Читать книгу The Art of Democracy - Jim Cullen - Страница 16

From angry New Jersey tenant farmers in 1766 to frustrated Los Angeles residents in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict in 1992, rioting is an American tradition. Such outbursts are usually the result of accumulating social tensions that have gone unaddressed by those in authority, and New York’s Astor Place riot of 1849 was no exception. What made it unusual, however, was its immediate cause: a dispute about the correct way to perform the lead role in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Unlike in the twentieth century, when Shakespearian drama became a largely academic passion for the well-read few, the early nineteenth century was a time when the Bard enjoyed mass appeal. Working people were intimately familiar with many of his plays and had firm ideas about proper interpretations of them. As a result, Shakespearian actors developed large and devoted followings in both England and the United States.

THE ASTOR PLACE OPERA HOUSE ON THE NIGHT OF THE RIOT

In the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the premier American actor was Edwin Forrest. Born in 1806 into a working-class Philadelphia family, Forrest exhibited theatrical promise as a child and apprenticed himself to the great English tragedian Edmund Kean when he toured the United States. Taking a cue from his mentor, Forrest developed an expressive style of performing Shakespeare that was very popular with U.S. audiences. Something of what we might call a method actor, Forrest built up his body, analyzed scripts, and tried to immerse himself emotionally and intellectually in his roles. To play King Lear, for example, he visited mental institutions so as to better portray insanity. He was also an ardent nationalist, ever ready to proclaim the superiority of his country. In this regard, he may have reflected a cultural insecurity of Americans vis-a-vis Europe that persists at least to some degree to the present day.

Forrest was also well regarded in England, particularly for his performance as an Indian chief in Metamora, a play he commissioned to create a showcase for himself. As a Shakespearian actor, however, he had a rival in William Macready, a prominent London tragedian whose style tended to be more restrained. Like Forrest, Macready had built up a following on both sides of the Atlantic, but his more refined demeanor and elitist sympathies led to a different set of dramatic priorities. The two men were at least civil to each other until Forrest’s second English tour, in 1845, where he was met with small, unenthusiastic audiences and hostile reviews, including one written by a friend of Macready. In retaliation, Forrest hissed during one of Macready’s performances in Scotland. An outraged Macready denounced Forrest, who insisted he was simply exercising his right to show his feelings about the performance. Forrest then returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome, denouncing the British in particular and aristocracy in general. In the events that followed, the right of an audience to express its opinion, friendly or otherwise, became a banner around which Forrest’s followers would rally.

In 1848, Macready left for a U.S. tour with some trepidation (his friend Charles Dickens, who had written a critical portrayal of Americans in Martin Chuzzlewit, considered it too risky even to see him off). Matters went well until Macready reached Philadelphia, where Forrest opened a version of Macbeth opposite his own. Both attracted large audiences, but by this point the controversy had been widely reported and Macready was attacked by a barrage of rotten eggs and vegetables. He cut short his Philadelphia run and went South and West, but found a great deal of hostility there too.

Five months later Macready ended his tour playing Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House in New York. This grand hall was a symbol of the economic disparities that would grow ever greater over the course of the nineteenth century. Forrest once again played the same role, this time at the Bowery Theatre, which was in a tough neighborhood, the turf of “Bowery B’hoys” and “Bowery G’hals” who wore flashy clothes and participated in a rich street life that included parades, horse races, and fights between gangs. The Bowery Theater was at the heart of the neighborhood’s nightlife, a place where journeymen, laborers, and factory workers went to socialize and enjoy entertainment. These people formed the core of Forrest’s constituency.

The two actors took the stage to play their respective Macbeths on May 7. Forrest’s performance was hailed as brilliant, but Macready’s was never heard: he was drowned out in a barrage of hisses and hurled objects. When chairs began to be thrown down from the gallery, almost hitting the actress playing Lady Macbeth, he stopped the play. He decided to leave the city, but a number of fellow artists, including Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Jacksonian editor and playwright Mordecai Noah, urged him not to back down, and he gave another performance two nights later.

