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Louis S. Warren

Page 61

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show


  Back in the United States, the constant reference to armed European frontiers assisted Cody’s imposture as world peacemaker, a pose which balanced the show’s increasing militarization. The Congress of Rough Riders of the World offered a synthesis of world history, in which mounted race warriors clashed in grand Darwinian combat from the Old World to the New. Its Cossacks, gauchos, and European military riders appeared alongside its premier attraction, the New World cowboys and Indians, reinforcing the show’s traditional emphasis on the East-to-West course of American history by suggesting a historical movement of an ancient, ongoing race war from Eurasia to North America, echoing the stories of Anglo-Saxonists and Aryanists alike.

  At the most superficial level, the champions of this unending race war were cowboys, the show’s version of distilled whiteness, despite all the nonwhite men who actually road as cowboys in the show.25

  Whatever the racial composition of the participants, the horseback stunts of the new contingents were so striking that the word “centaur” sprang from publicity even more often than before. The galloping gaucho was “a near approach to the mythical centaur,” like “the North American Indian, the Cowboy, the Vaquero, the Cossack, and the Prairie Scout.” Gauchos wrapped their bolas—leather thongs with iron balls at each end— around posts from sixty feet away, and subdued fierce broncos by riding them in pairs. Cossacks stood on their heads in the saddle, hung off the sides of their horses until their heads brushed the ground, and stood on the backs of galloping horses, slicing the air with powerful sweeps of their swords.

  Hailing from the Old World, the show’s new racial segments were practically living ancestors of the American cowboys, but they were degraded by miscegenation that blurred the ancient race frontiers they supposedly guarded. Cossacks were widely known in the United States as semi-civilized (or semisavage) warriors from the Russian Empire. In reality, they were often as racially ambiguous as American range cowhands. But in Cody’s show Cossacks were “of the Caucasian line.” They were “the flower of that vast horde of irregular cavalry” that the czar had “planted along the southern frontier of the Russian Empire” to contain Asiatic enemies. But programs also said they miscegenated with Muslim Circassians, until they were “as much Circassian as Cossack.” Exactly how white they remained was left for the audience to decide. One London writer saw through the Cossack disguise, reporting (truthfully), that they were trick riders from the province of Georgia, and not actually “Cossacks” at all. Another, who had substantial experience with Russian Cossacks, surmised, “Their peculiar accent and unmistakeable gestures, as well as certain movements in their dance, created a strong suspicion in me that they are Caucasian Jews.”26

  Of the frontier originals on display, the only racially “pure” contingents were cowboys and Indians. The racially degenerate Cossacks, gauchos, and Mexicans suggested the constant threat of race decay that awaited racial enemies who forsook combat long enough to embrace.

  The white American cowboy, a master of the frontier whose blood remained unmixed, would conquer the world, ushering in the new millennium of white civilization, itself signified in Buffalo Bill’s “conquest” of Rome and the Old World, now recounted in show brochures and memoirs. Cowboy horses were as racially pristine as the cowboys themselves, and publicists went to great lengths developing a theory of equine evolution that paralleled the show’s history of frontier whiteness. Each year, Cody replenished the show’s stable through off-season purchases of horses that would look right in the ring. But in the Rough Riders’ debut season, their horses were said to be a “race” descended from the horses of Cortés, on the backs of which the first conquistador appeared as a “four-legged warrior.” Dissatisfied even with this pedigree, John Burke reached into dim mists of the primeval, to the ancestor of all horses, an animal that was polydactilic, that is, multitoed. “Some instances have been known in modern times, and ancient records give stories, of horses presenting more than one toe. Julius Caesar’s horse,” he wrote, “is said to have had this peculiarity.” Caesar’s horse inspired ancient Roman soothsayers to predict “that its owner would be lord of the world.” Horses of the Wild West show (newly returned from the conquest of Rome) were mustangs of the Southwest, whose peculiarities similarly portended American power. “Most of the polydactyl horses found in the present day have been raised in the southwest of America, or from that ancestry bred.” 27

  As racially distilled men, hardened in frontier combat, astride animals in whose veins pulsed the blood of ancient, world-conquering horses, cowboys were bulwarks against the modern age and all its miscegenated, manufactured, and artificial blandishments. They and their nation were bound for glory.

  Buffalo Bill’s entertainment was only one of many to valorize frontier race heroes as repositories of national virtue in the age of the mongrel city. Novelist Owen Wister contrasted cowboys, “Saxon boys of picked courage,” with immigrants, those “hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities to Babels and our citizenship to hybrid farce.” 28 The Congress of Rough Riders reinforced white supremacy as the culmination of world history, and thereby affirmed the subordination of immigrant ghettoes, as well as the segregation of races, Jim Crow laws, and the tidal wave of lynchings which swept the nation in the 1890s.

