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i

Spectacular Men
iii

Spectacular Men
Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early
American Stage
vwv
Sarah E. Chinn

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​065367–​5

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

For Kris, who makes all things possible

vi
vii

CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: “Advancing the interests of private and political virtue”:

The Stakes of the Early American Stage   1
1. “The Imitation of Life”: How Men Act   31
2. American Actors/​Acting American   48
3. “O patriotism!/​Thou wond’rous principle of god-​like action!”: The Changing
Meanings of the Revolution   84
4. Love and Death: Staging Indigenous Masculinity   126
5. Tyrants, Republicans, and Rebels: Performing Roman Masculinities   171
Epilogue: From Sons of Liberty to Wage Slaves   210

Notes  215
Works Cited   233
Index  241

( vii )
viii
ix

AC K N O W L E D GM E N T S

This book grew out of an October 2001 discussion at the Nineteenth Century
American Women Writers colloquium—​a group to whom I owe more than
I can say, and whose pioneering founders have carried me on their shoulders
from graduate school to the present day. The readings assigned for that meet-
ing were by women playwrights, and together comprised an amazing mix
of melodrama, comedy, historical romance, and rom-​com. For the first time
I encountered the rich world of the nineteenth-​century American stage. As
soon as I got home, I started putting together a syllabus for a course in early
American drama, and that world opened up for me even more. At the time,
my first book had just been published, and I was already working on the sec-
ond, but this weird, emotionally intense, declamatory, overwrought material
stayed with me. As I taught my drama course to undergraduates and MA stu-
dents, and became increasingly involved in the community of scholars of the
early American stage, I knew I had to write about it.
Although I met him only once or twice, and he died just as I was entering
the field in earnest, this book would not have been possible without the work
of Jeffrey H. Richards. His love for, and his encyclopedic knowledge of, the
American theater of the early republic and antebellum years inspired much
more accomplished scholars than me, and, despite his premature death, will
most likely outlive us too. I am also grateful to his predecessors: the mad com-
pletists George C. D. Odell, editor of the Annals of the New York Stage, a fifteen-​
volume compendium of cast lists, reviews, theatrical news, and gossip; and
Barrett H. Clark, editor of the twenty-​one-​volume anthology America’s Lost
Plays. Their passion for the American stage has provided a bounty of resources
for scholars.
Thanks to Brendan O’Neill at Oxford University Press, who believed in
this book from the beginning, and whose faith in it was a major support.
Thanks, too, to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, whose input
helped me understand this project in contexts I had not considered. Their
comments made Spectacular Men much stronger than I could have managed
on my own.

( ix )
x

(x) Acknowledgments

Almost every word in this book was read, critiqued, reconstructed, reimag-
ined, and reworked by a group of scholars with whom I have been sharing
and exchanging writing for over a decade: Jeff Allred, Sophie Bell, Anna Mae
Duane, Joseph Entin, Hildegard Hoeller, Jennifer Travis, and Margaret Toth.
Special thanks to Joseph, who helped me realize that this was as much a book
about the emergence of an urban white working class as it was a cultural his-
tory of the plays of the early republic; this is not the first time that he has been
able to identify what I am doing well before I do. And a thousand thanks go out
to Anna Mae: a comrade in co-​editing, invaluable interlocutor, and precious
friend, who, when I asked her to read the entire manuscript of this book one
more time, jumped in with generosity of spirit and of intellect.
The last two years of working on Spectacular Men coincided with my first
two years as chair of the English Department at Hunter College. I could not
have maintained my sanity without the comradeship and support of my fellow
chairs in the School of Arts and Sciences, especially Elke Nicolai, Paolo Fasoli,
Catherine Raissiguier, Ida Susser, Sam DiIorio, Mary Roldán, Donna Haverty-​
Stacke, Laura Keating, Anthony Browne, and Devra Golbe. Angela Reyes has
been a steadfast deputy chair, whose friendship I value even more than her
wisdom and organizational acumen. Leah Light, Casandra Murray, and Meg
Williams make running a large department under ongoing austerity look easy,
and Thom Taylor is an incomparable magician, whose retirement I anticipate
with dread and the knowledge that he is truly irreplaceable.
This book would have been impossible without the myriad conversations
with friends and colleagues that make up the invisible, tensile, nourishing web
that we call scholarly community. With every interchange I felt like Antaeus,
the son of Poseidon and Gaia, whose strength was restored and redoubled
every time he touched the ground. Thanks for this to Elizabeth Abele, Sari
Altschuler, Robin Bernstein, Paul Fess, Brigitte Fielder, Jen Gaboury, Ellen
Gruber Garvey, Jeremy Glick, Glenn Hendler, Lucia Hodgson, Matthew
Knip, Laura Mielke, Heather Nathans, Janet Neary, Rupal Oza, Corey Robin,
Julia Miele Rodas, Justin Rogers-​Cooper, Karen Sanchéz-​Eppler, Jonathan
Senchyne, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Ida Susser, Rosie Uyola, and Priscilla Wald,
among many others.
Thanks, too, to all my students at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate Center,
some of whom have become enduring friends. It is no coincidence that all my
scholarly work has proceeded from my teaching: I am inspired and encouraged
by my students every day. They remind me that New York’s working class is
always renewing, always bringing new energies to the city and to the world,
and always learning new ways of being; and my students are always teaching
these new ways to me.
xi

Acknowledgments ( xi )

My father, Geoffrey Chinn, died suddenly and unexpectedly just as my last

book was published and as I was starting work on this one. If I learned a love
of reading, the fierce fun of intellectual engagement, and a (not unambivalent)
appetite for argument from anyone, it was from him. I am still learning what
his loss means to me, but I feel it keenly. My mother, Carol Chinn, has been
an example of resilience to all of us. I am endlessly amazed by my children,
Gabriel and Lia, as they occupy adolescence with élan and only the required
quotient of angst.
The constant of the last thirty years of my life has been that every morning
I open my eyes and see Kris Franklin. Without her I cannot imagine what or
who I would be; I only know that I would be much diminished. She talked me
through this book from its inception to its final pages, and what it has in clar-
ity and organization I owe to her. I am continually struck by her generosity, her
joy, her incisiveness, her wisdom. She has shown me how many things are tied
up in the word “love.”
xii
xiii

Spectacular Men
xiv
1

Introduction
“Advancing the interests of private
and political virtue”: The Stakes
of the Early American Stage

[T]‌hat decline in the dignity and usefulness of the stage … is now acknowledged on all hands
to be notorious in England, and as an almost inevitable consequence in this country. For
ourselves, we cannot but lament it most deeply, as one of those indications that point with
unerring finger to the absence of that wholesome, manly and vigorous taste, which may be
said always to mark the best periods in the history of every civilized country.
James K. Paulding, American Drama
Inasmuch as we may hereafter deviate from the models left to us by our ancestors, it will
only be, as we hope, in a more severe and manly character, induced by our republican institu-
tions, and approaching the high tone of the Greek drama … A people literally self-​governed,
and guided by the experience and accumulated science of Asia, and Africa, and Europe, must
appreciate liberty and feel patriotism as no other people did.
William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre

W hy did writers, audiences, and critics of early American drama insist

on “manliness” as a necessary attribute of the American stage? And
what does manliness even mean in this context? It has long been a truism
of early American drama studies that from the colonial period until the Civil
War, theaters were dominated by men: male playwrights and male managers,
yes, but most importantly, almost completely male audiences. While in the
years before and just after the American Revolution, the manners of male

(1)
2

(2) Introduction

theatregoers reflected the genteel tendencies of the elite, by 1800 theaters

were generally patronized by workingmen who, unlike their elite predeces-
sors, brought in alcohol from nearby taverns, smoked cigars, ate, and pro-
cured prostitutes during performances (Butsch 35). As the country entered
the new century, American theaters were developing into bastions of the male
working classes—​places to which respectable women rarely, if ever, went, and
that more elite men attended in the context of slumming or for an uproari-
ous night out as much as for theatrical entertainment. In the South, although
audiences were fairly rigidly segregated by race (enslaved and free black spec-
tators could sit only in the upper galleries, if they were admitted at all), they
were nonetheless strikingly heterogeneous, not to say rowdy.
So by 1827, when writer, playwright, and one-​time Secretary of the US
Navy James K. Paulding’s lament for the integrity of the British stage (quoted
above) was intended to rouse American playwrights to action, the assumption
that plays should encapsulate the “wholesome, manly and vigorous taste” that
“mark[s]‌the best periods in the history of every civilized country” was enough
of a given that Paulding hardly had to argue for this point of view. Citing the
fact that nearly sixty American-​authored plays of various kinds were in circula-
tion, Paulding moved effortlessly from aesthetic consideration of plays that “if
represented on our stage, with the advantage of good scenery and good acting,
would, or at least ought to be successful” (332), to a suturing of the dramatic,
national, and gendered virtues of the American theater.
Paulding was writing at a transitional moment in the history of the American
stage. As he noted, US-​born playwrights were carving out a niche for them-
selves, amid British imports and translations of German and French plays, to
create a new, nationally identified dramatic literature. However, what was con-
sidered the golden age of the nineteenth-​century American stage, populated by
such figures as Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Edwin Booth, was just
emerging from a theatrical tradition peopled primarily by British expats and
new migrants. Moreover, as I shall show in the pages that follow, rapid politi-
cal and economic changes in the first decades of the new republic ushered in a
distinctive connection between the construction of the nation and the develop-
ment of the American theater—​a connection that intensified in the first third
of the nineteenth century alongside immense demographic and electoral shifts.
One of the central terms of Paulding’s analysis above is “manly.” To a certain
extent, “manly” was inextricable from Paulding’s other adjectives in that sen-
tence, “wholesome” and “vigorous.” Paulding is not only offering a critic’s view
of the state of American theater in the closing years of the 1820s; he is also lay-
ing out an agenda for the American stage. Plays should be more than aesthetic
or dramatic successes; rather, they are crucial elements in the construction of
a strong, resilient, virtuous American masculinity, a kind of maleness that is
paradigmatic of “every civilized country.”
3

