GILDED AGE LEISURE AND RECREATION

During the Gilded Age, Victorian values clashed with a brash new order of commercial entertainment and leisure venues. "Daring" stage entertainments and their denunciation became common features of the social landscape, as commercialism liberalized social codes. Changes in leisure and recreation from 1865 to 1890 reflected the era's rapid transformations, which stemmed from improvements in rail and communication networks and innovations in printing, manufacture, and marketing. The new amusements also reflected the age's disparities in wealth, as well as the corruption and social injustices that prompted Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to nickname the era "The Gilded Age." The period's amusements and leisure patterns also reflected a cultural shift, as the working class, the emerging middle class, and elites of the Gilded Age found new ways, at home and in public, to pursue happiness in a world increasingly brave and new.

Gilded Parlors

The Gilded Age's industrial abundance prompted the commercialization of parlor culture. To house an emerging middle class, in the late nineteenth century the first suburbs developed in Brooklyn and in similar neighborhoods outside Philadelphia and Boston. In these new bedroom communities the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity reblossomed. This ideology dictated that the father would enter the perilous public sphere to earn a living, while the mother would stay at home to provide her family with moral nurture. The parlor, at the center of the middle-class woman's sphere, was the family's moral refuge. To furnish the parlor to an appropriate standard of comfort and status, the family of the period could turn to the era's new chain stores, department stores, and catalog houses.

Numerous department stores appeared in this period—for example, Macy's in 1860 and Bloomingdale's in 1872 (the same year that the Montgomery Ward mail-order business began). As historian William Leach argued in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, the Gilded Age department store was an incubator of consumer culture. Its luxurious architecture, opulent displays and trimmings, pageants and concerts, and offers of free delivery and lax return policies weaned the public from the Protestant values of thriftiness and austerity and nurtured a new desire for exotic luxuries. The department store also provided a respectable public space to which women could safely venture.

Such shopping venues and the social values they encouraged opened the middle-class parlor to a flood of gadgets, toys, and new media. From stores or catalogs parents could purchase magic lanterns along with prepared slides of microscopic organisms or exotic landscapes. Apparatus for viewing stereographic slides also were common in parlors. Families would purchase sets of such three-dimensional slides to gaze at natural vistas, foreign cities, and photographs of recent or past news events; for example, in the 1880s, the firm of Taylor and Huntington began to market slides of Matthew Brady's Civil War battlefield photographs.

Following the assumptions of the cult of domesticity, gender roles were inscribed into the playthings in the homes of the wealthy and middling class. Soldiers, miniature printing presses, storefronts, and steam engines were appropriate for boys, while dolls, dollhouses, and their furnishings were standard for girls. In Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, Miriam Formanek-Brunell described the "doll culture" that introduced consumerist desires into girls in this era. Prior to the 1880s, girls would be expected to sew costumes for dolls and so employ their domestic skills. By the 1880s, ready-made doll costumes became standard; these might include mourning clothes so that girls could stage doll funerals, or visiting cards, so that girls could more realistically stage tea parties and social events. By the 1890s, memoirs such as Dolly's Experience: Told by Herself as well as magazines such as the Doll's Dressmaker further reinforced girls' interest in domesticity and consumption.

Reading and Urbanization

The Gilded Age, with its compulsory education laws and high literacy rates—in 1870 about 88 percent for white Americans and 20 percent for black Americans—saw a large growth in available reading for all, whether women's parlor magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, genteel magazines for men and women such as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's, or dime novels by authors such as Ned Buntline, available at train station kiosks for working-class readers.

The most common of publications, and one of the binding forces of the new urban landscape, was the newspaper. From 1870 to 1900, 1,500 new daily newspapers appeared in America. Enormous increases in urban populations in the late nineteenth century encouraged foreign-language newspapers in Yiddish and German as well as the return of a more populist style of news reporting. Charles A. Dana, publisher of the New York Sun, which had a circulation of 130,000 in 1876, wrote that his newspaper would offer "a daily photograph of the whole world's doings in the most luminous and lively manner." While Dana's reference to photography followed the era's high regard for "realism" and quasi-scientific approach to all endeavors, the "lively manner" of the Sun also pointed to the fact that its publisher was not above offering sentiment and color in reporting.

