The Soul of Pleasure: Sentiment and Sensation in Nineteenth-Century American Mass Entertainment 9781501703997

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Enter Sentimentality: The Origins of the Entertainment Revolution
Chapter 2. Laugh and Grow Fat: Minstrelsy and Burlesque
Chapter 3. Looking Through: Sentimental Aesthetics
Chapter 4. The Democratization of Entertainment: The Concert Saloons
Chapter 5. Any Dodge Is Fair to Raise a Good Sensation: The Danger and Promise of Sensationalism
Chapter 6. Art with the Effervescence of Ginger Beer: The Creation of Vaudeville
Chapter 7. Spectacle and Nostalgia on the Road: Traveling Shows
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

THE SOUL OF PLEASURE

THE SOUL OF PLEASURE

SE NT I M ENT A ND SE N SAT I O N I N NI NE TEENT H - CENT URY A M E R I C A N M A SS EN TE RTA I N M E N T

David Monod

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2016 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Monod, David, 1960– author. Title: The soul of pleasure : sentiment and sensation in   nineteenth-century American mass entertainment /   David Monod. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2016. |   Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015043741 | ISBN 9781501702389   (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Performing arts—United States—   History—19th century. | Popular culture—   United States—History—19th century. |   Amusements—United States—History—19th century. Classification: LCC PN2245 .M66 2016 |   DDC 791.0973/09034—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043741 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover illustration: F. S. Chanfrau in the character of “Mose” as originally written for, and performed by him at the Olympic and Chatham Theatres, New York, c. 1848. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Adam and Emma With my love

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction1 1. Enter Sentimentality: The Origins of the Entertainment Revolution

14

2. Laugh and Grow Fat: Minstrelsy and Burlesque

42

3. Looking Through: Sentimental Aesthetics76 4. The Democratization of Entertainment: The Concert Saloons 108 5. Any Dodge Is Fair to Raise a Good Sensation: The Danger and Promise of Sensationalism

143

6. Art with the Effervescence of Ginger Beer: The Creation of Vaudeville

171

7. Spectacle and Nostalgia on the Road: Traveling Shows

206

Conclusion

237

Notes 247 Index 289

vii

Ack now l edgments

This book began as an unusual experiment. Instead of following my normal research practice and launching first into the scholarly literature, I started with the contemporary newspaper, magazine, archival, and memoir resources. My goal was to write a new history of the beginnings of mass entertainment which paid attention to the ways in which commercial amusements changed and were changed by the tastes and values of spectators. I therefore set out to learn new things about the attitudes and activities of Americans and not just about the process by which the entertainment industry grew. The source material on nineteenth-century entertainment is extensive, but it is also fragmentary, disjointed, and scattered, and so the act of writing a first draft based entirely on those primary sources, made me feel a bit like Gideon Mantell building the Iguanodon without a blueprint. Because I was mostly dealing with snippets of information (theatre reviews, recollections of theatre experiences, texts of songs and skits, advertising and promotional material), volume became an important tool in deciding which connections to make and what directions to follow. In other words, rather than employing a common practice in entertainment history and offering examinations of a few representative individuals or works, I created a synthesis by knitting together the mass of tiny bits. I mention the process and goals here only because I believe they produced two unexpected results. First, it led me to a number of intriguing insights into the development of mass entertainment specifically and American culture generally. Second, it forced me to focus on finding linkages between the fragments of contemporary evidence, concentrating my attention on explaining why things changed. The book’s somewhat unconventional chronological and thematic armature was produced by these convergences. I was very fortunate to have received support from the Office of Research Services at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A Fulbright Canada award placed me at Vanderbilt University at a critical point in the writing of the manuscript. During my term at Vanderbilt I was able to focus on reading the secondary ix

x    A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS

literature, revising the first draft, and presenting ideas to students and faculty. A heartfelt thanks to colleagues and friends who made my stay in Nashville so memorable and productive, especially Celia Applegate, Jonathan Bremer, Bill Caferro, Jim Epstein, Cathy Gaca, Sarah Igo, and Tom Schwartz. Several colleagues read, heard, or communicated with me about elements of this study, but I am especially grateful to the two who trudged uncomplainingly through the first draft: Richard Fuke and Darren Mulloy. I also appreciate the comments, encouragement, and advice I received from Robert C. Allen, Glen Hendler, M. Alison Kibler, Alan Lessoff, Michael Newbury, and David S. Reynolds. Thanks also to my colleagues in the History Department at Laurier: they are facing the contemporary challenge of teaching in the humanities with courage, good humor, and imagination, and they are models of what can be done. I am indebted to the librarians, archivists, and staff who assisted my research at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library; the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library; the Harry Ransom Research Center; Special Collections & University Archives at the University of Iowa; the Kentucky Historical Society; the Library of Congress; the American Antiquarian Society; Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library; and the National Museum of American History. The interlibrary loan offices at Wilfrid Laurier University and Vanderbilt were unfailingly helpful. Particular thanks to Helen Adair at the Ransom Center; Susan Halpert, Micah Hoggatt and Dale Stinchcomb at Harvard; Doug Reside at the New York Public Library and Sid Huttner at the University of Iowa for making their archives such uncommonly fine places to work. At Cornell University Press, Michael J. McGandy guided the editorial process with candor and efficiency. Copyeditor Kate Babbit and Senior Production Editor Karen Laun worked hard to fix the errors and Canadianisms in the text and offered invaluable advice on how to make my arguments clearer. At Laurier, Cindi Wieg was a staunch ally who forced me to carve out time from university administration to write and edit and kept me organized and happy in the storm. Books and lives move at different speeds, and this one is a repository of many memories: of road trips with George Urbaniak and Darryl Dee that provided laboratories for its arguments, of the kindness and hospitality of Michael and Maria Milde, and of conversations with Joan Monod that proved that zany comedy and melodrama can be truly indistinguishable. This book also holds, deeply nestled within it, years in the life of our household. I am so blessed to have shared those years with Michaela Milde and with her to be able to marvel at the miraculous growth of our kids, Adam and Emma, into such splendid young adults.

THE SOUL OF PLEASURE

Introduction

In a literary bonne bouche published in American newspapers in December 1840, Thomas Haliburton, the Nova Scotia humorist, described the first visit of Sam Slick, his fictional Yankee peddler, to a theatre. Slick goes out to the Tremont in Boston, a big handsome playhouse that was home to melodramas, comedies, and circuses. “Well, I never was at a theatre afore in all my life,” Slick explains, “for the minister didn’t approbate them at no rate.” But since he was far from home and his preacher would never find out, the intrepid seller of gimcrack clocks decides to temporarily shelve concern for his soul: “If I do go this once; it can’t do me no great harm, I do suppose, and a gal in tights is something new; so here I goes.” The show did not disappoint him. The scene was a tableau that looked to Slick exactly like Genesee Falls, “as nateral as life, and the beautiful four story grist mill taken off as plain as anything. . . . It was all but rael [sic]; it was so like life. The action, too, was equal to the scenes; it was dreadful pretty.” When one of the female performers came out in tights, the “folks hurrawed and clapped, and cheered like any thing. It was so excitin’ I hurrawed too . . . as if I was as well pleased as any of them, for hollerin’ is catchin’.”1 Slick’s misgivings about visiting a theatre were not just the stuff of comedy; moral anxiety prevented many Americans from patronizing popular entertainments in the nineteenth century. Twenty-five years after Slick hurrawed

1

2    I nt r od u ction

his first woman in tights, the young Frances Willard, who would one day lead the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, rationalized her first theatre experience. On a visit to New York, Willard decided to go to Wallack’s playhouse near Union Square. She believed Wallack’s to be “the most respectable one there is,” and she hedged her bets by buying a ticket to what she’d heard was “a reputable play,” the melodrama Rosedale; or, the Rifle Ball. In order to further increase her chances of spiritual remission, Willard asked a senior church member if he thought it would be alright. In the end, like Slick, she concluded that since “no one knows me . . . no harm will be done.” Willard afterward confessed a “strong natural liking” for the drama, and she admitted that she had spent an “evening of wonder and delight” at Wallack’s, but she remained an infrequent theatre patron.2 Only when assured of anonymity (the next time Willard went out to a show it was in London, England) and after reaffirming their faith were people such as Slick and Willard able to enjoy a night in a playhouse. Customers like these were plentiful enough to keep America’s popular theatre on life support through the early decades of the nineteenth century, but little more than that. If commercial amusements were to thrive, new attitudes had to develop. How did people in the United States overcome their hesitations and how did the popular theatre grow into a mass entertainment? From today’s perspective, it seems strange to even ask these questions, so closely has the United States become associated with contemporary popular culture. American movies, music, digital media, and celebrity marketing have been globalized and popularized to such an extent that they now define mass entertainment itself. It seems odd, then, to think back to a time when the American people were themselves learning how to enjoy commercial amusements, just as other people in other societies have since learned to do. The process by which people come to like things that their parents did not is interesting and important, and it’s an understandable preoccupation of those working in a wide range of consumer-oriented businesses and scholars in many fields. In this book, I am not interested in understanding change in order to manage or reproduce it; my concern is with documenting how a singular and monumental shift in tastes occurred and in understanding the role that entertainment played in that transformation. Like other historians, I describe change not in an abstract way but as a product of the actions and choices of specific people who could have chosen to do something else or to have held different values. When dealing with really diffuse changes, such as those involving morals, perceptions, tastes and manners, the process of change over time, while evident in retrospect, is hard to pin down. This work relies on many individual examples to chart the transformation in tastes

I nt r od u ction     3

that occurred in the nineteenth century. The examples are used to illustrate trends or innovations that inspired others; they are not meant to suggest that there was no variation. Change in the nature, organization, and popularity of commercial amusement involved trial and error and it happened unevenly, in part for geographic reasons. The entertainment world was a relatively close one that was dominated by the cities of the Northeast (and increasingly by New York). In this world, people moved around frequently (players traveled among theatres) and successful innovations were disseminated, copied, and adapted reasonably quickly. Today, movies, television, video games, and the Internet are what we understand as mass entertainments. But in the nineteenth century, popular commercial amusement was born in theatres and grew into a “mass” entertainment because large numbers of people began to go out to watch live shows in playhouses or mixed-use venues. In order to trace the process by which the live theatre developed into the first mass entertainment, this study focuses on the genres that were most commonly performed during the nineteenth century: minstrel shows, melodramas, burlesques, farces, and variety shows.3 These do not represent all the forms of entertainment people enjoyed, but together they are representative and numerically significant. By focusing on these types of amusements, I will document how attending a show developed into a socially and morally acceptable activity for a substantial portion of the population. I will also describe how the popular theatre influenced and adapted to changing tastes and values and how, in doing so, it grew into the first national mass entertainment. The development of popular entertainment is a topic that has been attracting reflection, commemoration, and scholarship for almost 200 years. Until the 1970s, however, much of that research was concerned with describing the shows that were performed and the personalities involved rather than uncovering the forces that stimulated the theatre’s growth. Older works assumed that the taste for entertainment was a constant and that the theatre’s popularity was therefore a function of the talents of actors and playwrights, the entrepreneurship of managers and owners, the health of the economy, and the reasonableness of lawmakers. What occurred on stage, rather than what was experienced in circles and stalls, was the subject of the narrative. But as theatre historian Robert Lewis explained of nineteenth-century entertainment, its rise has to be seen in the context of a change in attitudes toward the theatre, for “behind the showman’s entrepreneurial zeal and fascinating techniques lay something else—a striking change in American attitudes to ‘diversions’ and commercial entertainment itself.”4

4    I nt r od u ction

More recent scholars who seek to historicize taste often describe it as axiomatically related to the expansion of the nation and the changing nature of its society. As the country became more urban and its population more diverse, they suggest, people turned to amusements as a release from the congested and chaotic environment. A few historians show how elite groups were important contributors to this development in that they promoted the theatre as a national project—a way of developing an autonomous and distinctly American identity—and that this helped weaken the moral opposition to it. Some have also seen entertainment as a way that elite groups “disciplined” and “assimilated” audiences by using the theatre to promote values.5 But the most pervasive interpretation ties the rise of the popular theatre to the development of the working class. From the perspective of class, the theatre emerges as a site of labor struggle, race contestation, and gender definition. It was an arena in which working men, in particular, are seen to have forged their identity and exercised their power through a rowdy participatory culture that was racist, radical, and raucous. As historian Neal Gabler writes, “the iron law” of popular entertainment in America was that its forms were “originated by the lower class (and later by youths and minorities, who would come to fill the inventive functions of the lower class)” and that those forms “invariably get adopted and then co-opted by the middle class.” According to this approach, the birth of the popular theatre in the nineteenth century was, in the words of Cedric Robinson, “an archeological marker for the earliest evidence of the appearance of a white working class.”6 While class formation, assimilation, nation building, urbanization, and entrepreneurship are all important elements in any account of the theatre, the development of mass entertainment also depended on a change of attitude. During the nineteenth century, religion was at the center of most Americans’ world view, and it played a decisive role in shaping tastes. As the stories of Sam Slick and Frances Willard suggest, it took a change in or a suspension of religious belief for people to overcome their moral concerns and go out to a show. This was not a function of class formation in any straightforward way, for as Richard Wrightman Fox notes, “changes in ideas rarely follow mechanically upon changes in other social phenomena.”7 In exploring how values change, it is useful to differentiate broader cultural shifts in which the stage played a relatively small, albeit important, part from a process of assimilation, dissemination, and development within show business itself. I identify two significant transitions in the broader change in culture, morals, and taste: first, the new valuation of compassion that the Enlightenment inspired; and second, the retreat from sentimentality

I nt r od u ction     5

that the Civil War precipitated. Although I am not advancing a rigid and singular causal explanation of cultural change, I present the Enlightenment and the Civil War as temporal markers linked to shifts in behavior and thought that rippled through American society. The changes in culture I associate with these periods did not occur uniformly or suddenly. But change did take place, and it proceeded steadily over the course of the nineteenth century. In the pages to come I document how these cultural shifts occurred and how they inspired new ideas and practices that were disseminated, advanced, and adapted in the popular theatre. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, many Americans with sophisticated tastes did enjoy the experience of the theatre when they risked attending one. But the stage was regarded so unfavorably that few respectable citizens dared to go out to popular entertainment, and those that did seldom went with regularity. The public, a theatre lover lamented in 1810, seemed convinced that plays were “moral cantharides which serve to inflame the passions and break down the ramparts behind which religion and prudence entrench the human heart.”8 This observer put his finger on the problem. What many of those with the financial means to become spectators objected to was that the theatre was a space infused with the excitement of expecting the unbelievable and experiencing the unusual. Behind closed doors and in the dim lamplight, the popular theatre exposed audience members to the possibility of living according to other values. This was the concern that lay behind the assertion, so often made in the early nineteenth century, that the stage was immoral. Potential theatregoers appear to have been worried that they might, like Haliburton’s Sam Slick, lose control of themselves in the playhouse and halloo a woman in tights. In doing so, they would somehow signal their acceptance of a value system opposed to the one that governed their everyday lives. In short, most people were unwilling, or unable, to imagine containing popular entertainment in its own sphere or to see it as disconnected from their real-life activities, relationships, and morals. “The Theatre epitomizes every degree of corruption,” declared Henry Ward Beecher, America’s most famous preacher, in 1843, summing up the concern. “If you would pervert the taste—go to the Theatre. If you would imbibe false views—go to the Theatre. If you would efface as speedily as possible all qualms of conscience—go to the Theatre. If you would put yourself irreconcilably against the spirit of virtue and religion—go to the Theatre. If you would be infected with each particular vice in the catalogue of Depravity—go to the Theatre.”9

6    I nt r od u ction

Since what was involved in the marginalization of entertainment in the early nineteenth century was the audience’s reluctance to compartmentalize activities and separate the theatre from their everyday concerns and morals, a major change in attitudes or tastes was needed for a show business to develop. Without this change, the pasteboard, the assumed identities, and the face paint could only ever be seen as the kind of deception and falsehood that Americans deplored in their daily lives. To put the case this way is, admittedly, to run against the grain of much contemporary scholarship. Many historians see the subversive nature of entertainment as the very thing that made it appealing, especially to working-class audiences.10 The conventional account rests on two presumptions: first, that the popular theatre was a “low-brow” entertainment for poorer people; and second, that it was by nature transgressive and carnivalesque. This study argues, in contrast, that the theatre was initially synced to the tastes of a middling-class, not a working-class, audience and that its expansion therefore depended on its assimilation into a respectable moral outlook. To show this, I look not to urbanization or secularization but to the development of a spiritual worldview that can be termed sentimental. The change in public attitude that enabled the popular theatre to develop into a mass entertainment began in the 1820s. In 1848, as the New York Herald announced, “there is a revolution going on in theatres,” and it was one that involved not just growth but also diversification. According to theatre historian Rosemarie Bank, what was occurring was an “expansion . . . of the concept of entertainment itself . . . into spaces unimagined by even the most ambitious [theatre] entrepreneurs in the 1820s.”11 In particular, this antebellum period saw the development and rising popularity of such light entertainments as farce, variety, burlesque, and minstrelsy. These genres have typically been seen as raucous and subversive; I reinterpret them as products of a sentimental outlook. The growing influence of sentimentality or, as it was known at the time, sympathy caused a powerful shift in cultural and moral attitudes, especially among middling-class people. The primary purpose of sentimentality was the development of connections among people based on empathy or compassion. Empathy was understood to be a product of emotions, which is why sentimentalists saw feelings as more important than legal principles, customs, or social conventions in fostering community. Feelings were passions (which were seen as rude and even immoral emotions) that were directed in ways that realized God’s purpose, and sentimentalists saw themselves not as dreamy or tormented romantics but as people who had controlled their emotions and instincts and learned how to direct them toward the good. Novels and other forms of art came to be valued because they helped educate people about

I nt r od u ction     7

how to channel their feelings in uplifting or Christian ways. Sentimentality has sometimes been treated as a more primitive or “fake” form of romanticism, but this is a misleading approach. Where romantics struggled against humanity’s incompleteness, sentimentalists were optimistic about the human condition. Sentimentalists believed that people could learn to culture their raw passions, turn them outward in positive ways, and transform society by regrounding it on the spirit of compassionate love.12 It was the sentimental turn in belief that prepared the ground for the growth of commercial amusements. In order to describe the reciprocal relationship between performance and public tastes, I adapt philosopher Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of a “horizon of expectation.”13 Jauss coined this term with reference to reading, but it can also express an audience’s anticipation of what they wanted to see and hear at a show and how they wanted to experience it. I describe these horizons as partly perceptual and partly conceptual because there was more involved in going to a show than the mental or emotional stimulation one hoped to receive; audiences also had expectations concerning their “experience of the theatre.” How spectators wanted to see, feel, and hear entertainment—their expectations concerning their role as audience members—changed over time and differed according to the type of show they attended. Audiences did not watch a show in a theatre the same way that they watched one in a saloon where they were eating, drinking, and playing cards. They did not watch an operetta or a play the same way that they watched a variety show. These differences in expectation are critical to the argument this study advances. The sentimental horizons of expectation were never fixed in place and were expressed in art and practice in varied ways. They were, however, “expectations,” so it is appropriate to focus on those agencies—such as the press, memoirs, and popular literature—that helped shape tastes. It is no coincidence that performance reviews became a standard feature of daily urban newspapers in the late 1820s, around the time that commercial amusement began to become more popular. In the 1830s, specialized magazines carrying theatre reviews such as Spirit of the Times and Godey’s Ladies Book also appeared. Until the 1850s, theatre critics were amateurs, which was why Edgar Allan Poe famously denounce them as “illiterate mountebanks,” but their lack of professionalism makes them all the more interesting as interpreters of patrons’ attitudes. The opinions of amateur critics are extensively employed in this study both to reveal spectators’ viewpoints and to chart peoples’ “horizons of expectation,” since reviews helped create those taste predispositions.14 Because popular performers were aware of their audiences’ expectations (both perceptual and conceptual), in part because they reproduced each other’s successful practices and in part because they paid attention to the

8    I nt r od u ction

aesthetic climate (if only by hearing the applause and reading the reviews), their art tended to reinforce them. Audience pleasure, however, gives way to boredom when expectations are repeatedly satisfied, and this naturally inclines spectators to anticipate and welcome novelty. This is why entertainment feeds on and drives changes in tastes. Shows that do not reflect the values of their audience are often received as incomprehensible or abhorrent, and those that fail to stretch those values are generally seen as old-fashioned. Popular entertainment and the culture of which it is a part changes through this kind of dialogic cycle of demand, satisfaction, and the generation of new ideas that reinvigorate, inspire and then satisfy consumer expectations. Thanks to the sentimentalization of the theatre, entertainment began to reflect and advance the cultural ideals of the middling class. As many historians have shown, in the first half of the nineteenth century the “middling sort” expanded in number, influence and self-consciousness.15 This group, which included proprietors of businesses, professionals, modest investors and speculators, skilled tradespeople and clerical workers, can be characterized as affluent and upwardly mobile but not distinguished in terms of wealth and influence. But it is by their values rather than their incomes that most historians see them coalescing. Middling-class people tended to support economic and urban improvements, public education, and such cultural institutions as libraries and lyceums, and they were also inclined to employ sentimental arguments to advance gendered ideals of domesticity and moral uplift. This is not a group traditionally associated with popular entertainment, and particularly such ostensibly frivolous ones as farces, burlesques and minstrel shows. But as this book shows, the origins of mass entertainment can be traced to the growing appetite of the middling class for commercial amusements. The transition in values this involved was less a matter of people learning to compartmentalize entertainment and separate it from their day-to-day experiences than it was a redefinition of values that allowed people to include entertainment within what was becoming their moral outlook. Sentimental audience members in pre–Civil War America looked forward to an emotional thrill in the theatre; they wanted to be led to experience the deep feelings that performance art (like powerful preaching) could inspire. Of course, actors and managers encouraged and supported this transformation in taste. They were not isolated from the sympathetic turn and their values were influenced by it, but they also understood and seized upon the opportunity to secure a larger and more stable audience. I divide the story of the rise of mass entertainment into two distinct phases, each of which involved the assimilation, dissemination, and modification

I nt r od u ction     9

of broader changes in values. The first phase, during which a sentimental popular theatre catering largely to the middling class grew, lasted roughly until the Civil War; and the second, which produced a mass entertainment for a more diverse audience, occurred over the next two decades. In the first chapter, I set the stage for a discussion of the entertainment revolution and describe some of the main features of the emerging sentimental culture. In the second and third chapters I explain how sentimentality, as a particular form of taste, expectation, and experience, transformed and legitimized new forms of amusement. Chapter 2 focuses on comedy and minstrelsy, and there I argue that the combination of slapstick humor, emotional sincerity, and family entertainment that characterized both minstrel shows and comedies not only reaffirmed the value of loving relationships but also drew attention to the superficiality of the material world. In chapter 3, I look at the domestic drama that emerged in the 1840s. Here I describe a new form of melodrama that revolved around affective relations, authenticity, realism, and the power of moral reform. This chapter also argues that the expressive goals of sentimental culture—absorption, Bildung (or self-cultivation and moral growth through experience), “looking through” appearances to connect with inner “truths” and empathy—helped produce a new horizon of audience expectations. During the Civil War, the market for theatrical entertainment broadened beyond the middling class as commercial amusements finally came within the reach of a large number of working-class Americans. This new market provided theatrical entrepreneurs with enormous opportunities that they attempted to secure in various ways, and as the second half of this study shows, their efforts ultimately helped transform the sentimental stage and the broader culture of sympathy. The great beneficiary of this second phase in the rise of commercial amusements was the variety theatre. Variety was different in form and intent from the farces, burlesques, minstrel shows, and melodramas that dominated entertainment before the war. As its name suggests, the variety show was a salmagundi of short acts, skits, and stunts involving trained animals, singers and dancers, acrobats, comedians, and character delineators. It was the most flexible and inexpensive of all the forms of theatrical entertainment and was especially well suited to business cycles because it made variety performers responsible for much of the cost of mounting acts. Although its rise was anything but steady, variety grew after the Civil War to become the most popular type of show business. As with minstrelsy, historians have generally described it as a bawdy working man’s entertainment and trace its origins to dingy subterranean concert saloons.16 But this dates the amusement to the 1860s, when its popularity with soldiers and workers

10    I nt r od u ction

first attracted the attention of temperance and vice reformers. Variety was actually much older and it first emerged, much like burlesque and minstrelsy, as an entertainment for the middling class. In the 1860s, however, variety became the first form of theatre to amuse people from all classes and all regions. Barrooms with variety stages became ubiquitous after the war, and while some of them attracted a primarily middling-class clientele, others catered to predominantly working-class consumers. But all concert saloons, as they became known, catered to male audiences, and church leaders and reformers regarded them as disreputable institutions geared toward drinking and sex. Certainly the variety they served up was dominated by female performers and it was a theatre very much concerned with looking at bodies. My argument, however, is that variety saloons did not develop outside the sentimental culture but reproduced it in parody form as female performers sang sentimental songs and then sat with the men in the audience, flirting with them and inducing them to buy liquor. Variety saloons provided a form of amusement that ostensibly satisfied sentimental expectations and the cultural link between the stage and home life, but it was devoid of spiritually uplifting qualities. Partly because of cost and partly because of the shift in values that the war initiated, variety grew to become the first mass entertainment. In the late 1860s and 70s, its horizon of expectation was adopted by performers and spectators of minstrel shows, burlesques, and melodramas as they all competed to secure a share of the emerging market. In time, variety theatres became spaces where men and women of different ethnicities, races, and classes came together to watch a show. But the aesthetic stance the variety show developed was irony rather than sympathy. Irony on the variety stage was a pose, a way that performers communicated the idea that what they said should not be believed. In this sense, it was antithetical to sentimentality, which held that emotional transparency was essential to the appreciation of art. The impact of the rise of variety and the ironic pose represented a weakening of the sentimental aesthetic in the popular theatre and a shift of expectations from emotional absorption in a work to amusement by it. This was a second stage in the entertainment revolution as spectators of variety shows were encouraged to separate the morals and behaviors they saw on stage from the ones they followed in their daily lives. As audience expectations and performance practices cast free from their antebellum moorings, from the notion of sympathetically “looking through” the stage action and experiencing the essential humanity of the characters depicted, one of the sentimental culture’s most important public validations—its infusion of the popular theatre—was undermined.

I nt r od u ction     11

These changes were part of the broader process of cultural change that hollowed out the sentimental world view. Historians such as James Roark and Drew Gilpin Faust have shown how the Civil War unleashed “torrents of change” that transformed mental habits, emotional attitudes, manners, and values. Although sentimentality did not disappear, it was transformed from within. As literary critic Elizabeth Duguette notes, “Affective norms [were] inadequate to contain or prevent the often brutal social disruptions associated with the mounting passions of sections” (north and south) at war, and this encouraged skepticism about sympathy’s social benefits and sparked interest in regulating and containing emotional expressions that seemed excessive. Compassion surrendered its presumed place as the cement of society to such values as obligation, regulation, self-interest, and power. After the war, a new cultural turn toward the material occurred, one that was enriched by startling scientific and technological discoveries. Realism became the dominant artistic and philosophical pose, and irony thrived in the gap that opened between individual gratification and the lingering faith in higher principles.17 The development of a mass entertainment and the change in audience expectations from sentimental absorption to the kind of attention given to a variety show is the subject of the second half of this book. Chapter 5 covers the immediate postwar years, during which the concert saloon business continued to expand significantly. As entertainment entrepreneurs and artists looked for ways of securing the mass audience that saloons attracted, lawmakers, reformers, and religious leaders moved to curb what they saw as the demoralizing growth of barroom theatres. The chapter describes the efforts of municipal and state regulators to undermine the nascent mass entertainment industry by severing the connections between drink, sexuality, and the stage. Theatre entrepreneurs looked for ways of countering the regulatory threat and responded by creating a “clean” variety that they called “vaudeville.” They created this entertainment as a way of appealing to women and children without sacrificing their existing customer base. Just as it had before the war, popular entertainment played a significant role in shaping audience expectations. Chapters 6 and 7 investigate the influence of the variety theatre on the sentimental perspective. Chapter 6 focuses on how artists and spectators accommodated a new entertainment horizon centered on surface appearances. In vaudeville, the emerging mass theatre, the arousal of sympathy was replaced by more tangible goals: how to enjoy oneself, how to be physically attractive, how to be funny, how to flirt. At the same time, clothing became an increasingly important element and modern notions of the star personality began to develop. Chapter 7 then turns to

12    I nt r od u ction

postwar minstrelsy and discusses how it evolved into a type of blackface spectacle. As nostalgia for a lost plantation South became one of minstrelsy’s defining characteristics, looking through, an active and personally transformative perspective, became longing for and remembering, a much more passive way of perceiving.18 Sentimentality was not a fixed thing; it was a cultural expression with a history of its own. In the 1870s and 80s, audiences heard the same types of ballads and watched similar melodramas to the ones they had enjoyed before the war. But the expectations they brought to those forms were different. In antebellum America, amusements were viewed as a constitutive element in a sensorium and a taste system, and they provided affective individuals with the reassuring knowledge that they were members of a broadly respectable collectivity that held similar perceptions and feelings. While the sentimental genres and tropes survived after the war, their meaning altered as sentimentality lost its connection to empathy and became a synonym for melancholy personal emotions and mawkish presentations that were untrue to life. By the turn of the twentieth century, sentimentality had come to be associated, in the minds of prominent artists, critics, and intellectuals, with working-class or cheap amusements and with emotionally unstable middling-class women and soft-hearted men. This was not a meaningful group in any sociological sense, but it carried a powerful cultural charge: sentiment was increasingly connected with the tastes of all those on the margins of the male-dominated, business-driven, increasingly rule-governed, atomized industrial society of the Gilded Age. For many influential liberal thinkers, sentimentality was for losers, and their interpretation has stuck like pitch to historians. The fact that sensibility had been a transforming, indeed radical, force in society before the Civil War was forgotten. A new artistic ethos was taking hold, one grounded in irony, fashion, empiricism, self-aggrandizement, material success, and biological racism. The visual world was becoming a place of surfaces rather than depths, of external attributes rather than inner meanings to be discerned. Not surprisingly, in the legitimate theatre of the 1870s and 80s, realism became all the rage. Vaudeville was a popular entertainment that was ideally suited to the developing perceptual regime. Mobile and incandescent, it privileged appearances and individualized audience responses. Vaudeville turned performances into commodities, articles of consumption that were offered up to the atomized gaze of spectators. It also presented entertainment as a kind of respite that was designed for those seeking a little time off from everyday life. There was, of course, nothing wrong with this, and it remains the way most of us want

I nt r od u ction     13

to have our fun delivered, but the expectations on which modern mass entertainment thrived were different from those that had attracted antebellum audiences. Like their theatregoing forebears, late nineteenth-century spectators went out in pursuit of pleasure. Unlike audiences of their grandparents’ day, they were not especially interested in stopping to secure, far less to enjoy, the cultivation of their souls.

Chapter 1

Enter Sentimentality The Origins of the Entertainment Revolution

Running an American theatre was a risky business in the first decades of the nineteenth century. According to a German tourist in 1837, “of all the theatres in the United States there is but one which is known to have carried on a profitable business. The fault lies not so much with the managers as with the public itself. The Americans are not fond of any kind of public amusement . . . their evenings are either spent at home or with a few of their friends, in a manner as private as possible.” Frances Trollope, an English visitor who spent the 1830s unhappy in Cincinnati, came to believe that Americans were simply too “divested of gayety” to enjoy an evening out. “There is no trace of feeling from one end of the Union to the other,” she snarled. “If they see a comedy or a farce, they may laugh at it; but they can do very well without it.” In France, Michel Chevalier observed in 1839, there were always queues in front of the theatres, but in the United States, the only lineups began at the doors of banks. Even Harriet Martineau who, like Trollope, visited in the 1830s (and unlike her compatriot quite enjoyed her stay), admitted that “the Americans have little dramatic taste; and the spirit of Puritanism still rises up in such fierce opposition to the stage, as to forbid the hope that this grand means of intellectual exercise will ever be made the instrument of the moral good to society that it might be made. . . . The uncongeniality is too great.”1 In reality, the paucity of entertainments that European tourists described was a feast compared to the situation two or three decades before. Although 14

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     15

the visitors couldn’t have known it, from 1790 to 1830, the theatre had actually set down reasonably resilient, if as yet spindly, roots. Through most of the eighteenth century, theatrical companies had made only migratory stops in colonial settlements and no town was able to sustain a permanent professional theatre. Historian Odai Johnson suggests that this was due to the small size of most settlements, but there was more to it than that. Although the towns of colonial America were certainly small, New York had 25,000 people in 1776, which made it equivalent in size to such places in England as Portsmouth, Lich­field, Saxmundham, and Newcastle-on-Tyne, all of which had permanent theatres by the 1740s and 50s. Bath, which was smaller than New York or Philadelphia, had two professional theatres by 1750. In fact, when they were under British military occupation during the Revolution, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were all able to support theatre seasons.2 The real reason why commercial entertainment was so underdeveloped was, as Harriet Martineau observed, that the cultural and social context was uncongenial. Popular entertainment would become a major force only when that climate changed. Two conditions had to be met for the theatre to place itself on a firm footing. First, the cultural space for its development had to open, and this required a shift in values and tastes. Second, theatre professionals needed to occupy that space and find ways of enlarging it. Both of these things happened simultaneously beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, though they were still not so apparent, by European standards, that tourists noticed them in the 1830s. The shift in values was stimulated by the slow emergence and dissemination of sentimentality as a hegemonic cultural ethos from the 1750s to the 1850s. Theatre entrepreneurs first responded in tangible ways to that shift in the 1780s, when they introduced melodramas into the repertoire and increasingly interpolated Italianate love songs into English-language plays. They even anticipated its influence when they financed playhouses that could seat larger audiences.3 These attempts to enlarge the theatre’s cultural space were partial and tentative, they involved limited change in dramaturgy, and they produced only small changes in market or taste. Though not especially successful, they were important first steps in the development of commercial entertainment.

What Institution Is More Abandoned than the Theatre? Until sentimentality transformed the cultural milieu, the theatre remained a limited presence in American life, an amusement that was considered contrary to religion and morality. “Struggle,” John Rankin writes, is the best word one can find to sum up the history of the early American theatre, “struggle against

16    C H A PT E R

1

religious zealots, against moralists, but more than anything else, a struggle for survival.” Bent on resisting tendencies they saw as secularizing and worried by creeping unbelief, religious leaders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries criticized the stage as a manufactory of insincerity, modernity, materialism, and irreligion. To the Christian churches, the theatre was seductive, a tempter that lured spectators into a false world where inhibitions disappeared and people behaved unethically. Church leaders of the early national period were products of a culture that imagined reason and emotion, social order and passionate excess as opposites, and they were instinctively suspicious of aroused feelings. They saw feeling without purpose as destructive to authentic moral passion, which is why the exhibition in theatres of “fictitious emotion strongly excited the sensibilities of the heart, without the possibility of their being exerted in virtuous action.” Not unlike those who today maintain that video games inure people to violence, religious leaders were concerned that the affective experiences audiences enjoyed in a playhouse could spill over and damage social proprieties. The consequence of the arousal of emotions in the theatre “is, and must be, a decrease in the power of feeling, without any corresponding increase in the strength of beneficent habit.” Theatre promoters maintained that the stage was either good for morals or so fanciful that it posed no threat to everyday morality, but the country’s clergy did not believe them. The fact that almost all the plays mounted in America were by British writers also aroused many patriots against them. In the second half of the eighteenth century, jurisdictions across the Northeast were so hostile that they passed laws preventing the performance of plays, and during the Revolution the Continental Congress ordered an end of all theatrical productions in the hope of severing the unwelcome link to the enemy.4 The uneven geographic spread of commercial entertainment revealed the power of the moral and religious opposition to it. Commercial amusement was restricted to occasional performances in assembly rooms and town halls in New England and Pennsylvania and more firmly rooted in areas that were more religiously diverse, such as the mid-Atlantic and the South. As pioneering theatre historian Glenn Hughes points out, these difference made the colonial South “the cradle of the Arts” in America. By the time of the Revolution, there were dedicated theatres in Baltimore, Maryland; Williamsburg, Norfolk, and Petersburg, Virginia; and Halifax, North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, in contrast, laws prohibiting the theatre were passed in 1700, 1706, 1713 and 1760, all prior to the appearance of any playhouses in the colony. In New England, even liberal divines, such as Boston Universalist Charles Chauncy, denounced the theatre as an arena of dangerous passion and a place antithetical to reasoned thought and moral restraint.5

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     17

The uncongenial climate changed slowly after the Revolution. According to Heather Nathans, at the end of the eighteenth century “resistance to theatrical activities [was] largely a subject of debate between factions who objected to the theatre for religious reasons, and elite groups, who supported the theatre as a link with ‘civilized’ British culture.” The elite groups who enjoyed watching British plays were powerful enough to skirt religious objections (Timothy Milford calls them “urbane Federalists”), but they were never especially numerous. Through their patronage, Boston was able to support two theatres by 1800, the Federal Street and the Haymarket, each of which catered to supporters of different political factions. In Philadelphia in the 1790s, taking all forms of entertainment together, there was enough to average one show performed in the city every other day; and in 1797, New York managed to average one performance per day for the first time. A professional theatre therefore existed by 1800, but it catered to the conspicuous elite, freethinkers, immigrants, sporting, men and roughs—“an assemblage of codfish aristocrats, snobs of the upper ten, and deadheads of the lower twenty,” in the words of one wag.6 Accompanying the modest establishment of the theatre after the Revolution was a change in certain aspects of the plays being performed. In the early years of the republic, the stage softened its satiric edge, groomed its nationalist image, and became more spectacular, even though it failed to fully lift the moral opprobrium that was attached to it. The ribald humor that characterized the plays of writers such as Wycherley and Congreve largely disappeared from American comedy, but the satire and cynicism remained. Comedy in the early republic continued to center on manners and ironic situations involving seduction, greed, and class aspiration. Vapid rich men attempting to seduce clever servants was a comic staple. Love was commonly depicted as irrational, uncontrollable, and oddly like a fever. Its main dramatic purpose was to lead characters away from duty and into folly. One of the earliest comedies by an American playwright, James Barker’s Tears and Smiles, which was produced in Philadelphia in 1807, is typical of the genre. The heroine is promised by her father in marriage to a “French” dandy and fop named Fluttermore. She is in love, however, with a young sailor of uncertain parentage who has made a hero of himself fighting the Barbary pirates. Most of the laughs come at the expense of Fluttermore, who is too clever in his conversation and too unmanly in his behavior to be taken seriously. This is a humor of stock characters that centers on the artificiality and immorality of aristocratic Europeans, praises the directness of the Yankees, and ridicules the pretensions of parvenus. Although there are no salacious jokes, there is a surfeit of wit, much of it directed at the audience, as when Fluttermore sneers

18    C H A PT E R

1

at American tastes: “I can’t conceive what you possibly do in this corner of the globe. No opera; no masquerade, nor fête, nor conversazione.” This type of dialogue is self-consciously amusing, reflecting a kind of coffee-house cynicism about society that originated in the social burlesque of the Stuart Restoration. But it also makes clear that even theatregoing Americans were somewhat proud of their unsophisticated tastes.7 The drama of the age remained as contrived as the comedy, though it began to feature more principled reflections on republican virtues. One of the most popular works of the period, George Washington’s favorite, was Addison’s Cato, written in 1712. Like other plays of principle—Dunlap’s André or his Glory of Columbia are in this genre—Cato was more concerned with laying out ethical positions than it was with emotion, relationships, or authenticity. Cato moves in the play against the backdrop of family, but he must put domestic relations and kinship aside in order to uphold the principle of patriotism. The most significant plays of the late eighteenth century revolved around the friction produced by conflicts related to important moral or philosophical positions; they arranged values to produce dramatic tension by having characters stand for things that other characters had to oppose. Incorporating republican values in productions and striving not to offend local pruderies did make the theatre more acceptable to some Americans, but these changes did not result in a new approach to dramaturgy. The theatre of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries centered on a vision of character grounded in language, and mannerisms. Speech, Daniel DeWispe­ lare points out, was a particularly profound and evocative social signifier, the best way of “externalizing the internal contours of the hidden mind” and one’s social condition: one’s class, vocational potential, national, regional, and ethnic derivation. Playwrights and actors used familiar accents and appearances to communicate a character as though the externalities were an accurate guide to the inner self. Describing this as a theatre centered on exteriorities is not a criticism, but a description of an aesthetic approach. The pleasures of the stage in the early republic were found on the surfaces rather than in the depths—in conventional gestures and dialects, in great speeches and witty asides instead of in an engagement with the inner turmoil, ideas, or emotions of the characters. In fact, plays of this time questioned the very idea that dramatic characters had “interiors” by stripping them of conscience and psychological motivation. Actors described their assumption of these external characteristics as “realistic” because they were rendered without affectation, not because they were true to life. Audiences went to the theatre expecting to see what they took to be a more perfect reality: a reproof of metaphysics that offered a vision of values manifested as extrinsic qualities

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     19

rendered in a fashion that made them plausible. This was a theatre for an age where reality was assumed to be stable and identifiable. Theatre became what Joseph Roach calls “an instrument of highly selective enlargement,” a means of aggregating visual and aural signifiers of class, ethnicity, character, gender, nationality, and principle.8 At the very end of the eighteenth century, change was introduced into the theatre of manners and principles in the form of sentimental dramas and songs imported from Europe. This development was anticipated by the appearance in the 1760s of Italian songs featuring minor-mode arie agitate that dramatized the suffering of heroines. By the 1780s, English parlor songs were in circulation that described the emotions of recognizable people in familiar situations instead of stylized shepherds and mythological figures. Gothic dramas and melodramas also began to be staged in the United States in the 1790s, many of which featured Italianate songs. Melodramas differed from plays of principle in that they moved the emotional underpinnings of action into the foreground. In melodramatic plays, desire or lust was not expressed in finely tailored language but in hyperbole, while heroism was presented not as a commitment to principles but as an emotive force. Still, both late eighteenth-century songs and turn-of-the-century melodramas remained rooted in a culture centered on manners and appearances. Until the 1820s, plays featured more action than the dramas of the eighteenth century, but it was more verbalized than shown. Similarly, while the songs suggested that one should select a mate for love and spoke of individual happiness, as Jon Finson points out, taken as a whole, they still had “a practical rather than idealistic ring to them.” Consequently, in the opinion of a writer in the American Magazine in 1788, sentimental art works seemed more like “sermons in dialogue” than “true pictures of life.” A Boston critic in 1792 agreed: “Instead of soothing or raising the soul and delighting the delicate fine ear, [sentimental works] only serve to rack and torture it with the violence of sounds.”9 Melodramas were generally big and expensive, demanding dozens of extras and complex machinery. Putting them on well required a substantial stage and actors with the chops to declaim loudly. Beginning in the 1790s, entertainment entrepreneurs tried to capitalize on the nascent popularity of melodrama and use it to overcome public resistance to entertainment by making a concerted effort to entice audiences to their houses with large-scale productions and more spacious and elegant halls. But the public still did not come in the numbers expected and managers were forced to fill the seats as best they could. According to early nineteenth-century writer and theatrical producer William Dunlap, this was in part because most decent people

20    C H A PT E R

1

continued to regard playhouses as immoral, raucous, and plebian. When “the wise and good desert the theatre,” he cautioned, managers had no choice but to “attract the idle and vicious by such entertainments as suits their ignorance or depravity.” Unfortunately, packing a house with “boys, vulgar brawlers, drunkards, rioters, thoughtless and vicious persons of both sexes” only made the theatre even less attractive to decent people, especially women. In the words of one fashionable Boston patron in 1818, “scarcely a night of performance passes, in which the respectable part of the audience is not disturbed in some manner. . . . Profane and vulgar language is frequently overheard, and by those disposed to direct their attention to the upper part of the house a row is not unfrequently [sic] witnessed.” Genteel Americans were not inclined to sit in dim airless spaces filled with malodorous and rowdy mechanics. “It is the audience that gives the tone to every part of the theatre,” Dunlap opined, and at American theatres, “in the presence of ladies at a play, common civility has been set at defiance, and the privilege of being a rude clown, even to a nuisance, has in a manner been demanded as . . . [a] right.”10 Theatres at the turn of the nineteenth century tried to ease class tensions by separating audience members along a vertical axis and thereby minimize their mingling. More affluent men and women invariably sat in the boxes that lined the walls or in the first balcony (appropriately named the “dress circle”). Above them, in the upper balcony (the third row) and gallery (which was nearest to the roof), sat the “other” audience for the theatre: the “deadheads of the lower twenty.” African Americans, prostitutes, and working men made up the audience that filled the upper balconies. On the ground floor, in “the pit,” or parquet, sat the more interested theatregoers, because from there they could see and hear the stage most clearly. Although the pit was the most socially diverse space, it was also a crowded, smelly, and vocal section of the house, so patrons needed strong nerves to choose it. The bulk of those sitting there were not rich people but clerical workers, less affluent professionals, and shop proprietors—members of what we might still call the middling class. Women did not sit in the pit. “Every part of the house has its different department,” Washington Irving joked in 1802. The “good folks in the gallery” make their interests known by “stamping, hissing, roaring, whistling,” and when the performers were “refractory[,] [by] groaning in cadence.” The elite spectators in the dress circle seemed to be there largely “to lounge away an idle hour, and play off their little impertinences for the entertainment of the public. They no more regard the merits of the play, nor the actors, than my cane. They even strive to appear inattentive; and I have seen them perched on the front of the box with [their] back to the stage.” If the behavioral divide between the gallery and the

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     21

dress circle below was especially stark, it was no less deep between the boxes and the pit. Box members, a pit customer complained, “are frequently more delighted with seeing and being seen among themselves than in attending to the performance.” A well-to-do theatre enthusiast who chose to sit in the pit did not think much of the boxes because “I cared little for the dresses and diamonds. . . . Feathers could not tickle my imagination, nor bright eyes take me from my propriety. On the contrary, I rather pitied the boxites; few of them appreciated, like myself and my associates, the shifting glories of the drama.” Boxes protected respectable women while at the same time providing a focus for the thinly veiled class and gender tensions that coursed through society. In 1818, a Boston theatregoer explained how “triumphant glances . . . are always thrown from the pit to the boxes . . . to say nothing of the approving shouts of the third row and gallery” whenever actors issued indelicate words or gestures.11 The confrontation of different classes, which the limited market for entertainment demanded and the drama of principles and the comedy of manners celebrated, became for many respectable Americans another reason not to go to the theatre. Close contact between classes, sexes, and races tended to occur only in the foyer, but even this proved too much for some patrons. “A party of ladies in entering or going from the Park Theatre in New York are liable to be brushed by the garments of the prostitute, and to be assailed by their unblushing looks and loud laughter,” complained a patron. Another magazine contributor in Boston concurred. At the Tremont, he wrote, the prostitutes enter “beside our wives—daughters—sisters! And they may TOUCH them! . . . Let no one, we repeat it, enter the house!”12 Early nineteenth-century Americans were stratified by education, manners, taste, and (especially) smell. Well-to-do people were not inclined to mix too closely with the unwashed masses. It was infinitely more pleasant to interact with one’s own type at private parties, balls, and dinners. The theatre could be left to the cultural snobs, the plebs, and the sinners. Despite the fact that the theatre occupied a more secure place in national life in 1830 than it had in 1790, social prejudices such as these, combined with the unrelenting hostility of the nation’s churches, served to keep the conventional stage a marginal presence. Theologians were an acrimonious group, but on the question of entertainment they spoke as one: theatres were to their minds places “where the youthful imagination has been polluted, where the dormant propensities to sin have been awakened, where the unholy passions of the heart inflamed.” Because they refused to make moral behavior situational, they held that one couldn’t be a good Christian and enjoy activities where immoral acts were simulated.13 Of course there was a

22    C H A PT E R

1

portion of the elite that could risk watching the shows that church leaders considered corrupting, and there was within the vast working-class population a reasonable market for inexpensive seats. But the middling class, a segment of the urban population rich enough to regularly attend the theatre and large enough to fill most of the seats, did not attend in substantial numbers. The statistics tell the story: until the 1830s, cities such as New York, New Orleans, and Boston supported less than half a dozen legitimate stages each; Philadelphia, constrained by its Quaker heritage, had just three. In the South, although the planter aristocracy and merchants patronized the theatre, it was never with enough regularity to make the business stable or to reduce its dependence on the sale of discounted seats. Most southern cities supported just one or two theatres apiece. As European tourists in the 1830s noted, by their standards, America was an entertainment wasteland.14 In an effort to combat the hesitancy of class-conscious and morally anxious Americans, theatre owners in the first decades of the nineteenth century introduced a number of innovations designed to attract audiences. Primary among them was what they called “the star system.” In the minds of playhouse managers, this was the cross they had to bear in order to draw any business at all. Under the system, a manager would sign a celebrated actor (until the 1830s almost always a European) to appear in his house for a fixed period during which the star performer would undertake a variety of leading roles. Managers made this attractive to foreign actors by offering them extremely high salaries and promising them lavish productions with well-trained supporting casts. These inducements forced theatres to maintain stock companies that the visiting star could plug into. The result was staggering overhead expenses in a business that already entailed high risk. “The money is mainly absorbed by the stars,” sighed a theatrical agent, but he could see no alternative. People, he maintained, “go to a theatre not to witness a play, but to see . . . a star.” With expenses locked up before the season began, even a slight downturn in custom—as happened following the financial panic of 1837—was enough to ruin many houses. “Stars demand a greater sum than any management can afford to pay,” a nationalistic theatre owner groaned in 1838, and “the American stage cannot rise from the slough of despond, while it is compelled to uphold the train of every penny star . . . [who] with the aid of letters and puffs prepared in Europe, [is] forced down the throats of the gullible American public.”15 The star system, however, was not really the problem. It was merely a symptom of something bigger: the limited popularity of the stage. “Even with Mr.  Cooke and Mr. Kean to perform them,” William Wood, the manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, explained in the mid-1820s,

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     23

“the public would grow weary of an eternal succession of the same dozen pieces night after night. Yet this is exactly what the star system engenders.” In other words, not only did managers have to secure big stars, but they also had to replace them at regular intervals in order to keep the audience returning. “Public taste requires variety,” a writer in a theatrical journal remarked, “and no matter how great the talent may be, constant repetition palls the appetite, and people sigh for a change.” It is small wonder that so few theatres survived more than a couple of seasons or that American managers had a reputation in Europe for not living up to their contractual agreements. Unpaid wages and broken contracts were the inevitable companions of an industry subject to high costs and unpredictable demand.16 With so little financial maneuvering room, theatre entrepreneurs came to regard all supplementary income sources, such as the sale of programs, food, and drink, as essential to their business’s profitability. Washington Irving, a regular theatregoer, wrote that the New York playhouse he patronized was becoming increasingly like “a coffee house. . . . It is the polite lounge where the idle and curious resort, to pick up the news of the fashionable world; to meet their acquaintances, and to shew themselves off to advantage. As to the dull souls who go for the sake of the play, why if their attention is interrupted by the conversation of their neighbors, they must bear it with patience.” Theatre barrooms became an especially steady source of cash after 1800. In fact, although they publically maintained that they served liquor and food merely as a service to their customers, in reality owners geared the entire experience of attending a show to the sale of these goods. In conventional houses, intermissions were frequent and long and playbills provided detailed descriptions of the action so that patrons returning late from a break could figure out what they’d missed. It was accepted practice for audience members to enter and leave a hall during the performance and the bar was always open.17 Because so many respectable Americans were antipathetic to the stage, most managers felt there were no alternatives to the terrible economics of the star system or their dependence on liquor. Some of them clearly knew, as one observed in 1841, that so long as “the pious and enlightened remain either hostile of indifferent to this great enterprise it can never be successfully prosecuted.” But attracting them seemed an impossible task. “It is fashionable to attend the theatre,” sermonized a minister in Philadelphia in 1840, but “probably not one in twenty of our citizens ever enter these establishments. Among the most respected and wealthy merchants, and among the great majority in the learned professions, among the enterprising mechanics, among the really intelligent and virtuous portion of the female sex, how few enter the doors of a theatre? Indeed, it would ruin the commercial credit

24    C H A PT E R

1

of any man to be known as devoted to theatrical amusements.” In truth, explained another, because the vast mass of “enlightened” Americans were pious people, they would not go to the theatre because they did not believe it could be ever be “so purified as to make it the hand-maid of morality as well as of amusement.”18

Pleasure Gardens Not all forms of commercial entertainment faced the same level of opprobrium, however. Commercial pleasure gardens first came to America in the 1750s, and over the next half-century they became important elements of the urban leisure industry. By the 1790s, many of them, such as Gray’s Garden in Philadelphia, the Spring Garden in Alexandria, and the Mount Vernon Garden in New York, were offering open-air concerts, circus entertainments, plays, and pantomimes. Commercial gardens appealed for many reasons: they expressed the Enlightenment ideal of measured enjoyment, they validated conspicuous consumption and public display, they encouraged the contemplation of nature and sentimental pastoralism, and they provided urban families with places of relatively healthy retreat. Because they were not conventional theatres, the nation’s moral leaders generally ignored the stages they provided and the shows they featured. In validating light entertainment and sentimental reflection, commercial gardens made a major, albeit generally overlooked, contribution to the revolution that was to produce mass entertainment. Pleasure gardens were city-block-sized estates that charged patrons a fee for admission. Inside their walls pedestrians found arbors and meadows, graveled walkways, monuments and statuary, fountains, and entertainers such as rope walkers and jugglers. Stalls were set up in grottos to sell ice cream, lemonade, and wine, and lanterns lit the walkways in the evening. Commercial gardens were elegant little places of escape from the cacophony of early nineteenth-century urban life—from the smells of sweat and decaying garbage, of unventilated buildings and tight spaces. They were, in fact, one of the few urban areas where one might go to “air oneself after the confinement of the day.” The garden he patronized in his youth, a visitor recalled many years later, was “the most gorgeous and beautiful place on earth.” A physician agreed: Gray’s Gardens in Philadelphia, he wrote, provided “scenes romantic and delightful beyond the power of description.” For many Americans, walking around a garden was especially attractive because it aroused pleasant feelings and encouraged calm and reflective thoughts. Those who struggle in the world of enterprise, “alone and sheathed like the pine upon the mountain

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     25

top,” mused one Maryland advocate of public gardens, will find “that there is recuperative principle . . . in the reviving tree and the budding flower, which the breath of Heaven awakens to life, beauty, immortality—emblems of the christian’s hope.”19 Before the 1830s, almost all American gardens catered to a well-to-do clientele who came out on summer evenings to mingle together and show off. Pleasure gardens were particularly inviting for respectable women because they were both pastoral and utterly devoid of privacy. Women felt safe knowing that others were watching them. In northern cities, a tourist joked, people visited gardens “to exchange a dish of scandal or gossip, as well as sweetmeats.” Enjoying a garden walk was a way of keeping track of ­others under the guise of communing with nature. At Gray’s Garden, “much well-dressed company” could be observed walking the paths, and each group would “mark the different parties pursuing the various paths, as inclination led.” Walking was an especially potent way of making a public statement about private relationships. “It is very much the fashion here for the ­gentlemen of an evening to promenade with their sweethearts,” a visitor to New York commented in 1816. By transferring a courtship outdoors, the garden promenade at once naturalized it and distanced it from associations that were private and potentially scandalous.20 The Vauxhall, New York’s longest-lasting garden, was a descendant of one of the country’s first, the Bowling Green, which opened in the 1750s. The Vauxhall was considered an especially “beautiful retreat,” singular in its loveliness with “delightful shade [that] will captivate those who desire to see nature clothed by a beautiful Providence in richest livery.” In 1797, this neat little square of greenery was purchased by the French confectioner Joseph Delacroix and rich New Yorkers took to strolling around while eating one of the sweet-maker’s famous frozen creams. Located at the present junction of Warren and Greenwich Streets, the Vauxhall was also the first of New York’s gardens to install a covered stage.21 Paradoxically, it was the very openness of the theatre in the garden that served to screen it from the gaze of the country’s moral leadership. Observation was critical here because the public space of the garden was open to surveillance and could be subjected to communitarian norms of behavior. Unlike conventional theatres, which compressed people into a confined, vertically structured, dimly lit world, the garden placed its entertainments in the open, in the context of a visible community life. Many parents were comfortable enough with the setting to attend the garden theatres with their children. Looking back on his childhood, Lyman Abbott, the Congregationalist theologian, remarked that the shows he watched as a boy at pleasure gardens

26    C H A PT E R

1

in the 1840s “were the delight of my life. . . . I wonder whether I am still boy enough to enjoy it all now, or whether I should see through the illusion and wonder at my wonder.” John Brougham, who managed a garden theatre for several years, recalled “the open air feature” as being, along with the “fancy drinks,” the key attractions to visitors. “There was not much of a garden, as I remember, but the theatre was open on one side, and there was a kind of freedom allowed that made it very attractive.” Because the gardens charged admission and screened customers, they were able to keep out street walkers and less affluent people. They offered a space, as Jonathan Conlin explains, “in which members of a rising middling rank could mingle with their superiors.” Although they were far more democratic than theatres, which stratified customers on different floors, they were also much less inclusive. Pleasure gardens were patronized only by the more affluent, upwardly mobile, and well-dressed citizens; not until the 1830s and 40s would the surviving inner-city ones be taken over by a rougher crowd. This was why the garden theatre was something new in America and something quite unlike the conventional theatres: they were public spaces of amusement that policed class distinctions.22 In the early 1820s, William Niblo, a New York businessman, decided to try something new: he laid out a garden organized around a large stage and dining area. Although eating and drinking al fresco while listening to music or watching a Punch and Judy show was nothing new, Niblo innovated by bringing together the restaurant, the theatre, and the pleasure garden. The enterprising Niblo was already an established restaurateur when he opened his garden, having risen in catering in a classic rags-to-riches fashion by marrying the daughter of the owner of one New York’s leading chop houses. When his father-in-law retired, William took over the business, the Bank Coffee House, and ran it with great success for the next twenty years. Niblo’s restaurant on Pine Street was a place where wealthy brokers and merchants would gather to drink wine, eat mutton, and gossip about business.23 Inevitably, when Niblo laid out his garden on the site of the former Bayard farm, he imagined serving suppers there, just as Delacroix or Contoit, the confectioners, imagined their gardens as places to sell ice cream and cake. The block Niblo purchased contained a large and airy auditorium, known as the stadium, which had once been used as an equestrian arena. It also had a smaller building that Niblo opened on its garden side and converted into a saloon. It proved a winning combination and it quickly became “the thing” for elite New Yorkers to “run up and spend an evening at Niblo’s.” Here genteel customers sat protected from the elements at tables where they consumed “lemonades, wines, punches, [and] little suppers” while listening

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     27

to concerts, skits, or burlesques. It was a pleasant retreat, and Niblo’s Garden soon became known as a place where one might “go into conviviality and spend a joyous evening.” It was also a genteel establishment “attended by persons of high respectability, though such constitute but a small part of our theatre-going community.” Indeed, “from its splendid decorations in addition to the youth and beauty that nightly visit it,” remarked one patron, “it has more the appearance of Mahomet’s paradise than a terrestrial spot scarcely more than an acre in extent. It is the resort of elegance and fashion.” Niblo’s operated in a “splendid manner,” noted another observer in the spring of 1825. “Such a continual stream of beauty and refinement has seldom been witnessed as nightly flow around its walks.”24 So great was his success with the garden saloon that Niblo realized that his entertainments could generate money all year round. Consequently, in the late 1820s, he renovated the stadium and transformed it into the Sans Souci Theatre, which included a stage and eating area. It was a daring move. By enclosing the stage, Niblo risked reversing the achievement of his open-air entertainment, and he seems to have understood this well enough to keep the outdoor and indoor spaces closely associated by opening the Sans Souci at the back, where it merged into the garden. In 1843, Niblo expanded the Sans Souci by constructing a long low, greenhouse-like structure alongside it. This new combination, commonly called Niblo’s Garden Theatre, preserved the pastoral features by emphasizing openness, light, and the consanguinity of theatre, saloon, and foliage. The theatre’s foyer occupied the width of the building and opened onto the street with a series of “large plate glass doors,” while its ceiling, supported by Corinthian columns, was painted with a fresco depicting the sky. A large vestibule lay behind the foyer, illuminated by thirty gaslights. From there, one could move into the gardens on the left, the saloon on the right, or walk straight ahead into the formal concert hall (the original Sans Souci). The vestibule’s ceiling was white and gold, “elaborately ornamented in relief,” and the doors on either end were large and glass. The auditorium seated a thousand people, and its glass doors opened onto the garden; the saloon was just on the other side of a strip of greenery. At this point, Niblo appears to have eliminated food and drink from the actual theatre space. But his garden stage remained a place of familial and light-hearted entertainment, home to pantomimes and band music, so no one objected to its enclosure or worried over its impact on morals. In fact, the garden theatre’s immense success can be explained by the fact that it “was patronized by a large class of people who had a holy horror of profane theatres.”25 Niblo’s success brought imitators, and a number of “German-style beer gardens” with stages soon appeared, such as New York’s Tivoli Garden. Like

28    C H A PT E R

1

Niblo’s, these businesses diminished the garden and devoted most of their attention to the more lucrative theatricals, for which they began to charge extra, and to the drinking. But like Niblo’s they maintained the pretense of pastoralism. When the Tivoli Garden enclosed its theatre, for example, it attempted to preserve as much of the garden feel as possible. “The saloon,” reported a newspaper critic after his first visit in 1842, “which is turned into a theatre is exceedingly spacious; it gives room for a sufficient stage with ample room behind . . . in the front of which is an orchestra of convenient size, where a band of twelve performers of excellent quality [played]. . . . The side of the audience part of the theatre has several French windows through which the visitors can walk into a spacious balcony outside, and from thence down into the gardens, or along wide galleries . . . [where] parties can partake, at their pleasure[,] of ices, lemonades, and other refreshments.” Similarly, the Volksgarten theatre, according to an 1839 visitor, had alcoves all around that were filled with bushes, flowers, and potted trees in order to convey the impression of an open space. Although now enclosed, saloon theatres such as these remained open to the garden and as such they continued to appeal to those “who do not desire to sit in a crowded audience but will listen to the music and while away these hot evenings with something like comfort amid the flowers and under the canopy of green leaves.”26

Vaudeville It was in the airy space of his Sans Souci theatre that William Niblo made his second important contribution to the incipient entertainment revolution by introducing variety, or what was at the time and would later be called vaudeville. Variety was a French word that had been associated since the Revolution with the comic theatre and light opera. It was generally used to refer to places where popular shows were staged, as in the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. The word “vaudeville” was also French, though it was known in America from the 1790s because it appeared regularly in reviews of the European comic theatre. It was properly used to describe farcical operettas; works where songs were interspersed with dialogue, that had plots and characters even though performances included random buffoonery and acrobatics. Visiting troupes did not bring this theatrical form across the Atlantic until the late 1820s, when works such as Scribe’s “comic vaudeville” Le Charlatanisme were performed in French in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. But the term was never fully fixed to the French form, and musical farces would soon come to be known in America as burlesques. At the same time, thanks in large part to the success of the French acrobats and pantomime artists in the Ravel family,

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     29

who in the 1830s became a staple feature at Niblo’s, vaudeville took on a whole new meaning.27 It is hard to exaggerate the influence of the Ravels on American entertainment in the years before the Civil War. They appeared at regular intervals at Niblo’s from 1828 until the 1860s, and over the years they toured most of the nation’s larger cities. A decade after their first appearance, William Niblo managed to secure them on contract for an extended run, and for the next twenty years “their entire vaudeville company” would be the theatre’s main attraction. So consistent was their popularity that in 1857 Niblo’s engaged them for an astounding 300 nights broken down into four performances a week.28 The Ravels’ success was partly due to the format of their act. Comprised of one long or several short pantomimes interspersed with unrelated short turns—dancing, juggling, acrobatics—their show was perfectly suited to a migratory audience that arrived and left at different times. Unlike conventional plot-driven and wordy comedies or true French vaudevilles, the Ravels’ theatre was initially designed to capture the attention of audience members who were eating and drinking and socializing. The pantomimes had extraordinarily simple stories (as befits silent comedy) and attracted interest because of their acrobatic, magical, and spectacular effects. Green Monster and White Knight, for example, had a flying imp, a balloon that descended and rose, a character who has his arms and legs separated from his body (they continued to move once severed), an earthquake, a monster, a tightrope walker, a comic vocalist, and a number of solo dances. The individual turns within the pantomime were distinct enough that several of the Ravels’ performers, such as the acrobat Joseph Marzetti, who played a monkey in the pantomime Jocko, or the Ape of the Brazils, reprised their act in minstrel and variety houses.29 The Ravels were brilliant dancers, acrobats, and comedians, and they created a new type of physical comedy in America. The troupe numbered up to forty performers who rope danced, vaulted, juggled, tumbled, flipped, and performed “pantomime ballets.” The alienist William McLane Hamilton captured something of the improvisational slapstick appeal of a Ravels’ performance in his recollection of one comic turn from near the end of their long career: “I recall a trick in which Gabriel [Ravel] the clown was besieged at the top of a lighthouse, and seeing one of his pursuers standing below, dropped a cannon ball upon him. The result was that the man beneath was completely flattened out; then a companion appeared with a pair of bellows, inserted the nozzle somewhere in the flat remains, and inflated them, when the revived and restored figure walked off the stage.”30

30    C H A PT E R

1

According to a Harper’s critic, the members of the Ravel troupe had been “formed by nature to make extremes meet . . . doubling up their anatomies, jumping out of unexpected meal bags and into impossible chimneys.”31 Their vaudeville was ideally suited to a theatre where other activities were going on because it rested on simple stories, stereotypical characters, and short, rapidly changing numbers. Central to this, as it would always be to comedy, was the manipulation of familiar elements. Audience members whose attentions were divided needed to be able to look up and know instantly what was happening on stage. But at the same time, from the artists’ perspective, that wandering attention had to be anchored for as long as possible, which encouraged performers to favor the unexpected, the shocking, and the extravagant. Variety artists such as the Ravels therefore specialized in surprising and attention-grabbing comic twists—as in the feat with the bellows and the deflated pursuer—and startling acts of balance and dexterity. This singular juxtaposition of elements—the familiar and the stereotypical with the improvisational and shocking—would remain the core element of American vaudeville for over a century. Crucially, the idea underpinning vaudeville was that acts had to excite interest in order to be successful. The performers’ expectation was that surprise would create attentiveness, and it was therefore a theatre hostile to immobility. Vaudeville audiences walked around, ordered drinks and food, and talked among themselves, so performers wanted to connect to their audience by focusing attention on what they were doing. Although spectators in conventional theatres were not eating and drinking during shows, in a fundamental way the approach to spectatorship was the same in vaudeville, dramas of principle, melodramas, and social comedies. In all theatrical entertainments it was assumed that the spectators’ attention had to be fixed on the stage. Audience-members were presumed to be distracted and uninvolved. Consequently, where more conventional productions employed words and ideas to rivet attention, melodramas relied on the incidents and actions, and vaudevilles secured attention through novelty and surprise, In all these cases, spectators were involved in the show only as observers. They commented on the performance vocally and sometimes with thrown garbage. They behaved as rival objects of observation, but they were not engaged participants in the stage action. While they shared an approach to spectator engagement, the garden stage and the conventional playhouse differed in significant ways. Most important, the garden theatres were the first to break through the public’s moral hesitancy and draw respectable Americans out to amusements. “Once established, Mr. Niblo’s Saloon became both the head-quarters of the first

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     31

families, and the leading place of amusement in New York,” a journalist recalled. What was so striking to contemporaries was that places such as Niblo’s garden attracted both the rich and the moderately well-to-do. It was still uncommon for entertainments to attract a middling-class audience, which is why, in the 1830s, reporters frequently commented on the fact that “the mass which this little piece of rural scenery attracts from the tide of human beings” was increasingly “composed of material as dissimilar as can easily be imagined. . . . Other places of resort are generally attended by particular classes. At the theatre you meet one kind, at most public assemblies another, perhaps at balls and parties a third; but at Niblo’s they all rally around a common point. Here one might find “wealthy inhabitants of the city” with their “wi[ves] and daughters loaded with finery,” young clerks “not rich” and in need of “application” but with the “ambition of the city buck,” writers and poets wandering indolently, businessmen casting off the stresses of the day, and even citizens of leisure, “well fed, genteel and rich,” with “a dashing fashionable air” about them. Visitors to the various gardens after the mid-1820s frequently noted how remarkable it was to run into such a diversity of people: the “nob and the snob” is how the wealthy lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong described them. This was not an audience comprised of all classes in society, but it did include the rich and middling class.32 Conventional theatres, like public squares and churches, were places that had the potential to bring into proximity individuals and families of diverse stations and characters, but in the hierarchical structure of their seating they embodied rather than transcended social distinctions. It was only in the lobby or the vestibule that people of different social backgrounds rubbed shoulders, and there only briefly and in passing. The gardens, however, not only attracted the custom of men, women, and children, they also pushed people into contact along the horizontal. The garden saloons did not have boxes or tiers or pits; everyone sat at tables on a level field, so to speak. All the gardens charged enough admission to keep poorer folk out, but their patronage was still incredibly heterogeneous by contemporary urban standards. Variety shows like those offered at Niblo’s may not have broken any molds in terms of taste expectations or audience perception, but the garden saloons, with their conviviality, light entertainment, and greenery, were nonetheless innovators. The country’s spiritual leaders were united in their hostility to the conventional theatre well into the 1840s, but they paid little heed to the garden stages. Entering a dark theatre and being swept away by fantasy was clearly immoral, but the same could not be said of watching a dancer or acrobat in the open air while enjoying a drink or a meal. As George Templeton

32    C H A PT E R

1

Strong explained, the entertainment the Ravels provided was “coarse and trivial, but very vigorous and not unwholesome.” He went there often with his wife and children and always “had a very good time.”33 Vaudeville, as practiced in America, was seen as a complement to conversation, food, and drink, not an alternate reality. In this way the variety theatre was able to cast off the cloak of spiritual opprobrium and eventually secure a respectable audience. It all seemed harmless enough, even in a society whose well-to-do citizens were intensely concerned with appearances.

The Sentimental Turn A large part of the appeal of pleasure gardens was that they put city people in touch with nature. Gardens were not, of course, “natural”; they were arranged and planted. But for turn-of-the-century Americans, that made them only the more beautiful. In the era before romanticism changed thinking about the natural world, the environment was most meaningfully observed in idealized form, corrected so as to minimize its unruly features. In the mid-eighteenth century, garden aesthetics in England had been transformed by landscape designers seeking to create a picturesque effect or the illusion that the garden was in a natural state. American commercial gardens, at least judging from contemporary pictures, were only marginally affected by this fashion. They remained, until the 1840s, linear and symmetrical, developed on grids marked by hedges and trees, with the natural irregularities confined to specific flower beds or bowers.34 But just as the arrival of Italian song and gothic melodrama in the 1790s heralded something new, the pleasure gardens, in their limited informal touches and in their family-oriented vaudevilles, gave physical shape to a budding reorientation toward feeling. Sentimentality, as an artistic and cultural expression, arrived in America in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, but it took time for its influence to become pervasive. Commercial gardens and melodramatic plays were incubators of the sentimental impulse because they appealed to the senses, whether in the contemplation of ideal forms of nature or in the excitement of watching an epic struggle on stage. Song was another cultural product that advanced the turn toward feeling. In the 1780s, singing became increasingly influenced by a set of techniques that were widely considered to be more emotive. Most important among them were an increasing use of vibrato, melisma (stretching a syllable over a run of notes), and, especially, portamento (a slide from an accented to an unaccented note, coupled with a delicate swell and fade of the voice).35 These mannerisms all came to be associated with an “Italian” approach to singing drawn

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     33

from bel canto operas that would come to dominate genteel vocal style from the 1820s to the Civil War. From these stylistic roots, sentimentality would grow to become what Shirley Samuels calls “the heart of nineteenth-century American culture.” As a characteristic of literature, politics, music, relationships, and architecture, it involved using tools of expression designed to evoke a particular form of emotional response that was referred to as compassion or, more commonly, sympathy. The essence of sentimentality was the belief that when individuals felt strong emotions on behalf of others—and this was different from simply loving them—they were exhibiting the highest human virtue. Feeling empathy or sympathy for someone else led, it was felt, to compassionate behavior, which was what good Christians hoped to achieve in their social interactions. Sentimentality has often been criticized as maudlin and superficial, but it was actually a remarkably nuanced and sophisticated cultural and social belief system. In the first place, it rested on the idea that individuals could see through appearances and understand the deeper, truer motivations of others’ actions and feelings. Second, it held that we were so alike as humans that we were able to vicariously feel what others were experiencing. Third, it advanced the idea that emotions were directly wired to moral virtue, which meant that God worked through them. Finally, it maintained that self-discipline and training were needed to “refine” emotions and lift them to a place where they could be turned to compassionate purpose, which is why John Locke thought that children should be given pets to train on. Sentimentality was linked to spiritual awakening in that both rested on the belief that feelings were subject to refinement and that the more one exercised positive emotions such as empathy or self-denial for others, the better one would become as a person and the closer one would become to God.36 “The whole [human] system, mind and body,” an American medical student explained in 1799, “is one mass of general sympathy.” As a scientific observation this may seem nonsensical, but it was a view that had won general acceptance among physicians and scientists during the Enlightenment. Humans, it was conceded, were physically quite similar to animals, but comparative anatomy was insufficient grounds for placing animals and people in the same class or order. What was crucial to scientists of the Enlightenment was that people had “innate” spiritual potentialities that separated them from beasts and gave them the capacity to live in societies, create art, admire beauty, and worship God. That critical differentiator, progressive scientists and physicians argued, was sympathetic feeling.37 Humans were capable of being uplifted by the happiness of others and distressed by their misery and this, according to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral

34    C H A PT E R

1

Sentiments, was what distinguished people from beasts. Through empathy, Smith observed, “we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure the same person with the agent.” Smith’s view was similar to that of the influential philosopher John Locke. Locke argued in Some Thoughts concerning Education (judged to be “perhaps the most significant text in the Anglo-American enlightenment”) that the foundation of human society could be traced to “compassion,” or the ability to experience what others were feeling. Without compassion, Locke maintained, individuals would never surrender their autonomy and agree to live together.38 Underlying the emphasis that British Enlightenment philosophy placed on “sentiments” was the conviction that all people had different “sides.” Emotions that were personally uplifting or spiritually improving were called sensibilities, sympathies, or sentiments in order to distinguish them from passions, which were widely conceived as selfish, base or degrading. The belief in the duality of human nature made empathy into a form of self-control, a means of mastering the passionate and antisocial side of human nature and directing it in positive ways. For sentimentalists, emotions were both the source of human creativity, goodness, and love and the wellspring of selfishness, violence, and lust. Individuals had to “refine” their passions if they were to serve constructive ends. This could be done through various forms of self-discipline, including the application of reason, caring, and a reliance on strict codes of ethical behavior. Feeling empathetic love for a spouse or a child was generally regarded as good training for a compassionate life. But for the faithful, the best way of ensuring the sublime purity of one’s emotions was to allow God into one’s heart. This could be achieved through a spiritual awakening or it could be done in the mundane world by working on developing one’s feelings for others. By reading books, listening to stories, viewing art, and hearing sermons that inspired compassion, people were able to cultivate their emotions and their love for others and so rise up the ladder of goodness. This is why, as historian Richard Bushman observed, soulful feeling became “itself part of the refining process,” a way to “burn away vulgarity.”39 The fascination of Enlightenment thinkers with sympathy, as the American writer William Dean Howells so beautifully observed, grew out of the “efflorescence from the dust of systems and creeds,” and it “carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine.”40 It began, as the novelist implied, as a critical and scientific observation, a way of shifting the understanding of humanity away from Christian doctrine and toward something that seemed empirical and commonsensical. It fit in with a belief that people learned values from experiences assimilated

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     35

through their senses. As a way of experiencing those senses, “compassion” was a concept that allowed freethinkers to balance the competing ideas of individualism and community, materialism and idealism, without resorting to what they viewed as hidebound notions of religious duty or hierarchical privilege. But the focus on the individual that accompanied the elevation of reason and science during the Enlightenment had troubling implications for Christians. Individualism moved the keys to heaven from the pulpit and scripture to the self and the spirit, which was also the source of earthly wants and desires. To make matters worse, by the end of the eighteenth century, “the business, profits and pleasures of temporal existence [had] crowded out the mysteries of eternity,” turning “the big issue . . . from ‘Shall I be saved?’ to ‘How shall I be happy?’ ”41 The idea that gratifications of the flesh might supplant the devotions of the soul was upsetting to religious thinkers, and it inspired them to look for new ways of reintegrating body and spirit in order to ensure the continued subordination of the former to the latter. In the United States, the disestablishment of the churches and the perceived rise of deism threatened religious authority and made it all the more important for church leaders to counter the perceived trend toward unbelief. Ultimately, American divines found a way of reconnecting the spiritual and the material by assimilating the idea of sympathy or compassion. In the 1790s, as the first great revival waned and churches emptied, many religious leaders looked for ways to reignite the faith of their parishioners. Some clergymen discovered that they were able to lead the sinful back onto the path to righteousness with an appeal to emotion. Among the Protestant denominations, it was the Second Great Awakening that demonstrated the value of an emotional appeal and, in so doing, sanctified the orientation toward feeling. The main expression of the second awakening was a continuous sequence of religious revivals between 1800 and 1860, but the spirit of revival was bigger than the camp or prayer meeting. It involved a new belief that sinners might turn away from evil in the material world by surrendering themselves to God. Although liberal religious leaders in the United States continued to base their faith in reasoned arguments about biblical texts and more conservative ones still emphasized the total depravity of humankind, the more innovative approach was to appeal to emotions and to suggest that one could escape a selfish life through individual effort. This was distilled during the awakening into an experience of conversion that, among Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists, depended on a direct, personal, and affective experience of guilt and an equally intense acceptance of Jesus’ death as atonement for our sins.

