Tourist attractions serve their purpose best when they are pseudo-events. To be repeatable at will they must be factitious. Emphasis on the artificial comes from the ruthless truthfulness of tourist agents. What they can really guarantee you are not spontaneous cultural products but only those made especially for tourist consumption, for foreign cash customers. Not only in Mexico City and Montreal, but also in the remote Guatemalan Tourist Mecca of Chichecastenango and in far-off villages of Japan, earnest honest natives embellish their ancient rites, change, enlarge, and spectacularize their festivals, so that tourists will not be disappointed. In order to satisfy the exaggerated expectations of tour agents and tourists, people everywhere obligingly become dishonest mimics of themselves. To provide a full schedule of events at the best seasons and at convenient hours, they travesty their most solemn rituals, holidays, and folk celebrations—all for the benefit of tourists.
In Berlin, in the days before the First World War, legend tells us that precisely at the stroke of noon, just as the imperial military band would begin its daily concert in front of the Imperial Palace, Kaiser Wilhelm used to interrupt whatever he was doing inside the palace. If he was in a council of state he would say, “With your kind forbearance, gentlemen, I must excuse myself now to appear in the window. You see, it says in Baedeker that at this hour I always do.”
Modern tourist guidebooks have helped raise tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichecastenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists’ stage. The pioneer, of course, was Karl Baedeker (1801–1859) of Leipzig, whose name long since has entered our language as a synonym for his product. He began offering his packaged tours in print at the same time that Thomas Cook in England was perfecting the personally conducted packaged tour. Baedeker issued a guidebook to Coblenz in 1829, first in German; then in 1846 came his first foreign-language edition (in French); in 1861 appeared his first English-language edition. By the beginning of World War II the Baedeker firm had sold more than two million copies of about a hundred different guides in English, French, and German, the languages that reached those nations with rising middle classes who were now strenuously adapting the Grand Tour to their more meager budgets and more limited education. Despite the setback of the war and the destruction of the Baedeker plant in Leipzig by the Royal Air Force, fifty new editions were published in the decade after 1950. In the single year 1958 about 80,000 Baedeker guides were sold at a price of nearly five dollars apiece. At this rate, within twenty-five years as many Baedekers would be sold as in the whole previous century.
Karl Baedeker himself was a relentless sight-seer. In the beginning he refused to describe anything he had not personally seen. His guidebooks have held a reputation for scrupulous accuracy, leading many tourists to share A. P. Herbert’s faith:
For kings and governments may err
But never Mr. Baedeker.
A testimony to Baedeker’s incorruptibility was his statement in an early edition that “Hotels which cannot be accurately characterized without exposing the editor to the risk of legal proceedings are left unmentioned.” Baedeker saved his readers from unnecessary encounters with the natives, warned against mosquitoes, bedbugs, and fleas, advised wariness of unwashed fruit and uncooked salads, told the price of a postage stamp, and indicated how much to tip (overtipping was a cardinal sin in Baedeker’s book).
Eventually Baedeker actually instructed the tourist how to dress and how to act the role of a decent, respectable, tolerant member of his own country, so as not to disappoint or shock the native spectators in the country he was visiting. By the early years of the twentieth century Baedeker was prompting the English reader to play this role “by his tact and reserve, and by refraining from noisy behaviour and contemptuous remarks (in public buildings, hotels, etc.), and especially from airing his political views.” “The Englishman’s customary holiday attire of rough tweeds, ‘plus fours,’ etc., is unsuitable for town wear in Italy.” “The traveller should refrain from taking photographs of beggars, etc.”
Baedeker’s most powerful invention was the “star system,” which soon had as much charm over sight-seers as its namesake later came to have over movie-goers. His system of rating gave two stars (**) to sights that were extraordinary (the Louvre, Yellowstone Park, Windsor Castle, St. Peter’s, the Uffizi, the Pyramids, the Colosseum), one star (*) to sights of lesser rank (merely noteworthy), and no stars at all to the mine-run tourist attractions. This scheme, later copied or adapted by Baedeker’s successors (Russell Muirhead of the successful Blue Guides and Penguin Guides, and numerous American authors of guides), has dominated the uneasy, half-cultivated modern tourist. Hermann Göring, instructing his Luftwaffe in 1942, is said to have directed them to destroy “every historical building and landmark in Britain that is marked with an asterisk in Baedeker.” These were sometimes called the “Baedeker raids.”
