USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 65
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The battle between the modernists and traditionalists erupted into a full-scale war with the opening of the International Exhibition of Modern Art in the early winter of 1913 at the armory of the Sixty-ninth Regi- ment on Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in New York City. Spon- sored by some of the Eight and by such other representatives of the Ash Can School as George Bellows, the so-called "Armory Show" con- tained sixteen hundred exhibits of American and European painting and sculpture. The work of foreign artists, many of whom were repre- sentatives of advanced schools of European art, attracted the greatest attention and aroused the most indignation. While conservatives pro- tested that modern art was obscene and fraudulent, the critics-with a few exceptions-could neither understand nor appreciate the distor- tions and unusual color combinations used by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo
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Picasso, Francis Picabia, and others. Meanwhile, the press treated the exhibition as news as well as art, and the armory was jammed with the curious. The Armory Show may have made few converts among the Philistines, but it was more responsible than any other single event for stimulating popular interest in modern art in America.
New York City was not only the center of new art movements, but it was also the home of some of the most valuable collections of painting and sculpture in the world. Steel, coal, and oil barons, searching for some way to spend their money and display their wealth, bought up European art treasures in much the same fashion that they purchased their daughters' husbands from among the European nobility. A contemporary wrote that "private galleries in New York" were "almost as common as private stables," and many of the new acquisitions undoubtedly be- longed in stables. But as millionaire connoisseurs gained in experience and learned to rely on the advice of experts, both their taste and their galleries improved. Because they were buying prestige as well as art, they generally neglected American artists. Native art was not, how- ever, completely ignored, and by World War I there were several well- to-do New Yorkers who were collecting American painting and sculpture.
Most of the private collections eventually were either opened to the public or given to one of the city's museums. Of the museums, the largest was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was opened in 1872 and moved to its present location on Fifth Avenue in 1880. Other important galleries opened in Greater New York before World War I included the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (1897), Cooper Union's Museum for the Arts of Decoration (1896), the Pratt Institute Free Library's Art Gallery (1896), and the Museum of the Hispanic Society of America (1908). In addition, public buildings such as the City Hall contained portraits of prominent Americans, while collections of paintings of considerable merit were owned by the New-York His- torical Society, the New York Public Library, and several other institu- tions. Outside of New York City the principal museums were the Albright Art Gallery-Buffalo Fine Arts Academy (1901) in Buffalo and the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (1914).
Millionaires collected homes as well as paintings, and their baronial residences made New York City's architecture distinctive, if not dis- tinguished. For some years after the Civil War the rich, like the middle class, lived in brownstones, but by the 1880's home-grown millionaires and those who had migrated from the hinterland were building palaces and chateaus of marble and granite on upper Fifth Avenue. Every new mansion was larger, more sumptuous, and more expensive than those already built, and almost all were modeled on famous European struc- tures. Richard Morris Hunt and other architects for the plutocracy were
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willing to employ any style that happened to suit the fancy of their patrons. As a consequence, the "millionaires' colony" stretching along Fifth Avenue was a bewildering array of baroque, rococo, classical, ren- aissance, and romanesque buildings. But the "battle of the styles" was not confined to Manhattan, for in cities, towns, and villages throughout the state were examples of every variety of home architecture from the bungalow in the suburbs to the factory-owner's Victorian house on the hill.
Public buildings, like private residences, were usually built along the lines of European models that had been designed centuries before the advent of industrial America. For many years the city's leading archi- tectural firm was McKim, Mead, and White, and its buildings-among which in New York City were Columbia University's Low Memorial Library, the University Club, and the Pennsylvania Railroad Station- were usually done in a classical style of which the firm's members were acknowledged masters. But classicism, however excellent, bore little relation to the needs of a highly urbanized, business civilization. The skyscraper rather than the Greek temple was to become the hallmark of the twentieth-century city. Although Chicago architects were the first to use the steel framework for multistoried commercial buildings, it was Manhattan that became the home of the skyscraper. The first example of the school of vertical architecture in New York City was the Flatiron Building, designed by Daniel Burnham of Chicago and completed in 1902. Within a decade, however, its twenty stories had been dwarfed by the Woolworth and Singer buildings and the Metropolitan Tower. McKim, Mead, and White, succumbing to the demand for height and to the pressure of urban real estate values, designed the skyscraping Municipal Building in 1907.
