During the first decades of the twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States, bringing cheap, accessible, and respectable entertainment to an enormous national market.Footnote ¹ Dominated by a handful of powerful syndicates, the tightly centralized industry compiled information about performers and customers, data that flowed from local theaters to corporate headquarters in New York and Chicago, where it was sorted and analyzed before being returned to the public through decisions about booking.Footnote ² A means to organize both business and culture across a far-flung network in the years before the rise of mechanically reproducible performance, this informational economy enabled a genre-defining process of negotiation between artists, managers, and audiences. Anchoring an analysis of vaudeville's social and aesthetic impact in the concrete details of the firms that created it not only expands our understanding of the form and its role in American culture; it also points towards the broader utility of the tools developed by business history for the examination of a wide array of entertainment industries.

In 1914, the Western Vaudeville Managers’ Association (WVMA) published a promotional yearbook intended to serve as “a compendium of information” about the operations of vaudeville in the western, midwestern, and southwestern United States.Footnote ³ The organization, often referred to as a “syndicate” in the contemporary press, initially emerged as a booking partnership that united the interests of a handful of prominent theater owners.Footnote ⁴ Seventeen years later, it stood as a powerful middleman between traveling performers and local managers throughout the country. While owners of commercial amusements had long attempted to “give the people what they want,” such associations developed an unprecedented set of tools with which to do so.Footnote ⁵ Using a sophisticated apparatus of on-the-ground reportage, historical pricing records, and finely honed managerial experience, the WVMA's Chicago offices gathered and analyzed real-time information from hundreds of communities before booking artists into venues across a vast swathe of the continent in response.Footnote ⁶

Vaudeville presented audiences with a fast-paced succession of individual performances, each of which typically lasted between fifteen and twenty-five minutes—an evening's bill could include anything from the short plays, popular songs, and snappy dance numbers that dominated most lineups to more unusual fare such as a Hebrew juggler-magician or carefully trained roosters promoted as “Chanticleer cyclists.”Footnote ⁷ Not only did such acts, which typically toured independently, have to be successfully routed to theaters, but each week's lineup needed to be carefully balanced, gradually increasing in quality and excitement before climaxing in a satisfying headliner.Footnote ⁸ The WVMA—along with the United Booking Office (UBO), its East Coast counterpart—organized such performances at an enormous scale, ushering tens of thousands of vaudevillians between hundreds of stages to a daily audience of millions, creating and distributing bills with machine-like precision.Footnote ⁹ It was the largest entertainment system the world had ever seen, held together by railroad and telegraph and ordered by form and filing cabinet.Footnote ¹⁰

In their search for mass popularity, vaudeville's syndicates attempted to provide “something for everyone,” drawing together a heterogenous audience that crossed the lines of class, ethnicity, and gender.Footnote ¹¹ Analysis of these efforts has typically followed two interlocking paths: on the one hand, focusing on the power of the businessmen who owned the dominant syndicates, while on the other, exploring the boundary-pushing artistry of the performers who brought them to life.Footnote ¹² The tension between these groups is understood as driving the creation of a distinctive vaudeville aesthetic, dispensing with plot and logic in favor of speed, novelty, and spectacle.Footnote ¹³ The WVMA yearbook points in another direction, however, drawing attention to the importance of the long-overlooked cohort of middle managers whose activity defined the functioning of this vast system.

The managers’ association “has succeeded,” explains the yearbook's anonymous author,

The workings of the association were not art, beholden to the vagaries of subjective assessment, but science, constructed with precision and control. “Their judgement secures smoothness of operation and that shading of contrast which makes every spectator an ‘enthusiastic booster’ for the week's bill. . . . Once an act is booked over W.V.M.A. time, it is a stable business quantity.”Footnote ¹⁵

