American Fun (39 page)

But patriotism itself had to be recovered. In love with a different “nation” than their parents had been, Thomas Morton’s latest descendants weren’t loyal to institutions that had to be defended by military force. They weren’t true to government or business. These latest patriots, often with naïve and reckless exuberance, rose up in support of the
Declaration of Independence’s wild ideals—a pursuit of happiness and national felicity for the individual and collective alike. From
Ken Kesey’s “Vote for Fun” to
Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock (1969), these flag-waving, flag-wearing, flag-burning citizens voiced their loyalty to an unsung America of rebels, merrymakers, outlaws, and freaks.

THE
MERRY PRANKSTERS
’ new American rebellion didn’t appear ex nihilo: the ice had already been cracking for some time.

Twenty years earlier, during World War II, a culturally conservative freeze had set in. The
Zoot Suit Riots were just a warning shot: that same month, June 1943, California governor
Earl Warren ordered 110,000 Japanese evicted from their homes and relocated into internment camps, arguing, “
We don’t propose to have the Japs back in California during this war if there is any lawful means of preventing it.” He urged other governors to follow his lead. By contrast, the early forties had been a watershed era for the rights of women, whose decades of social
and political progress had worked in concert with national need; all at once they were regarded as essential wartime personnel—especially in the distinctly unladylike field of heavy manufacturing. The free-spirited
flapper had paved the way for her muscle-bound daughter,
Rosie the Riveter, the socialist-realist icon for a multiracial workforce of tough and capable independent women. But shortly after the United States ended the war—by expediently vaporizing two Japanese cities—the nation’s love affair with
women’s labor ended.

Over the next two years, the early baby boom years, two million women were summarily fired.
Over the next five years, not coincidentally, the number of new houses built annually increased more than twelvefold, from 114,000 in 1944 to 1.7 million in 1950; this progress was accelerated by the likes of
Bill Levitt, a Long Island subdivision entrepreneur whose elimination of skilled labor in favor of non-union workers and whose elimination of complicated basements in favor of mass-produced concrete slabs helped to generate “
Levittowns,” suburban human parking lots with minimal public space (“
one swimming pool was built for every thousand houses”) that could accommodate 80,000 inhabitants at a pop. The result, in general, was a cookie-cutter culture wired for prosperity and gender division. The middle class had come into its own, with all the exigencies of suburban mediocrity. Men in suits, enjoying the
machine-made “freedom” of
Herbert Marcuse’s uncritically minded “one-dimensional” society, rode shiny new escalators through middle management’s middle floors while
women, now housebound, took conservative advice from recently empowered guides like
McCall’s,
Good Housekeeping,
and
Ladies’ Home Journal:
they wore feminized styles, devoted themselves to high-output child rearing, and gratefully endorsed new labor-saving devices like clothes dryers, garbage disposals, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, trash compactors. No longer socially acceptable wage earners, women became the vanguards of a new consumerism. The Airstream contours of a capitalist republic called for team-spirited conventionalism: millions of homes had tiny-screen
televisions playing
vaudeville’s latest incarnation, and garages and carports housed late-model automobiles.

A paranoid new patriotic trend—which had been codified as early
as 1939, when an arch
conservative representative from
Texas created the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (soon to become the notorious HUAC)—made “American” (read “capitalist”) an ideological imperative. After World War II, assisted by the virulently anti-communist
Truman Doctrine (that required government on all levels to create
loyalty review boards), by a crushing 1946 Republican victory in both houses of Congress, and by widespread wiretapping under
FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover, the national consciousness was seized by fear of freedom haters both foreign and domestic—a fear that touched every level of government and society and that those who witnessed it frequently described, in the words of the Red-scare historian
Ellen Schrecker, as “
paranoia, delirium, frenzy, hysteria.”

