The Development of American Identity Defined by the Outsider in the American

Musical Theatre

This paper examines the American musical theatre as a lens through which an

image of American identity has been projected. This American identity, created by

immigrants, outsiders, who could then enter the society through that projected image, is

explored from the early American musicals of the latter 19th century through the second

half of the 20th century.

The literature and traditions of the American musical theatre, born at the moment

when America was beginning to develop a self-image on a global scale, and following

great waves of European immigration, are reflective of the notion of American identity.

This identity operates on personal, communal and global levels simultaneously.

American identity, particularly as seen in “the American dream,” is imprinted on the

evolving mythos of the American musical theatre.

Historically considered a cultural melting pot, a nation continually reconfigured

by shifting waves of immigrants, American identity has been in a constant state of

refinement and redefinition. This shifting national identity becomes blazingly clear in a

study of America’s popular culture, making the literature of the American musical theatre

fertile ground for examining this evolution. From its beginnings the literature of the

American musical theatre has almost exclusively been created by first- or second-

generation immigrants, outsiders who presented a created image of “American” and “the

American dream” to which they themselves aspired.

Stories of inclusion/assimilation and exclusion/expulsion are encoded throughout

19th and 20th century American musicals. Through the 1910s, German-American and

Irish-American immigrants held sway in the American musical theatre. Later musicals

grappled with Jewish American assimilation, as most great American musical theatre

figures were first or second-generation Jewish immigrants seeking their place in

American society. While the German and Irish-Americans sought assimilation by

exploiting ethnic stereotypes of themselves, Jewish musical theatre creators presented

mythic tropes of assimilation which rarely dealt explicitly with Jewish characters–

implying Jewish-American assimilation into mainstream American life allegorically.

Late 19th century popular American entertainments exploited what today we

would consider abhorrent racial and ethnic stereotypes. In minstrel shows white men

made grotesque mockery of African-Americans. On vaudeville and legitimate stages,

American immigrants portrayed grotesque stereotypes of their ethnic progenitors. These

years saw two teams and two individuals reign on the New York stage: the Irish-

American team of Edward “Ned” Harrigan and Tony Hart dominated the American

musical stage with their knockabout musical comedies from 1873 to 1884, the German-

American star Joseph Emmet starred in sentimental musical plays from for twenty years

beginning in 1871, the German-American team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields reigned in

the American musical from 1885 until 1904 and “The Man Who Owned Broadway,”

Irish-American George M. Cohan was the leading American musical attraction from

1904 until 1920. In those 16 years, Cohan wrote book, music and lyrics, directed, co-

produced and starred in over 50 musicals, plays and revues.

By the 1870s, a distinctly American identity had started to take shape, begun by

American writers like Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Herman Melville and Mark Twain who had starting in the 1820s. During this time, the

shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy saw the rise in city populations, creating

crowded cities and a ready market for American stage entertainments with American

characters set in American locales. It was at this point that the immigrant artists rose to

fill the need for popular entertainments, exploiting the nascent American identity.

From 1873 to 1884 Irish-American’s Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart’s successful

musical farces played almost continuously. The Mulligan Guard Picnic, The Mulligan

Guards Ball, The Mulligan Guards Chowder, The Mulligan Guards Christmas, The

Mulligan Guards Surprise, The Mulligan Guards Nominee, The Mulligans Silver

Wedding, The Major, Squatter Sovereignty, Mordecai Lyons, McSorley’s Inflation, The

Muddy Day, Cordelia’s Aspirations, Dan’s Tribulations, Investigation, McAllister’s

Legacy, Are You Insured? and The Leather Patch—these eighteen shows set the standard

for American musical farce. The titles of their musicals and popular songs like “Paddy

Duffy’s Cart,” “Maggie Murphy’s Home” and “The Widow Nolan’s Goat” reveal that

their work was firmly rooted in their Irish heritage. Harrigan and Hart’s characters were

drawn from a vast array of ethnic and racial stereotypes, all from the kinds of lower class

neighborhoods in which they both grew up, Harrigan in New York’s Five Points

neighborhood and Hart outside of Boston.

