American Fun (54 page)
Authors: John Beckman
This book is deeply indebted to generations of historiographers and journalists whose investigations into all of these events and eras make it possible to tell fun’s broader story. It is also indebted to the many libraries where I found these scholars’ books as well as primary and unpublished materials. Many thanks to the circulation and special collections departments at Shields Library (UC Davis), Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley), Widener and Houghton libraries (Harvard), and the Beinecke Library (Yale). I am especially grateful to the generous and gifted Nimitz librarians at the U.S. Naval Academy who have supported this book’s research at every stage: Katherine Lang, David Dudek, Nick Brown, Jack Martin, Jerry Alomar, Mary Danna, and Linda McLeod in Circulation; Michael Macan in Reference; Jennifer Bryan and David D’Onofrio in Special Collections; Florence Todd and Margaret Danchik in Interlibrary Loan. Diana Lachatanere, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, provided indispensable help—as did Amber Paranick and Margaret Kiechefer (among many others) at the Library of Congress; Rick Watson at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center; Christopher Geissler at Brown
University’s John Hay Library; and Benjamin Gocker and Ivy Marvel at the Brooklyn Public Library. Many thanks to Ray Raphael for his invaluable insights and critique of my treatment of Samuel Adams, and to Andy Shernoff, the Christopher Columbus of Punk, for kindly fact-checking my account of the era that he made legend. Warm thanks to Adam Goodheart, Peter Manseau, and Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
The two heroes of
American Fun
are Steve Wasserman, my indefatigable agent at Kneerim & Williams, who has shaped and championed the manuscript for years, against all odds, and Keith Goldsmith, my ever-constant editor at Pantheon, who has encouraged and challenged me through three full drafts, always applying the full force of his powerful intellect. My deepest gratitude to both of you for your faith, patience, generosity, and commitment. Many thanks to my agent Kathryn Beaumont, who has gallantly taken over the helm from Steve. Among the many people at Pantheon who have made this book, my special thanks to Nicholas Latimer, Andrew Miller, Susanna Sturgis for her gimlet-eyed copyediting, Cassandra Pappas for her elegant designing, Pablo Delcán for the stunning jacket, Michelle Somers for getting fun attention, and Roméo Enriquez, Ellen Feldman, and Andrew Dorko for managing production with such élan.
Among all the brilliant fellows and affiliates in my wife’s Nieman year, particular thanks goes to Alysia Abbott and Jeff Howe, Ashwini Tambe and Shankar Vedantam, Alissa Quart and Peter Maass, and Beth Macy and Tom Landon for their unfailingly fun counsel and company. Among the beloved Americans, native and naturalized, who have supported and inspired me throughout this long project, I thank the following: Ed Carew has been my brother in crime since Catholic school, as have the Wahlert Golden Eagles Alan Hennagir and Thomas Lally. Bill Martin has seen me through it all. As have Gus “Gustavo” Rose and Nami “Naminko” Mun. Thomas Heise (who has too), Andrew Strombeck, and Robert Balog have guided/goaded me through bicoastal underworlds. Lev Grossman (who has too) and Sophie Gee are our model family. Jason Shaffer (who has too) is my early American maharishi. Mick Calhoun has been my brick. Tom Bissell, on this and
other books, has been my godfather, and Julie Barer has been my rock. Tom De Haven and Steve Dunn are the sweetest men on earth. Glenn Keyser and Wendy Low (“Gwendy”) have always indulged me. Gary (“Sir Novitz”) Sernovitz cracks me up. Christy Stanlake and Judah Nyden have been no end of fun, as have Jeff Alexander and Amber Hoover, John and Barbara Hill, and Mick and Becky Loggins.
My parents, Ann and Jerry, and my brother, Tom, have been loving, lifelong champions of anything I pursue. My parents-in-law, Pedro and Cathy Valdes and Dan and Ximena Sessler, have been amazingly supportive.
My dearest Katy, you’ve taught me my finest lessons in life. My dearest Evita, now you’re doing it too. My dearest Marcela, you’re the heart and soul of everything I do.
I
N FOND MEMORY OF
G
EORGE
W
HITMAN
(1913–2011), A
MERICAN FUN
’
S AMBASSADOR TO
P
ARIS
INTRODUCTION
1.
“
heroes and heroines
”: “East Defies West in Dance Marathon,”
New York Times,
April 19, 1923, 22. See also Carol Martin,
Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the
1920s and
1930s
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 14–15.
2.
“
the pioneer spirit of early America
”: Frederick Nelson, “The Child Stylites of Baltimore,”
The New Republic,
August 28, 1929, 37.