During this period, vaudeville's magnates embraced a narrative of top-down control for reasons of both ego and economy.Footnote ¹⁶ Operating in a genre that had long hovered on the boundary of respectability, these businessmen found it useful to portray themselves to the broader public as discipline-minded reformers involved in every detail of their theaters’ operations.Footnote ¹⁷ In the face of this, the attention that the yearbook lavishes on the knowledge and skill of the employees who staffed the vaudeville booking offices reflects the importance of the work occurring in such spaces. It was not simply that the industry was too vast to be effectively overseen by a limited group of executives. Rather, the organizational forms that they had established were intended to distribute decision making throughout the managerial hierarchy.Footnote ¹⁸

Hubs of data creation and exchange organized around up-to-date principles of corporate management, booking offices were designed to meet the intense demands of a nationalizing entertainment industry.Footnote ¹⁹ Vaudeville's adoption of a rationalized office bureaucracy placed it on the leading edge of a broader set of developments remaking business in this period, setting it apart from the approaches adopted by contemporary entertainment forms. While centralized booking and management offices also existed for circuses, lyceum agencies, Chautauquas, and the “legitimate theater,” the sheer number of independent acts employed by the major vaudeville syndicates required the development of a particularly flexible system built to enable the flow of information.Footnote ²⁰

In part a means of circulating performers while ensuring quality and respectability, and tactically a tool for depressing salaries and reducing competition, vaudeville's booking system came to play a far broader role.Footnote ²¹ By gathering and storing data about artists in order to facilitate assessments of their value, these offices created an internal marketplace that shifted authority away from managerial preference and toward the constantly evolving tastes of the industry's customers. Built to register and collate the opinions of both audiences and bookers, they mediated a back-and-forth conversation between centralized authority and local desires.Footnote ²² By closely examining the structure of the informational economy at the heart of vaudeville, it is possible to develop a new understanding of how—and why—the form was able to exert such a pronounced influence on American society during the early twentieth century.

Sustained scholarly interest in vaudeville first emerged during the 1980s, as a generation of social and labor historians began to examine questions of working-class culture.Footnote ²³ These early studies described the genre as a commercial form breaching the previously insular world of immigrant community.Footnote ²⁴ The late 1990s and early 2000s saw research into the discourses and contexts that structured vaudeville performance, with influential accounts exploring how artists’ displays of gender, sexuality, and race undercut the sanitized rhetoric of the syndicate owners.Footnote ²⁵ More recent work has begun to expand our understanding of the business history of the form.Footnote ²⁶ The crucial role that centralized management played in the evolution of vaudeville from a set of scattered theaters into a fully fledged “corporate entertainment industry” is a common thread among all of this literature.Footnote ²⁷ However, despite gesturing toward the importance of the topic, historians have yet to examine the broader implications of the business practices used to structure the genre.

This historiographical oversight reflects a gap in research on entertainment in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Decades of work has argued convincingly for the central importance of the era's burgeoning forms of commercial performance.Footnote ²⁸ During the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s, theaters and concert halls served as vital anchors for the emergence of female-oriented spaces of consumption in American cities.Footnote ²⁹ Expanding alongside department stores, they embodied new forms of public respectability that paved the way for the mass middle class of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁰ During the same years, traveling shows were early and efficient adopters of pictorial promotion and brand identity, helping to set the terms for the more general expansion of advertising.Footnote ³¹ Dancehalls, theaters, and amusement parks became emblematic of the fast-paced, consumption-centered lifestyle of the progressive city.Footnote ³² Inclusive, cheap, and cross-class, such spaces played a crucial role in the commercial unification of a widely dispersed and heterogenous population during the early decades of the century.Footnote ³³

Despite successfully establishing the influence of these cultural forms, relatively few scholars have explored how the businesses that produced them worked.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, we still lack an accurate grasp of the dynamics—the interactions between profit motive, corporate organization, technological possibility, aesthetic invention, and social structure—that shaped the development of mass entertainment in the United States. This oversight is particularly striking given the rise in recent years of the “new history of capitalism,” a subdiscipline that has sought to return attention to the structures and cultures of economic life.Footnote ³⁵ Although the fusion of social analysis and business history that drives much of the work associated with this turn has reshaped scholarship on a number of subjects, the study of entertainment has, for the most part, remained exempt.Footnote ³⁶

