"One theme of the book basically deals with the process by which popular culture has worked its way out into the mainstream. Think of the big tent in a circus. That's where the big crowds come, where the big acts are, where the famous appear. That's where the money is. That's where the respectable families can go. Then you have the side shows. They're more exotic, erotic, challenging, and controversial. Over the years the big tent changed, and today the big tent reflects what was out there on those margins, what was out there in those side shows. For example, in the 1970s, out in the South Bronx, people who lived there called it America's Viet Nam; it was an economic dead zone. In that particular area hip-hop got started. No one knew about it then, but now it's become almost a national soundtrack. It's a multibillion-dollar business. It was a side show that made it in to the big tent. Pop culture can offer alternatives, it can reflect, it can shape."
LeRoy Ashby
http://newsletter.wsu.edu/chronicle/february07/authors-recognition.html
...A central image to Ashby's description of the nature of popular culture is the circus, with its large acts meant for mass consumption and its sideshows that satisfy some darker human curiosities. Through the course of the book, he shows how popular sideshow acts eventually achieve acceptance in the "big tent." ...Ashby traces numerous examples of entertainments being cleansed as they move from the sideshow to the big tent...
http://www.amazon.com/Amusement-All-History-American-Popular/dp/0813123976
http://www.leithart.com/archives/print/002446.php
http://www.sideshowworld.com/interviewjimmyZ.html
How alternative "economies" get "incorperated" with resistence;
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/msg/8c7353c25ef4c583
...Deliberately courting working-class readers, the penny press published lengthy, often gory accounts from police court reports that revealed hypocrisy and scandal in the ranks of the middle and upper classes. In this context, news that seemed apolitical in fact contained a sharp political edge. Stories of sex, crime, and manners could expose the misplaced pretensions of privileged groups who presumed to lecture their inferiors about proper conduct.
As penny papers attracted a growing and more diverse readership, they were agents of democratization, blurring lines of deference and newsworthiness. Without doubt, from the perspective of the old print world and its upper-class clientele, the penny dailies were a disruptive force. Although members of Americas social elite reportedly dismissed as a sad joke comments such as, I read it in a newspaper, and it must be true, they sensed nervously the truth in the writer Edgar Allan Poes statement: Words-printed ones especially-are murderous things....
...As minstrelsy helped construct the budding new world of popular amusements, it found a significant ally in the penny press, a centerpiece of what was becoming the first information explosion. Between 1790 and 1835, the number of newspapers in the United States surged from 106 to 1,258. The federal governments postal system played an instrumental role in this development. A symbol of republican ideals, the postal system reflected the revolutionary leader Benjamin Rushs argument in 1787 favoring the circulation of knowledge of every kind to citizens throughout the country. With the Postage Act of 1792, Congress in effect subsidized newspapers with special discount rates and privileges. By the 1830s, the postal service was shipping far more newspapers than letters; indeed, newspapers constituted 95 percent of the weight of the services mail while providing only 15 percent of its revenue.
In this supportive environment, a growing flood of inexpensive magazines, paperbacks, and news sheets rolled off revamped presses, undermining the once well-ordered and controlled world of print, in the words of the historian Isabelle Lehuu, and creating a virtual carnival on the page that was cheap, playful, and sensational....
P. T. Barnum, a brilliant promoter of himself
...Probably no individual in the antebellum era took advantage of the appeal of the penny press as effectively as did the incomparable P. T. Barnum, a brilliant promoter of himself and his exhibits. ...In 1835, two years after Barnum returned to Manhattan, he took a bold step, quitting his job, borrowing money, and joining the itinerant hawkers and walkers who trudged the countryside with acts and exhibits ranging from animals to peep shows and freaks. Barnum, however, had a particularly audacious exhibit: Joice Heth, whom he touted as The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World-natural because of her alleged age of 161 years and national because of her ability to tap patriotic emotions...
