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Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Be good for one second.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Perfect stitch, also cute and fluffy.
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind and we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Amy Hughes about her book titled An Actor's Theater Culture and Everyday life in the 19th century United States, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2025, notably open access for people who like that. This book takes us well into a bunch of things. Yes, we're going to be talking about 19th century United States or theater culture more broadly. We're also going to be talking about a very specific individual within that and kind of going back and forth between the context he's operating in, what's happening to him specifically, and what this helps us understand about a lot of things. We're going to be talking about race, about culture, about theatre as an industry, about how we think about authorship. Turns out by looking at this one person, we can ask and answer a whole bunch of questions. So, Amy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Thank you so much for having me. It's really exciting to be a part of the New Books Network in this way, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes. So I'm a professor of Theater and drama in the School of Music, Theater and Dance at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the land of the Anishinaabe people. And I'm also a faculty associate in the Department of American Culture in the Literature, Science, and the Arts schools at the university. I'm a theater historian who focuses on popular theater in the United states during the 1800s. And why I decided to write this book is that when I was a doctoral student, more years ago than I want to admit, I I noticed that many theater historians in my field working on the 19th century were citing a particular book by Otis and Maude Skinner called One man in his the Adventures of H. Watkins Strahling Player from his journal, published in the 1930s. So almost 100 years ago now. So that book is inspired by a diary written by an actor I had never heard of at the time. His name is Harry Watkins. And because so many folks were citing this book, which contains long but also heavily edited entries from the diary, I noticed that people were just citing this book instead of trying to track down the original manuscript in an archive. And my work is really archival, and I love archives, so I thought, why not track it down? And it was actually pretty easy to find, to be honest. It wasn't some kind of glorious archival victory on my part. I was able to find it at Harvard's Theater Collection. It was uncataloged, but after asking a librarian for help, she helped me find it. Her name was Betty Falsi. Thank you. Still Betty. And I concluded that perhaps no one tracked this down because he was too ordinary. He was no one special. He was not a celebrity. He wasn't an Edwin Forrest or a JB Booth or a Charlotte Cushman. And so troubled by this, I eventually realized that his ordinariness might be the subject of my research. Not only in the terms of why folks in my field had ignored him in some ways for so long, but also because, in general, people who are ordinary don't tend to be the subject of a book in my field. So that was where I ended up or why I ended up writing this book, An Actor's Tale.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is really interesting backstory. So thank you for telling us about kind of the motivations there. I think the obvious next question is more about Harry Watkins. I mean, who is he? Did you find other people you could have focused on? Are we focusing on him because of this thing we found in the archives? Like more about him, please, as an introduction?
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Absolutely. So he was no one special. I was able to find information about him and his family through census data, city directories, things like that. He is the only. But this is the only diary of substantial density and length by a mid 19th century actor in the United States that we know of so far. So it is a special source, but he was not a special person. He was born in New York City, what we now call the Lower east side, in 1825. His mother was named Elizabeth Young Watkins. She was ordinary, too, the daughter of a Connecticut mariner who drowned when she was 16 years old. She was either widowed or abandoned by her first husband after having three sons with him after his. After this husband died or left, she supported herself in the Lower east side, working as a seamstress, which was one of the very few ways that women could support themselves during this time and for many, many decades after. She supported herself and her family with that work. And probably when Harry Watkins, her fourth son was born, she was in between husbands. There's no information, really about his father that I could find. He briefly had a stepfather when she remarried, but he too died soon after the marriage. So when Harry was 13, he tried to stop being a burden on her, on her, his mother, by joining the Army. He became a music boy, playing the fife, principally in the US Army. This was not uncommon for someone, a boy of 13, to join the Army. He went west, what it was called the west at that time, which is present day Minnesota and Michigan. He was stationed at forts where the military advanced colonization by white settlers by supporting trade outposts with indigenous Americans and keeping Local settlers, safe even just by their presence, as a way to thwart violence or other things that settlers were afraid of. He learned how to play music in the army. He did something called running the mail, which was getting alcohol for the soldiers, which was not permitted, but probably the officers just looked the other way. And another thing he did was performed plays, usually female roles, in classic Shakespearean or British dramas, as a way to alleviate the boredom at the fort where he was stationed. And this was quite common too, at military forts at the time. So after