Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  In the same year that Cinerama was born, the world was also given 3-D movies. The first was a film called Bwana Devil, apparently one of the worst movies ever made. The process involved slightly overlapping images which melded into a three-dimensional whole once the viewer donned special Polaroid glasses. Originally called Natural Vision, it enjoyed a huge if short-lived vogue – sixty-nine Natural Vision movies were made in 1953 alone – and people flocked in their millions to features like The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Charge at Feather River for the dubious thrill of having barge poles thrust at them and, in one particularly memorable scene, having a character appear to spit in their faces. So promising did the process seem at first that many quite respectable films, notably Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, were filmed in 3-D, though the fad was so short-lived that most, including Dial M, were released in the normal flat form.

  Before long it was all but impossible to go to a movie that didn’t involve some impressive-sounding new technical process. One after another came Vistarama, Superscope, Naturama, even AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision, in which, as you might surmise, the theatre was pumped full of appropriate odours at regular intervals. The problem was that the odours tended to linger and mingle in a perplexing manner, and the members of the audience situated nearest the smell dispensers weren’t particularly gratified to find themselves periodically refreshed with a moist outpouring of assorted scents.

  A year after Cinerama made its debut, Twentieth Century-Fox came up with a slightly more sophisticated, and certainly less gimmicky, process called CinemaScope, which required just a single camera with a special anamorphic lens. The first CinemaScope picture was The Robe. CinemaScope screens were roughly double the width of a normal movie screen and were slightly curved to give some illusion of depth.17 By 1955, just two years after its introduction, more than 20,000 cinemas throughout the world had installed the CinemaScope system.18 Hollywood would live to fight another day.

  Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series

  16

  The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play

  The abiding impression of life in Puritan New England is that it wasn’t a great deal of fun. ‘Sad-visaged people moving always with sober decorum through a dull routine of work unrelieved by play’ is the traditional view expressed by the historian John Allen Krout in 1929.1

  In fact, it wasn’t quite like that. Though they could scarcely be described as libertines, the Puritans were not averse to pleasure. They smoked and drank, and enjoyed games and contests as much as anybody, particularly those involving physical challenges like foot-races and wrestling, or that honed necessary skills like archery. Increase Mather called recreation ‘a great duty’, and at Harvard College the students were not merely permitted but actively encouraged to take part in ‘lawful’ games.2 And lawful is the operative word. What the Puritans didn’t like were activities deemed to be an encouragement to idleness or ungodliness – and of these, it must be said, they found many. Among the amusements they forbade at one time or another were quoits, ninepins, bowls, stool-ball and even shuffle-board. Games involving dice and cards were entirely out of the question. Plays, entertainments, ‘dancing and frisking’ and ‘other crafty science’ were equally abhorrent to them. Maypoles were cut down and even Christmas was abjured. Smoking was acceptable only within certain well-prescribed bounds. Connecticut had a statute forbidding inhabitants from taking ‘tobacco publiquely in the street, nor shall any take yt in the fyelds or woods’.3 On Sundays, no recreation of any sort was permitted. Even going for a stroll was forbidden. Indeed, sitting quietly could land you in trouble. One hapless couple found themselves hauled before magistrates for no graver offence than being found ‘sitting together on the Lord’s Day, under an apple tree’.4

  Oddly, none of this was inherent in Calvinist doctrine. Calvin himself was known to enjoy a lively game of bowls on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing in their pre-American experience had suggested that the Pilgrims would institute such an aggressive crackdown on fun.

  To understand why this happened in New England, it is necessary to re-examine two commonly held conceptions about the Puritans. The first is the belief that they had come to America to establish freedom of religion. In truth, freedom of worship was the last thing they wanted. Having suffered years of persecution on their native soil, they desired nothing from America so much as the opportunity to establish an equally intolerant system of their own. The second misconception is the belief that the colonization of New England was primarily pious in its impulse. In fact, throughout the early period Puritans were decidedly – indeed, uncomfortably – in the minority. The great bulk of early pilgrims were attracted to America not by religious zeal but by the hope of a better life. Between 1630 and 1640, of the 16,000 immigrants to Massachusetts, only one in four was a Puritan.5 Even on the Mayflower, the Saints had been outnumbered 61 to 41 by Strangers. Both of these considerations worked powerfully on the Puritan psyche. From the outset they became jealously possessive of their moral authority in the New World, and in consequence showed a decidedly neurotic preoccupation with activities that might be construed as a challenge to their pre-eminence.

  But beyond this there was a practical side to their detestation of idleness. Building a community in a wilderness was a terribly earnest undertaking, and one that did not admit of much leisure. Yet many of the non-Puritan settlers showed a vexing inclination to down tools and engage in play on any convenient pretext. Thus, when on Christmas Day, 1621 (almost precisely a year after their landing), Governor William Bradford found a group of impious Strangers ‘in the streete at play, openly; some pitching the barr and some at stoole-ball’, and huffily took their implements from them, he was offended not merely by their celebration of a holiday not recognized by his sect, but at the wanton and dangerous frittering away of time and energy that might have been directed to securing their survival.

