During the first third of this history, from about 1750 to the 1820s, America underwent major political, social, and cultural transformations that were reflected in theater audiences. In 1750, Colonial America, more than England itself, still was a monarchical society ruled by royal governors and gentry chartered and licensed by the king. The Revolution of course changed this and substituted a bourgeois democratic structure premised on the idea of government serving the people. Commoners challenged the authority of gentry and asserted their right to a voice in their own governance. By the 1820s early industrialization transformed class relations and the nascent working class gathered in urban neighborhoods. Throughout this time audiences were active and exercised sovereignty over performances. But who wielded this power and with what significance changed. Theater audiences continued to be important public gatherings, but the behavior and significance of the gatherings changed. Audience gender changed too, but its significance was as much about class as about gender. In the next three chapters we will detail these changes.

Professional theater arrived in the colonies in the 1750s, just as the power of gentry had reached a high point and was about to enter a long process of dismantling. The colonies were a hierarchical society with a specific place for each person in a vertical structure. Relations were governed by a culture of deference, an expectation that each individual would defer to his “betters” and expect the same from his inferiors.

Nineteenth–century magazines and theatrical memoirs often recounted tales of greenhorns, or “green'uns,” who reacted to events in the play as if they were real. In a story of Edwin Forrest's early career in an 1825 Albany performance of The Merchant of Venice, a canal boatman was so immersed in the characterization of Iago that he shouted “you damned lying scoundrel, I would like to get hold of you after the show and wring your infernal neck.” In another story set in 1841 Baltimore, a sailor jumped on stage to help a dying heroine, saying, “I'll be damned if a woman should starve and die,” giving her all the money in his pocket. After the scene was explained to him and he was led back to his seat, the audience gave him three cheers and ladies waved their white handkerchiefs to salute his generosity. Typically, the green'un was an unsophisticated figure, a backwoodsman, boatman or sailor, whom the rest of the audience treated with a benign condescension. Green'uns were exemplars of the common man – generous, possessing a strong sense of fairness, uncorrupted by civilization, but naive and unsophisticated in city ways.

Green'un stories offered readers an opportunity to feel knowledgeable by contrast, and thus highlighted the value placed on knowledge of the theater. The other members of the audience described in these stories also express a bemused superiority.

In the early days of television people were proud of their television set and placed it in the living room to entertain guests. They considered it a wonderful and entertaining new addition to their homes and even felt gratitude for it. But by 1958 television viewing was no longer novel. Television use had settled into a routine. Market researchers Ira Glick and Sidney Levy described the change as a shift from excitement and widespread acceptance to uneasiness, dissatisfaction, denial, and criticism. By the late 1950s it was not considered appropriate among college-educated people to admit that one watched television much. They no longer turned on television when visitors came. Instead they placed the television where it could be viewed privately, by children or the family without company, in the recreation room or in the parents' bedroom.

From that time the negative characterizations of television would persist for decades as conventional wisdoms. Culture critics, communication researchers, and viewers asked whether television was a good thing and what was it doing to viewers. This chapter examines how the discourse on television defined cultural capital and reinforced class distinctions. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term “cultural capital” to refer to the possession of cultural knowledge, abilities, and tastes that allowed one to claim higher status in a social hierarchy, distinguishing higher from lower classes by their tastes. The discourse on television demonstrates that one's attitudes toward and use of television have been a common basis for such distinctions.

During the colonial period theater was a place for gentry, during the early republic a place for political debate and contest between classes, but in the Jacksonian era, roughly 1825 to 1850, theater belonged to the common man. The rowdy nineteenth-century audiences so often recounted in colorful tales were the young working men of this era. Now the working class constituted a large enough market to sustain their own theaters, and the young men were the most avid theatergoers among them. These young men exercised sovereignty not through patronage, as gentry had, but through vocal expression of their will and enforcement through physical assault. This was the ultimate “active” audience. They participated in collective action more than public debate. They brought the street into the theater, rather than shaping the theater into an arena of the public sphere. Elites would be increasingly concerned about containing them.

The privileged were disinclined to engage these ruffians and instead increasingly sought refuge in more exclusive gatherings. Gustave de Beaumont, travel companion of Tocqueville, claimed that, in Philadelphia in 1831–32, “Persons more distinguished in fortune and position do not make theatergoing a habit; only something out of the ordinary will attract them there – for example, the presence of a celebrated guest actor.” While this may have overstated their absence, clearly they had reduced their past support of theater. Classes were increasingly at odds with each other in theaters and increasingly the upper classes sought their own theaters, segmenting entertainment by class.

In 1996, the American Medical Association sent out to 60,000 physicians a guide to advise their patients in children's use of television. The booklet concludes with a list of “media use suggestions for parents” that reads like the warning labels on drugs and dangerous household chemicals: use only in limited amounts, for specific purposes, and under careful guidance of adults. This is just one example of the popular, professional, and scholarly discourses in the twentieth century that have been concerned with mass media's dangers to audiences. Precisely what is the danger and how great it is may vary, but the issue is the foundation of almost all discussion about audiences. And the topic of audiences is pervasive, from popular magazines and books, to debates in Congress, to thousands of scientific studies of the effects of television, to scholarly debates about reception in the humanities.

