The City as Playground: Culture, Conflict, and Race

Popular culture has been one of the most significant and enduring American exports in the second half of the twentieth century. Music, movies, television sitcoms and MTV, Coca-Cola and McDonalds, even the Levi’s that are no longer manufactured in this country, all carry the American label and, for better or worse, convey American cultural influence from one corner of the globe to the other. Although our cultural exports reflect our contemporary diversity and distinctive social conditions, they also reflect the contradictions and structures of historical con-flict in this country.

Warren Susman wrote that the past is among the most important things about the present, and it is a segment of cultural past, the era of public amusements, that David Nasaw so ably elicits in his most recent book, Going Out. ¹ A work of synthesis that freely incorporates and credits the recent scholarship of a number of well-known American social and cultural historians, Going Out recenters the historical narrative both to be more inclusive and to focus on the complex interplay between popular culture and the ongoing social-racial tensions of American life.

“They are all gone now,” Nasaw laments in his introduction—the vaudeville houses, movie palaces, world’s fair midways, the Coney Island Dreamlands and the Ebbets Fields—replaced by theme parks, shopping cum entertainment malls, and increasingly, suburban sports stadiums. The vital era of public amusements, born in the second half of the nineteenth century, comes to an end in this telling in the decades after the Second World War. Huge, general-interest audiences of another era fracture in this narrative of loss. What we have really lost, Nasaw suggests, and what are major themes of this book, is civic sociability and the public quality of urban leisure.

Public, commercial, and decidedly urban, the new mass entertainments were the product of several independent but overlapping factors: the growth of the “downtown” and tourism, the development of rapid transit and electric street lighting, the mutual interests of real estate men and city officials, and rising wages and a shortened work day. Crucial to the creation of audiences for entertainment was a growing tolerance for amusement on the part of many liberal American Protestants and the grudging acceptance by many other Americans of the idea of pleasure and enjoyment without the protective coloration of education and self-improvement. ² By the early 1890s, a night life that, according to Nasaw, had once comprised two extremes—opera, concerts, and legitimate theater for well-to-do patrons, or saloons and cheap entertainment for “sporting men”—was transformed by the emergence of vaudeville. The middle class, along with growing masses of first-generation white-collar workers, women as well as men, became avid consumers of vaudeville and similar commercial pleasures in cities across the country. But these pleasures were now morally acceptable and “decent”; drinking, smoking, and the more obviously tawdry ambience of the concert saloons were banished from the vaudeville theaters, as were prostitutes from the third tier. “Respectable” became the operative word for the new world of live, affordable, heterosexual entertainment, and suddenly, urban people, young people in particular, had some place “to go at night.”

Going Out documents the “something for everybody” philosophy that took hold of commercial entertainment. Borrowing from almost every previous entertainment form, world’s fairs, amusement parks, and early moving pictures consciously and successfully sought to broaden their appeal and reach out to untapped audiences, particularly white middle-class women. Shoppers at the large and centrally located department stores were particular targets for afternoon performances. Nasaw demonstrates that with the institution of the continuous vaudeville show (“After Breakfast Go to Proctors” became the operative slogan), even temporal boundaries became anachronistic.

Elites were as necessary to the success of public entertainment as were ordinary wage earners. In a conscious attempt to attract the attention of the most desirable class of patrons while creating distance from earlier forms of popular...