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LEISURE

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Between 1820 and 1870 changes in the nature and structure of American labor simultaneously transformed the practice and the concept of leisure in the United States. At the beginning of the antebellum period, when the majority of Americans still lived on farms or in small towns, leisure activities were predominantly rural, communal, and improvisatory, and the line separating leisure from work was often blurred. Over the next half-century, however, as more Americans moved to cities and as wage-centered industrial employment with its omnipresent time clock displaced both rural and artisanal work rhythms, labor and leisure became increasingly separate realms. Although the pace of change differed by region, the nature of leisure shifted as well, becoming, like labor, more routinized, specialized, and commodified. There were benefits to these changes: for the first time, new forms of commercial leisure and spectator entertainments were within the reach of working-class Americans. But there were drawbacks as well. Fault lines in the wider culture separating genders, classes, and ethnic groups often formed in the world of leisure, resulting in exclusions and hierarchies. In the South, at least until the 1860s, the leisure activities of an entire class depended on the forced labor of black slaves.

Under the pressure of these changes, disagreements over the "proper" use of leisure, which had been common since the colonial period, became more vocal and sometimes violent. Injunctions against idleness and profligacy appeared with renewed vigor, particularly early in the period, and many middle- and upper-class Americans sought to stamp out or reform what they considered disreputable or even dangerous amusements. At the same time, the monotony and tediousness of industrial labor, fast becoming an inescapable reality for many in the United States, helped steer a profoundly work-oriented culture toward a halting but ultimately affirmative embrace of play. Class-based debates over leisure did not wholly abate; but alongside such disputes there emerged a growing appreciation for the restorative, character-building, and even morally uplifting dimension of time productively spent away from work. This trend, which would evolve into an even more emphatic "gospel of play" by the end of the century—propelled in part by mid-century health reform movements and the spread of active outdoor sports—was one of the most important of the era.

American writers participated in these revaluations of work and play in myriad ways. Not only did literary texts frequently depict and comment on scenes of leisure, but reading itself, through the dramatic expansion of affordable newspaper, journal, and book publishing, also became a prominent—and to some minds, freshly dangerous—leisure activity. Nineteenth-century American literary works thus inculcated new ideals of play, challenged existing or emerging ideologies of leisure, and probed the cultural divisions exacerbated or initiated by new forms of, or new ideas about, recreation and amusement.

A brief note on terminology: although during this period the terms "leisure," "play," "recreation," "sport," and "amusement" were sometimes used interchangeably, each also developed its own nuances of meaning. "Leisure" tended to refer to free time most broadly, "play" to the activities of children, "recreation" to actions that refreshed or rejuvenated, "sport" to organized games or events, and "amusement" to paid entertainments.

THE DIVERSITY OF LEISURE ACTIVITIES

Although foreign visitors to the United States in the early nineteenth century often complained that Americans were too consumed by business to take leisure seriously, anyone traveling widely through the country in the early 1820s would have been witness to a diverse range of leisure activities. Often varying by region, these activities also differed in purpose, scale, and level of participation. On the western frontier of Illinois or Michigan, for example, one would likely have encountered preindustrial forms of recreation, including barn raisings, corn huskings, quilting bees, and other communal activities that introduced an element of fun into the large-scale tasks often necessary in farming societies. One might also have found ample attention paid, particularly among men, to such blood sports as cockfighting, which were popular not just in rural areas but in towns and cities around the country as well. Rat baiting, in which spectators typically wagered on the number of rats a dog could kill within a given period of time, became a popular leisure activity among working-class men in New York City, among other places, in the 1830s.

Other spectator sports operated on a grander scale. In 1823 perhaps as many as seventy thousand people—including northerners, southerners, whites, blacks, and men and women from all classes—gathered at Union Course, Long Island, to watch the northern thoroughbred, Eclipse, defeat its southern challenger, Sir Henry, in a twenty-thousand-dollar match race. Although such huge crowds remained rare in the largely preprofessional antebellum era, prominent bare-knuckle prizefights, rowing matches, and even walking races (known as "peds," short for "pedestrian" races) at times drew similarly large audiences and wagers.

