The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

On both sides of the North Atlantic around 1900, entertainment entrepreneurs discovered a wage-earning people with free time, money, and mobility. These enterprisers turned this realization into profit by providing a plethora of pleasures, which reflected the diverse and often localized taste and experience of the crowd. Their methods were diverse—offering everything from the latest music and dance hall entertainment and mechanical spectacles and thrill rides to the seemingly archaic attractions of the trained animal and freak show—and thus appealed to taste that was simultaneously modern and saturnalian. By 2000, the nature of the crowd at play had changed dramatically, becoming more affluent and in many ways less diverse in its taste in entertainment as it shed many of its plebeian and traditional characteristics. Powerful entertainment corporations had learned how to package pleasure internationally, efficiently transporting and managing crowds while creating and responding to a shared vocabulary of increasingly globalized desires.

To many these changes constituted improvement: Not only were the pleasure seekers of 2000 more reliably profitable, but they were less threatening to the social order. The family-oriented fun of Disney and the controlled and potentially “improving” experience of a heritage open-air museum like Beamish seemed to measure cultural progress over the bizarre stalls and freak shows along Coney Island’s Bowery and Blackpool’s Golden Mile. But is it enough to simply say that entrepreneurs had learned to create and sell pleasure crowds more efficiently? Is it sufficient to claim that the crowd itself became more “civilized?”¹

As we have seen, such understandings of a century of consuming crowds fail to confront subtle continuities and deeper contrasts between the two ends of the century. Without acknowledgement, Disney borrowed much from Coney Island’s four amusement parks, and recently has even sought to capitalize on nostalgia for the seaside resort in the company’s California Adventure feature, Paradise Pier. Meanwhile, British seaside resorts have marketed their own pasts as “heritage” attractions. Open-air museums of life in the recent past feature the Edwardian fun-fair with its carousels and steam fairground organ. Images of uncomplicated transatlantic “progress” are also clouded by the contrasting experiences of the decline at Coney Island and continuing reinvention and vivacity at Blackpool—a fact that may lead us to reevaluate common claims of American adaptability and presumptions of British cultural conservatism. This uneven history of progress with different paths to the contemporary aesthetic of pleasure crowds has been central to our story.

In some ways, it is not surprising that Blackpool survived for decades after Coney Island became an urban/industrial ruin. Blackpool was a regional entertainment center, a northern Piccadilly Circus. By contrast, Coney Island was a summer seaside sideshow to America’s most important urban entertainment center, never providing an alternative to Broadway or Times Square because they were so close by. The beach lured the earliest crowds of the 1830s and a century later the seashore prevailed over artificial entertainment. Blackpool was a vacation destination in the days of trains, while Coney Island soon became merely a day trip for the subway crowd. Blackpool’s majestic buildings—the Tower and Winter Gardens—were permanent vessels that floated on the ongoing stream of British popular culture. Even the Pleasure Beach took on this quality in the 1930s with the construction of Joseph Emberton’s Casino and other modernist structures that have survived to this day.

In every way, Coney Island was transient: Physically and architecturally, it was much more like an extensive circus or fair grounds than a Times Square. In 1900, the Island certainly was more innovative than Blackpool—creating the enclosed, but out-of-doors, themed amusement park with novel rides and spectacles. But, built as they were, Coney Island was perpetually threatened with shabbiness and tackiness. Even more, Coney Island’s amusement parks, by making novelty as well as entertainment central to their appeal, eventually made themselves obsolete. While in 1900 Blackpool had lodging houses and hotels that perpetuated an established holiday tradition, Coney Island had bath houses that many saw as a barrier to a free beach and “hotels” that served mostly as restaurants. Eventually both became superfluous and disappeared. The very short summer season at Coney partially explains the tacky structures there. And, the famous American predilection for building for the short run (revealed in everything from industrial machinery to housing construction) was certainly reflected in the “staff” castles of Luna Park. Dreamland’s Beacon Tower never played the iconic role of the Blackpool Tower. Unlike Blackpool, Coney could never have a real “tradition,” because its tradition was novelty itself. Of course, Blackpool also had its freak shows, mechanical rides, and dramatic spectacles, but it had disproportionately more stable entertainment forms—stage shows, fish and chip shops, and pier entertainment.

Another sharp contrast was the far more rapid impact of the car culture on Coney than on Blackpool. In Britain, where until the 1960s the automobile remained accessible only to the relatively well-to-do, most travelers to Blackpool took the train until that decade of transition. Even when the motor car became dominant, Blackpool adapted, eventually replacing the Central [train] Station and its approaches, with a sequence of large car parking lots. At Coney Island, the automobile was an earlier and much greater challenge: Already in the 1920s, the automobile allowed the more affluent elements of its crowd to go elsewhere. Parking places were insufficient to accommodate potential demand, and by the 1930s, because of the car, Coney became a far more proletarian place—the destination of youth and families too poor to own cars. Increased racial tension was inevitable as poor whites and blacks clashed after World War II.