Forrest’s partisans were waiting. They had papered the city with rabid diatribes in the press and on posted signs: “WORKING MEN, shall AMERICANS OR ENGLISH RULE in this city?” asked one, making the actors’ dispute into a referendum on national autonomy. Much of the effort was orchestrated by an “American Committee” headed by E.Z.C. Judson (a.k.a. dime novelist Ned Buntline), who gathered a collection of Bowery B’hoys and planned to disrupt Macready’s second show. But audience support for the actor—he was greeted with a fifteen-minute standing ovation—and arrests of troublemakers inside the theater stymied this effort, and Macready was able to finish his performance and safely leave the theater by hiding in the audience, which exited through a police cordon.

The situation was much more tense outside the opera house. There, police efforts to quiet the crowd only inflamed it. Rocks began to fly, and the officers called on the help of the local militia, which had been put on standby in case of trouble. When Macready left the opera house, the militia fired over the heads of the crowd. Believing that soldiers were shooting blanks, the crowd surged forward. The next round of firing revealed their miscalculation. Moreover, when the militia tried to avoid further confrontation by again firing over the crowd, they ended up hitting some of the bystanders. In the end, at least twenty-two people died and over 150 were wounded. Eighty-six were arrested, including butchers, carpenters, machinists, bakers, and clerks—a cross-section of the working class of New York. Attempted unrest the next night was held firmly in check by police and soldiers.

There was a good deal of commentary in the New York press in the aftermath of the riot, predictably divided between those who condemned the hooliganism of the rioters and those who condemned the deadly response of the police. Virtually everyone, though, saw class tensions and values as the underlying issue. “There is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto considered it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class,” a writer for the Philadelphia Ledger noted. In the first stages of the attacks on Macready, the New York Tribune, edited by future presidential candidate Horace Greeley, condemned the “miscreants,” but after the riots it concluded that a series of reforms was called for, including greater government action to curb inequities of wealth. Even Lydia Maria Child, appalled by the “blind rage of the mob” she saw as she tried to pass by the disturbance, acknowledged the justice of its grievances. “There are instants, when the sight of rags and starvation make me almost ready to smash thro’ the plate-glass of the rich and seize their treasures of silver and gold,” the pacifist writer later wrote in a letter to some friends.

The behavior of Forrest, the Bowery B’hoys, and the more irresponsible elements of the New York press suggest they share some of the blame for the Astor Place riot. It is hard to ignore the chauvinism that accompanied so much of the search for, and celebration of, a home-grown artistic tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not that Macready was miscast as a snob: as early as 1826, he wrote that Forrest showed promise as an actor—if he stopped performing for Americans, whom he would repeatedly describe in later years as “vulgar,” “coarse,” “underbred,” and “disagreeable.” Nevertheless, he was repeatedly rebuffed in his efforts to resolve his dispute with Forrest and his Yankee enthusiasts, who thirsted for confrontation.

Riots never occur in a vacuum. The Forrest-Macready conflict reflected a growing awareness of the class divisions that the United States prided itself on having avoided. Equality of opportunity was increasingly rare for both white and black workers; the relatively large ranks of artisans (like Greeley himself) who managed to launch enterprises before the Civil War would not find much success after it. The United States was becoming afflicted by injustices that would create a clearly defined, self-conscious working class by the second half of the century.

This emerging polarization was reflected in the world of entertainment. In the 1820s and 1830s, theaters were a microcosm of the larger society, populated by men and women, rich and poor, white and black. By the 1840s and 1850s, performing halls like the Astor Place Opera House evidenced a segregation by wealth and race that would become a gulf by the end of the century. At the same time, the raucous audience participation that was a major aspect of the performing arts early in the century was gradually being replaced by an expectation of passivity. The Astor Place riot reflected, and intensified, movement in this direction.

In its wake, new entertainment forms would emerge and new ideological possibilities would be created. But a moment of considerable excitement, and fluidity, was now past.

