American Fun Read online

  THIS EXUBERANT ERA WAS grimly bookended between the Red Summer of 1919 and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 (or possibly the 1958 closing of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom)—but certainly not the crash of 1929. When it is reviewed not for its evidence of economic prosperity but for, as Fitzgerald’s catchphrase implies, its aerobatics of playful rebellion, the Jazz Age gets its due as a coming-out party for the fiercest exponents of American fun. Morals were loosened, wits sharpened, boundaries busted, the citizenry widened. The voices of long-muffled women and minorities rang out louder and more joyfully than anyone’s. Bodies that had been suffocated for decades by Victorian ruffles, bustles, and “character” were suddenly half naked, inebriated, and jitterbugging in public.

  If F. Scott Fitzgerald was determined to read fun as a prelude to disaster, as a chancre in the rose of civilization, then the Zoot Suit Riots may fit his vision: their victims were bold young men and women who pushed too hard against American standards at an intensely conservative and patriotic time. In their opponents’ view, they courted disaster. Their clothes were outrageous, their colors too loud. Their walk was too cocky, their talk too ethnic, and their gymnastic dancing just asking for it. Strutting their pleasure and cultural difference, they drew civic fire in a time of war, when the dominant culture enforced a campaign against racial enemies in the Pacific and ideological ones in Europe. The zoot suiters’ fun was a threat, an affront, to the steamrolling myth of white American sameness that was rising to prominence at that time. To this extent, their risky fun was the perfection of 1920s popular culture. Theirs was the playful resistance of outsiders who claimed and flaunted their brilliant contributions—of Buddy Boldens and Louis Armstrongs, of Clara Bows and Mae Wests, of Shorty Snowdens and Bessie Smiths. It was the ludic defiance of Chaplin’s Tramp in the face of destruction natural and social. To the same extent, from the streets to the dance floors, their fun was the perfection of radical 1920s social mixing, of Thomas Morton’s original vision for Merry Mount that began to take shape by the grace of jazz. Zoot suit culture, with all its contests and conflicts, boasted a civility that the Bowery b’hoys lacked. It sported a style that touted the individual and highlighted racial discrepancy—but it welcomed everyone into the fight. The America it boasted was defined by struggle. The fun it promoted was passed around among agile individuals and swinging throngs. And the danger it presaged was the boys from Plymouth coming to chop that Maypole down.

  So they did, but it wasn’t disastrous.

  For joyous revolt had carved a riverbed that is deeper and wider now than ever.

  10

  * * *

  A California Education, Redux

  IN A GRAINY COLOR MOVIE from 1964, the novelist Ken Kesey spray-paints a campaign slogan across the top of his psychedelic school bus: “A Vote for Barry Is a Vote for Fun.” The Merry Pranksters, as his band of funmakers called themselves, drive backward through the center of Phoenix, wearing red-white-and-blue sport shirts and frantically waving American flags from the roof. This lavish send-up of Barry Goldwater (that year’s archconservative presidential candidate) happened early in the LSD-lidded Pranksters’ serpentine cross-country bus trip—a joy ride that delivered the new Wild West lunacy to the boring, buttoned-down East Coast “establishment.” The Merry Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” (similar in its irony to Paul Krassner’s star-spangled 1963 “FUCK COMMUNISM” poster) inaugurated a raffish participatory politics that all but obliterated the voting booth: it was a politics of sex and drugs and pranks, rooted in a cheeky sense of humor. As playfully rebellious as Merry Mount; as heedless of its consequences as Twain’s and Barnum’s hoaxes; far wilder and more irreverent than Timothy Leary’s later The Politics of Ecstasy (1968), the Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” campaign (as it might as well be called) gave rise to an excitable generation that aimed to change the course of world power, and to have an insanely good time doing it.

