Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest 1890-1920

We are pleased to share with you an excerpt from a newly published book by historian Holly George. Show Town traces the history of the lively theatrical scene in Spokane, Washington at the turn of the twentieth century. Co-Managing Editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly and author of journal articles on gender, recreation, and the West published in Pacific Northwest Quarterly and Utah Historical Quarterly, George’s work correlates the clash of tastes and sensibilities among Spokane’s theatre patrons with a larger shift in values occurring throughout the Inland West- and the nation- during a period of rapid social change.

Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city’s reputation as a “good show town,” the more genteel among them worried about its “Wild West” atmosphere. George begins this multifaceted story in the year 1890, when two Spokane developers built the lavish Auditorium Theater as a kind of advertisement for the young city. The new venue catered to a class of people made wealthy by speculation, railroads, and mining. Yet the refined entertainment the Auditorium offered conflicted with the rollicking shows that played in the town’s variety theaters, designed to draw in the migratory workers—primarily single men—who provided labor for the same industries that made the fortunes of Spokane’s elite. As well-to-do Spokanites attempted to clamp down on the variety theaters, performances at even the city’s more respectable “legitimate” playhouses began to reflect a movement away from Victorian sensibilities to a more modern desire for self-fulfillment—particularly among women. Theaters joined the debate over modern femininity by presenting plays on issues ranging from woman’s suffrage to shifting marital expectations. At the same time, national theater monopolies transmitted to the people of Spokane new styles and tastes that mirrored larger cultural trends.

chapter one

Theater and Boosterism in Late Victorian Spokane

In 1889 the Spokane Globe described the residents of Spokane, Washington, as “refined, intellectual and energetic,” people who “would add luster to the most cultured court of the period” and whose urbanity sprang, from among other things, their love of the stage.1 The Globe’s deployment of culture for civic promotion was hardly uncommon, either in Spokane or elsewhere in the West, and for a good reason: a city’s clubs, churches, schools, or theaters marked it as a place that fit within established white middle-class America. Thus white middle-class Spokanites made cultural claims part of the steady stream of ballyhoo they produced; when Spokane’s white middle-class people boasted of their refinement, they were telling other Americans that respectable Victorians could live there. In late-century Spokane, legitimate theater symbolized the boosting efforts of the city’s middle and upper class.

Young Spokane’s promotional use of the stage culminated with the 1890 opening of the Auditorium, a facility built by local nou­veaux riches and openly acknowledged as an advertisement for the city.2 Yet, if the Auditorium embodied elite Spokane’s attempts to market the town to potential residents and investors, the the­ater also demonstrated the difficultly of the city’s relationship with the very groups its people tried to attract. First, though affluent Spokanites sought the validation of highbrow culture by building and patronizing the Auditorium, they did not walk the line of Vic­torian propriety—showing, instead, a proclivity for the light and the naughty. Upper-class Spokanites sponsored the derivative art that lent them a patina of culture—but apparently did not particu­larly like it. They at once aped and rejected the culture prescribed by eastern, Victorian critics. With this judgment of the canon, Spo­kanites expressed their distance from both the East and from the values of the nineteenth century.

The Auditorium of the 1890s illustrated a second aspect of Spo­kane’s connection to outside forces. The theater was conceived and built by local men, but they did not finance it. Rather, it was one of many Spokane properties heavily mortgaged to an investment bank. When the Panic of 1893 occurred, the Inland Northwest could not resist the malaise. Spokane crashed hard, and the Auditorium was repossessed by European capitalists. Late-nineteenth-century networks of transportation, communication, and commerce facilitated upper-class Spokane’s enjoyment of the arts but also made the city a financial house of cards. All told, the story of the Auditorium demonstrates the many factors that complicated Spokane’s relationship with eastern and European society: factors that included a desire to conform to Victorian standards even as these standards lost currency throughout the United States, the reality of Spokane’s arriviste upper-class and its preference for “middle-brow” theater, and finally, the economic and cultural difficulties Spokanites faced as they tried to transplant eastern art into a raw western environment.

