THE FOREFATHER OF AMERICAN FUN1. “heroes and heroines”: “East Defies West in Dance Marathon,” New York Times, April 19, 1923, 22. See also Carol Martin, Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 14–15.
2. “the pioneer spirit of early America”: Frederick Nelson, “The Child Stylites of Baltimore,” The New Republic, August 28, 1929, 37.
3. “wandered aimlessly toward the door”: “Tri-State Dance Marathon Ends in 69 Hours; Police Stop It After Woman Breaks Records,” New York Times, April 18, 1923, 6.
4. “I’m Irish; do you suppose”: “East Defies West,” 22.
5. “sport, high merriment, and frolicksome delight”: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language, ed. Jack Lynch (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002), 202.
6. we haven’t had a history of fun: Or perhaps more precisely, we haven’t had a history of the fun-as-radical-merriment that this book endeavors to present. At least three books, from three different eras, offer mighty precedents; they give essential histories of, respectively, humor, play, and commercial amusement. Constance Rourke’s classic study, American Humor: On the National Character (1931), examines Jackson Age comic almanacs and other nineteenth-century sources and tracks several strong currents in performance and folk culture that helped to shape an American identity (New York: New York Review Books, 2004). In America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), Foster Rhea Dulles provides a detailed and often witty history of American recreation and play. And most recently, in his exhaustive history With Amusement for All: A History of Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), LeRoy Ashby gives what he calls “an interpretive synthesis of almost two hundred years of American entertainment: the sale, and purchase, of fun.” It makes good sense that Ashby’s study begins in 1830, with the rise of P. T. Barnum and blackface minstrelsy, America’s earliest innovations in the mass production of a certain kind of “fun”—amusements Ashby categorically (and rightly) divides “from the folk games, festivals, and celebrations that had marked societies around the globe for centuries” (vii–viii). To a large degree, American Fun is about the tenacity of such lingering folk fun, despite the entertainment industry’s indomitable campaign.
7. “civilizing function,” “enjoyment,” “play,” “play-element”: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 11.
8. “creates order, is order”: Ibid., 10.
9. “the fun of playing”: Ibid., 3.
10. “in passing,” “it is precisely”: Ibid., 10.
11. “merely” fun: Ibid., 33.
12. “only for fun”: Ibid., 8.
13. “make believe”: Ibid., 24.
14. “no other modern language”: Ibid., 3.
15. “comes from doing”: Anand Giridharadas, “America and the Fun Generation,” New York Times, October 29, 2010.
16. “pure democracy”: James Madison, “No. 10,” The Federalist Papers: Hamilton, Madison, Jay (New York: Penguin, 1961), 81. These ideas are nothing new. The notion that participatory democracy, active citizenship, and an engaged civil society all depend for their vitality on direct civic action and conflict derives from a long discursive tradition. On the short list of key texts informing this line of argument are, following the Students for a Democratic Society’s “Port Huron Statement” (1962): Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2001); Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
17. “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun”: Jeff Chang and DJ Kool Herc, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 120.
18. “falling into fattened hands”: Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 245.
THE FOREFATHER OF AMERICAN FUN1. “civill body politick,” “most meete & convenient”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), 70.
2. those who trace America’s democratic tradition: As Mark L. Sargent demonstrates, the Mayflower Compact, originally cited as a loyalist document, gradually was embraced as an original vestige of American democracy by nonpartisan framer James Wilson and presidents John and John Quincy Adams. In “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth,” New England Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 1988): 233–51. Nathaniel Philbrick cites Pastor John Robinson’s farewell letter to the Separatists, which advises them to “become a body politic, using amongst [themselves] civil government,” as evidence that the compact was meant to lay “the basis for a secular government in America”—though of course Robinson wasn’t along to frame said government or to see it through. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006), 41.
3. “discontented & mutinous speeches”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 69.
4. “to be as firme as any patent”: Ibid.
5. “godly”: Ibid., 70.
6. Bradford’s childhood was filled with misery: Perry D. Westbrook, William Bradford (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 17–27; Bradford Smith, Bradford of Plymouth (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1951), 70–71.
7. “grave & revered”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 27.
8. “not out of any newfangledness”: Ibid., 38–39.
9. “evill examples”: Ibid., 39. See also Wm. Elliot Griffis, The Influence of the Netherlands in the Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic (Boston: DeWolfe Fiske & Co., 1891); Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 548–90.
10. “those vast & unpeopled”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 40.
11. “lustie,” “very profane younge”: Ibid., 57.
12. “spared no pains,” “had been boone companions,” “but a small cann of beere”: Ibid., 71.
13. “lusty yonge men”: Ibid., 80.
14. “pitching the barr,” “implements,” “gameing and reveling,” “mirth,” “at least openly”: Ibid., 83.
15. “buggery,” “a mare, a cowe,” “sadd accidente,” “lesser catle,” “Then he him selfe,” “and no use made”: Ibid., 202. Detailed accounts of sexual surveillance and criminalization in the New England colonies can be found in James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz’s The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Plantation (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001), 131–70, and in Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 84–116.
16. “how one wicked person,” “so many wicked persons,” “mixe them selves amongst,” “such wickedness”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 203.
17. Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan”: Merry Mount received newfound attention in the liberal academic climate of the 1960s and 1970s, its vogue reaching a climax in 1977, incidentally the peak of America’s sexual revolution. That year at least four scholars gave Morton and his merrymakers their moment in the sun. Karen Ordahl Kupperman argued against the long-held but unproven assumption that Morton was ousted for selling firearms to the Indians, asserting, in his defense, that Native American archery was known to be more effective than Pilgrim warcraft and that the latter more likely wanted to hoard the fur-trade market share. In “Thomas Morton, Historian,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1977): 660–64. Michael Zuckerman dismissed the Pilgrims’ practical motives (apart from their abiding jealousy that Merry Mount ran a 700 percent profit while Plymouth Plantation operated at a loss), focusing instead on ample evidence that Morton “threatened what [the Pilgrims] lived for”—by celebrating the horrid wilderness; by eating, drinking, speaking, and “[keeping] sexual company” with the hated Indians; and especially for enjoying “carnal pleasure” for reasons other than “procreation,” “utility.” “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 1977): 255–77. John Seelye, in his sparkling account, reads Morton as “an American version of Falstaff” and America itself as a “zone of pleasure.” Prophetic Waters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 169, 166. John P. McWilliams Jr. argued that the chroniclers of Merry Mount’s Maypole fracas historically fall into two historical groups: “Post-Revolutionary Americans” who “saw in Merry Mount the opportunity for reflection on the origins of the national character” and “twentieth-century writers” who used the same story to “[trace] the beginnings of failure, decline, or betrayal.” “Fictions of Merry Mount,” American Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 4. With one notable exception, Nathaniel Hawthorne, these two partisan groups are fundamentally opposed. The Post-Revolutionary Americans—who include Bradford himself, Catherine Sedgwick, Charles Francis Adams Jr., Whittier, and Longfellow—might be called, in the fight over fun, “Bradfordites”: they dismiss Thomas Morton as the pettifogger, scofflaw, con man, and/or idiot who threatened our young nation’s safety and integrity by selling firearms to savage terrorists. The twentieth-century camp—including Morton himself, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Vincent Benét, Robert Lowell, and Richard Slotkin—could as easily be called “Mortonites.” These writers tout Merry Mount as the first frontier, an amoral outpost a stone’s throw from Plymouth, where sexual, political, and racial freedoms were squelched by mean-spirited philistines. But it is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of events, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1834)—a fanciful short story that historically belongs among the Post-Revolutionaries, while thematically anticipating Morton’s modern champions—whose very popularity gives it the last word. This staple of college survey courses secures the incident in our national imagination as a missed opportunity for American democracy, which, alas, could have been such fun, had the majority not been too sober to pursue it.
18. “hidious & desolate wilderness”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 60.
19. “long[s] to be sped”: Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, or New Canaan (Amsterdam: Jacob Frederick Stam, 1637), 10; facsimile edition (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
20. “science,” “Art of Revels”: Sir George Buck, The Thirde Universitie of London, accessed August 13, 2012, from http://www.winerock.netau.net/sources/stow_third_universitie.html, where the transcription is explained as such: “from the NYPL Mid-Manhattan Research Library’s copy of selected dance-relevant passages of Sir George Buck’s The Third Universitie of England, an appendix to the 1615 edition of John Stow’s The Annales, Or Generall Chronicle of England finished and edited by Edmond Howes. London: Thomas Adams, 1615, as well as a few passages from the main Annales text. The 1631 edition as viewed at the British Library also contains The Third Universitie of England, but while the main text differs, the ‘Orchestice’ and other Third Universitie passages are the same.”
