The Iowa Womens’ Vaudeville Act That America Loved to Hate

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press . . .

--The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Hugo Black, was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan and U.S. Senator from Alabama until he was named to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served for 40 percent of his life, from 1937 to 1971.

He became a strong advocate of the First Amendment and was fond of distilling its meaning to the simplest terms: “No law means no law,” (the emphasis was his) he would say whenever the opportunity arose.

There have been periodic attempts to impose limits on the First Amendment freedoms, but mostly these efforts have failed. Still, the First Amendment today is under the most intense attack of its 233-year lifetime.

Some of the previous attacks on the First Amendment have seemed as though they might tempt the courts to place restraints on the absolute freedom of speech/press. One of the most tempting such attacks arose in Iowa beginning in the early 1890s and set a standard that remains in force today.

Introducing the Cherry Sisters

Their names were Ella, Addie, Effie, Lizzie, and Jessie, and they were all Cherrys, which is to say that they all were the daughters of Thomas and Laura Cherry, who operated a small farm near Marion, Iowa.

Laura died at age 45, three years after the birth of her sixth surviving child, Jessie. Their father, Thomas, died in 1888. Not long after that, the only boy in the family, Nathan, in his early 20s, traveled to Chicago for work and never was heard from again.

The five Cherry Sisters struggled to make a living off their 20-acre farm.

Finally, in 1893, when the Sisters were ages 21 to 38, Effie, who was the closest among them to having a natural feel for musical and theatrical writing and performance — despite a limited talent in voice — decided to do something about it. If they could create and perform musical and threatrical sketches, maybe they could raise some money to try to find their missing brother.

Ella, the eldest sister and a less outgoing personality, worried that there might be some in the community, especially rowdy young men, who would make fun of them. Effie did not care about that. The effort went forward.

The Five Cherry Sisters debuted their musical-dramatic act at the Daniels Opera House in Marion on January 20, 1893. Addie, a skilled artist, painted a poster to promote the event. “Lovely costumes, Rare and Sweet Music, Laughter by the Yard,” the poster promised. They were warmly received by an audience comprised mostly of friends and neighbors. The Sisters went home that night with $200 in proceeds, the equivalent of $7,000 today. They must have been gloriously giddy with happiness.

A performing troupe with an act that would run for decades had been born. It would soon become known as the worst act in the history of musical theater.

The Five Cherry Sisters, 1893, from a painting by Addie Charry. The Cedar Rapids Gazette, March 15, 1893.

After two more concerts in Marion, they decided to move to the big stage – Greene’s Opera House in nearby Cedar Rapids, a venue that had drawn comparisons to opera houses in much larger cities, including Chicago.

On February 16, 1893, “The Five Cherry Sisters Opera Co.,” advertised in The Cedar Rapids Gazette that they would appear in “original sketches, songs and dances – a ceaseless stream of mirth and laughter” the next evening at the Opera House. “Funny prices for a Funny Show,” they advertised – 25 cents to 75 cents per person, the equivalent of about $9 to $27 in today’s money.

The performance was not as well received as their preceding performances in Marion, where they were among friends and neighbors, but overall, it was not a hostile audience. Still, some in the audience – perhaps the rowdy young men from Marion Ella had feared – were boisterous and active in making fun of the Sisters. The review the next day in The Cedar Rapids Gazette by City Editor Fred P. Davis was a barn blaster. A few sample lines:

• Their knowledge of the stage is worse than none at all, and they surely could not realize last night that they were making such fools of themselves.

• The costumes and the girls themselves were positively killing. They couldn’t sing, speak or act. They simply were awful.

• If some indefinable instinct of modesty could not have warned them that they were acting the part of monkeys, it does seem like the overshoes thrown at them would have conveyed the idea in a more substantial manner which perhaps is easier to be understood by people of that calibre.

The Sisters were outraged. They repaired immediately to The Gazette editorial rooms where they asked to see the author of the article about their performance. The Sisters were informed that the Gazette would publish any statement they wished to make in response to the review.

Writing, presumably in the voice of the newspaper – a clever twist for women who had little knowledge of how newspapers operated – the Sisters submitted a response that began, “The Cherry Sisters Concert that appeared in the Gazette the other evening was entirely a mistake and we take it back. The young ladies were refined and modest in every respect. And their entertainment was as good as any that has been given in the city by home people. . . “

Their response was printed exactly as submitted including a substantial number of errors — one for every seventh word. Newspapers, then and now, usually correct such errors in reader submissions before publication. The Gazette’s decision not to provide this service for the Cherry Sisters seems an obvious attempt to suggest to readers that this was not a serious retraction and to further embarrass the women. It also may have contributed to a decision by the Sisters a day or so later to file a libel lawsuit against the author of the demeaning review, City Editor Fred P. Davis.

The Gazette responded to the libel suit in print the following day: “Let the trial be held in the Opera House and a fee charged. It would make the richest entertainment of the season. The sisters could sing and dance, and Fred is no poor timber in that line himself. The jury could join in the chorus and . . . there would be no lack of fun.”

Greene’s Opera House, Cedar Rapids, from a program in the collection of the Library of Congress.