Whatever political or cultural differences they may have had with England, American theatergoers embraced William Shakespeare as one of their own. Fully one-fourth of all the plays mounted in Philadelphia between 1810 and 1812 were written by the Bard, and twenty-one of his thirty-seven plays were performed there between 1800 and 1835. Nor was Shakespeare’s appeal solely Eastern: Chicago had only 4,000 people in 1837 when Richard III played. The Mississippi towns of Vicksburg and Natchez mounted at least 150 Shakespeare plays between 1814 and 1861, and by the 1830s, Shakespearean plays were being performed on riverboats in the North American interior.²⁹

In the twentieth century, Shakespeare became the supreme symbol of high culture, the subject of intensive scholarly exegeses, textual reverence, and highbrow performance on stage and public television. Americans of the nineteenth century, though, knew Shakespeare on a much more chummy basis—and were not afraid to “improve” him for their own purposes. Juliet, for example, was typically older than she was in the seventeenth century, and did not kiss Romeo at their first meeting. Richard III became even more of a villain than originally written. And King Lear ended up a happy man. In general, the moral prescriptions of Shakespeare’s plays were more heavily underlined, the characters more dichotomized. This made the plays more simplistic, in keeping with the popular romanticism of the time. Yet in its own way, this moralistic stance was more sophisticated than the pieties of Enlightenment drama, where characters were evil because they didn’t know any better and where happy endings were simply a matter of applying the infallible logic of reason.³⁰

Shakespeare aside, however, a call for plays by and about Americans was heard very early in the young republic and became ever more insistent over the course of the nineteenth century. The first major play to fulfill this prescription was Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). The title referred to the difference between sturdy American republicans and effete British degenerates, embodied in the difference between the play’s protagonist, Revolutionary War hero Colonel Manly, and the duplicitous Billy Dimple, heir of a Hudson River estate. A secondary contrast was suggested through Dimple’s valet Jessamy and Manly’s waiter Jonathon. A simple, assertive, yet likeable yeoman, Jonathon was clearly intended to be Manly’s social and intellectual inferior. But he evoked the archetypal “Brother Jonathan” who emerged in this period and reappeared in numerous reincarnations in later plays (e.g., Zachariah Dickerwell, Jediah Homebred, and Solomon Swap, made famous by U.S. actor James Hackett). For the next thirty years, the representative American was a sparsely educated but quick-witted farmer who drove a hard bargain but had a soft heart.

By the 1830s and 1840s, Brother Jonathan had become less a national figure and more one associated with New England. New archetypes emerged, among them the rustic backwoodsman Davy Crockett, the riverboat pilot Mike Fink, and Mose the fireman. In their evocation of the Southerner, Westerner, and working-class city dweller, such archetypes represented the elaboration of a sectional, as well as national, identity whose accents gave U.S. actors an advantage over their British counterparts. Not only were their voices distinctive, but a full appreciation of their foibles depended on an immersion in the American milieu.³¹

It should be noted that these vernacular characters tended to appear in comedies. By twentieth-century standards, nineteenth-century dramas and tragedies often had a melodramatic quality—although, as has already been suggested, the romanticism and moral didacticism of the early nineteenth century can be seen as a reaction to Enlightenment drama, as well as a justification for what was still a suspect form of entertainment. In comedy, however, lower artistic and moral expectations permitted a kind of social commentary that was bracing in its frankness. This was especially true with regard to representations of women. Certainly, the stage was a patriarchal institution that treated women’s claims for autonomy as humorous. But such jokes could be revealing and even subversive. One can see this dynamic at work in William Dunlap’s 1796 play The Archers, in which a young woman tells her sweetheart not to go to war:

Cecily: I shall like you the better for it as long as I live—if you’re not killed.

Conrad: Why, you should like me better for dying for my country.

Cecily: Should I? Well maybe I should; but somehow I shall never like a dead man as well as a live one.

Conrad: Well I don’t know but that your taste is as well founded as your politics.³²

The Archers, however, is still an eighteenth-century comedy of manners. A broader humor was evident in “The Magna Charter of Heaven,” a song from the 1822 play Deed of Gift:

While each freeman’s son

boasts of rights a plenty

Daughters have but one

E’en at one and twenty.

’Tis the right to choose

Tom or Dick or

Harry Whom we will refuse

Which we wish to marry

Chorus: ’Tis our chartered right Nature’s hand has penn’d it Let us then unite Bravely to defend it While our fathers fought For our Independence Patriot mothers taught This to their descendants: Daughters guard and save Rights too dear to barter Spurn the name of slave Freedom is our charter³³

Such a song would only be permissible in the context of comedy—and if the charter was portrayed as of Heaven, not Earth. Nevertheless, it would not have had such vitality if it had not expressed a feeling that resonated with at least some of its audience, and a hope for this world, not the next one.

