jewish Supremacy in the Theater and Cinema 103

towns in the country arranged engagements 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 of

a central bookings concern relieved local managers of much time, labor

and thought, all details were handled for him and his next season's

bookings were arranged for him. In this manner was laid the foundation

of the later day Theatrical Trust. The booking firm which gave birth to

the iron control of the theater was that of Kiaw & Erlanger. This is the

key to the whole problem of the decline of the American stage. The rise

of the Theatrical trust completed the destruction of the personal touch in

the relationship between manager and company. The old "personal"

system made possible the development of genius in accordance with the

organic laws which determine its nurture, growth and fruition.

The fact of Jewish control of the theater is not itself a ground for

complaint. If certain Jews working separately or in groups have

succeeded in wrenching this rich business from its former Gentile control,

that is purely a matter of commercial interest. It is precisely on the same

footing as if one group of Gentiles had won the control from another

group of Gentiles. In this, as in other business matters, however, there

is the ethical test of how the control was gained and how it is used.

Society is usually willing to receive the fact of control with equanimity,

providing the control is not used for anti-social purposes.

The fact that the old-time Gentile producing managers usually died

poor while Jewish producing managers wax immensely rich would

indicate that the Gentile managers were better artists and poorer business

men than the Jewish managers. At least poorer business men, perhaps;

and in any case working on a system, whose chief object was to produce

plays not merely profits.

The advent of Jewish control put the theater on a more

commercialized basis than it has previously known. It really represented

applying the Trust idea of the theater before it had been largely applied

to industry.

The early control of theaters in strategic cities, the black booking

·agencies for artists and productions, and the running out of business of

the independent theaters and stock companies by excessive charges for

plays that had already been used in the regular theaters of ·the Trust,