American Fun (38 page)

In an age when Hollywood was marshalling its forces to wipe “miscegenation” off the silver screen, swing dance was proving more effective than ever at bringing races and ethnicities together—close together.
Malcolm X, who had been a zoot suiter at the Savoy in the early 1940s,
looked back on its electric, multiracial fun: “
I just about went wild! Hamp’s band wailing, I was whirling girls so fast their skirts were snapping. Black girls, brownskins, high yellows, even a couple of the white girls there. Boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air.… Circling, tap-dancing, I was underneath them when they landed—doing the ‘flapping eagle,’ ‘the kangaroo,’ and the ‘split.’ ” The historian
Luis Alvarez explores the pleasure and tension generated by swing dancers’ racial mixing. In Los Angeles, major dance halls represented a full sample of the region’s complex demographics: blacks, whites, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese. “
Many zoot suiters,” he writes, “broke public taboos against integration and racial mixing by socializing together and participating in [overtly diverse] public events”; the results themselves were often mixed—dancing, competing, sometimes
rumbling—but the building up and breaking of tension was engineered into this subculture’s fun, its “sheer enjoyment,” eros dancing and tangling with thanatos.

Sandra Gibson throws the legendary Al Minns in the
Savoy Ballroom’s Cat’s Corner, 1939. (Courtesy of Cornell Capa, Magnum Images.)

Throughout New York City, not just in Harlem, swing bands drew radically diverse crowds: “
every couple, almost,”
Dizzy Gillespie (who zooted, too) said, “was a mixed couple one way or the other. That was the age of unity.” Swing was especially popular, he observed, among black and white Communist Party members. But larger society didn’t share that love. In the early 1940s, when their subculture gained force and their styles and attitudes became more visible,
zoot suiters and pachuco/as took it from all sides. Zoot suits themselves, constructed of ample fabric, were declared illegal in 1942—for hoarding textiles during wartime. Disliked by whites, disowned by adults who hated their flash, zoot suiters inhabited, as
Shane White and
Graham White have shown, the abject new category of “
juvenile delinquency.” Even
J. A. Rogers, the journalist who touted jazz’s “joyous revolt” in
Alain Locke’s
New Negro
anthology, decried zoot suiters in 1943 as the “revolt of callow youth against convention and authority.” Zoot suiters strutted the worst of jazz’s “morally anarchic spirit.”

Their
racial mixing was also seen as a threat, as unpatriotic, disgusting, enraging, especially by white U.S. soldiers and sailors, who were often forbidden to attend jazz clubs. Indeed, in May 1943, when city health authorities ordered the Savoy shut down, claiming its “
role in facilitating the spread of
venereal disease among
servicemen,” investigative reporting by the local black press unearthed a different motive: “Mixed Dancing Closed Savoy Ballroom.” Their case was sound. In comparison with the downtown sex clubs and brothels that somehow eluded the authorities’ notice, the Savoy, as they put it, looked like a “Christian youth center.”

Later that same month, a long-running tension between zoot suiters and service members (often with the assistance of cops) erupted into the so-called
Zoot Suit Riots—just the latest wave of
race riots to spread throughout Los Angeles County. Having long been ridiculed by soldiers and sailors as femmes, cowards, and national enemies, a group of Mexican-American zoot suiters clashed with eleven service members
in L.A.’s Alpine neighborhood, breaking the jaw of one of the sailors. On June 4, following a few similar clashes, two hundred or more sailors entered East L.A. in a fleet of taxicabs, armed with bludgeons and patrolling for zoot suits. They attacked the first boy they saw and unleashed four days of unchecked violence against randomly identified Mexican Americans and blacks, many of whom were beaten and stripped naked—whether they wore zoot suits or not.

THIS EXUBERANT ERA WAS
grimly bookended between the Red Summer of 1919 and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 (or possibly the 1958 closing of Harlem’s
Savoy Ballroom)—but certainly
not
the crash of 1929. When it is reviewed not for its evidence of economic prosperity but for, as Fitzgerald’s catchphrase implies, its aerobatics of playful rebellion, the Jazz Age gets its due as a coming-out party for the fiercest exponents of American fun. Morals were loosened, wits sharpened, boundaries busted, the citizenry
widened
. The voices of long-muffled women and minorities rang out louder and more joyfully than anyone’s. Bodies that had been suffocated for decades by Victorian ruffles, bustles, and “character” were suddenly half naked, inebriated, and jitterbugging in public.

