Page:The International Jew - Volume 2.djvu/105

 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 several months in New York to make up a season’s bookings. 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 season’s itinerary, or “route,” for a traveling company and enabled the producer of a play to spend his vacation 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.

In this manner was laid the foundation of the later-day Theatrical Trust. The booking firm was that of Klaw & Erlanger, the former a young Jew from Kentucky who had studied law, but drifted into theatrical life as an agent; the latter a young Jew from Cleveland with little education but with experience as an advance agent.

The booking system was not of their devising. They borrowed the idea from Harry C. Taylor who established a sort of theatrical exchange where producers and local managers could meet, desks being provided them at a small rental, and who took over the booking in the smaller cities, without foreseeing—