American Fun (23 page)

And so it follows that, in the 1850s, promoters, reformers, and city officials had only to cite the Astor Place riots when justifying strict civic rules—in theaters, on sidewalks, in municipal parks. Taste and decency had to be enforced, law and order had to be maintained, lest Mose and Sykesy and their Five Points thugs spread their mayhem across the land.
Maine went dry in 1850, the same year
P. T. Barnum opened his own tidy theater and debuted
The Drunkard,
William H. Smith’s blockbuster temperance play. It would outsell even
A Glance at New York
and have a field day with the Five Points subcultures. With that decade’s commercial blitz of Stephen Foster’s sentimental minstrelsy and tsk-tsking novels like
T. S. Arthur’s
Ten Nights in a Barroom
(1854), in which King Alcohol brings a town to its knees, popular culture was cleaning up its act and catering to a new middle class.

B’hoys and g’hals fell out of vogue, but they didn’t just vanish. In 1856, a year after the
Dead Rabbit/Bowery Boy riot devastated lower Manhattan,
Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
sent their man
George A. Foster to report on “
the nightly revels at Dickens’s Place,” aka Uncle Peet’s, the Five Points dance hall still known for the English author’s visit some fifteen years before. The place hadn’t changed much, despite once having burned to the ground. It “reechoed its wonted sounds of festive jollification.” And on a Saturday night, all of America’s outcasts were there. Among its usual multiracial clientele of “thieves, loafers, prostitutes and rowdies” were the expected
Jack Tars and b’hoys and g’hals. Early in the evening the bar was mobbed, while female dancers, mostly black and “tidy and presentable,” were “all agog for the fun to commence.” When the little orchestra had warmed up and the gallants had stowed their wet chaw in their pockets, the whooping couples assumed their positions
on the crowded, creaky planks. As Foster describes it, they were baited and caught by “Cooney in the Holler”: “contorting their bodies and accelerating their movements, accompanied with shouts of laughter and yells of encouragement and applause, until all observance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurrahs on his or her own hook.” Foster orients this harmless riot within the district’s violent history: “the dancers, now wild with excitement, like
Ned Buntline at Astor Place, leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder.” But the sheer exuberance of Uncle Peet’s celebrants shines right through the sneering prose, just as William Henry Lane’s lightning-heeled expertise shone through Dickens’s Victorian smirk.

Foster then notices an adjoining apartment, an implicit brothel, that was meant to cater to higher-brow clients—presumably to the wealthy
slumming parties who would be slinking in great numbers into places like Five Points in the stuffier decades to come. “Champagne made of very superior pink turnip-juice is kept ready for the upper crust whenever the fun grows fast and furious and those with money have reached the ‘damn-the-expense stage of excitement.’ ” Uncle Peet’s effort to attract the swells shows that he was a man of his times. The b’hoys were evolving into the flashier “sporting set.” And the rubbed-up fun of mixed dance halls was fast becoming a thing of the past, if also of the distant future.

6

B
ARNUM’S
AMERICAN MUSEUM PROSPERED
throughout the
Civil War: the giants, the little people, even the automatons were dressed in Yankee uniforms.
Patriotic dramas played two times a day. And Barnum made his most profitable discovery yet, William Henry Johnson—the “What Is It?”—a microcephalic African-American dwarf whom he pitched to the recently Darwin-crazed audiences as the “missing link” between man and monkey. But in March of 1868, when the museum burned for a second time, a holocaust that killed hundreds of animals in their cages, the showman declared he was closing up shop. He retired to a new mansion (“Waldemere”), then took a long, all-American vacation hunting wild buffalo on the Kansas plains. He had hardly been in retirement for a year, however, when he was approached by
William Cameron Coup, a young
circus manager whom he’d gotten started years before, and was tempted with the thought of starting a road show. What began as a revival of his museum on wheels—reassembling his pet performers and curiosities—soon hit the rails as “
The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Barnum defended its claim to “Greatness” with a $100,000 challenge across his billboards: “
ten times larger than any other show ever
seen on Earth.” Only a fool would have taken him up on it. Even with its dozens of dormitories and stables and its ten big tops housing all his specialties—the Museum and the Laboratory, the Fine Arts collection and Menagerie—“Barnum’s Magic City” could materialize overnight and accommodate ten thousand patrons at a pop. His decades of experience in keeping crowds moving ensured that nobody stood still for long, but was propelled from one attraction to the next—past Siamese twins, bearded ladies, frog swallowers, and dwarves, shedding nickels and dimes along the way as they were herded toward the roaring, high-flying Hippodrome.

In its first year his circus struggled on the roads, getting mired in mud and flooding rivers, but starting in 1872 they chartered trains—often sixty-five overcharged cars in length—and thereafter they struck all the midwestern towns where Barnum’s name had only been legend. Despite severe setbacks, principally another fire in 1872 that killed most of his animals in a New York warehouse, his show kept growing every season, eventually merging in 1880 with that of his only competitor,
John A. Bailey, to form a worldwide entertainment juggernaut.

The entertainment industry slavishly followed Barnum’s methodology—for promotion, production, and transportation; it also enforced the standards of Victorian decency that he had adhered to long before the war. When in the 1830s he upstaged preachers to defend the virtues of entertainment, Barnum broke ground for a towering monoculture that throve on exciting, inoffensive pleasures. These pleasures were often peppered with dashes of folk fun (slang, risk, seeming rebellion), although even these zingers were mostly nostalgic, as if mischief belonged to America’s past, which in many ways it did. For, to be sure, with the growing force of “middling folk” up north—white-collar suburbanites who earned regular salaries—the entertainments devised by Barnum and his adherents feasted on a lucrative new market.
“Family fun,” as these amusements have come to be called, were ostensibly nutritious and virtuous pleasures: they reinforced the tastes and mores that had been popularized during the
Second Great Awakening. Family fun broadened the entertainment market with its daintier appeals to women and children. Perhaps more insidiously, it took citizens in moments of
deep distraction and slotted them into postbellum America’s increasingly corporate social structure.

But of course the mischief wasn’t really gone: In the West, there were still jumping boomtowns. In the cities, there were untamed Bowerys that wisely preyed on leering slummers’ wallets. But in a more pervasive sense, during the Gilded Age, American mischief went big time and came to characterize the culture industry—in both its methods and its champions. As
Karen Halttunen argues in her classic book on the
rise of the middle class, after the
Civil War, the confidence men and “painted ladies” that antebellum reformers warned their children about gave way to heroic tricksters like the hero of
Horatio Alger’s eponymous
Ragged Dick
. Confidence men became
capitalist icons. In what Halttunen calls the nation’s “
new corporate context” of acquisition and aspiration, “personality skills, such as that subtle quality called charm, were more useful to the ambitious youth than the qualities of industry, sobriety, and frugality” that reformers touted before the war; “executive ability and management—the art of manipulating others to do what you want them to do—was far more valuable than the ascetic self-discipline of an earlier era.”

This new education redefined the citizen, not as an entrepreneur, adventurer, or rebel but rather—in the spirit of
Mark Twain’s middle-class hero, Tom Sawyer—as a lubricant in the capitalist system. If the system itself was based on trickery, the con man was its model citizen. Barnum said it himself: the “
humbug in the exhibition room [is] merely market
capitalism by another name.” But if the heroes were con men, then the larger citizenry were their dupes, and family fun—one of the era’s biggest-ticket schemes—had all the marks of a blurry shell game. Its customers stood in lines for tickets. They assumed their quiet places in rank-and-file bleachers. They bought cheap
imitations of participation and liberty that made them feel like soaring athletes, daring cowboys, noble explorers. Before the Civil War, as many historians have shown, P. T. Barnum welcomed crowds to call his humbugs humbug. Afterwards, in an age of popular realism, his Gilded Age progeny flattered and dazzled their crowds. They assured them they were praying to see the real deal. In the exhibition room of the Gilded Age, corporate con men aimed to convince.

The recreation, amusement, and entertainment industries made lighthearted pleasures widely available—both to the city dwellers who benefited from the construction boom in parks, gymnasiums, vaudeville theaters, and arenas and to rural citizens who traveled from counties away when the big-top shows came to town. This cheap, modern, standardized “fun” not only filled the perceived social need for earlier American fun (the daring, primitive rebellions detailed in earlier chapters) but also—after the logic of P. T. Barnum, blackface, and “Mose”—often sold it in
replica.
Thrills that had been born out of sometimes desperate need, as they had been in slave quarters and mining camps, were repackaged as diversions for a growing workforce. They became “
leisure” activities for weekends and holidays, and in eras since, their success has only grown. They have become so diverse, widespread, and profitable that they have spawned their own academic discipline, “leisure studies,” which is a subdiscipline of both sociology and business administration.

Regulated and commercial family fun is, in its own right, “American fun.” It reflects powerful strains in the national consciousness—capitalism and corporate administration, in particular—and it remains more prevalent now than ever. But far from reflecting a national tendency toward risk, struggle, and self-identification, it reflects the opposite in a tendency toward leisure, toward disappearance into the passive crowd. To be sure, this kind of Gilded Age fun is often the pleasure of
repressing
struggle, also of
dissolving
it. In the terms of this book’s larger argument, the entertainments and amusements engineered during this period mark the first of modern fun’s three “tributaries,” all of which keep flowing today, usually mixing and commingling their respective social waters. The remaining two tributaries, the wildly playful and the radically political, will join the mainstream in later eras.

IN THE REPUBLIC
’
S EARLY DECADES
, when a mostly rural population was struggling for survival,
athletics were largely primitive pastimes. In the Northeast, sports, though generally less regulated than they had been in colonial Puritan communities, were valued most when they had something to deliver. Children’s games like marbles and hopscotch
were often linked with moral lessons, and adult diversions, like hunting and fishing, had obvious practical benefits. In Quaker Pennsylvania and throughout the American South, attitudes toward skittles, bowling, billiards, and a few other traditional European sports were typically more lax. In general, however, early U.S. citizens, mostly males, played roughly the same games that their ancestors had played—stoolball, ninepins, and, among the elite, tennis. The rules of these games were basic, the matches ad hoc. The balls and bats were crafted at home according to tradition or, by the 1820s, instructions in magazines. A “fitness movement” sprang up in that decade; this tentacle of the larger
reform movement brought private male
gymnasiums to East Coast cities and inspired the odd college to start a physical education program. Over the next twenty years, however, vigorous activities like rowing and gymnastics belonged almost exclusively to the upper classes. By the 1850s,
baseball was becoming nationally prominent, but nobody risked mass-producing its equipment until after the Civil War, when soldiers on both sides had discovered the sport and baseball became the dominant sector of a sudden and booming “sporting goods” industry.