As we have seen, Blackpool was a site for the playful crowd longer because it had much more effective political support. Impresarios were well connected with government at all relevant levels, but especially at the local council, more effectively promoting the site in competition with rival seaside resorts and complementing private seaside entertainments with public works to improve the beach and promenade and build green parks. On the edge of the city and dependent upon it, Coney Island lacked urban sponsors. First, the resort was the political plaything of the village of Gravesend. Then, after it was annexed by Brooklyn and then becoming part of New York City, Coney Island was perpetually caught between the interests of reformers who tried to make the site into a Central Park by the Sea and developers looking for more profitable land uses (like housing and commerce). No political or even corporate interest promoted the modernization of the entertainment purpose of Coney.

All of these physical, economic, and political factors were decisive (suggesting a contrast that cannot be explained by something as simple as differences in the rates of “modernization”). In addition, there was a more subtle divergence that helps explain the contrasting fates of Blackpool and Coney—the playful crowds themselves. For decades Blackpool’s throngs were created around a simple repetitive, even nostalgic theme—coming back year after year. This repetition was more than a continuation of the ancient annual trek to the village or regional fair—part of a seasonal cycle, running from festival to festival. Instead, it was a key element in the modern life cycle, a habit of youth renewed annually as part of an on-going culture of memory fed upon renewal. Blackpool was the gathering place for a crossgenerational and relatively stable working-class culture. Blackpool and its largely Victorian culture of memory and renewal reflected the stability and relative homogeneity of the northern English working class.

By contrast, the American crowd at Coney was in a continuous state of change, of migration. In the 1930s, forty or sixty year olds who had visited Coney Island at the age of twenty felt little need or desire to return. This may have been because Coney Island had become as early as 1900 a site of teens and young adults on a day’s adventure. It already depended on a generationally defined crowd that eventually was no longer able to recruit a new generation. In comparison to Blackpool, Coney Island was not a place that people aged with. This pattern of the perpetually changing youth crowd became even more pronounced by the 1920s with the shift from the dioramas and scenic railroads that had once appealed to adults with cultural roots in the dime museum to the raw excitement of the giant roller coasters that attracted a daring crowd of youth. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Coney or even the seaside resort; it happened to many amusement parks built around 1900 as well as to roller skating rinks and dance halls at different points in twentieth-century America.

Reinforcing these generational cycles in the U.S. was the fact of social mobility across class and space. By the 1920s and 1930s, older, now more affluent Italian Americans, for example, had no desire to return to the loud, fast-paced, and to their altered eyes, cheap and tawdry site of their impoverished youth in 1900. The fate of Coney Island crowds was the same as that of the America of immigrants who moved from the city into the suburb. The people and especially their children forgot the old playground of Coney Island just as they forgot the old neighborhood in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. Immigrants followed the WASPs out of Coney Island just as they imitated the residential movement of the rich and middle-class native-born from the city outward to the suburb. Coney was not a life-long annual pilgrimage, but a place one grew out of and moved up from. By contrast, for much of the twentieth century, Blackpool was a life-long tourist destination because it never took on the reputation of an exclusive site of youth and, even more, because Britain saw a much slower migration out of the working classes.

Beyond these differences between the attractions and crowds, these two sites point to still another perhaps even more important contrast. The broad middle class in Britain and the United States responded in dramatically different ways to the culture of the plebeian crowd. This becomes even clearer when we think also about the successors of Coney/Blackpool—Disney/Beamish. Although we are suggesting neither that Disney represents American culture nor that Beamish is the “essence” of Britain, the contrast between the two pleasure sites reveals distinct patterns that are embedded in American and British culture.

At first, we need to recall that the critique of that crowd that emerged from the literati of both countries was different: While American intellectuals and reformers decried the seeming anonymity and suggestibility of the crowd, their British counterparts often found a tolerable good-natured vulgarity with mostly a minority of working-class and leftist intellectuals sharing the American (and European) perspective. Of course, members of the respectable classes in both countries found parallel ways of escaping from the industrial saturnalia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some of the “better classes” retreated to resorts that featured fashionable self-display, perpetuating an older tradition of “aristocratic” socializing well illustrated at both the American Newport and the British Torquay. One difference remained: At Coney Island, the respectable classes abandoned their genteel Manhattan Beach hotels, while at Blackpool they remained on the North and South Shore. Still, in both countries the apostles of “moral improvement” and “rational recreation” preferred fresh air and the simple life, hiking and holiday camps, mountains, “Nature and Nature’s God,” and the different freedoms offered by the bicycle and later (with more moral ambiguity) the automobile. These groups were offended by the perceived disorder and moral anarchy of pleasure crowds at Coney /Blackpool, and some consciously tried to organize alternatives to it. In many ways, these critiques and contrasting visions of the proper holiday illustrate ongoing culture wars. Shaped by ethnic and class prejudice and the pursuit of “high culture” as well as romantic notions of nature, these attitudes survive in the perceived contrast between the praiseworthy “traveler,” seeking new experiences in informed and adventurous ways, and the sheep-like, exploited (mass) “tourist.”²

