Abstract
In 1909, Current Literature published an anonymous article that addressed an ongoing argument about the ethical responsibility of theatre and theatregoing entitled “The Theatrical Muckraker Answered.” One side of this argument included the likes of Walter Pritchard Eaton whose argument that “certain of the theatrical managers [were] as devils luring our sons and daughters to perdition” was cited at length in the previous issue and “an avalanche of similar indictments in a larger number of publications.”1 The other side included Jane Addams who commended “the American dramatist for his eagerness to attack serious problems on which the press and the church are silent.”2 “At least a dozen plays,” she remarked, “are now on the stage whose titles might easily be translated into a proper heading for a sociological lecture.”3 More than half these plays were slum plays, including The Battle, which might be rechristened “The Need for Model Tenements”; The Writing on the Wall, “An Exposition of the Methods of Trinity Church in Administering Its Property”; The Easiest Way, “The Entrenchment of a Social Evil”; The Melting Pot, “The Value of Immigration”; and The Dawn of a To-morrow, “Optimism as a Rectifier of Social Wrongs.”4 The preponderance of slum plays on this list defending theatre against allegations of sensationalism and sophistry is significant in two ways for this study.
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Notes
Harry P. Kraus, The Settlement House Movement in New York City, 1886–1914 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 131.
Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 43; original emphasis.
Richard Burton, The New American Drama (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company Press, 1913). Burton applauds the focus on local issues and the role of the social worker in this new, “vital” theatre that has begun to address social issues. Included among the plays producing this “vital” drama are Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell, and Cleveland Moffett’s The Battle. See Chapter 8, “Humor and the Social Note.”
James Halleck Reid, From Broadway to the Bowery. 1907. TS. Billy Rose Collection. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, act 4, scene 1, page 2.
Cecelia Tichi, Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America(and What They Teach Us) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 9.
William Dean Howells, Impressions and Experiences (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Press, 1909), 206.
Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 106–107.
Quoted in Lynn Kear, Laurette Taylor: American Stage Legend (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2010), 12.
Charles A. Taylor, From Rags to Riches. In America’s Lost Plays VIII: The Great Diamond Robbery and Other Recent Melodramas, edited by Garrett H. Leverton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 104.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, 1992), 311.
Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), 128.
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© 2014 J. Chris Westgate
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Westgate, J.C. (2014). “What the Poor of This Great City Must Endure”: The Sociological Narrative in Slum Plays. In: Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357687_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357687_3
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