Sam Patch's family history and significance in early American economic context

¶ … Patch: The Famous Jumper

As one of America's first entertainer-daredevils, Sam Patch's popularity amongst his fellow working class citizens illustrates how this segment of society yearned for a hero with whom they could identify. Paul E. Johnson's Sam Patch: The Famous Jumper depicts Patch himself as an effortless, and sometimes drunken, self-promoter who turned a childhood love of heights and excitement into an attention-grabbing, if short-lived, career. Patch's ingenuity, showmanship, and bravery allowed him to connect with his fans on a deeply symbolic level, given that his own personal struggles and working-class background served to emphasize the notion that any American could achieve success on their own terms so long as they possessed the fearlessness to go after what it was they most desired.

Sam Patch's early years played a pivotal role in his eventual success as a daredevil, primarily because his parents' troubled work history brought them from the countryside into the city, where they worked in a series of mills and factories. Johnson notes the difficulty of tracing the history of the Patch family who, like many of their working-class contemporaries, did not keep journals or memoirs, but emphasizes how vital these "anonymous years" (Johnson x) were in understanding Patch's attraction to daredevilry and his later rise to fame. If the Patch family had remained on the farm, it is unlikely that Sam Patch would have had the opportunity to scale the heights of factory walls, ship masts, and local dams. His childhood spent working in a cotton mill also brought him into contact with the young people who would later make up much of his fan base as he came to recognize how his feats of daring were able to distract other mill employees from the drudgery of their daily work.

The feats of bravery that Sam Patch undertook in Patterson, New Jersey are representative of the connection he continued to make between the social and political conditions of the era and his own public persona. Although Johnson was not able to entirely determine exactly how invested Patch was in raising the consciousnesses of the working class, his first few public events managed to disrupt social norms and draw the public's attention to events beyond Patch's own antics. As Johnson writes, Patch's events were inexorably "bound up with the angry industrial history of Paterson (xi) in which the upper class were constantly at odds with the working class people who made up Patch's primary fan base. Indeed, Patch's first public leap was noted in local newspapers for having distracted attention from a celebration marking the opening of an enclosed park for upper-class children, and subsequent leaps occurred both as class-based contests and during Patterson's first labor walk-out.

Sam Patch's broader popularity took hold once he branched out from his local antics to tackle the great heights of Niagara Falls. This decision did not only mark the beginnings of his iconic status as an American daredevil, but also demonstrates the manner in which the American class struggle converged at the site of the falls. As Johnson notes, wealthy visitors to Niagara Falls were able to draw parallels between "the power and beauty of nature [and their own] newfound sensibility and taste" (xi). Thus, a class collision of sorts occurred when Patch arrived at the falls with a mass of noisy working class fans and an accompanying cadre of journalists and assorted other hangers-on. Patch's popularity turned the tranquillity of the Falls into a circus sideshow, demonstrating the uneasy relationship between the classes.