250 Years of American Independence: The Founders Museum
The White House presents 'The Founders Museum' in partnership with nonprofit PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education. Housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, it features original portraits and compelling digital storytelling, including AI-enabled, simulated-speaking videoclips of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence and six ladies who participated in the American Revolution. Visitors who scan the provided QR codes with their phones can watch the portraits come to life and hear great patriots tell their stories.
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Epoch Times
a day ago
- Epoch Times
250 Years of American Independence: The Founders Museum
On July 4, 2026, America will celebrate its most important historical milestone: 250 years of independence. So, the White House has unveiled two video-series to mark this anniversary and revive a love for America's history. Part 1 of this two-part review highlights ' The Founders Museum.' The White House presents 'The Founders Museum' in partnership with nonprofit PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education. Housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, it features original portraits and compelling digital storytelling, including AI-enabled, simulated-speaking videoclips of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence and six ladies who participated in the American Revolution. Visitors who scan the provided QR codes with their phones can watch the portraits come to life and hear great patriots tell their stories.
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Boston Globe
He wanted to make a patriotic movie. He was prosecuted for it — and then disappeared.
At the defense table, looking so nervous he might shake apart, was the defendant, Robert Goldstein, 34, the American-born son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany. He was 5-foot-3⅜-inches tall and 140 pounds, with a high forehead, gray-blue eyes, and a clean-shaven, pleasant face, if not an especially handsome one. He spoke too softly in court and radiated fear, like an injured bird. Goldstein had one production to his credit, The Spirit of '76, a lavishly-produced film about the American Revolution. He had finished the 12-reel extravaganza in the spring of 1917, around the time the United States entered World War I. Running over two hours, the film was a fictional love story entwined with historical events, many set in Massachusetts, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and a galloping Paul Revere. The action of the silent movie, with violent battle and massacre scenes, was synchronized in the theater with a live orchestra. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up All I ever wanted to do was make a patriotic movie, Goldstein pleaded to anyone who would listen. Advertisement It seemed an incredible twist, Goldstein thought, that he stood accused of betraying his country by producing a film about its origin — a film hostile to Britain, the government insisted, America's ally in the Great War. The prosecutor in Goldstein's case rose for closing remarks. Advertisement 'Gentlemen of the jury,' he began. 'When you go to the jury room the first thing you want to do is to put a label on this defendant. Which class does he come in? Is he a traitor or is he a patriot?' Being called traitor was so uncanny to Goldstein that he experienced a sense of dissociation, as if he were merely part of the audience at this sensational trial, rather than the main character, facing up to 20 years in prison. With the United States at war, the government said, there were only two classes in America. 'Traitors or patriots,' the prosecutor repeated, and then, indicating Goldstein, 'Which is he?' I have been chasing Robert Goldstein and the largely forgotten story of his prosecution for five years, after learning about him while writing a book about espionage and propaganda in World War I. As a journalist, my professional life, my very identity, rests on the First Amendment and free expression. The Goldstein saga speaks to me as a warning shouted through time, a tragic harbinger from America's past about the damage done to individuals and to the nation when the White House perverts justice to silence its critics and punish those who don't fall into line. We'll never know what art was not made, what opinions not voiced, because of Goldstein's high-profile prosecution. There is another reason I have chased Robert Goldstein. He disappeared in the 1930s, vanishing from history as if plucked from the face of the earth. For years, history sleuths thought he probably died in the Holocaust, an American Jew who, after his legal troubles ended, sought refuge in Berlin. Advertisement I needed to know for certain what happened to Goldstein, this unwitting martyr for the cause of free speech, unjustly prosecuted for making art. Returning him to the historical record was the only bit of redress I could offer. So I became, in a word, obsessed. I began to accumulate a file, which eventually grew to hundreds of pages in length, filled with court records, declassified FBI files, old newspapers, census records, and materials from microfilm archives. I followed others who had pulled these threads before me; compelling new evidence continued to emerge, as paperwork long lost in the files of bureaucracy was digitized and made searchable. For years, the file