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A strictly American institution: Neil O'Brien, blackface minstrelsy, and the invention of white Catholic identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

George K. Blake
George K. Blake*
Affiliation:
Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University, Clark Hall, Room 207, 11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland, OH 44106-7120, USA E-mail: georgekblake@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines the politics of race, religion and nation in relation to blackface minstrelsy during the first decades of the twentieth century. Having been superseded by more modern amusements, minstrelsy was outdated as a performance genre, yet the minstrel show served as a forum for Neil O'Brien and the Knights of Columbus fraternal society to participate in the invention of a white American Catholic identity. For fraternal society members, estranged from national belonging by religious difference, these performances situated the group as proponents of an old-fashioned American tradition, structured around anti-blackness. At a time of anti-Catholic sentiment, Catholic fraternal society members gathered for minstrel performances, distancing themselves from black people and marking themselves as white Americans.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , October 2019 , pp. 379 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

References

The Neil O'Brien Papers. Davidson Library. University of California, Santa Barbara. Includes unpublished items and items with incomplete information:Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1904. The Columbiad, August, p. 6Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1906. The Columbiad, FebruaryGoogle Scholar
Denver News. 1904. ‘Knights of Columbus honor the veteran minstrel, Neil O'Brien’Google Scholar
Knights of Columbus Minstrels Auspices of San Antonio Council No. 786. 1912. Souvenir programme. DecemberGoogle Scholar
The Mobile [Alabama] Register. 1912. ‘Two immense audiences saw the two performances at the Lyric Monday afternoon and evening’, 2 JanuaryGoogle Scholar
Wilmington, Delaware News. 1919. ‘O'Brien minstrelsy in a riot of fun at the playhouse’Google Scholar
Neil O'Brien's personal scrapbook of newspaper clippings:Google Scholar
Blackwood, L. 1935. ‘Al Jolson of his day says he is still young’, The Mount Vernon News, AugustGoogle Scholar
Sibley, C. 1931. ‘Neil O'Brien, Jr. tells of famous star's career’, The Mobile Press, 26 July, p. 2Google Scholar
Abbott, L., and Seroff, D. 2007. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, ‘Coon Songs,’ and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi)Google Scholar
Allen, E.F. 1918. Keeping Our Fighters Fit for War and After (New York, Century)Google Scholar
Anderson, R.B. 2005. Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1946–1956 (Nashville, TN, Vanderbilt University Press)Google Scholar
Barth, F. 1969. ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’, in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Sollors, W. (New York, New York University Press), pp. 294–324Google Scholar
Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia (New York, Basic)Google Scholar
Carnes, M. 1990. ‘Middle-class men and the solace of fraternal ritual’, in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, M.C. and Griffen, C. (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press), pp. 37–52Google Scholar
Chude-Sokei, L. 2006. The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Clawson, M.A. 1989. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press)Google Scholar
Dolan, J. 1992. The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press)Google Scholar
Dumenil, L. 1991. ‘The tribal twenties: “assimilated” Catholics’ response to anti-Catholicism in the 1920s’, The Journal of American Ethnic History, 11/1, pp. 21–49Google Scholar
Fischer, C. 1992. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Goldschmidt, H. 2004. Introduction, in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. Goldschmidt, H. and McAlister, E. (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Gutman, H. 1976. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York, Alfred A. Knopf)Google Scholar
Haden, K. 2013. ‘Anti-Catholicism in U.S. history: a proposal for a new methodology’, American Catholic Studies, 123/4, pp. 27–45Google Scholar
Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Higham, J. 1955. Strangers in the Land; Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press)Google Scholar
Huggins, N. 1971. Harlem Renaissance (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Ignatiev, N. 1995. How the Irish Became White (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Kauffman, C. 1982. Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882–1982 (New York, Harper and Row)Google Scholar
