In 1965, a committee planning Williamstown’s bicentennial celebration sought to represent the area’s Indigenous history.
The source they looked to was not the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, who had lived in this region long before Williamstown’s founding, and who were residing in Wisconsin at the time.
Although generalized and inaccurate presentations of Indigenous history were common in decades past, the museum is striving to improve its representation of Stockbridge-Munsee history.
In 1965, a committee planning Williamstown’s bicentennial celebration sought to represent the area’s Indigenous history. The source they looked to was not the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, who had lived in this region long before Williamstown’s founding, and who were residing in Wisconsin at the time. Although generalized and inaccurate presentations of Indigenous history were common in decades past, the museum is striving to improve its representation of Stockbridge-Munsee history.
By Kendall McGowan
This article was published in our Winter 2021 newsletter. Read more of the newsletter here.
As an intern getting my first experience in cataloging with the WHM this winter, I was hoping to encounter surprises in the archives. Almost immediately, I struck upon a small mystery. It came in the form of photos of Williamstown’s bicentennial, celebrated by residents in 1965, to commemorate the town’s incorporation, which included acquiring its current name. The bicentennial planning committee arranged a number of activities, including parades, shows, and historical reenactments. Several of the pictures I found showed people in Native American-style dress participating in the celebration, dancing, performing rituals, and constructing tepees. This puzzled me, as the event whose anniversary was being commemorated– the official naming and establishment of a white settlement— took place in 1765, in the context of a widespread colonial effort to push Indigenous peoples off their lands, including the Mohican and Munsee people in what is now known as Western Massachusetts.
My curiosity led me to carry out some research and I found that, as an apparent effort to connect to the historical presence of Indigenous peoples in the area, white students from Springfield College’s Hosaga Club were hired by the planning committee to put on this performance. According to committee records, the group was paid $150 and their food and lodging were provided by residents. I did not find any evidence that the members of the club or the bicentennial committee made any effort to reach out to or learn the history or even the name of the Mohican people, who inhabited this region at the time of the town’s settlement.
If members of the Hosaga Club or the bicentennial committee had tried to contact Mohican community members, they might have discovered a more nuanced version of Williamstown’s history. As I looked into the bicentennial and began to research Mohican history, I started to compare the portrayal of Native Americans at the bicentennial to the reality of the Mohican Community’s experience over the past two centuries. By 1765, Europeans had already been in this region for a century and a half, according to Tribal Member Edwin Martin on the official Mohican website. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the resource- and culturally-rich Mohican society had been challenged and diminished by previously irrelevant factors like diseases, privatization of land, competition for resources, and white efforts to replace the existing culture and language with their own. Like other Native groups in the area, the Mohicans went on to support the colonists against the British in the Revolutionary War. In the first half of the 19th century, however, white greed for land pushed the Mohican community from one of their remaining villages in Massachusetts– Wnahktukuk, renamed Stockbridge– to land donated by the Oneida near Syracuse, NY, then to land in Wisconsin. There they were joined by a group of Munsee people and became known as the Stockbridge-Munsee.
The land in Wisconsin was covered by pine forest, with soil too swampy for farming. This, combined with broken promises by the government to provide adequate services in the area, led to conditions of poverty for many living there. To survive, many Stockbridge-Munsee people were forced to sell valuable cultural artifacts, the rights to lumber on their land, and the land itself. Through the early 20th century and the Great Depression, these challenges were only compounded. By 1965, policy changes and community effort meant the Stockbridge-Munsee could regain some of their land and reorganize their tribal government. However, the centuries of displacement, governmental mistreatment, and resource loss that occurred between 1765 and 1965 had imparted compounding and negative consequences for the Stockbridge-Munsee. With this perspective, it is clear that there was a disconnect between the bicentennial performances and the true Indigenous history of the area which they sought to represent.
Headdresses are only worn by a few Plains tribes, and never by the Mohicans, but they were depicted in promotions of the bicentennial and at the event. The suggestion that only a generalized Native American history is available is untrue.
The white members of Springfield College’s Hosaga Club were not alone in acting out Native American stereotypes, a practice today known as “redface.” Throughout the 20th century, the practice was ubiquitous in movies, sports, Halloween costumes, and even children’s games. While many depictions were deliberately disparaging, others, like the Hosaga Club, professed to be well-intentioned. A pamphlet produced by the club states that the group was founded in 1947 in order to “study the history, ritual, art, dress and dance of native American Indians,” with the ultimate goal of “realization of the wealth to be found in [their] cultures.” While this sounds like a well-meaning goal, portrayals of Indigenous people as exotic or foreign have long been used to justify historical and ongoing violence against them by the government. Other common misconceptions include the belief that Indigenous communities no longer have a significant presence at all, or are otherwise incapable of representing themselves, or that the diverse cultures of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the US are easily studied or interchangeable. These falsehoods can lead to cultural erasure or a denial of necessary resources or attention. When a role depicting an Indigenous person is given to a white performer instead of one from that background, they are denied not only the job but control over how Indigenous communities are presented to the world.
