Play in America from Pilgrims and Patriots to Kid Jocks and Joystick Jockeys /R (OW 0LAY -IRRORS 3OCIAL #HANGE s Gary Cross Drawing on a range of sources in the history of play, this article discusses how play for all ages mirrors social change, especially but not exclusively in America. The article explores three broad themes from colonial times to the present: first, how play was shaped by changes in work and time at work; second, how play activities were transformed by emerging technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by commercialization; and third and finally, how play and its meanings changed along with childhood and the family. Common in many mammals and birds, play may be universal in humans. Across cultures and times, what people called playful took on similar patterns and served similar needs. Most often associated with children, play offered them ways to imitate future adult roles and to cope with their powerlessness. But play was not absent from adult life, though it may have been renamed recreation, leisure, or even entertainment and art. Play is also historical, built on past traditions, and transformed by changes that may seem only tangentially related to anything playful. I will not attempt to offer an encyclopedic treatment of that history, nor present a chronology of its development, nor even strive to cover the topic in its particular American setting. Instead I will trace the major themes of that transformation and offer examples of some of the ways in which play, its meaning, and its setting have changed since the arrival of the first white settlers in North America. I will show how play mirrors social change by exploring how it was shaped by work time, how play activities were transformed by technology and by commerce, and finally how play and its meanings changed along with the transformation of childhood and the family. © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 8 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  Work and Time Obviously and inevitably, play is shaped by work, but such shaping is much more complex and interesting than that statement might indicate. Work time and schedules invariably determine not only the duration and opportunity to play but also its character. And the type of work that people have done has had its impact on the kind of playful release they have sought. Conventionally, the history of the modern western world has been divided into three phases: preindustrial (ca. 1500–1800), industrializing (roughly the nineteenth century), and mass consumption or sometimes postindustrial (twentieth century). With interesting exceptions, American history shares in this three-stage development. Like most agricultural-based societies where goods were made chiefly with simple tools, in preindustrial America play was limited by the routine and time-consuming demands of tending animals, plowing fields, and spinning flax into linen yarn. This was a world of sunup to sundown toil, where muscles not machines did most of the work. Work was as much the lot of children, certainly any child over four years old, as it was of adults. Most families worked as an economic unit, though men, women, and children did different jobs. But this did not mean no one played. Rather, they did so in ways different from the ways we play today. Most preindustrial leisure took place during seasonal respites from work after the harvests were in and the pigs slaughtered (coinciding with the Christmas holiday, for example). In fact, most traditional festivals of the Christian calendar in Europe corresponded with seasonal lulls in farm work. Another characteristic of such play was its collective, often cross-generational nature. Poverty certainly called for group pleasures—no one had a room of his or her own, and most work took place in groups. Yet even for the rich there was no privacy, and thus dining, drinking, sports, games, and other leisure activities took place in large gatherings.1 American colonists did not transport the full European festival calendar with them across the Atlantic. They abandoned, for example, Carnival and Shrove Tuesday. In New England, Puritan leaders eschewed the celebration of Christmas, which they considered pagan and unbiblical. Workers in some skilled urban trades in England and France took informal time off on Mondays, which they often dubbed St. Monday, but such leave remained rare in America. Partly, Americans abandoned the old traditions of communal play in the colonies because of Puritan opposition, partly because, when they settled on isolated farms, they failed to reestablish the kind of European farming and village life Play in America around which festival leisure was organized.2 Still, communitarian festivities did not die in the migration; they were often simply expressed in different ways than in Europe. We see them in group hunting expeditions, in plantation house parties, in work frolics, in parades, and in celebrations around election days. Older collective traditions also survived. Cock fighting, horse racing, and rowdy holiday traditions formed around Christmas partying, especially outside Puritan-dominated areas. Sometimes, playful festivities occurred on the edges of crowds gathered for religious revivals, often with the organizer’s disapproval. Not only were frontiersmen like Abraham Lincoln skilled wrestlers in their youth, but chaotic games like greased pig contests were common to American fairs and other festive occasions in the nineteenth century.3 With labor that was mostly mind numbing, physically exhausting, and even humiliating, all under the strict supervision of slave masters and work bosses, play occasionally took on a Saturnalian character. Used in reference to the ancient Roman custom of a week of drinking in early December, Saturnalia was firstly a “binge,” common in many poor societies. Economic and other practical matters encouraged the use of intoxicants. Beer, wine, and spirits were ageless means of conserving fruit and grain in a world without refrigeration and modern food preservation. American corn and wheat was, of course, cheaply converted into whiskey. Alcoholic beverages were often safer to drink than ordinary water and milk, and they were integral to the workday in most trades and on many farms. Beer, fermented cider, or wine at work was long viewed as nourishment. It “strengthened” the laborer and got him through a 10– or a 12–hour day, and the employer sometimes supplied it.4 Another central feature of these festive times was wagering. While the Virginia Company sought to outlaw gambling by Jamestown’s settlers in 1607 in order to impose work discipline, the company nevertheless sponsored a lottery in England in 1612 to raise funds for the financially unstable colony. The adventurers who colonized Virginia scarcely saw any difference between the dangers of settlement and betting a tobacco harvest on a horse race. Both may have been long shots but both promised the potential for big payoffs. Settlers also commonly gambled on blood sports such as cock fighting, which paired roosters in duels to the death and was an obvious outgrowth of a rural agricultural society. As historian John Findlay has shown, gambling was at the heart of colonization and the western migration in America.5 Saturnalian play often expressed social tensions, especially protests against the rich and powerful. In holiday mumming, a British legacy to colonial cities 9 10 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  like New York and Philadelphia, groups of costumed youths went door to door demanding food and drink. Saturnalian outbursts could be violent, but the rich and powerful often tolerated them because holiday disorders were confined in time and place and authorities felt that these festivals released otherwise dangerous tensions. Even