American Fun Read online

  A Glance at New York was a simplistic comedy—the travails of a country “greenhorn” taken in by a series of con men. Over the course of the play, Mose and his canny friends adopt the bumpkin, George, and defend him against grifters, sharpers, and thieves. But the story’s real arc is the b’hoys’ search for “fun”—the “capital fun” of cross-dressing in the g’hals’ “uniform” and infiltrating their bowling alley; the “capital fun” of the bowling itself; their easygoing spree in the bohemian “Loafers’ Paradise”; and, always, avidly, the pugilistic “fun” (the all-engrossing “muss”) for which the tobacco-spewing and slang-slinging Mose itches, aches, parades, and spoils. His g’hal, Lize (Eliza Stebbins), is pegged with urban amusements of her own; she appears reading Matilda, the Disconsolate and urges Mose, in her Bowery dialect, to go to “Waxhall,” “Wawdeville,” and a “first-rate shindig.” Mose and Lize strutted with a modern insouciance that tickled pit denizens right where they lived: they affirmed the audience in their own love of fun. “As may be supposed,” one reviewer wrote, “it is received with shouts of delight by the thousand originals of the pit.”

  The play was such a runaway success—the biggest hit yet for the city’s biggest-drawing theater—that it spawned a flash-in-the-pan “Mose” and “Lize” franchise, always starring Chanfrau as the beloved Mose. It packed the Olympic for seventy-four nights before Chanfrau moved the venture to his own theater, the Chatham, and began reaping the profits for himself. Chanfrau knew his rowdy clientele. But despite the fact that he was expanding the pit to accommodate nearly three-quarters of the hall, the unscrupulous New York Herald threw some humbug his way, calling his new theater “a pleasant place for family resort.” The play had a surefire business model, and its crowd had a bottomless appetite for more, but the script left nothing to chance. Before the curtain falls, as Mose exits the stage to help his pal Sykesy “in a muss,” he calls out to the pit: “Don’t be down on me ’cause I’m goin’ to leave you … if you don’t say no, why, I’ll scare up this crowd again to-morrow night, and then you can take another.”

  The trick worked. The play’s immediate sequel, New York As It Is, sold a total of forty thousand tickets in forty-seven straight performances. It reheated the basic plot of A Glance and kept its promise of urban realism—in a soup kitchen and tenement fire—but also, for fun, a steamboat race and “dancing for eels” in Catharine Market. The next play, Mose in California (1849), jettisoned realism for topical hyperbole: the b’hoys take a ship called the Humbug through the Isthmus and get an exaggerated California education—grappling bears, defeating Indians, and landing an impossibly large chunk of gold. In subsequent plays the franchise flew off the rails, finally losing its wheels with Mose in China (1850), which closed in a month. As Chanfrau upped the ante to hold the Bowery b’hoys’ attention, Mose transformed into an inner-city giant to steal even Davy Crockett’s thunder. As David S. Reynolds and others have shown, “Onstage, the b’hoy gained superhuman powers. The gargantuan Mose used lampposts as clubs, swam across the Hudson with two strokes, and leaped easily from Manhattan to Brooklyn.” To be sure, if Yankee peddlers and Kentucky woodsmen were comic icons of an earlier American character, b’hoys and g’hals (as well as some of their minstrel counterparts) stood for a roughneck cosmopolitanism that was spreading outward from the inner cities.

