Theater

The Gilded Age was a time of transition for the musical theater and drama in the United States. At the beginning of the period, English and Continental influences dominated theater in America; by the turn of the century, the American theater had its own stars, playwrights, and tastes, though a new set of foreign influences was emerging. The period also witnessed important changes in stagecraft and business practices.

Musical entertainments were common during the 19th century, but it was not until The Black Crook (1866) that the basic elements of musical theater came together in the United States. The show combined MUSiC, dance, and spectacle to tell a melodramatic story. Moralists denounced the show because the dancers (a French ballet troupe stranded in America) showed too much leg, but The Black Crook enjoyed unprecedented success during its original run in New York City. Touring companies and revivals sustained the show until the late 19th century. The Black Crook inspired burlesques, spin-offs, and parodies (The Black Crook Burlesque, The Black Crook Song Book, and The White Crook) and prepared American audiences for such popular musicals as Evangeline (1874) and a British import, Florodora (1900).

Generally, the musical theater in America hardly differed from its counterparts in England and Europe. Comic operas by French composer Jacques Offenbach were popular during the 1870s and 1880s, while English comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan dominated the American musical stage after 1879. Operettas, another European import, came into fashion during the 1890s, though an American composer, VICTOR Herbert, made his mark in the genre with Prince Ananias (1894), The Wizard of the Nile (1895), and The Serenade (1897). Of course, burlesque, minstrelsy, variety, and vaudeville also offered musical entertainment.

Drama, like the musical theater, took its cues from abroad. During these years when there was no “American” drama of consequence, the vitality of theater in America depended largely on the appeal of star actors—Edwin Forrest, Joseph Jeeeerson III, John Drew, Minnie Mad-dern Fiske, Edwin Booth, and such foreign attractions as Sir Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt. Shakespeare and melodrama were their stock in trade and were the dramatic staples of the period.

During most of the 19th century Shakespeare was not high culture in America but popular entertainment. Shakespeare was performed at a wide range of venues across the country, even in rough-and-tumble mining camps. Some immigrant neighborhoods got their Shakespeare in Yiddish, German, or other foreign language productions. Variety theaters often presented works by Shakespeare on the same bill with magicians, jugglers, acrobats, comedians, and song-and-dance acts. Minstrel and burlesque shows frequently included Shakespeare parodies.

Of course, the appeal of Shakespeare rested largely on the merits of the works themselves, but in America theaters promoted the bard as a moral playwright. This strategy was meant to counter VICTORIANISM and the latent suspicion that theatrical entertainments were somehow immoral. Theater historians with a practical turn of mind note that Shakespeare was in vogue because Shakespeare was in the repertoire of most companies. Touring stars, if they did not have their own traveling companies, could mount a shortterm production using the actors, sets, and costumes of local stock companies.

By the 1890s, however, Shakespeare was less popular. The mass audience in America, which had grown increasingly exuberant and aggressive, turned to vaudeville, burlesque, and movies, leaving Shakespeare to more refined theatergoers. Class distinctions became a feature of the American theatrical experience. More discrete and high-minded audiences increasingly favored legitimate drama performed in legitimate theaters, where the price of admission was too high for rowdy workingmen and their families.

Even at such venues, melodrama soon surpassed Shakespeare. Melodrama combined suspense, high emo-

Poster for a popular vaudeville show (Library of Congress)

Tion, sensationalism, and elaborate plot contrivances in a moralistic framework. In the world of melodrama, virtue always emerged triumphant. Female chastity was usually at the heart of the drama. Women in melodrama generally personified gentleness, selfless love, innocence, and moral virtue, in essence, the Victorian ideal. Naturally, the villain, who embodied worldliness, corruption, and lust (the bane of Victorianism), set out to despoil the heroine, body and soul. Only the hero, the epitome of manly virtue (though typically somewhat dense), could rescue the heroine from “a fate worse than death.” Melodramas upheld Victorian notions of gender and domesticity. The home (woman’s sphere) was a sanctuary, “a haven in a heartless world.” The genre also drew moral distinctions between the city (a dangerous den of vice and temptation) and the country (a peaceful, innocent place of simple, virtuous, hardworking people).