  By 1965, thousands were already on the bus, already in the “pudding,” throwing in their lots with a noisy youth culture whose soul was somewhere between the Rolling Stones and radical New Left political activists. By 1966, hundreds of thousands had achieved at least a good contact buzz. And by the summer of 1967, all hell was breaking loose. Love (as they called it) was in the air, kind of, sure, although so were smoke, anger, drugs, satire, and dangerous levels of factionalism. But if this mostly young, white, middle-class movement had a fuzzy political agenda, their common target, cops—the apparent tip of the establishment’s spear—was in clear focus. Police were uniformed, impassive, and armed. Police curtailed the search for absolute freedom in practically every form: free voices that joined in mass protest; free minds that explored psychedelic limits; free bodies that fell out of line and loitered, went vagrant, got naked, had sex in public, and refused to be conscripted into military service. As such, police contested this new youth culture’s boundaries, just as the British had those of the Sons of Liberty, and the skirmishes along that disputed border were playful, coaxing, witty, and violent, much as they had been in the 1760s. Increasingly, the skirmish was a good in itself. On the one hand it was proof that the youth were serious and the cops were as tyrannical as they suspected. On the other hand, by 1968, the skirmish in all its forms—protest, satire, pranks, disobedience, as well as hand-to-hand combat—became the practice of liberty. The fight for rights was exhilarating fun. It was the thrill of democracy in action.

  When one reads memoirs, journalism, literature, comedy, pamphlets, history, and court cases from the 1960s, when one watches the movies and listens to the songs of one of the nation’s most culturally rich eras, the popular story comes into focus, as does its place in the history of fun. Yes, America’s largest, most prosperous generation to date resisted and often rejected their parents, the “Greatest Generation” that had fought in World War II and revived U.S. patriotism. Many ran away from home, dropped out of school, got high, got lost, and followed the cues of demagogues and charismatic radicals into what came to be called the “counterculture”—radicals like, for one, Ken Kesey. En masse, but in different and colorfully imaginative ways, they raised arms against the “establishment” that their parents’ generation seemed to embrace: the seemingly hydra-headed power structure that encompassed everything from banks and corporations to the U.S. military, organized religion, big media, university administrations, all forms of government, and even, as the decade got wilder, radical political organizations. This David-and-Goliath struggle, to the extent that it was one, became the latest reprise of Merry Mount’s rivalry with the militant stodginess of Plymouth Plantation. In it, fun was more than a liberating practice or a widespread communal value—though of course it was both of those things too. More than ever, more pointedly than even during the Jazz Age, fun was conceived as both a civic practice and a sort of paramilitary tactic. And more than any time since the American Revolution, fun—raw fun, risky and rebellious—was overtly linked to patriotism.

  But patriotism itself had to be recovered. In love with a different “nation” than their parents had been, Thomas Morton’s latest descendants weren’t loyal to institutions that had to be defended by military force. They weren’t true to government or business. These latest patriots, often with naïve and reckless exuberance, rose up in support of the Declaration of Independence’s wild ideals—a pursuit of happiness and national felicity for the individual and collective alike. From Ken Kesey’s “Vote for Fun” to Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock (1969), these flag-waving, flag-wearing, flag-burning citizens voiced their loyalty to an unsung America of rebels, merrymakers, outlaws, and freaks.

  THE MERRY PRANKSTERS’ new American rebellion didn’t appear ex nihilo: the ice had already been cracking for some time.

  Twenty years earlier, during World War II, a culturally conservative freeze had set in. The Zoot Suit Riots were just a warning shot: that same month, June 1943, California governor Earl Warren ordered 110,000 Japanese evicted from their homes and reloc
ated into internment camps, arguing, “We don’t propose to have the Japs back in California during this war if there is any lawful means of preventing it.” He urged other governors to follow his lead. By contrast, the early forties had been a watershed era for the rights of women, whose decades of social and political progress had worked in concert with national need; all at once they were regarded as essential wartime personnel—especially in the distinctly unladylike field of heavy manufacturing. The free-spirited flapper had paved the way for her muscle-bound daughter, Rosie the Riveter, the socialist-realist icon for a multiracial workforce of tough and capable independent women. But shortly after the United States ended the war—by expediently vaporizing two Japanese cities—the nation’s love affair with women’s labor ended.

