Those looking to get a pre-season jump to summer reading should pull up a beach chair and dip into Daniel Wolff’s “Fourth of July, Asbury Park.”
The Grammy-nominated biographer of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan’s 200-page book was just updated and released by Rutgers University Press.
And while the book is steeped in history and research, the subtitled “A History of the Promised Land” is also a lively, witty, and illuminating look at the ideals, delusions, and cultural hypocrisy that shaped a town — and a nation.
True to its title, the book uses a succession of July 4ths to chart the shore town’s ups and downs and the forces that made it happen. Only one of the 11 chapters deviates and focuses instead on “American Day,” 1892.
The first July 4th is the one in 1870 that marks the personal day of independence for Asbury Park founder, James A. Bradley.
The wealthy New York City brush manufacturer had grown world weary and found his own calling during a journey to the Methodist seaside retreat of Ocean Grove.
He felt called to create a soul-rejuvenating community that would also serve as a buffer between Ocean Grove and the materialistic seaside communities to the north, especially Long Branch.
As Wolff recounts, Bradley and John Baker, Bradley’s servant of African ancestry, arrive in the future city’s wild shoreline where Bradley literally and figuratively strips himself of modern life and recasts himself as a new Robinson Crusoe — the shipwrecked character forced to recreate himself on a semi-populated island in the West Indies.
He also recasts Baker as the novel’s other important character, Friday, a non-European who effectively becomes Crusoe’s servant.
Bradley’s Methodist religious fervor is reflected in the town’s namesake, the influential English-born American Methodist evangelist Francis Asbury.
It was during Asbury’s 1771 voyage to America that he made the following journal entry: “Whither am I going? To the New World. What to do? I am going to live with God and to bring others to do so.”
Bradley’s intent seems the same. But while he may have also given lip service to the early Methodist’s inclusion of people of African ancestry into the church, Bradley’s vision of heaven on earth was less inclusive, was based on business know-how, and dependent on Bradley’s own oversight — elements that sowed the seeds of future problems.
In the chapter “fourth of July, 1885,” Wolff reports that Bradley’s dream “was a reality. Part of it, anyway.”
The town had grown into a resort worth $2 million. While it was summer destination whose hotels and boarding houses could accommodate more visitors than Long Branch and Atlantic City, it also had 3,000 year-round residents and a strong concentration of businesses that attracted regional customers.
However, the city’s main summer attraction also fractured the dream: donning a bathing suit. Despite the reality that women and men used multiple layers of garments to cover their bodies, Wolff notes that while bathing “might be a healthy, even medicinal pursuit, but there was no denying that it encouraged venal thoughts and actions.”
He then quotes reports that men in the water “fling out their joints like colts in pastures; and dignified women sport like girls at recess” and that “young men and maidens forget how far society keeps them apart and together dash in, in entire forgetfulness of all society may think.”
The founding father then “did his best to stem the tide of sinfulness” that was rising from the town’s main attraction. As Wolff writes, in addition to the city’s Blue Laws, Bradley “personally patrolled the beach and the lakes, catching couples spooning in rented rowboats or lying too close together in the sand. On Sunday, he’d make sure the beach closed at 8 in the morning.” He also posted signs that quoted scripture and offered moral advice.
And while Bradley would publicly say that he had “respectable people” of all races, he was mainly interested in doing everything he could do to attract rich white Protestants.
One of the results was an assessment of town that appeared in an 1892 newspaper article that said, “Asbury Park creates nothing” and that “it merely amuses.” The writer was American novelist, poet, and Asbury Park resident Stephen Crane who reported on the 1892 American Day Parade organized by the workers making the clothes sported by the wealthy vacationers.
Crane saw the politics of Asbury Park as “a battleground in a national struggle” and that its “distinctly American” rules and regulations also reflected a “raunchy, unquenchable honky-tonk idealism.”
The ensuing chapters follow the city’s struggle through the 20th century and its cracking from corruption, racism (as illustrated in the chapter, “Independence Day, 1970”), and a resistance to facing social change and attitudes.
Interestingly, just as the city found unexpected problems from one of its main attractions, it eventually found a benefit from something else that the city leaders struggled to contain: music.
Wolff shows how music was used to placate the sensibility of its leaders, who criticized fun seekers while offering them Ferris wheels and carousels.
Music events included military bands, piano music, and the homogenized popular “ethnic” music that was more about acceptable toe-tapping than unacceptable dancing. Later it embraced rock ‘n’ roll, but of the whiter and lighter variety.
Wolff shows that things got rocking when the city was down on its luck in the late 1960s and early 70s. That’s when a couple opened a café that welcomed musicians whose freedom to create brought the decaying town back to life with a rock ‘n’ roll sound that connected to the music’s original impulse and was unapologetically enthusiastic.
One musician, of course, was Bruce Springsteen, whose album “Greetings from Asbury Park” gave people a new way of seeing the tired town and put it back on the map. That included the ones used by investors — as the final chapter, “Independence Day 2020,” shows.
While Wolff says he designed the book to show how a Methodist dream became tainted by racism, Ku Klux Klan revivalism (with Roman Catholics high on its list of undesirables), and crooked capitalism, he also suggests that it is a history of rock’n’roll. “Asbury’s music has always been key to what’s going on, and the story of the city inevitably races the origins of the rock ’n roll sound and attitude. But also, the history of Asbury Park has the shape and feel of rock ‘n’ roll. It keeps jumping to what moves us, hurrying to the next climax, deliberately repeating itself as it tries to get and keep our attention.”
He also says, it is the history of “the promised land. Which is a place that never existed — and has proved almost impossible to leave.”
The book provides a good reason why.
Fourth of July, Asbury Park by Daniel Wolff, 208 pages, $25.95, Rutgers University Press.
