the classroom environment played a nurturing role in a child’s development. By replacing a classroom’s blank white walls with tinted paint and by hanging reproductions of artworks, including recent mural paintings, adherents looked to art to exert its “silent influence,” believing that pictures would quietly

86 Art-house publishers such as Curtis & Cameron (who produced Copley Prints) and the Detroit Publishing Company (known as the Detroit Photographic Company until 1905) sold prints of the state house murals as soon as they were unveiled; see the Burrill File. 87 On Louis Prang, see Michael Roy Clapper, “Popularizing Art in Boston, 1865-1910: L. Prang and Company and the Museum of Fine Arts” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1997); and J. M. Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton: Princeton University, 2005), 17-97. 88 “Notes,” Perry Magazine 1 (June 1899): 201. For an examination of the efforts of cultural tastemakers to regulate the uses of art reproductions through educational organs such as Perry Magazine, see Katharine Martinez, “At Home with Mona Lisa: Consumers and Commercial Visual Culture, 1880-1920,” in Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, ed. Patricia Johnston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 160-176. 89 Walter Gilman Page, “The Adornment of School-rooms,” Perry Magazine 1 (Christmas Number, 1898): 69.

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suggest to children “certain kinds of conduct.”90 Adorning the classroom represented another Progressive effort to train future citizens through behavior. Picture study developed soon afterwards as a pedagogical technique that aimed for a more active mode of teaching with art. James Frederick Hopkins, Director of Drawing for Boston Public Schools, wrote a column on picture study for Perry Magazine, in which he advised educators to make good use of their art: “Unconscious absorption is theoretically very beautiful, but every teacher knows that under the environment of modern conditions it is not always a practical success. Attention must be directed to the examples of decoration if they are to do their best and lasting work.”91 Instead of the passive influence of adorned schoolrooms or the use of pictures as illustrations for informational study, Hopkins advocated the examination of pictures “for their own sake.” “[I]n picture-study, it is the picture which occupies the chief place,” he asserted.92 Through such a program of looking closely, with activities designed for pupils at each grade level, art education would foster art appreciation, molding a child’s taste and comportment. In addition to using reproductions, Hopkins encouraged teachers to have their students study “local originals” when possible: “Whenever the fine examples hang in town and city...the children should be taken to them, and made to appreciate their civic advantages in their young days.”93 For Progressive educators in Boston, the realist vocabulary of the state house murals had its “civic advantages.” The practices of learning by looking at the Massachusetts State House functioned as a primer for action. Depicted in moments of transition, the painted heroes of a shared American past, Progressives believed, would prompt present-day Boston residents to shed Old World allegiances and customs in favor of Anglo- American ways. The tangling of myth and history in the murals enabled this call for action in a way that allegory could not. While the floating females that adorn the

90 M. V. O’Shea, “Art in the Schoolroom,” Perry Magazine 1 (June 1899): 171-172; and James Frederick Hopkins, “The Aim and Purpose of Picture Study,” Perry Magazine 4 (October 1901): 66. 91 Hopkins, “The Aim and Purpose of Picture Study,” 66. 92 Ibid., 66-67; emphasis original. 93 James Frederick Hopkins, “Picture Study in the Boston Public Schools,” Perry Magazine 1 (March- April 1899): 135-136.

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Library of Congress embody ideals such as Civilization or Good Government, the robust males at the state house enact change, moving the American story forward. Scaling up an American past, the artists at the state house made the case that the nation’s mural painting did not have to look European and, more importantly, that it could help construct what American looked like in the public history Progressives promoted in early-twentieth-century Boston. The contours of “American” remained easier to define in the past tense versus the present. Shean, Low, and Blashfield had all suggested modern subjects for mural painting, but they did not find form in this early experiment in historical decoration. Realism at the Massachusetts State House was not used to forthrightly tell stories of contemporary American life—that of industrialization, immigration, or commerce, for example—but employed to recount narratives safely outside the Progressive-Era present.94 Realism, like allegory, functioned as a language about the past. Its time-bound narratives, unlike allegory, however, could marshal specific actions of the past for contemporary civic instruction. The Massachusetts State House mural program also served as a call for action among muralists themselves. With Boston, the tenor of American mural painting shifted to historical realism, as more artists and their civic patrons envisioned historical subjects as appropriate adornment, especially for state capitols and courthouses. Local history took center stage, with eastern cities mining their colonial history and far western cities looking to more recent historical events (figure 2-15). In midwestern cities, a hybrid style characterized capitol assignments, such as those in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, with mural programs that featured real and ideal forms in a single composition, combined with strictly historical or allegorical decorations in other spaces (figure 2-16).95 In the early years of the twentieth century, American mural painting looked increasingly historical, yet allegory did linger. Artistic language by then had become a matter of choice, a decision made by muralists

94 Industry, for instance, did appear in later U.S. murals, in both real and ideal variations, such as John White Alexander’s hybrid compositions in 1905-1908 for the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, The Crowning of Labor and the Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, and Everett Shinn’s realist composition in 1911 for Trenton City Hall in New Jersey, Steel and Ceramics Industries. 95 Van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo, 146-149. See also Cutrer, “Negotiating Nationalism, Representing Region.”

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and their patrons based on a mix of principle and strategy. Although Reid, Simmons, and Walker set aside allegorical forms for their assignment at the Massachusetts State House, they did not abandon allegory altogether in their mural practice. The artists continued to employ allegorical figures to embody abstract ideals, such as Civilization, the Law, the Future, and the Arts, on the walls of civic institutions.96 Although historical realism did not transform murals into a people’s art, as Charles Shean had proposed, the earthly style did offer muralists inroads to the claim that mural painting could be a democratic art for the nation. Historical realism on its own did not make murals more democratic; the artistic expressions on the walls of the Massachusetts State House were the product of three artists and a small group of state officials, not “the people.” Yet by emphasizing the common man, collective struggles, and transformative moments in their compositions, the artists did enlarge civic art’s participatory premise. The aspiration for a national mural painting that brought art into everyday experiences and communicated plainly made some headway in Boston in the first years of the twentieth century. Because the historical subjects of the state house decorations fit into a broader campaign of Americanization in Massachusetts, the murals gained traction for a wider audience, circulating outside the institution’s walls. Mural painting assumed a role as public educator, in Edwin Blashfield’s vision, because the state house compositions suited the pedagogical needs of local instructors. In combination with lessons of history, civics, and art in the schools, the murals could communicate more effectively than they could on their own. Schoolchildren and young adults in Boston were equipped by their Progressive teachers to decode the messages of white male heroism, behavioral citizenship, and Americanism embedded in the paintings by Reid, Simmons, and Walker. The murals offered an aura of agency akin to Roosevelt’s notion that newcomers chose to become Americans through self-transformation. Yet in order to

96 For example, Walker painted Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow for the Minnesota State Capitol in 1904; Simmons painted Guilt, Innocence, Justice, and Power of the Law for the Mercer County Courthouse in Pennsylvania in 1911; and Reid painted The Four Golds of California and The Golden Arts for the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Simmons reprised his battle flag theme in 1910 for a historical mural at the Polk County Courthouse in Iowa, Presentation of the Flag to the Troops Departing for the Civil War. See “Hope and Memory,” Richard Murray Papers.

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enjoy that sense of empowerment, a viewer at the state house had to buy in to the idea that the act of becoming someone else defined American identity. To breathe in the accomplishments of Otis, Revere, or Civil War soldiers, an immigrant viewer would first have to accept change as a condition of his own membership in the American community. At a time when Boston’s political environment was marked by ethnic conflict, the state house’s monumental visions of unified action for a common (American) good likely did not persuade viewers to set aside group loyalties or to adopt wholeheartedly the genteel behaviors of model citizenship. Rather, mural painting’s universalizing mode amounted to a visual Progressivism, an aesthetic style embraced by various viewer constituencies, particularly artists, critics, educators, and state officials, who found in the consensual tenor of civic art a means to promote narrower agendas: the role of the mural painter as reformer, a national art of mural painting, pictures as a persuasive mode of citizenship training, and state house decoration as state prestige. As a pictorial arm of Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanization campaign, the Massachusetts State House mural program extended the reach of its cultural work. More than simply a moment of aesthetic experimentation among a small circle of debating artists and critics, the decorations fit snugly into Roosevelt’s efforts to convert a nation of immigrant identities into a uniform Americanism. With the turn to historical realism, muralists solidified their role as aesthetic reformers, embedding their civic art-making in the nationalist agendas of Progressivism. The state house murals visualized Roosevelt’s ideal, lending vivid historical precedent to his Americanization program while also sidelining alternative histories that would have proven disruptive to that ideal. Picturing one, Anglo history for all, the mural program (and its government sponsors) directed melting-pot messages to the state’s immigrants through a painted American past that failed to include those immigrants’ own histories. The murals encapsulate a Progressive-Era vision that valued singular nationalism, common origins, civic stewardship, and a faith in conversion. The paintings by Reid, Simmons, and Walker model individual transformation as the engine of national progress. Depicting historical moments of conversion—when

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attorney becomes patriot, when citizen becomes soldier, when Indian espouses Christianity—the decorations elevate the process of becoming someone else, celebrating that pivotal embrace of a new identity. As willing agents of change, the painted protagonists give tangible form to Roosevelt’s belief that individuals— regardless of their past, their education, their ethnicity, or their class—choose to participate in Americanism, and that such a choice is an act of empowerment.

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CHAPTER THREE

Performing Progress as Art and History at the Pageant of Illinois (1909)

In October 1909, the campus of Northwestern University, located just north of Chicago in Evanston, Illinois, buzzed with the sounds, sights, and stories of the state’s yesteryears. Dressed as Potawatomis, French explorers, colonial maidens, Illinois chiefs, American soldiers, and other historical figures, more than eight hundred area residents performed the Pageant of Illinois on a grassy stage framed by a grove of tall oaks near the shores of Lake Michigan (figure 3-1). An audience of more than five thousand gathered on each of three consecutive nights for the event, which presented a history of the state in a series of episodes that combined fine art, drama, dancing, music, and costuming. Part reenactment and part tableau, the pageant wed history and art, crafting a monumental, living picture of the past as community participants envisioned it. The production recounted a progress narrative that traced the rise of white civilization and the destruction of Indian tribal life in the Great Lakes region from the arrival of Father Marquette in the early 1670s to the first presidential campaign of the Prairie State’s native son, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. This chapter examines the Pageant of Illinois to show how civic artists used the dramatic art of pageantry and the visualization of local history to expand their influence as Progressive reformers and enter into contemporary debates on citizenship, Americanism, and education. Written and directed by Thomas Wood Stevens of the Art Institute of Chicago, An Historical Pageant of Illinois, as it was officially titled, lent momentum to an emerging pageantry movement in America that was intimately tied to Progressivism. In 1909, nascent leaders like Stevens began to conceptualize the pageant form as an agent of Progressivism, as a mode of creative play that animated and aggrandized the Americanization programs of schools, settlement houses, cultural institutions, and communal organizations. Like muralists, pageant- masters (as pageant directors called themselves) tied their art-making to citizen- making, promoting such stylized storytelling as a means to broaden the reach of the arts into everyday life; to materialize civic ideals of community, democracy, and

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progress; and to teach a collective history. In translating Progressivism from a political strategy to an artistic one, Stevens scaled up in performative terms the era’s “consensus model,” a framework for presenting self interests or group interests as unified, community interests. He and fellow pageant adherents fashioned themselves as aesthetic reformers who orchestrated communal self-expression. Making pageantry Progressive, leaders tethered their practice to something bigger than the fine arts alone. They worked to modernize an older art form that recalled the festive rituals of antiquity and medieval Europe, shaping contemporary U.S. pageants as secular, civic tools that could teach Americanizing lessons to the nation’s diverse citizenry in aesthetic, participatory form. Thomas Wood Stevens’ version of public history celebrated the colonization of local land, white male heroes, individual sacrifices for the common good, and the “vanishing Indian” of Illinois’ past, employing a kind of Progressive history-telling that paralleled what Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, and Henry Oliver Walker had composed in paint at the Massachusetts State House. While the Boston muralists shaped a usable past that I call the “past as freedom fighters,” Stevens crafted a “past as frontier triumph,” shifting the emphasis from a defense of principles to the acquisition of new terrain. The expansionist rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanism drove the pageant’s story. The Pageant of Illinois tracks the state’s Indian, French, and English predecessors as they befall an American people and way of life, privileging a singular nationalism over cultural pluralism. For his midwestern audience, Stevens created seven episodes that pivot on questions of land possession. After Marquette in the first scene Christianizes the terrain with his planting of the cross, the second scene recounts French exploration, culminating with La Salle’s claiming of the land for France in 1682. In episode three, the Ottawa chief Pontiac visits an Illinois tribe, seeking a pan-Indian alliance to protect indigenous lands from English invasion. Pontiac’s efforts come to naught as French authorities cede the territory to the British in 1763, dismissing claims of Indian sovereignty. The local land changes into American hands in episode four when George Rogers Clark, military leader during the Revolutionary War, takes the

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settlement at Kaskaskia, interrupting a festive ball attended by English and French inhabitants. In episode five, Potawatomis challenge American possession of the land, attacking Fort Dearborn in 1812 as U.S. forces evacuated the garrison. Having reasserted their presence in the territory, Americans in the sixth episode face renewed hostilities in 1832 from the Sauk leader, Black Hawk, who fights to return to his native land. The pageant’s final episode presents a procession during Abraham Lincoln’s first presidential campaign in 1860, ritually marking the Illinois territory as the Land of Lincoln. As pageant-master, it was Stevens’ job to combine history and art into a harmonious whole. For the Evanston production, he took liberties with the historical record and its timeline, compacting events that spanned considerable time and distance into a single episode with a unified narrative.1 Unlike traditional dramatic plays that developed a closely-knit plot, pageants were large-scale “chronicle plays,” in Stevens’ words, which forwarded a main idea or theme through a series of discrete episodes.2 An audience would typically gather along a hillside, natural amphitheatre, or temporary seating to watch the performance unfold on an expansive, grassy stage; a wooded area and adjacent meadow at Northwestern University provided such a setting for the Pageant of Illinois. A pageant combined spoken words, artistic stage direction (or tableaux), scored music, and dancing to communicate its story. While a script or “book of words,” as it was called, served as the pageant’s founding document, pageant-masters did not rely on dialogue alone to recount their narrative, as words spoken from an outdoor stage did not carry evenly or sufficiently across a large field of spectators. As a result, pageant-masters like Stevens wrote action-driven scenes and focused on visual components such as pantomime, grouping, costuming, and lighting to express the storyline pictorially. With most characters engaging in slim

1 The specific date listed in the pageant program for a particular episode, therefore, does not correspond exactly to all of the events contained within. For instance, the program lists the time of episode three as 1764, but Pontiac’s uprising lasted from 1763 to 1764, Pontiac himself not submitting to British rule until 1766. And the treaty between France and England ceding lands east of the Mississippi to England was signed in 1763. See Thomas Wood Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1909), 4-7. 2 Thomas Wood Stevens, “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” Atlantic Educational Journal 8 (September 1912): 13-14.

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dialogue, pageant-masters often relayed essential points of storytelling through a narrator or herald, one of Stevens’ favorite devices. The figure of White Cloud, a bygone Indian prophet, serves this role in the Pageant of Illinois, opening the performance and then appearing between episodes to tie one scene to the next. Hundreds or even thousands of local community members made up a pageant’s amateur cast, whose ranks were occasionally augmented by a few professional actors. For the Pageant of Illinois, Stevens brought in the Donald Robertson Players, an acting troupe working in Chicago, to undertake the pageant’s principal roles, with Robertson himself playing White Cloud. Celebrated as events where amateurs took the stage, pageants, according to Stevens, nevertheless needed a dose of professional talent to carry the biggest performances. Civic artists working in pageantry chose to tell history visually and performatively. By staging a past in lived relation to the present, they shaped a particular version of local history through immediacy, color, and emotion, creating a sensory-rich experience that encapsulated a reformist vision and carried Progressive lessons. On its face, the Pageant of Illinois’ singular, nationalist narrative denied marginalized groups a self-determined role in the art of history-telling. Yet this performative way of doing history did grant community members some degree of agency in the process of crafting shared narratives. The staged performance on Northwestern University’s campus functioned as one of many pageant-related activities, and we must look both onstage and offstage to recover the modern tensions that structured a pageant like the one in Evanston. Pageantry opened up several ways of envisioning a local past, presenting not one communal history, but rather a range of histories. As a participatory art form, pageantry offered its communities a measure of agency that mural painting could not. Although mural publics occasionally lobbied for local content or local artists, their moments of self-assertion typically occurred in response to mural programs via art criticism, efforts to use the space for their own agendas, or repurposing the paintings for art reproductions, schoolroom decoration, and other contexts. A pageant’s communities, in contrast, were constituent players in

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the art form, positioned within the craft of history-telling as it unfolded. Enacting Stevens’ script, participants vitalized his official narrative of white male triumph, but they also set in motion other self-reflexive performances, giving material form to the inequalities and struggles for agency that powered—and persisted within—the consensual tenor of reform. Playacting nurtured alternative visions within the imagined pageant world. Although organizers adopted a consensus model to picture a public history that was monumental, authoritative, and vital, Evanston’s communities—artists from the Art Institute, Northwestern faculty and students, local historians, area schoolchildren, North Shore socialites and business leaders, and other groups—played upon the form’s constructed harmonies, drawing attention to Progressive-Era fissures within such artful storytelling about the past. Questions of Indian citizenship, U.S. Indian policy, African American civil rights, woman suffrage, and Americanization come into view through the pageant’s visual culture. Embellishing and revising Stevens’ official narrative, participants in the Pageant of Illinois played at consensus, framing contemporary civic debates in pictorial terms that opened up rather than shut down cultural discussions. Focusing on the relationship of civic art and Progressivism, I look closely at the Pageant of Illinois’ imagery to consider how its ways of envisioning a past both reinforced and called into question adherents’ cultural and political goals. When approached through its visual culture, pageantry emerges as a dynamic form of history-telling. Understanding pageantry as a constellation of events, we can contextualize the form’s consensus model within a thicker, noisier field that accounts for the ways that various pageant players negotiated what a shared, communal narrative should look like. Alongside the Pageant of Illinois script and handful of official photographs documenting specific episodes, I examine press accounts of rehearsals and performances, publicity photographs of the cast, spoofs or imitations of the official pageant, contemporary writings on the pageant form, and related civic art activities in the Chicago area. Expanding the pageant’s archive to include its visual culture and context will help us gain a fuller picture of how the ideas and activities of

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pageantry played in the Evanston community, from its creative leaders and promoters to its participants and observers. This work builds upon historian David Glassberg’s scholarship, which foregrounds the struggles for agency within American pageantry’s celebratory episodes, as competing groups vied to fashion a particular version of history as public history. Concerned with the uses of tradition, Glassberg examines how pageants enabled social reformers, educators, drama professionals, civic boosters, and other groups to give tangible form to their ideal visions of past, present, and future communities. Like Glassberg, I regard the ritualized story onstage as one of many pageant stories that, taken together, help us determine how the art of pageantry both reflected and shaped Progressive culture.3 I hope to open a discussion within pageantry studies on the form’s aesthetic elements and what they can tell us about how artists made Progressive reform into something visible—something to be witnessed, performed, composed, and refashioned. Both pageant-masters and muralists worked to visualize reform at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the American pageantry movement took root about a decade after that of mural painting, a kinship developed among the two fields with respect to aesthetics, leadership, and pedagogy, as practitioners came to see themselves as agents of Progressive change. Just as murals were about painting big, pageants were about playing big. Despite the formal differences between static, two- dimensional painting and time-based, embodied performance, mural painting and pageantry adhered to common aesthetic rules. Both disciplines underlined the importance of harmonious compositions, decorative flatness, and simple forms. Part of a comprehensive scheme of artistic unity, pageants were charged with bringing together the arts of dancing, music, and costuming just as murals were expected to resonate with surrounding architecture, sculpture, and decorative ornamentation. With an American Renaissance spirit of collaboration, along with a competitive desire to professionalize their respective fields, spokesmen positioned both murals and pageants

3 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1-5, 126, and 156.

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as creative linchpins that allied the various branches of art for wide-reaching, civic good. Muralists and pageant-masters oftentimes moved in the same artistic circles, sharing ideas at conferences and in writings, working together on civic art productions, and even practicing in both fields. Thomas Wood Stevens was one such figure, writing and directing pageants in the same years that he was teaching mural painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. Stevens forwarded a broad vision of civic art as a “living art” that pulsed through museums, schools, theatres, government centers, public parks, and communal organizations.4 Bringing art into everyday life, civic artists like Stevens expanded the sites of Progressive reform, molding future citizens and teaching a consensual public history on a grand scale through visual compositions. As pageant-master, Stevens shaped what that public history would look like for the Pageant of Illinois’ communities. A publicity photograph, depicting the first episode of the performance, documents how Stevens framed the pageant’s official view (figure 3-2). The image is one of a set of seven photographs by Burke & Atwell of Chicago that accompanied an article on the pageant written by William Hard for Outlook in January 1910. William Hard worked on the publicity committee for the pageant and was thus invested, like Stevens, in shaping its imagery and meanings for a larger public. This set represents the most complete evidence we have of the pageant’s official vision, the “Stevens eye,” so to speak. In the years after the Pageant of Illinois, Stevens endorsed the images as the go-to record of his creation, directing those who wished to learn more about the event to Burke & Atwell’s photographs and to Hard’s article.5 In figure 3-2, cast members stage the crescendo of episode one, visualizing the arrival of Europeans on local land as a transformative moment marked by clear lines of authority and submission. The tone is solemn, the drama of frontier life both stilled and harmoniously arranged. In his script, Stevens recounts the arrival of French

4 Thomas Wood Stevens, “New Fields for the Art Institute,” Midland, pages 9-10, clipping with handwritten date of 1908 in the Thomas Wood Stevens Papers, University of Arizona Library Special Collections, box 54 (hereafter cited as TWS Papers, Arizona). 5 William Hard, “The Old West in Pageant,” Outlook 94 (22 January 1910): 182-190; “Hundred-Foot Stage for Evanston Show,” Chicago Post, 14 September 1909, clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1; and Stevens to Ralph Davol, 27 December 1912, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 43, folder 1.

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missionary Father Jacques Marquette and compatriot explorers to the region in the early 1670s, and Marquette’s ritual planting of the Christian cross before the Potawatomi and Illinois tribes that lived there. In the photograph, the actors direct their collective gaze toward the gowned figure of Marquette, whose raised right hand visually echoes the vertical post of the cross behind him. A sturdy oak bifurcates the image into left and right sections with seemingly distinct designations—Indian and white, savage and civilized, earthbound and heaven-bound. The Stevens eye focused on “turning points in the story of the State,” creating a public history through seven compact moments of decisive change that together sketched the progress of civilization on the Illinois frontier. 6 Capturing the first episode in its final tableau, the Burke & Atwell photograph crystallizes Stevens’ history-telling strategy, condensing the script—the entirety of the scene enacted by participants onstage—into a singular, mural-like composition. This is the moment of transformation for the Great Sachem of the Illinois, who alone remains standing opposite Marquette. The Indian men, women, and children gathered around the Sachem have all knelt down, as have Louis Joliet and his party of explorers behind the Father, submitting to the “law of Christ.”7 The standing Sachem strikes a contemplative pose, his curled fingers near his chin, suggesting that the Illinois leader will kneel presently alongside the others. Stage directions in the pageant script confirm this—the Sachem kneels, the lights fade, and the first scene ends.8 To frame this privileged view of the pageant, the photographer had to stand extremely close to the scene, either occupying a front-row seat at the performance, or more likely, capturing this tableau backstage or at a dress rehearsal. Burke & Atwell cropped more than half of the episode’s seventy cast members from the image, pruning the narrative to its key compositional elements. Those within the image seem to be posing for the camera rather than enacting the scene for an audience in attendance. Without periphery actors, a wider view of the stage, or a glimpse of the

6 Thomas Wood Stevens, Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois (Chicago: Alderbrink Press, 1909), 5. 7 Ibid., 18. 8 Ibid.

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thousands of spectators, the photographer directs our attention to the visual crux of the scene. Marquette, bolstered by the compass-like cross behind him, steps westward and ushers in white civilization, witnessed by the region’s attentive, submissive natives. This is history dramatized, not lived. The photographer’s nutshell composition captures several details that destabilize its seventeenth-century setting and complicate the pageant’s own progress narrative. Most prominent is the greasy paint on the faces of the Indians. The paint appears heavy on several figures, particularly the kneeling chief in profile at the left; on others, its application is uneven or smeared. White residents of the community were “playing Indian” in the words of historian Philip Deloria, masquerading as Potawatomis and Illinois.9 Playacting also comes into view in other areas of the photograph: Joliet’s false beard hangs scraggily and malformed on the actor’s young face; a wedding band is visible on the finger of the kneeling chief at left; and an electric light gleams among the oaks in the background. Through such details, the photograph attests to the self-crafting at work within the frame. It is perhaps the trio of figures at the center of the composition that renders this self- crafting most clearly. Two young Indians near the large oak tree stare out toward the viewer, as does a man in a suit and tie in the distance, who is not an actor in the scene, but an offstage bystander. The three break the photograph’s internal network of gazes, acknowledging the present-day viewer’s role as a consumer of the pageant scene. An artful staging of history, here twentieth-century Evanstonians are playing at the seventeenth century. 10 While the Stevens-endorsed image constructs an up-close, serious, and onstage view, the difficulties of containing the pageant within such a frame become discernible when we compare the photograph to an illustration that located the Pageant of Illinois far offstage. “Life in Evanston, Just at Present” appeared on the front page of the Chicago Daily News on October 8, 1909, the day of the second performance (figure 3- 3). At the hand of the artist, the pageant world has become topsy-turvy. The

9 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 10 I use the term “Evanstonians” to collectively describe pageant participants, as newspaper reports likewise did at the time. Yet participants hailed from several towns along the North Shore.

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illustration depicts a chaotic intersection in town, where the cultures of Progressive- Era Evanston and the frontier west literally collide. An Indian has overturned his canoe in a European-styled fountain. A prairie schooner rattles through the streets with the aid of a new kind of horsepower, the automobile. Two portly Indians, one sporting a non-native-looking mustache, alongside a fur trader, chase a wagonload of beer, shouting “No Firewater!” The porticoed bank advertises: “Wampum Changed Here.” And a hatch-wielding Indian in the foreground accosts a stranger for, quite plainly, not fitting in. What the Daily News illustration visualizes in this humorous take of Evanston “Just at Present” is that playacting itself was a subject of the pageant. The past functioned as an object of consumption in the modern life of the city, not simply as a panorama that unfolded onstage. Indeed, many of the activities in the scene are commercial ones—from banking and liquor distribution to feather sales and moccasin repair. Further, the illustration demonstrates that pageantry has infused the Evanston community. The boundaries between art and the everyday have not simply blurred, they have utterly collapsed, albeit tongue-in-cheek. Through parody, the illustration offers us another view of the pageant, one that insists on its present-day context, its playacting, and the cultural contrasts that emerge within its real and imagined spaces. This comedic view captures an essential component of the Pageant of Illinois. The illustration’s playfulness is attuned to the spirit of the art form. A creative enterprise, pageantry was supposed to be fun, with participants enlivening history and forging lived connections to an otherwise dimmed and distant past. In turn, the Stevens eye, with its seriousness and official gloss, should be contextualized within this larger pageant record, which accounts for the complexities of wedding history- telling and playacting. Although Stevens approached the art form with professionalism, didacticism, and reformist leanings, he likely anticipated a level of playfulness within his productions: the amateur cast would ad-lib, break character, wink at the crowd—all a part of the novelty of dressing up and performing for familiar faces on such a grand scale. As pageant-master, it was Stevens’ responsibility to

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arrange in harmonious whole the community’s talents and energies, orchestrating a degree of smoothness and a sense of magnitude within the communal production.11 It is the residue of Progressive-Era life within pageant views such as the two above, one serious and one comedic, that this study seeks to recover. Pageantry’s visualizations of the past animated pressing debates of the early-twentieth-century present—particularly those that centered on citizenship status and formation and on the practices of Americanization. Most importantly, Stevens’ Pageant of Illinois rendered tangible questions about the position of Native Americans in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. With white residents performing roles as relic Indians of a bygone era, comparisons emerged between the figure of their playacting and the cultural and political circumstances of the nation’s actual, present-day Indians. The turn of the twentieth century marks a period of transition in U.S. Indian policy, as strategies to rapidly assimilate Native Americans through education, land allotment, and citizenship—a “vanishing policy” based on evolutionist views of civilizing uplift—gave way to gradualist and preservationist approaches, along with open debate. At this time, Native American activists established pan-Indian political coalitions, advocated for full citizenship (citizenship status was woefully inconsistent) and changes to U.S. policy, and worked to create an Indian public opinion. 12 Further, as a pictorial component of the Americanization campaign, the Pageant of Illinois vitalized the pre-war strategy of conversion that likewise structured school curricula, settlement-house programming, and mural decorations such as those in Boston. Pageants typically had financial as well as artistic motives, and the Evanston performance was no exception. The Pageant of Illinois was designed to generate funds for the Northwestern University Settlement, which served the

11 Stevens, “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” 15. 12 See Tom Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), xi-xii, xvi, 51-53, 132, and 177; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 16-21 and 308-319; and Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 89-96.

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immigrant residents of a West-Side neighborhood.13 As a fundraiser, the pageant supported the settlement’s recent work, such as infant nutrition and educational classes for adolescents who had left public schooling to earn a wage.14 As a dramatic performance, the pageant celebrated the image of a local American community in the making, marshaling a usable past for the assimilationist agendas of the present. The Burke & Atwell photograph, for instance, frames an early moment in a long view of the Americanization story, when Marquette’s footing on Indian territory sets in motion the transition of land from French to English and eventually to American control. Yet Stevens’ script also gave voice to the Sachem of the Illinois’ efforts in the seventeenth century to create a pan-Indian alliance among the Illinois and Potawatomi tribes, an assertion of communal identity that contrasted with Progressive-Era efforts to Americanize Indians by individualizing them. 15 In response to the government’s individualizing tack, Native American activists in the early twentieth century renewed such calls for pan-Indian alliances, seeking to preserve, not destroy, tribal bonds. As historian Alan Trachtenberg has shown, images of the Indian and the immigrant were intertwined in the era’s popular imaginations of “America” and in the cultural struggles to define national identity amidst an expanding multi-ethnic society.16 As a mythic frontier story, Stevens’ Pageant of Illinois called on the contemporary discourse of Theodore Roosevelt, who framed western expansion as tales of

13 Facing a three-thousand-dollar deficit, the settlement’s board decided in the summer of 1909 to put on a pageant as a fundraiser. Cora Patten (Mrs. Henry J. Patten) was nominated to organize it. See Mark Wukas, Doris Overboe, and Ronald R. Mandershied, eds., The Worn Doorstep: Informal History of the Northwestern University Settlement Association, 1891-1991 (Chicago: Northwestern University Settlement Association, 1991), 80; and Northwestern University Minutes, Board of Trustees and Executive Committee, 22 November 1910, Northwestern University Archives. 14 Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 8-9. Settlement houses forwarded assimilationist goals while also working to preserve some immigrant traditions. According to Allen Davis, “[M]any settlements became important instruments for interpreting America to the immigrants as well as interpreting the immigrants to America.” See Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (1967; New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1994), 88-89. 15 Adams, Education for Extinction, 22-23. 16 Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), xi-xxv.

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immigrant success.17 When viewed in light of the Americanization push, the clash of cultures in the Daily News illustration rings ominous despite its parodic contours, outlining the supposed chaotic consequences should the effort fail. Picturing a common origin story, while a Progressive ideal, proved a difficult undertaking in pageantry, as it drew attention to the performative maneuvering required in getting everyone to take their “proper” places.18 Looking back, 1909, the time of Stevens’ pageant, represents a momentous year in Chicago, when various forces within the city initiated reforms rooted in big visions, a belief in the environment’s power to shape social change, and an assertion of rights to partake in (or control) the political processes of reform. The Pageant of Illinois and the cultivation of a pageantry movement took place within this Progressive Chicago context. In 1909, architect Daniel Burnham and the Commercial Club of Chicago published the Plan of Chicago, an urban planning document that proposed a comprehensive vision for the city’s continual growth and renewal. Like mural painting and pageantry, this was monumental thinking; Burnham aimed no less than to remake the city, laying out projects to reconfigure major roads, reroute train traffic, improve the lakefront, create a regional park system, and construct a new civic center. Understanding urban experience as malleable—something that could be made both orderly and profitable—he and a small group of planners, as self-elected leaders, directed a vision for the entire city. Although Stevens reached back to the past and Burnham projected a future, both men rooted their imaginative work in the Progressive thinking of the present.19 Notably, Burnham, an Evanston resident, participated in preparations for the Pageant of Illinois and bought box seats to enjoy the performances.20

17 Leroy G. Dorsey, We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 47-48. 18 On the role of Indian performance in the shaping of American identity, see Deloria, Playing Indian; Maddox, Citizen Indians; and Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha. 19 See Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, with ed. Charles Moore, Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1909); and Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), especially 8, 35, 86-87, and 94-95. 20 “’Pioneers’ in Pageant,” Chicago Daily News, 2 October 1909, 11; and Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 15.

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Additionally, the year 1909 marks entwined movements to secure home rule— rights for the city to govern itself in lieu of state control—and municipal suffrage for women. Chicago women, as historian Maureen Flanagan has shown, fought during the Progressive Era to participate in the institutions that held municipal power. With the drafting of a charter reform bill, suffragists lobbied to tie their campaign for the vote to the city’s campaign for municipal rights. Both the proposed charter and the suffrage bill, however, were defeated that year.21 With charter reform on the minds of Chicagoans, Marquette’s actions in episode one can be read as a kind of usurpation of home rule, whereby Indians would be forced to relinquish sovereignty of the land beneath them. And despite the calls for suffrage in the air, the Daily News illustration registers only the gendered activities of women shopping (running into the Great Sale of Feathers) and mothering (a women with a baby on her back dashes from the path of the schooner-mobile). Pageantry did provide women opportunities to assume leadership roles, both creative and administrative.22 Cora Patten was chair of the pageant’s executive committee, her business management alongside Stevens’ blank verse characterized as a “happy inversion” of the sexes by William Hard in his Outlook review of the event.23 Finally, two other subjects shaped the 1909 moment: the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the emergence of the playground movement. In response to race riots that had recently ignited in Springfield, Illinois, a group of settlement workers and others organized to protect the social and political rights of African Americans, publicly announcing the new NAACP on Lincoln’s centennial birthday in February 1909.24 In the seven episodes of the Pageant of Illinois, Stevens granted no room for black historical

21 The Illinois legislature granted municipal and federal (but not state) suffrage to women in 1913. See Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 75-84. 22 See Martin Sidney Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry, 1908-1918” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1982). 23 Hard, “The Old West in Pageant,” 185. Notably, Cora Patten was consistently referred to as “Mrs. Henry J. Patten” in pageant publications and in the press. 24 Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 94-102; and Mary White Ovington, “How NAACP Began,” NAACP, www.naacp.org/about/history/howbegan/index.htm (accessed on 27 April 2009).

