The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

When the Russian writer Maxim Gorky visited Coney Island one summer night in 1907, he was struck with horror at the sight of the tens of thousands who flocked to the “phantom city of lights.” He was appalled by the cheap artificiality of the amusement parks: “A dozen of white buildings, monstrously diverse, not one with even the suggestion of beauty. They are built of wood, and smeared over with peeling white paint which gives them the appearance of suffering from the same skin disease…. The glare is everywhere, and nowhere a shadow.” But he was shocked even more by the individual in the plebeian crowds at Coney Island:

Despite his leftist leanings, Gorky saw not a playful crowd that evoked empathy, but a confused childlike throng that “turn about in a slow dance of weary boredom” resulting from “the pressure of self-disgust” that envelops their everyday lives.¹ In 1911, the American writer William Dean Howells found Blackpool much as Gorky had found Coney Island, a site of unconscious animal-like desire: “The crowd forever writhing, forever worming, squirming, up and down at Blackpool … looks like some immeasurable organism, some monster of the geologic prime, never still, but creeping with one side this way and the other that…. It was always awful to look upon, but awfulest at high noon, when it had swollen to its hugest, and was imaginably famishing for lunch with the hunger of some consuming insect horde.”²

Gorky’s assessment of Coney Island was typical of most intellectual observers of the New York resort, whether they were American or European. Howells’ perception of the Blackpool crowd, however, was not widely shared by British intellectuals. British elites were much more relaxed and tolerant of the Blackpool crowd, at least from the late nineteenth century. Its most consistently severe critics were drawn from those sectors of the organized working class where Protestant Nonconformity and romantic socialism met, expressing a strong preference for holidays involving fresh air, healthy exercise, striding out in attractive countryside or cycling along rural lanes, singing as they went in cheerful groups of like-minded holiday-makers. For such people Blackpool’s commercial success was an affront, representing the false values of popular entertainment capitalism, and inducing people to tire themselves out while wasting their money on tawdry artificial amusements.³ Elite readings of the playful crowds of Coney Island and Blackpool do not so much explain those crowds as show how the bourgeois outsider adapted to, shaped, and ultimately challenged industrial saturnalia. Differences in how British and American elites responded to the plebeian crowd of 1900 lead us directly into understanding differences in the “modernization” of the playful crowd later in the century.

For centuries, the so-called mob was equated with unreasonable desire—for food, revenge, or the property of others. After the American and especially the French revolutions, the literate public often believed that peasants and urban poor in crowds were immediate threats to political order, susceptible to the harangues of the agitator and professional revolutionary. The French Gustave Le Bon’s influential work, The Crowd (1895), updated this century-old view with concerns that new democratic politics threatened stability and rationality.⁴ The masses in the twentieth century, however, took on a quite different, though no less threatening, cast. New shopping and amusement sections of cities attracted crowds of people apparently uneducated, if no longer impoverished and ultimately politically less threatening. Still, the new age of mass production and cheap, fast transportation challenged the old social order by giving wage-earners access to leisure, goods, and mobility on an unprecedented scale. This generated fear and hostility among some outsiders, but more in the United States than in England.

Bourgeois observers of crowds, pouring off the train platforms at Coney Island, thought they saw desire unrestrained. The old world of suppressed longing, ritualistically liberated only during those rare saturnalian festivals that elites had sanctioned, was no more. Temporary escape from the most pressing aspects of poverty allowed these desires to be satisfied nearly anytime or anywhere. No longer was the full expression of appetites dulled by hunger, sublimated into religious fervor, work, or war; nor was it confined to the indulgence of the rich and powerful. Civilization faced a new situation that seemed to threaten vaunted traditions of self-control and edification that an educated elite was supposed to perpetuate. Uprooted from their villages and the control of clergy and rural gentry, as well as custom, gossip and neighborly surveillance, these crowds were yet unprepared to embrace the high culture of the urban elite; they seemed to be easily lured by the bright lights and promise of immediate pleasure on the street. They appeared to drown cultivated values and civility with the wash of their raucous ways and collective economic power. Elites saw mass culture as ephemeral, rooted neither in the permanence and conservatism of folk culture nor the timeless values of high culture. Instead, mass culture was superficial and its votaries were susceptible to the latest sensation. American writer Rollin Hartt made this perspective plain: “Incapable, commonly of introspection, [the Coney Island visitor] has experienced an interval of dazzling, astounding self-revelation. Out of his littleness, he rises to momentary greatness—feels himself terribly, almost especially alive.”⁵

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, middle-class observers repeatedly painted this image of immigrants at Coney Island. Such a picture was perhaps mostly famously, though more generally, drawn by the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset in his The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Ortega shared with most intellectuals of the period a fear that the “spoiled child,” the mass of wage earners recently enfranchised with higher wages and increased leisure, was imposing “its own desires and tastes by means of material pressure” on the cultured minority.⁶ Ortega’s representation of the rational individual besieged by the crowd beating down the gates of civilization was shared by many who wrote about the pleasure crowd early in the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology (1922) borrowed from Le Bon’s thinking about the irrational crowd, redirecting concern about its dangers from the political to the cultural world. On the street, he argued, the masses regressed to the mental state of savages or children because of their inability to sublimate their libidinal drives.⁷

The problem of the playful crowd at Coney Island was more than its unrestrained hedonism and irrationality accelerated by affluence. It was also the dilemma of “boredom” as Gorky saw it and self-destructiveness (or, in Freud’s terms, the “death instinct”) that seemed to be released when workers had time free from work and other regular obligations.⁸ Others saw ennui less as a natural trait of the masses than as a consequence of modern technology, work, and media. For an observer of Coney Island in 1921, Bruce Bliven, “A palate dulled with condiments must be over-stimulated before it can taste at all. A mind buffeted by the whirlwind of life in New York, assaulted by the roar of machinery, excited by the pace at which we spin along, learns to regard a shout as the normal tone, and cannot hear with comfort anything less strident.” Not surprisingly, Bliven insisted, “The very architecture roars at you.” The endless quest for stimulation led to an absurd attraction to danger: “A chief pleasure of battered souls, one notices at once, is battered bodies” in the joyous submission to the bounces and jars of mechanical rides.⁹

The same processes that led to overstimulation also produced passivity. Richard Edwards’ 1910 evaluation of Popular Amusements makes the point plainly in the context of the American amusement park: “The spontaneity of playful activities, and the originality which creates them are being lulled to sleep by the habit of being amused…. The lust for profit has picked open the bud. It is no cause for wonder that youth wilts under the process.” The young especially were “easy prey for exploitation, lured into immorality under the stress of unusual excitement or temptation in the glittering or unlighted portions of these parks.”¹⁰

These writers saw danger in the Coney Island crowd, not just the desiring individual. Despite all the complaints about “passivity,” most critics perceived that the masses were more than the flypaper of fads and fancies. They represented a new kind of social interaction. These crowds, intellectuals believed, did not consist of family, friends, and neighbors well known to each other; in these throngs, even traditional routines of greeting and ritualized conversation seemed to have disappeared. People in the street crowd interacted, not personally, but indirectly through the display of their clothes and the passive sharing of theater or movie images. This culture of the street seemed to suppress individuality and what was left of traditional social interaction and constraint.¹¹