Nevertheless, over the long run, more effective challenges to industrial saturnalia neither defended status nor nature in either country. These alternatives have been obscured by the tenacity of the original taste wars. Ultimately, what divided the consuming crowds of 1900 from those of a century later was less the refinement or pacification of the masses than the emergence of a new holiday aesthetic constructed around middle-class values, although versions of them appeared in the “respectable” working class. The vacation destination of the late twentieth century came to reflect a new society that no longer sought relief from and meaning in industrial work. Rather, holiday-makers in 2000 endeavored to find wonder experienced through two separate but overlapping appeals: child-like innocence captured in a commercialized fantasy world that culminated in Disney and nostalgia for imagined older versions of community grounded in craft and manual skill, technologies using steam and water, and the visible proximity of nature as seen at Beamish. Although these ideals shared much with the several forms of genteel culture of around 1900, they were adapted to the longings and concerns of a consumer culture that would not fully emerge until the 1950s. While this new sensibility, of course, drew on Victorian notions of status and pure experience and, even more, sought alternatives to the psychological oppression of the crowd, it also broke new ground. New technology (especially the mass-produced automobile and affordable air travel) radically changed the possibilities of the tourist experience, both dispersing and widening the potential range of the crowd.

Even more important for our purposes, middle-class sensibilities were divided in the twentieth century much as they were in late Victorian times. In the 1950s, Americans separated from prevailing British sensibilities by offering an alternative to the plebeian pleasure crowd in a fantastic nostalgia, rather than the grounded version that emerged more strongly (though certainly not exclusively) in Britain, and constructing it around the culture of the child as cute rather than the child as inheritor of tradition. We have represented the former with Disney and the latter with Beamish. Now is the time to stand back and try to explain this difference.

At both Disneyland and Beamish, nostalgia was a dominant appeal and both attracted mostly a respectable, even middle-class, crowd of child-centered families. Yet these similarities were the beginning of the difference. Disney created nostalgia by blending a fantasy of America in 1900 (turned into a playground) with the transformation of a real 1900-era playground at Coney Island into a form acceptable in 1955 America. The secret to the success of Disney was not in the capture of kitsch and the creation of a safe, saccharine sentimentality or even the perpetuation of a sanitized memory of small-town life. It was in making a “memory” of the past into a playground, not by re-creating the past, but by fashioning a dream world of nostalgia through the power of emotional associations.³ Main Street U.S.A. was more like the memory of a child’s play set than the actual small-town center that some visitors may have experienced. Disney also transformed the industrial saturnalia of Coney into forms acceptable to a newly affluent middle class of the mid-twentieth century. Disney preserved much of the playfulness of Coney without its reliance on “outdated” wonder—“unnatural” freaks and exotics and the supernatural or afterlife—the public display of which middle-class Americans had rejected by 1950. The carnival culture of freaks and circus took cartoon forms in Disney that appealed to the old need for “turning the world upside down,” but were liberated from premodern sensibilities by the creation of wondrous innocence. At Disney, nostalgia was about a fantasy of the past and a symbolic world of “timeless” and childlike images of Mickey Mouse and pixie dust rather than the bizarre mysteries of Lilliputia or Hell’s Gate.

All this was not simply the product of Disney’s “genius,” but a reflection of some rather distinct American patterns and trends that emerged gradually in the half century before Disneyland. Walt Disney drew upon the circulation of characters and stories with which Americans identified and which ultimately became substitutes for traditional and religious images and narratives. Historians of American consumer culture have long noted the central element of imaginative narrative and graphic fantasy in the seemingly endless expansion of consumer needs.⁴ This was hardly unique to the United States, but Americans learned especially well how to associate emotions and satisfactions with the stories and characters into which advertisers placed their products, making their purchase part of the happy ending. From the late 1890s, the American entertainment media developed an exceptionally icon-rich culture—especially in serial form that ranged from comic strips and storybooks to movies and radio/TV programs. Many of these icons appeared also as trademark characters on the labels and boxes of new consumer goods (sometimes, like the childlike images of Skippy, Buster Brown, Kewpie, and Shirley Temple, appearing in several media). Disney’s success grew out of and flourished in this hothouse—first when he created his own menagerie of fantastic characters for cartoons, movies, and comic books and then when he placed them in his human-sized play sets with which the crowd was to interact at Disneyland.⁵

