Louis S. Warren
Page 66
The spectacle of the Congress of Rough Riders of the World kept America’s increasingly imperial stance in the minds of Americans throughout the decade and after. At no point was the flow between entertainment and expansionist politics more obvious than in 1898. Many assume Cody’s Rough Riders took their name from Roosevelt’s. The reverse is true. Theodore Roosevelt’s First Volunteers adopted the Rough Rider name from Cody’s show and took it to the top of San Juan Hill and into American history. Some of Cody’s troupers joined Roosevelt’s troops, and after the war, in 1899, a genuine detachment of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders appeared in the Congress of Rough Riders to reenact their famous charge into the Spanish guns. 2
Although Cody and Roosevelt became passing friends, in the beginning the gauzy overlap between real history and public entertainment masked tensions between them. The aspiring politician staked a claim not only to the charge up San Juan Hill, which practically guaranteed his election to the governorship of New York, but also to the history of the campaign, which he published in The Rough Riders, a lively, self-aggrandizing account that appeared in 1899. In the book, Roosevelt distanced himself from Cody’s show, insisting the Rough Rider name was bestowed by the public “for some reason or other.” He claimed to have resisted it, “but to no purpose,” and when commanding generals began to refer to them by that name “we adopted the term ourselves.”3
These disingenuous denials reflect the antitheatrical leanings of the era’s most theatrical politician (dubbed Theater Roosevelt by some wags). Whether or not he saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, he imbibed freely of its manly regionalism. His regiment’s ideological premise was that a volunteer force of western cowboys, sheriffs, outlaws, Indians, and even some “half-breeds,” combined with a smattering of easterners who were “western” in spirit (including Roosevelt himself), could, through their hardy warrior virtues and their natural self-reliance, perform at least as well as a regular army regiment. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were as heavy on “real western men” as Cody’s Wild West show, and included their share of frontier army veterans, too (including the aging Chris Madsen, who had been at Warbonnet Creek when Cody scalped Yellow Hair).4
In reenacting the history of a regiment that drew its name from the show itself, the “Battle of San Juan Hill” to a degree reprised Cody’s fusion of historical action and representation in the scalping of Yellow Hair over two decades before. But the gesture to Roosevelt, in deflecting attention onto the blustering politician and away from Buffalo Bill, came with a risk. Roosevelt’s refusal to acknowledge the show as an inspiration was itself a challenge to Cody’s authenticity. Cody’s press agents fired back at TR’s demurrals. If the “manner in which Colonel Roosevelt” introduced the Rough Rider name to the Spanish had “made it historically immortal,” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had been the first to introduce it to the world. Through Cody’s labors, not Roosevelt’s, audiences had “grown to understand, fully appreciate, and unboundedly admire” the Rough Rider title.5
The spat with Roosevelt may have originated in Cody’s earlier ambivalence about the man, which TR could have read as hostility. When and where they first met is not clear, but the two men circled each other warily after Roosevelt returned from Dakota Territory and ascended to New York political command in the mid-1880s. In 1887, Chauncey Depew told a raucous, pro-Roosevelt meeting of the New York Republican Club, “Buffalo Bill said to me in the utmost confidence, ‘Theodore Roosevelt is the only New York dude that has got the making of a man in him.’ ”6 If Cody actually said such a thing, the compliment was decidedly double-edged. TR might possess the “making of a man,” but if so, it was only “the making.” He was still a New York dude.
There was a greater danger, too, in making the celebration of Roosevelt’s victory so central to the show. The charge up San Juan Hill marked the high-water mark of America’s overseas enthusiasm. Roosevelt’s victory was popular. But unlike George Custer, the only other military leader to become the subject of a Buffalo Bill’s Wild West scene, Roosevelt returned from his battles a living hero. He was also a political figure; he became governor of New York in 1898, then vice president to William McKinley in 1900, then president of the United States after McKinley’s assassination in 1901.
