by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Tonight, a presentation given to the Los Angeles Corral of The Westerners, an international organization of history enthusiasts that marks its 80th year this year, at Almansor Court in Alhambra covered some of the history of The Mission Play, the theatrical pageant penned by John Steven McGroarty and held for two decades at San Gabriel, just a mile from the venue.
Sharing photographs, programs and other material from the Museum’s collection, the talk examined various aspects of the play which drew a few million visitors during its long run, with a good many of them, local residents and tourists alike, believing that what McGroarty wrote was not just theatrical, but historical, as well, and that they were learning what Spanish California was really like.
The main idea was the devoted, selfless Franciscan missionaries, in the supreme act of self-sacrifice and devotion to the Roman Catholic faith, saved the souls and redeemed the barbarity of California’s indigenous people in the 21 missions founded from 1769-1823 along the coast and that this work, despite the staggering loss of life, much less the destruction of cultural, religious and social practices, was a noble one in its inculcation of faith and civilizing the heathen.
A devout Catholic, McGroarty was hardly alone in his views or unique in propagating this concept about pre-American California, but he had the talent and the platform to carry his message to millions in a stage presentation that dazzled audiences and left impressions not to be found in other public presentations, whether events like Los Angeles’ La Fiesta (held intermittently from the mid-1890s to the mid-1910s), books like Helen Hunt Jackson’s massive popular novel Ramona and the legions of imitators that followed, or others.
The writer Carey McWilliams came up with the term “Spanish Fantasy Past” to describe the phenomenon, in which The Mission Play was among the most prominent proponents, of casting Spanish and Mexican California in ways that purported to portray actuality, but instead were concoctions calculated to cover up some of the more insidious and destructive realities of the period from, roughly, 1770-1830.
Some would argue that, without the missionaries, the plight of the native people would have been far more horrific if left in the hands of the military or merchants. This is certainly very plausible, but the presentations of the “Spanish Fantasy Past” were still largely distortions and, most importantly, omitted the experiences and voices of California’s indigenous people, the descendants of whom are still very much among us and are seeking to reclaim their histories under Spanish and Mexican, as well as American, rule over more than 250 years.
This post goes back to 1912, as The Mission Play was ready to debut at San Gabriel, with an article “An American Oberammergau,” written by Willard Huntington Wright and published in the Los Angeles-based magazine, The West Coast Magazine. The periodical happened to be edited by McGroarty and, presumably, modest forbore him from writing about his own production, so Wright (1888-1939) was enlisted to pen the essay.
Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, but largely raised in Santa Monica, where his father ran a hotel, Wright went to St. Vincent’s College (a Catholic boys’ and mens’ school in Los Angeles), Pomona College and Harvard University, though he did not complete his education at America’s most prestigious college.
His journalistic career began in 1909 with the Los Angeles Times as a book reviewer, it seemingly clear that he became acquainted with McGroarty, a former writer for the influential paper, and he moved to New York City two years later and became editor of the monthly magazine, The Smart Set, though his eccentricities led him to be fired after a year.
Wright went on to become well-known for his work as an art critic, championing the modernism that was roiling that world (his brother, Stanton MacDonald-Wright was a well-known abstract painter), including a pair of books on painting published in 1915 and 1923, but he experienced a nervous breakdown.
After two years in bed recovering (he also drank, smoked marijuana and ingested opium and became an addict as well as a notorious womanizer), he turned to detective fiction under the nom de plume of S.S. Van Dine, whose mysteries featuring character Philo Vance became, from 1926, massively popular for about a decade, a few years before his death.
“An American Oberammergau” begins with the explanation that “the development of the pageant has been parallel to that of the dramatic consciousness” and that “the historical pageant is a mirror held up to an actual or an imaginary past,” as well as “a revival of by-gone memories.” Typically, Wright continued, “pageants and panoramas of vanished splendors thrown against the background of the present” so that the telling of historic events is how we see that “our present-day world is evolved.”
Still, these might have reference to realities from the past “or they may body forth in new glory a buried mythology.” The critic, however, determined that “the elements of the pageant, whether documentary or legendary, are to be found only in the racial imagination.” Wright then offered that,
The first element of a pageant is romance—romance in the broad sense in which there is color and conflict, in which the unusual is fraught with significance. History becomes romance only when the dimming years have clothed it in unreality. The past is necessarily imaginative. We ourselves have not lived the bloody fights nor worn the multicolored raiment of old. And so the ages which have gone are to us dreams that we conjure up over the relics and documents which have outlives the men of an elder day.
Asserting there was long “a clamor for an American pageant” with “spectacular displays, Wright remarked that prior attempts failed because “the spirit of romance has been packing” and constituted “elaborately materialized documents rather than apotheoses of a semi-fabulous past.” This, he declared, as because “we Americans have no past” and “no historical background distinctively our own” while “our racial beginnings are too near to us” to contain “the atmosphere of romance.”
Being, he continued, “a nation of pioneers,” it was obvious that “our culture is imported” as, as “we are now in the process of crating our past,” an American pageant could not be created “because we are without a national heritage.” While there were surely some readers who might have argued otherwise, Wright offered,
there is one page in the early chapters of America’s story, which contains the conflict, the color, the pomp, and the splendor needed in a dramatic panorama—and that is the history of the Franciscan padres and the missions of California.
Allowing that this was not a national story and that Spanish California’s history was one “of an isolated civilization,” the young critic asserted that “generations ago [its] ideals were blasted; the dreams were shattered; its brief day of romance passed out with a broken sunset.” What it did leave behind in its ruins, though, was “the glamour of its romance” and was the only aspect of American history in which there was “the essence of old-world splendor” trough the Franciscans’ “plans for a great Catholic civilization.”
