On July 29, 1895, the New York Dramatic Mirror added a new department to its weekly coverage of theatre: "The Vaudeville Stage." Because vaudeville was "steadily coming into nearer relations with the regular stage," the editors explain, "it is evident that the leading newspaper of the theatre should lift this class of intelligence to the dignity of a carefully maintained and occasionally illustrated department" (8). The section provided just what theatregoers needed to navigate an expanding entertainment field: detailed summaries of bills playing in New York City's variety houses including audience responses to particular acts, lists of performers' engagements in cities across the nation, and a weekly profile of vaudeville stars, usually someone currently playing in New York. "The printing of a department like this one," the editors assert firmly, "will not, however, in any way interfere with the established form of the well-known policy of the paper, or affect any other feature or interest" (8). The Mirror's editorial policy, led famously by Harrison Grey Fiske, was known for its anti-commercial stance, and, over the next decade, the paper would become the nation's leading theatrical publication by staunchly criticizing the expansion of mass culture its back pages helped coordinate. 

The Mirror's expanded format reflected wider developments in American theatregoing at the turn of the century, particularly an emerging desire among the middle classes to move freely between a variety of entertainment venues and formats.¹ These new market conditions of course compelled the Mirror's inclusion of vaudeville, but the structure of the paper's "departments" in fact proposed a way for legitimate theatre, and its leading publication, to prosper in this competitive marketplace. Like the paper's two halves, theatregoers could disavow their involvement in commercial amusement by supporting "serious" drama. [End Page 211]

The social work done by this theatrical practice has not been adequately recognized, for it seems to complicate a key assumption about the formation of modern culture in the US; namely, that faced with a society fragmented by urbanization and immigration, elite authorities imagined and instituted the meaning of legitimate culture as a process of retreat from, and refusal of, the "lowbrow."² Given its close association with such commercial amusement, American theatre has not proved a compelling site for scholars studying the production of literary value in these modernizing times.³ In this article, I hope to suggest otherwise. My contention is that market pressure compelled legitimate theatre's advocates like the Dramatic Mirror to articulate the value of literary practice in explicitly social terms, as a privilege realized through mobility rather than removal. My thesis will be that such promotions drew by locating cultural legitimacy in unmarked identity, promising to restore for the dominant classes a threatened social order by confirming the dominion of "white" authority in an "ethnic" commercial landscape. To make this case, I'll focus particularly on the theatre criticism of James S. Metcalfe, the drama editor at Life magazine who gained national prominence early in the century by blaming the commercialization of theatre on a group of Jewish theatre owners. In order to understand how such an overtly ideological argument could be recognized by audiences as an expression of legitimate criticism, however, it will be necessary first to reconstruct the context of its articulation and appreciate the role of the professional theatre reviewer in the entertainment field. 

The expression legitimate theatre itself is a useful starting place for such restoration work, for the term became vernacular within this turn-of-the-century amusement market. The legitimate prefix confirmed the fact that conventional stage plays no longer monopolized the definition of legitimate theatrical entertainment, while, at the same time, asserted that they did (or could), as a strategy for profiting under these new conditions. As such, legitimate theatre referred to the history of theatre's high-cultural place, most directly to the authority invested in the Patent playhouses of eighteenth-century Britain, but it also suggested the sort of literariness associated with legitimate drama, a term familiar to British and American playgoers, actors, and critics in the nineteenth century for distinguishing classic plays (Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan) from the contemporary melodramas they also enjoyed. As it does today, however, legitimate theatre made no distinction between good and bad plays; what it proposed and promoted was that, in relation to other competing forms of commercial amusement, the particular value of conventionally staged drama was that it provided the best occasion and opportunity available for acquiring cultural prestige, "literary" value, commercially.⁴[End Page 212]

The entertainment field was structured to support this definition, even as it functioned to undercut its sense. When a vaudeville performer was billed "straight from the legit," for instance, the advertisement underscored the difference between theatre and commercial amusement in order to promote the opportunity to collapse that difference. Indeed, what made vaudeville so widely popular was its capacity to commercialize virtually any form of entertainment, from a working-class song to grand opera, in order to provide "something for everyone" each show. While such promotions of course broke down the working distinction between "high" and "low" culture, the consumerist mind set that they depended upon in fact functioned to solidify (rhetorically at least) the differentiation, even stratification, among what were, in practice, equally legitimate amusements.⁵

While escapist entertainment like vaudeville could be advertised in explicitly commercial terms--most often as high-quality merchandise available at cut rates--the promotion of legitimate theatre had to follow a scheme that resolutely opposed such commercialism. The point is not only that the literariness of legitimate theatre was understood in relation to competing amusements in the market, but that the meaning of its literary value was produced from that competition, from its being positioned against "commercial" opponents in the field. 

