Louis S. Warren (72 page)

Indeed, Cody himself might have been as appealing to immigrants as to native-born whites. His ancestors were English and Breton French, but in 1899, his younger sister Helen Cody Wetmore wrote a new biography of him in which she traced the family lineage to ancient Irish kings. How she came upon this story is not clear, and perhaps most immigrants never heard about it.

But even if they were unaware of Cody's putative Irish roots, Cody's white Indian imposture was a powerful symbol among the Irish. London audiences equated Indian and Irish savageries to deride the Irish. But in the United States, the Irish were so thoroughly urbanized that competition with real Indians was not a factor in day-to-day life. Comparisons of Irishmen and Indians were less insulting to immigrants, and even had some romantic potential. Irish ward politicians dominated New York politics for decades after taking over Tammany Hall, the New York gentleman's society named for a seventeenth-century Delaware chieftain. Through the 1890s, every May 12, or “Tammany Day,” the increasingly Irish membership of Tammany Hall—who called themselves “braves”—paraded the streets with painted faces, carrying bows, arrows, and tomahawks. Newspaper correspondents joked about meetings between Buffalo Bill's Indians and the “great chief” Dick Croker, the Irish-born boss of New York's Tammany machine.

Among Irish Americans, then, symbols of Indianness and white Indianness were easily adopted, and adapted, to signify (in no particular order) political power, American identity, ethnic unity, a “noble” past, and Irish oppression at the hands of British and Americans alike. When Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders opened in Brooklyn, notables in the boxes included not only the mayor of the city, but A. W. Peters, “chairman of the General Committee of the Tammany Society, and Patrick O'Donahue, another magnate in the New York Democracy.”
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In a sense, the potential for inclusiveness in the Rough Riders was greater than in the old Wild West show, as Cody and Salsbury constantly adopted new Rough Rider contingents to resonate with current events, especially wars. Cody recruited Japanese soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and Cuban insurgents and Filipinos as conflicts in their homelands began. But as savvy as the technique was for recharging the show's authenticity, it paradoxically created frictions and imposed new limits on the show's appeal for old fans. In 1901, the Congress of Rough Riders incorporated a regiment of Boer veterans from Britain's ongoing war against the Republic of the Transvaal, in southern Africa. In New York, sympathy with the Boers ran high, especially among Irish ward politicians and city officials. But that same year, Cody also signed a detachment of Canadian Mounties, who were allied to the British in the war against the Boers. Show managers hired these mutual enemies as a means of refreshing Cody's peacemaker image, extending his old claims to having brought warring tribes into amity in the interests of educating the public.

But just as hiring real Indians continued to place Cody's amusement in the midst of political battles between the army and the Indian Service, the practice of hiring imperial troops and colonial rebels entangled the show in bitter politics. In the afternoons before opening in a new town, the show cast often paraded through city streets to drum up public enthusiasm for the show. Irish officials in the police commissioner's office denied Cody a permit for the cast parade, on the grounds that a “strong sentiment against the presence of British soldiers in the Street[s] of New York” made his Canadian Mounties a threat to public order. Salsbury was livid. He and Cody managed to have the decision overturned, but the incident suggests how tapping into the drama of ongoing wars around the globe both provided a range of identities and attractions for an ethnically diverse audience (Boers as anti-British heroes to the Irish) but also threatened to trap the Wild West show in complex webs of ethnic and imperial contention.
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Moreover, for all the ways the Rough Rider spectacle spoke to immigrants, it probably appealed even more to the American-born children of immigrants, a new population that was gaining in political and cultural influence. By 1890, there were over 300,000 American-born children of immigrants in Brooklyn.
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By the time Cody's show camp pitched its tents in south Brooklyn, they were asserting themselves in the workplace and in urban neighborhoods. As citizens and speakers of English with as much education as most native-born whites, many of them took up clerical positions in factories and warehouses or sales positions in stores. These were white-collar workers, increasingly anxious to separate themselves from common laborers (among whom numbered many of their parents). But exactly where these new Americans stood in the class hierarchy was not clear. The office work they performed had been extremely limited or even nonexistent prior to the massive explosion in industry and the wave of corporate consolidation that swept the country in the last decades of the century. According to Eric Hobsbawm, in the United States this new “petty bourgeoisie of office, shop and subaltern administration” actually outnumbered the working class by 1900.
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Whether they were middle class or working class, white collar or blue collar, the rising prominence and disposable income of the new Americans ensured that by the 1890s, they were taking an ever larger role in Brooklyn elections through the influence of the German-American Association, the German Democratic Union, the Swedish Association, and other civic groups.
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To this point, few of these people could feel they were part of American history. Native-born Brooklyn elites construed American history, and the history of their city, as a story of New England settlers and their descendants. In 1880, some of Brooklyn's self-identified New Englander upper crust founded the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn. Taking Plymouth Rock as their symbol, this frankly nativist organization vowed to “commemorate the landing of the pilgrims” and “encourage the study of New England history.” Rather than public-spirited festivals which invited mass participation, they celebrated “Forefather's Day,” which defined historical connection as family descent.
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The New England Society's story of America was narrow and exclusive, but it was merely an expression of the dominant narrative of American history in 1894. Anglo-Saxonism reigned, and American history remained mostly a tale of Britons moving west. Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, Slavs, and others found virtually nothing in this narrative to confirm their sense of national identity in either the Old World or the New.

