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On their return to Muncie, Indiana, in 1935, after six years of depression, Robert and Helen Lynd found much to be lauded about the changes in leisure wrought by the Depression, changes that gained their approval in comparison to the uninhibited commercialism and the centrality of money of the previous decade. At both ends of the social scale, they claimed, leisure was being practiced that illustrated “a more varied expression of energies.” Recreational and civic resources had been expanded, visible in the growth of supervised playgrounds and parks, swimming pools, sports grounds, play centers, public square dances, concerts by unemployed musicians, and open air theatrical performances. “More informality and less expenditure” also characterized changes in behavior, as did the popularity of Xower gardening, adult reading, and “inexpensive backyard skills,” which illustrated that people had been “Wnding new leisure-time values in the depression,” values “which it may not entirely lose if and when the depression disappears.”1 Yet the sociologists expressed their approval of these changes with a sting of reproach, warning the citizens and the reader that all the good lessons taught by the Depression could disappear as quickly as they had come: “Like other phases of deliberate social change in Middletown Conclusion The Leisured World of Tomorrow, Today What will be the permanent impression on the work-leisure complex in this culture left by the depression? Has Middletown learned anything permanently from the depression’s blow to the prestige of business as a basis for a society’s design for living, and from the sudden availability of unprecedented amounts of leisure? Has something of the honoriWc status traditionally associated with work extended to the new possibilities in the use of leisure? Has the meaning of leisure to the business or working class in any way been altered? Has it become to any less degree an extension of, or an alternative to, working activities in the orbit of getting a living, and acquired a more independent status of its own? Has the depression altered in any way the extent to which leisure is formal, passive, organized, a product shaped by the business and machine age? —Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition directly traceable to the depression, some of this public provision of leisure facilities, especially of those for adults, is likely to disappear with returning good times.” Further on they added: Here and there, innovations learned under the jarring dislocations of habit in the depression—such, for instance, as the growth of interest in Xower gardens— will continue. But the summary balance sheet of Middletown’s four years of prosperous growth and six years of depression experience suggests decidedly that the community has not discovered with the help of its “new leisure” new designs for living. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the community has simply in the fat years bought more of the same kinds of leisure, and in the lean years made what curtailments it was forced to make and just marked time pending the return of the time when it could resume the doing of the familiar things.2 Arguing that the town of Muncie had ultimately condemned itself to a pecuniary work culture that precluded developing new “fruitful ways of living,” the Lynds saw the new leisure as an immense missed opportunity to transform the wasteful and alienating habits of the middle classes. Despite this, the centrality of leisure to deWnitions of American democracy remained. By 1940, according to historian Foster Rhea Dulles, it was widely recognized that “what a nation does with its leisure is oftentimes just as signiWcant as how it either maintains itself economically or governs itself.” In his book America Learns to Play, published in 1940, Dulles charted the growth of leisure-time activities over three centuries as a “thin trickle” to “a riotous torrent, breaking through all barriers as it carved out fresh channels.”3 Dulles attempted to show how shifts in American society and culture, such as economic depressions or technological inventions, entailed changes in the practice and meanings of leisure—and by reading the meanings of leisure it was possible to better understand broader cultural patterns. Dulles’s book not only demonstrated that America had a rich history of popular leisure-time activities, but also it showed how popular amusements had attained signiWcance as cultural and political indicators of the progress of modern American society. Its publication sent a message loud and clear that, by the end of the 1930s, leisure was no longer a trivial subject to...

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