LITMIR.BIZ

      THE ASTOR PLACE OPERA HOUSE ON THE NIGHT OF THE RIOT

      In the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the premier American actor was Edwin Forrest. Born in 1806 into a working-class Philadelphia family, Forrest exhibited theatrical promise as a child and apprenticed himself to the great English tragedian Edmund Kean when he toured the United States. Taking a cue from his mentor, Forrest developed an expressive style of performing Shakespeare that was very popular with U.S. audiences. Something of what we might call a method actor, Forrest built up his body, analyzed scripts, and tried to immerse himself emotionally and intellectually in his roles. To play King Lear, for example, he visited mental institutions so as to better portray insanity. He was also an ardent nationalist, ever ready to proclaim the superiority of his country. In this regard, he may have reflected a cultural insecurity of Americans vis-a-vis Europe that persists at least to some degree to the present day.

      Forrest was also well regarded in England, particularly for his performance as an Indian chief in Metamora, a play he commissioned to create a showcase for himself. As a Shakespearian actor, however, he had a rival in William Macready, a prominent London tragedian whose style tended to be more restrained. Like Forrest, Macready had built up a following on both sides of the Atlantic, but his more refined demeanor and elitist sympathies led to a different set of dramatic priorities. The two men were at least civil to each other until Forrest’s second English tour, in 1845, where he was met with small, unenthusiastic audiences and hostile reviews, including one written by a friend of Macready. In retaliation, Forrest hissed during one of Macready’s performances in Scotland. An outraged Macready denounced Forrest, who insisted he was simply exercising his right to show his feelings about the performance. Forrest then returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome, denouncing the British in particular and aristocracy in general. In the events that followed, the right of an audience to express its opinion, friendly or otherwise, became a banner around which Forrest’s followers would rally.

      In 1848, Macready left for a U.S. tour with some trepidation (his friend Charles Dickens, who had written a critical portrayal of Americans in Martin Chuzzlewit, considered it too risky even to see him off). Matters went well until Macready reached Philadelphia, where Forrest opened a version of Macbeth opposite his own. Both attracted large audiences, but by this point the controversy had been widely reported and Macready was attacked by a barrage of rotten eggs and vegetables. He cut short his Philadelphia run and went South and West, but found a great deal of hostility there too.

      Five months later Macready ended his tour playing Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House in New York. This grand hall was a symbol of the economic disparities that would grow ever greater over the course of the nineteenth century. Forrest once again played the same role, this time at the Bowery Theatre, which was in a tough neighborhood, the turf of “Bowery B’hoys” and “Bowery G’hals” who wore flashy clothes and participated in a rich street life that included parades, horse races, and fights between gangs. The Bowery Theater was at the heart of the neighborhood’s nightlife, a place where journeymen, laborers, and factory workers went to socialize and enjoy entertainment. These people formed the core of Forrest’s constituency.

      The two actors took the stage to play their respective Macbeths on May 7. Forrest’s performance was hailed as brilliant, but Macready’s was never heard: he was drowned out in a barrage of hisses and hurled objects. When chairs began to be thrown down from the gallery, almost hitting the actress playing Lady Macbeth, he stopped the play. He decided to leave the city, but a number of fellow artists, including Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Jacksonian editor and playwright Mordecai Noah, urged him not to back down, and he gave another performance two nights later.

      Forrest’s partisans were waiting. They had papered the city with rabid diatribes in the press and on posted signs: “WORKING MEN, shall AMERICANS OR ENGLISH RULE in this city?” asked one, making the actors’ dispute into a referendum on national autonomy. Much of the effort was orchestrated by an “American Committee” headed by E.Z.C. Judson (a.k.a. dime novelist Ned Buntline), who gathered a collection of Bowery B’hoys and planned to disrupt Macready’s second show. But audience support for the actor—he was greeted with a fifteen-minute standing ovation—and arrests of troublemakers inside the theater stymied this effort, and Macready was able to finish his performance and safely leave the theater by hiding in the audience, which exited through a police cordon.

      The situation was much more tense outside the opera house. There, police efforts to quiet the crowd only inflamed it. Rocks began to fly, and the officers called on the help of the local militia, which had been put on standby in case of trouble. When Macready left the opera house, the militia fired over the heads of the crowd. Believing that soldiers were shooting blanks, the crowd surged forward. The next round of firing revealed their miscalculation. Moreover, when the militia tried to avoid further confrontation by again firing over the crowd, they ended up hitting some of the bystanders. In the end, at least twenty-two people died and over 150 were wounded. Eighty-six were arrested, including butchers, carpenters, machinists, bakers, and clerks—a cross-section of the working class of New York. Attempted unrest the next night was held firmly in check by police and soldiers.

      There was a good deal of commentary in the New York press in the aftermath of the riot, predictably divided between those who condemned the hooliganism of the rioters and those who condemned the deadly response of the police. Virtually everyone, though, saw class tensions and values as the underlying issue. “There is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto considered it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class,” a writer for the Philadelphia Ledger noted. In the first stages of the attacks on Macready, the New York Tribune, edited by future presidential candidate Horace Greeley, condemned the “miscreants,” but after the riots it concluded that a series of reforms was called for, including greater government action to curb inequities of wealth. Even Lydia Maria Child, appalled by the “blind rage of the mob” she saw as she tried to pass by the disturbance, acknowledged the justice of its grievances. “There are instants, when the sight of rags and starvation make me almost ready to smash thro’ the plate-glass of the rich and seize their treasures of silver and gold,” the pacifist writer later wrote in a letter to some friends.

      The behavior of Forrest, the Bowery B’hoys, and the more irresponsible elements of the New York press suggest they share some of the blame for the Astor Place riot. It is hard to ignore the chauvinism that accompanied so much of the search for, and celebration of, a home-grown artistic tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not that Macready was miscast as a snob: as early as 1826, he wrote that Forrest showed promise as an actor—if he stopped performing for Americans, whom he would repeatedly describe in later years as “vulgar,” “coarse,” “underbred,” and “disagreeable.” Nevertheless, he was repeatedly rebuffed in his efforts to resolve his dispute with Forrest and his Yankee enthusiasts, who thirsted for confrontation.

      Riots never occur in a vacuum. The Forrest-Macready conflict reflected a growing awareness of the class divisions that the United States prided itself on having avoided. Equality of opportunity was increasingly rare for both white and black workers; the relatively large ranks of artisans (like Greeley himself) who managed to launch enterprises before the Civil War would not find much success after it. The United States was becoming afflicted by injustices that would create a clearly defined, self-conscious working class by the second half of the century.

      This emerging polarization was reflected in the world of entertainment. In the 1820s and 1830s, theaters were a microcosm of the larger society, populated by men and women, rich and poor, white and black. By the 1840s and 1850s, performing halls like the Astor Place Opera House evidenced a segregation by wealth and race that would become a gulf by the end of the century. At the same time, the raucous audience participation that was a major aspect of the performing arts early in the century was gradually being replaced

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