THE PAGEANT IN AMERICA in America began in 1905 with Percy MacKaye's pageant in honour of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, at Cornish, New Hampshire. Within three years the Educational pageant at the Boston Normal school, the Philadelphia pageant in honour of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the city, and the superb Quebec pageant followed.
Five well-known and typical pageants may be mentioned. The Hudson-Fulton celebration in New York was a processional pageant of vast dimensions. For imaginative quality Percy Mac Kaye's "Caliban," produced in New York, and later in Boston, to honour the Shakespeare tercentenary, should be cited (though the author wishes this example of his work to be termed a "community masque") and for even greater poetic beauty the same writer's St. Louis masque. This last preluded the his torical scenes of the St. Louis pageant, written by Thomas Wood Stevens.
"The Pilgrim Spirit" written and produced at Plymouth, Mass., by George Pierce Baker for the Pilgrim tercentenary, was marked by historic accuracy and fine dramatic quality. The Yale pageant, written by a large group of Yale graduates, has naturally a diversity of treatment in its various episodes, but also poetic prologues of high order. The Lexington pageant, by Sidney Howard, is distinguished by its somewhat expressionistic ending, which endeavours to state the significance of democracy.
has taken two forms. One is the strictly historic as given in the frontier States. These productions deal with pioneering, Indian fights, the gold rush, the cattle industry and agricultural developments. The other is the processional type, usually a flower festival. The more famous of these are given annually in California and Oregon. Throughout the South ern States, also, are flower and fruit festivals and the justly cele brated Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans.
The States along the Atlantic seaboard, especially as one moves northward to Pennsylvania, New York and the New England group, use the historical type freely.
Religious pageantry has kept step with civic. The three salient examples are "The Pageant of Darkness and Light," by John Oxenham; "The Wayfarer," by J. E. Crowther, and "Faith of Our Fathers," by Anita Ferris.
W. Fairholt, Catalogue of a Collection of Works on Pageantry (1869) ; M. L. Spencer, Corpus Christi Pageants in England: A Study of Mediaeval Cycle Plays 0910 ; F. H. Hayward, A New Book of Celebrations (1927). (E. W. Bs.)