grew. Then, in June, I received the clue that changed everything. G oldstein's early life emerges readily from records and his own writings. The Goldsteins of San Francisco were an immigrant success story. Robert Goldstein's father, Simon, came from Germany as part of the wave of European Jews who resettled in the United States in the latter half of the 19th century. Goldstein's mother, Margaret, from Lowell, was the American-born daughter of Irish immigrants. She gave birth to Robert in San Francisco in 1883. Simon was a serial entrepreneur best known for his theatrical costume shop. When producers of plays or films needed to dress a brood of pirates or some Roman centurions, they called Goldstein. The business allowed him to befriend many of the biggest stars of his time, including Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, and director D.W. Griffith, whose 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, became the first ever blockbuster movie and inspired the terror group's rebirth. Advertisement Being around famous actors, Goldstein developed an insatiable appetite for performance. From his earliest memories, according to a letter he wrote, he spent several nights a week in San Francisco theaters with his mother, seeing all the new plays. He would later spend a year in Europe as a theater apprentice, painting scenery and making costumes. As a young man, Goldstein wrote plays nobody read and musical compositions nobody played. Those things did not satisfy his creative itch, nor his ambitions. When he was 25, he discovered moving pictures. In these first primitive silent flicks Goldstein saw, actors performed the story while a mechanical organ played the William Tell Overture. Film moved him like no stage play ever had. 'There was dramatic suspense,' Goldstein wrote later in a letter, 'a charming mystery about this miracle which the stage or printed page lacked.' He saw every new movie that came out. In 1911, a patriotic film, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, thrilled him 'to the roots of his hair,' he wrote. Throughout the audience, tears streamed down faces. Goldstein was astonished that fleeting images on a screen could raise so much emotion. His life's wish was set: to make a movie. T he brief glimpses of a young Goldstein that appear in the public record paint him as an eccentric and vulnerable personality — soft-spoken, averse to confrontation, and easily steamrolled. Goldstein married in 1908, when he was 24. His 20-year-old bride, Adele, went by Della. In the coming years of their tempestuous union, Della pursued divorce, only to change her mind. They never had children. She left Goldstein often, apparently for affairs with other men. Advertisement Adultery was still scandalous enough in 1912 that the Goldsteins' marriage problems were splashed across the front page of The San Francisco Call. Under the headline 'MATES ARE MISSED,' the wife of a prominent architect publicly accused her husband of running off with Della Goldstein. In the story, Robert confirmed that his wife had vanished with a cart full of their household effects, leaving him with nothing 'but an aching heart.' They reconciled, but that was not the end of it. Four years later, Goldstein took out a humiliating classified ad in The Los Angeles Evening Express: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: YOU will please take notice that my wife, Adele J. Goldstein, having abandoned me and having left my bed and board, I will not be responsible for any debts or obligations incurred by her or any articles or property furnished to her. ROBERT H. GOLDSTEIN. A 1917 advertisement for The Spirit of '76. wikimedia commons Once again, the marriage survived. By then, they had moved to Los Angeles, where Goldstein ran a thriving branch of the family costume business. He had provided costumes for Birth of a Nation, and the stock shares Goldstein owned in the movie paid a substantial profit. Birth earned an estimated $10 million in its first run, an astonishing amount at the time. Its total earnings are far higher, though opinions differ on how high. Birth' s original title was The Clansman, like the 1905 novel by white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr. on which the movie was based. In the film, robed Klansmen on horseback are portrayed as heroically defending the South from rampaging Black men after the Civil War. Regarded today as perhaps Hollywood's most racist production ever, the film sparked nationwide protests in its time, including in Boston, where Advertisement There is no evidence that Goldstein was morally conflicted by his connection to Birth. While his writing is not racially disparaging, there are also no passages expressing regret or concern. By all appearances, he considered his involvement with the film to be a smart investment. A few months after Birth debuted, Goldstein struck a partnership in a movie venture with a former newspaper publisher, George Hutchin, and several others. Given the massive profit the director, D.W. Griffith, had made with Birth, a Civil War-era picture, Goldstein suggested they make a movie about the real birth of the nation, the American Revolution. It would be a flag-waving appeal to patriotism, with what was then an enormous budget of $250,000, the equivalent of nearly $7 million today. Goldstein hired professional actors, including Howard Gaye, who played Robert E. Lee in Birth, and Jane Novak, whose movie career would extend into the 1950s. Like roughly 