The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

About 1,500 New Yorkers gathered in the dead of winter on January 3, 1903 to witness the “execution” of Topsy, the elephant. A 28-year veteran of the traveling American circus, Topsy had for two previous years developed a mean streak, killing three trainers (the last after he “fed” her a lighted cigarette). Topsy’s current owners, Skip Dundy and Frederick Thompson of Coney Island’s newest amusement park, Luna Park, had finally had enough of the temperamental beast. They decided to make a moral lesson of her and win in the process valuable publicity by “executing” the elephant.

At a time when public hangings were being banished from most of the civilized world, the spectacle of hanging the elephant first caught the promoters’ fancy. But it was not merely the logistics of such an act that frustrated them but the objections of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Instead Luna Park teamed up with Thomas Edison to electrocute the offending pachyderm. Edison, who had only recently promoted the electric chair as a humane form of capital punishment, found Luna Park’s offer an opportunity to once again show the “dangers” of alternating current (a rival to his preferred form of electricity, direct current) by arranging for the execution. As significant, a team from Edison’s movie studio eagerly filmed the event for the millions who could not attend. Luna Park staff secured the beast and fitted her with wooden sandals lined with copper to which they attached electrodes. On a signal, “a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan.” While the New York Times described it as “a rather inglorious affair,” Topsy’s execution fascinated Americans at the time when crowds no longer could enjoy the morality play and gruesome thrill of the public executions of people. The sight of a six-ton beast at the mercy of the silent and still mysterious power of electricity brought the crowd to this death scene. This spectacle was memorialized and moralized a century later in 2003 with a sculpture of Topsy at the Coney Island Museum where Edison’s film could be seen through a vintage coin-operated mutoscope. Most Americans today find this event disgusting and especially object to its public character, but in 1903 it was fascinating, even amusing, and suitable for the hoopla of an amusement park.¹

Twenty years later the popular British resort of Blackpool put on its version of the age-old festival of Carnival. Yet this was hardly the ancient custom of festivities taking place the week before the solemnity of Christian Lent. Instead, it was a promotion of the local government from June 9 to 16, 1923 to stimulate the tourist industry in the lull before the start of the holiday season in July. This commercialized saturnalia imitated a successful tourist attraction, the Carnival of Nice on the French Riviera, which was in turn based on the pre-Lenten traditions of Catholic Europe. Carnival was thus transplanted in space and time, and visitors were urged to lay aside their English inhibitions and embrace the “glorious exhilaration in giving rein to folly” that the “Carnival spirit” entailed. Huge processions snaked along the town’s long sea-front promenade, featuring special carriages containing strangely dressed music-makers and dancers, and accompanied by giants wearing enormous papier-mâché heads constructed in the municipal workshops by craftsmen imported from Nice itself. Solid Lancashire citizens did circle dances on the beach; Carnival officials obliged plump traffic policemen to run races along the shore and encouraged visitors to cavort around striking each other with inflated pigs’ bladders. As the official souvenir programme enjoined, “There’ll be laughter for all these eight days, the merriest, maddest laughter that even Blackpool, the home of mirth, has ever heard. So get merry. Join in it.”²

But there were limits to how far this could go in Northern England in the 1920s. Everything stopped on Sunday, where preachers at the churches and chapels were expected to “speak on the spirit of Carnival and the value of healthy enjoyment”; extra police were brought in to control the crowds, catch pickpockets, and enforce the car parking regulations; and there were complaints that the “bladder biffing” had got out of hand. Blackpool would enjoy only two Carnivals; after complaints about rowdyism at the 1924 event and about the disruption caused to production in Lancashire’s mines and factories, the town sought other means of extending its season. It was all very well to shed inhibitions and give way to absurdity and self-indulgence, however self-consciously; but in the end British reserve had to prevail over Continental relaxation.³

