Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

16 With Amusement for Alllittle more than blackfaced versions of heroes from southwestern humor.”Crockett, the famed Tennessee frontiersman, trumpeted his own exploits inthe immensely successful Crockett Almanacs. He touted his ability to outdrinkand outfight anyone. As a child, he supposedly consumed a pint ofwhiskey with his breakfast and a quart with his lunch. In one fight, he reportedlybit his opponent’s big toe off. After another, he “picked up threeheads and half a dozen legs an [sic] arms, and carried ’em home to Mrs.Crockett to kindle fire with.” Once, just as he prepared to pop an adversary’seye out (“like taking up a gooseberry in a spoon”), the fight ended.Similarly, river boatmen such as Mike Fink boasted reputations as “halfhorse, half alligator.” 15Like Crockett and Fink, who humbled and thumbed their noses atsnobbish aristocrats, the Jim Crow stage character quickly evolved into abrawling, boisterous tough guy, proclaiming, as Rice did: “When I got outI hit a man, / His name I now forget, / But dere was nothing left / ’Sept alittle grease spot.” Rice could supposedly “wip my weight in wildcats” or“eat an Alligator.” He was part “snapping turtle, / Nine-tenths of a bulldog. I’ve turned the Mississippy, / All for a pint of grog.” 16The blackface acts of the 1830s helped express a developing workingclassconsciousness and often contained messages of contempt for privilegedgroups. It was not by accident that minstrel shows found exuberantaudiences in places such as the Bowery section of lower Manhattan. Norwas it coincidental that minstrelsy became a popular rage among laborerswhen it did. By the 1830s, the U.S. economy was clearly in the throes of adramatic transformation. The opening in 1825 of the Erie Canal, an engineeringtriumph, provided a powerful symbolic marker of the changes underway. The 364-mile channel connected Lake Erie with the Hudson River,allowing goods and people to move, as never before, to and from the northernfrontier areas and New York City. Virtually overnight, the small upstatetown of Rochester became a bustling commercial city and a microcosmof the economic adjustments that marked an emerging industrial system inthe Northeast. In cities such as Rochester, a social wall increasingly separatedlaborers and their employers, who had once worked in small shopsalongside each other, talking and drinking together, and sometimes evensharing living quarters. As businesses became more lucrative, the ownerstended to relocate to residential sites outside the industrial districts, leavingbehind a kind of working-class ghetto, a low-rent area with a floating populationand a reputation for vice and crime—and a target for a growingbody of moral reformers from the swelling ranks of an identifiable bourgeoisie.An economy of self-sufficient artisans increasingly gave way to oneof wage earners in the employ of industrial and merchant entrepreneurs.New forms of work discipline accompanied the shifts to more mechanized