3.
“
wandered aimlessly toward the door
”: “Tri-State Dance Marathon Ends in 69 Hours; Police Stop It After Woman Breaks Records,”
New York Times,
April 18, 1923, 6.
4.
“
I’m Irish; do you suppose
”: “East Defies West,” 22.
5.
“
sport, high merriment, and frolicksome delight
”:
Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary:
Selections from the
1755 Work That Defined the English Language,
ed. Jack Lynch (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002), 202.
6.
we haven’t had a history of fun
: Or perhaps more precisely, we haven’t had a history of the fun-as-radical-merriment that this book endeavors to present. At least three books, from three different eras, offer mighty precedents; they give essential histories of, respectively, humor, play, and commercial amusement. Constance Rourke’s classic study,
American Humor: On the National Character
(1931), examines
Jackson Age comic almanacs and other nineteenth-century sources and tracks several strong currents in performance and folk culture that helped to shape an American identity (New York: New York Review Books, 2004). In
America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation,
1607–1940
(Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), Foster Rhea Dulles provides a detailed and often witty history of American recreation and play. And most recently, in his exhaustive history
With Amusement for All: A History of Popular Culture Since
1830
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), LeRoy Ashby gives what he calls “an interpretive synthesis of almost two hundred years of American entertainment: the sale, and purchase, of fun.” It makes good sense that Ashby’s study begins in 1830, with the rise of P. T. Barnum and blackface minstrelsy, America’s earliest innovations in the mass production of a certain kind of “fun”—amusements Ashby categorically (and rightly) divides “from the folk games, festivals, and celebrations that had marked societies around the globe for centuries” (vii–viii). To a large degree,
American Fun
is about the tenacity of such lingering folk fun, despite the entertainment
industry’s indomitable campaign.
7.
“
civilizing function
,” “
enjoyment
,” “
play
,” “
play-element
”: Johan Huizinga,
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 11.
8.
“
creates order,
is
order
”: Ibid., 10.
9.
“
the
fun
of playing
”: Ibid., 3.
10.
“
in passing
,” “
it is precisely
”: Ibid., 10.
11.
“merely” fun
: Ibid., 33.
12.
“
only for fun
”: Ibid., 8.
13.
“
make believe
”: Ibid., 24.
14.
“
no other modern language
”: Ibid., 3.
15.
“
comes from doing
”: Anand Giridharadas, “America and the Fun Generation,”
New York Times,
October 29, 2010.
16.
“
pure democracy
”: James Madison, “No. 10,”
The Federalist Papers: Hamilton, Madison, Jay
(New York: Penguin, 1961), 81. These ideas are nothing new. The notion that
participatory democracy, active citizenship, and an engaged civil society all depend for their vitality on direct civic action and conflict derives from a long discursive tradition. On the short list of key texts informing this line of argument are, following the Students for a Democratic Society’s “Port Huron Statement” (1962): Carole Pateman,
Participation and Democratic Theory
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); C. Douglas Lummis,
Radical Democracy
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics,
2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001); Benjamin R. Barber,
Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
17.
“
Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun
”: Jeff Chang and DJ Kool Herc,
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop:
A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 120.
18.
“
falling into fattened hands
”: Patti Smith,
Just Kids
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 245.
THE FOREFATHER OF AMERICAN FUN1.
“
civill body politick
,” “
most meete & convenient
”: William Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), 70.
2.
those who trace America’s democratic tradition
: As Mark L. Sargent demonstrates, the Mayflower Compact, originally cited as a loyalist document, gradually was embraced as an original vestige of American democracy by nonpartisan framer
James Wilson and presidents John and
John Quincy Adams. In “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth,”
New England Quarterly
61, no. 2 (June 1988): 233–51. Nathaniel Philbrick cites Pastor
John Robinson’s farewell letter to the
Separatists, which advises them to “become a body politic, using amongst [themselves] civil government,” as evidence that the compact was meant to lay “the basis for a secular government in America”—though of course Robinson wasn’t along to frame said government or to see it through.
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
(New York: Viking, 2006), 41.
3.
“
discontented & mutinous speeches
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
69.
4.
“
to be as firme as any patent
”: Ibid.
5.
“
godly
”: Ibid., 70.
6.
Bradford’s childhood was filled with misery
: Perry D. Westbrook,
William Bradford
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 17–27; Bradford Smith,
Bradford of Plymouth
(New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1951), 70–71.
7.
“
grave & revered
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
27.
8.
“
not out of any newfangledness
”: Ibid., 38–39.
