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Flashback Photos: Charles Hoyt, the Sad New Hampshire Man Who Made Broadway Laugh

[jpshare]When Charles Hoyt was a boy, his father dreamed he would become a country lawyer. Instead, he invented the Broadway musical.

Charles Hoyt

He wasn’t as well-known as Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk, another son of Charlestown, N.H., nor fellow playwright George M. Cohan, but he dominated the American stage for 15 years during the late 19^th century. His string of hit plays ended only after the death of his second wife drove him insane.

Charles Hoyt was born in Concord, N.H., on July 26, 1859, to George and Martha Hoyt. The family moved to Charlestown, N.H., when he was six so his father could run a hotel. The Hoyts were plagued by ill health: a younger brother died as an infant, his mother died when Charles was nine and his father became too frail to run the hotel. Charles attended Boston Latin School for two terms and was appointed to West Point, but he couldn’t pass the physical examination.

He wanted to be a journalist, but his father persuaded him to come home and study law. A friend offered him a shot running the St. Albans Advertiser while he vacationed. Hoyt jumped at the chance and wrote witty stories about the town’s social life. His stories caught the attention of the Boston Post. His law career was over.

He wrote a popular humor column for the Post and became the music, theater and sports editor. That led to his writing a melodrama that premiered at the Amesbury, Mass., fire house on March 21, 1881. It opened to good reviews – including one of his own, which lamented the variety acts that preceded the play were too long. Eventually he incorporated variety acts into his plays.

After he wrote another melodrama that did poorly at the box office, Hoyt wrote a funny play called A Bunch of Keys. It bombed. A friend suggested the actors didn’t act funny enough. Hoyt rewrote the play and supervised rehearsals until it was a Broadway hit. According to the New York Times, “Its humor is of that exquisite kind which rests on horse play, acrobatic feats, clog dances, the throwing of various missiles by the performers, the blowing of flour by one actor in the face of another, and such like pleasantry.”

The play made $56,000, while Hoyt earned $500 for writing it and a fee for the rewrite. In 1884, Hoyt quit his job and formed a partnership with a friend from the Boston Post, Charles Thomas. For the next 15 years they dominated Broadway, churning out an average of one hit per year.

Flora Walsh in A Texas Steer

Their first play, A Rag Baby, was a critical flop but a popular success, touring on the road for years. A Parlor Match was even more successful, playing far and wide. Another play, A Tin Soldier, toured as well. A 14-year-old actress named Flora Walsh took a small part in the production in San Francisco. Hoyt, then in his mid-20s, instantly fell in love with her. She returned his feelings and they were married July 12, 1887, 13 days before her 17^th birthday and 14 days before his 28^th.

He wrote a new play, A Hole in the Ground, for Flora. Again it was hated by critics, loved by the public. His next three plays — A Midnight Bell, A Temperance Town and A Texas Steer – were more serious and plot driven, but included elements of farce. Hoyt was asked why he didn’t take his art seriously. He replied, “I do. There is nothing funny about a game that is earning me $100,000 a year. That’s serious money.”

Charles Hoyt’s home in Charlestown, N.H.

He had bought a mansion in Charlestown before his marriage and returned often to his home town. He brought theatrical stars as guests, tried out new plays and threw lavish parties. He was civic minded enough to be elected to the New Hampshire General Court in 1892 and 1894.

The year 1893 was successful financially but marred by tragedy. Hoyt’s play A Trip to Chinatown shattered attendance records on Broadway and his other plays filled theaters around the country. (Chinatown was later made into a silent film starring Anna May Wong and featured songs still known today, The Bowery and After the Ball, a later addition that appears in Showboat.) Flora died of pneumonia in January at the age of 22, his father died in February and his partner Charles Thomas died in November.

Hoyt was devastated but took a new partner, Frank McKee, and threw himself into his work. He produced new plays, A Milk White Flag and A Temperance Town, featuring an actress who would be named the most popular of her day: Caroline Miskel. Hoyt married her in March 1894.