How different from this version of Carnival were the orchestrated Electric Parades of Disneyland! Thousands lined Main Street U.S.A. at nightfall on June 17, 1972 to witness the debut of Disneyland’s latest spectacle. It ran daily from June 17 through September 9, the height of the summer vacation crowds, so popular that it ran twice nightly by the end of July. The quarter mile procession lasted exactly 30 minutes and over the years was performed approximately 3,600 times to 75 million visitors. This spectacle was reminiscent of old-time American regional gatherings in small cities that featured high school bands, baton-twirling teams, and colorful floats built by members of small town grange halls. However, instead of featuring the local court of kings and queens of the parade, the floats were tableaux of Disney cartoon characters and the music was piped in from hidden speakers along the procession. Instead of lighted torches, Disney’s parade glowed from hundreds of thousands of colored electric lights. The Grand Marshal was no longer a regional hero or politician, but the Blue Fairy from Disney’s cartoon version of “Pinocchio.” Notable floats included the Casey Junior Circus Train (from “Dumbo”) with Goofy at the controls of the engine. Instead of a single annual event timed to the blossoming of apples or lilacs, the parade was to the 100 performers an everyday thing, shown to Americans on vacation on that special day when they entered the paradise of Disney nostalgia. Though discontinued in 1996, it had already been copied and sent to Walt Disney World in 1977 and thereafter to EuroDisney, transcending completely its American small town roots.⁴

The North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish, County Durham, also celebrates the regional and presents itself as a small town; but its opening on August 30, 1971 was a much less choreographed affair. There were five volunteers manning a makeshift car park, and the arrival of several hundred curious visitors created two-hour queues at the main entrance.⁵ This was a controversial new kind of regional museum, dedicated to bringing the distinctive recent past of northeastern England back to life, reconstructing old home interiors, and making old machines work. It wanted to make history fun without compromising academic standards of accuracy and, as far as possible, authenticity. Its ideals were democratic and participatory as well as educational, and by 1991 it was drawing in over half a million visitors per year: small change compared with the Disney enterprises, but very impressive for an educational facility established and backed up by local government. But Beamish found that there were limits to spontaneity, as it ran on a shoestring in its early years. In 1973 the Newcastle Journal urged local people to go to Beamish and let their kids run wild until they were “brought up short” by the wonder of what was on display. However, two months later staff threatened to walk out as hundreds of under-supervised schoolchildren did run wild, producing “absolute chaos.” Five years later organized theft by school parties led Beamish to replace its volunteer staff in the shopping areas with trained full-timers, and detectives were employed. Here was a loss of innocence even though the museum kept on trying to find its way between spontaneity and order and to create a distinctive version of the “playful crowd.”⁶

Across the twentieth century, masses of pleasure-seeking humanity gathered on both sides of the Atlantic to interact with each other and to react to spectacles. And yet how much these throngs and the things that attracted them have changed! The crowd that gawked at the silent horror of the “execution” of Topsy had little in common with the families who lined the manicured “streets” of Disneyland to smile and coo at life-sized Mickey Mouse figures. The revelers at Blackpool’s version of Carnival seem a world away from the people from northern England who came to contemplate and enjoy their own past at the Beamish open air museum. Someone who witnessed the death of Topsy or watched the Carnival parades at Blackpool might also have been present in adulthood or old age at the Disneyland spectacle or in the opening seasons of Beamish; but a great deal had happened in between. Part of the attraction of Beamish and Disney was that grandparents could explain what was presented as a living past to their grandchildren: and even though they may have conjured up or recalled different things (and forgotten still others), Beamish and Disney were, like this book, to lay claim to being exercises in recovered memory.

These playful crowds reflected their times and places, and comparisons between them help us to understand how the world has changed across the century and between the Atlantic’s opposite shores. This book tells the story of how and why Americans and Britons gathered at such sites as Coney Island, Blackpool, Disneyland, and Beamish, especially at the height of their popularity. In the sheer contrast and diversity of these settings and the crowds that they attracted, we see the playfulness of modern humanity across an astonishingly wide range of contrived and mostly commercial, but still intensely appealing, settings and experiences.

In contrast to so many other throngs (from shoppers on main streets or malls to gatherings at political rallies), our crowds were engaged in the unalloyed pursuit of pleasure. As sites of outdoor spectacle that invite crowds to interact with each other and with the sites themselves, to participate actively as well as to gaze and listen, to move, mingle, compete for attention and put the self on show, all four places created crowds distinct from sports or staged entertainment spectators. Their pursuits were distinctly complex—seeking the novel as well as the nostalgic, the thrill of the mechanical ride as well as the majesty of the sea, both the gaudy and the sublime. And, in their inherent structure as artificial, but relatively open environments, they created a flowing, even potentially promiscuous, crowd that required special efforts to regulate and control and frequently raised the question of whether these throngs threatened rational self-restraint and other prized values of modern industrial civilization.

