American Fun Read online

  America’s growing white population was intensely curious about black culture, which could be seen in all of its public defiance from King Charles’s Pinkster Days to Sundays on Congo Square. “Blackness,” on the one hand, marked a moral danger zone where men were feared as sexual predators and women were identified, in the spirit of Sara Baartman—the wildly sensationalized “Hottentot Venus” who toured European stages until 1815—as essentially voluptuous, desiring animals. Blackness also stood for a culture of “fun” whose diction, humor, music, and dance loosely informed blackface minstrelsy’s repertoire. Ironically, it marked a social freedom that was increasingly forbidden among middle-class whites. Blackface enthusiasts tried importing such “genuine negro fun” to the stage, a space of relative liberation, though all they offered was a cheap replica.

  Edwin Forrest, perhaps the nation’s first bona fide celebrity, wore blackface onstage in the 1820s, but it was Rice, with his limping “rockin’ de heel” dance, who invented the overblown physical grotesquery that turned it into a national sensation. Whereas actual African-American dancing of the period was, as Hans Nathan notes, “improvised” and naturally “ecstatic,” the theatrical heel-dancing inspired by Rice “demanded planned variety and … encouraged showmanship.” Not spontaneous fun but deliberate comedy, minstrel dancing “stress[ed] jolliness and clownishness for their own sake.” Rice’s equally important innovation was his comic character, the bootblack “Jim Crow,” whom he featured in dozens of songs, poems, monologues, and plays. This warm-blooded, hotheaded, fork-tongued fugitive dusts up trouble all over town—and throughout the society he’s supposed to serve—whether he’s charmingly pursuing “de holy state of hemlock” or insouciantly telling an uppity white mistress, who smirks at his interest in Shakespearean tragedy, that “he should like to play Otello—and smoder de white gal.” In the 1830s, when T. D. Rice was indistinguishable from Jim Crow, he dominated theaters from New York to London with his popularization of the African-American trickster figure.

  It’s easy to be revolted by Rice’s Jim Crow—a white man making fun of blacks for the amusement of other whites. He lampooned African-American skin color, facial features, and dialect. He exaggerated genitals, breasts, and curves that played on stereotypes of hypersexuality. But as W. T. Lhamon Jr. convincingly argues, Rice’s Jim Crow, unlike the blatantly stupid clowns that Lhamon calls “Sambos,” should be read for the deeply mixed messages that it sent to his “overlapping publics”—working class, middle class, bohemian, even black. Jim Crow was a “quick-quipping runaway who mocked slavery” and at the same time “pestered those who would enter into middle class aspirations or grasp at dandiacal pretensions.” In the twentieth century he became associated with a truckling Uncle Tom figure, but in the antebellum period he was the original rebel who necessitated “Jim Crow” laws. Both the product of American racism and a critic of it, Jim Crow was pitched to heterogeneous audiences who laughed at different sides of his jokes: his burlesque of undereducated blacks, his attack on imperious and overeducated whites. Blackface may have “inspired the laughter of cruelty as well as the laughter of affirmation,” as Gary D. Engle puts it, but the overwhelming evidence points to its cruelty.

  For most minstrels weren’t sending such a sophisticated message—most were showmen riding a wave of popularity. They played taverns and street corners. They jumped up during the intermissions of theatrical productions. P. T. Barnum, in his early circus days, always kept a blackface minstrel or two on hand. In the 1830s he blacked up himself when he couldn’t secure good talent: once, behind the tent, he defended an employee against a local white man, who then turned his violent force on Barnum, thinking he was being disrespected by a black. On another occasion, having lost his star minstrel, John Diamond, to a competitor, Barnum allegedly scoured the Five Points dives until he landed a superior breakdown dancer. The best one, predictably, was a “genuine negro” who would have outraged respectable white audiences. This didn’t stop the prince of humbugs. He blacked his dancer’s face with cork and transformed William Henry Lane into the world-renowned “Juba,” whose “regular break-down” in a New York bar would later command Charles Dickens’s full attention:

  Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him?