slaves were sometimes given the week between Christmas and New Year’s for partying. The ex-slave, Frederick Douglass, reported disapprovingly that “it was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas . . . .These holidays serve as . . . safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity . . . .The slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days in such a manner [of drunkenness] as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning.”6 Hunting served as another form of play. In Europe, hunting remained mostly the reserve of the rich, who had private access to the forests owned by the aristocracy. The colonies boasted undeveloped and even public land that housed large bands of pigeons and other game birds as well as herds of deer and many bear, which made the hunt a democratic and often a group activity. Although group hunting provided Americans with a practical source of food, they engaged in it for sport and pleasure as well. In a circle hunt, men drove thousands of animals into a glen and there slaughtered them. A seasonal respite from farming, the hunt offered excitement and competition for men who led dull lives.7 For all that, when early Americans did engage in Saturnalian play, they had to fit it into lulls in the daily grind. While workdays were usually long in colonial America, settlers interrupted the toil and routine with play breaks—a few minutes several times a day taken to gamble, gossip, even drink. For working men, sports and contests were not only often welcome but probably necessary breaks in a long day. In Benjamin Franklin’s description of journeymen at a London printing shop, the typical worker “drank every day a pint [of beer] before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work,” and did so often while playing games and gambling. Franklin thought he was merely describing an ancient tradition that thankfully Americans were abandoning.8 But he was wrong— eighteenth-century Americans did indeed break from work to watch fistfights, drink hard liquor, and gamble. The modern division between work and play had hardly developed, and this was even true of Puritan merchants in New England. Their business of trading sugar, slaves, and naval stores was strung out over Play in America months of waiting between the coming and going of cargoes. True enough, this left hundreds of hours free for religious activities, but it also provided time for conversation and for personal pleasures. As these presumably hard-working Yankees waited for their “ships to come in,” some, for example, played card and board games, which helps account for the New England origins of game companies like the Parker Brothers. For women—who had few seasonal breaks, like those enjoyed by men, from their daily tasks of child rearing, food preparation, and spinning—socializing and entertainment often took place during special group work projects. The sewing bee was an obvious example, but “frolics” for candle dipping and other essential projects also involved a feast, some wine, and much dancing to the music of amateur fiddlers. Even so serious an event as childbirth often included partying by female friends of the mother on the birthing stool. This mixing of work and play, so strange to us moderns who segment activities to an extreme degree, is key to our understanding of preindustrial leisure and the societies in which it existed.9 The rich and powerful of colonial America, of course, were less circumscribed by work and found special times and places for their playful activities. In many ways, the play of the elite in the preindustrial colonies was similar to that of the everyday colonist. Especially in the South, the wealthy drank, gambled, and hunted. But they also began to introduce new, more “refined,” genteel, and individualistic forms of play. Many of these began or developed in Northern Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries during the so-called Renaissance.10 These cultivated nonmilitary skills included formal dancing and music playing as well as pursuit of fashion in clothing, home decoration, and gardening. By the end of the seventeenth century, royal capitals were becoming centers of pleasure as well as power with the emergence of the secular theater, the concert hall, and even the tennis court. Urban aristocrats greatly refined the private dwelling, dividing space into areas for receiving guests and private chambers for residents. They also created specialized rooms and outdoor gardens for dining and entertaining separate from the public and its unruly crowds. In the larger towns, new venues for socializing appeared that promised more “refined” and genteel behaviors. Some coffeehouses, for example, became centers of lively conversation, while others featured gambling or newspaper reading. Pleasure gardens—expanses of green space featuring manicured gardens, fountains, alcoves, and walkways that charged an admission to keep out the poor—grew 11 12 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  prominent in eighteenth-century London and were soon imitated elsewhere. The urban nobility also introduced innovations like mechanical amusement rides and fireworks spectacles, launching new ideas about pleasure that would culminate in modern theme parks. Other new sites attracted an elite clientele. Inland springs like Bath offered a daily routine of morning bathing in and the drinking of waters, combined with rounds of socializing.11 In the American colonies, Newport, Rhode Island, served the same purpose, attracting wealthy visitors from as far away as the Carolinas. The resort’s pristine isolation provided the rich its warm Gulf Stream waters and its cooling breezes in the summer. Verandas and piazzas for strolling or sitting in rocking chairs allowed plenty of opportunity to see and be seen. These resorts set the stage for the modern seaside resort in the nineteenth century.12 Although the pastimes of the urban aristocrats were European inventions, rich American colonists emulated them in their fashionable promenades around Hanover Square in New York. Members of the Southern colonial gentry, like George Washington, cultivated an exclusive culture of Sunday afternoon rounds of visits with occasional treks to Annapolis, Williamsburg, or Charleston for balls, plays, concerts, and lawn bowling. Elites, both north and south, attended dancing schools and imported wines, liquors, and expensive foods for their parties, adopting the individualistic and rationalist ethic of the Renaissance and even more the Enlightenment. By the eighteenth century, the violence, irregularity, and social chaos so evident in traditional play had begun to offend this new gentry and merchant class.13 An extreme and early form of such change could be found among the English and American Puritans. They sought not only to isolate themselves from Saturnalian play, but to reorganize daily life by creating the modern work ethic that also transformed play. As historian Bruce Daniels shows, while Puritans in England and the Northern American colonies had a well-deserved reputation for attempting to eliminate gambling, theater, and drunkenness, they embraced “improving” leisure, play that “joineth pleasure and profit together,” as the English Puritan Richard Baxter put it. Moderate exercise, especially if it involved individual activities like walking, riding, or even shooting, was acceptable. Puritan passion for hymns and Bible reading translated later into new forms of leisure such as choral singing and the reading of modern literature. Few of us embrace the Puritan label, so much do we associate these Godly people with obsessive self-control and work. But their efforts to “redeem God’s time” in commitment to steady labor had subtle effects. They undercut traditional Play in America habits of mixing work and play