CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hazel MacKaye and the “Allegory” of Woman Suffrage

WHAT’S A PARADE without a souvenir program? When Alice Paul took the lead in organizing what she called “a procession of our own” to coincide with President Woodrow Wilson’s March 1913 inauguration, she underscored her grand aspirations by commissioning an elaborate twenty-page program clearly meant to be saved if not treasured by participants and spectators alike. Paul planned the entire event in just nine weeks, which might explain why she didn’t have time to find a female artist to do the cover art. Instead, she turned to a twenty-four-year old Washington, DC illustrator named Benjamin Moran Dale.

The full-color cover image was striking. Whether or not Paul gave the artist specific suggestions, he gravitated towards themes that were often featured in suffrage propaganda. The palette, for example, featured purple and gold, colors already associated with the suffrage cause. The central figure was an elaborately attired woman suggestive of a medieval knight—or perhaps Joan of Arc—astride a horse also decked out with medieval cloth barding. As in numerous pieces of suffrage literature, the figure was portrayed as a herald with a bugle, spreading the word with a “Votes for Women” banner. And she was broadcasting this message in a decidedly public space—the streets of the nation’s seat of government, as shown by the visual prominence of the US Capitol.

The rest of the official program was black and white, a mixture of paid advertisements (Terminal Taxicabs was an especially loyal backer), photographs of suffrage leaders with short biographies, and narrative text on subjects such as “Why Women Want to Vote.” But the program’s main purpose was to describe the intricately plotted order of the “Progression,” as the organizers referred to the marching procession, starting with the “Great Demand” float (“WE DEMAND AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES ENFRANCHISING THE WOMEN OF THIS COUNTRY”), followed by seven carefully curated sections of marchers, ranging from representatives of countries where women already voted to wage-earning and professional women grouped by occupation (and dressed accordingly), state delegations, and a separate section for male suffragists. There was no mention of the segregated section for African American marchers—presumably this was put into effect as the parade assembled. The suffrage parade also featured twenty floats, four mounted cavalry brigades and three bands. The event culminated with Hazel MacKaye’s suffrage pageant Allegory, which was staged on the steps of the Treasury Building.

The official program anticipated a dignified and orderly procession. In contrast, the actual parade was marred by an unruly crowd and a totally inadequate police presence. Yet the marchers persisted, bravely claiming the streets of the nation’s capital to press Congress and the new president for the vote.

Hedwig Reicher cut an imposing figure as Columbia on the steps of the Treasury Building. Visible behind her are members of Allegory’s supporting cast. While Hazel MacKaye’s production featured approximately one hundred participants, some pageants had casts that numbered in the thousands. Courtesy of Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-B2-2501-14.

HAZEL MACKAYE worked out the logistics carefully in advance, setting up a telephone relay to coordinate her suffrage tableau with the progress of the larger parade. At 3:00 p.m. on March 3, 1913, almost ten thousand marchers would leave their gathering spot at the Peace Monument near Capitol Hill and begin the fifteen-block procession down Pennsylvania Avenue. At precisely that same moment, her suffrage pageant Allegory would begin to unfold on the marble steps of the Treasury Building—the first time, thanks to Alice Paul’s persistent lobbying, that women had secured permission to use a federal building for such a purpose. Both events were part of the suffragists’ attempt to create in effect a counter-inauguration to Woodrow Wilson’s official investiture the next day—to claim public space in the nation’s capital in support of women’s demand for the vote at a time of presidential transition.

At first things unfolded as planned. To the musical accompaniment of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the figure of Columbia—decked out in breast-plate and helmet and cloaked in a blue velvet cape with a red and white lining to symbolize the American nation—majestically emerged from between the classical columns framing the entrance to the Treasury Building and proceeded slowly to a flat, plaza-like area where the action was to take place. In pantomime, she used her eagle-topped scepter to salute the grandstand audience, who had paid five dollars per seat for admission to the spectacle, as well as the crowd of curious bystanders. MacKaye remembered that both groups greeted the start of the pageant “with a veritable Niagara of applause.”¹

Then, to musical accompaniment ranging from Verdi to Wagner to Mendelsohn, Columbia began to summon her court, who were gathered out of sight inside the main entrance to the building at the top of the stairs. First came Justice with her entourage, then Charity, accompanied by a girl and boy (the only male in the cast) scattering rose petals. Liberty, portrayed by the event’s choreographer, Florence Fleming Noyes, leapt and skipped down the Treasury stairs “with great, free limbed steps” in a low-necked crimson gown. Next came Peace, who released a white dove in the direction of the White House, followed by Plenty, who descended to the plaza with attendants decked out with olive branches and cornucopias of fruit. The final character was Hope, accompanied by fifty young girls dressed in bright colors and clutching balloons. Led by the commanding figure of Columbia—the event’s “visual crux … allegory-turned-suffragist”—the group of approximately one hundred actors, now assembled together in a tableau on the Treasury steps, stood silently as they awaited the procession of marchers, whose impending arrival was to be announced by heralds of trumpets.²