But if the economy and culture are genuinely understood as interdependent objects of analysis, then culture must have an economy just as much as economy has a culture.Footnote ³⁷ In fact, closely examining the business of entertainment offers scholars the chance to anchor difficult questions of continuity and change in the granular details of practice and profit. Such research foregrounds the ways in which the products of this industry acted simultaneously as marketable goods and semiotically dense expressive forms, calling attention to the intricate processes of commoditization that enabled their creation and sale.Footnote ³⁸ In doing so, this approach necessarily demands attentiveness to the longue durée dynamics, shifting performance structures, and intergenre interactions central to the evolution of American entertainment.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 1. The Chicago booking offices of the WVMA. (Source: Vaudeville Yearbook, 1914, TS 10.23.6.2, Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

Vaudeville first developed out of “variety,” an older and less reputable form that thrived in the wake of the Civil War.Footnote ⁴⁰ During the 1870s and ‘80s, enterprising managers and theater owners began to reshape the genre's cultural associations, gesturing toward middle-class respectability in an attempt to broaden its potential audience.Footnote ⁴¹ Buoyed by the success of these efforts, entrepreneurs expanded from individual houses to regional circuits, establishing booking offices to better satisfy their need for a continual stream of performers.Footnote ⁴² Using the leverage provided by the ability to connect artists and playhouses, managers such as New England's B. F. Keith and the Chicago-based Kohl & Castle started to exert influence over the broader industry. By the early twentieth century, impresarios such as Keith, who increasingly ruled the eastern UBO, and Martin Beck, who led both the Pacific Coast Orpheum chain and the WVMA, dominated the genre, unifying scores of formerly independent circuits through their control over booking.Footnote ⁴³

From this imposing position, the businessmen at the head of these syndicates profited both from the theaters they owned directly and from the fees, information, and preferential treatment they wrung from supposedly independent booking offices.Footnote ⁴⁴ Within a system virtually defined by conflicts of interest, rents were extracted from a bewildering array of interactions. Vaudeville performers were charged a fee by their agents for obtaining them bookings (agents would frequently be asked to pay part of this fee to the syndicate) and another fee by the agencies for being booked.Footnote ⁴⁵ Theaters likewise paid the syndicate for the right to contract with performers through their offices.Footnote ⁴⁶ If artists or theater owners balked at this, or otherwise attempted to go against the business interests ruling this system, they would quickly find themselves on the infamous “blacklist,” cut off from further bookings.Footnote ⁴⁷ Over the years, this powerful weapon was used against upstart managers attempting to open theaters that challenged syndicate territory and performers fighting to unionize for better pay and working conditions. Ultimately, it landed syndicate officials before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for an investigation into their potentially monopolistic restraint of trade—a series of hearings that produced an invaluable record of the internal workings of the vaudeville system.Footnote ⁴⁸

Regardless of whether an artist worked through the eastern (UBO) or western (WVMA) syndicate, the process of booking was essentially the same. Unless they were either foolish or particularly desperate, performers would begin their journey onto the vaudeville stage by obtaining the services of an agent.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was possible to contact either theater owners or their booking representatives directly, but the chances for success with this method were limited. Poorly connected artists crowded the exterior waiting rooms of the booking agencies, desperately passing their cards to the office boys who worked the front desk, begging for time to make their case.Footnote ⁵⁰ Agents, armed with long-standing industry connections and close personal relationships to booking managers, were a far surer path and represented a significant majority of all acts employed by the primary vaudeville organizations.Footnote ⁵¹