36    C H A PT E R

1

The Social Feeling In the history of sentimentality, it was the process that was important. Because people could experience God’s love emotionally, redemption linked the spirit and individual feeling. This both validated affect as a path to the good life and moved mainstream American Protestant religious culture in far more materialist, or worldly, directions. If individuals could cleanse themselves and rededicate their lives to God, then so could society as a whole. The Second Great Awakening thus unleashed a zealous quest for personal and social improvement. Emotion, even for those critical of the revivalist fervor, such as Episcopalians, was accepted as the “attendant circumstance of the new birth.”42 If emotional release was the trigger that empowered people to renounce sin and overturn vice, then affect might also serve positive functions when allowed into other aspects of people’s lives. Social reformers adopted the evangelical method and used oratory and exhortation to convince opponents to cast off selfishness and work to improve the lives of others. One could master evil by arousing the sinful to experience compassion for their victims, which was one of the tasks that Harriet Beecher Stowe set herself in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.43 In a remarkably short time, the emotional appeal to sinners that they turn their lives around served to reinvigorate the churches. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, the post-Revolution decline in the number of the faithful had been reversed, enough for him to conclude that “there is no country in the world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” Methodists and, to a lesser extent, Baptists, spearheaded the religious transformation of the early nineteenth century, accounting for almost 70 percent of those with membership in Protestant churches. By emphasizing the role of feeling as an improving force, revivalists spread ideals of sympathy through America’s geographically and socially divided society. In its idealistic and transcendentalist forms, this belief was expressed in the idea that God’s truth could be found in the depths of the soul and that feeling and intuition were the means of releasing it. For more materialist thinkers, sensibilities were a means of accessing knowledge, maintaining social order, and assessing worth.44 Critically, then, feeling became for many Americans what it was for evangelicals: an instrument of spiritual improvement. Jane Tompkins has argued that nineteenth-century sentimental literature employed motifs borrowed from religious tracts, sermons, and sinners’ confessions. It was in this literature that one can find the origins of such potent images as the death of the pious child, the abuse of the honest woman by a drunken man, and

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     37

the martyrdom of the slave. The essential feature in these tracts, and sentimentality’s religious inheritance, was an emphasis on establishing a direct and personal connection between the narrator and the reader or listener. This link both rested on empathy, which Abigail Adams, wife of the second president, called the “social feeling,” and on the principle of exhortation, through which the preacher touched the soul of the sinner and led him or her to feel the purifying breath of God.45 Lifted to prominence on the waves of evangelicalism, the importance of feeling to morality came to be accepted by all but the most conservative believers. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in a household governed by her father’s strict Calvinist moral code, she, like many early nineteenth-century Americans, came to see sympathy as a key to eventual salvation. “There is a ladder to heaven,” she wrote, “whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul grows higher and higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises into the image of the divine.”46 In the first half of the nineteenth century, sentimentality became America’s guiding culture. This does not mean that everyone was a sentimentalist or that they shared a single belief structure or world view (as James Johnson writes, “perceptual change occur[s] unevenly”), but the influence of sensibility could be felt everywhere. The intimacy of the home and the affections of men and women were primary ways that sentimentality was made manifest socially and culturally, and, as historian Mary Ryan has shown, the “history of class and religion are hopelessly entangled with questions of family and gender.” Affection was an expression of compassion: the ability of one individual to identify with someone else to the extent that they felt the same feelings as them. Sentimental Americans, who liked to create rank orders of feelings, generally placed love pretty close to the top, surpassed only by the moral emotion of feeling compassion for a stranger. “There are gratifications secured by the senses,” wrote Stowe, “pleasures of taste, the happiness of giving and receiving affection” and, above all, there was love, the highest enjoyment “resulting from our moral nature.”47 Affection for a spouse was a particular sign both of movement toward God and a mark of one’s status as a member of respectable society. “So powerfully were the Victorians attracted to an image of family intimacy,” writes historian Anne Rose, “that they tried hard . . . to model elective friendships on what they envisioned as resonant family bonds.” Loving a spouse, not in a passionate way but by feeling empathy for the other, was a deeply Christian and moral activity. Training for marriage and the compassionate life by modeling close friendships on spousal relations was common, which meant that

38    C H A PT E R

1

interactions between young people carried enormous social weight, particularly in smaller places where anonymity was impossible. This led one rather unsentimental mechanic at the Amoskeag Mill in New Hampshire in the 1830s to complain that “a young man cannot be seen with a girl without the most outrageous stories being told about him.” Single men and women shared beds with friends of the same sex, hugged, kissed, walked arm in arm, read literature to each other, and proclaimed their undying love. The young Daniel Webster so loved his friend James Hervey Bingham, whom he called his “Dearly Beloved,” that he expressed his feelings in the only terms he had for his affections: marital ones. “I knew not how closely our feelings were interwoven,” he wrote his friend when he moved away, “had no idea how hard it would be to live apart.” Abraham Lincoln, as a young romantic in Springfield, Illinois, seemed to imagine every friendship he formed with a woman as a kind of contract that could only be resolved in marriage. As Arthur Schlesinger pointed out, Lincoln was not anomalous in this, because for sympathetic Americans an affective marital relationship was the “only proper basis of companionship with the other sex.”48 But sensibility was more than a domestic ideology. It affected most aspects of antebellum American culture, though it did so in various ways and was put to different uses. For example, the critical nineteenth-century shift in legal approaches to criminality from action to intention was a manifestation of sympathy: those who did not intend to commit a crime were considered less culpable than those who did. Determining criminal intent required jurors to look inside the accused and attempt to understand their motivations and moral characters. This notion of connecting with others through compassionate understanding was an essential element of sentimentality. Compassionate feelings were also revealed in public expressions and social performances, such as promenading in a garden. “The private moment of sentimental individualism” notes the cultural critic Allan Sekula, “was shadowed . . . [by] public looks.”49 Loving couples walked the streets and later had themselves photographed, melancholy young men withdrew into themselves where others might easily see them, statesmen wept and ranted in public, believers moaned at mass revivals. Displaying feelings was status enhancing. Men of strong sentiment wanted other men to see them conversing tenderly with women or escorting them about. Women might have their reputations ruined by socializing in public with the wrong man, but to be seen in the company of a sensitive and sincere one was empowering. Sentimentality was observable in house architecture and design; in popular fiction; in the music, theatre, and art people consumed; in the newspapers they read; and in the letters and journals they wrote. Feeling became

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     39

a measure of people’s respectability. It was what separated those of the elite and middling class from the poor, uncultured, and laboring masses. It was democratic to the extent that anyone might refine their affections, but it was also divisive because it created its own hierarchy. As the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, a periodical geared to self-improvement, explained, what made a gentleman was “in the mind. Whoever is open, just and true; whoever is honorable in himself, and in his judgment of others, and requires no law but his word to make him fulfill an engagement—such a man is a gentleman.”50 What sensibility offered was not merely a way of separating people into refined and rough, saved and sinners, but also an instrument of really fine gradation. One could assign people a rank order depending on their respectability, on the polish of their manners and emotions. This is why sentiment became so important to defining the antebellum middling class. It may have begun as a fad among the literati and elite of the Enlightenment, but, popularized in large part through the Second Great Awakening, it became a democratic tool of class definition.51 Compassion was the kind of social cement that was ideally suited to a society deeply divided racially and economically. Sympathy did not break down differences; rather, it reassured “the best” people of their ability to identify with each other despite them. Writing in 1823, the Massachusetts lawyer and poet Richard Henry Dana Sr. observed that while all people “are capable of understanding and feeling,” the most refined people were capable of “moral feeling,” or compassion. Even in the slaveholding South, sentimentality helped justify human bondage because it reconfigured slaves as romantic lovers or children who were devoted to their masters and emotionally dependent upon them. Slave owners, at the same time, were able to imagine themselves enthralled in an emotional relationship where they were duty bound to care for their human chattel. What Jefferson called the “daily exercise in tyranny” that mastery over slaves involved did represent a powerful threat to the virtues of white owners, but the restraint of those passions, which slavery’s defenders insisted most masters achieved, was presented as evidence of the superior moral cultivation and emotional refinement of southern slave-holding whites.52 Acceptance of rank or status was intrinsic to sentiment, even if, in placing the emphasis on spiritual cultivation and emotional sensitivity instead of property, people of sensibility disguised their elitism. Sympathy, when applied to human relations (as opposed to art or religion), was all about feeling the emotions of those less fortunate than oneself. It was easily tainted with a sense of social and moral superiority, as the compassionate individual deigned to vicariously experience the suffering of another. Early nineteenth-century

40    C H A PT E R

1

sentimentalists did not see themselves this way, and we must respect their self-assessment as a product of a different age, but it remains true that their sympathy can seem terribly condescending today. Sentiment led one to feel the suffering of the slave or the poor, but the very experience of sympathy implicitly revealed the superiority of the feeling subject. Sentimentality encouraged people to feel for each other while essentializing the distinctions that set them apart. In an age before biological science had offered its justification for the rank ordering of races or capitalism its commitment to the inequality of classes, sentiment provided the key. In antebellum America there was a “rough” working-class culture that surged beyond the reach of the middling class. Respectable people were not only aware of it, they used it to validate their own superiority. The culture of sympathy served as a mode of self-fashioning, especially for the middling sort, because it allowed them to distinguish themselves from working people without adopting European notions of privilege. It was democratic in that anyone could refine their sentiments, but refinement was itself taken as a substantiation of status. Manual laborers in the antebellum period, according to one genteel observer, did not have sentiments, they had passions; they were “cynical, unpatriotic, and hostile to religion . . . rough, dirty and profane.” They enjoyed a rowdy camaraderie, bullying, fighting, drinking, and resisting authority. Life for many laborers “meant moving frequently to find work and occasionally fighting, both with bosses and other workers to keep it. It also meant engaging in ‘antisocial’ behavior, such as excessive drinking and interpersonal violence.” In this hard world, working people seemed to spurn self-control and engage in violent displays of physical strength, the source of their labor power. This culture, not surprisingly, rejected refinement as feminizing. Naturally, middle-class Americans in the early nineteenth century made much of the existence of this rough culture, in part because they found it shocking.53 Antebellum Americans may seem quixotic in the way they led their lives because they appear at once emotive and constrained, but the two were not incompatible. The emotions gave meaning to marriage and faith, creativity and love. Emotions moved people to action, but it was moral sense, reason, honor, and compassion that ultimately made them into a constructive force, turning the “passions” of the savage into the “sentiments” of the cultured. This was why “any decay of sentiment, which is the grand operative principle of human virtue and felicity, must be attended by a proportionate degree of corruption and calamity.” Destructive emotions such as lust, greed, envy, and selfishness were simply the Janus face of positive emotion. Although they deplored the backsliding, sentimentalists understood how

E N T E R S E N T I M E N TA L I TY     41

cultured people might occasionally surrender to passion. As one southern writer mused, “How narrow the boundaries that separate the impassioned from the seductive.” Good feelings became malicious when unrestrained by moral purpose.54 Sentimentality was a way of educating and refining emotions that, if not controlled, were thought to produce destructive, selfish, and antisocial behavior. Art had a major role to play in that education and it was sentimentality that created the cultural space that the theatre could occupy. The pleasure gardens began the process of connecting middling-class Americans to commercial amusements, but sentimentality shaped their outlook. The variety shows offered in garden theatres served spectator expectations by distracting them from attention to each other and the gossip the gardens encouraged. But for sentimentalists, the theatre offered so much more. The very artificiality of performance opened the door to explorations of the great emotional, spiritual, and social questions: the distinction between love and passion, faith and deceit, white and black, truth and falsehood, appearances and realities. Making the right choices, feeling the right sensations in the theatre, could improve audience members, allowing them to counter in their own minds the opposition of the nation’s spiritual authorities. Expectations also came to be influenced by the idea of sentimentality as tastes shifted. Theatre patrons moved at mid-century from wanting to be entertained or inspired by the stage to preferring involvement in it. Even in comedy, audiences came to favor amusements that manifested the sentimental belief in the duality of existence, one in which there was a superficial surface world of action and an inner world that was far more meaningful and valuable that feeling individuals experienced through compassionate connections. This complex of audience expectations and perceptions provided performers and entrepreneurs with the opportunity to finally create a permanent, vigorous, and stable entertainment industry.

Chapter 2

Laugh and Grow Fat Minstrelsy and Burlesque

The play that opened at Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre in New York just before Christmas 1844 was a bubbly bit of theatrical froth. It told the story of three rich young gentlemen who are smitten by three rich young ladies. The women are returning home after an Italian vacation, and the men resolve to detain them on the road out of Rome by pretending to be brigands. One of them takes the identity of the notorious bandit Fra Diavolo. However, the ladies learn of the intrigue and they disguise their own servants as Diavolo and his bandits. When the gentlemen surprise the female travelers in Act II, the servants appear and disarm their social betters, who quiver and quake “like utter cowards.” But the plot twists again when the “Simon Pure” Diavolo arrives on the scene with his actual bandit band, provoking “terror upon terror” among servants and mistresses alike. Fortunately, while the authentic robbers are busily rifling pockets and ransacking purses, a company of soldiers appear along this busy road, led by the romantic hero, and they promptly round up the villains and save the day. It was a charming farce, apparently made even more delightful by a tarantella danced as a pas de deux by two members of the corps de ballet and by Mary Taylor’s moving rendition of “I Dreamed that I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” the hit song from Balfe’s popular opera of 1843, The Bohemian Girl. Taylor had, remembered one spectator, “a nameless charm, a winsome manner and a gracious personality” that Olympic Theatre audiences found utterly magical.1 42

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     43

The Three Fra Diavolos was just one of several successful farces that made up the 1844–45 season at the Olympic, one of the most profitable playhouses in New York in the 1840s. The Olympic was the first theatre in the city to specialize in comedy: farces, burlesques (or operettas), and trimmed-down versions of comic operas (the Three Fra Diavolos was preceded, for example, by a one-act version of Mozart’s La Nozze di Figaro, in which Mary Taylor played Susanna, and was followed by another farce, Telemachus, by the English journalist and adventurer Joachim Hayward Stocqueler, with the versatile and hardworking Taylor in a trouser role).2 The Olympic, a “bandybox temple of Thespis,” as future New York mayor A. Oakey Hall called it, spearheaded the theatrical naissance of the 1840s in New York. What its success signaled, to all who paid attention, was the emergence of a new taste for popular entertainment. The Olympic’s success, a drama critic of the New York Herald explained in 1842, was “evidence of the remarkable revolution that has late taken place in theatrical affairs. . . . People now resort to the cheap theatres, where the vaudeville and the farce take the place of the tragedy, opera and the ballet. Everywhere the large, expensive theatres are going to perdition.”3 In the 1840s, respectable middling-class audiences, the very people who had once avoided theatres as sinful, began to go out to shows such as those offered at Mitchell’s Olympic. It was striking evidence of the success of theatre entrepreneurs in cultivating and adapting to the sympathetic turn in middling-class thought and expression. But the entertainment revolution of the 1840s, although grounded in sentimentality, did not come (as we might expect) in a flood of tears; it came amid gales of laughter. It was in farce, burlesque, and minstrelsy that sentimentality, with its emphasis on family, companionship, affection, cultural refinement, and the redemptive power of love, first infused the stage. Humor held a high place in the sentimental temple of compassion, for it was considered “as important as all the passions of mankind,” one of the human expressions that was most “innocent in [its] indulgence, and [ease] of attainment.”4 We don’t tend to think of nineteenth-century sentimentalists as having funny bones, but that is merely our prejudice. Nothing about feeling or sympathy is incompatible with humor if it is the right kind of humor, as the long history of romantic comedy attests. But sentimental comedy was different from the humor that dominated the Enlightenment stage, and it constituted its own type. In sentimental comedies, the characters act virtuously rather than viciously, evil defeats itself through its own foolishness, sincerity is rewarded, and falsehood is punished. Like other forms of sentimental culture, it was an expression of faith in the essential goodness of people, and it presented

44    C H A PT E R

2

characters not as they were in real life but as types manifesting idealized values and foibles. It was immensely popular with the middling-class audiences who patronized it in a wide variety of forms: heart-warming musicals, wacky farces, Italian comic operas, and even blackface minstrel shows.

Frivolity’s Treasury In the 1840s, it was the popular theatre, with its light vaudevilles, minstrel shows, and domestic melodramas, that lifted entertainment out of the doldrums. In fact, older playhouses that specialized in heroic melodramas, comedies of manners, and classical plays (what were now called “legitimate” works) actually fell on hard times. In August 1842, the Park Theatre, New York’s most venerable playhouse, had to drop its prices by 30 percent, and in December the Bowery, the largest theatre in the city, slashed its price to 25 cents for a box and a shilling for the pit. It was the same everywhere in the country. In the early 1840s, big “legitimate” playhouses in Buffalo and Norfolk declared bankruptcy and the owner of the St.  Charles in New Orleans “squandered a fortune” trying to keep his house going. In Boston, the Tremont, the theatre Sam Slick attended, went under in 1843 and was converted into a church. In New York, the venerable Park Theatre seemed on the verge of closure throughout the decade, even though it hosted stars such as Charles Kean and Fanny Eissler. When the stars were not on the boards, there were “all but empty benches” in the auditorium, according to one observer. The Park struggled on until 1849, when fire claimed a house that had become a victim of “neglect, nay almost desertion.” The Bowery, home to melodramas and spectacles, fared only marginally better, and it too became increasingly dependent on stars and gimmicks. It sacrificed its claims to fashion and became a house that catered to working-class audiences. “We can almost imagine,” a critic lamented of the theatre, “a kind of parallel between the present condition of the drama, and that of literature in the dark ages.”5 But gloom did not enshroud all theatres. When the depression of 1837 began, Boston had two playhouses; ten years later it had seven. Similarly, in 1837, New York had five theatres of note, but within a decade, the “passion for amusements” in the city seemed to have “developed to fully as great an extent as in the proverbially famed city of ‘Cockaigne.’ ” Thirteen houses were listed in the 1850 New York business directory, and one reviewer believed that there were more theatres per capita in the city than in any other place in the world. “Fifteen years ago,” New York dentist and amateur playwright William Knight Northall pointed out in 1851, “two or three theatres were sufficient to satisfy the demand of the theatre-going people; whilst now

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     45

six or seven are hardly sufficient for that purpose”—and he was not even counting the variety houses. It was no understatement. The growth in the number of playhouses in New York and Boston was matched in other cities. By 1850, San Francisco had four popular theatres, Cincinnati and New Orleans had three, Philadelphia five, and southern cities such as Charleston, Atlanta, and Mobile supported two or three apiece. As an older form of drama faded, a new entertainment was born.6 The successful playhouses of the 1840s and 50s were all “popular” places serving a fare of burlesques, farces, minstrel entertainments, and domestic melodramas. In the comedies, actors got their laughs from physical gags and from confusions of identity and their verbal equivalent, the malapropism. This form of humor emphasized incongruities in which words were used incorrectly or situations one expected to develop were inverted. The comedy often came from pitting real-life expectations against performed actions: the idiotic person turned out to be wise, the dangerous to be harmless, the black to be white, and everyone was characterized as either good or ridiculous. Although some critics disparaged low comedy because in Europe it was associated with sexual innuendo and bawdy jokes, impropriety was not essential to the form and it was not used in the farces offered at theatres such as William Mitchell’s. As one critic said of the Olympic in the mid-1840s, “we do not recollect one instance of vulgarity or of broad impertinence.”7 But why would stereotypical characters and absurd humor, even if they were not vulgar, appeal to patrons discovering the theatre for the first time? Part of the answer lay in the fact that this form of entertainment did not have a critical edge; it was simple, warm-hearted fun. For a generation that was freeing itself from the constraints of pietistic belief, this kind of amusement was very appealing. Like the vaudeville show in a garden, it posed little threat to the soul; its comedy was on one level so trivial, its good characters so decent and its bad ones so cartoon-like, that it could not tempt anyone to sin or lure them into an alternate reality. Moreover, farce and burlesque drew pleasing attention to the role of sympathy and affection in one’s life. Sentimental comedy juxtaposed an empty and superficial external realm, characterized by foolish gags, with a sensitive and domestic world characterized by truthful and feeling communication. The critic Laurence Hutton remembered the Olympic as a place “to which the despondent came, and at which the despondent laughed, and continued to come and laugh, until the Olympic became the fashion.” Mitchell, he pointedly explained, was the first manager who “dared to make his entire audience members, so to speak, in his stock company,” so “perfect” was the “sympathy between [him] and his audience.” Unlike heroic melodrama,

46    C H A PT E R

2

which roared with excess, sentimental comedy emphasized honesty, charity, and kindness in relations. In Satan in Paris, by Charles Selby, which the Olympic premiered in 1845, an aristocratic roué, Henri Beausoleil, is pilloried for renouncing his decadent life and going “frightfully spooney” over a woman, like “a modern Werther . . . wrapped in melancholy solitude.” In order to teach him that the good life is about moderation, compassion, and devotion rather than passion, Henri is visited by Satan (Mary Taylor in a trouser role), who tells him that he has come to take him to hell. When the aristocrat refuses to believe that the visitor is Satan, the devil informs him that within three days he will lose his friends, his fiancé will abandon him, and he will be financially ruined. When all these things come to pass, Henri surrenders himself to the devil, only to learn that Satan is the disguised daughter of a man he once saved from ruin who has come to save him, in return, from a bad marriage (his fiancé loves another), faithless friends, and a corrupt business partner (she manages to get back his lost fortune).8 For all its slapstick escapes and silly situations, the play communicates the redeeming power of sympathy. Satan rebukes Henri’s false friends by telling them that “to possess the hearts of our friends when we are in misfortune is one of the dearest blessings on earth.” It was, we learn, the compassion Beausoleil showed years before for a ruined businessman that will save him now. And when Henri learns of his fiancé’s faithlessness, he sings in recognition of the fact that the material world is false and that the only truth is love: Stay, bright and blessed delusion, Plunge not my soul in dread: What matters wealth’s profusion When the heart is dead? And when Henri discovers who Satan really is, he declares that she has restored love to him, “the heavenly spirit of my dream . . . with redoubled force on its blessed reality. Not only as my protecting angel and a lovely woman, but as my only love and happiness, let me adore thee.”9 At the heart, then, of antebellum burlesque and farce was an affirmation of middling-class values related to love, relationships, and compassion. The sentimental comedies seen at the Olympic and similar comedy houses centered on lovers, and audiences were invited to identify with their affection, anguish, and chaste desires. Sympathetic comedies invariably contained moments of deep feeling; in Telemachus and The Three Fra Diavolos, these occurred when the lovers were alone and during the songs the effervescent Mary Taylor sang.

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     47

Songs in antebellum farces and burlesques were generally interpolated from bel canto operas, and even though we don’t know if singers in comic plays employed the accepted techniques of Italian singing, there is no reason to believe they didn’t. Mary Taylor sang arias from Bellini, Balfe, and Donizetti at the Olympic and she also sang English, Irish, and Scottish ballads. In this repertoire, the Italian style was the preferred one in the 1840s, and even Thomas Moore, who in the early nineteenth century published a volume of Irish ballads that became hugely popular in America, recommended that singers employ ample portamento in his compositions. Portamento was considered the epitome of sentiment. As a critic who heard a Mlle Bishop sing Italian arias and English ballads in a concert performance rhapsodized in 1847, there was a “liquid purity of her voice . . . which rises and falls with the fullness and smoothness of an unbroken wave . . . the notes seem to incorporate—the one is touched before the other has ceased . . . suggesting a deep passion and intense emotion.” If Mary Taylor rendered the same repertoire in similarly ways, and we have no reason to expect she did not, then she would have been using song, as other singers of the period did, to induce a particular reaction in her audience. “The truly exquisite” use of portamento, a music review noted in 1843, tended to “transport the audience, and produce an almost religious effect.”10 Surrounding the ballads and arias, and highlighting their affect, was a comedy that was broad, disruptive, and absurd. The very idiocy of the humor served to transform the love of a couple into a center of calm in a storm of foolishness. The jokes in burlesque and farce, theatre historian, T. Allston Brown later wrote, had to be “of a boisterous and exuberant character,” while the romance provided a contrasting, wistful, and “saddening picture, merely exaggerated, and affecting from its very naturalness.” Both farce and burlesque differed from the eighteenth-century comedy of manners, Theodore Watts-Dunton explained in the 1885 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, not “in degree at all, but rather [in] kind. . . . Comedy, whether broad or genteel[,] pretends that its mimicry is real. Farce, whether broad or genteel, makes no such pretense, but, by a thousand tricks, which it keeps up between itself and the audience, says ‘My acting is all sham, and you know it.’ ” Where eighteenth-century forms of comedy were considered clever and purposeful and satirized actual social relations, burlesque, variety, and farce were rated as ridiculous. Comedy, wrote George Cruikshank, the early nineteenth-century caricaturist, “has been aptly compared to a mirror, reflecting men and manners as they are found in real life . . . Burlesque [or] farce . . . may be compared to one of those irregular mirrors, for which

48    C H A PT E R

2

no name has been assigned, but which readers may have seen at some museum. . . . Their property is to lengthen and object, or extend its breadth in a ludicrous manner.”11 The very absurdity of this kind of humor was what endeared it to audiences tuning themselves to the strains of an increasingly sentimental culture. The simple and unchallenging humor made it far less nasty and provocative (even scandalous) than the satire of conventional comedy, and the juxtaposition of affective and slapstick moments drew attention to the superficiality of the real and the importance of the tender ties that bound people together. Although this comedy did feature types—the drunken Irishman, the gullible rube, the childlike African American—they were stock characters, not objects of social satire. As Ralph Waldo Emerson explained, comedy was “the balance wheel in our metaphysical structure. . . . The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves.”12 In 1840, the type of comedy the Olympic presented was relatively new, but so too was the audience patronizing it. Drawn from the middling social strata, the new theatre patrons of Jacksonian America—in part through their support for the theatre—were staking a claim on respectability. According to The Ladies Companion, which advised middling-class readers on manners and taste, the Olympic’s audience was “most fashionable. The dress circle nightly presents a brilliant array of female beauty, while the ‘lords of all creation’ are distinguished for their gentlemanly deportment and high respectability.” It did not attract many from what the Herald called the “upper and refined classes,” the “up-town exquisite or the fashionable lounger on Broadway,” the class that Washington Irving had earlier pilloried, but it was also far removed from the working-class playhouse some historians have depicted it as being. The audience, agreed a visitor, “was genteel, rather than dandy.” William Knight Northall knew the character of the audience well because he was one of the theatre’s regular “pit boys.” As he explained in 1851, “some there is among them, it is true, not perfect in a knowledge of the conventional forms which distinguish those bred in polite society, but the element of true refinement was among them.”13

Temperance Is the Virtue of the Senses In drawing a new audience, innovative theatre managers of the 1840s made sentimentality manifest in their house architecture, in the prices they charged, and in the ancillary services they provided (or failed to provide). Nothing

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     49

was more important to their success than their house policies regarding liquor consumption. Particularly in the Northeast and the old Northwest, where the influence of evangelicalism was pronounced, temperance created in the minds of many middling-class people a new standard of respectability. Temperance deepened the divide between those who wanted to be seen as refined and those who constituted the sporting, free-thinking, and rougher elements in society. These divisions would find powerful expression in the entertainment of the 1840s and would, oddly enough, serve to fuel the growth of the middling-class popular theatre. Customers who wanted a drink while attending the Olympic, for example, had to leave the theatre and search out a nearby watering hole. This wasn’t especially difficult, as two doors up from the theatre was Roberts’ halfway house, an inn and saloon, and on the corner of Grand stood the Broadway House, a meeting hall with a ground-floor saloon that served as the headquarters of the Whig Party. But patrons could not drink in the theatre or its cramped lobby, and that secured the respectability of the place. When, in 1844, an inebriate managed to take a seat in the Olympic’s balcony and began calling out loudly to the stage, “the sophisticated patrons in the boxes rose up and demanded that the raucous youngster be removed from the theatre, while their counterparts in the pit brandished their fists and suggested that the offender be executed on the spot.” Given its reputation as a dry environment, it is no surprise that among the Olympic’s many selling features was that it drew “more pretty women in the dress circle than any other place.” And what clerk with his seat in the pit did not secretly wish to catch the eye of some merchant’s daughter and so rise in society?14 Although a majority of Americans continued to consume alcohol, at least in private, respectable people could not ignore the progressive demonization of its consumption, especially by women, even if they were otherwise unsympathetic to the temperance cause. “No matter what shade of belief the Christian may profess,” an editorialist acknowledged in 1842, “temperance is . . . essential to all. No matter what political school a man may belong to—the furtherance of temperance and its attendant blessings is recognized as a cardinal duty by all lovers of the country.” By the Civil War, thirteen states had passed laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol and another five had rejected temperance legislation by small margins. In the 1860s, most Americans outside the South lived in states where the distribution of liquor was either closely controlled or completely prohibited.15 The influence of temperance in the 1840s made it hard for people who wanted to appear respectable to drink liquor in any but the most decorous or private of circumstances. As Emerson remarked, temperance “rides the

50    C H A PT E R

2

conversation of ten thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every private table.” There were many reasons for this. The class antagonisms that gurgled beneath the surface of American society erupted in political confrontations and street violence during the Jacksonian era. Ordinary Americans who felt they had toppled what they considered a decadent aristocracy used temperance as a club against the elite. At the same time, many reform-minded citizens gravitated toward the Whig Party because it seemed more amenable to using state power to control vice. Temperance empowered the middling class and artisanate and provided small proprietors and their workers with a new sense of their own moral righteousness. People of all social classes and religious persuasions who enjoyed a drink suddenly found themselves caught in a struggle over the meaning of gentility.16 “Sobriety,” writes historian Richard Stott, became “a credential of character. Anyone with ambition had at least to appear to live a sedate and temperate lifestyle.” Middling-class women were most damaged by the opprobrium public drinking provoked. Constrained by a society that provided few public avenues to self-realization, well-to-do women generally found that their character was assessed on the basis of their domestic, familial, and religious connections. Their reputation was a large part of their capital, and they had to use it whenever they searched out new attachments or nurtured old ones. The character of a woman could be seen, it was asserted, in her “delicacy of appearance and manners, refinement of sentiment, gentleness of speech, modesty of feeling and action” and in her “shrinking from notoriety and the public gaze, aversion to all that was course [sic] and rude, and instinctive abhorrence to all that ends in indelicacy and impurity.” The best strategy for anyone concerned with preserving her reputation was moderation: “We [should be] moderate,” a writer on morals reminded her readers, and “temperate in all things. . . . When journeying through this world and seeking its enjoyments, we should never forget that we must soon enter upon another state of existence . . . and into that world our works here will follow us.” Women were particularly implicated in the temperance agitation of the antebellum period because they were seen as the home’s moral keystone. Moderation became a crucial sign of status in the community and an acknowledgement of an individual’s ability to control his or her baser instincts.17 The rise of temperance feeling challenged the conventions of the theatre. Some of the larger playhouses, which depended as much on their barrooms as on their high-priced stars, attempted to defy the new morality. As they had to draw large numbers to fill their houses, they could not afford to alienate patrons who expected the traditional pleasures of a night out. In 1842, the Bowery Theatre actually started providing a free drink with every

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     51

shilling ticket to the pit. It did not, of course, extend the same offer to the customers in the dress circle, since these included women. A few owners of legitimate houses responded to the temperance surge by attempting to segregate drinkers. When Noah Ludlow, the highly successful and experienced owner of the St.  Charles in New Orleans, built a new theatre in St. Louis in 1838, he provided both a barroom for women on the ground floor and a gentleman’s saloon on the second tier. From these rooms, patrons were able to watch the show while enjoying a drink and a light supper. But the women’s saloon closed soon after opening “because a very small proportion of the lady auditors ever visited it, a notion having sprung up among some of the leading ones that their visits to the saloon might be misconstrued.” James Wallack in New York tried moving his theatre’s saloon out of the lobby and into the basement, where it would be kept out of sight. Unfortunately, he also found “its business was poor in consequence of the dislike to going down cellar.”18 So deep were misgivings about public drinking that even the pleasure gardens began to seem disreputable. The gardens faced multiple challenges in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The older ones were mostly located near city centers, and as urban cores expanded taller buildings crowded around them, customers grew weary of walking the same promenades, wealthier people moved farther from the downtowns, and the gardens began to seem less attractive. When this happened, genteel people started to doubt the healthful influence of little squares of greenery struggling “to combat the Genius of Brick and Mortar” and to “keep alive a few natural fountains at which people may drink health in their scanty leisure hours.”19 Declining custom led many inner-city gardens to lower prices and open their doors to a more numerous and proximate, if rather less affluent, clientele. Writing in 1844, a New York reporter commented sadly that several of the loveliest gardens, which had once been “abodes of nature and art” where “the beaux of our metropolis [used to] dissertate on morsels of chit chat over the fragrant julep and the light cigar,” were now frequented by “the belles of Broadway [prostitutes].” As early as 1837, temperance-minded Asa Greene observed that he wouldn’t want to go to any of the city’s gardens, as it was “vulgar . . . to be seen walking in the same ground with mechanics, house servants and laboring people.” In his novel of 1841, Cornelius Matthews has his gentleman hero, Puffer Hopkins, attend a ball at the Vauxhall Garden, where he witnesses artisans, journeymen, clerks, and apprentices strutting around with their “g’hals,” laughably imitating the refined manners of the well-to-do. At this point, the Vauxhall was said to be attracting “the lowest riffraff.” When the Vauxhall finally closed in 1856, the Herald noted sadly

52    C H A PT E R

2

that “the fashionables had deserted it and the democracy of society took it altogether for themselves.”20 In the late 1840s, even Niblo’s—New York’s premier garden—had to give up the struggle. As a theatre saloon, Niblo’s had carved out a particular niche for itself as a respectable family venue that sold liquor, but when the Garden Theatre was rebuilt after a fire, both the garden and the liquor disappeared. Niblo continued to operate a number of adjacent barrooms for thirsty patrons, but he now kept his food and beverage business separate from his theatrical business. According to the impresario Max Maretzek, in the foyer of Niblo’s there were posters that read: “After the conclusion of the first piece, an intermission of twenty minutes takes place, for a promenade in the Garden.” As there was no garden anymore, this was assumed to be advice to gentlemen who “felt dry” to go next door for drinks. When a gentleman returned to his seat and “his lady [inquired] where he has been,” he might reply, with candor, “promenading in the garden.”21 Liquor was not the only thing middling-class theatregoers of the 1840s were trying to avoid, or at least appear to avoid. As their desertion of gardens that attracted working people reveals, they were also increasingly trying to separate themselves from places and people they considered less respectable. Many of the comedy theatres of the 1840s, unlike early nineteenth-century playhouses, were designed for an audience that didn’t mind being squeezed together. The Olympic, for example, was extraordinarily compact. Its stage was only 15 by 20 feet and the auditorium, which sat four or five hundred, was “a semi-library one” where “the occupants of the tiers could almost shake hands over the pit.” It was, recalled one patron, “more like a private drawing room than a theatre,” which, in the words of another, presented “more the appearance of the house of an elegant lady in its refined and tasteful surroundings” than a “home of drama.” Ticket prices indicated the homogeneity of the audience. In the mid-1840s, Olympic owner William Mitchell charged a shilling (12½ cents) for a seat in the pit, 25 cents for the upper box, and 50 cents for the dress circle. The Park theatre, by way of contrast, even after it lowered prices by a third, still charged $1 for the boxes (dress circle and balconies), 50 cents for the pit, and 25 cents for the gallery. Although the relative increase in seat prices at the two houses was the same, the spread at the Olympic was 37½ cents, roughly half of what it was at the Park.22 Containing the rough behavior of working-class patrons, African Americans, and prostitutes, or even prohibiting their entry, as Mitchell did at the Olympic, was a major factor in the emergence of the sentimental middling-class theatre. In larger houses that had galleries this was hard to

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     53

accomplish because managers felt they had to fill the otherwise dead space of the upper tier with less affluent customers. Owners of larger playhouses in the 1840s who wanted to capture a share of the growing middling-class market had to find other means of segregating or silencing their working-class patrons. At William Burton’s enormous New National Theatre in Philadelphia, which opened in 1840, for example, each balcony was provided with a different entrance from the street so that “the visitors to the third tier cannot intrude upon the frequenters of the dress circle, and the man of family will be able to secure a box at a modest price, without being compelled to have his daughter mix in the crowded lobbies with loose females and their rowdy companions.” The St.  Charles in New Orleans, another big house, did not have the luxury of separate entrances, so it imposed strict new rules: no audience member was allowed to wear a hat in the theatre or smoke a cigar, peanuts were proscribed, drinks were not allowed outside the saloon at the corner of the lobby, no one was permitted to reenter the auditorium during the show, and audience members would be fined $20 if they made noises that disturbed others. Efforts such as these were designed to create a theatrical experience that would be more congenial to the tastes of respectable consumers. But none of these approaches were as effective as a small house and a homogeneous audience.23 What small playhouses in the 1840s provided were community, good fellowship, and laughter to reasonably undifferentiated spectators. Increasingly, different sorts of people patronized different places of amusement. In the spring of 1847, Gamaliel Bailey, the editor of the Washington-based abolitionist journal National Era, made a tour of New York’s theatres. The idea of a moral amusement was still a new concept to him and he went out expecting to find the theatres filled with the godless and the rough, with prostitutes and roués. Instead, he made a discovery that surprised him: audiences were being segregated into different theatres. At the Bowery Theatre, home of “sensationalism and other clap trap,” he found a heavily working-class audience. The boxes, Bailey reported, were filled up not with rich spectators but with the elite of poorer neighborhoods, “shopkeepers, mechanics, and small tradesmen,” while in the pit sat working men and there was “a terrible munching of apples and pea-nuts.” At the Olympic, which he rated the home of “stupid farces” featuring banal humor and “showy women,” he was surprised to find an audience of the established and aspiring middling class, “tradesmen, apprentices, clerks, professionals, men about town, and verdant youths from the country.”24 Because theatres such as the Olympic catered to a smaller (but more stable) audience base, they were able to eliminate many of the inducements that had

Figure 1.  Mary Taylor, lodestar of the sentimental comic theatre. “Our Mary” dominated the stage of the Olympic Theatre through the 1840s. According to one spectator, the love felt for her was “not a mere passing fancy, but a lasting, sincere affection.” Mary Taylor, TC-100, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     55

traditionally brought people out for the occasional show. Although pretty young female actors—Constantia Clarke and especially Mary Taylor (both of whom were in their early twenties in the theatre’s heyday)—became particular favorites with the single men who filled the pit at the Olympic, the theatre did not employ “stars.” Significantly, local artists, such as the New York–born Taylor, were imagined not as subjects of “a mere passing fancy, but [as] a lasting, sincere affection,” in other words, as a sentimental object of enduring devotion. But the public, a columnist explained in 1844, did not go out to spoon over “our Mary.” It “must laugh; and the author who fails in his material to create mirth here has not come up to the true Olympian standard.” The humor offered up in these popular playhouses appealed to the tastes of middling-class audiences for two reasons: first, it was warm-hearted, sentimental, and community oriented; and second, it gratified their sense of refinement and their ambitions for cultural advancement.25 In terms of entertainment, the 1840s was a decade-long coming-out party for the middling class. But their patronage of particular venues remained insecure and easily damaged. Theatre managers had to walk a fine line and remain attentive to the values of their customers or they risked ruining their business forever. Once a theatre was deemed “suspect” or “unfashionable,” it was doomed. William Mitchell discovered this to his misfortune in 1848, and so precipitous was the decline in his custom that he was forced to sell in 1850; the Olympic closed soon after that. According to William Northall, the problem was that the theatre fell out of favor with its middling-class audience when more “plebeian” audiences started to frequent it. The fault, he believed, originated with Ben Baker, the Olympic’s prompter and one of its house writers, who convinced Mitchell to put on a topical play about working-class New York starring a well-known star from the nearby Chatham Theatre, Frank Chanfrau. The play was called Glimpses of New York and Chanfrau was hired to play a fireman and Bowery b’hoy named Mose.26 The Chatham appealed to a less affluent clientele than the solidly bourgeois Olympic; it was a playhouse for immigrants, apprentices, mechanics, clerks, small proprietors, and a sprinkling of the young men who styled themselves Bowery B’hoys, a subculture whose members were known for their outlandish dress and peculiar slang. A cozy little playhouse tucked in behind a row of shops and houses, the Chatham was in many ways similar to the Olympic, but unlike Mitchell’s house, it had a bar off from the pit where one could buy liquor for three cents a glass and, for six cents more, pickled pigs’ feet or pickled clams. According to Gamaliel Bailey, the theatre’s dress circle held the “elite” of Chatham Square: “genteel dealers in feather beds and auctioneers in second-hand furniture” and the owners of dry goods

56    C H A PT E R

2

stores and their families. Among these he noticed not a few Jews, bedecked in gauze turbans. The pit audience was “homogeneous and indigenous” and seemed to be comprised of red-shirted sailors from the packets in James’s slip, apprentices smelling of meat and fish from the stalls of Catharine Market, newsboys, and clerks from the dry goods houses on Bowery and Grand. No upwardly mobile “pit boy” from the Olympic would visit the Chatham, whose audience was made up of people considered to be going nowhere. It was, snapped the intensely partisan Northall, mostly “useful as a kind of sewer for the drainage of other establishments.”27 Baker’s Glimpses of New York may have been intended to offer the vicarious thrill of observing the life of the working class, but it had unintended consequences. On opening night, a contingent of the very people Chanfrau was impersonating, the tough red-shirted firemen of the Lower East Side, purchased seats in the pit. Mitchell was terrified that they had come to riot in his theatre, but the unanticipated audience ended up being delighted with Chanfrau’s realization. “In all the details of his character from the use of a seegar [to] the various changes of habit and manner, the performance is the various embodiment of the creature it is designed to represent,” wrote one critic. The Olympic’s regular patrons were not, however, nearly as amused with Chanfrau’s realism and the theatre’s new audience, and it drifted away. Chanfrau drew more and more fans from the Chatham to the Olympic and in no time, lamented Northall, “the character of the audience was entirely changed and Mose, instead of appearing on stage, was in the pit, the boxes and the gallery. It was all Mose, and the respectability of the house Mosed too.” In an effort to bring back his usual audience, Mitchell had Baker write in a part for Mary Taylor, but it did no good. As a reporter in the Spirit of the Times had earlier warned, vulgarity was the “rock upon which the Olympic may split” because it would “drive respectable people out. . . . There is no half way.” Recognizing defeat, Mitchell withdrew the play and Baker and Chanfrau took it off to the Chatham, where it sired a seemingly endless stream of Mose plays. The Olympic revived somewhat in 1849, but the damage had been done. A pact of respectability between the theatre and its audience had been broken.28

The Evolution of Minstrelsy Farce and burlesque were not the only types of amusement to attract middling-class and affluent spectators in the 1840s and the Olympic was not the only theatre that catered to that trade. Minstrelsy, the most important entertainment of the nineteenth century, was also a favorite with respectable

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     57

families. As an influential and indigenous form of entertainment, blackface has justifiably attracted myriad textual interpretations, if only a limited amount of historical analysis. Studies by Eric Lott, Paul Gilmore, Heather Nathans, and William Mahar Jr. have, however, offered nuanced interpretations of minstrelsy by showing it to have been a deeply layered, albeit palpably racist, amusement. To most scholars today, blackface was a complex cultural expression in which racial, class, and gender norms were affirmed or challenged. Certain inherited assumptions undergird most recent interpretations, however: first, that minstrelsy was a working-class amusement; second, that its pervasive racism was a cipher for the displaced anxieties of white males about race, gender, class, or economic change; and third, that it was overwhelmingly satiric and subversive.29 Burnt cork was not, however, used only or primarily for comic purposes. It was also donned by actors and singers who wanted to express deeply romantic, sincerely tender, and warmly familial feelings. This aspect of minstrelsy has been almost completely ignored by recent generations of cultural analysts, who tend to see minstrels as messengers of disorder rather than of sympathy. But “Ethiopian” delineators were both comic and pathetic, and a true understanding of the form must encompass its funny and serious aspects. In fact, as in farce and burlesque, the two elements were closely related. In antebellum minstrel shows, white people occupied and transfigured black bodies by pretending to be African Americans. Although the white men who impersonated black people generally knew little or nothing about the actual lives of their subjects, they did know that most antebellum “negroes” were slaves. Through blackness, white male performers were representing a concrete condition and it was the fact of slavery that made their portrayals pathetic. To see the minstrels’ colonization of black bodies as simply a form of disguise that allowed them to present taboo subjects or explore their own gender and class identities is to decontextualize minstrelsy from slavery. It was always about black people and slavery underpinned it. Representing blackness was more than a mask; it was an assumption of the character of the most pitiable Americans in order for white people to transfigure the enslaved and, in so doing, improve themselves. This was why Republicans employed minstrel songs and even the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass allowed himself to be swept away by the poetry of the sentiments expressed in minstrel ballads. “They are heart songs,” Douglass confessed, “and the finest feelings of human nature are expressed in them. ‘Lucy Neal,’ ‘Old Kentucky Home,’ and ‘Uncle Ned,’ can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile.”30

58    C H A PT E R

2

Minstrelsy did not begin as a sentimental entertainment. Rather, blackface bubbled up as an expression of the ethnic and class tensions of the early Jacksonian era. As its historians have demonstrated, burnt cork was originally used as a disruptive mask under which class oppositions and racial animosities could be expressed. Class and ethnic tensions were pronounced in the decade minstrelsy appeared, a decade scarred by economic insecurity, Jackson’s Bank War, the failure of many of the country’s financial institutions, food riots in New York, racial panic in Mississippi, rent wars on the Hudson, anti-Catholic mob violence in Charlestown and Philadelphia, and street battles involving Irish Americans in Boston. To historian David Grimsted, these were “mob years” that “revealed the tensions and strains of communities being torn asunder by divisions and enmities.” Although the problems inherent in rapid urban growth, the adaptation of people to industrial and commercial labor, and the dislocations of migration were the foundations of the strife, the breakdown in deference that underlay Jacksonian democracy served to justify it. The Jacksonian’s proslavery position and hostility to abolitionism created the initial alignment of blackface, community violence, support for slavery, and class antagonism. Similarly, Jackson’s campaign against the Bank of the United States as a bastion of privilege and his opposition to aristocracy, validated popular attacks on power, wealth, and status.31 Antislavery reformers recognized that one of the earliest minstrel performers, Thomas Rice, held abolitionist sentiments, but it was still hard in the 1830s to see blackface as anything other than a weapon in the hands of racists and slavers. In 1837, an abolitionist speaking at a Presbyterian church in rural Pennsylvania was drowned out by rough musicians who intruded on the meeting playing and singing “Zip Coon” and other “Ethiopian songs.” That same year a New York City mob forced its way into an African Methodist church and individuals delivered speeches in “mock negro style” and then struck up a chorus of “Jump Jim Crow.” George Washington Dixon, an early minstrel, sang his hit song “Zip Coon” before proslavery rioters in New York in 1834 and was nominated as a proslavery candidate in the Boston campaign for mayor. Dixon’s proslavery position probably influenced his original decision to cork up and ridicule “negroes” because before he donned blackface he had enjoyed a career as a singer of patriotic songs that he rendered in a “soprano of great compass.” Southern newspapers applauded Dixon when he “cowskinned” (i.e., hit with his cane) the editor of a Lowell, Massachusetts, abolitionist newspaper.32 Southerners who were aware of Thomas Rice’s “diabolical scheme . . . to have all the slaves set free and their masters become bond servants to

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     59

them” denounced his impersonation of black people as a falsification and invention, forcing the singer to defend the authenticity of his portrayal by saying he was imitating the behavior of a man he knew in Louisville. Zip Coon, in the meantime, became a southern favorite in the 1830s, and when Dixon quit the stage and moved to New Orleans to edit a newspaper, Bob Farrell, another native southerner (Dixon was a Virginian), assumed both the character and the proslavery advocacy. Farrell followed Dixon’s lead in publically attacking the abolitionist Rice for “trying to niggerize the people of the North.”33 There is considerable debate over who first created the singing and dancing comic blackface minstrel character.34 In 1826 or 1827, Carney Burns, a circus performer, sang “Gumbo Chaff ” in blackface during a scene change at the Park Theatre in New York (“Gumbo Chaff ” was enough of a hit to be published in 1827). George Washington Dixon adopted the blackface character of Zip Coon, a dandified and unappealing northern free black, to sing “Coal Black Rose” at the Chatham Theatre in 1829, and in 1830 Thomas D. Rice premiered his “Jump Jim Crow” routine dressed as a “plantation negro” at a playhouse in Louisville. No matter who came first, Rice was the best dancer and comic of the three and he quickly eclipsed all others, at least in the North, establishing himself as the epitome of the burnt-cork entertainer.35 As with his peers, Rice generally performed as an entr’acte entertainer in big theatres catering to socially diverse audiences, though he would eventually became a headliner. Minstrels initially served to keep gallery and pit patrons in their seats while the more genteel stretched their legs and drank during the intermissions. Not surprisingly, elite and middling-class Americans initially found burnt-cork performers utterly distasteful. Dixon was a notorious humbug, gossip, sporting man, and inebriate while Rice performed in tattered clothes and offended sensibilities with his crude mannerisms, uncultured speech, and insinuating gestures. Respectable Americans in the 1830s expressed no interest in seeing imitation black men jumping about in rags during intermissions. “Such trash is valueless,” opined one Connecticut correspondent dismissively. “The buffooneries of Jim Crow and Bone Squash Diavolo [should] be abolished,” snorted another in 1838. “A little of the song, occasionally, as an interlude, is well enough, but au reste, let it be dispensed with.” Small wonder that “the boxes are empty” at theatres whenever “Ethiopians” were on the bill, according to a Nashville critic in 1834; they were an offense to good taste. “I had no previous idea of the capabilities of the violin,” the critic continued sarcastically, until he heard it in Zip Coon’s hands and learned that it could “produce sounds hitherto conceived impossible.”36

60    C H A PT E R

2

Class, ethnic, and racial tensions unwound somewhat in the 1840s, although they periodically retightened. The Astor Place and California House riots of 1849, nativist vigilantism in California, and violence accompanying insurrection scares in the South all revealed the pus that could still bubble up from beneath the skin of American life. But the political and social reform movements of this sentimental age—temperance, abolitionism, Sabbatarianism—gradually served to realign public discourse and reshape the class and ethnic tensions that distinguished the 1830s. The revolutionary language of popular sovereignty was defused and even the Whigs found that they needed sectional leaders who could negotiate the class divide, which they first managed in the log cabin and hard cider campaign of 1840. The delicate balance of the second party system would not shatter until the 1850s, when the call to reform could no longer be contained by the various compromises and agreements to disagree. The popular democracy of the urban crowd, which burnt cork rendered as music and comedy, produced riots and mob actions in the 1830s, but the revolution never came. Philadelphia and Savannah were not Paris or Berlin.37 Elite Americans had only to sit tight and shun the new popular culture surging up from below, and in time it atrophied: burnt cork lost its edge and the uninhibited whirling noise-making and racial abuse gradually quieted down. By the mid-1840s, rowdy blackface soloists were suffering the inevitable hardening of the arteries that accompanies all politically charged acts as they age. Many critics in the early 1840s felt that minstrelsy was all but dead as a popular art form, which is likely why some burnt-cork performers began searching for new paying customers. Genteel Americans, even in the 1830s, were not entirely insulated from the influence of blackface. In the mid-1830s, “Ethiopian” songs were heard in intermissions, which meant that some well-to-do women who, by custom, remained in their seats during breaks, were exposed to them. Moreover, they were also being sung everywhere, by “every boy in the street.” In 1832, Thomas Rice had taken his act east and staged it in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York; by 1836 he was performing it in London. There he enjoyed a triumph (one correspondent referred to a “Jim Crow mania”), and literate Americans read with surprise that Lord John Russell had even composed a song about Westminster based on his “Jim Crow.” They also learned that the Duke of Devonshire had seen Rice three times and that the performer had met the Duke of St. Albans, the Earl of Sefton and his family, and a gaggle of other aristocrats. The orchestra at Almack’s, the prestigious London dinner club, even introduced a quadrille that used the “Jump Jim Crow” melody.38 Rice’s popularity in London attracted critical attention to

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     61

burnt-cork songs at home, leading some pundits to declare it to be the first authentically American music. “Ethiopian” songs, if not performers, began to make their way into respectable parlors. By the middle years of the decade, renditions of burnt-cork songs were appearing in numerous arrangements and styles. In 1835, “Coal Black Rose” was published by P. K. Moran, “veried like de big Autors of Urope and Meryka; compose for de Piany-fort, wid companyment for de Flute.” Soon even “the most polished belles in the city [in this case Boston] have not disdained to enroll the sapient and polished language of Messrs. Crow & Coon at their piano forte.” Once they had entered the parlor via the pianoforte, “negro songs” became a natural accompaniment of dinners, balls, and charity benefits. As early as 1833, a society benefit in Philadelphia featured an amateur minstrel performer among the singers of opera excerpts. Songs “spawned in the very lowest puddles of society,” observed one writer, began to find their way, “like the frogs of Egypt, into places of admitted respectability.”39 Although blackface began as a “grotesque” entertainment for the urban poor, during the 1840s it had, “by gradation, risen from the inelegant contraband to the ward of the nation.” Minstrelsy’s potential to express values that middling-class Americans cherished was too great for them to deny its worth as a theatrical device. The change was transmitted through sheet music, and it reached the stage in 1843, when the Virginia Serenaders or Minstrels (as they called themselves) became the first group of blackface performers to create a coherent act instead of offering individual entr’actes. The founding story of the group has often been told, but what is significant is that in bringing together a number of individual burnt-cork artists, the Serenaders joined Rice’s ragged “plantation negro” and Dixon’s “dandified negro” on the same stage. They played and danced “Darkey Songs, Glees and Breakdowns,” and they were the first group to call themselves minstrels, a name that linked them to the Pandean minstrels, the Tyrolese minstrels, and the wildly popular Rainer family, who performed standing or sitting in a line. In early February 1843, the Serenaders made their first public appearance as a feature between stunts at the Bowery Amphitheatre in New York. The Amphitheatre was a circus house that specialized in equestrian acts and catered to families of all social classes. Although little is known of the first performances (except that the quartet performed a skit called “Dan Tucker on Horseback”), given the audience, it was undoubtedly high spirited rather than rough; they advertised themselves as demanding the attention of “the refined portion of the public.”40 Burnt cork had begun to move up in the world.

62    C H A PT E R

2

When Bailey toured New York’s popular entertainments in 1847, he found the city’s most genteel audience attending a minstrel show. “I looked around the audience,” he wrote in surprise, and “it was composed chiefly of highly respectable citizens who would have [once] regarded it as worse than bankruptcy to be seen within the walls of a theatre!” Other commentators found the same thing. “We noticed a large number of ladies present, members of churches, ‘bright and shining lights’, who would be shocked at the thought of going to a theatre, reading the Last Sensation, the New York Ledger, or the Police Gazette,” noted a journalist who attended a minstrel performance in Vincennes, Indiana. A minstrel show, agreed a Missouri correspondent, was “one of the few . . . causes that bring[s] out the elite of St. Louis.” The opera house, sniffed a Georgian, “was thinly attended, and it was a sad reflection on the tastes of our people. They crowd a negro minstrel show. The most refined and cultured go.”41 How could such a thing have happened? Ferdinand Palmo, like William Niblo, was a theatre man who had made his money in the food and beverage business. In 1835, he duplicated Niblo’s success by opening a concert saloon that provided fine foods and wines and an evening of vaudeville entertainment to well-heeled New Yorkers. A Neapolitan by birth and a great lover of opera, he next built an elegant little theatre and imported a slew of expensive Italian singers to fill it. Aware, however, that the market for opera was relatively small, Palmo decided to alternate serious music with burlesques and farces. It was in this capacity that in 1845 he hired the Ethiopian Opera Troupe (a group of performers who modeled their act on that of the Virginia Minstrels) to do a comic version of Balfe’s opera hit The Bohemian Girl, which they rendered in blackface as The Virginia  Gal. Palmo’s has become known as the “cradle” of minstrelsy, for it was there that burnt-cork performers first removed their rags and abandoned the rough language that had hitherto characterized the amusement. Instead of Zip Coon’s gaudy and mismatched outfit, monocle, and oversized white top hat, which spoofed both African Americans and the fashionable establishment, the Ethiopians were nattily dressed in swallowtail coats, black trousers, and “white waistcoats and cravats” that contrasted elegantly with their “swart visages.” In the second half of an evening’s entertainment, they performed parodies of well-known operas, and they accompanied their untrained voices with the banging of cymbals, the strumming of banjos and the rapping of bones. More significantly, they greatly reduced the rough caricature of black speech and spoke to each other more or less as white men with standardized dialects. They also adapted their dress, making it tasteful: “a great improvement,” in the eyes of one genteel spectator, “over the outrageous costumes [minstrels] have formerly indulged in.”42

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     63

Rice’s triumph in England was undoubtedly on the minds of other ambitious minstrels. The Virginia Minstrels sailed for Liverpool in April 1843 and the Ethiopians followed them in February 1846. In England, the Ethiopians performed before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children. The Atlantic connection was critically important to the redefinition of minstrelsy. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and it abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833, in part, as Philip Gould writes, because of a recategorization of slave owning as “barbaric” and of the discourse of racial oppression as “unmannered.” For abolitionists, accepting a British approach to minstrelsy might serve as a way of demonstrating what Thomas Harwood called the “moral isolation” of the slaveholding South. That British audiences could see the characters American minstrels portrayed not as figures of ridicule, but as objects of sympathy, was important in reconfiguring stateside perceptions of blackface. Instead of laughing derisively at minstrel characters, genteel British audiences seemed to be exchanging identities with them, enjoying them as innocent fun, and portraying them not as crude and unfeeling but as constituted only by emotion. In this sense, watching a “negro minstrel” became like watching a child, and delight in the innocence and exuberance of childhood was one of the sturdiest pillars of sympathetic culture.43 The Ethiopian Serenaders, as they now called themselves, remained in London for eighteen months, but their place at Palmo’s was filled by what would become the most influential of all blackface groups: Christy’s Minstrels. Edwin Pearce Christy organized his minstrels in a Buffalo concert saloon owned by the mother of one of his players (George Harrington, who was 15 at the time and would take the stage name Christy after joining the group) in 1842. According to one eyewitness, their specialty was slapstick comedy and the songs they performed were much like those played by Rice: “The Boatmen Row,” “Dan Tucker,” and “Dandy Jim Ob Caroline.” They spoke and claimed to sing the “songs transplanted from the sunny South, with precisely the same words that had been handed down from singer to singer and generation to generation on the old plantations. . . . They little thought the time would ever come, when under [burnt cork’s] fully developed power and marvelously expanded influence, its application to the face of a would-be minstrel would make him become a scholar, a gentleman, an artist of peculiar ability, a poet and a composer.”44 According to Dan Emmet, one of the original Virginia Minstrels, it was Enam Dickinson who filled the Christy minstrels in on what was happening in New York. Dickinson joined the four original actors in Milwaukee in 1843, and under his tutelage, they learned to sing four-part harmony,

64    C H A PT E R

2

something beyond the ability of the Serenaders or the Virginia Minstrels. He may have encouraged Christy to organize his group on stage in a line, with the rhythm section and main comics on the end and the master of ceremonies, the interlocutor, in the center. Quite possibly Dickinson also urged Christy to copy the Serenaders in targeting families rather than rough audiences. George (Harrington) Christy had previously been a circus performer, and it is possible that he further inclined E. P. Christy to seek the custom of women and children. Whatever the reason, Christy’s group changed as it traveled from Milwaukee to New York, and it was soon promoting itself as offering family-style entertainments. It was on this basis that it secured a place at Palmo’s.45 Christy did not remain long at the opera house, but he was there long enough to further refine his act and establish his reputation. Ambitiously, after a tour that took the group to Philadelphia and Baltimore, he placed his minstrels—now styled Christy’s Ethiopian Opera Troupe—in the elite New York Society Library and then he secured a gig at the fashionable Alhambra concert saloon that John Niblo, William’s brother, had opened. By now, according to the theatre manager Henry Dickinson Stone, Christy’s “beautiful and heart-melting melodies” were becoming “the accepted and favorite music in the parlors of the wealthy and fashionable of the day.” It was only after establishing the troupe’s appeal among New York’s well-todo by bringing the minstrel show to them that Christy moved downtown into the Mechanics’ Hall, where he pursued a solidly middling-class audience. It was not considered much of a risk; “soon” predicted the Herald after the move was announced, “force of habit will carry a full audience to that locality.”46 In urban centers, the minstrels now began to appeal to the very people who had traditionally scorned the legitimate theatres and the melodramatic playhouses, with their alcohol and gallery roughs, and they did it largely through their children. Like the circus, Christy’s group presented itself as a family entertainment, and by bringing in the children, the minstrels drew in their mothers, caregivers, and fathers. The minstrel halls were, as a rule, free from alcohol and smoking. As a result, on a regular evening a large proportion of their audience would be female. They also offered half-price tickets to youngsters and may also, like postwar minstrel groups, have reserved the front rows for unaccompanied women and children. New York journalist, minister, and soldier John Flavel Mines remembered seeing Christy’s Minstrels at Mechanics’ Hall in 1847, when he was 12. Mines and his younger siblings and cousins were taken to the show by their black servant, “a stately colored girl of eighteen, whom my father had brought from the West Indies.”

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     65

Figure 2.  A blackface burlesque performed by Buckley’s Minstrels at their home theatre on Broadway in the mid-1850s. The audience depicted is middling class and largely female. Well-dressed women can also be seen in the balcony and going up the stairs to it. The actors are performing in the blackface burlesque, which made up the third part of the show. Buckley’s Minstrels, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-2520.

The ticket office refused to sell her a ticket because she was black, and Mines recalled that one of the players took their money, brought them in through the stage door, and sat them in the “little side orchestra gallery” beside the stage. Throughout the show the “minstrels cracked their jokes at Ancilla [the black servant],” much to Mines’s embarrassment and the girl’s apparent delight.47 Christy’s appeal to children was that they sold “fun, and even sheer, absolute and utter nonsense.” Many of the skits bore a striking resemblance to the antics of Punch and Judy, Punchinello, or the televised cartoons of a later era, in which the actors whacked each other with slapsticks, pushed each other over, or dodged one another’s blows. In this sense, it owed a great debt to the Ravels and their physical comedy. This was the kind of exaggerated violence that was regarded, then as now, as entirely appropriate to the

66    C H A PT E R

2

young. Minstrelsy “is devoted mainly to fun,” wrote one reviewer. “One darkey pulls another’s nose, and that begins the fun. Injured and indignant, this latter darkey, by way of bravado, requests him to do that again. He does it again and again, to the still greater delight of the audience. Then the injured darkey returns with a brickbat in each hand. Better and better. After all the fun of the brickbats is exhausted, the other darkey retires. He returns with a club—there is a fight. . . . It is all supremely ridiculous, as foolish as can be, yet made intensely laughable by the buffooneries to which it gives rise.” Racism still underwrote the comedy—the “preposterous” black skin, “impossible” red lips, and “monumental” feet, a fan recalled years later, were impossibly funny—but it did so by making blackness absurd. It seemed to one nostalgic writer in 1902 “as though tastes and times were simpler [then]. Perhaps people laughed more easily.”48 The buffoonery, however, was not random. Rather, like the nonsense served up in burlesque or farce, it served to enhance the emotional impact of the ballads that were sung between the nonsense skits. The juxtaposition of slapstick comedy and feeling song was a core element in sentimental entertainment. The heartbreak of the clown who sang of his dead mother actually became more sublime because moments before other clowns had been thwacking each other with sticks. The abrupt alternation of the comedic and the deeply serious is not that common today, but it was pervasive in theatrical entertainment right up until the 1920s and is a startling feature of early silent films, in which the transitions were made even more abrupt through parallel editing. Some critics consider these twists and turns and the shapelessness that resulted as a sign of the low quality of the art. But the unnecessary abruptness and totality of the shifts from comedy to melancholy and the centrality of the same technique to burlesque and farce suggests that it served a purpose. In silent films, the alternation provided a perceptual function by giving the spectators a sense of their omnipotence: they know what the actors do not. While some of the characters laughed and played, for example, a terrible tragedy might be unfolding, unbeknown to them, on the train tracks nearby.49 This however, was not the case in minstrel shows or burlesques, where there was little tension in need of reduction. Instead, in these amusements, the sentimental and affective were used to provide a respite from the laughter. This was the crucial thing. The moments of pathos, the sentimental songs, served—like the love story within the otherwise anarchic farce—to anchor the show and give it emotional solidity. Songs in minstrel shows, explained writer George Wakeman in 1868, “possess a charm that compensates for much of their nonsense. That list of bright maidens of which they tell, whose

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     67

dirges are sung in such beautiful tunes, should be, every one of them, an inspiration to a kind and mournful thought. Who is not better for hearing ‘Poor Lost Lillie Dale,’ ‘Darling Nellie Gray,’ ‘Dear Evelina, Sweet Evelina,’ ‘Carrie Lee,’ ‘Dear Annie of the Vale’?” These songs were likely performed using similar “Italianate” techniques in the transposed opera arias that were featured in burlesques. Certainly minstrel banjo technique made ample use of “tremolo,” which was executed by holding the index finger straight and sliding it rapidly back and forth across one string while the thumb sounded a higher note, to create a two-tone, haunting, quavering harmonic effect modeled on the descending portamento line. In effect, the songs served both to sentimentalize the minstrel show and, by their emotional weight, to trivialize the comedy in which they were embedded.50 Not everyone was convinced, of course. At least one critic who preferred the original rowdy humor of a Dixon or a Rice complained: “When [the blackface performer] informs us that ‘His Heart is Broken,’ we can but take little interest in the matter, and on the whole we heartily condemn this introduction of sickly sentimentality into . . . a strictly funny entertainment.” Calling for a return to the earlier, grotesque minstrelsy, the critic continued: “The Minstrels are supposed to represent negroes, and their songs should be such as negroes indulge in. Some years since they confined themselves to such songs, and the Minstrels were then most amusing. Let them by all means abandon the sentimental melodies and the attempted emotional dramas and give negro melodies and burlesque, with their usual amount of witty conundrums and charm. The public will not feel the loss of sentiment we dare say.”51 But most antebellum spectators, at least judging from the popularity of minstrel shows, disagreed. Evidence suggests that to them, the sentimental aspect was more important and enduring than the nonsense.

The Sweet Sighs of the Comic Ethiopian In the 1840s, the minstrel show evolved into a rigidly structured, finely balanced combination of elements. A typical evening with Christy’s Minstrels in the mid-1840s began with the curtain rising on ten to twelve blackface men sitting on chairs in a straight line. After an overture (generally something from a popular opera such as Fra Diavolo or La Fille du Regiment) played on a combination of instruments that invariably included a pair of violins, at least one banjo, bones, and a tambourine, the actors would rise individually from their seats to sing or dance. They would be accompanied instrumentally by the performers who remained seated behind them on stage. The first part of the show would invariably end with a chorus sung by all the

68    C H A PT E R

2

minstrels. The second part initially centered on a burlesque of an opera or play. It would feature anywhere from four to six members of the group; the remainder would accompany them. In the late 1850s, the burlesque moved to the third part, and “the olio,” as the second segment was now called, would feature a glee, or chorus, and even more individual musical turns: violin or banjo solos, dance numbers, songs, and comic lectures or speeches (one of Christy’s was on Nat Turner, of all unfunny things). The third part was then given over to skits, operatic burlesques, and scenes such as “the Peculiarities of the Southern Plantation Negro,” which featured banjo solos, songs, and jigs. The entertainment would often end with another burlesque of a play or opera or another comic lecture (on topics such as “magnetism”) followed by a polka or a march.52 Although the Tambo and Bones stock characters offered funny songs, the other members of the minstrel troupe typically sang plaintively of their loves, their deceased or careworn parents, or their childhoods. A sample of Christy’s playbills from the 1850s reveals that ballads constituted an average of six out of eight of the songs delivered in the first part of the show. Humor and the pathetic were in this sense closely interwoven, much to the spectators’ satisfaction. “Who has not sympathized with them at the death of Lucy Neal, or pitied the sufferings of the young Nigger who sucked the sugar cane green? Or the disconsolate young Brown whose black bride was so cruelly lost to him?” remarked a journalist in 1845.53 Decades after Christy’s and the other minstrel groups had disappeared, a writer who stumbled across a collection of songs published by these antebellum artists expressed surprise at their “curious sentimentalism.” Almost all the numbers in the songbooks were sad, he discovered. The singer of minstrel ballads left “Annie in sorrow, wondered where his schoolmates were, one mourned for the stolen Nellie Gray, tolled the bell for gentle Lillie Dale.” There was also, he noted, a remarkable mortality rate among the young women these minstrels loved: Ella Leene, Eulalie, Nelly of Hazen Dell, “sweet dear” Lillie Dale, Marion Lee, blue-eyed Minnie, Nelly who was a lady, Hally, Lilla Brown, Anne Page, Annie Lisle, Angelina Baker: all of them died in song. “The landscape” of minstrelsy, the journalist concluded in wonder, “was one of weeping willows, swamps and hillside graveyards.” It seemed so different from the boisterous, cheerful songs of the Virginia Minstrels; the nonsense verses of the Jim Crow or Zip Coon; and the highly sexual, cynical, often-violent minstrel songs of the “coon” craze of the 1890s.54 Late in the 1840s, this form of sentimental “Ethiopian” music received a spectacular injection of talent when E. P. Christy began buying the songs of a young writer, Stephen Foster. Owing to his initial “prejudice” against

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     69

blackface, the composer was reluctant to attach his name to the minstrel songs he composed for Christy, but soon enough he was doing so “without fear or shame.” Foster recognized, and quite rightly, that “my efforts have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.”55 Foster’s songs were the quintessence of sentimentality: plaintive, sincere, and sensual but devoid of eroticism. Many of the songs quickly became parlor standards, including “Oh! Susanna,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “The Old Folks at Home,” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground.” The more emotive among these songs were filled with rural imagery and a yearning for the security of the hearth and the warm embrace of the family: The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom, While the birds make music all the day. The young folks roll on the little cabin floor, All merry, and happy and bright; By n’ by Hard Times comes a-knocking at the door, Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.56 Although some of Foster’s songs were funny—“De Camptown Races” and “Oh! Susanna” come to mind—they were never ironic. The humor might be absurd, but it was also transparent, unlayered, and sincere. Irony implied falsehood to the sentimentalist; it was an ugly device that involved saying one thing while meaning another. Irony suggested the outsider who commented sarcastically on others while lacking the courage to say what he or she really meant. Sentimentalists expected to find irony in a brothel or a nasty eighteenth-century English comedy, not on the minstrel stage. Foster was a supporter of slavery, but unlike Dixon and Farrell, he did not express his opinions by ridiculing free blacks. Rather, the songwriter sentimentalized slavery itself, placing into the mouths of his enslaved narrators a deep love for their masters and a reverence for the plantations on which they worked. A northerner who was uninterested in the real South, he wrote of the slaves’ love for their white owners and the planters’ reciprocal attachment to their property, as in the song, “Uncle Ned”: When Old Ned die, Massa take it mighty bad, De tears run down like de rain. Old Missus turn pale and she look’d berry sad, Kase she nebber see Old Ned again.

70    C H A PT E R

2

Foster’s was an approach subtle enough to win over abolitionists as well as pro-slavery advocates because he sentimentalized blackness, just as Stowe had done in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Though Foster, unlike Stowe did not suggest that African Americans had any desire for freedom. The sympathy aroused by his songs did, however, allow slavery’s supporters and its opponents to unite in a common vision of the simple and pure-spirited longings of the African Americans. This approach made Foster’s songs popular with both sides in the abolitionist debate, even though it erased the brutal realities of slavery itself. Audiences were not fooled by the blackface, of course; they understood that it was a mask and that the feelings being expressed by the minstrels were those of white men. In case they had any doubts, minstrels perpetually let the mask slip by offering out-of-character asides to the audience or, when dressed as women, lifting their skirts to show the shoes and trousers underneath. But this is not to suggest that blackface involved the erasure of black identity and humanity, as some scholars maintain; it was important that Foster’s sentimental lyrics and the silly jokes that surrounded them were delivered by actors painted black. Why? Historians have generally treated the popularity of blackface as evidence of the racism of white spectators empowered by the mockery of black people. This was one element in minstrelsy’s popularity, but blackface also appealed to people who were morally opposed to slavery. Foster’s songs provide us with an answer of why blackface appealed so widely. Both supporters and opponents of slavery imagined that they could educate their feelings and elevate their humanity by imagining themselves occupying the emotional world of slaves.57 When an actor imitated the mannerisms of a suffering or oppressed individual, sentimentalists maintained, the subject “undergoes a half humanizing process under the intensity of our love, yet still retains the character of the insensate creation, thus affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering blended emotion.” This was evidently a self-serving idea, as it suggested that parodies of “cultured” people were inherently offensive (unless done with due deference), whereas impersonations of those who were deemed inferior were potentially sublime. But it also points to the inner meaning of minstrelsy, which was that by embodying characters commonly regarded as incapable of truly expressing their feelings themselves, the actor was able to touch an emotional nerve among whites. Widely regarded as children, who had strong emotions, but little self-control, black people were the ideal subject of sentimental reconstruction. Sentimentalists experienced their sharing of the feelings that they imagined slaves to hold as an empathetic release. Since the actor, in order to become someone of another color, “must transfer” himself “beyond his self-centering circle,” sentimentalists believed that

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     71

he became “for a time wholly occupied and identified with another object.” In this sense, theatrical impersonation could be regarded as the highest form of empathy: it relied upon keen observation and the ability to so completely identify with another that one actually felt as that person was imagined to feel. And because the white man could say what it was assumed that his black subject could not express, it made that assumption all the more moving. To this extent, as one critic noted, although performed in blackface, the “sentimental chants ballads . . . have wonderfully little to do with the darkey.” It was a white performer who, through mouth painted gash red, was expressing feelings of longing, love, remorse, or redemption that no African American was thought capable of articulating. By performing blackness, the white actor made dark skin into something deeper than the original, at least in the minds of white spectators. According to one fan, reminiscing in a letter to a newspaper many years later, the white man in blackface was “the superior of any genuine negro in his characterizations”; he was “an amplification of the plantation and [he] brought negro life to a higher state than the originals ever dreamed.”58 The disruptive quality of the black mask, which both disguised whiteness and allowed for the experience of deeper states of feeling, was minstrelsy’s defining feature. It symbolized the ludicrous and sentimental nature of the act. The combination of apparently contradictory elements was crucial. In the lineup, the seemingly intelligent interlocutor, who sat in the middle, was continually provoked by the ostensibly less learned end men. In the mock lectures and stump speeches, the seemingly ignorant character was actually devastatingly and disarmingly clever; in the knockabout segments, the characters seemed to enjoy hitting each other and being hit. Much of the verbal humor was also disruptive as it tended to center on the malapropism. Wrong words were funny when rendered by minstrels because more educated people appreciated the malaprop’s referent: the correct word. As a minstrel show opened, Mr. Johnson, the interlocutor, would conventionally ask: “How is Brother Bones this evening?” and Brother Bones would answer: “scrumptious” or “like a morning-glory,” or “salubrious.” The spectators’ knowledge reaffirmed them in their own intelligence while at the same time destabilizing the language itself, forcing auditors to listen through the dialogue in order to catch what was wrong with it. This can be seen in a routine made popular by Christy’s minstrels in the 1850s in which Julius, one of the end men, explains to the interlocutor: “Mr. Johnson, [Sam] lubbed a gal to extraction, and if [I] has not a-fool’d [him] dat time [he]’d a had her sure. . . . You see Sam was in

72    C H A PT E R

2

lub wid dat gal, shirt-collar, boots, ears and all; but he did not know xactly what to say to her, to kind’r fetch her round to him; so he come to me [Julius] and ac me if I eber seed no lub plays in de treatre, I told him yes. . . . Well sed Sam, can’t you tell me som on dem words . . . so dat I can say se same ting to my gal-tonight? I told him I recomembered one sentence. . . . When [the hero] sees [his love] he exclaims ‘Oh, Paul-lean! Delicious moment! Your amniable face draws to my heart! Oh, Cupid!’ And I told him to go see his gal, and when she luff him in, to frow up he hands, roll up he eyes in histerics, and say dem words, and if any ting would reach her gizzard, dat would. I was all day a-larnin’ it to him, and at night he dress heseff up buck, and go knock on de do’; out she cum, when Sam split back ob he coat open a-flingin’ up he arms, and said as lout as he could, “Oh! Malicious Moses! Your abominable face draws my heart to a glue pot!”59 This fairly typical comic routine had several apparent and, for members of the middling-class, reassuring features. The dialogue made fun of the characters’ failure to get sensibility right without criticizing sentiment itself and it drew attention to the humor involved in uneducated people (it took a whole day for Julius to teach Sam one sentence) imitating refined feelings. But the joke within the joke was that by delivering an alternate speech, in clear English, also referencing melodramatic exclamations (“Malicious Moses” referred to the prophet leading the people into a wilderness), Sam added complexity to his character, distancing himself from the unintelligent “darkey” he was playing. Gentility was affirmed not merely in the joke but also by the actor’s claim to a cultural knowledge that the character he was playing was not supposed to have access to. Situating minstrelsy within this context helps us decipher a great deal of the mystery that still surrounds the art. It explains why minstrels so often let the mask “slip” by offering jokes and allusions that the characters they were portraying could not possibly think up and by revealing who they were underneath the wig, grease, or dress. It also makes clear why superior white men mimicked those they considered their inferiors and then used that racial mask to portray white middle-class characters, Irish and German immigrants, and crafty politicians (although impersonating down was acceptable but impersonating up was problematic, minstrelsy managed to do both at once). Indeed, Charley Backus, an end man with the San Francisco minstrels, who was connected by birth to some of Virginia’s most famous families, used to make a joke out of posing down but laughing up. “You know, Mr. Johnson,” Backus would explain to the interlocutor as the house roared with laughter

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     73

at the absurdity of the truth, “that I’m from one of the best families. My mother was a Fitzhugh.”60 Moreover, it also helps explain why, in the eyes of slavery’s opponents, blackface imposture could serve to improve perceptions of African Americans. By looking through the mask of the empathetic white mimic, spectators believed they were able to sense the feelings that they felt the country’s debased and suffering slaves could not themselves express. Cross-dressing was another important feature of the art. Just as only a white man was imagined capable of expressing in a feeling way what it was like to live with black skin, so too did male minstrels affirm their perception of the essential qualities of women. Women in farce or burlesque might sing sentimental songs, but they did so encumbered by their own sexuality and moral vulnerability. Mary Taylor’s ability to arouse sympathy was hindered, to a degree, by the fact that she was young, pretty, and adored by the pit boys at the Olympic. Cross-dressing, however, allowed male actors to fully separate feelings from passions, because the man in a dress could not serve as a figure of sexual desire. Moreover, female impersonators provided a whimsical element, the comedy alongside the tears, that Frederick Douglass and other sentimental Americans so cherished. Cross-dressed minstrel were not just figures of fun; they also produced some of the most emotionally intense songs heard on the minstrel stage: Now Sambo, let me press your hand, Just now before I die, You den will see me leave dis land Widout a tear or sigh. Oh! Husband Sambo, do not weep, God calls, I must obey; Dis night wid angels I will sleep, Farewell, farewell—good bye!61 Cross-dressing males did joke about women’s rights, make fun of women’s fashions by complaining about the clothes they wore, and laugh at the fantasies men had about women, but teasing men and women who looked to step outside the sentimental framework was not transgression, it was affirmation. And in letting their mask slip, the female impersonator defused the potential danger of being taken seriously in their masquerade.62 Although Christy’s was antebellum America’s most famous and defining minstrel group, in the 1850s dozens of others that emulated its success emerged in cities across the nation. Among the most successful groups were Buckley’s Serenaders (originally the New Orleans Minstrels), a Boston-based

74    C H A PT E R

2

group modeled on Christy’s that was organized in 1843; Bryant’s Minstrels, which became the dominant New York City group of the 1860s and took Christy’s place at Mechanic’s Hall; Backus’s Minstrels (originally the New Orleans Serenaders), which was organized in San Francisco in 1854; the various Morris and Pell combinations, and which were based in the birthplace of moral melodrama, the Boston Museum; and the San Francisco Minstrels, which split off from Christy’s troupe in 1854, and which eventually replaced Bryant’s as the leading minstrel group in New York in the 1870s. All of these groups performed a similar repertoire to Christy’s and all appealed primarily to middling-class families. As an 1864 review of Wood’s Minstrels, which were fronted at the time by the talented Frank Brower, made clear, spectators fond of “plaintive music” had to see this group. “They perform a variety of pleasing colored tunes,” he wrote, so it was safe to “take the partner of your bosom with you, or any lady of a mild and lovable disposition who may have beauty and intelligence in her composition.”63 Remarkably, then, a respectable popular theatre in America was born in comedy. This was so because it was created to serve a middling class that was carefully freeing itself of the restrictive bonds of pietism and tradition. It made sense that these people looked to comedy for recreation since harmless fun seemed less likely to offend their morals or challenge their faith than melodrama or tragedy. What they needed, though, was a comedy that was simple and pure; something very unlike the cynical, sensual humor of the eighteenth century. And that was precisely what minstrels, vaudevillians, and burlesquers provided. Although few at the time would have noticed it, two different forms of comedy had emerged in the early nineteenth century. Both addressed sentimental tastes, but each served a different horizon of expectation. The older of the two forms was the first to gain currency among the middling class; it triumphed in the garden theatres and then in the vaudevilles of the late 1830s and early 40s. Spectators expected the action on stage to excite them and they looked to the theatre for novelty, the surprising, and the engaging. In this theatre, the proscenium arch became a clear divider that separated the stage from the seat; the spectator could admire the athletic Ravels but not empathize with them. This gave the acrobats and pantomime artists a solidity despite their physical dexterity. The Ravels were what they appeared to be: the surfaces expressed the whole story. In contrast, minstrelsy, farce, and burlesque invited spectator involvement and empathy; their performers asked audiences to develop emotional connections to the characters on stage and communicate directly with the sentiments they expressed. In this form of amusement, sympathetic audiences hoped to assimilate the feelings of the

L AU G H A N D G R O W F AT     75

actor, look through their masks, and experience themselves the sadness that attended death, abandonment, or old age. Unlike variety, where surprises and inanities drew applause, the comedy in this second form of amusement was to a great extent incidental. It was there to lighten the spirit and entertain the children, but its very absurdity focused attention outside itself, on the moments of pathos. Under the influence of sentimentality, a new form of spectatorship was developing that would produce a radical new approach to the experience of entertainment.

