Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Lodge’s love of Shakespeare was lifelong. When memorializing him, Bishop William Lawrence vividly recalled seeing Lodge “taking out his little volume of Shakespeare which was always with him.” Lodge himself acknowledged that he was “brought up to a blind devotion to Shakespeare.” Before the age of 10 he was taken to see Edwin Booth’s Julius Caesar. His father helped found the Boston Theater and was president of its board, so the young Lodge had free run of the place and saw some of the great Shakespearean performers of the day. Lodge acted while an undergraduate, and a striking photograph of him survives from these years, cross-dressed as Lady Macbeth. One of his good friends was Brander Matthews, a Shakespearean who taught at Columbia, to whom Lodge confessed that he had “always wanted to write a book about Shakespeare’s plays.” While he never wrote that book, he invoked Shakespeare in speeches and essays in his decades-long effort to change America’s immigration policy.

  Like many others in the Republican Party, Lodge had supported open immigration before denouncing it. A recent revisionist explanation attributes this shift to pragmatism, not racism: the demand for cheap industrial labor had slackened and Republicans were losing working-class voters, so in the 1890s the party decided that targeting more recent immigrants was the way to win those voters back. That argument may well be true of others in his party, but not of Lodge, one of the most intellectually gifted individuals of his generation, whose views on race went beyond political calculation.

  Lodge published three linked essays on this subject in 1891. In the first, “Restriction of Immigration,” his argument was twofold: the recent wave of newcomers was both an economic threat to working-class Americans and “an infusion which seems to threaten deterioration.” Lodge then published an uglier piece—“Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration”—in which he responds to news that a mob broke into a jail in New Orleans and lynched eleven Italian immigrants. Rather than condemn this hate crime, Lodge argues that “such action, if not justified, is predictable,” given “America’s open borders to unwanted immigrants,” and warns that if “we do not act, and act intelligently, we must be prepared for just such events as that at New Orleans, not merely bringing in their train murder and sudden death, but breeding race antagonisms and national hostilities.” Having blamed the victims, he pivoted in a third essay to praise those responsible for American greatness—in “The Distribution of Ability in the United States”—a statistical analysis of fifteen thousand individuals who contributed to American society. Predictably, men of northern European ancestry take the prize. This same year he gave his first speech urging Congress to revisit immigration policy and introduced the first of several bills requiring that adults entering the country be literate. Heads of households and single adult immigrants would be presented upon landing with a short passage from the Constitution in their own language; if they could not read and transcribe it they would be sent back to where they came from.

  Such a test for immigrants might appear modest, and if you consider how little impact it would have on Eastern European Jews (most of whom could read and write Hebrew or Yiddish), largely ineffective, as it proved to be, for only a few thousand immigrants were ultimately denied admission on these grounds after the legislation finally passed in 1917. But the only alternatives considered at the time were raising the head tax paid on entry into the United States or vetting potential immigrants before they set sail. The idea of establishing racial or national quotas as yet remained unthinkable, or unspoken, and even getting Congress to pass a literacy requirement was an uphill battle. The real aim of restrictionists was to harden American hearts against an open-door policy, to no longer think of their country as a refuge. The restrictionists were playing a long game, and their focus on literacy appealed to the elites, whose support they needed; it was easy enough riling working-class whites fearful of losing their jobs to foreigners.

  In 1896, Lodge, by now a senator, delivered a major speech on immigration reform. But before doing so he published a piece on “Shakespeare’s Americanisms” in Harper’s Magazine. In it, he made the counterintuitive argument that Americans had a better claim to Shakespeare’s linguistic heritage than modern-day British subjects did because the language that the founders of America “brought with them to Virginia and Massachusetts was . . . the language of Shakespeare, who lived and wrote and died just at the period when these countrymen of his were taking their way to the New World.” And while initially “common to the English on both sides of the Atlantic,” a surprising amount of Shakespeare’s vocabulary had only survived in America. Lodge’s essay pushes back against British claims that the English language has degenerated in America and takes exception to how “words used by Shakespeare himself, should have lived to be disdainfully called ‘Americanisms’ by people now living in Shakespeare’s own country.” For Lodge, “English speech is too great an inheritance to be trifled with or wrangled over. It is much better for all who speak it to give their best strength to defending it and keeping it pure and vigorous, so that it many go on spreading and conquering.” In one stroke, Lodge declares America’s superiority to England and its greater proximity to pure Shakespeare, while implicitly supporting the position that in order to retain its imperial vigor, American immigration policy must be literacy based.