The WHM is committed to presenting an honest story of the region, and that story emerges over time. We are working to be thoughtful about how the history of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community is depicted at the Williamstown Historical Museum. In collaboration with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community’s Historic Preservation Office in town, we are revising our section on local Indigenous history and including more of this history throughout the museum. Every trip into our archives is capable of exciting curiosity and bringing up lessons like this one, which is why ongoing preservation and use of the WHM collection is so important!
In 1936 and 1937, Williams faculty advisor Max Flowers and students Talcott B. Clapp, Gordon Kay
and Thomas Morgan (L-R above) organized a summer theater in the old Opera House, pictured.
Williams professor Max Flowers and students Talcott B. Clapp, Gordon Kay and Thomas Morgan (L-R above) were heavily involved in local theater. In 1936 and 1937, the students organized a summer theater in the old Opera House, pictured.
By Dustin Griffin
This article was published in part in our Winter 2021 newsletter. Read more of the newsletter here.
Most people know that the Williamstown Theatre Festival, formerly called the Williamstown Summer Theatre, was founded in 1955. But few probably know that back in the 1930s there was an earlier “Williamstown Summer Theater” that had nothing to do with the WTF of today.
In the spring of 1936 three Williams sophomores– Talcott B. (“Teeb”) Clapp, Gordon Kay, and Thomas Morgan, all members of the Class of 1938 and members of the Little Theatre, a student group that put on evenings of one-act plays, and of Cap & Bells, the college’s major dramatic organization – decided to organize what they called a “co-operative summer theater.” There had long been a lively theatrical culture at Williams during the academic year, but there was little theatre in the Berkshires in the summer, apart from the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, which put on 8-10 plays a summer. (The Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, which hosted traveling productions, closed in 1934, and reopened in 1937 as a movie theatre.) Morgan and Clapp constituted the production staff of the new organization , Morgan the general manager and Clapp the stage manager. They raised money from the Rotary Club and hastily assembled an acting company of local amateurs, including Williams students – Gordon Kay was a talented character actor – Bennington girls, Williams faculty, and several faculty and staff wives. They were joined by Linda Grantham, a drama school graduate with some summer stock experience. As director of the productions, they hired S. Wesley McKee, a recent graduate of the Yale Drama School who had directed summer theatre in Connecticut in 1934 and 1935, and established himself as an itinerant director-for-hire.
A 1936 article in The North Adams Transcript describes some of the plays offered in the Williamstown Summer Theater’s inaugural season. One was Candida, headlined by longtime Williamstown resident Eleanor Bloedel, pictured, who returned for seasons in 1937 and the 1950s.
The new Williamstown Summer Theatre put on an eight-week season in July and August of 1936, a new play every week. This was back in the days before the Adams Memorial Theatre was built. The founders initially planned to put on plays in a barn on Rt. 7 south of town that later became the 1896 House restaurant, but then secured access to the Williamstown Opera House on Water St., where they arranged to put on three performances a week in the 300-seat auditorium on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. During the day the company would rehearse the next week’s play. Tickets were only 55 cents (35 cents for children), and season tickets were available. The plays, mostly forgotten now but popular in their day, were chosen to appeal to “every variety of taste.” But they tended toward light, summer fare, including J. Frank Davis’s “Gold in the Hills; or, The Dead Sister’s Secret” (a 1929 melodrama), George Kelly’s “The Torchbearers” (a 1922 comedy about community theatre), and Arnold Ridley’s “The Ghost Train” (a mystery thriller). The most ambitious production was George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” (1894), with Eleanor Bloedel (a staff wife, and the mother of Pam Weatherbee, still a Williamstown resident) and William J. Sprague (a Williams undergrad who aspired to a career on the stage) in the lead roles. It played to enthusiastic audiences, including a capacity crowd on Saturday night.
