34 PAGEANT
Amy M. Tyson
Twentieth-century historical pageants are often referred to as “Parkerian pageants,” so named for Louis Napoleon Parker (1852—1944), who wrote and staged The Pageant of Sherbourne in Dorset, England in 1905.
Intended to commemorate the town's 1200th anniversary, Parker drew on 900 locals who performed 11 historic episodes chronicling the town's early history, and so began the historical pageant's modern form. Not long after Parker's early effort, communities across the globe were participating in these large-scale, historically focused performance spectacles. The pageant's form borrowed from the tableau vivant genre (i.e., living pictures that were staged but static), as well as from the long-standing processional pageants (i.e., narrative plays performed on mobile structures, such as wagons) that preceded and overlapped with them. In a sense, they might be thought of as a series of dramatized historical reenactments, but whereas reenactments have tended to refer to stagings of a singular event or moments in time (as in, say, a battle reenactment), modern historical pageants were grand theatrical performances depicting chronological histories that unfolded in carefully crafted episodes intended for mass consumption (pilgrimage).Unlike earlier forms of pageantry that traveled, historical (nee Parkerian) pageants were generally performed in fixed locations such as arenas or fields—and when possible, often took place in front of settings meant to evoke the aura of the past—for instance, in front of a castle's ruins. At the helm of these pageants was the pageant master (and sometimes mistress), who was hired to write, organize, and direct the production. Depending on the production's size, local citizens also formed committees to orchestrate areas such as finance, costumes, publicity, and the like. As with Parker's inaugural effort, historical pageants enlisted the time and talents of hundreds and sometimes thousands of community participants who worked as the pageant's volunteer amateur actors.
Regardless of what history was being portrayed or where it was being portrayed—the many weeks of rehearsals leading up to a pageant encouraged face-to-face contact between community participants who might otherwise never have encountered each other. Thus, in an era where rapid advances in telecommunications dispersed connections beyond the local sphere, the pageant reestablished the increasingly tenuous bonds of community—at least, for those who were permitted to participate in them (Glassberg, 1990, p. 288). Finally, after many weeks of rehearsal the cast would dramatize their pageant over the space of an afternoon or several consecutive ones for massive crowds (for the larger pageants, spectators could be in the tens of thousands), many of whom would take home a specially printed souvenir program (Figure 34.1).In a very real sense, historical pageants were meant as antidotes to the perceived problems of the modern industrial era. Like the folksy open-air museums that emerged in Europe in the 1890s, on the surface, historical pageants tended to evoke nostalgia for the pre-industrial past through historical narratives that erased the real dissonance between groups in the industrial present. Pageant participants intentionally drew on a broad cross-section of a community, with the thought that the communal histories that unfolded within the pageant would promote the cross-class unity mirrored in the pageant’s cross-class production effort. And yet, this art nevertheless tended to mimic life, with the most prestigious roles often going to the town’s elite or local gentry (Sheail, n.d.). That said, from a gendered perspective, the historical pageants of the early 20th century provided opportunities for both women and men to organize civic participatory activities and to perform in the public sphere, even while the historical narratives portrayed therein tended only to portray men as the agents of historical change (gender).
The mammoth scale of these historical pageants did not lend easily to nuance.
Most pageant writers assembled their historic episodes with an eye toward inspiring patriotic sentiment, fostering joyful civic participation, and also avoiding controversy. Louis Napoleon Parker even urged fellow British pageant writers to focus their efforts on histories prior to the British Civil Wars of the mid-17th century, in order to avoid civic discord. Thus, particularly in the era before World War I, most historical pageants focused on dominant narratives and canonical episodes in a town’s history (with American pageants making liberal use of allegorical interludes). In Hertford, England, their pageant episodes began in 673 with an episode dedicated to The Synod
Figure 34.1 Souvenir of the Oxford historical pageant: in aid of the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford Eye Hospital, etc. commemoration, 1907. Source: Oxford Pageant Committee.
of Hartforde; the final and eighth episode was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I’s 1561 visit to Hertford Castle (Sheail, n.d.). In Cheshire, a 1914 pageant focused its efforts chiefly on Queen Elizabeth I’s 1589 “visit” to Cheshire’s Moreton Hall. Significantly, this latter Elizabethan visit is apparently not substantiated by any historical documentation, yet in the historical pageant that depicted it—like so many others—her presence was intended to boost local civic pride alongside promoting national unity (Bartie et al., n. d.).
While most modern historical pageants were rooted in localism, pageant scripts were often mere variations on a theme, as the two mentioned English pageants suggest (narrative). In England, for example, the iconic Elizabeth I often came a-calling. Moreover, in settler-colonial societies such as Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the US, historical pageants worked not merely to inspire civic pride and patriotism, but also to uphold imperialist narratives. Peter Merrington describes, for example, how pageant scripts from both Cape Town and Quebec shared similar features with “the most significant historical episodes [...] dealing with landfall and settlement; as well as moments of dedication, covenant between settlers and God, or the signing of treaties between them and the ‘natives’” (1998—1999, p.
140) (indigeneity).Given that modern historical pageants—whether dealing with imperialist themes or not— helped maintain the status quo, it is not surprising that subaltern histories tended to be excluded from pageant narratives. For example, in the US, when ethnic minorities were included among the cast of most modern pageants, it was only when such inclusion supported the pageant’s hegemonic themes. Historian David Glassberg observes that in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914, the pageant masters of Pageant and Masque assigned white ethnic groups (much to their chagrin) roles as “‘some peasant folks’ arriving as new immigrants. on the margins of the community, rather than having them appear in scenes depicting the making of St. Louis” (1990, p. 5) (Figure 34.2). Similarly, despite protest, the city’s 44,000 black residents were excluded from the pageant. Here, and elsewhere in most American historical pageants, immigrants and black Americans were considered people without history.
