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16 A HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
powerful factor in ameliorating the clerical attitude. Even rigid Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians approved of its' propaganda against slavery and permitted themselves to enjoy the emotions aroused by half a hundred "Uncle Tom" troupes that played in halls and tents for forty years after slavery was abolished.
Through the gap made by "Uncle Tom" came "Ten Nights in a Bar Room," a temperance play, "Only a Farmer's Daughter," "Davy Crockett," Denman Thompson's "Old Homestead," James Heme's "Sag Harbor," "Uncle Josh Spruceby" and other plays "teaching wholesome lessons." "Ben Hur," accepted and endorsed as a religious play, was a reliable success for several decades, but owing to* the tread-mill machinery needed in the chariot race, "Ben Hur's" activities never got beyond theaters in larger cities.
Little by little the church restrictions were relaxed — not formally by the authorities, but informally by the members — so that in the nineties of the last century multitudes of Americans were restlessly searching for entertainment. They knew they wanted something; they did not know what that thing was; they merely knew it must be enjoyable — and its price must be low. They had welcomed the phono and kineto-parlors and arcades, and the comparatively scarce dime museums, as places of amusement within reach of their pocket books; and when living pictures reached these "cheap showshops," the masses soon overcame their suspicion of dark rooms and their skepticism of showmen's trickery, and flooded the ticket-sellers with their dimes and nickels.
To the great, non-theater-going public, life-size living pictures were not merely a novelty — they were a marvel that held in the background an elusive promise of something vague, indefinite, but full of encouraging possibilities. Vaudeville patrons enjoyed the newness of the first screen pictures, and enthusiastically welcomed succeeding unique film items such as the railroad train coming full speed into their eyes, or exceptionally interesting prize-fight or dancing pictures; but the customers of the arcades,