The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  II

  SOMETIME PAST the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Graphic Revolution was getting under way, the character of foreign travel—first by Europeans, and then by Americans—began to change. This change has reached its climax in our day. Formerly travel required long planning, large expense, and great investments of time. It involved risks to health or even to life. The traveler was active. Now he became passive. Instead of an athletic exercise, travel became a spectator sport.

  This change can be described in a word. It was the decline of the traveler and the rise of the tourist. There is a wonderful, but neglected, precision in these words. The old English noun “travel” (in the sense of a journey) was originally the same word as “travail” (meaning “trouble,” “work,” or “torment”). And the word “travail,” in turn, seems to have been derived, through the French, from a popular Latin or Common Romanic word trepalium, which meant a three-staked instrument of torture. To journey—to “travail,” or (later) to travel—then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work.

  In the early nineteenth century a new word came into the English language which gave a clue to the changed character of world travel, especially from the American point of view. This was the word “tourist”—at first hyphenated as “tour-ist.” Our American dictionary now defines a tourist as “a person who makes a pleasure trip” or “a person who makes a tour, especially for pleasure.” Significantly, too, the word “tour” in “tourist” was derived by back-formation from the Latin tornus, which in turn came from the Greek word for a tool describing a circle. The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing” (a word, by the way, which came in about the same time, with its first use recorded in 1847). He expects everything to be done to him and for him.

  Thus foreign travel ceased to be an activity—an experience, an undertaking—and instead became a commodity. The rise of the tourist was possible, and then inevitable, when attractive items of travel were wrapped up and sold in packages (the “package tour”). By buying a tour you could oblige somebody else to make pleasant and interesting things happen to you. You could buy wholesale (by the month or week, or by the country) or retail (by the day or by the individual foreign capital).

  The familiar circumstances which had brought this about are worth recalling. First and most obvious was the easing of transportation. In the latter part of the nineteenth century railroads and ocean steamers began to make travel actually pleasurable. Discomfort and risks were suddenly reduced. For the first time in history, long-distance transportation was industrially mass-produced. It could be sold to lots of people, and it could be sold cheap. For a satisfactory return on investment, it had to be sold in large quantities. The capital invested in any of the old vehicles—a stagecoach or the passenger quarters in a sailing ship—was minute compared with that in a railroad (even a single sleeping car) or a luxury liner. This enormous capital investment required that equipment be kept in constant use and that passengers be found by the thousands. Now great numbers of people would be induced to travel for pleasure. Vast ocean steamers could not be filled with diplomats, with people traveling on business, or with aristocratic Henry Adamses who were intent on deepening their education. The consuming public had to be enlarged to include the vacationing middle class, or at least the upper middle class. Foreign travel became democratized.

  The obvious next step was the “personally conducted tour.” Well-planned group excursions could entice even the more timid stay-at-homes. Of course guided tours of one sort or another had been very old: the Crusades had sometimes taken on this character. We can recall, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the late fourteenth century, the knowledgeable, generous host of the Tabard Inn, who offered

  And for to make yow the moore mury,

  I wol myselven goodly with yow ryde,

  Right at myn owene cost, and be youre gyde.…

  But later guides seldom offered their services free. The guided tour itself actually became a commodity. Adventure would be sold in packages and guaranteed to be consumed without risk. In England, with its short distances, its rising middle classes, and its early-developed railroads, came the first organized tours. According to legend the very first of them was arranged in 1838 to take the people of Wadebridge by special train to the nearby town of Bodmin. There they witnessed the hanging of two murderers. Since the Bodmin gallows were in clear sight of the uncovered station, excursionists had their fun without even leaving the open railway carriages.

  The real pioneer in the making and marketing of conducted tours was of course Thomas Cook (1808–1892). He began in the early 1840’s by arranging special-rate railroad excursions within England. His first planned tour took nearly 600 people the eleven miles from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance convention—at a reduced round-trip third-class fare of one shilling a head. Soon Cook was sending hundreds to Scotland (1846) and Ireland (1848), and for thousands was arranging tours of the Crystal Palace Exposition in London in 1851. In 1856 he advertised his first “grand circular tour of the Continent,” visiting Antwerp, Brussels, the Field of Waterloo, Cologne, the Rhine and its borders, Mayence, Frankfort, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Strasbourg, Paris, Le Havre, and back to London. Then, with the help of his enterprising son, he offered Swiss tours, American tours, and finally, in 1869, the first middle-class Conducted Crusade to the Holy Land. He quickly developed all kinds of conveniences: courteous and knowledgeable guides, hotel coupons, room reservations, and protection and advice against disease and thievery.

