5 5 IN 1876, the American humorist Samuel S. Cox claimed that “Plenty, unless gorged to dyspepsia … is the very father of fun.” Samuel S. Cox was a man of his age—the so-called Gilded Age. In his era of conspicuous consumption and leisure, when American calendars were suddenly abloom with weekends, vacations, and holidays, “fun” became a catchall name for outlets that didn’t require backbreaking, mind-numbing labor—sports, spas, carnivals, circuses, vaudeville, parks, and so on. Fun-as-plenitude prevailed during the period, and it made some folks a lot of money.
American fun, as defined by this book, rarely prevailed in the early republic. Fun, as the previous chapters show, was one of many notable forces in the struggle between authoritarian citizens, who tried to contain the people’s freedoms, and individualistic (or communitarian) citizens, who felt such freedoms were the life of democracy. Ambitious fun lovers like Thomas Morton and King Charles may have made some effort to prevail, but achieving market share wasn’t their priority—or a realistic possibility. Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty scored stunning victories, but a “culture of fun” wasn’t their objective; their sights were set on founding a republic. And “funmaking animals” like Zab Hayward and Alfred Doten were happy just whipping up a crowd; for all of their spontaneous influence, they lived from one wild party to the next.
In the Gilded Age, however, it is fair to say, a culture of entertainment did prevail, did attract the population’s broadest middle—drawing tens of thousands of upright citizens to its various, widespread, spectacular events. This revolution came about largely by the efforts of a single businessman. The progenitor of Gilded Age entertainment was the inveterate prankster P. T. Barnum. (He is also believed to be the nation’s second millionaire, after fur-and-opium mogul John Jacob Astor.) Barnum’s greatest humbug was to concoct a “fun” that seemed to resolve one of America’s deep struggles: it pandered to Puritans while pleasing hedonists. As a bonus, it sold the novelty of the open frontier in the midst of congested urban drudgery. And for no extra cost, it captured the crowd-pleasing power of the Yankee-inflected practical joke.
It was during these same decades, from the Jackson Age to the Civil War, that the bizarre phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy turned the mockery of black folk fun into antebellum America’s dominant amusement. T. D. Rice, a pioneer of this craft, reveled in the danger of black trickster figures, but in the 1840s and 1850s, when Barnum and other showmen endeavored to raise the theater to higher Victorian standards, clever crowd pleasers like Dan Emmett and Stephen Foster traded blackface’s raciest content for bland sentimentality. Upbeat songs like “Camptown Races” brought plantation romance into the nation’s most respectable parlors.
And it was likewise during this antebellum period that the urban subculture of b’hoys and g’hals bullied its way into the crossroads of American fun: now “fun-making animals” of the Zab Hayward school, now troublemaking stooges for radical politicians, now ardent consumers of commercial entertainment, these stylish firebrands (and volunteer firemen) were destined to become the target market of their own folk icons. What is more, their rude, unscrupulous, and often violent behavior forced the theaters to clean up their act.
During the postbellum period, then, the prosperous North feasted on commercial entertainment, much of which bore the fingerprints of these antebellum phenomena. At circuses, in vaudeville, in the Uncle Remus tales, and in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, all of America’s weirdness and roughness was sanitized, multiplied, and packaged for mass consumption. Eventually, at the end-of-the-century theme parks, the speed and power of an industrialized nation was replicated by whirling machines. Sass and excitement were out there in the open, and everybody had some fun.
But the dirt and danger and freedom were missing.
BORN IN 1810 into a family of barkeeps and grocers, Phineas Taylor Barnum was the “pet” of his maternal grandfather, Phin, who would “go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven.” Young Barnum became the target of one such joke before he could even speak. Old Phin had deeded him “the whole of ‘Ivy Island,’ one of the most valuable farms in the State,” or so the boy was told for his first ten years. During this time his family and neighbors puffed up his pride in this legendary tract: with it came power, responsibility, and so on. When his time came to visit this bounty, however, a swampland gnarled with vines and alders rose before him with its sour “truth,” that he “had been made a fool by all our neighborhood for more than half a dozen years.” The boy’s alleged retort to his father, that he would sell the land “pretty cheap,” spoke volumes about the man he would become. For Barnum, the best punch line served the bottom line.
Barnum inherited Phin’s taste for pranks—“those dangerous things”—and even if sometimes he regretted their damage, the joy was just too strong to resist. In every New England village of his childhood, he speculated, “there could be found from six to twenty social, jolly, story-telling, joke-playing wags and wits, regular originals,” and staging pranks was their greatest endeavor. But this diverting pursuit played second fiddle to Barnum’s most formidable trait—an “organ of acquisitiveness” (as he liked to call it) that had him pinching pennies, selling candies to soldiers, besting friends at swaps, selling lottery tickets at the age of twelve, and finessing the Yankee tradition in trickery behind his parents’ grocery counter.
At age twenty-two, married, secure, and breathing the fire of Jacksonian democracy, Barnum ran a weekly called the Herald of Freedom that espoused his anti-Calvinist beliefs in what he called “cheerful Christianity” and that stood by his motto, cribbed from Thomas Jefferson, of “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” The Herald was as bombastic and quirky as its editor, and it didn’t shy from a public fight—typically in opposition to the killjoy blue laws that stepped on travel, amusement, and lotteries. Its most infamous potshot, against a local deacon, landed Barnum in jail for two months, during which sentence he kept publishing his paper and enjoyed an outpouring of public support: the people carpeted, papered, and furnished his jail cell, lining its walls with his personal library. They kept his story alive in the press, and they converged by the thousands on the day of his release—throwing a dinner for him in the courthouse where he’d been convicted. Cannons were fired, toasts were raised, and the ex-con was paraded home by a sparkling six-in-hand, followed by crowds and a marching band. He went on to open a grocery store, but his love affair with the public was only on hiatus, as were his plans for “cheerful Christianity.”
