American Fun (24 page)

In the 1860s and 1870s, manufacturers doubled down on the sporting crazes that many Americans, as
Stephen Hardy has shown, still shunned as “
exotic and frivolous indulgences”: croquet, football, tennis, bicycling, as well as baseball itself. Against lingering middle-class disapproval, however, sports bred new commercial opportunities. Americans swarmed new public courts and playing fields, and entrepreneurs were there to greet them, inventing new equipment, packaging uniforms, branding semiprofessional clubs and leagues, and selling tickets to athletic spectacles that hitherto had been limited to the horse track. Organized sports and softening attitudes toward games and sports made enduring changes to the postbellum republic. They improved citizens’ spirits and physical health while making them behave in predictable patterns. They also served as ideological bait. Writing in 1869, upon the opening of New York’s elaborate new Young Men’s Christian Association, fund-raiser William E. Dodge Jr. justified the games typically found in barrooms (including “
chess, draughts, billiards, and bowling”) by saying “the devil should not have all the amusements” and by citing the growing Christian
opinion “that every legitimate attraction should be utilized to gain the end desired.” The “end,” in this case, was winning young men’s souls.

Sports had the potential for raw, pure fun.
Football,
baseball, track and field, and all of the exhilarating new athletic games demanded full-body engagement; they thrilled participants with heated contest; they hurled them into risk-filled arenas where natural talents were tested and sharpened. But two sweeping trends in the industrialized North, administration and commercialism, intervened to regulate and exploit these pleasures in the service of order, discipline, and profit. In contrast to spontaneous antebellum sports—played in open fields and on street corners and sandlots—postbellum sports, slotted by officials into newly founded ziggurats of clubs and leagues and organizations, helped to control the intimidating sprawl of an increasingly diverse and urban citizenry. Sports staged rivalries between schools and cities, turned youthful aggression into sanctioned competition, and channeled the American love of risk into games with ever more intricate rules. Organized sports revved up the citizens’ activity, but they also corralled their spontaneity and rebellion into highly regulated channels. And they reinforced popular taboos that separated Americans by race, class, and gender: blacks and other minorities were excluded outright; whites were separated by privilege and ability and divided, more specifically, into the increasingly fine categories of “amateurs” and “professionals.” For some, this latter division signaled the death of fun—by turning sports into work and
spectacle. In 1884,
Dudley Sargent, who would become the director of
Harvard’s Hemenway
Gymnasium, decried “
the growth of the professional spirit in our college sports” as “a most serious evil”: in making his case, he cited the loss of “courtesy and generous competition” to “exhibitions of brutal violence” and excoriated the “demoralizing work” of professional training that turned athletes into de facto racehorses.
E. L. Godkin, writing for
The Nation
in 1893, declared “
the thing which produces most of the evils of football and other games”—among which he included humiliation and physical injury—“is the effort to improve them as a spectacle for the multitude.”

Spectacle, naturally, was the whirring propeller of typical Gilded Age fun. And unlike rowdy Jackson-era audiences, whose obstreperous
behavior was finally clamped down following the Astor Place riot, postbellum crowds had to behave themselves. Indeed, the white-glove Astor Place Theatre itself—against which the
b’hoys had violently rebelled—set the new high standard. In 1858, when
Frederick Law Olmsted helped to design New York’s
Central Park, he wanted it “
to embody his conception of democratic recreation,” in John F. Kasson’s terms, which meant he wanted it to be a scenic strolling ground for quality folk and “made little provision for the desire of working-class males to have ‘manly and blood-tingling recreations,’ ‘boisterous fun and rough sports.’ ” From the 1870s to the 1890s, museums, opera houses,
theaters, concert halls, even public parks, laid down the social law, enforcing dress codes, lowering noise levels, and imposing stringent rules of conduct. As
Lawrence W. Levine and other historians have shown, well-heeled citizens “
transform[ed] public spaces by rules, systems of taste, and canons of behavior of their own choosing” in an effort “to convert the strangers [read ‘immigrants’] so that their modes of behavior and cultural predilections emulated those of the elite.” But it was generally enough just to
emulate
the elite, for the audience promoters hoped to reach was the vast and aspiring middle class. The
spectator’s fun could be lively and flashy, but it took pains not to shock or offend, as it had to appeal to the nicer sensibilities of a widely imitated
leisure class. If Barnum could meet such standards with the
circus, which hitherto had suffered the lowest reputation, any entertainment was up to the challenge.

