American Fun (26 page)

While under Salsbury’s influence, the Wild West show revived a lawless frontier that had only recently been declared “closed.” In the popular imagination this extravagant lawlessness
belonged
to Americans. It bucked with the broncos, fought with the cowboys, and war-whooped with Cody’s bona fide Indians. It roused the crowd’s most savage wishes without ever making them enter the arena. The show no more threatened its audience’s safety than did contemporary tableaux vivants (live still lifes of classical set pieces that flattered the upper classes with Old World culture), but its
sensations
were shocking, and it made the crowd feel radically American.

……………

THE MASS-PRODUCED AMUSEMENTS
of the postbellum period justified the smirking sense of frivolity that is commonly associated with “fun.” These pleasures were fleeting and superficial—
by design
. Nothing was at stake, except the ticket price. As enjoyable as it was to laugh at
vaudeville or to gasp at the triple-somersaulting aerials of Barnum’s magnificent Matthews family, these were things you did “for fun”—which is to say, for nothing at all. You took no risks, and took no part. Even Cody’s spectators who were pulled from the crowd to ride in the Deadwood stage attack didn’t experience deadly frontier action; it only looked and felt as if they did.

Such fun was vicarious, as were its risks: spectators identified with dexterous athletes, death-defying acrobats, and rough-riding (retired) cowboys. Such fun was also voyeuristic, whether folks ogled the ribald antics of minstrels or the splendor of Native American powwows. It required no talent, no personal investment. Such no-stakes fun (call it entertainment) was readily transferable from the
circus to vaudeville to nickelodeon and carnival, where automated games of skill and chance offered a limited sense of participation—shooting (corn kernels) like
Annie Oakley, galloping (on a carousel) like Buffalo Bill. This closed commercial circuit made for a self-sustaining market. Its consumers were unspecialized, indiscriminate, omnivorous, expecting little more than varieties of distraction from one inexpensive venue to the next. The print media benefited on all levels—selling advertisements, publishing promotions, tracking and contriving celebrity gossip.

This system reinforced a severe double standard for what it meant to “have fun”: either, like Buffalo Bill, you achieve the impossible as the star onstage or you achieve the bare minimum in the anonymous crowd. Both were (and are) kinds of American “fun,” and both tried to approximate the participatory excitement that liberated early American crowds—at Merry Mount or on
Congo Square, or in the unadulterated cussedness of Virginia City. Day and night, in “
continuous performance,” performers replicated the merriment and daring of a bold young nation inventing itself. Season upon season, in row after row, American
spectators took in the show, while the wide-open spaces for loose public pleasure quietly vanished like the western frontier.

Ironically, in the age of aggressive realism, the age of pragmatism and science, when the people had outgrown the midcentury gaslights of mystery, hoaxes, magic, and romance, the
humbug of commercialism reached its adulthood. Fraud wasn’t a laughing matter anymore. It also wasn’t open to debate.
Mark Twain verified Buffalo Bill’s story, and the product these pseudonymous moguls sold was so much more flavorful than the real, dusty thing—funner than an actual “Mexican Plug,” funner than a saddle-busting
Dismal River roundup—so much funner that it handily passed the public taste test. Buffalo Bill’s great sleight of hand, what had him out-Barnuming P. T. Barnum, was to engineer a pleasure so irresistible that nobody
cared
how real it was.

America hasn’t been the same ever since.

