The Jew seeks immediate success in all but racial affairs. In this breakdown of the Gentile theater, the process cannot be too swift for him. The training of artists takes time. It is far simpler to have the adver¬ tising bills serve as a substitute and, as the itinerant faker-dentist had a brass band blare loud enough to drown the anguished cries of his victims, so the Jewish manager seeks to divert attention from the dramatic poverty of the Theater by throwing confetti, limbs, JEWISH CONTROL OF THE AMERICAN THEATER 97 lingerie and spangles dazzlingly into the eyes of his audience.
These three results of Jewish control in the Theater are all explainable by a fourth; the secret of the serious change which has occurred since 1885 is found in the Jewish tendency to commercialize everything it touches. The focus of attention has been shifted from the Stage to the box office. The banal policy of “give the public what they want” is the policy of the panderer, and it entered the American Theater with the first Jewish invasion.
About 1885 two alert Jews established in New York a so-called booking agency and offered to take over the somewhat cumbersome system by which managers of theaters in St. Louis, Detroit or Omaha arranged engagements of attractions for their houses for the ensuing season. The old process involved extensive correspondence with producing managers in the East and many local managers were obliged to spend sev¬ eral months in New York to make up a season’s book¬ ings. The advantages were that the booking agency, supplied with a list of the “open dates” of the houses they represented, were able to lay out a complete sea¬ son’s itinerary, or “route,” for a traveling company and enabled the producer of a play to spend his vaca¬ tion at the seashore instead of passing the sultry mid¬ season in New York, while the local manager was saved the trouble of much writing or even a trip East, and was content to let the booking concern attend to all details and send him his next season’s bookings when completed.