by John Beckman
17. “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun”: Jeff Chang and DJ Kool Herc, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 120.
18. “falling into fattened hands”: Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 245.
1 THE FOREFATHER OF AMERICAN FUN
1. “civill body politick,” “most meete & convenient”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn Books, 1962), 70.
2. those who trace America’s democratic tradition: As Mark L. Sargent demonstrates, the Mayflower Compact, originally cited as a loyalist document, gradually was embraced as an original vestige of American democracy by nonpartisan framer James Wilson and presidents John and John Quincy Adams. In “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth,” New England Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 1988): 233–51. Nathaniel Philbrick cites Pastor John Robinson’s farewell letter to the Separatists, which advises them to “become a body politic, using amongst [themselves] civil government,” as evidence that the compact was meant to lay “the basis for a secular government in America”—though of course Robinson wasn’t along to frame said government or to see it through. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006), 41.
3. “discontented & mutinous speeches”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 69.
4. “to be as firme as any patent”: Ibid.
5. “godly”: Ibid., 70.
6. Bradford’s childhood was filled with misery: Perry D. Westbrook, William Bradford (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 17–27; Bradford Smith, Bradford of Plymouth (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1951), 70–71.
7. “grave & revered”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 27.
8. “not out of any newfangledness”: Ibid., 38–39.
9. “evill examples”: Ibid., 39. See also Wm. Elliot Griffis, The Influence of the Netherlands in the Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic (Boston: DeWolfe Fiske & Co., 1891); Henry Martyn Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 548–90.
10. “those vast & unpeopled”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 40.
11. “lustie,” “very profane younge”: Ibid., 57.
12. “spared no pains,” “had been boone companions,” “but a small cann of beere”: Ibid., 71.
13. “lusty yonge men”: Ibid., 80.
14. “pitching the barr,” “implements,” “gameing and reveling,” “mirth,” “at least openly”: Ibid., 83.
15. “buggery,” “a mare, a cowe,” “sadd accidente,” “lesser catle,” “Then he him selfe,” “and no use made”: Ibid., 202. Detailed accounts of sexual surveillance and criminalization in the New England colonies can be found in James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz’s The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Plantation (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001), 131–70, and in Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 84–116.
16. “how one wicked person,” “so many wicked persons,” “mixe them selves amongst,” “such wickedness”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 203.
17. Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan”: Merry Mount received newfound attention in the liberal academic climate of the 1960s and 1970s, its vogue reaching a climax in 1977, incidentally the peak of America’s sexual revolution. That year at least four scholars gave Morton and his merrymakers their moment in the sun. Karen Ordahl Kupperman argued against the long-held but unproven assumption that Morton was ousted for selling firearms to the Indians, asserting, in his defense, that Native American archery was known to be more effective than Pilgrim warcraft and that the latter more likely wanted to hoard the fur-trade market share. In “Thomas Morton, Historian,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1977): 660–64. Michael Zuckerman dismissed the Pilgrims’ practical motives (apart from their abiding jealousy that Merry Mount ran a 700 percent profit while Plymouth Plantation operated at a loss), focusing instead on ample evidence that Morton “threatened what [the Pilgrims] lived for”—by celebrating the horrid wilderness; by eating, drinking, speaking, and “[keeping] sexual company” with the hated Indians; and especially for enjoying “carnal pleasure” for reasons other than “procreation,” “utility.” “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 1977): 255–77. John Seelye, in his sparkling account, reads Morton as “an American version of Falstaff” and America itself as a “zone of pleasure.” Prophetic Waters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 169, 166. John P. McWilliams Jr. argued that the chroniclers of Merry Mount’s Maypole fracas historically fall into two historical groups: “Post-Revolutionary Americans” who “saw in Merry Mount the opportunity for reflection on the origins of the national character” and “twentieth-century writers” who used the same story to “[trace] the beginnings of failure, decline, or betrayal.” “Fictions of Merry Mount,” American Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 4. With one notable exception, Nathaniel Hawthorne, these two partisan groups are fundamentally opposed. The Post-Revolutionary Americans—who include Bradford himself, Catherine Sedgwick, Charles Francis Adams Jr., Whittier, and Longfellow—might be called, in the fight over fun, “Bradfordites”: they dismiss Thomas Morton as the pettifogger, scofflaw, con man, and/or idiot who threatened our young nation’s safety and integrity by selling firearms to savage terrorists. The twentieth-century camp—including Morton himself, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Vincent Benét, Robert Lowell, and Richard Slotkin—could as easily be called “Mortonites.” These writers tout Merry Mount as the first frontier, an amoral outpost a stone’s throw from Plymouth, where sexual, political, and racial freedoms were squelched by mean-spirited philistines. But it is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of events, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1834)—a fanciful short story that historically belongs among the Post-Revolutionaries, while thematically anticipating Morton’s modern champions—whose very popularity gives it the last word. This staple of college survey courses secures the incident in our national imagination as a missed opportunity for American democracy, which, alas, could have been such fun, had the majority not been too sober to pursue it.
