WORKING-CLASS CULTURE AND LANGUAGES OF RACE
This may be the music
for the million, hurly burling,
We will not hear it
for a million sterling.
—anonymous
As the minstrel show situated itself in the urban North, its debased cultural position, no less than its racial economy, made its representations politically volatile. Its racial meanings were inextricable from its class argument, and one must therefore attend to the shifting class formations, and minstrelsy’s shifting place within them, in the antebellum North. It was in rowdy theatrical spaces that an emergent racial politics was both registered and created, and that the racial feeling underlying and shaping but many times eluding the official narratives of race in these years began to appear. Rather than locate in disembodied minstrel types some coherent, intentional politics (derived from our present notions of nineteenth-century racial matters), one ought, as Gareth Stedman Jones’s work suggests, to examine the complications in the minstrel show’s languages of race with reference to antebellum social and political developments (Languages 8). The popular theater was itself an increasingly crucial though less and less respectable part of those developments, and for a time this status enabled minstrelsy to become an oppositional, almost underground cultural form. As a result, it told a story less articulate yet perhaps more revealing than the taunts and ripostes of polemicists.
To get at this story I will sketch the outlines of a new kind of “popular” sphere in the urban Northeast (primarily in New York) that began to emerge after 1830. The disparate meanings of blackface found their material basis in the various concrete ways certain popular domains engaged black culture, in the physical spaces and cultural institutions where it was produced for and enjoyed by predominantly working-class audiences. Leaving to one side the minstrel show’s more baroque transgressions, I am after some sense of why this suitably racist cultural form generated so much disdain, why its critics found it so distasteful, an objection that often had little to do with race. Rather, in its appropriations of “blackness” the Jacksonian popular theater—along with the penny press, the saloon, and the public museum—appears to have reproduced and revitalized a set of class values. It was the way it staged class that was most often the objection, the way the stale patter and bad puns and achieved grotesquerie kept sliding from racial burlesque into class affiliation or affirmation. It was through “blackness” that class was staged, and to some observers, at least, the combination could not have been more irksome.
The minstrel show, eclectic in origin, primitive in execution, and raucous in effect, virtually announced itself as one of our first popular institutions. The nineteenth-century debate about it seems familiar perhaps because minstrelsy helped constitute a break (and thus an anxious discourse about that break) between elite, genteel, and low cultures which would be fundamental by our century. In fact, the dual emergence of the first remarkable body of (black and white) American imaginative literature and of such notable popular phenomena as minstrelsy, melodrama, and the dime novel neatly demonstrates Fredric Jameson’s point about the dialectical interrelatedness and opposition of high and low cultural forms; in capitalist societies they presuppose and depend on each other, are twin responses to a common, class-divided history (“Reification” 133–34). Many writers (such as the dime novelist George Lippard) put a broadly class-related face on the opposition in terminologies of the scandalous “upper ten” and the abused “lower million.” Indeed, by the early 1840s minstrelsy—alongside lower-million amusements such as the public lecture, the public museum, and melodrama—was ranged explicitly against the opera, the “legitimate” theater, and the concert hall, the American beginnings of what Andreas Huyssen has called the “great divide.”1 In this sense minstrel shows actually resembled the nineteenth-century dime museum, as George Rehin has observed. On the one hand, they constantly deflated the pretensions of an emerging middle-class culture of science, reform, education, and professionalism, while on the other, they disseminated information about technology and urban life for working people very often new to the city: “Minstrel ‘darkies’ were conned and swindled, run down by trolleys, shocked by batteries, and jailed for violating laws they didn’t understand.”2 They ultimately assuaged an acute sense of class insecurity by indulging feelings of racial superiority.
Yet minstrel companies unquestionably had a defiant sense of both their own and their audiences’ compromised cultural position. Part of a general emergence of artisan culture into national view, the minstrel vogue, along with mass political parties and the penny press, helped to create or organize a new public whose tastes the popular amusements now represented for the first time (Henderson 103). As one popular song put it:
Music now is all de rage;
De Minstrel Bands am all engaged;
Both far and near de people talk
’Bout Nigger Singing in New York.
Barnum’s Museum can’t be beat:
De Fat Boys dar am quite a treat.
Dar’s a Big Snake too, wid a rousing stinger;
Likewise Pete Morris, de Comic Singer.
De Chatham keeps among de rest—
Entertainments ob de best.
In public favor dis place grows,
’Specially on account ob Mose.
De Astor Opera is anoder nice place;
If you go thar, jest wash your face!
Put on your “kids,” an fix up neat,
For dis am de spot of de eliteet!3
By the time this song was published in 1849 (it was probably performed somewhat earlier), the minstrel show had long since found its urban northeastern audience: the Bowery milieu whose more vehement representatives rioted at the Astor Place Opera House later that year. We might, in fact, take this variety of song as a rallying cry for that event, inasmuch as both riot and songs marked the end of an earlier fluidity and intermixture of class-identified entertainments and institutional sites.
One does not quite yet find this song’s sentiments consolidated in, for instance, the early 1830s (though of course blackface always bore a fiercely popular stamp). First performed in those years between the acts at “respectable” theaters, minstrelsy in New York steadily retreated over the next decade to lower Broadway, and lower-class, houses. The long-accepted (and somewhat permeable) internal division of theater audiences into cheap gallery, fashionable box, and middling pit seats—the so-called gods, gentlemen, and groundlings—gradually became rough external divisions between class-specific theaters. In 1820 the “internal situation” of a Boston house still looked this way to one patron:
It appeared that the gallery was the resort of the particoloured race of Africans, the descendants of Africans, and the vindicators of the abolition of the slave trade; that the tier of boxes below it in the center was occupied by single gentlewomen who had lodgings to let, and who were equally famous for their delicacy and taciturn disposition. The remainder of the boxes, I was given to understand, were visited by none but the dandies, and people of the first respectability and fashion; while the pit presented a mixed multitude of the lower orders of all sorts, sizes, ages, and deportments.4
“Africans,” “vindicators of abolition,” and “mixed multitude,” one surmises, are shorthand for the rabble; but the rabble (at least its white members) soon had its own playhouses, and made its triumphant mark on existing ones. This division was not a simple matter of newly specialized theaters, as Raymond Williams has reminded us; the specialization itself was produced by, and in a range of ways mirrored, the social structure and tensions in metropolizing northeastern cities (“Social” 131). Exemplars of a new cultural sphere, minstrel shows were unrelentingly self-conscious, continually inscribing audiences’ allegiances in the form of the show: you would never go to the Astor Place Opera because you came here (recall that Margaret Fuller hadn’t actually gone to the theater to hear those “African” melodies). The result, however, was in one sense to equate “low” audiences with the racial ritual that defined their cultural position, that is, implicitly to identify the Bowery constituency with the blackness they “put on.”
They were, in any case, understood to inhabit the bottom. The Philadelphia Public Ledger (May 16, 1849) conceded the class character of the audience for minstrelsy and melodrama in its response to the Astor Place riot: “It leaves behind a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger—an opposition of classes—the rich and poor—white kids and no kids at all; in fact, to speak right out, a feeling that there is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto considered it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class.” If this is vague sociology it is better cultural geography. For not only in the theater but in the public sphere generally, as Peter Buckley has shown, a bifurcation had indeed occurred between the 1830s and 1849. From the late 1820s, when audiences and entertainments were still broadly representative of the social totality, northern urban culture had begun to develop along two lines—in New York, one following Chatham Street and then up the Bowery, the other marching fashionably up Broadway to the Astor Place Opera House. “These two cultural axes were not initially in opposition,” Buckley writes, “yet gradually there developed, especially after 1837, two distinct idioms, two audiences and two versions of what constituted the ‘public’ sphere of communication and amusement” (31). In 1849 the cultures clashed where the axes nearly met, at Astor Place.
