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 pursuit, 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 SHEPPARDS 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 bending a few blue laws to have a bit of fun.

THERES 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.

Huizinga dismisses “fun” from the start, but not before making the useful observation that “no other modern language known to [him] has the exact equivalent of the English ‘fun.’ ” What is more, while “fun” is unique to the English language, it holds a special place in the American lexicon, where it is a word and concept that, for all its difficulty, has come to reflect our national values. Indeed, in late 2010, New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas employed a powerful database of America’s print history and determined that “achievement” and “fun” were the nation’s most bountiful words, the use of “fun” increasing eightfold from the 1810s to the 2000s. Giridharadas addresses what he calls the “Fun Generation” and joins the loud chorus of American intellectuals who have long decried the value of fun, which he rightly says “comes from doing and, often, switching off the brain.” He also draws a (rightful) contrast between elitist Old World pleasures and more “equitable” New World “fun” and rather seems to regret the contrast. (Couldn’t Americans just relax, like Italians? And couldn’t they be more reflective?) But this book contends that devalued American fun—“mere fun,” “unthinking fun,” the fun of what Giridharadas rejects as “doing, doing, doing”—has indeed had a “civilizing function,” often a very powerful one.

Unlike the pleasures of watching and eating that have come to characterize the United States (often justifiably) as a nation of dull consumers, fun is one pleasure that can’t be felt. Fun, like sex, must be had. Whether it’s bantering, shooting the rapids, or playing charades, fun requires investment, engagement. It also makes you take some risks. It demands you have a bit of courage. Freud’s famous “pleasure principle” refers to relaxation, vegetation, numbing away every last volt of stimulus. You can curl up lazily in the folds of such pleasure, but not so with fun. As the desire for excitement, to stir up stimulus, fun goes far “beyond the pleasure principle.” To the extent that it runs a collision course, testing its velocity against total destruction, fun is closer to Freud’s “death drive”—the desire to die that swerves from death. Like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, blindfolded, on roller skates, coasting backward, fun buzzes right up to the brink of destruction and glides away with a little thrill.

Fun is the active enjoyment of: stunts, pranks, hoaxes, jokes, mock trials, parties, troublemaking, dancing, protests, fights, and ad hoc games and gambling and sports. It’s the discourse-disrupting thrill of slang. It’s the joy of throwing your body into the mix, of raising your voice in the public sphere, and of putting your reputation at risk. In order to investigate such rowdy fun and to question how such “doing, doing, doing” has shaped American identity for the better, it is necessary to distinguish it from its impostor: the passive “fun” of entertainment.

Americans en masse confused “fun” with “entertainment” in the years right after the Civil War. In a sweeping campaign throughout the urban North, the amusement industry simulated the people’s fun and marketed it for widespread entertainment—in the forms of big-top circuses, theme parks, carnivals, vaudeville, the burlesque, and Wild West shows. These shiny new products, whose avatars still abound from Disneyworld to Hollywood, from Rock Band to Wii, had the population suddenly standing in line and buying tickets to have their “fun.” All at once it was a passive pursuit: performers were divided from spectators, who were increasingly divided by class and made to follow new rules of etiquette. Risk and rebellion were confined to the stage, where audiences had vicarious fun. Rodeos brought the frontier to the cities. Carnivals simulated low-level participation. Blackface minstrelsy, one of the industry’s most popular features, twisted African-American culture into a cruel cartoon. The best simulations of participatory fun were in Coney Island’s “Fun Pavilion,” where frightening rides like the “Insanitarium” automated thrills and spills. But fun’s active ingredient, liberty, was gone.

Also in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the South was plunged into depression and chaos, average citizens of the industrializing North were going crazy for organized sports—not only for the expected baseball and football, but for croquet, lawn tennis, track and field, and many games that had been unheard-of even a decade before. Apart from the cyclists and rogue roller skaters who terrorized the sidewalks, such activity was easy to control—by parents, schools, associations, franchises, and, of course, commercial outfitters. Sports became big business. Sports also served to divide the public—by race, class, gender, and ability. Sports ranked citizens according to their talents and divided athletes from spectators in bleachers. In contrast to free-lance American fun, the marketing, organization, and regulation of sports strapped ankle weights onto the citizenry. It kept them from fending for themselves on sandlots, alleys, pickup courts, and scruffy patches of public grass.

The fun explored here originates with the people—playful, active, courageous people. When we turn over the keys to the Kool-Aid junkies, to the Barnums and Disneys who have branded “fun” since the Gilded Age, we tend to forget who invented it. We fail to see it when it’s right under our noses, doing the good work of civil society. And we fail to see how powerful it can be. The Sons of Liberty weren’t just amusing themselves—they were hammering out the structure of a new republic. The slaves on Congo Square weren’t enjoying their “leisure”—they danced ring dances every Sunday to steal back some of their precious humanity. These would-be citizens weren’t just bored, looking to be entertained. Their thirst for pleasure meant life or death. They wanted to function as full members of society, and their attempts to do so were crazy fun.

