witnessed a fight between billy goats, a rat baiting, a cockfight, and a boxing
match between bare-breasted women. “Certainly for a lad of 17, such as I,” he
recalled, “a night with Tommy Norris and his attraction was quite a night.”
Boxing
Prizefighting emerged from the same subterranean culture
that sustained cockfights and other blood sports. This
sport, imported from Britain, called for an enclosed ring, clear rules, cornermen, a referee, and a paying audience. Boxing’s popularity rose during the 1840s and
1850s, a time of increasing immigration and violence in poor city neighborhoods.
Many of the fighters had close ties with ethnic-based saloons, militia units, fire companies, and street gangs such as New York’s (Irish) Dead Rabbits and
(native) Bowery B’hoys, and many labored at occupations with a peculiarly ethnic
base. Some of the best American-born fighters were New York City butchers—a
licensed, privileged trade from which cheap immigrant labor was systematically
excluded. Butchers usually finished work by 10 A.M. They could then spend the
rest of the day idling at a firehouse or a bar and often were prominent figures in neighborhood gangs. A prizefight between an American-born butcher and an Irish
day laborer would attract a spirited audience that understood its class and ethnic meaning.
An American
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, all American theaters
Theater
were in the large seaport cities. Those who attended were
members of the urban elite, and nearly all of the plays, man-
agers, and actors were English. After 1815, new theaters sprang up not only in New York and Philadelphia but also in dozens of other new towns, while traveling troupes carried theatrical performances to the smallest hamlets. The new theaters catered to male, largely plebeian audiences. Before 1830, the poorer theatergoers—nearly all of them men—occupied the cheap balcony seats (with the exception of the second balcony, which was reserved for prostitutes); artisans and other workingmen filled
benches in the ground-floor area known as “the pit”; wealthier and more genteel
patrons sat in the boxes. Those sitting in the pit and balcony joined in the performance: They ate and drank, talked, and shouted encouragement and threats to the
actors. The genteel New Yorker Washington Irving lamented the “discharge of
apples, nuts, and gingerbread” flying out of the balconies.
As time passed, rowdyism turned into violence. Working-class theatergoers
protested the elegant speech, gentlemanly bearing, and understated performances
of the English actors, which happened to match the speech, manners, and bearing
of the American urban elite. Protests were directed not only at the English actors but also at the ladies and gentlemen in the orchestra who were seen as adherents
of an aristocratic English culture unsuitable in a democratic republic.
The first theater riot occurred in 1817, when the English actor Charles Incledon
refused a New York audience’s demand that he stop what he was doing and sing
“Black-Eyed Susan.” Such assaults grew more common during the 1820s. By the
1830s, separate theaters offered separate kinds of performances for rich and poor, but violence continued. It culminated in the rivalry between the American actor
Edwin Forrest and the English actor William Charles Macready. Macready was a
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trained Shakespearean actor, and his restrained style and attention to the subtleties of the text had won him acclaim both in Britain and in the United States. Forrest, on the other hand, played to the cheap seats. With his bombast and histrionics, he transformed Shakespeare’s tragedies into melodramas. Forrest and Macready carried out a well-publicized feud that led to a mob attack on Macready in 1849.
Led by E. Z. C. Judson (who, under the pen name Ned Buntline, wrote scores of
dime novels), the mob descended on Macready’s performance at the exclusive Astor
Place Opera House. The militia was waiting for them, and 20 people died in the
ensuing riot and gunfight.
Playhouses that catered to working-class audiences continued to feature Shake-
spearean tragedies (Richard III, played broadly and with a lot of swordplay, was
the favorite), but they now shared the stage with works written in the American
vernacular. The stage “Yankee,” rustic but shrewd, appeared at this time, and so
did Mose the Bowery B’hoy, a New York volunteer fireman who performed feats of
derring-do. Both frequently appeared in opposition to well-dressed characters with English accents. The Yankee outsmarted them; Mose beat them up.
Minstrelsy
The most popular form of theater was the blackface minstrel
show. These shows were blatantly racist, and they were the
preferred entertainment of working men (again, the audience was overwhelmingly
working class and male) in northern cities from 1840 to 1880. The first minstrel
show was presented in 1831 when a white showman named Thomas Rice blacked
his face and “jumped Jim Crow,” imitating a black shuffle-dance he had seen on
the Cincinnati docks.
Minstrel shows developed a form that every theatergoer knew by heart. The
shows lasted an hour and a half and were presented in three sections. The first
consisted of songs and dances performed in a walkaround, in which the audience
was encouraged to clap and sing along. This was followed by a longer middle sec-
tion in which the company sat in a row with a character named Tambo at one end
and a character named Bones at the other (named for the tambourine and bones,
the instruments they played), with an interlocutor in the middle. The Tambo char-
acter, often called Uncle Ned, was a simple-minded plantation slave dressed in
plain clothing. The Bones character, usually called Zip Coon, was a dandified,
oversexed free black dressed in top hat and tails. The interlocutor was the straight man—fashionably dressed, slightly pretentious, with an English accent. This middle portion of the show consisted of a conversation among the three, which in-
cluded pointed political satire, skits ridiculing the wealthy and the educated, and sexual jokes that bordered on obscenity. The third section featured songs, dances, and jokes, most of them familiar enough so that the audience could sing along
and laugh at the right places.
The minstrel shows introduced African American song and dance—in toned-
down, Europeanized form—to audiences who would not have permitted black
performers on the stage. They also reinforced racial stereotypes that were near
the center of American popular culture. Finally, hiding behind black masks,
minstrel performers dealt broadly with aspects of social and political life that
other performers avoided.
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