planters’ and poor Northern workers’ shared fear of Whig domination created a powerful, and lasting, institutionalized foundation for racism. Both Whigs and Democrats realized that slavery was a bulwark against the expansion of free market, free labor capitalism, and many Democrats (and even some Whigs) therefore saw it as a positive good. In the insecure labor market of Northern cities, white workers saw free blacks as a threat to their job security, while slavery gave them a twisted source of psychic satisfaction in their whiteness. One of the most unlikely partnerships in working-class history was the alliance between the fiercely pro-slavery theorist John Calhoun and the rabble-rousing, Bowery-based politician Mike Walsh.15
It was an alliance that dismayed many Democratic voters and newspaper readers, and further fractured the party into abolitionist (“Barnburner”) and anti-abolitionist (“Hunker”) wings. Into the breach rushed such new Whiggish papers as the New York Tribune, founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley, and the New York Times, which was launched in 1851 but whose Olympian reputation was still a half-century away. Drawing on many of the same techniques as the Democratic penny press, these political papers signalled the formation of a new political order that would finally crystallize with Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860.
In New York, at least, resistance to the racist tendencies of the Democratic Party and its papers also came from the African-American press. The first black paper in the country was Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827, followed shortly thereafter by the Colored American. These papers were largely oriented to the free black elite of ministers, teachers, and other professionals, and focused on religious issues, opposition to black colonization of Africa, and the prevention of white mob violence. They also debated the propriety of black participation in such white celebrations as the Fourth of July, and condemned black patronage of parades and shows that drew on racist stereotypes. At times this concern for the image of the community shaded into class bias, as when forms of religious worship among poor black people, such as the highly expressive “ring shout,” were criticized as undignified.16 Yet the existence of papers like the Colored American suggests how, by the Jacksonian era, even relatively small constituencies were able to support their own publications.
Meanwhile, the mass press continued to proliferate. By 1860, Illinois had over 400 newspapers, with eleven dailies in Chicago alone. St. Louis had ten. And Cincinnati, an emerging cultural center, had twenty-six monthlies, semi-monthlies, and quarterlies. In addition, while penny, mercantile, and political papers remained important, other journalistic forms were emerging and blending with them. Sunday papers, which were first issued as extras during the Revolutionary War, became increasingly common in the early nineteenth century. Some were published on Saturdays for Sunday reading, such as Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post. They included news along with pieces of a magazine-like tenor. Story papers, which published fiction, poetry, and essays in a newspaper format, flourished after 1840. Pictorial weeklies, which became tremendously popular before and during the Civil War, blurred the lines even further. This is not to say there were no magazines in the modern sense of the word. On the whole, however, they tended to be aimed at the emerging class of merchants, professionals, and their families.17
There was much to dislike about the penny press: its habits of manufactured outrage and sexual pandering; its aggressive support of Jacksonian Indian removal in the South and West, instead of policies of toleration (or even the less brutal National Republican policy of assimilation); its rabid enthusiasm for the Mexican War in the name of Manifest Destiny; and its often tacit—and occasionally explicit—support of slavery. All too often in U.S. history, those with the most egalitarian class politics have had the worst race politics (and vice-versa), a pattern that these newspapers amply document. Yet this connection was complicated. Important figures in the Workingmen’s Party, most notably the irrepressible writer, lecturer, and reformer Frances (“Fanny”) Wright, were principled abolitionists, and the realities of interracial cooperation remained alive throughout the rest of the century (particularly in the early Populist movement). If the early mass media was limited in spreading its egalitarian ethos, it nonetheless represented an important first step in the eventual development of a diverse popular culture.
THE CURTAIN RISES: ANTEBELLUM PERFORMING ARTS
The American stage (a term used here to describe theater, opera, and minstrel shows) also underwent a major transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. The period was marked by the quest for a native dramatic idiom, one that had both nationalistic and class overtones, but a distinctive theatrical style did not develop until race became a central issue in American politics.
In the colonial era, theater was at the center of a religious controversy that pitted secular aristocrats against clerical authorities. Radical Protestant church leaders generally regarded the theater as subversive, which is why it tended to be more common in the South, where sacred influences were less strong. In fact, it was not until 1792 that the last official strictures on theatrical performances were finally lifted in Boston. From this point on, clerical resistance increasingly became a rear-guard action. At the same time, however, secular aristocrats became relatively less important in theater.18
The rapid growth of cities after the War of 1812 gave new life to the theater. Unmoored from the social and familial traditions of Europe and the U.S. countryside, a mobile urban population turned to new forms of entertainment as a release from the ravages of wage-earning labor. Playhouses were built to accommodate this new audience, and soon priced themselves to maximize profits. New York City’s Park Theatre, which opened in the late eighteenth century, charged between $1 and $2 for one of its 300 seats; its replacement, finished in 1821, was over eight times larger and charged between 37½¢ and 75¢. The new Park, in turn, was expensive compared to the 4,000-seat Bowery Theatre, which opened in 1826. Theatergoers got a lot for their money: the average evening featured a full-length play punctuated by orchestral music, dances, and novelty acts, followed by a farce or short comic opera.19
Opera was another popular form of mass entertainment in the early nineteenth century. Nothing illustrated mass enthusiasm better than the triumphant tour of Swedish opera star Jenny Lind between 1850 and 1852 (the first part of which was managed by the famous impresario P.T. Barnum, who will be discussed below). Tens of thousands of people gathered to greet Lind’s arrival in New York, and tickets for her shows were auctioned off for as much as $225. Jenny Lind clothing, including gloves, hats, shawls, and robes, became a fad.20
The most beloved operas tended to be Italian works performed in English. As would later be the case with Broadway plays and Hollywood movies, opera became the source of much popular music, as individual arias were performed by entertainers and published in sheet music form to be sung at home. The songs of composers like Rossini and Mozart (whose Barber of Seville and Don Giovanni were tremendous favorites) took their place beside those of Stephen Foster and other songwriters.21
Perhaps the most striking aspect of show business in the early nineteenth century was the diversity of the audience, which cut across racial, class, and gender lines. Within the theater itself, however, segregation prevailed. This was accomplished by dividing the house into box, pit, and gallery seats. Boxes were the most expensive and were usually reserved for the wealthy. The pit held a spectrum of theatergoers, from the swelling ranks of the middle classes to boisterous youths known as “Bowery B’hoys and G’hals”: pleasure-loving working people who partook of the rich street life and entertainments of the Bowery, especially its theater.22 The gallery was at the top of the theater and was generally understood to be the place for African Americans, and for prostitutes and their customers. The observations of a Maine farmer who visited a Boston theater in 1820 note the various lines that separated the theater audience, but also show how thin those lines could be and how much jostling took place:
It appeared that the gallery was the resort of the particolored race of Africans, descendants of Africans, and the vindicators of