The Astor Place riot proved a full-scale eruption of national and class tensions into the sphere of culture. With some help from the press, and from nativist Bowery agitators such as the dime novelist Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), himself a direct link between the new culture of amusements and growing social fissures, a lengthy rivalry between the British “legitimate” Shakespearean actor Charles Macready and the air-sawing American Edwin Forrest entered a new register as the two actors portrayed Macbeth in concurrent New York productions. To their respective constituencies this was a struggle for political legitimation fought out in the cultural terms that the “great divide” had made available. If Forrest had for more than twenty years created various incarnations of a Jacksonian hero (Metamora, Jack Cade, Spartacus),5 Macready, as the feud developed, came to signify an aristocracy of “taste,” the “upper ten,” the Dickens of American Notes. On May 7 Macready’s New York opening at Astor Place was interrupted by boos, a hail of rotten lemons, and ultimately a row of chairs thrown by a conspiratorial claque of Forrest’s Bowery “b’hoys.” A published list of signatories (including Washington Irving and Herman Melville) quickly responded, vowing order and urging Macready to continue his performances. Three nights later similar demonstrations plagued Macready’s Macbeth; refusing to be bullied, however, and buttressed by some well-placed police, Macready pressed on. A crowd of over five thousand, further angered by admission restrictions and the show of police force, now gathered outside the opera house, assaulting the structure with paving stones and yelling slogans such as, “Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!” and “You can’t go in there without kid gloves on!” The militia, two hundred anxious troops, readied themselves for this assault, which was soon turned against the troops themselves. First they fired over the heads of the crowd, and then directly into it; twenty-two were killed, over one hundred and fifty wounded. As Buckley puts it, “The Astor Place riot appeared to be a moment when the mob became a class and when the classes seemed in irreconcilable opposition.”6 The minstrel show, in other words, inhabited—and began actually to signify—not an undifferentiated “mass” culture but a class-defined, often class-conscious, cultural sphere.
But while the broadest structural outlines of minstrelsy’s class character are sharp enough, the details are rather less so. One should note, for instance, that its audience’s class makeup was often contradictory; while the audience was made up predominantly of young male workers, there was also a fair number of men and women from other classes, not only in the more mixed audiences of the 1830s but later as well. The journeyman craftsmen and semi-skilled or unskilled workers (teamsters, boatmen, barbers, and so on) who increasingly constituted the minstrel show’s audience when theater prices plummeted after the 1837 panic were often joined by people from “contradictory class locations,” to use Erik Olin Wright’s term (19–63): shopkeepers, clerks, small master artisans. Regarding even the class-bound audiences of the 1840s, there was some confusion among commentators about just who was out there in the pit and the gallery. As I will argue later, one of minstrelsy’s functions was precisely to bring various class fractions into contact with one another, to mediate their relations, and finally to aid in the construction of class identities over the bodies of black people. Emerging splits within the working class (between artisans and proletarianized workers, for instance, or between “natives” and immigrant Irish) were often made manifest in terms of these groups’ differential relations to racial privilege, even as the formation of a northern working class depended on a common sense of whiteness. In short, the new milieu that blackface occupied came unevenly into being, cutting across the popular classes and constituting in itself a field of conflict over which “public” would in fact turn out to define it. Nor was the minstrel show simply created out of nowhere; consisting partly of appropriations of extant institutions, partly of new inventions, it grew up right alongside the more respectable entertainments.7
These unevennesses were enough to tilt the “lower million’s” rhetoric of class in the direction of a populist sensibility, as the phrase itself suggests, but they hardly mitigated the minstrel show’s class basis. As David Montgomery has observed of the people who were minstrelsy’s adherents: “The praise they bestowed on the ‘honest mechanics’ of their communities echoed through the popular songs and dime-novel literature of the day…. Although this culture was infused with a populist, rather than a strictly class consciousness, it clearly separated the nation into ‘the producers’ and ‘the exploiters’” (“Labor” 94). Ideologically the minstrel show was a “popular” or “producer’s” form, mightily class-inflected but unstable in its class ideologies and shifting in its class makeup; structurally it was a working-class form, firmly grounded in the institutional spaces and cultural predispositions of workers.8 Christy’s Minstrels had their longest New York run at a theater named Mechanics’ Hall. Working-class values and desires were aired and secured in the minstrel show. Its racial “narrative” dovetailed with its class sources in surprising and sometimes confusing ways. Theatrical displays of “blackness” seemingly guaranteed the atmosphere of license so central to working-class entertainment in this period. And blackface provided a convenient mask through which to voice class resentments of all kinds—resentments directed as readily toward black people as toward upper-class enemies. But as we have seen, there was also a historical logic in glossing working-class whites as black, given the degree to which large sections of these groups shared a common culture in many parts of the North. Certain minstrel forms attested to this fact; moreover, as David Roediger has shown, many popular racial slurs both onstage and off (“coon,” “buck”) also referred to whites (Wages 97–100). Occasionally these facts resulted in positive identifications between black and white, however quick the minstrel show usually was to forestall them.
All of which evidence may begin to suggest that blackface, in a real if partial sense, figured class—that its languages of race so invoked ideas about class as to provide displaced maps or representations of “working-classness.” Thus it was said of T. D. Rice’s English tour that his burlesque skits were “vulgar even to grossness,” and captivated “the chimney sweeps and apprentice boys of London, who wheeled about and turned about and jumped Jim Crow, from morning until night, to the annoyance of their masters, but the great delight of the cockneys.”9 The submerged equation here of slaves and white workers (apprentices and perennially blackened sweeps ranged against their “masters”) was not at all unusual; it was popularized, as we shall see, in radical artisans’ rhetoric of “wage slavery.” Nor was the implicit (and opposing) claim that caricatures of blacks culturally represented workers above all. Blackface quickly became a sort of useful shorthand in referring to working men. New York’s Castle Garden, noted the Journal of Music, nightly featured a variety of distinguished musical offerings, “and two or three songs by ANNA ZERR, who (shame to say) stooped to pick up one night and sing ‘Old folks at home,’ for the b’hoys; one would as soon think of picking up an apple-core in the street.”10 Indeed, the overlapping of racial and class codes probably made the minstrel show’s audiences seem more homogeneously working class than they actually were; in this way as in others, minstrelsy helped resolve internal differences within plebeian culture, creating notions of white working-classness and blackness at one and the same time.11
Certainly this rhetorical situation only hardened observers of the theater against blackface’s constituency. “There must be some … place for a certain class of people to effervesce in their excitements of pleasure,” said one wit of the Chatham Theatre, a primary site of minstrelsy and by all accounts the “lowest.” “It has been useful as a kind of sewer for the drainage of other establishments” (Northall 152–53). The sporting paper Spirit of the Times produced a clipped taxonomy: “Firemen, butcher-boys, cab and omnibus drivers, ‘fancy’ men, and b’hoys, generally” (February 6, 1847). Yet while the minstrel show was too mediated or overdetermined a form to have been simply the creation of a workers’ culture, or enjoyed solely by it, the “sheer weight of numbers,” as Gareth Stedman Jones has argued of the English music hall, “the preoccupations and predilections of workers” did impose a “discernible imprint” on minstrelsy’s racial imagery (Languages 9–10). Conversely, racial rhetoric became instrumental to ideas about working people themselves. How, exactly, did this situation come about?