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figures. Yet a small number of African Americans did participate as part of the colonial camps that expanded the pageant world to the grounds near the stage, where spectators could buy historical foods and crafts. The black actors played the role of slaves in the southern camps, serving corn cakes, for instance, in the Georgia camp and chicken bouillon in the South Carolina camp to audience-consumers.25 With the pageant’s narrative ending in 1860, the “progress” of white civilization stagnated in antebellum America. Secondly, a national playground movement had gained hold by 1909, with Chicago hosting the first conference of the Playground Association of America in 1907. Believing in the social value of (supervised) recreation and in the ameliorative role of an alternative environment, reformers sought to provide city children with more areas for creative play, especially in immigrant neighborhoods. Northwestern University Settlement, along with other local settlements, helped erect thirty playgrounds and recreation centers in Chicago between 1899 and 1909.26 The playground movement’s leaders promoted the educative value of play, linking physical activity to moral reform—Roosevelt’s strenuous life repurposed for the nation’s children, moved from the frontier to the urban park. Enthusiasts viewed structured activities on the playground as lessons in community cooperation and civic participation, ideas akin to those developed in this period by pageant leaders. Launching the Pageant of Illinois into 1909 Chicago, Stevens aimed to reconcile his vision of a more inclusive kind of art-making with his developing role as an aesthetic reformer who helped build a consensual public history and a shared identity, an effort that hinged on a narrower vision of cultural authority. By examining the pageant’s visual culture, we can recover the tensions that structured such playacting and marked pageantry as a contested site of Progressive-Era reform. The Pageant of Illinois materialized contemporary debates on American citizenship, giving aesthetic form to not one American story, but many.

25 Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 12-13. 26 Robin Bachin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 146-149; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 242-251, statistic on 243; and Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 60-63.

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In the years around 1909 in Chicago, Thomas Wood Stevens played a central role in several initiatives to expand the points of contact between art and the community. Stevens became an instructor of illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1902, soon broadening his activities there to include teaching mural painting as well as occasionally writing plays for his art students to perform.27 As a faculty member, Stevens emphasized the civic responsibilities of the museum (and its art school), nurturing the idea of a “living art”—more than a storehouse of art treasures, the museum needed to connect to the present-day life of the city. With Stevens’ help, the institution had made practical steps in this direction, launching efforts to bring mural painting into public schools, to train area teachers and schoolchildren at the Art Institute, to create a municipal theatre program, and to enliven history through community pageantry. Recounting such activities in the pages of Midland, Stevens asserted: “There is nothing dead about the Art Institute; nothing dusty, save with the moving dust of effort. It stands facing the heart of the city.”28 Thomas Wood Stevens brought together the roles of pageantry and mural painting in a growing civic art movement. While staging dramatic productions like the Pageant of Illinois, Stevens was also leading a program to decorate Chicago public schools with murals created by his students at the Art Institute. Stevens developed the program with his colleague Charles Francis Browne around 1906, aiming to give the pupils in his mural painting course some practical training. Art professionals applauded Stevens’ model, whereby art students gained necessary experience and area schools acquired murals (with little or no cost) that gave color to dull walls and monumental form to history lessons. Stevens would hold competitions for the mural commissions, with current students and recent graduates vying for an assignment; once awarded, the student would see the commission through from preliminary sketch to mural installation (figure 3-4). (Notably, female students received a number of

27 “Former Faculty” file for Thomas Wood Stevens, Institution Records, Ryerson & Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago (hereafter cited as AIC Records); Melvin R. White, “Thomas Wood Stevens: Creative Pioneer,” Educational Theatre Journal 3 (December 1951): 280-282; William Robert Rambin, Jr., “Thomas Wood Stevens: American Pageant Master” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1977), 15-18; and “Prominent Pittsburghers: Thomas Wood Stevens,” Index: Pittsburgh’s Illustrated and Society Weekly (18 May 1918): 4, in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 2. 28 Stevens, “New Fields for the Art Institute,” 10.

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commissions, opportunities that sorely diminished once the woman muralist moved from the art classroom to the male-dominated system of public art patronage.) By 1913, Art Institute students had placed between eighty and ninety murals in Chicago public schools, sparking requests throughout the Midwest for student decorations and peaking the interest of educators and art professionals around the U.S.29 Stevens saw murals and pageants as doing a similar kind of Progressive work, both functioning as agents of Americanism. The subjects of the Chicago murals coincided with those of pageantry, with local figures such as Marquette, La Salle, and George Rogers Clark appearing both in painted form on school walls and in dramatic episodes of the Evanston pageant (figure 3-5).30 In an article on the Art Institute mural program for School Arts Magazine, Stevens asserted that his students’ murals had “a function beyond the purely decorative” for those who would encounter them each day in classrooms and school hallways. The murals, Stevens believed, would pictorially instruct immigrant schoolchildren on “America in the making.”31 Similarly, pageantry fit into school curricula, animating the historical narratives taught in the classroom. Through a pageant’s vivid form, “names in black type” grew into

29 Art Institute of Chicago, Circular of Instruction of the School of Drawing, Painting, Modelling, Decorative Designing, Normal Instruction and Architecture, 1906-1907 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1906), 31, 34, 43, 52, and 60; Art Institute of Chicago, Circular of Instruction...1907-1908 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1907), 42-44; and Art Institute of Chicago, Circular of Instruction...1908-1909 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1908), 50 and 52, all in AIC Records. See also Stevens, “New Fields for the Art Institute;” Thomas Wood Stevens, “Mural Decorations by Art Students,” School Arts Magazine 12 (January 1913): 299-305; Kenyon Cox, “School Decoration by Art Students,” Nation (1 June 1911): 563-564; and correspondence on mural decorations by Art Institute students in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 7. For an account of recent efforts to conserve hundreds of murals in Chicago public schools, including many Progressive-Era murals, see Heather Becker, et al., Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002). Notably, John W. Norton, who would also teach the mural painting course at the Art Institute beginning in 1913, designed the poster for the Pageant of Illinois. A reproduction of the poster appeared in the Chicago Daily News on 5 October 1909, page 4. See Art Institute of Chicago, Circular of Instruction...1913-1914 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1913), 6; and Becker, et al., Art for the People, 216-217. 30 For example, Lauros Monroe Phoenix, Art Institute student, painted Father Marquette Preaching to Native Americans in 1906 for the Wendell Phillips High School Academy. See Becker, et al., Art for the People, 11, 174-175, and 217-218. Another student, Frank Makowski, painted a mural entitled La Salle (figure 3-5), which is reproduced in Art Institute of Chicago, Circular of Instruction...1911-1912 (Chicago: Art Institute, 1911), 47. 31 Stevens, “Mural Decorations by Art Students,” 305.

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“living presences,” according to Stevens, breathing life into dull textbooks and thus sharpening their nationalist lessons for area schoolchildren.32 Stevens’ vision of civic art stressed what he called “the artist’s efficiency.” As aesthetic producers, artists, he believed, had a responsibility to be useful to the community, an idea that resonated with those of mural spokesmen like Edwin Blashfield, Charles Shean, and Will Low.33 As a fine arts educator, Stevens aimed to mold future art professionals, his student mural competitions putting that idea into practice. As an artist himself who stepped in and out of various creative fields, Stevens proved a model civic artist, assuming that identity in earnest: “Determined to live by artistic endeavors, I find that by writing stories and plays and verses and textbooks; by etching and painting mural decorations; by teaching and preaching...I can almost make a go of it....It is a serious question, as all of you know—perhaps the most serious we artists have to face—how to get done the best that is in us.”34 As Stevens’ reputation grew as a leader of the pageantry movement, he continued to move in mural painting circles, inviting established muralists such as Kenyon Cox and Blashfield, for instance, to visit the school’s mural studio in conjunction with their lectures at the Art Institute in 1911 and 1912.35 Moreover, Stevens published articles on both pageantry and mural painting in art education journals in these years, detailing a Progressive outlook that placed civic art, broadly conceived, at the center of education and reform. In addition to the efforts by Stevens and other creatives to build a culture of “living art” at the Art Institute, related activities in Chicago likewise aimed to bring art into new spaces. Hull-House, for example, developed arts curricula for area residents, hosting exhibitions and giving lectures. In the early years of the twentieth century, the

32 Thomas Wood Stevens, “The Pageant as a School Exercise,” School Arts Book 11 (June 1912): 1008. 33 Edwin Howland Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” Municipal Affairs 2 (March 1898): 108; Charles M. Shean, “Mural Painting from the American Point of View,” Craftsman 7 (October 1904): 26; and Will H. Low, “National Expression in American Art,” International Monthly 3 (March 1901): 241. 34 Thomas Wood Stevens, “The Artist’s Efficiency,” speech given at the Exhibitor’s dinner, Chicago Artists, 31 January 1911, typescript in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 54. See also Thomas Wood Stevens, “A Note on the Provinces of Art Education,” Educational Bi-Monthly, pages 133-138, undated clipping (about 1910) in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 54. 35 Cox and Blashfield delivered the annual Scammon Lectures at the Art Institute in 1911 and 1912, respectively.

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settlement house gradually offered more programs that enabled immigrants to create art themselves, including folk dancing, festivals, the Hull-House Players (an amateur theatre troop that staged serious dramas), musical instruction, and workshops in fields such as painting, sculpture, and bookbinding.36 Thomas Wood Stevens and Jane Addams discerned commonalities in their efforts, Addams asking Stevens in 1910 to work with the Boys Club at Hull-House on a dramatic performance “dealing with American history.”37 Stevens wrote of Addams at this time: “Miss Addams sees more clearly, perhaps, than anyone else the social functions of the arts, since it is the habit of her life to view everything in relation to the social service which she performs.” They both, he continued, valued “the experience of play.”38 Additionally, Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of Hull-House, led an initiative as president of the Public School Art Society to place more art in local schools, including original decorations on classroom walls and picture study from reproductions.39 The Municipal Art League, of which Stevens was a member, supported Starr’s project and also encouraged civic pageants, art exhibitions at park field houses, ethnic dance festivals, and open-air theatres in public parks.40 This city-wide movement to enlarge the experiences of art included Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago as well. As part of a multimedia campaign to promote the plan, a 1911 version of the publication entered the eighth-grade civics curriculum in public schools as a required textbook, another avenue through which Chicago Progressives stitched the practices of art into citizenship training.41 While Stevens kept himself busy participating in many of these public art initiatives throughout Chicago, he dedicated much of his creative energy to the developing art of American pageantry. The early-twentieth-century revival of

36 Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 41-42 and 48-50; Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry,” 14; and Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 86-88 and 152-156. 37 Stevens to William Chauncy Langdon, 20 August 1910, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 4, folder 3. 38 Thomas Wood Stevens, “Educational Aspects of the Drama,” undated transcript (likely 1910) in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 54. 39 Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 42-43; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 211. 40 Thomas Wood Stevens, “Municipal Art League: Memorandum of Report of Committee on Plan of Work for the Ensuing Year,” 1910, typescript in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 54. 41 Smith, The Plan of Chicago, 111-129.

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pageantry began in England, and Stevens found himself there at an opportune moment in 1906. Studying that summer in the studio of painter Frank Brangwyn, Stevens attended a rehearsal for the Warwick Pageant, prompting him to contact its creator to learn more about the art form.42 Dramatist Louis Parker was the originating force behind what would become a transatlantic pageantry craze, Stevens meeting him practically at the inception of the art’s modern form, on the occasion of Parker’s second production. Historically employed more broadly to identify coronations, processions, parades, and religious festivals, the term “pageant” at this moment gained a more specific definition as an aesthetic community drama, both secular and civic in function.43 The Englishman based his historical pageants on Renaissance models and on modern-day interest in the arts and crafts movement. Parker viewed the revived art form through a distinctly antimodern lens, regarding pageantry as a way for a community to recreate the perceived innocence, brotherhood, and vitality that shaped their town’s own preindustrial past.44 Inspired by Parker, Stevens and fellow stateside enthusiasts Americanized the pageantry craze. Early U.S. practitioners melded Parker’s historical pageantry with other popular forms of communal celebration, such as festivals, parades, tableaux, and masques (dramas with more allegorical than historical content). In June 1908, teacher Lotta Clark staged A Pageant of Education, which the American Pageant Association (founded in 1913) later declared the “first American performance properly to be regarded as a pageant.”45 Given at the Boston Normal School, the performance traced the growth of education from ancient to modern times, using processionals and symbolic figures, however, more so than episodes driven by dramatic unity. 46 Another important 1908 performance was the Founders’ Week Pageant-Parade, organized by Ellis Oberholtzer in Philadelphia that October. Although a parade, the

42 Louis N. Parker to Stevens, 14 June 1906, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 5. 43 Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), 5. 44 American Pageant Association Bulletin 10 (15 November 1914); Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 42-45; and Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry,” 54. 45 American Pageant Association Bulletin 10. 46 Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry,” 82-90.

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series of floats chronicled the city’s history from exploration to the Civil War, pictorially narrating the development of the local community. Notably, muralist Violet Oakley (who executed mural commissions for the Pennsylvania State Capitol) designed a unified artistic scheme for the pageant-parade’s nearly seventy floats.47 Thomas Wood Stevens was responsible for two of the noteworthy pageants of 1909. Prior to the Evanston pageant, Stevens directed A Pageant of the Italian Renaissance in January at the Art Institute of Chicago. An indoor performance staged in the museum’s statuary hall, a cast of art students brought to life the art and culture of Renaissance Florence, Rome, and Venice through episodes featuring such masters as Giotto, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Titian.48 Later that year, the historical pageant of the Parker type took root in America with The Pageant of Westchester County by Violet Oakley and Eugene Sanger in Bronxville, New York, in May, and with Stevens’ Pageant of Illinois in October 1909.49 With these two performances, U.S. pageantry assumed several of its distinctive characteristics—monumental in scale; a natural outdoor stage; a well-written script that developed an idea through episodes of dramatic action; local history as principal subject; the integration of music, dance, costuming, and theatrical effects; and widespread community involvement. Stevens helped establish the mainstream vocabulary that would shape the look of American pageants over the next several years. American pageant-masters, including Stevens, reworked the form’s English associations with antimodernism to fit Progressive needs, seeing pageantry as a constructive investment in twentieth-century social and cultural concerns rather than as a ritual escape from an over-civilized, modern life.50 Guiding the nation’s taste for

47 Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 46-52. 48 As with the Pageant of Illinois, Stevens enlisted the Donald Robertson Players to lend some professional rigor to this student production at the Art Institute. See Thomas Wood Stevens, Book of Words: A Pageant of the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: Society of the Antiquarians of the Art Institute, 1909); Martyn Johnson, “Chicago’s Renaissance: An Old Italian Pageant in a New-World Setting,” Putnam’s Magazine, pages 41-47, undated clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 30; and Rambin, “Thomas Wood Stevens,” 15-38. 49 American Pageant Association Bulletin 10; and Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry,” 93-101. 50 Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 66. On the origins and effects of antimodernism in America, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994).

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pageantry through their writings and productions, leaders promoted the revived art as a powerful civic tool. Making pageantry both modern and American proved a rhetorical exercise as much as an aesthetic one. Leaders, for instance, invented a national origin story for U.S. pageantry, placing emphasis on homegrown essays in the pageant vein that predated lessons from England. One such event was The Saint-Gaudens Masque, a relatively small, but elaborate outdoor performance staged in 1905 by a community of fine artists in Cornish, New Hampshire, celebrating the life of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in a classically-inspired theatrical.51 Further, like muralists, pageant spokesmen framed their art-making in democratic terms. Lotta Clark, for instance, echoed Edwin Blashfield when she spoke of pageantry as a people’s art: “What can be more thrilling than a spectacle in which all the arts combine to produce a great festival of a community of people, by the community and for the community. Let us work for that!”52 Writing in Scribner’s Magazine in 1909, Percy MacKaye named pageantry no less than “a mighty agency of civilization.” A pageant-master and poet, who would team up with Stevens in 1914 for a massive production, The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, MacKaye called on fellow art professionals to “realize the educative possibilities of pageantry in providing a fine art for the people.”53 Stevens offered practical advice on pageant techniques in his writings, detailing his own strategies for giving tangible shape to leaders’ democratic and pedagogical ideals. He did so in articles like “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” which appeared in 1912 in the Atlantic Educational Journal, accompanied by photographs and artwork from his 1909 pageants. Stevens insisted that the “book of words” should be a work of literature, which would endure as a teaching tool long after the lights dimmed on actual performances (typically two and one-half hours in length). During the pageant, Stevens did not want audience members to take their eyes away from the spectacle to read from the script. Rather, the pageant should

51 See Annelise K. Madsen, “Private Tribute, Public Art: The Masque of the Golden Bowl and the Artistic Beginnings of American Pageantry,” in Pageants and Processions: Images and Idiom as Spectacle, ed. Herman du Toit (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), 161-182. 52 Lotta Alma Clark, “The Development of American Pageantry,” American Pageant Association Bulletin 9 (1 November 1914); emphasis original. 53 Percy MacKaye, “American Pageants and Their Promise,” Scribner’s Magazine 46 (July 1909): 34.

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convey its ideas pictorially through a story of turning points—episodes grounded in the “clash and struggle” of dramatic action. Stevens even suggested that pageant- masters look to (silent) film as a model: “Think your pageant through in terms of moving pictures; filter out the talk and find out how much action remains. If there remains a connected and appealing whole, the pageant should succeed.” (Other leaders distanced pageantry from film, wary that film’s appeal as popular entertainment would taint pageantry’s associations with civic education.)54 Further, to harmonize historical reenactment with modern-day playacting, Stevens preferred to stage pageants at night, a practice discouraged by other leaders. Evening performances accompanied by artificial lights and the glow of campfires, in his opinion, mitigated the everyday distractions that surrounded a performance.55 Stevens, in short, wanted to tamp down playacting as an overriding subject of the pageant. As a dramatic art that put amateurs on center stage, pageantry required careful management so that individual roles would not outsize their actors: “Your amateur will frequently sustain a character finely for ten minutes or so; and by that time the scene is over, and a new group of characters comes on, before the first group has worn out its little ‘box of tricks,’” wrote Stevens. 56 From atop a hierarchical structure of organization, a pageant-master marshaled into harmonious form the diverse stories, talents, personalities, and interest groups of a community. This weaving together of many threads into one was a process valued by Progressives, a creative means of enacting the tenets of Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanism. In the years around 1909, Thomas Wood Stevens and fellow spokesmen like Percy MacKaye and Lotta Clark debated pageantry’s specific goals, meanings, and best practices, but not its consensus model, resting their art form on the

54 Stevens, “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” 13-16, quote on 15; Thomas Wood Stevens, “The Spoken Word in Pageantry,” American Pageant Association Bulletin 23 (1 August 1915); and Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 120. Notably, battle reenactment films were an early film genre, enabling civilian spectators to witness “history.” During the Spanish-American and Philippine- American Wars, such films brought contemporary military campaigns home for visual consumption. See Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 63-116. 55 Stevens, “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” 14. 56 Stevens to Langdon, 20 August 1910, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 4, folder 3.

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assumption that a common history could be shared (and embraced) by an entire community. It was within actual performances like the Pageant of Illinois that communities put the consensus model to the test.

Scaling up Thomas Wood Stevens’ version of public history, the cast of the Pageant of Illinois helped launch pageantry as a tool that tied art-making to citizen- making, materializing the Progressive goals of pageant leaders. Yet through such creative play, Evanstonians also tested pageantry’s constructed harmonies, opening up alternative narratives on contemporary citizenship status and Americanization programming. While Stevens’ Illinois story located conflict safely in the past, playacting rendered such timeworn battles into present-day struggles for agency. Set on the campus of Northwestern University, the pageant unfolded within an educational frame, the inclusion of students, professors, as well as experts from institutions like the Field Museum lending emphasis to the pedagogical goals embedded in this artful staging of history.57 Press coverage of the event highlighted its community appe al, the Chicago Record-Herald reporting, for instance, that the “entire north shore” was involved in preparing the pageant.58 The cast, somewhere between eight hundred and fourteen hundred in size, included two hundred cadets from a nearby military school, hundreds of pupils from public schools, children from the local YMCA, two hundred students from the Art Institute, hundreds of singers from the Northwestern glee club and the Evanston Musical Society, and many other area residents.59 Notably, immigrant members of the Northwestern University Settlement (located on Chicago’s West Side) may not have participated, although a

57 The pageant took place in an oak grove on the west side of Heck Hall (current site of Deering Library) near Sheridan Road, between the Foster Street gate to the north and University Place to the south. 58 “Historical Pageant Opens in Evanston,” Chicago Record-Herald, 8 October 1909, 3. 59 “In the Realm of Society: Dates for Historical Pageant Changed to Oct. 7, 8, and 9,” Chicago Tribune, 8 September 1909, 13; “Pageant to Show Illinois History,” Chicago Tribune, 12 September 1909, 7; “News of the Society World,” Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1909, B7; Chicago Record- Herald, 19 September 1909, untitled clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1; Willie Dearborn, Inter Ocean, 23 September 1909, untitled clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1; and “Historical Pageant Magnificent Affair,” Evanston Press, undated clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1.

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few of the settlement’s officers did serve on the pageant’s executive committee.60 The large cast likewise drew a large audience, which topped five thousand on each of the event’s three nights.61 Stevens’ pageant envisioned the local past through a set of transformative moments, driven by conflict, wherein collective identities coalesced. Like muralists at the Massachusetts State House, Stevens charted progress visually by fusing history and art, crafting turning-point narratives through a mix of realism, myth, historical artifacts, and compositional editing. To legitimize his performative version of Progressive history-telling, Stevens consulted with academic historians and cultural experts, spent time in area archives, and read local histories. 62 He also advocated a place for myth-making alongside historical accuracy, granting himself a degree of artistic license as pageant author. Stevens readily admitted that he took such “liberties” in the Pageant of Illinois, drawing on myth and romantic histories alongside scholarly sources.63 For instance, in episode four, when George Rogers Clark captures the settlement at Kaskaskia during the Revolutionary War, Stevens chose the “more picturesque” setting of a festive ball, with its music and dancing, for Clark’s siege rather than the “literal record,” alerting spectators in the official program of his artistic decision to draw from myth for this scene in particular.64 To trigger the tension and dramatic action that drove his pageant narrative, Stevens scripted episodes focusing on moments of cultural miscommunication—

60 Press accounts of the pageant made no mention of settlement community members participating in the event, emphasizing simply that proceeds would benefit the settlement. Further, the Northwestern University Settlement Association Records in the Northwestern University Archives provide no evidence of such participation. For settlement officers who served on the pageant’s executive committee, see Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 8-9, and 14. The wife of one settlement officer, James Lee Mahin, was in charge of the Indian encampment and played Indian in the pageant. 61 Tickets cost between 50 cents and $2.50, and boxes more. 62 For instance, Stevens consulted Jesse L. Smith, Superintendent of Schools in Highland Park, who suggested several sources on Illinois history. Smith advised Stevens to read academic histories like George G. Mason, Chapters from Illinois History (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1901), as well as romantic histories like Randall Parrish, Historic Illinois: The Romance of the Earlier Days (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1905). See Jesse L. Smith to Stevens, 12 September 1909, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1. 63 Stevens, Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois, 5-6. 64 Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 3.

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between Indian tribes, Indians and Frenchmen, Indians and Englishmen, American pioneers and soldiers, and Americans and Indians. A tangle of alliances and misconceptions, for example, characterizes episode two, wherein La Salle and Tonty prepare to travel down the Mississippi River. The Illinois chief, Nicanope, who originally offered to guide La Salle and his men along the waterway, reneges his offer after a Miami messenger warned of troubled waters ahead. La Salle dismisses the spiritual warnings, suspecting instead that the messenger had fingered him a spy for the Iroquois. Yet some of La Salle’s men resist, wishing to heed Nicanope’s new stance. Sorting the alliances among the Illinois, Miami, Iroquois, and French quickly becomes a moot point when La Salle declares the explored terrain (both present and future) for the French king, reconfiguring the lines of loyalty. In episode six, miscommunication ignites the Black Hawk War, as a female pioneer mistakenly relays a message concerning Indian aggression to the captain of a volunteer regiment instead of to the ranking general. When three Indian envoys arrive with Black Hawk’s message (of truce) for the general, they refuse to divulge it to the captain, who, in frustration, ties them up. Upon his arrival, Black Hawk is enraged by the caption’s actions, sending his Sauk tribesmen after the fleeing volunteers.65 To frame his pageant and hold its episodes together, Stevens used a herald figure, creating a mythic version of a historic Indian medicine man. The Pageant of Illinois unfolds through the eyes of White Cloud, also known as the Winnebago Prophet, who personifies the noble savage, a token Indian of a dying race. In the opening lines, the prophet calls on the Great Manitou, the spiritual power, to “let me look back,” to “Bring back the glow / Of our forgotten camp-fires; bring our chiefs / To their lost councils.” 66 In wishing to revisit a time “When there had come no pale- face to our lands,” White Cloud renders Indian culture as nostalgic for its pre-colonial past and positions that culture in a pre-modern America. As such, this figure vocalizes the “vanishing Indian” ideology that structured removal and assimilationist efforts by white government officials during the nineteenth century. In 1909, Stevens’ imagined

65 Stevens, Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois, 19-30 and 55-65. 66 Ibid., 11.

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White Cloud actually endorsed a failing U.S. policy. It was the vanishing policy itself that faced extinction in the early twentieth century, as gradualist and preservationist approaches shifted the course of Indian policy from eradication to accommodation of Indian cultures.67 In vitalizing a vanishing Indian, Stevens, like his pageant prophet, conjured a romanticizing apparition. A photograph by Burke & Atwell, another from their Outlook set, frames White Cloud as visionary, materializing his outsider position to the pageant narrative (figure 3-6). As a Stevens-endorsed image, this is White Cloud posing for his official portrait. The pageant-master entrusted the production’s biggest role to Donald Robertson, head of the professional troupe of actors that made up a small portion of the cast. In the image, Robertson stands atop a platform in an oak tree with his eyes and arm raised upward. Fall foliage and geometrically-patterned handicrafts surround him. Head to toe, he wears his Indianness—feathered headdress, greased paint on his face, Wampum beads, fringed pants, and moccasins. The photographer positioned his camera below White Cloud, composing a full-length view that aggrandizes the figure and captures the sensation of tilting one’s head upward— White Cloud, pageant audiences, and viewers of the photograph look collectively to an imagined past.68 Burke & Atwell cropped out any reference to the historical scenes that unfolded below White Cloud, physically and spiritual removing him from the flow of time. In a similar vein, the cover art for the Book of Words portrays the lone figure of White Cloud atop a grassy ridge as he surveys a line of prairie schooners advancing along the Illinois terrain below him (figure 3-7). This illustration likewise documents the Stevens eye, serving as the visual preface to the writer’s published script of the Pageant of Illinois. Moreover, the cover was designed by Stevens’ colleague at the Art Institute, Ralph Fletcher Seymour. The visual structure of both photograph and illustration reinforces Stevens’ literary conventions in the script. Speaking from the elevated stage in blank verse, White Cloud functions poetically; his

67 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 88; Stevens, Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois, 11; and Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 180. 68 In the Outlook article, Burke & Atwell’s photograph has been cropped on the left and right sides, further enhancing its verticality.

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language contrasts the prosaic conversations of the historically-bound figures beneath his oak shelter. Yet White Cloud too had lived on the land, denied historical specificity by Stevens in favor of this mythic role. The historic White Cloud, also known as Wabokieshiek, was an influential medicine man of Winnebago and Sauk descent, born about 1794 and active through the 1830s in western Illinois, not far from where Stevens himself was born in 1880. Wabokieshiek preached resistance to American encroachment of Indian lands, advising Black Hawk to continue his militant stance in 1832.69 Stevens, however, did not give his White Cloud a historical place in episode six, which recounts the beginnings of the Black Hawk War, sidelining Wabokieshiek’s actual, adversarial role in Illinois history. In fact, Stevens’ White Cloud disappears after his prologue in episode four announcing U.S. arrival—the moment depicted in figure 3-6 according to the photograph’s caption in Outlook —so as to not disrupt the march of American progress. White Cloud returns for his final words after the Black Hawk episode and before Lincoln’s procession, assuring his audience at the conclusion of the pageant that the vanishing Indian would do just that: “my darkened eyes behold / The ruin of our nations.”70 While Robertson as professional actor played White Cloud, hundreds of Anglo Evanstonians played Indian in every scene of the Pageant of Illinois, assuming roles as Indian warriors, maidens, drunken Indians, and noble savages—native types that flourished in the popular imagination. As Philip Deloria has shown, Americans since the Revolutionary Era have engaged in Indian masquerade as a means to contest and construct national identity. In the early twentieth century, donning Indian garb functioned as a salve for modernity, an imaginative, natural(ized) counterforce to those of mechanization, industrialization, and incorporation that shaped the Progressive-Era city. Yet playacting was not all antimodernist escape. Such “Indianized quests for authenticity,” in Deloria’s words, served contemporary needs,

69 Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology and Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 885-886; and Kathleen J. Bragdon, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Northeast (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 156. 70 Stevens, Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois, 66.

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enabling early-twentieth-century Americans to “devise a better modern.”71 The masquerading Indians in Robert Reid’s Boston Tea Party mural at the Massachusetts State House, for example, modeled identity formation for modern-day immigrants (see figure 2-10). Similarly, Pageant of Illinois participants enlivened a frontier past to forge communal bonds in a (sub)urban, increasingly diverse society; to raise funds for a nearby settlement house; and to materialize Progressive identity. Finding ways to transgress the boundary between an Indian past and an Americanized present reinforced the boundary itself, opening up all the while a space for cultural reimagining. The contradictions of this desire to embody both primitivism and progress are suspended within the frames of two Burke & Atwell photographs from the final tableau of the Pageant of Illinois (figures 3-8 and 3-9). The images depict a portion of the pageant’s “march past,” as it was called, when the entire cast paraded before the audience in reverse chronological order, just after Lincoln’s campaign line had filed off the stage. There are two known versions of this panoramic diptych. A first version was reproduced in Hard’s Outlook article in 1910 and again in Stevens’ Atlantic Educational Journal article in 1912. Figures 3-8 and 3-9 comprise the second version, which were reproduced in Ralph Davol’s 1914 handbook on American pageantry, with Stevens’ permission.72 This second version crops the march past more tightly, allowing us to view the costumed cast in richer detail.73 In figure 3-8, actors from the Revolutionary War episode move from right to left across the photograph’s middle distance, their momentum sure-footed even though the camera has stilled their steps. In profile at left is the figure of White Cloud, separated from the line by a giant oak. As in the solo portrait of White Cloud, Burke & Atwell use the

71 Deloria, Playing Indian, 97-127, quotes on 115 and 102. See also Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 72 Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry (Taunton: Davol Publishing Company, 1914), 52- 53; and Stevens to Davol, 27 December 1912, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 43, folder 1. Davol misidentified the site of the pageant as “Evansville” on page 6 of his handbook. 73 Stevens’ personal papers, housed in the University of Arizona Library Special Collections, contain large prints of four of the Burke & Atwell photographs—these two of the march past, White Cloud (figure 3-6), and episode one (figure 3-2).

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tree as a compositional barrier that renders the prophet ahistoric and static, pictorially reinforcing Stevens’ mythologizing. The image gives material form to the twined concepts of cultural development and stasis that structured Indian mimicry, and pageantry’s playacting, more broadly. A dressed-up Robertson impersonates White Cloud, who stands motionless as civilization parades by, staying put like the sturdy oak at his side. The prophet’s rootedness serves as a visual cue, alerting the photograph’s viewer (and by extension, the pageant’s audience) that the rest of the figures are, historically speaking, on the move. Burke & Atwell’s photographs of the Pageant of Illinois represent compact pictorial equivalents of Stevens’ dramatic episodes. Yet interpreting the pageant only through its script and endorsed imagery leaves much of the performance unexamined. By expanding the pageant’s frame to include a range of activities both onstage and offstage, we can discern how Evanston’s communities embellished or altered Stevens’ artful composition of the past and, in turn, unsettled its meanings. Such activities point to a less-than-serious tone animating the pageant’s consensual progress narrative. Through playful and irreverent performances, participants winked at fellow Evanstonians, mixing Stevens’ Americanizing lessons—his usable past—with personalized acts of cultural agency. Pageantry could be just plain fun, as the Pageant of Illinois’ expanded archive reveals. Importantly, between Stevens’ monumental history-telling and the community’s more lighted-hearted play, we can discern how contemporary debates on Native and African American citizenship, for instance, materialized within pageantry’s spaces. Through creative play, participants both promoted and called into question the nationalist agendas of Progressivism. Fissures in the pageant’s official vision become discernible in moments when playacting is heightened, where the boundaries of art and the everyday give way. While Burke & Atwell’s official photographs focus on Stevens’ script, another set of images taken for the Chicago Daily News highlights the pageant’s local personalities without the gloss of theatre. These news photographs were arranged as photomontages alongside articles on the event’s preparations, giving the newspaper’s

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readers an early glimpse of the Pageant of Illinois (figures 3-10 and 3-11).74 The images frame the pageant in its unscripted moments. Participants strike self-conscious poses for the camera, embracing their costumes and props and revealing their amateur status as they fashion their historical selves for a larger public. Such photomontages place little emphasis on particularities of the pageant narrative, presenting tight shots of individuals (or small groups of actors) and naming the participants in detailed captions. In frame five of figure 3-11, for instance, Alden Jewell stands tall in his eighteenth-century garb, dramatically raising his hat as he impersonates a French commander. And in frame five of figure 3-10, six young women strike rather casual poses—one wraps her arm around her friend’s shoulder—infusing their dressed-up tribal identity with present-day camaraderie. The Daily News photographs shift the reporting of the pageant from heroic moments in history to role playing, letting 1909 Evanston comingle with an imaginary past. Instead of emphasizing storylines and historical characters, the press focused on the local names and faces of participants. Reporters took notice of casting decisions that played upon resonances between everyday personalities and pageant identities. The pastor of the Evanston Episcopal Church, for instance, undertook the role of Father Marquette and cadets from a nearby military school impersonated French, English, and American soldiers.75 Further, despite assertions by Stevens and fellow leaders that pageantry represented a democratic art—a means for communal self- expression—the event enabled middle- and upper-class participants to stage their own cultural agency as benefactors and socialites. In society pages, the press profiled the prominent men and women taking part, local patrons who supported the charity event by buying box seats, and the elaborate costuming worn by actors and attendees alike.76

74 Notably, Burke & Atwell are credited with two images in these montages (the rest taken by a staff photographer for the Daily News), changing gears from their Outlook assignment to frame the pageant in its unscripted moments. Similar cast shots appeared in the Chicago Record-Herald and the Chicago Tribune. 75 “News of the Society World: Evanston Pastor to Take Part in Historical Pageant,” Chicago Tribune, 23 September 1909, 13. 76 See, for example, “Evanston Campus Turns Time Back,” Chicago Tribune, 8 October 1909, 3.