90 percent of movies from its era, The Spirit of '76 is considered a lost film — no known copies exist. Goldstein wrote the script, a synopsis of which survives. He also summarized the story in a letter written a decade later. The film, shot mostly in and around Los Angeles, weaved events of the American Revolution with a convoluted love story. The short version of the plot — stay with me here — is that the secret, half-Native American wife of British King George III is exiled to the colonies with a plan to take over the Iroquois tribes, put down the Colonial rebellion, and become queen of America, while in the meantime she falls in love with a man who she doesn't realize is her own brother. Goldstein learned much from Birth of a Nation, which pioneered new techniques of cinematography. He also concluded that the controversy around the film had been good for its bottom line. Goldstein could not always make the film's payroll, despite backfilling cash shortfalls from his own pocket. Creditors sued. Goldstein's associates tried to fire him. Still, the production was lavish: For one scene, Goldstein needed snow to film George Washington at Valley Forge — snow in California. Every morning during the winter of 1916-17, a film assistant called a lodge on Mount Lowe — a 5,606-foot peak in the San Gabriel Mountains — to ask if there was snow. A thousand extras who would play Washington's army stayed ready to rush to the mountains within hours. When snow finally fell, a convoy of trucks and train cars whisked the men to the mountain to film the scene before it melted. For another scene, he researched a minor but brutal event of the revolution. In 1778, British loyalists and their Iroquois allies attacked the village of Cherry Valley in central New York, slaughtering about 30 civilians. Goldstein filmed scenes of fictionalized atrocities based on the raid. Others involved in the film cautioned Goldstein that the violent scenes went too far. Nonsense, Goldstein thought. The atrocities, he said, would give the movie 'punch.' W orld War I had split the major powers in Europe: Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. When the war began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson had declared that the United States would remain neutral. In early 1917, as Goldstein tackled his final edits, world-changing events cascaded one upon another. Germany announced on January 31 that it would unleash 'unrestricted submarine warfare' on shipping to prevent supplies from landing in Britain. That put US ships and passengers in jeopardy. President Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany. Then on March 1, 1917, the infamous Zimmermann Telegram became public. The secret diplomatic cable, decoded by the British, revealed that Germany was trying to provoke hostilities between the United States and Mexico. Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, bringing the United States into the conflict. Goldstein's movie about the nation's founding was about to debut in a very different America. G oldstein chose Chicago's Orchestra Hall to debut The Spirit of '76 in May 1917, with a 40-piece live orchestra. An advertising campaign hyped 'The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Produced,' and boasted of a $500,000 production budget, exaggerating the cost by double. The planned premiere quickly snagged. Chicago police Major Metellus Funkhouser, the city's 'censor of public morals,' refused to issue a permit to show Spirit. In his judgment, some of the scenes would be offensive to the British, who were America's ally in WWI. Funkhouser considered it his duty to block anything that might undermine American support for the war. The atrocity scenes from the Cherry Valley massacre were too much for Funkhouser. These included the bayoneting of a baby, the murder of an unarmed Quaker, and the suggestive carrying off of a young woman by a soldier. There's no evidence those exact things happened at Cherry Valley, though what did happen was no better: Women and children were hacked to death or had their skulls caved in. A battle scene filmed by Goldstein for "The Spirit of '76." rom Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences After a lawsuit and two weeks of wrangling, Goldstein relented. He made substantial cuts in the movie — almost certainly the most violent scenes — and received his permit. When Spirit finally opened, The Chicago Tribune published a warm review. The audience responded with 'frantic applause' to Paul Revere's ride, the Battle of Lexington, and Valley Forge. Cuts made to the film, the Tribune reported, had rendered the production 'highly innocuous.' By the fall, Goldstein was in California to relaunch the movie at a prestigious location, Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles, where Birth of a Nation had been shown to huge crowds in 1915. Officers of the US attorney's office demanded a preview showing, to check for violations of the Espionage Act. The federal law, which had passed months earlier in June, made it illegal to even 'attempt to cause' insubordination or disloyalty in the US military. The Wilson administration stretched the law to police criticism of its war efforts. Goldstein reluctantly screened the film for the officials. Whether the version they previewed contained the atrocity scenes would soon be in dispute. The feds, it turned out, had been interested in Goldstein for months: In May 1917, a British diplomat in Chicago had passed along some intelligence