two enlistments in the army doing these activities, he decided to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a professional theater maker. So your other question is why focus on him? And I think what motivated me to start working on him and learning more about him and his peers was that I thought I would learn something new and interesting about the 19th century theater from his perspective as an ordinary workaday actor and playwright and theater manager. But what motivated me to finish the book? Which are. These are two different questions. What motivated me to start. What motivated me to finish was. I realized that I was really uncomfortable working on Harry Watkins because he was. He embodied in many ways, things that I didn't. I wasn't very interested in. He was a white person, he was a male person, he was heterosexual, he was a nativist who was afraid of immigrants. He was not particularly pro slavery, but it also wasn't particularly pro abolition politically. And I really was not very attracted to him for his personal qualities, in other words. And my feelings about him, in fact, included nonlinearly, but and even simultaneously, I was irritated, I was annoyed, I was shamed. I was ashamed of investigating this person who had privileges that I, as a white person, shared with him. I dismissed him, in other words, for a long time. But eventually I realized that actually his ordinariness, his. His interests in becoming somebody doing important things in the world, his attachment to his family, these things too were things I had in common with him. And also I found that I became more comfortable with my own ordinariness once I admitted that, and I'm saying this not in a self deprecating way, not at all, but rather my acceptance of how almost everyone that I know, including myself, will never be famous, just like Harry Watkins, are leading really terribly ordinary lives, just like Harry Watkins. These are things that are sort of troubling to a lot of us, terrifying even for a lot of us growing up in a culture that tells us that we must be excellent and that we're only worthy if we become recognized for excellence, that we're Terrified, in other words, of being merely ordinary. And that was what motivated me to finish the book. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you so much for sharing the thought processes through the project. And four, so clearly delineating between why start and why finish? Because I think they're all often different and yet we don't, you know, by the time we finish, that's what we're focused on. Or, you know, we don't want to admit that things change as we go on, but they so often do. So thank you for sharing what it is in your particular case. I wonder if we can talk perhaps about one other sort of motivation or thing you came across as you put all this together, which is the way in which examining his life and his diary can help us make sense of theatre culture more broadly, both then and now.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Yeah, that's such a great question. Thank you for that. May I first start with a question for you as a way to start your answer? Okay, so maybe listeners might think about this too. When you think about the entertainment industry, Miranda, the general social, cultural or political orientation of it, the artists and what they believe are, or what they're trying to do with their work, would you say your impression is that the community is progressive, liberal about advancing ideas, or more conservative, more cautious, more about sustaining the status quo in general? What do you think about arts and artists in this way?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I would venture a guess that lots of individuals within the industry might individually hold lots of progressive views or think they do, but that as an industry, perhaps there's a tendency towards what is financially successful, which maybe isn't the avant garde.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Absolutely. So I, I knew that's how you would answer. And, and this is, this is how I feel too, that that a lot of art artists and the arts industry in general is, is committed to, genuinely committed to progressive ideals, like being accepting of people who identify as queer in various ways, or even gender non conforming, as being accepting of people of all races and ethnicities. And you know, love is love, Black Lives Matter, that sort of, that sort of thing. But in, but actually that. And again, I think those are genuine feelings and, and aspirations. But at the same time, as you note, because the theater industry is still a commercial enterprise in many contexts, especially in the United States, where there's not a lot of public arts funding, and even less so now during President Trump's second term, there is a conservatism that is often denied or hidden. And part of what I learned by writing this book and focusing on Harry Watkins and his peers in the 19th century was that a lot of Those conservative tendencies actually started to coalesce during his lifetime, the 40 years when he was working in the US theater. And one way that he and his peers tried to be successful, which they often had to do in a cutthroat way, just like in the industry today, was by performing a kind of excellence that they didn't really have. And they were. And Watkins was, was one of the people who did this. And I figured this out or I started to realize it thanks to the really brilliant and important work of Dr. Karitha Mitchell, who is someone in theater studies in the United States who works on African American drama. And in 2018 she wrote a really pivotal, an impactful article called Identifying White Mediocrity and Know youw Place Aggression. And a couple of years later also I should say, Ijeoma Oluo wrote a book called the Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. And both of them talk about white mediocrity as something that cannot be named, cannot. It's omnipresent. There are lots of mediocre white folks everywhere, especially in, in regions and cultures that have history, a history of colonialism and, and are driven by capitalism. And I encourage you