McFadden's Row of Flats was “intended for laughing purposes only,” but in 1902, five years after this musical farce was first produced, Irish nationalists saw more sinister intentions in the production.Footnote ¹ Filled with physical gags – slippery stairs and sword fights – and interspersed with vaudeville acts, the play's loose plot follows two saloonkeepers in their election for alderman. Irishman Tim McFadden, wearing a red wig with scraggly red or green whiskers, campaigns against a German immigrant, Jacob Baumgartner, in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Five Points, New York. When McFadden and Baumgartner hold campaign parties at the same ballroom, the two factions begin to fight, trip each other and roll around the stage.Footnote ² Many of the jokes pit Irish and Germans against each other. Baumgartner brags that his saloon has “der gut beer” and, when one character observes that the Germans started to dance first at the campaign party, another responds, “Yes, but the Irish will stay longest.”Footnote ³ At the end of the play, McFadden and Baumgartner become friends, and McFadden wins the heart of Mrs. Murphy, a drunken widow in the flats.

Irish nationalists in Denver first objected to the play in late October of 1902. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a large Irish fraternal order with strong ties to radical Irish nationalism around this time, passed a resolution against the play, and the city's Gaelic League, devoted to de-Anglicizing Irish and American culture, concluded that the play was “wholly devoid of legitimate fun, is indecent, and [is intended] to demean and to ridicule Irish character.”Footnote ⁴ On 20 March 1903, at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, several Irish men yelled and hissed during the production of McFadden's Row of Flats. They were thrown out of the theater. A week later, at the play's next stop in New York City, the New Star Theatre, five Irish men were arrested after they threw eggs and vegetables onto the stage.Footnote ⁵ They complained about green whiskers on the Stage Irishman, the appearance of Mrs. Murphy drunk in a wheelbarrow, and pigs in McFadden's flat. Protesters announced their support for the Clan na Gael, a secret, revolutionary Irish organization devoted to driving the British out of Ireland by force.Footnote ⁶ On 30 March, at the People's Theatre in Philadelphia, Irish “auditors” threw eggs and fought with police and actors during the play, even though the theater manager had cut what he thought was the cause of the trouble – the green whiskers.Footnote ⁷ This uproar resulted in the arrest of eighteen Irish men. When the play returned to New York City in the second week of April, the theater manager agreed to cut the green whiskers, Mrs. Murphy's entrance with the donkey, and the pig in the parlor.Footnote ⁸ Even though this was not an exhaustive list of the play's offensive traits, the protesters bragged of their success: they had put McFadden's Row of Flats under “practical censorship.”Footnote ⁹

This essay examines the most volatile moment in the history of McFadden's Row of Flats – the Philadelphia riot of 30 March 1903. This is not a straightforward story of anti-Irish caricatures on stage inciting outrage among sensitive spectators; instead, rioters were “late” to the attack, fighting against a play that had been on the boards for several years, and they sometimes asserted their right to close the play, regardless of the details of the act. To explain these twists in timing, scholars need to look to motivations offstage. The outcry against McFadden's Row of Flats grew out of the resurgence of militant Irish nationalism in the United States, particularly the reunification of the Clan na Gael, and its close ties with the Ancient Order of Hibernians as well as the Gaelic League.Footnote ¹⁰ These Irish nationalists scrutinized the play carefully and paid attention to revisions as the play moved to new cities. But they were not just reacting to the play in Philadelphia; they were also responding to the rallying cry of their allies in Denver and New York City and sending a message to their rivals, including the more moderate wing of Irish nationalism. By attacking particular details of the play and sometimes rejecting the play regardless of revisions, radical Irish nationalists staged their own aggressive defense of themselves, their faction within Irish nationalism, and their race. Practical censorship, therefore, was more than textual criticism; it was a show of force and a political platform.

A snapshot of protests around the time of the McFadden's Row of Flats riot suggests some of the elements of the representation of the Irish that most upset Irish nationalists. Irish nationalists in the early twentieth century became more vocal and violent about the representation of Irish men and women as “low, drunken, ignorant and brutal.”Footnote ¹¹ They objected to images of Irish men as baboons, of animals in the Irish home, and of Irish women as oafish and unfeminine. On 30 December 1902, three months prior to the uproar over McFadden's Row of Flats, a “small riot” broke out in Springfield, Massachusetts, during Eddie “Monkey” Weston's performance of A Hot Old Time when Weston appeared with bright red hair and “eyes that blinked like monkeys … and loose baggy trousers.”Footnote ¹² After many men yelled at the stage, several patrons were removed from the theater and one man, accused of hitting the theater manager, was arrested. Several months later, some Irish activists also criticized the Ancient Order of Hibernians branch of Pittsfield, Massachusetts for showing The Finish of Bridget McKeen.Footnote ¹³ In this 1901 Edison film, an exploding stove kills a hapless Irish maid after she uses kerosene to light the fire: “Here lies the remains of Bridget McKeen who started a fire with kerosene.”Footnote ¹⁴ In 1904 Irish nationalists were also angry about how the comedy team of Daly and Devere depicted the Irish maid, Bridget. This manly, transvestite character boxed onstage and wreaked havoc in her employer's home.Footnote ¹⁵ Irish leaders attacked a comic story in a Catholic magazine in 1905 because it included an image of a St. Patrick's Day party with a “real pig in the parlor.” In this case, as in many others after 1903, Irish protesters noted that the offensive story fit the “‘McFadden's Flat’ Pattern.”Footnote ¹⁶

