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WORK TITLE: Red Hot Mama
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LC control no.: n 2009027545
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2009027545
HEADING: Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Wellesley College, B.A., 1995; University of Virginia, M.A., 1998, Ph.D, 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, Department of History and Art History, visiting assistant professor and post-doctoral fellow, 2003-04; University of South Carolina, Columbia, Department of History, assistant professor, 2005-10, associate professor, 2010–.
AWARDS:Grants from Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, and University of South Carolina.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Journal of American History, and American Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff is a scholar of American history. She is particularly interested in “the ways that cultural institutions shape racial, ethnic, and religious identity,” she writes on the website for the University of South Carolina, where she teaches. She has written books on African-American culture and on entertainer Sophie Tucker.
Black Culture and the New Deal
In Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era, Sklaroff examines African-American participation in the cultural programs funded by the federal government during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. These programs, which sought to showcase “authentic” American arts in addition to providing much-needed jobs during the Great Depression, offered opportunities for black writers, performers, directors, and musicians to present their work in ways that challenged negative and demeaning stereotypes, she writes. For instance, the Federal Theater Project production of The Swing Mikado, a version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta using jazzy tunes and African costumes, gave African-Americans a chance to show they were serious artists. She also looks at the Federal Writers’ Project, the Armed Forces Radio Service, and the Office of Wartime Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, as well as World War II public relations efforts that highlighted the patriotism of boxer Joe Louis. While the federally funded efforts usually avoided overt challenges to racial inequalities, the work of the artists involved served as its own challenge, according to Sklaroff.
“Sklaroff presents a complicated portrait of the fight for racial equality,” observed Matthew L. Downs at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. She shows that as black artists gained visibility, “their actions served to make a strong political statement about the continued existence of racial inequality.” he noted. Her found her book “a valuable addition to the growing history of the ‘long’ civil rights movement.”
Red Hot Mama
Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker tells the story of an entertainer who also challenged cultural assumptions. Tucker, born in 1887 to Jewish immigrant parents, left her husband and infant son to become a nightclub performer in the early twentieth century. She was outspoken, her routines were often bawdy, and she was not conventionally attractive. Her musical and comic talents, however, made her a favorite with audiences, and she became one of the most beloved and successful entertainers in the United States. She was also a philanthropist, a civil rights activist, and an inspiration for later performers such as Ethel Merman and Bette Midler.
Sklaroff”s sources Tucker’s 1945 autobiography, but it revealed little about the entertainer’s personal life, so “the author faces a considerable challenge in probing Tucker’s feelings and motivations,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “Sklaroff’s portrait, then, is necessarily of the public woman,” according to the critic, who did find that portrait worthwhile, summing up the book as “an appreciative celebration of a dynamic entertainer.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker.
ONLINE
Garamond Agency website, http://garamondagency.com/ (June 28, 2018), brief biography.
H Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (November 1, 2010), Matthew L. Downs, review of Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era.
University of South Carolina website, https://www.sc.edu/ (June 28, 2018), brief biography.
Wall Street Journal website, https://www.wsj.com/ (April 12, 2018), Gary Giddins, review of Red Hot Mama.
Quoted in Sidelights: “the ways that cultural institutions shape racial, ethnic, and religious identity,”
FACULTY AND STAFF
Lauren Sklaroff
Title: Associate Professor
Department: History
College of Arts and Sciences
E-mail: sklaroff@mailbox.sc.edu
Phone: 803-576-5817
Office: Gambrell Hall, Room 214
Resources: Curriculum Vitae [pdf]
Department of History sklaroff image
Education
B.A. Wellesley College
M.A. University of Virginia
Ph.D. University of Virginia
Bio
I have been on the faculty at USC since 2005, specializing in the ways that cultural institutions shape racial, ethnic, and religious identity. I am the author of Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker (University of Texas Press, 2018) as well as several articles and book reviews. My work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, the Chicago Tribune and several other media outlets as well as the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. I have spoken at the National Jewish Book Council, the American Jewish Historical Society, the National Museum of American History, as well as various universities and professional conferences. My research has been supported by the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as grants from the University of South Carolina. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on American Cultural History, Racial and Ethnic History, and Gender and Sexuality. I supervise several doctoral students in the History Department at USC, as well as M.A. students in Public History. I also serve as a consultant on digital and documentary film projects which bring history to a wider audience.
Activities
I am currently beginning a project exploring queer identity among Jewish performers in the 20th Century. While I was writing my biography of Tucker, I underscored how the singer was quite ambivalent about her Jewish identity and professed an unconventional kind of sexuality. Thus, I became more interested in these concepts among other major American musicians and composers. A reporter once asked playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, “Why do all you gay Jewish men write so many plays?” Before the creation of West Side Story (1957), Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Laurents circled among a coterie of actors, dancers, screenwriters, and other artists who found solace in the political culture of the New Deal era, wrestling with homosexuality, Jewish identity, and new aesthetic priorities. In the post-war period they were part of a vast federal interrogation of any sort of “deviant” behavior, revealed through public testimonies and shamed through blacklisting, deportation, and other methods. Art often became a way to express ideas that were forbidden in most other areas of public life. Thus, my new book project, Fear and Desire: Sexuality, Judaism, and the Politics of American Culture, explores the connection between sexual orientation and Jewish identity among some of America’s most famous cultural figures in the period from 1930-1970.