to read anyone and any listener here, Dr. Mitchell's work and Oluo's work. But in essence, what they argue is that people are subject to different thresholds or expectations of excellence depending on their race or ethnicity, their gender, their ability or disability, their sexual orientation and so forth. In other words, there's different thresholds of excellence depending on whether or not you are part of a dominant group or you're part of a marginalized group. And there's plenty of research that this is true. Research on salary, equity, access to leadership opportunities and so on in various professions reveal that women and people of color or people and of, of the global majority, which is another way to talk about people of color, need to be even more excellent in than white males in order to achieve their goals, such as for example, a great high profile, high paying job. And in the United States, especially in the 19th century, a bunch of cultural myths started to solidify to, to advance this acceptance of white men, usually in favor especially of Euro, Western, well, English immigrants in the United States, as opposed to German or even Irish immigrants and especially East Asian immigrants. And then in this time, of course, we've got free black Americans in the north and south, enslaved African Americans or Black Americans in the South. So these myths, like meritocracy, the self made man and the American Dream, helped to keep white men especially in power in their respective industries, regardless of how excellent they were. And these myths and the marketing of them continue today. And so I learned a lot through his life and his story and the people around him about white mediocrity, this really helpful fact that Dr. Mitchell and others have written about, and how that myth harms everyone. So I want to be really clear here in saying that the book is not or not only, or not merely an indictment or critique of white mediocrity and people who embody it, like Watkins and his peers. But also, I'm trying. The book is about how these myths actually hurt them and hurt me as a white person still, and others like me who even benefit from these myths because they really are in many ways lies that are perpetuated throughout time. And the benefits, though they are real to some folks who have power and privilege, they also hurt us on some level. So that's sort of the big global picture. And as we move on in our conversation, I know we'll talk, we can talk more about how that manifests in Watkins life, but that's the global. Some of the global arguments.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, and the global stakes as well. So that's definitely helpful to have laid out sort of earlier on in our conversation and gives us context then to understand the specifics of Watkins diary. So let's talk about what you found and didn't find within it. First off, do we know why he kept a diary? What sorts of things did he want to write down? What sorts of things do you kind of look for and not find when you examine it?
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Oh, wonderful. Well, anyone who is familiar with 19th century research or culture, writing handwriting is the principal way that people archive their experiences and communicate with each other as individuals. So this diary seems to have been modeled or inspired by a common practice in the 19th century and maybe even for some folks today, including me, of the travel diaries. So it begins when Watkins travels to what is then the Republic of Texas before the state of Texas becomes a state. And he is traveling with an itinerant group of actors to make some money from the gathering military, US Military forces at the Texas and Mexico border. So, as I mentioned before, Harry Watkins gets his start as an actor when he himself is enlisted in the army and he's helping to entertain troops who are bored in between skirmishes or other responsibilities at these military encampments. And so he, as a professional actor, goes with actors, other actors, to Texas as the US Mexican War is brewing in the 1840s. And so his diary starts out as a sort of travel journal of his experiences in Texas, but also diary keeping during the 19th century is a practice, as other scholars have written, of self culture, something called self culture, which is a way to think about one's character, to ponder things that we are reading or encountering or conversations we have with other people. And so the diary, I think, is functioning for him in that regard too, because long after that time in Texas has ended, he keeps writing. He actually writes in the existing portions of the diary anyway, from 1845 to 1860 or 1860 63, 15 years well after his his young adulthood ends and it becomes an archive for information about his professional life, people he worked with, places he stayed in various cities, where he traveled and performed. And what he didn't write about was information that could have been scandalous or embarrassing. There are indications from the manuscript that there were volumes of the library that he act he either lost, destroyed, or simply didn't want to be, didn't want to survive. There's a lot of redactions that you can see on the pages if you've got a good close up lens, that the redactions are about love affairs he had. He was divorced from his first wife who accused him of adultery, and the period of time when she says he was carrying on with other women are missing, even though we have parts of the diary that are before and after that time. There's also a moment when he travels to the United kingdom in the 1850s, which again, you would think what an adventure for him to travel abroad for the first time to track his time in England. But that is missing too. So there's a lot that's there and there's a lot that's missing. And it's the absences that actually made me really curious and caused me to dive in more deeply to periods of his life where there might be some interesting stories to tease out. So all of that, both the the contents that we have and the contents that are that appear to be missing or omitted are valuable and and that's what the book explores.