In contrast, the Congress of Rough Riders appealed to the burgeoning ranks of adult children of immigrants by gathering symbols of Old World nations into its New World frontier spectacle. Caught between classes and between nationalities, these spectators sought escape from ethnic labels and confusing class hierarchies by immersing themselves in a broad “American” public, especially in crowds at the era's popular amusements, from baseball to vaudeville.
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Ethnic types, or stereotypes, paraded on the vaudeville stage. The clueless German in peaked cap and wooden shoes, the belligerent Irishman, and the carefree Italian were all standards of variety performance by the 1890s. But, as David Nasaw points out, the potential ire of the multi-ethnic audience prohibited the grossest ethnic slurs, and many ethnic German, Irish, and Italian spectators enjoyed these performances because in lampooning the rustics just off the boat, the comedy honored immigrants and first-generation Americans as seasoned residents. The ethnic parody was ultimately unifying, with the diverse ethnics united in bonhomie and camaraderie by the end of the sketch, so that divided urban immigrants could imagine themselves to be part not merely of an ethnic group, but also of a city, or a public.
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Cody's show of the 1890s encouraged similar sentiments. The Rough Rider display parodied none of its members, but the Wild West show gestured to vaudeville in ways that suggest its ethnic and “racial” teachings should be understood in a spirit of vaudeville unification. Jule Keen, the Wild West show treasurer, was a vaudeville veteran who played a comic German on the stage, and he sometimes inserted the act into the Wild West show (where his rustic German brought laughs to the mining camp just before it was destroyed by cyclone in The Drama of Civilization).
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Thus, direct ethnic connections to Rough Riders were important, but specific cultural bonds were likely less significant than the wide range of possibilities for affinity and identity created by the show's ethnic and racial variety. In 1893, the show's opening number, a “Grand Review of Rough Riders of the World,” consisted of a high-speed, choreographed equestrian display in which “Fully Equipped Regular Soldiers of the Armies of America, England, France, Germany, and Russia” galloped through the arena. By 1894, that opening was itemized more variously. The “Grand Review” now introduced “Indians, Cowboys, Mexicans, Cossacks, Gauchos, Arabs, Scouts, Guides, American Negroes, and detachments of the fully equipped Regular Soldiers of the Armies of America, England, France, Germany, and Russia.”
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Even where they had no direct linguistic or other cultural tie to these Rough Rider contingents, the kaleidoscopic, multiracial Rough Rider spectacle provided an increasingly diverse public with a visual frontier myth extending beyond the Anglo-Saxon-versus-Dark-Savage narratives of earlier writers and artists, and far beyond the Plymouth Rock fetish of New Englanders. To be sure, the show walked a fine line, confirming for white Americans that their cowboys reigned supreme, but presenting European contingents as progressive, noble warriors and descendants of historic frontiersmen. Whether one had been born in Europe or in America, to see the Congress of Rough Riders was to imagine one's people as hardy, powerful, armed horsemen.