In 1835, he seized the chance to cash in on “that insatiate want of human nature—the love of amusement.” He was put in contact with an “extraordinary negro woman” who claimed not only to be 161 years old, but also to have been George Washington’s childhood nurse. It wasn’t your typical brand of entertainment, but the inveterate trickster knew what would fetch ’em. He bought “Joice Heth” for $1,000. She was toothless, bedridden, and “totally blind,” but performing from her couch on a “tastefully” festooned stage she issued such captivating streams of lies that the press trumpeted her glory from Philadelphia to New York. Capacity crowds flooded in and gawked and gaped until they were herded toward the refreshments.
When Barnum feared the frenzy was calming down, he upped the ante with an outrageous counter-hoax, an anonymous letter to the local press claiming Joice Heth herself was a fake, a “curiously constructed automaton, made of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs.” The titillated public rushed back to the exhibit with reinvigorated excitement; Heth herself, in Barnum’s words, “began to take great delight in the humbug, which was a profitable one to her.” When Heth died a couple of years later, the hoax came back in a well-publicized autopsy. When her unremarkable age came to light (eighty at the oldest), Barnum staged a crowning gag in retaliation: a letter to the papers saying Joice Heth was alive and performing in Connecticut.
Barnum became a large-scale prankster in the spirit of the Sons of Liberty, but his pranks were superfluous, and his agenda was increasingly commercial. In the easily agitated Jackson era, when crowds were quick to come to blows, he emancipated their love of mischief. His 1843 “Grand Buffalo Hunt, Free of Charge” was wilder and grander than even the Joice Heth hoax. For it he bought a $700 herd of the mangiest buffalo and publicized a free safari in Hoboken. Quietly splitting profits with the ferryboat companies, who dragged twenty-four thousand Manhattanites across the Hudson, he managed to clear $3,400 without letting on that the “prince of humbugs” was behind it. The hunt itself was a blatant rip-off, “Ivy Island” for the masses—“so perfectly ludicrous,” Barnum recalled, “that the spectators burst into uncontrollable uproarious laughter.” The crowd, in their hilarity, spooked the buffalo, which feebly trampled through the chintzy fencing and into the surrounding marshes. “The uproar of merriment was renewed, and the multitude swinging their hats and hallooing in wild disorder.” The papers got in on the fun as well, inventing injuries and buffalo deaths, but the truth was the masses had been lured from the city to enjoy some ersatz Americana. Barnum got folks to play along with his joke, even a joke on their inherent cheapness—and their yearning for a wilder world out west—and a fine June day was had by all.
But for all the mischief bred in his bones, P. T. Barnum was no Thomas Morton, and no Alfred Doten. He went to church, led carnies in prayer, and became a roaring voice for temperance. More to the point, he knew that alienating pious America was terrible for business. In 1836, when the national reform movement and his first traveling show were both just getting their sea legs, Barnum attended Sunday services “as usual” and had to endure an “abusive” preacher lambasting his “circus and all connected with it as immoral.” Accosting the preacher afterwards for not allowing him a rebuttal, Barnum made a speech that won over the congregation, some of whom “apologized for their clergyman’s ill-behavior.” The act was such a hit that he replayed it weeks later and “addressed the audience for half an hour.”
That same year Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” his delightful romance of Morton’s great showdown in which “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” but Barnum wasn’t at war with Plymouth. Calvinist reformers weren’t Barnum’s enemies; they were his stiffest competition. No radical, no rebel—the original crowd pleaser—Barnum, like the reformers, set his sights on the majority. Both parties wanted the middle class to flourish, but while the Second Great Awakening demanded work over play, severity over silliness, private sobriety over public pleasure, Barnum gave the people a break. Instead of scaring them with hellfire and brimstone, he hypnotized them with Signor Vivalla’s death-defying, stilts-walking, plate-spinning extravaganza.
His fun became theirs, for a nominal fee. A Yankee peddler of the wonderful and bizarre, he ensnared the public with his vision of progress. In the 1840s, when he opened his towering American Museum, he offered them the world in miniature: replicas of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem; the first stateside Punch-and-Judy show; dioramas of biblical and literary dramas; “trained chickens,” “industrious fleas,” and a knitting machine run by a dog. With his knack for teasing the fun from diversity, he hired Chinese and Spanish jugglers, brought in war-dancing Native Americans from the Rockies and three obese Scottish brothers, “The Highland Mammoth Boys.” He kept corpulent children on hand at all times (these, he found, were guaranteed to please), but the Mammoth Boys were especially versatile, practicing acts of mesmerism at their soirées mystérieuses.
His duty, as he saw it, was “to arrest public attention; to startle, to make people talk and wonder; in short to let the world know that I had a Museum.” So he situated his museum on Manhattan’s Broadway, adorned it with fireworks and international flags, and targeted pedestrians from all walks of life, from the downtown working class to the uptown elite. He cashed in on the Jackson-era will to participate—to have Gypsy girls tell their fortunes, to have their heads read by phrenologists, to be taken in by elaborate jokes—but in the end every citizen was one more customer.