and the old festival calendar. This led not only to opposition to a boisterous Christmas, but also to the Sunday family outing as a replacement for rough collective games. The Puritans helped to create a new locus of leisure by replacing the community or parish with the family for a more restrained, but also emotionally intimate social life. For them, the Sabbath became a day of weekly rest that guaranteed a new kind of balance between work and relaxation. This regular pattern—one day in seven—coincided with a new industrial and commercial rhythm of work. Unlike the rural cycle of seasonal labor and rest (or binging), the newer industrial pace was more steady and unwavering. Thus there emerged the notion of “recreation” as a restoration of the mind and body from and for work. The same methodical and individualistic attitude that Puritans adopted toward work was applied to recreation. These attitudes shaped the nineteenth-century movement for “rational” or purposive recreation, and they obviously are at the root of much of modern thinking about physical fitness and familial recreation.14 After the 1790s in the United States, industrialization began to change everything by mechanizing and disciplining labor in factories and offices and creating much more intense work time. But it also led to more wealth and eventually to more time free from work, both of which transformed the meaning of and opportunities for play. Especially key for notions of play, industrialization separated work time (for income) from “free” private time (eventually, in part, used for leisure). This separation occurred when jobs were removed from the family farm and cottage and centralized in the impersonal workshop and office. Among much else, this change, in turn, made possible the creation of a family-oriented leisure culture. Industrialization also broke up traditional seasonal “play times” insofar as work became more a day-in, day-out routine with no breaks because of the agricultural calendar. Bosses also clamped down on much on-the-job play. Moreover, the elite withdrew financial and moral support from festivals and attempted to create new, more regular and improving leisure patterns and to persuade a sometimes reluctant population to participate. American elites tried to weaken the Saturnalian communal forms of play by creating domesticated play (often child-centered—see the final section below) and by trying to control the play time of the “traditionalist” working and rural populations, especially men. In these ways, the history of leisure, especially in the nineteenth century, has been often about class identity and conflict.15 Scholars have persistently questioned just when and where mechanization actually changed work and leisure. It seems first to have affected textiles, then 13 skip pages 14-30 Play in America Childhood and the Family Play has been shaped not just by changes in work and technology but also by other key components of social life—family and childhood. In preindustrial America, family life and childhood were infused with work obligations. The household was the center of most labor. All members of the household, except for infants, were expected to contribute. Most play, too, took place within the domestic work group. The traditions of play were passed down through the group, even the wild and rebellious customs of youth like drinking, mumming, and holiday mischief. Yet, because houses were small and largely devoted to work, play took place largely outside the home—in bars and other public places or on the street and otherwise out-of-doors. Most typically, preindustrial play served the needs of adults more than those of children. Of course, children found the time and a place of their own in which to play outside the supervision of busy parents. As did the adults, children often played rough games that tested especially boys’ courage and loyalty to the group. Philippe Ariès, in his celebrated Centuries of Childhood, may have exaggerated when he described how, until modern times, children and adults intermingled in play. Adults, he said, played more like kids, and children were exposed precociously to such adult vices as drinking, promiscuous sex, gambling, and violent and boisterous games. Still, there is much evidence that “toys”—such as, say, balloons in eighteenth-century France or toy soldiers much earlier—were enjoyed first by adults and then passed down to children. The carousel had its origins in an aristocratic game played by adult men riding wooden horses, presumably to train for the ancient sport of jousting.53 With industrialization we see work being gradually removed from the home with the expansion of factories, offices, and other specialized workplaces. But the same process also had just as profound an impact on leisure. In fact, the home became a place of leisure for many in the nineteenth century—in historian Christopher Lasch’s words, a “haven from a heartless world” of increasingly impersonal labor and economic competition.54 The industrial system tended to oblige women either to withdraw from the economy (especially if their husbands enjoyed high incomes) or to work outside the home until marriage and especially childbirth forced them to remain at home raising children and doing housework. Increasingly freed from arduous work thanks to the hiring of servants, and later aided by the purchase of domestic appliances, middle-class women were also liberated from life-long childcare as they bore fewer children, 31 32 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  half the number in 1900, for example, as in 1800. Such changes made possible the domestication of leisure as women devoted time to decorating, entertaining, and organizing family holidays. For the industrial-era housewife, the home remained a place of both work and leisure, while husbands tended to view the domestic realm as exclusively for relaxation, the place where they compensated for their loss of control and lack of creativity on the job. In many ways, women’s leisure remained more traditional, interspersed with the demands of home and family care. In the nineteenth century, the home grew increasingly into a retreat from the market, one for a small circle of family members, one opened only on special events to a few friends and distant relatives.55 Prosperous middle-class Victorian families tried to isolate themselves from the boisterous public and make the home an effective alternative to the distasteful crowd. One of the principle motivations for modern suburbanization was to separate middle-class families—and especially their children—from the “dangers” of the busy city and the street play of working-class youths. The suburban neighborhoods that sprang up early in the nineteenth century served as a laboratory for the new leisure culture—private, familial, ultimately uplifting. These suburban homes set many precedents. Situated on large private lots, they could have gardens and, in a later American variant, extensive front and back lawns, providing opportunities for family games. The Victorian suburban home, totally bereft of economic purpose, developed into a multipurpose leisure center. Well-appointed parlors boasted displays of female accomplishments in the handicrafts, witnessed the performance of amateur singing and piano playing, served as the stage for demonstrations of magic lanterns and other precursors of movies, and provided a safe space for the playing of uplifting parlor games, often educational card and board games. On the second floor, the nursery not only isolated the very young from their parents but was really a playroom that provided a special place for toys and games. By the late nineteenth century, even the respectable working class devoted a large share of scarce living space to the dining room and parlor, which were often never