Coney Island and American Society
"Coney
Island has a code of conduct which is all her own" -Guy Wetmore Carryl
America at the turn of the 20th century was a
nation in flux. Across the country, institutions that had long defined life and
social interaction were challenged by the new realities of a modern mass
society. Historians point to
industrialization and urbanization as two movements with drastic effects on
traditional constructions of leisure, gender, citizenship, sexuality, morality,
aesthetics, and social identity. These
developments were disorienting, confronting the status quo with the idea that
progress, reform, and efficiency would improve people’s lives but often failing
to address how the country could reconcile the realities of the present with
the brilliant ideas of the future.
While these questions of
identity were being discussed across America,
Coney Island burst onto the national
stage. The island was the site of three major amusement parks which
drew inspiration from the great World's Fairs of the era, but laid
claim to a different sort of cultural relevance in their permanence and
scale. The amusements were billed as “an
escape from the labor and drudgery of everyday life,” a place
where the modern American could temporarily forget the pressures of
industrial
society to engage in a sensory world of pleasure-seeking (DeAngelis 109). In actuality, however, the very existence of
Steeplechase, Luna, and Dreamland parks around 1900 was due to the identity
crisis that defined contemporary American civilization.
The island’s existence as a pleasure
center for the population of New York City made it a symbol of the new cultural
order, in which the democratic promise of mass entertainment would “knit a
heterogeneous audience into a cohesive whole” (Kasson 4).
By the late 19th century, leisure trips had entered the realm of
possibility for a large number of Americans, and older conceptions of
"proper entertainment" began running up against the reality of a new
pleasure-seeking demographic.
Meanwhile,
the groundbreaking forms of play engineered by the
entertainer-entrepreneurs of the island helped to codify new forms of
social roles and relations. This left men and women freer than ever
before to shed traditional responsibilities and restrictions and to
embrace a new moral code (which often involved embracing each other).
Coney not only made it acceptable to shed one's inhibitions in pursuit
of fun, but made it profitable too. The
success of the island's three major amusement parks was based on the
commodification of desire that marked advertising and consumption
around the turn of the century.
Coney Island
played heir to the Western carnival tradition, in which tradition is
turned on its head in a hedonistic expression of liberty. What sets it
apart in the history of American society is the way that Coney fostered
changes that outlasted its cultural influence. In dealing a blow to the
standards of Victorian morality, Coney Island also rendered itself
obsolete. The marketing of indulgence, mass entertainment, and new
conceptions of gender and liberated sexuality that were pioneered in
the great cultural laboratory of Coney Island were no longer shocking
by the mid-1910's. These social trends had left the realm of the
playground to become the new reality of modern American life.
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