  Sophisticated Englishmen objected. They said that Cook was depriving travelers of initiative and adventure and cluttering the continental landscape with the Philistine middle classes. “Going by railroad,” complained John Ruskin, “I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely being ‘sent’ to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.” An article in Blackwood’s Magazine in February, 1865, by a British consul in Italy, attacked this “new and growing evil … of conducting some forty or fifty persons, irrespective of age or sex, from London to Naples and back for a fixed sum.” “The Cities of Italy,” he lamented, were now “deluged with droves of these creatures, for they never separate, and you see them forty in number pouring along a street with their director—now in front, now at the rear, circling round them like a sheepdog—and really the process is as like herding as may be. I have already met three flocks, and anything so uncouth I never saw before, the men, mostly elderly, dreary, sad-looking; the women, somewhat younger, travel-tossed, but intensely lively, wide-awake, and facetious.”

  Cook defended his tours, which he called “agencies for the advancement of Human Progress.” The attacks on them, he said, were sheer snobbery. The critics belonged in some earlier century. How foolish to “think that places of rare interest should be excluded from the gaze of the common people, and be kept only for the interest of the ‘select’ of society. But it is too late in this day of progress to talk such exclusive nonsense, God’s earth with all its fullness and beauty, is for the people; and railways and steamboats are the result of the common light of science, and are for the people also.… The best of men, and the noblest minds, rejoice to see the people follow in their foretrod routes of pleasure.”

  Still, in the United States, where everything was suddenly available to everybody, it was far more profitable to deal in immigrants than in tourists. Mobile, immigrant-filled, primitive America saw less glamor in travel, whether at home or abroad. Among Americans, even longer than among Englishmen, foreign travel remained close to its aristocratic origins. Until early in the twentieth century, Americans who wanted a planned European excursion still relied on Thomas Cook & Son. President Grant used Cook’s. And one of the best testimonials for Cook’s new foolproof, carefree travel c
ommodity came from Mark Twain:

  Cook has made travel easy and a pleasure. He will sell you a ticket to any place on the globe, or all the places, and give you all the time you need and much more besides. It provides hotels for you everywhere, if you so desire; and you cannot be overcharged, for the coupons show just how much you must pay. Cook’s servants at the great stations will attend to your baggage, get you a cab, tell you how much to pay cabmen and porters, procure guides for you, and horses, donkeys, camels, bicycles, or anything else you want, and make life a comfort and satisfaction to you. Cook is your banker everywhere, and his establishment your shelter when you get caught out in the rain. His clerks will answer all the questions you ask and do it courteously. I recommend your Grace to travel on Cook’s tickets; and I do this without embarrassment, for I get no commission. I do not know Cook.

  Cook’s has never lost its early leadership. It is still the largest travel agency in the world.

  The principal competitor in the United States was to be the American Express Company. It grew out of the famous Wells, Fargo and other agencies which by the mid-nineteenth century were forwarding goods and money across the vast American spaces. In the nineteenth century these agencies profited from the immigrant influx, by going into the business of arranging remittances from successful, recently arrived Americans to their needy families back in Europe. In 1891 the first American Express Travelers Cheque was copyrighted, and in the years since it has done much to ease the traveler’s cares. (By 1960 about two billion dollars’ worth were being sold annually.) In 1895 American Express opened its first European office. At first all it offered traveling Americans was a mail-forwarding service, help in securing railroad tickets and hotel reservations, and help in finding lost baggage. President James C. Fargo, in charge until 1914, insisted there was no money in the tourist business. American Express, he said, should deal exclusively in freight and express. But the consolidation of the different express services as part of the war effort in World War I inevitably changed the business. Even before the end of the war American Express had begun to develop an extensive travel service, and after the war its travel department grew spectacularly. By 1961 American Express, serving tourists everywhere, had 279 offices throughout the world.

  American Express sent the first postwar escorted tour to Europe in October, 1919. Soon afterwards the first Mediterranean cruise went out in the Cunard liner Caronia, under joint control of American Express and Cook’s. In 1922 American Express dispatched the first all-water round-the-world pleasure cruise in the Laconia. Afterwards a similar cruise was arranged every year. The great backwash had begun. Americans were returning to the Old World in the great tourist invasions of Europe which have fluctuated with our domestic fortunes, but which in recent years have been greater than ever before.

  By the middle of the twentieth century, foreign travel had become big business. It was a prominent feature of the American standard of living, an important element in our cultural and financial relations with the rest of the world. In 1957, for example, about ten million American residents spent over two billion dollars on international travel. Of these travelers, 1.5 million went overseas. For the summer of 1961 alone, it was estimated that 800,000 Americans were visiting Europe and were spending there about seven hundred million dollars.

  Foreign travel now had, of course, become a commodity. Like any other mass-produced commodity, it could be bought in bargain packages and on the installment plan. It was considered a strange and noteworthy event, a peculiar quirk, when Charles Sumner in early nineteenth-century Boston borrowed money from a couple of old friends who had faith in his future, to finance his tour of Europe. Nowadays more and more travelers take the trip before they can pay for it. “Go Now, Pay Later.” Your travel agent will arrange it for you.

