11. Tourism & the travel habit

In The American Roadside, James Agee discusses the roadside cabin camps which first took-off during the 1930’s. This immediately caught my eye as an interesting subject, especially in relation to the role of cabin camps relative to traditional large scale hotels. Last summer I worked as an economic consultant and briefly conducted some industry research into hospitably revenues on a macro-level. Much in keeping with Agee’s presumption that the cabin camps were here to stay, I found that motels and microtels actually make up a majority of hospitality revenues and profits in the United States today. So why did the microtel succeed? Well, I think Agee hits on most the main reasons in his piece.
 
The first is that there are few barriers to entry and relatively low overhead required, at least back in the day, to start a cabin camp. As Agee says, you might come across one such cabin camp with “a small clean room, perhaps twelve by eleven feet. Typically it’s furnished with a double bed…a table, two chairs, a small mirror, and a row of hooks in one corner and a half opened door to a toilet in the other.” (47) Agee then goes on to say that it was not uncommon for such cabins to be furnished out of “an old chicken coop” (50) or the like, with many having been cheaply yet practically constructed. Moreover, Agee stresses how such establishments often used their own profits to fuel expansion, perhaps adding more cabins, a dinner or a fueling station, all built up in an efficient and cost effective manor. This low cost and convenient service model, one large-scale hotels such as Radisson and Hilton had a hard time following, turned out to be incredibly attractive to motorists, leading many such firms to buyout or invest in their own microtel lines.     
 
Secondly, as Agee stresses in his piece, the demand was extraordinary, with the mass appeal of the automobile people were no longer chained to train lines and major cities, or even small towns, they could drive anywhere the road could take them and oftentimes saw little need to deal with the headaches of driving into a town and checking into a large hotel. The cabin camps, or modern day motels, offered convenience, accessibility, and in the 1930’s a tremendous degree of independence in which you got your own little roof, all to yourself for the night.
 
Finally, Agee makes the point that cabin camp owners could easily construct a few more cabins once the initial camp was in place at relatively low cost. This made the cabin camps uncommonly scalable for the industry, as additional cabins could be added and converted with relative ease as needed, a level of flexibility completely foreign to large scale hotel planers.
 
In conclusion, I think the accuracy and astuteness with which Agee presents the cabin camp movement is remarkable. The idea of cabin camps is distinctly individualist and appealing to many Americans, and Agee did a remarkably job of describing its appeal and recognizing its potential.     

In my experiences as a tourist, both in the US via RV and abroad via cars and trains, I've seen my share of tourist traps. What has always amazed me, however, is when people still get a kick out of the dullest and stupidest sights. I know that advertising affects everyone despite our denial, but there is really no need to spend an hour waiting for some clock to chime when you're in the middle of the beautiful city of Munich, surrounded by hundreds of blocks that aren't crammed with tourists. This week's readings have helped solidify my suspicions of how much of our travel is influenced by advertising. How much of what we end up seeing when we travel is something we found ourselves? Probably very little. With vacation time in the US still much lower than other 1st world countries, our travel time is heavily commodified. Much like Thomas Wolfe noticing that Americans are focused on 'making' every national park rather than seeing them, I see tourists snapping pictures of everything with a "biggest!" of "tallest!" or "smallest!" or other hyperbolic sign next to it, then running off to the next 'sight.'

But who's to blame the tourists? If we're conditioned to enjoy that kind of thing, how could we not enjoy tourist traps? We don't have time to really experience every place we go. Most people have to plan out their vacations ahead of time to make sure they'll be home when they need to be and don't go broke somewhere along the way. They need guidance in order to figure out where to go with their free time. No wonder Frederic Van de Water "observed that most tourists saw only the major attractions as interpreted by guidebooks and signs" at the National Parks. You think everyone's going to read an ecology textbook before they go for a hike in Yosemite? 

I guess my point is that I really can't hate tourism advertising, or the tourists who listen to it. If I want to spend the extra time researching a place to visit, that's on me. But most people are just glad to be away from their jobs. If they want to go to Dodge City in Kansas (DON'T GO, IT'S AWFUL) or kiss the Blarney Stone or shop at the M&M store in Times Square, so be it. I hope they have a good time.