The season was a critical success, with glowing reviews in local papers. Thus encouraged, the producers set their sights higher for the summer of 1937. McKee was again hired as director, and he brought with him several professional actors to play the leads, including Maury Tuckerman, a New York actor who had some Broadway credits, and Marion Rooney, an instructor at the Yale Drama School, as well as Robert Crane, Joy Higgins, and William Whitehead, who had all played summer stock around the northeast for several years. The company also included several actors who returned from 1936, including William Sprague and Gordon Kay, Mary Lou Taylor (a Bennington student), Isabel Calaine (a Wheaton College student), as well as Linda Grantham.(The acting company of today’s Williamstown Theatre Festival has long included some local amateurs alongside professional actors.) For the 1937 season Williams undergrads again served as Business Manager, Stage Manager, Property Manager, and House Manager. Bennington students designed the sets. Constance Welch from the Yale Drama School was brought in to run the “Williamstown School of the Theatre,” which enrolled seven apprentice actors. Ticket prices were doubled, to $1.10. Members of the company were put up in a college fraternity house (Theta Delta Chi, now Mears House, on Park St.)
Again there were eight plays in eight weeks, this time including plays that had enjoyed successful productions on Broadway in recent years (Samson Raphaelson’s “Accent on Youth,” a 1934 comedy; Philip Barry’s “Spring Dance” from 1936) and two plays that had already become modern classics, Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock” (1924), with Marion Rooney in the title role, and “Candida,” brought back from the 1936 season, with Mrs. Bloedel again in the lead. She also starred in Clement Dane’s “Bill of Divorcement.”
In 1938, control of the Williamstown Summer Theater was transferred from its student founders to a board of local residents. In a fundraising campaign, they only sold 60 out of their goal of 200 subscriptions, ending the festival until its return in 1955.
The 1937 season was also critically successful, but it struggled financially to meet its expenses, apparently failing to sell enough tickets. And the three Williams students who founded the theatre were all scheduled to graduate in June 1938. So in the spring of 1938 a newly-formed Williamstown Summer Theatre Association took over management of the theatre, with a board of local residents, including several of the actors who had performed in previous seasons. President of the board was Mary Dempsey, who was then serving as the town’s Postmaster. Another member was the president of the Williamstown National Bank. They determined that to be successful they would need to sell 200 subscriptions to a four-week season. They planned to put on four plays, including Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” (1894) and Ferenz Molnar’s “Liliom” (a 1909 drama that was a hit on Broadway in 1921 and was later the basis for the Rogers and Hammerstein “Carousel” in 1945).
The board hired McKee to return as director, and he arranged to bring four Equity actors – none of them headliners and apparently available at short notice – who would be joined by returning local amateurs, including Eleanor Bloedel and Hallett Smith (an English professor at Williams). But everything depended on selling 200 subscriptions. By July 12 the Theater Association had only sold sixty, and on July 20 decided that they had to cancel the season. And thus the Williamstown Summer Theatre came to an end after only two seasons.
[End of printed version of article]
Wesley McKee moved on. He continued to work in regional theatre, returning in 1958 to direct the season at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge. Gordon Kay became a movie producer. Talcott Clapp became a journalist in Waterbury, Ct, and while there joined a community theatre and wrote a feature story about Thornton Wilder. He later founded and directed the Woodbury (CT) Players. Maury Tuckerman continued to get roles on Broadway into the mid-1940s. In 1938 Marion Rooney performed in Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” with Raymond Massey as Lincoln, which played for more than a year on Broadway, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Mary Dempsey would go on to become a prominent businesswoman in town, and president of the local Board of Trade in 1954 when she helped Ralph Renzi and Irwin Shainman found the new Williamstown Summer Theatre, later serving on its board.
The local members of the company found other acting opportunities in Williamstown, where the two Williams drama clubs, Cap & Bells and the Little Theatre, continued to put on plays. Cap & Bells, founded in 1898, was in the mid-1930s putting on two major productions each academic year, one in the fall and one in the spring, in Chapin Hall, the largest auditorium on the campus. The fall production also went on tour during the Christmas holidays, playing in as many as eight cities in the northeast in as many nights. In the early years Williams students played all the parts, male and female, but beginning in 1931 faculty and staff wives, including Eleanor Bloedel, were cast in the female parts.
The Little Theatre had been founded in 1925 to supplement the dramatic offerings and opportunities on the campus. Part of a “community theatre” movement on college campuses and in towns around the country, the Little Theatre produced evenings of three one-act plays, sometimes work that was experimental or not commercially successful, including plays by Eugene O’Neill and Granville Barker, as well as plays written by Williams students. They performed in the auditorium in Jesup Hall, but also in the White Oaks Church and the Mitchell School gym. Initially Williams students played all the parts, but the group soon invited women – Bennington girls and faculty wives – to take the female parts. Beginning in 1927 Mrs. Bloedel performed in many productions. Male professors were also recruited to play some roles. Leading members of Cap & Bells, including William McKnight ‘34 (father of today’s Phil McKnight), often performed with the Little Theatre as well. Plays were directed sometimes by Williams faculty, including Prof. Charles Safford, sometimes by students, including William Sprague, who had performed with the Williamstown Summer Theatre in 1936 and 1937. In 1936 he directed a production of “The Trial of Mary Dugan,” a 1927 melodrama that had run for 437 performances on Broadway in 1927 and 1928. In the lead roles were Mrs. Bloedel and Hallett Smith, who had worked with Sprague in the summer theatre.