The interconnected East and West Coast syndicates maintained bureaus in the “principal cities” of the theater industry: Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.Footnote ⁵² Of these, Chicago and New York had the largest, extensive, multi-floor offices that brought together the activity of numerous semi-independent circuits.Footnote ⁵³ Over time, however, Chicago ceded its position to Manhattan, with the Orpheum and Keith offices completing an in-all-but-name fusion that finalized East Coast dominance in 1913.Footnote ⁵⁴ Despite this change, the offices themselves seem to have undergone remarkably little modification over their years of operation, with the basic mechanics of the business established in 1900 maintained for decades. “Hardly a piece of paper has changed since the office was opened,” explained UBO booking official Daniel Hennessey in 1919. “The same forms and system [are used] exactly. The only difference is in the method of filing.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Arranged “like a banking house,” the booking floor was made up of a series of desks or small rooms, each manned by a booking representative for a theater or circuit of theaters whose task was to put together diverse, balanced bills for their venues.Footnote ⁵⁶ While in early years, many local owners either came in themselves or sent direct representatives, over time the professional staff of the booking agency took over much of this work, blurring the line between the interests of the syndicate and the supposedly independent circuits and theaters that comprised it.Footnote ⁵⁷ Throughout the day, the office was a buzz of information; actors lined up along the outer grillwork, attempting to contact those inside, while elite agents connected to the syndicates walked directly onto the floor to negotiate with booking representatives or office managers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Meanwhile, these booking representatives kept up their own conversations—they “visited each other at their desks,” trading news and working to pull together the acts they needed for future bills.Footnote ⁵⁹ Skilled white-collar workers, bookers were responsible for a set territory encompassing a number of theaters. Each was supported by a staff of lower-level employees who would handle correspondence and deal with individual houses.Footnote ⁶⁰

Once a booking representative and an artist's agent agreed on the terms of date and price, the representative made out a “booking slip” stating the terms of the deal. This slip was then taken to a “time clock and stamped,” locking in the details and preventing any other manager from attempting to steal the slot or double-book the performer.Footnote ⁶¹ Once on the books, the agreement was filed away, and a clerical manager with power of attorney for the theater drew up the contracts. After being signed by the artist, these contracts—designed by the agency and standard across their bookings—were printed in triplicate.Footnote ⁶² One went to the theater, one went to the artist, and one remained on hand to serve as a record.

These offices offered artists’ agents and booking managers a number of crucial informational resources. In addition to maintaining the association's books, which revealed the pay records and touring schedules of every performer who contracted through the firm, the offices also held a vast collection of manager's reports, sent from theaters affiliated with the syndicate and containing detailed reviews of almost every vaudeville act in the country.Footnote ⁶³ Filled out by local managers employed by theater owners on the Monday of every week, these reviews carefully noted performers’ behavior as well as the style and quality of their acts, while also tallying audience response and providing an overall judgment of the balance of the show and its fit with local expectations.Footnote ⁶⁴

Between the contracts and the reports, offices provided the tools necessary for the complex system that determined an artist's salary. Unlike performers in plays or revues, whose individual talents, no matter how noteworthy, were ultimately subsumed within the artistic impact of the broader production, every vaudeville act not only stood alone but would be quickly replaced by another.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a result, the logic of the system forced all of those operating within it towards a constant, commodifying process of comparison, with the cash value (per week) of an act serving as a stand-in for a far broader set of aesthetic and commercial concerns.

Within this system, the payment received by performers had a remarkable level of inertia. Rather than rising or falling with demand, it moved in a clear, step-by-step motion.Footnote ⁶⁶ A $300 a week act was a $300 a week act, and unless something happened to render it either significantly more or less successful, it would stay that way.Footnote ⁶⁷ Sudden changes in salary could occur when performers moved between circuits, playing a substantively different sized town or theater, but when they returned to the previous setting, their payment would typically resume without pause.Footnote ⁶⁸ The same was not true, however, when considering variations in price within the same class of theater. Once an act had been given a raise by the booking agency, its essential identity changed. Formerly a $300 act, it was now (for instance) a $400 act and in the future would unwaveringly demand as much for its standard price.