Agee and Berkowitz present two very different propositions for how America became infected with the travel bug. Agee argues that Americans have been instilled with a sense of restlessness that has inspired us to put our homes in the rearview mirror for as long as we have been Americans. Whereas Berkowitz sees the rise of travel and tourism in America as a result of management’s concession of paid vacations to salaried and wage-earning workers, and a calculated effort by the government to stimulate the economy, Agee argues, “Whatever you may think, we move for no better reason than for the plain unvarnished hell of it. And there is no better reason.”(Agee P.44)
 
Agee does seem to be concerned with the flourishing economy that rose up from the American roadside, but he is writing about the boom period of the 1920s, before the Great Depression. He romanticizes the experience of being on the road, immersing oneself in the various pockets of American cultures in different areas of the country. Reminiscent of a 1920s Anthony Bourdain, he writes about the challenge of getting a proper barbeque sandwich, and the importance of the hot dog as an American symbol. Agee writes about the advent and economics of the American roadside camp as if he is the authority on the subject. To him, the American roadside camp is the ultimate symbol for the growing American leisure class. He writes, “For the tourist camp is one sound invention that the American roadside has contributed to the American scene. And as an invention it is more satisfying than the hot dog.”(Agee P.52) Both the hot dog and the tourist camp serve as perfect American symbols, because they are both accessible and universal across various classes, and perfectly pragmatic.
 
Berkowitz describes many of the vital factors that led to the institutionalization of the travel habit as an American past time. He acknowledges the movement for paid vacations and the promotion of travel by the railroad and hospitality industries that began in the mid 1800s and grew until the turn of the century as essential to the creation of the leisure class. However, he credits the Great Depression as a perfect storm of interests in American travel as the turning point, writing, “The crisis of the depression was ultimately responsible for completing the transformation of tourism into a mass phenomenon. As the 1930s progressed, management’s desire to secure industrial peace and labor’s increasing militancy and consumerist ideology brought about a frenzied expansion of paid vacations to a majority of wage earners. At the same time, the New Deal-era interest in promoting social harmony and in encouraging new consumption practices to revitalize the economy compelled business leaders and government officials on both the local and the national levels to intensify their tourism promotional activities and spread vacationing beyond its formerly middle and upper-class base.”(Berkowitz P. 187) 
 
The desire for both industry and government to stimulate spending during the Great Depression reminds me of 9/11 when President Bush asked the country to be patriotic by going to the mall and spending, spending, spending. We can credit the period that Berkowitz described as the origin of our consumer culture today. We have gotten to the point that when our massive consumer culture, now fueled mostly by credit and debt, slows down just a little bit it can cause a national economic crisis itself.

I used to have a map from Cracker Barrel on my wall.  It showed the United States, complete with little logos, marking each of the nearly 600 Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores and, for each location, the map provided an address and highway exit number so that you could easily plan out your vacation rest stops so as to eat a greasy pile of bacon, eggs, and biscuits’n’gravy for every possible meal until your return to actual home cookin’.
 
Until looking at the map, I didn’t really think about the fact that every single Cracker Barrel in the country is located directly off the interstate.  Bizarre—that’s really really weird when you think about it.  They are not located in cities or towns, but simply along a four-lane road.  James Agee, in “The American Roadside,” describes this roadside as a character in the paradigmatic American road trip.  If Americans are to travel, they must have an infrastructure to support them.  It is almost as if there are two Americas—one stationary and one moving—and the two meet at exits when it is possible to get off the highway and move into town or city life.
 
Agee and Michael Berkowitz in their respective articles trace this growing phenomenon back to the 1930s with the working-class extension of the paid vacation and government promoted tourism.  For someone born in 1989, it is difficult to imagine leisure being organized in any other way.  We were brought up seeing this sort of artificial America, prepackaged for the road, for quick consumption, for ease.  It is somehow strangely comfortable for any of us who have grown up in suburban America
 
As air transportation increases, I wonder what will happen to the roads.  Will they die since we’ve started to hop around the globe without keeping track of our relation to the ground?  Instead of a convenience, they are now more of a hassle.  Suddenly, we can go to cities without passing this century old American roadside.  In a way, we are avoiding these prepackaged roadside sites, but with that, we give up our sound conception of spatial relations.  How will the near-immediate access to any city in the world affect our perceptions of time, space, and consumption?