But the uprisings against the “stage Irish” cannot be explained fully by a catalog of offensive traits. Irish protesters sometimes worked to stop a play regardless of the details of the production and, in some cases, political battles or grudges offstage seemed to propel protesters to attack “shop-worn acts” that had been purveying drunken, ape-like Irish characters for years.Footnote ¹⁷ Two prominent examples illustrate this claim. First, when Irish nationalists rose up in 1907 against the Russell Brothers' vaudeville act, “The Irish Servant Girls,” they complained about how their flirtatious, manly maids maligned chaste Irish women, but this act had been onstage since the 1870s. The attack in 1907 seems to have been timed to coincide with the opening of J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World in Dublin, which was the target of rioters in the same week in 1907. Second, when the Abbey Theatre produced Playboy of the Western World in the United States in 1911 and 1912, Irish protesters attacked the play in New York City, Philadelphia, and other major cities. As Lucy McDiarmid explains, the Irish nationalists in Philadelphia did not seem to care about details of the production, for they did not wait for the “objectionable” parts of the play to launch their protests. But they were inspired by previous uprisings – in Dublin in 1907 and in other American cities in 1911 and 1912. Irish activists in Philadelphia, she notes, would have “felt shamed” if they did not respond as aggressively to the play as their allies had in Dublin or New York City.Footnote ¹⁸ The fights over McFadden's Row of Flats show that the campaign against the stage Irish depended not only on details of stage productions, but also on the development of “aggressive Irish ethnocentrism” in America and on the sequence of Irish theatrical controversies.Footnote ¹⁹ Offstage, dares and grudges among Irish nationalists helped determine when, exactly, the eggs and rotten vegetables would fly.

McFadden's Row of Flats drew on two significant theatrical trends of the late nineteenth century – Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart's popular Mulligan Guard plays, in which the Irish (led by Dan Mulligan) interact with a variety of different immigrant groups and African Americans, and the theatrical adaptations of comic strips about immigrant life on the Lower East Side, including Richard Outcault's The Yellow Kid, and Frederick Opper's Happy Hooligan. The Mulligan Guard plays and the dramatizations of the comics focus on confrontations between different exaggerated ethnic types in poor neighborhoods and both featured rowdy mishaps and fights. First, with its stock Irish and German characters in a political campaign, McFadden's Row of Flats resembles Edward Harrigan's The Mulligan Guard Nominee (1880), in which Mulligan and his German neighbor, Gustave Lochmuller, run against each other for alderman. Though Mulligan is a corrupt politician, a heavy drinker and a raucous fighter, he is also loyal, streetwise and generous. The Irish are more sympathetic characters than the razor-wielding African Americans of the series and they also outwit the hardworking, plodding, and fat German characters.Footnote ²⁰ Historians generally agree that Harrigan's Irish characters were more positive and rounded than the other types in his plays. As literary critic Lauren Onkey argues, the Irish “run” the crowded, racially mixed tenement neighborhoods in these plays.Footnote ²¹ In contrast, McFadden seems to be a cardboard character, probably not as endearing as Dan Mulligan.

Second, McFadden's Row of Flats was one of a dozen theatrical adaptations of the popular Yellow Kid comic strips. R. F. Outcault started to draw the Yellow Kid cartoons in 1895, first for the New York World and then for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. His illustrations focussed on Mickey Duggan, the Yellow Kid, a bald Irish child in a yellow nightshirt. His friends in the neighborhood, including Terrance McSwatt and Liz, put on amateur circuses, parades, and horse shows; they compare their paltry Christmas presents, assault the dogcatcher and nurse their wounds after a raucous Fourth of July. Mrs. Murphy watches from her window with her bucket of beer handy. The Yellow Kid's observations about the poverty, chaos, and violence surrounding him are recorded in Bowery dialect on his nightshirt. When Outcault moved the comic strip to the New York Journal in 1896, E. W. Townsend, an author who specialized in stories about slum children, began to write text to accompany the Yellow Kid illustrations.Footnote ²² The Yellow Kid then became a fad, with sheet music, books, and many theater productions devoted to Mickey Duggan and his motley gang.

Historian Kerry Soper argues that the popularity of the Yellow Kid is based on the characters' appeal to native-born and immigrant audiences, because the Yellow Kid was not a simplistic “ethnic scapegoat.”Footnote ²³ In fact, according to Soper, the image of the Irish in the comic strips of the 1890s was more sympathetic than in earlier political cartoons; the Irish in the Yellow Kid cartoons may have been “laughable fools” but they were not dirty animals. McFadden's Row of Flats departed from the Yellow Kid tradition by pushing the cute Yellow Kid to the sidelines of the play and focussing on a drunken Irish widow instead. An early review of McFadden's Row of Flats noted, “The day of the ‘yellow kid’ is over. The management seems to have realized this, for the ‘kid’ is far more in evidence on the billboards of ‘McFadden's Row of Flats’ than on the stage.”Footnote ²⁴

In 1897 Frank Dumont's The Yellow Kid Who Lives in Hogan's Alley was produced in Philadelphia, and Gus Hill's competing show, McFadden's Row of Flats, appeared in the same city in 1898 (after its national debut in 1897).Footnote ²⁵ Dumont's published script survives, as does an unpublished script for McFadden's Row of Flats.Footnote ²⁶ The McFadden's Row of Flats text should not be considered a definitive guide to what actually occurred onstage. The play had a loose plot, interspersed with vaudeville acts, and Gus Hill's production was also revised during its long run. Characters' names change – from Bud Taggem to Jacob Baumgartner, for example – and some stage directions were dramatically altered.Footnote ²⁷ The script cited in this essay indicates that Kerrigan, the police officer, wheels Mrs. Murphy onstage in a wheelbarrow, but reviews of the controversial play in New York City and Philadelphia refer to a donkey pulling Mrs. Murphy onstage in a cart. The script indicates that Mrs. Murphy – “maudlin drunk” – throws a drink at McSwatt, trips over her own robe, and confesses, “It isn't the first time my feet were tangled up.”Footnote ²⁸ Although this script does not exactly match the live performance of the play in New York City and Philadelphia, it is still useful to consider this text along with published reviews and the protesters' complaints to reconstruct the productions as closely as possible.