...Barnum, displaying an absolute genius for marketing, devised several strategies to publicize the Heth exhibit and fend off critics. Working with Levi Lyman, whom he hired as an advance man, he scheduled special opportunities for ministers to meet Heth, showing them baptismal documents that he and Lyman had forged. In order to reassure abolitionists, he planted a newspaper story that the exhibit was actually an antislavery benefit. He published a short biography, The Life of Joice Heth, the Nurse of George Washington, further heightening the tensions over her identity...
...Barnum cleverly seized on charges that Heth was, in fact, a fraud. He planted newspaper stories and staged incidents suggesting that she was actually made of whalebone and India rubber (itself one of the eras wonders) and that the contraptions voice came from a ventriloquist. As Barnum snickered: Many who had seen her were equally desirous of a second look, in order to determine whether or not they had been deceived. Whether they paid once or twice, Barnum reaped the dividends...
...For several decades, the once-proud museum business had been descending rapidly toward the disreputable. ...Barnum hoped to capitalize even more on the appeal of the excessive and the bizarre...
...The museum in downtown Manhattan that Barnum purchased in 1841 became, under his inventive leadership, nationally known and, for a while, New York Citys most popular attraction. The five-story building had formerly been John Scudders American Museum but had fallen on hard times...
...With formidable show business savvy, Barnum skillfully implemented vigorous advertising, stunning decorations, and, of course, controversy to publicize a breathtaking range of exhibits and experiences. He later delighted in relating how, in 1842, he had manipulated the citys Independence Day celebration to his advantage. One of his plans was to run out a string of American flags across the street on that day, for I knew there would be thousands of people passing the Museum with leisure and pocket money; the flags would arrest their patriotic attention, and bring many of them within my walls. Vestrymen from St. Pauls Church threatened to scuttle his plan, however, when they objected to his attaching any rope to their churchyard tree. Early on July 4, Barnum defied them, hanging flags from a rope with one end tied to that very tree. By 9:30 a.m., when the vestrymen discovered what he had done, festive crowds were already thronging the street between the church and the museum. Barnum seemed accommodating enough when the vestrymen came to his office in angry protest. But, after persuading them to join him outside, he said loudly: Really, gentlemen, these flags look very beautiful; they do not injure your tree. Rolling up his sleeves, he then dared the vestrymen to take down the flags and threatened to show you a thousand pairs of Yankee hands in two minutes if they tried to take down the stars and stripes on this great birthday of American freedom! By now, Barnum had successfully captured the attention of the crowd, including some loud patriots who were determined to protect the flags at all costs. The vestrymen quickly relented. Barnums gambit had worked so well that by 1 p.m.his museum was so crowded that additional customers could not get in. To avoid repeating that situation, Barnum devised a gimmick for future use. Several months later, when the museum was again full, he fooled some of the customers into leaving prematurely by hanging up a sign that said To the Egress. Curious spectators, anxious to see whatever this egress was, found themselves exiting into the back alley, thereby allowing Barnum to sell more tickets up front...
...Barnum ...toyed with issues of sexuality when he exhibited Josephine Clofullia, his Swiss bearded lady. Ever mindful of the benefits of controversy, he encouraged rumors that she was, in fact, a man. After paying a customer to accuse her of being a fraud, Barnum brought the phony case to court, where doctors, as well as Clofullias husband, testified that she was truly a female. The big winner, of course, was Barnum, who used the cases notoriety to boost his museum. Similarly, he profited from public speculation over the sex lives of Chang and Eng, the famed Siamese twins who performed all kinds of astonishing physical feats before enthusiastic audiences...