used except for the formal visit of guests on Sunday evenings.56 Again family change gives us another way of understanding the disappearance of the old festivals and the transformation of holidays like Christmas. From about 1810 on, reformers in New York City and elsewhere promoted the turning of Christmas from an often rowdy holiday of public drinking, feasting, and theater into a private celebration of family, focused especially on young children. Americans, who in the early nineteenth century had celebrated July Play in America Fourth with the bacchanalian abandon of a village Mardi Gras, turned to family picnics by the 1850s. And after the Civil War, the American Thanksgiving became a tradition of family reunion. Holidays, once expressions of deep communal needs and occasions for expressions of Saturnalian tomfoolery, metamorphosed into celebrations of the genteel values of family harmony and the delight of the child.57 At the heart of this change was a new attitude toward children’s play. Earlier, adults excluded kids from their parties and sent them to the protected environment of playgrounds and nursery rooms. This paralleled the long-term commitment of adults to separating children from adults in work and younger from older children in age-graded schools. By around 1850, new manufacturing techniques, greater affluence, the coming of department stores, and mail order catalogs made children’s games and toys cheaper and more plentiful. Innovative interlocking building blocks and comical wind-up toys appeared in the 1860s and 1870s. But more common were simple miniatures of adult work tools—toy hammers and saws and garden tool sets for boys and dolls and miniature houseware sets for girls. In homes progressively devoid of productive tasks, toys served to simulate adult roles. Fairy tales from the late 1840s began to supplant the moralistic tales of Puritan writers. Play became the “work” of the child and the tools of play (toys, games, children’s literature) the parents’ indirect way of shaping their offspring.58 Older children came to be increasingly isolated in play. Consider the effort of middle-class reformers to transform sport. An activity that had been part of the Saturnalian festival culture, where men and youth gathered for rough and often chaotic play, gradually gained legitimacy in the nineteenth century as sport became equated with character building and with moral as well as with physical perfection. A new attitude toward the body emerged in the 1840s, and middle-class reformers—especially clergy and schoolmasters—no longer viewed it as merely a source of temptation, something that had to be disciplined by the mind and spirit. By training the body, they now decreed, one disciplined the will. Morality continued to connote self-restraint but it also increasingly implied vitality and action in the “real world.” Educators and clergy subscribing to this doctrine, often called Muscular Christianity, believed that moral courage could be cultivated through playing sports. Such beliefs necessarily led to the reform of physical contests. Educators outlawed disorderly, unsupervised games and blood sports, replacing them with games that stressed individual achievement (gymnastics, for example) and especially teamwork.59 33 34 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  The Victorian British elite ideally wished to isolate a boy in school until age sixteen or seventeen. There the boy not only obtained a formal education, but also found diversion in increasingly formalized sports. Organizations like England’s Football Association, founded in 1863, imposed strict rules that penalized bodily contact, encouraged team play, and developed individual skills such as kicking and passing. In America, organized sports emerged from different settings—from community groups like volunteer fire companies (baseball), from the YMCA (basketball), and from colleges (American football). But in America, too, sports in schools became almost as important as in England. American patrician Henry Cabot Lodge claimed in 1896 that college sports inculcated the skills of competition and accountability that were at the root of success in business. At the same time, sport could offer an alternative to what many found harmful in the modern industrial world. President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, found in the “strenuous life” an antidote to the moral degeneration of modern wealth and materialism. The temptation to self-indulgence and indolence could be averted by the self-sacrifice required by disciplined, competitive sports. The key, according to Roosevelt, lay in following the rules of competition and in winning and losing gracefully. In effect, sports underwent what Norbert Elias has called a “civilizing process.” So powerful were these values that they eventually transformed the games of those in school and church sport lower down the economic and social scale.60 Many institutions inculcated similar values of building character in the young through play. By 1870, the American “Y” had become a sports and physical fitness center for the urban middle class. The Boy Scouts, founded in 1908, aimed at a younger male. Historians like David Macleod and Michael Rosenthal stress the conservative, middle-class orientation of the scouts. Summer camp for youths, begun as an extension of the schools and churches after the Civil War, was unique to North America, offering a fresh-air environment for cultivating cooperation and appreciation of nature, something that could not be taught in a strict school or church environment. By the 1920s, local governments were building parks and even public golf courses. Perhaps more impressive were New Deal public works projects that constructed a wide array of playgrounds, parks, tennis courts, swimming pools, and cultural centers.61 These recreational facilities were designed to challenge commercial amusements that promised immediate pleasures rather than cultivated useful skills. Despite efforts of parents to create more child-centered homes and to shape the young through play, kids—especially teens—often broke from the older Play in America traditions of play their parents had known. Especially for the children of the less-well-regulated poor, the industrializing city offered both new (and sometimes dangerous) diversions and new forms of play that parents did not identify with their own youthful sowing of wild oats. Whereas the play of the young had previously been bound to tradition—rituals and rules of their trade or the informal strictures of the festival—the newly urbanized youths of the nineteenth century were largely cut adrift from time-honored codes of behavior. By 1850, the youth gangs in most American cities had formed a street-corner society built around social clubs. Parents as well as civic leaders worried about how play could turn into crime. By 1900, commercial dance halls were sweeping American towns. In New York, writes Kathy Peiss, they attracted respectable young working women with cut-price entrance fees, which allowed females to break from their ethnic and family traditions but also caused great worry among parents and moralists.62 In response, some reformers advocated new, repressive laws that prohibited traditional games, outlawed mumming and bawdy singing, and improved the policing of street gangs. One interesting response tried to “domesticate” Halloween pranksters. Traditionally, young urban males paraded through town, demanding money of passers-by or “dusted” them with bags of flour. By the end of the nineteenth century, some derailed streetcars and set fires. Masquerading as goblins and witches, young males in small towns removed gates, broke or waxed or soaped windows, tied doors shut, even put buggies on roofs and tipped over outhouses. Sometimes householders avoided