250 Years of Theater History

 

[On 16 July 2026, I posted “250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream” by Vanessa Friedman (under the headline “Dressing for the American Dream”).  That was about fashion, with an unstated theater connection to costume.  Now I’m posting another semiquincentennial article, this one with an unquestionable theater connection—it’s about theater history!

[Maybe five pages—that’s how long the article was in print—isn’t anywhere near sufficient space to cover a quarter of a millennium of theater in America, but there was enough coverage to introduce to me some pretty interesting things I didn’t know or hadn’t considered.  See if you agree.] 

“WE THE (THEATRE) PEOPLE”
by Charlotte M. Canning 

[This article was published in American Theatre 42.4 (Summer 2026 – “Theatre History”) on 30 June 2026. Under the same headline, it’s posted on the website of the Theatre Communications Group at AMERICAN THEATRE | We the (Theatre) People.]

The history of live performance on this continent has been about art, commerce, innovation, stereotyping, and the breaking of stereotypes—i.e., messy democracy in action.

John Adams [1735-1826; a Founding Father of the Unites State and the second President of the United States: 1797-1801] once predicted [in a letter to his wife on 3 July 1776] that July 4, the date of the vote ratifying the Declaration of Independence, would be “celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary festival . . . with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this continent to the other.”

[In the quotation above, Adams was, however, referring to 2 July, the day the Continental Congress actually officially voted to sever ties with Great Britain, making the colonies independent states—rather than 4 July, when Congress formally adopted the wording of the Declaration of Independence, drafted to explain their decision to the world. Adams believed, erroneously, as it turned out, that 3 July would forever be marked as America's true birthday.]

Adams had little interest in theatre at the time, but he understood that live performance [i.e., “Shews”] is bound to democracy as a civic space of convening, public discourse, and collective engagement. Just over 50 years later, a visiting Frenchman would affirm Adams’s sense that democracy and theatre are bound up with one another. “When a revolution that has changed the social and political state of an aristocratic people begins to affect literature, it generally manifests itself first in the drama and remains conspicuous there,” politician and historian Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59; French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian] argued in Democracy in America [De la démocratie en Amérique; two volumes: Librairie de Charles Gosselin, 1835 and 1840]. The book is still read today for its prescient insights into and understanding of the United States, and its passing observations on U.S. theatre offer a tidy summary of why and how it persists in the 21st century.

[The two volumes of de Tocqueville’s study were first published in English by London’s Saunders and Otley (translated by English political writer and jurist Henry Reeve [1813-95]) in 1835 and 1840, later the same years as the original editions. The first U.S. editions, the Reeve translations with an original preface especially for American readers, were released in 1838 and 1840. They were published by Adlard & Saunders, a newly established U.S. branch of the British publishers, in partnership with George Dearborn & Co. of New York City. There are, of course, many more recent republications, both in French and English.]

In de Tocqueville’s nine months of travel around the nation in the company of magistrate Gustave de Beaumont [1802-1866; French magistrate and prison reformer]—an itinerary which spanned Boston, upstate New York, Quebec, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Memphis, among other places—it is certain that the two men attended the theatre in Philadelphia, New York City, and New Orleans, though there may have been other visits that they did not document. What would de Tocqueville and de Beaumont have seen on American stages in the early 19th century? In Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, they would have seen theatre produced by managers Noah Ludlow [1795-1886; actor and manager of a theater company touring Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi] and Sol Smith [1801-69; actor and theater manager in St. Louis], whose partnership exemplified one way theatre operated up through the mid-19th century. From the 1830s through the ’50s, Smith and Ludlow commanded the theatre scene in the South and Midwest. They not only controlled acting companies and repertoire; they also built, ran, and owned influential theatres, most significantly the St. Louis Theatre [1837-51; first theater in St. Louis; first real theater west of the Mississippi] and the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans [1835-1967; first English theater in New Orleans]. Their acting companies were itinerant, stopping in smaller towns to perform while traveling to and from Smith and Ludlow’s larger theatres.

Indeed, theatre in the U.S. has always been about travel and movement. Large companies known for their impressive quality and stars with name recognition were no less itinerant than small groups who hustled from small town to small town trying to make a living. With itinerancy, though, came suspicion. In Mark Twain’s famous novel, Huckleberry Finn encounters two fraudsters [the Duke and the King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chatto & Windus [U.K.], 1884; Charles L. Webster And Company [U.S.], 1885)] on the Mississippi who offer a “Shaksperean [sic] Revival ! ! ! Wonderful Attraction!” with the “world-renowned tragedians, David Garrick the Younger [1716-79] of Drury Lane Theatre London, and Edmund Kean [1787-1833] the elder, of the Royal Haymarket Theatre.” These may have been fictionalized parodies, but their struggle and desperation would have been instantly recognizable to any 19th-century jobbing actor. Harry Watkins [1825-94; actor, diarist, playwright, and theater manager], whose career spanned the 1840s to the late ’80s, never impersonated a fake British star (he did claim to perform “in imitation of the celebrated Lucius Junius Brutus Booth”), though he knew his Shakespeare well. But his plight was often no better than Huck Finn’s companions. Of an 1845 stint in Galveston, Watkins rejoiced that one show had done well enough that he could afford both shoes and food. “I had nothing on my feet before, and now I have a good pair of boots, and enough money left to buy something to eat with and that is a good deal in Texas,” he wrote in his diary.

[Lucius Junius Brutus Booth, better known as Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), was an English-born American theatrical tragedian, one of the most prominent actors of the 19th-century American stage. He was the father of 12 children, including Edwin Booth (1833-93), widely regarded as one of the greatest American tragic actors of the 19th century and the first American-born actor to achieve an international reputation; Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. (1821-83), an actor and theater manager; and John Wilkes Booth (1838-65), the actor who infamously assassinated President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-65) at Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865.

[Curious fact: Gail Merrifield Papp (b. ca. 1935), widow (and partner) of New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater founder Joseph Papp (1921-91), whom she married in 1976, is the great-great-granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth. Though Booth never married, he had a secret, long-term, out-of-wedlock affair that in 1859 produced a daughter, Gail Papp’s great-grandmother.  The Booth family never acknowledged the relationship, but private family records and contemporaneous letters confirm it.  (The descent passed through the female line, so the surname changed with each generation until Gail Papp’s grandmother, Booth’s granddaughter, married a man named Merrifield in 1899.)]

Though the two Frenchmen were unimpressed with the quality of what they saw (“The theatres are bad,” de Beaumont bluntly observed), the important thing to note is the connection de Tocqueville posited between democracy and theatre. “Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, but the keen emotions of the heart,” de Tocqueville argued. Audiences in democracies like to see onstage “that medley of conditions, of feelings, and of opinions, which occurs before their eyes. Theatre becomes more striking, more vulgar, and more true.”

If de Tocqueville and de Beaumont were looking for the most meaningful theatre on the continent, they may have been looking in the wrong place, and with the wrong measuring tools. Theatre in the U.S. was not a proper literary endeavor until well into the 20th century. Instead, theatre as it emerged in what became the United States, and was practiced up through the end of the 19th century, was not about inventing a new literary canon but about innovation in performance itself. As theatre historian Constance Rourke [1885-1941; author and educator; known for shaping the fields of American studies, American literature, and American folklore] has argued, Americans “emerged as the theatrical race,” defining “theatrical” in opposition to “the dramatic” and characterizing it as “full of experiment . . . closely interwoven with the American character and the American experience” [American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931)]. Rourke went on to argue that some of the earliest performance innovations in North America happened during encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. She found evidence for the claim in treaties as early as 1677.