Barnum treated these customers with dignity. In his early years he courted the people’s doubt, knowing their skepticism increased their investment and, in the end, sold more tickets. In 1842, for instance, when public was slow to challenge his “Feegee Mermaid” (a monkey head sewn to the tail of a fish), he published an anonymous notice in the papers that put the skeptics onto his scent: “Mr. Griffin, the proprietor of this curious animal, informs us that some persons have the impression that he is getting editors to call it a ‘humbug,’ for the purpose of drawing public attention to it, but he assures us positively that this is not the fact, no such clap-trap being necessary.” This artfully lobbed missile of meta-promotion was aimed at only the sharpest readers, those who saw that the notice itself was the same “clap-trap” it was scoffing at.
Humbug, the way young Barnum presented it, relied for its effect on the public’s curiosity. Whether gazing in wonder or laughing in ridicule (at Barnum, at the dupes, at their gullible selves), the crowd was engaged in a lively sort of fun that triggered their agency as free-thinking citizens. Indeed, as James W. Cook demonstrates, Barnum’s hoaxes and museum pieces were among the many overt deceptions that appealed to the emerging middle class; magicians, trompe l’oeil artists, and other popular tricksters contributed to a culture of wonder and debate that energized the public during this period and engendered “a new way of thinking about popular culture—one in which deception (artful or otherwise) came to be understood as an intrinsic component of the commercial entertainment industry.” For a time Barnum courted the people’s imagination by daring them to find him out, but eventually, in the Gilded Age, as Americans became enamored of so-called realism, even he learned it made more horse sense to hide his trickery behind a gauze of convincing illusion.
But his hoaxes, humbugs, and American Museum wouldn’t be Barnum’s greatest legacy. In the decades after the Civil War, his international celebrity as Tom Thumb’s promoter and ringmaster of “The Greatest Show on Earth” shot him to the forefront of American power. He headed up a campaign for mass spectatorship that ran roughshod over public debate. When postbellum intellectuals, as Bluford Adams has shown, decried the “Barnumization” of culture, they weren’t referring to his humbug days, but to his legacy of tasteless commercialism. Even Mark Twain, a sometime friend, avoided all public associations, except when burlesquing the showman in print.
But Barnum knew there was no bad press. In his 1865 Humbugs of the World, he identified “business” as a breeding ground for “humbug.” “All and every one protest their innocence,” he wrote of his fellow businessmen, “and warn you against the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that they tell the truth—about each other!” Which of course is exactly what Barnum was doing. James W. Cook calls this statement his “greatest trick of all: to convince many of his new middle-class peers that humbug in the exhibition room was merely market capitalism by another name.” Cook is right. Barnum was downplaying his infamous humbugs by putting them on a footing with commerce. But as with all of Barnum’s best pranks, this one had at least one more twist. While amusing his readers with a straight-talk apology, he was distracting them from his open admission that his entire enterprise—all of show business, all of business—hinged on fraud.
He explains such fraud in The Art of Money-Getting (1880), though he may not have meant to. He warms us up with some Horatio Alger boilerplate (thrift, perseverance, diligence), then moves on to a bit of Gilded Age wisdom (“be systematic”). The prince of humbugs first tips his hand when he hits on the subject of advertisement, which is most effective when it tricks trusting consumers with reverse psychology, by placing plants in the audience, and other such assaults on the masses’ gullibility. (After all, it’s the “art” of money getting—as in “artifice,” “artfulness.”) But the kicker comes when Uncle Barnum is seeming most sincere, offering his cheerfully Christian advice that “politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business … the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him. ‘Like begets like.’ ” Is he advising rough, raw, radical civility? Politeness born of “amicable collisions”? Certainly not. He is advising the softest, most lubricating kind. Barnum had mastered the show of civility, the air of fairness, the abuse of good manners to give the cozy impression that moguls like him had a chummy rapport with their millions of hoodwinked customers, and his good example helped to radically reorient the American public sphere. Under Barnum’s influence, “civility” became advertising, “politeness” became marketing, and rapacious corporations looked down from billboards with open arms and avuncular smiles. In the civil society Barnum inspired, citizens are greeted by upbeat clerks, appeased with impeccable “customer service,” and flattered with the illusion that they are always right. If the customer is “happy,” commerce clips along—and commerce is this civil society’s purpose. But where is the fun, without that time-tested American friction? In the Gilded Age, promoters Barnumized fun’s rough edges.
Such deception would work miracles for bigger and bigger business. One day it would make behemoths like McDonald’s and Disney our household names and trusted friends.
THE POPULAR STORY GOES something like this: Thomas Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice, a journeyman actor from New York City, was making a show stop in the Ohio River valley (Louisville, Cincinnati, maybe Pittsburgh), when he stumbled upon a nugget of comic gold. A disabled old black man (or was it a young boy?), with a hitched-up right shoulder and atrophied left leg, was out behind a barn throwing his body and soul into a folk song about “Jim Crow”: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so,” he sang, as if giving himself instructions. “Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.” This was the late 1820s, and the enterprising Rice, knowing the vogue for strange new dances, stylized the unfortunate stranger’s gyrations, crafted the lyrics to fit an Irish folk tune, and borrowed a black man’s worn-out suit of clothes. Blackening his face with a chunk of burnt cork, he fashioned what he saw into a monstrous act that transformed mid-nineteenth-century American theater.
