6 6 BARNUM’S AMERICAN MUSEUM PROSPERED throughout the Civil War: the giants, the little people, even the automatons were dressed in Yankee uniforms. Patriotic dramas played two times a day. And Barnum made his most profitable discovery yet, William Henry Johnson—the “What Is It?”—a microcephalic African-American dwarf whom he pitched to the recently Darwin-crazed audiences as the “missing link” between man and monkey. But in March of 1868, when the museum burned for a second time, a holocaust that killed hundreds of animals in their cages, the showman declared he was closing up shop. He retired to a new mansion (“Waldemere”), then took a long, all-American vacation hunting wild buffalo on the Kansas plains. He had hardly been in retirement for a year, however, when he was approached by William Cameron Coup, a young circus manager whom he’d gotten started years before, and was tempted with the thought of starting a road show. What began as a revival of his museum on wheels—reassembling his pet performers and curiosities—soon hit the rails as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Barnum defended its claim to “Greatness” with a $100,000 challenge across his billboards: “ten times larger than any other show ever seen on Earth.” Only a fool would have taken him up on it. Even with its dozens of dormitories and stables and its ten big tops housing all his specialties—the Museum and the Laboratory, the Fine Arts collection and Menagerie—“Barnum’s Magic City” could materialize overnight and accommodate ten thousand patrons at a pop. His decades of experience in keeping crowds moving ensured that nobody stood still for long, but was propelled from one attraction to the next—past Siamese twins, bearded ladies, frog swallowers, and dwarves, shedding nickels and dimes along the way as they were herded toward the roaring, high-flying Hippodrome.
In its first year his circus struggled on the roads, getting mired in mud and flooding rivers, but starting in 1872 they chartered trains—often sixty-five overcharged cars in length—and thereafter they struck all the midwestern towns where Barnum’s name had only been legend. Despite severe setbacks, principally another fire in 1872 that killed most of his animals in a New York warehouse, his show kept growing every season, eventually merging in 1880 with that of his only competitor, John A. Bailey, to form a worldwide entertainment juggernaut.
The entertainment industry slavishly followed Barnum’s methodology—for promotion, production, and transportation; it also enforced the standards of Victorian decency that he had adhered to long before the war. When in the 1830s he upstaged preachers to defend the virtues of entertainment, Barnum broke ground for a towering monoculture that throve on exciting, inoffensive pleasures. These pleasures were often peppered with dashes of folk fun (slang, risk, seeming rebellion), although even these zingers were mostly nostalgic, as if mischief belonged to America’s past, which in many ways it did. For, to be sure, with the growing force of “middling folk” up north—white-collar suburbanites who earned regular salaries—the entertainments devised by Barnum and his adherents feasted on a lucrative new market. “Family fun,” as these amusements have come to be called, were ostensibly nutritious and virtuous pleasures: they reinforced the tastes and mores that had been popularized during the Second Great Awakening. Family fun broadened the entertainment market with its daintier appeals to women and children. Perhaps more insidiously, it took citizens in moments of deep distraction and slotted them into postbellum America’s increasingly corporate social structure.
But of course the mischief wasn’t really gone: In the West, there were still jumping boomtowns. In the cities, there were untamed Bowerys that wisely preyed on leering slummers’ wallets. But in a more pervasive sense, during the Gilded Age, American mischief went big time and came to characterize the culture industry—in both its methods and its champions. As Karen Halttunen argues in her classic book on the rise of the middle class, after the Civil War, the confidence men and “painted ladies” that antebellum reformers warned their children about gave way to heroic tricksters like the hero of Horatio Alger’s eponymous Ragged Dick. Confidence men became capitalist icons. In what Halttunen calls the nation’s “new corporate context” of acquisition and aspiration, “personality skills, such as that subtle quality called charm, were more useful to the ambitious youth than the qualities of industry, sobriety, and frugality” that reformers touted before the war; “executive ability and management—the art of manipulating others to do what you want them to do—was far more valuable than the ascetic self-discipline of an earlier era.”
This new education redefined the citizen, not as an entrepreneur, adventurer, or rebel but rather—in the spirit of Mark Twain’s middle-class hero, Tom Sawyer—as a lubricant in the capitalist system. If the system itself was based on trickery, the con man was its model citizen. Barnum said it himself: the “humbug in the exhibition room [is] merely market capitalism by another name.” But if the heroes were con men, then the larger citizenry were their dupes, and family fun—one of the era’s biggest-ticket schemes—had all the marks of a blurry shell game. Its customers stood in lines for tickets. They assumed their quiet places in rank-and-file bleachers. They bought cheap imitations of participation and liberty that made them feel like soaring athletes, daring cowboys, noble explorers. Before the Civil War, as many historians have shown, P. T. Barnum welcomed crowds to call his humbugs humbug. Afterwards, in an age of popular realism, his Gilded Age progeny flattered and dazzled their crowds. They assured them they were praying to see the real deal. In the exhibition room of the Gilded Age, corporate con men aimed to convince.
The recreation, amusement, and entertainment industries made lighthearted pleasures widely available—both to the city dwellers who benefited from the construction boom in parks, gymnasiums, vaudeville theaters, and arenas and to rural citizens who traveled from counties away when the big-top shows came to town. This cheap, modern, standardized “fun” not only filled the perceived social need for earlier American fun (the daring, primitive rebellions detailed in earlier chapters) but also—after the logic of P. T. Barnum, blackface, and “Mose”—often sold it in replica. Thrills that had been born out of sometimes desperate need, as they had been in slave quarters and mining camps, were repackaged as diversions for a growing workforce. They became “leisure” activities for weekends and holidays, and in eras since, their success has only grown. They have become so diverse, widespread, and profitable that they have spawned their own academic discipline, “leisure studies,” which is a subdiscipline of both sociology and business administration.
Regulated and commercial family fun is, in its own right, “American fun.” It reflects powerful strains in the national consciousness—capitalism and corporate administration, in particular—and it remains more prevalent now than ever. But far from reflecting a national tendency toward risk, struggle, and self-identification, it reflects the opposite in a tendency toward leisure, toward disappearance into the passive crowd. To be sure, this kind of Gilded Age fun is often the pleasure of repressing struggle, also of dissolving it. In the terms of this book’s larger argument, the entertainments and amusements engineered during this period mark the first of modern fun’s three “tributaries,” all of which keep flowing today, usually mixing and commingling their respective social waters. The remaining two tributaries, the wildly playful and the radically political, will join the mainstream in later eras.
