“It is universally well known, That in digesting our common Food, there is created or produced in the Bowels of human Creatures, a great Quantity of Wind.
That the permitting this Air to escape and mix with the Atmosphere, is usually offensive to the Company, from the fetid Smell that accompanies it.
That all well-bred People therefore, to avoid giving such Offence, forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.
Were it not for the odiously offensive Smell accompanying such Escapes, polite People would probably be under no more Restraint in discharging such Wind in Company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their Noses.”
Benjamin Franklin, A Letter To A Royal Academy, 1781
According to my good pal Jeff, there are two universal truths in life:
1. Girls are sexy.
2. Farts are funny.
But this begs the obvious question: why are farts so widely thought of as impolite, foul, fetid, unpleasant, ill-mannered actions? Why is it so taboo to even discuss farting in polite company? Fortunately it’s not like this in all societies. When I lived in Germany, our landlord used to call round to our house and in her heavily-accented English, politely inquire of us on many a morning, “Now, how is your stool?” Fine, thank you, oma! That’s politeness and consideration for you.
However, it’s not my intention to delve into the pros and cons of farting in public, and I’ve already digressed from my main point here. I’m more curious about the above quoted passage from that finest of American statesmen, Benjamin Franklin. This is not a side most American schoolchildren are exposed to in school. We instead are taught that Ben was a fine statesman, orotund (and rotund) orator, magnificent inventor, and charming raconteur known for his acerbic wit (somewhat the ladies man, too, allegedly). It just saddens me that there’s another side to this great individual that very few of us are fortunate enough to have gained wind of. This is surely a heinous crime.
[and yes, of course that pun was intended!]
I recently had to take a social studies certification exam for my course. Because the scope was so wide and varied – from US and world history to economics to geography to civics to sociology – I had lots of brushing up to do in many areas. Including American history, which I hadn’t really studied in any great depth since high school.
It’s one of the oldest adages that history is written by the victors. There are, of course, notable exceptions in English – the Spanish Civil War springs to mind – but for the most part, we’re left with the winner’s versions. So I thought it would be interesting to read The Penguin History of the USA, written by Hugh Brogan, a former Cambridge historian: what a terrific find. Though the prose is somewhat turgid and bombastic in parts, and though Brogan has a puerile proclivity for ridiculing the early American colonists as pettifogging and petulant whingers, the book presents a fascinating take on American history. I certainly learnt a lot that I hadn’t before. (And no, I don’t think he’s bitter or anything.)
Booze, burning and bacchanalia
There are a few recurring themes in American history, one of which is the mighty impact of booze. Whisky, for example, ‘was regularly adopted to cheat [Native Americans] of their land and fair payment.’ Alcohol was a regular part of early American society, a fact to which the author devotes considerable attention. Boston was a major exporter of rum, in direct competition with the Caribbean variety, primarily because ‘it was much cheaper, which was a decisive consideration with the poor and frugal consumers of North America’. Apparently, Bostonians ‘sat tippling and sotting for whole evenings, or perhaps for whole days’. Aren’t these the guys who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?
Burning as a punishment was widespread, the reasons varied. Many years after the Salem Witch Trials, insubordinate slaves were often burned to death. This is generally glossed over but in this case, it was the footnote that caught my eye: ‘The British must not make too much of these incidents. As late as 1763 a white woman was burned in England for murdering her husband.’ Well in that case…
Sometimes his disdain for America’s founding fathers is subtle, at other times glaringly blunt: he doesn’t mince his words. John Hancock, Boston’s richest merchant and leading smuggler, was a ‘mixture of vanity, pique and cowardice.’ Samuel Adams, that purveyor of fine beer, was ‘incompetent at just about everything’ he did, except for politics; that somehow isn’t very comforting. And here’s a side of America we never get to read about in the textbooks. In the days just before independence, there was all sorts of squabbling amongst the colonists. Adams said that justice and liberty in America were being subverted by ‘pensioners, placemen and other jobbers, for an abandon’d and shameless ministry; hirelings, pimps, parasites, panders, prostitutes and whores’. This kind of excessive sexual abuse was supposedly profuse from Adams and his cronies. John Adams once compared England to imperial Rome, both being the prey of ‘musicians, pimps, panders and catamites.’ James Otis called members of the House of Commons ‘a parcel of button-makers, gamesters, pin-makers, pimps and whore masters’. I don’t remember such evocative language in the textbooks I studied. And is being a button or pin maker such a bad thing? Maybe it’s not very manly. Accusing them all of being a bunch of hapless haberdashers would be a far greater insult in my book.
Brogan takes an especially keen interest in the Mormons. Amongst all sorts of lucid description of Mormon religious practice is this valuable nugget of insight: ‘Looked at in detail, the intricacies of Mormon polygamy strikingly resemble those of twentieth-century American divorce, especially as to wife-swapping.’ I’m not sure what kind of light that paints wife-swapping in.