Caroline Miskel-Hoyt

His next play, A Runaway Colt, featured baseball players who had bit parts in his previous plays: Cap Anson of the Chicago White Stockings and Boston Beaneaters star Mike King Kelly, the model for Casey at the Bat. The ballplayers were lousy actors and the play didn’t do well. Hoyt went back to his old formula of musical farce and came up with another string of hits: A Black Sheep, A Contented Woman (written for Caroline Miskel) and A Day And A Night In New York.

Caroline in 1896 gave birth to a daughter who died the same day. Two years later, 25-year-old Caroline died in childbirth giving birth to a son, who died after an hour. Hoyt was overcome by grief and began to lose touch with reality. He sat in his New York apartment staring for hours at photographs of Caroline. In 1900, his partner McKee took him before a judge in Hartford, Conn., and had him committed to the Retreat for the Insane, considered a humane institution. He was released after a short while and returned to Charlestown, where he died four months later on Nov. 20, 1900 at the age of 41.

Charles Hoyt

With thanks to Charles Hoyt, Popular Playwright of the Gay Nineties By Cliff and Linda Hoyt.

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Franklin Pierce Discovers the Body of Nathaniel Hawthorne in New Hampshire

In 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne did the unthinkable: He wrote a campaign biography for presidential candidate Franklin Pierce.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Critics thought such hackwork beneath Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was, after all, the acclaimed author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.

Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t care. He had befriended Pierce during their student days in the 1820s at Bowdoin College, and he would be loyal to him until the end.

Pierce ran for president of the United States as a Northerner sympathetic to the South. As president, he appointed Nathaniel Hawthorne as the U.S. consul in Liverpool, a plum job that paid him well to do little so he could continue his writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne Stands By His Man

Four years later, Pierce left office as one of the most reviled ex-presidents in history. He had tried to unify the North and South, but drove them further apart. Most of his friends, neighbors and political allies abandoned him, though Hawthorne never did.

While serving as consul in England, Hawthorne had traveled the countryside. He wrote a series of sketches called Our Old Home. Back home on July 2, 1863, he wrote the book’s dedication to Franklin Pierce.

It read, in part,

…it rests among my certainties that no man’s loyalty is more steadfast, no man’s hopes or apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt, or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness, than those of FRANKLIN PIERCE.

His publisher, James T. Fields, begged him to leave it out. Nathaniel Hawthorne replied, “if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him.”

Hawthorne’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson ripped out the dedication before putting the book on his library shelf.

White Mountains

Months later, Pierce’s wife Jane died. Nathaniel Hawthorne stood by the side of the lonely, grieving ex-president as she was laid to rest. Pierce noticed Hawthorne seemed in ill health and adjusted his collar to keep him warm.

In the spring of 1864 Nathaniel Hawthorne decided a trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire would be good for his health. Pierce agreed to go with him. Hawthorne’s wife Sophia told the ex-president he needed help getting in and out of carriages because of his weak eyesight and uncertain steps.

Franklin Pierce by Matthew Brady

The two friends left Boston together and traveled to Pierce’s home in Concord, N.H. They went to Dixville Notch once the weather was good enough.

On May 18, 1864, they returned through Plymouth. They turned in at the Pemigewasset Hotel, on the site of what is now a Plymouth State University dormitory.

Nathaniel Hawthorne took a nap, ate a bit of food and drank a cup of tea before going to bed. Pierce, in a letter four years later, described what happened next.

The Death of Hawthorne

“Passing from his room to my own, leaving the door open and so placing the lamp that its direct rays would not fall upon him and yet enable me to see distinctly from my bed, I betook myself to rest too, a little after ten o’clock,” he wrote.

“But I awoke before twelve, and noticed that he was lying in a perfectly natural position, like a child, with his right hand under his cheek. That noble brow and face struck me as more grand serenely calm then than ever before. With new hope that such undisturbed repose might bring back fresh vigor, I fell asleep again; but he was so very restless the night previous that I was surprised and startled when I noticed, at three o’clock, that his position was identically the same as when I observed him between eleven and twelve.

“Hastening softly to his bedside, I could not perceive that he breathed, although no change had come over his features. I seized his wrist, but found no pulse; ran my hands down upon his bare side, but the great, generous, brave heart beat no more.”

