BEACHES

Not counting Alaska, the mainland United States has more than 88,000 miles of tidal shoreline, much of it marked by the concave arcs of "wave-deposited sediment" that geologists define as beaches. Yet since the early nineteenth century, Americans have treated beaches as more than dynamic geological formations subject to the shifting patterns of wind, wave, and tide. Beaches have become the most cherished and coveted feature of the nation's natural geography. Although making up only 17 percent of the nation's land mass, the narrow coastal fringe is home to more Americans (153 million in 1998) than the rest of the United States combined. In the early nineteenth century, only the richest and most leisured elite had any interest in spending time at the shore; today, a quarter of the American population—and twothirds of California's—visits a beach one or more times every year. The "beach" has become the nation's universal playground and a primary symbol of what constitutes the "good life" in the United States.

In the most important sense, going to the beach specifically has meant not going to work. Beaches seemed to be a part of nature; thus, they seemed to encourage communion with elemental forces lurking beneath the veneer of civilized life, or acting outside the bounds and rules that confined ordinary life. Yet Americans have continuously worried that the pleasures of sun and surf could become dissipations that compromise individual integrity and undermine social morality. Does a beach outing refresh the vacationer to be more productive at work, or make her or him wish never to work again? Does swimwear free the body to enjoy nature's goodness, or turn women into sexual objects? Such vexed questions and ambivalent attitudes, which have been part of the larger history of work and leisure in the modern period, suggest how beaches and beachgoing in particular have paralleled important social, cultural, and economic changes of the last two centuries.

Attitudes Toward Beaches in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America

Until the mid-eighteenth century, most Western Europeans and Euro-Americans who did not make their livings at the seaside avoided it. Instructed by local lore as well as Judeo-Christian accounts of the flood, most people fearfully beheld the ocean as the "great abyss" of disorder, incomprehensible mysteries, and ferocious sea creatures. But after 1750, Westerners began reimagining the sea and seaside as resources for revitalization. Physicians and former invalids led the way, hailing the curative powers of inhaling salty air and submerging the naked body into the icy wintertime ocean. Romantic artists and growing numbers of ordinary urban dwellers sought similar coastal therapies. If they felt confused about who they really were or believed city life had alienated them from nature, wandering the beach and contemplating the clash of the elements on the shoreline, the historian Alain Corbin has observed, was a way "to discover—or better yet, perhaps, to rediscover—who they were" (p. 164). American writers and painters searching for such self-knowledge led the way to the seashore. The poet Walt Whitman, for example, recalled haunting beaches near New York City in the 1830s, watching "the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in" and pondering how to make "this liquid, mystic theme" into poetry (p. 67).

Aside from artists, the earliest seaside tourists usually belonged to the northern mercantile and southern planter elite. These people not only could afford days or even months of leisure at a time; they also believed they needed to recuperate in this manner. In the 1820s and 1830s, a commercial leisure economy emerged in the Northeast to serve such desires. Regular steamboat service carried Boston's leading citizens to the rocky shoreline of Nahant, a peninsula jutting into Massachusetts Bay north of the city. Wealthy Philadelphians amused themselves on the New Jersey shore at Cape May. Newport, Rhode Island, was the era's premier seaside resort. Located near the southern tip of Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay, Newport had been a leading Atlantic port and manufacturing center in the 1770s, but rapidly went into decline in the postrevolutionary period. In the 1820s and 1830s, though, as the nation's growing commercial aristocracy sought places for relaxation and recreation, Newport rebounded as a stylish getaway within proximity of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. By 1860, America's "fashionable resort for rank, fashion, and beauty" featured eleven hotels and twenty-nine boardinghouses. Yet all of these facilities and kindred amusements were positioned out of sight of the dramatic coastline. The resort population avoided the beach except during the fashionable morning bathing hours. Socializing was the preeminent occupation, which prompted Henry David Thoreau to observe that Newport's leisured set much preferred "wine" to "brine."

Newport's high life offended the modest purses and sensibilities of many middle-class Americans, but the seaside camp-meeting grounds spawned by the great religious revivals of the era did not. Wesleyan Grove on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, which held its first outdoor revival in 1835, was typical of such "Christian retreats." By the late 1850s, Wesleyan Grove's original communal accommodations had been replaced by hundreds of private tent residences spread over almost fifteen acres near the shore. In the late 1860s, small cottages were replacing the tents, and the Methodists consolidated their camp with the speculative shoreline development of Oak Bluffs. The two areas together blossomed into a resort offering beach recreation with a clear conscience: no gambling or drinking, but plenty of bathing, except on Sunday. For the rest of the century, other "Christian" (that is, Protestant) retreats—Ocean Grove, New Jersey; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Lake Bluff, north of Chicago on Lake Michigan—followed a similar pattern of accommodating "innocent" or hygienic beach recreations with Christian self-improvement.