Introduction (3)

These intersections of theatrical, national, and masculine achievement are

exactly what this book explores. I argue that early American drama (from just
after the Revolution until the Jacksonian era) both produces and reflects cru-
cial ideas about manhood, national belonging, and the political and economic
changes facing both the nation and the theatrical industry in the years of the
early republic. As I shall show, the stage was a central mechanism for dissemi-
nating patriotic feeling and national identity, and as a predominantly male
arena, theatrical productions spoke to American men, especially white men in
the emerging working and middle classes, embodying their desires and fears,
and physically enacting the possible trajectories the nation might follow.
Indeed, as much as it is a literary history of the early American stage,
Spectacular Men is in many ways an alternative history of American mascu-
linity that takes the plays of the early Republic as its archive. I argue, too,
that the plays of the period provide us access not only to the political and
social elites, who have constituted the dominant subject of inquiry in anal-
yses of early American masculinity, but also to the less clearly articulated
tastes and political leanings of the urban workingmen who were increasingly
the audience of the plays I discuss. Workingmen—​or “mechanics,” as they
were called at the time—​might not have been able to vote in elections until
well into the nineteenth century, but in the theater they voted with their
feet. To succeed, plays had to represent the situations, follow the preferred
dramatic conventions, and express the values of the people who bought the
tickets.
Contemporary critics took for granted that the stage was the domain of the
working classes, and that theater should be not just entertaining but also edi-
fying. That this function was self-​evident is itself remarkable: there is no inevi-
table reason that manliness should be a necessary component of the American
stage, or that American drama should be “wholesome” and “vigorous” instead
of, say, “debauched,” “barbarous,” or “brutifying”—​words Paulding uses to
characterize other forms of popular entertainment like bear-​baiting and box-
ing matches (333). But Paulding is careful to point out the educational and
civilizing work that drama can do, especially when “the price of admittance
is within the means of the ordinary classes of people” (333). Theaters can
function as

a substitute, and a most salutary one, for tavern brawls and low debauchery …
[and] chastity, fortitude, patriotism, and magnanimity, are virtues of all classes of
mankind, and … all can feel and comprehend them, though they may be exercised
in circumstances and situations in which they never expect to be placed. (333)

Paulding’s concern that theater be both accessible and enlightening is a result

of the democratization of both drama and politics in the United States in the
4

(4) Introduction

early nineteenth century. White workingmen gained political power, most

notably the franchise (that is, the right to vote in local, state, and federal
elections), increasingly in the first third of the nineteenth century, even as
they edged out free blacks and the few women who had access to political pro-
cesses. As Sean Wilentz shows in his magisterial study, The Rise of American
Democracy, over the course of the early nineteenth century, the franchise was
increasingly equated with white maleness. In 1821, the revised New York
Constitution expanded the vote to unpropertied white men—​even as it pre-
ventatively disenfranchised the thousands of enslaved black men due to be
emancipated within the next few years.
These changes were enacted, both literally and metaphorically, on the
American stage—​ which means that these ideas spread throughout the
expanding territories of the United States. By the time the US Constitution
was ratified in 1789, there were theaters or theatrical companies in residence
in every major city along the eastern seaboard, as well as in more inland towns
in the South (Richards 1). As the frontier extended, theatrical companies fol-
lowed, from western Pennsylvania, to Ohio, and across the plains. In the early
1800s these companies, both professional and semi-​professional, performed
three to four times a week for a formal season of September through May, and
often toured during the summer to smaller towns that had no local troupe.
Supporters of the theater saw within it the potential for civic education and
engagement, the training of Americans toward virtue. For many American men,
especially men in the expanding working classes, the stage was the site in which
concerns about identity, masculinity, political power, and the relationship of
the self to others and the individual to the group were worked through.1 So,
I would argue, if we want to know which texts most powerfully expressed the
primary anxieties, desires, assumptions, and aspirations of and for American
masculinity in the years of the early republic, we should look to the stage.
This is hardly a new supposition. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “[i]‌f
you want advance knowledge of the literature of a people which is turning
toward democracy, pay attention to the theater” (489). Tocqueville recog-
nized how quickly populism informed the theater and took control of it—​in
his words, “the pit often lays down the law for the boxes” (490). Moreover,
popular audiences wanted the stage to speak directly to them, “to see the pres-
ent world mirrored” (490).2 And playwrights delivered. As Jeffrey H. Richards
argues,

From its humble origins in the colonial period to the all-​pervasiveness of the stage
in the mid-​nineteenth century, the American theatre displayed before its citizens a
variety of depictions of characters and types that gave back clues about the ways in
which residents of the United States imagined who they were—​or were not. (17)
5

Introduction (5)

Although this attention to the cultural significance of the early American

stage may be well-​established in field of theater history, wider critical analy-
sis of theater as a signifier of American national self-​fashioning runs counter
to a long-​running trend in US literary studies, which has looked to prose—​
especially the novel—​for insight into American national and cultural forma-
tion. As scholars have shown, the novel was a formational genre especially for
the American middle class, particularly but not exclusively women.3 The novel
schooled its readers in appropriate domestic behavior, affective relations, and
the interactions between social classes, races, and genders. Arguments around
canonicity, literary and cultural history, and indeed, the meanings of American
culture, have looked to the novel as an explanatory technology, and charted
generic developments alongside national changes.
There are important reasons for this focus on the novel, especially in the
second half of the twentieth century. The immense influence of groundbreak-
ing critical work like F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance and Leslie
Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel positioned prose, especially long
fiction, as the tape by which literary importance was measured. The crucial
work done by feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s to reclaim and recon-
textualize late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century American novels
that were organized around women’s lives and concerns revolutionized and
remade American literary criticism. These novels spoke to, for, about, and with
(mostly, although not exclusively, white middle-​class) women, a population
almost wholly ignored by the critical establishment.
But the novel can only take us so far, especially since the printed word
was hardly accessible to the majority of the population, while the theater was
available to almost everyone. Print may have been crucial to those men of the
“privileged elites that controlled the formal creation of the new state apparatus
in 1776 and beyond,” but if we reach beyond the educated men of the land-​
owning classes, print artifacts are few and far between for most people in the
early republic (Loughran 22). While literacy rates in some parts of the country,
especially New England, were fairly high even among working-​class people, the
mid-​Atlantic states, where the theater dominated, lagged behind. By 1840 only
half of the white children between the ages of five and nineteen in these states
were attending schools, which suggests a comparatively low level of literacy
(Moran and Vinoskis 291). The numbers in the Southern states were even lower
(indeed, by mid-​century, a higher proportion of free blacks in New England
and the Mid-​Atlantic were in school than were whites in the South [Moran and
Vinoskis 293]). Between 1790 and 1840, among Philadelphia’s merchant sea-
men (a popular occupation for workingmen), almost a third were unable to sign
their names. This may not be a direct indication of illiteracy, since many children
learned to read even if they could not write, but it is certainly a corollary to it.
6