21. “Master of Revels”: Robert R. Pearce, A history of the Inns of Court and Chancery: with notices of their ancient discipline, rules, orders, and customs, readings, moots, masques… (London, 1848), 114–22.
22. “did endeavour to take a survey”: Morton, New English Canaan, 59–60.
23. “Infidels”: Ibid., 17.
24. “the continuall danger of the salvage people”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 40–41. It was commonly held among early-modern Europeans that indigenous peoples needed to be “reduced to civility” from their current state of “barbarism” before they could receive Christianity. Until then, they were assumed to be lazy, disorderly, anarchic, unmannered, oversexed, and suspiciously itinerant. No moral creature would freely live in the wilderness without trying to bring its chaos to order. “The only acceptable notion of order,” James Axtell writes of the Pilgrims, “was the order they had known at home, the all-encompassing order of institutions, written-law, and hierarchy.” James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137–38.
25. “new creede”: Morton, New English Canaan, 113.
26. “modesty,” “cumbered,” “feate,” “Diogenes hurle away his dishe”: Ibid., 57.
27. “without Religion, Law, and King”: Ibid., 49.
28. “uncivilized,” “more just than the civilized”: Ibid., 125.
29. “poore wretches,” “beggers”: Ibid., 55.
30. “feats and jugling tricks”: Ibid., 34.
31. “worshipped Pan”: Ibid., 18.
32. “According to human reason”: Ibid., 57.
33. “I, having a parte”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 140.
34. “fell to great licentiousness,” “gott much by trading with Indeans”: Ibid., 140–41.
35. protesting too much: Anderson also suggests that Bradford’s fanciful monologue may have been a poke at his contemporary Levellers, who “had come to represent an extreme expression of radical Protestant ideology.” William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 142.
36. “worthy wights,” “And pitty ’t is I cannot call them Knights”: Morton, New English Canaan, 146. Michelle Burnham, reading New English Canaan “in the context of Morton’s already intersecting regional and transcontinental economic relationships,” makes a compelling point: that Morton “offers readers a kind of aristocratic colonial fantasy” by “promis[ing] would-be planter-gentlemen the pastoral possibilities of unlimited pleasure and leisure,” but she reads the text quite narrowly to conclude that he dismisses Indians and bondservants alike as faceless economic resources. Despite Morton’s obvious embrace of his contemporary culture and economics (the pastoral, Saturnalia, fur trading, tourism), what distinguishes his book (and colony) from those of his peers is both his explicit criticism of aristocratic “heraldry” and his deep and careful appreciation for these devalued groups’ craftsmanship, intelligence, and human dignity. “Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan,” Early American Literature 41, no. 3 (November 2006): 405, 425.
37. “Fouling peeces,” “the hants of all sorts of game,” “all the scume of the countrie”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 142–43.
38. the name’s witty abominations: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 58–65.
39. “memorial to after ages”: Morton, New English Canaan, 132.
40. “they call it Merie-mounte”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 141.
41. “Jollity and gloom were contending”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 88–93.
42. “a barrel of excellent beare,” “the olde English custome,” “faire sea marke”: Morton, New English Canaan, 132.
43. “wombe,” “art & industry,” “darck obscurity”: Ibid., 10.
44. “a Satyrist”: Ibid., 9.
45. making Merry Mount last: Hawthorne’s short story, written during the dreariest period in Native American history, seems to echo this poignant wish. It stages an actual wedding in the scene, but jollity’s empire is nipped in the bud when the Lord and Lady of the May, “madly gay in the flush of youth,” are dragged away in the end by the Pilgrims, those “most dismal wretches.” Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” 92–93.
46. “and other fitting instruments”: Morton, New English Canaan, 132.
47. “the good liquor”: Ibid., 134.
48. “Make greene garlons,” “Drinke and be merry”: Ibid.
49. “drinking and dancing aboute it”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 141.
50. “Sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight”: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language, ed. Jack Lynch (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002), 202.
51. competing social systems weren’t held in check: William Heath, who gives the liveliest and most detailed account of Merry Mount in recent years, reads Morton’s colony as a rude intrusion of Renaissance England into a would-be Calvinist paradise: “As an Anglican cavalier with literary pretensions and a hedonistic bent, Morton epitomized the ‘eat-drink-and-be-merry’ England the Puritans hoped to leave behind. His maypole festivities smacked of folk superstitions, pagan practices, Old Testament precedents, and King James I’s Book of Sports; his consorting with Indian women violated their sexual and racial taboos” (153–54). The pleasure of this multiplex transgression, however, left England far behind; for all of its culturally British antecedents, the fun of Merry Mount crushed all the old aristocratic molds and experienced an audacious (if short-lived) civil society that was properly North American, a New English Canaan. “Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England,” Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 135–68.
52. “harmles mirth”: Morton, New English Canaan, 135.
53. “over armed with drinke”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 144.
54. “the effusion of so much noble blood”: Morton, New English Canaan, 142.
55. “We must be knit together”: John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume A, ed. Nina Baym (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 176–77.
56. The American Self was menaced: Did the Puritans have fun? Bruce C. Daniel argues that they did. But what he spools out in a blurry list as their “quiet fun, spiritual fun, family fun, [and] civic fun” turns out to be, upon closer inspection, a catalogue of generally sanctioned activities that Puritans engaged in as a matter of course and therefore—according to an apparently Lockean idea of “pleasure” that arises merely from following laws—possibly enjoyed. Take, for instance, this business of “spiritual fun,” much of which took place on the so-called Day of Joy, when “custom proscribed sexual intercourse, unnecessary traveling, and any type of frivolity.” Even though the jacket copy on Puritans at Play promises a “reapprais[al]” of the old assumption that Puritans were “dour, joyless, and repressed,” the author comes clean and lets us know that “brandings and mutilations for crimes committed on the Sabbath were not unusual, and a few ministers and civil leaders believed the death penalty appropriate for Sabbath breaking.” If a Puritan could be mutilated or killed for frivolity on Sunday, what room was left for “spiritual fun”? The entire day was spent in church, in “rigid segregation by gender, class, age, and race characterized by physical arrangements.” Daniels sets the stage with daring honesty:
The proceedings were formal, the atmosphere somber, the audience passive, the message long and complex, the meetinghouse unpainted, undecorated, and unheated. Convention tolerated no instrumental music, no talking, no shuffling about, not even any daydreaming. And despite the fact that magistrates occasionally prosecuted people for “rude and indecent behavior” or for “laughing in the meetinghouse,” the services usually lived up to the community’s expectations for good conduct. We should not look for anachronistic Tom Sawyer behavior in Puritan boys or assume that the congregation secretly longed to be elsewhere.
So where was the fun? Even if we were to assume, along with Daniels, that Tom Sawyer–like fun was not only anachronistic but constitutionally undesirable for the Puritans—which is also to assume that the likes of Hawthorne’s Edith and Edgar in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” sowed no seeds of mirth at Plymouth—we would still have to distort “fun” beyond all recognition to agree with his claim, in the following paragraph, that “the entire milieu of the services” (drearily described above) “had entertainment value.” A captive audience who is subjected to sermons that detailed the people’s depravity and eternal perdition (per Calvinist doctrine) was neither having “fun” nor being “entertained.” The sense one gets from Puritans at Play, as from most histories of early New England, is that what Daniels calls “boisterous” and “deviant fun” happened, like Thomas Morton’s, in spite of Puritanism, and usually at a considerable remove. Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), xiii, 77.
57. “praying towns”: Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 201.
58. “sharply against Health-drinking”: Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 48–50.
JACK TAR, UNBOUND1. “trifling, nasty vicious Crew,” “to Prisons and the Gallows”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:129.
2. “the nurseries of our legislators”: Ibid., 2:85.
3. Adams had not been bred for taverns: See ibid., 1:128, 257–69; 3:98–99, 257, 260, 261, 260.
4. “Let no trifling diversion”: Ibid., 2:59.
5. “fond”: Ibid., 2:47; dated July 22, 1771.
6. “The Rabble”: All quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are from ibid., 1:172–73.
7. “rhythmic crowd”: Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960), 30.
8. “Fiddling and dancing”: Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:172–73.