  But b’hoys and g’hals have the dubious distinction of being America’s first folk heroes to stand in line and buy tickets to see their own spectral images. The steps Chanfrau took to amuse these youths heralded a new age in American fun. His heroes were designed to flatter a demographic, and his theater catered directly to their class. The fact that his shows were loud and louche, maximizing audience participation, only showed how well this “Mose” understood his clientele’s taste. Surely they thought they had invented this fun, and to a certain degree they had. But Chanfrau apparently had the last laugh, and it isn’t clear whether the real b’hoys (who mortally hated fat cats like the one he was becoming) were warm to his elaborate gag. Quite possibly, like country greenhorns, they’d been had.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time. Politicians had been gaslighting them for decades. But in the year when Chanfrau baited his pit, the b’hoys’ short tempers, high-value brawn, and mobbish fandom for true-blue American actors created a delicious new opportunity. For years they had championed the American tragedian Edwin “Neddy” Forrest against his archrival, William Charles Macready, England’s greatest tragedian. On May 10, 1849, at the peak of the Mose craze, while Forrest played Macbeth to a capacity crowd at the downtown Broadway Theatre, a few blocks away, at the posh new Astor Place Theatre, with its high ticket prices and white-glove dress code, Macready also played Macbeth—but not to his typically tony audience. In the previous weeks, a loose consortium of troublemakers and Tammany Hall politicians—among them Mike Walsh, Isaiah Rynders, and the rapscallion journalist Ned Buntline, whose first dime novels would lionize the b’hoys—had distributed blocks of free tickets to the show. So while Forrest played his part with anti-British fervor, driving thousands of cheering minions to their feet, Macready, simply doing his job, incited a rain of witty abuse, rotten food, urban detritus, and theater seats. Afterwards leagues of b’hoys marched the streets, chanting in the voice of Shakespeare’s weird sisters:

  Mose in his full B’hoy regalia admires the finer points of an African-American jig—danced for eels at New York’s Catharine Market. (“Dancing for Eels,” F. S. Chanfrau & J. Winans in New York As It Is. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.)

  When shall we three meet again

  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  When the hurlyburly’s done,

  When the battle’s lost and won.

  The next night, when Macready accepted a petition from forty-eight prominent New Yorkers (among them Washington Irving and Herman Melville), asking him to retake the stage, ten thousand nativists flooded into Astor Place, and the result was the nation’s bloodiest riot to date. Twenty-two were killed, more than a hundred injured, with the casualties due mostly to police suppression.

  So, yes, Mose had fun. Commercial fun, criminal fun, loads of mobocratic fun. At his worst he did his henchmen’s bidding and severely disrupted civil society—destroyed property, pummeled innocents, even allegedly gang-raped prostitutes. Luc Sante offers a grimly accurate explanation for the b’hoys’ seeming “carnival”: “the collected miseries of the people were acted out with torches and clubs and rocks … unable to imagine social stability as anything but repression … the rioters sought a permanent state of riot.” No Sons of Liberty or Pinkster revelers, who strove for a permanent state of democracy, b’hoys outright rejected civility. They had a big appetite for American thrills—rough, raw, dangerous, dirty—but they failed to strike the playful balance that makes a party fun, the balance between individual and communal pleasure. At their worst they played in a danger zone between radical activism and criminality; they explored American fun’s dark side. More vicious than eighteenth-century Jack Tars, who made surgical strikes on offending property; less principled than their revolutionary forebears, b’hoys seemed to justify ruling-class fears (as one Dorr Rebellion opponent put it) of “an aristocracy of the dram shop, the brothel and the gutter; not in the ruffle-shirt gentry but in the gentry who have no shirts at all.” Bullying, wild, hell-bent for destruction, the Bowery b’hoys were a proven menace. Their self-serving pursuit of absolute freedom played right into their enemies’ hands, justifying reform. What’s more, their collective rage, combined with their love of popular amusement, made these kids an easy touch—vulnerable to politicians and entertainers alike, who stood to profit from their fury.

  And so it follows that, in the 1850s, promoters, reformers, and city officials had only to cite the Astor Place riots when justifying strict civic rules—in theaters, on sidewalks, in municipal parks. Taste and decency had to be enforced, law and order had to be maintained, lest Mose and Sykesy and
their Five Points thugs spread their mayhem across the land. Maine went dry in 1850, the same year P. T. Barnum opened his own tidy theater and debuted The Drunkard, William H. Smith’s blockbuster temperance play. It would outsell even A Glance at New York and have a field day with the Five Points subcultures. With that decade’s commercial blitz of Stephen Foster’s sentimental minstrelsy and tsk-tsking novels like T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Barroom (1854), in which King Alcohol brings a town to its knees, popular culture was cleaning up its act and catering to a new middle class.

