Controlling Crowds: On the Technological Management of Entertainment Audiences

The rise of large cultural performance venues in early 1900s America presented a problem: how to harness the energy and profit potential of the crowd without risking the political and property damage that large masses threatened? The solution lay in crowd control technologies, including turnstiles, stanchions, and seats. Manufacturers framed these products in terms of their ability to generate calm audiences by channeling bodies through venue spaces and seating them in neat rows. Designers and operators of theaters, music halls, and stadiums with crowd control equipment often used the same language of calmness and orderliness. Historicizing existing social science scholarship with trade literature and technical books, this article shows how large performance facilities used technological means to convert mass crowds into audiences, accommodating expanding urban populations and reinforcing the racial order of early twentieth-century America.