Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper

In the 19th century, a debate emerged between working-class people and wealthy elites about the idea of art. Industrialists like Timothy Crane saw their commercial enterprises as “the artful refinement of raw nature that transformed a forbidding wilderness into an opportunity for aesthetic contemplation” (43). According to this perspective, art was an essential part of “the language of progress” that drove industrialization in 19th-century America (55).

Working-class people like Sam Patch thought of art in a very different way. Sam Patch described waterfall jumping as an art because he believed that “a man’s art was his identity-defining skill” (53). For men like Patch, the word art “affirmed the intelligence, learning, and dexterity” of working-class men (55). It “affirmed the worth” of working-class men and their sporting interests, regardless of the objections of their bosses (53).

Boss spinners were essential workers in 19th-century textile mills in England and America. In the mid-1800s, the spinning mules used in textile mills were among the biggest and most expensive machines in the world, and the men who operated them were called boss spinners. Johnson shows that operating the spinning mules required “a practiced mix of strength and a sensitive touch” (32), and that “when a spinner had labored with a mule for a few weeks no one else could run it” (33).