This tendency toward price stability was accentuated by the expansive schedules that the vast size of the syndicates made possible.Footnote ⁶⁹ Centralizing the once-scattered activities of arranging a tour within the confines of single space, the booking offices also compressed it within time. Successful vaudeville performers could receive bookings for dozens of consecutive weeks, all of which were drawn up and signed simultaneously. With a handful of representatives responsible for most or all of these theaters, what legally comprised dozens of individual contracts was actually conducted as a single negotiation, further pushing prices toward standardization across performances. Although this system of pricing may have been created by the practical requirements of the booking system, over time it came to assume a more complex meaning, serving as a powerful tool for organizing and storing information about the cultural value of a performance.Footnote ⁷⁰

The importance of the information contained within an act's price can be seen in the steps taken to ensure that these prices could not be manipulated. Booking agencies feared such manipulation to the point that they suspected potential collusion between artists and theater managers to artificially raise a performer's salary, just to get this new price on the books and therefore in circulation among other theaters.Footnote ⁷¹ In order to prevent such occurrences, prior to drawing up contracts, the price that the artist's agent and the booking representative had agreed upon was checked by a clerical worker against the act's previous salary. If it was substantially higher, the contract was returned to the booking agent for explanation.Footnote ⁷² That such a system was necessary at all is remarkable; it reflects the extent to which the entirety of the booking acumen of the central offices was contained within this data point. If successfully manipulated, it would not be merely a one-time scam but a long-term coup, with the new valuation disseminated and validated by the functioning of the system.

While artists, through their agents, proposed their desired salaries, the actual decisions about what they would be paid were made at meetings held by the booking managers who represented the various theaters and circuits comprising the syndicate. Armed with the ability to check past contracts, as well as to read several years of performance reviews and draw on their own firsthand experience of the artists in question, these managers gathered multiple times a week to set collective prices for the performers who were to play their houses.Footnote ⁷³ While Hennessey, attempting to forestall accusations of monopolistic activity while testifying before the FTC in 1919, claimed that each manager would choose his own price, his descriptions of the meetings reflect the distinctly noncompetitive dynamics at play: “There is a certain act, for instance, conceded by everyone to be of a certain value. It gets so much. . . . That is agreed upon.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Pushing further, the examiner wondered whether the managers “try to come to some understanding as to what the values of the acts are, at this meeting?” “Yes,” replied Hennessey, “what they should get.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Samuel K. Hodgdon, who ran small-time booking for the UBO, explained that “usually the artist has a price, and unless it has been established and played for some time, it is usually higher than the booking representative wants to pay.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While new acts were open to negotiation, established acts were booked at the price dictated by the activities of the system. This was the “correct” value of the act—a decision determined by the informational economy of vaudeville and encapsulating a wide set of historical evaluations about the performer.

This same understanding of what the price of an act meant is echoed in many of the surviving manager's reports from theaters in the East Coast Keith circuit. Put together in relation to the strict budget available for performers’ salaries, a successful bill needed to present a wide enough variety of talent to appeal to the heterogeneous vaudeville audiences, not repeating, not offending, and not boring.Footnote ⁷⁷ As a result, performers were not simply discussed in terms of their skill or success but analyzed by the ratio between their abilities and their cost. For example, on August 8, 1910, R. G. Larsen, the manager of Keith's theater in Boston, wrote that the Alexandroff Troupe, a group of Russian dancers who performed for ten minutes, was “hardly as good as some troupes of the same kind that we have had in years past, but filled the spot and is a fair value for the money.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Even more precisely, in 1916, Charles Lovenberg, the manager of Keith's theater in Providence, Rhode Island, complained that the comic duo Madison and Winchester “didn't do very well as a whole, got laughs in spots, and from the way they went with the audience, they are not worth the salary I am paying them which is [already] at a $50 cut. The act is worth $150.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Armed with such information, booking agents would be well situated to determine the “accurate” price of an act, whether overpriced or a potential bargain.