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Along with these portraits of local residents as actors, newspaper accounts of the pageant as live performance emphasized unscripted moments onstage, behind-the- scene preparations, and activities unfolding among the audience and at the nearby encampments. Two stories concerned unruly horses onstage. On the first night, the Chicago Tribune reported, a horse started amidst the shooting during the Fort Dearborn Massacre, dismounting its trooper in a commotion that sent players running and women screaming. No one was seriously injured and the scene continued. A horse in the next scene got “stage fright,” resisting the cue from his rider, Hazel MacKaye, who needed to deliver her lines as the messenger whose miscommunication seemingly starts the Black Hawk War. (Hazel MacKaye, sister of Percy MacKaye, participated in the Evanston pageant as a Donald Robertson Player. She would soon emerge as a leader in the pageantry movement, writing and directing several productions, including the suffrage pageant examined in chapter four.) The Tribune reported the incident as “merely ‘greenroom’ gossip,” giving readers a glimpse of the orchestrations backstage, as the audience was none the wiser during the performance.77 Other instances where everyday life broke through the pageant world include the Dutch girls of the New York camp, who had trouble walking in their wooden shoes, and participants dressed as Indians, Puritans, and Huguenots visiting the audience box seats during the performance.78 Onstage, backstage, and throughout the grounds, such activities revealed the human side—and theatricality—of Stevens’ vision of Illinois history. The thousands of ticketholders who came to watch the performance also got into the act, expanding the Pageant of Illinois beyond its seven scripted episodes to the many actor-audience exchanges that unfolded throughout the pageant grounds. Like the cast in their final tableau, the audience participated in a procession of their own, traversing a torch-lit pathway through the past along colonial and Indian encampments—complete with prairie schooners, tepees, and even a live bear cub—on

77 “Evanston Campus Turns Time Back,” Chicago Tribune, 3. 78 Ibid.; and “6,000 at Pageant on Second Night,” Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1909, 11.

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the way to their seats.79 At the camps, spectators interacted with pageant players, who hawked small treats and handicrafts such as cornbread, tarts, cocoa, cider, baskets, candlesticks, blankets, and moccasins. Through these (commercial) interactions, the boundaries between imagined and real, playacting and spectatorship, a colonial past and the Progressive-Era present begin to blur. It is here in the wooded pageant grounds that a small number of African Americans participated in the Pageant of Illinois, animating a scarred and contested vision of American history at the periphery of Stevens’ pageant world. Denied historical roles in the scripted episodes, black Evanstonians played slaves in the southern colonial encampments, where they sold historical foods and crafts to spectators. A photograph of one of the southern camps, likely that of Virginia, captures the dislocations that emerge when twentieth-century residents reenacted eighteenth-century slave society (figure 3-12). We do not know who took this photograph or how it circulated at the time of the pageant.80 An unmarked image in the archives of the Northwestern University Settlement Association, we can reasonably assume that it served as a visual record of the settlement’s pageant fundraiser. We can also categorize the image as an unofficial view; that is, as an image outside of the Stevens-endorsed Burke & Atwell set, offering us an alternative interpretive frame. In the photograph, pageant actors play colonist, slave, and Indian. A group of colonial maidens dressed in flowered chintz and ruffled hats stands in a line at right in the middle distance, a lone male among them. Six slaves extend the line to the left, dressed more modestly. The figures face the camera, in varying degrees of attention,

79 Hard, “The Old West in Pageant,” 185-186. 80 The photograph is in the Northwestern University Settlement Association Records, Photographs, Northwestern University Archives, box 5, folder 1. While its only identifier is a handwritten date of 1910, I believe it to be a photograph of one of the colonial camps at the Pageant of Illinois in October 1909. The Indian figure wears a similar costume to those in Burke & Atwell’s photograph of the Marquette episode and the wooded setting corresponds to other photographs taken on the pageant grounds. Further, descriptions of the southern colonial camps in the program and in newspaper accounts confirm such slave reenactments. A description of the dress of the Virginia ladies suggests that this photograph was taken at the Virginia camp. See “Illinois Pageant Given at Evanston,” Inter Ocean, 8 October 1909, clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1; and “News of the Society World,” Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1909, B7.

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except for two women at center who converse and a young Indian boy at far left who seems somewhat misplaced. While the photographer has cleared the foreground of any visitor foot traffic, creating a visual divider between past and present, traces of temporal commingling remain. Positioned near a cooking station, the slaves hold pitchers, a pan, and other culinary gear, ready to serve pageant-consumers (or even the other camp actors—one southern belle holds an empty plate). The white boy playing Indian who has seemingly wandered into the frame draws further attention to the scene’s playacting, as the African Americans next to him were similarly playing slaves, with one crucial difference—their masquerading was not based on racial or ethnic difference. Black actors crossed the antebellum timeline, but not the color line. Although Anglo Evanstonians by the hundreds greased their faces and donned native costumes to play Indian, they did not dress and black up as slaves, a distinction made clear in this photograph. While the pageant dramatized a history of Indian conquest and displacement, it nearly ignored the country’s history of slavery (save for the southern encampments). The Pageant of Illinois concludes in antebellum America during Abraham Lincoln’s first presidential run, the episodes before this finale failing to visualize any African American story. Rooted in burlesque forms of mass entertainment, blackface minstrelsy did not fit with the educational objectives of pageant leaders, who wanted their grand-scale theatricals to carry historical import as citizen-building object lessons. Further, by the early twentieth century, minstrelsy had lost much of its appeal as a predominant form of white playacting. In these years, Jewish film actors took up blackface as a practice through which to negotiate an ethnic American identity on screen, distancing blackface from the domain of Anglo play.81 The Anglo casts in pageants like the one in Evanston instead engaged in “Indian minstrelsy,” in the words of Alan Trachtenberg, as a way to tangibly enact a nationalist progress narrative that claimed an Indian past (versus a past of black enslavement) for an Americanized, melting-pot present.82

81 Rayna Green, “A Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore 99, no. 1 (1988): 31 and 47; and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3-18. 82 Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha, 95.

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As African Americans playing slaves, staring firmly towards the viewer in figure 3-12, the camp actors materially resisted the nostalgic lens through which local audiences consumed the pageant’s antebellum world. By personifying non- citizenship, the dressed-up Virginia slaves in the photograph visually prompt questions about the citizenship status of blacks in Progressive America. The NAACP, formed just months before the Evanston pageant, represented an organized effort to ameliorate the conditions of violence, disenfranchisement, and discrimination that plagued African American citizens in the early twentieth century.83 Playing slaves, the pageant’s black actors positioned the new NAACP within a nationalist progress narrative of their own, as a modern, civil rights institution that would redress the primitive practices of slavery in America’s shared past. This alternative progress narrative unfolded in the pageant wings, so to speak, for the only onstage scene that addressed slavery and citizenship did so in Revolutionary-Era terms. In episode four, after George Rogers Clark captures the territory at Kaskaskia in the name of the Virginia governor, he declares: “We have come to free these people, not to enslave them. They are to be citizens, not subjects.”84 This reference to slavery elides African Americans, fashioning national identity as the triumph of (white) democracy over monarchy. Although the episode’s colonial subjects were now “free,” the southern encampments near the pageant stage featuring “negro mammies” animated a more conflicted public history.85 The vision of camp actors playing eighteenth-century slaves likely melded with another vision, that of African Americans playing contemporary roles as servants or maids. At the time of the pageant, Evanston was the domestic service hub for the affluent suburbs of the North Shore. Blacks settled in the segregated community of Evanston in growing numbers during the early twentieth century, representing almost five percent of the population by 1910. Others commuted from Chicago to work in

83 Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 99-107. 84 Stevens, Book of Words: An Historical Pageant of Illinois, 45. 85 Ibid.; Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 13; and Frederic Hatten, “Evanston’s Pageant Is Artistic Success,” Chicago Post, 8 October 1909, clipping in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1.

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Evanston.86 Outside the pageant world, the camp actors in figure 3-12 may well have held jobs in service labor or domestic work in Evanston or its neighboring communities.87 The domestic servant uniform represented another kind of identity- playing, a dressing up that enabled African American Evanstonians to cross the boundaries of segregation while racial hierarchies remained intact. Importantly, the official story of the Pageant of Illinois includes a brief report in several newspapers that Carlos Montezuma, a Native American, activist, and Chicago resident, would dance in the performance, opening up the possibility of another alternative narrative within the space of the pageant. Montezuma, a practicing physician educated at the University of Illinois and at the Chicago Medical College, had established a public reputation by 1909 as an ardent spokesman for Indian reform. He advocated Native American freedom—in some cases more aggressively than fellow Indian Progressives—protesting racial oppression, assailing the reservation system, calling for the abolishment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and demanding immediate citizenship for all Indians. 88 At the time of the Pageant of Illinois, citizenship status for Native Americans remained glaringly inconsistent.89 Montezuma framed his critiques of U.S. Indian policy through a Progressive lens, strongly supporting Americanization efforts such as Indian education in public schools, and viewing assimilation as both necessary and inevitable. Native Americans in his eyes would have their own progress narrative, so long as whites removed the

86 Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 61-65. 87 It is less likely that any of the black actors were students at Northwestern. At the time of the pageant, an estimated five (or fewer) African American students attended the university. This is according to Janet Olson, Assistant University Archivist, Northwestern University Archives (email correspondence, 21 December 2009). 88 The Society of American Indians, a pan-Indian organization, counted Montezuma among its founding members in 1911, though he would later express criticism of the organization for not advocating the changes he thought necessary. Maddox, Citizen Indians, 111-112; and Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 65-74. 89 The Dawes Act of 1887 had tied citizenship to land allotment; Indians who continued to live in tribal relations remained noncitizens. With the Burke Act of 1906, citizenship was no longer granted at the time of an allotment assignment, forcing new Indian landholders to wait twenty-five years before becoming citizens as well as introducing a discretionary policy whereby some allottees could gain the status earlier. See Adams, Education for Extinction, 145-146; and Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 165 and 177.

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barriers of political and cultural discrimination. Montezuma was active in the Chicago community, vocalizing his ideas in speeches; writing opinion pieces for the Chicago Tribune, such as “American Indian Is Rising” in 1907; and participating in social events like a University of Illinois alumni baseball game in 1909. 90 It is unclear whether or not Montezuma participated in the Evanston performance, but such talk in the press disrupts Stevens’ scripted version of public history by visualizing a pluralist Americanism for the pageant’s audiences. The Indian activist was a contributing member of present-day Illinois, not a relic of its past. In a report of event preparations on October 1, the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Another feature of unusual interest is the Montezuma dance to be given by Dr. Montezuma, a Sioux Indian and prominent physician, assisted by Harry Burgess, who boasts of Pawnee Indian ancestors.”91 Nearly verbatim reports appeared the following days in the Chicago Daily News and in the student paper, the Northwestern.92 Press coverage of the evening performances themselves made no mention of Montezuma. Moreover, his name does not appear in the program, nor does any correspondence with him exist in Stevens’ personal papers.93 The Tribune’s brief account misidentified Montezuma as a Sioux (he was a Yavapai, born in Arizona), a mistake that points to the persistence of the idea of “Indian” as a collective identity.94 One can only assume that Montezuma would have participated in the corn dance at the opening of the pageant, as there was no “Montezuma dance,” or any other Indian dance, according to the Book of Words, program, and press descriptions. The musical program featured “original Indian melodies which [had] been unearthed in the archives of the Field museum.”

90 Carlos Montezuma, “Plea for Poor Lo,” Chicago Tribune, 6 November 1898, 37; Carlos Montezuma, “How America Has Betrayed the Indian,” Chicago Tribune, 4 October 1903, 21; Carlos Montezuma, “American Indian Is Rising,” Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1907, B5; “Alumni Arrange Ball Games,” Chicago Tribune, 25 August 1909, 13; and Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 67. 91 “In the Realm of Society,” Chicago Tribune, 1 October 1909, 13. 92 “’Pioneers’ in Pageant,” Chicago Daily News; and “Pageant Opens Thursday Evening,” Northwestern, 6 October 1909, 1. The Northwestern reported Montezuma’s assistant to be Harry Burr; neither “Harry Burgess” nor “Harry Burr” appears in the program. 93 There is no correspondence between Stevens and Montezuma in the TWS Papers, Arizona, or in the Thomas Wood Stevens materials at the Newberry Library, Chicago. 94 Peter Iverson, “Montezuma, Carlos,” American National Biography Online, www.anb.org/articles/12/12-01531.html (accessed on 6 April 2009); and Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 23.

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Begun after White Cloud’s first monologue, the corn dance involved rhythmic movement as well as chanting, initiated by Indian men, who were then encircled by Indian children and women. 95 Montezuma’s presence at the Pageant of Illinois, whether anticipated or actual, materially resisted the notion of a dying Indian. While Stevens’ White Cloud was a medicine man who conjured a vision of white civilization’s rise and the Indian’s consequent defeat, Carlos Montezuma held a medical degree, a product of civilization’s institutions, who sought to defeat the oppressive policies that actual Indians faced during the Progressive Era. White Cloud turned his gaze backward and Montezuma focused on the present and future. As reformer and pageant dancer, Montezuma embodied Indian agency, fusing his offstage role as political activist with his onstage persona as cultural producer. As an Indian playing Indian, Montezuma altered the terms of playacting, much like the African American actors did in playing slaves in the southern camps. In performing Indian roles, Native Americans aligned themselves with white stereotypes of Indianness, a tricky proposition that nonetheless created some room for self- definition. 96 As the only real Indians in the Pageant of Illinois, Montezuma and his assistant would have been far outnumbered by the hundreds of white actors playing Indians, whose greased faces, war whoops, and drunken celebrations may have proven too much for the two to challenge through their dance. Yet as the Tribune reported, Montezuma’s expected participation drew “unusual interest,” suggesting that pageant enthusiasts made a distinction between Montezuma’s performative practice and that of other cast members. Other pageants during the Progressive Era featured entire casts of Indian actors, such as the Song of Hiawatha pageants performed annually by Ojibwe and Odawas in the Great Lakes region, amplifying the tensions between the self- conscious playacting of Native Americans and the amalgamated Indianness of the

95 This opening melody was woven into the rest of the musical accompaniment, written and arranged by Frank E. Barry and Olaf Anderson. An orchestra played the music “screened by a network of vines.” See Chicago Record-Herald, 19 September 1909, untitled clipping, and “Illinois Pageant at Evanston,” Inter Ocean, 8 October 1909, clipping, both in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 31, folder 1. 96 Deloria, Playing Indian, 121-126.

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white cultural imagination, and opening up a broader space for Indian agency.97 In 1919, Carlos Montezuma played Indian in a pageant staged by members of the Society of American Indians, a reform organization made up of Indian Progressives. The activist-performers appropriated the pageant form to present their own history, control their representation as Indians, and educate audiences by fusing art-making and reform. 98 Enacting the Pageant of Illinois, the communities of Evanston scaled up Stevens’ progress narrative, launching pageantry as a citizen-building art that infused everyday life, vitalized lessons of Americanization, and tied local identity to a shared national past rooted in western expansion. The Burke & Atwell photographs of Marquette, White Cloud, and the march past visualize this Progressive agenda, preserving Stevens’ official view—its grand scale, serious tone, and educational footing. While materializing this official view, participants also framed the pageant in their own terms. Onstage, offstage, and in front of the camera, they navigated a cultural space for creative play, testing pageantry’s constructed harmonies. Playing Indian, pioneer, soldier, and slave, participants were likewise playing at consensus, opening up alternative narratives within the pageant world. In fashioning a stylized past, Evanstonians engaged in a cultural struggle to define American citizenship for the Progressive-Era present.

Not only did Evanston residents play at consensus during rehearsals and performances, they also created entirely new pageant worlds, putting the Pageant of Illinois to new ends by staging imitation events for insider audiences. Through such take-offs, residents enacted alternative public histories, reimagining Stevens’ production and repurposing the pageant form to resonate with narrower Evanston communities. I would like to conclude with two examples, both produced by students on the campus of Northwestern University. Like the opening comparison between the

97 See Michael D. McNally, “The Indian Passion Play: Contesting the Real Indian in Song of Hiawatha Pageants, 1901-1965,” American Quarterly 58 (March 2006): 105-136. 98 Maddox, Citizen Indian, 51-53.

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Burke & Atwell photograph of Marquette and the Daily News illustration, the take-off pageants include one serious and one comedic rendition. A week after Stevens’ main event, the Woman’s League, a student group at the university, staged their own pageant in Willard Hall for fellow women collegiates, repositioning pageantry within a feminized space. The student newspaper previewed the event, announcing that all women were invited to attend on October 16: “The feature of the evening is to be an historical pageant of Northwestern [U]niversity, in imitation of the recent pageant on campus.”99 Modest in scale, this pageant drew about 150 students. In earnest, members pictorially recounted a progress narrative of their own: “The interesting epochs in the life of Northwestern University were depicted, true to life, from the erection of the Old College on the shores of a dish-pan Lake Michigan to graduation exercises in oratory school.”100 Unfortunately, we do not have a script or any photographs of the pageant, only slim descriptions in the student newspaper. Although brief, reports of the event in the Northwestern suggest that the Woman’s League understood the components of pageantry, employing a progress framework and turning-point episodes that “strongly rivaled” the monumental production of the prior week.101 At least one member of the league, Fannie Pritchard, had participated in Stevens’ production, playing Indian in episode one; she likely served as a bridge between the official pageant and this take-off. 102 A feminine space, the Woman’s League performance might also have been a feminist space, as women enacted a history of the university that placed the college woman at center—as actor and perhaps as protagonist. There was indeed a woman’s history to be told, as Northwestern University conferred its first degree to a female student in 1874. Further, as part of the 1909 campaign for municipal suffrage, Catherine Waugh McCulloch, an 1886 alumna of the law school, surveyed the

99 “Woman’s League Party: Feature of Evening Will Be Take Off on Recent Historical Pageant,” Northwestern, 13 October 1909, 1. 100 “Woman’s League Entertains: Historical Pageant of Northwestern University Presented by Girls,” Northwestern, 18 October 1909, 1. 101 Ibid. 102 Fannie Isabelle Pritchard listed the Woman’s League in her entry for the Juniors section of the 1911 yearbook, the Syllabus, on page 79. See also Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 4.

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Northwestern faculty, revealing that nearly seventy-three percent of respondents favored woman suffrage. McCulloch had published a pamphlet with her findings in February 1909. The Woman’s League did not take an official position on the suffrage question, its 1906 constitution outlining a social purpose, not a political one. Yet by 1920, at the time of the Nineteenth Amendment, the organization had redefined itself to include judicial and legislative functions. Through the Woman’s League, college women partook in self-government, active members in the university’s student politics. 103 The 1909 all-female pageant in Willard Hall played off of enthusiasm for the Pageant of Illinois, redirecting the gaze of a subset of that community toward a different Progressive vision, one featuring women as cultural producers en masse. This effort by students to include women in official history echoed that of the female Evanstonians who were concerned during the planning stage that the Pageant of Illinois only had a few scripted roles for women. To increase female participation— and visibility—in Stevens’ narrative, they initiated the idea of colonial camps to create a space for female agency within the pageant world.104 The second take-off of the Pageant of Illinois used humor to uproot the pedagogical premise of Stevens’ civic production and to debunk performative history- telling as a series of heroic episodes. The “Northwestern Hysterical Pageant” played out in pen and ink in the pages of the student yearbook, the Syllabus, in 1911 (figures 3-13 to 3-16).105 Like the Woman’s League event, the yearbook spoof tightened the Evanston community to campus life in particular. The four-page spread included its own “book of words” of sorts, textual descriptions accompanying the illustrative mock-ups of each of the pageant’s nine episodes. Artist H. Parker Lowell and his yearbook committee cohorts appropriated other devices of pageantry, concluding the

103 “History of Northwestern: 1850-1899 Timeline,” Northwestern University, www.northwestern.edu/about/history/1850-1899.html (accessed on 6 May 2010); “Northwestern University and Suffrage,” University Archives News, Northwestern University, 26 March 2009, www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/news/archives/2009/03/ (accessed on 6 May 2010); Catherine Waugh McCulloch, “Northwestern University and Woman Suffrage” (Evanston, 1909); “Constitution,” Woman’s League of Northwestern University, 1906; and “The Woman’s League,” Syllabus (1920), 200. The pamphlet, constitution, and yearbook are all housed in the Northwestern University Archives. 104 “Girls in ‘Schooners,’” Chicago Daily News, 6 October 1909, 16. 105 “Northwestern Hysterical Pageant,” Syllabus (1911), 237-240.

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pen-and-ink performance, for instance, with its own march past. The Hysterical Pageant revels in playacting, jumbling Stevens’ progress narrative of Illinois into a comedic staging of contemporary student life. An artful assemblage, the yearbook performance presents an insider vision, a playful rebuttal to the grand scale and serious tone of Stevens’ public history. In Lowell’s composition, White Cloud has become Medicine Man Jimmie James, sobriquet for Professor James Alton James, head of the history department at Northwestern. James had served on the executive committee of the Pageant of Illinois, and in late October 1909, he was appointed by the state legislature to be chairman of the committee on historical research in Illinois.106 Despite his expert credentials, James’ persona in the yearbook spoof acknowledges the imminent boredom of those in earshot of his oration, likening the pageant’s student audience to the “listless” tenor of his own classroom. As the herald for the Hysterical Pageant, Medicine Man Jimmie James declares: “It is my purpose to present Northwestern life as she is lived. If you already know enough concerning your college history...hike out for the tall timber rather than tarry longer in my sacred presence.”107 The scenes that follow call out the antics of specific students, giving visual form to the notorious personalities and incidents that marked campus life. Lowell also draws in elements of the Pageant of Illinois, using its communal imagery—French explorers, tomahawk- wielding Indians, and tied-up maidens—only to render a tale legible primarily to the student body. In scene five, for example, “blood-thirsty braves” have tied up a sorority girl, Miss Jenks (see figure 3-14). Waiting to “spring to her rescue at the psychological moment” is “Abram II,” short for Abram W. Harris II, a classics major and member of the Syllabus board. Abram’s exuberant persona in the scene carries over to his yearbook photograph, in which he poses pensively with his hand beneath his chin, in distinction from his classmates.108 In scene eight, Lowell pokes fun at

106 Stevens, Programme: Historical Pageant of Illinois, 14; and “Highest Honor to Professor James,” Northwestern, 20 October 1909, 1. 107 “Northwestern Hysterical Pageant,” 237. 108 “Northwestern Hysterical Pageant,” 238; “Gamma Phi Beta,” Syllabus (1911), 125; and “Juniors,” Syllabus (1911), 77.

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himself and the rest of the Northwestern Magazine staff, depicting the student association in Indian tribal life (see figure 3-15).109 And in the Hysterical Pageant’s finale procession, a White-Cloud-inspired Professor James, head in history book, leads a rowdy march past, featuring a roller-skating Abram II in tow (see figure 3-16). Not only was H. Parker Lowell the mischievous hand behind the Hysterical Pageant’s illustrations, he was also the 1910 senior class president and editor of the Syllabus yearbook, assuming a role as student leader alongside that of troublemaker. (In 1908, Lowell was threatened with expulsion for contributing to a parody of the student newspaper.)110 As spokesman for the senior class and as resident cartoonist, Lowell asserted that he too, like Thomas Wood Stevens, could be the community’s history-teller. Rather than teaching civic lessons, however, Lowell’s topsy-turvy pageant resonated with offstage visions of the Pageant of Illinois—like the collision of frontier west and Progressive Era in the Daily News illustration (see figure 3-3)— accentuating the tensions that structured such artistic efforts to compose a shared past. Members of the Woman’s League also claimed the role of history-teller, appropriating Stevens’ grand, educational frame for a female-centered communal narrative—a strategy employed by woman leaders in the pageantry movement in the coming years. Notably, there is a connection between these two take-off pageants—socially at least—despite their differences in form and tone. In 1912, Lowell married Marcia Johnson, vice president of the Woman’s League.111 Eyeing the Pageant of Illinois, one square and the other askance, the two take- off performances demonstrate that Thomas Wood Stevens’ conception of civic art as a living art had taken root in greater Chicago. In the fall of 1909, pageantry infused the Evanston community. Reworking the main pageant to communicate different messages to even more localized audiences, the take-offs further extended pageantry’s reach into the everyday, providing area residents with additional points of contact

109 “Northwestern Magazine,” Syllabus (1911), 28-29. 110 I thank Janet Olson at the Northwestern University Archives for helping me track down further information on H. Parker Lowell (email correspondence, 16 April 2009). 111 “What People Are Doing in Evanston,” Lake Shore News, 8 May 1912, 6; and “Woman’s League,” Syllabus (1911), 179.

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between abstract ideals of community, progress, and citizenship, and the range of expressions that made those ideals tangible. When viewed as a constellation of activities, pageantry becomes much more than its official narrative. Expanding the Pageant of Illinois’ field of vision to include press accounts of rehearsals and performances, cast photographs, promotional artwork, and take-offs recovers a dynamic cultural form. An art historical approach to pageantry helps us discern how the visual, imagined pageant world created a stage for negotiating how history was told, revealing a range of histories and a competing cast of history-tellers. The Evanston pageant succeeded in its primary goal of raising money for the Northwestern University Settlement, generating roughly four thousand dollars, which more than covered the institution’s immediate debts.112 The event also launched Thomas Wood Stevens’ career as a nationally recognized pageant-master. In the years after 1909, Stevens managed to reuse some of the episodes from the Pageant of Illinois for other midwestern pageants: Pageant of the Old Northwest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1911; Madison County Historical Pageant in Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1912; and the Wisconsin Pageant in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1913. Further, the Evanston pageant likely strengthened ties among creative-minded Progressives in the Chicago area, as Jane Addams, for instance, asked Stevens in 1910 to work with the Boys Club at Hull-House on a historical drama. In 1912, Stevens moved to Madison to teach art history at the University of Wisconsin, commuting to Chicago once a week to continue at the Art Institute on a reduced schedule. The following year, he shifted definitively from a fine-arts professional to a dramatic professional, heading up the new school of drama at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. With his Pageant of Illinois, Thomas Wood Stevens made Progressive reform visible, placing himself as civic artist at the center of contemporary debates on citizenship, Americanism, and education. Through pageantry’s artful lens, he fashioned local history into pictorial instructions on how Americans are made, composing all the while a common origin story from less-than-harmonious roots. In materializing this history, the pageant, in turn, opened up a cultural space for

112 “Historical Pageant Ended Saturday,” Northwestern, 11 October 1909, 1.

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alternative visions, made clear in the disjunctions between a dressed-up White Cloud and Carlos Montezuma; between African Americans playing slaves and those organizing for the protections of citizenship; between the erasure of female leaders from a collective past and the efforts of activist women to participate in arenas of cultural and political power; and between the pageant’s earnest, Americanizing tale and the playful, unscripted moments that shifted focus from a long view of Illinois history to the imaginative uses of the past for the immediate moment. Within the world of pageantry, Progressive-Era citizens in Evanston cast their own, often competing, visions of what a shared American past, present, and future should look like.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Recasting Allegory as Modern Womanhood at the Suffrage Pageant-Procession (1913)

With large crowds in Washington for President-elect Wilson’s inauguration the following day, woman suffragists dramatically demanded the vote on the nation’s political stage, enacting an artistic pageant on the steps of the Treasury Building in coordination with a mass march on Pennsylvania Avenue. Half a million people clogged the streets to witness the event on March 3, 1913. Scheduled at three o’clock in the afternoon, the parade commenced at the Peace Monument near the Capitol with participants, five thousand strong, traveling west along the avenue toward the site of the pageant, adjacent to the White House.1 The theatrical performance was scripted to finish just as the end of the parade line passed by the Treasury’s south plaza, at which time the pageant actors would join the march to its final destination, Continental Hall, for a spirited suffrage rally. In visually sumptuous form, women inserted their legislative calls for enfranchisement into Washington’s ritualistic changing of the guard. The young and daring Alice Paul, chair of the event’s organizing committee, insisted on the inaugural-eve date and waged numerous bureaucratic battles to secure the needed permits, recognizing that suffragists would become “part of the week’s official program” by demonstrating in such close cadence to Woodrow Wilson’s own march to power.2 Indeed, one journalist called the inauguration a “double event,” characterizing the suffrage portion as a “brilliant overture” to the proceeding day’s pomp, replete with the sounds of votes for women. 3 In staging this sensory-rich comparison, organizers of the Suffrage Pageant-Procession, sponsored jointly by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the Suffrage Societies of the District of Columbia, aimed not simply to divert eyes, but also to

1 Estimates of the number of participants ranged from five to ten thousand. 2 Alice Paul to Official Board of NAWSA, 16 December 1912, National Woman’s Party Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, reel 1, frame 31 (hereafter cited as NWP Papers, LC). 3 Joe Mitchell Chapple, “The Inauguration of President Wilson,” National Magazine 38 (April 1913): 17.

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convert minds among the inaugural crowds. A writer for the Woman’s Journal, NAWSA’s official organ, gave voice in the days before the event to the rational goals at the core of suffragists’ emotive appeals: “The artistic and allegorical beauty of the floats and dances will appeal to the spectator’s eye; the arguments on the banners and transparencies will appeal to his reason and sense of justice; but, above all, the ocular proof showing how far the advance of equal suffrage has actually gone will appeal to his political common sense.”4 This was civic art-making with a punch—artistic choreography on a grand scale that infused celebratory forms with a specific demand for change, an amendment to the U.S. constitution enfranchising women. For Hazel MacKaye, who designed the Treasury theatrical and called it The Allegory, the event represented an opportunity to harmonize her professional aspirations with her support of woman suffrage. Less than four years earlier, MacKaye had participated in the Pageant of Illinois as part of the troupe of professional actors cast in its leading roles. After Evanston, she grew increasingly interested in pursuing a career as a pageant writer and director, exiting the stage for work behind the scenes. As the pageantry craze hit full stride between 1909 and 1913, MacKaye moved her way from actor to dramatic coach to assistant pageant-master, and with The Allegory, she debuted as author and pageant-master. In designing her pageant at the Treasury, MacKaye worked with Glenna Smith Tinnin, who was in charge of the entire day’s pageantry, particularly the artistic effects of the procession (figure 4-1). A producer of plays and pageants, Tinnin was active in the dramatic community in D.C.5 While working together on logistics, MacKaye proved the visionary for The Allegory, confessing enthusiastically during the planning stages to her brother Percy, a fellow pageant devotee, that it was her own idea.6 At a moment when pageant leaders began to organize professionally and the nearly seventy-year-old

4 A. S. B. (Alice Stone Blackwell), “The Pageant Procession,” Woman’s Journal (1 March 1913): 68. 5 See Glenna Smith Tinnin’s profile in Harriet Connor Brown, ed., Official Program: Woman Suffrage Procession (Washington, D.C., 3 March 1913), np; and Tinnin [“Lizzie”] to Patricia Margaret Street [“Lady”], undated, Alice Paul Papers, The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, box 16, folder 239. 6 Hazel MacKaye to Percy MacKaye, 7 January 1913, MacKaye Family Papers, Dartmouth College Library, box 120, folder 5 (hereafter cited as MacKaye Papers).

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suffrage movement intensified its visual campaign, Hazel MacKaye emerged as a bridge between the two movements, discerning women’s political equality through the lens of Progressive-Era civic art. She recognized in pageantry “a splendid means of expressing living public issues” like the vote, voicing this connection in the pages of the pageant-procession’s official program. 7 As both pageant professional and suffragist, MacKaye sought to thread her passions into a singular—and monumental— aesthetic creation. This chapter examines the Suffrage Pageant-Procession to consider how women activists made use of pageantry in this coordinated performance, fashioning a mosaic of modern womanhood that resisted essentialism and translated pageantry’s civic idealism into solidarity for the suffrage cause. Participants gave tangible form to a female-centered vision of citizenship, putting civic art’s consensus model to new ends. Stitching together the pageant and parade forms, women orchestrated their dissent from the female status quo into a visually appealing performance that measured the era’s ideals of community, progress, and democracy against the realities of women’s collective history and their modern-day claims to a just future. Suffragists traded on tangled allusions to old and new, male and female, militant and conservative, concrete and abstract, and modern and classical, infusing both the pageant and the procession with hybrid forms that complicated contemporary notions of acceptable womanhood. With the 1913 performance in Washington, Hazel MacKaye realigned pageantry’s pedagogy from that of civic uplift to a specific, political curriculum. The story of the Suffrage Pageant-Procession is likewise the story of how the art form became fully politicized in the U.S. By 1913, America’s taste for pageantry had hit a critical mass. Amid this enthusiasm, MacKaye imagined new possibilities for civic art, catalyzing a trend among a small group of leaders for pageantry “with a purpose,” in the words of an early historian of the movement.8 The Allegory contributed to a

7 Hazel MacKaye’s profile in Brown, Official Program, np. 8 Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 254.

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new spirit of art and politics that coalesced in 1913.9 MacKaye reworked the pageant form at a time when fellow leaders were organizing the American Pageant Association to standardize, nationalize, and monitor the field. The contemporaneous efforts to professionalize and politicize pageantry represent two sides of the same coin, entangled objectives that, until now, have not been read together. A key figure, MacKaye advanced both aims, ruffling feathers along the way. Although political pageants would not come to dominate the field, her production on the eve of Wilson’s inauguration made headlines, dramatized the suffrage cause, and fashioned pageantry into a striking, effective mode of gender politics. Hazel MacKaye in The Allegory reconsidered the pageant formally, pedagogically, and ideologically, bringing her innovations to a national (versus local) audience, a first in the American pageantry movement. At the height of the pageantry craze, her intervention unfolded in seemingly nonthreatening terms through the lyrical movements of figures like Columbia, Liberty, and Hope, draped in the garb of tradition. Yet as embodied allegory, the pageant recast its classical actors as part and parcel of a twentieth-century vision of (enfranchised) womanhood. MacKaye made pageantry speak politically about the present and future. Her refashioned pageant, and the pageant-procession as a whole, hinged on a slippery kind of agency to be sure, as suffragists could not completely control how their hybrid forms were consumed by various audiences, nor could they quell pockets of dissent within their own ranks. The performance nevertheless compellingly enacted debates on such unsettled terms as citizen, womanhood, and pageant, modeling a kind of self-reflexive civic art-making that did not simply rearrange prevailing artistic forms and cultural assumptions, but reimagined their contexts and meanings. Whereas Thomas Wood Stevens in his Pageant of Illinois viewed playacting as a way to mold participants into good citizens, MacKaye’s version of playacting aimed to make disenfranchised citizens whole—to empower women to act politically—first with the pageant and then with the vote.