In 1885, when Benjamin Franklin Keith opened Boston’s Bijou Theatre, he stepped into a well-worn variety-show tradition. He populated his stage with the same minstrels, jugglers, scientists, actors, gymnasts, preachers, and oddities he had been hawking for years as a barker for Barnum. What made him the founder of the new American
vaudeville was an innovation he called “
continuous performance”—the rotation of crowds through a twelve-hour cycle of repeating, “respectable” stage shows. He described the setup as a kind of banal paradise where “the show is [always] in full swing, everything is bright, cheerful and inviting.”

The “fixed policy” for his “new scheme” was that “cleanliness and order should be continued” and that “the stage show must be free from vulgarisms and coarseness of any kind.” He intended the theater to be
“as ‘homelike’ an amusement resort as it was possible to make it,” and in doing so he bundled low culture with high and stripped vulgar fun and the fine arts alike of their respective difficulties. By the turn of the century, the more homogenized his “homelike” industry grew, the more he came to value, in his own words, “light, frothy acts, with no particular plot, but abounding in songs, dances, bright dialogue and clean repartee.” Such melodramatic pap, he discovered, was “the sort of entertainment which seems to please most.”

Not everyone was pleased, of course. “
The most dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn,”
William Dean Howells, nineteenth-century America’s great tastemaker, moaned in 1903, citing the loss of high-risk spectacle as a harbinger that “vaudeville is dying.” But in fact it kept growing into the early 1920s, around the time of Hollywood’s rise, when
the “Keith Circuit” commanded an annual audience of four million customers. And in the 1920s and 1940s, with the advents of
radio and
television, respectively, Keith’s continuous performance was perfected. If Hollywood retrofitted vaudeville theaters for a new generation of movie palaces, these household devices, transmitting endless sanitary entertainment, perfected Keith’s mission: “home” entertainment. Television’s direct access to vaudeville-trained celebrities came to define the middle-class household.

THE GILDED AGE POPULATION
was slow to get educated—from 1870 to 1890, the national percentage of high school graduates hardly budged from 2 to 3.5 percent—but its interest in
newspapers,
dime novels, and other print media fairly exploded. Indeed, during this same twenty-year period, daily news circulation increased by 222 percent, a growth that was boosted by new printing and transportation technologies, funded by flourishing
advertisement opportunities, goaded by big-city newspaper wars, and—perhaps most forcefully—disseminated by the ingenuity of cooperative publishers like
A. N. Kellogg and
A. J. Aikens. These two Chicago moguls retrenched their businesses after the Great Fire of 1871 and syndicated hundreds of the nation’s “
country” newspapers. Otherwise unscrupulous about their papers’ content, Kellogg and Aikens only
required that the stories be tasteful, which mostly meant that crimes and scandals could not be reported in detail, but only summarized.

Mainstream journalism became less sentimental—and less blatantly sensationalized—than it had been at the birth of the penny papers. In this proud new era of straight-shooting realism, respectable papers didn’t resort to antebellum-era
hoaxes or to rollicking
Wild West facetiousness. In the spirit of
postbellum
Barnumism, rather,
the dramatic “facts” of modern life became popular entertainment.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
offered “pictorial reporting” of Ku Klux Klan killings, rough prison life, and the
mob violence of the “Great Uprising” of railroad workers in the early 1880s. Also, the style of their lavish images, as the historian
Joshua Brown has shown, became decreasingly stereotyped and more observant to meet public demands for authenticity. The news was also tempered with local-color sketches and comical human-interest pieces by the popular new regionalist writers—from northeasterners like
Sarah Orne Jewett and
Mary Wilkins Freeman to “southwesterners” like
Mark Twain and southerners like
Charles W. Chesnutt and
George Washington Cable. Among this latter set, cutting his teeth as a self-proclaimed “cornfield journalist” for the
Atlanta Constitution,
was the amateur folklorist
Joel Chandler Harris, a beat reporter whose renditions of African-American dialects and folk tales became widely touted for their apparent realism. In 1884,
The Nation
praised him for getting “
very close to the untutored spirit of humanity.” What sold newspapers, however—what helped the
Constitution
rebound from the financial panic of 1873—was his stories’ delicious fun.