And that is exactly what happened in a sham trial that was arranged a couple of weeks later with the Sisters having agreed to the sham and no doubt having realized that it could be another opportunity from which to profit and build an audience for their act.

Five hundred patrons paid their way into the Opera House on the evening of the so-called trial. Many of them came equipped with whistles, horns, and the like. Judge I. N. Whittam presided. Davis entered a plea of not guilty. As the Sisters began their performance, the roar was deafening. “Every gesture brought out a howl and each movement provoked a scream,” The Gazette reported. Two arrests were made. The jury listened, observed, and presented their predetermined outcome.

Fred P. Davis was guilty of libel as charged.

Sort of. The jury’s finding:

“Davis shall, in the absence of the Cherry sisters from their farm, proceed at once to the said farm and diligently manage the same, especially see to it that the pigs are fed at the proper time, that the cows do not go past their milking without due attention, that the ducks are regularly driven to water, and that the chickens are penned for the night. . .

“When the said Cherry sisters shall return from their triumphal tour, the said Davis shall submit himself to the choice of the said sisters, beginning with the eldest, and the first one who will consent to such alliance, to that one shall then and there be joined in the holy bonds of matrimony.”

The trial farce aside, this would not be the last opportunity for the courts to limit freedom of speech or of the press in commentary stemming from an artistic/musical performance by the Cherry Sisters.

The Sisters would continue to perform in municipalities across eastern Iowa and beyond. And from here on out, the formula for such performances and for the responses both by the audiences and the local newspaper reviewers had been set. It would never vary through the hundreds of concerts over the next 30-plus years that eventually spread through much of the country.

While the Sisters were generally described as practicing performance entertainment at its worst, they attracted large audiences that came to listen and watch, but also to participate in and probably enjoy the unusual privilege of yelling, screaming, and sometimes throwing things or emptying fire extinguishers at the Sisters without fear of consequence.

Prior to one Dubuque concert, the theater virtually encouraged such behavior by distributing notices in the community suggesting that boorish behavior would be allowed. And the press likely was in on the gag – their role in this farce was for each reviewer to see if he could outdo some of the preceding horribly critical and even mean reviews. The New York Times, as we shall see, probably won the prize for the most evil and demeaning review of all.

The question may be reasonably asked whether a performance troupe of five brothers would ever have come to face such vile behavior by either an audience or a reviewer. But women on stage were considered fair game for the most extremely horrendous behavior by both the audience and the press during these years – roughly from the so-called Gay ‘90s through the Depression.

In fact, the Cherry Sisters may have had some creative talent in writing; most of their material was original and some of it appears to have been clever, even funny. Their voices, however, appear to have been lacking.

To wit: In May 1894, The Waterloo Courier commented on a new poem, “The Traveling Man,” with music attachment written by one of the sisters, probably Effie. “The talent of these young ladies runs out in many directions and they are as interesting a set of sisters as Iowa affords. The Burlington Journal, whose editor has been favored with a copy of the new composition, says that, all joking aside, the song is very cute and ought to make a hit. . .” Still the Burlington Journal editor could not resist taking a shot at the Sisters’ voices. Picking up from the immediately preceding commentary about the new song: Yes, it “ought to make a hit, and it will if Miss Effie Isabelle doesn’t sing it.”

Still, the performances continued in Iowa and beyond. In Dubuque, a wash boiler – an oval metal tub about two feet long used for boiling clothes – was hurled onto the stage during one performance. In La Porte City, near Waterloo, Jessie Cherry slapped a male audience member over the head with a six-inch-long wood slat after authorities ignored the Sisters’ repeated calls for the man to be ejected.

And yet, the Sisters continued to write and perform new songs, poetry, and dramatic sketches. It was a source of a moderate, albeit inconsistent, income during an era when farming was hard physical labor and subject to the vagaries of the weather – without benefit, yet, of crop insurance. Oldest sister Ella soon withdrew from the performing Sisters’ act to tend the farm full-time. The youngest, Jessie, would die following a lingering illness in 1903.

The three remaining Cherry Sisters would go down in history as the worst performers ever seen or heard. The show, however, would go on.

Steadily, their reputation spread. Newspapers as far away as Hong Kong told the Sisters’ story. Invitations to perform began to arrive from more distant cities. In 1896, an agent from New York City arrived in Marion, Iowa, to offer a six-week booking at the famed Olympia Music Hall. The Hall was built and operated by Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of Oscar Hammerstein II, who would become one of the all-time great Broadway lyricists with partner Richard Rodgers in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Olympia Music Hall, New York. Wikimedia Commons.

The senior Hammerstein was near bankruptcy when his agent booked the Cherry Sisters. “I’ve tried the best. Now, I’ll try the worst,” he is reported to have said. To help assure that it would work as well for him as it did for theater operators in Iowa, he passed out vegetables and fruit to the audience.

The crowds came and the money followed. And not incidentally, The New York Times performed to the expected standard with a scathing opening night review that took aim at the Sisters’ performance skills – while also crossing a thin line into territory of which most reviewers had been wary. The Times, however, was excessively mean to the Sisters on a personal level.