Anyone who has toured with Baedeker knows the complacent feeling of having checked off all the starred attractions in any given place, or the frustration of having gone to great trouble and expense to see a sight only to discover afterward that it had not even rated a single asterisk. Tourists versed in one-upmanship who visit some frequented place like Paris or Florence have been known to concentrate their sight-seeing on unstarred items, so that in conversation back home they can face-down their plodding acquaintances who go by the book. But the star system, like the public museums and the whole phenomenon of middle-class touring, has been a by-product of the democratic revolutions. It, too, has helped blaze “an easy path to cultural sophistication for millions.” As Ivor Brown shrewdly observes, this star system has tended to produce star-gazers rather than explorers.
The tourist looks for caricature; travel agents at home and national tourist bureaus abroad are quick to oblige. The tourist seldom likes the authentic (to him often unintelligible) product of the foreign culture; he prefers his own provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems more charmingly French than one who simply sings in French. The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey. He wants to believe that geishas are only quaint oriental prostitutes; it is nearly impossible for him to imagine they can be anything else. After all, he hasn’t spent all that money and gone all the way over there to be made a fool of. The Noh or Kabuki or Bunraku (which have long entertained the Japanese in their distinctive theatrical idiom) bore him, but he can grasp the Takarazuka girlie show, a Japanesey musical extravaganza on the Ziegfeld-Billy Rose model, distinguished from its American counterparts mainly by the fact that all the performers are women. The out-of-dateness of its manner he mistakes for an oriental flavor. Even the official Japanese Tourist Bureau guidebook, anxiously reminding the American that in Japan he will not fail to find what he wants, notes that “strip tease … performances are advancing somewhat artistically.” The Takarazuka extravaganza is described at length as “an opera peculiar to Japan, known as the girls’ opera.” Like its Frenchy counterpart, the Folies Bergères which is sometimes featured in Las Vegas, a Takarazuka-type show from any country will be a box-office success in the United States.
As the obliging foreign producers work harder to give Americans just what they expect, American tourists, in turn, oblige by becoming more and more naive, to the point of gullibility. Tourists, however, are willing gulls, if only because they are always secretly fearful their extravagant (and expensive) expectations may not be fulfilled. They are determined to have their money’s worth. Wherever in the world the American tourist goes, then, he is prepared to be ruled by the law of pseudo-events, by which the image, the well-contrived imitation, outshines the original.
Everywhere, picturesque natives fashion papier-maché images of themselves. Yet all this earnest picturesqueness too often produces only a pallid imitation of the technicolor motion picture which the t
ourist goes to verify. The Eternal City becomes the site of the box-office hit Roman Holiday; tourist-pilgrims are eager to visit the “actual” scenes where famous movies like Ben Hur and Spartacus were really photographed. Mount Sinai becomes well-known as the site about which The Ten Commandments was filmed. In 1960 a highly successful packaged tour was organized which traced the route of events in Leon Uris’ novel Exodus; the next year El Al Israel Airlines announced a new sixteen-day tour which promised to cover the very places where Otto Preminger and his film crew had shot scenes for the movie version.
The problems of satisfying the tourist expectations of a great middle-class market were summarized in a government study (1936) under the auspices of the Union of South Africa and the South African Railways and Harbours:
Supply of Tourist Attractions
In the wake of advertising and demand, creation must ordinarily follow an organized and systematic supply. If publicity has been given in foreign countries to the national tourist attractions of a country and if a demand has been created therefor, then it is imperative not only that that which has been advertised should come up to reasonable expectations but that it should also be ordinarily available and normally accessible. So, for example, if animal or native life is made to feature in foreign publicity then as such it must be ordinarily available to tourists. Under no circumstances should any aspect of animal or native life which is not ordinarily present be made to feature in a country’s tourist publicity. Thus it is wrong to make a feature of native initiation ceremonies or native dances which are only seen on rare occasions since in their true character they have ritual significance.
The sight-seeing items which can be confidently guaranteed and conveniently and quickly delivered to tourists on arrival have these merchandisable qualities precisely because they are not naive expressions of the country. They cannot be the real ritual or the real festival; that was never originally planned for tourists. Like the hula dances now staged for photographer-tourists in Hawaii (courtesy of the Eastman Kodak Company), the widely appealing tourist attractions are apt to be those specially made for tourist consumption.
And the tourist demands more and more pseudo-events. The most popular of these must be easily photographed (plenty of daylight) and inoffensive—suitable for family viewing. By the mirror-effect law of pseudo-events, they tend to become bland and unsurprising reproductions of what the image-flooded tourist knew was there all the time. The tourist’s appetite for strangeness thus seems best satisfied when the pictures in his own mind are verified in some far country.