Joining the Cultural Order

Spokane began its urban career as did many American towns: inconspicuous, but ambitious nonetheless. Native Americans for years had used the area near the falls of the Spokane River as a gathering place, and a fur trading post known as the Spokane House existed in the region in the early nineteenth century. Still, as late as the 1860s, there was little indication of the site’s future use. This changed in 1873, when a pair of Oregon speculators bought a claim near the falls because they had heard the Northern Pacific Railroad might pass through there. But things remained quiet for years. Finally, in 1879, news that the Northern Pacific’s Pend Oreille division would indeed be built led to burgeoning settlement in the region. By 1880 Spo­kane Falls (as it was known until 1891) had a population of 350, putting it well behind local rivals such as Dayton (996) and belying its claims to be the natural place for metropolitan growth.3

When growth occurred, it did so largely because of the decisions of powerful entities and financiers.4 From 1881 to 1892 Spokane enjoyed its first rush of development as its economic foundations were laid. The importance of railroads in this process cannot be overemphasized. The first big event of the decade took place in 1881 when the Northern Pacific arrived. This watershed moment could have easily not occurred if the company had based its route on a different river; Spokane would have then remained geographi­cally isolated until the 1890s. As it was, Spokane was only a small town on a rail line, competing with other small towns for what prizes it could.5

The second key event stretched from 1882 to 1885, when mineral discoveries in the Idaho panhandle allowed Spokane to become an outfitting point for the lucrative rush. But again, Spokane’s victory here was not a fait accompli, for although Spokanites stocked min­ing supplies and perfected a byzantine method for reaching the diggings, theirs was neither the closest nor the solitary gateway to the Coeur d’Alenes. Then in 1886, an eastern capitalist named Daniel Chase Corbin concluded that a rail line through the Idaho mines meant profit. Luckily for Spokane, timing and legalities made the Washington site the outlet for Corbin’s road. The story illus­trates well how mining and railroads interacted to Spokane’s benefit. As further mineral deposits were discovered in the Inland North­west in the 1880s—and roads were built to them—Spokane became a mining headquarters.

Railroad development placed another major stone in Spokane’s economic foundation: agriculture. As with other aspects of the city’s growth, attracting the farm market required plenty of competition and promotion. When a competing railroad threatened to siphon away the business of Palouse farmers, Corbin built the Spokane and Palouse Line (1886–1888). With that Spokane became the Palouse’s supply and distribution point. By 1888 rail lines stretched east, west, and south from Spokane, connecting northwestern mines and farms with eastern markets. In 1892 the city became part of another transcontinental line when property holders gladly supplied James J. Hill with the free right-of-way that guaranteed Spokane a spot on the Great Northern. Spokane was “railroad made.”6 The rail building of the 1880s and 1890s realigned transportation corridors—and thus urban influence—away from Lewiston and Walla Walla and made Spokane the largest railroad hub between Minneapolis and Seattle.7

The 1880s were heady years for Spokane. Its population mush­roomed from 350 (1880) to 1,169 (1885) to 19,922 (1890), a nearly 6,000 percent increase. Haphazard, often sloppy, development accom­panied the boom. Spokane was a jumble of unpaved streets, false front shops, and ponderosa pines. But the boomtown had preten­sions—many of them. Spokanites aggressively advertised their town from the start, recognizing that they had to attract settlers, investors, and business to keep the good times coming.8 An 1888 account, for instance, compared Spokane’s prospects to those of Minneapolis, advising readers that “those who buy in the primary stage of successful towns are the ones who reap the largest rewards.” The following year, the local board of trade sponsored a pamphlet that waxed eloquent about “the commercial and manufacturing advantages of the city” and proudly displayed its few fine homes and buildings.9