The apparent anonymity of the pleasure crowd especially distressed conservative observers. As Lindsay Denison lamented at Coney Island (1905): “There is scarcely any variety of human flotsam and jetsam that is not represented in its permanent population…. Every defaulting cashier, every eloping couple, every man or woman harboring suicidal intent … comes flocking to it from every part of the land.” And at Coney Island, pleasure crowds meet a crowd of sellers: “a concentrated sublimation of all the mean, petty, degrading swindles which depraved ingenuity has ever devised to prey upon humanity.” Bliven revealed his prejudice when he complained that “Coney is one more place from which the native Yankee stock has retreated before the fierce tide of the south European and Oriental…. The Coney crowd, once or twice removed from Europe, has only partially digested the Anglo-Saxon Puritanism which forms the framework of American manners.”¹²

The crowd at Coney represented not only the presumed crudity of the European peasant, but also the attempt of the children of those “peasants” to escape from traditional ways in the new world of fads and Americanisms. Some may argue that the melting pot does not melt, notes Bliven. But “Helene—whose mother’s name was Yashyanka—knows better. Her aunt back in Bulgaria has never seen a bathtub, cannot read or write, and sews up her children every autumn for the winter, while Helene is a cash girl at Bulger’s Big Store, has seen eighty-six installments of ‘The Risks of Ruth’ in the movies, and buys the Evening Journal every night.” And, says Bliven, she went to Coney Island, because it, like all the other novelties of American consumerism, liberated her from her mother’s “Bulgarian” ways. More ominously, the Coney Island pleasure crowd seemed to threaten the moral stability of the family: “The home in the modern city,” noted American Maurice Davie, “can no longer be the center of life in leisure hours…. All must go away when in search of pleasure and recreation.” Street pleasures of the city separated generations by allowing the young to escape to the anonymity of the crowd.¹³

Even more, critics insisted that the crowd amplified the irrational longings of individuals. American sociologist Edward Ross saw the “crowd self” as “credulous,” “ephemeral,” and even “immoral.” Following Le Bon, Ross lamented: “Masked by their anonymity, people feel free to give in to the expression of their feelings…. To be seen, one does not simply show one’s self; one gesticulates.” James Huneker fretted that instead of recreation that would improve body and mind, “Unreality is as greedily craved by the mob as alcohol by the dipsomaniac.” Once en masse, “humanity sheds its civilisation and becomes half child, half savage.”¹⁴

The social position of many critics explains much of this rhetoric. As inheritors of a cultivated tradition dependent upon old money or position, they were sensitive to their loss of status and felt deprived of influence over a business culture that seemed to be progressively less subservient to educated tastemakers. They saw themselves in competition with the Barnums who marketed the “easy” entertainment of circuses and sideshows, movies, and popular magazines and paid scant attention to the opinions of educated minorities. Many shared Ortega’s keenly felt belief that the formerly submissive masses no longer gave respect to the elite, reflecting the growing social distance between the educated few and the crowd.¹⁵

These American reactions to the playful plebeian crowd went far beyond most of the British comment, and we shall see that during the first half of the twentieth century writings on the Blackpool crowds were generally much friendlier in tone. Despite the presumed democratic preferences of Americans, elites, even among the ranks of early-twentieth-century Progressivists, were more uniformly critical of that crowd than were their British counterparts. American reformers were especially concerned about the money that immigrant families spent at Coney Island. These “residual” forms of saturnalia seemed to mock the virtues of familial thrift and prudence that Progressivists saw as key to Americanization.¹⁶ An even more forceful wedge separating American elites from immigrant crowds was moral and religious. Brooklyn’s Protestant elite wanted to purge Coney of its German, Irish, and Italian Catholics who opposed their Sabbatarian and temperance projects. The Brooklyn Union repeatedly attacked McKane in the late 1880s, often with the support of the famous scold Anthony Comstock, for the gambling and whoring on the shore. The hostility to immigrant crowds could hardly be clearer than in these words by Dudley Herbert Cox, pastor at a prominent Brooklyn Congregational Church:

Still, not all intellectuals and middle-class reformers, even in the United States, condemned the saturnalian crowd or attempted to reform it. The Victorian tradition of enjoying low life that brought elites to boxing matches, whorehouses, and gambling dens certainly survived into the early twentieth century; but there was more to it than that. Julian Ralph encouraged his bourgeois readers to go to Coney Island’s Bowery for the “oom-pah bands of rusted brass.” The raw energy and natural vulgarity of the crowd amused Ralph and he assured readers that the open air diluted the smell and noise of the crowd. Others like short story writer William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) were less patronizing and more sympathetic when they saw a raw honesty and vitality in the plebs. Even Huneker recognized that the thick mass of humanity he viewed at Coney’s beaches on a hot August evening in 1915 really consisted of “sweethearts in pairs, families in three or four, six or seven, planted close together…. It was impossible for such a large body of people to be more orderly, more decent.” Although 1.75 million were taken by rail to Coney on June 30, 1901, a New York World reporter could still claim that it was a “decorous orderly throng.” The painter John Sloan delighted in the “roar of natural ‘vulgar’ mirth” when crowds saw “lingerie displays” as women slid down the Bamboo Slide at Luna Park. Richard Le Gallienne recognized that even modern people needed a saturnalia: “Coney Island is the Tom-Tom of America. Every nation has, and needs—and loves—its Tom-Tom. It has its needs of orgiastic escape from respectability—that is, from the world of What-we-have-to-do into the world of What-we-would-like-to-do, from the world of duty that endureth forever into the world of joy that is graciously permitted for a moment.”¹⁸

A British observer, H. S. Ashbee, was favorably disposed to the unthreatening vigor of Coney and its crowds as early as 1882: “The people I saw reminded me strongly of those one finds at Ramsgate or Margate in the summer months with an admixture of coloured folk…. There appeared to be no restriction as to drinking; and yet I was agreeably struck with the fact that during the whole day I met no one the worse for liquor, heard no bad language, witnessed no disputes; everybody conducted himself in an orderly and decorous manner.” Years later, another Briton, E. V. Lucas, was equally supportive of Coney Island and its crowd, comparing it with Blackpool in August: “High spirits are the rule, and impropriety is the exception. Even in the auditorium at Steeplechase Park, where the cognoscenti assemble to witness the discomfiture of the uninitiated, there is nothing but harmless laughter as the skirts fly up before the unsuspected blast. Such a performance in England, were it permitted, would degenerate into ugliness…. But the essential public chastity of the Americans—I am not sure that I ought not here to write civilization of the Americans—emerges triumphant.”¹⁹

The natural vitality of the Coney crowd was sometimes seen in the children, especially on the beach, dressed in “pretty holiday clothes … racing up and down the sand, taunting and defying the sea.” More typical, however, for the early twentieth century was an awareness of the naïve and natural sensuality of the adult crowd. At Coney, the painter Reginald Marsh delighted in the unassuming joy and pleasure of the crowd that contrasted so sharply with the constraint of his own genteel background. His “George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park” portrays a lush sensuousness in the joyous poses of women on the Human Whirlpool.²⁰ More typical, however, was the abstract, if ambiguous empathy of writer Robert Neal: “Bare human nature, naïve and unashamed, stands up at Coney and cries out ‘Brother’ and the unanimity with which human nature responds is hopeful though disconcerting.”²¹