Bourdieu may be useful here to conceptualize the thinking behind this marketing strategy. In Bourdieu's work on the sociology of artistic appreciation, the familiar antithesis between high art and mass amusement does not so much delimit objective categories of cultural expression as much as it defines the logic under which artistic value can be discussed, promoted, or even conceived. In other words, the oppositions between literature and entertainment, disinterestedness and profit-taking, "highbrow" and "lowbrow," are structuring rather than structural, forming a conceptual framework, a set of "rules of the game," which govern the positions taken by critical reviewers and inflect the dispositions and tastes of cultural consumers. Bourdieu summarizes this logic as the "disavowal of 'the economy,'" in which cultural value is acquired, "symbolic capital" gained, only when economic self-interest is strategically renounced.⁶

One of the most useful insights that comes from Bourdieu's model is that, while the state of a particular cultural field differs according to historical situation, the logic which organizes the positions taken by the competing players does not. What matters is against whom one positions oneself. Thus, from the location of literary criticism, free-market culture like legitimate theatre is usually condemned as commercial and therefore illegitimate, but at the place and occasion where such "quality" commercial culture is sold, the transaction must also involve some "anti-commercial" gesture, if [End Page 213] the value of the product advertised is to be realized. In this manner, the promotion of legitimate theatre's "literary value" centered on finding ways to oppose the institution to its "commercial" competitors in the entertainment marketplace, according to the logic of the cultural field. 

When they have studied plays produced out of this situation, drama historians have focused on two apparently contradictory trends, developments that were actually consistent with legitimate theatre's position in the commercial entertainment field. On the one hand, scholars have worked out the ways in which certain plays and critics in these times show an emerging concern with "literary" forms and methods, steps toward the emergence of so-called modern drama and Eugene O'Neill in the 1920s.⁷ On the other hand, historians have also documented how, at the same time, the production and distribution of theatre underwent unprecedented centralization and commercialization, following the wider processes of incorporation in American business.⁸ The assumption has always been that the theatre's nascent "literary" production emerged to resist the institution's overt commercialism, especially since the advocates of reform tended to protest with great enthusiasm in public. That many such critics of commerce owed their living to a commercial theatre or that not a few "exceptional" productions turned a substantial profit at the box office are usually understood with a mixture of condescension and historical positivism: who can blame the pioneer if a compromise or two must be made? Yet when we understand such anti-commercial position-takings in terms of legitimate theatre's position in the entertainment field, we begin to see how criticizing theatre's commercialism and investing in it functioned collusively, the former position advancing the latter goal by disavowing its purposes, according to the logic of the field. 

In large part, such duplicity was coordinated by the work of a new class of theatre journalists, professional reviewers who came to function, in Bourdieu's words, as "cultural bankers," and in whose supposedly disinterested behavior theatregoers modeled the process of their own cultural consumption. By the 1890s, major urban newspapers were in the process of instituting the position we know as the theatre critic, a journalist removed from the news department, and dedicated exclusively to reviewing theatrical productions on behalf of the paper. As Tice Miller's work on several of these early reviewers makes manifest, the construction of an idiosyncratic "style" or "personality" was crucial to establishing one's authority as an "independent" critic.⁹ The public performance of this role involved fashioning the logic of the field of cultural production, the "disavowal of 'the economy'" into a social posture, typically by casting oneself as the indignant victim of an imposing commercial [End Page 214] audience. When asked, for instance, how he could possibly negotiate the commercial forces encountered on the job and remain unbiased, New York Tribune critic William Winter spoke of his own grace under pressure. Although critics such as he must "commingle with a miscellaneous multitude" who are "largely unaccustomed to the use of soap," and encounter always the "patent-leather smile of the effusive theatrical agent"--although he works "under the pressure of adverse conditions such as would paralyze any intellect not specially trained to the task," the professional reviewer can and "must preserve the coolness and composure of a marble statue."¹⁰ In such fashion, the critic's professed social alienation became the calling card for his supposed disinterestedness, oppressed but inviolate, and therefore (in a relative sense, according to the logic of the field) autonomous. 

For professional theatre reviewers (and their constituencies), claiming literary authority in the entertainment field was always ultimately a matter of habitus, of claiming the ability to assume an unmarked posture in social space, to become a "marble statue." And it was, above all, the promise of acquiring such a public identity that made the idea of legitimate theatre of social value to its patrons. In response to the widely held concern among the dominant classes that an ongoing process of immigration was threatening prior notions of social order, supporters of legitimate theatre suggested, in the logic of their practice, a way to reassert the authority of white privilege. If the "literary" position in the entertainment field becomes, in social space, a disembodied one, then the "commercial" position identifies a constituency marked as such visibly on their bodies. The mass audience is therefore commercial and "ethnic," and the legitimate audience, by virtue of its resistance to such a "commercial" mass, is autonomous and non-ethnic--indeed anti-ethnic, just as legitimate cultural authority is realized in the act of taking a stand against "the economy." 