Chapter 3

Looking Through Sentimental Aesthetics

The great promoter P. T. Barnum was not the first to notice the growing popularity of the theatre, but he provides a good example of how entrepreneurs harnessed that interest. By the time he entered the theatre business, Barnum had enjoyed on-again, off-again success exhibiting curiosities such as an Italian plate juggler and a woman whom he said was the 161-year-old former nurse to George Washington. In 1840, in a penurious state, Barnum leased the Vauxhall Gardens in New York in partnership with his brother-in-law. Unlike most commercial gardens in New York, the Vauxhall had preserved much of its greenery into the 1840s even as it lost its dignity. As respectable families moved away from the crowded and poorly serviced neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, the Vauxhall opened its doors to those that remained. By 1840, it was becoming an entertainment space for mechanics and artisans rather than the well-to-do.1 Early in the century, Delacroix the confectioner had installed a canvascovered stage in the garden where variety shows and pantomimes were shown while couples and their children ate light suppers and drank lemonade and wine punches. Barnum made few changes to the variety repertoire, although, in keeping with his interest in curiosities, he added the “Fulton Market Roarer” (a butcher with a loud voice who shouted out his cuts and prices) and a group of real New York firemen. As he tailored his shows to the tastes of working people, Barnum lost whatever remained of 76

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     77

his middling-class audience. The transition was finally complete when he hosted a dance competition between an African American, William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, and a minstrel, John Diamond. The competition attracted sporting men, gamblers, and riffraff and drove the respectable people away. Juba’s victory over the blacked-up white man apparently shocked the garden’s respectable patrons as much as the gambling.2 What Barnum discovered during his stint at the Vauxhall, however, was that a taste for popular family entertainment of a reasonably respectable kind existed even among members of the artisan class. While pleasure gardens welcomed families, theatres traditionally did not, and Barnum, like William Mitchell at the Olympic, seems to have recognized the benefits of breaking this tradition. Barnum was certainly familiar with the changes taking place in the New York playhouses. Mary Taylor, the favorite at the Olympic, performed for him at the Vauxhall, and, in addition to managing the garden, he was writing the advertising for the Bowery theatre. When he learned in 1841 that Scudder’s American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Ann, had been put up for sale, he secured it.3 The museum merged Barnum’s established interest in curiosities with his new belief in the possibilities of the popular stage. In order to draw a more genteel audience than he attracted to the pleasure garden, he conceived of this new playhouse as occupying a moral space. Barnum’s Museum theatre, unlike the Vauxhall, was dry, and to make the point clearer, the great showman renamed it the “Moral Lecture Room.” Here, in 1841, Barnum began mounting spiritually invigorating dramas and family-oriented minstrel and variety shows. By 1850, he had made enough money to dramatically expand the Lecture Room, transforming it into “an elegant place of popular resort” that seated 3,000 people. It was, he announced, a hall “without parallel in Europe or America in point of Symmetry, Comfort and Gorgeous Decoration,” a fitting home for “Grand Moral Dramas, Sterling Temperance Plays, Solid English Comedies, Comic Local Farces, Lively Pantomimes, Gorgeous Spectacles, Pleasing Operettas . . . etc. etc.” As a critic of his huckstering complained, Barnum had adopted “the miserable trick of calling each play and farce represented a moral affair, as though every well written piece did not teach a moral lesson.” But it worked.4 Barnum was not alone in believing that the moment had come to launch a new type of dramatic playhouse. The same year he bought Scudder’s Museum, Charles W. Taylor addressed the audience in a newly opened playhouse above the Albany Museum. Taylor was the musical director of the new theatre, which sat 1,500 people in a hall divided into a dress circle (which it called the family circle), boxes, and a parquet (there was no gallery). “It

78    C H A PT E R

3

cannot be denied, ladies and gentlemen,” Taylor began, “that the regular drama has ceased to be a favorite object with the citizens of Albany, and I may add elsewhere.” The problem, he admitted, was that the theatre “has not always fallen into good hands,” so “its true design has been perverted and its native moral tendencies changed.” This development could be reversed, however, and “if its abuses could be effectually guarded against, it would still be an object worthy of the admiration and encouragement of the most fastidious.” In order to make it so, the museum would offer “exhibitions in musical science” (concerts), displays of extraordinary skill in scientific illusions” (magicians), “representations of the drama known as the French Vaudeville” (operettas), “living paintings,” and “chaste and pleasing productions” (domestic melodramas). According to Taylor, the cultivation of taste depended on “sincerity of expression” in popular entertainment: “the melody of song, the inspiration of harmony, the wit and humor of the passing scene.”5 In the 1840s, a large number of middling-class and wealthy Americans, consumers who had hitherto avoided the playhouses on moral grounds, started patronizing them. In so doing, these people were not surrendering their morals; rather, they were reimagining the theatre as a moral institution. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the idea that the stage promoted immorality kept most respectable people away. In the 1840s, the idea that the stage might arouse moral feelings led them to patronize it. Sensibility centered on the idea that people could be improved if their passions were controlled by their moral sense and refashioned into empathetic and refined feelings. The theatre might contribute to this by arousing emotions that cultivated patrons could direct. The drama did so by encouraging spectators to look through the performed realities and develop a sympathetic link to the characters portrayed and the situations experienced. This implied both a new approach to spectatorship and a new understanding of performance. According to one theatregoer, the new goal of popular drama was to “tear off the covering of the human heart” and expose “the living and quivering fibres . . . [and] inmost hiding places of passion and emotion.” In so doing, theatre patrons would experience the “fearful and doubtful struggles of the heart . . . pour out our own sympathies in the contest; and if we gather no wisdom from the absorbing spectacle, let us lay no claims to the character of rational and moral beings.”6 Adapting to a new horizon of expectations, the theatre of the midnineteenth century, in both its comic and dramatic forms, evolved to serve sentimentalized tastes and the new form of spectatorship. Sentimentality predisposed theatre audiences to want an emotional experience rather than intellectual stimulation, ironic amusement, or excitement when they attended

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     79

a show. Although not everyone who went to an antebellum theatre was able or willing to internalize the emotional situations revealed on stage, the sympathetic approach affected the nature of the theatres they attended and the performers they preferred. The promise of new sensory experiences was sufficient to draw new groups of customers to the popular theatre and to transform American acting and dramaturgy. Unfortunately, because sentimentality’s aesthetic ideal depended on the arousal of feelings, the same fine line that separated the passionate from the sympathetic was relied on to divide the sentimental from the sensational. Sentimentalists argued that it was in part the responsibility of the spectator to understand the difference as the more refined the sensibility, the more deeply the soul animating the object of observation could be seen. What was important, in effect, was not the surface reality but the value within. Sophisticated spectators could look through images that might be shocking or sensational and connect with ideas or feelings of the characters in empathetic ways. The compassionate bond that was developed was spiritually uplifting for sympathetic audience members. Serving the expectations of sentimental spectators encouraged producers and performers to raise the emotional temperature and to mount performances that experimented with situations and feelings hitherto considered dangerous, prurient, upsetting, or abnormal. The cultured spectator, it was argued, would be able to look past these ostensibly distressing elements and feel the spirit that animated them. The sensational and the sympathetic were therefore closely entwined, which left unanswered the question of where, in this taste revolution, one was going to draw the line.

Taste Is the Only Morality Because sensibility was all about achieving a moral direction of feeling, “no work of art can be considered truly beautiful unless it recalls or re-produces, even in its finite form, some of the divine attributes.” Although it was not necessary for a work to deal directly with spiritually-uplifting themes, “or consciously suggest them to the intellect, . . . they must enter into the creation of the artist, [so] that the immediate and intuitive perception of beauty, always attached to their manifestation may appeal to those faculties or instincts which ever answer in delight when there attributes are suggested to the human spirit; for, consciously or unconsciously, the soul yearns for a clearer view of the beauty of God.” But how could spectators know whether an actor or theatre director was communicating the tingle of divine presence? The answer lay in the sympathetic bond that might be forged between artist and audience, for “how could we interpret the moral

80    C H A PT E R

3

meaning of these signs . . . if the keys were not within us, in the motive affections of our own hearts?” It is in “the private plot of our own consciousness . . . that we discern the sacredness and the sin.” In effect, it took moral depth to recognize artistic depth, which made the deeper appreciation of a performance a sign of the refinement of the spectator’s individual perceptual antennae.7 This was a view similar to John Ruskin’s influential aesthetic theory. It mirrored his distinction between “typical beauty,” which is pleasing to the eye, and “vital beauty,” which is pleasing to the conscience. Even though the senses might be initially repelled by a work of art or an element of nature—such as things that manifested violent emotions, were horrifying, or asymmetrical—moral feeling allowed the observer to discriminate between what was truly meaningful and what was on the surface. From this perspective, and despite Ruskin’s intentions, the appreciation of “typical beauty” came to be regarded as rather mundane since it rested on such superficial features as order and symmetry, purity and moderation. But appreciation of “vital beauty” arose out of an affective bond, or identity, between the object and the observer. Vital art could arouse feelings that were fundamentally spiritual and moral because it brought the sensibility of the spectator into intense communion with the soul of the artist or, when contemplating nature, with the greatness of God. “The highest art,” Ruskin wrote, “can only be met and understood by persons having some sort of sympathy with the high and solitary minds which produced it—sympathy only to be felt by minds in some degree as high and solitary themselves.”8 This suggested to Ruskin and to other nineteenth-century sentimental thinkers that art could serve as an instrument of differentiation and self-improvement. In the theatre, a performance that stimulated the spectators’ sympathies would lead to the progressive improvement of their moral faculties. Since the point of antebellum sentimentality was to uplift and cultivate spectators by awakening their emotions, the more intensely they were engaged, the more deeply they were thought to feel. Engaging with vital beauty in works that aroused painful feelings or that were awe-inspiring or frightening was better than seeing something that was merely pretty or comforting. This is why there were so many monsters and storms in plays and so many songs and poems of bereavement or parting in the sentimental canon: making the audience suffer the narrator’s sadness was the whole point. By feeling the pain of the bereaved, the listener moved a step higher on the ladder to God. Thus, for example, in “Annie Lisle,” a popular song of 1857, Boston composer Henry S. Thompson wrote:

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     81

Raise me in your arms, dear Mother! Let me once more look On the green and waving willows, And the flowing brook; Hark, those strains of angel music From the choir above; Dearest mother, I am going: Truly, “God is love.” By experiencing the mother’s grief over “lovely” Annie Lisle’s death, by feeling, as a real parent would, the absolute heartbreak of the situation, sentimental listeners were supposed to feel a purifying urge to be and do good.9 Recalling a scene in a play in which a child actor told the audience she would soon be dead and buried in her tiny grave, a spectator explained that the speech was “delivered in a voice which trembled with emotion, but which was so clear and shrill that it could be heard by every person in the house. The scene that followed has rarely been paralleled in any theatre. Men and women, overcome by emotion, broke down and wept, while the mother of the little player, forgetting her part in the play, sobbed with as much sincerity as any in the audience.”10 To a sentimental audience, this was a moment of sublime pathos and moral regeneration because the emotions the performer expressed inspired empathetic feelings in the audience. This is what sentimentalism worked toward: the sudden and generally unanticipated moment of revelation when compassion for another swept through the feeling person and revealed what advocates called the percipient’s “full humanity.” By the 1850s, a great number of middling-class Americans had come to accept the arts generally and the theatre specifically as beneficial to their values and sensibilities. “I am persuaded,” opined an Illinois newspaper editorialist, “that nothing is so proper . . . as the cultivating of that higher and more refined taste, which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of compositions of genius, and of the productions of the noble arts.” As the philosopher, David Hume, explained: “a greater or less relish for these obvious beauties which strike the senses, depend entirely upon the greater or less sensibility of the temper.” Swooning or weeping over art became a sign of the viewer’s empathetic feeling, his or her ability to connect with another. The novelist Newell Dunbar was not alone in finding a night of sentimental drama spiritually revitalizing. As characters develop, he wrote, as the plot unfolds and feelings awake, “we know not where we are, nor when we are, nor who we are; we have lost all consciousness, all self-consciousness even, save as we palpitate in the pangs and ecstasies of that sore-bestead soul, think

82    C H A PT E R

3

its thoughts, feel its feelings, live in it.” In doing so, “we have bathed in the Ideal.” The culture of sensibility thus inverted conventional ideas about entertainment. Where early in the nineteenth century, public amusements were commonly considered agents of moral contamination, in the1840s sentimentalists began suggesting that Americans would “grow vicious without the refinements and distractions of the fine arts and liberal amusements.”11 An advertisement for Barnum’s newly renovated museum playhouse concisely expressed the new horizon of expectation that sentimental culture created and that popular theatre managers now sought to exploit: Oh come you to Barnum’s, Oh come there with me, Chaste acting to witness, Rare beauties to see, There’s beauties of science, There’s beauties of art, There’s beauties of feeling, That reaches the heart12 Commercial amusement emerged not as a distraction for businesspeople or as escapism for housebound women or even as an expression of a rowdy working-class culture; it emerged as a manifestation of a new horizon in faith and feeling. Under the influence of sentiment, the dramatic theatre, which had hitherto been considered a place of temptation and fantasy, followed the comedy playhouse into the light. “The domestic drama,” a critic in the New York Herald explained in 1845, “reflects our own hearts, and the objects they hold dearest, and the more powerfully illustrate the relations of virtue or vice.” As another theatre critic later recalled, in the 1840s and 50s good people began to “swallow” moral melodrama “as though it were a dainty morsel of something most delightful to the inner man.”13

The New Melodrama In the early 1840s, even as the owners of comic playhouses and minstrel troupes drew a middling-class audience to comedy, another group of entertainment entrepreneurs worked to attract them to drama. The issue for them involved adapting the dramas of the previous generation to the taste and perspective of the sentimental patron. Phineas Barnum’s move from vaudeville to drama, from the Vauxhall to the museum, was not uncommon. Comedy educated many theatre entrepreneurs and audiences about

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     83

the moral possibilities of tragedy and melodrama. Moses Kimball’s Boston Museum, which opened in 1841, for example, was also initially run as a variety house. During his first years in operation, Kimball provided a roster of magicians, acrobats, blackface comics, child performers, and ballad singers.14 In 1843, the Boston Museum launched its first dramatic season when Kimball introduced a run of spectacular musicals based on fairy tales, including Puss ’n Boots, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and Aladdin. These shows targeted a family audience. In the eyes of one spectator, they had “a wonderful effect on young and old.” It was only after his success with family entertainments that Kimball added the first of the theatre’s adult melodramas.15 Moses Kimball was a close friend of Phineas Barnum, and like his famous contemporary, he came to the stage by an indirect route. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1809, Kimball first clerked in a merchant’s house, then became the proprietor of a gentleman’s furnishings store, and finally founded a periodical, the New England Galaxy. In the mid-1830s, having enjoyed little financial success in any of these ventures, he created the Franklin Print Company, which manufactured cheap lithographs about patriotic and inspiring subjects. By 1840, he was reputedly worth $100,000, a substantial fortune by the standards of the time. Using the money he made from his printing business, Moses and his brother David opened the Lowell Museum in 1840 and its Boston counterpart at the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets a year later.16 There was nothing especially new in the collection of curios the Kimball and his brother offered. Most of them had been on exhibit on and off since 1818. They included a mixture of artifacts from an old museum in New York, Mix’s Museum in New Haven, and a collection of wax figures once housed in Boston’s New England Museum. But the Kimballs, like Barnum, used the curios as a feint, a way of reassuring audiences that they were getting something educational. Initially, a two-bit ticket bought a tour of the museum, which occupied one long hallway, and a seat in the theatre.17 In the 1840s and 50s, “moral drama” became “all the rage,” fittingly perhaps, as the fight over slavery fired the nation’s blood. A number of new playhouses with novel seating arrangements were constructed in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. These theatres, often attached to museums, were capable of housing a thousand or more spectators in well-ventilated surroundings. They were not as ostentatious as the playhouses of the early nineteenth century, and they were also far less democratic. Like Mitchell’s Olympic, the new theatres were geared to the tastes of a narrowly defined audience. They contained a balcony but no gallery, and they rejected the conventions of the pit and charged the same (or more) for the seating in the parquet as they

84    C H A PT E R

3

did for the seating in the dress circle. Women and children were encouraged to sit in the parquets of these theatres, and for some performances the front rows were reserved only for them. Like the Olympic and other burlesque theatres, seat prices were comparatively low, generally between twenty-five and fifty cents. All these theatres were dry, and their advertisements announced that “profane expletives and indecent allusions” in their shows had been “totally expunged.” Deepening their association with moral causes, these theatres also offered themselves as venues for lecturers and conventions dealing with such issues as temperance, abolitionism (Frederick Douglass spoke at the Boston Museum, for example), and opposition to capital punishment.18 The museum theatres of the 1840s also differed from those of earlier decades in terms of content. Where the new theatres specialized in moral melodramas, farces, burlesques, and minstrel shows, the older ones continued to provide dramas of “established merit”: Shakespeare’s works, Italian operas, eighteenth-century English comedies and dramas, and heroic melodramas. As a middling-class audiences for commercial entertainment emerged, these older houses became for genteel people what the New York Herald called places “of dernier resort.” Although many of the grand old theatres closed, in New York at least one, the Bowery, became the country’s first working-class playhouse. Walt Whitman, who liked to attend the Bowery to watch old-school heroic melodramas, described its audience in the 1850s as largely comprised of “mechanics.” Applause at the Bowery, he recalled, was “no dainty kid-gloved business, but electric force and muscle from perhaps 2,000 full-sinew’d men.” Another patron recalled the antebellum pit audience at the Bowery as being filled with peanut-crunching artisans with faces “as red as their shirts,” though it was also sprinkled with what he called “orange and lemonade boys” (likely newsboys and bootblacks). “Manners in the Bowery houses,” wrote this memoirist, “were quite democratic and conversations between the patrons in the gallery and the pit were carried on so that all might hear, a practice which often added to the enjoyment of auditors in the more exclusive parts of the theatre.” As this spectator made clear, a few affluent customers continued to attend shows at houses such as the Bowery, especially when they hosted famous actors. By the 1850s they were coming in reduced numbers, however, and they were the first to leave; the theatre employed ushers who escorted them safely to carriages lined up at the side entrance to carry them home. In short, the older theatres were segregating along class lines, just as the burlesque playhouses and museums were.19 The original definition of melodrama is a dramatic play with singing and music, but that definition gradually lost meaning over the course of

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     85

the nineteenth century. Although most melodramas featured singing and all had musical accompaniment and interludes, the word came to be applied generally to plays with a peculiar narrative thrust and an identifiable stock of characters. Theatre historians generally define melodrama by referring to these characteristics. To Frank Rahill, for example, melodrama was a kind of hybrid, a “dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime and spectacle, and intended for a popular audience.” Elaine Hadley, in a recent study of the genre, agrees, though she places even more emphasis on the specific features of the action. Calling melodrama a “mode,” Hadley describes it as involving visual renderings of criminal acts, torture, and the personification of good and evil; a highly charged style of acting; and “atmospheric menace and providential plotting.”20 The trouble with approaching melodrama in this way is that it tends to obscure the changes that took place within it, and melodrama changed a lot over the course of the nineteenth century. Melodrama first appeared in Europe during the Enlightenment, and until the 1840s almost all works in the genre focused on history, adventure, mythology, or the occult. Most featured epic battles, startling incidents, spectacular scenic effects, and blood-soaked realism. The Last Days of Pompeii, for example, which was written by Louisa Medina (later the wife of the Bowery Theatre’s owner, Thomas Hamblin) and was the first play in America to enjoy a substantial run (twenty-nine performances in 1835), ended with the volcano exploding and ash descending on scores of extras. In The Spectre King, and His Phantom Steed, the climax came when 200 “bearded and savage looking soldiers, with fierce and warlike demonstrations, suddenly [rose] out of the stage and commence[d] the storming of a fortress in a ferocious and bloodthirsty manner.” The Bowery had an immense stage and its vast stock company included an equestrian troupe of forty horses that were used in the battle scenes that normally crowned these epics. It was all part of the shock and thrill that underlay the genre. Kelly and Coleman’s Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity! featured a moving skeleton, a horrifying Blue Chamber haunted by the ghastly and supernatural forms of the villain’s murdered wives, and a host of eunuchs and harem girls. An 1845 Bowery production of The Robbers had a decapitated head that was placed on a table, where it proceeded to talk. Intense and declamatory acting added to these sensational elements, as performers snarled and shouted, “squalled, kicked, rolled, and grinned.” One performer was described as acting rather like “a West Indian hurricane,” while a Mrs. Waller in the 1835 melodrama Marie offered such “guttural gurglings” in her death scene that one squeamish reviewer found it “simply revolting.”21

86    C H A PT E R

3

The melodramas that were featured in the middling-class theatres of the 1840s were very different from these heroic and gothic ones. They differed not in the intensity of the emotions on display or in the horror and mystery they presented but in their focus and scale. The first successful domestic melodrama was the temperance piece The Drunkard, which premiered at Kimball’s Boston Museum in 1844 and went on to 144 performances there, becoming the longest-running show of the mid-nineteenth century. When it opened at Barnum’s New York Museum the next year, it did almost as well, with a run of 100 nights. According to one of the play’s many fans, works such as The Drunkard were “great moral engine[s]” that promised to add “thousands to the ranks of reformed men.” But temperance dramas were only precursors of a “veritable outbreak” of sentimental melodramas on the popular stage. Even more current and popular were the gambling plays and the abolition plays, both of which became genres in their own right, the latter largely in the form of innumerable theatrical versions of the decade’s best seller, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.22 “Uncle Tom” plays were incredibly popular. The first one, written by George Aiken, became the basis for many of the other prewar versions. Aiken, who described his version as a “domestic drama,” recast the novel for an urban middling-class audience. Where Stowe’s novel features strong, morally righteous women and vacillating or uncommunicative men, the plays established a more conventional family structure with good men, angelic children, and modest, self-effacing women. This was typical of the new melodrama, which domesticated the action and placed the shocking and scary bits in the context of a familiar, even ordinary, emotional life. Cast as a melodrama, Uncle Tom became, according to the editor and former theatre critic for the Boston American J. Frank Davis, the first theatrical performance “vast numbers” of Americans ever saw and “also the second, third, fourth . . . I was one of those,” he continued. “Until I was 13 years old I never saw a professional company of actors in anything but ‘Tom’—but I had seen that production five or six times.” By the time he wrote his memoir, he had attended twenty-five Uncle Tom performances. A journalist he knew claimed to have seen it sixty-three times. Although domestic melodramas, including “Uncle Tom” plays, attracted abolitionists and other reformers, their audiences extended well beyond partisans of particular causes. The success of domestic melodramas lay in their appeal to sentiment.23 Tom Taylor’s Still Waters Run Deep, a domestic melodramatic that had its American premiere at Barnum’s Museum in September 1855 and went on to become a favorite in both the North and the South, illustrates the connection between the development of the popular theatre, the growing

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     87

importance of the middling-class audience, and the transformation of the emotional landscape. The play centered on a newly yet unhappily married middle-class couple, John and Emily Mildmay. Emily is a romantic who craves “spirit, life enthusiasm” and wants a mate “to share my feelings, to invest life with something of poetry—of romance.” Unfortunately, John, a successful businessman, is by his own admission “cold, awkward, uninteresting, unimpassioned.” Emily’s aunt, who lives with the couple, believes that there was in the relationship “a want of proper feeling” and considers “such an arrangement” in marriage to be “indecent.” A scoundrel, Captain Hawks­ ley, seeks to take advantage of the couple’s unhappiness by seducing Emily, though his real goal is to blackmail John. The captain, who has lived in Spain (“the land of poetry and passion”), attracts Emily “with his romantic airs, his honeyed words, and showy graces” and almost succeeds in drawing her into an affair. Mildmay, however, who is far smarter than he initially appears, succeeds in outwitting Hawkesbury and exposes him as a forger and blackmailer, thereby saving his wife from disgrace. At the end of the play, Mildmay reasserts his authority over the household, but in so doing he admits that he was wrong. “I have carried the laissez aller principle too far,” he confides to the audience, “it’s a capital rule in political economy—but it don’t do in married life.” He assures Emily that in the future he will place “love first” and secure her loyalty “by a lover’s tenderness.” Emily, for her part, swears to “honor and obey him as a wife should” and thanks him for his love: “Oh bless you—bless you for such word!” She sobs, “How have I misjudged you!”24 Still Waters was a controversial play because it dealt with adultery, but it also depicted sin as a product of a dysfunctional marriage. The play warns that although pleasure seeking, romance, and sexual passion, all of which Hawkesbury represented, might be alluring to women, they should not fly too close to those flames. Similarly, it cautioned men to avoid the pitfalls of too much business, too much reason. The happy balance was to be found in gentle affection, companionship, compassion for the other, and the wife’s proper deference of to her husband. Emily owed John affection and sympathy, and she owed him obedience and loyalty. This relationship was more than simply worldly, as Emily’s final blessing makes clear. Love between a man and a wife was a Christian and a human obligation that carried the partners closer to God’s will. According to Barnum, the popularity of Still Waters was “eclipsing all precedent” at his museum and when it opened in Boston, it created a “sensation” and a “furore.” The Tribune called the popularity of the play “astounding,” and the theatre correspondent in the Spirit of the Times concurred. Tickets, he reported, could not be had and, despite its immodest theme, audiences for it were “composed of the elite of the city.”25

88    C H A PT E R

3

Moral melodrama satisfied the sentimental desire for an entertainment that was at once overtly good and appealing to the spectator’s sympathies. In The Drunkard, it was not only the reform of the inebriate Middleton or the evil of his tempter Cribbs that appears to have engaged the audience’s feelings; it was the suffering of the drunkard’s wife, Mary. According to one spectator, she inspired unrivaled sympathy by displaying “the devotion of her sex, and the strength of [a] woman’s love, sustained by the precepts of religion, when abandoned by him who had sworn to cherish and protect her, and enduring a life of misery while seeking her lost and erring husband.”26 Just as sentimental comedy invited audiences to look beneath surfaces and drew attention to the superficiality of material existence by juxtaposing the absurd and the sincere, domestic melodrama responded to the new cultural emphasis on compassion and companionship. Even though reform plays such as The Drunkard represented a small percentage of the shows at places such as the Boston Museum, their concern with transformation, family, and the redemptive power of the affective relationship percolated through all other forms of middling-class melodrama. In the historical play Belphagor, the Mountebank; or, Woman’s Constancy, a feature of the Boston Museum’s 1850–51 season, a child whose parents perished in the French Revolution is adopted by a group of mountebanks and becomes a street busker. He marries Madeline and they have two children, and the conflict between “the deep set domestic affections of the Mountebank, and the vagabondism inherent in his calling” constitutes the core of the drama. Complications develop when it is revealed that Madeline is also an orphan whose noble parents were executed in the Revolution. Her aristocratic family finds her and urges her to claim her fortune, insisting, however, that to do so she must leave her low-class husband. Reluctantly Madeline goes, but only because one of her children is dying and “can only be saved by such a chance.” Her husband, who is away performing, is unaware of the circumstances of her departure. After many toils and tests to their love, the couple is reunited, and at the decisive moment it is discovered that the mountebank is also of noble lineage. It was, in the eyes of one reviewer, a play of great historical interest, “deeply suggestive of thought and feeling.”27 Just as historical dramas took on a domestic and sentimental cast in the 1840s, so too did horrors and mysteries. In The Dream, or The Truth Revealed, which the Boston Museum staged in 1848, a rich and happy merchant has in his employ a clerk with a secret passion for gambling. The clerk needs money to feed his vice, so he connives to marry the merchant’s daughter. The evil man, a slave to his passions, schemes to murder his employer once he is married in order to secure the merchant’s fortune for himself.

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     89

An upstanding farm youth who is courting the family’s maid learns of the plot and denounces the clerk, only to be driven away by the disbelieving household. The clerk then lures the merchant to an abandoned house and murders him, pinning the crime on the maid. The unfortunate girl is forced to flee, though she has time to stop at a cemetery and bid a tearful goodbye to her deceased parents. The maid then escapes, but she is accosted on the road by bandits and takes refuge in a gristmill that happens to be owned by the brother of her betrothed, the good farmer. The scene then switches back to the deceased merchant’s house, where the villain delights in verbally abusing his wife (who is grieving her missing father), demonstrating that a marriage without love is a living hell. He briefly leaves the room in order to get a weapon to murder her, but before he can finish the job, the gristmill owner arrives and rescues the unfortunate and imperiled woman. In the final act, the murderous clerk is in New York. Having gambled away much of his original fortune, he is now looking for a new merchant’s daughter to marry. By coincidence, the wrongly accused maid now works at the home of the family he has chosen for this vile enterprise. She summons the heroic agrarian brothers and they reveal the evil man to be a murderer, a thief, and a would-be bigamist. Their charges are confirmed by the villain’s wife, who steps out of the shadows at the decisive moment. The gambler then flees and is pursued to the abandoned house where he murdered the merchant. He comes across the gruesome body and goes mad. As his pursuers arrive, he confesses to his sins and drops dead in horror.28 The happy ending finds the farmer reunited with the maid and the widowed daughter with the gristmill owner in a joyous affirmation of conquering love. According to one thoughtful patron, melodramas such as these offered the reassuring triumph of “meek domestic sentiment” over immense evil, albeit after a struggle of “emotional ferocity.”29 In adventure tales, a character had to confront death in order to save someone he or she loved. Sometimes characters found the objects of their devotion in the process of a great struggle, but that did not stop them from confronting even more hardships in order to prove the sincerity of their feelings. The good characters in these stories felt deeply for each other, but their love was invariably companionate, honorable, and tender rather than carnal. In addition, when the good finally triumphed over evil, it did so as a catharsis, through some process of conversion or some hidden truth that was revealed. Domestic melodrama took the epic struggles of the heroic or gothic stage and rendered them ordinary. Middle-class audiences wanted to be able to identify with the characters on stage and feel with them. Domestic melodrama contained the fantasy of the stage by embedding it in everyday reality. This produced a very different horizon of expectation

90    C H A PT E R

3

from the one prevailing in working-class houses such as the Bowery or the Chatham.

The Real and the Actual In the 1840s, sentimental expectations helped produce a change in the conventional approach to acting. Today we tend to think of melodramatic performance as invariably exaggerated and affected, but in the mid-nineteenth century acting styles were in flux. Spectators distinguished two different approaches, which were sometimes called the real and the authentic. The eminent American actress Charlotte Cushman, for example, was considered “a rude, strong, uncultivated talent”; at the time of her death in 1876, the critic William Winter observed that while she always made her characters “real” she never made them “actual.” The distinction of reality from actuality was the difference between old and new performance styles; where the former tried to communicate real feelings by intensifying their expression, the latter involved more understatement and “naturalism.”30 In the 1830s and 40s, Edwin Forrest, the first native-born American star, was considered the preeminent male exemplar of what would come to be regarded as the old or realistic style of melodramatic acting. Characters performed by Forrest, one fan wrote, were “cast in a larger mold than the expressions of ordinary life.” The actor made emotions manifest by using “physical exaggeration,” to “rise to the height of a great passion.” Performed with “the usual exhibition of emotion in society,” the writer continued, the characters Forrest depicted “would be unnatural, for there are no such examples of such affection or sublime revenge in the drawing room or the counting house.” In other words, while Forrest made the passions of his characters tangible, he did not make them actual. Audience members who preferred the more subdued, less romantic, and more sentimental style of melodramatic acting, therefore found Forrest hard to take seriously. “There he is,” chuckled the columnist Olive Logan, “the neck, the immemorial legs—the a-h-h-h-h, in the same hopeless depth of guttural gloom—if gloom could be guttural. . . . We may crack jokes about it. We may call it the muscular school, the brawny art, the biceps aesthetics, the tragic calves, the bovine drama, rant, roar and rigmarole; but what then?” In the antebellum decades, when he was in his prime, Forrest was seen by spectators as a primeval force. As Logan admitted, when, as the Indian chieftain Metamora, he “folds his mighty arms, and plants his mighty legs, and with his mighty voice sneers at us ‘Look there!’ until the very ground thrills and trembles beneath our feet,” he delighted the eager crowd. And when, as Pythias, Forrest slapped his chest

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     91

and roared “death before dishonor!” the audience, she recalled, would “break out in a storm of applause.”31 This kind of “ranting, ear-splitting declaimer” was standard fare at houses such as the Park and the Bowery after the 1830s, and it invariably called forth “bursts upon bursts of applause.” As one newspaper critic observed in 1843, “a really chaste, classic performance has never been appreciated here.”32 As tastes changed in the 1840s, the difference between real and authentic acting became a marker of class distinction. Where sentimental middlingclass spectators wanted to see lives similar to their own depicted on stage, working-class audiences sought something more exotic. They continued to demand bold declamations, villains who received their just punishment, and heroes who overcame all odds. Although they involved themselves passionately in the show, these spectators did not treat the stage as a place they belonged, even spiritually. Their engagement, wrote an observer in 1846, came from the fact that “they know that there is another and a better world than theirs, even in this life, and a longing to have glimpse of it sends them to the theatre. There they see the insides of palaces, and listen to the talk of kings and statesmen. They learn how things are done in upper circles, and hear royal lovers make love, and meet cabinets with prime ministers and statesmen. . . . The ragged boy who has sold penny papers all day, and eaten his dinner by the side of a fire-plug for the convenience of water, may at night see a queen in a blue satin robe curtsey to him, and hear her thank him for his applause.”33 Audiences at old-style melodramas shouted down the villains and cheered the heroes not because they empathized with them but because they found the action exciting. They celebrated as uninhibited fans at noisy sports events or rock concerts still do. Working people goaded the orchestra leader to “dry up” if the overture went on too long, they screamed at the villains, and they threw oranges at the actors they did not like. They egged on the heroes and cheered loudly when they triumphed. “Hello there!—bang! Knock him down! Hurraw!!! Pop! Pop!—there he goes! Hit him Jim, he’s got no friends! Hi Hi!!” was how one spectator tried to reproduce the noise around him at the Bowery as personal fights and stage enthusiasm intermingled into “one mass” of sound, punctuated only by “shillelagh whacks” in the audience and pistol shots on the stage. Working—class audiences clearly enjoyed the theatricality of the theatre and they transferred its unreal excitement to the pit and gallery, but their participation was that of a critic, a fan, or a show-off. Spectators at a traditional melodrama released their own energies; they did not seek to assimilate the energy of the performers.34 “Realistic” acting of the Forrest or Cushman kind was predicated on the idea that a performer had to distill the essence of an emotion and then

92    C H A PT E R

3

express it. There was nothing natural or everyday about this: people who hate someone or who are inspired to a noble act normally do not evince their feelings with wild eyes, vicious rages, or thunderous declamations. But hate or pride were real emotions, and when they were expressed on stage it was done in a way that magnified their intensity and made the feelings of the characters experiencing them transparent. Reality came from the distillation process: the melodramatic actors of the 1830s and early 40s strove to express the essence of emotion (passion, in fact). This tradition survived in the working-class playhouses right up until the 1860s. In the 1840s, however, a new sentimental style of acting grew in popularity, one characterized by actuality or naturalism. Actors who emoted in the old way began to be scorned by sentimental critics and fell out of favor with middling-class audiences. The “mouthing, spouting, sing-song declamation of the old school is out of keeping with the age,” a journalist remarked in 1844. “Actors have only to cast their eyes around the House when they are inflicting their nightly doses of elaborated artificialities upon their audience,” wrote another journalist of a middling-class theatre, “and witness the apathy, almost amounting to disgust, which follows their efforts, and then to notice the heavy burst of approbation which reward some genuine stroke of passionate nature, and we should have a total reform of the artificial style of playing.”35 The English actors Ellen and Charles Kean, who periodically toured the United States in the 1840s, and the American performer Edwin Booth were the most famous exemplars of the new style. Acting for these artists, wrote one of Booth’s earliest biographers, in explaining what separated Booth from Forrest, was “an art and not a spasm.” Booth and the Keans appealed to people who wanted to be moved to introspective feeling. Even Henry Ward Beecher, who denounced the theatre as immoral, said that he would be willing to watch Booth act. Booth’s Hamlet, his most celebrated impersonation, was, in the words of Olive Logan, not a fierce and tormented character, haunted by very real ghosts, but “a true gentleman sadly strained and jarred. Through the whole play the mind is borne on in mournful reverie . . . for under all, beneath every scene and word and act, we hear what is not audible, the melancholy music of sweet bells jangled out of tune. . . . This gives a curious reality to the whole.”36 This was the type of acting that the middling class preferred. The essayist Laurence Hutton recalled that Mary Taylor was never “unrefined,” but she also did not seek to reach, as did Cushman, “the sublime or the immensely high toned.” Some more traditionally minded critics accused her of “not putting feeling or expression in her parts,” but she was a “whole-souled” and

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     93

“true-hearted woman, whose better nature shone through” and this was what audiences wanted to see. Although Frederick Conway, who played Belphagor at the Boston Museum in 1850–51, drew criticism for some of his more extreme “bursts of feeling,” overall, his performance was rated true to life because he appeared to be just what he was, “a gentleman masquerading as a mountebank.” Eliza Logan (Olive Logan’s sister), was similarly a favorite with Boston Museum audiences because she was always “perfect and correct . . . without an appearance of affectation.” Those fond of the old-style of acting regarded her as “subdued” and insufficiently “declamatory,” but museum audiences loved her because she had “an earnestness of style and manner, as well as a life-like vitality that closely approximates to nature.” In the early 1850s, the museum’s “fashionable and discriminating” audiences gave Logan “unmistakable demonstrations of their approval and delight” every night.37 The choice of adjectives in these reviews is important because they reflect a desire to demystify the theatre. Sentimental theatre patrons seemed to want to forget that they were watching a play at all. They preferred an acting style that made them feel as though they were looking at something actual and true to life. In preferring this kind of drama, mid-century spectators were declaring their interest in approaching art from a similar perceptual position as that of the theatre’s religious critics. Church leaders had argued for generations that the theatre was dangerous because the fantasy life it presented would contaminate real-life values. Middling-class spectators accepted this and wanted to be made to connect with the good characters and to feel like the drama could be happening to them or to people they knew. This explains their repudiation of larger-than-life characterizations such as Forrest’s; they were exciting but not authentic in any literal sense. The naturalness of the actors they preferred eliminated the bridge of artificiality that divided the stage from the seat and made empathy possible. Actors tried to draw people in by emotionally connecting with each of them personally. In order to do so, they had to exhibit a focused intensity and concentrated feeling without appearing unnatural. “An audience cannot be excited without being thrilled,” a critic explained, and “it cannot be thrilled without being made to feel.” Good acting became a matter of finding a balance between a style that was “not exaggerated into ranting” but that also did not “subside into tameness.”38 Sentimental domestic melodrama tried to do more than simply arrest the audience’s attention; its goal was absorption so complete that the subject-object division collapsed and the spectator was completely engaged with the feelings of the actor. “What do people go to the theatre for,” an actor of the new school asked rhetorically, “but to laugh and to cry?”

94    C H A PT E R

3

Sentimental theatre focused on spectators’ reaction to it, which depended on their involvement in it. Sentimental melodrama domesticated the genre by working to create a fusion of audience member and performer rather than the hi-hi-ing and hurrawing commonly heard at houses such as the Chatham, the Tremont, and the Bowery. According to a contributor to the Northern Christian Advocate, when “carried away,” “good, sober-sided people, occupying prominent seats at the plays” “applaud by silent tears, as eloquently as others could do by cheers and clapping.” For sentimentalists, these silent tears were self-improving because they manifested the sympathetic bond between souls.39 The new melodrama and the empathetic engagement it invited pulled spectatorship away from its early nineteenth-century moorings. Sometimes the differences in aesthetic approach and class identification that the old and new styles of melodrama reflected contributed to very real conflicts. Many things caused two riots at the Astor Place Theatre in New York in 1849, but they were in part triggered by a clash over attitudes toward performance and spectatorship. The Astor Place Theatre had been established by elements in New York high society as a subscription opera house, but it had been unable to function as such and had been forced to open its doors to middling-class people. Despite this, an unpalatable elitism hung about the place, and it was sometimes pilloried in the press as the preserve of the “exclusives,” or the old moneyed “upper ten” and the “codfish aristocrats” (or nouveau riche), and as a bastion for refined, even European, notions of cultural separation. The authentic stage seemed in the context of this theatre to be somehow anti-republican.40 When the English actor William Macready, one of the most famous exponents of the new, more natural, performance style and a well-known critic of his thundering American contemporary, Edwin Forrest, appeared at the house to perform Macbeth, the same role being performed by his American rival a few blocks away, a group of working men infiltrated the theatre and hissed the visitor off the stage. Unwilling to be intimidated, the subscribers of the Astor Place Theatre urged Macready to appear the next night, promising him the protection of the police. The city administration had recently passed into the hands of the Whigs, and the mayor, who was concerned about preventing violence, called out the militia. When the grassroots Democratic Party network summoned its own protesters to defend republican values, the result was one of the bloodiest riots of nineteenth-century America. The explosion, wrote a Democrat paper, had two causes: first “that the right of the public to hiss an actor was denied” and second that there was “an illegal employment of the military to coerce citizens.”41 As the paper suggested, the

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     95

riot was in part a response by working people to the sentimentalization of melodrama. Playhouses had once been open to all Americans, from the clerks and shopkeepers in the pit to the gentry in the dress circle and the prostitutes and mechanics in the gallery. Each group sat in separate sections, but all watched together. In creating a respectable popular theatre that excluded working-class audiences, the new theatre was challenging what many saw as their democratic right to hiss, shout, and emote in the old-fashioned way.

The Danger of Uncontrolled Vision Reflecting in 1851 on the recent growth of the popular theatre in Boston, a columnist in the Baptist journal Christian Watchman and Reflector revealed that the “gradual and silent revolution in the public sentiment” had occasioned “great surprise in religious men. They imagined a resurrection of Dramatic entertainment to be quite impossible, and congratulated themselves that the conversion of the Federal and Tremont into churches was an epoch in the religious history of Boston never to be forgotten.” The snake had been scotched, but not killed. “The Museum, with its miniature farces and comedies exhibiting all the frivolities of the theatre with none of its tragic grandeur and subduing pathos, has attracted many professing Christians,” the columnist continued. Following fast on the heels of this, “fascinating [moral] works” had been offered and these seemed to have “dissipated prejudices and antipathies which were once deeply rooted.” But, the writer cautioned, although “licentiousness and intemperance, twin sisters of the theatre, are forbidden to enter the door [of the new playhouses], and impure performances, the favorites of the stage in other days” were currently being denounced “with a zeal that Congreve and Wycherly would have called fanatic,” the faithful should not be “hoodwinked.” The theatre “has never been a school of virtue; in all ages, in all nations, under all managements, it has pandered to vice, and been prolific in immoralities.” The revolution in the theatre, he predicted, will end a “disastrous failure”; the instrument of evil could never be turned to moral ends.42 The fretful Baptist was getting at something important. While almost everyone who reflected on the subject admitted that a great flood of moral sentiment had swept the stages clean in the 1840s, they wondered if the tide of purity could be sustained. Major changes in taste had taken place: a large number of new playhouses had been opened, most of which were geared to a more narrowly defined and genteel audience; new forms of comedy had gained currency that appealed to sentimental Christian values and eschewed bawdiness and cynicism; a new style of acting had grown in popularity that

96    C H A PT E R

3

stressed naturalism and seemed to be taming the theatre’s passions; and a new sentimentalized form of melodrama was all the rage that appeared to be harnessing the stage to moral causes. Secure money was being made in the entertainment industry for the first time, thanks to the emergence of the middling-class consumer, and that meant that the direction of reform would not be reversed quickly. But there was more to this revolution than genres, styles, and manners: it also involved perceptions. And that was the problem. On an overcast August day in 1851, Uriel Wright, the popular St. Louis lawyer, politician, and orator, delivered a lively address on the occasion of the setting of the cornerstone of the new Varieties Theatre. The Varieties, a magnificent house, was paid for by a consortium of wealthy St. Louis entrepreneurs (each of whom contributed $500) and operated under the management of the well-known actor James M. Field. It was built as a comedy playhouse with a large sloping parterre and a single balcony, designed for the enjoyment of the city’s middling class and elite. The theatre was a symbol of St. Louis’ rising wealth and sophistication, for as Wright explained to the crowd, with the “subjugation of physical nature now complete,” the time had come for the respectable citizens of St. Louis to build a “temple which shall be devoted to the encouragement and illustration of feelings.” Theatres, he knew, were controversial, and many Christians still felt that they were evil. But as Wright made clear, one should not confuse the culture of the institution with the level of refinement of its patrons. “Men may visit the theatre with objects widely different,” he explained, “but this is not less true of all institutions, human or divine. A man may enter the temple of Christianity, and sit in the ‘seat of the scornful’; he may listen to eloquence burning with the theme of ‘life and death and immortality’, and only smile at the delusion which vests him with a soul; or he may go to catch the spirit of the heaven taught morality, which secures that soul’s felicity. Man cannot be denied the privilege of choice. But if he rightly choose, he will gather from the drama that which helps to raise the genius and to mend the heart.”43 A choice, Wright made clear, had to be made about how to look at the stage and this was something for each person to decide. While sentimental tastemakers might agree that one had to look through the performance and feel the emotions animating the actor, they knew doing so depended on the refinement of the spectators’ sensibilities. Cultural transformations are never linear, absolute, or pervasive and the rise of sensibility was no exception. Although antebellum cultural ideals reoriented people toward the affective, the familial, and the empathetic and untold numbers attempted to realize those ideals in their lives, the depth of sentiment and the sincerity of its expression was always subject to the moral predispositions and cultivation of individual

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     97

spectators. Sentimentalists knew that people had to be open to improvement in order to be uplifted, and they accepted the possibility that some might close their heart to sympathy. But this raised the possibility that the reform of the theatre might be no reform at all and that it could remain a temptation to evil, at least for the unenlightened. This concern was present from the beginning, and many people saw it. Although they welcomed the purification of the stage, many commentators mistrusted the perceptions of the audiences. “Like a spoiled school boy, who, instead of studying his primer, smacks his lips over a stolen repast of sugar-plums and bons-bons, and afterwards refuses a wholesome dinner,” a critic worried in 1846, audiences might come to “no longer enjoy the strong intellectual food which nature and truth were wont to spread before them.” The risk was that they would “vitiate their healthy appetite” on the superficial elements of the drama: the “extravagant spectacles, melodramatic absurdities and other grossly physical exhibitions.” They might perceive sentimental theatre as “improbable circumstances, dressed up in big, windy words, or unmeaning pantomime.” If these were the “aliments for which the public appetite is set,” then the theatre would inevitably plunge back into immorality. It was on this basis that so many religious thinkers, including Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn and Thomas De Witt Talmage in Philadelphia, continued to doubt that the stage could ever be purified.44 Nowhere was the question of looking more sharply framed than in the depiction of potentially prurient or violent material. Ironically, sentimental theatre had the potential to encourage the presentation of such matter because of its focus on the reform of sinners. In the new moral theatre, the brothel, the barroom, and the gambler’s den were presented with harsh realism intended to turn people from sin. But was there not also a risk that they might encourage an interest in vice? Entertainment entrepreneurs, who understood the value of working the edges of propriety in order to create a stir and sell tickets, had an incentive for pushing public tolerance to what they regarded as the limit of safety, and this meant making the graphic elements of the drama as shocking as possible. So, for example, in The Drunkard, an otherwise exemplary play, much attention was focused on the Middleton character’s delirium tremens immediately preceding his renunciation of drink. The drunkard lashes around, raves, and writhes in “all-too-truthful agony.” As Harry Watkins, who played Middleton in the National Theatre production of 1850, wrote in his diary on opening night, “I brought them down in the delirium tremens and everyone said I made a hit.” Although one could argue that the graphic depictions of material such as this was potentially refreshing, its fascination partly lay in the repellant nature of what was

98    C H A PT E R

3

being portrayed. Was it the shocking element that attracted interest or the sympathy that the poor man’s suffering invited? The same was true of scenes or depictions that were potentially sexually arousing. Managers maintained that they were illustrations of the danger of eroticism (as in images of sexual tempters) or of divine beauty (angelic but lightly clad forms), but they still provided opportunities for ogling.45 That this was not merely a problem of philosophy was made clear in the public and legal response to perhaps the most eye-opening theatrical presentations of the 1840s and 50s: the Living Pictures exhibition of Dr. Robert Hanham Collyer. The doctor was a remarkable character. Born on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, in 1814, he studied mesmerism in Paris and then medicine in London. In 1836, he migrated to the United States, settling in Massachusetts and establishing himself as a lecturer in phrenology. Collyer wrote a manual on that subject in 1838. While touring the country, he hid under a bed in a Louisville hotel and caught his wife in the arms of the English novelist Frederick Marryat. Perhaps inspired by his experience, in 1843 Collyer published a discourse on New World philistinism and immorality, Lights and Shadows of American Life. A self-proclaimed medical wizard, the doctor claimed, among other things, to have used magnetism to restore “to active animation” a man who had died from excessive drinking.46 In the fall of 1847, shortly after he had purportedly reanimated the dead and four years after he had denounced American morals, Collyer unveiled his Living Pictures at New York’s fashionable Apollo Rooms. Collyer’s exhibition featured live performers modeling art works by assuming poses drawn from celebrated paintings and statues. In smaller tableaux, the actors stood on a revolving platform that slowly turned while a brass band played. In order to increase the educational value, Collyer organized the exhibition chronologically and introduced each study with a lecture on the original work’s importance. In one evening, spectators saw fifteen to seventeen tableaux. But what was so remarkable about the “model artists” was that they observed “the strictest accuracy . . . in relation to . . . the clothing—or lack thereof—of the original art work.” In effect, in many of the tableaux the performers were nude. A reporter for the Herald described his reaction to the show this way: “Before seeing it we were afraid it would not be as chaste and pure as we would desire; but after seeing them a short time, that impression was soon dispelled. . . . We saw accurate representations of the most exquisite works of the most renowned sculptors of the old world—such as Titian, Van Dyke, Rembrandt, and a host of others . . . and we learned from persons present who have seen the originals . . . [that they were] very accurate.” Another spectator rhapsodized that he had witnessed

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     99

“finished perfection” and felt that his thoughts had been raised “above earth to the Sovereign Creator, the only Inspirer of true beauty.” Indeed, through the sublime contemplation they invited, Collyer’s representations were even said to have provided “chaste, though living representations of the blessed above.”47 After a month in the Apollo Rooms, Collyer’s show moved to the more substantial, if no less fashionable venue of Palmo’s Opera House, where it continued to enjoy enormous commercial success. “The house is crowded nightly,” a journalist wrote, “and the fascinating entertainment seems to increase in attraction the more it is seen.” Tickets were priced at the same level as those at middling-class theatres such as the Olympic: 50 cents for the parquet and dress circle, 25 cents for the family circle (there was no gallery), and, in an effort to encourage female patronage, 75 cents per couple. Because the “model artists” were people, sentimental spectators were able to test their cultivation by going to see them. Attendance itself became a measure of people’s refinement and ability to overcome base impulses. “The ladies are all anxiety to see them,” a journalist in Baltimore observed, “though they are afraid to make the first move in the matter.” Attracting women to the show was critical, because as the more delicate sex, their attendance validated the appropriateness of the exhibition.48 Technically speaking, the actors in Collyer’s show were not naked—they were “cased in flesh-colored silk netting, tight to the person, without any superfluous drapery”—but newspaper reporters, the police, and, one assumes, most spectators, regarded them as nude. A correspondent for the New Orleans Daily Picayune put it best: “They appeared as naked as flesh colored tights could make them.” The fact that thousands of respectable people went out to see them is evidence that the genteel public was now willing to look at art as something beyond the conventional code of propriety, as something with such powerful cultural force that previous moral considerations might be suspended. Like other showmen in this sentimental era, Collyer insisted that his tableaux would actually improve American morals because he designed the “pictures” to invite contemplation. The art reproduced in the show was also presented chronologically and it “thus become a course in history of art, valuable to those who are engaged in painting and sculpture” and to any interested in “instructive entertainment.” Not all scenes featured nude posturers: Collyer alternated tableaux of paintings with fully clothed figures such as Caravaggio’s The Lute Player with those in which figures were nude, such as Jan Gossaert’s Neptune and Amphitrite. Given the performers’ state of dress, however, it is hard to believe that prurient interest was not a factor in the exhibition’s success, even if no one at the time would admit

100    C H A PT E R

3

to it. Collyer’s advertisements announced exhibits of “Adam and Eve as they were in the Garden” and “sublime scenes of Paradise,” suggesting that he was willing to cater to something beyond the spiritual interest of the public.49 Sentimentalists maintained that although art might be representational or actual, looking at it was different from looking at reality itself. The refined eye could look beyond the surface of the art and see something sublime even in objects that might strike the uneducated as unconventional. Collyer made this point explicit when he added an American work to his performers’ repertoire at Palmo’s, Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave. Powers’s statue was a controversial choice. It depicted a nude young white woman shackled wrist to wrist and tethered to a post. According to the artist, she represented a Greek slave in an Ottoman market, and he attempted to convey a sense of her spiritual strength and Christian resignation through a facial expression that was variously described as “calm and lofty,” “chaste,” and “filled with grief.” The terrible fate that awaited the girl, which her chains and nakedness and her capture by the Ottomans made obvious to all nineteenth-century minds, served as an indictment of the purchasing of women by men. But because she was not black, sentimental spectators could also look through the rape they imagined she would suffer and see its endurance as inspirational. She was, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning gushed, “passionless perfection,” and she struck the observer with “thunders of white silence.”50 Although Powers had sculpted The Greek Slave in Europe, it toured the United States from 1847 to 1849, drawing a reported 100,000 spectators. Not surprisingly, many religious leaders and more conservative people considered the work obscene. One Cincinnatian even recalled having to formally apologize to the parents of two girls after he invited them to accompany him to the gallery to see the statue. By adding The Greek Slave to his show in the midst of the controversy, with a real woman posing as the naked girl, Collyer was announcing his belief that art had a spiritual power that transcended its material reality.51 Walt Whitman, who saw the Living Pictures in New Orleans, maintained that the models encouraged an “appreciation of the divine beauty evidenced in nature’s cunningest work—the human frame, form and face.” If anyone took this to be obscene, the fault resided in the perceiver, not the exhibition. As the poet explained, “It is only when people will try to think exclusively of what they assume to be a grossness intended, that they are ‘shocked’ at such spectacles.” The theatre critic for the New York Herald similarly noted: “Whoever can find fault with them on the score of morality is looking through a mackinaw blanket; the wrong is in him.” Stanley Matthews, a

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     101

leading abolitionist who would later serve as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and was at the time editor of the Cincinnati Herald, took the same line: “Whatever may be beheld with propriety of improvement in stone, is not indelicate or vulgar, to an appreciating mind, to represent by the living human form. The true object of observation is the thing represented, not the medium of its representation.” It followed logically, wrote another, that it took “the depraved eye” to “discover food for the corrupt senses” in Collyer’s tableaux. In fact, one hopeful writer maintained that the show was “persuasive to matrimony,” since any bachelor seeing it would want to get a living model of his own to “gladden the evenings of his life.”52 The Living Pictures filled the seats in Palmo’s for two months before setting off on a tour of the East Coast. They sold out one-week runs in Boston and Philadelphia, but in Baltimore in late January they had a great deal of trouble attracting women to the show. In Washington, it was initially the same, but favorable newspaper reviews boosted the trade at the Odd Fellows Hall and women began to attend. The aged and unwell senator Henry Clay was reportedly so inspired by what he saw that he kissed the artist portraying Psyche, who was “denuded to the middle,” three times.53 However, things were coming undone for the model artists as February wore on. Talk of scandalous exhibitions of naked women started to appear in the Washington, Baltimore, and New York press. As Collyer’s traveling show moved from city to city, doubts about the propriety of viewing his Living Pictures grew. When Collyer took his show to Richmond, the mayor refused to license him to perform. As the tour moved west and south, the show ran into increasing difficulty. In Cincinnati, some church leaders agitated to have the production banned. Although the city’s aldermen voted “by a thumping majority” to permit the Living Pictures to play, respectable women could not be induced to attend. The mayors of Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and St. Louis refused to allow the show to open at all. In Mobile, Alabama, in early May, an onstage scuffle between Mars and Venus spread to the all-male audience, many of whom were recently demobilized veterans of the Mexican War. Spectators knocked over benches, fought with each other, and threatened to riot. The troupe then traveled to New Orleans, but it had by that point gained a reputation for sordidness, prompting Walt Whitman’s belated defense of it in the press. When the mayor saw the show at the St.  Charles, he ordered it shut down. When Collyer returned north in the late summer of 1848, his show was prevented from exhibiting in Buffalo and Boston. Returning to New York, it reopened to modest audiences for a few weeks before heading off to Havana. Shortly after returning, Collyer retired from show business and the exhibition finally closed down.54

Figure 3.  James Baillie’s satiric depiction of Collyer’s “model artists” in 1848. The artist got many things right: the turning pedestal, the well-to-do audience, and the subject depicted. But Collyer employed a brass band, women attended his show, and the models wore “fleshings” (silk bodysuits). Baillie’s depiction was part of a backlash against the exhibition that ultimately made it too scandalous for respectable women to attend. Collyer’s Model Artists (Living Pictures image), Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     103

What had gone wrong? In part, Collyer ran up against difficulties as he moved into more socially conservative regions of the South and Midwest. But there is also evidence that the class of spectator attending the show changed: the predominately male audiences in Baltimore and Cincinnati and the rioters in Mobile were not the kinds of people who had seen the Living Pictures in New York and Philadelphia. The press commentary changed too, as the tableaux were increasingly depicted as pornographic or at the very least controversial. As doubts about the propriety of looking at naked people increased, promoters did what they usually did when receipts fell: they filled their halls any way they could. This lowered the standards of audience propriety, further alienating the press and genteel consumers. It is clear that it was not Collyer’s show that changed, but the audiences’ perception of what it meant to look at the Living Pictures. This had a lot to do with the style of tableaux in the shows Collyer’s competitors presented. When Collyer left New York, Palmo replaced him with tableaux operated by Professor Thier and this was followed by the Sable Brothers’ exhibition. That Palmo should have continued to host tableaux for several months after Collyer’s Living Pictures went on tour is evidence of the continued popularity of the entertainment in New York, and reporters suggested that men and women were attending these exhibitions right through the end of February 1848. The majority of these tableaux, however, featured clothed models, and by February the Sable Brothers had even begun to use their exhibition as an early form of fashion show. Other tableaux of a respectable nature were mounted in early 1848 at Pinteux’s Saloon, the Temple of the Muses, and the Anatomical Museum. All of these conformed to genteel moral standards and sentimental aesthetics, and when members of a New York grand jury visited several of these places, they found “no fault with the exhibitions.”55 The declining use of nudity in the better class of Living Pictures exhibitions was caused by an explosion in the number of shows in saloons and grog shops that featured less richly costumed performers. In fact, “as all profitable experiments give rise to imitators,” it did not take long before more disreputable shows began to appear around New York. In mid-January 1848, exhibitions “in some bystreets at three, four, or five cents” opened in the city, “thereby inviting newsboys, loafers, and the veriest ragamuffins about town to see them.”56 These shows revealed none “of the taste and propriety which characterized those at Palmo’s or Pinteux’s.” One report maintained that the nude posturers he witnessed in a “grog shop” were accompanied by “negro melodies” played on the banjo, in crude parody of Collyer’s brass band. In these cheap shows, “the more they diminish the drapery, the more they draw

104    C H A PT E R

3

the men,” and genteel opinion began to turn against the living pictures idea which, in the words of one paper, was being “lost to all decency.”57 The Herald backtracked on its earlier support for living picture shows and impugned the lot of them. The poseurs “have become more naked as the weather grows colder,” the paper’s theatre critic smirked. “When this species of amusement was first introduced to the public,” another journalist lamented, “it was free from those indecent features which have since sunk it into disrepute.” As they began to appear in “different parts of the city,” however, they developed a “more vulgar and cheaper character, until the lowest order of them finally have become nightly scenes of licentiousness.” As the threat to morals increased, a complaint was brought before a New York grand jury, which issued an indictment in late February compelling the mayor to crack down on them. There were a large number of such exhibitions in New York by that time, and one of them, in Laurens Street, even provided “a presentation of naked negroes.”58 The transformation of the model artist exhibition into a peep show took place in other cities in the wake of Collyer’s visit. By establishing the propriety of living pictures exhibitions, Collyer unintentionally opened the door to more erotic and explicit displays. When his troupe reached Washington, the newspapers in Baltimore were already complaining of the appearance of cut-rate nude shows. The declining reputation of the living picture form of entertainment, more than anything else, was responsible for the failure of Collyer’s show to retain its female patronage. But from the point of view of the municipal authorities, it was not the nudity that most troubled them; it was the risk of civil disorder. Although public indecency was punishable under common law because it, in the words of the Connecticut Supreme Court in 1808, “outrage[ed] decency, shock[ed] humanity” and was “contrary to good morals,” only three states actually had statutes prohibiting pornography (Vermont was the first to legislate against obscenity in 1821; Connecticut and Massachusetts followed in the mid-1830s) and there was no federal law until the 1870s. Civil disorder was, however, a crime in every state, and it was on this basis that municipal officials justified banning obscene shows. Their argument was that the passions produced by watching indecent shows could lead to riot. As the Unitarian clergyman Armory Dwight Mayo wrote, when a man “goes to see a work of vile art it is not to be elevated by the expression . . . but to burn with lustful passions.”59 That worry was realized early in March 1848, when ten or twelve patrons at the Temple of the Muses in New York City became so excited by the performance that they “pushed through the dense crowd, towards the stage,

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     105

tearing off the backs of the seats and expressing their determination to have their passions gratified.” The female artists instantly fled to their dressing room and their would-be assailants followed them there, knocking down the manager when he tried to stop them and only dispersing when some of the male performers, armed with “musket, sword, and other weapons used in their tableau in honor of the United States,” blocked their passage. “It is threatened that similar riots and rows will take place at some of the others [theatres featuring tableaux],” the New York Herald reported ruefully.60 And a week later, when an exhibition was announced at the Eagle Hotel, a couple of blocks away from the Temple of the Muses, the police were on hand to ensure that the emotions of the spectators were kept in check. The rooms in the Eagle Hotel were under renovations in the spring of 1848, and its owner, Garner Littlebridge, decided to make some money by putting on shows in the capacious downstairs parlor. Although he told the police he was mainly interested in mounting Shakespeare’s dramas, in the interim he put on an exhibition of living pictures. Tickets were advertised and sold for the hefty sum of $1 and the audience was all male. According to a reporter who attended, in the front of the room, seated on a few benches, were “grey and bald headed old men adjust[ing] their pocket telescopes and enormous opera glasses,” while “dandy bucks sporting short canes and white gloves” mixed in “with beardless boys” behind them, crowding the room “almost to suffocation.” “On the mantelpiece of this room was a glimmering lamp, reflecting a miserable light,” and in that dim light the parlor doors were opened and closed, in imitation of a drop curtain, to reveal each tableau. Several living pictures were shown in this way, “the females being nude, holding across their figures a gauze scarf thrown over them in a negligee manner, so as to create the greatest excitement possible.” It worked, for when the last tableau revealed “a tall, well formed young woman, with long hair, representing Venus rising from the sea,” the temperature of the audience soared and several people moved forward “to such an extent that the folding doors closed and the police burst in.” The audience promptly scattered, and the police made no effort to detain them. Instead, they arrested five of the female performers and the door keeper for inciting a riot.61 The police, who were present during the entire show at the hotel, intervened only when the audience grew agitated. It was the spectators’ actions in moving toward the performers that proved that the exhibition had gone from encouraging the uplifting appreciation of art to arousing lust and passionate desire. The debasement of the living pictures genre frustrated many sentimental observers. “If we are to enjoy nothing that is intrinsically pure, because the evil-minded are disposed to pervert its object and make it a means of profit

106    C H A PT E R

3

or sensual gratification, what among God’s noblest works are we to enjoy?— What element of truth and beauty, amid the great creations of His hand are we to gaze upon with confidence?—What pure and elevating thought are we to indulge, lest it lend to others that are carnal?” a writer from Washington asked. But for most middling-class spectators, who were still acclimatizing themselves to commercial entertainment, the threat of scandal was too much to bear. Many reporters who had previously been favorable began to doubt the propriety of looking at naked people, and they separated the original art, which they accepted as beautiful, from the simulation, which they now described as pornographic: “It is presumed to be understood that a lady may look on a piece of marble a posteriori without flinching in the presence of bald-headed men, but a living breathing woman is another thing,” a Baltimore reporter explained. “The philosophy of the case may be absurd, but it is so.”62 Sensibility celebrated the power of feeling, but society evidently needed some mechanism for controlling the unleashing of the very emotions it legitimized. What limit would be placed on designs geared to arouse feelings? How could one ensure that the positive affections inspired in one spectator were not immoral ones in another? Sentimentalists argued that the feelings stimulated by great art, morally engaging drama, romantic music, and passionate literature were sacred and that those who failed to see this were simply boors. “Works of sentiment,” opined one, “should be inscribed for the benefit of such persons, with the epigraph one finds in some old books under a vignette of a laurel bush approached by a pig: Apage, non tibi spiro.” But many Americans felt that sensationalists had to be saved from sin and that controls needed to be applied to prevent the pursuit of emotional stimulations. More conservative Congregationalists even blamed the problem on evangelicalism. As Rev. William Bacon, the author of Aesthetic Piety, conceded, evangelicals seemed to give “more attention to moral duties, especially to civility, sociability and refinement and less to that which is harsh and repulsive among them than among the more sternly orthodox.” Rev. Gardiner Spring of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York agreed. Encouraged by a false belief that they had the power to save themselves, evangelicals were being drawn to amusements they thought would sharpen their sensibilities. “A lecture on astronomy, or history, or some important department of the arts;—a mere play at the theatre, or song at the opera . . . holds them in silent thought and admiration,” he charged. People had become arrogant, the minister told his Fifth Avenue parishioners; they believed that they could invite in the spirit by cultivating their senses. A “depravation of morals” resulted because “reason, blinded by appetite, is the only guide; conscience has no

LO O K I N G T H R O U G H     107

firm mooring, and the only impulse is the fitful breath of passion.”63 It was this that made respectable citizens vulnerable to the appeals of “pornographers” such as Collyer. Had it been simply a question of class, the solution would have been easy: the police could have closed down all indecent exhibitions catering to the poor while allowing the rich to do as they liked. But what sentimentality’s conservative critics were addressing was a vice that affected members of the middling class, for they were the ones who patronized theatrical events. Looking out in his mind’s eye over the theatre, Rev. Talmage saw “a father and mother, with their sons and daughters . . . happy family! They have come to cultivate their taste, and to become better acquainted with human nature. Back yonder is a young man all caught up in the greatest enthusiasm. He laughs and cries, and chides himself that he has not before been to the theatre. . . . You have not ink in your inkstand black enough to write down the names of scores of plays that are enacted night after night in the presence of approving gentlemen and ladies. [But] by what law is an indecent thing any the less indecent by being on the stage? That which is improper before one person in the parlor, in a theatrical audience of fifteen hundred people is fifteen hundred times more improper.”64 The controversy over Collyer’s Living Pictures illustrated how difficult it was to control perception. Sensibility celebrated the power of feeling communication, but society needed mechanisms for ensuring that looking at emotionally arousing things did not produce riots or crimes. The Living Pictures exhibition was an extraordinary example of a problem inherent in sentimental spectatorship; by employing verisimilitude to induce the audience to feel, the naturalistic theatre risked burying its higher purpose in the drapery, or lack thereof. The reality on display might distract the gaze to itself, transforming the reproduction from a portal that opened onto a deeper truth into a sensational spectacle. If the thing on display was potentially erotic, how could one be certain that the perceiver was looking through it and not at it? Sentimental aesthetics were predicated on an idea of spectatorship grounded in assumptions about class, race, and gender. Refined people, it was believed, would be able to separate the sensational husk from the spiritually significant fruit. But how could this culture deal with the democratization of entertainment? If, as Whitman pointed out, beauty and smut were alike produced in the eye of the beholder, artists and theatre entrepreneurs increased the likelihood that their designs would be misperceived when they abandoned abstraction in order to naturalize the beautiful.

Chapter 4

The Democratization of Entertainment The Concert Saloons

The entertainment revolution of the 1840s occurred because new types of shows were mounted in new types of playhouses for a new type of spectator. Although older forms of melodrama and vaudeville did not disappear, they became less fashionable and more clearly targeted to a certain kind of customer. Vaudeville, or variety, in particular, had always been a saloon entertainment that spectators enjoyed while talking, walking about, eating, and drinking, and it suffered as temperance feeling pushed respectable people—especially genteel women—away from theatres where liquor was served. In addition, variety was a form of amusement closely connected to urban commercial gardens, and it suffered when those pleasing places of retreat lost their appeal. During the 1850s, these various influences combined to transform variety into a peripheral kind of amusement, one that survived in saloons and theatres where mostly female performers danced and sang in front of mostly male customers. Paradoxically, in this theatrical half-life variety thrived, becoming the first of the new popular entertainments to appeal to spectators (albeit male ones) in all regions and from all classes. In the 1870s and 80s, it emerged from the saloon to become the engine of mass entertainment. But the amusement the saloons served up was very different from that offered in the sentimental playhouses. Where spectators of sentimental entertainments anticipated making an emotional investment in the characters depicted on stage, in 108

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     109

concert saloons audiences simply wanted to be amused. In this way, variety preserved an older form of aesthetic experience, an unsentimental one. Its purpose was to secure attention, not to secure engagement; to encourage looking, not looking through. But in other ways, variety was not opposed to middling-class sentimentality. In fact, entertainment fed off it by burlesquing its forms and values. Saloon performers sang the popular sentimental songs, but they did so in a space that was antithetical to sincere engagement. The waiter girls and seat warmers in saloons mimicked companionate relationships, but they never intended their customers to take them seriously. The saloons provided carnival and masquerade, and their fantasy subverted rather than erased the sentimental culture.

Gentlemen’s Saloons Although thousands of middling-class spectators acquainted themselves with popular entertainments in playhouses that were dry, there were still enough drinkers to populate theatres where liquor was a major attraction. Several of the more exclusive restaurants and barrooms of the 1840s and 50s—Carusi’s and Pupanti’s in Washington, Brigham’s in Boston, and the Exchange in Richmond, for example—offered concerts and shows along with refreshments, as did the Art Union Saloon and the Santa Claus in New York. Under the influence of temperance, some of these saloons gave up trying to attract female customers, evidence that the liquor they served was more important than the shows they offered. The Hyperion Saloon, at Chambers and Broadway, was not untypical of these businesses. It advertised itself in the 1840s as a resort “for the most fashionable gentlemen of the city, and of strangers sojourning at our different hotels.” Here, as in most saloons, the actors (mostly dancers and singers) were female (the Hyperion specialized in “lady vocalists”) and the food and drink were expensive and appropriate to an evening of light-hearted fun—oysters and Welsh rarebit and wines, coffees, cobblers, and ales.1 In the late 1850s, the number of concert saloons, as these businesses were called, grew dramatically. A large proportion of them appear to have been variants on the old pleasure garden saloons: fashionably appointed places designed to serve merchants, professionals, and investors, rather like gentlemen’s clubs. Fox & Curran’s saloon, for example, was in the Mozart Hall, the headquarters of what would become the peace wing of the New York Democratic Party during the Civil War, and it provided an extravagantly decorated environment where office-seekers, donors, and petitioners could

110    C H A PT E R

4

Figure 4.  An antebellum gentleman’s concert saloon on Broadway in New York in 1859. The audience is clearly a middling-class one, though it includes men of all ages and a variety of occupations. The women are dressed in drawing-room décolletage and most of the audience is paying only limited attention to the performers. Broadway Concert Saloon, Crawford Theater Collection (MS 1387), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

meet. Marpirello’s saloon, on Chambers Street in New York, similarly combined a stage, an elegant barroom (fitted out with marble tables, brilliant chandeliers, ottomans, and upholstered seats), female entertainments, and a downstairs bathhouse. Its owner optimistically predicted that his spa and saloon would become “the grand focus of fashion and gentlemanly society.” The owners of many of these businesses were well-respected individuals. Harvey Dodworth, who opened a concert saloon uptown at 806 Broadway in 1858, was the conductor of the 13th Regiment Band, the Dodworth Band, and Niblo’s Saloon orchestra. He became nationally famous when he transcribed a number of Richard Wagner’s opera overtures for brass instruments. Dodworth’s concert saloon featured opera soloists, instrumentalists, band performances, and ballet-pantomimes.2 Gentlemen’s concert saloons spread across urban America in the 1850s, but no place had them in such concentration as New York. Manhattan had 312,000 inhabitants in 1840 (close to 400,000 lived in the five boroughs),

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     111

of whom one-third were between the ages of 15 and 30. It was, however, as Christine Stansell has pointed out, a city of women, as females outnumbered men in the 15–30 age group by 20–25 percent in the 1840s and 50s. The majority of these women were working class, and the city was a magnet for females looking for domestic and industrial employment. Although the preponderance of women in the city helped feed the vast sex trade (5 percent of all working women were prostitutes), there was not a profusion of marriage prospects for upwardly mobile young men of the middling class. The clerk or young gentleman who was intent on improvement (and marriage was the most popular instrument of upward mobility) would be unwise to choose a marriage partner from among the ranks of domestics or seamstresses. Moreover, the separation of the sexes in genteel society, which temperance deepened by censuring female drinking, pressed men even more frequently into each other’s company. These peculiarities produced a male entertainment culture in which upwardly mobile and middling-class men went out together and paid lower-class women (whom they had no intention of marrying) to amuse them.3 Concert saloons were not the only type of business that combined entertainment and liquor in the 1840s and 50s. German beer gardens were another institution that offered concerts and variety shows, and they could be found everywhere that immigrants from Central Europe settled. Most of these establishments contained nothing to remind one of a garden beyond the name and a few potted plants. However, unlike concert saloons, they were large, airy, somewhat leafy, and structured like conventional theatres with balconies above parterres.4 Gentleman’s saloons, by contrast, tended to be located in basements because the rooms were larger, the attention they attracted was less, and the rent was lower. Beer gardens also differed from concert saloons in that the ones catering to an immigrant trade managed to continue to attract women and even children as customers. The number of both kinds of saloons grew enormously in the 1850s, thanks, in part, to the belief that lager was not intoxicating. A series of court cases in the middle years of the decade—the most important being the Jacob Staats case in Brooklyn in 1858—helped spread this idea and served to justify exempting beer parlors in several cities from Sunday observance laws. “The inebriating character of lager bier was fairly shown to be nothing,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported optimistically. “Its effects are to clarify the imagination, relieve the mind from thought, and wrap the happy recipient in a dreamy philosophy, that suggests life has no care, the past no regret, the future no uncertainty”; it induces not drunkenness but “happiness.” In the mid-1850s, beer drinking became a sort of “mania” among respectable

112    C H A PT E R

4

people who otherwise felt quite inhibited in their consumption of alcohol. Beer parlors, a journalist wrote, were sprouting up around dry theatres, and well-to-do male patrons were nipping off to them during intermission or for a mug of brew after the show. In 1857, Buckley’s Minstrels toasted the new craze with a burlesque comedy: King Lager, or, Ye Sons of Malt.5 The rage for lager beer cemented the connection between the saloon and the variety style of entertainment that the garden theatres had originated. In all probability, given that it was common practice in Central Europe, concert saloons also copied the beer gardens’ practice of employing women as serving staff. Certainly the chronological coincidence between the beer mania of the 1850s and the proliferation of concert saloons that were, by 1856, employing waiter girls makes it hard to believe that there was not some connection to the German tradition.6 Dancing and singing women became staples of saloon stages, both immigrant and native, garden and basement, in the 1850s and, by that time, pretty well all of them were also employing “waiter girls.” But in other ways the concert saloons became inhospitable places for women. Although the more venerable ones, such as Niblo’s and Carusi’s, and the German beer gardens still catered to both sexes, most of the newer establishments, including fashionable ones such as the Art Union and Fox & Curran’s, were completely geared to a bachelor society of clerks, business travelers, college students, and unmarried gentlemen. Most probably used the method employed at the Reveille in New York, one of the city’s more exclusive gentleman’s saloons (near Buckley’s minstrel theatre and Barnum’s New Museum), which mounted signs beside its doors that prohibited entry to women not working there. This was presumably done in order to keep out prostitutes, but the policy had the added benefit of protecting married men who attended from scandal or trouble.7 Not surprisingly, as soon as their development attracted notice, concert saloons were demonized by temperance crusaders. A New York Times reporter who claimed to have visited the Santa Claus saloon in December 1858, for example, described the show as “doleful” and the audience as “shabby” and “seedy.” At the back of the hall, he noted, a man appeared to be selling pornographic literature covered in brown paper wrappings.8 The exposé may reflect the journalist’s prejudice more than reality. Although the Santa Claus was not doing well in the winter of 1858–59 and would soon close, it had, until recently, been advertising energetically in the press and attracting well-to-do audiences to respectable shows. Similarly, although Fox & Wadsworth’s saloon in New York was a high-class establishment, when a visitor from California, William S. Tompkins, was killed there by a blow to the head in 1858, apparently for making a rude remark about one of the

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     113

female performers, it received national news coverage and reform-minded papers insisted that young men should be careful in “these dangerous places.” Reform and religious papers invariably portrayed the waiter girls and variety performers in gentlemen’s saloons as prostitutes. It was no coincidence that New York’s leading temperance newspaper before the Civil War was called The Subterranean in reference to the below-ground location of most saloons.9 Historians have accepted the view that concert saloons were dingy and disreputable dives where working-class men went for rough entertainment, sexual encounters, and cheap liquor. But pre–Civil War concert saloons do not fit that stereotype. Instead, concert saloons of that period seem very much like successors to the pleasure gardens; they catered to a similar market, albeit an almost exclusively male one. The Santa Claus on Broadway, which R. W. Williams launched in March 1858 and which the Times reporter condemned in December, initially offered operas such as La Somnambula and The Bohemian Girl in truncated form and instrumentalists, acrobats, and comedians that appeared between the operas (the singers would perform two or more operas per night). At least one affluent New Yorker, George Templeton Strong, recorded going there to hear the opera and said that he liked it. Surviving playbills for the saloon show that it offered a range of genteel entertainments.10 Although some saloons, perhaps even the Santa Claus, may have hit the skids at some point, it took the Civil War to fully democratize them and establish variety as a mass entertainment. In fact, it was only when soldiers began patronizing the saloons that working men started to attract the saloonkeepers’ interest as consumers. The patronage of working people was essential to the democratization and expansion of variety, but the concert saloons’ origins in genteel society and their connections to its sentimental culture continued to influence both their expansion as a business and their evolution as an entertainment.

Working Men Enter Concert Saloons Reflecting back on the matter, George Alfred Townsend, the most famous newspaper reporter of the 1860s, dated the spectacular growth of the concert saloon business to the Civil War. During the war, he wrote, paper money and the presence of “volunteers, substitutes, and hospital inmates removed from female influence, wife and home” led to a proliferation of saloons offering variety shows. Far from the healthful influence of families and communities, uniformed men sought women’s company and found it in “some low-bred girl with a cracked voice and a pair of tights.” On the heels of Union soldiers and in pursuit of their $13-a-month pay, the saloon “disease” spread.

