American Fun Read online

  As they act and fight for the common good, rude citizens enjoy what Ferguson calls “national felicity.” Under such conditions, he argues, individual and communal happiness are “easily reconciled”: “If the individual owe every degree of consideration to the public, he receives, in paying that very consideration, the greatest happiness of which his nature is capable.” Hence, when looked at in these terms, which are largely consistent with Samuel Adams’s arguments, the feistiest moment of the early Revolution—the Boston Tea Party—was also the happiest. Dressed as Mohawks, breaking British law, these rebel citizens enjoyed their position outside of any state. They throve on activity, pursued common liberty, and experienced national felicity.

  JOHN ADAMS HAD SPENT the night in his office. Weeks before, true to form, he had counseled Francis Rotch to comply with the Tea Act. The next morning, however, presumably having read about the events in the Gazette, even he wanted to claim this triumph. He praised the Tea Party as “the most magnificent Movement of all.” He recognized “a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots.” But just as this wallflower judged Zab Hayward’s dancing from a bench of high-cultural authority, so too did this opponent of risky crowd actions offer a bit of expert advice: “The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable and striking.” Apparently the Tea Party passed his test: “This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible … that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History.” And so he praises it for posterity. Adams once scoffed at what he called the people’s “genius,” but only when he wasn’t profiting from it.

  The day after the Tea Party, Samuel Adams, by contrast, razzed Plymouth township to rise to the challenge: “The people at the Cape will behave with propriety as becomes Men resolved to save their Country.” And on New Year’s Eve, in private correspondence, he reveled in the event’s lingering satisfaction: “You cannot imagine the height of joy that sparkles in the eyes and animates the countenances as well as the hearts of all we meet on this occasion; excepting the disappointed, disconnected Hutchinson and his tools.” As Adams well knew, the “decency, unanimity, and spirit” with which this action was conducted gave it its force and potential staying power.

  The Tea Party, despite its potential calamity, charmed even the wariest Whigs like John Adams with the real potential of people power. And Jack Tar, for a moment, was afforded some dignity among the “body of the people”—without having to leave his wharfside paradise.

  FOLLOWING THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR, the newly minted U.S. citizenry put on events reminiscent of the parties that celebrated the Stamp Act repeal. Almanacs bulged with revolutionary holidays: honoring the Boston Massacre and the Treaty of Paris, remembering evacuations, town burnings, and battles. Sometimes the events were reenacted, as the Boston Tea Party is to this day, but most often they were honored with toasts and parades. David Waldstreicher’s important book on the subject says these events “were actually a great deal of fun”—due in no small part to their “revolutionary” function of “allow[ing] both for the creation of cross-class alliances and for the partial expression of class conflict, as in the shaming of aristocratic tories.” That may be so, but it is clear the people’s “fun” was losing its teeth. After all, these events, so much tamer than the Boston Tea Party, “required very little sacrifice” on the participants’ parts. To Samuel Adams, the original Knowles riots connoisseur, they were just decadent. Disgusted by the parties he saw in 1780, he called them “public diversions as promote Superfluity of Dress & ornament.” They belied the “Christian Sparta” he once envisioned for Boston. More generally, they signaled the rampant individualism that had come to dominate the U.S. “pursuit of happiness.”

  No worries, however. Over the next half century, when local, state, and federal governments were scheduling parades to foster a sense of national unity, a rash of decidedly unofficial gatherings raged from the mouth of the Mississippi to grassy patches in the deep Maine woods. Whereas the former holidays were fêted with parades that modeled the tiers of a functional republic (marching ranks, waving celebrities, masses spectating from the sidelines), the latter, ostensibly chaotic gatherings, especially those driven by African-American communities, stayed focused on the kinds of bad behavior that oxygenated the nation’s blood.

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  Technologies of Fun

  Ours is a light-hearted race. The sternest and most covetous master cannot frighten or whip the fun out of us.… In those days I had many a merry time … the fun and freedom were fixed facts; we had had them and he could not help it.

  —JOSIAH HENSON, former slave (1858)

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS, one of the great figures of the nineteenth century, used brains, brawn, and incredible bravura to free himself from chattel slavery. As a field hand on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he physically defeated a brutal white overseer and learned the difference between being a “slave in form” and a “slave in fact.” As a domestic slave in Baltimore, he tricked white boys into teaching him to read and picked up specialized dock-working skills that he would eventually use to make his passage northward. Through personal grit, literary talent, and the courage to speak for the abolitionist cause despite the heavy price on his head, he rose to become a spokesperson for his race.