  Over the next two years, the early baby boom years, two million women were summarily fired. Over the next five years, not coincidentally, the number of new houses built annually increased more than twelvefold, from 114,000 in 1944 to 1.7 million in 1950; this progress was accelerated by the likes of Bill Levitt, a Long Island subdivision entrepreneur whose elimination of skilled labor in favor of non-union workers and whose elimination of complicated basements in favor of mass-produced concrete slabs helped to generate “Levittowns,” suburban human parking lots with minimal public space (“one swimming pool was built for every thousand houses”) that could accommodate 80,000 inhabitants at a pop. The result, in general, was a cookie-cutter culture wired for prosperity and gender division. The middle class had come into its own, with all the exigencies of suburban mediocrity. Men in suits, enjoying the machine-made “freedom” of Herbert Marcuse’s uncritically minded “one-dimensional” society, rode shiny new escalators through middle management’s middle floors while women, now housebound, took conservative advice from recently empowered guides like McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal: they wore feminized styles, devoted themselves to high-output child rearing, and gratefully endorsed new labor-saving devices like clothes dryers, garbage disposals, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, trash compactors. No longer socially acceptable wage earners, women became the vanguards of a new consumerism. The Airstream contours of a capitalist republic called for team-spirited conventionalism: millions of homes had tiny-screen televisions playing vaudeville’s latest incarnation, and garages and carports housed late-model automobiles.

  A paranoid new patriotic trend—which had been codified as early as 1939, when an archconservative representative from Texas created the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (soon to become the notorious HUAC)—made “American” (read “capitalist”) an ideological imperative. After World War II, assisted by the virulently anti-communist Truman Doctrine (that required government on all levels to create loyalty review boards), by a crushing 1946 Republican victory in both houses of Congress, and by widespread wiretapping under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the national consciousness was seized by fear of freedom haters both foreign and domestic—a fear that touched every level of government and society and that those who witnessed it frequently described, in the words of the Red-scare historian Ellen Schrecker, as “paranoia, delirium, frenzy, hysteria.”

  In 1947, the languishing HUAC was energized by an incoming class of young Republicans, chief among them Richard M. Nixon, who staged an investigation of the culture industry. Naturally Hollywood was their highest-value target. The movie moguls, who had grown increasingly unnerved by their industry’s worker guilds, played right into their hands. Better than anyone, they knew the public imagination: much as they had co-opted the “decency” wars over the previous two decades (disingenuously censoring their own palpitating flappers for threatening America’s delicate morality), so too did they betray their own writers and actors—Communist, former Communist, or just suspicious—for smuggling left-wing and Soviet-sympathizing propaganda into the nation’s innocent playtime. True to form, they sold them out in a spectacular way. The red-baiting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI) served a list of suspected Communist sympathizers to the HUAC, which that September subpoenaed forty-three witnesses for a media-blitzed hearing in Washington, D.C. Hollywood was represented by high-profile “friendlies” (conservatives like Ronald Reagan, Jack Warner, and Walt Disney, who testified against his own subversive cartoonists for trying to paint even Mickey Mouse red) and a defiant band of nineteen “unfriendlies,” ten of whom—the infamous “Hollywood Ten”—refused to take the Fifth Amendment, believing they were protected by their right to free speech. They ended up serving time in prison, to the destruction of their careers and the general suppression of American filmmakers’ creativity. In November of that year, Hollywood’s executives and their New York financiers met at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where they devised the “blacklist” that would govern moviemaking for more than a decade and usher in the vicious age of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.

  While the economy boomed, thanks in large part to America’s first big ideological war in the Pacific, a small group of queers, bisexuals, college dropouts, carpetbagging Buddhists, and autodidactic intellectuals crisscrossed the continent in search of real fun. They came to be known as the Beat Generation, though they were little more than a roving clique. Energized by the sheer spontaneity of bebop; exhilarated by Benzedrine, marijuana, and booze; outraged by their government’s Cold War xenophobia; and enthralled by their libertine friend Neal Cassady, who had slept with many of the beats and their wives, these renegades chased restless, kinetic new joys and stamped them in the titles of their trademark books: Go, Howl, On the Road. For Jack Kerouac, in his disgust with U.S. law and order, Mexico City was the Xanadu of fun: “This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road.” Such fun was a vanishing point for the beats, and it would kill more than one of those who tried to reach it, but even their car crashes, overdoses, and deadly enthusiasm are quaint, exuberant, even innocent—in contrast to the 1960s counterculture they came to inspire. Fittingly, Neal Cassady himself drove the Pranksters’ bus.

