51. Banned in Philadelphia

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we try to bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m Peter Schmitz, and our sound and original music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. We are plunging right into today’s topic, as we continue with our series of episodes about the history of censorship and public controversy on the Philadelphia stage:

[ “DRAMA IS CONFLICT” THEME - TRANSITION MUSIC ] 

February 1936: As America was struggling through the Great Depression, everyone was increasingly aware of the persistence of deep poverty throughout the nation, especially in cities such as Philadelphia for instance, which like many other cities was hit hard by the prolonged economic downturn. But there was also the matter of rural poverty, which the New Deal programs of President Franklin Roosevelt were trying to alleviate. This was reflected in the plays being written in that era, too, and there were many folk dramas exploring rural poverty - especially in the American South - that were having a bit of a vogue. And we’re not just talking about the WPA Theatre Project. Even in commercial theater, one of the most popular serious Broadway dramas  was a play called Tobacco Road, by Jack Kirkland, based on the 1932 novel of the same name by Erskine Caldwell. Tobacco Road took place in the deep backwoods of rural Georgia, and it depicted the story of a dirt farmer named Jeeter Lester, and all the poverty, squalor, and grotesque tragic lusts and avarice that spring from that situation. There was a lot of frank talk about sex and desire and food and everything else that was basic to human life. Folks in the world of the play tended to get married at the age of twelve or thirteen, and they would live a hard life and die poor. In the end of the play the reader, or the audience, can see a certain beauty and dignity to the humanity to the family’s story. And although the work had its critics, a lot of people liked it a good deal, and the acting of the original cast was apparently top rate, and many people mentioned especially the actor Henry Hull who played Jeeter Lester. The original New York production ran on Broadway for a total of 3,182 performances, surpassing the record formerly held by that old standby of the 1920s, Abie's Irish Rose.  [FADE MUSIC OUT] 

Here’s a sound clip from the 1941 Hollywood movie that was eventually made of the play, where young Lov Bensey comes to the Lester family’s yard to complain that his new wife, Pearl, their youngest daughter, won’t sleep in his bed or even talk to him, even though he’s tried beating her and throwing stuff at her - doesn’t work! They offer him her hare-lipped sister, the sensuous Ellie Mae:

Jeeter: Well, her not talking ain’t nothing to get mad about. Ada here didn’t talk to me for the first ten years we was married -  and them was the happiest ten years of my life!

Lov: She runs away, too, I’m getting sick and tired of the whole business!

Jeeter: GIve her time, boy. She’ll be all right. She ain’t but thirteen, remember!

Ada: You listen to me, Lov Bensey, you don’t like what she’s doin’ you just bring her back home! Git yerself another wife.

Jeeter: You can have Ellie Mae!

Lov: Oh, every time I say anything, y’all want me to marry Ellie Mae. Well it ain't no use and that’s all there is to it. I want a young wife. I ain't gonna take no 23 year-old woman for a wife, have everybody laughin’ at me . . .

Ellie Mae: Hey, Lov! 

Love: Hey, Ellie Mae. It’s Pearl I’m talkin’ about! 

Now this film version is a bit cleaned up from the original theatrical script - remember that Hollywood, unlike Broadway, actually was working under an official self-imposed censorship code. Amazingly the 1936 road company of the play Tobacco Road, this stark show about the lowly rural poor, which had been banned in Boston and Chicago, was booked into the glittering new Forrest Theatre on Walnut Street, and Philadelphia audiences were ready to find out what all the fuss had been all about up in New York. But not everybody in Philly was happy, it seems, because an urgent telegram arrived on the desk of the Superintendent of the Philadelphia Police Department:

TOBACCO ROAD IS SCHEDULED TO OPEN AT THE FORREST TONIGHT STOP I UNDERSTAND THIS PLAY ACCLAIMED FOR ITS LACK OF RETICENCE ITS FRANK EARTHINESS AND ANIMALISTIC NATURALNESS WAS PUT OUT OF BOSTON STOP SOMEBODY HAD SAID THAT IF THE PLAY IS STAGED HERE AS PRINTED IN WORD AND ACTIONS THEN FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL LOOK BACK AND AVOW WE HAD LOST OUR REASON STOP

The telegram was signed "John W. Keogh 3745 Spruce St." Now this, apparently, was Father Keough - the pastor of St. Bede's Chapel of the University of Pennsylvania, who was also the head of the Philadelphia Catholic Total Abstinence Union.

