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Popular Culture N Popular Culture Overview Was by Then Famous in His Own Right

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Popular Culture N Popular Culture Overview Was by Then Famous in His Own Right Popular Culture n Popular Culture Overview was by then famous in his own right. Reputed to be the most handsome man in America, the youngest Booth son The forms of popular culture Americans experienced and was already known for his energetic performances and participated in during the Civil War era varied according onstage acrobatics. Less well known was his bitter racism to the part of the country in which they lived and their and deep sympathy for the Confederate cause. personal preferences. Residents of the rural interior had More readily accessible to most Americans than the different opportunities for diversion than did denizens theater was popular literature. The romantic novel was the of the relatively cosmopolitan cities, and Americans’ ideas favorite light reading material of many. The British novelist about desirable use of leisure time differed as widely in Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a favorite of Americans the mid-nineteenth century as they do in the twenty-first, of both the North and South before the war, and his books even if many of the specific activities and attractions are continued to be popular long after Appomattox. Scott had much different. his American imitators, most notably William Gilmore One of the forms of entertainment available in many Simms (1806–1870), a South Carolinian who tried to cities and towns was the theater. British theater was also cultivate a distinctly Southern literature. At the opposite popular in America. The British actress Laura Keene (1826– extreme of sectional literature was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1873) came to America in 1852 and became an immediate enormously popular 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Based favorite. In New York in 1855 she opened Laura Keene’s on interviews with escaped slaves, Stowe’s book was aimed Theater, which she managed until 1863. Thereafter she at illustrating the evils of the system of slavery. Naturally, it continued to star in her own traveling theater troupe, per- was anathema south of the Mason-Dixon line. Louisa May forming a variety of plays including the British playwright Alcott (1832–1888) was not yet well known at the time of Tom Taylor’s popular 1858 farcical comedy ‘‘Our Ameri- the Civil War, though her first book, Flower Fables, had can Cousin,’’ which Keene and her company presented at appeared in 1854, and her 1864 novel, , was received Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, for an audience that Moods included President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln on April 14, well by critics. She gained far more recognition for her 1865. That performance was disastrously cut short midway 1863 nonfiction work, Hospital Sketches, which drew through Scene 2 of Act III when Lincoln was assassinated on her experience as a volunteer nurse in Union hospitals. by John Wilkes Booth (1838–1865). Much greater fame awaited her 1868 book, Little Women. Traveling thespians were not unusual during this era, The Civil War was also the era of Transcendentalist authors and performances even by the most renowned actors of such as Herman Melville (1819–1891) and the poet Walt the day were not entirely limited to East coast cities, even if Whitman (1819–1892), though their works had some- they were more frequent and abundant there. America’s what less appeal to popular audiences. most famous acting family, the Booths, appeared in many A significant segment of the American population cities, towns, and smaller venues during the decades pre- looked somewhat askance at the reading of novels, and ceding the Civil War. Junius Brutus Booth Sr. (1796– at most or all of the theater. For some devout Christians, 1852) and his son Edwin Booth (1833–1893) famously novel reading and theater going represented worldly dis- toured gold rush California, performing Shakespeare for tractions that might draw them away from God. Other the Forty-niners. In 1864 the Booths performed Julius Americans, whether strongly religious or not, saw such Caesar in New York City, the only performance in which pursuits as unprofitable and intellectually stultifying dis- Junius Brutus Sr. and Edwin appeared on stage with the tractions for idle minds. For them, serious books and youngest member of the family, John Wilkes Booth, who educational lectures were preferable. 