The body of Nathaniel Hawthorne was returned to Concord, Mass., where he was laid to rest. His pallbearers included Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Louis Agassiz.

Franklin Pierce was not among them.

With thanks to Dead Presidents. You can read more about Hawthorne’s milieu in Concord — their lives, their loves and their work — in American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever. This story about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce was updated in 2023.

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The School Garden Army Feeds a Hungry Nation During World War I

During World War I, hundreds of thousands of American children joined the U.S. School Garden Army and helped feed a hungry nation at war.

U.S. School Garden Army recruitment poster.

Yankee farms lost considerable labor because young men went off to war. Or munitions factories offered high pay to those who didn’t enlist. But demand for food kept rising. Starving Europeans and Allied armies needed food, as did America’s large new army. “War rages in France,” blared one U.S. Food Administration poster. “They cannot fight & raise food at the same time. We must help them.”

“Food will win the war,” said President Woodrow Wilson. Herbert Hoover, as head of the U.S. Food Administration, avoided rationing by urging Americans to conserve food. “Meatless Mondays,” “Wheatless Wednesdays” and “Porkless Saturdays” encouraged Americans to eat less so more could be sent overseas.

The Women’s Land Army, or farmerettes, also helped supply the farm labor to help feed the country and the military.

Can’t Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm

Charles Lathrop Pack, a wealthy timber baron from Michigan, had an idea. He thought the food supply could be increased without using farms, farm labor or trucks and trains needed to transport supplies for the war effort. He also believed it would be easier to inspire Americans at home to raise food on empty land in cities than to send them off to farm.

“Ambitious young men and women will not remain in the country where comforts are denied and where advantages of social life and education are few,” he said. “But they will be glad to farm in the city.”

Charles Lathrop Pack (right) and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

Victory Gardens

His idea had already worked in Michigan during the depression that followed the Panic of 1893. Detroit Mayor Hazen Pingree, a transplanted Maine shoemaker, allowed poor people to plant vegetable gardens on vacant lots. His Potato Patch Plan won national attention and was then replicated in cities throughout the country.

Pack revived the Potato Patch Plan for the war effort, calling the urban potato patches ‘victory gardens’ or ‘liberty gardens.’

Pack and others then formed the U.S. National War Garden Commission to inspire and educate Americans to plant victory gardens. The then commission churned out propaganda. It sent out posters, pamphlets and lesson plans with advice on how to start a victory garden.

One poster promoted the ‘free book’ with the legend “Can vegetables, fruit and the Kaiser too.” It was illustrated with jars of tomatoes, peas, and Kaiser Wilhelm with the label ‘Monarch Brand Unsweetened.”

Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Local organizations embraced the effort.

The Norwich, Conn., Chamber of Commerce and the New London County Improvement League sent out cards asking people if they had available land to cultivate. They also asked people if they wanted to work on a home garden.

“The war with Germany has brought to every one of us an opportunity to render patriotic service in promoting economic preparedness and social welfare,” read a committee notice in the Norwich Bulletin on April 18, 1917.

The School Garden Army

President Wilson decided to further link food security with national security by starting The U.S. Garden Army. The War Department then funded it and the Bureau of Education developed a national curriculum.

Its motto appeared in much of its literature:

A garden for every child
Every child in a garden.

Garden information building on Boston Common. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

In New England, Boston Common was the epicenter of the effort to enlist schools in the effort.

School authorities established demonstration gardens on the Common, according to the government publication, School Life, Volume 3. Meanwhile, children in nearby schools carried on the work of producing food for their families. Teachers from around the country were expected to visit Boston’s demonstration gardens.

New Hampshire Gardens

Image courtesy Library of Congress.

New Hampshire tried to reach every schoolchild in the state. Practically every city and town had one or more companies enlisted in the School Garden Army by 1919, with nearly 40,000 total pupils — about a tenth of the population. Manchester had the most, with about 3,500, closely followed by Concord with 3,000. Then Portsmouth and Keene followed with about 1,200 each, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s pamphlet, School Supervised Gardening in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire had high-minded goals for its School Garden Army:

To make the Granite State a Garden State; to give to the young people of the new generations the sturdy qualities which were developed in those early years when New Hampshire boys and girls were reared on farms and went southward and westward to become leaders in new communities.