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
A leading scholar of American cultural history, Lauren Sklaroff is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Her areas of research include all elements of popular culture, and the history of race and ethnicity in the U.S.. She taught previously at George Mason University, held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, and was an assistant curator for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
Her first book, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era, explained the government’s extensive use of racially-oriented cultural programs during the Depression and World War Two. In its review of the book, H-Net called the book, “A valuable addition to the growing history of the ‘long’ civil rights movement.” Reviews in American History stated, “Black Culture and The New Deal is a nuanced and highly effective exploration of the discourses about race and inequality in the theater, radio, print culture, and motion pictures of the era.” In 2002, she won the Organization of American Historian’s esteemed Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for her essay on the boxer, Joe Louis.
Lauren’s new book, Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker, is based on years of research in the Sophie Tucker Scrapbook Collection at the New York Public Library, as well as several other prominent archives relating to popular culture, Jewish History, and African American History. The book was supported by a fellowship from the New York Public Library as well as the University of South Carolina Provost Humanities Grant, and an NEH public scholars fellowship.
Quoted in Sidelights: “the author faces a considerable challenge in probing Tucker’s feelings and motivations,” . “Sklaroff’s portrait, then, is necessarily of the public woman,” “an appreciative celebration of a dynamic entertainer.”
Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca: RED HOT MAMA
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca RED HOT MAMA Univ. of Texas (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1236-0
Bold and sassy, the legendary Sophie Tucker (1887-1966) influenced generations of women entertainers.
In 1906, Tucker took her first paying job in a seedy New York nightclub, beginning a 60-year career that included vaudeville, radio, movies, and
TV. In 1953, 1,500 people gathered at a Waldorf Astoria gala to honor her success: "Sophie Tucker is to show business what Eleanor Roosevelt is
to politics," comedian Milton Berle remarked at the event. Sklaroff (History/Univ. of South Carolina; Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest
for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era, 2009) sensitively traces the unlikely rise of the daughter of Jewish immigrants, a woman who never fit the
svelte body image of popular female entertainers and whose "sexual movements and provocative delivery" shocked some viewers. Tucker was
determined to be a star: married with an infant son, she separated from her husband and left her son in the care of her 16-year-old sister. "I have
decided I can do big things," she said. Once she began to earn money, she helped her family financially, but Sklaroff has no evidence that Tucker
felt guilty about leaving. In fact, the author faces a considerable challenge in probing Tucker's feelings and motivations. She draws on Tucker's
autobiography, published in 1945, which "contained little about her family," especially her son, and "did not reveal anything...that wasn't already
part of public record in interviews and press reports." That material made its way into 400 scrapbooks that Tucker amassed, filled with clippings,
programs, speeches, birthday cards, and sheet music. Sklaroff's portrait, then, is necessarily of the public woman, a much-acclaimed entertainer
who chucked her early performances as a "Coon Shouter," wearing blackface, to become a glamorous, bespangled singer who, in 1952, was
"listed among ten of the biggest nightclub 'money-makers,' an elite group that also included Sinatra, Lena Horne, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis."
She was also a generous philanthropist, mentor, outspoken supporter of African-Americans, and model for performers such as Ethel Merman and
Bette Midler.
An appreciative celebration of a dynamic entertainer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca: RED HOT MAMA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461538/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae2f3a72. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461538
Quoted in Sidelights: “Sklaroff presents a complicated portrait of the fight for racial equality,” “their actions served to make a strong political statement about the continued existence of racial inequality.” . “a valuable addition to the growing history of the ‘long’ civil rights movement.”
Downs on Sklaroff, 'Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era'
Author:
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
Reviewer:
Matthew L. Downs
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 328 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3312-4.
Reviewed by Matthew L. Downs Published on H-Law (November, 2010) Commissioned by Christopher R. Waldrep
Staging Civil Rights
As scholars outline the long history of the African American civil rights struggle, the New Deal has become a historiographic battleground, centered on the objectives and limits of federal legislation. For some historians, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failure to address directly the needs of black communities demonstrates the government’s unwillingness to challenge racial inequality (see, for example, Harvard Sitkoff’s A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade [1978]). For others (including William Leuchtenburg in his The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson [ 2005] and Patricia Sullivan in her Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era [1996]), the inclusion of African Americans in larger programs, albeit as secondary beneficiaries, suggests a growing concern for the effects of segregation and an important first step in the fight for civil equality. In Black Culture and the New Deal, Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff forgoes legislation in favor of the larger cultural effects of black participation in the New Deal, providing a refreshing new perspective on the ways in which African Americans carved out spaces for civil rights activism in public life.
