In 1913, the New York Hippodrome show was called America. Recent seasons had more of a global travelogue theme — Around the World, Under Many Flags — but this one stayed within the hemisphere. Act II opens with an expansionist jaunt down South American way to the Panama Canal Zone. The prologue, like the cover of the souvenir program, showed the Landing of Columbus. Pretty sure the native guy in the bottom right looks way more like someone from Great Plains tribe and not a Taino/Arawak indigenous person who’d actually be present.
Cover of America Hippodrome Souvenir Program, 1913-1914 season, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts
The play proper began in a train station ”In Which is Depicted with Musical Accompaniment the Daily Occurrences in a Great Starting Point of Country-Wide Travel.” After a professor and chaperone sing about their obligations while taking “college boys” and “co-eds” on an excursion and the men sing about their wives going on vacation, everyone in the station forms themselves into the header image. I think the effect would have been pretty impressive: groups of people in different colored outfits rushing around the station and finally resolving into a red U, a white A, and a blue S. The Hippodrome was known for patriotic spectacles like this one. R.H. Burnside had a group of girls with streamers who took up the full stage to make a city-block-long representation of Old Glory.
“Suffrage Parade Photo,” Box 46, America folder. Production Photographs Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin..
Bur it’s not all rah-rah patriotic abstraction on the Hippodrome stage. America also featured a street on New York where a women’s suffrage parade was staged. This was described in the program as a “Replica of the Parade Held Recently in New York.” I think it’s a riff on the May 6, 1912 suffrage parade illustrated below, only because of how prominent the American flags are in both.
Originally copyright by American Press Association, published 1912, courtesy of Library of Congress via Wikimedia
The suffragist strategy of wearing all white during their protest marches was borrowed to striking effect by the NAACP for the July 28, 1917 Silent Protest Parade seen below. Ten thousand Black marchers moved silently through midtown Manhattan.
Photo of the Silent Protest Parade where Black women dressed all in white are lead by a Black man carrying a sign that reads “The First Blood For American Independence Was Shed By a Negro, Crispus Attucks.” Photographs by Underwood and Underwood, digitized by the Beinecke Library and held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library collection Photographs of Prominent African Americans.
All of this is to say I’ve been thinking about the way Hippodrome shows contributed to nationalism and nativism. I’m really interested in thinking about the ways collective movement can work in other ways too. And I wanted to end my Independence Day writing by thinking about other ways that people can move as a collective body and demand that their inherent freedom be recognized.