Such theorizing is useful for understanding conceptually how the promotion of legitimate theatre used the logic of the field of cultural production to exploit the social anxieties of its supporters, but when we move to analyzing specific examples of such promotion in practice the connection between the "literary value" advertised and, for instance, specific anti-immigrant sentiment or policy becomes obscure. As Bourdieu reminds us, while activity in the field of cultural production exists always in the field of power relations, support of dominant social interest can only be articulated legitimately in the language of disinterest. The promotion of literary value in legitimate theatre therefore continually required what Bourdieu calls collective misrecognition, in which the particular social and economic profit gained by both parties in the exchange is at once recognized and actively denied.¹¹[End Page 215]

This is why, for instance, William Winter's attack on the unwashed masses quoted above could only take the form of retreat, his figuration of privilege necessarily misrecognized by his constituency as a condition of marginality, even invisibility, rather than one of status, power, and domination. The oppressive presence constructed to define, through negation, the meaning and purpose of the absent identity could only be formulated in conceptual terms as a "miscellaneous multitude," intruding its "vulgarity" virtually everywhere. Winter's double need to articulate and obfuscate the social dimension of his criticism shows how the logic of the field of cultural production tends to break down when its affirmation is most called for. The greater the need to affirm the social purpose of art in the language of art, the wider this space becomes, so that the history of a particular cultural field tends to be marked by episodes of mounting crisis, when the ideological value of criticism is increasingly revealed, followed by periods of containment, when those stakes become again hidden, misrecognized in legitimate cultural practice. 

In the next section, I analyze a particularly revealing episode of crisis, precipitated by the emergence of the Theatrical Syndicate, a cartel of theatre owners who, by the turn of the century, controlled the distribution of most legitimate theatre in the US. For his part, Winter called the Syndicate "the incubus," a fiend which had suddenly descended upon the institution while its guardians slept. As such a response makes evident, critically addressing the Syndicate involved disavowing its relation, characterizing the operation as a hostile commercial force threatening the theatrical institution from the outside, according to the logic of the field. 

Such attempts to characterize who were in reality central figures in the legitimate theatre industry as essentially the representatives of mass culture often found their way by observing that the majority of the Syndicate's membership was comprised of Jews. The move shows the transgression of the logic of the field for its defense and reaffirmation. In these explicitly ideological arguments, we are able to see, if only briefly, the connection between theatre and society normally obscured by legitimate criticism. In particular, connecting mass culture with the Jew marks the mass audience as immigrant and ethnic, and, in so doing, conceptualizes, through negation, the legitimate theatre position as "literary," "American," and "white." 

Though the agreement under which the group would function was spelled out behind closed doors in 1896, by the first decade of the twentieth century the Syndicate was following the example of other emergent corporations and defending its monopolistic practices openly in public. "The Theatrical Syndicate has brought order out of chaos, legitimate profit out of ruinous rivalry," asserted the Syndicate's Marc Klaw in Cosmopolitan in 1904, "Under its operations the actor has received a higher salary than ever was his, the producing manager has been assured a better percentage on his investment, and the local manager has won the success which comes from the booking of accepted metropolitan favorites."¹³ Like other industrialists, Klaw couched his defense of monopoly in the parlance of social Darwinism, presenting the incorporation of theatre as inevitable, natural, and benevolent. Yet there was something in Klaw's argument that would have sounded terribly unnatural. "The Theatre is governed by the rules and observances of all other commercial enterprises," he wrote, "It is not out to dictate to public tastes. It is out to satisfy the public's demand" (200). An efficient and centralized marketing bureau, Klaw reasoned, enabled the Syndicate to "form the vague idea of the public's taste," allowing it to "shape plans to fit conditions" (201). 

Klaw, of course, was referring to a then-emerging system of cultural production which links producers to a mass of consumers directly via market research and advertising. While such an efficient operation was of course helpful in legitimate theatre's bid to profit in the commercial entertainment market, the increasing publicity of its existence threatened the very basis for that viability, promising to undo the logic which made its commercial-cultural relations functional. Under the arrangement Klaw proposed, the collusive but censored relation between cultural consumers and their "disinterested" representatives would be replaced by a rationally coherent, above-board sales strategy. Rather than allow the office of independent criticism to keep separate and mediate the production and consumption of theatre, the business office, Klaw proposed, would now oversee the theatrical institution. Without a mechanism to disavow it commercial basis, legitimate theatre could no longer claim to offer "literary value," for it could no longer actively oppose the "commercial" opponents in the field. 