Though as we shall see in 1936 the censorship of plays performed in Philadelphia was once again the responsibility of an official Board of Censors, nobody from that board actually went out and made it their business to attend every play and look for smut, like they did back in the 20s. In the 30s that job was handed over to a squad on the Philadelphia police force that among its other duties regularly visited the city's theaters. So, responding to this telegram, the Superintendent called the Captain of Detectives, John J. Creeden, and Capt. Creeden immediately put his best man on the job, Sergeant Jacob Gomborow.

Gomborow was a well-known figure in the Bureau of Public Safety, he often escorted visiting celebrities around the city, as well as keeping watch on possible subversive political organizations. Gomborow had a keen eye for unseemliness at the theater, and would officially inform the producers of touring shows that certain lines or jokes had to be cut while they played in Philadelphia. That kind of stuff might work in New York, he would tell them, but not here.

Nonetheless, over his many years of doing this duty, Gomborow had seen a lot of theater, and had developed an appreciation for good drama, and he called things as he saw them. His report on the Theatre Guild's production of Tobacco Road was on the Superintendent's desk the very next day. And it read:

"In accordance with your instructions I attended the performance of Tobacco Road playing at the Forrest Theatre on the evening of February 10, 1936, occupying seat N-110."

"The play was presented by the very strong cast headed by Henry Hull in the role of Jeeter Lester, and very ably supported by Mary Servoss as the wife, Ada Lester. The audience was the typical 'first nighter' comprised of people prominent in Philadelphia, well known businessmen, lawyers and doctors, who undoubtedly came to see a much-heralded play which received so much publicity, having been stopped in Boston and Chicago."

"In my opinion,. . . This play does not intend to portray lewdness or obscenity, or even suggestiveness, as was intended in other plays I [have] reviewed . . .." 

"With the exception of the acting on the part of the sister Bessie Rice, the rest of the cast ably assisted Henry Hull in one of the finest and best dramatic acting I have had the occasion to review. During the intermissions I contacted several persons whose opinions are usually respected and I learned from one who had seen the show in New York that a number of lines that would be considered objectionable to a Philadelphia audience had [already] been eliminated. To one whom I spoke who comes from the South, the opinion was given that it was an exaggerated portrayal of actual conditions, but all agreed that the acting was superb."

"The performance started at 8:45 P.M., and was over by 11:15 P.M. Respectfully submitted, Jacob H. Gomborow, Detective Sergeant."

So, having received that official all clear, and I guess much to the shock and disappointment of Father Keogh, the run of Tobacco Road went on as scheduled during its week at the Forrest Theatre. (And it then moved on to the Chestnut Street Opera House on the next block for an additional week.) The papers of Jacob H. Gomborow, including many of his reports on Philadelphia plays in the 1930s, were donated to the Temple University Library by his family, and can be found in its collection.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Now, in that year we’re discussing today, 1936, Philadelphia had just gotten another new Mayor, Republican S. Davis Wilson. In the mid-30s the voters of Philadelphia, which had formerly been a solid GOP city, were turning towards the Democratic Party. The New Deal of FDR and its efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression were wildly popular with the city’s working and middle classes. Back in the November 1935 mayoral election, Wilson had only beaten the popular and charismatic John B. Kelly by a very slim margin. But still, once he won, he called himself: “The People’s Mayor.”