IN THE REPUBLIC’S EARLY DECADES, when a mostly rural population was struggling for survival, athletics were largely primitive pastimes. In the Northeast, sports, though generally less regulated than they had been in colonial Puritan communities, were valued most when they had something to deliver. Children’s games like marbles and hopscotch were often linked with moral lessons, and adult diversions, like hunting and fishing, had obvious practical benefits. In Quaker Pennsylvania and throughout the American South, attitudes toward skittles, bowling, billiards, and a few other traditional European sports were typically more lax. In general, however, early U.S. citizens, mostly males, played roughly the same games that their ancestors had played—stoolball, ninepins, and, among the elite, tennis. The rules of these games were basic, the matches ad hoc. The balls and bats were crafted at home according to tradition or, by the 1820s, instructions in magazines. A “fitness movement” sprang up in that decade; this tentacle of the larger reform movement brought private male gymnasiums to East Coast cities and inspired the odd college to start a physical education program. Over the next twenty years, however, vigorous activities like rowing and gymnastics belonged almost exclusively to the upper classes. By the 1850s, baseball was becoming nationally prominent, but nobody risked mass-producing its equipment until after the Civil War, when soldiers on both sides had discovered the sport and baseball became the dominant sector of a sudden and booming “sporting goods” industry.
In the 1860s and 1870s, manufacturers doubled down on the sporting crazes that many Americans, as Stephen Hardy has shown, still shunned as “exotic and frivolous indulgences”: croquet, football, tennis, bicycling, as well as baseball itself. Against lingering middle-class disapproval, however, sports bred new commercial opportunities. Americans swarmed new public courts and playing fields, and entrepreneurs were there to greet them, inventing new equipment, packaging uniforms, branding semiprofessional clubs and leagues, and selling tickets to athletic spectacles that hitherto had been limited to the horse track. Organized sports and softening attitudes toward games and sports made enduring changes to the postbellum republic. They improved citizens’ spirits and physical health while making them behave in predictable patterns. They also served as ideological bait. Writing in 1869, upon the opening of New York’s elaborate new Young Men’s Christian Association, fund-raiser William E. Dodge Jr. justified the games typically found in barrooms (including “chess, draughts, billiards, and bowling”) by saying “the devil should not have all the amusements” and by citing the growing Christian opinion “that every legitimate attraction should be utilized to gain the end desired.” The “end,” in this case, was winning young men’s souls.
Sports had the potential for raw, pure fun. Football, baseball, track and field, and all of the exhilarating new athletic games demanded full-body engagement; they thrilled participants with heated contest; they hurled them into risk-filled arenas where natural talents were tested and sharpened. But two sweeping trends in the industrialized North, administration and commercialism, intervened to regulate and exploit these pleasures in the service of order, discipline, and profit. In contrast to spontaneous antebellum sports—played in open fields and on street corners and sandlots—postbellum sports, slotted by officials into newly founded ziggurats of clubs and leagues and organizations, helped to control the intimidating sprawl of an increasingly diverse and urban citizenry. Sports staged rivalries between schools and cities, turned youthful aggression into sanctioned competition, and channeled the American love of risk into games with ever more intricate rules. Organized sports revved up the citizens’ activity, but they also corralled their spontaneity and rebellion into highly regulated channels. And they reinforced popular taboos that separated Americans by race, class, and gender: blacks and other minorities were excluded outright; whites were separated by privilege and ability and divided, more specifically, into the increasingly fine categories of “amateurs” and “professionals.” For some, this latter division signaled the death of fun—by turning sports into work and spectacle. In 1884, Dudley Sargent, who would become the director of Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium, decried “the growth of the professional spirit in our college sports” as “a most serious evil”: in making his case, he cited the loss of “courtesy and generous competition” to “exhibitions of brutal violence” and excoriated the “demoralizing work” of professional training that turned athletes into de facto racehorses. E. L. Godkin, writing for The Nation in 1893, declared “the thing which produces most of the evils of football and other games”—among which he included humiliation and physical injury—“is the effort to improve them as a spectacle for the multitude.”
Spectacle, naturally, was the whirring propeller of typical Gilded Age fun. And unlike rowdy Jackson-era audiences, whose obstreperous behavior was finally clamped down following the Astor Place riot, postbellum crowds had to behave themselves. Indeed, the white-glove Astor Place Theatre itself—against which the b’hoys had violently rebelled—set the new high standard. In 1858, when Frederick Law Olmsted helped to design New York’s Central Park, he wanted it “to embody his conception of democratic recreation,” in John F. Kasson’s terms, which meant he wanted it to be a scenic strolling ground for quality folk and “made little provision for the desire of working-class males to have ‘manly and blood-tingling recreations,’ ‘boisterous fun and rough sports.’ ” From the 1870s to the 1890s, museums, opera houses, theaters, concert halls, even public parks, laid down the social law, enforcing dress codes, lowering noise levels, and imposing stringent rules of conduct. As Lawrence W. Levine and other historians have shown, well-heeled citizens “transform[ed] public spaces by rules, systems of taste, and canons of behavior of their own choosing” in an effort “to convert the strangers [read ‘immigrants’] so that their modes of behavior and cultural predilections emulated those of the elite.” But it was generally enough just to emulate the elite, for the audience promoters hoped to reach was the vast and aspiring middle class. The spectator’s fun could be lively and flashy, but it took pains not to shock or offend, as it had to appeal to the nicer sensibilities of a widely imitated leisure class. If Barnum could meet such standards with the circus, which hitherto had suffered the lowest reputation, any entertainment was up to the challenge.
In 1885, when Benjamin Franklin Keith opened Boston’s Bijou Theatre, he stepped into a well-worn variety-show tradition. He populated his stage with the same minstrels, jugglers, scientists, actors, gymnasts, preachers, and oddities he had been hawking for years as a barker for Barnum. What made him the founder of the new American vaudeville was an innovation he called “continuous performance”—the rotation of crowds through a twelve-hour cycle of repeating, “respectable” stage shows. He described the setup as a kind of banal paradise where “the show is [always] in full swing, everything is bright, cheerful and inviting.”
