Listening to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

These dynamics make sound a particularly potent resource when teaching the history of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. During these years, American society underwent a many-sided process of development difficult to adequately capture within a coherent narrative.Footnote ¹⁰ The study of sound, with its ability to link numerous trends and dynamics within densely layered events, can help address this issue. Providing insight into the practices and problems of everyday life, such sonic history can reveal the interplay of change and continuity that defined the social experience of the turn-of-the-century United States.Footnote ¹¹

Whatever records of past sounds survive over time must necessarily be understood as both accounts of what a listener heard and an argument over what it meant for them to hear—an especially pressing issue given the relative paucity of auditory evidence prior to the advent of recording technology. In the context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, such debates took on particular salience. The waves of migration that defined these years brought an incredible variety of people into close proximity, exposing listeners to an array of unfamiliar sonic practices.Footnote ¹² This sense of dramatic change was furthered by the expansion of new, technologically derived noises. This transformation held significant importance within the realm of work, where factories and sweatshops, as well as offices and farms, all underwent significant transformation, definitively shifting the broader soundscape.Footnote ¹³ These developments were accompanied by the proliferation of public spaces shaped by distinctively sounded forms of transportation and entertainment.Footnote ¹⁴

In the face of the rise of technological noises, homes—particularly those of the middle and upper classes—were increasingly defined against noise. Within such spaces, the absence of clamor was an argument in its own right, reflecting beliefs about respectability, work, gender, and the family.Footnote ¹⁵ The effort to organize sound did not stop in the private domain. Controlling the sonic environment was an integral part of progressivism’s broader attempt to reorder industrial society. In cities across the country, reformers drew on cutting-edge science to claim that the sounds of industry and transportation had the potential to cause neurological disorder and physical dissolution.Footnote ¹⁶ The development of such opinions was both a reaction to changed industrial conditions and an ideological argument about how American society should be organized.

Along similar lines, the sonic practices of the working classes were increasingly viewed as unruly disruptions to public order. To reformers, these styles of auditory culture needed to be curbed and, ideally, transformed, bringing them in line with the assumptions of classed decorum.Footnote ¹⁷ As a result of such activity, much of the evidence about noise during these years must also be understood as evidence of social efforts to control it—an exercise of power that left its mark on the soundscapes of the past. Such efforts, it’s important to point out, were never entirely successful. Instead, they triggered a host of counter-hegemonic sonic cultures and discourses that developed in counterpoint to demands from above.Footnote ¹⁸ While such activity could follow more traditional lines, it often intersected with the new types of commercial leisure and entertainment audible everywhere from the chatting of multinational audiences in the era’s nickelodeons to the lively streetscapes of Harlem.Footnote ¹⁹ Over time, the popularity and profitability of such spaces helped remake the outlines of American public culture, brokering a complex auditory compromise between progressive expectations and commodified pleasure.

Music, used to organize time and order society throughout the nation, replicated many of these discourses. On the one hand, this can be seen in the enormous importance accorded to European art music by the middle and upper classes.Footnote ²⁰ Communities sought to support organizations capable of skillfully performing styles like opera, viewing their success in doing so as a litmus test for the refinement (and therefore civilizational success) of the United States more broadly. At the same time, the middle classes continued to embrace discourses of domestic femininity in which a woman’s ability to perform on the parlor piano was a highly regarded skill. Indeed, the link between musical performance and the bourgeois home only grew more important during these years, as a massive increase in the production of affordable keyboards put them within reach of an ever-growing swath of the population.Footnote ²¹

Simultaneously, a wide variety of musical practices continued to develop among the nation’s vast working class. Music related to racial or ethnic communities remained a vital element in the creation and articulation of identities both old and new—the efflorescence of Afrodiasporic forms like the blues and ragtime among the communities of formerly enslaved people in the South and Midwest only the most famous among them.Footnote ²² It would be a mistake to consider such developments as the expression of age-old tendencies, either cultural or musical. Instead, such forms were distinctly modern, born in the cross-class (and sometimes cross-racial) leisure spaces of the industrializing nation, and shaped by new technologies of performance (like the widespread availability of the upright piano) and transportation (like the train lines that allowed musicians an unprecedented degree of mobility).Footnote ²³ Similarly, a host of new immigrant communities brought their music to America, filling the streets of cities like New York and Chicago with rapidly evolving forms of Polish, Italian, or Jewish song.Footnote ²⁴ These communities intersected with an array of longstanding sonic traditions among the native-born working classes, many of which centered around forms of alcohol-fueled performance embedded in spaces like taverns and concert saloons.Footnote ²⁵ Within such environments, energetic, ribald musical activity thrived for decades, providing the organizational foundation for a host of new cultural styles.Footnote ²⁶

These dynamics were transformed by the emergence of a new force within the music industry.Footnote ²⁷ While individuals had made a living as performers or publishers since the early days of the republic, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era saw a massive increase in commercial leisure, much of which was connected to a nationally oriented entertainment sector. Appearing live, through performances, and as circulating commodities in sheet music (and later piano rolls or records), the products of these businesses began to remake the American soundscape. Cutting across the lines of class, ethnicity, race, and geography, leading firms upset long-standing hierarchies of musical practice, setting the stage for twentieth-century mass culture. Such developments must be understood in relation to the era’s broader sonic history. While entrepreneurs like Edward Marks (whose journeys through New York in this period are detailed in my article “The Best Songs Came from the Gutters”) may have helped to reshape the nation’s musical identity, he did so in reaction to decades of already rapid evolution.

Begin to examine almost any description of sound from this period, and it is possible to unpack layer after layer, from the most specific of local dynamics to structural shifts playing out at the global level. Such complexity is why teaching with the history of sound is such an effective way to introduce students to the complexities of American history during these years. Linking individual experience to social structure, and short-term fad to centuries-long tradition, music and sound unify the myriad levels at which change operates across time. And if that sounds good, that’s because it is.

Sound In the Classroom

As is true for many aspects of life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, newspapers offer a tremendous resource for sonic history. The following examples are meant to be further illustrations of both the broad themes sketched out over the preceding pages as well as the journey through New York City detailed in the article “The Best Songs Came from the Gutters.”

Within a classroom setting, the analysis of the following articles offers an opportunity to explore the ways in which the experience and description of sound and music reflect the complex historical dynamics of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era website will make available an additional set of passages selected for use in the classroom. These do not include prewritten analysis. Instructors can use these materials as the basis for a session focused specifically on sound or music in history. They could also use this essay and the following passages to facilitate discussions about progressive reform, changing gender dynamics, the rise of mass culture, or evolving tensions around class or race. In such instances, students could be asked to reflect on how a consideration of these topics shifts when sound is incorporated alongside more traditional forms of historical evidence.

One potential approach to utilizing these resources in the classroom would be to talk through one or two of the passages in a group setting, drawing on material from the preceding essay as background, before breaking into smaller groups to discuss the passages included online. Another might be to assign the essay as a supplement to other class materials, using it to introduce students to the concept of sound history, before asking them to analyze one or more passages. Finally, a minimal version might involve simply projecting one of the following passages on the classroom screen, and asking the class to talk through it as a group, reinforcing prior discussions of the era’s social dynamics through sounded history.

Case Study 1: “Soper Strains His Ankle”

Newspaper fiction was widespread during the late nineteenth century. While not an account of actual happenings, such pieces were intended to depict more-or-less realistic situations. As a result, they can provide extremely useful descriptions of day-to-day life. In “Soper Strains His Ankle”, Soper, an architect who works in Manhattan’s noisy downtown, strains his ankle and attempts to work from home (Figure 1). What he finds there is a series of sonic disturbances, as a variety of peddlers move past his apartment, breaking through the boundaries of the home with the distinctive cries necessary to advertise their businesses. While the family is upper-middle class, and therefore able to maintain a clear distinction between the husband’s work and the wife’s domestic duties, sound crosses and complicates these dividing lines. This disruptive soundscape is only expanded by an array of domestic noises, as those living around Soper’s apartment—in particular, a series of young children and music-loving young adults—make their presence known. Over the course of the day, Soper realizes that his home is anything but a sanctuary from the world; the office, structured specifically for his needs, is actually a safer, calmer setting. A farce on the ideologies and expectations of gender among the middle class, the piece reflects the vital role of sound in defining both experiences and expectations of home and work in the Progressive Era. Note as well that the role of sound here is not exclusively physical. Soper dreams about sonically embodied imperial conflict in the Philippines, while his younger wife wants him to break his “philosophical” calm and curse—a commentary on the structures of classed masculinity in this period.

Figure 1.

“Soper Strains His Ankle,” The Sun (New York), June 16, 1901.