114    C H A PT E R

4

In midwestern cities and towns by the end of the war, Townsend lamented, “one half the boys who went to school during the day went to the concert saloons at night, to learn slang and bring it home, and have the old man and woman and the young ladies admire it and giggle.” These concert saloons “followed the carpet bagger South” and “were close behind the Indian” as he “walked into the setting sun.” On the frontier, especially, Townsend wrote, “the very making of towns out of crude and strange material, out of the bachelor life and miners and gamblers seemed to require some exchange where night could be worn away, and it became the concert saloon theatre.”11 What Townsend did not mention, doubtless because his hostility to the saloons spared him the thought, was that the spread of the concert saloon business also marked the advance of an English-speaking, largely white, and reasonably homogeneous masculine culture. While ethnic grog shops that served German, Italian, and Irish neighborhoods also proliferated after the war, concert saloons were not associated with any single nationality, region, or income group. Instead, ethnic performers—delineators of Dutchmen, “Dagos,” and Yankees, Irish dancers, Chinese acrobats, and Italian singers—all performed and toured the same saloons and played before the same audiences. To be sure, there were more fashionable saloons and dingier ones, better performers and weaker ones, but the entertainment was all of a type. In the 1860s and 70s, the saloons became spaces defined by gender rather than ethnicity or class (some even admitted black men). In Chicago, a reporter observed Irish and Italian patrons at L’Arche de Noé on Milwaukee Avenue, and at the Garden Theatre on State Street, where a “soirée musicale” was in progress, a journalist described the pit audience as an undistinguished mass: “the great unwashed.” In the West, the saloons also attracted a polyglot clientele. An 1878 visitor to McDaniel’s concert saloon in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for example, reported patrons of all “races” and classes: Indians “in blankets and leggings,” Mexicans, African Americans, and white men, all in “regulation sombreros.” Soldiers from nearby Camp Carlin and Fort Russell were also regular patrons.12 What Townsend did notice was that the expansion of the variety saloon business across the nation started during the war. “Concert saloons, houses of ill fame, and dens and dives of all descriptions,” recalled one Union officer, “spr[a]ng up like mushrooms” wherever his troops were stationed. “Just imagine the feelings of a soldier who for a year has been wandering through all the quagmires and quicksands of Dixie, fighting at Donelson, Fort Henry, Corinth, Iuka, and a dozen other places unknown to fame, upon his arrival at Cairo,” wrote a California correspondent in December 1862, “to find that his table is presided over by two pretty, rustic divinities, in clean calico wrappers, tidy white dainty pinafores, sweet little collars, flowing ringlets,

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     115

curls, bright teeth, white eyes and flashing lips—just imagine his emotions, as the little angel with the auburn eyes presents him the bill of fare, and leans lovingly and tenderly over his left shoulder.”13 For the hundreds of thousands who passed through Washington, a great pull to the city was the Canterbury concert saloon, which “Colonel” William Sinn and Leonard Grover opened in the summer of 1861. A tobacco wholesaler before the war, Sinn was a novice showman when he bought the Canterbury, but his sister was married to Grover, one of the country’s leading playwrights and impresarios. “What old soldier who visited Washington about this period does not remember this marvelous dispenser of amusement and good cheer to the volunteer soldier, from his dull and monotonous camp-life on the other side of the river, and what a temptation it was to take a ‘French leave’ just for a few hours of boisterous entertainment within those festive walls?” a veteran from Maine asked. “The audience,” according to a ticket seller at the Canterbury, “was made up almost wholly of soldiers and others brought here by the war.”14 The Canterbury’s audience embodied the diversity of the nascent mass market. The saloon, recalled one patron, “was crowded nightly” and “soldiers and civilians filled its seats.” Entry to the theatre cost a quarter, but it was still visited “by people of all classes and from all parts of the country.” In fact, even President Lincoln went there once or twice, and he sometimes sent his boys to attend a matinee. Here “brigadier generals . . . drank their wine or cooling juleps and cobblers from the hands of nimble white-aproned waiters; [and] Congressmen talked over the . . . works of the legislative halls, lifting their eyes now and then to glance at the plump, yet graceful ballet girls whirling to and fro.” Members of the political and military elite went to the Canterbury to enjoy the show but periodically their amusement was interrupted by the provost guard that swept through the theatre, rounding up common soldiers away from camp without passes.15 Wartime concert saloons in other cities where large numbers of soldiers were stationed or recuperating were similar to the Canterbury. A reporter for the New York Clipper who visited a number of New York’s concert saloons in the early 1860s recorded conversations with customers from a variety of respectable occupations (two doctors, a lawyer, an alderman, a police captain, an auctioneer, a stock broker, a tobacconist, and a merchant), but emphasized that in all the saloons he attended the seats were filled with uniformed men. “It’s no use talking, the concert saloon business is mainly supported by soldiers,” the Clipper concluded. “If you have taken any notice of how things are managed, you will see that ninety-nine cases out of every hundred the moment one of Uncle Sam’s boys show their shoddy overcoats and blue worsted trousers inside the door, the . . . waiters will go for them as if shot from

116    C H A PT E R

4

a gun.” Soldiers made the saloons an even more viable proposition. “Within the last six or eight months,” the New York Times snorted in December 1861, this “class of nuisance has been growing up” and now “Broadway is full of these infamous and diabolical pesthouses.”16 The changing character of the concert saloons from the mid-1850s to the early 1860s can be traced in the work of Tony Pastor, one of the most popular saloon comedians of the period. Pastor’s specialty was comic songs loaded with references to contemporary events and customs. His work from before the war, which was collected in a book published in 1862, appears to have mostly dealt with the lives of affluent people. His first songster includes songs describing men who study Latin and go to college, young men who squander their fathers’ money, women who buy $40 hats and $200 dresses, and wives who insist that their servant bring them breakfast in bed, and a pair of contrasting songs, one about a man who marries above his station and is unhappy and the other about one who finds joy with a serving girl. Only a few of the songs deal with working men, and those that do tell stories of people with folkloric occupations such as cobblers and blacksmiths. These is one song about a poor man who strikes it rich mining in the West. Songs such as these, which spoke to middling-class men, did not disappear entirely from Pastor’s 1864 songster, but most of those in his wartime collection celebrated the virtues of the nation’s workers. Pastor’s major complaint during the war was that ordinary men were fighting for the Union while the rich ones were dodging their obligations. The Upper Ten Thousand have plenty of cash— At the Central Park, on the “Drive” cut a dash; They have their light wagons, fast horses beside; In the free “Black Maria” the Lower Ten ride. The Upper Ten Thousand have got their champagne; When the cellar gets low, it’s replenished again: But the Lower-Ten-Thousand chap happy is seen If he’s got but three cents for a nip of camphene . . . And now, when rebellion o’ershadows the land, And the nation sends forth each brave volunteer band, Who is it in battle the valiantest proves— Is’t the Upper Ten Thousand that wears its kid gloves? Or is’t the Lower Ten Thousand, that’s found (Whose hands have by labor been hardened and browned) With his steel in his hand and a fire in his eye, Rushing into the battle to conquer or die?17

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     117

The change in the tone and subject matter of Pastor’s songs during the war is marked. His wartime songs dealt with the problems of Irish immigrants looking for work and of laboring men who gamble away their happiness. During the war Pastor offered one song that opposed emancipation and another that celebrated the virtuous “yankee yeomen” and several that dealt with Irishmen who drank too much. Only two of the songs in his wartime songster deal with well-to-do people, one of which makes fun of a man who joined the army and found the going hard.18 In most saloons, the interests of the uniformed spectators were placed on stage and variety shows were “replete with patriotic soldiers, comic negroes and screeching devotion to the flag.” Amazon marches, patriotic songs, and transparencies of General McClellan or President Lincoln became features of most entertainments. “Many performers seek and obtain popular favor by interpolating star-spangled gags into their parts who, relying upon their own legitimate merit, would be forced to retire from public life before a thunder-storm of indifferent eggs and decayed cabbages,” a reporter in Vanity Fair complained. Even Niblo’s started dressing its chorus line in Zouave uniforms and stepping them around the stage to martial tunes. Variety also marched alongside the men. Soldiers entertained themselves in camp with songs and jokes heard on the popular stage, and entrepreneurs set up saloons close to their encampments and billets. The first night that Sherman’s troops occupied Atlanta, recalled journalist Wallace Putnam Reed, a saloon popped up on Decatur Street advertising a blackface entertainer.19 The concert saloon business continued its furious spread after the war. In 1866, the police counted twenty-five licensed concert saloons in New York. By 1869, there were at least two variety saloons in Helena, Montana; Omaha had enough to propel the mayor to regulate them; Memphis had a Varieties Theatre with waiter girls; and there were concert saloons in small towns such as Troy, Illinois, and Titusville, Pennsylvania.20 In cities such as New York, Washington, and Boston, saloons catering exclusively to well-heeled gentlemen did not entirely disappear, but they became less common. Some well-todo people moved over to places such as the Louvre in New York, which had waiter girls but did not mount shows, but most continued to attend saloons that were attracting both working and middling-class men. A sure sign of the increased diversity of the audiences for concert saloons was the effort of their owners to segregate their customers by class. Jack Harris’s saloon in San Antonio installed boxes in 1868, as did the Parisian Varieties in Cheyenne one year later. At the Parisian, the boxes could be reached only by a narrow flight of stairs from the parquet. Here, wrote a tourist, “above the motley crowd of cow-boys, ranchmen, Black Hillers, miners and

118    C H A PT E R

4

Figure 5.  The Canterbury concert saloon in Washington in 1862, rendered by the eminent Anglo-Irish illustrator Richard Doyle. Soldiers are sprinkled through the hall and children can be seen squabbling in the box. The Canterbury was as much a theatre as a barroom, as evidenced by the row seating, but its audience still seems a distracted one. Canterbury Concert Saloon, LC-USZ62-64451, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

soldiers, is a row of private boxes, filled with rich ranchmen, officers, tourists, and fellows who have come down with gold dust from the Black Hills. . . . It is a common thing for a rich ranchman, after selling a thousand cattle, to come here and spend one thousand dollars on a spree.” At Gropper’s theatre in Butte, Montana, which opened in 1882, the orchestra level was filled with cowhands and miners, who “guzzle beer at 25 cents per glass” and flirt with the “flabby barmaids.” But up above them, and surrounding the parquet, were boxes occupied by “bank presidents, merchants and wealthy citizens, who sit behind lace curtains and drink Missouri cider champagne at $5 a bottle,” attended by “sprightly girls in gauze dresses and tights.” At Gropper’s, as in other saloons, the boxes “are closed in, and have each a window, through which the inmates must project head and shoulders if curious to witness the performance on the stage; but, as they contain tables and chairs, it is possible that a glass of wine or lager and social intercourse may be more the object than spectacular entertainment.” McDaniel’s Theatre in Cheyenne, which opened in 1867, was similar. It contained three large rooms, a barroom in the front, a theatre in the middle, and a gambling room alongside. The parquet

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     119

of the theatre was fitted up with simple wooden chairs and tables, and it was serviced by waiter girls “who fondle the patrons and extract all the treats they can.” At each side of the auditorium were tiers of boxes reached by long, narrow flights of stairs from the parquet, which had in the stairwells notices in large letters reading: “Gents, be liberal.”21 In eastern cities, where space was more restricted and where saloons were commonly located in basements, it was more difficult to vertically segment the seating. But many owners still found ways to divide more affluent from poorer patrons. One New York entrepreneur, for example, put in two large “caboose-like” structures on either side of the stage where rich patrons could sit. At the Over the Rhine in Cincinnati, another subterranean establishment, the owner enclosed the portion of his hall closest to the stage in “a gallery of boxes” to provide a secluded area where rich men and “the young women from the stage mingled.” Ordinary patrons could see the pretty “stuffers” moving from stage to box, but they were not permitted to talk to them unless they paid for the high-priced seats and drank the more expensive liquor that was served only to the “boxites.”22 Although big concert saloons served all social classes, a rank order remained among them, and middling-class men kept clear of some. In Deadwood, the Gem Theatre was known as a rough establishment, while the Bella Union Saloon across the street served a more subdued crowd. Both, however, drew soldiers from nearby Bear Butte and Camp Devin, harvesting, according to the Black Hills Daily Times “about all the money distributed by the paymaster.” When blackface comedian Tom Miller opened the Bella Union in 1876, the shows he offered were promoted as being “of the Vaudeville type” albeit “a little naughty.” His saloon had boxes around the parquet and he advertised the playhouse as catering to “the respectable portion of the community.” In 1877 he even experimented with a matinee “for ladies and families.”23 Al Swearengen’s notorious Gem Theatre, on the other hand, served a solidly working-class audience. It featured prizefights and wrestling matches and the usual run of female variety. It did not have boxes; instead, Swearengen put in a number of small wine rooms behind the stage where men could meet the performers, dance with them for 10 cents a dance, or buy 20-cent beer and $1 bottles of wine. Upstairs was a particularly nasty set of cribs occupied by the saloon’s prostitutes. The prostitutes working at the Gem were apparently frequently beaten and abused by their customers and the saloon’s male enforcers. After the great fire of 1879 destroyed both the Bella Union and the Gem, Swearengen raised the standards at his saloon, eliminating the brothel and installing boxes. A shrewd, if reportedly unpleasant individual,

120    C H A PT E R

4

Swearengen appears to have recognized that as Deadwood became more established his business needed to smooth its frontier roughness. One visitor who looked in on the new Gem in 1882, found that it “contains nothing that seems objectionable.” Swearengen was even trying to draw women and children to his playhouse with matinees. In the early 1880s his rebuilt theatre was attracting second-rate, albeit reasonably well-known variety performers such as Harry Montague, Inez Sexton, the child actor Baby McDonald, and the Vaidis Sisters, an acrobatic duo.24 As was the case with frontier establishments, eastern and midwestern saloons came in different shapes and sizes. They differed in size, quality, and ventilation and in the degree to which they attempted to attract well-to-do patrons. Matthal’s Opera Pavilion at Clark and Division streets in Chicago, for example, was in the 1880s among the better class of concert saloon. Here “the aristocracy of the vicinity” sat in the balcony sipping Rhine wines while working men occupied the parquet and called for beer. André’s Pavilion, next door on Clark, was even more upscale; a journalist noted seeing “a great variety of waistcoats among the gentlemen” there. Jerry Monroe’s at 405 State Street, by way of contrast, was seen as catering to the “vilest and toughest” characters. A reporter who visited the saloon found a “poorly attended” show in progress with about fifty white men and four African American women in the “auditorium.” On stage were ten girls with “well-rounded limbs” in skimpy costumes and variegated tights and two blackface comedians who “trotted out their time honored vulgarities.” Visitors described saloons such as Monroe’s as dirty, more cheaply furnished, and far smellier than those that served a middling-class clientele. This last, their smell, seemed to have especially characterized working men’s concert saloons in the minds of middling-class visitors. A  Chicago reporter who attended a cheap West Side basement saloon described it as “vile smelling.” A visitor to Kohl and Middleton’s in Chicago similarly depicted the “crowd” as “dense and odorous.” After the war, larger, more high-class saloons and variety theatres were equipped with fans, but the air in the smaller working men’s houses was “to speak mildly, quite overpowering. It was the concentrated essence of shut-up unventilated theatre, bottled up for months. . . . The outside air is religiously excluded, and the inside air, which has been breathed and rebreathed . . . is as religiously preserved, and dashes at you fiercely as you enter. There must be a great deal of typhus fever generated in these places.”25 After the war, many southern towns also had theatres such as these, and they also had African American concert saloons. These were similar in most respects to their white-owned equivalents. In New Orleans, the most popular black concert saloon was on Dryades Street, cheek by jowl with one of

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     121

the largest white-owned saloons, the Buffalo Bill. The black concert saloon and dance hall in Macon, Georgia, was the Buckingham Palace, “an enclosure with a plank floor, musicians, ice cream vender and saloon.” (It is worth noting that even the most basic saloons often adopted sophisticated names.) Virginia City also had an African American saloon in the 1880s that employed a house band and may have featured shows. In Chicago, Henry Smith operated a concert saloon at 328 Clark Street that served an African American clientele. It was a subterranean business with a board floor about 60 by 40 feet. Smith’s saloon was made up of a front room containing the bar and a back room where shows were staged. Entry into the theatre auditorium cost 15 cents, but drinks were on sale only at the bar (there was no waiter service in the theatre). The auditorium sat about eighty customers on chairs and benches, and on the night the reporter attended about three dozen patrons were in attendance. On the side of the hall was a wine room that cost 25 cents to visit. It was separated from the dressing room by a curtain, where male visitors could drink with women who came in from the street and possibly also with performers. African American saloons such as this one provided variety acts and a dance floor, a tradition that carried over into the cabarets of the twentieth century.26 Concert saloons owned by African Americans may have pioneered the mixed use of floor space because of the difficulty they had, until the late 1880s, securing enough black performers. The first saloon with a stage and a dance floor may also have been an African American business, Pete Williams’s Almack on Orange Street in New York, which operated in the 1840s. According to the Daily Times, the Almack was regularly visited by governors, congressmen, and other “prominent men,” and the aldermen of New York reportedly went there together to dance with black women and “debauch” at the saloon. Indeed, it became known as “a great resort for strangers from abroad who were anxious to see the ‘sights.’ ” Even Charles Dickens was taken there.27 The Almack was a substantial subterranean establishment, and one visitor on a quiet night found “fifty to sixty negroes and mulattoes there, of both sexes, and a dozen white men” who appear to have been flashily dressed clerks and apprentices. White customers were “monopolizing the best looking of the colored wenches in the dance,” the visitor reported. All, however, “appeared to be in high glee.” When southerner William Bobo visited Williams’ place in 1852, he quickly left because he found the racial mixing “most disgusting and revolting.” But the saloon was still a New York landmark in the decade before Williams’s death in 1848.28 After the war, dancing also became part of the show at some white-owned concert saloons. “Engine boys and sailors,” for example, seemed to prefer the

122    C H A PT E R

4

dance halls on Water Street in New York where, “to the incessant jingle of tambourine and fiddle,” they danced with “caricatures of girls, in scarlet short dresses and pantalets.” A journalist who visited one of these concert saloons in 1869 explained that following an overture by the band (a piano, violin, clarinet, and flute ensemble) and a song by a performer with a “small head and little voice,” there was a “gallop” where the customers danced with the waiter girls. “Around and around they went, pell-mell, thumping against each other and half knocking one another down.” The stage performance resumed after the dance with a ballad performed by a blind singer followed by a minstrel’s comedy routine, then another dance. In the early 1880s, some of the biggest concert saloons that catered to both working and middling-class people, such as Harry Hill’s saloon and Theodore Allen’s concert and dance house in New York, interspersed dancing and a show, which may have been what attracted groups of working-class women to these houses in the 1870s.29 Working-men predominated in some concert saloons, but according to John Jennings of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “clerks, salesmen, and sometimes the trusted employee of a bank or broker’s house” remained the mainstays of the business. This was logical enough, because in the late nineteenth century, unmarried men of moderate means continued to spend a higher share of their income on entertainment than married people or single women—about 50 percent more, according to a 1912 New York study (the first that we have)—and the number of single males in better-paid clerical professions was rapidly growing. By 1870, thanks to the wartime boost in both civil service and mercantile jobs, there were around 80,000 clerical workers in the United States, and almost all of them were male. During the 1870s, the number of office workers quadrupled and there was a doubling in the number of bookkeepers and accountants. Clerical workers were fledgling members of the middling class, and in the 1870s and 80s they were more likely to have some college education, to be second-generation Americans or more, and to be upwardly mobile. Almost a quarter of a sample of young male clerical workers in Boston in 1870 had become professionals or proprietors in their own right by 1885.30 According to a New Orleans observer, bankers were so used to the idea of their “corps of clerks” going off together to the variety theatres after work that they suspected employees who shunned that company. And most nights in most cities after the war, the concert saloons were jammed with bookkeepers, salesmen, and tellers from banking houses. “I looked around for the working classes,” wrote a postwar visitor to New York’s Alhambra saloon, without seeing anyone who appeared to be a true laborer. Instead, “the people surrounding me were . . . clerks, assistants in shops, youths of fifteen

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     123

beginning life, and nearly all wearing a low-crowned hat with turned-up brim called, I am given to understand, the ‘Champagne Charlie.’ . . . The business at the bar was tremendous [and] the smoking, on all sides, was incessant.” When the police swept into the Metropolitan saloon in New York in 1874, the parquet was similarly “filled with clerks, shop men and gamblers.” Managers were keenly aware of the importance to their businesses of unmarried male clerks, and the genteel appearance of their businesses and the women they employed was almost certainly a response to the clerks’ class aspirations. As one of them explained to a newspaper reporter, American cities contained “hundreds of [unmarried] young clerks” willing to “spend an evening at the theatre with the best girls.”31 Although women did not generally attend the saloon theatres as customers, no house could survive without placing them behind the footlights. Concert saloon variety was primarily an entertainment for men, but it was also the first of the new theatrical amusements to appeal to people of widely different incomes and manners, even if they watched it in different places or from different areas in the same hall. The growth of popular entertainment in the antebellum era had been predicated on deepening the divisions among people, separating middling-class from working-class customers and families from unmarried people. The saloons began the process of reversing that trend. Theatre entrepreneurs were aware of the market that would open up if respectable and rough could be brought together in one venue. “There is a vast audience which never enters the Academy, nor the French theater, nor Steinway Mall, nor Wallack’s, nor Niblo’s, nor the New York theatre, nor the Olympic, nor the Bowery, nor Barnum’s,” a theatre critic mused at the end of the war. “Think of it!” In New York alone, there were “fifty thousand people who support exclusively the highest styles of theatrical and musical performances; there are two hundred thousand perhaps who throng minor places of amusements that the rest know nothing whatever of. . . . It is an audience much greater than the audience we know about.”32

The Parlor Room Fantasy For the middling-class men who patronized them, and even more so for farming and working people, the concert saloons offered a glimpse of something exotic: upholstered seating, fancy beverages, walls covered with salacious art, women serving drinks in fancy gowns, and the glittering light of chandeliers. The essence of the concert saloon’s appeal was the all-encompassing theatricalization of its space. It was a theatre with multiple and coincident functions—a place to eat and drink, to converse with male acquaintances, to

124    C H A PT E R

4

play games, and to flirt with women—all packaged together in such a way as to obscure the division between the stage and the seat. In this sense, the horizon of expectation the concert saloon established shared many similarities with that of the sentimental theatre, but its methods were completely different. The various historical springs that fed the concert saloons of the late 1850s and 60s stamped their character, and their democratizing influence spread genteel customs through the working population. The saloons in this sense did not merely create a broad-based entertainment, they also played a role in closing the manners gap between middling-class and working-class men. Like the garden theatres and other fashionable watering holes before them, the concert saloons specialized in the provision of light refreshments: sangaree, beer, white wine, champagne, iced brandy, and sherry cobblers. Beer, not spirits, was the preferred drink in western saloons, and in many towns they were referred to as lager bier saloons. While working men drank lager, richer ones tended to consume wine. “It may seem strange that champagne should appear to be a common drink in a Concert Saloon,” noted one writer, “but such is the fact.” This was even true in the West, where light liquors were more popular than has been generally recognized. Large quantities of wine were consumed at the Cosmopolitan Saloon in Tombstone, while at the Parisian Varieties in Cheyenne, it was customary for rich ranchmen to sit in private “boxes” and drink champagne. Jack London later reported consuming demijohns of wine in saloons patronized by California oystermen, and at Jack Harris’s concert saloon in San Antonio the manager called the area where waiter girls sat with customers the wine room, which appears to have been the accepted term across the West. Interestingly, wine drinking was not much practiced at home, for as one California vintner complained in 1881, it was “completely confined to public hostelries.”33 In other words, it was the culture of the concert saloon that made wine popular, not the general habits of Americans. Little rituals that were more appropriate to the salon than the saloon accompanied the drinking. One distinctive American custom was practiced in concert saloons across the country: customers who ordered wine or spirits were provided with a decanter and allowed to serve themselves. What made this “Yankee” practice so peculiar, according to an English tourist in 1859, was the “sense of honor” it implied. In Europe, he expected, customers would “fill their glass, and thus take more than their money’s worth,” something they did not seem to do in most American saloons.34 The service waiter girls provided was also modeled on genteel customs. An 1869 spectator noted that “we had expected to see low, vulgar

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     125

actions and to hear lewd obscene language. In this we were agreeably disappointed. Indeed, we can truly say that, aside from drinking and an occasional word of profanity, we neither saw nor heard anything that would be out of place among ladies at a respectable hop.” In the opinion of one New York journalist, the typical waiter girl served customers “respectfully and silently” until she was asked to join the table. Then “she will comply, and so long as you spend money largely and rapidly will stay there as long as the shop is open, bestowing on you the largesse of her sweetness and smile. It is her cue to be reticent upon many subjects, and it may require several separate visits before you are sufficiently ingratiated to win a degree of confidence.”35 Like their gentlemanly precursors, the décor of many of the new concert saloons was also quite sumptuous. While the Reveille, for example, appeared from the outside to be small, dark, and removed from the street, suggesting that “there is little or nothing to entice pedestrians downstairs . . . no gaudy gew-gaws, flashy muslins and painted sign boxes,” inside, the grand saloon was large and expensively decorated with “everything looking so clean and comfortable.” The main hall had forty tables (each with a domino set), rows of velvet-backed “theatre chairs” for those who wanted to focus on the show exclusively, and sideboards covered with white tablecloths that were decked out with complementary “fricasseed frogs and boned turkey.” Crystal chandeliers lighted the room. The Reveille was a popular spot in the 1860s with businessmen. “We have often heard of the Reveille,” observed a New York Clipper correspondent, “and always noticed that our informers were not old rounders or fast youths. . . . There must be something beneath the surface worthy of commendation when merchants, cotton and stock brokers, buyers of gold, limbs of the law (and others who make their money easily and have mansions in the Sixth Avenue) spoke well of it.”36 Another customer, who was disgusted by the richness of the décor in the concert saloons, described them as “fitted up regardless of cost. Marble tables—marble counters—fulllength mirrors—brilliant lights—a large fountain playing into a marble basin six feet across, filled with gold-fish—canary birds hanging in the evergreen branches, which form little screens of bowers in the corners of the room, or by some pillar where sits a gray-haired sinner, half-hidden from the gaze of curious eyes, holding the hand of a pretty waiter-girl, who has him on a string, for sure!”37 Saloons all across America appear to have aspired to the same posh standards. In Butte, Montana, the Opera Saloon had stained-glass windows facing the street so the light shone out at night in “cardinal and amethyst rays.” At McDaniel’s in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the auditorium was “resplendent

126    C H A PT E R

4

with gaudy, frescoed walls and ceiling, the brilliant colors and gilding being in keeping with the flashy tastes of the patrons.” Even the Gem in Deadwood was, according to the Black Hills Daily Pioneer, “neat and tastefully arranged,” and it was equipped with an expensive drop curtain. Tom Maguire’s Opera House in Virginia City, a concert saloon built in 1863, had gas chandeliers, gas footlights, and a curtain showing a scene of Lake Tahoe. The walls at Maguire’s were highly ornamented, and the boxes lining them had scarlet drapes, gilt chairs, and velvet railings. Denver saloon historian Thomas Noel notes that “nineteenth-century real estate and insurances atlases portray mazelike partitioning of saloons”; there were smoking and wine rooms, shooting galleries, clubrooms, and boxes, and the rooms were decorated with paintings (often lewd—the Bird Cage in Tombstone had a big portrait of a belly dancer named Fatima), chandeliers, richly upholstered chairs, and an ample use of art glass.38 The clothing of the female employees also revealed the saloon’s birthright, as décolleté gowns, modeled on the ball gowns worn by affluent women, were standard garb. The women who worked at the Opera Saloon in Butte reported an appalled visitor, were in “drawing room décolleté!” A newspaper editor who visited a New York concert saloon similarly reported of the waiter girl who served his table that “in the matter of dress, no lady in the land excels her. Rustling silk, with amplitude of crinoline; her waist looks all that [an] artist could wish; her hair is dressed to the apex of fashion; her fingers are covered in rings, and her person generally well ornamented. In the country she would captivate deacons, merchants, business men and perhaps even editors were they easily caught.” Short skirts were not as common as one might expect and appear to have been worn only by young dancers and soubrettes who modeled their outfits on those of ballerinas. As one Chicago waiter girl told a reporter from the Tribune, a woman should wear short skirts only if she had nice plump calves. Décolleté dresses were, however, standard garb and the exposure of clavicles and cleavage was viewed as deeply erotic and rather high class. In the cut of their necklines, as in so many other things, variety theatre women mimicked the clothing of elite women, for, as one waiter explained, most of them bought their gowns in shops that sold the cast-off clothes of the well-to-do. If, as historians suggest, fashion was a way elite people set themselves apart from less affluent Americans, then the variety saloons specialized in challenging that distinction by dressing working women as glamorous ladies. The disguise of fashion that waiter girls adopted was another sign that saloons were a dream world, a place of male fantasy. For working men and clerks, part of that fantasy was upward mobility.39

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     127

A reporter who descended the “precipitous flight of stairs” to 135 Madison Street in Chicago (a saloon theatre unmarked except for a red gaslight and a sign reading “J. Rosche, Lager, Wines, and Liquors”) was immediately approached by two women. Choosing to speak to “the best looking” one, he was asked what he was going to drink and then invited to buy her one as well. Another journalist who went into a New York variety saloon noted that when he and a friend took their seats, two women promptly “slid down beside [us] like little birds going to roost. ‘Won’t you buy me a drink dear?’ says one. ‘And you’ll treat me pet, won’t you?’ remarks the other, and without waiting to discuss the matter further one of the beautiful creatures waves one of the waiter girls, who are darting about like bees, to the table.” The same practice prevailed in theatres where the performers entertained only the customers in the boxes. A reporter for the Police Gazette who attended the Folly Theatre in New York with a friend was solicited in this way. They reached their box by passing through an upstairs “wine room” that connected through a back passage to their seats. They were not long there when they “heard a rustling outside” and two of the dancers in pink tights entered, saying “You look lonely, birdie,” before occupying the remaining two seats. “Now if you are going to treat us,” remarks one, “you must be quick about it. We’ve only got ten minutes, because we go on in the next dance.”40 Unlike conventional theatres, which patrons could enter with a reassuring anonymity, the concert saloons forced audience members to participate in the charade as soon as they crossed their thresholds. One might disguise oneself with a false identity, as the reporters, performers, and waiters generally did, but one could not hide in the crowd. Everything about the concert saloons was a kind of grand burlesque on the sexual hierarchy. Men who refused to buy what the women demanded were criticized for their cheapness and abandoned for more generous clients. Other customers were taunted for failing to meet challenges tossed out to sing, cuddle, dance, or wager. In the 1860s, many concert saloons had shooting galleries where customers could test their skills with air rifles for a few cents a shot. A reporter for the Clipper explained the results of an evening’s challenge: The crowd had now gathered around and got firing away at Mr. Bull’s Eye, but out of a half-dozen able-bodied sausage-eaters, nary one hit the B.E. “Here, gentlemen, haven’t I got a shot?” quoth a female jig dancer. “What’s the use, Kate, I’ll swear you can’t beat all of us,” responded [a] tragic personage, “but you may have a shot, and a dozen if you like.”

128    C H A PT E R

4

No sooner said than done and the diminutive little lady, adjusting the sleeves of her blue silk dress, cocked the musket, took aim, and darn our stockings if she didn’t break the pipe stern. “Well if that don’t beat all,” said one of the party, following the remark with three cheers for the Champion Concert Hall champion dancer and champion shooter, which were given. The forward behavior of women such as Kate inverted mid-nineteenthcentury social ideals. As the reporter confessed, “you know we wasn’t born to be dared by a woman.”41 The fact that the saloons employed women as both entertainers and servers was part of their unreal quality. Waiting tables in antebellum America had generally been a male occupation, monopolized by Irish immigrants. The spark that went off in an unknown saloon owner’s head in the late 1850s was that his theatre’s overhead could be reduced if the same girls who performed on stage served in the hall. The employees’ pay would remain unchanged, but now their idle time would be productively utilized. As an incentive, the performers were given a scaled percentage on each drink sold: the amount increased as the cost of the liquor increased. The problem with this arrangement is obvious enough: the workers’ ability to serve drinks was limited by the demands of the stage and vice versa. As a result, by the1860s, owners had divided up the various functions. Some women, called waiter girls, served the liquor while others drank with the men and performed. In concert saloons with boxes or wine rooms, the privilege of sitting with a performer was reserved for those who paid more. Nonperforming, nonserving women who were employed to sit with the men were called beer jerkers and chair warmers in the trade.42 In whatever capacity, the women who worked in variety saloons were noted for the “insinuating way they cast their eyes” at patrons. This in itself was shocking. Respectable women in the mid-nineteenth century were expected to avert their gaze from men and to defer to them in commercial interactions. Only prostitutes and similar moral wrecks looked with steady directness at men. In fact, what distinguished women who had fallen into sin, according to a southern writer, were their “boldness of eye” and “forced smiles of insinuation.”43 Waiter girls, performers, and chair warmers, like prostitutes, looked directly at men and flirted with them, and they dressed in what was considered enticing ways. They were also expected to add physical contact to their male customers’ ocular pleasure. Men put their arms around the women who sat with them and, at least according to a few prurient reports, laid their heads on their chests. Some girls may have sat on the knees

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     129

of their customers and some did not turn down kisses from a man who was buying champagne: When Charley wants to cut a dash, and lick all comes before him, He steals from Pa a little cash for me, ’cause I adore him. When he wants to kiss me there, or when he wants to kiss me here, He don’t go round behind my ear, for there’s nothing shy in Charley.44 However, the openness of the women to physical contact, perhaps modeled on the behavior of brothel prostitutes, was different because it was not a prelude to intercourse. The possibility of limited erotic touch set the variety saloons apart not only from more genteel entertainments (and from their garden precursors) but also from the brothels and the theatre galleries that had once been frequented by prostitutes. Some of the rougher saloons did, of course, carry the sexualized burlesque of genteel society to its ultimate extension by suggesting that the box and the wine room were resorts not for the gentleman but for the john. A journalist visiting the Garden Concert Saloon in Chicago described a large room covered with “hundreds of indecent photographs” and filled with a “crowd” of four or five hundred men. The theatre had several floors. On the lower level, men were seated in rows and waiter girls moved back and forth bringing cigars and liquor to the customers. Upstairs in the balcony, “chair warmers” and “hustlers” sat at tables (prostitutes were not allowed on the ground floor), smiling down and “display[ing] their ankles under the gallery railing” in an effort to attract the men to come up. At the back of the hall, a continuous stream of women moved up and down the stairs from the street to the balcony. Ascending the stairs, the reporter found that the prostitutes were “all thirsty” and that any man who sat down beside one was required to buy her a drink. Farther forward, above the sides of the stage, he saw boxes with closed curtains, and every so often he saw a “painted face” appear at a window. Having bought the most expensive ticket, the journalist was able to go up one more flight to the passageways that gave access to the boxes. Here he found a series of “apartments.” The first one was a wine room with a balcony from which a customer could view the stage. Beside this room was a darker one furnished with chairs and tables and lounges. A group of women were seated there with some “intoxicated men.” From this room one descended to the closed boxes, the reporter assumed for purposes of sex. The house did not appear to charge anyone extra for access to sex, though a man needed to buy the most expensive ticket, to purchase as many drinks for his companion as she desired, and then, one assumes, pay for the sex. The prostitute quite

130    C H A PT E R

4

possibly turned over a portion of her earnings to the house. The Garden, then, was a sectionalized sexual space. The cheapest ticket got a customer to the ground floor where he might flirt with a waiter girl; a medium priced ticket bought a customer access to a streetwalker on the balcony, but a man had to leave with her for sex. The most expensive ticket bought a box and the potential for a sexual encounter in the theatre itself. The traditional class division in seating had been shifted into an entirely new arena.45 But while reporters, clerics, and a growing host of critics assumed from their appearance that all waiter girls, chair warmers, and performers were prostitutes, many, if not most, were not in that branch of the sex trade. This was as likely true of the concert saloons in the West as it was of those in the East. The Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, for example, a popular variety house that featured well-known touring acts, was on the ground floor of a brothel. But here, as at the Gem in Deadwood, the women who worked in the saloon were not selling sex upstairs. Most concert saloons were simply theatres where some, but not all, of the performers might have made assignations. On the western frontier, the job of concert saloon women was generally much like that of workers in the East: to greet customers, to sit with them, and to encourage them to buy drinks. For that work they received a wage plus 20 percent on all drinks purchased. If they sold sex on the side, that transaction was completed on their own time.46 The saloon theatres did, however, naturalize the behavior of the streetwalker. Variety saloon entertainment sold titillation, not intercourse. The waiter girls understood that in the eyes of outsiders they were sex workers, and they used that image to keep their customers guessing about their intentions. As a coquettish Chicago saloon performer told a reporter who asked about her morals in 1874, whatever her actual “pretensions to purity . . . no one would believe me, while I’m in this business.” Another writer agreed, advising reformers that they wouldn’t get far trying to extract confessions from the average waiter girl: “Any hint upon your part that there might be such a thing as a flaw . . . in the conduct of her moral life will be met with either a stony, withering stare of indignation, or a shrinking, tearful, hurt expression which will go to your heart.” The flirtatiousness of theatre workers was a performance and, despite the assertions of moral reformers, a potentially false guide. Ida Brevoot, for example, who was murdered by a customer in a New York saloon, was a young woman of 28 who, although she was “a favorite with both the men and women who haunt such places” and was dressed at the time in a knee-length and low-cut dress that revealed “her beautiful white throat and bust,” had rejected her murderer’s advances. As the press learned after her death, Brevoot was faithfully married and had

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     131

a seven-year-old son. Her job demanded that she be “bright eyed and pert” and she had initially flirted with her murderer, but in time “he bothered her by his intentions” and she had avoided him.47 The women who worked in variety saloons were, like Brevoot, subjected to constant sexual harassment. It was an essential part of the work and they were required to accept it so long as the men were spending. Sometimes the harassment became violent, and although most better-class houses had bouncers who were responsible for protecting the staff, the newspapers regularly reported women being hit in saloons or being involved in fights. On rare occasions, women were murdered in concert saloons by jealous lovers or spurned partners. Given that fights are not uncommon when men get drunk, one can accept many of the stories as true, but the papers also exaggerated the violence because they were universally hostile to the saloons. We know, for example, that a Duluth reporter made up the story of the gang rape of the variety dancer Daisy Donaldson “in revenge” because she had smashed a beer bottle over his head when he propositioned her. Similarly, while reporters noted that the waiter girls would leave together at closing time, meeting men at the back doors and walking away in small groups, they may not have been prostituting themselves.48 An equally plausible interpretation is that they were walking home together for mutual protection and that the men were as often as not husbands, siblings, or lovers; rape was not uncommon in the parts of town where working women lived. Women chose to work in concert saloons for many reasons, but primary among them was the relatively high pay. Lib, a Canadian waiter girl who was interviewed in Chicago in 1874, told her inquisitor that she’d previously worked in the “false-hair trade” and that she preferred the saloons because she only had to work from seven to midnight, earned well, and was having fun. “I like to get around and talk to the boys,” she explained. “It kills time and isn’t monotonous. I got tired of other people’s curls.” It was not, however, a glamorous job. The women were fondled and ogled by men and they were continually solicited for sex. Some waiter girls probably did develop addictions, became abusive toward their children or families, and led tragically brief lives.49 Still, the fantasy of affective union swirled about the saloon, deepening its ties to the genteel culture it burlesqued. Stories repeatedly appeared in the papers reporting the marriage of a waiter girl to an affluent customer. In these fables the rich man, sometimes a wealthy farmer, sometimes a mine owner from the frontier, sometimes a foreigner, attended the saloon and studied the girl. Impressed with her looks, comportment, and work ethic, he proposed marriage to her and after almost no reflection she accepted. Like the early

132    C H A PT E R

4

twentieth-century myth of the chorine who marries a prince, the fantasy of the marriageable waiter girl revealed the romantic aspirations of many of those who chose to work in the theatres and those who attended them. Some men, we know, did abandon their wives and families for seat warmers, buying them presents and spending evenings talking and drinking with them. In this way, they transposed their romantic longings onto women whose connection to them was primarily commercial. In one case, a distraught wife entered the saloon and, grabbing the gift her husband had given the saloon worker, declared “this belongs to me” before shooting her perceived rival in the stomach.50 It is unlikely that most waiter girls and beer jerkers, who were paid to keep their customers in the saloon and drinking, reciprocated their suitors’ projections of love, but we can never know. The presence of hostesses, saucy female waiters, and revealingly dressed performers among the tables turned the saloon into a multilayered stage. The atmosphere was raucous, perhaps more so on the floor than on the boards. This was especially true in concert saloons where the audience was predominantly working class. Picturing the Palace Varieties in Cincinnati, for example, a writer recalled, “the air is filled—yea, reeking—with the fumes of bad whiskey, stale beer, and the odor of foul smelling cheap tobacco smoke, and through all this haze the would-be show goes on, and the applause is manifested by whistles, cat calls, the pounding of feet on the floor and glasses on the table. Occasionally, some artist (?) will appear who does not seem to strike the popular fancy and will be greeted by beer glasses or empty bottles being fired at his or her head.” In Butte saloons in the 1880s, it was apparently common practice for customers who liked an act to fire their pistols into the floorboards.51 But the concert saloons did not so much challenge the association of gentility, domesticity, and amusement as burlesque it. By removing the affective relationship that was supposed to prevail between men and women at home and placing it in the barroom, they both reinforced middling-class values even as they distorted and drained them of moral purpose. In the saloon theatres, men and women engaged in courtship rituals without the final contract, enjoying companionship without later paying the price that convention demanded. In holding up a cracked mirror to respectable society and inviting ordinary Americans to look, the saloons helped to democratize respectability even as they stabbed at its moral core.

Grotesque Minstrels and Hard-Hearted Women The boxes along the walls were filled with “the scions of old families, sprucely appareled, their boots protruding towards the orchestra, leisurely

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     133

smoking and swearing.” At the tables in the center sat clumps of clerks and journeymen mechanics, “spitting, drinking, or chewing. The din was great.” The most rowdy customers were seated in a narrow balcony above the hall, and at the overture they “took the opportunity to single out the music-leader, whose head was bald, just at the back. He was requested to “play-up” and when he responded, he was asked to “dry-up.” Playbills and peanuts were showered down, and the bouncer struggled to control the noisiest elements. Around the edges of the room, “mulatto women” sat behind semi-circular counters where cigars were laid out for sale. The waiter girls, attired in dresses cut very low, were “buzzing hither and thither,” with “Here’s your whiskey, my dear,” “How many lagers was your order sir?,” and “Did you say a dime cigar?” So began the night in a Philadelphia concert saloon in 1868. The curtain rose to tumultuous applause. “The scene at the rear was a landscape, of former days. . . . The side scenes made up a collection of forest trees, and a row of girls, in short gauze dresses and flesh-colored tights were grouped under the leaves.” The foreground was occupied by the soloists, “thin, ghostly-eyed women, and men bloated or reduced by their excesses—who joined their voices, shrill or deep, in the grand harmony of the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ ” A young woman with roses in her hair, wearing a spangled bodice, came in at the last chorus and waved a silk flag. Then the performance commenced. First, a juggler came on, whirling knives around his head until they formed a continuous circle of glistening blades. He was followed by a young man who sang “a very refined ballad,” called “the Goose Hangs High.” This was encored twice, and “an abundance of orange peels were thrown.” After a little music, “indignantly received,” the scene opened upon a grand ballet, “wherein a great, voluptuous woman, with a simpering face full of animal desire” took the stage at three strides and “threw her feet several degrees higher than her head.” She was popular with the audience, and at the close of her dance “a dozen bouquets from the scions in the boxes” were thrown. One enthusiastic youth in the parquet screamed, “take my hat!” and many spectators laughed loudly over this. Some “less ample dancers” then exerted themselves, followed by a blackface comedy routine that had the audience roaring at the “coarse sallies of wit.” Next up was “a family of flexible people that twisted themselves out of shape and back again with the utmost ease,” a young lady with a piece of music in her hand who sang “Happy be Thy Dreams,” a Yankee delineator who “represented his countrymen smeared with war-paint and wearing a red wig,” and “a dozen similar exhibitions marked by vulgar versatility.” In the meantime, the waiter girls went on serving, chattering, drinking, and flirting with the men.52

134    C H A PT E R

4

Saloon entertainment such as this was hurled from the stage into the eyes and ears of its audience; its purpose was to surprise, arouse, and amuse. The success of the act could be tangibly measured in the shouts from the balcony, the bouquets from the boxes, and the thumping of heavy glasses on tables and wood-soled feet on the sawdust-covered floor. The biggest thrills were delivered by the female dancers. In fact, the comics and singers and jugglers and contortionists seemed to be there largely to build excitement for the next group of women in tights. This was not just the case in Philadelphia; at a New York concert saloon in 1869, the entire performance worked toward a dance by two girls whom the visiting reporter found revolting. Their “blood shot eyes and ghastly features but too plainly indicated the wretched and dissolute life they were living,” he moralized, and “modesty was evidently not one of their embarrassments.” Nonetheless, the women danced “amid the uproarious laughter and enthusiastic applause of the spectators.” When they were finished, three blackface minstrels joined them on stage and the five proceeded to dance a breakdown to even more vociferous cheering. What seemed to most thrill variety saloon audiences was cyclonic energy. Women moving about in an uninhibited way on stage seemed exciting to male spectators in the 1860s and 70s. This was likely why a show seemed to speed up as it progressed: “The whirling becomes wilder, the dancing dizzier, until it merges into a can-can of such reckless abandon as would move the case hardened habitués of the Parisian [Bal] Mabile to genuine wonder.” Solo dancing on the variety stage was an exercise in “violent exertion” and “voluptuous freedom” rather than beauty in any conventional sense. The dancers’ lack of inhibition, their speed and willingness to expose parts of their bodies that were normally covered, was what aroused audiences. A preference for slow erotic dancing does not appear to have emerged until the “danse du ventre” craze of the 1890s. Nonetheless, although the entertainment was frenzied, some spectators still projected more conventionally romantic desires on variety performers. One habitué reminiscing about a beloved singer, recalled the way “her tawny hair fell down in masses about her fair, full shoulders, her bare arms gleamed white and shapely, and her richly colored dress revealed rather than concealed the rare perfection of her rounded figure. Her every movement was full of grace, and every pose was a picture.”53 Male spectators fantasized about the eroticism of the performers in different ways, some positive, some negative, but all were fantasizing. In so doing, these men were projecting their own feelings onto the stage, and the raucous audience around them served to either intensify their horror or deepen their sense that they alone understood the savage or rare beauty of

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     135

what they were watching. In any case, audience perception of the variety stage, while certainly individualized, did not involve any effort to look for meaning in it. True, many spectators wanted to see clothing fall away from skin, but they were not expecting anything deeper. Even the sensitive young fan who romanticized the singer imagined her as a physical object cut up, as it were, into parts. Variety was a theatre of forward propulsion, not contemplation, and the fun of a concert saloon involved immersing oneself in its utter artificiality. According to an 1865 commentator, saloon “amusements have little time for sentiment, but just enough time for fun and that relief from the exacting obligations of everyday life.”54 The writer was right—up to a point. Although sympathetic spectatorship was hard to find here, sentimental idioms were prevalent. On the one hand, they were manifested in burlesque fashion, in the mimicking of affective relations, in the rituals of dress and treating and service, in the flirtatious manipulation of terms of endearment, in songs about country and love. In these ways, saloon variety employed the forms of sensibility but inverted them and stripped them of the inspiration sympathetic audiences and cultured performers were supposed to find in them. In the catalogue of variety songs that were published and in the snippets of acts that spectators recorded, it was empathy that seemed most lacking. Characters hit each other when they were supposed to make love, they manipulated each other’s desires, and only rakes treated girls to ice cream. The prevalence of sentimental inversions might be due to the fact that much of the evidence that has survived was produced by comedians and blackface artists and by men rather than women, or it might be that empathy was simply hard to express in the saloon’s boisterous atmosphere. The fragments of conversation we have from waiter girls suggest the latter; while they expressed curiosity about the men they entertained and flirted with them, they were not noticeably compassionate toward them. Their horizon was limited to stimulation; they weren’t paid to identify. Variety songs were generally narrative and their most common subject was relationships between men and women. Like conventional sentimental songs, the love they described often ended unhappily, but in the saloon it was generally because of the woman’s, not the man’s, infidelity. The impact of this was not so much to delegitimize relationships as to leaven them, making their expression appropriate to a barroom setting. Terry Ferguson sang in the late 1860s about going out to a variety show and being captivated when one of the girls “Come out on the stage to do a song and dance / And upon me she did stare.” As she winked and flirted with him from the stage, “She roped me in like the rest of the gawks.” Sitting down with him after her turn,

136    C H A PT E R

4

Ferguson continued, the hustler tried to get him to buy her drinks and even offered to “charge [him] five dollars a kiss.” When he chastised her for this, she “Gave me the laugh, / And said it was a sin,” but the fault was his, not hers. He should not have been attracted to her in the first place, for “I was a gawk, she knew by my talk,” and he had “allow[ed] her to rope me in.”55 Concert saloon songs toyed with sentimental ideals by suggesting that men had deeper emotions and more constancy than women. They were presented as the caring ones who longed for companionship and they were also the ones who most often ended up being disappointed, in the following case by a peanut vendor’s appeal: I am in love with a pretty girl, Who calls me pudding head; And when she turned and jilted me, For five long weeks I sighed, She eloped this town with some other chap, Who at the corner cried, cried, cried: “Peanuts, peanuts, warm your hands and fill your bellies, Peanuts, peanuts, smoking from the can.”56 Although the nonsense at the end makes the thing funny, the song still communicates the idea that faithfulness is a male, not a female, trait and that men’s emotional dependency was virtuous if misguided. In “Oh! Susan Jane,” which Will Hays performed at the Metropolitan saloon in New York, he begged: Oh! Susan quit your fooling, And give my heart to me, Oh! Give me back my love again, And I will let you be; I used to love you dearly, I cannot love again, I’m going to leave you Soon, good bye Susan Jane.57 In a practical sense, songs such as Hay’s or Ferguson’s served to remind customers not to take the waiter girls seriously, no matter how tender or dependent they appeared. In this way, they reaffirmed the artificiality of the concert saloons. By drawing attention to the falsehood of relations inside the theatre, variety was not discounting the loving relationship, it was simply telling men to go and look for it elsewhere. Truthfulness in a pleasure-loving girl was a

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     137

hard thing to judge; it was better to pursue someone who was shy or even homely. Certainly not a girl who worked in a saloon! If the sentimental comedic or melodramatic theatre tried to bring the morality of the contemporary bourgeois world into the playhouse and actualize it on the stage, the concert saloons did the reverse. Variety performers insisted that men leave their morality outside and accept the theatre as a palace of insincerity. This is why saloon songs rarely blamed coquettish women for their cold hearts. Instead, lyrics strongly advised men to be aware of female guile and to remain on their guard. Songs such as “That’s Just What I Want You for to Do” by the Arnold Brothers, sung in a hall bustling with waiter girls, affirmed the pleasures of a being out with a pretty woman who liked to drink: “Myself and Aunt Elizie Brunswick dear, She’s the gayest gal of all, Although she’s slim and tall, You can bet she likes a glass of lager beer”58 As with other saloon songs, this one laid down the rules of the house without disparaging its workers for their callousness or playfulness. Medieval and early modern poetry and song—the Canterbury Tales is a good example—often featured fickle women who unrepentantly deceive their husbands. But nineteenth-century sentimentality upheld the idea of female purity and helped transform the fallen woman into an object of pity. In sentimental art, the inconstant woman was generally seen as one who lacked the character needed to resist male advances; she was too mobile, in a sense, and therefore morally undeveloped and weak.59 Variety, in contrast, portrayed the fickle woman as strong-minded, high-spirited, and self-centered. She was too preoccupied by her own pleasure and profit to worry about the effects of her manipulations on male emotions. Like the uninhibited dancer, it was her freedom from constraint that made her sexy and dangerous. Fattie Stewart made this clear when, in women’s attire, he sang in the Philadelphia saloon he owned: My name is Nell, the dashing belle, Some call me a coquette, Of lovers I’ve had many score, But not the right one yet. And as I pass along the street, The Gents all bow and smile, I hear them cry, as I pass by, Oh! How is that for style?60

138    C H A PT E R

4

Paradoxically, when dealing with male relationships outside the saloon, variety entertainers were much less tolerant. But the inversion of the normal order carried over into courtship and marriage as variety singers insisted on their right to demand obedience and self-abnegation from their wives and lovers. Relationships that were supposed to be companionate were therefore rejected as demanding too much of a sacrifice of male freedom. This was especially so when the song involved women spending their partners’ money or placing demands, which the performers considered unwarranted, on men’s time. While maintaining that they liked beautiful clothes on the pretty waiter girls, saloon singers were decidedly less enthusiastic about fashion when it was their wives or the girlfriends of the characters in their songs doing the shopping. In these comic songs, males reacted violently when they felt a partner was challenging their authority in a relationship, and they sang and joked about beating spendthrift mates or women who didn’t know their place. Charley Fox, a well-known minstrel who was with Bryant’s group for a time and also performed as a soloist in concert saloons, published a song about a girl who was agitating rather too hard for him to marry her. Fox explained how he was walking down the street arm in arm with her when they stopped outside a store displaying infants’ clothes in the window. My love an me went near a dry-goods store, Where hung hoop-skirts by the billion or more, Childrens [sic] too no bigger than your hand, Some too to put on before they’re born; “Come,” said my love, “let us look in here”; “By golly!” says I, “Johnny, go if you dare.” . . . She caught me by the end of my coat-tail Till she made me boil over like that halfish ale Says she, “My love, look at that choker cravat, White would so suit you, I know that.” I said, “My love, now stop, or you I’ll throttle. Your spirit’s vile, there’s better in the black bottle.”61 Here Fox drew laughs by being abusive toward a woman who tested the boundaries of the affective relationship and demanded more than was her due. Implicitly, the burlesque did acknowledge the public nature of romance, accepted the logic of marriage, and then resisted the estate by escaping it or threatening violence on women who constrained them. Fox made this point in another song in which he declared his belief that being loved was the

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     139

secret to happiness and that he intended to beat the woman who denied him affection: “So I’ll get married, as I’m distressed,” he sang, “My wife must coax me up to her breast, / Or I’ll knock right off her tiny head, / And this I’ll do until I am dead.”62 The songsters in which these various works were published identifies them as having been performed in a concert saloon, and it is unlikely that Fox would have offered a song such as this in Bryant’s minstrel show. The audience was simply a different one, and what raised a cheer in the saloon would have offended men and women in the minstrel house. Still, it is important to recognize that while songs such as these burlesqued affective relations and avoided empathy, they did not repudiate sentiment. Variety songs actually endorsed the ideals of the companionate marriage by describing its inversion. Men were warned about women who bullied them or milked them for cash, and they invariably presented themselves as victims of flirtatious and insincere lovers. If they came home drunk or beat their mates, it was only because they had been pushed into it by a scolding wife or by the pressure of unreasonable expectations. Men were, in all cases, the suffering victims, physically powerful victims who felt entitled to respect perhaps, but victims nonetheless. Because of their subversions, George Wakeman called these songs “grotesque” and he associated them not only with “all those channels of amusement patronized more especially by the lower classes of cities.” He included among their performers not just variety concert saloon entertainers but minstrels as well.63 Looking at women and listening to songs about them were the core elements in all concert saloon variety shows, but an almost equally ubiquitous feature was blackface comedy. Until the later 1860s, minstrel shows continued to be popular entertainments with wealthy and middling-class men and women, which made their burlesque in the concert saloons almost inevitable. Saloon minstrels did not appear in troupes, as they did in respectable theatres; instead, they returned the genre to its Jacksonian origins and performed as soloists or in pairs. In their concert saloon guise, the blackface minstrel once again became a figure of the grotesque. Unlike genteel performers, who made the form into a type of parlor entertainment and dressed appropriately, the saloon minstrels sported outfits that were as garish as possible. The typical saloon minstrel of the 1860s and 70s wore a “grotesque costume,” according to one commentator, “tight pants of white and red striped material, long swallow-tail coat, immense shoes, a sugar-loaf shaped hat and a huge collar.” And he sang “comic ditties that elicited shouts of laughter.”64 Bright wigs were popular, especially white ones, because they made the black makeup even more outrageous. And physical deformities often characterized blackface artists: the western saloon minstrel One-eyed Johnny Smith

140    C H A PT E R

4

drew attention to the scar left from the bullet that put out one of his eyes and Bobby Gaylor talked about spending his childhood in a rag factory where he contracted the disease that “destroyed his lungs,” impaired his speech, and made him lose all his front teeth. Not surprisingly, traditional minstrels used words such as “crude,” “indelicate,” and “coarse” to describe their saloon counterparts. In the concert saloons, minstrelsy skidded not downward, but out of civility altogether.65 Little evidence of the types of blackface work performed in the saloons survives. Although many of Charley Fox’s and Charley White’s songs were published and both performed in saloons in the 1860s, they were mainstream artists who spent the bulk of their careers in respectable halls. Most of White’s songs employ the sentimental conventions of genteel minstrelsy. White’s Melodeon Theatre even made a point of advertising its respectability, refusing admission to “improper persons (male or female),” banning alcohol consumption and reserving the front seats for unaccompanied ladies. Little of the published work of genteel minstrels offers much insight into the work of the men who made it into a grotesque.66 Very few glimpses into the work of anonymous blackface saloon entertainers survive, but those that do suggest that they stressed the nonsensical dimensions of the genre. One snippet of a minstrel song performed in a New York saloon in the late 1860s was: There was a little frog He sat upon a log Pretty soon he fell off And got himself all wet We also know that The Three Crows, a blackface group that performed in saloons around New York in the period 1867–1870, sang a song with the refrain: Old hoss, old hoss, you’ve drawn many passengers And now you’re to be made into bologna sausagers Similarly, a snippet of a joke routine offered by a minstrel at Monroe’s Chicago saloon has come down to us, though the reporter refused to record three-fourths of what was said because he found it “too indecent for publication.” What we have are two jokes that center on prostitution: “Why is Fourth Avenue like a counterfeit 25-cent piece?” Answer: “Because it’s a bad quarter and hard to pass.” And why is State Street like a nursery rhyme? Answer: because there were so many Marys looking for little lambs to fleece.67

T H E D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N O F E N T E RTA I N M E N T     141

None of this work exploits the traditional minstrel vein of the malapropism. Instead, it turns the blackface comic into an interlocutor of absurdity and indecency. Blackness in the concert saloons seems to have taken on a new meaning that was not pathetic, but sexual. The burnt cork became a mask for an American harlequin who was a pimp, lecher, brute, and trickster. Miscegenation was the obvious threat this type of minstrel posed, especially when he leered at, joked about, and then danced with the female performers. The threat was made explicit in a skit we know was performed in a Brooklyn concert saloon in 1861. The act opened with a grotesquely costumed minstrel on the stage playing his banjo and singing a song. After he was finished, a long-haired Yankee rube in short breeches entered, searching for his beloved “Jerusha Doenut.” A girl in tights and short petticoats then ran onstage, and she and the Yankee sang and danced together. The blackface clown tried to cut in on the couple, forcing the Yankee to drive him off with the cry: “They must have no amalgamation of the races here!” The triumphant white man then asked for a kiss from Jerusha, who replied that he must ask for one on his knees. When he did so, she smacked him on the jaw, to the hearty applause and cheering of the audience.68 According to one retired minstrel, what distinguished the variety house comic from the respectable one was that he had “to depend more for effect upon the antics, pranks, gestures, and quips that he rings in with his joke than he does upon the intrinsic merit of the jest itself.” The saloon minstrel had to be both “master of the grotesque in humor” and “capable, also, of judging the temper and caliber of his audience.” Increasingly, burnt-cork variety artists became improvisers, arriving on stage with “a grim array of funny ammunition” but no real script.69 Some observers believed the change in the blackface humor of the saloons, essentially the loss of the tempering influence of sentiment, was a product of white people’s growing hostility to African Americans after the Civil War. It was the “revulsion of feeling,” a New York Sun reporter opined, “in many Northern communities to themes connected with the war,” together with the “influx into the North of thousands of needy colored men and women,” which “caused the popularity of [traditional] minstrel [show] entertainments to decline.”70 In concert saloons, the conventional minstrel type was burlesqued and transformed into a physical rather than a verbal character who sang silly rather than romantic songs and who ogled women instead of romancing them. Ironically, when ragtime restored minstrelsy to life in the form of the coon song craze in the 1890s, it was this violent, hypersexual, sneering clown who emerged as the dominant figure. The sentimental minstrel was all but forgotten. Of course, the grotesque black clown was no more a representation of real African Americans than the preceding sentimental construction. As a New

142    C H A PT E R

4

York Times writer pointed out, “not one variety performer in a thousand aims to reproduce anything he has seen in real life. . . . The conventions of that stage seem to be as rigid as those of drama, and the artifice as palpable and insincere.” Indeed, the reference point for variety show blackface was not black people but genteel minstrelsy, and the grotesque costume was a spoof of that original. For old timers, who believed that the respectable minstrel of the prewar decades represented something actual, in that he captured the slave’s pathetic and childlike character, variety’s burlesque was a retreat from truth. “Character acting is virtually abandoned because they can’t do it [and] the songs they sing now have neither the melody nor the sentiment of those they used to sing in the good old days,” explained the mainstream minstrel “Happy” Cal Wagner. “There is nothing left . . . except the black face, silk stockings, black suits and white wigs.”71 In variety show minstrelsy, the genteel type was ridiculed and rendered grotesque. Variety saloon entertainments, even though patronized by many middlingclass men, burlesqued a theatrical culture that idealized empathy for the performers and an emotional involvement in their struggles. The concert saloon was a world of greasepaint and falsies, not authenticity and spiritual depth. Looking at the varieties was just that: an enjoyment of surfaces, rather than a reflection on inner feelings. The grotesque harlequin and the waiter girl both created their performance from the fabric of an affective middling-class culture and in so doing they placed sentimentality in a context where it could only be spoofed, disquieted by the very proximity that the conflation of service and entertainment, the enclosed space, the rapid turnover of acts, the drinking and the socializing created. In the saloon’s burlesque, men were abused by women, lovers punched each other, and people were happiest when they were inebriated. The ballad singer finished her act and sat down among her most enthusiastic fans, urging them to buy champagne. The soubrette could then be seen smoking cigars and challenging her customers to shooting contests. The comic singer who explained his undying love for a girl immediately informed his audience that her feet were as big and as hairy as an elephant’s. When one concert saloon performer, a soubrette in short skirts, performed the popular sentimental favorite “A Broken Home” in a Minnesota saloon, a horrified spectator wrote, she “was not even moved by her own music.” Even as she was singing about a husband crying bitterly over the unfaithfulness of his wife, “she was smiling coquettishly at an admirer in the audience.”72

Chapter 5

Any Dodge Is Fair to Raise a Good Sensation The Danger and Promise of Sensationalism

Around 6 p.m. on Saturday, 19 January 1878, two young Chicago butchers left the stockyards and headed out for a drink in a concert saloon on State Street. Two hours later, they emerged from the saloon “slightly intoxicated” (one said that they each had consumed ten or twelve glasses of beer and “finished a bottle of whisky”) and ran into James Donegan, a cattle buyer they knew from the yards. An altercation occurred, and the bigger of the two butchers, George Sherry, struck Donegan on the head. Sherry’s companion, Jeremiah Connelly, urged him to “kill the—” as Donegan fled into a nearby shop. The men pursued him, and while inside, Connelly picked up a knife. Excited and “extremely boisterous,” Connelly and Sherry chased Donegan onto the street, where they collided with Hugh McConville, a house painter who was returning home from grocery shopping with his fifteen-year-old niece. Sherry said “vile and brutal things” to the girl, and when she tried to make her way past him, he accused her of taking up too much of the sidewalk and hit her in the face. Her uncle pushed Sherry away, and Connelly pressed forward and stabbed the painter in the abdomen with the knife. As McConville lay on the ground bleeding, the two men kicked him repeatedly, bruising his dying body. They then slipped into another saloon, where they drank and played pool. Sherry tried to arrange for sex with one of the waiter girls, but she laughed off his advances.

143

144    C H A PT E R

5

A short time later, having been identified, the two men were arrested. They were hanged on 21 June 1878.1 The rampage of the “two human butchers” was easily explained in the Chicago press. Both were “brutes” who had been aroused by drink and sexual desire to violence. At the 34th Street Saloon, where they had begun drinking, Sherry had asked one of the waiter girls if she was a “sport,” to which she had replied, teasingly rejecting his advance: “Yes, but not with everybody.” As they left the saloon, Sherry reportedly told Connelly: “I have failed to accomplish my purpose with this girl, but I will with the next woman I meet, if I have to hang for it.” This was the motive for the murder in the eyes of the crime reporters; it was a case of “revenge at being foiled in his [Sherry’s] attempt on Miss McConville.” True, Connelly had done the actual stabbing, but as the prosecution explained, “Sherry was master” and “Connelly the green student” in this crime of lust. “The two passions of rape and murder united them in one common object, and it was not until an opportunity to gratify the former base passion on the part of Sherry met the opportunity to kill on the part of Connelly that the common purpose was carried out by these partners in lawlessness.” Having redefined the murder as sexually motivated, it was easy to pin the blame on the corrupting influence of the concert saloons where the pair had begun the evening spree.2 After the war, concert saloons were viewed as the chief “cause which tends to build up such fiends,” and, according to the Chicago Inter Ocean, they were “overrunning the city. These places are hotbeds of vice. No respectable persons are seen in them, unless it is some one ‘doing the town,’ or some countryman ‘roped in’ by a woman or thief.” Appealing for sympathy and a pardon, Connelly echoed the journalists’ refrain. His crime, he said, was “the result of whisky and bad company.” The waiter girl saloon, the Chicago Daily Tribune concluded, “is decidedly the most dangerous form of vice”; for there “dozens of fallen women are to be seen seated about tables ‘slugging beer’ and making use of language that would shame a pirate, [or] standing beside a piano with another dissipated siren screeching ‘Over the Garden Wall,’ or ‘No One to Welcome Me Home.’ ” Men who work all day, a reformer insisted, “having nothing else to do, go to the saloon and become maddened by liquor.” Indeed, young fellows such as Sherry and Connelly “see these places open, the chairs are there, the beer is on draught and in they go . . . but once inside the painted harridans who throng these hell holes have their own way and the harmless glass of beer is but the prelude to a drunken orgie [sic].”3 Something clearly needed to be done. A terrible corruption, concerned citizens concluded, was eating away at American values. Since the Civil War,

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     145

“the moral susceptibilities of this community have been blunted,” the New York Herald editorialized. “Whatever is most shocking and most indecent; whatever is most bloody and most brutal; whatever, in fact, reveals and panders to gross desire and fiendish passion, is photographed to the life. Suggestive exposures of the person, indecent scenes of private life, dangers dripping with blood in the hands of the assassin or buried to the hilt in the victim’s breast, pistols in the act of exploding, faces and garments besmeared with blood and brains, such are the illustrations most in favor.”4 Both the saloons and the press coverage of the horrors that attended them were signs that Americans had grown thirsty for excitement, violence, and passion. Life was imitating melodrama, and the sentimental culture of the antebellum period seemed to be giving way to sensationalism. For many cultural observers, the concert saloons were only the most conspicuous sign of a surging virus. The Civil War was behind the moral crisis because it had discouraged the faithful and fostered dissipation. Alcohol consumption rose during the war at a rate that temperance advocates considered “formidable,” and it continued to rise, especially in the South, in the decade after it. The war also seemed to have had a destructive impact on faith. Methodism, the country’s largest denomination, reported a loss of 48,000 members during the war years. In the 1850s, the number of Methodist churches had increased by 50 percent; in the 1860s, their number grew by just 7 percent, a fraction of the rate of population increase. In New York City, where the population increased almost threefold in the 1860s, membership in Methodist churches rose by less than 1,000. The Baptists, the other booming denomination of the antebellum era, reported a similar stagnation.5 The cause of this worrisome reversal, concerned citizens asserted, was the horror of the war itself. The war bought images of gruesome death and mass suffering to the forefront of the American imagination. The public, one war reporter explained in 1863, seemed to have “an insatiable appetite for horrible news and rumors. . . . To satisfy this morbid appetite the newspaper correspondent has but to work up a skirmish into a column of gore.” Photographs brought the multitudinous dead into ordinary people’s lives and revealed to them the horrors of military prisons and field hospitals. “Almost as soon as the news of the battle [of Antietam] reached us; and before the dead were buried,” Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher commented sadly, “we had portrayed their mangled and swollen forms.” The world, he noted “will never die after this. It will live in shadow.”6 The shadow Beecher saw was cast by savage passion, a dark area in the sentimental imagination where terrors lurked.

146    C H A PT E R

5

Curbing the growth of a new Sodom seemed imperative to religious leaders, and immediately after the war, Protestant churches launched both urban revivals and a sustained educational effort aimed at the young. In the South, the revivals that swept Confederate ranks in the last two years of the war spilled out into the troubled countryside. Northern missionaries flooded the South, preaching a Holiness doctrine that held that penitents might be instantaneously cleansed of all sin in an ecstatic moment of rebirth and redemption. As had happened before the war, moral reformers also turned their attention back to the theatre. During the 1840s and 50s, the crusade against entertainment had all but ground to a halt. It was revived in the 1860s as religious leaders once again attacked popular entertainment for selling perversion, prurience, and drunkenness. Like the critics of Collyer’s Living Pictures, they charged that looking through was a deceit invented to divert the gullible public’s attention away from a show’s real motive, which was titillation, or sensation. Since the end of the war, a writer in the New York Herald editorialized in 1868 regarding the theatres, “every week gives birth to another monstrosity and the latest is always more daring, more fleshy, more brutal than any of its predecessors.”7 Sensational and gory novels were on sale on street corners, filthy jokes and naked bodies were on display in concert saloons, and middling-class people, the guardians of culture, were enthusiastically paying for smut at Niblo’s Garden. In order to combat these vices, postwar moral reformers adopted the tactics the abolitionists had used and attempted to mobilize the power of the state. It proved an infinitely more complicated process than they imagined, in large part because the vices they wanted to eradicate had become so intertwined with the pleasures Americans now enjoyed. In the end, they succeeded in destroying the concert saloon business, but they utterly failed to deter people from patronizing theatres generally. This was itself proof that commercial amusement had come of age. In 1848, a theatre could be driven into bankruptcy simply by linking it to immorality. By 1868, revelations of that kind were considered good for business. Commercial amusement was no longer a marginal presence in American life. The real question was how entertainment entrepreneurs would adapt the theatre to the constraints placed on them by reform. Could they separate the barroom and the theatre without inhibiting the developing market for variety entertainment?

War on the Saloons Moral regulation was traditionally one of the most pervasive and least controversial aspects of public law. From the earliest days of settlement in North

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     147

American, governments had prohibited a host of private sexual and antisocial practices, such as polygamy, fornication, obscene libel, and blasphemy. In the nineteenth century, the public regulation of private morality not only affected people on the streets, where it served as a means of reducing what the law considered nuisances, it also prohibited activities in homes and places of private recreation. The bedrock of early modern law was the performance of a criminal act and individuals who were shown “beyond reasonable doubt” to have committed one were, by definition, guilty. But under the influence of a more sentimental vision of society, the law changed in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and proof of criminal intent came to increasingly serve as the basis of guilt. “The legal arena,” Laura Hanft Korobkin explains, “has traditionally been thought of as so characterized by objectivity, logic, and masculine rationality that it would be the last place to find sentimental stories or sentimental storytelling in a position of dominance.” But intent rested on the belief that juries and judges could look inside the accused, understand his or her motivations, construct a narrative to explain what had happened, and feel compassion and forgiveness where it was deserved. In the nineteenth century, responsibility was viewed as a function of moral character, and intent thus had to be imputed from the accused’s soul, emotional state, and condition, not by his or her actions. This was the same notion that informed sentimental aesthetics: it was not the surface practices but the inner sensibilities that separated the rough from the refined, the good from the bad, and the moral from the degenerate.8 After the war, many reform-minded people rejected this change in jurisprudence. While those who worked with the insane or with children welcomed the focus on intent, those who struggled to control vices tended to concentrate on actions alone. They insisted that “vice retains its character throughout every gradation of its scale[;] what is evil in essence, no reduction can convert to good.”9 This was especially the view of those who were attempting to eliminate crimes against values, such as alcohol abuse, pornography, the mistreatment of animals, or blasphemy. They mirrored the critics who were attacking sentimentality and its preoccupation with the “health of the inner man” in favor of actions and concrete conditions. But if these reformers were going to control immorality and sensationalism, they needed to not only turn the law against those things, they also had to convince the politicians and justices that indecency was an absolute, not a relative, thing. Battle was joined over the concert saloons. It was a sensible cause for postwar reformers to take up because the saloons not only exposed women’s bodies, they did so in beer-soaked, spit-encrusted, and smoke-filled environments. The appeal of the saloons to working men enabled reformers to

148    C H A PT E R

5

portray themselves as saviors of the poor, the immature, and the uneducated. It was The Drunkard writ large, with every reformer assuming the role of the noble Mr. Rencelaw. Unfortunately, although everything seemed stacked in their favor, controlling the concert saloons proved amazingly difficult, in large part because it was hard to pin down what they were doing that was illegal. The long fight to control the saloons reveals both the deep divisions of class and ethnicity in urban America and the difficulty people had with agreeing on a single standard of morality after the Civil War. The reconciliation of the material and the spiritual, which sentimentality encouraged, had changed the country’s value system. Before the Civil War, a few states had already enacted legislation designed to drive a wedge between the barroom and the theatre. These laws were promulgated under the influence of the temperance campaigns of the 1840s and 50s, and they generally relied on licensing to control both drink and entertainment. Setting high fees for licenses became a way of controlling the drinking of poorer people in cheap grog shops, as well as constraining the sale of alcohol in establishments patronized by the rich. Under these laws, theatres that served liquor were required to pay two licenses: one to run a playhouse and another to operate a barroom. In Boston, for example, it was high licensing fees that forced the Tremont to close its saloon in 1842, and that helped drive the theatre out of business within a year. Pennsylvania also adopted the licensing approach in the 1850s, and New York followed late in 1861, when a newly elected Republican majority voted to require playhouses to take out both liquor licenses and performance licenses and to close on Sundays.10 New York reformers hoped that this licensing law would serve to eliminate the growing number of concert saloons, especially in Manhattan. Unfortunately, to the horror of reformers, saloon theatres actually proliferated during the war, for as the New York Times reported, they were the only theatres making enough money to pay the two licenses on top of the “large and in some cases enormous [wartime] salaries [demanded by] their artistes.” Regular theatre owners and German beer hall proprietors, who found the licenses more burdensome, promptly organized a lobby that demanded the law’s repeal. They argued that while regulation had to be passed to control the immoral waiter-girl saloons, their theatres and taverns should be freed from the double tax burden.11 Early in 1862, after briefly debating the issue, the state legislature responded to the criticism of its 1861 law by prohibiting women from serving or “attend[ing] in any manner” to customers in theatres where a ticket was sold and where alcohol was available. By shifting the target of legislation

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     149

away from the slippery and politically divisive one of drinking to the clearer target of female employment, they believed they had an issue they could use to illegalize the saloons without unduly disrupting other, less theatrical, enterprises. Significantly, in failing to clearly distinguish between female waiters, performers, and customers, the revised concert saloon law pinpointed the anomalous nature of saloon-based variety entertainment. But the law was the product of compromises. In response to pressure from Germans who argued that women might be acceptable as waiters in beer gardens, it exempted businesses that did not charge for admission.12 The 1862 law was as hastily drafted and poorly conceived as its predecessor, and it would prove equally unenforceable. With the war now raging, variety’s popularity among soldiers and working men made the police and politicians reluctant to press for the suppression of saloon theatres, and after a couple of well-publicized arrests they gave up. In addition, the legislation did not pacify German beer garden owners, who still found their profits reduced by the double licensing provision. Responding to the pressure from German voters, Justice McCunn of a New York grand jury, a Tammany Hall Democrat, reaffirmed the 1858 Staats ruling that beer was not intoxicating, thereby exempting beer gardens from the double licensing requirement. McCunn defended his judgment by affirming that drinking beer could not be a real vice if a large segment of the public engaged in it. Vice, he announced, was a matter of practice: “Human nature is becoming too universally educated, too magnanimous, too broad and grand in its scope here, to be narrowed down to any one idea in regard to any one proposition, never mind how wholesome it may be in its special relations to the well-being of society.” As the reformer Horace Greeley commented, McCunn’s decision on beer was as counterintuitive as “asserting that small-pox is not a fatal disease.”13 Sensibly, the police held off on arresting waiter girls until the war was over, at which point they renewed their activities under the 1862 legislation. Concert saloon owners, responding deftly, simply hired male waiters. Female employees and seat warmers continued to sit with customers and encouraged them to buy liquor by talking and drinking with them, but they no longer carried the trays. Thus protected from the state’s blue laws, the concert saloons “grew into vigorous life, [and] became bold from impunity.” By 1872, the New York Tribune was complaining that “the number of saloons has been rapidly increasing, the bands of music have been enlarged, and the announcement of their presence on the great thoroughfares has consequently been more loudly and impudently proclaimed. The saloons have been crowded night after night.” Through the medium of the concert saloon, variety was indeed becoming an amusement for the masses.14

150    C H A PT E R

5

New York’s reformers, anticipating a victory over the Democrats in the municipal elections, increased their demand for controls on the saloon menace. Mayor Oakey Hall, although a Tammany insider, was at this stage in his career willing to give his administration a more reformist face, if only to increase his chances for reelection. In early 1870, the police unexpectedly swept down on three of the largest concert saloons and charged sixty-five women with prostitution as determined by the “character of these dens and the costumes worn by the women.” But once again the effort to apply the law in broad strokes failed, this time because of the New York constabulary’s poor fashion sense. The case came up before Judge Joseph Dowling at the Tombs Police Court. Dowling was a Tweed Democrat, a Catholic, an aspiring boss for the Sixth Ward, and a man with a reputation for coarse humor. He was no friend of the mayor and some months before had accused the city police of widespread corruption and had been forced to defend his own connections to the saloon business. He was also a well-known theatre patron who, after retiring from the court, would open a high-class variety playhouse in partnership with the well-known showman Josh Hart.15 Dowling dismissed all the charges against the concert saloon performers because “he could not take the nature of the costume into consideration at all” in determining their moral propriety. The police had not caught any of the saloon girls in the act of soliciting, and a revealing dress did not make someone a prostitute, especially in a theatre. “Tried by any delicate standard of right and virtue,” the Tribune snapped in reviewing the judge’s record, “it would be absurd to speak of him as an honest or honorable man.”16 The issue, as moral reformers discovered, was that absolute standards of indecency were no longer taken for granted in America. Judges, politicians, and law enforcers seemed reluctant to impose clear standards, perhaps because they understood that such values would also affect amusements that they and other genteel people considered acceptable. But their decisions also reflected the values of a sentimentalized culture in which intent had to be determined in any assessment of a crime. It was not enough to dress like a prostitute, one had to be caught in the act of soliciting sex; one could not just refuse a concert saloon a license, one had to determine the owner’s “character.” This resulted in the practical discovery that even something as hypothetically vile as the concert saloon was not the absolute evil which moral reductionists assumed it to be. Across the nation, the pattern was repeated over and over. In Chicago, which by the 1870s was home to dozens of concert saloons, the call for reform arose first from the Citizens’ League for the Suppression of the Sale of Liquor to Minors and Drunkards. In 1877, this church-based temperance

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     151

organization successfully pressured for the enforcement of state laws pertaining to such theoretically uncontroversial things as Sunday observance, the sale of liquor to young people, and the enforcement of the liquor license law. In response, Chicago’s mayor, Monroe Heath, a successful businessman and civil service reformer, decided to establish his moral credentials by taking on the saloons. Generally speaking, Heath appears to have been little interested in moral causes, being primarily a fiscal conservative, but he was raised a Baptist and had imbibed at least some of that church’s view of demoralizing entertainments. In trying to explain why the variety business in Chicago had grown so significantly over the preceding decade, Heath asserted that “the bait in these traps was found in the wine-rooms, where women, lost to every sense of decency and morality, were kept and paid a percentage by the proprietor of the rookeries, according to their success in their career of infamy and their ability to delude the unwary.”17 As in New York, reform-oriented newspapers and temperance advocates demanded action, but in practice it was no easier to restrict saloons in Chicago than it had been in the Empire State. Contrary to reformers’ beliefs, the police affirmed that saloons were orderly places and “as good, in point of morality, as the more aristocratic theaters.” Mayor Heath, who felt stymied, didn’t care enough about the issue to act on it during his first year in office. Only after several particularly lurid reports of what was going on in saloons appeared in newspapers did he order liquor licenses withdrawn from establishments where “the women were in the habit of going about the wine rooms in dishabille.” The city’s middling-class concert saloons, the Coliseum, the Toledo, the Adelphi, and the Globe, were exempted from this regulation by name, though they were warned to end the practice of having women carry drinks to tables.18 It was not until the summer of 1877, when strikes and mob violence paralyzed the city, that the mayor surrendered to the embrace of the moral reformers. As part of his campaign to suppress “the ragged Commune wretches” who marched in the streets, Heath temporarily closed all the concert saloons. A  Citizens’ Association was organized to defend the city and suppress the anticipated revolution, and when the threat faded, its members pressured the mayor to keep the working-class saloons closed. As reform-minded city council members denounced him for not doing enough to control the vices they linked to civil disobedience—Alderman Tuley called the mayor “grossly derelict”—an indecisive Heath opted to push the issue onto state court with a “test case” that he hoped would “decide the matter, both as to what is a concert saloon, and what a theater.”19 The “test case” for this involved a variety saloon owner, Gleabert (Gilbert) Pottgeiser, who had hired a band at his State Street tavern. Pottgeiser was

152    C H A PT E R

5

an odd choice for prosecution because he was in many ways a model small businessman; he had served on the city council in the early 1870s, he supported local charities, and he played on the Lake Park Nine baseball team. The band that performed in his saloon included his daughters, who played clarinet and piano. The establishment was a peaceful and modest one, at least according to the police, but this may have made it an even more attractive target to conservatives, who were concerned with what they saw as the surrender of decent people to immorality. It is also possible that the test case was chosen because it was unlikely to succeed and would therefore spare Heath’s administration from trying to close popular saloons and theatres.20 The controversy over what constituted a vice that had repeatedly stymied moral reform efforts in New York proved no less an obstacle in Chicago. Pottgeiser’s case landed in the courtroom of Judge William King McAllister, a well-known spiritualist whose daughter entered trances and was guided in her piano playing by a musician’s ghost. McAllister refused to accept that music, which was capable of arousing tender emotions, should be made subject to censorship. “Why,” the judge asked, “as we near the close of the nineteenth century, should the heel of power be placed upon one of the noblest arts of civilization?” Nothing contributed more to “humanizing and refining the people than . . . music,” and the music that was performed in saloons was often rendered “with rare skill and excellence.” Although some people were impervious to music’s enlightening influence, surely even if a single carouser in a barroom paused in his drinking and, inspired by song, felt spiritual enlightenment, it was worth it. Like other sentimental people, Judge McAllister felt that it was essential to distinguish between arts that inspired and arts that degraded. “As the ordinance now stands,” he explained, “no license is required for a musical entertainment or concert by the citizens of this city . . . unless they partake [in activities] of a disorderly or indecent character.” And then, throwing the charge of immorality back at the reformers, the judge declared that “the immortal compositions of Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart alone have done more toward inspiring lofty and religious emotions in the human heart than all the utterances of dogmatic theology.” He then ruled in favor of Pottgeiser.21 Judge McAllister’s ruling was denounced by Mayor Heath’s conservative supporters, but it nonetheless ended formal attempts to control variety entertainment in the city. Instead, the Chicago police adopted the same technique as their New York counterparts; they simply harassed the concert saloons into closure. Five years after the Pottgeiser case, Illinois adopted a law proposed by the Chicago Citizens’ League that required all those who had a saloon license to be “of good moral character.” This was innocuous enough

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     153

and it reflected the legal principle of intent, but the law also empowered the Citizens’ League itself with charging saloon owners. That the charges were generally thrown out of court was less important than the fact that a saloon owner’s license was temporarily suspended when he was charged. Until such time as the case was heard, the bar was closed and could not be reopened until the proprietor applied for and was granted a new liquor license. As the Daily Tribune explained happily, the new licensing law “is necessary in the interests of good morals, good order, the prevention of crime, etc. and the exercise of this restraining power the courts are now powerless to abrogate.”22 It was the same in other cities. The conflicting positions of influential voters and commentators created a space for the law to fill, but the limits were set with little confidence. In Cincinnati in 1879, for example, the police board, responding to calls for the repression of vice, shut down all theatres on Sundays. There were howls of protest from the owners and customers of playhouses and beer gardens who insisted that this was the wrong approach to take. Rather, they argued, immoral theatres, such as concert saloons, should be closed at all times and the better houses left alone. “Is there a golden mean?” the Cincinnati Enquirer asked in vexation. “We are not in favor of making Cincinnati conspicuous for its illiberality or enforced solemnity. . . . We do not believe in making the city a prison or even a church on Sunday or any other day; nor do we believe in making it a bar-room or bawdy-shop or school for obscenity or immorality.” Although the mayor supported the idea of denying licenses to “places of immoral tendency,” the issue proved too complicated for municipal regulation to resolve. The same was true in Milwaukee, where reformer-mayor John Stowell closed all concert saloons where people were “playing musical instruments, or keeping women, girls, or any one for singing purposes.” A test case was launched in Milwaukee involving the owner of the Mascotte, the city’s most luxurious concert saloon, which was located in “the wealthiest and most aristocratic section of the city.” As elsewhere, the judge hearing the case dismissed the charges on the grounds that no law prohibited variety saloons from operating and there was no evidence that the Mascotte was a house of prostitution. Mayor Stowell responded with a licensing law that required concert saloons to take out both a theatre and a liquor license. “In my judgment,” announced the mayor, “all devices for amusement, anything tending to induce customers to remain in saloons longer than they otherwise would were no inducements there, should be eliminated.” The ordinance was no more easily enforced in Milwaukee than in other cities, compelling the police to adopt the same strategy of harassment.23 The political and legal failure to prohibit institutions that moral reformers and sensational journalists insisted were immoral and rough was deeply

154    C H A PT E R

5

frustrating. The miasma emanating from the concert saloons seemed impossible to control. Reformers railed against the growing vice but were unable to destroy it. Failure drove many conservative people, such as the Civil War veteran Anthony Comstock, to despair. Entertainments, wrote Comstock, “captivate fancy and pervert taste. . . . The wild fancies and exaggerations of the unreal . . . supplant aspirations for that which ennobles and exalts.” One should not “make day-dreamers of our children and castle builders of the student,” he declared, decrying sentimentality itself. “Nourish a generation on this sort of mental food, and it must be apparent to any candid mind that it will be a generation devoid of taste for that which is pure and noble. This kind begets vapid, shallow-minded sentimentalists. . . . Proper ambition is stunted, and the inspiration of lofty aims is supplanted by vain imaginings.”24 What looked like defeat to the reformers was, however, a disaster for the concert saloon owners. They tried to clean up their image, renaming their establishments music halls, but it did little good. In New York, as in Chicago, it took rounds of police raids in the late 1870s and 80s that arrested hundreds of women to accomplish what the courts had refused to order or the public to support. The women were quickly released, of course, but a raid meant that a saloon’s liquor license was revoked. It took weeks, sometimes months, to get a license restored, putting the concert saloon temporarily out of business. Reformers added to the saloon owners’ woes by engaging a private agency, the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, to force the Board of Excise to revoke licenses whenever they found a concert saloon selling alcohol to a minor. The saloon keepers felt like they were “between two fires and scarcely knew how to act.”25 By the mid-1880s, the larger and more notorious concert saloons/music halls were disappearing from most cities. After enduring years of harassment, even some of the largest and most prestigious in New York, including the Tivoli, the Alhambra, Harry Hill’s Variety Theatre, and the National Garden, simply closed down when the excise commissioner denied them licenses. According to Commissioner John J. Morris, “no place that I believe to be immoral” would be allowed to operate. The only feasible way to stay ahead of the enforcers was to keep operating without a license and prevent raids by paying off the police. Harry Hill claimed in 1885 that he paid $100 a week in bribes to the precinct. As reformers pushed Tammany Hall Democrats off the excise board and police commission in the 1880s, these tactics failed and one by one the remaining saloons were forced out of business. Only a few, such as the beer garden Koster & Bial’s, continued until the turn of the century to have tables and waiters on the ground floor, but they also moved their bars downstairs or upstairs or into the foyers. The few places that continued

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     155

to operate as bona fide concert saloons were often the smallest, least prominent, most dodgy, and most subterranean of enterprises. They had to operate by dint of bribery, and their links to prostitution and crime grew stronger. Some, such as Max Gombossy’s place in the Bowery, had to endure a police patrol that walked the floor almost every night. Even Dempsey’s Theatre in Peoria, which proudly preserved the concert saloon/music hall table service on the parterre through the early twentieth century, depicted a policeman supervising the floor in its advertising. Not until the emergence of cabarets and roof gardens in the early twentieth century would drinking and the stage be peacefully reunited.26 By the mid-1880s, the saloon’s dominance over the business of variety entertainment was at an end. In mobilizing against pornography, Sunday entertainments, and concert saloons, moral reformers were striking at the permissiveness they felt had crept into mass entertainment. Although their legislative success was limited, they did succeed, after twenty years of effort, in strangling the concert saloon business. Their campaign managed to fracture the connection between drink and theatre that the saloons had re-created in the 1850s. Saloons would continue to exist, but without shows; variety theatres would emerge, but their auditoriums would be removed from their bars. A second line of fracture then followed from this first. With the elimination of the role of performers as waitresses and drinking companions, a further separation of actors and audience members occurred. The stage moved from being a site of temporary division to become a barrier that almost completely separated the performer from the spectator. Many actors and theatre owners would strive in various ways to overcome that barrier (most notably through their “green rooms”), but not by having performers settling down among their customers to flirt and drink.

