The Eddie Cantor Story by David Weinstein

Author:David Weinstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Crowds flock to one of Cantor’s shows at the Loew’s State Theater on Broadway in the summer of 1939. Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections.

That fall, Cantor went on the road, presenting a series of one-week engagements in Pittsburgh, Boston, Brooklyn, Washington, DC, Chicago, and Cincinnati. The touring show was similar to the one in New York, though Cantor now closed with his old isolationist radio hit, “Let Them Keep It over There.” He repeated the grueling New York schedule of five or six performances a day, maintaining a steady audience flow while also impressing critics. In Chicago, Variety reported that he generated “zowie coin” of $52,000, with mobs of fans demanding that Cantor add more shows. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviewer, Harold W. Cohen, marveled that Cantor “is the top salesman-showman of his time, a comedian who continues to be good to the public that has been good to him for more than twenty years. Perfection is a pretty unapproachable commodity; Mr. Cantor achieved it some time ago and is still improving upon it.”6

On previous tours, Cantor found time between commercial engagements to appear at local fund-raisers for Jewish federations, synagogues, or Hadassah. In Pittsburgh, Cantor’s main offstage event was held at the First Baptist Church. He appealed for the preservation of democracy and Christianity before eighteen hundred people, advocating “church attendance and strict adherence to Christian principles to keep subversive influences of dictatorial governments from destroying the American rights of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’” Cantor saw “Christian prayer” as an important weapon against the dual threats of fascism and communism: “Christianity and Democracy go hand in hand. Go to church and practice true Christianity, because edifices like the one we are in tonight will live long after Hitler and Stalin are forgotten.” The speaker even had conciliatory words about Father Charles Coughlin. Cantor still “resented” unspecified remarks by Coughlin, but he believed that the radio priest’s influence could be used for good and promised that he “would be the first to fight for his [Coughlin’s] right to free speech.”7

From 1939 to 1940, Cantor took every opportunity to emphasize his affinity with Christians. Cantor tied religious faith to American values, reestablished his patriotism before skeptics, and aligned himself with major Jewish communal organizations. Groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) extolled America’s value as a country that fostered multiple forms of religious expression. Before Cantor stood atop the church pulpit, the NCCJ sent “tolerance trios” to thousands of communities throughout the 1930s. Comprising a minister, a priest, and a rabbi, the trios combated prejudice and promoted interfaith goodwill.8 American Jews emphasized the importance of religious freedom as central to democracy and looked for other affirmations of this freedom. In October 1936, for example, shortly before both the Jewish New Year and the presidential election, the Seven Arts Feature Syndicate distributed a long article under President Roosevelt’s byline to Jewish newspapers. The article compiled segments from speeches in which

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