American economist Simon Patten (1852–1922) shared in this more optimistic assessment of the pleasure crowd. He argued that affluence would elevate mass desire and create a wider, more democratic culture rather than simply threaten high culture or release libidos from the constraints of scarcity. In 1915, following current economic thinking, Patten argued that, as scarcity disappeared, any new surplus could be devoted to refined recreation and the arts. For Patten, technology did not unleash chaotic desire but rather freed people from these ancient traditional compensatory reactions to scarcity (gluttony and drunkenness).²² Patten recognized that work and traditional family and community structures would no longer satisfy social and psychological needs. Instead, the new consumer culture on the street and at the seashore would have to provide the “vital excitement” that was absent from the monotony of modern mechanical jobs. Patten also saw opportunities for uplift in the “amusements and recreations of parks, theatres, ‘Coney Islands,’ department stores, settlements, free lectures and socialized schoolhouses.” Patten made no effort to distinguish these “grouped pleasures” into good or bad, for he found them all cultivating a common culture.²³

Reformers often recognized the impossibility of isolating the individual from the pleasure throng. While the American James Sizer noted that “the amusement park simply charges the lonely individual ‘admission’ to the crowd,” he also recognized that there was no alternative to popular commercial leisure. Sizer assumed that the “lower races” (blacks and the white immigrant working class) would not respond to precept and theory to raise them culturally. Instead, “Amusement is the line of least resistance…. [for] amusement is stronger than vice, and it alone can be depended upon to fill the vacant hours of the millions of people, who are coming into their inheritance of leisure.” European-style paternalism (with subsidized summer camps, for example) would not work in “democratic” America. This, of course, was the approach of the American world’s fairs with their midways that attracted far more visitors than did their enlightening and educational “White Cities.” Simon Patten saw Coney Island as a site for the “pleasure economy,” meaning that it and other venues of amusement could turn “stragglers of industry … into the steady ranks of disciplined workers.” The “zest for amusement,” Patten claimed, “urges [wage earners] to submit to the discipline of work, and the habits formed for the sake of gratifying their tastes make their regular life necessary in industry easier and more pleasant.”²⁴ Modern saturnalia, Patten believed, not only was a safety value of social tensions, but also reinforced the industrial work ethic.

Blackpool’s plebeian throngs were treated in a generally more positive way than those of Coney Island. The consensus of contemporary observers, right through from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, was much closer to the views of Patten or (especially) Ralph than to Cox’s condemnatory tone. This was partly because by the 1880s Blackpool’s working-class visitors had already modified their behavior sufficiently to disarm important aspects of the criticism of their “betters.” During the transition to working-class domination, between the late 1840s and the 1870s, local criticism of the behavior of the “excursionists” who formed the original core of the playful crowd had sometimes been severe. The early cheap trippers drew the fire of a local correspondent in 1849, who complained of “railway mammon” desecrating the Sabbath by bringing in flashily-dressed “barbers’ apprentices and shoeblacks,” ignorant of social decencies, who bathed naked, drank heavily in the “low public houses,” and defied the “bewildered” policemen. This was a regular refrain for thirty years, although by the 1870s distinctive territories were being established. On the Central Pier, according to Ben Brierley, “th’ bacca reech [tobacco reek] smells stronger, an’ th’ women are leauder abeaut th’ meauth. We know what class their return tickets are.” It was in this decade that the London Times could still describe complaints about the scruffy dress of Blackpool excursionists, with their aggressive short clay pipes, cruelty to donkeys, spitting and swearing. The 1870s also saw the highest level of drunkenness convictions at Blackpool, but the number of prosecutions declined thereafter even as the crowds continued to grow. From the 1880s onwards the Blackpool crowd generated steadily more favorable comment from a cross-section of sources, national as well as local.²⁵

Positive press comment on Blackpool’s playful crowd in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century came from some seemingly unlikely sources. As early as 1883 the Methodist Recorder praised the sobriety of the well-dressed holiday crowds, and commented that the spectacle of “vast masses of people” enjoying themselves rationally (a keyword of the times) at Blackpool was “one of the sublimest triumphs of modern civilization.” At the turn of the century the Daily Mail praised the orderliness of the “amazing crowd” on the sea front, which transferred factory working hours to the seaside holiday: “By seven o’clock it is out, determined not to miss any ozone. It paddles methodically…. It samples one sixpenny sideshow after another with stolid perseverance…. Then towards one o’clock the whole of it marches off to dinner.” A similar mass clearance of the streets took place at teatime, and “at half-past ten everything stops.”²⁶

Aspects of such commentaries might seem patronizing, but the crowd had certainly become an object of good-humored interest rather than fear. Journalists noted the working-class visitors’ concern for value for money, their huge appetites, the women’s unembarrassed wearing of hair curlers at mealtimes (a trait that persisted into the 1960s), and the group photographs posed in shirtsleeves, rather than drunkenness or threat. In 1897, Blackpool’s own propaganda could confidently endorse this picture: “The Piers are covered with living streams of people…. It is possible to be carried along by the merry crowd and to be infected by the contagious joviality.” Le Bon’s critique of the crowd hardly fit this image of Blackpool.²⁷

These views extended widely. Sam Fitton, a Lancashire dialect poet, and cartoonist for the trade union newspaper the Cotton Factory Times, cast a quizzical but not unsympathetic eye on the Blackpool holiday crowds.²⁸ Asking “Where for our holidays?” he made his own position clear: the characteristic masculine group behavior of drinking, strutting, parading and going off with young women at a big popular resort was not for him, but in his good-humored verse he eventually recognized that this was what a lot of people enjoyed, and that it was not up to him to tell them what they should prefer. The socialist Arthur Laycock went to live in Blackpool and offered a much more positive view in his novel Warren of Manchester (1906). He gloried in the promenade with its “jostling, jovial crowds…. A truly wonderful, a marvellously impressive sight, these tens of thousands, all on holiday bent, all in happy holiday mood, genial, jovial, and for the most part well-conducted and orderly.”²⁹ Laycock was joined in this frame of mind by the Bolton socialist Allen Clarke, who in 1899 had denounced the Blackpool seaside holiday as an unhealthy extension of year-round stress, but subsequently went to live in Blackpool and defended the happy holiday crowds that surrounded him, while trying to persuade them of the health-giving benefits of excursions to the surrounding countryside.³⁰

Even within the ranks of Liberal Protestant Nonconformity, the Blackpool Times at Whitsuntide 1904 commented favorably on the crowded Promenade as an open leisure space where the classes could mix to their mutual benefit: “A common meeting ground this for all, for the merchant and the mechanic, the lady of fashion and the factory lass, for the plutocrat and the plebeian, the mightiest and the meanest. We all commingle on these spacious parades by the sea, for the time being having no castes, no precise distinctions of ‘proper’ and ‘select’ persons.”³¹ This at once suspends distinctions, reduces the crowd to an assemblage of unclassifiable individuals, and at the same time presents it as a healthy, homogeneous moral whole.