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, often what's not there is really interesting. So I'm glad you talked about what's there and what's not there too. I wonder if we could talk about a specific kind of kind of evidence. I suppose. Obviously the diary, in terms of what he, as an individual did is interesting. You also talk about cast books. Can you tell us about kind of what these are and what peak into 19th century theatre beyond just him as an individual? We can get through these sources.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes, thanks for asking this. I'm obsessed with cast books and the thing that that's interesting about that is that I had no idea what they were when I began this project and I I learned what they are because he kept one. Watkins kept a cast book. It is one of the few things of his that survive in archives. This cast book is also at the Harvard Theatre Collection. I have no idea how it got there, but it is basically a ledger in which he tracked the casting decisions that he made as a theater manager over the course of about four years in the 1850s in various cities where he worked. And this was a practice that I learned was quite ubiquitous and goes back at least to the 18th century, probably 100 or more years before he had his own cast book. And there are many cast books in archives if you just start looking for them. Sometimes they're cataloged differently, sometimes they're called cast lists. But essentially it's an archival practice by theater makers of casting in canonical or repertory dramas that were frequently performed again and again and again. And maybe this is a good moment to explain for anyone who's less familiar with 19th century theater practice, that unlike today, where the the usual practice is to produce a show for as long as possible. For example, a Broadway show can't even start to make money in the commercial environment until many years of performances have gone by. So you're hoping for a Hamilton, you're hoping for a Cats, you're hoping for a Phantom of the Opera et CETERA where you can make your money back through many, many, many performances. Same one night after night. In the 19th century, the especially when Harry Watkins was working in his early years in the 1840s, 50s and before and slightly after theater practice was rooted in local theater companies. They were still commercial. They were not nonprofit, which is a modern invention. In the United states, we have 501 nonprofit theaters, and that's our main place where we produce theater in addition to the commercial environment to incubate often plays and playwrights and musicals. When Harry Watkins and his peers were working, they would be hired for the whole year as a repertory performer or stock company actor, and they would perform a different play every night. So actors had to have a huge memory of and repertory of plays in their head that spectators wanted to see, so that people would come just because, oh, hooray, my favorite play is being produced again, they would show up at the theater and buy a ticket that night, or occasionally there would be a play that would perform for more than one night. But the long run, quote unquote, was, was not the norm. It was very exceptional to have something that ran night after night. So a cast book was where everyone knew what role they would play whenever that play was produced, for whatever reason. And as you might imagine, it was not a given that someone would play a role, especially the best roles. To play the best role for an actor meant that they could make a better living, they could maybe get better roles, they could maybe become a touring star and be someone who was recruited by producers to travel around and be a feature performer instead of spending all year in a lousy stock company supporting other star actors. So the cast book was a place where it was recorded who was entitled to play each role. And so that was something Harry Watkins did, of course, when he started managing theaters, sort of in his mid-90s career. And I realized in looking closely at his cast book and cast books kept by other theater makers, that roles were in essence, a form of property, that they were jealously guarded, that they were negotiated between managers and actors. They were part of contractual agreements. And, and this is an example, I think, of how talent, or merit, to use that the word invoked by that myth I mentioned before, that we are living in a meritocracy. Merit was actually not about who was best at something, but rather who owned something, who had been given the entitlement to play this or that role. It also suggests that merit is bound up in some ways in habit. So someone has the merit to play a role because they always have played this role, or they've played it before. And Watkins himself would make that argument in making contracts as an actor. I've played these roles at other theaters. Therefore I'm entitled to playing this role at this theater and would negotiate as such. And it doesn't mean he was the best person in that company for that role. It was just that he was entitled to it. And that kind of dynamic, I argue, continues to this day under the veil of meritocracy and under the veil of excellence. And cast books, I think, illuminate this for us, even though no one is keeping cast books anymore, because the industry has totally changed in terms of its conditions.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to see things that kind of were so normal at the time, that are so different from what we have now. And it's actually on that sort of theme. I'd love to ask about another thing I read about in your book, which is Watkins being given a sword, which sounds really like what? Like out of nowhere today.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can you imagine? I don't know. The stage bows at cats and suddenly someone gets a sword like that. Sounds bizarre, but the way you describe it in the book, that was normal at one point, or at least kind of. So what's up with the sword?
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Dr. Amy Hughes
What was the.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Giving that as a gift?