Dumont's burlesque is similar to the McFadden's Row of Flats script in several ways. Both pit Irish and German characters against each other. In The Yellow Kid Who Lives in Hogan's Alley, Schultz, a Dutch shoe repairman, fights with Hogan, an Irish tinker. Schultz yells at him, “Go into your cage, you baboon!”Footnote ²⁹ In addition, each script has a thin plot; most of characters spend their time onstage setting up physical gags – they grease the stairs, steal things, and fight with each other. The Yellow Kid and his gang wreak havoc in the alley, upsetting Hogan and Schultz, as well as the doctor. McFadden's Row of Flats, a three-act play, was longer than The Yellow Kid Who Lives in Hogan's Alley and put much less emphasis on Mickey Duggan. The romance between Tim McFadden and Mrs. Murphy and the campaign high jinks of Tim McFadden and Jacob Baumgartner are central, with the alley kids' antics in the background.

McFadden's Row of Flats played for five years in Philadelphia without protest. It appeared in this city at least seven times between 1898 and its contentious run there in 1903, including two bookings at the People's Theatre without any public outcry.Footnote ³⁰ Theater managers booked the show year after year as a “matter of course” and many observers were surprised by the Irish attack in 1903.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, nationalist leaders acknowledged that the protest against the play came “late,” after the Gaelic movement had built up national and individual self-respect.Footnote ³² Although it is difficult to fix a single version of the play – because of the improvisation of popular theater and the changing roster of vaudeville acts in the play – an examination of the history of the play shows that its contentious elements were not new.Footnote ³³ In print and onstage, the leading characters drank too much and were involved with saloons. Simian Irish makeup was a long-standing part of the act. An advertisement from 1897, for example, shows an ape-like Irishman, with whiskers and a protruding jaw, presiding over a wagon full of the gang from the alley.Footnote ³⁴

The widow Mrs. Murphy, a target of extensive criticism in 1903, was a consistent feature of the comic strip and stage productions. She is flirtatious and aggressive, and she drinks too much. Mrs. Murphy had been a regular character in Outcault's comic strips and Townsend's accompanying text. Draped in a checked shawl with her white hair pinned up, Mrs. Murphy watches the chaotic activities of the children of her alley.Footnote ³⁵ She often has with her a whiskey jug or bucket of beer (a “growler”), which she sometimes passes down to her neighbor.Footnote ³⁶ Her quest for beer is a joke in all of Townsend's stories. At the football game in the flats, she announces that if it was not for her rheumatism, “I'd play the game myself me dear, for think of the power of thirst it must give you!”Footnote ³⁷ She often asks the kids in the alley to rush “t'Kel's for a pint of beer,” she drinks beer instead of tea, and a sign in the flats advertising Mrs. Murphy's Thanksgiving reads: “Roast Turkey – Yes, Everything will be roasted and everybody will be roasted – Come.”Footnote ³⁸ Mrs. Murphy also threatens violence and flirts with Tim McFadden, the landlord at the flats. She skates with him, dances with him, and plots to kiss him. In Townsend's stories she is a drunken widow on the make.

This kind of female character appeared in some other Yellow Kid plays. In Bernard Gilmore and John Leonard's early Yellow Kid contribution, Hogan's Alley (1896), Mrs. Michael Hogan was played by a male actor and Liz, a minor character in Dumont's Yellow Kid of Hogan's Alley, was a cross-dressed character.Footnote ³⁹ This was part of a popular tradition of men portraying Irish women as manly and ugly – a practice that enraged Irish nationalists by the early twentieth century. Drunken women, transvestite characters, and simian Irishmen were thus long-standing – perhaps even stale – elements of McFadden's Row of Flats and the Yellow Kid fad more broadly. But in 1902 and 1903 Irish nationalists looked at these well-worn caricatures with fresh urgency and anger.

If many of the offensive parts of McFadden's Row of Flats had been onstage since the late 1890s, why did radical Irish nationalists attack the play first in 1902 and then with great force in 1903? The reunification of the Clan na Gael in 1899 and its broader campaign, with the Gaelic League and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, to de-Anglicize Irish and American culture set the stage for the campaign against the stage Irish, including McFadden's Row of Flats. Douglas Hyde, the son of an Anglican minister, helped establish the Gaelic League in 1893 to promote a superior, distinct Irish culture.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Gaelic League was active in the United States, where its critique of Anglicization undermined the “Anglo-Saxon idea of American nationality.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Gaelic League refused to take a side in the debate between physical-force nationalism and the more moderate home-rule proposals, but its program of ending British influence fit particularly well with the Clan na Gael's support for violent, anticolonial revolt as well as its celebration of the Celts as a superior “fighting race.”Footnote ⁴² The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) supported the Gaelic League, advocated Gaelic sports, and also pushed for more Irish history in schools. This commitment to a distinctive Irish culture and Irish solidarity also buttressed the rising popularity of physical-force nationalism, which the AOH supported in the early twentieth century. The attack on the stage Irish was one part of this aggressive, ethnic revival.Footnote ⁴³