235 Performing Arts: An Overview Appropriately, therefore, a popular and educational the majority of the time of most adults, and to a far greater feature of American culture during the antebellum period extent than is true in the twenty-first century. was the lyceum. The teacher and traveling lecturer Josiah Holbrook (1778–1854) founded the first American Steven E. Woodworth lyceum in 1826 in Millbury, Massachusetts. Holbrook believed learning should be a life-long passion, and he hoped to spread the concept of the lyceum as a regular n venue for educational lectures in each locality. By the Performing Arts 1850s his dream had largely become a reality, with lyceums PERFORMING ARTS: AN OVERVIEW established throughout the country, sponsoring lectures Kerry L. Pimblott on topics ranging from literature to science to current MINSTREL SHOWS events and issues. Large eastern lyceums paid impre- Eric R. Jackson ssive fees to major figures of the day such as Ralph THEATER Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau John L. Reilly (1817–1862), and top orators such as Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) regularly worked the lyceum circuit. More remote lyceums might have had to turn to local PERFORMING ARTS: AN OVERVIEW talent, as when the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in The social upheaval of the Civil War disrupted and trans- January 1838 heard up-and-coming twenty-eight-year-old formed the world of performing arts and the nature of the Springfield lawyer and politician Abraham Lincoln speak theatergoing public. As the nation mobilized for war, on ‘‘The Preservation of Our Political Institutions.’’ After theaters throughout the country were forced to close their the Civil War, lyceums gradually came to present more doors under the dual strains of mass enlistment and real- drama and entertainment and less lecture. location of vital resources. Those that continued to oper- More active, if less intellectual, entertainment was to ate sought to attract new audiences by altering their be found in physical activities. Children might play active schedules in accordance with a broader transformation of games such as crack the whip or leapfrog, but adults cultural tastes. Accordingly, the age group, gender, and usually did not. Some might play card games, though class distinctions that had characterized the theater during others eschewed such pastimes as sinful because of their the early nineteenth century were challenged, allowing close association with gambling. The closest means in women—as both performers and spectators—to redefine which adults usually came to active physical play was by the boundaries of the public sphere and transform the making some communal work activity into something like theatergoing experience for all Americans. The minstrel a game. This might be a corn-husking, a barn-raising, or a show, however, remained the nation’s most popular the- chopping bee. Those who did not have religious scruples atrical pursuit, bringing into relief the limits of wartime against it might also engage in dancing. Also, the Civil inclusion and the ongoing significance of white supremacy War brought an exception to the usual rule that adults did in the era of emancipation. not play physical games. The soldiers, many of whom were very young men barely out of their teens, often Initial Effects of the War referred to themselves as ‘‘the boys.’’ It made sense then During the initial stages of the war, theaters across the that when boredom weighed heavily on them in camp, country struggled to maintain regular operations. In New they took up some of the games they recently had played York, the Herald lamented the decline in theater attend- in the schoolyard. A favorite was known as ‘‘drive ball’’ or ance, complaining that there were frequently ‘‘more peo- ‘‘town ball,’’ and involved a player with a stick trying to hit ple upon the stage than in the audience’’ (August 5, 1861, some sort of ball thrown by one of the other players. It p. 3). By the following year little had changed, with the may be that the war, by bringing together thousands of Herald reporting that most of the leading theaters were young men with much unavoidable and generally tedious still closed, ‘‘not only in New York, but in all the other leisure time in the army camps, helped them to develop, large cities,’’ and that ‘‘great uncertainty prevails as to the regularize, and spread this game, which later came to be arrangements of many of them for the coming season’’ called ‘‘baseball.’’ However, contrary to legend, it was not (August 18, 1862, p. 2). In an effort to rationalize matters, invented by the Civil War general Abner Doubleday New Orleans’s Daily Picayune contended that it could (1819–1893). ‘‘hardly be expected that the theatres should be very lib- Reading, playing, dancing, attending lyceum, theater, erally patronized’’ during wartime when the ‘‘theatre of or religious worship, Americans of the Civil War era had war, with its stirring incidents of terrible reality, absorbs many options for amusing themselves and occupying their more of the popular interest than the theatre of mimic and free time, but of course work was the activity that took up amusing representations’’ (September 14, 1862, p. 1). 236 GALE LIBRARY OF DAILY LIFE: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR.
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