  His speech to the Senate on March 16, 1896, was a tour de force. It was covered widely in newspapers and subsequently published, and shaped the national conversation on immigration for years to come. In order to justify imposing a literacy test, Lodge had to reinvent a past that explained the present crisis. The decisive moment in that past was when Shakespeare lived. At this pivotal juncture, the “work of race making had been all done and the achievements of the race so made were about to begin.” The defining features of what would emerge as American greatness—its anti-despotic ideology, its Teutonic roots, its Protestant faith—can be traced back to this extraordinary Elizabethan moment. In support of this claim, Lodge quotes at length from Thomas Carlyle: “Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating among these men; witness one Shakespeare . . . the finest human figure, as I apprehend, that nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teutonic clay.”

  Immediately after this work of race making was complete, the heirs of this legacy carried it with them to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Soon, others from northern Europe began settling in America as well. Happily, this did nothing to diminish homogeneity, since “the people of the thirteen colonies were all of the same original race stock. The Dutch, the Swedes, and the Germans simply blended again with the English-speaking people, who like them were descended from the Germanic tribes,” and who had “been welded together by more than a thousand years of wars, conquests, migrations, and struggles, both at home and abroad” through which they “attained a fixity and definiteness of national character.” In Lodge’s elaborate racial fantasy, America’s uniformity (African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Mexicans, and early Jewish and southern European immigrants don’t figure) continued undiluted until 1875. That’s when things took a sharp turn for the worse: “Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Greeks, and even Asiatics, whose immigration to America was almost unknown twenty years ago, have during the last twenty years poured in in steadily increasing numbers.” This had to be stopped, for “when you begin to pour in in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that a people can run. The lowering of a great race means not only its own decline, but that of civilization.”

  Lodge’s bill requiring that new arrivals be able to both read and write—crafted in collaboration with the Immigration Restriction League—carried the majority in both the House and Senate, but was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. A disappointed Lodge wrote to his friend and future president Teddy Roosevelt that he “was disappointed because I wanted this great piece of legislation upon the statute books.” In 1907 Roosevelt, now president, appointed an Im
migration Commission that included Lodge among its nine members. They held no hearings and heard little testimony before producing a forty-one-volume report in 1911 strongly urging that immigration be restricted, and recommended a literacy test. A bill to impose one was passed, then once again vetoed, this time by President William Howard Taft in 1913, and then again by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915, who, in his letter to the House explaining why he rejected the bill, made the stakes perfectly clear: Lodge and his supporters were advocating a “radical change in the policy of the nation,” for the “new tests here embodied are not tests of quality or of character,” and their object “is restriction, not selection.” This set the stage for yet another showdown, when it appeared as if there was finally enough will, and votes, to overrule yet another expected presidential veto in 1916, the same year that Americans were gearing up for a nationwide celebration of Shakespeare’s tercentenary.

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  TO CONSIDER SHAKESPEARE an American hero is a strange idea. Joseph Watson was among the first to make such a claim, in 1877, in a column in the New York Herald, “Shakespeare in America,” where he argued that the English were “slow to recognize the appalling grandeur of the genius of her immortal bard,” while Americans “could read those lessons of the poet and witness his historical plays while untrammeled and uninfluenced by monarchical surroundings.” Watson conceded that the English might not agree, and reports a conversation from around the time of the War of 1812 between the English actor George Frederick Cooke, who was performing at the time in New York, and an unnamed American interlocutor. Cooke objected to Americans calling Shakespeare “our great poet,” and insisted that “you are not the countrymen of Shakespeare.” When the American replied that he had the right to “claim the same share in the heroes, poets and philosophers of former days as any Briton of this day can,” Cooke would have none of it: “No, no, that won’t do. You are a race of yesterday, mere upstarts. You abandoned Great Britain and gave up your share in her fame.” What had changed in the course of the nineteenth century was the notion of racial inheritance: for Cooke, Americans were a newly forged race—“a race of yesterday”—but by the close of the century it had become increasingly accepted that America had been, since its founding, racially Anglo-Saxon, and so the Shakespearean inheritance was a shared one.

