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1 Risky Enterprise: Stunts and Value in Public Life of Late Nineteenth-Century New York

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1 Risky Enterprise: Stunts and Value in Public Life of Late Nineteenth-Century New York 1 Risky Enterprise: Stunts and value in public life of late nineteenth-century New York Kirstin Smith Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2 Abstract This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where ‘stunt’ developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called ‘stunt journalism’, and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer’s popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a ‘crisis of value’ concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which ‘stunt’ connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself. 3 Acknowledgements I am indebted to Nicholas Ridout for his many insightful ideas and reflections. Thank you, Nick! I also owe a debt to Sophie Nield, for helpful early conversations about the project, and illuminating reflections on it during examination, as well as Tom Wright for his extremely helpful advice during examination. I’d like to thank the librarians at the Library of Congress and all those who work in the Kluge Center. I am grateful to everybody who read or discussed parts of this research and offered their thoughts and advice: Mariellen R. Sandford, Tara A. Willis, Eleanor Massie, Michael McKinnie, Jennifer Foy, Jonathan Williams, Neil Smith, Aoife Monks, Catherine Silverstone, Jen Harvie, Bridget Escolme, Martin Welton, Emma Bennett, Caoimhe Mader McGuinness, Cat Fallow, Sarah Mullan, Ellie Roberts, Faisal Hamadah, Philip Watkinson, Noah Birksted-Breen and Rebecca Stott. Finally, thank you to Rowland Manthorpe for all of the support, advice and talk. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant numbers AH/M108823H, AH/M000427/1]; and the Queen Mary Postgraduate Research Fund. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 1. Risky enterprise… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 6 2. Tracing stunts: definitions and etymologies … … … … … … … … 9 3. Performance Studies: perspectives on stunts … … … … … … … … 21 4. Stunts and value in New York … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 26 5. Conceptual framework: precarity… … … … … … … … … … … … 32 6. Conceptual framework: liveness and aliveness … … … … … 37 7. Conceptual framework: public life … … … … … … … … … … … 40 8. Cultures of spectacle: archive and research context … … … 43 1. Stunts and money: bridge jumping and the Industrial Army 1. Introduction … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 54 2. The first bridge jumper: Sam Patch and skilled labour … … … … 56 3. Jumping from Brooklyn Bridge … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 64 4. Dime museums, enfreakment and the entertainment context … 68 5. ‘He was no fool. He was a bridge jumper’ … … … … … … … … … … 71 6. An ‘advertisement dead or alive’: economy of excess and human/capital … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 74 7. The real abstraction … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 83 8. The currency problem … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 87 9. The Industrial Army … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 95 10. Occupy Washington … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 100 11. Stunts and soldiers: substitutes, greenbacks and war … … … … 104 12. Conclusion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 108 2. Stunts, work and walking in circles in the ‘Go-as-you-please’ race 1. Introduction … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 109 2. Their long jaunt begun … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 110 3. The value of walking … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 112 4. Producing the contest and the city … … … … … … … … … … … … … 116 5. Walking round the clock … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 121 6. Economies of walking … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 127 7. Reaching the limits … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 134 8. Conclusion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 141 3. Stunt Journalism 1. Introduction … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 142 2. Stunt journalism: an overview … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 145 3. Stunt stories and the World’s circulation… … … … … … … … … … 152 5 4. Becoming Nellie Bly… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 156 5. Behind Asylum Bars … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 159 6. Imitation, identification and the construction of character 164 7. Women, sex and work … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 168 8. Labouring in the image: Meg Merrilies, the World’s courageous young woman for all occasions… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 175 9. Conclusion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 181 4. Turning the wheel: bicycle stunts, circulation and derivatives 1. Introduction … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 183 2. Bicycle performance cultures: an overview … … … … … … … … … … 187 3. Live wire … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 192 4. Contracts: a romance of the market … … … … … … … … … … … … … 198 5. Circulation and stunts as derivatives … … … … … … … … … … … … … 201 6. Bicycling for ladies … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 209 7. Girdling the globe on a wheel … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 214 8. An advertising scheme from start to finish? … … … … … … … … … … 220 9. Costume, virtuosity and idle talk … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 224 10. Conclusion … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 230 6. Conclusion 1. Aestheticised precarity … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 232 2. Liveness and aliveness … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 233 3. Performance and value … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 236 Bibliography 238 6 Introduction 1. Risky enterprise In the late nineteenth century, people began to frame risky and attention-grabbing acts in public life as stunts for the first time. This thesis explores what stunts were, and how and why they were deployed as a strategy. It focuses on New York, a hub of theatrical, media, sporting and political activity. In this thriving culture of spectacle, stunts experimented with emerging forms of self-actualisation and value creation. Stunts tested developing modes of identity, work and politics in extreme fashion. In doing so they exposed and aestheticised the precarity of life in New York’s hyper-exploitative culture, as well as the conflicting drives that shaped that culture. I examine four types of stunt that took place in the 1880s and 1890s: bridge jumping; pedestrianism; stunt journalism; and bicycle stunts. The four categories each involve distinct performance histories, but several interlocking themes speak across the case studies: precarity and its aestheticisation; liveness and aliveness; the affinities and differences between humans and machines; and surrogation. The first chapter explores bridge jumping, a precarious feat that was a sport, entertainment and form of protest in the early nineteenth century, and by the century’s end, exploited in New York’s cultures of spectacle. I explore how bridge jumping aestheticised precarity for political and commercial aims, situating jumps in relation to contemporary protests and debates concerning value, work, race and the role of the state. Drawing on the work of Joseph Roach, the returning structure of bridge jumping is understood as a process of surrogation, which maintained a cultural memory or fantasy of antebellum white masculine autonomy. This nostalgic affect intersected with widespread concern about the potential and dangers of freedom by the turn of the century, and the precarity of everyday life under laissez-faire industrial capitalism. Analysing a macabre contract between a bridge jumper and a dime museum, I suggest that bridge jumpers played a sacrificial role in narratives of American history, underpinned by a prevalent discursive parallel between stunts performers and soldiers. 7 The following chapter on extreme pedestrianism extends this investigation to another sporting act which attained its popular interest by pushing bodies to the limit and staging precarious life. Both bridge jumping and pedestrianism demonstrate the modes of self-actualisation
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