The “fixed policy” for his “new scheme” was that “cleanliness and order should be continued” and that “the stage show must be free from vulgarisms and coarseness of any kind.” He intended the theater to be “as ‘homelike’ an amusement resort as it was possible to make it,” and in doing so he bundled low culture with high and stripped vulgar fun and the fine arts alike of their respective difficulties. By the turn of the century, the more homogenized his “homelike” industry grew, the more he came to value, in his own words, “light, frothy acts, with no particular plot, but abounding in songs, dances, bright dialogue and clean repartee.” Such melodramatic pap, he discovered, was “the sort of entertainment which seems to please most.”
Not everyone was pleased, of course. “The most dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn,” William Dean Howells, nineteenth-century America’s great tastemaker, moaned in 1903, citing the loss of high-risk spectacle as a harbinger that “vaudeville is dying.” But in fact it kept growing into the early 1920s, around the time of Hollywood’s rise, when the “Keith Circuit” commanded an annual audience of four million customers. And in the 1920s and 1940s, with the advents of radio and television, respectively, Keith’s continuous performance was perfected. If Hollywood retrofitted vaudeville theaters for a new generation of movie palaces, these household devices, transmitting endless sanitary entertainment, perfected Keith’s mission: “home” entertainment. Television’s direct access to vaudeville-trained celebrities came to define the middle-class household.
THE GILDED AGE POPULATION was slow to get educated—from 1870 to 1890, the national percentage of high school graduates hardly budged from 2 to 3.5 percent—but its interest in newspapers, dime novels, and other print media fairly exploded. Indeed, during this same twenty-year period, daily news circulation increased by 222 percent, a growth that was boosted by new printing and transportation technologies, funded by flourishing advertisement opportunities, goaded by big-city newspaper wars, and—perhaps most forcefully—disseminated by the ingenuity of cooperative publishers like A. N. Kellogg and A. J. Aikens. These two Chicago moguls retrenched their businesses after the Great Fire of 1871 and syndicated hundreds of the nation’s “country” newspapers. Otherwise unscrupulous about their papers’ content, Kellogg and Aikens only required that the stories be tasteful, which mostly meant that crimes and scandals could not be reported in detail, but only summarized.
Mainstream journalism became less sentimental—and less blatantly sensationalized—than it had been at the birth of the penny papers. In this proud new era of straight-shooting realism, respectable papers didn’t resort to antebellum-era hoaxes or to rollicking Wild West facetiousness. In the spirit of postbellum Barnumism, rather, the dramatic “facts” of modern life became popular entertainment. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper offered “pictorial reporting” of Ku Klux Klan killings, rough prison life, and the mob violence of the “Great Uprising” of railroad workers in the early 1880s. Also, the style of their lavish images, as the historian Joshua Brown has shown, became decreasingly stereotyped and more observant to meet public demands for authenticity. The news was also tempered with local-color sketches and comical human-interest pieces by the popular new regionalist writers—from northeasterners like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman to “southwesterners” like Mark Twain and southerners like Charles W. Chesnutt and George Washington Cable. Among this latter set, cutting his teeth as a self-proclaimed “cornfield journalist” for the Atlanta Constitution, was the amateur folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, a beat reporter whose renditions of African-American dialects and folk tales became widely touted for their apparent realism. In 1884, The Nation praised him for getting “very close to the untutored spirit of humanity.” What sold newspapers, however—what helped the Constitution rebound from the financial panic of 1873—was his stories’ delicious fun.
In the words of his daughter-in-law Julia, Harris was himself, as a boy, “like Brer Rabbit,” the African-American trickster figure he would single-handedly transform into a mainstream national hero. Young Harris was small, quick-witted, and mean. Indeed, many of his biographers note how this poor, illegitimate, and physically slight child pulled vicious pranks on his peers and bullies—how he coaxed one into hogslop that was infested with fleas; how he shoved another into an active wasps’ nest, causing him to be seriously stung; how he burned yet another about the neck with a spatula, much to his indulgent mother’s delight. As a boy he aspired to be a professional clown, acting for a spell in a local troupe that called itself the Gully Minstrels, but later in life he would dismiss blackface as “represent[ing] nothing on earth, except the abnormal development of the most extraordinary burlesque.”
It wasn’t until 1862, however, when he was sixteen and working as a printer’s devil on the Turnwold plantation in central Georgia, that Harris befriended Harbert and “Uncle” George Terrell, two older black slaves who would help to define his illustrious career. During this period he immersed himself in the slaves’ daily lives, hunting rabbits with them, recording their language in dialect poetry, and slipping off at night with the master’s children to visit the interiors of their cabins. His daughter-in-law steeps the tale in plantation nostalgia: “From a nook in their chimney corners he listened to the legends handed down from the African ancestors,—the lore of animals and birds so dear to every plantation negro.… The boy unconsciously absorbed their fables and their ballads, and the soft elisions of their dialect and the picturesque images of their speech left an indelible imprint upon the plastic tablets of his memory.” Yet there is poignant realism in the shadows of this cabin. As a white boy who had grown up at the bottom of Southern society, Harris may have been, as Wayne Mixon suggests, more nostalgic “for a black world than a white one”—and more for a black paternalism than a white one.
For the Terrells were Harris’s first father figures, and their nightly lessons in wily animals who capsized upright Southern mores shaped the way Harris would think. Brother Rabbit must have been a revelation for the boy, a sympathetic hero and a sort of family secret. He took the rabbit’s lessons to heart. In the 1870s and 1880s, as he was tracking its stories, Harris employed his own trickster techniques to collect these tales from the source. When he was in the presence of blacks, and only blacks, as he once was in a rail yard waiting for a train, he would set out to gain “their confidence and esteem” by “listening and laughing awhile.” Then he would tell a tale or two of his own. In the rail yard it was the “Tar Baby” story that threw the gathering crowd into “unrestrained laughter.” Then it was “Brother Rabbit and the Mosquito” that “had the effect of convulsing them.”