Americans also pursued more private recreations. In towns and cities, voluntary societies, such as those founded by immigrant groups to preserve cultural and linguistic ties, often sponsored musical, theatrical, or athletic gatherings for their members. Many Americans seeking to connect anew with the natural world were drawn to such field sports as hunting and fishing, which, especially in nonrural areas, had only recently become recreational rather than subsistence activities. Along the East Coast in particular, inspiration for such pursuits might have come indirectly from the Romantic poetry of writers such as William Cullen Bryant or, a bit later, from reflections on nature's regenerative spiritual power by such transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau.

More broadly, though in equally diverse ways, rhetorics of leisure, recreation, and sport often played significant roles in the works of many of the most popular early-nineteenth-century American authors. In "Rip Van Winkle" (1819–1820), a story by Washington Irving (1783–1859), for example, although the easygoing Rip will uncomplainingly help his neighbors complete even the most arduous of tasks (and is always prominent at work frolics and bees), he scrupulously avoids all activity that resembles profitable labor. Rip is not punished for his dilatory ramble into the Kaatskill Mountains, when an afternoon of leisurely squirrel hunting turns into a twenty-year nap—he even snoozes through the American Revolution—but is instead rewarded with an old man's immunity from responsible work. Other writers, particularly those who set their fiction on the frontier, also championed an ethic of play over busyness. The best-selling Leatherstocking novels (1823–1841) by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) are a case in point. Drawing on the already mythologized image of the wilderness hunter epitomized by Daniel Boone (1734–1820), Cooper's novels not only depict frequent scenes of frontier sport (as well as unsporting frontier waste, as proto-industrial modes of mechanized slaughter mock the sportsman's code of honor and restraint), but they also transform his character Natty Bumppo—also known as Deerslayer, Pathfinder, and Hawkeye—into a nearly mythic figure of sporting fair play.

Related yet distinct literary traditions buttressed regional notions of leisure and play. Southwestern humorists, for example, countered Cooper's heroic sporting myth with the outlaw figure of the backwoods gamesman, whose role was to outwit an unsuspecting genteel opponent—or better yet, another backwoods con man. Among the plantation romancers of the American South, by contrast, the respectable leisure and spirited play of the landed class was offered as proof of the superiority of southern culture. Swallow Barn (1832), a novel by John Pendleton Kennedy (1795–1870), though in certain ways ambivalent about planter class values, helped link the genre of plantation fiction to the idea of the distinctiveness of southern, predominantly male, leisure. These traditions also had their own implicit and explicit critics. In her 1839 novel of the Michigan frontier, A New Home—Who'll Follow?, for example, Caroline Kirkland (1801–1864) challenged many of the classic motifs of the frontier sporting tradition with a deflating irony. Recollections of a Southern Matron (1837), by Caroline Howard Gilman (1794–1888), minimizes masculine honor and sporting culture in favor of domestic attentiveness and feminine compassion. Southern black autobiographers such as Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) depicted the powerful communal bonds forged among slaves during moments of temporary relaxation from toil while simultaneously critiquing the planter's common contrivance of providing intermittent leisure to bondsmen and bonds-women, particularly at Christmastime, to defuse the threat of revolt.

Americans seeking to read about diverse leisure activities could look to journalism as well as literature. The first national sporting magazines appeared in the 1810s and multiplied in each of the next five decades. Among the most influential was Spirit of the Times, launched in 1831 by William T. Porter (1809–1858) and marketed to sporting gentlemen. Reaching a national circulation of over 40,000, Porter's paper provided not merely sporting but also theatrical news and humorous sketches. Those who could not afford the ten-dollar annual subscription fee to Spirit of the Times could turn instead to the penny press, which offered, in addition to sports news, salacious reporting on crime and scandal. Women readers had their own leisure magazines, most prominently Godey's Lady's Book, first published in 1830 and reaching as many as 150,000 subscribers at its peak before the Civil War. An illustrated national monthly best known for printing sentimental literature, advice columns, and water-color engravings of women's fashions, Godey's provided its readers with a dynamic mix of information and entertainment, as well as spiritual, moral, and aesthetic uplift.