(6) Introduction

Moreover, books and periodicals were often beyond the financial reach
of wage earners. For decades after the Revolution, many books for sale in
the United States were imports, for which booksellers paid retail plus ship-
ping, and then marked them up accordingly (Green 76). Improvements in
the technology of printing books domestically do not seem to have reduced
prices significantly before 1840, and even though the cost of most durable
and perishable goods halved in the first four decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury, paper and book production and labor costs did not decline nearly as
much (Green 112). James N. Green cites a retail price of two dollars for a
typical board-​bound two-​volume novel in 1820 (although he cautions that
book prices varied greatly)—​a meaningful sum for unskilled and semiskilled
workers whose daily wages ranged from one to two dollars per day (Wilentz,
Chants 419).
Theater tickets, on the other hand, were dropping in price and offered a full
evening of entertainment, from tragedies and melodramas to farces, songs,
dancing, and even animal acts. From the Revolution to the end of the cen-
tury, prices plummeted from the equivalent of an artisan’s day’s pay to a third
of that (Butsch 33). By the 1830s, ticket prices were half of what they had
been at the beginning of the century, and the economic shifts to wage labor
meant that workingmen had more access to cash with which to buy admission
to the theater (Butsch 40). Before changes in print technology in the 1840s,
the entire run of a moderately successful novel rarely topped three thousand
copies. By contrast, a large theater like the Bowery held up to 3,500 people a
night over the course of a months-​long season.4 Even a smaller theater like
that in Richmond, VA, could seat 750 people as well as standing room. In Mark
Mullen’s words, theater was “the mass media of the antebellum period” (36).
And with the stage as their dominant cultural form, workingmen demanded
and received quite a different set of ideological directives from their upper-​
class counterparts.
This is all to say that if we want a cultural index to the nation’s shift from
a republic organized around the leadership of elites selecting other elites to
represent the people, to a democracy focused on direct representation through
the power of the vote, the most useful place to look is the American stage,
with its development of a home-​grown theatrical tradition dominated, by the
second decade of the nineteenth century, by workingmen. Trish Loughran
has punctured the widespread assumption, rooted in the foundational work
of Benedict Anderson and Michael Warner, that there was such a thing as a
national print culture, arguing instead that there were multiple, regionally
specific (dis)articulations of national identity. I would extend and invert her
argument, though, claiming the early American stage as a site of emerging
national consciousness among working people.
7

Introduction (7)

Unlike print, which depends upon virtual connections between writer and
reader and among readers themselves, the theater requires the simultane-
ous embodied presence of actors and audience—​a collaborative, experiential
collectivity moving through the same temporal frame in the same space. As
Joseph Roach has argued, “the theatre became a site of the transformation as
well as the transmission of American identities” (“Emergence of the American
Actor” 341). One of the primary mechanisms for the communication of cul-
tural values during the years of the early republic was the theater, a vibrant
laboratory of highly wrought emotion, patriotic claims, and a variety of
national and regional “types” that a surprisingly high proportion of Americans
sought out and had access to. No wonder, then, that American-​authored plays
of the period engaged so actively with questions of national identity, which
were inextricable from “appropriate” masculinity.
American playwrights in the early republic were well aware of the connec-
tions between the stage, national identity, and masculinity, and they produced
scripts that spoke directly to those linkages. The material conditions of the
theater, in which audiences were actively involved in what was happening
onstage, shouted out requests to actors, and exercised what Richard Butsch
has called “audience sovereignty,” constructed a dramatic literature that
engaged with the cultural and political concerns of its viewers, much as the
nineteenth-​century novel spoke directly to the fears, desires, and hopes of its
burgeoning class of female bourgeois readers. “This closeness of audience con-
trol,” in David Grimsted’s words, “made the drama more than any art form,
the theater as much as any social institution, immediately sensitive to public
opinion” (62).5 That is to say, managers, playwrights, actors, and theater com-
panies responded to their audiences, who “not only participated in the theater
from the sidelines, but also shifted the way the theater functioned, from seat-
ing practices to acting styles to dramatic content” (Rebhorn 17). Moreover, as
Butsch argues, and as I believe the plays written in the United States at the end
of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth centuries show, theater
audiences not only were “conceived as a body politic and acted collectively,”
but they also looked to the stage for clues to how they might understand their
new and rapidly changing role in the world as workers, as voters, as cultural
actors, and as men.
As Jane Tompkins, Karen Halttunen, and others have shown, just as novels
and magazine stories were guides for women and girls, instructing them in
how to behave (that is how to be mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives; how
to comport themselves in public and private; and, most importantly, how to
understand their places in the world), plays functioned as a kind of conduct
literature for workingmen. Like other conduct literature, American-​authored
plays from this period are both prescriptive and cautionary. They lay out
8

(8) Introduction

idealized models of manhood, and anatomize the pitfalls that American men
need to avoid in order to contribute fully to their families, communities, and
nation. More often than not, American playwrights looked to the past, both
recent and distant, to find models for their audiences to emulate, but in their
prologues, epilogues, and author’s notes, they explicitly linked these historical
events to the present day.

“A THEATRE, WHERE THE ACTIONS OF THE GREAT

AND VIRTUOUS MEN ARE REPRESENTED, WILL ADVANCE
THE INTERESTS OF PRIVATE AND POLITICAL VIRTUE”:
THE AMERICAN STAGE AND REPUBLICAN VIRTUE

From the beginning of Anglophone settlement, theater faced an uphill battle

to establish itself in the British American colonies, especially in New England.6
The Puritan opposition to theater focused on the stage as a site of sin: act-
ing was barely distinguishable from lying and theatergoing was aligned with
idolatry. To the extent that audiences believed what they saw on stage to be
truthful, plays encouraged violence, sexual misconduct, and social discord.
These objections were less of an issue in the Southern colonies, but acting
was still considered a disreputable profession, and, anyway, most Southern
towns lacked the density of population to support a permanent theater. There
was little in the way of homegrown theatrical entertainment throughout the
colonial period: although professional and amateur companies played in New
York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Williamsburg throughout the eighteenth
century, professional actors were brought in almost exclusively from Britain or
the Caribbean colonies. Indeed, the first permanent US company was imported
as a whole in the mid-​1750s: Lewis Hallam’s London Company (later renamed
the American Company).
Unlike in France and England, there was no “official,” state-​ regulated
American theater. The disadvantages of this were obvious: a state theater is
financially supported by the citizenry and/​or the crown, and therefore needs
to rely on ticket sales merely to supplement its income, rather than gener-
ate it altogether. And as it turned out, the history of the American stage was
one of bankruptcies, sudden closings, and shady business dealings of all kinds.
On the plus side, however, lack of state support can be made up for by com-
parative lack of state control; whereas the official European theaters were con-
strained in the kinds of plays they could perform,7 theaters on the American
side of the Atlantic had no such limits. They were free to stage anything from
Shakespeare to farce to animal acts. And theater companies could be formed
by anyone with the money, access to actors, and the will to do so.
9

Introduction (9)

Access to actors, however, was a significant obstacle to the formation of

an American theatrical tradition. British actors and companies dominated
the American stage for decades, and as Gary Richardson has pointed out, this
Anglocentrism “encourag[ed] American authors to write plays whose subject
matter and style seemed as much ‘British’ as ‘American’ ”(255). Despite the
distance of an ocean, productions that did well on the British boards swiftly
found their way to the colonies: for example, Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy
She Stoops to Conquer opened at the American Company’s New York Theatre in
the same year that it first appeared in London (Bigsby and Wilmeth 7). And
the perennial popularity of Shakespeare meant that there was little incentive
for North American playwrights to produce dramas.
Jeffrey H. Richards has argued, in his important and field-​defining book
Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic, that this British
influence suffused American drama well beyond the colonial period, and that
“when Americans thought of or participated in the theatre [in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries], they entered into a cultural space that was transat-
lantic and without fixed national borders” (4). Indeed, as he maintains,

[d]‌espite efforts by playwrights like John Murdock, Judith Sargeant Murray, James
Nelson Barker, and others to set plays in the United States and dwell on themes
of citizenship and national character, most spectators saw something else, on the
surface at least—​a procrustean bed of plots and characters imported and recycled in
which one strained to hear a syllable spoken on things American. (314)

In many ways he is right—​the vernaculars of the American stage found

many of their origins in their British counterparts and, as I argue in Chapter
2, American actors had to struggle to establish themselves as equivalent to
British performers. However, in the wake of the Revolution, many Americans
looked to the stage as a place to construct national identity as much through
analogy and allegory as through producing plays that dealt with the here and
now. True, only a few American-​authored plays spoke explicitly to the con-
temporary American scene—​but the same themes of masculine self-​mas-
tery, the rewards and dangers of popular rule, and the appeal and threat of
violence emerged out of these plays, whether set in ancient Rome, colonial
Massachusetts, or present-​day Virginia.8
More to the point, playwrights, actors, audience members, and cultural
commentators wrote often and at length about the potential of the stage to
usher in a new national identity organized around American republican virtue.
One of the arguments used to repeal the Massachusetts ban on the theater
(which was eventually lifted in 1793) was that “a theatre, where the actions of
great and virtuous men are represented, will advance the interests of private
10

