Stage performance of "The Merry Life of Patrick Henry."
The Merry Life of Patrick Henry was a play that was first performed in New York City during the Starkist Terror of 1899 - 1901. Although the play was nominally about Patrick Henry of Virginia, a leading figure in the American Crisis of the 1760s, the play was actually a thinly-disguised attack on Governor-General Ezra Gallivan. Gallivan had been accused in 1899 of accepting bribes from the Mexican company Kramer Associates. Although the accusation was quickly debunked by the Nelson Committee, Gallivan's enemies continued to insist that it was true.
The Merry Life of Patrick Henry implied that Gallivan was guilty of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Popular feeling against Gallivan was so great during the Starkist Terror that the play received good reviews, became an immediate hit, and soon opened in other major cities in the Confederation of North America.
Following Gallivan's resignation in July 1901 and the ouster of Mexican dictator Benito Hermión three months later, the wave of Starkist hysteria receded, and a pro-Gallivan reaction set in. By 1902, according to Sobel, Gallivan's attackers were being purged from their positions in newspapers and universities, and publicly shunned. Presumably the writers and producers of The Merry Life of Patrick Henry also suffered this fate.
Sobel's source for The Merry Life of Patrick Henry is Alice Welsch's Who Killed Cock Robin? Starkism in Perspective (New York, 1959).