Louis S. Warren
Page 36
But it also had obvious, though unspoken, sexual connotations. Indeed, marksmanship was a coded display for an entire ideology of sex and race. Victorians understood men and women as fundamentally sexual beings. To many, the success of individuals and nations was contingent on the control of male sexuality. Some saw semen, the “male essence,” as the source of manly ambition and energy. Too-liberal dispersion of it led to the loss of both. Others were convinced that each organ had only so much “nerve energy,” and that overutilizing one organ drained all the others. Wholesome marital sex made men temporarily limp. Illicit, excessive sex made them perpetually languid, indolent, and passive—neurasthenic. Men who restrained their lust, on the other hand, were more likely to be physically and mentally “hardened,” primed to exploit opportunity where it opened.116 White men triumphed over dark men, and American civilization advanced at the expense of savagery, precisely because of the alleged superiority of white men at controlling their sexuality.
Of course, the perceived threat of overcivilization had led to refinements in this thinking. Some, notably the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, had suggested less emphasis on the restraint of male passion and more on the channeling of it, the better to avoid nervous exhaustion.
But whether one believed in old-fashioned restraint of male passions or the newer gospel of channeling them, the marksman was a near-perfect symbol, his ability to control the direction and delivery of his bullets a metaphor for his ability to contain and channel his desires. The death-dealing machine of the gun was symbolic of life-planting male organs, its lethal bullets an inversion of the “male essence” that planted the seeds of life. The sharpshooter stood for sexual restraint, the conscious redirection of masculine energy, individual success, and national power.
The allure of this symbolism was heightened by its relevance to the increasing racial and class violence of American cities after the Civil War. In the pervasive labor upheaval of the 1870s and ’80s, working-class men and many immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere rebelled against frequent, industry-wide wage reductions. In the subsequent violence, strikers wielded clubs, rocks, torches, and sometimes guns. In 1877, beginning with railroad workers in Maryland and West Virginia, what came to be known as the Great Strike burned along the railroad lines to Chicago, Kansas City, and other cities. A crowd of 20,000 demonstrated in Chicago. The railroad station in Pittsburgh burned to the ground. Dozens died in confrontations between strikers, police, militia, and federal troops.117
In response, terrified authorities and legislatures created new institutions to restrain “savage” labor, including urban armories and, in 1877, they reformed National Guard units. National Guardsmen were successors to the old militias, which in a few notorious cases had been composed of workingmen reluctant to fire on strikers. The new National Guard formalized command hierarchies and provided greater militarization. Above all, it promised to put guns in the hands of men who would use them against rebellious workers. Businessmen created volunteer guard units during the strike. Afterward, they helped support the National Guard with voluntary donations, and filled its ranks enthusiastically.118
Thus, proficiency with firearms came to be seen as practical, even vital for the defense of middle-class interests in the 1880s and ’90s. The National Guard, its business supporters, and the nascent National Rifle Association (formed in 1871) opened dozens of shooting ranges for National Guard regiments. They also sponsored regional and national shooting competitions to encourage “the steady advance in marksmanship” of this new institution, “on whom we largely depend in the last resort for the preservation of public order.”119
While the marksman embodied an answer to deep-set anxieties about the need to strengthen masculinity and class power among white men, he also contained a message about restricting access to guns. For, without exception, the shooters in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as in the many other shooting acts of the Gilded Age, were white. Just as the destructiveness of the gun was restrained by the marksman who kept his bullets within a minimal “spread” on the target, his performance implied that the gun’s power would not undo him, that he could contain it, and keep it from spreading into the hands of racial others.
In this way, as in many others, the Wild West show rewrote western history to correspond with the mythic needs of its middle-class, white audience. Outside the show arena, throughout American history, hands of all colors had gripped the shooting iron. Although bullets and firearms were expensive on the Plains, Cheyenne and Sioux snipers targeted American officers to terrible effect. In 1868, the first moments of the battle of Beecher’s Island in Nebraska saw the surgeon mortally shot, the commanding general severely wounded, and his subordinate officer, Lieutenant Beecher, killed (and his name given to the battle).120
Of course, there were Mexican and African American marksmen, too, but significantly, no Indian, Mexican, or other nonwhite sharpshooters emerged in the genre of performance shooting after the Civil War. Hostility to minority displays of gun prowess complemented a gathering political movement to keep guns from minority hands. At the dawn of the twentieth century, African Americans saw their gun-toting privileges curtailed in the South, and gun-ownership rights of noncitizen immigrants vanished altogether in Pennsylvania and New York. In the West, once the Indian wars ceased, state legislators increasingly demanded that Indians be banned from hunting or carrying firearms off the reservation.121
In contrast to its reflection of gun rights as a white privilege, or talent, the show’s horse and footraces soon became multiracial. In 1884, the first act of the show, after the “Grand Entree,” was a “Grand Quarter Mile Race, among four Mexicans, four Cowboys, and four Indians.” 122 Interracial races kicked off the show’s action in most years thereafter, introducing the show’s drama as a display of American history told in social Darwinist terms, or a “race of races.” This contest was not fixed. Any racer—of any race—might triumph. White victory could be construed as proof of white superiority. An Indian or Mexican winner suggested that racial competition was ongoing and potentially tragic for a white race that allowed itself to flag. Against the possibility that white failure in the opening races might signify a larger racial degeneration, the show retained its comic ending partly by rendering the power of the gun a uniquely white province.123
After Salsbury came on board, he and Cody adapted the all-white shooting display to make it still more acceptable. Having banished Doc Carver’s “Evil Spirit,” they enhanced the family context for the show’s most famous shooter, Adam Bogardus, by placing him in performance with his four sons.124 Featuring white families in shooting acts was a standard way of making destructive gunplay appeal to family audiences, embedding it in a regenerative context of kin. Show publicists referred to the Bogardus “shooting quintette,” suggesting a performance similar to the popular family singing acts of the period.125 But it also communicated the essence of controlled, directed masculine desire common to all shooting acts: the faithful marksman who was a faithful and potent husband, producing four strapping marksman sons. With the Bogardus family, shooting became a demonstration of filial piety and inherited—therefore racial—virtue.
