American Fun Read online

  By age twenty-two he was already known as the dance-band leader with the loudest horn in town. His horn invited wild hyperbole—people said it could be heard blocks away, even twenty miles away, and his folk-hero status increased in proportion. The only record Bolden ever made has been lost, but testimonies to his uncanny musical voice, and his idiosyncratic hooks and quirks, fill the pages of early jazz history. More generally, they survive in the work of his descendants: King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong. What mattered most to this genial young fellow, who chatted in barbershops and caroused in bars and maintained an extramarital “harem” of prostitutes and brawling lovers, was the life of his music down among the dancers. Crushing opponents in nightly cutting contests; conning their hits overnight and blasting them back better; hearing and repeating the sounds of the people and tailoring syncopation to the dancers’ needs, Bolden rose to fame—albeit local fame—right alongside the cakewalk craze. But Bolden had more of the Williams in him than the Walker. Absorbing the dance floor (not the parade), he improvised a brass-based ragtime that sparked “keen rivalry” among its dance members, taunted and tickled its demanding audience, and maximized the dancers’ fun.

  Bolden had some Barnum in him, too. He rolled his bandwagon around the neighborhoods, spreading his trademark with his loud, crackling horn—but the real local Barnum was named Buddy Bottley. Bottley was an enterprising balloon-ride operator who helped to manage Lincoln Park (the turn-of-the-century Congo Square where Bolden’s band often performed) and staged competitions among Bolden’s audience members. His carny ride fell out of favor when the crowd’s “best dancer,” “a cute little girl named Annie Jones,” went up in his balloon and didn’t return for a week, having been found in a swamp thirty miles away by “some Cajun trappers.” Bottley and Bolden were “bosom buddies,” two conspiring “lady killers” who dressed “like wealthy Southern gentlemen,” yet Bolden was more in the line of Zab Hayward (kicking up Thayer’s tavern floor) and Alfred Doten (touring the California gold fields with his banjo, fiddle, and obstreperous spirits). Steeped in folk culture, in love with the crowd, King Bolden was the avatar of old King Charles—because he was also a rebel. Jazz was disreputable, lowdown, and dirty, and its practitioners wore their notoriety with pride. His honky-tonk music was so low down that it barely reached the bass clef of New Orleans’s social scale. It was the scourge of the good Creole society that disowned Ferdinand LaMothe—the great ragtime pianist known as Jelly Roll Morton—for descending into Bolden’s demimonde.

  Upon the request of Lincoln Park’s proprietor, Buddy’s band could “keep it clean” for the “real high class, respectable, influential, colored people who would be having an affair in the main dance hall.” But Bolden’s fan base, whom he called his “Chillun”—“a bunch of youngsters … great dancers … fanatics,” as Bottley’s brother recalled—preferred it low and dirty. Case in point was his signature number, “Funky Butt.” This ribald little tune, and the dance it inspired, was a dynamite cap of American fun: loud, rude, angular, sensual. The song was born one hot, sticky night when the band was playing Odd Fellows Hall. Willie Cornish, the trombonist, heard Bolden crack an impolite joke about the foul, nasty air. He spun the joke into a song that thrilled his sporting set:

  I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say

  Funky butt, funky butt

  Take it away.

  Bolden’s jazz headquarters, the Union Sons Hall on Perdido Street, soon became known as Funky Butt Hall, and the song itself became a mixing bowl for the people’s defiant wit and slang. Bolden legendarily would change its lyrics “on the spot,” improvising as always to suit the crowd’s needs. The versions ranged from the political to the profane. Jelly Roll Morton’s famous version softened the refrain—“You’re nasty, you’re dirty, take it away”—but it also took a swipe at the local judge who had convicted Bolden’s various band members for the occasional misdemeanor. The Funky Butt’s bard was the banjo player, Lorenzo Staulz, a wit, rhymester, and dirty-dozens maestro who “had the reputation of being the nastiest talking man in the history of New Orleans.” Trombonist Frankie “Dusen and Bolden used to get a great big happy feeling when Lorenzo sang. He could sing ‘Funky Butt’ for an hour … because he would sing about all the notoriety whores, pimps, madams and even about the [white] policemen at the door.” Duke Bottley recalled one especially hazardous verse:

  I thought I heer’d Abe Lincoln shout,

  Rebels close down them plantations and let all them niggers out.