THIS U.S. MARKET OF SEEING
(and believing) achieved critical mass in 1893, at Chicago’s
World’s Columbian Exposition. National religious leaders had convened months earlier, debating the exposition’s general morality and lobbying to have it closed on Sundays, but in the end they conceded it was an excellent way to showcase their various orthodoxies. So the exposition surged seven days a week, and everybody was satisfied. Between May and October of that year, 21.5 million customers paid fifty cents apiece to gape in wonder at the plaster-of-Paris White City and to gawk along the fair’s mile-long Midway Plaisance. The former was a temporary faux-classical metropolis devoted to the heights of civilization—plastic arts, music, technology, government.
Charles Dudley Warner, Twain’s co-author of
The Gilded Age,
lectured there and described a viral disease he called “
Barnumism”—a “lack of moderation” and a “striving to be sensational” that was warping literature, sermons, and the press. Of course Barnumism defined the entire exposition, all of which was drawn to immoderate scale—outsize buildings, miniaturized nations—but the designers pretended it was kept to the Midway (at the farthest possible remove from the fair’s art museum) where millions thronged along a Barnumesque esplanade of international
“villages” and other gaudy attractions. The Midway offered a low-cultural universe in dozens of crass curios like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the bluntly Orientalist Streets of Cairo, where the belly dancer
Little Egypt became a household name and spawned lurid copycats across the country. But whereas the Columbian Exposition was mostly about looking (at a Hawaiian volcano, a squat Eiffel Tower) and also about listening (to lectures and sermons and world music, from Poland’s Paderewski to African drummers), among its greatest hits were the oddball exhibits that invited full-body participation, especially the “captive balloon” rides soaring 1,500 feet above the city and
George Ferris’s wildly popular Big Wheel. This 264-foot-wide stroke of genius is said to have saved the exposition from failure. It was also the future of commercialized fun.

One of the exposition’s millions of customers—a thirty-one-year-old honeymooner from
Coney Island, New York—returned home determined to build a Big Wheel of his own. If any one American of his era
valued
the fun of participation, it was
George C. Tilyou.

Coney Island had been Tilyou’s grammar school and college. Raised in his father’s resort, the Surf House, George was underfoot in the 1860s and 1870s when tourists arrived from the city dancing on pleasure boats and enjoyed what one guidebook called the “
great democratic resort—the ocean bathtub of the great unwashed.” As a youth, that is, he saw the real deal: the fun of New York’s earliest “mixt Multitudes,” dating from Easter Mondays in the early eighteenth century to any given summer day at nineteenth-century Coney Island. The West Brighton beaches were famously diverse (men and women; rich and poor; whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Jews) and overwhelmingly crowded with easygoing folks who mingled, frolicked, danced, sang, lounged, and dallied in the waves. According to a reporter for the
Brooklyn Standard Union,
they seemed to “
abandon all the restraint imposed by the rules of decency and morality.” Another reporter, from the
New York Sun,
wrote, “
The opposite gender rush together at Coney Island and how they stay together and romp and tousle one another, and wrestle and frolic and maul each other, gray heads and youths alike, precisely as if the thing to do in the water was to behave exactly contrary to the manner of behaving anywhere else.” By all reports Tilyou was a pious young man, but these radically playful surroundings
may well have loosened his spirit, for he grew to be an expert on “fun”—at least from an entrepreneurial angle.

In his youth, when the iconic
Old Iron Pier split the sweeping beach between the tony east, with its white and sprawling
Manhattan Hotel, and the demotic west, where the Tilyous lived, a notorious sub-industry preyed on the crowds—swindling them with cons and three-card monte, picking their pockets while they ogled “panel girls.” The Tilyous ran a respectable business, catering to well-connected families who took in the sea baths, clambakes, and beer gardens. George’s later life as a titanic showman, however, suggests he took cues from both of these worlds, from the sharpers on the beach and his good, godly family.

As a boy he was as enterprising as young P. T. Barnum. He started small, at fourteen, selling vials of saltwater and cigar boxes of sand for midwesterners to keep as souvenirs. The next year he got serious and bought a pair of horses, built a rickety driftwood coach, and spent the summer hauling tourists back and forth between the boat landing and the center of Coney Island’s amusements; his endeavor was so successful that he was quickly muscled out by the town’s political heavy,
John Y. McKane. In the early 1880s, when Coney Island hosted Buffalo Bill’s first season and basked in the fame of its first
roller coaster, George and his father opened a popular vaudeville theater and assembled a small real-estate empire. McKane, who by then was the corrupt police chief and notorious “
King of Coney Island,” had become the family’s bête noire. His loose stance on prostitution and gambling, and his promotion of prizefighting and drinking on the Sabbath, helped West Brighton to become “Sodom by the Sea,” a fact that the God-fearing Tilyous loathed. It was bad for the soul and bad for business. They were the only local businessmen to speak out against him, arguing in 1887 for middle-class reforms to make West Brighton a respectable resort. This stunt cost the elder Tilyou his lease, which officially belonged to the police department.