9. “foolish enough to spend”: Ibid.
10. a fast crowd collectively known as “Jack Tars”: Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3–129; Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New York: Garland, 1997), 28, 150.
11. “eighteenth century’s most complex machine”: Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 88. Vickers spends little time recounting the “celebrations” in so-called “sailortowns”—the “drinking to excess, feasting on fresh victuals, regaling their friends and families with stories from abroad, and renewing their acquaintanceships with women and girls” (133) that he says characterized the young mariner’s shore leave—but presents a wonderfully detailed history of the young Jack Tar’s work life and society.
12. “the antics of a wild, harebrained sailor”: Samuel Leech, Thirty Years from Home, or A Voice from the Main Deck (Boston: Charles Tappan, 1844), 24–25. Recall, too, William Bradford’s cautionary tale of the “proud & very profane younge … seaman” whom “it plased God … to smite with a greeveous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate maner.” Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 57.
13. The contagious fun: In Moby-Dick, the Pequod’s variegated crew does a jig that would have boiled Cotton Mather’s blood. The Icelandic, Maltese, and Sicilian sailors beg off for lack of female partners, to which the Long Island sailor chides these “sulkies” that “there’s plenty more for the rest of us” and the all-male crowd lights up the deck. The Azores sailor beseeches Pip on the tambourine: “Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies! break the jinglers!” The Chinese sailor hollers: “Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.” The French sailor, beside himself in the frenzy, suggestively shouts: “Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split jibs! tear yourselves!” All the while Tashtego, the “quietly smoking” Indian, watches over the ruckus in judgment: “That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 146–47. This romp celebrates a seafaring camaraderie that predated the Revolution and would grew all the more diverse after 1776, when, as Gilje shows, Americans ignored Britain’s Navigation Acts and welcomed crew members of all nationalities (25).
14. “a Mob, or rather body of Men,” “their Captivated Fr[ien]ds”: Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 62.
15. “using Rigour instead of Mildness”: Cited in John Lax and William Pencak, “The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,” Perspectives in American History 19 (1976): 186.
16. “rioting,” “People can experience”: Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 104.
17. “such Illegal Criminal Proceedings”: Lax and Pencak, “Knowles Riot,” 197.
18. “who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness”: Cited in John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 8. Alexander’s indispensable book was among the first in a recent surge of Samuel Adams biographies; it also remains the most incisive account of his early political life. It has since been revised, expanded, and retitled: Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary (2011). Pauline Maier’s long biographical essay—in The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 3–50—is also highly recommended. Other biographies consulted for this account are Benjamin H. Irvin, Samuel Adams: Son of Liberty, Father of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Puls, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Ira Stoll, Samuel Adams: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2008).
19. “No man was more aware”: Maier, Old Revolutionaries, 40.
20. “Folly,” “Dissipation”: Ibid., 42.
21. “Cause of Liberty and Virtue”: Ibid., 36.
22. “zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause”: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2010), 2:163.
23. “Chief Incendiary”: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 103.
24. “all serpentine cunning”: Peter Oliver, Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1961), 39.
25. “The true patriot”: Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 24 vols. (McLean, VA: IndyPublish.com, n.d.), 2:106.
26. “spent rather lavishly”: Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 10, 1736–1740 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1958), 421–22. When he returned for his master’s degree in 1743, Adams argued under his politically liberal father’s influence “that it is lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved.”
27. “No other caucus leader”: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 14.
28. “difficulties”: Samuel Adams, Writings, 1:200.
29. “a Master of Vocal Musick,” “This genius he improved”: Oliver, Peter Oliver’s Origin, 41.
30. “had for years been complimented”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 426.
31. Boston’s public houses, “slaves and servants”: David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 58, 59, 127.
32. “many Americans”: Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 361; see 361–417.
33. “distinct lower-class subculture”: Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 48, 50; see 45–56.
34. “the traditional oral culture of taverns”: Conroy, In Public Houses, 244, 180n, 254. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
35. “were where republican concepts gripped”: Conroy, In Public Houses, 254.
36. it was Jack Tar who hoisted: By tracing American seamen’s crowd actions (from the Knowles riots forward) to a colorful array of boat burnings, slave revolts, and other violent uprisings in the larger eighteenth-century transatlantic context, Marcus Rediker’s powerful article shows how and why Jack Tar’s multiracial revolution “could not easily be contained” by the Sons of Liberty’s conciliatory gestures. It was far more radical. After 1747, “Jack Tar took part in almost every port city conflict in England and America for the remainder of the century… [they] took to the streets in rowdy and rebellious protest on a variety of issues, seizing in practice what would later be defined as ‘rights’ by philosophers and legislators. Here, as elsewhere, rights were not granted from on high; they had to be fought for, won, and defended.” “A Motley Crew of Rebels: Sailors, Slaves, and the Coming of the American Revolution,” in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 197, 168.
37. “body of the people”: John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in The Selected Political Writings of John Locke, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 116.
38. “particularly strong collectivism”: Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29. From the 1750s to the 1770s, new intellectual currents flowed into the colonies from Europe, loosening the Puritans’ crumbling authoritarianism with Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality—what John Adams loosely called “all the Nonsense of these last twenty Years” (Autobiography and Diary, 3:265). Bernard Bailyn, in his landmark history of the period, establishes how opposition writers who had been considered “Cassandras” in their luxurious, extravagant Georgian England—“doctrinaire libertarians, disaffected politicians, and religious dissenters”—“seemed particularly reasonable, particularly relevant, and … quickly became influential” in the disenfranchised colonies (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], 92, 52–54). Jay Fliegelman demonstrates how the widespread rhetoric of independent children provided a rallying point for colonists who experienced, like kids, both exhilaration and fear in individuating themselves from England. “A call for filial autonomy and the unimpeded emergence from nonage” became “the quintessential motif. At every opportunity Revolutionary propagandists insisted that the new nation and its people had come of age, had achieved a collective maturity that necessitated them becoming in political fact an independent and self-governing nation” (Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution and Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 3). Gordon S. Wood details the colonies’ rapid upheaval from monarchical hierarchy to “enlightened paternalism” to an orderly form of autonomous democracy. Wood attributes this upheaval to, among other causes, an influx of new ideas: an increased interest in civilization and civility, an emphasis on benevolence and communal happiness, and an enlightened awareness of cosmopolitanism, as well as a lightening of punishments in general and vicious practices like public shaming (The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992]).
39. The middle management: Conroy, In Public Houses, 256.
40. a deft little dance: Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 31–32.
41. “A goodlier sight who e’er did see?”: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 32.
42. “Many Gentlemen”: Francis Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot, 1765,” in Documents to Accompany America’s History, Sixth Edition, ed. Melvin Yazawa (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 107.
43. “So much were they affected”: Boston Newsletter, August 22, 1765; Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 159–65; John Rowe, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, ed. Anne Rowe Cunningham (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1969), 88–89.
44. “three huzzas”: Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot,” 107.
45. “a Burnt-Offering”: Cited in Hoerder, Crowd Action, 98.
46. “some bruises”: Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot,” 107.
47. “gave universal Satisfaction”: Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, vol. 1, 1764–1769 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 59–60.
48. “There is,” he wrote: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:39.
49. “republican monarchist”: Richard Allen Ryerson, “John Adams, Republican Monarchist: An Inquiry into the Origins of His Constitutional Thought,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution and the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 72–92.
50. “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law”: Boston Gazette, August 12, 1765, reprinted in John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selections (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954), 18–21. Cited in David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 61.
51. “Head”: This and subsequent quotations in this and the following paragraph are from John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:341–42.
52. “parades, festivals, and shows of fireworks”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 431.
53. “Ears [were] ravished”: John Adams, “To William Crawford,” The Earliest Diary of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 99.
54. “higher object”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:124.
55. “body,” “harangue,” “constantly refused”: Ibid., 3:290–91.
56. “No Mobs or Tumults”: Boston Gazette, quoted in Hoerder, Crowd Action, 151.
57. “Where are the damned boogers”: All quotations in this paragraph are from A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March, 1770, by Soldiers of the 29th Regiment, which with the 14th Regiment Were Then Quartered There; With Some Observations on the State of Things Prior to That Catastrophe (1770; Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1973), 50–63.
58. “Council”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:293.
59. “by certain busy Characters”: Ibid., 3:292.
60. “We have been entertained”: John Adams, Legal Papers of John Adams, Ser. 3, General Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 266–69. Emphasis added to “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs.”
