by John Beckman
43. an efflorescence of political parties: Sean Wilentz gives a lively account of the “radical democracies” during this period: The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 330–59. Ironically, however, beneath the blare of 1830s partisan conflict, there was a tepid turnout at the polls (a little more than 50 percent of eligible voters); this trend would hold steady until 1840, when—thanks to the same kinds of popular organization that fortified reform movements—there was what Altschuler and Blumin call “the annus mirabilis of American partisan democracy,” when “fully eight of ten eligible voters cast ballots.” Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14–18.
44. “swing, which nobody but a Bowery Boy”: William M. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York City (1852), quoted in Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 178. Also consulted: George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 174–76; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 102–5; David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 303–7. Others have also followed Reynolds’s lead in reading the b’hoys’ influence on the slang, style, and attitudes of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose. See Robert M. Dowling, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 52–59.
45. “with a perfect exuberance of flowers and feathers”: Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 176.
46. “The gang had no regular organization”: John Riply quoted in Anbinder, Five Points, 181.
47. “recreational”: Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 54–84.
48. their bloody 1834 race riots: Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 34–37.
49. “Slamm Bang & Co.,” “democratize”: Peter Adams, Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), 63; Google eBook.
50. “Thorough-going sporting-man”: Anbinder, Five Points, 142–43.
51. “shirtless democracy”: See Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 326–35. See also Adams, Bowery Boys, 107–8.
52. Dorr Rebellion: Adams, Bowery Boys, 47–60. Marvin E. Gettleman, The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1949 (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1980), 135–36.
53. “the first New Yorkers to leave for California”: Anbinder, Five Points, 180.
54. “dandies and dandizettes”: Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 85–119.
55. So faithfully did he mimic their dress: David Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Folk-Hero,” Theatre Journal 33, no. 2 (May 1981): 199–212.
56. “greenhorn”: Benjamin Archibald Baker, A Glance at New York (Cambridge, MA: ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2003), 4.
57. “capital fun”: This and subsequent quotations are from ibid., 11–14.
58. “Waxhall,” “Wawdeville,” “first-rate shindig”: Ibid., 21.
59. “As may be supposed”: Albion review quoted in Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose,” 202.
60. “a pleasant place for family resort”: Herald review quoted ibid., 204.
61. “Onstage, the b’hoy gained superhuman powers”: Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 104. Each of these folk heroes, in its era, captured a strain in American fun. The peddler was a rambling bricoleur who baffled yokels with pranks and stunts and quirkily practical contraptions. Trappers, woodsmen, and heel-cracking boatmen were monsters of risk and silly braggadocio who tackled the frontier’s sublime opponents—great lakes, grand canyons, rocky mountains—and always with a bizarre sense of humor. Their citified Jackson Age cousins, moreover, updated the nation’s puckish fury for Jacksonian democracy’s social wilderness. Mose and Lize posted their brash white selves as America’s cocky urban explorers. The classic treatment of these early American icons—Yankee peddlers and Kentucky woodsmen as well as blackface minstrels—is Constance Rourke’s superlative 1931 American Humor, 15–91. Like these other icons and, say, Brother Rabbit, b’hoys and g’hals keep popping back up in the national consciousness—in Ned Buntline’s dime novels and especially in Herbert Asbury’s sometimes fanciful popular history, The Gangs of New York, which transcends his accounts of America’s other skid rows (the Barbary Coast and Quartier Latin) to present a high-flying mythology of the b’hoys’ gang wars and has inspired such titanic mythmakers as Jorge Luis Borges and Martin Scorsese. Kurt Andersen’s 2007 historical novel Heyday also takes an admirable crack at the subject.
62. It wouldn’t have been the first time: Nigel Cliff, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2007), xix.
63. “carnival”: Sante’s claim that this rioting was “carnival” stands among the more convincing efforts to import this European concept stateside. Five Points rioters, like feudal peasants, saw no other way out, and they often acted with medieval naïveté in their attempts to upend society. But these efforts, like the “play” rebellions of traditional Saturnalia, did not strive for a permanent state of democracy. In their violent frustration and self-gratification, the b’hoys’ riots strove for outright anarchy and thereby triggered even harsher measures of authoritarian rule and social inequality. Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 340.
64. “an aristocracy of the dram shop”: Quoted in Adams, Bowery Boys, 51.