Some historians have suggested that upwardly mobile Irish fought against onstage stereotypes of coarse Irish immigrants because these representations challenged their new respectability.Footnote ⁴⁴ Lucy McDiarmid, however, questions this assumption in her examination of the Clan na Gael's attack on J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World in Philadelphia in 1912. She claims that the Irish nationalists who attacked this play “did not necessarily aspire to assimilation with Anglo-Saxon Protestant American social customs but rather to the control of culture exercised by the dominant class.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Throughout the campaign against the stage Irish, protesters were often willing to risk the disfavor of American elites by moving beyond resolutions and restrained boycotts to the undignified disruption of theatrical space with fistfights and rotten vegetables. The editor of the moderate Irish American was shocked by the “drastic measures” of the attacks on McFadden's Row of Flats, and the New York Times labeled the Irishmen who rioted over the Russell Brothers in 1907 “impudent ruffians” and “baser fellows.”Footnote ⁴⁶ It is not surprising, then, that most of the Irish involved in disrupting McFadden's Row of Flats were actually “immigrant, lower-class backers of aggressive Irish ethnocentrism.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Around 1900 the Irish of Philadelphia maintained a dense network of Irish nationalist organizations with the same fissures that marked nationalist politics in Ireland and the United States – a competition between moderate or home-rule nationalists, who were largely middle- and upper-class Irish, and radical nationalists, who had a base of working-class, immigrant Irish men.Footnote ⁴⁸ Radical nationalist organizations like the Clan na Gael expressed fiery resistance to home-rule nationalism as a “betrayal of everything national.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Major Henri LeCaron, a British spy who had infiltrated the Clan na Gael, identified Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century as the most powerful stronghold of revolutionary Irish activity.Footnote ⁵⁰ He was particularly concerned about Philadelphia's Luke Dillon, who worked on a variety of radical ventures, including the bombing of a Canadian canal near Buffalo, New York in 1900. Philadelphia was also home to prominent moderate nationalists. In 1908, for example, Philadelphia attorney Michael Ryan became president of the United Irish League of America, an organization that worked for increased peasant landownership and helped establish a popular foundation for John Redmond's “rejuvenated home rule movement.”Footnote ⁵¹

Prominent Philadelphia Clansmen donated funds for Irish causes; financed Clan members' business ventures, such as opening saloons (which often became hubs of Clan activity); and attempted to disrupt British power and influence by any means necessary, including dynamite.Footnote ⁵² The Clan na Gael also staged public events to attract attention to its cause. The organization often rented a theater in the city to host an evening of Irish dances, music, and speeches.Footnote ⁵³ The Clan na Gael's biggest attacks on the stage Irish in Philadelphia – the uprisings against McFadden's Row of Flats and Synge's Playboy of the Western World – were dramatic, well-publicized occasions.Footnote ⁵⁴

Meetings about the McFadden's Row of Flats protests occurred on Clan turf, the Irish American Club House, at 726 Spruce Street in Philadelphia, and the leading spokesmen were Clan organizers.Footnote ⁵⁵ For example, Dr. Peter McCahey, a physician who helped run the Clan na Gael, was a prominent leader of the protests.Footnote ⁵⁶ Born in Philadelphia to Irish parents, McCahey had joined the Clan and the Ancient Order of Hibernians as a young man. He worked for “complete Irish independence” and led Irish organizations in their fight against American alliances with Britain. As part of his campaign to defeat England, McCahey opposed the stage Irishman. He was probably one of the leaders of the 1887 uprising against McSwiggan's Parliament in Philadelphia and he also attacked Playboy of the Western World.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1903 McCahey chaired the meeting of many Irish societies brought to organize the defense of the eighteen men who were arrested and to form a committee charged with discouraging theater managers from booking acts that disparaged the Irish race. Six of the nine members of this committee were affiliated with the Clan na Gael, including McCahey; Patrick O'Neill, a Clan supporter with fundraising experience for the Irish Land League; and Henry Carney, a Clan member since at least 1892 and a leader of the protests against Playboy of the Western World.Footnote ⁵⁸

Information about the Irish men who were arrested for their role in the disruption of McFadden's Row of Flats matches the background of the Clan's working-class, Irish-born base. Seventeen of the eighteen men arrested in Philadelphia were reportedly born in Ireland.Footnote ⁵⁹ In addition, the men who were arrested were concentrated in semi- and unskilled occupations. Four laborers, a driver, and a finisher were arrested, but only two skilled workers – a stonemason and a cooper – along with a low-white-collar worker, a grocer.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although Clan leadership often included doctors and judges, rank-and-file Clan members tended to work mainly in semi- and unskilled jobs – “workers at the very bottom of the economic hierarchy.”Footnote ⁶¹