In the words of his daughter-in-law Julia, Harris was himself, as a boy, “
like
Brer Rabbit,” the African-American trickster figure he would single-handedly transform into a mainstream national hero. Young Harris was small, quick-witted, and mean. Indeed, many of his biographers note how this poor, illegitimate, and physically slight child pulled vicious pranks on his peers and bullies—how he coaxed one into hogslop that was infested with fleas; how he shoved another into an active wasps’ nest, causing him to be seriously stung; how he burned yet another about the neck with a spatula, much to his indulgent mother’s delight. As a boy he aspired to be a professional clown, acting for a spell in a local troupe that
called itself the
Gully Minstrels, but later in life he would dismiss blackface as “
represent[ing] nothing on earth, except the abnormal development of the most extraordinary burlesque.”

It wasn’t until 1862, however, when he was sixteen and working as a printer’s devil on the Turnwold plantation in central Georgia, that Harris befriended
Harbert and “Uncle” George Terrell, two older black slaves who would help to define his illustrious career. During this period he immersed himself in the slaves’ daily lives, hunting rabbits with them, recording their language in dialect poetry, and slipping off at night with the master’s children to visit the interiors of their cabins. His daughter-in-law steeps the tale in plantation nostalgia: “
From a nook in their chimney corners he listened to the legends handed down from the African ancestors,—the lore of animals and birds so dear to every plantation negro.… The boy unconsciously absorbed their fables and their ballads, and the soft elisions of their dialect and the picturesque images of their speech left an indelible imprint upon the plastic tablets of his memory.” Yet there is poignant realism in the shadows of this cabin. As a white boy who had grown up at the bottom of Southern society, Harris may have been, as
Wayne Mixon suggests, more nostalgic “
for a black world than a white one”—and more for a black
paternalism
than a white one.

For the Terrells were Harris’s first father figures, and their nightly lessons in wily animals who capsized upright Southern mores shaped the way Harris would think. Brother Rabbit must have been a revelation for the boy, a sympathetic hero and a sort of family secret. He took the rabbit’s lessons to heart. In the 1870s and 1880s, as he was tracking its stories, Harris employed his own trickster techniques to collect these tales from the source. When he was in the presence of blacks, and only blacks, as he once was in a rail yard waiting for a train, he would set out to gain “
their confidence and esteem” by “listening and laughing awhile.” Then he would tell a tale or two of his own. In the rail yard it was the “Tar Baby” story that threw the gathering crowd into “unrestrained laughter.” Then it was “Brother Rabbit and the Mosquito” that “had the effect of convulsing them.”

Harris feared these sources were fading fast. As he explained in 1881, most contemporary blacks were “
unfamiliar with the great body of their own folk-lore,” and even older ones who were “as fond of the legends as ever” lacked “the occasion, or the excuse, for telling them.” So he caught them and stuck them like butterflies on poster board. When he began publishing in the
Constitution
in the mid-1870s, he put his hard-won tales in the mouth of Uncle Remus, the jolly but devilish former slave who animates “Brer Rabbit” (as Harris called him) for the ears of a white Southern boy, identified simply as “the little boy.” Uncle Remus was, for Harris, the natural voice to tell these tales. “
Only in this shape,” he wrote, “and with all the local allusions, would it be possible to adequately represent the shrewd observations, the curious retorts, the homely thrusts, the quaint comments, and the humorous philosophy of the race of which Uncle Remus is the type.” Only in this “shape,” through this “type,” could Harris convey his own experience, that of a dazzled and honored white boy glorying in stories of outrageous rebellion.