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Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes. I love it. So this gives me an opportunity also to talk about how the book is structured in that every chapter focuses on an object in Harry's life. And the first chapter is about the diary. So I look at the. As I've mentioned, the diary in detail, its material qualities, its function and his life and so forth. The second chapter, I look at cast books. So that is where I explored this. This item that was ubiquitous at the time, but now completely forgotten as a practice in the theater. And the chapter, chapter three is about this sword, which is another of. Of the objects that has survived to the present day. I know where it is. I know who has it. Although for a long time I did not know it existed. I thought it had been lost, like so many other precious bits and pieces of a human life when someone dies. But, hooray, it is still around. I can touch it. I can hold it in my hands. But anyway, the sword is something that Watkins writes about at length. It's something he treasured throughout his life. It is something that survived because he passed it on to his descendants. And it was something he received in 1853 in the town of Williamsburg, New York, which is now part of Brooklyn. And it was presented to him by, he says, dramatic friends and Admirers at the conclusion of a season of theater at a new theater called the Odeon in Williamsburg, New York, that he managed for a time. And in short, it was sort of a disaster. That theater company was not successful in any way. He lost money on it. The investor he was in partnership with lost money. He was full of conflict among the actors. The diary reveals all of this. But at the end of it, still, these friends and admirers gave him a beautiful sword. And he was so chuffed that he kept it his whole life. He wrote about it in LinkedIn, the diary. And so I got really curious, like, what did this happen? Only to Watkins was this a unique occurrence. And turns out, like with many other things he writes about in the diary, this kind of practice was actually quite ordinary. It was very common for actors to be presented with silver cups or bouquets or money, even purses of money that recognized the actor's excellence. And these were purportedly given by admiring audiences or fellow actors. And I discovered that in addition to their ubiquity during the 19th century, some actors actually faked these presentations. Watkins is suspicious at one point that a fellow actor faked a presentation of a silver trumpet to the actor Joshua Silsbee, who was also in. Who was the star, traveling to his theater company in one of his. During one of his gigs in the West. And I think that the fakery, which I found other evidence of fake gift presentations, and even gift presentations that never happened, that evidence suggests that they were really important within these theatrical collectives. And it was a way for this recognition. Even at the end of a dismal theater season, as when Harry Watkins was presented with his sword. The ubiquity of these presentations shows that collectives really depended on the people's friendship, everyone's collaborative investment in a theatrical enterprise. These presentations hinged on spectators funding them showing up, showing the recognition, because they benefited actors in their careers by showing that they had. That they were loved, that they had status, that they were appreciated, and so their own careers could be advanced through such presentations as well. And I write in this chapter that we can still see this practice today, actually in the form of the sort of mythic bouquets thrown on the stage, or actual bouquets thrown on the stage to recognize our favorite performers. And also even in social media, when we follow a favorite performer, when we share one of their posts, and all the way up to awards ceremonies that maybe are a more precise echo of the 19th century gift presentation, like the Oscars or the Tonys in the United States or the Olivier Awards in the uk. So these presentations of admiration signal merit. Right? They signal love and merit and appreciation. But as activists have shown us through campaigns on social media like OscarsSoWhite, which is by April Rain, pointing out that the Oscars was and still is a white dominated award ceremony, and the people who tend to be recognized for their talent or their excellence still constitute the majority, rather than those who tend to be marginalized in our industries. Activists point out that even awards like this belie some of the ongoing trends of exclusion that the gift presentation in the 19th century also initiated and perpetuated. So that's what the sword taught me was that approval itself or approbation itself is not something that happens in a vacuum. It happens and is shaped by individual people, habits, and cultural privilege that continue to shape awards ceremonies and other kinds of approval even today.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's these ideas then, of kind of who gets the credit and who gets the recognition that I think definitely applies to the chapter about the sword, but also kind of, we can extend further into other aspects of the book, too. One thing, for instance, that I found really curious is that later on in his career, Watkins goes around calling himself a playwright, in addition to all the other things he calls himself. But when you started to kind of poke at, well, was he doing something different at this point? The answer, it seems you came up with was kind of not really. Like, he was doing sort of some writing and some adapting, not just when he was calling himself a playwright, but also earlier when he wasn't calling himself a playwright. So if he's doing the same thing, but only using this word for it later, what's up with the word?
