Holly George: Early 20th Century Theater in the American West (Season 1, Ep. 14 -Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history. My name is Brad Westwood. I'm Senior Public Historian at the Utah Dept. of Heritage and Arts.
Speak Your Piece is a podcast where writers, historians, curators, all those who contribute to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fixed, this is the place.
My guest today is Dr. Holly George, co-editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly. Good morning, Holly.

**Holly George** (0:42)
Good morning.

**Brad Westwood** (0:43)
I'm really good. Thanks for being here.
Dr. Holly George is also the author of Showtown, Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890 to 1920 Her current research concerns Marie Ogden and the Home of Truth, a religious commune which as a ruin still stands some 15 miles north of Monticello, in San Juan County. We're going to talk to Dr. George about this research as well. George is particularly interested in Marie Ogden's connection to far right, political far right in the 1930s and 1940s.
An exceptional researcher, writer and editor, Dr. George has, along with Dr. Jedidiah Rogers, co-led the Utah Historical Quarterly, Utah's premier local and state and regional quarterly for six and a half years. Dr. George, thank you for joining me in Speak Your Piece.

**Holly George** (1:45)
Oh, thank you. That was a really kind introduction.

**Brad Westwood** (1:48)
In this episode, we'll be discussing one family story, specifically the George family story surrounding the 1918 influenza epidemic and the death of her great-grandmother Gladys Craighead Buck. We'll be talking about the surrounding Utah family context before and after Gladys death. First, Holly, I want to ask you about your work as a cultural historian in the Western historical context. In your book, Showtown, Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920, you write about Spokane's lively late 19th and early 20th century theater culture. Now, I've been doing a bit of research into this interesting book about theater, which not only deals with Washington, but I think has a broader application to theater across the West.
A book reviewer wrote this, The author has placed that targeted story within a larger social and cultural framework, thus giving theater in Spokane much larger meanings.
In this situation of the somewhat isolated story within the larger interpretive framework, the author provides a valuable and memorable model for other scholars to study Western theater history. Salt Lake City in Ogden, like Spokane, had long established active theater districts. This aspect of city life tells us much not only about artistic life, but about broader community issues. Holly, tell me about the theater world in this period of time and how it might be applicable. Not only to Washington or the coast, but also in the Intermountain West, say Salt Lake or Ogden.

**Holly George** (3:41)
I studied two strands of professional theater, not amateur theater, but professional.
First of all, variety theater, which were not, they were a lot less high class. I don't quite have to describe it here.
And then also what would be called the legitimate theater. And I guess higher class, more family friendly theater. So the thing that I really took away from it is, well, I'm always interested in gender and how women are portrayed, how men are portrayed and how they interact with the world. And then the thing that was so fascinating was the economic connection and the cultural connections that were really facilitated by the railroad and by financial networks and then how those played out in the town.
And so, you know, you see this again and again in studying the American West, that you get the benefit of having outside, you know, financial connections, you get a new store, you get new business opportunities, then that also makes you vulnerable. And we can see that today, right, with internet shopping. It's really fun to get stuff back from somewhere and it costs less. But on the other hand, there are repercussions. And that's what happened to folks. And there would be, you know, we play a lot of board games at our house. And there's this kind of mechanism called area control, where you like try to control different areas. And that's what was going on. It was like a chess game in America. There were these theater kingpins in the big cities, especially New York, of course. And they would try to map out what cities and what territories, that's what they call them, what territories they controlled.

**Brad Westwood** (5:41)
And they would just count on these cities, theaters, taking in their productions.

**Holly George** (5:48)
Well, they would. There were syndicates. There was something called the syndicate. And they would often control what would go wrong.