But Bogardus had just quit the show, and now Oakley’s image as a virtuous white girl, or a girl-bride, provided a regenerative female context for the show’s exhibition of lethal weapons, her femininity a stunningly ironic paradox for a display of gun proficiency. The symbolic meanings of the act reinforced the larger ideology of middle-class domesticity and restraint. Superficially, her performance was simple, spectacular marksmanship. But it was her inspired imposture as a middle-class farm girl and housewife that made her shooting skill so entrancing.
Indeed, her embodiment of a feminine domestic ideal suggests her acting skills were every bit as remarkable as her shooting. The Moses family had been hardscrabble farmers in rural Ohio. Annie Moses was six when her father died, nine when her stepfather passed away. Her mother, unable or unwilling to care for her children
, dispersed them. Brothers and sisters went to neighbors. Annie spent a year in the county home, then another two years with a cruel farm family. “The man was a brute,” she later recalled, “and his wife a virago.”126
She returned home only by running away, to discover her mother remarried to one Joseph Shaw. He was kind enough to take her in but he, too, soon died. This time, Annie kept her place at home by making enough cash to be invaluable, as the proficient market hunter she had become. Within four years, she figuratively left the house forever as Frank Butler’s wife. Only then did she learn to read.
By 1902, Annie Oakley’s sixteen years with the Wild West show had come to an end. Her hair dyed, she was still youthful, even virginal, an icon of middle-class femininity. Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
In her publicity, Oakley made much of her devotion to her mother and siblings. “I know this much,” she told a London interviewer in 1887, “if I had my mother living with me here I should be in no hurry to get back to the States.”127
But in more private ways, she could not get far enough away from her origins. It is said that she took the name Oakley because children at the county home taunted her with a singsong refrain, “Moses poses.” This could be true. But her eagerness to seize a new identity, and her thoroughness in burying the old, suggest a deep anger. Annie Moses went after her old surname like a fury. Before she became Oakley she tried out the name “Mozee.” Her experiment extended to changing family records, rechiseling “Mozee” on Moses family tombstones, and waging a consequent feud with her brother, who retained the Moses name.128 When she failed to expunge that name from history, she abandoned Mozee for still another.
Perhaps her new and most famous identity was preferable because it severed all connection to the Moses name. Whatever her reasons, there is no indication that Annie Oakley’s affection for Frank Butler was anything but deep and constant. But if Annie Mozee began her path to stardom with her marriage, her refusal to take her husband’s name to the stage with her— even he called her “Miss Oakley” in newspaper interviews—suggests she might have been dubious about its value.129 Indeed, marrying a divorced trick-shooting Irish immigrant from the vaudeville circuit was no sure ticket to better fortunes. Butler made his way to the stage after arriving from Ireland in 1863. When the couple went out on the stage together, they entered the same world of widespread disrepute that Cody occupied in the 1870s. On its face, the idea of her becoming a middle-class attraction by this route seemed absurd.130
But Annie Oakley was never one to take no for an answer. She insisted on star billing, and she got it. Her act featured a woman pushing—or bursting— a whole series of cultural constraints. She earned a livelihood by drawing a gun on her husband, shooting a dime from between his thumb and forefinger, the ember off a cigarette between his lips, a playing card in his hand held edgewise toward her, so that the bullet sliced the card in two. She could do all of these stunts with her rifle held backward over her shoulder as she sighted in a mirror. When Butler released two clay pigeons, Oakley would leap over a table, pick up her gun, and shatter them both before they hit the ground. In another event, he held small cards in his hand. She fired at them, then he threw them into the stands. Spectators beheld these souvenirs in awe: two-inch by five-inch cards with her picture at one end and a one-inch-wide, heart-shaped bull’s-eye at the other—with a bullet hole through it.131
Oakley’s spectacle entranced middle-class audiences partly because she appeared as a respectable, domestic figure. Her entrance in the arena “was always a very pretty one,” wrote Dexter Fellows, longtime press agent for the Wild West show. “She never walked. She tripped in, bowing, waving, and wafting kisses.” She was less than five feet tall, and with her delicate, youthful features, and a dress that reflected the latest middle-class fashions, her large rifle or shotgun looked oddly out of place. “Her first few shots brought forth a few screams of fright from the women, but they were soon lost in round after round of applause.” If the pretty, diminutive, respectable woman could handle the guns so masterfully, then surely the display was safe to watch. “It was she who set the audience at ease,” recalled Fellows, “and prepared it for the continuous crack of firearms which followed.”132
Annie Oakley’s act made powerful use of her symbolic femininity. Where Victorians believed that men were bedeviled by surging passions that they struggled to restrain, the better class of women were “naturally good,” more able to restrain their passions unless somehow corrupted. Thus, the best way of containing the surging desires of manhood was a faithful marriage. A good wife was the sole recipient of a good husband’s physical affections, and in this connection, she was vital to the restraint and direction of his passions.