Case Study 2: “Noises of the City”

An article written in the early days of progressive reform, “Noises of the City,” catalogs the wide variety of sounds that defined the New York City soundscape and explores the ways in which they were beginning to be disciplined (Figure 2). Within such descriptions, it’s important to analyze the perspective of the author producing the account. Not yet convinced that the “chorus that tells of man’s ceaseless activity” was a threat to health or social order, the journalist appears to believe that the city’s myriad noises could be disruptive and required some mechanisms for their control. At this point, however, these efforts were not yet the top-down attempts to restructure the city’s lived environment that would define the Fiorella La Guardia administration of the 1930s. Instead, they were piecemeal, with individual citizens required to collaborate (or complain) in order to shape the city’s soundscape. At the same time, the tensions that would define future discourse around noise were already visible (or rather, audible). Forms of industry and retail created unsustainable levels of sound—similarly, the plethora of transportation and delivery modes created a nonstop “clatter” and “grind.” All of this reflected the mixture of new and old forms of life within the turn-of-the-century city—rag men and church bells mixing with cable cars and subways.

Figure 2.

“Noises of the City,” New York Daily Tribune, September 6, 1906.

Case Study 3: “Eyes That Don’t See”

“Eyes that Don’t See, and Ears that Don’t Hear, Have These Excise Inspectors” is a report on the proceedings of a senatorial committee investigating allegations of corruption in the oversight of New York City’s bars and saloons (Figure 3). These businesses had long served as vital spaces of community organization and pleasure among the city’s working classes—while also providing space for “vices” including prostitution, gambling, and drunkenness. While a series of laws had empowered city commissioners to remove the license of offending businesses, in practice, bar owners were frequently able to continue their operations through ties to members of the police and city government. In such proceedings, it is possible to see the ways in which the structures of government sought to control the social environment of cities while also obtaining a rare glimpse into the oppositional cultures that thrived in such spaces.

Figure 3.

“Eyes that Don’t See, and Ears that Don’t Hear, Have These Excise Inspectors,” New York World, May 5, 1890.

Sound and music are a crucial element throughout the article, used by both commissioners and the police as a metric to assess whether or not an establishment operated with an acceptable amount of disorder. When one lawyer questioned the police’s refusal to close Blank’s concert saloon, a space where unmarried men and women could drink together and listen to performances, a patrolman pushed back, stating that “Poor people go there with their families to hear music—people who cannot go to the Metropolitan Opera.” Such a response undercut the assumptions of the investigators, arguing that these officials needed to look past middle-class assumptions of cultural value. Such sound-based evaluations could determine the respectability of an establishment—and therefore its business success. On the one hand, Theiss’s place on 14th Street was described as “running very quietly now … people drink soft stuff with an orchestrion accompaniment.” A complex machine that could play a variety of musical instruments, the orchestrion was unlikely to provide the kinds of wild performances that could lead to disorder. At the same time, Murphy’s saloon was never allowed to open its dancing room because of police interference. A notoriously “tough” place, dancing in this establishment would transgress the limits of acceptability. Throughout this discussion, music and sound are used as a means to organize social hierarchy and urban space—both from the top, and, as patrons chose between establishments based on the entertainment they could provide, from the bottom.

Case Study 4: “At Gay Coney Island”

The importance of both sound and music to the new spaces of commercial leisure was made clear in a 1903 Indianapolis Journal description of Coney Island, the famous seaside resort in southern Brooklyn (Figure 4). Originally a class-segregated space that catered to both respectable families and rough-edged “sports,” the area was commercialized toward the end of the nineteenth century, adding an array of amusement park rides, boardwalk entertainment, restaurants, and pavilions capable of hosting hundreds of thousands of guests. Within these spaces, New Yorkers explored new styles of commercially mediated experience, interacting across the lines of class and gender that had long structured public life in the city. From the first, the resort is defined by its soundscape—“the boisterous strains from a hundred brass bands, the maddening mechanical music of countless merry-go-rounds and the everlasting rag-time of a thousand pianos all join together in one frightful nightmare of discord.” In such descriptions, the physical impact of sound is made viscerally apparent, suggesting the ways in which the island’s distinctive sonic environment both epitomized and furthered the intentionally disorienting pleasures that beachgoers sought. The cultural influence of the period’s entertainment industry is also obvious. The carnivalesque surroundings were shaped by the presence of new forms of popular music, many of which (like the cakewalk and ragtime) were distinctly racialized. The ability of a heterogeneous array of (newly) white Americans to enjoy such commercial products helped to generate a shared mainstream culture, forged in spaces like Coney Island and then transmitted across the country through media like this newspaper article, which was published in Indiana. Exploring the roles played by music and noise within Coney Island helps us to better understand how these processes unfolded in real time, and at ground level.

Figure 4.

“At Gay Coney Island,” Indianapolis Journal, July 5, 1903.