While Klaw denied his role in dictating public taste, arguments against the Syndicate invariably returned to the group's illegitimate, if not ill mannered, [End Page 217] transgression of cultural place. Winter put it this way: "It is one thing to sell boots or pickles, and another to disseminate thoughts and emotions."¹⁴ The insinuation that the Syndicate was better suited to conduct its business in the Lower East Side than on Broadway was in fact a characteristic critical response to its new public prominence. For instance, in the first installment of a four-part series published by Leslie's Monthly Magazine entitled "The Great Theatrical Syndicate: How a Group of Speculators have Gained Despotic Control of the Amusements of the American People--The Results, Good and Bad," the editors pause from their biographical sketch of the Syndicate members to observe, "It may be noted for the benefit of those who are interested in ethnological influences as applied to modern business methods that only one Christian is a member of the Theatrical Syndicate and he is said to be a convert."¹⁵ Like Winter's quip about boots and pickles, the so-called ethnological connection to American theatre does not receive elaboration in the article, however. Ethnicity, it seems, is both relevant to and beyond the scope of an even-handed assessment of legitimate theatre. The Syndicate's Jewishness, in other words, is the key point that needed to be misrecognized, its significance underscored and disavowed. 

One place where the connection between commercialism and Jewish ethnicity was made explicit, however, was in the New York magazine, Life. Not the glossy publication we know as Life Magazine (which did not appear until 1936), Life was modelled on the British Punch and The Harvard Lampoon, and it offered a sophisticated mix of political commentary, satire, and culture review, including a weekly section on New York City theatre.¹⁶ There, James S. Metcalfe, the magazine's drama editor, referred to the Syndicate as "the Sheeniedicate" and often blamed the lack of "decency and art" in American theatre on the "low-bred craft and cunning [of] Jewry and its hired people"¹⁷ Most conspicuously, the section featured cartoons that depicted the Syndicate members with enlarged noses, crooked teeth, and broad lips. Such coverage drew public protest, from both Jewish and mainstream publications and from the members of the Syndicate themselves. In January, 1905, at a meeting of the New York Theatre Owners Association, the group resolved to ban Metcalfe from attending its 47 theatres in New York City for his "malicious, vile and unjustifiable attacks upon those of the Jewish faith."¹⁸ In the weeks that followed, Metcalfe, usually accompanied by his attorney and the press corps, tested the ban at various theatres in the association, [End Page 218] and in all but a few cases, the embargo held. The case became front-page news, and editors in newspapers across the country applauded Metcalfe for his principled resistance to the Syndicate's methods.¹⁹

A conventional wisdom emerged from this coverage that Metcalfe's personal feelings about Jews were really beside the more important point that his critical independence had been unjustly restricted by commercial interests. Harrison Grey Fiske's editorial in The Mirror was typical of such commentary: "If critics can be shut out of theatres in New York on purely extraneous grounds . . . [then] the persons who control the theatre of this country . . . may take it into their heads to exclude from their houses everywhere all those whose duty it is to write of the drama, if the writers display the hardihood necessary to tell the public the truth about plays and players."²⁰ Since Metcalfe's views on race were really "extraneous" to his work as a disinterested reviewer (they must have been, according to the rules of the game), then the managers' decision to refuse him admission could only be understood as a self-interested, and therefore illegitimate, obstruction of the independent critic's public "duty." Following this logic, critics and audiences joined in defending Metcalfe's right to remain disinterested while his commentary continually betrayed an explicit ideological purpose. Positioned as the resistant victim of commercial oppression, Metcalfe was able to disavow "the economy," a "literary" gesture which allowed his supporters, in their turn, to deny the move as primarily ideological. 

The critical space opened by way of this reversal, in which the dominant speaks from a position of supposed marginality and oppression, was enabled for Metcalfe by the ban itself. Because he had no plays to review, and authorized by his publicized resistance to "the economy," Metcalfe dedicated his weekly column, now titled "From Under the Ban," to working out, more directly than would otherwise be possible, the Syndicate's "ethnological influence" on theatrical production. If the Syndicate had not "intruded their vulgar personalities into public view," he explained, and instead "had been content to confine their energies to the money-grabbing to which they were equipped by nature and inheritance, the public might never have become interested in the question of who was or who was not getting the profits of the theatrical business."²¹ Rather succinctly, Metcalfe's commentary here identifies the Syndicate's threat to legitimate theatre and models the strategy for its resolution: the vulgar fact of "the profits of the theatrical business"--the acknowledged, but unspeakable relation to "the economy" which needs to be disavowed--is displaced onto the "vulgar personalities" of the Syndicate. In this judeophobic formulation, commercialism could be understood as essentially alien to the theatrical institution, the distasteful enterprise of pushy outsiders and unassimilated ethnics rather than an activity more foundational to the national stage. 

