Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890–1930 by M. Alison Kibler (review)

From the time of Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, 1999), Kibler has contributed greatly to our understanding of American popular and mass cultures. The distinction between “popular” and “mass” as modifiers is worth preserving, as often objectionable live performance in the early twentieth century—ethnic-based melodrama, the appearance of “Paddy” and “Hebrew” comics on the variety stage, and the residual attractions of black-face minstrelcy—found a keen competitor in an emergent cinema.

The first chapter of Censoring Racial Ridicule describes responses to the minstrel show and musical-comedy “melee,” which “featured different races together in rollicking comic scenes that often erupted into fights on stage” (21). Other potentially incendiary cultural forms also receive attention—the “legitimate” theatre, for example, including J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, the premiere of which incited rioting in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1907 and elicited a similar response from American audiences a few years later, and the less-accomplished theatrical version of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905). In the second half of Censoring Racial Ridicule, efforts to restrain an ethnically insensitive mass culture—D. W. Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation (1915); silent-film adaptations of The Merchant of Venice in 1914, 1916, and 1923; and even nickelodeon features—seize the limelight from these earlier texts. Some of the book’s most incisive moments occur when Kibler pauses to read scenes in McFadden’s Row of Flats (1896), a melodrama adapted from a widely read comic strip, juxtaposing them with such vaudeville performances as James and John Russell’s “The Irish Servant Girls” (1904). The result is a portrait of a raucous stage Irishwoman—manly, promiscuous, and often inebriated—vastly different from the chaste “colleen bawns” of Dion Boucicault’s earlier Irish plays, frequently seen in America from the 1860s into the new century.

But the grander ambitions of Kibler’s project require a more multi-foliate archive than play texts, reviews of live performance, and newspaper accounts of “ructions” (a useful Irish expression) in the theatre, punctuated by noisy disruptions and the heaving of rotten eggs stage-ward. In her introduction, Kibler states her intention of providing a “new chapter in the history of the so-called culture wars in the United States” (9). In this case, the newly expanded history includes early twentieth-century efforts to respond to, and effectively contain, what is today commonly termed “hate speech.” She argues further that the “legal terrain” of the now infamous proposed Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1976 had “direct roots in the Irish, Jewish, and African American struggles seventy-five years before the Nazis set their sights” on this northern suburb of Chicago with a significant number of Holocaust survivors in residence (17). Later chapters about Jewish and African-American censorship campaigns against insensitivity in motion pictures and about the work of Jewish censors in Chicago reveal the value of the legal archive that runs throughout the book, complementing and deepening Kibler’s summaries of more organized responses to offensive portrayals than the throwing of a tomato or an egg.

In Censoring Racial Ridicule, Kibler demonstrates the rich interpretive results of not only utilizing a broad archive of both cultural and legal texts but also of combining the analogous struggles of several ethnic groups in America to overcome prejudice. The result is an estimable new chapter indeed in the history of the great American social experiment.