Charleston Politics

Some facts about Charleston that I learned at the South Carolina Historical Society:

"Of all the slow places on the planet, it was the slowest."

From "Charleston Politics in the Progressive Era," a thesis written in 1963:

New Progressivism: an aversion of the common people to the aristocracy.
Charleston Mayor John P. Grace (Mayor 1911-1915, 1919-1923) was an Irish Catholic politician and lawyer who was a believer in majority rule and an antagonist of aristocratic privilege. Traditionally, politicians in Charleston were "boni" (aristocracy of English or Huguenot ancestry).

"The government of the city had long rested in the hands of a few old families, among them the Gadsons and the Rhetts. The overthrow of this ancient and aristocratic rule (with the election of Grace) was spoken of by the New York Sun as being not a mere change in municipal government, but the fall of a dynasty which had controlled the city politically, financially and socially for a century and a half."

 (If you're interested in this, here is another article: http://www.thestate.com/2011/03/20/1743237/after-charlestons-fall-the-mob.html)

After Grace, however, the next few mayors were of the "boni" class-- Thomas P. Stoney (though unusual because he did not live South of Broad) and Burnet Rhett Maybank (mayor of Charleston 1930-1938) are prime examples. Maybank was the direct descendent of five South Carolina governors.

I have lots more info on this, but just wanted to give a general overview. If you have any questions or would like more resources, let me know. I think it's an interesting parallel with the elected monarchy of Hamlet.

1917 Harper's Magazine

Here are some snippets from a travel article about Charleston, published in Harper's magazine in 1917:

"Without being exactly one pattern, [the houses] were of a general type which I found continually repeated throughout the city. A certain rather narrow breadth of stone or brick or wood abuts into the street, and as wide a space of veranda, colonnaded and rising in two or even three stories, looks...over a more or less ample garden ground."

"Nearly all the gardens are shut in by high brick walls and it is something fine to pass in or out by the gate of such a garden, with a light iron-work grill overhead and small globes on the high shouldered brick piers..."

"The tobacco chewing habit, so well-nigh extinct in the North, is still rife in the South."

"To this moment, I do not know what must be the prevalent feeling concerning slavery. It was intimated only once, from lips that trembled with old memories in owning and affirming the Negroes, "They were slaves, but they were happy.'"

"Their presence is of an almost unbroken gloom......[they have] little or no gradation from absolute black to any lighter coloring...but there may be paler shadings of the mulatto, the quadroon, the octaroon, but I did not notice them, though more than once I took persons for white who would have shown to the trained eye as black."

In the shadows of giants...

While in a production meeting this morning at College of Charleston, I spotted this poster from many years ago:  "Amadeus" directed by my former acting professor R. Scott Lank with sets by my first theatre teacher in high school Ike Stoneberger. Two men that I greatly respect were having similar conversations in these same hallways. I suddenly felt like a kid again -- and more like an adult.

 

In theatre, we are often asked to follow in the footsteps of others. An audience will compare tonight's performance to past productions in that same theatre or by that same company or college. And because many plays get produced time and time again, many audience members go in having seen another production of that play or, god forbid, the movie. Any production of a play in the canon such as "Death of a Salesman" or "Our Town" carries some baggage, from audience preconceptions to theatrical precedents, not to mention the fact that these plays are heralded as "masterpieces" and so they'd better be good. 

 

Perhaps no play carries with it more baggage than "Hamlet." It is THE masterpiece by THE master playwright. We have seen pictures or heard stories of everyone from Richard Burbage to Edwin Booth to Laurence Olivier to John Gielgud to Daniel Day Lewis to Keanu Reeves playing the lead. More books and essays have been written about the play than one could read in a lifetime. Whenever I tell people that I'm directing "Hamlet," their eyes get big. An old mentor of mine gave me a stack of books to read as research. A director friend gave me another stack. Cultural analyses, annotated texts, studies of great productions. This is big stuff. The stuff of greats. Don't screw it up.