This group's working-class base is not surprising, considering that its support for violence put it at odds with many upwardly mobile Irish in America. The willingness to disrupt theatrical space and the protesters' unapologetic stance toward disorder fit with the Clan na Gael's distinctive “cult of male revolutionary ‘brotherhood.’”Footnote ⁶² The Clan na Gael, and the closely affiliated AOH, were also involved in raucous holiday celebrations, such as the Fourth of July and St. Patrick's Day, in which Irish men played sports, drank heavily, and fought to “let off steam and settle old scores.”Footnote ⁶³ In these contexts, rowdiness was a respectable assertion of Irish pride. Rather than searching for mainstream respectability, these Irish theater rioters flaunted racial difference and solidarity as well as “belligerent masculinity.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The “moderate versus radical tension that polarized Irish American organizational life” is an important context of the protests against McFadden's Row of Flats.Footnote ⁶⁵ The United Irish League and its American branch, the United Irish League of America (UILA), run by John Redmond's moderate Irish Parliamentary Party, celebrated a series of achievements, including the introduction of land reform measures and the its first national convention, during this controversial run of McFadden's Row of Flats. Denver Hibernians and Gaelic League members – Clan allies – fired the first shot in the McFadden's Row of Flats war in the midst of a UILA campaign. The UILA was building membership with a celebration in Chicago in August 1902 and then its inaugural national convention in Boston on 20 October 1902, just over a week after the Denver outcry over McFadden's Row of Flats. The Clan na Gael and its radical allies tried to undermine the UILA's constitutional nationalism at every turn. The Clan na Gael amended its own constitution with a statement that it was “‘treason’ to belong to the Irish League or to aid or support it in any way.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Then, in July of 1902, at an AOH conference in Denver, the Clan na Gael tried to use its influence within the AOH to force a formal condemnation of the United Irish League. John Redmond's supporters lashed out at the Clan for creating “malignant factionalism” among Irish American nationalists.Footnote ⁶⁷

This factionalism emerged in disagreements between moderate and radical nationalists over the best way to combat the stage Irish. Although John Finerty, the first president of the UILA, criticized the stage Irish, he only advocated a boycott, stopping short of the Clan na Gael's violent approach to the Irish caricature onstage.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Clan na Gael's rough, steadfast campaign against the stage Irish thus set it apart from its rivals in headlines in the nationalist press. Perhaps the Clan na Gael hoped the theatrical confrontations with McFadden's Row of Flats would serve as its own membership drive.

The Clan na Gael rejected what it saw as Redmond's conciliatory approach to parliamentary affairs in the early twentieth century. Redmond, for example, supported George Wyndham's land reform package, which emerged from a conference of landlords and tenants in December 1902. This legislation set out the terms for tenants to purchase land: it provided government aid to tenants and incentives to landowners, such as the appropriation of £12 million of bonus payments to landowners.Footnote ⁶⁹ The bill was introduced on 25 March 1903, approved by the United Irish League in April, and passed by Parliament in August. The bill was divisive. The upcoming land bill, according to Redmond, would be “an important step toward home rule.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, Finerty praised the “mere introduction of the measure [as] a monumental victory for the masses of Ireland … due to the splendid leadership of John E. Redmond.”Footnote ⁷¹ But Redmond's endorsement ran counter to many nationalists who were hostile to the act because it seemed too favorable to affluent tenant farmers.Footnote ⁷² The Gaelic American, edited by national Clan na Gael leader John Devoy, called the Wyndham Act a “fraud land bill.”Footnote ⁷³

The Wyndham Act was introduced in Parliament in the midst of the protests against McFadden's Row of Flats in New York City, right before the second skirmish in that city on 27 March 1903. Although there is no direct evidence that the constitutional nationalists' success with the Wyndham Act caused radical nationalists to attack McFadden's Row of Flats as their own rallying cry, it is a relevant framework for understanding the language of the radical nationalists' complaints about the play and it may have helped to intensify the demonstrations against the play. Opposition to the Wyndham Act often ran parallel to the attack on McFadden's Row of Flats. Edward T. McCrystal, president of the Gaelic League of New York, disregarded the reforms of the Wyndham act and turned the focus back to national Irish culture. He asserted that this “concession” to the Irish would not derail the fight for a “separate entity”: Irish peasants, he predicted, would not “halt on the high road to victory for the bribe of a mess of pottage.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Then, two days after the Wyndham Act was introduced in 1903, McCrystal took a seat at McFadden's Row of Flats at the New Star Theatre. He objected to the image of the Irish onstage and, though he was not arrested, he spoke out in support of the Irish men who were detained for resisting arrest and rioting in the theater:

His critique of McFadden's Row of Flats resembles his critique of the Wyndham Act. In the face of home-rule nationalists' negotiation of political details and celebration of incremental reforms, competing nationalists may have tried to bolster their side with their aggressive opposition to the stage Irish.

McFadden's Row of Flats changed as the protests escalated. Gus Hill, the producer of the play, responded to the New York City protests by revising it. He tried to appease protesters by eliminating the green whiskers from the Irishman's makeup. The manager of the People's Theatre in Philadelphia explained that he was baffled by the riot because “there are no green whiskers on the stage, which was the objectionable feature in New York.”Footnote ⁷⁶ But Hill did not remove the drunken Mrs. Murphy or the pig. He also antagonized protesters by adding a song and jokes that mocked the protesters specifically and Irish nationalism more broadly. Hardly conciliatory, Hill vowed that the show would go on “even if they have to play over a few dead Irishmen.”Footnote ⁷⁷ He was angry about what he saw as a cross-country Irish nationalist conspiracy, which began when Irish nationalists in Denver “sent the orders” to stop the play, according to Hill.Footnote ⁷⁸

Hill was correct to point out that Philadelphia's indignant Irish men were responding as much to nationalists in other cities as they were to the details of his play. New York's Irish activists, for example, had challenged their compatriots in other cities to shut down the play: “the show would not be tolerated here or elsewhere.”Footnote ⁷⁹ To live up to Denver's and New York City's calls to action and to counter Hill's defiant stance, Irish nationalists asserted that it did not matter that the “highly objectionable features” had been dropped: “The only way this slum show could secure the approval of self-respecting Irishmen would be by dropping itself out of existence altogether.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The defiance of Philadelphia's Irish protesters ran deeper than details onstage.

