American Fun (6 page)

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THE WAY BRADFORD TELLS IT
, the earth was still warm from all the stamping and dancing when Plymouth’s militia made their ambush. In fact they waited until the following summer, June of 1628. After an unrecorded year of stormy disapproval, Standish and his men stormed in from the woods and found Morton’s maskers ready for battle—doors locked, guns loaded, bullets and powder laid on the table. In Bradford’s version, the wights were too “
over armed with drinke” to work their guns, so they peaceably handed them over to Standish. In Morton’s version, he and his men, having been warned in advance by Indians, stood the militia down at gunpoint. They shouted negotiations through the windows and brokered Morton’s safe return to England, where he anticipated getting a fair legal hearing. Only when he had secured his house and property did he offer himself up without (he boasted) “
the effusion of so much noble blood.” In September, with Morton on a boat home, Standish felled the Maypole with a still-ringing slam.

EARLY IN THE SUMMER
of 1630, as the English
Arbella
bashed the Atlantic swells—leading ten other vessels and seven hundred passengers in the first strong wave of the Great Migration—
John Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan whom the king had appointed governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, stood firm on its pitching decks and regaled his congregation with the first great sermon of American exceptionalism. He was forty-three years old. He had high-arched eyebrows, a sundial nose, and a pointed shovel of a beard. His message was even nobler than the Mayflower Compact. “
We must be knit together in this work as one man,” he intoned. Detailing his vision of the glorious new colony, he entreated them to join in “brotherly Affection” and to rise above their “superfluities.” He urged them to come together “in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality” and, best of all, to “delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together,” et cetera. To this end, as a chosen people, in the eyes of God and all the world, they should become “as a
city upon a hill.”

When the fleet hit Salem on June 22, Winthrop’s inspired flock got
cracking. One of their first tasks, upon settling in Boston, was to burn Morton’s Merry Mount to the ground. Then they paved the region under a Puritan empire that expanded and fortified with impressive speed, joining forces with the Separatists in 1648. For more than a century their City upon a Hill imposed its message throughout the Northeast. Song was silenced, dancing forbidden.
The American Self was menaced from all sides—by threats of the stocks, dunking pools, whipping posts, ear-cropping, branding, banishment, public execution, and eternity in the Hands of an Angry God. Indians, of course, were the hardest to reform. During King Philip’s War of 1675, for instance, when Plymouth’s colonists faced shameful defeat by the martially more skillful Wampanoags, they exacted their revenge against all native peoples by burning the peaceable “
praying towns” (which they had vowed to protect) and by impressing other communities’ women and children as slaves.

In Boston’s early years, Morton kept making his presence known—escaping from his jail cell, returning to America from his exile in England, but the dispersal of his merry, merry boyes and the spread of law throughout New England had reduced his threat to a ghostly legend. He was apprehended in Boston in 1644 for the publication of
New English Canaan,
distinguished ever since as America’s first banned book. He was jailed for one year without charges or trial and eventually released for general infirmity. He was ultimately exiled from Massachusetts and died in Maine in 1647. He left more than twelve thousand acres of land to his cousins, as well as the island of
Martha’s Vineyard, but nobody can prove it was his to give. In any case, the cousins never claimed it.

But shining from the shadows of Winthrop’s City upon a Hill came glimmers of lingering American fun. The maskers had to keep a low profile. Writing in his diary on March 10, 1687,
Samuel Sewall relates a sermon by
Cotton Mather, “
sharply against Health-drinking, Card-playing, Drunkennes, Sabbath-breaking, &c.” Two months later he shows the latest Thomas Mortons pushing back: “It seems the May-pole at Charleston [Massachusetts] was cut down last week, and now a bigger is set up, and a Garland upon it.”

2

O
N NOVEMBER
27, 1760, something remarkable happened. Twenty-five-year-old
John Adams walked into a bar. America’s grand story seldom pauses for such events. Yet the arrival of this tetchy young Puritan descendant—a paunchy, bow-shouldered, overworked lawyer—at a tavern on the Braintree docks sparkles with deep historical meaning. Here was a proud scion of Massachusetts’s flintiest Pilgrims lowering himself to smoke a pipe among New England’s benighted souls, a drinking, dancing, frolicking class who made their lives along the wharf. What he witnessed there was nothing less than the
early stirrings of the American Revolution. He didn’t like what he saw.

Adams wouldn’t have stooped to frequent such a place even a short six months before, when, channeling the jeremiads of his Puritan forebears, he railed in his diary against reeking taverns and their “
trifling, nasty vicious Crew.” Impressionable youths who squandered their time in taverns were taking a shortcut, he argued, “to Prisons and the Gallows.” But this budding politician’s deepest concern had been that licensed houses were fast becoming “
the nurseries of our legislators.” Who knew what kind of reckless republic could spring from such dens of iniquity?

Adams had not been bred for taverns. In his youth he had lived by
the old Puritan values. He had berated himself daily for not studying enough, then had gotten sick from studying too much. He had gloried in the noble pleasures of the mind and forbidden himself everything else: “
Let no trifling diversion, or amusement…; no girl, no gun, no cards, no flutes, no violins, no dress, no tobacco, no laziness, decoy you from your books.” Only years later, when the Revolution was over, did he decide his children could take up dancing—so long as they weren’t at all “
fond” of it.

