Abstract
Americans have long been known as a mobile people characterized by a seemingly insatiable wanderlust. In 1961, Time magazine proudly proclaimed the nation’s citizens to be “the world’s most restless travelers.” It is easy to imagine this instinct for mobility as the expression of a national genetic trait. Richard K. Popp’s book The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America does the valuable service of showing how, in fact, this trait has been carefully cultivated and shaped by the tourism, advertising, and publishing industries. Wanderlust may come naturally to many Americans, but the postwar culture of tourism described here was guided by many helping hands.
Popp, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, identifies a number of factors that set the stage for the postwar travel boom, including the widespread institution of the two-week paid vacation, the development of an expansive network of roads, the craze of “automobility” and the consumer credit industry that facilitated it, and government efforts to promote tourism during the Depression era. Equally important, however, was the creation of a mindset that taught Americans they were supposed to travel, that their two weeks of paid vacation should be spent on the road. As Popp describes it, middlebrow and nationalist cultural narratives converged to position travel as “a shared activity that constructed and affirmed group identity” for those who sought to be real Americans. The creation of these narratives is the focus of the book.
One major strength of the book is Popp’s discussion of the emergence of the travel magazine Holiday, created by Curtis Publishing in 1946. Popp demonstrates how the magazine was carefully formulated using market research to reach that segment of the reading public most attractive to potential advertisers in the tourism business. These readers had the income necessary for travel and, more importantly, had values that allowed them to spend freely on themselves, either for entertainment or for self-development. Popp rightly identifies this as a precursor to the trend toward market segmentation that affected the magazine industry as a whole in the postwar years as television took away their general audience. Holiday enjoyed several decades of popularity with its travel stories, destination features, enticing photos, and advertisements for everything related to tourism. Even Jack Kerouac, America’s iconic postwar traveler, wrote for it. As Popp suggests, the magazine made an effort to cultivate a particular way of seeing and understanding tourist locations in a way that soothed readers anxieties about travel by replicating readers’ preconceived ideas of place and presented them “through the lens of middle-class desire.”
The middle-class focus of postwar travel narratives fit in well with cold war cultural constructions. Celebrants of a “people’s capitalism” pointed to mass travel culture as “a manifestation of American economic and technological power” and a symbol of the benevolence of the capitalist system. Working- and middle-class Americans abroad were useful cultural ambassadors and exemplars of the classless nature of American society. This idealized vision apparent in tourism ads and magazines like Holiday did, of course, overlook painful class and racial divisions; not all Americans were able to, or allowed to, enjoy the benefits of travel. Although Holiday Makers discusses these tensions briefly, especially those involving race, more could be added to round out the book’s analysis.
The book is more, however, than a history of Holiday magazine. Popp also outlines an important shift in the strategies used to market and sell tourism and travel services. Prewar tourism advertising tended to be site-specific “lure” ads that focused on the unique attractions of an individual location. More sophisticated postwar approaches began to sell the idea of traveling to consumers looking for self-betterment or distinction. In other words, travel was increasingly sold based on the benefit to the traveler and less on the value of the destination. Where earlier tourism narratives focused on travel as a means to fit into the national culture, postwar advertising and magazine content sold it as a mark of individual distinction and taste that attracted wealthier and more sophisticated travelers.
Americans still travel, but the cultural moment described by Popp in this book began to pass by the end of the 1960s. By 1962, the historian Daniel Boorstin was already able to complain about the inauthentic nature of the kitschy roadside attractions and commercialized packaged tours dreamed up by the tourism industry. The distance between the advertised fantasies and the reality of travel widened for most middle-class tourists. Popp also points out that changing economic conditions meant fewer working Americans could afford to travel, even if they were among the lucky few who still had two weeks of paid annual vacation.
The Holiday Makers is a very insightful and well-researched study of the age of mass tourism in postwar America. In addition to addressing a gap in the scholarship on consumer culture history, it fits into an emerging literature on how Americans were taught to “see” the world in particular ways during the cold war era. It would be a good addition to any reading list in a course on the history of journalism or consumer culture. Much more could be done to outline the ways that African-Americans and other minorities were marginalized by the dominant narratives of postwar tourism, but the book still succeeds in helping us understand how the American wanderlust was harnessed and reshaped through advertising and magazines like Holiday.