“These treaties were essentially plays,” Rourke wrote, “recording what was said in the parleys, including bits of action, the exchanges of gift, of wampum, the smoking of pipes, the many ceremonial dances, cries, and choral songs. Even the printed form of the treaties was dramatic: The participants were listed like a cast of characters, and precise notations were made as to ceremonial action” [The Roots of American Culture (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942)].

Rourke and subsequent theatre historians also recognized the primary, and problematic, invention that North American theatre contributed to global entertainment: blackface minstrelsy. The practice emerged in the early 1830s as a white performance form presented as a representation of Black life. Comic actor Thomas Dartmouth Rice [1808-60; performer and playwright] claimed to be mimicking a Black man he had seen in the street when he performed “Jump Jim Crow” [song and dance from 1828 that Rice performed in blackface all over the U.S.] but his appropriation, distortion, and exploitation owed far less to accurate research than to the white racist imaginary. The first minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface (often burnt cork; eventually makeup companies offered specialized products), though by the mid- to late 19th century Black performers found that their access to professional performance often depended on their willingness to “black up” for minstrel shows.

[Minstrelsy (or minstrel shows) was a 19th-century American theatrical entertainment where white performers wore blackface makeup to act out demeaning, racist caricatures of African Americans, establishing harmful stereotypes of Black people as lazy, dimwitted, and buffoonish.

[Originating in the 1830s in New York, minstrelsy became the most popular form of public entertainment in the country by 1848. Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entr’actes in the early 1830s in the Northeastern states. They were developed into full-fledged art form in the next decade.

[Shows typically featured a mix of comedy skits, musical numbers (such as early ragtime), and variety acts. It laid the foundation for vaudeville (early 1870s-early 1930s) and modern American musical theater. Its legacy of stereotypes heavily influenced early 20th-century radio, television, and film.]

While de Tocqueville and de Beaumont did not comment on minstrelsy, they did notice that racism was no less part of the theatre than the nation at large. As de Beaumont later reflected, “The first time I attended a theatre in the United States, I was surprised by the care with which white spectators were distinguished from Black audiences.” He used this practice in his 1835 novel Marie, or Slavery in the United States [Stanford University Press, 1958 (first English edition); Marie; ou, L'esclavage aux États-Unis (Libraire de Charles Gosselin, 1835)] to illustrate the ferocious violence Black people experienced under white supremacy.

Across the 19th century, theatre was where American national identity was rehearsed and produced, often self-consciously: In 1828, actor Edwin Forrest [1806-72; American Shakespearean actor] offered a prize for a new play in which “the hero shall be an aboriginal of this country.” While Forrest was primarily looking for a starring vehicle for himself, he also earnestly wanted to develop U.S. dramatic literature. Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoag [debuted, 1829 in New York City], by John Augustus Stone [1801-34; American actor, dramatist, and playwright] became a staple in Forrest’s repertoire, and inspired a character that resonates to the current day, that of the “vanishing Indian.” Theatre historian Bethany Hughes [Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; DOB unknown] has noted that so-called “Indian plays” like Metamora typically depict “noble savages dying to make way for virile young Americans” [Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (NYU Press, 2024)]. Like minstrelsy’s racist depiction of Black people, these Native American stereotypes have persisted into the 21st century.

Plays by Shakespeare [1564-1616]—whom Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82; essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet] described as “the father of the man in America,” despite his being English—were also a staple of the emerging American identity. De Tocqueville remarked “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found.” Audiences were even willing to resort to violence to assert American ownership of the Shakespearean tradition. Forrest, for one, had a long-established rivalry with British actor William Charles Macready [1793-1873], which came to a head in 1849, when Macready dared perform Macbeth the same night as Forrest and only a few blocks away in New York. A fierce riot broke out, leaving dozens dead and more than 120 injured. The Astor Place Riot, named for the theatre where Macready was performing, was fueled more by class identity and anti-British hatred than fandom per se. Nevertheless, the riot demonstrates how integral theatre was to life in the U.S.

[The Astor Place Riot, which left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured, broke out on 10 May 1849. It wasn’t named for “the theatre where Macready was performing,” the Astor Place Opera House (often commonly referred to as the Astor Opera House), I maintain, but the area around the theater that was known by New Yorkers simply as Astor Place. (The theater in which Forrest was playing, the Broadway Theatre, was about a mile further downtown in the area now known as TriBeCa.  Neither theater building exists today.)

[The violent clash between the fans of rival actors began at the Astor Place Opera House, the actual riot—which involved a crowd of over 10,000 people, brick-throwing, and the calling in of the state militia—predominantly played out across the entire multi-block neighborhood pocket. The riot was named for the location where the event occurred, a section of the East Village bounded by East 4th Street on the south, Broadway on the west, East 8th Street on the north, and Third Avenue on the east.]

In the post-Civil War years, American theatre also grew into a big business, and no business was bigger than vaudeville. From the 1880s to the 1930s, vaudeville circuits criss-crossed the nation. No matter `available. Vaudeville, a descendant of variety theatre, concert saloons, minstrelsy, burlesque, circuses, and medicine shows, among other popular forms, in turn shows its influence on entertainment today, from standup comedy to late-night TV to musical theatre.

[Vaudeville (early 1870s-early 1930s) was a variety entertainment consisting of short acts such as acrobatic turns, song-and-dance routines, animal acts, and so on, popular especially in the early 20th century. American vaudeville was essentially a parallel version of British music hall; though they arose independently, they shared the same core format. Furthermore, turn-of-the-20th-century vaudeville served as the direct structural and stylistic model for early television variety shows. Early TV stars like Milton Berle (1908-2002), Bob Hope (1903-2003), and Jack Benny (1894-1974) got their professional start directly on vaudeville circuits.]

Crucially, vaudeville distinguished itself from some of its disreputable predecessors thanks to the influential impresario Tony Pastor [1837-1908; impresario, variety performer, and theater owner; sometimes referred to as the “Dean of Vaudeville”], who prohibited the sale of alcohol and proscribed risqué or salacious content. This allowed him to offer “family-friendly” fare and to expand audiences to include middle-class spectators, especially women, who had shunned or been excluded from earlier diversions. At its peak vaudeville encompassed everyone from ill-paid small-time hacks in slapdash shows to big-time operators with national names performing the highest-quality work in state-of-the-art theatres.

The capital of the big-time circuit was unquestionably New York’s Palace Theater [sic], built in 1913 by manager-producer Martin Beck [1868-1940] of the Orpheum Circuit, which was operated by producer-manager B. F. Keith [1846-1914]. Keith founded the United Booking Office of America. That eventually merged with Beck’s company, further consolidating their power. This merger was typical of this period, following the recurring trend toward monopolies, and not only in vaudeville. One of the earliest and most successful of such empires was the Theatrical Syndicate, run primarily by Charles Frohman [1856-1915], Abraham Lincoln Erlanger [1859-1930], and Marcus Alonzo Klaw [1858-1936] from 1888 to 1919. This triumvirate controlled booking in most theatres, as well as the careers of many actors. Their domination was eventually successfully challenged by the Shubert brothers [Lee Shubert (1871-1953), Sam S. Shubert (1878-1905); Jacob J. Shubert (1879-1963)], and the Syndicate’s influence waned after 1910. As the Shuberts’ actions demonstrated, no control is so absolute that it cannot be challenged (today the Shubert Organization [incorporated, 1904] owns nearly half of Broadway theatres [as of 2024, 17 Broadway theaters]).