If
F. Scott Fitzgerald was determined to read fun as a prelude to disaster, as a chancre in the rose of civilization, then the Zoot Suit Riots may fit his vision: their victims were bold young men and women who pushed too hard against American standards at an intensely conservative and patriotic time. In their opponents’ view, they
courted
disaster. Their clothes were outrageous, their colors too loud. Their walk was too cocky, their talk too ethnic, and their gymnastic dancing
just asking for it
. Strutting their pleasure and cultural difference, they drew civic fire in a time of war, when the dominant culture enforced a campaign against racial enemies in the Pacific and ideological ones in Europe. The zoot suiters’ fun was a threat, an affront, to the steamrolling myth of white American sameness that was rising to prominence at that time. To this extent, their risky fun was the perfection of 1920s popular culture. Theirs was the playful resistance of outsiders who claimed and flaunted their brilliant contributions—of
Buddy Boldens and
Louis Armstrongs, of
Clara Bows
and
Mae Wests, of Shorty Snowdens and
Bessie Smiths. It was the ludic defiance of Chaplin’s Tramp in the face of destruction natural and social. To the same extent, from the streets to the dance floors, their fun was the perfection of radical 1920s social mixing, of Thomas Morton’s original vision for Merry Mount that began to take shape by the grace of jazz. Zoot suit culture, with all its contests and conflicts, boasted a civility that the Bowery
b’hoys lacked. It sported a style that touted the individual and highlighted racial discrepancy—but it welcomed everyone into the fight. The America it boasted was defined by struggle. The fun it promoted was passed around among agile individuals and swinging throngs. And the danger it presaged was the boys from Plymouth coming to chop that
Maypole down.

So they did, but it wasn’t disastrous.

For joyous revolt had carved a riverbed that is deeper and wider now than ever.

10

I
N A GRAINY COLOR MOVIE
from 1964, the novelist
Ken Kesey spray-paints a campaign slogan across the top of his psychedelic school bus: “
A Vote for Barry Is a Vote for Fun.” The
Merry Pranksters, as his band of funmakers called themselves, drive backward through the center of Phoenix, wearing red-white-and-blue sport shirts and frantically waving American flags from the roof. This lavish send-up of
Barry Goldwater (that year’s archconservative presidential candidate) happened early in the LSD-lidded Pranksters’ serpentine cross-country bus trip—a joy ride that delivered the new
Wild West lunacy to the boring, buttoned-down East Coast “establishment.” The Merry Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” (similar in its irony to
Paul Krassner’s star-spangled 1963 “FUCK COMMUNISM” poster) inaugurated a raffish participatory politics that all but obliterated the voting booth: it was a politics of sex and drugs and pranks, rooted in a cheeky
sense of humor. As playfully rebellious as Merry Mount; as heedless of its consequences as Twain’s and Barnum’s hoaxes; far wilder and more irreverent than
Timothy Leary’s later
The Politics of Ecstasy
(1968), the Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” campaign (as it might as well be called) gave rise to an excitable generation that aimed to change the course of world power, and to have an insanely good time doing it.

By 1965, thousands were already on the bus, already in the “
pudding,” throwing in their lots with a noisy youth culture whose soul was somewhere between the
Rolling Stones and radical
New Left political activists. By 1966,
hundreds
of thousands had achieved at least a good contact buzz. And by the summer of 1967, all hell was breaking loose. Love (as they called it) was in the air, kind of, sure, although so were smoke, anger, drugs, satire, and dangerous levels of factionalism. But if this mostly young, white, middle-class movement had a fuzzy political agenda, their common target,
cops
—the apparent tip of the establishment’s spear—was in clear focus. Police were uniformed, impassive, and armed. Police curtailed the search for absolute freedom in practically every form: free voices that joined in mass protest; free minds that explored psychedelic limits; free bodies that fell out of line and loitered, went vagrant, got naked, had sex in public, and refused to be conscripted into military service. As such, police contested this new youth culture’s boundaries, just as the British had those of the Sons of Liberty, and the skirmishes along that disputed border were playful, coaxing, witty, and violent, much as they had been in the 1760s. Increasingly, the skirmish was a good in itself. On the one hand it was proof that the youth were serious and the cops were as tyrannical as they suspected. On the other hand, by 1968, the skirmish in all its forms—protest, satire, pranks, disobedience, as well as hand-to-hand combat—became the practice of liberty. The fight for rights was exhilarating fun. It was the thrill of democracy in action.

When one reads memoirs, journalism, literature, comedy, pamphlets, history, and court cases from the 1960s, when one watches the movies and listens to the songs of one of the nation’s most culturally rich eras, the popular story comes into focus, as does its place in the history of fun. Yes, America’s largest, most prosperous generation to date resisted and often rejected their parents, the “Greatest Generation” that had fought in
World War II and revived U.S. patriotism. Many ran away from home, dropped out of school, got high, got lost, and followed the cues of demagogues and charismatic radicals into what came to be called the “counterculture”—radicals like, for one, Ken Kesey. En masse, but in different and colorfully imaginative ways, they raised arms against the “establishment” that their parents’ generation seemed to embrace: the
seemingly hydra-headed power structure that encompassed everything from banks and corporations to the U.S. military, organized religion, big media, university administrations, all forms of government, and even, as the decade got wilder, radical political organizations. This David-and-Goliath struggle, to the extent that it was one, became the latest reprise of Merry Mount’s rivalry with the militant stodginess of
Plymouth Plantation. In it, fun was more than a liberating practice or a widespread communal value—though of course it was both of those things too. More than ever, more pointedly than even during the
Jazz Age, fun was conceived as both a civic practice and a sort of paramilitary tactic. And more than any time since the American Revolution, fun—
raw
fun, risky and rebellious—was overtly linked to patriotism.