American Fun (58 page)

1.
“
Plenty, unless gorged to dyspepsia
”: Samuel S. Cox,
Why We Laugh
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876), 38.

2.
“
go farther, wait longer
”: P. T. Barnum,
The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, Clerk, Merchant, Editor, and Showman With His Rules for Business and Making a Fortune,
2nd ed. (London: Ward and Lock, 1855), 3.

3.
“
those dangerous things
”: Ibid.

4.
“
there could be found
”: Ibid., 11.

5.
“
organ of acquisitiveness
”: Ibid., 5.

6.
“
cheerful Christianity
”: Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. et al.,
P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 16.

7.
“
eternal hostility
”: P. T. Barnum and James W. Cook,
The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 113.

8.
“
totally blind
”: Barnum,
Autobiography,
49.

9.
“
curiously constructed automaton
”: Ibid., 54.

10.
“
began to take great delight
”: Quoted in Kunhardt et al.,
P. T. Barnum,
22.

11.
“
so perfectly ludicrous
”: Barnum,
Autobiography,
253.

12.
“
as usual
”: P. T. Barnum,
Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself
(Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr & Company, 1869), 81–82.

13.
“
Jollity and gloom
”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales,
ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 89.

14.
“
to arrest public attention
”: Barnum,
Struggles and Triumphs,
67.

15.
“
Mr. Griffin, the proprietor of this curious animal
”: Notice in
New York
Herald,
August 14, 1842, quoted in James W. Cook,
The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 101.

16.
“
a new way of thinking
”: Cook,
Arts of Deception,
29.

17.
“
Barnumization
”: Bluford Adams,
E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & the Meaning of U.S. Popular Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 195.

18.
Even Mark Twain
: See, for example, Mark Twain, “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” in
Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches,
ed. Tom Quirk (New York: Penguin, 1994), 24–27. Also, his protagonist Hank Morgan, a monster of humbugs, is a glorious send-up of this original Connecticut Yankee. Mark Twain,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

19.
“business” as a breeding ground
: P. T. Barnum,
The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages
(New York: Carleton, 1866), 13.

20.
“
greatest trick of all
”: Cook,
Arts of Deception,
118.

21.
“
be systematic
”: P. T. Barnum,
Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money
(1880; Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1999), 63, 83.

22.
“
Weel about and turn about and do jis so
”: T. D. Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” in W. T. Lhamon Jr.,
Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 96.

23.
“
that fascinating imaginary space
”: Eric Lott,
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51.

24.
“
Hottentot Venus
”: For an exceptional account, see Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully,
Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

25.
“
improvised
” “
ecstatic
,” “
demanded planned variety
,” “
stress[ed] jolliness
”: Hans Nathan,
Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 71.

26.
“
de holy state of hemlock
”: Rice, “Original Jim Crow,” 250.

27.
“
he should like to play Otello
”: Ibid., 293.

28.
“
Sambos
”: Lhamon,
Jump Jim Crow,
36.

29.
“
overlapping publics
”: Ibid., 5.

30.
“
quick-quipping runaway
,” “
pestered those who would enter
”: Ibid., 16.

31.
“
inspired the laughter of cruelty
”: Gary D. Engle,
This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), xxvii.

32.
“
genuine negro
”: Thomas Low Nichols, quoted in Lott,
Love and Theft,
112–13.

33.
“
Single shuffle, double shuffle
”: Charles Dickens,
American Notes for General Circulation
(Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1842), 107.

34.
Lane is believed to have been
: Nathan,
Dan Emmett and the Rise,
71.

35.
He had learned to dance
: Eileen Southern,
The Music of Black Americans: A History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 121.

36.
“
to give correct Imitation Dances
”: Quoted in Lott,
Love and Theft,
115. See also James W. Cook, “Dancing Across the Color Line,”
Common-Place
4, no. 1 (October 2003), section IV;
http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-01/cook/cook-4.shtml
.

37.
“
rare boys
”: Nathan,
Dan Emmett and the Rise,
129.

38.
“
the fun of these three nigger minstrels
”: English actor H. P. Grattan quoted ibid., 145.

39.
This frantic endeavor to “reproduce” fun
: Ibid., 120.

40.
starting a trend that in decades to come
: Robert C. Toll,
Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 31.

41.
“
I have always strictly confined myself
”: Emmett’s introduction quoted in Nathan,
Dan Emmett and the Rise,
232.

42.
urban riots
: At least fifty-three riots erupted in 1835 alone; Daniel Walker Howe notes that there probably were three times that many.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America,
1815–1848
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 430–39. See also Feldberg,
The Turbulent Era,
84–119.

