American Fun (27 page)

Tilyou knew fun’s power to fling people together, and like an electrician he harnessed that power. Turning people loose on his maniacal machines, he zapped their restless American spirits in harmless, painless, ninety-watt jolts. And he probably provided some of the vigor he advertised: he pumped his patrons with perpetual shots of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine. By many accounts, Tilyou was a man who wanted to do some social good. He stood down scoundrels like
John Y. McKane. He believed in his inventions and the virtue of commerce. He wanted to bring joy to modern society. At the same time, he followed all the Gilded Age guidelines: Barnum’s self-promotion and “politeness,” B. F. Keith’s “
continuous performance,” the jostle and pitch of Cody’s stagecoach, and the celestial scale of the
Ferris wheel. And he upheld his era’s standards of decency. He believed in his outfit, and it made him a mint. “
Laughter,” he said, “made me a million dollars.”

But P. T. Barnum would have caught the
humbug. Tilyou was such a subtle trickster that apparently he had tricked himself. The “fun” he hawked in his Pavilion of Fun wasn’t the real American deal—hardly the antics,
pranks, and parties he witnessed as a boy growing up on the beach. Maybe he didn’t want it to be. Tilyou was selling a modern experience: cleaner, easier, with a quicker payoff. But unlike the old-style pranks and parties, this new stuff lacked fun’s social function—or, worse, it
warped
it. Tilyou may not have seen it that way. He saw his park as unadulterated fun. So would his son Edward, who would call it a “
gigantic laboratory of human nature” that allowed customers to “cut loose from repressions and restrictions, and act pretty much as they feel like acting—since everyone else is doing the same.” A
feeling
of liberty may have prevailed at Coney Island, but the fun in this laboratory was
a whole new species. Unlike the free-lance human pyramids that feature in countless Coney Island photographs, in which men and women in striped bathing costumes laugh and struggle to keep their balance, Tilyou’s machines got in between the people and forced them to take passive, defensive roles: trapped them in the Soup Bowl, whisked them along cables and groaning tracks, rolled them up high on the
Ferris wheel.

With fewer chances in the vertical city for wild, expansive, liberating fun, crowds flocked to the beach to frolic in the waves, as they had done in decades past. But now they were halted several meters short by Tilyou’s acres of indoor distractions. (He was still selling sand by the seashore.) Tilyou’s machines looked friendly and familiar—they were cousins to appliances, elevators, and subways. But their threat was insidious. They hit the citizens at the level of their pleasures and created new tastes, desires,
needs
. It was that old West Brighton trick of picking men’s pockets while they gaped at “panel girls.”

FUN WAS INSTRUMENTAL
in forming the best of the early American character. Playful risk and playful rebellion helped to loosen Puritanical authority. They motivated peaceful crowd action in the revolutionary era. They liberated African Americans in the face of tyranny. They helped to civilize the violent frontier. Fun, in these cases, lubricated the conflicts natural to a budding democracy. It rewarded citizens for acting boldly, for breaking barriers and speaking out. It brought them into amicable collisions with people they may have considered enemies.

But the “fun” engineered during the Gilded Age rewarded distinctly different behavior. It rewarded waiting, watching, and buying. Early photographs of the Pavilion of Fun show neck-craning crowds standing placidly by while the daring few are jerked in circles. Tilyou’s pleasures demanded submission, a submission even more extreme than at Barnum’s circuses or in Keith’s muffled theaters. His patrons were fixed, immobilized, trapped. But the mass of Americans were used to submission: no longer rebels, they were the stage rebel’s cheerleaders; they weren’t the cowboy, but his screaming fans; they weren’t the prankster, but the prankster’s dupes. As Americans became customers, consumers,
and fans, the citizenry became ever more susceptible to the ingenious humbugs of bigger and bigger business. Not that many cared, however, not while they were having such fun.

Visiting Europeans sensed something was amiss.
Maxim Gorky, having seen Coney Island in 1906, allegedly exclaimed, “
What a sad people you must be!” Freud went there in 1909, the same year he concluded that America was “
a gigantic mistake.”

Whether mechanical amusements were healthy, as Tilyou contended, or insidiously damaging, their legacy was mighty in the century to come. Progressives pushed back in the name of hands-on playtime: starting in 1906, the newly founded
National Recreation Association oversaw the widespread construction of free urban
playgrounds—promoting kid-powered fun on swings, seesaws, and merry-go-rounds and, by their mission, “
encourag[ing] positive citizenship through supervised playground and leisure time activities.”

But the mechanical amusement industry, now a
multibillion-dollar international juggernaut of interactive museums and
theme parks, was only in its infancy, and already it was a formidable opponent.

There was more to turn-of-the-century fun, however, than what was found on Coney Island, and the best of it
wasn’t
supervised. During these same decades, in Missouri and Louisiana, a volcanic new variety of fun was erupting. Pulling “walk-arounds” down from the minstrel stage, freeing tricksters from the storybooks, early
jazz was black folk fun destined to shatter America’s barriers—and to set people twirling all on their own.

