American Fun Read online

  “Well, I tell you dis,” Remus cautions in Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), “ef dese yer tales wuz des fun, fun, fun en giggle, giggle, giggle, I let you know I’d a-done drapt um long ago.” There were serious lessons to be learned from Brother Rabbit, lessons never intended for little white boys. But even—especially—Brother Rabbit’s fun, the same fun that electrified antebellum slave quarters, sent readers a penetrating message. The pursuit of pleasure on one’s own terms—not P. T. Barnum’s terms, nor B. F. Keith’s—sometimes comes at a personal cost: embarrassment, hurt feelings, broken bones. But the benefits include a personal freedom that can’t be bought at any price. Brother Rabbit was no “respectable” white trickster like Tom Sawyer, but once he had gotten into the American mainstream, he kept popping back up again—perhaps most tenaciously as Bugs Bunny.

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  BOLDER THAN THE CIRCUS, rawer than vaudeville, more “genuine” than Uncle Remus, was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The show opened in Omaha in 1883 with a flagrant insult to Barnum’s gimcrackery: “No Tinsel, No Gilding, No Humbug! No Side Shows or Freaks!” Here was genuine American fun—thrills, spills, and spectacular clashes between rowdy cowboys and noble savages. The Omaha headlines responded in kind: “Eight Thousand Attend the Initial Performances, and Go Wild With Enthusiasm—the Races, Fights and Feats of the Big Amusement Hit.”

  Colonel William Cody was no P. T. Barnum, no B. F. Keith. This ringmaster was himself the real, rawhide deal, at least according to his big-talking Autobiography, which appeared in 1873 as a realist foil to the various popular novels featuring the thirty-three-year-old legend. The story it told (and sold at the show) tintyped the West in grand escapades that appealed to middle-class American dreamers, and many of them appear to be true. When Cody was seven, in 1853, his father built a log cabin in the Kansas Territory, and the boy took an easy shine to frontier life. He aspired to the westerner’s long-haired, buckskin-clad elegance, to “the belt full of murderous bowies and long pistols,” a look he would eventually make iconic. His daily exposure to “the rare and skillful feats of horsemanship,” he wrote, “bred in me a desire to excel the most expert,” which eventually he did. He kept constant acquaintance with Indian boys who schooled him in archery and a bit of Kickapoo, and allowed him to “[take] part in all their sports.” He told of a childhood fraught with violence, as between the “mobs of murder-loving men” who wanted Kansas open for slavery and opponents like his father, who was stabbed on a platform for making an anti-slavery speech. (This one was true.)

  Then, of course, there was violence with Native Americans, but is it possible that Cody, fatherless and eleven, was overtaken by “red devils” and had occasion to kill his “first Indian”? Biographers dispute this story. Fewer, however, have challenged his claim to have ridden, at thirteen, for the Pony Express. This too-delicious-to-be-false episode, which stars young Cody making the Express’s longest ride ever and working under Twain’s favorite desperado, Slade, came to signify the Express itself—its youth, its danger, its daredevil audacity. Its reenactment was the signature event of his show; histories of the Express cited it as fact; and as late as 2000 a respected biographer honored it with a fastidious chapter, only to have it debunked in 2005, when Louis S. Warren showed with disappointing certainty that during those years Cody “was in school.”

  But even as he exaggerated his later-life exploits—tacking zeroes onto Indians’ headcounts, decorating his gruesome buffalo slaughters with impossibly acrobatic flourishes—there was no disputing the frontier butchery that paid for his reputation. Strapping and handsome with his long flowing locks, sporting decadent weapons and fringe, Cody stood for western extravagance. He strutted the frontiersman’s dangerous fun. He didn’t swear, but he drank and fought, and he loved to stage a practical joke. In September 1871, on a buffalo hunt with General Philip Sheridan, Cody pulled an elaborate prank reminiscent of Dan De Quille’s at Carson River. Having riled up “Mr. McCarthy,” a New Yorker in their party, with rumors of violent Indians in the region, Cody arranged for twenty-some Pawnees, who were in league with a captain he knew, to “throw blankets around them, and come crashing down upon us, firing and whooping in true Indian style.” The joke got out of hand, and “two companies of cavalry” were sent in pursuit, but Cody, as he told it, headed off disaster.

