This Day in Irish-American History (Playwright Philip Barry Scores 1st Broadway Hit With ‘You and I’)

Feb. 19, 1923— Starting a career that would see him become an integral part of the “Golden Age of American Theater,” Philip Barry achieved his first Broadway success with a comedy written for a college class that won him a prize—and enough money to assure he could make a living from the theater to marry the woman he loved.

You and I, premiering at the Belmont Theater in its first of 174 performances, launched the 26-year-old playwright on a quarter-century run as one of the leading lights of the Great White Way, with several of his plays—The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, and The Animal Kingdom—adapted into classic films.

Those works, like his first, were comedies of manners in which razor-sharp repartee was joined to piercing insights into the lives of the rich and well-born.

Barry also served as a key signpost of Irish-American success in the worlds of theater and literature. He made his Broadway debut the same year—and with more success—than F. Scott Fitzgerald would achieve with his play The Vegetable; a year after George Kelly enjoyed a long, profitable run with his comedy The Show-Off; and in the same decade that Eugene O’Neill steered American theater away from its former shallowness into more probing, psychologically oriented considerations of the human dilemma.

While the quartet were most consistently popular in the 1920s, the overturning of traditional norms during that time—and the subsequent collapse of the bubble prosperity with the Great Depression—led them to deeper, more pointed examinations of how personal conduct could survive under such an onslaught.

At that point, popular and critical regard for their work became harder to come by.

The unstable Fitzgerald became a casualty of this more negative reevaluation—and O’Neill would require superb posthumous productions of his last plays (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten) to remind people of his greatness. Kelly, a member of the famous Philadelphia clan that also produced his brother John, an Olympic medalist and wealthy contractor, and niece Grace, lived with restraint and carefully managed his income.

The fickleness of success seemed far away for Barry when You and I packed the Belmont Theater. His play, colored by the anxiety of long-term failure, simultaneously celebrated a commitment to one’s muse and to one’s heart.

It was a triumph Barry knew intimately. He had followed his ambition to writing drama, even in the face of strong opposition from his brothers, who wanted him to take over the family’s stone-quarry business. He had followed his heart just as strongly, as hinted in his stage directions for the play’s ingenue, based largely on his fiancée and eventual wife, Ellen Semple—herself a talented artist:

She is about nineteen, slim, of medium height, with a decidedly pretty, high-bred face, lovely hair, lovely hands, soft, low-pitched voice  —whatever she may be saying. Heredity, careful upbringing, education and travel have combined to invest her with a poise far in advance of her years. She has attained the impossible—complete sophistication without the loss of bloom. Her self-confidence is an added charm —free, as it is, from any taint of youthful cocksureness.

The solid Broadway run of You and I also brought much-needed credibility to Barry’s Harvard drama instructor, George Pierce Baker. Barry had revised and renamed this play he had conceived of for Barry’s class, the “47 Workshop.”

By winning the prestigious Richard Herndon Prize for the comedy, the playwright was not only guaranteed a Broadway production, but also was able to vindicate the instructional methods of Baker.

Students in the latter’s class gained practical experience by mounting their plays on a makeshift stage far from the unforgiving eyes of New York critics. Many in the Harvard faculty had viewed Baker’s class with condescension and disdain.

But Barry’s success signaled that such a pedagogical approach could work in a real-world setting, and such other “47 Workshop” alumni as Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon effectively answered the naysayers, as I noted in this prior post on Baker.

You and I sprang from the urbane, witty side of Barry that not only captivated audiences but won him friends like artist Gerald Murphy, novelist John O’Hara, and Wall Street financier and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. There was another side—less successful, more experimental and preoccupied with religious and ethical concerns—that came to the fore in later years.

But, in whichever vein he worked, Barry was a diligent craftsman on whom nothing was lost or wasted.

In 2018, You and I enjoyed its first New York revival in 95 years at the Off-Broadway Metropolitan Playhouse. COVID-19 and the social disruptions of the last few years have led to more change in the New York theater scene than I recall during my lifetime. 

But when all is said and done, I hope theater producers and directors will look at Barry with the same fresh eyes they are using to assess everything else with.

This Day in Irish-American History (James Forrestal, Self-Made Man and Cabinet Casualty, Born)

Feb. 15, 1892—James Forrestal, who earned riches on Wall Street and acclaim as one of the architects of the national security state before succumbing to despair brought on by his workaholic style, was born in the upstate community of Beacon, N.Y.

