Rest actually takes hard work

AMERICANS HAVE LONG BEEN KNOWN FOR OUR INDUSTRY and ambition, but until recently, we also recognized the value of rest. The Puritans had a famously strict work ethic, but they also took their Sundays very seriously.

- ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG

In 1842, Henry David Thoreau observed, "The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure"; a decade later he wrote, "A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book." Post-Civil War captains of industry didn't rise and grind, according business journalist Bertie Charles Forbes: "No man goes in more whole-heartedly for sport and other forms of recreation than" industrialist Coleman du Pont, while Teddy Roosevelt "boisterously... enters into recreation" despite a busy public life.

At the same time, union organizers, mass media and entertainment, and the parks movement democratized leisure: rest became a right, enshrined as much in college sports and penny arcades as in labor law. Richard Nixon, during a campaign speech in 1956, predicted that "new forms of production will evolve" to make "backbreaking toil and mind-wearying tension" a thing of the past, and "a four-day week and family life will be... enjoyed by every American." Together, these sources paint a vision of American life in which work and leisure are partners in a good life, and "machines and electronic devices," as Nixon called them, created more time for everyone.