Max Flowers, a Yale Drama School graduate and Assistant Professor of English at Williams, was involved in the campus drama clubs which gave the summer theater’s founders their early experience. He was later named the first director of the Adams Memorial Theater.
In February 1937 the Little Theatre and Cap & Bells decided to merge, forming a single drama club, under the presidency of Gordon Kay. The expanded group now planned to put on four productions each year, including evenings of one-act plays. And it continued the practice of inviting local women – mostly faculty wives – to audition for the female parts. In 1937 the new Cap & Bells put on Maxwell Anderson’s “Both Your Houses,” a 1933 play that won the Pulitzer Prize, directed by Max Flowers (1908-2003), a 1937 graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and a newly hired assistant professor in the English Department. (Flowers was neither the first nor the last product of the Yale School of Drama to direct plays in Williamstown. He was followed by Nikos Psacharaloulos in 1955.) In 1939 Flowers again directed a Maxwell Anderson play for Cap & Bells, “High Tor,” billed as a “fantastic comedy,” that had played for 171 performances on Broadway and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as the best play for 1936-37. It was presented not in Chapin Hall but in the Opera House. He also supervised the student directors of one-act plays. In the main-stage productions, Flowers cast two faculty wives, Mrs. Bloedel and Frances Chaffee (wife of the newly-hired Williams tennis and squash coach, Clarence Chaffee).
After he graduated in June 1937 William Sprague went to work as a radio actor, announcer, and writer. In World War II he commanded a tank group with Patton’s 3rd Army, winning four bronze stars. He returned from the war to build a career in radio journalism. Max Flowers went on to be named the first director of the new Adams Memorial Theatre, which opened on the Williams campus in 1941. During World War 2, he served for four years as a theatrical advisor in the Special Services division of the army, staging shows for troops in the Pacific. After the war he returned to Williams for two years, and then directed the Berkshire Playhouse Drama School for two summers, before moving to Illinois where he taught drama, with a special interest in Shakespeare, until he retired in 1970. Both Eleanor Bloedel and Fran Chaffee continued to perform with Cap & Bells for many years and then with the new Williamstown Summer Theatre, the only performers with the distinction of acting with the original Williamstown Summer Theatre and with its 1955 re-creation.
On Saturday, January 16, at 11 a.m. Dusty Bahlman presented a free talk entitled “The 1918 Flu Pandemic Strikes Williamstown.” The 45 minute talk was illustrated with numerous photos and documents provided by Michael Miller and was be followed by a 15 minute question and answer session.
“We’re living this experience all over again,” Bahlman noted when asked what inspired him to investigate this topic. “And the similarities are depressing. In the end the 1918 flu killed millions more people than have perished from COVID-19 so far, but the tragic nature of the stories people tell are the same. Not only could they not be with their loved ones, but because World War I was raging soldiers died in Europe and their families didn’t learn until months later.”
Private Willard C. Pike, whose family lived on Latham Street, is one such flu victim whose story Bahlman will recount. Pike’s mother got a letter from him on the same day she was officially notified of his death. By coincidence there was a nurse from Williamstown assigned to the hospital unit where he died who was able to write and tell the family about his last days. After the war, Private Pike was disinterred and reburied in Westlawn Cemetery.
“It was the third and last wave of 1918 flu that killed people here in Williamstown,” Bahlman noted. “Brainerd Mears was the commander of the state guard at that time and they closed Williamstown off for a couple of weeks. You had to have a pass from town hall to cross the borders into town!”
Mark your calendars and use the Zoom link below to join us for this special opportunity to learn more about the history of the last international pandemic to affect our community.
Long-time Williamstown resident, Dusty Bahlman graduated from the Lawrenceville School and Millbrook School and then from New England College in Henniker, NH, with a BA in communications/journalism. He launched his career as a reporter at the Troy (NY) Record, then worked as associate editor of Photonics Spectra, a Pittsfield based monthly magazine for professionals in the fields of lasers, fiber optics, electro-optics and imaging, before becoming a reporter at The Berkshire Eagle for nearly 20 years. Since leaving the Eagle in 2005 he has worked as a freelance writer and journalist.
