Coney Island and American Society
"It is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of the ridiculous.
But it is something more; it is like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon
or Yellowstone Park; it is a national playground, and not to have seen
it is not to have seen your own country."
-Reginald Wright Kauffman (Coney Island)
The
New Morality
In
contrast to the despised "Sodom by the Sea" image of the late 19th
Century Coney Island,
Thompson, Tilyou, Reynolds, and the
other purveyors of pleasure came to understand that Coney's success was
tied to its moral acceptability in the minds of a middle-class
audience. This second wave of entrepreneurs came to Coney at the height
of its reputation for vice and condemnation by the press and reformers
alike, but saw a business opportunity. "They realized that Coney's
greatest potential lay not in corruptly defying the genteel culture as McKane had done but in providing a respectable alternative to it with exciting, uninhibited amusement" (Kasson 35).
In 19th century America, genteel
manners were "an expression of the relation of status, - a symbolic
pantomime of mastery on the one hand and of subservience on the other."
They acquired a "sacramental character" because of this reinforcement
of the hierarchies of social rank. One who was decorous and restrained
was one who was refined, and by their external actions, necessarily
wealthy and powerful (Veblen 30-31).
Thorstein Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class,
associated strict adherence to the code of polite social behavior with
this titular class. In 1899, when this book was published, those who
had the time to observe the demands Victorian decorum were still
largely upper-class Americans. Reflecting the social stratification
that had defined cross-class relations since the colonial period in
America, restraint and gentility were instrinsic attributes "of
superior worth, before which the base-born commoner delights to stoop
and yield" (Veblen 34).
Coney Island's assault on
traditional conceptions of morality was deliberate, at least on the
part of the entrepreneurs who built its amusements. As discussed on
the Consuming Desire page,
Thompson, Tilyou, and Reynolds knew that they would have to confront
the assumed American values of thrift, self-restraint, and delayed
gratification in order to market their vision of a sensual playground.
It was obvious that other values predominated among this class of
entertainers. “Fred Thompson cared less about instructing the
conscience of his customers than about selling pleasure and
manufacturing the kind of fun that people would pay for” (Register 11).
Everywhere
at Coney, tradition was sacrified on the altar of a progressive vision
of modernity. The question of what values would matter to a modern
society was embodied in the strange delights of the mechanical and
technological wonders of Steeplechase, Luna, and Dreamland.
“There are so many keys that unlock to us the magic chambers of
this paradise of secular joys and terrors. You may swim or guzzle; on
the hard backs of iron steeds, to the accompaniment of bedlam music,
you may caracole or go plunging down perilous declivities, swinging
into the gloom of sinister tunnels or, perched aloft, be the envy of
small boys” (Huneker).
An obession
with oriental exoticism was evident in the architecture, expositions,
and other pleasures of Dreamland and Luna Parks. The early 20th century
was in fact a time of great interest in the supposedly "mysterious"
cultures of the east - from the "Garden of Allah" displays in large
department stores to the media frenzy over the discovery of King Tut's
Tomb and Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. "Orientalism
was symptomatic of changes taking place within Western scoiety - and
especially in cities - that...symbolized a feeling of something missing
from Western culture itself, a longing for a 'sensual' life more 'satisfying' than traditional Christianity could endorse" (Leach 105).
The oriental
ethos was one of a wild, vigorous virility, free from the codes of
decorum and restraint. In essence, this was the very conception of
desire that entertainment entrepreneurs were advocating. "The Streets
of Cairo" and the Algerian and Turkish theaters featured scantily-clad
"hoochy-koochy" dancers as well as "muscle men" to titilate both sexes
alike. Sword swallowers, candle dancers, camel riders, and fortune
tellers defied not only the rules of polite society, but also the
bounds of nature. Working against the efforts of social reformers who
tried for years to close these liscentious amusements, the Oriental
exhibitions thrived. They delivered novelty and seemingly seditious
thrills that exposed by contrast the sterility and prudish nature of
greater America at the time (Register 114-115).
Coney Island
was an escape for urban men and women, but it also "allowed them to
extend their culture to the resort, whose beaches, boardwalk, and
dancing pavilions were arenas for diversion, flirtations, and displays
of style." (Peiss 116) This
was always part of the fun of a summer excursion - so see and be seen.
The liberating social setting of the beach allowed for relaxed dress,
as well as moral codes. Sexuality was on display in the relatively
skimpy bathing costumes of women in the surf, whose coquettish grins
graced so many postcards at the time. (Kasson 42-47)
“Either they wuz scrimped for cloth, or they wanted to look so;
whichever way it wuz, I pitied ‘em,” according to the
prudish Samantha of Marietta Holley's popular novels (Holley 287-288).
Many women were able to experience Coney Island due
to the emerging culture of intra-family heterosexual relations that
marked the early 20th century. Urban living had rendered the old
systems of courtship unfeasible by the 1890s, and in its place, many
young urbanites began dating as a means to finding a mate at this time.
The atmosphere of the island's parks was a perfect venue for this new
courtship. Here "women as well as men could escape the governance of
family and neighbors" who might attempt to enforce more stringent
adherence to Victorian values of restraint and decency (Register 127).
Under the cover of night, beneath the boardwalk, or hidden in the
tunnels of the Scenic Railway, men and women were free to act out their
sexual roles in places disjointed from the world of traditional
morality. This spirit of sexual freedom was still associated with Coney
Island when, in 1928, it was vibrantly recorded for King Vidor's film The Crowd.
Cultural critics often aimed their pens at Coney
because of the audacity of its social message. Despite the message of
progress and "good clean fun" that the park owners would
talk up to the press, many adherents of older codes of morality didn't
buy it. "After the species of straitjacket that we wear everyday is
removed at such Saturnalia as Coney Island, the human animal emerges in
a not precisely winning guise. He and she and the brats are a mixture
that sets you thinking over the idle boast that our century is the
flowering of culture” (Huneker).
Coney Island, however, did not
derive its success from the accolades of academics. It was in its
popularity, both in the numbers of visitors and in the popular
imagination, that the area's cultural influence was measured. Author
Marietta Holley wrote a novel in which her popular character Samantha
travels to the Island and attests to both its popularity and
transformative nature. “It seemed to me that everybody in New
York and Brooklyn and the adjacent villages and country, wuz all there
a Steeple Chasin’, yet I knowed there wuz jest as many
dreamin’ in Dreamland and bein’ luny in Luny Park. And Surf
Avenue was full, and what they called the Bowery of Coney Island, and
all the amusement places along the shore. And all on
‘em on the move, jostlin’ and bein’ jostled,
foolin’ and bein’ fooled, laughin’ and bein’
laughed at” (Holley 265).
Coney's
success could not be ignored. Society, so awed by the ludicrus
spectacle of it all, was riveted to attempts to recreate the same in
popular media. Despite the attention the island garnered, however, the
effect it had on social institutions was too monumental and insiduous
for most to perceive until long after Coney had faded into the
collective consciousness.
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