Given what I have just written, you might wonder why my headline, instead of using the phrase “military history” or even “business history,” referred to “Irish-American history.” 

But Forrestal, the son of an Irish immigrant father and American mother of Irish descent, spent much of his adult life in near-total rejection of his background—not just Roman Catholicism but even his ethnicity and family.

This all-stops-out attempt at assimilation represented one means by which Irish-Americans of his time could fit into America and attain success. But it exacted a terrible cost: a lack of a home life or roots, culminating in a suicide that haunted his lofty social-cultural set and powerful figures in Washington, D.C. for generations to come.

Forrestal grew up in a time when the Ivy League was a WASP bastion, when Jews were excluded by quotas, and Catholics—particularly those of the lower-middle-class—were often looked down upon.

Initially rejected by Princeton, he was at last accepted, then shone so brightly, in academics and on the school paper, that the Class of 1915 voted him Most Likely to Succeed. Then, a few weeks before graduation, he dropped out, for reasons that remain unexplained.

The inability to get a degree, after the various sacrifices he and his parents had made to get him through school, appears to have led him to cut off contact with his family. (A tentative attempt to reconcile with his mother--who had originally wanted him to become a priest--by buying her a house a decade later went nowhere: she didn't move into the house.) 

Then, after a brief stint as a clerk/handyman—quite below what his classmates had been making—he took a job with William A. Read and Co., a New York investment banking firm that later became Dillon, Read and Co.

The resulting career there—interrupted only by service as a naval aviator in WWI—was astonishingly successful. He made partner at age 31, and by 1932, the heart of the Depression, he made $5 million—more than $82 million in today’s currency.

Although he wore the map of Ireland on his face, Forrestal continued to shed his heritage, becoming an Episcopalian, giving up on contact with his family, and refusing to refer to himself as Irish-American.

That denial allowed him to “pass” in WASP society, contract an advantageous marriage to a Vogue columnist beautiful enough to be photographed by Cecil Beaton, and advance on Wall Street.

In 1940, Forrestal left Dillon, Read to become one of the “dollar-a-year” businessmen who, forgoing their normal much larger private-sector salaries, helped the Roosevelt administration fulfill his desire to make America “the arsenal of democracy.” 

He worked seven days a week as undersecretary of the navy, so he was the natural choice to became secretary of the department itself in 1944 when his boss Frank Knox died.

So successful was Forrestal—first for FDR, then for Harry Truman—that he was tapped to spearhead the reorganization of the armed services into a single Defense Department; so exhausted was he in that effort by the dawn of the Cold War and constant political infighting, and so forlorn about being trapped in an unhappy marriage to his now-alcoholic wife, that he suffered a nervous breakdown.

After leaving the Defense Department, a depressed Forrestal, confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for exhaustion, asked to see a Roman Catholic priest so he could confess. His request was denied. Not long afterward, he threw himself out the window of the 16th floor at the hospital. 

His death haunted his literary friends Philip Barry and John O’Hara, inspiring, respectively, the play Second Threshold and the sprawling novel From the Terrace.

This Day in Irish-American History (Peace Jubilee Conducted by Civil War Composer)

June 19, 1869— Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, an emigrant from the Irish Potato Famine who achieved renown in the Civil War as an army bandleader and composer of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” concluded a five-day music festival in Boston that he himself had organized to celebrate the return of peace to the nation and to benefit the widows and orphans of the conflict.

Gilmore is not so well remembered today, but it was another story in his time. Musicologist Frank J. Cipolla has written of the bandleader’s “quick wit, flamboyant personality and grandiose musical projects.” It is hard to conceive of musicians such as John Philip Sousa, Arthur Fiedler or Guy Lombardo without thinking of how Gilmore paved the way for them. Moreover, in a time still rife with anti-Catholic sentiment, Gilmore’s ebullience and patriotism enabled many to see his ethnic group as potential contributors to American life.

The Great National Peace Jubilee was built on an epic scale, complete with a band and orchestra of about 1,000 musicians plus soloists and members from 103 choral groups totaling over 10,000 singers. It was, in a way, a kind of hammock event swinging between past and present, illustrative of the manner in which Gilmore sought not just to equal or even surpass a past event, but go 100% beyond it—and use it as the baseline for his next monster moment.

It was also the kind of event made to order for Ulysses S. Grant, who had made the centerpiece of his successful campaign for President the prior year the slogan, “Let us have peace.” The Union hero’s musical tastes were not unlike his writing style: utterly straightforward. Asked about his favorite music, Grant responded: “The cannons!”

