The air-conditioned puritan アメリカ人の休暇取得と罪悪感
August 21st 2010 N1P45
Even when Americans do take time off, they find it hard to relax. Having holidayed for many years with a Wall Street lawyer, your columnist's slumber has all too often been disturbed in the early hours by the murmur of writs, affidavits and threatening letters being dictated by phone to New York from Provence, Tuscany and other otherwise tranquil locations. It may be that without this unremiting industry the lawyer and his family could not have afforded quite so many hops across the Atlantic. But it seems pretty clear that something cultural - that famous Protestant fear of idle hands and easeful nights - is at work as well.
That is certainly the argument of ゛Working at Play゛, Cindy Aron's aptly named social history of vacations in the United States, which argues that (up to 1940s at least, when her story ends) Americas have found themselves trapped in a love-hate battle with their holiday and have made a point of filling their leisure with various sort of work - religious, intellectual and therapeutic. The middle classes did not start to take holidays in a big way until the late 19th century, at a time when the values that mattered were still industry and dicipline, and when leisure and idleness were perceived as a sources of moral, spiritual, financial and political danger. Many a modern holiday resort, such as Matha's Vineyard in Cape Cod, sprang out of a Methodist summer camp created to offer spiritual rather than physical comfort.
Like all theories about America as a whole, this one has its holes. How to explain Las Vegas? Beside, not all immigrants to America brought Puritanism in their hearts. From the 1930s onwards Jews living in New York started to holiday in the hundreds of rooming houses and hotels that sprouted in the nearby Catkill mountains. By all accounts the self-contained world they created there every summer was dedicated unabashedly to pleasure. They danced the rumba, and ldter the bossa nova, and thrilled to crooners and comedians from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Though the posher hotels had swimming pools, golf courses and nightclubs, this was a magnet for Jews of all classes, and many families and their friends returned to the same hotels or rooming houses year after year, until air conditioning, affluence and cheap air travel made alternatives available and brought the enchanted little world to an end.
And yet neither affluence nor diversity seem to have made it as easy for Americans to relax on holiday in the way that guiltfree Europeans do. The American vacationer unable to silence his inner Puritan for those paltry 13 days a year must combine his holiday with some self-improving experience. Children are sent to camp to learn the Great Outdoors, or taught to fish or light fire by over-earnest fathers. Communing with history is another way to stiffen the laxity of a vacation: famous buildings, battlefields and landmarks are popular and lucrative draws. Not even Disney believes it can prosper by selling escapism alone. Hence its proposal for an American-history theme park outside Washington DC (a scheme thwarted by the objection of local residents). And if the educational holiday fails, there is always the pilgrimage.
