With Amusement for All

A History of American Popular Culture since 1830

LeRoy Ashby

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780813141329
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Popular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, dance, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, technology, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture, revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience. Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies, appetites, and values in American society. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Americans embraced "self-made men" such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie: the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey, Wild West star "Buffalo Bill" Cody, professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time, however, several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak, frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback, and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance. Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans, blacks, and other non-whites appeared in the nineteenth-century circuses and Wild West shows, it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypes—crowds jeered Sitting Bull at Cody's shows. By the early twentieth century, however, black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions, reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later, Red Foxx and Richard Pryor's profane comedy routines changed American entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryor's short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common American experiences—from family life to college life—with black casts. Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold, erotic, sensational, and surprising, as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market, control shifting public appetites, and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock 'n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s, Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene, and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLean's 1971 anthem "American Pie" served as an epitaph for rock's political core, which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock 'n Roll did not lose its ability to shock, in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge. With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected, refracted, or reinforced the values those forces represent in America.

1

BLACKFACE, BARNUM, AND NEWSPAPER BALLYHOO

In 1832, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a young former carpenter’s apprentice wearing blackface, electrified his boisterous working-class audience by spinning around on a Bowery stage with a curious, jerky motion and singing: “Weel about and turn about, / And do jis so; / Eb’ry time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” A year later, the newspaper publisher Benjamin Day, age twenty-three, launched a newspaper that was about one-third the size of other papers, sold at the incredibly cheap price of one cent, and highlighted sensational murders, tragedies, and gossip. And, in mid-1835, Phineas Taylor Barnum, a twenty-five-year-old refugee from the dry goods business, exhibited a decrepit, partially paralyzed, blind slave woman who supposedly was 161 years old and had nursed and cared for “dear little George” Washington, the nation’s first president.¹

Here, in the early 1830s, within a few brief years and within a few blocks in New York City, the scaffolding for modern popular culture in the United States took shape. The pillars of this rapidly emerging world of cheap, accessible, and rambunctious entertainments included blackface minstrelsy, which “Daddy” Rice’s “Jim Crow” performance elevated to new levels of popularity; the penny press, which heralded a revolution in America’s print industry; and “the show business,” as Barnum dubbed it and which he, as much as anyone, helped define and fit with the era’s democratic sensibilities. Each benefited from ongoing changes in Communications and transportation. Each initially catered to enthusiastic working-class audiences, much to the chagrin of nervous social elites and an upstart middle class whose members worried that raucous amusements threatened civility and good character. Each in one way or another ultimately helped blur boundaries separating races, genders, and classes. Each attested to the force of the rising democratic politics that Andrew Jackson symbolized as well as the upheaval of the emerging market economy. And each helped put in motion trends and patterns that continued to play out generations later.²

In the late 1820s, even before T. D. Rice took his little song and dance to what he described as “unsophisticated” Bowery audiences, a friend of the fledgling songwriter Stephen Foster observed that “Jim Crow was on everybody’s tongue.” Its popularity had spread after Rice first introduced his Jim Crow steps and little tune in Louisville, when he was acting in a play, The Rifle, He reportedly did so after observing a slave, who was cleaning a stable, do the odd, jerky movements, hunching his shoulders, shuffling, spinning around on his heel, and singing. In fact, however, according to one minstrel scholar: “No single stable hand made up or taught the song. Instead there was a widespread African-American folk dance impersonating—delineating—crows, based in agricultural ritual and, some say, ‘magical in character.’” Whether or not Rice realized that he was adapting a regional folklore character, he soon added, between acts of The Rifle, other “Negro” performances. Singing “Me and My Shadow,” for example, he danced while a child actor in blackface mimicked his steps. By the time Rice took his talents to New York City, he enjoyed a popular stage reputation as “the negro, par excellence.”³

Although “jumping Jim Crow” elevated Rice from obscurity and made him one of the best-known actors of his era, blackface performances were far from new. Indeed, they were deeply rooted in the carnivals and festivals of early modern Europe. A carnival served as “an anti-holiday (literally an unholy feast),” and the line between celebration and criminality or violence was thin. Rowdy celebrants, often hiding their identities behind costumes and masks, defied propriety and traditional roles and assumed the identities of other people. Centuries later, during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, participants continued to carry that tradition into the streets, momentarily celebrating disorder and reversing roles. Similarly, in Finland, citizens staged an annual revelry—Vappu—by donning masks, parading through the streets with drinks in their hands, ringing doorbells, and urinating in public. During these “inversion rituals,” as scholars would later describe them, boisterous, sometimes riotous participants momentarily turned the existing social order upside down, switching roles, repudiating decorum, and threatening traditional authority figures.⁴