Historians agree that American culture in the Northeast underwent profound changes between 1825 and 1835. Among other things, a bourgeoisie worthy of the name came into being. As many recent historians have in different ways constructed this history, an unprecedented separation and discrete self-definition of classes occurred after the mid-1820s. For Burton Bledstein, an emerging “professionalism” constituted the “cultural process by which the middle class in America matured and defined itself” (ix); for Karen Halttunen, antebellum sentimentalism was “central to the self-conscious self-definition of middle-class culture” (xvii). Mary Ryan’s account places the family at the center of middle-class formation—the child-rearing practices, familial values, and domestic ideologies that became, in her striking phrase, the “cradle of the middle class.” Paul Johnson and Paul Boyer, like David Brion Davis before them, both see a culture of moral reform as crucial to the middle class’s self-making; as Boyer has it, a phalanx of temperance reformers, advocates of industrial morality, and the like, concerned to instill good Christian principles in an undisciplined work force, in fact helped “an embryonic urban middle class define itself” (61). This work undoes an earlier historiographic tradition (the “consensus school”), still alive in the writing of scholars such as Sacvan Bercovitch, which saw a hegemonic culture of liberalism at work in all walks of American life, summed up in Louis Hartz’s remark that America is “a kind of national embodiment of the concept of the bourgeoisie” (51). As Stuart Blumin has argued, “However broad the bourgeois consensus may have been in comparison to European societies, it was not so broad that it precluded the formation of distinct classes within American society” (“Hypothesis” 304). For what is implied in the notion of middle-class formation is precisely the formation of a distinctive working-class culture or way of life—though of course the development of each class (and its class fractions) was uneven, halting, not necessarily synchronous with the others.12
The specific results of working-class formation, particularly with regard to popular racial consciousness, will necessarily be foregrounded in my readings of the minstrel show in part II. Here, however, the broadest social effects on male workers of a new free-labor economy may be briefly noted. The crafts were fairly quickly proletarianized, splitting formerly self-sufficient artisans into masses of wage workers on the one hand and select groups of industrious mechanics and industrial entrepreneurs on the other; control over the trades went to merchant capitalists who had in some cases been artisans themselves. The word boss was coined in these years, Paul Johnson observes, a sign that the interests of master and worker were now different and opposed.13 In many trades, de-skilling accompanied this keener sense of social hierarchization, and increasingly rigid practices of industrial discipline were instituted. Making and selling for the first time became distinct activities; employees in the front rooms of, say, shoemakers’ shops were separated from—and as “clerks” came eventually to occupy a higher class than—the artisans who made the shoes.14 Housing practices mimicked these new divisions. Master craftsmen, men on the way up, moved away from their places of business and into residential neighborhoods, while workers moved themselves and their families out of their masters’ homes—if, that is, they had been lucky enough to live in them in the first place. In a host of new journeymen’s societies and more informal collectives, workingmen implicitly set themselves off from a supposedly harmonious community of “the Trade.” Massive Irish and German immigration soon segmented that community even further, transforming the American working class, by the mid-1850s, into a largely foreign-born population.15
The minstrel show’s cognitive equation of black and white working class had its origins here. In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and others argue that disarticulations of hegemony accompany periods of extreme capitalist crisis, generating fresh repertoires of domination. The strained class relations that resulted from the explosion of capitalist energies in early nineteenth-century America produced various such languages and practices. A new discourse of crime and lower-class criminality in these years was one example, although journals such as the Police Gazette also admitted of more populist, “republican” accents, resulting in a war of definition between, as Dan Schiller puts it, “rogues” and the “rights of men” (377). Similarly, a new discourse of race, employed largely by workers themselves, also helped mute newly created class conflicts, particularly in the postdepression 1840s.16 The insecurity that attended class stratification produced a whole series of working-class fears about the status of whiteness; working-class white men, Richard Slotkin points out, began to perceive “the form of labor degradation in racial and sexual terms,” rejecting such degradation by affirming positions of white male superiority (150).
Sandwiched between bourgeois above and black below, respectable artisans feared they were becoming “blacker” with every increment of industrial advance, and countered with the language and violence of white supremacy. But the very vehemence of their response indicated the increasing functional and discursive interchangeability of blacks and working-class whites. The neighborhoods to which white workers moved, for example, were often racially integrated, effectively negating the cushion of difference, and this condition, along with workers’ fears of being displaced from work by blacks, seems to have given rise to much of the racist violence in the antebellum United States.17 Likewise, “blackleg” was used to describe what later strikers would call a “scab,” its racial overtones further evidence of black and white working-class competitiveness and interchangeability, for blacklegs were in fact in some cases black. An extreme instance of working-class “blackening” was that of the immigrant Irish, whom antebellum native whites widely equated with blacks as an alien, subhuman, and brutal species.18 The rhetoric of race that was a specific product of antebellum America’s capitalist crisis thus equated working-classness with blackness as often as it differentiated between them, an antinomy with properly equivocal results. For while it gave “the cutting edge of racial feeling,” Slot-kin writes, to working-class disdain for both Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash, it also produced “artificial and ultimately destructive distinctions within the working classes” (150). Blackface minstrelsy, I would argue, was founded on this antinomy, reinstituting with ridicule the gap between black and white working class even as it reveled in their (sometimes liberatory) identification.
This dynamic surfaced not only in the minstrel show but in a variety of popular domains of discourse19—largely because they constituted one major way in which working people resisted the constricting demands of metropolitan industrialization. It should come as no surprise that social conflicts in which race and class interpenetrated and contradicted each other were acutely registered in the cultural forms and spaces that arose to ease them.
In the early 1830s changes in the northern American class structure urged the need for a discrete sphere of working-class sociability just as an urban culture industry started to emerge. The classes began to forge social lives independent of one another; drinking became a staple of working-class boardinghouses as abjuring drink became a badge of respectability. Goaded by these developments and accelerating them in turn, amusements of all kinds sprang up in New York’s Bowery. Unsympathetic observers noted the connection, and one blamed boardinghouse life itself for the upsurge in New York amusements. “There is no bond of union among the lodgers of a boarding-house,” wrote the popular playwright William K. Northall; in the absence of fireside enjoyments boarders were forced on their own resources, and “public places of entertainment offer the readiest means to these poor undomesticated animals” (7). At least the animals appear to have gotten what they wanted. Although the city had decided in 1823 to regulate an already alarming array of novelty acts in the commercial summer gardens, Peter Buckley speculates that these restrictions only drove such “minor” amusements onto the commercial stage (141). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826; and while it had begun with “legitimate” fare, by 1830 its innovative manager, Thomas Hamblin, was booking melodrama, performing animals, jugglers, minstrel acts, and more—that theater’s contribution to a whole new downtown milieu. Scores of cheap dance halls, billiard rooms, saloons, and amphitheaters for bare-knuckle prizefights and cockfights, as well as prime minstrel show sites such as the Olympic, Franklin, and Chatham theaters, had all established themselves by the late 1830s, more or less in spite of the panic. Not only theater managers but also entrepreneurs such as P. T. Barnum revolutionized commercial forms of leisure. Barnum developed in his Great American Museum the variety acts that were coming to characterize many downtown “vaudevilles.” The first organized minstrel troupe in New York City, Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, grew out of this context in 1843; while accounts conflict, the troupe was probably born in a hotel across the street from the Bowery Theatre.20
These domains of popular discourse together constituted a new, largely masculine ideological field separate from both bourgeois culture and that of the trade unions, as Sean Wilentz suggests, in its own way connecting “workingmen’s pride, resentments, and simple pleasures to the language of republican politics” (263)—a sensational street version of the radical artisan’s emphasis on liberty, egalitarianism, and cultural independence.21 The uses of race in this antiauthoritarian culture, however, have not been properly examined; labor historians have done little, beyond apologizing for white workers’ racial attitudes, to clarify the affective results of American “freedom’s” dependence on American slavery and racism.22 The fact is that these new amusements were also primary sites of antebellum “racial” production, inventing or at least maintaining the working-class languages of race that appear to have been crucial to the self-understanding of the popular classes, and to others’ understanding of them as well. In minstrel acts and other forms of “black” representation, racial imagery was typically used to soothe class fears through the derision of black people, but it also often became a kind of metonym for class. Even then it usually referenced only a cherished working-class relationship to its objects of fun; yet one occasionally finds in this imagery the tones of racial sympathy. Indeed, the popular theater, the saloon, the museum, and the penny press—to name the institutions I look at here—prominently displayed the ambiguities that resulted from the grounding of much racial discourse in working-class culture.
