American Fun Page 18

  IN THE REPUBLIC’S EARLY DECADES, when a mostly rural population was struggling for survival, athletics were largely primitive pastimes. In the Northeast, sports, though generally less regulated than they had been in colonial Puritan communities, were valued most when they had something to deliver. Children’s games like marbles and hopscotch were often linked with moral lessons, and adult diversions, like hunting and fishing, had obvious practical benefits. In Quaker Pennsylvania and throughout the American South, attitudes toward skittles, bowling, billiards, and a few other traditional European sports were typically more lax. In general, however, early U.S. citizens, mostly males, played roughly the same games that their ancestors had played—stoolball, ninepins, and, among the elite, tennis. The rules of these games were basic, the matches ad hoc. The balls and bats were crafted at home according to tradition or, by the 1820s, instructions in magazines. A “fitness movement” sprang up in that decade; this tentacle of the larger reform movement brought private male gymnasiums to East Coast cities and inspired the odd college to start a physical education program. Over the next twenty years, however, vigorous activities like rowing and gymnastics belonged almost exclusively to the upper classes. By the 1850s, baseball was becoming nationally prominent, but nobody risked mass-producing its equipment until after the Civil War, when soldiers on both sides had discovered the sport and baseball became the dominant sector of a sudden and booming “sporting goods” industry.

  In the 1860s and 1870s, manufacturers doubled down on the sporting crazes that many Americans, as Stephen Hardy has shown, still shunned as “exotic and frivolous indulgences”: croquet, football, tennis, bicycling, as well as baseball itself. Against lingering middle-class disapproval, however, sports bred new commercial opportunities. Americans swarmed new public courts and playing fields, and entrepreneurs were there to greet them, inventing new equipment, packaging uniforms, branding semiprofessional clubs and leagues, and selling tickets to athletic spectacles that hitherto had been limited to the horse track. Organized sports and softening attitudes toward games and sports made enduring changes to the postbellum republic. They improved citizens’ spirits and physical health while making them behave in predictable patterns. They also served as ideological bait. Writing in 1869, upon the opening of New York’s elaborate new Young Men’s Christian Association, fund-raiser William E. Dodge Jr. justified the games typically found in barrooms (including “chess, draughts, billiards, and bowling”) by saying “the devil should not have all the amusements” and by citing the growing Christian opinion “that every legitimate attraction should be utilized to gain the end desired.” The “end,” in this case, was winning young men’s souls.

  Sports had the potential for raw, pure fun. Football, baseball, track and field, and all of the exhilarating new athletic games demanded full-body engagement; they thrilled participants with heated contest; they hurled them into risk-filled arenas where natural talents were tested and sharpened. But two sweeping trends in the industrialized North, administration and commercialism, intervened to regulate and exploit these pleasures in the service of order, discipline, and profit. In contrast to spontaneous antebellum sports—played in open fields and on street corners and sandlots—postbellum sports, slotted by officials into newly founded ziggurats of clubs and leagues and organizations, helped to control the intimidating sprawl of an increasingly diverse and urban citizenry. Sports staged rivalries between schools and cities, turned youthful aggression into sanctioned competition, and channeled the American love of risk into games with ever more intricate rules. Organized sports revved up the citizens’ activity, but they also corralled their spontaneity and rebellion into highly regulated channels. And they reinforced popular taboos that separated Americans by race, class, and gender: blacks and other minorities were excluded outright; whites were separated by privilege and ability and divided, more specifically, into the increasingly fine categories of “amateurs” and “professionals.” For some, this latter division signaled the death of fun—by turning sports into work and spectacle. In 1884, Dudley Sargent, who would become the director of Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium, decried “the growth of the professional spirit in our college sports” as “a most serious evil”: in making his case, he cited the loss of “courtesy and generous competition” to “exhibitions of brutal violence” and excoriated the “demoralizing work” of professional training that turned athletes into de facto racehorses. E. L. Godkin, writing for The Nation in 1893, declared “the thing which produces most of the evils of football and other games”—among which he included humiliation and physical injury—“is the effort to improve them as a spectacle for the multitude.”

