American Fun Read online

  But shining from the shadows of Winthrop’s City upon a Hill came glimmers of lingering American fun. The maskers had to keep a low profile. Writing in his diary on March 10, 1687, Samuel Sewall relates a sermon by Cotton Mather, “sharply against Health-drinking, Card-playing, Drunkennes, Sabbath-breaking, &c.” Two months later he shows the latest Thomas Mortons pushing back: “It seems the May-pole at Charleston [Massachusetts] was cut down last week, and now a bigger is set up, and a Garland upon it.”

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  Jack Tar, Unbound

  ON NOVEMBER 27, 1760, something remarkable happened. Twenty-five-year-old John Adams walked into a bar. America’s grand story seldom pauses for such events. Yet the arrival of this tetchy young Puritan descendant—a paunchy, bow-shouldered, overworked lawyer—at a tavern on the Braintree docks sparkles with deep historical meaning. Here was a proud scion of Massachusetts’s flintiest Pilgrims lowering himself to smoke a pipe among New England’s benighted souls, a drinking, dancing, frolicking class who made their lives along the wharf. What he witnessed there was nothing less than the early stirrings of the American Revolution. He didn’t like what he saw.

  Adams wouldn’t have stooped to frequent such a place even a short six months before, when, channeling the jeremiads of his Puritan forebears, he railed in his diary against reeking taverns and their “trifling, nasty vicious Crew.” Impressionable youths who squandered their time in taverns were taking a shortcut, he argued, “to Prisons and the Gallows.” But this budding politician’s deepest concern had been that licensed houses were fast becoming “the nurseries of our legislators.” Who knew what kind of reckless republic could spring from such dens of iniquity?

  Adams had not been bred for taverns. In his youth he had lived by the old Puritan values. He had berated himself daily for not studying enough, then had gotten sick from studying too much. He had gloried in the noble pleasures of the mind and forbidden himself everything else: “Let no trifling diversion, or amusement…; no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness, decoy you from your books.” Only years later, when the Revolution was over, did he decide his children could take up dancing—so long as they weren’t at all “fond” of it.

  No surprise, therefore, that the man who entered Thayer’s tavern should be a wallflower. The dancing and revelry whirled all around him, but Adams only stood back and watched. It was natural to his class and professional standing to be a terrible snob. (“The Rabble,” he sniffed, “filled the House.”) The trimming and buttons of his fine linen coat must have glittered like jewelry amid the blouses and tattered frocks of tradesmen, dockhands, and sailors on leave. But in this environment he was treated like any man in a crowd. The smoky, fishy, ale-stinking tavern—unlike the classrooms and courtrooms where he already struck an imposing figure—pushed the pungent people together. It literally rubbed him up against the masses. Every room, even the kitchen, was packed to the walls with common people—and not the orderly types on sidewalks who doffed their hats to the upper classes, but heedless, rowdy, beer-drinking folk who spun and stamped to the music of black fiddlers. “Young fellows and Girls [danced] the Chamber as if they would kick the floor thro.” One imagines Adams clutching his ears.

  Rocking back in a corner with his pipe, he zeroed in on one “Funmaking animal,” a popular wag named Zab Hayward whose antics kept the downstairs revelers enrapt. Indulging in a bit of armchair criticism, Adams ridiculed Hayward’s dancing for lacking the grace he was used to seeing in Boston’s ballrooms. But for all his mockery, he loved to watch. To be sure, Zab Hayward—cutting “absurd,” “wild,” “desultory, and irregular” moves—was the paragon of fun.

  Hayward started out slow, catching the ladies’ eyes with gentle antics, but as he picked up speed, getting looser and freer and gradually drunker, his manner turned flirty and downright cheeky. He plucked them up, one by one, radiating his pleasure throughout the crowd. He gave all the women a whirl, not just the prettiest. He took the hand of a light-haired one, notable for a “Patch on her Chin,” and “tickled her Vanity” with a flattering song. He jigged with another, led her from the ring, and delighted the rest by giving her instructions: “Stand here, I call for you by and by.” (Big laughs.) He charmed yet another with a bawdy joke, saying, “I must confess I am an old Man, and as father Smith says hardly capable of doing my Duty.” (The crowd roared.) Clearly Adams was taking notes.