REFORMERS TAKE AIM

Nowhere were the changes taking place in American leisure more visible or controversial than in U.S. cities. To many middle- and upper-class moralists—weaned on a nineteenth-century evangelicalism that judged idleness and intemperance even more censoriously than had their Puritan forebears—the persistence of blood sports, the pervasiveness of gambling, and the proliferation of working-class dance halls, theaters, and saloons were all signs of irredeemable spiritual and social degradation. Where possible, reformers tried to control working-class leisure. Using moral suasion and regulation, they succeeded, for example, in placing modest constraints on liquor sales. Attempts to shape workers' free time more drastically, however, met with opposition or indifference from workers themselves, who continued to patronize "Bowery" entertainments (typically the only affordable alternatives for working-class men and women) or simply ignored genteel injunctions against, for example, alcohol consumption and boisterous play in such new leisure venues as urban parks.

Literary responses to the rise of reformist energies varied. Capitalizing on both the reformers' zeal for condemning the misuse of leisure and the public's thirst for titillating narratives, popular novels that grimly illuminated the depths to which the unsuspecting leisure abuser might fall often became massive best-sellers. These included George Lippard's The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) and Timothy Shay Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854). Respectable national magazines such as Harper's Weekly periodically satirized such popular urban pleasure grounds as Jones's Woods on the east side of Manhattan, which featured bowling alleys, dancing stands, and beer halls, as well as space for picnics, sporting events, and festivals. Accompanying one such editorial from 1859 was an engraved illustration showing a densely packed exurban scene, at the center of which appeared an anxious young mother. In the near background leer bearded, heavy-jowled men; on the right margin an eager young man—identified in the editorial as the woman's husband—takes aim at targets in a shooting gallery, forgetful of his family (indeed, according to the editorial, he will soon be swindled by gamblers who con him into wagering on his next shots); on the far left two men, one of them an aproned African American, perhaps taking a break from work, quaff beer. In the top right corner of the engraving, above the forgetful husband's head, three apprehensive figures momentarily defy gravity on the vertiginous upswing of a ballistic ride, while above the whole scene teeters an insouciant high-wire performer, his face plastered with an inane grin.

Literary critics have differed in their assessment of the degree to which American writers partook of the reformist, or conversely, the resistant, attitude toward mid-century attempts to control leisure. Some have argued that in his writings, with the exception of The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) stages the repeated defeat of play at the hands of sin and death. Others discern in Hawthorne's work a deep ambivalence toward contemporary reform culture and its susceptibility to the very immoralities it professed to correct. In the case of Thoreau (1817–1862), scholars generally agree that his major works, particularly Walden (1854), offer the paradoxical ideal of earnest play as life's most important work. But some have also noted that Thoreau's ideal pointedly excludes from its otherwise capacious imaginings such new Americans as the Irish immigrants crowding Walden's shores in the middle of the century. According to some critics, Herman Melville's work subverts reform ideology; for others it is suffused with, and enriched by, a dark reformist rhetoric. The fact that Melville (1819–1891), along with Irving, signed the inflammatory elite petition that helped trigger the Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849—in which the city's militia, anxious to protect the upper-class Opera House from working-class demonstrators protesting elite support for a despised British actor, shot into a crowd of thousands, killing at least twenty-two—highlights how deeply mid-century conflicts over leisure touched many Americans, famous and obscure.

A NEW SPIRIT OF PLAY

Beginning around 1850, a few formerly rabid critics of leisure broke ranks to speak out on behalf of beneficial play and repose. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), Harriet Beecher Stowe's younger brother, was one such figure. Barely ten years after Beecher had published his fiery sermons against idleness, Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844), which would remain one of the best-selling American advice books for at least another generation, the influential minister unexpectedly shifted his position and offered praise for the restorative effects of rest and relaxation. Part of the impetus behind this shift was Beecher's own move to Brooklyn from Indianapolis. Away from the relative deprivations of the Midwest, Beecher gradually embraced the new ideology of repose taking shape in thriving middle-class suburbs such as Brooklyn. Surplus and rest, well used, might bring joy rather than dissipation, Beecher argued. He also found himself influenced by the new mid-century reform emphasis on health and exercise. Alarmed by the pale, sickly bodies of overworked Americans, some Christian reformers embraced physical improvement as a necessary part of mental and spiritual uplift. In his important 1858 essay, "Saints, and Their Bodies," Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911)—later a Civil War colonel and also an interlocutor of Emily Dickinson—argued that only a more "muscular" Christianity would be "manly" enough to confront the multiple dangers of the age.