No surprise, therefore, that the man who entered Thayer’s tavern should be a wallflower. The dancing and revelry whirled all around him, but Adams only stood back and watched. It was natural to his class and professional standing to be a terrible snob. (“
The Rabble,” he sniffed, “filled the House.”) The trimming and buttons of his fine linen coat must have glittered like jewelry amid the blouses and tattered frocks of tradesmen, dockhands, and sailors on leave. But in this environment he was treated like any man in a crowd. The smoky, fishy, ale-stinking tavern—unlike the classrooms and courtrooms where he already struck an imposing figure—pushed the pungent people together. It literally rubbed him up against the masses. Every room, even the kitchen, was packed to the walls with common people—and not the orderly types on sidewalks who doffed their hats to the upper classes, but heedless,
rowdy, beer-drinking folk who spun and stamped to the music of black fiddlers. “Young fellows and Girls [danced] the Chamber as if they would kick the floor thro.” One imagines Adams clutching his ears.

Rocking back in a corner with his pipe, he zeroed in on one “Funmaking animal,” a popular wag named
Zab Hayward whose antics kept the downstairs revelers enrapt. Indulging in a bit of armchair criticism, Adams ridiculed Hayward’s dancing for lacking the grace he was used to seeing in Boston’s ballrooms. But for all his mockery, he loved to watch. To be sure, Zab Hayward—cutting “absurd,” “wild,” “desultory, and irregular” moves—was the paragon of fun.

Hayward started out slow, catching the ladies’ eyes with gentle antics, but as he picked up speed, getting looser and freer and gradually drunker, his manner turned flirty and downright cheeky. He plucked them up, one by one, radiating his pleasure throughout the crowd. He
gave all the women a whirl, not just the prettiest. He took the hand of a light-haired one, notable for a “Patch on her Chin,” and “tickled her Vanity” with a flattering song. He jigged with another, led her from the ring, and delighted the rest by giving her instructions: “Stand here, I call for you by and by.” (Big laughs.) He charmed yet another with a bawdy joke, saying, “I must confess I am an old Man, and as father Smith says hardly capable of doing my Duty.” (The crowd roared.) Clearly Adams was taking notes.

If John Adams was heir to William Bradford’s respect for absolute law and order, then Zab Hayward was a
Thomas Morton manqué. Not at all cowed by the lawless crowd, he was energized by it, ignited by it. And his fellow revelers responded in kind. He whipped up what the writer
Elias Canetti, in his classic work
Crowds and Power,
called the “
rhythmic crowd”—the most generative and powerful kind of crowd. In the rhythmic crowd, “density and equality coincide from the beginning” and “everything depends on movement.” The fiddlers and dancers and cajoling Zab Hayward brought this rhythm to a rolling boil. Charming though these antics could be, however, they rankled the tightly wound John Adams, who may have recognized their force. Whether or not Adams made the connection, he was confronting a radically democratic spirit that was spreading from the docks throughout chilly Massachusetts.

Adams sat back and gaped at the show, but he knew much better than to get up and join. In his eyes, Captain Thayer’s fogbound tavern was perched somewhere on the steppes of Hell, and the stomping and swearing of mixed genders and ages had all the marks of deviltry. Adams’s last judgment was to plunk their fun down into the legal category of “Riot.” “
Fiddling and dancing, in a Chamber of young fellows and Girls, a wild Rable of both sexes, and all Ages, in the lower Room, singing dancing, fiddling, drinking flip and Toddy, and drams.—This is the Riot and Revelling of Taverns And of Thayers frolicks.” Gavel cracks, case is closed.

In this visit to the pub, John Adams captured a moment in the early Revolution when the people’s pleasures were threatening to collapse his trusted social order. Why he was “
foolish enough to spend the whole afternoon in gazing and listening” is anybody’s guess, but it seems he
half understood what he saw, and it set his teeth on edge. The experience of democracy was terribly unattractive and driven by forces beyond his control. What he didn’t seem to recognize in this nursery of the legislators was just how nourishing such floor-kicking fun could be to the republic in its infancy. Raucous fun was its mother’s milk.

Maybe he can’t be blamed for this blind spot. He was inclined by heritage, education, breeding, and possibly most strikingly by his skittish temperament to view such fun as distasteful at best, a crime against civilization at worst. But his prejudice shows how remarkable it is that his cousin Samuel, who shared the same heritage and
Harvard education, may have been a connoisseur of such floor-kicking fun—and of fun far more dangerous than “Thayer’s frolicks.” What for John Adams could be anarchy, criminality, “Riot,” for Samuel was the practice of pure democracy. The cousins, both Whigs, would divide as partisans in a war over the virtues of American fun. Often they would stand on opposite sides of the law, and the winner would set the Revolution’s course. But the conflict they embodied—authoritarianism versus people power—was centuries old and destined never to be resolved.

IT WAS
a sign of the times that a gentleman like Adams even stepped foot in Thayer’s tavern. In previous decades such waterfront bars were exclusive to wharf rats, swabbies, and sailors—
a fast crowd collectively known as “
Jack Tars” after their tar-infused foul-weather gear. Typically young, uneducated, and poor, Jack Tar was a reckless agent of the seas. He strutted the docks in cheap, flashy dress. He bragged and swore about his life aboard. He danced with men and bare-shouldered women, often to the music of black musicians. On precious shore leave, he often finished the night in a brawl, or paying for sex, or being dragged home to his squalid boardinghouse. During the
Great Awakening of the 1730s, while Puritans were busy punishing themselves, Jack Tar was doing the good work of Merry Mount. And before the Sons of Liberty rallied against the
Stamp Act, a loudmouth society of rollicking seamen flaunted their freedom in the face of the British—calling themselves the
Sons of Neptune.