61. “Mean and Vile Condition”: Lax and Pencak, “Knowles Riot,” 197.
62. “Not one extravagance”: Cited in Conroy, In Public Houses, 247.
63. “so very fat”: Abigail Adams, quoted in McCullough, John Adams, 64.
64. “Roxbury, I am told”: Samuel Adams, Writings, 2:241.
65. “Stop the Progress of Tyranny”: Ibid., 2:238.
66. “spirit”: Tea Leaves: Being a collection of letters and documents relating to the shipment of tea to the American colonies in the year 1773, by the East India Tea Company. Now first printed from the original manuscript. With an introduction, notes, and biographical notices of the Boston Tea Party, by Francis S. Drake (Boston: A. O. Crane, 1884), xliv. Also consulted for this account were Wesley S. Griswold, The Night the Revolution Began: The Boston Tea Party, 1773 (Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1972); Benjamin Woods Larabee, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991).
67. “the sharpest, the sharpest conflicts”: Tea Leaves, lix.
68. “he was willing to grant”: Griswold, The Night the Revolution Began, 91.
69. “Who knows how tea”: Tea Leaves, lxiii.
70. “A mob! A mob!,” “This meeting can do nothing more,”: Ibid., lxiv.
71. “Mohawk”: This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph and the next are from ibid., clxiii.
72. “Sport; high merriment”: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, 202.
73. “countryman”: Tea Leaves, cxvi.
74. “handled pretty roughly”: Ibid., lxx.
75. “speak[ing] to the British”: Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 32.
76. playlike “practice” for a possible republic: William Pencak, “Play as Prelude to Revolution: Boston, 1765–1776,” in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. Matthew Dennis et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 149.
77. “mock ceremonies”: Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 90–91.
78. “In 1765 the rioters had hung effigies”: Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: New Press, 2001), 46.
79. “blackfaced defiance of the Tea Party”: Deloria, Playing Indian, 32.
80. “the suggestion of instinct”: Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1995; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 85.
81. Such “natural” citizens: Ibid., 87, 86.
82. “embrace the occasions of mutual opposition”: Ibid., 25.
83. “national or party spirit,” “active and strenuous”: Ibid., 29.
84. “grimace of politeness”: Ibid., 43.
85. “happiness”: Ibid., 46. How important was Ferguson’s Essay to Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness”? Kevin J. Hayes recently states that Ferguson “would significantly shape Jefferson’s ideas concerning man’s responsibility to his fellow man,” but in no way does he substantiate this claim in The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113. Garry Wills goes so far as to promote Ferguson’s Essay as one of the “obvious places” to look when parsing “the pursuit of happiness,” but then he lets the subject drop. See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 367–68. To overlook Ferguson’s influence, as have all other of the Declaration’s major interpreters, is to overlook a compelling explanation of how something so radical as the “pursuit of happiness” could ever become an inalienable right—and why this phrase would have motivated Patriots who had struggled, often felicitously, to obtain their own society: the right to pursue communal happiness would not be a guarantee of private property (as Lockeans have always had it) but instead every citizen’s guarantee to enjoy the benefits of participatory democracy. For a strong argument for the materialist pursuits of individualist “happiness” to be found during the early revolutionary era, especially in the Chesapeake and Caribbean colonies, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
86. “If the individual owe every degree”: Ferguson, Essay, 59.
87. “the most magnificent Movement of all”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:85.
88. “The people at the Cape,” “You cannot imagine the height”: Samuel Adams, Writings, 3:72.
89. “were actually a great deal of fun”: David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 51. See also Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence and the Rights of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
90. “public diversions as promote Superfluity”: Samuel Adams to John Scollay, reprinted in Irvin, Samuel Adams, 151.
TECHNOLOGIES OF FUN1. “Ours is a light-hearted race”: Josiah Jenson, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life. With an Introduction by Mrs. H. B. Stowe (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland: Henry P. B. Jewett, 1858), 20–21. Important sources consulted for this chapter are Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Jean Stearns and Marshall Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1994); Larry Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 162–209; Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 50–91, 129–66; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 115–90; Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Biography, vols. 1, 6, and 16 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973); Lynn Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1989); Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972; New York: Pantheon, 1974).
2. “slave in form”: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (London: H. G. Collins, 1851), 68.
3. “The staid, sober, thinking and industrious ones”: Ibid., 68–70.
4. “no moral religious instruction”: Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself with An Introduction by Lucious C. Matlack (New York: Published by the Author, 5 Spruce Street, 1849), 21–23.
5. “buoyant, elastic”: Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853), 180–81, 218; electronic edition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html, accessed August 5, 2012.
6. “slave minstrels”: Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 169.
7. “beloved violin”: Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, 180–81.
8. “the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation”: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 248.
9. “It was Christmas morning”: Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, 282.
10. “To Federalists”: Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes, 230, 231n. Len Travers, in his version of the rise of partisan holidays, gives a sparkling account of Philadelphia’s “Grand Federal Procession” on July 4th, 1788—a partisan take on Independence Day that was also “the largest, most lavish procession ever seen in the United States” (Celebrating the Fourth, 71).
11. The earliest account of an African-American holiday: All quotes in this paragraph are from “UTOPIA, April 10 _____” (letter), The New-York Weekly Journal: Containing the Freshest Advices, Foreign, and Domestick, March 7, 1736, 1, cited in Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams, “Zenger’s ‘Banger’: Contextualizing the Banjo in Early New York City, 1736,” forthcoming in a yet-untitled collection of essays from the University of Illinois Press to be edited by Robert Winans.
12. Joseph P. Reidy notes: See Joseph P. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day’ & Black Community Life in New England, 1750–1860,” Marxist Perspectives (Fall 1978): 102–17.
13. “Nine-tenths of the blacks”: James Fenimore Cooper, Works of J. Fenimore Cooper: Oak Openings. Satanstoe. Mercedes of Castile (New York: P. F. Collier, Publisher, 1892), 277.
14. “collected in thousands”: Southern, Music of Black Americans, 53.
15. “negroes patrol[led] the streets”: “Pinkster,” Albany Centinel, June 17, 1803, 3–4; emphases in original.
16. “graceful mien”: Absalom Aimwell, Esq., “A Pinkster Ode, for the year 1803, Most Respectfully dedicated to Carolus Africanus, Rex: Thus rendered in English; King Charles, Captain General and Commander in Chief of the Pinkster Boys” (Albany, NY: Printed Solely for the Purchasers and Others, 1803); Geraldine R. Pleat and Agnes N. Underwood, eds., “A Pinkster Ode, Albany, 1802,” New York Folklore Quarterly 8 (Spring 1952): 31–45.
17. “King Charley”: James Eights, “Pinkster Festivals in Albany,” in Readings in Black American Music, 2nd ed., ed. Eileen Southern (1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 42.
18. “blacks and [a] certain class of whites,” “biographer of devils”: “Pinkster,” Albany Centinel, June 17, 1803, 3–4.
19. “still retained all the vigor”: Eights, “Pinkster Festivals,” 42–45.
20. “most lewd and indecent gesticulations”: “Pinkster,” Albany Centinel, 3–4.
21. “[T]here, enclosed within their midst”: Eights, “Pinkster Festivals,” 42–45.
22. “cultural syncretization”: See Melville J. Herskovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). More recently, Claire Sponsler makes this same critical point and reads Pinkster, through Paul Gilroy’s transatlantic theory, as the product of a “compound interculture … a transgeographical culture without national boundaries that thrives on syncretism and lateral networks.” Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 49.
23. “subversive music makers”: To quote Gilroy’s statement more fully: “I want to endorse the suggestion that these subversive music makers and users represent a different kind of intellectual not least because their self-identity and their practice of cultural politics remain outside the dialectic of pity and guilt which, especially among oppressed people, has so often governed the relationship between the writing elite and the masses of people who exist outside literacy.” Then he goes on to dignify the content produced by these intellectuals—“the unrepresentable, the pre-rational, and the sublime”—while acknowledging the difficulty of reading such texts. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76–77.