...Race as a subject was never more evident than in Barnums What Is It? exhibit. In this instance, Barnum pressed beyond some of the racial issues that had surrounded his Joice Heth tour. In 1860, he undoubtedly took advantage of intensified public speculation, following the recent publication (in 1859) of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species,about connections between humans and monkeys. Barnum had devised earlier exhibits to suggest such connections, but never before had he used a black man as, according to advertisements, the connecting link between man and monkey. The man was William Henry Johnson, under five feet tall, with a small, pointed head, a large nose that seemed to start at the hairline, and diminished intellectual capacity. Zip was his stage name, perhaps echoing that of the Zip Coon minstrel character. Although Johnson was more than likely born in New Jersey, Barnum claimed that a group of explorers in Africa, looking for gorillas, had found him and an entire race just like him, living nude in the trees. Johnson had supposedly been the only survivor among the several of his species whom the explorers brought to the United States. He reportedly walked initially on all fours and ate raw meat as well as fruit and nuts. One of Barnums advertisements claimed that Johnson has been examined by some of the most scientific men we have, and pronounced by them to be a connecting link between the wild african and brute creation. Other museum ads suggested that it seems to be a sort of cross between an ape species and a Negro or between the wild native african and the orang outang. As white museum customers watched Johnson, they could wrestle with questions of race, secure at least in the knowledge that the missing link was apparently black.
At least one skeptical reporter suspected that the act was fraudulent. He observed that, when the keeper was delivering his What Is It? lecture to the audience, the It made many sly manoeuvers that lets in the light on the humbug terribly....
...Barnums clever gambits fit superbly in the antebellum era, when American culture, as one historian has described it, was a jamboree of exaggeration, chicanery, flimflam, and bunkum. Against a backdrop of wrenching change, citizens understandably worried about making sense of what was happening all around them...
...difficult because of the expanding numbers of people who engaged in trickery, wearing disguises to fool innocent citizens and mastering the art of the swindle. A fast-talking New Yorker named William Thompson inspired the label confidence manby convincing strangers to loan him their watches, which he promptly stole. In 1857, with Thompson in mind, Herman Melville published his novel The Confidence Man.The penny press reported regularly about con artists and painted ladies who adopted poses in order to fleece unsuspecting individuals....
...Within this burgeoning marketplace of playful frauds, Barnum competed for customers. Indeed, the eras fascination with human oddities was so large that some individuals-Horatio Algers of the underworld who cannily faked their uncanniness, as one historian has characterized them-tried to cash in on the phenomenon by posing as freaks...
...Overall, Barnum more than held his own when it came to inventive deceptions, some of which he termed his side shows. He once advertised for free viewing of a wild buffalo hunt. Fifteen of the animals, which he had purchased for $700 from the Western frontier, were on a farm in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. On one day, twenty-four thousand passengers jammed on ferryboats to see these fearsome animals. To their chagrin, they discovered not magnificent beasts but ones that were mangy, emaciated, so weak and tame that it was doubtful whether they would run at all, as Barnum later admitted, and so terrified that they fled into a nearby swamp. Still, because, except for the cost of transportation, the buffalo exhibit was free, viewers masked their disappointment with humor. When one of them on a departing boat shouted to passengers who were just arriving at the New Jersey wharf that the exhibit was the biggest humbug you ever heard of! the incoming audience cheered. Barnum, meanwhile, happily pocketed his share of the transportation fees, courtesy of a deal he had struck with the ferryboat owners, and made a profit of $3,500.
Intuitively, Barnum seemed to recognize that the phenomenon of diddling not only stirred public anxieties but was also a rich source of entertainment. While the confidence man loomed as a frightening specter of social disorder, he could just as easily be a beloved rogue, a trickster in the mold of a Davy Crockett or a Yankee peddler, like the fictional character Simon Suggs, who joked, it is good to be shifty in a new country. Deception perhaps played an important role in many of the new amusements because it continually tested the viewers abilities to distinguish fact from fiction, the authentic from the artificial, and what was legitimate from what was pretense.
In that regard, one of the eras most popular exhibits-and one from which Barnum drew much inspiration-was a mechanized chess player. Viewers could wonder whether it was truly a thinking machine or a glorious hoax...
...A human hid behind false panels inside the cabinet, shifting from one side to the other as the owner opened each door for examination. When the chess game started, the concealed person was able to manipulate the automatons arm and fingers in response to the moves that the owner described. Barnum was particularly impressed with how Maelzel, following exposure of the ruse, in effect reinvented himself as a creator of elaborate hoaxes rather than thinking machines. Deception, even once the secret was out, could still be a source of profit. Controversy and doubt-not conclusive demonstrations of truth-were magnets for audiences.