65. “the nightly revels at Dickens’s Place”: Quotations in this and the next paragraph are from Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 140–43.
6. BARNUMIZING AMERICA
1. Patriotic dramas: Kunhardt et al., P. T. Barnum, 154.
2. “ten times larger”: Billboard reprinted ibid., 224.
3. “new corporate context”: Karen Halttunen, Painted Ladies and Confidence Men: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 207.
4. “humbug in the exhibition room”: Barnum, Humbugs of the World, 13.
5. athletics were largely primitive pastimes: Puritans had long allowed certain games of skill—from footraces to combat sports—but as Eliot J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein put it, “when these very same activities became part of ‘Romish’ celebrations … then a line was crossed.” Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 33. Richard A. Swanson and Betty Spears, History of Sport and Physical Education in the United States (Dubuque, IA: WCB Brown & Benchmark, 1995), 32–144. See also Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), 3–99.
6. “exotic and frivolous indulgences”: Stephen Hardy, “ ‘Adopted by All the Clubs’: Sporting Goods and the Shaping of Leisure, 1800–1900,” in For Fun and Profit, ed. Richard Busch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 78.
7. “chess, draughts, billiards, and bowling”: William E. Dodge Jr. “The Young Men’s Christian Association … Shall It Be a Club? About Amusements,” New York Times, July 18, 1869, reprinted in George B. Kirsch, Sports in North America: A Documentary History, vol. 4, Sports in War: Revival, and Expansion, 1860–1880 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1995), 3.
8. “the growth of the professional spirit”: Dudley Sargent, “The Evils of the Professional Tendency in Modern Athletics,” American Journal of Social Science 20 (1884): 87–90, reprinted in Kirsch, Sports in North America.
&n
bsp; 9. “the thing which produces most of the evils”: E. L. Godwin, “The Athletic Craze,” Nation, December 7, 1893, 422–23, reprinted in Kirsch, Sports in North America.
10. “to embody his conception”: John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 12–13.
11. “transform[ed] public spaces”: Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 177.
12. “continuous performance”: Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from Benjamin Franklin Keith, “The Vogue of Vaudeville,” reprinted in American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, ed. Charles W. Stein (New York: Da Capo, 1991), 17.
13. “The most dangerous acts of the trapeze”: William Dean Howells, “On Vaudeville,” in Stein, American Vaudeville, 76.
14. the “Keith Circuit” commanded: Edward F. Albee, “Twenty Years of Vaudeville,” in Stein, American Vaudeville, 17.
15. The Gilded Age population: The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 379.
16. “country” newspapers: George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 83. See also Ted Curtis Smythe, The Gilded Age Press, 1865–1900 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 33–44.
17. the dramatic “facts” of modern life: Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 131–231.
18. “very close to the untutored spirit”: Review, The Nation, August 7, 1884, 116.
19. “like Brer Rabbit”: Julia Collier Harris, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 12; Walter M. Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), 2–5; Michael Flusche, “Underlying Despair in the Fiction of Joel Chandler Harris,” in Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, ed. R. Bruce Bickley Jr. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 175. Wayne Mixon, “The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race: Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus in Their Time,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 3 (August 1990): 458; R. Bruce Bickely Jr., “Joel Chandler Harris,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg, vol. 11, American Humorists, 1800–1950 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), 191. Robert Cochran argues effectively that Harris, the author, was also more of a trickster than is commonly recognized: “It’s high time,” he writes, “to at least consider the possibility that Harris constructed his tales and their framing narratives with consummate skill and deliberate cunning, that multiple ironies were not only not lost upon him but were in fact something of his stock-in-trade, and that he was, in short, something of a Brer Rabbit among authors.” “Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris,” African American Review 38, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 24.
20. “represent[ing] nothing on earth”: Joel Chandler Harris, “Negro Customs,” The Youth’s Companion, June 11, 1885, 238, cited in Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, 10.
21. “From a nook in their chimney corners”: Julia Collier Harris, Life and Letters, 34.
22. “for a black world than a white one”: Mixon, “The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race,” 459.
23. “their confidence and esteem”: Joel Chandler Harris, “Introduction,” from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, compiled by Richard Chase (1955; Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1983), xvi.
24. “unfamiliar with the great body of their own folk-lore”: Ibid., xiv.
25. “Only in this shape”: Ibid., xxvi–xxvii.