( 10 ) Introduction

and political virtue” (Dunlap 128). Countering claims of immorality, sup-

porters of the theater maintained that “a theatre in the hands of a republican
government, regulated and directed as such, would be, instead of a dangerous
instrument, a happy and efficient one” (Dunlap 61).
This kind of political engineering was made easier by the fact that, despite
their theoretical freedom, actual early American theater companies were few
and far between. As Faye Dudden has observed, “American theatre in 1790 was
marginal, provincial, and disreputable—​a craft in the first stages of becoming a
small business” (5). The John Street Theatre, which opened in 1767 in New York,
held a “virtual monopoly” on dramatic productions in the city until its closing
in 1797 (Henderson 27). That same year, a group of influential New Yorkers
pooled their resources to fund the building of the Park Theatre, an enterprise
that cost almost $130,000, and that, having lost money for the first several
seasons, they sold a few years later to John Jacob Astor and John Beekman,
who leased it to new management, among them playwright, actor, and theater
historian William Dunlap (Henderson 50). While other theaters opened and
closed between 1800 and 1820, the Park had minimal competition, until the
construction of the Chatham Gardens Theatre in 1824 (Henderson 58).
The story in Philadelphia was similar, where the Chestnut Street Theatre,
founded by famed comic actor Thomas Wignell in 1791, dominated the scene.
A competing theater was built on Walnut Street in 1809, but it featured eques-
trian circus acts only until 1812, when the company staged Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s comedy, The Rivals.9 Similarly, Richmond and Baltimore each had
only one theater well into the nineteenth century, and after the Richmond
Theatre burned to the ground in 1811, a new building was not constructed
until 1819, leaving the city without a formal playhouse for almost a decade
(Click 34).
At the same time, the theater rapidly became a national phenomenon, and
was thought of as such. This was not only because productions that origi-
nated in the theatrical centers of New York and Philadelphia soon toured to
outer areas and across the South, although the movement of companies up
and down the eastern seaboard over the course of the year did help spread a
culture of performance nationwide.10 Theater was also seen as an important
source of patriotic pride—​nation-​forming and character-​building—​especially
for American men. The growth of the US theater “accompanied Americans on
their political journey from colony to nation, on their physical journey from
Atlantic to Pacific, and on their ontological journey toward a sense of national
identity” (Bigsby and Wilmeth 15).
Although the venues for theatrical performance were limited in the early
years of the republic, enthusiasm about the stage grew enormously in the
same period. This was in marked contrast to the pre-​revolutionary era. During
11

Introduction ( 11 )

the late colonial era, as Heather Nathans has shown, theaters were identified
with British elites. In response to the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act
of 1765, the Sons of Liberty stormed the Chapel Street Theatre in New York
in May 1766, in “an outpouring of anti-​British sentiment” (Nathans 25). The
Continental Congress banned theatrical productions for the duration of the
Revolutionary War (a ban relieved only by the British occupation of New York
from 1776 to 1783), and, as Nathans argues, “by the end of the war, for many
citizens antitheatricalism had become identified with patriotism, and, by
extension, republican virtue” (39).
After the Revolution, prominent citizens in Boston and Philadelphia main-
tained the association between the theater and elites by arguing that play-
houses could, in the words of a 1791 petition to Boston’s selectmen to lift
the ban on the theater, “have the tendency to polish the manners and habits
and society, to disseminate the social affections, and to improve and refine
the literary taste of our rising republic” (qtd. in Nathans 60). Ongoing class
divisions, embodied by the assignment of various sections of the theater to
elites, workers, merchants, and free and enslaved blacks, characterized this
period. At the same time, as Richard Butsch has shown, artisans established
themselves as vocal, active audience members (28). While the theater was, in
his words, “an institution of the colonial aristocracy who, with their families,
friends, servants, slaves, and clients, composed the audience,” working people
laid claim to the theater as early as the 1770s.
In New York this led to the establishment, in 1796, of the Haymarket
Theatre, which was bankrolled and attended in large part by mechanics and
merchants. In the years of the early republic, these facts were the source of
significant concern for the upper classes, since the theater, to their minds,
“tempted the poor into an extravagance they could ill afford, an extravagance
that ruined not only the spendthrift himself, but his inevitably large family”
(Withington 25). These anti-​theater critics had the upper hand in the years
before the Revolution and during the war. They claimed that “watching plays
could turn into an obsession, and obsessed people, deaf to claims of charity,
did not make good patriots … The theatre enslaved people by arousing pas-
sion, which overwhelmed reason” (Withington 43).
However, the association between the stage and British rule (or vice more
generally) eroded significantly toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning
of the nineteenth century. As one Baltimore theatergoer observed in 1810,
the theater “instructs while it amuses, and conduces much to that grace and
elegance of conversation and manners so fascinating in private life” (Click 4).
The instructional function of the theater was a subject of frequent discussion
by cultural commentators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-
ries: as Dunlap argued repeatedly, “the theatre is in itself a powerful engine well
12

( 12 ) Introduction

adapted to the improvement of man, and … it only wants the directing hand of
an enlightened society to make it the pure source of civilization and virtue” (6).
Ironically, the theater morphed into an imagined locus of virtue, as it became
decreasingly associated with social and political elites and more identified with
working people. In the pre-​revolutionary period and the first decade or so of
the new republic, theaters were financially supported and dominated by the
gentry. Wealthy young men had the run of theaters, and would wander onto
the stage, socialize backstage, and generally disrupt the performance, as “free
trespass of the boundary between performer and audience were practices
that served to affirm gentry status and the general hierarchy of colonial life”
(Butsch 23).
By contrast, a different kind of masculinity was championed by the new,
less privileged audiences, and also represented on the stages they patronized.
It was not the manhood of sympathy and sentiment that suffused the upper
and middle classes and that represented “bonds between men that kept men
free” (Crain 2).11 For elite men, sympathy might have been “irresistible, unruly,
and mysterious” (Crain 21), but it also flattened out differences between and
among men. Sympathy—​feeling with—​mitigated conflict, and diminished the
role of social class (and sometimes, although rarely, race) in favor of what Dana
Nelson has called “national manhood.”
As Nelson meticulously shows, national manhood was a mechanism that
allowed mostly (although not exclusively) men of the owning classes to ignore
class difference and emphasize white national brotherhood. As a cultural phe-
nomenon, it “blocks white men from being able efficiently to identify socio-
economic inequality as structural rather than individual failure [and] it entails
a series of affective foreclosures that block these men’s more heterogeneous
democratic identifications and energies” (ix). In Nelson’s analysis, national
manhood interwove patriotism, masculine identity, and whiteness to relieve
the “anxieties of economic competition in the warm emotional space of civic
fraternal sameness” (x). Ultimately, the language of democracy stands in for
the actuality of socioeconomic equality.
Nelson’s argument explains why the continual economic crashes, the wid-
ening gap between rich and poor, and the consolidation of a middle class
around first merchant and then industrial capital, did not lead to more open
rebellion.12 As she observes,

national manhood’s mandate to manage difference—​in the name of social and

political “unity” and for the sake of a national economy—​underwrites middle-​class
professionalism and white collar management which generate scientific rationales
for the organization and supervision of the nation economy, and the civic, public,
and private arenas. (14)
13

Introduction ( 13 )

National manhood discursively limited outright class hostility, promising

what was structurally impossible: “a space where men can step out of competi-
tive, hierarchically ordered relations and experience rich emotional mutuality
of fraternal sameness” (19). Ultimately, Nelson’s goal is to understand “how
and under what conditions ‘white’ manhood came to ‘stand’ for nation, how
it came to be idealized as a ‘representative’ identity in the United States” (28).
If we look to the American stage, however, this process seems much less
clear. As the theater became increasingly identified first with factional con-
flict and then with workingmen’s culture, the currents of discord and animos-
ity that national manhood worked to erase made up the core themes of early
American drama, especially in terms of emerging definitions of manhood. As
we shall see, on the early American stage, white masculinity was understood
as competitive, and as defined by struggle and class-​based animus, as much as
it was by fraternal connection and shared economic interest. While the char-
acters Peter P. Reed calls “rogues” were pushed to the margins of American
fiction, they often occupied center stage in US drama. Unlike the novel, which
functioned within an economy of reconciliation and sympathy, “playhouses
operate[d]‌as socially constitutive and self-​referential spaces, producing and
glossing social relationships” between and within classes (Reed 12).
Certainly, the artisan class aspired to the national manhood their more
elite brothers took for granted. But, as Sean Wilentz has shown, the power
of artisans was already on the decline at the moment that they felt it most
strongly. In New York, for example, the massive increases in population in
the years of the early republic (the number of residents doubled between
1790 and 1800 and then tripled between 1800 and 1820; by 1805 New York
was the nation’s largest city [Wilentz, Chants 25]) were accompanied by an
equally large growth in the number of factories in those same years. And
while artisans and semiskilled workers outnumbered their unskilled coun-
terparts until well into the 1820s, in large part because most cities were not
set up for large-​scale industrial manufacture, business owners responded
to changing economic conditions by depending increasingly on piecework,
sweatshops, and putting out labor (Wilentz, Chants 112-​3). Systems of
apprenticeship and journeyman expertise fell apart or were transformed by
a wage economy.
In other words, the ideology of national manhood that worked so effec-
tively for the owning classes needed to work much harder to convince working
men. I would argue that this was also because the primary medium for com-
municating this ideology was print, a much less accessible technology for the
working and artisanal classes than for their middle-​and upper-​class counter-
parts. Moreover, the contemplative, horizontal, homogenous, individual, or
small-​group environment that characterized the absorption of the novel could
14

( 14 ) Introduction

not have been more different from the often-​raucous, heterogeneous, com-
munal, literally vertical (with the actors above and the regular ticket-​holders
below, or vice-​versa) experience of the theater. As I argue in the following sec-
tion, print culture was a distant second to the stage as working-​class culture
formed and solidified in the early republic.

THE CONFLICTS OF THE 1790S AND THE DEVELOPMENT

OF WORKINGMEN’S CULTURE

Two seemingly unrelated phenomena irreversibly shaped the trajectory that

the American theater took in the early years of the republic: the intense politi-
cal strife of the 1790s that culminated in the election of Thomas Jefferson;
and the emergence of an urban workingmen’s culture in the first two decades
of the nineteenth century. Both of these phenomena evoked a national con-
versation about virtue, political loyalty, masculine self-​determination, and
the meaning of manhood itself. The full-​throated engagement of workingmen
with partisan politics, especially those of Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans,
laid the groundwork for the massive changes in electoral politics in the 1810s
and 1820s, in which unpropertied white men gained the vote. White working-
men who cut their teeth on the partisan battles of the 1790s were primed
to see themselves as a constituency that should have a say in representative
government—​and as they gained political power, they also shaped the cultural
conversation about national identity and American manhood that came into
being at the same time.
I discuss the animosities of the 1790s in some detail in Chapter 4, but
I would like to take time here to think about how the conflict found expression
on the stage and within the space of the theater itself. As I show in Chapter 3,
playwrights used the opportunity to speak directly to audiences about political
issues throughout the Revolutionary period, urging them to claim the struggle
for independence as their own. This strategy carried through to the 1790s,
whose politics were considerably more curdled. Commentators remarked on
how often theaters became arenas for the partisan enmities of the day, for
better and for worse.
While in the years immediately after the revolution, playwrights and com-
mentators believed that the theater could “be molded to serve the ends of
republican citizenship and teach its spectators the basic virtues that constitute
American identity” (Richards 298), less than a decade after the 1783 Treaty of
Paris, which ended hostilities between the colonies and Britain and created
the United States of America, the stage was just as often deployed to wage
factional war between Federalists and Republicans, tendentiously identified
Random documents with unrelated
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Twelve ounces of boiled water.
At seven months the baby is ready to have gruel combined with
the water and the milk in the following proportions:
Nine ounces of plain milk.
One and one-half ounces (3 tablespoonfuls) Dextri-Maltose.
Five ounces of water.
Six ounces of gruel—made as follows:
Two tablespoonfuls of prepared barley, wheat, or oat flour; smooth with cold
water; have ready one pint of water boiling hard; add a pinch of salt; stir in the
smoothed flour; cook for thirty minutes in a double-boiler, and strain through a
hair sieve. Add enough boiling water to make a pint, and set it away to cool.

At ten months the child is taking modified milk in these

proportions:
Thirteen ounces of plain milk.
One heaping tablespoonful of Dextri-Maltose.
Six ounces of thin gruel; no water.

Milk thus modified can be given to the child until it is one year old.
Between the first and the seventh month the increase in the
amount of cow’s milk and the decrease in the amount of boiled water
will depend entirely upon the condition of the child’s digestion. After
the first month the increase in cow’s milk should be made quite
gradually, and several days should be permitted to elapse after each
change, to watch the effect upon the digestion.
The child himself furnishes a pretty fair indication of when the
strength of the food should be increased. If he drains the bottle
rapidly and cries when it is taken from him, or if he begins to fret
anywhere from an hour to half an hour before his feeding time, and if
he constantly sucks his fingers in hungry fashion, either the quantity
of the food or its strength must be increased.
If the food is already too rich for the child, this is shown by
indigestion, vomiting, diarrhea, or constipation. The increase in the
strength of the formulas should be at the rate of half an ounce or less
in three days or more for about a month after artificial feeding
begins; then a greater amount of time should be permitted to elapse.
The increase in quantity should be at the rate of a quarter of an
ounce at each feeding, made at intervals of four to seven days,
according to the growth and appetite of the child. It will be noticed
that there is a more rapid increase during the first month of the
child’s life than at any other time. This is because exquisite care
must be taken to start the child on the most delicate form of artificial
food. Then, if modified milk does agree with the infant, it thrives and
demands artificial food of increasing strength, precisely as the
mother’s milk gains in strength as she gains in health and energy
after her confinement.
It will be recalled that mother’s milk up to the fourth or fifth day is
practically sweetened water on which the baby thrives. The child’s
digestion is not injured when the flow of mother’s milk is suddenly
established and becomes rich. In planning the diet for a bottle-fed
baby, those who have given the matter study follow as closely as
possible the rules laid down by nature in supplying breast milk.
These are the simplest and most reliable of formulas with plain
milk as the foundation.
The use of cream and top milk in the place of plain milk seems to
be purely a matter of difference of opinion between medical
authorities. If the top milk is used, the quantity of boiled water used
in modifying it must be greater, and gruels are added at a much later
date.
A question frequently brought up at contests was that of adding
lime water to modified milk. This, too, represents a difference in
medical opinion. Dr. L. Emmett Holt, one of the first American
specialists in the care and feeding of children, advises that one
ounce of lime water be included in every twenty ounces of modified
milk, to correct acidity in cow’s milk. Dr. Roger H. Dennett, Professor
of Pediatrics at the Post Graduate Hospital, New York City, does not
consider lime water essential to a successful formula. Other
authorities differ in the same way. The mother who feels any anxiety
on this score will do well to consult her own physician, who can study
at first hand the general condition of the baby, its appearance, the
stools it passes, and what it may vomit if the artificial food is not
properly digested.
There are almost as many feeding tables in existence as there are
specialists in the care of children. This is another question where
hard and fast rules cannot be laid down. But here are some general
tables which have borne the test in families where artificial feeding is
a stern necessity:
Any baby weaned under three months of age should have bottle
feedings as it would have had breast feedings, at intervals of every
two hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. It should also have one
feeding in the night between one and two o’clock. This represents
ten feedings in twenty-four hours, up to the time the child is three
months old.
The quantity to be supplied at each feeding varies with the baby’s
age:
During the first week the baby should be given one and one-half
ounces at each feeding. This, with ten feedings in twenty-four hours,
means from ten to fifteen ounces of nourishment a day.
During the second week the amount at each feeding is raised to: 2
ounces, or 20 ounces in twenty-four hours.
Third and fourth weeks: 2½ ounces for each feeding.
Second and third month: 3 ounces for each feeding.
During the fourth month the table of feeding changes. The child is
now fed every two and one-half hours from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with one
feeding between 1 and 2 a.m. Four and one-half ounces at each
feeding, or 36 ounces in twenty-four hours.
During the fifth month the feedings are still farther apart; every
three hours between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., and one feeding in the night.
Five and one-half to 6 ounces at each feeding.
So, from month to month, the feedings are a little farther apart and
each feeding a little heavier.
 At five months, if the baby is strong, the night feeding may be
omitted. At eight months the baby is fed six times a day, at three-
hour intervals, eight ounces of food to the feeding.
It must be understood that the feeding tables here given are
planned for a normal, healthy baby. The sickly baby, or the child
whose digestion is very poor and whose appearance denotes
malnutrition, should be placed under the care of a physician who is
capable of planning special diet.
Only in case of emergency is the baby weaned within a day or so
after birth. As a rule, the mother attempts to nurse the child, and
weans him only when she realizes beyond all question that her milk
is not sufficiently nourishing. In such cases it is not necessary to
wean the child abruptly; the feedings can be alternated, breast and
bottle. In this way certain properties in the mother’s milk correct
possible ill-effects on the digestion from bottle feedings. Moreover,
the mother sometimes gains in strength, the milk improves and the
bottle is then given at rarer intervals. When it becomes necessary to
wean the child completely from the breast, because of its age, or
pregnancy in the mother, half the battle has been fought in
accustoming the child and its digestive apparatus to the bottle food.
A question frequently asked by mothers is this:
“What is the difference between pasteurized milk and boiled milk,
and which is better for the child?”
Pasteurizing milk consists of heating it to a temperature varying
from 155° to 175° F. in apparatus specially made for this purpose,
which can be bought at prices varying from four to eight dollars
through dealers in surgical instruments. Directions come with the
apparatus. To pasteurize milk without an apparatus, fill the bottles
with milk, cork them with sterile cotton wool, set in a pail, fill the pail
with boiling water, cover it tightly and set aside for forty-five minutes;
then cool the bottles rapidly and place them on the ice.
Boiling milk—or sterilization, as it is known to medical men—
means keeping the milk at a boiling point for at least one hour in a
double-boiler. The utensil containing the milk is then set in ice-water
so that it will chill in twenty minutes or less. The milk is next poured
into clean bottles, corked with sterile cotton wool, and placed on ice.
The milk to be fed to babies should be pasteurized or boiled when
there is doubt as to the source of milk supply; also when there is an
epidemic current, such as typhoid fever, diphtheria, etc. Both
processes are supposed to kill bacteria, boiling being more effective
than pasteurization.
It is far better for the baby’s health, however, to secure certified
milk than to treat it as described above. Boiled milk may be given to
a baby during the first two or three weeks of its life, also to babies
suffering with diarrhea and other acute digestive disturbances. But
the child who is fed for a great length of time on boiled milk receives
no fresh food, and is therefore subject to scurvy.
If, for any reason, the mother feels that it is necessary to feed her
baby the boiled milk, she may counteract the effects on a child, three
months old or more, with the strained juice of half an orange,
morning and evening.
Particularly in mining towns, mothers must depend upon
condensed milk as artificial food for babies. While it is much better to
use fresh cow’s milk, if it can be secured, the condensed milk is
preferable to stale cow’s milk. If a reliable brand is secured, the
mother is buying fresh milk which has been sterilized and then
evaporated. A can of condensed milk is equal to about three times
as much whole or plain milk, sweetened with cane sugar.
When the child must be placed on condensed milk practically at
birth, the milk should be diluted in the proportion of one level
teaspoonful of condensed milk to sixteen spoonfuls of boiled water.
This gives a very weak and watery solution, and the young mother is
apt to think it does not contain enough nourishment for her child. But
she should bear in mind that mother’s milk is equally thin, yet
sufficiently nourishing for the child one week old or less. Forty-eight
hours later the dilution may be strengthened to one spoonful of milk
to fifteen of water; then gradually to fourteen, etc. At three months
the baby may be taking a solution of one part condensed milk to
eight parts of barley water.
 Babies raised on condensed milk gain rapidly in weight because
the condensed milk, being low in fats and proteids, and high in
sugar, is easily digested. However, the same children show little
resistance when attacked by acute disease, and, if fed on
condensed milk exclusively, they may develop rickets or scurvy. It is
therefore desirable to secure a good quality of fresh milk to alternate
with the condensed milk and, eventually, to serve it for all the
feedings.
Medical authorities differ on the question of patent foods. Men who
have specialized on the feeding of infants agree that the safest
substitute for mother’s milk is modified cow’s milk, and claim that
whatever nourishment is drawn from patent foods is due to the sugar
or carbohydrates in the patented article and to the cow’s milk with
which it is prepared. These foods have no medical or life-giving
properties; and most of them, in analysis, show a combination of
starches, various kinds of sugar, dried milk, and even eggs. They
should be given to the child only under the direction of the family
physician.
The same is true of buttermilk, casein milk, and peptonized milk.
The use of these foods is necessary only under certain conditions,
when the child’s digestion is seriously disturbed. They should not be
fed to a baby on the advice of a neighbor or a druggist. I have known
many mothers who, at the first sign of indigestion, dosed the baby’s
milk with quantities of lime water and peptonizing powder. This
should not be done without consulting a physician.
Above all things, the mother of the baby artificially fed should keep
calm and cool-headed. Even breast-fed babies have occasional
attacks of indigestion, vomiting, colic, and diarrhea, which yield
quickly to treatment. The same trouble in bottle-fed babies will yield
to treatment.
 CHAPTER VI
GUARDING THE BABY’S DIGESTION
SOUND DIGESTION MEANS A STRONG BABY—BOWEL CONDITIONS TELL
THE STORY—THE UNDERFED AND THE OVERFED BABY—SYMPTOMS
OF DISORDER IN THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM—VOMITING—COLIC AND
CONSTIPATION—DIARRHEA AND ITS TREATMENT