Disney and his apologists have long insisted that this formulation of the playful crowd is unique and revolutionary. Yet, in taking a long view, Disney adopted elements of the freak show, carnival, circus, amusement park, and diorama of 1900, transforming them for the consumer age and bringing them to the children and grandchildren of the Coney crowd of 1900. Disney’s attractions and crowds were different from old Coney’s (and we have emphasized how in chapter 5), but they also shared an aesthetic of playfulness quite foreign to the genteel and improving cultural heritage of the late Victorian bourgeoisie. This points to an obvious fact—the cultural distance between the Coney Island immigrant crowd of 1900 and the scrubbed WASP-ish Disneyland crowd of 1955 was not so great as most suppose. This cultural and social connection between the two can be explained by the fact that Disney replaced the genteel sublime in American middle-class culture that had largely died by the 1920s, with a more playful, but still respectable, aesthetic. The key was that Disney (and American popular commercialism in general) learned how to make middle-class culture fun by selectively imitating Coney. This was possible because the “original” Coney Island of 1900–1910 had, in fact, been a cross-class cultural mix, drawing on middle-class playfulness (as, for example, exemplified in Frederic Thompson) as well as the sensibilities of the wage-earner.

Only after 1920 did Coney go thoroughly down-market. This suggests once again that there was less a break between the eras of the “original” Coney and mid-century Disney than often thought, and, even more, that the continuities between the two were part of an American “mass” culture. As seen in the success of American films and much else, what distinguished American popular commercial culture from Britain and elsewhere in 1900 as well as 1955 was the cross-class appeal, drawing on icons and stories that stretched across the “mass” of Americans. Middle-class observers of Blackpool in the first half of the twentieth century may have tolerated, even encouraged, the playful crowd there, but they stood outside and seldom embraced popular taste in entertainment beyond a shared presence at music-hall and cinema programs. For the generation of 1900 (but not beyond), Coney was a “mass” culture in the sense that it reached both (respectable) working- and middleclass audiences, as did Disney in the 1950s and long thereafter.

It is significant that there are many parallels between Coney and Disney, but fewer between Blackpool and Beamish. At base, this British contrast can be explained by the fact that nostalgia and middle-class sensibilities took on very different forms than they did in the United States. Beamish, like Disney, romanticized early-twentieth-century social life, albeit on a basis of careful reconstruction and research, and invited crowds to pretend to “return to the past.” But Beamish was painstakingly protective of its ideal of a time-warped community, re-creating, for example, the commercial small-town street and colliery village (stressing the collectivist/ voluntarist character of the cooperative store rather than the romanticized “origins” of contemporary corporations as did Disney’s Main Street U.S.A.). Even more, Beamish gave much space and attention to the re-creation of the hard world of the coalmine and the serious business of the school.

Beamish is not “real,” but neither is it a deliberate fantasy, a play set in the manner of Disneyland. The model for Beamish was not a fantasyland or even an entertainment district like Edwardian Blackpool. No one had to re-create “old Blackpool” as Disney created Main Street and more recently “Paradise Pier.” Old Blackpool is still there! The model instead was the outdoor museum of Skansen in Sweden, a site that was supposed to recall the lost crafts and culture of Europe’s preindustrial past. Of course, Americans had their own versions of this quest to recover the “real” past (Colonial Williamsburg and Old World Wisconsin, for example). But the British did not create anything like Disney.

Beamish was supposed to evoke a nostalgia that brought crowds back to simpler and even “tougher” times and induced elders to teach the young both the pride of crafts and the struggles of the past. Although Beamish had continually to compromise with this rigorous vision of time travel to appeal to fun-seeking crowds, the end product remained a grounded, not fantastic, nostalgia. And, its rationale and point of pride was that it displayed exhibits from the real world, accurate (if relocated and rearranged) re-creations of places of work and everyday living, not a playground. Even if Blackpool no longer existed, there is little doubt that no one in England would have re-created it as a site of nostalgic fantasy in the way that Disney did (only half aware) in imitating Coney. In fact, Beamish is as much an anti-Blackpool of today and 1900 as it is an anti-Disneyland.

All this points to a very different sensibility that spanned significant elements of the “respectable” British middle and working class (especially in the professions, the trade unions, and Protestant Nonconformity—i.e., non-Anglican Protestants). The playful crowd of Coney, updated in Disneyland, was not possible in Britain, where the important aspects of “respectable” culture remained far more distinct from the culture of hedonistic consumerism than in the United States. Although the British middle class visited twentieth-century Blackpool it made no effort to transform it; it kept itself apart on the northern and southern shores and chose to enjoy selected central pleasures on its own terms. Blackpool could not be “Disneyfied” as a blend of class tastes. The plebeian crowd dominated Blackpool for generations, hardly a threat to civilization much less to themselves, but serving as a continuous target of the high-minded scold as a symbol of the manipulated leisure of the working class. This attitude passed on to the creators of Beamish. There was no possibility of even an unacknowledged borrowing from Blackpool at Beamish as there was from Coney at Disneyland. As an anti-Blackpool, Beamish was starkly anti-commercial and anti-tacky, but also anti-play in the saturnalian sense of the word. If bourgeois British indulgence of plebeian Blackpool assured its survival, British social and cultural divisions help explain Beamish.