24. the fun expression of free-spirited community: If collective fun, as suggested here, is the Pinkster Days’ most legible text—how should it be read? How can it be read, as speech, in an objective way that doesn’t once again project its reader’s will? How can these “intellectuals,” as Gilroy might call them, be understood? An intriguing solution comes from the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s book Rhythmanalysis: Time, Space, and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2004), which sets out to establish a scientific “analysis of rhythms”—“repetitive time and space”—“with practical consequences.” Several elements of Lefebvre’s theory and method combine to make it relevant to Pinkster Days. The persistent dancing and drumming and singing, performed with variation in a single setting, presented an ever-changing dynamism that at the same time had unity and positivity. Hence, as musical events where “rhythm dominates” and “supplants melody and harmony (without suppressing them),” Pinkster had what Lefebvre calls “an ethical function,” for intensely rhythmic music mirrors the body’s internal functions and uses the body as its “resource.” Lefebvre writes: “In its relation to the body, to time, to the work, [music] illustrates real (everyday) life. It purifies it in the acceptance of catharsis. Finally, and above all, it brings compensation for the miseries of everydayness, for its deficiencies and failures” (62; emphasis in original).
The dance on Pinkster Hill, to the extent that our meager evidence allows, presents a complex illustration of everyday life that stands in highest relief alongside the partisan celebrations taking place during the same era. If these contentious Fourth of July showdowns reflect a republic characterized by “arrhythmia”—what Lefebvre calls “disturbances” to rhythm “that sooner or later become pathology”—then Pinkster reflects “the eu-rhythmic body, composed of diverse rhythms, each organ, each function, having its own” and yet coexisting in harmony. As Claire Sponsler claims, the black participants’ experience will never be known except as tendentiously reported by whites; put differently, the predominantly black revelers at the Albany Pinkster Days, like Gayatri Spivak’s theorized subaltern, will never have the chance to “speak”—unless, perhaps, we broaden our sense of speech to include expressive bodily acts, much as Spivak does in interpreting Bhubaneswari Baduri’s suicide for its political content. When we do, the clearest and most positive evidence of that experience, among all of the competing accounts of Pinkster, is in the participants’ various displays of pleasure: bodily pleasure, ironic pleasure, rebellious pleasure, communal pleasure. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
25. Albany’s Common Council passed: See Shane White, “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (January–March 1989): 68–75.
26. “The language of the slave’s speech and song”: Owens, This Species of Property, 175.
27. The storytellers themselves: Blassingame, The Slave Community, 57–59.
28. In a rustic opening in the Georgia pines: Fictional composite of a storytelling session drawn from a variety of works. The story itself was collected in Georgia by Emma Backus and cited in Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness, 110–11. Other sources include Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, compiled by Richard Chase (1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983); Charles C. Jones Jr., Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888); J. Mason Brewer, American Negro Folklore (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).
29. “We started shuckin’ corn”: Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1993), 112. Quilting parties had a similar appeal among plantation women, as did the “Coonjine” among river workers—the latter being “a combination of song and dance connected with freight handling on the steamboats” (Emery, Black Dance, 146). Deborah Gray White’s landmark work on female slave culture emphasizes the relevance of work, fun, and community building in the “double duty” practices of laundry and quilting, arguing that a “saving grace … was that women got a chance to interact with each other”: “On a Sedalia County, Missouri, plantation women looked forward to doing laundry on Saturday afternoons because, as Mary Frances Webb explained, they ‘would get to talk and spend the day together.’ Quiltings, referred to by former slaves as female ‘frolics’ and ‘parties,’ were especially convivial. South Carolinian Sallie Paul explained that ‘when dey would get together den, dey would be glad to get together.’ ” Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 122.
30. “extra swig of liquor”: Emery, Black Dance, 112.
31. “usually the most original and amusing”: Letitia Burwell, quoted in Abrahams, Singing the Master, the essential work on the culture of corn shuckings, 92.
32. “merciless,” “meaningless etiquette,” “rigid hierarchies,” “slaves lied, cheated, stole”: Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness, 122.
33. “music as a deceptive form”: Campbell, An Empire for Slavery, 174.
34. “created for others”: Rawick, The American Slave, 1:32.
35. “Negroes like to do everything at night”: Rivers, Slavery in Florida, 167.
36. “by imitating the voices of slaveholders”: James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 24.
37. “underhanded, unsportsmanlike”: Daryl Cumber Dance, Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 181.
38. “divine culture-hero”: Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken Books, 1956), 125. Though Harris declares it “extremely doubtful” that any of “Uncle Remus’s stories” (as he calls them) could have been “borrowed by the Negroes from the red men,” Jay Hansford C. Vest has responded with a thorough and convincing study to the contrary, especially as it concerns the “aboriginal Rabbit-Trickster motif.” Tracing Brer Rabbit tales to various stories in the Hare cycle as well as charting the countless sites and situations (not the least of them the institution of slavery) where African Americans and Native Americans commingled, Vest establishes the likelihood that more of these stories have North American than African origins. Harris, Complete Tales, xxii; Jay Hansford C. Vest, “From Bobtail to Brer Rabbit: Native American Influences on Uncle Remus,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 19–43.
39. And unlike the Trickster’s morality tales: For a more optimistic response to Levine’s and others’ arguments for Brer Rabbit’s “amorality and brutality,” which argues that his tales contain a deeper Christian morality, see William Courtland Johnson, “Trickster on Trial: The Morality of the Brer Rabbit Tales,” in Ain’t Gonna Lay My ’Ligion Down: African American Religion in the South, ed. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 52–71.
40. “from round Yankees”: This and subsequent quotations in this and the following paragraph from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe, Being the Notes and Sketches of an Architect, Naturalist and Traveler in the United States from 1769 to 1820 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905), 161–63.
41. general racial “blending”: Interview with Henry Kmen, quoted in Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 20.
42. a pungent blend: Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008), 274–81.
43. “However much of the primitive”: Henry Kmen, Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791–1841 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 229.
44. “movements, gyrations, and attitudenizing exhibitions”: Creecy, quoted in Sublette, World That Made New Orleans, 282.
45. While it is hard to say with precision: See Southern, Music of Black Americans, 161–62.
46. “a principal means by which”: Stuckey, Slave Culture, 24.
47. “ ‘praise’-nights”: William Frances Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: Peter Smith, 1951), xiii.
48. “any assembly of [enslaved] Negroes or Negresses”: Code Noir, cited in Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 239.
49. “Oh, where are our select men”: Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 227.
50. “a jerking, hitching motion”: Allen et al., Slave Songs, xiv.
51. “unceasing, wave-like ripple”: T. Amaury Talbot, quoted in Stuckey, Slave Culture, 11.
52. “ ‘danced’ with the whole body”: Stuckey, Slave Culture, 362.
53. “sensual, even blatantly erotic dances”: Crété quoted in Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 65.
54. “not altogether to understand”: Asbury, The French Quarter, 253.
55. “rhythm and excitement”: Emery, Black Dance, 121.
56. “turning around occasionally”: Ibid., 122.
57. “Some gits so joyous”: Former Texan slaves Wes Beady and Richard Carruthers quoted in Rawick, The American Slave, 1:36, 37.
58. “worship,” “the sole object”: Schultz and Nuttall quoted in Sublette, World That Made New Orleans, 281–82.
59. “the steps and figures of the court”: Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 28.
60. “Long Dog Scratch”: Ibid., 29.
61. “mass of nonsense and wild frolic”: Douglass, My Bondage, 155.
62. “The Majesty of the People had disappeared”: Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society: Portrayed by the Family Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 295.
63. “Hangings and public executions”: Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 12.
64. “expressive,” “recreational”: Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot & Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 55.
65. “friendly rivalry”: Discussion following April Masten’s presentation, “Shared Traditions: The Origins of Negro Jigging in Early America,” at the conference Triumph in My Song: 18th & 19th Century African Atlantic Culture, History, & Performance, University of Maryland, College Park, June 2, 2012. For Masten’s groundbreaking analysis of the “friendly rivalry” between dancers and musicians during this period, see “Partners in Time: Dancers, Musicians, and Negro Jigs in Early America,” Common-Place 13, no. 2 (Winter 2013), http://www.common-place.org/vol-13/no-02/masten/.
66. White acknowledges that these fancy-dress balls: The following quotations are from Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 49, 191–98.
67. “at a signal”: Asbury, The French Quarter, 243.
68. “abhor & detest the Sabbath-day”: Mark Twain, Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 520.
69. “frightful triumph of body over mind”: George Washington Cable, “The Dance in Place Congo,” The Century 31, no. 51 (February 1886): 525.
70. “what havoc”: Ibid., 522.
71. “Now for the frantic leaps!”: Ibid., 525.
