“A theatrical race”: American Identity and Popular Performance in the Writings of Constance M. Rourke

On 14 December 1932, Constance M. Rourke (1885–1941) wrote a quick letter to Esther Porter, a graduate student who had requested advice on the construction of her dissertation. One guesses that Porter approached Rourke, then riding the crest of success from her landmark book American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931), because they were both Vassar College alumnae. Porter was attempting to construct a history of Montana theatricals, and West Coast performance was one of the subjects Rourke knew best: her book Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928) was a history of Lotta Crabtree and nineteenth-century West Coast traveling players. Tucked away in this letter filled with suggestions on individual caches of handbills and personal collections of newspaper clippings, disguised as a piece of friendly advice, is a statement that crystallizes Rourke’s animating concerns as a writer, scholar, critic, and advocate:

There is a certain sort of book on theatricals about which I feel rather bitterly. Let me be high handed and urge you to avoid it. With a very rich factual material I suppose O’Dell [sic] may be forgiven for writing in this manner. The example I have in mind is W. G. B. Carson’s recent The Theatre on the Frontier with its inviting title and dry interior. When the plays and the acting are not of intrinsically the greatest importance I cannot see the point of a long, loving, detailed account of the movements of actors and the members of casts. No one could value the history of the theatre in this country more than I do: it seems to me to belong in the very heart of our social history, being perhaps as important as camp meetings. . . . What I’m hoping you’ll do is write your thesis as a social history rather than purely theatrical history. If you think I’m being very impassioned, set it down to the state of mind one’s in on finishing a book, plus the conviction that all this is really important if ever we are to know our own character and history and literature.¹

In this ephemeral note of encouragement and advice, Rourke summed up the key concern that runs throughout her body of work: the definition of the American character and the centrality of the theatre to it.

As a critic and historian, Rourke tirelessly sought to articulate “our own character and history and literature”; that is, she directly engaged Van Wyck Brooks’s 1918 declaration, in his “On Creating a Usable Past,” that America had no “cumulative culture.”² Brooks believed that a lack of an aesthetic or cultural tradition resulted in the pale artistic capabilities of the nation. Rourke, who was given her start as a critic by Brooks himself, vehemently disagreed.³ In fact, her career can be seen as a rebuke to his claims—and to the claims of the majority of critics who expounded a deep and profound disenchantment with American art and culture during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Critics like Brooks—or H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Parker, Waldo Frank, and many, many others—voiced their dismay at a gap they perceived between American culture (where popular entertainments were expanding exponentially) and European culture (where high modernism was in full flower). For them (and for many of the artists they encouraged and judged), American culture appeared at best a quagmire of philistinism, and at worst an oxymoron. Even today there is still general agreement that American arts—especially the theatrical arts—”came of age” or “arrived” during the 1920s, thanks in part to this flogging criticism and also because of the powerful, tonic influence of European modernism.⁴

Yet, this assessment was not, at the time, unanimous, and its conclusions should not, today, be taken as foregone. Constance Rourke viewed the same popular entertainments denigrated by Brooks or Mencken as vibrant evidence of exactly the distinctive American culture they thought they were seeking. In her writings from the 1920s and 1930s, Rourke argued that the “lively arts” of American...