Coney Island The New American Culture Analysis

As time and different ethnic groups pass by, America is transforming and shaping their definition of American culture. So far, America went through the change of becoming more urban and industrial. With society that’s focused on industries, leisure and fun was a rare thing to think about. Soon enough, Coney Island emerges to serve as an escapade from the strict genteel order. Kasson argues the fact that Coney Island was more than an amusement park, it was known as the visualization of the new American culture, straying away from the Victorian Genteel order, at the turn of the century. Of course, “the popular resort quickly became a symbol not only of fun and frolic but also of major changes in American manners and morals.” (13) As Coney Island becomes more popular with “strikingly heterogenous and diverse population with a variety of culture and subcultures” (8) it was a good mechanism “to provide cultural leadership for an urban-industrial society; to present a model of social order, cohesions, and tranquility for a fractious people.” (14) As Coney Island was becoming more popular and entertaining as the population grew, and “the genteel middle-class cultural order crumbled” (10) and in came the less modest and more free minded individual. Although many of the older people stayed with their genteel way of thinking, the new
generation became “of age around the turn of the century” (8). Coney island also shaped how the younger generation thought and spoke about things by the pool of diversity at the time. They would fully “immerse themselves in issues and experience outside the categories of genteel respectability…working class and ethnic minorities, in muckraking journalism of business and politics, in artistic realism and modernism, in feminism, education, and other fields” (8). So, with the new generation taking on new or upcoming careers as they came of age, it began “changing economic and social conditions helped to create the basis of a new mass culture which would gradually emerge in the first decades of the twentieth century” (6). Coney Island, an amusement park, an escapade from life, they “embraced activities which had previously existed only on the margins of American life” (10), brought in new people from foreign lands, who brought along work, ideas, and the ability to immerse into the American life through an amusement park. After all, Kasson strongly emphasizes on the fact how the amusement park wasn’t just for fun.
It was a business that could bring in anyone and come together in enjoyment and leisure, he also “measured the cost not only in the most obvious “social failures”: the swelling ranks of criminals and prostitutes, of the alcoholic, insane, diseased, and the poor” (14). Being able to relax and escape from routine life is great to anyone, and transforming from a strict Victorian order to being able to express oneself more clearly because they are able to escape somewhere such as Coney Island and stimulate their mind other than school and
work