  Spectacle, naturally, was the whirring propeller of typical Gilded Age fun. And unlike rowdy Jackson-era audiences, whose obstreperous behavior was finally clamped down following the Astor Place riot, postbellum crowds had to behave themselves. Indeed, the white-glove Astor Place Theatre itself—against which the b’hoys had violently rebelled—set the new high standard. In 1858, when Frederick Law Olmsted helped to design New York’s Central Park, he wanted it “to embody his conception of democratic recreation,” in John F. Kasson’s terms, which meant he wanted it to be a scenic strolling ground for quality folk and “made little provision for the desire of working-class males to have ‘manly and blood-tingling recreations,’ ‘boisterous fun and rough sports.’ ” From the 1870s to the 1890s, museums, opera houses, theaters, concert halls, even public parks, laid down the social law, enforcing dress codes, lowering noise levels, and imposing stringent rules of conduct. As Lawrence W. Levine and other historians have shown, well-heeled citizens “transform[ed] public spaces by rules, systems of taste, and canons of behavior of their own choosing” in an effort “to convert the strangers [read ‘immigrants’] so that their modes of behavior and cultural predilections emulated those of the elite.” But it was generally enough just to emulate the elite, for the audience promoters hoped to reach was the vast and aspiring middle class. The spectator’s fun could be lively and flashy, but it took pains not to shock or offend, as it had to appeal to the nicer sensibilities of a widely imitated leisure class. If Barnum could meet such standards with the circus, which hitherto had suffered the lowest reputation, any entertainment was up to the challenge.

  In 1885, when Benjamin Franklin Keith opened Boston’s Bijou Theatre, he stepped into a well-worn variety-show tradition. He populated his stage with the same minstrels, jugglers, scientists, actors, gymnasts, preachers, and oddities he had been hawking for years as a barker for Barnum. What made him the founder of the new American vaudeville was an innovation he called “continuous performance”—the rotation of crowds through a twelve-hour cycle of repeating, “respectable” stage shows. He described the setup as a kind of banal paradise where “the show is [always] in full swing, everything is bright, cheerful and inviting.”

  The “fixed policy” for his “new scheme” was that “cleanliness and order should be continued” and that “the stage show must be free from vulgarisms and coarseness of any kind.” He intended the theater to be “as ‘homelike’ an amusement resort as it was possible to make it,” and in doing so he bundled low culture with high and stripped vulgar fun and the fine arts alike of their respective difficulties. By the turn of the century, the more homogenized his “homelike” industry grew, the more he came to value, in his own words, “light, frothy acts, with no particular plot, but abounding in songs, dances, bright dialogue and clean repartee.” Such melodramatic pap, he discovered, was “the sort of entertainment which seems to please most.”

  Not everyone was pleased, of course. “The most dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn,” William Dean Howells, nineteenth-century America’s great tastemaker, moaned in 1903, citing the loss of high-risk spectacle as a harbinger that “vaudeville is dying.” But in fact it kept growing into the early 1920s, around the time of Hollywood’s rise, when the “Keith Circuit” commanded an annual audience of four million customers. And
in the 1920s and 1940s, with the advents of radio and television, respectively, Keith’s continuous performance was perfected. If Hollywood retrofitted vaudeville theaters for a new generation of movie palaces, these household devices, transmitting endless sanitary entertainment, perfected Keith’s mission: “home” entertainment. Television’s direct access to vaudeville-trained celebrities came to define the middle-class household.