It is difficult to capture both the unevenness and the peculiar coherence of this popular sphere in the antebellum years. The character of the minstrel show in particular appears to have shifted slightly at least once in each of the three decades under consideration, and these shifts refer us not only to changing historical formations or conventions of racial representation but also to the earliest development of the culture industry itself. Beginning as an entr’acte affair of solo songs and dances in legitimate theaters and certain popular sites, minstrelsy remained an art of brief burlesque and comic relief throughout much of the 1830s. But from its development into a full-fledged show in the post-panic early 1840s until its partial absorption into the Uncle Tom’s Cabin melodramas in the early and mid-1850s, minstrelsy formed one major part of urban popular culture, settling into a rather lifeless, and enormously profitable, institutionalization in the late 1850s.
Produced in theaters that hosted the whole range of popular amusements, blackface performance was marked by the new styles of staging and commercial organization that were only one example of this theatrical culture’s internal continuity. In 1839 Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre, mid-panic, halved its admission prices; and it focused almost exclusively on what William Mitchell described as “tragico-comico-illegitimate” productions—essentially travesties of local events and amusements (Buckley 383). These innovations sustained minstrel companies as well. Their topical commentary, Shakespearean or operatic burlesques, and stock companies (useful in generating familiarity between actors and audiences) resulted in extended runs. Shakespearean burlesque proved particularly long-lived, so intimate were even popular audiences in the antebellum years with what one minstrel parody called “de Bird of Avon.” Shakespeare’s plays became Hamlet the Dainty, “Bad Breath, the Crane of Chowder,” Julius Sneezer, “Dars-de-Money”; while, as Lawrence Levine has shown, Shakespeare was truly an author for the million, such travesties defined even more clearly this culture’s difference from that of the upper ten. One Hamlet parody refused to distinguish between hawk and handsaw:
Devoutly to be wished,
To end your heartache by a sleep;
When likely to be dished,
Shuffle off your mortal coil,
Do just so,
Wheel about and turn about
And jump Jim Crow.
Owing to the popularity of such fare, theaters devoted solely to blackface began to appear by the late 1840s, and many troupes eventually, if briefly, supported their own “Ethiopian Opera Houses.”23
The coherence of this class-based culture, as I have noted, was also to be found in its self-conscious relationship to its own amusements. Many minstrel songs amount to little more than narratives of the audience’s preferred entertainments, and much of the playing time of productions such as Benjamin Baker’s wildly popular A Glance at New York in 1848 was taken up, Peter Buckley notes, with the “vigorous consumption of popular amusement and commodities—the popular fiction, the ‘waudevilles,’ … corner rolls and fried liver” which defined this culture’s everyday life (390). Like other popular plays in this period, New York As It Is (1848), an updated version of A Glance at New York, features scenes set at the Chatham Theatre itself, as well as a bout of “nigger” dancing reminiscent of the black Catherine Street shingle dancers. This commercial self-consciousness was, like minstrelsy, one result of an aesthetic of local travesty; it was also an obvious product of culture-industry cunning, a self-serving roll call of brand names. But it served, again, to equate working-class audiences with the arts, notably blackface, that they patronized—the most immediate reason, perhaps, for the overlay of racial and class imagery. As the Young America writer Cornelius Mathews was one of the last to point out, the more popular pleasures and their characteristic audiences were in some sense interchangeable metaphors for each other. In A Pen-and-Ink Panorama of New York City (1853), Mathews boards a Hudson River steamer and is soon surrounded by a “group of Bowery pit inhabitants” who “begin to dance to the banjo and triangle” (89). (A plantation frolic on the Hudson!) By 1853 the signifying chain linking workingmen to Bowery amusements and through these to blackface performance was little more than a cliché of social observation. What concerns us here are the chain’s uncertain racial outcomes.
Perhaps its strongest link, in these times of temperance, was alcohol. As early as the 1820s, saloons and grocery-grog shops had become the centerpiece of an emergent culture (Wilentz 53), despite the attempts of protoindustrialists and other elites to police working-class habits and amusements through the revival, the Sunday school, and the temperance society—that “middle-class obsession,” as Paul Johnson calls it (55). It is true that drinking was so central to this culture that journeymen and laborers hardly needed a separate place to indulge the pastime. E. P. Thompson remarked the “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives” (“Time” 73), and although employers were increasingly in a position to insist on abstemious codes of industrial behavior, shop-floor traditions such as brandy tippling and hangover-induced, inoperative “Blue Mondays” provided the readiest means of worker control (Gutman 33–39). Yet saloons were not simply more and better space for saturnalia; they were semiofficial working-class institutions. Their function was often proclaimed in various bold inscriptions hung above the entrance:
1. King—I govern all.
2. General—I fight for all.
3. Minister—I pray for all.
4. Laborer—And I pay for all.24
Custodians of a sometimes overtly politicized cultural style, tavernkeepers nourished camaraderie, mutuality, and solidarity among their patrons. For immigrant workingmen especially, friendly saloons were upholders of traditional customs and rituals, or political halfway houses; the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell was a regular toastee. Major figures of immigrant life, among them the prizefighter Yankee Sullivan and politician David Broderick, organized constituencies and maintained their position by owning saloons. Broderick actually named his The Subterranean after the radical news sheet of his friend, firebrand Mike Walsh.25
A wide variety of amusements was to be found in the saloon, from cock-fights to minstrel acts; for every T. D. Rice making his fortune on the stage, we might suppose several or even dozens of imitators worked the local taverns. Some of these, like the men who formed the Virginia Minstrels in 1843, went on to fame of their own; and many of the taverns began an upgrading to the status of “concert saloon” by the late 1840s. Yet the presence in this particular milieu of a Mike Walsh—who, however radical in his class sympathies, went so far as to form an alliance with proslavery Calhoun Democrats in the early 1840s—perhaps affirms the racist intentions behind the casual presence of blackface in the saloon.26 It is nevertheless clear, as we will see in chapter 4, that Repealer O’Connell and Liberator William Lloyd Garrison frequently corresponded in the 1840s, attempting for a time an “internationalist” labor abolitionism that could not have left many Irish-American saloon patrons untouched though it ultimately failed in its project. Indeed, writes Bruce Laurie, one tavern in Philadelphia sported a placard with a bust of O’Connell and a snippet from Byron’s Childe Harold that may have permitted a variety of political investments: “Hereditary bondsmen! who would be free,/Themselves must strike the blow” (“Nothing” 100), instancing again the potentially positive equation of white working-class and black. (Significantly, Frederick Douglass appended this couplet to the end of the Covey chapter [chap. 17] of My Bondage and My Freedom [1855]; he also used it to argue in favor of black enlistment in the Civil War [Life 339].) The conflicted intimacy American racial cultures shared is certainly present in a detailed account of saloon life later in the century, in which a black man is said to have sung songs “of many kinds, comic, sentimental, pathetic, and silly,” inducing tears and a respectful hush with his “strange, wailing refrain” (Harrison 178–88). This response was of course only another kind of condescension, and it set the terms of interracial association, but in the mid-ninteenth century productive working-class political ties across racial boundaries usually had no other base of support.
