American Fun Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by John Beckman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music Publishing for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Let’s Misbehave” (from Paris), words and music by Cole Porter, copyright © 1927 (Renewed) by WB Music Corp. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music Publishing.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

  Beckman, John.

  American fun : four centuries of joyous revolt / John Beckman.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-90817-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-307-90818-6 (eBook)

  1. United States—Social life and customs. 2. Amusements—

  United States—History. 3. Popular culture—

  United States—History. I. Title.

  E161.B43 2014 306.0973—dc23 2013021015

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Pablo Delcán

  v3.1

  For Marcela

  There’s something wild

  About you, child,

  That’s so contagious,

  Let’s be outrageous,

  Let’s misbehave.

  —cole porter,

  “Let’s Misbehave”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. The Forefather of American Fun

  2. Jack Tar, Unbound

  3. Technologies of Fun

  4. A California Education

  5. Selling It Back to the People

  6. Barnumizing America

  7. Merry Mount Goes Mainstream

  8. “Joyous Revolt”: The “New Negro” and the “New Woman”

  9. Zoot Suit Riots

  10. A California Education, Redux

  11. Revolution for the Hell of It

  12. Mustangers Have More Fun

  13. Doing It Yourself, Getting the Joke

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction

  On April 15, 1923, eight marathon dancers, aged nineteen to twenty-eight, outran the law for a chance to make history. For twenty-nine hours straight, as weaker contestants limped off the floor, they had twirled and swung each other’s bodies to the fox-trot, two-step, and bunny hug. At midnight, New York police enforced a law that put a twelve-hour cap on marathon activities. They ordered the kids to cease and desist, but the dancers wanted none of it. They danced en masse out the doors of the Audubon Ballroom, across the 168th Street sidewalk, and into the back of an idling van. They danced in the van’s jumpy confines all the way to the Edgewater ferry, on whose decks they danced across the choppy Hudson, before being portaged like a cage of exotic birds and released into New Jersey’s Pekin dance hall.

  They had been there only an hour when more cops shoved them along, and so it would go for the next two days. The venues kept changing, and the comedy mounting, as they crossed and recrossed the tri-state lines, cheerfully dancing all the while. They shed a few compatriots to squirrelly exhaustion and gave reporters a private audience in an undisclosed Harlem apartment. Back in the van, they cut fantastic steps on their way to Connecticut, where the contest would reach its strange conclusion.

  The New York Times, filing updates as the events unfolded, struck a distinctly American tone: they touted the dancers as the pinnacle of youth—of vigor, ambition, free expression—calling them “heroes and heroines … alive with the spirit of civic pride.” But they scorned the cops as “mean old thing[s]” who should have been ashamed of enforcing “meddlesome old laws.” As tensions mounted they framed a rivalry between the upstart “West” and the noble “East.” (Dancers from Cleveland had set the record only a few days before.) The upshot of all this ballyhoo, of course, was that the reporters took none of it too seriously. The Times just wanted to join the party and to let their readers join it too.

  But their patriotism wasn’t all tongue-in-cheek. Youthful antics in the 1920s were often held up as national virtues. Alma Cummings, who had set the first dance-marathon record that March, was honored with the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Avon O. Foreman, a fifteen-year-old flagpole sitter, was recognized in 1929 by the mayor of Baltimore for showing “the pioneer spirit of early America.” In an era when Prohibition had divided the country and the KKK had nearly five million members, the splashy high jinks of free-spirited youths were for many a welcome vision of good-natured resistance. They called to mind the Sons of Liberty—or Huck Finn lighting out to the territory.

  Things got weird in the marathon’s endgame. At two o’clock on Sunday morning, when the van arrived at an athletic club in East Port Chester, judges disqualified two of the last four contestants for sleeping in transit, leaving Vera Sheppard, nineteen, and Ben Solar, twenty-three, to rally for the record. At 8 a.m. Solar broke away from Sheppard and “wandered aimlessly toward the door, like a sleep-walker.” Smelling salts revived him for precisely two minutes. When he collapsed, and was out, the ever-vigorous Sheppard—performing “better than at any time during the night”—galloped on with a series of relief partners. The good citizens of Connecticut, fearing for her health, or maybe her soul, had police stop the madness at 3:30 p.m. Only with special permission was she allowed to dance past four o’clock, at which point she demolished the world record. “Miss Sheppard’s condition at the close,” the Times reported, “was surprisingly good.” She had also lost a cool ten pounds.

  Vera Sheppard wasn’t your typical rebel. An office worker from Long Island City, she lived at home with her father and two sisters and gave dance lessons most nights till twelve. She wasn’t even your typical flapper. But when her sisters attributed her endurance to prayer and the fact that she didn’t drink or smoke, Sheppard preferred to answer for herself. Showing all-American pride in her ethnic difference, she told reporters: “I’m Irish; do you suppose I could have stuck it out otherwise?” What kept her going for sixty-nine hours was “thinking what good fun it was.”