In 1947,
the languishing HUAC was energized by an incoming class of young Republicans, chief among them
Richard M. Nixon, who staged an investigation of the culture industry. Naturally Hollywood was their highest-value target. The movie moguls, who had grown increasingly unnerved by their industry’s worker guilds, played right into their hands. Better than anyone, they knew the public imagination: much as they had co-opted the “decency” wars over the previous two decades (disingenuously censoring their own palpitating
flappers for threatening America’s delicate morality), so too did they betray their own writers and actors—Communist, former Communist, or just suspicious—for smuggling left-wing and Soviet-sympathizing propaganda into the nation’s innocent playtime. True to form, they sold them out in a spectacular way. The red-baiting
Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI) served a list of suspected Communist sympathizers to the HUAC, which that September subpoenaed forty-three witnesses for a media-blitzed hearing in
Washington, D.C. Hollywood was represented by high-profile “friendlies” (conservatives like Ronald Reagan,
Jack Warner, and
Walt Disney, who testified against his own subversive cartoonists for trying to paint even Mickey Mouse red) and a defiant band of nineteen “unfriendlies,” ten of whom—the infamous “
Hollywood Ten”—refused to take the
Fifth Amendment, believing they were protected by their right to free speech. They ended up serving time in prison, to the destruction of their careers and the general
suppression of
American filmmakers’ creativity. In November of that year, Hollywood’s executives and their New York financiers met at the
Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where they devised the “
blacklist” that would govern moviemaking for more than a decade and usher in the vicious age of Senator
Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.

While the economy boomed, thanks in large part to America’s first big ideological war in the Pacific, a small group of queers, bisexuals, college dropouts, carpetbagging Buddhists, and autodidactic intellectuals crisscrossed the continent in search of real fun. They came to be known as the
Beat Generation, though they were little more than a roving clique. Energized by the sheer spontaneity of bebop; exhilarated by Benzedrine,
marijuana, and booze; outraged by their government’s
Cold War xenophobia; and enthralled by their libertine friend
Neal Cassady, who had slept with many of the beats and their wives, these renegades chased restless, kinetic new joys and stamped them in the titles of their trademark books:
Go,
Howl,
On the Road.
For
Jack Kerouac, in his disgust with U.S. law and order, Mexico City was the Xanadu of fun: “
This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road.” Such fun was a vanishing point for the beats, and it would kill more than one of those who tried to reach it, but even their car crashes, overdoses, and deadly enthusiasm are quaint, exuberant, even innocent—in contrast to the 1960s counterculture they came to inspire. Fittingly, Neal Cassady himself drove the Pranksters’ bus.

The
Merry Pranksters also grew from
rock ’n’ roll—the latest iteration of African-American dance music whose rhythm and message sprang from the hips. In 1950s America, safe and sound in air-conditioned suburbia, congregating at
amusement parks and drive-ins, middle-class teens guzzled American prosperity and strutted their youth in a runway show of styles, slang, and backbeat music. Their parents tried to contain the fallout radiating from
Elvis Presley’s hips—chaperoning sock hops and hosting basement dance parties, packaging it through
Dick Clark’s weirdly stiff
American Bandstand
—but the randy energy of rock ’n’ roll had poisoned the country like Bikini Atoll.
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955) created Elvis, who had memorized every line of
James Dean’s dialogue
and studiously mimicked his clothes and walk. (To cultivate his rebellious neo-soap-locks look, Elvis also mimicked “
cross-country truckers,” whom he called “wild-looking guys,” moved his body like black bluesmen, and bought flashy clothes from a black store on Beale Street.) But the movie gave Americans in general, not only enterprising young Elvis, a glossary for reading this troubling new fun. (Even
Jack Kerouac was called a “
literary James Dean” in
Time
’s 1957 review of
On the Road.
) On the one hand, by glamorizing
greaser culture,
Rebel
branded switchblade duels and “chickie runs” (a deadly combination of drag racing and chicken that the movie served to popularize) as “
kicks” that could turn young
Natalie Wood into a fountain of surging hormones. On the other hand, however—by James Dean’s angsty/playful example—it popularized a silly, carefree honesty that
Sal Mineo’s character, Plato, calls “fun.” This latter fun, had by our three heroes in an abandoned mansion—on the run from their parents, the hoodlums, and the law—momentarily frees these bewildered kids from the fakey manners of the
Eisenhower era. With its bright-eyed innocence, this lighthearted fun seems centuries away from the pants-down decadence of the late 1960s, but it was in fact in the whirl of such James Dean carnival,
at
Gregg’s Drive-In in Springfield, Oregon, that young
Ken Kesey’s legendary pranksterism first appeared. Prosecuted for sticking a potato into some killjoy’s exhaust pipe, he explained himself in court with a spirited defense of the exhilarating American Saturday night.