The Congress of Rough Riders threatened to become a political advertisement for the Rough Rider Republican. Cody had reasons for preferring Roosevelt to his Democratic rivals, as we shall see. Even so, many in his audience did not. Populists and many Democrats also favored American expansion, but they reviled the professional army and saw McKinley’s acquisition of the Philippines as a disaster. In 1900, Democrat William Jennings Bryan vigorously denounced McKinley’s imperialism for placing white American men in the steamy, sensual tropics, on a mudslide to miscegenation and the decline of the white race. He lost the election, but he still won over 45 percent of the popular vote. 7 Bryan had his supporters even then, and he remained a powerhouse in the Democratic Party for many years. For Cody, there was a very real possibility that the mythologizing of Roosevelt would disenchant a large part of the mass audience he needed to fill the bleachers.
The political limitations of the San Juan Hill reenactment help to explain why Cody shelved it about the time McKinley was killed and Roosevelt began swinging his big stick around the White House. In 1901, Cody replaced Roosevelt’s legendary charge with the “Battle of Tsien-Tsin,” a scene from China’s Boxer Rebellion in which “the allied armies of the world” rescued the besieged foreign legations and raised the triumphant “Banners of Civilization” in the place of the “Royal Standard of Paganism.”8
Various historians have argued that Cody’s freewheeling incorporation of recent events into his frontier narrative allowed him to tap popular sentiment for expansion. As the new century began, his show included “Strange People from Our New Possessions,” a group of “families” representing “the strange and interesting aboriginals”—Hawaiians, Filipinos, and Guamanians—from places “now grouped by the fate of war, the hand of progress and the conquering march of civilization under Old Glory’s protecting folds.” The new members of the show “keep step with the marvelous, potential and gigantic expansion of the nation.” 9 Some of these, notably the Hawaiian cowboys, or “paniolos,” even qualified as Rough Riders. By placing America’s expansion into its spectacle, Cody’s show implied a direct connection between frontier history and American victory on the world stage. By mingling cowboys and Indians with his professional military detachments, he incorporated symbols of amateur soldiers and volunteers, the kinds of military organization still preferred by a large segment of the populace.10
But close inspection of the show and its critics suggests these vague, ambiguous gestures to overseas expansion were politically risky for Cody. Westward expansion itself had been divisive, haunted by fears of racial decay, political disunion, and moral (and financial) bankruptcy. Ultimately, the economic success and overwhelming military victories of western annexation pushed those arguments into the mists of history, where they were easily forgotten. The Wild West show, for all its authentic western Indians, scouts, and cowboys, was by and large devoted to showing the settlement of the Far West that had already happened. The likelihood of any further military action against Indians was small when the show began in 1883, and grew smaller with each passing year. The Ghost Dance troubles erupted so suddenly, then receded into history so quickly, that Cody merely had to strike his usual ambivalent pose, urge the Nebraska state militia to remain calm, and wait for it to end. A popular sense that conquest of the Indians was inevitable limited other questions about the morality of that conquest.
The new expansion (as Roosevelt and his Republicans preferred to call it) or empire (as Bryan and the Democrats termed it) was either a glorious ascendance of democracy and capitalism or a turn from America’s virtuous, agrarian past into the halls of imperial corruption. This argument was rarely settled by a sense of inevitability. There were American victories in overseas battles. But
underlying factors that facilitated American success in the Far West were largely absent outside North America. The demographic collapse of indigenous peoples through disease had been pivotal to American success in Kansas, Nebraska, and the entire continent, as it was in Hawaii. But disease would play much less of a role in subjugating indigenous people in the Philippines, where enduring connections to Asia ensured long exposure to Eurasian maladies and higher rates of native survival from epidemics.
Also, Europeans contested American power in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific in ways they seldom had in the post-1848 Far West. Isolationists and anti-imperialists could point over and over again to the cost of overseas deployments and the absence of compelling victories to urge the end to overseas adventures. American expansionists would have to articulate and rearticulate a convincing case for sacrificing lives and resources, because in no other way would American power be secured on distant shores.11
In some ways, the fear of racial degeneration and undemocratic consequences that flowed from governing imperial subjects loomed largest of all. A primary threat of continuing the Philippines occupation, according to many of its opponents, was the dissolution of soldiers’ marriages as they were tempted by polygamous native life. White women sickened in the Philippines, said press accounts. American men, debilitated by the malarial tropics and the temptations of naked primitives, were losing their manhood. Prone to violent excess, horrendous atrocities, and indolence, they were becoming more like the “weak and impotent” British who struggled against the Boers in South Africa, and more like the corrupted Spanish whom they had so recently expelled.12
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had always presented Indian conquest in an ambivalent light. Perhaps having Indians play Spanish soldiers in the San Juan Hill reenactment, and Chinese soldiers in the “Battle of Tsien-Tsin” in 1901, was meant to complicate these historical moments, by infusing recent U.S. enemies with the honor of the noble savage.
