John McCormack and Patsy Tuohy at the St Louis World Fair
Ronan Nolan
Revisiting tenor John McCormack's walkout at the 1904 World Fair.
John McCormack's publicised walkout at the St Louis World Fair of 1904 over the performance of piper Patsy Touhey has all the appearances of a cultural clash between emerging nationalism and stage-Irish America. But things are not necessarily as they seem.
St Louis 1904 was a spectacle of technical advance and all-round entertainment, representing 62 nations and 43 states. Built on 1,200 acres in the heart of the city, the official hotel, The Inside Inn, had 2,257 rooms. One restaurant seated 4,800. It may also be remembered as the birthplace of the icecream cone and for the film 'Meet Me in St Louis'.
According to a newspaper account of the time, ‘a syndicate of Jewish speculators’ first pitched for an Irish Village incorporating a Donnybrook Fair, a huge beer garden and camels. Irish-America responded and the bid by wealthy entrepreneur Thomas F. Hanley and the Irish Exhibit Company was accepted.
Work got under way on the Irish Village with many Irish historic buildings, most of them life-sized reproductions, constructed of metal and plaster. Included were the Dublin Parliament House (now the Bank of Ireland), Blarney Castle, and the ruins of Muckross Abbey. There was a 1,800 capacity theatre and a bandstand where the Ireland's Own Brass and Reed Band played daily. The main restaurant, in the House of Parliament, seated 2,000 people.
The Department of Agriculture gave financial aid. Its Vice President, Sir Horace Plunkett, had been instrumental in developing the arts and crafts movement in Ireland. It sent T.W. Rolleston to St Louis to coordinate affairs. Born in County Offaly, Rolleston (1857-1920) founded the Dublin University Review and with W.B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde formed the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891.
Patsy Touhey was born near Loughrea in County Galway in 1865. At the age of three his family emigrated to Boston, where his father died at 35. By 18 the young Touhey was working as a labourer in a lumber yard in Brooklyn. One evening he saw piper John Egan was playing in a music hall in the Bowery. The young man returned frequently, observing Egan and learning all the while.
The two struck up a friendship and toured together for about a year, thus beginning Touhey's 37-year stage career. He played at the World Fair in Chicago in 1893 where he won the admiration of Francis O'Neill of Chicago. The Rev. Richard Henebry, author of A Handbook of Irish Music (1928), went so far as to suggest ‘he should be installed as a professor of music in a national university in Dublin.’
Vaudeville/music-hall was the popular entertainment of the day. To keep a toehold in that heated circuit and win over a multi-ethnic audience, an uillean piper like Touhey had to combine music and humour. He frequently toured as a duo with the comedian Charles Henry Burke and the fare was stage Irish. ‘By and large,’ wrote musician and folklorist Mick Moloney, Irish musicians in vaudeville ‘sublimated their artistry under the primary goal of popular theatre.’
Shortly after his return to Dublin from St Louis, McCormack gave an interview to the Dublin Evening Mail. Asked about his ‘personal experiences of the Stage Irishman’, he replied: ‘All went well until the evening of the 24th May. Then Touhey, whom I have already mentioned, came on and sang a song called “Patrick’s Day”. Yes, it is absolutely true to say that this song held the Irish up to ridicule. It was about a man who took 30 days to celebrate the feast of St Patrick, and who took 29 of the days to get well from the effects of the first day’s drink. While Touhy was singing this, he worked in a lot of very offensive “business” – he played the drunken Irishman in a very disgusting manner.’
‘You considered it a degrading exhibition, then?’
‘Decidedly, it was most degrading and scandalous,’ said Mr McCormack, with indignant emphasis. ‘I watched the performance from inside the curtain. I was angry and disgusted. Touhey was encored and danced. I went straight up to Mr Martin [assistant to the stage manager], and said, quietly and publicly – “Mr. Martin, I will not go on the stage after such an artist.”’
He said that Touhey did not appear on the stage on the following night ‘or any night afterwards up to the time I left.’
Asked if he was acting on his own account or in concert with others, McCormack replied: ‘Decidedly on my own account. I was thoroughly disgusted with what had happened, and I accept the fullest personal responsibility for my own withdrawal.’
While this incident grabbed the headlines, backstage a greater drama was unfolding. Details from correspondence at the time were included in an article in The Irish Arts Review Annual, written by Homan Potterton and titled 'Letters from St Louis'. It draws on the archived letters of wealthy New York lawyer and patron of the Irish arts, John Quinn.
W.B. Yeats had refused a request to have the Irish National Theatre perform short dramas at the St Louis Fair. A year earlier Maud Gonne and some actors associated with Inghinidhe na hÉireann had broken away from the National Theatre in a row over art and propaganda. It was mainly these actors who travelled to St Louis to perform short dramas, including AE's Deirdre. The second half of the programme was made up of singers, musicians, dancers, acrobats and entertainers. This group included John McCormack, Lilly Foley and Patsy Touhey. Myles Murphy was the manager of the Irish Village.
It soon became clear that things were not going well. T.W. Rolleston wrote to John Quinn: ‘The theatre folk are the great difficulty. Murphy says they are no good, except Miss Deirdre Young and they won't leave. They performed Deirdre shortly after arriving. I was not there but according to Murphy the performance was wretched ... and what the miscellaneous crowd of Sioux, Cowboys, Demimondaines – pleasure seekers of all kinds who make up an average Pike audience thought of it would be an interesting study.’
The players, sensing they were going to be sacked, protested over the stage Irish content, which, it must be said, had been watered down by the time McCormack had arrived. ‘They seized the opportunity of going out explosively as champions of Irish dignity and self-respect,’ Rolleston wrote.
The performance collapsed. The players were sacked and rushed to the Irish-American press appealing to patriotism. They called Rolleston a ‘one-time revolutionist – now a devout loyalist’. 'Fighting Oirish' headlines abounded. Betraying the class snobbery which dogged the earlier years of the revival, Rolleston privately branded Touhey a ‘Bowery Irishman’.
John Quinn wrote to AE: ‘The St Louis row has ended ... the Irish actors have done a great deal of damage to the very creditable Irish Exhibit by their hasty and exaggerated charges.’
In the summer of 1904, John McCormack (b. 1884) was relatively unknown. In Ireland his reputation stemmed from a Feis Ceoil gold medal in 1903 and his place as tenor under Vincent O'Brien with the Palestrina Choir in Dublin. By the autumn he was making plans to travel to Milan to study under Vincenzo Sabatini. He went on to distinguish himself on the operatic stage in Europe and America.
Patsy Touhey continued to play the vaudeville/music-hall circuit with his wife, the dancer Mary Gillen, and C.H. Burke. Around 1900 he bought an Edison machine and made recordings – one disc at a time – of his own playing which he sold by mail order. His reputation as a piper was revived in the late 1980s when the Pipers Club in Dublin released a tape of his surviving recordings, The Piping of Patsy Touhey.
