Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. —MARK TWAIN

faced with the choice of either a continued subservience to an overweening Mother England or a gathering of their colonial brass balls in their mitts with which to cast off the taxing yoke of England’s imperial control.

The magnificent sons of bitches who founded our United States truly brandished a courage that is hard to fathom and a serving of foresight that very well beggars my modern imagination. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the like saw the extremely rare opportunity to create a new “American experiment,” one in which the best organizational techniques and brewing methods could be retained from the oldguard European governments, while discarding all the more unsavory trappings (clotted cream) of the monarchies and oligarchies they’d left behind “on the continent.”

Now all they had to do was liberate themselves from the iron grip of the military equivalent of Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson that was eighteenth-century Great Britain.

Our young society flourished, exhibiting a gaiety and “rascally” nature that the rest of the globe found (very) briefly adorable. This was our puppy phase.

The Emanuel Leutze painting of Washington’s historic crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776, has always stuck with me as a clear representation of his military chutzpah. Having rowed a lot of boats in my day, I was astonished to see these men rowing in a river full of large chunks of ice, which would obviously be incredibly uncomfortable and difficult, especially long before the advent of “boat fuel” (canned beer).

When news items or “patriotic” messaging that suggest our flag is a license to murder, or even just a gung ho, extra-white country music video about “’Murica,” it reminds me unpleasantly of the absurd sense of entitlement we Americans seem to feel, “since we butchered our way to the ownership of this land, fair and square”;

They stopped at a saloon for refreshments, and were confronted by the tall, taunting figure of J. J. Costello, a Tammany member. Some insult . . . caused Roosevelt to flare up. “Teddy knocked him down,” Hunt recalled admiringly, “and he got up and he hit him again, and when he got up he hit him again, and he said, ‘Now you go over there and wash yourself. When you are in the presence of gentlemen, conduct yourself like a gentleman.’”

“He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.”

In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole. The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures—all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. The chase is among the best of all national pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.

On the day of the big fight I had to ask my men to do a deed that European military writers consider utterly impossible of performance, that is, to attack over open ground unshaken infantry armed with the best modern repeating rifles behind a formidable system of entrenchments. The only way to get them to do it in the way it had to be done was to lead them myself.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Slogan-worthy.

My copy of Huckleberry Finn may weigh more than a Kindle, but if I am reading it under a tree in Minnesota, I am in zero danger of any pop-up ads or other apps appropriating my focus.

This farmer-to-farmer discourse allowed our intrepid reporter to deftly run the numbers involved in the efficiency of farm productivity with and without the use of slavery. His findings were quite elucidating, showing conclusively that a slave accomplished about half the work a Staten Island hired hand could achieve.

Enter Calvert Vaux. (I recommend this title by Francis R. Kowsky for more on this underappreciated but fantastic artist: Country, Park & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux.)

peccadilloes.

The lesson that I would like to draw from this sequence is as follows: If you don’t like the rules as they apply to your art, then break the rules. This won’t always work out in your favor, as it also requires a degree of perspicacity on the part of the adjudicators; but if they are able, as Olmsted’s and Vaux’s were, to look at the broken rules and say, “Oh, this is better. Why did we make that dumb rule?,” then taste and good design can win the day.

Olmsted admonished the headmaster of Owen’s boarding school with incessant instruction, detailing all the skills he thought imperative in a young man’s matriculation, including: “To saddle & bridle a horse. . . . To ride, drive, pack, clean, feed, bleed & physic a horse. . . . To rescue drowning persons. . . . To ford a river. To kill animals without cruelty; to preserve meat. . . . To make slight repairs in & run a steam engine safely. . . . To preserve clothing from moths.” While Colonel Roosevelt (as well as one Ron Swanson) might have heartily approved of these directives, it’s hard to imagine a school conducting some of this curriculum without losing a few of the runts, but perhaps that’s just exactly where the source of Ron and Theodore’s rugged preference would lie.

Dickens’s Bleak House.

“It always amuses me when any one group of people takes it for granted that, because they have been privileged for a generation or two, they are set apart in any way from the man or woman who is working in order to keep the wolf from the door. It is only luck and a little temporary veneer and before long the wheels may turn and one and all must fall back on whatever basic qualities they have.”

slattern.

Eleanor and Franklin proceeded to move into a town house connected by only a sliding door to the residence of Franklin’s mother, Sara, whom, it should be noted, was outspoken in her opposition to their union. Although the young couple produced six children, Eleanor did not feel well suited to motherhood and was overshadowed by her mother-in-law in the child-rearing department. This arrangement, in which Sara openly commandeered control of both households, was miserable for Eleanor, and most likely her husband, Franklin, as well, but nobody possessed the gumption at that point to stand up to the overweening matriarch.