More clearly at the center of the era's New Journalism, which mixed activism with sentiment, was Joseph Pulitzer, who reigned first at the St. Louis Post and Dispatch and later at the New York World. While at the Dispatch, Pulitzer announced that his paper "will serve no party but the people . . . will oppose all frauds and shams wherever and whatever they are." In both of his newspapers, Pulitzer mixed sensational stories and gossip with reform crusades and investigations of political corruption. Appealing to New York's large immigrant population, the World pushed for tenement and sweatshop reforms, relying on emotionally charged headlines such as "How Babies Are Baked" to report on deaths in tenements after a heat wave in the summer of 1883.

The new formula for journalism also transformed reporters into celebrities. Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, one of the era's best-known reporters, developed a style that mixed crusading with sensationalism. At the Pittsburgh Dispatch and later at Pulitzer's World, Bly cultivated an undercover reporting style to show, for example, what it was like to be committed to one of the era's insane asylums in "Ten Days in a Madhouse" (1888), or to observe child labor in factories and housing conditions for the poor. In another "undercover" effort, she encouraged the attention of mashers in order to skewer them in print. Bly's greatest fame came, however, when she traveled around the world for the New York World in less than Jules Verne's prescribed eighty days. Reflecting the era's high commercial style, Bly began to be marketed as a character in Victorian trade card sets, in a board game that the World developed, and in a popular song "Globe Trotting Nellie Bly."

Working-Class Heroes

While newspapers offered a daily photograph of the whole world's doings, other media catered to the public's taste for escape. A fascination with past "golden ages" and the authority that these ages implied led, for example, to the elitist Gothic revival style in architecture and to the immense popularity of the novel Ben Hur (1880), set in ancient days and bearing Christian values; meanwhile, dime novels, the most abundant form of literature in the late nineteenth century, offered working-class and immigrant men and women tales of rugged individualism and survival. Wilderness tales for urban readers could feature pirates, soldiers, outlaws, Indian fighters, frontiersmen, and gunfighters, as well as rough-and-tumble women dressed as men who took their place among the adventurers. In contrast, dime novels with urban settings often set their heroes in the midst of the harsh urban environment and the labor difficulties of this period.

The dime novel's origins were in the numerous antebellum story papers, which sold for 20 cents a copy, had circulations as high as 100,000, and offered serialized adventure stories. Beginning in the 1860s, dime-novel publishers such as Street and Smith and Beadle and Adams applied a factory system to the story paper formula to create entire novels for 10 cents. These publishers often farmed out plot sketches and characters to authors, the more adept of whom could write two 40,000-word stories a week; the resulting dime novels were then distributed to newsstands in first runs of about 50,000 copies.

Publishers such as Beadle and Adams also enforced moral standards and insisted authors not offend "good taste." Nevertheless, predictably, the sensationalism in dime novels drew the ire of reformers. Anthony Comstock, with the support of Protestant elites, targeted dime novels along with pornography in his 1873 Committee for Suppression of Vice in New York, which lobbied successfully to make mailing pornography illegal. While the dime novels were often violent, nationalistic, and racist, those with urban settings made heroes of the workingman and reflected a moral outlook. Horatio Alger's often-derided "rags-to-riches" stories exposed some of the harsh realities of New York City street life while extolling the importance of a moral outlook and wise economic practices for youths to survive the streets. Historian Michael Denning, in Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, described the many dime novels featuring a worker or "mechanic" that added a more pronounced socialist subtext to the Horatio Alger success formula and stressed the dignity of labor in an era when workers were often regarded as disposable goods.

Leg Shows and Burlesque

The reform-minded members of society viewed Gilded Age theater in much the same way that Anthony Comstock viewed the dime novel. While stages retained the earlier nineteenth-century mix of Shakespeare productions, minstrel shows, and countless versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Gilded Age added "leg shows," variety theater, spectacular restagings of events such as the destruction of Pompeii, and extravaganzas such as circuses and Wild West shows. Historian Lawrence Levine, in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, established that, as these popular venues developed, elite audiences began to sacralize art forms such as opera, ballet, orchestral music, and Shakespeare dramas to create elite performance halls removed from rowdy venues.