  If John Adams was heir to William Bradford’s respect for absolute law and order, then Zab Hayward was a Thomas Morton manqué. Not at all cowed by the lawless crowd, he was energized by it, ignited by it. And his fellow revelers responded in kind. He whipped up what the writer Elias Canetti, in his classic work Crowds and Power, called the “rhythmic crowd”—the most generative and powerful kind of crowd. In the rhythmic crowd, “density and equality coincide from the beginning” and “everything depends on movement.” The fiddlers and dancers and cajoling Zab Hayward brought this rhythm to a rolling boil. Charming though these antics could be, however, they rankled the tightly wound John Adams, who may have recognized their force. Whether or not Adams made the connection, he was confronting a radically democratic spirit that was spreading from the docks throughout chilly Massachusetts.

  Adams sat back and gaped at the show, but he knew much better than to get up and join. In his eyes, Captain Thayer’s fogbound tavern was perched somewhere on the steppes of Hell, and the stomping and swearing of mixed genders and ages had all the marks of deviltry. Adams’s last judgment was to plunk their fun down into the legal category of “Riot.” “Fiddling and dancing, in a Chamber of young fellows and Girls, a wild Rable of both sexes, and all Ages, in the lower Room, singing dancing, fiddling, drinking flip and Toddy, and drams.—This is the Riot and Revelling of Taverns And of Thayers frolicks.” Gavel cracks, case is closed.

  In this visit to the pub, John Adams captured a moment in the early Revolution when the people’s pleasures were threatening to collapse his trusted social order. Why he was “foolish enough to spend the whole afternoon in gazing and listening” is anybody’s guess, but it seems he half understood what he saw, and it set his teeth on edge. The experience of democracy was terribly unattractive and driven by forces beyond his control. What he didn’t seem to recognize in this nursery of the legislators was just how nourishing such floor-kicking fun could be to the republic in its infancy. Raucous fun was its mother’s milk.

  Maybe he can’t be blamed for this blind spot. He was inclined by heritage, education, breeding, and possibly most strikingly by his skittish temperament to view such fun as distasteful at best, a crime against civilization at worst. But his prejudice shows how remarkable it is that his cousin Samuel, who shared the same heritage and Harvard education, may have been a connoisseur of such floor-kicking fun—and of fun far more dangerous than “Thayer’s frolicks.” What for John Adams could be anarchy, criminality, “Riot,” for Samuel was the practice of pure democracy. The cousins, both Whigs, would divide as partisans in a war over the virtues of American fun. Often they would stand on opposite sides of the law, and the winner would set the Revolution’s course. But the conflict they embodied—authoritarianism versus people power—was centuries old and destined never to be resolved.

  IT WAS a sign of the times that a gentleman like Adams even stepped foot in Thayer’s tavern. In previous decades such waterfront bars were exclusive to wharf rats, swabbies, and sailors—a fast crowd collectively known as “Jack Tars” after their tar-infused foul-weather gear. Typically young, uneducated, and poor, Jack Tar was a reckless agent of the seas. He strutted the docks in cheap, flashy dress. He bragged and swore about his life aboard. He danced with men and bare-shouldered women, often to the music of black musicians. On precious shore leave, he often finished the night in a brawl, or paying for sex, or being dragged home to his squalid boardinghouse. During the Great Awakening of the 1730s, while Puritans were busy punishing themselves, Jack Tar was doing the good work of M
erry Mount. And before the Sons of Liberty rallied against the Stamp Act, a loudmouth society of rollicking seamen flaunted their freedom in the face of the British—calling themselves the Sons of Neptune.