  I’m positively sure I heer’d Mr. Lincoln shout.

  Sidney Bechet, who started out in Bolden’s original Eagle Band, recalled: “The police put you in jail if they heard you singing that song.”

  “Funky Butt” was the young black rebels’ anthem, and the dance it inspired—exaggerating the city’s earliest hip-grinding techniques—waved its unapologetic essence in the face of high New Orleans society. The funky butt flouted couth. Not at all orderly like the quadrilles and schottisches that sometimes shared the same dance floor; not proud and prancing like its fraternal cakewalk, the funky butt was purely a product of the folk—their street sounds (and smells), their vulgar jokes, and their ancestors’ unassailable music. It enjoyed an easy place among other pelvis-driven dances that were fashioned by African Americans; as the blues musician Coot Grant recalled, these included “the Fanny Bump, Buzzard Lope, Fish Tail, Eagle Rock, Itch, Shimmy, Squat, Grind, Mooche … and a million others.” But when Grant was asked to put the funky butt into words, she “hesitated and then explained: ‘Well, you know the women sometimes pulled up their dresses to show their petticoats—fine linen with crocheted edges—and that’s what happened with the Funky Butt.’ ” She went on to describe the dancing of “a tall, powerful woman” named Sue “who worked in the mills pulling coke from a furnace—a man’s job,” saying: “As soon as she got high and happy, that’s what she’d do, pulling up her skirts and grinding her rear like an alligator crawling up a bank.”

  Bolden’s fame crumbled in 1906, when he began to show symptoms of “dementia praecox, paranoid type”; he would spend the next quarter century in a mental hospital. While his musical contributions to early jazz are faint (he played mostly in B flat, and his riffs were just hints at the sophistication to come), his groundbreaking, ground-shaking take on ragtime, tailored to the whims of unbridled dancers, whipped up a genuinely popular culture that would define America’s funnest era.

  IN THE FINAL WEEKS of 1924, writer and New York Times editor Robert L. Duffus welcomed America’s “Age of Play.” Writing for The Independent, he attributed Roaring Twenties joie de vivre to factors long since held commonplace: shorter workdays, longer vacations, the boredom of factory work, and the chance to make more money while exerting less energy. Duffus, who in college had been the houseboy for Thorstein Veblen, eminent theorist of the “leisure class” and “conspicuous consumption,” ran through a list of largely commercial diversions that pleased the primed and ready nation: contact sports, “recreation centers,” playgrounds, movies, phonographs, “cheap automobiles,” summer camps, et cetera. Praising Americans for altering their “ancient attitude,” he argued, with a nod to current race theories, that their seeming shift from the “unceasing industry” of the “temperate zones” to the noncompetitive ease of “tropical and subtropical areas” was liberating them from the chains of conservatism and letting them get “nearer a frank and full enjoyment of life than any people that ever lived.” At the heart of his argument, he pleaded with his readers to preserve what was “sacred” in all of this pleasure:

  I do not maintain that all [American] amusements are wholesome, nor that the excessive standardization and mechanization of work and play alike is without its dangers.… These evils are not to be cured by curbing the spirit of play. Reformers and educators must accept this spirit as more sacred than anything they have to give; they can help by guiding, not by restraining.

  Duffus’s appeal for a constructive respo
nse to the nation’s sudden rush for enjoyment (“by guiding, not by restraining”) placed him in a demilitarized zone of the Jazz Age culture wars, a tiny zone indeed. His vague reference to play’s “evils” and “[un]wholesome” pleasures didn’t exactly put him in William Bradford’s old camp, the army of preachers and vice-squad bullies whose mission in the 1920s was to bomb America back to Plymouth Plantation. Nor, however, did his clarion call to America’s “right to play” show him swinging drunk around the May-pole with the flappers, sharpers, and Lindy Hoppers who reveled in their own exciting permission. He wasn’t overjoyed to live in what has been called “the Golden Age of the roller coasters”; to him, George C. Tilyou’s chutes and wheels looked like the flip side of factory work. Nevertheless, in his socially reforming way, Duffus admired fun—not so much P. T. Barnum’s fun, but the stuff the people came up with on their own. In it—“the spirit of play”—he saw the perfection of liberty. “The right to play,” he wrote, “is the final clause in the charter of democracy. The people are king—et le roi s’amuse.”