Prior to the 1850s American melodrama was an inferior product. American theaters relied on translations or adaptations of English or European melodramas. But the stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel,

Uncle Tom's Cabin, changed all that. It caused an immediate sensation in 1856 and remained a homegrown staple of the American theater well into the 20th century. During the 1890s approximately 400 companies toured the country with their versions of the popular melodrama. With Uncle Tom's Cabin, American melodrama came of age. The genre enabled American playwrights to dramatize a wide range of social ills, such as drunkenness, urban crime, political corruption, and the exploitation of workers.

A key figure in the maturation of the American theater was Dion Boucicault, a playwright and manager who had enjoyed considerable success in England before establishing himself in New York City. He specialized in expensively mounted melodramas, though his best-known work was an adaptation of Rip Van Winkle that renowned actor Joseph Jefferson performed for 40 years. After Boucicault, David Belasco, William Gillette, and Augustus Thomas further refined the melodrama by introducing more scenic realism, reducing violence, and minimizing improbable plot twists. Their reforms coincided with the emergence of the “well-made play,” a British innovation featuring less improbable plots, well-crafted dialogue, a more restrained acting style, and realistic production values. Playwright Clyde Fitch was the foremost American practitioner of the genre.

The latter years of the 19th century saw other substantial changes in the American theater, some of them originating abroad. Controversial works by Ibsen and Shaw had their first American productions during these years, thus inaugurating modern theater on this side of the Atlantic. American realism found expression in plays by William Dean Howells and Edward (Ned) Harrigan. At the level of stagecraft and production values, the hallmarks of the period were new techniques (improved lighting, versatile stage designs) and greater use of opulence and spectacle. Consolidation was the principal development in the business of theater, culminating in a theatrical trust organized in 1896. The syndicate enabled producer Charles Frohman, booking agents Mark Klaw and Abraham Erlanger, and a few regional partners to dominate commercial theater in the United States into the early 20th century.

Further reading: Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Robert C. Toll, On With the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

—William Hughes

Theosophy See religion.

Thomas, M. Carey (1857-1935) educator Martha Carey Thomas, college president, was born on January 2, 1857, in Baltimore into a wealthy, educated, Quaker family. She graduated from Cornell in 1877 and then studied Greek privately at Johns Hopkins but, as a woman, was barred from its seminars. Beginning in 1879 Thomas studied philology for three years at the University of Leipzig, and since no German university would grant the doctor of philosophy to a woman, she transferred to the Swiss University of Zurich and received her Ph. D. summa cum laude in 1882. Academic frustrations coupled with the influence of her mother and her aunt made Thomas a passionate feminist. In part, she pursued the Ph. D. to prove that women could excel in difficult subjects and had the same right to study science and culture as men.

With a college for women at Bryn Mawr in the planning stage, Thomas saw an opportunity to further her career and hammer home her conviction that rigorous intellectual pursuits should be open to her sex. Capitalizing on the good fortune that her father and two uncles were trustees of the new college, Thomas—fresh from her triumph at Zurich—audaciously asked to be made its first president. The trustees chose a male but made Thomas its dean and professor of English. In 1894, by the margin of one vote, they named Thomas president, and she served until 1922. As dean and as president, Thomas insisted that the standards at Bryn Mawr be as high as at the leading colleges for men. She required difficult entrance examinations and modeled the curriculum on that of Johns Hopkins, with students taking relevant parallel courses in a prescribed sequence as well as demonstrating to her satisfaction their proficiency in foreign languages. She had no use for either practical courses or for the elective system and retained the traditional faith that the virtue of mental discipline could be achieved by studying languages (preferably dead) and mathematics. As an administrator Thomas was opinionated, vigorous, impetuous, at times devious, and always the autocrat who detested the idea of faculty self-government. Yet, although Bryn Mawr under her idiosyncratic leadership bucked dominant trends in higher education toward coeducation and a flexible and practical curriculum, Thomas made it into an outstanding institution.