With that lesson in mind, Barnum cultivated his growing reputation as the prince of humbug, a term that he proudly applied to himself. Now and then, he recalled, some one would cry out humbug and charlatan, but so much the better for me. It helped to advertise me. Humbugging was, from his view, different from swindling or even lying. It depended on the participation of the victim; typically, the object of the deception enjoyed the ruse or was at least so gullible that others could laugh. When people expect to get something for nothing they are sure to be cheated, and generally deserve to be, Barnum wrote. Humbug was like an inside joke, and it was an expected part of merchandising. Barnum recalled that, when he was clerking in general stores as a youngster, the customers cheated us in their fabrics: we cheated the customers with our goods. Each party expected to be cheated. . . . Barnum implicitly nudged viewers in the rib and gave a wink; participants agreed to join the game, just as they had done when they were purchasing goods from the general stores at which he had worked: Our cottons were sold for wool, our wool and cotton for silk and linen; in fact nearly everything was different from what it was represented. Thus, later in his museum, the ballyhooed Man-Eating Chicken turned out to be a man eating chicken, and the great model of niagara falls, with real water! (an exhibit that city officials initially feared would demand a huge amount of water) was, in fact, only eighteen inches high and used a barrel of water per month.
Such artful deception meshed well with the antebellum eras celebration of democracy-evident, for instance, in the leveling rhetoric of President Andrew Jackson, whom Barnum warmly endorsed. John Quincy Adams could write, but Jackson could fight, as one poet observed in 1828. Similarly, the art of deception was open to common scrutiny, regardless of wealth, privilege, or education. Any individual could try to figure out the puzzle, solve the mystery, discover the hoax. In that spirit, at a time when science and technology were opening vast areas for inquiry, Barnum was urging rank-and-file citizens to join the debate. A prime example was his infamous Feejee Mermaid, a manufactured curiosity with a monkeys head attached to a fishs body whose exhibition virtually tripled the muse- ums receipts in just four weeks. Barnum publicized it as the discovery of Londons Dr. J. Griffin (actually Levi Lyman, Barnums advance man during the Heth exhibit). Spectators could reach their own conclusions about the mermaids authenticity. The opinions of common citizens in effect counted as heavily as did those of famous scientists, who, according to Barnum, were themselves deeply divided over whether the exhibit was a fake. To entice people to view his critter, he contemplated an advertisement that asked: Who is to decide when the doctors disagree? Barnums museum thus encouraged a kind of cultural democracy; truth rested with the majority.
Even low-life Bowery residents were welcome at the museum and could join the debates over whether exhibits were phony or genuine. Upper-class patrons could take offense, but I worked for the million, wrote Barnum, which was also the only way to make a million. He admittedly greeted Bowery types in part because he recognized that their dimes and quarters matched in value those of everyone else. Moreover, he liked to tweak the respectable folks who sneered at him and his amusements, complaining, as one did, about crowds rushing, ready to break their necks, to witness a vile imposter, a gross humbug who exhibited stunted children, pasteboard mermaids, wooly horses, and other wonderful inventions....
...Although Barnum liked to say that he would rather be kicked than not noticed at all, he privately regretted that he had (foolishly) stuck my worst side outside. As he tried to bridge the expanding cultural gap between the Bowery and Broadway, he leaned increasingly toward the prosperous and the respectable. And, in that regard, he mirrored trends in other amusements, including the minstrel shows and the press...
With Amusement for All -
A History of American Popular Culture since 1830
LeRoy Ashby
http://www.amazon.com/Amusement-All-History-American-Popular/dp/0813123976
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
http://www.kentuckypress.com/viewbook.cfm?Group=17&ID=1282&Category_ID=1
http://www.kentuckypress.com/0813123976excerpt.pdf
The Hollywood Organizational Model
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.energy/msg/8fd1faadd858fec1