  B’hoys and g’hals fell out of vogue, but they didn’t just vanish. In 1856, a year after the Dead Rabbit/Bowery Boy riot devastated lower Manhattan, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune sent their man George A. Foster to report on “the nightly revels at Dickens’s Place,” aka Uncle Peet’s, the Five Points dance hall still known for the English author’s visit some fifteen years before. The place hadn’t changed much, despite once having burned to the ground. It “reechoed its wonted sounds of festive jollification.” And on a Saturday night, all of America’s outcasts were there. Among its usual multiracial clientele of “thieves, loafers, prostitutes and rowdies” were the expected Jack Tars and b’hoys and g’hals. Early in the evening the bar was mobbed, while female dancers, mostly black and “tidy and presentable,” were “all agog for the fun to commence.” When the little orchestra had warmed up and the gallants had stowed their wet chaw in their pockets, the whooping couples assumed their positions on the crowded, creaky planks. As Foster describes it, they were baited and caught by “Cooney in the Holler”: “contorting their bodies and accelerating their movements, accompanied with shouts of laughter and yells of encouragement and applause, until all observance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurrahs on his or her own hook.” Foster orients this harmless riot within the district’s violent history: “the dancers, now wild with excitement, like Ned Buntline at Astor Place, leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder.” But the sheer exuberance of Uncle Peet’s celebrants shines right through the sneering prose, just as William Henry Lane’s lightning-heeled expertise shone through Dickens’s Victorian smirk.

  Foster then notices an adjoining apartment, an implicit brothel, that was meant to cater to higher-brow clients—presumably to the wealthy slumming parties who would be slinking in great numbers into places like Five Points in the stuffier decades to come. “Champagne made of very superior pink turnip-juice is kept ready for the upper crust whenever the fun grows fast and furious and those with money have reached the ‘damn-the-expense stage of excitement.’ ” Uncle Peet’s effort to attract the swells shows that he was a man of his times. The b’hoys were evolving into the flashier “sporting set.” And the rubbed-up fun of mixed dance halls was fast becoming a thing of the past, if also of the distant future.

  6

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  Barnumizing America

  BARNUM’S AMERICAN MUSEUM PROSPERED throughout the Civil War: the giants, the little people, even the automatons were dressed in Yankee uniforms. Patriotic dramas played two times a day. And Barnum made his most profitable discovery yet, William Henry Johnson—the “What Is It?”—a microcephalic African-American dwarf whom he pitched to the recently Darwin-crazed audiences as the “missing link” between man and monkey. But in March of 1868, when the museum burned for a second time, a holocaust that killed hundreds of animals in their cages, the showman declared he was closing up shop. He retired to a new mansion (“Waldemere”), then took a long, all-American vacation hunting wild buffalo on the Kansas plains. He had hardly been in retirement for a year, however, when he was approached by William Cameron Coup, a young circus manager whom he’d gotten started years before, and was tempted with the thought of starting a road show. What began as a revival of his museum on wheels—reassembling his pet performers and curiosities—soon hit the rails as “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

  Barnum defended its claim to “Greatness” with a $100,000 challenge across his billboards: “ten times larger than any other show ever seen on Earth.” Only a fool would have taken him up on it. Even with its dozens of dormitories and stables and its ten big tops housing all his specialties—the Museum and the Laboratory, the Fine Arts collection and Menagerie—“Barnum’s Magic City” could materialize overnight and accommodate ten thousand patrons at a pop. His decades of experience in keeping crowds moving ensured that nobody stood still for long, but was propelled from one attraction to the next—past Siamese twins, bearded ladies, frog swallowers, and dwarves, shedding nickels and dimes along the way as they were herded toward the roaring, high-flying Hippodrome.

  In its first year his circus struggled on the roads, getting mired in mud and flooding rivers, but starting in 1872 they chartered trains—often sixty-five overcharged cars in length—and thereafter they struck all the midwestern towns where Barnum’s name had only been legend. Despite severe setbacks, principally another fire in 1872 that killed most of his animals in a New York warehouse, his show kept growing every season, eventually merging in 1880 with that of his only competitor, John A. Bailey, to form a worldwide entertainment juggernaut.