The result was that, for almost two hours, a crowd of thirty or more negroes vied with each other to see which could tell the most and best stories. Some told them poorly, giving only meagre outlines, while others told them passing well; but one or two, if their language and their gestures could have been taken down, would have put Uncle Remus to shame.
Harris feared these sources were fading fast. As he explained in 1881, most contemporary blacks were “unfamiliar with the great body of their own folk-lore,” and even older ones who were “as fond of the legends as ever” lacked “the occasion, or the excuse, for telling them.” So he caught them and stuck them like butterflies on poster board. When he began publishing in the Constitution in the mid-1870s, he put his hard-won tales in the mouth of Uncle Remus, the jolly but devilish former slave who animates “Brer Rabbit” (as Harris called him) for the ears of a white Southern boy, identified simply as “the little boy.” Uncle Remus was, for Harris, the natural voice to tell these tales. “Only in this shape,” he wrote, “and with all the local allusions, would it be possible to adequately represent the shrewd observations, the curious retorts, the homely thrusts, the quaint comments, and the humorous philosophy of the race of which Uncle Remus is the type.” Only in this “shape,” through this “type,” could Harris convey his own experience, that of a dazzled and honored white boy glorying in stories of outrageous rebellion.
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) became one of the century’s best-selling books. In the book’s opening tale, “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy,” the latter’s mother, Miss Sally, finds him leaning his head against Remus’s arms, gazing into his kindly “weather-beaten face,” and hearing about the time Brer Rabbit robbed her own garden to throw a dinner for Brer Fox—who in turn tries to make a dinner of Rabbit. But the lesson is that Rabbit always slips away. Rabbit always outwits Fox in the end, “en Brer Fox ain’t never cotch ’im yit, en w’at’s mo’, honey, he ain’t gwine’ ter.” The story never reveals Miss Sally’s reaction to the glorification of her garden thief, but this bold “initiation,” taking place right under her nose, tells young readers that these cautionary tales aren’t intended for their mothers.
Of all the diluted “family fun” of the Gilded Age, Harris’s Brer Rabbit tales may have been the most socially subversive. His tricksters didn’t teach you how to climb the corporate ladder. Writing under the cover of a fawning old “darky” (Harris’s word)—blacking up with the masquerade of hokey false innocence that middle-class audiences had applauded for decades—Harris celebrated the pranks, rebellion, flirtations, risks, jokes, fiddling, dancing, mockery, and indefatigable hedonism of “de funniest creetur er de whole gang.” While overtly racialized through Uncle Remus’s black culture and often impenetrable dialect, these naughty beast epics had a broad appeal for all of the nation’s Victorian children: even in a world of starchy manners, where the rich and powerful call all the shots, they said the smallest and smartest creatures in the forest can, at their own risk, sport the highest prestige.
Children also liked it that Uncle Remus was black. Samuel Clemens was there in the spring of 1882, at the house of George Washington Cable, when a group of them came to hear Uncle Remus. They looked with “outraged eyes” upon the “undersized, red-haired and somewhat freckled” Harris, who was too shy to open his mouth in public. (Harris also had a stutter.) “Why, he’s white,” they complained. Clemens said he understood their outrage. As a fellow admirer of Uncle Remus, Clemens, like thousands of other readers, had come to believe they were “personal friends,” and here was this stammering white journalist. This trickster’s humbug was shocking even to the pupils of Brother Rabbit.
“Well, I tell you dis,” Remus cautions in Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), “ef dese yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.” There were serious lessons to be learned from Brother Rabbit, lessons never intended for little white boys. But even—especially—Brother Rabbit’s fun, the same fun that electrified antebellum slave quarters, sent readers a penetrating message. The pursuit of pleasure on one’s own terms—not P. T. Barnum’s terms, nor B. F. Keith’s—sometimes comes at a personal cost: embarrassment, hurt feelings, broken bones. But the benefits include a personal freedom that can’t be bought at any price. Brother Rabbit was no “respectable” white trickster like Tom Sawyer, but once he had gotten into the American mainstream, he kept popping back up again—perhaps most tenaciously as Bugs Bunny.
……………
BOLDER THAN THE CIRCUS, rawer than vaudeville, more “genuine” than Uncle Remus, was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The show opened in Omaha in 1883 with a flagrant insult to Barnum’s gimcrackery: “No Tinsel, No Gilding, No Humbug! No Side Shows or Freaks!” Here was genuine American fun—thrills, spills, and spectacular clashes between rowdy cowboys and noble savages. The Omaha headlines responded in kind: “Eight Thousand Attend the Initial Performances, and Go Wild With Enthusiasm—the Races, Fights and Feats of the Big Amusement Hit.”
Colonel William Cody was no P. T. Barnum, no B. F. Keith. This ringmaster was himself the real, rawhide deal, at least according to his big-talking Autobiography, which appeared in 1873 as a realist foil to the various popular novels featuring the thirty-three-year-old legend. The story it told (and sold at the show) tintyped the West in grand escapades that appealed to middle-class American dreamers, and many of them appear to be true. When Cody was seven, in 1853, his father built a log cabin in the Kansas Territory, and the boy took an easy shine to frontier life. He aspired to the westerner’s long-haired, buckskin-clad elegance, to “the belt full of murderous bowies and long pistols,” a look he would eventually make iconic. His daily exposure to “the rare and skillful feats of horsemanship,” he wrote, “bred in me a desire to excel the most expert,” which eventually he did. He kept constant acquaintance with Indian boys who schooled him in archery and a bit of Kickapoo, and allowed him to “[take] part in all their sports.” He told of a childhood fraught with violence, as between the “mobs of murder-loving men” who wanted Kansas open for slavery and opponents like his father, who was stabbed on a platform for making an anti-slavery speech. (This one was true.)
Then, of course, there was violence with Native Americans, but is it possible that Cody, fatherless and eleven, was overtaken by “red devils” and had occasion to kill his “first Indian”? Biographers dispute this story. Fewer, however, have challenged his claim to have ridden, at thirteen, for the Pony Express. This too-delicious-to-be-false episode, which stars young Cody making the Express’s longest ride ever and working under Twain’s favorite desperado, Slade, came to signify the Express itself—its youth, its danger, its daredevil audacity. Its reenactment was the signature event of his show; histories of the Express cited it as fact; and as late as 2000 a respected biographer honored it with a fastidious chapter, only to have it debunked in 2005, when Louis S. Warren showed with disappointing certainty that during those years Cody “was in school.”