If the saloon was a more “organic” component of this culture, the museum marked the extent of early American “cultural industrialization.” Future University of Michigan president Henry Tappan in 1851 delineated the difference between its British and American versions: “Museums—a place for the Muses,” he wrote, a “fit appellation” for an institution such as the British Museum. In New York, however, the word denoted only “a place for some stuffed birds and animals, for the exhibition of monsters, and for vulgar dramatic performances—a mere place of popular amusement” (quoted in Harris 33). Although we should be much more careful in assessing the attraction of landmarks such as Barnum’s American Museum, this remark indicates, from the point of view of the educated classes, the adjectives they called forth. Yet they were of no slight lineage. Historians have emphasized the importance of such plebeian places of learning to revolutionary-era artisans, rationalist Paineites whose thirst for knowledge was slaked by scientific exhibits and astronomical lectures. From a certain angle, indeed, the story of the museum is one of declension, Jeffersonian republicanism vulgarized into Jacksonian democracy.27 Neil Harris, however, has argued that Barnum’s relation to his audiences was underwritten by an “operational aesthetic,” an active intellectual responsiveness on the part of patrons who were delighted with issues of truth and falsity and were as ready to be fooled by an ingenious humbug as to be thrilled by a genuine curiosity. Yet, as Peter Buckley argues, this more sympathetic view still tends toward an ahistorical idea of undifferentiated cultural predisposition. “Barnum’s pieces of management,” rather, “were concrete responses to the need to create a paying reliable public at a time when this ‘public’ was a contested political category and when the market for popular amusement was typed by its plebeian origins and attitudes” (489). Barnum was helping this popular sphere define itself, that is to say, by putting it in his pocket. A new public was being won over in every sense by the same culture-industry innovations it was beckoning into existence.28
Race figured prominently in the spate of amusements the museum offered, most obviously in blackface acts but in other productions as well. One way to evade the genteel prejudice against theatrical vice was to provide the same entertainments under the roof of a seemingly more respectable institution. Henry James, one of Barnum’s early customers, later wrote that Barnum’s “‘lecture room,’ attached to the Great American Museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical bravery disavowed by its title” (162). Barnum, whose early enterprises (dwarfs, minstrel dancers, foreign jugglers) planted him firmly within the Bowery setting, was himself a sometime blackface performer, and, he wrote, “to my surprise was much applauded” (90). The showman’s first major success was the exhibition of a blind, paralytic black woman named Joice Heth, a slave Barnum purchased in 1835—a particularly gruesome instance of the economics of minstrelization. Barnum claimed Joice Heth to be one hundred and sixty-one years old, and to have been the nurse of George Washington. “She was apparently in good health and spirits, but from age or disease, or both, was unable to change her position; she could move one arm at will, but her lower limbs could not be straightened; her left arm lay across her breast and she could not remove it.” Yet she was “pert and sociable,” Barnum wrote, often breaking suddenly into hymn (74–75). His display at New York’s Niblo’s Garden of the gnarled old woman, who combined patriotic appeal (she spoke of dressing “dear little George”) with circus monstrosity, brought Barnum an estimated $1,500 a week (Werner 31). It was in Barnum’s use of such appalling spectacles that the tastes of his plebeian audiences were represented—in the sense both of satisfying their desires and of raising them to public view.
Joice Heth was only the beginning of Barnum’s intrigues with “blackness.” He exhibited a skillfully constructed mass of animal parts as the “Fejee Mermaid” in 1842; he hosted blackface acts throughout the antebellum years; and in the 1850s the American Museum ran stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred. Like his audiences, Barnum seems to have been fascinated with the mystery of color. In 1850 he hired a black man who claimed to have discovered a weed that would turn Negroes white. True to form, Barnum the future Republican trumpeted this discovery as the solution to the slavery problem, while newspapers daily reported any changes in the black man’s hue.29 Barnum takes obvious relish in mimicking this very process in his enlarged autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs (1869). Someone mistakes the young Barnum for a querulous black man after one of his blackface performances and makes a move for his revolver; nothing daunted, Barnum, as he wrote, “rolled my sleeve up, showed my skin, and said, ‘I am as white as you are, sir.’ [The man] dropped his pistol in positive fright and begged my pardon” (90). These instances of imaginary racial transmutation literalize one train of thought responsible for the minstrel show.30 They are less articulations of difference than speculations about it. They imagine race to be mutable; very briefly they throw off the burden of its construction, blurring the line between self and other, white workingman and black. (Here blackface actors approached certain fictional uses of the mulatto figure.)31 They obviously devalue blackness, canceling racial boundaries only to (triumphantly) reinstitute them: through biology with the weed, through makeup with blackface. But they perform this whole operation with a kind of ludic, transgressive glee. One also finds this spirit in, for instance, minstrel-show stump speeches, themselves a species of inflated Barnum-speak. Indeed, stump speeches occasionally parodied certain popular practices devoted to the fixing and classifying of racial boundaries—phrenology, for instance, or the midcentury “science” of racial ethnology.
There was indeed a revealing continuity among these discourses. The Egyptologist George Gliddon, who in Ancient Egypt (1844) argued that the greatness of the Egyptians owed to their Caucasian (not Negro) origins, made lecture tours carrying an extensive collection of Barnum-like artifacts; Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839), which gauged the mental capacity of different races by skull size, was at least as indebted to phrenological techniques as to controlled experiment. The class-based character of blackface performance went some way toward making these discourses seem absurdly similar, or just plain absurd. “On dis side ob me, you may obserb, I hab a cast ob de head ob a gemman ob color; on de udder side, I hab a cast ob de head ob a common white feller,” goes a “lecture” on phrenology. A series of perambulatory speculations follows, coming to rest in the observation that all great men are “brack”: blacklegs, blackguards, and so on. As to the difference, finally, between the two specimens, “Julycum Cezar Pompy Dan Tucker” and the “dam white rascal”: “You see den, dat clebber man an dam rascal means de same in dutch, when dey boph white; but when one white and de udder’s brack ‘dat’s a grey hoss ob anoder color’” (De Susannah 80, 83–84). It is no doubt remarkable to discover in a minstrel act an inquiry into the construction—by language, no less—of racial difference; but this speech and the minstrel show generally share with Barnum’s antics an urge, nonetheless real for its derisive humor, to investigate the boundaries of race established by “respectable” science, to play with, even momentarily overturn, their placement. This was so even when there was fundamental accord as to that placement: lower-million impatience with the discourses of learned authority, not to mention the complexities of working people’s everyday negotiations with race, might result in assaults on the color line itself.