  The entertainment industry slavishly followed Barnum’s methodology—for promotion, production, and transportation; it also enforced the standards of Victorian decency that he had adhered to long before the war. When in the 1830s he upstaged preachers to defend the virtues of entertainment, Barnum broke ground for a towering monoculture that throve on exciting, inoffensive pleasures. These pleasures were often peppered with dashes of folk fun (slang, risk, seeming rebellion), although even these zingers were mostly nostalgic, as if mischief belonged to America’s past, which in many ways it did. For, to be sure, with the growing force of “middling folk” up north—white-collar suburbanites who earned regular salaries—the entertainments devised by Barnum and his adherents feasted on a lucrative new market. “Family fun,” as these amusements have come to be called, were ostensibly nutritious and virtuous pleasures: they reinforced the tastes and mores that had been popularized during the Second Great Awakening. Family fun broadened the entertainment market with its daintier appeals to women and children. Perhaps more insidiously, it took citizens in moments of deep distraction and slotted them into postbellum America’s increasingly corporate social structure.

  But of course the mischief wasn’t really gone: In the West, there were still jumping boomtowns. In the cities, there were untamed Bowerys that wisely preyed on leering slummers’ wallets. But in a more pervasive sense, during the Gilded Age, American mischief went big time and came to characterize the culture industry—in both its methods and its champions. As Karen Halttunen argues in her classic book on the rise of the middle class, after the Civil War, the confidence men and “painted ladies” that antebellum reformers warned their children about gave way to heroic tricksters like the hero of Horatio Alger’s eponymous Ragged Dick. Confidence men became capitalist icons. In what Halttunen calls the nation’s “new corporate context” of acquisition and aspiration, “personality skills, such as that subtle quality called charm, were more useful to the ambitious youth than the qualities of industry, sobriety, and frugality” that reformers touted before the war; “executive ability and management—the art of manipulating others to do what you want them to do—was far more valuable than the ascetic self-discipline of an earlier era.”

  This new education redefined the citizen, not as an entrepreneur, adventurer, or rebel but rather—in the spirit of Mark Twain’s middle-class hero, Tom Sawyer—as a lubricant in the capitalist system. If the system itself was based on trickery, the con man was its model citizen. Barnum said it himself: the “humbug in the exhibition room [is] merely market capitalism by another name.” But if the heroes were con men, then the larger citizenry were their dupes, and family fun—one of the era’s biggest-ticket schemes—had all the marks of a blurry shell game. Its customers stood in
lines for tickets. They assumed their quiet places in rank-and-file bleachers. They bought cheap imitations of participation and liberty that made them feel like soaring athletes, daring cowboys, noble explorers. Before the Civil War, as many historians have shown, P. T. Barnum welcomed crowds to call his humbugs humbug. Afterwards, in an age of popular realism, his Gilded Age progeny flattered and dazzled their crowds. They assured them they were praying to see the real deal. In the exhibition room of the Gilded Age, corporate con men aimed to convince.

  The recreation, amusement, and entertainment industries made lighthearted pleasures widely available—both to the city dwellers who benefited from the construction boom in parks, gymnasiums, vaudeville theaters, and arenas and to rural citizens who traveled from counties away when the big-top shows came to town. This cheap, modern, standardized “fun” not only filled the perceived social need for earlier American fun (the daring, primitive rebellions detailed in earlier chapters) but also—after the logic of P. T. Barnum, blackface, and “Mose”—often sold it in replica. Thrills that had been born out of sometimes desperate need, as they had been in slave quarters and mining camps, were repackaged as diversions for a growing workforce. They became “leisure” activities for weekends and holidays, and in eras since, their success has only grown. They have become so diverse, widespread, and profitable that they have spawned their own academic discipline, “leisure studies,” which is a subdiscipline of both sociology and business administration.

  Regulated and commercial family fun is, in its own right, “American fun.” It reflects powerful strains in the national consciousness—capitalism and corporate administration, in particular—and it remains more prevalent now than ever. But far from reflecting a national tendency toward risk, struggle, and self-identification, it reflects the opposite in a tendency toward leisure, toward disappearance into the passive crowd. To be sure, this kind of Gilded Age fun is often the pleasure of repressing struggle, also of dissolving it. In the terms of this book’s larger argument, the entertainments and amusements engineered during this period mark the first of modern fun’s three “tributaries,” all of which keep flowing today, usually mixing and commingling their respective social waters. The remaining two tributaries, the wildly playful and the radically political, will join the mainstream in later eras.