Under the influence of spiritual and intellectual leaders such as Beecher and Higginson, the idea that leisure, sport, and recreation—rightly managed—might actually build character rather than destroy it, slowly took hold. This timely ideological shift not only validated the new middle-class practice of taking planned vacations from work; it also encouraged the expansion of nascent, male-dominated outdoor sports such as baseball, cricket, and rowing while simultaneously rehabilitating older, less reputable indoor pastimes such as tenpin bowling and billiards. In the proper setting, almost any formerly vicious pursuit could be rendered wholesome. Other activities and recreations that instilled or rewarded Victorians' sense of healthful discipline, order, and self-control, such as calisthenics and gymnastics (a staple program of many German immigrant fraternal organizations), found new participants, not only in cities but eventually on college campuses and in the schools. By 1870 many of the bureaucratic and organizational structures that would underlie modern sports and recreation were firmly in place, including the first professional baseball associations, city and regional athletic clubs, and both the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations. Less formal and more social recreational activities, including ice skating, sledding, croquet, and an entire class of private "home entertainments," thrived during this period as well and encouraged mixed-sex play. Although this new ideology of leisure was theoretically available to all, and while its broad cultural success eventually helped suppress some of the working-class activities most objectionable to middle-class reformers, in the last decades of this era most leisure activities, especially commercial pursuits, were deeply stratified by economic status. In addition, women's participation in the new leisure culture, while expansive in many ways, was limited in others, particularly as male-oriented sports drew an ever-larger share of cultural attention. And while the importance of the freedom conferred by emancipation on black Americans cannot be underestimated—for the first time, most blacks ostensibly controlled their work and leisure time—a postwar color line frequently prevented full participation in America's new sporting ethic.

American writers continued to shape and critique the new ideas about play emerging after 1850. In Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855), for example, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) seems fully to share the reformers' newfound respect for productive relaxation and a healthy body, repeatedly celebrating the freedom and exhilaration of a vigorous "manhood." In Ragged Dick (1867), the first of Horatio Alger Jr.'s massively successful serial novels, Alger (1832–1899) imagines a working-class bootblack addicted to low pleasures and commercial entertainments who is pulled out of the Bowery and into the middle class by his own newly awakened desire for respectability in both work and play. Conversely, Herman Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (1855) and Rebecca Harding Davis's (1831–1910) Life in the Iron Mills (1861) both provide dark portraits of the class and gender stratifications that continued to structure labor and leisure despite the presence of these new ideas, whereas domestic satirists such as Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton, 1811–1872) called attention to the particular labors of working women, a class largely overlooked by leisure reform. Finally, African American activists and writers such as Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), through their speeches, poems, and stories, similarly critiqued the seemingly endless toil of black workers who all too frequently had no margin for rest, relaxation, or play. After 1870, although free time and disposable income would finally begin to increase for most American workers, regardless of class, region, race, or gender, the larger questions attending leisure not only failed to disappear—they grew, if anything, thornier and more vexed.

See also Circuses and Spectacles; Health and Medicine; Labor; Manhood; Reform; Urbanization

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks. 1867. Introduction by David K. Shipler. New York: Modern Library, 2005.

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories. Rev. ed., edited by Tillie Olsen. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1985.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.

Irving, Washington. "Rip Van Winkle." In The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.

Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion. Edited by Lucinda H. MacKethan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Kirkland, Caroline M. A New Home, Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life in the West. 1839. Edited by Sandra A. Zagarell. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Norton critical edition. Edited by William Rossi. New York: Norton, 1992.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: New York University Press, 1973.

Secondary Works

Braden, Donna R. Leisure and Entertainment in America. Dearborn, Mich.: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, 1988.

Butsch, Richard, ed. For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Click, Patricia C. The Spirit of the Times: Amusements in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore, Norfolk, and Richmond. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Dawson, Melanie. Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Gleason, William A. The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Gorn, Elliott J., and Warren Goldstein. A Brief History of American Sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Grover, Kathryn, ed. Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Lehuu, Isabelle. Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Oriard, Michael. Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Rogers, Daniel T. The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Spears, Betty, and Richard A. Swanson. History of Sport and Physical Activity in the United States. 3rd ed. Edited by Elaine T. Smith. Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1988.

William Gleason