Travel

The Nineteenth Century

Although a limited number of colonial Americans traveled regularly in the eighteenth century, it was not until the early nineteenth century that recreational travel became a well-organized activity in the United States. New means of transportation, such as steamships and railroads, made it possible for Americans to travel in relative comfort throughout the continent or across the ocean. Recreational travel also required destinations that people wished to visit, and entrepreneurs first turned New England spas, Appalachian resorts, and tourist attractions such as Niagara Falls into preferred places for travelers to meet, socialize, and sightsee. Later in the century, commercial tour companies guided customers to western states and through the nations of Europe. Most significantly, travel required money—only the affluent could afford to travel far and regularly before 1900.

Because wealthy men were the first to travel frequently, a specific form of upper-class masculinity was the first to be exhibited through American travel. Spas and mountain resorts that attracted the elite traveler in the early nineteenth century were home to fashionable displays of gentility and privilege based upon a man's economic standing and his public interaction with women. Both bachelors and men who traveled with their wives were expected to act as sophisticated gentlemen at resort balls and dinners. A man's dancing skills, knowledge of etiquette, and power of conversation became barometers of his manhood and social status. Travel to exclusive resorts before the Civil War thus demonstrated an interweaving of class and gender dynamics.

Expensive tours of Europe relied upon the same mixture of sophistication and manliness. Men who traveled through [Page 462]such European cities as Paris and Rome followed prescribed routes made fashionable in earlier centuries and promoted themselves as schooled in the finer arts of high society. Trips to art museums and palatial estates allowed wealthy American men to associate themselves with the discerning taste and formal social rules of the European gentry. Above all, genteel travel reinforced the privileges of upper-class Americans by emphasizing their freedom from the demands of daily work.

For middle-class men who could not afford European excursions, travel in the nineteenth century often provided an opportunity to expand their sense of masculinity beyond the workplace. The rise of white-collar occupations and business culture led many men to question their usefulness and independence in an increasingly industrial society—a society that still valued the traditional work ethic of physical toil and autonomy. Leisure travel allowed middle-class men to escape the constraints of their working lives, if only temporarily. Travel offered a sense of manly independence that few white-collar jobs could provide, allowing men to set challenging itineraries and assert themselves without supervision. Henry David Thoreau provided a model for the journey of self-discovery with A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in which he wrote of travel's “buoyancy and freedom” as an integral part of his experience. Whereas the late-nineteenth-century popular press classified resort vacations as decidedly feminine excursions, middle-class camping vacations and long-distance sightseeing tours reproduced a sense of labor for men who lamented the lack of physical work in their professional lives. Significantly, American mills and factories became popular destinations in the last quarter of the century, as tourists combined their pursuit of leisure travel with their romanticized view of working-class manhood.

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