But even as he exaggerated his later-life exploits—tacking zeroes onto Indians’ headcounts, decorating his gruesome buffalo slaughters with impossibly acrobatic flourishes—there was no disputing the frontier butchery that paid for his reputation. Strapping and handsome with his long flowing locks, sporting decadent weapons and fringe, Cody stood for western extravagance. He strutted the frontiersman’s dangerous fun. He didn’t swear, but he drank and fought, and he loved to stage a practical joke. In September 1871, on a buffalo hunt with General Philip Sheridan, Cody pulled an elaborate prank reminiscent of Dan De Quille’s at Carson River. Having riled up “Mr. McCarthy,” a New Yorker in their party, with rumors of violent Indians in the region, Cody arranged for twenty-some Pawnees, who were in league with a captain he knew, to “throw blankets around them, and come crashing down upon us, firing and whooping in true Indian style.” The joke got out of hand, and “two companies of cavalry” were sent in pursuit, but Cody, as he told it, headed off disaster.
It was Cody’s flair for such bullish theatricality that had him less than one year later exploiting the new road-show industry and staking his claim in the emerging star system. Thanks to Ned Buntline’s dime novels—yes, Ned Buntline of the Astor Place riots—“Buffalo Bill” was now a household name, and easterners clamored to see the legend in the flesh. Accompanied by fellow scout Texas Jack Omohundro, Cody played out scenes from his personal adventures in Scouts of the Prairie, a play Buntline himself threw together in an afternoon. They fist-fought, wrestled, fired live rounds, and hurled hackneyed obscenities like “Death to the Indians!” But for all of the stage show’s mawkish melodrama—which early reviewers mercilessly detailed—realism was Cody’s ace in the hole. He would step out of character and mug for the audience. Between seasons, he would be back on the trail, hunting, scouting, and working up material that blended seamlessly into his dramas. Most notably, in the summer of 1876, he wrapped his season early to join the western wars that brought Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn: adorned in his flashy stage clothes, he was out scouting Cheyenne warriors when he was stood down by the young Indian chief Yellow Hair (Cody called him “Yellow Hand”), who recognized his face and wanted to fight. Cody shot the man at twenty paces, and “jerking his war-bonnet off … scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.” He branded this achievement “The First Scalp for Custer” and worked it into the next season’s performance—“a noisy, rattling, gunpowder entertainment,” he called it, “all of which seemed to give general satisfaction.” In the years to come he expanded his cast to include fellow gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok and hand-picked Lakota actors from the Indian Territory.
By 1882 he had outgrown the stage. A national population, riven by the Civil War and waves of immigration, still struggling to recover from the Panic of ’73, took comfort in this dashing frontier hero who bragged of America’s manly triumphs. There was money to be made from his heroism. All he needed was an open arena and a good supply of cowboys and Indians. In recent years he had become partner in a ranch on Nebraska’s Dismal River. Cody himself was a reckless horseman who groused about the “hard work” of ranching (“I could not possibly find out where the fun came in”), but he was fascinated by the cowboys’ antics in their downtime: “broncho riding, roping, racing, riding wild steers, swimming contests.” This was the genuine cowboy fun he imported for his show, along with “a bunch of outlaw cow horses.” His hired Indian actors followed a similar pattern. Having learned on the boards that Native Americans could be sold as symbols of vanishing nobility (as well as of ruthless savagery), Cody joined the Barnums and other showmen who had been sensationalizing this culture for decades. His respectful treatment of the many Indians he hired for the Wild West show—to parade in full dress, to engage in staged battles, to compete in fair-and-square foot and horse races—earned him lifelong appreciation among various western tribes. With hard-won permission from the federal government, even the outlawed Sitting Bull joined his show for one year in 1885.
During its infamous first season, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West caused a national thrill, though it failed to lasso the respectable audiences that Cody knew it would need to survive. As a large-scale road show it outshone Barnum. Cody borrowed some of Barnum’s best tricks, such as his techniques for moving animals in boxcars, but he traded the big-top for the wide-open sky and told a manly, white-supremacist story that, as Warren argues, soothed the anxieties of an urban middle class. Against popular fears that boys and men were becoming “neurasthenic” milksops, Buffalo Bill and his handsome “centaurs” celebrated the virility of the American male. Against the dread of runaway immigration, his noble white cowboys staged glorious triumphs over the threat of racialized others—over the Native Americans and Mexican “vaqueros” who played his road agents and cattle rustlers. In truth, Cody’s cast of western toughs couldn’t live up to this white-hat myth. They drank like real cowboys all throughout the season, legendarily devoting one boxcar to liquor. They let their violence leak into the arena, publicly abusing their animals and their assistants. And the program itself showed little restraint, promising spectacles of killing and “torture.” Newspaper reporters noticed less-than-savory crowds swarming Cody’s bloodsport spectacle, just the thing to keep nice families away.
But Samuel Clemens, America’s first source for Wild West high jinks, attended the show two days in a row and wrote Cody a fan letter in 1884 that served as publicity for both mythmakers. “It brought vividly back the breezy wild life of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains,” he wrote, “and stirred me like a war-song.” “The show is genuine,” he testified, “wholly free of sham and insincerity.” Most stirring for Clemens, as he reported it, were the curiosities his book Roughing It had made iconic, the “pony expressmen” he had glorified with shameless hyperbole and the “bucking horses,” which he claimed, in an allusion to his own famous “Mexican Plug,” were “painfully real to me, as I rode one of those outrages once for nearly a quarter of a minute.” Most potent for Clemens was the show’s nationalist splendor, its “purely and distinctively American” entertainment. He signed the letter with his brand (“Yours Truly, Mark Twain”), thus giving Cody tacit license to use it as a blurb.
