American Fun (10 page)

The Tea Party, at bottom, was
revolutionary
fun, a pleasure unique to this New World event. Unlike the upcoming French variety, when revolution was celebrated with heads on pikes and waves of sadism consumed the people, here the reigning spirit was civility and brazen displays of participation. Josiah Quincy Jr. had warned the Tea Partiers that such rebellion was preliminary to war, and so it was, but the tone it set and the sensations it created defined the kind of nation they would give their
lives for. Its strange admixture of Puritan restraint, Enlightenment ideals, and dangerous jolts of social upheaval would resonate with Americans for centuries to come.

The enduring potency of such revolutionary fun, as opposed to Merry Mount’s fading dream, makes it all the more remarkable that our best historians have diminished its social force.
William Pencak argues that such patriotic acts were
playlike “practice” for a possible republic to come, as though just because they spoke wittily, acted
riskily, and dressed in glittery native garb their pranks were not legitimate acts of citizenship.
Gordon S. Wood concludes that these risky acts of self- and public assertion were just “
mock ceremonies,” which “were, like all parodies, backhanded tributes to what was being ridiculed.” Even
Ray Raphael, who deeply understands these nonviolent crowd actions, downplays their force: “
In 1765 the rioters had hung
effigies and conducted mock funerals; by 1774 ordinary farmers were forcing high-ranking government officials to resign. By intimidating real people rather than toying with dummies, rank-and-file rebels effectively derailed all opposition.” Had the “rioters” of 1765 not jubilantly mocked the
Stamp Act, but instead rebelled only violently (“by intimidating real people”)—or much worse, had they followed
John Adams’s wishes and only rebelled in the safety of their minds—then a different sort of citizenry most certainly would have formed, maybe a factional one, maybe a pathetically obedient one, maybe an untenably anarchic one that necessitated new forms of despotic control. Precisely by “toying with dummies,” however, and by having fun at England’s expense, the people of Massachusetts sparked a national felicity that throve on democratic virtues.

Philip J. Deloria contends that the early Revolution in general, and the “
blackfaced defiance of the Tea Party” in particular, signaled “period[s] of emptiness during which [participants] are neither one thing or the other.” By reading the Revolution in this purely structural way, by reading it, that is, as a negative space between two ideological eras, he overlooks the Tea Party’s essential positivity—that it was not preparation for a possible republic but rather was the vivacity of democracy in action. The participants were not “empty” of identity, of politics. On the contrary, even as shapeshifting, masquerading youth—especially
as shapeshifting, masquerading youth, who took their rude civility to the streets—these citizens experienced a political plenitude that many Americans have yearned for ever since.

By design, Boston’s crowd actions of the 1760s and 1770s were guided by the era’s “moral-sense” philosophy. This school of thought (whose adherents were as varied as
Adam Smith,
David Hume,
Lord Kames,
Francis Hutcheson, and
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui) could be traced back two generations to the Earl of Shaftesbury, for whom social behavior was motivated by a
sensus communis
—an instinctual concern for one another’s happiness and well-being. Just so, the Sons of Liberty’s call to patriotism—in speeches, broadsides, and the actions themselves—was predicated upon the assumption that “liberty” and “happiness” were communal virtues, not just individual values. For Shaftesbury and others, political life wasn’t governed by niceties and manners. It required citizens to dust it up. But in a moral-sense world, citizens fight in good faith, trusting that everyone is acting in the community’s best interest.

The philosopher
Adam Ferguson, a Scot, gives us the best moral-sense picture of a rowdy citizenry’s fun. Writing in 1767, but sounding at times like Thomas Morton in the 1630s, Ferguson praised Spartans, Native Americans, and other “rude” nations for following “
the suggestion of instinct” more “than the invention of reason.” Social instinct works better than government, he asserted, because it springs from the citizens’ natural inclinations: “Without police or compulsory laws, their domestic society is conducted with order, and the absence of vicious dispositions, is a better security than any public establishment for the suppression of crimes.”
Such “natural” citizens, he observed, take “delight” in pure action “without regard to its consequences.” Speaking more generally of “mankind,” he finds their affections are given freely, but they also relish risky engagement. People everywhere “
embrace the occasions of mutual opposition, with alacrity and pleasure”; as members of civil society, a pervading sense of “
national or party spirit” fortifies them against their enemies. Accordingly, the most “active and strenuous” citizens serve as the rude nation’s “guardians,” and the general tenor is boisterous and coarse. Indeed, for Ferguson, if fattened nations keep commerce and
politics lubricated by maintaining a “
grimace of politeness,”
rude, young nations enjoy “real sentiments of humanity and candour.” The latter are civil in the radical sense. By extension, then, they don’t view “
happiness” as the “state of repose” or vicious “languor” that comes with material wealth; their happiness “arises more from the pursuit than from the attainment of any end whatever.” For them, the
pursuit
of happiness—striving, grappling, thrashing, competing—is happiness itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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