to the US Bureau of Investigation, what is now called the FBI. The intel included that Goldstein was 'a German Jew' who was 'rabidly pro-German.' Antisemitism in the United States was at a peak in the early 20th century; Jews in Goldstein's time were routinely caricatured as conniving and openly blackballed from many elite social clubs, company boards, and schools. The diplomat also alleged, wrongly, that The Spirit of '76 had been financed by German interests, and speculated that the whole film project may have been a propaganda vehicle of the German Empire. This information went to the highest levels of government, by secret memo to the chief of the Bureau of Investigation. For Spirit' s public California premiere on November 27, a Tuesday, the theater was decked out with huge replicas of early American flags. Ushers were dressed in Colonial costumes. The movie was scheduled for two shows daily. The audience for Spirit' s California debut was about 1,500. Clune's Auditorium could seat nearly twice that, but Goldstein was pleased with the interest. The reviews published the next day were generally good. Tickets sold well. On Thursday, which was Thanksgiving, Goldstein eavesdropped among the matinee crowd after the showing and heard nothing but praise for his film. The evening show that night, Goldstein learned from the box office, was a sellout. Robert Goldstein on the set in King George's court during filming. from Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Delighted, he walked to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner convinced that Spirit was a hit, and he was destined for a career making movies. At last! At last! Success! he thought, as he wrote in a letter 10 years later. He returned to the theater 15 minutes before the evening showing was to start. The place was dark. The audience was still outside. Federal agents were in the theater with a warrant, impounding all 12 reels of The Spirit of '76 under the Espionage Act. A federal grand jury indicted Goldstein five days later. He was charged with attempting 'to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty' in the military with his movie. How? By arousing antagonism between Americans and Brits. The government's entire case came to this: Goldstein made the British look like bad guys in a movie about the American Revolution. To win a conviction, prosecutors did not have to prove the movie actually caused insubordination or disloyalty, only that it was Goldstein's intention. It was not just a speech crime, but a thought crime. Goldstein's case was unique because he was charged for making a film, but across the nation the Wilson administration wielded the Espionage Act like a club, smashing criticism and dissent. In the following months, the pacifist socialist and labor leader Eugene Debs would be charged for making an antiwar speech in an Ohio park. Ultimately, the US government prosecuted more than 2,000 people for speech during the war. Fear radiated from these criminal cases, permeating the country. The government encouraged people to report their neighbors for making disloyal comments. The Department of Justice threatened to revoke the citizenship of naturalized Americans who engaged in 'seditious speech.' German language books were burned. Playing music by German composers was discouraged or prohibited. South Dakota banned the speaking of German in public. The uncounted victims of the administration's crusade against its critics were those whose speech was chilled — those who got the message that it was safer to shut up than speak out. In Goldstein's case, the government accused him of adding several scenes depicting British war atrocities after members of law enforcement had previewed the film. Goldstein was mystified. He would give conflicting accounts of whether the scenes were added before or after the screening, but, either way, Goldstein considered the scenes merely atmospheric. 'They gave only a fleeting impression, to increase the suspense and excitement of this part of the picture,' he later wrote. 'Every picture has hundreds of such scenes in battle sequences.' A photo from The Los Angeles Times on June 21, 1918, showing Goldstein leaving county jail on his way to federal prison. From the Los Angeles Times He spent the night in county lockup, with his chest so tight from nerves he thought he might suffocate. The government conducted its prosecution of Goldstein backward: First it indicted him, then it sent out investigators to find evidence to make the charges stick. The FBI interviewed dozens of people in and around the film, according to declassified files. They found nothing criminal, but plenty that could hurt Goldstein in an emotional jury trial. A former stock salesman for the movie revealed that Goldstein had remarked that the British barbarity scenes would be good for ticket sales. Investigators were told that Goldstein's company had placed an ad for stock in the film in a German-language magazine. And the FBI learned that Goldstein had opposed the US entry into the war and had written to his congressman urging him to vote against it. Goldstein went to trial in Los Angeles in April 1918, before Judge Benjamin Franklin Bledsoe, a passionate supporter of the war. Throughout the trial, the press hammered Goldstein with innuendo. The Los Angeles Times published on its front page a photo of a storage shed Goldstein had used in his production. A canvas sign on the shed had once read 'SPIRIT of 76,' but after damage from 