We need to appreciate just how the particular demographics of American Jewry at the turn of the century allowed Metcalfe and his readership to perform this misrecognition. At the same time that Russian Jews were arriving in New York City by the thousands, aspiring middle-class (and mostly German) Jews were seeking entrance [End Page 219] to gentile hotels and social circles. From this historical coincidence emerged, in Louise A Mayo's words, "the paradoxical perception of the Jew both as quintessential parvenu who pushed himself into places where he wasn't wanted and as clannishly aloof and unwilling to assimilate."²² In the field of theatrical amusement, Jews were especially well situated to enable these games with mirrors. While Jewish producers, managers, and actors had attained status and authority in the theatre industry, representations of Jews on stage remained dominated by the performance of greenhorn immigrant types, especially in vaudeville.²³ In this manner, the alien-looking Russian Jews of the Lower East Side allowed cultural elites to gloss challenges to hierarchies of class in terms of visible racial difference. Thus, in Life the Syndicate's transgression of cultural authority was continually figured in terms of displacements in social geography: as the Hester Street peddler, hawking his wares on Broadway (figure 1), and the vaudeville comedian, ventriloquizing his ethnic speech on the legitimate stage (figure 2).²⁴ Perhaps most succinctly, the commercialization of dramatic literature was simply a process of its becoming more "Jewish" looking: legitimate drama wearing a showy diamond, Shakespeare with a nose (figure 3). 

These articulate representations fuse two conceptions of Jewish threat for expressing the Syndicate's particular threat for legitimate theatre and its audience. Figuring the Syndicate as both an ethnic, marginalized, and ghettoed minority, and as a mobile, [End Page 220] [Begin Page 222] hidden, and dominating force, able to cross boundaries invisibly or emerge suddenly to the surface, the critics and patrons of legitimate theatre were able to confirm their dominant status (as the unrestricted mainstream) and disavow that position of power (thus making it legitimate, culturally) by imagining their practice as somehow the minority posture, supposedly oppressed by a dominating commercial majority--the "literary" position, according to the logic of the cultural field. In his commentaries while "under the ban," Metcalfe further elaborated the social authority of this minority position, arguing that combating the Syndicate's commercial take-over of legitimate theatre was part of a broader mission to assimilate the ethnic immigrant to the American way of life. 

Metcalfe pointed out, unfortunately quite accurately it seems, that the caricatures published in the magazine were quite in line with similar representations of the Jew in literature and on the stage.²⁵ The crucial difference with the Jews, Metcalfe asserted, was that while caricatures of recent immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy "do not picture [their] racial characteristics in flattering delineation," from these loyal "countrymen we hear no word of resentment against the liberties taken with their features and characteristics by the pictorial fun-makers."²⁶ The problem, Metcalfe explains, is that "the bad Jew, if he is caught with the goods on, immediately sets up the howl that he is being persecuted because he is a Jew, and expects the respectable members of his race to come to his rescue."²⁷ Such solidarity "is un-American in the sense that it creates a nation within a nation" (199). 

Metcalfe worked out in detail for his readership the contours of this "Jewish nation" in New York City. 

Jewish ownership controls the editorial voice of several daily newspapers in New York City. But more potent than that is the fact that the largest advertisers in the New York dailies are the department stories, whose proprietors are, with one or two exceptions, Jews. This advertising can practically make or break a New York newspaper. With it, and under essentially the same control, goes the advertising placed by Jewish bankers and financiers. Naturally no newspaper in this city cares to imperil a patronage which means its very existence--a patronage which has become so systematized in the method of its bestowal that almost at a word every dollar of it could be taken away by a single command.²⁸[End Page 222]

Cultural commodification and social fragmentation cohere in Metcalfe's sense of "those who are Jews and Jews only," the theatrical producers and clannish ethnics who manifest the "worst traits which are associated with the worst members of [the Jewish] race." Theatrical legitimation, like national citizenship, requires that the "Jew only" be subjected to established cultural authority: the business office needs to defer critical judgment to the independent critic just as the immigrant must yield his difference to Americanization. 

For his model of a theatrical producer who was "not a Jew only," Metcalfe singled out David Belasco and pledged his unconditional critical support for the famous theatrical producer's work. Like Metcalfe, Belasco fought publicly to remain independent from the Syndicate, and along the way, became the period's most consistently profitable theatrical producer.³⁰ During Metcalfe's ban, Life reprinted an interview with Belasco from the New York News in which he protested the Syndicate's commercial methods. The article ran with the headline, "The Opinion of a Cultured Jew."³¹ Perhaps supporting Belasco allowed Metcalfe to publicly swear that some of his favorite theatre producers were Jews. Yet, for Metcalfe, Belasco's theatre was not "Jewish" in the way he believed the Syndicate's was. While the Syndicate spoke about drama as a consumable item, Belasco publicly defended the institution in the parlance of high culture. In the same issue of Cosmopolitan as Klaw's defense of the Syndicate quoted earlier, for instance, Belasco described his mission in a different tone: "Certain minds," he wrote, 

are blessed, or, if you will cursed with an oversensitive veneration for whatsoever is true and beautiful--for the great things that have been thought and said in the world, and for the traditions attaching thereto. When these "great things" become vulgarized and fall, for the moment, from their high estate, it is the obvious duty of those who care for them to sound the warning note and to do what lies in their power to stay the tide of corruption.³²[End Page 223]

Such a breach in the logic of the cultural field, Bourdieu observes, occurs most often in the rhetoric of culture brokers like Metcalfe, for although they "form a protective screen between artists and the market, they are also what link them to the market and so provoke, by their very existence, cruel unmaskings of the truth of artistic practice."³³ The vulnerable position of such figures, Bourdieu observes, "predisposes them for the role of scapegoat" (75), particularly at moments of crisis, when the critic's functional duplicity "is unveiled and the values which do the veiling are affirmed" (79). 

