That Ain't I a Woman Speaker Not What You Thought

 

Sojourner Truth giving her famous speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron in 1851.

On May 28, 1851 fifty-four-year-old Sojourner Truth mounted the platform and addressed the delegates to an Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron.  The meeting was held only three years after the inaugural Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. 

Truth was a former slave who had gained fame as a lay preacher and abolitionist speaker.  Accounts differ as to whether she was fully welcomed or if there were some women afraid that her presence would antagonize men otherwise sympathetic to her cause.  But Truth was already friendly with leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and most of her audience that day were either already convinced abolitionists, or at least sympathetic. 

The speech Truth gave has outlasted any other comments at the meeting and it is widely quoted by both feminists and African-American activists.  But the speech she gave may not have been the one widely quoted with its repeated refrain of “Ain’t I a Woman?” 

Truth was born a slave in 1797 in Swartekill, New York.  Her birth name was Isabella Baumfree, one of thirteen children.  The Hardenbergh family which owned her was from old Dutch colonial stock and Dutch was her first language.  She was sold along with a herd of sheep at the age of nine to English speaking tavern keeper John Neely for $100. 

By her later accounts Neely beat and raped her.  She was sold twice more becoming the property of John Dumont of West Park in 1810.  Conditions were less harsh than with her previous owners and Isabella, called Belle, labored there for several years.  She fell in love with a slave named Robert from a neighboring farm, but his owner forbad the relationship and beat him so severely that he later died.  Robert fathered her first two children. 

In 1817 Dumont selected another of his slaves, Thomas, to be her husband and he fathered three more children by 1826.

Under New York’s gradual emancipation law slavery would officially end on July 4, 1827.  Dumont had promised her release early in exchange for “doing well and faithful,” but reneged after a hand injury left her less than a fully effective worker.  Feeling cheated but determined to be fair to her master, she spun him 100 lbs. of wool, what she thought her remaining time was worth and escaped with her infant daughter. 

She could not take her other children because even under emancipation they would be held as bond servants until they were 21.  She found a sympathetic home with Isaac and Maria Van Wagener who took her in and settled her debt with Dumont for $20.  She stayed with them until emancipated under the law. 

Learning that Dumont had illegally sold her five-year-old son south to Alabama, she sued her former master with the support of the Van Wageners and after several months was able to recover her son.  She was the first Black in New York State to successfully sue a white man. 

During her time with the Wagner family, she experienced a religious conversion and became a devout Christian.  

Sojourner Truth's association with the religious fraudster Robert Mathews led to her indictment for the murder of her previous employer.  After a sensational trial she was acquitted.

In 1829 she moved with her son Peter to New York City to serve as housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson.  Through Pierson she met the religious charlatan Robert Matthews, a.k.a. Matthias Kingdom and the Prophet Matthias who had bilked Pierson and several others out of two houses and large sums of money.  Bella went to work for him in 1832.  When Pierson died a short time later both she and Matthews were charged with his murder but acquitted.  Mathews headed west in an attempt to strike up an alliance with the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith leaving Belle behind. 

Despite the notoriety of the trial she was able to scrape together a living in the city.  Her son Peter signed on whaling ship in 1839 and after three letters never heard from him again. 

In 1842 she adopted the name Sojourner Truth because, “The Spirit calls me and I must.”  She became a Methodist, and like many others became a lay preacher and traveling evangelist mixing in a heavy dose of abolitionism.  Gaining a reputation, she was invited to join Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts in 1844.  One of many utopian social experiments of the era, the Association was founded by abolitionists and supported women’s rights and pacifism.  Other members of the association included leading abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass.  Like other communal experiments of the era, the Northampton Association collapsed in 1847 and Truth went to work as a housekeeper for Garrison’s brother-in-law.  

The front piece and title page of the first edition of Sojourner Truth's memoirs.