 

So. How to begin? I sat with the play for many months and got nowhere, daunted by preconceived notions of nearly every moment. Is it even possible to read the "To be or not to be" speech with fresh eyes? I started to try to knock the play down a few notches. I asked myself, Why do I like this play? DO I like this play? What is the story? What are the problems with the story? What parts make no sense at all? I stopped thinking about the play as a masterpiece and started thinking of it as just another play. It's messy at parts -- do I leave those parts messy or try to iron them out? It's overlong -- do I trust the length or try to streamline the story? And what is the story WE as a cast and team are most interested in telling?

 

People started to ask me, "What's your concept?" I felt pressured to say something interesting and brilliant, something worthy of the greats. But every grand idea seemed either to have been done before, or sounded fake in my head like I was trying too hard. My team and I decided that we wanted to base the play in Charleston…but when and where? What does the castle and court feel like? For me what was missing, what I was praying for, was that one idea that would put it all into focus. I tried to stay patient.

 

It started with a joke. I found myself joking that the last scene of the play is like "a garden party gone horribly awry." That's how the idea started to take shape. I started to be able to see and hear and touch the characters. And through that one image, other elements and moments of the play started to unfold in my mind. A garden party. It sounded ridiculous, not "grand" at all, and yet… "A hit, a very palpable hit." I had started to find my way.

Old Jepthah

Painting of Jepthah, John Everett Millais, 1867

Jepthah asked God to bring him victory over his enemies, the Ammonites. In return, he vowed that "whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD's, and I will offer him up as a burnt offering. (Judges 11:30-31) When he returns home victorious, his only child, a virgin daughter, runs out of the house to meet him. 
"And when he saw her, he rent his clothes, and said, 'Alas, my daughter! you have brought me very low and you have become the cause of great trouble for me, for I have opened my mouth to the LORD, and I cannot take back my vow."(11:35)
His daughter tells him that he must do whatever he has promised to God, but first she asks, " 'Let me alone two months, that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my companions.'
  

The Lament of Jepthah's Daughter, George Elgar Hicks, 1871

"And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had made. She had never known a man. And it became a custom in Israel that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year." (11: 37-40)

Ashley Hall, Magnolia Gardens, Charleston, 1910-1920

Charleston, early 20th century

By the early twentieth century, Charleston seemed more like a medieval city than a modern port. Hogs and dairy cows lived in the alleys and walked the streets, while buzzards provided a primary public sanitation service. The city had no professional fire department or police force. In a city becoming known as “too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash,” Charleston’s elite had little interest in or vision of economic renewal. Most shops and even banks in the city opened in late morning, closed at midday to allow the proprietors to enjoy a long and leisurely three o’clock dinner, then reopened briefly before sundown. Charlestonians had the reputation of being lost in a dreamy contemplation of the past. Grace was unwilling to let the city sleep. He instituted a series of reforms that began its modernization, such as raising taxes to pave roads and build sidewalks. Grace held o ffi ce from 1911 to 1915 and again from 1919 to 1923 . Seeing the city’s potential for tourism, in his second term he saw to it that the city contributed to the building of the Francis Marion Hotel, which still stands on the corner of King and Calhoun streets across from Marion Square. The city finally developed professional police and fire protection and other services. Farm animals disappeared from the streets. But the old elites of the city hated Grace. He lost in 1915 by a handful of votes to Tristram T. Hyde. Armed partisans for Grace and equally well-armed partisans for his opponent showed up at Democratic Party headquarters at the corner of George and King streets. A scuffle over ballots led to a wild shootout. Two ballot boxes were hurled into the street, a Charleston News and Courier reporter was shot and killed, and only intervention by police and local militia ended the violence. Meanwhile, although African Americans lacked any meaningful vote in the early twentieth century, they did more than simply accept the marginal place whites attempted to assign them. Unable to challenge Jim Crow as a social system, they worked to improve their position within it. These efforts planted seeds of resistance that would come to fruition in the civil rights struggle.

 

Bass, Jack. Palmetto State : The Making of Modern South Carolina.

Columbia, SC, USA: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. p 76.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/baruch/Doc?id=10559535&ppg=93

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