26. “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy”: Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs, 3.
27. “de funniest creetur er de whole gang”: Ibid., 124.
28. “undersized, red-haired and somewhat freckled”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 331.
29. “Well, I tell you dis”: Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus, in Complete Tales, 331.
30. “No Tinsel,” “Eight Thousand Attend”: Billboard and headline quoted in Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 248.
31. “the belt full of murderous bowies and long pistols”: William Frederick Cody, Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W. F. Cody), A Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1888), 405.
32. “red devils”: Ibid., 426–27. For differing analyses of this episode, see Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody, 31, and Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 38.
33. “was in school”: Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 20.
34. “Mr. McCarthy”: Cody, Story of the Wild West, 617–18.
35. “Death to the Indians!”: Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 13, 7–41.
36. “jerking his war-bonnet off”: Cody, Story of the Wild West, 675–77.
37. “hard work”: Ibid., 691.
38. “broncho riding, roping, racing”: John Bratt, Trails of Yesterday (Chicago: University Publishing Company, 1921), 279, 280.
39. Against popular fears: Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 211–18.
40. “It brought vividly back”: “[SLC to William F. Cody, 10 September 1884, Elmira, N.Y.], Elmira, NY (UCCL 12811),” catalogue entry, Mark Twain Project Online (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
41. “America’s National Entertainment”: Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 264.
42. “domesticate”: Ibid., 250.
43. “Barnumism”: David Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 253. See also Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition & American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979), 107–10; Stanley Applebaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (New York: Dover, 1980), 75–102; Joe McKennon, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival, vol. 1 (Bowling Green, NY: Popular Press, 1972), 27–39.
44. “great democratic resort”: Appleton’s guidebook quoted in Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 16.
45. “abandon all the restraint”: Quoted in Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 110.
46. “The opposite gender rush together”: Quoted in Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 67.
47. “King of Coney Island,” “Sodom by the Sea”: Immerso, Coney Island, 48. For Tilyou’s early biography, see also Edo McCullough, Good Old Coney Island: A Sentimental Journey into the Past (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 284–327.
48. “On This Site Will Be Erected”: Kasson, Amusing the Million, 57.
49. “clean fun,” “A ride on the horses”: Promotional material quoted in Immerso, Coney Island, 57–58.
50. “We Americans want”: Immerso, Coney Island, 78.
51. “caused laughter enough”: Ibid., 57.
52. “sales people”: Robert C. Ford and Ady Milman, “George C. Tilyou—Developer of the Contemporary Amusement Park,” Cornell Hotel & Restaurant Administrations Quarterly 41 (August 2000): 2.
53. “flirtation, permissiveness, and sexual humor”: Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 136–37.
54. “Laughter”: Immerso, Coney Island, 77.
55. “gigantic laboratory of human nature”: Kasson, Amusing the Million, 59.
56. “What a sad peopl
e you must be!”: H. A. Overstreet, The Guide to Civilized Loafing (New York: W. W. Norton, 1935), 17.
57. “a gigantic mistake”: John Strasbaugh, “The Case of Sigmund F. and Coney I.,” New York Times, July 22, 2009.
58. encourag[ing] positive citizenship”: David Klaasen and Sally Ryan, “Historical Note,” National Recreation Association records; http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/ead/swha/sw0074.xml. Accessed July 17, 2013.
59. multibillion-dollar international juggernaut: Disney’s theme parks alone pulled in $3.4 billion in the third fiscal quarter of 2012, which ranks as the most profitable quarter in their history; http://www.themeparkpost.com/index/2012396-the-walt-disney-company-reports-largest-quarterly-earnings-in-its-history. Accessed August 14, 2012.
7 MERRY MOUNT GOES MAINSTREAM
1. According to legend: Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29–34.
2. “jes’ grew”: James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), xi. To be precise, Johnson writes that “ragtime jes’ grew.”
3. “kindly, rather simple, hard-luck personage”: Jessie Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Touchstone, 1997), 162.
4. “decide which of us”: James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Da Capo, 1930), 105.
5. “sex dance”: Musical Courier quoted in Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 122–23.
6. “hummed, whistled, and played”: San Francisco Call and French newspapers quoted in Davinia Cady, “Parisian Cake Walks,” 19th-Century Music 30, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 288–317.
7. Born Charles Joseph Bolden: Donald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 36–37.
8. “harem”: Ibid., 45.