An important aspect of such civic promotion was a demonstra­tion that Spokane fit a certain cultural order, that this rough new town belonged to the white, educated, and respectable world of mainstream America. Respectability, in other words, was an impor­tant asset in attracting settlers and investors. For this reason and others, prominent Spokanites pushed forward a small but ambitious cultural life in the 1880s.10 Theater joined the list of attainments Spokanites bragged about during the decade, though their claims were obviously threadbare. The genres at the top of the cultural hierarchy, legitimate and grand opera, came to town only through the concerted action of Spokane’s “better element.” When large productions played in Spokane, they did so once the railroad had made the trip convenient and then as one-night stands—signaling that even if Spokanites considered themselves to be devotees of the stage, the market did not justify risking much on their town.

The theatrical highlights of 1880s Spokane demonstrate how towns used culture against each other. Consider the February 1887 appearance of the Emma Abbott opera company. Securing a troupe of this caliber required an advance subscription of $1,000, which local elites gladly contributed. Abbott threw Spokane into a dither: nearly every business closed in the diva’s honor, and people waded through ankle-deep mud to meet her.11 Yet the show took place in a drafty frame hall that its builder “had the great nerve [to call] ‘Joy’s Opera House.’”12 When the company traveled on to Walla Walla, the level of local identity wrapped up in the affair became obvious. In Spokane Abbott performed Michael Balfe’s opera Bohe­mian Girl; in Walla Walla she presented lighter fare. The Spokane Falls Review seized on this fact as proof of Spokane’s cultural (and hence overall) superiority.13 A Walla Walla newspaper rebutted that Bohemian Girl was grand, too grand for a “Punch and Judy” venue like Joy’s Opera House and a pup like Spokane. Spokane dismissed the insult and instead reflected on its progress, but Walla Walla had a point: one month after Abbott’s appearance, Joy’s was converted from an “opera house” to an agricultural implement store.14

Walla Walla’s sarcasm reflected a deeper injury. Positioned near the Columbia River, Walla Walla had served as a major inland trad­ing center for years. With the regional advent of the railroad, the Columbia lost some of its primacy as a transportation route, as did Walla Walla. By 1887 Spokane stood poised to wrest control of lucrative trading routes from Walla Walla, and in the upcoming years Spokane shot ahead of its erstwhile rival.15 The Emma Abbott scrimmage, then, reflected how aspiring western towns connected cultural hierarchy with civic identity and used it as another tool to gain dominance.16

After this Spokanites only amplified their efforts to put their town on the artistic map. In the summer of 1887 with Joy’s Opera House having renounced show business, those of a cultural and civic mind scrambled to find a site for another large opera company. Their answer was a canvas tent lit by two borrowed street lamps.17 These circumstances embarrassed the booming town and were cor­rected with the November 1887 opening of the Falls City Opera House. As the top stories of a business block, the new hall was still crude, but it allowed Spokane to enjoy legitimate drama with more regu­larity and sophistication.18

Almost as important, the Falls City Opera House—its name imbued with local pride—gave Spokane bragging rights. Spokane Falls Illustrated, an 1889 pamphlet published under the auspices of the board of trade, boasted that Spokane had “ever retained” the honor among pro­fessional thespians of being a “‘good show town.’” The best shows from the best companies, the brochure continued, were exhibited “to the criticism of intelligent and art-loving audiences.”19 In other words, cramped and inconvenient though it was, the Falls City Opera House served as another feather in the cap of the boosters eager to mark Spokane as a place of finish and grace—where one could live and invest.