  Like many American forefathers, Douglass held a hard line on fun. In a striking passage from his classic Narrative, which made great strides for the abolitionist cause, he establishes a class hierarchy among his fellow slaves that would have pleased even Cotton Mather: it divides the intelligentsia and the hunters from the hedonistic rabble. These classes came into highest relief for him during the five-day Christmas holiday, when the enslaved community was released from work. “The staid, sober, thinking and industrious ones”—presumably Douglass’s own small class—went about “making corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars, and baskets” that would come in handy in the busy new year. “Another class” hunted woodland animals. “But by far the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky.” Douglass shows these fun-loving masses through the eyes of his conniving master, who provides the whiskey and enjoys the revelry because he thinks he is keeping his slaves in their place. The industrious ones are in this sense the rebels—they claim their labor back from the master and demonstrate their autonomy. The wrestlers and fiddlers are the suckers.

  Douglass wanted to expose all the trickery behind slavery. Christmas holidays were his example of how masters distorted slaves’ ideas of freedom. Just as the master forced slaves to drink whiskey until they were miserable, or to overeat molasses until they were vomiting, he also coerced them to party hard on the holidays, so they would gratefully go limping back to work after New Year’s. This is how they were taught to confuse precious “liberty” with sickening “dissipation.” Undoubtedly these were the master’s intentions. Henry Bibb, another former slave turned abolitionist lecturer, made a similar argument, saying slaves who had “no moral religious instruction” absconded “to the woods in large numbers … to gamble, fight, get drunk, and break the Sabbath,” and also to dance and sing and “pat juber”—often by the coaxing of masters, themselves looking for “sport.”

  Perhaps the most sympathetic account of Christmas frolics comes from former slave Solomon Northrup, an expert fiddler whose talents brought out his drunken master’s best and worst—sometimes making him “buoyant, elastic, gaily ‘tripping the light fantastic toe’ around the piazza and all through the house,” but often inspiring him to taunt exhausted slaves to dance all night for his amusement. Northrup was also hired out to other plantations—a player in the era’s larger economy of “slave minstrels,” enslaved musicians, singers, and dancers who brought their masters considerable profit. On Christmas, however, when they were left to themselves, Northrup’s “beloved violin” gave him the “honored seat at the yearly feasts.” He taunts Sout
hern whites (mocking the “listless and snail-like” movements of their “slow winding cotillion”) “to look upon the celerity, if not the ‘poetry of motion’—upon genuine happiness, rampant and unrestrained” of “slaves dancing in the starlight of a Christmas night.”

  “Those who make no profession of religion resort to the woods in large numbers on that day to gamble, fight, get drunk, and break the Sabbath.” (From the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.)

  Douglass describes these holidays as “safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.” Without such holidays, he warns the masters, slaves would rise up in an “appalling earthquake” and possibly tear the system down. This hydraulic model of control and appeasement has a familiar ring to it. It’s the same metaphor used to explain the medieval carnival: peasants were allowed a bit of Saturnalia to keep them contained for the rest of the year. Contemporary historians use it, as well, when accounting for antebellum black celebrations. Undoubtedly the masters had “safety-valves” in mind when encouraging slaves to cut loose on holiday. What all of these arguments assume, however, is that African Americans who played on holiday were putty in the masters’ hands. They also underestimate the force behind fun—especially African-American fun.

  Douglass gives the Puritan boilerplate on fun—it weakens the will, it’s a waste of time, it turns you into the devil’s plaything—and he sends this message with noble intentions. In the closing lines of My Bondage and My Freedom, he says he aims to liberate slaves by promoting “the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation of the free colored people.” As a rising abolitionist—under the influence of his famous mentor, William Lloyd Garrison—Douglass was more than an opponent of slavery; he was part of the Second Great Awakening that was gathering force in the 1830s. (The “First” had seized New England a century earlier.) This national wave of revivalists and reformers targeted a range of society’s evils, from slavery and domestic abuse to promiscuity and drunkenness. But in giving the reformers’ party line on the profligacy of blacks, as he does in both of these books, Douglass also reinforces a common bias—that “by far the larger part” of blacks are childish folks with an incorrigibly hedonistic streak. This stereotype didn’t need his help. It traveled throughout nineteenth-century America, as later chapters will show, in the wildly popular form of blackface minstrelsy. Stiff, white society oversimplified black culture as a thoughtless, oversexed free-for-all. In many circles, they loved it for that; cartoon images of hedonistic blacks provided a nice holiday from whites’ own repression. Naturally Frederick Douglass hated this love, especially when it flickered in his master’s eyes. He wanted fellow blacks to stop fooling around and playing into white society’s hands. As a reformer, he wanted them to play by the rules. But Solomon Northrup saw it differently. For him, blacks having fun—fun of their own, not compulsory dances for their master’s sadism—was a human triumph inaccessible to whites.