these “supernatural” assaults with gifts of food and drink. While some complained, adults accepted within limits these acts of petty vandalism because they were customary, something that now-respectable fathers and husbands themselves had done not so many years before. Because adults knew the youths involved, they considered them just “boys being boys.”63 However, increasing urbanization and the social tensions especially sharpened by the Depression of the 1930s soon made the traditional rowdyism of Halloween unacceptable. Beginning in 1920 in Minnesota, and expanding in the 1930s, voluntary organizations like the American Legion, Rotary Club, Lions Club, and municipal recreation departments sought to cajole pranksters to join in Halloween fairs and parades. By the end of the 1930s, we see signs of the modern rite of trick-or-treating restricted to smaller children “mumming” for candy from door to door in costume.64 Another response was to attempt to build bridges to the poor youth of the new cities and remake them in the image of the middle class. Hence the urban 35 36 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  park movement that began in northern England in the 1840s and was copied in the United States in the 1850s with New York’s Central Park. In the 1870s, members of small-town churches participated in the Fresh Air Fund by opening their homes to slum-dwelling children from New York City during summer vacations. The campaign for public libraries followed a similar course. The hundreds of Carnegie libraries built beginning in the 1890s aimed to civilize the leisure of working people, and so did the public swimming pools of the same period. While civic elites fostered large showy parks, sometimes associated with zoos or museums, social reformers advocated smaller neighborhood parks to make green space accessible to the poor in their own neighborhoods— sometimes created from slum clearance. Beginning with Kansas City in 1893, soon most American cities had park commissions and networks of parks. The American playground movement was a natural outgrowth of these trends. Beginning modestly, in 1885, when Boston’s public schools first provided sandboxes for poor children, soon playground advocates sponsored neighborhood parks throughout the immigrant districts of American cities. In 1906, Luther Gulick and others founded the Playground Association, which later became the National Recreation Association.65 The concept of the playground movement was quite simple: the government must provide alternatives to the street and its degrading commercial leisure in the form of safe, regulated fun. Games and play areas should be age-graded and sex-differentiated in order to prevent the older from corrupting or bullying the younger child and to train the sexes for their appropriate roles. In many ways this movement was a modern update of the old reformers’ battle with traditional play. As one early leader of the Playground Association noted, “It is not the play but the idleness of the street that is morally dangerous. It is then that the children watch the drunken people, listen to the leader of the gang, hear the shady story, smoke cigarettes . . . .” As an antidote to the violent, self-destructive activity of the urban gang, the Playground Association offered “a wholesome outlet for youthful energy.” The playground movement aimed at providing regulated, rather than violent, games and at organizing team and individual, rather than gang, play. And the playground reformers shared these goals with the rational recreationists of the early nineteenth century and the Puritans and evangelicals of an even earlier period.66 Added to all this was the notion, popularized by psychologist G. Stanley Hall, that play provided a necessary means of turning the natural “barbarian” instincts of the boy into the virtues of the gentleman. It radically challenged the Play in America older goal of training boys in the self-restraint suitable for success in business and refined bourgeois domesticity. Hall saw virility and self-controlled domestic manhood not as the opposites that many women quite naturally believed them to be. Demanding that young boys learn self-restraint had only made them obsessive or incapable of dealing with stress (that is, made them wimps). Instead, Hall argued that by letting boys be “primitives” in aggressive play and sport, they would develop and give expression to their “nerve force” thus avoiding wimpishness. At the same time, as in sportsmanship, this set the stage for later self-control, which would make them vital but rational leaders of men. For Hall and others, the barbarian stage would not make boys into permanent primitives, but serve like a smallpox inoculation, creating the conditions in which they could develop into ideal gentleman—self-controlled, but also vital, and courageous, and capable of manly action.67 But what influence did these play reformers achieve? Historian Dom Cavallo doubts that more than 10 to 20 percent of immigrant youth visited urban playgrounds in the period from 1900 to 1920.68 Most preferred the freedom and independence of the street. It was the middle class who mostly adopted Hall’s goals. Play reformers were not entirely successful in transmitting their values down the social ladder. Yet they helped to solidify a recreational style and ideology that still permeates modern youth and sports institutions. Youth leisure had long been a “problem,” but a rapidly changing consumer culture directed toward the young made for greater intergenerational conflicts. Soon after 1900, amusement parks, dance halls, neighborhood candy stores, soda fountains, penny arcades, and nickelodeons became sites of youth recreation and spending in cities, later described in William Whyte’s Street Corner Society.69 High school and college also became major settings for a new peer culture of play in the thirty years after 1900 when attendance increased explosively. Historian Paula Fass shows how a new peer-group culture built around dating, parties, attending football games, and style-setting organizations like fraternities and sororities emerged at American colleges in the 1920s. Adults tried to control these practices by introducing teacher-supervised extracurricular activities (especially in high schools), but they hardly challenged the peer culture. By the 1940s, class and ethnic divisions were often reproduced in these youth leisure groups in high schools as middle-class students dominated the extra-curriculum and working class “greasers” remained outside in peer groups organized around hot-rod cars, for example. Increased mobility due to cheap streetcars and—by the 1930s—used cars, accelerated the liberation of the young. Children and youths picked up new 37 38 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  media earlier than did their elders, using it as a venue for autonomy—movies in the 1910s and 1920s, radio in the 1930s, new fantasy literature, especially the comic book after 1938, rock radio and records after 1954, action figures in the 1970s, and video games in the 1980s.70 In part, adults feared youth leisure because it symbolized rapid change and the inability of parents to control the culture of their offspring, which seemed to be dominated by commercial entertainment. Commercialized youth leisure grew impressively during and after World War II. Parents away as soldiers or off at work lost control over their offspring, and increased affluence encouraged commercialized play. In the 1950s, new technologies like the 45 rpm record and the transistor radio were quickly adapted by the young to declare their independence. While males dominated these “deviant” cultures and became the focus of early studies, more recent scholarship looks also at the consumer culture of girls, especially that coalescing around