Let’s look at S. Davis Wilson for a minute. He was from Boston, originally. He had quite an interesting, though not a distinguished past. As a young man, up in Vermont, he was once an agent of the State Armory and in the course of his duties he had even shot another man to death - self defense, he always maintained.

In 1905 Wison came down to Philadelphia. And he stumbled around from job to job for over two decades. Was a bit of a loner - he had no real friends to speak of, no close associates. By the age of 45 he was still largely unsuccessful, quite frustrated in his ambitions, and desperately longed for some sort of fame and recognition.

In 1926 he got a five dollar a day job working for a Temperance citizens group, The Lord’s Day Alliance, ferreting out sites of illegal drinking during the Sesquicentennial Exhibition. And he used that to get a job as an assistant to the Philadelphia City Comptroller. From this minor bureaucratic post, Wilson finally began to get noticed. His boss did not want to be in the public eye, so Wilson took over that part. He finally began to make headlines, mostly through official clashes with Philadelphia Rapid Transit, the private business that controlled all the subways and trolleys in the city. Wilson learned how to get the attention of reporters, and after that was very rarely out of the newspapers for a single day the rest of his life. He made ‘Good Copy'. He was loud and he was controversial. He would call crooked politicians ‘Dirty Rats’ to their faces during public meetings. Wilson became a Democrat just long enough to get elected Comptroller himself, and then he switched back to the Republican Party when he decided to run for mayor. The old corrupt Protestant GOP cabal that had run the city for decades now was still a majority - barely a majority - but a majority, over the white Catholics and Jews and the growing Black population that was turning to the Democrats. So to gain the support of wealthy industrialists that funded the GOP, Wilson blasted Roosevelt’s New Deal, he even threw a little anti-Semitism into his campaign. Still, it’s likely that he actually won the Mayor's office because Mort Wilkins, the old political boss of the 13th Ward along the Delaware, had dumped 30,000 ballots for his opponent, Kelly, into the river.

But once he became Mayor on January 6th 1936, Davis Wilson quickly turned on the GOP - he became a political independent, and made increasingly populist ploys. He attacked the transit system magnates again and again. He tussled with the politicians who controlled the city gas company. He courted the national Democratic Party to bring its presidential convention to Philadelphia. He got the Army-Navy football game to be permanently played here in the city’s stadiums. And - here we finally get back to theater history once again - he reinstituted the old Philadelphia Board of Theatre Control which had been abolished four years before!

Now this move was popular in the sense that it was ostensibly to PROMOTE Philadelphia as a theater town. The Depression had seen a huge dropoff of the number of Broadway shows coming through the city. Most of Philadelphia’s grand theater spaces - including all the ones that had sprung up during the previous fifty years of prosperity - were sitting empty much of the time. 

So this new board of theater control was urged by Mayor Wilson not to concentrate on eliminating smut on stage - Sgt. Gomborow and the others would take care of that - but instead to work to stimulate public interest in going to the theater. Get the local colleges to bring in classes of students in huge groups - stuff like that. To further this end Wilson recruited some prominent society ladies who were active in the Philadelphia theater world, including Mrs Rosa De Young, Mrs Elizabeth Craven, and the beautifully named Mrs Upton Favorite - an active supporter of the Plays & Players Theater group, the Theater Guild, and the American Theatre Society. She was, of course, also a member of the Charlotte Cushman Club, whose charitable activities we described in an episode last year. Mrs. Favorite was a strikingly tall, erudite and elegant woman, and she was quite different from the other members of Boards of Censors we have met in the past. Mayor Wilson did make sure that other more reliable functionaries like his personal assistant Louis Wilgarde were also on the panel.

But the other big difference was that the mayor had formed it not to take controversial matters off his desk, to avoid being responsible for anything going on in the theater world - because, as we mentioned, Wilson wanted attention, he wanted public controversy - like many other populist American politicians of that day, like Huey Long down in Louisiana, Wilson thrived on it! And as it turned out, unlike other mayors Wilson really liked going to the theater. He and his wife went to every show that came through town, he was one of those regular first-nighters! He even told the producers of a show called 3 Men on a Horse which was running at the Garrick Theatre in April of 1936, that, hey, they could use his name in its publicity if they wanted to! “Mayor Wilson Says: ‘I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN!’ ” the newspaper ads proclaimed.

