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introduction The New Leisure I n 1959, Alfred Hitchcock appeared before movie audiences and asked, “Have you planned your vacation yet?” The occasion was the trailer for the director’s newest film, North by Northwest. Hitchcock’s spy thriller starred Cary Grant as an advertising executive mistaken for a secret agent and drawn into a saga of international intrigue. Like many of Hitchcock’s works, the film told the classic story of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what made North by Northwest so distinctly a product of the postwar era was the backdrop it played out against—the United States as a vacationscape. On the run through much of the film, Grant skulked around hotels, raced from New York to Chicago aboard the Twentieth Century Limited, flew to the Black Hills vacationland, faked his own death in a national park cafeteria, and, most spectacularly, eluded would-be assassins in a mad scramble across the face of Mount Rushmore. Given the film’s setting, Hitchcock’s trailer was appropriate. The stout director posed as a travel agent surrounded by posters, literature, and maps. He suggested that the audience consider Grant’s itinerary when making their summer plans.1 North by Northwest’s trailer was more than a clever play on the film; it was a distillation of midcentury travel culture. When Hitchcock’s film was released in 1959, the United States was nearly a decade and a half into a period of widespread affluence without precedent. Tourism played a unique and pivotal role in this culture of mass consumption. Paid vacation plans had been extended deep into the American labor force, middle- and workingclass people had more disposable income than ever, and a vast transportation network spilled out across the globe. With an eye on these developments, many observers saw a new type of society arising—one predicated on a mobile public, unshackled from work’s constraints, and free to roam wherever they pleased. Socially, the notion of a travel boom grew out of the shift toward a Keynesian, consumer-driven economy in the 1930s and 1940s. Vacations 2 the holiday makers occupied important symbolic ground within this economic order. They suggested that industrial modernity’s driving dynamism, a finely tuned balance of raw technological power and rational technocratic order, had achieved such precision that it transcended the production of wealth and moved on to producing time. Long enjoyed by the leisure class, vacationing was an unknown practice to most Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet by midcentury, paid leave periods, carved out for the explicit purpose of giving individuals the chance to get away for a while, had become an expectation for white- and blue-collar workers alike. Even if many middle-income people couldn’t travel, paid leave at least made it a possibility. Vacations, then, were not only a highly visible part of the Fordist good life that flowed from business, labor, and government’s cooperative pursuit of mass consumption but were metaphoric for the expanding life possibilities brought into view by a more equitable economic order.2 In terms of workplace perks, paid vacations were an especially attractive accommodation to the business community. For one, they helped shroud the American economic system in an aura of managerial benevolence. But more important, paid leave was thought to be a greater economic stimulant than alternatives like a shorter workweek.3 Simply put, vacationers spent money. They bought tickets for planes, trains, buses, and ocean liners, or if traveling by car they burned through gasoline and tires. While away, they dined out, stayed in hotels, motels, and campgrounds, bought tickets for amusements, and gobbled up souvenirs. And just as important, they outfitted themselves with the accoutrements of a leisured way of life: sportswear, swimsuits, luggage, cameras, film, skis, camping gear, and much more. In this way, paid vacations carved out blocks of time in which distinct patterns of consumer activity could develop and take hold.4 A robust tourist trade could have other benefits as well. After World War II, government and industry viewed travel abroad as an alternative form of foreign aid that used the market and private spending to spread capital around a war-ravaged world. The dollars that American tourists toted abroad would in time trickle back to U.S. coffers by way of purchases for tractors, machine heads, Hollywood film rights, and dozens of other exports. Tourism’s spending spree had other benefits as...

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