Abstract
The nineteenth century was marked by what historian Lawrence Levine has called a “sea change” in American culture. During the first part of the century, urban Americans shared a common culture, which they experienced at home and in a relatively undifferentiated set of public entertainments. By 1900, the arts were becoming sharply stratified. Works that just a few decades before had been presented in mixed programs to mixed audiences were now enclosed in nonprofit art museums and orchestras, part of an upper-class culture set off by a distinctive ideology and etiquette of appropriation. This classification and sacralization of the arts was accomplished by urban elites, members of a new industrial and commercial upper class actively engaged in transforming itself into a status group, with command over authoritative cultural resources.1
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Notes
See Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” parts 1 and 2, Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982) 33–50, 303–22
John F. Kasson, “Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America,” Prospects 9 (1984) 143–67
Lawrence W. Levine, “William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation,” American Historical Review 89 (1984) 34–66
Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
By “prenational” I mean societies in which the impetus for organizing remains focused in urban social structures rather than in national private or public agencies. Nineteenth-century America was prenational in comparison to the United States after the First World War, although national in comparison, for example, to Italian city-states. The comparative historical study of urban social structure and institution building has made progress in recent years. Significant works include Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (1978;repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)
David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982)
Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982)
Martin Green’s classic and implicitly comparative book on Boston, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966)
Peter Dobkin Hall, “Cultures of Trusteeship in the United States,” in Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
William M. Weber, Music and the Middle Class in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976)
Civil Society, Associations, and Urban Places: Class, Nation, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe ed. Graeme Morton, Robert J. Morris, and Boudien de Vries (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.) Work by sociologists includes E. Digby Baltzell’s trailblazing but flawed Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1979)
Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Betty G. Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
On the contrast between New York and Boston, see Paul DiMaggio, “Social Structure, Institutions and Cultural Goods: The Case of the United States,” in Social Theory for a Changing Society ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press and New York: Russell Sage Society, 1991) 133–55.
Vera Zolberg, “Art Institute of Chicago: The Sociology of a Cultural Institution” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 1974). Zolberg’s fine dissertation is the indispensable source on the Art Institute.
Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity & Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) 56
Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West during the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1965) 385
Ibid., 30–31. See also Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976).
Rose Fay Thomas, Memoirs of Theodore Thomas (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1911) 52–54
Ellis A. Johnson, “The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1891–1941: A Study in American Cultural History” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1955) 33.
Florence Ffrench, ed., Music and Musicians in Chicago (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979 [1899]). Ffrench reports that Rose was from 1882 a mainstay of the Amateur Musical Club, an influential women’s association devoted “to stimulating musical interest in Chicago” (60).
James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 14
Nathaniel Burt, Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977) 179–81.
Charles Edward Russell, The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927) 214–30
Thomas, Memoirs Philo Adams Otis, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Its Organization, Growth and Development, 1891–1924 (Chicago: Clayton F. Summy, 1925) 44–53.
Theodore Thomas, Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography, ed. George P. Upton (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1905) 104
W. S. B. Mathews, Program Notes (Chicago: Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1895–96) 41.
Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) 218.
Robert F. Schmalz, “Paur and the Pittsburgh: Requium for an Orchestra,” American Music 12(1994) 138.
Twombly, “Cuds and Snipes: Labor at Chicago’s Auditorium Building, 1887–1889,” Journal of American Studies 31 (1997) 86.
Otis, Chicago Symphony 80–81. On contemporary evaluations, see Quaintance Eaton, The Boston Opera Company: The Story of a Unique Musical Institution (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965) 10.
Margaret Grant and Herman S. Hettinger, America’s Symphony Orchestras and How They Are Supported (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940) 70.
Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005) 173–74.
Germans were prominent in the audiences for Thomas’s garden concerts in the 1870s, and even after the CSO was founded, Hans Balatka and other conductors led German bands in Chicago’s parks, which played classical music to enthusiastic crowds of their countrymen. See Derek Vaillant, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) 76–79.
William Foster Apthorp, By the Way, I: About Music (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1898) 3–12, 16–27
William H. Gerdts, “Chicago Is Rushing Past Everything’: The Rise of American Arts Journalism in the Midwest, from the Development of the Railroad to the Chicago Fire,” American Art Journal 27 (1995–96) 55–56. Starr was actively involved in the arts until her death in 1901. Jane Addams, profoundly influenced by John Ruskin, shared Starr’s conviction that the arts were important instruments of social betterment
Addams, “A Function of the Social Settlement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 13 (1899) 33–55.
