Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

PRologuePOPULAR CULTURE ON THE BRINKIn November 1829, some twelve thousandpeople, many of whom had paid for a good view, watched the famousfalls jumper Sam Patch leap off a scaffolding and plunge 125 feet into the roilingwaters at the foot of Genesee Falls in upstate New York. It was his lastjump. Drunk before he leaped, he did not survive. He could hardly have guessedthat his jump from that platform marked a symbolic moment in the history ofAmerican popular culture. When Patch bounded into the void, American entertainmentwas in the process of stepping into a turbulent new era. 1That new era was the product of several developments that owed muchto the American Revolution. Initially a colonial war for independence, theRevolution hastened many changes. “A fundamental mistake of theAmericans has been that they considered the revolution as completed whenit was just begun,” observed Noah Webster, a young member of the revolutionarygeneration, in 1787. One of the rebellion’s ongoing consequenceswas a spreading political environment that celebrated personal autonomy,social mobility, and popular sovereignty. Another was an emerging marketeconomy that prized the individual’s freedom to profit from producing andselling goods. Much irony existed in the fact that such changes came at theconsiderable expense of the republican ideals that shaped much of theRevolution’s ideology. But the paradoxes and unintended consequences socentral to that story also helped give rise to the kinds of entertainment thatleading revolutionaries feared. It would have been of little comfort to thoserevolutionaries to realize that such entertainment derived in significantways from their own ambivalence about accommodating the expectationsand tastes of society’s increasingly assertive lower ranks. 2Although the developing commercial amusements differed substantiallyfrom the folk games, festivals, and celebrations that had marked