By the turn of the century the theater, like other forms of creative endeavor, had become a major business enterprise, with its headquarters in New York City. Repertory, which had once flourished in almost every city, was in large measure supplanted by touring companies from Broadway. Plays were increasingly built around star performers who were under contract to New York producers. In 1893 Charles Froham took over the city's Empire Theatre and made it "the greatest of all American star factories." Three years later he joined forces with Al Hayman, Marc Klaw, and Abraham Erlanger of New York and Sam Nixon and Fred Zimmerman of Philadelphia to form what came to be known as the "Theatrical Trust." Controlling many of the nation's leading performers and theaters in several cities, the trust's system of production and distribution was not unlike that of the industrial trusts. After 1900 the Schubert brothers-Sam, Lee, and Jacob-were able to break the trust's near-monopoly and establish a rival syndicate of stars and theaters.
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But competition did not change the basic features of the system, for both combines operated from New York City and used it as the manu- facturing and distributing center for their wares. By World War I most other cities in the United States had become "road towns" for plays that originated in New York, were financed by New York capital, and were under New York management.
Regardless of who controlled the theater, the fact remained that from the Civil War to World War I the popular stage in New York was dis- tinguished by a kind of uninhibited flamboyance that was altogether pleasing to the customers. And the customers responded by making folk heroes of many of the leading actors of the day. The result may have not been great art, but all agreed that it was great fun. East Lynne, which opened in 1863 with Lucille Western in the lead and which the critics decided was "trash," ran for ten years to set a record that was never sur- passed. But East Lynne and its successive stars had no monopoly of the affection and support of the city's theater goers. By the 1880's Lily Langtry (the "Jersey Lily") and Sarah Bernhardt had arrived from Europe to captivate audiences as much by their well-publicized private lives as by their acknowledged beauty and ability. There were also more than enough American stars to suit every taste. Lillian Russell was acclaimed for her voice and beauty, and no other actress in the history of the New York stage ever so completely captivated male audiences over a long period of time. Among the male performers, John Drew and Otis Skinner, who starred with Ada Rehan in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew, were particular favorites. There was, moreover, no dearth of comedians in the city, and variety acts usually drew large audiences; but the Harrigan and Hart shows were generally acclaimed the funniest in town. Written by Ned Harrigan who also starred in them, such Har- rigan and Hart comedies as The Mulligan Guards and Cordelia's Aspira- tions were hilarious farces about the topics of the day and the rivalries of the city's various immigrant groups. As popular as the plays were their songs, and there were few New Yorkers who did not know the words and tunes of such Harrigan and Hart favorites as "McNally's Row of Flats," "The Salvation Army," and "The Charlestown Blues."
By the 1890's the enthusiasm for Harrigan and Hart had begun to sub- side, and Joe Weber and Lew Fields had become the city's favorite comedy team. Holding forth at the Music Hall in a series of variety acts and aided by stars of the caliber of Lillian Russell, Weber and Fields convulsed their audiences with outlandish parodies of New York's most successful plays. The Music Hall also had the prettiest chorus girls on Broadway. But in 1900 with the appearance of the Floradora sextet, all the chorus lines of the past were forgotten. Floradora ran for more
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than five hundred nights, and on every one of them the six pretty girls wearing frilly dresses and carrying parasols stopped the show. Each of the original sextet married a wealthy admirer, and before the show closed seventy-nine other girls had at one time or another comprised the sextet. It remained for Florenz Ziegfeld, a young producer who had scored his first success with a show starring Anna Held, to make beautiful chorus girls a standard fixture of the Broadway musical comedy. His first Follies opened in 1907, and for the next twenty years he employed famous comics and strikingly handsome chorus girls in a series of Ziegfeld Follies that became lavish institutions of the New York theater.
