American Fun (22 page)

B’hoys worked as butchers, printers, shipbuilders, factory hands, and carpenters, but it was their universal identification as volunteer
firemen that lent them their signature sartorial panache and their ferocious company loyalty. G’hals worked as bookbinders, milliners, and housekeepers, and often took sides with the combative b’hoys. B’hoys were early
America’s most flamboyant
gangsters. They pledged their allegiance to the violent street gangs that carved up turf from the Bowery to Five Points. The Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, Black Roach Guards, Bowery Boys, and other such clubs battled for turf, politics, and fun. As one former Bowery Boy recalled, “
The gang had no regular organization, but were a crowd of young men of different nationalities, mostly American born, who were always ready for excitement, generally of an innocent nature.” Veterans of the ongoing “
recreational” riots that had broken out for years between fire brigades, b’hoys’ greatest thrill, and highest prestige, came from fighting downtown fires and fighting other gangs and firefighters.

For all of their bare-knuckle differences, however, these mostly native-born children of Irish and other working-class immigrants rallied around their disgust for America’s “aristocratic”—British, Whiggish—wealth. They took American democracy at its word, but they also believed it belonged exclusively to whites, as
their bloody 1834
race riots, and widespread resistance to abolition, made clear. In the tradition of
Jack Tars in the Sons of Liberty’s taverns, they studied the incendiary editorials of proletarian activists like
William Leggett. And as the
Jackson Age wore on, and the Democratic Party became a factional circus under the big top of New York’s
Tammany Hall, they split up among the ranks of sexy new demagogues who prized them for their heedless streetfighting tactics.
Levi Slamm’s little militia of
Locofocos (known in the press as “
Slamm Bang & Co.”) set out to “democratize” capitalism, but
Thomas Skidmore’s band of
Workies pushed a communist agenda. In the 1840s,
George Henry Evans’s
“Young America” movement had scores of b’hoys imploring busy New Yorkers to fulfill the nation’s destiny in the West. “
Thorough-going sporting-man”
Isaiah Rynders led a thousand of his “Empire Club” b’hoys to rally for
James K. Polk and bully Whigs away from the polls. And the pugnacious “underground” journalist
Mike Walsh, a rabble-rousing Irish-born b’hoy himself, built an army of b’hoys he called the
Spartans to bring about his “
shirtless democracy.” It suited the b’hoys’ unresolved loyalties—cosmopolitan, racist, democratic, patriotic—that Walsh himself harangued for such inconsistent beliefs as Fourierist socialism, increased immigration, and the expansion
of slavery into
Texas. But it was his hobnailed tactics that pleased them most. Under his influence, they took politics to the streets—even road-tripping to
Rhode Island in 1842 in a failed attempt to topple a state government that still restricted
voting rights to landowners, the
Dorr Rebellion.

B’hoys and g’hals were America’s first fans. They frequented Barnum’s humbugs and museums. They devoured
dime novels and the sauciest penny papers. They were also incurable theater junkies who bullied their way en masse into shows and lectures. Voracious audience members whose eclectic tastes conformed to the era’s new variety shows, they rallied for Shakespeare with the same avidity that they did melodramas and
blackface minstrelsy. B’hoys and g’hals were pop-culture consumers, but they also spun their own turbines of fun—spoke out, wisecracked, and pulled practical jokes. They gambled, drank, and fought in the streets. And as cultural descendants of Irish immigrants who danced against blacks for eels and cakes, they frequented Five Points’s rowdiest dance halls and put their own energetic spins on breakdowns, hornpipes, tap dance, and waltz. Up for adventure whenever, wherever, b’hoys were also—as
Tyler Anbinder notes—“
the first New Yorkers to leave for California when the
gold rush began.”

