Everyday Peter Pans

Abstract

From 1900 to 1930, many middle-class men working in new urban consumer enterprises in the United States believed that they had never grown up, valued the work because it was fun, and attributed their achievements to their eternal boyishness. In doing so, they contributed to the creation of a commercial culture of Peter Pan, which reflected and encouraged new gender identities that validated and demarcated social roles and opportunities for men in a corporate consumer society. The three men examined in this article—the Coney Island showman Fred Thompson, the ethnologist Stewart Culin, and the Broadway comic actor Fred Stone—were involved in either developing, selling, or embodying new commodities of play. Like other such men, they both reflected and helped sanction the transition from a nineteenth-century market culture that condemned play as the negation of productive manhood to a twentieth-century consumer culture that marketed itself as the playground of boys who never grow up.