In A “New Deal” for Leisure, Michael Berkowitz begins his essay by describing Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph Toward Los Angeles. Toward Los Angeles depicts two migrant workers who are walking on road leading to Los Angeles. To the right of the workers is a large billboard that depicts a man reclining on a chair with the slogan “NEXT TIME TRY THE TRAIN… RELAX.” These two main focuses are symbolic of Berkowitz’s argument demonstrating the dichotomy between the working class and the unemployed and provide great insight into the government’s New Deal efforts to improve the American economy during the Great Depression.
 
During the Great Depression, there was a significant movement for Americans to tour America. One initiative that fostered this movement was the creation of the United States Travel Bureau. The United States Travel Bureau was an independent, government-sponsored department that was the “most significant contribution to the field of tourism.” The United States Travel Bureau created “newsletters, bulletins, event calendars, research reports [as well as] aids to travel agencies, transportation companies, tour operators, and members of the hospitality industry.” An example of their work might be a Dorothea Lange photograph who was paid by the government to photograph America or billboard on a highway that said “NEXT TIME TRY THE TRAIN… RELAX.” The billboard served to promote travel, which would improve the national economy by having Americans spend their money all across America. The result of the United States Travel Bureau’s “promotion and coordination efforts… helped make mass tourism during the depression.”
 
Another initiative that aided American travel was the incorporation of the paid vacation in the American workforce. The paid vacation allowed workers to take time off from work to explore America from beyond their home, “As a result of the expanding pervasiveness of paid vacations…Americans increasingly possessed the time and means to take at least a weeklong vacation.” It provided an incentive for workers to travel while still allowing them to earn a wage as they relaxed. It also increased consumer business, as when most Americans traveled, they would stay in hotels, eat at restaurants and buy souvenirs. However, a paid vacation only aided white-collar workers as one had to be employed to earn this incentive. Thus, migrant workers who were forced to travel for employment did not benefit from a paid vacation and thus, would not “relax” like upper class Americans.
 
By the end of World War II, most Americans had the time, means and desire to take at least a week long vacation. Mass tourism soon become and integral part of midcentury American life and is deeply entrenched in American culture today.

As a child, I spent countless hours in the backseat of my parents minivan, an early-90’s Nissan Access, crossing America’s highways en route, generally, to visit relatives for holidays. My memories of that time include watching the power lines following the highway, and imagining some character, either a super-powered version of myself or some established mythic figure of the popular culture, running along the wires like a tightrope, effortlessly keeping pace with the powder-blue beetle my father rocketed across the country. What my memories do not include is any impressive encounters with any of the points between our origin and our destination. That’s not entirely true, there was a ferry between New York and Maine that was somewhat enthralling, but mostly for its incredible ability to carry cars across water than any aspect of the ferry itself.

 

What I am driving at here is that my family roadtrips represent the eventual development of the trends discussed in the Jakle reading on the automobile’s effect on tourism. Travel was, especially from my miniature perspective, a destination-focussed affair. Celebration was made of favorable traffic conditions, high speeds and quick arrivals. Stops were perfunctory and necessary. McDonalds for a meal. Gas. Snacks or books to stave off the boredom of the passengers and the monotony of the driver. Sighs were heaved upon arrival and our distance and time elapsed recited to the impressed relatives. Cheaper than flying or trains, the road was simply that thing we had to get past as fast as possible.

 

Jakle essentially opposes the position of Agee, that Americans traveled for the hell of it and the automobile was merely a tool to make that possible. The car, argues Jakle, changed the fundamental purpose of and attitude toward travel.

 

In the middle of these, commenting on both but challenging neither, is Berkowitz’s meditation on the function of vacation for those who now found they could take them. If the Jakle collects the spirit of my own middle-class tourism experience, Berkowitz collects it from the perspective of my father.