With roots in Maryland dating back to the 17th century, Thomas had strong aristocratic leanings. Although she worked tirelessly for equal rights and woman suffrage amendments to the Constitution, her egalitarianism ended there. At Bryn Mawr she aimed to train an elite, with the conspicuous exception, inspired by the spirit of noblesse oblige, of a summer school she inaugurated in 1921 to expose working women to social issues and cultural ideas. She believed the white race, especially Nordics, intellectually superior to people of color, favored immigration restriction, hampered the promotion of Jewish instructors, and—stressing heredity over environment—kept statistics on the ancestry of incoming freshmen. An acrimonious depiction of Thomas can be found in Gertrude Stein’s novel Fernhursit.

Thomas thought women, even if they married, should pursue active careers. She never married but had longterm love affairs with two childhood friends, Mary (Mamie) Gwinn and Mary E. Garrett, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad heiress. Garrett willed Thomas a fortune, which she utilized for wide travel in a grand style. Just prior to her death on December 2, 1935, Thomas returned to a changed Bryn Mawr College for its 50th anniversary, but her high standards and the inspiration of her pioneering spirit had endured.

Further reading: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

—Harry Stein

Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848-1933) designer, painter Noted chiefly for his stained glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany was born in New York City on February 18, 1848. He was the son of the founder of Tiffany and Company and had early exposure to fine decorative arts and the methods used to produce them. Instead of entering the family firm, however, Tiffany chose a career as an artist. By the age of 18 he had exhibited at New York City’s prestigious National Academy of Design, and he continued to paint in oils and watercolors throughout his life. By 1879 Tiffany had turned to interior design, then a nascent profession. With painter Samuel Colman, textile designer Candace Wheeler, and furniture designer Lockwood de Forest, Tiffany formed Associated Artists, which quickly found success contriving interiors full of intricate patterns and sumptuous color. The firm was dissolved amicably in 1883, and Tiffany formed his own company to decorate interiors, focusing especially on glass architectural fittings such as mosaics, light fixtures, and windows. While conducting innovative experiments in glass, Tiffany oversaw a large corps of craftspeople designing theaters, clubs, and residences. In the early 1890s he began designing blown-glass vessels, which he soon marketed under the name “Favrile Glass.” By 1900 he had established Tiffany Studios, which manufactured lamps, ceramics, enamels, and more.

Tiffany was a masterful businessman and promoter. Any of his services or products could be purchased at his Manhattan showroom, and many were also available through his father’s company, where he became artistic director in 1902. He organized prominent displays at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and at subsequent world’s fairs; donated his works to museums in America; and sold his products at Siegfried Bing’s tastemaking shop, L’Art Nouveau, in Paris. He spent much time designing Laurelton Hall, his own home in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and after 1918 managed the Tiffany Foundation, which offered young artists working retreats. Tiffany Studios declared bankruptcy in 1932, a year before Tiffany died (January 17, 1933, in New York City), and his glass fell out of fashion until the 1960s, when it became highly collectable.

All of Tiffany’s work was marked by a sensuous approach to color and light. By introducing variegated colors and textures into individual pieces of glass, Tiffany (along with his rival John La Farge) transformed the art of stained glass. Unlike medieval and baroque craftsmen who painted upon glass, Tiffany’s motifs were formed by the play of light through glass that had been mottled, textured, and otherwise colored to produce calculated effects. While he derived motifs from many sources, especially Islamic and Roman glass, nature was his richest source of inspiration. Wisteria, peonies, and dragonflies were favorite motifs for lamp shades, while ecclesiastical windows depicting landscapes, rather than conventional biblical figures, generated controversy. Tiffany was perhaps happiest when he could create a fully integrated interior. He did so for Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, whose New York City house (now demolished) featured a ceiling of Japanese textiles, a fireplace of iridescent tiles, and a suspended staircase of wrought iron. Tiffany’s name is now so well known and so identified with richly colored stained glass, the term Tiffany is used to describe any stained-glass lampshade.