'a curious freak of the wind,' the sign read 'SPI 76,' playing into the antisemitic trope of the disloyal Jew. Goldstein was so humiliated by the suggestion he was a German spy that he could barely face his fellow prisoners in lockup. Blockbuster testimony came from Goldstein's old business partner Hutchin, who said Goldstein told him early in their efforts that Franz Bopp, a disgraced former German diplomat in San Francisco, would help finance the movie. There was no evidence Bopp actually invested in Spirit. Prosecutors called Goldstein's father to the stand, asking him biographical questions about his son. It appears they merely wanted the jury to hear Simon Goldstein's strong German accent. Goldstein's lawyers entered passages from history books into the record, arguing that the basic thrust of the movie was true. A courtroom was turned into a cinema so the jury could see the picture. Goldstein's defense bitterly argued that the session be moved to a real theater so the film could be seen as intended, with an orchestra. 'There is not the proper spirit or atmosphere,' one of the lawyers complained. A clip from the front page of The Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1918, mocking Goldstein during his trial. From the Los Angeles Times Judge Bledsoe overruled the objection (he also brought his wife to court to see the movie). Testifying in his own defense, in a hurried whisper, Goldstein said no customer in LA ever complained about the scenes the government considered unpatriotic. The prosecutor was unsparing in his arguments. He called Goldstein a 'beast' and 'a vile thing.' He reminded the jury that while Jesus Christ was a Jew like Goldstein, so was Judas. G oldstein waited 'in a fever' while jurors decided his fate. They deliberated for one hour in the afternoon, broke for dinner until 8 p.m., and then returned their verdict at 8:30. Guilty. Goldstein choked up as if he could not breathe. He sobbed uncontrollably. Two weeks later the moviemaker stood again before Bledsoe, for his sentencing. Goldstein 'shook like an aspen,' one reporter noted. 'The defendant is lucky,' Bledsoe said, 'that he is not in some countries where such conduct as he has been guilty of would have met with the supreme penalty.' He sentenced Goldstein to 10 years in prison. Goldstein got his first view of McNeil Island from the motorboat transporting him to the federal penitentiary in Puget Sound, Washington, where he would serve his sentence. It was 'desolate and depressing,' he later wrote. He had to learn how to use a shovel on work details. Lift with the legs, not the arms. 'Some natures can stand the bleak monotony of prison life,' he wrote, 'others waste like the sparrow in a cage.' Goldstein was a sparrow. While Goldstein was incarcerated, lawsuits from his creditors piled up. His wife finally divorced him. A Pasadena man named Jesse Goldstein made headlines when he filed in court to change his name, so people would stop asking if he was related to the seditious filmmaker. Others convicted under the Espionage Act received similarly severe sentences. S even months into Goldstein's sentence, in November 1918, Americans poured into the streets to celebrate victory in the Great War. The celebration was short-lived, though: The US economy was in a recession, and the public mood quickly soured. In February 1919, a friendly newspaper editor suggested to President Wilson that the nation would be uplifted if the president offered amnesty 'for all those persons who have been convicted for expressions of opinion.' Wilson wouldn't go that far, but he shortened many of the long sentences imposed for speech. Goldstein's term was commuted to three years. He earned seven days off his sentence each month for good behavior, and was discharged from custody in October 1920. Prison seemed to have broken something in Goldstein. Not only had he lost 40 pounds, his writings of the time reveal deep paranoia. Everyone was secretly against him: his own lawyers, his family, even his dentist. He was convinced that strangers everywhere were laughing at him, plotting, and trying to drive him mad. 'He must escape them somehow,' Goldstein wrote about himself. 'But if they followed him everywhere he went, how was this possible?' In the years after the war, a sort of national reckoning over the speech prosecutions played out, beginning at the Supreme Court. Boston-born Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, after voting in 1919 to uphold Debs's conviction, seemed to change his mind later that year. Writing in dissent in another case, Holmes laid out the concept of the public square as the marketplace of ideas, which shaped future speech rulings. The next year, free speech advocates formed the American Civil Liberties Union. And, the Supreme Court affirmatively extended First Amendment protections to films in 1952. G oldstein was just 37 when released, yet his film career was effectively over. He recut The Spirit of '76 and showed it for three weeks in New York in 1921. The press savaged the picture with bad reviews. He moved to Europe, chasing job opportunities in film that did not pan out, and eventually settled in Berlin with his aunt. In 1927, he became engaged to a 25-year-old woman named Erna Prange. She had dark eyes and light, wavy hair, cut fashionably short. Goldstein, then 43, was tortured by fantasies that his neighbors were conspiring to corrupt Erna, trying to seduce her and get her addicted to cocaine. 