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1 INTRODUCTION From Celebration to Show Business Before Tin Pan Alley’s phonograph and Hollywood’s moving picture overshadowed the Broadway stage, live performance dominated American popular entertainment. In the early republic there were public spectacles open to all—communal celebrations, folk festivals , firework displays on the Fourth of July, processions of militia companies , and street parades that usually ran to the rowdy and raucous.1 Later, traveling professionals offered escape for the price of admission. Even Americans who lived in remote villages—weary of toil in factory or on farm but lucky enough to have a dime or a quarter in their pockets—could enjoy the brief spectacles supplied by acrobats, animals exotic and extraordinary, ‘‘curiosities ,’’ conjurers, carousels, clowns, cowboys, dwarfs, dancers, dioramas, magicians , mechanical marvels, melodramas, menageries, and minstrels, often under the pretense of being educational. Whether organizers merely jumbled together these ‘‘clever turns’’ or expertly packaged them, whether they graced a tent, small-town ‘‘opera house,’’ or urban ‘‘palace,’’ the shows were almost always variety shows, and traveling was essential to any profitable amusement enterprise. ‘‘The Decline of ‘The Road,’ ’’ Billboard reported in late 1925, signaled the end of a century-long tradition of touring companies presenting live theater. According to a survey conducted by show business’s trade paper, two-thirds of the halls that had welcomed itinerant performers fifteen years earlier now restricted their programs to moving pictures or vaudeville.2 To many theaterowners , personal appearances seemed outdated: modern means of mechanical reproduction presented melodrama at lower cost and in novel form. The transition to machine-made culture had begun almost imperceptibly in the preceding generation, as showmen supplemented the standard routines of variety acts with the latest inventions, gimmicks, and gadgets. By 1925 smalltown playhouses no longer needed one-night stands of repertory players ‘‘on the road’’: the photoplay and the picture show had supplanted them. We might well wonder how this momentous change came about, and what it tells us of American society in the nineteenth century. The documents collected in this volume argue forcefully that the energy and enterprise of INTRODUCTION 2 showmen, along with the diffusion of new technologies, worked to transform the festivities of the early republic into the theatrical spectacles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But behind the showman’s entrepreneurial zeal and fascinating techniques lay something else—a striking change in American attitudes to ‘‘diversions’’ and commercial entertainment itself. Mr. Beecher and the Learned Pig In the late 1860s actress and playwright Olive Logan poured scorn on the presumptions of self-styled ‘‘professionals’’ in the field of entertainment. In their view, she complained, ‘‘the Show Business’’ embraced any and every public performance given to a paying audience. Logan considered herself far more discriminating than the purveyors of cheap thrills. She valued good taste and genuine talent enriched by training, experience, and dedication to ‘‘art,’’ whether in ‘‘the drama’’ or opera or ballet or in the lyceum lectures of Henry Ward Beecher. ‘‘I respect the actor who is an artist,—even the harmless clown of the pantomime, who makes us laugh without offending decency.’’ Very different in character were the charlatans of the amusement world, the performers from dime museums, circus tents, and minstrel halls, who courted popularity by pandering to the prejudices and ignorance of the audience, and solely for monetary gain. The most despicable of all were the ‘‘clog-dancing creatures’’ of the ‘‘blonde burlesque,’’ who merely exposed their bodies and uttered ribald remarks too coarse even for the lowly minstrel fool. In the past these disreputable players had been considered fit only for the low-class ‘‘concert-saloon’’ and ‘‘variety-show.’’ Now they ventured into ‘‘the temples of the drama,’’ and posing as actresses, sought equal status with the most esteemed in the legitimate theater. Their selfish and single-minded pursuit of profit excluded issues of taste, quality, and morality. This ‘‘leg business,’’ Logan noted with disdain, was merely business, not art. According to these ‘‘professionals,’’ all performers were in ‘‘the show business.’’ ‘‘It must be a very wide world which should include Mr. Beecher with the learned pig,’’ she commented sarcastically.3 The phrase ‘‘the show business’’—what Olive Logan called a ‘‘curious’’ and ‘‘remarkably comprehensive term’’—was of recent vintage. The first recorded use seems to have been in 1850. However, ‘‘show,’’ or ‘‘shew,’’ denoting a display or exhibition for the purpose of entertainment, had a much longer history. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combinations derived from...

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