American Fun (5 page)

LATE IN THE WINTER
of 1626, less than a year after establishing his colony,
Captain Wollaston rounded up most of his
bondservants and sailed to Virginia to sell them off. Morton stayed behind with the remaining seven, who were left in the charge of a
Lieutenant Fitcher. The weather was bad, the granaries were low, and the rest of the crew started making noise about seeking their fortunes on surrounding plantations. According to Bradford, whose hearsay is our only source for this event, Morton, who had taken a liking to Passonagessit, prepared a feast for the hungry men, opened his personal stock of liquor, and counseled them on their legal
right to rebel—before Wollaston returned and sold them too. If they took his free advice, Morton promised to join them in open society.

Bradford ventriloquizes the radical democrat: “
I, having a parte in the plantation, will receive you as partners and consociats … and we will converse, trade, plante, & live together as equalls, & supporte & protecte one another, or to like effecte.” Even as a mocking squib, his speech rings true for today’s readers, who see in it the tenets of basic civility. But to its intended audience, the Separatists, it would have hissed liked the serpent in the Garden. It promised knowledge beyond man’s control.

The servants took Morton’s bait, ran feckless Fitcher into the forest, and quickly “
fell to great licentiousness” as willing pupils in Morton’s “schoole of Athisme.” They also became incredibly prosperous. Even Bradford, whose own beaver trade was operating at a loss (due in no small part to his bad rapport with the Wampanoags), had to admit that this new rebel colony “gott much by trading with Indeans”—though naturally, as the antagonists in his ongoing parable, they squandered
their fortunes, “10 pounds worth in a morning,” on “wine & strong waters.” It was thanks to this financial hardship that Plymouth Plantation itself, in the same year of 1627, was forced to take in a host of
Strangers that further diluted their social purity. To be sure, in ridiculing Morton’s open society, Bradford may have been, as
Douglas Anderson suggests,
protesting too much.

History hides the names of Morton’s “
worthy wights,” who would have been listed among Wollaston’s cargo as so much merchandise. They were the lowest of the English low. They could have been petty criminals working off sentences, or they could have been folks from the London slums who had signed away their rights in a drunken blur and ended up locked in a dockside tank. Aboard ship, confined in the airless hull, they would have suffered conditions like those of Africans making the
Middle Passage: sickness, starvation, abuse, and death. Hence, to have thrown off their chains and been incorporated as traders on a thriving plantation must have given them the communal thrill that has long since been associated with coming to the New World—the land of plenty, opportunity, and freedom. Morton himself names few names in his book, but the honor he affords these new fellow colonists supports Bradford’s charge that he was radically democratic:

Rules of heraldry need not apply in America, not so far as Morton was concerned. The New English Canaan need not be stratified, exclusive. For Europeans to prosper in this abundant new land, an ethic of friendship had to prevail. Traders had to mingle and deal as equals, among themselves and with the Indians. To this extent, Morton’s vision of social upheaval wasn’t the old European “misrule,” the festive suspension of social roles that actually kept them more firmly intact. It was an explosion of Old World order, and he urged his wights to enjoy the fireworks.
Though he lacked the authority to “call them Knights,” on Merry Mount such titles didn’t carry weight. Morton claimed the right to treat them as partners and dignify them as intellectual peers.

In his efforts to get closer to the Massachusetts, moreover, he exchanged sporting secrets and also (allegedly—he never copped to it) broke the king’s ban on teaching indigenous people to shoot. Before long, his trading company was trouncing its competition up and down the New England shore. William Bradford, sounding the alarm, cited the spread of Morton’s technology throughout the local tribes: “
Fouling peeces, muskets, pistols & c.” made the already “barbarous savages” even deadlier combatants, a point he sensationalized for European readers (though Indian archery was quicker and deadlier than heavy, clumsy early guns). But these skills also made them unbeatable hunters, for as Bradford complained, Indians were already nimbler than the English, ran faster, could see farther, and knew “the hants of all sorts of game.” Compound these threats and financial costs with Morton’s infectious example of democracy—“all the scume of the countrie, or any discontents, would flock to him from all places”—and one could see why, in Bradford’s opinion, Morton’s “nest” had to be “broken.” A conspiracy of families and smaller English colonies began holding meetings at Plymouth Plantation on how to destroy this strange new menace.