'I began to watch her,' he was quoted as saying in a 1928 celebrity news story about the end of their relationship, 'But she always eluded me and those in the plot helped her.' Goldstein believed the plotters were whisking his fiancée through underground tunnels for her to perform in secret strip clubs. His neighbors went to these lengths, according to Goldstein's tangled thinking, to punish him for being imprisoned over a movie. Twice, Goldstein failed to show up on the date of his own wedding. On the third try, he made it to the ceremony, but when the minister asked, 'Will thou take this woman?' Goldstein shouted: 'No!' The spurned bride nearly fainted in embarrassment. The relationship ended. Erna came to believe that Goldstein suffered from 'persecution mania,' she was quoted as saying, 'possibly as a result of his prison experiences in America.' The American movie star Mary Nolan, who made films in Germany in the 1920s, befriended Goldstein in Berlin. She told reporters that her friend Robert Goldstein had tragically begun to confuse movie plots with his real life. A nd then Goldstein disappeared. He was soon forgotten, even by those closest to him; when Goldstein's only sibling, Louis, died in 1950, his obituary made no mention of Robert. In 1991, 'I feel sorry for him because it's sad,' Slide, now 80, recently told me. 'It's something the American government caused, not only his professional downfall but his mental and emotional downfall.' When Slide wrote his book, there was no known record of Goldstein after a letter he sent from Berlin in 1935, two years after Hitler rose to power. Slide surmised that Goldstein was killed by the Nazis. Subsequent to the publication of Slide's book, another letter from Goldstein to the academy turned up, dated 1938, sent not from Berlin but New York City. The letter is in the academy's collections at the Margaret Herrick Library, in Beverly Hills. Keith Negley for the Boston Globe In this note, Goldstein suggests that Germany deported him in 1935. A ship manifest from that era confirmed that he had sailed from Hamburg to New York that August. His letter begged the academy for a job. 'It may be merely superstition on my part but perhaps the whole [industry] might have more luck if they did something decent by me,' he wrote, 20 years after his conviction. Goldstein applied for Social Security benefits in New York in 1940, digitized records show. From there his path grew hazy. The 1950 US Census, made public in 2022, lists someone named Robert Goldstein as a resident of Willard State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in New York. The name is not that unusual and the records were not conclusive — though they were interesting. Online records of The Hebrew Free Burial Association, a New York charity that arranges respectful funerals for impoverished Jews, were equally interesting. The organization recorded the burial of a Robert Goldstein in 1957. This man died at age 74 as a patient at Harlem Valley State Hospital, a former psychiatric facility on a campus of gloomy redbrick buildings in Dover, New York, where lobotomies were performed. The facility closed in 1994. The Hebrew Free Burial Association is still around. I wrote to them in June. T he document from the Burial Association appeared in my inbox less than two hours later. It was a one-page burial application, dated November 1957. Name of deceased: Robert Goldstein. Occupation: Theatrical costumes. That was when I knew. After years of searching, this was the right man. I jumped screaming from my chair, and then had to explain myself to co-workers in the Globe newsroom. The document also correctly named Goldstein's parents as Simon and Margaret. The proof is irrefutable. This dogged maker of a lavish movie spectacle about America, who profited from bigotry and was wrecked by antisemitism, died in ruin, madness, and quiet anonymity in a mental institution, after his government put him in prison for speech it did not like. Robert Goldstein, filmmaker, is buried in Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, beneath a donated stone. Mark Arsenault is the author of and an investigative reporter at The Boston Globe. Send comments to Mark Arsenault can be reached at
New York Times
5 days ago
- New York Times
The ‘Hamilton' Effect: 10 Revolutionary Years on Broadway
The American Revolution lasted seven years. 'Hamilton,' the groundbreaking musical about one of its unsung heroes, has now outlasted it. It has also spawned a revolution of its own. Little on Broadway looks the way it did on Aug. 6, 2015, when 'Hamilton' opened; that's what happens when a show runs 10 years, sells more than four million tickets and earns more than $1 billion — not counting tours, international productions and the 2020 movie. And though some predictions about 'the 'Hamilton' effect' have not panned out, the ones that did have dramatically altered musical theater, affecting casting, content, marketing, pricing, outreach and even stardom. Here are nine ways of looking at the changes that Lin-Manuel Miranda and his colleagues wrought; please share your own insights in the comments section. After all, as 'Hamilton' says, 'History has its eyes on you' — and now vice versa. Race-Conscious Casting To study the portraits of our founding fathers and their known associates is to face an unceasing parade of white men. 