Shannon Louise Green, ‘Art for Life’s Sake’: Music Schools and Activities in United States Social Settlements, 1892–1942 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1998) 204–5
Linda L. Tyler, “‘Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand’: Music in American Department Stores, 1880–1930,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 45 (1992) 89
Peter W. Dykema, “The Spread of the Community Music Idea,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 67 (1916) 220. Elite worries about the assimilation of new immigrants lay close to the surface of some of these programs. In the early teens, the Association sponsored a “melting pot of music,” in which choral societies of Chicago’s diverse immigrant groups “sang songs of its own nationality and then from the music thrown upon the screen, one song of each nation was sung in English translation by the entire audience,” after which “all of the elements joined in the singing of a number of American patriotic and folk songs” (ibid., 222–23). In its 1915 report, a CMA trustee wrote, “Every social center should have its own choral club, orchestra, children’s chorus and series of artist concerts. Every factory should have its choral club, orchestra and band.” The Civic Music Association’s classical-music concerts in neighborhood field houses at popular prices attracted large and enthusiastic audiences
Lisa Meyerowitz, “The Negro in Art Week: Defining the “New Negro’ through Art Exhibition,” African American Review 31 (1997) 75–89
Jennifer J. Harper, “The Early Religious Paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner: A Study of the Influences of Church, Family, and Era,” American Art 6 (1992) 74.
Barbara Jaffee, “Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago,” Design Issues 21 (2005) 47.
Frank W. Hart, Executive Secretary, National Society for Vocational Education, to “Gentlemen,” July 1, 1919
Ryerson to Flexner (telegram), September 24, 1919; folder 2780: “Industrial Art Survey, 1919–21,” box 269, General Education Board, Rockefeller Archives Center.
Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991) 13–14.
Dena Epstein, “Frederick Stock and American Music,” American Music 10 (1992) 32
Horowitz, Classical Music in America 307. On “Prometheus,” see Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 50
James M. Baker, “Prometheus in America: The Significance of the World Premiere of Scriabin’s Poem of Fire as Color-Music, New York, 20 March 1915,” in Over Here: Modernism, The First Exile, 1914–19, ed. Kermit Champa, Nancy Versaci, and Judith E. Tolnick (Providence, RI: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 1989) 90–111.
On the New Theatre, see J. Dennis Rich and Kevin L. Seligman, “The New Theatre of Chicago, 1906–1907,” Educational Theatre Journal 26 (1974) 53–68
Aristocracy O,” Theatre History Studies 24 (2004) 97–108.
On canonization in theater, see Levine, “William Shakespeare and the American People.” On the annexation of the stage to the institutional model for high culture, see Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater, Opera, and the Dance, 1900–1940,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality ed. Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 21–57.
Andrew Martinez, “A Mixed Reception for Modernism: The 1913 Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 19 (1993) 32.
Horowitz, Culture and the City 197–203, notes the surprising willingness of wealthy Chicagoans to patronize modernism in poetry and drama, as well as music and the visual arts. Stefan Germer, “Traditions and Trends: Taste Patterns in Chicago Collecting,” in The Old Guard and the Avant Garde: Modernism in Chicago 1910–1940 (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1990) 171–91, describes the significance of the 1933 exhibition, as well as the contributions of the five patrons who built the Art Institute’s collection of modern art.
McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige 117. Crane’s views did not prevail, even within his own family. One son, Charles, attended Yale and became a noted diplomat, eventually serving as U.S. Ambassador to China. Another, Richard Jr., avoided college but was seduced by extravagance in later life, building a 40-room European-style estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he was attended by a butler in livery (a degree of extravagance to which even his wealthy neighbors objected), and giving his daughter’s hand in marriage to a Russian prince. See Richard Jay Hutto, June Hall McCash, and Stillman Rockefeller, Their Gilded Cage: The Jekyll Island Club Members (Macon, GA: Henchard Press, 2006).
Joseph M. Siry, “Chicago’s Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57 (1998) 137.
Maureen Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Women’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” American Historical Review 95 (1990) 1032–50
Dorothy Rogers and Therese B. Dykeman, “Introduction: Women in the American Philosophical Tradition, 1800–1930,” Hypatia 19 (2004) xiv. The Chicago Women’s Club that induced the Art Institute to sponsor its exhibition of African American art in 1927 had opened its membership to African American women in 1905, well before its counterparts in most other cities. Vaillant, in Sounds of Reform makes the case persuasively that Chicago’s musical progressives were a different group, not just in background and occupation but also, and especially, in ideology from the sacralizers of the “cultured generation.”.
On Frank Damrosch, see Lucy Poate Stebbins and Richard Poate Stebbins, Frank Damrosch: Let the People Sing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1945)
Mannes, see George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983).
Jaher, Urban Establishment 496, who notes that only 6 percent of the city’s millionaires in 1892 had been born in Chicago.
Ffrench, Music and Musicians; Allan McNab, “The School of the Art Institute: A Brief History,” The Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly 55 (1961) 24–28.
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© 2010 Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
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DiMaggio, P. (2010). The Problem of Chicago. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_13
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