Kauffman, C. 1993. ‘Christopher Columbus and American Catholic identity: 1880–1900’, US Catholic Historian, 11/2, pp. 93–110Google Scholar
Koehlinger, A. 2004. ‘Let us live for those who love us: Faith, family, and the contours of manhood among the Knights of Columbus in late nineteenth-century Connecticut’, Journal of Social History, 38/2, pp. 455–69Google Scholar
Kun, J. 2005. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Lancefield, R.C. 2004. ‘Hearing orientality in (white) America, 1900–1930’, PhD dissertation, Wesleyan UniversityGoogle Scholar
Linn, K. 1991. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press)Google Scholar
Lipsitz, G. 1994. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music and the Poetics of Postmodernism (London, Verso)Google Scholar
Liptak, D. 1989. Immigrants and Their Church (New York, Macmillan)Google Scholar
Loewen, J. 2005. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York, New Press)Google Scholar
Lott, E. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Mahar, W. 1999. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press)Google Scholar
McGreevy, J.T. 2003. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, W.W. Norton)Google Scholar
Meer, S. 2005. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens, GA, University of Georgia)Google Scholar
Monks, A. 2005. ‘Genuine Negroes and real bloodhounds: cross-dressing, Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones’, Modern Drama, 48/3, pp. 540–64Google Scholar
Nordstrom, J. 2006. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press)Google Scholar
Nowatski, R. 2010. Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press)Google Scholar
Nyong'o, T. 2009. The Amalgamation Waltz: Antebellum Dreams of the Transcendence of Race (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Pickering, M. 1986. ‘White skin, black masks: “nigger” minstrelsy in Victorian Britain.’, in Musical Hall Performances and Style, ed. Bratton, J.S. (Milton Keynes, Open University Press), pp. 78–90Google Scholar
Radano, R., and Bohlman, P. (eds) 2000. Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press)Google Scholar
Rawick, G. 1972. From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT, Greenwood Publishing Company)Google Scholar
Rice, E.L. 1911. Monarchs of Minstrelsy from ‘Daddy’ Rice to Date (New York, Kenny)Google Scholar
Rice, T. 2010. ‘Disciplining Ethnomusicology: a call for a new approach’, Ethnomusicology, 54/2, pp. 318–25Google Scholar
Roediger, D. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, Verso)Google Scholar
Roediger, D. 2005. Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (New York, Basic Books)Google Scholar
Rogin, M.P. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Rourke, C. 1931. American Humor: A Study of National Character (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books)Google Scholar
Saxton, A. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, Verso)Google Scholar
Schechner, R. 2003. Performance Theory (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Schrode, G.M. 1993. Knights of Columbus: Kentucky State Council (Paducah, KY, Turner)Google Scholar
Schultz, A. 1994. Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American through Celebration (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press)Google Scholar
Scott, E.J. 1969. Negro Migration during the War (New York, Arno Press)Google Scholar
Senelick, L. 2000. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Skocpol, T., and Oser, J. 2004. ‘Organization despite adversity: the origins and development of African American fraternal associations’, Social Science History, 28/3, pp. 367–437Google Scholar
Small, C. 1998. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press)Google Scholar
Sotiropoulos, K. 2006. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press)Google Scholar
Soyer, D. 1999. ‘Entering the “Tent of Abraham”: fraternal ritual and American-Jewish identity, 1880–1920’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 9/2, pp. 159–82Google Scholar
Stock, J. 2001. ‘Toward an ethnomusicology of the individual, or biographical writing in ethnomusicology, The World of Music, 43/1, pp. 5–20Google Scholar
Stokes, M. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford, Berg)Google Scholar
Toll, R.C. 1974. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Tosches, N. 2001. Where Dead Voices Gather (Boston, MA, Little, Brown)Google Scholar
Trouillot, M.-R. 1990. ‘Good day Columbus: silences, power and public history (1492–1892)’, Public Culture, 3/1, pp. 1–24Google Scholar
Varacalli, J. 2006. The Catholic Experience in America (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press)Google Scholar