If so, the gesture failed. The politics of empire were harder to contain in the past. The Indians masquerading as foreigners potentially rewrote the conquest of the American West as an imperial maneuver, upending the older narrative of inevitable, sometimes unfortunate progress across a unified continent. To many, the Chinese who fought the combined American, European, and Japanese forces in the Boxer Rebellion were not rebels, but brave patriots defending their native land. For these observers, Cody’s celebration of the Chinese defeat was more propaganda than entertainment. Mark Twain, the great fan of the original Wild West show, had become a major critic of America’s overseas engagements. The author who urged Cody to take the Wild West show to Europe in 1884 was less pleased when the show imported foreign entanglements into its drama. Twain was in the audience at Madison Square Garden on opening night, 1901. But he stormed out of the stands in protest at the jingoistic “Battle of Tsien-Tsin.”13
Cody himself had doubts about American expansion, especially the Spanish-American War. At the onset of hostilities, he offered to take up arms for the United States and to lend four hundred horses to the army for the campaign. Nelson Miles, now general of the army, appointed Cody to his staff. In April 1898, as the Wild West show began touring, Cody announced he would stay with the show until he was called to service. The 1898 show included a detachment of Cuban insurgents, the fighters for freedom on whose behalf the United States was ostensibly entering the conflict.
But Cody delayed joining. In his private correspondence, he suggested his doubts. “George, America is in for it,” he wrote an old friend, “and although my heart is not in this war—I must stand by America.” 14
Miles sent for Cody in late July. By that time, the Cuban campaign was already over, and the general was shipping out for what was to be a series of small, soon-forgotten battles in Puerto Rico. Still Cody could not bring himself to join. His business partners, especially Salsbury, were livid at the prospect of financial losses that would follow on the star’s departure and the early closing of the show. “Your bluff about going to Cuba was a brutal violation of your contract,” Salsbury later huffed, “and a moral wrong to the people who would have been thrown out of employment if you had been compelled to make your bluff good.”15 Cody wrote to his old friend Moses Kerngood, the man to whom he had sent Yellow Hair’s scalp in Rochester all those years ago, “I am all broke up because I can’t start tonight [for Puerto Rico].” It was impossible for him to leave without “some preparation, and it will entail a big loss and my partners naturally object. But go I must. I have been in every war our country has had since Bleeding Kansas war in which my father was killed. And I must be in this fight if I get in at the tail end!”16
But he did not. When Cody lamented that leaving the show would cost him $100,000, Miles advised him to stay.17
His reservations about the war stemmed more from his financial liability than from concerns about moral culpability. In that sense, his personal anxieties anticipated national sentiment after 1900. The American army in the Philippines turned from expelling the Spanish to fighting an indigenous rebellion. Combat and slaughter dragged on for years, costing the lives of 250,000 Filipinos and over 4,000 Americans. Even Roosevelt had turned against overseas acquisitions by 1901.18
Cody’s interest in reenacting overseas engagements waned almost at the same time. He ceased to present them after 1904, when he staged the Battle of San Juan Hill in Britain. The show retained generic displays of global warrior prowess with the Congress of Rough Riders and other exotic peoples, but connections to specific, foreign wars or battles disappeared. The colorful whirl of foreign and primitive peoples continued to reinforce the messages crafted in the early 1890s, about the capacity of white men to manage racially diverse primitives and modern technology sprung from frontier origins. “In its transportation, commissary, arenic, camp, and executive departments … the Wild West is at once a model and a wonder.”19
But even in its glamorous new format, for all its appeal to the press and the public, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was anything but a guaranteed income. Cody was forty-eight years old in 1894, and the show’s Brooklyn summer at Ambrose Park cost him a fortune. “I am too worried just now to think of anything,” he wrote to his sister Julia. “This is the worst deal I ever had in my life—for my expenses are $4,000 a day, [a]nd I can’t reduce them, without closeing entirely. You can’t possibly appreciate my situation—this is the tightest squeeze of my life.” 20
Cody’s struggle to shore up the political relevance and profitability of the show accompanied his fading personal interest in performing it. Retirement was a form of vanishing, of fulfilling the frontiersman’s destiny, and hints of his permanent departure from the arena began to recur almost as often as the “Attack on the Settler’s Cabin.” He first hinted at retirement as early as 1877, when he announced he would leave the stage and spend the rest of his days on his ranch.21 Throughout the 1890s, he mused in public about leaving the Wild West show. For all the difficulties with Louisa, he still returned to Nebraska during every break from the road. He took long hunting and camping trips. As he aged, he seems to have been drawn ever more to home in the West.
