American Fun Read online

  Fun-loving, quick-witted “jubilee beating” also featured on Congo Square, where it injected some ego and biting satire into the circle dance’s eros.

  BY THE 1830s, such scenes of social harmony had grown quite rare in the overcrowded states. Andrew Jackson’s 1829 inauguration kicked off the era in characteristic style. Thousands of gawkers and office seekers, angered by too little ice cream and lemonade, too few government positions to go around, and only one presidential hand to shake, mobbed the White House for their share in the feast. They pushed through doors, tumbled through windows, and smashed a fortune in cut glass and china. (Old Hickory himself skipped out the back door.) Washington socialite Margaret Bayard Smith, the most-quoted witness of this infamous scene, sounds like John Adams defending the Boston Massacre: “The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling fighting, romping. What a pity what a pity!”

  Impromptu riots were common under Jackson. Despite the reformers’ shrill jeremiads, loudmouth, violent, disorderly mobs went to war in the city streets—fighting to achieve political goals, fighting to oust minority religions, fighting to suppress certain racial or ethnic groups—blacks and Irish, in particular. “Hangings and public executions of any kind,” the historian Edward Pessen notes, drew crowds from all levels of American society. Among all classes, personal differences were barbarously resolved through “stabbing, shooting, gouging out of eyes, biting off of nose or ears,” and personal differences cropped up frequently in this testy, preadolescent nation. Michael Feldberg examines the violence during this period and distinguishes in particular between “expressive” riots (in which self-identified groups of vigilantes, neighbors, partisans, and others come out swinging to show their solidarity) and “recreational” ones (in which “election riots, volunteer firemen’s riots, and street-gang battles, took on the character of organized team sports”). A popular recreation that was divisive and hateful, if not usually physically violent, was “Bobolition,” Northern parades (and accompanying pamphlets, newspapers, and songs) that made public mockery of African Americans and their public bids for abolition. Such recreational violence can be considered “fun,” even when it is sometimes lethal. It’s rowdy, satirical, ecstatic, spontaneously communal. But when the thrill of destruction trumps the joy of the crowd, it’s time to run for cover.

  During this same era, however, dance became a form of peaceable defiance. For example, the fish market at New York City’s Catharine Slip was a gathering place for black and Irish dancers who performed and competed on elevated wooden shingles (chosen for their percussive effect) for prizes of cakes and eels. From the 1820s through the 1840s, these competitions pushed the limits of racial and ethnic dances—blending shuffles, breakdowns, and jigs—and brought men and women and blacks and whites into what the historian April Masten calls a state of “friendly rivalry.” Charmingly, “shindig,” Jackson Age African-American slang for dance parties, derives from the smarting bruises and abrasions incurred from dancing Irish jigs.

  In both New York and Philadelphia, each a hotbed of Jackson Age violence, the press and the courts were up in arms about a new craze in fancy-dress balls: during the winter social season, better-off African Americans, often in carriages, sometimes attended by whites in livery, would arrive by the hundreds at rented ballrooms and hold elaborate waltzes and cotillions that could carry on long into the night. Such balls were cause for alarm, and ridicule: they were frequent targets for mocking squibs and scrutinized by police for aberrant behavior. Still, the revelers didn’t mute their rebellion—they wore it with style and overt pleasure. Whites sneered that the balls were juvenile imitations, and black reformers scorned them as decadent, but an event in Philadelphia in 1828, as Shane White argues, suggests that they were neither: Frank Johnson’s celebrated orchestra performed, the dance floor was adorned with a map of Africa, a wall was decorated with broken shackles, and a visiting officer from Haiti’s black republic was the toast of the evening. The pioneering chronicler of much antebellum black culture, White acknowledges that these fancy-dress balls involved “imitation,” “parody,” and “showy performance of a northern urban African-American culture” but then pointedly adds: “They must also have been something else—something that historians in their bookish dourness often omit from their renditions of human behavior—namely fun.” To be sure. He includes under this category the revelers’ high style, their “mingling and gossiping with friends and acquaintances,” as well as their drinking and various shades of dancing, all of which point to “the way freedom was meant to be.” But must this “fun” be “something else,” something distinct from “parody” and “performance”? Something, it seems, lower? The fault doesn’t lie with Shane White’s argument but rather with our use of “fun.” As it was redefined and practiced during this era by all classes of blacks, “fun” wasn’t frivolous, it was a community treasure. Black “fun” gave force to a host of virtues—pride, defiance, competition, and freedom—that were fast becoming white society’s vices. Without a doubt, the intimidating “sense,” as White puts it, “that blacks seemed to be having more fun than were their former owners” must in itself have been good fun. It also spoke volumes about black civility.

  Throughout this aggressive era—even after Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 rebellion terrified the white nation—Sundays on Place Congo held on strong. Festivities began in the morning, “at a signal from a police official,” and they promptly dispersed after the 9 p.m. cannon. In a world where blacks didn’t own their own bodies, where their bodies were objects of industry and punishment, they seized on these parties to free themselves and build the bonds of essential community. Their parties were wild, rebellious, and sexy, but all they really threatened were Victorian sensitivities—and national feelings of white supremacy.