  ALL OF WHICH makes surprising how much the show now appealed to immigrants, too. As immigrants and their American-born children increased in numbers, they confronted Anglo-Saxonism and American racism not by demanding separation or cultural exclusiveness, but through rituals of assimilation. One of the most popular ways of asserting American identity was by going to public amusements, where immigrants were so numerous that they were now an economic force. 29 A glance at Brooklyn makes this point. In 1890, the U.S. census enumerated 806,343 Brooklyn residents. Over 260,000 of these—one-third of the populace—were foreign-born. One-third of these, the largest immigrant group, were Germans, who numbered 94,000. Another 90,000 were Irish. 30 Some saw the show, or heard about it, during its European tours. Even before the show debuted, many were drawn to America partly by fantasies of lawless frontiers (where there were no punitive elites to demand taxes or labor), abundant buffalo (free meat), and easily dispatched Indians (people even lower down the social ladder than European peasants). In the 1880s, the show’s best seats cost fifty cents, too much for most immigrants. But the cheap seats, at twentyfive cents, were within reach, if barely.31

  Ethnic affinity with Rough Rider contingents increased the show’s appeal for Germans, and other immigrants, too. We may speculate that during the show’s six-month stay in Brooklyn, German Rough Riders, the cuirassiers, relaxed in Brooklyn’s many German beer gardens, and found a semblance of the homeland in the “Klein Deutschland” of the Williamsburgh neighborhood. In Milwaukee, home to a large German population, immigrants jammed the stands and cheered the cuirassiers in 1896. Perhaps there were Arabs, such as the Syrians who moved into lower New York in the 1880s, who forged American identities through the debut appearance of Arabs in the show in 1894. At least one of these performers saw his Wild West tenure as a ritual of Americanization. George Hamid was a Lebanese immigrant and acrobat who became owner of the Hamid Morton Circus, as well as of the Steel Pier in New Jersey and the New Jersey State Fair, on his way to becoming “the king of the carnival bookers” by the 1940s. He traced his success to his first job in American entertainment, in 1906, when he began his stint as a “Riffian Arabian Horseman” in the Congress of Rough Riders (he also told a tall tale about learning to read from Annie Oakley—who had left the show in 1901, and probably never had anything to do with George Hamid).32

  The stories of Germans and of Hamid are compelling, but whatever the strength of ethnic bonds between immigrant audiences and their Wild West counterparts, some immigrants—especially the Irish and Germans—were drawn also to American performers as naturalizing symbols. Where Remington and Wister saw cowboys and soldiers as a last bastion of Anglo-America in an immigrant world, the cowboy and army contingen
ts fairly bristled with Irish and German names like McCormack, Gallagher, Ryan, McPhee, Shanton, Schenck, Franz, and Kanstein.33 Irish and non-Irish readers alike could imagine themselves as frontier Indian fighters, when “Trumpeter Connolly, of the Seventh Cavalry,” recounted his sanguine experience at Wounded Knee for a newspaper reporter. These ethnic names reflected the presence of Irish and German immigrants in the actual West, and the maturation of their descendants as Americans.34

  The challenges of becoming native to a new country seem to have been on the minds of Germans in another way. A few surviving reviews from the German American press suggest that the presence of German soldiers, who are barely mentioned, was less important to German immigrants than the show’s tour of Germany, which was recounted in detail. In a sense, the show’s tenure in Germany gave the Wild West a cachet with German immigrants through a naturalizing process that mirrored what German immigrants hoped to experience in the United States. One reviewer explained, with some enthusiasm, that the show had recently wintered over in Bennefeldt, in Alsace Lorraine. The following spring, “when Col. Cody returned to Bennefeldt, his cowboys had almost become German.” At the same time, Cody’s press agents reached out to Germans by speaking of German American cities as worthy counterparts to citadels of German culture in Europe. “Milwaukee is the only city in the United States that can be compared to a German city,” John Burke flattered the reporter from Milwaukee’s Deutsche Eindrucke, “and rightly deserves to be called the Munich of America. In no other city do you find the age old German charm that dominates here.”35

  Indeed, Cody himself might have been as appealing to immigrants as to native-born whites. His ancestors were English and Breton French, but in 1899, his younger sister Helen Cody Wetmore wrote a new biography of him in which she traced the family lineage to ancient Irish kings. How she came upon this story is not clear, and perhaps most immigrants never heard about it.

  But even if they were unaware of Cody’s putative Irish roots, Cody’s white Indian imposture was a powerful symbol among the Irish. London audiences equated Indian and Irish savageries to deride the Irish. But in the United States, the Irish were so thoroughly urbanized that competition with real Indians was not a factor in day-to-day life. Comparisons of Irishmen and Indians were less insulting to immigrants, and even had some romantic potential. Irish ward politicians dominated New York politics for decades after taking over Tammany Hall, the New York gentleman’s society named for a seventeenth-century Delaware chieftain. Through the 1890s, every May 12, or “Tammany Day,” the increasingly Irish membership of Tammany Hall—who called themselves “braves”—paraded the streets with painted faces, carrying bows, arrows, and tomahawks. Newspaper correspondents joked about meetings between Buffalo Bill’s Indians and the “great chief” Dick Croker, the Irish-born boss of New York’s Tammany machine.

