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| On a summer Sunday, more than a million people sometimes visited Coney Island. Photo by Weegee. |
To the fastidious Lanny Budd the
worst thing of all was their emptiness of mind. They had come for a holiday,
and wanted to be entertained, and there was a seemingly endless avenue of
devices contrived for the purpose. For prices from a dime up, you could be
lifted on huge revolving wheels, or whirled around sitting on brightly colored
giraffes and zebras; you could ride in tiny cars which bumped into one another,
you could walk in dark tunnels which were a perpetual earthquake, or in bright
ones where sudden breezes whipped up the women’s skirts and made them scream;
you could be frightened by ghosts and monsters — in short, you could have a
thousand fantastic things done to you, all expressive of the fact that you were
an animal and not a being with a mind, you could be humiliated and made
ridiculous, but rarely indeed on Coney Island could you be uplifted or inspired
or taught any useful thing. Lanny took this nightmare place as an embodiment of
all the degradations which capitalism inflicted on the swarming millions of its
victims. Anything to keep them from thinking.
… (H)e got himself into a red-hot
argument with a carload of his young companions, who had drawn their own
conclusions from this immersion in carnality. Irma, who monopolized a half-mile
of ocean front, was disgusted that anyone should be content to squat upon ten
or a dozen square feet of it. Her childhood playmate, Babs Lorimer, whose
father had once had a “corner” in wheat, drew political conclusions from the
spectacle and wondered how anybody could conceive of the masses having anything
to say about the running of government. “Noodles” Winthrop — his name was
Newton — whose widowed mother collected a small fraction of a cent from
everyone who rode to Coney Island on a street railway, looked at the problem
biologically, and said he couldn’t imagine how such ugly creatures survived, or
why they desired to.
— From “Dragon’s Teeth” by Upton Sinclair
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