American Fun Read online

  In the Gilded Age, however, it is fair to say, a culture of entertainment did prevail, did attract the population’s broadest middle—drawing tens of thousands of upright citizens to its various, widespread, spectacular events. This revolution came about largely by the efforts of a single businessman. The progenitor of Gilded Age entertainment was the inveterate prankster P. T. Barnum. (He is also believed to be the nation’s second millionaire, after fur-and-opium mogul John Jacob Astor.) Barnum’s greatest humbug was to concoct a “fun” that seemed to resolve one of America’s deep struggles: it pandered to Puritans while pleasing hedonists. As a bonus, it sold the novelty of the open frontier in the midst of congested urban drudgery. And for no extra cost, it captured the crowd-pleasing power of the Yankee-inflected practical joke.

  It was during these same decades, from the Jackson Age to the Civil War, that the bizarre phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy turned the mockery of black folk fun into antebellum America’s dominant amusement. T. D. Rice, a pioneer of this craft, reveled in the danger of black trickster figures, but in the 1840s and 1850s, when Barnum and other showmen endeavored to raise the theater to higher Victorian standards, clever crowd pleasers like Dan Emmett and Stephen Foster traded blackface’s raciest content for bland sentimentality. Upbeat songs like “Camptown Races” brought plantation romance into the nation’s most respectable parlors.

  And it was likewise during this antebellum period that the urban subculture of b’hoys and g’hals bullied its way into the crossroads of American fun: now “fun-making animals” of the Zab Hayward school, now troublemaking stooges for radical politicians, now ardent consumers of commercial entertainment, these stylish firebrands (and volunteer firemen) were destined to become the target market of their own folk icons. What is more, their rude, unscrupulous, and often violent behavior forced the theaters to clean up their act.

  During the postbellum period, then, the prosperous North feasted on commercial entertainment, much of which bore the fingerprints of these antebellum phenomena. At circuses, in vaudeville, in the Uncle Remus tales, and in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, all of America’s weirdness and roughness was sanitized, multiplied, and packaged for mass consumption. Eventually, at the end-of-the-century theme parks, the speed and power of an industrialized nation was replicated by whirling machines. Sass and excitement were out there in the open, and everybody had some fun.

  But the dirt and danger and freedom were missing.

  BORN IN 1810 into a family of barkeeps and grocers, Phineas Taylor Barnum was the “pet” of his maternal grandfather, Phin, who would “go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven.” Young Barnum became the target of one such joke before he could even speak. Old Phin had deeded him “the whole of ‘Ivy Island,’ one of the most valuable farms in the State,” or so the boy was told for his first ten years. During this time his family and neighbors puffed up his pride in this legendary tract: with it came power, responsibility, and so on. When his time came to visit this bounty, however, a swampland gnarled with vines and alders rose before him with its sour “truth,” that he “had been made a fool by all our neighborhood for more than half a dozen years.” The boy’s alleged retort to his father, that he would sell the land “pretty cheap,” spoke volumes about the man he would become. For Barnum, the best punch line served the bottom line.

  Barnum inherited Phin’s taste for pranks—“those dangerous things”—and even if sometimes he regretted their damage, the joy was just too strong to resist. In every New England village of his childhood, he speculated, “there could be found from six to twenty social, jolly, story-telling, joke-playing wags and wits, regular originals,” and staging pranks was their greatest endeavor. But this diverting pursuit played second fiddle to Barnum’s most formidable trait—an “organ of acquisitiveness” (as he liked to call it) that had him pinching pennies, selling candies to soldiers, besting friends at swaps, selling lottery tickets at the age of twelve, and finessing the Yankee tradition in trickery behind his parents’ grocery counter.

