Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of ...

to be a nine-part autobiographical saga.³⁰The public was thus conditioned into considering the playwright himself as his primary subject, rather than any larger cultural issues.

In 1932, years after Nathan initially championed O’Neill, he convinced the playwright to join him in a new journalistic venture, The American Spectator, naming him to its editorial board. The most significant writing O’Neill did for this publication was the well-known “Memorandum on Masks”; less well known, if it were it would be infamous, is the “Editorial Conference (with wine)” that O’Neill supposedly took part in. This joint editorial discussed, among other things, “the Jewish problem in America.” It is most unlikely that O’Neill was present at any such “conference” and one must recall Nathan routinely put his own words in O’Neill’s mouth. Be that as it may, this final attempt of Nathan’s at running a periodical was controversial from its inception. Two years into its run, the editors defended the magazine against accusations ranging from anti-Semitism to Communism, from Zionism to fascism.³¹Nathan’s defense is, to put it mildly, disingenuous. The accusations of anti-Semitism redounded for years afterward. The Spectator editor who suffered most was Theodore Dreiser, who was called out by his former friend and fellow radical Hutchins Hapgood, in letters to The American Spectator and later to The Nation. Dreiser somewhat awkwardly attempted to defend himself, but the accusation has lingered. Hapgood was also an old Provincetown associate of O’Neill’s who deeply influenced his early “philosophical” anarchism. Thus, even when Nathan attempts to link O’Neill to contemporary issues, he hobbles him.

When the periodical folded, the editors harkened to their 1932 mission statement: “the moment [we] feel that The American Spectator is becoming a routine job, is getting dull and is similarly continuing merely as a matter of habit, [we] will call it a