43. The Fight Against The Clansman, Part Two

COPYRIGHT 2022 Peter Schmitz. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History! In this episode we continue the amazing, appalling and the much too little-known story of how the arrival in town of a play entitled The Clansman rocked Philadelphia back in 1906 - and then later returned to rock the entire nation, and not in a good way. 

I’m going to talk about two things today to provide really important context about the background to our current storyline. I’m going to describe the life and career of Thomas Dixon Jr., the author of The Clansman, because it’s important to understand what a formidable person he was. He was not just a garden variety racist who had written a nasty little play.

But before we even go there, I want to explore the way that the world of Philly theater was organized as a business, back in the early 20th Century.

Because it’s important to make one other thing clear. Although much of the events we describe in these episodes happened at what was called the Walnut Street Theatre, this had nothing to do with the modern Philadelphia producing organization of the same name. The current Walnut Street Theatre, as an organization, is a non-profit, it was founded in the 1980s. Although we in Philadelphia like to refer to it as the Oldest Theater in America, that’s true only really in a limited sense. The building in 1906 was not the same as the structure that we know today, and it certainly was not the same in terms of management. It, like most theaters in Philadelphia, was controlled by the Theatrical Syndicate. 

[“Drama is Conflict” THEME MUSIC]

I’ve been meaning for a while now to talk about The Syndicate, and this seems like as good a time as any. You may remember that as Season One of the podcast came to close, I ended the narration in the year 1897. Part of my reason for selecting that year as the end of 19th Century theater was that it saw the advent of the motion picture in Philadelphia theaters, which was going to forever alter the structure of American entertainment. And the other reason was that the year before, in 1896, Philadelphia was the first American theater city to fall completely under the control of The Syndicate.

The Theatrical Syndicate was the name of a group of businessmen who controlled most major theaters in America. All the shows exhibited on all their stages were produced by large touring combinations who gave large concessions to the Syndicate, and were booked by the central office in New York City, controlled by the producers with the nefarious sounding name of Erlanger and Klaw. 

However, two Philadelphia businessmen had played a large part in the formation of The Syndicate. The first man was J. Fred Zimmerman. In 1863 at the age of 20, Zimmerman had started working at the very bottom of the ladder of Philadelphia show biz, as an usher in the newly constructed third Chestnut Street Theatre, the one west of 13th Street. Always good with numbers, he soon caught the eye of upper management and by 1868 he was the Treasurer of an opera troupe and then he became an advance agent for booking shows into the Chestnut. By 1880 he was running the Chestnut for owner William Haverly, and then he acquired the lease from him.

In 1881 Zimmerman teamed up with Samuel F. Nirdlinger, who had left his family’s clothing business in Indiana and was now working for theater manager George Goodwin at the Walnut as his right hand man. Nirdlinger, as you may imagine, found his last name a bit too unwieldy for show business, and so adopted the name Samuel F. Nixon instead. When Goodwin suddenly died in the middle of 1881, Nixon and Zimmerman quickly sensed their opportunity. They persuaded Goodwin’s widow to sell them the leases on both the Walnut Street Theatre and the Chestnut Street Opera House nearby. Now they controlled three of the major theatrical venues in town - the Walnut Street Theatre, the Chestnut Street Opera House and the Chestnut Street Theatre - and all touring companies began to notice that to book their shows into Philadelphia, it was best to keep on the two men’s good side. By then both Nixon-Nirdlinger and Zimmerman were extremely wealthy. They looked oddly alike, too, and both wore the sweeping handlebar mustaches that were popular in that era. 

By the mid 1890s, they had gotten control of the Broad Street Theatre across from the Academy at the South side of town and the new Park Theatre at the corner of Ridge Avenue on the north side. And they had started buying up theaters elsewhere in Pennsylvania, as well as West Virginia and Ohio. And as we have mentioned previously, the theater business was booming. Up till then the theater had largely been a cigars-and-handshake business, with booking and deals done on curbsides and in restaurants. But now the Nixon-Zimmerman office became quite a formidable barrier to any actor-manager of the touring troupe who wanted to bring his production to Philadelphia at all. As a team they had the good cop/bad cop routine down, with Nixon being described by one actor-manager as a vain little person who “could squeeze more juice out a business orange than any man I have ever met, and I have met some squeezers.” Zimmerman, however, was quite a genial person, but if you could not come to terms with him, what he would genially ask you was could he just buy out your shares in your company, instead?

