Introduction to Hospitality

Commissioned by Washington State and funded by the Department of Education, the essay was published as a chapter in an open source textbook for use by the state's community and technical colleges. As editor and lead author of the multi-authored project, I contributed the following chapter as well as ones on "Gastronomic Tourism" and "Sustainability and Regenerative Tourism." Whereas the online book includes numerous elements intended to aid students in reader comprehension and to serve as mnemonic devices, the following excerpt includes only the narrative essay.

History of Tourism

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, andnarrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

—Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

As far back as ancient Rome, wealthy individuals left the crowded city for the summer to enjoy the seaside, traveling for the same reason as modern tourists do—to escape their everyday lives in pursuit of pleasure. The roots of modern tourism, however, are embedded within the more recent past, beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, when British elites began to travel in pursuit of worldly knowledge and experience. Prior, travelers journeyed for food, exploration, adventure, trade, the acquisition of lands, and to conquer the peoples inhabiting resource-rich territories. Sea voyages were undertaken for economic and political gain as well as for adventure. People also traveled to partake in religious ritual, to undergo a pilgrimage, or to proselytize religion. As Eric Zuelow explains in his book on the History of Modern Tourism, “Religious pilgrimage, at least in the West, arguably reached its zenith during the high middle ages when Europeans left their homes in order to visit an astonishing network of holy sites such as Canterbury Cathedral in England, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, Rome, and, of course, the Holy Land itself” (8). The pilgrimage was codified into English literature by Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales (1476) would presage the capacity of travel to bring together individuals from varied social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.

Although the roots of modern tourism date back centuries to the Grand Tour, the study of the history of tourism only developed as a full-fledged academic field in the 21st century. By 2009 enough scholars had begun to explore the field to warrant the founding of a designated Journal of Tourism History. Scholars have been driven to study the history of tourism because it illuminates the development of the modern nation-state. As Zuelow deftly summarizes, “the tourism industry and experiences enjoyed by tourists were both shaped by and helped to create the modern world. Tourism grew from political, social, and cultural forces, emergent nationalism, new modes of consumption, intellectual change, and evolving technology” (10). Just as wealthy British elites on a Grand Tour of Europe did centuries ago, today’s tourists develop an understanding of their nation’s identity by learning about and comparing it to that of other nations.

Shifting Ideas about Nature

As Zuelow argues in his book on the History of Modern Tourism, several factors came together over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries that shifted human attitudes toward nature in a way that enabled the development of today’s tourist industry. First of all, wealthy visitors to Holland were inspired by the way the Dutch had tamed and controlled the waters of their nation to become an economic superpower surpassing England (Zuelow, 36). The Dutch ability to “conquer” nature conjoined with shifting ideas about science to ease anxiety about what would come to be termed “sublime” landscapes, which inspired travelers, artists, and writers.

Whereas mysterious, awe-inspiring, or frightening landscapes, coastlines, and oceans were once thought of as dangerous entities populated by ferocious beasts and demons, the Irish intellectual Edmund Burke helped transform European thought with the publication of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in which he argued that stunning, awe-inspiring, even frightful vistas open the mind and expand human consciousness. So too, Burke believed, do mysterious natural phenomenon, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, fires, and avalanches (Sullivan, “Romantic Attitudes Toward Nature”). Whereas previously nature had been understood in religious terms, Burke helped shift European and, in turn, American attitudes toward a scientific understanding of nature and of humanity.

Burke believed that careful observation and analysis could lead to productive advances in our understanding of the universe and its workings. He argued that traveling through awe-inspiring and fearful settings could prove instructive and enlightening. Burke’s writings would inspire such brilliant minds as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, each of whom wrote about nature’s power to broaden and enrich the human mind. Religious and folk beliefs about nature were slowly replaced by scientific inquiry into the workings of the universe at the same time that explorers such as Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838) were mapping the uncharted territories west of the Mississippi in the New Republic, where they were “discovering” new animals such as grizzly bears, coyotes, bighorn sheep, and jackrabbits.