Despite the apparently fecund marriage bed that produced those six kids, Eleanor sadly disliked having sex, stating to her daughter, Anna, that it was merely “an ordeal to be borne,” which makes me very glum.

sagacity

FDR must have been doing something right, since he was the only president to be elected into office four times.

burgeoning

denigrate

“At least, I have never known what it was to be bored or to have time hang heavily on my hands.”

demur

“Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted and I have come to the conclusion that practically nothing we do ever stands by itself. If it is good, it will serve some good purpose in the future. If it is evil, it may haunt us and handicap our efforts in unimagined ways.”

Billy Jack, a movie that may be little known now but was at the time (1971) both a cultural revolution and the highest-grossing independent film of all time, a record it still holds. You’ll likely want to devour it at least thrice, so please notify anyone who might be relying upon you to deliver their medication or perhaps pick them up from school, Scouts, or 4-H, if they’re especially lucky.

great deal while saying little. The priest kicked things off with a reverential welcome, and I was aghast as it slowly dawned on me that there was to be no flaming pyre? No sacrificial bighorn sheep or grizzly bear? “There won’t be any trumpets blowin’ come the judgment day”? What the fuck?! Didn’t these people know whom it was we were burying today? At this point, I caught myself, extremely mortified at the power of my selfishness. Of course these people knew. “These people” belonged to Tom Laughlin, and he belonged to them. I was the egotistical asshole who had been graciously allowed by these people to attend this solemn occasion with my asshole friend. Pat agreed. Like true modern Americans, we wanted this man’s funeral to be somehow about us and our (superficial) experience of him. Fortunately, we caught ourselves in time to arrest our descent to the nadir of good taste toward which we were plummeting.

timorously

existential

machinations,

Tom was crazy for books. He read voraciously and encouraged his kids (and everyone around them) to do the same.

engender

mirth

perspicacity

hyperbole

Wendell and Tanya and I spoke at length about one of his themes that drives me with constancy, that of “good work.” One aspect of this topic that I often regurgitate is his dislike for a society that celebrates the notion of “Thank God it’s Friday!” Taking this position, people are necessarily saying that they despise five of every seven days of their lives. He said he first noticed it when he was teaching college, that people would answer the question “How are you doing?” with “Well, pretty good, for a Monday.” This exposed a joylessness that filled Mr. Berry with concern. “It’s a great harbinger of what’s to come. If you don’t like the classes about what you’re going to do, you’re not going to like going to do it.” “More importantly,” he said, “the collegiate system and the importance that’s placed upon it has demeaned and is doing away with the trades.” This is a topic of his that has always gotten me fired up. When I was in high school in the eighties, only the underachievers and burnouts were relegated to the area vocational school. It was considered a substantial demotion in life, brought on only by poor grades or attitude. “John, I don’t think you have what it takes to get through trigonometry. How about we make a welder out of you?” I was going to be headed to college because I was not planning to work in a field so low as mechanics or clothing fabrication or (forfend!) woodworking.

A main focus of this indecency, in Mr. Berry’s view, is what this attitude has done to the small farmer. A particularly insidious American dream is being whispered into the ears of our young people as soon as they can hear a television set, that things will be better for them someplace else.

He said it was a McCormick-Deering, “and you’d do eight rows. There’s about a thousand ways you could adjust these things to get the furrows turned just right. They would do what the old people called ‘pretty work.’ They’d say, ‘That’s pretty work.’” I was quite taken with that. These days, who among us can say with any regularity, “That’s pretty work”? The fact that most of what we do in modern America doesn’t fall into that category is precisely what he’s driving at in his writing. You know who does get to say it? The kids who went to vocational school. The welder, the seamstress, the cobbler, the potter. Those who work with their hands. Those who work in jobs in the only category that is so devalued that most schools in the country have fully cut their shop and home economics programs. Creating a deficiency even more elemental, our kids are no longer being taught to write in cursive. This seems so shortsighted and flatly idiotic to those of us not in love with our pocket televisions. We are being trained into a complete homogeny, and we’re all just going along with it. Tanya asked me especially to point up the folly in the exclusion of this most basic life skill.

terroir

In his excellent book Why We Make Things and Why It Matters, Peter Korn makes a similarly philosophical argument for handcrafting items such as furniture. “Prior to the Industrial Revolution, virtually every object had been produced ‘by hand.’ Subsequent to it, making things by hand became a potentially subversive act—something one did in opposition to prevailing societal norms.” Korn’s thoughtful book makes a persuasive case for the ways in which we choose to make items with our hands: “The [handmade] desk is at odds with our society’s rampant consumerism. It speaks of durability at a time when most goods are disposable.” Then: “Furniture, after all, is more than an object of contemplation; it is a prescription for the life to be lived around it.” That is certainly a type of good work.

A WARNING TO MY READERS Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

Look, this job certainly didn’t make any sense in terms of maximizing my income or minimizing my stress or maximizing the comfort of my life. I think it’s a wonderful job to have, because I’m able to work to make fundamental changes in society and improve the quality of people’s lives and eliminate and diminish unfairness at various times. If I wasn’t able to do what I thought was important public policy, it would be a stupid job to have.

Let’s face it—the state of our nation’s decency is an absolutely shameful mess.

ilk

erudition,