Performances were central to the commercial leisure that was ubiquitous in the Progressive Era. Vaudeville alone, which grew into a national entertainment industry around the turn of the twentieth century, featured talking horses, acrobats who “jumped” on their heads, quick change artists (who dazzled with their speedy changes of costume and character), hypnotists, and female impersonators, among many others. And vaudeville was just one option in a growing array of urban amusements that included movie theaters, musical theater, circuses, baseball, dime museums, freak shows, and dance halls. Each of these industries has a scholarly tradition of its own. Recent books on vaudeville include Rick DesRochers’ The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian, Nicholas Gebhardt's Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870–1929, and Jennifer Mooney's Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905. Footnote ¹

This volume counters this siloing of Progressive Era entertainment industry history by bringing together chapters on musical theater, vaudeville, dance halls, art house theater, and historical pageantry. What unites such disparate chapters? All the essays link performance to politics. Some essays do this more deeply than others. In his excellent essay, J. Chris Westgate compares James Halleck Reid's play, From Broadway to the Bowery, with Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot. While The Melting Pot upheld “civic nationalism,” which promised, according to historian Gary Gerstle, “economic opportunity and political freedom to all citizens, irrespective of their racial, religious, or cultural background” (55), Westgate shows that From Broadway to the Bowery supported “racial nationalism” in which Africans, Asians, and southern and eastern Europeans were excluded from the nation. Furthermore, the play exposed the limits of The Melting Pot's seemingly inclusive national boundaries, as Zangwill's play mainly celebrated the integration of European immigrants. Gillian Arrighi's fine essay on child performers in vaudeville dives into the shifting regulation of child performers, the organized efforts to change these laws, and child actors’ resistance to laws controlling their labor.

This volume succeeds in expanding the archive of Progressive Era performance—exploring the “diversity of performances”—to include lesser-known child performances, vaudeville's “business farces,” and incubator baby sideshows (4). In some cases, readers will wonder how representative an act or a play was in such a crowded, eclectic realm of performance, but the essays by Arrighi, Westgate, Michael Schwartz (on the representation of Taylorism in vaudeville), and DesRochers (on Buster Keaton and vaudeville comedy) give ample context within relevant genres and offer comparisons of multiple acts and performers to help answer the question of whether or not an act was truly a “novelty” or part of a wider trend.

The editors argue that the essays show how performers negotiated, expressed, and often resisted the programs of “top-down” control launched by political leaders and reformers who sought to mold the behavior of immigrant families and the underclasses, sometimes by limiting immigration altogether, and other times encouraging acculturation to American values (9). This volume emphasizes how performances, in Sabine Haenni's words, were an “empowering … medium for minoritized constituencies at the periphery” (7). For example, performances like historical pageants allowed Italian Americans to represent their distinctive traditions and their civic belonging; laborers may have laughed at the “business farces” that mocked Taylorism; and child actors in vaudeville rebuffed images of sentimental childhood. Other case studies depict the affirmation of dominant ideals, such as From Broadway to the Bowery's support for a racial hierarchy of citizenship, with Anglo-Saxons at the top, Irish immigrants in between, and Chinese and African Americans at the bottom. And some of the democratic themes of Cleveland's Little Theatre Movement were countered by the exclusive neighborhoods in which the theaters operated.

The editors did not divide their selections into sections, highlighting instead the “abundance, variety, and contradictions of the performative offerings from 1890–1920” (11). Their decision not to create sections is misleading; the volume mainly focuses on immigration, childhood and family relations, and medical innovation, and these themes often overlap. Though strong pieces in their own right, Amy Arbogast's chapter on “Rural Life with Urban Strife: The Evolution of Rural Drama in the Late Nineteenth Century” (a discussion of three rural dramas) and Ariel Nereson's “New Women and Girls of Today in Motion: The ‘Strenuous Clasping’ of Tango Teas” (an analysis of gender relations in the tango) are outliers. The volume might have been stronger if the editors had worked to bolster the three sections, offer a unifying introduction to each section, and then connect immigration, family, and medicine.

Despite its eclectic, expansive approach to Progressive Era entertainment, this volume marginalizes some aspects of the Progressive Era, such as gender and sexuality. For example, outside of Nereson's strong chapter, woman suffrage is mentioned only once. The child actors and the babies in the sideshows are distanced from their mothers and gender relations in their families. In her highly original essay on incubator sideshows, Susan Kattwinkel acknowledges that some observers believed that the incubator would liberate women from domestic labor but more generally, her discussion of progressive efforts to improve parenting masks the blame placed on mothers for unhealthy babies in this period. Birth mothers and “stage mothers” are, for the most part, left offstage in this volume.

In their introduction, Shulman and Westgate summarize the central argument of their volume: “that the Progressive Era was brought into being in no small part through the ubiquity of performance” (3). This bold claim is hard to prove—it is difficult to imagine the central developments of the Progressive Era derailed by the absence of any particular play, sideshow, or vaudeville sketch covered in the book. If the volume's authors do not prove that performances drove historical change, they do show that a diverse array of performances commented on and sometimes resisted Progressive Era politics and reform initiatives.