This was to be the predominant tone of interwar commentary on the Blackpool crowd and how Blackpool preferred to represent itself. The Official Guide of 1924 even won the endorsement of that classic Establishment figure the Bishop of Manchester: “Blackpool is rendering a really great service to the country by its ample provision of jolly and wholesome amusement.”³² These cheerful images of Blackpool epitomized what were coming to be seen as traditional English virtues of good humor, class harmony, and shared pleasures. This self-image became easier to sustain as the town invested in parks and promenades in the 1920s and 1930s. But landscape architect T. H. Mawson articulated this vision in darker social terms when he cited a Lancashire businessman: “Blackpool stands between us and revolution. May it long continue as the protector of social order.” After months of disciplined labor in the industrial towns, “once a year (the workers) must either burst out or go to Blackpool; and there they go, and after a fortnight they come back, quietened down and ready for work again.”³³ The reference to a fortnight was optimistic (few had more than a week of holiday), but this perception that Blackpool was a bulwark against social revolution certainly reflected the ancient view of saturnalia as a safety valve and affirmed Patten’s modern notions of consumption and leisure as guarantors of industrial discipline.

This positive vision of Blackpool continued into the 1930s in the writings of journalists and novelists. In August 1934 William Holt wrote a series of profiles of Blackpool and its holidaymakers for Manchester’s Daily Dispatch.³⁴ His descriptions of the crowds at Bank Holiday weekend could appear condescending when he wrote “The sands were swarming like the banks of the Ganges, multi-coloured in the intense light; and there was a confused murmur of joy everywhere.” Yet, he also saw the crowd as “Something trying to express itself. Something struggling to be born out of all [the people’s] powerful will for life and joy, which murmurs and becomes more highly-coloured when the sun comes out…. I can no longer watch individuals. I can only watch the crowd with wonder and amazement.” Yet Holt also understood that crowds consisted of small groups of friends and family parties and offered sympathetic descriptions of their little extravagances in drink or gambling or visiting peepshows or the Chamber of Horrors at the waxworks on the Golden Mile, of the difficulties they faced in making their savings last through the week, and of the way the crowd still kept factory hours. Holt discussed the mysterious pleasures to be found in screaming and stimulating (or simulating) fear on the rides at the Pleasure Beach. He also enjoyed the characteristic “Lancashire singing” in the “song bazaars” where sheet music was sold along the promenade. He endorsed the picture of Blackpool as a resort that brings the classes together. Above all, writing for his populist Northern England audience, Holt was at pains to celebrate the overriding virtues of this vast and mysterious crowd:

The novelist and playwright J. L. Hodson, looking back in 1937 to the Carnival of 1923, emphasized the “generous note” in holidaymakers’ spending, and the eagerness with which they pursued the fleeting pleasures of the holiday: “Lancashire might be faring badly in a chaotic world, the pleasant and prosperous places in England might be a long way off, but these indomitable cotton operatives and engineers and coalminers were scraping their bits o’ brass together and chancing their arms with a few days at Blackpool.” Frank Tilsley, writing about “Northpool” in the 1930s found an innocent crowd, whose members assert themselves as individuals within the collectivity: “Sometimes the fellows and the girls linked arms—ten, a dozen, a score of them, all arm-in-arm, walking jauntily along and singing at the top of their voices.” Tilsley’s description of the crowd arriving at Northpool station sums up the position: “the crowd … laughed and shouted to each other, blinked at the sunshine and anxiously counted their children, and sniffed the sea air as though it was altogether different from the sort of air to which they were accustomed, as, indeed, it was.” Here were pictured families, workmates, people from the same towns and neighborhoods, re-creating their societies at the seaside rather than fragmenting or dissolving them—in sharp contrast with much of the critical discourse on Coney Island. And, as D. L. Murray pointed out in another Blackpool novel, they were welcomed in a relaxed way by the locals, and the “serene and orderly throng” was controlled unobtrusively by police who were “as composed as a country constable in a village high street.”³⁶

Nor were these perceptions confined to journalists and novelists. Some British intellectuals challenged the negative psychological assessment of the “mass man,” arguing that it was based on a “profound ignorance of common life.” These were the words of C. D. Burns written in 1932 who found in new technology and rising wages a new culture that would emerge from the “energetic” crowds of youth and in “fellowship with strangers.” Like Patten, Burns believed that the crowded streets of shopping districts and the promenades of seaside resorts were creating a “common feeling.” These crowds were leading to a “democratic civilization” and a “freer and subtler community between all men.”³⁷ For Burns the nostalgia for nature and “natural communities” was outdated, elitist, and isolated the bourgeois intellectual from the wider world. A greater openness to plebeian pleasures was also expressed in Ivor Brown’s The Heart of England (1935). The English were “a cheerful people with a good notion of how to enjoy themselves” when they journeyed to Blackpool, the “capital of pleasure,” and did not need “urban intellectuals” telling them the meaning and means of “true” pleasure.³⁸ A young intellectual from the team of “Mass-Observers” who visited Blackpool in 1938 to make an “anthropological” study of its working-class visitors wrote this about the crowd enjoying themselves at the Savoy Dance Hall:

Across a wide range of observers, we see an extraordinarily similar message: The Blackpool experience provided the working class a well-deserved respite from labor and affirmed the good natured character of Northern wage-earners and the essential social harmony of British people. This perspective was at times self-serving and even illusory, but it made for a surprising acceptance of the commercial culture of the Blackpool crowd well into the twentieth century.

In contrast to Coney Island, critics of the Blackpool holiday crowds were drawn disproportionately from within the working class. They came from the serious-minded strata, dominated by skilled and white-collar workers, where Protestant Nonconformity met idealistic socialism in organizations like the Independent Labour Party and the Clarion socialist cycling clubs. Their publications contained eloquent denunciations of the ways in which Blackpool’s artificial and commercial attractions diverted the workers away from the healthy, communal pleasures of walking and cycling in the uncommercial countryside, damaging their health and corrupting their morals in the process.

To Katherine St John Conway, writing in the Workmen’s Times in 1893, “Blackpool was … hideous—a place where many men and women gather together who know not what is or what might be, who think Socialists idle dreamers, and England a glorious country so long as she keeps the cotton trade…. On the grey sea wall were grouped the sunshades and frocks of the lasses who learn to shriek instead of to laugh, and to parade instead of to stroll.” The Labour Leader in 1904 denounced the waste of hard-won savings and the diversion of new-found purchasing power into sordid commercial channels: “Every where you see evidence that those who set the fashion at Blackpool look upon the British working-man as one who can be got to part with a copper on the very slightest pretext…. The whole town seems filled with a frenzy to imitate the worst vices of the idle class…. It would be a sorry result if we won elbow-room for the working man only to let him build a third-rate imitation of modern commercial conditions with rolled gold for the real article.”⁴⁰ T. A. Leonard, a Congregationalist minister from the Lancashire weaving town of Colne, set up the Co-operative Holidays Association in 1893 to provide cheap-countryside holidays for those who might otherwise be drawn into the “whirligig” of Blackpool, with its “brass bands and bluster” and “shady delights” that held back the moral and intellectual progress of the working classes.⁴¹

Carrying on this critical tradition were the nostalgic intellectuals of the mid-1930s who lamented that the Blackpool crowd had lost some of its old spontaneity and vitality. The writer J. B. Priestley fell into this category, complaining in 1934 that, “From the few glimpses I have had of it since the war, I gather the impression that it lacks some of its old genuine gaiety. Its amusements are becoming too mechanised and Americanised…. It has developed a pitiful sophistication—machine-made and not really English—that is much worse than the old hearty vulgarity.” He was nostalgic for the “energetic old Blackpool, crowded with vital beings who burst out of their factories for the annual spree as if the boilers had exploded and blown them out.”⁴² Even so, Priestley would have preferred workers to appreciate the rambling clubs.