Cody took note. He inflated the show’s patriotic image and made it worthy of this celebrity endorsement. He also enlisted showman Nate Salsbury, who had gotten his start as a minstrel performer, to clean up the show’s act for Victorian consumption. Salsbury forbade the cast to drink. He retained many of the show’s original thrills—Bill’s Express ride, his Buffalo Hunt, and the breathtaking Deadwood stagecoach attack that gave select audience members the rides of their lives—but he set it to the music of a cowboy orchestra, adding a dainty Virginia reel on horseback and for a “grand finale” having Cody and his cowboys save a white frontier family from Indians. Salsbury killed much of the show’s genuine danger, and also its indulgence in reckless fun, but its new patriotic tribute to pure domestic values would have won even B. F. Keith’s approval.
The show could now be sold as “America’s National Entertainment” and boast its educational value for children. It also attracted a prized demographic that hitherto had eluded Cody: women. It wasn’t until 1885, however, when he discovered the small, young, pretty, frugal, sprightly, demure, but sharpshooting Annie Oakley, that Cody was ultimately able, in Warren’s terms, to “domesticate” the Western image. In Oakley’s clever hands—the same hands that embroidered her stage costumes and served tea to reporters in her humble trailer—even the deadly, phallic rifle took its place as a household appliance. With the help of Oakley, the ruder Calamity Jane, and a supporting cast of female performers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show cracked the mainstream code. No longer a celebration of the masculine abandon that galloped from one firefight to the next, it repackaged the frontier as a rousing triumph of the orderly American home.
While under Salsbury’s influence, the Wild West show revived a lawless frontier that had only recently been declared “closed.” In the popular imagination this extravagant lawlessness belonged to Americans. It bucked with the broncos, fought with the cowboys, and war-whooped with Cody’s bona fide Indians. It roused the crowd’s most savage wishes without ever making them enter the arena. The show no more threatened its audience’s safety than did contemporary tableaux vivants (live still lifes of classical set pieces that flattered the upper classes with Old World culture), but its sensations were shocking, and it made the crowd feel radically American.
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THE MASS-PRODUCED AMUSEMENTS of the postbellum period justified the smirking sense of frivolity that is commonly associated with “fun.” These pleasures were fleeting and superficial—by design. Nothing was at stake, except the ticket price. As enjoyable as it was to laugh at vaudeville or to gasp at the triple-somersaulting aerials of Barnum’s magnificent Matthews family, these were things you did “for fun”—which is to say, for nothing at all. You took no risks, and took no part. Even Cody’s spectators who were pulled from the crowd to ride in the Deadwood stage attack didn’t experience deadly frontier action; it only looked and felt as if they did.
Such fun was vicarious, as were its risks: spectators identified with dexterous athletes, death-defying acrobats, and rough-riding (retired) cowboys. Such fun was also voyeuristic, whether folks ogled the ribald antics of minstrels or the splendor of Native American powwows. It required no talent, no personal investment. Such no-stakes fun (call it entertainment) was readily transferable from the circus to vaudeville to nickelodeon and carnival, where automated games of skill and chance offered a limited sense of participation—shooting (corn kernels) like Annie Oakley, galloping (on a carousel) like Buffalo Bill. This closed commercial circuit made for a self-sustaining market. Its consumers were unspecialized, indiscriminate, omnivorous, expecting little more than varieties of distraction from one inexpensive venue to the next. The print media benefited on all levels—selling advertisements, publishing promotions, tracking and contriving celebrity gossip.
This system reinforced a severe double standard for what it meant to “have fun”: either, like Buffalo Bill, you achieve the impossible as the star onstage or you achieve the bare minimum in the anonymous crowd. Both were (and are) kinds of American “fun,” and both tried to approximate the participatory excitement that liberated early American crowds—at Merry Mount or on Congo Square, or in the unadulterated cussedness of Virginia City. Day and night, in “continuous performance,” performers replicated the merriment and daring of a bold young nation inventing itself. Season upon season, in row after row, American spectators took in the show, while the wide-open spaces for loose public pleasure quietly vanished like the western frontier.
Ironically, in the age of aggressive realism, the age of pragmatism and science, when the people had outgrown the midcentury gaslights of mystery, hoaxes, magic, and romance, the humbug of commercialism reached its adulthood. Fraud wasn’t a laughing matter anymore. It also wasn’t open to debate. Mark Twain verified Buffalo Bill’s story, and the product these pseudonymous moguls sold was so much more flavorful than the real, dusty thing—funner than an actual “Mexican Plug,” funner than a saddle-busting Dismal River roundup—so much funner that it handily passed the public taste test. Buffalo Bill’s great sleight of hand, what had him out-Barnuming P. T. Barnum, was to engineer a pleasure so irresistible that nobody cared how real it was.
America hasn’t been the same ever since.
THIS U.S. MARKET OF SEEING (and believing) achieved critical mass in 1893, at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. National religious leaders had convened months earlier, debating the exposition’s general morality and lobbying to have it closed on Sundays, but in the end they conceded it was an excellent way to showcase their various orthodoxies. So the exposition surged seven days a week, and everybody was satisfied. Between May and October of that year, 21.5 million customers paid fifty cents apiece to gape in wonder at the plaster-of-Paris White City and to gawk along the fair’s mile-long Midway Plaisance. The former was a temporary faux-classical metropolis devoted to the heights of civilization—plastic arts, music, technology, government. Charles Dudley Warner, Twain’s co-author of The Gilded Age, lectured there and described a viral disease he called “Barnumism”—a “lack of moderation” and a “striving to be sensational” that was warping literature, sermons, and the press. Of course Barnumism defined the entire exposition, all of which was drawn to immoderate scale—outsize buildings, miniaturized nations—but the designers pretended it was kept to the Midway (at the farthest possible remove from the fair’s art museum) where millions thronged along a Barnumesque esplanade of international “villages” and other gaudy attractions. The Midway offered a low-cultural universe in dozens of crass curios like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the bluntly Orientalist Streets of Cairo, where the belly dancer Little Egypt became a household name and spawned lurid copycats across the country. But whereas the Columbian Exposition was mostly about looking (at a Hawaiian volcano, a squat Eiffel Tower) and also about listening (to lectures and sermons and world music, from Poland’s Paderewski to African drummers), among its greatest hits were the oddball exhibits that invited full-body participation, especially the “captive balloon” rides soaring 1,500 feet above the city and George Ferris’s wildly popular Big Wheel. This 264-foot-wide stroke of genius is said to have saved the exposition from failure. It was also the future of commercialized fun.
