The Mysterious Carlisle Kawbawgam

Business card of Carlisle Kawbawgam

 

In 1912 the Red Caruso burst on the scene, drawing admiration and sneers from both sides of the Atlantic.

Six feet tall, the papers reported, and a magnificent tenor, twenty-six year old Carlisle Kawbawgam told the world that he was the son of the last chief of the Chippewa tribe of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  

“The copper-colored Indian is a magnificent specimen of young manhood,” declared the New York Dramatic Mirror. Audiences and critics predicted that Kawbawgam would soar. He had a brilliant future in opera, they said.

At least one editor spewed venom:

 

The spectacle of Poor Lo singing high “C” should be sufficient to give one pause. Incidentally, if there is any foundation in fact for the story, we would advise “Jim” Thorpe to get out of his present popularity all that he can.

“Poor Lo,” a derogatory name for Native Americans, became popular in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. It derives from “An Essay on Man” by the English poet Alexander Pope, who wrote:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind . . .

"LO THE POOR INDIAN" (1875)
(Library of Congress)

The Upper Peninsula is perched above the mitten of Michigan, surrounded by the lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior. There, Carlisle Kawbawgam was born in 1882. However, the chief whom he claimed as his father had no children. More than a few puzzling facts or fibs would follow.

During adolescence, Kawbawgam said, he left the Chippewa village and traveled to Pennsylvania to enroll at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. If he actually attended Carlisle, he may have entered willingly or forcibly. The government-run boarding school had one goal: total assimilation and acculturation in white society. Students were brutally subjected to reprogramming.   

Later, when he became a singer, Kawbawgam announced that he chose the name “Carlisle” as a tribute to his alma mater. Immediately, numerous journalists and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote to Moses Friedman, superintendent of the school, inquiring about the former student. Friedman replied that he had no record of this famous alumnus.

 

Carlisle School Superintendent Moses Friedman
informs the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs that
Carlisle Kawbawgam never attended the boarding school.

Now the young man, it would be reported, went off to the Yale School of Medicine—except Yale has no record of his enrollment. The first Native American graduate of Yale, Henry Roe Cloud, received a B.A. in 1910.  

Kawbawgam may have attended Yale under a different name. But in the age of Jim Crow, it is unlikely that a Native American—even "unblanketed and unmoccasined," as one observer noted—could have passed.  

Onward to Washington, D.C., where Theodore Roosevelt inhabited the presidency and smart society had sprung back to life after years of late Victorian stuffiness.

There, Kawbawgam practiced medicine and sang at private events to earn extra money. During a performance for a Latin American legation, he met and fell in love with Alma Lopez, a Chilean woman of Aztec descent. They married and sailed to Europe. Kawbawgam planned to tour, then settle in Berlin to study with an American expat, Frank King Clark, a well-known voice and elocution teacher.

 

Advertisement for one of Kawbawgam's
performances in Berlin 

In December 1912, rave reviews started flying across the ocean. 

GERMANS DISCOVER AN INDIAN CARUSO

Graduate of Carlisle School

Hailed in Berlin and Vienna

As Coming Opera Star

TO GIVE UP VAUDEVILLE

 

But Kawbawgam did not give up vaudeville. He continued to perform in music halls, never opera houses. Perhaps he studied with Clark until war broke out in 1914; then he and his wife moved to London. There he appeared regularly, always with second billing, at the Trocadero Restaurant and the Alhambra.

Often appearing alongside him were an Australian swimmer and diver, Annette Kellermann; a Parisian torch singer, Mlle. Damia; and a Japanese family of ventriloquists and pantomimists, the Hammamuras.

Of Kawbawgam, English critics “declared unreservedly that an undeniably wonderful talent lies hidden in his bronze throat,” according to a report in the New York Times.

 

He lately inherited the chieftaincy of the Chippewa through the death of his father, is erect as a sycamore and Indian in every line of his gaunt frame and physiognomy. He is really a “medicine man” by profession. . .  

While Kawbawgam performed as a singer in the London variety shows, he probably also had parts in minstrel-type skits like “The Indian Mail Carrier” and “Queen of the Redskins.”