And what of the South, and its magnificent standard of education in the 1800s? ‘The colleges of the South remained jokes until the twentieth century. Instead of science and Greek, the young gentlemen learned to hold their liquor, or at least not to mind getting blind drunk; how to use a knife in a brawl; how to handle dueling pistols and to play cards; how to race and bet on horses. They were provincial, ignorant and overbearing: excellent cannon-fodder, as it turned out.’ I now feel somewhat cheated with my college education. All those loans, all that debt, and for what? I’ve got no idea how to duel.
If we fast-forward to the 1950s, to the height of the anti-Communist hysteria, we see many suspected of having red sympathies being given the old heave-ho. In New York City, a public washroom attendant was dismissed for past membership of the Communist party. ‘No doubt he would have corrupted his customers with Soviet soap or Communist lavatory paper’. (This brings to mind the old popular Communist-era joke: Why, despite constant shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany/Czechoslovakia/Hungary always two-ply? Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Russia. It also recalls fond, yet painful, memories of toilet paper in many parts of the developing world, especially the former Soviet Union: that brown, sand-papered consistency stuff that leaves you in a constantly chaffed state. But at least it’s dirt-cheap.)
And the old curmudgeon takes a few pot-shots at 60s youth: ‘it is easy to be unkind about youth in the 60s…these ignorant, provincial, conceited young people…[who] turned out to be quite as unpleasant and as stupid as what they condemned.’ Though it ‘was nevertheless a great mistake to dismiss them all as no more than middle-class hooligans’.
And did you know that in 1760 King George II ‘died at stool in his closet’. The author handily provides a translation in his footnotes: ‘In modern idiom, on the lavatory.’
This stuff is important kids. It’s history! And it will be the kind of history that I will no doubt focus on; my students are in for a real treat.
As far as recommending the book, initially I’d say yes, though with a few caveats. There’s no doubt that Brogan’s heuristic approach is a major draw; once I was sucked in I couldn’t stop reading. But his attitude towards America at times is convoluted, soaked in layers of optimism and obsolescence, hubris and delusion, and it’s hard to discern his actual attitude. I was never sure whether it was one of calculated condescension or bemused indifference (and yes, that does make sense), and this bugged me for one reason or another. There’s no way in hell something like this would ever be used in an American high school classroom, though I would argue that certain excerpts from it could be used as a counterweight to your average, soporific high school textbooks. The problem with all textbooks, and the ones taking a survey approach to American history in particular, is that they are drenched in provincialism. But I think that reflects more on American education than American society, and these textbooks are evidence less of provincialism than of the intellectual orientation that downplays the importance of aesthetic criteria. It doesn’t matter how it’s written – though the blander the better – as long as it presents the [sanitised] facts in an orderly, coherent fashion. To my mind, this only demonstrates that indifference to aesthetic value inevitably shifts the whole culture back into provincialism. Thus, what we read in school, and the way it’s written, does matter.
But really, what do I know?
Time for a quick multiple-choice exam
Which of the following would you consider to be the most quintessentially and stereoptypically modern American phenomena?
A. Nascar (or, for the uninitiated, stock-car racing). A truly eye-opening, revelatory experience was going to a Nascar race, the New Hampshire 500 back in September. The amount of Confederate flags was staggering and I’m surprised I didn’t get assaulted for wearing a Stone Roses t-shirt adorned with the Union Jack. Honestly, what was I thinking?
B. The other day in the high school, I overhead two students discussing their weekends. I heard ‘five-pointer’ and ‘six-pointer’ and I started thinking, when did they change the scoring in basketball? when it dawned on me that they weren’t talking about basketball, but about hunting, and who had bagged the biggest deer.
C. Cars honking their horns at me as I walk along the parts of the road without any pavements, one guy shouting out the window, ‘where’s your car, buddy?’
D. In a coffee shop the other day, a woman, adorned in a fleece top, seemed flustered when complaining to the woman behind the counter, ‘I’m in a bit of a rush, I have to run and get Caitlyn from soccer practice, pick up my dry cleaning and then get home to get the stuff for the bake sale, then go to the P[arent] T[eacher] A[associaton] meeting.’ I didn’t see what she was driving but if I were a betting man, I’d say an SUV.
E. Not only attending a post-Thanksgiving Day holiday parade, but actually participating in one. While my father was a huge hit in his converted fighter jet go-kart, which he spent weeks working on, I was inveigled into following behind in the support vehicle - his minivan - wearing a Santa hat, Christmas music blaring from the speakers, while hundreds, if not thousands, of people lined the streets of Salem, NH waving at me, wishing me a Merry Christmas (they don’t go for the politically correct ‘Happy Holidays’ around here).
My old man doing the community proud
[P]arting thoughts from Ben
He that is conscious of
A Stink in his Breeches,
is jealous of every Wrinkle
in another’s Nose.
Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1751
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