One of the exposition’s millions of customers—a thirty-one-year-old honeymooner from Coney Island, New York—returned home determined to build a Big Wheel of his own. If any one American of his era valued the fun of participation, it was George C. Tilyou.
Coney Island had been Tilyou’s grammar school and college. Raised in his father’s resort, the Surf House, George was underfoot in the 1860s and 1870s when tourists arrived from the city dancing on pleasure boats and enjoyed what one guidebook called the “great democratic resort—the ocean bathtub of the great unwashed.” As a youth, that is, he saw the real deal: the fun of New York’s earliest “mixt Multitudes,” dating from Easter Mondays in the early eighteenth century to any given summer day at nineteenth-century Coney Island. The West Brighton beaches were famously diverse (men and women; rich and poor; whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Jews) and overwhelmingly crowded with easygoing folks who mingled, frolicked, danced, sang, lounged, and dallied in the waves. According to a reporter for the Brooklyn Standard Union, they seemed to “abandon all the restraint imposed by the rules of decency and morality.” Another reporter, from the New York Sun, wrote, “The opposite gender rush together at Coney Island and how they stay together and romp and tousle one another, and wrestle and frolic and maul each other, gray heads and youths alike, precisely as if the thing to do in the water was to behave exactly contrary to the manner of behaving anywhere else.” By all reports Tilyou was a pious young man, but these radically playful surroundings may well have loosened his spirit, for he grew to be an expert on “fun”—at least from an entrepreneurial angle.
In his youth, when the iconic Old Iron Pier split the sweeping beach between the tony east, with its white and sprawling Manhattan Hotel, and the demotic west, where the Tilyous lived, a notorious sub-industry preyed on the crowds—swindling them with cons and three-card monte, picking their pockets while they ogled “panel girls.” The Tilyous ran a respectable business, catering to well-connected families who took in the sea baths, clambakes, and beer gardens. George’s later life as a titanic showman, however, suggests he took cues from both of these worlds, from the sharpers on the beach and his good, godly family.
As a boy he was as enterprising as young P. T. Barnum. He started small, at fourteen, selling vials of saltwater and cigar boxes of sand for midwesterners to keep as souvenirs. The next year he got serious and bought a pair of horses, built a rickety driftwood coach, and spent the summer hauling tourists back and forth between the boat landing and the center of Coney Island’s amusements; his endeavor was so successful that he was quickly muscled out by the town’s political heavy, John Y. McKane. In the early 1880s, when Coney Island hosted Buffalo Bill’s first season and basked in the fame of its first roller coaster, George and his father opened a popular vaudeville theater and assembled a small real-estate empire. McKane, who by then was the corrupt police chief and notorious “King of Coney Island,” had become the family’s bête noire. His loose stance on prostitution and gambling, and his promotion of prizefighting and drinking on the Sabbath, helped West Brighton to become “Sodom by the Sea,” a fact that the God-fearing Tilyous loathed. It was bad for the soul and bad for business. They were the only local businessmen to speak out against him, arguing in 1887 for middle-class reforms to make West Brighton a respectable resort. This stunt cost the elder Tilyou his lease, which officially belonged to the police department.
But George kept socking away his profits, and in 1893, full of big ideas from his Chicago honeymoon, on which he had failed to buy the Ferris wheel (it was relocating to the St. Louis fair), he took out a loan, ordered a smaller one built to scale, and posted some humbug along Surf Avenue: “On This Site Will Be Erected the World’s Largest Ferris Wheel.” When it arrived, Tilyou’s wheel wasn’t half the size of the original, but it was higher and brighter than anything around. Soon there were knockoffs of the Midway Plaisance and Streets of Cairo, complete with camel rides and a fake Little Egypt. Following McKane’s conviction in 1894 for rigging Benjamin Harrison’s election, Tilyou’s vision for Coney Island blossomed. His sights were set on “clean fun.” More exhilarating than the roller coasters and the toboggan slides that had cropped up over the previous decade were his high-wire Aerial Slide and his Aqua Aerial Shuttle. The latter carried passengers on an 825-foot loop over the ocean’s crashing waves. And more spectacular even than Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park—which opened in 1895, featuring his world-famous Shoot the Chutes—was Tilyou’s response to it two years later, the twenty-two-acre Steeplechase Park, a midway boasting fifty mechanical amusements and encircled by a gravity-powered wooden racetrack: “A ride on the horses,” Tilyou’s promo claimed, “is a healthful stimulant that stirs the heart and clears the brain. It straightens out wrinkles and irons out puckers.… The old folks like it because it makes them young again. Everybody likes it because it’s cheap fun, real fun, lively fun.”
As a Coney Island native, Tilyou knew that Americans liked to participate, even to put themselves at risk—bodily risk, social risk. Americans were drawn to anything daring, whatever raised eyebrows or got a laugh. “We Americans want either to be thrilled or amused,” he said, “and we are ready to pay for either sensation.” (This last bit, payment, was key.) So to jangle their nerves and make them look silly—to give them their nickel’s worth—he sent them walking on the Earthquake Floor, zapped them in the Electric Seat, knocked them around on the Human Pool Table, splashed them through the Electric Fountain, rolled them around in the Barrel of Love, and sent them down the Funny Stairway, which, he attested, “caused laughter enough to cure all the dyspepsia in the world.” Tilyou knew from a life on the beach that people loved to get lost in the crowd, so he threw in New York’s largest ballroom and kept four bands in constant rotation. Perhaps his more genuinely fun-making machine—for riders and amused observers alike—was a contraption called the Human Roulette, or the Human Whirlpool, a ride later depicted in an esteemed Reginald Marsh painting and featured in Clara Bow’s blockbuster It, where it was rechristened again as the Social Mixer. The ride was simply a wide spinning cone, surrounded by a dish. Its riders gamely clung to the center until—when the thing really got going—its centrifugal force scattered them around the margins in a tangled, woozy, democratized mass of heads, legs, arms, and torsos.