The British writer Walter Greenwood, famous for his novels of working-class life in the Manchester and Salford of the Depression, took an even more pessimistic view of Blackpool, but one that harked back even more directly to the critiques of the early socialists: “No other county than Lancashire could have produced Blackpool…. It is a product of unconscious revolt, revolt of the masses against the horror of living 51 overworked weeks in hideous industrial towns. They want a holiday place in which they can give vent to their hysteria. Blackpool caters for this.”⁴³ These views of Blackpool were certainly in a minority, and surprisingly so, in the light of the American case. But that critique of Blackpool responded to and helped to create a legacy of opposition to commercial culture and a nostalgia for “traditional” working-class life that shaped Beamish and other industrial museums later in the twentieth century.

Intellectuals, especially in the United States, despaired at understanding why wage-earners would be attracted to the seaside crowds. A revealing example of perplexity was American James Huneker’s question: “Why after the hot, narrow, noisy, dirty streets of the city, do these same people crowd into the narrower, hotter, noisier, dirtier, wooden alleys of Coney?”⁴⁴ Huneker assumed that urban working people would seek a leisure site that reflected his own longings for escape from the city and its polymorphous crowds. They should go to the countryside or quiet seaside. This desire had a long pedigree with modern roots in the British romantic longing for villages, empty shorelines, and mountains. The “picturesque” gained a fashionable ascendancy from the mid-eighteenth century alongside the dominant vogue for taking the cure at elite healing wells and beach resorts, many of which also were or soon became social settings, like Bath, Tunbridge Wells, and Brighton. The fashion for scenic tours and the emergence of the English Lake District and the Scottish Highlands as tourist destinations were also part of this process.⁴⁵

In the American colonies, Newport, Rhode Island served the same purpose, attracting wealthy visitors from as far away as the Carolinas. This resort’s pristine isolation attracted the rich to its warm Gulf Stream waters and cooling summer breezes. Verandas and piazzas for strolling or sitting in rocking chairs allowed plenty of opportunity to see and be seen. The slow pace and ritualized activities prompted complaints of boredom. But in the nineteenth century seaside resorts like Rockaway Beach on Long Island and Long Branch on the New Jersey shore, promised distance from the hoi polloi, an opportunity to win social status and to enjoy the restful beauty of nature. In the interior, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia and other health resorts followed the decorum of Bath—though northern resorts like Saratoga Springs were more diverse and less slavish of British models, allowing a mixed urban crowd not only to promenade and dine, but also to gamble at horse races. These retreats provided an alternative to the urban pleasure gardens, which, despite intentions of founders, could not maintain a high social tone because of their proximity to working-class neighborhoods. Of course, the east end of Coney Island with its Oriental and Manhattan hotel complexes was part of the same effort. The point of these sites was as much to be free from the plebeian crowd as it was to socialize with one’s own. The genteel writer William Dean Howells complained of excursionists at New York’s Rockaway Beach who made him nervous though they were an “entirely peaceable multitude.” Despite differences, all of these resorts were sites of respectable gatherings, not crowds, where tradition not novelty prevailed.⁴⁶

The genteel ideal was about more than exclusive socializing; an essential ingredient was the contemplation of nature. Vistas of green hills, mighty rivers, cascading falls or, of course, foaming surf and ocean breezes were required for genteel resorts. The site of natural beauty became part of the American Grand Tour and the See America First movement after the Civil War. While refined socializing did not easily cross class lines, middle class reformers hoped to enlist the working classes (and especially their children) into a mutually uplifting love of nature and thus to separate them from the saturnalian crowd. The New York Times (1866) found that “a tumble in the surf” was a “healthful and resting exercise,” especially for those “forced to ply their busy tools in almost air-tight shops where the blast of furnaces consume what little air they might have.” In the United States, organizations like the Fresh Air Fund (beginning in 1877) sponsored summer vacations for tenement children in the homes of suburban and rural families. The scout and summer camp movements hoped to bring children from all social ranks into a personal engagement with nature.⁴⁷ More important, perhaps, in reaching out to youth from wage-earning families were the urban playgrounds. With roots in philanthropy, the Playground Association (founded in 1907) was the voice of attempts by municipal playground staffs to organize games on city playgrounds to lure youth from the unsupervised street.⁴⁸

British elites likewise attempted to train working class youth to appreciate nature through patronage of sports clubs, company-run summer camps, and playground centers. Notable was the interwar experiment, the Duke of York’s Camp, where equal numbers of public (elite) school and working-class boys shared games and bonfires. The object was to create an uplifting but pleasurable setting where organizers encouraged self-discipline and group loyalty.⁴⁹ Beginning with a meeting of Liverpool ramblers in 1929, the Youth Hostel Association (YHA) attracted elite patronage but also offered low-cost country holidays for hikers and cyclists, promising interclass fellowship along with the beauty and serenity of nature. By 1939, half a million nights were spent in YHA facilities across Britain, an impressive statistic which nevertheless has to be compared with Blackpool’s claim to seven million visitors at this time.⁵⁰

There was also a strong independent British working-class “outdoor movement” with deep Victorian roots in footpath preservation, campaigns to protect access to open land, and working-class enthusiasm for botany and geology. This developed into the rambling (or hiking) and cycling clubs that proliferated from the 1890s and reached a peak in the 1930s. Working-class mountaineers and climbers were not always welcomed by the middle-class professionals who had been developing the sport since the 1850s and 1860s. But love of the outdoors, and especially of wild upland landscapes, was present at all levels of British society. The movement for “rational holidays” through the Co-operative Holidays Association, founded in 1891, and its offshoot the Holiday Fellowship (1913) pulled together didactic middle-class influences and working-class lovers of the open air in a movement that was directly opposed to the Blackpool style of high-pressure commercial holiday. The 1890s also saw the emergence of the Clarion movement, with its socialist ethos of returning the enjoyment of the land to the people.⁵¹ These activities attracted only a minority, but they enjoyed a measure of respectability except when they threatened established property rights when trespassing (in the name of the “right to roam”) through treasured places like Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout.⁵²

In contrast to the United States, where working-class love of nature more often took the form of hunting and fishing in small groups, the British tradition of proletarian social solidarity in nature offered a counter to the commercial crowd, and helped to shape the ethos that led to Beamish. Still, in neither Britain nor the United States did this kind of holiday ever come to rival the resort-based vacation with its crowds and “artificial” amusements: the excitements of the attractions and crowds of the Golden Mile of Blackpool or the Bowery of Coney Island appealed more to people whose lives were weighed down with routine and isolating work than did the tranquil contemplation of nature.⁵³

The attack on the saturnalian crowd revealed a third component of the middleclass tourism aesthetic. In addition to a longing for orderly, even ritualized, social gatherings and personal encounters with nature, critics often shared a nostalgic impulse. Hostility toward the novelty and flash of Coney Island often betrayed a desire for the return to the old “picturesque features of ocean commerce” or even the old picnic parks of “noble elms and oaks and beeches.” Typical were the sentiments of William Sydney Porter, who lamented the passing of beach sand and clam chowder remembered from his youth at Coney and the coming of the phony “red-flannel eruption of Mt. Vesuvius” at Dreamland in the 1900s.⁵⁴

