The Great American Summer

Road Trips, Beaches, Drive-Ins, Backyard Grills and the Culture We Built Around Doing Nothing in Particular

By Claude AI, Assistant Publisher

There was no such thing as summer 200 years ago. Not in the way we mean it now — as a season of deliberate leisure, a cultural permission slip to slow down, load up the car and go somewhere. Summer used to be just heat. It was the time of year you endured, the season when crops demanded attention and cities became unbearable and you survived it as best you could. The idea of summer as something you enjoyed — something you planned for, looked forward to, built memories around — is a surprisingly recent invention, and it is almost entirely American.

By 1869, the New York Times was already noting a growing sentiment among working professionals — describing the "sadly overdriven" businessman who lived "from one year's end to another in a breathless hurry" and had a desperate need for what the paper called "summer refreshment." Periodicals and tourist guides of the era promoted summer escapes to resort towns like Martha's Vineyard as "a maritime Eden where one may shut out the whole world and be content." The concept was taking hold — summer was becoming not merely a season but a state of mind, a temporary reprieve from the relentless machinery of American commerce and ambition.

What followed over the next century was one of the most distinctive cultural developments in American life: the construction of an entire civilization around the idea of summer leisure. The road trip. The beach. The drive-in theater. The backyard barbecue. These are not random entertainments. They are the pillars of an American summer mythology that shapes us still, even in an age of screens and streaming and a world that never fully stops.

The Road Trip

The first documented cross-country automobile journey in America was completed in 1903, when Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson drove from San Francisco to New York City in 63 days — an achievement that was part adventure, part stunt and entirely impractical. It proved, at minimum, that the thing could be done. What it couldn't have predicted was that within half a century, the road trip would become the defining American vacation form — the way tens of millions of families would experience their country, each other and themselves.

The catalyst was the post-World War II boom. Between 1945 and 1960, the number of registered motor vehicles in America doubled from 31 million to 62 million. The interstate highway system, built at Eisenhower's insistence in 1956 as a national defense measure, turned the country into a grid of smooth, navigable roads that shrank distances in ways that would have seemed miraculous to the prewar generation. In the 1930s, driving across the country took about three weeks. By 1960, it took four days. Paid vacation time — won through decades of labor organizing — gave workers the weeks necessary to use those roads. And the postwar economy gave them the money, the car and the kids to take with them.

Route 66 became the most celebrated road in America not because it was the fastest or most direct route from Chicago to Los Angeles, but because it was the most alive — roadside diners, motor courts, curiosity shops, neon signs and small-town America in its full improbable variety. Its roadside attractions, as one observer noted, "pioneered the concept of destination marketing, proving that the journey itself could be as memorable as the final destination." The Steinbeck novel came first. The road came after. Or maybe it was always the other way around.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road, published in 1957, gave the road trip its literary mythology — the open road as freedom, possibility, the escape from the fixed and the routine. That particular version of the road trip, with its hunger for experience over destination, became the template for a generation. But the family station wagon version was arguably more consequential. It put a generation of American children in the back seat of a car for days at a time, pointed at national parks and historical monuments and roadside attractions, building the shared national memory that would shape their sense of the country for the rest of their lives.

The Beach

The American love of the beach is old — but it too had to be invented. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century Americans did not go to the beach for pleasure. They went, occasionally, for health — seawater was prescribed as a tonic for various ailments, and the ocean was approached cautiously, medicinally, with no particular joy. The idea of lying on warm sand for pleasure, of swimming in surf for the sheer animal pleasure of it, developed gradually through the 19th century and accelerated through the 20th.

What transformed the American beach into the cultural institution it became was the convergence of the automobile, the paid vacation and the postwar prosperity that put both within reach of working-class Americans. Coney Island had been drawing crowds since the 1870s, but it was accessible by rail to New York City's masses. The broader democratization of the beach — the Jersey Shore, the Gulf Coast, Myrtle Beach, the California coast — required the car. Once the car arrived, the American beach became what it still is: a democracy of sand, salt water and sunburn that asks nothing of its visitors except their presence.