The liberalized social codes that later would appear in everyday life surfaced early on in theater. In 1866, The Black Crook, the first modern musical, played at Niblo's Theater in Manhattan. It was notorious for including a chorus line of female dancers, in this case, a group of stranded French ballet dancers. Two year later, in 1868, Lydia Thompson and Her British Blondes, a female troupe, came to the United States and mounted a comic version of a Greek tragedy, playing both men's and women's roles, broadly caricaturizing both sexes. Their comedy also featured skimpy costumes.

As early as 1869, a suffragette decried this trend. In "About Nudity in the Theaters" Olive Logan complained of the era's numerous "leg shows" that showcased attractive but generally untalented woman. Logan insisted that for a young woman to pass an audition in 1869, she need only to have her hair dyed yellow; a body symmetrically formed; a willingness to bare her legs; and an ability to sing brassy songs, dance the can-can, wink at men, and attract wealthy admirers.

Robert C. Allen, in Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, depicted burlesque performers in these first shows as feisty women contesting the gender assumptions of the era. Allen further argued that this early burlesque later declined into the "kootch" dances of the 1890s and the striptease born in 1917 at Minsky Brothers'. While some of the performers who suffragette Logan described may have been "feisty" women braving the public sphere, her critique establishes that sexuality as a selling point entered American popular culture early on and that the kootch dancer of the 1890s had her precursor in the can-can dancer of the 1860s.

Identity Theft and Minstrelsy

While burlesque troupes such as Lydia Thomson and her British Blondes explored gender roles on stage, minstrelsy, the most popular theatrical form in mid-nineteenth-century America, parodied racial identities. The minstrel show involved white performers, generally from working-class immigrant backgrounds, who "blacked up" by smearing burnt cork on their faces. Playbills often included illustrations of the troupe both in respectable poses as "white" men and in their outrageous costumes and makeup as "black" minstrels. As in any carnival setting, the donning of a mask gave the performer license to perform in an uninhibited manner. A performance would include songs and ballads, dances, skits, burlesque operas, parodies of popular plays, and comic speeches, relying on dialect and gestures meant to reflect African American folkways. In the process the minstrel performers created and promulgated stereotypes of African Americans as childlike and nonthreatening plantation hands or as egotistical urban dandies.

The racism in such shows was uncloaked. In 1848, when the minstrel show was at the height of its popularity, Frederick Douglass, in the antislavery weekly North-star, denounced minstrel performers as "the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens." Later scholars such as Robert C. Toll in Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America and Eric Lott in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class argued that, while the minstrel show abetted derisive stereotypes, it also provided some interchange between African American and white American cultural forms and created a transgressive space in which to explore class and racial politics.

Rise of Vaudeville

By the 1870s, with the end of Reconstruction, variety theater and its grab-bag approach to entertainment became a greater draw than minstrelsy. Early variety had taken place in the lowbrow concert saloon, where drunken male audiences mixed with prostitutes while acrobats, jugglers, singers, and dancing girls performed. By the late nineteenth century, the concert saloon tradition had blended with burlesque to offer kootch dancers and off-color comedy to male audiences, while a cleaned-up variety theater became codified on vaudeville circuits.

Tony Pastor is generally credited for pioneering the "wholesome" approach to variety. In the string of theaters he owned around New York City, he prohibited alcohol and banned low humor. Following Pastor's lead, beginning in the 1880s, vaudeville theater operators B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albee created an East Coast vaudeville empire, while Martin Beck developed the Orpheum Circuit in the West. Their central offices arranged booking and pay scales for the entire circuit. The theaters were often grandiose in décor. Along with the elegant settings, and the banning of alcohol and low humor, vaudeville circuit bookers attempted to domesticate a diverse audience by varying the ten acts of a typical bill to include spectacles, comedy, and such highbrow acts as snippets of Shakespeare's plays, or renditions of opera or classical music. By developing a standardized and sanitized entertainment formula, vaudeville paved the way for the mass entertainment later offered by Hollywood.