In turn, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was crafting a vision of nature and its ecosystems that was centuries ahead of its time. Exploring some of most extreme places in the world, Humboldt climbed higher than any European ever had before. During his ascent of Chimborazo, a 21,000-foot-tall inactive volcano in the Andes, Humboldt wrote journals and drew sketches charting the change in vegetation and topography, noting that lichen stopped growing at 18,000 feet. As Andrea Wulf describes in her award-winning biography The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, at the edge of the volcano the naturalist “stood at the top of the world, looking down upon the mountain ranges that folded beneath him [and] began to see the world differently. He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected” (2). Beginning to comprehend the earth as a living entity, Humboldt “became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change” after seeing the scarred and ravaged landscape of colonial plantations in Venezuela in 1800. In 1804, after his journey through the Americas, ending with a lengthy visit with Thomas Jefferson, Humboldt returned home to Europe at the age of 34, bringing back “some 60,000 plant specimens” (129). Of the 6,000 species represented among his collection, 2,000 were new to Europeans.

In part due to Burke and in part due to Humboldt, human understanding of nature was being radically transformed. None other than Charles Darwin sited Humboldt as the inspiration for his career, which involved the scientist’s intellectual pursuit of earth’s geo-history, among many other aims. Darwin attributed his youthful drive to ascend the mountains of Chile to Humboldt’s writings. Darwin’s travel memoir about the trip, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), in turn, inspired generations of naturalists and explorers. In his memoir, Darwin wrote about discovering fossilized shells high in the mountains, which showed that the vertiginous topography he climbed had once been submerged in water. Darwin’s engaging writing style helped fuel the travels of his fellow Victorians, who began exploring ever further afield to see the world’s vast and varied geography and to gain perspective on the natural world as well as rich urban centers.

The Origins of Tourism: The Grand Tour

Centuries before Burke, Humboldt, and Darwin helped revolutionize our understanding of nature and the earth, the roots of tourism had begun to take hold in 16th-century Britain. Reserved for aristocrats with the income and leisure time to travel for years on end, the Grand Tour served as a coming-of-age rite of passage. As scholar Sarah Goldsmith explains:

the Tour, which dates back to the Elizabethan era, had its roots in a long tradition of travel as a means of male formation.... Its participants were young elite men in their late teens and early twenties, often travelling after school, home tutoring or university but before the responsibilities of adult life. As this was the most expensive, time-consuming and socially exclusive of the early modern options of educational travel, a Grand Tourist was typically the family heir. (Introduction, paragraph 2)

The majority of research into the Grand Tour centers on British outbound travel, but French, Germans, and Russians also participated in the Tour. At the Tour’s peak in the mid-1700s, one scholar surmises, 15,000 to 20,000 British took part annually (Page & Connell, 27). The Grand Tour embodied educational travel, and Burke’s writings informed the Grand Tour’s emphasis on and appreciation of sublime vistas as having an enriching impact on the viewer’s mental development and emotional depth. The cosmopolitan focus of the Grand Tour was complemented by hikes through treacherous landscapes and wild environs that developed the tourist’s agility and stamina.

Individuals on the Grand Tour often traveled with scholars or artists who would educate them about the antiquities, art, architecture, gardens, and natural curiosities they visited. Initially, as Goldsmith notes, “The Tour was understood as a finishing school of masculinity, a coming-of-age process, and an important rite of passage that was intended to form young men in their adult masculine identities by endowing them with the skills and virtues most highly prized by the elite” (2). The Grand Tour introduced future leaders to the world and prepared them to become an intellectual force, well-versed in foreign cultures and with a cosmopolitan bent, honed from traveling to cities including Rome, Naples, Paris, Hanover, Berlin, Geneva, and Prague. Grand Tourists were introduced to the politics, trade, economics, agriculture, manufacturing, and leading industries of the countries to which they traveled.

The Tour was intended to form young men into curious adventurers with a clear understanding of other cultures and economic powers. Tourists were trained to be intrepid, intelligent, educated, polite, and virile intellectual explorers. They climbed the Alps and ventured up Mount Vesuvius, honing their physical stamina. Being able to face and handle danger proved an essential part of the rite of passage just as much as learning how to behave in a polite, educated, and elegant manner. The Grand Tour was intended to develop a young man’s strength, refinement, adaptability, as well as his knowledge of the classics and antiquity, literature, the arts, and the military; some tourists even volunteered to fight in military campaigns to test themselves in battle. The Grand Tour likewise served as a means introducing young men to European elites, enabling them to forge connections and social networks for future use.