No trumpets sang out, MacKaye remembered, only “a most deadly pause.” The spectators craned their necks up Pennsylvania Avenue, but there was no sign of the procession. The pageant director grabbed the nearest telephone and learned that unruly crowds had disrupted the suffrage parade and the police had been unable—or unwilling—to intercede. The cavalry was on its way, but it was unclear how long it would take to re-establish order. In the meantime, the tableau of characters stood frozen on the Treasury steps.³

MacKaye acted quickly, sending out a messenger (presumably in costume) to convey to Columbia what had happened. Calmly assessing the situation, Hedwig Reicher, the experienced German-born actress who played the lead role, signaled the bandmaster to play “America” while she explained to the cast what had transpired. “Whereupon, as though they were veteran players, the entire cast wheeled about and, group by group, mounted the steps again as though the whole thing had been rehearsed.” Once safely inside the Treasury Building, they warmed up (many were dressed in loose-flowing gowns and sandals on a cool March day) and waited.⁴

When word came that the march was finally on the move again, MacKaye sent the groups of actors out a second time. Columbia, Justice, Charity, Liberty, Peace, Plenty, Hope and their colorful entourages re-enacted the pageant, and then, this time with perfect timing, the allegorical figures finished their final tableau just as Inez Milholland, widely credited as “the most beautiful suffragette,” rode by on her white horse at the front of the procession. “With a friendly lilt of her head, she acknowledged the acclaim and then turned to raise her hand in solemn greeting to Columbia and her assembled court who stood in silent review. Then she passed on and the radiant young crusader was swallowed up in the surging crowds beyond.”⁵

After the masses of suffragists had marched past the tableau on the Treasury steps, the actors fell in line at the end of the procession and proceeded to the planned meeting, featuring Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Helen Keller, at Continental Hall. But Hazel MacKaye rushed off to catch a train to Chicago, where she was directing another pageant. As she later observed, “Thus ended one of the most eventful days in my career as well as a day fraught with significance in the history of woman suffrage.”⁶

Hazel MacKaye was absolutely right about the importance of this event. In part because of the rowdiness of the crowd and the inability of the Washington police to maintain control, the suffrage parade received an enormous amount of press coverage, especially when President Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural parade went off without a hitch the following day. The sheer visual impact of thousands of suffragists marching down Pennsylvania Avenue won new converts to the cause, and MacKaye’s Allegory was singled out for special praise. The Washington Herald called it “one of the most beautiful spectacles ever seen on the stage or in the open in Washington,” while the New York Times deemed it “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in the country.” The Woman’s Journal offered an especially positive endorsement: “To those who feared that equal suffrage would make women less womanly, to those who feared that in becoming politically free woman will become coarse and mannish looking, to those who fear the loss of beauty and grace, art and poetry, with the advent of universal suffrage, the pageant offered the final word, the most convincing argument that human ingenuity can devise.”⁷

The coordination of Allegory’s climax with the suffrage parade’s passing in review confirms that the pageant was conceived as an integral part of the Progression. The official program described the link in this way: “The story told in the Progression shows what woman is striving to achieve, as well as what she has so far attained. The Allegory, on the other hand, illustrates those ideas towards which both men and women have been struggling through the ages and toward which, in cooperation and equality, they will continue to strive.”⁸

Open-air suffrage parades and pageants were both still quite unusual in 1913. The pageant movement in the United States dates to 1905, when an outdoor masque in honor of the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens was held in Cornish, New Hampshire. Relying exclusively on amateur performers and often featuring huge casts, pageants prized participation and inclusion. The format, which usually offered six episodes with musical or dance interludes designed to “deliver wholesome and uplifting entertainment to the general public,” proved especially adaptable to town histories and other historical commemorations. While most pageants consciously steered away from controversial topics, Hazel MacKaye took a different tack. If pageants were such a popular form of entertainment, she reasoned, why not use them as a vehicle for social change? Specifically, why not stage pageants as a creative way to build support for a movement like woman suffrage? As MacKaye wrote to a supporter, “A pageant is the most potent means of welding the women themselves together as well as poignantly to set the question of suffrage before the voters.”⁹

Hazel MacKaye came from a family with deep roots in theatrical production. Her mother, Mary Medbery, was a writer and actress; her father, Steele MacKaye, was a playwright best known for Hazel Kirke (1880), reputed to be the most widely performed play of its time after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The play provided a name for their daughter, who was also born in 1880. Her older brother Percy, who wrote the prologue to the 1905 St. Gaudens production, became a leading pageant director; he was especially well known for staging a pageant featuring 7,500 actors in honor of St. Louis’s 150th anniversary in 1914 and for his series Caliban, by the Yellow Sands, staged in 1916 for the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death.

