History on Display: Suffs: The Musical
Earlier this week, a friend and I attended a performance of Suffs, Shaina Taub’s award-winning musical about the women’s suffrage movement, which I’ve wanted to see ever since it opened off-Broadway in 2022.
The short version? Suffs did not disappoint. I laughed. I cried. I cheered. So did everyone else as best I could tell. There was one moment when much of the audience gasped.[1]
Suffs :The Musical begins in 1913,[2] just as radical young suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977)[3] is about to divide the suffrage movement with her demands for more aggressive action, including an unprecedented suffrage march in Washington on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration. Taub follows the movement through the final passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul is the central character, set in counterpoint to and often conflict with Carrie Chapman Catts (1859-1947), then 54 years old, successor to Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, and later the founder of the League of Women Voters. The two leaders embody two generations of suffragists with very different styles and strategies.
That description may make Suffs sound a little dull. It is anything but. Taub has built a powerful, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking historical drama about the suffrage movement. Paul and Catts are surrounded by a coterie of brilliantly characterized historical suffragists, including a fiery Ida B Wells, each of whom dominates the stage at least once over the course of the show, bringing to life the divisions within the movement. “Why are you fighting me? I’m not the enemy” is a powerful refrain between different members of the movement that Taub returns to again and again. Woodrow Wilson, who is in fact the enemy they are all fighting is pale and unenergetic, by contrast—clearly a deliberate choice.
Suffs ends with both triumph and the recognition of work left undone: making it a perfect show to attend as part of the Semiquincentennial.[4] Definitely worth seeing if it comes your way.
[1] Nope, not going to tell you. Just because we all know how the story ends doesn’t mean I’m willing to spoil surprises along the way. Which makes writing this harder than it would be if I felt free to share delightful moments.
[2] Sixty-five years after the suffrage movement began at the Seneca Falls convention—a fact that Taub skillfully shares with the audience in the opening moments of the show in the form of a speech by long-time suffragist Carrie Chapman Catts. It’s a critical point: the question of waiting for change and not being willing to wait anymore is a theme that Taub returns to over and over again.
[3] I must admit, I was stunned to learn that Paul lived and worked well into my lifetime. Progress in women’s rights remains relatively new, and fragile.
[4] Can anyone spell that right on the first try?
History on Display: Americans and the Holocaust
On a recent trip home to Springfield, Missouri, I had the chance to visit a traveling exhibition titled Americans and the Holocaust at the local public library. Sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum and the American Library Association, the exhibition is small but powerful. The exhibit includes some well-done general context about the Nazis’ rise to power and the beginnings of World War II, but that is not its focus. Instead, as its title suggests, Americans and the Holocaust considers difficult questions about what Americans could have known about the Holocaust and when, and about the motives and fears that shaped the United States’ unwillingness to do more to save Jews and others who suffered under the Nazi regime.
I was familiar with much of the material because I have spent the last few years reading, writing, and now talking about the issues the exhibit covers. And yet, some of the details were new to me, and some that I was familiar with hit me hard all over again. Here are some of the things that caught my attention in particular:
• In November, 1938, American newspapers ran front page stories and banner headlines about the violence of what became known as Kristallnacht. In a Gallup public opinion poll conducted several weeks later, ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. In that same poll, seventy-one percent did not want the United States to admit more Jewish refugees, a position that was clearly reflected in our immigration policies at the time.
• In late 1943, officials in the Treasury Department learned that the State Department had been blocking reports about the mass murder of Jews.[1] Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau went around the State Department and took the information directly to President Roosevelt in January, 1944. Roosevelt then signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving some 200,000 refugees.
• More than half of all Americans heard Edward R. Morrow’s broadcast from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. Before that, reporters had told Americans over and over about the brutality of Nazi oppression, against Jews, communists, political dissenters, and others, but many Americans had found it all too easy to disbelieve. Now that was impossible. As Life magazine summed it up, “Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”
• A story I am very familiar with, but think it is important to emphasize whenever possible: After the liberation of Ohdruf, General Eisenhower visited the camp. The visual evidence and verbal testimony of the brutality of the camps made him ill. But he had no doubt of the importance of his visit. “I made the visit deliberately,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall three days later,” in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”
Not an easy story to read. Too important to dismiss.
The exhibition is nearing the end of its second tour of libraries in smaller cities, but you still have six months to track it down. You can read more about the exhibit and see the tour schedule here.
[1] I have unsubstantiated thoughts about how the demographics of the State Department contributed to this.
Celebrating the Fourth of July
Here in the United States, we’re heading into the July 4th weekend–a holiday that expands or contracts depending on where in the week it falls.
It’s also a holiday where the meaning of what we are celebrating is often lost in the celebration itself.
In the past I’ve used this post to remind all of us of this ideal which stands at the core of who we are:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This year, I’d like to remind you of another quotation from our history, the words written on the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! “
Over the years, we’ve had trouble living up to both ideals. Over the years, some heroic figures have fought to keep them alive.