Chapter One
The Miserable Toys of Despotism
It may not have been the first battle fought over a Frenchwoman’s thighs, nor was it likely to be the last. But it was the first to launch a newspaper.
She had been brought across the sea to dance the ballet at the grand new theater on the Bowery Road. The most cultured of New Yorkers had been anticipating her coming for weeks—Mayor Hone had been urging the city’s social leaders to turn out for her debut almost as though it were a civic duty. At last, in early February, the newspapers had been able to make the announcement: “Madame Francisque Hutin, of the Opera House, Paris, has arrived.”
No one in the city had actually heard of Francisque Hutin, not even those who followed events in Paris, but everyone had heard of this latest French vogue, this new school of dance in which ethereal maidens leapt and spun to sentimental music, swept their liquid arms and floated on their toes. Fashionable Parisians could not get enough of it; after decades of revolution, war, and depression, it was a celebration of color, sentiment, gossamer delicacy, sweet harmony, illusive innocence, and sex. Their counterparts in Gotham, in those dark early weeks of 1827, were eager to make it their own—although in their minds it stood for something quite different.
The house was crowded for a Wednesday night. Philip Hone, erstwhile mayor of the city, alertly poised and irreproachably dressed, surveyed the house from his private box and felt gratified to see all the neighboring boxes in the upper tier overflowing with the wealthy and cultured. But the boxes of the lower tier were full too, with the respectable husbands and wives of the middle class, and so were the cheaper seats in the pit, packed with young clerks and craftsmen. So, for that matter, were the cheapest seats of all, in the third tier above the boxes, where even laborers, black people, and unaccompanied women (along with those less respectable men who went looking for unaccompanied women) had come to see Madame Hutin dance.
Of course, she would not appear early in the evening. First there had to pass the usual parade of musical acts, farcical sketches, and abbreviated plays that struggled to hold the attentions of a motley city crowd. But at long last, after a chopped-up version of Much Ado about Nothing, the orchestra sent up a sentimental folk melody to fill the vast space of the theater, and onto the stage bounded Francisque Hutin.
Her dance was called “The Coquettish Shepherdess,” and after a coquettish bat of her eyelashes she bounded again with an athleticism astonishing for a female dancer. Then she hurled herself into a muscular pirouette. As she spun, her light skirt rose. And rose. And rose.
No worldly member of the audience could have been surprised by the light gown she wore that bared her arms and lifted with her movements to grant a flash of stockinged leg. French dancers had been stirring minor scandals for thirty years with their filmy Grecian gowns, and popular actresses liked to play young Shakespearean males and Greek gods precisely so that they could wear breeches that displayed their calves. But few if any of them were prepared for what had lately become acceptable on the Parisian stage. Before seven thousand widening American eyes, Francisque Hutin kept spinning as centrifugal force, like the hand of an invisible lecher, revealed her calves, her knees, the fullness of her thighs, and, at least for an instant, even more.
The audience did not remain in spellbound silence for long. A great chorus of male cheers swelled up from the pit. Claps and foot stamps met them from above. And in the middle, in the lower row of boxes, respectable middle-class wives rose indignantly from their seats and, proud and legless in the vast satin cones of their gowns, swept toward the lobby like bellflowers on a stream.
One area of the house, however, was not so quick to announce its verdict: the upper boxes that held the people who shaped opinions and started vogues, the people whose opinion mattered most to Philip Hone. He knew art and valued civilization, and he understood what this performance meant to his city, how the whirling thighs of Madame Hutin embodied everything he yearned for New York to be.
Hone’s newly completed tenure as mayor had lasted just a year, but it had been a monumental year. New York was rising on a flood tide. Not of water—although water was the source of it—but of money and humanity. The city had already been growing rapidly for two generations, faster than any other big city in the young republic, muscling ahead of Boston and Philadelphia as a center of commerce, finance, and industry. Then, in the fall of 1825, only fourteen months before, Governor Clinton had officially opened the Great Western Canal, that highway of water slashing nearly four hundred miles through stone and forest from distant Lake Erie to the Hudson River, ferrying the whole, incalculable wealth of the vast American interior past the docks at the tip of Manhattan. In its first year of operation, the canal had been even more profitable than its backers had predicted, nearly paying back its titanic cost. Now the winter had shut it down, but everyone knew that in a month or two, when the ice began to break, the surge of barges and wealth would be greater than any city had ever dreamed of.