Class prickliness usefully inflected the production of “race” in the penny press as well, which was sometimes capable of outright contradiction. New York newspapers such as the Transcript and the Sun, for instance, often printed both self-consciously egalitarian antislavery material and lurid accounts of white assaults on blacks.32 Perhaps the most interesting product of this culture’s racial paradoxes was the urban journalist Walter (subsequently Walt) Whitman. As a reporter for the New York Aurora in the early 1840s (where he was, in fact, a colleague of Mike Walsh), the author of a temperance dime novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842), a columnist at the Brooklyn Star in the mid-1840s, and, shortly after, a many-hatted editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman stands out in his attention to the various modes and media of “racial” representation, from minstrelsy to painting to politics itself. He too registered the contradiction between white supremacy and staunch egalitarianism, and while it can scarcely be said that Whitman always found himself on the better side of this problem, he at least has the virtue of having wrestled with it. There were surely complacent moments, such as the racialist-gothic subplot of Franklin Evans in which the protagonist, after a drunken binge, finds himself married to a Creole woman, herself a figure for his profligacy. Worse yet, “Is not America for the Whites?” Whitman wrote in 1858. “And is it not better so?” On the other side were Whitman’s antislavery views, his celebrations of black English (about which more later), and his praise of William Sidney Mount’s paintings of black life, which, he wrote in William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, “may be said to have a character of Americanism.”33 Falling somewhere between these instances was Whitman’s interest in blackface minstrelsy.
Whitman was a great lover of the minstrel show, seeing in it an American example of what he had found in opera, but he could never quite decide whether it represented the best or the worst America had to offer in the way of a national art. He avidly attended blackface performances, as he did many Bowery productions, and he praised them in print. One troupe, the Harmoneons, said Whitman in 1846, proved that much could be done with “low” material: “‘Nigger’ singing with them is a subject from obscure life in the hands of a divine painter: rags, patches and coarseness are imbued with the great genius of the artist.” Before long I hope to clarify what nourishment our democratic poet might have gotten out of blackface coarseness and obscurity; he certainly seems to have taken them for a people’s culture, representative not only of black life but of the Bowery pit as well. Yet Whitman later excoriated minstrelsy, not for its racism but for its vulgarity—“I must be pardoned for saying, that I never could, and never will, admire the exemplifying of our national attributes with Ethiopian minstrelsy”—a judgment whose evident distaste for black people themselves reflects a somewhat common split in working-class culture between antislavery beliefs and personal abhorrence of blacks, not to mention of abolitionism as a movement. (There were also, of course, other sorts of disjunctions and contradictions.) We do know that at the time of Whitman’s greatest enthusiasm for the minstrel show he was extensively engaged in Free-Soil politics, that late 1840s challenge to the pro-southern Democracy which would shortly grow into the Republican party. But the ambiguities of Whitman’s culture inhered even in the relatively egalitarian Free-Soil movement, for, as Eric Foner observes, it was ideologically broad enough to encompass those opposed to slavery on moral grounds as well as those opposed to the presence of Negro slaves in newly acquired territories and those worried about fugitive slaves fleeing North—in short, “the most vulgar racists and the most determined supporters of Negro rights, as well as all shades of opinion between these extremes.” Whitman is a salutary reminder that there is no simple correspondence between individual racial feeling, cultural predisposition, and political ideology. In this he is perhaps a representative case; and he is representative as well in demonstrating both the potential and the real limits of class egalitarianism as a wellspring for antiracism.34
It is an ambiguity one finds even in working-class forms such as the dime novel. Although black characters (and black writers) were seldom featured in such fiction, Michael Denning has argued that certain of its favorite class plots could result in surprisingly radical racial stories. George Lippard’s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853) uses the familiar trope of a lowly mechanic’s inheritance to narrate the fortunes of one of its black protagonists, Randolph Royalton. Born of a black slave mother, Randolph is the half-brother of the white Harry Royalton. Both have a claim on the Van Huyden inheritance; seeking it for himself, Harry hires a slave catcher to abduct Randolph and his sister into slavery. The inheritance takes on symbolic weight when Lippard reveals that Randolph’s mother was the daughter of a great “leader of the American people”—Thomas Jefferson, perhaps, since stories of his purported slave children were well known (William Wells Brown called on them the same year in Clotel). The story thus becomes, writes Denning, “an allegorical assertion of the Black Randolph’s rightful share in the inheritance of the Republic” (Mechanic 116); derived from stories of noble white mechanics, the plot suddenly accommodates a sympathetic tale of black people’s fate in America. (Neither Randolph the black hero nor Arthur Dermoyne the white mechanic receives his inheritance.) Lippard certainly shared the racism of much of the antebellum labor movement, and in his novel The Quaker City; or, Monks of Monk Hall (1844) he uses race as a metaphor for corruption: the swindling, pretended southern aristocrat Colonel Fitz-Cowles turns out to be the son of a Creole slave. But the lineaments of Randolph’s story reveal that when structured along acceptable class lines—when, that is, there was an implicit twinning of blacks and working-class whites—black characters in such writing, as in popular culture at large, could be portrayed in liberatory ways. As it turned out, the converse was equally true: more than once, and increasingly as the 1840s went on, the presence of “blackness” in this culture would pose a significant class threat.
It was, most of all, as a “culturalist” class ideology, a manifestation of class values in audience rites and cultural self-presentation, that blackface sponsored a sense of incipient class trouble. The social tenor of the new amusements very quickly became fodder for the critics, who began to light on the defining—ideological—behavior of this emergent “public.” Even as early as the 1830s, T. D. Rice’s performances of “Jim Crow” at the Bowery Theatre routinely brought crowds onto the stage (see Fig. 7):
When Mr. Rice came on the stage to sing his celebrated song of Jim Crow, they not only made him repeat it some twenty times, but hemmed him in so that he actually had no room to perform the little dancing or turning about appertaining to the song; and in the afterpiece, where a supper-table is spread, some among the most hungry very leisurely helped themselves to the viands. It was a rare treat, indeed, to the audience.35
Now this was theater for the million. Even when they did not partake of stage viands, audiences made their demands plain. The New York Mirror noted of one 1833 Bowery performance:
A few evenings since [the orchestra] were performing an overture, which did not exactly suit the cultivated taste of some worthies in the pit. “Yankee Doodle,” being more in unison with the patriotic ideas of propriety, was loudly called for, and its melting tones forthwith breathed forth in mellifluous harmony. The pit were gratified, and evinced their satisfaction by a gentle roar. (quoted in Buckley 156–57)
This is by no means the last we will see of such demonstrations; nor is it the last of stage reports whose irony, in a kind of homeopathic reaction to the events they describe, is barely under control.