While there she dictated her memoirs to her friend Olivia Gilbert.  In 1850 Garrison arranged a private printing of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave.  The book was widely read in liberal circles and cemented Truth’s reputation.  The same year she was able to buy her own home in Northampton for $300 and attended the first full National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts where she shared the platform such leaders as Lucy Stone, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Ernestine Rose, and Antoinette Brown as well as old friends Garrison and Douglass.  More than 900 people attended the convention, which attracted wide, if sometimes derisive, coverage. 

Truth came to the 1850 meeting in while on a western speaking tour with abolitionist George Thompson.  The first published version of her speech was transcribed by local newspaperman Marius Robinson and was published a month after the event.  The speech was stirring and contrasted the leisure afforded White women who were “put on a pedestal” with the grim “work or die” reality for Black women both slave and free.  But it was rendered as standard English and nowhere included the words “Ain’t I a woman.” 

Those were included, along with idiomatic—and stereotypical—Southern Black speech patterns in a version of the speech published 13 years after it was given by one of the meetings organizers, Frances Dana Barker Gage.  Gage’s version is the one widely quoted today.  Yet it has its many doubters.  It is unlikely that Truth, a native Dutch speaker who had spent her entire life well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, spoke with any kind of southern drawl, Black or otherwise.  On the other hand, supporters of the Gage version argue that Robinson “cleaned up” Truth’s raw language for his genteel readers. 

More telling are factual inaccuracies in the Gage version, including the claim that she had 13 children “most of which” were sold into slavery.  In fact, she had five children, one of whom was temporarily sold into slavery.  Gage also embellished the circumstances of the speech, making it sound as if Truth spoke to a hostile audience, whereas contemporary accounts, including her own, attested to a warm reception.  The speech as recorded by Gage in 1863 began:

 Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin’ out o’ kilter. I tink dat ‘twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all dis here talkin’ ‘bout? Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! ‘And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...

By contrast Robinson recorded:

 I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now...

To my ears, the originally published journal sound much more likely to have been given by a woman who had been raised in the North, had spent many years in association with highly educated people, and made a living as a preacher and speaker. 

Truth spent the next decade touring in support of abolition and women’s rights working in close association with Robinson.  She had many colorful encounters with hostile audiences, including one where a heckler insisted that she was a man, so she opened her shirt to show her breasts. 

In 1856 she sold her Northumberland home and moved to the Battle Creek, Michigan area which she would consider home for the rest of her life.  The household in her new home included a grown daughter, Elizabeth Banks, and two grandsons. 

                                    

                                                Sojourner Truth in her later years.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she saw her older grandson, James Caldwell enlist in the famous Black 54th Massachusetts while she recruited other blacks to rally for the Union.  In 1864 she was called to Washington to join the National Freedman’s Relief Association to improve the lot of newly freed slaves.  She met President Abraham Lincoln, and almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks insisted on riding Washington horse car trolleys effectively, if temporarily ending segregation on them. 

She tried to claim her 40 acres and a Mule as a freedman herself, appealing to President Ulysses Grant himself in 1870.  But despite seven years of effort was turned down because she was a woman and had been freed by a northern state years earlier.  

The Sojourner Truth Memorial statue in Florence, Michigan.

Truth resumed speaking tours after the war then returned to Battle Creek to try to vote in the 1872 Election.  But she was tired.  Sojourner Truth died in her Battle Creek home on November 26, 1886 at the age of 86.                                                                 

U.S. Workers Have Their Own Memorial Day--A Bloody Walk on the Prairie

The Memorial Day Massacre--American Tragedy, 1937, by Philip Evergood was based on a press photograph.

Eighty-nine years ago it was hot and muggy in Chicago.  But the Sun was shining brilliantly.  Due to a week-old strike and the Memorial Day holiday, the giant steel mills nearby were not belching their customary heavy smoke.  Maybe those unaccustomed dazzling skies contributed to the air of a holiday outing as steel workers, their wives in their finest summer dresses, and their children converged by bus, trolley, auto, and foot on Sam’s Place, an erstwhile dime-a-dance hall, turned into a makeshift soup kitchen and strike headquarters on the Southeast Side less than a mile from the Republic Steel mill.