Ken Kesey wasn’t your average political activist. Like Thomas Morton holing up thirty miles north of
Plymouth Plantation’s solemn religious experiment, Kesey ran a South Bay den of iniquity while the students at Berkeley were getting serious—in particular, in 1964, taking on the University of California Regents and forming the powerful
Free Speech Movement (FSM). Kesey had a different take on his revolutionary times. The
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960 at the
University of Michigan, branched out among the nation’s campuses to promote what its influential “
Port Huron Statement” (1962) called “
participatory democracy” and the people’s “unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” They devised and debated new, revolutionary, political theories, and they valued the university’s capacity for conflict,
saying that students and faculty “must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life.” Their leaders were good students in suits and ties who wanted to work within the system. (Their more popular archenemies were the Young Americans for Freedom [YAF], founded by young conservative
William F. Buckley.) And most important, the
civil rights movement, which had exploded in 1955 following
Emmett Till’s grisly murder, overcame setbacks, hatred, and violence through extraordinary self-control. Its member organizations maintained a steady regime of protests, marches, and voter registration campaigns—not stopping when they had achieved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which legislated equal rights for women and blacks. These movements were principled and serious. Martin Luther King, a sober and religious race leader in the line of
Frederick Douglass and
W. E. B. DuBois, believed civic and legislative rights were greater and more enduring than personal freedoms. He demanded strict moral discipline from the movement, and he got it—as would
Malcolm X, whose 1965
Autobiography
was the story of a zoot suiter’s reform.

Kesey? Not so much. He was all
about
personal freedom. Like many of the young white men who would form the sixties counterculture, his basic political rights were secure. In the spirit of the rebel
without
a cause, Kesey took pleasure in rebellion proper—against bugbears of authoritarianism and narrow-mindedness—and flew off in search of
absolute
American liberty: sex, drugs,
rock ’n’ roll, bullhorns.

A talented young actor and wrestler, Ken Kesey came to Stanford University’s
Writing Seminars in 1958 and moved with his wife, Faye, a fellow working-class Oregonian, into the woodsy enclave of Perry Lane, the same bastion of
bohemian exclusivity where
Thorstein Veblen had lived at the turn of the century. Kesey, with his junky dooryard and bad table manners, finally alienated the colony’s tweedy elite when, in the fall of 1959, he participated in
CIA-funded laboratory experiments with LSD, a drug unheard-of by the rest of world, then passed it around among his neighbors. The history of American fun often entails forbidden booze. At Merry Mount, on the wharf, in the
Wild West, in
speakeasies during
Prohibition, alcohol is the illicit social liberator that puts people in the mood for dancing and pranks.
Cocaine had amped
up the hip
jazz crowd;
marijuana was popular among mid-twentieth-century Mexican Americans and beats. But the designer drug Kesey brought home to Perry Lane, and which attracted curious hipsters from all around Northern California (
Allen Ginsberg,
Neal Cassady,
Robert Stone,
Larry McMurtry, and
Jerry Garcia were among the now-familiar names), was proof that rebellious American pleasure had entered the nuclear age. To the acid taker, its benefits seemed limitless. As a passport to lunacy and cosmic amusement, it left alcohol to a quainter time. Kesey was eager to get its message into the world. He served it to guests in his venison chili.

With the proceeds from his first novel,
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
the weirder passages of which he wrote on LSD, Kesey established his own psychedelic Merry Mount, in a redwood forest outside the “
Wilde West” town of La Honda. He equipped his log-cabin lodge for wild parties and guided head trips into the woods, where loudspeakers, light shows, and avant-garde “
Funk Art”—like the copulating male and female sculptures that orgasmed with garden hoses—anticipated the 360-degree “happenings” that would typify the coming era. Among the dropouts, drifters, writers, and heads who answered Kesey’s open invitation,
Kenneth Babbs—an honors English major and an NCAA basketball star who most recently had flown choppers for the Marines in Vietnam—“
introduced the idea of
pranks
,” writes
Tom Wolfe, “great public put-ons they could perform.” The American institution of pranks, which dated back to the scroll of lascivious verse that Morton tacked up for Plymouth’s delectation, was just the trick for rousing a nation lulled to stupor by professionalism and obedience. But it was one thing to keep shocking the rustic folks of La Honda, another altogether to take their show on the road and electrify the keyed-up U.S. citizenry. With the introduction of a 1939 school bus, every inch of it painted with Day-Glo mischief, wired inside and out with microphones and loudspeakers for an ongoing dialogue with clueless America, what began as a road trip to New York City, where Kesey’s second novel was being released, was transformed into a “
superprank.”