Dear Readers,
It’s the day before Thanksgiving, aka “Blackout Wednesday.” This is when people, especially college students home for the holiday, go out to the bar with old friends to get “blackout drunk.”
Of course, few things are worse than a terrible hangover. But lots of our fellow citizens will nonetheless pursue that outcome with reckless abandon tonight. Hooray! Not surprisingly, this is also one of the biggest drunk-driving nights of the year.
But that’s later. It’s still early, and in a few hours me, my family, and a few old friends will be engaging in much more wholesome activity—going to Angelo’s diner in Ann Arbor for the very last time, as it is soon to close after almost seventy years serving customers on the edge of the University of Michigan campus.
If you went to Michigan, you know Angelo’s.
But before I start getting too nostalgic, I’d like to offer some final thoughts on those quirky Jumping Frenchmen of Maine.
According to Stephen Whalen and Robert Bartholomew: “The most plausible explanation for jumping is that a local social interaction became institutionalized among a select group of people.”
Isolated loggers had few sources of amusement besides each other, and personality peculiarities offered a focal point for distractions . . . . If the inhabitants of a logging camp lived with the knowledge that they may be surprised by a sudden “poke,” and that an exaggerated startle was the expected response, then this “reflex irritation” became a normal part of social intercourse. Kunkle posed this when he wrote that “jumping may represent a special variety of socially conditioned reflex, reinforced by example and by repeated stimulation from attentive colleagues.” He also raised the possibility that the behavior of jumping allowed some individuals to act out or release concealed hostilities . . . . and he implied that well-known jumpers may have added “considerable dramatization” as they were deliberately targeted by their friends and co-workers. In this light, the jumping behavior was very much the result of the participants’ view of their social status or role in the community. It should also be noted that jumping was only the second part of the activity, for without the stimulus there is no response . . . . Essentially, jumping was a symbiotic relationship between “pokers” and “victims.”
Back in the 1880s, right around the time that George Miller Beard was up in Maine looking for jumping Frenchmen, there was a student in Mexico City studying marijuana to determine if its users should be criminally responsible for their actions. I’ve mentioned this before. In the course of that study, the student, Genaro Pérez, collected some very interesting testimony given everything we’ve learned about Jumping Frenchmen:
Soldiers who smoke [marijuana] for the first time, generally on account of the mischievous intentions of their fellow soldiers, go crazy and run around doing lots of disordered things, according to the expression employed by the soldiers who have seen such effects: and, in addition, say these same soldiers, some become happy and sing, and others bullies [valientes] and quarrelsome.
This, it seems to me, is a cousin of the “horseplay” linked to Jumping Frenchmen. In Mexico, marijuana had a reputation for causing madness and wild behavior. And in soldiers’ barracks, one of the two locations where marijuana was most likely to be used (the other being prisons), a mischievous game had developed that played on that drug’s reputation. The “victims,” like those observed by Reuben Rabinovitch in the Laurentian Mountains three thousand miles north, knew the expected response and, voila, there it was!
But of course with marijuana this is particularly interesting, because, as we’ve seen, cannabis is well known to produce anxiety in many of its users. It thus had considerable potential to serve as an active placebo, especially when the soldiers were playing their mischievous game, likely helping to produce behaviors that today seem very odd indeed. That placebo effect was surely strengthened with every story told about the drug’s apparent maddening effects.
And that brings us to the final piece of the puzzle. While actual incidences of Jumping Frenchmen were observed, soon tall tales about these jumpers became a kind of modern folklore in Maine and surrounding areas, with reports of weird occurences spreading as pure hearsay, in the manner of “urban legends.” The same was surely true of many of the mad marihuano reports in Mexico.
History is in fact full of phenomena like this, where fantasy and reality meld seamlessly within stories that transmit morals, or warnings, or some of our deepest fears.
But it’s getting late. I’ve got to get to breakfast at Angelo’s for the very last time. So more on this in the coming days.
Be careful out there tonight, everyone.