  The novelist George Washington Cable—such a prude that Mark Twain said Cable made him “abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it”—as late as 1886 wrote with deep ambivalence about Jackson-era “Congo Plains.” He called it a “frightful triumph of body over mind,” but it is clear he also rather liked it. He trembled at its vision of wild democracy. He enjoyed the dancers’ embrace of freedom and their rolling spirit of innovation, “the constant, exhilarating novelty—endless invention—in the turning, bowing, arm swinging, posturing and leaping of the dancers.” He was so moved by their head-spinning diversity that he catalogued their national identities: the Senegalese, Mandingos, Foulahs, Popoes, Cotocolies, Fidas, Socoes, Agwas, Mines, Nagoes, Fonds, Awassas, Iboes, more and more—“what havoc,” he cried, “the slavers did make!” At one point he lost himself completely and fell headlong into one of the rings:

  Now for the frantic leaps! Now for frenzy! Another pair are in the ring!… What wild—what terrible delight! The ecstasy rises to madness; one—two—three of the dancers fall—bloucoutoum! boum!—with foam on their lips and are dragged out by arms and legs from under the tumultuous feet of crowding new-comers. The musicians know no fatigue; still the dance rages on.

  At a time when so many citizens were abusing their liberties, Place Congo’s congregation of slaves performed democracy at its fiercest. Free within the narrow confines of law, the people—of warringly different origins—drew from their various cultural repertoires, took from whatever was lying around, and employed their talents for the delight of the whole. Every citizen played her part, whether it was beating drums, plucking strings, rattling gourds filled with corn, or calling and dancing around the ring. Each got his fifteen minutes of glory, and the group’s pervasive sense of fun managed to keep the riotous peace. And it didn’t take so much as a Pinkster King to rev it up and keep it running.

  The revolution in early African-American fun lacked a Samuel Adams. It also lacked a Frederick Douglass. Its most notable publicity was mockery, ridicule, sensationalism, and the distorting burlesques of blackface minstrelsy. Even today, with our full knowledge of slave culture’s d
eep impact on America’s sense of humor—and freedom, empowerment, self—few call it political. Indeed, many historians, following Orlando Patterson’s powerful theory that people under slavery suffer a “social death,” examine the soul-killing institutions themselves, lest we develop romantic ideas about these victims’ utter depravity. For it is true. Slavery imposed a “social death.” Even Christmas holidays were a cynical ruse to keep enslaved people contained. But nobody knew this better, of course, than antebellum blacks themselves. They recognized these weapons and stole them when they could. They hammered these weapons into tools and techniques for building a durable community. What helped their revolution endure—not for a year on Merry Mount, or a decade in Boston, but for centuries throughout the North and South—was their tireless attention to the vicious ironies that undermined the American republic. Denied the basic rights of citizens, even those of prisoners, “by far the larger part” of slaves didn’t rise up in bloody resistance. They channeled their frustration into electrifying fun whose white-hot core was strategic rebellion. Not merely for amusement or recreation, these risky pleasures were the “fun and freedom” that Josiah Henson, in the epigraph to this chapter, said even “the sternest and most covetous master” could not “frighten or whip out” of slaves. As he put it, they were “fixed facts.” The fun and frolic of early American blacks bred “national felicity,” not social death. And their raging parties spoke for themselves.

  Even when Americans aren’t hurting anyone, their fun wakes up some William Bradford who promptly orders their Maypole toppled. Maybe he fears his own wish for fun, his own strong desire for “dancing and frisking.” George Washington Cable was evidently aroused by “limbs that danced after toil, and of barbaric lovemaking,” but at the end of his essay, when he noted that “all this Congo Square business was suppressed” in 1843, he added that there was “nothing to be regretted in its passing.” In a moment of postcoital clarity, he concluded: “No wonder the police stopped it.”

  And so they did. But Place Congo, like Thomas Morton, kept coming back to life. By some reports it was kicking up dust as late as the 1870s.

  WHAT’S AMAZING—and what made Place Congo and storytelling circles and street-corner sessions so un-American—was that with all of these liberated thousands having such an absolute lark, all day long and late into the night, and for how many decades, it didn’t cost anybody (or make anybody) one red cent, one thin dime, one plug nickel.

  Naturally, that was about to change.

  4

  * * *

  A California Education

  JOHN DAVID BORTHWICK WAS a freewheeling Scot who followed his whims into the world’s dark corners, but as an artist and journalist he mostly went to watch. In March 1851, at the age of twenty-seven and recently endowed with a nice inheritance, he joined sixty argonauts taking the Panama route from New York City to San Francisco. Like the rest of them he was seeking riches, but the gold this young fellow struck—and later refined into Three Years in California—was a bonanza of observations regarding the emerging western character.