72. “social death”: For a brilliant response to recent historical trends that argue for “social death” in slavery, see Vince Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (December 2009): 1231–49. See also Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
73. “all this Congo Square business”: Cable, “Dance in Place Congo,” 527.
74. “No wonder the police stopped it”: Ibid., 525.
A CALIFORNIA EDUCATION1. “quite dejected and sulky”: J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1857), 10.
2. “grumbled at everything”: Ibid., 150.
3. were often ungoverned, ungodly fun: Susan Lee Johnson, whose study of gold rush “leisure” includes church attendance, saloons, gambling, dancing, and popular blood sports like bull and bear baiting, makes the strong claim that “like domestic and personal service work, leisure was one of the key locations in which gendered and racialized meanings got made, unmade, and remade … When immigrant men laid down their picks and shovels, they found that the oppositions which created both social order and social relations—that is, society—back home were all out of kilter in California.” Anglo-American men, in particular, used to enjoying positions of social domination, experienced what Johnson calls a “crisis of representation.” Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 144.
4. “The streets were full of people”: Bayard Taylor, El Dorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 43.
5. “Northern barbarians”: Ibid., 30.
6. “for action”: This and subsequent quotations come from ibid., 44–46.
7. “beggarly sum”: Ibid., 62.
8. “disposition to maintain,” “In the absence of all law,” “thousands of ignorant adventurers”: Ibid., 77. Taylor also exposes self-government’s dark side. He watches in Stockton as two defenseless blacks were apprehended, tried, accused, and sentenced for allegedly assaulting a Chilean woman in her tent—all in the course of one day. Their respective sentences of fifty and twenty lashes were administered on the spot: “There was little of that order and respect shown which should accompany even the administration of impromptu law; the bystanders jeered, laughed, and accompanied every blow with coarse and unfeeling remarks” (ibid.).
9. “They struggled to gain freedom”: Sucheng Chan, “A People of Exceptional Character: Ethnic Diversity, Nativism, and Racism in the California Gold Rush,” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, ed. Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 69. For a penetrating study of African-American life in the diggings, see Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
10. “ideological overtones”: W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 151. See pp. 149–83 for vivid examples of Americans’ fidelity to alcohol—as a test of character, mark of freedom, and lubricant to community—in the early years of the republic.
11. American Temperance Society (ATS): Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), 3–42.
12. Not content with just reforming hard drinkers: Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition, 1800–1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 77, 87, 159–60.
13. “the natural bad passions of men”: Borthwick, Three Years in California, 67.
14. “sufficiency of schools and churches”: Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from ibid., 68–69.
15. the “disease” of “drunkenness”: This and other quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 71.
16. “a farewell whiff of smoke”: This and other quotations in this paragraph and the two following paragraphs are from ibid., 318–22.
17. Such happenings were common: Gary F. Kurutz, “Popular Culture on the Golden Shore,” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil, 294–97.
18. “cotillions upon the green prairie”: Paula Mitchell Marks, Precious Dust: The Saga of the Western Gold Rushes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 77.
19. “generous, hospitable, intelligent”: Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters from California Mines, 1851–52 (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922), 165.
20. “the ‘ladies,’ after their fatigues”: Borthwick, Three Years in California, 321.
21. “a very good move indeed”: Alfred Doten, The Journals of Alfred Doten, ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, vol. 1, 1849–1903 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1973), 20.
22. “slaves of King Alcohol”: Ibid., 26.
23. “several of the Americans drunk”: Ibid., 37.
24. “the most civil country”: Ibid., 52.
25. serious gold rush fun: A small sample indicates Doten’s daily frolics: “Harry sang her some of his naughty songs—We had the tallest kind of dancing and when we started for home again about one o’clock we were all more or less thick tongued and top heavy” (ibid., 144). “Ranch routine during the days, partying at night—Many snakes killed in the hayfields” (15). “The house was crowded—dancing, singing, and kicking up was the order of the night … waltzes and polkas … a most glorious jollification and we kept it up till daylight” (153). “We danced and kicked up to hearts’ content till just before daybreak” (159). “We marched up and down the road and went through all the military maneuvers—We had a glorious time and kept it up till about two o’clock” (164). “Tom Locke, John Fernandez, Mike and a lot more of the boys came in and we had a most joyful jollification—We had plenty of the ‘oh be joyful’ and were very joyful and jolly—we had music and dancing and lots of songs” (165).
26. “drinking and gambling”: Ibid., 97.
27. “howling drunk”: Ibid., 98, 117.
28. “a hell of a spree”: Ibid., 125.
29. He “astonished” crowds: Ibid., 128–30.
30. “This is one of the best ‘benders’”: Ibid., 141.
31. “jollification”: Ibid., 137, 192, 779.
32. “plum cake”: Ibid., 198.
33. “Mexicans are robbing and killing the Chinese”: Ibid., 141.
34. “thieving Mexicans”: Ibid., 107.
35. “it perfectly thunder beneath”: Quotations in this and the next paragraph are from ibid., 168.
36. “little Spanish village”: Ibid., 177.
37. “As usual in California”: This and other quotations in this paragraph from ibid., 190.
38. “as fast as [they] could load”: Quotations in this and the next paragraph are from ibid., 227–32.
39. “far famed,” “No use for my pencil”: Ibid., 716.
40. “considerable drunks & some fights”: Ibid., 723.
41. “got on a big spree”: Ibid., 727.
42. “skylarking”: Ibid., 762.
43. “Evening stage brought a noted correspondent”: Ibid., 763.
44. “Every feature of the spectacle”: Mark Twain, Roughing It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 156; see also 1–284. Further, see Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: The Free Press, 2005), 110–30, and Paul Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 3–33.
45. “Oh, don’t he buck”: Twain, Roughing It, 161.
46. “Here was romance”: Ibid., 67.
47. “It was dark as pitch”: Ibid., 145.
48. “Unassailable certainty”: Ibid., 274.
49. “could take [his] pen and murder”: Ibid., 277.
50. Clemens’s hoax of a “petrified man”: Mark Twain, “Petrified Man,” in Early Tales & Sketches, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, vol. 1, 1851–1863 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 159.
51. But a medical journal: Kelly Driscoll, “The Fluid Identity of ‘Petrified Man,’ ” American Literary Realism 41, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 214–31.
52. “Unreliable”: Mark Twain, Mark Twain of the Enterprise: Newspaper Articles & Other Documents, 1862–1864, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 59.
53. “April Fool & Co.”: Doten, Journals, 146.
54. “that most incorrigible of jokers”: Dan De Quille [William Wright], The History of the Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the World Renowned Comstock Silver Lode of Nevada (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1877), 357.
55. “12 pound nugget”: William P. Bennett, The First Baby in Camp: A Full Account of the Scenes and Adventures During the Pioneer Days of ’49 (Salt Lake City: Rancher Publishing Company, 1893), 6–7.
56. One famous prank: Twain, Roughing It, 221–27, 631–32n. For an earlier account of the landslide case, see also Mark Twain, “A Rich Decision,” in Early Tales & Sketches, vol. 1, 280–81, 481–82n.
57. “to provoke cascades of inextinguishable merriment”: Lucius Beebe, Comstock Commotion: The Story of the Territorial Enterprise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954), 40, 60.
58. At a time when eastern culture: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), especially 227–56.
59. a rash of murders: Mark Twain and Dan De Quille took a room in a house shared by the family of Tom Fitch, editor of their rival Union, and Twain managed to offend Fitch’s hospitable wife, Anna, with the rumor that De Quille had hanged her cat. (He hadn’t.) Making matters worse, Fitch had become the object of the Enterprise’s vicious ridicule for turning against the Union cause, a war of words that peaked, on September 27, in a Colt .44 duel between the two editors in chief. It was the season’s best-attended social outing—numbering “gamblers, pimps, touts, bartenders, teamsters, newspaper reporters, con men, shills, spielers, gold-brick artists, and snake-oil venders” among the witnesses—and though it spared Fitch’s life, it cost him a kneecap. Beebe, Comstock Commotion, 63–65.
60. “great pine forest”: Mark Twain, “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” in Early Tales & Sketches, vol. 1, 324–26.
61. “Presently his eyes spread wide open”: Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Sketches New and Old (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1882), 296.
62. “as baseless as the fabric of a dream”: Richard G. Lillard, “Contemporary Reaction to ‘The Empire City Massacre,’ ” American Literature 16, no. 3 (November 1944): 198–203.
63. “fun,” “gold as large as peas”: These quotes and the story of Tom and Pike are in De Quille, History of the Big Bonanza, 542–53.