 

A middle-aged middle-class middle manager, my father had grown up filled to the brim with heady and important road narratives. Certainly some of that was informed by the Depression-era narratives we discussed, but mostly as they were filtered through the 1950’s and 60’s. A teenager in the 1970’s, my father had absorbed Alger, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and not least the globetrotting and gallivanting of his own college-age older brother which drove him to view the open road, and by extension the splendor of  America and Nature, as holy places, which should be visited often to renew the spirit.

 

As my father grew into a suit-and-tie family man, the emphasis was greatly placed on that desire to “renew the spirit.” These road trips, more than the family functions waiting on the far side of them, were essential to the boosting of his spirits, the rejuvenation of his spirit, and his continued effectiveness as a gray-faced office drone. 

 

As the Berkowitz piece aptly demonstrates, corporate culture knew that workers, especially those like my father, required such escapes as a useful release valve to allow them to cope with the pressures of work and remain productive employees. Without his two week paid vacations my father, a naturally energetic adventurer who had in his youth dreamed of being an actor, would have long ago abandoned the corporate drudgery for a tiny apartment in New York City and a shot at Broadway. But because his comfortable middle-class existence afforded him the luxury of travel , of that rejuvenation of the spirit, he was able to endure his slavery. 

 

In that anecdote of my father, gaining perspective and courage with each dink of the odometer, and myself listlessly imagining endlessly running supermen, is the symbolic fulfillment of the promises of all of these pieces predictive statements. For some, the travel is the thing, as Agee promises. It allows the American worker to remain content in the capitalist structure that in its gentle way squashes his truer ambitions, as Berkowitz explains. It is a meaningless race, the endless watching of miles tick away behind you and your destination loom larger ahead, as Jakle implies. The middle class is a simple yet complex thing, and remarkably unchanged in seventy years. It is very easy to have a true notion about its nature, and yet it is always possible to determine yet another explanation that is as true as every other seemingly authoritiative aspect. Like a multi-aspected Hindu god, the middle class is at all times both the chaff and the wheat of the American system, an expression of its deepest complacencies and foolishness and the fulfillment of its highest aspirations and principles.

For this week, Agee writes about the boom of the tourism industry, and what seems to be the birth of the road trip. Berkowitz examines the associated phenomenon of vacationing as a pastime seeping into the public consciousness.
 
Agee is very hit and miss in his analysis of the phenomenon—claiming the advent of the motel is the death knell of the hotel being the most egregious hyperbole in his piece— but overall provides valuable insight into the rise of tourism. One of the more fascinating aspects of his piece is the list he provides of yesteryear’s titans of tourism—some of which have stuck around and some that haven’t. The development of motels was an obvious ramification, but noting their trajectory was enlightening. The burgeoning of the fast food industry with the spread of hot-dogs and the like was less obvious but makes sense in retrospect, especially with the prevalence of 7-11s. As for the success story of the roadside stands, I believe theirs is no longer a feasible business model. Having fairly recently taken a tour of the outlying United States, I believe I can make this assessment with a degree of anecdotal confidence. To be sure, from time to time one might find roadside stands advertising small quantities of produce, but these have been largely displaced by supermarkets. The stalls that dot the modern interstate are largely devoted to handmade trinkets and sometimes sundries, and occasionally fireworks, and I sincerely doubt that any of these stands will grow into resorts. The argument may be made, of course, that 7-11s and their ilk are the spiritual successors to these roadside stands, and while it may be a valid point, the concept of a roadside stand exists as a very particular expression of Americana culture.
 
Berkowitz spills his ink illustrating how the middle class’ newfound thirst for tourism formed a sort of feedback loop. While many people traveled seeking work, selling travel to the upper and emerging middle classes created economies based around travel, employing travelers. He also mentions how a common knowledge emerged in American business culture around this time that mental labor required stints of rest and relaxation, whereas manual labor was simple and merely required a night’s rest. Of course this practice eventually spilled over from the white-collar circles into the blue-collar crowd, largely due to the development of tourism as an American institution.
 
Motels found their success in travelers on a budget who cared more for the exploration than the comfort. This is still largely true, but for longer trips a night or two in a slightly more upscale room makes a grand difference. Based on personal experience I’d venture to assert that after about two weeks on the road, one develops a sort of sixth sense for judging the quality of motel while driving by. 