Entertainment as Medicine

Humbler in scope than rivals such as vaudeville and circus, the Gilded Age's medicine shows were early "infomercials" that intermixed free variety entertainments with product sales pitches. Prior to the Civil War, patent medicine peddling had been a booming business—many "penny-press" newspapers relied heavily on advertisements for wonder medicines such as Dr. Wheeler's Balsam, Parr's Life Pills, or Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. By the 1850s, over 1,500 patent medicines were marketed in America, with larger companies spending as much as $100,000 a year in advertising.

In the 1870s, patent medicine firms begin to send medicine shows on tours that might include as many as fifty performers. The medicine show functioned as a small-scale circus traveling to those towns that circuses would ignore, offering parades and several days of free performances. Bills changed nightly during visits, and might offer exhibitions of trick shooting, minstrelsy, banjo, songs, hypnotism, dances, Punch and Judy shows, menageries, and countless pitches for Hamlin Company's "Wizard Oil" or the many compounds of the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company of New Haven.

Jumbo Tent Shows

If the medicine show sprang forth from the medium of print advertising, the American circus was nurtured by railroads, both as the preferred transportation method and as the medium that created many of the new towns the circus would visit. Prior to the Civil War, the expenses and difficulties of rail travel meant that wagon-drawn shows could mount larger productions at lower costs. After the Civil War the development of a standard-gauge rail network shifted the balance.

Showman P. T. Barnum, whose American Museum in New York City closed after repeated fires in the 1860s, soon turned to the commercial possibilities of the circus. Rather than rent cars owned by railroads, in 1872 the circus of Barnum, Coup and Castello bought and built their own train cars to carry performers, workers, circus animals, and equipment. Their circus, larger than that of any rival wagon show, was a financial success in its first year. Barnum, who had presented "human oddities" at his American Museum for decades, also made the "freak show" or sideshow a common element of the circus.

Barnum's growing circus reflected the economic trends of the late nineteenth century; while companies grew and devoured competitors, and a gluttonous financier like Diamond Jim Brady became a folk hero, Barnum and his partners expanded the circus to two rings with simultaneous attractions. Barnum's later partnership with James Bailey led to ballyhoo about their elephant "Jumbo" and the creation of the three-ring circus in 1881, a distinctly American cultural form that guaranteed frenzy and spectacle. In 1902, William Dean Howells complained of circus performances that "glutted rather than fed."

The Scout of the Plains

Developing alongside the American circus, the Wild West show offered a portable nationalistic spectacle rooted in the West of dime novels. Author Ned Buntline had made Buffalo Bill Cody, a former Pony Express rider, buffalo hunter, and Army scout, the hero of many dime novels. In 1872, Cody debuted on the stage in a production of Buntline's "Scout of the Plains." Cody, who published dime novels about his own exploits as well as an autobiography in 1879, in 1883 organized "Buffalo Bill's Wild West," bringing the dime novel to life as a theatrical extravaganza.

The show offered a heroic version of the conquest of the American West that ignored economics and focused on the bravery and tribulations of white frontiersmen and the treachery and nobility of savage Indians. The troupe's 1887 European tour was a crowd pleaser that included sharpshooter Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, and numerous other Native American performers. Buffalo Bill's Wild West featured reenactments of Indian raids, prairie fires, cyclones, military drills, and bison hunts. Cody's success spurred several rival shows, including "Pawnee Bill's Historic Wild West," which opened in 1888. Although Cody continued to appear with his troupe, the close logistical and theatrical ties between the circus and Wild West surfaced in 1894, when circus magnate James Bailey purchased and took over management of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.

Elite Sports

Alongside the circus and Wild West show, the Gilded Age saw the transformation into mass spectacles of many participatory sports first nurtured in elite settings. In this era, social elites took to tennis, rowing, yachting, golf, football, and horse racing. Football began in this period as an offshoot of rugby played at eastern colleges. Largely through the guidance of Yale coach Walter Camp, it developed into the modern game. Historian Michael Oriard, in Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, argued that football grew in popularity because, unlike the meandering "plotless" format of a soccer or rugby match with its nonstop flow, football as Camp fashioned it lent itself to dramatic narrative form—newspaper reporters responded and their coverage engendered mass interest.

