With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830

Preface

PR~FAC~ "WE SELL FUN," SAID MARK CUBAN, THE owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, in 2002. "We sell the answer to 'What do you want to do tonight?'" Cuban's comment neatly sums up the history of popular culture in the United States.1 This book is an interpretive synthesis of almost two hundred years of American entertainment: the sale, and purchase, of fun. Popular culture must enjoy at least fairly broad support from ordinary people and be accessible to them. But what separates it from noncommercial neighborhood and family games, for instance, is that its creators and/or disseminators seek to profit from it; they are in the business of merchandising entertainment. Over the years, new technologies, shifting values and moods, economic conditions , political pressures, consumer expectations, and demographics have dramatically formed and transformed the nature of that business and its products.2 In that regard, popular culture both reflects and shapes the larger society . How it does so is anything but simple. It can refract as well as mirror, breaking the larger society into a wide range of images and meanings. It can follow well-worn paths and set new directions. American entertainment has never comprised a neatly homogenized set of diversions. Instead, it is full of contradictions and speaks in many voices, some louder and more influential than others. Its messages cal). be liberating and confining, reassuring and unsettling. Conflicts, sometimes violent, have frequently accompanied efforts to establish what kinds of amusements are acceptable and on whose terms. Shifting historical contexts have been crucial in determining what is popular, how it emerges, and what forms it takes. In that regard, popular culture has mirrored social, economic, and political changes . But it has also been an agency of change, influencing attitudes, breaking down barriers, facilitating upward mobility, and causing social collisions. xxxvi PREFACE It has both provided important cultural ties in times of crisis and triggered conflict.3 The processes by which assorted amusements have become mainstream entertainment have resembled the dynamics between a circus's big tent and the outlying sideshows. The owners of the big tent typically move cautiously , courting relatively well-to-do and respectable middle-class audiences. In order not to offend people with money and status or create problems with local authorities, the big tent's offerings must be decent, reputable, and not overly controversial. Yet acts that are too bland or uninteresting may fail to attract customers. In that regard, the sideshow exhibits have played crucial roles. Sideshows aim to shock. They appeal to society's allegedly baser instincts. For a small fee, customers can peek briefly into forbidden or unsettling worlds-the worlds of freaks, nudity, the risque, the exotic, and the erotic. In their quest for new, exciting fare, operators of the big tent have historically reached, however tentatively, into the sideshows for material. Despite ongoing resistance from authorities and moral guardians, the sideshows have eventually influenced what happens in the big tent. But it is only as tamer, cleaner versions that sideshow acts have eased into the spotlight . The acts must qualify as "respectable" fare, fit for general audiences. As a result, it is only in sanitized form that many once-boisterous, daring, lower-class entertainments have eased into more prosperous, bourgeois venues. But, even as the big tent incorporates and tames the sideshows' more risque and edgier elements, it is invigorated and energized by them.4 The history of popular culture has consisted of ongoing exchanges and sometimes brutal struggles between society's outsiders and insiders. Sometimes outsider status has been primarily a state of mind, a result of perceived snubs and slights. In most instances, however, American entertainers have truly come from society's margins-from the difficult worlds of new immigrants, racial minorities, the working class, and women who chafed under the restrictions of a patriarchal environment. Lacking power and influence, and often struggling against discrimination, prejudice, and poverty, they have looked to entertainment as a "way out." The amusement business, although harsh and demanding, has been alluring as a place in which to demonstrate talent, achieve individual attention, and perhapsas a few have done-become rich and famous. Too often, talented and innovative people who helped clear the way for their more celebrated successors have labored in obscurity. In a number of instances, the environments in which they have worked have been hostile. Still, in significant ways, popular culture has provided a ladder of opportunity for some gifted individuals who have lacked financial...