He and Alma stayed in England through World War I. Carlisle Jr. was born in 1916 and little Alma came along in 1919. A few years later, the family sailed to New York on the Red Star Line. Whether they stayed in the U.S. or returned to England is a mystery.

Carlisle Kawbawgam is a mystery, too. A Native American of ambiguous ancestry, he may have been a poser (as the British say) or a faker (as the Americans say). Perhaps he fabricated his education at Carlisle and Yale. Perhaps he practiced medicine under false pretenses. We don’t know.

One thing is certain: he dreamed of being an opera star.  

Soon after Kawbawgam’s name began to appear in newspapers, a chronicler of Ohio who authored interminable books about the glory days of the frontier, wrote:*

 

Certainly the Indians did not indulge in any kind of music to the extent that did other races. They had few songs or refrains, and no musical instruments worthy of the name. In fact, they were a silent, sullen people, and did not even indulge in laughter to the extent that other people have. So if we are to have an Indian singer who is to startle the world with his music, it only shows what mighty transformation has been wrought in the Indian since he first met the white man.

*Abraham J. Baughman, Past and Present of Wyandot County, Ohio (1913).

 

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2022/01/the-mysterious-carlisle-kawbawgam.html

Wanamaker, Ogden, Whalen & Powell: A Story about Race

Wanamaker's at Astor Place, 1920s

In 1928, about 300,000 black people resided in New York City and 250 of them were employees of the department store known as Wanamaker’s.  

Founded by John Wanamaker in Philadelphia in 1876, the same year as the nation’s centennial, the store employed African-Americans through Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era.  Wanamaker’s devout Christianity led him to believe in racial equality – to the extent that the times permitted.

John Wanamaker

The brilliant entrepreneur was also influenced by his friend Robert Curtis Ogden, who joined Wanamaker’s soon after it opened and conceived of the store’s innovative advertising and marketing schemes. 

Robert C. Ogden had been committed to the education of black Americans since 1874, when he joined the board of the Hampton Institute.  The Institute, established after the Civil War as a teachers’ training school, provided agricultural and industrial education – although little in the way of academics – to freed slaves. *

Nature study brochure
Hampton Institute, 1908

In 1896, Ogden moved from Philadelphia to New York City to manage a new branch of Wanamaker’s located downtown near Astor Place.   

There he drew admiration from black employees who soon formed the Robert Curtis Ogden Association of the John Wanamaker Store.  Its purpose was to celebrate the achievements of the store’s black employees; for example, the association awarded annual prizes for achievement in musical composition and performance.

In 1905 Wanamaker and Ogden addressed the National Negro Business League, founded by the educator Booker T. Washington to support black-owned businesses.  Their remarks received flattering reviews in the New York Age, one of the nation’s foremost African-American newspapers.

Robert Curtis Ogden

But contemporary scholars note that the speeches were patronizing and that both men denied the existence of systematic racism.  Further, it is now evident that Wanamaker’s nonwhite employees were rarely promoted. They remained in menial jobs behind the scenes with the exception of elevator operators.  

However, the store’s employment practices were tolerant compared to other businesses.

After World War I, for example, white veterans lobbied the Fifth Avenue department stores to fire black elevator operators and give them the jobs instead.  Saks and Best & Co. obliged but Wanamaker’s and Bloomingdale’s did not buckle.

One could argue that Wanamaker and Ogden were racists, yet they rose above the shameful standards of the day.

John Wanamaker died in 1922, by which time his son Rodman had complete control of the company.  While Rodman’s three passions were music, aviation, and American Indian culture, he continued the work of the Ogden Association and the store’s relatively liberal hiring policy.

Everything changed when Rodman Wanamaker died in March 1928 and a glad-hander named Grover Whalen, a longtime store employee who had been one of Rodman’s assistants, stepped into the top position.

Perpetually doffing a homburg hat, Whalen dabbled in everything: politics, public relations, ceremonies.  He did have some good ideas such as the creation of WNYC, the city’s radio station.  Also, he was a fabulous greeter of General Pershing, Charles A. Lindbergh, and numerous famous people who visited New York.

But he wasn’t great for Wanamaker’s.  Just a few months after Whalen stepped in, the New York Age ran a front-page story about a change in the store's longstanding policy.

