American Fun (19 page)

“The Story of Pike and Tom,” a tale of brinksmanship and one-upmanship. (Courtesy of Special Collections, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.)

The freedom with which Twain skewered politicians, much like the freedom with which he needled public sympathies and roared away his nights with other drunk reporters, was enabled on some level by the permissiveness of the West, and by the viral mistrust of authority and control, but it also sprang from his fascination with community—especially reckless, chaotic community. He liked watching society run its rocky course, and he bristled when oligarchs got in the way. Twain was nobody’s radical democrat. He despised Nevada juries—“
composed of two desperadoes, two low beer-house politicians, three barkeepers, two ranchmen who could not read, and three dull, stupid, human
donkeys!”—but he was thrilled by dance halls and theaters in uproar; delighted by Nevada’s “
infinitely varied and copious” slang; amused, then scared, then ultimately enlarged by the widespread sensations caused by his hoaxes, for here was humanity at its most excitable.

The
noblest
fun he witnessed along these lines—“
the wildest mob Virginia had ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable”—was during his last month in Virginia City, when the citizens “rose as a man” and heaped their accumulated riches on the
U.S. Sanitary Commission, a medical brigade serving both sides of the
Civil War. Nevadans’ “flush-times” munificence met their wartime patriotism and gave way to an extraordinary
prank that evinced the territory’s sterling character.

Reuel Gridley, Clemens’s childhood classmate, was living in the nearby town of Austin. That March, when he lost Austin’s mayoral race, Gridley also lost a bet with his Republican opponent and had to haul a fifty-pound flour sack through the streets, followed by townsfolk and a marching band. When someone suggested he auction the sack “for the benefit of the Sanitary,” the crowd went wild. The first winner bought it for $250, then turned around and auctioned it off again. By the end of the day it had been bought and sold so often that it had earned a stunning $8,000. Virginia City caught wind of the gag and, not to be bested, called for the sack themselves. They were disgusted when they could raise only $5,000, and they thought they might get another chance the next morning when a parade of carriages blared its way down the high street, led by Gridley and his flour sack, “the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt lettering.” But the wagons kept going out the other side of town, leaving Virginians with their wounded pride. It was a warm spring day, and the glittering procession (Clemens included) merrily rolled on over the sagebrush mountains to the mining towns of Gold Hill, Silver City, and Dayton, announcing their arrival with “drums beating and colors flying” and greeting mobs of “men, women and children, Chinamen and Indians” who had been alerted in advance by telegram.

Gridley’s traveling orgy of absurd largess rolled all the way to Carson City, and eventually on to San Francisco, where its reputation preceded it. The prank held on for three months straight, and the sack was last
sold at “a monster Sanitary Fair” in St. Louis, where it was displayed alongside its final purchase price, valued in bricks of Nevada silver ($150,000!), and was baked into platters of costly cakes.

WHAT J. D. BORTHWICK CALLED
a “California education”—the “polish” argonauts got “from being violently shaken up with a crowd of men of different habits and ideas from their own”—conjures up lessons in plain moral sense. Borthwick’s phrasing is remarkably similar to that of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the eighteenth-century father of “moral sense” philosophy and
Thomas Hobbes’s fiercest philosophical rival. Unlike bitter and cynical Hobbes, who believed people entered into society out of selfish motives, Shaftesbury thought people were naturally good citizens, who, when left to their own devices, achieved their aims through brisk give-and-take. In the throes of open public discourse—as in barrooms and around campfires, where civility turns coarse and often boisterous—folks are free to rail and joke, even on occasion, in his words, to “fight.” Such conflict is safe, by and large, when the majority are interested in the common good. In a society that is motivated by the generality’s good, even etiquette can afford to be feisty. In fact, as Shaftesbury argued, it
has
to be. “
All Politeness,” he wrote, “is
owing
to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men’s Understandings. ’Tis a destroying of Civility, Good Breeding, and even Charity it-self, under pretence of maintaining it.”

The argonauts Borthwick saw heading east from California showed the marks of many “collisions,” “amicable” or otherwise. Californians and Nevadans were connoisseurs of collision. It toughened their hides and steeled their wills. It was also a surefire source of pleasure. The excitement and adventure that had propelled them westward—that which drove Taylor, Doten, and Twain—had also thrown them into makeshift society where cursing, pranks, gambling, song, and the capacity to hold their fiery drink were counterweights to honor and bravery. While the growing eastern middle class was minding their manners and shuttering their taverns, these emigrants and westerners pursued a radical civility
that had been on the run since Merry Mount: the social bonds and personal thrills of risky, rebellious fun.