The mock-utopian injunction to “spurn the name of slave” in the “Magna Charter of Heaven” serves as an important reminder that freedom and equality in the pre-Civil War United States were predicated on whiteness. As everywhere else in the society, race was a major issue on the stage. After Europeans, the two most commonly represented racial groups were Native Americans and African Americans. Depictions of the former tended to occur in the realm of drama; the latter in comedy. The difference reveals a great deal about the relative place of each group in relation to white society.

From the very first settlement, European Americans tended to dichotomize red-white relations between nature and civilization. The rapid development of technology, coupled with progressive Indian removal westward (two processes that were, of course, intimately related), intensified this attitude, turning the Native American into something of a romantic figure—a tragic, dignified embodiment of a vanishing way of life. This portrayal usefully limited white guilt, for if the natives were doomed anyway, white incursions did not need to be seen as brutal. While in many cases portrayals of the destruction of Native Americans centered on evil white men, more often it was internecine conflict or bad Indians who were responsible.

If Indians were allowed a measure of respect, they were still not considered the white man’s equal. One important index of this was the treatment of women. Unlike with African Americans, with Native Americans there was at least some toleration of interracial sex, although for the most part playwrights implicitly or explicitly upheld racial separation. Indian women who did marry white men usually converted to Christianity or took up white folkways. And while white women were only sexually propositioned by the most vile villains, red women tended to have to contend with garden-variety boors (“Bad Man! Indian girl’s cheek grows redder with shame!” says one such victim).³⁴

Perhaps the most well-known play about Native Americans was John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1828), commissioned by Edwin Forrest, the most famous actor of his day. The story of an Indian chief who perished fighting New Englanders in King Philip’s War of 1675-1676, Metamora features the usual depiction of the noble savage who patiently endures his mistreatment by the white man. What makes this play unusual, though, is that Metamora finally strikes out against his oppressors. “Our Lands! Our nation’s freedom! Or the Grave!” he cries. Finally surrounded, he kills his wife rather than have her raped by whites, then dies with her name on his lips. In his passion for freedom—which evokes Patrick Henry’s famous slogan “Give me liberty or give me death!”—and in his possessive sexual anxiety about women, Metamora seems more white than red. Of course, he represents a white man’s idea of what a great Indian should be, and his dramatic actions at the end of the play were probably as much calculated to show off Forrest’s physique and generate standing ovations as to make a political statement. But the play was nonetheless a genuine critique of white policy toward Indians. “Let us hope, for the honor of humanity, that this applause is bestowed on Mr. Forrest, rather than the ferocious savage he impersonates,” said a reviewer in the American Quarterly Review in 1830. In all likelihood the writer need not have worried, for the pace of aggression toward Indians did not slow in any perceptible way. Moreover, Robert Bird, who helped revise the play to suit Forrest’s purposes, later became the author of Nick of the Woods (1837), a novel that essentially justified a policy of extermination.³⁵

By the mid-nineteenth century, Native Americans were a dwindling group living outside white society. African Americans, by contrast, were part of a racially hierarchial system within white society, and their numbers were increasing. These facts help account for the different treatment of the two groups on the stage. A disappearing danger, Indians were often romanticized, the subject of nostalgia for a vanishing world. Black-white relations, on the other hand, were a subject of increasing conflict and uncertainty.

It must be noted that while an assumption of black inferiority has been a staple of white thinking since the first slave arrived on these shores, this attitude toward blacks has not been monolithic. “In certain places and at certain times between 1607 and 1800, the ‘lower sorts’ of whites appear to have been pleasantly lacking in racial consciousness,” writes David R. Roediger in his study of nineteenth-century racism. Thus, he notes, white indentured servants and black (and Indian) slaves sometimes fled oppressive masters together in the colonial era, and blacks and whites socialized—and engaged in petty crime—together. Some slave revolts, notably in New York City in 1741 and Richmond in 1800, included white participants.³⁶