'Hamilton' had other ideas. Burnishing the bona fides of the musical as a hip-hop narrative and making a place in the show (and in American history) for the likes of Miranda and friends and collaborators such as Daveed Diggs and Christopher Jackson, the production cast actors of color in the roles of America's forebears and some of the women who loved them. This casting underlines the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants (even though the lead actors were not themselves immigrants) and questions the inclusivity and exclusivity of what these white men accomplished. 'Hamilton' is certainly not the first show to employ race-conscious casting (a 'photo-negative' 'Othello,' starring Patrick Stewart, is an early example), but this move has proved unusually influential, even as its playful, trenchant achievement has rarely been equaled. — Alexis Soloski New Music Much as 'Hair' supposedly did with rock music of the 1960s, 'Hamilton' did with the sounds of the new century. Or so critics said, predicting that hip-hop would soon merge into mainstream musical theater. It didn't: We had misunderstood what Miranda was up to. His songs for 'Hamilton' (as for 'In the Heights,' which preceded it) certainly include hip-hop beats and rap-style lyrics, along with hat tips to stars like Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G., but they aren't pop any more than 'Hair' was. They are fully theater songs, filtered through an imagination that had long since absorbed Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim, Kander and Ebb. The lyrics do pretty much what they do in 'Fiddler on the Roof': insistently point the ear to key content. You hear it even in the title character's first utterance, linking the name 'Alexander Hamilton' to the phrase 'a million things I haven't done' — a wonky rhyme by traditional standards but a dead-perfect rhythmic echo that bonds the man to his ambition. (Say it out loud.) 'Hamilton' may have brought new tools to the craft, and succeeded where other efforts, like the Tupac musical 'Holler if Ya Hear Me,' failed, but it didn't start a trend. It's too wrapped up in the old one for that, and too singular to be copied. — Jesse Green That'll Be $849, Please. It's hard to remember just how unhinged the lust for 'Hamilton' tickets grew when the musical was at the height of its cultural cachet. For Miranda's final Broadway performance, in July 2016, scalpers were asking an average of $10,900 for a single seat. The public's willingness to pay serious money to be in the room where the show happened, especially with the original Broadway cast, was supply and demand in action — and the producers wearied of seeing secondary sellers rake in tens of millions of dollars on the back of the show's success. Nearly a year into the run, hoping to edge scalpers out and keep more of the profits, 'Hamilton' jacked its top ticket price way up, from $475 to a record-setting $849, which seemed to be the sweet spot for scalpers. Smartly, the show paired that change with a promise of a lottery offering 46 tickets at $10 apiece for each performance. But one production breaking a pricing taboo invites others to follow. Bruce Springsteen charged $875 for his Broadway show in 2017, and the Bette Midler revival of 'Hello, Dolly!' that year went even bigger, at $998 — the price 'Hamilton' had charged over the 2016 holidays. So, last season's kerfuffle about $921 tickets for 'Othello,' and $799 seats for 'Good Night, and Good Luck'? 'Hamilton' got there first, and got away with it. — Laura Collins-Hughes Pop Culture Juggernaut Even if you'd never seen a musical, 'Hamilton' was impossible to ignore, from Broadway to the middle of the country and beyond. Celebrities turned out in droves to see the show, including the Obamas, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Oprah, Emma Watson, Alicia Keys and Lena Dunham. The cast members became stars in their own right: Miranda hosted 'Saturday Night Live' in 2016, and he and others went on to have success on TV and in film and music. 'Weird Al' Yankovic released a polka medley of several songs from the show, 'The Hamilton Polka.' 'The Hamilton Mixtape' featured a who's who of hip-hop and R&B stars — Common, Wiz Khalifa, Nas, Alicia Keys and more — performing songs from the musical. Riffs on the show popped up on popular television series, like 'The Simpsons,' 'Succession,' 'And Just Like That … ' and 'Ted Lasso.' On 'Modern Family,' a parodic version of 'Alexander Hamilton' was recorded as part of a character's college application ('How does an artsy, well-read, child of divorce … '). For the first time in years, a musical's popularity transcended not only New York City, but the theater world. — Sarah Bahr Ham4Ham for the People Tickets were expensive from the start, spurring hundreds of fans to line up outside the Richard Rodgers Theater each day to enter a live lottery for $10 seats. To keep the hopefuls from going stir crazy while waiting, and to thank them for their support, Miranda started Ham4Ham, an informal entertainment that turned him into a kind of showman for the people, a 46th Street Ed Sullivan. But from the first installment — on July 15, 2015, two days after previews began — Ham4Ham was not much about Miranda himself; he was more a host than a star, sharing what he called the theater's front stoop with 'Hamilton' cast members, performers from other shows and even the Classical Theater of Harlem singing Christmas carols in the cold. Sometimes using taped elements, and going fully virtual during the pandemic, Ham4Ham has been produced intermittently ever since, most recently on May 30, when two Norma Desmonds