43.
an efflorescence of political parties
: Sean Wilentz gives a lively account of the “radical democracies” during this period:
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 330–59. Ironically, however, beneath the blare of 1830s
partisan conflict, there was a tepid turnout at the polls (a little more than 50 percent of eligible voters); this trend would hold steady until 1840, when—thanks to the same kinds of popular organization that fortified reform movements—there was what Altschuler and Blumin call “the
annus mirabilis
of American partisan democracy,” when “fully eight of ten eligible voters cast ballots.” Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin,
Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14–18.

44.
“
swing, which nobody but a Bowery Boy
”: William M. Bobo,
Glimpses of New-York City
(1852), quoted in Tyler Anbinder,
Five Points: The
19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum
(New York: Free Press, 2001), 178. Also consulted: George G. Foster,
New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches,
ed. Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 174–76; David S. Reynolds,
Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 102–5; David S. Reynolds,
Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 303–7. Others have also followed Reynolds’s lead in reading the
b’hoys’ influence on the slang, style, and attitudes of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose. See Robert M. Dowling,
Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 52–59.

45.
“
with a perfect exuberance of flowers and feathers
”: Foster,
New York by Gas-Light,
176.

46.
“
The gang had no regular organization
”: John Riply quoted in Anbinder,
Five Points,
181.

47.
“
recreational
”: Feldberg,
Turbulent Era,
54–84.

48.
their bloody 1834 race riots
: Herbert Asbury,
The Gangs of New York
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 34–37.

49.
“
Slamm Bang & Co
.,” “
democratize
”: Peter Adams,
Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), 63; Google eBook.

50.
“
Thorough-going sporting-man
”: Anbinder,
Five Points,
142–43.

51.
“
shirtless democracy
”: See Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class,
1788–1850
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 326–35. See also Adams,
Bowery Boys,
107–8.

52.
Dorr Rebellion
: Adams,
Bowery Boys,
47–60. Marvin E. Gettleman,
The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism,
1833–1949
(Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1980), 135–36.

53.
“
the first New Yorkers to leave for California
”: Anbinder,
Five Points,
180.

54.
“
dandies and dandizettes
”: Shane White and Graham White,
Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 85–119.

55.
So faithfully did he mimic their dress
: David Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Folk-Hero,”
Theatre Journal
33, no. 2 (May 1981): 199–212.

56.
“
greenhorn
”: Benjamin Archibald Baker,
A Glance at New York
(Cambridge, MA: ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2003), 4.

57.
“capital fun
”: This and subsequent quotations are from ibid., 11–14.

58.
“
Waxhall
,” “
Wawdeville
,” “
first-rate shindig
”: Ibid., 21.

59.
“
As may be supposed
”:
Albion
review quoted in Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose,” 202.

60.
“
a pleasant place for family resort
”:
Herald
review quoted ibid., 204.

61.
“
Onstage, the b’hoy gained superhuman powers
”: Reynolds,
Walt Whitman’s America,
104. Each of these folk heroes, in its era, captured a strain in American fun. The peddler was a rambling bricoleur who baffled yokels with pranks and stunts and quirkily practical contraptions. Trappers, woodsmen, and heel-cracking boatmen were monsters of risk and silly braggadocio who tackled the frontier’s sublime opponents—great lakes, grand canyons, rocky mountains—and always with a bizarre sense of humor. Their citified
Jackson Age cousins, moreover, updated the nation’s puckish fury for Jacksonian democracy’s social wilderness. Mose and Lize posted their brash white selves as America’s cocky urban explorers. The classic treatment of these early American icons—Yankee peddlers and Kentucky woodsmen as well as blackface minstrels—is
Constance Rourke’s superlative 1931
American Humor,
15–91. Like these other icons and, say, Brother Rabbit,
b’hoys and
g’hals keep popping back up in the national consciousness—in
Ned Buntline’s
dime novels and especially in
Herbert Asbury’s sometimes fanciful popular history,
The Gangs of New York,
which transcends his accounts of America’s other skid rows (the Barbary Coast and Quartier Latin) to present a high-flying mythology of the b’hoys’ gang wars and has inspired such titanic mythmakers as
Jorge Luis Borges and
Martin Scorsese. Kurt Andersen’s 2007 historical novel
Heyday
also takes an admirable crack at the subject.

62.
It wouldn’t have been the first time
: Nigel Cliff,
The Shakespeare
Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America
(New York: Random House, 2007), xix.