The Citizen Audience

Crowds, Publics, and Individuals

Richard Butsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135867454
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In The Citizen Audience, Richard Butsch explores the cultural and political history of audiences in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. He demonstrates that, while attitudes toward audiences have shifted over time, Americans have always judged audiences against standards of good citizenship.

From descriptions of tightly packed crowds in early American theaters to the contemporary reports of distant, anonymous Internet audiences, Butsch examines how audiences were represented in contemporary discourse. He explores a broad range of sources on theater, movies, propaganda, advertising, broadcast journalism, and much more. Butsch discovers that audiences were characterized according to three recurrent motifs: as crowds and as isolated individuals in a mass, both of which were considered bad, and as publics which were considered ideal audiences. These images were based on and reinforced class and other social hierarchies. At times though, subordinate groups challenged their negative characterization in these images, and countered with their own interpretations.

A remarkable work of cultural criticism and media history, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking an historical understanding of how audiences, media and entertainment function in the American cultural and political imagination.

Part I
Crowds

Chapter 1
Theater audiences, crowds, and publics

Much of the written record about theater audiences in the nineteenth century revolved around depictions of artisan and working-class auditors as raucous, rambunctious, rowdy, and sometimes riotous crowds, much like descriptions of disorderly urban street crowds of the times.¹ It was in relation to these unruly crowds that other classes were advised to avoid sections of the theater or the theater altogether.

Before the nineteenth century, such audiences were not an issue, due to the late development of theater and the late arrival within theaters of a substantial artisan audience. Professional theater did not arrive in the English colonies until the 1750s, when the largest American city was smaller than a second-class port city of England and could not support a permanent theater. Even then, it was banned on religious grounds in Massachusetts and opposed by the influential Quakers in Pennsylvania. Where theater was performed, mostly in the population centers of New York and Virginia, it was more a novelty than a regular practice, and almost exclusively a genteel amusement without the large and raucous crowds of the English pit and the French parterre. Artisans were absent, since they could not afford these events and were out of place in this genteel milieu. Slaves, who sometimes attended to serve their masters, were under strict control. Class conflict was involved, but it was between the genteel audiences inside the theater and the artisans and others outside protesting. Artisans characterized theater a symbol of the English aristocracy they opposed, and the protests were part of the growing spirit of revolution.²

The crowded pit of artisans appeared after the American Revolution. The pit was a mixture of plebeian classes, journeymen and master artisans, small merchants, and lawyers. These audiences made theaters places for expression of the turbulent politics of the era, with Jeffersonian Republicans in the pit contending with Federalists in the boxes to control the choice of plays and music favorable to their political views. The gentry and wealthy merchant class began to consider theater an institution naturally inclined to cause disruption, and therefore a matter of concern to the commonwealth (the state and its property-owning citizens). Consequently, around the turn of the century, gentlemen took upon themselves the tasks of criticism and censure by establishing and contributing their observations to the first theatrical publications in the United States, the Theatrical Censor (1806–7) and the Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor. Stephen Cullen Carpenter wrote in 1810 as editor of the Mirror, “Since it is the young, the idle, the thoughtless, and the ignorant, on whom the drama can be supposed to operate as a lesson for conduct, an aid to experience and a guide through life … it becomes a matter of great importance to the commonwealth that this very powerful engine … should be kept under the control of a systematic, a vigilant and a severe, but a just criticism.”³

Carpenter’s statement looks both backward to an old English concern about theater audiences as disorderly crowds and unruly subjects, but also forward to the new Early Republic era of citizenship. Behind his comments was a republican concept of citizenship that entailed both rights and obligations. In a later column, he acknowledged that censorship must be done “without violating the rights of the people.”⁴ On the other hand, his quote above emphasized that it is not simply a private matter but one “of great importance to the commonwealth” to assure that theater offer “the young, the idle, the thoughtless and the ignorant” of its audience the right lessons. A republic required citizens who had the knowledge and character to fulfill their duties as citizens. Carpenter’s columns suggested that theater contributes to creating such citizens.

Dueling visions of audiences as crowds and publics wove themselves through the discourses of the time about theater audiences.⁵ Revolutionary discourse framed audiences as engaging in legitimate actions in their roles as citizens, both exercising rights and participating in political debate. Elite discourse however would increasingly frame working-class audiences as crowds that threatened social order and needed to be contained, rejecting any traditional justifications on the grounds that, as citizens rather than subjects, they now had other avenues to express their concerns and interests. In this chapter I will trace this development.