  At age twenty-two, married, secure, and breathing the fire of Jacksonian democracy, Barnum ran a weekly called the Herald of Freedom that espoused his anti-Calvinist beliefs in what he called “cheerful Christianity” and that stood by his motto, cribbed from Thomas Jefferson, of “eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” The Herald was as bombastic and quirky as its editor, and it didn’t shy from a public fight—typically in opposition to the killjoy blue laws that stepped on travel, amusement, and lotteries. Its most infamous potshot, against a local deacon, landed Barnum in jail for two months, during which sentence he kept publishing his paper and enjoyed an outpouring of public support: the people carpeted, papered, and furnished his jail cell, lining its walls with his personal library. They kept his story alive in the press, and they converged by the thousands on the day of his release—throwing a dinner for him in the courthouse where he’d been convicted. Cannons were fired, toasts were raised, and the ex-con was paraded home by a sparkling six-in-hand, followed by crowds and a marching band. He went on to open a grocery store, but his love affair with the public was only on hiatus, as were his plans for “cheerful Christianity.”

  In 1835, he seized the chance to cash in on “that insatiate want of human nature—the love of amusement.” He was put in contact with an “extraordinary negro woman” who claimed not only to be 161 years old, but also to have been George Washington’s childhood nurse. It wasn’t your typical brand of entertainment, but the inveterate trickster knew what would fetch ’em. He bought “Joice Heth” for $1,000. She was toothless, bedridden, and “totally blind,” but performing from her couch on a “tastefully” festooned stage she issued such captivating streams of lies that the press trumpeted her glory from Philadelphia to New York. Capacity crowds flooded in and gawked and gaped until they were herded toward the refreshments.

  When Barnum feared the frenzy was calming down, he upped the ante with an outrageous counter-hoax, an anonymous letter to the local press claiming Joice Heth herself was a fake, a “curiously constructed automaton, made of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs.” The titillated public rushed back to the exhibit with reinvigorated excitement; Heth herself, in Barnum’s words, “began to take great delight in the humbug, which was a profitable one to her.” When Heth died a couple of years later, the hoax came back in a well-publicized autopsy. When her unremarkable age came to light (eighty at the oldest), Barnum staged a crowning gag in retaliation: a letter to the papers saying Joice Heth was alive and performing in Connecticut.

  Barnum became a large-scale prankster in the spirit of the Sons of Liberty, but his pranks were superfluous, and his agenda was increasingly commercial. In the easily agitated Jackson era, when crowds were quick to come to blows, he emancipated their love of mischief. His 1843 “Grand Buffalo Hunt, Free of Charge” was wilder and grander than even the Joice Heth hoax. For it he bought a $700 herd of the mangiest buffalo and publicized a free safari in Hoboken. Quietly splitting profits with the ferryboat companies, who dragged twenty-four thousand Manhattanites across the Hudson, he managed to clear $3,400 without letting on that the “prince of humbugs” was behind it. The hunt itself was a blatant rip-off, “Ivy Island” for the masses—“so perfectly ludicrous,” Barnum recalled, “that the spectators burst into uncontrollable uproarious laughter.” The crowd, in their hilarity, spooked the buffalo, which feebly trampled through the chintzy fencing and into the surrounding marshes. “The uproar of merriment was renewed, and the multitude swinging their hats and hallooing in wild disorder.” The papers got in on the fun as well, inventing injuries and buffalo deaths, but the truth was the masses had been lured from the city to enjoy some ersatz Americana. Barnum got folks to play along with his joke, even a joke on their inherent cheapness—and their yearning for a wilder world out west—and a fine June day was had by all.

  But for all the mischief bre
d in his bones, P. T. Barnum was no Thomas Morton, and no Alfred Doten. He went to church, led carnies in prayer, and became a roaring voice for temperance. More to the point, he knew that alienating pious America was terrible for business. In 1836, when the national reform movement and his first traveling show were both just getting their sea legs, Barnum attended Sunday services “as usual” and had to endure an “abusive” preacher lambasting his “circus and all connected with it as immoral.” Accosting the preacher afterwards for not allowing him a rebuttal, Barnum made a speech that won over the congregation, some of whom “apologized for their clergyman’s ill-behavior.” The act was such a hit that he replayed it weeks later and “addressed the audience for half an hour.”