In the two decades preceding the outbreak of World War I, Clyde Fitch's plays were among the most notable features of the New York stage. Fitch, the only American playwright of the period with an international reputation, began his career in 1890. Beau Brummell was produced in New York. Written by Fitch especially for Richard Mansfield, Beau Brummell was a social comedy that was both a critical and financial suc- cess. By the turn of the century, Fitch's reputation was secure, and in 1901 four of his plays (Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, The Climbers, Lovers' Lane and Barbara Frietchie) were running simultaneously in New York, while a fifth (The Way of the World) was produced there in the same year. Among his subsequent plays, the most distinguished were perhaps The Truth (1906) and The City (1909). Although Fitch was a versatile dramatist, he was most at home with the comedy of man- ners, and he gained his major successes in this field. The author of thirty- three plays in two decades, he was without any doubt America's most distinguished playwright in the prewar years.
New York City's location, wealth, and size eventually made it the musical as well as the theatrical capital of the United States. Although Boston held this position for some years after the Civil War and no New York music school ranked with Boston's New England Conservatory, by the turn of the century New York's supremacy was, nevertheless, uncontested. As late as World War I, the United States had virtually no serious music of its own. But if Americans found it difficult to produce a native music, they found it relatively easy to fill the void with European imports. And this fact was in part responsible for New York City's pre- eminence in musical affairs, for it served as the principal port of entry for Europe's outstanding musical performers and masterpieces. It was, moreover, one of the few cities in the nation that could meet the costs involved in the production of serious music by professionals. For ap- proximately a decade and a half after the Civil War the musical life of the city centered on the concerts of the Philharmonic Orchestra, the activities of various choral and orchestral societies, and the performances
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of European concert stars and opera companies. Whether the performers were natives or foreigners, amateurs or professionals, the music was in- variably European.
A landmark in the city's music history was the founding of the Metro- politan Opera Company in 1883 by a group of wealthy New Yorkers who could not obtain boxes at the Academy of Music. Although the first season was a financial disaster and Leopold Damrosch, the company's director, died in the middle of the 1884-1885 season, within fifteen years of its founding the Metropolitan was a firmly established New York in- stitution and the only American opera company to rival those of Europe. In 1903 Enrico Caruso made his debut at the Metropolitan; five years later Giulio Gatti-Casazza became its director, and Alfred Hertz, Gustav Mahler, and Arturo Toscanini became conductors.
While New York City had ample facilities for the production of music, it produced few notable musicians and composers. It had several music schools, but none approached either the New England Conservatory or the better institutions in Europe. Most performers appearing in New York were Europeans offering European works. This was not so much a manifestation of cultural snobbism as it was an indication of the paucity of native talent. Edward Alexander MacDowell, who was born in New York City and taught at Columbia from 1896 to 1904, was a composer who was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, but his position was unusual enough to be unique. It is significant that From the New World, which is generally recognized as the outstanding symphony with an American theme composed before World War I, was the work of Anton Dvořák, a Czech, whose only firsthand knowledge of the United States was acquired during the four years he served as the director of the National Conservatory in New York City. Popular music, on the other hand, was both made and consumed in America. Although jazz as late as 1910 was played by only a small number of musicians in New Orleans, ragtime was a national craze and almost all of its composers worked in New York City's Tin Pan Alley.
Other cities in the state, lacking New York City's resources, had to rely almost exclusively on touring professionals and amateur organizations for musical entertainment. Most cities had an academy of music (Brooklyn's, for example, was founded in 1859 and Rochester's in 1864), where local choral societies and orchestras as well as touring stars performed. Adelina Patti, Ignace Paderewski, and Theodore Thomas were among the musi- cians known and admired in such cities as Syracuse, Rochester, and Buf- falo, while visits from opera companies and Gilbert and Sullivan troupes were annual occurrences. Immigrant groups often took the lead in form- ing musical organizations. There was at least one German singing society in every city, and Buffalo had two musical societies founded by and for
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the city's Poles. A further indication of the widespread interest in music throughout the state were the annual music festivals sponsored by numerous New York communities.