To be sure, in this primitive age of the theater—when crowd members drank, spat, yelled, tussled, and kept up an ongoing contest with the stage (and when balconies served as ad hoc brothels)—the b’hoys and g’hals, the most spirited patrons, saw celebrity fandom as an excellent reason to rumble. They took proud ownership of actors and plays and staged their own dramas in the peanut gallery. So it seems almost inevitable, in this age of humbug, that b’hoys and g’hals should soon become the
subjects
of popular culture. They were just too colorful, excitable,
ripe
. Just as stylish black “
dandies and dandizettes” entered the national consciousness through 1830s and ’40s minstrelsy (most notably under the guise of
Zip Coon), b’hoys and g’hals made their stage debut in
Beulah Spa; or Two of the B’hoys
(1834). But they wouldn’t become larger-than-life poster-board caricatures until the late 1840s, when
Frank Chanfrau, a b’hoy turned melodramatic actor, fashioned a character, “Mose,” from
Moses Humphrey, an actual tough he had known as a fireman for the
Peterson Engine Company no. 15. Before long he had worked him into
Benjamin A. Baker’s play
A Glance at New York in 1848
. Chanfrau’s more immediate inspiration, however, for this streetfighting butcher and red-shirted fireman were the kids who filled the pit in Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre, where the play made its debut.
So faithfully did he mimic their dress, gestures, and talk that the play’s producer,
William Mitchell, mistaking Chanfrau for a gallery rogue who had managed to sneak backstage, tried to eject him on opening night.

A Glance at New York
was a simplistic comedy—the travails of a country “
greenhorn” taken in by a series of con men. Over the course of the play, Mose and his canny friends adopt the bumpkin, George, and defend him against grifters, sharpers, and thieves. But the story’s real arc is the b’hoys’ search for “fun”—the “
capital fun” of
cross-dressing in the g’hals’ “uniform” and infiltrating their bowling alley; the “capital fun” of the bowling itself; their easygoing spree in the bohemian “Loafers’ Paradise”; and, always, avidly, the pugilistic “fun” (the all-engrossing “muss”) for which the tobacco-spewing and slang-slinging Mose itches, aches, parades, and spoils. His g’hal, Lize (Eliza Stebbins), is pegged with urban amusements of her own; she appears reading
Matilda, the Disconsolate
and urges Mose, in her Bowery dialect, to go to “
Waxhall,” “Wawdeville,” and a “first-rate shindig.” Mose and Lize strutted with a modern insouciance that tickled pit denizens right where they lived: they affirmed the audience in their own love of fun. “
As may be supposed,” one reviewer wrote, “it is received with shouts of delight by the thousand originals of the pit.”

The play was such a runaway success—the biggest hit yet for the city’s biggest-drawing theater—that it spawned a flash-in-the-pan “Mose” and “Lize” franchise, always starring Chanfrau as the beloved Mose. It packed the Olympic for seventy-four nights before Chanfrau moved the venture to his own theater, the Chatham, and began reaping the profits for himself. Chanfrau knew his rowdy clientele. But despite the fact that he was expanding the pit to accommodate nearly three-quarters of the hall, the unscrupulous
New York Herald
threw some humbug his way, calling his new theater “
a pleasant place for family resort.” The play had a surefire business model, and its crowd had a bottomless appetite for
more, but the script left nothing to chance. Before the curtain falls, as Mose exits the stage to help his pal Sykesy “in a muss,” he calls out to the pit: “Don’t be down on me ’cause I’m goin’ to leave you … if you don’t say no, why, I’ll scare up this crowd again to-morrow night, and then you can take another.”

The trick worked. The play’s immediate sequel,
New York As It Is,
sold a total of forty thousand tickets in forty-seven straight performances. It reheated the basic plot of
A Glance
and kept its promise of urban realism—in a soup kitchen and tenement fire—but also, for fun, a steamboat race and “dancing for eels” in Catharine Market. The next play,
Mose in California
(1849), jettisoned realism for topical hyperbole: the b’hoys take a ship called the
Humbug
through the Isthmus and get an exaggerated California education—grappling bears, defeating Indians, and landing an impossibly large chunk of gold. In subsequent plays the franchise flew off the rails, finally losing its wheels with
Mose in China
(1850), which closed in a month. As Chanfrau upped the ante to hold the Bowery b’hoys’ attention, Mose transformed into an inner-city giant to steal even Davy Crockett’s thunder. As
David S. Reynolds and others have shown, “
Onstage, the b’hoy gained superhuman powers. The gargantuan Mose used lampposts as clubs, swam across the Hudson with two strokes, and leaped easily from Manhattan to Brooklyn.” To be sure, if Yankee peddlers and Kentucky woodsmen were comic icons of an earlier American character, b’hoys and g’hals (as well as some of their minstrel counterparts) stood for a roughneck cosmopolitanism that was spreading outward from the inner cities.