their magazines. Despite repeated efforts, adults found it difficult to control the youth culture. As James Gilbert shows, middle-class parents feared that their children were adopting minority or working-class pleasures, as they sometimes were. Many so-called “moral panics” were eventually resolved when adults embraced at least part of the innovation of the youth culture, for example, rock music and dancing by the early 1960s.71 The battle between the longings of youth for autonomy in play and adult worries about the dangers of uncharted waters certainly remains an abiding issue in the modern history of play. But the issue of children’s (more than youth) play went beyond these moral panics. In the twentieth century, children remained a focal point in the reform of many traditional festivals like Christmas and Halloween, but also in the emergence of the child-centered family vacation. Let me return briefly to the seaside resort and amusement park to elaborate. Like the “traditional” celebration of Christmas, these pleasure sites were often occasions for outbreaks of Saturnalian disorder and “dangerous” delights that deeply offended middle-class taste and morality. Although amusement parks like Coney Island were at the heart of these sites, few children attended them in the early years. Instead, crowds consisted mostly of single young adults. In 1900, young children with mothers appeared on the beach and, oddly enough, occasionally at midget shows. But even rides that appear childlike, such as carousels and roller coasters, were patronized by adults. The crowds that these venues attracted were playful, attracted not to contemporary genteel or later family, child-centered values, but to an intense excitement, to a sensuality of sights and sounds, and to a public flirtatiousness between the sexes.72 In the Play in America twentieth century, the interjection of the child and parent into these pleasure sites made “dangerous” into “playful” crowds, thus creating a new middle-class culture distinct from its genteel predecessors. As exhibitors and officials attempted to attract a middle-class crowd after 1900, they began to make accommodations to the play of children. In 1920, Steeplechase Park at Coney Island introduced Babyland at one corner of the Pavilion of Fun, featuring two child-sized slides, hobbyhorses, and a kiddie carousel. In the summer of 1925, the National Association of Amusement Parks promoted new children’s rides at member parks.73 Although children slowly became part of the new playful crowd, even more important to this transformation were new ways of understanding children’s fun. A new middle-class ideal of fun abandoned some traditional delights, such as freak shows, and found new ones in the wide-eyed wonder of children. In fact, the freak was cutesified. Over time, dwarfs and other oddities were taken from the world of the bizarre into the realm of the innocent. All sorts of gnomish figures found their way to children’s amusement park rides. Disney perfected this trend in his cartoon animals with their neotenic or childlike features, reflecting a shift in adult sensibilities—abandoning the fascination with the boundary of nature for nostalgia for cartoon innocence. Despite Disney’s rejection of those “dirty, phony places run by toughlooking people,” his Southern California amusement park opened in 1955 was far less a break from the tradition of Coney Island than he thought.74 His park provided a playfulness that attracted a mass audience of the second half of the twentieth century as much as did Coney fifty years before. What made his park survive while those at Coney did not was that he was able to sustain a middleclass clientele. Disney not only cleaned up the pleasure site, but reconstituted the playful crowd by inviting its individual members to focus on their family units, especially the delighted innocence of their children. What made it both playful and middle class was that it was driven by the evocation of childhood wonder and the nostalgic longings of the “child within.” This, as opposed to the Saturnalian, became central to the meaning of play.75 Disney appealed to “timeless” childlike delight and the “cute” through many visual cues. Disney buildings evoke the feeling of a toy, and, as Walt Disney noted, “the imagination can play more freely with a toy.”76 Because the overall impression is reassuring, elements of topsy-turvy could run through the design of Disney parks. In all this the buildings appealed to the delight of children. The fact that most Disney stories and buildings took the perspective of a child allowed 39 40 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  a cross-generational bonding insofar as grandparent, mother, father, teenager, and child were expected to enter into a shared “innocent” fantasy. This was more than “taming” the imagination, defanging the old world of the carnival. The cute was a celebration of the seemingly untethered delight of innocence.77 Not only did Disney rally the family around the child’s imagination and invite the old to regress to their own inner child, but he encouraged the adults to “recall” the worlds of their own childhoods. For Disney that meant the time of his own youth, a magical era of childhood wonder, 1900s America, expressed in his romantic reconstruction of Main Street, U.S.A. Main Street recalled a youth that was foreign to most young visitors, and, over the years, it grew alien even to parents and grandparents. However, Disney’s fantasy of his youth, because it was made delightful, became the nostalgia of subsequent generations. This was possible in part because American nostalgia was not about returning to an ancestral village. After all one family in four moved every year in the 1950s, and mobility and marriages across ethnic and neighborhood groups meant that there was often no obvious home to return to. Going home in such a setting meant “returning” to a romantic idea, one easily blended and idealized in an all-white, all-American Main Street U.S.A.78 Of course, Disney’s creation did not go unchallenged. Children rebelled against the cute and longed to be cool. The dark and violent images of science fiction, gangster stories, or monster movies; pinball games; and the thrill rides of the modern roller coaster and bumper cars were associated with youth and the cool by the 1930s. But Disney had nothing to do with the emerging culture of the cool. Even haunted houses would only come much later to Disney and they would be systematically cutesified. Eventually Disney as a company did have to make concessions to the cool but not until the late 1970s, a decade after Walt’s death.79 By then the decrease in births was beginning to translate into smaller numbers of young families. Moreover, children’s, especially boys’, attraction to the mystique of the frontier, global adventure, and science upon which Disney built three of his “lands” was in decline. Between 1977 and 1983, the Star Wars trilogy and its licensed products, along with a more cynical popular culture that “bled” into children’s culture, challenged these older ideals. The striking manifestation of this was the young’s attraction to the thrill rides that their parents and grandparents had rejected decades before in the old amusement parks.80 Company officials began to recognize this trend especially as Disneyland was competing with amusement parks that built roller coasters rather than fantasy rides.81 As early as 1977, Disneyland began to adapt with Space Mountain, an indoor roller coaster, pretending to be “educational.” Today Disneyland Play in America and its progeny in Florida and its new cousin, California Adventure, have fully conceded to the appeal of the cool. We see a similar shift in the toys of children. A tradition of toy making that developed about 1900 and ended in the 1960s