  Duffus made a charming case, but in retrospect his thoughts on play and democracy may have been too timid. In the 1920s, the struggle against cops, parents, censors, and even well-meaning reformers like himself was built right into the people’s fun—certainly their most dangerous and democratizing fun. Essentially edgy, 1920s fun was had in reaction to cops, vice squads, racists—and especially to that popular villain, the “Puritan,” who was widely viewed, in Frederick J. Hoffman’s terms, as the embodiment of Freudian “repression,” “a man ignorant and rudely affirmative, who forced his religion and its strait-laced moral code upon a growing country.” But this villain also reflected a national reality, the long legacy of social, political, and legal institutions that anxiously defended what Stanley Coben calls the “Victorian character” in 1920s America: feminine domesticity, patriarchal manliness, Protestant faith, and white supremacy. If Prohibition was the tallest monument to this “character,” then members of the Ku Klux Klan, which was gaining political dominance in Indiana and elsewhere, were its most vicious “guardians.”

  Caricature or not, this would-be “Puritan” became the fall guy for intellectuals, bohemians, flappers, minorities, homosexuals, and other outsiders who aimed to liberate their nation and—as is the subject of the following three chapters—its libido through unapologetically liberal pleasure. Even when their fun was outrageously silly—flagpole sitting, goldfish swallowing, utterly fluffy and superfluous slang—Americans flicked a tooth at the modern severity of pragmatism and professionalism. And rolled their eyes at squares like Duffus. The “guiding” he proposed—who needed it? The people were happy guiding themselves.

  But for this reason the Jazz Age did advance democracy—widen it, energize it, modernize it. If Gilded Age entertainments, as we have seen, were designed to separate and segregate the people, then many of the risky new Jazz Age amusements, with which the culture industry struggled to keep up, did just the opposite. In the tradition of Buddy Bolden’s Funky Butt Hall, and in their illegal and unregulated hideouts from Prohibition, the people engineered new pleasures of their own that not only fostered class and race mixing (in an otherwise politically volatile age), but also, most radically, gave new social power to many race and gender minorities who managed to have more fun than the majority. The people’s fun, in the 1920s, may indeed have been “the final clause in the charter of democracy.” In the spirit of Merry Mount and the Pinkster Days, though now on a national scale, Jazz Age fun allowed average Americans to revel in their two basic freedoms at once—their individuality and their community membership.

  Duffus was one of countless contemporaries to debate the worth of fun. This discourse itself was quite new, modern. In earlier eras, “fun” was treated as the ineffectual aside to pressing political and social issues. Jack Tar’s pranks were instruments of revolution; African-American festivals and balls were quaint displays of primitivism; public drunkenness was the bugbear of reformers. In the 1920s, however, fun qua fun advanced to the forefront as either proof positive of the great American spirit or a warning of civilization’s decline. Its presence was too great to be dismissed. It was also just too interesting. The voices in this debate were varied and forceful, and they addressed the subject in every medium. Duffus, Walter Lippmann, Constance Rourke, Max Eastman, and countless other intellectuals parsed, debated, and defended the value of fun. Preachers and lawmakers argued for and against it. Newspapers and magazines bulged with the subject and reveled in its culture wars. H. L. Mencken, the decade’s most jaundiced culture critic, assessed his home state of Maryland’s rage for fun as a dismal reaction against both a “stiffening, almost a deadening in” moral and political “manners.” In such an overregulated society, he argued, “To be happy takes on the character of the illicit: it is jazz, spooning on the back seat, the Follies, dancing without corsets, wood alcohol.” He blamed his contemporaries’ “almost complete incapacity for innocent joy” on antics that to twenty-first-century Americans look exceedingly joyful and innocent, if also quaintly roaring.