  The Merry Pranksters also grew from rock ’n’ roll—the latest iteration of African-American dance music whose rhythm and message sprang from the hips. In 1950s America, safe and sound in air-conditioned suburbia, congregating at amusement parks and drive-ins, middle-class teens guzzled American prosperity and strutted their youth in a runway show of styles, slang, and backbeat music. Their parents tried to contain the fallout radiating from Elvis Presley’s hips—chaperoning sock hops and hosting basement dance parties, packaging it through Dick Clark’s weirdly stiff American Bandstand—but the randy energy of rock ’n’ roll had poisoned the country like Bikini Atoll. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) created Elvis, who had memorized every line of James Dean’s dialogue and studiously mimicked his clothes and walk. (To cultivate his rebellious neo-soap-locks look, Elvis also mimicked “cross-country truckers,” whom he called “wild-looking guys,” moved his body like black bluesmen, and bought flashy clothes from a black store on Beale Street.) But the movie gave Americans in general, not only enterprising young Elvis, a glossary for reading this troubling new fun. (Even Jack Kerouac was called a “literary James Dean” in Time’s 1957 review of On the Road.) On the one hand, by glamorizing greaser culture, Rebel branded switchblade duels and “chickie runs” (a deadly combination of drag racing and chicken that the movie served to popularize) as “kicks” that could turn young Natalie Wood into a fountain of surging hormones. On the other hand, however—by James Dean’s angsty/playful example—it popularized a silly, carefree honesty that Sal Mineo’s character, Plato, calls “fun.” This latter fun, had by our three heroes in an abandoned mansion—on the run from their parents, the hoodlums, and the law—momentarily frees these bewildered kids from the fakey manners of the Eisenhower era. With its bright-eyed innocence, this lighthearted fun seems centuries away from the pants-down decadence of the late 1960s, but it was in fact in the whirl of such James Dean carnival, at Gregg’s D
rive-In in Springfield, Oregon, that young Ken Kesey’s legendary pranksterism first appeared. Prosecuted for sticking a potato into some killjoy’s exhaust pipe, he explained himself in court with a spirited defense of the exhilarating American Saturday night.

  Ken Kesey wasn’t your average political activist. Like Thomas Morton holing up thirty miles north of Plymouth Plantation’s solemn religious experiment, Kesey ran a South Bay den of iniquity while the students at Berkeley were getting serious—in particular, in 1964, taking on the University of California Regents and forming the powerful Free Speech Movement (FSM). Kesey had a different take on his revolutionary times. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960 at the University of Michigan, branched out among the nation’s campuses to promote what its influential “Port Huron Statement” (1962) called “participatory democracy” and the people’s “unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” They devised and debated new, revolutionary, political theories, and they valued the university’s capacity for conflict, saying that students and faculty “must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life.” Their leaders were good students in suits and ties who wanted to work within the system. (Their more popular archenemies were the Young Americans for Freedom [YAF], founded by young conservative William F. Buckley.) And most important, the civil rights movement, which had exploded in 1955 following Emmett Till’s grisly murder, overcame setbacks, hatred, and violence through extraordinary self-control. Its member organizations maintained a steady regime of protests, marches, and voter registration campaigns—not stopping when they had achieved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which legislated equal rights for women and blacks. These movements were principled and serious. Martin Luther King, a sober and religious race leader in the line of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, believed civic and legislative rights were greater and more enduring than personal freedoms. He demanded strict moral discipline from the movement, and he got it—as would Malcolm X, whose 1965 Autobiography was the story of a zoot suiter’s reform.