Profs & Pints Alameda: Daredevil Democracy

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Daredevil Democracy,” on how a nineteenth-century waterfall jumper invented modern celebrity and challenged American ideas about power, with Felicia Angeja Viator, professor of history at San Francisco State, nationally published culture writer, and author of the acclaimed book on West Coast rap, To Live and Defy in LA.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-daredevil-democracy .]

What’s the relationship between fame and power? And what happens when anyone, no matter how ordinary, can make themselves famous?

Join Professor Felicia Viator, a scholar of American society, popular entertainment, and mass culture, for a fascinating look at the first famous American daredevil and how he shaped the nation’s early debates about celebrity, power, and democracy itself.

To set the scene, she’ll take us back to a time in early American history when fame belonged to generals, founding fathers, and philosophers, being reserved mainly for people born into privilege or distinguished by military heroism and civil service.

Young Sam Patch had none of that. No education, no political power, no traditional heroism. Nothing that would have typically been considered worthy of celebration.

Sam Patch was just a mill worker who jumped waterfalls for fun. But by sheer will he transformed himself into a household name, proving that anyone could manufacture their own fame simply by captivating an audience.

At a moment when the American republic was just taking shape, Patch inspired the disenfranchised with his motto, “Somebody besides other folks can do something." But his DIY success also terrified elites who saw in his spectacle-driven influence and mastery of “cultural mobility” a dangerous preview of what was to come.

Was Sam Patch's rise to fame an outgrowth of American revolutionary ideas about self-determination? Or was it evidence that democracy was going off the rails? The questions Sam Patch raised long ago— about who deserves to be influential—are the same ones we wrestle with in today’s age of reality stars and viral fame.

We're still asking if cultural mobility is democracy's promise or its problem. This talk at Alameda’s Faction Brewing won’t offer definitive answers, but will give you a much deeper understanding of the debate. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From the cover of The Wonderful Leaps of Sam Patch, a children’s book published in about 1875 (University of Rochester Libraries).