But Wilson could also take a violent dislike to shows that he saw, too. And sometimes for a very personal reason. Turns out, for example, that a cousin of his, named Martin Jones, had become a successful millionaire. Now, cousin Martin got on Davis Wilson’s nerves - especially when he started using some of his well-earned money to finance the tours of Broadway shows. One of the first shows that Martin Jones brought down to Philly was a comic revue called New Faces of 1936. Now this revue was not one of the ones we talked about in the last episode, that was filled with musical numbers and chorus girls. New Faces of 1936 was an evening of sketch comedy, featuring some great New York performers like the Duncan Sisters - and interestingly also Imogene Coca, a fantastically talented physical comedienne who came from Philadelphia, as it happened. Coca had a great bit where as a incompetent burlesque dancer, she would attempt to do a strip tease, but consistently fail to actually remove any item of her clothing - after a great deal of hilarious struggle, by then end of the act, only one single glove would finally come off - to her amazement and pleasure and to the audience’s sustained laughter.

The other comediennes on the bill, The Duncan Sisters, also did a hilarious skit about American First Ladies, the wives of former president Herbert Hoover and current president Franklin Roosevelt, the redoubtable Eleanor Roosevelt. In this particular skit Mrs. Hoover and Mrs. Roosevelt had become leaders of the Girl Scout troop, and were trying to instruct their charges on how to be prepared for everything in life - including, well, future romance and marriage and motherhood. Now this review had run in New York to great success, and the Roosevelt family’s grown children had even seen the show, and everybody laughed. But when S. Davis Wilson saw it, all hell broke loose.

Here’s how the opening night was covered in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I’ll ask Chris to give us that “Old Timey” sound quality again as I read to you the item from November 10th, 1936 in the Philadelphia Inquirer  . . page 21, if you want to go look for it yourself. The headline was: MAYOR PLAYS GALLANT: BANS GIRL SCOUT SKIT. CALLS PLAY SHOWING MRS ROOSEVELT TALKING ON BABIES A “DAMNABLE OUTRAGE”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

February 1937: Mayor S. Davis Wilson had another problem with a touring show. He heard from his assistant Louis Wilgard about a production of the Langston Hughes play Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South. Wilgard had seen the play in New York, and he thought it was indecent. Although he hadn’t seen the play himself, Mayor Wilson was inclined to take his assistant’s word for that, because once again his cousin Martin Jones was the producer, and Jones had booked the Locust Street Theatre to host the show, just a few blocks south of City Hall - he could see it out the window. Well, for many reasons, Mayor Wilson was suspicious - including that it was about interracial sex. Like a lot of white folks back then, Wilson just had a complete horror of what was termed “miscegenation”. And he saw this as another opportunity to take on one of his quixotic public stands that would immediately get him into the newspaper.

Mulatto had played in New York City (at several theaters) from October of 1935 through September of 1936. Its 373 performances were the most for a Broadway show by any Black playwright ever - a record that would stand for the next 20 years. Now admittedly, the show, as produced, was not quite the one that Langston Hughes had originally written. As was the common practice of that day, Martin Jones had added sensationalistic language and extra action to stoke controversy and gather public attention. But to Mayor Wilson’s mind the play had provocative content already, since its central story was a longstanding relationship between a white plantation owner in the South and his Black housekeeper. The couple have four grown children, and the resulting struggle between whether these children should "pass" as white, or claim their heritage as African American, provided the show with lots of violent conflict, and (spoiler alert) ends with one of the sons strangling his father to death, and then being pursued by a white lynch mob.