The Black Crook Although the campaign against concert saloons eventually succeeded, what it really demonstrated was that commercial entertainment could not be stopped. Moral reformers had hoped to quickly triumph over saloons and then rush on to destroy sensationalism in playhouses, but they barely got over the first hurdle. The main effect of their campaign was to force show business entrepreneurs to look for ways of avoiding police harassment. This didn’t eliminate sensationalism or sex in the theatre, but it did drive innovation. Moral reform clarified the hazards of mass entertainment as clearly as the wartime boom in amusements had illuminated its possibilities. An entertainment featuring a kaleidoscope of fun-filled acts, skimpy outfits, and

156    C H A PT E R

5

sensational effects seemed to go over with middling-class and working-class audiences alike. The right packaging could bring those two groups together around a common entertainment, though it evidently couldn’t be done in a barroom. The push factor of reform and the pull factor of profit moved popular theatre in a single and irresistible direction. Nothing educated theatre entrepreneurs about the possibilities of the mass market more than the phenomenal success of The Black Crook, a ballet-melodrama that opened at Niblo’s Garden Theatre in the fall of 1866. The production eclipsed all previous records set in the theatre and it became the single biggest hit of the nineteenth century, generating huge profits for its owners. It filled the seats at Niblo’s for an extraordinary 474 continuous performances and reappeared in new productions in 1870–71 and in 1872–73. Local versions of the show started to pop up almost immediately: in New Orleans and Philadelphia in November 1866, in Boston in early 1867, and, in an unlicensed version called The Black Rook, in San Francisco in 1872. Californians got to see the original Niblo version when Langrishe and Glenn mounted it there in 1873, and their production toured the Southwest in 1874. That same year, the Kiralfy Brothers put their touring production on the road in the Northeast and Midwest. The success of The Black Crook was evidence to many critics that mass entertainment was the standard-bearer of the nation’s cultural degeneration. According to the reviewer in Dwight’s Magazine, it was a “stupid and tiresome” play, while a correspondent for Punch rated it “uncommonly dull.” Charles Dickens, who was visiting the United States at the time of its premier, concluded that even “the people who act in it have not the slightest idea what it is about and never had,” though he confessed that he had seen it “more than once.” But that, as everyone knew, was the secret of the thing’s success. For all its dramatic weaknesses, people returned to watch The Black Crook over and over again. As Bolossy Kiralfy, the impresario who bought the rights to the show, explained, the market in America immediately after the war was still narrow, meaning that theatres needed repeat customers. The success of The Black Crook was built on the support of people such as one young man who boasted that over two seasons he’d watched the show forty-seven times.27 The critics were wrong about one other thing: The Black Crook did have a plot, though it was so convoluted it was almost impenetrable. Wolfenstein, an evil German nobleman, lusts after Amina, a charming peasant girl (who is, of course, really of noble birth) who is in love with Rodolphe, a heroic artist. The count enlists the help of a wicked sorcerer (the Black Crook) to kidnap the girl and dispose of her lover. Under the terms of the evil sorcerer’s

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     157

contract with the devil, he must provide a victim in his stead every year to avoid being dragged to damnation. Putting the two parts of the equation together, the Crook tricks Rodolphe into attending the witches’ Sabbath, where he is to be sacrificed to pay his debt to the sorcerer. Fortunately, the hero rescues a fairy, who turns out to be Stalacta, Fairy Queen of the Golden Realm. She then saves him and Amina by whisking them off at a critical moment to fairyland. The devil, deprived of his sacrifice, hauls the Crook down to hell and the lovers are married while the fairies frolic. Despite the plot turns, The Black Crook was a pretty commonplace family melodrama, not unlike Aladdin or Cinderella. Like those other works, it featured the struggle between good and evil and ended satisfyingly with “the overthrow of the sorcerer, the triumph of the hero, the happiness of the heroine, and the general joy of all the good spirits in the company.” The young lovers, Amina and Rodolphe, are the requisite affective pair. Just before they are rescued by the fairy queen, when the count and his minions have them trapped, the dialogue emphasizes the companionate nature of their love: Wolfenstein:  Ha, ha, ha! At last we meet! Rodolphe (Starting back and drawing his sword): Fly, Amina, seek safety with our people. My arm shall bar pursuit. Amina:  No, Rodolphe, we will die together.28 In fact, the producers and director made every effort to ensure that The Black Crook could be seen in conventional ways, as a moral melodrama and family entertainment. The initial idea for the show was investor and impresario Harry D. Palmer’s, and in his imagining of it, the show entailed an imported ballet troupe and a set purchased from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Palmer and his business partner, Henry C. Jarrett, the former manager of the Boston Theatre, bought the set for the grotto/fairyland transformation scene in London and Jarrett returned to New York to book a theatre while Palmer remained in Europe to hire the dancers.29 Jarrett wanted to place the ballet at the Academy of Music, the most respectable house in New York, but that theatre had recently been damaged in a fire, so he approached William Wheatley, the manager of Niblo’s Garden. Wheatley clearly regarded a European ballet as a risky venture for his house, and the contract he signed required Palmer and Jarrett to pay for the initial production costs and specified an equal three-way split of any profits. Wheatley appears to have been the one to suggest that instead of mounting a pure French ballet, they should superimpose the dance on top of a moral melodrama. This, Wheatley calculated, would serve to minimize the negative impact of scantily clad dancers on the sensibilities of middling-class families. A story

158    C H A PT E R

5

was then purchased from one of Niblo’s house writers, Charles M. Barras, the music for the ballet was hastily cobbled together from Giselle and other popular works, and the choreography was adapted from the principal dancers’ existing repertoires. Critically, from the start, the producers sought to encase the ballet within the protective cocoon of inspiring and uplifting art: European dancers, an opulent imported set, a story featuring moral conflict, a melodrama, a fairy tale, and a fashionable house. And it all worked. The Black Crook sold out for its first six months and ultimately yielded a staggering net profit for Niblo’s of $310,000, and of course the same amount for each of Wheatley’s two partners.30 However, The Black Crook was not simply a family melodrama with dancing. What spectators saw was the most extravagantly and expensively staged piece that had to that moment been produced in America, a “showy spectacle” with scores of dancers, “some of the most perfect and admirable pieces of scenery that have ever been exhibited,” lavish costumes, a stunning transformation scene in the second act when a grotto metamorphosed into a fairy kingdom, and “a wonderful exhibition of unadorned female loveliness.” The sets were immense, highly detailed, and realistic. In the grotto scene there were fish in the lake, jewels sparkled on the shoreline, stalactites hung from the ceiling, shells and rocks and rivulets could be seen on all sides, and the moon was reflected in the water. The scenes, observed a spectator, were so realistic that they could truly be said to “hold a mirror up to nature.” It was gorgeous, reported another; it “dazzles and conquers . . . cataracts pour, the roses bloom, and the music turns the air to ravishment.” Extravagance was the logic of the set design. The scene painter for the original production, William Voegtlin, provided highly colorful and immensely detailed backdrops, the costumes had lots of lace and glitter, and the furnishings were ornate and bejeweled. “The costumer and upholsterer overshadow the dramatist,” one reviewer said. “Story, humor, dialogue and characterization are all sacrificed to the scene painter, machinist and costumer.”31 The complexity of the stage created the illusion of truth, but it also meant that spectators had a lot to take in. It was, wrote a New York Times reviewer, so opulent as to be “indescribable. Indeed, we might as well try to send a prismatic bubble by post as to enclose a notion of the scene.”32 Many commentators reported feeling overstimulated as they watched the show. With almost a hundred extras flitting about in the group scenes, it was as challenging to apprehend the stage action as it was to take in the throng on a busy city street. The promptbook gives a clear idea of the kind of optical overload the director wanted to achieve. In Act I, Scene 5, for example, the set depicts a mountain pass. An altar stands at the center of the stage and

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     159

next to it is a blasted tree with a large mechanical raven on its limb. The count is beside the fire and the action begins when he casts some red ingredient into it. As he does so, there are wild crashes of demoniacal music and a huge burst of red flame and smoke. A big green serpent with a movable jaw then rises from behind the altar and strikes viciously but ineffectually at the count. This makes the mechanical raven croak, flap its wings, and flash its illuminated eyes. In the meantime, the leaves of great mechanical plants open to disclose demons and serpents. Skeletons appear on the rocks above and point to the count. The wicked man then casts a green ingredient into the fire and there is another “wild blast” of demonic music and more spectral shapes. As he casts more red ingredients into the fire, there are loud blasts of thunder and the stage is illuminated with bright lightning flashes that show “in luminous forks” on the backdrop. Huge serpents appear and writhe to and fro across the stage as the devil, bearing a scepter around which twines a moving, mechanical green serpent, suddenly appears from the stump of a blasted tree, as strong light from calcium is thrown upon him. He “holds the picture” for a moment before speaking. It was a thrilling scene but also a frenetic one. At least one spectator found it not just “confusing” but also “bewildering.”33

Figure 6.  The Black Crook. This drawing of the spectacular grotto scene from the original production reveals the complexity of the costumes and scenery. Spectators watching the show often complained of experiencing sensory overload. Black Crook, TS 944.28, Records of the New York Stage, vol. 8, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

160    C H A PT E R

5

What appears to have drawn the most attention, however, was the dancers’ costumes. Although concert saloon audiences were used to seeing performers in short skirts and tight bodices, it was something new to most middling-class Americans, especially women. According to the New York Tribune, in The Black Crook “the nudities took the place of the unities.” No theatrical skeleton of equal flimsiness, the newspaper’s reviewer declared, had ever before attracted so much attention, “no piece has ever succeeded on the stage that owes so little to itself and so much to limbs and outward flourishes.” Rev. Charles Smyth, the minister at the 11th Street Presbyterian Church in New York, a close observer of the wickedness, outlined his reaction: “The first thing that strikes the eye is the immodest dress of the girls; the short skirts and undergarments of thin gauze-like material, allowing the form of the figure to be discernible with the exceedingly short drawers, almost tight fitting, extending very little below the hip, also of this material, arms and backs apparently bare, and bodices so cut and fitted as to show off every inch and outline of the body above the waist.”34 The leading dancers, at least in the original production, were professional Italian and English ballerinas, but the company included a corps de ballet of thirty-nine American and twenty-three English girls plus thirty-five children. While some were trained professionals, critic Olive Logan protested, most of the others were little more than “leg dancers.” Was it any surprise, she wrote, that most Americans “are utterly unable to see any difference in the decency between the dancing of a ballet-girl and the caperings of a jigging burlesque woman”? Spectators confirmed that while a few of the performers seemed well trained, most just wiggled in and out of the scenery, kicking up their legs and marching in lines. One visitor recalled a ballerina with leaves and berries on her head, “whirling on one toe round and round, til she seemed to be a dozen girls whizzing round in a cloud of white muslin. By and by all the crowd of girls joined in and began dodging about among the trees and flowers, like—well I must say it—like runaway angels determined to have a good time of it. Then a man, covered to his knees with silver scales like a fish, came in, and he had a dance with the girl in leaves and red berries. Such a dance—they backed, they advanced, they snapped their fingers at each other, they flung up their heels, they locked arms backward, then broke apart, and began a most lively double-shuffle . . . a splendid can-can.”35 While the principal dancers all wore conventional ballet dresses, some members of the company were rather more revealingly outfitted. As with the model artists, contemporaries judged them nude—or “barefoot up to the neck,” in the words of one wag—even though they were encased in silk fleshings. The show’s famous dance of “naked” women occurred in the

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     161

witches’ Sabbath scene that formed the centerpiece of the work. Here, as the hero’s fate hangs in the balance and the forces of good and evil fight over his soul, dozens of dancers in fleshings, representing imps and demons, run about the stage. It was considered a scene of great drama and it manifested the moral conflict at the heart of the story. “The plot is moral,” insisted one fan. “Fiends and fairies struggle for the possession of a noble human soul, and the fiends get euchred. This is excellent, and gives a man’s good resolutions a healthy jog.” Like Collyer’s model artists, in some people’s eyes, the culture of aesthetic improvement helped veil the nudity and made its display more acceptable. In fact, some commentators even maintained that the unexpected popularity of the ballet, which The Black Crook revealed, provided tangible evidence of America’s growing cultural refinement. Despite the nakedness of the dancers, Olive Logan thought that “some faint odor of ideality and poetry rested over them.” Niblo’s manager, William Wheatley, took no chances, however, and for the first performance, he placed a “great number of dead-heads and hired clacquers” throughout the auditorium. These were told to applaud wildly during the Sabbath scene. When the naked dancers appeared, “there was breathlessness for a moment” and “an appearance of nervousness among some of the spectators,” and at that point “a round of applause settled the timid ones, and the success of the piece was secured.”36 The production drew vast crowds of spectators, middling-class city people mostly, but also a growing number of tourists. After Niblo’s original Garden Theatre burned down in 1843, it was rebuilt as a large playhouse with a dress circle and two balconies, seating 3,000 people. Attending in February 1867, at the beginning of the show’s long run, a South Carolina writer found the house “crowded to suffocation by the most refined and select of audiences.” Around the same time a journalist from Washington’s National Republican attended a matinee and reported that the audience was “made up almost entirely of families—young ladies with their mothers and young brothers, grand-parents with their curly-headed grand-children, etc.” These “respectable people,” he observed, “manifested no symptoms of demoralization”; indeed, they were “bound by the spell in which the romantic and the beautiful continually fill the mind with emotions of pleasure.”37 Middling-class spectators continued to attend the show as it passed through its various revivals. Describing the audience one night in January 1872, a correspondent noted that “ladies of fashion and rank, of first class respectability and influence in society, comprise more than half the theatre-going crowd that nightly throngs this gilded palace.” The novelist Ann Stephens, who attended either the 1870 or 1872 revival, rated the audience a middling-class one, reporting that the hall was “jammed full of people,

162    C H A PT E R

5

mostly with shawls, and cloaks, and bonnets on.” But by the late 1860s, The Black Crook was also attracting a large number of tourists to New York. Some of them appear to have come expressly to see the show. The New York Clipper reported that “Children cry for it. Countrymen coming to town clamor for it, and will not be comforted until they see it. The rural visitor, in fact, divides his time between Niblo’s Garden and Trinity Church, and he certainly sees a good deal of both places.”38 One thing seems certain: The Black Crook broke through a taboo. It demonstrated that respectable men and women could be induced into a proper theatre (not a concert saloon) to watch lightly clad women dance about on stage. A veneer of exoticism in the form of European performers, spectacular scenery, and glittering costumes contributed mightily to the show’s success, as did the “moral” storyline, but there was no denying that values had changed. A public that twenty years before had entered theatres only reluctantly was now pouring in to see a “leg show” that religious leaders and press commentators universally denounced as naughty. In fact, New York’s moral guardians had no intention of letting respectable churchgoing people degrade themselves without weighing the consequences. The campaign against The Black Crook was orchestrated by the New York Herald, a paper that made its reputation by exposing smut and crime and waging unceasing war on what it considered the phony moralizing of sentimental middling-class Protestants. The fact that Horace Greeley had been seen at an early performance of the production may have helped goad the paper to action. In any case, its campaign was in the grand tradition of the Astor Place riot, disgust over the exhibition of The Greek Slave, and other attacks on the pretensions and decadent tastes of those considered genteel. In an editorial on The Black Crook, the Herald wrote, not incorrectly, that it “marks a new era in the history of the stage.” It was, however, an era characterized by “primitivism” and “vulgarity,” and the “decent people” who filled the theatre’s seats were hypocrites. “The Model Artists are more respectable and less disgusting,” the paper claimed in reference to concert saloon “nudities,” because “they are surrounded by the sort of mystery—something like a veil of secrecy—which women do not look behind and which men slip out stealthily to see. But the almost nude females at Wheatley’s are brought out boldly before the public’s gaze.” A few other journals took up the attack. “It is but a ballet,” Alfred Guernsey mused in Harper’s, but it was also a demonstration of “wild dissipation,” its costly spectacle making “visible [the] tendency among us to an extravagance which ends in perilous luxury. . . . Such extravagance is more than foolish, it is criminal. The debt can be paid only by individual sacrifice.” Rev. Smyth offered the most famous denunciation of the show in a lecture at Cooper Union. In the gaslight illuminating

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     163

the stage, Smyth proclaimed, he had seen “the hell-flame light” that was the reflection of the “bronzed light of his Satanic majesty’s countenance.” The moral theatre, a prescient observer warned in 1868, “has been pushed from its stool.”39 The press and pulpit criticism had no impact on ticket sales. In fact, Wheatley privately boasted that the bad press was so good for business that one might almost think he had put the Herald up to its attack. In postwar New York, being fashionable in this world seemed to have become more important than remaining unsullied for the next. “What is genteel in one place is vulgar in another,” Ann Stephens wrote. “That is fashion.” The generous, forgiving God that sentimental Christianity had espoused seemed willing to forgive minor transgressions such as going out to a leg show. According to one gossip, “everybody goes to see The Black Crook because not to have seen it is to be prudish, old fogeyish, [and] behind the times.”40 I don’t want to minimize the difficulty watching the show involved for many individuals. Louisa May Alcott wrote a novel in which her heroine, Polly Martin, could not even look at the dancers on The Black Crook’s stage. She felt “ashamed of those girls,” wrote Alcott, and the spectacle “gave her more pain than pleasure.” It was, wrote Alcott, Polly’s “innocent nature” that “rebelled against the spectacle.” Watching The Black Crook challenged mid-nineteenth-century perceptions, and even those who kept looking often recorded their discomfort. In Ann Stephens’s 1874 novel Phemie Frost’s Experience, her heroine is taken out to see the production and narrates in some detail the process of adjusting to the shocking sights before her. “While I was looking at this beautiful world,” Phemie explained of her first impression, “a scream burst from my lips, for, all in a moment, it was alive with women, so lovely, so graceful, so full of life, that they almost took away one’s breath. At first, they all came whirling in, as figures do in a dream; but, after a minute, I just felt like sinking through the floor. Why, sisters, they might just as well have been dressed in flowers! In short, dress a full-grown girl in a double poppy, with fringed edges, and you have an idea of what I couldn’t look at. I felt my cheeks glow with fire; my fingers tingled with shame. It seemed to me that every man in the house was looking straight into my eyes, to see how I bore it. I lifted my eyes, and cast one frightened look around me, ready to jump up and run from the first face turned to mine. Then I just covered my face with my open fan. There wasn’t a face turned my way. Every soul—men, women, and children—were looking at those girls, who whirled, and moved, and

164    C H A PT E R

5

tangled themselves up in some sort of a wild, wicked dance, that must have been the work of Old Nick himself, for nothing less could have made me look on. My whole heart rose right up against those beautiful creatures, but somehow they seemed to hold me to my seat. Really, sisters, you have no idea how very enticing a woman can be who puffs a lot of gauze around her waist, throws a wreath of flowers over her shoulders, and dances like a whirlwind. At first, I just covered my face with my fan, for I could not bring myself up to a straightforward look. Then, somehow, my fingers would get apart, and I found myself peeping through the slats just as shamed as could be, but yet I could not help peeping. Phemie was unable to tell “just when my hand dropped into my lap, but before I knew it my eyes were fixed on that great whirling picture, and my sense of shame was lost in a storm of music.”41 Although spectacular melodramas were not an unanticipated development, what Palmer, Jarrett, and Wheatley accomplished in The Black Crook advanced a dramatic transformation in taste. Spectators echoed Stephens’s fictitious Phemie in describing the show as exploding upon their senses, subjecting them to relentless stimulation. One spectator writing for a Troy, New York, newspaper, tried to explain it in this way in 1872: the stage was “all bustle and confusion—no it was part bustle and confusion—not that exactly—all was bustle and the remainder confusion. But there was a great difference between the two: the confusion was confusion, and the bustle was something else. No—I’ll be hanged if there was any confusion about it. It was all bustle. Nothing but bustle.” A member of the audience in Sacramento in 1874 felt that the “dramatic representations, ballet dances, Amazonian marches, thrilling gymnastic exercises” presented him with a “surfeit of things” to watch. Many spectators later explained how they initially resisted what their eyes and ears were communicating or how they struggled to comprehend what was being thrown at them from the stage. But in a few moments most of them gave up, relaxing like Phemie, and allowing the spectacle and the music to fill their senses. As Alcott explained, even the uptight Polly “did not know how easy it was to ‘get used to it.’ ” One spectator from Nashville observed that the show was unlike a conventional drama because it had no beginning or end: “It prevails suddenly and mysteriously, and pervades, and shimmers, and streams, and wanders, and parades, and mixes itself up and dies out somehow like a conflation, without anyone knowing what was burned.”42 The fascination that so many spectators expressed with the show’s assault on the senses suggests that it was for many a novel experience. Most of them

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     165

described it as a harrowing, almost overwhelming but ultimately unforgettable sensation. Many of them liked it so much that they returned again and again. The spectators who recorded their reactions did, however, realize that the spectacle had shifted the horizon of their expectation. Although The Black Crook preserved many of the sentimental forms of the antebellum theatre, it changed the way those forms were perceived. As critics of theatrical naturalism had predicted in the 1840s, the sonic and scenic elements in the drama had come to serve as a barrier between performer and audience, diverting percipients away from empathetic communication and pressing them into a more passive reception of noise and bustle.

The Music Hall Experiment The Black Crook induced T. De Witt Talmage, then pastor of the Second Reformed Dutch Church in Philadelphia, to pray for God’s deliverance and call for the repentance of Wheatley, Jarrett, and Palmer. The play, he said was “calculated to corrupt the morals of the whole community” by confusing the senses, “corrupting taste,” and “giving a distorted view of human nature and life.” Its malignant influence worked slowly on people, gradually eroding their sense of decency. When spectators first looked at the stage, he maintained, they “sat aghast, and there was no applause for a while save by professionals,” but as the show continued, their senses were dulled and they “got used to it, and [in this way] Christian men and women [accepted] the French nudities.” Rev. Smyth in New York described his own experience in much the same way. By “fixing the eye of the spectator” and “absorbing the attention of soul and spirit” in the stage action, the producers tried to blind him to the moral corruption that looking at naked women entailed. The Black Crook, sighed a writer in Appletons’ Journal, was a stunning illumination of the familiar adage “show our eyes and grieve our hearts.”43 But where church leaders saw mischief in The Black Crook dancers, show people saw opportunity. The message they took from the spectacle’s success was that respectable, middling-class men and women would go out to a leg show if it was properly presented. If this could be carried over into concert saloon variety, then it could be cleaned up from within. Of course, the sensory onslaught The Black Crook created came at the enormous cost of $1,000 a week in overhead, something far beyond the reach of most theatre operators. But there were aspects of the show—the dancers, the acrobats, the music, the glittery costumes, the speed, and the psychological overload—that ordinary theatres could duplicate. Moreover, it had made ample use of variety and its sponsorship of the form helped give the amusement a new

166    C H A PT E R

5

respectability. Each of the scene changes in The Black Crook took upward of twenty minutes to make, and there were a lot of them. To keep the audience amused when the curtain was down, Wheatley hired clog dancers, comics, acrobats, contortionists, and even a woman who did a turn with an anaconda. So popular were these before-curtain fillers that Wheatley began to integrate them into the show itself. An Amazon march (a variant on that wartime concert-saloon favorite, the Zouave march) was added in 1867; in the 1870 production the Majilton family of contortionists was in the show, as was a pair of roller skaters. In the 1871 production, a goat who rode a horse was introduced, as were the Royal Japanese acrobats. In time, The Black Crook began to more closely resemble a variety entertainment than either a ballet or a melodrama. “The piece is . . . a farrago of nonsense,” the Boston Globe observed of the 1872 production, but it was “merely used as a framework for the scenery, dances, scanty wardrobes and the variety performances with which it abounds.” Reflecting back, a reporter for the New York Times agreed. Variety, he wrote, “made the success of the piece, which, being called a drama, gave people an excuse for seeing a variety performance, against which a ridiculous prejudice had long existed.”44 It was true that variety had gained a bad name in the press because of its association with saloons. But to the average entertainment entrepreneur, it remained the most attractive style of amusement possible. Because a variety show was comprised of short, unrelated acts, it had the merit of complete flexibility. Turns could be alternated, canceled, replaced, or juggled to suit the preference of the director. Moreover, variety performers supplied their own costumes, sets, and equipment, which made a show inexpensive to mount. Finally, by selectively changing acts or introducing a few new ones, the show could be continually renewed, bringing spectators back to the same theatre over and over again. And this, the producers of The Black Crook knew, was the secret of their show’s success. The theatre market had not yet proven its depth, meaning that the same customers had to be repeatedly tapped for a theatre to make a profit. In a farce, burlesque, or minstrel shows, this was an expensive proposition, because customers were unlikely to return to the same production more than once. Bringing the same customers back to the theatre meant continual change in shows, and that involved new sets and costumes, new scripts, and new music. Variety solved this essential problem. The real question for entrepreneurs was whether the leg show in The Black Crook could be turned into a regular theatrical entertainment. Palmer and Jarrett were the first to test the water by taking some of the profits they made from their production and renting a large hall on the second story of the brand-new Tammany Hall building on 14th Street (next door to

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     167

the Academy of Music). Here, in January 1869, they opened an enormous, 4,000-seat variety playhouse, a bold experiment at recreating a form Americans had not seen since the garden saloons went underground. The owners clearly hoped that they could draw an upmarket crowd; they sold reserved orchestra seats in the front rows for $1.50 and open seating at the back of the hall for 50 cents. These were high prices that were comparable to the inflated “war prices” charged at the more fashionable houses such as Wallack’s Theatre and Niblo’s Garden.45 No one quite knew what a family-oriented variety theatre should look like, and Palmer and Jarrett, who had spent considerable time in Europe, took as their model the European music hall where drinking, dining, and entertainment were equal features. Consequently, drinks and full dinners were sold at The Tammany’s saloon, the Café Amusant, which also featured shows such as panoramic views and living pictures. For more rakish visitors, there was a salon de concert, where drinks were served and where pantomimes, opera excerpts, magic shows, and concerts entertained the customers. Palmer and Jarrett also put on masked balls, where customers mingled and danced with performers. There was even a ladies’ oyster bar on the great landing that served lighter suppers, desserts, and wines. The Grand Theatre was a splendid and immense auditorium modeled on Barnum Museum’s. Its single floor and narrow surrounding balcony seated 3,000. The most expensive seats were on the ground floor and closest to the stage. The Tammany opened under the management of Leonard Grover, a former co-owner of the Canterbury concert saloon in Washington, in January 1869. Grover experimented with combining variety entertainments, ballets, and burlesques. An evening’s entertainment was generally divided into four parts, each separated by a five-minute intermission, in what seems to have been a fairly random order. Although varieties often opened the show, sometimes the orchestra offered a prelude and sometimes there was a farce. The varieties featured the usual mix of short acts: the team of Sheridan and Mack, who owned the hit song of 1869, “Brooklyn Belle and the Broadway Swell”; ventriloquists; and “a number of dances and pretty girls, together with a quite comic scene on parlor skates, where two beginners are supposed to do their early practicing with the attendant tumbles. The falls were most ingeniously contrived.” There was a clown who did “knock downs and summersaults” and was “perpetually lifting his skirts while dressed as a woman”; a Mr. Gurr, who ate, drank, and smoked while immersed in a tank of water; and a trapeze artist, Mlle. Senyah, who sported “nothing but a small American flag, worn as a fig leaf.” Doubtless, the incredulous reporter added, she “meant to pay us a delicate national compliment.” The ballets were performed by house

168    C H A PT E R

5

dancers sometimes fronted by a star such as Marie Bonfanti (who had starred in The Black Crook), and burlesques were the usual comic sendups of operas such as La Traviata and literary works such as Robinson Crusoe.46 Grover, Palmer, and Jarrett clearly intended patrons to move around the theatre, from bar to dining rooms and in and out of shows. Consequently, although the show started at 6:30 p.m., about a third of the audience arrived after 10 p.m., making it a “nightcap, to be taken before going to bed.” Palmer and Jarrett believed that American sensibilities had undergone a sea change and they were gambling on The Black Crook effect. They were wrong. In fact, given the coincident war on the concert saloons, their timing in opening The Tammany could not have been worse. It proved far harder to break attendance habits than Palmer and Jarrett had anticipated. Their new theatre did attract huge crowds and averaged 3,000 visitors a night, but it never became a place of family entertainment, despite the introduction of a matinee early in 1869. According to one newsman, “the attendance . . . has been large—beyond anything seen in a place of public amusement in this city. [But] very few women were present on the first night, and by the third evening scarcely a woman was to be seen.” The New York Times agreed; within three weeks of opening, “the ladies for the most part are on the stage, the gentlemen in the front.” The combination of liquor, smoking, dancing girls, and interior passageways raised too many images in respectable people’s minds of the degenerate saloon entertainments that the state was busily trying to suppress. As a Chicago reporter later remarked, the variety manager “stands upon the edge of a very unpleasant abyss. He threads his way between two chasms, as it were, and his ground is sometimes exceedingly narrow. He is often compelled to do a great deal of balancing. On one side yawns a gulf of offence from a word, look, or gesture that may be disreputable; on the other side is dullness. It requires no little skill to travel between them.”47 Palmer, Jarrett, and Grover hoped they could overcome inhibitions by creating a sophisticated experience reminiscent of what one would expect in a European music hall, but the public was not ready for this heady mix. They offered nothing more explicit than The Black Crook had provided. In fact, even the prudish reporter of the forever-moralizing New York Times found an evening at The Tammany to be mindless fun. “It gratifies the demand of that section of the public that demands nothing beyond gaudy show, and accepts as a matter of choice that species of theatrical entertainment which never is adorned by wit or overweighed by common sense,” he wrote. It suited “the tastes and inclinations of those for whom the understanding of an ordinary dramatic performance is an intellectual impossibility and who yet insist upon their right to lively and harmless popular exhibitions.”48 But it was no

A N Y D O D G E I S FA I R TO R A I SE A G O O D S E N SAT I O N     169

good. In the spring of 1869, Palmer and Jarrett sold out their interest in the theatre to Leonard Grover, who tried, unsuccessfully, to turn the music hall around by lowering prices. In February 1870, after one more attempt to make a profit by transforming the Tammany into an imitation of the Folies Bergère with a closing can-can, Grover locked his employees out and slipped away from the city, leaving the remains to his creditors.49 In the decade after the war the parameters of popular entertainment were established. The struggle to control concert saloons revealed that American values had changed, that moral absolutes were no longer implicitly accepted. Moreover, the old argument that bad morals seen in the theatre would translate into bad morals in daily life resonated only with the more conservative reformers and those still wedded to the idea that entertainment had to be explicitly educational. The primary lesson to be learned from the failure to curb the growth of mass entertainment was that audiences were beginning to compartmentalize amusement and accept it as “escapism.” Only when drink, bad language, blasphemy, or prostitution were involved were they willing to regard theatres as a corrupting influence. Reformers such as Dr. Talmage, the New York Evening Post claimed, were really trying to find “some method of reconstructing human nature. . . . Unless we are willing and able to destroy the imagination and all its works, unless we are prepared to burn our books and suppress the artistic impulse in every way, it is a foolish waste of time to attempt to overthrow the stage.”50 But the stage that developed after the Civil War was different from the one that had grown up in the decades before it. The sentimental stage had been based on optimism—the idea of improvement through compassion and engaged feelings with another. But the terrible losses produced in the war challenged the confidence in the power of personal reform and improvement upon which sentimentality rested. Lincoln’s supposed remark on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” would have been a painful taunt to a sentimentalist. What sympathetic artist, after all, would wish her novel to be held responsible for so much death, no matter how firmly she opposed slavery. Sentimental Americans were fully aware of the fact that, as a Pennsylvania pacifist despaired, the “scenes of horror and blood have become so common, during the sanguinary contest . . . that we are liable to have our finer feelings blunted by listening to the recital of them.” It is no wonder that one shocked observer described the battlefield photographs he saw as a “mutilation of the image of God in humanity.”51 Sentimental optimism was irreparably damaged by the war, and even though sentimental tropes survived, they were eviscerated from their original purpose.

170    C H A PT E R

5

Theatre people did not understand what was happening any more than reformers did. What they did see was a change in taste and expectations regarding the sensational, and they tried to cultivate it. They also came to understand, after the war, that mass entertainment was not going to be easily uprooted. Finally, as businesspeople, they were convinced that while the market for entertainment was large, repeat customers were essential to their success. Since they did not believe they could survive on patrons who went out only once or twice a year, they moved theatres into well-populated, affluent neighborhoods and looked for acts that offered novelty. Variety satisfied their needs in this regard, as it was inexpensive to put on, had demonstrated popularity, and was infinitely variable. But on what basis could a taste for variety be cultivated? The success of The Black Crook and the failure of The Tammany suggested that securing a female audience was the important ingredient in business success. But to attract female patrons, barrooms would clearly need to be eliminated, smoking prohibited, manners regulated, and shows sterilized. And in order to seat both rich and poor, theatres would have to move away from the democratized floor space of museums and music halls and accept the divided spaces of early nineteenth-century playhouses. Concert saloons were already demonstrating that such a thing could be made to work. The risk involved in cleaning up theatres was that entrepreneurs might lose the support they already had among middling-class and working men who still wanted a drink. Finding a way to meet the needs and expectations of each of these groups was the great challenge show business entrepreneurs faced in the 1870s and 80s. The logic of the marketplace was all on their side and the quest for profit propelled them, but the spread of variety also meant the acceptance of a horizon of theatrical expectation that entailed, just as surely as did the spectacle of The Black Crook, the demise of sympathetic spectatorship and the ascendance of sensationalism.

Chapter 6

Art with the Effervescence of Ginger Beer The Creation of Vaudeville

Tony Pastor claimed that he was the first to come up with the idea of vaudeville, and because people loved him they generally accepted his boast, doing so all the more enthusiastically as he grew older. It seemed to matter to Pastor that he should be known as “the first man to put into practice a theory, that of giving a clean performance, eliminating all objectionable and obscene language and action, so that the ladies and children could attend [his variety theatre], without offending the most fastidious.”1 In essence, Pastor wanted to be remembered as the creator of America’s first entertainment for a national audience. Tony Pastor was a second-generation American (his birth name was Antonio Pastore), the son of an Italian fruit seller, barber and violinist in the orchestra of William Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre. At an early age Tony was busking on street corners in burnt cork and a white wig, and during the war he became the country’s most popular white-face comedian.2 In the 1860s, Pastor perceived what many astute theatre entrepreneurs were seeing: the possibility of a mass audience for variety entertainment. He realized that if he could put the various elements together he could achieve great and lasting success. But bringing it off was harder than Tony Pastor later admitted. Concert saloons were the incubators of vaudeville, and the licensing laws and police raids that destroyed them helped drive many of their owners in the same direction as Pastor. Saloon managers in the 1860s and 70s cleaned 171

172    C H A PT E R

6

up their houses, did away with their barrooms, and turned their businesses into proper theatres. By 1885, the country’s leading entertainment directory counted fifty regular variety theatres that were not associated with barrooms. They were sprinkled across the county, from East Saginaw, Michigan, to Cleburne, Texas, and most major cities had at least one, especially in the Northeast. New York, which had seven, had the largest concentration of such playhouses, while Philadelphia had three, as did Chicago. Impressive though this growth was for a new entertainment, the directory greatly underestimated the actual number of variety theatres because it listed only the ones owned by its subscribers. Still, it is a glimpse of the shape of things in a moment of development and it pointed to New York’s continuing domination of the entertainment scene.3 When he explained his contribution to vaudeville, Pastor focused attention on his role in the transformation of variety from a men’s entertainment into one that women and children also enjoyed. This involved a dissemination among working people of the ideal of the middling-class companionship that concert saloons celebrated in burlesque form: the couple who went out together for amusement. In offering this explanation, Pastor was quite naturally focusing attention on his own innovations rather than on the push factor of concert saloon regulation. This helped distance vaudeville playhouses from the theatre-barrooms that the law and public opinion derogated, but it is worth remembering that most of the successful variety men of the 1870s and 80s (including Pastor) made their start in concert saloons. Moreover, it was because of the saloons that the taste for variety was nurtured and normalized among working people in the first place. The audience tastes and performance expectations that had been developed in saloons were transferred to vaudeville and became the basis of mass entertainment.

Sentimentalizing the Masses A man of girth and charm, the avuncular and generous Tony Pastor was one of the most beloved entertainers of the North during the Civil War. After working as a minstrel and singing comic songs and telling amusing stories (generally about the Irish) in traveling circuses, in 1859 Pastor crossed over to variety saloons. He became a regular at the Melodeon and the 444 in New York, the Melodeon in Philadelphia, and the Canterbury in Washington. Pastor later maintained that it was his experience at the 444 that “opened the idea that in the variety show there was an opportunity waiting for the man who would disentangle it from cigar-smoking and beer drinking accompaniment.” After the war was over, he made his first bid for “lady patronage”

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     173

by creating a touring variety company in partnership with minstrel manager Sam Sharpley. Later in 1865, still in partnership with Sharpley, Pastor leased Gustav Lindenmüller’s beer hall at 201 Bowery and opened a theatre.4 Lindenmüller’s lager bier saloon was an ethnic community establishment that featured a German stock company performing domestic melodramas and burlesques. In leasing 201 Bowery, Pastor was moving into a well-known place ideally suited to conversion from barroom to variety house. From the start, Pastor’s small Opera House, which sat 400 patrons, proved attractive to the neighborhood’s men, women, and children; workers; clerks; and shop proprietors. Pastor was a temperance man, so although he set up a barroom adjacent to the entrance to the theatre, he did not allow drinks to be brought into the auditorium or the lobby.5 Pastor worked hard to nurture an interest in variety among the type of women and children who would not have entered a concert saloon. His theatre had a gallery, as befitted a working-class house, and a balcony, which he called the family (rather than dress) circle, where he sold seats for 25 cents (15 cents for children). There was also a parquet, which he divided in two: a few rows at the front were higher-priced “orchestra chairs” (75 cents) and seats at the back that cost 50 cent. He instituted Wednesday and Saturday matinees, gave away women’s hats and bolts of fabric as premium gifts, and offered free seats to ladies who were accompanied by men every Friday night. Thanks to these innovations, Pastor’s playhouse became something that was rare in New York in the late 1860s: a working-class, immigrant, variety “resort cherished by ladies and children.”6 We can gain insight into the values Pastor communicated to his audience from the collection of lyrics of songs he performed at 201 Bowery that were published in 1867. These demonstrate the spread of genteel ideals about love and family to immigrant working-class Americans (Pastor’s audience was heavily Irish, Italian, and German). The songs about shrewish wives that had peppered his wartime concert-saloon songsters had disappeared, as had lyrics about wealthy men slumming in barrooms and working-class Irishmen complaining about their girls. At his Bowery theatre, Pastor tended to sing about respectable working people and small business owners, and he voiced his support for the eight-hour day and his opposition to votes for African Americans, as “the land should by white men be ruled.”7 In the songs he presented at 201 Bowery, Pastor described honest but poor working men and women who enjoyed innocent pleasures together. His “Mabel Waltz,” for example, is sung by a lover who recounts: I bought her lots of diamonds, At a dollar jewelry store,

174    C H A PT E R

6

And also bought her a new silk dress, Which every day she wore.”8 Pastor’s approach to consumerism was very different from that of saloon singers, whose men verbally or physically abused women who made demands on them. Where Charley Fox’s songs for male audiences urged them to control their spendthrift wives and children, Pastor encouraged his audience to lavish presents on each other. But Pastor’s subjects were not members of the middling class. Many of the girls in his songs were like Matilda Baker, the “pretty little hoop skirt maker,” but several were children of proprietors (butchers, curio shop owners, and millers), and the working-class men who gave them presents were therefore courting up the social ladder. Those men were never flamboyant b’hoys or champagne-drinking swells, and while they took their girls out, they did not take them to barrooms, as the middling-class narrators of his prewar songs had done. Instead, To the dancing rooms, about the town, On Saturday nights I take her; There’s no other pair that can cut and shuffle there, Like me and Matilda Baker. Sometimes we to the theatre go, And don’t she look so fine, oh! And as soon as I have saved cash enough, I mean to make her mine, oh!9 Some of the songs Pastor sang on his Bowery stage were critical of women, but the edge was off his misogyny; there were no more nags, leeches, or abusers. Now he gently chastised women instead of lambasting them: “Oh you pretty creatures bless you!” he sang. “Let us love you and caress you, / But it costs a heap to dress you, / Oh, you naughty, naughty, girls.” And on a few occasions, Pastor grew even more sentimental and sang songs that promoted the joys of maturity, marriage, and home: She is the comfort of my life; My darling and my pride; For twenty years together, my boys, We’ve traveled it side by side . . . I smoke my pipe and sing my song, Content to stay at home; As happy as the day is long,

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     175

And ne’er inclined to roam. There’s many talk of single bliss, And for their freedom sigh; But that will never be the case, With my old wife and I.10 Irish skits, songs, and jigs figured prominently at 201 Bowery in the 1860s and early 70s, though they were always complemented with blackface and Dutch acts. In order not to shock the families who attended, Pastor kept the show “clean”; he refused to allow swearing and innuendo in his house. As one wag commented, Pastor’s shows were so clean “a child could take his parents into his theatre.”11 There were still dancing soubrettes and women who performed in décolleté dresses and even some in trousers, but as innumerable shows had already proven, it was not the legs or décolletage that drove off the female customers, it was the drinking, the smoking, the spitting, the lewd remarks, and the impression of solicitation from the stage that caused discomfort. A tolerance for these things, which once served to separate the bourgeois from the working-class woman, was increasingly being rejected by all in the common pursuit of respectability. In contrast to their assessments of concert saloons, journalists reported favorably on Pastor’s small Bowery playhouse. It seemed to have provided them with what they wanted to see: a working-class community of men and women out for an evening of temperate amusement. A New York Times reporter who visited the theatre in 1875 recommended the playhouse to his readers as an exotic treat. The balcony was filled with bootblacks and messenger boys who got in for 15 cents. “There were Irish boys, with shocks of red hair; American boys, who chewed tobacco and ate peanuts, colored boys who gathered in a corner by themselves, and Italian boys. . . . The playful eccentricities of the gallery boys were toned down to the regular standard pitch by the door-keeper, who, armed with a long, extremely pliable, and efficacious cane, kept watch and guard over the juveniles.” Filling the orchestra below was a crowd of “mechanics,” although some clerks must have been in attendance because the reporter noted that one of them won a prize. For this writer, as for many postwar commentators, Pastor’s shows embodied the common people: warm-hearted, simple, high-spirited, and thirsting for inoffensive amusement that would not tax them. “An innocent stranger will never forget a visit to this place, and he will undoubtedly be delighted with the people on the auditorium as with those on the stage. There is novelty on both sides of the footlights.” The change in the tone of these reports from antebellum accounts of working-class theatres is striking. It reflected not

Figure 7.  Tony Pastor, ca. 1870. Pastor brought the values of the sentimental theatre to Bowery audiences. Fashionably attired in top hat and suit, Pastor communicates his respectability even though, at the time of this photo, he was managing a small working-class theatre. Tony Pastor TCS1, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     177

only Pastor’s popularity as an entertainer but also the changing manners of audiences. Even the noisy behavior of the street children in the gallery struck the newsmen as endearing; everyone seemed to be mellowing as their various horizons of expectation moved into alignment.12 Pastor clearly wanted more. Successful though he may have been running a working-class house, real profit meant cracking into the middling-class market. As a start, and in order to solidify his image as the country’s premier purveyor of family variety, he began taking his theatre company on the road in 1872. There was nothing especially innovative in this, as circuses traveled much of the year and other touring variety companies, such as George Sun’s New Phantasm Combination Company and G. Swaine Buckley’s Character Entertainment, were starting up. A touring company was both good advertising for a playhouse and a way of keeping a business going in the quiet summer months between seasons. In Pastor’s case, it also helped him market his show as clean family fun for suburban and small-town people and, because he energetically promoted his company’s New York connection, as a big-city attraction. He particularly used his touring company to win audiences in the suburbs, taking it often to Brooklyn and performing in such venues as the Academy of Music on 14th Street, which normally served a middling-class clientele. Surviving receipt books for his 1882 tour support the impression that the road show drew its most stable audience from people willing to pay $1 a seat. From the late 1870s, Pastor may have been doing better on the road than he was in New York. As Odell notes, in the 1880s his touring became longer and longer and his New York seasons shorter and shorter.13 The appeal of Pastor’s sentimentalized variety to both working people in New York and middling-class audiences on the road speaks to the gradual convergence of taste across classes, genders, regions, and ethnicities. But the process of building a mass market for entertainment was still far from smooth. Although the cultural and social horizons had been established, and although the demand for clean entertainment was growing, entrepreneurs still had to strike the right balance of location, character, and quality. Pastor, for example, had a great deal of trouble making his New York theatre pay, and the facts that he lost 10 cents on every seat sold to a bootblack in the gallery and 50 percent of his profits to every ticket sold to a couple on Friday nights was a problem. Moreover, although Pastor attracted women to his playhouse, he seemed to have done it largely through matinees and premiums. He appears not to have succeeded in converting the habit gained by free entertainment into sales of full-priced seats. Pastor’s tenure at 201 Bowery reveals both the growing possibilities of variety as a working-class

178    C H A PT E R

6

entertainment and the difficulties involved in securing a more diverse paying audience, even in the relatively flush times of the late 1860s.

Building a New Theatre Business became unsustainable for Tony Pastor and for many other owners of working-class theatres during the long depression that followed the specie and credit contraction of 1873. The effect of the crisis was first felt in speculative sectors, such as real estate and railroads, but deflation soon wiped out thousands of businesses, wages were slashed, and the unemployment rate went into the double digits. Although business activity increased substantially in the latter half of the 1870s, the wealth generated by that growth was not evenly distributed, and while profits rose and employment opportunities for white collar workers expanded, many laboring and farming families experienced a decline in income or continuous underemployment. The drop in real wages for much of the industrial workforce was not stayed until the 1880s, partly because of looser money policies but more importantly because of the leveling off of productivity and the consequent shift in income from capital to labor.14 In the 1870s, variety theatre managers experienced these trends directly in the form of a decline in the volume of lower-priced seats they sold. It was therefore likely the depression that kept Pastor on the road longer and longer. He even contemplated moving to a theatre where he might attract a more affluent trade. “Oh look at the empty seats at night,” a New York manager exploded to a reporter in 1877. “Do you ever go upstairs into the galleries? I thought not. Well, look at the empty seats at night and then at the empty stare of the manager in the morning.”15 Variety house ticket prices were conceived as a pyramid: there were very few high-priced seats, more mid-priced ones, and many lower-priced ones. Managers made their profit from the high-priced seats, but that is because they assumed they could sell out the cheaper ones. When the market for low-priced seats contracted during the depression, they were in trouble. As more and more concert saloons transitioned to theatres in the 1870s, owners pursued a wider clientele in a traditional way: by stratifying their playhouses. They installed boxes and expanded balconies to form family circles. Some even put in galleries for the poorest customers, though they often had to move to new premises to do so. In 1879, for example, Jac Aberle, the owner of the Tivoli concert saloon, opened a small variety theatre (ostensibly so that his daughter, Lena, could find permanent work on stage) at 8th and 14th in New York in what was formerly a Roman Catholic

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     179

church. The theatre was outfitted with a single balcony where seats sold for 20 cents, a gallery where boys as young as 9 and less-affluent patrons could find a 10-cent seat, and chairs in boxes that sold for 75 cents. Similarly, in 1879, New York saloon owner Harry Miner opened his 8th Avenue Variety Theatre near 23rd as a four-story structure that he outfitted with a gallery, a dress circle, and orchestra chairs in the parterre.16 The drop in sales of cheaper seats also pushed some variety theatres to move into more solidly middling-class neighborhoods in order to reduce their dependence on working-class patronage. Miner’s original saloon theatre was in the Bowery, and Aberle’s Tivoli was at 8th and 3rd, locations far south of their second theatres. Josh Hart, who managed the Theatre Comique downtown, moved to the Eagle uptown in pursuit of more well-to-do customers. Middling-class people were less affected by the economic downturn than workers. In fact, Hart maintained in the midst of the depression that if seat prices in the Eagle “were higher than they were it would not make the slightest difference.”17 In other words, during the long depression, it was the middling-class market that was stable and the working-class one that was volatile, and this set theatre entrepreneurs in pursuit of the more stable clientele. Tony Pastor decided to try it himself in 1875, when he closed down 201 Bowery and leased the former home of the French opera and then of Buckley’s Minstrels, the Metropolitan Theatre on Broadway, located within a block of Niblo’s old garden. In this location, opposite the enormous 400-room Metropolitan Hotel, he hoped to attract a better class of family custom. Doubtless he also anticipated profiting from the tourist and commercial traveler trade, as the Metropolitan was one of the city’s larger business hotels. In the 1870s, commercial travelers became a major source of business for theatre owners in major cities and jokes even started to be written about them. “Jimmy, what’s a grass widow?” asked a comic in a Chatham Street variety house in 1880. Answer: “A woman whose husband has gone to New York.”18 The move uptown to the “Beautiful Auditorium” of the Metropolitan Theatre and its “Superior Claims to Patronage” was a risky one for Pastor. Although he advertised his house as “the Family Theatre of New York,” it seems likely that he lost many of his old customers when he moved away from the Lower East Side. The fact that he doubled the price of his orchestra seats to $1.50 in hard economic times would have forced poorer working people into the gallery, which remained the only truly affordable space at 25 cents. In order to draw a better class of women and children, he maintained his practice of keeping the shows scrupulously clean. “There was almost a continuity of fun,” wrote one spectator, “no indecency, and hardly

180    C H A PT E R

6

any vulgarity, so that ladies’ ears were safer than in some more pretentious places.” Still, the neighborhood may not have been quite as reputable as he’d imagined. Pastor complained of the competition from the concert saloons on Broadway, a sign that his audience remained substantially male either because he was competing for the same trade or because the saloons kept female patrons away. Perhaps this was why his dancers started performing a can-can at a time when it was a notorious dance. By the summer of 1880, times were hard enough that Pastor was unable to pay his performers’ salaries and his business manager jumped town. He remained on the road even longer, and in the summers his place slipped considerably. In 1880 he rented it to a “second rate” female minstrel troupe. Two years later things were still bad, and according to the Police Gazette after the fall tour “it would require a little Hercules to tackle the Augean stable into which Pastor’s [theatre] has been transformed during his absence.”19 As Pastor’s experience demonstrates, it was one thing to build a new theatre able to accommodate patrons of diverse income and background and another to induce them to come. In the 1870s, variety managers were convinced that the best way of doing so was to attract female customers to alcohol- and smoke-free houses that featured matinees and price-tiered seating. The push of the campaign against concert saloons and the example of success that those who managed to attract female customers enjoyed appears to have driven variety managers to this conclusion. It was, however, no longer enough for them to simply secure female patronage some of the time. “If the enormous middling class of society was in the habit of going to the theatre for wholesome entertainment, there wouldn’t be such a wide discrepancy in receipts,” an unnamed variety theatre manager told the New York Sun in 1877. “All a manager’s efforts should be directed to keeping [the house] full of fathers, mothers, and children. If he can plant his playhouse on the family, all right.”20 Josh Hart, a theatre manager who is now largely forgotten, may have been the first one to get the balance right. Like Pastor, Hart worked behind the footlights in the early 1860s, and like him he had frequently appeared at the Canterbury in Washington. Moreover, for a time in the early 1860s Hart managed the Volksgarten (which became Lindenmüller’s) in the Bowery, and he was clearly attracted to the idea of a variety entertainment that drew the family trade. After the war he was Leonard Grover’s stage manager at the Tammany Theatre, where he experimented with the idea of combining varieties and burlesques. When he moved into management at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston, Hart adapted the innovative approach to entertainment that men such as Pastor, Grover, Wheatley, and Sinn were developing,

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     181

and it was there that he refined the technique that would finally result in the successful creation of a respectable, family-oriented variety theatre. The Athenaeum was on Howard Street near Bowdoin Square, nestled among some of the finest buildings in the city. Although it had been renovated in 1847, it still looked much like a church, having earlier housed the Millerite Tabernacle. It was a fairly large establishment that seated just under 2,000, and it had been considered a “first class house,” “the representative theatre of the city,” an enterprise that well-to-do theatregoers had supported. Unfortunately, the Howard did not prosper during the war, and in 1867 it was purchased by Isaac Rich, the editor of the country’s leading spiritualist newspaper, Banner of Light, and a former member of the theatre’s stock company, and Joseph C. Trowbridge, a former interlocutor with the Morris Brothers, Trowbridge and Pell minstrel outfit. Rich and Trowbridge then “by all means abrupt” converted the Athenaeum into a variety theatre. The owners hired Hart as stage manager for their new business, and in 1869 they brought him in as a full partner. Under Hart’s management, the Howard became the fulfillment of Pastor’s dream: a respectable variety house that attracted the patronage of well-to-do men and women to its evening performances and attracted working people to its cheaper seats.21 Significantly, Hart did not call the Howard a variety theatre; he described it as a novelty or combination house. What he meant by that is that the theatre featured rotating variety artists who performed individual acts in the first half, and then, after the intermission, a stock company that acted in fully staged farces, moral melodramas, and light operas. A primitive form of social study appears to have influenced the innovative combination idea. Hart maintained that “variety” was a working-class and saloon entertainment that few respectable men and women would deign to attend. Dramas, burlesques, minstrel shows, farces, and operettas, on the other hand, were the usual entertainment for the kinds of people who filled the expensive seats. The Howard’s management believed that by combining these two ideas, their theatre could attract a wider spectrum of the public. They “understand human nature thoroughly,” an impressed Boston Globe writer declared, “and so proportion the elements of their attractions as to draw to their theatre not one class alone, but representatives from all classes in the community. . . . Scores of . . . well dressed and self-satisfied people [can be seen] in the orchestra stalls; a shade higher up the same class of people are scattered here and there among hundreds of bright faces who represent what are sometimes termed the middling classes; and still higher up the great crowd is in the gallery.” The variety acts changed every few days, but the plays and operas remained in the repertoire for a week at a time. In order to attract women to the house, the

182    C H A PT E R

6

Howard did not allow drinking or smoking in the theatre and the jokes, the ballet company, and the skits were sterilized.22 Hart remained at the Howard only two years. In 1871, he took over as manager of the Theatre Comique in New York, which he ran for the next four years, before moving to The Eagle, further uptown. These two theatres—which were conceived as downtown and uptown siblings—were the first in the entertainment capital to prove that the formula developed at the Howard could be successfully duplicated and sustained. Location was important to the success of both ventures. The Theatre Comique, located on Broadway near Spring Street, had already begun to attract a better class of patrons under the brief management of William H. Lingard, an English singer famous for his delineation of “Captain Jinks” (“I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, / I feed my horse on pork and beans”). Under Lingard, the Comique was a farce and burlesque house where liquor was not served and where the manager was the star performer (the Tribune said that he must have impersonated Jinks 500 times in his year as manager).23 Hart may have been attracted to the house because it was a theatre in transition, and he kept moving it in the same direction. Under Hart, the Comique offered, according to the New York Sunday Dispatch, “no longer a variety show, but one of the most chastely conducted places of entertainment in this country, and [it] is nightly crowded by ladies and gentleman of refinement. No person, however fastidious in disposition or refined in taste, can find anything to cavil at in the performance.” In fact, the Herald noted that “a particular rule about this establishment is that no indecent double entendre or profane expression is allowed to be spoken from the stage.” With tastefulness assured, Hart introduced a ballet, offering “a brilliant constellation of healthy, young, and beautiful Coryphées” modeled on cast of The Black Crook. Hart “made variety popular with the masses,” the Herald writer continued. “It had long been considered an entertainment only fit for men—in fact, indecent and low. Mr.  Josh Hart was the first man to come to the front and struggle against this sentiment. It is always easy to cater to the vulgar, but Mr. Hart determined to provide an entertainment to which no man need fear to take his wife or daughter, and one that should embrace every class.” The secret: there was no bar in the house and no saloons on the block and no breaks between the acts, so “the whiskey brigade does not hold forth at this establishment; there is no going out between the acts, and ladies lose not their companions as they do at other theatres.”24 The Comique was something new in New York: a combination house that appealed to men and women of all classes and to people of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Hart’s belief that he could seat together a wide spectrum of the

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     183

population in a relatively democratic space was manifest in the seat prices. In the mid-1870s, the Comique had two prices for matinees on Wednesday and Saturday, both reasonably high: 50 cents for open seating and $1 for a reserved seat. For evening shows, costs were differentiated even more: the rear of the parquet and dress circle seats were 50 cents, balcony and orchestra chairs sold for $1, and seats in the family circle (the new name for the gallery) were 25 cents. Despite the mixing of classes, the house attracted what Hart insisted were “the elite and fashion of the metropolis.” Visiting reporters concurred, noting that “many ladies are in his audience nightly” and that the house attracted a “high-toned audience.” The New York Clipper described “the audience in the lower portion of the house” as primarily “composed of ladies,” which, even if it was not numerically true, was a remarkable achievement. Hart maintained that he wanted to increase the number of women in attendance even more: “If ladies wish to enjoy an evening of hearty and innocent merriment they may fearlessly go to the Theatre Comique,” he announced. The Evening Mail rated it as occupying a “peculiar and almost isolated position among places of amusement in New York; it is the only place where the rendering of a miscellaneous program has been made a success, and where a variety business is performed free of vulgarity or offensiveness.” The Star observed that “husbands bring their wives, fathers their daughters, and the male sex in general their lady friends.” As the New York Herald pointed out, the Comique offered an acceptable entertainment for middling-class women because “its offensiveness is not more than that of the nostrils.”25 Hart also built on a pattern he saw emerging in New York; he associated his house with a particular star. This was an idea that had already become familiar in minstrelsy: Charley White was the headliner at the Melodeon, the San Francisco Minstrels was the resident company at their opera house at Broadway and 29th Street, and Pastor and Lingard appeared on the stage of their theatres every night. In December 1872, Josh Hart brought in a team he had used at the Howard Athenaeum, Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart, who were completing a successful three-month run at Pastor’s in the Bowery. Harrigan, like Pastor, was a gifted lyricist, and when he paired up with the Comique’s music director, David Braham, the result was a string of tremendously popular song hits.26 Hart remained at the Comique until 1875, when he sold his interest to Harrigan and Brahman and moved north to lease the Eagle, which he and Joseph Dowling, the former judge of the New York City police court, had constructed in partnership. In so doing, Hart was completing the transformation of variety by moving it to an uptown theatre where it would be patronized almost exclusively by middling-class customers. The Eagle was

184    C H A PT E R

6

a beautiful theatre; it had a domed ceiling, elaborate carvings, and mirrors that extended up the walls. The house continued to combine variety with comedy and light opera, but in the absence of house stars such as Harrigan and Hart, the manager hired well-known actors from the legitimate stage to perform leading parts in the plays that constituted the “afterpiece.”27 Josh Hart’s up-market move may have inspired other entrepreneurs, including Tony Pastor. Pastor’s house on Broadway had not been as successful as he had anticipated, but when he moved again, he decided it would not be back to the Bowery. In 1881, Pastor once more moved north, taking out a lease on the 1000-seat Germania Theatre in the basement of the Tammany building on fashionable Union Square. It was a high-class theatre that had once owned by Palmer and Jarret and more recently by Adolph Neuendorff, a church organist and conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society Orchestra. The gamble worked. The square was not only frequented by middling-class theatregoers, it was also just a few blocks north of his original Bowery playhouse. Here Pastor’s would finally begin to pull in more affluent men and women while keeping his gallery filled with exuberant messenger boys and bootblacks. Colonel Sinn was also following Hart’s lead at what he called his “suburban theatre,” the Park in Brooklyn. Sinn quit the Canterbury concert saloon in Washington when the Civil War ended and went into the business of producing and touring shows, including The White Fawn, a highly successful imitation of The Black Crook. In 1874 he bought the Park, a variety theatre, with the aim of turning it into a high-class combination house with a stock company and visiting variety acts. Like Josh Hart, Sinn wanted to entice “the best” people, by which he meant middling-class women, into the popular theatre, so he eliminated “the variety element,” meaning the barroom and smoking, and “made the house a resort for the best audiences in Brooklyn.” At the Park he was also able to realize the full value of his commitment to the matinee. “It is the ladies who bring gentlemen to the theatre,” he explained in 1888. “Courtesy insists that a gentleman shall leave to the lady the choice of the theatre they shall attend,” and women were choosing the variety houses. According to Sinn, the trick to bringing women to a playhouse was to offer matinees. “The matinee enables many women to go to a performance unaccompanied by gentlemen,” Sinn explained, and if they liked the show, they returned in the evening with their husbands or companions. Women were “the true critics from a box office point of view . . . They] are better auditors: they are more appreciative, grasp the point quicker, and are decidedly more easy to please. If their fancy is caught by an actor or singer they applaud vigorously; in fact, women are learning to applaud more and more, and they are in earnest.”28

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     185

“Brooklyn,” “Colonel” Sinn believed, “is the best matinee town in the country.” The reason was that “a large portion of the male population of the city go to New York in the morning and don’t return until the evening. The women are left alone all day, with no dinner or lunch to superintend, and naturally they turn their attention to shopping and places of amusement. Matinees are a hook to women living in the suburbs of the city, who cannot conveniently reach the theater in the evening, or, perhaps, have a number of children to look after. Sometimes the mother will bring her children with her to the afternoon performance.” Like Hart, Sinn did not want to be seen as operating a variety house, as that word was associated with saloons. In fact, he maintained that he had “eradicated” it as soon as he took over.29 What people needed was a new word for the old form.

Vaudeville Redux The term “vaudeville” had dropped out of currency after the 1840s. It survived largely because of its association with the Ravels, who were still headlining at Niblo’s in the 1860s, and with a few other visiting French and German acrobats and mime artists. In the early 1870s, a traveling company that called itself a vaudeville troupe toured the Midwest, but it was likely performing operettas, much like the show at the Globe Theatre in New York, which, from 1871, advertised “burlesques and vaudevilles.”30 However, the word vaudeville began to become more popular as variety saloons looked for a new image. Perhaps it is only logical this should have first happened on the entertainment periphery. In 1868, a high-class “vaudeville saloon” opened in San Antonio, and by 1874 there was a Vaudeville Theatre in Louis­ville, Kentucky (Tony Pastor’s touring company appeared there in 1875, the year before he adopted the name in New York), and there was a Grand Central Vaudeville Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska. Three southern theatres combined in 1873 to form a Great Southern Circuit of Vaudeville Theatres. The Grand Central Vaudeville flipped the conventional order of combination houses by offering burlesque in the first half and “a pleasing variety of songs, dances, farces, [and] burnt cork eccentricities” in the second, but it was using the word to refer generally to what it otherwise called “a variety performance.”31 In 1876, Tony Pastor adopted the word “vaudeville” and applied it to his combination company, and in 1877 he used it to refer to his Broadway theatre.32 When William Sinn took over the management of the Olympic in 1876, he ran it as a combination house, offering what he described as “vaudeville and novelty entertainment.”33 He even briefly experimented with shuttling

186    C H A PT E R

6

a single company back and forth between New York and Brooklyn. Half the group would perform a play in the first half in one theatre, then race across the bridge during the intermission and put it on again in the other house. Given its dependence on the traffic flow in lower Manhattan, it is not surprising that the experiment was short lived. There were other local experiments at sharing performers in the 1870s and a few where theatres in different cities attempted to secure better-quality acts by promising performers a series of engagements in a small regional circuit. In the late 1870s, the theatrical meteor Jack Haverly began moving performers along the chain of theatres he owned in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago. By 1876, a “ring” had also been organized that included Sinn’s Olympic and Park theatres, the Howard Athenaeum, the Adelphi in Chicago, the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore, the Theatre Comique in Washington, the Adelphi in Buffalo, the Theatre Comique in St. Louis, and Bidwell’s Academy of Music in New Orleans. The managers of these theatres corresponded about acts, advised each other about what was successful and what failed to please, exchanged programs, and agreed not to employ any actor who broke a contract or came in drunk at any one of them. Apparently the managers also authorized each other to sign up acts for them, thereby keeping performers inside the “ring.” This made the threat of a boycott more potent, because “to be tabooed by one of the ring is fatal to the actor.”34 By 1880, vaudeville theatres employing methods such as these were proliferating. Most were created by owners of concert saloons or music halls who closed their barrooms, some by minstrel or legitimate houses reaching out to a mass audience, and a few by working-class theatres launching an appeal to middling-class customers. Among the more successful in the latter category were Kohl & Middleton’s in Chicago, the Central in Baltimore, and, of course, Tony Pastor’s. Charles Kohl and George Middleton, two circus performers, opened their first Dime Museum on West Madison Street with the goal of “furnish[ing] instructive and innocent amusement to the people, especially ladies and children, at prices within the reach of all. . . . No objectionable feature will be tolerated.” The museum initially displayed freaks, curiosities, and natural wonders but also loveliness; in fact, the house was home to Chicago’s first beauty contest. In 1883, the owners opened a second, larger location on Clark Street where they set up a stage for variety shows on the first floor, relegating the museum to the second story. The idea of a working-class variety house without liquor was a new one in Chicago, and Kohl & Middleton drew huge crowds of people who attended “just for fun.” The partners did so well with this that they opened new museums across the Midwest, in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     187

Cleveland. The improvement of the business also led to rising prices and a more affluent clientele; as Middleton recalled, “then came the ten, twenty, and thirty cent performance, the people all the time demanding better shows, for which they were willing to pay, until finally, it has reached the high vaudeville of today.”35 In other cases, such as those of the Germania and the Comique in New York, the American in Philadelphia, and the Howard and the Bijou in Boston, established middling-class houses were turned into vaudeville/combination houses for a mass audience. Although the Bijou was in financial trouble in the 1880s, it was a fancy little theatre on Washington Street that had once served as Boston’s premier opera house. In 1882, David Braham, the conductor at the Comique and Edward Harrigan’s songwriter, leased the house and turned it into a lyric theatre where operettas were performed. It again failed to prosper in this form, and four years later B. F. Keith and George Batcheller bought the “prestige” house and gradually converted it into a combination house that offered vaudeville and plays. Until that time, Keith and Batcheller had been owners of a working-class museum, similar to Kohl & Middleton’s, where, for a dime, patrons could see midgets, Guatemalan dwarf musicians, the strongest boy in the world, and the Human Hourglass. Few of those freaks made it onto the Bijou’s stage, however, as the genteel establishment was refitted with electric lights, chandeliers, and “gorgeous” gilt decorations. There was no bar at the Bijou, smoking was prohibited, and stage profanities were eliminated. As with so many variety pioneers, Keith would later spuriously claim credit for creating respectable vaudeville: “I learned” Keith said, “that catering to the best would cause the multitude to follow.” Indeed, according to a later publicist, “it was in Boston . . . that the primordial creature called variety first stood up and walked like a man.”36 Whatever the actual process, variety theatre managers such as Keith and Hart and Middleton were trying to bring together under one roof men and women, rich and poorer, ethnic and native. They were seeking to harness the possibility of the mass market that the diffusion of a more sentimental form of variety had created. They were not democratic enough to imagine theatres without class stratification, boxes, or differently priced seats, but they were entrepreneurial enough to see in the enlarged demand the key to financial stability and profit. Some of them even tried to hang on to the trade of the mashers without compromising their respectable image by inviting selected men backstage to drink and flirt with the female performers after the show in their theatres’ “green room” (as the old “wine room” was now called).37 There were other continuities. Few at this point thought they needed the custom of black people. Most variety theatres, including Sinn’s and Hart’s,

188    C H A PT E R

6

refused to sell seats to African Americans on the grounds that their white customers would object to their presence. Sinn even denied seats to black Civil War veterans who wanted to attend a benefit for the Grand Army of the Republic. In other theatres, black patrons who managed to secure reserved seats were asked to move to the gallery; if they refused, they were denied admission. Although some contested this discrimination in court, they were rarely successful because managers insisted on their right to accommodate people in their businesses as they chose. Thus, a writer in The Colored American could only storm after attending a show at a Washington variety theatre: “I saw crowds of well dressed and refined appearing males and females of our race, laughing and merry, climbing the iron ladder of the Negro gallery to witness a vaudeville show. Did they have self-respect? . . . Oh! How humiliated I felt at the scene.” African Americans continued to be confined to their traditional place in the top balcony, even though there was an increase in the number of black minstrel and variety stage performers in the later 1870s.38 After 1900, segregated black vaudeville theatres emerged in most cities, North and South, but before that time the few black patrons who wanted to watch a variety show had to do so from the third balcony. Eliminating black customers, like prohibiting smoking, swearing, and the sale of alcohol, was seen as a way that white-owned theatres could broadcast their respectability. As they reoriented their businesses to the family trade, theatre people promoted vaudeville as uplifting and moral. They made the case that the theatre was a way of improving audience behavior. Patrons at theatres were instructed by signs on walls and in programs not to be rowdy, to respect their neighbors, to applaud rather than stamp their feet, not to obstruct the sight lines of others, and to remain quiet during some performances.39 Respectability now followed simply from attending the theatre and behaving oneself. It had become a matter of smelling better, talking better, dressing better, taming passions, and appreciating art with greater sensitivity. By the 1870s, theatre managers were advancing their interests by declaring their patrons genteel simply because they behaved that way when attending shows. As variety theatre entrepreneurs democratized their theatres by opening them to all those of good manners, they also found ways to break down the barriers that would have kept middling-class people away in an earlier era. They imported stars from Europe, toured their companies, moved to more prestigious locations, introduced more segmented seating, banned liquor and smoking from their auditoriums, cleaned up indecency, and promoted the morality of their shows. But looking at women’s bodies frisking about on stage remained central to what they provided. They sold their entertainments

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     189

as places where the cares of the day might be relieved by light-hearted and meaningless amusement. Using this approach, variety theatre entrepreneurs were able to create an entertainment that was appealing to both middlingand working-class audiences. However, the potpourri they concocted was not the same as the sentimental entertainment of the antebellum period. In fact, vaudeville contributed handsomely to the ongoing process that had been transforming the sentimental theatre’s horizon of expectation since the war.

The Age of Burlesque Looking at attractive young women was an important part of postwar vaudeville, just as it had earlier been in burlesque and concert saloon variety. Vaudeville theatres might eliminate their barrooms, but no one for a moment considered banishing their dancing girls or soubrettes. Single men were too crucial a part of the entertainment market to sacrifice, and there appeared to be no pressing need to do so. As The Black Crook and innumerable farces demonstrated, female spectators did not object to looking at women whom men found attractive. But for female vaudevillians, the trick to appealing to both men and women was to present their sexiness as fashionable and progressive and to make their naughtiness something chic instead of something scandalous. The prototype for how it would be done was provided by music hall performers from England. The British Blondes, who toured the Northeast in 1868–69 and ventured as far west as Chicago in 1870, were the most famous of these actors, but the supply was replenished at regular intervals. The influence of these music-hall women was immense because they defined how sexuality could be portrayed on the popular stage in a way respectable audiences found acceptable. In so doing, they supplied a substantial part of the glossary that enabled concert saloon variety’s translation to vaudeville. The British Blondes were a largely female burlesque troupe (two men acted with the company) under the direction of Lydia Thompson and Alexander Henderson (a somewhat notorious philanderer whom Thompson later married). Although the Blondes revealed no more of themselves than many concert saloon women who performed in form-fitting outfits and tights and certainly less than ballerinas, they caused a stir by performing at such respectable theatres as Wood’s Museum and Niblo’s. The campaign to control the “pretty waiter girls,” it must be remembered, was in full swing in the late 1860s, and the Blondes were vaguely associated in the mind of the public with such work. But the burlesquers’ unspoken link to the concert saloons was also part of their appeal to genteel spectators: they offered a toned-down

190    C H A PT E R

6

glimpse of variety’s reputed raciness in a safe and proper environment. In addition, because these women were foreign, they were able to push American conventions in ways no native actor could. Foreign stardom entitled them to be subversive without threatening the audience’s security about their own cultural standards. As a critic in the Atlantic Monthly remarked some years later, when people later talk about a show, “they praise only the performers who do their acts with skill,” even though they “often go merely to see a pretty soubrette.” Somehow to admit the real reason to themselves would “savor too much of wickedness.” The exceptional beauty of the female British Blondes further contributed to the attention the English burlesquers attracted. The press proclaimed Lydia Thompson “one of the handsomest women on the stage” and a “wondrous beauty,” and her co-star, Pauline Markham, was rated as “as near a personal realization of the goddess [of beauty] as one can expect in a mortal woman.”40 Conservative critics and moralists were shocked that “uptown” spectators jammed theatres to see these peroxide blondes from England. “A short time ago,” the New York correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser wrote, people “blushed” when they acknowledged they had been to see The Black Crook, “but the new charms of Lydia Thompson and Miss Markham are discussed in the most genteel circles . . . in what is called ‘good society’ with perfect freedom.” Indeed, the audience profile of those who watched the British Blondes seems very much in keeping that of The Black Crook. Shakespeare scholar Richard Grant White, who attended one of the Blondes’ matinee performances, found the audience “notable in the main, for simple and almost homely respectability. Comfortable middle-aged women from the suburbs, and from the remoter country, their daughters, groups of children, a few professional men, bearing their quality in their faces, some sober, farmer-looking folk, a clergyman or two, apparently the usual proportion of nondescripts . . . an audience less fashionable than I have seen in Fourteenth street, but at least as respectable.”41 Curiosity to see the world’s most beautiful women doubtless drew many to the theatre, but the Blondes also played to genteel expectations by refraining from shocking people with their burlesques. Their flagship piece, Ixion; or, the Man at the Wheel, told the story of a mythical king of Thessaly. It was a sordid tale of parricide and adultery in which Thompson, the star of the musical comedy, played the eponymous antihero. Ixion was nonetheless offered up as a tale of sinfulness and insubordination defeated. Ixion is a tyrant who, the chorus laments at the beginning, has curtailed press freedoms, taxed the population, and undermined “the Rights of Man.” With the angry mob that is stirred up by his estranged wife in pursuit,

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     191

Ixion is invited by Jupiter to Olympus. The human proves an uncivil guest, however: he flirts with Venus and then attempts to seduce Hera. Enraged, Jupiter condemns Ixion to an eternity of suffering tied to Apollo’s chariot wheel. As he is bound to the wheel, the character turns the moral knife in the belly of an audience that is self-righteously applauding his punishment while ogling his legs: There’s a power beyond you Who, you see, May sentence you as you have sentenced me42 The plays the English visitors performed were relatively conventional in their morality, which meant that it was the costumes and personalities that attracted notice rather than the plots. And the outfits were certainly considered risqué for the time. It was partly a matter of legs, for “hair and legs only are required, and even the former of these might be dispensed with unless of a golden hue.” Legs, the producer Henry Jarrett explained, were “top [of] the list of the Beauties of Nature.” There is nothing like legs, a reporter in the New York Clipper concurred, “good legs, to keep a place going.” But in their form-fitting, décolleté outfits the members of Blondes also provided spectators with something more: “a lavish display of person,” or what White euphemistically termed a glimpse of “the finer points” of their figures. As another reporter in the Clipper made clear in referring to visiting English performer Elise Holt, “were [she] to lose her lace collar during the performance she would have nothing left to cover her but her boots.”43 The burlesquers got away with this kind of display by turning their performance into a wry joke, transforming themselves from potentially pornographic figures into fun-loving, albeit saucy, young women. If they didn’t consider their own exposure worth fixating on, why should the audience? The essence of the burlesquers’ subterfuge was that they refused to be contained by the moral narratives of the musical comedies or the skimpy clothes in which they performed. Lydia Thompson’s playful “deviltry” in the role of Ixion, for example, undermined the ostensible message of the play by destabilizing its moral balance. Thompson did not play Ixion as a flirt with a heart of gold, as one would expect of a woman; instead, she portrayed him as an appealingly irredeemable and rakishly unapologetic lecher, not unlike Don Giovanni. She was full of “ardor and ambition,” the Times critic observed, “and breathes the breath of life into everything she does, whether it be in making wicked advances on the wives of the gods, or singing local songs.” Ixion gets his just reward in the end and order is restored, but his

192    C H A PT E R

6

unrepentant attitude made observers doubt that the message was being taken entirely seriously. The same was true of other saucy postwar burlesques. Elise Holt, who succeeded Thompson when the British Blondes left Wood’s Museum for Niblo’s, was featured in Henry Byron’s musical comedy Lucretia Borgia. Holt played Gennaro, a young man in love with Lucretia Borgia, an attractive middle-aged quack doctor who is forever prescribing potions that make people sicker than their illnesses. The audience, however, knows that this isn’t a romantic comedy because Lucretia is already married to the “Dook” and the actor performing her is a cross-dressed male comedian. When the Dook learns of Gennaro’s suit he decides to poison the hero, but Lucretia, who does not take her young suitor seriously, forces her husband to relinquish his suspicions. In an interesting modern take, Gennaro has fallen for Lucretia’s image (displayed everywhere in advertising posters) rather than the real woman. But it is the Dook’s jealousy that keeps the story moving, and it ends when he is forced to beg forgiveness for having doubted his wife. (As Lucretia tells him, rather archly, Gennaro remained in front of the door and never made it into the house.) Holt’s Gennaro was “saucy, charming and full of mischievous humor.” One had no doubt watching her, as she lit up a cigar on stage and sang “Up in a Balloon,” that her Gennaro was not an innocent young man who had misdirected his affections toward a married woman but a fun-loving and cheeky young woman playing a part. Indeed, the play defied sentimental expectations by not including a nice female character whom Gennaro could ultimately wed.44 From the broader perspective, the English burlesquers advanced a redirection of audience attention from the show to the performers. The trend in popular entertainment since the 1840s had been to naturalize performance style and encourage audiences to more directly relate to the moral drama as something real and lived. In a certain way, the burlesquers’ “superabundance of vivacity and élan” and their self-reflexive approach to performance sustained this tradition by signaling to audiences that they were “aware of [their] own awarishness” (as Richard Grant White put it). They often did so by donning trousers and mocking the very males who would in other circumstances have gone to saloons to watch them. This self-mockery, the ironic pose, was a feature of the concert saloon stage, but there the principle role of the actress had been to tease. The burlesquers brought this performance approach to the formal stage, and in so doing they introduced a device that would transform ogling into high-spirited fun. What they were ostensibly providing were not bodies to be desired but the exuberance, “dash,” and vivacity of their own personalities. The leg show, a columnist in the Chicago

Figure 8.  As the culture of the concert saloon infused the popular theatre in the 1860s and 70s, audiences became increasingly comfortable looking at women’s bodies. The British actor Elise Holt, here in her costume from Lucretia Borgia, is keenly aware of the sexual interest she arouses and saucily returns the viewer’s gaze. Elise Holt, 1987PH29, Nicola Marschall Collection, Kentucky Historical Society.