Shakespeare, Cannon, Beethoven, and Browne

Whatever theatrical venues Spokane had by the end of the 1880s, the situation changed on August 4, 1889, when fire destroyed thirty-two square blocks of downtown Spokane, including the new opera house.20 The city’s residents responded to the disaster with vigor but also in a way that showed their speculative and derivative bent. After the initial devastation, Spokanites used the disaster as an opportunity to remake their city in a finer fashion: haphazard wooden buildings yielded to brick, and the town’s already lively real estate market skyrocketed.21 Spokane’s rebuilding set off an over-heated real estate boom and by 1892, more than a million dollars had been invested in new buildings. But the hundreds of new houses and business blocks did not take on just any form. No. Spokanites wanted their reborn home to look metropolitan and eastern and therefore modeled it on powerful American cities, specifically Chicago. In this city of mud streets, a visiting Dutch banker remarked that he had never seen a place with such overwhelming buildings, prompting him to ask whether local leaders had been a touch excessive.22

Spokane’s first citizens had much impetus to reconstruct their city. On one hand, with an increasing concentration of railroads in the late 1880s, Spokane was becoming the regional hub its promoters dreamed of.23 Economic expansion meant both a developing local gentry and growing investment by Spokane’s stakeholders, groups concerned with the image their city projected and the amenities it offered. On the other hand, few could describe the months that followed the fire as refined. Amid the tents that popped up in the ruined downtown were those of Jacob “Dutch Jake” Goetz and Harry Baer, partners who kept their notorious gambling resort more than alive throughout that cold winter. Such considerations surely played into the decision to make Spokane a more attractive, more cultur­ally advanced, place.24

A celebrated feature of the reborn Spokane was a structure already under construction when the fire broke out, the Auditorium Theater.25 Initially referred to as the “new” or “grand” opera house, the Auditorium became a symbol of civic progress and social status, serving notice that this rich little city had arrived. Like their theater, the Auditorium’s owners—Anthony M. Cannon and John J. Browne—were emblematic of Spokane’s economic development. Both men hailed from the Midwest, Cannon looking for his main chance from Kansas to Los Angeles, Browne studying and practicing law; they likely met in Portland, Oregon.26

These “live-wire promoters” came to Spokane in the 1870s, pur­chased much real estate, and quickly became dealers in the kind of speculative transactions that had made (and unmade) fortunes throughout the West. Their names strewn throughout town—Browne’s Addition, Cannon’s Addition, Cannon’s Block, Browne Street—the two men were able to capitalize on the mineral rushes, political plums, and railroad business that caused 1880s Spokane to boom so fabulously. By 1889 Browne and Cannon had decided that a beau­tiful theater could only enhance the town’s image and that they would bankroll it.27

As with cultural endeavors throughout the United States, the Auditorium borrowed its form and style from theaters in older areas. This derivative aspect was intentional for it signaled that Spokane belonged to the world of established respectability. The Pacific Northwest, at this point, had fresh examples of highbrow theaters. Harry C. Hayward, Spokane’s theater manager since 1887, returned in Novem­ber 1889 from a tour of trend-setting opera houses in three of the region’s top cities, Tacoma, Portland, and San Francisco. That Hay­ward visited these theaters during the Auditorium’s construction was no coincidence, for Spokane’s city fathers intended their house to be as grand as anything in the United States. Accordingly, Cannon and Browne patterned the Auditorium not on a Portland or a Tacoma house but, rather, on New York City’s Broadway, “with many additional improvements.”28 The boosters’ desire to cement Spokane’s place in the cultural and urban hierarchy becomes clear with a story often told about the Auditorium: on discovering that a Chicago theater had the largest stage in the nation, Browne and Cannon ordered their builders to make the Auditorium’s stage wider and deeper by one foot.29

A neighboring mountain supplied the granite that became the Auditorium building. Nearly every detail of design and embellish­ment in the theater, however—architecture, brass work, scenery, draperies, curtains, carpets, carpentry, chairs, chandeliers, tiling, fres­coes, wainscoting—came from Chicago or New York.30 Altogether, the Auditorium’s borrowed nature points to Spokane’s imitation of accepted external aesthetics, to the young city’s dependence on outside markets and transportation systems for its existence, and to its self-conscious use of things cultural to remake Spokane in the image of Victorian America.

To purchase a copy of Show Town, visit The University of Oklahoma Press: www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/2165/show%20town