9.
“
evill examples
”: Ibid., 39. See also Wm. Elliot Griffis,
The Influence of the Netherlands in the Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic
(Boston: DeWolfe Fiske & Co., 1891); Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter,
The England and Holland of the
Pilgrims
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 548–90.
10.
“
those vast & unpeopled
”: Bradford,
Of
Plymouth Plantation,
40.
11.
“
lustie,
” “
very profane younge
”: Ibid., 57.
12.
“
spared no pains
,” “
had been boone companions
,” “
but a small cann of beere
”: Ibid., 71.
13.
“
lusty yonge men
”: Ibid., 80.
14.
“
pitching the barr
,” “
implements
,” “
gameing and reveling
,” “
mirth
,” “
at least openly
”: Ibid., 83.
15.
“
buggery,
” “
a mare, a cowe
,” “
sadd accidente
,” “
lesser catle
,” “
Then he him selfe
,” “
and no use made
”: Ibid., 202. Detailed accounts of sexual surveillance and criminalization in the New England colonies can be found in James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz’s
The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Plantation
(New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001), 131–70, and in Richard Godbeer’s
Sexual Revolution in Early America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 84–116.
16.
“
how one wicked person
,” “
so many wicked persons
,” “
mixe them selves amongst
,” “
such wickedness
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
203.
17.
Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan”
: Merry Mount received newfound attention in the liberal academic climate of the 1960s and 1970s, its vogue reaching a climax in 1977, incidentally the peak of America’s sexual revolution. That year at least four scholars gave Morton and his merrymakers their moment in the sun. Karen Ordahl Kupperman argued against the long-held but unproven assumption that Morton was ousted for selling firearms to the Indians, asserting, in his defense, that Native American archery was known to be more effective than Pilgrim warcraft and that the latter more likely wanted to hoard the fur-trade market share. In “Thomas Morton, Historian,”
New England Quarterly
50, no. 4 (December 1977): 660–64. Michael Zuckerman dismissed the Pilgrims’ practical motives (apart from their abiding jealousy that Merry Mount ran a 700 percent profit while Plymouth Plantation operated at a loss), focusing instead on ample evidence that Morton “threatened what [the Pilgrims] lived for”—by celebrating the horrid wilderness; by eating, drinking, speaking, and “[keeping] sexual company” with the hated Indians; and especially for enjoying “carnal pleasure” for reasons other than “procreation,” “utility.” “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,”
New England Quarterly
50, no. 2 (June 1977): 255–77. John Seelye, in his sparkling account, reads Morton as “an American version of Falstaff” and America itself as a “zone of pleasure.”
Prophetic Waters
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 169, 166. John P. McWilliams Jr. argued that the chroniclers of Merry Mount’s Maypole fracas historically fall into two historical groups: “Post-Revolutionary Americans” who “saw in Merry Mount the opportunity for reflection on the origins of the national character” and “twentieth-century writers” who used the same story to “[trace] the beginnings of failure, decline, or betrayal.” “Fictions of Merry Mount,”
American Quarterly
29, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 4. With one notable exception, Nathaniel Hawthorne, these two partisan groups are fundamentally opposed. The Post-Revolutionary Americans—who include Bradford himself, Catherine Sedgwick, Charles Francis Adams Jr., Whittier, and Longfellow—might be called, in the fight over fun, “Bradfordites”: they dismiss Thomas Morton as the pettifogger, scofflaw, con man, and/or idiot who threatened our young nation’s safety and integrity by selling firearms to savage terrorists. The
twentieth-century camp—including Morton himself, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Vincent Benét, Robert Lowell, and Richard Slotkin—could as easily be called “Mortonites.” These writers tout Merry Mount as the first frontier, an amoral outpost a stone’s throw from Plymouth, where sexual, political, and racial freedoms were squelched by mean-spirited philistines. But it is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of events, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1834)—a fanciful short story that historically belongs among the Post-Revolutionaries, while thematically anticipating Morton’s modern champions—whose very popularity gives it the last word. This staple of college survey courses secures the incident in our national imagination as a missed opportunity for American democracy, which, alas, could have been such fun, had the majority not been too sober to pursue it.
18.
“
hidious & desolate wilderness
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
60.
19.
“
long[s] to be sped
”: Thomas Morton,
New English Canaan, or New Canaan
(Amsterdam: Jacob Frederick Stam, 1637), 10; facsimile edition (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
20.