  According to William Bradford, and later Jonathan Edwards, young men who made their lives at sea were devil-spawned rascals hell-bent on converting impressionable Calvinists into whoring, fighting, drunken brigands. (As if the salts cared.) In fact, young mariners in the Age of Sail, if they hoped to pull their weight on ship, had to be highly skilled, industrious workers—acrobats who swung from mast to boom, craftsmen forever trimming sails. They also had to be orchestral teammates who could operate what the maritime historian Daniel Vickers calls the “eighteenth century’s most complex machine.” Jack Tar was no slouch. But for his maverick attitude and cavalier sociability, he was definitely seductive, and a serious cause for Puritan concern. Samuel Leech, an English seaman who would turn his coat for the United States during the War of 1812, told of his life-changing encounter with Jack Tar when he was a lad on a stagecoach headed for Bristol. He was mesmerized by “the antics of a wild, harebrained sailor” who amused the fellow passengers by climbing out the window, scrambling monkey-like onto the roof, and dancing a hornpipe jig up there as the speeding coach bounced its way downhill. “The more I saw of this reckless, thoughtless tar, the more enamored I became with the idea of sea life.” The contagious fun of such simple-hearted tars nibbled at the edges of Puritan severity, evoking sheer liberty and easygoing camaraderie. More dangerously, their flair for serious fun got crowds engaged in their anti-British cause.

  In 1747, Jack Tar’s resentment against six years of impressment culminated in three days of waterfront rioting. On the chilly morning of November 16, a press gang under orders from Commodore Charles Knowles bullied its way along the docks, seizing random sailors and entire crews from the decks of Boston’s commercial ships. The practice had been common enough in recent years, but in this case the commodore’s needs were high—he had to replace a host of deserters before sailing on to the West Indies. They had already seized forty-six civilians, many of them legally exempt from impressment, when a crowd of maybe three hundred citizens, watermen mingled with other classes, closed in on the press gang and held them hostage. One prominent witness couldn’t decide if they were “a Mob, or rather body of Men”—criminals, that is, or righteous citizens—for it was his sense that these tars had a single intention: liberating “their Captivated Fr[ien]ds.”

  In the next three exultant days, thousands of Bostonians followed these rebels’ lead, hitting the streets, banging cookery, breaking windows, dragging British officers from the doors of their homes, and beating an interfering sheriff who, according to one eyewitness, “using Rigour instead of Mildness … rather irritated the populace from which he was glad to get off with a Broken Head, tho’ he was in danger of losing it.” Another sheriff, locked in the stocks, “afforded” the rioters “diversion.” Their most spectacular move was to burn a royal barge in the middle of Boston Common. Showing sober foresight, however, they chose not to torch it on Governor Shirley’s lawn, for fear of burning the neighboring houses. Also, the barge itself was a hoax—belonging not to the king but to a member of the mob.

  “Sailors,” wrote John Sherburne Sleeper, “seemed to have no thought beyond the present moment—and they often seek for pleasure in the indulgence of the sensual appetites, at the expense of all that is moral or intellectual.” (From Tale of the Ocean and Essays for the Forecastle: Containing Matters and Incidents Humorous, Pathetic, Romantic and Sentimental, 1847. Courtesy of Special Collections, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.)

  It makes sense that a historian devoted to crowd action—Paul A. Gilje, an expert on both riots and Jack Tars—should say that “rioting” like this “can be fun.” He explains its thrills like a veteran of the crowd: “People can experience a personal sense of liberty; they can scream, shout obscenities with abandon, shatter windows, and stand entranced by the consuming flames of a bonfire. Both adrenaline and alcohol add to the excitement. Rumors spread wildly, and an electric tension fills the air that can only be released, like a bolt of lightning with a great thunderclap, as the crowd goes into action.” And as Gilje puts it, nobody had more fun than Jack Tar: “the raw material for such social explosions could always be found on the waterfront. There, sailors with too little to do and a penchant for mischief were ready for fisticuffs.” For this same reason, of course, such volatile action wasn’t fun for everyone—certainly not for the victims and innocent bystanders at its business end.

  As anarchic as the Knowles riots may have appeared, Jack Tar’s knack for rousing mixed crowds—for inciting them with feelings of liberty—would fuel the early American Revolution. If they hoped to be effective, Patriots had to show restraint, but they also had to fill the sails. And Patriots hated backing down from a fight. They took great joy in the rebel throng—its energy, its conflict, its chaos, its fellowship—for there was the molten core of liberty, but they also had to steer the ship through treacherous social shoal waters. In both cases, of course, this wild work was fun. It wasn’t until the 1760s, however, that Patriots took care to develop durable tactics and ethics that prevented their festivities from crumbling into violence. These measures themselves, when perfected, were among the Patriots’ finest achievements.