By the turn of the century Tilyou had Steeplechase Parks in Atlantic City, St. Louis, and San Francisco. One was even featured in the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Eventually he housed all of his head-spinning rides in the five-acre so-called Pavilion of Fun, a family-oriented steel-and-glass enclosure where drinking, swearing, even slang were forbidden. (B. F. Keith’s standards for “polite vaudeville” were judiciously enforced.) Just as Cody sold his show as education, Tilyou promoted his rides’ health benefits and ballyhooed their high moral standards. Bucking the island’s lingering reputation as a “Sodom by the Sea,” he enlisted local churches as evangelizing “sales people” and offered special deals to Catholics and Lutherans and eventually to troops of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Apparently even his Blowhole Theater—which blew fast air up women’s skirts and shocked men’s privates for the hilarity of the audience—was winkingly excused under Tilyou’s good name. As the historian Kathy Peiss explains it, by risking a bit of “flirtation, permissiveness, and sexual humor,” while never slipping into outright obscenity, Tilyou discovered a winning “formula” and exercised a “sexual ideology that would become increasingly accepted by the middle class.”
Patrons of George C. Tilyou’s famous Human Whirlpool enjoy the gut-wrenching fun of centrifugal force. (Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library—Brooklyn Collection.)
Tilyou knew fun’s power to fling people together, and like an electrician he harnessed that power. Turning people loose on his maniacal machines, he zapped their restless American spirits in harmless, painless, ninety-watt jolts. And he probably provided some of the vigor he advertised: he pumped his patrons with perpetual shots of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine. By many accounts, Tilyou was a man who wanted to do some social good. He stood down scoundrels like John Y. McKane. He believed in his inventions and the virtue of commerce. He wanted to bring joy to modern society. At the same time, he followed all the Gilded Age guidelines: Barnum’s self-promotion and “politeness,” B. F. Keith’s “continuous performance,” the jostle and pitch of Cody’s stagecoach, and the celestial scale of the Ferris wheel. And he upheld his era’s standards of decency. He believed in his outfit, and it made him a mint. “Laughter,” he said, “made me a million dollars.”
But P. T. Barnum would have caught the humbug. Tilyou was such a subtle trickster that apparently he had tricked himself. The “fun” he hawked in his Pavilion of Fun wasn’t the real American deal—hardly the antics, pranks, and parties he witnessed as a boy growing up on the beach. Maybe he didn’t want it to be. Tilyou was selling a modern experience: cleaner, easier, with a quicker payoff. But unlike the old-style pranks and parties, this new stuff lacked fun’s social function—or, worse, it warped it. Tilyou may not have seen it that way. He saw his park as unadulterated fun. So would his son Edward, who would call it a “gigantic laboratory of human nature” that allowed customers to “cut loose from repressions and restrictions, and act pretty much as they feel like acting—since everyone else is doing the same.” A feeling of liberty may have prevailed at Coney Island, but the fun in this laboratory was a whole new species. Unlike the free-lance human pyramids that feature in countless Coney Island photographs, in which men and women in striped bathing costumes laugh and struggle to keep their balance, Tilyou’s machines got in between the people and forced them to take passive, defensive roles: trapped them in the Soup Bowl, whisked them along cables and groaning tracks, rolled them up high on the Ferris wheel.
With fewer chances in the vertical city for wild, expansive, liberating fun, crowds flocked to the beach to frolic in the waves, as they had done in decades past. But now they were halted several meters short by Tilyou’s acres of indoor distractions. (He was still selling sand by the seashore.) Tilyou’s machines looked friendly and familiar—they were cousins to appliances, elevators, and subways. But their threat was insidious. They hit the citizens at the level of their pleasures and created new tastes, desires, needs. It was that old West Brighton trick of picking men’s pockets while they gaped at “panel girls.”
FUN WAS INSTRUMENTAL in forming the best of the early American character. Playful risk and playful rebellion helped to loosen Puritanical authority. They motivated peaceful crowd action in the revolutionary era. They liberated African Americans in the face of tyranny. They helped to civilize the violent frontier. Fun, in these cases, lubricated the conflicts natural to a budding democracy. It rewarded citizens for acting boldly, for breaking barriers and speaking out. It brought them into amicable collisions with people they may have considered enemies.
But the “fun” engineered during the Gilded Age rewarded distinctly different behavior. It rewarded waiting, watching, and buying. Early photographs of the Pavilion of Fun show neck-craning crowds standing placidly by while the daring few are jerked in circles. Tilyou’s pleasures demanded submission, a submission even more extreme than at Barnum’s circuses or in Keith’s muffled theaters. His patrons were fixed, immobilized, trapped. But the mass of Americans were used to submission: no longer rebels, they were the stage rebel’s cheerleaders; they weren’t the cowboy, but his screaming fans; they weren’t the prankster, but the prankster’s dupes. As Americans became customers, consumers, and fans, the citizenry became ever more susceptible to the ingenious humbugs of bigger and bigger business. Not that many cared, however, not while they were having such fun.
Visiting Europeans sensed something was amiss. Maxim Gorky, having seen Coney Island in 1906, allegedly exclaimed, “What a sad people you must be!” Freud went there in 1909, the same year he concluded that America was “a gigantic mistake.”
Whether mechanical amusements were healthy, as Tilyou contended, or insidiously damaging, their legacy was mighty in the century to come. Progressives pushed back in the name of hands-on playtime: starting in 1906, the newly founded National Recreation Association oversaw the widespread construction of free urban playgrounds—promoting kid-powered fun on swings, seesaws, and merry-go-rounds and, by their mission, “encourag[ing] positive citizenship through supervised playground and leisure time activities.”
But the mechanical amusement industry, now a multibillion-dollar international juggernaut of interactive museums and theme parks, was only in its infancy, and already it was a formidable opponent.
There was more to turn-of-the-century fun, however, than what was found on Coney Island, and the best of it wasn’t supervised. During these same decades, in Missouri and Louisiana, a volcanic new variety of fun was erupting. Pulling “walk-arounds” down from the minstrel stage, freeing tricksters from the storybooks, early jazz was black folk fun destined to shatter America’s barriers—and to set people twirling all on their own.