It was May 30, 1937.   The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the pet project of John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), shocked the nation earlier in the year by bringing industry behemoth U.S. Steel under contract by infiltrating the company unions and having them vote to affiliate.  Faced with rising demand from an apparent recovery under way from the depths of the Depression on one hand and a popular, labor-friendly administration in Washington on the other, the nation’s dominant steel company quietly surrendered.

Buoyed by the success, organizers turned their attention to Little Steel, the smaller, independent operators in Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Chicago and other grimy industrial cities.  But the bosses of Youngstown Sheet and Steel, Republic, Bethlehem, Jones and Laughlin and others were a tougher bunch than the Wall Street stock manipulators that ran the huge rump of the old Steel Trust.  In fact, they had nothing but contempt for the monopolists, their old business enemies, and their “weakling” attitude toward unionization.  Little Steel vowed to fight.  Tom Girdler, President of Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands.

The ferocity of the opposition to unionization was not just empty rhetoric either.  They showed they meant business in blood on more than one occasion.  Famously in Youngstown, Ohio back in 1916 strikers accompanied by their wives and children marched from the slums to the gates of the Sheet and Tube mill to keep strike breakers from reporting to work.  Inside the gates a small army of private security forces responded by throwing dozens of tear gas bombs.  As the thick, poisonous haze hung over the workers obscuring their vision, guards unleashed volley after volley of rifle fire directly into their ranks.  The exact toll may never be known as workers were afraid to bring the wounded to medical attention.  At least three were killed, probably twice that many including women.  Twenty-seven injuries were confirmed, but strikers made oral reports of more than a hundred.  Enraged as the dead and wounded lay bleeding on the ground the strikers attacked the guards with stones and bricks and perhaps a pistol shot or two before retreating to town.

Little Steel strikers remembered Youngstown 21 years earlier.

In rioting over the next two days, workers burned much of the town’s business district only to be eventually crushed by Ohio National Guard troops.  The memory of those events was still fresh to workers more than twenty years later.  Especially when Little Steel bosses quietly let it be known that they had been stockpiling armories for years and were ready, even eager to repeat the carnage.

The USWOC called their national strike against Little Steel a week earlier.  In Chicago it was marred by predictable violence, particularly on the part of the Chicago Police Department which had a long history of being used as armed strike breakers.  Beatings and arrests on the picket lines were occurring daily.  Some strike leaders had been kidnapped and held incommunicado.  For their part senior police officers were “subsidized” by corporate bosses who also bought political clout with the usual campaign contributions and bribes to local officials.  They also pledged to reimburse the city for police overtime during the strike.  In addition, the still largely Irish Catholic force was kept inflamed by homilies preached in their parishes deriding USWOC as “Godless Communists.”

Despite this, morale among the strikers was high.  After only a week out, families had not yet felt the full pinch of lost incomes and strike soup kitchens kept them fed.   Organizers made a point of engaging workers’ wives from the beginning, including them in planning and giving them important support roles.  This was critical because many a strike had been lost in the past when families went hungry, and the women urged their men to return to work.

As the large crowd gathered at Sam’s Place for the first mass meeting of the strike, vendors plied the crowd with ice cream, lemonade, and soft drinks.  Meals were passed out from the soup kitchen.  Other families munched on sandwiches wrapped in wax paper brought from home.  Many of the men passed friendly bottles as they settled into a round singing—mostly old Wobbly songs including Solidarity Forever and Alfred Hayes’s I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.

Then came the rousing speeches.  Joe Webber, USWOC’s main organizer pointed his finger at the distant plant. The plan was to establish the first mass picket at the gates of the Republic Works.  Some workers carried homemade signs.  Organizers passed out hundreds of pre-printed placards stapled to lathing emblazoned with slogans.

With a sense of a gay holiday parade the strikers marched away from Sam’s Place behind two American flags singing as they went one block up the black top and then turned into the wide, flat prairie that separated them from the distant plant.  

