1. For more on the tramp clown of vaudeville and burlesque see Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (1940; repr., New York: Dover), 269–92. For more on the stage drunk see Frick, John W., Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 186–98Google Scholar.

2. Westgate, J. Chris, Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage: Class, Poverty, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in American Theatre, 1890–1916 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haenni, Sabine, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008)Google Scholar; DesRochers, Rick, The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Haenni, 5.

4. DesRochers, xvi.

5. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1993); Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Katie Johnson's Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).

6. I must thank Laurence Senelick and his entry in The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (see note 64) for alerting me to McCree's existence in the first place.

7. “Cocaine, the Curse of Chicago, Claiming Victims by Tens of Thousands,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 February 1906.

8. Etiologies of addiction changed throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; now in its fifth edition) offers a range of eleven criteria to diagnose “substance use disorder.” Terms such as “addiction,” “abuse,” and “dependence” are difficult to parse, but for the purposes of this article, “addiction” is used to describe a pattern of drug use that leads to significant clinical impairment over an extended period.

9. For a more in-depth examination of the history of addiction as it affected women, see Stephen R. Kandall, Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

10. Charles E. Terry and Mildred Pellens, The Opium Problem (New York: Bureau of Social Hygiene, 1928), 808.

11. General reportage of more white smokers in dens corresponded with reports that the importation of smokable opium had reached a high mark at 1.2 million pounds between 1900 and 1909 (up more than 290,000 pounds from the prior decade). Hamilton Wright et al., “Report from the United States of America,” Report of the International Opium Commission, Shanghai, China, February 1 to February 26, 1909, vol. 2: Reports of the Delegations (Shanghai: North-China Daily News & Herald, 1909). 2:1–42, at 40.

12. Herman Scheffaner, “The Old Chinese Quarter,” Macmillan's Magazine no. 21, n.s. (July 1907): 698–709, at 703.

13. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890; repr. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914), 95–6.

14. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age [1982], 25th anniv. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007); Timothy Hickman, “Double Meaning of Addiction: Habitual Narcotic Use and the Logic of Professionalizing Medical Authority in the United States, 1900–1920,” in Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800–2000, ed. Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Jean Acker (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004): 182–202.

15. Hickman, 184.

16. Edward Marshall, “Uncle Sam Is the Worst Drug Fiend in the World,” New York Times, 12 March 1911.

17. Terry M. Parssinen and Karen Kerner, “Development of the Disease Model of Drug Addiction in Britain, 1870–1926,” Medical History 24 (1980): 275–96, at 278–9.

18. Meredith Conti, “Ungentlemanly Habits: The Dramaturgy of Drug Addiction in Fin-de-Siècle Theatrical Adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes Stories and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” in Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture, ed. Louise Penner and Tabitha Sparks (London: Routledge, 2015), 109–24, at 115.

19. Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 34.

20. Craig Reinarman, “The Social Construction of Drug Scares,” in Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction, ed. Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1994), 92–104, at 96.

21. McCree wrote for the following performers (among many others): Lydia Barry, Stella Mayhew, Byron-Merkel and Company, Armstrong and Milloy, Cohan and Harris Minstrels, Rich Lancaster, Sam and Kitty Morton, Taylor Granville, Laura Pierpont, Bernard and Scarth, Lew Ward, Harry Crandall, The Remple Sisters, Emma Carus, Frank Fogarty, Hallen and Fuller, Clara Morton, Leroy and Lytton, Joe Jenny, Girard and Gardner, Will H. Philbrick, Stuart Barnes, and Al H. Wilson. McCree served two terms as president of the White Rats, from 1913 to 1916.

22. McCree continued to write minstrel pieces long after he abandoned the dope fiend. “Keith Vaudeville,” Atlanta Constitution, 14 April 1916. For the history of Irish Americans in minstrelsy see Robert Nowatzki, “Paddy Jumps Jim Crow: Irish-Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy,” Éire-Ireland 41.3–4 (2006): 162–84.

23. M [ary L]. Kienholz, Opium Traders and Their Worlds: A Revisionist Exposé of the World's Greatest Opium Traders, 2 vols. (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2008), 1: 409.

24. Kane's writing is unambiguous in its preoccupation with white racial purity and the ways that drug addiction theoretically caused its degradation. Harry Hubbell Kane, Opium Smoking in America and China (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1882), 1.

25. Curt Gentry, The Madams of San Francisco: An Irreverent History of the City by the Golden Gate (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 169–70.

26. As the first censorship trial of the new century in the United States, Sapho has received substantial scholarly attention from Katie Johnson, Anne Callis, John Houchin, Randy Kapelle, and Joyce Reilly. McCree was not the only performer to capitalize on the attention Nethersole received. The vaudeville duo Weber & Fields had a spoof called “Sapolio: A Clean Travesty of ‘Sapho’” at the same time. Sapolio was a brand of soap.

27. Toledo Blade, 19 March 1907.

28. The German word “Katzenfell” means “catskin,” which as slang may refer to an inferior type of silk hat, and thus be a way to mock the suitor; on the other hand, it may mark him as rich enough to afford a real catskin coat.

29. Untitled clipping, 3 December 1910, n.p., Envelope 1391, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

30. Junie McCree, “A Dope Fiend” (typescript, Library of Congress, 1900), 6.

31. “Junie McCree's Funny Sketch,” New York Telegraph, 30 March 1906.

32. Toledo Blade, 19 March 1907.

33. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in American before 1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), 64.