  As late as 1892, with the publication of Howard H. Furness’s comprehensive Variorum edition of The Tempest, no critic had explicitly tied the play to the future United States. It had long been understood as a European dynastic play that was indebted, among its various sources, to recent New World narratives. Yes, as far back as 1797, Richard Sill noted that Shakespeare’s sources included “narratives of discovery of the New World,” and in 1808 Edmond Malone elaborated on these connections at length. But it was quite a leap to associate Caliban with the natives of North America or the play with American political values.

  By the close of the nineteenth century, critics were increasingly willing to make that leap. In 1898 Frank M. Bristol published Shakespeare and America, in which he argued that The Tempest “has an entirely American basis and character,” and that Caliban “is an American.” Four years later the Massachusetts native Edward Everett Hale pressed the case for a New England rather than a Virginian interest on Shakespeare’s part. He gave a talk to the American Antiquarian Society arguing that the setting of The Tempest was Cuttyhunk Island, off Cape Cod, on which an English explorer had landed in 1602. In 1916, Henry Cabot Lodge, who had heard Hale’s talk and thought it “very convincing,” persuaded his old friend Brander Matthews to publish it, along with a long introduction by Lodge himself. In this introduction Lodge speaks of Caliban as “distinctly human, and yet wholly unlike the humanity we know,” in whose character “we find Shakespeare’s intimation of the evolution of man and the missing link,” and he concurs with the British scholar Walter Raleigh’s conclusion that “Shakespeare, almost alone, saw the problem of American settlement in a detached light.”

  Much of the credit for popularizing the belief that The Tempest was preoccupied with America goes to the English scholar Sidney Lee and his 1898 biography of Shakespeare. Lee’s argument reached an even wider audience when he published an extended version of his thesis, “The Call of the West: America and Elizabethan England,” in Scribner’s Magazine in 1907. What Lee had to say about Caliban sounded a lot like what restrictionists were saying about undesirable immigrants: Caliban’s “life is passed in that stage of evolutionary development which precedes the birth of moral sentiment, of intellectual perception, and social culture. He is a creature stumbling over the first stepping-stones which lead from savagery to civilization.” In Caliban, Lee declares, Shakespeare “propounded an answer to the greatest of American enigmas,” and The Tempest was “a veritable document of early Anglo-American history.” By 1916 a critic for the New-York Tribune could confidently write that The Tempest “was mainly inspired by Shakespeare’s interest in America”; the latest revival was now being touted as “Shakespeare’s One American Play.”

  Along with Lodge, Charles Mills Gayley, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, did the most to popularize the connections between Shakespeare, America, race, and restricted immigration. Gayley was a charismatic professor who wrote for a national audience. In 1914, as war broke out in Europe, he embarked on a sabbatical in England in which he researched a popular book, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, published in 1917. The xenophobic version of America’s past that Lodge had been telling in Congress, and that the Immigration Restriction League had been promoting to journalists, lawyers, and policy makers, was now authorized by literary scholarship. If anything, Gayley’s version was even harsher toward new immigrants, berating them as at best superstitious and grasping, and at worst, as seditious anarchists:

  If it be true that, during the past generation, we have with too light scrutiny admitted to our large freedom and easy fatness tens of thousands whose hands grasp our privileges, but whose heirs still cherish the superstitions of the political inhumanity from which we thought they had escaped, who is to blame? If it be true that we have admitted tens of thousands who, crazed with license, leap to the torch and bomb and in the name of liberty flaunt the rag of anarchy, who is to blame?