Most of all these four sites fostered crowds very different from those gathered to witness human executions (in contrast to the mockery of Topsy’s demise) or in anger or frustration at a riot or political demonstration. These resorts and theme parks promised experiences and meanings that contrasted with, relieved, and yet often confirmed the ordinary work-a-day lives of their paying visitors. This liberation from and yet reconciliation with the everyday is what made their visitors into playful crowds. Human culture has produced many versions of playful crowds—on feast days and holidays, in lulls in the hunting or agricultural work cycle, in religious, political, or military celebrations. Temporarily “turning the world upside down” has taken many forms from the ancient Roman saturnalia to the modern New Orleans Mardi Gras. Each reflected and reinforced a particular society and culture. One of our goals is to explore that distinctive version of the playful crowd that came to culminate in the early twentieth century—what we call industrial saturnalia—and how it was transformed across the course of that century.

We begin our panorama of the playful crowd with the two most popular resorts at the dawn of the twentieth century: Blackpool, the holiday destination first of the wage earners of England’s Lancashire cotton towns and eventually of most of the British Isles; and Brooklyn’s Coney Island, southeast of Manhattan, the model of the popular American amusement resort/park for a half century. These were the first great popular playgrounds for the industrial working class in the modern world.⁷ Although the working classes at play never completely dominated their beaches, streets, and fairgrounds, they quickly came to provide the images that overrode all others, and Blackpool and Coney Island became indelibly associated with crowded, noisy, vulgar, unbuttoned, uninhibited enjoyment, for better and worse. They epitomized the suspension of dignity and inhibitions, the reign of gluttony, extravagance, and licentiousness, at once a surrendering and a celebration of self. In 1910, Coney Island claimed 20 million visitors or 22 visits for every 100 Americans, a higher proportion than even Disney theme parks could claim 70 years later.⁸ Blackpool’s four million at this time were 11 percent of the population of England and Wales; but a much higher proportion of its visitors stayed for several days or a week rather than a day or a few hours as in Coney Island.⁹

Coney Island and Blackpool led the field in introducing the first great permanent amusement parks in their countries, with rides generating physical excitement and appealing to fantasy and wonderment: Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach, and the evocative Coney Island trio of Luna Park, Steeplechase, and Dreamland. The two seaside resorts combined popular modernity, mass consumption, and a new collective experience. At the same time, they offered settings for more traditional entertainments across a broad taste spectrum: from dioramas, firework spectacles, and music and dance halls to freak shows, animal acts, bars and pubs, sticky festive foodstuffs, games of skill and luck, girlie shows, prostitution, and much else. In differing degrees, they borrowed from the varied Victorian traditions of exhibitions and world’s fairs, musical theater, circuses, fairground entertainments, and urban “museum” curiosities.

The playful crowd in the form that it emerged in late Victorian Blackpool and Coney Island seemed to take on a life of its own. The Bulgarian-born Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960) perhaps best captured its vitality when he saw this crowd as “wanting” to grow, loving its own density, and demanding a social leveling within its boundaries. Here he echoed the comments of many contemporary journalists and social observers. Individuals joined the crowd, Canetti believed, because it offered them an opportunity to overcome their fear of being touched by others and allowed them to surrender self to the group.¹⁰ Especially germane to our understanding of Blackpool and Coney Island crowds is Canetti’s description of the feast crowd: Within the confines of the seaside resort (and later the theme park),

We may have some doubts about the collective agency ascribed to the crowd, but Canetti captures much of the appeal of the crowd to the popular classes especially in 1900. The longing for a release from the “rules” of urban/industrial life in what we call an industrial saturnalia created and sustained the playful crowds. The crowds we describe here were dense, but quick in the pursuit of enjoyment. In this book we recover Canetti’s feast crowd from neglect; but in transforming it into the “playful crowd” we also move it on to an understanding of popular culture through the twentieth century.¹²