At the turn of the twentieth century, intellectuals longed even more for their “lost childhood” memories of rural and village life. Enthusiasm for the English countryside and “Merrie England” crossed class and political lines in Britain: In the 1920 and 1930s, it attracted the socialist George Lansbury for whom England was still a “land of hedgerows and lanes” as much as the conservative Stanley Baldwin. Even northern textile workers dreamed of traveling to the country lanes in Devon when they could afford nothing more than a few days of holiday at the nearby commercial resort of Blackpool.⁵⁵

Accompanying this British longing for a visit to a lost past was a romantic assumption that the “real” people came from such an imagined realm, whether it was composed of simple rural craftsmen who practiced “folk” customs or courageous fishermen who had a natural bond with their shorelines and harbors. Efforts to preserve or revive customs such as Morris dancing and “folk” singing from the late nineteenth century were part of this romantic nostalgia, which was shared and propagated by intellectuals like the literary critic F. R. Leavis.⁵⁶ Cyril Joad lamented that “we are deprived of the social pleasure of those who live in a community”; instead we pass our lives “in perpetual transit from workshop and dormitory” and, while on holiday, we destroy real Dorset villages with the “all conquering car.”⁵⁷

Although Americans had only a short history, they too longed for the “lost” simplicity of the small town and rural life, and of the common people who lived in these worlds.⁵⁸ In 1929, Robert Lynd contrasted the recently departed intimacy of the small town of the 1890s with the corrosive impact of modern materialism, mass media, and the automobile on the small midwestern city of “Middletown”: “In the [eighteen] nineties, we were all much more together…. We rolled out a strip of carpet and put cushions on the porch step to take care of the unlimited overflow of neighbors that dropped by.”⁵⁹ There was an endless longing for an imagined childhood in a place where no one really lived and surrounded by people who existed only in a sanitized past or a fairy tale world.

The quest to recover this community and to restore its memory would lead to “heritage tourism.” In 1891, Artur Hazelius reconstructed a Swedish village and craft life at Skansen near Stockholm. This open air “living” museum with costumed guides, dancers, and musicians became the model for heritage sites throughout Europe. Professionals and educated elites, seeking to recover a lost community of peasants and artisans free from mass production and capitalist class conflict, embraced Hazelius’ vision. As early as 1876, his influence reached the United States in the tableaux of Swedish folk-life exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The living museum had even clearer roots in the conservative American movement for restoring historic houses (the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association to preserve George Washington’s plantation, for example). The 1909 restoration of the John Ward House (built in 1685) by the Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts led to the introduction of costumed reenactors of early colonial life to lend an authenticity to the site. Urban museums also began to take interest in restoring early American crafts and furnishings and placing them in period rooms designed to evoke an emotional response to the past. Even more ambitious was Henry Ford’s sponsorship of the Greenwood Village in 1929; it gathered artifacts from across the industrial northern United States and even England. This heritage site near Dearborn Michigan re-created the “common man’s” world of blacksmiths and pioneer farmers of Ford’s youth—the world he had helped to destroy with his Model T car. According to Mike Wallace, at Greenwood Village Ford created a “pre-capitalist Eden immune to modern ills, peopled with men and women of character.”⁶⁰

John D. Rockefeller Jr. shared Ford’s vision, when in the 1930s he financed much of the early restoration of Williamsburg to its prerevolutionary status as the colonial capital of Virginia. His hope was to re-create “the complete area and free it entirely from alien or inharmonious surroundings as well as to preserve the beauty and charm of the old buildings and gardens of the city and its historic significance.” More than 700 modern houses were demolished to restore the authentic look of the 1770s. Later, critics like David Lowenthal, complained that “Williamsburg has the flavor of a well-kept contemporary suburb.” As places promising to make time stand still, uncorrupted by modernity, heritage sites were always fixed in time. At Plimoth Plantation, restored in 1947 close to the original site, the year was always 1627.

Outdoor history museums expanded in the 1950s (Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts and Old Salem in North Carolina, for example). In the 1960s and 1970s, even more emerged around restorations of regional rural and village life. The bias was toward times before industrialization, in part, because the motive of founders and staff was to “return” to a simpler time; and these living museums usually downplayed conflict and the hardships of these long past times. At Gettysburg, the site of the famous Civil War battle, visitors were supposed to feel like it was July 1863. The quest was not for historical context or understanding of the causes and meanings of the battle but for the experience of returning to the “immediacy and detail” of an imagined past.⁶¹ British developments in this and a related vein peaked later. Still the National Trust, a voluntary preservationist organization founded in 1895 to acquire scenic and historic properties and restore historic houses, attracted substantial elite and even government support by the 1930s.⁶²

The genteel longing for sedate social rituals and escape to the serenity of nature and sites of nostalgic community explains much of the middle-class intellectual’s rejection of the tawdry sites of industrial saturnalia and attempts to reform them. Yet, as we have seen, this was never the complete story. Many outsiders, especially in the British context of Blackpool, were tolerant of, even sympathetic toward, the plebeian playful crowd. Moreover, after about 1900, genteel standards were under attack, not only by commercial popular culture, but also from within the middle classes themselves, some of whose members had long been drawn to the disreputable pleasures of drink, gambling, and sexual indulgence. Even more important, the very people who used the genteel code to define themselves against wage earners began to accept a fun morality that challenged the ideals of ritual, serenity, uplift, and contemplation. This occurred even as the “official” middle class aesthetic continued to rebuff the Saturnalian crowd and most that it entailed.

The first thing to note is that none of the key elements of genteel tourism survived the nineteenth century entirely intact. As American historian Jon Sterngass shows, resort entrepreneurs were regularly torn between stressing exclusivity and trying to increase access (and thus paying customers). This led to the decline of genteel locations like Saratoga and the east end of Coney Island. The appeal of the sublimity of natural sites like Niagara Falls suffered a similar fate. Though by the late 1830s Niagara Falls was an essential venue for genteel contemplation of God’s natural world, it also quickly became commercialized in ways that appealed to the plebeian crowd. Moreover, the romantic vistas of the rapids, falls, and whirlpool could not hold the attention of even the middle-class visitor who paid to see the still more exciting diversions of daredevil tightrope walkers, showmen spinning tales of accidents and rescues at the Falls, souvenir shops, and dime museums. While purist landscape architect Frederick Olmsted objected strongly to the commercialization of “sacred places” like Niagara, this did not stop Barnum and others from popularizing the Falls in museum dioramas. The nostalgia for pristine sites of ancient villages, restored founding settlements, and heritage battlefields inevitably drew cheap and often tawdry hangers-on.⁶³

In Britain, commercial holiday camps run by Billy Butlin and others from the mid-1930s copied elements from nature-loving trade union or cooperative camping grounds, but they added chalet accommodations, cheap bars, dancing, playful competitions and opportunities for heterosexual encounter, as well as child care for established families. The customers for places like this were drawn from white-collar workers as well as the skilled working class, and the effect was to subvert the “back to nature” ethos by turning it into a mirror of the popular resort.⁶⁴

The middle classes made significant compromises with the fun morality. This is a long and complex story. But signs of it appeared across many venues. English elites in the 1910s and 1920s were hostile to American popular phonograph and movie entertainment, to the point of regulating the number of American films that could be shown in British cinemas and prohibiting Sunday exhibitions.⁶⁵ By the thirties, however, populist intellectuals were beginning to defend film as harmless entertainment, and general Sunday opening of cinemas was allowed in 1932. In the early 1930s, popular pressure from citizens and competition from commercial stations reaching from Europe into Britain forced the BBC into offering more popular musical and educational formats.⁶⁶