9 See Martin Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant (New York: Collier, 1988).

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Organizers of both portions of the performance paid keen attention to pictorial effects, orchestrating their message of deserving female citizenship through carefully planned sequences of color, banners, floats, music, dancing, and marching. A vision of order, punctuated by timed crescendos, the pageant-procession would interweave respectability, beauty, and Progressivism. Suffragists choreographed every detail— from the Joan-of-Arc demeanor of the parade herald astride a white steed (noted suffrage belle Inez Milholland); to the gradations of blue worn by social workers, teachers, businesswomen, and librarians who marched in succession; to Abraham Lincoln’s words “No Country Can Exist Half Slave and Half Free” on a banner that introduced a float representing states with and without the vote; to the allegorical figure of Peace on the Treasury steps releasing a dove to the sounds of Wagner’s Lohengrin (figures 4-2 and 4-3).10 With Tinnin in charge of the event’s artistry and MacKaye designing The Allegory, organizers found room for yet a third committee head responsible for pictorial elements. Patricia Margaret Street, a suffragist with Australian roots, took charge of the performance’s color scheme and costumes. In the words of the Washington Post, the ebb and flow of hues along the line of march produced “a kaleidoscopic picture of ever-shifting color.” “Gay tunics set off somber caps and gowns,” for instance, and “the prim dress of professional nurses were the background for the gingham gowns and ‘poke’ bonnets of the farming women.”11 With her palette, Street attempted to tell a progress narrative through color, evoking the rainbow as a symbol of a better tomorrow for women. “After storm,” she averred, “comes sunshine and the indication of a beautiful day.”12 In this chapter, I place new emphasis on the pageant-procession’s pictorial effects, situating the event within the professionalizing pageantry movement and within Progressivism’s civic art vocabulary and ideals. While the 1913 performance has received considerable scholarly attention, particularly from historians of woman suffrage, its visual dimensions have not been the focus of such inquiries. Further,

10 Brown, Official Program, np; and “Pageant Outline,” NWP Papers, LC, reel 2, frames 43-48. 11 “Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” Washington Post, 4 March 1913, 10 (microfilm edition by Micro Photo Division, Bell & Howell, Wooster, Ohio). 12 “Color Scheme of the Woman Suffrage Pageant,” NWP Papers, LC, reel 2, frames 73-74.

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scholars have tended to consider either the parade or the pageant, leaving its companion largely on the sidelines (or relegated to a separate area of analysis).13 Conceptualized in tandem, the parade and pageant staged their meanings as a hybrid event. Just as MacKaye wed her aspirations as pageant-master and suffragist, she likewise stitched The Allegory into the fabric of the procession on Pennsylvania Avenue. As such, my examination of her pageant takes its cue from this hybrid approach, looking not only at the literal intersection of pageant and parade at the steps of the Treasury Building, but also discerning how hybrid forms of allegory, gender, and playacting throughout the day’s performance structure our understanding of pageantry as a self-reflexive cultural practice. Pageantry functioned as a space of negotiation, where MacKaye both used and debated with the art form’s myth of consensus. Taking account of the pageant-procession’s scripted vision as well as the actual conditions of its enactment, this chapter maps the ways that civic art pictorially held old and new meanings in productive tension, pinpointing as well where such artistic maneuvering remained susceptible to recalibrations by the press, government officials, pageant leaders, and suffragists themselves, who flattened or essentialized the performance’s hybrid mode for their own ends.

13 Modern literature on the Suffrage Pageant-Procession includes Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44-74; Karen J. Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913- 1923,” Theatre Survey 31 (May 1990): 23-46; Sidney R. Bland, “New Life in an Old Movement: Alice Paul and the Great Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington, D.C.,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 1971-1972, ed. Francis Coleman Rosenberger (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 657-678; Mary Chapman, “Women and Masquerade in the 1913 Suffrage Demonstration in Washington,” Amerikastudien 44, no. 3 (1999): 343-355; Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 77- 109; Leslie Goddard, “’Something to Vote For’: Theatricalism in the U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movement” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001), 108-170 and 248-321; Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 70-113; Sarah J. Moore, “Making a Spectacle of Suffrage: The National Woman Suffrage Pageant, 1913,” Journal of American Culture 20 (Spring 1997): 89-103; and Martin S. Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry, 1908-1918” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1982), 199-212. Notably, Barber offers a careful reading of The Allegory alongside the parade, situating the dual performance within a history of marching on Washington. Although concerned with visual aspects of suffrage politics, Barber does not directly engage with its imagery. I see my research as building on Barber’s example, bringing the event’s visual effects to the foreground of my analysis. Chapman reads the pageant alongside the parade, but insists on a conservative/radical split that I find too tidy; and Chapman does not consider the event’s visual archive. Moore, an art historian, does not engage in close visual readings.

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Artistic hybridity on its own did not politicize MacKaye’s production or inherently improve upon pageantry of a strictly allegorical or historical kind. Rather, this hybrid mode of civic art-making oftentimes signaled, as in the case of the Suffrage-Pageant-Procession, a site of experimentation. The hybrid combinations that MacKaye and her fellow suffragists crafted provide evidence that as artists, they were negotiating modernity, finding suitable vocabularies and forms to visually express their particular Progressive agenda: votes for women. Importantly, the hybrid mode represented a working from within, an attempt to reform existing vocabularies—both in the sense of improving them and forming them again. In this way, the hybrid mode was essentially reformist, not radical. It was an incremental approach to change by artists akin to that pursued by Progressives in social and political circles. Fashioning intersections of real and ideal, MacKaye worked as an aesthetic reformer, rather than as a radical. Yet Progressivism as style did have an artistic range: reform could look more conservative or more radical. MacKaye’s hybrid experiments likely appeared more radical to some viewers, for example, than muralist Henry Oliver Walker’s Pilgrims on the Mayflower at the Massachusetts State House (see figure 2-6). In his painting, composed of separate, rather disconnected registers of allegorical and historical forms, Walker seems to be holding on to the old as he inches toward new solutions, depicting a more conservative vision of reform. Alternatively, MacKaye discerned political value in classical forms, launching her allegorical performers into concrete, modern debates at the heart of official Washington on the nature of female citizenship. Not only do we need to look closely at the event’s visual archive—its photographs, postcards, illustrations, and descriptive accounts—but we also have to frame a wide enough field of vision so that connections between images can likewise give us clues as to how suffragists’ pictorial claims to citizenship played out. Take, for instance, a photograph of The Allegory near its conclusion (figure 4-4). At the center stands the imposing figure of Columbia, female personification of the nation. Robed in a blue velvet mantle lined with the stars and stripes, she wears a dress of white silk, a breast-plate, and helmet, holding an eagle-topped scepter in her

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outstretched right hand. Standing guard at the front of the Treasury plaza, the structure’s massive classical columns aggrandizing her stature, Columbia (Hedwig Reicher) has called forth the likes of Justice, Charity, Liberty, Peace, and Hope, who have each made their way down the grand staircase along with their attendants. Behind Columbia to the left is Hope (Mildred Anderson), who has just danced down the steps, drapery billowing over her shoulder. In green gauzy fabric, Hope moved across the monumental pageant stage accompanied by a host of children representing “Hope’s dear Reliance.”14 With her entrance, the pageant’s entire cast forms a panoramic tableau—the central portion visible here—for the express purpose of viewing together the parade of women that would presently pass before them. The photograph affords a wealth of information about the look and feel of MacKaye’s pageant. It renders tangible the textual descriptions in the official program and in newspaper accounts that guided spectators through the narrative. But more than that, the photograph’s stilling of the performance captures visual details that temper the scripted idealism of Columbia and her allegorical entourage with prosaic elements of lived experience. Holding their balloons, the young girls on either side of Hope stand in poses that connote varying degrees of attention. Some face forward and play their pageant roles, while others assume more spectatorial habits, peering over their shoulders at the performance unfolding around them. The photograph’s details underline the presence of both the imagined and the everyday within the phenomenological event of the pageant itself. Idealism here is an embodied idealism—a set of abstract qualities made tangible through the costumed bodies and scripted playacting of actual women. While acting the part of the ideal, pageant participants could not entirely shed their modern-day skin. Further, the photograph gains texture when we read it in concert with another image taken at the performance. Standing at attention in the above photograph, her gaze piercing its frame, Columbia signals her audience to about-face, redirecting, in effect, the subject of interest away from herself and toward the viewer’s own space. When we draw from the visual archive to turn our heads, so to speak, the pageant

14 Brown, Official Program, np.

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gains new texture (figure 4-5). Rotating our vantage point to a position above and slightly behind Columbia’s left shoulder, we discover that Columbia too has a bead on the day’s pageantry. From atop the Treasury landing, she faces a dense crowd of spectators, who have packed the building’s periphery and the grandstands across the street to firstly take in her actions, and then to eye the anticipated paraders. At left, a crew of photographers mans their equipment, cameras at the ready to frame images like the one we have just considered. Although difficult to make out facial expressions, we can discern nevertheless that many members of the crowd have turned their attention from Columbia. People gathered on Columbia’s right, including a police officer, look down the road. Behind the cameramen, a tuba horn also points toward the road, indicating that its player faces in the direction of the marchers. This photograph rounds out the frieze-like qualities of the first image, serving as a visual reminder that The Allegory’s actors were not simply decorative in function—or even safely bounded within a timeless, imaginative space—but classical protagonists that ambulated between the worlds of player and spectator. After the parade files by, Columbia and the other hundred actors taking part will descend the remaining steps, walk between the throngs, and assume their identities as modern-day suffragists and marchers. The conditions of the pageant-procession transpiring outside this photograph’s frame would make that ideal/real crossover a difficult feat, which we will consider later. To fashion modern womanhood into a tangible ideal, organizers employed a hybrid form of civic art, the “pageant-procession.” The term itself resonated in more complex ways than simply as a hyphenation of two distinct forms. Pageant-procession could describe a parade with rich artistic elements such as floats, banners, and costumes. Calling upon this older definition, Glenna Tinnin declared that the “new crusade of women of our pageant-procession, like those splendid religious processions of the Middle Ages, will have the power to convert, to encourage, and to inspire.”15 The day’s pageantry was not confined to the Treasury steps, but infused the entire production, bolstering women’s civic demands with glosses of spiritual authority.

15 “Pageant Will Be Wonderful Scene,” Woman’s Journal (15 February 1913): 49.

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Such merging of medieval pageantry and Progressive-Era politics structures the cover illustration of the official program, where a Joan-of-Arc figure and her attendants, in voluminous drapery and adornments, trumpet votes for women (figure 4-6).16 Many terms circulated to describe the performance on March 3: procession, parade, pageant, Allegory, tableau(x), cumulative allegorical tableau, pageant parade, and pageant- procession. (Leaders in the pageantry movement would have much to say about terminology as well, which we will turn to shortly.) Tinnin favored the term pageant- procession, explaining to fellow suffragists in the Woman’s Journal that as original plans for a parade took shape, they quickly “swung into the province of pageantry.” As a “form of argumentative persuasion,” the pageant raised the stakes of parading, framing the parade’s claims in numbers, quality, and serious purpose through the lens of artistry and beauty. The pageant-procession’s pictorial emphasis made it “the one kind of demonstration” that would meet suffragists’ needs, according to Tinnin, “driv[ing] home to the mind through the eye” their demands for change.17 In the early twentieth century, women activists saturated the learning-by-looking practices of visual Progressivism with gender politics. Just as the pageant form carried resonances both historic and topical, so too did the parade. Americans had staged parades since the nation’s earliest years, and the form’s popularity grew steadily into the nineteenth century. With a luster of consensus, celebrations like Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July functioned as ritualistic expressions of nationalism, efforts to speak for the nation and to script its public history. Parades interwove consensus with dissent, enabling their participants to practice partisanship, ethnic solidarity, or syndicalism, for example, within the unifying cadence of the line of march.18 Harmoniously holding together competing

16 The original artwork for the cover was recently discovered at a garage sale in Texas. The story was featured on the PBS television show, History Detectives. See “Women’s Suffrage Painting,” History Detectives, season 5, episode 1, www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigations/501_suffrage.html (accessed on 12 August 2009). 17 Glenna Smith Tinnin, “Why the Pageant?” Woman’s Journal (15 February 1913): 50. 18 See Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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constituencies, parades orchestrated civic division into visions of pluralism and democracy.19 As historian David Waldstreicher has shown, the parade itself was a hybrid rite, its politics of celebration representing its motivating force: “[T]o ignore the politics of the parade is to miss its very reason for being.” He continues, “those who see nationalism as a realm of unthinking consensus, and therefore as neither interesting nor politically useful, have conceded too much to those who have used parades to recreate that myth of consensus.”20 A female-centered production, the inaugural-eve parade feminized a traditionally masculine cultural practice. Historically, as a display of citizenship, militarism, and political authority, parades resided in the (public) realm of men. Suffragists’ twentieth-century move to recast the line of march echoed on a grander scale the efforts by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women to participate in festive culture. Despite constraints of unequal time, space, and power, women sought ways to express their allegiance or dissent within the rites of nationalism, wearing ribbons or other accoutrements, for example, to signal partisanship on their person; assuming allegorical roles in processional floats; or presenting hand-sewn banners at official ceremonies.21 At the 1913 event, women no longer inserted their political expressions from the margins, but controlled the entire affair; they were the parade’s organizers, sponsors, promoters, symbols, and foot-soldiers. The suffrage parade was a novel, but not untested, mode of female activism in 1913. By this time, a performative campaign for suffrage had taken hold in the U.S. In addition to nineteenth-century tactics such as signing petitions, publishing

19 Mary P. Ryan, “The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 137. 20 David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776- 1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 14. 21 Women were not a monolithic category, nor were they alone in their attempts to participate in parades and other forms of festive culture. Elite and middle-class white women, black men and women, working-class and poor residents found ways to overcome their positions on the political and cultural margins, and to make festive culture their own. See Davis, Parades and Power, 48; Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1835-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

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pamphlets, and sending delegations to the legislature, suffragists in the early years of the twentieth century introduced more spectacular methods, arguing visually and bodily for the vote through open-air speaking, automobile tours, balls, films, plays, tableaux vivants, parades, and other publicity-generating stunts.22 American women took their cues from British “suffragettes,” who had demonstrated the value of seizing the streets en masse.23 Yet because the British movement’s militant campaign occasionally included violence (throwing rocks, lighting fires, interrupting Parliament), many suffragists in the U.S. approached such dramatic tactics with caution, fearful of drawing too direct of a link between themselves and their sisters in England. Some leaders embraced militancy as a matter of expediency; others looked for ways to harmonize genteel (white) womanhood with a militant stance. Suffragists working on the state campaign in New York staged several parades in the years immediately preceding the 1913 pageant-procession in Washington, convincing supporters that feminizing the parade had its advantages. Beginning in 1910, Harriot Stanton Blatch, head of the Women’s Political Union (WPU), organized annual parades along Fifth Avenue in New York City, calling on Albany legislators to support the cause. The events had grown from about five hundred participants in 1910 to a staggering ten to twenty thousand marchers in 1912.24 Blatch’s efforts helped make parading acceptable to suffragists and their audiences, framing a militant spirit

22 See Lumsden, Rampant Women; Goddard, “’Something to Vote For;’” and Michael McGerr, “Political Style and Women’s Power, 1830-1930,” Journal of American History 77 (December 1990): 864-885. On the turn to consumerism in the campaign, see Finnegan, Selling Suffrage. A good source documenting the visual dimensions of the suffrage campaign is Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr., Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement (Santa Cruz, CA: American Graphic Press, for the National Women’s History Project, 2005). 23 See Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Tickner’s important art-historical study of the British movement’s visual campaign has no American equivalent, a gap in the scholarship that I aim to address in small part with this chapter. 24 Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 111-156; Ellen Carol DuBois, “Marching toward Power: Woman Suffrage Parades, 1910-1915,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 88-106; and Frances Diodato Bzowski, “Spectacular Suffrage; Or, How Women Came Out of the Home and into the Streets and Theaters of New York City to Win the Vote,” New York History 76 (January 1995): 56-94. Maude Malone staged the first suffrage parade on February 16, 1908, in New York City with twenty-three women marchers. See DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch, 102- 103.

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of protest within feminine respectability.25 Bringing the suffrage parade to the national stage in 1913, Alice Paul consulted with Blatch on logistics and even borrowed some three hundred banners from the WPU to reuse at the inaugural-eve event.26 Instead of laboring state-by-state for local change, Paul wanted suffragists to refocus their energies on the federal amendment. Nationalizing the suffrage parade, Paul pushed to nationalize the suffrage campaign.27 Pageantry likewise gained momentum during these years, with an increased number of performances nationwide providing women with new opportunities to participate in the art of civic life. When MacKaye directed her Allegory on the Treasury steps in 1913, the pageantry craze was in full swing.28 The handful of performances in 1909, centered in the Northeast and Midwest, including Stevens’ Pageant of Illinois, had grown nearly tenfold by 1913 with dozens of pageants that year, stretching coast to coast from Maine, Massachusetts, and Virginia, to Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California. Pageant numbers would soar in 1914. Women took leadership roles in these productions as writers, directors, choreographers, artists, and committee members. Alongside MacKaye, female pageant-masters such as Lotta Clark, Margaret Eager, Constance Mackay, Ethel Rockwell, and Virginia Tanner

25 Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years: The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 183-184; and Harriot Stanton Blatch, “The Value of the Woman Suffrage Parade,” Woman’s Journal (4 March 1912): 137. 26 Caroline Lexow to Alice Paul, 23 December 1913; and Paul to Mary Ware Dennett, 6 February 1913, both in National Woman’s Party Papers: The Suffrage Years, 1913-1920 (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981), reel 1, frames 36 and 754, respectively (hereafter cited as NWP Papers, SY). 27 For more on Alice Paul and her leadership in the suffrage campaign during its final decade, see Linda G. Ford, Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912-1920 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991); and Christine Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910-1928 (1986; San Jose: toExcel, 2000). 28 Prior to The Allegory, suffragists had employed theatrical forms in support of the cause, including A Pageant of Protest in New York on March 28, 1911, a short, indoor drama written by Augusta Raymond Kidder featuring both historical and allegorical figures. Tableaux vivants also proved popular with suffragists. One such performance was presented by the Equal Franchise Society in New York in January 1911, with Inez Milholland, herald of the 1913 pageant-procession, taking part. See “A Pageant of Protest,” leaflet, MacKaye Papers, scrapbook “Pageants I: 1895-1915;” Goddard, “’Something to Vote For,’” 119-120, and 139; and Bzowski, “Spectacular Suffrage,” 75-78.

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fashioned careers in the field, each staging numerous productions (see chapter five for more on Rockwell and Clark).29 Further, American alterations to the pageant form opened up more female roles, as stateside creators tempered the form’s emphasis on historical scenes and male heroism with allegorical interludes and finale episodes set in the future. Two or more interludes in a given pageant offered a pause in the dramatic action, wherein women, typically, performed abstract concepts such as the Age of Homespun, the Pioneer Spirit, or the Spirit of Dreams through music, pantomime, and dance (figure 4-7). Moreover, the taste for future-based scenes granted women additional stage time as allegorical figures who anchored a community’s idealizing vision of what might be. While these new roles were largely ahistorical and un-individuated, their gendered basis nonetheless provided women with a space for cultural agency, namely as dancers.30 Dance represented a major component of Progressive-Era pageantry, and women controlled its practice as both directors and performers. Pageant dance included realistic compositions such as an Indian corn dance, a folk dance, the minuet, or the gavotte, as well as the innovative symbolic dances that structured interludes. The field of dance itself underwent a revival in the early twentieth century, attracting new professionals and scores of amateurs. The physical culture movement nurtured an interest in symbolic dancing, focusing on physical self-improvement, aesthetic self- expression, and theories of movement and gesture. Many terms described this new artistic dance, including Greek, classic, aesthetic, natural, dramatic, pantomimic, and interpretive. With variations, dancers wore flowing, diaphanous garments, moved in

29 See Tackel, “Women and American Pageantry;” Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990), 177-187; and “List of Pageants of the Year 1913,” American Pageant Association Bulletin 2 (1 February 1914). In compiling lists of pageants each year, the APA also policed which productions fell inside and outside the association’s definition of a pageant. I consider this effort in relation to MacKaye’s work later in this chapter. 30 On American changes to the pageant form, see Mary Porter Beegle and Jack Randall Crawford, Community Drama and Pageantry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 19; and Lotta Alma Clark, “The Development of American Pageantry,” American Pageant Association Bulletin 9 (1 November 1914).

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sandals or bare feet, vivified themes from nature, and accorded their expression with beauty and uplift.31 Hazel MacKaye made considerable use of dance in The Allegory, a device that aligned her production with the current pageant mode. Of the pageant’s seven episodes, two centered on dancing, the entrances of Liberty and Hope. About an hour in length, the entire program unfolded in pantomime, with music accompanying each allegorical figure and her attendants as they descended the Treasury’s south steps. The pageant presented the “past as struggle for justice,” as I will name it here— women’s struggle for inclusion as communal history-tellers, contributing citizens, and cultural producers. Trumpeters along the mile-long line of march signaled the start of the procession, and when the notes reached the pageant stage, the band opened the theatrical by playing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Columbia then emerged from behind the monumental columns and slowly moved down twenty-seven steps to the edge of the plaza, an expansive space (thirty paces back to front) for the choreographed meeting of the personified nation and her ideals (figure 4-8).32 After saluting the audience, Columbia then summoned Justice (Sarah Truax Albert), who entered to the slow melodies of Wagner’s “Pilgrim’s Chorus,” the first of a suite of music by European composers. Dressed in robes of purple, sword in hand, Justice moved across the stage with her twelve attendants, who manipulated parchment-like scrolls as they advanced toward Columbia (figure 4-9).33 Next came Charity (Violet Kimball) in robes of blue to the tune of Handel’s “Largo,” led by a young girl and boy

31 On the role of dance in American pageantry, see Dorothy Jean Olsson, “Arcadian Idylls: Dances of Early Twentieth-Century American Pageantry” (PhD diss., New York University, 1992). See also Beegle and Crawford, Community Drama and Pageantry, 190-216; Lucia Gale Barber, “The Significance of the Present Dance Movement,” New England Magazine 41 (November 1909): 272-279; and Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890- 1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 32 Glenna Smith Tinnin to Florence Flemming [sic] Noyes, 23 January 1913, NWP Papers, LC, reel 1, frames 420-421. I am estimating the scripted length of the pageant at about one hour based on Tinnin’s remark that the entrance/dance by Noyes would be the longest at eight to ten minutes. 33 Stage direction and costume details can be pieced together from various newspaper articles, some of which report conflicting details, as journalists relied on publicity materials as well as eye-witness accounts. For Justice, see “Suffrage Day in Capital,” Boston Transcript, 3 March 1913, clipping in MacKaye Papers, box 126, folder 14. See also Brown, Official Program, np; and “Treasury Steps Tableau,” on costume colors, materials, and costs, undated, NWP Papers, LC, reel 2, frame 78.

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(the only male in The Allegory) with flower baskets, and followed by adolescent maidens (figure 4-10).34 After greeting Columbia, Charity took her position at the front of the plaza at stage left, with Justice and her crew assembled at stage right. Liberty then made her lyrical entrance to the trumpeting sounds of the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s Aida, a much anticipated moment of The Allegory. Florence Fleming Noyes, called “the noted Greek dancer” by the press, played the role of Liberty (figure 4-11). Noyes, who taught “the art of rhythmic expression” at her New York dance school, arranged the dances for the Treasury performance, her own representing the event’s longest episode. In crimson silk, Noyes as Liberty moved across the steps, “a flying figure, unfettered and free” (figure 4-12). With twisting and turning movements, Noyes interpreted Verdi’s music, which concerns a female slave and her struggle for liberty. “Never did Greek slave dance more rapturously, beautifully, the very heart of the drama and poetry of motion than Miss Noyes did yesterday as ‘Liberty,’” wrote the Washington Herald. Aligning this sense of freedom with woman suffrage, the episode crescendoed in “a triumphant dance of joy and freedom.”35 The exuberant tone continued with the appearance of Peace (Eleanor Lawson), who released a dove from atop the steps to the notes of the overture to Wagner’s Lohengrin (see figure 4-3). In a gown of white and silver, Peace descended to the plaza, followed by her attendants who represented Peace and Plenty, holding olive branches and cornucopia, respectively (figure 4-13). They all made their way to

34 Emma L. Ostrander was also reported to have played Charity; it is unclear whether Kimball or Ostrander performed on March 3. It is possible that Kimball replaced Ostrander in the last days before the event. Ostrander’s name appears on a flier for The Allegory, yet the Woman’s Journal named Kimball in its report on March 8. See “Principals in The Allegory,” flier, MacKaye Papers, scrapbook “Pageants and Festivals;” and “Pageant Wins Throng,” Woman’s Journal (8 March 1913): 80. Further, the Evening Star listed Ostrander on March 2 and Kimball on March 3. See “Banquet to Hikers,” Evening Star, 2 March 1913, 2; and “Suffrage Tableaux Are Viewed by Mrs. Taft and Other Prominent Persons,” Evening Star, 3 March 1913, 1. 35 Washington Herald reference to “the noted Greek dancer” and “Greek slave” quote in Florence Fleming Noyes, et al., “The Revived Art of Rhythmic Expression,” pamphlet, undated, MacKaye Papers, box 120, folder 11. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Description of Noyes’ movement from Brown, Official Program, np. See also “Dancers in Parade,” Washington Star, 10 February 1913, clipping in MacKaye Papers, box 121, folder 1; “Suffrage Day in Capital,” Boston Transcript; and Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 91.

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Columbia and then gathered at stage right next to Justice, opposite Liberty and Charity. The final allegorical figure summoned by Columbia was Hope, played by Mildred Anderson, a pupil of Noyes. Like a “bright spirit,” she danced to “Elsa’s Dream,” a piece from Lohengrin that portrays a woman’s sentiment of hope amid life- and-death circumstances. After a solo dance staged between the Treasury’s columns, Hope was then joined by her rainbow-hued attendants, all gliding down the steps to Dvorak’s “Humoreske.” A troop of some fifty children quickly followed, carrying balloons (figure 4-14). Together, they danced merrily to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” and then greeted Columbia at center stage.36 All assembled, the patriotic tune of “America” playing, the cast formed a panoramic final tableau across the Treasury landing, the building’s Greek façade framing the 1913 performance within an aura of monumental classicism (figure 4-15).37 Although the garb of tradition abounded in The Allegory, MacKaye aimed nevertheless to fashion a modern story, reworking staple devices of American pageantry in the name of suffrage. Linking pageant and parade, MacKaye launched her classical figures into a Progressive-Era fight for the vote, making a name for herself as a pageant professional in the process. Just weeks after the American Pageant Association was founded, she challenged fellow leaders on the capital stage with a hybrid performance that put in play pageantry’s civic idealism, its artistic devices, and its gendered roles, harnessing the form’s consensus model as a point of departure.

With the Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Hazel MacKaye carved out her niche as a pageant leader, scaling up the “living public issue” of suffrage through the vocabulary of civic art. Confiding to her brother Percy that she wished to “get my name up,” Hazel recognized the event as an opportunity to establish her credentials among fellow pageant enthusiasts and, accordingly, to distinguish her efforts from

36 Brown, Official Program, np; “Suffrage Day in Capital,” Boston Transcript; and Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 91. 37 The program named the final melody as “America,” also called “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” by the Boston Transcript. See Brown, Official Program, np; and “Suffrage Day in Capital,” Boston Transcript.

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amateurs.38 (Hazel came from a family of theatrical professionals. Her father was renowned dramatist Steele MacKaye.) “I am a working woman,” she stated plainly, and “if [NAWSA] want[s] my services, they must consider me worthy of my hire.” “I love to work for suffrage—Heaven knows—but I cannot live on air,” MacKaye remarked two short weeks after the capital event, when the idea of another suffrage pageant was already brewing, and with it the question of remuneration. 39 Just hours after the Treasury performance, in fact, MacKaye had caught a train to Chicago to resume her role as assistant pageant-master on The Pageant of Darkness and Light, a traveling production that took her to Boston, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and finally Chicago. Working steadily in the field over the next decade, MacKaye would build an impressive pageant résumé, aligning her professional talents and her suffrage politics on several occasions. Suffrage pageantry, her signature site of experimentation, took root in 1913. Hazel MacKaye’s interventions in the field of pageantry—reworking its forms and politicizing its messages—coincided with the founding in early 1913 of the American Pageant Association (APA), a national organization designed to shape pageant professionals and their productions. Practitioners wanted to legitimize themselves as reformers—to position themselves as leaders of a fine art form and an educational practice. The APA was an effort to stabilize (and contain) pageantry within the discourses of Progressivism, as an artistic tool of civic uplift, community- building, and democratic engagement. Amateurism and commercialism accompanied pageantry’s rise in America, which APA leaders viewed as a threat to their reformist status. If pageantry slipped too far into the realm of entertainment, pageant-masters might seem more like ring-masters to early-twentieth-century viewers. Some APA leaders also guarded against politically-charged content like woman suffrage in pageant narratives, seeing such politicking as threatening to give pageantry a radical edge instead of a reformist sheen. MacKaye was an active member of the APA,

38 Hazel MacKaye to Percy MacKaye, 27 December 1912, MacKaye Papers, box 120, folder 5. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 39 Hazel MacKaye to Mary Medbery MacKaye (her mother), 23 March 1913 and 19 March 1913, MacKaye Papers, box 125, folder 13. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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working within her own professionalizing community as she expanded pageantry’s subjects and endorsed hybrid expressions that unsettled—yet did not dismiss— familiar artistic devices. Hazel MacKaye was reforming the reformers. The launch of the American Pageant Association set in motion discussions about the definition of a proper pageant and the professional standards that should guide its development in the U.S. Seeking to pin down and police the art of pageantry, spokesmen had to first negotiate a common ground. Even among a small circle of leaders, the pageant idea would be cobbled together from a variety of so-called conventions. Fearing that the pageantry craze would overtake its adherents, a group of leaders came together “to protect from misuse” the people’s art. “[I]n grave danger of being commercialized and diverted from its rightful purpose,” the pageant was in need of stewardship, according to Frank Chouteau Brown, one such (self-elected) steward.40 The American Pageant Association got its formal start when William Chauncy Langdon and Lotta Clark (the APA’s first president and secretary) invited leaders to participate in a public “Conference on Pageantry” in Boston on January 31 and February 1, 1913, less than five weeks before the inaugural-eve suffrage performance. Speakers included Thomas Wood Stevens (then at the University of Wisconsin), Ellis Oberholtzer, Virginia Tanner, Langdon, Clark, and others.41 Although Percy MacKaye was not among the roster of speakers, fellow attendees elected him to the APA board during the conference. Hazel MacKaye did not attend the event, as she was juggling rehearsals in Washington with her obligations in Chicago. Participants aimed no less than to control the nationwide movement as its authorized practitioners, educators, and monitors. They wanted to secure their role as guiding professionals who led scores of amateurs in an artful practice. The APA sought “to establish and define the scope of pageantry; as well as to provide a means

40 Frank Chouteau Brown, “The American Pageant Association: A New Force Working for the Future of Pageantry in America,” Drama 9 (February 1913): 178. See also Peter W. Dykema, “American Pageant Association: Details of the Conference at Boston When It Was Formed,” Atlantic Educational Journal 8 (March 1913): 30-31. 41 Lotta A. Clark to Percy MacKaye, 11 January 1913; and “Conference on Pageantry” leaflet, both in MacKaye Papers, scrapbook “Pageants and Festivals.”

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of giving added authority and prestige to those pageant masters working along the right lines; to endeavor to influence other pageant workers in the right direction; and to correct in the public mind the somewhat vague understanding as to the meaning of the word pageantry that now appears to exist.”42 Hammering out the organization’s scope and what members meant precisely when they spoke of “the meaning of the word pageantry” and its “right lines” took time, and the idea of the APA itself remained somewhat malleable throughout 1913. In 1914, the association established its constitution, initiated annual conferences, and regularly published bulletins on pageant activities and best practices. Members disagreed among themselves about how to define the pageant, some insisting that the word needed strictness and granularity while others advocated an inclusiveness that allowed a variety of festival forms to reside under the umbrella of pageantry. “But what is this pageantry? Everyone with whom I talk seems to have his or her definition, vague perhaps, but firmly and even belligerently held,” wrote George Baker, professor at Harvard, who clashed with Langdon on the APA’s direction. (Baker contemplated non-participation as well as starting a rival organization, yet joined the APA by November 1913.)43 As president, Langdon vocalized the rigid tack, outlining a whole system of classification that distinguished pageant types (historical, civic, and social, as he would have it) from related dramatic forms like processions, dances, masques, and folk plays. Langdon negotiated with fellow organizers to include these related forms under the APA’s purview, seeing them as in need of monitoring alongside pageantry.44 In dialogue with Langdon in April 1913, Percy MacKaye urged a more forgiving approach, one that accorded pageant-masters a necessary degree of agency: “[W]e ought not, by any rigid definitions, to fetter or restrict the indigenous forms,

42 Brown, “The American Pageant Association,” 181-182. 43 George P. Baker, “Pageantry,” Art and Progress 4 (January 1913): 831. See also George Baker to William C. Langdon, 2 May 1913; Langdon to Lotta Clark, 6 November 1913; and “American Pageant Association, Active Members—Elected Nov. 22, 1913,” typescript, all in William Chauncy Langdon Papers, Brown University Library, box 8 (hereafter cited as Langdon Papers). 44 On Langdon’s elaborate classification scheme, see William Chauncy Langdon, “The Newer Forms of Festival Activity,” Atlantic Educational Journal 7 (June 1912): 20-22. On negotiations of the APA’s scope, see Langdon to Percy MacKaye, 30 April 1913, Langdon Papers, box 8.

