Taking a vacation? You’re history!

It's June, so most of us are either taking our vacation or are planning to take one soon. Perhaps you are heading to the beach for two weeks, packing your gear for a camping trip, taking the kids to Disney World, visiting the national parks, or embarking on a trip to Europe. Regardless of which you choose, you probably do not realize that you are following patterns established more than a century ago. Vacationing has a history -- one that still resonates.
Vacationing began as a privilege of the early 19th-century elite -- southern planters and wealthy northerners who journeyed in search of health and pleasure. Over the last half of the century middle-class men and women, enjoying intervals set aside for rest and recreation, began to become part of a growing throng of vacationers. During these decades a vast variety of summer resorts took shape across the nation, catering to the increasing crowd of American vacationers. The spread of vacationing knew no regional boundaries. It was a nationwide phenomenon and it was the invention of a newly emerging middle class. The sorts of vacations with which many of us are familiar today took shape during the last four decades of the 19th century as middle-class men and women embarked on what, for many, was a new kind of experience.

But vacationing did not come easily to this new middle class. Vacationing generated fears and anxieties because vacationers were people at leisure and leisure remained problematic for middle-class Americans. Work, discipline, and industry were the virtues that allegedly counted for the success and well-being not only of individuals, but of the nation itself. Conversely, leisure and idleness were potentially sources of moral, spiritual, financial, and political danger. Vacationing posed risks, however, not only because it separated people from work, but also because vacationers often found themselves in environment where temptations lurked. As if idleness itself were not bad enough, those visiting summer resorts found plenty of opportunities for flirtations, gambling, and drink. Middle-class people were left with a persistent dilemma. How to enjoy their vacation without jeopardizing the commitment to work -- one of the very things that had made them middle-class in the first place?

The answer, for many, was to devise forms of vacationing that protected vacationers from some of the worst temptations and dangers that idleness posed. Methodists, for example, turned many of their camp meeting grounds into large and permanent summer resorts where rules prohibiting liquor and banning swimming on Sunday kept vacationers from violating codes of moral conduct. Chautauqua -- another Methodist-inspired venture in upstate New York -- combined vacation pleasures with a variety of educational opportunities. Vacationers at Chautauqua could attend lectures and take courses, thus spending their vacations in the quest for intellectual and spiritual self-improvement.

Others chose to become tourists -- traveling in search of natural and historic sights where they could witness God's wonders and visit the nation's sacred markers. Tourists were busy vacationers, people with a purpose. They left home not only to enjoy recreation and amusement but also to add to their stock of knowledge, experience, and information. Rather than idling away time at a resort, drinking juleps and flirting with strangers, a tourist could feel engaged in a constructive endeavor.

Camping provided a different alternative. By the late 19th century, growing numbers of middle-class vacationers were choosing to spend their vacations out-of-doors. Campers needed to pitch tents, build fires, cook (and sometimes fish and hunt for) their dinners. Thus they could not only exchange the sybaritic influences of resorts for the beauty and purity of nature, they could also avoid the potentially dangerous consequences of leisure by the "work" that camping required.

Our vacation habits today clearly reveal the legacy of the 19th century. How many of us have dragged our children (or remember being dragged by our parents) on instructive and culturally enriching vacations? The American tourists who run themselves ragged visiting European museums and churches, the families who journey to Washington, D.C., and tramp through museums and government buildings, and those of us who insist that our laptops, cell phones, and fax machines accompany us to the beach are all finding ways to make leisure useful and productive. Certainly not everybody chooses these options, but enough people do to suggest that frivolous amusement and idleness are still suspect among many Americans. The tensions between work and play with which American culture struggled in the 19th century has taken on some new guises, but flourishes still -- nowhere perhaps, ironically enough, more so than in the sorts of vacations we take.