De Tocqueville once wrote that “the pit has often imposed its law on the boxes”—i.e., in the popular arts, ordinary people will not be dictated to by the elite if elite taste contradicts their needs and desires. This popular pushback might show up not only in theatre’s content but also in its practices, including racial segregation. In the 1920s, Sherman H. Dudley [1872-1940] founded the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which established a circuit to provide Black performers with long-term contracts. Dudley also bought or leased theatres in the South and Midwest to ensure greater access for Black entertainers.

By far the most important issue being wrestled with on U.S. stages was the question of who belongs here and why. For their part, Indigenous people used theatre in multiple ways to provide their answer, and to resist their erasure from the national narrative. Activist and artist Zitkála-Šá [1876-1938; writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist] (Yankton Dakota Sioux, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) wrote the libretto for The Sun Dance (1913) in collaboration with composer William F. Hanson [1887-1969; composer and music teacher; specialized in Native American music]. Her goal was to merge Ute stories and experiences with Western art to create serious work from the Indigenous perspective; the opera debuted in Utah that year and was performed on Broadway in 1938.

[Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird) was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory (now South Dakota). At 8-years-old, Quaker missionaries recruited her for the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a boarding school in Wabash, Indiana [775 miles east of the reservation]. There she was given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons.

[Though she found great joy in learning to read, write, and play the piano and violin, she experienced great grief and pain in losing her heritage by the forced assimilation and the cutting of her hair. After returning to the Yankton Reservation in 1887 over a school break, she felt that she no longer belonged there after her time at the institute, so she returned to the institute to further her education. She later learned that the government paid the schools for every child successfully removed from reservations, realizing that the schools were created for cultural erasure.

[Zitkála-Šá began writing and producing works that portrayed Lakota people as generous and loving, actively fighting stereotypes in the mainstream that were used in arguments supporting assimilation. Working on the Yankton Reservation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she met Captain Raymond Bonnin (1880-1942), a Yankton Dakota; they married in 1902. For the next fourteen years (1902-1916), they were assigned to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Vernal, Utah.

[From 1897 to 1898, Zitkala-Ša studied and played the violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1910, she met Hanson, a professor of music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Hanson and Zitkála-Šá worked on the Sun Dance Opera for the next three years. She wrote the libretto and the songs for the story, while Hanson wrote the score. The songs were based on the sacred ritual that was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978. By folding the sacred ritual into a Western operatic structure, the librettist legally bypassed federal restrictions and preserved her culture.

[Zitkála-Šá died on 26 January 1938. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Viginia, with her husband, who died on 24 September 1942.

[The Sun Dance Opera premiered for three nights in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. It was performed by members of the Ute Nation who lived on the reservation. The opera was performed several more times at BYU, including twice in 1914 and once in 1935. The Broadway début was on 27 April 1938 (three months after the librettist’s death) at the Broadway Theatre, where it was put on by the New York City Light Opera. Reviews were universally bad and a planned second performance was cancelled.

[Hanson received all public credit for the opera, with no mention of Zitkála-Šá, which he’d also done in 1935 at BYU. She wasn’t involved in the production, nor in the revisions made to her libretto and Hanson’s composition which doubled the show’s length. He added a number of songs and rewrote those remaining from the original text.]

Other notable Native artists of this period include popular vaudevillians Mary Nelson Archambaud (Penobscot), a.k.a., Molly Spotted Elk [1903-77; Native American dancer, actress, and writer], and Princess White Elk (Yurok, born Bertha Thompson [1886-c. 1924; performer, model, and activist]). Writer-performer Will Rogers [1879-1935; vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator] and playwright Lynn Riggs [1899-1954; author, poet, playwright and screenwriter; his 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs adapted into the 1943 musical Oklahoma!] were Cherokee Oklahomans with influence in multiple entertainment venues, including vaudeville, Little Theatre (a sort of precursor to regional theatre as we know it), Broadway, and Hollywood.

Immigrants also employed theatre to claim space in their new country. On the vaudeville stage, actors Joe Weber [1867-1942] and Lew Fields [1867-1941], both children of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, formed a double act [Weber and Fields; first stage appearance: 1876; formed vaudeville company: 1885; Broadway debut: 1893; partnership dissolved: 1904] as two bumbling German immigrants trying to make it big in the U.S. Immigrants from one part of the world performing as those from another was a popular approach: Chinese American Lee Tung Foo [1875-1966] performed in multiple languages, sang popular and classical songs, and caricatured recent immigrants, including the Irish, Scottish, and Chinese. Diverse playwrights, including María Ruiz de Burton [1832-95; first female Mexican-American writer published in English], Israel Zangwill [British; 1864-1926], Li Ling-Ai (Gladys Li) [1908-2003], [1906-63], and Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953] all wrote movingly about their immigrant and first-generation experiences.

[The immigrant on the list is:

•   Ruiz de Burton, who was born in Baja California in 1832, before the Mexican-American War. After the war, but before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Ruiz de Burton moved to Monterey in Alta California, which would become U.S. territory pursuant to the treaty. (Part of it would become the State of California in 1850.) Unlike the stereotypical immigrant, Ruiz de Burton became a U.S. citizen automatically by virtue of her residency in a territory acquired by the United States.  

[The first-gen writers are:

•   Zangwill was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—but immigrants to Britain. He wrote about that experience in works such as the novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (William Heinemann (London); Jewish Publication Society of America (Philadelphia), 1892; dramatized for Broadway in 1899 and filmed in 1915), but in 1908, he wrote The Melting Pot that was a hit in Broadway (6 September 1909-1 January 1910; Comedy Theatre). The play gave us the very phrase that defines the American immigrant experience.

•   Li, a writer, dancer, playwright, and film producer, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Both her parents were Chinese immigrants. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Li returned to China to study Chinese music and directing theater productions at the Beijing Institute of Fine Arts. Because of the war. She returned to Honolulu ib 1937, where she conceived the project that would become Kukan (1941), a harrowing documentary exposing the atrocities of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It became the first feature-length documentary to win an Academy Award. In 1972, she published Life is for a Long Time: A Chinese Hawaiian Memoir, which detailed her parents’ medical careers and first-generation life in Hawaii. While a student at the University of Hawaii in the 1920s, she studied playwriting, and in 1924, she composed The Submission of Rose Moy (produced 1928), her most famous work was the very first play written and published by an Asian American woman. The play’s a melodrama detailing intergenerational conflict, assimilation, and the clash between Western freedom and traditional Chinese immigrant customs.

•   Odets became the Group Theatre’s signature playwright with the debuts of Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Awake and Sing! (written, 1933; produced, 1935) and his reputation is inextricably connected with the Group. Odets was the son of Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and the characters in Awake and Sing! are a working-class immigrant Jewish family living in a crowded Bronx apartment during the Great Depression. The narrative centers on the struggle between the older generation’s traditional dreams and the younger, American-born generation’s search for identity, dignity, and economic stability (see “Awake and Sing!, et al.” [3 April 2017]).