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which are bound to spring and take shape from the creative minds of pageant artists.”45 Pageantry functioned as a recruitment tool of sorts, according to Percy, a means to encourage talented members of a community to enter artistic professions. Further, he advocated cooperation between pageant leaders and professionals of the traditional theatre, and a loosening of boundaries between the two. Receptive to such collaboration, Langdon cautioned, however, in his reply that theatre and pageant credentials were not transposable, referencing the art of mural painting to drive home his point: “There is just as much difference between pageant-drama and theatre drama as there is between easel canvas painting and mural painting. Maybe the easel painter will be a fine mural painter; let him try; it depends on the individual and his abilities; but it does not necessarily follow; there is not any presumption that he will be.”46 Although they differed on the usefulness of classification, both men wanted to professionalize the field—to structure a community art form through the lens of expertise. Hazel MacKaye likewise viewed professionalism as integral to the movement. Understood to be a democratic art, pageantry hinged on large-scale participation. Yet it also required “the leadership of the artist,” according to MacKaye, to marshal amateurs’ creative energies into “Art.” “I spell it purposely with a capital A,” she emphasized.47 This people’s art not only gave members of the community an opportunity to express themselves as actors, dancers, and singers, but it also brought together the professional talents of “the painter, the sculptor, the architect, and the musician.” 48 Commercialization loomed as the common enemy. Theatrical firms branched out into the pageant business with ready-made costumes, scripts, and traveling pageant-masters. For instance, Van Horn and Son, Costumers, established

45 Percy MacKaye to Langdon, 25 April 1913, Langdon Papers, box 8. Courtesy of Brown University Library. 46 Langdon to Percy MacKaye, 30 April 1913, Langdon Papers, box 8. Courtesy of Brown University Library. 47 Hazel MacKaye, “Pageantry: The Art of the Theatre in a New Form,” Vassar Quarterly 1 (May 1916): 75-76. 48 Hazel MacKaye, “The Future of Pageantry in the Life of the People,” speech given before the Drama League, Chicago, 1913, typescript, MacKaye Papers, box 120, folder 18. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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the Industrial and Historical Pageant Corporation with offices in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.49 Such “’ready made’ Pageant[s],” MacKaye warned, threatened the artistic and communal foundations of the form, debasing productions to recycled storylines and gate receipt cuts.50 MacKaye’s commitment to professionalism echoed the mission of the American Pageant Association, and in 1914 she co-compiled an APA pamphlet called “’Who’s Who’ in Pageantry,” a peer-edited list of leaders and their credentials.51 MacKaye’s early contributions to the life of the APA included strengthening member communication through projects like “Who’s Who” as well as challenging her colleagues to give practical form to the association’s ideals. For instance, beginning in 1913, MacKaye put pressure on the notion of a pageant’s community, redrawing its boundaries to reflect a specific group identity, that of suffragists. Her application of pageantry to a national political cause expanded the communal ideal beyond the local limits of township or city. Broadening the boundaries of citizenship, MacKaye’s vision of community nevertheless came with a caveat: to partake in the Suffrage Pageant-Procession’s community—as actor, marcher, or sympathetic viewer—you must take the side of suffragists. This adversarial edge to the pageant dramatized dissent in two ways: performers materialized their dissatisfaction with the female status quo and viewers who opposed suffrage watched the production as knowing outsiders. Hazel MacKaye initiated her own reform measures within the newly founded American Pageant Association. While President Langdon and others in the APA monitored the definition and use of pageantry as a civic art, MacKaye policed pageantry’s civic idealism, making the abstract concepts of democracy and progress

49 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 105. 50 Hazel MacKaye, “The Future of Pageantry in the Life of the People.” Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 51 MacKaye worked with Langdon and Mary Porter Beegle; see American Pageant Association, “’Who’s Who’ in Pageantry,” pamphlet, May 1914, MacKaye Papers, scrapbook “Pageants and Festivals.”

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speak to the concrete issue of female enfranchisement.52 She advocated pageantry as a form of propaganda, an artistic tool of persuasion that could serve the “mighty cause” of suffrage.53 As such, she refocused pageantry’s pedagogy from that of civic uplift to a specific, political curriculum, which she staged at a government building— another novel move. 54 MacKaye was not alone in her efforts to infuse Progressive- Era pageantry with a social agenda, but she was the first to lodge a sharp note of dissent into its visual forms, prompting a call for solidarity while also agitating the antipathetic and indifferent.55 The Allegory represented an interrogative engagement with pageantry’s consensus model, a stance in distinction from that at the Pageant of Illinois. Thomas Wood Stevens scripted a consensual progress narrative, which Evanston residents played upon in small ways to make it their own. MacKaye’s official narrative, in contrast, incorporated an alternative narrative into its very fabric, monumentalizing, in effect, the take-off pageant and moving it to center stage. Further, MacKaye’s history-telling in The Allegory emphasized the present and the future. Whereas Stevens dramatized a safe and distant past—the Pageant of Illinois concluded in the antebellum era—MacKaye framed her allegorical story within a contemporary lens and tied typically timeless, classical figures to present-day politics, to the immediate actions of marchers along Pennsylvania Avenue, and to a future amendment. While Stevens’ White Cloud conducted the Evanston pageant from an ahistorical, elevated position in a large oak tree, MacKaye’s Columbia expressly heralded her attendants in order to lead them from the Treasury steps into the line of march (see figures 3-6 and 4-5). This is not to say that Stevens’ production

52 There is a long history of American women using classicism to cultivate a contemporary political voice and a public role. See Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 53 Hazel MacKaye, “Pageants as a Means of Suffrage Propaganda,” Suffragist (28 November 1914): 7. 54 Franklin MacVeagh, Secretary of the Treasury, to Mrs. William Kent, 2 January 1913, NWP Papers, SY, reel 1, frames 82-83; and Percy MacKaye, “Art and the Woman’s Movement: A Comment on the National Suffrage Pageant,” Forum 49 (June 1913): 683. 55 Langdon, for example, used the pageant as a dramatic component of the New Country Life movement, addressing rural issues such as the modernization of farming methods. See William Chauncy Langdon, “The Pageant of Thetford,” Playground 5 (December 1911): 302-318. Randolph Bourne would later elaborate on the possibilities of pageantry as a social art; see Bourne, “Pageantry and Social Art,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 515-519.

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lacked political content. As discussed in chapter three, Stevens positioned the Pageant of Illinois within Progressive discourses of Americanization and citizenship formation, much as muralists had done in paint at the Massachusetts State House. Yet MacKaye’s capital pageant raised the political stakes, staging suffragists’ political objective in no uncertain terms within the fabric of the narrative. Stevens’ ambitions principally resided with Evanston participants and viewers, who would constructively engage in civic lessons on Americanism and community through the experiences of pageantry. MacKaye, in contrast, set her sights on an expansive female community, seeking to effect change through the ballot for women across America—for those who would partake in the pageant in Washington as well as those who would not. Shortly after MacKaye’s Allegory, two other performances in 1913 ambitiously reworked the pageant, likewise using the art form for political purposes. The Paterson Strike Pageant was staged at Madison Square Garden in New York City on June 7, broadcasting in dramatic form the ongoing plight of silk workers then on strike in Paterson, New Jersey. John Reed, editor at The Masses, wrote the pageant, working with fellow Greenwich Village intellectuals and with leaders of the International Workers of the World (IWW), the radical labor organization heading up the strike. With one thousand workers playing themselves in the pageant, the event aggrandized class identity and framed community through the lens of labor oppression, violence, and revolt. Pageantry as a tool of reform gained a decidedly radical edge. Reed, who joined the American Pageant Association, radicalized civic art through a stark vision of proletarian strife. Whereas MacKaye worked within a classical vocabulary to give expression to her political demands, Reed and his collaborators adopted a realist mode to agitate for fundamental change, situating pageantry at the silk mill, the deadly picket line, and the strikers’ mass rally.56

56 For a persuasive analysis of The Paterson Strike Pageant, its performance, press responses, and symbolic work, see S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98-126. See also Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America 62 (May-June 1974): 64-68; Green, New York 1913; and Brooks McNamara, ed., “Paterson Strike Pageant,” Drama Review 15 (Summer 1971): 61-71. John Reed is listed as a member of the APA in “American Pageant Association, Active Members—Elected Nov. 22, 1913,” Langdon Papers, box 8.

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The Star of Ethiopia, written by W. E. B. Du Bois, also harnessed pageantry’s civic idealism for political ends, giving material form to a pan-African nationalism that pictured a common ancient history for black Americans, replete with allegorical visions of racial uplift. The pageant was first performed in October 1913 in New York at the National Emancipation Exposition, which celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation. Du Bois scripted an alternative public history centered on the contributions of blacks to humanity over thousands of years, from the “Gift of Civilization” at the Egyptian court, to the “Gift of Struggle Toward Freedom” in the New World, to the “Gift of Hope” after slavery’s end, bringing freedom, education, and professional accomplishment.57 Du Bois regarded his production as a contribution to the pageantry movement, enlarging the APA’s definition(s) of the pageant to include black folk drama, with the aim of teaching African Americans “the meaning of their history and their rich, emotional life” as well as educating whites on that history’s importance.58 Like others in the field, Du Bois emphasized the role of expertise; yet the APA’s white membership failed to recognize him as a fellow pageant leader. “The American Pageant Association has been silent, if not actually contemptuous,” declared Du Bois in the pages of the Crisis.59 Draped in classical robes, the figure of Ethiopia called on the same civic vocabulary used in The Allegory (figure 4-16). Both Du Bois and MacKaye reinvested consensual forms with

57 Du Bois wrote the pageant in 1911. The 1913 production in New York City was entitled The People of Peoples and Their Gifts to Men. The Star of Ethiopia and The Jewel of Ethiopia were used for later performances in D.C. (1915), Philadelphia (1916), and Los Angeles (1925). Du Bois’ pageant as well as the Emancipation Exposition itself performed an alternative public history, offering a black narrative of U.S. history that contrasted with the commemorations that year of the battle at Gettysburg, which framed national memory of the Civil War as white reconciliation between North and South. The 1915 staging (and those thereafter) also contested the public history that D. W. Griffith crafted in The Birth of a Nation, a popular, controversial film whose racist content prompted Du Bois and the NAACP to lobby for its censorship. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The National Emancipation Exposition: The People of Peoples and Their Gifts to Men,” Crisis 6 (November 1913): 339-341; W. E. B. Du Bois, Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 151-152, 161-165, and 206-209; David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1911-1927 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 81-94; Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 219-236; and Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 194-208. 58 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Drama among Black Folk,” Crisis 12 (August 1916): 171. 59 [W. E. B. Du Bois], “Editorial: A Pageant,” Crisis 10 (September 1915): 230; and Du Bois, “The Drama among Black Folk,” 173.

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contemporary political messages, but racial discrimination kept The Star of Ethiopia outside the boundaries of the APA-guarded pageantry movement. Before Paterson and Star, Hazel MacKaye politicized the pageant form, claiming suffrage as an appropriate subject for American pageantry and, in turn, compelling some APA members to weigh in. While Percy MacKaye praised his sister’s production as professional, historic, and moving, Ralph Davol bristled in response to activist women using dramatic forms to agitate for the vote. In his 1914 Handbook of American Pageantry, Davol asked his readers: “Should the pageant, as an expression of community ideals, exalt that phase of feminism which turns the back upon the domestic virtues in the feverish reach for sensational publicity (and marks the decline of nationality), or should the pageant throw the weight of its influence to uphold the sweetness, charm and sanctity of the home, on which America was founded and has been preserved!”60 For Davol, the answer was clear—suffragists were “interlopers” in pageantry’s grand march past and should be denied a place in its consensual vision. 61 Hazel MacKaye thought differently, challenging the self- proclaimed protectors of the pageant mode not only with her subject, but also with her artistic forms. MacKaye opened up visual debates on ideas of pageantry, citizenship, and womanhood by stitching her Allegory into the logic of the parade and framing the contemporary issue of suffrage within this older type of pageantry. Because of the interlocking of Treasury steps and Pennsylvania Avenue, the idea of the pageant remained malleable.62 Pageantry extended beyond MacKaye’s production at the Treasury: floats and sections along the line of march can be thought of as historical episodes that trace a communal story of women’s progress. A series of floats, for example, represented the suffrage movement in 1840, 1870, 1890, and at present. Another section of the parade charted women in the field, in the home, in service, and

60 Percy MacKaye, “Art and the Woman’s Movement,” 680-684; and Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry (Taunton, MA: Davol Publishing Company, 1914), 94. 61 Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry, 206. 62 Hazel MacKaye also gave the parade form a plot, another inventive move. See Ryan, “The American Parade,” 134.

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in education, with floats announcing groups of marching farmers, homemakers, nurses, and college graduates. Similar to White Cloud in the Pageant of Illinois, banners functioned much like heralds. Punctuating the parade line, they announced categories of marchers by profession, association, or region, and also commented on the unfolding suffrage argument with phrases such as “Women of the World Unite” and “Man and Woman Make the State, Man Alone Rules the State” (figure 4-17).63 As scholar Lisa Tickner has argued, banners “acted as a gloss on the procession itself, developing its meanings, identifying and grouping its participants and clarifying its themes.”64 With “episodes” along the parade, the dances on the Treasury steps served as allegorical interlude s within the larger production (figure 4-18). In order to discern a progress narrative—so critical to early-twentieth-century pageant adherents—spectators of MacKaye’s Allegory would have had to expand their field of vision to include the entire pageant-procession, adopting, in effect, the event’s hybrid premise. Columbia and her entourage resist resonances of timelessness only when they perform their idealizing task in relation to the historic struggle for suffrage narrated pictorially along the line of march. As such, MacKaye recasts her classical figures, unmooring them from a vague past and putting them to work for Progressive- Era change. While garbed in tradition, MacKaye’s actors shifted the focus of the pageant form onto the present and the future. Columbia hears contemporary suffragists’ demands and with them envisions enfranchised womanhood. In the eyes of the American Pageant Association, MacKaye’s interventions did not add up to a proper pageant. Structured through dance, pantomime, its coordinated parade, and the suffrage cause, The Allegory tread too far from the APA’s notion of pageantry as communal self-expression grounded in historical action. While her “Suffrage Allegory and Pageant Parade” made the association’s second Bulletin, which listed the (approved) pageants of 1913, it was relegated to a subsection called “Festivals, Masques, Etc.”—a catch-all category for productions the APA wished to

63 For float and banner details, see “Pageant Outline,” NWP Papers, LC, reel 2, frames 43-48. 64 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 60.

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demote yet monitor.65 In contrast, APA member Percy MacKaye championed Hazel’s intervention as a milestone event for both suffrage and pageantry, declaring in the pages of Forum that it represented “the first convincing art expression of the woman’s movement, and the first national expression of the new art of pageantry in America.”66 In a letter to Percy, APA President William Chauncy Langdon defended his parsing of terms, drawing distinctions between “Miss MacKaye’s pageant allegory,” Percy’s own Gloucester Pageant, and Louis Parker’s pageants in England: “Why on earth call the three by the same name? Each splendidly fine, each of an absolutely different kind.”67 In spite of Langdon’s restricting impulse, Hazel insisted on the value of experimentation: “[E]ven though a tendency has been shown among well-meaning but mistaken enthusiasts to establish at once precedents in pageantry, thus forever closing the door to all untrammeled experiment, this tendency has been by no means general, and pageantry is still free to grow and feel its way toward its goal.”68 She positioned her suffrage intervention as essential to the movement, its vitality, and its commitment to reform. For Hazel MacKaye at the Treasury steps, hybrid allegory became a site of experimentation, an aesthetic space in which to reform pageantry and its civic art vocabulary. Allegory is a strategy for speaking grandly, a means of giving idealized human expression to abstract concepts like Liberty, Dance, Fame, Discovery, or the nation. During the American Renaissance, female figures typically performed such allegorical work, dressed in classical draperies and holding signature attributes (Phrygian cap, cymbal, trumpet, compass, or scepter). On the surface, MacKaye did not stray too far from this formula, but she did grant her allegories more than one register of meaning. The figure of Columbia-turned-marcher fused ideal and real. Walking down the steps from the Treasury plaza to join the parade line, she moved as

65 “List of Pageants of the Year 1913,” American Pageant Association Bulletin. Despite its radical subject, the “New York City Pageant of the Paterson Strike” made the list as a pageant, perhaps due in part to its formal adherence to historical episodes (even though they recounted recent history). Du Bois’ Star of Ethiopia did not make the list, shut out of the APA altogether. 66 Percy MacKaye, “Art and the Woman’s Movement,” 680. 67 Langdon to Percy MacKaye, 30 April 1913, Langdon Papers, box 8. Courtesy of Brown University Library. 68 Hazel MacKaye, “Pageantry: The Art of the Theatre in a New Form,” 77.

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both the ideal Columbia and as the real-life professional actress Hedwig Reicher—as a hybrid vision of nationhood and singular suffragist (see figure 4-5). While allegory in the interludes of other contemporary pageants did carry political messages, however abstract, MacKaye’s innovation was to root her forms in present-day context, to insist that timeless ideals hold timely resonance for participants and viewers of the inaugural-eve event. Although MacKaye pioneered this revised allegorical mode on the (national) pageant stage, other civic artists, particularly muralists, had experimented with allegory in painted form during the previous two decades. At the Massachusetts State House, as discussed in chapter two, Henry Oliver Walker created a hybrid composition for his Pilgrims on the Mayflower, relegating allegory to one register and historical realism to another. And as we will see in chapter five, Edwin Blashfield crafted a different kind of hybrid painting, wherein allegorical and historical protagonists stood shoulder-to-shoulder.69 In pageantry, the American innovation of inserting allegorical interludes between historical episodes paralleled Walker’s technique, with ideal content and real content separated in different registers. MacKaye, similar to Blashfield, blended these two registers, as The Allegory’s actors would march shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow suffragists at the event’s culmination. Hybrid combinations of real and ideal infused the entire performance, extending beyond the literal intersection of pageant actors and procession at the Treasury Building. Scholars have tended to make tidy divisions between the performance’s two components, reading the parade as concrete, modern, male, and militant, and the pageant as abstract, classical, female, and conservative.70 Yet the line of march had its classicizing moments and MacKaye’s pageant its modern-day grounding. Allegorical figures peppered the parade, particularly on floats, representing, for example, states or countries where women had suffrage (or partial

69 Notably, for The Pilgrims on the Mayflower, Walker chose male figures for his allegorical portion. Some U.S. artists at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 experimented with how realism could be put in the service of allegory and made to speak grandly. For these early attempts, see Wanda M. Corn, with Charlene G. Garfinkle and Annelise K. Madsen, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (University of California Press, forthcoming). 70 See, for example, Chapman, “Women and Masquerade at the 1913 Suffrage Demonstration in Washington,” 345-351; and Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights,” 36.

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suffrage); the concepts of Greed, Tyranny, and Indifference on “A Labor Story” float; and the woman in bondage on the “In Government” float (figure 4-19). Further, Patricia Street, in charge of the day’s color scheme, used color symbolically. For the historical float “As It Was in 1840,” Street dressed her representative pioneer woman in a light purple cape, contrasting this beaconed suffragist with “three figures in black (meaning an obstruction to our progress) and scorners in the shape of four women dressed in darker purple.”71 Other women donned robes of white, symbolizing the “Light” of existing equal-suffrage states in the West.72 Finally, groups of marchers wore costumes of flowing draperies that looked vaguely classical rather than resembling the uniforms of their professions—doctors, nurses, wage-earners, and businesswomen, for instance. College graduates in caps and gowns exemplified this hybrid look, animating the masculine regalia of classical learning as modern-day representatives of female higher education (figure 4-20). In The Allegory, “well-known actresses and artists” played the principal roles of Columbia, Justice, Charity, Liberty, Peace, and Hope, retaining their identities as modern-day, professional women even as they embodied abstract ideals on stage.73 Hedwig Reicher, for example, was a German-born actress who had secured a successful career in New York theatre by 1913.74 And Florence Fleming Noyes, who received considerable press coverage as the event’s choreographer and star dancer, ran her own dance studio in New York as well as a summer program in Massachusetts. As Columbia and Liberty, Reicher and Noyes lent their clout as cultural producers to the suffrage cause, their everyday personas enriching their classical playacting. As such, they gave typically timeless allegories a contemporary grounding, long before the parade line had reached the Treasury steps.

71 “Color Scheme of the Woman Suffrage Pageant,” NWP Papers, LC, reel 2, frames 73-74. 72 Ibid. 73 “Pageant Wins Throng,” Woman’s Journal, 80. 74 See “Hedwig Reicher, Who Turns to a Play in English,” New York Times, 28 February 1909, X9. Just weeks before the Suffrage Pageant-Procession, Reicher performed in two artistic pageants in New York, one at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the other at the studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany, where she impersonated Cleopatra, playacting alongside muralist John W. Alexander and dancer Ruth St. Denis. See “Ancient Festival by MacDowell Club,” New York Times, 19 December 1912, 15; and “Egyptian Fete a Fine Spectacle,” New York Times, 5 February 1913, 8.

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The play of hybrid allegory throughout the pageant-procession enabled participants to model a hybrid womanhood as well, as revisions to the allegorical mode visually disrupted the gendered assumptions at the mode’s core. Suffragists made use of the tensions between real and ideal, modern and classical, militant and conservative, picturing a mosaic of womanhood that resisted essentialism. Women were lawyers, social workers, mothers, writers, warriors on horseback, vessels of Peace and Justice, shackled helpmates, artists, pioneers, and historical heroines. (Accompanying this female diversity, a group of men marched in the parade, including congressmen who supported suffrage.) Demonstrating that womanhood meant many things and took several forms, participants employed civic art as a means to contest and modify existing definitions of femininity. As Lisa Tickner has argued, suffragists (as well as their opponents, the antis) fought to control representations of women “already in circulation,” reworking “the values and possibilities ascribed to them.”75 Suffragists wanted to amp up the Progressive politics of the “womanly woman” as well as emphasize “The Feminine Charms of the Woman Militant,” as a February 1912 article in Good Housekeeping put it.76 On the day before the pageant-procession, the Washington Evening Star published an opinion piece, “True Womanliness Defined by Rival Faction Leaders,” wherein suffragist and anti-suffragist faced off in their own words. Josephine Dodge (referred to as “Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge”), president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, stated plainly the case of the antis: “The woman who possesses true womanhood does not worry over the question of equality.” “General” Rosalie Gardner Jones, who had just arrived in Washington after leading a group of “pilgrims” on a 250-mile hike to the March 3rd event, voiced the view of suffragists, declaring: “The woman who appeals for justice on intellectual grounds in the world of

75 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 173 and 167-169. 76 Mary Holland Kinkaid, “The Feminine Charms of the Woman Militant,” Good Housekeeping 54 (February 1912): 146-155.

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things is womanly. The willingness to fight for that which is right is womanly.” 77 General Jones gave the womanly woman a martial spirit. Importantly, Jones’ argument took visual shape the following day, particularly when Justice made her entrance in The Allegory (see figure 4-9). The opened scrolls of her attendants were reported by the Washington Herald to bear the words “Justice demands equal suffrage.”78 Although such writing is not discernible in this photograph, the fact that a journalist envisioned the statement as part of the episode reinforces the link that suffragists forged between allegorical woman (a symbolic ideal) and woman citizen (a Progressive-Era voter). Perhaps the journalist had mentally transposed the parade’s leading banner onto the pageant’s scrolls: “We Demand an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Enfranchising the Women of This Country.” Further, Jones’ comments on the womanly woman also resonated with a photograph that appeared directly above her article in the Evening Star, showing pageant actors during a rehearsal on the Treasury steps (figure 4-21). Wearing contemporary clothing—long skirt, shirtwaist, and hat—the participants strike graceful poses, twirl, and corroborate their movements with one another. They are allegorical women in the making, practicing how they will integrate womanly posture with a militant demand. From planning and rehearsal, we turn finally to the actual conditions of the Suffrage Pageant-Procession—how it played out along Washington’s artery of power and how well MacKaye’s hybrid mode held up amid the event’s unscripted revisions.

On March 3, 1913, the scripted vision that suffragists had so carefully rehearsed faced considerable resistance, both physical and ideological. Despite its meticulous choreography, the pageant-procession did not go off as planned, as huge crowds along the parade route and at the Treasury Building literally prevented the performance from moving forward. Suffragists did manage to complete the day’s

77 Ethel Lloyd Patterson, “True Womanliness Defined by Rival Faction Leaders,” Evening Star, 2 March 1913, 8. 78 “Women Appear in Tableaux,” Washington Herald, 4 March 1913, clipping in MacKaye Papers, box 121, folder 1.

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events after several chaotic hours, forced to refashion their civic demonstration in response to unpredictable conditions. “Five thousand women, marching in the woman suffrage pageant yesterday, practically fought their way foot by foot up Pennsylvania avenue, through a surging mass of humanity that completely defied the Washington police, swamped the marchers, and broke their procession into little companies,” read page one of the Washington Post (figure 4-22).79 Meanwhile, at The Allegory’s culmination, Columbia and her attendants waited and waited, the parade line failing to come into view. The female performance on the eve of Wilson’s inauguration drew intense interest from sympathizers as well as antagonists, the latter group’s behavior overtaking the suffragists’ own celebratory, yet militant, tone. Insufficient police protection (and outright antipathy) enabled belligerent spectators to physically assault marchers. The Woman’s Journal raged just days after the event: “Women were spit upon, slapped in the face, tripped up, pelted with burning cigar stubs, and insulted by jeers and obscene language too vile to print or repeat.”80 Called in to regain control of the streets, U.S. cavalry troops from nearby Fort Myer cleared a path for the marchers in piecemeal fashion, and paraders finally eked their way forward to the south steps of the Treasury. At the evening’s rally at Continental Hall, suffragists lambasted the D.C. police, demanding Congress to investigate the police’s utter failure to protect participants; Senate hearings began within days. The unanticipated events of March 3 wedged new variables into suffragists’ carefully constructed visual arguments. Looking closely at how the pageant- procession unfolded, we can discern the ways that Hazel MacKaye’s civic art-making did its cultural and political work as well as the ways that the performance opened up opportunities for others—both outside and within suffrage circles—to reframe the debate. First, suffragists themselves were not a unified coalition. Although organizers engaged with the myth of consensus, putting pressure on the era’s ideals of community, progress, and democracy, they adopted a vision of white womanhood that left racial and class biases largely intact. Some within suffrage ranks resisted.

79 “Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” Washington Post, 1. 80 “Parade Struggles to Victory Despite Disgraceful Scenes,” Woman’s Journal (8 March 1913): 73.

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Secondly, the press, government officials, and suffragists themselves responded to the day’s chaotic conditions in various ways, recalibrating the performance within essentializing terms that threatened to undo its vision of hybrid womanhood. Recasting allegory for modern ends amid unscripted circumstances, suffragists later had to retool the pageant-procession’s meanings in order to claim victory for the cause. In some respects, the actual conditions on March 3 heightened the hybrid vision of real and ideal, modern and classical, that suffragists had rehearsed. Because crowds had swarmed the streets, blocking the marchers’ route, the cumulative meeting of parade and pageant was thrown into doubt. Would the marchers reach their allegorical sisters? “When we passed the Peace Monument [at the start of the parade] the Avenue was open, but in a little while it was like going into the neck of a funnel,” testified one participant at the Senate hearings later that week.81 Spectators physically impeded woman’s progress, triggering a bodily struggle on the part of marchers to literally appropriate a denied terrain. It took an hour to march ten blocks, and paraders still had five more blocks to muscle through before they would reach a sea of spectators near the Treasury—a dizzying prospect even after troops had “cleared the way” (figure 4-23). Cast as symbolic warrior, lead herald Inez Milholland (a New York lawyer) put her militant guise to new uses, as she “rode beside a mounted policeman during the worst part of the crush and helped charge the crowd. Miss Milholland gesticulated and shouted to the crowd and rode her horse into it with good effect.”82 When Milholland finally reached the south steps of the Treasury Building, the mood was celebratory, the moment triumphant. As Hazel MacKaye remembered it: “Upon her appearance, a cheer broke from the sympathetic crowds on the grandstand. With a friendly [t]ilt of her head, she acknowledged the acclaim and then turned to raise her hand in solemn greeting to Columbia and her assembled court who stood in

81 Testimony of Mrs. Abby Baker Scott, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the District of Columbia, Suffrage Parade Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 63rd Cong., Special sess., under S. Res. 499, part 1, March 6-17, 1913, 35. 82 “Score the Police for Inefficiency,” Evening Star, 4 March 1913, 1.

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silent review. Then she passed on and soon the radiant young crusader was swallowed up in the surging crowds beyond.”83 Next, Columbia and the rest of the pageant cast joined the line (see figures 4-2 and 4-5). MacKaye’s visual crescendo of hybrid womanhood indeed came to pass, its importance all the more intensified because of the day’s chaos. Such physical struggles on the part of suffragists to make their campaign visible drew attention to their modern-day bodies. As the press would have it, an army of women fought their way through the streets while bare-footed ideals waited disconcertedly in the chilly March air for the foot-soldiers to arrive. A cartoon for the New York Herald inked these contrasts in sharp relief (figure 4-24). Although aesthetic dancing was sometimes referred to as “barefoot dancing,” the pageant performers did not move on unprotected soles, wearing sandals over thick socks. The two principal, professional dancers—Noyes as Liberty and Anderson as Hope— proved the exceptions, covering their feet only with sandals (figure 4-25). Costumes also gave the classical cast some measure of protection on the cool, sunny day, with woolen layers underneath their gauzy fabrics. 84 While the conditions of the pageant-procession lent emphasis to the notion of allegory as an embodied, modern-day enactment, the event’s unscripted course nonetheless jumbled portions of the suffragists’ visual messages. First, because crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue obstructed the women’s marching path, spectators themselves were “[m]ade part of the procession,” according to one suffragist. Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington state, who marched in the men’s section, concurred that the crowd was “completely involved in the parade.”85 The balancing act of showing female solidarity while also signaling dissent through the parade form was put out of kilter by activist spectators who inserted their own consenting and dissenting views into the line of march.

83 Hazel MacKaye, “Pioneering in Pageantry,” typescript, undated [circa 1924], MacKaye Papers, box 129, folder 10, page 8. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 84 “5,000 of Fair Sex Ready to Parade,” Washington Post, 3 March 1913, 2. 85 U.S. Congress, Suffrage Parade Hearings, 36 and 80.

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Further, such impediments along the avenue crippled MacKaye’s choreography, leaving the pageant cast frozen in their final tableau, without a parade line to review. MacKaye later recalled the tense moments that followed the assembly of Columbia’s court: “Then came a most deadly pause. The music of the advancing procession failed to ring forth as had been expected. Instead, there was only the ind[i]stinct murmur of thousands of people craning their necks to see what would happen next. But nothing happened. Our stately groups remained in their places, beautiful but perplexed as were all the rest of us. What was the matter? Why didn’t the procession come?” The cast at first simply waited, much like the spectators in the grandstands and along the Treasury steps (figure 4-26). MacKaye only discovered the magnitude of the obstructing crowd after securing a vantage point from inside the Treasury Building: “Horrors! There was nothing but an immense jam of people packed like herded cattle down the Avenue as far as the eye could see.”86 With the rehearsed timing of allegory-meets-procession miserably off, Hazel MacKaye had to orchestrate another solution on the fly. Learning via telephone that the cavalry was en route, the parade’s progress still in doubt, she devised an artistic means of stalling. A messenger entered the pageant stage to alert Hedwig Reicher of the situation, who relayed the news to the rest of the cast. Group by group, they then mounted the Treasury steps, retracing their movements in reverse “as though the whole thing had been rehearsed,” in MacKaye’s words.87 The following day, the Post chalked up the retreat to cold feet: “Beautiful in coloring and grouping, the dramatic symbolization of women’s aspirations for political freedom was completed long before the head of the parade was in sight. In their thin dresses and bare arms, the performers waited, shivering, for more than an hour until finally they were forced to seek refuge within the big building.”88 MacKaye later dismissed that notion, writing that “our costumes of wool, although Grecian in line and fold, had kept everyone as

86 Hazel MacKaye, “Pioneering in Pageantry,” 7. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 87 Ibid. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 88 “Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” Washington Post, 1. See also “Barefooted Women in Gauze, Despite Cold, Pose in Tableaux on the Treasury Plaza,” Washington Post, 4 March 1913, 10.