The accommodation to fun went much further in the United States. Advocates of gentility tried valiantly to maintain cultural distant and uplift—from liberal arts higher education and ad-free classical music on the radio to the massive commercial effort to disseminate the “Five-Foot Shelf of Books,” selected by Charles Eliot, President of Harvard, to provide the adult reader with the essentials of a classical liberal arts education.⁶⁷ However, subtle changes in middle-class values weakened the legitimacy and appeal of genteel authority. In the decades after 1920, the broad middle class abandoned the expectation that it was really necessary to embrace genteel values to rise in social status.⁶⁸ Middlebrow magazines introduced the idea that ordinary people had “ready-made capacity for independent judgment,” making culture a matter of personal choice, no longer a bulwark against the barbarian mass culture. Instead, by mid-century, an individual lifestyle free from the “elitism” of imposed standards became the accepted norm.⁶⁹

This was, of course, not a capitulation to plebeian crowd pleasure and the industrial saturnalia. The middle classes and their intellectuals continued to reject them, in America at least, but found an alternative to the genteel gathering in a new kind of social setting and new pleasures. They redefined the playful crowd by reducing as much as possible the presumed negative elements of the plebeian pleasure crowd—the physical crush of people, the disorder and dirt, the competing appeals of barkers, and unpredictability of the throng. The new middle-class idea of the playful crowd was no longer an amalgam of strangers, but rather semi-autonomous clusters of individual families and friends. Because, as we have seen, middle-class anxiety about the proletarian crowd was less extreme in Britain, this theme was much less evident at Blackpool. Increasingly, as the middle-class version of the playful crowd emerged, those clusters would be focused on children and child-like fantasies. And, although the new playful crowd shared with the old a longing for sensual envelopment, the content of those sensations changed dramatically.

The critical addition of the child to the playful crowd occurred slowly. Youngsters came with mothers and even fathers to Coney’s beach and to Blackpool in the nineteenth century, but children remained a distinct minority. As we have seen, the Bowery and Golden Mile were very unfriendly to minors and even the amusement parks appealed to adult sensibilities with the playful sexuality of Steeplechase, the orientalism of Luna Park, and the religious fantasy of Dreamland. Even the mechanical rides and circus shows attracted adults in 1910. Grown-ups may have acted like children, but they seldom burdened themselves with kids when they went to the parks. Most important, the thrills and adventures that excited them—the dance halls, the freak shows and even dioramas—had little to attract innocent children’s wonder.

Gradually, this begins to change. In 1920, Steeplechase introduced Babyland at one corner of the Pavilion of Fun, featuring two child-sized slides, hobbyhorses, and a kiddie carousel. In the summer of 1925, the National Association of Amusement Parks promoted new children’s rides at member parks.⁷⁰

Beginning in 1906, an annual baby show was held at Coney Island, complete with a carriage parade of the 1,200 participants and a contest judging the most beautiful, fattest, smallest, and most strenuous baby. Done in obvious fun, the contest became an integral part of the Mardi Gras celebrations. In the 1920s, as the final days of the revelry drew rowdy throngs of 500,000 requiring extra police to handle the drunken brawls, the baby parade became a way of civilizing the crowd. Under the auspices of Laura Riegelman, sister-in-law of the Brooklyn Borough President and Chairman of the Bureau of Child Hygiene, Mardi Gras was quickly tamed with this parade designed to attract a “family crowd.” The appeal to the cute babies on parade was not pure maudlin. Some mothers dressed their infants and toddlers mockingly as marginal adults: First prize in the 1923 parade went to a three-year old dressed “in full harem regalia as Fatima.” In later years, mothers costumed their toddlers as the boxer Jack Dempsey, as “Eve and the Forbidden Fruit,” or as the mayor Jimmy Walker (festooned with a tilted derby). Others, however, adopted a more “sweet” look when they dressed their children as popular dolls (Baby Bunting) or cupid.⁷¹ The appeal to the “cute” child, a concept new to the twentieth century,⁷² had become part of the crowd culture of Coney Island itself, a “fun” alternative to the racy playfulness of the traditional Mardi Gras. Carnival had become cutesified in a way that met the needs of Coney Island. At Blackpool, there were no baby parades. This was not only because the British crowd evoked less anxiety but also because the “wondrous” child was a less needed substitute for earlier forms of delight.

Still, the real innovation came not from these historically plebeian pleasure sites, but from new American amusement parks that catered to a new crowd—the fun-seeking middle-class family with children. The opening of Rye Beach’s Playland in 1928 signaled a major break from the old idea of the amusement park. At a cost of $5 million, this seaside resort, built on the lower end of Long Island sound, was a clear alternative to Coney Island’s plebeian commercialism. Playland was owned by the Westchester County Park Commission and built over the demolished Paradise Park, a standard turn-of-the-century commercial amusement park. Fulfilling the dreams of middle-class reformers, Playland featured flowerbeds bordering walks around a small lake, a boardwalk and “fireproof bath house” on the beach, and a 1,200-foot mall ending in a 100-foot high music tower—a “natural” version of Dreamland. Significantly, it was approachable only by car (with parking for 12,000), excluding the tenement crowd. Its popularity was immediate. While Coney Island attracted about 600,000 on the Fourth of July in 1928, the Rye Beach resort drew an impressive 325,000. Despite its middle-class appeal, Playland was hardly the epitome of gentility. On the mall, it offered thrill rides (a whirl ball and tumble bug as well as a carrousel and Noah’s ark) and even excursions on the still new and exciting airplane. Also, unlike the old genteel resort (but like Coney Island), Playland introduced a “Kiddyland” with miniature roller coasters and other rides. This was still a long way from Disneyland for Kiddyland also offered a childcare service with the motto “Park’em and forget’em,” allowing parents to enjoy a romantic stroll or the thrills of the roller coaster free from small children. Instead of the fairy tale fantasies much less thrill rides, Kiddyland featured sandboxes and seesaws. Still, Playland’s familial ethic was a step along the way to a new form of the happy crowd.⁷³

Even earlier, Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach began accommodating this new focus on the young when it opened a Children’s Playground in 1924. Like Playland’s Kiddyland, it included no thrill rides, but featured a sand pit, paddling pool, and teeter-totters. From 1934, a baby crèche with appropriately dressed “nurses” provided care for babies and toddlers (it would survive until 1960). By 1927, this rather ordinary park playground was made more fantasyful with a collection of “Bingle and Bob” rides, miniature carousels, railroads, airplane swings, Ferris Wheel, and even Kiddie Kars (imported from Coney Island–area manufacturers). Like its American counterpart, the Pleasure Beach gradually began to accommodate crowds that included young families. Even so, the park remained primarily for adults—the Children’s Playground was a place to deposit children, not for adults to play with them. This would come much later.⁷⁴

