hey there welcome to the first installment of paper two resources this is going to probably remind you a lot of what we were doing with uh paper one when i would break down frederick douglass and kind of connect it to some of the things that we've been discussing in class be they readings or lectures and you get the idea so what i'm going to be doing here today is basically introducing you to the sam patch guy i mean i want you to think about something for just a second he's this working class american um not that there's anything wrong with that but but i mean there's a book that's been written about him and you know the stuff that he was doing the things that he was engaged in were happening well over 200 years ago and somebody somewhere thought strongly enough about this to record this sort of activity and make it into at least one full length book in any case we'll get to the who what when where and how of sam patch here in just a second but for the time being there's sort of like an organizational question that i always like to ask when i'm in class and it's going to be a little bit different for us but um i think that you're going to get the idea here in a second and and if you think about it i i also think it's going to help you really move in the direction of really engaging that central question so you ready i want you to ask yourself who or what a celebrity is okay now i know you can't answer back but but think about it and put me on pause if you want to put me on pause maybe jot down a couple notes um because if you think about who or what a celebrity is that's actually gonna go a long way when it comes to engaging this central question it's actually a very important part of this central question now i don't know maybe you put me on pause maybe not but if you're back ask yourself another question are celebrities dangerous that's another question that i like to ask in class a lot and you know we always have a pretty robust energetic passionate conversation and there are people that firmly believe that absolutely celebrities can be dangerous they command a huge audience and you know they set a lot of trends and if they're moving in a direction that's not so healthy you know however you want to describe defined unhealthy that can be problematic on a societal level in any case uh let's let's get back into sam patch because we are going to figure out you know the connection between you know celebrity and and and and what's going on here in the early years of the 19th century so get your book out if you brought it with you and if not if you're following along with us i want you to open up to the very first page of the book it's so early that you that that it literally doesn't have a page it just says preface okay if you're following along with me i'm going to read that first paragraph this is the story of sam patch a factory hand who in the 1820s became america's first professional daredevil patch jumped from high places beside waterfalls journalists wrote about him crowds came to see him boys imagined being him and he became a famous man if you go to the second paragraph here this is really going to drive at the point that i was trying to make a second ago sam patch was a male boy that's where him the second paragraph there in that first page sam patch was a mill boy who became a celebrity and that is the story line of this book so who is sam patch well we know a few things about him we know that he is a working class american in the northeast and we also know that he's going to become a famous celebrity which is the whole reason that i asked you those questions a few minutes ago for right now i i want to connect a few more dots and to do that we need to turn to page four scroll down to page four whatever it is that you're using to follow along with us i am four lines down from the top with a sentence that's that starts out thus american said the promoters you see what i'm talking about thus americans said the promoters could enjoy domestic manufactured goods without threats to agriculture and without the european messiness of industrial cities or the industrial working class there would they promised be no manchester's in america in other words we're americans we're special we're unique and we don't have to worry about the stuff that came along industrialization over there in europe things are going to be very very different for the americans that's what we're being told okay hold that thought i want to go down to the next full paragraph there on page four still on the same page it starts out at first samuel slater you see what i'm talking about at first samuel slater's pawtucket kept that promise his earliest mill workers were children of his partners and associates then the children of pawtucket artisans and farmers within a few years however he was searching beyond the neighborhood for mill hands and outworkers slater needed women and children and he advertised for widows with large families what he found was whole families headed by property-less destitute men the patches were one of these doesn't exactly sound like it's all that inviting or of a happy scenario and that's because it's not um the the next paragraph down is really really important and is going to drive at the centrality of this question as the new families struggle into pawtucket you see what i'm talking about as the new family struggled into pawtucket slater and the other mill owners began referring to the workers as poor children that description of people pay attention to this part those who are dependent on their labor for daily support if that sounds familiar it's probably not a coincidence if you think back to the argument that alexander hamilton and thomas jefferson were having when george washington is trying to get this country up and off the ground one of the biggest arguments was whether or not we should go down the road of industrialization alexander hamilton very much favored an industrial-based economy and thomas jefferson was deeply deeply suspicious of that and if you think back to that time in our class jefferson makes it really really clear whenever you go down the road of industrialization what you're ultimately going to get is dependency and i told you as a matter of fact that was an exam question right what was thomas jefferson trying to prevent he was trying to prevent industrial dependency this isn't some crazy maniacal you know uh philosopher that's uh just totally out of touch with uh you know the economy this is samuel slater samuel slater is the guy that owns the factory he doesn't have any reason to say that and he says it point blank these people are becoming dependent and so you know it turns out americans aren't that special and as we went down the road of industrialization of course what came along with it was in dependency much like thomas jefferson predicted that it would now what i'd like to do i'm going to leave a lot of this reading up to you but i would like you to kind of turn uh to to page 18. um i'm i'm on page 18 toward the bottom of page 18. i want to talk to you a little bit about how the patches as in his family kind of came to pawtucket in the first place there's a there's a paragraph that starts out toward the bottom with that the patch is exhausted you see where i am with that the patches exhausted the family connections on which they had subsisted since their marriage the long stay in north reading in the moves to danvers and marblehead had been determined by the availability of relatives and their resources in 1807 the patches moved to the mill village of pawtucket rhode island nearly 100 miles south of the neighborhoods in which the patches and mcintyre's had always lived the move was a climactic moment in their history it marked their passage out of the family economy and into the labor market in other words once upon a time they were landowners and they were the masters of their destiny and now they're workers and are dependent very last line last line on page 18. new england families new england families did not move into pawtucket's mills unless something bad had happened usually to the man of the house in other words if if this is going to go forward if you if you're strolling in used to be a farmer and you come into pawtucket rhode island it's usually not all that happy of a situation okay now there's another you know way of looking at what's going on here uh industrialization is what i'm talking about and this other way of looking at things does sort of lend itself to the concept of opportunities new opportunities that are sort of being hatched as a result of the process of industrialization um before i really you know delve into this i wanna i wanna ask you if if maybe you have had the experience of jumping off of a a high point and into a body of water whether that's a diving board maybe it's a cliff or you know i'm not talking about like a cliff diver or something like that i'm talking about 20 30 feet tops um i don't know about you but but i've had that experience you'd never know it by looking at me today but i tried it once upon a time and it didn't exactly go very well it was actually a very terrifying experience and i guess my point in telling you any of this is you better know what you're doing if you're going to do something like that it's not something that you just want to ex there's all kinds of things that could go wrong so the title of this book is sam patch the famous jumper and as we began this conversation discussing he becomes famous by jumping off of waterfalls okay hold that thought because i want to enter for right now i want to introduce you to a guy by the name of timothy b crane flip um this is this is in the next chapter i want you to flip over to page 43 scroll down to page 43. toward the top of page 43 it's a paragraph that starts out a builder and sawmill owner you see where i am a builder and sawmill owner named timothy b crane had bought the forested north bank of passaic falls in august 1827 in september he turned it into a commercial pleasure garden announcing that he would reshape the forest in the name of material and moral progress although nature has done more for this spot of earth than perhaps any of its size to render it beautiful and interesting to the visitor it is nevertheless susceptible of very great embellishments from the hand of art and with that he improved the grounds with gravel walkways imported bushes and trees and a combined ice cream parlor and saloon crane called his establishment the forest garden during the next few summers crowds went there for ice cream and conversation and there were periodic circuses indian war dances and displays of fireworks as well what just happened well he created himself an amusement park it always reminds me of the arboretum and if you know anything about an amusement park or you know a garden like the arboretum you can tell me that they're going to charge you uh admission to come in they're not just going to welcome you in out of the kindness of their hearts crane's a businessman and he purchased the passaic falls you got to ask yourself what was passaic falls before it was before it was the forest garden and of course what it was was the place where sam patch and other milltown boys like him learned how to jump off of waterfalls it was public territory it was open domain and people used it not only for recreation but i think if you were to ask someone like patch it kind of held a really important warm place in their hearts so what's going to be the reaction it's not going to be a really happy reaction but i want to show you go to page 46 go to page 46 right there in the middle of page 46 sam patch in short right right in the middle sam patch in short was an angry and not particularly admirable victim of the huge social process that was creating places like pawtucket and paterson and granting money and respect to people like timothy crane as he watched crane boss his gardeners and bridge builders an unhappy constellation of class anger and rum-soaked resentment took shape in the minds of sam patch sam let it be known that he would spoil crane's day in other words crane had all of these festivities planned for his opening ceremonies and sam just became determined to ruin all of that i'm still on 46 paragraph that starts out that saturday ola patterson that saturday all of paterson turned out to watch timothy crane pull his bridge over the chasm constables patrol the crowd looking for sam patch they'd locked him in a basement for safe keeping but somebody let him out next paragraph down tim crane swaggered through the afternoon tugging at his whiskers and shouting instructions to his men always with an eye on the crowd the bridge rested on log rollers on the northern bank cables stretch across the chasm and ropes and tackles waited to edge the bridge over the precipice and along the cables and to set it into place on the substructure at last the workmen took their stations and pulled at the ropes and clinton bridge edged slowly across crane's fairytale landscape moved by sweating men and by what the patterson intelligencer called the exercise of a good deal of ingenuity and mechanical skill on the part of timothy crane as the bridge reached the cliff and began riding over the cables things went wrong one of the log rollers slipped and dropped end over end into the pool below the falls and the bridge lurched dangerously crane's men regained control and set it safely into place tim crane looked up for applause but the cheering was broken by shouts from the south bank for there was sam patch standing erect on a rock at the edge of a cliff sam spoke to the people near him then he stepped off next paragraph it was a straight 70-foot drop to the water below and sam took it in fine pawtucket's style at the end he brought up his knees then snapped them straight drew his arms to his sides and went into the water like an arrow tim crane in his kidnapped audience stared into the chasm certain sam was dead but a few seconds sam shot to the surface the crowd cheered wildly as sam sported in the water paddled over to crane's log roller took the trail rope between his teeth and towed it slowly and triumphantly to shore before he jumped sam patch told the people on his side of the chasm that crane had done a great thing and he meant to do another i want you to think about something and the something is really really critical to paper two this is a jump that probably seems a little bit forgettable i mean i couldn't tell you who timothy crane was let alone sam patch before i read this book but you know this has survived for close to 200 years now and you got to ask yourself why i have a theory my theory is that everybody in the crowd was thinking the same thing that day everybody was was angry just like sam was angry but sam had the audacity to do something about it right uh one one final paragraph there on 47 toward the bottom of page 47. at it simplest you see where i am at its simplest sam's leap at the clinton bridge was an act of vandalism timothy crane was an enterprising successful man and sam patch was a solemn failure who risked his life to ruin crane celebration we might label the jump an act of drunken resentment and leave it at that and so it may have been but the crowd applauded sam's patch's leap and the leap survived in the folklore of patterson as an admirable performance something it seems had prepared the people of patterson to enjoy sam's assault on the festivities of tim crane let me ask you something have you ever been to like a movie or a ballpark baseball games even better example and there's someone usually is a guy that has had a little bit too much to drink and he's being obnoxious and he's standing up and he's causing a scene and he's and he's he's generally a distraction and everybody in your part of the park is thinking the exact same thing i just wish this guy would go away and finally finally somebody works up the nerve to go tell on him and security comes and they escort him out what happens next exactly everybody in that area starts applauding because he got exactly what he deserved right everyone was thinking the same thing nobody had the nerve the backbone to do anything about it but when it finally happened everyone is simultaneously happy and i think that's what's happening there and i also think what's happening in sam patch is is why it survived for so long what sam did was what everybody else wanted to do they just didn't have the nerve to do it now you're seeing other people that we've talked about in this class react in in similar ways i want to kind of revisit um a another rhode islander a guy by the name of seth luther and seth luther warned about this aristocracy of capital remember remember talking about that he worried that handing handing factories and machines and and all and all the means of production from one generation to the next generation to the next generation was going to lead us down the very similar road that europe had gone down and it would be an aristocracy of landowners it would be an aristocracy factory owners but it would basically be the same thing you would have a very small handful of haves and a massive army of half-knots now whereas sam jumped drunkenly off of a waterfall and drew all kinds of attention to the fact that what he thought tim crane was doing was not okay um seth luther went down a very different road for seth luther this is about giving everybody the right to vote if all men including working class men whether they had you know two nickels to their name or they were the richest man in in in all of slater's film um regardless they they all would have one vote and that vote would not count anymore any less than anybody else's vote and so this is not just happening with sam patch you're seeing this happen in various forms and fashions in our class as well in our next installments we'll we'll see sam push this envelope even further but uh as it turns out somebody or a collection of somebody's thought that maybe sam could offer an even in an even bigger advantage to the workers you'll see what i mean if you join me for the next installment