  Borthwick’s fellow travelers, having heard that weapons were like California tableware, stuffed their belts with bowie knives and never-fired revolvers. They set out down the Atlantic coast with a common spirit of adventure, spearing dolphins and musing about their fortunes, but as time wore on, and the crew got drenched by days of tropical storms, Borthwick saw a division forming in the ranks: between the few grudging travelers in rubber raingear who refused to share even a plug of chaw and the larger, more cheerful, more generous set. The stingy ones turned “quite dejected and sulky” and “oppressed with anxiety” when sheets of muggy rain wouldn’t quit; the merry ones maintained “a wild state of delight at having finished a tedious passage” and at the “novelty and excitement of crossing the Isthmus.” The killjoys, he reflected later, wouldn’t stand a chance in the diggings, where a sense of humor was standard equipment. But the fun lovers would have the times of their lives.

  He cooled his heels for a while in Panama City, where he made another important observation. There was a basic difference between the rubes heading west (who “grumbled at everything, and were rude and surly in their manners”) and the comparatively “perfect gentlemen” on their way back. Both types came from the same lower social realms, but the latter had gotten their “California education.” As he explained it later, once he’d been there himself, even the coarsest folks who spent time in California “received a certain degree of polish from being violently shaken up with a crowd of men of different habits and ideas from their own.” Some of this violent “shaking” was lethal, of course, but the shocks that didn’t kill them—the educational shocks—were often ungoverned, ungodly fun.

  The mostly male company of diggings and boomtowns hammered out their own social tools from the crudest of materials. There was no stable government, no stable class structure, no religious authority, no strong domestic sphere. Contracts were settled by honor-bound handshakes; character was tested by games and jokes; bonds were forged at faro tables and in the sweaty throng of miners’ “ballrooms.” Whether it was California in the 1850s, Nevada in the 1860s, or Deadwood in the 1870s, in these cultures of excitement and cutthroat competition, citizens schooled each other in manners that allowed a spirit of freedom to prevail. Keeping it light, having fun, and toughening their hides against petty offenses, they engineered new strains of sociability that challenged, alarmed, and enthralled the young republic.

  A new species of newspaper—as irreverent, disingenuous, and playful as its readership—had a strong hand in upholding such standards. Since the New York Sun appeared in 1833, so-called penny papers (costing one or two cents an issue) had flooded the antebellum public sphere with an entertaining and widely accessible new journalism: they deemphasized politics, sensationalized crime, and appealed to the growing urban working class with practical advice and exhilarating fraud—such as the Sun’s 1835 Great Moon Hoax, an astronomer’s report of weird plants and weirder monsters peopling the lunar surface. Out west, the penny press found fertile new ground. In gold rush California and a decade later in silver rush Nevada, “news” took its cues from coarse frontier humor and miners’ rawhide attitudes. Tall tales, mad spellings, rivalries, and hoaxes inspired a journalism less concerned with facts than with spiking the social punch. A wild new permissiveness reigned in the West, and pseudonymous troublemakers like “John P. Squibob,” “Ben Bolt,” “Dan De Quille,” and above all “Mark Twain” modeled raffish public behavior that challenged readers to live by their wits.

  IT ALL BEGAN in January 1848, when James W. Marshall found an ugly yellow nugget while building Sutter’s Mill in Coloma. Word leaked out. In no time some hundred thousand “forty-niners” were carving up California’s hills. By September 1849, when lanky Bayard Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old world traveler, arrived on assignment from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, San Francisco’s fiery cosmopolitanism dazzled even his jaded eyes.

  The streets were full of people, hurrying to and fro, and of as diverse and bizarre character as the houses: Yankees of every possible variety, native Californians in sarapes [sic] and sombreros, Chileans, Sonorians, Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese with long tails, Malays armed with their everlasting creeses, and others in whose embrowned and bearded visages it was impossible to recognize any especial nationality.

  Just as Borthwick would two years later, Taylor abhorred the “Northern barbarians” he encountered crossing the Panamanian isthmus—clods who barged in in the middle of church services and gawked at altars with their hats on; “miserable, melancholy men” whom the majority of travelers “generally shunned.” But he found Californians refreshingly sociable, especially, ironically, when the stakes were highest.

  Californians gambled, fought, bought, and sold. They scurried to capitalize on the bum’s rush for capital. They lived for adventure, new excitements, and prided themselves on sportsmanship. Taylor was intrigued by this orgy “for action” and “int
ercourse with … fellows,” and though it wasn’t easy for him to throw aside his “old instincts,” he gradually warmed to the lax commercial attitudes that drove this “restless, feverish” society and to a generosity that put East Coast stinginess to shame. In particular, he saw a “disregard for the petty arts of money-making,” an unusual eagerness to repay debts, and a widespread confidence “in each other’s honesty” that he attributed in part to bare necessity, in part to “an honorable regard for the rights of others.” This liberal attitude seemed even freer in the camps, where, for instance, he watched a mule driver refuse the “beggarly sum” of three dollars for a pistol and hand over the gun as a gift instead. When the would-be purchaser laid his money “on a log,” insisting, “You must take it, for I shall never touch it again,” the gift giver tossed the money in the road, scoffing, “Then I’ll do what I please with it.” The apparent butt of this joke for Taylor is the Irishman who “raked in the dust for some time, but only recovered about half the money.”