If wealth made New York City the nation's principal cultural center, wealth also made it the home and focal point of what is generally termed "society." Before the Civil War the city's aristocracy had been composed of old families whose members for generations had lived off the income derived from real estate holdings and mercantile enterprises. Following the war, the old aristocracy's supremacy was challenged by men-or perhaps, more accurately, by the wives of men-who had made their own fortunes as industrial capitalists. The situation became so alarming that in the 1880's Mrs. William Astor, with the assistance and tutelage of Ward McAllister, set herself up as the queen and dictator of the highest echelons of American society. To gain entree into this self-proclaimed aristocracy required an invitation from Mrs. Astor, and this, in turn, could be obtained only by those who had secured McAllister's approval. Society, as organized by Mrs. Astor and McAllister, required that its members follow a strict and expensive routine. Attendance at the opera was virtually compulsory. Everyone had to make a point of spending outrageous amounts of money on balls and other parties to which were invited only those on whom Mrs. Astor had smiled. An interest in horses was almost mandatory, and every male member was expected to belong to at least one exclusive club. A mansion on Fifth Avenue was not abso- lutely essential, but it certainly did no harm. In the summer, Newport, Rhode Island, was considered the most desirable of all resorts, although several well-to-do New Yorkers had country homes at Tuxedo Park.
Mrs. Astor's reign ended with her death in 1908, but long before this the barriers had been let down. Despite all efforts, money had its way, and it seldom required more than a generation for the new rich to become old aristocrats. Moreover, throughout her reign New York never lacked men who had money and were willing to spend it on their own entertain- ment regardless of the dictates of Mrs. Astor. Vulgar, uninhibited, and raucous, such men gravitated to the one city in which they could purchase the pleasures they desired with fortunes obtained from speculation, jobbery, and corruption. Jim Fisk, who was murdered by the lover of his mistress, was an example of this type before Mrs. Astor had mounted her throne, and "Diamond Jim" Brady with his matching sets of jewels ("Them as has 'em, wears 'em," he liked to tell admirers) and his spectacularly beautiful women was a worthy successor to Fisk during Mrs. Astor's declining years. These big spenders and gay livers, along with their gaudy companions, never would have been admitted to New- port or Tuxedo Park, but this presented no problem, for they preferred Saratoga (or Saratoga Springs, to call it by its actual name). New York's
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oldest spa drew many visitors who wished to benefit from the curative effects of its renowned mineral springs, and several of Mrs. Astor's fol- lowers were there during the racing season, but its reputation rested on its attraction for the flashier residents of New York City. Famed for its race track, its rich men and beautiful women, the invention of the potato chip and the Saratoga trunk, and its two enormous hotels, Saratoga was the gaudiest of America's nineteenth-century summer resorts.
Neither Fisk nor Brady ever attempted to storm the citadels of high society; but like Mrs. Astor and her followers, they helped to make New York City as pre-eminent in conspicuous consumption as it was in every other field of endeavor. And conspicuous consumption was not altogether unrelated to the city's leadership in the arts. Sponsoring the opera or endowing museums and libraries was one of the accepted ways of con- verting the owner of a mere fortune into an aristocrat, while even those plutocrats of the Fisk and Brady stripe were enthusiastic supporters of the popular stage. This system of subsidizing the arts through patrons who had more money than taste may have been wasteful, but it was the only system that was known at the time, and it deserves to be judged by its results.
New York City's leadership in arts and letters did not always endear it to the rest of the United States. Those living west of the Hudson and north of the Bronx often considered the city more European than Ameri- can, and they accused its citizens of lacking all the pioneer virtues that had made the nation great. But critics could not help being influenced by what they professed to despise. The countryside could cherish its past, but the present and future of intellectual America had been monopo- lized by the metropolis. Culture had become a commodity, and New Yorkers were its largest producers. Most other Americans had to be con- tent with being consumers.