According to Goldsmith, in addition to “instilling knowledge, the Grand Tour was also used to form men’s virtues, character, identities and even their emotional capacity. For example, it was deliberately designed to separate young men from their families and homes. This resulted in a set of anticipated emotional reactions and can therefore be termed an ‘emotional practice’” (11). During the height of the Grand Tour at the mid-18th century, travelers developed a tendency toward what American Thorstein Veblen would eventually term conspicuous consumption (Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899). The ostentatious display of the leisure time needed to take a Grand Tour was increasingly coupled with lavish purchasing sprees and decadent meals.

As Westerners began to shift their attitude toward nature and to understand it as a key to comprehending humanity’s place in the world, the perception of oceans and seawater shifted as well. As far back as the 17th century, when Scarborough was developed as the first spa in Britain, wealthy travelers began to visit seaside resorts. Visiting the seashore provided urban dwellers a respite from the city, and spas began to develop to serve these visitors, who were often directed by doctors to bathe in sea water and to drink mineral water, which were believed to promote physical health. With the publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785) less well-heeled English tourists began to seek adventure closer to home. Spurred by Johnson’s and Boswell’s travel accounts, poets, artists, musicians, and academics journeyed to the western isles and the Hebrides in Scotland. The Industrial Revolution of late 18th- and 19th-centuries, which began in Britain and spread throughout Europe and the New Republic, created enough wealth and leisure time among the middle classes that they were able to join the upper classes at seaside resorts and to follow in Johnson’s and Boswell’s footsteps. The rise of industrialism also created enough pollution to encourage those with sufficient income to visit the seashore for cleaner air, especially during the heat of summer.

Between 1695 and 1841 the population of England and Wales skyrocketed from 5 million to 14.9 million. Formerly small towns became huge industrial centers. Coal smoke filled the air and workers lived in squalid condition. Garbage filled the streets along with sewage. Public sewers were not introduced until after 1850, so the crush of people living in squalor bred illness as waste water moved through the streams and rivers where people sourced their drinking water. At the time, bad health was believed to be caused by putrid air, known as “miasma.” Not surprisingly, many British workers fled the slums of England to make their way across the Atlantic. Industrialism also brought more money into the pockets of workers, who began to travel to the seashore in increasing numbers in order to escape crowded cities. Railroads began to run from urban centers to the shoreline, transporting increasing numbers to seaside retreats.

In order to capitalize on train passengers, Thomas Cook launched his first travel excursion in 1841. He hired a train, sold 570 tickets, and led his first tour to a temperance retreat, where his clients heard a series of lectures on the demon alcohol. Trains were so novel at this point, that people lined the tracks to watch Cook’s train pass by. The next year, Cook led his first tour to Scotland, almost six decades after Johnson and Boswell inspired individuals to journey through the Scottish isles. In 1842, Scotland had not yet developed the infrastructure needed for comfortable group travels. As a result, Cook’s passengers had to maneuver a series of carriages, trains, and steamships on their journey. The ship that took the passengers from England to Scotland lacked enough cabins, so many tourists found themselves forced to sleep in deck chairs. Despite the fiasco, Cook learned quickly and found workarounds so that within a few years his Scottish tours had earned him a solid reputation. In 1860, Cook took 50,000 tourists to Scotland, many of them women, for whom Cook served as chaperone (Zuelow 64–65).