Horse racing, too, became a large spectator sport via elite sponsorship in the Gilded Age. Retired Tammany Hall politician and boxing champion John Morrisey opened a racetrack in 1863 at Saratoga Springs, a health spa and resort for the wealthy in upstate New York. Morrisey persuaded wealthy partners to join him in the venture, and they created an extensive August racing season, replacing the one- or two-day races common elsewhere. By 1875, the Kentucky Derby, at Churchill Down, in Louisville, Kentucky, joined the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Park, in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Belmont Stakes held at Jerome Park in Westchester County, New York, to create American racing's Triple Crown. By 1890, over 300 tracks were operating across the country.

The National Pastime

In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the nineteenth-century innovations that mechanic Hank Morgan brings to early England include electricity, the stock market, and a lineup for two baseball teams of knights dubbed the "Bessemers" and the "Ulsters." By the time Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee, baseball was already the nation's premier spectator sport. It emerged from variations on the English games of cricket and rounders in the 1840s, when a group of clerks, storekeepers, and professionals formed the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club and developed some of the modern game's rules. By the 1850s, as America edged toward a sectional conflict, enthusiasts were promoting baseball as the American "national pastime," seeing it as a medium for creating unity. The dime-novel publishing house of Irwin P. Beadle offered the game's first guidebook, Beadle's Dime Baseball Player, in 1860, offering "elementary instructions of this American game of ball," along with rules, regulations, names of teams, and essays arguing the game's physical and moral benefits. Civil War soldiers, who learned to play baseball in pickup games, further disseminated the game after the war's conclusion. Numerous amateur teams and leagues developed; entrepreneurs who built stadiums and charged admission and salaried players soon followed.

All-professional teams became common in the 1870s, and, by 1875, the Boston Red Stockings drew 70,000 fans to their stadium. The following year, the new owner-controlled National League of Professional Baseball Clubs barred liquor sales, gamblers, and Sunday games; the season after that, professional baseball had its first large gambling scandal when four members of the Louisville Grays, charged with throwing games during the last weeks of the pennant race, were banned from life from the National League.

By the mid-1880s interleague play began between the National League and the American Association, a new rival that had permitted liquor sales at stadiums as well as Sunday games. In the 1889 season, 2 million fans attended major league play. With a solid tradition of gambling scandals, drunken fans, carousing players, and guidebooks and magazines that encouraged the statistical analysis of teams and players, baseball was well enshrined as the first major spectator sport in late nineteenth-century America.

Protestant Entertainment

Debates about the morality of working-class sports venues such as bare-knuckle boxing, as well as efforts to ban liquor and Sunday games in baseball, suggest how entertainment mirrored the tensions then common between America's elites and the working class; these tensions had erupted into violence during the widespread railroad strikes of 1877, as well as at the Haymarket Riot of 1884 and the subsequent trial that led to the hangings of four of Chicago's labor leaders. Throughout this period, social elites searched for methods to impose order and unity on civic society and on entertainment and leisure venues as well. The emergence of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Dwight Moody's revivals, and the creation of the Chautauqua Institute all point to the Protestant elite's efforts to find substitutes for liberalized secular culture. These movements also reveal a Protestant leadership willing to accept and appropriate some of the terms of the new commercial venues.

In 1873, Dwight Moody, formerly a successful shoe salesman, leader of a popular Sunday School in Chicago, and president of Chicago's YMCA, teamed up with gospel singer Ira Sankey and began a series of urban revivals that attracted huge audiences. During an early tour in England, he drew crowds of 20,000 or more. His subsequent revivals in the United States also drew crowds larger than 10,000. Moody would advertise in newspaper amusement sections, hire choirs of 500 singers, and rely on his own considerable storytelling and preaching skills to gain converts and to build an evangelical empire that included the Moody Bible Institute, the Northfield School in Massachusetts, and the Moody Press.