In 1896, the two Philadelphia theatrical tycoons found themselves at a luncheon at the Holland House in New York City, with four of the biggest producers on Broadway: Al Hayman, who also had interests in Chicago and San Francisco, George Frohmann, who ran theaters in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Boston, and the formidable duo of Abraham Lincoln Erlanger and Marc Klaw, who controlled . . well, everything else. The men realized they could do for the theater business what was being done in all other American industries of the day: they could control it, just like the titans of banking, steel, sugar, coal, railroads, etc. By coming to a mutual understanding, they could rationalize booking policies, set prices, dictate wages to actors and fees to managers and playwrights.

And on that basis, the Theatrical Syndicate was born, and the era of the great actor-managers like Forrest, Booth or Cushman barnstorming across the country in their own independent troupes, renting theaters as they went, was over. Work with the Syndicate, and agree to do a run in every one of their theaters across the country - or, you know, you could just not work at all. The members of the Syndicate just kept gobbling up more and more theaters, in cities large and small across the country. For a while, a few of the biggest names in American theater fought back - Richard Mansfield, David Belasco, Fanny Davenport, Mrs. Fiske,  . . . but after a while they mostly gave in. Everything was the Syndicate. And you know, for the most part, theatergoers in Philadelphia did not mind at all. All the delightful revues, operettas, and musical shows just kept cycling in and out of town and there was always plenty of entertainment available. All the big stars came through town, from Sarah Bernhardt to Lillian Russell to Henry Irving to the brash new fella George M. Cohan. There were no more Philadelphia-based directors or playwrights or actors, true - even all the Drews and Barrymores had moved to New York. Because from then on, that’s where show business came from, as Frohmann, or Klaw & Erlanger dispatched them. And down in Philly, Nixon and Zimmerman just packed away the money, taking a hefty cut from every show that came through town.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But what about the story we started to tell last time, about Thomas Dixon and his play The Clansman that would end up roiling the city in October of 1906? And how does this all tie in with the Theatrical Syndicate? Okay, I gotta warn you, there is a MUCH wilder story than I thought it would be when I started looking into it. Get ready, because here we go.

Thomas Dixon Jr. was the most intellectually accomplished and politically driven playwright we have met in our adventures together on this podcast since - well, since the last intellectually accomplished and politically driven playwright, George Lippard, in our last series of episodes. But Dixon was not a Philadelphia man. Not at all. Although he knew the northern states intimately and had lived and traveled in them for much of his adult life, Dixon was a son of the South, and proud of it.

Thomas Dixon Jr. was born in 1864 in the waning months of the American Civil War. His father, Thomas Dixon Sr., had brought the family back to the old homestead in Shelby, North Carolina - just north of the South Carolina border after a grueling journey from Arkansas (where he had been living), during which three of his children had died. He came from a family of substantial preachers, plantation owners and Revolutionary War veterans. A considerable part of their holdings, of course, were in human beings - though his father always refused to sell any of his slaves he had inherited, on principle, even when he had a chance to do so. When Tom was just an infant, of course, the South was defeated, the enslaved people were liberated anyway, thankfully, but this left the Dixon family impoverished. As they struggled through the succeeding years, the occupying Union Army was not at all sympathetic to former white supporters of the Confederacy, and young Thomas and his four siblings found themselves working long hours in the family fields just to feed the household. A general sense of shame, humiliation, and defeat hung in the air. There were fearful rumors of huge migrations of freed blacks roaming the countryside, which caused the family to keep long nighttime vigils - their shotguns in their hands. The general chaos, confusion and resentment of the post-war era burned themselves into his consciousness literally from his earliest days.