64. “Three Saints”: Nigey Lennon, The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California; Samuel Clemens’s Turbulent Years on the Barbary Coast (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 30.
65. “very wild”: Artemus Ward [Charles Farrar Browne], (His Travels) Among the Mormons, in The Complete Works of Charles Farrar Browne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1889), 204.
66. “ ‘opinions and reflections’ ”: Twain, Mark Twain of the Enterprise, 122–25.
67. “composed of two desperadoes”: Twain, Roughing It, 321.
68. “infinitely varied and copious”: Ibid., 309.
69. “the wildest mob”: The story is told ibid., 293–98. See Lennon, Sagebrush Bohemian, 31–35.
70. “All Politeness”: Anthony, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 1 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 42; emphasis added. Shaftesbury countered Hobbesian egotism with the idea that citizens don’t strive just for their personal happiness, but also for their neighbors’ happiness, and have what he called sensus communis. He argued that a sense for the “common good” is an instinct every bit as natural as hunger.
SELLING IT BACK TO THE PEOPLE1. “Plenty, unless gorged to dyspepsia”: Samuel S. Cox, Why We Laugh (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876), 38.
2. “go farther, wait longer”: P. T. Barnum, The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, Clerk, Merchant, Editor, and Showman With His Rules for Business and Making a Fortune, 2nd ed. (London: Ward and Lock, 1855), 3.
3. “those dangerous things”: Ibid.
4. “there could be found”: Ibid., 11.
5. “organ of acquisitiveness”: Ibid., 5.
6. “cheerful Christianity”: Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. et al., P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 16.
7. “eternal hostility”: P. T. Barnum and James W. Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 113.
8. “totally blind”: Barnum, Autobiography, 49.
9. “curiously constructed automaton”: Ibid., 54.
10. “began to take great delight”: Quoted in Kunhardt et al., P. T. Barnum, 22.
11. “so perfectly ludicrous”: Barnum, Autobiography, 253.
12. “as usual”: P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr & Company, 1869), 81–82.
13. “Jollity and gloom”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 89.
14. “to arrest public attention”: Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 67.
15. “Mr. Griffin, the proprietor of this curious animal”: Notice in New York Herald, August 14, 1842, quoted in James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 101.
16. “a new way of thinking”: Cook, Arts of Deception, 29.
17. “Barnumization”: Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & the Meaning of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 195.
18. Even Mark Twain: See, for example, Mark Twain, “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” in Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches, ed. Tom Quirk (New York: Penguin, 1994), 24–27. Also, his protagonist Hank Morgan, a monster of humbugs, is a glorious send-up of this original Connecticut Yankee. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
19. “business” as a breeding ground: P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages (New York: Carleton, 1866), 13.
20. “greatest trick of all”: Cook, Arts of Deception, 118.
21. “be systematic”: P. T. Barnum, Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money (1880; Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1999), 63, 83.
22. “Weel about and turn about and do jis so”: T. D. Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” in W. T. Lhamon Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 96.
23. “that fascinating imaginary space”: Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51.
24. “Hottentot Venus”: For an exceptional account, see Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
25. “improvised” “ecstatic,” “demanded planned variety,” “stress[ed] jolliness”: Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 71.
26. “de holy state of hemlock”: Rice, “Original Jim Crow,” 250.
27. “he should like to play Otello”: Ibid., 293.
28. “Sambos”: Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 36.
29. “overlapping publics”: Ibid., 5.
30. “quick-quipping runaway,” “pestered those who would enter”: Ibid., 16.
31. “inspired the laughter of cruelty”: Gary D. Engle, This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), xxvii.
32. “genuine negro”: Thomas Low Nichols, quoted in Lott, Love and Theft, 112–13.
33. “Single shuffle, double shuffle”: Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1842), 107.
34. Lane is believed to have been: Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise, 71.
35. He had learned to dance: Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 121.
36. “to give correct Imitation Dances”: Quoted in Lott, Love and Theft, 115. See also James W. Cook, “Dancing Across the Color Line,” Common-Place 4, no. 1 (October 2003), section IV; http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-01/cook/cook-4.shtml.
37. “rare boys”: Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise, 129.
38. “the fun of these three nigger minstrels”: English actor H. P. Grattan quoted ibid., 145.
39. This frantic endeavor to “reproduce” fun: Ibid., 120.
40. starting a trend that in decades to come: Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 31.
41. “I have always strictly confined myself”: Emmett’s introduction quoted in Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise, 232.
42. urban riots: At least fifty-three riots erupted in 1835 alone; Daniel Walker Howe notes that there probably were three times that many. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 430–39. See also Feldberg, The Turbulent Era, 84–119.
43. an efflorescence of political parties: Sean Wilentz gives a lively account of the “radical democracies” during this period: The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 330–59. Ironically, however, beneath the blare of 1830s partisan conflict, there was a tepid turnout at the polls (a little more than 50 percent of eligible voters); this trend would hold steady until 1840, when—thanks to the same kinds of popular organization that fortified reform movements—there was what Altschuler and Blumin call “the annus mirabilis of American partisan democracy,” when “fully eight of ten eligible voters cast ballots.” Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14–18.
44. “swing, which nobody but a Bowery Boy”: William M. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York City (1852), quoted in Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 178. Also consulted: George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 174–76; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 102–5; David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 303–7. Others have also followed Reynolds’s lead in reading the b’hoys’ influence on the slang, style, and attitudes of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose. See Robert M. Dowling, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 52–59.
45. “with a perfect exuberance of flowers and feathers”: Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 176.
46. “The gang had no regular organization”: John Riply quoted in Anbinder, Five Points, 181.
47. “recreational”: Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 54–84.
48. their bloody 1834 race riots: Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 34–37.
49. “Slamm Bang & Co.,” “democratize”: Peter Adams, Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), 63; Google eBook.
50. “Thorough-going sporting-man”: Anbinder, Five Points, 142–43.
51. “shirtless democracy”: See Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 326–35. See also Adams, Bowery Boys, 107–8.
52. Dorr Rebellion: Adams, Bowery Boys, 47–60. Marvin E. Gettleman, The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1949 (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1980), 135–36.
53. “the first New Yorkers to leave for California”: Anbinder, Five Points, 180.
54. “dandies and dandizettes”: Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 85–119.
55. So faithfully did he mimic their dress: David Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Folk-Hero,” Theatre Journal 33, no. 2 (May 1981): 199–212.
56. “greenhorn”: Benjamin Archibald Baker, A Glance at New York (Cambridge, MA: ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2003), 4.
57. “capital fun”: This and subsequent quotations are from ibid., 11–14.
58. “Waxhall,” “Wawdeville,” “first-rate shindig”: Ibid., 21.
59. “As may be supposed”: Albion review quoted in Rinear, “F. S. Chanfrau’s Mose,” 202.
60. “a pleasant place for family resort”: Herald review quoted ibid., 204.
61. “Onstage, the b’hoy gained superhuman powers”: Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 104. Each of these folk heroes, in its era, captured a strain in American fun. The peddler was a rambling bricoleur who baffled yokels with pranks and stunts and quirkily practical contraptions. Trappers, woodsmen, and heel-cracking boatmen were monsters of risk and silly braggadocio who tackled the frontier’s sublime opponents—great lakes, grand canyons, rocky mountains—and always with a bizarre sense of humor. Their citified Jackson Age cousins, moreover, updated the nation’s puckish fury for Jacksonian democracy’s social wilderness. Mose and Lize posted their brash white selves as America’s cocky urban explorers. The classic treatment of these early American icons—Yankee peddlers and Kentucky woodsmen as well as blackface minstrels—is Constance Rourke’s superlative 1931 American Humor, 15–91. Like these other icons and, say, Brother Rabbit, b’hoys and g’hals keep popping back up in the national consciousness—in Ned Buntline’s dime novels and especially in Herbert Asbury’s sometimes fanciful popular history, The Gangs of New York, which transcends his accounts of America’s other skid rows (the Barbary Coast and Quartier Latin) to present a high-flying mythology of the b’hoys’ gang wars and has inspired such titanic mythmakers as Jorge Luis Borges and Martin Scorsese. Kurt Andersen’s 2007 historical novel Heyday also takes an admirable crack at the subject.