Wright continued that the key ingredients for a presentation were to be sown from this aim:
Here we have the early struggles of the Spaniards against hunger; the beginning of the building of the missions . . .; the training of the Indians; the invasion of the caballeros; the gaiety of Spanish social life; the gradual turn of the tide—the disintegration, crumbling and decay.
With these concepts identified, the writer then informed his readers that “we can no longer say that America is without a pageant” and this was because McGroarty “has made for us [one] of California’s early history.” In a matter of weeks, “it is to be given to us in all its prodigious splendor” and, because of its “religious dignity”, the poetic language, “its august and reverent air” and, with Wright’s claim that “the history of nations is a history of religions,” the idea of the missionaries’ “struggles for the establishment of a tremendous idea,” he added that “I cannot help comparing it with the Passion Play of Oberammergau” and to others of the medieval period. McGroarty’s signal achievement in Wright’s view was that “in . . . combining the pageant and the drama, a two-fold result has been obtained.”
The playwright was lionized for having been “thoroughly saturated with the spirit of the mission days” and who “steeped himself in the color and the atmosphere of California history.” Moreover, it was claimed that McGroarty “has made the struggles and the hopes of the early padres a part of his own emotions” and, as a Catholic, he married objective history with subjective poetry. Wright then turned to describing the three-act play, with its cast of 300 and covering some 75 years of the mission era, as one that “will present a mass of chromatic splendor,” taking a full one-sentence paragraph to attempt to convey the color and character of the work.
The hero is Junipero Serra, who, in McGroarty’s telling in the first act at 1769, refuses, when confronted by others of his order as well as soldiers wanting to leave what’s been elsewhere called the “Siberia of México when a supply ship goes missing, to do so as he could not “bring himself to abandon California and his dream of Christianizing it.” Kneeling in prayer for relief, Serra’s exhortation to God is realized as the vessel arrives—for Wright, “this is the beginning of the history of [the] California missions.”
Act two displays “the whole splendid panorama of the mission life in the height of its power” in the mid-1780s. and involved “not only the spectacular exposition of the accomplishments of the missions” but also “the gorgeous pageant of the gay and brilliant life of the time.” Wright accounts that era as “that brief flash of historical glory when the Spaniards ruled the western shores” and before “the Americano invaded California with his commercial aspirations.” It was a time, he insisted, when “the days were full of scintillant color and langorous [sic] charm.”
As for the missionaries’ work with the indigenous people, they
Christianized the Indians and taught them useful trades; they have clothed them well and instructed them in the use of agricultural implements; there are an abundance of good and many head of cattle.
In other words, all is well and a processional in the second act, shows native people at Mission Carmel showing the results of their training, including adobe bricks, roof tiles, carved statues and altar pieces, furniture, horseshoes, blankets, baskets and much else, while they played music, danced and sang. They are followed by Spaniards who also perform their music and dances. These are the elements of what McGroarty, as interpreted by Wright, considered the zenith of Spanish California.
Decades pass as the third act takes the audient to Mission San Juan Capistrano and where “the dream has been broken; the riot of color is gone; the glory has departed” as “only the ruins remain” and “there is a tragic atmosphere over all.” A caretaker “alone has survived the devastating hand of those forty years of decay,” while “a few ragged, barefoot Indians slink into the mission yard and are driven away.” Later, a quintet of these neophytes return with the body of a Franciscan to bury in the church cemetery and Señora Dominguez utters the despairing words to conclude the piece:
Farewell, dear place. Sleep well, all ye tender dead padres, my countrymen and all. Sleep well, ye that were once so happy here when San Juan was filled with plenty. No more thy feet shall come again. Fallen is the altar, and the roof is in the dust. San Juan of God, farewell.
With this dour soliloquy, Wright concludes his piece by merely commenting, “the stars appear in the blue night; the old ruin stands a moment under their light. The dream is dead.” There is in Wright’s essay those notable emphases on romance, on a vaguely-defined “racial imagination;” on the juxtaposition of history and myth; a strange denial of an American history while his characterization of Spanish California either ignores or is ignorant of the rapid decay of that empire; and his insistence that McGroarty was both an accurate historian and a sublime poet.
In the lionizing of Serra and the Franciscans and the near-absence of any reference to the indigenous people, other than as seemingly passive vessels for the inculcation of civilization by their missionary masters, Wright’s affirmation of McGroarty’s approach with The Mission Play stands out amid his declarative statements about the lack of possibilities for an American pageant. The Mexican government’s decision to secularize (essentially close) the missions is an indictment of it because of the Indians being cast out without any support, but nothing was admitted in terms of what the mission system did to undermine indigenous culture and religion.
Yet, for twenty years and two 1940s revivals, the performances, numbering over 3,000 and witnessed by some 2 million persons, were routinely described as authentic history cast in a compelling theatrical form. Wright was hardly alone in his thinking, as McGroarty and his play had a great many supporters, including Walter P. Temple, who invested in buildings across from the mission and then purchased a large block of stock in the second Mission Playhouse, which was completed in 1927, not to mention delved deeply into historical romantic representations in his house, La Casa Nueva, also finished that year.
Sharing some of this history, including an abundant use of material from a donation a few years ago by Gloria Ballard, niece of choreographers and dancers Juan Zorraquinos and Juanita Vigare, tonight helped sharpen the thinking about interpretation of this very popular, long-running pageant and play, which correlated with much of the period the Temple family owned the Homestead.