At the time each neighborhood in New York, and many other cities, had its own

private militia, which mostly acted as social clubs, offering men the chance to get out of

the house and drink. Harrigan and Hart satirized these organizations in their ten
17 April 2020 4 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

Mulligan Guard musicals, exploiting the stereotype of the drunken Irishman – and every

other ethnic type found in the lower class neighborhoods using ethnic dialects,

malapropisms. Dialogue and lyrics were in the vernacular and filled with ethnic slang

and poor grammar. Harrigan and Hart played all principal roles, male and female, black

and white. Their shows were bawdy, brawling and energetic, “knockdown and slap-

bang” and “all jumbled up together,”i according to biographer, E.J. Kahn, Jr.; they were

rowdy and physical. Here is the plot of The Mulligan Guard’s Picnic (1878):

… a bad day in Mulligan’s (Harrigan) life. Not only does the tailor
shorten Dan’s trousers to the point of absurdity, but the picnic Dan has
planned is disrupted by the claims of a Negro society to the picnic grounds
and by a wild fight between Gustavus Lochmuller and Tommy Fagan …
assuming Lochmuller dead because he has mysteriously disappeared,
Tommy has announced he will court his ‘widow.’ A hasty trial is held at
Squire Cohog’s Grocery and Court, where sassy, black Rebecca Allup
(Hart) provides a hilariously hostile witness.ii

More than anything else, the musicals of Harrigan and Hart exploited their Irish-

ness as an essential element of their Irish-American identities.

The Germans, the Italians, the Negroes, and particularly the Irish who inhabited
Gotham’s Lower East Side were [Harrigan’s] special subjects, […]. His
characters were grocerymen, butchers, barbers, dock workers, “river rats,”
undertakers, pawnbrokers, tailors and an assortment of loveable bums and waifs.
Their locales were never far removed from the Five Points, a tenement area […]
commonly known as the vilest place in town.iii
James H. Dormon asserts, “Harrigan’s intention from the outset [was] to depict

the ethnic life of the Lower East Side in all its diversity. Evocation of the lives,

characters and circumstances of [Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Chinese and African-

American] immigrant/ethnic populations constitutes the main body of Harrigan’s thirty-

nine extant full-length plays.”iv In an 1889 interview, Harrigan stated, “I use types and

never individuals. […] The speech or dialect, the personal make-up, the vices and

virtues, habits and customs must be equally accurate.”v Dorman claims, “If the entire
17 April 2020 5 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

immigrant spectrum was represented in Harrigan’s ethnic world, his Irish characters

dominated in the mosaic. As Harrigan’s character Bernard O’Reagan explains to the

green newcomer Paddy Kelso in speaking of the Lower East Side in The O’Reagans,

“The Italians rule the south of it, the Dutch [Germans] rule the east of it. And the Irish

rule the whole of it,’ to which Paddy replies “That plazes me.’vi”

To a contemporary reader, Harrigan’s characters read like broad stereotypes; and

yet, in 1886 Harper’s magazine proclaimed: “In certain moments the illusion is so perfect

that you lose the sense of being in the theatre; you are of that world of conventions and

traditions, and in the presence of the facts. […] He is part of the great tendency toward

the faithful representation of life which is now animating fiction.”vii Dormon concludes,

“The ethnic cultures so uproariously detailed by Harrigan were caricature cultures in and

of the minds of their creators, and evoked in the minds of their perceivers [their audience]

through what was essentially a semiotic process.”viii Dormon is right, of course, the

caricature is recognized as “realistic” by the audience because of qualities deemed to be

“essential” to the ethnic type; but by placing the ethnic type within the construct of the

entire ethnic diorama of the immigrant slums of New York’s Lower East Side, they are

given legitimacy as part of the larger American mosaic. They are thus legitimized in

their new-found “American-ness.”

Why was this Irish-American team so successful at this time? Between 1845 and

1852, about 650,000 Irish arrived in New York harbor fleeing the great potato famine.ix

They were crowded slums in New York’s lower East Side and the area around the docks.

By 1878, the time of The Mulligan Guard Picnic, Harrigan and Hart’s first big New York
17 April 2020 6 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

success, there was a substantial population of first and second generation Irish-Americans

in New York who had established themselves enough economically to afford attending

the theatre as a leisure-time activity. Harrigan and Hart were one of them, and offered

them the opportunity to see themselves, and their families and friends reflected from the

stage. They celebrated their Irish heritage and their newfound American identities.

According to musical theatre historian John Kenrick, Harrigan and Hart’s musicals

“proved extremely popular with New York's immigrant-based lower and middle classes,

who loved seeing themselves depicted on stage. Powerful politicians made a point of

showing up too, anxious to curry the favor of voters. Harrigan & Hart's plots focused on

such real-life problems as interracial tensions, uneasy romances between different

ethnicities, political corruption and gang violence, but always with enough clownish

humor to keep audiences laughing. Since every class and ethnic group was treated as fair

game nobody took offense.”x By 1885 Harrigan and Hart’s relationship soured, and they

separated; tertiary syphilis ultimately took Hart’s life in 1891. But the stage had been set,

literally and figuratively, to use the musical theatre stage as a liminal space for

Americanizing newly hyphenated American citizens – a view of the melting pot.