Early American theater : politics, crowds, and publics

The spirit of revolution in the United States created theater as a sphere for political discourse, but one much more robust and raucous than the rational deliberation envisioned by Habermas. The audience was both a crowd and a public, or a hybrid of the two. Federalists tended to equate the pit with Republican artisans and their lawyer leaders, and their actions as typical of crowds. A parody in the Federalist Boston Gazette in 1801 characterized the professional men in the pit as demagogues manipulating the working men to support Republicans and causing a riot, a classic stereotype of a lower-class crowd incited by a speaker.⁶

Through the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, the pit audience drew legitimacy for its actions from the traditions of crowd action imported from England. But audience rights were buttressed by a much more powerful justification: the discourse of liberty and elite revolutionary leaders’ need for crowd action to succeed in the events leading up to the Revolution. As historian Edward Countryman wrote, “The Revolution gave rioting a new legitimation by identifying it directly with the American cause.” The crowd had its purpose. It was enshrined in the language of the Declaration of Independence, which declared the rights of men, the purpose of government to protect such rights, and the right and duty of the people to overthrow such government that abused these rights. While elites were, at best, of mixed opinions about these rights extending to the common man, they resonated powerfully among artisans and the emerging working class. Fixed in Revolutionary language and iconography, the legitimacy of crowd action was not easily dislodged by elites. It was sustained beyond the Revolution by the success of the Jeffersonian Republicans, and then into the Jacksonian era of the common man with its heroic imagery as varied as Mose, the Bowery B’hoy, and Whitman’s celebrations of the masses. In the Jacksonian era, the idea that work brought civic virtue as much or more than property had gained ascendancy, combined with the idea that all had rights and therefore the right to oversee the government’s protection of those rights led to a democratic formulation of citizenship.⁷

Certainly, early Americans conceived themselves engaged in intense and widespread political participation and defined theaters specifically as a politicized public space. Indeed, this era is often described as a high point of public sphere vitality. After the Revolution, Americans from aristocrat to common man exerted themselves to express their new-found rights as citizens. Newspapers flourished as partisan broadsheets intended to rouse their supporters, exercising a new freedom of public expression. There was almost a celebratory aspect to these civic performances during the early republic.⁸

Theaters were actively used for these political performances and they flourished as never before. Formerly condemned as an aristocratic pastime, theater gained newfound legitimacy as one of few indoor gathering spaces for republican political participation.⁹ In the feverish political atmosphere of the Federalist era, theaters experienced a building boom, lowered admission prices, and extended their market to the working classes. Theater was redefined as a republican activity accessible to common men—some English visitors were surprised at mechanics able to afford theater in this era—where all could gather as the body politic and where the entertainment itself had political import. Even ownership of theaters was democratized by shifting from the colonial reliance upon aristocratic patrons to stockholding, offering shares in exchange for the labor of mechanics to build the theater.

Theater-going was not mere entertainment, but an opportunity to celebrate the new republic. American plays appeared on the stage for the first time. Music as well was parsed for its expression of political sentiment. Theater managers were careful what political import might be given to plays and music. English actors, by their nationality alone, were seen as representing a politics favoring England and aristocracy and had to take care of how they spoke off stage as well as on. American actors performing American plays were hailed as heroes. Especially in the early years of this time, both the affluent in the boxes as well as those in the pit treated the theater as a place where they might express their political views. It was thus that discourse reconstructed theater as part of the public sphere.

But one man’s public was another’s crowd. While theaters were acknowledged places of public discourse, contemporary descriptions sometimes make it appear more as a quarrel between two mobs.¹⁰ The Federalist Theater in Boston in the 1790s made its politics obvious in its name and in its policies. The Haymarket Theater was built as the Republican response to the Federalist. Divided audiences in other theaters shouted each other down, each singing their own songs. Where theater managers tried to steer a course satisfactory to both parties, they were assailed from both sides, as at the Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. Theater managers censored plays to avoid anything that might incite a demonstration and damage their pocketbooks.¹¹ Neither side held sway.

American plays that were popular at the time were typically hot-blooded, patriotic spectacles and melodrama, featuring obvious and stark contrasts between heroes and villains, good and bad. William Dunlap’s Glory of Columbia (1803), a play about the heroics of the Revolution and the victory at Yorktown, became a fixture of national holidays. Likewise John Daly Burk’s Bunker Hill (1797) became a favorite for its glorification of the battle near Boston and its treatment of the British. The anonymous The Politician Outwitted (published in 1789) presented a Federalist argument for the proposed Constitution. Selected scenes in many other dramas suggested similarly patriotic themes and evoked similar sentiments. The effect was to appeal more to the crowd’s passions than the public’s reason.¹²

At the same time, news of the French Revolution reaching American shores alarmed patricians, as they feared crowds out of control in ways they did not before the American Revolution. Federalists used the Sedition Act to suppress just such crowd action, while Republicans considered crowd action the bulwark against tyranny and their rightful inheritance from the Revolution.¹³ Many of the pre-industrial elites considered this rowdy political expression by artisans and the lower sorts presumptuous and lacking in deference to their genteel superiors.