  It was Cody’s flair for such bullish theatricality that had him less than one year later exploiting the new road-show industry and staking his claim in the emerging star system. Thanks to Ned Buntline’s dime novels—yes, Ned Buntline of the Astor Place riots—“Buffalo Bill” was now a household name, and easterners clamored to see the legend in the flesh. Accompanied by fellow scout Texas Jack Omohundro, Cody played out scenes from his personal adventures in Scouts of the Prairie, a play Buntline himself threw together in an afternoon. They fist-fought, wrestled, fired live rounds, and hurled hackneyed obscenities like “Death to the Indians!” But for all of the stage show’s mawkish melodrama—which early reviewers mercilessly detailed—realism was Cody’s ace in the hole. He would step out of character and mug for the audience. Between seasons, he would be back on the trail, hunting, scouting, and working up material that blended seamlessly into his dramas. Most notably, in the summer of 1876, he wrapped his season early to join the western wars that brought Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn: adorned in his flashy stage clothes, he was out scouting Cheyenne warriors when he was stood down by the young Indian chief Yellow Hair (Cody called him “Yellow Hand”), who recognized his face and wanted to fight. Cody shot the man at twenty paces, and “jerking his war-bonnet off … scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.” He branded this achievement “The First Scalp for Custer” and worked it into the next season’s performance—“a noisy, rattling, gunpowder entertainment,” he called it, “all of which seemed to give general satisfaction.” In the years to come he expanded his cast to include fellow gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok and hand-picked Lakota actors from the Indian Territory.

  By 1882 he had outgrown the stage. A national population, riven by the Civil War and waves of immigration, still struggling to recover from the Panic of ’73, took comfort in this dashing frontier hero who bragged of America’s manly triumphs. There was money to be made from his heroism. All he needed was an open arena and a good supply of cowboys and Indians. In recent years he had become partner in a ranch on Nebraska’s Dismal River. Cody himself was a reckless horseman who groused about the “hard work” of ranching (“I could not possibly find out where the fun came in”), but he was fascinated by the cowboys’ antics in their downtime: “broncho riding, roping, racing, riding wild steers, swimming contests.” This was the genuine cowboy fun he imported for his show, along with “a bunch of outlaw cow horses.” His hired Indian actors followed a similar pattern. Having learned on the boards that Native Americans could be sold as symbols of vanishing nobility (as well as of ruthless savagery), Cody joined the Barnums and other showmen who had been sensationalizing this culture for decades. His respectful treatment of the many Indians he hired for the Wild West show—to parade in full dress, to engage in staged battles, to compete in fair-and-square foot and horse races—earned him lifelong appreciation among various western tribes. With hard-won permission from the federal government, even the outlawed Sitting Bull joined his show for one year in 1885.

  During its infamous first season, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West caused a national thrill, though it failed to lasso the respectable audiences that Cody knew it would need to survive. As a large-scale road show it outshone Barnum. Cody borrowed some of Barnum’s best tricks, such as his techniques for moving animals in boxcars, but he traded the big-top for the wide-open sky and told a manly, white-supremacist story that, as Warren argues, soothed the anxieties of an urban middle class. Against popular fears that boys and men were becoming “neurasthenic” milksops, Buffalo Bill and his handsome “centaurs” celebrated the virility of the American male. Against the dread of runaway immigration, his noble wh
ite cowboys staged glorious triumphs over the threat of racialized others—over the Native Americans and Mexican “vaqueros” who played his road agents and cattle rustlers. In truth, Cody’s cast of western toughs couldn’t live up to this white-hat myth. They drank like real cowboys all throughout the season, legendarily devoting one boxcar to liquor. They let their violence leak into the arena, publicly abusing their animals and their assistants. And the program itself showed little restraint, promising spectacles of killing and “torture.” Newspaper reporters noticed less-than-savory crowds swarming Cody’s bloodsport spectacle, just the thing to keep nice families away.