It is the purpose of this book to provide a history of audiences, particularly one that exposes the terms of twentieth-century debate by comparing them to the terms of debate in earlier eras. Popular and scholarly discussions of audiences have long lacked a historical context. Concerns about television viewing, for example, have almost never led to consideration of earlier concerns about radio listening or moviegoing, let alone popular nineteenth-century entertainments such as melodrama, minstrelsy, and vaudeville. Yet the very issues at the heart of debates today have been played out repeatedly, sometimes in the very same terms, sometimes after inverting these terms.

Remarkable as it may seem, Americans spend more of their lifetime being an audience than working or sleeping. This reflects the cornucopia of entertainment and communication that surrounds us in the latter part of the twentieth century. Its pervasiveness makes it central to understanding our culture and our society today.

This was not always the case. We did not consume as many hours of our lives with radio and movies, even at their height of popularity, as we do with television. In the nineteenth century, theatergoing was far more popular than it is today. Nevertheless, it did not reach the same proportion of the population, with the same regularity, as movies, radio, and television have in the twentieth century. Nor was it an everyday, or even weekly, source of entertainment for the vast majority of the population as the mass media became. Attendance records confirm the difference. Compare the estimated 36 million tickets sold annually for theater in the last half of the 1860s, about one ticket per person per year, to the approximate 4 billion tickets annually for movies in the late 1940s, about twenty-seven per person per year, or the audiences of approximately 20 million for the average primetime network television program every night. While in the nineteenth century some Americans were weekly audiences, by the mid-twentieth century, being an entertainment audience was a daily activity for almost everyone in the United States.

Radio had a dramatic impact on rural life. The United States was a rural nation when radio broadcasting began. In 1920, 49 percent of Americans lived in rural areas; in 1940, 43 percent were still living in rural areas. Before radio, few rural people had daily contact with the “outside world.” Most had no telephone or newspaper. News mostly came from neighbors and mail. They did not have daily weather forecasts that would enable them to prepare their crops and animals for a frost or storms. They sold their crops with no knowledge of current prices on commodities markets, the prices at which the buyer could sell them. In bad weather they were often isolated even from their neighbors. Paved roads were rare; dirt roads turned into muddy quagmires whenever it rained. Snow made them impassable. Often farmers could not get to town for weeks, sometimes not even to their own mailbox.

Radio changed that. It would bring timely weather and market reports, news and entertainment. Far more than city dwellers, rural people were most grateful. In numerous letters to stations, entertainers and magazines and in conversations with agriculture agents and radio dealers, they expressed the value of the information and the great relief to isolation and loneliness.

A decade after their first commercial exhibition, millions of people made movies a weekly habit. But who went to the movies in the early days and what was the character of the early movie theaters were matters of debate. Multiple images of movie theaters and audiences vied for acceptance. Reformers and flaneurs described movies as immigrant entertainment, yet small-town entrepreneurs promoted it as an entertainment for the middle class. The working-class nickelodeon was described on the one hand as community center and conqueror of the saloon, and on the other as a school for scandal teaching adolescent boys to steal and girls to be promiscuous. The latter image of endangered children represented a shift from the nineteenth-century concern about women's respectability to a twentieth- century fixation on children's welfare, and from the place to the performance as the cause of the problem. This would give rise in the 1920s to research on the effects on children and the beginnings of a mass communication research tradition. In this chapter I will explore how some characterizations were contradicted by the growth of middle-class attendance, but nevertheless continued to fuel popular worries about and eventual research interest in the effects of the media on children.

Colonial theater was barely on its feet when the Revolution halted its growth. There had been a flurry of theater construction after 1767, perhaps stimulated by the growing population. But the Puritan characterization of theater as an extravagance gained wider acceptance during the hardships of the Revolution. The First Continental Congress in October 1774 passed a resolution to “discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” In October 1778, the Congress passed another resolution that states should suppress theatrical entertainments as causing “idleness, dissipation, and a general depravity of principles and manners”; and that officeholders who encouraged plays should be dismissed. The language in part reflected the displacement of the culture of deference in which the leisured class was seen as creating work for commoners through their consumption, by language that condemned leisure as idleness and instead called for industriousness. Remarkably, theater was not condemned as British – perhaps too many members of the Congress were patrons of theater to label it traitorous. Indeed some did not abide by the resolutions. Baltimore built a theater after the resolution of 1778 was passed, and there is some indication that a troupe played there and at Annapolis during the war. Plays were performed in Pennsylvania as well. In general, however, theater during the war was reduced to performances by British officers in cities occupied by their troops.

The 1850s witnessed a remarkable growth in three new urban stage entertainments that competed with traditional theater: museum theater, minstrelsy, and variety. By far the most influential on nineteeth-century American culture was minstrelsy. Northern white Americans at midcentury were fascinated with stage portrayals of blacks, as slavery grew to be the issue that overshadowed all else in the nation. Minstrelsy blended politics and popular culture and its music permeated daily life. One could go nowhere outside the South without hearing “Negro melodies.” Putnam's Monthly described Jim Crow's immediate and widespread popularity, “The school-boy whistled the melody … The ploughman checked his oxen in mid furrow, as he reached its chorus… Merchants and staid professional men … unbend their dignity to that weird and wonderful posture … it is sung in the parlor, hummed in the kitchen, and whistled in the stable.”

Whiteness and Blacks

The incredible popularity of whites performing as stereotyped black characters on stage confirmed the overwhelming whiteness of American theater before the Civil War. Blacks were barely a presence on-stage or in the audience. There was only a handful of black entertainers who played to white audiences, almost always as between-act diversions. Aside from the African Grove, a summer garden theater in New York City in the early 1820s, there is no record of any black theaters in the antebellum period.