By contrast, in settler-colonial societies, indigenous people were often represented because the generic episodic histories of historic pageants demanded either that indigenous peoples’ domination or their acquiescence be accounted for as a way to visibly demonstrate an inevitable ascendency of white settler-colonists. In many cases, the roles of indigenous people were played by white townsfolk. In Pageant and Masque, for example, local whites were chosen to “play Indian” despite offers from the Ojibwe’s William Hole-in-the-Day that his people be hired for the indigenous roles (Glassberg, 1990, pp. 178—179). Here, an actual indigenous presence would contradict the pageant’s dominant message that “conquered” indigenous peoples had stepped aside (or vanished altogether) to make way for the inevitable progress of white civilization. By the same token, even when actual indigenous people were included among a historical pageant’s cast, it was only to reinforce their perceived distance from white civilization.
In the 1908 Quebec tercentenary, for example, Nelles describes how the hired “Natives” were dressed in “gaudy Plains Indian” feathered headdresses “and leather-fringed clothing, brandishing tomahawks and shouting war whoops,” borrowing heavily from the era’s popular Wild West theatricals, which—like the historical pageant—also staged canonical and mythic retellings of history (1996, p. 402). Here, while we find one episode of the pageant devoted to the Iroquois’ dramatic performances of disarray and murder, in the episode that follows, Nelles notes, “[o]rder is restored and civilization secured by the Church, reinforced by the secular power of the state” (1996, p. 404).Bytheseconddecadeofthe20th century,groupsseeking tocounter dominanthistoricalnar- ratives also adopted the form. In 1913, activist, sociologist, and historian W. E. B. DuBois staged The Star ofEthiopia,apageant honoring the 50th anniversary ofthe Emancipation Proclamation,
Figure 34.2 Group of cast members from the Pageant and Masque, wearing colonial and American Indian costumes. Source: Missouri History Museum, 1914.
the presidential order during the American Civil War that declared the freedom of enslaved persons in certain parts of the American South (Figure 34.3). Premiering in New York City with more than a thousand participants, DuBois’s production, as historian David Krasner has noted, did not merely trace black history to pre-historic times through to the present, it represented African Americans’ experience with slavery as evidence of their resilience (2002). Earlier that same year, the countercultural Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913 took place in New York’s Madison Square Garden to support 26,000 striking silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey. With the support of the radical labor organization Industrial Workers of the World, strikers protested the replacement of skilled laborers by mechanized silk looms.
To gain public sympathy for the cause (which it did) and to raise money for it (which it did not), leftist journalist Jack Reed took the role of pageant master and worked with his bohemian comrades from Greenwich Village on sets and publicity. Over a thousand actual strikers, many of them Italian immigrants, reenacted the history leading up to and during the strike. Activist writer Steve Golin sees this pageant production as a pivotal moment for understanding how a “fragile bridge” was forged between middle-class activists and working people: “once the strike was lost,” Golin writes that the Industrial Workers of the World “and its bohemian allies lost some of their vitality and hope and retreated into their respective spheres” (2005, p. 1).While the American Left never quite embraced the form again on any large scale, in Britain, in the era between the world wars, trade unions and the communist party made frequent use of historical pageantry in order to dramatize narratives wherein unionism or communism
Figure 34.3 “The Star of Ethiopia” to celebrate the XIII amendment... October 11, 13, and 15, 1915 [Washington, DC] Goins printing co. 1344, You Street N. W [1915]. Source: Library of Congress 1915-01-01.
(respectively) were portrayed as inevitable conclusions to the struggles of history (Wallis, 2000). At this time, however, historical pageantry was still embraced in mainstream culture, but the form expanded to urban centers with industrial backdrops. Also, during the interwar period in Britain, the form was sometimes adapted to incorporate commemorations of the recent war (memory and commemoration). These were performed both allegorically—as was the case with the 1919 Oxford Pageant of Victory, which “placed the conflict in a longer-term historical context,” and hyper-realistically—as was the case with the traveling 1919 St. Dunstan's Pageant of Peace, which focused entirely on reenacting episodes from the war (Bartie et al., 2017, p. 647). Thus, the British interwar pageants should be seen as “sites of mourning” even as they embraced the “‘truth-telling’ of modernism [alongside] older forms and structures of historical performance” (Bartie et al., 2017, p. 640). American pageants at this time similarly reckoned with the recent war, but unlike their British counterparts, focused a good deal on how citizens on the home front supported the war from afar (Glassberg, 1990, p. 267). On both sides of the Atlantic, when interwar pageant narratives addressed the recent war, the local histories that were the hallmarks of the early Parkerian pageants were somewhat supplanted by more overtly nationalist and imperialist themes.
In the long run, however, the modern historical pageant’s focus on local histories never fully waned, that is, until the form itself more or less was abandoned, receding sharply by the end of the 1950s in favor of other expressions of civic engagement and national unity, including other forms of historical reenactment that gained popularity in the latter half of the 20th century, such as living history and battle reenacting. Ultimately, the popularity of historical pageants in the early 20th century is testament that people en masse took pleasure in being both participants and spectators in this form of historical reenactment. More importantly, these pageants tell us about the stories people wanted to tell themselves about themselves, while also prompting scholars of reenactment to consider who had the privilege to tell those stories, who was excluded, and what that means for any dramatized history.
Further reading
Glassberg, D., 1990; Withington, W, 1920;Yoshino, A., 2011.