A Leisure Culture

In his January 4, 1965, State of the Union message to Congress, President Lyndon Johnson said, “We are in the midst of the greatest upward surge of economic well-being in the history of any nation. We do not intend to live—in the midst of abundance—isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness of leisure.” In outlining his vision of the Great Society, Johnson promised something for everyone. Almost every paragraph of the fifty-minute speech called for a new government action or study. Even after his administration had fallen apart under the weight of its own ambitions, Johnson believed in the principle of the Great Society. “We’re the wealthiest nation in the world,” reflected the former President in 1970. “We need to appeal to everyone to restrain their appetite. We’re greedy but not short on the wherewithal to meet our problems.”

One of the principal sneering criticisms of President Reagan’s eight years in the White House is “Oh, he didn’t do anything except make us feel good.” While I believe that assessment is basically wrong and simply states the conventional wisdom that held that President Reagan was bound to be a failure, it also seems to me that it overlooks the fact that it is quite an accomplishment to make the American people “feel good” about their country and themselves. When we have that feeling, there are very few limits to what each of us and the country can accomplish.

By the 1920s most Americans lived in urban areas where they enjoyed greater anonymity and social freedom. A burgeoning leisure culture provided more and more places, from dance halls to movie theaters, where men and women could meet on common ground. And as an educated work force became increasingly important to the vitality of America’s advanced economy, more young people (75 percent by the 1920s) were attending high school, creating a new mixed-sex peer culture and environment.

The 1920s heralded America’s entry into the modern era. It was the first decade when the nation came under the full influence of advertising, consumer culture, movies, and radio. In a new world that was defined more by the city than the farm, Americans responded with enthusiasm to the promise of abundance and leisure. Their new watchword was fun; their new goal, fulfillment; their new obsession, sex.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the average American household was transformed by the introduction of a group of machines that profoundly altered the daily lives of housewives; the forty years between 1920 and 1960 witnessed what might be aptly called the “industrial revolution in the home.” Where once there had been a wood- or coal-burning stove there now was a gas or electric range. Clothes that had once been scrubbed on a metal washboard were now tossed into a tub and cleansed by an electrically driven agitator. The dryer replaced the clothesline; the vacuum cleaner replaced the broom; the refrigerator replaced the icebox and the root cellar; an automatic pump, some piping, and a tap replaced the hand pump, the bucket, and the well. No one had to chop and haul wood any more. No one had to shovel out ashes or beat rugs or carry water; no one even had to toss egg whites with a fork for an hour to make an angel food cake.

In 1923 the Curtiss Candy Company invented Butterfinger. Dropped from airplanes over major U.S. cities, it quickly became Curtiss’s number two candy bar, a bite behind Baby Ruth. When I was’a kid, I opted for longevity over taste, hence filling-plucker Jujubes on Saturday at the movies and Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy at the playground. Sucked correctly, it turned into a lethal weapon, same as a Sugar Daddy. I once kept a Tootsie Roll hidden in my shoe bag for a year and licked it every morning before school. Now I can afford a Butterfinger whenever I want one, but its lasting a long time still matters.

A Butterfinger is a leisure-eating bar. It forces you to savor. No other candy bar is striated like shale. Its core shatters on your tongue. This makes a Butterfinger dissolve unevenly and mysteriously, leaving you with interesting hard bits to roll around on your mouth. The butter in Butterfinger refers to peanut butter, ground-roasted peanuts being its third ingredient after sugar and corn syrup. Everybody tastes things differently, and what I taste most strongly is molasses, the sixth ingredient, worked to the texture of high-end halvah, only brittler. I don’t particularly like peanut butter except on fresh rye with Hellmann’s mayo (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it). There’s a hint of caramelization in a Butterfinger too, not chewy caramel but the glassy kind that forms when sugar is heated to 310 degrees. The chocolate dip is important, but only for contrast, smooth versus shardy.

Nestlé owns Butterfinger now, but Butterfinger chocolate is better than the chocolate in a Nestlé Crunch. For some horrible reason, Crunch has been tasting fruity lately. Butterfinger is one of the only candy bars that taste the same as they did when I was a kid. It never lets me down. I don’t know why I’m not frightened by its preternatural orange Day-Glo color. A Butterfinger is only 270 calories, about the same as a fruit yogurt. Bart Simpson loves them too. He considers Butterfingers a food group.