Sklaroff focuses on the numerous cultural programs enacted during the New Deal and World War II, a period in which the federal government actively encouraged and shaped cultural expression. Stricken by economic depression and determined to boost public morale, the Roosevelt administration funded artistic production, both as a source of direct economic relief and as a means of creating and selling an “authentic American culture” that “championed national values and traditions by celebrating regional and racial diversity” (p. 28). African Americans played a central role in the production of this “authentic” culture, though as Sklaroff carefully documents, the work and influence of black actors, directors, writers, and musicians changed as the national discussion of “black Americanness” shifted to address the demands of wartime participation (p. 9). Tracing the development of government-sponsored black culture during the New Deal and World War II, Sklaroff presents a complicated portrait of the fight for racial equality.
Sklaroff proceeds topically and chronologically, with chapters on the Federal Theater Project (FTP), the Federal Writers’ Project, wartime publicity (centered on the “character” of boxer Joe Louis), the Armed Forces Radio Service, and the Office of Wartime Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). With each chapter, Sklaroff notes the growing “inclusion” of African Americans into government-sponsored portrayals of “American culture.” As black performers played larger roles in the construction of cultural images, such as plays, radio programs, travel guides, and films, their actions served to make a strong political statement about the continued existence of racial inequality.
Beginning with the New Deal, federally funded and organized cultural programs sought to portray African American life more “authentically”; yet by privileging black participation in American culture, administrators provided a unique opportunity for black performers to challenge negative portrayals. At the outset, the FTP formed “Negro Units” to select and produce plays that highlighted black culture. Overseen by mostly white administrators seeking a specific presentation of black culture, the FTP nevertheless provided a unique opportunity for black performers to move beyond stereotypical “minstrelsy” toward a more realistic portrayal of African American life. In fact, even when the agency “blackened” traditionally white performances, black actors found space for autonomy. In the Swing Mikado (1938), for instance, the FTP “swung” aspects of Gilbert and Sullivan’s iconic musical, replacing Japanese robes and makeup with African headdresses and sarongs and adding several new songs and dances to reflect the changed mood and setting. Sklaroff argues that the performance gave black actors and actresses the opportunity to demonstrate “serious” skills, faithfully reproducing much of the original score, while “blackening” the traditional musical and giving it a “distinct racial meaning” (p. 69). While fueling white audiences’ desires to see black performers in “the comfort of a recognizable artistic format,” the FTP’s productions also demonstrated growing space for a black culture separate from the “minstrel stereotypes” that dominated much of mainstream American culture (p. 78).
Even as Roosevelt’s administration shifted from the New Deal to World War II, cultural production remained an important aspect of the government’s domestic program. With the advent of the “Double-V” campaign and growing discontent among African Americans, federal support for black performance offered administrators a way to increase patriotism and participation in the defense effort while forestalling more direct discussions of continued inequality. Government programs supported publicity that portrayed prominent African Americans, such as boxer Joe Louis, as valuable additions to a patriotic cause. In particular, Louis’s victories over “enemy combatants” became symbols of the superiority of American ideals, and his willingness to volunteer for the army suggested that racial animosity had no place in a society at war. Yet again, Sklaroff shows the complicated nature of such publicity. Even as Louis represented cooperative black patriotism, his presence and participation in a government program demonstrated a growing sense that black support for the war effort was essential to eventual success; Louis’s performance “produc[ed] a narrative both sanitized and racially charged” (p. 156).
For Sklaroff, these efforts at cultural inclusion culminated in the BMP, a federal agency tasked with enforcing patriotic principles in Hollywood films. As with the “performance” of Louis, the BMP sought to portray African Americans as important contributors to the war effort without broaching sensitive issues, particularly social integration. Yet unlike the carefully guided productions of the New Deal and early war effort, black performance in wartime films pushed the boundaries of what was “acceptable,” both for the administration and for mainstream black civil rights organizations. This was most notable in Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-black musical starring Ethel Waters and Lena Horne as women fighting for the heart of a lottery winner. In contrast to the success of another black musical, the Swing Mikado, Cabin in the Sky received serious criticism. The all-black production did not fit with the wartime imperative to show African Americans as participants in a larger American culture, and for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the “vulgar” portrayal of urban life threatened the organization’s “bourgeois sensibilities” (p. 218). Yet despite the criticisms, by the end of the war effort, such portrayals of African American life had become an essential aspect of American culture. As Sklaroff notes, Hollywood films conscientiously sought to attract African Americans to theaters, black music found an increasingly interracial audience, and white audiences came to appreciate the “serious” talents of black performers.
Black Culture and the New Deal is a valuable addition to the growing history of the “long” civil rights movement. As historians uncover the numerous actions of resistance that marked the black response to inequality, the lines between political performance and cultural performance necessarily blur. Hoping to build and maintain black support for economic recovery and the American defense effort, the Roosevelt administration’s support for cultural production provided an opportunity for African Americans to challenge popular conceptions about black culture and life. Working within an admittedly limited system, performers forced American audiences, white and black, to reconsider long-held prejudices; in doing so, black actors and actresses, directors, singers, musicians, and writers became foot soldiers in the struggle for civil rights.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=31007
Citation: Matthew L. Downs. Review of Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca, Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. November, 2010. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31007
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