By contrast, Disneyland was a commercial saturnalia—both an affirmation of consumer culture and an escape from its daily form. It rejected the barkers and the cheap huckstering of the old Coney, but its unrelenting merchandizing was as “catch penny” or should we say “catch dollar” as anything that Coney or Blackpool ever tolerated. Still, by its celebration of wonder, especially childhood wonder, Disneyland was an answer to the banality and boredom of suburban consumer society, recalling in playful delight an era of coherent and human-scale space before the contemporary era of the freeway, the mall, and the sidewalkless suburban residential street. Even more, Disneyland returned the jaded affluent adult to the wonder of first pleasures as the child within, or the child accompanying the adult, grinned with delight at the sight of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.

The enchanted child renewed the sated consumer. Wonder was no longer the genteel sublimity of nature or the awe and terror at encountering the “super” natural, or even the vertigo of the thrill ride. Those old quests for excitement gradually gave way to the pleasures of awakening consumer desires in children while recovering a childlike excitement of consumption in adults. Wonder became the timeless, childlike amazement in Disney’s world. It was best expressed in Disney’s movie set playground that stimulated fantasies of both bygone childhoods and contemporary children’s dream-worlds. Disney created a saturnalia for the age of suburban consumption. The vacation was no longer mostly a release from the routines of workplace and neighborhood. It had become a recovery of the purity of the pleasure of consumption, long lost to the modern middle-class adult in boredom and obsession, through the wondrous response of the child (or nostalgic adult). Disney’s consumerist saturnalia was as appropriate for his time as that of Frederic Thompson’s industrial fantasies at Luna Park in 1910. These in turn liberated audiences from industrial and consumerist cultures, while also confirming their central realities.

There was continuity between Coney and Disney in the appeal to the child, but with very important differences: Steeplechase and Luna Parks let the adult “return” to the carefree adventure of childhood without the burden of real children, while Disney invited adults to make that trip back to innocence through the inspiration of the child in attendance. In the process, the idea of the child changed: the associations conveyed by the idea of the child no longer meant “freedom” from the rules of the everyday adult life of work and responsibility; they were now an affirmation of delight. The child served a very different purpose at Disney than at Coney: The “child” no longer meant separation from adults in a boisterous youthful crowd (the attraction and ultimate curse of Old Coney); Rather, with Disney, the “child” created a crowd acceptable to middle-class American sensibilities—“playfully” engaged in the childlike, but consisting of intimate family groups, not a “mob.” Thus, some of the old excitement in the teeming crowd was transformed and refocused when the family unit toured together.

These Disney rituals were adapted from a half century of middle-class experimentation with “wondrous innocence” as adults learned to take children to seaside resorts and to offer them ice cream cones, teddy bears, and kiddy rides. This transition began in the late Victorian middle class where increasing affluence led to more tolerant child rearing practices and a fantasy world presumably derived from childhood sensibilities. Think, for example, of the popularity of Peter Pan among adults as well as children when it premiered in 1903.⁶ This was a long process. Whereas Coney Island/Blackpool visitors rarely brought children in 1900, as much for reasons of cost as purpose, by 2000, many parents could now afford family vacations and happily made the Disney trip an affirmation of love for children. This child-centeredness, as it spread among the working class, began to break up the older crowd culture, imposing on the industrial saturnalia new standards of decency, order, and cleanliness of the kind long identified with bourgeois respectability. But the wondrous child also introduced a new rationale for pleasure acceptable to the middle class, enabling that new playful crowd to transcend class boundaries through a shared culture of wonderment.

By contrast, in Britain this role of the child was slower to develop. Many British have long enjoyed Disneyland, Disney World, and Disneyland Paris, but they did not build their own. British cinema embraced the marketing ploys of Walt’s brother Roy Disney in the 1930s and offered Saturday morning cartoon programs in the form of “Mickey Mouse Clubs.” Blackpool Illuminations in the late 1930s featured Disney-like themes of grottos and dwarfs. Even the Pleasure Beach built a “Bingle and Bob” kiddie park in 1927; in 1960, in flattery of the American innovations in theming, they installed a complex of children’s rides called Candy Land and in 1992, Bradley Beaver Creek.⁷ Still, these were imitations and never as central to the park or as successful as what Disney had created. The iconic figure, Bradley Beaver, was no Mickey Mouse. He lacked a popular “background story” promoted in cartoons and films, and the imaginative oversized representations of Gulliver, a pirate, bull dog “Bobbie,” frog, totem pole, space rocket, and clowns lacked thematic coherence, no matter their charm. By the 1970s, the Pleasure Beach conceded “ownership” of the Disney formula to the Americans, and revitalized the amusement park with new thrill rides to attract a teen and young adult crowd. Not only did the Pleasure Beach lack the means or money to “theme” their facilities around the characters and stories of iconic Hollywood films or cartoons as did Disney, Universal Studios and other American amusement parks, but, it was apparently simply too wed to the ways of the old Blackpool, and too aware of their enduring popularity among its visitors, to Americanize itself.