The transformation of revival campgrounds into recreational beach resorts at mid-century prefigured what historian Cindy Aron calls "the democratization of vacationing" in the United States between 1850 and 1950. Once considered the luxury of a privileged few, vacations came to be regarded as a national necessity and entitlement, first for the growing urban population of middle-income corporate and professional workers, then, in the decades before World War II, for working-class families, too. The emergence of the vacationing American reflected important developments in the nineteenth century: first, the new medical and popular consensus that time away from work, especially in the salubrious environment of clean sea or mountain air, was essential to a man's vigor; second, the growing agreement among leading Protestant religious authorities that pleasure was not an evil in itself, especially if it served, as one minister put it, to "send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit;" third, the growth of what historian Orvar Löfgren calls a "new mode of consumption . . . based on the idea of leaving home and work in search of new experiences, pleasures, and leisure" (p. 5).

By the 1870s and 1880s modestly priced summer resorts and cottage communities were proliferating at the nation's lakefronts and mountain passes, but seashores were the preferred getaway, especially for the weary breadwinning man. "There is nothing so restful to the restless American," a businessman observed in 1896, "as the sight and sound of the unresting sea" (Lencek, p. 154). In the late century New Jersey's 100 miles of Atlantic shoreline had fifty-four seaside resort cities, foremost of which was Atlantic City, which featured 400 hotels by 1900. Sojourners to Put-in-Bay Island, Ohio, an inland shore resort in the western basin of Lake Erie, reported hotels "full to overflowing" with refugees from Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, and other points west. Even further west, white-collar families from Portland flocked to Clatsop Beach, "the great watering place of Oregon"; those from San Francisco crossed the mountains to Santa Cruz, the "Naples of the Pacific Coast." Middle-class African Americans frequented resorts friendly to them at Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard or Highland Beach on Chesapeake Bay.

Vacations were refreshing, but they were not a waste of time; taking time off signaled middle-class respectability. Vacationers usually bathed in the morning to avoid the intense sun, and they devoted their afternoons and evenings to strolling on boardwalks, napping (the hammock became a fixture of beach cottage life in this period), dining, and pursuing commercial amusements. Victorians counseled restraint and modesty, but beach behavior and use proved difficult to regulate. While Europeans bathed at gender-segregated beaches, American women and men usually swam "happily" together, as a newspaper reported in 1885, "without reference to age [or] sex." Middle-class women donned cumbersome bathing suits of light flannel or muslin, plus caps, stockings, and even gloves; men's suits covered their upper legs and torsos. But a lively surf tossed women's and men's bodies together and destabilized self-control. Moreover, wet bathing suits revealed more than was respectable. Just being at the beach encouraged men and, especially, women to feel less restrained by convention. Like other new leisure practices at the turn of the century, beachgoing contributed to a new middle-class style of living by undermining Victorian restraints and encouraging a more heterosocial culture in which women pursued pleasure in public, sometimes with men and sometimes not.

Popularity of Beaches in the Twentieth Century

Throughout the twentieth century, Americans have continued to look to beaches as refreshing resorts where living the "simple life" enabled introspection, self-awareness, and revitalization. Yet the ways in which they used and understood beaches underwent dramatic changes in the interwar years. For one, beaches were more popular and crowded. Inexpensive mass transit systems linked urban working-class neighborhoods to nearby shorelines, like New York's Coney Island. The rapid growth of automobile ownership and construction of roadways made it easy for urban and suburban working people to make a day's excursion or longer to the shoreline. The Dixie Highway, completed in 1927, snaked from Chicago and the Great Lakes region to Miami, the new Mecca for wintertime "snowbirds." By the end of the 1930s, too, most full-time American workers received week-long paid summer vacations. Persons of limited means not only could afford, but also desired extended stays at Atlantic City's inexpensive hotels, or a week at oceanside campgrounds, where they enjoyed the same views, if not accommodations, as rich folks. As many as 10,000 vacationed each summer at Tent City on Coronado Beach near San Diego, where $4.50 rented a furnished canvas tent for a week next door to the grand Hotel del Coronado, a favored resort for celebrities.

White Americans also went to the beach to frolic in the sun. Victorians had prized fair skin, which not only marked a person's inner virtue but also reinforced the racial and class boundaries between white and non-white and non-manual and manual laborers. But in the 1920s Americans, who were still concerned that urban life weakened them, became sun worshipers. A tan suggested the physical power and athleticism valued in men and, increasingly, in women. Many whites also coveted a tan because of the stereotype that dark-skinned races possessed a savage and sexual vigor. At Cape May in 1925, an African American newspaper noted that black people were confined to an undesirable corner of the beach, but white "life-guards, burnt so dark that they were eligible for the jim-crow car, were the envy, particularly of the [white] women." Lifeguards aside, a suntan broadcast the bearer's position of privilege, rather than lack of it; she or he had the leisure to sunbathe.