(Image is mine)

Travel in the 1930s, the grandeur, the romanticism of the road, and wait, what is that you say? With pay even!? No wonder the 1930s started the tourism boom in America. Add on some snazzy ad campaigns, not so far removed from the ones they play with on earlier episodes of the TV show “Mad Men” when they are coming up with advertising campaigns for the Hilton Hotel chain. It is about luxury and living life without being in real life. Most highly promoted were the places that could boast “the fact that it was an all-in-one vacation destination.” (p. 198). A New Deal for Leisure discusses the ad campaigns that went along with this new tourism industry. Advertising, marketing and social research to serve these purposes also seems to have become a new  industry of major interest at this time: “in conducting these campaigns, community advertisers became the most prolific and skilled advertisers in the tourist trade. In using state-of-the-art- marketing surveys, professional advertising techniques, and a pioneering understanding of the importance of market segmentation, they had created a promotional apparatus that had regularly issued billions of advertisements in “class” and mass-circulation magazines as well as major metropolitan news papers.” (p.199-200). Ads from this time are now being “re-advertised” as works of art, sold for much more than they were ever intended to be worth on websites like AllPosters.com.(source).
 
In recent years there has been a push to travel in America and bring wealth back not just to Wall Street, but to “Main Street.” Politicians use advertising and marketing slogans to promote consumerism and tourism throughout America, which is especially important for the American economy in an age of globalization when it is so easy to travel the world without ever traveling your own country. I have not traveled much in my life, but the most I have traveled has been in the past year, and I went out of the country. Before that, I had never been out of the country, but I also rarely ever left my home state of New York. When reading John A. Jakle’s The Tourist, I was struck by the truth in his statements that still hold true about the romanticism and love of the automobile trip in America. Throughout the years since driving and infrastructure became simple to navigate, every generation has had iconic images, stories and dreams about a life changing road trip. About that coming of age story that one can only get while jumping impulsively in a car and traveling “the back-roads.” Though I grew up in New York City, I just got my drivers license and love “road trips.” In fact, the idea of doing a road trip with my friends was the main motive in learning to drive, “with automobiles came speed. And with speed came the impulse toward constant driving" (p. 146).
 
In a society where we want everything as quickly and conveniently as possible, we still go with the impulse to drive, for speed, and instant gratification. Decades later, the American population is still entranced with the Road Trip, traveling and the experience of going someplace. Though other travel industries, like the airline industry, have certainly taken a huge place in the tourism market, many still prefer to throw clothes in a bag and jump in the car. Personally, my favorite road trip fantasy is with my best girlfriends from childhood. In this daydream we have a cute, old, beaten-up, 1990s style car (for my own nostalgia's sake I suppose), and we drive it cross country, going to the most bizarre places on the way, having no road map, and blasting all the best “road trip” songs of the past 40 years. The soundtrack is what really makes that trip in my head. “Travel by automobile was a way of escaping the everyday,” and hey, for a city girl like me, it still is (p. 147).
 

I am currently taking another course, in which we are looking in to what makes Chinatown unique, and as a result, what makes America what it is. We have been examining what it is that makes us culturally American, and many believe it lies in our history and the fact that almost all of us are immigrants.  This seemed to me to be lacking in some way, but I think that James Agee has given me the answer.  It lies in Americans’ restlessness and desire to travel and know what other parts of the world are like.  When immigrants came to America, they didn’t know what they would find, but they were willing to try to improve their lives. We are risk-takers, intrigued by the possibilities, travelling to new lands.   

It is just this that entices us to ride across the country, examining different regions and landscapes.  Unlike a journey to Europe where most is laid out for you – the hotel you will sleep in, the art and sites you will see, the culture you will experience – an American road trip is much less organized.  While driving, you and your family may become fatigued and will likely come across an auto camp (then prosperous enough to be deemed like a “cash crop”).  A spontaneous decision can be made to stay the night, and all will be well.  It is the spontaneity that enlivens the American road trip – perhaps the essence of the American road trip - and I think it comes down to the billboard.       