7

A
CCORDING
TO LEGEND
, jazz was born in the brothels of Storyville. There’s some truth to this. The early practitioners of rhythmic, brass-based, syncopated music tended to frequent the twenty-five barbershops—and countless bars, dance halls, and parks—in and around the twenty-block New Orleans neighborhood winkingly named after
Sidney Story, the alderman who made prostitution legal there in 1897. And jazz has traditionally been connected with sex—and vice, disruption, dissolution, and crime. The word “jazz,” which gained currency during
World War I, may possibly derive from the cant word “jasm”—a mid-nineteenth-century version of “jism,” which meant “pep” and “vigor” in addition to semen. So Storyville’s brothels make for an attractive birthplace. But few musicians ever played the red-light district proper, where live music was shunned as a costly distraction from the brothels’ more lucrative services. They were just as likely to play in churches.

The music is actually of uncertain parentage. Most likely, in the words of
James Weldon Johnson, jazz—“like Topsy,” the ragamuffin slave girl from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—“
jes’ grew”: just grew from early black spirituals, field hollers, work songs; grew from the bamboulas on
Congo Square; grew (ironically) from
blackface minstrelsy; grew from the herky-jerky
ragtime piano playing that had traveled from the gut-bucket bars of Missouri to the
World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; grew from the street-corner spasm bands that bashed out songs on washtubs, lead pipes, cigar boxes, and hair combs; grew from the bighearted call-and-responses in black Baptist churches throughout the South; and grew, most directly, from hip-swaying marching bands that drove miles-long
parades throughout the Crescent City—wedding parades, holiday parades, funeral parades to raise the dead.

It also grew from turn-of-the-century black theater. Black-owned, -directed, and -performed minstrelsy had risen to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s, and even when it upheld the blackface cartoon of heedless
African-American life, it slipped in innovative new dances and humor and served as a training ground for serious black performers. While some African-American productions of the 1890s shed the minstrel tradition altogether (1898’s
A Trip to Coontown
and
Clorindy—the Origin of the Cake-Walk,
for example), others, like the comedy act of Williams and Walker, turned it inside out.

Looking back on this duo in 1925, the author Jessie Fauset contrasted
Bert Williams’s “
kindly, rather simple, hard-luck personage” with
George Walker’s “dishonest, overbearing, flashily dressed character” and concluded: “The interest of the piece hinged on the juxtaposition of these two men.” They hammed up this juxtaposition in a dance. In 1896, during their record-breaking forty-week run at Koster and Bial’s Hall in New York, Williams and Walker ignited the
cakewalk into the first international dance craze. The dance was a play on the
Virginia Minstrels’
walk-around, which was a play on the
slaves’
play on Southern white marches—as well as
eel dances at New York’s Catharine Slip. The way Williams and Walker did it, the dance split ragtime music down the middle: flashy Walker pranced out its marchlike rhythm, and shy Williams improvised the syncopated accompaniment. Something about the way they rounded the stage, leading their lively female partners; something about the mix of Walker’s tidy strut (a variation on the stately, original cakewalk) with Williams’s slinky, sliding “smooch” (a less polite move, with ring shout origins) made audiences scramble to try it themselves.

Suddenly walk-arounds stepped off the stage and reclaimed their place down in the crowd. That year the nation was overtaken by cakewalk sheet music, cakewalk piano rolls, cakewalk contests. Williams and Walker appeared in cigarette ads, and when they learned that their chief competitor, the performer
Tom Fletcher, was giving dance lessons to the Vanderbilts, they delivered a challenge to the Fifth Avenue mansion: $50 would “
decide which of us all shall deserve the title of champion cake-walker of the world.” (The Vanderbilts never responded.) In 1899, the
Musical Courier
scorned this unruly “
sex dance” as “a milder edition
of African orgies,” but the people were having too much fun to care. In 1900, when
John Philip Sousa brought the cakewalk to the Paris Exposition, the song “Bunch o’ Blackberries” was, according to the
San Francisco Call,
“
hummed, whistled, and played in almost every nook and corner of the French capital,” and the dance itself—the “peregrination for the pastry”—was widely celebrated as “gay,” “boisterous,” and
“la plus illustre des fanfares américaines,”
even more illustrious, presumably, than
George C. Tilyou’s mechanical amusements.

Minstrelsy and the Jazz Age overlap. On this 1896 sheet-music cover, Bert Williams and George W. Walker, originators of the global cakewalk craze, are racially exoticized for their “eccentric” fun. (Courtesy of African American Sheet Music, 1850–1920, Sheet Music Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.)

Jazz was reaching its preadolescence when it sprang from the cornet of
Buddy Bolden, the light-skinned, muscular, five-foot-eleven sport who is usually credited with being its first “king.”

Born Charles Joseph Bolden in 1877, Buddy was raised in a mixed New Orleans neighborhood where working-class blacks, Irish, and Germans mostly got along. These groups divided along religious lines, but they mobbed the same street corners, and in the city’s ongoing culture of celebration nearly everybody came together for barbecues,
parades, and plein-air parties. Marches and dance music were the main attractions, and they provided Buddy’s elementary training. Little is known about his early years. He may have attended
Fisk School for Boys, with its vibrant choral and band programs, but most of his training would have happened by osmosis—from the ever-present fiddle bands, brass bands, and orchestras that were known to share a single stage in a night. Not long after he turned seventeen and had learned the cornet (from a kindly cook in the French Quarter), Bolden was incorporating all of these musical styles into his magpie horn-playing technique, a musical ventriloquism that incorporated anything from the junk collectors’ calls to the fruit peddlers’ chants.