194    C H A PT E R

6

Daily Tribune emphasized early in 1870, “is not a dramatic performance” in any conventional sense, nor was it really about legs. “It is purely upon their ‘personalities’ that such artistes as Miss Holt lay claim to popularity; the public pays to witness these personalities.”45 This was the horizon of expectation that vaudeville occupied in the 1870s.

Watching Vaudeville In the 1870s, a typical show in a vaudeville theatre consisted of a collage of acts drawn from a relatively limited range of types: blackface comics, acrobats, animal acts, clog dancers, and seriocomic singers. Mind readers, escape artists, magicians, pickaninnies, and sports heroes—all of which would become standard vaudeville features in the 1890s—were not yet featured in any significant number. A variety show, a Police Gazette reporter griped, “is only so called because there is no variety in it. One variety show is just the same as another variety show.” Novelty in terms of stunt or manner was the primary way performers described their singularity in this otherwise fairly standardized form of entertainment. Novelty came from the personalities of the performers, not from the type of act. Like the burlesquers, early vaudeville artists cultivated personality, which often meant looking like they wanted spectators to know they were enjoying themselves or were playfully aware of what they were doing, thereby drawing attention to the artificiality of their performance. The ironic pose became especially popular among seriocomics, who were the variety stage equivalents of the burlesquers. More physical performers—such as acrobats, jugglers, contortionists, and dancers—had to remain focused on what they were doing, so they communicated personality through confidence, concentration, or a winning smile, any one of which attracted attention to their stamina, grace, or physical prowess. These artists often adopted gimmicks to make spectators pay attention and to make their performance stand out. They also strove to have audiences regard them as trained and disciplined athletes, not freaks. But the ultimate goal of physical artists was the same as the burlesquers and the seriocomics: to keep people looking at their bodies and make them wonder how they could do what they were doing on stage.46 Vaudeville was by its nature a confusing entertainment because it was not narrative: acts followed upon each other in a seemingly disorganized fashion. The entire “system is a defiance system,” Richard Grant White wrote in 1869. “It is out of all keeping. . . . It is without relation of parts to a whole, without design, without coherence.” Concentrating on bodies, something familiar to every member of the audience, helped spectators make sense of

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     195

the incoherence of the ensemble work and their feelings of incomprehension as they watched people do feats that often seemed impossible. In the 1870s and 80s, Chinese acrobats and the “Royal Japs” were the most popular tumblers and jumpers in variety. Their performances were widely viewed as chaotic. “The stage was alive with activity,” noted an admirer of one troupe of Chinese acrobats, but “one didn’t know where to look.” A spectator who saw a group in San Francisco reported watching a dozen men flying at each other, their bare feet striking each other’s chests. Following this display of jumping, half-naked tumblers leapt from towers and ladders and piles of boxes, landing on one another’s bodies and then hopping off into a somersault. Spectators who watched these acrobatic troupes, like those who attended The Black Crook, found it difficult to focus their attention.47 Three historical currents informed how physical performers were seen. The first was the pantomime, or the French vaudeville tradition that connected the artist with dance and expressive body movements; the second was the circus, with its emphasis on physically impressive or comic bodies; and the third was the freak show, with its focus on wondrous or weird bodies. What performers of all traditions shared was a strategy of distancing the audience from themselves, because all wanted to be perceived as exceptional. Variety’s emphasis on novelty only encouraged this. Unlike dancers, who could attract the audience’s sympathy and identification through expressive movement, acrobats wanted to make spectators see them as unusual. Many of them sought to arouse desire or admiration in order to make the daring of their act even more terrifying. Commenting on the Vaidis Sisters’ final descent from the wire, a writer in the New York Times wrote: “The moment of the last dive is an exciting one. . . . Some of [the spectators] refuse to look altogether, most of them give a little gasp of relief when it is over, and occasionally some one screams from fright or nervousness. . . . But all the nervousness . . . is among the spectators. The performers have none.” In fact, reported the journalist, the Vaidis Sisters seemed to suffer from a “lack” of “sensation” when they were performing that he found disquieting. In other words, they were toying with audience sympathy, not striving to embody it.48 Slack-wire artists, who traditionally performed in tights, were often pretty young women or handsome men, and their physical attractiveness naturally aroused audience concern for their well-being. Sympathy was therefore attracted in the form of fear about the fate of an admirable body, but only in order for that fear to be rebuffed through the professionalism and sangfroid of the performers. In most cases, of course, it was desire the artist sought to arouse, not compassion. For female balancers who were already admired for their figures, it was a short step to turn their preparations for the wire into

196    C H A PT E R

6

a strip-tease act. In 1890, a “handsome and very shapely” female tightrope walker in Memphis appears to have been the first to try this stunt. She slipped out of her street dress on stage, then pulled her chemise over her head and dropped her stockings, to the shocked delight of the audience. After disrobing, she ascended to the wire, “clad in the regulation tights and trunks that all well-regulated slack wire and trapeze artists are wont to wear,” but the audience nonetheless felt they’d just seen something unspeakably naughty. By the turn of the century, disrobing had become normal for female acrobats, and some, such as Charmion, the vaudeville trapeze artist, were more famous for their extended striptease (she did hers on the trapeze itself, tossing some clothing items to the audience) than for their perilous stunts.49 There was something subversive in the trick these artists played with audience expectations. Their beauty, their “unmentionables,” and the exposure on the wire they offered all suggested vulnerability to the nineteenth-century mind, and audiences worried all the more that they might hurt themselves. Watching benders involved a similar form of perceptual attraction, surprise, and distancing. Contortion was often deemed painful to watch, so much so that many found it unbearable. In the 1860s and early 70s, it was largely a children’s act, and most performers were therefore front benders. The Royal Japs in 1872, for example, had a group of children who did various front bends: hugging their ankles, placing legs behind their heads, and rolling around like “wheels on a wagon.” As a children’s act, bending attracted sympathy and sorrow. “It is sad to think that they will not always remain young and pliable,” wrote one spectator, “and capable of perpetuating in themselves such strange powers of contortion.” In the late 1870s, however, reformers started going after acts like this as abusive to children. The most notorious case involved a Caucasian child, Prince Leo, whom the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children pulled off the Tivoli’s stage in 1875. As was usual with children such as Leo, audiences were “thrilled with astonishment and indignation” in response to the little boy’s act, and his rescue doctors confirmed that “the muscles of his abdomen and back were permanently injured.” The little boy claimed to have been beaten by his manager in order to make him perform, but it is hard to know if this was true, as no one at the Tivoli had witnessed it and his manager denied it.50 Nonetheless, cases such as Prince Leo’s turned a public already sympathetic with the child actor against traditional contortion, creating an opening for flexible adults. The performer who redefined contortion in vaudeville and detached it from antebellum notions of freakery, pain, and compassion, was Frank McGuire, a bender from Maine whose stage name was Young Ajax. McGuire

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     197

began performing in circuses at the rather mature age of 16 before moving into variety in 1877, when he was in his early 20s. A talented contortionist, Young Ajax was able to twist “his body into every conceivable shape, in apparent violation of every bone and law of nature.” In publicity for McGuire, the reference point was not the pliancy of the child but the discipline of scientific study and the mastery of technique. He was, according to an advertisement, an “Intrepid and marvellous Gymnast in his scientific and remarkable manipulations of Contortion. A study to all scientific men and even to the Surgical world.” But from the perspective of his spectators, what made McGuire so singular was that he seemed to like what he was doing. As a reporter of his work at the Boylston Museum in Boston remarked in 1878, “he appears very wide awake and to enjoy his performance, [and] the audience do not feel, as they must when witnessing some of the ‘India rubber men,’ that every effort and act tells in bringing him nearer his last appearance on the world’s stage.”51 Young Ajax helped redefine bending by disconnecting it from pain and from the compassion that watching another’s agony might arouse. The effect of this was to reproduce in bending the perceptual shock that the vulnerable slack-wire or trapeze artist doing death-defying stunts had already managed. Audiences imagined the pain of the bend but did not see it represented on stage. The contortionist’s “body is thrown into a score of unnatural postures, which appear to the audience to be achieved by dislocating every joint in the human frame, and to be effected at great risk to limb and life,” a spectator explained, but the ease with which it was done made audiences feel disturbingly voyeuristic and a bit sadistic. William Dean Howells felt that contortionists were “really remarkable artists in their way, . . . though it’s a painful way.” A New York Times writer made the same point about bending: “There is not a particle of grace in it, but there is the most astounding dexterity and of real hard work which is exceedingly palatable to American audiences of the variety order. . . . It is not beautiful, but it is real, [and] full of life.”52 Young Ajax drew audience sympathy as he twisted and then chucked it away with a genial smile. Where sentimental aesthetics held that inspiring art turned spectators into participants by making them feel and share the emotions of the artist, variety’s horizon made palpable the separation of performer from audience member. “The theatre,” novelist Newell Dunbar lamented in 1886, demands “no effort on the part of its audience, only asks it to be present and receptive, and then proceeds to distract and charm. If the hearer will be simply passive it will take the active part.” The meaning of amusement here shifted from vicarious life to passive enjoyment. “The strong points

198    C H A PT E R

6

of a variety show,” a Chicago critic remarked, “are its lightness—it never strains or bewilders—and the ability to furnish something suited to the taste of every one who is not too exacting.” Unlike sentimental experiences that activated spectators, as people watched variety, they kept their feelings contained to their seats; variety was a mode of entertainment that relaxed and entertained them. It treated audiences as distracted rather than alert, catering to the “Tired Business Man and the Lady Who Goes with Him,” and offering them stimulation and reanimation. It provided sparkling and superficial amusements so that audience members would “not be allowed to worry their brains with anything more serious than chuckling at merry nothings or humming lifting melodies.”53 The disengagement of the audience member from the performer—the emergence of modern spectatorship—would take many years to accomplish, but it advanced rapidly as vaudeville spread. As early as the 1880s, critics were noticing that the nature of the audience’s involvement in the performance was not the same as it had been before the war. “The present theatre audiences,” correspondent and novelist George Alfred Townsend complained in 1884, “are in their very nature ephemeral. They go to the theatre to see other things than the piece itself. Some go there to worship a particular woman, whose photograph they possess in a half-dozen aspects, or they go to study the dresses she is reputed to have brought back from Paris, or to observe how she manages herself on the straight high-heeled shoes, or why she has managed to dye her hair so perfectly, when numerous efforts on the part of the auditor to dye have been abortive.”54 The drive to amuse instead of uplift had a singularly poignant effect on the farces that made up the second parts of most combination shows in the 1870s and 80s. Subtly, their focus changed from celebrating affection to laughing at lovers’ foibles. Not surprisingly, French farces, which were notorious for their callous treatment of relationships, became staples. In Whose Can It Be?, a successful farce that began life at Tony Pastor’s house in Union Square in 1885, a couple “who do not care to make it known, under the circumstances surrounding them, that they are married and have a baby” try to keep the baby hidden and themselves apart. Like Edward Gorey’s beastly baby whose family tries unsuccessfully to get rid of it, the infant keeps turning up, “picked up, concealed and discovered” by one character after another. The play reportedly sent out a “fusillade of humor” and had “any amount of go in it,” but it is hard to imagine a farce so cavalier in its treatment of companionship, love, and family being so well received a generation before. What was at work here was a separation of stage from lived morals. Audience members might pay attention to performers as guides to fashion or manners,

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     199

but the sense that they would be corrupted or morally improved by what they saw in the theatre was disappearing. Spectators were learning to once again compartmentalize entertainment and treat it as escapism.55

Seriocomics Even those who did not unclothe their bodies had to respond to the increased emphasis variety placed on the visual. Postwar variety transformed the freakish body (the acrobat and contortionist), the racial body (the blackface impersonator), and the sentimentalized body (the female dancer or singer) into beautiful, boneless, or extraordinary bodies. Just as the trend toward spectacle and natural acting in the popular theatre had created a new horizon of expectation in which taste involved the impression of authenticity, in variety attention came to focus almost exclusively on surfaces. Dress was particularly important in variety acts. Actors supplied their own costumes and carried them around with them, and this encouraged them to be excessive in order to stand out from the others. Wandering backstage in one theatre, a reporter found himself “struck with the gaudiness of their [the performers’] attire,” even though, on close inspection, it became apparent that much of it was soiled. Here were blackface artists in gold and crimson, soubrettes in brightly colored skirts, and comics in loud checks and white gaiters. “We are as handsome as clothing store dummies” sang a pair of male comics at the Howard Athenaeum, and “when we wink at the girls they do go crazy.”56 Looking at dress had an understandable appeal to people at the beginning of the ready-to-wear clothing revolution, and variety actors became living, moving, fashion plates for spectators. As fancy clothes became increasingly affordable in the last decades of the nineteenth century, some performers advertised their own costumes as prototypes of the latest fashions. In the eyes of a grumbling critic in 1880, variety actresses seemed to “insist on wholly subordinating themselves and their parts to what they wear. To their partial mind, the first thing required for success is an affluence and variety of raiment; dramatic talent, skill, and experience are not to be despised exactly, but they are a mere secondary consequence.” The actor served as armature for the display of a consumer item. The “outward equipment,” wrote another reviewer, was being used to cover the “inward deficiency.”57 The largest group of vaudeville artists were the seriocomics, most of whom were female, and they were there to be heard as well as seen. Seriocomic was the name given to singers cast in the concert saloon or burlesque mold. They normally wore costumes “reduced to a minimum” and performed

200    C H A PT E R

6

coquettishly. The term “seriocomic” is an instructive one that used to be associated with young female singers in farces in the 1840s because, as one critic wrote of Mary Taylor (the darling of audiences at the Olympic in New York), they were expected to display both “the buoyant and elastic spirits of the madcap girl, and yet preserve the softness of the female and the delicacy of the gentlewoman.”58 As we have seen, a combination of lunacy and sympathy was central to sentimental comedy, and the tradition carried over, in ironic ways, into concert saloons and variety theatres. Female seriocomics had to be young, pretty, and willing to be ogled. Some appeared “without any dress on at all—[in] nothing but a bodice, trunks, and flesh colored tights,” but others were “superbly dressed de rigeur, the costume being thought far more important than voice.” Male seriocomics (and there were a few) generally wore evening dress, including a white tie, kid gloves, and diamond pins and many of the women similarly communicated the socialite’s concern with fashion. In both cases, costumes were crafted to focus attention on the performer’s external characteristics. How one looked was as important as how one sounded, or more so.59 But singing was what the seriocomics were there to do, and as with their visual appeal, they used their voices to market their personalities rather than to communicate a message. Most popular singers in the 1870s had only modest training, but they generally had big voices that they could use to fill houses and drown out audience noise. This was no easy task; a reporter in Chicago was shocked by the noise he found in variety theatres in 1874. He noted that while the seriocomic sang, “the audience [was] laughing,” and it kept on laughing through the encore, which was “a medley of nonsense highly relished.” Singers had to have “slam bang loud voices” to be heard in such environments, and what they lacked in vocal skill “they [made] up in yelling and shouting and squeeling [sic] through their teeth.” One spectator attending Pastor’s Union Square Theatre in 1885 noted that the audience “appeared at first sight to be a howling mob, part of which was on the stage and was endeavoring with fair success to out-howl the other half.”60 With these sorts of demands placed on singers, it was a challenge for them to deliver on what their title promised: the serious and the comic. A variety singer’s turn would normally include three songs with encores. In the case of a seriocomic, one of those songs would normally be sentimental while the others would deal with the high-spirited fun of youth or romance. English dramatic critic A. B. Walkley remarked that variety singers were “idealists” because of their “inveterate optimism.” Their version of sentimentality was often linked to geography (Ireland or the American South were the most common objects of their wistfulness), and they sang of roses and rivers and

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     201

the loved ones they had left behind. In place songs, the physical landscape served as the focus of nostalgia and the tender remembrance. Place songs performed in variety theatres made longing for a homeland palpable, just as songs of aging, loss, and love aroused deep, often repressed feelings of sadness or regret. The feelings expressed in these songs were honest and beautiful, even though critics often dismissed them. As Walkley wrote, on variety stages, seriocomics “preach the gospel of climate and the affections, the pathos of common things, and the sentiment of a chromo-lithograph in a grocer’s almanac.”61 In the 1870s and 80s a number of critics began to criticize variety stage sentimentality as mawkish. They were certainly being snobbish, but they were not wrong. There was something different about vaudeville sentimentality. Before the war, sentimentalism centered on empathy; it was an effort to connect by tasting another’s joys and burning with the anguish of another’s shame. It was also essentially optimistic. This is why it was so closely linked to reform movements; it suggested that people could empathize, transform themselves, and return to beloved places and people. The achievement of an empathetic bond between spectator and performer was what people expected when they attended a show, even if they did not always receive the charge they desired. But postwar variety theatre, with its nonnarrative structure, chaotic juxtaposition of elements, and focus on surfaces, was not easily tuned to empathy. Sentimentality certainly existed in variety, as it had in concert saloons, but its communication and experience were different. It now involved a more personal experience of emotion rather than a social one. Reminiscing about Ireland or a dead parent inspired sorrow in individual members of the audience, but it did not make them empathize with each other or with the performer. Prewar spectators were proud to shed a tear in the theatre, but postwar spectators increasingly felt self-conscious and uncomfortable when they did so. It is no coincidence that the spread of vaudeville sentimentality was accompanied by a change in taste regarding vocal style. The antebellum “Italian” approach to song, with its slides and flourishes, began to seem affected and artificial. Today, a writer in the Memphis Daily Appeal explained in 1871, one wants a song such as “Home Sweet Home” to be sung “without floriture or ornament, but with heart.” Portamento, the essential element of the prewar sentimental musical tool kit, was increasingly regarded as a “quality [that] should be more sparingly indulged in[,] as an audience soon tires of its too frequent repetition.” Many postwar critics began to doubt that there had ever been a time when the use of portamento was thought to add beauty to playing or singing. As one writer confessed, “portamento always spoiled

202    C H A PT E R

6

whatever it appeared in, . . . it was an exasperation to the ear and seemed ridiculous to the mind.” In fact, by the early 1880s, portamento was coming to be considered a lost art. The “old Italian school” is dead, a writer in the New York Evening Telegram explained; today “the voice is divided into registers like water-tight compartments of an ocean steamship, and evenness of tone is consequently out of the question.”62 Vaudeville converted sentiment from a goal of theatre into a feature within it. Unlike antebellum farce or minstrelsy, both of which embedded sentiment in shows that were silly and nonsensical, variety undermined sympathy with irony. The female seriocomic was primarily interested in creating an image of herself as a fun-loving, devil-may-care, modern woman. She had a tender side, but it took second place to her coquettish or tough sides. Variety artists emulated the ironic pose of burlesque performers like the British Blondes by both celebrating gawking and poking fun at the practice. They offered audiences playful larger-than-life personalities that implicitly neutralized the concerns of those who might worry about the morality of appearing semi-clothed and the propriety of looking at sexualized bodies. This was why, in the opinion of one manager, a big voice always took second place to “archness of demeanor” and a “sweetness of manner” in a seriocomic.63 Just as singers in saloons warned young men not to take the flirtations of waiter girls seriously, variety artists cautioned audience members about the danger of looking beneath the surface of the clothing. In so doing, they at once presented glamour as an ideal and poked fun at it: In the good days of old, in our grand-mothers’ time, Girls didn’t enamel or paint; Didn’t wear palpitators their bosoms to swell, Didn’t lace themselves up till they’d faint; Didn’t wear pattern calves, or use bloom of youth, And the rose in their cheek didn’t fade. You must know a girl now before you get stuck, For she’s fearfully and wonderfully made.64 Even when variety songs dealt directly with those conventional subjects of sentimental engagement—parting, childhood, or even death—they did so in ways that seemed to lighten the emotional load. In these songs, sentiment was treated as synonymous with melancholy, sadness, or being in love rather than as something that made one spiritual alive and socially engaged. As such, melancholy became an emotional state that, according to variety performers, needed to be cured. Sentiment in this form did not transfigure the imagined

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     203

lives of the characters depicted; it obstructed their enjoyment of life’s pleasures. As one character explained to his stage lover in a Boston variety theatre: In spring-time love, when the birds return again, Then I will come back, dear, always to remain, So dry your tears, love, and let me see thee smile. And be like the birds, dear, happy all the while. I’ve told you the reason why now we must part, And yet to leave you here alone it almost breaks my heart. Kind friends will cheer you, so let me see you smile, And be like the birds, dear, happy all the while.65 Similarly, infidelity was sometimes treated with a levity that would have shocked antebellum audiences. It was not that variety artists considered sexual betrayal a positive thing, but they urged its victims to get on with their lives. On the vaudeville stage the broken heart was rarely presented as emotionally satisfying. Instead, heartbreak was something that needed fixing, preferably with another love. Thus, in 1874, Harry Richmond, the “low comedian” who five years later would make the news by killing a friend when he struck him over the head with a pitcher in Walling’s saloon in Philadelphia, sang: I was always a good-tempered man. My courting I paid to a fair pretty maid, When I asked her to wed she lovingly said, “Dear Daniel, it’s true I’m faithful to you, Believe me and don’t be afraid.” But in less than a month her promise she broke, And off with another she ran; I laughed and treated it all as a joke, For I’m such a good-tempered man.66 Simple flirtation, which had been almost as great a source of pain to antebellum romantics as actual infidelity, was reconceived in the postwar variety houses as the natural accompaniment to love’s gaiety. In concert saloons, young men were advised to enjoy but not to believe the coquette; in variety and vaudeville songs of the 1870s, flirtation was treated as a normal element in a fun romance that might lead to a happy marriage for a spirited pair. As one seriocomic sang of a suitor who approaches her at the garden gate and asked if he might presume to speak with her, “your right is in flirtation.” Indeed, gay young men and women were expected to flirt because doing so

204    C H A PT E R

6

showed them to be amusing and fashionable people. There was a new element of equality in this that likely carried over from the saloons, because in variety flirtation was presented as the prerogative of both men and women. Cross-dresser John Henshaw’s comic song made this point clearly: “How can you blame us giddy girls, / If in you men we’re unbelievers.”67 Vaudevillians urged audiences to enjoy pleasure without guilt. Like their saloon predecessors, they cautioned against excess, but they normalized dancing and flirting as modern amusements. In fact, the enjoyment of pleasure was presented as a way a person could demonstrate to the world that he or she was normal or, in the parlance of the day, “all right.” Being “all right” meant having fun and not worrying about conventions. At the same time, performers communicated the impression that in urging audiences to have fun they were not pressing them to sin. The ironic pose allowed them to both endorse risqué behavior and suggest that it was all innocent. This is why Jennie Hughes, a highly talented, “rollicking,” and “good natured” seriocomic, could advise her listeners: Whenever you go on a picnic Enjoy yourself, have lots of sport, Take your girl, your father and mother, Good lager beer, sherry and port, Don’t stand around like a Quaker; Be merry and cheerful and bright, And when there’s a dance, bounce in for a change, And that’s where I know you are right.68 Advancing the idea that a capacity for fun was a way of measuring normality added an ironic twist to the sentimental notion that pleasure was a means of improving the spirit. Sentimental songs and incidents were not absent from the variety theatre, but they became one type among many. And they were delivered in a theatre that, taken as a whole, was designed to dispel audience preoccupations, longings, or melancholy feelings. As a critic in the New York Times remarked, the seriocomic’s songs were “more catching than epizootic, and stick to one’s musical memory as pitch does to one’s clothes.” Variety art, in other words, left its impression on the surface, not on the soul. The quick shifts that were made in emotional gears served not to attract attention to the reality of emotion but to create interest through change. Commenting unfavorably on a performance by a typical singing quartet, a Police Gazette critic observed in 1885 that they “sing at the same time at the tops of their shrill voices about

A RT W I T H T H E E F F E R V ES CE N CE O F G I N G E R B E E R     205

meeting some girl where the cucumbers bloom . . . and then, with one united leap, plunge from courtship and sentiment into a wild, unanimous breakdown.”69 In 1879, Jennie Hughes delighted her audience at the Globe Theatre in New York with a song in which she lamented how “the sugar of a lover is turned to the vinegar of the husband.” The song resonated with her audience because the singer was at the time suing her husband, the wealthy Brooklyn iron merchant J. Lloyd Haigh, for bigamy. Responding to the amused and surprised crowd, she stopped her song in the middle, laughed, and offered an impromptu speech: “Yes, that’s about the actual experience. Before marriage he buys the boxes at your benefit, throws flowers and jewelry at you, and sends his carriage to take you to the theatre and away again. Oh, he’s just too attentive for anything; and so jealous, Oh my! . . . I’ve told you how it is before marriage—too sweet for anything. But afterwards it is entirely different. He doesn’t throw jewelry and flowers at you—he throws crockery, chairs and tables.” She then finished her song and walked off somewhat flushed and apparently “more angry than facetious.” When she did so the audience laughed “uproariously” and the applause was thunderous.70 It is hard to imagine an antebellum audience or performer displaying such sangfroid when dealing with a moral disgrace. It was a sign of the extent to which the expectation that vaudeville would be lighthearted was undermining the sentimental popular theatre’s preoccupation with compassion.

Chapter 7

Spectacle and Nostalgia on the Road Traveling Shows

In the 1870s, Billy Kersands ranked among the greats. His special gifts—a spectacularly large mouth, a stentorian voice, nimble feet, and a keen wit—ensured his place in their august company. Like Rice, Emmett, Dan Bryant, and George Christy, Kersands communicated his joy in performing to his audience, and like his eminent forbears in minstrelsy, he was idiosyncratic enough to be instantly identifiable. Although he was a graceful dancer, he was popularly regarded as a comic genius, and with good reason. Yet even though he would never have considered himself as such, Kersands was a destroyer of tradition. Unlike the great pre-war minstrels, sentimental performers all, Kersands developed his comic craft in concert saloons and transported that institution’s grotesquery into his performance. It was his mouth that made him “the wonder of minstrelsy”; he famously placed billiard balls, his hands, and even a teacup and saucer into it. Burnt-cork artists had traditionally worn oversized shoes, goofy outfits, and women’s clothing, but they were playing at being unnatural in order to make their imposture transparent. By donning outlandish disguises, minstrels kept their audiences aware of the white skin beneath their black masks. Kersands, however, rose to fame on an actual physical peculiarity—his oversized mouth—and in so doing he helped import the freak show into the minstrel lineup. But there was something even more disruptive about his popularity. Unlike all the famous minstrels who had gone before him, Kersands was black.1 206

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     207

African American, or black-on-black minstrelsy contributed to burnt cork’s movement away from sentimentality. It did so not only because black-on-black minstrels (like many black-on-white entertainers) adopted concert-saloon grotesqueries, but also because of the color of the performers’ skin. Sentimental aesthetics rested on the idea that a sensitive, attentive and, it was assumed, white subject would be able to immerse him or herself in the emotional experience of another. The more refined and cultured the spectator, the more perfectly they would be able to enter the other’s sensibilities; in fact, as burnt-cork artists attempted to demonstrate, they were supposedly able to translate the feelings of people nineteenth-century whites commonly regarded as primitive or simple into something transcendently human. But how could a black man such as Kersands hope to communicate the sublime purpose of art to an overwhelmingly white audience? Because he was seen to live, rather than interpret, blackness he could attract sympathy for his condition, but not for his performance of it. Moreover, given the racial prejudices of the age, nineteenth-century white audiences might laugh at a performer such as Kersands, but not with him. In Kersands’ art, sensibility ran smack up against racism and was shattered in the collision. Over the course of the 1870s and early 80s, sentimental minstrelsy changed as the culture to which it had contributed was unraveling. After the war, minstrelsy assimilated to variety, spectacle and the grotesque became prominent, sentimentality gave ground to nostalgia, and the old forms and structures were forgotten. Paradoxically, these changes helped reinvigorate a minstrel entertainment that many considered to have been another casualty of the Civil War. By the time the curtain fell on the last of the prewar minstrel troupes, the San Francisco Minstrels, in 1883, all of the others had long before disappeared: Christy’s folded in 1860, Buckley’s two years later, and Dan Bryant died in 1875. According to one contemporary assessment, the number of minstrel troupes had fallen from sixty to a dozen in the decade after the war.2 The minstrelsy that emerged with such vigor in the Gilded Age was very different from its antecedent. The new shows melded together concert saloon grotesqueries, Black Crook–style spectacle, the dancing girls and seriocomics of vaudeville, and a healthy dose of nostalgia into an amusement that was designed to overwhelm spectators. Like variety, it reached out to audiences instead of drawing them into the performance. It was big, loud, and overflowing with fun. When it did slow down, it was to remind predominantly white audiences that slavery should be remembered as a happy condition for black people. Minstrel troupes took this mix on the road, touring small towns across the country and spreading the new experience of

208    C H A PT E R

7

mass entertainment around the nation. In helping to popularize the grotesque practices of concert-saloon blackface, African-American minstrels like Kersands were forced to contribute not just to the decline of sentimental minstrelsy but to the creation of a new minstrelsy even more firmly centered on malignant racial stereotypes.

Creative Destruction The first successful black-on-black group was the Georgia Minstrels, which was organized the summer the war ended by “town boys” in Macon who “gathered together the [amateur] colored musicians of the city” and featured them in an entertainment for the occupying Union troops. It was a money-making gimmick launched in a moment of great distress: the war was lost and federal soldiers were occupying Macon. However, each soldier seemed to locals to have “had a sweetheart, and these would make up a good audience at any time, even if a single ticket sold at $5.” It is unlikely that the dozen or so recently freed musicians who made up the Georgia Minstrels were well prepared, or well paid for their work by their white employers. Their show did, however, attract the attention of a staff officer, Captain W. H. Lee, who was granted permission to employ the group for a Fourth of July troop entertainment. “It did not take his Yankee shrewdness long to corral them,” one unsympathetic southerner wrote. After training the freedmen to sing some minstrel favorites, Lee convinced them to return with him to New York State. There the captain joined forces with George W. Simpson, a Philadelphia newsman and promoter, to manage and market the troupe, which they toured in late 1865 under the name Brocker and Clayton’s Georgia Minstrels. The managers hoped to appeal to the public interest in seeing and hearing former slaves and they advertised the Georgians as a novelty, “a slave troupe,” and “genuine darkey minstrels.”3 In Utica, New York, early in 1866, the minstrels were seen by the English burnt-cork entertainer Sam Hague, a seasoned professional who had introduced statue clog dancing to the United States in the 1850s. At the time Hague was an on-again, off-again partner in a minstrel operation run by “Happy” Cal Wagner and was also running a Utica concert saloon named the Champion Shades. Hague saw enormous potential in an “authentic” show featuring former slaves and convinced Lee and Simpson to sell him their interest in the group, though he temporarily retained Lee as his advance agent. But Hague was not interested in showing the Georgians in America. Instead, he was thinking internationally, and within six months, in June 1866, he had taken the group off to England.4

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     209

It was their skin color that made the Georgians a curiosity and an attraction on the minstrel stage. In their marketing, both Lee and Hague made much of the minstrels’ supposed “authenticity.” They were, announced their advance agent, “the Simon pure plantation darkey,” offering “unadulterated” southern music and humor. They spoke and sang in “pure negro dialect,” and they hoped to “introduce” white spectators to “the peculiar music and characteristics of plantation life” through “melody, action, grotesque humor and natural extravaganza.” They were, a Memphis paper, declared: “real bona fide niggers.”5 Like Barnum’s mermaid, his human skeleton, and his miniature Aztecs, black minstrels were being marketed for their exoticism, and the audience was being challenged to accept their authenticity. This injected something new into minstrelsy and heralded a subtle but dramatic change in the nature of the form. The truth is that although they claimed difference because of their color, the Georgia Minstrels’ act was closely modeled on those of black-on-white minstrels. They sang such familiar sentimental songs as “When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home,” “Meet Johnny Booker at the Bowling Green,” “Mother Dear, I’ll Come Home Again,” and even “Dixie,” and their skits and dances were based on those performed by white entertainers. Southern spectators noted from the beginning that what they were performing was not representative of antebellum slave culture. As a writer in the Atlanta Constitution observed in 1875, “the plantation negroes in the days of slavery sang everywhere; in the fields at work; at the corn-huskings; in their forms of worship; in joy and in sorrow, everywhere they sang.” But their “peculiar style of song has never been taken up and presented by the traveling negro minstrel troupes.”6 Although African American minstrels were advertised as more “real” than their white counterparts, their singularity as performers lay in their epidermis, not in the songs or jokes they performed. This encouraged spectators to question whether they were authentic enough. Although “previous to the war, all [were] slaves,” remarked one northern reviewer who had preconceptions about what slaves should look like, “a number of them are a little too light in color and refined in manner and carriage to give . . . a correct idea of a plantation slave.” Hague, another pointed out, should have recruited more black people of “ebony color and ivory teeth, who’s [sic] every look and gesture, and twinkle of eye provokes a laugh.” In other words, to be fully accepted as minstrels, black performers were expected to conform to the caricature of blackness that minstrel shows had already established. Thus, even though they were promoted as true representatives of antebellum black culture, the performers were re-created in the white minstrel mold. This made comparison inevitable, and those who commented on the Georgians in

210    C H A PT E R

7

print generally considered them “inferior to white [minstrels].” As a writer in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat explained, “Real negroes do not succeed well as minstrels . . . because they are incapable of the requisite jokes.” Even in England, where minstrelsy had achieved enormous popularity, the original Georgians were regarded as poor imitators of their white and, by that point, generally British rivals.7 Racism was undoubtedly behind the apparent consensus among white spectators that the Georgians were substandard reproductions of the white “original.” According to a midwestern critic, “A negro generally ceases to be funny as soon as he knows that he is funny.” In effect, they were laughable, but not comic. Not surprisingly, the Georgia Minstrels were subject to insult and abuse. In Westport, Connecticut, audience members even pelted them with onions, forcing them off the stage.8 But there were other reasons why black-on-black minstrelsy was discounted by white audiences. Many white commentators argued that black people performing themselves could only go through the motions; they could not create an identity of emotion with their white audience. “There is not one in the company that possess a musical voice,” a critic wrote of one of the three Georgia Minstrel groups operating in 1867, “and the attempts by those who do the ballads is something that cannot be described.” William Welsh, “the trainer of African humorists in the rough” for Callender’s colored minstrels, with whom Kersands was then appearing, agreed, but as he explained, one should not expect black minstrels to communicate sentimentally. “Only last week,” Welsh told a reporter, “one of them wanted me to allow him to recite a pathetic ballad. Now just imagine a colored man reciting ‘Bingen on the Rhine,’ or something of that kind. Of course, I refused to allow it. All the jokes and gags in use have to be selected on account of their appropriateness and the line of thought in all this is what people would expect to come naturally from colored people.” Walsh believed that “in jubilee songs and plantation dances, they are superior to white men, and they have the advantage of possessing natural dialects. They have to be taught everything else.” Their natural feelings and humor were “crude and coarse.” It would be best, a spectator in Memphis concurred, to have black-on-black performers stay away from “old minstrel tricks” and to make more of their “negro peculiarity.” Black Americans, he added “have a rich fund of originality that if drawn on more freely, will enable them to do even better things . . . especially in song.”9 In urging black minstrels to reveal their peculiarities, these white observers were not advocating equality. Rather, they were attempting to contain black-on-black minstrelsy by redefining it as something exotic and strange and outside the minstrel tradition. Pressed into the mold of white minstrels

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     211

and then criticized for attempting to duplicate them, many black entertainers had little option but to turn to burlesque. Nathan Huggins and other historians have argued that black-on-black minstrels used the “theatrical grotesques” they created “as ways of marking distance between themselves and their horror.” This may have become the case, but it is also true that burlesque was forced on the first generation of black minstrels. This made the assumption of the grotesque a containment of talent, for as author and activist, James Weldon Johnson, wrote of a performer who strongly resembled Kersands: “here was a man who made people laugh at the size of his mouth, while he carried in his heart a burning ambition to be a tragedian; and so after all he did play a part in a tragedy.”10 The Georgia Minstrels’ owner, Sam Hague, was an experienced blackface performer, and he may well have been reluctant to present his black performers in conventional minstrel fashion. Consequently, even though he advertised his company as “Simon pure,” he undercut their claim to authenticity by layering freakery and the grotesque onto their act. Before going to England, Hague added “a gnome-like being,” Japanese Tommy, to his cast. Tommy was a diminutive performer, barely thirty inches tall, who had been discovered by Dan Bryant in New York in 1861. Bryant had not considered Tommy a real minstrel; he had dressed the little actor up as a monkey and put him in his show as an animal act. At the time, Barnum was drawing crowds to his museum with “What is it?” an African American freak performer whom he covered in fur and advertised as the missing link. Bryant also advertised Tommy as “What is it?” and declared that his “missing link” was more authentic than Barnum’s. “Barnum” he announced, “has been outdone by the Bryants.”11 After leaving the Bryants, Japanese Tommy spent time as a monkey impersonator with Hague and Wagner’s Pontoon Minstrels and then joined Newcombe and Arlington’s group. He was with them in Utica in March 1866, doing his “Mischievous Monkey” act, when Hague enticed him to join the Georgians as their headliner. Like other freak-show performers, Tommy based his appeal on his physical abnormality. When he dressed up in fur and sported a tail, his act propelled audience members to question whether he was a man or an animal. “As he walks on stage,” wrote a Syracuse spectator, “he looks the impersonation of clumsiness and deformity, but he is really as nimble as an antelope, and elastic as rubber, turning somersaults with lightning rapidity and darting about with wonderful swiftness. It is difficult to realize that he is human, and yet he sings well.”12 Once Hague had departed for England, the field of African American minstrelsy was open, and rivals quickly occupied the market niche.

212    C H A PT E R

7

Black-on-black minstrelsy was attractive to black entertainers, because they saw it as a way of gaining a foothold in the more remunerative and mainstream white theatres. In 1866, a black entrepreneur, Charles B. Hicks, organized his own troupe of Georgia Minstrels in Indianapolis while Hague’s outfit was overseas. Although he hoped to cash in on a name, his group, unlike the original Macon troupe, did not consist of real Georgians, although several, including Hicks himself, had been born in slavery. Nonetheless, Hicks, like Hague, continued to move sentimental minstrelsy closer to its undoing. Just as Hague had headlined a freak performer, in 1869 Hicks hired the Torres Brothers, a pair of trapeze artists, and the next year he secured Japanese Tommy. In 1871, Billy Kersands signed on.13 In the 1860s, Kersands worked as a concert saloon entertainer by night and a bootblack by day. He first made a name for himself at Jake Berry’s New York saloon, a place notorious for its “bathing beauties.” Like Japanese Tommy, he had attained celebrity as a freak entertainer, even though, like his diminutive colleague, he was an accomplished and diversified performer. He was, according to Walsh, “as smart as a steel trap” and would enjoy a long career with the Georgia Minstrels, Callender’s Minstrels, a series of white companies, and ultimately his own troupe. Kersands’ popularity with white people stemmed from the fact that he was a freak. He had “the biggest mouth of any man ever seen. . . . When he opens it, an awful cavity yawns in front of the audience.” That mouth, declared the Fort Worth Gazette, “is like the back door of a saloon in a local option town,” while the Paducah Sun described him simply as “ridiculous looking.”14 Kersands was an exceptionally gifted actor, and his most famous songs filled the same space within black-on-black minstrelsy that George Walker and Bert Williams would later occupy. In his most popular song of the 1870s, “Aunt Jemima,” he assumed the character of a slave who had been promised freedom when his mistress died, only to find that she just wouldn’t kick off. His other great song of the period, “Mary’s Gone Wid a Coon,” tells of a father who gave his daughter “eberyting dat her heart could wish, / She was raised in de laps of luxury,” only to have her run off with “a big black coon”: He’s as black, as black as he can be. Now I wouldn’t care if he was only yaller, But he’s black all o’er.15 This deliciously complex song, sung by a black man painted to appear darker, referenced both the divisions of color within the African American community and the threat black-on-black minstrelsy posed to white male sexual

Figure 9.  Billy Kersands, ca. 1875. Advertisements and reviews invariably emphasized Kersands’ huge mouth, but as this portrait reveals, it was not noticeably large. The tensions in “colored minstrelsy” are revealed here. Kersands played the freak on stage, but he also wanted to be respected as a well-dressed, talented, and affluent gentleman. Billy Kersands TCS1, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.

214    C H A PT E R

7

authority. What is important here is not that African American minstrels used the burnt-cork mask to subvert white privilege through mockery; minstrelsy had always rested on poking gentle fun at respectable society. But the subversion that actors such as Kersands engaged in was different because it was an assault from the outside. Where white minstrels used the black mask to laugh at their own mannerisms and trivialize the world of surfaces, black minstrels began to use it as a tool of cultural rebellion. Like white concert saloon minstrels, black-on-black showmen returned burnt cork to its roots and made it into a revolt against gentility itself. Implicitly understanding that white people were reluctant to extend sympathy to them, black minstrels adopted the practice of ironically undercutting their own attempts at refined feelings. Describing a black minstrel show he’d just seen in Los Angeles, a terrifically amused white spectator reported: “Tender sentiment succeeded low comedy. . . . Charles Prince sang “The Heart Bowed Down” in a creditable tenor, and with the true musical feeling of the negro, but the active cooperation of the end men resulted in a variegated effect.” As Prince sang, “Tambo was dissolved in tears, while Bones gazed over the footlights with his yards of lip quivering, and his glittering eyeballs set in a stony stare of anguish that brought down the house. . . . Sentiment had not the ghost of a show with that crowd.” Even God stood no chance, for when Harry Smith stepped forward to perform “The Church across the Way,” Tambo “went into a frenzy of religious fervor and wept copiously into a bandana handkerchief, while Bones slumbered peacefully until prodded up to help out in the refrain.” Here the performers were burlesquing the genteel sentiments they were expected to express but were not considered capable of feeling. The aping of refined emotion, which is the best white audiences believed black performers could master, was affirmed by the end men who made the singers’ attempts ridiculous. Like Kersands, these performers preserved their own dignity by refusing to give their audience the smug pleasure of thinking that they took themselves any more seriously than white people did. Their self-parody was of a kind with the ironic pose of seriocomic singers and burlesque artists who performed genteel songs and skits while drawing attention to their saucy personalities; all were wearing the mask and mockingly tearing it away in the same instant.16 Forced by racism into revisionism, black minstrel performers such as Kersands and Japanese Tommy became mold breakers in the immediate postwar years, while Hicks, their manager, introduced trapeze artists, grotesque performers, contortionists, and freaks and made them centerpieces of his show. And it did not stop there. In 1872, Hicks’s company, including Kersands, was bought by Charles Callender, a white entertainment entrepreneur who had

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     215

already experimented successfully with using a black minstrel group as a Christmas entertainment in his Chicago theatre. Callender had also risen out of the saloon business, having learned his trade in John Morrissey’s sporting house in New York, and he was no respecter of minstrel traditions. When he fired Hicks as manager in 1874, he hired a pair of young Jewish New Yorkers—Daniel and Gustave Frohman—to manage and market his Georgia Minstrels, even though neither of them had any previous experience in minstrelsy. The Frohmans continued to press forward with Hicks’s revolution. In their hands, Callender’s minstrels became a form of variety show, with occult features, animal acts, and acrobats in addition to the conventional lineup. In Philadelphia, they added a mirror act to the show, in which the performers’ images were reflected eerily onto the stage and described as ghosts. They then took the radical step of doubling up the company so that there were four, not two, end men.17 In 1878, the Frohmans dispensed completely with tradition and added women—the Hyers Sisters—to the show. Anna Madah and Emma Louise Hyers were a duo of African American concert singers who had been on the road performing operatic and parlor songs for about a decade. They were genteel performers and added class to Callender’s Georgia ensemble. Soon the Georgians and the Hyers Sisters were performing in the third part of the show, offering a straight, albeit abbreviated, rendition of the popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. Although burlesques of operas had been a feature of minstrelsy since the 1830s, they had traditionally served as objects of fun. For African American minstrels, operetta was a way of establishing their credibility as artists before white audiences. One white spectator promptly derided them as being “more or less a group of colored concert singers” instead of minstrels. Home now to both freakery and operetta, Callender’s minstrels had become a type of touring combination show or, as it was increasingly being called, a vaudeville entertainment.18 Black-on-black minstrel shows were especially popular in the South, where, according to the manager of Barlow, Wilson, Primrose and West’s Mammoth Minstrels, “the darkies all turn out to see them.” However, touring a colored minstrel show through the South was dangerous business in the 1870s and 80s. Performers were harassed, denied hotel accommodation and restaurant service, and forced to accept the poorest travel conditions. They generally performed in segregated houses, where African American spectators were in the gallery, though Hicks’s Georgia Minstrels did sometimes succeed in having black patrons admitted to other sections of the theatre. Despite these obstacles, the growth of an African American audience for minstrelsy encouraged the development of the form, and by the late 1870s

216    C H A PT E R

7

smaller shows that catered exclusively to black audiences had made their appearance. Although a formal African American theatre circuit would not exist until the 1890s, two decades before that an informal route system seems to have emerged for groups playing black saloons and community halls. In the fall of 1875, for example, the Plantation Minstrels traveled from Chicago to Aurora, Batavia, and Joliet, Illinois, before heading south for two months.19 A white reporter who attended a show when the Plantation Minstrels were in Chicago noted that it was appearing in the “auditorium” of a basement variety saloon that seated eighty people on benches and a few chairs. With the exception of the reporter and one white working-class spectator who was sitting in the front row with a black woman, the entire audience was African American. The troupe was small and performed familiar minstrel songs and skits in traditional concert-saloon costume: “The performers were dressed in black, the end-men having red striped shirts, with the enormous projecting collars which have obtained conventional recognition as being funny. To put burnt cork on a negro would seem to be wasteful and ridiculous excess, but the end men were regularly corked-up and bewigged. . . . Their natural amplitude of lip was enhanced by the use of red pigment, until their mouths looked like broad clefts of raw liver.” The reporter found the experience alienating and felt that the rest of the audience did too. The spectators were “dull and impassive. . . . They were not participants but critics. They had paid 15 cents apiece for amusement and were not going to cheapen themselves by being easy to please.” What seemed to him to have appealed most to the audience was the “zanyism of a couple of really clever clog dancers.” It is noteworthy that the white newsman did not hear any of the performers singing plaintive songs or ballads.20 Black-on-black minstrelsy, at least in its infant stage, appears to have blended burnt cork and variety even when it was presented to African American audiences.

The Touring Saloon Black-on-black minstrelsy was not the only touring entertainment to blend concert saloon variety and blackface minstrelsy. The possibilities that variety offered—of an inexpensive mass entertainment—were simply too great to ignore. Touring became possible because of the expansion of railroad transportation after the war. The miles of railroad tracks in the nation almost doubled (to 67,000 miles) from 1860 to 1872, and it doubled again over the next decade. Indeed, between 1870 and 1872 alone, 20,000 miles of track were laid, which was more than the entire mileage in Great Britain.21 Touring allowed theatre companies to pursue a market based on

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     217

breadth rather than depth. This would lead in time to a centralization of the theatre business, the development of circuits, and the demise of much local amateur entertainment, but before that happened, traveling companies had to decide what to tour. Given the pervasiveness of concert saloons, it is perhaps not surprising that variety companies based on the saloon theatre’s combination of blackface comics and dancing women were among the first to be offered. The first and most celebrated of what would come to be called “female minstrel shows” was organized by Billy Pastor, Tony’s brother, a former circus carpet jumper and acrobat. Having just finished a successful stint on the road managing his brother’s variety company, Billy experimented with operating a small concert saloon troupe of six women and two men in August 1870. To head his group, he hired Ada Tesman, a well-known variety star celebrated for her Irish character songs. Pastor hoped that he might achieve what The Black Crook and the British Blondes had shown to be possible and attract genteel families to a leg show. He advertised his new company as “novel, chaste and pleasing” and announced that they had “engaged ‘Artistes’ celebrated for their talent on the stage, and respected for their deportment in private life.” On their first tour through New York State, they specifically invited women and children to attend.22 Ada Tesman’s female minstrels revealed that small-town American women would go to a variety show if it was shorn of sexual humor and separated from liquor. A glimpse of Tesman’s audience was provided by a reporter who attended a performance at Mechanics’ Hall in Utica, New York, in 1871. The announcement of a female minstrel show was received as a “mystery,” he wrote. No one knew what to expect, and it consequently drew “a most remarkable audience. There were several ladies and gentlemen there, many business men whose families were in the country, a few young gentlemen in full costume, white neckties and kids, a full delegation of fast young men, and all the pious old bachelors who keep private families posted in regard to the morality of the city.” An alderman was there, as was the local Republican Party organizer and an unnamed but apparently well-known figure “who popped in to get a quick look while his wife was in a crockery store.” But if any men who attended expected something sexual, “the boys were fooled on the mystery after all. There was nothing in the performance at all improper or objectionable. The end-men made a great deal of rough and tumble fun; Miss Somers’ clog dance was very good; Miss Boswell’s performance of the slack wire was tip-top.” The reporter rated the singing, however (other than Tesman’s), “decidedly inferior.” A Watertown, New York, reporter echoed these sentiments: Tesman’s female minstrels gave a “chaste and pleasing”

218    C H A PT E R

7

performance, he wrote, and “the vulgar jokes of which we have had a surfeit [in the saloons] were omitted.”23 Pastor was not the only one to sense an opportunity to combine variety, blackface, and legs in a road show, and a number of other female minstrel companies appeared in the summer of 1870. The most enduring of these was Madame Rentz’s, an invention of M. B. Leavitt, already a veteran manager at the age of 27. The head of the troupe was supposedly Carlotta Rentz, an invention of Leavitt’s, so named because the name sounded “foreign” and he was an admirer of Europe’s great Rentz Circus. Leavitt recruited many of his performers in England, and one of these, Mabel Santley, was an alumna of Lydia Thompson’s burlesque group. In order to make explicit the connection between his female minstrel troupe and that famous burlesque company, Leavitt renamed the group the Rentz-Santley Minstrels in the mid-1870s, and after a generous application of peroxide, began to advertise his performers as “blondes.” In 1878, the group performed an abbreviated version of Ixion as its closing skit and toured with the British Blondes’ controversial vehicle, The Forty Thieves.24 Female minstrel groups such as Rentz-Santley’s adopted the three-part format of conventional blackface entertainments and used the minstrel lineup as the curtain raiser, with the women in the center and male comics in blackface as Tambo and Bones. The middle section of the show, still quaintly called the olio, included the variety acts. The last section of the show was a big musical number or a burlesque involving the entire troupe. Although similar in structure to antebellum minstrelsy, female minstrel shows employed trapeze artists, grotesque blackface performers, and chorus lines. In addition, although they used the word “minstrel” to describe themselves, female variety performers did not black up, at least not until Isham’s Octoroons broke the gendered color barrier at the end of the 1880s. Until then, the ideas of white women pretending to be black and of white men admiring black female bodies were simply too scandalous to place on stage, even in a show conceived of as sexy. Despite a nominal similarity with its burnt-cork prototype, female minstrelsy was really a concert saloon entertainment on the road. It is not surprising that even the most refined among them attracted disproportionate numbers of men, especially when they performed in the West and South. Reporting on the Rentz company’s first appearance in Denver in 1878, a columnist noted that the audience was “decidedly male in its character, [and] filled every available seat and crowded the aisles of the opera house.” As with concert saloon variety, however, the show’s audience crossed social boundaries and included “all classes and all grades of society.” A writer who attended the Rentz show in Little Rock made the same point:

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     219

“The audience was in every degree respectable—we might say, with truth, eminently respectable, for in it we noticed State officials, county officials, merchants, bankers, real estate agents, lawyers, doctors, newspaper men—in fact, you couldn’t go into any church today and cast a stone at random on the male side of the house, and miss hitting a man who went to see the Female Minstrels last night; in fact nearly all the middle-aged and old men were present.” In areas of the Northeast, where The Black Crook and burlesquers had made leg shows more familiar, Rentz’s minstrels even attracted some women. The company offered a matinee in places where it thought it could draw women and children, and it reserved evening seats near the front for single females and couples. As time passed, this also happened in places beyond the Northeast. Attending a performance in Omaha in 1882, a journalist reported on the usual wide spectrum of patrons. The parquet, he wrote, was made up of representatives of the railway company, banks, and other “solid institutions,” lower-middle-class people filled the balcony, and the gallery was loaded with boys and poorer working men. But, he added, “several ladies strayed in,” though he presumed it was because they were either “ignorant of what the show was expected to be; or because they may have been desirous of encouraging the idea that women have a right to adopt occupations usually monopolized by men, and took the enjoying of female minstrelsy to be one of the great and glorious illustrations of the new departure.” In doing so, however, their reputations were not really at risk as the show was “not at all immodest . . . it must be confessed that the audience appeared a trifle bored.” One male spectator was overheard complaining that it was “a little tame.”25 The Tesman and Rentz outfits were clean enough that they did not offend respectable tastes but inevitably cheaper imitations aimed at a rougher crowd tried to profit from the possibilities for scandalous performance. By 1871, a number of low-quality female variety companies appeared in which the performers imitated the minstrel lineup, sang sentimental and racy songs, and performed risqué dances. According to a southern reviewer, minstrel shows of this kind were “vile and consisted chiefly in the exhibition of half naked women who were[,] with one exception, in various stages of age and ugliness.” But that did not prevent their proliferation, especially when linked to the sensation created by the trans-Atlantic migration of the can-can. Elwood’s Female Minstrels was the first to take up the dance, performing a “Shoo-Fly Can-Can” that featured the “full Corps d’Ballet” in the summer of 1871.26 Within months, most of the more racy troupes were finishing the night with the dance. Although the can-can raised the hackles of the press when Lydia Thompson’s burlesque company performed it in The Forty Thieves at Niblo’s, it

220    C H A PT E R

7

swiftly made its way through New York’s theatres. At the Grand Opera House, which was owned and managed by robber baron and theatre addict Jim Fisk, a spectacular operetta in the French style, The Twelve Temptations, was mounted early in 1870 that featured a can-can as its centerpiece. “The Demon CanCan” according to a Philadelphia Evening Telegraph reporter who saw Fisk’s show, “is the most outrageous exhibition. . . . It is simply obscene. . . . We have, in a single gross picture, shameless nakedness and vile portrayal of salaciousness that far exceeds what an American theatre has had the temerity to show in any previous representation.” Something this titillating couldn’t be kept within the confines of respectable theatres, and it entered concert saloons early in 1870. It immediately became a standard feature of western saloon entertainment, and in New York the Canterbury Variety Theatre on Broadway, a converted concert saloon that already featured a dance of female “bathers” in swimsuits, made the can-can its special property. The Canterbury’s can-can was an immense spectacle that was performed nightly at 11 p.m. by forty high-kicking women (a number undoubtedly chosen to profit from the notoriety of The Forty Thieves).27 Small-town people, especially southern males, provided a fertile market for female minstrelsy, and big audiences turned out whenever the terrible French import was advertised. By the mid-1870s, most of the leading female minstrel troupes—Fanny Mays’s, Billy M’Chrystal’s, Ida Cerito’s, Duncan Clark’s, and even Madame Rentz’s—were promoting themselves as offering a can-can. Because of the notoriety of the dance, the number of female minstrel troupes grew dramatically in the early 1870s. Most of them were pretty rough organizations that appealed to males who lived in places that did not have concert saloons or had made them illegal. Indeed, when one of these troupes traveled the South and West, it was advertised as being “exclusively for gentlemen. Positively no ladies admitted.”28 Life on the road with one of the rougher female minstrel troupes was hard indeed. As one of Duncan Clark’s dancers told a reporter in Savannah, it was “tough all around. . . . Most of the girls are tough, we give a tough show, draw tough houses and have a tough time generally. . . . Some pretty raw things are said on the stage.” Men went to female minstrel shows, the reporter concluded, “to see something vulgar . . . [and the] audiences were made up of roughs, or gentlemen who thought it smart to act like roughs.” According to the dancer, “the way we were treated [in the South] was fearful” and after one performance “there must have been all of 200 men and boys hanging around there waiting on us to come out.” The women who performed in these shows were generally amateurs who “had a crazy idea that they could sing or dance or had a nice shape. The manager picks them up here and

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     221

there. After a few weeks they generally get tired or make a mash somewhere and drop out.” The constant turnover did not adversely affect the company, however, because the acting demands the show placed on performers were limited. “They don’t need much breaking in,” the dancer said. “They generally know a few dance steps and catch on to the choruses by hearing the others. The Amazon march is really nothing but a walk around and anybody can do it on sight. The main thing, you see, is shape. All they have to do is to put on their costumes and let the jays look at them. The show carries a couple of dozen outfits and they rig themselves up out of the lot. All they need is a pair of tights and a waist and sash. Three trunks were all we took to the theatre to-night. The costumes are in pretty bad shape, too, I assure you. Half the tights are ripped or split and it takes about a paper of pins apiece to go round in getting the rest of the things to hold together.”29 Female minstrelsy—essentially a variety entertainment organized in three parts with a Tambo and a Bones—was really about looking at women. There was no deeper purpose here than amusement and titillation. The quality of the act, the beauty of the actor, the cut of the cloth, the sheen of the tinsel and spangles and paint, the roundness of the padded tights, and the catchiness of the music were all that distinguished the rich act from the thin. As a Chicago reporter observed, the “cream must be cream[,] for your variety audience, though not a highly intellectual body, is sharp to detect skim milk, especially when it is a little sour.” The theatre of the past, explained one western manager, was “the relic of a fine old educational system, when the purity of language and the education of the masses were conserved for the stage.” But today “too much intellectual strain will not do. The people go to the theatre to be amused, not to learn.”30 As with concert saloon actors before them, the main performance challenge female minstrels faced was coping with the audience. But here, where they often did no more than kick up their legs for the benefit of small-town and rural males, the monetary returns were as minimal as the assault on their dignity was great.

Mastodons of Minstrelsy In the early 1870s, many commentators believed that minstrelsy was dead. Reeling under the body blows delivered by grotesque men and high-kicking women, minstrelsy appeared to have succumbed to “the cat-calls and boot heels . . . of the vulgar street crowd and of gamins and fast men and women, rather than [trying to] please by refined wit the decent people who are present.” While black-on-black minstrelsy might be a freakish curiosity to white spectators, grotesque white performers were simply off-putting. Similarly,

222    C H A PT E R

7

most female minstrel troupes were seen as obscenities. Rarely is a minstrel performance given, a reporter sighed in 1875, “that does not in some part offend good taste and decency,” and in consequence “its patrons are fast becoming reduced to a class that can appreciate nothing unless it has the savor of the gutter.” Everything about minstrelsy today, lamented a forlorn fan, is “common place and low in tone. . . . It does not begin to hold the place it did when Luke West, Matt Peel and George Christy were famous end-men. Occasionally artists with some clever specialty appear, but even their excellencies are spoiled by an association with other things that bring the whole stage into disrepute.”31 Traditional black-on-white sentimental minstrels faced a very real challenge. The old-time plantation jokes and songs struck postwar audiences as tired, and listening to them year in, year out, according to retired theatre critic Edmund Yates, had the same effect “which the surfeit of tarts is said to have had on the pastry-cook’s boy.” The Galaxy magazine, which argued that the star of minstrelsy had been waning for some time, declared its final expiration with the death of Dan Bryant. By that date, “old-time minstrelsy” had ceased to pay and all but one or two of the specialized minstrel theatres had closed down. Most of the stationary companies, as they were called—such as Buckley’s, Wood’s, and Christy’s—were gone. What remained, in addition to black-on-black companies and female minstrels, were two money-making black-on-white travelling shows, Haverly’s and Duprez and Benedict’s. Moreover, the geography of their profitability had shifted from the urban to the rural market and from the North to the South. Blackface among whites had developed into a saloon entertainment, a grotesque disguise that entitled performers to leer at women and make crude and racist jokes. Traditional minstrelsy was disappearing, a reporter in St. Louis concluded in 1875, because burnt-cork artists had failed “to recognize the fact that the public taste is advancing, and that the general desire for novelty must be indulged.”32 But predictions of minstrelsy’s demise proved premature. By 1880, minstrelsy had fully resuscitated, though not in a form its prewar practitioners would have recognized. According to Harry Chapham, the advance agent for Barlow, Wilson, Primrose and West’s Mammoth Minstrels, by 1879, minstrelsy was the most profitable branch of show business. His employer was selling an average of $500–$1,000 in tickets every night, and in 1878 alone his company turned a net profit of $23,000. The Atlanta Constitution reported that in large cities in the South, where minstrelsy was especially popular, $500 in receipts per night was a given. In 1878, Haverly’s touring company claimed to have made $50,000 in four months on a tour that took it from New England to Mexico. Under these conditions, star salaries

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     223

quickly shot up, and in 1880 the old minstrel Dan Emmett and the most popular new one, “Happy” Cal Wagner, were each earning $500 a week.33 It was a remarkable turnaround. The transformation of minstrelsy began when companies passed out of the control of actors and into the hands of impresarios and entrepreneurs. Where minstrel troupes had traditionally been owned by a headliner such as Christy, Bryant, and Buckley, in the mid-1870s, investors who did not appear on stage or even accompany the show bought up their names or their companies. Lon Morris, who owned Morris Brothers’ Minstrels in partnership with his brother Charles, made his money from a variety theatre in Boston. Charles Callender was a Chicago theatre operator, not a minstrel man, and he operated his two minstrel troupes (one black-on-white and one black-on-black) purely as investments. Jack Haverly, who owned a string of theatres from Brooklyn to San Francisco, ran three minstrel troupes and four other touring companies and pumped the money he made from the theatre into mining stock. George Milbank, who in the 1870s meshed variety and minstrelsy in his touring show, was another absentee investor. Before starting his minstrel company, Milbank was the New York office manager in M. B. Leavitt’s theatre chain. Men such as these emerged as the innovators in black-on-white minstrelsy. Like the Frohmans, they had no truck with tradition and were interested purely in novelty. In the late 1870s, Haverly—with Daniel, Charles, and Gustave Frohman managing what would become the United Mastodon Minstrels—added trick dancers, whiteface singers, female “Zouaves,” trapeze artists, and “Royal Japanese” acrobats. In place of the eight to twelve burnt-cork singers who had constituted the standard antebellum lineup, Haverly’s company included forty entertainers. He turned the gargantuan size of the company into the heart of its appeal. Advertised as the biggest minstrel show ever, Haverly promoted his United Mastodon Minstrels as a variety entertainment with a blackface core, something “as different as possible from the old-time minstrel show.” Other minstrel outfits followed suit. When Moore and Burgess revived the name of Christy’s Minstrels in the late 1870s (the name had market value) they included on the bill Blondin, the French tightrope walker (who had formerly been attached to the Ravels); a dancing Scotchman in a kilt; “chair equilibrists”; and a juggler, none of whom applied burnt cork. The Metropolitan Minstrels did all this and then copied the dime museums in offering premiums to lucky ticket holders: five pounds of beef, a silver watch, a gentleman’s gold ring, and ladies’ dress patterns.34 The challenge for ambitious owners of minstrel shows was the same as it was for variety managers and promoters: to bring together the widest

224    C H A PT E R

7

spectrum of customers possible. The solution they arrived at was to combine variety and burnt cork and then dress the whole thing up as a Black Crook–like extravaganza. The financial realities of touring helped influence the form they gave to their shows. Touring companies paid the theatres where they performed a percentage of their sales. This encouraged entrepreneurs to break with the antebellum tradition of having six or eight well-known performers divide up the revenue equally. Now they used one or two big names as featured performers and relied on lower-paid stock performers to carry most of the entertainment. In order to draw audiences to a show where the star was on stage for only ten minutes, minstrel troupes emphasized spectacle, excitement, and surprise. Large numbers of relatively low-paid performers took on the novelty and variety work—the acrobatics, contortion, magic, and musical oddities. They also formed a burnt-cork chorus for songs and dances, compensating through numbers for their individual anonymity. Touring shows assigned the first part of the entertainment to the minstrels and featured vaudeville in the second part. In the olio there was “clog dancing for the ladies, and rough and tumble for the men. The music is always fine.” Spectacle was as important to these shows as variety, and in the third part they featured large-scale musical numbers and animal acts. But size and splendor characterized most aspects of the new minstrelsy. When a blackface outfit arrived in a town it marched from the train station to the theatre, all in uniform, with the band leading the way. The uniforms, which were generally used for the parade rather than in the show itself, made the company’s arrival more of an event. It also marked the minstrelsy’s distance from other variety entertainments and from the antebellum form’s conventional six-man lineup.35 The most long-lived minstrel troupe of the late nineteenth century was Barlow, Wilson, Primrose and West’s Mammoth Minstrels (which in the early 1880s became the celebrated Thatcher, Primrose and West’s Minstrels). The organization was created late in 1877, when clog dancers Billy West and George Primrose quit Haverly’s Mastodons and set off on their own. George Primrose, a Canadian, started his career in Buffalo as a variety artist. In 1871, he paired up with West to form a song-and-dance team. After a stint in the circus, they became minstrels for the 1872–73 season, doing a double clog routine. Two years later they signed with Haverly’s gargantuan combination. Like Haverly’s, Primrose and West’s shows were all “gorgeous costumes, glittering scenery, tinkling music, topical songs, and skirt dances—all with accompanying burlesque.” The pair’s first company included the comic Cal Wagner, the eccentric comedian Sam Price, balladeer Milt Barlow (who created the character of the “Old Darkey”), and

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     225

seven others. When Thatcher joined up with Primrose and West, they added the famous ham-fisted, large-mouthed blackface comic Billy Rice (Kersand’s black-on-white equivalent) and a chorus of male singers to the twelve soloists. By the mid-1880s, the company had quadrupled the size of its lineup and was featuring no fewer than eight end men but fewer stars. By this point Primrose and West were doing their clog routine backed up by six other dancers. Unlike genteel minstrel shows that revolved around melancholy songs and used slapstick in skits, Primrose and West’s troupes adopted the variety convention of featuring an “abundance of comedy of the acrobatic sort”; gymnastic dances; a burlesque baseball game; lots of tumbling, sliding, and colliding; and contortionist Frank McNish, “the boneless man.” Sentiment took a distant third place behind comedy and novelty. By the end of the 1870s, following the example set by Hooley’s Minstrels, Primrose and West’s swollen line was performing in a lavish palace set and the actors were decked out in eighteenth-century costumes and powdered wigs. They still painted themselves black, but in other respects they looked and acted like white people. Only the end men continued to use the minstrel’s original “black” dialect.36 When the curtain rose on Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels at Niblo’s Garden on a cool March evening in 1880, spectators beheld forty-six performers organized into four tiers, all of them “in full dress, with ebony-colored faces.” There were eight end men on each side, eight more in between, a chorus in the row behind, and two rows of instrumentalists in back of them. In the center of the last tier was the company’s immense bass drum, famous because of its size, and above the stage hung a huge portrait of owner Jack Haverly. The first part of the evening’s entertainment consisted of an orchestral introduction, “conversations with the center,” four songs by individual soloists, choruses, and a group number featuring a firemen’s drill centered on an “old fashioned hand-engine over which posed the Goddess of Liberty in a blaze of red fire.” In the olio, there was a banjo player, a clog dance featuring twenty-six performers, a lecture by Billy Emerson on the metropolitan police, and thirteen members of the company acting in a burlesque about romantic Spaniards called “The Spoonish Students.” The third part was monopolized by the “Four Claws Circus,” which included a menagerie of trained animals and an equestrian show.37 Spectacle rather than sentiment characterized minstrel shows such as this one. Of the songs Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels performed that night at Niblo’s, only two were sentimental ballads (“Plant Sweet Flowers” and “The Warrior Bold”); the rest were comic songs. This appears to have been the regulation number of sentimental songs. At a performance in Boston in

226    C H A PT E R

7

December 1878, the first part featured a humorous song, a sentimental song, two more comic numbers, then an Irish sentimental song (“Nora, a Cushla”), then a plantation jubilee song, then the lively tune “Somebody’s Coming.” Where sentimental songs had made up half to two-thirds of the songs performed in an antebellum minstrel show, in performances by Haverly’s troupe in the late 1870s, they averaged 25 to 40 percent. The stars of the show were not engaged to perform ballads; that job fell to individual members of the stock company.38 Men such as Emmett, Rice, and Wagner were there to supply comedy. In the clog dance, the march, and the cakewalk, the chorus became the burnt-cork equivalent of the corps de ballet. The connection to the ballet was a real one, because it was The Black Crook that first demonstrated how well spectacle sold around the country. The production the Kiralfy brothers toured in 1873 was explicitly designed to “convert” American spectators “into enthusiasts for the French style of musical spectacle.” Although the Kiralfys trimmed the original cast down from 150 to 76, they placed enormous stress on costumes, sets, and scale, intending that these “would become paramount in the spectators’ eyes.” They also adopted Palmer and Jarrett’s trick of using variety acts to entertain audiences while the sets were being changed. Their success in the Northeast demonstrated to other entertainment entrepreneurs that a market existed for the touring song-and-dance spectacular.39 The masters of the new minstrelsy—the Morris brothers, Haverly, Callender, Primrose, and West—revived a moribund form by creating a blackface version of the ballet-variety spectacular that The Black Crook had introduced. Haverly’s Mastodons, based in Chicago, was the biggest of them all. It was considered “a characteristic Western enterprise” in terms of its “magnitude of magnificence.” Americans, a critic mused, simply loved big things and minstrel shows in the late 1870s and 80s were “emphatically a Big Thing, after the approved fashion of American Big Things.” Shows such as Haverly’s, wrote another, satisfy a “profound admiration for largeness,” appealing to “a pagan instinct. . . . When you think how much we owe to the largeness of the country it is not strange that we should measure the worth of things by their size.” It was a strange thing perhaps, but as this writer concluded, “the soul thrills with a deep awe” when fifty people were on stage doing in unison what one might do better. There was no denying the effect; after seeing the Mastodons one’s senses felt “poverty struck” by anything smaller.40 The new minstrel shows continued to attract a broad cross-section of the population. Their arrival in a town was an event, advertised weeks before in the local papers, and they generally followed a fixed route, arriving in the same towns each year at the same time, like the seasons. The new minstrel

Figure 10.  An Advertisement for Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels, ca. 1878. Under the management of men such as Jack Haverly, minstrelsy was transformed. The number of performers expanded dramatically, the range of acts grew, and references to enslaved black people were increasingly contained to nostalgic depictions of plantation life. Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels, MS Thr 951, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

228    C H A PT E R

7

shows were billed as a family entertainment, and here they drew capital from the antebellum tradition, offering “pure and wholesome” amusement with “no sly hits under the waistcoat of propriety, and no jokes that a man would fear to tell to his wealthy grandmother.”41 In this way, minstrel shows helped build a mass market for variety, breaking through the gender divisions that confined the concert saloons and female leg shows. In order to justify modern minstrelsy’s break with tradition, George Primrose offered a startling interpretation of the origins of the art that virtually eliminated slavery from the narrative. “We have gone to the very root of the subject,” he explained to the Dramatic Mirror, “and have found that the term minstrel means street singer.” As a result, Primrose maintained, one should look to the English music hall tradition, not the slave South, for the origin of “the primitive burnt cork artist in all his grotesque impersonations.” Although Primrose recognized that “legitimate minstrelsy must, in order to please the public, forever retain the substantial features of the characteristics of the race it represents” (by which he meant only the burnt cork), the representational features of minstrelsy were no longer important. Primrose’s definition of minstrelsy gained currency in the 1870s and 80s as segregation and scientific racism increasingly separated blacks and whites. No less an authority than George Christy’s daughter was quoted in1880 as saying that she believed that minstrel songs were all really “variations” on Scots and English ballads. “The measure was altered to suit plantation dancing,” she remarked, but there was nothing African American about minstrel melodies; after all, she continued, “the negro is not creative in music.” From a show business perspective what this meant was that a blackface entertainer might just as effectively perform in a set depicting the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles as in one representing the plantation.42 The antebellum idea that blackface transfigured the white artist and deepened his feelings and the original purpose of slapstick, which was to highlight the inconsequential nature of the material world, were both forgotten. Empathetic communication became an element in the spectacle rather than its purpose. Reflecting in 1888 on a performance he’d seen by Haverly’s Mastodons, one spectator commented, “The sentimental ballads of the first part—not as many nor as delicately shaded as [traditional] minstrel companies had accustomed us to—have no trace of real negro song.” There was, in fact, “but a bare pretense of imitation of plantation life,” and the particular pathos of slavery as it was imagined by antebellum performers was absent. In the end, “the comic songs . . . are better than the sentimental.” The reason was likely to be found in the “multiplicity of effects” and the scale of the performance, which obstructed the intimacy necessary for sympathetic

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     229

identification. As another commentator explained when he saw spectacles such as those Haverly’s Mastodons presented, “The brilliance of the setting tends to diminish the apparent brightness of the [individual] impersonation.” The costumes and scenic elements “deceive the eye” because the effect of what is “seen is so great that they render the spectator incapable of bestowing that attention which a poetical work of art demands; and thus the essential is sacrificed to the accessory.”43

Remembering the South Nostalgia was the antithesis of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentality. Where the latter was directed toward emotional awakening and the arousal of feeling for others, nostalgia looked backward to possibilities that were lost; it expressed a futile longing to return to an irretrievable past. Unlike sentiment, which conceived feelings as authentic, communal, and spiritual, nostalgia mourned the death of values such as authenticity, simplicity, love, and family. Unlike sentiment, which was inherently optimistic, nostalgia was an expression of powerlessness. Although nostalgia was demedicalized after the Civil War, it was still considered in the 1870s to be vaguely neurasthenic.44 Where sentimentality offered the possibility of spiritual emancipation through feeling, nostalgia imposed closure on the open-ended pursuit of spiritual refinement by suggesting that the object of fond remembrance resided in an unrecoverable past. Stephen Foster’s antebellum masterpiece “My Old Kentucky Home” is often seen as a nostalgic lament for a lost South. But the song was actually inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and instead tells the story of a slave from Kentucky who has been sold by his master. As the narrator anticipates overwork, mistreatment, and death in the “land where the sugar canes grow,” he thinks back to the plantation he has left behind. The Kentucky home remains where it was, but lost to the exiled narrator.45 Although a road song or a song of parting describes a relationship or space that an individual must leave, its poignancy comes from the fact that one is leaving a person who waits or a place to which one might return. Sentimental place songs such as “Where the River Shannon Flows” or “My Old Kentucky Home” retain the possibility of the homecoming, just as sentimental bereavement songs promise reunion in heaven. Nostalgia, in contrast, presents a place or time that no longer exists; it represents a refusal or inability to move on. The fixation on place, ideals, or practices and the emotional focus swing from the suffering and reconfiguring of the individual to the poignant realization that the past was a better time than the present or future.