A perfect example is the “Wall Drug” billboards, which were created in 1931 to convince people to come to Wall, South Dakota.  I’ve heard about these billboards since I was a kid, as my parents were convinced by the billboards to stop in Wall Drug, where they purchased a gigantic moose hat, and ever since they have collected everything moose.  Basically, for hundreds of miles there are signs on the highways stating “800 miles to Wall Drug – FREE ICE WATER!”  A gimmick, sure, but hey, Wall Drug is still one of the largest tourist attractions in the north.  Without the billboards and the freedom of the open road and your own car, Wall, South Dakota would be a very different place, and the classic American road trip wouldn’t be the spontaneous adventure it is. 

I recently attended a talk at the New York Public library, featuring chef Rene Redzepi in conversation with chef David Chang.  Redzepi’s restaurant, Noma, is in Copenhagen, and has recently been named the best restaurant in the world; David Chang is the owner of the Momofuku restaurant group, which is to say that he is the revered head honcho of the kitchen where I work, and will likely never learn my name.

Redzepi was talking about how his food is distinctly Copenhagen cuisine: the food is foraged from the immediate vicinity and is cooked and presented in a distinctly personal way, influenced by the aesthetics unique to the chef’s extra-special Scandinavian personal histories.  

That’s awesome for Redzepi-- his restaurant is extraordinary, and extraordinarily expensive.  He proceeded to bemoan the state of fine dining all over the world, saying that if you were blindfolded and had a dish at a three star restaurant in a given nation, you would have no idea whether you were in Italy, France, America, Abu Dabi… there is a homogenized idea of what “high art” type food can be.  

At this point Chang stopped complacently swilling beer for a well-tempered retort, to point out the place of American pop culture in our food.  I thought immediately of the famous Doughnuts and Coffee dish served at Per Se.  The most ubiquitous dish for a stiff on the skids in the texts we’ve read, rendered with some artful attention, served at one of the best restaurants in our country.  People adore this dish.  Why?  Because doughnuts and coffee are our indigenous food: just as restiveness has been bred into our shiftless selves (love that idea, by the way, Agee-- very romantic), perhaps all we want in a restaurant experience is a bit of comfort and humility, a “donut” and a cup of coffee.  

This is far from the only example.  America developed an affection for hotdogs as cheap, efficient, one-hand snacking in the 1930s-- unabashed reverence for cheap cuts of pork is unavoidably in vogue in all the hot restaurants today (especially in Chicago, where the hotdog is a traditional star but increasingly the fodder of high cuisine as well).  Christina Tosi, also of Momofuku, is celebrated for making cookies with potato chips and candy corn embedded in them.  Fried chicken and pie cropped up on the menus of several Michelin two-star restaurants this year.   All of these traditional, road-friendly American foods are delivered with a little bit of a self-conscious laugh-- these chefs are owning up to the flavors of their American rearing, and that of their parents before them.  It’s kitschy and cute, but ultimately, it works because it tastes damn fine. 

Berkowitz and Agee both discussed the changes in America that occurred in order to not only enable but facilitate the tourism of America. To me, this one of the most fascinating ad campaigns of all time – Discover the land that you call your own! And simultaneously be patriotic! Oh, and don’t do it by meeting others from those places, but instead play a huge game of swap with your fellow Americans as you all tour around, on your paid vacations and see the commoditized natural resources our  country has.
 
The Grand Canyon is a perfect example. The Grand Canyon will never be anything BUT the Grand Canyon. I have never been, yet I know what it looks like – and I have known what it looks like since BEFORE the rise of the internet. I saw postcards! Yet I still want to go and see it. And I am pretty sure, I am still going to be shocked by the view. Somehow, America in the 1930s created this unbreakable image of America.
 
My guess is that with all of the movement towards Green trends and a back to nature approach, combined with the rising tensions of American Tourists abroad – Americans will go back to exploring their own country  a bit more. The road trip is still romantic!
 
On a completely different note – throughout our entire discussion of the hobo, this article did not present itself but I feel it is crucial to the conversation now. Here is a link to an interview of a homeless man who has both an iPad and a laptop. He uses them to find jobs, places to stay (couchsurfing etc) and more. It is how he keeps in touch with people.
 