Although Irish nationalists in Philadelphia proclaimed their goal of stopping the play outright, they also attacked several specific scenes, including a new scene that Gus Hill had designed specifically for Philadelphia. At the People's Theatre, when Mrs. Murphy arrived onstage drunk drawn by a donkey – the flashpoint in New York City – no one in the audience hissed or threw food.Footnote ⁸¹ Rather than interrupt this contentious scene, Philadelphia protesters responded to a new addition to the play – a commentary on Irish nationalist agitation. They waited until Arthur Whitelaw began to sing about Irishmen in the house and their misreading of the play. One protester threw the first egg when this comedian sang an original version of “Mr. Dooley” that questioned the judgment of the Irish protesters:

Then “Mr. Dooley” also mocked the political aims of the Irish men when Whitelaw joked, “If ever this band before the King would play, I'm sure old Ireland ere this would be free.”Footnote ⁸² At this point eggs flew from the auditorium. The barrage of fruit, vegetables and eggs, in this case, seemed to be a rejection of Whitelaw's defense of the play, and of his mocking of the protesters' nationalist credentials. With this addition to the play, the producers may have been trying to inflame, not quell, the protests.

Irish activists had objected to “Mr. Dooley” in the past because they regarded it as a foolish, “lowbrow” representation of the Irish.Footnote ⁸³ Written by Jean Schwartz and William Jerome in 1902, the song ridicules Irish contributions to American history.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this published version of the song, George Washington confesses that Mr. Dooley really cut down the cherry tree, Mr. Dooley invented the wireless telegraph, Mr. Dooley greeted Columbus in New York, and Mr. Dooley was the new leader of the “400.” All of these achievements were funny because of their incongruity; they presumed Mr. Dooley's incompetence and insignificance. The song joked about the general anti-Anglo program of the Gaelic League and its allies, which documented great Irish men who were American military heroes, authors, and statesmen in an attempt to prove that America was not an Anglo-Saxon nation.

When these Irish nationalists interrupted Whitelaw's new verses of “Mr. Dooley” they defended their specific political goals. In this way, the assault on McFadden's Row of Flats in 1903 resembles an 1887 protest against McSwiggan's Parliament at McCaull's Opera House in the city. Scheming to blow up the world to hasten Irish independence, Corney McSwiggan dreams of an Irish parliament when he falls into a drunken stupor. In his dream two bombs destroy the earth except for a single green patch – Ireland. McSwiggan becomes king of Ireland and presides over the new parliament.Footnote ⁸⁵ Protesters launched eggs when the ridiculous Irish parliament appeared onstage.Footnote ⁸⁶ With Clan na Gael leader Peter McCahey at the forefront, the Irish activists argued that the farce was a “slur cast upon the much-talked about era of Irish independence.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The management agreed to shut down the show.

Echoing their New York City compatriots, the Philadelphia Irish men reinforced the three main themes in the critique of McFadden's Row of Flats – a challenge to the depiction of Irishmen with green whiskers, pigs living with Irish families, and unfeminine Irishwomen.Footnote ⁸⁸ Even though management had removed green whiskers from the play, Philadelphia protesters still objected to posters that included the outlandish Irish hair. As one Irish leader explained, “The play itself is not so objectionable as the posters of ‘McFadden's Row of Flats’ … One of them depicts an Irishman with green whiskers, and another an Irish woman sleeping with a pig in the room.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The Philadelphia Irish men thus continued one theme of the New York City attack, even though it was not onstage. New York protesters, for example, had objected to “putting a monkey face on an Irishman and then green whiskers.”Footnote ⁹⁰

This was a common complaint in the war on the stage Irish. The stage Irishman, which Irish nationalists derided as an English export to the American stage, had a protruding brow and lips and a pug nose; he was shabbily dressed in green, with bright red or green whiskers on his face and a bottle of whiskey close at hand. Comedian Dan McAvoy, for example, faced the ire of the Ancient Order of Hibernians when he appeared “as a huge ape, with a tremendous upper lip, a short stubby nose, and a fringe of bright red whiskers” for his play, The Mayor of the Bowery, in 1905.Footnote ⁹¹

