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Copyright by Rebecca Coleman Hewett 2010 Copyright by Rebecca Coleman Hewett 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Rebecca Coleman Hewett certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Progressive Compromises: Performing Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Pageants of 1913 Committee: ________________________________ Charlotte Canning, Supervisor ________________________________ Dorothy Chansky ________________________________ Jill Dolan ________________________________ Steven Hoelscher ________________________________ Stacy Wolf Progressive Compromises: Performing Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Pageants of 1913 by Rebecca Coleman Hewett, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2010 Acknowledgments Over the past three years, whenever I felt I could not look at this dissertation one more minute for fear of throwing my computer out the window, I worked on my acknowledgements instead. It always reminded me that there were many people supporting me through this process—as friends, mentors, and suppliers of comfort food. As I thought about how to thank them, I would always see how badly I didn’t want to let them down. And then I would go back to work. As members of my dissertation committee, Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, and Steven Hoelscher provided excellent guidance, advice, and support. I am deeply grateful for their attention to my work while a student in their classes. The training I received from them held me in good stead as I embarked on this project and taught me essential lessons not just in research and writing, but also in how I hope to move through academia. I am equally indebted to additional faculty members from the Performance as Public Practice program at The University of Texas at Austin during the years I was in course work, particularly Deborah Paredez, Lynn C. Miller, and Joni (Omi) Jones. Their commitments to bridging theory and practice shaped me as a scholar, artist, and citizen— it is my hope this dissertation reflects that interest in praxis. Dorothy Chansky served on my dissertation committee, although my work with her began many years earlier while I was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. She was the first to encourage me towards attending graduate school, and the first to suggest the Performance as Public Practice program, because, as she said to me, “You want to be a part of what’s going on there.” She’s always right. She offered advice iv throughout my years in graduate school and provided generous feedback as I drafted this dissertation. My committee chair, Charlotte Canning, has served as my adviser throughout my graduate career. Her humor, patience, generosity, and attention to every detail of my writing and researching processes shaped my thinking over years of course work and dissertation writing. For the past two years I have worked as an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station. Judith Hamera, the department chair through most of my tenure there, offered much support as I finished this project. Even on the hard days, I was grateful to have time with my A&M students: they continually reminded me what I was working towards, and showed me how much I still had to learn. While conducting my research I received help from a number of excellent librarians, whose generosity and advice undoubtedly strengthened this work. The archivists at the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Houghton Library at Harvard were patient and thorough in their suggestions to me. A number of newspaper articles I use to document Allegory were quite difficult to track down; I would not have been able to do so without Kathryn Kenefick, Library Assistant at the Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin; Henry Scannell, Curator of Microform and Newspapers at the Boston Public Library; and Amber Paranick, Librarian in the Serial & Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress. Mr. Scannell and Ms. Paranick were especially generous in researching v footnotes for an unknown graduate student and I am excessively grateful to them. My archival research was possible in part because of a generous Homer Lindsey Bruce Fellowship from The University of Texas at Austin; this scholarship funded my research trips and allowed me the time and space to launch this project. I was lucky to work with a thoughtful and devoted writing group. Susanne Shawyer, Jenny Kokai, Tamara Smith, and Clare Croft offered thorough, intelligent feedback throughout my writing process. Lastly, I come to my family: my parents Ronald and Emily, and my brother Richard. I don’t think they always understood what I was doing here, but they offered emotional (and financial) support, entertained my friends and lifted my spirits during many visits to Austin while I lived there. vi Progressive Compromises: Performing Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Pageants of 1913 Publication No.________________ Rebecca Coleman Hewett, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Charlotte Canning This dissertation explores embodiments of citizenship in three historical pageants of 1913. As historical pageantry reached the height of its popularity in the early twentieth century, the form was criticized by those who felt it represented a limited understanding of community and citizenship. Historical pageants came to prominence at a time in the nation’s history when lynching plagued the south, women agitated for the right to vote, and labor unions organized to demand better working conditions. Popular historical pageants presented a history which ignored these pressing social issues and supported the status quo. As a result, while pageants gained popularity the form was taken up by groups seeking to use pageants for different political purposes. My dissertation interrogates embodiments of citizenship in Progressive Era pageantry through three case studies: W.E.B. Du Bois wrote and staged Star of Ethiopia, devoted to re-telling African-American history; John Reed organized members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for a performance of The Paterson Strike vii Pageant to aid laborers on strike; and Hazel MacKaye staged Allegory in support of women’s suffrage. While each pageant aimed to promote diversity, once each pageant’s historiography landed on live bodies, the gaps between what the pageant argued for and who the pageant simultaneously excluded were made visible. Allegory crafted an argument for white women’s suffrage by excluding recent immigrant and women of color; Du Bois sought to promote the African American middle class by denigrating the working classes; John Reed painted an image of the IWW as a fully united working class while ignoring the racial and ethnic differences that had led to tensions among the group. Despite their progressive intentions, once each pageant moved its political arguments on stage, the choices they made in performance belied their inclusive aspirations. viii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 The Pageant Impulse: Attempting a Democratic Performance Chapter One………………………………………………………………………….…48 Producing Whiteness in Hazel MacKaye’s Allegory Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………….....93 “Looking at One’s Self Through the Eyes of Others”: Representations of the Progressive Era Middle-class in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia Chapter Three……………………………………………………………………...….134 Embodying Melting Pot(s) in The Paterson Strike Pageant Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..177 Historical Pageantry’s Varied Legacy Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...184 Vita………………………………………………………………………………….….195 ix The Pageant Impulse: Attempting a Democratic Performance In July of 1988 I performed in my first stage production as Sacagawea in my local neighborhood Fourth of July celebration. The performance was deceivingly simple: each child involved was assigned an historical figure to impersonate; we lined up in chronological order based on our characters’ birthdates before the group of assembled family members eating their hamburgers and hot dogs off the grill in the humid Virginia summer. One by one, we each stepped forward and delivered brief monologues, in costume, about “our” individual contributions to the United States. My family and I were stationed in a suburb of Washington, D.C. that year while my father worked at the Pentagon. We lived in a development populated by many other young families; from April to August my brother and I spent afternoons and evenings out in the streets riding bikes, roller skating, or playing tag with any number of neighborhood kids. The families on my cul-de-sac were particularly friendly with one another, and in the summer of 1988 decided to organize a block party to celebrate the Fourth of July: a barbeque followed by a bike parade for the kids and a water balloon toss for everyone, which would culminate at dusk with fireworks in the center of the cul-de-sac. In the wake of the 1987 recession in the United States, organizing a low key, family friendly neighborhood party seemed more cost effective than taking the usual trek to downtown Washington, D.C. to watch the massive fireworks display on the Mall. A few weeks before the party, a group of children on my block roughly around my age decided to contribute to the festivities by putting on a play. This eventually resulted in my debut as a nine year-old Sacagawea, the Native American who led Lewis 1 and Clark in their expedition through the western United States in 1805. I’ve forgotten much of what was said during the performance, and how our audience responded, but I do remember how excited we were to present our skit. We wanted to add to our neighborhood’s sense of patriotism that day, to be good for our parents and show them we knew the holiday was about more than eating watermelon and throwing water balloons at our younger brothers and sisters.
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