For Gillian M. Rodger, associateprofessor of musicology at UWM, Astor Place wasn’t just an upsurge of misplacedpatriotism but an episode of class warfare. In Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the NineteenthCentury (University of Illinois Press),Rodger sees the riot as a convenient watershed in American popular culturethepoint where highbrow separated from lowbrow and socio-economic classes thatonce sat in the same theater went their separate ways. The upper class adoptedthe fine arts of Europe as a means of distinction while the workers embracedthe roots of vaudeville that eventually carried over into Hollywood.
Of course, Rodger realizes that the riot represented only an infamousturn in trends that were already underway. Before Astor Place working class men werealready enjoying inexpensive and unrefined forms of entertainment. Afascinating study in popular culture, ChampagneCharlie investigates what the workers were up to during the firstgeneration of the American industrial proletariat. Previously, artisans andtheir masters socialized together during the course of a workday. The rigidtemplate of the Industrial Age forced employees to seek leisure off site intheir off hours, often in taverns that competed to provide singers and floorshows, even theatricals, to draw paying customers.
The challenge in researching ChampagneCharlie comes from the paucity of sources. Newspapers of those days didn’treview those performances and academics weren’t analyzing them. Often bawdy andeven explicitly sexual, they were beneath the consideration of respectablesociety. Rodger, however, gleaned information from studying newspaperadvertisements and sometimes from news reporting, especially if viceinvestigators were involved.
The makeup of the mostly white male Anglo-Saxon audience for varietyshows shifted with the changing ethnic demographics of America. Andwith the growth of a middle class, what had been seedy amusement for the tiredand the drunken became more respectable, “family friendly” as would say today.In the evolution from amateur variety shows to vaudeville “there was a greateremphasis on pace and on building anticipation for the star acts,” Rodgerwrites, seeing a reflection of the increasingly competitive structure of theindustrial workplace with its hierarchies of skilled workers and unskilledlaborers.