Images of women were even more controversial than images of men in McFadden's Row of Flats. As one critic remarked, “the one thing to which Irishmen emphatically object in this production is its degrading caricatures of Irish women.”Footnote ⁹² It was not unusual for the Irish activists to focus particularly on images of Irish women. As the National Hibernian stated, “If the ‘Stage Irishman’ represented the very lowest and vilest traits of the Irish character, his spouse did worse.”Footnote ⁹³ Even Monkey Weston, reviled by Irish nationalists, paled in comparison with images of Irish women. When the Irish World described a “broad and vulgar caricature” of an Irish girl, it concluded, “We doubt if Monkey Weston was so bad.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Philadelphia protesters criticized the depiction of Mrs. Murphy onstage and in the publicity for the show. Her character was prominent in advertising, with one poster showing a “slovenly Irishwoman leaning out of the window of a shanty and smoking a clay pipe.”Footnote ⁹⁵ One review of the play in Philadelphia explained that “the portrayal of Mrs. Murphy, Queen of the Flats … is but little behind what the posters would lead one to expect.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The character Mrs. Murphy appears in all three acts of McFadden's Row of Flats. She arrives onstage in a drunken stupor in Act I; she dresses up as the Queen of England – a “rale lady” – and fights with her daughter in Act II; and she kisses Tim McFadden in Act III. She is argumentative, flirtatious, and ugly – the antithesis of a real lady. Though drinking is the backdrop for much of the play, it is Mrs. Murphy who first appears onstage intoxicated. According to the script, the police officer that pushes her onstage in a wheelbarrow explains, “I found her down in the alley and this was the only way I could get her home.”Footnote ⁹⁷ He tips the wheelbarrow over and she slides out. Mrs. Murphy then asks him to “go and get five cents worth of oats.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Throughout the campaign against the stage Irish, Irish protesters focused on several depictions of drunken Irish women: Kitty Fogarty in “The Factory Girl,” Mrs. McCluskey, in the Belle of Avenue A, and the Russell Brothers in “The Irish Servant Girls.” Kitty Fogarty, according to the National Hibernian, was a “shrieking, drunken woman, with wildly disheveled red hair, a blackened eye and generally besotten aspect.”Footnote ⁹⁹ In The Belle of Avenue A, Mrs. McCluskey drinks too much and leaves the stage with two English men. She asks in confusion, “If it just the same to you men, whose wife am I?”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Irish nationalists also attacked comedians John and James Russell when they depicted Irish domestic servants as “whiskey drinking” women and “growler rushers” – beer drinkers with buckets of beer.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Gaelic American reported that the protesters “do object to the drunken creatures who are on stage as Irish characters. It is far worse to so portray an Irish woman.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Although Irish tradition had accommodated the female drinker, Irish community leaders were, by the late nineteenth century, embarrassed when Protestant reformers noted the drunkenness among Irish women, because it was a manly public display, a sign of poverty and lawlessness, as well as a fall from the virtue associated with women in Ireland. Drinking was a problem for Irish women in America. Irish men drank more than Irish women, within a male-dominated pub culture, but Irish women drank far more than women from other ethnic groups. Between 1884 and 1890 in New York City, 1·16 Irish women out of a thousand died from alcoholism, while German women died from it at a rate of 0·12 per thousand.Footnote ¹⁰³ In America, “where village controls seem to have been weakened, female drinking took a quantum leap forward,” concludes historian Hasia Diner.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Irish in America upheld liquor dealing as an honorable occupation for widows, and Irish women were central to the “kitchen grog shops” that were the locus of drinking prior to the rise of saloons in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But bourgeois reformers declared the unlicensed kitchen pub immoral and illegal. Catholic priests and Irish journalists attributed the problem of Irish women's alcoholism to poverty, domestic discord, and the decadence of American urban life.

Irish women who ran in and out of saloons were invading a working-class male preserve, filled with cigar smoke and brass cuspidors and decorated with lithographs of provocative women and famous prizefighters. Saloon culture celebrated working-class manliness, which was expressed through peer-group loyalty, ethnic pride, and physical prowess. Treating neighbors and co-workers to drinks was an Irish custom that expressed “solidarity and equality” among men, according to historian Roy Rosenzweig.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A woman might enter the saloon through a special ladies' entrance on the side, eat a free lunch in the back room, and buy liquor “to go,” but she would probably want these habits hidden from many of her neighbors. With only marginal access to the saloon, women left the front barroom to the men. Historian Madelon Powers describes the two-pronged rationale of gender exclusion: “On the one hand, decent women should be protected from the rough world of men; on the other, the rough world of men should be protected from decent women.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The Russells' servant girls, Mrs. McCluskey, and Mrs. Murphy shared more than alcohol. Their intoxicated loss of control was a double-edged sexual message. It established them as sloppy, manly, and unattractive, but also made them sexually available to the men they met. These women were overeager for romance, but also undesirable. Mrs. McCluskey, for example, is dumped by the English men in the play: “The English worthies, having finished with their Irish American pawns, withdraw, and leave their poor abandoned wretch [Mrs. McCluskey] alone.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Mrs. Murphy put off people with her bad breath and her ugly face. McFadden exclaims, “Let's run away,” then clarifies, “From each other.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Mrs. Murphy says, “My face is my fortune” and McFadden retorts in an aside to the audience, “Faith then she's broke.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Although these jokes are at Mrs. Murphy's expense, McFadden still tries to kiss her in Act I and embraces her in Act III. He asks, “Will you change your name to McFadden?” And she answers enthusiastically, “In a minute.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Why was the sexuality of the stage Irishwoman a contentious issue? As a symbol of traditional national culture and racial superiority, Irish women's sexual behavior was under careful scrutiny, so the stage Irishwoman was held to high moral standards. According to the protesters, the stage Irishwoman was a “libel on the purest race of womanhood that God ever created.”Footnote ¹¹² Indeed, Irish nationalists as well as Irish Catholic leaders in the United States regularly asserted that Irish women were more virtuous than women of other nationalities. These claims were based on post-famine traditions of sexual control in Ireland, where rates of premarital sex and illegitimacy were low compared with rates in other countries.Footnote ¹¹³ According to historian Patricia Kelleher, Irish women's remarkable chastity was a “source of self-esteem and a credit to women's reputations.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

It was not just sex and alcohol that made Irishwomen offensive onstage; protesters also objected to women smoking clay pipes. One Irish man criticized a poster for McFadden's Row of Flats that shows an Irish woman “smoking a clay pipe … almost every picture has its fling at the womanhood of the race.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Around the same time, the Irish World warned readers about a female performer who marketed herself to the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Her specialty was singing “Dig Away Dempsey” with a clay pipe in her mouth. Clay pipes hurt Irish women's class and gender reputations because tobacco was associated with the all-male saloon culture and the clay pipe, in particular, was identified with the day laborer of the nineteenth century.