Hazel started her career as an actor. After working on several of her brother’s productions, she switched to directing pageants on her own. When she masterminded Allegory, she was thirty-two years old and “not averse to the wonder I caused among the people to see a woman in the position of stage manager.” Showing the male professional stagehands that “I knew my business,” she confessed, caused her “pleasurable pride.” Looking back, she felt that this experience helped to strengthen her already well-established feminist tendencies and proved “that a stage manager’s job had nothing to do with sex—it was whether or not an individual was fitted for the task.”¹⁰

MacKaye had quite a capacious approach to pageantry, which she laid out in a 1914 article for The Suffragist: “I can only state my firm belief that a pageant has more power to convince people of the truth of our cause than any other means. A pageant is a forceful and vivid form of drama. It combines the medium of the spoken word, the dance, pantomime, stirring music, masses of people in striking costumes, strong contrasts in situation, in its appeal.” That very fluidity of form made it especially appealing for theatrical professionals, but MacKaye realized pageants were also very effective at reaching audiences: “When our emotions are swayed, our very innermost being is touched. The light comes to us in a single flash, instead of by dim and cautious flickerings.”¹¹

MacKaye made special note of what the pageant experience meant for participants. Pageants subsumed the individual to the larger whole, encouraging a “remarkable esprit de corps,” which according to MacKaye “welds a heterogeneous mass of participants from every class and creed into an army disciplined to withstand the onslaughts of any disaster.” Taking part in a performance—in effect fulfilling the dream of generations of would-be thespians—was truly thrilling: “To enter to a blaze of trumpets in a sweeping costume with a banner or a wand, or a star upon one’s brow, whether it be down lofty steps or through winding paths of greensward, makes the commonplace days of one’s ordinary life seem drear and dry, indeed.” Performers were just as touched as audiences, according to MacKaye. “Not one of those women or girls who participated in the pageant could ever again feel indifference towards the cause of Equal Rights.”¹²

Like many others involved in the pageant movement, MacKaye emphasized the underlying aesthetics. “I stress the beauty of the ceremony because I have an intense belief in the importance of beauty to the health of the world,” she wrote. But she didn’t want to merely present a vision that imitated neo-classical forms without linking them to modern themes: “If pageantry is to endure and live we shall have to use pageantry—not alone as a review of the past—but also to interpret the problems of the present and our hopes for the future.” Her brother Percy captured this sense of inhabiting parallel worlds when he described the experience of seeing his sister’s Allegory performed: “gazing up at the double background of mysterious pillars—before them the sun-blazed plaza and steps, a-flutter with rose and iris and pale gold—one sank, under the spell of music, into a day dream of old Athens, only to thrillingly awake at the thought: ‘No. This is to-day, 1913, America—our own living age and festival! This is Washington—the Athens of tomorrow.’ ”¹³

Unfortunately, this “Athens of tomorrow” was totally white. Whether intentionally or not, Allegory’s depiction of female beauty served to reinforce prevailing standards of race and class—what scholars call “performing whiteness”—in its presentation of elite white women as the caretakers and upholders of culture. There was no room on the Treasury steps for women of color, and if suffrage leaders had had their way, there would have been no room for them in the suffrage procession either, unless they marched segregated at the back. The black suffragist Ida Wells-Barnett of Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club had made it clear what she thought of that capitulation to southern suffragists when she joined the Illinois delegation midway through the parade. Maybe she should have walked on to the “Allegory” set as well.¹⁴

After Allegory, Hazel MacKaye mounted three more suffrage-themed pageants. The first, Six Periods of American Life: Past—Present—Future, sometimes referred to as The American Woman, was staged in New York City for the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage in collaboration with the Equal Franchise Society. Presented at a ball held April 17, 1914 at the Seventy-first Regiment Armory in front of several thousand guests, the pageant drew on the talents of more than five hundred participants, male and female—more than five times the scale of Allegory. Alas, the New York Times review only had eyes for the women, headlining its article about the event “Real Beauty Show in League Pageant; Handsomest of Their Sex Chosen for Suffrage Allegorical Scene.”¹⁵

MacKaye’s narrative in this pageant was much more hard-hitting and antagonistic to men than the generalities that floated Allegory. Perhaps she thought the supporters of the Men’s League would be more open to such an interpretation than the general public. In what was basically a parody of the laudatory tone of most town histories, she reframed the historical narrative to speak out boldly against sexism (although that word had not yet been coined) from colonial times to the present and clearly laid the blame for women being “powerless and ignored” at the feet of men. While her portrayal of recently emancipated male slaves was positive, her staging reinforced reigning racist tropes regarding Native Americans.¹⁶

