American Fun Read Online Free Page B

the Constitution to Pulitzer Prize–winning historians—prefer to see the people’s power refined within government, or legally bound on a dotted line. But America’s lifelong yen for democracy has much racier, messier origins.
    The compact was written under serious duress. Winter was closing in. The Pilgrims had been bobbing in the harbor for weeks, and their scouts had already drawn deadly fire from indigenous people hiding in the woods. They needed to erect a “governmente” fast. William Bradford, the compact’s principal author, reports that the document had two main motives. Some of the unfaithful among their number had been giving “discontented & mutinous speeches” about using “their own libertie” once they hit shore; containing these rogues was the first order of business. Indeed, without the contract, “none had the power to command them.” Second, the compact, if it could get enough buy-in, would prove “to be as firme as any patent” in setting up a system that the English courts would recognize. Once a small majority had signed it, all they needed was to elect a leader. They chose the “godly”John Carver on the spot.
    Carver may have been the benevolent leader that Bradford made him out to be (managing to “[quell] & overcome” uprisings with his “just & equall carrage of things”), but the following spring, after a hot day in the fields, he died of sunstroke. Bradford himself was promptly elected governor, as he would be annually for the next thirty years. Bradford’s regime—much more accurately than his Mayflower Compact—tells the true story of America’s character, or at least one fierce side of it. William Bradford was nobody’s democrat. He crossed the Atlantic to build a fortress in the wilderness where he could wall out natural and social evils and wall in his tidy hive of “Saints.” He was the first in a long line of American fortress builders—from slave owners and Klansmen tocorporations and country clubs—elitists, oligarchs, and authoritarians for whom the wilderness was either weeds to be incinerated or woods to be hewn into exclusionary towns. He was also the first great American curmudgeon.
    And he had his work cut out for him. Fortress builders always do.Not only did his Pilgrims face the constant peril that they had known to expect when they left Amsterdam—sickness, starvation, Native American hostility. But, more surprisingly, they also encountered an ideological threat to their fastidious utopia:Thomas Morton, who founded a camp of free-loving bondservants within striking distance. A lover of the wilderness who consorted with Indians, a radical democrat and reckless hedonist, Morton represented an opposing side of the incipient American character, the gleefully unruly side. Cheerful, curious, horny, and lawless, he anticipated the teeming masses, the mixing millions who would exploit the New World as an open playground for freedom, equality, and saucy frolic. His experiment in insanely energized democracy at his anything-goesMerry Mount colony, thirty miles north of Plymouth’s spiky fortress, made confetti of their Mayflower Compact. Bradford’s coup to bring it down, in the spring of 1627, counts as the first volley on the battlefield of American fun.
    BRADFORD’S CHILDHOOD WAS FILLED with misery. He was born in 1590 to a Yorkshire yeoman, and by age five he had lost both his parents and his grandparents. He suffered a prolonged and debilitating illness, and from the age of seven, his feeble health aside, he toiled in the fields, herded sheep, and probably attended some grammar school. He was twelve when he declared his independence, enraging his father’s surviving brothers by abandoning the family’sAnglican Church and joining a congregation of Separatist rebels in the nearby town of Babworth.Richard Clyfton, the Separatists’ “grave & revered” preacher, soon became Bradford’s father figure. In all likelihood, he inspired the young fellow