A Staggering Machine of Desire

The rise of a culture of consumption in the early twentieth century catalyzed a sea change in the campaign for women's rights. The growth of urban centers, and particularly New York City, created an economy of abundance, desire, and choice: the modern idea of "fashion" emerged, and women learned that a desire for certain commodities could be transformative. Indeed, an unanticipated consequence of abundance was the "eureka" recognition that the right to choose particular products could change personal identity. In the years leading to the passage of woman's suffrage in 1919, the transformative power to "shop"—i.e., to choose—generated what one observer called "a staggering machine of desire." It also led to an epochal change in women's sense of control over their own lives.

These cultural strands weave throughout Marlis Schweitzer's new study, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. Because of centrifugal urban growth, large-scale immigration, and enormous technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York emerged as the hub of a new American identity. New York became the vital center of the corporate and advertising world, and—as symbolized by Broadway—the heart of show business. It was "the imaginary if not geographic heart of the United States, the epitome of all things American" in these years; New York was also the site of convergence where consumer culture flourished (p. 5).

Schweitzer finds the linkage to women's self-perception an integral offshoot of consumer culture, both as a result of theater's penchant for spectacle and "stars" and because of the new vogue for shopping. She writes, "theater managers aggressively pursued . . . female theatergoers by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle." Nearby department stores absorbed this path to consumer success and became arenas for spectacle themselves, fusing "theatrical spectatorship and consumption" as they formed a mass market for consumer goods and helped generate the rise of celebrity culture (p. 4).

Broadway played a very special role, providing the words and music for the American Dream. From the 1890s to the 1920s, the Lower East Side witnessed the arrival of twenty-three million new immigrants. German beer gardens, Irish brass bands, and curbside minstrel shows created a commotion of cultures that resonated through the Bowery, lower Broadway, and Union Square in the 1880s—and then migrated north toward West 28^th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where the din of tinny pianos clanging out new tunes led to the area's sobriquet as Tin Pan Alley in the early 1900s.¹

The "genteel tradition" that had been central to America's mainstream culture dissolved in the new urban, industrial stew. Replacing it was a vernacular culture that rose from the streets and was captured best by vaudeville—the most successful entertainment of the time, and one that literally evoked the "voice of the city." Legendary performer and composer George M. Cohan brought a red-white-and-blue sensibility to Broadway musicals that were quintessential expressions of the American melting pot, including such notable songs as "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "You're a Grand Old Flag." Schweitzer describes the theater—with its extensive ties to department stores and the emerging mass media—as "a central locus for producing modern consumers." The potential audience for both was vast: in the 1914-15 season, there were 133 productions on Broadway in forty-two theaters, with the names of such stars as W. C. Fields, Ed Wynn, Bert Williams, and Irene Castle illuminating marquees along the "Great White Way." The rise of these popular stage stars—as well as Maude Adams as Peter Pan and such other Ziegfeld Follies' headliners as Fannie Brice and Eddie Cantor—helped give birth to celebrity culture: star images and stories flooded newspapers and magazines to feed an insatiable public appetite that demanded to know more about their anointed favorites.²

To broaden theater's appeal, impresarios such as...