When present at all, African Americans were generally relegated to small roles on the early American stage. Free men of color did occasionally appear, and were treated with relative respect. And there were a few plays about the plight of slaves, usually centering on the tragedy of broken families. Most of the time, however, blacks were the butt of jokes, often stemming from their unusual dialects. In this regard, they were not unlike such ethnic types as the (drunk) Irishman, also a source of humor. More specific to blacks was comedy based on a purported love of finery, which reflected a racist contempt for any effort to enjoy white economic privilege. By the time Brother Jonathan was a clearly elaborated archetype, so was his black counterpart, Sambo, “lthough this “happy darky” was generally not allowed to express the confidence and pride of white characters like Jonathan, he was sometimes portrayed as a person of simple integrity, although this changed as the Civil War approached.³⁷

These black characters were almost always portrayed by whites in blackface—white men who covered their faces with burnt cork and used what they considered black language, mannerisms, songs, etc. By about 1820, such characters were common, especially for songs or brief entr’acte (“between act”) performances. However, this cultural practice was placed on an entirely new basis sometime around 1828, when Thomas D. Rice, an actor who specialized in blackface performances, saw an old African-American man perform an unfamiliar dance while singing “Wheel about and turn about jus’ so/Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.” Rice learned the song and dance, added new verses, and began performing “Jump Jim Crow” on stage. It was a sensation across the country, and even in London when Rice took it on tour.

In the 1830s, blackface entertainment became increasingly popular but remained only one part of an evening’s stage entertainment. It was not until the early 1840s that groups of blackface actors began banding together to form troupes for what became known as minstrel shows. Many went on tour through the South and West, but the demand was so heavy that some cities were able to sustain troupes for a decade or more.

Between the mid-1840s and the onset of the Civil War, the minstrel show evolved into the three-part structure that would define its course for the rest of the century. In the first part, the entire company formed a semicircle, with the star performers, called “Tambo” and “Bones” for the instruments they played, at either end. Individual minstrels sang or danced, while the rest of the company sang the choruses. Such numbers were interspersed with jokes and comic songs, presided over by a white master of ceremonies known as the interlocutor. The first part ended with a group song-and-dance number.

The second part of the show, known as the “olio,” was a variety section that featured any number of novelty acts. One important element of the olio was a stump speech, usually given by an endman, who spoke in the garbled language of a pretentious black man “putting on airs.” “Transcendentalism is dat spiritual cognoscence ob psychological irrefragibility,” began one such speech, which simultaneously lampooned the “uppity” black man and the pieties of such intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, class critiques were a very big part of minstrel social commentary, so much so that African Americans occasionally had a laugh at the expense of the white elite, as in this story about a black man who rides a ferry with a white one:

When I got out a little piece from the shore, de man axed me if I knowed anyting about frenologism [phrenology, the mid-nineteenth century pseudoscience that mapped the brain]. I told him no. Ah, says he, den one quarter of your life is gone. Finally he says, does you know anyting about grammar. I told him no. Ah, says he, den one half ob you life am gone … He axed me if I knowed anyting about dickshionary. I told him no and he say tree quarters of your life is gone. We hit a rock and den I axed him if he knowed how to swim. He said no. Den, says I, de whole four quarters of your life am gone—shure.³⁸

In this story, blacks and whites share the kind of practical knowledge and wit so often celebrated on the U.S. stage, and the “other” is the formally educated white American who is both arrogant and ignorant.

Shakespeare, incidentally, was a favorite among minstrels, both in such speeches and as a source of simple jokes. “When was Desdemona like a ship?” a comic would ask. “When she was moored,” came the answer. “Get thee to a brewery!” Hamlet would tell Ophelia—a telling joke on middle-class temperance advocates who considered alcohol a major moral issue. Such comedy is an important reminder not only of Shakespeare’s popularity with the mechanics’ set, which formed the core of the minstrel audience, but also of the often risque and decisively male humor that characterized it.³⁹

The final part of the minstrel show was a one-act skit. These generally had Southern plantation settings and featured slapstick comedy “nearly always ending in a flurry of inflated bladders, bombardments of cream pies, or fireworks explosions that literally closed the show with a bang,” according to one historian of minstrelsy. Such climaxes were typical of stage entertainment in the early nineteenth century, when even the most sober Shakespearian tragedy was followed by a farce to lighten the audience’s mood.⁴⁰

Broad comedy was only one side of minstrelsy, however. The other was a kind of melancholy that took a variety of forms in the songs. Some were laments for lost family members; others expressed nostalgia for plantation life. The most famous composer of such music was Stephen Foster, who began his career as a blackface singer before selling a series of songs to minstrel troupes in the 1840s and 1850s. His “Old Folks at Home” and “Massa’s in the Cold Ground” were great favorites in his time, while others (“O! Susanna,” “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”) are still familiar today. Many described dying or dead lovers, which intensified their impact. Foster drank himself to death during the Civil War.