Many of the surviving press photos--the police confiscated and destroyed as much film as they could lay their hands on--was damaged.  Still, they tell an unmistakable story.  Police continue to beat the helpless in the pile while launching more tear gas as firing at those still fleeing.

Historian/novelist Howard Fast later described the scene.

…snake-like, the line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first...but then the song died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policemen took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed—but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened… now it was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”

About two hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers.  Billies and clubs were out already, prodding, striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of holsters.

“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”

The cops said, “You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”

Even if a modern man’s a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol equalizes him with a weakling—and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic, and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing ran like fire through the police.

They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers—at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.

And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.

Because workers were afraid to bring their injured to hospital, the exact casualty count may never be known for sure.  Ten men were confirmed dead.  All shot in the back. More than 50 gunshot wounds were reported. At least a hundred were badly injured, many more with scrapes, bruises, and turned ankles from police clubs and the panicked stampede to escape.

Many reporters and photographers were on the scene.  Police confiscated most of their film.  Newsreel cameras caught the action, but the companies were pressured not to show the footage.  The next day, led by the rabidly anti-union Chicago Tribune, most of the press dutifully recorded that the police had come under attack by fanatic Reds and had acted in self-defense.  

The rabidly anti-union Tribune spread the lie that Communist radicals had attacked police.  They threatened their own reporters who knew better.

Although covered in the labor press, the nation as a whole was kept in the dark about what happened.  Even the workers supposed friend Franklin D. Roosevelt, pretty much accepted the official account and told reporters that “the majority of people are saying just one thing, ‘A plague on both your houses.’”

A Cook County Coroner’s Jury ruled the deaths that day as justifiable homicide.  Not only was no action taken against any of the police involved that day, but senior officers were commended and promoted.

The truth about what happened was very nearly suppressed, as so many atrocities committed against working people had been.  But a single newsreel cameraman saved the footage he shot from the roof of his car.  Some of the photographers on the scene retained their shots.  The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel Strike held by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor almost a year later.  A shocked nation saw for itself the senseless, unprovoked brutality of the police.

The Ladies Day massacre outside of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube plant later in July showed that Little Steel Bosses were still committed to smashing the strike with brutal force. 

As for the strike, it dragged on through the summer, as did regular violence on picket lines.  Then on July 19th it was Ladies Day on the picket line in front of the Republic Steel mill in Youngstown.  After company guards assaulted one of the women, they were pelted with rocks and bottles.  Retreating into the plant, in an eerie replay of the 1916 violence, guards let loose with tear gas and then opened fire, many firing down on the crowd from virtual snipers’ nests.  At least two were killed and dozens wounded.  Once again, the National Guard was called in and the town became a virtual occupied territory.  The strike was crushed, and workers went back.

But the Steel Workers turned to the new National Labor Relations Board for help.  They complained of unfair labor practices by the Little Steel companies.  The case took years to resolve.  But in 1942, with another war on and the need for industrial peace, the NLRB ordered the companies to recognize what had become the United Steel Workers Union.

                                            

                                                The Memorial Day Massacre victims remembered.

Today a local union hall stands on the site of Sam’s Place.  The Republic Mill and other Little Steel plants are closed and pad-locked eyesores or have been torn down for largely undeveloped parkland. The City seeks desperately to find some way to redevelop what are now called simply Brown Fields.  At one time the site was suggested as one possible future home for Barack Obama’s Presidential Library, but it was passed over.  USW members and the Illinois Labor History Society sometimes gather in remembrance of that terrible day.  And the last aging survivors, including some of the children present, fade away one by one, their stories untold. 

 

The Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre Sculpture, created by former Republic Steel employee Edward Blazak, was dedicated in 1981. Originally located near the main gate at 116th Street and Burley Avenue, it was rededicated in 2008 and relocated to 11659 South Avenue O, at the southwest corner of the grounds of a Chicago Fire Department station where it is somewhat hard to find.  I'm told that current Chicago Police are resentful of the CFD for letting it be put on their grounds.

This year again there will be scant mention of the Memorial Day Massacre or coverage of commemorations.  Seems like Chicago is still eager to forget. 

