THROWING A PARTY

 

I think of him as one of those self-made right-wing technocrats, who used his fortune to finance an ultra-conservative agenda - a Ross Perot or the Koch brothers. In this case the technology was the telegraph, and the agenda was Anti-Catholicism.  Samuel Finley Breese Morse (above) learned on his father's knee to fear the 'Bavarian Illuminati' from his Protestant father's Sunday sermons. 

As an adult Samuel proselytized that the Roman Catholic Church was flooding America with Irish and German Catholic immigrants to establish a new Vatican City in the Mississippi valley. Wrote Morse, “Surely American Protestants...(will) discover...the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is...a political as well as a religious system; that...differs totally...from all other forms of religion in the country.” In 1836 Morse ran for Mayor of New York City. He lost big. But the poison he was peddling (and funding) would take root.

It sprouted into full flower in the congressional elections of 1854, catching on “like measles”, according to one Democrat. The organization was officially known as “The American Party”, but commonly refereed to as the Know Nothings, because its members were coached to respond to all questions by admitting only, “I don't know”, and because, frankly, in the eyes of their critics, the members didn't seem to be very bright. 

Membership was limited to white males of proven English heritage, and usually evangelical Protestants,. And although most of the new candidates had never been active in politics or held public office before,  they won 61 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. They elected a governor and all the other posts open that year in Massachusetts and Maine. 

They controlled the state legislatures in Pennsylvania and most of New England. They gained advantage in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Tennessee by taking no position on slavery. This hurt them in the deep south, as did violence and murders in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Columbus, Cincinnati and New Orleans. Still, the Know Nothings looked certain to capture the White House in 1856. And then came Bloody Monday in Louisville, Kentucky.

They held three elections in Louisville in 1855. On April 7^th, voters threw out the incumbent mayor, who had converted to Catholicism, and elected a Know Nothing replacement and a majority on the city council. They followed this a month later by electing a Know Nothing majority of county court judges. Then the school board fired every Catholic teacher, save one. The Know Nothings were feeling both confident and paranoid - it was the nature of the party and the movement. 

Now another Know Nothing, Charles Morehead (above), was favored to win the governorship of Kentucky on yet another election, Monday August 6^th. On the night before, 1,500 Know Nothings staged a torch light march through Catholic neighborhoods, warning them “to keep their elbows in” come morning.

Maybe no one other than Reuben Thomas Durrett (above) could have made the nation face the truth about the Know Nothings. Others wrote about it, but they lacked his resume. R.T., as he preferred to be known, was a defense attorney, and familiar with arguing unpopular causes. He was “intellectually and physically...a magnificent man.” More than that he was a poet, and a lover of truth and history. He had a 50,000 volume personal library. And 300 years earlier, his French Protestant ancestors had barely escaped the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France. So when the political spin machine tried to smother every honest voice in Louisville, it was R.T. who validated the reality. “To my mind,” he wrote, “the whole secret of the success of this disgraceful affair was...that the Know Nothing sympathizers were prepared and armed for the conflict...”

According to R.T., the thugs, hired as “special police”, formed a gauntlet in front of the polls. If a would-be voter were an immigrant from Germany or Ireland he was presumed to be Catholic, and was “... ordered by one of the bullies to leave...” And if he refused, “...he was attacked by the whole mob, severely beaten and driven away. If the man showed fight, his life was in great danger. “ 

Recently ousted Mayor James Speed watched the beatings on the courthouse lawn from eight in the morning until six. “It was not fighting man to man, but as many as could fall upon a single Irishman or German and beat him with sticks or short clubs...” The clubs were specially made with lead weights in their tips, and mass produced. In the afternoon Speed was told 200 shotgun wielding “Germans” had captured a polling place. Speed knew this to be a fantasy and said so. But the informant, a judge, “replied with warmth showing that he believed it to be true.” About four in the afternoon, things went from bad to worse.