Rice wasn’t the first. Blackface, a long-standing English tradition, had cropped up long before in American frontier towns where blacks and whites were forced to mingle and thus developed a begrudging sociability. Like the Patriots who dressed as war-whooping Indians, or the members of northeastern Tammany societies who performed elaborate Indian-inspired rituals as rallying points for an emerging middle class, young men who asserted their dominance through blackface both exaggerated racial differences to their own advantage and indulged in lewdness, by way of comedy, that was otherwise scorned or forbidden. Many of the early minstrels were outsiders and bohemians who enjoyed the carnival freedom of blackface, what Eric Lott calls “that fascinating imaginary space of fun and license outside (structured by) Victorian bourgeois norms.”
America’s growing white population was intensely curious about black culture, which could be seen in all of its public defiance from King Charles’s Pinkster Days to Sundays on Congo Square. “Blackness,” on the one hand, marked a moral danger zone where men were feared as sexual predators and women were identified, in the spirit of Sara Baartman—the wildly sensationalized “Hottentot Venus” who toured European stages until 1815—as essentially voluptuous, desiring animals. Blackness also stood for a culture of “fun” whose diction, humor, music, and dance loosely informed blackface minstrelsy’s repertoire. Ironically, it marked a social freedom that was increasingly forbidden among middle-class whites. Blackface enthusiasts tried importing such “genuine negro fun” to the stage, a space of relative liberation, though all they offered was a cheap replica.
Edwin Forrest, perhaps the nation’s first bona fide celebrity, wore blackface onstage in the 1820s, but it was Rice, with his limping “rockin’ de heel” dance, who invented the overblown physical grotesquery that turned it into a national sensation. Whereas actual African-American dancing of the period was, as Hans Nathan notes, “improvised” and naturally “ecstatic,” the theatrical heel-dancing inspired by Rice “demanded planned variety and … encouraged showmanship.” Not spontaneous fun but deliberate comedy, minstrel dancing “stress[ed] jolliness and clownishness for their own sake.” Rice’s equally important innovation was his comic character, the bootblack “Jim Crow,” whom he featured in dozens of songs, poems, monologues, and plays. This warm-blooded, hotheaded, fork-tongued fugitive dusts up trouble all over town—and throughout the society he’s supposed to serve—whether he’s charmingly pursuing “de holy state of hemlock” or insouciantly telling an uppity white mistress, who smirks at his interest in Shakespearean tragedy, that “he should like to play Otello—and smoder de white gal.” In the 1830s, when T. D. Rice was indistinguishable from Jim Crow, he dominated theaters from New York to London with his popularization of the African-American trickster figure.
It’s easy to be revolted by Rice’s Jim Crow—a white man making fun of blacks for the amusement of other whites. He lampooned African-American skin color, facial features, and dialect. He exaggerated genitals, breasts, and curves that played on stereotypes of hypersexuality. But as W. T. Lhamon Jr. convincingly argues, Rice’s Jim Crow, unlike the blatantly stupid clowns that Lhamon calls “Sambos,” should be read for the deeply mixed messages that it sent to his “overlapping publics”—working class, middle class, bohemian, even black. Jim Crow was a “quick-quipping runaway who mocked slavery” and at the same time “pestered those who would enter into middle class aspirations or grasp at dandiacal pretensions.” In the twentieth century he became associated with a truckling Uncle Tom figure, but in the antebellum period he was the original rebel who necessitated “Jim Crow” laws. Both the product of American racism and a critic of it, Jim Crow was pitched to heterogeneous audiences who laughed at different sides of his jokes: his burlesque of undereducated blacks, his attack on imperious and overeducated whites. Blackface may have “inspired the laughter of cruelty as well as the laughter of affirmation,” as Gary D. Engle puts it, but the overwhelming evidence points to its cruelty.
For most minstrels weren’t sending such a sophisticated message—most were showmen riding a wave of popularity. They played taverns and street corners. They jumped up during the intermissions of theatrical productions. P. T. Barnum, in his early circus days, always kept a blackface minstrel or two on hand. In the 1830s he blacked up himself when he couldn’t secure good talent: once, behind the tent, he defended an employee against a local white man, who then turned his violent force on Barnum, thinking he was being disrespected by a black. On another occasion, having lost his star minstrel, John Diamond, to a competitor, Barnum allegedly scoured the Five Points dives until he landed a superior breakdown dancer. The best one, predictably, was a “genuine negro” who would have outraged respectable white audiences. This didn’t stop the prince of humbugs. He blacked his dancer’s face with cork and transformed William Henry Lane into the world-renowned “Juba,” whose “regular break-down” in a New York bar would later command Charles Dickens’s full attention:
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him?
Dickens doesn’t name “this lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly,” but he declares him “the greatest dancer known,” which in 1840s America was explicit enough. Lane is believed to have been the only professional black minstrel until small troupes began appearing in the late 1850s. Notable among “Master Juba” ’s feats was to challenge his fellow Barnum alumnus “Master Diamond”—the other (and white) greatest dancer known—to at least three highly publicized dance-offs and ultimately to earn the latter’s public respect. Of course Lane didn’t perform real “juba,” the patting kind. He had learned to dance the Irish jig and reel from a renowned black dancer, Uncle Jim Lowe, and thereby also elevated Catharine Market’s challenge dances to the middlebrow stage at Vauxhall Gardens. At the same time he took potshots at T. D. Rice’s grotesque tradition. In a cheeky announcement for an 1845 show, he promised “to give correct Imitation Dances of all the principal Ethiopian Dancers in the United States. After which he will give an imitation of himself—and then you will see the vast difference between those that have heretofore attempted dancing and this WONDERFUL YOUNG MAN.”
