the number of traveling shows available to the farm and village
families who constituted the bulk of the American population was small
until, really, the 1880s, if not later. It is difficult to put figures
to anything like this, for there must have been hundreds, if not
thousands, of traveling performers moving around the United States in
the middle decades of the 19th century who went unrecorded. But in
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's portrait of small-town America in the
ante-bellum period, it is clear from the famous "Duke and the Dauphin"
episodes that Huck, then about twelve years old, had had little
experience with circuses or shows in general. Few farm families had
either the time or the money to take in a traveling show very often;
and during a hard northern winter, not many would have been much
inclined to hike three or four miles through the snow to enjoy one.
For most Americans during the colonial period and for decades after,
professional entertainment was a relatively rare treat. Like butter
and candles, American entertainment was usually home-made-a dance, a
footrace, a family sing around the square piano or cottage organ in
the homes of the better off.
Among the few traveling shows which did meander around the United
States were some entertainers, working by themselves or with small
troupes, who did blackface acts to give what purported to be
imitations of Negro song and dance. The most famous of these
entertainers was Thomas D. Rice, who copied a dance he saw done by a
black man stiff with age and crippled with rheumatism. "Weel about and
turn about and do jus so; ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow,"
the old man sang, and Rice's version of the dance became widely
popular in the 1830s.
In time these blackface acts were expanded, with larger troupes
playing more elaborate shows. This form of entertainment came to be
called the minstrel show. It was made up of set routines combining
songs, dances, jokes, and even fairly lengthy skits, all supposed to
represent the jolly life of blacks on the old plantation. Minstrelsy
"swept the nation" in the 1840s, and remained popular for decades
thereafter. In the post-Civil War period, some blacks, now able to
travel and to organize their own businesses, put together minstrel
shows of their own, ironically blacking up to maintain the character
of minstrelsy. These black minstrels began the tradition of the black
entertainer in the United States, which has played so profound a role
in American entertainment. Nonetheless, whites continued to dominate
minstrelsy.
By the 1860s and 1870s a new, although parallel, form of entertainment
was emerging which would eventually kill the minstrel show and go on
to become the basis for the modern entertainment industry. This was
[variety]. Like minstrelsy, variety consisted of a loose collection of
songs, dances, comedy, skits, and other hard to categorize acts; but
it was not tied together by a common theme, as minstrelsy had been.
Variety owed something to minstrelsy, in part because the minstrel
shows had worked out the system of moving a large troupe from town to
town, and in part because variety shows frequently included black acts
which had been developed by the minstrels.
But the true roots of vaudeville lay in Europe. Beginning in about the
1840s there had developed in European cities the institution of what
was called in France the cafe-concert. Often set in the open air,
these cafes-concerts consisted of tables grouped around a stage where
fairly rough entertainment was put on. Waiters went through the
audience serving liquor, mainly beer. One important feature of the
cafes-concerts was the mingling of social classes, as we can see in
Edouard Manet's "The Waitress," which shows a top-hatted gentleman
seated close to a blue-smocked working man in a cafe-concert.
The immigrants pouring into the United States from the late 1840s on
brought the idea to America. Kathy Peiss, in her study of working
women's amusements at the turn of the century, says, "In the 1850s
some saloon owners converted their back rooms and cellars into small
concert halls and hired speciality acts to amuse their patrons and
encourage drinking. By the 1860s over two hundred concert-saloons had
spread along Broadway, the Bowery, and the waterfronts, catering to a
heterogeneous male clientele of laborers, soldiers, sailors, and
'slumming' society gentlemen. The conventions of polite society were
put aside in these male sanctuaries, where crude jokes, bawdy comedy
sketches, and scantily clad singers entertained the drinkers."
The idea of providing entertainment to attract and hold drinkers is an
obvious one; but the timing of the rise of the concert saloon, the
mingling of social classes, and the name itself strongly suggest the
European origin.
The shows might open with a chorus line of women in revealing
costumes, after which would come comics and song and dance acts.
Performances were often closed by an "afterpiece," usually an erotic
and partly improvised skit; among the most famous of these were "The
Book Agent" and "The Bathing Girl," both short on plot but long on
innuendo. In most of these places "waiter girls," in short uniforms,
served drinks and sometimes themselves. By the latter decades of the
19th century there were saloons of this type in all big cities and in
many small towns, like Sherwoods Mascot in Galveston, Texas, and
Chicago Joe's Coliseum in Helena, Montana. The most famous of these
places were the big city saloons, like Harry Hill's on Houston Street,
in New York City, which offered boxing matches, walking contests, song
and dance, and the usual blue skits.
Variety was created by moving this saloon entertainmemt into theaters.
"At first the changes were superficial and, although more elegant than
the saloon, the fare was still quite low and vulgar," employing the
usual sexual jokes and dancing girls showing a good deal of flesh.
Ethnic humor, built on stereotypes of the German and Irish immigrants
coming into the country, was a staple of the new variety show.