  It was Christmas morning—the happiest day in the whole year for the slave. That morning he need not hurry to the field, with his gourd and cotton-bag. Happiness sparkled in the eyes and overspread the countenances of all. The time of feasting and dancing had come. The cane and cotton fields were deserted. That day the clean dress was to be donned—the red ribbon displayed; there were to be re-unions, and joy and laughter, and hurrying to and fro. It was to be a day of liberty among the children of Slavery. Wherefore they were happy, and rejoiced.

  When this reveling “class” is taken more seriously, a story of radicalism comes to light. What Douglass dismisses as foolhardy mischief—and hopefully there was a lot of that—starts to emerge as a peaceable revolution that created new strategies for staying free. Forced to survive under an authoritarian system far more forbidding than Plymouth Plantation, slaves crafted kinds of play and satire that made Merry Mount look like amateur hour. In resisting a nationwide system of tyranny protected by the U.S. Constitution, they put their fun to more strategic uses than even the Sons of Liberty did: their need was that much more severe. Their celebrations formed regional and national webs, even when much of the antebellum Union was threatening to come apart at the seams. Their jokes, stories, songs, and dances modeled sly resistance. Their wrestlers, fiddlers, dancers, jokers, whiskey drinkers, and quoits players reclaimed ownership of the people’s body and soothed its lacerations with pleasure. In the process, they wrote the code for America’s most American popular culture—and made it deeply, richly smart.

  BY THE DAWN of the nineteenth century, postrevolutionary holidays—honoring the Boston Massacre and the Treaty of Paris and above all touting Independence Day—were turning into occasions for partisan conflict. All throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Republicans and Federalists and their warring newspapers often co-opted nation-building festivities for boisterous, even violent, political advantage. The year 1803 was especially hot. In Providence that spring, when Republicans celebrated the anniversary of Congress, Federalists ran an effigy of Tom Paine through the streets, “insulting and hooting at every person not in their sect.” In Trenton that July, thirty Federalists pummeled a Republican editor for depicting their festivities “as drunken and ‘riotous.’ ” African Americans—especially those who joined in these celebrations—were deployed as scapegoats by both sides in these wars. “To Federalists,” David Waldstreicher writes, “black participation in festivals and elections epitomized the low-class origins, and demagoguery, of the Jeffersonians. Yet these same Jeffersonians constructed their republican virtue atop the symbolic foundation of the underclass—a black underclass.” Both groups presented blacks as civic toxins, as Newark’s Republican press did that August when they charged Federalists with “ ‘admitting black people and slaves’ into the courts.” By associating their opponents with blacks, they called them politically dangerous—or, worse, irrelevant.

  Such partisan events provide an ironic backdrop for the “Election Day” and “Pinkster” events held by African Americans during this same time period. For while the dominant parties held now pompous, now divisive celebrations that mocked feast days of national unity, African Americans, the partisans’ objects of common scorn, hosted elaborate public blowouts that, by most accounts, flaunted the joys of participatory democracy—if only for a few precious days at a stretch. These celebrations showed citizens’ unguarded selves—citizens in the thrall of liberty—and whereas partisans enjoyed splitting the public sphere in half, often in sadistically violent ways, the multiracial celebrants at Election Days and Pinkster showed pride in racial and national identity, took pleasure in collective activity, made examples of amicable conflict, and throve on mutually granted freedom.

  The earliest account of an African-American holiday in the Northeast was in the 1736 New-York Weekly Journal. Calling himself “The SPY,” the reporter describes whites and blacks en masse disporting in a field outside of town; the whites were simply “crouded,” but the blacks “divided into Companies,” possibly “according to their different Nations, some dancing to the hollow Sound of a Drum” and other percussion instruments while “others plied the Banger,” or banjo, and sang. Blacks also “exercised the Cudgel,” probably a form of martial art. But everyone drank and swore and frolicked. In addition to gambling, pugilism, and cockfighting, and amid shaded booths selling unidentified merchandise (the SPY buys a beer), was a business that struck him as a “Place little better (if anything at all) than a Brothel,” where the “mixt Multitude” sat with “Doxies on their Laps,” or “in close Hugg,” and tried to sell the disapproving SPY their services. What he clearly could not get over, however (he returns to the subject at least three times), was the festival’s radically “mixt Multitude.” The festivities were rude and showed “want of a better Education,” but they comprised more than blacks and lower-class whites. Most da
ngerously, they delighted all levels of New York society: “Gentlemen, Merchants, and Mechanics of different Occupations, and even Day Labourers, of different Ages, in different Garbs.” Under these free and liberal conditions, despite their highly stratified city, the motley participants “seemed to be all hail Fellow well met.” The event’s high spirits leveled their partiers’ biases. While Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg Adams make the strong case that the event took place on Easter Monday (and that “The SPY” was the prominent New Yorker James Alexander), it remains unclear what common purpose threw this “mixt Multitude” together—apart, that is, from the chance to have fun. It does appear, in any case, that the party’s instigators were black.