Both Dixon’s father and his uncle, a former Confederate Colonel named Leroy McAfee had also been some of the chief organizers of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan - supposedly to maintain order and revive the honor in their part of the South. (But in effect their real mission was to re-establish White supremacy and political power and to terrorize Black people.) When he was just a boy, Tom had watched as a black man was lynched and murdered by a 1500-strong hooded Klan mob on horseback. This unfortunate victim was immediately judged to be guilty, of course, and was hanged in the town square. His dead body was then riddled with bullets. In the accounts I’ve read of this ghastly incident I can not tell if his father was part of the gang responsible for the lynching, but I think we can safely assume that he approved of it.

His father could also be a stern authoritarian figure at home, too, driving all his children to succeed, demanding strict obedience, and once beating young Tom within an inch of his life when he discovered that the boy had agreed to go on an errand to buy a little whiskey for his grandmother.

The Dixons were a highly intellectual family, however. Thomas’s siblings all were bright, gifted, and ambitious, and as the Reconstruction period ended they all found quite successful paths in life. His oldest brother A.C. Dixon became a well-known Baptist minister and a leading fundamentalist writer and theologian. His younger brother Frank, though crippled and in need of crutches, became a leading public speaker and the president of the American Chautauqua Society. His sister Addie became an author, and his other sister Delia went to medical school and became one of the first female physicians in the South.

But the whole family agreed that Tom Jr. was the brightest one of them all. He only went to school for two years, but that was because that was all the school he needed. Tom blazed through the Shelby Academy so quickly that they soon had nothing left to teach him. Exceptionally tall and gangly, with coal-black hair and a wiry body from his time spent plowing the fields, he was determined to show everyone that he could succeed too. Accepted into Wake Forrest College like his brothers, he excelled in languages and in science, earned the highest academic scores ever awarded to a student, and soon emerged with both his Bachelors and his Masters degrees at the age of 19. He also was given a full scholarship to attend Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to get his PhD in what was then the new field of Political Science. When he got there in the fall of 1884, at his first seminar he found himself sitting next to another bright fellow, a bespectacled Georgina and graduate of Princeton University by the name of Woodrow Wilson. Even though Wilson was eight years older, the two became fast friends. And . . . ladies, and gentlemen, here is a turn of events I bet you didn't see coming . . It was Woodrow Wilson who introduced the intense young North Carolinian to the world of the Theater! The future US President would take Dixon along with him to the nightspots of Baltimore in the evenings, and they were able to take in the touring companies that came through town: Lily Langtry, Joseph Jefferson, James O’Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo, Rose Eytinge in A Winter’s Tale, and even Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice.

Now, being the sort of intense and enthusiastic person that he was, Dixon immediately decided that the theater was going to be his Life’s Calling. Forget political science! He got hired by a Baltimore paper to be their drama critic, at the age of nineteen - but his evenings watching plays only convinced him that he didn’t want to WRITE about plays, he wanted to BE IN plays! He had to become a Shakespearean actor! So in January 1884 he slipped away from his friend Mr. Wilson, and from his studies at Hopkins, and he took a train to New York to find glory on The Great White Way.

Dixon enrolled as a drama student at the Frobisher school of drama and spent every evening at the Broadway theaters. And was thrilled when he soon got an actual job in a touring company of Richard III! But it turned out to be one of those jobs where the actors had to ‘invest’ in the company before they could go out on the road, with promises of a monetary return down the line. Dixon’s family, with some trepidation, sent him the necessary three hundred dollars so he could join this troupe, only to find their fears confirmed when the theater manager immediately skipped town with all the cast’s money. Desperately, Tom started auditioning all over town for other roles, only to be told finally by a director that with his height of six feet three and half inches and his weight of only 150 pounds, he was just too odd looking for the leading roles he supposedly wanted and he was just uncastable. Give it up, kid. It had all been a terrible mistake. Young Tom Dixon’s fever dream suddenly broke, and his ambitions of a glorious career in the theater were in tatters. He got on a train back to North Carolina chastened and defeated, having now become that most dangerous of all things: a failed actor.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