Beamish did not even try. Its view of the child was as radically different from Disney’s as was its conception of nostalgia. And, here the contrasting sensibility comes out in full relief. Whereas the child in Disney served to evoke wonder and to make the playful crowd acceptably intimate, the child at Beamish was to be the recipient of heritage, elevating the crowd to an educational purpose. Of course, the contrast between the two was never stark. Walt Disney hoped that his Main Street U.S.A. would help grandparents draw the grandchildren into their reveries on their small-town upbringings (or imaginations of such childhoods) just as elders visiting Beamish were expected to recall to their presumably curious offspring the rituals of home baking, the coal fire, the washing of clothes with mangle and dolly tub, and the distinctive experience of shopping at the Co-op. Yet, in the Beamish case the objective was always to use enjoyment as a means to education, an attempt to provide children with an alternative to the commercialized, alienated, even overly comfortable and artificially stimulating world of their contemporary experience—not in a fantastic, but grounded nostalgia. Beamish drew on a well-established strand of middle-class culture, that of recreation as self-improving and educational, with its hands-on experience to re-create past environments and promote their understanding. Beamish rejected fantasy and the rushed excitement of the amusement park. Based upon accurate re-creations of past realities, it tried to pull back the child and adult alike from their fragmented, uprooted, hedonistic, and overexcited lives in contemporary consumer culture to an appreciation of a close-knit, natural world of honest work and local traditions. The child was not supposed to reflect wonder back on the adult as in Disney, but to guarantee the survival of a valued way of life or at least an “appreciation” of it.

The child at Beamish was supposed to experience and emotionally embrace an everyday life that adults had, in some cases, only recently abandoned. Even more, by implication, at least, they were expected to adopt the critique of modernity that their parents (or the Beamish leadership in any case) embraced. This was a romantic vision of the past, but still was rooted in the original rejection of the “escapism” of the plebeian pleasure crowd. While some miners, textile machine operators escaped their work-a-day lives by embracing the industrial saturnalia of Blackpool, their descendents at Beamish were fascinated by representations of their ancestor’s working lives in the mine or on the farm. The alternative to the potentially dangerous pleasures of the hedonistic crowd was the thoughtful, though enjoyable, engagement of the crowd that learns—especially, if at its center, is found the enlightened (not the wondrous) child. Beamish did not adapt the plebeian crowd of Blackpool to a middle-class sensibility, as had Disney, but instead combined the self-improving culture of Victorian “rational recreation” with the family-oriented popular pleasures of contemporary Europe.

These contrasting resolutions to the “challenge” of industrial saturnalia naturally lead us to the question: Which modern concept of the playful crowd has prevailed? The obvious answer, of course, is Disney’s, even though not without ambiguity. His ideas and practices in park design, crowd control, thematic entertainment and commerce, and much else won global acceptance in the half century after the opening of Disneyland. The Disney formula was sold to a group of Japanese investors whose Disney Tokyo has attracted growing crowds since its opening in 1983. EuroDisney (1992) near Paris was, at first, a failure, but with lowered prices and more thrill rides (along with a name change in 1995 to Disneyland Paris) it has become a financial success. The foreign versions differed. For example, the Paris entrance featured an elegant Center Court presumed to be expected by Europeans, and Main Street was supposed to be less a nostalgia of the American past (which few Europeans could relate to) than a collection of images of shops recalling 1900 America—a candy shop à la Atlantic City and a Gibson Girl ice cream parlor.⁸ Tokyo Disney understandably did not copy Main Street U.S.A. but instead build a World Bazaar shopping center at the entrance and added Meet the World, a Japanese perspective on progress in the context of this island nation’s encounter with the West.⁹ Still, the basic format remained: a single entry point, a central hub in the form of a castle with “lands” radiating from it, and a surrounding berm that separates the entertainment complex from the “outside” world. The continuing and global success of this formula raises questions beyond the scope of this book. But the fact that a plan designed for the baby boom families of the 1950s has survived is an expression of the persistence and adaptability of the fantasy and family themes of that era. That it translated with few changes to Japan and Europe shows not only the appeal of American popular culture, but also the transnational character of this middle-class fantasy world.¹⁰

