American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt Hardback - 2014

Excerpt

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.

Media reviews

“The historian who revisits well-trodden ground must offer either something new or at least a new way of looking at it. In American Fun John Beckman does both—stringing unfamiliar episodes of U.S. history together in a new and ingenious way.” —The Washington Post
 
“The key to this spirited and challenging book is in its subtitle: ‘joyous revolt.’ . . .  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.” —Howard P. Chudacoff, The New York Times Book Review

“This freewheeling history . . . richly demonstrate[s] how Americans have often blended defiance and wit with the pursuit of liberty.”  —The New Yorker
 
“[I]n his adventuresome new history, American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt. . . . Beckman, an English professor at the United States Naval Academy, makes a powerful case that fun may be good but should always be at least slightly less than clean.” —The Daily Beast 

“American Fun is ecstatic, erudite, anarchical and utterly irresistible. It’s the great cultural history of busting out and cutting loose that we’ve always wanted and always needed. This is a party you don’t want to miss.” —Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians
 
“John Beckman’s American Fun is a raucous, frequently dazzling tour through the country’s wild and crazy side, the joyous out-of-control culture that, as he writes, ‘flouts couth.’ In an age of bleak spectacle, Beckman reminds us in living color that ‘folk fun’ and ‘coarse civility’ are deep in the American grain. At once learned, thrilling, splendidly written and wicked smart, this is the best book I've read about popular culture in ages—or ever.” —Todd Gitlin, author, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

“A raucous, anarchic shadow history of celebrations, pranks, and joyous rebellion, American Fun chronicles the American penchant for high energy, authority-flouting acts of fun. . . . In the end, with modern permutations of American fun, American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt offers a history that is about fun and is fun to read. It illuminates the very American tradition of stickin’ it to the man, dancin’ in the street, and havin’ a blast.”  —New York Journal of Books
 
“John Beckman’s American Fun offers an alternative history of our culture, zeroing in on the many ways in which our country’s fun making was spurred on by subcultures formed in opposition to that Waspy standard.” —Bookforum

“A lively, entertaining history of American fun. . . . With a novelist’s care for detail and storytelling, Beckman offers a remarkably expansive . . . cultural history.”  —Kirkus Reviews
  
“Folksinger and Yippie organizer Phil Ochs once proclaimed, ‘A demonstration should turn you on, not turn you off.’ There’s even a band named Fun. But who could ever have predicted that there would be this unique, comprehensively researched, scholarly approach to 400 years of fun in America, a historical tradition of ridicule that has served as a threat to the status quo—from King Charley to Dick Gregory, from Thomas Morton to Ken Kesey, from Mark Twain to Abbie Hoffman—in a myriad of forms that provide a strong sense of continuity. Like pasta fazool, which features a bean in every macaroni, a satirical ploy is embedded with a level of irreverent truth. ‘Laughter,’ said Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of Punch, ‘is the most effective of all subversive conspiracies, and it operates on our side.’ And now, with the aid of technology, that process can go viral, fast and furious. Joyous revolt, after all, is not an oxymoron.” —Paul Krassner, author of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture
 
“American Fun reads like a graphic novel as John Beckman connects the dots between Thomas Morton, the flappers, Abbie Hoffman and punk rock, celebrating fun as a great American value.” —Andy Shernoff, founding member of The Dictators

“Beckman captures the rambunctiousness, subversiveness, and inventiveness of the American spirit, as well as its ugliness, violence, and bigotry.” —Publishers Weekly

“This rollicking and patriotic paean to American ‘rough play’ deserves a serious look.” —Booklist

“Beckman challenges our understanding of American Puritanism by showing that we’ve been an essentially prankish, fun-loving nation. Colonists reveled wildly, Patriots mocked Redcoats, slaves lampooned masters, the Twenties roared, Hollywood entertained, Yippies invaded the stock market, and the Internet isn’t entirely sober-minded either. Have fun reading.” —Library Journal
 
“American Fun is that rare and lovely thing: a serious and original work of history which entertains from the opening pages to the conclusion. John Beckman captures a vital, yet neglected, feature of American life—the untrammeled pursuit of happiness—and will have you grinning as you learn.”
—Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation