Page 259 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Yet in the cities, the rise of industrialization was also creating a permanent class
10.1 of low-paid, unorganized wage earners. In rural areas, there was a significant division
between successful commercial farmers and small holders, or tenants who subsisted
on marginal land, as well as enormous inequality of status between southern planters
10.2 and their black slaves.
Changes in the organization and status of the learned professions also showed that
traditional forms of privilege and elitism were under attack. Under Jacksonian pres-

10.3 sure, state legislatures abolished the licensing requirements for physicians that local
medical societies had administered. As a result, quacks and folk healers could compete
freely with established medical doctors.
The democratic tide also struck the legal profession. Local bar associations contin-
10.4
ued to set the qualifications for practicing attorneys, but in many places, they admitted
persons with little or no formal training and the most rudimentary knowledge of the
law. The clergy responded to the new democratic spirit by developing a more popular
and emotional style of preaching to please its public.
In this atmosphere of democratic leveling, the popular press was increasingly
important as a source of information and opinion. Written and read by common folk,
hundreds of newspapers and magazines ushered the mass of white Americans into the
political arena. New political views—which those in power might once have silenced—
could now find an audience. Reformers of all kinds could easily publicize their causes,
and the press became the venue for the great national debates on issues such as the
government’s role in banking and the status of slavery in new states and territories.
As a profession, journalism was open to those who were literate and thought they had
something to say. The editors of newspapers with a large circulation were the most
influential opinion makers of the age.
The democratic spirit also found expression in new forms of literature and art for
a mass audience. The intentions of individual artists and writers varied considerably.
Some pandered to popular taste in defiance of traditional standards of high culture.
Others tried to capture the spirit of the age by portraying the everyday life of ordinary
Americans rather than the traditional subjects of “aristocratic” art. A few hoped to use
literature and art to improve popular taste and instill deeper moral and spiritual values.
But all of them were aware that their audience was the broad citizenry of a democratic
nation rather than a refined elite.
A rise in literacy and a revolution in printing technology made a mass market
for popular literature possible. More potential readers and lower publishing costs led
to a flood of lurid and sentimental novels, some of which became the first American
best-sellers. By the 1840s and 1850s, writers such as George Lippard, Mrs. E. D. E. N.
Southworth, and Augusta Jane Evans had perfected the formulas that led to commer-
cial success. Gothic horror and the perils of virtuous heroines threatened by dastardly
villains were among the ingredients that readers came to expect from popular fiction.
Many of the new sentimental novels were written by and for women. Some women
writers implicitly protested their situation by portraying men as tyrannical, unreliable,
or vicious and the women they abandoned or failed to support as resourceful individu-
alists able to make their own way in a man’s world. But the standard happy endings
sustained the convention that a woman’s place was in the home: A virtuous and protec-
tive man usually turned up and saved the heroine from independence.
In the theater, melodrama became the dominant genre. Despite religious objec-
tions, theater-going was popular in the cities during the Jacksonian era. The standard
fare involved the inevitable trio of beleaguered heroine, mustachioed villain, and a hero
who asserted himself in the nick of time. Patriotic comedies extolling the common
sense of the rustic Yankee who foiled the foppish European aristocrat were also popular
and aroused the audience’s democratic sympathies. Men and women of all classes went
to the theater, and those in the cheap seats often became raucous and even violent when
they did not like what they saw. Unpopular actors or plays could provoke riots. In 1849,
in New York, twenty-three people were killed in disorders over an English actor who
was the rival of Edwin Forrest, the era’s most popular American thespian.
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