Untitled Document

The Birth of a Jazz Singing Nation

Horace Pippin, "Mr. Prejudice"

You ain’t heard nothing yet.

– “The Jazz Singer”

The story of how the Statue of Liberty came to the United States highlights the relational aspects of immigration histories. Given to the United States by French republicans both to honor the memory of President Abraham Lincoln and as a memorial to liberty (which for the donors meant the emancipation of the slaves), the statue received a lukewarm response from the recipients of this honor. Americans for many years had difficulty raising funds for the erection of the statue in New York harbor. Partly this was due to a feeling that New Yorkers alone should be paying for their statue, but largely it was owing to the lack of enthusiasm people felt for Reconstruction and emancipation of the slaves by the mid-1870s. New York City was itself, after all, the sight of hideous anti-black riots during the Civil War itself. [1]

In 1883 a bill for $100,000 failed to pass through Congress, and it was only due to the promotional work of Joseph Pulitzer, the owner of the New York World and, as a Hungarian born immigrant, perhaps also a man with the spirit of Kossuth coursing through his veins, that the money was raised.[2] When Emma Lazarus entered a poetry competition associated with the fund raising effort, she did so reluctantly, and her poem that would enshrine the new meaning for the Statue completely erased the French meanings associated with the monument. Whither the spirit of Kossuth, no-one knows, though the open letter from William Lloyd Garrison to the Hungarian revolutionary, protesting the latter’s silence on the issue of slavery during the time that he was traveling around the United States drumming up support for his cause, suggests that the erasure of slavery in the battle cry of freedom was nothing new.[3]

Indeed, the erasure of slavery (and, by extension, African Americans) has become a central trope in the histories of immigration, and to illustrate this here I will dwell for a moment on a couple of snapshots from American popular culture.

Our first snapshot is a still from the 1927 movie “The Jazz Singer.” The picture is of Al Jolson, visibly anguished by his inability to decide between two women: his mother and his “girl.” The fact that Jolson is dressed in blackface does not merely make his expressions more powerful; it also allows the audience to draw on their image of the emasculated black man to help them understand Jolson’s dilemma.

“The Jazz Singer” was the first talkie, and in making such a momentous film the Warner Brothers had wanted to focus on their own immigrant experience. The movie represents an attempt to capture on screen the Jewish immigration experience, represented through the character of Jake Rabinowitz (played by Al Jolson), the son of a cantor who becomes the fictional Jazz singer, Jack Robin.

The tensions in the movie lie between the Old World and the cantor’s god, and the New World and America’s gods presented by Mary Dale, a young dancer. In short, this is the tension that exists between Judaism and “the Show must go on.” The turning point in the movie takes place in Jack's dressing room as he prepares for his dress rehearsal. His mother and Yedelson, the kibitzer, a leader in the synagogue, enter looking for Jack but do not recognize him because he is in blackface. Jack turns to his visitors and says “Mama,” at which point there is visible shock on Sara Rabinowitz's face. “Jakie, this ain't you,” she exclaims, at which point the kibitzer says, “He talks like Jakie – but he looks like his shadow.” If the audience has never seen or heard “nothing” previously, they find the embodiment of it in this scene.

Establishing Jack as the shadow of a man, sets the stage for the remainder of the scene. Jack's mother wants him to take the place of his ailing father and sing at that evening's service for the Day of Atonement. Mary, in opposition, tells him he cannot give up his chance to perform on the stage that evening. Unable to decide between his mother, who represents the past and Jewish tradition, and Mary (a shiksa), who has made possible his future on Broadway, Jack becomes the Jazz singer, the mere shadow of a man, the “uprooted”, echoing the cry of his race.

It is clear to the audience by this time that Jack's manhood is at stake. His problems can only be solved if he makes his own path independent of the two choices offered to him. Jack does this by ensuring that he does take his father's place, and demanding that the opening night of the show be postponed. In the process he becomes, not merely a jazz singer, but as Mary observes, “a jazz singer, singing to his god.”

Our other snapshot comes from D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” though in this case it is not the film itself, but its audience that we should observe.

Lizabeth Cohen, in Making a New Deal, describes the ways in which early commercial and technological changes ironically contributed to the consolidation of ethnic communities. Rather than the vitriola or the radio breaking down ethnic ties, she argues, Italians and Polish listened to their own music and radio programs. Similarly, because movie theaters were located in ethnic neighborhoods, seeing a film did not have the homogenizing impact that historians have often assumed. Surrounded by members of their own ethnic group, listening to their own musical accompaniment, individuals could be tied more closely to their community through the movie theater.[4]

Our second snapshot, however, reveals the slightly nostalgic aspect to Cohen's description. This is of a Polish audience in Chicago (around 1916) watching “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece and the first great blockbuster, with a group of African Americans led by ministers and leaders from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People picketing outside. The screen, paralleling (in the white imagination) the NAACP’s efforts to gain social equality, shows a black soldier desperately trying to push open a door that separates him from the white women inside the house – whom, the audience must assume, he would like to rape. On the inside a white man holds a pistol to his daughter’s head; if the soldier succeeds in opening the door, he will kill her.

This movie which purported to give an accurate history of the Civil War and Reconstruction (after all, it received historian Woodrow Wilson’s seal of approval) portrayed black men as corrupt, ignorant rapists, unworthy of equality, and black women (even the faithful servants) as emasculators. The narrative also suggested that it was the resurgence of masculinity among white people, in the form of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, that saved the South from the “tragedy” of Black Rule, and the poor young woman from her father's gun.

A young woman (perhaps Sister Carrie) in the audience, otherwise tempted by all the “cheap amusements” (to borrow from Kathy Peiss) available to her in the windy city, could learn from the movie not to assert her own rights in relation to her family, as this might reflect badly on her ethnic group as a whole.[5] If she failed to learn the prescriptive lessons from the movie, then she would be reminded of them by the men in her company, who feeling anxious about their own marginality and lack of status would demand her subordination. All these snapshots and the shady origins of the Statue of Liberty suggest (to this historian at least) that we need to be conscious of the fact that the immigration of the post-1880 period occurred in the immediate aftermath of the failure of Reconstruction, and recognize the significance of the fact that immigrants would often contrast themselves with freedmen and women. Further, unless historians recognize this and treat immigration and migration in relational terms, we will be contributing to the process of ‘silencing’ – participating in the writing of history as ‘propaganda.’

A picture comes to mind: ‘Mr. Prejudice’. Painted by Horace Pippin during the Second World War, this picture revealed the hypocrisy of white Americans fighting against Nazism while segregating African Americans. On one side of Pippin’s painting, stand white symbols of the American war effort, white GIs, industrial laborers, beneath the robed figure of a Ku Klux Klan member holding the lyncher’s rope. On the other side, are black symbols, a Tuskegee airman, a black soldier, and an African American laborer. As such the work seems to allude to this process of ‘silencing’ of slavery and blacks in American history. And, on the side with all the black symbols, standing tall, is a black Statue of Liberty.

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