  Dickens doesn’t name “this lively young negro, who is the wit of the assembly,” but he declares him “the greatest dancer known,” which in 1840s America was explicit enough. Lane is believed to have been the only professional black minstrel until small troupes began appearing in the late 1850s. Notable among “Master Juba” ’s feats was to challenge his fellow Barnum alumnus “Master Diamond”—the other (and white) greatest dancer known—to at least three highly publicized dance-offs and ultimately to earn the latter’s public respect. Of course Lane didn’t perform real “juba,” the patting kind. He had learned to dance the Irish jig and reel from a renowned black dancer, Uncle Jim Lowe, and thereby also elevated Catharine Market’s challenge dances to the middlebrow stage at Vauxhall Gardens. At the same time he took potshots at T. D. Rice’s grotesque tradition. In a cheeky announcement for an 1845 show, he promised “to give correct Imitation Dances of all the principal Ethiopian Dancers in the United States. After which he will give an imitation of himself—and then you will see the vast difference between those that have heretofore attempted dancing and this WONDERFUL YOUNG MAN.”

  Minstrelsy became an industry in the 1840s when Dan Emmett’s sensational Virginia Minstrels inspired musicians across the country to form their own blackface ensembles—or “Ethiopian entertainments,” as they were sometimes known. Emmett’s stage-shaking variety show was built around the basic Jim Crow grotesquerie: five musicians in blackface arrayed themselves in a line, constantly bantering and strutting their antics, spontaneously breaking into theatrics and dance, and working it all up in outlandish dialect. Their first newspaper review called them “rare boys—‘full of fun.’ ” When the English actor H. P. Grattan saw Emmett’s chief competitors, the Christy Minstrels, perform in Buffalo in 1843, he was so astonished by “the fun of these three nigger minstrels” that he wanted to see it all over again. “The staple of [their] entertainment was fun—mind, genuine negro fun … the counterfeit presentation of southern darkies [whom] they personally wished to illustrate, and whose dance and songs, as such darkies, they endeavored to reproduce.” This frantic endeavor to “reproduce” fun—“genuine negro fun”—dominated popular culture in the 1840s, seizing even the most respectable audiences. The Ethiopian Serenaders played the White House in 1844, starting a trend that in decades to come would amuse presidents Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, and Pierce. Like all popular culture, minstrelsy also headed west with the forty-niners, and by 1855 there were five professional blackface groups vying for San Francisco’s gold.

  Stephen Foster, composing hits in the 1840s and ’50s, rebuffed “trashy and really offensive” lyrics by the likes of Rice and Emmett (Rice had rejected some of Foster’s early numbers) and instead sold sanitized, sentimental songs to Christy’s (increasingly mainstream) Minstrels. With upbeat tunes like “Oh! Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “Camptown Races,” the so-called father of American music favored nostalgia for an “Old Kentucky Home” over a voyeuristic peep into the slave quarter’s taboo frolics. The bet paid off, and the craze for his sheet music Fostered do-it-yourself minstrelsy in decent households across the land.

  When Emmett formed Bryant’s Minstrels in 1857, he introduced an unbeatable theatrical innovation. Dancing was of course a minstrel-show staple—Christy’s employed both a “somersault jig dancer” and a (cross-dressed) “negro wench dancer”—and much of it, by the fifties, was tightly choreographed, often involving
a call-and-response routine between the star performer and the ridiculous “end-men.” But Emmett mined gold from an unrulier dance tradition that sprang the whole troupe to their feet. Clearly inspired by the ring shout and dances “for the eel” that were vanishing from urban public spaces, Bryant’s Minstrels culminated their widely varied new sets—at Mechanic’s Hall on Broadway, the main stage for American minstrelsy—with prancing, jigging, hand-waggling “walk-arounds” in which all of the blackface musicians and their large supporting cast climaxed in a jerky plantation-style hoedown. They clapped and shouted and mugged into the footlights. Children and dwarves provided Barnum-like diversity, and performers rotated in a counterclockwise motion that tried to replicate this African-American rite.