Already the city was outgrowing itself. There had been fewer than a hundred thousand people there ten years before, but at least seventy thousand more had crowded in since. How many more would come now? Every day they poured in by ship and ferry, from every state in the Union and half the nations of Europe, fighting for a piece of New York’s new wealth. The rasping and pounding of construction had become the music of the city, and this new theater was at the center of it. Laborers and immigrants crowded into the tenant houses that proliferated across the boggy neighborhood that stretched out behind the theater’s back, while another immigrant, a friend of Hone’s named John Jacob Astor, was rapidly transforming a respectable fortune into a colossal one by turning the farmland to the north into new neighborhoods.
Right where Philip Hone sat, where theater patrons now packed themselves into boxes and rows, another sort of crowd had gathered just a few years before—crowds of great, stinking, pissing, moaning brutes, unwittingly brought together to die. This had been the slaughterhouse district until a group of wealthy landowners, Astors among them, had determined to plow it under with the city’s most elegant new neighborhood. The Bowery Road, so recently churned muddy by cattle drives from the pastures of Manhattan, now rolled like an imperial boulevard into the north and the future, to half-built neighborhoods where wandering lanes were giving way to a scientific grid of streets with numbers instead of names.
To anchor that boulevard’s southern end, where Chatham Street curved into it from the old city, the Astors and their allies had decided to build the New York Theatre. They had planned its opening for October, 1826—almost exactly a year after Governor Clinton had officially opened the Canal—as a monument to wealth and modernity. One thing alone made it a bright, hissing testimony to a new age: it was the first American theater built for gas lighting, that invisible power just then beginning to transform the urban night. But it was also the biggest theater in the New World, seating thirty-five hundred people within the body of a Greek temple, a white-pillared assertion of the power of reason and republicanism, with “scenery and machinery equal to anything in London.” It would present, they had promised, only the finest performances. It would never, unlike the other new theaters popping up, pander to baser tastes.
Mayor Hone had delivered an address upon the laying of its cornerstone. “No act of my public life,” he remembered, “lost me so many friends.” A growing body of influential citizens had been stirred to do battle against the city’s rising tide of vice and crime (especially those Presbyterian merchants who’d been pouring in from New England), and most had come to view theaters as nearly as pernicious as taverns and brothels—as much for the crowds they attracted as for what happened on stage. For the mayor, however, the theater was worth the political risk.
Hone was a cosmopolite, one who had made his fortune auctioning European goods, one who followed the artistic fashions of Paris and London, a dashing master of taste and ton who knew paintings and music and threw scintillating dinner parties. He had grown weary of Europeans mocking the United States as a land of farmers and religious cranks, and just as weary of Americans mocking New Yorkers for caring about nothing but money, food, and amusements. An annoying woman named Anne Royall had recently published a book of “sketches” of life in the various regions of the young United States (one of those books that no one would admit to owning but that everyone could complain about in great detail), in which she’d asserted that Boston was “unmistakably a century ahead of New York in intellectual refinement.” Hone wanted his city to use its wealth to make itself the glittering cultural jewel of the new world.
There was something, however, even more important than appearances. In culture, Hone knew that he moved at the vanguard of his times, but he knew just as well that in politics he was a vestige of lost era—the era when only men of property were allowed to vote. He had come of age in a city still dominated by the old, landed families that had run it since the days of the Dutch, those intermarried clans of Beekmans and Stuyvesants and Livingstons. When the merchant princes (among whom Hone liked to count himself) had risen to rival them, they had swiftly united their interests with the old gentry through bonds of marriage and real estate. But over just the past few years, bending before the democratic winds that swept the country, the legislature in Albany had been gradually expanding suffrage until soon nearly every white male would have the vote; and now a brushfire of angry egalitarianism was sweeping from the West with the inexorable Andrew Jackson. Hone himself had been installed as mayor only because an ugly feud had briefly split the corrupt and cupiditous democrats who were clearly taking control of the city.
He worried about the costs of sudden democracy. He had seen the growing restiveness of laboring men: the recent march of a thousand men along the docks in support of a stevedors’ strike, but also the vandalism of Mr. Stuyvesant’s garden, the riot that had erupted when the city had tried to round up the herds of pigs that ran free in the streets, the ugly demonstration of partisan anger in front of his own mansion on New Year’s night. He knew that if his class of people were to do anything to steer the city away from mob rule, they would have to do it not through their diminishing political power but through whatever cultural power they could wield. They would have to bring civility to the masses, educate and uplift them from mobhood to citizenship.