Class, Race, and the New Republic

The first immigrants departed England for America, in large part, for three reasons: to seek wealth or property of their own, to obtain religious freedom, or to escape poverty or prison. Mirroring the dangers of urban living, ship travel at the time was perilous. Early ships had two passenger options—first class and steerage. Those in steerage had to supply their own food. Such a task often proved difficult for those passengers fleeing poverty. During the Irish potato famine (1845–1861), for example, so many people died while trying to escape their impoverished country that boats became known as “coffin ships” (Zuelow, 45). The lack of jobs and overcrowding that began to degrade life in Europe for the working classes, led 1.7 million Europeans to immigrate to the New Republic from 1841–1850. Among these were 780,000 Irish. As it continues to do today, the spike in immigration fueled hostility. Catholic Irish, in particular, became political targets, eventually spurring the party known as the “Know-Nothings” which “called for restrictions on immigration, the exclusion of the foreign-born from voting or holding public office in the United States, and for a 21-year residency requirement for citizenship” (Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Unlike Europe, where lands were long settled, the New Republic was founded, in large part, as a means of escaping the social, political, and economic hierarchies that divided the Old World’s landed gentry from the laboring classes. As a result young American men often experienced their rite of passage into manhood through self-propelled adventure, both overland and at sea. One such figure was Herman Melville, who set sail for the Pacific aboard an American whaling ship at the age of 21. Unlike elite British Grand Tourists who traveled with scholars and hobnobbed with European aristocrats, Melville bunked with sailors and traveled to Indigenous-held lands.

At the time Melville joined the crew of the ship Acushnet, American whalers had become the world's best, sailing from 20 ports to such far-flung places as the coasts of Africa and Japan. At its 19th-century peak, American whaling ships were mobile factories. A ship's crew processed whales while at sea in the brick tryworks, where they rendered the blubber and spermaceti, the substance contained in a sperm whale's massive head, which provided the cleanest source for lamp oil. Hardworking, underpaid, mistreated, and poorly fed sailors bonded, swapped stories, and shared terrifying, life-changing adventures. Many were illiterate. Some suffered from alcoholism, syphilis, or tuberculosis. Of the 26 original crew that boarded the whaler Acushnet with Melville, only 8 sailed home aboard the ship. Five died at sea, and the remainder, like Melville, deserted.

Unhappy with the captain of his whaling vessel and irresistibly drawn toward the unknown, Melville deserted when Acushnet anchored off the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia. He fled into the forests, injured his leg, and was eventually captured and held captive in the Typee Valley. His captivity proved far more pleasurable than his time as a sailor. Hand-fed, bathed, rubbed with oils, and entertained by beautiful women, Melville found himself steeped in a sensual paradise. From this vantage point, the young American began to draw comparisons between the suffocating rules of Victorian America and the sensual paradise that surrounded him in Polynesia. He also began to question the American drive to conquer and eradicate Indigenous cultures. Comparing Americans with Polynesians, Melville began to see his nation from a disturbing distance. From afar, he spied his nation's many vices—greed for material wealth built on the enslavement of laborers, insatiable hunger for land and dominion over all its creatures, and a penchant to rationalize violence and other evils inherent in man, all in the name of Manifest Destiny. Those same traits that drove the rise of mass tourism as a thriving American industry were not, in young Melville’s eyes, without vice.

Having sailed away from his home country and lived in Polynesia and worked in Hawaii on his journey home, Melville saw what Humboldt had back in 1804 when the Prussian naturalist first set foot in what would become the United States. Eager to end his journey to the Americas with a trip to the New Republic, Humboldt set sail from Havana for Philadelphia, then the largest city in the nation with a population of 75,000. On landing, Humboldt wrote to President Thomas Jefferson and to Secretary of State James Madison to ask if he might visit with them. He was warmly received. Jefferson, who considered himself a farmer with a keen interest in the botanical sciences and who enjoyed exploring himself, was delighted to converse with Humboldt, and Madison threw a party in the explorer’s honor. Humboldt supplied the statesmen with details about Mexico, a country about which Jefferson was eager to know much more but was unable to gather much intelligence. Humboldt, who had traveled through Mexico under permission of the Spanish crown, was delighted to share the knowledge he had learned.

Humboldt gave a strong critique of Spanish colonialism, which he described as driven by greed. He also decried the wholesale Spanish destruction of Indigenous cultures and spoke passionately about the devastation wrought by Spanish mining, which ravaged the lands and native peoples. Jefferson and Humboldt conversed about imperialism, ecology, agriculture, and nature, agreeing amicably on most topics with one glaring exception—the issue of slavery. As Wulf explains, “for Humboldt colonialism and slavery were basically one and the same, interwoven with man’s relationship to nature and the exploitation of natural resources” (123). During his travels, Humboldt had witnessed the vicious cruelty of slavery. Wulf surmises:

Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race ‘inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind’, Humboldt insisted there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climactic conditions but nonetheless displayed the same traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’. (125) Some three decades later, Herman Melville would voyage far enough from his own country to come to the same conclusions.