- [39:25]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes. I didn't set out in this project to explore the history of labor specialization in the theater industry, but Watkins and the ways that he himself started to specialize through the 40 years of his career forced me to grapple with how today's theater industry for more than a century really has been one of great specialization and labor segregation in comparison to the 19th century and earlier. So, in brief, Watkins, in the 1840s, when he started out as a professional player, he and other actors were not just actors, they were polymaths. They were jack of all trades. Jacks of all trades. And I use that gender jack deliberately because they. Even though there were women who. Of all races, ethnicities, and abilities as well, who wrote plays, the vast majority of plays that were presented were by white male playwrights. And. And this helped them to be polymaths, including Watkins, to know how to act, to know how to Write to know how to manage a theater company, to keep a cast book, all of those things, because they provided added value. They provided added value to theater producers. So just to remind folks, this is a time when a performer or theater maker would usually contract with a theater company for a whole season, a whole year. So the negotiation would happen during the summer usually. And by the time September rolled around, most of those contracts had been signed. And Watkins and many other folks like him made. Made arguments that you should hire me because I can. Also, I'm bringing with me a bunch of original plays that I could share with the company and I could direct, even though that word directing doesn't emerge until much later. After Harry Watkins dies, there was a kind of responsibility in these theater companies for staging a play with very little rehearsal whenever it was presented. And so these were things that would add value to the company. And so Watkins and people like him helped to advance themselves or they. They. They advanced themselves by becoming polymaths in this way. But when watkins died in 1894, at the end of the century, a lot had changed. And so the last time, or one of the few times at the end of his life, when I found him listed in a. In a directory in the 1880s, he only is listed in the section headed dramatists. This directory includes lots of listings of other theater professionals under headings like the line of business, their line of business, which is the kind of role that they would specialize in. So lead tragedian or lead leading lady. There were sections for actors in this directory, but he only lists himself as a dramatist. And I started to wonder why. And I learned that, or I. I thought anew about how this time, when he was living and working, also saw the rise of copyright protections for dramatists. For the first time, copyright had existed in the United States and internationally for writers of novels and other texts long before dramatists had those protections. So very seldom did people who wrote plays receive royalties or other kinds of remuneration when other companies would perform their plays. But by the time Watkins died, that had been achieved. Also, the combination company, by the time he died, had occurred, which is, in short, a kind of theater making that is more corporate than local. It's also national rather than local. So this is when a producer would take a play that they thought people all over the nation would appreciate, such as adaptations of Harry Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and they would create a whole production with sets, costumes, in an acting company, and they would put it on the Road in the form of a combination company. And so they would perform the same play night after night in different cities over many months. And that was a sort of long run, if you will, just not in one place. And that kind of packaging was new by the time he died and became a model for other kinds of theater making. Also, vaudeville became popular by the time he died, which is a form of theater that is not really around much now, but was also about specializing the actors. The performers of vaudeville would create a bit or a short skit or have songs with acting that would become very popular. So think Fanny Brice, the famous Fanny Brice was a vaudevillian performer. And Bert Williams, arguably one of the most famous black performers of the 20th century, he was a vaudevillian too. And so this was about specializing as well in the performing space. And so by the time we see, in other words, lots of kinds of specialization and corporatization and industrialization of the entertainment industry by the time Watkins dies, in comparison to when he started out, when everyone did everything, a little bit of everything, and we still see this form of specialization today. And so that's what his career as a writer and how it shifted over time, those are some of the things it taught me.
- [45:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting that, you know, we can look at one word being there or not being there and go, well, what happens if we pull this thread right? It turns out loads of things can be excavated from that. And I know we've been talking sort of throughout this around these questions of meritocracy and the extent to which these are myths versus actually accessible to everyone. Is there anything further we want to discuss on that sort of topic? If we add in, you know, iconic phrases like the American dream.
- [45:51]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes, absolutely. So I feel it's important to say that these myths are. Are different. And they've been unpacked and studied by a lot of scholars of history and American culture for a long time. And they are. They are different, but they're also interrelated. They sustain each other. They support other enterprises that become. That are important for capitalism, that are important for certain political parties being in charge or in power. So these myths that I'm talking about operate on the level of individuals, but they have reverberations nationally and culturally. And so meritocracy is one that is a. Is. It's basically the idea that if you. That there are the people live in. In the United. People living in the United States, if they have merit, they will succeed. And if we give special privileges to people Then we will not give the, we will not grant access to, to success to the people who really deserve it. And I've noticed in recent, well, since January, when President Trump was inaugurated for the second time, as many listeners may know, one of the things that President Trump has been doing is issuing a lot of executive orders. And many of the executive orders, especially right after his inauguration in late January 2025, include the words meritocracy in that the administration is saying that programs that are rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion, three words that have been in many ways weaponized by this administration and political activists on the right, that these values prohibit people with actual merit from succeeding by conferring special privileges, special opportunities, things like that. So this word meritocracy, this myth, meritocracy, has even appeared on the national level in the form of these executive orders. But these myths are ones that like meritocracy and American Dream, a phrase that appears in the executive orders as well, they, they serve to obscure the fact that lots of other evidence supports the people who historically have been marginalized, women, people of color or the global majority, people who are non gender conforming, people who, who have sexual orientations beyond heterosexuality and so on. They, they, those folks still experience oppression. And even folks who experience oppression have adopted these myths in many ways in order to make themselves feel better, in order to make themselves feel less marginalized. So in this book, I think