Further reading: Alastair Duncan, Martin Eidelberg, and Neil Harris, The Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989); Alastair Duncan, Louis Comfort Tiffany (New York: Harry N. Abrams; Washington, D. C.: National Museum of American Art, 1992).

—Karen Zukowski

Tilden, Samuel Jones (1814-1886) politician, lawyer Samuel Jones Tilden, reformer and presidential candidate, was born on February 9, 1814, in New Lebanon, New York, the son of Elam Tilden and Polly Younglove Jones. He attended Yale for one term (1834) and the University of the City of New York (now New York University), where he also studied law. In 1841 he was admitted to the bar and practiced in New York City. A bachelor, Tilden devoted his life to politics and the law. He became a masterful and wealthy railroad attorney and a brilliant political organizer.

Tilden was an active member of the Democratic Party in New York. As a student, he wrote political articles for New York newspapers in support of Martin Van

Buren. In 1843 Tilden was named corporation counsel of New York City, served one term in the New York Assembly (1846), and was identified with Van Buren’s antislavery “Barnburner” faction in New York. Tilden was also a delegate to the 1856 Democratic National Convention and the 1860 convention of Douglas Democrats.

During the Civil War Tilden joined other Northern Democrats in supporting a war to restore the Union as it had been and opposed the emancipation of slaves and the growing power of the federal government. During Reconstruction, Tilden favored the policies of President Andrew Johnson. In 1866 he was named chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, and in 1868 he managed the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Horatio Seymour.

Tilden won a national reputation for attacking the spectacularly corrupt Tweed Ring, but he was a tardy political reformer. In the late 1860s William M. Tweed, the “boss” of Tammany Hall—New York City’s Democratic Party organization—and his associates dominated politics in the city and the state. Tilden, however, did not attack Tweed until after the New York Times in 1871 published damning evidence of the Ring’s stealings. Tilden’s reluctance to attack Tweed stemmed from both his cautious nature and his Democratic partisanship.

In 1874 Tilden’s reform reputation gave him the Democratic nomination for governor of New York, and he defeated the incumbent John A. Dix by a plurality of 50,000 votes. As governor, Tilden added to his reform reputation by leading a successful attack against the corrupt “canal ring,” which was a bipartisan group of politicians and contractors who made fortunes on the repair and extension of the state’s canal system.

Tilden’s activities as governor of a pivotal state made him the Democratic presidential nominee in 1876. In the November election he had approximately 250,000 more popular votes than his Republican opponent Rutherlord B. Hayes and won 184 electoral votes, which was one short of a majority. Hayes had 163 votes, but 22 electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina were contested. In the ensuing crisis neither Tilden nor Hayes provided much leadership for the contending forces in Congress. Presidential candidates at that time were supposed to be above politics, but the stance especially suited the cautious, passive nature of Tilden and was galling to many of his followers. To resolve the disputed election, Congress created the Electoral Commission of 1877. Ultimately, the commission (which had a Republican majority) declared Hayes the winner by one electoral vote.

Following the disputed election, Tilden remained a significant figure in national politics. However, he suffered various physical ailments that eventually forced him to withdraw from public life. Tilden died on August 4, 1886, and left the bulk of his estate in trust for the establishment of a free library in New York City. His bequest served as the foundation of the New York Public Library.

Further reading: Alexander C. Flick, Samuel Jones Til-den: A Study in Political Sagacity (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1939); Jerome Mushkat, The Reconstruction of the New York Democracy, 1861-1874 (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).