IN THE SPRING OF
1627, Morton renamed Wollaston’s camp “Merry Mount”—cheekily spelling it “Ma-Re Mount” as a
digitus impudicus
aimed at the Separatists.
Richard Slotkin lists
the name’s witty abominations: its innocent homonyms with “Merry” and “Marry” call forth visions of merriment and nuptials, but it also rhymes with “Mary,” a name that makes for “bawdy blasphemy” when coupled, as it is, with “mount.” Worse yet, when read for its brazen spelling, “Mare Mount” flaunts the
Levitican crime for which Thomas Granger (plus menagerie) was executed. But even a bawdy name like Ma-Re Mount declared the colony’s permanence. Morton called it a “
memorial to after ages.” Bradford scoffed, “
they call it Merie-mounte, as if this joylity would have lasted forever.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his marvelous romance of the
events, depicted their dispute as a battle for staying power: “
Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.”

Near the end of April, to commemorate their audacious new name, Morton’s wights made preparations for a
May Day festival. As blossoms opened and new leaves glittered, a gentleman and seven roughnecks brewed “
a barrel of excellent beare” and filled a case of bottles “with other good cheare.” They fashioned green garlands to wear in their hair, disseminated word among the locals, and felled an eighty-foot-tall pine to which they would affix ribbons (after “the olde English custome”) and a set of buckhorns as a New World innovation. Morton wanted the Maypole big—phallus-big, America-big—as a “faire sea marke” that would welcome visitors from all directions. The more the merrier was his position. Unlike the Separatists, who warned off visitors with tales of
cannibalism, Morton advertised America’s riches, inviting strangers to impregnate the land’s “
wombe” through “art & industry,” lest it wither in “darck obscurity.” He was laying plans for a thriving civilization, not an exclusive promised land.

In preparation for the festival, Morton also wrote a
ribald twenty-three-line poem, overloaded with classical references. The Inns where he had studied had a thriving theater culture where biting
satire had been the dominant tone, often at the expense of
pisse-froid
Puritans. Morton’s legendary friendship with
Ben Jonson, who was the Inns’ most famous working-class interloper, will probably never be confirmed, but it is likely he counted himself among the “
Sons of Ben,” the cavalier writers in the younger generation who parroted Jonson’s wit. He declared himself “
a Satyrist” with “smarting fanges.” Where Bradford preaches throughout his
Historie,
Morton cracks jokes—turning short-statured
Myles Standish into “Captain Shrimpe” and the righteous
John Endicott into “Captain Littleworth.” And the revels themselves were soaked in satire. It has been speculated that they were inspired by a 1594
Gesta Grayorum masque, performed in front of Queen Elizabeth, featuring a Maypole and “Indeans” and even Proteus, whom Morton puts at the center of his poem and jokingly conflates with “Priapus.” This may be so, but such revels were utterly changed on Merry Mount, where the instruments of monarchy became the lubricants of democracy: the “Indeans” were
actual, the would-be courtiers were lowly
bondservants, and their pleas for fertility weren’t theatrical, but real.

For when May Day arrived, Morton’s young bachelors hoped their pretty garlands would catch the eyes of local women—especially Massachusetts women. Having waited long enough for English wives, they welcomed the idea of starting households that the Separatists would have abominated. (Of course courting wasn’t preliminary only to marriage.) But in a song he wrote to buoy the occasion—telling “Lasses in beaver coats,” “Yee shall be welcome to us night and day”—Morton encouraged open minds among his wights, declaring Indian women far more desirable than “Scotch” or “Irish stuff,” a bit of bigoted English misogyny that sent a strangely tolerant message. What is more, his harping on marriage throughout the account reinforces his interest in
making Merry Mount last.