Although log flumes and kiddie rides might seem no more than simple fun now, when Hershey Park first opened, on April 24, 1907—with little more than a bandstand and a pavilion interrupting its shady groves—amusement parks were, like model towns, a tantalizing glimpse at a hopeful future, in which technology and human ingenuity promised to erase civilization’s ills. Milton S. Hershey believed wholeheartedly in that vision, and he put it to the test when he built his attractive, luxurious company town in the dairy fields of Pennsylvania. He made sure his workers had safe homes, decent transportation, and, no less important, a source of wholesome amusement.

Every major American city made room on its picnic grounds for a band shell, carousel, roller coaster, arcade, and Ferris wheel. Many of the new “trolley parks” rejected the brazen character of Coney (home to skirt-lifting compressed-air “blowholes” and the Barrel of Love, which spun riders into the laps of fellow revelers) and the Midway. An exhilarating escape from the tedium of workaday routine would vent an urbanite’s otherwise potentially disruptive frustrations. Visitors could indulge their desire for danger in a minutely controlled, family-friendly, usually alcohol-free environment.

And what on the face of God’s earth has happened to the Hershey bar? Close your eyes and you’d think you were sucking Clarksdale, Mississippi, mud. You have to work hard to convince yourself it’s chocolate at all. The fact is, the regular 1.55-ounce Hershey bar in the new vacuum-sealed wrap (no more waxed paper! No more feeling as if you’re opening a present!) isn’t primo chocolate at all. Hershey chocolates have a quality pecking order. Their best is saved for the gold-foil wrapped bars.

When you conche chocolate (rub it back and forth over granite rollers to make it smooth, a process developed by Rudolphe Lindt in 1879), eventually the stones need to be replaced. Microscopic bits of rock erode into the chocolate. I do deeply love the 12 little pre-scored pieces, each with its own logo, that snuggle perfectly into my upper palate for casual tonguing. Milton Snavely Hershey took good care of his employees and started a school for orphans. Hershey’s Ration D bar, a 450-calorie energy boost un-meltable in the tropics and loaded with vitamin B1 to prevent beriberi, accompanied our soldiers in World War II. So it’s almost un-American to gripe about the Hershey bar. But Milton would be melancholy. His namesake doesn’t taste like Hershey’s, and it’s as thin as an after-dinner mint. Any thinner, and you could read this through it.

The Depression spelled an abrupt death for many amusement parks, but Hershey funded a building campaign in the 1930s to employ more than 600 men. In addition to erecting a community center, an opulent 1,900-seat theater, and a $2 million 190-room hotel, the workers updated the park with a fun house, a water flume, a penny arcade, and a new roller coaster. By 1940, the town of Hershey was welcoming 2 million visitors a year.

The 1940s represented the nadir of the American amusement park industry. Of the 2,000 parks operating in 1920, 1,750 had shut down by 1940. The postwar years, however, brought America new prosperity and a bumper crop of children to entertain. It was a lucrative nexus, one that a veteran Hollywood mogul was wise enough to exploit. In 1955 in an orange grove in Anaheim, California, Disneyland opened its gates and, with runaway success, redrew the blueprint for American amusement parks. Over the next two decades, its imitators—Busch Gardens, Six Flags, Great Adventure—would flourish across the country. No longer bounded by city streets, the new, corporate-owned theme parks sprang up along highways, unreachable by city subway or tram line. High walls isolated them from their surroundings, and visitors bought admission rather than paying a fee per ride. Unlike the earlier generation’s attempts to vent the pressures of urban life, these parks attempted to block out the realities of the city altogether. Inside, they presented a meticulously controlled fantasy world, an exotic location here, a bygone era there, an action movie elsewhere.

Has the restless spirit of true tourism gotten hold of you? That’s the spirit that compels you to drive that extra fifty miles to see the World’s Largest Olive (Lindsay, California), the Pig Driving a Cadillac (Hot Springs, Arkansas), the Wonderful World of Tiny Horses (Eureka Springs, Arkansas), the Five-Story-Tall Chicken (Marietta, Georgia), or Jayne Mansfield’s Death Car (St. Augustine, Florida). Hundreds and hundreds of other attractions, some quite grand (“The World of CocaCola Pavilion opened in 1990, a $15 million, forty-five-thousand-square-foot shrine to what Coca-Cola humbly calls ‘the most successful product in the history of commerce—”), but most of them are parched and desperate little heartbreakers, the alligator farms and stuffed multiheaded animals that embody the entrepreneurial spirit at its most poignant. The days of leisure are precious and usually end in another excursion to the dull wastelands of Six Flags, Busch Gardens, and Disney.

Before you get outa here. . .

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