In addition to pricing culture, the informational economy of vaudeville also helped shape it. Among the most obvious of these mechanisms was the need for artists to have systemic legibility. Only acts that could be understood and categorized could be easily sorted, organized, and booked.Footnote ⁸⁰ While booking representatives would sometimes have the opportunity to see a new act play at a specially designated “try-out” house, much of the time they were signing a contract on faith and reputation alone. To make this possible, agents needed to be able to easily understand the artists they represented and explain them to the managers who booked them, “describing the act and making comparisons with other acts of similar nature or style.”Footnote ⁸¹ This legibility was particularly important because of the need to avoid repeats within a single bill, an event that was understood to mean “death to one of the acts and injury to the show as a whole.”Footnote ⁸² Even acts that were only superficially similar could “take the edge off” of each other's work, dulling the novelty necessary to please an audience.Footnote ⁸³

Because of these needs, regularized styles of description flowed throughout the industry—manager's reports are full of them, able to identify acts with only a few words. For example, of the seven acts that performed at the Hudson theater in Union Hill, New Jersey, on May 16, 1910, fully five were categorized by manager John. C. Peebles in this tight, descriptive vocabulary before he entered into a longer evaluation of their performance: the Jordan Trio was a “Novelty wire act”; McBride and Goodrich were “an old fashion song-and-dance team”; Gertrude Vandyck, the “Girl with Golden Voice,” was “a novel singing act in 1”; the Five Columbians were a “novel dancing act”; while Lewis and Green were a “clever two-man act.”Footnote ⁸⁴

This same process of categorization can also be seen in vaudeville artists' own self-descriptions, suggesting the extent to which the generic expectations baked into this shorthand helped to proscribe the types of performances that could be bought and sold through the booking agencies. A wide array of these descriptions is discussed in Vaudeville: From the Honkey-Tonks to the Palace, in which ex-performer Joe Laurie Jr. spends hundreds of pages exhaustively enumerating the basic classifications of vaudeville performers as they were understood within the industry. These include “dumb” acts (nonspeaking players such as jugglers, acrobats, top-wire and bicycle performers), song-and-dance men, comic sketches, solo female singers, group singers, two-man (straight man and comic), female and male impersonators, quick-change artists, mimics, magicians, Blackface acts, family comedy troupes, animal acts, monologists (the forerunners of stand-up comedians), “freaks,” and male-and-female groups.Footnote ⁸⁵ Given that many of these categories came complete with numerous subgroupings, it was possible for artists to locate themselves within a remarkably precise performance taxonomy.

Ironically, the very intensity of the process of generic categorization forced vaudevillians to further the individuality of their acts.Footnote ⁸⁶ Establishing a clear identity was crucial for performers, as the brevity of stage time required that their audiences understand—and react—immediately.Footnote ⁸⁷ Acts typically referred to such a success as “putting it over,” that is, creating a sense of shared community “that fostered real and immediate communication between artist and audience” while also leaving the crowd stunned and satisfied by a perfectly structured act capped by a “wow finish.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In the tightly competitive world of vaudeville, all of the acts on a bill were attempting to make their mark and “stop the show.” To find this success, they needed to let the audience know what they were doing and, simultaneously, to surprise them, providing the novelty that would allow them to stand out from the competition and that became so important to the experience of vaudeville.Footnote ⁸⁹

Unlike the legitimate theater, in which realism was beginning to take hold, vaudeville performers constantly crossed the fourth wall in order to connect with the crowd.Footnote ⁹⁰ The most effective way to achieve this was to express the individuality not merely of the performance but of the performer, selling audiences what the legendary vaudeville singer Sophie Tucker referred to as “personality.”Footnote ⁹¹ Discussing the popularity of her songs in the autobiographical Some of These Days, Tucker explains that the “secret that makes for their success is the fact that they are all written in the first person. When I'm singing them, I am talking about myself. . . . [M]aking it a song about myself leaves [the audience] free to apply it to themselves.”Footnote ⁹² Instead of playing a role clearly separated from their identity while on stage, such performers focused on offering audiences a seemingly authentic connection to their genuine character, albeit one mediated by the mechanisms of the vaudeville theater.Footnote ⁹³ An integral part of the broader shift towards what has been termed a full-fledged “culture of personality” in the early twentieth century, these booking-derived developments helped to lay the ground for the explosion of entertainment celebrity in the coming decades.Footnote ⁹⁴