Two Catholic activists, Theodore Rhodes and David Doughtery were warning everyone in their east side neighborhood to stay off Main Street. They stopped at Micheal O'Connor's grocery store, at the corner of 10^th street and warned him to close. As they came out of the store a man ran up to them. Basil Rhodes, Theodore's father, who was a block away, saw the man shoot his son dead. The gun shot drew Know Nothings from all directions, and it quickly became common knowledge that the reverse was true, that a Catholic had killed a Know Nothing. What followed was wholesale murder.

The worst of it was Quinn's Row, a block of 12 three story row houses along Main between 11^th and 12^th streets. Around eight that evening a Know Nothing mob set fire to a ground floor corner grocery run by a family named Long. Recorded a Catholic newspaper, “Seeking to escape...the wretched inhabitants reached the street only to meet death in another form. As soon as one appeared at a door he was fired at...” Mr. Long and two of his sons died that night, as did several of the residents of the upper floor apartments. “A number were taken off badly wounded, and others...returned to the burning houses, preferring rather to be burned than to meet the infuriated mob. One man escaped in woman’s clothes, was detected and shot. Another, who came out covered with a blanket, and, leaning on the arm of his wife, was torn away, and deliberately shot.”

While the first building was still raging, the feed store next door and its apartments went up, followed by a vacant house, then a tobacconist. Noted the newspaper, “How many of these miserable people thus caged in their own houses were burned alive there can be no computation.... Two men were hanged from their banisters of their own homes and also consumed in the flames.” In the last structure on the street, a rooming house, Patrick Quinn, who owned the entire block, was driven outside like the others. Recognized because of his investments around the city (and his brother who was a priest) , he was singled out, beaten to death, and his corpse was thrown back into the fire.

The official version said that 22 people had been killed in the entire city on Bloody Monday It is much more likely that the number was at least 100. The death toll would have been higher but in the German district one of the first buildings looted was Armbruster's brewery. The rioters got so drunk they could only satisfy themselves with torching the building before passing out. 

The new Know Nothing Mayor, John Barbee, managed to save two Catholic Churches from the rioters, but lost on others. But no one was ever prosecuted for the murders, the beatings or the arson. In response the despised immigrants voted with their feet. Ten thousand left Louisville over the next few months, almost 25% of the cities' population. 

In the city left behind businesses failed, unemployment soared and city coffers dried up. Charles Morehead was easily elected governor. but it was the classic tale of “be careful what you wish for”.

Most of the Irish moved to Chicago. Typical was ex-Mayor Speed, who became active in Republican Party politics and served in the Lincoln administration. The Germans mostly moved to St. Louis and Milwaukee, and some to Kansas City, Kansas – ensuring that state would remain in the Union come the Civil War. It was that war which put the entire Know Nothing movement into perspective.

The Civil War made the Know Nothing agenda obsolete. Immigration was the great enemy in the eyes of Samuel Morse. But the actual cause of the pain many were feeling was the industrial revolution, and the refusal of one half of the nation to recognize mechanization had made human slavery economically and morally obsolete. 

The mathematician Alfred Whitehead observed, “The major advances in civilization....all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” And in his book “War and Peace in the Global Village” Marshall McLuhan explains why that is so. “When one has been hurt by a new technology, when the private person or corporate body finds its entire identity endangered...it lashes back in a fury of self-defense...But... the symptom against which we lash out may be caused by something about which we know nothing.” McLuhan calls that symptom “Phantom Pain”, and compares it to the agony amputees report they feel in missing limbs.

Although America has institutionalized such cultural revolutions, and has succeeded by taking advantage of them in the past, that does not make our politics, and did not make the politics of our ancestors, any easier to live with. Politics are never a solution. Politics are only another symptom.

- 30 - 

THE NIGHT I PLAYED MACBETH

 

"…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Macbeth; Act V, scene v

I doubt there has ever been a good reason for a riot. But of all the stupid reasons to have one, the stupidest, the dumbest, has to be because you found an actor’s rendition of Macbeth was “too English”.

"I bear a charmed life".

Macbeth: Act V, scene viii 

This particular stupidity began in 1836 with a then 20 year old athletic rock-headed ego maniac from Philadelphia named Edwin Forrest (above). He was a sort of full-back version of the Michael Flatley, “Lord of the Dance”.  Humbly, Mr. Forrest described himself as “…a Hercules.” 