In the interest of time, I’m going to hurry through the next periods of Thomas Dixon’s life, though they are no less fascinating. He himself was always, always in a hurry. He enrolled in law school down in North Carolina, and even before he was done got himself elected to the state legislature. He got married after a whirlwind courtship. He tried practicing law for a while, hated it, and then like his father and brother he got a Call to the Pulpit. So he Got Religion. He was ordained a Baptist minister, and now with his frame filled out and his intense look, his rich voice and piercing intellect, was soon receiving offers from congregations all over the country. He went from a congregation in Raleigh, NC to Boston MA, and then found himself back in Manhattan, the minister of the 23rd Street Baptist Church, where his dynamic sermons were so wildly eclectic and popular that the congregation had to rent out a nearby YMCA auditorium just to handle the crowds. Because he often spent these sermons haranguing his listeners about politics and social issues, he left that Baptist congregation to found his own independent church, which he called The People’s Church. He also began an independent public speaking career, and was again wildly popular - spending three years criss-crossing the country, advocating for Temperance, for progressive politics and a support for US expansion into foreign affairs. In 1896 he was an honored guest at the graduation ceremony of Philadelphia’s Peirce College of Business at the Academy of Music. By now Dixon had bought a home in Virginia and was commuting back and forth to his congregation in New York by train, but in the end it all just seemed too much to handle.

In 1899 the exhaustingly restless Dixon gave up the ministry entirely and became a professional author, churning out endless articles, essays, and novels. Especially novels. This was the great age of the lending library, there was always a market for more novels.

And then one night, he found himself one night back in the theater again - always a dangerous place for him to be. The play he went to go see was not Shakespeare or some progressive-minded Ibsen play, folks . . It was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Now to you and me, if we know anything about theater history, we know that by the very first years of the 20th Century. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a tired old chestnut of a play, rehashed and re-written by hundreds of authors  for hundreds of companies that used to play throughout America. It had very little to do with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s original novel anymore, but was a rather predictable parade of stock characters and well-known tropes, with the usual scene of Eliza escaping across the icy river, a tear-jerking tableau of saintly little Eva rising to heaven, and at the end poor faithful Uncle Tom being beaten to death by the cruel slave master Simon Legree, all of it ending in a scene of reconciliation and a promise of eventual liberation for his people.

But here’s the thing, Thomas Dixon saw this play, and thought: This is outrageous. This is SO UNFAIR to the South. Though paradoxically Dixon rather much admired Abraham Lincoln, and even felt that ending slavery had been a necessity for a democratic nation, Dixon was also filled with a violent personal contempt for the entire black race, which he thought would only hold the rest of America back from its manifest destiny.

So Dixon sat down and wrote another novel. It was called The Leopard’s Spots, which actually used characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Simon Legree was now a cynical white politician trying to profit off the South, and the light-skinned George Harris (the husband of Eliza), educated at Harvard, was attempting to win the affections of a white lady. Dixon was terrified, in fact, at any prospect of what was then called ‘miscegenation’ - a very ugly word, what we would call interracial marriage. All the Black characters were depicted as subhuman characters. However, this was not at all an unusual attitude for white America at the time, and Dixon’s rhetorical and writing talents were still insidiously strong about what many Phialdelpha papers openly called “The Negro Question.” The Leopard’s Spots was popular. The novel sold so well, in fact he wrote another one, also set in the Reconstruction South - and now he found that all his childhood memories, fears, resentments, and all his sternly taught family lessons come flooding back to him. This would be his masterpiece, he felt, he could finally tell the truths that he had witnessed as a child. He could write a truer history in novel form than any academic could with some tired old treatise. This book, of course, would be The Clansman.