There were three waves of German immigration to the U.S. in the 1800s. During

the potato famine, 939,149 German men women and children reached U.S. shores. The

second wave, between 1865 and 1873 saw 1,066,333 lower-middle class Germans

entering the United States. Between1880 and 1893, 1,849,056 German citizens found

new homes in the United States. Most of these immigrants entered the United States

through New York, the Castle Garden immigration center from 1855-1890 and the Ellis

Island from 1892 to 1954; many of these immigrants settled in New York’s immigrant
17 April 2020 7 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

neighborhoods. As the Irish immigration had resulted in a middle-class audience eager to

see themselves reflected as Americans on the musical theatre stage, the waves of German

immigration created a similar audience for German characters.

There had been a series of sentimental plays with music in which a German

immigrant comes to New York and goes in search of his long-lost sister. In Joseph K.

Emmet’s Fritz, Our Cousin German (1871), Fritz arrives at Castle Garden immigration

center seeking his sister, but is set upon by con artists. Despite this, Fritz finds his sister

and wife by the end of the second act, in the third act he has become a father and an

American success, owning a mill and becoming a brave citizen despite his broken

English and malapropisms. Where Harrigan and Hart’s shows had been broad farces

filled with knockabout comedy, Emmet’s were highly sentimental, deeply emotional.

Emmet made a career of playing Fritz and spinning variations on this story in: Carl, The

Fiddler (1871), The New Fritz, Our German Cousin (1878), Fritz in England and Ireland

(1883), Fritz in Ireland (1883), Fritz Among the Gypsies (1883), Fritz, the Bohemian

(1884), Fritz in a Madhouse (1889). In 1892 Emmet’s son, J.K. Emmet, Jr. took on his

father’s role in a revival of Fritz in Ireland and finishing out with Fritz in Prosperity

(1893), Fritz in Tammany Hall (1905); but critics complained that the younger Emmet’s

Fritz was too Americanized – the funny little immigrant attaining his American-hood did

not work with an actor who was already Americanized. German audiences loved

watching the older Emmet as the slightly befuddled, deeply emotional immigrant making

his way in American in spite of his quaint vocabulary and old world manners – it was

their journey (or that of their parents) that they saw enacted as they watched Fritz making

a place for himself in America in variation after variation – year after year.
17 April 2020 8 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

German characters came to full fruition with Weber and Fields, the kings of

Broadway from 1885 to 1904, who were the pre-eminent writers, directors, stars, and

producers riding the crest of the waves of German immigration. They replaced Emmet’s

schmaltz with comic stereotypes and broad slapstick. Short and fat, Weber played the put

upon character of Mike, while tall, skinny Fields played Meyer, the bully. They

established the comic trope of the short, fat, put-upon partner and the tall, skinny, acerbic

bully. In 1870, the Castle Garden entry station cleared 118,000 German immigrants; and

by 1885 they were ready to laugh at themselves.

Mike and Meyer, the characters they played, were lovingly drawn exaggerations

of familiar German immigrant types; the more assimilated German-Americans in the

audience laughed at their naiveté and felt superior while still watching their own journey

towards assimilation. Mike and Meyer had heavy German accents and old-world

fashions. Their humor was based on mangling the English language and Fields

physically pummeling Weber. Their act was also intensely physical.

The act usually began with Fields pushing the smaller Weber onstage, with

Weber indignantly squealing, "Don't pooosh me, Meyer, don't pooosh me!" […]

In the course of their banter, one would unintentionally offend the other, with

verbal insults turning into all-out battles with punches, kicks, pratfalls, etc.xi

Weber and Fields worked together for almost thirty years, opening Weber and

Fields’ Music Hall in their last eight years together, where they producing and starring in

twelve hit musicals between 1896 and 1904. They parted company in 1904 \.