For audiences, the functioning of the vaudeville system had a profound aesthetic impact. The core of the form's appeal was its ability to present a wild diversity of acts with cosmopolitan glamour and well-oiled efficiency—elements closely allied to its rationalized, corporate construction and made possible by the informational economy behind it. Highlighting a promise to deliver the same acts to theaters and cities across the country, vaudeville enabled its audiences to experience a local, often intimate, instantiation of a nationally circulating entertainment culture.Footnote ⁹⁵ Built around a standardized succession of unique artists, it placed the burden of individuality on certain aspects of performance while accepting the legitimacy of the system as a whole. In doing so, vaudeville helped to define the limits and meanings of mass entertainment, articulating how and where it could connect with audiences, what kinds of claims it was capable of making, and what vision of identity it might attempt to put forth.Footnote ⁹⁶

All of this was enabled by the intentional indeterminacy of the booking process.Footnote ⁹⁷ “The difference of opinion regarding those different managers is what makes our business,” explained Hennessey, the UBO manager. “If I booked all the houses in the United States for three years, after that you would not have any Vaudeville, because I would have my idea of shows, and they would be played to death.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Delivered in front of an FTC panel investigating monopolistic tactics, Hennessey's disavowal of control was strategic. Managers could—and did—target individuals, making an example out of performers for aesthetic, political, or personal reasons.Footnote ⁹⁹ Despite this, his statement reflected a broader truth. Unlike their competitors in the circus or “legitimate theater,” vaudeville's many managers were unable to assert final creative control over the products they sold.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Instead, by taking such material and subjecting it to the mechanics of the booking system, the industry produced a result that surpassed the potential abilities of any individual entrepreneur, one ultimately derived from the summed and averaged desires of its geographically and culturally heterogeneous audiences.

Modeled after a stock exchange, the booking apparatus of vaudeville functioned along similar lines, providing a “market place for the transaction” capable of compiling a wide array of information and condensing it into a single valuation.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, unlike grain futures or pig-iron prices, it dealt with artistic performance, a distinctly different sort of commodity.Footnote ¹⁰² Developed through collective action, agencies created a remarkable venue for information exchange about the tastes and preferences of the American public.

Driven by the efficiencies of this system, vaudeville grew by leaps and bounds throughout the early 1900s. However, by the middle of the next decade, cracks had begun to emerge.Footnote ¹⁰³ Moving pictures, first introduced to Americans through the vaudeville circuits, had begun to challenge the form's dominance among the lower segments of the entertainment market after the “nickelodeon boom” of the mid 1900s.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By the end of the teens, the feature films and bankable stars of early Hollywood, coupled with the construction of increasingly luxurious movie theaters by the larger exhibitors, had adversely impacted vaudeville's popularity more broadly.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the face of these headwinds, the managers of the now-unified Keith-Orpheum syndicate refused to alter their business model to address the evident danger.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ By the end of the twenties, the diminished firm was taken over Joseph Kennedy, who fired most of its executives and fused the chain with the Radio Corporation of America, transforming its theaters into movie houses and ending vaudeville as a stand-alone entertainment.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Beyond enabling a better understanding of how vaudeville became America's leading theatrical form, a grasp of the informational system that structured its operations sheds a revealing light on many of the other entertainment styles with which it interacted. Certainly, Tin Pan Alley, the New York–based sheet-music industry that kick-started the modern music business, relied heavily on vaudeville performers to introduce its commercial compositions to a mass audience.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Its expert songwriters did not ignore the performance contexts that would determine the success or failure of their compositions.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Perhaps even more intriguing, however, is the interaction between vaudeville and film, the mechanically reproducible medium that ultimately replaced it.