Both the comic and the sentimental sides of the minstrel tradition were racist. With certain partial exceptions, like the ferry story quoted above, most humor in minstrel shows was at the expense of African Americans and was emphatically hostile to any hint of equality with whites. The sentimental strain in minstrel entertainment, a form that generally celebrated plantation life, implicitly or explicitly sanctioned slavery as the natural and most comfortable place for African Americans (escaped slaves were usually depicted as unhappy). In the early days of minstrelsy, there were important exceptions to this rule, among them depictions of rape, alcoholism, and broken families, as well as humorous jibes at slaveholders. For instance, “Blue Tail Fly,” with its famous chorus “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care/master’s gone away,” expresses pleasure at the death of a slaveowner. But such sentiments became progressively less common as sectional conflict intensified and slavery became an increasingly divisive political issue.

As the controversy over slavery intensified in the 1840s and 1850s, it strained the national political system to the breaking point and polarized the parties along racial lines. The Whig Party had collapsed completely by the early 1850s, giving way to the Free Soil and Republican parties, both of which were against slavery. During the same years, pro-slavery forces got the upper hand in the Democratic Party, driving many Barnburners into Free Soil and/or Republican ranks and recruiting Southern pro-slavery Whigs. The effect was to make the Democrats more racist, and this new hard line was reflected in minstrel shows, whose cultural politics were strongly consonant with those of the Democratic Party.⁴¹

There were two powerful ironies in all of this. First, while minstrelsy was considered a cultural form that displayed the variety and mirth of Southern plantation life, some of the most important figures in its development—E.P. Christy, Thomas Rice, and Foster, among others—were of Northern, urban origin. So was Dan Emmett, an Ohioan whose “Dixie’s Land,” a paean to the plantation sung from the point of view of a slave (“I wish I war in the land ob cotton/Old times dere am not forgotten”), eventually became a Confederate anthem. In fact, there is a logic to this apparent contradiction, in part because minstrelsy was largely an urban creation for urban audiences, and in part because it embodied the Southern planter-Northern workingman alliance that had been forged in the 1840s.

The larger, more powerful irony in minstrelsy was its dependence on the very African-American culture it satirized, belittled, and feared. In fact, many minstrels prided themselves on the degree of verisimilitude in their renditions of black culture. E.P. Christy and other influential troupe leaders boasted about their immersion in African-American life and fancied themselves amateur anthropologists. While these men undoubtedly overestimated their powers of observation and recall, there can be little question that minstrel shows did tap into the immense vitality of an Afro-American folklore that had accumulated over the course of two centuries of bondage. The ferry story quoted above suggests the humorous, pragmatic thrust of secular black storytelling, while melancholy minstrel songs evoked the otherworldly quest for reassurance found in black sacred music. For all their fear of and condescension toward black people, minstrels captured the genuine beauties of pastoral life for white rural refugees who were forced to leave the Irish, German, or American countrysides for subsistence wages in large cities. If minstrelsy was a cultural form that often projected fierce hatred, it also, often despite itself, betrayed a deep admiration and affinity for the world the slaves had made under conditions of severe adversity.⁴²

In terms of the future course of popular culture, what was most significant about minstrelsy was its heterogeneous character. Not only did whites alter black culture in the course of its translation and migration into the cities—many minstrel songs have a strongly Celtic flavor that draws on shared traditions of oppression—but minstrelsy also found its way back into black communities, where it underwent further refinement. For the most part, minstrel songs that became part of the slave cultural tradition were those, like “Blue Tail Fly,” that retained their critical character.⁴³ They eventually formed part of the bedrock for blues, gospel, and other forms of African-American music. Meanwhile, minstrelsy’s ideas and forms—comic skits, monologues, and a variety format—laid the foundations for burlesque, vaudeville, and eventually television. For better and worse, here was a true wellspring of U.S. culture.