The suntan craze in the 1920s suggested how the beach had become a setting for staging and celebrating the well-groomed body. In the 1910s, the Portland (Oregon) Knitting Company introduced the affordable Jantzen line of swimsuits for women. Made of colorful form-fitting jersey knit, Jantzen suits symbolized the "new woman" of the 1920s who loved "to dive into clear, cool water and feel every muscle active—stroke after stroke as [she swam]!" Meanwhile, ads for the muscleman Charles Atlas promised weakling men that beach bullies would never kick sand in their faces again—if they purchased his fitness program. Glistening in leopard-skin briefs, Atlas also modeled the bare-chested look that American men would adopt for the beach by the end of the 1930s.

After 1945, getting away to the beach became an American pastime, and the laid-back and sun-filled beach "lifestyle" a well-advertised expression of postwar consumerism, although the nation's rapidly growing population of affluent suburbanites were no longer trying to escape the frenzy of city life. America's new premier beach escape was Hawaii. A year after the U.S. Congress made the islands an American territory in 1900, the first modern resort opened in Honolulu. Hawaii remained an exclusive destination for the rich and famous until World War II brought working- and middle-class sailors and GIs to the bases there. Many would return in the mid-1950s once affordable jet travel moved the beaches of Waikiki within reach of the mainland middle-class masses. A one-time family vacation or honeymoon seemed the height of luxury, glamour, and the exotic, which was why, through the 1960s and 1970s, a week in Hawaii was the luxurious grand prize on TV game shows like Let's Make a Deal.

An alternative, but related, hedonistic counterculture of sun, sea, and heterosexual sensuality developed in California in the postwar decades. Southern California surfers were an obscure subcultural tribe until the early 1960s, when beach movies and "surfing music" popularized the "Endless Summer" lifestyle: baggie shorts, huarache sandals, bushy blond hair, and, as the duo Jan and Dean explained in their song "Surf City," "two girls for every boy." Later, hippies, seeking to live in harmony with untouched nature, set up camps on the Baja Peninsula south of the Mexican border. Movie stars and celebrities settled the magnificent Malibu beach as their private preserve. The teenage surfing set's bonfire parties, soirees at Malibu, and makeshift settlements at Baja consciously rejected the packaged paradise of volcano tours and luaus that drew middle-class adults to Hawaii, but all of these uses of the beach exploited fictions about communing with nature, retreating from civilization, and playing instead of working at the seaside—motivations that had drawn Americans to beaches since the early nineteenth century.

Since the early 1980s, new concerns that the beach may be bad for health have arisen. Warnings of ozone layer depletion heightened fears that cancer-causing ultraviolet rays were shooting down unfiltered onto the bodies of sunbathers. At the end of the decade, New York and New Jersey beaches closed when used needles and other medical waste washed onshore. Outbreaks of fecal coliform bacteria, usually attributable to sewage runoff in areas of dense residential development, continually shut down freshwater and saltwater beaches to swimmers. Residential developments on the Gulf of Mexico from Florida through Texas—one of the fastest-growing regions in the country—have devastated coastal fishing and shellfish populations. Hurricanes and the severe beach erosion attributed to global warming make buying beach property a risky venture. Yet even if the beach seems more and more a dimension of modern industrial, urban, and consumer culture than a haven from it, Americans still go there to discover or announce who they are, although the journeys often follow a multiplicity of routes reflecting interest group preferences. The very wealthy fight for property in expensive coastal areas in Santa Barbara, California. Gay men claim Provincetown in Massachusetts and Fire Island in New York as their particular playgrounds. Retirees bake in the sunshine of Florida's "Gold Coast," from Palm Beach to Miami Beach, while each spring, more than 100,000 students from historically black colleges descend on Daytona Beach, 250 miles to the north, for Black College Reunion. Much as a coastal vacation announced that Americans had "arrived" in the late nineteenth century, a day or longer at the shore remains an important way in which Americans define themselves through the pleasures and liberties the beach affords.

See also: Atlantic City; Boating, Power; Coney Island; Spas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aron, Cindy S. Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World. Translated by Jocelyn Phelps. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Culliton, Thomas J. "Population: Distribution, Density and Growth." National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) State of the Coast Report. Silver Spring, Md.: NOAA, February 1998.

Immerso, Michael. Coney Island: The People's Playground. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Lencek, Lena, and Gideon Bosker. The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth. New York: Viking, 1998.

Löfgren, Orvar. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

——. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.

Sterngass, Jon. First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport & Coney Island. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Stilgoe, John R. Alongshore. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. Boston: David R. Godine, 1971.

Woodroffe, Colin D. Coasts: Form, Process and Evolution. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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