The pageant would have been a marvel to see. Local invitees filled the grassy, sun-drenched hill. Against a deep backdrop of shimmering wooded mountains, and the Shawmut hills in the distant north, a formal parade of Europeans and Indians—heralded by rifles, pistols, drums, “
and other fitting instruments”—portaged an enormous, ribbon-streaming tree from the lapping beach of Boston Harbor to the crest of their village mount. They erected the thing with a communal heave, sturdily packed it deep in the ground, and tacked up the poem for the Separatists’ pleasure. Cheers were raised, shots were fired, toasts of beer and spirits were drunk. Probably the poem was read aloud in honor of their germinal colony. And when the mood was right, the mummers arrayed themselves widely about the pole, joined their hands and took up ribbons, and cordially began the old pagan dance that prettily weaves a rainbow-colored braid.

One fellow was assigned to replenish “
the good liquor like gammedes and Jupiter,” and to lead the dancers in singing Morton’s verses:

All the while, dancing to pipes and tabors, men ducked under the arms of women, who curtsied beneath the arms of the men, and the two traipsing rings—probably quite clumsy for lack of practice, many of them hindered for lack of English—did what they could to sing the racy chorus:

Stamping grass into mud, stumbling up a sweat, singing and shouting and entwining their ribbons, Morton’s mixed company, in “harmless mirth,” closed in closer and closer on the pole, soon entangling in such an erotic knot that even William Bradford, who would have been tending his fields that day, let himself go with a bit of alliteration, imagining them: “
drinking and dancing aboute it many days together, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices.” For who could resist this innovative pleasure—so youthful, vernal, innovative, and free? Naturally they wished it to continue for days. They wanted the joylity to last forever.

Morton nurtured a species of pleasure that later Americans would simply call “fun.” In England, in 1755, Dr. Johnson would nail its definition: “
Sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight.” But Americans, following Morton’s lead, would hone their fun to an even sharper edge—they would have it in spite of Puritan laws. In a land of danger and opportunity, they would often have it at high personal risk. And in an ever growing and complicated society, flooded with classes and races and cultures, where the laws were in flux, when laws applied at all, the frontier was expanding, and the
competing social systems weren’t held in check by legal rituals like Saturnalia, Americans learned to have fun with friends and aliens whose styles and differences revved up the pleasure. In point of fact, as this history aims to show, these necessary rebellions, these tantalizing risks, and these extraordinary prospects for open gathering are part and parcel of the fun itself. And yet, by the same token (and this is essential),
it has always remained such a simple pleasure. It requires only that you get involved—throw in a joke, raise your voice in song, take up a ribbon and give it a go with one of the Maypole’s merry, merry boyes. It may be illegal, dangerous, rebellious, but all of these things give tingles of freedom when you’re a bondservant or gentleman or Massachusett lost in the merry, merry dance. Thomas Morton’s fun, which would mature down the centuries into American fun, sprang from conflicts and dangerous differences. It was the fun of mixing, not the comfort of recoiling into a gated community. All it needed was “
harmles mirth,” an attitude Morton found “much distasted of the precise Separatists,” who “troubl[ed] their braines more then reason would require over things that are indifferent.”

It makes sense that the
First Thanksgiving, and not May Day at Merry Mount, should become a national holiday, though the event doesn’t rate a mention in Bradford’s honored history. Thanksgiving gives the impression that even the most authoritarian system can reconcile itself with America’s “savage” side, when in fact the event was a wary détente that would fall to pieces during King Philip’s War. The First Thanksgiving, as such, is a wishful anodyne to rival the Mayflower Compact’s “democracy.” Much as laws contain the people’s excesses, treaties ensure a grimace of tolerance among aggrieved and mistrustful nations. It’s an American tradition worth recognizing: laws, treaties, prisons, and gallows undergird a powerful empire. They try to ensure a measure of fairness, and they keep the trains running on time. But there is also a necessary American
rowdiness that is more consistent with Merry Mount. A nation that has maintained deep currents of civility throughout its rough history of Indian massacre, institutionalized slavery, and unpopular waves of immigration should also look to the successful experiments that have brought it into states of feverous harmony—dangerous intimacy—mutual enjoyment. Radical movements like Thomas Morton’s launched their snowballs at cranky despots and let the people in on their joke: they posted their poems, published their books, performed their dances, whipped up the crowds. They celebrated civility
outside
the law. In centuries to follow, the ways such practices have lured people together have grown ever more daring, widespread,
sustained,
and the best ones have been an absolute blast. The best ones have become the American Way.