MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

While scholars have long argued that blackface minstrelsy was central to the evolution of antebellum American culture, far less attention has been paid to the genre in the period following the Civil War. The era of Reconstruction posed a potentially existential threat to a form of entertainment based on faux plantation frolics and the impersonation of slaves. At the same time, rapid urban growth, increased railroad construction, and widespread (if intermittent) prosperity offered huge new audiences for producers able to navigate the period’s fraught cultural politics.

Of the managers active in minstrelsy during these years, none was more successful than Jack Haverly, an entrepreneur who built a vast entertainment enterprise between 1875 and 1885. Haverly was famous for his “Mastodon Minstrels,” a 40-person troupe that transformed the genre into grand spectacle. With the Mastodons, Haverly remade the subject matter of minstrelsy, incorporating everything from tableaus of black soldiers to skits set in luxurious Newport mansions. Haverly also dramatized his own managerial persona, displaying himself as an empire-building magnate, and allowing audiences to imagine themselves as part of American greatness and modernity through the very act of attendance. In their evocation of a unified national audience, the Mastodon’s performances carried a potent political charge, embodying a vision of sectional reunion that implicitly wrote the free blacks depicted on stage out of a new American compact, centered on business, and symbolized by Haverly’s own success. This paper uses newspapers, advertisements, biographical accounts, and Haverly’s published interviews to explore the linkages between conceptualizations of race, nation, and business in Gilded Age performance. An aesthetic that connected all three would come to serve as the basis for the reconstruction of minstrelsy in the late nineteenth century, setting the stage for the next era of mass commercial culture.