October 16, 1778—In the midst of a war fought by soldiers outnumbered, outgunned, and outprovisioned, America’s Continental Congress took decisive action: it voted to dismiss any soldier or officeholder caught attending a play or performing in one.
Let me tell you, if I were around back then, this theatrical ban would not have been a great recruiting pitch for me. Since college, I’ve been an inveterate playgoer, often even scheduling vacations to maximize my chances of catching one or more shows.
Lots of colonists felt the same way I did. Charleston, for instance, saw its first play in 1735 and its first regular playhouse a year later. (Sadly, as I discovered on a visit to this beautifully preserved city, theaters are no longer the force they were in the city before the Civil War.) There had even been plays performed in the new nation’s seat of government, Philadelphia, as far back as 1749, despite the disapproval of Quakers.
But as early as October 1774—before the onset of hostilities with the mother country, that is—the first Continental Congress had already passed a resolution meant to “discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation”—i.e., the “exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Similar resolutions followed, meaning that this hectoring didn’t work in the slightest.
Now, you’d think that the Continental soldier, risking everything he had for his country—very much including the lives, fortunes and sacred honor referred to in the Declaration of Independence—could use a little entertainment, even if it consisted of something less than, say, Sixties sexplots Raquel Welch, Ann-Margret or Joey Heatherton onstage for one of Bob Hope’s Vietnam Christmas morale boosters for the troops. (And I’m not even talking here about the appearances of Playboy bunnies like the one in Apocalypse Now, where cavorting with the young women was the least of problems for soldiers caught in sudden attacks, split-second atrocities, and constant questioning about what they were doing there in the first place.)
But no. The Continental killjoy politicians decided that such performances fostered “a fatal tendency to divert the minds of the people from a due attention to the means necessary for the defence of their country and preservation of their liberties.”
I mean, can you imagine the reaction of George Washington when he got wind of this resolution? You can bet that the first thought to sprang to mind was something like the great Dorothy Parker line, “What fresh hell is this?”
Indulge me for a minute as I perform something akin to one step beyond the Vulcan mind-meld of Star Trek, only this time across a few centuries, as I enter into the mind of the general of the Continental Army and future first President of the United States:
“Let me get this straight, gentleman. You’ve been having all kinds of trouble even forming a government that can collect taxes from the individual colonies and print money with value. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase ‘not worth a continental.’ Not so coincidentally, I see every day many of my men with shoes falling apart, if they still have any, not to mention tattered uniforms.
"At the same time, I myself haven’t been getting much support from the lot of you, what with all your conniving against me, hoping to put Horatio Gates in my place, all because he won one battle at Saratoga—a fight that Benedict Arnold had a lot more to do with winning than he ever did. Oh, all that muttering you’ve been doing has gotten back to me. I’m talking about you, Sam Adams. And that goes, too, for your cousin John. If I knew he’d be complaining about my leadership so much, I never would have worn my French and Indian War uniform that got your attention so much three years ago that he stood up and nominated me to head the army. Well, gentlemen, you can take this job and…”
But George said nothing of the kind. Instead, he agreed to the ridiculous ban, then quickly disregarded it, just like before.
Don’t believe the popular perception that Washington was nothing but a Big Stiff, with a capital B and a capital S. The concept was fueled by that unfortunate late-in-life portrait by Gilbert Stuart that highlighted the President’s dental imperfections more than his dignity, not to mention that Clint Eastwood squint he leveled during the Constitutional Convention at Gouverneur Morris when the Pennsylvania delegate clapped him on the back in an attempt to win a bet with Alexander Hamilton.
No, despite what those boring high school history texts might have led you to believe, ol’ George liked a good time, and I don’t mean the kind engaged in by his feuding Cabinet secretaries Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson with Maria Reynolds and Sally Hemings, respectively. Listen: any guy who spends one day of the day to the other thinking how to arm and train his men, keep that army alive and together for one more day against the forces of the world’s greatest imperial power, and keeping track of business operations at Mount Vernon needs to unwind, badly.
And Washington, to his credit, did this—throwing the ball around outside headquarters with aides, dancing with officers’ wives (like the vivacious spouse of his trusted general Nathanael Greene) for up to three hours at a time with barely a stop, and, best of all, attending plays.
Courtesy of that night at Ford’s Theater, everybody knows that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed plays. But I bet you never knew that the fellow usually ranked with Lincoln as our greatest President did, too.
David McCullough has the details in 1776: attending a theatrical with his older brother in Barbados at age 19; going to the theater regularly as a member of the Virginia legislature in Williamsburg; watching plays four nights out of five in an Annapolis visit; and attending the theater seven times while in New York, including Hamlet. His favorite production was Joseph Addison’s Cato, a show not produced much nowadays but, in its time, the most popular theatrical of them all.
It was a quintessential Virginia pastime, this playgoing, but a habit that stuck in the craw of Sam Adams. What a joke that the delegate from Massachusetts has a beer named for him, because, if he couldn’t be donning warpaint under cover of night and dumping British tea in Boston Harbor, or rabble-rousing in the streets against redcoats, the guy could be a pill. He took it as his personal mission to safeguard republican virtue, and to that end he and his allies in the Continental Congress passed this frivolous exercise in busybodyism.
Well, Washington and his soldiers went on defying the ban. In a way, it was kind of a point of honor to the men that they could mount amateur theatricals the equals of their British cousins. It would take nearly a century and a half more for Eugene O’Neill to make something really distinctive out of American drama, but already the instinct was there not to let Americans take a backseat to anyone. And by the end of the century, Washington—by this time, properly revered as the man who held his country together in the worst of times—had become a subject of theatricals himself.
Sam Adams didn’t fare as well—not, that is, when he got his nose bent out of shape about playhouses again. In 1792, now lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, he decided to go after a group of actors who had decided to circumvent a 42-year state ban by outfitting a stable in Broad Alley as a theater under the thin pretext that they were sponsoring “moral lectures.” Adams’ attempt to jail the actors was greeted with loud derision at one of those wonderful New England town meetings—especially wonderful in this case because the audience hooted at Sam that they wanted their “natural Theatrical rights,” as quoted in John C. Miller’s biography, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda.
In the end, the citizens of the new republic struck a blow for greater creative liberty, and the state theatrical ban was rescinded under the watch of the increasingly lonely old Puritan.
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