The last major Irish musical theatre force was George M. Cohan. Writer,

songwriter, producer, director, star, designer, Cohan did it all. Born into a family of
17 April 2020 9 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

touring vaudeville performers, Cohan found his stage persona early in his career in the

play Peck’s Bad Boy, in which Cohan played the scrappy kid who isn’t afraid of a fight,

if the need arises. And Cohan’s persona for life was the tough little guy who would stand

up for himself, his family and his country. Patriotism was at the heart of Cohan’s

success. Cohan replaced the comic Irish-American stereotype with the little Irish guy

who will always have your back – while Harrigan and Hart offered comic versions of

Irish-Americans and Weber and Fields of German-Americans, and Emmet offered a

sentimental journey towards acculturation, Cohan offered Irish-Americans (and other

recent immigrants) an image of a recent hyphenate to which they could aspire – the good,

decent guy, filled with the energy of his adopted homeland, and ready to come to its

defense in a heartbeat. The art of the musical theatre was the selling of a recognizable

image in a range of vehicles; and Cohan’s was always the little guy making good because

he refused to curl up and go away. Cohan’s grandparents had emigrated from Ireland

during the potato famine; originally named O’Caomhan, and upon arrival at Castle

Garden it was changed to Cohan. George made himself the all-American boy, writing

such hits as “Over There,” “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Give My Regards to

Broadway” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” Cohan’s story is the plucky little Irish guy

becoming an immigrant success story; the immigrant becomes American before our eyes.

By the mid 1910s the time of the great European-Jewish-American writers and

stars was just beginning. Not coincidentally, concurrent with this shift, the way in which

the musical theatre was used to tell the story of assimilation shifted. Irish-Americans and

German-Americans had created an American world onstage around their stereotypical

characters. For the Jewish writers, however, narrative becomes much more important
17 April 2020 10 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

and is used allegorically, encoded with ritual enactments of assimilation while only rarely

referencing Jewish people, or the Jewish community directly.

Starting with Irving Berlin’s first song craze in 1911 with “Alexander’s Ragtime

Band,” and his first successful Broadway musical, 1914’s Watch Your Step, most major

contributors to the literature of the American musical theatre through much of the 20th

century were first, second or third generation Eastern European Jewish immigrants:

Berlin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, the Gershwins,

Sigmund Romberg, Kurt Weill, and so many more. Cole Porter, the one exception, in “a

striking and apparently verified anecdote, after the failure of several early shows, telling a

friend that, from then on, he was going to write ‘Jewish tunes’ – a remark made

admiringly rather than sarcastically.”xii At this point Porter began writing modal music,

that switches back and froth between major and minor keys and reflected more influence

from khlezmer and other Jewish musical forms; and with that switch came Porter’s

successes. But equally important, Porter, being a homosexual in the 1920s was as much

an outsider as his Jewish contemporaries, seeking a definition of American and the

American Dream into which he could fit. It makes sense that, as an outsider he would

also write an encoded allegorical search for an American that could embrace him.

There is danger in ascribing any particular motivation or overriding agenda to any

group of artists based on race, ethnicity or religion. Mark Lawson’s arguments in his

article, “How Jewish Artists Built Broadway,” include, “that the artist may have a broad

variety of themes, may have been born but then grown out of the faith, and,” most

importantly, and dangerously, “that the fingers pointing out the ethnic identification may

not always be friendly.” However, central to Jewish dialog, and common to many great
17 April 2020 11 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

Jewish-American artists, religious figures and philosophers of the time is the question of

assimilation and finding (or creating) a peaceful and inclusive home. Whether this was

the agenda of individual Jewish-American artists, it cannot help but to be part of the

fabric surrounding their work.

The use of the musical theatre as a mechanism of assimilation by Jewish

immigrants has been the subject of several important books and papers recently. Andrea

Most, in her book Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, examines the

early book Broadway musicals in terms of the enacted ritual of the alien, the outcast,

becoming Americanized by the musical’s end. Most postulates that the reason this theme

is so consistently addressed in the musical theatre, is that musicals differ from plays and

operas (and other non-performative art forms) in their transitioning of delivery modalities

from spoken scene to song. In the moment of transition from speech to song the actor,

according to Most, “gives birth to a new self. As the music swells, the actor drawing in

breath is pregnant indeed. Each song offers the performer the opportunity to create

somebody new, somebody different from the character in the dialogue scenes. The

collective thrill the audience experiences is the joy of watching not just a character but

also an actor reinvent him or herself. … In the musical comedy, this moment of

alteration, of self-fashioning, [leads to] an experience of, and a dramatization of

assimilation.”xiii Many of these shows do not feature Jewish characters, but in Most’s

terms outsiders who stand in for the American Jew in the enacted ritual of assimilation.