But b’hoys and g’hals have the dubious distinction of being America’s first folk heroes to stand in line and buy tickets to see their own spectral images. The steps Chanfrau took to amuse these youths heralded a new age in American fun. His heroes were designed to flatter a demographic, and his theater catered directly to their class. The fact that his shows were loud and louche, maximizing
audience participation, only showed how well this “Mose” understood his clientele’s taste. Surely they thought they had invented this fun, and to a certain degree they had. But Chanfrau apparently had the last laugh, and it isn’t clear whether the real b’hoys (who mortally hated fat cats like the one he was
becoming) were warm to his elaborate gag. Quite possibly, like country greenhorns, they’d been had.

It wouldn’t have been the first time. Politicians had been gaslighting them for decades. But in the year when Chanfrau baited his pit, the b’hoys’ short tempers, high-value brawn, and mobbish fandom for true-blue American actors created a delicious new opportunity. For years they had championed the American tragedian Edwin “Neddy” Forrest against his archrival,
William Charles Macready, England’s greatest tragedian. On May 10, 1849, at the peak of the
Mose
craze, while Forrest played
Macbeth
to a capacity crowd at the downtown Broadway Theatre, a few blocks away, at the posh new Astor Place Theatre, with its high ticket prices and white-glove dress code, Macready also played
Macbeth
—but not to his typically tony audience. In the previous weeks, a loose consortium of troublemakers and
Tammany Hall politicians—among them
Mike Walsh,
Isaiah Rynders, and the rapscallion journalist
Ned Buntline, whose first dime novels would lionize the b’hoys—had
distributed blocks of free tickets to the show. So while Forrest played his part with anti-British fervor, driving thousands of cheering minions to their feet, Macready, simply doing his job, incited a rain of witty abuse, rotten food, urban detritus, and
theater seats. Afterwards leagues of b’hoys marched the streets, chanting in the voice of Shakespeare’s weird sisters:

Mose in his full B’hoy regalia admires the finer points of an African-American jig—danced for eels at New York’s Catharine Market. (“Dancing for Eels,” F. S. Chanfrau & J. Winans in
New York As It Is.
Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.)

The next night, when Macready accepted a petition from forty-eight prominent New Yorkers (among them
Washington Irving and
Herman Melville), asking him to retake the stage, ten thousand nativists flooded into Astor Place, and the result was the nation’s bloodiest riot to date. Twenty-two were killed, more than a hundred injured, with the casualties due mostly to police suppression.

So, yes, Mose had fun. Commercial fun, criminal fun, loads of mobocratic fun. At his worst he did his henchmen’s bidding and severely disrupted civil society—destroyed property, pummeled innocents, even allegedly gang-raped prostitutes.
Luc Sante offers a grimly accurate explanation for the b’hoys’ seeming “
carnival”: “the collected miseries of the people were acted out with torches and clubs and rocks … unable to imagine social stability as anything but repression … the rioters sought a permanent state of riot.” No Sons of Liberty or Pinkster revelers, who strove for a permanent state of
democracy,
b’hoys outright rejected civility. They had a big appetite for American thrills—rough, raw, dangerous, dirty—but they failed to strike the playful balance that makes a party fun, the balance between individual and communal pleasure. At their worst they played in a danger zone between radical activism and criminality; they explored American fun’s dark side. More vicious than eighteenth-century
Jack Tars, who made surgical strikes on offending property; less principled than their revolutionary forebears, b’hoys seemed to justify ruling-class fears (as one
Dorr Rebellion opponent put
it) of “
an aristocracy of the dram shop, the brothel and the gutter; not in the ruffle-shirt gentry but in the gentry who have no shirts at all.” Bullying, wild, hell-bent for destruction, the Bowery b’hoys were a proven menace. Their self-serving pursuit of absolute freedom played right into their enemies’ hands, justifying reform. What’s more, their collective rage, combined with their love of popular amusement, made these kids an easy touch—vulnerable to politicians and entertainers alike, who stood to profit from their fury.