S OUND digestion in the family baby stands for many good things.
It spells peace and comfort for the entire household; for good
digestion means good health and good humor, therefore a baby
whose presence does not disturb the family. It spells small doctor’s
bills, because a sound digestion gives the baby power of resistance
to throw off germs of disease and even to pass safely through
exposure to contagion. It spells efficiency and intelligent care on the
part of the mother, for, common belief to the contrary
notwithstanding, the healthy baby is not a matter of accident but of
care. The knowledge of how to give that care may be innate,
inherited from a line of sensible, motherly women, or it may be
acquired by education in the feeding and care of infants; but it is
there.
That fact is proved by experiment among untrained mothers. A
Philadelphia branch of the Congress of Mothers started an infant-
saving campaign in a certain ward of that city. For a given time, they
had meetings of mothers, with talks on the care and feeding of
babies, week in and week out. Babies were weighed and measured,
and, as they gained, the mothers were praised for the improvement
in their children. In this one ward, where education for motherhood
was taught persistently and intelligently, the death rate was reduced
44 per cent. on the year. No record was kept of the improved
condition in mothers and homes. These are blessings which cannot
be reduced to figures.
 When the American woman knows as much about feeding babies
and children under three years of age as she knows about mixing
bread, polishing furniture, and embroidering doilies, our home
economics and domestic relations will undergo a change for the
better. Thousands of marriages have been wrecked by the ignorance
of the mother in rearing her children, and the subsequent confusion
and quarreling. A sickly baby loads the husband and father with
harassing expenses. It brings the family bread-winner home to a
disordered house and a tired, fretful wife. It keeps both husband and
wife awake when they should be securing a good night’s rest to meet
the next day’s duties. Result: in poor circles, the husband turns
coward and deserts wife and child; higher up in the economic scale,
the husband secures work in a distant city and the wife goes home
to “her people.” In either case, the man often seeks, in more
pleasant companionship, relief from the unsatisfactory conditions
existing in his own home.
The wife considers the husband unreasonable and dishonorable.
She declares that she has the heavier burden to bear, a sickly baby
to tend day and night. What she does not realize is that the baby
would not be sickly if the mother knew her job of motherhood as well
as the father knows his trade of bread-winning. The law does not
recognize indigestion in the family baby as a divorce cause, but any
judge who has ever presided over what is known as a court of
domestic relations will tell you that desertion, non-support, cruelty,
and infidelity on the part of the husband can often be traced directly
to the wailing of a baby or several babies, who would not wail if their
mothers knew how to guard their digestion.
Mothers are not altogether to blame for their inability to prevent
digestive ailments in their babies. Generally, their own mothers did
not understand this wonderful science of infant feeding, nor warn
them of the pitfalls which yawn before the young mother who has not
studied it.
Even general practitioners have not placed great importance on
the study of babies. They have had their hands full by doctoring
grown-ups, who might have been healthy adults if properly started in
life.
 After ushering the child into the world and pronouncing it sound,
the average family physician has turned the baby over to the
parents; and under their care it has remained until it developed some
acute malady, when the doctor has reappeared on the scene. The
cure of the malady, not its prevention, has long been the office of the
family physician. They do it better in China, where physicians are
paid only so long as the health of the family is good.
The world has long proceeded on the theory that with the birth of
the baby was born in the mother some heaven-sent knowledge of
how to raise the baby. To be sure, she was taught to read and write
and cook and sew, but there was no need to teach her how to feed
her baby. By some mysterious process, God supplied that
knowledge. That He did not is shown by the fact that twenty-five per
cent. of the deaths in our country are of children under one year of
age.
Another mistaken belief about babies has been that they are born
“delicate” or “strong”; and, as they are born, so must they live—that
is, if they live at all! The delicate baby has been regarded as a cross,
to be carried with patience and resignation. Mother trotted and dosed
it by day; Father walked the floor with it by night; and the neighbors
pitied them both. The idea that the poor little tot was born with the
right to acquire strength and health was not preached: the thought of
calling in science to transform the delicate baby into a strong one is
comparatively new.
Fortunately for the race, a few brave spirits in the medical
profession decided to defy tradition and study babies as controllable
human machines rather than as dispensations of a more or less
kindly Providence. They found that babies born healthy and normal
could be kept that way; that babies born puny and delicate could be
made sturdy and strong; that even babies born with inherited
defects, physical and mental, could be so treated that they would
develop into useful, self-supporting citizens, where once they were
consigned to that hideous human scrap-heap, the institutions for
defective and feeble-minded children.
 Only those of us who have followed the work of specialists in
children’s diseases—pediatrists, as they are known in the medical
profession—can appreciate what marvels have been worked in
children born without the birthright of good health. Now these men
are going farther. They stand behind the twentieth-century campaign
for public education among women in the care and feeding of
children. They have rent the veil of mystery which so long has
surrounded medical learning; they have written books for mothers,
couched not in dictionary-defying terms, but in simple English which
the average mother can understand; they have given public talks to
mothers on infant feeding; and now they are leading the movement
for health conferences between parents, physicians, and health
officers—city, county, and state—and for what are known as Better
Babies Contests, where babies are brought by their parents for
examination in physical and mental development.
All these signs indicate a new and popular appreciation of what is
known as preventive medicine. The broad-minded physician
practises preventive medicine. The progressive mother works with
the progressive physician, and the baby profits by the combination.
To-day there is little excuse for a colicky, crying, sickly baby in the
family circle. Except in rare cases, when the baby’s poor condition
does not improve under intelligent mother-care, modern medical
science can effect a cure. What generally stands between the sick
baby and its cure to-day is ignorance or tradition on the part of the
parent, who clings to the belief that strong babies are born to live,
that weak babies are born to die, and that the Creator has decreed it!
In reality the Creator should not be held responsible for the
physical future of the child. Its normal development is practically in
the hands of the mother. In the midst of this magnificent campaign
for the intelligent care and feeding of infants, she has no right to
remain ignorant. Lectures, conferences, and books are at her
command; and what this simple preventive medicine teaches her to
do for her child she is morally bound to perform.
And this brings us back to the original statement at the head of this
chapter: Sound digestion in the family baby stands for many good
things—more especially for the safety and comfort of the baby. So it
is most important that the mother ask herself:
“What is the condition of my baby’s digestion?”
The baby whose digestion is in good order gains steadily in
weight, has firm flesh, a clear skin, and good color. During the first
few months of its life it sleeps two or three hours after nursing; and
during the brief periods of wakefulness it is quiet, good-natured, and
quite content to lie staring at nothing. It does not demand attention,
rocking or walking. It has an excellent appetite, nursing with relish,
often greedily. This does not mean whimpering or fretting for food.
The baby that tugs nervously at the breast is not properly nourished.
The healthy baby may have what is known as regurgitation, which
is best described as the overflow when the baby has taken more milk
than its little stomach will hold. The milk, uncurdled, practically
exactly as it was swallowed, rolls out of the baby’s mouth without
any gagging or muscular contraction. This is especially apt to
happen when there is an unusually strong flow of mother’s milk; or
when the nipple hole is too large for the bottle-fed baby.
The healthy baby does not have colic or gas on the stomach.
A healthy baby may cry, especially just before it is fed, because
crying is its only method of announcing that it is hungry. It may also
cry while being bathed or dressed, because it resents being
disturbed. Such crying in moderation is healthful, for it is about the
only exercise the baby gets.
Perhaps the best indication that a baby’s digestion is in good
condition is the state of the bowels. The mother should watch this
closely. For the first three or four days the movements are black and
sticky. There should be not less than two and not more than four in
number. From black they are very apt to turn green, and remain so
for a week or more, because the flow of mother’s milk is not yet
established. As a rule, however, during the second week, the breast
milk gains in quality, and the stools turn a light yellow and become
more solid, about the consistency of mush. If the mother’s digestion
and general health are good, the child will have from two to four
movements a day.
Neglect to regulate the bowels is one of the most common causes
of death among bottle-fed babies. The entire system is poisoned, for
the waste matter is not carried off through the bowels. The
inexperienced mother will be wise to have her physician watch the
stools until the child’s health seems fairly well established. Hundreds
of bottle-fed babies, who do not outlive the first month, might be
saved if this rule were observed. When a physician is not at hand,
the mother must watch the stools with a critical eye.
The bowels of the bottle-fed baby rarely move as often as those of
the breast-fed infant; but the stool is larger, and of a lighter yellow,
smooth, and of the consistency of a firm ointment or cold cream. If
the child does not have at least one movement a day, the
proportions used in the modified milk must be changed.
The digestion of the nursing baby may be disturbed by milk that is
scanty and poor in quality, or by milk that is too rich and flows too
fast. When the former condition exists the child does not gain, and it
may even lose in weight; the flesh is soft and flabby, the skin pale;
the child sleeps poorly and often brokenly or with sobs. When awake
the baby looks dull and listless, or is fretful or irritable. It may also