230    C H A PT E R

7

The increasing role of nostalgia in minstrel performance reflects the growing separation of the audiences’ lived experiences from those revealed on stage. Where the sentimental theatre held that the stage would inspire moral behavior in the audience, nostalgia offered a world of obdurate memories; it centered on longings that could not be fulfilled. Cultural critic Stuart Tannock argues that nostalgia has three chronological pillars: the existence of a prelapsarian Golden Age, a moment of separation, and a present world that is deficient in important ways.46 Although this kind of nostalgia arouses strong emotions, especially feelings of sadness, it is fed by a frustration with the present that can become active and even violent. Sentimentality depends on the belief that reconciliation is possible, even for the most lonely and isolated; in nostalgia, the homecoming is deferred indefinitely because the things remembered are no longer there. A mythologized South became an important element of minstrel enter-­ tainments—male and female, black and white—after 1875. On the surface, there was nothing shocking in this, as knowledge of (an idealized version of) life in the antebellum South had always been central to minstrelsy’s claim to authenticity, but new minstrelsy separated blackface from slavery and transformed the southern element into a particular type of skit: the plantation scene. This was in keeping with the antebellum South’s postwar emergence as a mythic site in the works of a wide variety of white novelists, popular historians, and musicians. Although southerners who were anxious to turn the crushing of an insurrection into a spiritual loss for the nation were the primary authors of a rewritten history of the South, other narrators contributed to the story. Some northern veterans considered the martial spirit and desperate sacrifice of southerners during the war to be a counterweight to the weaknesses of their own society. Others who were appalled by what they saw as the popular appetite for shocking, decadent, and sensational stimulations that accompanied the democratization of amusement presented the antebellum South as a model of a cohesive, pastoral, and tasteful society. Some who were distressed by urban sprawl, freebooting entrepreneurship, class conflict, and immigration, used the slave South as a symbol for a more homogeneous preindustrial world. Antebellum minstrelsy had been a northern urban entertainment, and traveling blackface performers from the North often received a hostile reception as they toured southern communities immediately after the war. “The sojourner,” remembered one river-show blackface artist, “no matter how peaceable his intention, was frequently put in the proscribed class.” This entertainer particularly remembered being shot at in Friar’s Point, Mississippi, and being driven out of town by a mob in Osceola, Arkansas. Within

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     231

two decades of the war, however, the dedicated minstrel house that was formerly a feature of every northern city had closed down and burnt cork had become a traveling entertainment focused primarily on rural and small-town audiences. The South and West came to dominate the minstrel circuit in the late 1870s and 80s. In fact, long after the minstrel show was dead and buried in the Northeast it remained popular in other regions, and it continued to thrive in the Jim Crow South as a tent-show entertainment well into the twentieth century. “For a number of years,” an entertainment reporter observed in 1894, “the south [has] furnishe[d] the most favorable field for theatrical enterprise.” By 1890, W. S. Cleveland’s operation had its own manager for its southern tours, based in Mobile, and of his three touring minstrel companies, one was always in the South and another in the trans-Mississippi West.47 In prewar minstrelsy, the association with slavery was highly abstract because most minstrels had little or no knowledge of the South or of the lives of real black people. Old-time minstrelsy was concerned with burlesquing and sentimentalizing the operas, manners, intellectual pretensions, and relationships of white, not black, culture. But the form this self-loving humor assumed was still a dark-skinned one, and it was the interplay of blackness and whiteness that gave the slapstick winsomeness. The changes that took place in respectable minstrelsy after the war affected all of this. Those black-onwhite minstrels who did not engage in grotesque performances gave up trying to imitate black speech, most no longer dressed like plantation workers or stevedores, and increasing numbers presented their amusements against backdrops that depicted palaces and Ottoman harems. But in a variety of ways the South moved closer to the heart of burnt-cork entertainment. A vast number of minstrel songs continued to describe the South and its various geographical features, and discreet scenes depicting slave plantations as rustic utopias became common. The songs offered were inevitably old favorites from the middle years of the century, “redolent” now of an America past: “the plantation, the cotton field, the cabin and the camp-meeting.”48 What had changed were not the actual songs or the settings but the people delivering them and the meanings they carried and communicated. Where antebellum depictions of the plantation inevitably raised the issue of bondage and thus made the minstrel’s childlike happiness sublimely pathetic, in the late nineteenth century, the horror of slavery was detached from the romantic vision of the South and largely forgotten. The South, observed Isaac Goldberg, the historian of Tin Pan Alley, in 1930, “[became] our Never-never Land—the symbol of the Land where the lotus blooms and dreams come true.” Slavery was what had given antebellum minstrelsy its moral resonance,

232    C H A PT E R

7

and with its elimination, the blackness minstrels applied to their faces lost its pathos for white people, making it meaningful only as tradition. “Slavery is now only a matter of history,” sighed the retired minstrel Frank Leon with unintended irony, and “the halo of the plantation is gone.” Edward LeRoy Rice, a former minstrel turned historian, concurred: “The characteristics of the plantation negro, the quaint antics of the river roustabout, and the unique genius of the darkey swell, [have gone] glimmering down the corridors of time,” and with them went sentimental minstrelsy.49 Postwar minstrel shows became sites of mourning for the lost South. It was the Kentuckian Will Hays, one of the most successful popular song writers of the 1870s, who first gave minstrelsy slavery’s dirge when he penned the song hit of 1871, “The Little Old Cabin in the Lane.” I’m getting old and feeble now, I cannot work no more; I’ve laid de rusty-bladed hoe to rest; Ole massa an’ ole miss’s am dead, dey’re sleepin’ side by side, Deir spirits now are roaming wid de blest! De scene am changed about de place, de darkies am all gone, I’ll nebber hear dem singing in de cane, And I’se de only one dat’s left wis dis ole dog ob mine, In de little old log cabin in de lane.”50 Given the nostalgia and racial fantasy this song expressed, it is not surprising that it became a southern favorite. It occupied one side of Fiddlin’ John Carson’s first record and launched old-time music as a genre in its own right in the 1920s.51 The spirit that nostalgic ballads such as this one offered helped keep minstrelsy a viable entertainment in the South and took visible form in the creation of a new stock character, the “Old Plantation Darkey.” The invention of Milt Barlow, the “Old Darkey,” was so popular that he quickly became a fixture on minstrel stages, where he expressed not just the fantasy of slavery but also a new version of minstrelsy’s own history. In one typical blackface skit, the “Old Darkey” returns to the scene of his bondage: “Yas,” he says, “dis am de ole lane war I’ve trabbled many and many a day, to the old plantation. Been away so long now dat no one knows Ole Ben. . . . De ole faces are here no more. Ole Massa gone; Missis gone; ebbery body gone. . . . Ah! Dat war changed ebbery ting and ebbery body.” And then sitting down by the old pine tree to die, he recalls his happy youth as human property and sings: And now I’m going far away To join my darling wife;

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     233

The massa’s sending angels bright To set my spirit free.52 White southerners were particularly gratified by the “Old Darkey’s” lament for slavery because it offered them “much genuine pathos mixed with humor . . . nothing is exaggerated—nothing is overdrawn. It stands out . . . wonderfully picturesque and touchingly familiar” according to a critic in Atlanta’s Daily Constitution.53 This romanticization of slavery by performers from the north, who knew better, is bizarre and offensive today, but it was embraced at the time. The older generation of minstrels knew that things had changed in their art, and while they acknowledged that popular taste played a role in minstrelsy’s transformation, they saw emancipation as really to blame. From their perspective, the subtext of the minstrel’s plaintive song had been slavery. This is not to say that minstrels were all abolitionists; far from it. But even when pro-slavery minstrels rhapsodized about the plantation, it was what they saw as the childlike love of the ‘inferior’ black man or woman for the white master that gave soul to the impersonation. The free African American simply did not carry the same cultural resonance for most whites as the bonded one. Freedom, from the perspective of old-time minstrelsy, turned the African American into simply another poor, uneducated subject of impersonation, no different from the German or Irishman or hayseed. Black people therefore came to enjoy a special status in minstrel shows only as objects of nostalgia and tradition, not as cultural producers or human beings. In fact, at one show in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1875, Cal Wagner, standing on stage and in blackface, ordered the black members of the audience to leave their seats at gunpoint. Others, such as Billy West, blacked up when they impersonated other ethnic stock characters, doing “Irish, Hebrew, Italian, Chinese and other foreign characters in black face make-up,” and Lew Dockstadter later did burnt-cork impersonations of Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt. According to Dockstadter, this was perfectly justifiable because African-American impersonation was no longer racially referential. “There will never again be straight minstrelsy of the early type,” he explained in an interview. “The sentimental interest in the negro as he was in slavery has departed; we now must regard him from the same standpoint from which we study the peculiarities of other races.” The black character in minstrelsy now became a specific “type” like the burnt-cork Jews or the Italians. A performer in burnt cork might delineate a plantation type or a leering, knife-wielding concert-saloon grotesque figure or a pretentious city slicker, but the impersonation had in almost all cases lost its reference to slavery. And in the case

234    C H A PT E R

7

of the “Old Darkey” who most clearly linked prewar to postwar minstrelsy, the sentiments were not for the enslaved man but for the lost institution. The lament of the “Old Darkey” was the blackface equivalent of place nostalgia: a way of remembering something irrevocably gone. Emancipation “put negro minstrelsy in its little bed” forever.54 The burnt-cork performers who most resented the debasement of their craft tended to deride performers such as Dockstadter as comedians with painted faces. Those who performed the “Old Darkey” types insisted they were sustaining a dying tradition. In other words, they imagined themselves to be vessels for nostalgic feelings. Old-time performers such as Jim McIntyre and Tom Heath, who had formed their first troupe in 1871, maintained that they were engaged in the business of preservation. In fact, they claimed to be so authentic in their character portraits that they were often asked if they were actually black. McIntyre, who delivered his lines with a slight Irish accent, insisted that this was an authentic pronunciation from the Virginia Coast, while Heath claimed to have learned to speak like a black person by “living among the Negroes.” Other old-time performers, including Luke Schoolcraft, made similar claims. Schoolcraft said that he “portrayed a type of colored man that was indigenous to the South soon after the war. It was the negro of the levee, the roustabout, with his queer dialect, and shuffling manner and happy-go-lucky ideas.” He had grown up in New Orleans and claimed to have “spent much of his boyhood leisure along the docks. Here he picked up the strange accent of the Louisiana negro and it served him in good stead all his professional career.”55 McIntyre recognized, however, that he represented a disappearing tradition: “Real, genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Negro dialect comedians will soon be a thing of the past . . . because nobody is in training. Nobody is down south studying the Negro to preserve his identity on the stage. Within a few years, Negro comedy will be but a travesty of its real self.” What is interesting is that actors such as Schoolcraft, McIntyre, and Heath were no longer defending minstrelsy on the basis of its purported inner truth; it was the surface impression that mattered to them, not the spirit. Old-time minstrelsy’s last line of defense against variety and burlesque was not sympathy but nostalgic reproduction of a slave society that was itself a fiction. The “negro delineators” who appeared in minstrelsy’s new form of variety entertainment were, like Barlow, McIntyre and Heath, seeking to reproduce what they insisted was an authentic, if disappearing, type: the loyal, happy-go-lucky former slave: the “Old Darkey.” In place of the compassion, postwar minstrelsy offered an ex post facto justification of slavery itself. By claiming authenticity and then portraying happy black slaves, minstrelsy in the late nineteenth

S P EC TA C L E A N D N OSTA LG I A O N T H E R O A D     235

century therefore also became an instrument of southern revanchism over a lost war. In James Decker’s setting of “Life on the Plantation,” for example, which filled the afterpiece, or third part, of Lew Dockstadter’s minstrel show, the scene depicted an old cabin in the twilight “resting under the protecting shadows of a spreading oak.” A second scene was set in the slave quarters, “where the merry darkies and their gals are gathered to join in song, dance and merrymaking.” Sunlight generally suffused plantation scenes such as these, depictions of slave weddings were popular, and everywhere happy slaves, “the minstrels of nature and the children of melody sing in high glee.” What more potent defense of slavery could one imagine? The Civil War, scenes such as these suggested, had been a mistake; black folks had not been improved by freedom; rather, the security of their perpetual childhood had been destroyed.56 This was not the way black-on-black minstrels likely saw it, though they would eventually also be swept up by the nostalgic tide. The original Georgia minstrels were marketed to audiences who were interested in seeing and hearing former slaves. For these audiences, the plantation was not a nostalgic feature in an entertainment that was severing its connection to the past but the thing that defined the appeal of the performers. This is made clear in a rare publicity poster for the Georgia Minstrels from the late 1860s. There are no ebullient slaves dancing in the moonlight or smiling benevolently at their plump children in a plantation scene. Rather, the poster depicts a field of cane in front of a great house, at the center of which is a white overseer on a horse, whip in hand. Beside him a ferocious bloodhound, more leonine than canine, is poised to pounce. The field workers watch the overseer with what seems to be anxiety. The unusual image is given meaning by its context: above it the freed minstrels are arrayed in smart suits and shiny shoes, symbolizing the successful achievement of abolition. On either side happy urbanized black people are dancing together, smiling and laughing. The Georgia Minstrels may have offered a dystopian vision of the past, but they assigned it no less forcefully than their white counterparts to a place truly and irrevocably, if for them happily, gone. In contrast, a well-known poster for Callender’s Colored Minstrels from the late 1870s adopted the same nostalgic image of bucolic plantation life as black-on-white minstrel shows. Here rollicking, robust, and confident slave children dance to banjo music in front of a smart log cabin. The children are rambunctious, but the family is united in its joy as an old man plays the banjo, a mother looks on happily from the doorway, and a father, who is trying to silence the children, stomps his feet to the music. Black-on-black and black-on-white minstrels alike employed the slave plantation idyll to connect blackface to its antebellum origins, providing a kernel of

236    C H A PT E R

7

tradition and legitimacy to an entertainment that, as a traveling variety show, it had no particular reason to claim.57 Men such as Primrose, Haverly, Callender, Japanese Tommy, Leavitt, Billy Pastor, and Billy Kersands did not set out to destroy sympathetic minstrelsy. These men were actors and entrepreneurs who simply wanted to win audiences by combining a popular, albeit rather formulaic, amusement—the minstrel show—with a popular and novel entertainment, the variety show. They employed big casts and lavish sets because that was what worked in spectaculars and melodramas, and they paraded dancing girls in tights because The Black Crook and the British Blonde burlesquers had shown how profitable such displays could be. McIntyre and Barlow, similarly, could not see that in recasting sympathy as reproduction they were contributing to both the rehabilitation of slavery and the rise of modern ways of looking at popular entertainment. African American artists such as Kersands did not link freakery to minstrelsy out of malice. Opportunities were few for African American performers in the immediate postwar years and white audiences were not interested in providing black people with a stage for improvement. At the turn of the twentieth century, black comedians such as Bert Williams and Bob Cole would succeed in balancing elegance and grotesquery, but in the 1870s, white spectators were more inclined to applaud the African American buffoon or freak than the gentleman. The performers and investors who destroyed sentimental minstrelsy were, however, participants in the subversion of what had been the soul of antebellum American culture. Empathy was marginalized as a social ideal after the war, a victim of the war’s killing, the abolition of slavery, the nostalgia for the South, the popularization of sentimental tropes, the rise of scientific racism, Darwin’s destruction of natural theology, and the emergence of less forgiving standards of gendered behavior. One spectator implicitly acknowledged this when, commenting on a performance by Dan Rice in 1875, he reflected on the transformation of the burnt-cork art. When the old minstrel sang “in a voice quivering with emotion . . . ‘Oh! My Love’s Gone,’ ” the writer found himself suddenly transported back in time and the thought “forcibly” remind him “of this sort of entertainment of other and sweeter days.”58 Here sympathy itself had become a topic for nostalgic reflection.

Conclusion

Like many intellectuals after the war, Richard Grant White was depressed by what he saw. White was especially concerned about what he took to be a loosening of bonds of affiliation, manners, and values. It had become, he wrote in 1869, “a mark of breeding to cover the profoundest emotion with a jest, and to speak of a matter of life and death as if it were one of a day’s pleasures. . . . We have schooled ourselves in imperturbability, and have so anatomized out own consciousness that we have come to regard our souls as machines. . . . So, when a man begins to flame with passion, or a woman to flow with tears, we say, in our hearts, at least, why do you go through that performance before me?” White was not alone in remarking on the change in tastes and values. A  New York portrait painter said that he remembered the time before the Civil War when “young fellows read poetry, nourished romantic dreams, wore their hair about their ears and indited [sic] in verses, in imitation of Byron, to dark Inez and golden-haired Helen.” They delighted in the blushes of women, long swan throats, and alabaster shoulders, he reminisced, and these things “inflamed their sentimental hearts.” Writing in 1899, the painter lamented that the feminine ideal had become the “lively miss, whose tongue rattles as brisk a measure as castanets, who has a spontaneous ready laugh, who can make a golf ball sling through the air, who is full or grit and jokes, who is not afraid to put a cigarette between her lips, who is in short a jolly good fellow.” Genteel people, White 237

238    CO N C LU S I O N

concurred, used to “profess sentiments, and it was thought a fine thing to give way to emotion. Now we repress, as much as we are able, all such manifestations in ourselves.”1 After the war, people such as White were troubled by things such as increasing materialism, sensational newspapers, dime novels, and popular lithographs, all of which signaled the emergence of a mass culture based on imitation and reproduction. In their extravagant shopping habits and light banter, weren’t respectable people surrendering to the same preoccupation with surface impressions and mindless fun that popular entertainment promoted? The modern girl, the portraitist lamented, “earns her belle ship” by “dressing her darling, vivacious little self up in Paris gowns,” not by cultivating her inner beauty. Fashion, it seemed, had led the cultural charge from “solidity to show, from comfort to stylishness,” in the opinion of one writer in a ladies’ magazine in 1873. Once it was believed “that for a lady to be well dressed, she should not be conspicuous. Now she must be conspicuous or she has no claim to be considered well-dressed.”2 Art and life were inseparable, White mused, and the “repression of manifestations of real feeling” in relations could only end in the “caricature of such manifestations in art.” Society, he wrote, already preferred “the kind of theatrical entertainment at which it is not required to think. It asks, not diversion, a turning of the mind from one object to another, but the pleasure of the senses where the mind lies dormant.”3 It seems fitting that what provoked White’s gloomy reflections was his recent visit to Wood’s Theatre to see Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes in Sinbad. Lucky thing he hadn’t gone out to watch The Forty Thieves with its high-kicking can-can denouement. That show would have broken his heart. White wrote as an unrepentant Ruskinian who opposed the popular theatre’s retreat from deep truths, engagement with feelings, and the principle of looking through. While he warmly applauded Thompson’s talents and pooh-poohed puritanical complaints about her clothing, he regretted the emergence of a theatre that glorified the superficial, the ironic, and the spectacular. Many sentimentalists felt the same way and worried that the age seemed to be turning against them. Sentiment, they recognized, was losing its connection to compassion and was becoming merely a contrivance for stimulating the emotions. Mark Twain, who, like White, clung to antebellum notions of sympathy, struggled to distinguish true sentiment (which had a moral purpose) from the simple emotionalism he found in postwar art (which was largely personal). As he wrote in an 1876 letter to a friend, “real sentiment is a very rare & godlike thing” but what passed for it in his own time was “maudlin,” a form of emotional “masturbation.”

CO N C LU S I O N     239

What his contemporaries took for sentiment, he snarled, “is for girls. . . . [I have] not the slightest sympathy for what the world calls Sentiment—not the slightest.”4 Many postwar observers had little patience with such neo-Platonic laments. If contemporary culture was becoming materialistic and shallow, they argued, it was because the sentimental outlook had itself failed to guide them away from such things. E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation and arguably the country’s leading public intellectual, made this point when pondering the meaning of the most shocking sexual scandal of the immediate postwar era, the Beecher-Tilton affair. Henry Ward Beecher, the long-serving minister at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, was the country’s preeminent spokesman for sentimental Christianity. The son of Lyman Beecher and the brother of Twain’s friend and neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, he embodied the union of reform, patrician evangelicalism, and empathetic outreach. In 1870, the wife of one of Beecher’s friends, Elizabeth Tilton, told her husband that she had had an affair with the minister. Although both men moved to cover up the scandal, it soon found its way into the press, forcing Tilton to defend his honor through the courts. In the end, Beecher was acquitted, but both families and the reputations of everyone involved were savaged in the process.5 For Godkin, one of the salient things about the Beecher-Tilton scandal was that it demonstrated the failure of sensibility as a cultural cynosure. All that Beecher and emotive preachers like him “had encouraged, if we may judge by some of the fruits, is vague aspirations and lachrymose sensibility.” In consequence, American civilization had suffered “from a kind of mental and moral chaos.” Sentimentality had debased culture by making it over into a form of popular entertainment, and now there was “a large body of persons . . . who are not only engaged in enjoying themselves after their fashion, but who firmly believe that they have reached, in matter of social, mental and moral culture, all that is attainable or desirable.” The fruit of this complacency was decadence, a “pseudo-culture,” not a real one. Godkin used the lithograph as his metaphor for this cultural banality. Popular lithographs reproduced fine art for the mass market, which made them the ideal symbol of the United States’ “Chromo Civilization.” True culture was not lacking in depth, standards, and fiber, Godkin claimed. It required “the conquest of oneself ” rather than self-gratification or emotional enrichment, and it involved “the ability to dare and do, the readiness to ask one’s due which comes of readiness to render their duty to others, the profound consciousness of the need for sound habits to brace and fortify morals, which are the only

240    CO N C LU S I O N

true foundation and support of a healthy civilization.” These were things a sentimentalist such as Beecher “either has not preached or which his preaching has only stifled.” The “old Calvinist theology,” wrote Godkin (sounding oddly like Anthony Comstock), provided a better guide to life than what America offered in his own day because it forced the individual to “walk in ways that were not to his liking.” He dismissed sentimental religion as nothing more than the “stimulator and gratifier of certain tender emotions. [The church congregation] contains a large body of persons whose religious life consists simply of a succession of sensations not far removed from one’s enjoyment of music and poetry.”6 Although sentimentality continued to be defended by people such as White, after the war leading intellectuals and artists collectively moved against it, declaring it morally and aesthetically bankrupt. Not without justification, they associated sympathy with self-indulgence, and in so doing they transformed what had been largely a form of middling-class self-definition into an embarrassment. It fell to people such as Godkin, Charles Francis Adams, C. C. Schackford (who defined “character” simply as “Manhood”), William Graham Sumner, Lester Ward, and others to map out a new direction for the country, one that was no longer based on “what civilized men call morality. Civilized notions of right and wrong may have little, if any, place in it.” Rather, social cohesion in their minds should be conceived as arising out of rational self-interest. The bond of society, Godkin wrote, was not empathy; John Locke and Adam Smith had gotten it wrong. Instead, individuals were motivated by fear of disgrace and the desire for social approval; it was this that led citizens to cultivate their self-esteem by honesty in business dealings, “sexual purity,” obedience to the law, helpfulness to the disadvantaged, and reasonableness in disputes. It was the quality of the man, his character (a crucial concept to these thinkers) and sense of personal honor, not his ability to sympathize with others, that should define republican citizenship.7 In such an unfavorable intellectual climate, it is not surprising that progressive artists of the Gilded Age also repudiated sentimentalism as cheap and vacuous. Whatever legitimate hope Richard Grant White held for a rebirth of sensibility in 1869 was a forlorn one by 1890. Drawing on new technologies and recent scientific approaches—especially on Darwin’s tide-turning theories—modern thinkers adopted the view that life was unstable and transient. They called their outlook “realism,” an ambiguous term that was chosen to distinguish their art from the “idealism” of the antebellum generation. A more precise way of describing what they aimed to achieve might be impressionism because, like the European painters with whom that word is commonly connected, post–Civil War American artists strove to replicate

CO N C LU S I O N     241

the transient beauty of existence, not to improve upon it by uncovering its spiritual meaning. “Let fiction cease to lie about life. Let it portray men and women as they are, activated by the motives and passions in the measure we all know. Let it speak the dialect, the language that most Americans know,” novelist William Dean Howells wrote. Art should not attempt to penetrate life in the interest of uncovering an inherent perfection of form; it should rest on the surface, offering “a glimpse of it . . . as . . . always in a state of ‘transition,’ as everything is always and everywhere.” The artist, Henry James explained, must “render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.”8 American impressionists were, like other progressive thinkers of the postwar generation, contemptuous of sentimentality. In the new cultural world, wrote novelist Frank Norris, “sentiment will be handed down the scullery stairs.” In Godkin-like fashion, Howells suggested in The Rise of Silas Lapham that reasoned self-interest, not sentiment, should guide society. Even sympathy with the pain of others, Rev. Sewell, Lapham’s spiritual instructor, tells him, should be subjected to rational (Sewell calls them “economic”) considerations. Sympathy, Sewell makes clear, is a “perverted tradition,” a figment of the imagination.9 Impressionist artists and progressive thinkers of the Gilded Age rejected the essence of the sentimental world view, the idea that reality was a deceit, a superficial covering that had be penetrated for truths to be revealed. They accepted external realities for what they perceived them to be: transient and alive in themselves, not shadows of some Platonic inner truth that feelings could expose. Like the painter in Henry James’s short story “The Real Thing,” impressionists had an implicit “preference for the represented object over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure.” Art, Howells announced, does not “map life”; it “pictures it.”10 Even artists who churned out popular works, such as Charles K. Harris, took an increasingly pragmatic view of sentiment. Harris’s “After the Ball” was the most spectacular song hit of the 1890s, and it is often seen as the epitome of late nineteenth-century sentimentalism. But Harris’s approach to empathy was, in the words of music historian Charles Hamm, “curiously detached and objective” and he used it, just like vaudeville artists, as a device. Harris wrote “After the Ball” about what he contemptuously called “a little drama” involving a man who sees his sweetheart kissing someone else at a party. The narrator abandons her and refuses to listen to her entreaties, only to discover after she is dead that his “rival” was in reality her brother. It is therefore a song about the

242    CO N C LU S I O N

failure of compassion and how earthy emotions like jealousy and pride were far more powerful than sentiments. “After the Ball” delivers this message in a narrative of remorse and guilt (the story is told by an old man to a child), which places the work in the antebellum period. Harris subtly reveals the falsehood of that age while cynically employing a lilting waltz melody to popularize his message. “In all my ballads I have purposely injected goodly doses of sentiment,” Harris wrote, “and invariably the whole country paused” and bought.11 Many things contributed to the decline of sentiment as a cultural and social value system. The artists and thinkers who turned against it were inspired by new scientific theories, especially by Darwinism; by the new art of photography; and by the economic and technological transformation of the late nineteenth century that made their impressionism, as Amy Kaplan wrote, into a “strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change.” But “realism” was also produced by the recognition of the hardship of life in an age scoured by war, mourning, industrialization, racial oppression, depression, and migration. The material world was so prominent in their work because the desire of some to acquire goods and of others to survive made it into a potent symbol of the postwar era. Writer Rebecca Harding Davis made this point with delectable bluntness when she described one of her characters making biscuits to express her love for her husband. “As pure and deep [a] love syllables itself every day in beefsteaks as once in Sapphic odes,” she wrote. Cooking for another person was, after all, the same “sensual, groveling utterance of feeling” as sentimental art. “Your wife,” Davis wrote ironically, “may keep step with you in keen sympathy, in brain and soul; but if she does not know whether you like muffins or toast best for breakfast, her love is not the kind for this world, nor the best kind of any.”12 In rejecting sentimentality, impressionists such as Howells, Davis, and James were setting themselves against a Victorian culture that they saw as obsessed with the perfectibility of man and the ideal forms beneath the surface realities. They called for truth, by which they meant depicting life as it was. The paradox of this, as many cultural historians have demonstrated, is that the work of Gilded Age artists and intellectuals was wonderfully suited to the very chromo-civilization they decried.13 They were themselves uninterested in looking beneath the image. They accepted action as the measure of men and they saw reasoned self-interest as the only mortar a society could need. Consequently, although they congratulated themselves on aerating the musky parlor of the American imagination and trashing the sensational literature and maudlin lithographs mass culture had thrown up, they proved better at critiquing the past than themselves. This would make them appear

CO N C LU S I O N     243

no less genteel and complaisant to the next generation of modernists than the sentimental artists of the antebellum period were to them. The emerging popular entertainment industry contributed to the changes that affected the larger current of American cultural life. While artistic expressions sometimes change because of a thunderclap of innovation, they more commonly develop through accretion, reproduction, emulation, and trial and error. The shape of the postwar popular theatre was very much an adaptation of its prewar form: the main entertainments were the same, as were the songs, dances, jokes, and incidents. There was no obvious revolution in taste in the 1870s and 80s like the ones that gathered, for example, in the wake of the ragtime or rock ’n roll revolutions. The entrepreneurs who directed show business in the Gilded Age had learned their craft during the war and a large number of them had shaped their understanding of mass entertainment in concert saloons. The task they set themselves was not one of revolutionizing fun so much as converting a male entertainment into a familial one and thus securing a bigger, more respectable, and more stable market. They built the popular theatre with the materials they had at hand, so instead of dumping variety, they cleaned it up, tinkering with the form until they achieved the right balance of the risqué and the exciting, style and interest, nonsense and novelty. The continuities in form and type have encouraged historians to undervalue the changes that took place in the popular theatre as it expanded and democratized. But just as sentimentality lost ground among intellectuals and artists in the 1870s and 80s, it suffered in its translation to mass entertainment. The vaudeville theatre that men such as Josh Hart and Tony Pastor created was a poor environment in which to express sympathy. They approached spectatorship from the direction of the saloon and the art they promoted employed speed, sudden shifts in mood, a nonnarrative structure, and the charisma of its performers to interest audiences. Entertainment, rather than involvement, was what variety aimed to supply, and its purveyors adopted the same ironic pose that had proved so successful for postwar burlesquers. Irony allowed performers in variety shows to do shocking things or turn conventional acts into something new by making the audience feel that they were self-aware. They communicated a playful disengagement from their own performance and acted as though they shared the audience’s pleasure in it. This was the meaning of the smile on Young Ajax’s face when he painfully twisted his body, and it is what gave dash to the songs of the perky soubrette. Black-on-black minstrels used a similar approach to subvert the dominant system of racial representation by ironizing it; they made fun of their supposed lack of sophistication and emotional depth.

244    CO N C LU S I O N

Nostalgia was another element in the retreat from sentiment. The nostalgia for the plantation that minstrel shows evidenced relied for its effect on fantasy, on the irrecoverable, unreal, nature of past that it described. Its pastness was so absolute it became allegorical. In recreating what could not be recovered, nostalgia for slavery implicitly drew attention to the inauthenticity of its own reproduction. There was, to this extent, the same “awarishness” of performance in plantation nostalgia, in the spectacular presentations of simpler times, in the minstrel shows’ self-referential features, as there was in vaudeville. Audiences appear to have increasingly expected, and enjoyed, the sprightly artificiality of vaudeville and the outlandishness of minstrel shows. The weak underbelly of sentimentality, as domestic melodramas and Collier’s model artists had demonstrated in the late 1840s, was its dependence on shocking images. Antebellum artists and managers argued that frightening or arousing scenes raised the emotional temperature of a work and excited the senses. Cultured audience members were gratified by their ability to master their baser feelings and find themselves swept away by the art or emotion. But this worked better in theory than in practice, and the sensational aspects seemed to overwhelm the finer sensibilities the theatre purported to educate. Although vaudeville was built on audience fascination with the sensational, the shocking, and the unexpected, it refused to take those elements or itself seriously by making them seem actual, in the antebellum sense. Stage managers and signboards announced acts, audiences came and went during the show, and the curtain would drop down and soloists or comic pairs would perform in front of it while the next piece was being set up behind them. Vaudeville did not aim to reproduce actual life or disguise the fantasy of performance. It was completely theatrical, even to the extent of making its stage mechanics part of the show. To be successful, variety performers had to have personalities that seemed genuine and they had to communicate their enjoyment of being in front of an audience. As B. F. Keith, who would go on to run the nation’s largest chain of vaudeville theatres, insisted: “What the public likes is the artistry native to the atmosphere, congenial to the idea of variety.” The actor in the popular theatre, Keith argued, could tell no lies; they were expected to be “true to themselves and to their audience,” even to the extent of making spectators aware that they were on stage performing.14 The point here is not that artificiality drove emotion from the theatre. Feeling, popularized through sentimental music, minstrel acts, melodramas, and dime novels, became ever more pervasive as respectability spread in the decades after the war. But sentimentality as it was expressed in the postwar popular theatre operated on a different level than its antecedent had. The audiences the popular stage entertained still watched acts that made them

CO N C LU S I O N     245

gasp in surprise and spectators still shed tears or set the walls ringing with their laughter, but their expectations of what they would experience had changed. In the popular theatre of the Gilded Age, audiences reacted emotionally to signals from the stage, but performers did not try to link themselves to the public in bonds of empathy. The heart of variety, whether in its vaudeville, burlesque, or minstrel form, was dissonance, not predictability. The ethnic stock characters messed around with the stereotypes sentimentalists had once found inspiring, the soubrettes sang songs of undying love while letting the audience know that they knew they were fun or sexy, the acrobats did strip-tease acts and laughed while they risked their lives, the animals were dressed up and trained to behave like people, and African Americans specialized in grotesque humor that made fun of the images white people projected on them. Popular theatre audiences liked being surprised, and much of the novelty they enjoyed was produced by performers who disrupted their expectations instead of nourishing them.15 Although sentimentality fell out of favor with “serious” artists and intellectuals after the war, we have to remember that what its critics were partly objecting to was the democratization of entertainment and manners. Vaudeville did more than undercut sentimental aesthetics, it also created an amusement that all Americans could enjoy. The repudiation of sentimentality by the nation’s intellectual and cultural elite was as much a sign of the narrowing division in tastes as it was of the widening income divide and the frightening concentration of wealth and power in the Gilded Age. Their criticism has strongly influenced how we see sentimentality and the popular theatre, but it should not blind us to the overall contributions of either. The culture of sympathy made America a livelier, more tolerant place. Vaudeville, in turn, familiarized millions of spectators with the latest fashions, manners, dances, jokes, and songs. It disseminated new ideas about gender, nature, technology, and sex. It provided what was at once an escape from the trials of the everyday and a sourcebook for emulation. It made millions of people laugh. Variety was also an amusement which was perfectly suited to an age in which the bonds that, at least in theory, had united and stratified the compassionate society had ruptured. But the irony, novelty, self-awareness, spectacle, and chaos that popular entertainment provided went beyond challenging norms of behavior, they also placed audiences into a more objective relationship with the stage. The fracturing of the sympathetic bond between audience and actor—the development of disinterested spectatorship—changed what people came to expect from entertainment and brought the theatre into better alignment with modern times. The truth is that vaudeville was an art ideally suited to a public that no longer craved food for their feeling hearts, or culture for their hungry souls.

Notes

Introduction

 1. New Bedford Mercury, 18 December 1840.   2.  Frances Elizabeth Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: An Autobiography of an American Woman, vol. 3 (Chicago: H. J. Smith & Co., 1889), 510.  3.  “Most commonly performed” was the way the 1844 edition of Webster’s Dictionary defined “popular.” See Paul Charosh, “Popular and Classical in the MidNineteenth Century,” American Music 10, no. 2 (1992): 123.   4.  Robert M. Lewis, ed., From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2. Among the many scholars who apply a textual approach to theatre history are Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Peter Reed, Rogue ­Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (London: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).   5.  On mass entertainment as a reflection of the urban environment, see Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City:Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989); Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and David Nassaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993). On the role of elites in promoting the early theatre, see Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Jason Schaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For a later period, see Katherine Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011); John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,1982), 215–16. Lawrence Levine’s influential study Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) linked the growth of the popular theatre to the development of elite ideas of art and the subsequent fracturing of amusement into highbrow and lowbrow categories. Rosemarie Bank adopts this approach in Theatre Culture in America, 1835–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

247

248    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 4 – 9

  6.  Neal Gabler, Life on the Move: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 42; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 115; and Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 135.   7.  Richard Wrightman Fox, “The Discipline of Amusement,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William Taylor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 85.   8.  “History of the Stage: Objections to the Stage Considered and Refuted,” The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor (Philadelphia), 1 January 1810, 11.   9.  Henry Ward Beecher, Seven Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects (Indianapolis: Thomas B. Cutler, 1844), 184. 10.  On the subversive and carnivalesque, see Laurence Senelick, The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, 1825–1877 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988); Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima:Variety Theatre in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); and Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 11.  New York Herald, 8 December 1848; Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 188–89. 12.  On sentimental optimism, see Olwen Campbell, Shelley and the Unromantics (New York: Russell and Russell, 1924), 259. 13.  Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 19, 31–32, 34; David Parris, Reception Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics (Princeton, N.J.: Pickwick Publications, 2009), 168. See also Robert Holub, Reception Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984). 14.  Edgar Allan Poe, “Robert Walsh,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1984), 980. On the professionalization of criticism, see Tice Miller, Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981). 15.  Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Jonathan Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). The term middling class, as opposed to middle class, is chosen in order to describe both those who had achieved and those who aspired to a level of comfort, respectability, and security based on labor that was primarily nonmanual. In addition to owners of businesses and people in the professions, the category includes clerical workers. As every student of society knows, the middling class is a loose category because it is open on both ends. I employ it here descriptively in order to summarize contemporary observational data about audiences and their manners. 16.  Brooks McNamara, The New York Concert Saloons: The Devil’s Own Nights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima, 5–6.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 1 – 1 6     249

17.  James Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1977), 157, 163; Drew Gilpin Faust, Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Elizabeth Duquette, Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 3. 18.  The idea of a transition from absorption to attention is explored in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). Especially when discussing minstrelsy, this book deals with material that many readers will find offensive. The ways in which African Americans were presented in nineteenth-century popular culture served to justify racial oppression and created stereotypes that continue to exercise a baleful influence. This book explains why primarily white audiences enjoyed those images and how they drew emotional sustenance from them. One of the more distressing arguments of this book is that representations of black people were treated more sympathetically when the majority of African-Americans were slaves and that, for various reasons, those representations became even more disparaging after emancipation. I found the images, and this realization, as disturbing as will readers, but that did not stop me from trying to document the ways audiences experienced popular entertainment rather than indicting them for the damage their attitudes inflicted. Chapter 1. Enter Sentimentality

 1. Francis Grund, The Americans and Their Moral, Social and Political Relations (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1837), 119; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, vol. 1 (London: Whitaker, Treacher & Co., 1832), 171; Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Co. 1839), 308; Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 1 (Paris: A. and A. Galignani, 1837), 343.  2. Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in Colonial Theatre: Florelli’s Plaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 61; Vivyan Ellacott, “1748–50,” Rogues and Vagabonds: A Year by Year History of the British Theatres Since 1567, http://www. overthefootlights.co.uk/Rogues%20and%20Vagabonds.html; Glenn Hughes A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1950 (New York: Samuel French, 1951), 46–47.   3.  O. G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America (New York: C. Shirmer, 1915), 79; Karen Ahlquist, Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 1815–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 9–10; Heather Nathans, Early American Theatre, from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37–38.  4. Hugh Rankin, The Theater in Colonial America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 190; “Theatrical amusements: The Theater, in its influence upon Literature, Morals, and Religion,” Quarterly Christian Spectator (New Haven, Conn.), 1 November 1838, 61; “The Theatre,” Religious Monitor and Evangelical Repository (Philadelphia, Pa.), November 1826, 257–58.   5.  Harrold C. Shiffler, “Religious Opposition to the Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Stage,” Educational Theatre Journal 14, no. 3 (1962): 215; Odai Johnson and William Burling, The Colonial American Stage (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2001), 59–62; Hughes, A History of the American Theatre, 5; Charles Chauncy,

250    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 7 – 2 1

Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), 109. In Boston, theatres were officially prohibited until 1796; in Connecticut, they were prohibited until the 1840s.  6. Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 13; T. A. Milford, “Boston’s Theater Controversy and Liberal Notions of Advantage,” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1999): 65; Jeffrey Richards, Drama, Theatre and Identity in the American New Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 252; Tice Miller, Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 1–2; Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60–62, 147; James Dormon Jr., Theatre in the Antebellum South, 1815–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); The Broadway Belle, 10 September 1855.  7. Miller, Entertaining the Nation, 41–45, the quote is on 41. On the “types” used in comedy, see Daniel Havens, The Columbian Muse of Comedy: The Development of a Native Tradition in Early American Social Comedy, 1787–1845 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), esp. chapter 2; and Hughes, A History of the American Theatre, 23.   8.  Daniel DeWispelare, “Spectacular Speech: Performing Language in the Late Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of British Studies 51, no. 4 (2012): 858; Lisa Freeman, Character’s Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), esp. chapter 1; Joseph Roach, “The Artificial Eye: Augustan Theatre and the Empire of the Visible,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, edited by Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 134–37.   9.  Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), 16; M. Susan Anthony, Gothic Plays and American Society, 1794–1830 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2008),148; Jon W. Finson, The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in 19th-Century American Popular Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5; “Poetry,” The American Magazine 1 (October 1788): 793; Boston review from 1792 quoted in Sonneck, Early Opera in America, 140. 10.  William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 185, vi. 11.  Washington Irving, Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Vol. 2, edited by Pierre Irving (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1866), 29; Richard Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and Matinee Ladies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,” American Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1994): 378–83; “Theatres,” The New-England Galaxy, and U.S. Literary Advertiser (Boston), 8 June 1833, 2 ; “Spasmodic Confessions by a Member of the Old Park Pit,” The Literary World (New York), 20 January 1849, 51–52; “Dramatic Department,” The Boston Weekly Magazine, 31 January 1818, 66. 12.  “The Third Tier of the Park Theatre,” The New World: A Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art, and News (New York), 30 September 1843, 393–94; “The Third Row,” Zion’s Herald (Boston), 21 October 1835, 167. 13.  “The Theatre,” The Panoplist and Missionary Record (Boston), May 1812, 552; “The Theatre,” Evangelical Record, and Western Review (Lexington, Ky.), 1 August 1812, 262.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 2 2 – 2 7     251

14. Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre, 1:131–32. 15.  “Topic of the Time,” Scribner’s Monthly (May 1874), 110; “Mirabilia Exempla,” The Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1838), 129. On the star system, see Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835), 49; Tyrone Power, Impressions of America during the Years 1833, 1834 and 1835, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835), 111; and Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 8–9. 16.  William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1855), 455; The New York Mirror, 29 February 1840. 17. Irving, Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, 25; New York Herald, 5 June 1848. 18.  “The Drama,” Southern Literary Messenger (May 1841), 181; “Influence of the Theatres,” Christian Observer (Louisville, Ky.), 8 October 1840, 141; “The Theatre,” Religious Remembrancer (Philadelphia), 14 December 1822, 66. 19.  “A Walk on the Battery,” The Courier (New York), 5 August 1816, 263; Life, Journal and Correspondence of Dr. Manasseh Cutler, quoted in Harold D. Eberlein and Cortland Van Dyke Hubbard, “The American Vauxhall of the Federal Era,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 68, no. 2 (1944): 163. The final quote comes from a speech advocating the creation of a public garden in Baltimore in Southern Literary Journal (Charleston, SC) 11, no. 5 (November 1839). For the history of gardens: “The Gardens: Vauxhall Garden, Mount Vernon Garden, United States Garden,” Lady’s Monitor (New York), 10 October 1801, 79; “Summer Amusement,” The Intellectual Regale, or Ladies’ Tea Tray (Philadelphia), 8 July 1815, 540; Heath Schenker, “Pleasure Gardens, Theme Parks, and the Picturesque,” in Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations, edited by Terence Young and Robert Riley (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 69–90; untitled newspaper clipping, 22 August 1878, MWEZ + n.c. 24, 350, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL. 20.  William Bobo, Glimpses of New York City (Charleston, [S.C.]: J. J. McCarter, 1852), 155; “Description of Grey’s Gardens, Pennsylvania,” The Massachusetts Magazine, or, Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment (Boston) July 1791, 415; “A Walk on the Battery,” The Courier (New York), 5 August 1816, 263. 21.  New York Herald, 11 September 1865; Cornelius Matthews, The Career of Puffer Hopkins (New York: Wilson & Co., 1842), chapter 29. 22. Lyman Abbott, “Reminiscences: New York Seventy Years Ago,” Outlook (New York), 28 February 1914, 456; untitled newspaper clipping, 22 August 1878, MWEZ + n.c. 24,350, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; Jonathan Conlin, “Introduction,” in The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island, edited by Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 12–13. 23.  Niblo’s obituary in New York Times, 22 August 1878; and untitled newspaper clipping, 22 August 1878, MWEZ + n.c. 24,350, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL. For more on Jocko, see Amy Hughes, “White Rebels, “ ‘Ape Negroes’ and Savage Indians: The Racial Poetics of National Unity in Harry Watkin’s The Pioneer Patriot (1858),” in Enacting Nationhood: Identity, Ideology and the Theatre, 1855–1859, edited by Scott Irelan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 15–20. 24. Reminiscence in The Sun (New York), 15 August 1880; “The Public Gardens—Niblo’s,” American Musical Journal (New York), 1 October 1834, 19; R. Osgood

252    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 2 7 – 2 9

Mason, “Niblo’s Saloon and Garden,” The Theatre 20, no. 3 (1887), 411; “Fashionable Resorts,” The Ladies’ Companion: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Literature and the Fine Arts (New York), July 1834, 153; “Sketches,” The New York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, 14 June 1828. 25. “Niblo’s,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 14 May 1853, 308; Mason, “Niblo’s Saloon and Garden,” 412; William Knight Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), 115. 26.  “The Drama,” The Albion (New York), 2 July 1842, 320; “The Theatre,” The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty (New York)1, no. 18 (13 July1839), 283. 27.  “Niblo’s Garden,” The Ladies’ Companion (New York), 18, August 1837, 205; “Theatrical,” Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Gazette, 15 October 1828, 157. On burlesque’s creep into the vocabulary, see “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (New York), 8 March 1845, 20. “The word vaudeville is an application, not a fact, when connected with American theatricals,” one early chronicler pointed out, “as we have no vaudeville theatres on this continent, nor have we any vaudeville writers and composers. What passes current for comic opera in this country is the nearest approach to vaudeville we have, but not what the Parisian public know and patronize as vaudeville”; clipping of an article originally published in Chamber’s Magazine, clipping in subject file: Vaudeville and Variety, 1891–1900, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; “Bowery,” The Opera Glass, Devoted to the Fine Arts, Literature and the Drama (New York), 15 September 1828, 14. Initially, the word vaudeville was attached to the musico-comic spoofs the Ravels performed, as in the advertisement for the “comedy—Vaudeville—Rope dancing—Pantomime” act they mounted at Niblo’s in 1839; “The Ravels,” The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty (New York), 29 June 1839, 156. However, the term “vaudeville” was soon used to refer to the Ravels as a group rather than to any specific element in their act. By 1850, the Ravels were being promoted as a “vaudeville company.” 28.  On the Ravels’ touring: for Pittsburgh, Francis Courtney Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co. 1846); for New Orleans in 1845–46, Arts and Entertainment in Louisiana (Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press, 2006), 635; for Charleston, William Stanley Hoole, The Ante-Bellum Charleston Theatre (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1946), 102; for California, Katherine Preston, “The American Musical Theatre before the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, edited by William Everett and Paul Laird (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13–14. On the Ravels’ contract with Niblo’s, see “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 25 August 1838, 217. 29.  T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage: From the First Performance in 1732 to 1901, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903), 95 and 183–84, 186; George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 329. 30.  Allan McLane Hamilton, Recollections of an Alienist: Personal and Professional (New York: George H. Doran, 1916), 128. This act was not new when Hamilton saw it; the Ravels had been performing it for at least twenty years. “The New Ballet,” The Spirit of the Times, 7 November 1846, 439.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 3 0 – 3 6     253

31.  James Fields, “Then,” Harper’s Magazine 63 (June–November 1881), 393. 32.  “The Theatre,” The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty (New York), 13 July 1839, 283; “Niblo’s Garden,” The Ladies’ Companion, A Monthly Magazine (August 1837), 205; Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 14 May 1853; New York Mirror, 29 August 1829; “Stars of Niblo’s Garden,” undated newspaper clipping, MWEZ + n.c., 24, 350, clipping, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; George Templeton Strong, diary entry for 29 July 1851, quoted in Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: Reverberations, 1850–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 165. 33.  George Templeton Strong, Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 2, edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Octagon, 1974), 252. 34.  Schenker, “Pleasure Gardens, Theme Parks, and the Picturesque,” 69–89; see also Heath Schenker, Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 35.  John Potter, “The Beggar at the Door: The Rise and Fall of Portamento in Singing,” Music & Letters 87, no. 4 (November 2006): 326. 36.  Shirley Samuels, “Introduction,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4; John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education; and, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, edited by R. Grant and N. Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 91. 37. The quote is from Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 9. On medical discourse, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), chapter 2; and Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Theodore M. Brown, “From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth Century English Physiology,” Journal of the History of Biology 7, no. 2 (1974), 179–216. 38.  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 9; Locke quoted in Jerome Huyler, Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 201; John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 92. On the roots of Smith’s ideas, see Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 162–66. 39. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 324. 40.  William Dean Howells, “Puritanism in American Fiction,” in Literature and Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1902), 282. 41.  Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 23. 42.  Washington Theological Repertory 1 (August 1819), quoted in Robert Prichard, The Nature of Salvation: Theological Consensus in the Episcopalian Church, 1801–1873 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 115. 43.  Thomas Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University, 1985), 185–86.

254    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 3 6 – 3 9

44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2002), 241. On the evangelical revival, see C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985), 59–62; Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); Ruth Bloch, “Changing Conceptions of Sexuality and Romance in Eighteenth-Century America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2003): 33; and David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Mel­ville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21. 45. Abigail Adams to John Adams, 16 July 1775, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1876), 79; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 149–53. 46.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing (New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897), 66; Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chapter 4. 47.  Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 12; Harriet Beecher Stowe quoted in Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 40. 48.  Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127; John Rogers quoted in W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 111; Daniel Webster to Hervey Bingham, 26 October 1801, in Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, vol. 17, edited by Fletcher Webster (Boston: Little, Brown &  Co., 1903), 96; Arthur Schlesinger, “Learning How to Behave”: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York: Cooper Square, 1946), 25. For more Webster correspondence, see Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 79. On friendship among men, see Richard Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 93. On friendship among women, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29; Carol Lasser, “ ‘Let Us Be Sisters Forever’: The Sororal Model of Nineteenth-Century Female Friendship,” Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 158–81; Catherine Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 7. 49.  Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 10; Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). On the importance of being seen in public, see David Scobey, “Anatomy of a Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Social History 2, no. 17 (1992): 203–27. 50.  James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 84; The Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1837), quoted in David Rinnear, Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 33. The best

N OT ES TO PA G E S 3 9 – 4 3     255

study of the gentrification of middling-class culture is Bushman, The Refinement of America. 51.  Amy Schrager Lang, “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 128–42. 52.  Richard Henry Dana Sr., “Men and Books,” in Idle Man 4 (1822): 20; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, William Peden, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 155–56; Charles Francis Adams, “The Reign of King Cotton,” The Atlantic Monthly (1 April 1861), 461. The idea of slavery as emotional bondage is explored in Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies and Slaves,” American Literature 66, no. 2 (1994): 239–73. Jefferson considered slave owning morally dangerous because it demanded the “perpetual exercise in the most boisterous passions.” In the 1820s, as sentimentality’s influence in American culture grew, defenders of slavery increasingly described it as a positive institution which gave slaves a good life and improved the morals of white owners by making them caring and paternalistic. The history of southern justifications for slavery is explored in Lucy Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a powerful indictment of sympathy, see Marcus Wood, Slavery, Sympathy and Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Dana Nelson, The World in Black and White: Reading Race in American Literature, 1838–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 144. 53.  Lorien Foot, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor and Manhood in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 74. Peter Way, “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction Laborers,” Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (1993): 1397–1428; Elliott Gorn, “ ‘Goodbye Boys, I Die a True American’: Homicide, Nativism and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York,” Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (1987): 388–410; Richard Stott, Jolly Fellows, chapters 1 and 2. More skilled workers in the mid-nineteenth century distinguished themselves by their respectability, craft pride, and whiteness. See, for example, Mary Blewett, “Deference and Defiance: Labor Politics and the Meanings of Masculinity in the Mid-Nineteenth Century New England Textile Industry,” Gender and History 5, no. 3 (1993): 398–415; Gregory Kaster, “Labour’s True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877,” Gender and History 13, no. 1 (2001), 24–61; and generally, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso,1999). 54.  “Remarks on Modern Female Manners,” Gentleman’s Magazine (New York), September 1802, 846; “Article VIII,” The Southern Review 4 (November 1829): 520. Chapter 2. Laugh and Grow Fat

 1.  “Olympic Theatre,” The Anglo-American (New York), 28 December 1844, 238; “Beauties of the American Stage,” The Cosmopolitan, 14, no. 111 (January 1893): 298. For information on Taylor, see Mary Taylor file, Clippings on Persons in the Theatre, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.   2.  What differentiated farce from burlesque were mostly the sources. Burlesque was a parody based on an existing serious work (often an opera), similar to what we

256    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 4 3 – 5 0

might today call an operetta. Farce offered an original story that also contained singing, but the music was less pervasive.  3. New York Press, 25 January 1891; New York Herald, 11 December 1842.  4.  “Theatricals,” Ladies’ Companion: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Literature and Fine Art, 13 (May 1840), 47.  5. Morning Herald (New York), 30 January 1840; William Head Coleman, ed., Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans (New York: New Orleans Press, 1865), 139; New York Herald, 31 August 1842; New York Herald, 12 December 1842; The Albion (New York), 8 January 1842; “The Drama,” The Albion, 25 March 1843, 152; “The Drama,” The Albion, 18 December 1847, 612; “The Park Theatre” and “The Bowery Theatre,” The Anglo-American (New York), 6 May 1843, 46.  6. The Albion, 13 January 1849; The New York Mercantile Union Business Directory (New York: S. French and H. L. Pratt, 1850); William Knight Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), 6. I calculated the number of theatres in 1850 by counting theatres whose shows were reviewed in city newspapers.   7.  “The Drama,” The Anglo-American, 2 November 1844, 45.  8. Laurence Hutton, Plays and Players (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875), 22 and 24; Charles Selby, Satan in Paris; or, The Mysterious Stranger (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1855).  9. Selby, Satan in Paris, 16, 52, 64, 68–69. 10.  New York Evening Mirror, 22 September 1847; Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 49; New York Daily Tribune, 7 October 1843. 11.  New York Times, 3 August 1902; Theodore Watts-Dunton quoted in James Douglas, Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894), 260; George Cruikshank, The Melange: A Variety of Original Pieces in Prose and Verse (Liverpool: Egerton Smith and Co., 1841), 395. 12.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Comic,” in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 6 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903), 119. 13.  New York Herald, 19 April 1844; “Olympic Theatre,” no date, file: Theatres, New York, Olympic Theatre, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL); Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 61. 14.  Spirit of the Times (New York), 4 January 1845, quoted in David L. Rinear, The Temple of Momus: Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 123; New York Herald, 29 March 1841. 15.  Untitled article, Brother Jonathan (New York), 17 September 1842, 78; Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 25–35; Paul Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 54–55. 16.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Lectures on the Times,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion 3, no. 1 (July 1842), 7. On temperance and class, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 311–14; and Dannebaum, Drink and Disorder, 41–42. 17. Richard Stott, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 90; “English vs American Girls,” Boston

N OT ES TO PA G E S 5 1 – 5 6     257

Emancipator and Republican, 1 August 1850, 432; “Using the World as not Abusing it,” Christian Index (Philadelphia, Pa.), 28 September 1837, 620; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 22; Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 99; and Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981). On temperance and status, see Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and Monica Najar, Evangelizing the South: A Social History of Church and State in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. 18.  New York Herald, 12 December 1842. N. M. Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It (St Louis: G. I. Jones and Co., 1880), 478; James Dormon Jr., Theater in the Antebellum South, 1815–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 180. Shortly before the Bowery began offering the drink premium, the Herald observed that it “appears to be on its last legs”; New York Herald, 17 September 1842. 19. “Gossip from the Athenaeum,” Littell’s Living Age (Boston), 24 August 1844, 157. 20.  “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 6 July 1844, 228; Asa Greene, A Glance at New York (New York: A. Greene, 1837), 216–17; Cornelius Matthews, The Career of Puffer Hopkins (New York: Appleton & Co., 1849), chapter 29; New York Herald, 24 March 1856, quoted in Heath Schenker, “Pleasure Gardens, Theme Parks, and the Picturesque,” in Theme Park Landscapes, edited by Terence Young and Robert Riley (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2002), 81. 21.  Max Maretzek, Crotchets and Quavers: Revelations of an Opera Manager in America (New York: Burroughs’ Steam Press, 1855), 201–2. 22.  “Prospects of the Drama,” Broadway Journal (New York), 5 April 1845, 219; “Mitchell’s Olympic,” no date (ca. 1875), file: Theatres, New York: Olympic Theatre, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; Hutton, Plays and Players, 19. 23.  “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 4 June 1842, 168; “The Southern Stage,” Dramatic Mirror and Literary Companion (New York and Philadelphia), 15 January 1842, 177. 24.  “Popular Amusements in New York,” National Era (Washington), 15 April 1847, 3. 25. Mary Taylor file, Clippings on Persons in the Theatre, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass., obituary in Boston Transcript, 10 November 1866; Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 39–40; The Albion, 9 November 1844. 26. Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 90–112. 27.  “Popular Amusements in New York,” National Era, 15 April 1847, 3; Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 152; Brown, A History of the New York Stage, 301; New York Herald, 10 December 1843. The Chatham was not the Chatham Garden Theatre that Frances Trollope famously described in 1831: the Chatham Garden was a mainstream playhouse that was converted into a Presbyterian church in 1832, while the Chatham Theatre opened in 1839. 28.  “Things Theatrical”. Spirit of the Times (New York), 11 March 1848, 36; Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 92; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 1 February 1845, quoted in Rinear, Temple of Momus, 125–26.

258    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 5 7 – 5 8

29.  The key works on minstrelsy are Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William Mahar Jr., Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990); and W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Lott introduced the idea that minstrelsy was an ambivalent form where conflicts in white society were contested, not resolved. Rogin argued that blackface served as a vehicle for assimilation and acceptance. Mahar is concerned largely with its comic manifestations and with showing that it was about much more than racial ridicule. Mahar, Lott, and Gilmore link the representation of race to the process of imagining and representing masculinity. There is considerable debate over the audience for minstrelsy. Saxton sees it as a working-class entertainment that “propagandized metaphorically the alliance of urban working people with the planter interests of the South” (165); Cockrell accepts this view. Lott, who sees blackface as setting the pattern for future expressions of popular culture, such as rock ’n roll, similarly sees it as bubbling up from below. Mahar is not so sure. On minstrelsy as racial appropriation and displacement of sexual anxiety, see Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 45–59; and Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 244–301. 30. “The Anti-Slavery Movement: Extracts from a Lecture Before Various Anti-Slavery Bodies, in the Winter of 1855,” in Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), 364. See also Mark Neely Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 110–12. 31.  David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 63. This paragraph also draws upon Peter Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 63; Paul Weibaum, Mobs and Demagogues: The New York Response to Collective Violence in the Early Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979); Michael Feldberg, Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Carl Prince, “The Great Riot Year: Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 1 (1985): 1–19; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), chapter 13; Donald Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 213. 32.  Saxton makes a clear connection between minstrelsy and support for slavery in The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, chapter 7. “Freedom of Speech,” The Plaindealer (New York), 4 February 1837, 148; untitled report on New York riot, The Man (New York), 16 July 1834, 202. On Dixon, see Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 98–140. On Dixon before minstrelsy, see Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (Portsmouth, N.H.), 4 April 1835. See Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, Va.), 29 September 1835, for Dixon’s attack with his cane.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 5 9 – 6 3     259

33.  Macon Weekly Telegraph (Macon, Ga.), 31 July 1833; Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, Va.), 2 February 1838 also attacked Rice’s abolitionism. On Rice’s defense of the “negro” origins of his song, see New Orleans Picayune, 7 May; Nashville Banner and Nashville Whig, 1 May 1834; and Nashville Banner and Nashville Whig, 23 November 1836. 34.  For minstrelsy’s antecedents in pantomime and theatre, see Jeffrey Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 10; and “Nigger Minstrelsy in England,” Dwight’s Journal of Music (New York), 29 June 1861, 99. 35.  New York Tribune, 30 June 1865; Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 29–30, Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 64–65. 36.  Bridgeport Recorder (Conn.), 9 January 1836; “The Drama,” The Knickerbocker 11 (1 January 1838), 85; Nashville Banner and Nashville Whig, 1 May 1834. 37.  Lisa Keller, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 38.  “Records of a Stage Veteran,” The Albion: A Journal of News, Politics and Literature (New York), 7 January 1837, 4; “Coal Black Rose,” The American Musical Journal (New York) 1, no. 5 (April 1835), 111; “English Summary,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 14 January 1837. 39.  “George Washington Dixon,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (Portsmouth, N.H.), 15 July 1837; Untitled, Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Portfolio, 16 March 1833, 85, New York Musical Review and Choral Advocate (7 December 1854), 892. 40.  An advertisement for what was described as the first appearance of the Virginia Minstrels on 6 February 1843 was reprinted in New York Clipper on 4 November 1876 and their Amphitheatre performance was reviewed in the New York Herald on 9 February 1843. On the gentility of the Amphitheatre, see “Reviews,” The Knickerbocker 15, no. 2 (February 1840), 173. Auburn Journal and Advertiser (Auburn, N.Y.), 10 July 1842, referred to the Virginia Minstrels’ performance at the Amphitheatre in the winter. The Amphitheatre was sufficiently genteel to serve as a venue for a temperance meeting the weekend the Virginia Minstrels left. When the Virginia Minstrels went to Boston in March 1843, the Chatham advertised another group that called themselves the Virginia Minstrels; that group soon changed their name to the Kentucky Minstrels. 41.  “Popular Amusements in NewYork,” National Era ( Washington),15 April 1847, 3; Vincennes Gazette (Vincennes, Ind.), 28 March 1868; Weekly Vincennes Western Sun (Vincennes, Ind.), 15 November 1862; Columbus Daily Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), 27 September 1878. 42.  New York Herald, 28 May 1845; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 10 May 1845, 148; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 16 October 1847; “Town Amusements: The Ethiopian Music,” Broadway Journal, 12 July 1845, 13; New York Clipper, 4 November 1876; On Palmo’s, see Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes (Philadelphia: Parmelee & Co. 1870), 551 and “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 19 October 1844, 408. 43. Thomas Harwood, “British Evangelical Abolitionism and American Churches in the 1830s,” Journal of Southern History 28, no. 3 (1962): 305; Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

260    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 6 3 – 7 0

44.  Recollections of Christy’s publicist in New York Clipper, 25 March 1882; New York Tribune, 29 June 1855; The New York Clipper, 24 June 1854. 45.  Emmet’s recollection in Laurence Hutton, “The Negro on the Stage,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (June 1889): 142. 46.  Henry Dickinson Stone, Personal Recollections of the Drama (Albany: C. van Benthuysen & Sons, 1873), 241; New York Herald, 9 January 1848. New York Clipper, 21 February 1857; Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 114. 47.  John Flavel Mines, A Tour around New York and My Summer Acre (New York, Harper & Bros. 1893), 69–70. Campbell’s Minstrels Playbill, 25 June 1851, Series II, Box 2, American Minstrel Show Collection, 1823–1947, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library specifies that “Front Seats are reserved for the accommodation of Ladies and Children” as early as 1851. Seating women in the parterre may have become common practice, as one reporter observed a large number of women in the orchestra chairs of Charley White’s Minstrel Show at 472 Broadway; see New York Clipper, 7 July 1866. 48.  New York Herald, 25 December 1863; Sunday Telegraph (New York), 11 May 1902. 49.  Harry James Smith, “The Melodrama,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1907): 321. On the omnipotent spectator, see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 81–82. 50.  George Wakeman, “Popular Songs,” The Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading 5, no. 2 (February 1868), 162. On banjo technique, see Frank B. Converse, Analytic Banjo Method (New York: Hamilton S. Gordon, 1886), 17–18. 51.  New York Herald, 13 July 1863. 52.  “Programme of the grand concert, by Christy's original and far famed band of Ethiopian minstrels, 8 April 1846,” American Antiquarian Society, American broadsides and ephemera (online collection). Series 1. 53.  New York Herald, 17 September 1845; sampled from: Christy’s Minstrels Playbills, Series II, Box 4 (Cha-Co), American Minstrel Show Collection, 1823–1947, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 54.  “Sentimental Songs of Long Ago,” Inter Ocean (Chicago), 14 April 1907, 36. 55. Stephen Foster to E. P. Christy, 25 May 1852, quoted in Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 183. 56.  Stephen C. Foster, “My Old Kentucky Home” (New York: Firth, Pond & Co., 1853), American Sheet Music Collection, 1830–1870, AM2, NYPL. 57.  The erasure theory has been recently advanced as an alternative to the new minstrelsy studies that Eric Lott spearheaded. See Stephanie Dunson, “Black Misrepresentations in Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music Illustrations,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 45–65; and Barbara Lewis, “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Daddy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, edited by Annemarie Bean, James Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 257–74. Paul Gilmore, however, convincingly argues that race was crucial to minstrelsy’s cultural work; Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), chapter 1.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 7 1 – 7 7     261

58.  John Wilson, The Recreations of Christopher North, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1842), 213; Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, 13 June 1835; newspaper clippings, letter to editor by Herbert Renton, dated 22 March ?, MWEZ +++ n.c. 4529, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; New York Herald, 25 December 1863. For insight into how writers in the mid-nineteenth century viewed the black mask, see Frances Colburn Adams, Uncle Tom at Home: A Review of the Reviewers (Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1853), 94. 59.  The Sun (New York), 24 April 1897; George Christy, “Teaching Elocution,” in Christy’s and Whites Ethiopian Melodies (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Bros., 1854), 90. 60.  The Sun (New York), 24 April 1897. 61.  “The Death of Juney,” in Pop Goes the Weasel Songster (Philadelphia: Fisher and Brother, c.1855), 168–69. 62.  Unlike variety shows and farces, which generally showcased their female actors, antebellum minstrel troupes were all male. Many cultural critics, I believe incorrectly, interpret male cross-dressing as evidence of minstrelsy’s transgressive nature. While it is true that the cross-dressed “wench” or “yaller girl” was a comic staple, one needs to remember that the alternative—the inclusion of white women painted black—would be far less palatable to genteel spectators. Annemarie Bean, “Transgressing the Gender Divide: The Female Impersonator in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, edited by Annemarie Bean, James Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 245–56 presents cross-dressing as a way of challenging gender norms. Eric Lott, “White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 474–95 argues that cross-dressing expressed the homoerotic desire of white men for black men. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 311–16 presents cross-dressing as a way for male performers to “ridicule the sentimentality of the age.” 63.  New York Clipper, 30 January 1864. Chapter 3. Looking Through

  1.  Cornelius Matthews, The Career of Puffer Hopkins (New York: Wilson & Co., 1842), Ch. 29.   2.  Thomas Picton suggests that Barnum “hermetically sealed the doors of the Vauxhall as a place of polite resort” when he sponsored the dance competitions: see Fun and Fancy Free in Old New York: Reminiscences of a Man About Town, edited by William Stout (New York: Clipper Studies in the Theatre, 2007). 32. T. Alston Brown, History of the New York Stage, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1902), 236–37 says a re-match was held at the Bowery Amphitheatre in 1844, though it might have involved a different dancer named John Diamond.   3.  On Barnum’s move from the Vauxhall to the American Museum: The Sun (New York), 8 April 1891; for Bowery advertising: Joel Benton, A Unique Story of a Marvelous Career: A Life of Phineas T. Barnum (New York: Edgewood Publishing Co., 1891), 104–5, for Barnum’s employment of Mary Taylor, Phineas Taylor Barnum, Life of P. T. Barnum by Himself (London: Sampson, Low & Co., 1855), 52; see also:

262    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 7 7 – 8 4

Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 643–44.   4.  Untitled newspaper clipping, Illustrated News, 5 March 1852, and advertisement dated 25 April 1853, MWEZ + n.c. 9542, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; William Knight Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), 166.   5.  Taylor quoted in Henry Dickinson Stone, Personal Recollections of the Drama, or Theatrical Reminiscences (Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen & Sons, 1873), 232–35.  6. Boston Transcript quoted in The New York Mirror, 11 April 1840.   7.  “Reason, Rhyme and Rhythm – The Infinite,” Continental Monthly, July 1863, 20. Few critics have taken sentimental aesthetics seriously, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon recently observed: “In the critical tradition of American letters, placing sentimentalism and aesthetics together constitutes something of an oxymoron.” See “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004): 495.   8.  John Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); John Ruskin, Modern Painters (New York: John Wiley, 1879), 46.  9. Henry S. Thompson, “Annie Lisle” (Boston: Oliver Ditson Co., 1857), American Sheet Music Collection, 1830–1870, AM2, NYPL. 10.  Recollection in clipping from the Boston Globe, 1 October 1906, American Minstrel Show Collection, Minstrels and Minstrelsy, Clippings Concerning Minstrelsy, folder 2.Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 11.  Illinois State Democrat, 10 October 1860; David Hume quoted in “Delicacy of Taste,” The Crayon (New York), September 1845, 273; Newell Dunbar, “Our Theatre,” Outing: An illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation 7 (January 1886). 12.  “Barnum’s Museum,” The Huntress (Washington, D.C.), 20 April 1850, 1. 13.  New York Herald, 7 September 1845; New York Times, 30 September 1879. 14.  Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1940), 31–35. 15.  “Scenes from Alladin,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 3 January 1857, 4; McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum, 31–35; “Theatricals in Boston,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 585, 7 February 1846. 16.  Charles Cummings, “Moses Kimball,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Boston), October 1902, 335–38; “Moses Kimball,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 29 March 1856, 10 and 13. 17.  “Report of the Curator,” in Annual Meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, in Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, vol. 26 (Boston: Society Printers, 1895), 275; “Moses Kimball,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 29 March 1856, 10; William Clapp Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage (Cambridge: Allen and Parkman, 1853), 472. 18.  “New York Theatres,” United States Magazine of Science, Art, Manufactures, Agriculture, Commerce and Trade, 1 (1854): 23. David Rinear suggests that William Burton may have been the first to offer high-priced orchestra chairs at his New Theatre in Philadelphia; see Stage, Page, Scandals and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 57, 246. McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum, 24. Daily Evening Examiner (Boston, Mass.), 2 September 1843.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 8 4 – 8 8     263

19.  Walt Whitman, “The Old Bowery,” in November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888), 88, 90; Charles Burnham, “The Old Bowery Theatre,” Theatre Magazine 27, no. 2 (1918): 162, 160. For additional insight into Bowery audiences: New York Herald, 11 December 1842. 20.  Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967), xiv; Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3. David Grimsted offers a similar definition based on plot devices and characters; see Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 204–48. 21.  “The Specter King, and His Phantom Steed,” The New York Mirror, A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, 7 February 1835, 279; “The Bowery,” The Opera Glass, Devoted to the Fine Arts, Literature and the Drama (New York), 29 September 1828, 31; On Blue-Beard, see Heather Anne Wozniak, “Brilliant Gloom: The Contradictions of the British Gothic Drama, 1768–1823” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2008), chapter 3; On the Robbers: see “The Drama,” The Anglo-American: A  Journal of Literature, News, Politics, the Drama, Fine Arts, Etc. (New York), 23 August 1845; “Marie: The Bandit’s Daughter,” American Monthly Magazine 4, no. 5 (1 February 1835). 22.  John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 113, 119–20; Geoffrey Proehl, Coming Home Again: American Family Drama and the Figure of the Prodigal (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997), 42–43; Jeffrey Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Judith McArthur, “Demon Rum on the Boards: Temperance Melodrama and the Tradition of Antebellum Reform,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 4 (1989): 517–40; Mark Mullen, “Sympathetic Vibrations: The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 1999). 23.  Davis quoted in David Reynolds, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 178; John W. Frick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 60–62. 24.  Tom Taylor, Still Waters Run Deep (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1855), 3–5, 10, 26, 48–51. The play was performed in several cities, including New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Washington before the war and in Augusta, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee, during it. See Thomas Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1792 to 1901, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903), 73; Spirit of the Times (New York), 13 October 1855; Cleveland Morning Leader, 22 February 1862; Daily National Republican (Washington, D.C.), 29 September 1863; Thomas Conn Bryan, Confederate Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1953), 189; and Daily Nashville Patriot, 22 November 1861. 25.  New York Morning Courier, 1 October 1855; New York Tribune, 28 September 1855; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 29 September 1855, 396; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, 20 October 1855, 432. 26.  Daily Evening Transcript (Boston, Mass.), 26 November 1849. 27. “Drama,” The Albion: A Journal of News, Politics and Literature (New York), 8 March 1851, 116.

264    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 8 9 – 9 8

28. McGlinchee, The First Decade of the Boston Museum, 120–26. 29.  The Unknown Public,” Littell’s Living Age (New York), 752 (23 October 1858), 312. 30.  George Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Notebook (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1860), 195; Winter in the New York Tribune, 19 February 1876. 31.  “Theatrical Pathfinder,” The Pathfinder, 15 April 1843, 120; Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes (Philadelphia: Parmelee & Co., 1870), 460–63, my italics. 32.  “The Drama,” Brother Jonathan (New York), 30 September 1843, 130. 33.  The Knickerbocker, 28 August 1846. 34.  De Grachia, “Our Theatre,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 13 June 1846, 181. 35.  “Mr. Macready’s Farewell Engagement,” The Albion: A  Journal of News, Politics and Literature (New York), 21 September 1844; 456; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 4 October 1856, 408. 36.  N. A. Shenstone, Anecdotes of Henry Ward Beecher (Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Sons, 1887), 160; Logan, Before the Footlights, 460. William Winter, Life and Art of Edwin Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 252. 37.  Laurence Hutton, Plays and Players (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875), 34; “Drama,” The Albion: A  Journal of News, Politics and Literature (New York), 8 March 1851, 116; Bob Lively, “A Screed from Boston,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 17 September 1853, 362; “Letter from Acorn,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 6 September 1856, 349. 38.  Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 10 November 1855. 39. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 241. The Theatre, 2 May 1887; Northern Christian Advocate (Auburn, N.Y.), 15 December 1850; Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (Boston), 29 March 1856. 40.  Karen Ahlquist, Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 1815–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997), 134–40. 41.  “Municipal Government,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 25, no. 82 (June 1849): 498. For the Astor Place riot, see H. M. Ranney, Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the Astor Place Opera House (New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849); and Richard Moody, Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958). 42.  Christian Watchman and Reflector (Boston), 21 September 1854. 43.  “Field’s Varieties Theatre – Major Wright’s Address,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 6 September 1851, 338. 44.  The Knickerbocker, August 1846; T. De Witt Talmage, Sports that Kill (Wakefield: William Nicholson and Sons, 1875), 22–30; and Henry Ward Beecher, Popular Amusements (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus and Co., 1896). 45.  Amy Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theatre and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 66. On the delirium tremens scene, see Rahill, The World of Melodrama, 240–46; and James Cherry, “Melodrama, Parody and the Transformation of an American Genre” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2005), 150–54. 46.  Edgar Allan Poe wrote up the story of electrifying the dead as “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar,” The Broadway Journal, 27 December 1845. Coll­ yer also engaged in experimental surgery; see Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 3 March 1847 and 31 March 1847. For more on the doctor, see “Robert Hanham

N OT ES TO PA G E S 9 9 – 1 0 1     265

Collyer Chronology,” Geoff ’s Genealogy, accessed 22 August 2015, http://www. geoffsgenealogy.co.uk/collyer/robert-hanham-collyer-chronology. 47.  “Strictest accuracy” in New York Herald, 27 January 1848; “Before seeing it” in New York Herald, 24 September 1847; “finished perfection” in The Anglo American (New York), 6 November 1847, 68;”chaste, though living” in “Model Artists,” Harbinger, Devoted to Social and Political Progress (New York), 6:22 (1 April 1848), 171“Advertisement: Dr.  Collyer’s Model Impersonations,” Spirit of the Times (New York), 25 September 1847 for brass band and pedestal. 48.  Spirit of the Times, 25 September 1847; “Progress of Refinement,” The John-Donkey (New York), 25 March 1848, 200; The Knickerbocker 13, no. 3 (March 1839). The tableau vivant, or living picture, was a fashionable parlor game, similar to charades and pantomimes, that had been imported from Europe in the 1830s. In its domestic form, it involved individuals “posing” for several minutes in immobile representations of familiar art works, episodes in history or literature, or mythological or symbolic scene. On parlor entertainments, see Karen Halttunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), chapter 6; Robert Lewis, “Tableaux Vivants: Parlor Theatricals in Victorian America,” Revue Française D’Etudes Americaines 36 (April 1888): 280–91; and Melanie Dawson, Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 49.  New York Herald, 5 April 1848; Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 9 January 1848; “Model Artists,” The Elephant (New York), 12 February 1848, 27; advertisement in New York Herald, 28 December 1847; advertisement in New York Herald, 20 October 1847. 50.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave,” in Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. 1 (New York: James Miller, 1874), 245–46. For modern interpretations of the sculpture, see Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth Century Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 46–72; and Richard Wunder, Hiram Powers:Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873, vol. 2 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989, 1991), 242–47. Wunder documents the tour in volume 1, 207–74, and volume 2, 157–77. 51.  “The Greek Slave,” The Golden Rule (Boston), 20 November 1847, 224; New York Herald, 3 February 1848. The unfortunate young man was James Perkins; see Perkins, Memoirs and Writings, vol. 1 (Boston: Stephen Perkins, 1850), 251. 52.  Walt Whitman, “Model Artists,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, 6 March 1848, reprinted in Emory Halloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1927), 191–92; New York Herald, 3 February 1848; The Cincinnati Herald, 15 March 1848. For more insight into Matthews’s background, see Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, Book 32 (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyers’ Co-operative Publishing Company, 1889), 1091. 53.  “Denuded to the middle” in “Progress of Refinement,” The John-Donkey (New York), 25 March 1848, 200; Macon Weekly Telegraph, 7 March 1848; New York Herald, 11 February 1848; New York Herald, 31 January 1848. 54.  New York Herald, 3 July 1848; New York Herald, 3 February 1848; on the progress of the tour: New York Herald, 17 March 1848; Southern Patriot, 26 April 1848; New York Herald, 6 May 1848; North American and United States Gazette, 30 May 1848;

266    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 0 3 – 1 1 0

on the riot in Mobile: Cleveland Herald, 10 May 1848; Cleveland Herald, 23 August 1848; Boston Daily Atlas, 31 August 1848; Boston Daily Atlas, 5 September 1848; New York Herald, 14 September 1848. 55.  New York Herald, 24 February 1848; on Palmo’s show: New York Herald, 8 February 1848; on other shows in the city: New York Herald, 23 March 1848; New York Herald, 18 March 1848. 56.  New York Herald, 27 January 1848 and New York Herald, 3 February 1848. 57.  New York Herald, 27 January 1848; New York Herald, 12 February 1848; New York Herald, 5 March 1848; New York Herald, 20 February 1848. 58.  “Weather grows colder,” New York Herald, 27 January 1848; “species of amusement,” and “more vulgar,” New York Herald, 1 March 1848; “naked Negroes,” New York Herald, 5 March 1848; for more on the grand jury: New York Herald, 12 February 1848; New York Herald, 20 February 1848. “Nude” tableaux survived through the 1850s. The Temple of the Muses show moved to the Franklin Theatre on Chatham Street, where it deteriorated along with the neighborhood. Under George Lea’s management, it became a notorious exhibition featuring dozens of women posing in fourteen revealing tableaux. In 1857, Lea was charged with running a disorderly house; see New York Herald, 17 October 1859. The most complete discussion of Lea’s career can be found in Gillian M. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theatre in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 20–27. 59.  Frederick Schauer, The Law of Obscenity (Washington: The Bureau of National Affairs, 1976), 8–10; Dwight Armory Mayo, Graces and Powers of the Christian Life (Boston: Abel Tompkins, 1852), 31. 60.  New York Herald, 4 March 1848. 61.  New York Herald, 23 March 1848. One has to be cautious when dealing with press reports of nudity, even in these cheap “grog shop” shows. A few weeks after the Eagle Hotel incident, a place on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia was raided and the girls were caught “reposing in lascivious attitudes” upon a revolving pedestal. They were reportedly “cased in flesh-colored silk netting, tight to the person, without any superfluous drapery,” but the newspaper still referred to them as nude; New York Herald, 5 April 1848. 62.  Washington correspondent, 7 February 1848 in Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 20 February 1848; “Model Artists,” The Elephant (New York), 12 February 1848. 63. Horace Binney Wallace, Art and Scenery in Europe (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1857), 401; William Bacon, Aesthetic Piety, or the Beauty and Loveliness of the Christian Religion (Auburn, [N.Y.]: n.p., 1861), 145; Gardiner Spring, The Power of the Pulpit (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848), 444–45. Spring’s church became the center of resistance to the living picture shows, and one of his parishioners, Shepherd Knapp, organized the petition that led to the police crackdown in New York. 64. Talmage, Sports that Kill, 19, 25. Chapter 4. The Democratization of Entertainment

  1.  For the Hyperion: New York Herald, 27 October 1840.   2.  On Fox & Curran’s: New York Clipper, 10 June 1860; New York Times, 16 November 1860; on Maripello’s: New York Herald, 30 June 1841; on Dodsworth:

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 1 1 – 1 1 4     267

George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 596–97; and George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); Frank J. Cipolla, “Dodworth,” in New Grove Dictionary of American Music, vol. 4, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan Press, 1986).   3.  Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 82–84. For population statistics for New York City, see Department of State, Compendium of the Evaluation of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States (Washington: Thomas Allen, 1841).   4.  Even Natchez, Mississippi had two German beer saloons by 1850: Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazetteer, 17 April 1850. For more on German saloons: John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater, New York, 1840–1940 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 82–83 and Wilhelm Marr, Reise nach Central-Amerika, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Otto Meisner, 1863), 97.  5. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 11 October 1856; Daily Cleveland Herald, 26 August 1856. Because beer was judged non-intoxicating, it could be sold on Sundays. On the Staats case: New York Times, 6 February 1856; and on Sunday observance laws: “Sunday Theatres, Sacred Concerts and Gambling Saloons,” in New York Sabbath Committee, The First Five Years of the Sabbath Reform, 1857–62 (New York: Edward Jenkins, 1862), 21; King Lager: Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 7:67.   6.  For information on waiter girls in German beer gardens: Nathanael Greene, “The Saloon, the Alehouse, the Camp, and the Domestic Circle,” Home Journal (New York), 17 November 1849, 1. The first evidence I’ve located for the hiring of women to wait on tables was an advertisement for the Arcade Saloon on Grand Street; see New York Herald, 5 September 1856. Two years later, Hitchcock’s concert saloon ran a want ad for women to wait on tables; see New York Herald, 3 December 1858.  7. The Weekly Raleigh Register of 2 September 1854 tellingly deplored the fact that men expectorated in concert saloons even when in the company of ladies, evidence that even smaller cities concert saloons still drew female customers in the 1850s. See William Slout, ed., Broadway below the Sidewalk: Concert Saloons of Old New York (New York: Borgo Press, 2009), 61.  8. New York Times, 3 December 1858; Parker Zellers, “The Cradle of Variety: The Concert Saloon,” Educational Theatre Journal 20, no. 4 (1968): 579; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 13 November 1858. See also Alan Gevinson, “The Origins of Vaudeville: Aesthetic Power, Disquietude and Cosmopolitanism in the Quest for an American Music Hall (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2007), 53.  9. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 20 November 1858; “Concert Saloon Evil,” The Congregationalist (Boston), 12 November 1858, 651. 10.  New York Herald, 23 December 1856; New York Herald, 11 May 1857; playbill for the Santa Claus, American Vaudeville Collection, American vaudeville playbills and programs: by town: New York City, New York. By theater, A-L, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, Repercussions, 1857–1862 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 189–90. New York Herald, 8 March 1858; advertisement for the Santa Claus, 5 October 1858. 11.  Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), 6 July 1883.