34. Theodore Kremer's The Bowery after Dark and Joseph Jarrow's The Queen of Chinatown are both set in New York City, but they are the rare exceptions. The only opium-den dramas to show a white, male addict came after McCree: Billy Getthore's 1908 Slaves of the Opium Ring and Theodore Kremer's A Woman of Fire (1906) portray the unmanning of one of its male characters through addiction, a characterization that may have been influenced by McCree. For more on white slavery as a dramatic trope see Katie Johnson's Sisters in Sin.

35. Johnson, 116.

36. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2d ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 102–3 and 162–3.

37. Chambers's John-a-Dreams premiered in London with Herbert Beerbohm Tree as a poet who takes laudanum to write better. The play was produced in New York by Charles Frohman to mild success. Gillette's Holmes is addicted to cocaine injected through a syringe. For him, drugs are a way to enhance his already perceptive mind and to quell the boredom of the quotidian.

38. Conti, 112.

39. Westgate, 3.

40. The argument that outsiders formulate cultural norms is common in theatre studies and within a range of academic disciplines. For more see Erdman; Lott; and Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

41. Junie McCree, “The Man from Denver,” n.p., 10 March 1907, Envelope 1391, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

42. Junie McCree, “The Dope Fiend,” Variety 9.1 (14 December 1907): 23 and 81. These same stories and commentary, or versions of them, were reprinted in numerous periodicals. For instance, the Bill and Shorty story quoted in the text (at note 41) appears in this Variety, in different form, as transpiring between Big John and Harry (81).

43. E .P. Roe, Without a Home (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1881), 283.

44. Junie McCree, “Give Him Just Another Chance,” Variety 9.1 (14 December 1907): 31.

45. Théophile Gautier, “Le Club des hachichins,” Revue des deux mondes, February 1846. Published as “The Hashish Club,” trans. Ralph J. Gladstone, in The Marihuana Papers, ed. David Solomon (New York: Signet Books, 1968), 163–78, at 173.

46. Charles Baudelaire, “The Poem of Hashish” [“Le Poème du haschisch,” 1860], trans. Aleister Crowley, 1895, https://erowid.org/culture/characters/baudelaire_charles/baudelaire_charles_poem1.shtml, accessed 13 April 2018.

47. McCree, “A Dope Fiend,” 2.

48. John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 23.

49. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 172.

50. Susan Zieger, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (Boston: University of Massachusetts, 2008), 162.

51. Sedgwick, 172.

52. See Kasson's discussion of Sandow, 21–76.

53. Zieger, 173.

54. Ibid., 197.

55. Hughes, 46–85.

56. Zieger, 197.

57. New York Telegraph, 27 September1908; Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 November 1911.

58. “Theatrical News and Gossip,” Washington Post, 17 May 1908; “Empire Opens on Sunday with a Toledoan's Show,” Toledo News, 4 August 1917.

59. McCree, “The Dope Fiend,” 81.

60. Erdman, 102–4.

61. McCree, “A Dope Fiend,” 3.

62. Ibid., 4.

63. Ibid., 6.

64. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Slab,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/181189#eid22448450, accessed 6 July 2017.

65. Laurence Senelick, “McCree, Junie,” The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, updated paperback ed., ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Tice Miller (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 241–2.

66. Richard H. Paynter, “The Language of Drug Addicts,” American Speech 4.1 (1928): 19–21, at 20.

67. “Shakespeare First Used Slang, Says Junie M'Cree [sic],” n.p., 1907, Envelope 1391, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.

68. Ibid.

69. McCree, “The Dope Fiend,” 23.

70. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, 3d ed., ed. George Rogers Taylor (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1972), 17. Adding to the concern over the West was Turner's announcement that the frontier no longer existed. Not having a frontier to tame contributed to the concern over the characters who were now coming out of the West. For more on the formation of American manhood see Kasson; and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996).

71. “Shakespeare First Used Slang.”

72. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 46 and 4.

73. James A. Smith played Bill in a production at the Chutes Theatre in San Francisco. “Junie McCree in Slang Classic Is Top of Bill,” San Francisco Chronicle, 26 June 1910.

74. “Charles Nichols and Co.,” Variety 13.4 (2 January 1909), 12; “Century Girls,” Variety 9.3 (28 December 1907), 13; “Ashley and Lee,” Variety, 3 December 1910), 13; “Amusements,” Atlanta Constitution, 13 September 1916.

75. “Lew Kelly's Show at the Grand Theatre: Dope Fiend Impersonator Appears in Three Comic Burlettas,” Hartford Courant, 26 September 1920.

76. “Lew Kelly Welcomed Back to Singer Fold,” The Billboard, 26 January 1918; “Lew Kelly's Show at the Grand Theatre.”

77. These jokes by Kelly are recorded in “Lew Kelly's Show at Grand Theatre.” The description of his act is from “Schaffer Amazes by His Versatility,” Boston Daily Globe, 3 November 1914.

78. “Junie McCree Taken by Death,” The Billboard, 19 January 1918.

79. This skit is announced in “Behman Show,” Variety 32.12 (21 November 1913), 18. McCree quotes are from “The Dope Fiend,” 23 and 81.

80. For more on the Negro Vogue of the 1920s and 1930s see Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

81. Calloway became famous for his cycle of “Minnie the Moocher” songs that followed the life of the opium-smoking Minnie and her “cokey” boyfriend, Smokey.

82. See Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Provine, Doris Marie, Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar, quote at 137.

83. “Actor Taken to Bellevue,” n.p., 6 September 1903, Envelope 1391, Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library; Variety 49.8 (18 January 1918), 23.

84. Courtwright, 3.

85. Mason, Jeffrey D., Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 2Google Scholar.