the major portion of his audience under cover of Yiddish. The Theater is felt by him and his ilk to be a Jewish institution.
Down to 1885 the American Theater was still in the hands of the Gentiles. From 1885 dates the first invasion of Jewish influence. It meant the parting of the ways, and the future historian of the American Stage will describe that year with the word “Ichabod.” That year marks not only the beginning of the Jewish wedge of control, but something far more important.
It is not important that managers are now Jews whereas managers were formerly Gentiles. That is not important. The importance begins with the fact that with the change of managers there came also a decline in the art and morals of the stage, and that this decline has become accelerated as the Jewish control became widened. What Jewish control means is this: that everything has been deliberately and systematically squeezed out of the American Theater except its most undesirable elements, and these undesirable elements have been exalted to the highest place of all.
The Great Age of the American Theater is past. About the time that Jewish control appeared, Sheridan, Sothern, McCullough, Madame Janauschek, Mary Anderson, Frank Mayo, John T. Raymond, began to pass off the stage. It was natural that, life being brief, they should pass at last, but the appalling fact began to be apparent that they had left no successors! Why? Because a Hebrew hand was on the stage, and the natural genius of the stage was no longer welcomed. A new form of worship was to be established.
“Shakespeare spells ruin,” was the utterance of a Jewish manager. “High-brow stuff” is also a Jewish expression. These two sayings, one appealing to the managerial end, the other to the public end of the Theater, have formed the epitaph of the classic era. All that remained after the Hebrew hand fell across the stage were a few artists who had received their training under the Gentile school—Julia Marlowe, Tyrone Power, R. D. McLean, and, a little later, Richard Mansfield, Robert Mantell, E. H. Sothern. Two of this group remain, and with Maude Adams