The problem was how to find his rightful place there, as the old century gave way to the new. For a man who lived his life as a performance of the story of progress, the real challenge was in the denouement. He was acutely aware that how his life story ended would determine its meaning for the public. Commenting on how stories work, the philosopher David Carr observes that “only from the perspective of the end do the beginning and middle make sense.”22 If Cody’s life ended in the poorhouse, his biography would assume the dimensions of tragedy. If he ended it as a weary old showman, much of the authenticity of his early life, and of the frontier story, would be sacrificed. If he capped off his lifelong tale of frontier development with a triumphant culmination of real-life progress, he could validate the frontier myth he claimed as his own. From the mid-1890s on, William Cody dedicated himself to the search for an ending.
His ef
forts were of two kinds. On the one hand, Cody knew the manifold importance of entrepreneurialism as a real generator of wealth, as the commerce that expressed the maturity of civilization and its final stage of development, as evidence of the vitality and energy that characterized Anglo-Saxondom, and as proof of another great myth of America, the self-made man. To make a living in commerce required an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to tolerate setbacks. An estimated 95 percent of American businesses failed between 1873 and 1893.23 A wise man with money invested in a lot of different places.
Or so Cody seemed to think. His phenomenal energy spun off into dozens of different businesses after 1890. He invested heavily in theatrical productions, particularly in backing his lover, Katherine Clemmons. He bought bonds in a British short-line railroad in 1892. In 1893, he partnered with Frank “White Beaver” Powell to found the Cody-Powell Coffee Company, manufacturer and distributor of Panmalt Coffee. “Three pounds of Panmalt Coffee can be bought for the price of one pound of Java, and one pound of Panmalt is equal in strength and will go as far as a pound of Java, Mocha, or Rio.” He offered guiding services for tourist hunters out of Sheridan, Wyoming. For his sister Helen and her husband, Hugh Wetmore, and partly to advertise his other businesses, he bought a newspaper, the Duluth Press, and an office building in which to house it.24
The survival of American capitalism depended ever more on sales of consumer goods, and that entailed the expansion of sales, the sales pitch. Cody opened his show programs to advertisers. After 1893, audiences could read not only about Buffalo Bill’s lifelong adventures and the history of the show, but also pitches for Mennen’s Borated Talcum Powder, Sweet Orr & Co. Overalls Pants & Shirts, “The Best Union Made,” and Quaker Oats, “the Sunshine of the Breakfast Table—Accept No Substitutes.” There were ads for toys, for tools, for guns, for suspenders, and for bicycles. Cody himself endorsed more products personally: “I always use Winchester rifles and Winchester ammunition.” The John B. Stetson Company depicted “Buffalo Bill and his Stetson Hat.” Another enticed customers with the effectiveness of B. T. Babbitt’s Soap, “Used by this Show.”25 In their ongoing quest for markets to stave off overproduction and renew the economy, advertisers found in Buffalo Bill and his frontier originals at least a sheen of authenticity for manufactured goods, and Cody discovered a supplemental, if small, stream of cash.