offered parents an opportunity to present their young offspring with teddy bears, baby and companion dolls, and cutesified images of animals and everyday life. For older children, toys promised to enchant and teach about the world that boys and girls would grow up to inherit (electric trains, construction sets, and doll houses, for example). For generations, parents passed down playthings that were very similar to the ones that they had known. But from the end of the 1960s and then with greater force in the 1980s, all this changed. Toys reflected, in Barbie dolls and action figures, the culture of the cool as much as the cute. They no longer were a bridge between parent’s memories of play and children’s play as the old traditions of dolls and electric trains disappeared and toys became increasingly linked to children’s TV, movies, and video games.82 While much remains unchanged in the playful longings and activities of children and adults, what play means and when and how we engaged in it has changed greatly over the course of American history. Large events and processes—the transformation of work, of technology and consumption, and of the family and childhood—have all shaped play. And this history, as incomplete as it is, remains crucial to our current understanding of play. Notes 1. I develop this in A Social History of Leisure Since 1600 (1990), chap. 2. 2. Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (1995). For American religious hostility toward traditional Christmas festivals, see William B. Waits, The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving (1993), chap. 2; Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (1995), 17–41, 91–104; Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (1996), 14–45. 3. Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans at Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (1963), 34–35; Philip Alexander Bruce, Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (1907), 209–10; Jane Carson, Colonial Virginians at Play (1965), 151–52; Marquis de Chastellaux, Travels in North America (1827), 293. 4. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979); Sharon V. Salinger, Taverns and Drinking in Early America (2002). 5. John M. Findlay, People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas (1986); John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History (1993). 41 42 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  6. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (2004, first published 1845), 100–101. Good sources on American Saturnalian practices are in Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1986); William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America (2002). 7. Bruce, Social Life, 218–27; Dulles, Americans at Play, 7; Michel Chavalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (1839), 472–73; Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (2001), 1–7, 92–95, 134. 8. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Selections from His Other Writings, ed. Nathan G. Goodman (1932), 49–50. 9. Kenneth Cohen, “Frolics,” Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America, ed. Gary Cross (2004), 1:369–71. 10. The classic expression of refined Renaissance leisure is in Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1959, first published 1528), 11, 29, 34, 38, 43, 70, 78, 104, 139, 207–11, 348. 11. Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700–2000: Towns, Heritage, and History (2000); Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa, 1560–1815: A Social History (1990). 12. Perceval Reniers, The Springs of Virginia: Life, Love, and Death at the Waters, 1775–1900 (1984), 70–88; George Waller, Saratoga: Saga of an Impious Era (1966), 56–108; Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (2001), 241; Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (1999), chaps. 2–4. 13. Dulles, Americans at Play, 50–51; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (1964), 275–80. See also Susan L. Porter, With an Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America, 1785–1815 (1991). 14. Daniels, Puritans at Play; Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (2000), chaps. 1–2. 15. Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (1973), 98–111, 152–60. 16. I develop this in Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (1989), 5–9. 17. Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 163–69. See also Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (1998). 18. Findlay, People of Chance, chap. 3. 19. Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (1977), chap. 5; David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (1983). 20. Roy Rosenzweig, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992). 21. Robert W. Rydell and John E. Findling, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (2000). 22. Fuller treatment of this theme is in my “A Right to Be Lazy? Busyness in Retrospective,” Social Research, 72 (2005), 263–88. 23. John A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Holiday: A Social History (1976, first published 1917). Play in America 24. I and colleagues develop this in Gary Cross, ed., Worktime and Industrialization: An International History (1988). 25. Ibid. 26. John M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (1931), 365–73. 27. Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (1993), chaps. 4, 8; Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950 (2006), 29. See also International Monetary Fund IMF, Report 98/132 (1998). 28. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (1989); Centre Daily Times, July 3, 2004; Rosanna Hertz, Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home (2001). 29. Cross, Time and Money, 46–75, 99–127. 30. Robert C. Allen, “B. F. Keith and the Origins of American Vaudeville,” Theatre Survey, 21 (1980), 105–15. See also Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (2000); James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (2001). 31. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (1978), 24–36; Rachael Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001), 7, 9, 112–18. See also Cook, Arts of Deception. 32. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (2005), 38–44; Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (2000), 403–33. 33. Reniers, Springs of Virginia, 70–88; Sterngass, First Resorts, 241; Aron, Working at Play, chaps. 2–4. 34. Good sources are Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills (1991); Michael Immerso, Coney Island: The People’s Playground (2002); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (1987); Woody Register, The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements (2001). 35. Sally H. Clarke, Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market (2007), 103. 36. Warren Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel (1979), esp. 111–15. 37. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), chap. 14; Folke Kihlstedt, “The Automobile and the American House,” in The Automobile and American Culture, ed. David Lewis and Laurence Goldstein (1983), 160–75; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937), 244–46. 38. Carl Solberg, Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America (1979); Kenneth Hudson, Air Travel: A Social History (1973); Michael Gottdiener, Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel (2001). 39. Nasaw, Going Out, chap. 8; Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film 43 44 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  and the Shaping of Class in America (1998), chap. 7; Buck Rainey, Serials and Series: A World Filmography, 1912–1956 (1999), 3–4, 92–93. 40. J. Fred MacDonald, Don’t Touch That Dial: Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1960 (1979), chaps. 