Sometimes during such carnivals, a commoner would become “King for a Day,” or a “Lord of Misrule,” briefly playing out a charade in which the subjects took charge while the obliging ruling classes allowed their “inferiors” to unleash grievances and blow off steam. One such European ritual was mumming, when costumed young men, singing, drinking, and making all kinds of noise, demanded food and beverages from owners of wealthy homes and businesses. During some of these inversion rituals, white workers blackened their faces with chimney soot, changing their identities and, for the moment, becoming someone they were not: the Other. By the 1820s and 1830s, young workers in American cities such as Philadelphia and New York celebrated the new year by dressing outlandishly, making “night hideous” with street bands that created noise with anything from horns to pots and pans, and disguising their faces with grease and soot. When T. D. Rice jumped Jim Crow in New York City’s Bowery, he thus drew on complex but familiar social rituals that were loaded with cultural meaning.⁵

The rise in the 1830s of blackface minstrel acts as mass entertainment in the United States very much reflected the influence of economic change, social class, and the growth of mixed-race amusements on the margins of the burgeoning commercial society. The dockside area where minstrelsy first thrived in New York City was heavily working class and included a considerable mixing of blacks and whites. Similarly, in Western frontier river towns such as Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, black and white laborers mingled and observed each other on and off the job.

When “Daddy” Rice brought to New York City’s Bowery area the little dance that he had watched the black stable hand performing in Louisville, he provided an “instance in American commercial culture of an outland form exported to the northeastern city,” as the historian Eric Lott has written.⁶ Generations later, minstrel critics would attack the racist caricatures and messages of minstrelsy, but blackface performances initially contained more complex and ambiguous meanings as well. As racial hybrids, the spreading minstrel acts attested, however unconsciously, to black influences on whites and, at the same time, provided a way for lower-class groups to mock social elites.

Such was certainly the case in the rough-and-tumble, impoverished southeastern section of lower Manhattan, which fronted New York City’s East River. Around areas such as the Catherine Street Market—where T. D. Rice was born and raised—laborers battled economic hardship, harsh working conditions, and disease. By the early nineteenth century, a large proportion of New York City’s nine thousand blacks (constituting around 8 percent of the city’s population) lived and worked there, mixing with poor whites, and forming what a historian has described as an “urban shadowland” or “subversive landscape” where prostitution, drinking, and gambling flourished. Here, quite literally, was a marginal world, occupying the edges of the nation’s fastest-growing commercial city.⁷

While some of the racial intermingling was intimate, much of it was informal, casual, part of a daily give-and-take that accompanied residing, working, and playing in close proximity. An 1840 raid on a New York City gambling house found some twenty people “of all sizes and colors”; the apparent “master of ceremonies” was “an out-and-out darkey,” while off to one side “a little black rascal of twelve years, assisted by two little white ones of eleven or under were roaring a love song.” Elsewhere in the room, whites and blacks applauded a black man “who was jumping Jim Crow.”⁸

Black dancers, whether jumping Jim Crow or dancing for eels in street competition, constituted a common sight in and around the Catherine Street Market. A number of them came from Long Island (where slavery continued to exist until 1827) “to engage in a jig or breakdown,” recalled a white butcher, Thomas De Voe. According to De Voe: “Each had his particular ‘shingle’ brought with him as part of his stock in trade.” While a companion beat time with a heel or by striking a hand against a leg, the dancer performed on the board for monetary or other rewards, such as fish and eels. Another observer could well have been Micah Hawkins, a white man who owned a grocery store nearby and, in 1815, wrote an early blackface song. Sometimes, black fiddle players provided the backdrop for electrifying breakdown contests featuring the popular Bobolink Bob or the legendary “Juba”—William Henry Lane, who reportedly had no equal. Lane, from lower Manhattan, dazzled Charles Dickens when the famed English novelist watched him perform in a seedy underground dance hall.⁹

For African Americans, the dancing, the music, and the laughter not only elicited small rewards from white spectators but also provided momentary release from hard times. Whether dancing for eels in the streets or entering the noisy, multiracial world of taverns, oyster houses, and gambling dens, they found brief alternatives to the rigors of work and hardscrabble existence.

Not all blacks approved of such frivolity, of course. Some African Americans objected on religious grounds. Some warned that poor individuals were wasting their meager resources on liquor and vices. Others were concerned that such loose living only confirmed white perceptions of blacks as shiftless, immoral, and lewd. But, to many African Americans, the urban shadowland of streets and taverns was a welcome place where, in the words of one historian, they “shucked off the problems of a workaday existence, reclaimed their bodies as instruments of pleasure not toil, and showed that the night time was the right time.” Some, such as William Johnson, a free black resident of Natchez, Mississippi, even enjoyed the sight of whites in blackface doing their own versions of jigs and jumping Jim Crow. In the mid-1830s, Johnson watched “Daddy” Rice perform.¹⁰