blew the street down with nothing but moxie and a bullhorn. What has made the series so joyful, and also a brilliant marketing tactic, is just that combo of maximal showbiz and minimal means. It's a reminder that Broadway is not just a business but a neighborhood, and sometimes even a street party. — Jesse Green A Political Legacy One of the earliest public glimpses of 'Hamilton' came several months after Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, when Miranda delivered the first track off his Alexander Hamilton concept album at a White House poetry night. He returned to the White House in 2016 with a full cast for a performance that included 'One Last Time' — in which George Washington, played then by Christopher Jackson, prepares to step aside — as Obama, in the last year of his presidency, nodded along. Miranda wasn't looking to write a partisan show, he told The New York Times in 2015; the musical attracted public officials from across the political spectrum, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. But even with a 250-year-old plot, the show and its themes opened a door for more contemporary debates: Mike Pence's attendance when he was vice president-elect prompted an onstage plea from the cast 'to work on behalf of all of us.' (President-elect Donald J. Trump tweeted the next morning that Pence had been 'harassed.') And as the Broadway run stretches into a second Trump term, the show has canceled plans to perform next year at the Kennedy Center in Washington following the president's sweeping changes at the institution. But 10 years in, even when the partisan tangles extend offstage, the underlying political legacy of 'Hamilton' remains one not of opposition, but of energetic optimism: a symbol for the Obama years as 'Camelot' was for the Kennedys. — Nancy Coleman A New Era for Live Capture A live capture of 'Hamilton' premiered on Disney+ in July 2020. Four years later, the musical's Broadway and London productions are still going strong, and it has tours in North America and Britain. First, 'Hamilton' put an end to the idea that Broadway was allergic to hip-hop; then it killed the long-held belief that making a show available for streaming would kill its live prospects. Not only that, but 'Hamilton' also firmly established that a live capture would make people want to see the stage version more, not less. Of course, it helped that its producers had the funds for a high-quality capture, and that they filmed most of the original 'Hamilton' cast at the show's Broadway home, the Richard Rodgers Theater, in June 2016. Still, releasing a live film has worked for other productions since, most notably 'Come From Away,' 'Heathers: The Musical' and 'Frozen: The Musical.' Any exposure is good exposure nowadays, and fans seduced by streaming can morph into ticket-buying customers. The marketing wheel never stops turning. — Elisabeth Vincentelli An Ongoing Influx of Talent You change a field by changing what possibility looks like. Of all the ways that 'Hamilton' has altered the theater, probably the most radical is in its elevation of a critical mass of brilliant young actors of color — and not only in the original Broadway cast. That fact landed with me viscerally when I saw Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the 2018 Broadway revival of 'My Fair Lady,' and read in the program that he'd played Lafayette and Jefferson — the Daveed Diggs roles — on tour. Well, no wonder he was fantastic. I also think of the British actor Jamael Westman, who was 25 when he played Hamilton in the original London cast. He told me, in an interview then, about 'the bite back' that he and some friends encountered in drama school when they decided to put on an all-Black play, having seen so many all-white ones. Had 'Hamilton' not become a monster hit, it would still have been one of the relatively rare musicals with multiple capacious and challenging roles for performers of color, mostly men. But its prospering has made it a vehicle for an ongoing influx of talent. It has seeded the field with a wealth of artistry. If the theater has any sense, we will see the flowering of that for decades to come. — Laura Collins-Hughes Miranda's Post-'Hamilton' Career You might have expected that the man once credited with 'changing the language of musicals' would have continued to imprint the musical-theater canon. But his lone Broadway songwriting credit in the past 10 years is additional lyrics for the stage adaptation of 'New York, New York.' If one thing dominates Miranda's post-'Hamilton' career, it's his enduring, multipronged relationship with Disney, a company hardly known for poking the artistic bear. Over the past decade, his Disney contributions include voice work on 'DuckTales,' writing songs for the animated features 'Moana' and 'Encanto,' the latter of which spawned the chart-topping 'We Don't Talk About Bruno' and the Academy Award-nominated 'Dos Oruguitas,' proving that he has not lost his hit-making touch. If anything, this confirms that Miranda has always been, in formal and aesthetic terms, more conservative than firebrand. But no matter how far he's wandered, he is particularly inspired by New York City, which is why it was encouraging to see him back on home turf last year, when he and Eisa Davis released the concept album 'Warriors,' which gender-switched the film 'The Warriors,' from 1979. A stage version would be intriguing: After all, flipping roles has worked for Miranda before. — Elisabeth Vincentelli