•   O’Neill is the sole American who’s a Nobel laureate playwright and the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill (1847-1920) and Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922), who was also of Irish descent. He became involved with the Provincetown Players in mid-1916 and the Players performed many of his early works in their theaters both in Massachusetts and in Greenwich Village, New York City. Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely regarded as his magnum opus and one of the great American plays of the 20th century. It was written in 1939-41 and first published posthumously in 1956. The play portrays a family, the members of which are the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill, his older brother, and their parents, struggling to grapple with the realities and consequences of each member's failings. (A Moon for the Misbegotten, written in 1943 and premiered on Broadway in 1957, is a sequel to Long Day’s Journey.)]

Much American theatre bloomed well outside the mainstream of national life. Indeed, for centuries theatrical works in what would become the U.S. were performed in Spanish, as theatre was first used to colonize and convert Indigenous people to Christianity as early as 1568. In the 18th century, Spanish settlers wrote plays and performed them in Alta California and Louisiana, well before the first purpose-built theatre was built by the British in their North American colonies in 1716, and before even the arrival in 1752 of Lewis Hallam’s [British; ca. 1714-56] English theatre company.

Well into the 19th century and the 20th, theatre in languages other than English dominated the stage. German-language theatre could be found in the Midwest and West, especially Wisconsin and Texas; Chinese theatre was a staple of entertainment in San Francisco and across the U.S. from the 1850s on. Yiddish theatre would be ubiquitous in New York—from 1890 to 1940 there were 200 Yiddish theatres in the U.S., most in New York City [see “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene” (23 August and 26 August 2012]—and would go on to birth a generation of artists, including Stella [1901-92; actor and acting teacher] and Luther Adler [1903-84; actor], Harold Clurman [1901-80; director], and Lee Strasberg [1901-82; director and acting teacher], who would revolutionize theatre practices in the U.S.

Up through the mid-20th century, the most robust theatre circuits with the largest audiences were Spanish-language ones. They ranged from small family companies like the Compañía Hernández Villalongín, which performed on either side of the U.S.-Mexican border, to large-scale commercial businesses, with San Antonio and Los Angeles as major hubs. In the 1920s, Los Angeles easily supported over 20 theatres that changed their bills daily. Circuses and tent shows blanketed the Southwest, especially after the 1910s, when the violence of the Mexican Revolution [1910-20] drove many artists to settle more permanently in the U.S. Up through the 1940s, artists from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico would frequently rent and fill Broadway houses.

In the early 20th century, a division began to emerge between theatre as a crowd-pleasing business and as a challenging art form. Broadway was not yet the nexus of commercial theatre that it would become after World War II, but it did reflect the emphasis on profit and popular appeal that was becoming increasingly distasteful to theatre artists who saw themselves as serious art makers.

Meanwhile, theatre was being taken up as a legitimate academic subject, with universities as diverse as Brown, Yale, Case Western Reserve, and Howard establishing theatre departments. The Little Theatre Movement encouraged the proliferation of theatre outside of commercial structures, with director Helen Spaulding declaring Chicago’s Skyloft Players in 1942 a “theatre OF the people FOR the people BY the people.” Alexis de Tocqueville would certainly have approved.

The American theatre as we know it today, though it contains traces of and owes large debts to all this history, was largely built since the 1950s and ’60s, fueled by the nonprofit funding model, the Ford Foundation, and the early support of the National Endowment for the Arts. All those pillars are in question today. Indeed, now is a perilous moment to be arguing for a telling of history that encompasses our nation’s extraordinary diversity. Not long after being inaugurated for this second term, President Trump [b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029] issued the executive order [#14253, 27 March 2025] “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which sought to prohibit any telling of the national story that seeks to “undermine remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

If it is true, as de Tocqueville put it in 1835, that “no part of literature is more closely or more abundantly linked to the present state of society than the theatre,” then we should be able to look to our nation’s stages, as we always have, for signs of where our country has been—and where it is going.

[Charlotte M. Canning is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama at the University of Texas at Austin and a recipient of the University of Texas Systems Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.  She’s also director of UT-Austin’s Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism and has served as president of the American Society for Theatre Research.

[Canning has won the 2016 Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theater for On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History for The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (University of Iowa Press, 2005).  She’s also the co-editor, with Tom Postlewait, of Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (University of Iowa Press, 2010). 

[Besides AT, her writing has been seen in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Truthout, and her op-eds have appeared in Time, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, The Conversation, and other publications.]

Dressing for the American Dream

 

[Clothes make the man (and woman, I warrant), some people believe.  Maybe so, but Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic of the New York Times, wonders what that looks like, especially with the changing fashion of the oft-invoked American Dream.

[That’s actually her job.  She chronicles what clothing says about American women and men over the past two-and-a-half centuries.  Of course, Friedman doesn’t look at li’l ol’ you and me.  She looks at the people who make fashion.]

“250 YEARS OF DRESSING FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM”
by Vanessa Friedman

[Vanessa Friedman’s article appeared in the New York Times of 5 July 2026, in the “Sunday Styles” section.  An undated (probably 6 July), cut-down version (with photos, but severely edited text), under the same headline, is posted on the Times website. 

[The only other online version of the article with the complete text that I could find is on the ProQuest New York Times database on the New York Public Library website; if you have access to this service through your library, it’s at 250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream: [Style Desk] - New York Times - ProQuest (text only).]

Over 250 Years, What We Wore To Break Free And Show Off.

For 250 years the American dream has been fodder for a potent national brand. Little wonder that since he began running for president, Donald J. Trump [b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029], perhaps the most active executive brand manager in history, has repeatedly invoked the idea: declaring it dead, positioning himself as its champion, announcing it has been restored.

Often he seems to be talking about a purchase of some kind, like a home, a yacht, a freshened-up face, an ever more gilded fantasyland of success.

Yet when the American dream — or at least the idea that later became the American dream — was born along with the country, it looked very different.

Initially defined by the founders as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that dream was reimagined by each generation and wave of immigrants. As a collection of values (like any brand) it often had less to do with material value than abstract values like liberty, revolution, aspiration, security and reinvention.

Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a “mythic construct,” said Jim Cullen [b. 1962], the author of “The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation” [Oxford University Press, 2004]. One in which, he said, “freedom is the currency of self-realization, which gets reflected in outward presentation that ratifies one’s hope, or one’s status in culture.”

In other words, one way to understand the way the American dream has evolved may be to consider the different styles Americans designed for the world they were inventing.

Freedom and Revolution

It began with the chance to define a new set of laws and governance, to reject the inherited trappings (or traps) of class.

“To escape from Old World fetters and start over again,” said Sean Wilentz [b. 1951], a professor of American history at Princeton University and author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln” [W. W. Norton & Company, 2005].

The founding fathers dressed the part, taking their cues from the fashions of Britain and France and simplifying them.

“In terms of silhouette, in terms of embellishments, there was always a sort of underlying sense of, not puritanism per se, but pulling back,” said Andrew Bolton [b. 1966], the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the man behind the show “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity” [5 May-10 August 2010].

George Washington [1732-99; First President of the United States: 1789-97] may have powdered his hair, but he rejected the wig. Benjamin Franklin [1705-90; a Founding Father of the United States], who built a printing empire in Philadelphia, “was as attuned to self-presentation as anyone in American history,” Cullen said. It was not an accident that when he was ambassador to France [1779-85], Franklin represented his country with a beaverskin cap.

