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Blackface Minstrelsy in College Life at Georgetown University

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Blackface Minstrelsy in College Life at Georgetown University Lustig 1 Blacking Up the Ivory Tower: Blackface Minstrelsy in College Life at Georgetown University Marcus Lustig Honors Thesis Submitted to the Department of History, Georgetown University Advisor: Professor Adam Rothman Honors Program Chair: Professor Katherine Benton-Cohen 6 May 2019 Lustig 2 Acknowledgements Luck is nearly as important to the researching and writing of history as it is to betting.1 This past year, luck has been on my side. Yes, I was lucky to have found the incredibly interesting and rich documents in the Georgetown University archives that I did. But more fortunately, I was lucky to have the support time and time again of many brilliant people. At different points throughout the school year, the Vegas odds were certainly against the on-time completion of this thesis. And yet, there have been those who took the action, who bet on me. I want to thank those people. Thank you to Prof. Katherine Benton-Cohen who read my work, tweeted at me, and opened her home to me. For a whole year, she treated me always with generosity and candor. Thank you to Prof. Adam Rothman who inspired me to write a thesis and to study history at Georgetown in the first place. Thank you Prof. Rothman for encouraging me, advising me, teaching me to avoid teleological thinking. You demonstrated to me how a historian sees a narrative in every artifact and taught me that ultimately the best historians are great storytellers. Thank you to the other souls and minds I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with in the History Department: thank you to Prof. Brian Taylor for pointing out to me the ironies of American life in the 19th century; to Prof. Marcia Chatelain for advising me not to go looking for heroes in history; to Prof. Karen Hammerschlag who taught me how to write about art history; to Daniel Cano for showing me why one should never assume anything about who had power in the past because of who has power today. Thank you to Professors James Collins, Bryan McCann, Joe McCartin, Tommaso Astarita, and Amy Leonard for your wisdom. I owe a deep intellectual debt to all the scholars I cite in this project but specifically to Eric Lott and also to Ariel De La Fuente. Lott’s work about minstrelsy and De La Fuente’s about Argentinian history unveiled the power that exists in songs, theater, and stories. I owe even more to university archivists Lynn Conway and Ann Galloway whose enthusiasm for the project nearly exceeded my own. Practically speaking, this thesis is only possible because of their counsel and patience. Thank you to Lisa Rauschart, my high school history teacher, who taught me that history worth studying happened right here. Thank you to my peers in the honors program for inspiring me. Thank you specifically to Meredith Duflock, Sam Zarroff, Synie Sousa, Matt Zezula, and Brett Voyles. Thanks to my roommates for putting up with recordings of minstrel music and stacks of books left on our windowsill for months. Thanks to the Georgetown Improv Association for teaching me firsthand how humor works. Thanks to Emma Stern for listening to me talk about books I barely understood. Finally, thank you to my family. Thank you to my mom for reading for typos, to my dad for sharing stories of his own thesis writing, and to my sister for her patience. Yes, you support me materially and created me biologically speaking--but in so many other ways, I wouldn’t be the person I am without you. I give permission to Lauinger Library to make this thesis available to the public. 1 My guess is that that sentiment smacks of someone who aspires to be an historian...and has never gambled. Lustig 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Gentlemen, Be Seated!…………………………………………………… 4 Who are the folk in folk culture?: What we talk about when we talk about the Historiography of Blackface Minstrelsy ……………………………………………………15 Chapter 1: Our Lady of Fatima Shines: The Primacy and Proximity of Minstrelsy at Georgetown……………………………………………………………………………………29 Chapter 2: Contraband: Minstrelsy and the Civil War at Georgetown…………………35 Chapter 3: Home Again: How Minstrelsy Welcomed Young Men Into Their New World…………………………………………………………………………………………51 Chapter 4: “Down the Dear Dusky Line”: Blackface Minstrels Around the Year, Blackface Minstrels Do It All…………………………………………………………………………85 Conclusion: Masked: Things In The Past Aren’t As They Seem……………………...100 Image Appendix……………………………………………………………………………105 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………...129 Lustig 4 Introduction “Gentleman, Be Seated!”2 The topic of this thesis is the tradition of blackface minstrelsy, a deeply racist and dreadfully popular theater form that dominated American stages from its inception in the 1830s into the twentieth century. Thus, for better or for worse, I will begin by taking up an early conceit of minstrelsy: the haughty