As it turned out, Metcalfe's cultural authority followed just this trajectory, his judeophobic commentary eventually made illegitimate by way of the same cultural logic that had authorized its legitimate articulation. We can see this turn taking place in Metcalfe's extended legal suit against the New York Theatre Managers Association, for instance. Two weeks after the ban against him went into effect, Metcalfe filed a criminal complaint with the New York District Attorney's office against the seven managers who had banned him from entering their theatres. Metcalfe accused the managers of conspiring to deny him from pursuing his lawful trade as a theatre critic. The Magistrate agreed, and twenty-four members of the New York Managers' Association (essentially those in attendance when the "resolution" was read) were charged with criminal conspiracy. Over several years, and over the course of several appeals, the New York courts eventually upheld the Association's right to ban Metcalfe from their theatres. Whereas the Court recognized the rights of theatre owners to protect their private business interests, it eventually came to insist that theatre critics[End Page 224] could and must remain unbiased, disinterested, and impersonal. This double standard, of course, followed and helped sustain legitimate theatre's logic, where the business department is empowered through (the illusion of) its separation from the office of criticism. 

The break in the case came when the lawyers representing the Syndicate theatre managers entered into evidence a sample of Metcalfe's reviewing, claiming that the ideological analysis was not in fact dramatic criticism. In his decision, Judge Edward T. Bartlett agreed, calling the piece "an unexampled illustration of race bitterness and hatred."³⁴ The managers' decision to ban Metcalfe, he concluded, was not "an attack upon his right to exercise his calling as a dramatic critic, but an effort on the part of the [End Page 225] managers to protect themselves . . . against unjustifiable attacks upon . . . members of the Jewish race" (185). To draw this distinction, Bartlett quoted extensively from the Association's original "resolution" against Metcalfe: 

For his so-called criticism on plays or business methods we make no mention--that does not concern us and is without our province--but when [he] persistently and for no discernible just cause (but personal feeling perhaps) make a butt of one's religion--be his faith what it may then some action should be taken to . . . prevent our business interests being injured.

Though this eruption of judeophobic literary commentary was remarkable, it is not surprising that it occurred at such a location in the field of cultural production, where sustaining the "disavowal of 'the economy'" was so often under duress. Indeed, commercialized spaces like legitimate theatre offer particularly useful sites for opening up the particular social stakes of art in a given situation; when culture is marketed and sold, the transaction illuminates, in sometimes vulgar relief, the logic upon which all cultural appreciation is based. When literary scholars call commercial theatre the "Bastard Art," they disavow their relation not so much to a "bad" play but to a whole bad faith economy revealed by that (well-reviewed) money-making play--a disavowal which, of course, follows the same logic and bad faith. We need to think about the ways in which the perennial abuse of American drama functions as itself a useful critical position-taking, a strategy for constructing literary authority through the "disavowal of 'the economy.'" In the broadest sense, saying "American plays are not literature" does the work of both affirming that "true" literature exists outside of "the economy" and opening up the critical space needed to make such a claim. As we've seen with the Metcalfe case, at its most extreme, opposing commercialism not only deflects the issue of one's ideological commitments, it can authorize these commitments in the name of disinterestedness. American theatre in the twentieth century has remained a central place for the promotion and exercise of this "literary" privilege, not in spite of its "commercial" leaning, but because of it. 

Mark Hodin teaches English at Gustavus Adolphus College. His work has appeared in Prospects and Studies in Contemporary Jewry.

2. In the classic articulation of this thesis, Lawrence Levine explained how Eastern elites in the late-nineteenth century endeavored to separate the "highbrow" from the "lowbrow" (particularly in the fine arts) in order to assert authority over a modernizing American society. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 

3. Susan Harris Smith's American Drama: The Bastard Art (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997) offers an extensive and provocative overview of the various and persistent biases against the academic study of American drama as literature. 

4. The entry for legitimate theatre in A Dictionary of American English (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1942) reflects this shift: "Of or pertaining to stage plays having recognized theatrical and literary merit; in later use, designating plays, theatres, etc., belonging to that part of the show business concerned with drama rather than with the circus, vaudeville, moving pictures, etc" (3: 1413). 

5. I analyze how vaudeville producers exploited this culture of consumption in "Class, Consumption, and Ethnic Performance in Vaudeville," Prospects 22 (1997): 193-210. 