—Phillip Papas

Tillman, Benjamin Ryan (1847-1918) politician

Governor and senator, reformer and racist, Benjamin R. Tillman was born on August 11, 1847, on his parents’ large farm in upland Edgefield County, South Carolina. His family was unusually violent in a violent section in a violent time. In feuds, quarrels, and duels, his father and a brother each killed a man, and two brothers were killed. Having lost his father to typhoid fever when two years old, Tillman helped his mother run an inn in their home and manage their farm, with its 86 slaves. He loved books and attended a local academy until 1864, when he left to enlist in the Confederate army but never entered it because a tumor cost him his left eye and incapacitated him for two years. While recovering in Georgia, he met Sallie Starke, a fellow South Carolinian, whom he married on January 8, 1868. They had seven children.

Tillman became a successful farmer and a political force. Starting with 430 acres given him by his mother, he diversified his crops and acquired more land, having more than 1,000 acres by the early 1880s. Tillman was violently opposed to Radical Republican Reconstruction, based on universal black male suffrage. He supported the Edgefield Plan to organize secret illegal military units to use violence to keep the African-American majority from voting. From 1873 to 1876 Tillman belonged to the Sweetwater Saber Club, which assaulted black voters and assassinated black political leaders. During the 1876 presidential campaign he participated in the Hamburg and Ellenton riots to elect the Democratic candidate Samuel Jones Tilden. Violence did not prevent the election of the Republican Ruther-EORD B. Hayes, but it did elect Democrat Wade Hampton as governor and “redeem” South Carolina.

Tillman and his Edgefield neighbors soon discovered that redemption exchanged Republican carpetbaggers for Hampton’s lowland planter aristocracy that was conciliatory toward Aerican Americans and ignored the interests of upland farmers. An ugly man with a rasping voice, irras-cible and disliked by his neighbors, Tillman was an unlikely political leader. He became one because he and his neighbors suffered agricultural reverses, and at the 1885 meeting of the State Grange and State Agricultural and Mechanical Society, he called for a system of state agricultural education and blamed the plight of farmers on the Charleston merchants and lawyers who dominated the state government. As a result of follow-up letters to the Charleston News and Courier, he organized the Farmers’ Association in 1886. That organization helped Tillman secure the South Carolina governorship in 1890.

Serving as governor until 1894 and as U. S. senator from 1895 to 1918, Tillman introduced reforms, ensured white supremacy, and secured his power in South Carolina. He replaced officials, similar to Hampton, with partisans and established a primary system for nominating Democratic candidates. He redrew election districts to cut the representation of blacks, and he completely eliminated African-American holders of local offices by making them appointive by the governor. Under his leadership the 1895 South Carolina constitution eliminated black voters with a poll tax, property and educational requirements, and tests of individual voters. Tillman’s reforms included reorganizing the University of South Carolina, establishing Clemson College as the state’s agricultural and mechanical college and Winthrop College as a normal and industrial school for women, increasing state appropriations for education, empowering the state railroad commission to fix rates, limiting the hours of labor in cotton mills, equalizing taxes, and establishing a public monopoly for the sale of alcoholic beverages.

Having promised in 1894, when campaigning for the Senate, to “stick his pitchfork” into Grover Cleveland’s ribs, Tillman achieved national notoriety as an extreme advocate of southern agrarianism. “Pitchfork Ben” even had hopes of securing the 1896 Democratic nomination for president, but his violent denunciation of Cleveland turned off the convention, which nominated William Jennings Bryan. In the Senate Tillman opposed Republican policies, including imperialism. He hated Theodore Roosevelt but helped him secure effective railroad regulation by steering through the Senate the administration’s Hepburn Act (1906). Tillman remained a southern extremist on race, justifying lynching, in the case of rape, and force to disfranchise African Americans, and advocating the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. Tillman died in Washington, D. C., on July 3, 1918.

Further reading: Stephen David Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944).