In recent decades, writing on the emergence of film has pushed back against narratives that posited an inevitable process of evolution from the chaotic diversity of the early pictures to the narrative stability of the Hollywood feature.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Starting with a reconsideration of the aesthetic complexities of what had once been dismissed as “primitive” cinema, this work has expanded to incorporate an analysis of the settings in which movies were presented and viewed.Footnote ¹¹¹ Such scholarship has come to include examinations that highlight how the sustained interactions between live performances and moving pictures continued to structure the reception of film well into the era of movie palaces.Footnote ¹¹² More recently, research within the “new cinema history” has focused on issues of distribution, circulation, and reception, investing its analysis with a sense of business specificity and geographic diversity.Footnote ¹¹³ All of this work has drawn attention to the ways in which technology alone cannot account for either the adoption of cinema or the evolution of films into the long-form structures central to the aesthetic of the “Classic Hollywood” period.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Given this, the context in which film first grew into a mass medium—a context defined by the popularity of vaudeville and the importance of the leading vaudeville syndicates—appears critical to the class dynamics, social behaviors, and aesthetic expectations that flowed through cinema in the 1910s and 1920s.Footnote ¹¹⁵

A consideration of vaudeville's informational structures makes it possible to further develop these questions. It is important to determine not only what film provided that vaudeville did not or could not but also its converse: What, if any, structures did vaudeville enable that cinema was lacking? And how does an understanding of this earlier form help us to evaluate the dynamics that shaped Hollywood as an entertainment industry? Certainly, a better grasp of vaudeville's history provides a number of suggestive parallels to many of the business practices that cinema scholarship describes as central to the functioning of the “mature” Hollywood studio system.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In particular, block-booking, in which production companies required that theaters rent an entire slate of movies together, and the “runs, zones, and clearance” system, in which movie houses were sorted into hierarchical levels and granted exclusive rights to specific geographic areas, were direct echoes of nearly identical practices employed by the vaudeville syndicates.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Similarly, the adoption of various types of audience-response and box-office research by production companies appears less a groundbreaking innovation than an attempt to recapture the informational advantages of the live performance systems that had preceded them.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Given the importance of vaudeville as a training ground for many early movie executives, and the direct corporate connections between three of the five “major” studios and earlier vaudeville circuits, these similarities seem far from accidental.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While further research is needed to flesh out the potential implications of such links, it is clear that a better understanding of the management practices and business dynamics of pre-movie show business is critical to a fuller understanding of how and why Hollywood developed as it did.

These practices also patterned the emerging market for mass entertainment in the United States.Footnote ¹²⁰ By the time cinema and radio emerged as the paradigmatic entertainment forms of their era, Americans had already spent decades interacting with a highly rationalized, corporate industry selling them cultural commodities at a national level. In order to succeed, vaudeville's performers were pushed to alter their acts to better align with both audience taste and the demands of the system.Footnote ¹²¹ Meanwhile, a myriad of local preferences gradually shaped, and were reshaped by, centralized booking decisions.Footnote ¹²² Over time, such processes helped to remake consumer expectations of popular performance and define the nature of commercial leisure as a social phenomenon. By examining these dynamics as they operated on a variety of temporal and geographic scales, it should become possible to develop a fuller and more nuanced analysis of the impact of mass culture on American society in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Such questions reflect the potential benefits that have begun to emerge from a broader engagement with the business history of entertainment.Footnote ¹²³ The perspective that governs such efforts cannot be confined to individual firms, or even specific industries; instead, such work might draw inspiration from the wide-ranging literature on performance culture more broadly, seeking to connect a fine-grained analysis of a tightly defined context with a more capacious understanding of the functioning of entertainment commodities in the consumer market.Footnote ¹²⁴ In doing so, such scholarship could make it possible not only to more accurately ascertain how and why the American entertainment industries first evolved but to begin to lay the foundation for a better understanding of how they have shaped our world in the years since.