  But Samuel Clemens, America’s first source for Wild West high jinks, attended the show two days in a row and wrote Cody a fan letter in 1884 that served as publicity for both mythmakers. “It brought vividly back the breezy wild life of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains,” he wrote, “and stirred me like a war-song.” “The show is genuine,” he testified, “wholly free of sham and insincerity.” Most stirring for Clemens, as he reported it, were the curiosities his book Roughing It had made iconic, the “pony expressmen” he had glorified with shameless hyperbole and the “bucking horses,” which he claimed, in an allusion to his own famous “Mexican Plug,” were “painfully real to me, as I rode one of those outrages once for nearly a quarter of a minute.” Most potent for Clemens was the show’s nationalist splendor, its “purely and distinctively American” entertainment. He signed the letter with his brand (“Yours Truly, Mark Twain”), thus giving Cody tacit license to use it as a blurb.

  Cody took note. He inflated the show’s patriotic image and made it worthy of this celebrity endorsement. He also enlisted showman Nate Salsbury, who had gotten his start as a minstrel performer, to clean up the show’s act for Victorian consumption. Salsbury forbade the cast to drink. He retained many of the show’s original thrills—Bill’s Express ride, his Buffalo Hunt, and the breathtaking Deadwood stagecoach attack that gave select audience members the rides of their lives—but he set it to the music of a cowboy orchestra, adding a dainty Virginia reel on horseback and for a “grand finale” having Cody and his cowboys save a white frontier family from Indians. Salsbury killed much of the show’s genuine danger, and also its indulgence in reckless fun, but its new patriotic tribute to pure domestic values would have won even B. F. Keith’s approval.

  The show could now be sold as “America’s National Entertainment” and boast its educational value for children. It also attracted a prized demographic that hitherto had eluded Cody: women. It wasn’t until 1885, however, when he discovered the small, young, pretty, frugal, sprightly, demure, but sharpshooting Annie Oakley, that Cody was ultimately able, in Warren’s terms, to “domesticate” the Western image. In Oakley’s clever hands—the same hands that embroidered her stage costumes and served tea to reporters in her humble trailer—even the deadly, phallic rifle took its place as a household appliance. With the help of Oakley, the ruder Calamity Jane, and a supporting cast of female performers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show cracked the mainstream code. No longer a celebration of the masculine abandon that galloped from one firefight to the next, it repackaged the frontier as a rousing triumph of the orderly American home.

  While under Salsbury’s influence, the Wild West show revived a lawless frontier that had only recently been declared “closed.” In the popular imagination this extravagant lawlessness belonged to Americans. It bucked with the broncos, fought with the cowboys, and war-whooped with Cody’s bona fide Indians. It roused the crowd’s most savage wishes without ever making them enter the arena. The show no more threatened its audience’s safety than did contemporary tableaux vivants (live still lifes of classical set pieces that flattered the upper classes with Old World culture), but its sensations were shocking, and it made the crowd feel radically American.

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  THE MASS-PRODUCED AMUSEMENTS of the postbellum period justified the smirking sense of frivolity that is commonly associated with “fun.” These pleasures were fleeting and superficial—by design. Nothing was at stake, except the ticket price. As enjoyable as it was to laugh at vaudeville or to gasp at the triple-somersaulting aerials of Barnum’s magnificent Matthews family, these were things you did “for fun”—which is to say, for nothing at all. You took no risks, and took no part. Even Cody’s spectators who were pulled from the crowd to ride in the Deadwood stage attack didn’t experience deadly frontier action; it only looked and felt as if they did.

  Such fun was vicarious, as were its risks: spectators identified with dexterous athletes, death-defying acrobats, and rough-riding (retired) cowboys. Such fun was also voyeuristic, whether folks ogled the ribald antics of minstrels or the splendor of Native American powwows. It required no talent, no personal investment. Such no-stakes fun (call it entertainment) was readily transferable from the circus to vaudeville to nickelodeon and carnival, where automated games of skill and chance offered a limited sense of participation—shooting (corn kernels) like Annie Oakley, galloping (on a carousel) like Buffalo Bill. This closed commercial circuit made for a self-sustaining market. Its consumers were unspecialized, indiscriminate, omnivorous, expecting little more than varieties of distraction from one inexpensive venue to the next. The print media benefited on all levels—selling advertisements, publishing promotions, tracking and contriving celebrity gossip.

  This system reinforced a severe double standard for what it meant to “have fun”: either, like Buffalo Bill, you achieve the impossible as the star onstage or you achieve the bare minimum in the anonymous crowd. Both were (and are) kinds of American “fun,” and both tried to approximate the participatory excitement that liberated early American crowds—at Merry Mount or on Congo Square, or in the unadulterated cussedness of Virginia City. Day and night, in “continuous performance,” performers replicated the merriment and daring of a bold young nation inventing itself. Season upon season, in row after row, American spectators took in the show, while the wide-open spaces for loose public pleasure quietly vanished like the western frontier.