I was FASCINATED when I read this because I read the word “homeless” and automatically assumed, poor, crazy, etc. He discusses some homeless people he knows who put Bluetooth pieces under their hair so they just LOOK like they are talking to themselves! He goes to the south of France when it gets cold! It is the life!
 
Does this demean the homeless experience of modern day hobos that are on the down and out? Could technology revolutionize the fight against homelessness by providing people with the resources they need to find a job? There are so many questions posed by this guy! Does moving towards a world of complete connectivity and wirelessness mean we will have nothing tying us down? When it comes to travel, will the iPad be the new hitchiker’s thumb?! 

Michael Berkowitz introduces his piece with a paradox: why did the conditions of the Great Depression not only bring a decline in income and jobs, but an increase in tourism? (“Increase” is even a rather weak term for the incredible leisure travel boom of this period) How could this kind of spike occur during such difficult times?

Just before the Depression hit, paid vacations were on the rise. Employers wanted their workers to take some time off, rejuvenate, and come back ready to work twice as hard. These vacations were originally only granted to corporate employees whose brains were thought to need more rest than the bodies of wage laborers. I’m not sure if this attitude ever truly changed, but employers realized the granting of vacations to their wage laborers would “purchase” their loyalty and “subvert organization.” This makes particular sense when considering the attitude towards socialism and communism during this time.

These vacations, however, were not for sitting around the house. Employers figured if their employees were simply hanging around town, they might as well be at work. So people were encouraged to get out of town and see a bit of America. This worked in perfect conjunction with the federal government’s “community promotion” efforts, which in turn worked well with advertising companies, local businesses, etc. Thus we can see the beginnings and evolution of what Berkowitz nicely phrases as “the cultivation of the travel habit.”

My attention was caught by the concept of “not knowing how to take a vacation.” It makes perfect sense; why would middle-class workers have any reasonable level of familiarity with something previously reserved only for the higher-ups? This seems like a slightly humorous idea, but now that I think of the informational rest stops found near state lines or the brochures available in bookstores, I wonder if people today have made much progress. Travel guides line the shelves at Barnes and Noble, explaining exactly where to go and how to get there and what will be there waiting for you. It is kind of absurd that something so meticulously planned could at all coexist with the adventure or spontaneity often associated with travel.

As Jakle and Agee make clear, however, such travel planning may not have even been so necessary, as the automobile and motion itself became addictions, and the road in itself a destination. “Tin can tourists” harbored obsessions, not with experiencing new places, but with “covering long distances quickly.” Agee compares car travel to a “hypnosis” or “opium.” The “cocoon-like” automobile created a private traveling bubble; “travel became a series of social events contained within the car.” In other words, it became familiar and ultimately boring. So people traveled at night or on back roads to renew some excitement, and went camping.

I loved Jakle’s description of the appeal of camping: “limited hardships gave meaning to travel.” Even if traveling was in certain respects becoming too familiar, it still had that romantic charm of the simple life – “soft primitivism.” Some people obviously liked this idea but didn’t like the dirt and the bugs and the use of trailers increased. The cabin camps discussed by Jakle and Agee served as a nice middle ground between a tent and a motel. I think the central appeal of all of these types of lodging, even of the ever-increasing roadside restaurants, lay in the idea of “escaping reality.” This is further supported by the nature of tourist spots, which were made to create a “privileged” atmosphere normally alien to the tourists themselves (who were primarily working/middle class). Traveling and tourism allowed people to access what Jakle terms “worlds remote in terms of time and space.”

Baranawaski and Furroughs article gives insight into the origin of paid vacations.  It wasn’t until the 1920’s that the idea even occurred to anyone to give paid vacations.  Through google I found an article dating May 15, 1920 enetitle “Travel Arrangements that Don’t Upset Things”.  The author lists a few ways that companies are able to give their employees vacations.

To start, the author talks about how companies handle the length of the vacation their employees receive.  He also puts in as a side not that vacations allow employees to walk in the shoes of their peers.  A sub-manager may fill in as a mnager while the manger is gone.  So, vacations can be learning experiences.