He understood the story that was being constructed had to do with the promise of new frontiers. A century later, the same promise was embodied by Buffalo Bill [aka: William Cody; 1846-1917; soldier, bison hunter, and showman] and his fellow pioneers, who helped build the myth of the West and created an enduring style of their own, albeit one that borrowed heavily, and without acknowledgment, from the Indigenous cultures that were being displaced. Throughout the 1800s, that myth helped turn functionality and practicality into a virtue in dressing symbolized by the jeans [aka: “Levi’s”] invented by Levi Strauss [1829-1902; German-born American businessman; founded Levi Strauss & Co. in 1853].

That same spirit was adapted by the Gibson girls of the late 19th century, whose clothes reflected a newfound independence and love of action, captured for posterity by artist Charles Dana Gibson [1867-1944; illustrator for magazines and books], whose work gave them their name. And it was taken to an even further extreme by the flappers of the early 20th century, represented by Clara Bow [1905-65; film actress in silent films and early “talkies” (1921-33)] and Josephine Baker [1906-75; American-born French dancer, singer, actress (1921-75), and spy for the French Resistance (1940-44)], who rejected the corset with all its real and metaphorical limitations in exchange for unprecedented physical emancipation. Four decades later, the hippies would carry that torch, shrugging off fashion niceties the way they shrugged off antiquated ideas about sex and society.

[The Gibson Girl was the personification of the archetypal feminine ideal of physical attractiveness as portrayed by Gibson’s pen-and-ink illustrations that spanned the late Gilded Age [from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s] and Progressive Era in the U.S., from the 1890s to the 1920s. The character became iconic and came to embody the concept of the New Woman.

[Flappers were a subculture of young Western women prominent after the First World War (1914-18) and through the 1920s who wore knee-length skirts (then considered short), bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for prevailing codes of decent behavior. Icons of the Roaring Twenties, flappers have been seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes in public, driving automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

[Hippies (for those too young to remember the ‘60s) were followers of a youth subculture associated with the counterculture of the mid-1960s to early 1970s that began in the United States. Hippies were the generation that followed on the beatniks (fl. 1950s). The hippies of the 1960s and 1970s inherited the Beat Generation’s rejection of materialism, embrace of Eastern religions, and interest in altered states of consciousness—though they carried the Beats’ style, scale, and substance several steps further. While the black-clad beatnik was dark, cynical, and emotionless, the tie-dyed hippie was sunny, joyful, and enthusiastic.]

At the same time, the Black liberation movement [mid-1960s through the end of the 1980s] created a modern version of the militant, challenging conventional notions of what rebellion looked like. Their disciplined fashion communicated a powerful message of revolutionary intentions and solidarity.

Affluence and Aspiration

Still, the term “American dream” wasn’t officially coined until 1931, when the popular historian James Truslow Adams [1878-1949; writer and historian] wrote the best-seller “The Epic of America” [Little, Brown, and Company, 1932]. It codified the idea of the dream as “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Which later came to mean material attainment and conspicuous consumption.

“Making it was a big part of it,” said Valerie Steele [b. 1955; fashion historian, and curator], the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology [a division of the State University of New York, in Manhattan, New York City]. Or rather, being “self-made.”

The foundation was originally laid by the second and third sons of the British aristocracy who emigrated to the new colonies [from the mid-17th through the 19th centuries] to build the estates that primogeniture denied them. In the south especially, they recreated the grand homes and the elaborate fashions of England (as well as its worst caste structures). Later the trappings of immense and visible wealth became the provenance of the self-made men of the gilded age, whose fortunes ushered in the era of generational wealth and created an archetype that was, Bolton said, “exported around the world.

“Henry James [1843-1916; American-British author] wrote about it, Edith Wharton [1862-1937; writer and designer] wrote about it,” Bolton said. All that opulence in environment and fashion was preserved in oils by John Singer Sargent [1856-1925; American expatriate artist; considered the leading portrait painter of his generation] and William Merritt Chase [1849-1916; painter; known as an exponent of Impressionism]. A more exuberant counterpoint was created during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which challenged stereotypes and canonized Black style. Zoot suits, silk, satin and pearls dominated the dance floors.

[A zoot suit is a men’s fashion ensemble featuring a long, broad-shouldered jacket and high-waisted, wide-legged pants. Originating in African-American comedy shows of Black vaudeville in the 1920s, it became an iconic, rebellious cultural symbol for African-American men in the 1930s. it later became popular with Mexican, Filipino, Italian, and Japanese Americans in the 1940s, who used the dramatic, defiant style to assert their visibility and independence.]

The second gilded age arrived in the 1980s [through the 2010s], with a bigger-is-better ethos reflected in the grand talk and grander shoulders of the time, all of it memorialized in Tom Wolfe’s [1930-2018; author and journalist] “Bonfire of the Vanities” [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987] and embodied by the taffeta-clad gala-going wives of the new Wall Street robber barons.

By the late 1990s, the video maestro Hype Williams [b. 1970; music video and film director, film producer, and screenwriter] was ushering in the shiny suit era of hip-hop, followed by Jay-Z [b. 1969; rapper, businessman, and record executive] and Co., sailing into the sun on a mega-yacht in “Big Pimpin’” in 2000 [song by Jay-Z from his 1999 album Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter; released as a single]. As the millennium turned, bling and brands were remixed into cultural currency by artists like 50 Cent [b. 1975; rapper, actor, television producer, record executive, and businessman], Missy Elliott [also known as Misdemeanor; b. 1971; rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer], Biggie Smalls [also known as the Notorious B.I.G.; 1972-97; rapper and songwriter] and Lil’ Kim [sic; b. 1974; rapper, singer, songwriter, and model; referred to as the “Queen of Rap”], who built images and empires out of the totems of the one percent.

Security and Reinvention

Along with financial success came another version of the American dream, one that had less to do with bling and more to do with security. It was a sense of belonging expressed through assimilation, as well as the acquisition of actual belongings.

It was after 1945, Wilentz said, when snagging the brass ring started to resemble “owning your own home, preferably in the suburbs, having stable year-round employment and making sure your children would do better than their parents’ generation.”

In the 1950s, that fantasy took the real-life form of the man in the gray flannel suit, picket fences and poodle skirts — at least until Doris Day [1922-2019; actress and singer; known for her girl-next-door image on screen] gave way to the dependably preppy style of the Ivy League. In the early and mid-1960s, the Kennedy clan dressed up their political ambitions in the crew necks, polos and chinos of the Boston Brahmins. And the self-respect conveyed through the dignity of Sunday best became a weapon wielded by Black Americans in the fight for basic freedoms during events such as the March on Washington in 1963.

[Preppy (or preppie) is a fashion style associated with the alumni of college-preparatory (“prep”) schools in the Northeastern United States. It has its roots in, and substantially overlaps with, the “Ivy League” style of dress (see below), in a more casual, youthful interpretation of Ivy style. Preppy menswear relies on quality tailoring and natural fabrics. Key staples include Oxford cloth button-down shirts, chinos, tailored polo shirts, unlined blazers, and leather loafers or boat shoes (often without socks).