Chapter 42
Changing . Cultural Horizons
A wise people, like a wise individual, takes counsel of things in the making as well as those already entered on the books. Indeed, it may always hope to devise or revise the future whereas the past lies beyond recall.
-ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER
THE first half of the twentieth century wrought changes in the cultural atmosphere of New York State almost as radical as those which occurred in its technical and industrial structure. Essentially, these changes served to make the state more homogeneous, to bind its different areas more intimately together. A few years before World War I a good deal of the state still lived, culturally, in what has been well called "the golden age of homespun." Despite heavy concentrations of industry in major cities, a man could still live in the traditional complex of separate communities, plying a handicraft industry, or acting the role of a sturdy, independent proprietor who was his own master economically, socially, and culturally. After World War II this pattern was a rarity-for most New Yorkers nothing more than a nostalgic memory cherished by a dwindling group of old-timers. Bombarded by new inventions and applications of the communications industries, the twentieth-century New Yorker was mag- nificently and continuously in touch with everyone and everything. Sometimes he may have felt too much in touch, but the fact of change was not to be denied. By telephone, radio, newspaper, television, air- plane, railroad, and motorcar, by magazines, newspapers, billboards, and by the immense, intricate, yet almost intangible impulses of mass production, the inhabitants of the state were enabled, encouraged, and impelled to communicate with one another. Pessimists sometimes pro- claimed that the process led to standardized human beings, and perhaps it did. But it led in other directions, too-as will perhaps appear, if we look at the process itself in more detail.
If the prompt and widespread dissemination of basic information is
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an essential of democracy, New York State became infinitely more demo- cratic during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The news- papers of the state had, in 1950, a combined daily circulation of about nine million copies. That is an enormous number of daily newspapers, and from this many newspapers a great deal of information can be gleaned. To be sure, on any given day most of the headlines might blare forth information about the latest sex crime, love nest, gang murder, or confidence swindle. But if one wanted to, one could gain some general information from even the yellowest of the yellow journals. And, over the years, New York built up a tradition of publishing, not only a few loud yellow scandal sheets, but also the nation's most intelligent and free-ranging journalism.
The New York Times, for example, is a metropolitan daily; it reprints the wire-service stories, keeps the public informed of local developments, and covers the police news. One can even find accounts of sex crimes and love nests in the Times, though they will be hidden under small, quiet captions at the bottom of page 46. But in addition, the Times gives unexampled coverage to national and international news stories. Its team of correspondents is carefully selected, highly trained, and widely dis- persed; and it keeps the Times reader up to the minute on developments in Kuala Lumpur and Marrakesh-as well as in Washington, D.C. The importance of such day-to-day coverage in the conduct of democratic government is indicated by the fact that most congressmen and senators subscribe to the Times as well as to their own local papers. What the Times says often influences national legislation; and to question the accuracy of a Times story is to question, almost, the public record itself.
Not only does the Times offer an unequaled opportunity for the inter- ested reader to keep up with current events as they happen; through constant surveys, reviews, and feature articles, it provides guidance through the confusing masses of contemporary detail. Its surveys of educational developments are models of their kind; its reporting of scien- tific discoveries is lucid, detailed, and exact; its political analyses, though in the nature of things they can never please everyone, are usually thorough and painstaking. The Times reader must have at least one mark of a mature mind, a long attention-span; for the writing is often prolix by journalistic standards. Still, the Times is a great newspaper, and a worthy American counterpart to its famous London namesake. Its hun- dredth anniversary, celebrated in 1951, brought world-wide tributes. Other fine newspapers in New York are the Herald Tribune (like the Times, a morning paper ), and the World-Telegram and Sun, which ap- pears in the afternoon. The Daily News and Daily Mirror (established 1924) are tabloids as was the now extinct Graphic; these papers are small of size and sensational in coverage, with short stories and big
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