  Sheppard liked to dance, and she was willing to risk it if what she liked was against the law. More to the point, she enjoyed those risks. But her Jazz Age “fun” wasn’t just the boon of a wealthy country at the height of its powers. It wasn’t even a whirl on Coney Island’s Loop-the-Loop. Her cheeky dance across three state lines, as pure and innocent as it seemed, was underwritten by centuries of studied rebellion that made it quintessentially American. Sheppard and her cheering section at the Times were heirs to a raffish national tradition that flaunted pleasure in the face of authority.

  This book traces the lines of that tradition.

  AMERICAN HISTORY GIVES US one good brawl after another. Indians fought Pilgrims; pirates bullied merchants; Patriots bloodied Redcoats’ noses; slaves outwitted, sometimes butchered their masters; and hot young peppers—from Kentucky backwoodsmen to Bowery b’hoys, to greasers, break-dancers, and Riot Grrrls—declared civil war on a mincing middle class that wanted them to fall in line. “Hell, no!” Americans have always said—and such is the kernel of the national identity.

  So how has such a tumultuous public, historically riven by deep social differences (class division, racial prejudice, partisan politics, culture wars) ever gathered in peaceable activity, let alone done it time and again? The answer is by having fun—often outrageous, even life-threatening fun. This enduring purs
uit, so popular with Americans, can make even the scariest social differences exciting; it can bring even the bitterest adversaries into a state of feverous harmony. For conflict is the active ingredient in fun. Risk, transgression, mockery, rebellion—these are the revving motors of fun. True, wild fun can be downright criminal: the pirate’s joy in plundering and murder, the gangster’s joy in disturbing the peace—and such violent kinds of self-serving fun have sometimes put our democracy in peril. But all throughout American history the people have also proven to be radically civil—not too polite, not so clean, but practicing a rough-and-tumble respect for other people’s fun. At even the diciest moments in history the people’s rebellion has strengthened democracy. It has allowed the people to form close bonds in spite of prejudices, rivalries, and laws.

  The scuffles and clashes depicted in this book follow a striking pattern. A group of rebels, usually much rowdier than Vera Sheppard’s crew, takes joy in resisting a stern ruling class and entices the people to follow its lead. In many of these cases, inspired by the rebels’ good humor and daring, the people take to reveling in the same bad behaviors (or demographic or ethnic differences) for which the group was originally repressed. Such good-natured combat gives a twofold pleasure. On the one hand, its “fun” (in the word’s seventeenth-century sense) is the pleasure of mocking the ruling class for its unjust sanctions and small-minded rigidity. It’s the fun of breaking the master’s laws. On the other hand, in the word’s eighteenth-century sense—of Samuel Johnson’s “sport, high merriment, and frolicksome delight”—it’s the fun of pranks, lewd dances, wild parties, and tough competitions that unites the crowd in common joy. It’s the fun of eluding laws together, in playful, active, comical ways that often model good citizenship.

  VERA SHEPPARD’S VICTORY—over ministers, over magistrates, over the American Society of Teachers of Dancing, who declared marathons “a disgrace to the art and profession of dancing”—inspired countless others to jump into the game, to push their limits in the name of silliness. Dance marathons peaked in the Great Depression (despite grim portrayals like Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), and they provided a vibrant public space for folks of all races, classes, and politics to duke it out on the dance floor. During this golden age of the movie theater, when audiences sat rank and file in the dark, die-hard marathons kept citizens participating.

  Sheppard’s little victory, harmless as it was, called up centuries of American rebels who had only wanted to unite the people, even as they stirred them up. These fun-loving troublemakers, as this book will show, reveled in defying authority’s laws and limits. Obstacles only got them excited. Obstacles gave them something to work with. For beyond these obstacles, as many of them discovered, was a luscious frontier of liberty and equality.

  As early as the 1620s, when the Pilgrims left free-and-easy Holland to build their fortress of cold austerity, a radical democrat named Thomas Morton, schooled in English Renaissance hedonism, founded Merry Mount thirty miles to the north and devoted himself and his band of rogues to all of the excesses outlawed at Plymouth. They drank and danced and consorted with the Massachusetts. Their May Day revels, and the showdown to follow, put New World fun in high relief: there was freedom to be found in the wilderness, but you had to be ready to fight for it.

  The Pilgrims won, as we know, and their Puritan cousins swarmed in by the thousands, founding an empire on the Calvinist belief that people were fundamentally depraved. Folks were whipped, maimed, and executed just for following their carnal whims. If Puritans condoned anything close to carnival, it took the form of violent orgies like the tarring-and-featherings where the common folk did the minister’s dirty work. Otherwise, throughout much of early New England, people limited their public gatherings to the stone-cold-sober meetinghouse, where they sat through often terrifying lessons in obedience, piety, and self-restraint.