Gilmore knew the President (who came for the opening ceremonies only) was onto something. In his prior major public musical event, the March 1864 inauguration of Louisiana's new governor, Gilmore had used cannons in a performance for the first time. Now, for the Boston show, he proposed to use cannons even more prominently throughout the performance, along with double the number of musicians and singers used in his New Orleans gala.

Today, people who pass through Boston’s Back Bay and notice the Copley Plaza Hotel and Hancock Towers never realize than 145 years ago, Gilmore had constructed on the site the the largest structure of its kind in the city. The building was cavernous. It had to be, in order to hold all those musicians and singers, along with seating for seating for 30,000 audience members, not to mention 100 Boston firemen striking anvils, a battery of cannon, chimes, church bells, a bass drum 8 feet in diameter, and a gigantic organ built for the occasion.

Six years before, after the Battle of Gettysburg, Gilmore had adapted “Johnnie, I Hardly Knew Ye,” a mordant Irish ballad, into the rousing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” During the war, he would train, equip and dispatch 20 bands from his state to accompany troops on their missions. Now, he proposed to play music not to rouse men’s martial spirits but to foster reconciliation and understanding—and he was not done yet.

In 1872, Gilmore organized a World Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival to celebrate the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The pattern he set was familiar: twice the number of musicians and singers than had appeared at the National Jubilee, and a festival lasting more than three times longer. Gilmore wasn’t even fazed by the collapse of the new coliseum meant to house all of this—he had another built and opened just in time, for a program featuring the likes of Johann Strauss and his orchestra from Austria, the Grenadier Guards Band of England, the Garde Republicaine of France, and the Prussian band of Kaiser Franz Grenadiers.

A more important contribution by Gilmore on this occasion was introducing American audiences to emerging talent from a completely unexpected source. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed only the year before to raise urgently needed funds for that new African-American college, received major national exposure for one of the first times on this occasion. So did the Hyers Sisters, two African-American musical prodigies from California, who impressed Gilmore greatly at a private audition in Boston with their rendition of opera arias. Seldom if ever had African-Americans been featured in such a large-scale American musical extravaganza.

Annual Fourth of July concerts that Gilmore offered on the Boston Common predated, by more than half a century, the similar Independence Day musical extravaganza that Arthur Fiedler began offering on the banks of the Charles River, a tradition that the Boston Pops orchestra continues to this day.

When he was done with Boston after two decades, Gilmore moved to New York, where he began the tradition of ringing in the new year in Times Square. The rather tame doings of Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, however, paled next to the highlight of Gilmore’s show: the bandleader firing two pistols into the air at the stroke of midnight. (How times have changed: nowadays, those sounds, of course, would precipitate a massive police action.)

Throughout his career, Gilmore never forgot where he came from. It started with charity work, for such causes as Famine Relief, Clan na Gael, the Annual Emerald Ball for Orphans and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. But he also endorsed the work of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt and promoted Home Rule and the value of the boycott as a means of economic redress for the Irish people.

Gilmore’s death from a heart ailment in 1892 brought about a kind of passing of the musical torch. On the night of his funeral, 37-year-old John Philip Sousa, not yet the lionized creator of the “Washington Post March” and “Stars and Stripes Forever,” dedicated his performance in memory of the County Galway native he rightly termed “The Father Of the American Band.” In fact, 19 musicians from Gilmore's troupe would shortly provide the backbone of Sousa's newly formed "Sousa's New Marine Band."

This Day in Irish-American History (Nativist Mob Burns Charlestown Convent)

August 11, 1834—A rumor that a Protestant girl was being held against her will spurred a nativist mob to go on a rampage against an Ursuline convent.

The land is now occupied by the East Branch of the Somerville Public Library, but freedom of inquiry was the last thing on the rioters’ minds—in fact, by the time they were done, burning a valuable library was one of the least of their outrages, which included destroying religious relics, ransacking the possessions of nuns and their students in the convent school, mutilating the remains of the dead in the on-site mausoleum, then torching the once-imposing building.

All of this was done with nary a move to help—even from the fire companies who’d arrived on the scene—from the crowd that watched the blaze.

The attack, part of a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry that swept the United States in the middle decades of the 19th century, also reflected the growing sense of disenfranchisement of native-born Americans who felt increasingly crowded by Irish emigrants. And this was before the great wave that came to America from the Emerald Isle following the Great Hunger of the 1840s.

