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Summary
Summary
Here is an animated and wonderfully engaging work of cultural history that lays out America's unruly past by describing the ways in which cutting loose has always been, and still is, an essential part of what it means to be an American.
From the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have defied their stodgy rules and hierarchies with pranks, dances, stunts, and wild parties, shaping the national character in profound and lasting ways. In the nation's earlier eras, revelers flouted Puritans, Patriots pranked Redcoats, slaves lampooned masters, and forty-niners bucked the saddles of an increasingly uptight middle class. In the twentieth century, fun-loving Americans celebrated this heritage and pushed it even further: flappers "barney-mugged" in "petting pantries," Yippies showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, and B-boys invented hip-hop in a war zone in the Bronx.
This is the surprising and revelatory history that John Beckman recounts in American Fun . Tying together captivating stories of Americans' "pursuit of happiness"--and distinguishing between real, risky fun and the bland amusements that paved the way for Hollywood, Disneyland, and Xbox--Beckman redefines American culture with a delightful and provocative thesis.
(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Author Notes
John Beckman, a native Iowan, was born in 1967. He has taught literature at universities in Poland, France and California and is currently an assistant professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Beckman, an English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, traces the "three tributaries of American fun-the commercial, playful, and radically political," from Thomas Morton's anarchic Merry Mount colony in the 1620s to its modern counterpart, Burning Man. Accounts of politically motivated fun like the Boston Tea Party and the Yippies' attempt to levitate the Pentagon are presented along with tales of pranksters like Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum, as well as accounts of playful hoaxes, such as the "Electrical Banana," in which a 1960s underground newspaper convinced mainstream media that smoking dried banana peels produces "a cannabic effect." Beckman laments the commercialized fun of organized sports as well as the neutering of counterculture spirit by Madison Avenue advertising or pop culture's "test-tube teens." He also traces African-American culture from Pinkster festivals and Brother Rabbit folktales-later hijacked by white journalist Joel Chandler Harris-to the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of hip-hop in the 1970s South Bronx. Other notable characters include the "b'hoys and g'hals," Irish street gangsters with an affinity for Shakespeare; the Merry Pranksters and their LSD-infused parties with the Hell's Angels; and Jazz Age flappers like Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Beckman captures the rambunctiousness, subversiveness, and inventiveness of the American spirit, as well as its ugliness, violence, and bigotry. He also raises interesting questions about complacency and "the death of fun." (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Fun, argues Beckman, is the secret ingredient in American culture. When the Sons of Liberty dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, their message to the British was earnest, but their true power came from the rude and rowdy joy with which they carried out their actions, for this was what ultimately bound them together. Having fun raucous, participatory, antiauthoritarian frivolity was the impetus behind the ring shout dances of African Americans in the antebellum South, the practical jokes of California gold-rushers, the joyous revolt of the wets during Prohibition, and the hippies and yippies of the sixties. And although it wasn't always intended to be political, Beckman suggests that having fun has been key to Americans' ability to manage deep conflicts and see past their differences. The big American joke, argues Beckman, is that fun especially fun in the midst of struggle is the personal and communal experience of freedom, and as such has defined America, despite the efforts of various uptight constituencies and the constant threat of P. T. Barnum-style commercialization. This rollicking and patriotic paean to American rough play deserves a serious look.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE KEY to this spirited and challenging book is in its subtitle: "joyous revolt." The revolt depicted in "American Fun" derives from John Beckman's somewhat narrow definition of what constitutes fun. For his purposes, it requires active, spontaneous and unscripted participation, not passive amusement or entertainment contrived by the vaudeville circuit's B. F. Keith or by Walt Disney. Fun, Beckman asserts, is something to be had; it comes from the people; it is had by a group; it is risky; and it has a purpose. Adopting an unusual interpretation of American history, Beckman, a professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, explores the ways outlaw, oppressed and otherwise defiant groups reacted to their condition by creating and celebrating acts of raucous jubilation that represented quests for freedom. Both politically directed and self-rewarding, these rebellions, he says, had a peculiarly American tinge because they not only promoted their own brand of civility but also "turned social conflict into joyous upheaval and have strengthened the nation in the face of adversity." This is a big claim, one that makes for provocative reading but also for a degree of skepticism. Beckman locates joyous revolt in every era. The template for it all, he writes, was set by Thomas Morton, a renegade from British Puritanism, who in 1627 founded a quasi-utopian community 30 miles from the Pilgrims' Plymouth Plantation. In a colony aptly named Merry Mount, Morton and a group of freed indentured servants, along with some cooperative Indians, thumbed their noses at their prim neighbors by practicing forms of ribaldry and hedonism in wild celebrations. Their unruly behavior included a maypole and revels of singing, dancing and licentiousness: fun, not violence. In Beckman's view, this same blend of opposition and festiveness characterized other early events, like the Boston Tea Party, where, he contends, fun-loving Jack Tars (seafaring men) joined with other classes to convey their grievances through rebellious enjoyment. The pursuit of happiness thus involved happiness itself. From there, the narrative proceeds through the 19 th and 20 th centuries down to the present. Beckman examines the pursuit of happiness during the antebellum era in the activities of enslaved African-Americans who used fun as a means of resistance. Their celebrations of holidays called "Election Day" and "Pinkster," which consisted of multiday festivals of singing, dancing, drinking, gambling, joking and competition, brought release to a people normally deprived of such pleasures. The fun of these occasions also included forms of mimicry and ridicule of white society's prudery, racism and privilege. These sometimes threatening, always joyful, outbursts of fun, Beckman concludes, gave enslaved people control over their own bodies and helped them build an alternative and sometimes oppositional community. Similar communities grew up in the American West, where gold rush miners, echoing the Merry Mount revelers, sang, danced, gambled and drank themselves silly in defiance of Eastern decorousness and temperance. One of the most notable recorders of the frivolity, as well as a participant in it, was a young writer named Samuel Clemens, who made such fun and pranks famous in "Roughing It." A century later, the same oppositional frivolity could be found among Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, then, later, the hippies and yippies, who all craved personal freedom - and the drugs that went along with it - from the stodgy, corporate world around them. Their ethos was "revolution for the hell of it." Nor should it be thought that riotous fun was confined to one gender. Flappers and the "new woman" of the 1920s, symbolized by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Clara Bow and Mae West, used bravado and eroticism to breach patriarchy's barriers to pleasure. Music plays a large role in Beckman's outline of the challenging, riotous fun of recent times. The syncopated, erotic rhythms of jazz, often enjoyed by interracial groups, inspired laughter, dancing and partying, much as Pinkster had done in an earlier era. The anarchic nature of punk pulled outcast kids into their own community, symbolized by the raw, reckless and physically dangerous mosh pit. Hip-hop was (and is) a do-it-yourself culture that empowered dispossessed black youths, followed by alienated white youths, to challenge authority, especially the cops. After presenting these and other examples of frolic and defiance, Beckman concludes that "fun - especially fun in the midst of struggle - is the personal and communal experience of freedom. All it requires is a cavalier attitude toward killjoys, tyrants, limits and timidity." Sometimes, however, he tries too hard to read fun into the midst of struggle. Just because the Boston Tea Party is called a party, for example, does not mean that it was joyous. It was serious business, and Beckman's evidence that a mob of colonials was having a grand time dumping tea into the harbor is slim. Moreover, he makes his argument without fully considering consequences. He scatters words like "tumultuous," "rowdy," "festive," "spontaneous" and "uproarious" throughout the text, but there often was another side to this fun. One person's riotous joy can be another's torment. IN BECKMAN'S EYES, the boisterous Boston colonials who tanked up on rum and wine, then invaded and trashed the fancy home of Massachusetts's governor, Thomas Hutchinson, to protest the Stamp Tax, took great delight doing so. Not so much Governor Hutchinson. On a much larger scale, the same could be said for the Western Indians, who fell victim to young, unmarried, drunken men mingling rowdy fun with vicious racist violence. Occasionally, the fun-lovers themselves became victims, as when white servicemen murderously attacked Zoot Suiters in Los Angeles in 1943. As these examples suggest, the coarse civility that Beckman says accompanied the communal experience of freedom often teetered on the edge of, or descended into, mob ferocity. Riotous fun is not always civil, and it cannot always be restrained. The various episodes that Beckman selects to illustrate "fun in the midst of struggle" could be matched by incidents of death and destruction resulting from fun in the midst of struggle. Unlike the joyous upheavals Beckman selects, these degenerations, fun as they might have been for some of the participants, did not strengthen the nation. Nevertheless, "American Fun" provides an original perspective on how ordinary folk left a mark on the historical landscape in a way that has not received full recognition. Fun, as Beckman describes it, has been "the joy of the one joining the joy of the many in a powerful wave of common purpose." That purpose is the assertion of freedom by the oppressed, the unfree, the underprivileged and the alienated during hard times. Whether it was the Revolutionary era, the age of antebellum slavery, the 1920s or the '60s, laughter and merrymaking acted as forms of resistance. The fun was in the doing, not the watching, and the doing marked a quest for liberty otherwise denied. Fun in the midst of struggle 'is the personal and communal experience of freedom.' HOWARD P. CHUDACOFF, the Littlefield professor of history at Brown University, is the author of "Children at Play: An American History."
Kirkus Review
A lively, entertaining history of American fun. Notwithstanding its obvious subjectivity, the definition of "fun" has changed significantly since early American colonization. Yet Beckman (English/U.S. Naval Academy; The Winter Zoo, 2002) is undeterred by the challenge of drawing out what he believes to be a uniquely American idea of fun as an act of rebellion. Using a cast of familiar charactersSamuel Adams, Ken Kesey, Mark Twainas well as lesser-known AmericansThomas Morton, King Charles and Buddy Bolden, to name a fewBeckman argues that it is quintessentially American to participate in pranks and tricks. (The Boston Tea Party is a prime example.) For Beckman, it is this "boldness in the face of adversity and restraint" that characterized early American fun. It was social, political and, above all, daring, and it represented an appeal to the democratic principles that would come to define the still-maturing republic. But, as "fun" became more popular, Americans were quick to exploit the economics of leisure. Fun was now a matter of entertainment"Barnumization," as Beckman puts ita big business that no longer relied on prankster risk. "These pleasures were fleeting and superficialby design," he writes. "Nothing was at stake, except the ticket price." These two strands of fun continued to develop in parallel, defining their respective ages, from Jazz Age exuberance and the subversive counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s hypercommercialization and today's digital zombie-ism. While there is no shortage of irreverent and diverse examples that key in on various stages of fun's development in America, Beckman is often so diffuse in his breadth that his argument seems to be lost. His conclusions, moreover, slide dangerously close to exceptionalist rhetoric. Are Americans the only people that partake in such revelry? Nevertheless, he does identify uniquely American experiences that define a collective understanding of fun as a protest against the established order, even if one is a part of that order. With a novelist's care for detail and storytelling, Beckman offers a remarkably expansive, if flawed, cultural history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction On April 15, 1923, eight marathon dancers, aged nineteen to twenty-eight, outran the law for a chance to make history. For twenty-nine hours straight, as weaker contestants limped off the floor, they had twirled and swung each other's bodies to the fox-trot, two-step, and bunny hug. At midnight, New York police enforced a law that put a twelve-hour cap on marathon activities. They ordered the kids to cease and desist, but the dancers wanted none of it. They danced en masse out the doors of the Audubon Ballroom, across the 168th Street sidewalk, and into the back of an idling van. They danced in the van's jumpy confines all the way to the Edgewater ferry, on whose decks they danced across the choppy Hudson, before being portaged like a cage of exotic birds and released into New Jersey's Pekin dance hall. They had been there only an hour when more cops shoved them along, and so it would go for the next two days. The venues kept changing, and the comedy mounting, as they crossed and recrossed the tri-state lines, cheerfully dancing all the while. They shed a few compatriots to squirrelly exhaustion and gave reporters a private audience in an undisclosed Harlem apartment. Back in the van, they cut fantastic steps on their way to Connecticut, where the contest would reach its strange conclusion. The New York Times , filing updates as the events unfolded, struck a distinctly American tone: they touted the dancers as the pinnacle of youth--of vigor, ambition, free expression--calling them "heroes and heroines . . . alive with the spirit of civic pride." But they scorned the cops as "mean old thing[s]" who should have been ashamed of enforcing "meddlesome old laws." As tensions mounted they framed a rivalry between the upstart "West" and the noble "East." (Dancers from Cleveland had set the record only a few days before.) The upshot of all this ballyhoo, of course, was that the reporters took none of it too seriously. The Times just wanted to join the party and to let their readers join it too. But their patriotism wasn't all tongue-in-cheek. Youthful antics in the 1920s were often held up as national virtues. Alma Cummings, who had set the first dance-marathon record that March, was honored with the "Star-Spangled Banner." Avon O. Foreman, a fifteen-year-old flagpole sitter, was recognized in 1929 by the mayor of Baltimore for showing "the pioneer spirit of early America." In an era when Prohibition had divided the country and the KKK had nearly five million members, the splashy high jinks of free-spirited youths were for many a welcome vision of good-natured resistance. They called to mind the Sons of Liberty--or Huck Finn lighting out to the territory. Things got weird in the marathon's endgame. At two o'clock on Sunday morning, when the van arrived at an athletic club in East Port Chester, judges disqualified two of the last four contestants for sleeping in transit, leaving Vera Sheppard, nineteen, and Ben Solar, twenty-three, to rally for the record. At 8 a.m. Solar broke away from Sheppard and "wandered aimlessly toward the door, like a sleep-walker." Smelling salts revived him for precisely two minutes. When he collapsed, and was out, the ever-vigorous Sheppard--performing "better than at any time during the night"--galloped on with a series of relief partners. The good citizens of Connecticut, fearing for her health, or maybe her soul, had police stop the madness at 3:30 p.m. Only with special permission was she allowed to dance past four o'clock, at which point she demolished the world record. "Miss Sheppard's condition at the close," the Times reported, "was surprisingly good." She had also lost a cool ten pounds. Vera Sheppard wasn't your typical rebel. An office worker from Long Island City, she lived at home with her father and two sisters and gave dance lessons most nights till twelve. She wasn't even your typical flapper. But when her sisters attributed her endurance to prayer and the fact that she didn't drink or smoke, Sheppard preferred to answer for herself. Showing all-American pride in her ethnic difference, she told reporters: "I'm Irish; do you suppose I could have stuck it out otherwise?" What kept her going for sixty-nine hours was "thinking what good fun it was." Sheppard liked to dance, and she was willing to risk it if what she liked was against the law. More to the point, she enjoyed those risks. But her Jazz Age "fun" wasn't just the boon of a wealthy country at the height of its powers. It wasn't even a whirl on Coney Island's Loop-the-Loop. Her cheeky dance across three state lines, as pure and innocent as it seemed, was underwritten by centuries of studied rebellion that made it quintessentially American. Sheppard and her cheering section at the Times were heirs to a raffish national tradition that flaunted pleasure in the face of authority. This book traces the lines of that tradition. Excerpted from American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt by John Beckman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xi |
| 1 The Forefather of American Fun | p. 3 |
| 2 Jack Tar, Unbound | p. 21 |
| 3 Technologies of Fun | p. 49 |
| 4 A California Education | p. 77 |
| 5 Selling It Back to the People | p. 106 |
| 6 Barnumizing America | p. 129 |
| 7 Merry Mount Goes Mainstream | p. 155 |
| 8 "Joyous Revolt": The "New Negro" and the "New Woman" | p. 187 |
| 9 Zoot Suit Riots | p. 215 |
| 10 A California Education, Redux | p. 230 |
| 11 Revolution for the Hell of It | p. 263 |
| 12 Mustangers Have More Fun | p. 278 |
| 13 Doing It Yourself, Getting the Joke | p. 293 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 327 |
| Notes | p. 331 |
| Index | p. 379 |
