Made In America - Bill Bryson [170]
A year after Cinerama made its debut, Twentieth Century-Fox came up with a slightly more sophisticated, and certainly less gimmicky, process called CinemaScope, which required just a single camera with a special anamorphic lens. The first CinemaScope picture was The Robe. CinemaScope screens were roughly double the width of a normal movie screen and were slightly curved to give some illusion of depth.17 By 1955, just two years after its introduction, more than 20,000 cinemas throughout the world had installed the CinemaScope system.18 Hollywood would live to fight another day.
Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series
16
The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
The abiding impression of life in Puritan New England is that it wasn’t a great deal of fun. ‘Sad-visaged people moving always with sober decorum through a dull routine of work unrelieved by play’ is the traditional view expressed by the historian John Allen Krout in 1929.1
In fact, it wasn’t quite like that. Though they could scarcely be described as libertines, the Puritans were not averse to pleasure. They smoked and drank, and enjoyed games and contests as much as anybody, particularly those involving physical challenges like foot-races and wrestling, or that honed necessary skills like archery. Increase Mather called recreation ‘a great duty’, and at Harvard College the students were not merely permitted but actively encouraged to take part in ‘lawful’ games.2 And lawful is the operative word. What the Puritans didn’t like were activities deemed to be an encouragement to idleness or ungodliness – and of these, it must be said, they found many. Among the amusements they forbade at one time or another were quoits, ninepins, bowls, stool-ball and even shuffle-board. Games involving dice and cards were entirely out of the question. Plays, entertainments, ‘dancing and frisking’ and ‘other crafty science’ were equally abhorrent to them. Maypoles were cut down and even Christmas was abjured. Smoking was acceptable only within certain well-prescribed bounds. Connecticut had a statute forbidding inhabitants from taking ‘tobacco publiquely in the street, nor shall any take yt in the fyelds or woods’.3 On Sundays, no recreation of any sort was permitted. Even going for a stroll was forbidden. Indeed, sitting quietly could land you in trouble. One hapless couple found themselves hauled before magistrates for no graver offence than being found ‘sitting together on the Lord’s Day, under an apple tree’.4
Oddly, none of this was inherent in Calvinist doctrine. Calvin himself was known to enjoy a lively game of bowls on a Sunday afternoon. Nothing in their pre-American experience had suggested that the Pilgrims would institute such an aggressive crackdown on fun.
To understand why this happened in New England, it is necessary to re-examine two commonly held conceptions about the Puritans. The first is the belief that they had come to America to establish freedom of religion. In truth, freedom of worship was the last thing they wanted. Having suffered years of persecution on their native soil, they desired nothing from America so much as the opportunity to establish an equally intolerant system of their own. The second misconception is the belief that the colonization of New England was primarily pious in its impulse. In fact, throughout the early period Puritans were decidedly – indeed, uncomfortably – in the minority. The great bulk of early pilgrims were attracted to America not by religious zeal but by the hope of a better life. Between 1630 and 1640, of the 16,000 immigrants to Massachusetts, only one in four was a Puritan.5 Even on the Mayflower, the Saints had been outnumbered 61 to 41 by Strangers. Both of these considerations worked powerfully on the Puritan psyche. From the outset they became jealously possessive of their moral