  The Knowles rioters achieved their objectives—the governor fled and the sailors were released. But the “riot” probably resembled, to the casual observer, the violent mob activities called “skimmington” or “rough music” that had plagued New England since the early 1730s, often involving sexual mutilation and shaming coats of tar and feathers. Whereas these popular carnivals of violence usually did the bidding of magistrates and preachers against outlaws, adulterers, scolds, and witches, the Knowles riots were different. They (1) flouted restraint with playful zeal, (2) turned liberty and civility into brash celebration, and (3) defied the wishes of appointed civic leaders. This kind of partying was altogether new. All the same, as effective and restrained as this upheaval was, the crucible of democracy proved too hot to handle. Boston’s leadership called a town meeting, where they denounced “such Illegal Criminal Proceedings” as the work of “Foreign Seamen Servants Negroes and other Persons of Mean and Vile condition”—even though, as various historians have noted, not one of the rioters arrested by these officials was a servant or an African American.

  It was a common enough canard, however. Keen to the growing fears of democracy, magistrates targeted blacks and various strangers when seeking scapegoats for white Americans’ wild behavior. The practice would flourish in the decades to come, when the convenience of pinning rebellion on “primitives” mingled with the excitement of whites going native.

  JOHN ADAMS’S COUSIN Samuel found his political heart in the iffy tactics of the Knowles riots. Samuel Adams had thirteen years on John, and while both men were pear-shaped Puritans with similarly piercing eyes, their temperaments could not have been more different. If John pinched his pennies, Samuel shot his wad. If John was a snob who feared the so-called rabble and put his stock in the rule of law, Samuel answered to the will of the people. And if John was a wallflower who scoffed at dancing, Samuel was more like ornery Zab Hayward: his knack was for whipping up the fun-loving crowd.

  At twenty-five, the same age John was when he entered Thayer’s tavern, Samuel was already writing radical tracts to legitimize the Sons of Neptune. He and his secret society of friends published their views in the Independent Advertiser, a pioneering weekly that got behind Boston’s rebels and argued for the legality of the Knowles rioters’ actions. Young Adams’s many essays exclaimed the virtues of “Liberty.” One famous essay decried any citizen “who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness because he wears ‘a worsted Cap or a Leathern Apron’ ” or who “struts immeasurably above the lower Size of People, and pretends to adjust the rights of Men by Distinctions of Fortune.” One can’t help but see his cousin strutting in these lines.<
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  Samuel lived like a radical democrat, but he was nobody’s Thomas Morton. To be sure, in the words of the historian Pauline Maier, “No man was more aware than he of the legacy of his Puritan forebears, more proud of their achievements, more determined to perpetuate them into the future.” What he plainly admired in these ancestors, however, was not their elitism and sectarian prejudice, nor their vicious authoritarianism—habits which he himself eschewed. Samuel Adams’s trimmed-to-fit Puritan was a figure of steely purpose who rejected the aristocrat’s luxurious pleasures—“Folly,” frippery, “Dissipation,” theater—and raised the “Cause of Liberty and Virtue” above the “self.” The austerity Adams modeled for fellow Patriots dried their powder for feistier pleasures, in particular wild thrills of mass resistance conducted with noisy, good-humored civility. The discipline he urged, moreover, a respect for life and property, allowed the people—or a wide swath of them—to celebrate their freedom within generous bounds, often too generous for his cousin’s comfort.

  John Adams, looking back on the early Revolution, recalled Samuel as being “zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause,” things one could not always say of John himself. But while he appreciated Samuel’s sympathy for colonial freedom and even his ability to penetrate the crowd, he regretted his disregard for “the Law and Constitution” and the fact that he put, at least in John’s mind, the needs of “the Public” above himself and his family. Still, he was cautious on the topic of Samuel. John may have held back out of Adams family loyalty, or Whig affiliation, or deference to the rabble-rouser who did his dirty work, but Samuel’s opponents weren’t nearly so polite. Governor Thomas Hutchinson called him the “Chief Incendiary.” Chief Justice Peter Oliver, a die-hard Tory, fumed that Samuel Adams was “all serpentine cunning” and “could transform his self into an Angel of Light with the weak Religionist”—while even worse yet, among the “abandoned,” like those godless souls on the docks, he would “appear with his cloven Foot & in his native Blackness of Darkness.”