In 1873, the same year that Moody began preaching, members of the Women's Temperance Crusade marched on saloons in twenty-three states where they held impromptu prayer meetings, sang hymns, and asked the saloon owners to stop the sale of alcohol. The following year, leaders of this movement met at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed. The WCTU sought to end the domestic violence and disruptions its members connected to the lively saloon culture of the era. Under the WCTU's second president, Francis Willard, suffrage became a club goal as she transformed the union into an international political movement; learning from Moody, she also made WCTU meetings and rallies entertaining, offering not only speeches and prayers but also performances that included, for example, 300-voice choirs. While condemning public amusements and frivolous entertainment, the WCTU offered its members community, a large circulation newspaper, and moral entertainments.

Backwoods Uplift

Protestant "uplift" and reform blended with tourism in the turn-of-the-century's Chautauqua movement, which also tapped into the earlier American cultural forms of the camp meeting and the lyceum. The camp meeting was a country revival in which a temporary tent and shed city was established and people from the surrounding country converged to hear preaching, find God, and socialize. The lyceum movement of the antebellum, dedicated to public education, created 3,000 institutes in the United States that sponsored lectures, built libraries, and educated the public.

In 1869, farm manufacturer and revivalist Lewis Miller and Methodist Episcopal bishop John H. Vincent adopted the lyceum approach to attract summer vacationers to a rural New York retreat that they had begun as a training post for Sunday school teachers. Accessible by railroad, their Chautauqua Institute offered clean, rural living and inspirational speakers. In two-week visits, families could attend workshops, sermons, and devotional meetings, while also enjoying concerts, bonfires, humorous lectures, concerts, and fireworks. Tennis and golf were also available. Members of the Chautauqua's "Literary and Scientific Circle" took home-correspondence courses, read numerous books, and were honored at a "Recognition Day" ceremony in a structure decorated with busts of Plato, Socrates, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, and Shakespeare.

Vincent's Chautauqua Institute inspired numerous imitators at vacation areas throughout the country. By the 1890s, 10,000 reading circles based on Chautauqua principles had emerged throughout the country. Yet the movement can be characterized as a cultural format in retreat: just as elite audiences had retreated to opera houses, the Chautauqua provided uplift on nature preserves far from the cities. In the movement, Protestant leadership appropriated features of commercialized entertainment forms and continued the trend of packaging religion as a consumer product.

Democracy and Commercialism

While true mass culture entertainment would not arrive in the United States until the advent of movies, radio, and television in the twentieth century, the basic recipe was concocted in the Gilded Age. The then-"massing" culture developed standardized packages of the "exotic" such as the three-ring circus, the dime novel, the vaudeville palace, and the department store that helped shape the consumer society to come. When Victorian values and older ideals of "uplift" clashed with the new commercial order, the outcome was either short-lived reform efforts or the birth of hybrid forms reflected in the Chautauqua Institute, the National League's decision to ban Sunday games and alcohol, or Dwight Moody's revivals.

The rise of commercialized leisure also transformed American values and democratic practices. Media as diverse as baseball and Pulitzer's New York World helped to unify a divided populace and to promote democracy and a sense of community. Department stores and vaudeville houses with their palatial architecture championed a version of populist "equality," but they also encouraged consumerist passivity. Commercial culture liberalized social behavior norms, yet the era's theater and literature frequently promoted sexual, racial, and ethnic stereotypes. Although the era's commercialism could contribute to reform, at the same time it could reinforce existing social inequities; this paradox was rooted in the era's conflicting visions of freedom—embodied in the figure of the earnest suffragette and her commercialized alter ego, the brash dancing girl.

See also: Baseball Crowds; Baseball, Amateur; Early National Leisure and Recreation; Football; Football, Collegiate; Genre Reading; Impresarios of Leisure, Rise of; Media, Technology, and Leisure; Progressive-Era Leisure and Recreation; Prohibition and Temperance; Railroads and Leisure; Summer Resorts; Tourism; Wild West Shows

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Fred R. Nadis