Leisure and Recreation in the United States
In the wake of the Civil War, one of the bloodiest wars in the nation’s history, Americans discovered pleasure. “Vacation” became a verb as well as a noun and, in some quarters, even a form of moral exhortation. A vacation, insisted reformer Melvil Dewey, is not just a luxury but a “necessity for those who aim to do a large amount of high-grade work.” Well-to-do, hardworking German-born Jews of the 1870s heeded Dewey’s words. Like other affluent Americans, they vacationed at Saratoga Springs, then one of the country’s premier watering holes, had enjoyed the bracing sea air of the New Jersey shore where luxuriously appointed hotels dotted the beach. “Fond of fun and frolic,” they spent their mornings and afternoons promenading on the boardwalks and boulevards of America’s resort towns; in the evenings they dined, danced, and gambled. America, they believed, was truly God’s playground.
Within a few short years, however, their faith was shaken. In 1877, Saratoga hotelier Henry Hilton refused to host leading Jewish financier Joseph Seligman and his family at the world-renowned Grand Union Hotel. An otherwise valued guest, Seligman was banished from this latter-day Eden, Hilton explained, because his presence might attract “colonies of Jewish people,” whose behavior was considered “obnoxious” by the “majority” of Grand Union habitués.
At the time, many American Jews believed Hilton’s behavior to be little more than the idiosyncrasy of a misguided curmudgeon. But when, two years later, a similar statement was made, this time at the popular middle-class New York resort town of Manhattan Beach, waves of alarm spread across the pages of the country’s Jewish newspapers. “We do not like the Jews as a class,” declared Austin Corbin, president of the Manhattan Beach Company, in the summer of 1879. “There are some well-behaved people among them; but as a rule they make themselves offensive to the kind of people who principally patronize our [rail]road and hotel. I am satisfied we should be better off without than with their custom.”
As the Hilton and Corbin incidents made clear, the pursuit of pleasure for Jews was often fraught with disappointment. Nowhere, it seemed, was the fault line between expectation and reality, between acceptance and social ostracism, more exposed than when Americans were at play. A holiday by the sea or in the country, which promised a respite from daily restrictions, instead often heightened them. “Race prejudice at summer resorts,” explained Alice Hyneman Rhine in an 1887 exposé of the phenomenon, was “sweeping” the country. Rhine reported that like Hilton and Corbin (“Hilton the Second,” as he was dubbed in some quarters), many hotel owners were taking a dislike to Jews because of their supposed boisterousness. Others disapproved of the Jews’ “disregard of table etiquette and ignorance of the courtesies of the drawing-room.” Still others frowned upon their attire: “It is said of [the Jews] that their ill-breeding shows itself in an ignorance of the canons of good taste in dress, which causes them to affect patent leather boots, showy trousers and conspicuous and vulgar jewelry.”
Publicly, Jews were quick to defend themselves against such charges and to denounce “race prejudice” as a form of “petulant bigotry” at best and of “unjust, injurious, wicked,” and un-American behavior at worst. Privately, though, many Jews conceded that some of the allegations were not without merit, especially those regarding displays of flamboyance. When Jews walk and talk loudly, dress “showily,” and use a toothpick “profusely” while in public, said one Jewish newspaper, it was no wonder that hotel keepers were justified in “exercising discretion.” Columnist Henrietta Szold, or “Sulamith,” as she styled herself at the time, was quick to agree. Writing in the Jewish Messenger in the aftermath of the “Corbin affair,” Szold was as fierce in her condemnation of the behavior of fellow Jews as she was of Corbin’s. She roundly took them to task for their all-consuming pursuit of money and t