[Preppy style for women centers on timeless staples like pleated skirts, cable-knit sweaters, tailored blazers, and collared shirts, often accessorized with loafers, Mary Jane shoes, headbands, and pearl jewelry. Just as the preppy male attire was a boy’s take on the clothes of the students at Ivy League colleges, the female version was the girl’s take on the dress of students at the Seven Sisters colleges, the women’s counterpart to the Ivies.

[Ivy League style—or “Ivy”—is a timeless menswear aesthetic blending British tailoring with relaxed, sporty American collegiate wear. The style evolved on the campuses of the eight elite Eastern universities dubbed the Ivy League from the 1920s through the 1940s, and became mainstream in the 1950s. Key elements include natural-shoulder blazers, Oxford cloth button-down shirts, flat-front chinos, and leather loafers. It prioritizes casual elegance, quality fabrics (wool, tweed), and a comfortable, lived-in feel.

[Women’s Ivy League style blends tailored menswear elements with smart, collegiate basics. It relies on crisp Oxford shirts, cable-knit sweaters, and trench coats, balanced with pleated midi skirts, loafers, and a refined, earthy color palette. The women’s Ivy style developed on the campuses of the Seven Sisters about ten years after the men’s style began.

[John F. Kennedy [also known as JFK; 1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63], along with the extended Kennedy family (i.e., “the Kennedy clan”), epitomized everything preppy during its mid-20th-century heyday. JFK’s effortless blend of casual sophistication—polo shirts on the sailboat, chinos at family gatherings, and sharp suits in the Oval Office—set a benchmark for a style that feels as relevant today as it did in the 1960s.

[The Boston Brahmins are members of Boston's elite, wealthy, and educated historic upper class. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins. The term, derived from brahmin, the chief priestly caste in the Hindu caste system, refers to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) of old English and Puritan descent who built America’s closest equivalent to an aristocracy. They were known for a style of “quiet luxury” that favored conservative, high-quality attire (such as navy or charcoal suits combined with well-polished vintage leather shoes).]

Not quite two decades later, Martha Stewart [b. 1941; retail businesswoman, writer, and television personality] cooked up a new version of suburban life, repackaging her kitchen in Connecticut as a kind of apple pie paradise and herself as a domestic goddess.

The one thing all of these versions of the American dream have in common, however, is the belief in the power and right of every person to reinvention and optimization in any way available. It was the premise on which Hollywood was built, starting in the Golden Age with the soft focus, idealized and manufactured beauty of stars like as Jean Harlow [1911-37; film actress], Lena Horne [1917-2010; singer, actress, dancer, and civil rights activist] and Greta Garbo [1905-90; Swedish and American film actress], whose fame was its own kind of fortune.

Not to mention the promise inherent in the high-wattage sparkle of disco, where every song and sequin was electrified, as well as the physical perfection dangled by the aerobics age that followed, channeled most effectively by Jane Fonda [b. 1937; actress and activist] in her 1982 VHS workout tape [Jane Fonda’s Workout], which became one of the best-selling home videos of all time.

[In addition to the musical style, disco was a lifestyle and fashion movement. It was a radical, counter-cultural celebration of escapism, self-expression, and democratization that peaked in the mid-to-late 1970s. It was characterized by a sharp rejection of mid-century social conformity, the ruggedness of rock culture, and the anxieties of a turbulent economic era.

[Disco as a lifestyle was defined by a specific set of cultural shifts. It provided a deliberate sanctuary from the grueling economic recession, inflation, and political disillusionment of the 1970s. It originated as a safe haven for marginalized communities—specifically Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ individuals—before breaking into the mainstream. 

[As a cultural movement, it transformed nightlife into a theater of radical self-invention. It used fluid, high-glamour fashion and uninhibited physical movement to challenge traditional social barriers and offer a hedonistic escape from everyday reality.

[It shifted the cultural focus toward physical fitness, dance athleticism, uninhibited sexuality, and public display. It allowed working-class individuals to transform into glamorous, larger-than-life celebrities for a night just by stepping past a velvet rope.

[Disco fashion was built for performance, movement, and capturing the reflections of artificial light. It relied on lightweight, stretchy materials like Jersey knit, Lurex, and Qiana nylon that clung to the body and flowed during dance. It popularized shimmering sequins, metallic fabrics, satin, and bold jewel tones designed to gleam under flashing strobe lights. 

[It featured iconic structural elements like wide bell-bottoms, towering platform shoes, wrap dresses, and dramatically pointed collars unbuttoned to the chest. It blurred traditional style boundaries, encouraging men to wear cosmetics, silk shirts, and jewelry, while women embraced menswear-inspired tailored suits. 

Reinvention was the basis of the rejection of the old corporate uniform by the social media pioneers of Silicon Valley, who introduced the “zero dress code,” redefining office wear to suggest they were redefining industry, making it accessible to all. By the 2010s, it became the platform on which the Kardashians introduced themselves, becoming the ultimate avatars of the influencer economy in which celebrity through self-modification was an end in itself.

[“Zero dress code” serves as a general term describing workplace environments or events that enforce no restrictions on clothing. When used in a professional or event context, a "zero dress code" policy means there’s no formal mandate on what you must wear.

[In the early 1990s, employers institutionalized “Casual Fridays” on a wide scale. The actual concept of a true “zero dress code” emerged, however, in the 2000s and the 2010s alongside the dot-com boom and the rise of Silicon Valley. 

[Tech company CEO’s popularized the idea that success doesn’t require being buttoned up. Wearing t-shirts, hoodies, and flip-flops became a badge of innovation. Traditional institutions were eventually forced to match tech culture to retain talent.

[The ultimate transition into “zero dress code” policies solidified during the shift to remote and hybrid work in the 2020s. As professional meetings moved onto video screens, the standard for corporate clothing became highly contextual. 

[This move was reinforced and accelerated by the COVID pandemic practices, when many people worked from home and conferred over Zoom. Modern companies frequently replaced complex rules with a single, simplified mandate: “Dress for your day.” This relies on employee maturity to choose comfort for internal work and dress up only when facing clients.

[The Kardashian family, also referred to as the Kardashian-Jenner family, is prominent in the fields of entertainment, reality television, fashion design, and business. Through different ventures, several members of the family are reported to have assets of over $1 billion. From October 2007 through June 2021, they appeared together on the highly popular, albeit controversial, reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The show’s 14-year run gave and maintained media exposure to each member of the family, allowing them to start and build their individual careers in multiple businesses. (The family has been criticized as being “famous for being famous.”)]

In many ways, Trump’s version of the American dream is simply a throwback to the set dressing and costumes of the former gilded ages, viewed through the lens of televised materialism.

But even as it may seem increasingly stale and commodified, kitschy and tainted, the American Dream continues to endure — rewritten, revived, and reinterpreted by the figures shaping our lives and imaginations.

Because ultimately the look of the American dream is no more static than the dream itself. As Cullen said, it is “most authentically experienced as a struggle to achieve, not a destination.” And it is worn that way, too.

[Vanessa Friedman has been chronicling the relationship of clothing to identity, power, and politics for the New York Times since 2014.  She focuses on fashion as an expression of political, social, and cultural identity at a specific moment in time, especially how it is used by those in the public eye to communicate values and influence opinion.  

[She looks at how designers translate that into products for all of us on the runway, as well as the evolution of fashion into a part of pop culture.  She also examine the way all of that influences the larger business of fashion, one of the world’s biggest industries.

[Prior to joining the Times, Friedman spent 11 years at the Financial Times, five of them in London.  She was the FT’s first fashion editor, and the FT was my first all-fashion job.