  That same year Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” his delightful romance of Morton’s great showdown in which “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” but Barnum wasn’t at war with Plymouth. Calvinist reformers weren’t Barnum’s enemies; they were his stiffest competition. No radical, no rebel—the original crowd pleaser—Barnum, like the reformers, set his sights on the majority. Both parties wanted the middle class to flourish, but while the Second Great Awakening demanded work over play, severity over silliness, private sobriety over public pleasure, Barnum gave the people a break. Instead of scaring them with hellfire and brimstone, he hypnotized them with Signor Vivalla’s death-defying, stilts-walking, plate-spinning extravaganza.

  His fun became theirs, for a nominal fee. A Yankee peddler of the wonderful and bizarre, he ensnared the public with his vision of progress. In the 1840s, when he opened his towering American Museum, he offered them the world in miniature: replicas of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem; the first stateside Punch-and-Judy show; dioramas of biblical and literary dramas; “trained chickens,” “industrious fleas,” and a knitting machine run by a dog. With his knack for teasing the fun from diversity, he hired Chinese and Spanish jugglers, brought in war-dancing Native Americans from the Rockies and three obese Scottish brothers, “The Highland Mammoth Boys.” He kept corpulent children on hand at all times (these, he found, were guaranteed to please), but the Mammoth Boys were especially versatile, practicing acts of mesmerism at their soirées mystérieuses.

  His duty, as he saw it, was “to arrest public attention; to startle, to make people talk and wonder; in short to let the world know that I had a Museum.” So he situated his museum on Manhattan’s Broadway, adorned it with fireworks and international flags, and targeted pedestrians from all walks of life, from the downtown working class to the uptown elite. He cashed in on the Jackson-era will to participate—to have Gypsy girls tell their fortunes, to have their heads read by phrenologists, to be taken in by elaborate jokes—but in the end every citizen was one more customer.

  Barnum treated these customers with dignity. In his early years he courted the people’s doubt, knowing their skepticism increased their investment and, in the end, sold more tickets. In 1842, for instance, when public was slow to challenge his “Feegee Mermaid” (a monkey head sewn to the tail of a fish), he published an anonymous notice in the papers that put the skeptics onto his scent: “Mr. Griffin, the proprietor of this curious animal, informs us that some persons have the impression that he is getting editors to call it a ‘humbug,’ for the purpose of drawing public attention to it, but he assures us positively that this is not the fact, no such clap-trap being necessary.” This artfully lobbed missile of meta-promotion was aimed at only the sharpest readers, those who saw that the notice itself was the same “clap-trap” it was scoffing at.

  Humbug, the way young Barnum presented it, relied for its effect on the public’s curiosity. Whether gazing in wonder or laughing in ridicule (at Barnum, at the dupes, at their gullible selves), the crowd was engaged in a lively sort of fun that triggered their agency as free-thinking citizens. Indeed, as James W. Cook demonstrates, Barnum’s hoaxes and museum pieces were among the many overt deceptions that appealed to the emerging middle class; magicians, trompe l’oeil artists, and other popular tricksters contributed to a culture of wonder and debate that energized the public during this period and engendered “a new way of thinking about popular culture—one in which deception (artful or otherwise) came to be understood as an intrinsic component of the commercial entertainment industry.” For a time Barnum courted the people’s imagination by daring them to find him out, but eventually, in the Gilded Age, as Americans became enamored of so-called realism, even he learned it made more horse sense to hide his trickery behind a gauze of convincing illusion.

  But his hoaxes, humbugs, and American Museum wouldn’t be Barnum’s greatest legacy. In the decades after the Civil War, his international celebrity as Tom Thumb’s promoter and ringmaster of “The Greatest Show on Earth” shot him to the forefront of American power. He headed up a campaign for mass spectatorship that ran roughshod over public debate. When postbellum intellectuals, as Bluford Adams has shown, decried the “Barnumization” of culture, they weren’t referring to his humbug days, but to his legacy of tasteless commercialism. Even Mark Twain, a sometime friend, avoided all public associations, except when burlesquing the showman in print.