As industrialization began and cities grew rapidly, the chasm between these discourses would grow wider. The Jacksonian era, dubbed the age of the common man, ushered in a transformation of class structure. Ownership of production was passing from master artisans to businessmen and investors, while journeymen artisans were being reduced to permanent proletarian employees. At the same time, expanding businesses required increased numbers of clerks and managers to run, and lawyers and other professionals to service, such enterprises. The consequence was a new class structure of capitalist owners, served by middle-class managers and professionals, and employing a working class of permanent journeymen, apprentices, and laborers.¹⁴

Each class began to establish its distinctive culture. In their leisure, single journeymen and apprentices made themselves noticeable by their rough manners and outspoken public expression. Concentrated in urban boardinghouse neighborhoods, they spent much of their time and money frequenting public places. In the theaters of major East Coast cities, this newly forming working class was uninhibited in vocalizing their opinions, particularly against alleged insults to America by English actors, or cheering their own kind, and in their manner and dress rejecting middle-class respectability—and they did so collectively.¹⁵

At first, some gentlemen and a few literati like Walt Whitman praised the common man. With the growth of the penny press and the appearance of theaters catering to mechanics in the major cities in the 1830s and 1840s, the working classes found themselves positively represented in print and performance. The epitome of this image of the good, fun-loving workingman’s crowd was the Bowery b’hoy, a characterization of young, working-class men who worked and lived in the Bowery of New York City.¹⁶ Even the Spirit of the Times, a newspaper of leisure for affluent sporting men, emphasized the gregarious nature of the b’hoys at the Bowery Theater,

the pit is a vast sea of upturned faces and [b’hoys’] red flannel shirts, extending its roaring and turbid waves close up to the footlights on either side, clipping in the orchestra and dashing furiously against the boxes—while a row of luckier and stronger shouldered amateurs have pushed, pulled and trampled their way far in advance of the rest, and actually stand with their chins resting on the lamp-board, chanking peanuts and squirting tobacco juice upon the stage. And now Mr. [Jack] Scott makes his appearance in one of his favorite characters and is greeted with a pandemoniac yell as he rushes with gigantic strides down to the front…. At length, after executing a series of the most diabolical grimaces, during which the sympathies of the audience have been working themselves up to a pitch of intense excitement…. At this thrilling spectacle the enthusiasm of the audience finds vent in a perfect tornado and maelstrom united of “hi hi’s!”, cat-calls, screamings, whistlings and stampings. “That’s it Jack!”, “Give him thunder, you old buster!”, “hurrah for Scott!”, “Oh, get off my toes!”, “Put your toes in your hat!”, “I say you Jo Jackson up in the third tier! Come down here and I’ll kick yer into fits!”¹⁷

One thing distinguished the b’hoy from the other icons of the American common man, the riverboatman and the frontiersman: the b’hoy was always part of a crowd and he always acted collectively. In positive representations such as Mose, this was depicted as good-hearted, working-class camaraderie.¹⁸

Then disapproval of crowds began to gain ascendancy, motivated at first by a desire to contain this population, avoid contact with them, and suppress their antics. The emerging capitalist elite and their new middle-class retainers wished to contain their proletarian brothers in forging industrialization. Historian Paul Boyer terms this era “a time of almost continuous disorder and turbulence among the poor.” The era spawned publication of numerous representations of cities as dangerous places in a range of genre, from literary magazines to sensational newspapers and books. By the 1840s the increasing effrontery of this working class and its disorder was wearing thin among the upper classes; the divide between the two classes’ views was widening and hardening.¹⁹

The words of these patricians were almost hysterical with fear and filled with disgust of crowds of lower classes in the streets, equating them with dirt and impurity. George Templeton Strong described them as insects, the streets “absolutely swarming, alive and crawling with the unwashed Democracy.” Philip Hone, one-time mayor of New York, blamed the “vulgar and uneducated masses” as a source of “vile disorganizing spirit which overspreads the land” and “gangs of young ruffians who prowl the streets insulting females, breaking into houses.” Among other things, Hone feared the loss of control of the polity, saying “the heterogeneous mass of vile humanity [produced] unrestrained power in the hands of a mob of political desperados.”²⁰

The language describes subhuman working-class crowds taking over the city from embattled middle and upper classes. They were “unwashed,” “vile,” and “uneducated.” The fact that they were “unrestrained” and “disorganizing” “ruffians” and thieves who prowled and insulted women called out for suppression. The descriptions stand in stark contrast to images of the respectable classes and citizens who are depicted as clean, polite, educated, law-abiding individuals. Increasingly, concern turned to controlling crowds of these common men. At first, physical restraint was the recommended solution, as the respectable and cultivated increasingly called for cities to use force. Full-time municipal police departments were established as much to control crowds as to stop crime. In both, they functioned to contain and control the working class.²¹

The Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849 in New York City and its representations in most metropolitan newspapers constituted an end to favorable consideration of the b’hoys among the middle and upper classes. In this moment, two groups with divergent views confronted each other and clashed: one which hewed to the traditional view of audiences exercising their traditional rights to discipline the stage; the other depicting the audience, in the Opera House and out in the streets, as a mob led by demagogues. The b’hoys lost. It was a watershed, marking the end of civil authority tolerance of crowd actions...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the politics of audiences in America
• PART I Crowds
• PART II Publics
• PART III Individuals
• Epilogue
• Notes