[Before that, Friedman focused on culture coverage at magazines such as InStyle, The Economist, and The New Yorker.  She’s won the Fashion Group International’s Media Award, the Front Page award for fashion writing, and the Fashion/Beauty Monitor award for fashion journalist of the year.

[For “250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream,” she spoke with historians and museum curators about the patterns they saw in its seams.]

The Looting of Cambodia, Part 2

 

[This is the second part of the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun on 28 June 2026.  As readers of Rick On Theater know, I have a strong interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular.

[Other ROT posts on that subject include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); ”Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).] 

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
(continued)
by Anderson Cooper

[Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT, with Part 1 posted on Wednesday. 8 July.  As always, I recommend that ROTters go back and read the beginning of the transcript before turning to Part 2, below.  (There’s a brief précis of Cambodian history in the afterword to Part 1.)]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

It’s taken a team of Cambodian investigators led by Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, more than 10 years to document the theft of thousands of ancient statues and relics by a British collector named Douglas Latchford. As we reported in 2023, they’ve managed to get some of what he stole back, but many of Cambodia’s greatest treasures are still out there, hidden away in the mansions of millionaires and billionaires, and hiding in plain sight, on display in some of the most prestigious museums around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing [the South and Southeast Asian Art collection, housed in the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing] . . . are stolen. Like this one. And this one . . . This as well – all passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford. 

Latchford sold this one to the Met in the early 1990s . . . This one he donated. 

Anderson Cooper: Do you think people visiting the Met, know that these were looted? 

Brad Gordon: I think most people walk through the Met, they have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what– what the history is behind those pieces. They don’t know– the temples they came from. They don’t know the people who were killed to get them here.

Anderson Cooper: The dirt has been brushed off. There’s a little note that says where it came from. Should people believe what’s on that little note?

Brad Gordon: No. Absolutely not.

In 2023, we went with Brad Gordon to see where in Cambodia the Met and other museums’ collections really did come from. 

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible.

This seven-story pyramid is more than 1,000 years old . . . and rises out of the jungle in Koh Ker in northeast Cambodia . . . It’s one of dozens of temples in what was once the capital [928-944 CE] of an ancient Khmer empire.

Anderson Cooper: –looters have been all over this site for– for decades.

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

Anderson Cooper: Douglas Latchford loved the statuary . . .

Brad Gordon: In love with the beauty, in love with the artistic–

Anderson Cooper: The statues from here are–

Anderson Cooper: –have a distinctive style that he particularly loved?

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

And perhaps the most famous statues in that distinctive style that Latchford stole from Koh Ker were nine stone warriors once arranged together in a battle scene [10th century; stolen from the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker]. When we were there, seven had been returned to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, including this 500-pound sandstone sculpture — it’s the one Sotheby’s tried to sell in 2011. They’re back on their original pedestals, their ankles reunited with their feet, hacked off by looters.

Anderson Cooper: This was at Sotheby’s. This is at Christie’s.

Hab Touch: Norton Simon’s.

Anderson Cooper: Norton Simon Museum [Pasadena, California]–

Hab Touch [b. 1965] is the secretary of state in Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture [2019-present]. He is working with Brad Gordon to bring back the two Koh Ker statues who’s empty pedestals sit in the museum.

Anderson Cooper: So do you know what are supposed to be on–

Anderson Cooper: You know what are supposed to be here, and you know what’s–

Hab Touch: We know–

Anderson Cooper: –supposed to be here?

Hab Touch: Among nine sculpture, we have seven already. Only two missing.

One of those missing sculptures was discovered in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in 2008 . . . this mythical army commander and a stunning number of other stolen works . . . were all together in the Palm Beach mansion of the late billionaire George Lindemann [1936-2018; businessman; CEO of a fossil fuel infrastructure and pipeline company] and his wife Frayda [b. 1939]. 

[The referenced article and photo spread was “Striking a New Note in Palm Beach” by Judith Thurman in the January 2008 issue of AD. (nb: The link to the slide show that includes the Cambodian statues seems to be broken. Some views are shown on the 60 Minutes video. If a reader is a subscriber to AD, or wishes to become one, back articles are available on the magazine’s website.) There are two later articles that comment/report on this one: Spencer Woodman, Malia Politzer, Peter Whoriskey and Nicole Sadek, “Hidden Treasures: Magazine spread of ‘most beautiful house in America’ conceals allegedly stolen Cambodian relics,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (website) 15 Aug. 2022,  <https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/lindemann-cambodia-relics-altered-photo-magazine/>, 12 July 2026, and Sarah Cascone, “An ‘Architectural Digest’ Spread About Two Art Collectors Was Photoshopped to Obscure Potentially Looted Cambodian Statues in Their Home,” artnet 16 Aug. 2022, <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/looted-cambodian-art-architectural-digest-2160490>, 12 July 2026.]

Anderson Cooper: The ancient treasures of Cambodia were sitting in the living room of an incredibly wealthy family in America, in Florida, on display, while people were having cocktails and–

Brad Gordon: The one thing that I’m always struck by is how many people witnessed it and have been silent and continue to be silent today.

The Lindemann’s spent an estimated $20 million building the collection with the help of Douglas Latchford . . . Frayda Lindemann didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

But in Koh Ker . . . we showed her home to two former looters.

Anderson Cooper: What do you think of this house?

It’s a beautiful house, he said, it looks like it belongs to a king.

The former looters pointed out another statue in the Lindemann’s living room they said they helped steal . . . this reclining figure of the Hindu God Vishnu. They said it was dug out of the ground from this exact spot in late 1995.

Anderson Cooper: You’re 100% sure this was taken from here by you and others in 1995?

Lida (translated): Yeah, I’m sure. 

They also identified a number of other statues they say they stole that appear in books published by Douglas Latchford. They say they found this copper statue using a metal detector.

Anderson Cooper: This is Bodhisattva at Ease [late 10th century to the early 11th century; looted from the Koh Ker temple complex]? 

[In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who has attained, or is striving towards, bodhi (meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’) or Buddhahood. In this sculpture, the word refers to a class of powerful, semi-divine savior deities (here, specifically, Avalokiteshvara, a celestial being of infinite compassion and mercy) who forgo or delay personal liberation (nirvana) or bodhi in order to help other individuals reach Buddhahood.]

Brad Gordon: Yeah. 

They dug it out of the ground here in 1990. J.P. Labbat, former special agent with Homeland Security, found photos of the statue covered in dirt on Douglas Latchford’s computer. Latchford sold it to the Met in 1992. When we visited, it was still on display.

Anderson Cooper: You were able to get access to some of Latchford’s– emails?

J.P. Labatt: Yes. And in there– there are d– detailed– stories about the manner in which he obtained pieces, the fact that he was having them reassembled– and repaired, that dirt and– and crustaceans were being– cleaned off of them.

Anderson Cooper: They were freshly dug out of the ground?

J.P. Labatt: Fresh. The– these were fresh pieces that he would describe in his emails that needed a level of restoration before he could even attempt to sell them. 

Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019 but died [of complications of Parkinson’s disease in Bangkok at 89] before he could be put on trial. Federal prosecutors in New York however continued tracing his looted artifacts . . . they believe at least 18 of them have landed up at the Met.

Andrea Bayer: I am very involved in our work on provenance.