  Ironically, in the age of aggressive realism, the age of pragmatism and science, when the people had outgrown the midcentury gaslights of mystery, hoaxes, magic, and romance, the humbug of commercialism reached its adulthood. Fraud wasn’t a laughing matter anymore. It also wasn’t open to debate. Mark Twain verified Buffalo Bill’s story, and the product these pseudonymous moguls sold was so much more flavorful than the real, dusty thing—funner than an actual “Mexican Plug,” funner than a saddle-busting Dismal River roundup—so much funner that it handily passed the public taste test. Buffalo Bill’s great sleight of hand, what had him out-Barnuming P. T. Barnum, was to engineer a pleasure so irresistible that nobody cared how real it was.

  America hasn’t been the same ever since.

  THIS U.S. MARKET OF SEEING (and believing) achieved critical mass in 1893, at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. National religious leaders had convened months earlier, debating the exposition’s general morality and lobbying to have it closed on Sundays, but in the end they conceded it was an excellent way to showcase their various orthodoxies. So the exposition surged seven days a week, and everybody was satisfied. Between May and October of that year, 21.5 million customers paid fifty cents apiece to gape in wonder at the plaster-of-Paris White City and to gawk along the fair’s mile-long Midway Plaisance. The former was a temporary faux-classical metropolis devoted to the heights of civilization—plastic arts, music, technology, government. Charles Dudley Warner, Twain’s co-author of The Gilded Age, lectured there and described a viral disease he called “Barnumism”—a “lack of moderation” and a “striving to be sensational” that was warping literature, sermons, and the press. Of course Barnumism defined the entire exposition, all of which was drawn to immoderate scale—outsize buildings, miniaturized nations—but the designers pretended it was kept to the Midway (at the farthest possible remove from the fair’s art museum) where millions thronged along a Barnumesque esplan
ade of international “villages” and other gaudy attractions. The Midway offered a low-cultural universe in dozens of crass curios like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the bluntly Orientalist Streets of Cairo, where the belly dancer Little Egypt became a household name and spawned lurid copycats across the country. But whereas the Columbian Exposition was mostly about looking (at a Hawaiian volcano, a squat Eiffel Tower) and also about listening (to lectures and sermons and world music, from Poland’s Paderewski to African drummers), among its greatest hits were the oddball exhibits that invited full-body participation, especially the “captive balloon” rides soaring 1,500 feet above the city and George Ferris’s wildly popular Big Wheel. This 264-foot-wide stroke of genius is said to have saved the exposition from failure. It was also the future of commercialized fun.

  One of the exposition’s millions of customers—a thirty-one-year-old honeymooner from Coney Island, New York—returned home determined to build a Big Wheel of his own. If any one American of his era valued the fun of participation, it was George C. Tilyou.

  Coney Island had been Tilyou’s grammar school and college. Raised in his father’s resort, the Surf House, George was underfoot in the 1860s and 1870s when tourists arrived from the city dancing on pleasure boats and enjoyed what one guidebook called the “great democratic resort—the ocean bathtub of the great unwashed.” As a youth, that is, he saw the real deal: the fun of New York’s earliest “mixt Multitudes,” dating from Easter Mondays in the early eighteenth century to any given summer day at nineteenth-century Coney Island. The West Brighton beaches were famously diverse (men and women; rich and poor; whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Jews) and overwhelmingly crowded with easygoing folks who mingled, frolicked, danced, sang, lounged, and dallied in the waves. According to a reporter for the Brooklyn Standard Union, they seemed to “abandon all the restraint imposed by the rules of decency and morality.” Another reporter, from the New York Sun, wrote, “The opposite gender rush together at Coney Island and how they stay together and romp and tousle one another, and wrestle and frolic and maul each other, gray heads and youths alike, precisely as if the thing to do in the water was to behave exactly contrary to the manner of behaving anywhere else.” By all reports Tilyou was a pious young man, but these radically playful surroundings may well have loosened his spirit, for he grew to be an expert on “fun”—at least from an entrepreneurial angle.