  Among Irish Americans, then, symbols of Indianness and white Indianness were easily adopted, and adapted, to signify (in no particular order) political power, American identity, ethnic unity, a “noble” past, and Irish oppression at the hands of British and Americans alike. When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders opened in Brooklyn, notables in the boxes included not only the mayor of the city, but A. W. Peters, “chairman of the General Committee of the Tammany Society, and Patrick O’Donahue, another magnate in the New York Democracy.”36

  In a sense, the potential for inclusiveness in the Rough Riders was greater than in the old Wild West show, as Cody and Salsbury constantly adopted new Rough Rider contingents to resonate with current events, especially wars. Cody recruited Japanese soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and Cuban insurgents and Filipinos as conflicts in their homelands began. But as savvy as the technique was for recharging the show’s authenticity, it paradoxically created frictions and imposed new limits on the show’s appeal for old fans. In 1901, the Congress of Rough Riders incorporated a regiment of Boer veterans from Britain’s ongoing war against the Republic of the Transvaal, in southern Africa. In New York, sympathy with the Boers ran high, especially among Irish ward politicians and city officials. But that same year, Cody also signed a detachment of Canadian Mounties, who were allied to the British in the war against the Boers. Show managers hired these mutual enemies as a means of refreshing Cody’s peacemaker image, extending his old claims to having brought warring tribes into amity in the interests of educating the public.

  But just as hiring real Indians continued to place Cody’s amusement in the midst of political battles between the army and the Indian Service, the practice of hiring imperial troops and colonial rebels entangled the show in bitter politics. In the afternoons before opening in a new town, the show cast often paraded through city streets to drum up public enthusiasm for the show. Irish officials in the police commissioner’s office denied Cody a permit for the cast parade, on the grounds that a “strong sentiment against the presence of British soldiers in the Street[s] of New York” made his Canadian Mounties a threat to public order. Salsbury was livid. He and Cody managed to have the decision overturned, but the incident suggests how tapping into the drama of ongoing wars around the globe both provided a range of identities and attractions for an ethnically diverse audience (Boers as anti-British heroes to the Irish) but also threatened to trap the Wild West show in complex webs of ethnic and imperial contention.37

  Moreover, for all the ways the Rough Rider spectacle spoke to immigrants, it probably appealed even more to the American-born children of immigrants, a new population that was gaining in political and cultural influence. By 1890, there were over 300,000 American-born children of immigrants in Brooklyn. 38 By the time Cody’s show camp pitched its tents in south Brooklyn, they were asserting themselves in the workplace and in urban neighborhoods. As citizens and speakers of English with as much education as most native-born whites, many of them took up clerical positions in factories and warehouses or sales positions in stores. These were white-collar workers, increasingly anxious to separate themselves from common laborers (among whom numbered many of their parents). But exactly where these new Americans stood in the class hierarchy was not clear. The office work they performed had been extremely limited or even nonexistent prior to the massive explosion in industry and the wave of corporate consolidation that swept the country in the last decades of the century. According to Eric Hobsbawm, in the United States this new “petty bourgeoisie of office, shop and subaltern administration” actually outnumbered the working class by 1900.39

  Whether they were middle class or working class, white collar or blue collar, the rising prominence and disposable income of the new Americans ensured that by the 1890s, they were taking an ever larger role in Brooklyn elections through the influence of the German-American Association, the German Democratic Union, the Swedish Association, and other civic groups. 40

  To this point, few of these people could feel they were part of American history. Native-born Brooklyn elites construed American history, and the history of their city, as a story of New England settlers and their descendants. In 1880, some of Brooklyn’s self-identified New Englander upper crust founded the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn. Taking Plymouth Rock as their symbol, this frankly nativist organization vowed to “commemorate the landing of the pilgrims” and “encourage the study of New England history.” Rather than public-spirited festivals which invited mass participation, they celebrated “Forefather’s Day,” which defined historical connection as family descent.41

  The New England Society’s story of America was narrow and exclusive, but it was merely an expression of the dominant narrative of American history in 1894. Anglo-Saxonism reigned, and American history remained mostly a tale of Britons moving west. Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, Slavs, and others found virtually nothing in this narrative to confirm their sense of national identity in either the Old World or the New.

  In contrast, the Congress of Rough Riders appealed to the burgeoning ranks of adult children of immigrants by gathering symbo
ls of Old World nations into its New World frontier spectacle. Caught between classes and between nationalities, these spectators sought escape from ethnic labels and confusing class hierarchies by immersing themselves in a broad “American” public, especially in crowds at the era’s popular amusements, from baseball to vaudeville.42 Ethnic types, or stereotypes, paraded on the vaudeville stage. The clueless German in peaked cap and wooden shoes, the belligerent Irishman, and the carefree Italian were all standards of variety performance by the 1890s. But, as David Nasaw points out, the potential ire of the multi-ethnic audience prohibited the grossest ethnic slurs, and many ethnic German, Irish, and Italian spectators enjoyed these performances because in lampooning the rustics just off the boat, the comedy honored immigrants and firstgeneration Americans as seasoned residents. The ethnic parody was ultimately unifying, with the diverse ethnics united in bonhomie and camaraderie by the end of the sketch, so that divided urban immigrants could imagine themselves to be part not merely of an ethnic group, but also of a city, or a public.43

 

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