Zangwill's 'The Melting Pot' Plays Chicago

Chicago "is the great social alembic of this republic, the grand consolidator of diversity into unity. To what may be generously called the refined and semi-refined product of this distillation, the city holds alluring prizes of American citizenship." - Loren H.B. Knox, "Impressions from Chicago Faces" "What is the mistake in this notion that New York, Chicago, and other principal American cities are racial and national smelting plants?" - Henry Pratt Fairchild, The Melting-Pot Mistake Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot opened in Washington, D.C. on 5 October 1908. As the final curtain came down that Monday night, Theodore Roosevelt leaned over his box and shouted to Zangwill: "That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that's a great play" (qtd. in Leftwich 252). The president's words were ready-made for the hands of the play's promoters and blurb-meisters; his endorsement came to head countless ads and reviews. But, if his words and the week-long Washington tryout launched the play's publicity, they did not initiate the impending arguments over the existence of "the melting pot." That debate soon followed, taking on a contagious power far outside Washington's Columbia Theater. During the subsequent weeks and months of the play's extended run in Chicago, throughout the fall and winter of 1908 and 1909, the city's drama critics, social reformers, religious leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary theater-goers debated what "the melting pot" was - and sought to say if it was anything more than Zangwill's fanciful invention. The story of The Melting Pot in Chicago remains a largely untold one, despite much recent and important scholarship on the play and the ideas of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity that it is said to have framed. Werner Sollors could once charge that "since the beginning of the twentieth century," debates about "American ethnic interaction" have been "conducted in the terms of a rarely read, yet universally invoked play" (66). Thanks to his scholarship on the rhetoric of ethnicity, thanks to Philip Gleason's Speaking of Diversity and Arthur Mann's The One and the Many, the charge that Zangwill's play is "rarely read" seems bound to lose much of its original force and truth. If the play is unlikely, anytime soon, to be revived on Broadway, given such scholarly labors it most certainly will be read and studied closely. What continues to escape the net of scholarship is the debate over "the melting pot" generated by the play's promotion, performance, and reception during its five month run in Chicago. Leibler & Co., the New York "managers," succeeded in soliciting endorsements from the city's reform clergy, civic leaders, and certain Chicago writers: Hamlin Garland, Jane Addams, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, and Clarence Darrow among them. Such endorsements, however disparate, were packaged in ads under banner headings that suggested the play spoke in a single, powerful, uplifting voice. In a bid to stir profit-making controversies, Leibler & Co. also compressed and printed the most provocative lines of endorsement as catch slogans. As one of their regular Tribune ads grandly stated, this was "Zangwill's Great Play on the Amalgamation of the Races," "a worthy evangelist to the growth of national pride" (17 January 1909: II, 2). Taken together, the reviews, endorsements, and sloganeering lead to no single or unified interpretation, but they do outline some of the early, critical conflicts over "the melting pot." The play's multiple expressions of the "melting pot" - with trailing clouds of patriotic rhetoric, poly-ethnic sentiments, and sacred imagery - have made for a grab bag of contradictory readings and responses. Recognizing this, Philip Gleason once titled a study of the symbol and the reflexive terminology of ethnicity "The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?" Werner Sollors, even while asserting the central importance of the play to "discussions of American ethnic interaction," denounced Zangwill's "vague and self-conscious literary symbolism" (66). …