American Fun

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.

AMERICAN HISTORY GIVES US
one good brawl after another. Indians fought
Pilgrims; pirates bullied merchants; Patriots bloodied Redcoats’ noses; slaves outwitted, sometimes butchered their masters; and hot young peppers—from Kentucky backwoodsmen to Bowery
b’hoys, to
greasers,
break-dancers, and
Riot Grrrls—declared civil war on a mincing middle class that wanted them to fall in line. “Hell, no!” Americans have always said—and such is the kernel of the national identity.

So how has such a tumultuous public, historically riven by deep social differences (class division, racial prejudice,
partisan politics, culture wars)
ever
gathered in peaceable activity, let alone done it time and again? The answer is by having fun—often outrageous, even life-threatening fun. This enduring pursuit, so popular with Americans, can make even the scariest social differences exciting; it can bring even the bitterest adversaries into a state of feverous harmony. For conflict is the active ingredient in fun. Risk, transgression, mockery, rebellion—these are the revving motors of fun. True, wild fun can be downright criminal: the pirate’s joy in plundering and murder, the
gangster’s joy in disturbing the peace—and such violent kinds of self-serving fun have
sometimes put our democracy in peril. But all throughout American history the people have also proven to be radically civil—not too polite, not so clean, but practicing a rough-and-tumble respect for
other
people’s fun. At even the diciest moments in history the people’s rebellion has
strengthened
democracy. It has allowed the people to form close bonds in spite of prejudices, rivalries, and laws.

The scuffles and clashes depicted in this book follow a striking pattern. A group of rebels, usually much rowdier than Vera Sheppard’s crew, takes joy in resisting a stern ruling class and entices the people to follow its lead. In many of these cases, inspired by the rebels’ good humor and daring, the people take to reveling in the same bad behaviors (or demographic or ethnic differences) for which the group was originally repressed. Such good-natured combat gives a twofold pleasure. On the one hand, its “fun” (in the word’s seventeenth-century sense) is the pleasure of mocking the ruling class for its unjust sanctions and small-minded rigidity. It’s the fun of breaking the master’s laws. On the other hand, in the word’s eighteenth-century sense—of
Samuel Johnson’s “
sport, high merriment, and frolicksome delight”—it’s the fun of pranks, lewd dances, wild parties, and tough competitions that unites the crowd in common joy. It’s the fun of eluding laws
together,
in playful, active, comical ways that often model good citizenship.

VERA SHEPPARD
’
S VICTORY
—over ministers, over magistrates, over the
American Society of Teachers of Dancing, who declared marathons “a disgrace to the art and profession of dancing”—inspired countless others to jump into the game, to push their limits in the name of silliness.
Dance marathons peaked in the Great Depression (despite grim portrayals like
Horace McCoy’s
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
), and they provided a vibrant public space for folks of all races, classes, and politics to duke it out on the dance floor. During this golden age of the movie theater, when audiences sat rank and file in the dark, die-hard marathons kept citizens participating.

Sheppard’s little victory, harmless as it was, called up centuries of American rebels who had only wanted to unite the people, even as they
stirred them up. These fun-loving troublemakers, as this book will show, reveled in defying authority’s laws and limits. Obstacles only got them excited. Obstacles gave them something to work with. For beyond these obstacles, as many of them discovered, was a luscious frontier of liberty and equality.

As early as the 1620s, when the
Pilgrims left free-and-easy Holland to build their fortress of cold austerity, a radical democrat named
Thomas Morton, schooled in
English Renaissance
hedonism, founded Merry Mount thirty miles to the north and devoted himself and his band of rogues to all of the excesses outlawed at Plymouth. They drank and danced and consorted with the Massachusetts. Their May Day revels, and the showdown to follow, put New World fun in high relief: there was freedom to be found in the wilderness, but you had to be ready to fight for it.

The Pilgrims won, as we know, and their Puritan cousins swarmed in by the thousands, founding an empire on the Calvinist belief that people were fundamentally depraved. Folks were whipped, maimed, and executed just for following their carnal whims. If Puritans condoned anything close to carnival, it took the form of violent orgies like the tarring-and-featherings where the common folk did the minister’s dirty work. Otherwise, throughout much of early New England, people limited their public gatherings to the stone-cold-sober meetinghouse, where they sat through often terrifying lessons in obedience, piety, and self-restraint.