6. Randal Johnson's collection, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, provides us with Bourdieu's most concise articulation of the theory of cultural production which informs his more particularized analyses of contemporary French taste (Distinction, 1984) and the field of literary production in nineteenth-century France (The Rules of Art, 1992). See especially, Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed," trans. Richard Nice 1983, and "The Production of Belief: A Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods" (1977) trans. Richard Nice 1980, reprinted in ed. Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29-73; 74-111. 

7. The most thorough and informative study in this tradition is Brenda Murphy's American Realism and American Drama 1880-1940 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 

8. Theatre historians trace this process of consolidation by mapping the decline of the local resident "stock" company alongside the rise of the packaged, and centrally produced "combination" show. The panic of 1873, Peter A. Davis has shown, was the catalyst which effected a sudden and virtually complete shift from "stock" to "combination" ("From Stock to Combination: The Panic of 1873 and Its Effects on the American Theatre Industry," Theatre History Studies 8 [1988]: 1-9). 

9. Tice L. Miller, Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1981). For a very concise overview of the history of theatre criticism in the US, see Miller's entry for "Criticism" in Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller, eds., Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 112-14. 

10. Winter made these remarks at New York City's Goethe Society in 1889. He had been invited to the literary club to "debate" the nation's preeminent producer of melodrama, Dion Boucicault, on the question of "The Influence of the Newspaper Press upon Art," but everyone at the Society that night knew that Winter was being asked to defend the authority of his professional office. Some years earlier, in the North American Review, Boucicault had blamed the "decline of the drama" on the "eternal diarrhoea (sic) of thought" produced daily by newspaper theatre reviewers (Dion Boucicault qtd. in Jurgen Wolter, The Dawning of American Drama: American Dramatic Criticism 1746-1915 [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993], 186). William Winter, The Press and the Stage: An Oration Delivered Before the Goethe Society (New York: Lockwood and Coombes, 1889), 40. 

11. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief," 81. 

12. The Syndicate emerged directly from the logic of centralization that governed late-nineteenth-century theatrical production (see footnote 8 above). As producers of combination road shows sought the most efficient rail route between major cities, and developers built new theatres in small towns in between, national booking agencies emerged, promising to deliver quality goods in exchange for the exclusive rights to broker for the local theatre. In the larger markets, many local managers pooled their theatres into circuits, negotiating their own contracts directly with the play's producer. 

In 1896, two of the nation's largest booking agencies joined resources with two Philadelphia theatre owners to form the Theatrical Syndicate. The group established a chain of thirty-three theatres in major cities which it booked under the condition that the production would play only in houses owned or booked by the Syndicate throughout its tour. The key to the Syndicate's influence, however, were the "one night stand" locations on rail lines in between the major-city chain. A producer might be able to circumvent the Syndicate by booking with an independent theatre in a larger market, but rarely could he map a cost-effective national route without performing in the smaller markets along the way. Most of these small-town theatres gladly yielded to the Syndicate's demand for exclusive booking rights in exchange for the big-city hits. A single "one night stand" locked the production into the "official" Syndicate chain in the larger markets, making independent theatres even in the large cities impracticable. By 1903, the official Syndicate chain had reached seventy houses, but estimates put the total number of theatres under its control at around five hundred nationwide. In the vernacular of the day, the Syndicate was known as the Theatrical Trust. 

13. Marc Klaw, "The Theatrical Syndicate, The Other Side," Cosmopolitan 38 (December 1904): 199-201. 

14. William Winter, The Life of David Belasco, Volume 2 (New York: Jefferson Winter, 1925), 164. 

15. "The Dictators Rise From Obscurity," Leslie's Monthly Magazine 53 (October 1904): 590. Emphasis in original. 

16. Due in large part to its weekly feature of Charles Dana Gibson's beloved "Gibson Girl" drawings, Life became, by the mid-1890s, says David E. E. Sloane, "the most influential cartoon and literary humor magazine of its time" (142). David E. E. Sloane, "Life," in American Humor Magazines and Periodicals, ed. David E. E. Sloane (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 141-53. 

17. James S. Metcalfe, "Literature Goes on the Stage," Life 34 (5 October 1899): 272. 

18. The resolution is reprinted in John Flautz, Life: The Gentle Satirist (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1972), 179. Flautz's study of the magazine includes an informative chapter on Metcalfe which helps situate the particular episode under discussion here within Metcalfe's broader career of conflict with the Syndicate. For instance, years before the New York Theatre Managers Association resolved to ban Metcalfe, the firm of Klaw and Erlanger, a leading member of the Syndicate, had sued Life for libel, claiming that a cartoon printed in the magazine unfairly blamed the company for the disastrous Iroquois Theatre fire (in December 1903). Because the court exonerated Life of this charge less than two weeks before the Association voted to ban Metcalfe, there were many who understood the resolution as a pay back engineered behind the scenes by Klaw and Erlanger. 