These early popular theaters, it should be noted, had a strong_sexual
component, off-stage as well as on. Many of them had third tiers above
the dress and family circles reserved for prostitutes. "By the 1830s
and 1840s, the relinquishing of the third tier to prostitutes had
become an established national tradition," says one writer. There was
often a bar on the third tier, and a separate set of stairs leading up
to it from a side alley. One authority has estimated that as late as
1875, 70 percent of Americans associated the theater with sin; but up
until the 1880s theaters could not have survived without the patronage
of the prostitutes, not for their admission fees, for they were
generally admitted free, but for the men they drew.
The theater, then, was not a place where women and children of the new
middle class the industrial society was spawning, with their Victorian
ethic, could possibly go; and this in turn meant that middle-class
males could not visit them either, at least on those occasions when
they wanted to take their families or sweethearts out for an evening
of fun. The theaters, thus, were off-limits to the most affluent 25
percent of the American population; and it occurred to one showman,
Tony Pastor, that if he could produce clean variety, he could attract
a whole segment of the population to his shows which had hitherto not
come. In 1881 Pastor opened his Fourteenth Street Theater, offering "a
straight, clean, variety show-the first-as such-ever given in this
country. It was a daring venture. Only gals on the trampish side
attended variety in the eighties. Pastor's move was mainly (and
frankly) for profit, a definite and canny bid to double the audience
by attracting respectable women-wives, sisters, sweethearts-" says
Douglas Gilbert in his history of the institution.
Pastor's innovation was successful, and very quickly other
entrepreneurs leapt in to imitate him. Through the 1880s and 1890s
variety grew at an astonishing pace. Across the nation, barns,
warehouses, abandoned churches were converted to variety theaters.
Very quickly, in order to shed the old unseemly image, the name was
changed to vaudeville, a word of French extraction whose origins are
in dispute.
The heyday of vaudeville ran from about the mid-1890s to approximately
1920, although it had begun earlier, and was still staggering along
into the 1930s. Through its golden age the houses grew more elaborate,
the acts more polished and professional, the audiences ever larger,
the salaries higher, and the renown greater. Douglas Gilbert says,
"The essence of American vaudeville was comedy despite [Edward]
Albee's contention that it was women's backsides." The comedy,
especially in the early days, was often very heavy-handed, depending
on fright wigs, slapshoes, and the punching about of one comic by the
other. But the routines were fast-paced, played with energy and zest,
and followed each other in rapid fire, so that audiences hardly
finished applauding one act when the next was pouncing at them.
It began to be recognized that certain acts extracted more applause
than others, and promoters and theater owners started advertising, or
"billing," such acts more prominently. Very soon a hierarchy of
vaudevillians was created, with the stars at the top barely deigning
to speak to the humble unknowns at the bottom. The top acts began
demanding special treatment in the form of large dressing rooms and
other amenities, and of course salaries ranging upwards of $5000 a
week. Even fairly low level performers could make good incomes in the
vaudeville heyday.
With so much money rolling in, the acts were dressed up with stylish
backdrops and used elaborate props. In order to keep the Victorian
middle class coming, a certain refinement was allowed to creep in. In
the late 1890s violinist Edouard Remenyi, "the Heifetz of his day,"
performed in vaudeville playing "Hearts and Flowers," Mendelssohn's
"Spring Song," and similar works. B. F. Keith, co-owner of the Keith-
Albee chain, the largest vaudeville group in the country, began
posting signs in his dressing rooms warning performers against the
slightest impropriety. But not all performances were elegant. The cat
piano routine involved a man who miaowed the "Miserere" while pulling
the tails of cats imprisoned in wire cages. One dancer came on stage
naked to the waist, with eyes painted on his nipples, a nose below,
and mouth around his navel; by working the muscles of his torso he
made faces on his stomach as he danced. Another actor did soliloquies
from Shakespeare, playing Hamlet with a beard and tights, while a
comic played Yorick with a German accent, and dug beer bottles from a
grave.
Through the 1900s and 1910s vaudeville continued to expand. "By the
teens there were more than one thousand theaters playing standard
vaudeville acts and in excess of 4,000 small-time theaters." One
authority says that there were between ten and twenty thousand acts
competing for the work, but, in fact, it could not have been less than
twenty thousand, and may well have been double or triple that number.
The money roared in. In 1893 Keith and his partner, Edward Albee,
opened the first real vaudeville "palace," the Colonial in Boston. It
cost some $670,000 for the decor alone. In 1922 the chain added the
Cleveland Palace at a cost of five million dollars. There were
paintings by Corot and Bougeureau in the marble lobby, and the lobby
carpet was the largest single piece of weaving in the world; or so the
publicity went.
But by this time B. F. Keith was dead, and so was vaudeville, although
nobody quite realized it yet. The peak had come in the years just
before World War I; the downhill slide went faster and faster through
the 1920s, and when the famous Palace in New York, the nation's
premiere vaudeville showcase, was converted to a movie house in 1932,
the dying business stopped breathing.
