SAM PATCH, THE FAMOUS JUMPER

Episodes in the early-19th-century life of daredevil Sam Patch demonstrate both his nose-thumbing at the pretensions of mill owners and his evolution into a piece of vernacular American celebrity.

By any standards, Patch had rough early years, working as a hand in the cotton mills of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In the 1820s, to inject a little thrill into his life, he and a few friends would leap from the roof of a mill 100 feet into the moiling waters of Pawtucket Falls. When he moved to Paterson, New Jersey, to work in the textile mills—the author doesn’t pretend to know why he made the move, as the record of Patch’s early years is sketchy—he again took to jumping, now into the chasm of Passaic Falls. Johnson (co-author, The Kingdom of Matthias, 1994) suggests that these leaps were acts of class outlawry, timed to disrupt the opening of a private park on what had been public land, or to throw light upon various labor struggles. Patch possessed “an unhappy constellation of class anger and rum-soaked resentment”—he was a prodigious boozer—and yet what a showman, taking obvious pride in the brilliance of his art and its trappings of political theater. Such is fame, Johnson writes, that Patch’s gathering notoriety soon found him leaping into the maelstroms of Niagara and Genessee, providing a decided counterweight to bourgeois notions of the sublimity of economic development and the reflected grandeur of power-source owners, though at the same time distanced enough from political theater to leave Patch open to caricature. He became the butt of jokes as the clownish rustic whose suicidal bravado vied with a sense of skill, courage, and honor. Patch was on the cusp when celebrity wobbled between acts of piety, respectability, and disinterested service in the pursuit of fame for its own sake.

A portrait of the jumper that’s neither fanciful nor forced, but lively and keen, working surely with the much-neglected role of class in shaping American social history. (12 b&w illustrations)