The mob’s hatred also took root in class resentment and a patriarchal society’s distrust of educated women, such as the convent students and the sisters who taught them.

The event that precipitated the riot was the flight from the convent of an incoherent nun, Sister Mary John—the mother assistant—to the home of a neighbor. Before long, the convent’s mother superior, Sister Mary St. George, and Boston’s bishop, Benedict Fenwick, retrieved the exhausted nun, explaining that the recent heat wave and a heavy academic workload had induced “brain fever.”

If you know the context of American education at this time, it’s easy to see why teaching this curriculum might be a stiff challenge for Sister Mary John. The school’s students were expected to master writing, arithmetic, geometry, chemistry, botany, natural and moral philosophy, rhetoric, logic, and “use of the Globes.” Only then did they get around to learning skills that the conventional wisdom of the day felt more necessary for young women: needlework, drawing, and cookery.

Keeping students up to all these standards is difficult enough now; it was almost unheard of back then, particularly in Massachusetts, whose public schools only allowed girls to attend six months out of the year (rather than nine for boys).

So, as area residents looked up at the convent atop Mount Benedict, they wondered: why on earth are the nuns teaching these girls so much? And why on earth are so many of the students Protestants like ourselves? (No more than one-fifth of the fifty-to-sixty students were Catholic.)
The answer to these questions, in the mind of these bigots, was simple: the nuns were trying to convert the girls as a first step toward taking over Boston.

At this point, it’s necessary to mention some of the other forces whipping up the populace:

* The “pornography of the Puritan”. Historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase was not just a nice bit of rhetoric about anti-Catholicism, but also a thrust at the peculiar predilection of descendants of Cotton Mather for lurid tales involving young Catholic women. It was a given that these novels would retail the usual charges against Catholics—the Inquisition, their allegiance to a foreign potentate (the pope), their exotic rites. But the real frisson of these horror tales was the salacious recounting of misbehavior by wanton priests and their compliant nuns. (Think what a field day these authors would have had with the Rev. Paul Shanley and Rev. John Geoghan; they wouldn’t have had to resort to fiction!) Indeed, one of these tales, involving a woman named Rebecca Theresa Reed, concerned the Ursuline convent.

* A sensational—and, of course, inaccurate—press. On August 8, the Boston Mercantile Journal ran a news item about a “mysterious lady who was being held against her will on Mt. Benedict. The item implied that she could have been tortured, even murdered. Three days later, the paper printed a small item noting that another small competitor called the story “materially inaccurate.” Obviously, someone forgot to get the message out to the rioters.

* The Rev. Lyman Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe sensitized Americans to the plight of slaves with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her father was equally adept at doing so in the antebellum period. Too bad his sympathies did not lie with the Irish. The day before the riots, he was particularly energetic, preaching anti-Catholic sermons in three different churches.

* Sister Mary St. George. Yes, the Mother Superior herself. She was not the last person to react with asperity after a day of stress and physical exhaustion. (Henry Louis Gates and Hillary Clinton can relate.) But, after a period in which the convent had been subjected to unrelenting speculation—after she had already proved the falsity of the charges, to a visiting investigating committee—she’d had enough of the scruffy mob. For a long time, I could understand why Archbishop John Hughes of New York had promised “a second Moscow” (a reference to Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, when the Russian city burned) if any nativist mob perpetrated outrages against Catholics. But Sister Mary St. George’s words on this occasion might have pushed things too far: the bishop, she told the mob, had at his disposal “twenty thousand of the vilest Irishmen at this command.”

All of this produced a cauldron of hatred. It is fortunate that the nuns and students slipped out of the convent before the rioters burst in—who knows what they would have been subject to by the mob?

The ringleader of the mob, a big brickmaker named John R. Buzzell, was subsequently acquitted at trial. Only a youngster was ever convicted for this role, and that youth was later pardoned.

The ruins remained visible for another 40 years. The rioters expected it to force an exodus out of Boston. Instead, all they ended up doing was a more fervent embrace by Catholics of their faith—one that had already endured centuries of abuse and injustice, in the catacombs of ancient Rome down to the hedge schools of their native Ireland.

When the Irish seized political power, in Boston and in urban political machines around the country, many were disinclined to take seriously the cries of Yankee reformers. When the emigrants had been desperate to eat, the reformers had not been forthcoming. It should not have come as a shock that so many of the new bosses learned the lessons of the Ursuline convent burning only too well.