V
SO FAR I have been writing about foreign travel—tours to distant places. I have shown how Americans going to remote parts of the world have been transformed from travelers into tourists by the very same advances which have made travel cheap, safe, and available. A similar transformation has been going on here at home. Even within the United States to go from one place to another is no longer to travel in the old sense of the word. Not only because, as we often hear, the culture of different parts of the country has been homogenized—so that wherever you go in the United States you see the same motion pictures, hear the same radio programs, watch the same television shows, eat the same packaged foods, select from the same ice cream flavors. We all know how desperately Chambers of Commerce work to create local color, how auto license plates advertise unreal distinctions. Alabama is the “Heart of Dixie,” Arkansas is the “Land of Opportunity,” Illinois is the “Land of Lincoln,” Maine is “Vacationland,” Minnesota has “10,000 Lakes,” North Dakota is “Peace Garden State.” All this is obvious.
But in addition to this, the democratizing of travel, the lowering cost, increased organization, and improved means of long-distance transportation within our country have themselves helped dilute the experience. Even here at home we are little more than tourists. “Traveling,” the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observes, “… is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic. You laugh, gentlemen, but it’s true, travel is atavistic, the day will come when there will be no more traffic at all and only newlyweds will travel.” That day has almost arrived. Not because we no longer move about the earth. But because the more we move about, the more difficult it becomes not to remain 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 recently. In 1927 what is claimed to be the first escorted tour by air was planned by Thomas Cook & Son. It was an excursion from New York to Chicago to see the Dempsey-Tunney fight in which the famous “long count” occurred. Since this was even before any regular passenger air service between the cities, the trip was made by chartered plane. In recent decades the multiplying conventions of professional organizations, trade associations, unions, fraternal groups, and of the employees of large firms have supported the domestic travel business.
As late as 1928 the travel department of American Express 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 annual 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 quarter-million visitors to the Fair during the season. At the close of the Fair in 1934, American Express organized the annual Rotary Club convention in Mexico City; a Pullman city was brought down to house Rotarians taken there to see Mexico. In 1936 American Express expanded its “Banner Tours,” and in the summer 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 Battery, including seeing the Hudson from an excursion steamer, Chinatown, Greenwich Village, a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, and an evening at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe.… 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” filling 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 artificiality of “regular” tourist performances. They are Nature imitating the pseudo-event.
The automobile itself has been one of the chief insulating agencies. And the insulation has become more 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 acquaintance; the Pullman smoker was a traditionally fertile source of jokes and folklore. Now the train is dying out as a means of long-distance travel. And if we
travel by air we are seldom aloft long enough to strike up new acquaintances. But for meeting new people the private automobile is the least promising of all. Even hitchhikers are slowly becoming obsolete as well as illegal.
The nation-wide route numbering system, with its standardized signs of the new era, was adopted in 1925 by the Joint Board of State and Federal Highways, supposedly to eliminate “confusion” from the “motley array” of signs which differed from place to place. Even before our new transcontinental super highways it was not necessary to know where you were (provided you could remember the number of your route) or where you had to go to reach your destination. Today when we ask directions we usually inquire not for a place but for a number.
Super highways have been the climax in homogenizing the motorist’s landscape. A friend of mine recently drove his family from Chicago to New York on one of these tollways. His boy had heard about the prosperous Ohio farms and wanted to visit one. But this proved too difficult. Once on the super highway (with not a traffic light to stop them), they seemed more remote than ever from the environing farms. Where would one leave the toll road? How and where could one return?
As late as the early years of this century in the United States the general demand was for roads extending only two to five miles from railroad stations. Then the Federal Highway Act of 1921 began to co-ordinate state highways and to standardize road-building practice. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 established the new National System of Interstate Highways, an arterial network of 40,000 miles planned to reach forty-two state capitals, and to serve 182 of the 199 cities in the country having populations over 50,000. There has been an increasing tendency to concentrate road improvements on these most-used roads, which become more and more like one another in every respect. The seven-hundred-odd thousand miles of Federal Aid roads (primary and secondary) make up only a quarter of the total rural road mileage in the United States. Yet they serve almost 90 per cent of the total rural highway travel. An increasing proportion of passengers go over well-traveled roads. The better traveled the roads, the more they become assimilated to one another. Economy and good engineering require that they traverse the dullest expanses of the landscape.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage) Page 12