Vaudeville constituted the first organized system of mass
entertainment in the United States-or indeed the world. Before it,
entertainers had been individual entrepreneurs who worked as singles,
or as small opera or minstrel troupes, playing riverboats, small
theaters, and the free-and-easy saloons. But vaudeville came to be
dominated by a handful of showmen who owned huge chains of theaters,
and ran them with the attention to detail characteristic of big
business. By the 1920s Keith-Albee had four hundred houses, and the
great chains of Marcus Loew, F. F. Proctor, and two or three others
had hundreds more. The chains operated like network television,
"broadcasting" the same acts, even entire bills through the system,
the only difference being that network television is instantaneous,
while it might take an act months to work its way around a major
circuit. Bills were not thrown together haphazardly, but were
carefully worked out to provide pace, rhythm, and variety. Acts were
expected to be thoroughly rehearsed and carefully polished. There was
nothing slapdash or improvised about vaudeville in its mature stages.
The theater owners were by-and-large canny and usually fairly cold-
blooded showmen, who were, like other businessmen, mainly interested
in money. The system was operated by bureaucracies of experts in one
phase or another of the business. It ran with machine-like smoothness,
oiled by large sums of money, and was capable of crushing people who
stood in its way.
Vaudeville was the foundation on which the 20th-century entertainment
business was built. It provided a model for a national system. It
turned over to later forms, like the movies, an infrastructure of
theaters into which they could easily slide. It left a legacy of acts
which would be used by newer forms, perhaps modified, but still
essentially employing the old routines: Eddie Cantor, the Marx
Brothers, George Jessel, Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, Abbott and
Costello, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, W. C. Fields, and many others
trained in vaudeville went on to become headliners in movies, radio,
and television. The Marx brothers, Abbott and Costello, and W. C.
Fields movies were built around the characters and routines they had
developed in vaudeville; the Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and similar radio
programs were basically vaudeville bills, consisting of comic patter,
songs and skits, and in acknowledgment of their roots were called
variety programs; even as late as the 1960s one of the most popular
television programs ever was an out-and-out vaudeville show led by a
former Broadway newspaper columnist named Ed Sullivan.
The modern entertainment industry came out of vaudeville, and
vaudeville could not have grown to the giant it became outside of the
industrial city. In its maturity it was a very expensive operation and
for its audience needed a large population within easy distance of its
theaters. It needed crowds of people, it needed rapid transit systems,
it needed people with a little money in their pockets and leisure time
to spend the money on. A national vaudeville system could not have
been built on small communities with the populations of farm families.
It needed cities.
Among other things, the fact that the new industrial society was
actually tied together physically by a vast metal web of railroad
tracks and telegraph and eventually telephone wires allowed vaudeville
to develop into a national system to a degree that would not have been
possible had it had to depend upon canal barges and stage coaches for
transportation and the mails for communication. It was this network
that allowed industry in general to become national, and in that sense
vaudeville was "industrial" entertainment-a product of the same system
that created U.S. Steel and Standard Oil.
Furthermore, the huge success of vaudeville, which built enormous
fortunes for a lot of people, was predicated on the expanded middle
class of industrial society. "For the first time in America, a form of
entertainment was developed that offended virtually no one and
appealed to all classes," says Wilmeth.
Although working people did constitute a substantial proportion of the
audience for vaudeville, the poorest among them could not afford to go
often. There was, moreover, the language barrier for many. The middle
class, which was still living in cities and towns, not in the suburbs,
had certain attributes which made it important to show business. For
one thing, middle-class people had greater leisure than laborers in
the mills and mines. Clerks and accountants did not routinely work the
sixty-hour week that was typical of the mills and mines, and
furthermore, they were not so exhausted at the end of the day. For
another thing, they had considerably more money to spend on
entertainment than laboring people did, and were far better able to
afford to go to the more expensive palaces where the top acts worked.
For yet a third-and this is important-the members of the middle class-
could not generally avail themselves of some types of entertainment
that were open to working people. A young male accountant might be
permitted an occasional visit to a bar, and would probably also have a
periodic fling in a vice district; but he could hardly habituate such
places without risking his middle-class status; and he certainly could
not bring his wife or his fiancee to such places. As for middle-class
women, far from being able to go to taverns and the like, for the most
part they could not go out at night unless escorted by a male who
stood in some clear relationship to them as husband, fiance, brother,
or other relative. Through the years of the vaudeville boom there were
arriving other entertainment centers, particularly the new institution
of the cabaret, and the big, gaudy restaurant which offered
entertainment and, after 1910, dancing. But these places were
expensive, and they still appeared slightly tainted to many people of
the middle class. Vaudeville was acceptable to all but the very
religious; it was relatively inexpensive; and there were vaudeville
theaters everywhere. Vaudeville thus gave show business a
respectability that it had not always had; it brought it into the
American mainstream; it made it seem legitimate in a way that much of
the rough entertainment of the early day was not.
--------------
The Rise of Selfisness in America
James L. Collier
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195052773/
Copyright © 1991 by James Lincoln Collier
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
1. Self-interest - History-2Oth century.
2. United States-Moral conditions - History-20th century.