The pageant unfolded in six parts, accompanied by music composed by Bertha Remick. The first scene, “The Indians—Before the Coming of the White Man,” portrayed Native American men lazing about while their women did all the work. The next episode blamed male Puritan leaders for not listening when a suspected witch’s female friends vouched for her innocence. A third portrayed a colonial-era scene of men and women working productively together, until only the men were called by the town crier to attend the town meeting. A fourth, set immediately after the Civil War, featured Susan B. Anthony unsuccessfully arguing that women should be enfranchised alongside black men.

Then it was to “The Present—Side by Side.” Here MacKaye employed the favorite tactic of featuring a well-known personage—in this case New York City suffrage leader Harriet Burton Laidlaw—as an onstage actor. In another insider’s wink, Laidlaw’s husband James also had a role in the tableau. This scene argued that despite women’s working alongside men in “all occupations, trades, and professions,” the law still prevented women from passing through the “portals of state.” After a short, dream-like interlude, the pageant concluded in “The Future,” with the figures of Man and Woman (as embodied by Spencer Miller and Inez Milholland) now truly equal, celebrated by the Spirit of Triumph in a dance choreographed by Florence Fleming Noyes from Allegory, as well as by the choruses of Future Men and Future Women. Despite tackling patriarchy head on, the pageant seems to have been well received, although it was never performed again.¹⁷

MacKaye’s third suffrage pageant was decidedly more inspirational in tone. In yet another innovative gesture, she focused on a single individual, Susan B. Anthony. The pageant presented her life in ten biographical scenes and five symbolic tableaux, which were based on material drawn from the History of Woman Suffrage. The performance, which netted $4,000 for Alice Paul’s Congressional Union and was timed to the convening of the sixty-fourth Congress in Washington in 1915, featured four hundred actors, a chorus of sixty, and a twenty-five-piece orchestra. The play’s emotional climax was Anthony’s disruption of the celebrations surrounding the US Centennial in Philadelphia on July 4, 1876, which MacKaye called “the first militant act ever committed in the cause of Votes for Women.” Functioning both as entertainment and suffrage advocacy, this pageant proved MacKaye’s most popular and was performed by suffrage groups and amateur theatrical organizations around the country. She proudly considered it her most important contribution to the suffrage cause.¹⁸

Over the next few years, MacKaye produced pageants for groups such as Vassar College, the Women’s Peace Party, the YWCA, and a soap manufacturing company in Buffalo. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, she continued her activism in the fight for equal rights. When the National Woman’s Party looked to stage an extravaganza in 1923 to launch its campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seneca Falls declaration, she eagerly accepted the commission.

MacKaye had a different agenda for this final feminist pageant. Now that suffrage had been won, she could be less didactic and more celebratory. Her Equal Rights Pageant recruited more than a thousand women to portray the history of the women’s rights movement. Usually pageants ended with a grand finale, but MacKaye inverted the practice and opened with one: a huge procession of women carrying banners in the colors of the National Woman’s Party. Another unusual touch was the illuminated barges on nearby Seneca Lake that ferried brightly dressed Banner Bearers to the pageant’s outdoor set. The move that best wedded MacKaye’s theatrical sense to her commitment to women’s history was the giant sign that flashed on, like an oversize roadside advertisement, spelling out “Declaration of Principles”—the 1848 Seneca Falls manifesto—in electric lights, symbolically bringing suffrage history into the modern age.¹⁹

The performance was such a hit that it was restaged two months later for twenty thousand people in the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, and then, retitled Forward into Light, at the annual National Woman’s Party conference in Westport-on-Lake Champlain in New York State. This pageant was the last spectacle the women’s movement mounted until feminism’s revival in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1923, the pageant movement had basically run its course, falling prey to the competition of far more exciting forms of mass entertainment, such as movies, newsreels, Victrola records, and radio, which were readily available nationwide by the 1920s, especially in urban areas. This new popular culture made extravaganzas like pageants seem increasingly quaint and outdated.

Hazel MacKaye considered herself one of the “old guard” of the National Woman’s Party, having been present at the very first meeting in Washington in the winter of 1911–1912, which led to the formation of the Congressional Union under Alice Paul’s charismatic leadership. Like so many others, she had not set out to become a suffragist, let alone a suffrage pageant-maker, but when suffragists took to the streets in 1913 to stage their response to Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, she found herself standing up to male authority in a very public way. According to MacKaye, “that procession and allegory in their novelty marked a new era in the political campaigning of women,” confirming her insight about the importance of spectacle to the suffrage cause.²⁰