Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

8 With Amusement for Allthat displayed the “vilest and most hateful qualities.” In his opinion, obsessionwith profits was “incompatible with virtue.” To save theaters frommarket greed, he now advocated government patronage. As the historianJoseph Ellis has written: “Dunlap was warning against the commercializationof art and the creation of mass culture at precisely the moment theywere becoming dominant.” 19When Dunlap’s theater fell victim in 1805 to a rising democracyand market pressures, commercialized entertainment was still in its earlyform. Dramatic changes nevertheless hastened its development. A rapidlyexpanding population, increased per capita wealth, and the growth of citieswere major factors. So too were spectacular developments in transportationand communication. After 1815, steamboats began to revolutionizetravel. The construction of canals further opened water transportation.Particularly stunning was the completion in the 1820s of the Erie Canal,connecting the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. By the 1830s, railroadswere starting to form what over the next several decades would become agiant web of tracks tying cities and towns together, facilitating as never beforethe transport of goods and people. Improvements in printing andliteracy rates were spawning a host of new publications, a number of whichby the 1830s enticed ordinary readers with cheap prices and attention topopular amusements.In important ways, these developments helped provide their own kindof scaffolding for Sam Patch’s famed jumps. The completion of the ErieCanal allowed curious onlookers an easier opportunity to witness his feats.Increased wealth encouraged the growth of leisure and tourism that broughtmany visitors to Niagara or Genesee Falls, sites at which Patch performed.And many of those visitors were city people responding to advertisementsand publications hailing the wonders of rustic settings, beautiful scenery,wild nature—and Sam Patch plunging down a waterfall.Patch’s short career illustrated notable trends in the emerging popularculture. For one thing, it showed how amusements bubbled up from society’slower ranks. At the age of seven or eight, Patch had started working inSamuel Slater’s textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. As one of America’sfirst generation of factory employees, he labored for Slater before moving toanother cotton mill in Paterson, New Jersey. By then he was an accomplishedboss spinner, using his skills to operate one of the biggest machinesin the unfolding industrial revolution. He had also honed his jumping prowessby leaping time and again, as many of the mill boys and young men did,into the river below Pawtucket Falls, a drop of over fifty feet. Leaps fromthe top of one of Slater’s mill buildings covered eighty feet. 20In September 1827, Patch jumped seventy feet down the Passaic RiverFalls outside Paterson, disrupting the commemorative opening of a bridge,