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warm as though it had been a summer’s day.”89 She had circled the actors backstage with the aim of saving her pageant’s real/ideal crescendo. After receiving word that the cavalry-assisted parade line was finally nearing, MacKaye cued the cast to repeat the performance. “Out again through the doors swept the colorful groups of the Allegory and with deliberation and dignity took their places on the plaza below.”90 This time Columbia would greet the parade herald, with Treasury crowds, ten thousand strong, cheering. A photograph from the pageant renders visible, nevertheless, a moment of confusion during the twice-run pageant (figure 4-27). Standing on the Treasury plaza, the children of Hope occupy the foreground of the image, looking out at the scene around them with varying degrees of patience and attention. Behind them, other pageant actors descend the structure’s steps, including Noyes near the top of the steps in her dark crimson drapery—walking, not dancing. The photograph captures a jumbled pageant narrative, as Hope and her attendants, the last crew summoned by Columbia, have somehow reached the stage before Liberty and her ensemble. The photograph was likely taken during the pageant’s second run-through, when the prime objective would have been to reassemble the final tableau in time for Milholland’s arrival as head of the parade line (see figure 4-15). The episodes leading up to that tableau receded in importance compared to the staging of the event’s visual crux—Columbia as allegory-turned- suffragist. While participants muscled their way through the day amidst the unpredictable circumstances of a sometimes jeering, sometimes cheering crowd, organizers also had to navigate pockets of dissent within their own ranks, especially during the event’s planning. Through the pageant and parade forms, Hazel MacKaye, Alice Paul, and fellow organizers interrogated the myth of consensus, recasting it as solidarity for the suffrage cause. Yet suffragists were not a monolithic group, and Paul, as chair of the entire performance, had to address the requests and discontentment of a diversity of constituents. One such case came from Anna Howard Shaw, president of NAWSA,

89 Hazel MacKaye, “Pioneering in Pageantry,” 7. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 90 Ibid. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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over the issue of official colors for the pageant-procession. Shaw threatened not to march if a color scheme of purple, white, and green prevailed, as those were the colors of militant suffragists in England. They also happened to be the colors of the Women’s Political Union, the New York suffrage association that had lent Paul some three hundred banners. Paul insisted that the adoption of such colors would simply be practical, but eventually relented, assuring Shaw that no color would predominate.91 Further, a potential marcher, Elizabeth Hyde, wrote Paul urging her to make room in the parade line for “persons who do not care to march in disguise.” Hyde believed that wearing costumes defeated the purpose of the event, shrouding members’ strengths as individuals. Hyde wanted to participate, but not as “one more purple cap and cape.”92 Organizers did create a section for un-uniformed marchers, described in the official program as a place in line for late-arriving participants; yet the section also presumably accommodated Hyde’s request. Additionally, issues of labor and race proved divisive among suffragists, threatening some of the tenuous coalitions that the pageant-procession would weave together. After hearing, for instance, that a “hobo” float would be part of the parade, members of the Socialist Party sternly reminded Paul that their cooperation with NAWSA hinged on the principles of universal suffrage. Any float that styled a portion of the population as “undesirable” to draw comparisons to a deserving female enfranchisement crossed the line; Paul assured Socialists that the idea of a “hobo” float had been flatly rejected by her committee.93 Alice Paul proved less forthright when a group of African American women from Howard University, led by Nellie Quander, requested to march in the college section, and not in a segregated section of the parade line. Even before this request reached her desk, Paul expressed concern that race might break up the parade plans

91 Mary Ware Dennett to Alice Paul, 3 February 1913, reel 1, frames 679-680; Paul to Dennett, 6 February 1913, reel 1, frames 754-755; Congressional Committee to Mrs. James Laidlaw, 12 February 1913, reel 1, frame 932; and Anna Howard Shaw to Paul, 24 February 1913, reel 1, frames 1343-1344, all in NWP Papers, SY. 92 Elizabeth A. Hyde to Congressional Committee, 1 February 1913, reel 1, frames 623-624, NWP Papers, SY. 93 Winnie Branstetter to Alice Paul, 25 February 1913, reel 1, frames 1377-1378; and Congressional Committee to Branstetter, 1 March 1913, reel 2, frame 21, NWP Papers, SY.

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altogether. “[A]s far as I can see we must have a white procession, a negro procession, or no procession at all,” Paul wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell in January. Blackwell, editor of NAWSA’s Woman’s Journal, wanted African American women to take part, but Paul feared losing the support of white southern women, taking the nebulous position of not “encouraging” blacks to participate.94 In February, Quander wrote Paul twice before she received a response, wherein Paul avoided a straight answer, asking her to come to headquarters instead to discuss the matter.95 Twenty- five women from Howard University did march in the college section—an important success for black suffragists who too often faced discrimination from white leaders controlling the network of regional and national suffrage associations across the U.S.96 While suffragists engaged in a self-reflexive civic art-making, forcing Progressive ideals to speak to the specific, political issue of voting rights, their aesthetic maneuvering left racial and class biases largely intact. Organizers principally created a mosaic of white, middle-class womanhood as the vision of female enfranchisement. At the Treasury, where MacKaye crystallized and monumentalized suffragists’ idealizing message, an all-white cast, led by professional actresses and dancers, enacted concepts of Justice and Liberty through the untoiling, white body. Laborers and African Americans, in contrast, did find a place along the parade line, but genteel white womanhood still prevailed (figure 4-28). In this postcard, a group of syncopated marchers literally wears their whiteness, while several African American women look on from the crowd. One prominent black suffragist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, resisted such a place on the sidelines, or in a “’Jim Crow’ section of the procession,” according to the Chicago Defender. In a protest act within the line of march, Wells-Barnett moved into the Illinois delegation to walk

94 Alice Paul to Alice Stone Blackwell, 16 January 1913, reel 1, frames 265-267, NWP Papers, SY. 95 Nellie M. Quander to Alice Paul, 15 February 1913, reel 1, frame 1049; Quander to Paul, 17 February 1913, reel 1, frame 1118; and Paul to Quander, 23 February 1913, reel 1, frame 1317, NWP Papers, SY. 96 “Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” Washington Post, 10; and “Suffrage Paraders,” Crisis 5 (April 1913): 296. For a history of black women’s participation in the American suffrage movement, see Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

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shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow state leaders.97 The push and pull of consent and dissent animated the Suffrage Pageant-Procession on March 3, from organizers’ scripted visions to the revisionist moves of both participants and spectators. Promoting a hybrid womanhood, leaders nevertheless relied on white femininity as a common denominator, leaving the door open for audiences to reinscribe the day’s events through the lens of essentialism. The press, for instance, read the pageant-procession along gendered lines, contrasting the “beauty” and “dignity” of female performers to the failed masculinity demonstrated by raucous crowds and incompetent policemen. Newspaper reports foregrounded accounts of frail femininity—women injured, insulted, and shivering in the cold—more so than images of strong-willed, protesting women.98 The Herald cartoon, for example, deflated the pageant’s monumentality by portraying a chilled, bare-footed Hope—an earthly, not lofty figure—who is principally “hoping she wont catch cold” (see figure 4-24). The Senate investigation that began on March 6 likewise highlighted distinctions between appropriate female and male behavior. Audiences jammed the hearing room to listen to testimony by suffragists, police officials, government leaders, and parade bystanders.99 Alice Paul and fellow leaders gave detailed accounts of the bureaucratic steps they had taken in advance to secure the safety of the marchers, repeatedly requesting police protection and alerting officials to the anticipated large turnout. Superintendent of Police Richard Sylvester, D.C. commissioners, and U.S. defense officials took turns shifting blame among one another.100 Officers on the street did not exert their normal level of force against the unruly crowds, some argued,

97 “Marches in Parade Despite Protests,” Chicago Defender, 8 March 1913, 1. 98 See, for example, “Beauty and Dignity of Great Parade Impress Throngs,” Evening Star, 3 March 1913, 1 and 4; “Score the Police for Inefficiency,” Evening Star, 1 and 12; “Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” Washington Post, 1 and 10; and “Barefooted Women in Gauze, Despite Cold, Pose in Tableaux on the Treasury Plaza,” Washington Post, 10. See also Barber, Marching on Washington, 56. 99 “Grill for Police at Senate Probe,” Evening Star, 6 March 1913, 1-2. 100 U.S. Congress, Suffrage Parade Hearings, 8-10, 131-134, 181-183, and 437-451; “Probers Seek ‘Man Higher Up,’” Evening Star, 8 March 1913, 1-2; and “Sylvester Denies He Was to Blame,” Evening Star, 10 March 1913, 1-2.

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because those crowds were largely composed of women and children.101 Photographs submitted as evidence by suffragists flatly disputed such a claim. One woman testified plainly, “I really think that we do not need to say much [about the crowd’s profile], unless the women all wear derby hats.”102 In the mediated aftermath of the 1913 performance, a clear-cut vision of gendered behavior overshadowed the mosaic of modern womanhood that suffragists had rendered tangible. To a certain degree, suffrage leaders remained complicit in the press’ broadcasting of the event as an episode of feminine beauty marred by defiling manhood. The womanly woman represented too powerful an image in the American imagination to relinquish to the opposition. In their own press accounts, suffragists played up the assaults along the parade route as assaults on womanhood, infusing their feminine language, in turn, with feminist demands: “Once again the whole country has been forced to see how much more effective is the little ballot, the mark of citizenship, than is the much talked of chivalry of our lawful protectors.”103 In the days after March 3, the unscripted behavior of the crowd became a part of the performance and its visual argument. Suffragists claimed beauty and dignity for their assertive political campaign, the unchivalrous behavior on the streets giving tangible proof that their calls for self-protection indeed had merit. In addition to newspaper reports, press coverage of the pageant-procession included film, which broadcasted the suffrage demonstration in animated form to larger audiences across the country. “Moving picture men were everywhere present,” according to one journalist.104 The Washington Herald declared that Tom Moore, “the well-known local ‘movies’ manager,” secured “the most favorable films,” capturing a complete version of the day’s events from his position on the Treasury steps. Moore reportedly obtained NAWSA’s approval and began screening his production within

101 “Author Defends Work of Police,” Evening Star, 14 March 1913, 1-2. 102 Testimony of Helen H. Gardener, official press agent for the pageant-procession, U.S. Congress, Suffrage Parade Hearings, 446. 103 “Parade Struggles to Victory Despite Disgraceful Scenes,” Woman’s Journal, 78. For an analysis of press coverage of the pageant-procession, see Linda Lumsden, “Beauty and the Beasts: Significance of Press Coverage of the 1913 National Suffrage Parade,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (Autumn 2000): 593-611. 104 Chapple, “The Inauguration of President Wilson,” 22.

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twenty-four hours. The Herald estimated that in a month’s time a staggering fifty million people might see such a film. 105 What those audiences saw, exactly, remains difficult to determine, as no footage of March 3 has been uncovered in the archives. What did the spectacle “in its entirety” look like through Moore’s camera? What story did Moore tell from his physical vantage point, through his aesthetic decisions, and through his editing? Did, for example, suffragists’ scripted vision of hybrid womanhood prevail, or did the film flatten such complexities, playing instead to gender conventions? Although we do not know what the film looked like, we do know that Hazel MacKaye was excited about the project, emphasizing that Moore’s production provided a needed source of revenue: “I’m overjoyed to think the movies have proved a success and I can’t say how gratified I am to think I may have been instrumental in earning some money for the cause.”106 For MacKaye, her Allegory functioned as the generative force, the artistic production that set in motion film’s utility for the suffrage campaign.107 After the violence and commotion of March 3, suffragists re-scripted the pageant-procession’s meanings to highlight the struggles of a just fight, competing and collaborating with journalists, movie men, police officials, and members of Congress to frame the debate. Although actual conditions jammed the day’s carefully rehearsed visual arguments, they sharpened other arguments in the process, particularly the comparison to the inauguration of President-elect Wilson the following day. From its inception, Alice Paul twined suffragists’ capital protest with Wilson’s march to power. As extreme orderliness prevailed along Pennsylvania Avenue on March 4, the afterimage of the chaotic pageant-procession grew even more intense. It was a

105 “Tom Moore Wins,” Washington Herald, 4 March 1913, clipping in MacKaye Papers, box 121, folder 1. 106 Hazel MacKaye to Mary Medbery MacKaye, 11 March 1913, MacKaye Papers, box 125, folder 13. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 107 MacKaye’s enthusiasm for film may have cooled some by the following year. After seeing her brother’s huge pageant in St. Louis in 1914, Hazel found that pageantry, simply put, outdid the movies: “[O]ne of the results of the pageant was that the moving picture business for several weeks after was dull as ditch water. Nobody had any taste for ‘movies’ after the sublime drama they had witnessed in the blessed out of doors.” See Hazel MacKaye, “Pageantry—Drama of the People, by the People, for the People,” typescript, undated, MacKaye Papers, box 129, folder 9. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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powerful comparison, brought to high relief by both the Senate hearings and the press, such as in the photographic diptych published by the Evening Star contrasting the crowds at the two performances (figure 4-29). Women, categorically excluded from the inaugural parade, attempted to march instead on their own terms, photographs such as these laying bare the gender disparities that undergirded Wilson’s own entrance into the White House.108 The images gave visual punch to suffragists’ words in the official program: “We march that the world may realize that, save in six states, the newly- elected President has been chosen by only one-half of the people.”109 Newspapers, and the movement’s leaders themselves, scored the pageant- procession as a victory for the suffrage cause. The Washington Post called the event “a great success,” despite the crowd’s interference and the failures of the police.110 The writer for the Woman’s Journal accompanied her indignation with assertions of “a magnificent victory,” as the unanticipated circumstances set up “an unexcelled object lesson” for “the indifferent and lukewarm” in attendance, who were “forced to see” the merits of equal suffrage.111 The difficulties that female activists faced on March 3 in expressing their political arguments through the civic art forms of pageantry and parading served to heighten the stakes, giving women new opportunities to broadcast their call to action. The chaos likewise exposed underlying risks, as both the press and the government read suffragists’ hybrid forms of modern and classical womanhood through an essentializing lens, a task made easier by organizers’ own reliance on genteel whiteness as a structuring category. The congressional hearings awarded suffragists a limited victory, as senators pointed to police failures as evidence that the D.C. government needed more authority to patrol such crowds, rather than using the investigation as a pro-suffrage platform.112 Importantly, the pageant-procession did catalyze change. Within two weeks, the Senate activated its suffrage committee,

108 Inaugural committeemen barred women from marching in Wilson’s parade in response to requests by college women and clubwomen to do so. See “Women Are Barred: Sterner Sex Only to March in Inaugural Parade,” Evening Star, 12 February 1913, 2. 109 Brown, Official Program, np. 110 “Woman’s Beauty, Grace, and Art Bewilder the Capital,” Washington Post, 1. 111 “Parade Struggles to Victory Despite Disgraceful Scenes,” Woman’s Journal, 78. 112 Barber, Marching on Washington, 70-71.

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adding members and naming a new chairman. 113 And suffragists gained a jolt of publicity over the coming weeks, energizing a renewed push for the federal amendment—the winning strategy in the campaign’s final years. Hazel MacKaye, too, had her successes as pageant-master. With The Allegory, she modeled an overtly politicized civic art on the national stage, reworking the pageant formally, pedagogically, and ideologically amid the added challenges of an unpredictable—literally engaged—crowd. Securing her reputation in the field, MacKaye actively participated in the newly-founded American Pageant Association, launching her interventions from within its professional circle, as a reformer among reformers. Employing the myth of consensus as a point of departure, she denied civic art a quiet stability, calling on Progressive ideals of community, democracy, and progress only to then highlight the disconnect between such idealism and women’s present-day inequality. Framing the political issue of suffrage in aesthetic terms, MacKaye made use of the authority of tradition to monumentalize her argument, marshaling Columbia, Justice, and Liberty into suffragists’ march on Washington. Organizers of the pageant-procession, however, remained complicit to varying degrees in the racism and classism embedded in the hegemonic visions of citizenship that they aimed to revise. With her hybrid mode, MacKaye did not overturn all of these cultural assumptions, but she did fashion pageantry as a site of negotiation, a space to visualize the art of civic life on suffragists’ own terms. Brokering an allegory of modern womanhood represented a slippery kind of agency. At its core, civic art was concerned with collective expression, the allegorical mode representing a long-standing tool for speaking generally or universally. MacKaye attempted to shift that wholistic voice to the identity politics of woman suffrage. At a moment when personal expression in the arts surged to the forefront of cultural debate with the Armory Show—America’s first large-scale encounter with European modernism, then on display in New York—MacKaye’s nuanced reworking of an older, collective mode simply lacked traction for those artistic audiences looking

113 “Path of Suffrage Leads to Wilson,” Evening Star, 16 March 1913, 1.

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for strong stylistic signs of individualism, outside the realm of civic art.114 Rather, MacKaye’s artistic interventions signified most forcefully to the communities of pageantry and suffrage—APA leadership, pageant enthusiasts, the suffrage ranks, and those who might be persuaded to support votes for women. Through embodied allegory, Hazel MacKaye coupled “generic womanhood”—on display in the murals of the Library of Congress, just steps from the parade line’s start—to professional women like Hedwig Reicher and Florence Fleming Noyes, grounding abstract ideals in the personas of accomplished, contemporary suffragists (see figures 1-12 and 4- 11).115 Such maneuvering represented an act of empowerment, as women demonstrated solidarity as well as dissent on a grand scale through the intertwined performances of Columbia, Hope, heralds, float protagonists, and scores of marchers. The event’s hybrid forms pictorially held female and male, militant and conservative, modern and classical, stagnant and progressive in productive tension. Although the meanings of the pageant-procession remained susceptible to the consuming eye of disparate audiences, MacKaye successfully enlivened debates on the visual and political boundaries of contested terms such as womanhood, citizen, and pageant. After the inaugural-eve performance, suffragists would continue to interrogate civic art’s consensus model during the last push toward the Nineteenth Amendment. Alongside allegory, women appropriated the vocabulary of historical realism to make their visual arguments. An illustrated leaflet for the Massachusetts state campaign in 1915, for example, repurposed Robert Reid’s familiar mural at the state house into a female-centered vision of Americanism (figure 4-30). In “The Spirit of Paul Revere,” it is a female revolutionary who rides in service of her countrywomen, holding a “Votes for Women” banner. In the field of pageantry, Hazel MacKaye led the charge,

114 The boundaries between personal expression and collective expression, modernist styles and traditional ones, remained permeable in the early twentieth century, MacKaye’s work in pageantry but one example. For an analysis of the Armory Show that focuses on such relationships, examining the emergence of professional art criticism, see J. M. Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially 133-157. A similar dynamic characterized the emergent feminist movement at this moment, as women negotiated group consciousness with a sense of individuality. See Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 3-10. 115 “Generic womanhood” is scholar Judy Sund’s term. See Judy Sund, “Columbus and Columbia in Chicago, 1893: Man of Genius Meets Generic Woman,” Art Bulletin 75 (September 1993): 444.

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staging several suffrage productions over the next decade. Her experiments in pageantry grew more emboldened after 1913, as she incorporated a confrontational tone, visions of struggle, and episodes of women’s history into her civic expressions. 116 MacKaye had formed a lasting friendship with Alice Paul, who broke from NAWSA shortly after the Suffrage Pageant-Procession to pursue increasingly militant tactics.117 Hazel joined Paul’s Congressional Union (later the National Woman’s Party), creating Susan B. Anthony: A Chronicle Pageant for the organization in 1915, which challenged the American Pageant Association yet again, this time with a biographical, political production—profiling a female heroine—that resisted the APA’s notions of what constituted a communal drama. 118 It was on the steps of the Treasury Building in 1913 that Hazel MacKaye first experimented with pageantry, stitching together her professional ambitions with her identity as a suffragist. While others in the APA policed the pageantry craze, MacKaye focused on the creative possibilities that such enthusiasm opened up. With visual punch, she amplified the cause of woman suffrage by perceptively tapping into America’s vigorous taste for the art of pageantry.

116 In December 1913, MacKaye returned to Washington with a grand vision of collaboration, laying out plans for a national organization dedicated to dramatizing the suffrage cause. See “Pageants and Plays in Connection with Woman Suffrage,” typescript for a speech delivered before the School of Suffrage, 12 December 1913, MacKaye Papers, box 120, folder 18. On MacKaye’s later pageants, see “Biographical Material Concerning Hazel MacKaye: Author and Director of Pageants and Plays, Prepared for the Cyclopedia of American Women,” typescript, undated, MacKaye Papers, box 129, folder 12; and Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights.” 117 Alice Paul said the two were “lifelong friends” in Amelia R. Fry, “Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment,” November 1972 and May 1973, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6f59n89c/ (accessed on 27 May 2009). 118 According to MacKaye, her Anthony pageant made clear “that Susan B. Anthony was not the mild little Quaker of common impression, but that she was essentially a militant.” See “Anthony Pageant to Go on the Road,” Star, 12 December 1915, clipping in MacKaye Papers, box 132, folder 11. MacKaye sparred with the APA over the issue of whether her production was a proper pageant; MacKaye insisted that it was, asserting that “there is no name save a ‘Pageant’ which can fittingly describe the dramatic form I have used to interpret my subject.” See Frank Chouteau Brown (then APA president) to Hazel MacKaye, 1 October 1914; and Hazel MacKaye to Brown, undated, both in MacKaye Papers, box 120, folder 11; above quotation from the latter. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Teaching the Art of Citizenship in Madison, Wisconsin (1908-1917)

Muralists, pageant-masters, and other civic-minded creatives gathered in Wisconsin’s capital city of Madison in the early years of the twentieth century, fostering a remarkably rich environment of public, collaborative art-making during the height of the Progressive Era. Home to both state government and a leading university, the small city of Madison (population about 25,000) proved fertile ground for the expression of period ideals about participatory citizenship, community identity, and civic progress.1 In 1906, construction began on a new Wisconsin State Capitol after a fire in 1904 had devastated the previous structure. The new building was erected at the same location, a sliver of land between the shores of Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. Like many monuments of the American Renaissance, an extensive mural program was an integral component of the rebuilding of the capitol, completed in 1917. During these same years, civic art flourished at the nearby University of Wisconsin among faculty, students, and area residents. Madison soon emerged as the midwestern center of the pageantry movement. Located one mile west of Capitol Park, the university was as old as the state itself, established in 1848 with Wisconsin’s first constitution. It is this proximity of state house and state school that nurtured the Progressive spirit in Madison and gave reform a distinctly visual appeal. Civic art made tangible this link between local government and academia, stylizing on a grand scale what was known as the Wisconsin Idea. Guiding a collaborative approach to reform, the Wisconsin Idea held that education’s influence should extend beyond the classroom and campus to improve the lives of all the citizens of the state. The principle germinated in the first years of the twentieth century when Governor Robert La Follette, a fiery Progressive and future U.S. senator, and Charles Van Hise, President of the University of Wisconsin from 1903 to 1918, forged new ties between state officials and educators. Putting university

1 Madison’s population was 25,531 in the 1910 census and would nearly double by 1920. See David V. Mollenhoff, Madison: A History of the Formative Years, 2nd ed. (1982; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 246-247.

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expertise to practical use, faculty members served on government commissions and helped draft social legislation, contributing to Progressive measures such as the referendum, public regulation of utilities, workers’ compensation, and other local reforms. The Wisconsin Idea also opened the university to residents across the state with the creation of the school’s Extension Division, which enlarged the role of higher education in everyday life through various outreach programs, including local library services, job training, visiting instructors, correspondence courses, and summer sessions. When La Follette left the governorship for Washington in 1906, the Wisconsin Idea had taken hold and continued to shape state affairs in the years to come. This partnership between capitol and campus was well established by 1912 when the term came into formal use with the publication of The Wisconsin Idea by Charles McCarthy, the state’s legislative librarian. 2 This chapter examines how mural painting and pageantry in and around the new Wisconsin State Capitol helped construct the Wisconsin Idea as well as how civic art’s educational campaign was institutionalized in Madison in the years leading up to America’s entrance into World War I. In Madison, muralists and pageant-masters as aesthetic reformers found their audience: a university community eager to embrace and transmit the messages of civic art. Between campus and capitol, this is where Progressives were made (figure 5-1). Through paint and playacting, civic artists trained Madisonians to be Progressive reformers, orchestrating lessons on how to be model American citizens, local history-tellers, and agents of civic uplift in expressly creative terms. The case of Wisconsin offers a particularly rich example of the ways in which the early-twentieth-century movement to visualize reform became more than a set of discrete mural programs and pageants, but rather a nexus of coordinated sites, activities, and curricula. For the university community in Madison, civic art-making became a mindset and a way of life. The scale and scope of civic art-making in Madison was impressive. At the state capitol, architects, painters, sculptors, and government commissioners worked

2 See “The Wisconsin Idea: History of the Wisconsin Idea,” The University of Wisconsin-Madison, www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu/history.html (accessed on 6 January 2010); Mollenhoff, Madison, 281; and Charles McCarthy, The Wisconsin Idea (New York: Macmillan Company, 1912).

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together to create a decorative program for the new structure. Leading muralists adorned the building’s principal chambers and central dome. As each wing of the capitol was completed, its decorations likewise debuted for an interested public, spanning 1908 to 1917. Pageantry flourished at both the University of Wisconsin and the capitol. Instructors and students of fine art, music, dancing, history, English, and education collaborated with a wide swath of the Madison community to stage at least four major pageants between 1913 and 1915, peak years of the movement, with many more taking place across the state in and around that time. A host of artistic programming accompanied these murals and pageants, including public lectures, exhibitions, festivals, tours, and coursework. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Madison hummed with civic activity. The group of artistic Progressives who moved through Madison in these years created a vital and collaborative environment for reform-minded creativity, reaching across disciplines, University of Wisconsin (UW) departments, and professional/amateur divides.3 This cohort included UW faculty, visiting lecturers and instructors, alums, full-time students, extension students and auditors, as well as muralists, city planners, librarians, and local historians. For the capitol decorations, state commissioners hired nationally-recognized muralists, including Edwin Blashfield, the movement’s leading spokesman, who had recently completed compositions for nearby midwestern capitols in Minnesota and Iowa; Kenyon Cox, an unwavering adherent of allegorical classicism, who had built a strong mural résumé in the years since his Library of Congress assignment; and Charles Yardley Turner, an early advocate of historical realism in American mural painting. Although based on

3 The principle of working together guided reform efforts in the capital city among political and social Progressives as well. A commitment to cooperation took root at the turn of the twentieth century after the depression years of the 1890s catalyzed a new civic consciousness among Madisonians, and Wisconsinites more broadly. Efforts to secure and improve the public welfare amid industrialization and urbanization required emergent reformers to build coalitions across class, interest-group, and political lines. Legislators, muckraking journalists, settlement workers, labor advocates, playground enthusiasts, business leaders, club women, and others forged new alliances to realize a significant slate of reforms in Wisconsin: tighter regulation of electoral practices, direct and primary elections, government budgeting practices, housing codes and inspections, sanitary standards for milk and food, municipal garbage collection, temperance zones, woman suffrage for school-board elections, expanded kindergarten instruction, a public parks system, and other reforms. See Mollenhoff, Madison, 239, 352, and 384-385.

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the East Coast, the painters traveled to Madison to supervise the installation of their murals. Blashfield, for one, lectured at several venues during his visits to the capital city. A key player in pageantry circles was Thomas Wood Stevens, director of the Pageant of Illinois, who gave public lectures on civic art subjects at the University of Wisconsin in early 1912 before moving to Madison from Chicago that fall to join the faculty. Two more leaders, notably both female, were Lotta Clark, a Boston-based high school teacher and founding member of the American Pageant Association, who taught at UW summer sessions in 1914 and 1915, and Ethel Rockwell, a 1911 alumna of the university, who launched a pageant career in the following years with productions in Madison and across the region. The larger circle of artistic Progressives included Charles Van Hise, University President and steward of the Extension Division; Peter Dykema, UW professor of music; Harry Bassett and Thomas Dickinson, UW professors of English; Blanche Trilling, UW professor of physical education; Reuben Gold Thwaites, head of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and resident historian; John Nolen, landscape architect and city planner; Edward Ward, leader of the social centers (or civic centers) movement for the UW Extension Division; and Albert Herter and Hugo Ballin, muralists at the Wisconsin State Capitol.4 For civic artists, the university community in Madison served as their primary audience. It was largely an educated, white community whose range of members included professors and subject experts, adolescent students, adult auditors and others inclined to self-culture, attendees of public lectures and various school events, area teachers and schoolchildren, a statewide network of extension participants, local farmers and laborers attuned to university programs that aimed to improve working conditions, and municipal and state officials. This community grew rapidly in the early twentieth century. University enrollment doubled between 1900 and 1910 from two thousand to four thousand students, and topped seven thousand by 1920. The student body outpaced the city population during these years, with students

4 The State Historical Society of Wisconsin is known today as the Wisconsin Historical Society. The society was originally housed in the capitol and moved in 1900 to its present-day structure on the university’s campus.

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representing one in six residents by 1920 versus one in ten in 1900.5 Community interest in Extension Division programming also increased during this period, with Madison’s summer sessions (overseen by the Extension Division) drawing strong numbers during the most active years of pageant work, 1913 to 1915.6 The UW campus, and Madison more broadly, served as a training ground, a place where civic-minded creatives set Progressive pedagogies in motion. Artistic Progressives instructed future Progressives and community leaders, guiding them to see reform in art-making, imaginative history-telling, and collaborative learning. Artists nurtured the period impulse to perform reform. Importantly, they did so with a vision that participants would put such training to good use. After gathering in Madison, students, teachers, learning enthusiasts, and other community members would hopefully take their civic knowledge to other parts of the city, state, or region and engage in varying reform work with an eye toward the value of visual Progressivism. As such, the university community set its sights on a larger community, a secondary audience to which civic art’s lessons could be directed. As in the cases of D.C., Boston, and Chicago, the makers of murals and pageants in Madison entered into debates on citizenship, immigration, and Americanization through their artistic practice, envisioning reform within a particular set of values about community, progress, and democracy.

As Madison’s principal civic symbol, the new Wisconsin State Capitol anchored the educational campaign of civic art, lending a monumental frame to the reform-minded lessons that muralists, pageant-masters, and other creatives materialized and promoted (figure 5-2). In his 1911 official plan, Madison: A Model City, landscape architect and urban planner John Nolen conceptualized the state house (under construction) as a focal point of civic pride, lauding the capital city’s distinct

5 Mollenhoff, Madison, 335 and 254. 6 Peter Dykema to S. H. Goodnight, Summer Session Director, 7 August 1913, and George Ehler to Goodnight, 11 August 1913, both in University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives, Series No. 16/2/1, box 1, folder “Departmental Reports, 1913” (hereafter cited as UW Archives).

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position “as an educational and art center as well as the seat of the Government.”7 Mural painting and pageantry converged at the capitol during its decade-long period of rebuilding. As a monument of the American Renaissance, the Wisconsin State Capitol represents a late example in the movement to build grand, richly adorned state houses inspired by a vocabulary of the past. Commissioners selected the New York architectural firm of George B. Post & Sons, who produced a Renaissance classicism design that fit onto (and expanded) the previous building’s Greek-cross plan. The first section completed was the west wing, housing the Assembly Chamber, which opened to legislators and the public in 1909. Next, the east wing opened in 1910, the south wing in 1913, followed by the north wing in 1917, home to the Supreme Court Room, the Senate Chamber, and the North Hearing Room, respectively.8 The capitol dome of white granite marked the Madison skyline by 1915, notably visible from the hilly, upper campus of the University of Wisconsin one mile west (figure 5-3). Beneath that dome, state representatives crafted reform legislation, muralists embellished its interior, and pageant leaders staged outdoor performances in its shadow. In the few years since the decorative program at the Massachusetts State House (1900-1904), where Robert Reid, Edward Simmons, and Henry Oliver Walker experimented with realism and narratives of local history, artists had more or less worked out the styles and subjects of mural painting. Begun in 1908, the mural program at the Wisconsin State Capitol demonstrates that the ways of painting local history and ideals were naturalized during the movement’s peak years. Once-fiery debates among artistic circles cooled, as muralists fashioned a range of (formulaic) solutions.

7 John Nolen, “State Capitals and State Pride: Wisconsin’s Opportunity,” La Follette’s Weekly Magazine 3 (11 February 1911): 8. For more on Nolen, see his Madison: A Model City (Boston: Madison Park & Pleasure Drive Association, 1911); and Mollenhoff, Madison, 323-335. 8 For more on the design and construction of the capitol, see Christian A. Holst, The Wisconsin Capitol: Official Guide and History (Madison: M. F. Blumenfeld, 1917); Michael A. Mikkelsen, “The Wisconsin State Capitol, Madison, Wisconsin,” Architectural Record 42 (September 1917): 195-233; and Henry-Russell Hitchcock and William Seale, Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the USA (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 240-242 and 262-264.

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In charge of the aesthetic vision of the capitol in its entirety, architect George Browne Post and his son, George Otis Post, looked east for their roster of muralists, seeking artists with national reputations who were primarily based in New York and along the Atlantic seaboard. Capitol commissioners in Madison likewise valued decorators “of proved and tried ability” and followed the architects’ suggestions.9 The artists typically proposed subjects, with Post, his son, and commissioners approving the designs. The first to be hired was Edwin Blashfield, leading muralist of the day and prominent artist at the Library of Congress, who in 1908 painted Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future for the Assembly Chamber. The architects and capitol commissioners then discussed several names for the remaining spaces, offering contracts to two artists who would not end up executing murals: Francis D. Millet agreed to paint compositions for the Supreme Court Room, but died aboard the Titanic in 1912 before he could do so; and John White Alexander delayed acceptance of the Senate Chamber commission, eventually declining due to ill health. 10 In 1912, Edwin Blashfield undertook a second commission to create an allegorical mural of the Resources of Wisconsin for the dome crown and Hugo Ballin signed on to adorn the Governor’s Reception Room with a combination of allegorical and historical panels. After Millet’s death, Albert Herter accepted the commission in 1913 for the Supreme Court Room, painting a mural series on the history of the law. In 1914, Charles Yardley Turner signed a contract for the North Hearing Room, composing a series on the history of transportation in Wisconsin. Finally Kenyon Cox undertook the Senate Chamber commission in 1914, creating The Marriage of the Atlantic and the Pacific, an allegorical mural marking the opening of the Panama Canal. Cox had previously

9 George B. Post & Sons to H. D. Johnson (copy to Lew F. Porter), 21 April 1909, Capitol Commission General Files, Wisconsin Historical Society, box 21, folder 5 (hereafter cited as Capitol Commission, WHS). 10 George B. Post & Sons to Magnus Swenson, 2 June 1912, box 22, folder 3; and Post to Lew Porter, 8 December 1913, box 22, folder 4, both in Capitol Commission, WHS. Howard Pyle, H. Siddons Mowbray, Edward Simmons, and Barry Faulkner were also considered, along with the muralists who executed commissions.