18. “hidious & desolate wilderness”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 60.
19. “long[s] to be sped”: Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, or New Canaan (Amsterdam: Jacob Frederick Stam, 1637), 10; facsimile edition (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
20. “science,” “Art of Revels”: Sir George Buck, The Thirde Universitie of London, accessed August 13, 2012, from http://www.winerock.netau.net/sources/stow_third_universitie.html, where the transcription is explained as such: “from the NYPL Mid-Manhattan Research Library’s copy of selected dance-relevant passages of Sir George Buck’s The Third Universitie of England, an appendix to the 1615 edition of John Stow’s The Annales, Or Generall Chronicle of England finished and edited by Edmond Howes. London: Thomas Adams, 1615, as well as a few passages from the main Annales text. The 1631 edition as viewed at the British Library also contains The Third Universitie of England, but while the main text differs, the ‘Orchestice’ and other Third Universitie passages are the same.”
21. “Master of Revels”: Robert R. Pearce, A history of the Inns of Court and Chancery: with notices of their ancient discipline, rules, orders, and customs, readings, moots, masques… (London, 1848), 114–22.
22. “did endeavour to take a survey”: Morton, New English Canaan, 59–60.
23. “Infidels”: Ibid., 17.
24. “the continuall danger of the salvage people”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 40–41. It was commonly held among early-modern Europeans that indigenous peoples needed to be “reduced to civility” from their current state of “barbarism” before they could receive Christianity. Until then, they were assumed to be lazy, disorderly, anarchic, unmannered, oversexed, and suspiciously itine
rant. No moral creature would freely live in the wilderness without trying to bring its chaos to order. “The only acceptable notion of order,” James Axtell writes of the Pilgrims, “was the order they had known at home, the all-encompassing order of institutions, written-law, and hierarchy.” James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137–38.
25. “new creede”: Morton, New English Canaan, 113.
26. “modesty,” “cumbered,” “feate,” “Diogenes hurle away his dishe”: Ibid., 57.
27. “without Religion, Law, and King”: Ibid., 49.
28. “uncivilized,” “more just than the civilized”: Ibid., 125.
29. “poore wretches,” “beggers”: Ibid., 55.
30. “feats and jugling tricks”: Ibid., 34.
31. “worshipped Pan”: Ibid., 18.
32. “According to human reason”: Ibid., 57.
33. “I, having a parte”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 140.
34. “fell to great licentiousness,” “gott much by trading with Indeans”: Ibid., 140–41.
35. protesting too much: Anderson also suggests that Bradford’s fanciful monologue may have been a poke at his contemporary Levellers, who “had come to represent an extreme expression of radical Protestant ideology.” William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 142.
36. “worthy wights,” “And pitty ’t is I cannot call them Knights”: Morton, New English Canaan, 146. Michelle Burnham, reading New English Canaan “in the context of Morton’s already intersecting regional and transcontinental economic relationships,” makes a compelling point: that Morton “offers readers a kind of aristocratic colonial fantasy” by “promis[ing] would-be planter-gentlemen the pastoral possibilities of unlimited pleasure and leisure,” but she reads the text quite narrowly to conclude that he dismisses Indians and bondservants alike as faceless economic resources. Despite Morton’s obvious embrace of his contemporary culture and economics (the pastoral, Saturnalia, fur trading, tourism), what distinguishes his book (and colony) from those of his peers is both his explicit criticism of aristocratic “heraldry” and his deep and careful appreciation for these devalued groups’ craftsmanship, intelligence, and human dignity. “Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan,” Early American Literature 41, no. 3 (November 2006): 405, 425.
37. “Fouling peeces,” “the hants of all sorts of game,” “all the scume of the countrie”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 142–43.
38. the name’s witty abominations: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 58–65.
39. “memorial to after ages”: Morton, New English Canaan, 132.
40. “they call it Merie-mounte”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 141.
41. “Jollity and gloom were contending”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 88–93.
42. “a barrel of excellent beare,” “the olde English custome,” “faire sea marke”: Morton, New English Canaan, 132.
43. “wombe,” “art & industry,” “darck obscurity”: Ibid., 10.
44. “a Satyrist”: Ibid., 9.
45. making Merry Mount last: Hawthorne’s short story, written during the dreariest period in Native American history, seems to echo this poignant wish. It stages an actual wedding in the scene, but jollity’s empire is nipped in the bud when the Lord and Lady of the May, “madly gay in the flush of youth,” are dragged away in the end by the Pilgrims, those “most dismal wretches.” Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” 92–93.
46. “and other fitting instruments”: Morton, New English Canaan, 132.
47. “the good liquor”: Ibid., 134.
48. “Make greene garlons,” “Drinke and be merry”: Ibid.
49. “drinking and dancing aboute it”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 141.
50. “Sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight”: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language, ed. Jack Lynch (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002), 202.
51. competing social systems weren’t held in check: William Heath, who gives the liveliest and most detailed account of Merry Mount in recent years, reads Morton’s colony as a rude intrusion of Renaissance England into a would-be Calvinist paradise: “As an Anglican cavalier with literary pretensions and a hedonistic bent, Morton epitomized the ‘eat-drink-and-be-merry’ England the Puritans hoped to leave behind. His maypole festivities smacked of folk superstitions, pagan practices, Old Testament precedents, and King James I’s Book of Sports; his consorting with Indian women violated their sexual and racial taboos” (153–54). The pleasure of this multiplex transgression, however, left England far behind; for all of its culturally British antecedents, the fun of Merry Mount crushed all the old aristocratic molds and experienced an audacious (if short-lived) civil society that was properly North American, a New English Canaan. “Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England,” Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 135–68.
52. “harmles mirth”: Morton, New English Canaan, 135.
53. “over armed with drinke”: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 144.
54. “the effusion of so much noble blood”: Morton, New English Canaan, 142.
55. “We must be knit together”: John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume A, ed. Nina Baym (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 176–77.
56. The American Self was menaced: Did the Puritans have fun? Bruce C. Daniel argues that they did. But what he spools out in a blurry list as their “quiet fun, spiritual fun, family fun, [and] civic fun” turns out to be, upon closer inspection, a catalogue of generally sanctioned activities that Puritans engaged in as a matter of course and therefore—according to an apparently Lockean idea of “pleasure” that arises merely from following laws—possibly enjoyed. Take, for instance, this business of “spiritual fun,” much of which took place on the so-called Day of Joy, when “custom proscribed sexual intercourse, unnecessary traveling, and any type of frivolity.” Even though the jacket copy on Puritans at Play promises a “reapprais[al]” of the old assumption that Puritans were “dour, joyless, and repressed,” the author comes clean and lets us know that “brandings and mutilations for crimes committed on the Sabbath were not unusual, and a few ministers and civil leaders believed the death penalty appropriate for Sabbath breaking.” If a Puritan could be mutilated or killed for frivolity on Sunday, what room was left for “spiritual fun”? The entire day was spent in church, in “rigid segregation by gender, class, age, and race characterized by physical arrangements.” Daniels sets the stage with daring honesty:
The proceedings were formal, the atmosphere somber, the audience passive, the message long and complex, the meetinghouse unpainted, undecorated, and unheated. Convention tolerated no instrumental music, no talking, no shuffling about, not even any daydreaming. And despite the fact that magistrates occasionally prosecuted people for “rude and indecent behavior” or for “laughing in the meetinghouse,” the services usually lived up to the community’s expectations for good conduct. We should not look for anachronistic Tom Sawyer behavior in Puritan boys or assume that the congregation secretly longed to be elsewhere.
So where was the fun? Even if we were to assume, along with Daniels, that Tom Sawyer–like fun was not only anachronistic but constitutionally undesirable for the Puritans—which is also to assume that the likes of Hawthorne’s Edith and Edgar in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” sowed no seeds of mirth at Plymouth—we would still have to distort “fun” beyond all recognition to agree with his claim, in the following paragraph, that “the entire milieu of the services” (drearily described above) “
had entertainment value.” A captive audience who is subjected to sermons that detailed the people’s depravity and eternal perdition (per Calvinist doctrine) was neither having “fun” nor being “entertained.” The sense one gets from Puritans at Play, as from most histories of early New England, is that what Daniels calls “boisterous” and “deviant fun” happened, like Thomas Morton’s, in spite of Puritanism, and usually at a considerable remove. Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), xiii, 77.
57. “praying towns”: Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 201.
58. “sharply against Health-drinking”: Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 48–50.
2 JACK TAR, UNBOUND
1. “trifling, nasty vicious Crew,” “to Prisons and the Gallows”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:129.
2. “the nurseries of our legislators”: Ibid., 2:85.
3. Adams had not been bred for taverns: See ibid., 1:128, 257–69; 3:98–99, 257, 260, 261, 260.
4. “Let no trifling diversion”: Ibid., 2:59.
5. “fond”: Ibid., 2:47; dated July 22, 1771.
6. “The Rabble”: All quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are from ibid., 1:172–73.
7. “rhythmic crowd”: Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960), 30.
8. “Fiddling and dancing”: Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:172–73.