The states also aimed to bring into the schools the “vital interest found only in experience with realities.”

Children in the New Hampshire School Garden Army wore the USSGA insignia, a service bar with crossed hoe and rake.

U.S. School Garden Army insignia

By the end of the war, 5 million victory gardens grew in the United States. The U.S. would then revive Victory gardens two decades later during World War II.

Image courtesy Library of Congress.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Henry David Thoreau Still Takes Up His Pen With Satisfaction

[jpshare]During his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond beginning in 1845, Henry David Thoreau wrote a book, but it wasn’t called Walden. It was called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau wrote the book about a boat trip he took with his brother John from Concord, Mass., to Concord, N.H., in 1839.

John contracted tetanus after cutting himself shaving in 1842. He died in Henry’s arms. Henry wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River as an elegy to his brother, with digressions on history, poetry, religion and the changing New England landscape.

Thoreau couldn’t find a publisher, so he published the book at his own expense in 1849. It sold fewer than 300 copies. Three years later, his publisher, James Munroe, sent the books back to him.

He was 36 years old, living in Concord, Mass., as the town’s principled eccentric. He was disappointed in the failure of A Week, but he soldiered on and wrote Walden.

On Oct. 28, 1853, Henry David Thoreau wrote about what it was like to receive 706 of his own books in his journal:

Rain in the night and this morning, preparing for winter.

For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon,–706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship; these are the work of my brain. There was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The unbound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed,__
H.D. Thoreau’s
Concord River

So Munroe had only to cross out “River” and write “Mass.” and deliver them to the expressman at once. I can see now what I write for, the result of my labors.

Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the intreat mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever.

Read more about Thoreau in Laura Dassow Walls’ Henry David Thoreau: A Life. You can help independent bookstores and The New England Historical Society by buying it here.

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Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rebel Girl Leader of the Working Class

In 1906, 16-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn stood on a soapbox near New York’s Times Square and delivered a fiery speech championing workers’ rights. She was a pretty, delicate girl wearing braids and a plaid dress that stopped at the top of her high-button shoes.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

A Broadway producer, impressed with her oratorical gifts, stopped and offered to put her on stage.

“I’m in the labor movement and I speak my own piece,” she retorted. And then she was arrested.

True to her word, she spent the rest of her life fighting for workers’ and womens’ rights.

Sinn Fein Mama

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn went on to organize the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass., founded the American Civil Liberties Union, chaired the Communist Party USA and died in the Soviet Union.

She was born on Aug. 7, 1890, in Concord, N.H., to radical working-class parents. Her mother, Annie, immigrated from Ireland and belonged to Sinn Fein. Her father, the son of Irish immigrants, organized a chapter of the Knights of Labor.

The family moved around poor New England industrial towns until settling in a blue-collar neighborhood in New York City when Elizabeth was 10. She gave her first public speech at 16, What Socialism Will Do for Women, at the Harlem Socialist Club. That got her expelled from high school. The next year she fell in love with J.A. Jones, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, 16 years older than she. They married in January 1908 and had two sons, John Vincent, who died at birth, and Fred Flynn.

She left Jones in 1910 when she was pregnant with Fred. Later, she had a 12-year affair with Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca and a 10-year-affair with Marie Equi, a gay physician.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaks

She was a mesmerizing speaker. A Philadelphia newspaper reporter wrote her audience was “frowning when she frowned, laughing when she laughed, growing earnest when she merely grew moderately so.”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn described how she got involved with the IWW in a speech to students at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., in 1962. She told them critics said the IWW stood for “I won’t work.” But actually, she said, ‘the people who belonged to the organization were in the basic, most difficult hard-working industries of our country.’

My father and mother were Socialists, members of the Socialist Party. So all of us of the younger generation were impatient with it. We felt it was rather stodgy. Its leaders were, if you will pardon me for saying so, professors, lawyers, doctors, minister, and middle-aged and older people, and we felt a desire to have something more militant, more progressive and more youthful and so we flocked into the new organization, the IWW.