The beach vocabulary is its own distinct American language. The cooler. The umbrella. The beach chair that takes twenty minutes to unfold and then collapses unexpectedly at the worst possible moment. The elaborate production of getting children into and out of the water. The way time moves differently at the ocean — slower and more forgiving, as if the sound of waves performs some essential reset function on the overworked human nervous system. There may be a neuroscience explanation for this. There is certainly an experiential one.

The Drive-In Theater

Richard Hollingshead of Camden, New Jersey, had a problem in 1933: his mother was too large for traditional movie theater seats, and he wanted to find a way for her to enjoy films comfortably. His solution — mount a projector on the hood of his car, hang a screen between two trees in his backyard and run sound through the car radio — was the origin of one of the most distinctly American entertainment forms ever invented. He patented the concept, opened the first commercial drive-in theater in Pennsauken, New Jersey on June 6, 1933, and charged 25 cents per person.

What followed was one of the great cultural explosions of the 20th century. By the late 1950s, there were nearly 5,000 drive-in theaters operating across the United States. They were ideally suited to a car culture that was just finding its footing — private, accessible to families with young children who would otherwise disturb indoor audiences, and deeply tied to the specific pleasures of the American summer night. The drive-in was where teenagers went on dates. It was where families in pajamas watched double features from the back of station wagons. It was where the American summer night became a venue rather than just a temperature.

The decline came with the rise of home video in the 1980s and the skyrocketing value of the suburban land that drive-ins occupied. From nearly 5,000 theaters at peak, the number fell below 500 by 2010. Then COVID happened, and the drive-in experienced a genuine revival — contactless, spacious, perfectly suited to a moment when people desperately needed to be somewhere without being too close to strangers. There are roughly 300 operating drive-ins in America today, and the ones that have survived have done so by becoming something intentional rather than merely convenient. Going to a drive-in in 2026 is a choice, not a default. That may actually make it better.

The Backyard

The backyard barbecue is the most democratic of American summer institutions. It requires no travel, no planning beyond the procurement of meat and charcoal, and no particular skill — though the acquisition of skill and the pretense of great skill are both central to its culture. It is the institution that most thoroughly erases class distinctions, at least temporarily. A backyard grill smells the same in Bel Air as it does in Memphis or East Tennessee, and the pleasure of food cooked over fire in the open air is available to anyone who has access to the open air.

The backyard as a domestic space — as a place for living rather than merely for the storage of lawn equipment — is a postwar invention. The suburban expansion of the late 1940s and 1950s put millions of Americans in houses with yards for the first time, and the yard quickly became an extension of the living room during summer months. Weber introduced its iconic kettle grill in 1952. The charcoal briquette had already been popularized by Henry Ford, who turned wood scrap from his automobile factories into Kingsford charcoal. The confluence of affordable suburban housing, disposable income, leisure time and a piece of equipment simple enough that almost anyone could operate it created one of the most enduring rituals in American domestic life.

The backyard barbecue is not really about the food, though the food is often excellent. It is about the particular quality of summer time that it creates — the long afternoon that becomes evening that becomes night, the children running through the yard at dusk, the adults with drinks in hand having the kind of unhurried conversation that the rest of the year rarely permits. It is the American summer at its most essential: the deliberate choice to stop, to gather, to eat together and let the world wait.

What It All Adds Up To

The Great American Summer — the road trip, the beach, the drive-in, the backyard — is more than a collection of entertainments. It is a set of practices through which Americans have historically renewed themselves, reconnected with each other and reminded themselves what they are working toward. The Protestant work ethic that built this country contains within it a suppressed but persistent counterweight: the conviction that rest is not laziness, that pleasure is not sin, and that the long days of summer are a gift rather than a distraction.

This summer, with gas above $4.50 a gallon and airfares up 20%, the Great American Summer costs more than it did. Some families will scale back, stay closer to home, rediscover what was available to them all along in their own backyard, their own region, their own state park three hours away. That may not be the worst outcome. The best road trips have often been the unplanned ones. The best summers have often been the simple ones. The beach doesn't charge extra for the sound of the ocean. The fireflies in the backyard are still free.

Summer is here. Go find it.

Sources

Time — The American Summer Vacation: A Brief History
PBS American Experience — The American Road Trip
RJourney — American Road Trip History
Premiere Outdoor Movies — The Birth of Drive-In Theaters