The American frontier was a woolly place, incomparable to Shaftesbury’s courtly world. With its Indian wars, claims disputes, lawless justice, deadly predators, extreme weather, runaway riches, and (most often) desperate poverty, it laid the workings of society bare—often to reveal that they were badly damaged. The stakes for not getting along were high—typically isolation, mutilation, or death—and yet nobody was rewarded for acting skittish. On the contrary, as it emerges in these Sierra Nevada stories the celebrated citizens were the boldest ones—the practical jokers, rousing musicians, willing combatants, and impious journalists. These folks didn’t shy away from fray; they exploited its pleasures and voiced its freedoms. In a land that demanded backbreaking participation in order simply to survive, they modeled rude and playful civility. They made a mockery of the stingy and scared and dared other citizens to join in. Their coarse behavior was delicious, infectious, and their elaborate pranks and hoaxes and parties formed spontaneous and volatile communities bound by excitement and hilarity. And when the papers and publishers spread their fame back east, this Wild West attitude riveted the nation. These creatures of slang and daring and pluck became paragons of American liberty, their fame growing into instantaneous legend.

Such boldness in the face of adversity and restraint characterized the best early American fun. Boldness in the face of Puritans, the British, slave owners, and reformers. The principals were spark plugs like
Thomas Morton and
Samuel Adams, charismatic figures like old King Charles, tricksters and troublemakers like Alfred Doten and
Mark Twain, but in all of these cases their willing associates—sometimes numbering into the thousands—lent their fun its civic force. The crowd rose up and gave its assent, happy to join in the rebellious dance, glad to show they got the joke, ready to make wild contributions of their own. The joy of these free and lawless crowds affirmed, in flashes, the experience of democracy. It allowed citizens that would otherwise have been pushed away to feel brief thrills of liberty and equality.

……………

IN ALL OF THESE CASES
there were environmental conditions—
fundamentally American conditions
—that made the fun possible, made it necessary. Untamed wilderness. Unchecked tyranny. A world of everything and nothing to lose that benefited only the hardest characters. Whether they were adventurers tussling for ideological freedom, colonists rallying for a political identity, slaves asserting their pride and humanity, or emigrants risking life and limb to bust their fortunes out of rocks, the protagonists in these stories were attracted to conflict for all of its generative possibility. That they were advocates for group pleasure, not selfish domination, has helped to establish the coarse civility that continues to thrive in the national consciousness. The pleasure of tangling with opponents and rivals, of not backing down, of not giving up, all the while proving your style and wit, is a virtue that Sons of Liberty paraded and that Pinkster Boys reveled in. It was a survival tactic in the Wild West. Had Americans not risked such
amicable
collisions, but resorted only to violence or submission, they would have joined the low ranks of criminals and cowards who tried to keep the people apart.

Instead they were authors of a national culture that remains our greatest social resource.

5

I
N
1876, the American humorist Samuel S. Cox claimed that “
Plenty, unless gorged to dyspepsia … is the very father of fun.” Samuel S. Cox was a man of his age—the so-called
Gilded Age. In his era of conspicuous consumption and leisure, when American calendars were suddenly abloom with weekends, vacations, and holidays, “fun” became a catchall name for outlets that didn’t require backbreaking, mind-numbing labor—sports, spas, carnivals, circuses, vaudeville, parks, and so on. Fun-as-plenitude prevailed during the period, and it made some folks a lot of money.

American fun, as defined by this book, rarely
prevailed
in the early republic. Fun, as the previous chapters show, was one of many notable forces in the struggle between authoritarian citizens, who tried to contain the people’s freedoms, and individualistic (or communitarian) citizens, who felt such freedoms were the life of democracy. Ambitious fun lovers like
Thomas Morton and King Charles may have made some effort to prevail, but achieving market share wasn’t their priority—or a realistic possibility.
Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty scored stunning victories, but a “culture of fun” wasn’t their objective; their sights were set on founding a republic. And “funmaking animals” like
Zab Hayward
and Alfred Doten were happy just whipping up a crowd; for all of their spontaneous influence, they lived from one wild party to the next.

In the Gilded Age, however, it is fair to say, a
culture of
entertainment
did prevail, did attract the population’s broadest middle—drawing tens of thousands of upright citizens to its various, widespread, spectacular events. This revolution came about largely by the efforts of a single businessman. The progenitor of Gilded Age entertainment was the inveterate prankster
P. T. Barnum. (He is also believed to be the nation’s second
millionaire, after fur-and-opium mogul
John Jacob Astor.) Barnum’s greatest humbug was to concoct a “fun” that seemed to resolve one of America’s deep struggles: it pandered to Puritans while pleasing hedonists. As a bonus, it sold the novelty of the open frontier in the midst of congested urban drudgery. And for no extra cost, it captured the crowd-pleasing power of the Yankee-inflected practical joke.