“
science
,” “
Art of Revels
”: Sir George Buck,
The Thirde Universitie of London,
accessed August 13, 2012, from
http://www.winerock.netau.net/sources/stow_third_universitie.html
, where the transcription is explained as such: “from the NYPL Mid-Manhattan Research Library’s copy of selected dance-relevant passages of Sir George Buck’s
The Third Universitie of England,
an appendix to the 1615 edition of John Stow’s
The Annales, Or Generall Chronicle of England
finished and edited by Edmond Howes. London: Thomas Adams, 1615, as well as a few passages from the main
Annales
text. The 1631 edition as viewed at the British Library also contains
The Third Universitie of England,
but while the main text differs, the ‘Orchestice’ and other
Third Universitie
passages are the same.”
21.
“
Master of Revels
”: Robert R. Pearce,
A history of the Inns of Court and Chancery: with notices of their ancient discipline, rules, orders, and customs, readings, moots, masques…
(London, 1848), 114–22.
22.
“
did endeavour to take a survey
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
59–60.
23.
“
Infidels
”: Ibid., 17.
24.
“
the continuall danger of the salvage people
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
40–41. It was commonly held among early-modern Europeans that indigenous peoples needed to be “reduced to civility” from their current state of “barbarism” before they could receive Christianity. Until then, they were assumed to be lazy, disorderly, anarchic, unmannered, oversexed, and suspiciously itinerant. No moral creature would freely live in the wilderness without trying to bring its chaos to order. “The only acceptable notion of order,” James Axtell writes of the Pilgrims, “was the order they had known at home, the all-encompassing order of institutions, written-law, and hierarchy.” James Axtell,
The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137–38.
25.
“
new creede
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
113.
26.
“
modesty,”
“
cumbered
,” “
feate
,” “
Diogenes hurle away his dishe
”: Ibid., 57.
27.
“
without Religion, Law, and King
”: Ibid., 49.
28.
“
uncivilized
,” “
more just than the civilized
”: Ibid., 125.
29.
“
poore wretches,
” “
beggers
”: Ibid., 55.
30.
“
feats and jugling tricks
”: Ibid., 34.
31.
“
worshipped
Pan
”: Ibid., 18.
32.
“
According to human reason
”: Ibid., 57.
33.
“
I, having a parte
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
140.
34.
“
fell to great licentiousness
,” “
gott much by trading with Indeans
”: Ibid., 140–41.
35.
protesting too much
: Anderson also suggests that Bradford’s fanciful monologue may have been a poke at his contemporary Levellers, who “had come to represent an extreme expression of radical Protestant ideology.”
William Bradford’s Books:
Of Plimmoth Plantation
and the Printed Word
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 142.
36.
“
worthy wights
,” “
And pitty ’t is I cannot call them Knights
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
146. Michelle Burnham, reading
New English Canaan
“in the context of Morton’s already intersecting regional and transcontinental economic relationships,” makes a compelling point: that Morton “offers readers a kind of aristocratic colonial fantasy” by “promis[ing] would-be planter-gentlemen the pastoral possibilities of unlimited pleasure and leisure,” but she reads the text quite narrowly to conclude that he dismisses Indians and
bondservants alike as faceless economic resources. Despite Morton’s obvious embrace of his contemporary culture and economics (the pastoral, Saturnalia, fur trading, tourism), what distinguishes his book (and colony) from those of his peers is both his explicit criticism of aristocratic “heraldry” and his deep and careful appreciation for these devalued groups’ craftsmanship, intelligence, and human dignity. “Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton’s
New English Canaan,
”
Early American Literature
41, no. 3 (November 2006): 405, 425.
37.
“
Fouling peeces
,” “
the hants of all sorts of game
,” “
all the scume of the countrie
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
142–43.
38.
the name’s witty abominations
: Richard Slotkin,
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,
1600
–
1860
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 58–65.
39.
“
memorial to after ages
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
132.
40.
“
they call it Merie-mounte
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
141.
41.
“
Jollity and gloom were contending
”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales,
ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 88–93.
42.
“
a barrel of excellent beare
,” “
the olde English custome
,” “
faire sea marke
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
132.
43.
“
wombe
,” “
art & industry
,” “
darck obscurity
”: Ibid., 10.
44.
“
a Satyrist
”: Ibid., 9.
45.
making Merry Mount last
: Hawthorne’s short story, written during the dreariest period in Native American history, seems to echo this poignant wish. It stages an actual wedding in the scene, but jollity’s empire is nipped in the bud when the Lord and Lady of the May, “madly gay in the flush of youth,” are dragged away in the end by the Pilgrims, those “most dismal wretches.” Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” 92–93.