belch gas or, if the gas is retained, there will be colic and a distended
abdomen. Sometimes the bowels are constipated, but more
generally the movements are loose and the stools green in color and
streaked with mucus. Also the movement is accompanied by pain
sufficient to make the child cry.
When the supply of milk is scant, the baby will seem hungry and
restless; again, three-quarters of an hour after nursing, the baby will
seize the nipple greedily but, after a moment, drop it in apparent
disgust and begin to cry.
Sometimes both the quality and the quantity of the milk can be
built up by attention to the health and diet of the mother; but, as this
process is necessarily slow, the baby in the meantime must be given
occasional feedings of modified milk, as described in Chapter V.
Then, if the flow of milk is not established or the child still turns from
the breast, a complete weaning must follow.
If the indigestion is due to overfeeding, the child shows an
abnormal gain in weight, is restless after nursing, vomits, suffers
from wind and colic, is dull and sleeps a great deal but restlessly, not
quietly, perspires heavily on head and neck, and passes so much
urine that, despite frequent changing, the diapers are always wet.
For these conditions there may be either or both of two causes:
milk that flows too quickly, and milk that is too rich. The first trouble is
easily corrected by the mother compressing the base of the nipple
between her first and second fingers while the child is nursing, thus
checking the rapid flow of the milk. The second trouble is not so
easily corrected, for it is caused by one of three things: (1) the
mother is eating food that is too rich; (2) she is taking too little
exercise; (3) she is giving way to mental excitement, hysterics, grief,
or temper. If the condition is not mental, and the mother is taking
sufficient exercise, then it is a question of modifying the mother’s
milk.
This can be done, first, through the mother’s diet—simpler food,
less meat, no alcohol; second, just before nursing, the baby may be
given an ounce of boiled water in which one-fourth teaspoonful of
malt sugar has been dissolved, using an ordinary nursing bottle with
a plain nipple. The child will then nurse a shorter time and the water
taken from the bottle will dilute the milk drawn from the breast. The
first few ounces drawn from the breast are less rich than the last
ones; so if the child does not drain the breast, he does not get the
richest part of the milk. This experiment should not be tried, however,
without consulting the family physician, who will have a sample of
the mother’s milk drawn with a breast-pump and analyzed before
prescribing the sweetened water.
The mother must bear in mind, however, that there is a distinct
difference between chronic and acute illness from indigestion. When
a baby, that has nursed contentedly and gained regularly in weight,
suddenly refuses the breast, this is generally a sign of acute illness,
requiring the immediate attention of a physician and prompt
treatment. When the symptoms of indigestion are slight, but
persistent and regular, and the baby shows general distaste for
either breast or bottle, then it is merely some disturbance of
digestion, malnutrition or mal-assimilation of food, which can be
corrected by modifying the diet.
Neglect of acute indigestion may mean convulsions, intestinal
inflammation or other ailment which will quickly prove fatal. Slight but
chronic indigestion should be corrected because it disturbs and
weakens the entire system, fills it with poison and makes the child
liable to disease. The child who “takes cold easily” or “teethes hard”
is generally the child whose digestion is out of order.
General disorder of the digestive system is indicated by one or
more of these symptoms: Constipation, diarrhea, colic, and vomiting.
Gastric or stomach trouble is indicated by vomiting or the belching of
gas; intestinal trouble by colic, flatulence, diarrhea, and constipation.
The wise mother will learn to distinguish between the various
forms of vomiting. Regurgitation, already described, is not a danger
signal; if the milk, unchanged in consistency and color, runs easily
from the baby’s mouth almost immediately after the child is taken
from the breast or bottle, and then, as if relieved, the infant rolls over
in comfortable slumber, there is no cause for anxiety. If, however, the
vomiting happens just before the next nursing period, or even an
hour after nursing, the diet should receive attention; especially if the
milk is curdled or colored with bile.
Before changing the diet, however, other factors in the care of the
baby should be considered:
Is it fed at regular intervals, as outlined in Chapter IV?
At the Better Babies Contests I have often been shocked at the
replies given by mothers when the doctors inquired, “How often is
your child fed?”
Here are some of the answers: “I don’t know.” “When he wakes
up.” “Whenever he cries.” “When I have time to sit down.”
The child that is fed irregularly is very apt to vomit.
 So is the child that is jostled, jogged, or rocked after nursing.
Directly a baby is fed it should be laid down in its crib and the food
given a chance to digest.
Tight clothing over the stomach and abdomen will cause vomiting;
and, for that reason, belly-bands must not be pinned tightly.
If none of the above reasons is present, and the baby vomits
habitually, the diet must be changed.
The third form of vomiting is acute and sudden. It may generally
be regarded as a symptom of an acute illness, such as measles,
pneumonia, scarlet fever. It is safest to send for a physician under
such circumstances. He can decide whether the acute vomiting is
due to something the mother or child has eaten, or whether other
symptoms of a serious ailment are present. Under ordinary
circumstances the mother should merely withhold food until the
arrival of the doctor. If the doctor cannot be secured for some time,
she may safely give the child calomel, one-tenth of one grain every
half-hour until one-half of a grain has been taken. The calomel
should be carried off by an enema of warm water and sweet-oil. This
may prevent serious consequences until the doctor arrives.
Gas on the stomach, with distention and pain, is indicated by
belching, sometimes accompanied by a sour, watery fluid. Relief can
be given by adding half a grain of benzoate of soda to each ounce of
food for the bottle baby; but it is far better for both nursing and bottle
baby if the mother will either change her own diet or reduce the
quality of the bottle milk. Dr. Holt recommends, for gastric
indigestion, two ounces of lime water to each twenty ounces of food.
Colic and flatulence come from the distention of the bowel by gas,
and are generally accompanied by constipation. As a rule, if the
constipation is relieved, the colic will disappear.
The presence of gas in the intestines generally indicates that
either the sugar or the starch in the food is not being properly
digested. The mother must reduce the quantity of starch and sweets
which she is eating, in order to modify the breast milk. For the bottle-
fed baby starch may be omitted from the food, and malto should be
used instead of cane sugar.
For constipation in bottle-fed babies, milk of magnesia, which can
be purchased at any first-class drugstore, may be added to the
modified milk, in the proportion of one-half to one teaspoonful to
each twenty ounces of food. The proportion must be according to the
age of the child and the stubbornness of the constipation.
Constipation may also come from weak milk; in this case top milk
instead of plain milk should be used in preparing the food for the
bottle-fed baby.
No baby should be given cathartics nor enemas, except in
emergencies. Even castor-oil is not safe, because if constipation
springs from the fact that the milk is already too rich in fat, the oil
increases the trouble. Enemas given every day weaken the muscles
of the lower bowel. Up to the time the baby is six months old the
mother should give no cathartic except milk of magnesia. The bottle-
fed baby is given some of this at each feeding. It may be given to the
breast-fed baby in a little boiled and warmed water, just before
nursing. If milk of magnesia and attention to the diet do not correct
the trouble, then a physician should be called in.
After six months a child may have orange juice, or orange and
pineapple juice, strained; also apples scraped very fine.
Massage or kneading the abdomen lightly sometimes brings relief;
but this should never be done immediately after the baby is fed. An
hour should be permitted to elapse; and it is still better to massage
the abdomen just before feeding. However, massage without
correcting the diet is not sufficient.
Constipation must be corrected during infancy, for there is no other
evil of the human system that can bring upon men and women a
greater number of ailments which make life one long story of aches
and pains.
Diarrhea is a symptom of acute illness, and frequently ends in
death. It is the most dangerous of all symptoms that babies develop.
With all the agencies at work for infant welfare in large cities, during
hot weather, more babies die of diarrhea than of all the contagious
diseases, like measles, whooping-cough, diphtheria, scarlet and
typhoid fever, put together. Even in the country, with its pure air and
its better facilities for securing clean milk, babies die of diarrhea in
shocking numbers.
This dreaded disease of infancy can generally be traced to two
causes: improper food, and unclean milk.
One reason why it is more prevalent in summer than in winter is
the fact that heat affects milk quickly and unfits it for the baby’s
digestion. When the breast-fed baby has diarrhea, the mother must
immediately look to her own diet. The mother of the bottle-fed baby
must look to the source and care given to the cow’s milk fed to the
baby.
In this respect the small-town mother and the farmer’s wife have
the advantage over the city mother. They can secure milk from
healthy cows, directly the milking is over, twice a day. They can
strain it through cheese-cloth, cool it rapidly on ice, and allow no
contaminating hand or utensil to touch it. The city mother must pin
her faith to certified milk.
So much for the prevention of diarrhea. If, in spite of every
precaution, it appears, food of any kind must be withdrawn. Even the
breast-fed baby should fast for twelve hours. Cleanse the bowels
with either castor-oil or calomel. Try castor-oil first: one teaspoonful
for the baby three months old or less. From three months to a year
old, the dose may be graduated from a teaspoonful to a
tablespoonful. If the baby cannot retain the castor-oil, try calomel as
prescribed for vomiting—one-tenth of one grain every half-hour until
one-half grain has been taken—for the baby up to four months. After
that, and up to one year, the quantity may be increased, one-tenth of
one grain every half-hour until two grains have been taken. Boiled
water may be given at intervals, but not in any quantity, especially if
the diarrhea is accompanied by vomiting. If the diarrhea does not
yield to this treatment within twenty-four hours, a physician should be
called in.
 CHAPTER VII
TEETHING AND WEANING
TEETHING A NATURAL PROCESS—PUTTING THE BABY IN SHAPE TO
TEETHE EASILY—DENTITION TABLE—CARE OF THE FIRST TEETH—
GRADUAL WEANING IS SIMPLE PROCESS—ALTERNATE BREAST AND
BOTTLE FEEDING—EVILS OF DELAYED WEANING—DIET TABLES FOR
CHILDREN FROM NINE MONTHS TO THIRTY-SIX MONTHS