Andrea Bayer [b. 1957] is deputy director for Collections and Administration at The Met.

Anderson Cooper: The Met has said that they will return objects based upon rigorous evidentiary review. What rigorous evidentiary review was done before acquiring these pieces?

Andrea Bayer: Not enough.

Anderson Cooper: It seems like the Met had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection. And nobody was really asking questions where it came from.

Andrea Bayer: For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way.

Under pressure 13 years ago, the Met did return two statues called Kneeling Attendants [10th century; stolen from Koh Ker during the civil war of the 1970s], which had been donated to them by Douglas Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: In 2013, when you returned the kneeling attendants, did you investigate the other items that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I don’t know the answer to that question. I can only pick up the story several years later, when Doug– Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019, when we immediately and proactively went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered our full cooperation.

Anderson Cooper: Well, I can pick up the story actually in 2013, because a spokesman for the Met, said that “No special effort was gonna be made to check the provenances of any other Douglas Latchford donated work.” Why wouldn’t the Met want to look into everything else that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I can’t speculate about why that didn’t happen.

Anderson Cooper: But no one investigated all the other items that Douglas Latchford gave?

Andrea Bayer: Not to my knowledge.

The Met is not the only major museum with looted Cambodian artifacts, but its collection is one of the largest in the world. In 2023, the museum announced it would create a research team to examine the provenance or acquisition history of all its collections. 

Anderson Cooper: It’s taken 10 years since Douglas Latchford was shown to have given stolen property to the Met, for the Met to set up this provenance team. Why has it taken 10 years?

Andrea Bayer: It was a slow process, I’ll grant you that. It was a slow process, but– I think that the fact that we are– fully engaged now, fully cooperative now is– is our only answer to this really. it’s a moment of reckoning, and we’re ready to do what it takes now– to right whatever the wrong is. 

Anderson Cooper: Four years ago, when Douglas Latchford was indicted by prosecutors, did you set up a team to check the provenance of every Latchford work–

Andrea Bayer: Yes. We started, absolutely we started to dig in right then and there. It’s not easy. I mean the fact that we don’t have much information has to do with the fact that it’s very hard to find the information–

Anderson Cooper: But there’s enough information for federal prosecutors- to charge Douglas Latchford with stealing and looting and trafficking in smuggled items. How much more evidence do you need? You haven’t–

Andrea Bayer: We need–

Anderson Cooper: –returned any of the– any Douglas Latchford-related items since he’s been indicted, and that was four years ago.

Andrea Bayer: But we are on the verge of– of– of returning a number of them.

Anderson Cooper: All of them?

Andrea Bayer: That I can’t say.

Four months after that interview, just two days before we went to air in 2023, prosecutors announced the Met would return 13 antiquities that came through Douglas Latchford.

But the Met has not returned this statue, which was specifically cited in the indictment of Latchford, or this one, which Latchford sold to the Met in 1992.

Cambodia’s Culture Minister called the Met’s announcement a “first step” and says she looks “forward to the return of many more of our treasures.”

Anderson Cooper: Shouldn’t museums have thought twice about buying things that were coming out of Cambodia in– during the genocide and civil war and decades of strife?

J.P. Labatt: And this question that you raise is really– the– the crux of– of what we’re wrestling with. 

J.P. Labatt: You– acquired pieces from a known smuggler who– used a team of looters that the government has interviewed and taken statements from. They have emails which refute the information in your own provenance at the museum. You have items in the museum which were named in the indictment of Latchford that are still there. And so these pieces should go back.

Anderson Cooper: There’s no question.

J.P. Labatt: It’s the right thing to do.

In 2023, the Lindemann family, whose collection was showcased in Architectural Digest, struck a deal with federal authorities . . . voluntarily agreeing to return 33 stolen treasures. In a statement to the New York Times [Tom Mashberg, “Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia,” 12 Sept. 2023 (online only)], the Lindemann’s said: “Having purchased these items from dealers that we assumed were reputable, we were saddened to learn how they made their way to the market in the United States.”

Anderson Cooper: Why did the Lindemanns agree to return their collection to Cambodia?

J.P. Labatt: The pieces were dirty. I– I think they finally came around to the– the fact that– Latchford was dirty, their collection was– was all looted pieces. It was obvious. And– and so they– they– decided to surrender them.

We got a peek at what was the Lindemann collection shortly after the deal was done. It was sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York. A nation’s living gods and ancestors waiting for a ride home.

Brad Gordon: This is like a whole wing of a museum.

A wing of a museum that only the Lindemann’s and their friends had access to. 

Anderson Cooper: If the Lindemann’s hadn’t published these in Architectural Digest back in 2008?

Brad Gordon: I think there’s a good chance we maybe never would have found it. 

Brad Gordon: We always say, the gods want to come home. We feel like the gods have spoken today. They want to come home.

As one of the biggest crates was being opened . . . waiting eagerly was Muikong Taing and Thyda Long . . . two members of Brad Gordon’s investigative team. This would be their first look at the mythical army commander taken from Koh Ker . . . they were likely the first Cambodians to set eyes on it since Douglas Latchford stole it more than 50 years ago.

Thyda Long: He’s here.

Anderson Cooper: There’s a look in his eyes and on his face.

Thyda Long: It’s much bigger than I expected it to be.

Anderson Cooper: His presence is extraordinary.

Thyda Long: I did not expect to feel this way. 

Even the commander seemed to be smiling. 

Then it was time to see the rarest piece in the Lindemann’s collection. The Cambodian team knelt in reverence as the Hindu god Vishnu [10th century; looted from the Prasat Krachap temple in Koh Ker] was uncrated. Despite all the fuss, he appeared unperturbed . . . reclining in a cosmic slumber. When this statue arrived in Cambodia, it was welcomed as one of the most important ever returned.

Earlier this month, the Met returned two more artifacts to Cambodia following a seizure by the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The Cambodian government is still demanding the repatriation of 30 others in the Met’s possession.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[With respect to restoration of the ancient artifacts in the Cambodian temples about which Anderson Cooper reports above, looting, aside from its desecration, is an act of vandalism—the willful and malicious damaging of the sculptures. 

[In my coverage of art conservation and preservation on ROT, there are other forms of damage and potential damage against which art conservators and restorers must struggle.  I want to offer a look at another kind of conservation and restoration with which I had personal experience.

[Back in 2007, there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on the conservation and preservation of experimental and innovative art that doesn’t age well or lend itself easily to cleaning.  

[As artists were experimenting with new media and techniques, they never considered how those elements would change over time.  This created sometimes immense challenges for museums and conservators, as well as private owners with fewer resources, long after the artists had probably died. 

[Some years earlier, in 1985, the Hirshhorn had mounted another exhibit in which works modern artists from the museum’s own collection that had undergone conservation treatment were shown.  The conserved pieces were accompanied by photographs depicting what they’d looked like before the treatment.  

[A later Hirshhorn display, in 2003-2004, was “intended to address the interaction of principle, practice, materials, techniques and ideas, which characterizes the preservation and care of contemporary and modern art.”

[I had a serious problem of this nature with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of this issue.  

[The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, a 14th-birthday gift for me from my parents, is one of the most cherished pieces I have and, except when I went to college and the army, I took it with me every time I moved. 

[In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  

[As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  

[I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now just The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building, the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

[At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, so I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did.  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s 1960 purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration.  To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.]