In any event, although widespread, this longing for the self-forgetfulness of the crowd did not attract all. Many middle-class people did not want to be “touched” even in a crowd and many feared the release of inhibition—even as many also were fascinated by the mystery and energy of the throng. Blackpool and Coney Island excited anxiety, disgust, superiority, patronizing amusement, and even curious admiration from middle-class and intellectual witnesses. The urban crowd had long congregated for religious, political, or industrial purposes, in search of justice or revenge; in celebration of ritual, triumph or festivity. But toward the end of the nineteenth century as it became associated with the political and industrial demands of the emergent working class, the popular crowd attracted the attention of the first generation of “social scientists” like Gustave le Bon who were trying to find ways of analyzing and controlling the potential political threat of mass urban society.¹³ Nevertheless, our playful crowds attracted less attention until the appearance of Coney Island and the popularization of Blackpool. External observers’ critiques of these new forms of mass entertainment abounded as highbrow commentators damned the alleged shallowness, sameness, superficiality, and commercial exploitation of these popular resorts. The playful crowd was less threatening politically but more threatening culturally and morally. Still, celebrations of the raw energy, agency, and even self-discipline of the crowd at play were not hard to find, often mixed in with the critical commentaries as the other side of the coin.¹⁴

In this context, the impresarios of Blackpool and Coney Island had to foster an air of holiday relaxation and thereby widen the boundaries of acceptable conduct in these special spaces, and yet make sure that crowd behavior would not challenge the sensibilities of potentially valuable customers or outside authorities. The critique of the playful crowd continuously threatened to take the form of intervention and restriction, even as that crowd found ways to adapt and resist, and to develop internal controls and restraints of its own. This book looks at changing ways in which playful crowds were policed or policed themselves, by whom, and with what success. And, as we shall see, there were very different impacts of this struggle in Coney Island and Blackpool.

Behind the contradiction between the snobbish rejection and wistful admiration of the playful crowd were on-going cultural dilemmas: How was it possible to create a crowd that did not threaten bourgeois privacy? How could impresarios create a form of play that was liberating but also uplifted? There were many answers to these problems (including “hardy” holiday camps or Chautauquas). Ultimately, however, the fantasy world of Disneyland (1955) and the heritage site of the Beamish Museum (1971) would provide two of the most satisfying and long-lasting responses to the challenge of industrial saturnalia.

Comparing Disneyland and the Beamish Museum may seem at first glance like comparing apples and oranges, but, in fact, they represent distinct, if not equally popular, attempts to address the problems of taming the playful crowd of Coney/ Blackpool and of balancing uplift and leisure. Neither, of course, can be seen as representative of their respective countries, but they do reveal patterns rooted deeply in the nations that gave them birth. Disney’s park is universally recognized as the model of modern theme parks, a creation of the Hollywood dream machine that turns cartoon characters and movie scenes and stories into mechanical rides and fantasy spaces. Within a dozen years of its opening in 1955, more than 60 million had entered its gates and since the 1970s ten or more million visit it yearly. Its goal of creating playful, but wholesome, settings for crowds of families addressed middle-class sensibilities.¹⁵

Beamish, by contrast, is relatively little known outside of England, although it has many analogues and some imitators elsewhere. Located in County Durham, in the northeast of England, Beamish pulls together, on a secluded 300-acre site, a set of reconstructions of the industrial past of a region that was once famous as a center for mining and as the cradle of the steam railroad. There are farms, collieries, railways, shops, homes, cottages, and streets from about 1825, when the region was beginning to industrialize, and about 1913, the climax of the industrial era. Its founder, Frank Atkinson, conceived Beamish as a way of saving the artifacts of this period and presenting them to perpetuate a sense of regional identity. His goal was to mingle education with pleasure for crowds of locals and, as it turned out, crowds of tourists. It was an attempt to foreground learning as leisure, harking back to traditions of self-improvement that were usually hostile to commercial entertainment, and doing so under the auspices of nonprofit trustees and of local government. By 1990 it was attracting half a million visitors a year, from school parties to tourists; and although attendance has dropped, current figures have held firm at around 350,000 per year. At times unthinking commentators have referred to Beamish as “an industrial Disneyland,” and Atkinson himself was always aware of the Disney phenomenon as a competitor and alternative model. In fact, Disneyland and Beamish represent two distinct ways that an emerging middle-class culture responded to the challenge of industrial saturnalia. They were products of the long debate about the playful crowd, addressing how and why that crowd seemed both threatening and reassuring.