Minstrelsy became an industry in the 1840s when Dan Emmett’s sensational Virginia Minstrels inspired musicians across the country to form their own blackface ensembles—or “Ethiopian entertainments,” as they were sometimes known. Emmett’s stage-shaking variety show was built around the basic Jim Crow grotesquerie: five musicians in blackface arrayed themselves in a line, constantly bantering and strutting their antics, spontaneously breaking into theatrics and dance, and working it all up in outlandish dialect. Their first newspaper review called them “rare boys—‘full of fun.’ ” When the English actor H. P. Grattan saw Emmett’s chief competitors, the Christy Minstrels, perform in Buffalo in 1843, he was so astonished by “the fun of these three nigger minstrels” that he wanted to see it all over again. “The staple of [their] entertainment was fun—mind, genuine negro fun … the counterfeit presentation of southern darkies [whom] they personally wished to illustrate, and whose dance and songs, as such darkies, they endeavored to reproduce.” This frantic endeavor to “reproduce” fun—“genuine negro fun”—dominated popular culture in the 1840s, seizing even the most respectable audiences. The Ethiopian Serenaders played the White House in 1844, starting a trend that in decades to come would amuse presidents Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, and Pierce. Like all popular culture, minstrelsy also headed west with the forty-niners, and by 1855 there were five professional blackface groups vying for San Francisco’s gold.
Stephen Foster, composing hits in the 1840s and ’50s, rebuffed “trashy and really offensive” lyrics by the likes of Rice and Emmett (Rice had rejected some of Foster’s early numbers) and instead sold sanitized, sentimental songs to Christy’s (increasingly mainstream) Minstrels. With upbeat tunes like “Oh! Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “Camptown Races,” the so-called father of American music favored nostalgia for an “Old Kentucky Home” over a voyeuristic peep into the slave quarter’s taboo frolics. The bet paid off, and the craze for his sheet music Fostered do-it-yourself minstrelsy in decent households across the land.
When Emmett formed Bryant’s Minstrels in 1857, he introduced an unbeatable theatrical innovation. Dancing was of course a minstrel-show staple—Christy’s employed both a “somersault jig dancer” and a (cross-dressed) “negro wench dancer”—and much of it, by the fifties, was tightly choreographed, often involving a call-and-response routine between the star performer and the ridiculous “end-men.” But Emmett mined gold from an unrulier dance tradition that sprang the whole troupe to their feet. Clearly inspired by the ring shout and dances “for the eel” that were vanishing from urban public spaces, Bryant’s Minstrels culminated their widely varied new sets—at Mechanic’s Hall on Broadway, the main stage for American minstrelsy—with prancing, jigging, hand-waggling “walk-arounds” in which all of the blackface musicians and their large supporting cast climaxed in a jerky plantation-style hoedown. They clapped and shouted and mugged into the footlights. Children and dwarves provided Barnum-like diversity, and performers rotated in a counterclockwise motion that tried to replicate this African-American rite.
Tearing a page from Stephen Foster’s songbook, Emmett published a volume of his popular “Walk ’Rounds” for folks who wanted to try it at home. In his introduction he vouched for his own authenticity: “I have always strictly confined myself to the habits and crude ideas of the slaves of the South.”
But naturally there was nothing “genuine” about any of this “negro fun.” The fundamental safety of blackface minstrelsy depended upon its inauthenticity: that the participants weren’t black; that the pleasure derived from their lewd gyrations was sequestered onstage, and done in jest; and that the threat of such unbridled pleasure—loud, brash, energetic, profane—was contained and controlled within a cartoon. Following the Civil War, when the rage for realism in popular culture combined with a loosening of race restrictions, more African-American minstrels took to the boards, and like their pioneer, William Henry Lane, they raised the bar for showmanship. For decades, however, they remained the victims of P. T. Barnum’s original humbug, performing only as blacks in blackface.
THE PERIOD FROM the 1830s to the 1860s was one of widespread civic turmoil. Slave uprisings threatened Southern comfort; urban riots (over race, class, religion, elections, patriotism, banks, you name it) rankled tenuous northeastern civility; and Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act stirred up western race wars that would rage throughout the century. Though it didn’t always erupt in violence, ideological turmoil was also rampant: from America’s tiny towns to its overgrown cities, folks bumped chests over sundry issues that often erupted in bloody conflict—Protestants fought Catholics, drys fought drinkers, abolitionists fought slave owners; an efflorescence of political parties and native-born religions created divisions within the growing ranks of aspiring middle-class conservatives and progressives; and a bold, ethnically diverse working class stormed the streets for their claims to popular sovereignty. The most colorful exponents of this latter demographic were the boisterous young denizens of lower Manhattan (as well as Philadelphia and Boston)—the Bowery “b’hoys” and “g’hals.” Their nicknames approximated an Irish-American dialect, though this rowdy white subculture was multiethnic and many of them hailed from south of the Bowery—in the infamously seedy Five Points neighborhood. They were born to the fray—among pimps, prostitutes, thieves, and murderers, and in overcrowded tenements—and it was in their character never to back down. But they were also the era’s most glorious dupes, for politicians and promoters alike.