It turned out that a white woman customer had observed employees eating together in the integrated company cafeteria and complained to management.  Whalen immediately issued an order to segregate the lunchroom.  In protest, black employees began eating in local restaurants rather than in the cafeteria, but Whalen remained unbowed.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Grover Whalen could not resist the call of City Hall.  Within a few months he was gone from Wanamaker’s, having accepted the job of Police Commissioner offered to him by playboy Mayor Jimmy Walker.   

“There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick,” declared Whalen.  Communists and bootleggers counted among his many targets.

Over time, Whalen’s views on race might have evolved.  But they did not. 

In his autobiography, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives, recalled visiting Whalen around 1935 just after the former police commissioner had been named chair of the New York World’s Fair Corporation.  The fair would open in 1939.

We went to ask him for employment for qualified Negro people.  He offered us token jobs.  We refused them.  The slogan of the fair was “Building the World of Tomorrow,” and I can remember telling Grover Whalen: “You cannot have a World of Tomorrow from which you have excluded colored people.”

Mr. Whalen, suave and urbane, smiled beneath his carefully trimmed mustache and said, “I do not see why the world of today or tomorrow of necessity has to have colored people playing an important role.”

“A loss shared by all New Yorkers,” came the cry when Whalen died in 1962.  Even though the language is boilerplate, it’s still hard to choke down.

Grover Whalen (second from left) greets Charles Lindbergh
(facing camera) at the Manhattan Bridge in June 1927

*The Hampton Institute (now Hampton University in Hampton, VA) and the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University in Alabama) were denounced in some quarters for providing what critics considered the equivalent of a grammar-school education.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/02/wanamaker-ogden-whalen-powell-story.html

By Way of an Introduction to James D. Corrothers

James D. Corrothers, 1890s

Around 1900 while James D. Corrothers was the pastor of a Methodist church in Red Bank, N.J., he attended a banquet at a New York hotel.

The dinner honored Elbert Hubbard, a socialist, writer, self-improvement fiend, and adherent of the Arts and Crafts Movement, now largely lost to history.

In his autobiography, Rev. Corrothers described how he stood out as the sole Black person among 250 dinner guests. He sat near a woman journalist who wrote for the New York Times. She tried to guess his identity, he recalled years later.

“I know that coloured man!” she exclaimed. “It’s Booker T. Washington!”

But she learned her mistake.

“Oh, I know now whom he is! It’s Paul Laurence Dunbar!” she declared.

Then somebody told her my name and calling.

“Oh, I know whom he is now,” she explained. “He’s only a darky minister from Red Bank!”

In Reverend Corrothers’ autobiography, In Spite of the Handicap, he noted that the journalist, a Southerner named Zoe Anderson Norris, and the man she married, the illustrator J. K. Bryans, would become warm personal friends.

Indeed, Bryans, who specialized in comics and silhouettes, drew the pictures for Corrothers’ book, The Black Cat Club, Negro humor & folklore, published in 1902.

That book is a bit of a surprise, written as it is entirely in Negro dialect.

“I have grown to consider the book a very poor one, and regret exceedingly that it was published,” Corrothers reflected in 1916.

But he explained that his inspiration lay in the work of the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who popularized the use of Negro dialect.* In fact, some Black authors embraced “dialect literature” until the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance around 1920. And Black intellectuals of the day, including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, lauded it. **

Historians and critics have analyzed this phenomenon. Was it a satirical device? A roundabout way for the Black elite to distinguish itself from less sophisticated brethren? A means to preserve Black folklore after the Civil War? Various interpretations exist.

Illustration, The Black Cat Club
(by J. K. Bryans)

It appears that Rev. Corrothers intended The Black Cat Club to be a send-up of the pretensions of well-educated Blacks and their delusions about assimilation. The book opens as its main character, Sandy Jenkins, nicknamed “Doc,” exults in his newly established Black Cat Literary Club in Chicago. Doc celebrates with a drink:

“You black people been raisin’ san’ wid yo’ Shakespeare ack,” observed Billy “Spooks,” the bartender, pouring out Doc’s drinks. . . “See whut de papahs said ‘bout you dis mo’nin’?”