  Gayley is at pains to make clear that America was and must remain Anglo-Saxon. Until the 1870s, others who sought refuge in America had “gloried in identifying themselves with the inheritors of Anglo-Saxon blood and speech, common law, individual freedom and national responsibility.” But now, thanks to the crush of undesirable new immigrants, that was no longer so. Since for Gayley our “American heritage is of the revolutionary fathers, of the colonial fathers, of the English fathers of colonial liberty,” the primary aim of his book was to show that these early settlers were “the contemporaries and friends” of Shakespeare, who was both “the poet and prophet of the race.”

  Gayley pressed this political link very hard, in a syllogistic argument that runs something like this: Shakespeare was close to a patriotic “liberal faction” of Elizabethan notables who helped bankroll the early colonial voyage to Virginia, a source of The Tempest. Shakespeare shared their dislike of monarchy and their promotion of individual freedom and “equality before the law”—not pro-democracy exactly, but close enough. Shakespeare should therefore be considered one of the founders of liberty in America. Scholarly reviewers pointed out that there was no solid evidence for any of this. One of Gayley’s harshest critics, E. E. Stoll, took special exception to Gayley’s suggestion that The Tempest was about the Virginia colony: “There is not a word in the Tempest about America or Virginia, colonies or colonizing, Indians or tomahawks, maize, mocking-birds, or tobacco”; Shakespeare, he insisted, knew “exceedingly little” of America, and “said nothing of it as American.” But Stoll and others were publishing their critiques in obscure academic journals; Gayley’s book was a popular one. In 1916 Gayley pressed his racial cla
ims in a poem—“The Heart of the Race”—that reached a wide readership when published in newspapers in America and abroad:

  Poet, thou, of the Blood: of states and of nations

  Passing thy utmost dream, in the uttermost corners of space!

  Poet, thou, of my countrymen born to the speech, O Brother,

  Born to the law and freedom, proud of the old embrace,

  Born of the Mayflower, born of Virginia—born of the Mother!

  Poet, thou of the Mother! the blood of America,

  Turning in tribute to thee, revisits the Heart of the Race.

  By 1916 the line between speaking of Caliban in Shakespearean and immigration contexts was increasingly blurred. In the early years of the century, the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross conducted a bit of field work in New York City’s Union Square. He watched hundreds of recent immigrants employed as garment workers trudge home from grueling labor in nearby sweatshops. Ross studied their faces as they passed, and of the 368 he counted, only 38 looked American to him, that is, “had the type of face one would find at a country fair in the West or South.” “To one accustomed to the aspect of the normal American population,” he noted, “the Caliban type shows up with a frequency that is startling.” Even when these immigrants appear in their “Sunday best” one “is struck by the fact that from ten to twenty per cent are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality.”

  Ross made a similar claim in another jeremiad published in 1914, The Old World in the New, in which he argues that, like Caliban, these new immigrants are “sub-common,” and admitting them into the country is committing racial suicide: “In every face there was something wrong—lips thick, mouth coarse, upper lip too long, cheek-bones too high, chin poorly formed, the bridge of the nose hollowed.” Earlier in his career, in 1900, while teaching in California, Ross had opposed Asian immigration, saying that “should the worst come to the worst it would be better for us if we were to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land.” The jibe had cost him tenure at Stanford. By now, thanks to the effectiveness of anti-immigration campaigners, espousing such views was increasingly acceptable. By 1915 the Los Angeles Times could publish an opinion piece by a physician, John Madison Taylor, on the danger of “The Race Peril at Our Doors,” that shared this set of assumptions and linked Caliban to recent immigrants imagined to be “defective”: “Already our almshouses, jails, homes for feeble-minded, insane, deformed, blind and chronically diseased are filled with the foreign-born and their second generation.” Dr. Taylor warns that “mixing old and new American stock” risks producing offspring that “become alternately one fairly sound, the other a monster, a Caliban.”