Leisure

Leisure. Recreation and leisure figure importantly in America's cultural, social, and economic history. In the Colonial and earlier national eras, leisure activities were shaped by the agrarian nature of the economy, as well as by regional, gender, and class differences. In colonial New England, leisure was subject to religious strictures and close community oversight, though the Puritans, contrary to popular stereotypes, enjoyed beer drinking, games, recreational hunting, and social occasions, and the region's court records recount many instances of colonists engaging in a wide range of diversions discountenanced by the authorities, even on the Sabbath. The more easygoing middle and southern colonies tolerated a variety of leisure activities, including tavern going, dancing, gambling, and horse racing. Among the southern landed gentry, horse racing and fox hunting provided occasions for social display. Slaves enjoyed scant leisure, though records of African‐influenced singing and dancing in the slave quarters make clear that even this brutal labor system failed to extinguish the impulse for amusement and diversion.

In the cities of early America, opportunities for leisure pursuits gradually increased, including musical performances, theaters featuring visiting troupes from England, and even balls and dances. Charleston's St. Cecilia Society sponsored an annual subscription ball beginning in 1762. Most Americans through the mid‐nineteenth century were farmers, however, and leisure activities were largely centered around family, church, or other local institutions. Barn raisings, corn huskings, and harvest festivals; weddings and baptisms; and holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas provided breaks in the work routine, and occasions for family and community celebrations, as did elections, muster days (when local militias assembled and marched), and—after 1776—the Fourth of July. Women, while more closely tied to the home, organized quilting parties and sewing bees, and corresponded extensively with friends and relatives.

Profound social and economic changes in the mid‐ and later nineteenth century affected leisure practices. Urbanization encouraged commercialized leisure, stratified by social class and varying among different immigrant groups. Canals, railroads, the National Road, and steamboats allowed lecturers, performers, circuses, and theatrical companies to reach interior cities. In the larger cities, a new commercial elite patronized the opera, concert halls, theaters, and art museums. Boston's Academy of Music and New York's Astor Place Opera House (1847) became shrines of upper‐class leisure. The New York Yacht Club, established by wealthy sportsmen in 1844, sponsored the first America's Cup Race in 1851.

The rich sought out summer resorts such as Newport, Rhode Island; the Berkshires in western Massachusetts; Long Branch, New Jersey; and White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia. In the 1880s and 1890s, the railroad entrepreneur Henry M. Flagler built a string of luxurious vacation hotels, notably The Breakers at Palm Beach, along Florida's Atlantic coast. They also traveled more widely. Samuel L. Clemens' Innocents Abroad (1869) describes a tour of Europe and the Middle East by well‐to‐do Americans.

Middle‐class citizens seeking diversion flocked to lecture series, ranging from high‐minded discourses by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson to comic routines. A summer institute established for Sunday‐school teachers at Lake Chautauqua, New York, in 1874 by John H. Vincent evolved into a popular summer resort combining leisure and cultural uplift; it eventually spawned hundreds of local “Chautauquas” nationwide.

The quest for leisure and recreation took many forms. Urban parks, developed at mid‐century, offered islands of tranquility in the city. The first professional baseball team, the New York Knickerbockers, was founded in 1845, and baseball—both amateur and professional—surged in popularity after the Civil War. New York's Bowery Theater (1825), P.T. Barnum's American Museum (1842), and similar popular venues offered crowd‐pleasing melodramas, freak shows, and other amusements to a leisure‐seeking urban public. The 1850–1852 tour of singer Jenny Lind, the “Swedish nightingale,” arranged by Barnum, proved a tremendous success.

The waves of immigrants arriving between 1870 and 1920 introduced their own forms of leisure: the Yiddish theater popular with Eastern European Jews, the saints' feast days beloved of Italian Americans, the German‐American beer gardens and Turnvereins (athletic and singing clubs). While immigrant working‐class males patronized saloons, prizefights, and social clubs, young working women found other diversions, from department stores to ferry‐boat rides and amusement parks.

Urban commercialized leisure expanded as the nineteenth century wore on. The antebellum ministrel show evolved into vaudeville. Music halls such as Tony Pastor's in New York City (1865) offered popular songs, comedy routines, and variety sketches. Bandmaster John Philip Sousa (1854–1932), the “March King,” toured with great success. As new technologies developed, movies and recorded music made their appearance. Amusement parks modeled on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair sprang up, including three built by entrepreneurs at New York's Coney Island between 1895 and 1903. Progressive‐era reformers worried about this explosion of urban commercialized leisure. While some urged dance‐hall regulation and movie censorship, others organized civic pageants to entertain and instruct the immigrant masses and established supervised playgrounds to provide recreation and moral guidance for their children.

By the 1920s, leisure was both more standardized and more democratized. Americans flocked to Hollywood films, listened to network radio programs and popular songs produced in New York's Tin Pan Alley, and devoured mass magazines such as Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. The spread of automobiles, paved highways, and tourist cabins (which soon evolved into motels) stimulated family tourism to national parks, beaches, and big cities.

In the generally affluent decades from 1950 through the close of the century, commercialized leisure, increasingly controlled by multinational media conglomerates, expanded its reach. Television viewing exploded; the film and recording industries and professional sports thrived; computer video games diverted the young; and the travel industry flourished. With the introduction of jet aircraft, foreign travel, once an elite activity, became accessible to a broader range of Americans. The nation's first theme park, Disneyland, opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955, followed by scores of others, including Hersheypark in Pennsylvania, Nashville's Opryland, Cedar Point in Ohio, and the Six Flags chain. Thousands flocked to Branson, Missouri, to see aging pop stars perform one last time. Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida (1971), became enormously popular. By the 1990s, leisure was very big business in America.

Not all leisure was commercialized, however. Late‐ twentieth‐century Americans continued to find more small‐scale diversions, from camping, hiking, and biking to such age‐old pursuits as reading, gardening, and picnicking with family and friends. They joined in community‐ and church‐based recreational events; visited local parks, public gardens, and zoos; and engaged in such recreational activities as bowling, skiing, and competing in amateur baseball or soccer leagues. Despite its mass‐culture aspects and commercial trappings, leisure in America as the twentieth century ended remained highly diverse and resisted easy generalization.
See also Amusement Parks and Theme Parks; Automobile Racing; Automotive Industry; Basketball; Bicycles and Bicycling; Boxing; Chautauqua Movement; Dance; Football; Immigration; Minstrelsy; Music; Musical Theater; Popular Culture; Puritanism; Quilts and Quilting; Shopping Centers and Malls; Theater; Worlds Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

Carl Bode , The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840–1861, 1959.
Foster R. Dulles , A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play, 1965.
John F. Kasson , Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, 1978.
Warren James Belasco , Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945, 1979.
Judith A. Adams , The American Amusement Park Industry, 1991.
Peter G. Buckley , Popular Entertainment Before the Civil War; Richard V. Smith , Travel and Vacations; and Don B. Wilmeth , Amusement and Theme Parks, in Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of American Social History, III (1993), pp. 1611–25, 1677–88, 1705–11.

Paul S. Boyer