62. It wouldn’t have been the first time: Nigel Cliff, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2007), xix.
63. “carnival”: Sante’s claim that this rioting was “carnival” stands among the more convincing efforts to import this European concept stateside. Five Points rioters, like feudal peasants, saw no other way out, and they often acted with medieval naïveté in their attempts to upend society. But these efforts, like the “play” rebellions of traditional Saturnalia, did not strive for a permanent state of democracy. In their violent frustration and self-gratification, the b’hoys’ riots strove for outright anarchy and thereby triggered even harsher measures of authoritarian rule and social inequality. Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 340.
64. “an aristocracy of the dram shop”: Quoted in Adams, Bowery Boys, 51.
65. “the nightly revels at Dickens’s Place”: Quotations in this and the next paragraph are from Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 140–43.
BARNUMIZING AMERICA1. Patriotic dramas: Kunhardt et al., P. T. Barnum, 154.
2. “ten times larger”: Billboard reprinted ibid., 224.
3. “new corporate context”: Karen Halttunen, Painted Ladies and Confidence Men: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 207.
4. “humbug in the exhibition room”: Barnum, Humbugs of the World, 13.
5. athletics were largely primitive pastimes: Puritans had long allowed certain games of skill—from footraces to combat sports—but as Eliot J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein put it, “when these very same activities became part of ‘Romish’ celebrations … then a line was crossed.” Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 33. Richard A. Swanson and Betty Spears, History of Sport and Physical Education in the United States (Dubuque, IA: WCB Brown & Benchmark, 1995), 32–144. See also Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), 3–99.
6. “exotic and frivolous indulgences”: Stephen Hardy, “ ‘Adopted by All the Clubs’: Sporting Goods and the Shaping of Leisure, 1800–1900,” in For Fun and Profit, ed. Richard Busch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 78.
7. “chess, draughts, billiards, and bowling”: William E. Dodge Jr. “The Young Men’s Christian Association … Shall It Be a Club? About Amusements,” New York Times, July 18, 1869, reprinted in George B. Kirsch, Sports in North America: A Documentary History, vol. 4, Sports in War: Revival, and Expansion, 1860–1880 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1995), 3.
8. “the growth of the professional spirit”: Dudley Sargent, “The Evils of the Professional Tendency in Modern Athletics,” American Journal of Social Science 20 (1884): 87–90, reprinted in Kirsch, Sports in North America.
9. “the thing which produces most of the evils”: E. L. Godwin, “The Athletic Craze,” Nation, December 7, 1893, 422–23, reprinted in Kirsch, Sports in North America.
10. “to embody his conception”: John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 12–13.
11. “transform[ed] public spaces”: Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 177.
12. “continuous performance”: Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from Benjamin Franklin Keith, “The Vogue of Vaudeville,” reprinted in American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, ed. Charles W. Stein (New York: Da Capo, 1991), 17.
13. “The most dangerous acts of the trapeze”: William Dean Howells, “On Vaudeville,” in Stein, American Vaudeville, 76.
14. the “Keith Circuit” commanded: Edward F. Albee, “Twenty Years of Vaudeville,” in Stein, American Vaudeville, 17.
15. The Gilded Age population: The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 379.
16. “country” newspapers: George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 83. See also Ted Curtis Smythe, The Gilded Age Press, 1865–1900 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 33–44.
17. the dramatic “facts” of modern life: Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 131–231.
18. “very close to the untutored spirit”: Review, The Nation, August 7, 1884, 116.
19. “like Brer Rabbit”: Julia Collier Harris, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 12; Walter M. Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the “Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), 2–5; Michael Flusche, “Underlying Despair in the Fiction of Joel Chandler Harris,” in Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, ed. R. Bruce Bickley Jr. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 175. Wayne Mixon, “The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race: Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus in Their Time,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 3 (August 1990): 458; R. Bruce Bickely Jr., “Joel Chandler Harris,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Stanley Trachtenberg, vol. 11, American Humorists, 1800–1950 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), 191. Robert Cochran argues effectively that Harris, the author, was also more of a trickster than is commonly recognized: “It’s high time,” he writes, “to at least consider the possibility that Harris constructed his tales and their framing narratives with consummate skill and deliberate cunning, that multiple ironies were not only not lost upon him but were in fact something of his stock-in-trade, and that he was, in short, something of a Brer Rabbit among authors.” “Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris,” African American Review 38, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 24.
20. “represent[ing] nothing on earth”: Joel Chandler Harris, “Negro Customs,” The Youth’s Companion, June 11, 1885, 238, cited in Brasch, Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, 10.
21. “From a nook in their chimney corners”: Julia Collier Harris, Life and Letters, 34.
22. “for a black world than a white one”: Mixon, “The Ultimate Irrelevance of Race,” 459.
23. “their confidence and esteem”: Joel Chandler Harris, “Introduction,” from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, compiled by Richard Chase (1955; Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1983), xvi.
24. “unfamiliar with the great body of their own folk-lore”: Ibid., xiv.
25. “Only in this shape”: Ibid., xxvi–xxvii.
26. “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy”: Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs, 3.
27. “de funniest creetur er de whole gang”: Ibid., 124.
28. “undersized, red-haired and somewhat freckled”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 331.
29. “Well, I tell you dis”: Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus, in Complete Tales, 331.
30. “No Tinsel,” “Eight Thousand Attend”: Billboard and headline quoted in Robert A. Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 248.
31. “the belt full of murderous bowies and long pistols”: William Frederick Cody, Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W. F. Cody), A Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1888), 405.
32. “red devils”: Ibid., 426–27. For differing analyses of this episode, see Carter, Buffalo Bill Cody, 31, and Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 38.
33. “was in school”: Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 20.
34. “Mr. McCarthy”: Cody, Story of the Wild West, 617–18.
35. “Death to the Indians!”: Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 13, 7–41.
36. “jerking his war-bonnet off”: Cody, Story of the Wild West, 675–77.
37. “hard work”: Ibid., 691.
38. “broncho riding, roping, racing”: John Bratt, Trails of Yesterday (Chicago: University Publishing Company, 1921), 279, 280.
39. Against popular fears: Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 211–18.
40. “It brought vividly back”: “[SLC to William F. Cody, 10 September 1884, Elmira, N.Y.], Elmira, NY (UCCL 12811),” catalogue entry, Mark Twain Project Online (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
41. “America’s National Entertainment”: Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 264.
42. “domesticate”: Ibid., 250.
43. “Barnumism”: David Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 253. See also Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition & American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979), 107–10; Stanley Applebaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (New York: Dover, 1980), 75–102; Joe McKennon, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival, vol. 1 (Bowling Green, NY: Popular Press, 1972), 27–39.
44. “great democratic resort”: Appleton’s guidebook quoted in Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 16.
45. “abandon all the restraint”: Quoted in Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 110.
46. “The opposite gender rush together”: Quoted in Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 67.
47. “King of Coney Island,” “Sodom by the Sea”: Immerso, Coney Island, 48. For Tilyou’s early biography, see also Edo McCullough, Good Old Coney Island: A Sentimental Journey into the Past (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 284–327.
48. “On This Site Will Be Erected”: Kasson, Amusing the Million, 57.
49. “clean fun,” “A ride on the horses”: Promotional material quoted in Immerso, Coney Island, 57–58.
50. “We Americans want”: Immerso, Coney Island, 78.
51. “caused laughter enough”: Ibid., 57.
52. “sales people”: Robert C. Ford and Ady Milman, “George C. Tilyou—Developer of the Contemporary Amusement Park,” Cornell Hotel & Restaurant Administrations Quarterly 41 (August 2000): 2.
53. “flirtation, permissiveness, and sexual humor”: Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 136–37.
54. “Laughter”: Immerso, Coney Island, 77.
55. “gigantic laboratory of human nature”: Kasson, Amusing the Million, 59.
56. “What a sad people you must be!”: H. A. Overstreet, The Guide to Civilized Loafing (New York: W. W. Norton, 1935), 17.
57. “a gigantic mistake”: John Strasbaugh, “The Case of Sigmund F. and Coney I.,” New York Times, July 22, 2009.
58. encourag[ing] positive citizenship”: David Klaasen and Sally Ryan, “Historical Note,” National Recreation Association records; http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/ead/swha/sw0074.xml. Accessed July 17, 2013.
59. multibillion-dollar international juggernaut: Disney’s theme parks alone pulled in $3.4 billion in the third fiscal quarter of 2012, which ranks as the most profitable quarter in their history; http://www.themeparkpost.com/index/2012396-the-walt-disney-company-reports-largest-quarterly-earnings-in-its-history. Accessed August 14, 2012.