  Such concerns were far from unique to New England. In Virginia, too, outsiders were often appalled at how little the inhabitants attended to their well-being and security. Thomas Dale, arriving with supplies in 1611, found the residents on the brink of extinction but playing at bowls. Soon after, the Virginia Assembly enacted restrictive laws very similar to those of New England, making it illegal to gamble, to be found incapacitated by drink, to fail to observe the Sabbath, even to dress ‘in excess’. None of this was motivated by a desire to help them tread the narrow path to heaven, but rather by the need to bring order and discipline to a vulnerable community.

  When a celebration was deemed in order, the Puritans were delighted to let their hair down. The first Thanksgiving feast went on for three full days and involved, in addition to copious eating and drinking, such diversions as stoneball, a game similar to croquet, and competitions of running, jumping, arm-wrestling, shooting and throwing.

  No one knows quite when this first Thanksgiving took place, other than that it was sometime between the beginning of October and the first week of November 1621. Nor was it regarded as the start of an annual tradition. No Thanksgiving appears to have been held the following year, and the Plymouth colony would not begin regular celebrations until almost the end of the century. For the rest of New England, Thanksgiving didn’t become an annual tradition until about the 1780s. For the nation as a whole, Thanksgiving wasn’t a fixed holiday until President Lincoln so decreed it in 1863. The date he chose was 6 August. The following year it was moved, arbitrarily, to the last Thursday in November, where it has remained ever since, apart from a brief period during the Depression years when it was brought forward seven days to give stores an extra week of potential Christmas shopping.6

  Christmas likewise got off to an erratic start in America, not least because the Puritans disdained it, regarding it (not altogether inaccurately) as a pagan festival. In 1659 they went so far as to ban it altogether, and it remained widely suppressed in New England into the 1800s.7 Partly because of this interruption of tradition, Christmas as now celebrated is a mongrel a
ccumulation of practices from many lands.

  Gift-giving, which has no intrinsic connection with Christmas, was borrowed from Holland. From the Middle Ages, the Dutch had made a custom of giving presents to children on 6 December, St Nicholas’s Day. St Nicholas was a shadowy figure from Asia Minor whose many kindly deeds included bestowing bags of gold on three young women who otherwise faced a life of prostitution. Over time these three bags evolved into three golden balls and became, by some complicated leap of logic, the three balls associated with pawnbroking. In the late eighteenth century St Nicholas and the presents that went with him were borrowed from the Dutch but transferred to the nearest Anglican holiday, 25 December. At the same time, the now wholly secular figure of Santa Claus became bizarrely bound up with Christkindlein, the Christ child, and thus took on the alternative designation Kris Kringle.

  The Christmas tree and the practice of sending greeting cards arrived from Germany – they are often attributed to Queen Victoria’s German consort, Prince Albert – and gradually became part of the Christmas tradition in the nineteenth century. The first mention of a Christmas tree in America is in 1846. Carols (etymologically related to choral), mistletoe, holly and the yule log all come from Britain, mostly as survivors of a pre-Christian past. (Yule itself is pre-Saxon Germanic and evidently commemorates a forgotten pagan festival.)

  The American artitude towards Christmas and how to celebrate it was long ambivalent. On the one hand Macy’s was staying open till midnight on Christmas Eve as far back as 1867 in order to deal with the clamour to buy presents. But on the other, the practice of decorating trees was so late in developing that even in 1880 a manufacturer of ornaments could persuade F. W. Woolworth to take no more than $25 of his stock. (Before the decade was out, however, Woolworth had upped the order to $800,000.)8

  It may come as a surprise to learn that there are no official national holidays in America. One of the rights reserved to the states was the prerogative to declare holidays. The President can, with the assent of Congress, declare ‘legal public holidays’, but these apply only to the District of Columbia and federal employees. They have no formal sanction elsewhere.

  If revelries were seldom given official blessing in America, they generally found private outlets. Though those who governed the early colonies tried almost everywhere to subdue the national impulse to engage in dissolute pursuits, they didn’t often succeed. Cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear-baiting, drinking to excess and gambling were available to those who wished to find them, and not just on scattered feast days. Horse-racing, too, was widely popular, especially in Virginia, though suitable venues that offered a level surface and a measure of privacy were not always easy to find. Outside Jamestown there existed a particularly favourable stretch of road a quarter of a mile long. It became so popular as a location of illicit races that it led to the breeding of a new strain of horse, the quarter-horse, which lacked stamina but could sprint at enormous speed for short distances.9 Horse-racing would later endow the American vocabulary with a wealth of terms, among them frontrunner, inside track, to win by a nose, sure thing, also-ran and bookie, though some of these would have to wait some time before finding general acceptance. Bookie, for instance, isn’t found in print before 1885.10

  In the Appalachian region, wrestling – or wrassling – of a particularly brutal nature became popular early on and evidently stayed both brutal and popular up to this century. Many of those who settled the region hailed from northern England, home of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, a contest that is thought to date from Viking times and remains popular to this day at country fêtes and other such gatherings throughout the English Lake District and slightly beyond. In it, two men embrace in a standing position, and with occasional bursts of grunting exertion, mixed with longer periods of strategic stillness (during which a spectator could be excused for thinking that they had temporarily nodded off), try to throw each other to the ground. It was, and in England remains, a gentlemanly pursuit. In the more rough-and-tumble environment of Kentucky and Virginia, however, Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling evolved into something rather more aggressive. Competitors grew their thumbnails long and filed their teeth to a point the better to inflict damage. Anything was permissible – pulling hair, gouging eyes, biting, stomping on a windpipe – so long as it was done with bare hands.