interlocutor. The interlocutor was one performer in the minstrel troupe who played a role apart. Acting as a sort of master of ceremonies, the interlocutor’s contested authority invoked the ringmaster of the circus industry from which minstrelsy sprung (and even the slavemaster).3 Condescending to the rest of the troupe, the interlocutor began the show by posing questions in the fussiest language to the other minstrels who answered with raunchy witticisms that showed the hightalking interlocutor to be the real rube amongst the group. That is, he was the butt of the joke. Although this format depended for its laughs on the racist assumption that different kinds of Americans possessed different kinds of knowledge, it also suggested something radical: first, that things are not as they seem (perhaps this is the watchword of the minstrel show); and, second, that questions can inspire spectacle. It was a question that set the whole thing going. Therefore, I will begin with a question for you: How would you explain what it means to be American to a stranger? 2 This was the typical announcement of the interlocutor with which he begun the show. I wish to channel invoke that moment not to celebrate the interlocutor--who was the leader of the racist parody that was the minstrel show--but because his attempt at control over his subject was constantly interrupted, subverted, and nuanced which is what good history writing should do to established understandings of the past. See Rhae Lynn Barnes’ discussion of figure of the interlocutor in Ed Ayers et al., “The Faces of Racism,” Backstory (Charlottesville, VA: A Program of ​ ​ Virginia Humanities, February 8, 2019), https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/the-faces-of-racism/. ​ ​ ​ 3 See Robert C. Toll’s discussion of minstrelsy’s connection to the circus and sideshow industry in Blacking Up: The ​ Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 18-20. ​ Lustig 5 Quick—you whip out your wallet to flash a license and a crisp dollar bill. Too crass? Perhaps, you’d gather your thoughts and recount your own family history with asides about opportunity and the American dream. Perhaps you pontificate on what freedom means to you. Or maybe this is the moment when your pocket Constitution will come in handy (finally!). Most of us don’t know how we’d explain our Americanness because we’ve never had to explain ourselves—indeed, that strikes me as essentially American. ​ ​ It is at the encounter with the other that one must choose how to define oneself. This sentiment seems obvious in our post-colonial, post-modernist world—but I’m not asking a question of theory. I want to know what you’d really say or show to a person completely ignorant of the United States. Just such a situation presented itself in 1854. That spring, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor on his mission to open Japan to trade with the United States. A Japanese convoy came to meet Perry on board his lead ship. As part of this inaugural act of diplomacy, a cultural exchange took place aboard Perry’s ship. On deck, the Japanese ambassadors staged a kabuki ceremony for the seafaring Americans. Next came the Americans’ turn to represent themselves to their Japanese counterparts: so, Perry’s white sailors performed a minstrel skit in blackface. Each side would later describe the other as barbaric.4 Blackface minstrelsy originated as a dramatic form during the 1830s in the theaters of the urban, working-class North. Blackface minstrels were the performers of blackface minstrelsy, usually white men who, having blackened their faces with burnt cork or grease paint to imitate 4 Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America. 171-172. ​ ​ Lustig 6 African Americans, performed comic songs, dances, and satirical skits.5 It was an appropriative, deeply racist practice but, on that day in March 1854, it was the singular way by which Perry’s white sailors chose to demonstrate America to people who knew them not. Yes, for some scholars blackface minstrelsy means the genesis of the show business industry, or the first authentic artifact of an American folk culture, or the first American pop-culture export. But, as is obvious in this anecdote, it was more than that and meant something different to Commodore Perry’s crew: it was the best answer they could give to the question of American identity. By the middle of the nineteenth century when Perry arrived in Japanese waters, white Americans understood the theatrical conventions of blackface minstrelsy well enough for a regiment of professional sailors--not professional actors or musicians--to put on a minstrel show themselves for an important occasion.6 The theater form had already deeply penetrated American culture. A Japanese folding screen with paneled images of that fateful day depicts the American sailors dancing and singing, wearing blackface as well as white-and-blue pinstripe suits with red 5 The history of African American blackface performers is also long, beginning in the 1850s.
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