With their flashy styles and political fury, b’hoys resembled eighteenth-century Jack Tars—right down to their rakishly knotted cravats. They split the difference between roughs and dandies: they wore short black jackets, double-breasted red flannels, flared black trousers, clunky work boots, and neatly brushed black top hats. They wore their pistols holstered and their bangs exaggerated, slicked with soap in a way that anticipated 1950s greasers. They chomped blunt cigars and strolled with a “swing, which nobody but a Bowery Boy [could] imitate.” G’hals, for their part, were even more extraordinary, by dint of being streetwise working women in an age of compulsory domesticity. They worked long hours and partied at night. They trafficked in the latest gossip and slang and strutted in cheap, bright, extravagant versions of antebellum haute couture. They were recognizable from blocks away by bonnets that sprang out in all directions, “with a perfect exuberance of flowers and feathers, and gigantic bows and long streamers of tri-colored ribbons.”
B’hoys worked as butchers, printers, shipbuilders, factory hands, and carpenters, but it was their universal identification as volunteer firemen that lent them their signature sartorial panache and their ferocious company loyalty. G’hals worked as bookbinders, milliners, and housekeepers, and often took sides with the combative b’hoys. B’hoys were early America’s most flamboyant gangsters. They pledged their allegiance to the violent street gangs that carved up turf from the Bowery to Five Points. The Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, Black Roach Guards, Bowery Boys, and other such clubs battled for turf, politics, and fun. As one former Bowery Boy recalled, “The gang had no regular organization, but were a crowd of young men of different nationalities, mostly American born, who were always ready for excitement, generally of an innocent nature.” Veterans of the ongoing “recreational” riots that had broken out for years between fire brigades, b’hoys’ greatest thrill, and highest prestige, came from fighting downtown fires and fighting other gangs and firefighters.
For all of their bare-knuckle differences, however, these mostly native-born children of Irish and other working-class immigrants rallied around their disgust for America’s “aristocratic”—British, Whiggish—wealth. They took American democracy at its word, but they also believed it belonged exclusively to whites, as their bloody 1834 race riots, and widespread resistance to abolition, made clear. In the tradition of Jack Tars in the Sons of Liberty’s taverns, they studied the incendiary editorials of proletarian activists like William Leggett. And as the Jackson Age wore on, and the Democratic Party became a factional circus under the big top of New York’s Tammany Hall, they split up among the ranks of sexy new demagogues who prized them for their heedless streetfighting tactics. Levi Slamm’s little militia of Locofocos (known in the press as “Slamm Bang & Co.”) set out to “democratize” capitalism, but Thomas Skidmore’s band of Workies pushed a communist agenda. In the 1840s, George Henry Evans’s “Young America” movement had scores of b’hoys imploring busy New Yorkers to fulfill the nation’s destiny in the West. “Thorough-going sporting-man” Isaiah Rynders led a thousand of his “Empire Club” b’hoys to rally for James K. Polk and bully Whigs away from the polls. And the pugnacious “underground” journalist Mike Walsh, a rabble-rousing Irish-born b’hoy himself, built an army of b’hoys he called the Spartans to bring about his “shirtless democracy.” It suited the b’hoys’ unresolved loyalties—cosmopolitan, racist, democratic, patriotic—that Walsh himself harangued for such inconsistent beliefs as Fourierist socialism, increased immigration, and the expansion of slavery into Texas. But it was his hobnailed tactics that pleased them most. Under his influence, they took politics to the streets—even road-tripping to Rhode Island in 1842 in a failed attempt to topple a state government that still restricted voting rights to landowners, the Dorr Rebellion.
B’hoys and g’hals were America’s first fans. They frequented Barnum’s humbugs and museums. They devoured dime novels and the sauciest penny papers. They were also incurable theater junkies who bullied their way en masse into shows and lectures. Voracious audience members whose eclectic tastes conformed to the era’s new variety shows, they rallied for Shakespeare with the same avidity that they did melodramas and blackface minstrelsy. B’hoys and g’hals were pop-culture consumers, but they also spun their own turbines of fun—spoke out, wisecracked, and pulled practical jokes. They gambled, drank, and fought in the streets. And as cultural descendants of Irish immigrants who danced against blacks for eels and cakes, they frequented Five Points’s rowdiest dance halls and put their own energetic spins on breakdowns, hornpipes, tap dance, and waltz. Up for adventure whenever, wherever, b’hoys were also—as Tyler Anbinder notes—“the first New Yorkers to leave for California when the gold rush began.”
