For many years, the lowly Irish immigrant has served as a blank screen onto which scholars of American history and society have projected their own understandings of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ideas about what was going on in the mind of “poor Paddy” have served to buttress wide-ranging arguments on a variety of subjects from white supremacy to status anxiety to national identity to gender norms. In many of these studies, the “stage Irishman” has often been ushered front-and-center, his alleged propensity for blackface minstrelsy being used to demonstrate the ways in which immigrants employed racism to assimilate into American society. Despite their prominent role in the scholarship, however, Irish emigrants’ own ideas and words have often been neglected in favor of the thoughts and opinions of native-born Yankees. In the past, this lacuna was often explained away on the grounds of a lack of primary sources. In his famous work How the Irish Became White (1995), for example, Noel Ignatiev compared a scholar attempting to formulate a coherent image of antebellum Irish identity using archival materials to a paleontologist struggling to reconstruct a dinosaur from a single tooth. In sum, while the literature on immigrant racial identity produced thought-provoking arguments and theories, their collective struggle to engage the actual words of the actual emigrants themselves limited their power.

As such, the two books under review here are welcome additions to the scholarship on theater and ethnic identity. Both interrogate primary and secondary sources with a view to understanding how the playwrights, performers, and audiences understood and responded to representations of race on the stage. At the same time, both books approach the subject from very different perspectives. In Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905, Jennifer Mooney explores popular theater as “the site of complex negotiations about what it meant to the Irish in America” (172–73) during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Chronologically picking up where Mooney leaves off, and expanding her scope to include Jews and African Americans, M. Alison Kibler investigates how minority groups “developed varied protest strategies – such as theater riots, boycotts, and backstage lobbying – to combat racial ridicule” (1) between 1890 and 1930. In other words, while Mooney focusses on what was said and done on the stage itself, Kibler is more interested in offstage reactions to plays, musical productions, and motion pictures. Although Kibler's book is clearly the work of a seasoned veteran while Mooney is in the early stages of her scholarly career, both make important contributions to the literature on race, ethnicity, and the nineteenth-century American stage.

Jennifer Mooney's book is a new addition to the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series, which boasts an impressive list of over fifty titles on a wide range of (primarily, though not exclusively, American) subjects. Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905 is based on Mooney's PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Ulster Coleraine's Centre for Media Research. The book “seeks to examine stereotypes of the Irish in vaudeville” in order to more fully understand “whether representations of the Irish on the popular stage contributed to the development of an Irish American identity and how, if at all, they evidence the changing position of the Irish in America during this period” (3–4). To answer this question, Mooney employs a range of archival materials including vaudeville sketches, songs, programs, and plays produced and performed by both native-born and Irish Americans. She concludes that the standard scholarly argument – that portrayals of the Irish were uniformly negative – hides deeper complexities at work. While admitting that “the drunks, laborers, and housemaids are all there,” Mooney also notes that the vaudeville stage provides evidence “of a growing Irish American community attempting to come to terms with its changing position in American society” (172). Vaudeville was a tool with which some nativists attacked the Irish, but it was also employed by the Irish themselves to construct and express positive ideals of nationality and gender.

The book opens with a long Introduction (chapter 1) in which Mooney describes her project, sources, and questions; the relevant literature; and the broad historical context in which her story takes place. The subsequent four chapters at the heart of the book are organized thematically around two big issues: ethnic/national identity (chapters 2 and 3) and gender (chapters 4 and 5). Chapter 2 examines the ways in which Irish and Irish American actors performed both Irish stereotypes and blackface onstage. She concludes that while “contributing to the racist stereotyping of black Americans, Irish performers [used vaudeville] to shape and refine crude stage Irish types into a more genteel, sympathetic character” (61). Chapter 3 focusses on the performance of Irishness at Tony Pastor's Opera House in New York between 1865 and 1874, arguing that while the Irish nationalist struggle for independence from Britain was regularly justified onstage, the plays simultaneously sought to undermine American fears of Irish anarchism by downplaying class struggle. The next two chapters turn to examine gender. In chapter 4, Mooney argues that while Irish male laborers were sometimes portrayed in ways that contradicted mainstream ideals of the sober, industrious, American-born men, it is also “possible to discern” that performances of Irish men “helped to carve out a particular brand of Irish masculinity, as distinct from the hegemonic masculinity held as the ideal to native-born men.” Leaning on the work of Stephen Rohs, Mooney sees this as a “strong bachelor subculture” (129) in which Irish men drank, sang, and fought primarily with other Irish men. In chapter 5, the final chapter before the Conclusion, Mooney sees two sides of the Irish woman. “Whereas in the Irish-set plays, Irish women can be fair, innocent, and chaste,” Mooney argues, “in the American-set plays they are exclusively boorish, violent, and masculine” (159). The immigrant desire for social mobility could cost women their femininity.

