One nation, under fun

Book Reviewed by Carol Van Strum A Renegade History of the United States, by Thaddeus Russell. Free Press, 2010. Hardcover, $27.00.

I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

— Mark Twain, Huck Finn, 1884

“In Fourteen Hundred Ninety Two Columbus sailed the ocean blue to bring Puritans to America for turkey and pumpkin pie with Red Indians. Then they threw away their tea and had a war and George Washington got to be the first president.”

Thus does an average American schoolchild wrap up the first 180 years of U.S. history. On schoolroom walls, bonnet-clad pioneer women and handsome white settlers in coonskin caps symbolize the origins and values of a nation.

A very different portrait of Early Americana lurks in old records and accounts somehow overlooked in our official version of ourselves. “On nearly every block in every eighteenth-century American city, there was a public place where one could drink, sing, dance, have sex, argue politics, gamble, play games, or generally carouse with men, women, children, whites, blacks, Indians, the rich, the poor, and the middling,” writes Thaddeus Russell in A Renegade History of the United States.

Few if any whorehouses or taverns adorn the walls of our schoolrooms. Maybe we need to redecorate those walls. Kids might actually pay attention to history if they knew that at the time of the American Revolution:

“Nonmarital sex, including adultery and relations between whites and blacks, was rampant and unpunished. Divorces were frequent and easily obtained. Prostitutes plied their trade free of legal or moral proscriptions. Black slaves, Irish indentured servants, Native Americans, and free whites of all classes danced together in the streets. Pirates who frequented the port cities brought with them a way of life that embraced wild dances, nightlong parties, racial integration, and homosexuality…. Rarely have Americans had more fun.”

The bawdiness of Americans, John Adams complained, “is enough to induce every Man of Sense and Virtue to abandon such an execrable Race to their own Perdition.” With his fellow Founding Fathers — some of whose righteous “Virtue” masked profound hypocrisy — Adams despaired of such rabble being capable of governing themselves in the least degree.

The solution was simple: “The Founding Fathers invented a way to make Americans think fun was bad,” Russell writes. “We call it democracy.”

Renegade History chronicles two centuries of attempts to suppress fun in all its forms through shame, intimidation, legislation, and even by force. One of the most effective ways to suppress fun was universal adoption of the “work ethic,” which imposed a powerful guilt complex on any “nonproductive” activity. A colonial workforce that set its own hours — including entire afternoon breaks for card games and grog, and routine failure to turn up at all on “Blue” hangover Mondays — evolved into the religion of the 40-hour work week and rigidly limited breaks.

Happily, Russell documents how again and again such attempts have spawned renegade cultures that kept fun alive, creating art, music, ideas, innovations, and products that ultimately became mainstream. Indeed, he points out, we owe to 18th Century prostitutes, tavern keepers, slaves, and drunken sailors many rights and arts that we value dearly today:

— “Lower-class taverns were the first racially integrated public spaces in America. Black, white, and brown Americans came together through mutual desire centuries before the federal government brought them together by force. Although the law in all the colonies barred blacks from public houses, the law was often ignored by tavern keepers, white patrons, and by free blacks and even slaves.”

— “Prostitutes were the first women to break free of what early American feminists described as a system of female servitude.” Wages in the few “respectable” jobs available for women were far below subsistence, while marriage — even to a wealthy man — relegated women to chattel, prohibited from owning property and in all things subservient to the husband. Prostitution, by contrast, paid exceedingly well and was virtually the only profession that accorded women the freedom and wealth to buy lovely clothes, cosmetics, businesses, and land. Whorehouse madams pioneered the benefits of medical care and retirement funds for their workers, even representing them in court on matters ranging from unfair competition to charges of assault against clients.

— Prostitution — never successfully suppressed anywhere — both pioneered and kept alive a market for condoms and other birth control devices, as well as remedies to prevent and treat venereal disease.

— Slavery, now universally condemned, actually had a few silver linings. A slave may have been legally a white man’s property, but beyond forced labor the white man had little or no control. Slave culture — particularly music, dance, and unbridled sexuality — flourished in the absence of need to procure food, shelter, or protection. The slaves’ overt pleasure in such sensual delights was the envy of morally straight-jacketed white men, who eagerly mimicked black music and dance in wildly popular black-face minstrel shows, paving the way for the ultimate in subversive black arts: jazz.

A pervasive theme is that alcohol, racial integration/miscegenation, prostitution, jazz, dance, and other forbidden, renegade behaviors not only flourish under attempts to repress or eliminate them, but also in time become integral to mainstream culture. Sadly, Russell notes, in the process of becoming mainstream the liveliest and best renegades lose much of their spark. Jazz and boogie-woogie become elevator music, and one after another a series of despised minorities — first blacks, then Jews, then Irish, then Italian — produce champions of sport and entertainment, only to fade into conformity as their vibrant cultures are assimilated into Mr. Blandings’ America. Huck Finn’s horror of becoming “sivilized” was well founded.

A Renegade History is an equal-opportunity myth buster. Long-held icons, both hard-core villains and belovéd heroes, reverse roles throughout; in their own words George Washington, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, John Adams, and Franklin Roosevelt shatter the idols we have made of them. Similarly, today’s ideologies – feminism, progressivism, conservatism – reveal origins diametrically opposite to their current meanings. Roosevelt’s New Deal, for example, was championed vociferously by both Mussolini and Hitler, and early progressives applauded the ideas of eugenics and sterilization of the “unfit.”

Thaddeus Russell has compiled a bawdy tribute to our true and very mixed ancestry. Above all, the book is great fun to read, a subversive history told by drunks, whores, slaves, immigrants, and other social pariahs. History, their tales reveal, may explain our mistakes and blunders, but never, ever, justify them.