But George kept socking away his profits, and in 1893, full of big ideas from his Chicago honeymoon, on which he had failed to buy the
Ferris wheel (it was relocating to the St. Louis fair), he took out a loan, ordered a smaller one built to scale, and posted some humbug along
Surf Avenue: “
On This Site Will Be Erected the World’s Largest Ferris Wheel.” When it arrived, Tilyou’s wheel wasn’t half the size of the original, but it was higher and brighter than anything around. Soon there were knockoffs of the Midway Plaisance and Streets of Cairo, complete with camel rides and a fake
Little Egypt. Following McKane’s conviction in 1894 for rigging
Benjamin Harrison’s election, Tilyou’s vision for Coney Island blossomed. His sights were set on “
clean fun.” More exhilarating than the
roller coasters and the toboggan slides that had cropped up over the previous decade were his high-wire
Aerial Slide and his
Aqua Aerial Shuttle. The latter carried passengers on an 825-foot loop over the ocean’s crashing waves. And more spectacular even than
Paul Boyton’s
Sea Lion Park—which opened in 1895, featuring his world-famous
Shoot the Chutes—was Tilyou’s response to it two years later, the twenty-two-acre
Steeplechase Park, a midway boasting fifty mechanical amusements and encircled by a gravity-powered wooden racetrack: “A ride on the horses,” Tilyou’s promo claimed, “is a healthful stimulant that stirs the heart and clears the brain. It straightens out wrinkles and irons out puckers.… The old folks like it because it makes them young again. Everybody likes it because it’s cheap fun, real fun, lively fun.”

As a Coney Island native, Tilyou knew that Americans liked to participate, even to put themselves at risk—bodily risk, social risk. Americans were drawn to anything daring, whatever raised eyebrows or got a laugh. “
We Americans want either to be thrilled or amused,” he said, “and we are ready to pay for either sensation.” (This last bit,
payment,
was key.) So to jangle their nerves and make them look silly—to give them their nickel’s worth—he sent them walking on the Earthquake Floor, zapped them in the Electric Seat, knocked them around on the Human Pool Table, splashed them through the Electric Fountain, rolled them around in the Barrel of Love, and sent them down the Funny Stairway, which, he attested, “
caused laughter enough to cure all the dyspepsia in the world.” Tilyou knew from a life on the beach that people loved to get lost in the crowd, so he threw in New York’s largest ballroom and kept four bands in constant rotation. Perhaps his more genuinely
fun-making
machine—for riders and amused observers alike—was a contraption called the Human Roulette, or the Human Whirlpool, a
ride later depicted in an esteemed
Reginald Marsh painting and featured in
Clara Bow’s blockbuster
It,
where it was rechristened again as the Social Mixer
.
The ride was simply a wide spinning cone, surrounded by a dish. Its riders gamely clung to the center until—when the thing really got going—its centrifugal force scattered them around the margins in a tangled, woozy, democratized mass of heads, legs, arms, and torsos.

By the turn of the century Tilyou had
Steeplechase Parks in Atlantic City, St. Louis, and San Francisco. One was even featured in the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Eventually he housed all of his head-spinning rides in the five-acre so-called Pavilion of Fun, a family-oriented steel-and-glass enclosure where drinking, swearing, even slang were forbidden. (B. F. Keith’s standards for “polite vaudeville” were judiciously enforced.) Just as Cody sold his show as education, Tilyou promoted his rides’ health benefits and ballyhooed their high moral standards. Bucking the island’s lingering reputation as a “Sodom by the Sea,” he enlisted local churches as evangelizing “
sales people” and offered special deals to Catholics and Lutherans and
eventually to troops of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Apparently even his
Blowhole Theater—which blew fast air up women’s skirts and shocked men’s privates for the hilarity of the audience—was winkingly excused under Tilyou’s good name. As the historian
Kathy Peiss explains it, by risking a bit of “
flirtation, permissiveness, and sexual humor,” while never slipping into outright obscenity, Tilyou discovered a winning “formula” and exercised a “sexual ideology that would become increasingly accepted by the middle class.”

Patrons of George C. Tilyou’s famous Human Whirlpool enjoy the gut-wrenching fun of centrifugal force. (Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library—Brooklyn Collection.)