The actual vacations systems detailed come from the Autocall Company, the Burroughs Adding Machine company, and Swift and Company.  They all have different ways of including vacations into their companies.  Autocall company takes a month off as a company.  Only a stenographer and one executive remain, and the factory shuts down.  Burroughs has a way for their employees to put money aside for vacations.  Lastly, Swift and Company uses a lakeside house owned by the company in Indiana, as an option for vacationing employees.  They can stay there one wee for free.  If they wish to stay longer it’s $8 a week.  Overall, the author seems to be in favor of vacations as long as they “don’t upset things”.  But, given that this is from Business Digest and Investment Weekly, that’s understandable.

More research led me to a book by Cindy Sondik Aron called Working at Play: a History of Vacations in the U.S.   Vacations started in the 19th century with the upper class vacationing at resorts which varied from seaside, to country, to mountain settings.   What changed after the Civil War was that people who were middle class realized that they were middle class.  Whereas before the middle class worked hard with the hope of someday being autonomous, owning their own farmland or small business, they now realized that there was little hope of this.  Companies had grown so big that it became impossible to work your way up to the top.  As this was the definition of the middle class, the class of workers moving towards the top, they needed a new distinction to separate them from the labor class.  Also, without this motivation, there was no drive to work all of the time.   So, in the end, vacations served as the new separation between the labor and middle classes.

Both the article and the book I think give key insight into the evolution of our modern day vacation.  Just as a closing note, it was also in the late 19th century that schools were , with the help of Horace Mann, finally made to conform to certain generic rules.  One was the amount of vacation time allowed.  In urban areas children were in school for sometimes 242 days a year.  Rural areas might only have three months of school a year.  In the end, the decision to regulate the school year to 180 days leaving 10 wks/3 months for vacation also contributed to the jumble.  Now children in urban areas had time off, as they didn’t need to help on a farm.  This in turn spurred the idea of family vacations.

During the Depression the connotation of a “tourist” seemed to be a lot less negative than it is today. The articles speak of tourism only as a new and growing phenomenon- a little exploitive sure (as seen with the caves in Agee’s piece), but on the whole, good. The masses were getting paid leisure time, which was nice for them, and their desire for adventure helped re-fuel the American economy. What’s the big deal?

In the Dud Avocado, a travel novel about a girl’s visit to Paris in the late 50’s, a American man she meets and “falls in love with” describes (his remarkably sexist vision of) the tourist: “ ‘Basically,’ he began, ‘tourist can be divided into two categories. The Organized- the Disorganized’ ” (10-12). He goes on to describe the two groups and their subsections- one who goes terribly overly prepared, the other who loses everything and likes to just live by whim. The catch? All tourists are women. “The only male tourists-though naturally there are men visitors- you know, men visiting foreign countries… are the ones loping around after their wives” (16). Throughout the book, the narrator struggles with this image, with this idea of being branded as a tourist. The real truth of the matter is that no one wants to be called a foreigner, a sightseer, and if that means condemning the label to the opposite gender, or race, or social class, so what?

Here is an article from a men’s magazine that gives (somewhat obvious) tips on how not to appear like a foreigner, and here is another from Verizon describes with pride how he was once mistaken as French, and how he considers himself a good traveler instead of a tourist. Why doesn’t he want to be seen as a tourist? “They are depicted as Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, sandals-and-socks sporting, loud-talking, rude and often overweight. Plus, they are often seen as gullible – an easy target for a scam.”

West also helps uncover the problem in A Cool Million. As we discussed briefly yesterday in class, tourism can really only present a fetishized version of a culture. You can’t really own a place after having visited it for a few days. But everyone was determined to get themselves a slice, anyhow. People will even go so far as stealing just for a souvenir, “The theft of stuffed animals (about a dozen a year) and similar keepsakes is the bother now,” Agee writes of Log Cabin Farms, “that and the lady’s room- ‘my God they even swipe the tiles off the wall- I’m not kidding.‘“ (55).

No one wants to be mistaken for a gullible, style-less thief. But you can’t help being a tourist in a foreign place. You won’t look or talk or act like the locals. You'll probably need to use a map too. And when you get there, you might want to take some pictures. You really can’t help it. The only thing that you can do is to be respectful of the local culture. And just try not wear socks with sandals.