Book review: A Renegade History of the United States, by Thaddeus Russell

If you want to banish complacency you need to give the status quo a right old shake, and that's exactly what Thaddeus Russell administers in his lively revisionist work, A Renegade History of the United States.

Russell isn't the first historian to realise that understanding how our past informs the present means looking beyond the machinations of dead white males. He may, however, be the most rumbustious, declaring: "(This book] tells the story of 'bad' Americans - drunkards, prostitutes, 'shiftless' slaves and white slackers, criminals, juvenile delinquents, brazen homosexuals, and others who operated beneath American society - and shows how they shaped our world, created new pleasures, and expanded our freedoms. This is history from the gutter up."

His Founding Fathers are a clutch of repressed men so deeply appalled by the louche, lotus-eating behaviour of their fellow colonials that they impose democracy as a way of weaning Americans off of the idea of having fun. As a result, he argues, America's national culture wound up "more sexually restrained and work obsessed than Victorian England".

Just what went on in the bad old days? During the War of Independence, he writes, Americans guzzled roughly "6.6 gallons of absolute alcohol per year - equivalent to 5.8 shot glasses of 80-proof liquor a day - for each adult fifteen or over". Employees, not bosses, determined if, when and how hard they worked. Taverns were integrated. Sexual relationships were fluid, with less emphasis placed on matrimony or the legitimacy of children, and prostitution was rarely punished.

One of the most startling chapters addresses slavery. In it, he claims that slaves "enjoyed pleasures that were forbidden for white people", making them "the envy of America". This will come as a shock to many African Americans, I can assure you. Russell argues that White America has been imitating Black culture ever since the journey over via slave ship, and writes that blackface minstrel show performers knew the "secret" of slavery: that their masters didn't work them nearly as hard as the bosses they went on to toil for as free men and women.

He cites surveys and interviews with former slaves as proof that they enjoyed their leisure time to the hilt - unfortunately, this argument seems to give credence to Hollywood's embarrassing depiction of d'ose happy go lucky darkies larking 'bout on de farm - singing, dancing and fornicating with abandon. Russell doesn't endorse slavery, but he does write: "The beautiful irony of slavery was that it guaranteed food, shelter, clothing, health care, and child care for the enslaved - and even allowed for the acquisition of luxuries and money - without requiring the self-denial of 'free' labour."

It's always fascinating spending time with a devil's advocate, and Russell is one of the best. You'll shout at this book endlessly, but you won't be able to put it down, for it's chock full of startling, upsetting, and entertaining anecdotes. For instance, I'd never heard that the Ku Klux Klan, infamous for lynching black people, "spent much more of its time and resources policing the voluntary sexuality of white women … The KKK focused most closely on dance halls and automobiles, both of which, the Imperial Wizard of the Klan warned, subjected weak-willed women to ‘seductive allurement'."

Speaking of seductive allurement, Russell introduces another fascinating character called "Diamond Jessie" Hayman. She started out as a prostitute in the Sierra Nevada foothills in the 1880s, before moving to San Francisco - and into management. "Hayman's three-story brothel . . . included three fireplaces, a saloon, a champagne cellar, and fifteen suites filled with imported furniture". Each of her girls received a $6,000 wardrobe "that included a fox fur coat, four tailored suits, eight hats, two dress coats, twelve pairs of shoes, twelve pairs of gloves, seven evening gowns, and seven negligees". In the wake of the 1906 earthquake, Hayman, who owned several plots of land around town, helped feed and clothe those San Franciscans left homeless.

Russell, who teaches American history and cultural studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, demonstrates an enviable range of knowledge and he has clearly done his research. But I couldn't help feeling he'd painted himself into a corner with an overly restrictive thesis. Smart as he clearly is, the overall effect of Russell's book is to equate freedom with fun, placing more value on the so-called "illicit" pleasures, than on "pleasures" such as the right not to be owned by another human being, the right to vote, to own property, to enter into contractual agreements, or the right to get an education.

Provocation is, of course, the very point of this book - and on that score, it doesn't disappoint.