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secured a decorative commission in 1912 for a set of pendentive mosaics entitled Legislation, Government, Justice, and Liberty in the rotunda.11 The mural program at the state capitol scaled up the Wisconsin Idea, picturing a sense of statewide community rooted in the values of access, education, and contribution. When we consider the structure’s first mural, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future by Edwin Blashfield, in relation to a pageant staged on the grounds of the capitol in 1914, the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant by Ethel Rockwell, the allied curricula of murals and pageants come sharply into view. Looking closely at both, we can discern how the artists adapted the established vocabularies of civic art for Wisconsin viewers in particular. In Madison, a hub of Progressive identity, Blashfield’s mural and Rockwell’s pageant gave material form to three specific ideals of the era, ideals then at the height of their resonance: the fostering of communal spirit through the local, the understanding of progress as the outgrowth of a shared past, and the ennobling of the democratic form of government and its opportunities of education. Keyed to the capitol setting and to the city’s university community, both mural and pageant presented stylized narratives that made use of the past to shape a reform-minded future. Although a New Yorker, Edwin Blashfield knew how to paint Wisconsin in Progressive terms. He visualized the idea of togetherness for his midwestern audiences by harmonizing his own mural vocabulary with an understanding of local history, having researched the assignment. Blashfield employed a hybrid vocabulary combining realism and allegory, his signature style by 1908, to depict a history of the state as a Wisconsinite sacred conversation. Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, a sixteen by thirty-seven-foot lunette, spans the wall behind the speaker’s desk in the capitol’s Assembly Chamber (figure 5-4).12 At the time of its installation, Blashfield

11 Contracts for Blashfield, Ballin, Herter, Turner, and Cox are in the Capitol Commission, WHS, boxes 42 and 44. 12 The mural went by several names at the time of its debut. Wisconsin, Past, Present, Future appears in the first official guide to the capitol and in at least one newspaper report. The official guide also used the title The State of Wisconsin; its Past, Present, and Future. Blashfield copyrighted the mural under the name Wisconsin. This short title was later used to describe Blashfield’s mural for the crown dome; to avoid confusion, I have not used it for the Assembly Chamber painting. Further, the current official guide to the capitol uses the title Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future. See Holst, The Wisconsin

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provided capitol commissioners with an explanation of the painting, and we need this script as viewers to unlock the artist’s narrative. Under the canopy of a pine forest, more than thirty figures gather around a female form symbolizing Wisconsin, who presides on a rock just right of center. At her side, three maidens dressed in creamy fabrics and entwined in aquatic plants allegorize the state’s bordering waters: Lake Superior to the north, Lake Michigan to the east, and the Mississippi River to the west (figure 5-5). Several early European explorers surround this allegorical group, signaling Wisconsin’s past, such as Father Allouez and Pierre Radisson who represent the missionary and fur-trading endeavors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other historical figures gather on the right, including a group of Civil War soldiers. Wedged between a massive tree trunk and the composition’s border, a male and female Native American stand at the far right, relegated to the edges—and past—of this envisioned community (figure 5-6). While the right side of the mural is peopled by Wisconsin’s past, its center and left sections picture the state’s present and future (figure 5-7). At center, a fifth allegorical figure symbolizing To-day engages the seated Wisconsin, gesturing steadfastly with her left hand to the citizens and landscape behind her. Those over her shoulder represent the Present, typified by lumbermen, miners, farmers, and their families, holding the tools and wearing the clothing of their trades. Adjacent to a second old pine trunk at the far left stands a final pair of allegorical figures, their attention drawn to the nearby tree. Shielding her Lamp of Progress, the female form symbolizes the Future (figure 5-8). She confers with her male companion, the Conservation of Force, who warns her to protect her forests. And on the horizon at the left, Blashfield foresees the capitol’s monumental dome—seven years before its completion. Navigating Blashfield’s composition takes some time on the viewer’s part, as his peopled landscape, traversing three centuries of Wisconsin history, is not an easy

Capitol, 39-40; “Blashfield Comes to See Work,” Wisconsin State Journal, 23 December 1908, 2; Library of Congress Register of Copyrights for Assembly Chamber painting and its photograph, Edwin Howland Blashfield Papers, The New-York Historical Society, box 7, folder 6 (hereafter cited as Blashfield Papers, NYHS); and Wisconsin State Capitol: Guide and History (Madison: Department of Administration, State of Wisconsin, 2005), 38.

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read. Nonetheless, capitol commissioners as well as Post were pleased with the mural, the architect proudly calling it “by far the best thing that Blashfield has ever done.”13 Like the Boston muralists, Blashfield as history-teller constructed a narrative of white male triumph, framing Wisconsin’s common origins in the European settlement that flowed along the state’s waterways. This vision of community grants little room to the native Indian populations of Wisconsin—their bloody resistance to colonization, their role in the trading economy, their alliances with French and English forces during wartime, or their role as modern-day residents of the state. The components of Blashfield’s mural align with popular histories of Wisconsin, visual evidence that the painter did his homework. In a Madison newspaper article, Blashfield emphasized that he researched his subject, indicating his familiarity with the works of local historians such as Reuben Thwaites, superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Recent publications by Thwaites, like his Wisconsin: The Americanization of a French Settlement of 1908, presented a narrative of the state that stressed the importance of waterways and natural resources; fur-trading and missions under French and English colonization; the core industries of mining, lumbering, and farming; and Wisconsin’s contributions to the Union cause.14 Blashfield incorporated all of these, yet he did miss one crucial element. After installation of the mural, Blashfield heeded a request by state officials for a badger, the state mascot, to be added to the scene, which was duly painted in atop a rock near the color guard (figures 5-9 and 5-10).15 Pictorially, Blashfield defined community as a shared experience of statehood among various groups of people who have each made contributions to Wisconsin’s settlement, economic rise, and future promise. Dedication to state trumped loyalty to other identities, such as those of ethnicity, class, or trade. Visualizing the Wisconsin

13 George B. Post to Senator William Vilas, 16 July 1908, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 21, folder 4. Blashfield, however, was disappointed with the room’s lighting conditions, which he found too strong. See Edwin Blashfield to Evangeline Blashfield, 22 December 1908, Blashfield Papers, NYHS, box 5, folder 1. 14 “Blashfield Comes to See Work,” 2; and Reuben Gold Thwaites, Wisconsin: The Americanization of a French Settlement (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908). 15 A pamphlet for the new mural stated, “Since the painting was placed on the wall a badger has crept in and made himself at home.” “Mural Painting in Assembly Chamber, E. H. Blashfield, Artist,” leaflet, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 1, folder 4.

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Idea, Blashfield orchestrated this sense of statewide commonality by weaving together the many gazes of his protagonists, those of allegorical forms, historical figures, and present-day Wisconsinites. The lone figures not partaking in this web of visual exchange are the Native Americans at right, who must shield their eyes from the “westering sun,” in Blashfield’s words.16 The Indian pair, literally positioned in the eastern-most portion of the canvas, faces west with adverted eyes toward Blashfield’s present and future, and toward the University of Wisconsin, geographically west of the capitol. Although pictured within this community of statehood, Blashfield’s Native Americans play the part of “vanishing Indians”—like the (dressed-up) figure of White Cloud in Stevens’ contemporaneous Pageant of Illinois—a subject I will return to later. With her Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, Ethel Rockwell, like Blashfield, localized an established vocabulary of civic art, activating the Progressive ideal of communal spirit through a Wisconsin lens. Rockwell not only staged the Wisconsin Idea with her pageant at the state capitol on October 21, 1914, she also embodied it. 17 A 1911 alumna of the University of Wisconsin, she as pageant-master actively extended education’s boundaries beyond the campus, the core mission of the Wisconsin Idea. At UW, Rockwell had studied with English professor Thomas Dickinson, a proponent of open-air theatres and founder of the Wisconsin Dramatic Society.18 Rockwell became a schoolteacher after graduation, but transitioned to fulltime pageant work shortly after the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, her second production as pageant-master.19 She regarded her pageant as an opportunity to foster communal spirit at the local level, as the participatory art form showed a community “how to organize, co-operate, and unite,” in her words. One of the city’s newspapers

16 Ibid. 17 The performance was originally scheduled for October 14, but poor weather conditions delayed it until October 21. 18 Robert Gard, Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955), 85-97; and Thomas H. Dickinson, “The Open-Air Theatre,” Play-book 1 (June 1913): 3-32. 19 Rockwell debuted as pageant-master only two weeks earlier with the Social Center Pageant in Sauk City, Wisconsin, on October 3. See Ethel T. Rockwell, “Pageantry in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Alumni Magazine 16 (February 1915): 242-245.

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touted the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant as a “’Made in Madison’ affair,” as it was “written by a Madison woman...[and] played by Madison talent trained by Madison people.”20 Rockwell’s pageant literally assembled a Wisconsin community of grand proportions—the cast of more than twenty-five hundred included state officials, university faculty and students, businessmen, laborers, women, high-schoolers, and children. Sponsored by the Madison Association of Commerce, the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant was part of the annual Fall Festival, which brought residents from around the state to the city.21 With the new capitol as grandiose backdrop, Rockwell directed a two-hour performance that told the story of the writing of the national song in celebration of its one-hundredth anniversary. The pageant drew dense crowds estimated at twenty thousand to the capitol lawn, as seen in a photograph from the event (figure 5-11). The image is one of five small photographs published in an article by Rockwell on the pageant for the Atlantic Educational Journal, a set that has preserved a visual record of the performance for us today.22 Notably, pageant attendees could combine their visit to the capitol with a tour of the new building, which hosted an open house each day until midnight throughout the Fall Festival so that visitors could view the decorations in completed wings and speak with building guides.23 Witnessing the pageant and touring the capitol decorations, Wisconsinites encountered reinforcing messages about the importance of local community. At first glance, a pageant about the British capture of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812 and Francis Scott Key’s role in the subsequent fight at Fort McHenry seems to celebrate love of country above Wisconsin identity. But in choosing this national story, Rockwell aimed to allegorize a local one. As the pageant’s backdrop,

20 Rockwell, “Pageantry in Wisconsin,” 242; and “Pageant Billed for Wednesday, Delay Gives Opportunity for Perfecting Mammoth Spectacle,” Wisconsin State Journal, 18 October 1914, 7. 21 Ethel T. Rockwell, Star-Spangled Banner Pageant (Madison: Tracy & Kilgore, 1914); and John Newhouse, “That White-haired Dynamo: She Organizes Pageants Like Armies,” Wisconsin State Journal, undated clipping [after 1945] in Ethel Rockwell Biographical File, UW Archives. 22 Ethel Theodora Rockwell, “The Pageant of the Star-Spangled Banner,” Atlantic Educational Journal 10 (January 1915): 9-11; and “Suggests Pageant for Dedication,” Eau Claire Leader, 9 November 1915, 5. 23 “Capitol Lights to Burn during Festival,” Daily Cardinal, 9 October 1914, 10.

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the new state capitol gave residents a regional focal point that resonated strongly during one scene in particular enacting the burning of the nation’s capitol in 1814, an event reminiscent of the state’s own terrible fire at the site just ten years earlier. Another photograph from the Atlantic Educational Journal set captures a portion of this scene and its (doubled) story of capitol destruction (figure 5-12). In the first interlude, after the allegorical figure of the Capitol and her attendants were encircled by a band of fire demons in a symbolic dance of destruction, the historical figures of Presidents George Washington and James Madison took the stage. In figure 5-12, the Spirit of Washington, dressed all in white, stands at far left in front of his flag-draped tomb. In profile and powdered wig at far right is President Madison, the home city’s namesake and the nation’s leader during the 1814 burning of Washington, D.C. The dense gathering of pageant actors and onlookers at center suggests that the image might have been taken before or after the performance, and not as the scene unfolded. As told in Rockwell’s script, President Madison visits the Spirit of Washington, who assures him that the nation’s capital city would rise once again.24 Gathered on entrance steps, in windows, and atop the roof of the rebuilt capitol, the Wisconsin crowd and cast could take collective pride in knowing that such a feat was possible. Both Rockwell’s pageant and Blashfield’s mural pictured community as a combination of shared identity, cooperative spirit, and Americanism, emphasizing a local sense of place, people, and purpose in relation to national narratives. While Rockwell framed a national story in local terms at the state capitol, Blashfield focused on local communities, tying their efforts to the national good through painted details. His soldiers, for example, represent Wisconsin regiments of 1861 that fought for the Union, their state affiliation reinforced by their badger attendant. Also, in depicting a figure called the Conservation of Force, who councils the Future, Blashfield gave form to the state’s pioneering role in the conservation movement then developing nationwide. UW President Van Hise had served as one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s advisors on conservation policies, extending the Wisconsin Idea from the boundaries of the state to those of the nation.

24 Rockwell, Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, 16-18.

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In addition to visualizing the Progressive ideal of community, the Assembly Chamber mural and capitol pageant staged progress narratives that valued the past as an instructive model for the present and future. In his book of 1913, Mural Painting in America, Blashfield reminded his readers that “the present is the past of tomorrow,” a phrase that underlines the theme of continuity threading through Progressive-Era art and culture.25 As envisioned by muralists and pageant-masters, change came steadily, as the outgrowth of a shared past. Doses of reform, not revolution, Progressives believed, would gradually shape a better future. In Blashfield’s tale of frontier triumph, early Wisconsinites harnessed the state’s resources—moved goods along its waterways, harvested its soil for produce and lumber—providing a fertile environment for present-day intellectual, artistic, and scientific advancement in Madison and throughout the state. Whereas Blashfield composed his progress narrative in an intricately-woven single frame, Rockwell’s pageant recounted progress through a series of episodes that moved from the British invasion of Washington to American victory at Fort McHenry and the inception of the national song. Francis Scott Key’s melody commemorated a specific historical event, yet it had gained a broader, symbolic meaning as a rallying expression of patriotism and Americanism by its one-hundredth anniversary in 1914. Understanding progress as a story of Americanization, civic artists and other reformers imposed their vision of a shared past onto diverse populations, privileging a common culture that came with a price—the masking (and devaluing) of cultural differences. In the final episode of the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, for instance, hundreds of children “representing all of the different nationalities in Madison,” according to Rockwell, gathered on the capitol lawn and performed the various folk dances of their homelands. While the pageant did celebrate ethnic cultures and the different traditions that made up the Wisconsin population, it did so through a frame of Americanization. Bounded folk categories visualized at the beginning of the episode become traces of communities safely in the state’s past, as the children unite, hold

25 Edwin Howland Blashfield, Mural Painting in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 23.

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hands, and sing the national anthem (not designated as such until 1931) at the pageant’s culmination. Aligning symbolic unity with social unity, Rockwell asserted in the script that the immigrant children, hand in hand, “show[ed] that in America the German, the English, the French, the Irish, the Italian, the Greek, the Jew, the Norwegian, the Swede, and all other nationalities represented, have become united into the American with all of the old-world prejudices forgotten.”26 Here, ethnic diversity is not the result of progress, but instead fashioned as a starting point in Wisconsin’s immigrant past. Rockwell staged pageantry as a vehicle of Americanism, overlaying the idea of progress with a veneer of consensus. Alongside the principles of community and progress, Edwin Blashfield and Ethel Rockwell promoted an ennobling vision of democracy, emphasizing themes of education and participation in their art-making. Artistic Progressives, as we have seen in earlier chapters, considered the act of viewing a mural or participating in a pageant as a point of contact between themselves and the broad, diverse population they wished to edify, including immigrants, rural and urban workers, and schoolchildren. At the time of his Library of Congress commission, Blashfield called murals “painted lessons,” linking them to developing methods of the New Education. In 1913, after the completion of his second mural for the Wisconsin State Capitol and before its installation in the dome, Blashfield characterized the artist as a “schoolmaster,” with the adorned public building as his school.27 Similarly, Rockwell asserted that the pageant’s primary purpose was to educate, writing in 1916 that “the art of historical pageantry has served to demonstrate the idealism of our American democracy, and has satisfied the popular passion for art that could be understood, and...interpreted in terms of love of the home community.” A schoolteacher herself, Rockwell knew firsthand the difficulties of making the events of history “stand out as something real,” and like

26 Rockwell, Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, 37. 27 Edwin Howland Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” Municipal Affairs 2 (March 1898): 100; and Blashfield, Mural Painting in America, 5.

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fellow leaders in the field, saw the participatory art of pageantry as an effective way to do just that.28 Coupled with this goal to make history real was a desire on the part of civic artists to infuse their creations with a sense of idealism and grandeur. In contrast to muralists Reid and Simmons, who employed a vocabulary of historical realism at the Massachusetts State House and found ways for their grounded figures to do allegorical-like work, Edwin Blashfield expressly embraced both real and ideal forms in his murals. In Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, he placed realist figures of European explorers shoulder-to-shoulder with allegorical females representing the bodies of water that made their trade routes viable. Blashfield’s integrated version of a hybrid vocabulary contrasts with that of Walker, whose Pilgrims on the Mayflower in Boston organized ideal and real forms in separate registers (see figure 2-6). Walker’s approach reads as more tentative or conservative than Blashfield’s, especially considering the latter artist’s vocalism when it came to positioning mural painting within early-twentieth-century discourses of reform. Unlike muralist and critic Charles Shean, who in recent years had called for distinctly American subjects and realist forms, Blashfield insisted that an American brand of mural painting—that is, an art understood to be accessible and democratic—could rightfully speak in lofty terms: “The grand people of allegory, the men and women with swords and scales and trumpet of Fame and all that, belong to us as much as to the Renaissance.”29 Before Wisconsin, Blashfield had worked out hybrid solutions at numerous venues, including mural commissions in Baltimore, St. Paul, and Des Moines (see figure 2-16). By nature of its playacting, pageantry presented a more complicated relationship between real and ideal forms. When called for in a pageant script, it was everyday citizens who dressed the part of larger-than-life allegories and spirits, assuming a hybrid persona both material and abstract. While Thomas Wood Stevens

28 Ethel T. Rockwell, “Historical Pageantry: A Treatise and a Bibliography,” State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Bulletin of Information 84 (July 1916): 5; and Rockwell, “The Pageant of the Star-Spangled Banner,” 9. 29 Blashfield, “Mural Painting,” 104. On Shean, see, for example, Charles M. Shean, “The Decoration of Public Buildings: A Plea for Americanism in Subject and Ornamental Detail,” Municipal Affairs 5 (September 1901): 710-721.

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favored strictly historical episodes and a herald figure for productions like the Pageant of Illinois, other pageant leaders typically placed allegorical interludes between historical scenes. Creating a pause in the action, such interludes staged abstract ideals with classically-draped females, dancing, and music. (In Washington, Hazel MacKaye essentially expanded the interlude form into an entire pageant, positioning that performance in relation to the historic actions of marching suffragists on Pennsylvania Avenue.) Rockwell composed two interludes for the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, which unfolded between seven historical episodes. A photograph from the Atlantic Educational Journal set depicts an early moment of the first interlude when several allegorical figures have gathered, providing visual evidence of how ideal and real commingled in the pageant form (figure 5-13). In the photograph, a group of classically-garbed women stands on the capitol lawn. The figure at left with her back to us represents the Capitol, accompanied at center by Liberty, Peace, Justice, Law, and Progress. Performed by UW students, this scene presents a moment of harmony and stability just before the British capture and burning of the nation’s capitol, qualities reinforced visually in the staging of the interlude in combination with the framing of the photograph.30 Figures extend across the composition, with the Capitol closest to us, her larger size signaling her importance. She stands aligned with the Wisconsin capitol’s entryway, echoing the columns at the building’s core. Her attendants have lined up at middle distance, spaced at intervals that play upon the rhythm of window arches behind them. Overlaying these personified ideals onto the façade of the Wisconsin State Capitol works pictorially to infuse the new structure with its foundational symbols and also to lend monumentality to the dressed-up college girls and their idealizing task. Materializing Progressive ideals of community, progress, and democracy, civic art in Madison, such as Blashfield’s mural and Rockwell’s pageant at the Wisconsin State Capitol, envisioned reform through a lens of consensus that left out or dismissed various citizen groups as well as alternative narratives integral to the local story. Although Blashfield, for instance, painted a token Indian pair in the margins of his

30 “University Girls Aid in Pageant,” Daily Cardinal, 13 October 1914, 6.

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canvas—signaling their status as “vanishing Indians” by having them shield their eyes from the setting sun—the rich histories of local natives and their enduring roles in twentieth-century Wisconsin life found no form in the Assembly Chamber mural. Yet present-day Native Americans in and near Madison, and throughout the state, were indeed visible. Ho-Chunk Indians, for example, who in earlier generations had resisted government removal efforts, inhabited lands throughout southern Wisconsin. In the Wisconsin Dells, about fifty miles north of the capital city, Ho-Chunk natives negotiated a tourist economy, selling crafts, performing, and sitting for portraits for white visitors while also building their own communities and continuing native traditions. 31 Further, Blashfield chose to represent the Present in his mural through the core industries of farming, lumbering, and mining. Such a vision of solely land-based production waxed somewhat nostalgic in 1908. This triad no longer signified the whole of Wisconsin industrialism, as new manufacturing industries like meat processing, batteries, and machining accounted for increasing portions of the state’s labor force and economy.32 Blashfield painted no factory workers and but one diminutive, smokeless chimney on his mural horizon, dwarfed by the monumental farmers, lumbermen, and miners in the foreground (see figure 5-7). As both artistic and political style, Progressivism was a language of inclusion put to use by adherents to advance a particular vision of civic reform. While shaping a collectivity of interests, Progressives nonetheless set boundaries, sidelining some members from their imagined community. Further, Ethel Rockwell in her pageant staged local immigrant children as the pupils of Americanization, whose identities were in transition. Such a vision did not account for the significant role of adult immigrants (as well as those of a second or third generation who identified with their immigrant roots) as agents—and not simply recipients—of communal change. Wisconsin had a long history of ethnic and racial diversity: the transcultural economies of Indian, French, and English inhabitants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries grew even more diverse in the nineteenth century

31 See Steven D. Hoelscher, Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett’s Wisconsin Dells (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 32 Mollenhoff, Madison, 256-261.

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with the arrival of large numbers of Germans, Irish, and Norwegians, as well as Swedes, Danes, Canadians, Chinese, and other groups in smaller numbers. In 1880, seventy-three percent of Madison residents were foreign-born or born to emigrant parents. The beginning of the twentieth century brought a new wave of immigrants, including Poles, Russians, Czechs, and Italians.33 Ethnic communities put down roots, with residents establishing themselves in growing numbers as businessmen, municipal politicians, and state legislators. Leaders of the civic community, they participated in the era’s modernization and reforms, helping to shape a Progressive identity for Wisconsin. 34 Finally, neither Rockwell nor Blashfield included African Americans in their aesthetic history-telling. The group made up less than one percent of the Wisconsin population in 1910, but their numbers had increased modestly over the previous decade.35 Notwithstanding artists’ collaborative efforts and democratic outlook, muralists and pageant-masters in Madison presented civic images of a white, Americanizing community that positioned some Wisconsinites outside state narratives, relegated them to a distant past, or denied their role as contributing reformers. Alongside Blashfield’s Assembly Chamber decoration, other murals in the Wisconsin State Capitol aggrandized a Progressive vision, such as Kenyon Cox’s Marriage of the Atlantic and the Pacific, installed in the Senate Chamber in 1915, which resonated not only locally, but also nationally and internationally (figure 5-14). An accomplished muralist, Cox is better remembered today as an unyielding voice of classicism and vituperative critic of European modernism, especially during the 1913 Armory Show.36 Idealism and allegory are on full display in his composition,

33 Mollenhoff, Madison, 63-67 and 143-152; statistic on 143; and “Immigration (20th Century),” Dictionary of Wisconsin History, Wisconsin Historical Society, www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=9165&keyword=immigration (accessed on 13 January 2010). 34 Jørn Brøndal, Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics: Scandinavian Americans and the Progressive Movement in Wisconsin, 1890-1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 117-132 and 268-271; and Mollenhoff, Madison, 223-227. 35 U.S. Census Bureau, Negro Population in the United States 1790-1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 43. 36 On Cox as critic, see Kenyon Cox, Artist and Public, and Other Essays on Art Subjects (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914); and J. M. Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 133-157.

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attesting to the range of vocabularies that period artists employed to inculcate civic values—ideal, real, and hybrid forms. While strictly allegorical, Cox’s mural commemorated a contemporary event, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.37 In the central panel, the enthroned figure of America presides over the union of the two oceans, the Atlantic, personified by Neptune, and the Pacific, a female goddess. Behind the Atlantic in the right panel, Peace welcomes France, Germany, and Great Britain, allegorical females holding a palette, book, and shield, respectively, as an oarsman steadies their barge. And behind the Pacific at left, a floating figure of Commerce greets the symbolic forms of Japan, “the Semitic races,” China, and Polynesia, accompanied by a water nymph.38 Kenyon Cox’s mural fashioned the ideas of community and progress in decidedly imperialist terms. The U.S. had steered the engineering project at the Isthmus of Panama in the years after the Spanish-American War, controlling a strategic gateway for commerce and military traffic. For a state capitol in the heart of the Midwest, the choice of subject seems somewhat peculiar, yet a letter by Cox, who proposed the idea, indicates that the commissioners discerned a local angle, which met with their approval: “[The subject] has so little to do with Wisconsin that I was afraid they would turn me down. The importance of the event historically and its neat coincidence in time, dating the building forever, appealed to them.”39 Presiding over the Senate Chamber, the mural pictorially aligns the opening of the Panama Canal and that of the Wisconsin State Capitol as monumental events with far-reaching importance, whether for global or local communities. Cox, like Rockwell, fashioned local appeal out of grander narratives. Further, Cox acknowledged the timeliness of his allegorical composition on another front, as World War I had just begun in Europe

37 According to Richard Murray, the Senate Chamber mural was more historical in content than any other of Cox’s murals. See Richard Murray Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, entry for the Wisconsin State Capitol in his unpublished catalogue “Hope and Memory: Mural Painting in the United States, 1876-1920,” box 21. 38 “The Marriage of the Atlantic and the Pacific: Three Panels by Kenyon Cox in the Senate Chamber of the Wisconsin State Capitol, Madison, Wisconsin,” leaflet, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 1, folder 4. 39 Kenyon Cox to Louise King Cox, 21 May 1914, Kenyon Cox Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, part I, box 2; emphasis original. Letter reprinted in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., An Artist of the American Renaissance: The Letters of Kenyon Cox, 1883-1919 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 171-172.

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when he sketched out his designs. In August 1914, he wrote to commissioners: “Present European news gives an ironic aspect to my subject, but the canal will be there when the wars are over.”40 Dealing in the language of allegory, Cox placed figures of Britain and France next to Germany in a composition that symbolized union; his mural did not speak to the wave of militarism then rising across the Atlantic. For the North Hearing Room, Charles Yardley Turner had to retune his mural series on the history of transportation so that its progress narrative harmonized more closely with capitol commissioners’ own locally-inflected vision of such progress. In a realist mode, the artist framed transportation’s advancement in Wisconsin as a triumph of Western culture and ingenuity. Turner was an early adopter of historical realism in mural painting, executing a commission on colonial American subjects for the Baltimore Courthouse in the same years that Reid, Simmons, and Walker were working at the state house in Boston. For the North Hearing Room, Turner painted four panels, one for each wall, placed in the cove below the ceiling (completed in 1915 and installed in 1916). Representing four methods of transportation, the series moves from an Indian, pastoral past to a white, mechanized present: Transportation by Indians with Horses, By Trappers in Canoe, By Stage Coach, and Modern Transportation by Steam and Motor (figures 5-15 to 5-18).41 The last panel on modern transportation proved especially important to commissioners, who insisted on the subject after viewing Turner’s initial sketches. Turner had envisioned the stage coach scene as the fourth panel, with a prairie schooner scene as the third. Commissioners scrapped the schooner sketch and Turner went to work on his modern transportation design, a busy waterfront scene with trains, an automobile, a steamship, and even an airplane. 42 For commissioners, picturing the history of transportation in Wisconsin was also an exercise in picturing the present. The mechanized technologies

40 Kenyon Cox to Lew Porter, 2 August 1914, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 7, folder 9. 41 The titles of Turner’s murals vary in period archives. I am using the titles that appeared in the first official guide. See Holst, The Wisconsin Capitol, 43. 42 Charles Yardley Turner to Lew Porter, 9 February 1914, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 24, folder 16; Porter to Turner, 12 February 1914, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 25, folder 2; and Turner to Porter, 24 July 1914, Capitol Commission, WHS, box 24, folder 16.

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of ships, trains, cars, and planes—so crucial to the Midwest and its role as artery in national networks of circulation and distribution—needed to be the culminating expression of Turner’s series. As the North Hearing Room would host meetings by the state railroad commission, a regulatory agency created in 1905, capitol commissioners pushed for a modern and industrial vision of Wisconsin to suit the community that would conduct civic business in the space.43 Further, in the Wisconsin Pageant of May 1913, Thomas Wood Stevens staged a local progress narrative that recounted the rise of white civilization in the region, akin to the painted compositions by Blashfield and Turner at the state capitol. Stevens, a leader in the field when he arrived in the city in 1912, cultivated local interest in pageantry and helped initiate Madison’s rise as the midwestern center of the movement. Five hundred students, with the assistance of faculty from numerous departments, performed the pageant on the UW campus. Stevens reused elements of his Pageant of Illinois: Donald Robertson again played White Cloud and the first episode enacted Father Marquette’s planting of the cross (figure 5-19). Relocating the storyline to Wisconsin, Stevens wrote new episodes that recounted Indian resistance and defeat on local terrain, in Madison and beyond.44 More pageants quickly followed. The years 1913 to 1915 mark a particularly energetic period of civic playacting in the capital city, the height of the pageantry craze nationwide as well. This taste for pageantry was cultivated at the University of Wisconsin, where a collaborative group of creatives instituted a rich curriculum of visual Progressivism, teaching members of the university community how to aestheticize reform on a grand scale.

During the 1910s, the University of Wisconsin put art at the center of civic training. Programming at the Madison campus taught an expansive university

43 Holst, The Wisconsin Capitol, 43. 44 “The Wisconsin Pageant: Official Programme,” pamphlet, Thomas Wood Stevens Papers, University of Arizona Library Special Collections, box 32, folder 1 (hereafter cited as TWS Papers, Arizona). See also “Pageant at University Will Reveal Events in History of Wisconsin,” Wisconsin State Journal, 11 May 1913, 17; “Indian Braves in Spring Pageant,” Daily Cardinal, 15 May 1913, 1; and “Pageant Recalls Bygone History of Badger State, 10,000 People See Successful Production Given by Students Saturday,” Daily Cardinal, 26 May 1913, 1 and 12.

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community how to read and, importantly, create Progressive narratives. The Wisconsin Idea gained a visual dimension through a variety of activities, including coursework, pageantry, lectures, exhibits, and tours. While the adolescent students who enrolled for the academic year had perhaps the greatest access to such resources, many of the school’s civic art activities were open to the public. Further, the summer session, run by the Extension Division, encouraged learning enthusiasts across the state (and beyond) to partake in university programming as registered (for-credit) students, auditors, or attendees at special events. The University of Wisconsin institutionalized civic art’s educational campaign, cultivating a creative environment where Progressives modeled citizenship in collaborative, participatory, and artistic terms. This collaborative approach began with the UW faculty, which sought interdepartmental cooperation on creative projects. Specialists in art, history, music, English, theatre, physical education, and other subjects regularly joined forces in these years, finding common civic themes across disciplines. For his Wisconsin Pageant in 1913, for example, Thomas Wood Stevens enlisted the expertise and support of over two dozen faculty members, including Thomas Dickinson, English professor and spearhead of open-air theatre; Harry Bassett, English professor and instructor of pageant-related coursework at summer sessions; George Ehler, head of the Department of Physical Education; Blanche Trilling, director of the Department of Physical Education for Women and instructor of folk dancing at summer sessions; Horace Kallen, philosophy professor and proponent of cultural pluralism; William Varnum, professor of drawing and design; and Reuben Thwaites, head of the historical society and UW lecturer in history.45 Stevens was a catalyzing figure in the university’s growing civic art curriculum. A pageant-master, poet, etcher, illustrator, instructor in mural painting,

45 “The Wisconsin Pageant: Official Programme,” TWS Papers, Arizona; and faculty section of the 1914 yearbook, The Badger 28 (Madison: Junior Class of the University of Wisconsin, 1914), 92-126, available online at University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/UW.UWYearBk1914 (accessed on 18 January 2010). On Dickinson, see Gard, Grassroots Theater, 84-89. On Trilling, see Janice Ross, Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 73-102.

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and lecturer in art history, Steven led creative projects on several fronts in Madison, as he had done in Chicago in the immediate years before his move to Wisconsin. Although his residency at the university was relatively short—spanning the 1912 summer session, the 1912-1913 academic year, and the 1913 summer session— Stevens helped launch a vibrant civic art scene on campus, wedding various artistic disciplines and stylizing Progressive reform for an enthusiastic university community. (A year after his arrival, Stevens left Wisconsin to accept an offer at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh as head of their new program in drama, an opportunity he found too great to pass up.) President Van Hise had recruited Stevens to the University of Wisconsin to develop a fine arts department.46 During his time in Madison, Stevens taught courses in art history; practiced drawing, painting, and etching in his studio; staged the Wisconsin Pageant; delivered public lectures; gave studio demonstrations; and helped build the fledgling department’s resources and curriculum. For the 1913 summer session, he taught a new course called “Civic Art,” which “seems to make a hit with the powers,” Stevens wrote to a friend while designing the class.47 It covered topics from classical Greece to modern America, such as architecture, sculpture, mural painting, city planning, public parks, art museums, music, and pageantry. Notably, Stevens localized his course, touring the new state capitol with students to inspect its decorations, focusing on John Nolen’s plan of Madison for a session on city planning, and inviting professor Peter Dykema, UW colleague for the summer session and fellow member of the newly founded American Pageant Association, to lecture on civic music. Although there were no prerequisites for the course, Stevens considered it “comparatively advanced work,” drawing a modest enrollment of thirteen students (nine for credit and four auditors) for this first-time offering. 48

46 Thomas Wood Stevens to Frederic Crowley, 21 November 1912, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 3, folder 3. 47 Thomas Wood Stevens to Alden Noble, 2 March 1913, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 4, folder 13. 48 On his Civic Art course, see Stevens to S. H. Goodnight, 2 August 1913, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 8; Stevens’ handwritten lecture notes in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 10, folder 9; and course description in The University of Wisconsin Catalogue, 1912-1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1913), 548, in UW Archives. The above quote is from Stevens’ letter to Goodnight.

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A larger audience could engage in Stevens’ teaching at university-sponsored public lectures and demonstrations on campus. In July 1912, Stevens gave a lecture entitled “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” which Peter Dykema soon encouraged him to publish in the Atlantic Educational Journal (appearing in the September number), assuring that Stevens’ pageant lessons would reach a civic-minded community beyond the badger state. Dykema, editor of the journal’s “Festivals” section, worked at the Ethical Culture School in New York and had taught summer sessions at the University of Wisconsin since 1909; he joined the UW faculty full time in 1913.49 Additionally, Stevens offered a series of public talks during the 1913 summer session: a “lecture recital,” as it was called, on “The Pageant of the Italian Renaissance,” a “demonstration lecture” on “The Making of an Etching,” and an “illustrated lecture” on “Great Etchers and Their Work.”50 Stevens also suggested giving one or two talks on mural painting in the spring of 1912, but likely changed his topic due to Edwin Blashfield’s scheduled visit to the campus at about the same time. Owing to the university’s rich programming on civic art subjects, Stevens essentially got bumped, with Blashfield, then completing his dome composition for the Wisconsin State Capitol, given first choice to lecture on American murals.51 Other arts-related lectures in these years included “The Theatre and the Community” and “The Open-Air Theatre, Its Theory and Use” by Thomas Dickinson, who collaborated with Stevens on pageantry and drama initiatives in Madison.52 Much of this civic art programming took place during the annual summer sessions, run by the UW Extension Division. This arm of the university, organized in

49 Peter Dykema to Thomas Wood Stevens, 16 July 1912, 8 August 1912, and 25 September 1912, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 8; Thomas Wood Stevens, “The Making of a Dramatic Pageant,” Atlantic Educational Journal 8 (September 1912): 13-16; and Appointment Card File for Peter Dykema, UW Archives. 50 “Summer Session 1913, Announcements for the Week Ending July 5,” and that of July 19, UW Archives, Series No. 16/00/11, box 1. 51 Blashfield was in Madison March 26-28, 1912, to lecture at the university. Stevens visited May 13- 15, 1912, for his lectures. See Thomas Wood Stevens to Joseph Jastrow, 21 February 1912; Jastrow to Stevens, 22 February 1912, 2 March 1912, 20 March 1912, and 26 April 1912, all in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 8. 52 “Summer Session 1911, Announcements for the Week Ending July 22” and “Summer Session 1914, Announcements for the Week Ending July 4,” both in UW Archives, Series No. 16/00/11, box 1.

