Abstract

In the 1870s, a massive financial collapse upended American entertainment. In particular, the depression that blighted the decade caused widespread failure among the stationary stock companies that had long served as the backbone for the nation’s theater. In their place, managers turned to traveling troupes, transforming an industry based on local businesses into one dominated by nationally oriented firms directly responsive to market dynamics. By doing so, they also raised a series of disturbing questions about the relationship between cultural hierarchy and the free market that challenged many of the base assumptions of Gilded Age liberalism.

Using a mixture of newspaper accounts, financial records, business correspondence, and box office reports, this paper reconstructs how a generation of managers sought to address these interlocking cultural and economic challenges. Although market forces pushed them to reach towards the broadest possible audience, such expansion threatened to reintroduce forms of cultural conflict unacceptable to middle class customers. Creating over-the-top spectacles that appealed to diverse audiences while using information gathering and booking efficiency to reduce costs, these businessmen sought to carefully balance sacralized performances with crowd-pleasing favorites, relying on the architectural grandeur and commercial power of their theaters to bridge the difference. Seeking additional control over their productions, businessmen began to replace individual stars with managerially-organized traveling combinations, a development that allowed them to tour multiple copies of a single show. These entrepreneurs reshaped the nature of theatrical commodities, using copyright enforcement and media publicity to introduce replicable troupes stabilized by the reputation of their business. Ultimately, these innovations would result in the development of a national theater industry able to operate on a continental scale. Analyzing these developments, the paper sheds new light on the intricate interplay between art and commerce that defined the origins of the American mass entertainment.