As the technology needed to transport masses of Americans from one place to another in comfort developed, a growing tension took hold in the young nation. On the one hand, Americans were fiercely proud of their sublime vistas and landscapes. On the other hand, they wished to dominate nature and believed this domination made them exceptional peoples who marched westward as part of Manifest Destiny. American eagerness to dominate and tame nature, the appropriation of the lands of Native Americans, and the labor of immigrants and African Americans proved essential to the development of the U.S. tourism industry. At the same time, rising violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom worked and died building the first transcontinental railroad, led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned laborers from entering the United States. The next decade, Plessy v. Ferguson, passed in 1896, upheld the segregation of people of color in public facilities, including the National Parks, restaurants, buses, railcars, and hotels that flourished across the nation.

The Rise of the U.S. Tourist Industry

Between the time Melville boarded the whaler Acushnet and the introduction of grand luxury liners in the 1920s, the U.S. tourism industry had come into its own, developing in tandem with the technology that would eventually unite the nation from coast to coast, cohering a distinctive American identity. Powered by steam and internal combustion engines, the nascent tourism industry began to take discernible shape following the Civil War, a full twenty-five years after Melville set sail on a whaler. As Melville’s adventures attest, prior to the late-nineteenth century, travel could prove dangerous, if not outright fatal—train passengers froze to death, wagons were beset by thieves, and steerage passengers aboard ship were stricken with contagious diseases, such as cholera, dysentery or typhoid. Though the first passenger trains were launched a decade before Melville jumped aboard a whaling ship, it would be several decades before traveling by rail would reach anything approaching comfort. As a result, many Americans stayed close to home, traveling to a burgeoning number of northeastern American attractions that developed as early tourists sites between the 1830s and 1850s. Drawing American and Europeans alike, Niagara Falls, the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, Saratoga Springs, and the Catskills became home to elaborate resorts that attracted well-heeled tourists, especially during the oppressive heat of summer.

When passenger trains were launched in 1830, transport was the one (and only) service offered. A "restroom" was made by drilling a hole in a train car's floor, which opened directly onto the tracks. Flying cinders, ash, and soot spewed from the wood-burning locomotives that powered early trains. Those who journeyed westward through the Great Plains and Colorado were coated with swales of sand, which swept through cracks, crevices, and opened doors. Then there were the robberies that spiked after the Civil War, as waves of lawlessness coursed through much of the recently united nation.

Water quality varied so widely from station to station that railroad companies began loading their trains with potable water, which they dispensed free of charge, a service known as "watering the passengers." Despite the challenges of early train travel, transcontinental railroads began to unite the United States and the conscious act of nation-building began in earnest. The modern U.S. tourist industry arose, in large part, from this patriotic fervor. As Marguerite S. Shaffer explains in See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940, “tourism—both the production of the tourist landscape and the consumption of the tourist experience—was central to the development of a nascent national culture in the United States” (6). Despite the lawlessness that arose following the Civil War, the construction of the national railway system enabled increasingly larger numbers of European and U.S. travelers to journey throughout the country.

The Pacific Railroad was completed in 1869, becoming the first transcontinental line connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, running from New England to the San Francisco Bay Area. The Pacific Railroad, later known as the Overland Route, helped forge a national tourist industry that celebrated westward expansion and the gradual “taming” of the West. In 1876, Thomas Cook conducted his first annual trip to California.

A burgeoning number of guidebooks began to promote American travel, enthusiastically touting the wonders of the “expanding republican empire” (Schaffer, 22). To capitalize on the new rail lines and the boom of luxury hotels opening in Colorado and California, the company Raymond and Whitcomb, which was founded in Boston in 1879, expanded its Northeastern excursions to offer tours to California. By 1886 the company had built a large luxury hotel in Pasadena and the next year organized a dozen tours that took clients up the Pacific Coast from their new resort in Southern California up to the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey and the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. By the 1890s, Raymond and Whitcomb offered luxury tours to Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, and Yellowstone National Park. Despite such luxury tours on offer in the late 1800s, travel throughout the West remained a relatively rustic affair for the average American.