First Singing Superstar--Al Jolson Had a Million of 'em

Al Jolson's signature pose from The Jazz Singer.

Record keeping was hit and miss and life perilous in Jewish village of Srednik near Kaunas in Lithuania, then part of Tsarist Russia around 1886 so Asa Yoelson was never sure about his birthday.  Years later he would pick May 26 out of a hat to serve, and it has been dutifully reported by biographers ever since.

He was the son of a Rabbi and Canter and had three surviving siblings including a brother Hirsh.  His father Moses immigrated to the United States in 1891 and was able to send for his family when he found employment at Washington, D.C.’s Talmud Torah Synagogue in 1894.

Asa and Hirsh became fascinated with American music and show business hanging out on streets outside taverns and music halls.  By 1897 they were performing for spare change on the sidewalks.

In 1902 Asa launched a paying career as a singing usher in a traveling circus.  Soon after he teamed with Hirsh and worked as Al and Harry Jolson were doing specialties on the burlesque circuit.

Over the next five decades Al Jolson would perform and triumph in every possible American show business venue—vaudeville, the Broadway stage, concerts, records, movies, and radio.  He would have conquered television as well, but he died before his planned debut.  In the process he revolutionized stage and popular music by popularizing blues and jazz forms he learned as a young touring vaudevillian in New Orleans.  His charismatic performance style was the first to “make each song an event.”  And one way or another influenced every singer who came after.

Today he is dimly remembered in the popular imagination as the star of the first sound feature film, The Jazz Singer and for his performances in black face.  His style is dismissed as hammy and old fashion.  His black face work makes him suspect as a racist to modern sensibilities.

But one of his closest friends from the streets of Washington as a kid grew up to be tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.  He encouraged Black performers and featured them for the first time on the Broadway stage.  He brought Cab Calloway to Hollywood and not only insisted on equal billing but got adjoining suites in Beverly Hills penthouse hotel rooms during the filming of The Singing Kid.  Eubie Blake, with whom he never worked professionally, was one of his closest personal friends and companion at boxing matches and racetracks.  The home he shared with his then wife dancer Ruby Keeler was the only one among all the stars where Blacks were freely welcome and entertained.  His work was widely admired in the Black community, including his black face because he never performed the usual coon stereotypes, but treated black music with heartfelt earnestness and respect.  He saw the affinity of Jews and Blacks as oppressed outcasts and recognized Exodus as a common metaphorical experience.  At his funeral, the entire of Black Hollywood turned out, he was lauded in the Black press, and eulogized by the President of the Negro Actors’ Guild.

Jolson first donned blackface in 1904 while working in vaudeville in a trio with brother Harry and veteran performer Joe Palmer.  It not only boosted his career, but it freed Jolson to be more animated and emotional on the stage.

He was on his own as a touring vaudevillian by 1906 based out of San Francisco.  He claimed that he relocated there because the city needed cheering up after the famous earthquake and fire.

In 1909 with his first wife Henrietta, he returned to New York City where he joined the cast of the most popular minstrel show of the day, Dockstader’s Minstrels.  He was quickly the main attraction.

                                

                                        Jolson in 1916.

La Belle Paree at the Wintergarden Theater in 1911 was Jolson’s first Broadway show.  Not the headliner, he did Stephen Foster classics in blackface and stole the show.  From then until 1926 Jolson appeared in an unbroken string of hits with shows like Vera Violetta,  The Whirl of Society, Robinson Caruso, Jr., Bombo, Sinbad, and Big Boy.  As his popularity soared so did his weekly paycheck which grew to thousands of dollars a week making him the best paid performer in America.  At the age of 35 he became the youngest actor ever to have a Broadway theater named after him.  Overcoming paralyzing stage fright on opening night for Bombo in 1921, an ecstatic audience called him back for 37 curtain calls.