  Fischer recounts the story of a fight between two men – and if you are squeamish you might just want to flit your eyes to the next paragraph – in which the winner secured an early advantage by gouging his opponent’s eyes from his head with his thumbs. ‘The sufferer roared aloud, but uttered no complaint’ and astonishingly refused to give up the fight, according to one eyewitness. Not until his opponent had additionally bitten off his nose and torn his ears from his head did he at last conclude that discretion and the loss of a usable face were the better part of valour.11

  Naturally, large sums of money changed hands at these spectacles. The Puritan ethic notwithstanding, Americans evinced an irrepressible urge to wager from the earliest days. Early gambling pursuits gave us many terms that have since passed into general usage. Tinhorn, meaning cheap or disreputable, comes from a metal cylinder of that name used to shake dice in games like chuck-a-luck (or chutter-luck) and hazard. Pass the buck came from the custom of passing a buck-horn knife as a way of keeping track of whose turn it was to deal or ante, and thus it is etymologically unrelated to buck as a slang term for dollar. American gambling led to a broadening of bet into the wider language in expressions like ‘you bet I do’, ‘you bet your life’, and so on, which foreign observers commonly noted as a distinguishing characteristic of American speech by the early nineteenth century. Mark Twain told the story of a westerner who had to break the news of Joe Toole’s death to his widow. ‘Does Joe Toole live here?’ the westerner asks, and when the wife answers in the affirmative, he says, ‘Bet you he don’t!’12

  Among the favourite card games until about the time of the American Revolution were whist (a word of unknown derivation, but possibly related to whisk), brag (so called because of the bravado required of betters) and muggins (whence the term for a gullible person or victim of fate). But by the closing years of the century they were giving way to faro, a game first mentioned in Britain in 1713. Corrupted from pharaoh (a pharaoh was pictured on one of the cards of a faro deck; it later evolved into the king of hearts), faro was a dauntingly complicated game in terms of equipment, scoring, betting and vocabulary. Each card dealt had a name of obscure significance. The first was the soda card, the second the loser, and so on to the final card, the hock; hence the expression from soda to hock, and also to be in hock.13 Scoring was kept track of on an abacus-like device called a case, from which is said to come the expression an open and shut case. To break even and to play both ends against the middle also originated in faro, as did the practice of referring to counters as chips (previously they had been called checks). Thus most of the many expressions involving chips – to cash in one’s chips, to be in the chips, a blue-chip investment – owe their origins to this now forgotten game.14

  Gradually faro was displaced by poker. Dispute surrounds the origins of the name. The most plausible guess is that it comes from a similar German game called Pochspiel, in which players who passed would call, ‘Poche’, pronounced ‘polka’.15 Others have suggested that it may have some hazy connection to poke or puck (an English dialectal word meaning to strike, whence the name of the hard black disc used in ice hockey) or to the Norse-Danish pokker, ‘devil’, from which comes the Puck of English folklore. At all events, poker is an Americanism first recorded in 1848. In its very early days the game was also commonly referred to as poko or poka.

  Among the many terms that have passed into the main body of English from poker are deal in the sense of a transaction, jackpot, penny-ante, to stand pat, and just for openers. Jackpot is of uncertain provenance. The jack may refer to the card of that name or to the slang term for money, or possibly it may be simply another instance of t
he largely inexplicable popularity of jack as a component with which to build words: jackhammer, jackknife, jackboot, jackass, jack-in-the-box, jack-o’-lantern, jack-of-all-trades, jackrabbit, jackstraw, jackdaw, jackanapes, lumberjack and car jack. In none of these, so far as is known, does jack contain any particular significance. People clearly just liked the sound of it.

  According to Dillard, ace, deuce and trey, for one, two and three, are also American, through the influence of French gamblers of New Orleans. He may be right in the case of trey, but the first two were in common use in Britain in the Middle Ages and may date from Norman times. Ace comes ultimately from the Latin ās, a basic unit of currency, and deuce from the Latin duōs, or ‘two’. The French gamblers of New Orleans did, however, give us another venerable gambling term: to shoot craps. In New Orleans the game the English called hazard became known as crabs, which mutated over time into craps. It has no etymological connection to the slang term for faeces. The French were also ultimately responsible for keno (from quine, ‘a set of five’), an early form of bingo that was once very popular, though it left no linguistic legacy beyond its name.