MUCH OF THE BEST AMERICAN FUN doesn’t aim to be political. Forty-niners pulled pranks to get a laugh. Journalists staged hoaxes to get their readers’ goat. Thousands swarmed into the Savoy Ballroom to mix it up with all walks of life. The friction these wags created was harmless, but friction nonetheless, challenging the people to enjoy their differences through laughter, competition, and dance. Even this story’s least political funmakers are pranksters and dancers and rabble-rousers who ignited democratic feeling in the crowd and urged the people to fan its flames.

While most of the people’s fun isn’t meant to be political, at key points in history, like the Merry Mount colony or the early Revolution, citizens have harnessed the power of fun in an effort to lift the larger community—as in the early nineteenth century, throughout the Northeast, when African Americans held Election Day festivals that broadcast their desire to participate in society. But even when American Fun is telling the stories of apolitical funmakers—of dancers and jokers, of entrepreneurs and promoters—it never strays from its larger interest in the ongoing struggle for access to power, in the ongoing renovation of the public sphere: in a word, in politics.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson scrawling “whim” on his lintel, thus giving playfulness religious import, so too have Americans long dignified fun with their other great national values—“progress,” “self-reliance,” and above all “democracy.”

As James Madison established it in Federalist No. 10, one of the U.S. government’s founding documents, a “pure democracy”—“a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer government in person”—can lead only to factionalism; it only indulges the body’s “common passions”; and it offers “nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.” Since pure democracy (for the Federalists) inevitably crumbled into mob rule or tyranny, the people’s power had to be contained within what Madison called a “republic”—“a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.” By Madison’s plan, not unlike a parliamentary monarchy, the people’s passion had to be triple-distilled and bottled in the shapes of judicious politicians. That is the government Americans got, and it has functioned pretty effectively ever since. But the people didn’t give up that easily. For the American people are a feisty body, just as Madison feared. Whether taking inspiration from the early revolutionaries or simply trusting in their own “demos-kratia” (people power), historically Americans have unleashed their passions without ever needing to overthrow the government. They have lived peaceably enough under the roof of one republic, and in the best cases they have enjoyed each other’s bad behavior. More to the point, that enjoyment has made them more powerful citizens.

Radical democracy can be fun only when the citizens cut loose and get involved. In order for a society to grow and thrive, its citizens must be willing to tussle. Even in our thickly mediated culture—where experience passes through screens big and small; where communication is texted and tweeted; where play plays out on keyboards and consoles, triangulated between players on a video screen, often from points across the globe; where sex is had on pornsites and webcams; indeed, where citizenship is exercised through donation checks and in the privacy of voting booths—even in this sprawling culture of distance, classic fun remains immediate: football, keggers, mosh pits, step; skateboarding, improv, political protest; hands-on, face-to-face, playful activities that require dexterity and a sense of goodwill to avoid the pitfalls of injury or shame.

In order for a society to enjoy its own power, to risk a few friendly collisions without descending into eye-gouging anarchy, it must have a radical sense of civility. Its citizens must be able to engage in rough play without losing sight of each other’s pleasure. At the funnest moments in American history, citizens have done this exceptionally well. They have reveled in the law’s gaps and shadows, all the while showing due respect for their neighbors’ rights and happiness. They have turned social conflict into joyous upheaval and have strengthened the nation in the face of adversity. And so do we see the full measure of this subject. Fun is risky and rebellious for a reason. Fun is frivolous and silly with a purpose. The state may try to keep people apart, as it did for decades following Plessy v. Ferguson. Big Business may try to market thrills and get between the people and their fun, as George C. Tilyou did with Coney Island, as Nintendo ingeniously does with Wii. But the drive to get down, get dirty, get real, remains stronger than the rolling Mississippi.

……………

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUN is in fact structured rather like the Mississippi. Its pure source water came bubbling up from a variety of early folk sources—from Merry Mount and the Revolution, from slave culture and the gold rush. These streams flowed strong during the Age of Jackson, when rowdy Americans embraced and practiced their heritage of pure folk fun—often to the horror of social reformers. Mixing and mingling in the antebellum decades, these streams combined into a national culture—of political fury, of black festivity, and of risky freedom on the wide frontier. This early American fun, born of much struggle, still flows strong in the national consciousness.