To be sure, in this primitive age of the theater—when crowd members drank, spat, yelled, tussled, and kept up an ongoing contest with the stage (and when balconies served as ad hoc brothels)—the b’hoys and g’hals, the most spirited patrons, saw celebrity fandom as an excellent reason to rumble. They took proud ownership of actors and plays and staged their own dramas in the peanut gallery. So it seems almost inevitable, in this age of humbug, that b’hoys and g’hals should soon become the subjects of popular culture. They were just too colorful, excitable, ripe. Just as stylish black “dandies and dandizettes” entered the national consciousness through 1830s and ’40s minstrelsy (most notably under the guise of Zip Coon), b’hoys and g’hals made their stage debut in Beulah Spa; or Two of the B’hoys (1834). But they wouldn’t become larger-than-life poster-board caricatures until the late 1840s, when Frank Chanfrau, a b’hoy turned melodramatic actor, fashioned a character, “Mose,” from Moses Humphrey, an actual tough he had known as a fireman for the Peterson Engine Company no. 15. Before long he had worked him into Benjamin A. Baker’s play A Glance at New York in 1848. Chanfrau’s more immediate inspiration, however, for this streetfighting butcher and red-shirted fireman were the kids who filled the pit in Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre, where the play made its debut. So faithfully did he mimic their dress, gestures, and talk that the play’s producer, William Mitchell, mistaking Chanfrau for a gallery rogue who had managed to sneak backstage, tried to eject him on opening night.
A Glance at New York was a simplistic comedy—the travails of a country “greenhorn” taken in by a series of con men. Over the course of the play, Mose and his canny friends adopt the bumpkin, George, and defend him against grifters, sharpers, and thieves. But the story’s real arc is the b’hoys’ search for “fun”—the “capital fun” of cross-dressing in the g’hals’ “uniform” and infiltrating their bowling alley; the “capital fun” of the bowling itself; their easygoing spree in the bohemian “Loafers’ Paradise”; and, always, avidly, the pugilistic “fun” (the all-engrossing “muss”) for which the tobacco-spewing and slang-slinging Mose itches, aches, parades, and spoils. His g’hal, Lize (Eliza Stebbins), is pegged with urban amusements of her own; she appears reading Matilda, the Disconsolate and urges Mose, in her Bowery dialect, to go to “Waxhall,” “Wawdeville,” and a “first-rate shindig.” Mose and Lize strutted with a modern insouciance that tickled pit denizens right where they lived: they affirmed the audience in their own love of fun. “As may be supposed,” one reviewer wrote, “it is received with shouts of delight by the thousand originals of the pit.”
The play was such a runaway success—the biggest hit yet for the city’s biggest-drawing theater—that it spawned a flash-in-the-pan “Mose” and “Lize” franchise, always starring Chanfrau as the beloved Mose. It packed the Olympic for seventy-four nights before Chanfrau moved the venture to his own theater, the Chatham, and began reaping the profits for himself. Chanfrau knew his rowdy clientele. But despite the fact that he was expanding the pit to accommodate nearly three-quarters of the hall, the unscrupulous New York Herald threw some humbug his way, calling his new theater “a pleasant place for family resort.” The play had a surefire business model, and its crowd had a bottomless appetite for more, but the script left nothing to chance. Before the curtain falls, as Mose exits the stage to help his pal Sykesy “in a muss,” he calls out to the pit: “Don’t be down on me ’cause I’m goin’ to leave you … if you don’t say no, why, I’ll scare up this crowd again to-morrow night, and then you can take another.”
The trick worked. The play’s immediate sequel, New York As It Is, sold a total of forty thousand tickets in forty-seven straight performances. It reheated the basic plot of A Glance and kept its promise of urban realism—in a soup kitchen and tenement fire—but also, for fun, a steamboat race and “dancing for eels” in Catharine Market. The next play, Mose in California (1849), jettisoned realism for topical hyperbole: the b’hoys take a ship called the Humbug through the Isthmus and get an exaggerated California education—grappling bears, defeating Indians, and landing an impossibly large chunk of gold. In subsequent plays the franchise flew off the rails, finally losing its wheels with Mose in China (1850), which closed in a month. As Chanfrau upped the ante to hold the Bowery b’hoys’ attention, Mose transformed into an inner-city giant to steal even Davy Crockett’s thunder. As David S. Reynolds and others have shown, “Onstage, the b’hoy gained superhuman powers. The gargantuan Mose used lampposts as clubs, swam across the Hudson with two strokes, and leaped easily from Manhattan to Brooklyn.” To be sure, if Yankee peddlers and Kentucky woodsmen were comic icons of an earlier American character, b’hoys and g’hals (as well as some of their minstrel counterparts) stood for a roughneck cosmopolitanism that was spreading outward from the inner cities.
But b’hoys and g’hals have the dubious distinction of being America’s first folk heroes to stand in line and buy tickets to see their own spectral images. The steps Chanfrau took to amuse these youths heralded a new age in American fun. His heroes were designed to flatter a demographic, and his theater catered directly to their class. The fact that his shows were loud and louche, maximizing audience participation, only showed how well this “Mose” understood his clientele’s taste. Surely they thought they had invented this fun, and to a certain degree they had. But Chanfrau apparently had the last laugh, and it isn’t clear whether the real b’hoys (who mortally hated fat cats like the one he was becoming) were warm to his elaborate gag. Quite possibly, like country greenhorns, they’d been had.