Verhoeven, T. 2010. Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (New York, Palgrave Macmillan)Google Scholar
Warner, M. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books)Google Scholar
Watkins, M. 1994. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying – The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York, Simon and Schuster)Google Scholar
Whaley, D. 2010. Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press)Google Scholar
Wittke, C. 1930. Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, NC, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Wondrich, D. 2003. Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843–1924 (Chicago, IL, Chicago Review Press)Google Scholar
Wong, D.A. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
The Neil O'Brien Papers. Davidson Library. University of California, Santa Barbara. Includes unpublished items and items with incomplete information:Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1904. The Columbiad, August, p. 6Google Scholar
Anonymous. 1906. The Columbiad, FebruaryGoogle Scholar
Denver News. 1904. ‘Knights of Columbus honor the veteran minstrel, Neil O'Brien’Google Scholar
Knights of Columbus Minstrels Auspices of San Antonio Council No. 786. 1912. Souvenir programme. DecemberGoogle Scholar
The Mobile [Alabama] Register. 1912. ‘Two immense audiences saw the two performances at the Lyric Monday afternoon and evening’, 2 JanuaryGoogle Scholar
Wilmington, Delaware News. 1919. ‘O'Brien minstrelsy in a riot of fun at the playhouse’Google Scholar
Neil O'Brien's personal scrapbook of newspaper clippings:Google Scholar
Blackwood, L. 1935. ‘Al Jolson of his day says he is still young’, The Mount Vernon News, AugustGoogle Scholar
Sibley, C. 1931. ‘Neil O'Brien, Jr. tells of famous star's career’, The Mobile Press, 26 July, p. 2Google Scholar
Abbott, L., and Seroff, D. 2007. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, ‘Coon Songs,’ and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi)Google Scholar
Allen, E.F. 1918. Keeping Our Fighters Fit for War and After (New York, Century)Google Scholar
Anderson, R.B. 2005. Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1946–1956 (Nashville, TN, Vanderbilt University Press)Google Scholar
Barth, F. 1969. ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’, in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Sollors, W. (New York, New York University Press), pp. 294–324Google Scholar
Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia (New York, Basic)Google Scholar
Carnes, M. 1990. ‘Middle-class men and the solace of fraternal ritual’, in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, M.C. and Griffen, C. (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press), pp. 37–52Google Scholar
Chude-Sokei, L. 2006. The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Clawson, M.A. 1989. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press)Google Scholar
Dolan, J. 1992. The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press)Google Scholar
Dumenil, L. 1991. ‘The tribal twenties: “assimilated” Catholics’ response to anti-Catholicism in the 1920s’, The Journal of American Ethnic History, 11/1, pp. 21–49Google Scholar
Fischer, C. 1992. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Goldschmidt, H. 2004. Introduction, in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. Goldschmidt, H. and McAlister, E. (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Gutman, H. 1976. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York, Alfred A. Knopf)Google Scholar
Haden, K. 2013. ‘Anti-Catholicism in U.S. history: a proposal for a new methodology’, American Catholic Studies, 123/4, pp. 27–45Google Scholar
Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Higham, J. 1955. Strangers in the Land; Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press)Google Scholar
Huggins, N. 1971. Harlem Renaissance (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Ignatiev, N. 1995. How the Irish Became White (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Kauffman, C. 1982. Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882–1982 (New York, Harper and Row)Google Scholar
Kauffman, C. 1993. ‘Christopher Columbus and American Catholic identity: 1880–1900’, US Catholic Historian, 11/2, pp. 93–110Google Scholar
Koehlinger, A. 2004. ‘Let us live for those who love us: Faith, family, and the contours of manhood among the Knights of Columbus in late nineteenth-century Connecticut’, Journal of Social History, 38/2, pp. 455–69Google Scholar
Kun, J. 2005. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Lancefield, R.C. 2004. ‘Hearing orientality in (white) America, 1900–1930’, PhD dissertation, Wesleyan UniversityGoogle Scholar
Linn, K. 1991. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press)Google Scholar