“FOUR FREAKS FROM IOWA,” the headline read.

The critique of their performance was pretty much what the sisters had seen in countless cities where they had performed by that time. Their performance skills were brutally criticized. But what made The Times commentary different is that it resorted to personal attacks based on the girls’ physical appearance:

• “It was a little after 10 o’clock when three lank figures and one short and thick walked awkwardly to the center of the stage. They were all dressed in shapeless red gowns, made by themselves almost surely, and the fat sister carried a bass drum.”

• “The plump sister piped a song about ‘Fair Columbia,’ and another about some flowers, appearing barefooted in the latter. The three sad, flat-chested sisters went through some dialogues which they imagined to be dramatic.”

The New York Tribune, meanwhile, not to be outdone, reported, “Miss Jessie narrowly escaped being pretty, but her sisters never were in any such danger.”

Then, back in Iowa in 1898, the Odebolt Chronicle published a review of the Cherry Sisters’ performance in that community in which it combined the kind of personal attacks leveled by New York newspapers with the usual criticism of performance that had appeared throughout Iowa and elsewhere. The commentary:

“Effie is an old jade of 50 summers*, Jessie a frisky filly of 40*, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically and [soon] waved frantically at the suffering audience. Their mouths opened like caverns, and sounds like the wailings of damned souls issued therefrom. They pranced about the stage with a motion that suggested a cross between the danse du ventre [belly dance] and a fox trot – strange creatures with painted faces and hideous [demeanor]. Effie is spavined,** Addie is knock-kneed and stringhalt,** and Jessie, the only one who showed her stocking, has legs with calves as classic in their outlines as the curves of a broom handle.”

* The author’s introductory sentence contains multiple errors in fact. Either the ages are off by as much as 15 years, or the names of the three sisters names were scrambled. Effie was 31, not “50 summers.” Jessie was about 26, not 40. One possibility is that the author got the wrong names with all three of the descriptions he wrote; Addie, 35 and the senior member of the trio, might have been the one he described first, then Effie, 31, and finally Jessie, 26.

** Both words derive from horse anatomy and reference abnormalities of the lean, bony joint just above their rear leg joints, resulting in an awkward or unnatural gait.

The Des Moines Leader, which would merge with The Des Moines Register in 1902, reprinted the commentary from the Odebolt newspaper and was sued for libel by Addie Cherry, seeking $15,000 in damages, the equivalent of $57,0000 today.

If ever a libel case had been given every opportunity to succeed by the vehemence of the text that provoked the lawsuit, this might have seemed to be the one.

However, the Polk County trial judge, after listening to arguments and viewing a courtroom performance by one of the Cherry sisters, probably Effie, ruled for the newspaper.

The ruling was upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court in 1901. It became one of the major sources of reference in defending newspapers in all libel lawsuits thereafter stemming from commentary regarding theatrical or musical performances and beyond.

A newspaper editor has the “right to freely criticize any and every kind of public performance providing that in doing so he is not actuated by malice,” the State Supreme Court ruled. A comment that is a gross exaggeration is not necessarily unfair, the Court added.

Continuing, “If ever there was a case justifying ridicule and sarcasm, it is the one now before us. According to the record, the performance given by the plaintiffs was not only childish but ridiculous in the extreme. A dramatic critic should be allowed suitable license in such a case. The public should be informed of the character of the entertainment and in the absence of proof of actual malice in the publication should be held privileged.”

The bottom line seems to be that the Cherry Sisters did their own thing and they did it the way they wanted to, no matter how the public or the press responded. They learned to live with the rowdy audiences and ranting reviews, and thrived in their own celebrity, even if it was not the kind of celebrity they would have preferred.

The Cherry Sisters continued performing into the mid-1930s. None of them ever married. In their later years, two of them opened a bakery in Cedar Rapids for a time; yes, they made their own cherry pies. Effie, the last surviving sister, died in 1944.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruling against the sisters and for the press stands unaltered today.

U. S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who died in 1971, no doubt would approve.

Sources include but are not limited to: “The Shaming of the Cherry Sisters,” by Jack El-Hai, October 6, 2016, longreads.com; “The Cherry Sisters: Vaudeville’s Most Infamous Act,” November 16, 2020, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, ripleys.com; “Four Freaks From Iowa,” The New York Times, November 17, 1896; Various editions of Iowa newspapers, 1893, 1894, 1895,1901, 2015, The Waterloo Courier, The Des Moines Register, The Gazette (Cedar Rapids), The Daily Citizen (Iowa City), The Daily Times (Davenport), Sioux City Journal, Muscatine News-Tribune, Progress Review (La Porte City), all via newspapers.com; Cherry family trees, census documents, and death certificates, ancestry.com.

NOTE TO READERS: I write this column, Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. You can subscribe for free. However, if you enjoy my work, please consider showing your support by becoming a paid subscriber at the level that feels right for you. Click on the Subscribe button here. Pricing begins at less than $2 per column.

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

The Iowa Writers Collaborative is made up of some of the foremost regional journalists in the country. Each writer is independent and has a Substack of their own.