Disney’s influence went well beyond the company’s theme parks and products. The word “Disneyfication” has come into common use and has been applied to a wide assortment of settings—from amusement and theme parks to malls, museums, and even heritage sites. Not long after the success of Disneyland, numerous amusement parks appeared in suburban American locations copying Disney’s basic themes. After years of stagnation, the number of amusement parks increased from 400 in 1954 to 786 by 1967. Especially important were the corporate sponsored sites: Six Flags (Dallas, 1961), Busch Gardens (Tampa, 1975), Marriott’s Great America (Chicago and elsewhere beginning in 1976), Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich’s Sea World (San Diego, 1977), MCA Universal Studios (1964 in Hollywood and 1990 in Orlando), just to name the best known. Legoland, the theme park of the Danish manufacturer of colorful construction blocks and figure sets, opened in Billund, Denmark in 1968, expanding to Windsor, England in 1996, and opening near San Diego in 1998. Older, privately owned amusement parks, including Southern California’s Knott’s Berry Farm (1940) and Cedar Point (west of Cleveland, Ohio in 1897) also adapted Disney themes.¹¹

Disney’s impact was obvious. Six Flags was divided into themed zones designated by the six flags (and cultures) under which Texans had lived. It too relied on the suburban family crowd (with freeway access). These parks tended to displace the carnivals and fairground amusement grounds of the past by interlinking TV, movies, toys, rides, and other themed amusements and organizing the park design to facilitate the crowd’s flow through movie-like sets and scenes in the manner of Disney.¹²

The impact of Disneyland extends even to places that seem to be its opposite—like Las Vegas hotel and casino complexes. That influence is obvious in the immaculate, but carnival-like setting of the casino Circus Circus, in the Luxor and the Venetian that echo the architecture of Epcot’s World Showcase with their replicas of Egyptian and Italian icons, and in the family-coded fun of MGM Grand (with its indoor amusement park).¹³ Las Vegas and the Disney sites share much as artificial tourist sites that offer well-orchestrated and intense play environments with little of the “travail” of traditional travel. Unlike Coney Island or Blackpool, Disney and Las Vegas sites offer no natural or historic beauty. Instead, their totally artificial movie-set-like attractions can be constructed ex nihilo like the towers and turrets of Luna Park, but out of sterner stuff than staff and without the distraction of a wonderful beach. Moreover, Disney (in Florida, at least) and the “Strip” in Las Vegas can easily expand to accommodate increased crowds without the limits of the sea and urban housing.

Even staid museums of natural history, science, and history were seduced by the crowd appeals of Disney. In 1991, John Terrell wrote that the once lowly museum educator was on the verge of taking exhibitions in American museums away from the curators with the support of Museum Boards determined to increase attendance. These “educators” sacrificed learning and authenticity for entertainment.¹⁴ Paul Reddy, one of many who designed animated exhibitions for Disney, has spread his expertise and perspective to the museum: “Rather than looking through a glass case at something and reading about it,” he explained in 1985, “we want people to be able to participate in some way. We want to create excitement. The education gets through, but you don’t realize it so much.” The goal of sugar coating the bitter pill of learning is today commonly shared by museum administrators. J. Rounds of the Museum of Science and Industry at Los Angeles’ Exposition Park insisted museums must help visitors overcome their fears of subjects that seem “forbidding, unapproachable and threatening.” He oversaw the development of eighteen “interactive” exhibits in 1984. Rounds admitted that such exhibits have limited educational value: “In the few hours most people spend at the museum, we can’t expect to convey a great deal of factual knowledge, but we can get them over their fear of the subject.”¹⁵

In the 1990s, public aquariums tried to expand their audiences, spending millions to theme their facilities in order to give visitors with little knowledge of aquatic wildlife a sense of immersion in the habitat. Pressure to revitalize old tourist areas led to a proposal for a $30 million history museum at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf that was originally planned to include a fog machine, a simulated earthquake, and even a ride through a diorama of the 1960s hippie neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury aboard imitation Volkswagen convertibles. These schemes failed, but many cheered Disney’s efforts to revitalize Times Square in the mid-1990s by staging studio musicals like Lion King and refurbishing the New Amsterdam Theater, driving out the tawdry sex shows.¹⁶ When Disney became the language of the wondrous child as it has in so many ways today, anyone wishing to tap into that sentiment, be it a museum eager to draw young families to its exhibits, commercial caterers of kids’ birthday parties, or even Las Vegas casinos must talk and look Disney.¹⁷