Yet as many have pointed out, it is at first baffling that such audience activities should in the 1830s have taken on class-related signification, for they had marked the experience of theatergoing as early as the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1802 Washington Irving (as Jonathan Oldstyle) was assailed by “thunderbolts” from the gods in the gallery:
Some how or another the anger of the gods seemed to be aroused all of a sudden, and they commenced a discharge of apples, nuts & gingerbread, on the heads of the honest folks in the pit…. I can’t say but I was a little irritated at being saluted aside of my head with a rotten pippin, and was going to shake my cane at them; but was prevented by a decent looking man behind me, who informed me it was useless to threaten or expostulate. They are only amusing themselves a little at our expence, said he, sit down quietly and bend your back to it. My kind neighbour was interrupted by a hard green apple that hit him between the shoulders—he made a wry face, but knowing it was all in joke, bore the blow like a philosopher. (12)
So there was nothing especially new about the “gentle roar” of later years. Why, then, the access of irony in accounts of theater in the 1830s? As in so many instances, the irony says less about theatrical events than about the ironists themselves, particularly their increasing social distance, both within the theater and without, from an emerging self-conscious class culture unheedful of the vulgarity of racial display. Theater audiences and performances were becoming more differentiated, not more rowdy.36
By the 1840s rowdiness had begun to seem a working-class style. If “legitimate” productions in this period aspired to a new restraint, popular amusements cultivated a sort of demonstrative excess through which cultural allegiances were formed and class values negotiated. This ethos was briefly crystallized in the post-panic street and stage appearance of the Bowery b’hoy (see Fig. 3), that “compound of East Side swell, gutter bum, and volunteer fire laddie,” in Richard Dorson’s words, who parodied the styles of the “upper ten” and posed the greatest cultural challenge to uptown mandarins (288). Termed “Mose” after the stage character that set forth his popular image, the b’hoy affected a brusque manner, peculiar lingo, and extravagant costume, often capped by hair in “soap-locks” plastered to the temple and a shiny stovepipe hat. In many ways he exemplified the first U.S. working-class subculture—the volunteer fireman bent on class travesty, the butcher wise in the ways of cultural bricolage. Although the b’hoy’s rubric invoked Irishness, no single ethnic profile defined him, nor was he (contrary to later myth) a partisan of nativism. As one member of the subculture later recalled: “I was at that time what was known as a ‘Bowery Boy,’ a distinct ‘gang’ from either the ‘know-nothing’ or ‘Native American’ parties. The gang had no regular organization, but were a crowd of young men of different nationalities, mostly American born, who were always ready for excitement, generally of an innocent nature” (quoted in Buckley 316). “Generally,” of course, makes room for the Astor Place riot—a phenomenon not only concurrent with the emergence of the b’hoys but in many ways a result of their conscious cultural self-definition. By about 1847 their arrival was being announced in various fictional forms, but it was secured by A Glance at New York in 1848, one of the greatest melodramatic successes of the nineteenth-century New York stage.
“Mose’s” reception on opening night made it clear that the b’hoys’ time had come. As a near-contemporary wrote:
He stood there in his red shirt, with his fire coat thrown over his arm, the stovepipe hat … drawn down over one eye, his trousers tucked into his boots, a stump of a cigar pointing up from his lips to his eye, the soap locks plastered flat on his temples, and his jaw protruded into a half-beastly, half-human expression of contemptuous ferocity…. Taking the cigar stump from his mouth and turning half-way round to spit, he said:
“I ain’t a goin’ to run wid dat mercheen no more!”
Instantly there arose such a yell of recognition as had never been heard in the little house before…. Every man, woman, and child recognized in the character all the distinctive external characteristics of the class.37
FIGURE 3 Mose and Lize, 1848
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
A Glance at New York and sketches like it were riotously egalitarian, offering a kind of plebeian heroism against the dangers of downtown New York. As with Davy Crockett, one of Mose’s frontier antecedents, pugilism was his avocation: “I’m bilein’ over for a rousin’ good fight with some one somewhere…. If I don’t have a muss soon, I’ll spile” (Baker, Glance 15). But the urban (and often pugilistic) business of fire fighting was his central preoccupation:
Seys I, “What’s de matter, good woman?” Seys she, “My baby’s in de house, and it’s burnin’!” Seys I, “What!”—I turned my cap hindside afore, and buttoned my old fire-coat, and I went in and fetched out dat baby…. Ever since dat time I’ve had a great partiality for little babies. The fire-boys may be a little rough outside, but they’re all right here. (Touches breast.) It never shall be said dat one of de New York boys deserted a baby in distress. (20)38
The figure of Mose, with his “g’hal” Lize or his partner Sykesy, focused an urban style that gave visible, class-resistant expression to the Bowery milieu.39 Yet few writers have noted how much this expression owed to the accents of race.
I have mentioned that productions such as A Glance at New York did not stint on narratives of leisure time. One scene finds Lize on her way to work; she and Mose meet, and the two plot the evening’s fun:
MOSE: Say, Lize, you’re a gallus gal, anyhow.
LIZE: I ain’t nothin’ else.
MOSE: What do yer say for Waxhall [the Vauxhall] to-night?
LIZE: What’s a-goin’ on?—is de wawdeville plays there?
MOSE: No—there’s goin’ to be a first-rate shindig; some of our boys will be there.
LIZE:… I’d rather go to Christy’s. Did you ever see George Christy play the bones? ain’t he one of em?
MOSE: Yes, he’s some.
Lize proceeds to sing one of the Christy’s Minstrels’ songs, to Mose’s demotic approval, thus attesting again to the frequency with which blackface was used in nineteenth-century discourse to locate white working people. And it is almost predictable that minstrel acts would appropriate Mose himself, one of the many figures of white American humor that underwent a telling sea change on the minstrel stage.40 The b’hoy appears not to have been compromised by this disguise. Mose’s mechanic accents already tend toward the dialect represented as black on the popular stage; some minstrel songs merely blackened a Mose conforming in all other respects to the outlines of the stage b’hoy:
Wake up, Mose! De Fire am burning;
Round de corner de smoke am curling.
Wake up, Mose! the engine’s coming;
Take de rope and keep a running!
“Fire, Fire, Fire” (1848) moves the titular conflagration to the plantation for heroism in black; “Work! Niggers, work!” (1849) celebrates b’hoy culture in sepia tones:
I like to see de engines fly
Through streets and ober ditches;
And when de b’hoys get in a row,
Dey fight like sons of—Freedom!41
Such were the ready class associations of “blackness” that even this transmutation came with little effort. As the Journal of Music wrote, “What magnificent basses and tenors may be heard among our firemen, when making merry together and singing [blackface songs such as] “Uncle Ned,” “Old Dan Tucker,” or “Lovely May!” (“Letter from A. W. T.” 170). To be sure, the rowdiness that gave rise to chants of freedom was achieved by way of oppressive racial caricature, and in this the minstrel show mimicked Jacksonian social relations all around. What is surprising is the degree to which the blackness of the oppressed could itself become an idiom of class dissent—a fact that implied some sense of cross-racial identification. The danger was, of course, that the b’hoys’ blackface conquest of the theater foretold greater disasters than those at Astor Place.
An indication that “black” practices routinely conveyed this kind of danger appears in an 1849 account of saloon dancing by George Foster, the most famous urban chronicler of nightlife and amusements in this period. Retracing Dickens’s steps (in American Notes) on a Saturday night slumming trip to New York’s depressed Five Points section, Foster describes the entertainment at Pete Williams’s saloon, now renamed Dickens’s Place. The performers are black, not blackfaced; they number a fiddler, a trumpeter, and a bass drummer. The dancers are racially mixed: “Thieves, loafers, prostitutes and rowdies, as well as … honest, hard-working people” (Gas-Light 73). The orchestra strikes up a blackface minstrel tune, “Cooney in de Holler”:
The dancers begin contorting their bodies and accelerating their movements, accompanied with shouts of laughter and yells of encouragement and applause, until all observance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurras on his or her own hook. Affairs are now at their hight [sic]. The black leader of the orchestra increases the momentum of his elbow and calls out the figure in convulsive efforts to be heard, until shining streams of perspiration roll in cascades down his ebony face; the dancers, now wild with excitement, like Ned Buntline at Astor Place, leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder. (74)42
The point here is not merely that black cultural forms and their minstrel counterfeits evoked the riotousness that had lately riven the city. It is also that the language of revolt and the language of amusement were impossible to separate; they bled into each other, the same words referring effortlessly to two, now necessarily related, phenomena. What Foster is describing is in fact the riot—a fling beginning merrily enough and descending, urged on by the leader, into hot confusion and disorder. If the Astor Place riot had itself manifested social divisions in the sphere of culture, it now made a language of eruption available for revolutionary cultural events. The inference that blackface forms, despite all appearances, might have been included among these is hard to resist, given that the revolution then brewing under William Lloyd Garrison’s slogan “No Compromise with Slaveholders” was adding a racial component to the threat of social breakup. Fervid cultural forms, often “black” ones, sustained the sense of blood and revolution that came to be associated with Astor Place.