through how Harry Watkins himself adopted these nuts like meritocracy, American Dream, he fervently believed that despite his humble origins. Remember, he was born between husbands. He was, he had to join the army as a teenager in order to survive. He experienced a lot of hardship even as a, as a theater maker, because at the time he had pretty narrow talents and abilities and people knew that he also was an industry. He was in an industry that favored English performers over those who had been born in the United States like him. So, and yet he adopted the American dream and this belief that he could become somebody, regardless of those humble origins and regardless of his lack of privilege and connections. And that kept him going in many ways. But at moments it also really depressed him, frankly. He writes in he definitely had bouts of depression. That's a modern word, but I see it in his time text because he often failed. He often failed to get what he achieved. And at the start of my project, I sort of had a voice in me saying, well, that's what he deserved. And at the end of the project or toward the end of the project, I realized, well, I actually recognize that tendency in myself too, how I was fed this myth that I could be anyone, I could do anything, regardless of the fact that I identify as cisgender woman. And despite the evidence that I will probably never make the same amount of money as men who have accomplished less, who have done less than I have, there's plenty of evidence that I myself will. Will never achieve the American dream in the same way it's been fed to me, and especially in the same way that my white male peers will be able to achieve it. And Watkins, of course, he. He did much better in the theater as people who were marginalized were able to do, but. Or be. But he also, I see in the diary, was hurt by it. And this is a fact that many social activists, especially black feminists, have argued for, for decades and generations that these myths harm everybody. Not just people from who are racialized or minoritized, but even white people who buy into them. And of course the. The harm they experience is disproportionately less, including myself. I definitely include myself in that category. But there are moments when we too. And when I say we, I mean white folks. We too are subjected to the harm that they in many ways wage. And so that's why the American dream, meritocracy and the self made man are things that myths that become really front and center in this tale of one ordinary 19th century actor. This episode is brought to you by.
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Dr. Amy Hughes
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- [53:23]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up.
- [53:26]
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- [53:28]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Streaming only on Peacock.
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- [53:35]
Dr. Amy Hughes
It was just the five of us. So this was all planned.
- [53:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
What are you gonna do?
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- [53:42]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Get my son back.
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- [53:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of things in what you've just said, and I want to, I think, add complexity to it. You know, why not? We're here having this conversation.
- [54:01]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes.
- [54:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You've spoken a lot about race, and I wonder if we can add in some aspects. Well, you've mentioned gender, but I want to talk about that a little bit more in the context of Watkins life. He does eventually marry a woman, and he marries a woman who's also an actor. What benefits did he see from this kind of arrangement? Especially if we're thinking about these things in terms of kind of who gets the credit and where. The labor. Burgos.
- [54:28]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Yes. So great question. And of course, I want to. I sort of want to preface this by saying that I. One thing that troubled me as a writer, as a researcher, as a historian was that inevitably, perhaps in writing a book about a white male actor, I'm centering white men, right. I. I'm not writing a book, as many other amazing, brilliant scholars have, about a woman performer centering on gender, about black performers centering on black performers of all genders who have made incredibly important theater and written incredibly important plays that have been sidelined in theater history to date and still has been sidelined in theater courses in the canon and so forth. But I'm doing. So I chose to pursue the project ultimately because I think. I think that by recovering the history of mediocre white men and the more average white men, we can also recover the histories of the people who they worked with and labored with because they also labored and lived with ordinary women, ordinary black folks and people of Latino heritage and so forth. So whenever I can, I'm trying to recover those histories in the book. And. And I'm. I am able to do that especially with white women, because the. Because Harry Watkins had two wives and so he writes about them, there is some information about, especially one of them, his second wife, Rose Howard, who was a better actor than he and who he married after divorcing his first wife, Harriet Secor. These wives, he viewed them as important assets. This is clear from the diary, because at this time, to become a working actor often meant you had to travel. It often meant that you could make twice the money as a white male. Actor like Watkins, if you could make a contract with a producer for both yourself and your wife as a package deal, this again goes to the idea of offering something, value added, if you will. And so he knew that he could literally be a more successful actor himself if he had a talented wife. And he started working on this as a young man. It's clear from the diary he was keeping his eyes out for someone with lots of potential. And some of the benefits of this kind of arrangement for him were that he could travel, he could make these package deals. And I argue, because he was, you know, pretty average himself as an actor, if he could get an act, if he could recruit a partner who could be an even bigger draw than he could be on his own, that that rising tide of a fabulous wife would rise his own boat. So this had benefits for women, too, I learned. And this is something that I explore, by the way, in the last chapter, which is called Wife, the object or the objectified person. At the center of that chapter is the wife. In these relationships, for many women, whenever you married, you inevitably had to confront childbearing and child rearing, because those were the inevitable outcomes and burdens of marriage. But if you were also, you know, as I mentioned before, there were very few professions available to women in the 19th century. Everyone, I think, intuitively knows this, assumes this. Performing was something you could do. Being an actress was something you could do, a lady tragedian. And yet, if you were a single woman, you were often viewed as unrespectable. You were audiences and even theater managers viewed women who were not married, who were actors, as lacking respectability, as sexually available and so forth. And often women who were unmarried in the profession were subjected themselves to more harassment as well. That's clear from various points of the diary and other sources. So for a foreign actor, having a spouse was. Was also beneficial, even though it brought with. With the marriage, brought with it childbearing, child rearing responsibilities. And having a second income in that respect was also really important. So. Yeah. Does that answer your question, Miranda?