As an actor, “…baring his well-oiled chest and brawny thighs…” Forrest milked every ounce of histrionics out of “Henry V” and every pound of pathos out of “King Lear”, bounding about the stage to liven up the "slow" parts of Shakespeare.  By the time he was twenty, Forrest was earning $200 at day (today’s equivalent would be $4,000). 

Said a latter biographer, "He relished the positive attention he received... He enjoyed giving spontaneous soliloquys to young women...When speaking in or about plays...Edwin exuded confidence. Off stage, however, he struggled to find his place.  He was an uneducated man and self-conscience about his impoverished background and lack of refinement."  In spite of this handicap, Forrest decided to conquer the London stage, and parenthetically to study at the feet of the giants of Victorian Shakespearean over- actors, such as Edward Kean (below).

“If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak”

Macbeth; Act I, scene iii

Forrest (above) was a minor hit in London playing supporting roles. While in town he wined and dinned the other giants of the English stage, Charles Kemble and William Charles Macready, and paid them homage.

And as a memento of his trip, Forrest took home an English wife, the lovely and wise 19 year old Catherine Norton Sinclair (above).

Forrest's return to America was greeted with packed houses and raves by most reviewers. There were some voices of dissent, such as William Winter, who wrote for the New York Tribune that Forrest behaved on stage like a maddened animal “bewildered by a grain of genius”.

But such discontent was drowned out in the applause from Boston to Denver. American audiences liked their actors larger than life in those days, and Forrest was just about as large as he could get. In fact, everything would have been perfect but for two small details. 

First, Edwin could not resist sharing himself with every woman who swooned at his manly thighs (the vast numbers of whom Catherine had a little trouble dealing with), and second, Edwin decided to make a triumphal return tour of England in 1845

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair".

Macbeth: Act I, scene i. 

Forrest opened at the Royal Princess’s Theatre in London (above), where he billed himself as “The Great American Shakespearean Actor”. That was his first mistake. Importing Shakespearean actors to England is like bringing coals to Newcastle; they don’t really need any more. When Forrest performed his Macbeth, the audience had the audacity to “boo”. Forrest then made his second mistake when he decided that the negative reaction was a conspiracy hatched by William Macready.

"What 's done is done"

Macbeth: Act III scene iii

Oddly enough Macready (above, as Hamlet) respected Forrest, even though their acting styles were diametrically opposed. Macready even thought of them as friends. Which made Macready all the more shocked when one night, during his “to be or not to be” speech in Edinburg, he discovered that the foulmouthed baboon hissing at him from a private box adjacent to the stage was none other than his erstwhile friend, Edwin Forrest. 

Forrest even wrote to the “London Times” to justify his gauche behavior as every 'audience members’ right to critique a performer on the spot'. That lit up the press from Leadville, Colorado to Inverness, Scotland. Every yahoo had an opinion as to who was the more objectionable, the vulgar American, or the stuck up Limey.

“Let not light see my black and deep desires”

Macbeth; Act I scene iv

In 1849, when Macready (above), “The Eminent Tragedian”, began what he intended as his farewell tour of America, he found that Forest was sowing salt on his plantings.  At every major city he played, from New Orleans to Cleveland, Forest was headlining in another local theatre, and performing the exact same plays.

When Macready opened on 7  May in “Macbeth” at the Astor Place Opera House (above) in Manhattan, Forrest was opening in “Macbeth” at another theatre just a mile away. That first night, the instant Macready stepped from the wings,  it was, in the words of a modern critic, “Groundlings, garb your tomatoes!” The audience began to boo, and then to throw things. After a chair just missed beheading Macready, he took a quick bow and ran for the wings.

"...When the battle 's lost and won".

Macbeth: Act I, Scene i 

If the troubles had ended there it would have been a mere footnote in theatrical history. But the next morning Washington Irving (above)....

....and Herman Melville (above) stuck their gigantic egos into the mess. They circulated and published a petition signed by 47 ‘distinguished’ New Yorkers begging Macready to stay for just one more performance. Against his own better judgment, and facing lawsuits if he quit early, Macready (below) agreed to one more show.