In turn, as Rice and other white minstrel performers looked for material to use onstage, they observed and studied black workers, dancers, and singers.¹¹ One white minstrel, Ben Cotton, recalled spending time with blacks along the Mississippi, “twanging” the banjo with them: “They did not quite understand me. I was the first white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectly happy.” Such “crossing over” into the black world could also be a source of escape and satisfaction. In that regard, performers such as Cotton and Rice made career choices that took them, not into the emerging environment of middle-class respectability, but into the suspect arena of the theater and entertainment. “Marginalized by temperament, by habit (often alcoholism), by ethnicity, even by sexual orientation,” as Lott has written, “these artists immersed themselves in ‘blackness’ to indulge their felt sense of difference.” Thus, the New York Tribune reported that “a white negro” sang a minstrel song. If blackface minstrels quallfied as “white Negroes,” whites in the audience could also sense the thrill of crossing over. In the 1830s, the young Lew Wallace (who later wrote the best-selling novel Ben Hur [1880]) excitedly watched an actor who was passing through a small Indiana town perform “plantation songs and jigs, executed in costume—burned cork, shovel shoes, and all.” Among the songs was “Jump, Jim Crow.” “As I walked home through the night,” Wallace remembered, “I felt that the world was full of fun and life worth living, if only for fun.”¹²

While blackface minstrels drew heavily on their impressions of African Americans, they tapped other cultural veins that social elites also typically judged as disreputable—circus clowning and the “ring-tale roaring” of Southwestern humorists. Clowns, like blackface minstrels, engaged in the “doubleness” of masking and disguise, and a goodly number of minstrel men started out in the circus.¹³

The celebrated clown Daniel McClaren III, who sometimes engaged in “nigero singing and dancing,” as he put it, changed his last name to Rice to capitalize on the popularity of T. D. “Daddy” Rice, whom young Dan may have seen in New York City. George Washington Dixon, the son of a barber and a washerwoman, also started out in the circus before turning, in 1829, a minstrel song, “Coal Black Rose,” into what may have been the first blackface farce. Traveling circuses incorporated horseback riding, menageries, and various acts such as ropewalkers, but blackface was so common that owners usually indicated if they did not include “negro pantomime.” Performers moved back and forth from theaters to minstrel shows and circuses. White and blackface clowns competed for laughs in adult-oriented programs that were racy and raucous. Sometimes local rowdies got downright threatening, and performers had to protect themselves with their fists. “Respectable” people stayed away from this tawdry and even dangerous setting of animal smells, loud noises, rowdy spectators, and acts that sometimes included partial nudity. But the circuses were extremely popular among working-class audiences, who joined in the performances by shouting back at the clowns.¹⁴

The “roaring” or “whooping” exploits of Southwestern humorists such as Davy Crockett and Mike Fink provided blackface performers with another useful source on which to pattern their acts. According to Lott: “The most common characters of antebellum minstrelsy … were often little more than blackfaced versions of heroes from southwestern humor.” Crockett, the famed Tennessee frontiersman, trumpeted his own exploits in the immensely successful Crockett Almanacs. He touted his ability to outdrink and outfight anyone. As a child, he supposedly consumed a pint of whiskey with his breakfast and a quart with his lunch. In one fight, he reportedly bit his opponents’s big toe off. After another, he “picked up three heads and half a dozen legs an [sic] arms, and carried ’em home to Mrs. Crockett to kindle fire with.” Once, just as he prepared to pop an adversary’s eye out (“like taking up a gooseberry in a spoon”), the fight ended. Similarly, river boatmen such as Mike Fink boasted reputations as “half horse, half alligator.”¹⁵

Like Crockett and Fink, who humbled and thumbed their noses at snobbish aristocrats, the Jim Crow stage character quickly evolved into a brawling, boisterous tough guy, proclaiming, as Rice did: “When I got out I hit a man, / His name I now forget, / But dere was nothing left / ’Sept a little grease spot.” Rice could supposedly “wip my weight in wildcats” or “eat an Alligator.” He was part “snapping turtle, / Nine-tenths of a bull dog. I’ve turned the Mississippy, / All for a pint of grog.”¹⁶

The blackface acts of the 1830s helped express a developing working-class consciousness and often contained messages of contempt for privileged groups. It was not by accident that minstrel shows found exuberant audiences in places such as the Bowery section of lower Manhattan. Nor was it coincidental that minstrelsy became a popular rage among laborers when it did. By the 1830s, the U.S. economy was clearly in the throes of a dramatic transformation. The opening in 1825 of the Erie Canal, an engineering triumph, provided a powerful symbolic marker of the changes under way. The 364-mile channel connected Lake Erie with the Hudson River, allowing goods and people to move, as never before, to and from the northern frontier areas and New York City. Virtually overnight, the small upstate town of Rochester became a bustling commercial city and a microcosm of the economic adjustments that marked an emerging industrial system in the Northeast. In cities such as Rochester, a social wall increasingly separated laborers and their employers, who had once worked in small shops alongside each other, talking and drinking together, and sometimes even sharing living quarters. As businesses became more lucrative, the owners tended to relocate to residential sites outside the industrial districts, leaving behind a kind of working-class ghetto, a low-rent area with a floating population and a reputation for vice and crime—and a target for a growing body of moral reformers from the swelling ranks of an identifiable bourgeoisi...