From Travel to Tourism

   Tourism, as distinguished from its less aesthetic counterpart, travel, was relatively slow to develop in the United States--not really getting into gear until the 1820s and 30s with the completion of the Erie Canal and the creation of luxury steamboats. Up through the Civil War, it remained strictly an elite phenomenon: only those at the top of the socio-economic ladder traveled to Europe to finish their education, or to the New England spas or White Springs, Virginia to "take the waters" or avail themselves of the curative effects of "good air." 1 The heyday of the local color movement coincided with--and more to the point, helped to promote--the rapid development of a full-scale domestic tourist industry in the last quarter of the century.

On the Beach at Newport, c.1874

   The explosive growth in railroads--making travel faster, cheaper, more convenient, and more comfortable-- and the expansion of the white collar labor pool, whose steady bureaucratic jobs made the budgeting of time and money for such luxuries reasonably easy, placed vacations within the reach of a much larger percentage of the American population. By the turn of the century, ninety percent of all middle class workers were receiving an annual paid vacation. Members of the working classes would not match this until the 1920s; throughout the period under discussion, they had to content themselves with short excursions. 2 This democratization typically meant that the ante-bellum watering holes for the self-appointed "crème de la crème" were mushrooming, making them less and less effective in maintaining their air of exclusiveness: as early as 1857, Saratoga hotels could hold 1200 people each. 3

The United States Hotel in Saratoga, c.1876

   As one might expect, the old guard responded to this invasion of their prerogative by building summer homes (expensive, 'rustic' cottages or outright mansions) further afield in New York or New England, and/ or vacationing further West or South in an attempt to preserve the integrity of their group boundaries. With this kind of historical dynamic as context, it is not surprising to find a significant vein of tension between middle and upper class perspectives throughout local colorists' depictions of tourism.

   The development of railroads--especially the massive increase in the system of feeder tracks from 1860 on--is always mentioned as one of the factors which contributed to the growth of the local color movement. In fact, it hard to over-emphasize the influence of railroad development on tourism (and consequently travel writing and local color writing) in the United States. The phenomenal growth of the railways during this period opened up hundreds of small towns as new markets for mass-produced goods, including certain genteel magazines which aspired to national status. 4 Take a look at some railroad advertisements from this period, or compare the amount of existing railway in the U.S. in 1865 and 1890. However, much less has been said about the explicit connections between railroads, local color writing, and the promotion of tourism.

    In case after case, railroad builders invested in the construction of luxury hotels, creating a kind of package deal they then set about employing artists and writers to promote. The urge to "produce" the American Scene in such a way as to contrast it favorably with the historic monuments and impressive natural features offered by England and the continent was one which had been occupying an increasing amount of cultural energy from the end of the eighteenth century onward. What we see towards the end of the century is the emergence and growth of entrepreneurial (business) sponsorship for this project. As early as 1857, for example, the B & O railroad sponsored a gala publicity event, inviting twenty writers, painters, and photographers to take a free trip on a special train they had equipped "with the utmost comforts of the day--sofas, a piano, a bar, and even a darkroom for the photographers." 5 They traveled in leisurely fashion, eating elaborate foods, all the way to Wheeling (W.Va.) and back, stopping wherever anyone wanted to 'make art.'

Excursionists pictured in Lippincott's Magazine, August 1872


   Later, in the 1880s, Henry Flagler acquired railroad lines and then provided them with passengers by building a string of ritzy hotels along the Florida coast, as the developers of Yellowstone had done out West in the early 1870s. One of the earliest travel agencies in the U.S. was founded in the Boston area by a Harvard graduate whose father was a railroad tycoon. Between them, they had soon expanded into the resort business, opening a grand hotel in sunny Pasadena (ca 1886) in order to better serve their elite clientele. 6

   As a form of cultural production, local color participated actively in this larger project, sharing generic boundaries--which in some cases were highly permeable--with ubiquitous travel sketches (lightly-fictionalized or ostensibly non-fiction) and with the body of promotional literature commissioned and distributed by railroads and travel agents. A good example of this overlap is the 1883 tourist brochure written by a Georgia journalist John Temple Graves for the Savannah, Florida, and Western Railway Company--a fictional account of a northern family's vacation in the south. Intent on providing something for everyone, he first extols the healthy climate (quite a feat, as Nina Silber notes, for a region of the country which had a reputation for harboring malaria), then enumerates the kinds of investment opportunities the sharp-eyed businessman might uncover, but ends with romance: every member of the family strikes up a southern love affair. 7 This tract, like Rebecca Harding Davis' three-part series on traveling in the Appalachians, (Harpers 1880) could just as easily be considered local color as travel or promotional literature.

Illustration from By-Paths in the Mountains by Rebecca Harding Davis (1880)

   In a similar vein, as Richard Brodhead points out, Celia Thaxter's Among the Isle of Shoals (Atlantic Monthly 1873) can be read as one long (though heavily veiled) advertisement for her family's hotel on Appledore Island. 8 Not to be left behind, southern hotel owners apparently went out of their way to lure local colorists to their establishments, "hoping that these writers would be inspired to advertise the scenic wonders of their particular locale in a new magazine story." 9 One begins to appreciate why critics occasionally complained that their writers were throwing splashes of gratuitous color into their stories--strictly for the purposes of writing off vacations as business expenses.

   However, I would hasten to add that nearly all the instances of textual tourism (Chopin's The Awakening and Howells' Landlord at Lion's Head being notable exceptions) envision--and by extension, attempt to promote--a certain experience of tourism. This version of cultural conditioning--as articulated by the writers and the editors of the four, big, "quality" monthlies (The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's and The Century were in power as a "school" up through the mid-1890s)--frequently differs from the actual historical trends and normative behavior of both middling and elite classes. It consistently pictures an intimate form of tourism: one outsider staying amongst an entire community, boarding with them in their homes on quasi-familial terms. This sort of experience would be substantively different from the whirl of luxury hotels and the homogenizing and superficial world of package tours being sought by the average vacationer. Social scientists like Valene Smith link the latter condition to mass tourism and describes this group of tourists as preferring to inhabit a "tourist bubble;" that is, remaining completely surrounded at all times with the amenities and luxuries they left behind. Smith would label the former role, which is present in most local color writing, as that of an "Explorer" or an "Elite." This category consists of actual travellers and tourist characters who accept, or at least adapt to, the local norms they encounter (if, for no other reason, I would add, than because they are outnumbered). 10

   The intimate interactions depicted in many local color sketches are often nostalgic, but not so much in theme as from a historical standpoint. For example, by the end of the Civil War, it was less and less possible for someone living in Boston or New York to find an intimate, untrammeled nook within a day's journey. Further, while there is evidence that visitors to the South and West did, on occasion, get to know residents of that region, elite travelers tended to invest their energies in seeing and being seen by one another, using the landscape (animal, vegetable or mineral) largely as a pretext. 11

A family camping in Maine, 1876

   Whether sympathetic to or repulsed by the places they visited, local colorists implicitly drew distinctions in their writings between the adventurous, first-hand encounters of their protagonists and the "fashionable" travelers ensconced in their cushy Pullman tourist bubbles. These characters are insulated by in-group preoccupations with clothes, manners, and family crests: many regional tales tacitly encouraged their readers to emulate one model and renounce the other. 12 These authors--increasingly "professionals" rather than people of substantial wealth and leisure--together articulated a metropolitan voice which spoke from the perspective of a cultural elite, a group with less and less in common with "high society" as it could be found in the salons and parlors of late 19th-century urban centers.

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