Those sites that cannot or will not adapt the Disney style risk losing crowds. Certainly, in the United States the edifying and rooted nostalgia of Colonial Williamsburg has recently faced the threat of dwindling crowds (dropping to the lowest level in four decades in 2003) and the prospect of compromising its tradition as a living museum of American heritage, with its careful restoration of the eighteenth-century capital of the state of Virginia and reenactments of colonial political, craft, and social life. While this site of heritage tourism has entertained more than 100 million people since it was created in 1934, the private Williamsburg Foundation laid off 400 of its 3,200 staff and cut programming by 20 percent in 2004 in the face of a deficit of $30 million on an operating budget of $200 million. Williamsburg is still a place that families think they should visit, rather than want to visit. The pace is just too slow especially when just down the road are the Busch Gardens, a themed amusement park in the Disney tradition, and Water Country USA with plenty of thrills. Like Beamish, Colonial Williamsburg also faces criticism from advocates of authenticity and opponents of commercialism. Despite efforts in recent years to emphasize the role of slavery, some visitors see it as a “sort of three-dimensional Better Homes and Gardens.” In fact, in 2002 about 4,000 licensed products based on Williamsburg’s colonial themes ranging from furniture and linens to toys and baseball caps brought in $40 million compared with merely $27 million from visitors. While some argue for more fun and emotion at Williamsburg, it probably will not be able to build a thrill ride through the American Revolution without alienating that “cultured” base of support. Williamsburg, like so many other heritage sites, is caught between its appeal to historical authenticity and a public that measures meaning and enjoyment with a Disney yardstick.¹⁸

But Disneyfication has hardly gone unchallenged. We have seen that the company has had to adapt to changes in family and childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. Universal Studios and other amusement parks picked up on the appeal of the age-specific fad and the teenager’s rejection of the intergenerationality of Disney.¹⁹ Universal Studios draws on a strategy that had roots in 1900-era Coney Island itself, that of peer-gathering icons that separated the young from both their childhoods and from authoritative adults. Disney’s strategy of the cute was an answer to the middleclass fear of the plebeian crowd, but it never satisfied the needs of a large part of that crowd—youth—and the often cross-class appeal of the cool.²⁰ Universal, especially with the opening in 1999 of its second theme park, Islands of Adventure, took the movie theme into a more “cool” direction with blood-pumping roller coasters themed around Marvel Comic characters.²¹ In a 2004 TV ad, Universal had only to say, “If fairy tales and Pixie Dust aren’t your thing,” then come to Universal Studios. This dig at Disney appealed to an age and style group that could not be ignored. By the 1980s even Disney went after the cool crowd in the attempt to inject thrills and sarcasm into their rides and shows. TV ads in the winter of 2003–4 featured preteens coolly introducing their petrified parents to Disney’s terrifying rides.

Finally, critiques of the Disney solution to the problem of industrial saturnalia have hardly disappeared. Disneyfication has met with much resistance. Not only was the Disney-like museum on Fisherman’s Wharf scrapped but also a much larger scheme to build an actual Disney amusement park near Washington D.C. was defeated in the early 1990s. “Disney’s America,” was to be a “new” and more entertaining way of learning American history than provided at the “boring” museums in Washington D.C., including a ride through a nineteenth-century steel mill and cotton plantation. The demand for a state subsidy of $150 million for road and other improvements, as well as the fact that that “Disney’s America” would have desecrated the Civil War battlefields at Bull Run, doomed the project. Even though Disney hired prominent American historians for advice and legitimacy, Disney’s candy-coated history sparked strong objections across the political spectrum.²²

In fact, Disney provokes continual hostility. By 2001 there was a Society of Disney Haters on line (www.sodh.org) giving vent to people “forced” to go to the Disneylands with spouses, in-laws, or kids. One such correspondent complained that his relatives “like having everything laid out before them, with no thinking involved…. I found [Disney World] to be the most crass, dehumanizing, cheesy, smarmy pap I’ve ever seen. I simply cannot comprehend how so many people are willing to shell that kind of money for such an inauthentic experience.”²³ Though it is impossible to know for sure, this view still is in the minority and its espousers almost seem to glory in their status as “outsiders.” Though Disneyfication meets resistance, it still seems to call the shots in America, at least. Britain has remained much more resistant, as attendances at the successful industrial museums, stately homes, and preserved railways (for example) continue to hold up well, and highly popular theme parks like Alton Towers as well as the Blackpool Pleasure Beach continue to prioritize thrill rides rather than cute fantasy.

How have Americans and British changed what they desire when free from work and obligation? This history of variations on the theme of twentieth-century tourism addresses this highly meaningful, but seldom raised question. We have emphasized how the changing taste of the consuming crowd reflects less the refinement or manipulation of the masses, than the triumph of particular strands of middle class and “respectable” popular culture. This culture finds answers to the dilemmas of the crowd and consumption in the child-centered family and the celebration of a preconsumerist community. But the working out of this triumph has taken various forms, on a continuum from commercially generated fantasy of the cute to the careful re-creation and recreational re-presentation of historical pasts. These changes, in all their complexity, go to the heart of what makes the contemporary Western world distinct from that world a century before.