  Tearing a page from Stephen Foster’s songbook, Emmett published a volume of his popular “Walk ’Rounds” for folks who wanted to try it at home. In his introduction he vouched for his own authenticity: “I have always strictly confined myself to the habits and crude ideas of the slaves of the South.”

  But naturally there was nothing “genuine” about any of this “negro fun.” The fundamental safety of blackface minstrelsy depended upon its inauthenticity: that the participants weren’t black; that the pleasure derived from their lewd gyrations was sequestered onstage, and done in jest; and that the threat of such unbridled pleasure—loud, brash, energetic, profane—was contained and controlled within a cartoon. Following the Civil War, when the rage for realism in popular culture combined with a loosening of race restrictions, more African-American minstrels took to the boards, and like their pioneer, William Henry Lane, they raised the bar for showmanship. For decades, however, they remained the victims of P. T. Barnum’s original humbug, performing only as blacks in blackface.

  THE PERIOD FROM the 1830s to the 1860s was one of widespread civic turmoil. Slave uprisings threatened Southern comfort; urban riots (over race, class, religion, elections, patriotism, banks, you name it) rankled tenuous northeastern civility; and Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act stirred up western race wars that would rage throughout the century. Though it didn’t always erupt in violence, ideological turmoil was also rampant: from America’s tiny towns to its overgrown cities, folks bumped chests over sundry issues that often erupted in bloody conflict—Protestants fought Catholics, drys fought drinkers, abolitionists fought slave owners; an efflorescence of political parties and native-born religions created divisions within the growing ranks of aspiring middle-class conservatives and progressives; and a bold, ethnically diverse working class stormed the streets for their claims to popular sovereignty. The most colorful exponents of this latter demographic were the boisterous young denizens of lower Manhattan (as well as Philadelphia and Boston)—the Bowery “b’hoys” and “g’hals.” Their nicknames approximated an Irish-American dialect, though this rowdy white subculture was multiethnic and many of them hailed from south of the Bowery—in the infamously seedy Five Points neighborhood. They were born to the fray—among pimps, prostitutes, thieves, and murderers, and in overcrowded tenements—and it was in their character never to back down. But they were also the era’s most glorious dupes, for politicians and promoters alike.

  With their flashy styles and political fury, b’hoys resembled eighteenth-century Jack Tars—right down to their rakishly knotted cravats. They split the difference between roughs and dandies: they wore short black jackets, double-breasted red flannels, flared black trousers, clunky work boots, and neatly brushed black top hats. They wore their pistols holstered and their bangs exaggerated, slicked with soap in a way that anticipated 1950s greasers. They chomped blunt cigars and strolled with a “swing, which nobody but a Bowery Boy [could] imitate.” G’hals, for their part, were even more extraordinary, by dint of being streetwise working women in an age of compulsory domesticity. They worked long hours and partied at night. They trafficked in the latest gossip and slang and strutted in cheap, bright, extravagant versions of antebellum haute couture. They were recognizable from blocks away by bonnets that sprang out in all directions, “with a perfect exuberance of flowers and feathers, and gigantic bows and long streamers of tri-colored ribbons.”

  B’hoys worked as butchers, printers, shipbuilders, factory hands, and carpenters, but it was their universal identification as volunteer firemen that lent them their signature sartorial panache and their ferocious company loyalty. G’hals worked as bookbinders, milliners, and housekeepers, and often took sides with the combative b’hoys. B’hoys were early America’s most flamboyant gangsters. They pledged their allegiance to the violent street gangs that carved up turf from the Bowery to Five Points. The Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, Black Roach Guards, Bowery Boys, and other such clubs battled for turf, politics, and fun. As one former Bowery Boy recalled, “The gang had no regular organization, but were a crowd of young men of different nationalities, mostly American born, who were always ready for excitement, generally of an innocent nature.” Veterans of the ongoing “recreational” riots that had broken out for years between fire brigades, b’hoys’ greatest thrill, and highest prestige, came from fighting downtown fires and fighting other gangs and firefighters.