2–5; Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (1997), chaps. 6–7. See also Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (1999). 41. Corbett S. Steinberg, TV Facts (1980), 142; Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992), 39, 71–74, 102; Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (1991), 16, 19, 29, 32. 42. Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (1998), 2, 6, 65–67. 43. William F. Mangels, The Outdoor Amusement Industry from Earliest Times to the Present (1952), 37–50, 137, 163; Todd Throgmorton, Roller Coasters in America (1994), 26–27; Todd Throgmorton, Roller Coasters: United States and Canada (2000), 1–18. 44. Throgmorton, Roller Coasters: United States and Canada, 35; Robert Coker, Roller Coasters (2002), 8–11. 45. Garrett Soden, Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill: A History (2003), esp. 1–18. 46. For the rise and fall of the “Atari generation” of games, see David Sheff, Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World (1999), 150–57; Herman Leonard, Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Home Videogames (2001), 89–99; Steven Malliet and Gust de Meyer, “The History of the Video Game,” in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (2005), 26–28; Eugene Provenzo, Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo (1991), 8–9, 31–35. 47. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Grieg de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (2003), 84–108, 128–50; Dmitri Williams, “A Brief Social History of Game Play,” in Playing Video Games: Motives, Response, and Consequences, ed. Peter Vorderer and Jennings Bryant (2006), 205; Entertainment Software Association, http://www.theesa.com/archives/files/ Essential%20Facts%202006.pdf (August 2, 2006). 48. Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (1988), 116–20; Joan Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), chaps. 1, 3–5; Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), 23–30; Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (1994), 65–66. 49. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1922), esp. chaps. 3–4. 50. I develop this theme in All Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (2000), chap. 4; Gary Cross and John Walton, Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (2005), chaps. 3, 5; Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (1991), chap. 3. 51. Thomas Hyllard Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (2001), 20. Play in America 52. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1993); John Findlay, A People of Chance (1986), chaps. 4–5. 53. Dan Foley, Toys through the Ages (1962), 13–18. 54. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). 55. Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800–1960 (1986), 103–69. 56. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850–1930 (1988). 57. Elizabeth Pleck, “The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States,” Journal of Social History, 32 (1999), 773–90; Elizabeth Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (2000), chap. 4. 58. I develop this in my Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (1997), chap. 2. 59. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (1995), 12, 77–120; Donald J. Mrozek, Sport and the American Mentality, 1880–1910 (1983), esp. chap. 1. 60. Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 32–33, 44–45. See also Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1994); Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (1986) 61. Macleod, Building Character; Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (1986); Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, eds., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (1997); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (2001). 62. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 102; Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (1981), chaps. 4–5. 63. Nicolas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (2002), 59–73; Alvin Schwartz, ed., When I Grew Up Long Ago (1978), 127–30. 64. Margaret Mead, “Halloween: Where Has All the Mischief Gone?” Redbook, December 1975, 31–32; Rogers, Halloween, 81–82, 86–90; Tad Tuleja, “Trick or Treat: Pre-Texts and Contexts,” in Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, ed. Jack Santino (1994), 95–102. 65. Clarence E. Rainwater, The Play Movement in the United States: A Study of Community Recreation (1922), 100–105; Henry S. Curtis, The Play Movement and Its Significance (1917), 60–65. See also Dom Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (1981). 66. “The Playground Association of America: Purpose,” Playground, 4 (1910), 73, cited in Cavallo, Muscles and Morals, 37. 67. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 77–120. 68. Cavallo, Muscles and Morals, 46–48. 69. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1972, first published 1909); Paul Cressey, The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation 45 46 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY s Summer  and City Life (1932), 34–67. See also William Whyte, Street Corner Society (1955, first published 1943). 70. Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (1977), 23; Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (1996), chaps. 7–8; Edward Radlauer, Drag Racing: Quarter Mile Thunder (1966), 28; H. F. Moorehouse, Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the American Hot Rod Enthusiasm (1991), 42–44; Glenn C. Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America (2003), 8. 71. James Gilbert, Cycles of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (1986); Dawn H. Currie, Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers (1999). 72. Register, Kid of Coney Island, 12, 16; Sterngass, First Resorts, 272–73. 73. Cross and Walton, Playful Crowd, 123–24. 74. Walt Disney cited in “Insights to a Dream,” News from Disneyland (1979), Anaheim Public Library, Disneyland Collection. 75. Cross and Walton, Playful Crowd, chap. 5. 76. Karal Ann Marling, ed., Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (1997), 81; Beth Dunlop, Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture (1996), 25. 77. See my Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and American Children’s Culture (2003), chap. 3. 78. Margaret King, “Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form,” Journal of Popular Culture, 15 (1981), 116–40; Jean Starobinki, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes, 54 (1966), 81–103. See also Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,” American Historical Review, 106 (2001). 79. Konrad Lorenz, Foundations of Ethnography (1981), 164–65; Steven Jay Gould, “Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz,” Natural History, 88 (1979), 30–36. 80. See Cross, Cute and Cool, esp. chaps. 3, 5. 81. From the late 1970s, Six Flags’ Magic Mountain of Valencia, California, catered to teens with thrill rides like Free Fall (a 55 mph drop in two seconds) and a series of roller coasters (Revolution, featuring a scary loop, and the Colossus noted for its height). By 2003, Magic Mountain offered sixteen roller coasters. Even the once-staid Knotts Berry Farm adapted to change by opening the Wild Water Wilderness complex in 1987 and a teen night club and restaurants serving adults alcohol in the mid 1990s. Sea World of San Diego offered, as an alternative to Disneyland, a clean and more modern image of childhood wonder around a theme of nature and ecology that appealed to “soccer moms.” “Southland Thrill Rides,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1987; “Batman vs. Mickey,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1987; Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (1997). 82. I develop this theme in Kids’ Stuff. 
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