In 1911 Jolson began his recording career featuring songs from his shows and scores of others.  Had there been a Hit Parade, he would have topped it multiple times almost every year.  His signature songs included Rock-a-Bye My Baby with a Dixie Melodie, My Buddy, Swannee, Avalon, April Showers, Toot-Toot-Tootsie Good-by, Juanita, California Here I Come, I Wonder What’s Become of Sally, I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World, When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-bob-bobbing Along, My Mammy, Back in Your Own Back Yard, There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder, Sonny Boy, and Liza (Let the Clouds Roll Away).  That list is far from definitive.  Over 80 of his hundreds of recordings became hits.  No matter how you slice it, a huge chunk of the classic American song bag.

                                            Jolson's image sold sheet music as fast as his recordings.  This one from 1922 struck a note with Great War vets.

In 1928 Jolson “retired” from the Broadway stage to try his hand in a new medium—movies.

The story of the Cantor’s son who defies his father and tradition to become The Jazz Singer closely paralleled Jolson’s own life.  The Warner Bros. Vitaphone release was the first feature film to include some sound dialogue and songs, although much of the picture was still silent.  The film also highlighted the parallels between the Jewish and Black experiences as expressed by Jolson’s blackface performance.  Legendarily it was a huge hit and doomed silent movies.

What ever was playing next door this crowd is going to The Jazz Singer.

His second film The Singing Fool was his first all talking picture and even a bigger hit because more theaters had been outfitted for Vitaphone sound.  Made and shown in 1928 it held the box office record until Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ten years later.  The film also introduced the tearjerker, Sonny Boy.

Jolson made four more features for Warner’s, did a short, and made cameo appearances through 1930.  Repetitive and poor quality scripts plus rapidly changing public taste made the last couple of films less successful.  Jolson decided to return to Broadway in a new show, Wonder Bar in 1931.  Although due to the Depression ticket sales to the new show did not match his earlier long string of hits, reviews were positive and helped re-boot his career.

After storied concerts in New Orleans with jazz greats, Jolson returned to Hollywood where Warner’s leant him to United Artists for his most unusual, and many believe finest, film, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  This Depression Era comedy/drama only takes its title from the Haywire Mac McClintock IWW song.  Songs were by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart with the script by Ben Hecht.  Jolson played a happy-go-lucky bum living with a bunch of others in Central Park who saves the Mayor’s girlfriend from suicide.  She loses her memory.  He falls for her, but also befriends the suffering Mayor, Frank Morgan channeling Jimmy Walker.  Much of the dialogue is in couplets. 

Despite the difference in their ages Jolson and Ruby Keeler, shown shipboard on the return from their 1928 Paris honeymoon, were described as the happiest couple in Hollywood.

His wife Ruby Keeler turned down the female lead fearing that if she made her film debut in her husband’s film she would be dismissed.  Instead, she made Forty Second Street and became an overnight top star.  Jolson’s picture, although now considered a minor classic, was a box office flop and led to a decline in his film career.

Back at Warner Bros. the next year he made a film version of his stage show Wonder Bar.  It incorporated more of the elaborate production numbers fans were now demanding in their musicals and was a moderate success.

The final film for his original studio was The Singing Kid, the film in which he showcased and co-starred Cab Calloway.  Busby Berkley, unaccredited, choreographed and shot the production numbers.

Although he appeared in several films in cameo, Jolson only starred in one more picture, Rose of Washington Square for Paramount in 1939.  He shared top billing with rising stars Tyrone Power and Alice Faye.  The film reprised some of his most famous numbers.

His film career might be winding down and changing public taste for crooners like Bing Crosby and Big Band singers might have cut deeply into his record sales, but Jolson still was a major star on radio.  He had started making broadcast appearances from the time he began making films.  He made a famous appearance on the Dodge Victory Hour early in 1928 live from New Orleans reaching an audience of 35 million over 47 radio stations, a landmark in early broadcasting.  He fronted his own network shows twice in the ’30s.  But he was most in demand as a guest on shows hosted by all band leaders, singers, and comics.  Singers like Crosby, who had eclipsed his popularity, adored him and were glad to share a microphone.  These programs also showed off his considerable comedic talents and ability to ad lib with the best of them.  For those who know Jolson only from his sometimes stiff acting in his hyper sentimental early Warner Bros. films, audio from some of these radio shows is a revelation.

