Lew Bloom

Lew Bloom, born Ludwig Pflum on August 8, 1859, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was an American vaudeville performer, stage actor, art collector, and painter who died on December 12, 1929. He is best known for popularizing the comical tramp character on the American stage during the late nineteenth century.

Bloom was the son of Ludwig and Louisa (née Moyer) Pflum, German immigrants who settled in Philadelphia before relocating to Reading, Pennsylvania, where Bloom attended Poplar Street School. His father worked as a cooper, and the household included six other children: Susannah, Susan Deborah, Louisa, Charles, Edward, and Adolph, who died in childhood. Around 1871 the family moved to Williamsburg, where Bloom took up work as a jockey. Two years later he joined the Potter Hart Colossus Circus, performing a bounding jockey act that combined horsemanship with acrobatics. It was during this period that Ludwig Pflum adopted the stage name Lew Bloom, which he retained for the rest of his performing life.

After several years touring variety shows with his jockey act, Bloom relocated to Dover, Delaware, to compete in horse match races, then returned to Reading, where he and a friend opened the Drovers' Hotel, the first establishment to introduce cabaret to that city. Bloom performed song and dance acts there and also competed as a lightweight boxer. He subsequently served as stage manager at The General Taylor Hotel before leaving to work as a clown with the Shelby, Pullman and Hamilton Circus. Returning once more to Reading, he formed a partnership with vaudevillian Howard Monroe, and the two performed song and dance numbers and comedy skits in blackface until Bloom departed for New York to pursue solo comedy work.

In 1885 Bloom was cast in the play Nobody's Claim, and in 1888 he appeared in The Red Spider, the production in which he first conceived of his tramp persona. The character he developed, known as the Society Tramp, was a shabbily dressed, philosophically inclined homeless man who drank frequently and was routinely mistreated by those around him, yet responded to his circumstances with humor and an undiminished outlook. The act incorporated slapstick, dancing, and pantomime. One of the character's recurring jokes was: "I don't spend all my time in saloons. I can't. They have to close up some time." The character proved enormously popular and was quickly imitated by numerous performers of the era, among them Nat M. Wills and Charles R. Sweet. Bloom later maintained that he had originated the tramp character and was "the first stage tramp in the business."

Bloom's stage career reached its peak during the 1890s, when he appeared in a series of productions by playwright Charles Hale Hoyt, including A Black Sheep, On the Bowery, A Milk White Flag, A Day and a Night, and A Society Tramp. His Broadway appearance came in 1898, when he performed in the musical A Day and a Night in New York. After parting from Hoyt in 1892, the same year he married the performer known professionally as Miss Jane Cooper, Bloom and his wife toured the vaudeville circuit together with a comedy act titled A Picture of Life. Bloom played his customary tramp role while his wife portrayed a comic foil, alternately characterized as a New England spinster or a city maiden. By 1909, however, the tramp persona had exhausted its appeal, and Bloom's career declined steadily through the following decade.

Following his retirement from performing in the late 1910s, Bloom settled in Mount Penn, Pennsylvania, where he painted in a private studio and worked as an art collector and dealer. His involvement with art had begun during his stage years; between 1889 and 1892 he purchased thirty to forty paintings from artist Ralph Albert Blakelock. In 1910 he inherited an additional collection upon the death of his sister Susan. In April 1907 he exhibited seven original works at the Reinhard Rieger Gallery in Mount Penn, an exhibition that also included his painted copy of Herman Rheudesela's The Brooklet In the Meadow alongside the original. Bloom later moved to New York, periodically returning to Reading to visit family and attend Elks Club meetings. He also trained horses for Metropolitan Race Clubs operating in New York, Pennsylvania, and Cuba.

In early 1929 Bloom attracted considerable public attention when he announced the acquisition of a previously unknown oil portrait he claimed depicted former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. He asserted that shortly before President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, Mary Lincoln had commissioned painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter, who had resided at the White House for six months during Lincoln's presidency and had previously painted First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, to produce the portrait as a gift for her husband. Bloom further claimed that following the President's death, Mary Lincoln was unable to pay Carpenter and asked him to destroy the work, but that Carpenter instead kept it and eventually sold it to Jacob G. Neafie, a wealthy Philadelphia shipbuilder and admirer of Lincoln. According to Bloom, after Neafie's death his daughter inherited the portrait and gave it to Bloom's sister Susan in gratitude for Susan's care of Neafie's mother, Anna Neafie, who had died in 1860. Bloom stated that upon Susan's death in 1910 the portrait passed to him as part of her collection. To support the claim of authenticity, Bloom attached a notarized affidavit to the work and displayed it at Milch Galleries in Manhattan. The portrait received coverage in the February 12, 1929 editions of both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and was later referenced in Carl Sandburg's 1932 biography Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow. Shortly before his death, Bloom sold the portrait to Jessie Harlan Lincoln, granddaughter of President Lincoln and daughter of Robert Todd Lincoln, for a price believed to have been between two thousand and three thousand dollars.

In 1976 Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, the last undisputed Lincoln descendant, donated the portrait to the Illinois State Historical Library, now known as the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, at which time it was estimated to be worth four hundred thousand dollars. Two years later, art conservators at the Art Institute of Chicago determined that the portrait had been heavily retouched and contained elements added after the original painting's completion. A partial restoration revealed that the facial area of the subject had been altered, with coloring brighter than that present in the 1929 version and facial features that differed from the underlying original. Decades after Bloom's death, conservators concluded that he had been responsible for the forgery.

Bloom was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan on December 10, 1929, and died there two days later of a complication of diseases at the age of seventy. His funeral was held on December 16 at the Seidel Funeral Chapel in Reading, and he was buried at Charles Evans Cemetery the following morning.