Like the Mississippi River on its southward journey, American fun’s river has been strengthened and muddied by major tributaries along the way—three to be exact. Each one flows from its own cultural era; each one contributes its own political tint. The first joined the mainstream in the Gilded Age, when the people’s rough and rebellious pleasures were simulated and packaged as commercial amusements; fun became spectacle and mechanized play, and the crowd was divided into actors and consumers. The second coursed in during the Jazz Age, when Sons of Liberty resistance became popular practice and the hothouse flowers of African-American folk culture inspired wide participation; disenfranchised groups—women and blacks and youth in general—made smart and creative and antic innovations to a newly energized public sphere. The third tributary flowed in the 1960s. Riding a rising tide of popular upheaval, blending an excitement for revolutionary-era rebellion with sex, drugs, rock, and pranks, a new generation of hedonistic rebels chose lacerating fun over apathy, consumerism, and violence.

These three tributaries—the commercial, playful, and radically political—keep flowing into our current Internet Age. They pour nutrients, pollutants, and sheer life-force into the great American gulf—which is to say, into the citizenry. They mix and mingle to make delightful hybrids—from commercially funded flash mobs to YouTube-fueled Rube Goldberg machines. They inspire the people to come together in marvelous ways, as in the blitzkrieg street theater of the Cacophony Society and Improv Everywhere. But so much contemporary American fun stays loyal to its heritage. To be sure, the latest innovations in popular entertainment—in 4-D movies, in millennial roller coasters, in the entire video game industry—are only perfections of the controlled participation that George C. Tilyou invented on Coney Island. By the same token, even the freshest pranks of the Occupy movement or of the ingenious pranksters, the Yes Men, hark back to the Yippies and the Diggers and, indeed, to the Sons of Liberty. In these you can taste the purest source water.

VERA SHEPPARD’S GRANDCHILDREN WERE the do-it-yourself teens of the 1970s and early 1980s. Fed up with gang violence and excluded from nightclubs, early hip-hop innovators jacked into streetlamps and reinvented pop culture on inner-city street corners. In a similar vein, hardcore punks, disgusted by Reagan-era New Traditionalism, founded a self-sufficient nation on the virtues of primitive rock ’n’ roll. B-boys and B-girls fought for turf in the “cypher” with feats of acrobatic style. Hardcore punks from L.A. to Boston thrashed, bulldozed, and stage-dove in the mosh pit, unleashing their aggressions against corporate America in colliding, kicking, often bloody fury. B-boys and B-girls joined together as Zulu Nation; their motto was “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun.” The mosh pit had “anarchy” tattooed on its forehead. But as anarchic or criminal as it may have seemed—even to many of its young participants (not to mention the cops at the door)—the mosh pit perfected American democracy. Its raging conflict was totally consensual and held aloft by sacred rules.

In the history of American fun, B-boys and punks stand shoulder to shoulder with the earliest Patriots. For both generations freedom was more than an idea; it was a virtue to throw your whole body into. Patti Smith, a pioneer in New York’s punk scene, felt the same duty to save the people’s music that the Patriots felt to American liberty. Fearing it was “falling into fattened hands”—the hands of Capitol and EMI—she and her ragged CBGB crowd envisioned themselves “as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll.” As she remembers it, “We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”

B-boys and punks, like revolutionary Patriots, exulted in their youth. Both generations strutted in primitive costumes that set their law-abiding elders’ teeth on edge. Both invented do-it-yourself technologies—for publication, gathering, food, and shelter—that sidestepped corporations and the king, respectively. The Patriots had the likes of Samuel Adams and James Otis, leaders who inspired the lowliest dockworkers to believe they could form a republic of rough and active citizens. B-boys and B-girls were lightning-tongued MCs who honored the earliest black folk traditions—vocal, musical, fiercely athletic. Punks had insanely high-energy rock bands who inflamed their minds with a fierce new ethics—against commercialism, against race prejudice, against all that phony yuppie bullshit.

In past decades there’s been a national explosion in bold, loud, political merriment. From anti–World Trade Organization rallies to gay pride parades to the range of ethnic holidays, identity groups from throughout the population have tapped into the nation’s heritage of fun for ways to come together, be seen, and be heard. More than ever, despite a runaway entertainment industry that would keep the people warming its seats, Americans are deliberate about having their fun. For some, it’s the civil way to rebel. For some—like the thousands at Burning Man or the Sturgis, South Dakota, Motorcycle Rally—rebellion is just the best reason to party.

But at a time when both the Boston Tea Party can be trademarked by drug companies and average citizens take on Wall Street, it is important to revisit the origins of rebellion. For even when the stakes were highest—for Patriots, for slaves, for forty-niners—the pioneers in American fun managed to keep the battle civil. Full of crazy punk-rock courage, they dove into the crowd with big bloody smiles and surfed the citizens’ dangerous passion.