  THE GILDED AGE POPULATION was slow to get educated—from 1870 to 1890, the national percentage of high school graduates hardly budged from 2 to 3.5 percent—but its interest in newspapers, dime novels, and other print media fairly exploded. Indeed, during this same twenty-year period, daily news circulation increased by 222 percent, a growth that was boosted by new printing and transportation technologies, funded by flourishing advertisement opportunities, goaded by big-city newspaper wars, and—perhaps most forcefully—disseminated by the ingenuity of cooperative publishers like A. N. Kellogg and A. J. Aikens. These two Chicago moguls retrenched their businesses after the Great Fire of 1871 and syndicated hundreds of the nation’s “country” newspapers. Otherwise unscrupulous about their papers’ content, Kellogg and Aikens only required that the stories be tasteful, which mostly meant that crimes and scandals could not be reported in detail, but only summarized.

  Mainstream journalism became less sentimental—and less blatantly sensationalized—than it had been at the birth of the penny papers. In this proud new era of straight-shooting realism, respectable papers didn’t resort to antebellum-era hoaxes or to rollicking Wild West facetiousness. In the spirit of postbellum Barnumism, rather, the dramatic “facts” of modern life became popular entertainment. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper offered “pictorial reporting” of Ku Klux Klan killings, rough prison life, and the mob violence of the “Great Uprising” of railroad workers in the early 1880s. Also, the style of their lavish images, as the historian Joshua Brown has shown, became decreasingly stereotyped and more observant to meet public demands for authenticity. The news was also tempered with local-color sketches and comical human-interest pieces by the popular new regionalist writers—from northeasterners like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman to “southwesterners” like Mark Twain and southerners like Charles W. Chesnutt and George Washington Cable. Among this latter set, cutting his teeth as a self-proclaimed “cornfield journalist” for the Atlanta Constitution, was the amateur folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, a beat reporter whose renditions of African-American dialects and folk tales became widely touted for their apparent realism. In 1884, The Nation praised him for getting “very close to the untutored spirit of humanity.” What sold newspapers, however—what helped the Constitution rebound from the financial panic of 1873—was his stories’ delicious fun.

  In the words of his daughter-in-law Julia, Harris was himself, as a boy, “like Brer Rabbit,” the African-American trickster figure he would single-handedly transform into a mainstream national hero. Young Harris was small, quick-witted, and mean. Indeed, many of his biographers note how this poor, illegitimate, and physically slight child pulled vicious pranks on his peers and bullies—how he coaxed one into hogslop that was infested with fleas; how he shoved another into an active wasps’ nest, causing him to be seriously stung; how he burned yet another about the neck with a spatula, much to his indulgent mother’s delight. As a boy he aspired to be a professional clown, acting for a spell in a local troupe that called itself the Gully Minstrels, but later in life he would dismiss blackface as “represent[ing] nothing on earth, except the abnormal development of the most extraordinary burlesque.”

  It wasn’t until 1862, however, when he was sixteen and working as a printer’s devil on the Turnwold plantation in central Georgia, that Harris befriended Harbert and “Uncle” George Terrell, two older black slaves who would help to define his illustrious career. During this period he immersed himself in the slaves’ daily lives, hunting rabbits with them, recording their language in dialect poetry, and slipping off at night with the master’s children to visit the interiors of their cabins. His daughter-in-law steeps the tale in plantation nostalgia: “From a nook in their chimney corners he listened to the legends handed down from the African ancestors,—the lore of animals and birds so dear to every plantation negro.… The boy unconsciously absorbed their fables and their ballads, and the soft elisions of their dialect and the picturesque images of their speech left an indelible imprint upon the plastic tablets of his memory.” Yet there is poignant realism in the shadows of this cabin. As a white boy who had grown up at the bottom of Southern society, Harris may have been, as Wayne Mixon suggests, more nostalgic “for a black world than a white one”—and more for a black paternalism than a white one.