The show had been widely praised by critics, and had also been produced in Chicago and Atlantic City without incident. But Mayor Wison was evidently convinced, or wanted to be convinced that he was stopping a potential race riot by banning the play. He thought that this was The Clansman all over again. Local black leaders and journalists all publicly stated that this was nonsense - there was no public outcry amongst their community against the play. Even though folks knew this was another plantation melodrama, it was a VERY far cry from being anything like Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, after all.

However, Mayor Wilson was not to be persuaded, and deemed its themes too incendiary. "The show won't go on," he told newspapermen, claiming it was "an outrageous affront to decency." Nevertheless to do things all legally on the up and up, he convened a six-person review board, made up mostly of members of the Board of Theatrical Control, which at that point included both a Rabbi and a black minister, to watch a special performance of the play and vote on whether to let it proceed that Monday evening. The board split 3-3 (with Mrs. Upton Favorite, the rabbi and the minister  - sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? - wanting to approve it), but Wilson then used his official power to step in. He simply summarily relieved Mrs. Upton Favorite of her post, and since that made the vote 3-2, Wilson was able to officially ban any further public performance of the play.

Martin Jones made a visit to a local  judge, but the ruling came down that the mayor was within the law on this matter. The show would NOT go on - one of the clearest instances of a controversial play just being totally banned in Philadelphia as I can find.

There is a postscript to the story: Two years later, in December of 1939, Martin Jones again attempted to bring another production of Mulatto to Philadelphia, this time he had rented the Walnut Street Theatre. But by that point S. Davis Wilson was not only no longer in office, he had died earlier in that year at the age of 58, after suffering a stroke. But his successor, Acting Mayor George Connell, had upheld Wilson’s old policy and reinstated the ban on Mulatto. The Walnut's manager Joseph Becker sought a restraining order against Connell, but again a local judge ruled it was well within the mayor's power, according to the law. And that ban, ladies and gentlemen, was very effective - even long after the era of censorship had ended. To this date, Langston Hughes’ Mulatto has never received a professional production in the city of Philadelphia.

[”DRAMA IS CONFLICT CLOSING THEME]

And that was really the last of the era's big censorship controversies. Oh there was a kerfuffle about a play called Spirochete done by the WPA Theatre Project in 1939  . . . the Knights of Columbus objected to the play’s insinuation that Christopher Columbus was responsible for the spread of the disease syphilis  . .  and in 1945 another Philadelphia protestant minister got all bent out of shape about yet another ‘miscegenation’ play called Strange Fruit, but it didn’t end up getting banned, and that was pretty much it. As we get into the 1940s, 50s and the 60s - as we shall see - there are some other fun and fascinating disputes - but they have a different tone, on the whole. Social mores and censorship laws were changing, after all. There were much less moral crusades and no more Censorship Boards. By the end of the Second World War that was pretty much over. Even the darkest parts of the McCarthy Era - and there were some dark parts - in the 1950s didn’t really reach the theater world that much - that was mostly in television and the movies. And any further dispute about the historical reputation of Christopher Columbus in Philadelphia would also get left for another day - in this century, where as you may have heard, he would become part of the culture wars of our own era.

Well that’s our show for today, thank you so much! But before we go, hey, we have a favor to ask: we need your feedback! Would you write to us? - Just send us a quick email. Tell us why you tuned in, why you keep tuning in, what you’re particularly enjoying about the show or what you’d like to know more about - and that maybe you can suggest something that we’ve maybe missed so far. We’d love to hear from you. Our email is aithpodcast@gmail.com. Or you can contact us via our website. Second, there is another way you can help us out. Find our Patreon account - there’s a link in our show notes.

We’ll see you again in a couple of weeks, when we have a special interview subject coming up! Look for that, and then we’ll wrap up this series about censorship and municipal politics in Philadelphia during the month of May 2023, when our Season Two - Drama is Conflict -  will at last be complete. So long for now - thank you so much for listening today, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History, Philadelphia.

[AITH END MUSIC]