  For all of their bare-knuckle differences, however, these mostly native-born children of Irish and other working-class immigrants rallied around their disgust for America’s “aristocratic”—British, Whiggish—wealth. They took American democracy at its word, but they also believed it belonged exclusively to whites, as their bloody 1834 race riots, and widespread resistance to abolition, made clear. In the tradition of Jack Tars in the Sons of Liberty’s taverns, they studied the incendiary editorials of proletarian activists like William Leggett. And as the Jackson Age wore on, and the Democratic Party became a factional circus under the big top of New York’s Tammany Hall, they split up among the ranks of sexy new demagogues who prized them for their heedless streetfighting tactics. Levi Slamm’s little militia of Locofocos (known in the press as “Slamm Bang & Co.”) set out to “democratize” capitalism, but Thomas Skidmore’s band of Workies pushed a communist agenda. In the 1840s, George Henry Evans’s “Young America” movement had scores of b’hoys imploring busy New Yorkers to fulfill the nation’s destiny in the West. “Thorough-going sporting-man” Isaiah Rynders led a thousand of his “Empire Club” b’hoys to rally for James K. Polk and bully Whigs away from the polls. And the pugnacious “underground” journalist Mike Walsh, a rabble-rousing Irish-born b’hoy himself, built an army of b’hoys he called the Spartans to bring about his “shirtless democracy.” It suited the b’hoys’ unresolved loyalties—cosmopolitan, racist, democratic, patriotic—that Walsh himself harangued for such inconsistent beliefs as Fourierist socialism, increased immigration, and the expansion of slavery into Texas. But it was his hobnailed tactics that pleased them most. Under his influence, they took politics to the streets—even road-tripping to Rhode Island in 1842 in a failed attempt to topple a state government that still restricted voting rights to landowners, the Dorr Rebellion.

  B’hoys and g’hals were America’s first fans. They frequented Barnum’s humbugs and museums. They devoured dime novels and the sauciest penny papers. They were also incurable theater junkies who bullied their way en masse into shows and lectures. Voracious audience members whose eclectic tastes conformed to the era’s new variety shows, they rallied for Shakespeare with the same avidity that they did melodramas and blackface minstrelsy. B’hoys and g’hals were pop-culture consumers, but they also spun their own turbines of fun—spoke out, wisecracked, and pulled practical jokes. They gambled, drank, and fought in the streets. And as cultural descendants of Irish immigrants who danced against blacks for eels and cakes, they frequented Five Points’s rowdiest dance halls and put their own energetic spins on breakdowns, hornpipes, tap dance, and waltz. Up for adventure whenever, wherever, b’hoys were also—as Tyler Anbinder notes—“the first New Yorkers to leave for California when the gold rush began.”

  To be sure, in this primitive age of the theater—when crowd members drank, spa
t, yelled, tussled, and kept up an ongoing contest with the stage (and when balconies served as ad hoc brothels)—the b’hoys and g’hals, the most spirited patrons, saw celebrity fandom as an excellent reason to rumble. They took proud ownership of actors and plays and staged their own dramas in the peanut gallery. So it seems almost inevitable, in this age of humbug, that b’hoys and g’hals should soon become the subjects of popular culture. They were just too colorful, excitable, ripe. Just as stylish black “dandies and dandizettes” entered the national consciousness through 1830s and ’40s minstrelsy (most notably under the guise of Zip Coon), b’hoys and g’hals made their stage debut in Beulah Spa; or Two of the B’hoys (1834). But they wouldn’t become larger-than-life poster-board caricatures until the late 1840s, when Frank Chanfrau, a b’hoy turned melodramatic actor, fashioned a character, “Mose,” from Moses Humphrey, an actual tough he had known as a fireman for the Peterson Engine Company no. 15. Before long he had worked him into Benjamin A. Baker’s play A Glance at New York in 1848. Chanfrau’s more immediate inspiration, however, for this streetfighting butcher and red-shirted fireman were the kids who filled the pit in Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre, where the play made its debut. So faithfully did he mimic their dress, gestures, and talk that the play’s producer, William Mitchell, mistaking Chanfrau for a gallery rogue who had managed to sneak backstage, tried to eject him on opening night.