“Nevah pays no ‘tention to such small mattahs,” answered Sandy; “might, ef I wuz raised pickin’ cotton in de backwoods down South lak you. I’se a genamun ma’safe.”

The Black Cat Club is an interesting artifact.

However, a poem entitled “An Indignation Dinner,” which Corrothers published in The Century Magazine in 1915, is far more compelling. It starts:

              Dey was hard times jes fo’ Christmas round our neighborhood one year;

              So we held a secret meetin’, whah de white folks couldn’t hear,

              To ‘scuss de situation, an’ to see what could be done

              Towa’d a fust-class Christmas dinneh an’ a little Christmas fun.

As the meeting progresses, the men become increasingly angry about the deprivation they routinely endure, and decide to steal a turkey, chickens, hogs, and sweet potatoes from a nearby farm. The last stanza:

              Well, we lit right in an’ voted dat it was a gran’ idee,

              An’ de dinner we had Christmas was worth trabblin’ miles to see;

              An’ we eat a full an’ plenty, big an’ little, great an’ small,

              Not beca’se we was dishonest, but indignant, suh.  Dat’s all.

*Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the son of slaves, began writing at an early age and published books, stories, and poems although he was never able to support himself. His work, while admired widely, has been criticized for promoting racial stereotypes.

**During these years, white writers and artists also employed Negro dialect in books, songs, and plays for white audiences. Its use by whites was considered deeply derogatory.

Continued in August 24, 2016 post.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/08/by-way-of-introduction-to-james-d.html

Through the Hourglass: By Way of an Introduction to James D. Corrothers

A Mount Vernon Story

Postcard, A.B. Davis High School, Mt. Vernon, N.Y., 1920s

I visited Hamilton Grange, which was the 19^th century home of Alexander Hamilton in northern Manhattan where the island narrows and the terrain slopes steeply down to each river. High above St. Nicholas Park, where the home is now located, looms a neo-Gothic fortress.

It is the City College campus, also known as CCNY, perched on top of the schist boulders that form the island’s bedrock spine. Along with Hunter College and Brooklyn College, CCNY is one of 11 senior colleges that comprise the City University of New York system.

I flashed back to Ted K., an educator who started his career in the city of Mount Vernon, where I grew up. We met in the 1990s when he was an administrator in the school district where my family lived.

Somehow things always do get around to Mount Vernon. But first he talked about being a student at CCNY in the early 1950s. To make extra money, he worked part-time in one of the college offices where he occasionally walked by an open file drawer that contained student records. He noticed that some of the folders had red dots on them.

Sure enough, the marks indicated students who were thought to be affiliated with the Communist Party. Ted described how the realization that the administration was monitoring students’ activities truly shocked him. But he needed the job and kept his mouth shut.

He went on to get a Master’s that brought him into the field of high school counseling. He took a position at A.B. Davis High School, the precursor to Mount Vernon’s sprawling new high school which would be built on the north side of the city during the early 1960s.

Ted worked under the wing of Grace T. Lewis, dean of A.B. Davis. A descendant of Meriwether Lewis and daughter of a banker who served as mayor of Mount Vernon for two glorious years, Lewis still wore pince-nez and devoted herself to shepherding students toward college.

Things had changed a great deal – yet, in a way very little – since Dean Lewis arrived around 1920. At that time, the students at Davis were largely Protestant and Jewish and would complete the college preparatory course. The city had another high school: Edison Vocational and Technical High School, attended by black and working class students. Students were steered one way or the other.

Years ago, I interviewed a retired teacher who joined the high school faculty in the mid-1930s. “People would ask me whether I taught in the temple on the hill or the spaghetti factory in the valley,” she said.

It took nearly a decade to pass the referendum to build a new high school because of opposition to black students being bused across town from the south side. But eventually the progressives won. The new school was state of the art. Harvard president James B. Conant had recently proposed remaking secondary education with a consolidated curriculum, and Mount Vernon built the classic comprehensive high school with vocational courses such as business, auto body, and cosmetology. 

Ted K. became principal of Mount Vernon’s most prestigious elementary school. After a few more years, he confronted the superintendent about patronage and racism in the district and was punished with a demotion. After that, he’d had enough and moved on.

See post: 5/18/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/ccny-stream-of-consciousness.html