268    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 1 4 – 1 1 9

12. L’Arche de Noé: Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 March 1883; Garden Theatre: Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 April 1888; McDaniel’s: Titusville Herald (Titusville, Pa.), 5 September 1879. 13.  Robert Goldthwaite Carter, “Four Brothers in Blue,” Maine Bugle 4, no. 1 (January 1897), 40; Daily Alta California (San Francisco), 17 December 1862. 14.  New York Herald, 3 September 1900; National Republican (Washington, DC), 20 November 1861. 15.  Washington Post, 7 May 1905; Washington Post, 3 January 1909; on Lincoln’s visits to the Canterbury: Lawrence Gobright, Recollections of Men and Things at Washington (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1869), 319, and William Sinn, “A Theatrical Manager’s Reminiscences,” in Lincoln in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle, edited by Harold Bush (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 135. For more on Sinn, see Brooklyn Eagle, 11 November 1888, New York Clipper, 20 November 1863, and Washington Post, 7 May 1905. 16.  Soldiers quote: Slout, Broadway below the Sidewalk, 91; New York Times, 12 December 1861. Occupations recorded in the New York Clipper series on concert saloons reprinted in Slout, Broadway below the Sidewalk, 5, 10–11, 26, 44–45, 52, 57–58, 93. 17.  “The Upper and Lower Ten Thousand,” in Pastor’s Comic Irish Songster (published in 1862), reprinted in Tony Pastor, Tony Pastor’s Complete Budget of Comic Songs (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1864). 18.  “Parody on When This Cruel War Is Over,” in Pastor’s New Comic Irish Songster (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1863). 19.  New York Tribune, 3 September 1893; “Hoop De-Dooden-Doo,” Vanity Fair (New York), 12 October 1861, 177; Niblo’s Zouaves: untitled newspaper clipping from Chambers’s Journal, 14 March 1891, Arranged Series of Ephemera, Clippings on Theatrical Subjects: Vaudeville and Variety, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. Wallace P. Reed, History of Atlanta (Syracuse: D. Mason & Co., 1889), 198; for more on patriotism and popular entertainment: Mark Neely Jr., The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 122. 20.  New York Times, 29 April 1866; Montana Post (Helena), 14 April 1866; Montana Post, 28 March 1868; Montana Post, 20 August 1869; Eugene Bristow, “Looking Out for Saturday Night: A Social History of Professional Variety Theatre in Memphis” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1956), 49–50; Decatur Eagle (Decatur, Ind.), 27 August 1869; Titusville Herald (Titusville, Pa.), 14 February 1867; Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), 7 July 1886. 21.  Montana Post (Helena), 28 March 1868; Montana Post, 6 June 1868; Titusville Herald (Titusville, Pa.), 5 September 1878; Mrs. Frank Leslie, California: A Pleasure Trip from Gotham to the Golden Gate, April, May, June, 1877 (New York: G. W. Carle­ ton & Co., 1877), 45. 22.  David Bowser, “Jack Harris’s Vaudeville and San Antonio’s Fatal Corner,” in Legendary Watering Holes: The Saloons that Made Texas Famous, edited by Richard Selcer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 62; Leslie, California: A Pleasure Trip, 50; “Wickedest Town in America,”Gleason’s Monthly Companion 6, no. 8 (August1877): 342; Daily Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), 24 July 1868; John Jennings, Theatrical and Circus Life, or Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena (St Louis: Sun Publishing, 1882), 415.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 1 9 – 1 2 2     269

23.  Black Hills Daily Times, 22 July 1878, quoted in Robert Lee, Fort Meade and the Black Hills (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 26; Black Hills Daily Pioneer (Deadwood City, Dakota Territory), 16 November 1880; Omaha Daily Bee (Omaha, Neb.), 3 May 1877. 24.  For a description of the Gem: Black Hills Daily Pioneer, 3 May 1877; the quote is from: Linus Pierpont Brockett, Our Western Empire (San Francisco: William Garretson & Co., 1882), 772. For the new Gem: Black Hills Daily Pioneer (Deadwood City, Dakota Territory), 28 December 1879 and Estelline Bennett, “The Mining Camp Theatre,” in The Green Book Magazine 2, no. 3 (February 1910): 314. For a popular account of Swearengen and the Gem that provides background on the Deadwood television series, see John Ams, The Real Deadwood (New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2004), chapter 2. 25.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 April 1883; Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 March 1883; Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 May 1883; New York Times, 3 December 1868. 26.  New Orleans Picayune, 16 December 1874. Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York: Avalon, 2003), 319–24; Macon Telegraph (Macon, Ga.), 11 June 1880; for Clark St. saloon: Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 April 1875. On the Boston Saloon in Virginia City, see Kelly Dixon, Boomtown Saloons: Archeology and History in Virginia City (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005). 27.  New York Times, 29 November 1852. For more on the popularity of the Almack with city officials: “Disgraceful Scene Among the City Fathers,” The Subterranean (New York), 24 May 1845, 8 and “The Horrible Effects of Rum,” The Subterranean, 29 August 1846, 2. 28.  “The Five Points,” Harbinger: Devoted to Social and Political Progress (New York), 2 December 1848, 35; for a portrait of Pete Williams: George Foster, New York by Gaslight: with Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850), 77; on Williams’ death: New York Herald, 2 December 1848. The appalled Southerner who visited the bar was William Bobo, Glimpses of New York City (Charleston: J. J. McCarter, 1852), 96. 29.  Theodore Cutler, “A  Night with Newman Hall Underground,” Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal (Boston), 14 November 1867, 1; Evening Telegram (New York), 29 November 1869. On Harry Hill’s, see Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850–1950 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 50–53; Jennings, Theatrical and Circus Life, 393–94; and James Dabney McCabe, Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers & Co., 1868), 415–19. On Theodore Allern, see James William Buell, Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities (St. Louis: Historical Publishing Co., 1883), 54. 30. Jennings, Theatrical and Circus Life, 397. On clerks and entertainment: Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 106; for the growth in the clerical workforce: David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011), 385 and Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 126–27. For information on clerical workers in different cities: Jerome Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 17; Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271.

270    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 2 3 – 1 2 6

31.  The Daily Telegraph (Monroe, La.), 28 December 1870; Every Saturday (Ottawa), 30 March 1867; American Architect and Architecture (New York), 11 November 1882, 451; New York Times, 24 December 1874; Evening World (New York), 7 January 1885. 32.  New York Herald, 15 June 1867. 33.  Montana Post (Helena), 14 April 1866; quote on wine consumption: First Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners, Appendix to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the Twenty-Fourth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, vol. 2 (Sacramento: State Printing, 1881), 126; New York Herald, 11 May 1866; Sherry Monahan, Tombstone’s Treasures: Silver Mines and Golden Saloons (University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 68; Anaconda Standard, 10 January 1897, quoted in Players: Con Men, Hustlers, Gamblers and Scam Artists, edited by Stephen Hyde and Geno Zanetti (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2002), 147; “Wickedest Town in America,” Gleason’s Monthly Companion 6, no. 8 (August1877), 542–43; Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 64–65; Bowser, “Jack Harris’s Vaudeville,” 70; The records of the Cheyenne Club in Wyoming also reveal the popularity of champagne and claret among the cattle barons; see T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 204. For the use of the term “wine room,” see “Editorial Notes,” The Bachelor of Arts 6, no. 4 (1898), 632. 34.  Thomas Warren, Dust and Foam: or, Three Oceans and Two Continents (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859), 319. Hollywood films made famous the American practice of having customers serve themselves in the form of the bottle of whisky and a shot glass placed before the cowboy. Intriguingly, archeological evidence from Virginia City, Nevada suggests that some frontier saloons served drinks in good-quality crystal decanters and stemware. See Dixon, Boomtown Saloons, 60. 35.  George Ellington, The Women of New York; or, the Under-World of the Great City (Burlington: A. Root and Smith, 1869), 461; New York Times, 28 November 1865. 36.  “The ‘Reveille,” New York Clipper, 9 April 1864, reprinted in Slout, Broadway below the Sidewalk, quote on 58. 37.  The New York Times, 28 November 1865; M. M. Pomeroy, Brick-Dust: A Remedy for the Blues and a Something for People to Talk About (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co. 1871), 221. 38.  Lawrence Daily Journal (Lawrence, KS), 27 June 1886; Titusville Herald (Titusville, Pa.), 5 September 1879; Black Hills Daily Pioneer (Lead, S.D.), 10 April 1877; Noel, The City and Saloon, 23, 109–10; on Maguire’s: Jeremy Agnew, Entertainment in the Old West: Theatre, Music, Circus, Medicine Shows and Other Popular Amusements (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2011), 96,and Dixon, Boomtown Saloons, 37 and 57; for the new insights being gained from saloon archeology: Kelly Dixon, “Sidling up to the Archeology of Western Saloons: Historical Archeology Takes on the Wild of the West,” World Archeology 38, no. 4 (December 2006): 576–85. 39. Pomeroy, Brick-Dust, 217; Evening Telegram (New York), 29 November 1869; Chicago Daily Times, 29 January 1874; Sacramento Daily Union, 21 February 1867; Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), 5 March 1867. On fashion as a social divider, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 147; Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 34–35; Lori Mersh, Sentimental Materialism: Gender,

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 2 7 – 1 3 3     271

Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). Appleton’s Journal of Literature Science and Art 7, no. 163 (11 May 1872). 40.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 January 1874; National Police Gazette (New York), 22 November 1879; National Police Gazette, 27 September 1879. 41. Slout, Broadway below the Sidewalk, 10–11 and 17. Shooting galleries were another remnant of the pleasure garden: see Israel Joseph Benjamin, Three Years in America, 1859–1862 (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 192. 42.  The drinks the men bought for the women were watered down because the women needed to stay sober. See Bowser, “Jack Harris’s Vaudeville,” 69. 43.  Southern Literary Journal 2, no. 5 (July 1836); on recognizing prostitutes from the way they looked:: “Painted Ladies,” The Round Table: A Saturday Review of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society and Art (18 August 1866), 40; for insight into the way the police regarded women who made eye contact with men on the street: Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of New York, vol. 5 (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1895), 4870; for a novel which emphasizes the different ways people cast their eyes, see Joaquin Miller, The Destruction of Gotham (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886), note the discussion of eyes on p. 76. 44.  “Oh Charley, My Darling,” in Delehanty and Hengler’s I Hope I Don’t Intrude Songster (New York: Ornum & Co., 1877). 45.  Daniel Dorchester, Indictment of the Liquor Traffic (Boston: National League for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic, 1885), 61. Monroe became a target of reformers when he introduced a system of punching a ticket when someone bought a drink at his saloon. After a certain number of punches, the customer won a prize: a pocket pistol, a copy of The Life of the James Brothers, or a meerschaum pipe; see Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 March 1883. 46. Linda Wommack, Our Ladies of the Tenderloin: Colorado’s Legends in Lace (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2005), 5–8; Keith Bryant, Culture in the American Southwest: The Earth, the Sky, the People (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 55; Elliot West, The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 48–49. 47.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 January 1874; Ellington, The Women of New York, 462; Evening World (New York), 6 May 1891. 48.  New York Times, 16 September 1872; New York Times, 12 January 1880; New York Times, 4 April 1862; New York Times, 27 June 1880; Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 January 1879; Washington Post, 23 April 1891; St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, Minn.), 11 March 1886; National Police Gazette (New York), 3 April 1880. 49.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 January 1874; St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, Minn.), 11 March 1886. 50.  Omaha Daily Bee (Omaha, Neb.), 2 October 1874; New York Sun, 17 January 1884. The fact that the waiter girl reportedly laughed when the wife accused her of stealing her husband away was taken by the court as a sign that the husband had been seduced by a succubus and that this justified his wife’s actions. 51.  Jasper Ewing Brady, Tales of the Telegraph: The Story of a Telegrapher’s Life and Adventures (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899), 69–70. Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), 7 July 1886. 52.  Daily Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), 24 July 1868.

272    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 3 4 – 1 4 2

53.  National Police Gazette (New York), 24 January 1880; “A Queen of Burlesque,” Lippincott’s Magazine 26, no. 19 (May 1877): 584. 54.  New York Herald, 2 October 1865; George Wakeman, “Grotesque Songs,” The Galaxy 4 (May–December 1867): 292. 55.  “Behind the Scenes,” in Ferguson’s Aristocratic Nigs Songster (New York: Clinton T. DeWitt, 1879). 56.  “Peanuts! Peanuts!” in The Arnold Brothers’ Jig, Song and Dance Book (New York: J. Fisher, 1874). The Arnold Brothers sang this number at the Canterbury Music Hall in New York. 57.  “Susan Jane,” in ibid., 50. 58.  “That’s Just What I Want You For to Do,” in The Arnold Brothers’ Jig, Song and Dance Book. 59.  Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 60.  “The Dashing Belle,” in Butler’s Metropolitan Songster (New York: Robert De Witt, 1873). 61.  “My Love and Me,” in Charley Fox’s Bijou Songster (Philadelphia: A. Winch, 1858). 62.  “I’ll Get Married,” in ibid. 63.  Wakeman, “Grotesque Songs,” 789. 64.  Evening Telegram, 29 November 1869. 65.  New York Sun, 29 January 1872; Dodge City Times (Dodge City, Kans.), 13 July 1878. In the 1880s, Gaylor became best known for playing the part of “the every-day” Irishman, “Sport McAllister,” a ward politician; see Evening World (New York), 25 May 1889. Virginia Johnson, What the World Made Them (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1871), 103; Junius Henri Brown, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 136. 66.  1850 playbill quoted in Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90. Charley Fox, for example was a regular performer at the Canterbury Music Hall at 585 Broadway in the 1850s and at the Metropolitan Saloon in the 1860s. The Metropolitan was among the most luxurious of the city’s saloons; it occupied the former home of the Theatre Français. White wrote comedy skits for all the major groups, including Bryant’s and the San Francisco Minstrels. 67.  Evening Telegram (New York), 29 November 1869; Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 March 1883. 68.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 January 1883; Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 March 1884. 69.  New York Sun, 5 December 1889. 70.  New York Sun, 24 April 1897. 71.  New York Times, 27 November 1892; Omaha Daily Bee (Omaha, Neb.), 30 July 1899. 72.  St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, Minn.), 27 August 1893. Chapter 5. Any Dodge Is Fair to Raise a Good Sensation

Chapter title adapted from “The Great Sensation,” in Tony Pastor, Great Sensation Songster (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1863), 6.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 4 4 – 1 4 8     273

 1. Inter Ocean (Chicago), 20 February 1878; Inter Ocean, 21 February 1878; Inter Ocean, 25 February 1878.  2. Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 February 1878; Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 February  1878.  3. Inter Ocean (Chicago), 27 February 1878; Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 February 1878; Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 January 1874; Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 July 1882; Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 October 1872; Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 May 1879; Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 March 1882.  4. New York Herald, 11 February 1868.  5. Richard Eddy, Alcohol in History (New York: National Temperance Society, 1887), 206; Joe Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 33–34; New York Observer and Chronicle, 21 December 1865; New York Observer and Chronicle, 17 October 1867; New York Evangelist, 21 August 1873; Oneida Circular (Oneida, N.Y.), 3 February 1873; Reformed Church Messenger (Philadelphia, Pa.), 29 January 1873.  6. Cincinnati Enquirer, 28 September 1863, quoted in J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 647; Henry Ward Beecher, Freedom and War (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 357–58. On reporting, see Earl J. Hess, “A Terrible Fascination: The Portrayal of Combat in the Civil War Media,” in An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front, edited by Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 1–26. See also Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).  7. New York Herald, 26 January 1868. For the spread of the Holiness movement see Randall Stephens, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2008).   8.  Laura Hanft Korobkin, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and NineteenthCentury Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 15. Dana Rabin, Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Lisa Rodensky, The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); James Willard Hurst, Law and the Condition of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1956), 18–21.  9. “Intemperance,” Boston Medical Intelligencer, 27 April 1824, 197. 10.  The loss of revenue forced the Tremont to lower its prices, which temperance advocates declared “preliminary to a final winding-up of its doings.” “Theatre in Boston,” Western Temperance Journal (Cincinnati, Ohio), 15 March 1841, 30. Pennsylvania passed its first temperance law in 1834 which banned the sale of alcohol in theatres. See Inns and Taverns Act of 1834, Section XIII, Digest of the Laws of Pennsylvania, 1700–1846 (Philadelphia: Thomas Davis, 1847), 595. In 1858, after a referendum on prohibition, the state restored the sale of alcohol to theatres under municipal license. See Henry Clubb, The Maine Liquor Law: Its Origin, History, and Results (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1856), 84; and Johann Kohl, Travels in Canada, and through the States of New York and Pennsylvania, vol. 2 (London: John Childs and Sons, 1861), 285. For the New York legislation, see New York Times, 4 December 1861; and New York Times, 21 December 1861.

274    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 4 8 – 1 5 5

11.  New York Times, 21 December 1861; New York Times, 4 December 1861 for the opposition of the beer gardens. 12.  “Act to Regulate Places of Public Amusement,” Statutes at Large of the State of New York, Revised Statutes as of 1 January 1867, Vol. III, c. 281; Brooks McNamara, The New York Concert Saloon: The Devil’s Own Nights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter 3; Gillian Rodgers, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theatre in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), chapter 6. 13. Greeley quoted in A. Oakey Hall, Horace Greeley Decently Dissected (New York: Ross and Tousey, 1862), 19. For McCunn’s judgement: New York Times, 25 April 1862; New York Times, 18 April 1862. 14.  New York Tribune, 18 November 1872. 15.  New York Times, 28 April 1870; New York Times, 6 January 1870; for his partnership with Hart: New York Times, 15 December 1883. In Dowling’s battle for influence, one of his main supporters was the saloonkeeper Tommy Hadden; see New York Times, 28 April 1870; and Matthew Patrick Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-To-Date (1899; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1974), 516–20. 16.  New York Times, 28 April 1870; New York Tribune, 15 May 1876. 17.  Inter Ocean (Chicago), 13 April 1877; Perry Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 98, 237; J. C. Shaffer, “More About the Law-and Order-League,” The Century Magazine 27, no. 2 (December 1883): 318; Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 163. 18.  Inter Ocean (Chicago), 13 April 1877. 19.  Inter Ocean (Chicago), 27 May 1878; for more on politics in Chicago during the crisis: Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 107–9. 20.  Inter Ocean (Chicago), 27 May 1878; Chicago Daily Tribune, 27 February 1878; Inter Ocean, 31 August 1875; Inter Ocean, 28 May 1872. 21.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 October 1876; Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 August 1878. 22.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 August 1878; Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 June 1883; for more on the campaign against the saloons: Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 January 1883; Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 July 1883; Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 September 1883. 23.  Cincinnati Enquirer quoted in New York Times, 8 December 1879; Daily Globe (Saint Paul, Minn.), 18 September 1882; Chicago Daily Tribune, 3 August and 14 November 1882; for a summary of legislation: William Church Osborn, “Liquor Statutes in the United States,” Harvard Law Review 2, no. 3 (October 15, 1888): 133. 24. Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883), 11. 25.  New York Times, 28 March 1875. For the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, see New York Times, 28 January 1885. 26. On protection money, see Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 February 1886; The Sun (New York), 19 April 1884; The Sun, 29 June 1884; The Sun, 16 October 1886; and New York Tribune, 5 September 1886. On the patrols through Gombossy’s, see New York Legislature, Senate Committee on Cities, Testimony Taken Before the Senate

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 5 6 – 1 6 1     275

Committee on Cities Pursuant to Resolution Adopted January 20, 1890, vol. 2 (Albany: State Printers, 1891), 1135–48; playbill for Dempsey’s Theatre, ca. 1912, Box 1, Ed LaMoss Papers, circa 1903–1954, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 27.  Dwight’s Magazine quoted in Cecil Michener Smith and Glenn Litton, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950), 2; George Dolby, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America (London: Fisher Unwin, 1887), 196–97; Georgina Hogarth and Mamie Dickens, eds., The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1857–1870, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879), 434; Bolossy Kiralfy, Bolossy Kiralfy, Creator of Great Musical Spectacles: An Autobiography, edited by Barbara Barker (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), 84; “Smoking,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and Education 2, no. 10 (1868), 154. 28. “The Black Crook: An Electronic Edition Based on the 1866 promptbook.” http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/02/musical-month-black-crook. 29. Born poor, Palmer began at the bottom of the entertainment business in 1848, selling theatre programs at the Castle Garden. Two years later, he was working as an usher at Barnum’s Museum when Jenny Lind, the famous Swedish soprano, began her extraordinarily successful American tour. The young usher made a packet of money scalping tickets to Lind’s sold-out shows, quit his job, and opened his own ticket-selling business. A few years later he opened a theatrical agency, and shortly before the war he began producing his own shows. He never abandoned the furrow that had first yielded the crop of greenbacks, and the core of his agency was the marketing of European musicians and actors to American audiences. New York Times, 15 April 1867; and obituary in Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 July 1879. 30.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 December 1872; Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 July 1879. 31. William Sage, “Ideality in the Drama,” The Theatre 18, no. 4 (September 1888): 360. 32.  New York Times, 28 May 1867. 33.  The Black Crook; Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia), 26 November 1866. 34.  New York Tribune, 20 August 1873; “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 34, no. 203 (April 1867), 668; New York Herald, 19 November 1866. Smyth had a colorful career. In 1870 he was dismissed for chronic inebriation after he invited some of his parishioners to join him for a drink at a saloon on the Sabbath. In the 1880s, he was dismissed from a church in Harlem. See New York Times, 5 May 1870; New York Times, 12 May 1870; Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1870; “Church Gleanings,” The New Outlook, 31 (8 January 1885), 26. On the newspaper’s campaign, see Joseph Whitton, The Naked Truth! An Inside History of the Black Crook (Philadelphia: H. W. Shaw, 1897). 35. Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and Behind the Scenes (Philadelphia: Parmelee & Co., 1870), 563, 584–91; Ann Stephens, Phemie Frost’s Experiences (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1874), 118–19. 36.  “Barefoot up to the neck” quoted in Therese Yelverton, Teresina in America, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1875), 251; H. A. Taylor, Lute Taylor’s Chip Basket: Being a Choice Selection from Lectures, Essays, Addresses, Editorials, and Public and Social Correspondence (Hudson: Star and Times, 1874), 196; ; Olive Logan, Apropos Women and Theatres (New York: George W. Carleton, 1869), 135; “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 34:203 (April, 1867), 668.

276    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 6 1 – 1 6 9

37.  The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, S.C.), 12 February 1867; National Republican (Washington), 7 November 1866. 38.  Troy Daily Whig (Troy, N.Y.), 27 January 1872; New York Clipper quoted in George Freedley, “The Black Crook and the White Faun,” Dance Index 4, no. 1 (January 1945): 14. 39.  New York Herald, 18 November 1866; “Editor’s Easy Chair,” 668; New York Herald, 19 November 1866; Troy Daily Whig (Troy, N.Y.), 21 November 1866; Chicago Daily Times, 3 January 1868. 40. Stephens, Phemie Frost’s Experiences, 119; Daily Phoenix (Columbia, S.C.), 12 February 1867; Whitton, The Naked Truth!, 22–23. 41.  Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870), 16–17; Stephens, Phemie Frost’s Experiences, 118. 42.  Troy Daily Whig (Troy, N.Y.), 27 January 1872; Sacramento Daily Union, 3 September 1874; Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, 16–17; Nashville Union and American, 29 November 1874. 43.  Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia), 26 November 1866; Zion’s Herald (Boston), 18 March 1875; T. De Witt Talmage, Sports that Kill (Wakefield: William Nicholson and Sons, 1875), 43; New York Herald, 19 November 1866; Appletons’ Journal (New York), 5 March 1870. 44.  Boston Daily Globe, 5 March 1872; New York Times, 28 March 1874. Julian Mates, “The Black Crook Myth,” Theatre Survey 7, no. 1 (1966): 31–43; The National Republican (Washington), 7 November 1866; New York Commercial, 14 February 1872; Daily Phoenix (Columbia, S.C.), 23 February 1872. The 1874 production added aerialists, a horizontal bar performer, a clog dancer, a contortionist, a Dutch comedian, and a banjoist; see Charles Lauterbach, “Langrishe and Glenn’s Black Crook Tour of California, Nevada and Mexico, 1874–75,” in Theatre West: Images and Impact, edited by Dunbar Ogden, Douglas McDermott, and Robert Salos (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1990), 139–40. 45.  New York Clipper, 2 January 1869; New York Times, 11 December 1877; George Towle, American Society, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870), 16. On ticket prices, see Alan Gevinson, “The Origins of Vaudeville: Aesthetic Power, Disquietude and Cosmopolitanism in the Quest for an American Music Hall” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2007), 205–15; New York Times, 7 January 1869. 46.  New York Times, 5 January 1869. Tammany Theatre Playbills 1869–70, Theatres: New York, Tammany Theatre, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, various playbills, 1869–70, NYPL. 47.  New York Times, 24 January 1869; National Republican (Washington), 25 January 1876; Spirit of the Times (New York), 9 January 1869; New York Times, 11 January 1869; Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 April 1874. 48.  New York Times, 18 February 1870. 49.  New York Times, 18 February 1870; New York Times, 27 March 1870; Spirit of the Times (New York), 9 January 1869; New York Times, 16 January 1869. 50.  New York Evening Post quoted in Appletons’ Journal (New York), 12 December 1874. 51.  There is some doubt today whether Lincoln said this to Beecher-Stowe, see: Daniel Vollaro, “Lincoln, Stowe and the Little Woman/Great War Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 7 1 – 1 7 8     277

Association, 30:1 (Winter 2009), 18–34. The sentiment of the comment was, however, expressed at the time. A New York Times reporter, who interviewed the novelist in 1868, attributed a similar remark to the historian, Charles Campbell, New York Times, 11 October 1868; The Friend (Philadelphia) 5 December 1863. Chapter 6. Art with the Effervescence of Ginger Beer

  1.  “The Days of Tony Pastor,” no date, MWEZ + n.c. 11,143, Tony Pastor scrapbook, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,  NYPL.   2.  NYPL, MWEZ + n.c. 11,143, Tony Pastor Clipping File, “Antonio Pastor,” no date, ibid.; Emilise Aleandri, The Italian-American Immigrant Theatre of New York (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 65.  3. Harry Miner’s American Dramatic Directory for the Season 1884–85 (New York: Wolf & Palmer, 1884).   4.  “Antonio Pastor.”  5. Armond Fields, Tony Pastor: Father of Vaudeville (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2007), 63; Lindenmüller’s beer garden remained open on Sunday, see: “The Lager Bier Dodge,” New York Evangelist 31, no. 48 (29 November 1860), 4. One of the witnesses at Lindenmüller’s 1860 trial for exhibiting on the Sabbath testified that the play he saw was “a kind of love piece” entitled The Lost Child and that there were “six or eight actors, and the stage was arranged with scenes, representing forests, etc.”; New York Times, 19 November 1860.  6. The Sun (New York), 10 August 1874; on seat prices: New York Herald, 20 May 1869; and premiums: New York Tribune, 19 May 1862.   7.  “Of Course It’s No Business of Mine,” in Tony Pastor’s 201 Bowery Songster (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867); The Sun (New York), 23 February 1872.   8.  “Mabel Waltz,” in Tony Pastor’s 201 Bowery Songster.   9.  “Matilda Baker,” in ibid. 10.  “The Naughty Naughty Girls” and “Jemima Brown,” in ibid. 11. Quote from finding aid for Tony Pastor Collection, 1863–1959, NYPL, accessed 23 August 2015, http://archives.nypl.org/the/21700. 12.  New York Times, 31 January 1875; newspaper clipping, 2 October 1865, Scrapbook on Tony Pastor, MWEZ + n.c. 4,547, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; New York Times, 2 October 1875; New York Times, 30 September 1874. 13.  New York Times, 19 April 1875; Playbills for George Sun’s New Phantasm Combination Company and G. Swaine Buckley’s Character Entertainment, MS Thr 630, American Vaudeville Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; account books for 1882–83 tour, box 20, Tony Pastor Collection, Henry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. A $1 seat was an expensive one in 1882. Male factory workers in 1880 are estimated to have earned about $300–$400, a year or $6–$7 a week; see Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middling Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 272–73; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 69. George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 12 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 492. 14.  Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 44–49, 94–95; Walter

278    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 7 8 – 1 8 4

Nugent, Money and American Society (New York: Free Press, 1968), 85–92; Gary Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy (Mason, Ohio: South-West/ Cengage Learning, 2009), 323–26; J. W. Kendrick, Productivity Trends in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), tables on 331–32 and 338. 15.  New York Times, 17 December 1877. 16.  New York Times, 18 November 1881; James Lauren Ford, Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1921), 201; Puck (New York), 21 November 1877; Amusement Bulletin (New York), 29 March 1890. Like Pastor, Miner owned a barroom adjoining the theatre, but the doors between the two were kept closed. New York Times, 17 November 1885. 17.  New York Times, 10 December 1877; for more on the Eagle: New York Times, 17 December 1877. 18.  National Police Gazette, 14 March 1880. The Metropolitan Hotel was recommended in such works as Moses Foster Sweetser, ed., The Middle States: A Handbook for Travelers (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1876), 7; and New England: A Handbook for Travelers (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879), 327. 19.  New York Times, 17 October 1875; New York Times, 22 March 1875; New York Times, 2 October 1875; The Sun (New York), 14 December 1879; New York Times, 10 December 1877; New York Tribune, 4 July 1880; National Police Gazette, 11 November 1882. 20.  New York Herald, 3 September 1900; New York Times, 17 December 1877; New York Times, 10 December 1877; The Sun (New York), 16 December 1877. 21.  The Sun (New York), 28 September 1872; William Clapp Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1853), 450; Edmund Monroe Bacon and George Ellis, eds., Bacon’s Dictionary of Boston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1886), 205. On Rich, see John Clark Rand, One of a Thousand: A Series of Biographical Sketches, vol. 3 (Boston: First National Publishing Co., 1890), 511. Morris Brothers, Pell and Trowbridge was the leading minstrel troupe in Boston. They operated their own theatre and were the Boston equivalent of Dan Bryant’s New York group: entertainers to respectable people. New York Times, Trowbridge Obituary, 14 January 1891. 22.  Boston Daily Globe, 11 August 1874; Brooklyn Eagle, 21 January 1877; Boston Daily Globe, 12 April 1875; Boston Daily Globe, 27 February 1871. 23.  New York Times, 8 March 1868; New York Clipper, 15 September 1868; New York Herald, 27 February 1869; New York Daily Tribune, 12 April 1869. Two Lingards were associated with the Comique: J. W., who was formerly manager of the Bowery Theatre, leased it for a few weeks in 1870, and William H. leased it for the year 1868–69. J. W. Lingard killed himself after losing all his money mismanaging the theatre; on J.W. see New York Times, 9 July 1870. 24.  Sunday Dispatch cited in New York Herald, 5 October 1873. 25.  Clipper, Star, and Evening Mail quoted in New York Herald, 26 January 1873; New York Herald, 23 November 1880; New York Herald, 5 October 1873. 26.  Ely Kahn, The Merry Partners: The Age and Stage of Harrigan and Hart (New York: Random House, 1955); John Franceschina, David Braham: The American Offenbach (New York: Routledge, 2005). 27.  New York Times, 15 December 1885. 28.  Brooklyn Eagle, 11 November 1888. Barnum appears to have given the first matinees at his museum, but they may have been irregular occurrences. Sinn’s were

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 8 5 – 1 9 0     279

held at the Canterbury every Wednesday and Saturday; see Washington Post, 7 October 1909; New York Clipper, 20 November 1863; and Washington Post, 7 May 1905. 29.  Brooklyn Eagle, 18 January 1888; Hart quoted in The World (New York), 18 January 1888. 30.  New York Tribune, 17 October 1871; Gevinson, “The Origins of Vaudeville,” chapter 4 documents the gradual revival of the word “vaudeville.” 31.  The three theatres in the combination were White’s Opera House in Memphis, the Academy of Music in Nashville, and Wild’s Opera House in Little Rock; New York Clipper, 23 August 1873; New York Clipper, 30 October 1875; Omaha Daily Bee, 17 April 1874; New York Tribune, 28 March 1874; New York Tribune, 22 October 1874; The Sun (New York), 11 June 1874. 32.  New York Herald, 10 October 1876; New York Clipper, 4 August 1877; New York Herald, 7 November 1877. 33.  Brooklyn Eagle, 12 August 1876; New York Times, 16 July 1876; New York Clipper, 23 August 1873; National Police Gazette (New York), 10 May 1879. 34.  Chicago Daily Times, 14 October 1876. 35.  Chicago Daily Times, 15 October 1882; George Middleton, Circus Memoirs (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice and Sons, 1913), 69–70; on the first beauty contest: Chicago Daily Times, 11 May 1883. 36.  Boston Daily Globe, 6 September 1885; Boston Daily Globe, 22 August 1886; “Centennial of Vaudeville,” Providence News, 6 December 1926, Series II, Clipping Books, Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theatre Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. On the Bijou: Boston Daily Globe, 15 February 1882; Boston Daily Globe, 16 November 1884; illustrations of the house can be found in: Bijou Theatre, Diagram of Seats; and for quality: Bijou and Gayety Theatre Playbill, Week Beginning 15 August 1887, both documents in Playbills and Programs from Boston, Box: Boston Bijou Theatre, THE GEN TCS 66, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 37.  National Police Gazette (New York), 4 December 1880. 38.  Colored American (New York), 5 November 1899. On denying AfricanAmericans seats: Brooklyn Eagle, 12 December 1886; and Washington Bee, 24 October  1891. For more on the growing number of African-American performers in vaudeville: Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002). 39.  Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 31–33; John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), 249–50; Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 30–33; Richard Busch Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 8. 40.  Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 14–15; New York Herald, 26 February 1870; New York Tribune, 22 March 1869; “The Actor Today,” Atlantic Monthly, 465, no. 83 (January 1899): 126. The British Blondes “were best known for their short skirts, stale jokes, concert saloon music and nursery rhymes”; Chicago Tribune, 27 February 1870. Kurt Gänzl, Lydia Thompson, Queen of Burlesque (New York: Routledge, 2002), 109.

280    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 1 9 0 – 1 9 8

41.  Boston Daily Advertiser 23 June 1869; Richard Grant White, “The Age of Burlesque,” The Galaxy 8, no. 11 (August 1869): 260. 42.  Francis Cowley Burnand, Ixion; Or, the Man at the Wheel: An Original Extravaganza (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1844), 42. 43.  Spirit of the Times (New York), 13 February 1869; New York Clipper, 24 November 1868; White, “The Age of Burlesque,” 260; New York Clipper, 14 August 1869. 44.  New York Clipper, 29 April 1869; New York Times, 1 October 1868; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 17; Henry Byron, Lucretia Borgia, M.D., of La Grande Doctresse (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1868), 31. 45.  White, “The Age of Burlesque,” 260; Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 February 1870; New York Clipper, 18 June 1870. 46.  National Police Gazette (New York), 3 January 1885. The literature on bodies in the late nineteenth century is becoming quite sizeable. For a very good introduction, see Caroline Daly, Leisure & Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body, 1900–1960 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 33. U.S. works include John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); David Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Andrea Dennett, Weird Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997); and Jacob Smith, The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 47. White, “The Age of Burlesque,” 256; Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 December 1875; San Francisco Bulletin, 11 November 1875; New York Times, 9 April 1871. For other contemporary insight into Chinese acrobats, see “Chinese Acrobats,” Scientific American 34, no. 1 (1 January 1876), 1. 48.  New York Times, 20 October 1895. 49.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 August 1890. Charmion was not exactly poetry in motion, as a 1901 Edison film of her disrobing act demonstrates. See “Trapeze Disrobing Act,” YouTube video, accessed 23 August 2015, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CdxoZcHG9BY. 50.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 May 1872; Boston Daily Globe, 9 November 1875; New York Times, 8 November 1975; New York Times, 9 November 1875. 51.  Boston Daily Globe, 30 October 1877; Boston Daily Globe, 24 December 1878. Young Ajax had a serious fall while “doing a flight leap over camels and elephants” in Hillsboro, Ohio, that shattered his leg. It is not clear if his injury killed him; it certainly ended his career. He was 26 at the time. Ajax and Victor, Box 1, Folder A, Series 1, Male and Female Contortionists, Burns M. Kattenberg Collection on Contortion and Other Papers, 1890–1960, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 52.  New York Times, 29 October 1882; William Dean Howells, “At a Dime Museum,” in Literature and Life (New York: Harper & Brother, 1902), 197. 53.  Newell Dunbar, “Our Theatre,” Outing, An illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation 7, no. 4 (January 1886): 444; Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 July 1872; newspaper clipping, Philadelphia Public Ledger, no date, MWEZ + n.c. 19,703, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL. 54.  Boston Daily Globe, 30 November 1884.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 1 9 9 – 2 0 7     281

55.  Untitled newspaper clipping, 8 September 1885, MWEZ + n.c. 11,143, Tony Pastor scrapbook, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,  NYPL. 56.  “Stuck on Your Shape,” in Howard Athenaeum Star Specialty Songster (New York: Popular Publishing, 1883). 57.  New York Times, 14 March 1880; Washington Post, 10 October 1886. For the appeal to women of looking at actors as exemplars of fashion, see Marlis Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theatre, Fashion, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 58.  The Corsair (New York), 4 May 1839. 59.  John Jennings, Theatrical and Circus Life; or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena (St. Louis: Sun Publishing, 1882), 149; New York Times, 29 October 1882. 60.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 April 1874; New York Dramatic Mirror, 18 September 1897; National Police Gazette, 3 January 1885; newspaper clipping, 14 July 1885, MWEZ + n.c. 11,143, Tony Pastor scrapbook, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL. 61.  A. B. Walkley, “The Triumph of the Variety Entertainment,” The New Review 7 (July–December 1892): 509–10. 62.  Memphis Daily Appeal, 9 February 1871; New York Clipper, 24 February 1877; New York Tribune, 20 December 1896; New York Evening Telegram, 7 May 1883. 63.  New York Times, 9 April 1876. 64.  “She’s Fearfully and Wonderfully Made,” in The Fergusons’ “Aristocratic Nigs” Songster (New York: Clinton De Witt, 1879). 65.  “When the Birds Return Again,” in Howard Athenaeum Star Specialty Songster. 66.  Richmond’s real name was Augustus Boyle. In 1879, he was 28 years old and was married and had several children. He and his friend were drinking in a saloon and quarreled over a group of women his friend escorted there, but who seemed more interested in Richmond. Chicago Daily Tribune, 30 October 1878. Lyrics from “A Good Tempered Man,” in Harry Richmond’s Good Tempered Man Songster (New York: A. J. Fisher, 1874). 67.  “Flirting in the Lane,” in Western and Walling’s Just as You See Us Now Songster (New York: A. J. Fisher, 1876). See also “Deception,” in Howard Athenaeum Star Specialty Songster. 68.  New York Dramatic Mirror, 1 October, 1887; “That’s Where I Know You Are Right,” in The Great McCabe Songster (New York: Robert De Witt, 1874). 69.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 April 1874; National Police Gazette (New York), 3 January 1885. New York Times, 29 October 1882; New York Dramatic Mirror, 18 September 1897. 70.  The Sun (New York), 2 January 1875. Chapter 7. Spectacle and Nostalgia on the Road

 1. New York Age, 15 July 1915. No biography has been written of Kersands to date. In the meantime, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 106–10; and M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Richmond: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 68–71, provide solid introductions.  2. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 January 1877.

282    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 2 0 8 – 2 1 2

 3. The Charlotte Observer, 15 November 1895; New York Herald, 26 May 1889; New York Clipper, 6 December 1865. For a history of the Georgia troupe: Eileen Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” Inter-American Music Review 10, no. 2 (1989): 157–68.The Georgia Minstrels were not the first black minstrel group. Frederick Douglass reported seeing a performance by Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, a “colored minstrel group,” in Rochester, New York, in 1849; see The North Star, 29 June 1849. Gavitt’s Serenaders also appeared in Batavia, New York, but after a couple of performances they were unable to cover their expenses and dissolved; see Batavia Spirit of the Times (Batavia, N.Y.), 3 July 1849.  4. New York Clipper, 23 August 1913; New York Clipper, 26 January 1901; Syracuse Daily Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 12 January 1866; Bernard Peterson, ed., The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1890 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 85.  5. Syracuse Daily Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 12 January 1866; Memphis Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.), 22 November 1873.  6. Syracuse Daily Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.), 12 January 1866; Atlanta Constitution, 25 April 1875.  7. New York Herald, 26 May 1889; Herbert Renton, letter to editor of the New York Herald, newspaper clipping, scrapbook on minstrelsy, MWEZ +++ 4527, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 20 June 1874; Buffalo Evening Republic, 1 July 1884.  8. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 20 June 1874; Columbus Daily Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), 18 February 1866.  9. New York Clipper, 31 August 1867; National Republican (Washington, D.C.), 26 December 1882; Memphis Appeal, 22 November 1873. 10.  Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 257–58; James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French & Co., 1912), 102–3. 11.  Playbill for Bryant’s Minstrels, no date [1861], Series 1, Images of American Minstrel Performers and Troupes, folder B, American Minstrel Show Collection, 1823–1947, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Spirit of the Times (New York), 15 March 1861. 12.  The Journal (Syracuse), 19 May 1866. Japanese Tommy took his name from a Japanese teenager who accompanied the first embassy to the United States in 1860. The original “Tommy” became the darling of Washington society and a national celebrity; see Washington Post, 22 July 1895. On Japanese Tommy the actor, see Spirit of the Times (New York), 15 March 1861; Utica Daily Observer, 17 November 1866. For the obituary of Japanese Tommy, see New York Times, 13 July 1887. 13.  New York Clipper, 4 August 1866; New York Clipper, 10 July 1869; Southern, “Georgia Minstrels,” 61–62. Several different Georgia Minstrel troupes were operating in the period 1866 to 1870 and it is often difficult to distinguish among them. 14.  National Republican (Washington), 26 December 1882; Fort Worth Gazette, 26 February 1895; additional references to Kersand’s mouth: Paducah Sun (Paducah, Ky.), 28 March 1903 and Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), 8 March 1905. Jake Berry apparently ran a place where “French boxes, wine rooms and disgusting performers” prevailed; see National Police Gazette (New York), 26 July 1879; and Puck, 28 June 1878.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 2 1 2 – 2 1 8     283

15.  Not all versions of Aunt Jemima were so clearly a protest against racial stereotyping. In one baillet version, it is more clearly a pure nonsense song with racist overtones. This version describes a “monkey dressed in soldier’s clothes” who is such a poor shot that the best he can do is shoot a jay bird. The last verse deals in a demeaning way with African American courtship: “The bullfrog married the tadpole’s sister / Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh! / He smacked his lips and then he kissed her / Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh! / She says if you love me as I love you / Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh! / No knife can cut our love in two / Old Aunt Jemima, Oh! Oh! Oh!” See unbound scrapbook, Box 34, Minstrel Show Collection, 1831–1959, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. For yet another version, see Abbott and Seroff, Out of Sight, 106–10; Manring, Slave in a Box, 69; “The One I Dearly Love” from Delehenty and Hengler’s I Hope I Don’t Intrude Songster (New York: Ornum and Company, 1867). “Aunt Jemima” was written by James Grace, one of the end men with Callender’s Minstrels when Kersands was with that group. 16.  Los Angeles Times, 10 February 1897. For a rich discussion of this practice, see Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), chapter 2. 17.  New York Telegram, 30 September 1930. 18.  Oswego Morning Herald (Oswego, N.Y.), 17 June 1879. Callender apparently managed a gambling house on East Houston Street; see M. B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (New York: Broadway Publishing, 1912), 41. After the Civil War, saloons became the places where young African American entertainers went to polish their art; see Macon Telegraph, 25 August 1887. Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman, Charles Frohman: Manager and Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916), chapters 2–3; Chicago Daily Times, 15 June 1879. Although the act was usually called the Hyer Sisters in the press, Errol Hill has discovered that their proper name was Hyers: see “The Hyers Sisters: Pioneers in Black Musical Comedy,” in The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, edited by Ron Engle and Tice Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 115–30; New York Dramatic Mirror, 4 October 1882. 19.  Southern, “Georgia Minstrels,” 165; on Plantation Minstrels: Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 April 1875. 20.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 April 1875. 21.  The American Association of Passenger Traffic Officers, The Official Railway Guide (Philadelphia: National Railway Publication Company, 1874), xxx. 22.  Hudson Evening Register, 13 September 1870. On Tesman, see an advertisement for Bijou Music Hall, 18 February 1864, Broadsides and Ephemera Collection, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 23.  Utica Daily Observer, 18 January 1871; Daily Times (Watertown, N.Y.), 28 September 1870. For more on the audience at Tesman shows see Nashville Union and American, 16 February 1871. 24.  The appearance of female minstrel troupes can be traced in: New York Clipper, 16 July 1870; New York Clipper, 20 August 1870; New York Clipper, 24 September 1870; Daily Patriot (Concord, N.H.), 4 October 1871. Leavitt took his first professional company on the road when he was 17, in 1860; see Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 68, 308, 385; Macon Weekly Telegraph, 18 October 1877. In

284    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 2 1 9 – 2 2 8

the late 1870s, Leavitt split the troupe in two, creating the Rentz-Santley Female Minstrels and Rentz Company and Vienna Ladies Orchestra, both of which were on the road. By this time Leavitt was also managing five other touring companies: two burlesque, two regular minstrel, and one variety (he had taken over Tony Pastor’s show); see Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 413. On Mabel Santley’s Ixion, see Daily Rocky Mountain News (Jefferson, Colo.), 16 January 1878. 25.  Daily Rocky Mountain News (Jefferson, Colo.), 16 January 1878; Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), 18 March 1877; Omaha Herald, 26 April 1882. 26.  “In Torn Tights,” undated clipping from magazine titled The Looking Glass, Minstrel Portraits, Minstrels and Minstrelsy, Newsclippings and Illustrations file, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; playbill for Elwood’s Female Minstrels, 15 June 1870, Box 1, Folder 24, American Minstrel Show Collection, 1854–1943, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. 27.  The Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia), 11 March 1870. For the Canterbury Variety Theatre, see New York Herald, 11 December 1872. 28.  Steve Goodson, Highbrows, Hillbillies, and Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 70; playbill for Billy McChrystal’s Female Minstrels and French Can-Can Troupe, no date, Box 8, Playbills—Subjects, Minstrels, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Eugene Register Guard (Eugene, Ore.), 12 August 1892. 29.  “In Torn Tights.” 30.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 April 1884. 31.  Hartford Daily Courant, 25 September 1875; St Louis Globe-Democrat, 20 June 1875; Boston Globe, 18 January 1880. 32.  Every Saturday: A  Journal of Choice Reading, 30 March 1867; St Louis Globe-Democrat, 20 June 1875. For the impact of Dan Bryant’s death, see “Nebulae,” The Galaxy 6, no. 19 (June 1875): 862. 33.  Daily Constitution (Atlanta, Ga.), 25 November 1879; New York Times, 30 March 1880. 34. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 145–55; Boston Globe, 18 January 1880; Boston Globe, 19 April 1885; Morris Brothers, Pell and Trowbridge’s Opera House Playbill, 30 June 1865, Box 8, Christy’s Minstrels Playbill, October 22 1875, Box 4; Metropolitan Minstrels, nd., Box 8, Playbills – Subjects, Minstrels, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass. 35.  Daily Constitution (Atlanta, Ga.), 25 November 1879. 36.  Washington Post, 27 August 1882; New York Times, 26 February 1884; Atlanta Constitution, 16 October 1884; New York Dramatic Mirror, 1 February 1896; New York Dramatic Mirror, 19 January 1895. 37.  New York Times, 30 March 1880. 38.  Boston Daily Globe, 3 December 1878. 39.  Bolossy Kiralfy, Bolossy Kiralfy, Creator of Great Musical Spectacles: An Autobiography, edited by Barbara Barker (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 93–94. 40.  New York Dramatic Mirror, 30 June 1888; Critic and Good Literature (New York), 28 June 1884. 41.  Macon Weekly Telegraph (Macon, Ga.), 23 March 1886.

N OT ES TO PA G E S 2 2 8 – 2 3 5     285

42.  New York Dramatic Mirror, 15 December 1897; Utica Journal (Utica, N.Y.), 20 November 1884; clipping “Found in Christy’s Scrapbook,” nd (c. 1880), scrapbook on minstrelsy, MWEZ +++ 4529, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, NYPL. 43.  New York Dramatic Mirror, 30 June 1888; “Theatrical and Musical,” Spirit of the Times (N.Y.), 15 April 1871, 144; “Banjo and Bones,” The Critic and Good Literature (New York), 28 June 1884, 308. 44.  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 145. During the Civil War, nostalgia was considered a paralyzing longing for home, a medical disorder that could only be treated with furloughs; see Charles Zwingmann, “Heimweh” or “Nostalgic Reaction”: A  Conceptual Analysis and Interpretation of a Medico-Psychological Phenomenon (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1959), 80–85, cited in Ann Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: Palgrave, 1988), 3. 45.  Stephen C. Foster, “My Old Kentucky Home” (New York: Firth, Pond & Co., 1853, American Sheet Music, 1830–1870, AM2, NYPL. 46. Stuart Tannock, “Nostalgia Critique,” Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 453–64. 47.  Atlanta Constitution, 8 April 1894. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to the Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 210; Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 July 1895; Atlanta Constitution, 15 July 1890. 48.  Utica Sunday Journal (Utica, N.Y.), 14 August 1905; Fulton Times (Fulton, N.Y.), 28 May 1884. 49. Isaac Goldberg with George Gershwin, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (New York: John Day Company, 1930), 47; “Revival of Negro Minstrelsy,” 12 August 1900, Minstrel Portraits, Minstrels and Minstrelsy, Newsclippings and Illustrations file, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 3; Karen Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 50.  Will Hays, “The Little Old Cabin in the Land,” in Solid Dishes to the Front Songster (New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1875). 51.  Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 88–95. 52.  “Beneath the Old Pine Tree,” in The Fergusons’ “Aristocratic Nigs” Songster (New York: Clinton De Witt, 1879). 53.  Daily Constitution (Atlanta, Ga.), 19 October 1877. 54.  “Future of Minstrelsy,” clipping, no date, Minstrel Portraits, Minstrels and Minstrelsy, Newsclippings and Illustrations file, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Confederate Veteran 19, no. 4 (April 1911): 167–68; New York Clipper, 17 February 1912; Boston Globe, 11 January 1906. 55.  San Francisco Chronicle, 11 April 1914, and undated clipping Boston paper; interview with McIntyre—Charles Salisbury, typescript, no date, McIntyre and Heath Scrapbook, MWEZ+nc10,446, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,  NYPL. 56.  Utica Sunday Journal (Utica, N.Y.), 14 August 1905.

286    N OT E S

TO PA G ES 2 3 6 – 2 4 1

57.  “The Original Georgia Minstrels,” no date, Oversize Minstrel Show Poster Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.; Toll, Blacking Up, 206–7. 58.  Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 November 1875. Conclusion

 1. The Times (Washington), 12 February 1899; Richard Grant White, “Age of Burlesque,” The Galaxy, 8:11 (August 1869), 267.  2. The Times (Washington), 12 February 1899; New York Herald, 21 December  1873.   3.  Richard Grant White, “The Age of Burlesque,” 266, 259. For White’s visit to Wood’s Theatre, see The Galaxy 8, no.11 (August 1869).   4.  Twain quoted in Peter Stoneley, Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 54; see also Leland Krauth, Mark Twain & Company: Six Literary Relations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 35. On Twain’s sentimentality, see Gregg Camfield, The Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).   5.  Richard Wrightman Fox’s Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) makes Godkin’s treatment of the Beecher-Tilton affair comprehensible.  6. Edwin Lawrence Godkin, “The Chromo-Civilization,” in Reflections and Comments, 1865–1895 (Teddington: Echo Library, 2007), 150, 202–5.   7.  David Thelen, “Rutherford B. Hayes and the Reform Tradition in the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1970): 157; Richard Wrightman Fox, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875–1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 648; James Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: New York University Press, 2010); for a contrasting view which locates the creation of the liberal self much earlier; see Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); E. L. Godkin in Scribner’s Magazine 8, no. 1 (July 1890): 58–60.  8. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891), 112; Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Partial Portraits (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899), 390. American realism is conventionally seen as a reaction to impressionism because its subject matter tended to be gritty rather than pretty; see Richard J. Boyle, American Impressionism (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1982). This may well be true in terms of content, but not in terms of the approach to the nature of reality, as an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum demonstrated in 1994. For the catalog, see Barbara H. Weinberg, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). On realism and impressionism, see Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).   9.  Frank Norris, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” in The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (New York: Doubleday Page and Co., 1903), 213; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Houghton, Mifflin &

N OT ES TO PA G E S 2 4 1 – 2 4 5     287

Co., 1884), 338. See also James Cox, “The Rise of Silas Lapham: The Business of Morals and Manners,” in New Essays on the Rise of Silas Lapham, edited by Donald Pease (New York: Cambridge, 1991), 107–28. 10. Henry James, The Real Thing and Other Tales (New York: Macmillan Company, 1922), 32. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), 156. Martin Berger argues that sentiment and realism should not be opposed; see “Sentimental Realism in Max Eakins’s Late Portraits,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, edited by Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 244–58. 11.  Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 302; Charles K. Harris, After the Ball: Forty Years of Melody: An Autobiog-raphy (New York: Frank, 1926), 57, 62. 12.  Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), ix; Rebecca Harding Davis, “David Gaunt,” in Selected Writings from the Borderlands: Stories of the Civil War Era, edited by Sharon Harris and Robin Cadwallader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 40. 13.  See Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), esp. chapter 4; David Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1995), chapter 6; Karen Roggenkamp, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in the Late Nineteenth Century (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2005), chapter 1; Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985); and Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism. 14.  New York Times, 19 December 1915. 15. Vaudeville’s anarchistic nature is described in Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). It is a prominent theme in M. Alison Kibler’s Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

In dex

Abbott, Lyman, 25 Aberle, Jacob and Lena, 178 Abolitionism, 36, 58–59, 63, 84, 86, 100, 117 Acrobats, 29, 113, 194, 195–96; Boswell, 217; Blondin, 223; Charmion, 196; Royal Japanese, 166, 195, 196, 223, 223; Senyah, 167; Vaidis Sisters, 120, 220 Acting: realistic, 18, 85, 90–92; natural, 90–93, 97, 232 Adams, Abigail, 37 Adams, Charles Francis, 240 Addison, Joseph, Cato, 18 African Americans: in audience, 20, 64–65, 104, 114, 120, 121, 187–88, 215; as minstrels, 206–16, 235; as slaves, 39, 209, 229 Alcott, Louisa May, An Old-Fashioned Girl,163 Animals, 166, 225; humans playing, 29, 211 Astor Place Riot, 60, 162 Audience: absorption, 11, 74–75, 93–94, 99, 201, 249 n 18; attention, 11, 12, 20, 74, 109, 134–35, 155, 192, 195–97, 201, 204, 221, 228–29, 249 n 18; behavior in theatre, 4, 20, 49, 53, 91, 101, 104–5, 132–33, 134, 188, 200, 220; children among, 32, 64–65, 115, 118, 161–62, 171, 175, 180, 217; connection of theatre to life, 5–6, 8, 78, 89–90, 93, 97–98, 100–101, 131–32; distraction, 30, 110, 118, 132–34, 164–65, 168, 197–98, 216; experience of theatre, 5, 7, 45, 74, 81, 91, 96, 123–27, 132–33, 163–64, 168; women among, 20, 21, 52, 64, 84, 99, 103, 109, 119, 122, 161–62, 168, 170, 171–73, 180, 182–84, 217, 219. See also class; gender; looking; seating Backus, Charley, 72 Bacon, William, Aesthetic Piety, 106 Bailey, Gamaliel, 53, 62

Baillie, James, 102 Baker, Ben, Glimpses of New York, 55–56 Barker, James, Tears and Smiles, 17 Barlow, Milt (Old Darkey), 224, 232–34 Barnum, Phineas Taylor, 76–77, 83, 87, 211 Barras, Charles M., 158 Batcheller, George, 187 Beecher, Henry Ward, 5, 92, 97, 145; Tilton affair, 239 Beer Gardens, 111–12, 148, 149; ­ appearance of, 27–28; Koster & Bial’s, 154; ­Lindenmüller’s, 173; Tivoli Garden, 27–28; Volksgarten, 28, 180 Bingham, James Hervey, 38 Bobo, William, 121 Bonfanti, Marie, 168 Booth, Edwin, 92 Bower, Frank, 74 Braham, David, 183, 187 Brevoot, Ida, 130 Brougham, John, 26 Brower, Frank, 74 Brown, T. Allston, 47 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 100 Bryant, Dan, 211, 222 Burlesque, 28, 255–56 n 2; British Blondes, 189–91, 217, 218; The Virginia Gal, 62; women in, 160, 189–93. See also farce, comedy Burns, Carney, 59 Bushman, Richard, 34 Callender, Charles, 214–15, 223 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, 232 Chanfrau, Frank, 55–56 Chapman, Harry, 222 Chauncy, Charles, 16 Chevalier, Michel, 14 Christy, Edwin Pearce, 63 Christy, George (Harrington), 63, 68, 222

289

290    I N D E X

Clark, Constantia, 55 Class, 21, 22, 50, 116, 117–18, 181, 217, 218–19; antebellum entertainment defined by, 44, 48, 52–53, 56, 84, 113, 119, 120, 151, 181; elite, 20, 23, 48, 87, 124, 126; middling, 8, 39–40, 48, 72, 86, 93, 116–17, 161–62, 179–80, 190, 248 n 15; and sentimentality, 39–40, 106, 147; working, 4, 40, 51–52, 53, 55–56, 84, 91, 94–95, 103–4, 116–17, 151, 173, 175, 178 Clay, Henry, 101 Clerks, 20, 49, 111, 112, 121, 122–23 Clothing, 103, 126, 138, 150, 173–74, 198–200, 238 Collyer, Robert Hanham, 98–103 Combination Companies, 181, 184, 185, 187; G. Swaine Buckley’s Character Entertainment, 177; Howard Athenaeum, 180–81, 183, 186, 187; Olympic, 185–86; Pastor’s, 177; New Phantasm, 177 Comedy: eighteenth century, 17–18, 47–48; farcical, 45, 47–48; grotesque, 140–41; sentimentality and, 43–48, 55, 66–67, 69, 71–72; slapstick, 29, 65–66, 71 Comstock, Anthony, 154, 240 Concert saloons, 109–42; audience for, 109, 111, 112, 114–15, 122–23, 125, 267 n 7; décor in, 110, 118–19, 125, 129–30; decline of, 154–55, 171–72, 189–90; food and drink in, 109, 124–25, 167; press and, 112, 115, 128, 130, 144; spread of, 110– 11, 113–14, 148, 149; violence in, 112–13, 130–31, 138–39, 143–45, 203; Adelphi, 151; Alhambra, 154; Almack’s (London), 60; Almack’s (Pete William’s), 121, 135; André’s Pavillion, 120; Arche de Noé, 114; Art Union, 109, 112; Bella Union, 119; Bird Cage, 126, 130; Brigham’s, 109; Buckingham Palace, 121; Buffalo Bill, 121; Canterbury, 115, 118, 167; Carusi’s, 109, 112; Champion Shades, 208; Coliseum, 151; Cosmopolitan, 124; Dempsey’s, 154; Dodworth’s, 110; Exchange, 109; Folly, 127; Fox & Curran’s, 109, 112; Fox & Wadsworth’s, 112; Garden, 114, 129–30; Gem, 119–20, 126, 130; Globe (Chicago), 151; Gombossy’s, 155; Gropper’s, 118; Harry Hill’s, 122, 154; Henry Smith’s, 121; Hyperion, 109; J. Rosche’s, 127; Jack Harris’s, 117, 124; Jerry Monroe’s, 120, 140; John Morrisey’s, 215; Maripello’s, 110;

Matthal’s Opera Pavillion, 120; Mc­Daniel’s, 114, 118, 125–26; Metropolitan, 123, 136; National Garden, 154; Opera, 125; Over the Rhine, 119; Palace ­Varieties, 132; Parisian, 117, 124; Pinteaux’s, 103; ­Pottgeiser’s, 151; Pupanti’s, 109; Reveille, 112, 125; Santa Claus, 112–13; Temple of the Muses, 103, 104; The 444, 172; Theodore Allen’s, 122; Toledo, 151; Tom Maguire’s Opera House, 126; Walling’s, 203. See also dancers; minstrels ­(grotesque); opposition; waiter girls Connelly, Jeremiah, 143–44 Contortionists, 133, 196–97; Majilton Family, 166; Prince Leo, 196; Young Ajax, 196–97, 280 n 51 Conway, Frederick, 93 Cruikshank, George, 47 Cushman, Charlotte, 90, 92 Dana, Richard Henry, 39 Dance, 42, 120, 121–22, 128–29, 133, 134, 157–58, 160, 182, 223, 224, 225; Can-can, 160, 180, 219–20; Giselle, 158; Miss Somers, 217 Davis, J. Frank, 86 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 242 Delacroix, Joseph, 25, 26, 76 DeWispelare, Daniel, 18 Diamond, John, 77 Dickens, Charles, 121, 156 Dickinson, Enam, 63 Dilward, Thomas ( Japanese Tommy), 211, 214 Dime Museums, 187; Kohl and Middleton’s, 120, 186–87 Dixon, George Washington (Zip Coon), 58–59 Dockstadter, Lew, 233 Dodworth, Harvey, 110 Donaldson, Daisy, 131 Donegan, James, 144 Douglass, Frederick, 57, 73, 84, 282 n 3 Dowling, Joseph, 150, 183 Duguette, Elizabeth, 11 Dunbar, Newell, 81, 197 Dunlap, William, André, 18; Glory of Columbia, 18, 19 Eissler, Fanny, 44 Emerson, Billy, 225 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 48, 49–50 Emmet, Dan, 63, 222, 226

I N D E X     291 Emotion: love, 37–38, 87, 137–39, 205; parting and bereavement, 80–81, 89; passion, 6, 33, 34, 40, 87, 104–5, 144; repression of, 237–39 Empathy. See sympathy Ethnic impersonators, 72, 114, 133, 141, 175, 233 Evangelicalism, 37, 49, 106; Civil War, 145–46; Second Great Awakening, 35–36, 39 Farce, 255–56 n 2; The Forty Thieves, 218, 219, 238; Ixion; or, the Man at the Wheel, 190–91; King Lager, or, Ye Sons of Malt, 112; Lucretia Borgia, 192; Robinson Crusoe, 168; Satan in Paris, 46; Telemachus, 43; The Three Fra Diavolos, 42–43; Twelve Temptations, 220; Whose Can It Be? 198 Farrell, Bob (Zip Coon), 59 Faust, Drew Gilpin, 11 Ferguson, Terry, 135 Field, James M., 96 Finson, Jon, 19 Fisk, Jim, 220 Flirtation, 127–29, 131–32, 135–36, 142, 202–3 Forrest, Edwin, 90–91, 94 Foster, Stephen, 68–70, 229 Fox, Charley, 138–39, 140, 174 Fox, Richard Wrightman, 4 Frohmann, Charles, Daniel and Gustave, 215, 223 Gabler, Neal, 4 Gaylor, Bobby, 140 Gender, 25, 50, 57, 218; Bowery b’hoys and gals, 51, 55–56; cross dressing, 43, 46, 73, 192, 204, 261 n 62; saloons, 113, 114, 122–23, 126–28, 130–31, 134–36, 220; sentimentality and, 38, 87–88, 173–75, 237–38 Gilmore, Paul, 57 Godkin, E.L., 239–40 Goldberg, Isaac, 231 Gorey, Edward, The Beastly Baby, 198 Gould, Philip, 63 Greeley, Horace, 149, 162 Grover, Leonard, 115, 167–69, 180 Guernsey, Alfred, 162 Hadley, Elaine, 85 Hague, Sam, 208–9 Haigh, J. Lloyd, 205 Haliburton, Thomas (Sam Slick), 1, 5

Hall, A. Oakey, 43, 150 Hamblin, Thomas, 85 Hamilton, William McLane, 29 Hamm, Charles, 241 Harrigan, Edward, 183, 187 Harris, Charles K., 241–42 Hart, Josh, 150, 179, 180–85 Hart, Tony, 183 Harwood, Thomas, 63 Haverly, Jack, 223, 225 Hays, Will, 136, 232 Heath, Monroe, 151–52 Henderson, Alexander, 189 Henshaw, John, 204 Hicks, Charles B., 212, 214 Hill, Harry, 154 Holt, Elise, 191–93 Howells, William Dean, 34, 197, 241 Huggins, Nathan, 211 Hughes, Glenn, 16 Hughes, Jennie, 204, 205 Hutton, Lawrence, 45, 92 Hyers, Anna Madah and Emma Louise, 215 Impressionism, 240–2 Irony, 10, 12, 69, 137–38, 142, 191–92, 202, 204, 213–14, 237–38 Irving, Washington, 20, 23, 48 James, Henry, 241 Jarrett, Henry C., 157, 167–69, 184, 191, 226 Jauss, Hans Robert, 7 Jefferson, Thomas, 39 Jennings, John, 122 Johnson, James Weldon, 211 Johnson, James, 37 Johnson, Odai, 15 Juggling, 133 Kaplan, Amy, 242 Kean, Charles, 22, 44, 92 Kean, Ellen, 92 Keith, Benjamin F., 187, 244 Kersands, Billy, 206–7, 211–13, 225 Kimball, Moses and David, 83–84 Kiralfy, Bolossy, 156, 226 Kohl, Charles, 186 Korobkin, Laura Hanft, 147 Lane, William Henry (Master Juba), 77 Leavitt, Michael B., 218, 223 Lee, W.H., 208

292    I N D E X

Leon, Frank, 232 Lewis, Robert, 2 Lincoln, Abraham, 38, 115, 117, 169 Lindenmüller, Gustav, 173 Lingard, William H., 182 Littlebridge, Garner, 105 Living Pictures, 265 n 48; Collyer’s, 98–106, 107, 146, 162; Sable Brothers’, 103; Thier’s, 103 Locke, John, 240; Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 33 Logan, Eliza, 93 Logan, Olive, 90, 92, 161 London, Jack, 124 Looking, 128, 200; through reality, 9, 10, 70, 74–75, 78–79, 88, 94, 97, 100–101, 106, 146, 147; superficiality of real, 8, 18–19, 45, 48, 71, 8, 136–37, 229; at surfaces, 74, 100–101, 164–65, 198, 200, 240–42 Lott, Eric, 57 Ludlow, Noah, 51 Macready, William, 94 Mahar Jr., William, 57 Maretzek, Max, 52 Markham, Pauline, 190 Marryat, Frederick, 98 Martineau, Harriet, 14, 15 Marzetti, Joseph, 29 Mass entertainment, 2, 155–56, 165, 169– 70, 216–17; connection to class, 6, 8, 113, 114, 187; and convergence of taste, 177, 187; definition, 3; variety as, 10, 165–66, 170, 171–72, 182, 218–19, 226 Matinee, 119, 120, 168, 173, 184–85 Matthews, Cornelius, The Career of Puffer Hopkins, 51–52 Matthews, Stanley, 100–101 Mayo, Dwight Armory, 104 McAllister, William King, 152 McConville, Hugh, 143 McCunn, John, 149 McDonald, Baby, 120 McGuire, Frank (Young Ajax), 196–97 McIntyre, Jim and Heath, Tom, 234 McNish, Frank, 225 Medina, Louisa, The Last Days of Pompeii, 85 Melodrama: defined, 84–85; domestic, 82, 86–89; heroic, 19, 32, 84, 85; Belphagor, the Mountebank; or, Woman’s Constancy, 88, 93; Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity! 85; The Dream, or the Truth Revealed, 88–89; The Drunkard, 86, 88, 97, 148; The Last

Days of Pompeii, 85; Marie, 85; The Robbers, Rosedale, or, the Rifle Ball, 2; The Spectre King, and His Phantom Steed, 85; Still Waters Run Deep, 86–87; 85; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 86 Middleton, George, 186–87 Milbank, George, 223 Milford, Timothy, 17 Miller, Tom, 119 Miner, Harry, 179 Mines, John Flavel, 64 Minstrelsy: analysis of, 56, 70, 141–42, 258 n 29; and class, 58, 59, 60, 61–62, 72; female, 180, 216–21; grotesque, 58–59, 61, 67, 117, 133, 134, 138–41, 207, 211, 213–14, 216, 221–22; organization of show, 64, 67–68, 218, 224, 225; as sentimental entertainment, 57, 68, 70, 72, 74, 231; and slavery, 57–58, 63, 71, 231; as variety show, 215, 223–29, 231; Backus’s, 74; Barlow, Wilson, Primrose and West’s Mammoth, 215, 222, 224–25; Billy M’Chrystal’s, 220; Bryant’s, 74, 139, 207; Buckley’s, 65, 73, 112, 207, 222; Callender’s, 212, 215, 235; Christy’s, 63–64, 67–68, 71, 207, 222, 223; Duncan Clark’s, 220; Duprez and Benedict’s, 222; Ethiopian Opera Troupe (Serenaders), 62; Fanny May’s, 220; Georgia, 208, 211– 12, 215, 235; Haverly’s United Mastodon, 222, 223, 224, 225–27, 228–29; Hooley’s, 225; Ida Cerito’s, 220; Isham’s Octoroons, 218; Metropolitan, 223; Morris Brothers, (Trowbridge), and Pell, 74, 181, 223; New Orleans Minstrels, 73; Plantation, 216; Rainer Family, 61; RentzSantley, 218–19, 220; San Francisco, 183, 207; Tesman’s, 217, 219; Three Crows, 140; Tyrolese, 61; Virginia Serenaders, 61; W. S. Cleveland’s, 231; White’s Melodeon, 140, 172, 183; Wood’s, 74, 222. See also African-American minstrels Mitchell, William, 45, 52, 55, 56, 77, 171 Model artists. See living pictures Montague, Harry, 120 Moore, Thomas, 47 Morris, John J., 154 Morris, Lon and Charles, 223 Museums, 84, 95; Albany, 77; Anatomical, 103; Barnum’s American, 77, 82, 86, 112, 123, 167; Boston, 83, 84, 86, 88, 93; Boylston, 197; Lowell, 83; Scudder’s American, 77; Wood’s, 189, 192

I N D E X     293 Nakedness, 98–100, 101, 104–6, 126, 160–61, 162, 165, 191, 196, 199–200, 219–20, 266 n 58, 266 n 61 Nathans, Heather, 17, 57 Neuendorff, Adolph, 184 Niblo, John, 64 Niblo, William, 26–28, 62 Noel, Thomas, 126 Norris, Frank, 241 Northall, William Knight, 44, 48, 55 Nostalgia, 11; for antebellum South, 229–31, 234–35 Novelty, 8, 23, 194 Opera and operetta: Fra Diavolo, 67; HMS Pinafore, 215; La Fille du Regiment, 67; 47; La Nozze de Figaro, 43; La Somnambula, 113; La Traviata, 168; The Bohemian Girl, 42, 62, 113 Opposition to entertainment, 23–24, 30–31, 102–6, 112–13, 144–45, 147–55, 162; Chicago Citizen’s League, 151, 152–53; church-based, 1, 4, 5, 15, 21–22, 93, 95, 101, 106–7, 160, 162–63, 165; New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 196. See also Sunday observance; temperance Palmer, Harry D., 157, 167–69, 184, 226, 275 n 29 Palmo, Ferdinand, 62 Pantomimes, 195; Green Monster and White Knight, 29; Jocko, or the Ape of Brazil, 29 Pastor, Billy, 217 Pastor, Tony, 116–17, 171–80, 185 Patriotism, 4, 18, 22, 117, 133 Peel, Matt, 222 Pleasure gardens: appeal of, 24–27; class and, 26, 31, 51–52, 77; decline of, 51–52; design of, 32; gender and, 25; sentimentality and, 24; Bowling Green, 25; Gray’s, 24, 25; Mount Vernon, 24; Niblo’s, 26–27, 29, 31, 32, 52; Spring, 24; Vauxhall, 25, 51, 76–77 Poe, Edgar Allan, 7 Politics, 15, 94, 104, 109, 148, 149–50, 154 Pottgeiser, Gleabert, 151–52 Powers, Hiram, The Greek Slave, 100, 162 Price, Sam, 224 Primrose, George, 224, 228 Prince, Charles, 214 Prostitutes, 20, 21, 53, 111–12, 114, 119, 128–30, 140, 150 Putnam, Wallace Reed, 117

Racism, 141, 175, 188, 207, 209, 211, 212, 231–33, 249 n 18; sentimental, 71, 100, 210; scientific, 235, 240 Rahill, Frank, 85 Rankin, John, 15 Realism, 11, 18, 158, 163–65, 240–42 Respectability and manners, 18, 39, 48, 50–53, 55, 78–80, 124–25, 172, 175, 183, 188, 190, 204, 237–38 Rice, Billy, 225, 226 Rice, Dan, 236 Rice, Edward LeRoy, 232 Rice, Thomas ( Jim Crow), 58–59, 60, 63 Rich, Isaac, 181 Richmond, Harry, 203 Roach, Joseph, 19 Roark, James, 11 Robinson, Cedric, 4 Romanticism, 7, 32, 46 Rose, Anne, 37 Ruskin, John, 80 Ryan, Mary, 37 Saloons, 155; Broadway House, 49; Louvre, 117; Robert’s, 49. See also concert saloons Samuels, Shirley, 33 Santley, Mabel, 218 Schackford, C.C., 240 Schlesinger, Arthur, 38 Schoolcraft, Luke, 234 Seating, 20–21, 48, 53, 56, 77, 161, 178, 222; class and, 20–21, 31, 77, 84; price of, 44, 52, 83–84, 99, 105, 115, 121, 167, 173, 175, 177–79, 183, 216; saloon, 117–18, 129–30; women and, 52, 20–21, 49, 60, 94, 260 n 47 Sekula, Allan, 38 Selby, Charles, 46 Sensationalism, 34–35, 97–98, 107; Civil War and, 145–46, 169 Sentimentality, 5, 6, 12, 229–30; aesthetics of, 66, 79–81, 94, 99, 107, 147, 201; burlesqued, 126, 131–32, 135, 136–38, 141–42, 213–14; community and, 34, 38; critique of, 154, 230, 239–42; definition of, 33; eighteenth century, 19, 32–33; faith and, 33–37, 145, 239–40; free will and, 96, 100–101; law and, 38, 147, 149–50, 152; respectability and, 39, 79–80, 96–97, 98, 100, 106, 188; the sublime, 79– 80, 81–82, 99; transformation of, 201–5, 207, 216, 225–26, 229, 237–38. See also comedy; melodrama; minstrelsy, sympathy

294    I N D E X

Sexton, Inez, 120 Sharpley, Sam, 173 Sherry, George, 143–44 Simpson, George W., 208 Sinn, William, 115, 180, 184–86, 188 Slavery, 39, 69–71, 230, 233–34, 255 Smells, 20, 120, 132, 183 Smith, Adam, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 33–34, 240 Smith, Johnny (One-Eyed), 139–40 Smyth, Charles, 160, 162–63 Soldiers, 101, 113–17, 119 Song: Italian style,19, 32–33, 47, 67, 201–2; minstrel, 57, 59, 64, 68, 74; A Good Tempered Man, 203; After the Ball, 241–42; Annie Lisle, 80–81; Aunt Jemima, 213, 283 n 15; Behind the Scenes, 135–36; Beneath the Old Pine Tree, 232–33; Brooklyn Belle and the Broadway Swell, 167; Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, 182; The Church Across the Way, 214; Coal Black Rose, 59, 61; Dan Tucker, 61, 63; Dandy Jim Ob Caroline, 63; The Dashing Belle, 137; De Boatman Row, 63; De Camptown Races, 69; Dixie, 209; The Goose Hangs High, 133; Gumbo Chaff, 59; Happy Be Thy Dreams, 133; The Heart Bowed Down, 214; Home Sweet Home, 201; I Dreamed that I Dwelt in Marble Halls, 42; I’ll Get Married, 139; Jump Jim Crow, 58; Little Frog, 140; Little Log Cabin in the Lane, 232; Mabel Waltz, 173–74; Mary’s Gone Wid a Coon, 211; Massa’s in de Cold Ground, 69; Matilda Baker, 174; Meet John Booker at the Bowling Green, 209; Mother Dear, I’ll Come Home Again, 209; My Love and Me, 138; My Old Kentucky Home, 69, 229; The Naughty Naughty Girls, 174–75; No One to Welcome Me Home, 144; Nora, a Cushla, 225; Oh Charley My Darling, 129; Oh! Susanna, 69; The Old Folks at Home, 69; Old Hoss, Old Hoss, 140; Over the Garden Wall, 144; Peanuts! Peanuts! 136; Plant Sweet Flowers, 225; She’s Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, 202; Somebody’s Coming, 225; Stuck on Your Shape, 199; Susan Jane, 136; That’s Just What I Want You for to Do, 137; That’s Where I Know You Are Right, 204; Uncle Ned, 69; Up in a Balloon, 192; The Upper and Lower Ten Thousand, 116; The Warrior

Bold, 225; When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home, 209; When the Birds Return Again, 203; Where the River Shannon Flows, 229; Zip Coon, 58 Soubrettes, seriocomics and singers, 111, 126, 133, 199–205 Spectacles: Aladdin, 83; Black Crook, 155–65, 167, 168, 189, 217, 226; Cinderella, 83; Puss n Boots, 83; Red Riding Hood, 83; White Fawn, 184 Spring, Gardiner, 106 Stansell, Christine, 111 Stephens, Ann, Phemie Frost’s Experiences, 163–64 Stewart, Fattie, 137 Stone, Henry Dickinson, 64 Stott, Richard, 50 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 37, 70, 169; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 36, 86 Stowell, John, 153 Strong, George Templeton, 31, 32, 113 Sumner, William Graham, 240 Sunday observance, 111, 148, 151, 153. See also opposition to entertainment; theatres: laws regarding; temperance Swearengen, Al, 119–20 Sympathy, 6, 70–71, 78–79, 88, 94, 196–97, 201, 205, 238–39; as essence of humanity, 33–34, 37, 38, 79, 81; and suffering, 39–40, 81 Tableaux vivants. See living pictures Talmage, Thomas De Witt, 97, 107, 165, 169 Tannock, Stuart, 230 Taylor, Charles W., 77 Taylor, Mary, 42–43, 46, 47, 54, 55, 56, 73, 77, 92, 200 Temperance, 49–52, 84, 86, 111, 113, 145, 148, 149, 150–51, 173, 182; Citizen’s League for the Suppression of the Sale of Liquors to Minors and Drunkards, 150–51; Society for the ­Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, 154. See also opposition to ­entertainment; Sunday observance; theatres: laws ­regarding Tesman, Ada, 217 Theatres: financial situation of, 14, 23, 178; laws regarding, 16, 105, 111, 148–49, 151, 152–53; liquor, food and, 23, 50–51, 55; as moral entertainment, 77–78, 84, 86, 96, 99–100; number of, 17, 22, 43–45, 83,

I N D E X     295 172; press and, 7, 62, 106, 175–76, 183, 190; star system, 22–23, 44; 201 Bowery, 173, 176–77; Academy of Music, 157, 167, 177; Alhambra, 64; Apollo Rooms, 98; Astor Place, 94–95; Bijou, 187; Boston, 157; Bowery, 44, 50–51, 53, 77, 84, 91, 123; Bowery Amphitheatre, 61; Burton’s New National, 53; Chatham, 55–56, 59, 257 n 27; Chestnut, 22; Comique (New York), 179, 182–84, 187; Eagle, 179, 182, 183–84; Federal, 17, 95; Germania, 184, 187; Globe (New York), 185, 205; Grand Opera House (New York), 220; Haymarket, 17; Howard Athenaeum, 180–81, 183, 186, 187; Mechanic’s Hall (Utica), 217; Mechanics’ Hall (New York), 64; Metropolitan, 179–80; Mitchell’s Olympic, 42–43, 45, 49, 52, 53, 123, 171; New York Society, 64; New York, 123; Niblo’s Garden, 27, 29, 52, 110, 112, 146, 156, 158, 161, 162, 167, 189, 225; Palmo’s Opera House, 62, 99–100; Park (Brooklyn), 184, 186; Park (New York), 21, 44, 52, 59, 91; Sans Souci, 27; Sinn’s Olympic, 185, 186; St.  Charles, 44, 51, 53; Tammany, 166–70, 180, 184; Tivoli, 27, 178, 196; Tremont, 1, 21, 44, 95, 148; Varieties (St Louis), 96; Wallack’s, 2, 123, 167. See also audience; seating; variety; vaudeville; melodrama; minstrelsy Thompson, Lydia, 189–91,238 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 36 Tomkins, Jane, 36 Tompkins, William S., 112 Townsend, Alfred, 113–14, 198 Trollope, Frances, 14 Trowbridge, Joseph C., 181 Tuley, Murray F., 151 Twain, Mark, 238 Variety, 9, 76–77, 108–9, 135, 149, 165–66, 167–68, 171, 181, 187, 194, 197–98, 204, 215–16; touring companies, 177, 215,

217, 220, 224, 226, 228; Arnold Brothers, 137. See also vaudeville; theatres Vaudeville, 11, 171, 185–89, 194, 198; circuits, 185–86; French term, 28, 185, 252 n 27; Ravels, 29–30, 32, 65, 74, 185, 223; Adelphi, 186; Bidwell’s Academy of Music, 186; Canterbury Variety, 220; Central, 186; Comique (New Orleans), 186; Comique (Washington), 186; ­Holiday St., 186; Pastor’s Union Square, 184, 200; Le Charlatanisme, 28. See also combinations; variety; theatres Voegtlin, William, 158 Wagner, “Happy” Cal, 142, 208, 222, 224, 226, 233 Waiter Girls, Beer Jerkers and Seat ­Warmers, 112, 114–15, 118, 125–29, 136–37, 143, 148–50, 189 Wakeman, George, 66, 139 Walker, George, 212 Walkley, A.B., 200–201 Wallack, James, 51 Ward, Lester, 240 Watkins, Harry, 97 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 47 Webster, Daniel, 38 Welsh, William, 210 West, Billy, 224, 233 West, Luke, 222 Wheatley, William, 157, 161, 162–63, 166, 180 White, Charley, 140, 183 White, William Grant, 190, 237, 238 Whitman, Walt, 84, 100, 101, 107 Willard, Frances, 2, 4 Williams, Bert, 212 Williams, R.W., 113 Winter, William, 90 Wood, William, 22 Wright, Uriel, 96 Yates, Edmund, 222