  Those who got closest and most embroiled in fun’s details were the composers, musicians, novelists, poets, playwrights, comedians, filmmakers, actors, and painters who animated popular, pleasurable rebellion and tried to understand its social power. Down among the funmakers themselves—the dancers, drinkers, pranksters, and jokers who animated the “age of play”—were cultural leaders and innovators, especially young ones, who recognized fun as the great American difference and worked to elevate its dignity. Harlem’s most brilliant “New Negroes” saw fun as a mark of racial pride. America’s most daring “New Women” saw fun as a mode of liberation. Stars of both groups wrote poems, plays, stories, and songs that explored the risky pleasures of American rebellion. Jazz Age fun wasn’t as simple as it looked, and as these rebels’ works revealed (by slowing their era down to a vivid freeze-frame), the personal costs of having fun reflect the dangers of democracy itself.

  Fun—once the province of discrete American groups—was touted in the 1920s as the great social mixer. In earlier eras it had strengthened social bonds to the exclusion of meddling outsiders: it had fortified Patriots against Royalists; it had fortified black communities against racist whites; it had fortified frontiersmen’s homosocial bonds against the interference of feminine domesticity. In the 1920s, it still served such identity formation—as in helping young women break Victorian chains or galvanizing a growing black urban population. But in the social upheaval following World War I—America’s sudden economic prosperity, African Americans’ Great Migration, women’s suffrage and growing economic freedom—new and more sophisticated kinds of earlier fun became instrumental in breaking boundaries down. Playful behavior and acts of rebellion carved inroads among long-divided races, classes, and genders who recognized at least one common opponent: Bradford’s legacy, the American killjoy.

  GILDED AGE–STYLE “family fun” flourished during the prosperous 1920s. Thanks to sophisticated new communications technology, it had grown sleeker and stronger since Barnum’s newspapers announced the circus was coming to town. Silver screens dominated moviegoers’ senses. Radio signals entered consumers’ homes. But the pleasure being sold was basically the same: the passive reception of a performer’s talent. The popularity of amusement parks dropped off during this decade, beginning “a steady decline” as early as 1921, but Americans tripled their consumption of entertainment in general, largely in the form of sports and movie tickets—but also of records, books, sheet music, and sporting goods, products that required some level of consumer engagement. The U.S. population grew by 16 percent, from 105 million to 122 million, but annual spending on spectator sports more than doubled from $30 million to $65 million and on cinema from $301 million to $732 million.

  Sports stars became the new folk heroes. Among those who dominated the public imagination—boxer Jack Dempsey; tennis star Big Bill Tilden; running back Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost—none of
them matched the bleachers-packing celebrity of the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth, the rags-to-riches slugger whose fame was gaudily constructed by the press agent Christy Walsh. Adored for his athletic prowess as much as for his gustatory and erotic appetites, the barrel-bellied Babe—far more than his surly rival Ty Cobb—was the cheerful and beer-swilling epitome of fun, and his fans (who wasn’t one?) loaded themselves down with his trademarked merchandise and spin-off items, the cars, dress shoes, fishing poles, and other products (most with no connection to baseball) buoyed up by his famous name. Baby Ruth candy bars appeared in 1921 and cashed in on the Bambino’s fame for free—by claiming to have been named after Grover Cleveland’s daughter.

  “Each week about 100 million Americans went to the movies,” writes 1920s historian Geoffrey Perrett, “a number equal to nearly the entire population.… By 1926 there were more than 20,000 dream palaces offering celluloid refuge.” It would be difficult to overstate the impact Hollywood had on America’s national consciousness—and self-consciousness—during the 1920s. The movies’ “celluloid refuge” was even darker and more impersonal than B. F. Keith’s vaudeville theaters, but thanks to their absolute passivity and total immersion the reclining spectators were consumed by pleasure. No longer victims of the worn-out material and lackluster performances of circulating road-show talent, Americans paid a quarter to be plunged into fantasy—titillated by Cecil B. DeMille’s racy comedies, surrounded by D. W. Griffith’s (racist) and Erich von Stroheim’s sprawling histories, and—most important—indulged by the graceful, witty, glamorous, gorgeous, carefree, death-defying, and scandalous ectoplasms of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, and all the royalty whose faces and antics towered thirty feet above the raked seating. Anyone with the price of a ticket claimed an evening’s rights to the purity and danger of the world’s biggest stars. The movies’ dazzling fun blended in just fine with what Duffus called the “age of play.” Nevertheless, for all of their vicarious excitement, they were also the era’s most efficient means of keeping citizens stock-still in their seats, “gaping stupidly at idiotic pictures in monochrome,” Mencken objected. “No light, no color, no sound!”