Stuart J. Hecht in Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation and the American

Musical offers: “From the 1910s on, America’s Broadway musical was developed

primarily by Jews. Reflecting their own adjustments to American life, and that of their
17 April 2020 12 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

increasingly Jewish audience, these artists shaped the musical into a form that illustrated

their concerns, promoted their values, and, above all, provided a setting for the ongoing

discussion of how outsiders might gain access to America and its “dream” of acceptance

and success.”xiv

Up until 1943 when Oklahoma! shifted the paradigm, almost all musicals

employed their librettos differently than we are used to today. The preponderance of

these musicals featured a leading character who was an outcast of some sorts who

ultimately becomes a beloved member of the society by the musical’s end. Sometimes it

was the wise-cracking outcast, as in the shows featuring stars like Eddie Cantor, the

Cinderella musicals, which featured a plucky immigrant girl becoming successful and

getting a rich husband by the end of the musical, the college musicals which frequently

told the story of the “nerd” coming in to save the day and win “the big game,” becoming

beloved and included in the process. Although there was nothing in most of these

musicals about Jewish assimilation, the question had to have informed the creators of

these musicals.

With Oklahoma! the scope of the American musical theatre shifted; while the

musical play and musical drama supplanted the musical comedy of the 1920s and 1930s,

the story of assimilation and inclusion versus exclusion remained central to the American

musical. Oklahoma!s story of integrating farmers and cowmen to create a singular new

state had to expel the one member of the society who couldn’t effectively exist within the

union, the farmhand Jud Fry. In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, Julie Jordan and

her daughter Louise are the outsiders, excluded from “good” society because of Billy’s

death while committing a robbery, but Billy is finally able to offer Julie and Louise
17 April 2020 13 Dr. Nathan Hurwitz

redemption and enable them to become part of the society in the final chorus of “You’ll

Never Walk Alone.” Annie Get Your Gun, Brigadoon, Guys and Dolls, Finian’s

Rainbow, Hello Dolly, Mame, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, almost

all the great musicals from this period play out the same allegory over and over in

different forms.

By the mid 1960s great social upheavals where happening across the board.

Battles were being fought for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. The

Vietnamese anti-war sentiment was fueling protests by the Hippie movement and the

sexual revolution sparked by the development of “the pill” was changing gender

relationships in substantive ways. All of this found its way onto the stage of the

American musical theatre; being a popular cultural artifact it reflected the zeitgeist.

While the preponderance of the musical theatre practitioners continued to be Jewish, the

question of inclusion versus exclusion seemed to resonate on an even more universal

level than before with the assimilation of so many different groups at stake.

At the beginning of the 21st century and beyond, this question of

assimilation remains a valid prism through which to examine the musical theatre.

There is a trend of musicals going back to a more direct approach to this issue,

musicals like Memphis and Hairspray, which deal with the question of racial

inclusion, Wicked and Matilda, which deal with the feelings of not being loved or

understood enough common to every adolescent girl, if, in fact, not every

adolescent of either gender. The assimilation of central gay, lesbian and

transgender characters has also become more prevalent in this century. What

group is going to replace the Irish-Americans, German-Americans and Jewish-

Americans in using the American musical theatre as a place to seek assimilation –

it is difficult to predict; time will tell.

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i
E.J. Kahn, Jr., The Merry Partners: The Age and Stage of Harrigan and Hart, New York, NY:
Random House, 1955, pp. 27-72
ii
Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 43-44.
iii
Richard Moody, ed. Dramas from the American Theatre 1762-1909. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1966. p. 535.
iv
James H. Dormon, American Studies, “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind: The Harrigan-Hart Mosaic,”
volume 33, no. 2, fall, 1992, pp. 22-24.
v
Harper’s Weekly, “Mr. Edward Harrigan Speaks,” in “American Playwrights on the American
Drama,” vol. 33, 2 February 1889, p. 97.
vi
Edward “Ned” Harrigan, The O’Reagans, I, I, 13.
vii
Harper’s Weekly, “Mr. Edward Harrigan Speaks,” in “American Playwrights on the American
Drama,” vol. 33, 2 February, 1889, p. 97
viii
James H. Dormon, American Studies, “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind: The Harrigan-Hart Mosaic,”
volume 33, no. 2, fall, 1992, p. 36.
ix
Anon., Historyplace.com, History Place, “Irish Potato Famine: Gone to America,” accessed online
at http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/america.htm, accessed on 2, June 2015
x
John Kenrick, Musicals 101: The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, Film and Television,
“History of the Musical Stage: 1879-1890: The First Musical Comedies,” accessed online at
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xi
Ibid, accessed on 2 June, 2015.
xii
Mark Lawson, The Guardian, “How Jewish Artists Built Broadway,” 20, November 2013.
Accessed online at http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/nov/20/how-jewish-artists-built-
broadway-musical, accessed on 10, June 2015.
xiii
Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004, p. 10.
xiv
Stuart J. Hecht, Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical, New York,
NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 1.