  But Barnum knew there was no bad press. In his 1865 Humbugs of the World, he identified “business” as a breeding ground for “humbug.” “All and every one protest their innocence,” he wrote of his fellow businessmen, “and warn you against the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that they tell the truth—about each other!” Which of course is exactly what Barnum was doing. James W. Cook calls this statement his “greatest trick of all: to convince many of his new middle-class peers that humbug in the exhibition room was merely market capitalism by another name.” Cook is right. Barnum was downplaying his infamous humbugs by putting them on a footing with commerce. But as with all of Barnum’s best pranks, this one had at least one more twist. While amusing his readers with a straight-talk apology, he was distracting them from his open admission that his entire enterprise—all of show business, all of business—hinged on fraud.

  He explains such fraud in The Art of Money-Getting (1880), though he may not have meant to. He warms us up with some Horatio Alger boilerplate (thrift, perseverance, diligence), then moves on to a bit of Gilded Age wisdom (“be systematic”). The prince of humbugs first tips his hand when he hits on the subject of advertisement, which is most effective when it tricks trusting consumers with reverse psychology, by placing plants in the audience, and other such assaults on the masses’ gullibility. (After all, it’s the “art” of money getting—as in “artifice,” “artfulness.”) But the kicker comes when Uncle Barnum is seeming most sincere, offering his cheerfully Christian advice that “politeness and civility are the best capital ever invested in business … the more kind and liberal a man is, the more generous will be the patronage bestowed upon him. ‘Like begets like.’ ” Is he advising rough, raw, radical civility? Politeness born of “amicable collisions”? Certainly not. He is advising the softest, most lubricating kind. Barnum had mastered the show of civility, the air of fairness, the abuse of good manners to give the cozy impression that moguls like him had a chummy rapport with their millions of hoodwinked customers, and his good example helped to radically reorient the American public sphere. Under Barnum’s influence, “civility” became advertising, “politeness” became marketing, and rapacious corporations looked down from billboards with open arms and avuncular smiles. In the civil society Barnum inspired, citizens are greeted by upbeat clerks, appeased with impeccable “customer service,” and flattered with the illusion that they are always right. If the customer is “happy,” commerce clips along—and commerce is this civil society’s purpose. But where is the fun, without that time-tested American friction? In the Gilded Age, promoters Barnumized fun’s rough edges.

  Such deception would work miracles for bigger and bigger business. One day it would make behemoths like McDonald’s and Disney our household names and trusted friends.

  THE POPULAR STORY
GOES something like this: Thomas Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice, a journeyman actor from New York City, was making a show stop in the Ohio River valley (Louisville, Cincinnati, maybe Pittsburgh), when he stumbled upon a nugget of comic gold. A disabled old black man (or was it a young boy?), with a hitched-up right shoulder and atrophied left leg, was out behind a barn throwing his body and soul into a folk song about “Jim Crow”: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so,” he sang, as if giving himself instructions. “Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.” This was the late 1820s, and the enterprising Rice, knowing the vogue for strange new dances, stylized the unfortunate stranger’s gyrations, crafted the lyrics to fit an Irish folk tune, and borrowed a black man’s worn-out suit of clothes. Blackening his face with a chunk of burnt cork, he fashioned what he saw into a monstrous act that transformed mid-nineteenth-century American theater.

  Rice wasn’t the first. Blackface, a long-standing English tradition, had cropped up long before in American frontier towns where blacks and whites were forced to mingle and thus developed a begrudging sociability. Like the Patriots who dressed as war-whooping Indians, or the members of northeastern Tammany societies who performed elaborate Indian-inspired rituals as rallying points for an emerging middle class, young men who asserted their dominance through blackface both exaggerated racial differences to their own advantage and indulged in lewdness, by way of comedy, that was otherwise scorned or forbidden. Many of the early minstrels were outsiders and bohemians who enjoyed the carnival freedom of blackface, what Eric Lott calls “that fascinating imaginary space of fun and license outside (structured by) Victorian bourgeois norms.”