Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

The New York Times

Johnson, who teaches history at the University of South Carolina, attempts to explain what Patch meant by his cryptic motto, ''Some Things Can Be Done as Well as Others'' in the context of early-19th-century arguments about the meaning of work, art, nature and class. — David D. Kirkpatrick

Publishers Weekly

Little is known of daredevil Sam Patch (1800-1829). When he was seven, Patch, his mother and siblings were working in the mills of Pawtucket, R.I. The waterfalls that powered the mills attracted working boys like Sam, who'd compete at jumping from the heights. In his mid-20s, Patch moved to Paterson, N.J., where he worked as a skilled mule spinner. In September 1827, he made his first spectacular jump-right over Paterson's Passaic Falls-which he repeated the following July 4, declaring his motto: "Some things can be done as well as others." After Paterson, Patch jumped from a high cataract in Hoboken harbor, over Niagara Falls and over the Genesee Falls in Rochester, N.Y., where on a second leap, probably intoxicated, he died. Johnson, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, warns readers in his preface that Patch is a "front-porch story"-there isn't much of a story, but some interesting meanders. While Johnson makes a strong case that Patch was thumbing his nose at the capitalists with his Passaic Falls jumps, he admits that after Paterson, Patch was more interested in being a "showman and a celebrity" than in anyone's politics, unless staying drunk can be interpreted as a political statement (which Johnson sometimes implies). In the end, Patch's handful of spectacular jumps just can't carry so much political baggage. Still, readers interested in shifting class dynamics in early Pawtucket, Paterson and Rochester may find some suggestive material here. 12 b&w illus. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A boss spinner in a New England textile mill in the 1820s, Sam Patch was a tough, hard-drinking son of a tough, hard-drinking father. His claim to fame was his willingness to leap into waterfalls-at first for his friends' amusement but later as a political statement to divert attention from local politicians. Finally, Patch became a showman, jumping off cliffs for a percentage of the ticket sales. His last jump was at Genesee Falls at Rochester, NY; as usual, he leaped from a scaffold but never surfaced. His body was found six months later and several miles downriver. Patch's legend lived on in the 1830s and 1840s, as popular literature and plays resurrected the jumper for later generations. Johnson (history, Univ. of South Carolina; A Shopkeeper's Millennium) tells Patch's story against a detailed background of early 19th-century New England. Since little record of Patch survives, Johnson uses his life as a framework on which to hang his interesting and accessible narrative, exploring the lives of local politicians, entertainers, and entrepreneurs. Though not an essential purchase for most libraries, this book should be considered by libraries collecting in early 19th-century American history. (Index not seen.)-Grant A. Fredericksen, Illinois Prairie Dist. P.L., Metamora Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Episodes in the early-19th-century life of daredevil Sam Patch demonstrate both his nose-thumbing at the pretensions of mill owners and his evolution into a piece of vernacular American celebrity. By any standards, Patch had rough early years, working as a hand in the cotton mills of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In the 1820s, to inject a little thrill into his life, he and a few friends would leap from the roof of a mill 100 feet into the moiling waters of Pawtucket Falls. When he moved to Paterson, New Jersey, to work in the textile mills—the author doesn’t pretend to know why he made the move, as the record of Patch’s early years is sketchy—he again took to jumping, now into the chasm of Passaic Falls. Johnson (co-author, The Kingdom of Matthias, 1994) suggests that these leaps were acts of class outlawry, timed to disrupt the opening of a private park on what had been public land, or to throw light upon various labor struggles. Patch possessed "an unhappy constellation of class anger and rum-soaked resentment"—he was a prodigious boozer—and yet what a showman, taking obvious pride in the brilliance of his art and its trappings of political theater. Such is fame, Johnson writes, that Patch’s gathering notoriety soon found him leaping into the maelstroms of Niagara and Genessee, providing a decided counterweight to bourgeois notions of the sublimity of economic development and the reflected grandeur of power-source owners, though at the same time distanced enough from political theater to leave Patch open to caricature. He became the butt of jokes as the clownish rustic whose suicidal bravado vied with a sense of skill, courage, and honor. Patch was on the cusp whencelebrity wobbled between acts of piety, respectability, and disinterested service in the pursuit of fame for its own sake. A portrait of the jumper that’s neither fanciful nor forced, but lively and keen, working surely with the much-neglected role of class in shaping American social history. (12 b&w illustrations)