It is clear at least that high-toned commentators directed a broad vocabulary of distaste at these possibly insurrectionary developments. Following the riot, the Home Journal wrote that if Macready wished to see those he had offended, he had only to “follow a well-dressed idler down Broadway and observe the looks he gets from Mose and the soap-lock-ery as he goes along.” The article went on to say: “Let but the more passive aristocratic party clearly select a favorite … and let there be but a symptom of a handle for the B’hoys to express their dissent, and the undercurrent breaks forth like an uncapped hydrant” (May 12, 1849). But the b’hoys themselves found the “aristocratic party” far from “passive.” Said one speech maker at a rally the day after the riot: “For what—for whom was this murder committed? … To please the aristocracy of the city, at the expense of the lives of inoffending citizens … to revenge the aristocrats of this city against the working classes.”43 These were, perhaps, the same “sons of freedom” that blackface acts were so apt to celebrate. In any case, such talk kept the class ardor of this plebeian culture in full view, even before the riots. The standard account of Bowery patrons usually repeated the familiar metaphors, which, though they very quickly assumed the status of narrative convention, lost little of their power to disturb. Whitman, whose early journalism, if not his early poetry, is in the b’hoy manner, late in his life celebrated the 1830s Bowery Theatre:
Pack’d from ceiling to pit with its audience mainly of alert, well dress’d, full blooded young and middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics … the whole crowded auditorium, and what seeth’d in it, and flush’d from its faces and eyes, to me as much a part of the show as any—bursting forth in one of those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery—no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle from perhaps 2000 full-sinew’d men. (“Old” 595)
And in 1847 the Spirit of the Times observed
a vast sea of upturned faces and red flannel shirts, extending its roaring and turbid waves close up to the foot-lights on either side, clipping in the orchestra and dashing furiously against the boxes—while a row of luckier and stronger-shouldered amateurs have pushed, pulled and trampled their way far in advance of the rest, and actually stand with their chins resting on the lamp board, chanking peanuts and squirting tobacco juice upon the stage. (February 6, 1847)
What, finally, are we to make of howling dervishes, uncapped hydrants, electric force, turbid waves? First, this was indeed a “manly” preserve, a sphere of traditional male prowess and bravado whose turf loyalties were as likely to result in individual or gang violence as in the camaraderie of the saloon.44 There is no doubt that it was a newly contested space: since it drew its focus from leisure activities rather than the experience of work, it had to make a certain amount of new room for “its” gals; and a gay male subculture was just beginning to come into view in the Bowery, as Christine Stansell has noted (90–92). But its masculinism traversed the minstrel show’s representations of women and black men both. Whitman’s account captures the homoerotic moment of the usually misogynist male bonding that took place—over women’s bodies, between the men onstage and those in the audience—in the minstrel show’s “wench” characters. This homosexual-homosocial pattern persisted all through minstrelsy’s antebellum tenure, structuring in white men’s “imaginary” relation to black men a dialectic of romance and repulsion.45 If minstrelsy was based on an extreme though contradictory white fascination with black(faced) men, there was no less a white male solidarity over against them that obviously inspired racist ridicule. In any case, we shall see how insistently blackface performance concerned itself with matters of the body—gender anxieties, unconventional sexuality, orality—which mediated, and regulated, the formation of white working-class masculinity.46
Second, we ought to take seriously the more or less explicit threat regularly imputed to this culture, despite the temptation to see its collective fervor, like the violence at Astor Place, as little more than American farce to European tragedy—all we could muster, perhaps, in the way of revolutionary barricades. This view is unfortunately encouraged by the influential typology Alan Dawley and Paul Faler devised to account for the range of nineteenth-century working-class cultural predispositions. Charting workers’ varied responses to an increasingly rigid code of industrial morality, Dawley and Faler found a basic cleavage between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” Traditionalists were those men we might expect to see in minstrel theaters; they “refused to give up their casual attitudes toward work, their pursuit of happiness in gaming and drinking, and the raucous revelry that accompanied fire and militia musters.” Modernists, by contrast, shunned the “warm sociability of the drinking club [and] the ‘wasteful’ amusement of the circus and the Jim Crow show,” whether they were “rebels” who involved themselves in industrial militancy or “loyalists” who in the name of respectability held aloof from both spirits and class conflict (468).
Yet, as Sean Wilentz has stressed, there was intentionality even in the b’hoys’ traditionalist vehemence. Wilentz does not see in their pursuit of pleasure the passivity of workers dulled by a consolidating culture industry and uninterested in radical organizing; on the contrary, he construes “the republicanism of the Bowery and the republicanism of the unions” as “different but at times overlapping expressions of the journeymen’s fears and aspirations—one focused on the economic and political sources of inequality and exploitation, the other stressing cultural autonomy and manly independence” (270). In many ways the b’hoy was a rebel in traditionalist disguise; and this is a matter worth being clear about, given the advent in the postdepression 1840s of apparently more “cultural” responses to class conflict (nativism, temperance, and so on) and the decline of organized, 1830s-style class militancy. Certainly one sees a marked class accent in most minstrel acts’ racial representations. The dictates of autonomy readily enough produced blackface butts of derision for white men on the bottom; yet, perhaps as a result of minstrel figures’ sexual or sentimental power, they were occasionally objects of white male envy as well, even figures of interracial identification, providing in imaginary ways the labor abolitionism that failed to materialize in the Northeast before the Civil War. Minstrelsy’s use of racial license to map class revolt was one gesture in the sphere of culture toward what remained undone in the realm of politics.
With the eruption of class into the cultural arena—in the modality of race—the lower million had certainly shattered the mirror held up to nature, the universally representative character of “the” theater. As the actor William Davidge complained in 1866 (in a ritual mode by then at least twenty years old), “The rapid increase in the population in newly formed cities, produces a style of patrons whose habits and associations afford no opportunity for the cultivation of the arts” (202). In 1850 that would have been far the best face to put on it. By then the minstrel show was offering class turbulence with a racial accent, one element of a cultural revolution that made correlate use of grave racial conflicts. Minstrelsy was a prime example of the sometimes contestatory character of plebeian culture, articulating class difference, intentionally or not, by calling on the insurrectionary resonances of black culture. To put this another way, popular entertainments in which race was foregrounded yielded up a sense of unrest waiting to be tapped at its class source. For a brief time in the nineteenth century it seemed that the blackface impulse, based so firmly on the association of “blackness” with the white working class, was backfiring. As certain traditions of racial exchange were “elevated” into an art of black humiliation, that art fed in turn off class energies which resisted containment—and which had the unintended effect of marking the public threat of black culture. There was no other conclusion, wrote an exasperated New York Herald in 1848: “There is a revolution going on in theatres. The legitimate drama is down for ever, buried and entombed twenty feet under ground” (January 3).
Culture was now politicized in the most spectacular ways. The class anger of the Astor Place riot was strangely confluent with the struggles over slavery that were coming, that same year, to characterize the state of the Union. And this twin threat was no mere satire of the Paris June days. It was, in a sense, our 1848. In just what sense, exactly, is the subject of the next chapter.