- [59:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think it really does and brings together a lot of the threads we've discussed previous to it as well, really showing how, as you said, each of the chapters is kind of an individual object, but also they kind of keep coming back to each other as well, which is useful to see sort of how all of this comes together. And I think also kind of brings us to a good conclusion on the book, unless there was any last thing you wanted to mention on it that we haven't covered so far.
- [59:40]
Dr. Amy Hughes
No. You've been so generous with your questions, so bring it. What's the last question about the book?
- [59:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I don't. I in fact, think that could be a good place to end our discussion about the book. But that's not quite the last question of the interview, because I admit I am always very curious once I've gotten to read someone's book and then hear them talk about it, what they might be working on now that it's done. Because sometimes the answer is, I never want to touch that again. I'm doing something totally different. And sometimes it's actually, this has given me an idea for something else. So I'm curious, Amy, what might be on your desk next?
- [60:21]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Oh, well, I feel a little. A little sheepish in admitting this, but also I'm really excited about this next project I'm working on. I've been working on sort of in the background as I've wrapped up an actor's tale. In short, I'm writing a book about love, but it's not about human to human love. It's about human, human's love affair with dogs. And I know that may seem really strange after writing a really strange statement by an author who just wrote a book about white mediocrity in the 19th century theater industry. But I am a theater historian who is obsessed by popular theater in the 19th century. And one of the little known, understudied genres that was popular during the 1800s is something called then the dog drama. And I bet you Miranda and everyone listening knows exactly what this is. If I just describe it really briefly, which is, you know, think about Lassie, think about Rin Tin Tin, think about Old Yeller. These films that I think many of us watched as children, even contemporary films like Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs or other films that feature in which dogs feature. This was actually invented in the early 19th century, more than 200 years ago. It's a popular form that started arguably in 1803 on the London stage with a play called the Caravan by Frederick Reynolds, where a dog, basically an actual dog, jumps into a lake, which is a water tank, in the case of this theatrical entertainment, to save a drowning child. And so the idea of a dog rescuing a human gets popularized through this genre. It transforms in later dog dramas into dogs that have bizarre wonderful talents like sniffing out villains and other murderers, which. And problem solving human suffering or human dilemmas. And I'm a person who loves dogs. I've had dogs myself. Don't have one now, but my greatest love affair with a dog was with my last dog, Mabel. And as many of us who live with pets experience, when she died, it was really hard to grapple with my deep feelings of grief. And I knew when I was grappling with those feelings that it wasn't just about me and who I am as a person, and it wasn't just about her and who she was as a dog, but also probably the culture that had shaped me and specifically popular entertainments like the dog drama, which lives on today in cinema, television, social media. At least that's what I believe and have seen. And so the reason it's a book about love is I wanted to understand myself in many ways and the the great love that I and others have for our pets through the lens of theater history by excavating this popular genre that lives on today, by understanding how it reflected and maybe even shaped people's feelings about pets and how pet keeping itself has changed over time and has become such a prominent industry in Euro Western cultures. It's a very profitable enterprise, pet keeping, in terms of services and products. And so it's very early, this project, but this book about love is something that really excites me, and not only because it's something I think that a lot of folks will relate to and be curious about and learning more about, but also because of my personal connection to it. So, yeah, I'm really excited. What do you think?
- [64:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I love hearing about authors being excited about project. That to me is the exciting thing. So good, good. We've clearly got that with your next project, and I think it's come through in our conversation. The project we've mainly been talking about also had a lot of excitement for you. So for listeners who want to find out more, you can of course read the book we've been discussing. It is available from the University of Michigan Press Open Access entitled An Actor's Theater Culture and Everyday life in the 19th century United States. Amy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [64:58]
Dr. Amy Hughes
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda.
- [65:12]
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Dr. Amy Hughes
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