It wouldn’t have been the first time. Politicians had been gaslighting them for decades. But in the year when Chanfrau baited his pit, the b’hoys’ short tempers, high-value brawn, and mobbish fandom for true-blue American actors created a delicious new opportunity. For years they had championed the American tragedian Edwin “Neddy” Forrest against his archrival, William Charles Macready, England’s greatest tragedian. On May 10, 1849, at the peak of the Mose craze, while Forrest played Macbeth to a capacity crowd at the downtown Broadway Theatre, a few blocks away, at the posh new Astor Place Theatre, with its high ticket prices and white-glove dress code, Macready also played Macbeth—but not to his typically tony audience. In the previous weeks, a loose consortium of troublemakers and Tammany Hall politicians—among them Mike Walsh, Isaiah Rynders, and the rapscallion journalist Ned Buntline, whose first dime novels would lionize the b’hoys—had distributed blocks of free tickets to the show. So while Forrest played his part with anti-British fervor, driving thousands of cheering minions to their feet, Macready, simply doing his job, incited a rain of witty abuse, rotten food, urban detritus, and theater seats. Afterwards leagues of b’hoys marched the streets, chanting in the voice of Shakespeare’s weird sisters:
Mose in his full B’hoy regalia admires the finer points of an African-American jig—danced for eels at New York’s Catharine Market. (“Dancing for Eels,” F. S. Chanfrau & J. Winans in New York As It Is. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.)
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
The next night, when Macready accepted a petition from forty-eight prominent New Yorkers (among them Washington Irving and Herman Melville), asking him to retake the stage, ten thousand nativists flooded into Astor Place, and the result was the nation’s bloodiest riot to date. Twenty-two were killed, more than a hundred injured, with the casualties due mostly to police suppression.
So, yes, Mose had fun. Commercial fun, criminal fun, loads of mobocratic fun. At his worst he did his henchmen’s bidding and severely disrupted civil society—destroyed property, pummeled innocents, even allegedly gang-raped prostitutes. Luc Sante offers a grimly accurate explanation for the b’hoys’ seeming “carnival”: “the collected miseries of the people were acted out with torches and clubs and rocks … unable to imagine social stability as anything but repression … the rioters sought a permanent state of riot.” No Sons of Liberty or Pinkster revelers, who strove for a permanent state of democracy, b’hoys outright rejected civility. They had a big appetite for American thrills—rough, raw, dangerous, dirty—but they failed to strike the playful balance that makes a party fun, the balance between individual and communal pleasure. At their worst they played in a danger zone between radical activism and criminality; they explored American fun’s dark side. More vicious than eighteenth-century Jack Tars, who made surgical strikes on offending property; less principled than their revolutionary forebears, b’hoys seemed to justify ruling-class fears (as one Dorr Rebellion opponent put it) of “an aristocracy of the dram shop, the brothel and the gutter; not in the ruffle-shirt gentry but in the gentry who have no shirts at all.” Bullying, wild, hell-bent for destruction, the Bowery b’hoys were a proven menace. Their self-serving pursuit of absolute freedom played right into their enemies’ hands, justifying reform. What’s more, their collective rage, combined with their love of popular amusement, made these kids an easy touch—vulnerable to politicians and entertainers alike, who stood to profit from their fury.
And so it follows that, in the 1850s, promoters, reformers, and city officials had only to cite the Astor Place riots when justifying strict civic rules—in theaters, on sidewalks, in municipal parks. Taste and decency had to be enforced, law and order had to be maintained, lest Mose and Sykesy and their Five Points thugs spread their mayhem across the land. Maine went dry in 1850, the same year P. T. Barnum opened his own tidy theater and debuted The Drunkard, William H. Smith’s blockbuster temperance play. It would outsell even A Glance at New York and have a field day with the Five Points subcultures. With that decade’s commercial blitz of Stephen Foster’s sentimental minstrelsy and tsk-tsking novels like T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Barroom (1854), in which King Alcohol brings a town to its knees, popular culture was cleaning up its act and catering to a new middle class.
B’hoys and g’hals fell out of vogue, but they didn’t just vanish. In 1856, a year after the Dead Rabbit/Bowery Boy riot devastated lower Manhattan, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune sent their man George A. Foster to report on “the nightly revels at Dickens’s Place,” aka Uncle Peet’s, the Five Points dance hall still known for the English author’s visit some fifteen years before. The place hadn’t changed much, despite once having burned to the ground. It “reechoed its wonted sounds of festive jollification.” And on a Saturday night, all of America’s outcasts were there. Among its usual multiracial clientele of “thieves, loafers, prostitutes and rowdies” were the expected Jack Tars and b’hoys and g’hals. Early in the evening the bar was mobbed, while female dancers, mostly black and “tidy and presentable,” were “all agog for the fun to commence.” When the little orchestra had warmed up and the gallants had stowed their wet chaw in their pockets, the whooping couples assumed their positions on the crowded, creaky planks. As Foster describes it, they were baited and caught by “Cooney in the Holler”: “contorting their bodies and accelerating their movements, accompanied with shouts of laughter and yells of encouragement and applause, until all observance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurrahs on his or her own hook.” Foster orients this harmless riot within the district’s violent history: “the dancers, now wild with excitement, like Ned Buntline at Astor Place, leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder.” But the sheer exuberance of Uncle Peet’s celebrants shines right through the sneering prose, just as William Henry Lane’s lightning-heeled expertise shone through Dickens’s Victorian smirk.
Foster then notices an adjoining apartment, an implicit brothel, that was meant to cater to higher-brow clients—presumably to the wealthy slumming parties who would be slinking in great numbers into places like Five Points in the stuffier decades to come. “Champagne made of very superior pink turnip-juice is kept ready for the upper crust whenever the fun grows fast and furious and those with money have reached the ‘damn-the-expense stage of excitement.’ ” Uncle Peet’s effort to attract the swells shows that he was a man of his times. The b’hoys were evolving into the flashier “sporting set.” And the rubbed-up fun of mixed dance halls was fast becoming a thing of the past, if also of the distant future.