M. Alison Kibler, known for her groundbreaking book Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (1999), has produced another excellent monograph in Censoring Racial Ridicule. While there is only a brief chronological overlap between her book and Jennifer Mooney's, the two work well together because they approach performances of racism from different but complementary perspectives: while Mooney looks at the stage itself, Kibler examines ethnic reactions outside the theater. Focussing on campaigns to censor offensive productions in film and theatre, Kibler argues that despite inequities amongst the groups themselves, “Irish, Jewish, and African Americans used similar rhetoric in their critique of racial ridicule and occasionally found common cause” (20). Kibler hammers home several important themes throughout the book. Two stand out in particular. First, there is the way in which debates over censorship highlighted deeper struggles in American society between freedom of expression and equality. While “civil rights censors saw prejudice as a barrier to racial and religious equality,” opponents of government regulation “worked to stop prejudice in censorship, by which they meant political partisanship or narrow advocacy for one group, rather than the whole nation” (171, my emphasis). The second important theme relates to relations between these minority groups, which were subject to fluctuating alliances and rivalries. In 1905, for example, the campaign against the anti-black The Clansman was characterized by “alliances between African Americans and Jews, while the Irish battle against The Playboy of the Western World was riddled with Irish hostility toward Jews and African Americans” (82–83). Kibler shows that, taken as a whole, however, these campaigns to protect minorities by censoring racial ridicule onstage and in film were components of broader developments in the political organization of those groups.

Unlike Mooney, Kibler's chapters proceed chronologically. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the later chapters by offering the reader a broad portrait of the Irish, African American, and Jewish communities’ social, economic, and political positions in the United States while examining some of the relationships between them within and without the theater. Chapter 2 analyzes the ways in which Irish immigrants used theatre riots as a form of “practical censorship.” “Designed to enthrall an audience,” Kibler notes, Irish riots “affirmed a radical brand of Irish nationalism, strong Irish manhood, and a distinctive group identity” (51). Turning from violence in the aisles, chapter 3 examines the ways in which African American and Irish activists used lawful means to challenge damaging racial ridicule in two plays, respectively The Clansman and The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Taking their campaigns to court, African Americans argued that The Clansman threatened to inflame racial violence while the Irish claimed that The Playboy demeaned women and Irish femininity. Chapter 4 examines racism in film, considering the ways in which Jews and African Americans pioneered race-based motion picture censorship in a context of segregation and vigilante violence. In chapter 5, Kibler focusses on Chicago, showing that Jewish membership on censorship boards helped to roll back racism while simultaneously opening the community up to charges of favoritism and prejudice. Finally, chapter 6 illustrates how those in favor of free speech wrestled with race-based censorship. Kibler concludes that “the bans on racial ridicule were both a problem for some free-speech progressives and a useful symbol of censorship run amok for reformers fighting motion picture censorship” (17).

Taken together, these two books deepen and complicate scholarly understandings of the ways in which American ethnic minorities saw theatrical and motion picture productions as a threat to their standing in mainstream society. However, unwilling to rehearse familiar tropes of Jews, African Americans, and Irish as perennial victims, both books also show the ways in which the stage, and arguments surrounding it, opened new ground for the political and social activism of these minority groups. Debates over the depiction of racial stereotypes illustrate an ongoing tension in American society, in the words of Kibler, between “equality and freedom of expression, between the protection of groups and the rights of individuals” (217). These books both bring minority voices from long ago into that conversation.