At first glance, a performance in which a small, girlish—even virginal— woman raised a gun to her husband might seem to subvert these principles. Indeed, cultural anxieties about the place of women in public and private life were pronounced in the 1870s. As much as they were symbols of domestic order, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes, “from the mid-nineteenth century on woman had become the quintessential symbol of social danger and disorder.”133 The power of the home as symbol depended on a connection with woman. And the possibility that women might wish to sever or reshape that bond generated a large amount of cultural anxiety. Indeed, American society was as transfixed by the problem of shoring up womanly domesticity as it was by the presumed failure of manly virility, for the Industrial Revolution both called women to work for wages and created a new bourgeoisie for whom a principal symbol of status was a stay-at-home wife. The dangers of the new cities were legion, from crime and prostitution to alcoholism and many, many threats of nervous disorder. But none was more confounding than the danger of women choosing to leave the dwelling place of men, either to work or in more symbolic ways, by availing themselves of birth control or abortion.134 The willingness of white women to combat established notions of home and domesticity in this way left them open to accusations of weakening the culture or, in the parlance of the time, the white race.
Conceivably, Oakley might have been seen as a revolutionary who challenged and resisted the burdens of her sex, earning a salary by mastering the quintessential male technology of her day while her husband-manager took a subordinate role. But the combination of her targets—the cigarettes, money, and cards in his hands—created a symbolic male profligacy which she restrained with her firearm. Where Oakley’s alchemy of blushing femininity with astonishing marksmanship signified the restraining power of woman over the gun, it also suggested the power of women—especially white, middle-class women—to restrain and direct the gun’s inversion, male desire. Annie Oakley did not subvert middle-class ideals of marriage. She reinforced them. The woman who raised a rifle to her husband paradoxically embodied the perfect wife. Where white marksmen stood for racial strength against the surging, savage hordes of immigrant labor, Annie Oakley holding a gun was the perfect symbol of the racial strength to be had in domestic union of wifely virtue and male passion, which was, after all, the hearth of the race itself.135
Oakley balanced her arena inversion of gender roles with a strong social conservatism in day-to-day life. As a female sharpshooter and a symbol of domesticity, she stood in opposition to Calamity Jane—a genuine cross-dressing frontier woman who was named as a driver of the Deadwood coach in show programs. John Burke and other publicists made a great deal out of the fact that Oakley designed her own costumes and did her own needle-point on her dresses. In her tent at the showgrounds, journalists to whom she served tea praised the “quiet and ladylike manner in which she acts the part of hostess.”136 While she was an avid bicyclist, she had little time for suffragists and other “New Women” who seized on the bicycle as a vehicle of female liberation. To Oakley, cycle sports were properly feminine, but “many women abuse the glorious sport by making such a feature of century runs, riding until worn out, and wearing bloomers.”137
For whatever reason, she never had children of h
er own. Throughout her career with the Wild West show, she remained in the role of virgin and surrogate mother, to Indians, cowboys, or the assortment of schoolchildren and orphans in the crowd.138
Her interior life remains so remote that it is hard to say what private concessions she made to fulfill public demands, but there are hints they were considerable. In Dexter Fellows’s estimation, “she was a consummate actress,” her public gaiety and womanly graciousness a self-conscious projection. Her trademark of shooting holes through playing cards made “Annie Oakley” a synonym for a free ticket, which was identified by a punched hole. “The further connotation of getting something for nothing also applied to Annie’s code of living.” She never hired taxis to the showgrounds, but rode on wagons transporting show equipment instead. The show did not play on Sundays, when most performers took rooms in hotels for their stopovers. Annie and Frank always stayed in their Pullman car. On the showgrounds, she never bought her own soft drinks, but walked next door to Cody’s tent and filled her pitcher from whatever he had bought.
She was the Wild West show’s most powerful symbol of domesticity, her combination of marksmanship, femininity, temperance, and frugality a huge marketing asset for a show of border life. As Fellows recalled, “the sight of this frail girl among the rough plainsmen seldom failed to inspire enthusiastic plaudits.” But in the show community’s everyday life, her fierce attention to some virtues excluded others, such as generosity, or genuine hospitality, once the journalists left her tent. “During the nine years that I was with the Buffalo Bill show,” wrote Fellows, “I never saw her take a drink of anything stronger than beer, which she would imbibe only when someone else paid the bill.”139