Melodrama Unveiled, American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850 (review)

78CIVIL WAR HISTORY¡can military ethos. Cunliffe questions the observation in standard military histories that soldiers eschewed politics and emphasizes that military affairs and politics were intimately related in the decades before the Civil War. Many regulars were amateur politicians; many politicians were amateur soldiers. The interaction between the two resulted in an equilibrium, with neither exercising a dominant role. He also questions the age-old "Southern Military Tradition" which is found in most American history textbooks. Tackling the tradition from many different angles—West Point records, official rosters North and South in 1861, the army command system in 1861, obituaries during the Mexican War—Cunliffe reaches interesting conclusions. For example, he shows through charts and statistics that during the period 1802-1861 more northerners than southerners graduated from West Point (more southerners entered); that New York and Pennsylvania (Virginia was third) led in sending cadets to the Academy; that logistics in the Mexican War dictated the heavy levy on the southern states (actually, the first regiments were from the Ohio Valley); and that there were more military periodicals and volunteer associations in the North during the 1850's than in the South. However, it was true that southerners (Jefferson Davis and John B. Floyd) were war secretaries in the 1850's, that southerners held the senior military appointments in 1861, and that they dominated the cavalry. A southerner was also the superintendent of West Point in 1861. In summing up his observations, Cunliffe suggests that three major discordant strains influenced the martial spirit during the antebellum years. He identifies these as Quaker (antimilitary position as reflected by Franklin and Whitman, stressing diligence, hard work, piety); Rifleman (the amateur soldier unimpressed by rank and authority but easily stirred by patriotism); and Chevalier (the professional soldier who lived in a make-believe world). Each saw something attractive in the other. The result was rival yet complementary patterns—a harmony of discords whose "full, strident buzz" kept the nation active and virile. The volume contains chapter notes, acknowledgments, and an index . There are over fifty illustrations, plus internal chapter art. Although the work is more descriptive than analytical, the military historian, the student of American social history, and the expert on early nineteenthcentury America will find it provocative and interesting. Harwood P. Hinton University of Arizona Melodrama Unveiled, American Theater and Culture, 1800-1850. By David Grimsted. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Pp. 285. $8.95.) Since the theater is one of the most glamorous of professions, books about it, by their very nature, have to be interesting, and of course, BOOK REVIEWS79 this one is. From its title one would think that the volume would treat with only one phase of theater in the first half of the nineteenth century , but evidently the author defines all theater during that period as melodrama, since he has produced what amounts to a history of the American stage from 1800 to 1850. The book is entertaining at its best and is always scholarly. Some of the best comments and insights are in the small print of footnotes where they are apt to be missed, rather than in the body of the text where they could easily have been incorporated (fn. 12, p. 173). One point that comes through implicitly, although the author does not emphasize it, is the extent of theatrical activity in the nation before the Civil War. Reference is made to smaller cities such as Lexington, Kentucky, or Newburyport, Massachusetts. The bottoms of the pages teem with footnotes to forgotten plays by equally forgotten dramatists whom only scholars such as Mr. Grimsted would read. We are assured that many more were written than the 1100 titles catalogued in the most complete listing available. A spirit of improvisation hung over the American theater, from writing , to acting, to payment. Few playwrights were full-time dramatists. William Dunlap, with whom this study begins, besides writing his own plays as well as translating and adapting foreign works, was also a theatrical manager. Mordecai M. Noah, better known as a Jacksonian journalist and proto-Zionist, dabbled in the theater at the beginning of his career, with some success. John Minshull, a New York butcher, wrote...