Although children slowly became part of the new playful crowd, even more important to this transformation were new ways to express wonder. A new middleclass ideal of fun abandoned some traditional delights and found new ones. The absence of the freak show at Playland is very instructive of this change. While human curiosities prevailed on the Coney Island Bowery and even Dreamland, the most “respectable” of Coney Island’s major amusement parks, middle-class sensibilities had already begun to turn against this traditional expression of wonder by 1900. Although the boundaries between entertainment and science had often been blurred in the dime museums of nineteenth-century America, legitimate scientific display retreated to the publicly supported and professionally credentialed museum in the first decade of the twentieth century. Scientific understanding of the medical origins of freaks made giants and dwarfs less amazing than pitiful. Discoveries in genetics turned physical anomalies into intelligible accidents of nature and fostered a eugenic movement calling for the elimination of future “deformed” genes through sterilization of “abnormal” adults. A Scientific American article of 1908 fully revealed the new attitude: “Most of these humble and unfortunate individuals, whose sole means of livelihood is the exhibition of their physical infirmities to a gaping and unsympathetic crowd, are pathological rarities…. A more refined and a more humane popular taste now frown upon such exhibitions.” Fascination with the “elastic skin man” declined when his condition was reduced to “generalized dermatolysis” and the “wild men of Borneo” were revealed to be merely examples of “microcephalous idiocy.” In the 1920s and 1930s, popular magazines explained how standard freak types (giants, dwarfs etc) were really victims of glandular malfunctions. Sideshow barkers’ claims that they displayed a member of a “lost tribe” of pygmies or “natives” with tails lost credibility when global exploration demystified distant places and peoples.⁷⁵

The freak show that had been integral to the old “dime museums” of the nineteenth century largely disappeared from the cities in the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1915 even the waxworks of the Eden Musée in New York City had closed. With the exception of one traditional dime museum in Harlem, the survivors relocated to Coney Island, becoming exclusively freak shows, no longer part of the traditional dime museum’s wider cultural appeal with its diorama, camera obscura, and even stage shows. Following a pattern identified by historian Lawrence Levine, the city became a center for more upscale and “progressive” exhibits in scientific natural history museums and middle-class inspired movie palaces while the freak was confined to a few blocks in the seediest streets of Coney Island.⁷⁶ The freak show had lost its wonder, at least to the urban middle classes.

Even at Coney Island, the freak show became discredited. While in the 1900s newspapers had reported the latest additions to the freak shows in a tone similar to announcements of the newest Broadway show, by the late 1920s, Bertram Reinitz wrote approvingly in the New York Times that the sideshows were growing “more conservative,” not only because of the “growing scarcity of dog-faced men, mermaids, and many legged live stock,” but also because of the “marked slump in the credulousness of metropolitan throngs.” The “broad and dignified boardwalk” at Coney Island along with the “tall shoulder-to-shoulder apartment houses and retail enterprises … reminiscent not of the erstwhile leading honky-tonk center of the nation, but rather of [upscale Brooklyn neighborhoods like] Washington Heights and Williamsburg” were finally closing in on the old freak shows and catch penny amusements. Another pair of writers in 1928 took pride that only the freshly landed immigrant or the “holiday maker from Harlem” still gawked at the horror of the wax museum and was convinced that civility had finally come even to the working class: “A few hundred years have so developed our sense of decency that what was customary with the gentlemen of [the past] … would now be scandalous to the most proly of the proletariat.”⁷⁷

Critical comment on Blackpool’s remaining freak shows of the 1930s, which were confined to the stalls of the “Golden Mile,” was much more muted, largely because there were so few of them and the crowds reacted with increasing knowingness to the impostures. Starving honeymoon couples and transgressors against the accepted moral order were more in evidence than alleged physical freaks in any case, alongside horrific “educational” exhibitions (at the waxworks) of the consequences of venereal disease, and Blackpool’s relative overall respectability and elite tolerance of plebeian taste was demonstrated by the absence of critical focus on freak shows.⁷⁸

By 1950, American sideshow impresarios were finding it more difficult to find suitable human attractions due to early medical intervention preventing glandular disorders and the institutionalization of individuals with “freak” deformities.⁷⁹ But, by then, the freak show was also rapidly losing its audience even while amusement parks and circuses that surrounded them were still flourishing. Even though the freak show was resurrected in Coney Island in the 1980s, its self-display of sexual and cultural difference that tried to “combine flamboyant campiness with bawdy sexual humor” contrasted with the traditional serious, almost religious appeal of freak shows.⁸⁰

This story of the decline of the freak did not mean the victory of the severely rational and humanistic goals of reformers. Wonder may have shifted away from the liminal and bizarre, but the longing for fantasy and excitement hardly vanished. Like the carnival itself, the freak was cutesified and passed on to children. It is no accident that the 1920s children’s ride, the Pleasure Beach Express in Blackpool, used dwarfs as conductors. Even earlier, photos show parents taking their children to visit dwarf shows at Dreamland. Over time, “little people” were taken from the world of the bizarre to the realm of the innocent. Snow White had her cute seven dwarfs in Disney’s first feature length cartoon of 1937. All sorts of gnomish figures found their way on to and in children’s amusement park rides. If, as we shall see in chapter 5, Disney perfected this trend in his cartoon animals with their neotenic or childlike features, he was only conforming to a shift in adult sensibilities—abandoning the fascination with the boundary of nature for an obsession with nostalgia for a fantasy-based innocence.

The new middle-class sensibilities that were to provide the market opportunity for Disney were much more evident in the United States than in Britain. The British playful crowd, in its Blackpool incarnation and at other popular resorts, had become acceptable to mainstream middle-class opinion by the 1930s. At the same time, the British tendency to sentimentalize the virtuous working-class crowd led to the opening out of alternative routes to respectable communal pleasures after 1945, culminating in the rise of the “heritage industry” and the celebration of a variety of popular pasts, whether rural or industrial. These were alternatives ultimately to Blackpool, but also to Disneyland.

The elite critique of industrial saturnalia “won” with the triumph of middle-class values by the 1950s in the United States and, with more ambiguity, much later in Britain. Elements of the genteel aesthetic were sloughed off. There was a decline of the formality and ritual of class codes in both nations, but in Britain, the longing to affirm heritage in various guises (“natural,” rural, aristocratic, industrial) would be important to postwar democratic innovations like the Beamish Museum as well as to more established, upscale institutions like the National Trust. Significantly, this impulse derived in distinctive ways from the descendents of the romantic socialists and improving trade unionists as well as from the nostalgic aristocracy and genteel bourgeoisie. At Beamish, as at such popular National Trust venues as Tatton Park or “stately homes” like Chatsworth, the noise, novelty, and artificiality of the saturnalian crowd was banished while the encounter with the beautiful natural setting and the recollection of a lost heritage, whether aristocratic, populist or a blend, was to be shared between adults and children.⁸¹

In the United States, the flight from gentility was more extreme, even as the critique of the plebeian crowd was sharper. Affluent Americans rejected the late Victorian plebeian crowd, but not all of their fun in the rides, bright lights, and frivolous fantasy of the amusement park. These middle-class Americans found this pleasure acceptable when enfolded in genteel codes that celebrated nature, order, and progress (as at Playland) and when expressed as the playfully childish. Middle-class children and youth embraced the thrills and fantasy of the plebeian pleasure crowd, thus allowing excitement to be embraced by middle-class adults. If carnival was defanged with the decline of freak shows and bowdlerized with the sentimentality of fairy tales, a new kind of wonder appeared in the nostalgic and childish fantasy of Disney.

In this chapter, we have seen that the middle-class reaction to the plebeian playful crowd took distinct forms in Britain and the United States. In the long run, this contrast would lead to the radically divergent creations of Disneyland and the Beamish Open Air Museum. In the short run, it would also help to shape the very different fates of Blackpool and Coney Island in the decades following World War I. This will be the topic of our next chapter.