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Macomb, IL – As Independence Day approaches, Americans should realize that some people are saying that liberties too often taken for granted today are less derived from powdered wigs than powdered faces.
Thaddeus Russell's new U.S. history, A Renegade History of the United States, shows how rowdy rebelliousness in the American colonies' tavern culture reflected a desire for freedom that was irritating to more disciplinarian, if not authoritarian, Founders.
Russell's research reveals that the usual American Revolution heroes were less responsible than more ... unorthodox patriots. These carousing renegades through the decades included leisure-seeking workers and drinkers, prostitutes and pirates, slaves and freedmen, immigrants and gangsters, hippies and juvenile delinquents and many more regular people with irregular lifestyles or practices.
An American Studies professor at Los Angeles' Occidental College, Russell looks at American society's fringes, where cultural subversives legitimized taboos or demanded tolerance, and helped make the United States a bit more of a land of the free. These iconoclasts contrast markedly with history's more familiar heroes, who are more complex and contradictory than the traditional portrayal. Whether John Adams or Eugene Debs, such figures had a lot of Puritanical impulses and even tyrannical thoughts.
The first few unions seemed so eager to be accepted that they were willing to mouth platitudes about the work ethic that the roughest robber barons or religious hypocrites advocated. The rank and file, however, realized there was more to life than a job, and ensured that eventually weekends were established and protected. Working women had social clubs; many employees routinely demanded and received alcoholic beverages at work.
Decades later, the rank and file continued to be relatively radical compared to leaders of labor politics or government. In 1919, 22 percent of the U.S. labor force went on strike at some point, protesting rising prices and stagnant pay, and inadvertently gave the federal government an excuse to crack down on unions with a repressive campaign including anti-Communist hysteria and "Palmer raids."
Russell writes, "The so-called Red strikes were more likely an effort by millions of ordinary people to improve their material lives - to make more money so they could spend more money, and to work less so they could enjoy, among other things, the new pleasures available with that money."
Besides labor, vital elements of American life are linked to renegade or even unsavory elements, the author notes. Organized crime was key to the birth and growth of jazz in New Orleans, Chicago and New York, and in amusement industries ranging from gambling to Hollywood. Gangsters also fostered and protected the gay subculture of the 1940s and 50s.
By the 80s, popular culture and its entertainment exports worldwide were influential in residents of the former Soviet Union rebelling against the totalitarian system there, but few members of the American Establishment conceded that.
Russell sarcastically asks, "If jazz, rock, comic books and vulgar' movies helped bring down Communism, why were they not promoted by American political leaders as beacons of freedom?"
In the Civil Rights era, nonviolence succeeded as a tactic in part because so many African American men and women physically resisted the American apartheid of segregation exemplified by [quote] "the all-white, notoriously racist, and brutal Birmingham [Ala.] police force and the city's equally famous segregationist civilian population [, which] did not go unchallenged."
The Rev. Martin Luther King offered his philosophy of civil disobedience as a reasonable alternative to more militant approaches.
If there's weakness in this enlightening and very readable book, it's that Russell gives short shrift to legitimate complaints of unruly, anti-social or even evil behavior. But the title's strengths are led by the new information and new perspective on the raucous energies of extremists in our midst.
Russell writes, "Renegades made illicit joys not only possible but real. Now is our chance to take the side of the renegades when the guardians of social order try to keep them down - and take more."
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of WIU or Tri States Public Radio