  For the Terrells were Harris’s first father figures, and their nightly lessons in wily animals who capsized upright Southern mores shaped the way Harris would think. Brother Rabbit must have been a revelation for the boy, a sympathetic hero and a sort of family secret. He took the rabbit’s lessons to heart. In the 1870s and 1880s, as he was tracking its stories, Harris employed his own trickster techniques to collect these tales from the source. When he was in the presence of blacks, and only blacks, as he once was in a rail yard waiting for a train, he would set out to gain “their confidence and esteem” by “listening and laughing awhile.” Then he would tell a tale or two of his own. In the rail yard it was the “Tar Baby” story that threw the gathering crowd into “unrestrained laughter.” Then it was “Brother Rabbit and the Mosquito” that “had the effect of convulsing them.”

  The result was that, for almost two hours, a crowd of thirty or more negroes vied with each other to see which could tell the most and best stories. Some told them poorly, giving only meagre outlines, while others told them passing well; but one or two, if their language and their gestures could have been taken down, would have put Uncle Remus to shame.

  Harris feared these sources were fading fast. As he explained in 1881, most contemporary blacks were “unfamiliar with the great body of their own folk-lore,” and even older ones who were “as fond of the legends as ever” lacked “the occasion, or the excuse, for telling them.” So he caught them and stuck them like butterflies on poster board. When he began publishing in the Constitution in the mid-1870s, he put his hard-won tales in the mouth of Uncle Remus, the jolly but devilish former slave who animates “Brer Rabbit” (as Harris called him) for the ears of a white Southern boy, identified simply as “the little boy.” Uncle Remus was, for Harris, the natural voice to tell these tales. “Only in this shape,” he wrote, “and with all the local allusions, would it be possible to adequately represent the shrewd observations, the curious retorts, the homely thrusts, the quaint comments, and the humorous philosophy of the race of which Uncle Remus is the type.” Only in this “shape,” through this “type,” could Harris convey his own experience, that of a dazzled and honored white boy glorying in stories of outrageous rebellion.

  Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) became one of the century’s best-selling books. In the book’s opening tale, “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy,” the latter’s mother, Miss Sally, finds him leaning his head against Remus’s arms, gazing into his kindly “weather-beaten face,” and hearing about the time Brer Rabbit robbed her own garden to throw a dinner for Brer Fox—who in turn tries to make a dinner of Rabbit. But the lesson is that Rabbit always slips away. Rabbit always outwits Fox in the end, “en Brer Fox ain’t never cotch ’im yit, en w’at’s mo’, honey, he ain’t gwine’ ter.” The story never reveals Miss Sally’s reaction to the glorification of her garden thief, but this bold “initiation,” taking place right under her nose, tells young readers that these cautionary tales aren’t intended for their mothers.

  Of all the diluted “family fun” of the Gilded Age, Harris’s Brer Rabbit tales may have been the most socially subversive. His tricksters didn’t teach you how to climb the corporate ladder. Writing under the cover of a fawning old “darky” (Harris’s word)—blacking up with the m
asquerade of hokey false innocence that middle-class audiences had applauded for decades—Harris celebrated the pranks, rebellion, flirtations, risks, jokes, fiddling, dancing, mockery, and indefatigable hedonism of “de funniest creetur er de whole gang.” While overtly racialized through Uncle Remus’s black culture and often impenetrable dialect, these naughty beast epics had a broad appeal for all of the nation’s Victorian children: even in a world of starchy manners, where the rich and powerful call all the shots, they said the smallest and smartest creatures in the forest can, at their own risk, sport the highest prestige.

  Children also liked it that Uncle Remus was black. Samuel Clemens was there in the spring of 1882, at the house of George Washington Cable, when a group of them came to hear Uncle Remus. They looked with “outraged eyes” upon the “undersized, red-haired and somewhat freckled” Harris, who was too shy to open his mouth in public. (Harris also had a stutter.) “Why, he’s white,” they complained. Clemens said he understood their outrage. As a fellow admirer of Uncle Remus, Clemens, like thousands of other readers, had come to believe they were “personal friends,” and here was this stammering white journalist. This trickster’s humbug was shocking even to the pupils of Brother Rabbit.