As in his previous novel, there is a theme of political humiliation, racial peril from marauding and ignorant blacks, and political peril from mendacious and immoral white politicians - including one that modeled on the historical character of Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, whose memory Dixon hated with a special contempt (especially because, as was true, Stephens had a relationship with an African American woman). At the end, naturally, the day is saved by the hooded knights of the south riding to the rescue. He was paralyzed with fear with the thought of black political equality - but it was all tied into his fears of black social equality. Southern white men were not the villain here, it was the White northerners who came down after the war and tried to profit off the defeated South and sell some false narrative about equality. Reconstruction’s attempt to give Blacks the vote attempt had proved a disaster and must never be allowed again, he held. Because here’s the thing, - this was Dixon’s reasoning, which he stated explicitly. If you have to ask a black man for his vote as a political equal, then as a democratic courtesy, you have to invite him to your dinner table as a social equal. And if you invite him to your dinner table, then you can’t be surprised if he pays court to your sister. And that, that, he thought . .That can never happen. That must not happen. He felt he had to warn the nation.

When this novel, published in 1905, became a bestseller too, well, now Dixon felt empowered to return to his first love, the theater. Being the sort of person that he was, Dixon took a quick correspondence course in “How To Write a Play,” and then, on the basis of that, in six weeks Dixon had adapted his novel The Clansman into a melodrama that called for a huge company, a true Spectacular. He was especially pleased with his plans for the new lighting effects and supposedly ‘scientific’ scenes the play called for - employing mesmerism and microscopes - as well as a troop of actual horses on the stage. Drawing on his national reputation, he signed up with a well-known New York literary agency, formed his own production company, and got (here they come back again) Erlanger and Klaw to agree to book a tour of their theaters that they controlled in the American South. And to The Theatrical Syndicate, well, if a play was making money for us then it’s doing what a play is supposed to do. They weren’t really interested in the morality or the political message of it. Though it met with considerable protest, let me tell you, from Black journalists and political leaders in the South, during its run it was a big hit down there with white audiences, and it toured from Charleston to Atlanta to Raleigh to Richmond. And Thomas Dixon Jr. was so, so happy. All the dreams of his youth were now redeemed! As he gleefully wrote:

“When the success of this play was assured beyond a doubt on the first night, the supreme consciousness of power over an audience was something I had never experienced before. For fifteen years I have lectured - often to crowds of 5000 people. I know the feeling of an orator who holds an audience breathless on every word, and yet it was nothing compared to the joy of watching those people in the theatre live with me in laughter and tears, in hisses and cheers, the scenes of my play. I dreamed myself a musician, the fifty actors on the stage the living strings of a great harp which throbbed in unison with my own pulse-beat as I swept the souls of my listeners.”

Next, Dixon planned, he knew he had to bring it to the cities of the north, too, New York, Boston, Syracuse . . . and Philadelphia.

[“Drama is Conflict” END THEME]

Okay. Whew. Well, once again I’m going to leave it there and come back to the rest of this story in a final episode. 

Let me tell you something though - it’s almost Christmas time, and I’m not sure I can get myself into the proper holiday mood if I have to keep all these books about Thomas Dixon Jr. around the house. So, here is my plan: in two weeks time I’m going to give you a special Holiday Episode that will come out on the Friday between Christmas and New Years. This will be a selection of some short and more charming stories dealing with Philly’s theater history, just for a bit of relaxation and a change of pace.

And then in January I’ll return with the exciting conclusion of “The Fight Against the Clansman.” When we’re done with that, in the coming year we will delve right back into the maelstrom, and I’ve got a lot of stories of disputes, fights, riots, and lawsuits in Philly Theater history, just like before. 

But, for right now, let’s take a break. It’s been quite a year. Let’s be good to each other. Please accept my best wishes to you and for a joyous and peaceful time for you and those you love. 

I’m Peter Schmitz, and our music and sound engineering are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thank you, once again, for your kind attention, please check out our social media feeds on Facebook and Instagram, and maybe consider sending a little love and financial support our way on Patreon, a lovely holiday gift, where there are all sorts of extra benefits waiting for you, if you do. Please visit our website www.aithpodcast.com for additional images and blog posts, and information and to listen to earlier episodes, if you need to, and then like us and subscribe to our feed on whatever podcasting platform you are using right . And leave a review! That would be so helpful, and that would be a wonderful gift as well.

Most of all, please join us again in a few weeks time, when we continue this Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

[AITH END THEME]