Author Theodore Dreiser called her ‘an East Side Joan of Arc.’ She was arrested 10 times for giving speeches, but never convicted.

Strike Leader

In 1912 she led the Bread and Roses textile strike. She and IWW leader Bill Haywood came to Lawrence after three IWW organizers were arrested on false charges of killing a woman bystander. Two of them were three miles away at the time and the woman was probably shot by police.

The strike involved 20,000 workers of 51 nationalities who walked off the job after wages were cut. It lasted two months during a frigid winter. Flynn and Haywood started a campaign to send hundreds of hungry strikers’ children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey and Vermont. When police stopped a second wave of children from leaving the train station, violence erupted. The Congressional hearings that followed exposed shocking conditions inside the mills. Mill owners decided to settle the strike, giving workers a 20 percent pay raise.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn speaking to Paterson silk workers.

The Paterson, N.J., silk workers’ strike the next year was less successful. Police arrested nearly 2,000 strikers during the seven-month strike, and local officials shut down their meeting hall. The strike failed, though workers won their demand for an eight-hour day in a 1919 strike.

ACLU

In 1920, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. She campaigned against the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists accused of murder during an armed robbery. Despite evidence of their innocence, Massachusetts executed the two men.

In 1937, Flynn joined the American branch of the Communist Party, which got her kicked off the ACLU board. During World War II she fought for equal pay for women and day care centers for working mother. She ran for Congress from New York City in 1950, receiving 50,000 votes.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on trial. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1951, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was arrested for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence in violation of the Smith Act. After a nine-month trial she was convicted and served for two years at the Federal Prison Camp, Alderson, near Alderson, W.Va. The description of the photograph above, by the Bain News Service, reads, “Socialist girl orator on trial for speeches inciting strikers to violence.”

At the age of 71, Flynn won election as chairwoman of the Communist Party of the USA. In 1964, she traveled to the Soviet Union and died in Moscow on September 5 that year. Soviet authorities gave her a state funeral attended by 25,000 people.

This story last updated in 2022.

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A Grieving John Willis Fowler Heads to Camp Meeting, 1877

In 1877, John Willis Fowler of South Newbury, N.H., was grieving over the loss of his young wife Lonie in 1877. They were married on July 4, 1876, but she died the next month at the age of 24.

John Willis Fowler

In his diary, John Willis Fowler described frequent headaches and fatigue, but he managed to keep going. He and his brothers made wheels for the famous Concord coaches produced by the Downing & Abbot Co. At the time, stagecoaches were giving way to trains and wooden wheels were being replaced by metal ones. During the year 1877, John Willis, or Willis, described the ways he and his brothers adapted: making metal wheels and wooden furniture, repairing clocks and blacksmithing. He also spent time settling his late wife’s estate.

Born April 30, 1849, John Willis Fowler learned a number of skills from his father in his shops. His diary describes the routine of a small-town tradesman in the 1870s. He records visits to family by buggy and train, checking the potato crop, chores, going to meeting, singing with the choir and giving temperance talks.

“We have worked in the shop bending rims and have worked quite hard all day,” was a typical entry.

John Willis Fowler at Camp

On Monday, Aug. 13, he prepared for a trip to a religious camp meeting in South Framingham, Mass. He and his brothers Arthur, Elmer and Charles took a buggy to Concord, then a train to Manchester, where he did some business. They then spent nearly a week attending prayer meetings and sermons. He was interested in the meetings and felt it was good to be there despite the “immense” numbers of unbelievers who showed up.

Monday, August 13, 1877

(Written 24th)

This morning I repaired a clock for John Spalding and went over and put it in place and running, then came home and got ready to go away to be gone a week or more. At about 2 P.M. Charles, Arthur, Elmer and I took “Lill” and our 2 seat buggie and started for Concord arriving there at 7-40 P.M. and all went to Uncle Albert’s and put up for the night.

With thanks to ‘Social Genealogy, charting a people’s history of New England through our family tree. This story was updated in 2022.

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