  Waterfront taverns were the Puritans’ scourge. It was out of these taverns, where Jack Tars and dockworkers and bare-shouldered women stomped to the jigs of African-American fiddlers, that the earliest tremors of the American Revolution first rattled New England’s top-down society. Radical politicians like James Otis and Samuel Adams (against the wishes of his snobbish cousin John) courted this salty counterculture and tapped their love of rebellious fun as a sensible way to bring down the British. To be sure, in the 1760s and 1770s, it wasn’t musket balls and cannonballs but pranks, mockery, satire, and snowballs that set the tone for the early republic. Then as now, the Sons of Liberty—burning puppets, dressing as Mohawks, staging citywide practical jokes—hold high honors in the national imagination. Their antics taught disgruntled subjects how to act like citizens.

  In the laid-back antebellum South, the land of mint juleps and hootenannies, public pleasure rarely caused much fuss. This aristocratically minded social system turned a kinder eye on fun. But even as members of the slave-owning élite, kicking back on their wraparound porches, reveled in the songs and marvelous dances that emanated from the slave quarters—sometimes even stepping down themselves to stamp a foot or give it a whirl—the vicious injustice that preserved their feudal lifestyles was shaping the practices of African-American fun. Intensely athletic, erotic dances struck a rough balance between old African styles and strictly enforced Methodist prohibitions. Jokes and folktales lampooned the master while teaching the people to maximize their pleasures. Even backbreaking work like cornshucking generated a repertoire of songs, games, celebrations, and jokes that asserted the slaves’ humanity and freedom. Such technologies of antebellum black fun, born of resistance and the thirst for liberty, laid the infrastructure for several of America’s most powerful rebel cultures: early jazz, rock ’n’ roll, funk, rap, step, and so on. The will to rebel, combined with a hedonistic will to gather, made for a heady social cocktail that perennially has energized the national youth scene.

  While young Vera Sheppard, of strong Irish stock, crossed state borders in the back of a van, her arm on the shoulder of an older man, the “talking machine” grinding King Oliver rolls, she didn’t waste a single thought on her Puritan forebears, her revolutionary forefathers, her African-American benefactors. Of course she didn’t—she was caught up in the act. Nor should she have bothered to thank her antecedents on the nineteenth-century frontier. All the same, the Wild West, with its love of the new and thirst for adventure and contempt for limits of any kind, was the great test kitchen for what Sheppard rightfully tossed off as “fun.” In the half century following the Revolutionary War, as cities grew fractious, overcrowded, and dirty, the Puritans’ lessons of separation and restraint came in handy when corralling a runaway U.S. population. These lessons inspired customs, codes, and laws for keeping the people, like horses, in paddocks: taverns were shuttered, theaters scrubbed up, and democracy-drunk Bowery b’hoys were eventually kept in check. At the same time, however, a rude and rugged class of argonauts chomped at the bit, bucked the saddle, and struck out for a land of fortune and danger where they could make their own civil society from scratch. Out West—from the rawest mining camps to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast—Aunt Sally’s starchy modes of “sivility” were ridiculed, razzed, perverted, eschewed, and supplanted with a basic love of fun. From famous humorists like Mark Twain and Dan De Quille down to anonymous jokers in disreputable saloons, these foul-mouthed rogues and seeming reprobates were in fact the innovators of a pleasure-based society where drinking, gambling, dancing, and pranks worked much better than vigilantes and religion to keep, more or less, the general peace.

  The Wild West hit the mainstream in the 1920s. Average citizens packed into speakeasies, calling themselves the “Wild Wets.” Reviving the memory of Thomas Morton at Merry Mount, folks flaunted a host of Puritan taboos in the face of the majority’s “Dry Crusade.” The spores and seeds of early black folk culture flourished, nationwide, in the so-called Harlem Renaissance. All of it emboldened even good girls like Sheppard. She didn’t drink or smoke or gamble, but she didn’t mind bendin
g a few blue laws to have a bit of fun.

  THERE’S A REASON WHY, until now, we haven’t had a history of fun. The word itself is too easily conflated with its sorry impostors, “entertainment,” “recreation,” and “leisure.” Look up “fun” in the American Heritage Dictionary, and the first two definitions involve passive “amusement.” Only definition three touches the subject of this book: “playful, often noisy, activity.”

  “Play” is not synonymous with “fun.” If “play” can be defined as sport or jest, “fun” is the pleasure one gets from this. Johan Huizinga implies this key distinction in Homo Ludens (1938), his seminal book on play’s “civilizing function.” He accepts “enjoyment” as a key incentive to play but then argues that play becomes serious, even disinterested, once the player gets caught up in the game. It is this bloodless sense of “play”—play that has been scoured of all messy pleasure—that Huizinga elevates to civic behavior in which play is no longer play as we know it but a simulacrum he calls the “play-element”—a practice as germane to business and law as it would be to running a touchdown. Examining play’s rules, not its unmanageable spirit, Huizinga reasons that play “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme.” He misses out on all the fun, however, when he exclaims that “the fun of playing resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” and for this reason, “as a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category.” As an idea, fun is fundamentally elusive. It is intractable, illogical, irreducible, but this is precisely why it is an element of “play” that remains worthy of close investigation. Huizinga adds “in passing” that “it is precisely this fun-element that characterizes the essence of play,” but from here on out he treats “fun” (when at all) as play’s least serious feature, “merely” fun, “only for fun,” “make believe,” and so on.