  When travel is no longer made to order but is an assembly-line, store-boughten commodity, we have less to say about what goes into it. And we know less and less about what we are buying. We buy so many days of vacation pleasure without even knowing what is in the package. Recently on a lecture tour I flew into Hyderabad, a city in central India, of which I had not even heard a year before. Seated beside me on the plane were a tired, elderly American and his wife. He was a real estate broker from Brooklyn. I asked him what was interesting about Hyderabad. He had not the slightest notion. He and his wife were going there because the place was “in the package.” Their tour agent had guaranteed to include only places that were “world famous,” and so it must be.

  A well-packaged tour must include insurance against risks. In this sense the dangers of travel have become obsolete; we buy safety and peace of mind right in the package. Somebody else covers all the risks. In 1954 the suspense-thriller movie The High and the Mighty depicted the troubled flight of a luxury air liner from San Francisco to Honolulu. The assorted vacationers aboard were flying to the mid-Pacific for a week or two of relaxation. As the engines failed, the nerves of the passengers began to fray. Finally, in order to keep the plane in the air, the captain ordered the baggage jettisoned. I saw this movie in a suburban theatre outside of Chicago. Beside me sat a mother and her young son. He seemed relatively unperturbed at the mortal risks of the passengers, but when the plane’s purser began tossing into the ocean the elegant vacation paraphernalia—fancy suitcases, hatboxes, portable typewriters, golf clubs, tennis rackets—the boy became agitated. “What will they do?” the boy exclaimed. “Don’t worry,” comforted the mother. “It’s all insured.”

  When the traveler’s risks are insurable he has become a tourist.

  III

  THE TRAVELER used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter. They are always devising efficient new ways of insulating the tourist from the travel world.

  In the old traveler’s accounts, the colorful native innkeeper, full of sage advice and local lore, was a familiar figure. Now he is obsolete. Today on Main Street in your home town you can arrange transportation, food, lodging, and entertainment for Rome, Sydney, Singapore, or Tokyo.

  No more chaffering. A well-planned tour saves the tourist from negotiating with the natives when he gets there. One reason why returning tourists nowadays talk so much about and are so irritated by tipping practices is that these are almost their only direct contact with the people. Even this may soon be eliminated. The Travel Plant Commission of the International Union of Official Travel Organizations in 1958 was studying ways of standardizing tipping practices so that eventually all gratuities could be included in the tour package. Shopping, like tipping, is one of the few activities remaining for the tourist. It is a chink in that wall of prearrangements which separates him from the country he visits. No wonder he finds it exciting. When he shops he actually encounters natives, negotiates in their strange language, and discovers their local business etiquette. In a word, he tastes the thrill and “travail” which the old-time traveler once experienced all along the way—with every purchase of transportation, with every night’s lodging, with every meal.

  A planned excursion insulates the tourist in still another way. From its first invention by Thomas Cook in the early nineteenth century, the fully prearranged group tour promised good-fellowship with one’s countrymen in addition to the exotic pleasure of foreign sights. The luxury ocean liner and the all-expense “cruise” (the word in this sense is very recent and is possibly an American invention; originally it meant “to sail from place to place, as for pleasure, without a set destination”) have made this kind of travel amount to residence in a floating resort hotel.

  Shipmates now replace the natives as a source of adventure. Unadvertised risks from pickpockets and bandits are replaced by over-advertised risks of shipboard romance. The sights which disappoint the bachelor or spinster on a cruise are not the Vatican, the Louvre, or the Acropolis but the shipmates. Except for tipping and shopping adventures, returning cruisers have little to report about encounters with the natives, but they have a great deal to say
about their countrymen on tour with them. The authorized centennial history of American Express recounts the tribulations of a cruise director on a round-the-world cruise. He was obliged, among other things, “to rescue a susceptible young playboy from the wiles of a cruising adventuress; play cupid to a British baronet and an American actress; guard the widow of an Australian pearl magnate who carried tin cans full of matched pearls loose in her baggage; quietly settle an attempted murder in Calcutta; protect his charges during the pitched battle with which Hindus and Mohammedans celebrated the Harvest Festival in Agra; reason with a passenger who demanded a refund because he lost a day when the ship crossed the international date line; and hold the hand of a lonely old lady as she lay dying in a hotel in Rome.” In the old days, an excursion director was called a “guide”; now he is a “social director.”

  Of course the voyager, even on a planned excursion, is likely to be less insulated on land than on sea, and he is least insulated if he goes alone. But the notion of packaged touring has so prevailed that when a person goes by himself the American Express travel department gives his package a special name, “F.I.T.” or “D.I.T.”—for “Foreign (or Domestic) Independent Travel.” If you want to buy a vacation tour package all for yourself (that is, voyage alone and at will), this is actually offered as a “special feature.” It is described as an attractive new departure from the routine group arrangements, much as only a half century ago the group excursion was offered as something special. The individualized package, the American Express chronicler explains, “is for individuals who prefer to travel alone rather than in a conducted group. A tour is planned to meet the particular specifications of the client. The exact cost is reckoned and, on payment of this amount, the traveler is given the familiar American Express package containing tickets and coupons to cover his entire trip.”