19. For a sense for the geographical range of editorials on the subject, see those reprinted in the New York Dramatic Mirror, January 21-February 18, 1905. 

20. Harrison Grey Fiske, "The Press Taking a Hand," New York Dramatic Mirror (12 January 1907): 12. 

21. James S. Metcalfe, "The End of the Season," Life 45 (1 June 1905): 644. 

22. Louise A. Mayo, The Ambivalent Image: Nineteenth Century America's Perception of the Jew (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988). Mayo's study of Jewish iconography in the nineteenth-century US looks at a wide variety of popular and literary media and reveals "Shylocks and Shevas" side by side, confirming John Higham's influential thesis that stereotypes of the Jew in America tended to "blend affection and contempt," reflecting a culture-wide ambivalence over finance capitalism and immigration policy (John Higham, "Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18 [1957]: 559-78). Higham's and Mayo's "ambivalence" thesis falls in between Oscar Handlin's sense that Anti-Semitism did not really begin in American until after 1900 and Michael Dobkowski's thorough explication of the "anti-Jewish cosmology" pervading nineteenth-century American society and culture (The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism [Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979], 235). For a thorough overview and concise analysis of the historiography of American anti-Semitism see David A. Gerber, "Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past," in ed. David A. Gerber, Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 4-54. 

23. An important exception to this trend is analyzed in Harley Erdman's provocative study, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity 1860-1920 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). In 1901, David Warfield won popular and critical acclaim in David Belasco's production of The Auctioneer by performing a Lower East Side Jew who "negotiate[s] the transition into American bourgeois life" (108). "In performing the Jewish-American business man as lovable family man and pathetic hero," Erdman argues, "Warfield legitimized him as a figure that both Jews and Gentiles could accept" (110). Even Metcalfe was compelled to acknowledge the exceptional character of the role: "There is little sympathy here in America for the Jew," he wrote in his review of the play, "he has contaminated everything in American life that he has touched. But Warfield has made the stage Jew not simply a thing to be laughed at, but a human being to be laughed at with and wept with." "Imported and Domestic," Life 33 (3 October 1901): 272. 

24. The image of the vaudeville comedian further underscores the social threat of Jewish control by characterizing the drama as female, implying that guardians of legitimate theatre like Metcalfe were authorized to defend the culture's purity from ethnic contamination. The logic of the argument followed in part from the sense that the Syndicate's rise to power had distorted popular conceptions of Jewish masculinity, as if the usually "unmanly" stage Jew had now gained an unnatural vigor. Harley Erdman analyzes this formation perceptively in Staging the Jew, showing how the Syndicate was perceived as "vulgar and lecherous Jews" who "threaten[ed] to debase both the art of the stage and gentile womanhood" (94).

25. See Erdman and Dobkowski passim. 

26. James S. Metcalfe, "Racial Impersonation," Life 45 (23 March 1905): 330. 

27. James S. Metcalfe, "Come Off Your High Horse!," Life 45 (16 February 1905): 199. Emphasis in original. 

28. James S. Metcalfe, "From Outside the Breastworks," Life 45 (23 February 1905): 220. 

29. James S. Metcalfe, "Come off Your High Horse!," 199. 

30. Belasco's "disavowal of 'the economy'" was at the time legendary, thanks to a tireless public relations office that placed hundreds of stories and images of the producer at work inside his cloistered "studio," supposedly removed from the commercial affairs of Broadway outside. A fascinating component to the construction of this public persona was Belasco's practice of wearing a black suit and his shirt collar reversed, giving him the appearance of a Catholic priest. The performance earned Belasco the nickname, the "Bishop of Broadway." In the present context, the move suggests how a denial of commercial motive involved a disavowal of Jewishness. The dynamic, however, is complex, for Belasco never denied he was a Jew (as other performers of course did to succeed in public), and that fact seems crucial to the logic of Metcalfe's thinking under consideration here. How Belasco understood the performance of his own ethnicity deserves further consideration. 

31. Life (February 16, 1905): 188. 

32. David Belasco, "The Theatrical Syndicate, One Side," Cosmopolitan 38 (December 1904): 193. 

33. Bourdieu, 79. 

34. 189 N.Y. Rep. 185. 

35. The Court's final decision, in itself, did not somehow reinstate the belief that legitimate critics were not supposed to be interested in ideological matters, so much as it underscored the final and inevitable restoration of the logic of the field of cultural production. The return to business as usual actually preceded the final verdict. In December 1905, when the Court rejected the Managers' initial plea to dismiss Life's charges, it also ordered the Association to readmit Metcalfe during the course of the trial, and in all but a few instances, Metcalfe was again welcome at its theatres. Concurrently, judeophobic cartoons and commentary became less explicit in Life. See John Flautz, Life, The Gentle Satirist, 172-83. 

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