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1906 under the leadership of President Van Hise, grew out of a tradition of extension functions developed at the school in the late nineteenth century, such as the Teachers’ Institutes, Mechanics Institutes, as well as agricultural outreach, each aiming to enlarge the sites of education throughout the state.53 With the formal creation of the Extension Division, university officials expanded their efforts to give the Wisconsin Idea practical form through a diverse curriculum that included creative, reform- minded tracts, including courses in art history, modern drama, music, folk dancing, festivals, and pageantry. UW summer sessions during the 1910s became a training ground for civic leaders in the making, a responsive environment where artistic Progressives taught their craft. Here, an expanded university community learned how to use art and history to visualize reform through a lens of consensus. Pageantry represented a core component of this training, a creative space where Madison students, young and old, practiced the art of monumental history-telling. Summer coursework on the subject emphasized process and practical skills.54 Designed for teachers, Dykema and UW professor Harry Bassett inaugurated a “Festivals” course in the summer of 1911, which focused on a broad set of ritualistic celebrations in relation to the school. The final objective of the course was to prepare a children’s festival, putting together historical knowledge of the movement, methods of teaching and organization, and group-based creativity.55 In 1913, Dykema introduced a second, advanced course, “The Festival Movement,” which specifically studied pageantry, its history in Europe and America, and its practical applications in small cities like that of Madison.56 That year, both courses were offered for credit through the Department of Education (rather

53 “Highlight History of Extension in Wisconsin 1862 to 1999,” UW Extension, University of Wisconsin, www.uwex.edu/about/history/ (accessed on 18 January 2010). 54 Other universities initiated summer coursework in pageantry at this time, including Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley. See “Summer Instruction in Festivals and Pageants,” Atlantic Educational Journal 9 (May 1914): 26-27. 55 Peter Dykema to Thomas Wood Stevens, 24 February 1912, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 8; and course description for “The School Festival” in “Summer Session 1912, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin,” 42, UW Archives, Bulletin Series, Numerical File, Non-Professional Publications. 56 Course description for “The Festival Movement” (Education 9f) in “Summer Session 1913, The University of Wisconsin,” 38, UW Archives, Summer Session Announcements, 1909-1913.

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than as non-credit general courses), attesting to the increased pedagogical objectives of the material alongside those of artistic expression. The courses drew healthy enrollments representing varied interests and demographics: students ranged from kindergarten teachers to educators at rural colleges; included specialists in history, English, and playground reform; and hailed from Connecticut, North Dakota, Missouri, as well as Wisconsin. Spurred in part by Stevens’ recent arrival to the university, Dykema envisioned a large-scale pageant (with an adult cast comprised of enrollees from UW courses in English, music, art, physical education, history, and education) as the appropriate learning-by-doing culmination to his advanced course. Engaging in a performance’s text, stage direction, music, and costuming, students would “have a larger and larger part in the actual doing of festival work.”57 Summer- session students did just that the following year, gaining valuable experience as aesthetic reformers by writing and directing their own pageant for the Madison community. The first student-designed pageant at the UW summer session came together in 1914 under the guidance of Lotta Clark, a high school teacher and pioneering pageant- master. Assuming instruction of the advanced course in festivals—also referred to as the “class in pageantry”—Clark expanded the reach of civic art and Progressive pedagogies across the Madison campus.58 Having developed an interest in pageantry while studying in England, she began to incorporate simple pageants into her curriculum as early as 1905 at the Charlestown High School in Massachusetts, where she headed the history department. She saw pageants as artistic exercises in community self-expression and history-telling that complemented her Progressive educational methods, such as group-based work and an experiment in student-run classrooms. “A child, like everyone else, learns to do by doing,” insisted Clark in a

57 Peter Dykema to S. H. Goodnight, 7 August 1913, UW Archives, Series No. 16/2/1, box 1, folder “Departmental Reports, 1913.” See also Dykema to Stevens, 23 April 1913, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 9, folder 8. 58 Peter Dykema to S. H. Goodnight, 29 August 1914, UW Archives, Series No. 16/2/1, box 1, folder “Dept. 1914.”

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1907 essay for an educational journal.59 Outside the classroom, she made early strides as a leader in U.S. pageantry. Clark staged one of the first important American pageants of the modern movement, the Pageant of Education at the Boston Normal School in June 1908 (more than a year before Stevens’ Evanston production), followed by other assignments on the East Coast. And as a founding member and officer of the American Pageant Association, serving as its first secretary in 1913, Clark gained a national reputation in the movement and helped to professionalize the field. Having made a niche for herself as a specialist in pageants that narrated histories of education, Lotta Clark guided her UW students in the summers of 1914 and 1915 toward similar topics, framed through a Madison lens. On July 29, 1914, the pageantry class staged A Pageant of the University, which dramatized the founding and development of the University of Wisconsin. The following year on July 28, her students directed A Pageant of Education, a progress narrative that recounted the past, present, and future of education—from the ancient Phoenicians and their contribution of the alphabet, to present-day educational methods at work on the university’s own campus, to a future-looking, allegorical episode materializing ideals of peace and civilization (figures 5-20 and 5-21).60 (This 1915 production differed in terms of both story and artistry from Clark’s 1908 production of the same name.)61 Interludes of symbolic dance punctuated historical scenes in both pageants. The performances took place on Bascom Hill, the heart of the university campus, with views of the nearby Wisconsin State Capitol to the east (see figure 5-1).

59 “Successful as Director,” unmarked clipping in Lotta A. Clark Pageant Collection, Boston Public Library, Ms. f Am 1216; Lotta A. Clark, “Group-Work in the High School,” Elementary School Teacher 7 (February 1907): 335-344; quote on 335, emphasis original; and Lotta A. Clark, “Pageantry in America,” English Journal 3 (March 1914): 146-153. 60 UW Class in Pageantry, Book of Words: A Pageant of the University (Madison: F. C. Blied, 1914); and UW Class in Pageantry, A Pageant of Education: Book of Words (Madison: F. C. Blied, 1915). The American Pageant Association mistakenly attributed the Pageant of Education to Peter Dykema; it was Clark who taught the advanced course, “The Festival and Pageant Movement,” in 1915 and oversaw the pageant’s writing and direction. Dykema did not teach at the 1915 summer session. See “List of Pageants of the Year 1915,” American Pageant Association Bulletin 44 (15 June 1917); and Appointment Card File for Peter Dykema in UW Archives. 61 On Clark’s 1908 pageant at the Boston Normal School, see Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 281-283.

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One of the students in the 1914 class was Ethel Rockwell, recent alumna, local schoolteacher, and pageant leader in the making, who gained under Clark’s tutelage the knowledge and practice she needed to quickly transition from pupil to pageant- master.62 Less than three months after the summer session, Rockwell wrote and directed her first two pageants, including the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant at the capitol. As a summer-session student, Rockwell sharpened her pageant writing skills on the Pageant of the University, scripting several of its scenes.63 Rockwell and her cohorts in the pageantry class aestheticized Progressive reform on a grand scale, with a cast of 250, music by the university band, and a “large audience” in attendance, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.64 Participants dramatized several local reform efforts, crafting a history of the school that highlighted Madison’s Progressive identity. A scene entitled “The Question of Women,” for example, recounts the university’s early adoption of coeducation in the 1860s. In the following scene, newly-admitted female students send their male “co- students,” as one woman puts it, off to fight in the Civil War (figure 5-22).65 (Figure 5-22 is one of two known photographs of the pageant, published by Rockwell in an article on local pageantry for the Alumni Magazine.) Participants in the Pageant of the University also enacted episodes set in the present that gave form to the Wisconsin Idea. In the final scene, an imagined local community of “farmers, dairymen, mayor, principal of High School, boy scouts, camp fire girls, a group of engineers, merchants, postmaster, women, etc.” discusses the school’s service to the state through such reform-minded topics as scientific farming, social center work, the playground movement, woman suffrage, disease prevention, temperance, and UW extension coursework.66 Wisconsin was a leader in the social centers movement, a publicly-

62 Newhouse, “That White-haired Dynamo.” 63 Rockwell sent an annotated copy of the Book of Words: A Pageant of the University to Thomas Wood Stevens. As she indicated on the script two scenes that she did not write, it seems likely that she had a hand in writing most or all of the others. See the script copy in TWS Papers, Arizona, box 46. See also “Commendable Community Work,” Wisconsin Municipality 14 (September 1914): 1155. 64 “Pageant Receives History of University of Wisconsin,” Wisconsin State Journal, 30 July 1914, 8. 65 UW Class in Pageantry, Book of Words: A Pageant of the University, 9-13, above quote on 12. 66 Ibid., 16-20, above quote on 16.

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funded initiative to keep public schools open during the evening so that adult citizens could engage in forums and debates on local politics and social programming. Edward Ward, a nationally-recognized figure in this movement for participatory democracy, had joined the university in 1910 to oversee the Extension Division’s social center development. (Notably, Ethel Rockwell took up the subject for her first production as pageant-master, the Social Center Pageant in Sauk City, Wisconsin, on October 3, 1914.)67 A Pageant of the University brought statewide Progressive activities and learning within view for the Madison community, a student exercise in civic art-making that rendered reform tangible on the campus stage. A Pageant of Education, which Lotta Clark’s advanced class staged in 1915, likewise dramatized Wisconsin’s role in Progressivism, highlighting many of the same topics of reform that appeared in the previous summer’s pageant. The 1915 performance also visually referenced public mural decorations, further evidence of the harmonizing educational goals of Progressive-Era murals and pageants. Numerous photographs from the Pageant of Education survive today, preserved in an album catalogue of the Meuer Photoart House, a Madison firm that specialized in images of university life. Local customers could flip through albums of these small, cropped prints and then order copies as mementos (figure 5-23).68 Several of the photographs record the pageant’s opening episode, which presents the “Education of the Past” through a series of vignettes showcasing eight cultural groups and their contributions to educational progress: the Phoenicians, Hindus, Egyptians, Chinese, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and “Mediaeval people.”69 For the portion on the Hebrews, whose learned gift is the Old Testament of the Bible, the cast literally enacted a mural composition, creating a tableau vivant of John Singer Sargent’s Frieze of Prophets, a

67 See Edward J. Ward, ed., The Social Center (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1913); and Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy during the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), especially 48- 86. On Rockwell’s pageant, see Rockwell, “Pageantry in Wisconsin,” 242-245; “Commendable Community Work,” 1155-1157; and “Social Center Pageant: The School House as a Polling Place in Wisconsin,” Survey 33 (14 November 1914): 173-174. 68 See William J. Meuer Photoart Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/MeuerAlbumsAbout.html (accessed on 4 June 2008). 69 UW Class in Pageantry, A Pageant of Education: Book of Words, 4-11.

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widely-recognized decoration of 1895 in the Boston Public Library (figures 5-24 and 5-25).70 Further, aligning each cultural group with a particular civilizing advancement, the pageant episode recalls Edwin Blashfield’s Evolution of Civilization of 1896 in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress (see figure 1-5). In the pageant, for example, Phoenicians bring civilization the written alphabet and Hindus bring the mathematical gift of decimal notation (see figures 5-20 and 5-26). Nearly two decades after Blashfield’s decoration, the summer-session pageant presented an aesthetically similar, sweeping narrative of progress. Yet in the transposition from paint to playacting, such civic lessons were no longer directed from above (along the library’s dome collar), but fashioned instead through student collaboration, wherein education represented both subject and process. In addition to the pageantry class’ performance at the end of each summer session, other activities on the UW campus broadened civic art’s educational campaign. In 1914 and 1915, Lotta Clark helped expand pageantry’s reach into everyday life by offering a series of public lectures for the Madison community. During her first summer, she gave three talks in the weeks leading up to A Pageant of the University, sharing practical knowledge on the art form to a wider collective of student-citizens: “Pageantry, a New Force in Civic Life,” “Three Typical Pageants,” and “How to Start a Pageant.”71 The following year, Clark gave two new, illustrated lectures, “A Typical English Pageant” and “The St. Louis Pageant,” the latter accompanied by film from the performance. In the weeks before A Pageant of Education, she also organized an exhibition of “pageant material” for the library of the historical society, located on campus. Clark invited visitors to come learn more about pageantry; UW announcements indicated that she would be present for an hour each

70 For more on Sargent’s Frieze of Prophets, its popularity, reproductions, and viewing publics, see Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 272-305. 71 “Summer Session 1914, Announcements for the Week Ending July 18,” and those of July 25 and 31, UW Archives, Series No. 16/00/11, box 1.

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day at the exhibition to “give information and instruction.”72 Clark’s role as teacher extended beyond classroom walls. At the University of Wisconsin during the 1910s, reform-minded creatives, including pageant leaders Thomas Wood Stevens, Peter Dykema, and Lotta Clark, trained an expansive university community how to read and create Progressive narratives, nurturing a collaborative and artistic model of citizenship in Madison. While guided by a democratic impulse, such civic art-making nonetheless promoted consensual public histories and Americanizing goals. Attuned to the lessons of Progressivism that artists promoted, the university community fashioned Madison— and by means of the Wisconsin Idea, the state itself—into a vital training ground for visual, civic expression. Between state school and state capitol, Progressivism was on display in grand proportions. From Edwin Blashfield’s debut of the Assembly Chamber mural, Wisconsin, Past, Present, and Future, in 1908 to Lotta Clark’s pageant coursework and finale production, A Pageant of Education, in 1915, civic artists reached the height of their influence as Progressive reformers. Muralists, pageant-masters, and a larger group of creatives in the capital city made meaningful connections between art, citizenship, education, and reform. Home to the state university, hub of the UW Extension Division, and seat of government, Madison attracted a range of learning enthusiasts throughout Wisconsin and beyond to participate in reform’s biggest performances.

Local enthusiasm for pageantry remained strong in late 1915 when Ethel Rockwell, UW student turned civic leader, initiated a campaign to formally celebrate the dedication of the new Wisconsin State Capitol with a statewide pageant event. The building’s scheduled completion in 1917 coincided with the eightieth anniversary of the laying of foundations for the first capitol building at the Madison site in 1837 as

72 “Summer Session 1915, Announcements for the Week Ending July 17,” and that of July 30, UW Archives, Series No. 16/00/11, box 1. In addition to pageant material, the Wisconsin Historical Society also displayed mural paintings. At the time, two murals by Edwin Willard Deming adorned the institution, both depicting local history: Defeat of General Braddock [1775] of 1903 and Landfall of Jean Nicolet in Wisconsin [1634] of 1904. Both paintings have been moved from their original site and are now in the collection of the Wisconsin Historical Museum. See Edward Hale Brush, “American History and Mural Painting,” Review of Reviews 34 (December 1906): 691-692.

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well as the seventieth anniversary (one year shy) of Wisconsin’s admission to statehood in 1848. Rockwell envisioned a coordinated program whereby cities and towns across the state would stage their own full-scale pageants narrating local history. These local performances would be planned in such a way so that a representative episode of statewide historical import from each could be combined to produce a finale pageant in Madison at the capitol dedication. In December 1915, Rockwell assembled a formal committee of fellow educators and creatives to launch the proposal, including Peter Dykema; Charles Brown, director of the museum at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Charles Cary, state superintendent of public instruction; Mrs. I. M. Kittleson, chairman of the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant; and Alice Keith, UW alumna and participant in the Star-Spangled performance. Together, they made a Progressive pitch: “Nothing could be of greater value to the State as a dedicatory celebration: educationally, historically, dramatically, artistically and socially; while incalculable would be the effect in drawing together all of the people, and giving them the vision of what might be done for the future of the State if they would but cooperate in carrying out the ideas pointed out by those who have lived before them.”73 Rockwell brought her proposal to capitol commissioners, state legislators, communities throughout Wisconsin, and the press.74 The idea for a capitol dedication pageant had gained momentum and official support by the spring of 1917, with a Senate resolution on the table to create a “dedicatory committee” and to appropriate forty thousand dollars for the event.75 Yet Rockwell’s statewide civic pageant never materialized.

73 “Minutes, December 1, 1915,” “A Plan for a State Wide Capitol Dedication,” and “A Resolution to Petition the Capitol Commission of the State of Wisconsin to Make Provisions for the Production of a State-wide Historical Pageant to Be Given in Dedication of the New State Capitol,” Capitol Pageant Meeting papers, WHS; quote from the “Resolution.” 74 “Suggests Pageant for Dedication,” 5; “Beloit Lays Plans for State Pageant,” Janesville Daily Gazette, 20 November 1915, 2; “Plan Monstrous Pageant,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 20 November 1915, 1; “How to Dedicate Capitol,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 1 February 1917, 2; “Would Honor Birth of Capitol,” Racine Journal-News, 12 March 1917, 2; and “Wants Pageant to Dedicate Capitol, Unique Opportunity to Demonstrate State Industries’ Growth Says Miss Rockwell,” Wisconsin State Journal, 2 April 1917, 7. 75 “Joint Session of Legislature Held,” Stevens Point Daily, 7 April 1917, 9.

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In the same days that Wisconsin state legislators considered moving forward on the dedication proposal, the United States entered World War I, and plans for such a grand, local celebration quickly halted. By June, the pageant was officially postponed, the Senate resolution withdrawn: “Now that the war is on Senator Burke decided that the dedication of the [capitol] building should be delayed.”76 War and pageantry were not incompatible. Both the Star-Spangled Banner Pageant and the Pageant of Education had addressed the war in Europe, doing so in allegorical terms that conjured up images of contemporary strife, but at a safe distance. In Rockwell’s 1914 pageant on the capitol lawn, for instance, a herald in the final episode brings the message of war to the allegorical figure of Columbia, collapsing the War of 1812 with present-day events: “I come, Columbia, with message dread. / War’s fearful demon lifts his gory head / And shakes blood drops o’er Europe’s fertile lands.” Columbia assured the Madison audience that “Wilson guides the helm with steady hand” and will “lead the hostile nations back to Peace.”77 Less than three years later, in 1917, this vision of diplomatic intervention had faded. Now that America had entered the war, a pageant commemorating Wisconsin history and Madison’s new architectural icon no longer seemed appropriate. Civic energies and financial resources shifted to the war effort.78 After the war, legislators again took up the idea of a capitol dedication, but plans soon fizzled. The dedication was “indefinitely postponed” by May 1919, and Rockwell’s pageant scheme remained unfulfilled.79 The civic mood in Madison had changed. The Progressive impulse to perform reform through collaborative displays of art and history gave way to a version of civic identity more closely associated with wartime militarism, patriotism, and coercive practices of Americanization. War- inspired hysteria had been particularly virulent in Madison, as self-proclaimed loyalty groups targeted the city’s large population of German Americans; threw suspicion on

76 “New Bank Tax Bill to Pass Assembly,” Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 15 June 1917, 7. 77 Rockwell, Star-Spangled Banner Pageant, 38-39; and UW Class in Pageantry, A Pageant of Education: Book of Words, 16. 78 On wartime efforts in Madison, see Mollenhoff, Madison, 385-393. 79 “Real Estate Men Win in Lower House,” Capital Times, 1 May 1919, 4.

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the University of Wisconsin as a “Germanized” institution; pressured local public schools to eliminate German instruction; and disowned the state’s most prominent Progressive leader, Senator Robert La Follette, one of six U.S. senators to vote against the declaration of war.80 The civic art training ground between capitol and campus had lost its Progressive traction. Not only did Madison change, pageantry likewise changed with the war. The art form became part of the war mobilization effort, employed as a visual tool for promoting a consensual mode of patriotism, military preparedness, or a lasting peace. The focus on local history-telling shifted to decidedly nationalist narratives. During the UW summer session in 1917, for example, the class in pageantry dramatized national themes instead of university-centric ones. On July 31, they performed their student-designed pageant, The Spirit of America, with a prologue featuring Betsy Ross and interludes of symbolic dances personifying loyalty and service.81 After the war, America’s taste for pageantry mellowed. Civic artists gradually left pageantry and commercial interests converged on the field to make a buck with pre-packaged, portable storylines and readymade costume rentals. Reflecting on the end of pageantry as an artistic movement, Thomas Wood Stevens lamented: “After the war, the pageant game began to be attacked on one side by commercial racketeers, and from below by cheese cloth shows in the high schools. We tried to defend it by a National Pageant Association [the APA], trying to hold up standards of dramatization and performance. I was President of it for a time, but it slipped away—Gresham’s law. We prepared careful bulletins to guide people; but the rackets could make more money by not following our advice, and the high schools didn’t have the skill. Hence the period of pageants of boredom; the trouble wasn’t in the scheme, but in the unskillful use of it.”82 Despite this aesthetic slip in quality after the war, pageantry in America did not entirely fade from view. Ethel Rockwell, then in her thirties,

80 Mollenhoff, Madison, 388-390. 81 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 203-227; and UW Class in Pageantry, The Spirit of America, pamphlet, UW Archives, Wisconsin Pageant Programs, Series 0/9/22. 82 “On Pageants: Personal Notes,” typescript, undated, page 3, TWS Papers, Arizona, box 54, folder “Articles by TWS: Theatre, Drama Schools, Pageants.”

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continued to produce pageants across the Midwest and on the East Coast over the next several decades, becoming director of the UW Extension Division’s new Bureau of Dramatic Activities in 1927, a post she would hold until World War II.83 Pageantry’s force as an agent of Progressive reform peaked during the middle years of the 1910s, when a remarkably rich array of civic art programming—from pageantry and mural painting to art lectures, demonstrations, coursework, tours, and festivals—pulsed through Madison’s university community. As World War I approached, the Progressive investment in a shared local identity, cooperative art- making, and an evolutionist model of progress was eventually undone by the push of cultural pluralism, the arrival of European modernism, and the turn toward subjective experience. Civic art’s drive to picture collective expression lost its grip.

83 Newhouse, “That White-haired Dynamo;” and Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 231-277.

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CONCLUSION

In this study, I have argued that turn-of-the-century muralists and pageant- masters played a constitutive and central role in the period’s campaign for civic improvement, shaping Progressive reform into something visible, dramatic, and vital. In grand proportions, artists materialized ideas and behaviors concerning local and national identity, model citizenship, learning by doing, and the place of the arts in a democratic society. Communities of makers as well as viewers negotiated modernity through monumental forms of collective expression, fashioning early-twentieth- century civic art into an active and contested site for the aesthetic working through of the meanings, boundaries, and responsibilities of civic identity in Progressive America. This dynamism comes into view by examining murals and pageants within a thicker visual field—by situating the Library of Congress decorations in relation to the public library movement and New Education practices, and also through the lens of photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston; by reading the murals at the Massachusetts State House alongside the discourses and practices of Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanism, mural criticism, and local school curricula in art, history, and civics; by understanding the Pageant of Illinois as a constellation of events both onstage and offstage, earnest as well as playful in tone; by seeing the Suffrage Pageant-Procession as a hybrid event, whose meanings flexed as various constituencies of suffragists and spectators asserted authority during stages of planning, execution, and reception; and by interpreting mural and pageant activities near the state capitol in Madison in relation to one another, to the Wisconsin Idea, and as part of a rich set of programming in civic art at the University of Wisconsin. The legacies of this civic art movement were many. Artistic Progressives cultivated enduring efforts to integrate art and life, to educate through art, and to shape civic art into citizen-building experiences. From the 1890s to the 1910s, the arenas of civic art-making expanded, ranging from governmental sites like state capitols, courthouses, and Pennsylvania Avenue; to diverse public spaces including schools, libraries, parks, museums, world’s fairs, settlement houses, and social centers; to networks of print culture in the form of guidebooks, textbooks, newspapers, journals,

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art reproductions, and souvenirs. Artistic pedagogies increasingly entered public schooling, from primary to higher education, in the same years that museums inaugurated more formal programming on art education. The art museum entered the classroom, so to speak, through schoolroom decoration and the picture study movement, while the classroom moved into the museum by means of student visits, docent-led tours, learning-focused exhibitions and activities, and onsite teacher training. 1 In the years after World War I, a broad swath of art on display in public spaces gained a civic dimension, as learning to look at art had become a formative exercise in modeling citizens and future citizens. By examining civic art of the 1890s to the 1910s within the specific context of Progressivism, classicism, and communal expression, this study rethinks the place of mural painting and pageantry in the history of American art. It offers an alternative to the persistent narrative of early-twentieth-century art as one of embattled conflict between modernism and academicism. Breaking from the comparative approach of old versus new, conservative versus radical, traditional versus modern, I have focused instead on the artists, viewers, and stakeholders of the period who invested in large- scale communal art forms, seeing this group not as antagonists or straw-men to a modernist story, but as an active circle of creatives producing art on their own terms. Working and thriving rather independently from the proponents of European modernism, artistic Progressives cultivated their own aesthetics, patrons, audiences, institutions, and agendas. They had lively debates on the civic role of their profession, fashioning long and successful careers as painters and dramatists. Recovering their contributions to U.S. art and life during a dynamic moment of aesthetic, cultural, and political transformation unsettles early modernism’s clash-and-struggle narrative and, in turn, enriches our understanding of American art by embracing not one history of the field, but a range of histories. Further, by conceptualizing mural painting and pageantry as visual components of Progressivism, I have stitched the art forms firmly into their cultural

1 On the development of museum education at the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, see Sylvia Rhor, “Every Walk of Life and Every Degree of Education: Museum Instruction at The Art Institute of Chicago, 1879-1955,” Museum Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 20-45.

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and political moment, demonstrating how paint and playacting functioned as sites of and strategies for reform. This study recovers the pulse of civic art—its force as an aesthetic, monumental player in contemporary debates on Americanization, immigration, suffrage, pedagogy, and participatory democracy. Insisting that the histories of murals and pageants incorporate more than art-focused timelines of training, styles, biographies, or venues, I have argued here for a nuanced reading of civic art that frames such decorations and performances within a nexus of Progressive- Era discourses on art, education, politics, consumerism, and identity. Paying close attention to art objects, I have also looked across a broad visual and cultural field to make connections between those objects and the communities, activities, and physical and ideological contexts that shaped their meanings. An understanding of turn-of-the-century civic art as a Progressive practice likewise informs how the next chapter in the story of American painting and theatre should be told. The New Deal investment in public and communal art-making during the interwar years was less a beginning than a revival of the reformist spirit that had motivated an earlier generation of artists, patrons, participants, and viewers to collaborate on a grand scale in the name of art, nationalism, and participatory democracy. Because Progressivism and civic art were tied intimately together, the decline of political and aesthetic reform went hand in hand in the years after World War I. The Progressive Era came to a close, as collective modes of public action stalled amid the trauma of mechanized warfare, new investments in personal subjectivity, the continued rise of corporate capitalism, and the pro-business administrations of Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. American mural painting and pageantry did not end abruptly with the war—both continued well into the next decades—but their civic potential as catalysts for cultural and political change ebbed during the postwar years. By the 1920s, the two art forms no longer commanded debate as vital sites of creative-minded reform. With the onset of the Great Depression at decade’s end, civic art would again emerge as a valued space for the aesthetic working through of shared ideas about community, citizenship, and public history.

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Although reform agendas cooled in the 1920s, the civic art movement did not disappear. Rather, its complexion changed. The American Pageant Association published its last Bulletin in 1921. Having produced eleven to sixteen issues per year between 1914 and 1917 on best practices and news in the field, the APA circulated only a handful of issues from 1918 to 1921, as national taste for pageantry waned. Pageant leaders, however, did not fade from view, remaining active in the field of drama long after the war. Many leaders had built their careers through pageantry in the first two decades of the twentieth century, widening their expertise during the 1920s (then in their thirties and forties) to include a broader range of dramatic activities. In charge of programming in drama for the UW Extension Division until the 1940s, Rockwell had transitioned quickly from alumna, to teacher, to pageant- master, to academic head. Having begun his career at fine-arts settings like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin, Thomas Wood Stevens shifted to dramatic-arts settings, heading up the Drama Department at the Carnegie Institute from 1913 to 1925, leading the Goodman Memorial Theatre in Chicago from 1925 to 1930, working as a traveling director at several universities and community theatres across the country throughout the 1930s, serving as a regional director of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre in 1936, and finishing his career at the University of Arizona as head of drama from 1941 until his death in 1942. Over the course of pageantry’s rise and decline, Hazel MacKaye moved from actor, to pageant assistant, to pageant-master and women’s rights activist. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, MacKaye continued her pageantry work during the 1920s by aestheticizing the cause for equal rights, partnering on several occasions with Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. For many of the muralists in this study, mural painting represents a late stage in their careers. Artists like John White Alexander, Kenyon Cox, and Henry Oliver Walker had established themselves as easel painters, taking up monumental decoration in the 1890s while in their forties and fifties. By 1929, several key players in the movement had died, including Alexander, Cox, Walker, Charles Yardley Turner, Charles Shean, and Robert Reid. Edwin Blashfield remained a spokesman and

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practicing muralist into the 1930s. Known as the “dean of mural painters” until his death in 1936, Blashfield crafted decorations in his signature, classical style long after the tide of Progressivism had receded.2 With this generation’s passing, turn-of-the- century mural painting’s institutional memory was quickly lost, as younger practitioners took the helm. A new generation of artists entered the field during the interwar years. Some worked within classicism while others brought their modernist vocabularies to mural painting, including Barry Faulkner, Arthur Covey, and Winold Reiss. In a 1925 article for International Studio entitled “Tendencies in Mural Decoration,” Margaret Breuning noted an expansion of mural work in postwar America, asserting that “[t]here is a whole chapter of mural hangings” yet to be written. According to Breuning, decoration’s “continued vitality and its power to adapt itself to new conditions” gave the movement new life despite Progressivism’s decline.3 Muralists in the 1920s expanded the sites and subjects of wall painting and experimented with the decorative qualities of paint, color, and form: “[W]hile the decoration of libraries, state houses, churches, law courts and imposing mansions continues, there is another angle to the mural work, for it is no longer limited to grandiose conceptions, but is used wherever the architectural structure and color harmony permit. Hence we have banks, office buildings, show rooms, industrial plants, theatres, restaurants, schools, and railway stations rejoicing in murals.”4 In 1925, Breuning downplayed the art form’s civic content, celebrating instead the reach and variety of mural painting across a range of contexts—corporate, commercial, industrial, social, and institutional. She continued, “We have few large-limbed goddesses holding sheafs of wheat or streaming torches, but we have the real figures of actual contemporary life in effective arrangement.”5 In the twenty-some years since Charles Shean first envisioned an

2 Anne Lee, “Our Dean of Mural Painters Toils On,” New York Times Magazine (9 December 1928): 12-13, 20. 3 Margaret Breuning, “Tendencies in Mural Painting,” International Studio 82 (December 1925): 179 and 174. 4 Ibid., 175. 5 Ibid., 179.

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earthly, American brand of mural painting, fellow artists had crafted a corpus of decoration that scaled up national history and life in tangible, vivid terms. One of the aims of this study is to open up a discussion on a longer history of American mural painting, one that accounts for the continuities (as well as differences) among Depression-Era murals and Progressive-Era murals. Federally-funded projects during the 1930s and 1940s to put thousands of artists to work adorning post offices, schools, and other public buildings should be seen in part as a renewal of the efforts a generation earlier to ally art, education, democracy, and reform. Derrick Cartwright, whose scholarship has shaped such a revisionist history, has argued against the “short chronology for American mural painting—the narrative convention that the practice traced its roots to around 1930, and no earlier.”6 Depression-Era art professionals crafted this history of the field to claim novelty as well as distinctly modernist origins, and art historians since have perpetuated the tale.7 In an important recent study, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars, A. Joan Saab examines the New Deal movement to link art and democracy, focusing on the educational agendas of the Federal Art Project (which promoted the muralist as worker and citizen) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (which made modernism accessible through consumption). Saab’s concerns align with many of those addressed in this dissertation, such as the negotiation among makers, educators, and viewers over the terms and look of a democratic aesthetic; the expansion of art into everyday life; and the role of artistic pedagogies in shaping good citizens.8 To see Saab’s New Deal project in relation to turn-of-the-century mural practice and discourse would enrich

6 Derrick Randall Cartwright, “Reading Rooms: Interpreting the American Public Library Mural, 1890- 1930” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 50. 7 Ibid., 47-59. In addition to Cartwright, Richard Murray and Anthony Lee have worked toward a longer history of mural painting. Although Lee draws sharp distinctions between Progressive-Era murals and Depression-Era murals in his study, he does not erase the earlier decorations from his narrative, but begins with them. See Richard Murray, “Progressive Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1933,” in Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943, Heather Becker, et al. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 61-67; and Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), especially 1-24. 8 A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004).

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art-historical understandings of both periods. More mural histories need to be written; I hope my own study encourages others. As an art historian, I recognize that I have a role to play as public history-teller, similar to that of the muralists and pageant-masters in this study. I have told a story about how communal narratives were scaled up in paint and playacting, emphasizing process, context, negotiation, responses, and alternatives in my analysis of Progressive-Era civic art. This study has demonstrated that the artistic strategies employed by the makers of murals and pageants to shape communal histories should be and can be recovered by looking closely at art objects and at the larger cultural and visual spaces in which those histories were reinforced, revised, and debated. By examining mural painting alongside pageantry, placing civic art within the consensual vocabulary and style of Progressivism, and adding civic art to a broader vision of modernism, I hope to have helped build a revisionist narrative about American art and civic life at the turn of the twentieth century. If I have shown my readers how period artists made reform into something visible—as well as the merits, limitations, and complexities of that endeavor—then my story has made a difference.

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