Lipsitz, G. 1994. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music and the Poetics of Postmodernism (London, Verso)Google Scholar
Liptak, D. 1989. Immigrants and Their Church (New York, Macmillan)Google Scholar
Loewen, J. 2005. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York, New Press)Google Scholar
Lott, E. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Mahar, W. 1999. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press)Google Scholar
McGreevy, J.T. 2003. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, W.W. Norton)Google Scholar
Meer, S. 2005. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens, GA, University of Georgia)Google Scholar
Monks, A. 2005. ‘Genuine Negroes and real bloodhounds: cross-dressing, Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones’, Modern Drama, 48/3, pp. 540–64Google Scholar
Nordstrom, J. 2006. Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press)Google Scholar
Nowatski, R. 2010. Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press)Google Scholar
Nyong'o, T. 2009. The Amalgamation Waltz: Antebellum Dreams of the Transcendence of Race (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Pickering, M. 1986. ‘White skin, black masks: “nigger” minstrelsy in Victorian Britain.’, in Musical Hall Performances and Style, ed. Bratton, J.S. (Milton Keynes, Open University Press), pp. 78–90Google Scholar
Radano, R., and Bohlman, P. (eds) 2000. Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press)Google Scholar
Rawick, G. 1972. From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT, Greenwood Publishing Company)Google Scholar
Rice, E.L. 1911. Monarchs of Minstrelsy from ‘Daddy’ Rice to Date (New York, Kenny)Google Scholar
Rice, T. 2010. ‘Disciplining Ethnomusicology: a call for a new approach’, Ethnomusicology, 54/2, pp. 318–25Google Scholar
Roediger, D. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, Verso)Google Scholar
Roediger, D. 2005. Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (New York, Basic Books)Google Scholar
Rogin, M.P. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press)Google Scholar
Rourke, C. 1931. American Humor: A Study of National Character (New York, Doubleday Anchor Books)Google Scholar
Saxton, A. 1990. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, Verso)Google Scholar
Schechner, R. 2003. Performance Theory (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Schrode, G.M. 1993. Knights of Columbus: Kentucky State Council (Paducah, KY, Turner)Google Scholar
Schultz, A. 1994. Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American through Celebration (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press)Google Scholar
Scott, E.J. 1969. Negro Migration during the War (New York, Arno Press)Google Scholar
Senelick, L. 2000. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar
Skocpol, T., and Oser, J. 2004. ‘Organization despite adversity: the origins and development of African American fraternal associations’, Social Science History, 28/3, pp. 367–437Google Scholar
Small, C. 1998. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press)Google Scholar
Sotiropoulos, K. 2006. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press)Google Scholar
Soyer, D. 1999. ‘Entering the “Tent of Abraham”: fraternal ritual and American-Jewish identity, 1880–1920’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 9/2, pp. 159–82Google Scholar
Stock, J. 2001. ‘Toward an ethnomusicology of the individual, or biographical writing in ethnomusicology, The World of Music, 43/1, pp. 5–20Google Scholar
Stokes, M. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford, Berg)Google Scholar
Toll, R.C. 1974. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, Oxford University Press)Google Scholar
Tosches, N. 2001. Where Dead Voices Gather (Boston, MA, Little, Brown)Google Scholar
Trouillot, M.-R. 1990. ‘Good day Columbus: silences, power and public history (1492–1892)’, Public Culture, 3/1, pp. 1–24Google Scholar
Varacalli, J. 2006. The Catholic Experience in America (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press)Google Scholar
Verhoeven, T. 2010. Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (New York, Palgrave Macmillan)Google Scholar
Warner, M. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books)Google Scholar
Watkins, M. 1994. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying – The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York, Simon and Schuster)Google Scholar
Whaley, D. 2010. Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press)Google Scholar
Wittke, C. 1930. Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, NC, Duke University Press)Google Scholar
Wondrich, D. 2003. Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843–1924 (Chicago, IL, Chicago Review Press)Google Scholar
Wong, D.A. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar