American Fun (15 page)

Even when Americans aren’t hurting anyone, their fun wakes up some William Bradford who promptly orders their
Maypole toppled. Maybe he fears his
own
wish for fun, his own strong desire for “dancing and frisking.”
George Washington Cable was evidently aroused by “limbs that danced after toil, and of barbaric lovemaking,” but at the end of his essay, when he noted that “
all this
Congo Square business was suppressed” in 1843, he added that there was “nothing to be regretted in its passing.” In a moment of postcoital clarity, he concluded: “
No wonder the police stopped it.”

And so they did. But Place Congo, like Thomas Morton, kept coming back to life. By some reports it was kicking up dust as late as the 1870s.

WHAT
’
S AMAZING
—and what made Place Congo and storytelling circles and street-corner sessions so
un-
American—was that with all of these liberated thousands having such an absolute lark, all day long and late into the night, and for how many decades, it didn’t cost anybody (or make anybody) one red cent, one thin dime, one plug nickel.

Naturally, that was about to change.

4

J
OHN DAVID BORTHWICK WAS
a freewheeling Scot who followed his whims into the world’s dark corners, but as an artist and journalist he mostly went to watch. In March 1851, at the age of twenty-seven and recently endowed with a nice inheritance, he joined sixty argonauts taking the Panama route from New York City to San Francisco. Like the rest of them he was seeking riches, but the gold this young fellow struck—and later refined into
Three Years in California
—was a bonanza of observations regarding the emerging western character.

Borthwick’s fellow travelers, having heard that weapons were like California tableware, stuffed their belts with bowie knives and never-fired revolvers. They set out down the Atlantic coast with a common spirit of adventure, spearing dolphins and musing about their fortunes, but as time wore on, and the crew got drenched by days of tropical storms, Borthwick saw a division forming in the ranks: between the few grudging travelers in rubber raingear who refused to share even a plug of chaw and the larger, more cheerful, more generous set. The stingy ones turned “
quite dejected and sulky” and “oppressed with anxiety” when sheets of muggy rain wouldn’t quit; the merry ones maintained “a wild state of delight at having finished a tedious passage” and at the “novelty
and excitement of crossing the Isthmus.” The killjoys, he reflected later, wouldn’t stand a chance in the diggings, where a sense of humor was standard equipment. But the fun lovers would have the times of their lives.

He cooled his heels for a while in Panama City, where he made another important observation. There was a basic difference between the rubes heading west (who “
grumbled at everything, and were rude and surly in their manners”) and the comparatively “perfect gentlemen” on their way back. Both types came from the same lower social realms, but the latter had gotten their “California education.” As he explained it later, once he’d been there himself, even the coarsest folks who spent time in California “received a certain degree of polish from being violently shaken up with a crowd of men of different habits and ideas from their own.” Some of this violent “shaking” was lethal, of course, but the shocks that didn’t kill them—the
educational
shocks—
were often ungoverned, ungodly fun.

The mostly male company of diggings and boomtowns hammered out their own social tools from the crudest of materials. There was no stable government, no stable class structure, no religious authority, no strong domestic sphere. Contracts were settled by honor-bound handshakes; character was tested by games and jokes; bonds were forged at faro tables and in the sweaty throng of miners’ “ballrooms.” Whether it was California in the 1850s, Nevada in the 1860s, or Deadwood in the 1870s, in these cultures of excitement and cutthroat competition, citizens schooled each other in manners that allowed a spirit of freedom to prevail. Keeping it light, having fun, and toughening their hides against petty offenses, they engineered new strains of sociability that challenged, alarmed, and enthralled the young republic.

A new species of
newspaper—as irreverent, disingenuous, and playful as its readership—had a strong hand in upholding such standards. Since the
New York Sun
appeared in 1833, so-called penny papers (costing one or two cents an issue) had flooded the antebellum public sphere with an entertaining and widely accessible new journalism: they deemphasized politics, sensationalized crime, and appealed to the growing urban working class with practical advice and exhilarating fraud—such as the
Sun
’s
1835
Great Moon Hoax, an astronomer’s report of weird plants and weirder monsters peopling the lunar surface. Out west, the penny press found fertile new ground. In
gold rush California and a decade later in
silver rush Nevada, “news” took its cues from coarse frontier humor and
miners’ rawhide attitudes. Tall tales, mad spellings, rivalries, and
hoaxes inspired a journalism less concerned with facts than with spiking the social punch. A wild new permissiveness reigned in the West, and pseudonymous troublemakers like “
John P. Squibob,” “Ben Bolt,” “Dan De Quille,” and above all “
Mark Twain” modeled raffish public behavior that challenged readers to live by their wits.

IT ALL BEGAN
in January 1848, when
James W. Marshall found an ugly yellow nugget while building Sutter’s Mill in Coloma. Word leaked out. In no time some hundred thousand “
forty-niners” were carving up California’s hills. By September 1849, when lanky
Bayard Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old world traveler, arrived on assignment from
Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune,
San Francisco’s fiery cosmopolitanism dazzled even his jaded eyes.

Just as Borthwick would two years later, Taylor abhorred the “
Northern barbarians” he encountered crossing the Panamanian isthmus—clods who barged in in the middle of church services and gawked at altars with their hats on; “miserable, melancholy men” whom the majority of travelers “generally shunned.” But he found Californians refreshingly sociable, especially, ironically, when the stakes were highest.

Californians gambled, fought, bought, and sold. They scurried to capitalize on the bum’s rush for capital. They lived for adventure, new
excitements, and prided themselves on sportsmanship. Taylor was intrigued by this orgy “
for action” and “intercourse with … fellows,” and though it wasn’t easy for him to throw aside his “old instincts,” he gradually warmed to the lax commercial attitudes that drove this “restless, feverish” society and to a generosity that put East Coast stinginess to shame. In particular, he saw a “disregard for the petty arts of money-making,” an unusual eagerness to repay debts, and a widespread confidence “in each other’s honesty” that he attributed in part to bare necessity, in part to “an honorable regard for the rights of others.” This liberal attitude seemed even freer in the camps, where, for instance, he watched a mule driver refuse the “
beggarly sum” of three dollars for a pistol and hand over the gun as a gift instead. When the would-be purchaser laid his money “on a log,” insisting, “You must take it, for I shall never touch it again,” the gift giver tossed the money in the road, scoffing, “Then I’ll do what I please with it.” The apparent butt of this joke for Taylor is the Irishman who “raked in the dust for some time, but only recovered about half the money.”

His own ethnic slurs notwithstanding, Taylor admired Californians’ civility. From booming San Francisco to deep in the diggings, he witnessed what he called the general “
disposition to maintain and secure the rights of all.” “In the absence of all law or available protection, the people met and adopted rules for their mutual security.” And this may have been so, but it must be noted how Taylor credits this civility to the recent spike in U.S. citizens—as opposed to the “thousands of ignorant adventurers” from Mexico,
Peru, Chile, and China. His 1850 runaway best seller,
El Dorado,
seldom resists such jingoism.

The gold rush was no utopia. For the thousand
natural
shocks the West was heir to—rattlers, grizzlies, sunstroke, starvation, drowning, hypothermia, food poisoning, and so on—there were just as many societal ones. Any personal dispute could erupt in gunfire, usually with an audience to cheer it along. Grifters fudged maps, made false claims, and hooked greenhorns with fake guidebooks. Forty-niners imported their native bigotries, and the whole enterprise caused immeasurable destruction for the Native American population. And though California, which was rushed into statehood, outlawed slavery in 1851, one of the legislators’
most vocal concerns was that Southern miners, advantaged by slaves, would have a leg up on the rest. California featured America’s inequities in microcosm. As
Sucheng Chan has shown, African Americans, while well represented in the major cities as well as in largely black boomtowns like “Nigger Hill,” were more disadvantaged than other races and ethnicities: “
They struggled to gain freedom from slavery, the right to testify in court, the right to vote, and the right for their children to attend integrated schools.” Whites privileged whites, Mexicans Mexicans, Chinese Chinese, and so on, and the rising tide of American exceptionalism, shown in miniature by Taylor’s bigotry, was constantly pushing U.S. citizens up against internationals—especially against foreigners easily marked by their race or ethnicity. And of course, most starkly, it was a man’s man’s world where the majority of the minuscule women’s population worked as prostitutes.

That same year, 1849, a wave of revolutions spreading across Europe made the forty-niners’ race for lucre look pretty crass. In France, one month after the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, middle-class factions teamed up with socialists to overthrow King Louis-Philippe, effectively establishing the Second Republic and declaring universal male suffrage. This upheaval inspired subjects in Germany, Italy, and
Hungary to rise up against royals and demand the kind of democratic representation that Americans had enjoyed for more than half a century. Similarly, in England and the young United States, where democracy still left a lot to be desired, turmoil over human rights and social decency roiled the Victorian public sphere. In 1849 abolitionists outgrew the pulpits and achieved political viability with the
Free Soil Party. That summer
Gerrit Smith, the Liberty Party’s presidential candidate, argued for the suffrage of women and blacks; women’s rights had been brought to the national attention at the famous
Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The loudest voice in U.S. reform was the
temperance movement, which combined Puritan values with revolutionary era rhetoric to urge American citizens—all of them—to emancipate themselves from “King Alcohol.”

Alcohol, always a staple of the American diet, was drunk with political fervor in the early nineteenth century, when cheap, abundant, and liberating liquors were touted by many as liquid democracy—a bias, as
we’ve seen, that dates back to the Revolution. Factory workers demanded on-the-job drams as proof of their personal freedom. Men filled taverns to shrug off the reins of an emboldened domestic sphere. But when binge drinking exploded in the 1820s—obtaining, as the historian
W. J. Rorabaugh observes, “
ideological overtones” of “egalitarianism”—the then-fledgling and specialized temperance movement began to achieve mainstream appeal—especially when it linked drinking to
Jackson Age rioting, much of which came spilling out of taverns. As sobriety-minded Americans had been doing for two hundred years (long before
John Adams entered
Thayer’s tavern), middle-class teetotalers now looked to temperance as a basic prerequisite of civic order; hard drinking, or so their argument went, brought out the worst in a sovereign public—theft, lying, agitation, murder. For decades this had been a minority opinion, but in 1826, an evangelical front formed the
American Temperance Society (ATS) and ginned up the techniques—especially for publicity and mass organization—that persuaded America’s growing, professionalized middle class during this populist era. It wasn’t long before tsking over collective drinking had spread into a viable political movement.