Astor Place Riot

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Astor Place Riot

The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849 at the Astor Place Theatre^[1] in New York City and left at least 25 dead and more than 120 injured. ^[2] It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances pitting immigrants and nativists against each other and ultimately against the upper classes (who controlled the police and militia) in the urban United States of the 19th century, particularly in Manhattan.

It was the first time the National Guard had been called out and had shot into a crowd of citizens, and it led to the creation of the first police force armed with deadly weapons.^[3] Yet its genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, the first great American star, and William Charles Macready, the greatest English actor of his generation, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

Background

The riot, and its seemingly absurd origin in a feud between two actors, can best be understood by appreciating that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, in a time before professional sports or movies, theater as entertainment was a mass phenomenon, and theaters as buildings were the main gathering places in most towns and cities. As a result, star actors amassed an immensely loyal following. At the same time, audiences had always treated theaters as places to make their feelings known, not just towards the actors, but towards their fellow theatergoers of different classes or political persuasions.

In the early to mid nineteenth century, the American theater was dominated by British actors and managers. The rise of Edwin Forrest as the first American star, the fierce partisanship of his supporters, and their eventually violent struggle with the old order, can thus be seen as the birth pangs of a homegrown American entertainment business. The riot was the culmination of eighty or more years - since the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when an entire theater was torn apart while British actors were performing on stage - when British actors touring around America had found themselves, because of their prominence and the lack of other visiting targets, the focus of often violent anti-British anger.^[4]

The fact that both actors were specialists in Shakespeare can be ascribed to the godlike worship of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century as the figurehead of Anglo-Saxon culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, wrote in his journal that beings on other planets probably called the Earth "Shakespeare."^[5] Shakespeare's plays were not just the favorites of the educated: In gold rush California, miners whiled away the harsh winter months by sitting around campfires and acting out Shakespeare's plays from memory; his words were on the tip of everyone's tongue, from every echelon of society.^[6]

Genesis

The roots of the riot were multifold, but had three main strands. (1) A dispute between William Charles Macready, the greatest British actor of his generation, and Edwin Forrest, the first real American star, former friends whose understanding fell foul of theatrical rivalries and the poisonous Anglo-American relations of the 1840s, and became a notorious bone of contention in the British and (particularly) the American media, which filled columns with discussions of their respective merits. (2) A growing sense of cultural alienation from Britain among mainly working-class Americans, along with Irish immigrants; though nativist Americans were hostile to Irish immigrants, both found a common cause against the British. (3) A class struggle between those groups, who largely supported Forrest, and the largely Anglophile upper classes, who supported Macready. The two actors became figureheads for Britain and America, and their rivalry came to encapsulate two opposed views about the future of American culture. It was an irony that both were famous as Shakespearean actors: in an America that had yet to establish its own theatrical traditions, the way to prove its cultural prowess was to do Shakespeare as well as the British, and even to claim that Shakespeare, had he been alive at the time, would have been, at heart at least, an American.^[7]

Proximate causes

Macready and Forrest had each toured each other's country twice before the riot broke out. On Macready's second visit to America, Forrest had taken to pursuing him around the country and appearing in the same plays to challenge him. Given the tenor of the time, most newspapers supported the "home-grown" star Forrest.^[8] On Forrest's second visit to London, he was less popular than on his first trip, and he could only explain it to himself by deciding that Macready, the leading British actor, had maneuvered against him. He went to watch Macready playing Hamlet and at his most famous point, stood up and loudly hissed him. The ensuing scandal assumed ridiculous dimensions and followed Macready on his third and last trip to America, where at one point the carcass of half a dead sheep was thrown at him on the stage.^[9]

By this point Edwin Forrest had become inflexible in his belief in himself as a great star; more so even than the older Macready, whose ego was at least as large but was tormented by his hatred of his profession because, in the class-ridden context of Victorian Britain, it prevented him from becoming a respectable gentleman. Despite the fact that Forrest had married an English wife, he justified his attacks on Macready by whipping up his friends and the public, in a series of articles attacking Macready in the newspapers. The climate worsened still more when Forrest instigated divorce proceedings against his English wife for immoral conduct. Forrest aligned his wife with the supposedly dissolute Anglophile upper classes of New York, and the verdict came down, against Forrest, on the day Macready arrived in New York for his farewell run.

