boorstin19

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Front Traveler to Tourist:

will come when there will be do morę traffic at all and only newlyweds will travel.” That day has almost arrived. Not be-cause we no longer move about the earth. But because the morę we move about, the morę difficult it becomes not to re-main in the same place. Nearly all the changes in foreign travel have appeared with equal or greater effect in domestic travel.

Organized domestic conducted tours have grown only re-cently. In<T927 what is claimed to be the first escorted tour by air was planned by Thomas Cook & Son. It was an excur-sion from New York to Chicago to seethe Kempsey-Tunney fight jn which the famous “long count” occurred. Since tliis was even before any regular passenger air service between the cities, the trip was madę by chartered piane. In recent decades the multiplying conventions of professional organiza-tions, trade associations, unions, fraternal groups, and of the employees of large firms have supported the domestic travel business. _

As late as(^928 )he travel department of American Ex-press was sending only five or six tours out West each year, and for each tour eighteen people were considered a good crowd. Then an enterprising new manager of the Chicago Office sent 120 members of the Chicago Athletic Club on a tour to Alaska; a special train took Chicago doctors to the an-nual convention of the American Hospital Association in California; two shiploads of Spanish-American War veterans were sent to Cuba; and 300 electrical workers went to Miami. A new program of packaged Western tours was then developed. Even during the depression these tours somehow stayed in demand. In the depression summer of 1933 at the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair, American Express did over a million dollars’ worth of business within a single month, and handled nearly a ąuarter-million visitors to the Fair during the season. At the close of the Fair in 1934, American Express organized the annual Rotary Club con-vention in Mexico City; a Pullman city was brought down to house Rotarians taken there to see Mexico. In 1936 Ameri-can Express expanded its “Banner Tours,” and in the sum-mer of 1939, it sent out West twenty-two special trains on all-expense tours.

Since 1928 the domestic excursion business of American Express has increased a hundredfold. The items have ranged from expensive “Grand Tours” of the West and the Canadian Rockies, priced at nearly $1,000 apiece, to a bargain package three-day tour of New York at $19.95, “in the course of which the traveler stays at a well-known midtown hotel and does the metropolitan area from Bear Mountain to the Bat-tery, including seeing the Hudson from an excursion steamer, Chinatown, Greenwich Village, a baseball gamę at Yankee Stadium, and an evening at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horse-shoe. . . . It rather makes a native New Yorker believe in miracles.”

The growth of tourist attractions—or the better baiting of tourist traps—has been unprecedented in recent years. From the grandiose Disneyland, which we have already noted, and its smaller imitators (Freedomland, Frontierland, etc.) to the plaster-of-paris “Covered Wagon” and “Indian Tepee” filłing stations and “museums” now lining highways in Kansas and Nebraska. The pre-eminence of Yellowstone National Park as a tourist attraction is doubtless due to the fact that its natural phenomena—its geysers and “paintpots” which erupt and boil on Schedule—come closest to the artifi-ciality of “regular” tourist performances. They are Naturę imitating the pseudo-event.

The aufbmojyle itself has been one of the chief insulating agencies. Afia the insulation has become morę effective as we have improved body design from the old open touring car to the new moving “picture window” through which we can look out from air-conditioned comfort while we hear our familiar radio program. The whizzing cross-country motorist stops at his familiar trademark, refueling at gas stations of uniform design. His speed makes him reluctant to stop at all. On a train it used to be possible to make a casual acquaint-ance; the Pullman smoker was a traditionally fertile source