Depictions of Irish women thus caused trouble when the women violated feminine morality and when they were sexually assertive or manly.Footnote ¹¹⁶ American popular culture often portrayed hardworking, beleaguered Irish women who “could quaff the flowing bowl, use her fists, feet or tongue better than her husband.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The stage Irishman, in turn, was a slacker. Some Irish leaders attacked this reversal of gender roles. For example, a 1903 editorial in the Irish World aptly summed up the misrepresentation of the Irish: “The Irishman is a drunken loafer, who will not work, spends half or all of his wife's earnings, and beats her into the bargain.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

A final contentious image in the play was the pig in the Irish home. One editorial explained one of the fallacies in McFadden's Row of Flats: “Now, pigs are not members of the household of Irish families, and the impropriety of ‘McFadden's Row of Flats’ must be realized by any person who sees the play.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ This complaint was not unique to McFadden's Row of Flats. Two weeks before the outburst over McFadden's Row of Flats, the National Hibernian complained that the stage Irishman, with “florid face, porcine features and a touch of acquired brogue, [seems] to succeed in drawing crowded houses.”Footnote ¹²⁰ One Irish leader complained that the depiction of an Irishman pulling a pig to market by the tail conveyed a “grotesque side of Irish peasant life.”Footnote ¹²¹

The Irish have long been depicted as pigs – with snouts and fat cheeks – and as living too closely with pigs.Footnote ¹²² As historian Peter Way explains, the Irish were seen as having the “muscles and minds of apes and the manners of pigs.”Footnote ¹²³ A 1901 cartoon in a monthly humor magazine, Judge, shows an inspector looking into the hut of the Irish American Muldoon family. He asks, “How many have you in your family, Mrs Muldoon?” and she answers, “Tin, sur; counting ther ould man an ther pigs.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The Irish, through association with pigs, were thus dirty and indiscriminate, willing to live in filth, like their garbage-eating swine. The identification of the Irish with pigs was also a class stereotype, for the pig in the household was a sign of peasant life. It requires little capital or land to raise pigs, while prosperous landowners kept sheep and cattle.Footnote ¹²⁵

Irish nationalist protesters often objected to images of Irish women interacting with pigs. Critics of McFadden's Row of Flats, for example, assailed a poster showing an “Irishwoman sleeping with a pig in the room.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Around the same time, in a long complaint, members of the United Irish American Societies in New York City attacked St. Patrick's Day cards with a young Irish woman posed in front of a “sleek pig,” because other lands

The presence of the pig raised questions about the Irish woman's domestic skills and her feminine reputation generally. Irish nationalists vilified Gus Hill, the owner of McFadden's Row of Flats, for his unapologetic representation of Irish women “on signboards and on the stage as low, beastly creatures.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Indeed, the beastly Irish woman implied many overlapping insults.

The play returned to New York City one week after the riot in Philadelphia. At this point, the United Irish American Societies, an organization with significant Clan influence, hammered out an agreement with the management of the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn. A donkey would no longer pull Mrs. Murphy onstage, the green whiskers and the pig were gone.Footnote ¹²⁹ The immediate tension surrounding this farce was over, and McFadden's Row of Flats continued to tour throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. As one review noted in 1906, “The play has been produced here so often that it is familiar to all the patrons of the popular price houses.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The play returned to Philadelphia three times in 1907, 1910, and 1911.Footnote ¹³¹ But these appearances aroused no anger. Reviews described the play as “familiar” but “new, with special costumes and effects.”Footnote ¹³² Although the short reviews of the Philadelphia shows do not disclose any details about pigs, green whiskers, donkeys or wheelbarrows, the play may have continued to omit these controversial elements. The Yellow Kid fad was fading and Irish nationalists had turned to new targets in the war on the stage Irish in America – such the Russell Brothers in New York City (1907) and Playboy of the Western World in 1911 and 1912. However, despite the familiarity of McFadden's Row of Flats and despite rigorous editing of the show, the play still stirred controversy once in a while, as if the memory of some past affront was cause enough to assert belligerent defiance. When it returned to Boston in 1906, it was advertised as having “[n]o objectionable features” and earning the endorsement of “all societies.” But one Irish man wrote to the Gaelic American asking “How should any society endorse ‘McFadden's Flats’ even with its ‘objectionable features’ eliminated?”Footnote ¹³³ The nationalist challenge thus lingered on, regardless of revisions.

On 4 April 1903, the Irish World published a song to celebrate the triumph over McFadden's Row of Flats, particularly Mrs. Murphy and the donkey:

These protesters were willing to use force to achieve a pure Irish national culture; they were manly defenders of chaste Irish women. The rough attacks on McFadden's Row of Flats, a commonplace production by 1903, helped the Clan na Gael and its allies attract attention to their cause during a series of successes for moderate nationalists. The practical censorship of the play was not just about green whiskers, drunken women, and pigs, though protesters offered a spirited critique of these details – even when they were no longer part of the play. The theater riots were manly dares, defiant displays, and recruiting tools not only in the battles between Irish nationalists and Anglo-Saxon authority but also in the fiery debates between Irish nationalists themselves. Practical censorship was practical politics.