O NE of those dear women who never master the art of taking

comfort out of life as they go along remarked to me recently:
“Well, I suppose there are some mothers who find pleasure in
raising children, but I’ve never had a care-free moment with mine.
Just as soon as I could draw a long breath because they had
survived the first month or so, I began to think about teething. When
a couple of teeth were safely through, along came weaning. And
then measles——”
Yet this mother has raised four splendidly strong boys and girls,
and has never lost a child. Her husband would tell you that the family
doctor’s bills have been extremely small. Perhaps you think the
babies escaped illness because she worried over them and guarded
their health. Not at all! They were healthy, normal babies. If they had
been otherwise, the family doctor would literally have camped in her
nursery.
The real trouble with their mother was that she did not recognize a
normal baby when she had one, and she did not consider teething
and weaning natural events or processes in a baby’s life. She could
not believe that it was possible to raise babies without fighting illness
in some form or another. She did not understand that her simple
methods of preventive medicine, the intelligent care of her children
from the day of their birth, insured normal digestion. With this health
insurance she had no need to fear “symptoms” or bad results from
teething and weaning.
The testimony of physicians who have specialized in the care and
feeding of children, and of mothers who have raised normal babies,
proves that both teething and weaning are normal and gradual
operations which do not seriously disturb the child’s health, if the
digestion is in good condition.
Teething in particular is often made the excuse or the cloak for
chronic disturbances of the digestion, which should have been
corrected long before the time for dentition arrived. The average
child does not cut its first teeth until the sixth month, yet it is not
unusual to hear a mother claim that an attack of indigestion,
vomiting, or diarrhea in a three months’ old child is due to the fact
that teeth are beginning to make trouble.
If the child is kept in all-round good condition, teething is merely a
part of its all-round development, no more troublesome than the
growth of the hair on the head, or the nails on the fingers. To the
healthy child, the cutting of each successive tooth may bring a trifling
irritability, restlessness or wakefulness for a few nights, and drooling.
The baby may even suffer from loss of appetite, a very slight fever,
light vomiting, or streaks of undigested food in the stools; but these
symptoms will last only a few days and the baby will recuperate
rapidly.
When the child is not in a healthy condition, and especially if it is
fed irregularly and improperly, these slight disturbances take on a
more serious form. The fever will run up to 101° or 102° F. The child
will be unable to retain food, and the vomiting will be severe.
Diarrhea next sets in, and the child is in a fair way to develop a case
of cholera infantum, the dread disease responsible for the high death
rate among children under one year of age. Summer complaint, as it
is commonly called, is not due to teething, however, but to the bad
condition of the digestive organs, which teething aggravates.
While it is important to guard the baby’s digestion always, it is
even more important to prepare his entire system for the process of
teething by setting the digestive organs in good order before—not
after—the process starts. Here, indeed, the proverbial ounce of
prevention is worth many pounds of cure. It is far easier to put
stomach and bowels into good shape before the first tooth appears
than it is to check the diarrhea which comes when the child’s
digestion is too weak to meet the slight added strain of dentition.
The first teeth appear some time between the fifth and ninth
months. These are the two central lower teeth. The average time of
dentition in a healthy child is six months. Generally these two teeth
appear very close together. Next, between the eighth and twelfth
month come the four upper central teeth. Between the twelfth and
eighteenth month the baby cuts two more lower central teeth, and
four double teeth. Next in order are the four canine teeth, the upper
teeth in this set are known as “eye teeth” and the two lower as
“stomach teeth.” These should make their appearance by the twenty-
fourth month. Between this date and the thirtieth month come the
four back double teeth, which, according to tradition, are the most
difficult to cut. In reality, they give little more trouble than any others,
provided, of course, that the child is in good condition.
The following is an average table of dentition:
At 12 months, six teeth.
At 18 months, twelve teeth.
At 24 months, sixteen teeth.
At 30 months, twenty teeth, or the complete set of first, or milk, teeth, as they are
sometimes called.
Various causes are assigned to delayed dentition or slowness in
teething. A prolonged and serious illness, or a case of rickets, will
delay the teething; and it is also said to be a matter of family traits. In
some families the children, whether bottle-fed or breast-fed, teethe
later than in others. As a rule, too, the breast-fed baby teethes earlier
and more easily than the bottle-fed baby, because the breast milk
keeps the digestion in a uniformly normal condition.
The mother who studies this table of dentition and the diet tables
on pages 109-111 will see that the cutting of the larger teeth, and the
change in diet from milk to foods that require chewing, come at the
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