Forrest's roots among working people and the gangs of New York ran deep: he had made his debut at the Bowery Theatre, which had come to cater mostly to a working class audience, drawn largely from the notorious, immigrant-heavy Five Points section of lower Manhattan a few blocks to the west. Forrest's muscular frame and impassioned delivery was deemed admirably "American" by his working-class fans. Wealthier theatergoers, to avoid mingling with the immigrants and the Five Points crowd, had built the Astor Place Opera House at the junction of Broadway - then the purlieu of the upper classes - and the Bowery - the working-class entertainment strip. With its dress code of kid gloves and white vests, the very existence of the Astor Place was taken as a provocation by populist Americans for whom the theater was traditionally the gathering place for all classes.^[10]

Macready was scheduled to appear in Macbeth at the Opera House - which, since New York had proved itself unwilling to support a full season of opera, had opened itself to less elevated entertainment and was known at the time as the Astor Place Theatre.^[11] Forrest -- whether by intention or coincidence -- was scheduled to perform Macbeth on the same night, only a few blocks away at the huge Broadway Theater. A cultural war was brewing, and in the aftermath of the scandalous divorce trial, Forrest's patriotic friends became still more determined to make a stand on his behalf.^[12] Among several rabble-rousers who espoused Forrest's cause, the most prominent was Ned Buntline, a dime novelist, blackmailing journalist and thug for hire.^[13]

The riot

On May 7, 1849, three nights before the climactic riot, Forrest's supporters bought hundreds of tickets to the top level of the Astor Place theater, and they brought Macready's performance of Macbeth to a grinding halt by throwing rotten eggs, potatoes, shoes, bottles of stinking liquid, and ripped up seats onto the stage. Macready had intended to leave for Britain after this, but was persuaded to perform again by a petition signed by 48 well-heeled New Yorkers, including authors Herman Melville and Washington Irving. On May 10, Macready once again took the stage as Macbeth.

On the day of the riot, the National Guard had already been alerted by the new Whig administration and was amassing in reserve. Posters went up across the city inviting working men and patriots to show their feelings to the British. By the time the play opened, up to 20,000 people filled the streets around the theater. Ned Buntline and his young troops set up relays to bombard the theater with stones, and fought running battles with the police. They and others inside tried, but failed, to set fire to the building. As the theater fell in on their heads, the audience was in a state of siege; stubbornly defiant, Macready finished the play and only then slipped out in disguise. Fearing they had lost control of the city, the authorities called out the troops, who were jostled, attacked and injured, and finally lined up and, after unheard warnings, opened fire several times at point blank range. Many of those killed were innocent bystanders. Dozens of injured and dead were laid out in nearby saloons and shops, and the next morning saw pitiful scenes in which mothers and wives combed the blood-soaked stones and searched morgues for their loved ones. ^[14]

Astor Place Riot

Reported the New York Tribune: "As one window after another cracked, the pieces of bricks and paving stones rattled in on the terraces and lobbies, the confusion increased, till the Opera House resembled a fortress besieged by an invading army rather than a place meant for the peaceful amusement of civilized community."

The next night, May 11, a meeting attended by thousands was called in City Hall Park, with speakers crying out for revenge against the authorities whose actions they held responsible for the fatalities at the "Massacre Place Opera House". During the scrum, a young boy was killed. An angry crowd headed for the Opera House and fought running battles with mounted troops, but this time the authorities quickly got the upper hand.^[15]

Consequences

Three judges presided over the trial, including Charles Patrick Daly, a judge on the New York Court of Common Pleas.^[1]

According to Nigel Cliff in The Shakespeare Riots, the riots furthered the process of class alienation and segregation in New York City and America; as part of that process, the entertainment world separated into "respectable" and "working-class" orbits. As professional actors gravitated to respectable theaters and vaudeville houses responded by mounting skits on "serious" Shakespeare, Shakespeare was gradually removed from popular culture into a new category of highbrow entertainment, and Americans forgot why their forbears had taken to the streets in their thousands to support their actors of Shakespeare against the British. Though Edwin Forrest's reputation was badly damaged, his heroic style of acting can be followed through to the matinee idols of early Hollywood and performers like John Barrymore. Forrest's struggle with British acting, lethal though it became, nevertheless gave birth to the American star system.

Depictions in Literature

The riot is a key turning point in the plot of Anya Seton's novel Dragonwyck (1944). The Interpretation of Murder (2006) by Jed Rubenfield contains discussion with Sigmund Freud about an Astor Place Riot in which he incorrectly suggests that theater goers rioted over whether Hamlet should be a feminine or masculine character. The historical fiction play Two Shakespearian Actors deals mainly with the event surrounding and leading up to the riot.

Notes