                           

                                     Jolson making a 1938 NBC broadcast.

Still, in the early ‘40s Jolson was restless and depressed.  Occasional radio broadcasts and concerts were not enough to keep him busy.  His fading career and Ruby Keeler’s success mirrored the fictional story in A Star is Born.  By the late ‘30s their marriage, once considered the happiest in Hollywood was over.

World War II gave Jolson something to do.  As soon the fires of Pearl Harbor blew away, he was pressing the War Department for permission to entertain the troops anywhere in the world.  Before the USO was up and running, he became the first star to perform at a GI base in early 1942.  In fact, it was a letter he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt’s press secretary that is credited with the creation of the USO, into which he was later commissioned.  His first out of country tour took him to Central America and Naval bases in the Caribbean.  Not long after he was in Britain playing to packed and cheering GI audiences.  He would go anywhere—remote Alaskan stations, North Africa, the South Pacific.  He was out of the gate long before his friend Bob Hope and did many more shows.  His tireless work damaged his health.  He contracted malaria and lost most of a lung.

Jolson also found personal happiness.  He met Erle Galbraith, a young x-ray technician in an Arkansas Army camp.  Late in the war he tracked her down and got her work as an actress at Columbia.  They were married in March of 1945.

When the war was over, Jolson found his career was resurrected.  He had gained legions of new young fans among returning GIs and publicity surrounding his shows had endeared him to the public.  Columbia Pictures was eager to produce a bio-pic and in 1946 Larry Parks was tapped to play the singer in The Jolson Story.  Parks carefully studied his performances to match his signature moves and style, but Jolson himself did the singing.  He even managed to play himself in one scene—Suwannee filmed entirely in a long shot showing him dancing and doing his famous runs into the audience on a special runway extending into the theater auditorium.  The Technicolor film was one of the biggest hits of the year.  Parks even earned an Academy Award nomination for the role.

                     

                     Larry Parks won an Oscar nomination playing Jolson, but Al did the singing.

Jolson was back in the big time.  He got a new contract with Decca Records where he not only recreated many of his most famous songs, but also recorded new ones.  He had hits with both.  Among the post war hits were Carolina in the Morning, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, When Your Were Sweet Sixteen, After Your Gone, Is It True What They Say About Dixie, and Are You Lonesome Tonight.

He was back on radio in a big way too.   From 1947 to ’49 he co-hosted the Kraft Music Hall with Oscar Levant. In 1948 he bested Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and others in a Most Popular Male Vocalist poll by Variety.

Jolson Sings Again, with Parks reprising his role was released in 1949 and was another huge hit.  Jolson toured in support of the film and sang before thousands in special shows in New York and in Chicago.

He distrusted the emerging new medium of television and resisted going on as a guest star.  He wanted to have his own platform.  A proposal to introduce himself with a live two-hour concert broadcast uninterrupted by commercials was naturally greeted coolly by network executives.  But talks were under way for a program of his own.

Those plans were laid aside when President Harry Truman announced he was sending troops to defend South Korea from an attack by the North in the summer of 1950.  Jolson called the White House and simply announced, “I’m going to Korea.”  With the USO officially disbanded Defense Secretary Harold Johnson tried to call him off.  There were no funds for entertainment, he was told. “Funds? Who needs funds? I got funds! I’ll pay myself!” Jolson told reporters.

Jolson in Korea.  The exhausting tour shattered his health.

By September he was on the ground with the troops.  He did 42 shows in 15 days.  He was presented with a medal by General Douglas MacArthur as he returned. 

But he paid a heavy price.  Dust settled into his remaining good lung and he was exhausted.

While playing poker in a San Francisco hotel room just a few weeks later on October 22, 1950 Al Jolson suffered a massive heart attack.  He lived long enough to tell his pals, “Boys, I’m going.”  He was 64.