In 1894, the show still included many of its Wild West acts, such as the “Attack on the Deadwood Coach,” “Cowboy Fun,” shooting by Annie Oakley, the “Battle of the Little Big Horn,” the “Attack on the Settler's Cabin.” But it also incorporated a military musical drill, featuring the Seventh U.S. Cavalry (Custer's regiment, which also appeared in the “Battle of the Little Big Horn”), and the British, French, and German contingents. The “Riffian Arabian Horsemen” performed high-speed riding and juggling of rifles and swords, along with tumbling displays. The old horse races between cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians now featured “a Cowboy, a Cossack, a Mexican, an Arab, a Gaucho, and an Indian.”

The effect was not only to Americanize the global frontier, justifying American empire, but also to internationalize the American frontier, inviting once-excluded peoples into the American myth. With the cowboy reigning supreme, the Indian the lowest on the ladder, and everybody else somewhere in between, the Congress of Rough Riders expressed the white supremacy and national chauvinism of most Americans.
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Just as the cowboy conquered Indians, so he had conquered the world. And yet, by bringing more people under its awnings and into its mythological canvas, the show provided the diverse residents of the divided city of Brooklyn, and other cities where it played, a powerful sense of belonging, or at least the potential for belonging, to their new nation, its history, and its public.

In this sense, Cody's development of the Congress of Rough Riders paralleled the work of scholars and writers who were broadening American history to incorporate generations of immigrants traditionally excluded from Anglo-Saxonist narratives. Inoculating himself against the sting of Anglo-Americanism in his six-volume
Winning of the West,
Theodore Roosevelt wrote his forebears from the Netherlands into the ancient tribes of Anglo-Saxons whose descendants settled the United States.
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More significant for the development of American history as a discipline was the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, who delivered his classic essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the same Chicago World's Columbian Exposition where the Congress of Rough Riders debuted in 1893. In an exploration of the frontier and its recent closure, Turner argued that “free land” was the defining condition of American history, and that along its westward-moving edge American society went through a continual process of social evolution, from hunter to industrialist. The essay caught the era's intellectual anguish over the rapid modernization of America, but it also shaped a generation of historical scholarship, making the history of the American West into a major academic field.
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In the decades since, critics have rightly taken Turner to task for his overemphasis on manly white actors and for his vague and contradictory use of terms. But none of that detracts from how adventurous he was in opening his historical frontier to people who were not Anglo-Saxon. His mentor, Herbert Baxter Adams, had extolled, in essays like “Saxon Tithingmen in America” and “The Germanic Origin of New England Towns,” the wonders of Saxon institutions as they were transported to the United States. Adams was, in a sense, writing from the same script as the New England Society of the City of Brooklyn, making the Puritans into hardy Anglo-Saxons, both fulcrum and lever of American history.
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Turner turned the story of American history around, arguing that Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, English, and others had been transformed into Americans by the process of “winning a wilderness.” Among its inspirations were Turner's vivid memories of his hometown of Portage, Wisconsin, which was surrounded by Norwegian, Scottish, Welsh, and German settlements, and whose townspeople, as he knew them in the 1870s and '80s, were a “real collection of types from all the world, Yankees from Maine & Vermont, New York Yankees, Dutchmen from the Mohawk, braw curlers from the Highlands, Southerners—all kinds.”
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Turner's “types from all the world” look substantially white to modern readers, but they were only tenuously white in the days their ships were docking at Ellis Island, and they had little or no claim to Anglo-Saxon traditions. True, Turner removed Indians from his story except as an obstacle to be overcome, and his frontier thesis had no place for Mexicans, nor for the mostly urban “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe, nor for the Chinese or other Asians. But even so, “The Significance of the Frontier,” like Cody's Congress of Rough Riders, was a myth-busting punch at the Anglo-Saxonist orthodoxy, an attempt to broaden American history beyond its narrow racial tie to Britain, and to incorporate at least some American-born children of immigrants into national history and myth.