Po ca hon tas, or The Gentle Savage

Indian Removal

This prevalent success of Brougham upon the genre of American burlesque sits mainly on his choice to take a spin-off of such a specific American topic. Po-Ca-Hon-Tas appeared to surpass the usual guidelines of burlesque, lampooning up-to-the-minute dramatic formulas and characters. Po-Ca-Hon-Tas was also “specifically linked to the social and cultural transformations that were taking place in America” during this nineteenth century period. In the heat of century, there was a revolution of sorts happening between the Native Americans and the United States settlers due to the unrest concerning territory and authority. There were some groundbreaking Americans who believed that Indians could embody “what once had been, or yet could be, if only America’s overpowering drive to conquer and contaminate could be reined in”, but regardless of this view, the culture of the Native Americans took on a considerable amount of damage over the course of the nineteenth century. After winning independence from England in 1776, the new United States’ government began taking possession of Indian territories that lay west of the Appalachian Mountains, even though the United States did not yet manifest past that frontier. From this seizure on, there was a rapid fire of treaties and court cases between the American government and the Indian nations. Treaties were considered “legal … agreements between two legitimate governments” – in this case, the United States and an Indian Nation. Whenever an Indian Nation would sign a treaty, it consented to “give the federal government some or all of its land, as well as some or all of its sovereign powers” in exchange for the government’s “protection, benefits, and rights” to the Native people. Almost none of these agreements ended well for the Natives, as “Indians saw their lands greatly diminished between 1763 and 1889” and eventually all Natives were forced to relocate to relatively minuscule Indian reservations. Not only did the United States government greatly impose on the Indian’s geographical boundaries, but their cultural boundaries as well. The newly created and crammed reservations became a hub for government officials to “civilize Indians” and “prepare them for inclusion into the U.S. polity” – a concept that Pocahontas’ story specifically highlights. In the American perspective, Pocahontas’ conversion to English culture presented the possibility of the “European’s fulfilling their hopes for commercial, religious, and political gains” among the Natives – the idea that drove the condescension and controversy of the time.

Jacksonian Democracy

In the early 19th century, there was a huge infatuation with Indians, especially Pocahontas, as her story was a prime example of Jacksonian democracy: ‘expansion (nationalism), antimonopoly (egalitarianism) and white supremacy’ . The Jacksonian democracy, an era that defined American beliefs in the early 1800s supported the “Manifest Destiny” (1840), which extended the belief that the United States should extend from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Jackson battled Congress in order to pass his Indian Removal Act (1830), which would authorize removal of Native Americans west of the Mississippi River in order to increase United States territory. This only added to American’s practice of white supremacy and superiority over inferior races. There was pride in this idea of the eventual submission of the Indians to the whites’ colonizing/ ‘civilizing’ power. People idealized this story as proof that they could change the Indians and win them over to the white side, the “right side.” Pocahontas was this legendary figure, the famous Indian Princess who willingly renounced her own people and culture, converted to Christianity, and married the English colonizer Celebrating these ideas is to inadvertently suppress Indian culture and present it in an inferior to the new “White American” culture. John Brougham’s burlesque deeply goes against the ideals of “Jacksonian democracy” by portraying Pocahontas as a satire.

John Brougham

However, before all of this was John Brougham himself. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1810, Brougham was educated at Trinity College to be a surgeon, but he expended much of his college career partaking in substandard theatre endeavors. He made his true theatrical debut in London in 1830 playing six characters in the play Tom and Jerry. Being the well-rounded theatre man he was, Brougham also became the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in 1840, where he wrote several of his lighter burlesques. Finally in 1842, he made the fateful move to the United States, where he quickly joined in on the theatre scene – managing first the Niblo’s Garden, and then opening his own namesake lyceum in 1850, Brougham’s Lyceum. It was here that Po-Ca-Hon-Tas was produced and performed originally. Despite his seemingly successful managing career, theatrical business was not Brougham’s forte, and he lost his beloved Lyceum to comrade James Wallack, who proceeded to rename the theatre to Wallack's Lyceum. In spite of this, Brougham stayed in the same location and was reported to have been paid $250 a week by Wallack, which according to Moody, in Dramas from the American Theatre, was “the largest salary then paid any artist in a regular New York company.” Brougham was noted to have said that working at Wallack’s Theatre was the “brightest part of his life.” Nevertheless, Brougham did manage to write “no fewer than 126 plays, including burlesques, adaptations, Gothic melodramas, tear-jerkers, Irish plays, and social satire." Brougham was one of the first to bring a bit of the action of his plays into the auditorium. “Brougham was not a behind-the-proscenium, peephole-stage, realistic actor.” According to Moody, “He was genial, jovial, hearty, handsome, immensely popular, dashing, clever, and always stylishly dressed.” Many people attended the theatre just to hear his impromptu “before-the-curtain” speeches. He ignored the critic’s protests of “impropriety” and gave the audience what they wanted. “Few actors have received the personal acclaim accorded Brougham.” Fulfilling his American dream as both an actor and a dramatist, Brougham earned the “enthusiastic applause of American audiences, the praise of American critics, and the enviable title of America’s Aristophanes.”