“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me.”

Macbeth; Act I scene iii

Overnight handbills blossomed on every lamppost in the Bowery; “Workingmen! Shall Americans or English rule this city?” The question was posed by something called “The American Committee”, obviously not a bulwark of artistic objectivity. But I still wonder who really paid for those posters? 

Sensing disaster coming, the city fathers ordered up 325 policemen (above), and called up 200 members of the 7th regiment, New York Volunteers, to guard the Opera House. And they needed them.

On Thursday, 10 May, 1849,  the troublemakers were kept out of the theatre, but perhaps 10,000 future New York Yankee fans gathered across Astor Place hurling first insults at the cops, and then moving on to rocks and bricks. Eventually the shower of stone shattered the plywood that protected the theatre’s windows and audience members inside were dodging missiles bouncing between their seats.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

Macbeth; Act II, scene i

Then the crowd charged the cops. The cops beat them back: twice. A handful of “Bowery Boys” tried to set the Opera House on fire. And the next time the crowd charged the 200 members of the 7th let loose a volley of musket fire. 

When the smoke cleared, some 22 to 30 people were dead and more than 100 wounded, including some police officers. As at Kent State a century and a half later, many of those shot were innocent bystanders. But enough of the troublemakers had been scared enough to leave Astor Place. The Shakespeare Riot was over.  

Safely back in England, poor Macready would look back at America and write a friend, “What miserably stolid wretches, and what a country, where such things can be done!!!” 

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”
Macbeth Act V, Scene i.

It would be comforting to say that Edwin Forrest suffered for his egomaniacal gambling with other people’s lives. But he didn’t. He just got more famous and more popular, including with the ladies.

Poor Catherine (above) had already suffered through four childbirths by now, all of them still born. And married to a workaholic egomaniac lothario, she sought comfort where ever she could find it. 

She found with the young actor George W. Jamieson (above) -  famed for his appearances as Brutus in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar ".  Unfortunately Edwin came home one afternoon to find Catherine on her knees cradled between George's thighs. She insisted he was merely giving her a  amateur phrenology exam, reading the bumps on her head. With his hands. And amazingly, Edmund bought that explanation. For awhile.  Then, in 1850, Edwin wised up and sued Catherine for divorce, charging her with adultery.

Yes, the biggest horn dog in America was claiming his English wife had been unfaithful to him. She probably had, but that just made the details that much more delightful.   The press - on both sides of the Atlantic - published every nasty innuendo and allegation, including Edmund's repeated outbursts in open court. 

According to one historian,  "He cursed and yelled at the judge and Catherine’s lawyer whenever the subject of his (own) infidelity was raised.  Edwin was particularly enraged when the court was made aware of the affair he’d had with actress Josephine Cliften, a brawny, athlete woman with, in one reporter’s account, “a bust finely developed, a physiognomy indicative of great firmness of character...of a masculine turn.”  

Josephine (above) was a brilliant actress and a great beauty,  but so well known as a coquette and a sexual companion of Edwin's that their affair became Catherine's primary evidence of Edwin's  unfaithfulness even though Josephine had died three years earlier.      

In the end, Justice Thomas J. Oakley awarded Catherine her freedom and ordered Edwin Forrest to pay her $3,750 (the equivalent of $92,000 today) every year for the rest of her life. It doesn’t appear as if Edwin really missed the money because he never paid it.  Not a dime.

True to his character, Edwin kept his fortune simply by avoiding New York State.  And when he died in 1876, alone,  in his Philadelphia mansion, most of his estate went to Catherine because of unpaid alimony. At least she outlived the old jerk.

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

Macbeth: Act I, scene iv. 

It all brings to mind that 1922 William Hargreaves, English music hall ditty,   “I acted so tragic, the house rose like magic, The audience yelled, "You're sublime". They made me a present of the Mornington Crescent. They threw it a brick at a time. Some one threw a fender which caught me a bender. I hoisted a white flag and tried to surrender.  They jeered me. They queered me. And half of them stoned me to death. They threw nuts and sultanas, fired eggs and bananas, the night I appeared as Macbeth.”

- 30 –