The early stages of the twentieth century have been considered a pivotal moment in the formation of modern American culture. Americans in this period were forced to reshape and adjust the contours of their culture and society in response to new and explosive waves of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. These immense factors of causation, along with technological advancement, allowed more and more Americans to experience worlds outside of their own space and identity, their homes, neighborhoods, and regions. The result was the beginnings of a mass culture, forged by responses to these great changes and premised on revisions of genteel culture and new opportunities for leisure among a broader range of Americans. Though this new mass culture was, in its primary stages, an urban phenomenon, its grip increasingly widened to reach into vast portions of America’s hinterland—even Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. Popular amusements at Middlebury around the turn of the 20th century thus reflected trends in American society at large. Popular entertainment, as commercialized leisure, integrated changing social mores with leftover middle-class genteel sensibility, serving to showcase an emerging mass culture.
The cultural change that took place around the turn of the twentieth century emerged on the heels of and in response to 19th century, middle-class oriented Victorianism. Where domesticity and gentility once pervaded aspirations for the good life and its amusements, new notions of social interaction arose outside of previously
bound and separated gender spheres. As a result, social gatherings and venues for entertainment moved in this period from homo-social to hetero-social. Social life at Middlebury College reflected this shift. Middlebury College had always been divided into two colleges: one for men and one for women. This was the case through its first 100 years and much of the first half of the twentieth century. Even the college’s yearbook, the Kaleidoscope, separated the spheres of men and women within its pages. An account of the college boys, their respective classes and collective social habits, remained isolated from a similar account of the college girls. Yet, as early as 1909, the Kaleidoscope featured a section dedicated to hetero-social interaction. It displayed images of proms, hops, sporting events, and other activities that catered to a heterogeneous mixture of the college student body. Middkids were eager enough to brush off the shackles of genteel confinement that the intermingling of guys and gals in a public setting became a chief aim of college social life.
Victorian gentility still wielded significant cultural power, however, as arbiters of the new mass culture, even at Middlebury, were mindful of the
line between roughness and respectability. Turn of the century popular amusements, such as Coney Island and vaudeville, exhibited a rough and rugged, very often carnival-like entertainment but were presented in a way that aimed to persuade potential spectators or participants of their refinement and respectability. At Middlebury, the “carnivalesque” found a home in the Freshman Parade. The parade exhibited outlandish costumes and inversions of normal social roles. Every year, after the turn of the twentieth century, College upperclassman dressed their freshman counterparts in freakish costume and paraded them about campus. It was a brand new tradition and, as the College newspaper in 1917 decried, a “If the representatives of Barnum & Bailey or of Forepaugh had been in town… they would have thought they struck a gold mine.” At the same time, the Campus was careful not to flag this tradition as entirely rowdy. “These martyrs of [the class of] 1917 paraded the main street for the edification and enjoyment of humanity in general.” Moreover, the Campus reported that “1917 may well be proud of the quantity and quality of her freaks.”
Victorian gentility still wielded significant cultural power, however, as arbiters of the new mass culture, even at Middlebury, were mindful of the
line between roughness and respectability. Turn of the century popular amusements, such as Coney Island and vaudeville, exhibited a rough and rugged, very often carnival-like entertainment but were presented in a way that aimed to persuade potential spectators or participants of their refinement and respectability. At Middlebury, the “carnivalesque” found a home in the Freshman Parade. The parade exhibited outlandish costumes and inversions of normal social roles. Every year, after the turn of the twentieth century, College upperclassman dressed their freshman counterparts in freakish costume and paraded them about campus. It was a brand new tradition and, as the College newspaper in 1917 decried, a “If the representatives of Barnum & Bailey or of Forepaugh had been in town… they would have thought they struck a gold mine.” At the same time, the Campus was careful not to flag this tradition as entirely rowdy. “These martyrs of [the class of] 1917 paraded the main street for the edification and enjoyment of humanity in general.” Moreover, the Campus reported that “1917 may well be proud of the quantity and quality of her freaks.”
Remnants of genteel culture also reared their heads in popular and heterogeneously attended sporting events. Athletics, at Middlebury and in America generally, continued to blur the line separating genteel respectability and rough social conduct. This was the same era in which the immense popularity of professional baseball and the “rowdy” urban crowds attracted to it drew heated arguments over whether games should have been played on Sunday and whether alcohol should have been served at the stadium. Middlebury College displayed some of the same tension via spectators of its sporting events. In a letter to the editor of the Campus in 1910, an anonymous author bemoans the disreputable behavior of a Middlebury crowd at a baseball game. Presumably written by an older teacher or administrator or member of the community tied to notions of a respectable past, the letter offered advice for the proper use of enthusiasm: “Enthusiasm is a desirable and needed quality, but the proper conception of gentlemanly methods for expressing it has more importance.”
The College Prom, the freshman parade, well-attended sporting events, and even College produced minstrel shows exemplified the commercialization of leisure—that the new culture emerging from urban areas had penetrated the production of amusements and social life generally in rural Vermont. Middlebury College, according to the Campus, had several troupes of blackface minstrel players who performed in Middlebury and also traveled to surrounding areas. While latently racist, the shows achieved reviews from the Campus placing them in a high order of entertainment. Meanwhile, the advent of “moving pictures” as a new form of popular amusement in town employed the same concerns accented in the emerging cultural order. An advertisement in the Campus highlighted a showing of “Motion Pictures and Illustrated Songs” to be viewed at the Grange Hall. More poignantly, this viewing was inevitably “A good clean place to spend the evening.”
Through the commercialization of leisure, therefore, the distinct elements of an emerging mass culture at the turn of the 20th century can be traced even to the far reaches of the hinterland. Social life at Middlebury College in this era demonstrated the broad scope of influence this new mass culture exerted. Men and women now gathered together in public settings for their amusement and when they gathered exhibited a crassness that challenged genteel sensibilities of generations past. The late 19th and early 20th centuries indeed represented a critical moment in the formation of modern American culture.
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