The Case of Elbridge Gerry vs. Vaudeville

Here’s a post that links our ongoing series honoring the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with our core content stream of vaudeville. It concerns a grandfather and a grandson, both named Elbridge Gerry. Both gave the family surname to institutions that are better remembered than they are.

The first Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) was one of the most important of the Founding Fathers, though nowadays only history buffs tend to remember him, though as we say, his name remains widely known, for it was given to the practice we know still know as Gerrymandering, i.e., redrawing maps of political districts along partisan lines. (The word is an ungainly portmanteau of “Gerry” and “salamander”, which a district he redrew as Massachusetts Governor was said to resemble). It is ironic that this is what Gerry remains best known for, because throughout most of his political career, like his Massachusetts colleague John Adams, he tried to remain above partisanship in the early days of the Republic. Of political necessity Adams wound up among the Federalists, and Gerry with the Democratic-Republicans, though this never made them inimical toward one another.

But even if you didn’t know about Gerrymandering, Gerry is someone whom anyone interested in U.S. history ought to know about. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, and one of the most active participants at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, though only one of three who didn’t sign it, because it had no Bill of Rights. He then became a member of the First U.S. Congress, becoming instrumental in the creation of the Bill of Rights. Under President Adams he was a special envoy to France, becoming embroiled in the XYZ Affair. Then he was Governor of Massachusetts, and finally he was the Vice President of the United States under James Madison. He died after two years in office. He is the only signer of the Declaration of Independence buried in Washington, D.C.

In private life, Gerry was a wealthy merchant from Marblehead, Massachusetts. But he was also one of the eight signers of the Declaration who had been educated at Harvard. His masters dissertation was about why the Colonies should resist the Stamp Act. In the years leading up to the Revolution he was one of the most active organizers of Massachusetts opposition to Crown policies. This led to his appointment to the Second Continental Congress.

So…I don’t know how you rank such things. There were so many able and extraordinary men and women involved in the creation of this country. Somewhere just behind Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay, Madison, Hancock, and Patrick Henry in significance is Elbridge Gerry nipping at their heels.

Next we take up the Founder’s grandson, “Commodore” Elbridge T. Gerry (1837-1927), a major Gilded Age figure. This Gerry’s father (the other Gerry’s son) was a Navy man, but his mother was from the wealthy Goelet family. Gerry inherited a half million dollars from an uncle in 1879, which he grew to $25 million by 1912, allowing him to live like this:

The Gerry mansion was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 61st Street, where the Hotel Pierre now sits.

I am delighted (and a little confused) to learn that Gerry was born in Charlestown, Rhode Island, which is located between the town where I was born (Westerly) and the one where I grew up (South Kingstown). My confusion stems from the fact that I think of Charlestown as a kind of no-man’s-land between those two resort towns (South Kingstown used to encompass Narragansett, which is on the bay). Charlestown is not known for the same kind of fashionableness, or anything at all, but it is on the shore, and clearly the Gerrys summered there. Later, Gerry would also own the Newport estate Seaverge, which was demolished in 1957.

Gerry’s Commodoreship had to do with his leadership of the New York Yacht Club from 1886 to 1892. Thus far we have made him seem like a layabout, but Gerry was actually a very active man of affairs. He was a powerful attorney who had been educated at Columbia. He was involved with Tammany Hall and served on numerous board and commissions, and was associated with many charitable causes. His Chairmanship on the New York State Commission on Capital Punishment resulted in the replacement of hanging with the electric chair. The name “Gerrycide” was briefly contemplated for the new method, but “electrocution” had a gravitas that was more appropriate.

So that is NOT the second institution that bore the Gerry name which we alluded to in the opening paragraph. Elbridge also happened to be the co-founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, commonly referred to as The Gerry Society. Readers of my book No Applause will have encountered references to it there. The Society was controversial, because though it undeniably did good works, combatting cruelty, abuse and exploitation of children, its rigorous enforcement of child labor laws sometimes ran afoul of such complicated cases as family businesses (kids who help out in the family store or restaurant) and performing children in the theatre and vaudeville. Some of the folks I’ve written about with reference to their issues with the Gerry Society include the Keaton family, the Foy Family,Fred and Adele Astaire, Milton Berle,Rose Marie, Florence Mills,Sammy Davis Jr,The bicycle riding Elliotts, and Lucio and Simplicio Godino (who, as conjoined twins, had an entirely different set of issues beyond their young ages, one would think).

I have to confess that my identification with vaudevillians sometimes causes me to take their position and see the Gerry people as blue-blooded busybodies poking their noses in and interfering with the livelihoods of struggling artists. On the other hand…more often than not, child actors do not necessarily have the best of it, then or now. Supervision and regulation is certainly warranted, although outright prohibition of children performing as the Gerrys sometimes seemed guilt of striving for, seems excessive.

Also of interest: Gerry’s youngest child was Peter Goelet Gerry (1879-1957), who served as U.S. Senator from Rhode Island from 1917 to 1929 and then from 1935 to 1947. A Democrat, he was the first Senator to ever be re-elected to non-consecutive terms.