A major part of westward expansion and the construction of a national American identity, the National Parks played an essential role in the development of the American tourist industry. Billed as key sites on what boosters dubbed the “American Grand Tour,” Yellowstone (1872), Yosemite (1890), Glacier National Park (1910), Denali National Park (established in 1917 as Mount McKinley), and the Grand Canyon (1919) began to draw wealthy American and Europeans alike. Working to increase their ridership, rail lines began to promote the growing number of national parks and to build massive luxury accommodations to house riders on their journey to see the grandeur of the newly united country. By promoting the national parks in order to attract passengers, Shaffer states:

the major transcontinental railroads, the nation’s preeminent corporations, used their vast systems of influence, distribution, and finance, to construct, market, and sell tourist attractions to a national market. In building lavish resort hotels, in promoting natural wonders, and in advocating for the creation of National parks, transcontinental railway companies ... linked tourism with their mission of nation building and the national mythology of Manifest Destiny and in the process instituted a national tourism that depended on the technological, economic, and social infrastructure of the modern nation-state. (42)

One by one, railroads fashioned an image of tourism as a form of patriotic consumption and nation-building. When Southern Pacific bought 7,000 acres on the Monterey Peninsula in California to build the Hotel Del Monte in 1880, the fashionable resort boasted running water and telephone service along with an array of bathhouses and bathing pools. Yellowstone became a lucrative destination due to the efforts of Northern Pacific, which built the Old Faithful Inn, overtly yoking the railroad’s image with the civilizing force of westward expansion. The Great Northern railroad adopted Glacier National Park as its all-American tourist destination and built the infrastructure needed to transport and host tourists during their journey to the park, situated in the northwestern mountainous terrain of Montana. The railroad’s president, Louis W. Hill, purchased land from the Blackfeet Indians to develop two luxury hotels and nine complexes modeled after Swiss chalets. Serving as the National Park’s host, Hill arranged tours and accommodations for the most powerful of his guests and printed booklets that defined the behavior of the staff, who were directed to be attentive, unobtrusive, polite, and tidy.

The federal government worked alongside the Great Northern to push the Blackfeet confederacy off their lands and onto an adjoining reservation. Hill then proceeded to capitalize on the Blackfeet peoples, using them as what Shaffer terms “official mascots of the park” (Schaffer 68). Blackfeet peoples were hired to camp next to the Glacier Park Hotel during tourist season and to perform for the guests. In a similar, yet notably less imperialistic manner, the Santa Fe railroad backed by Fred Harvey Company billed the Grand Canyon as a location where travelers could encounter an exotic Native American realm perched on the edge of civilization. Over the course of several decades the Santa Fe and Fred Harvey fashioned a Southwestern regional identity, one that featured Native American cultures and the Grand Canyon as exotic tourist attractions.

Railroad companies with tremendous wealth and power helped to unite the country and to forge a national culture. With the establishment of the National Parks Service in 1916, the U.S. government joined the massive railroad companies to promote tourism and to help create a united nation. As Shaffer argues, the railroads and the U.S. government worked to promote American travel as a way to nurture patriotic citizenship. To practice “good citizenship” and to cohere the nation into a united whole, promoters urged individuals to travel the rail lines in order to “discover” the United States for themselves. In this way American citizenship was intertwined with consumerism at the dawn of the United States.

Prior to the Civil War, travel in the New Republic had largely been regional or undertaken by explorers such as Lewis and Clark. Now citizens and foreigners could see the country from one end to the other. As railroads began to capitalize on the newly founded National Parks, they billed them as “wild” spaces where one could experience life beyond “civilization.” As Shaffer argues, this latter push toward wilderness, in turn, expressed a growing anxiety over the rise of industrialism, along with crowded cities and polluted air, that began to characterize the northeastern United States, much as it did in fast-growing industrial cities such as London and Manchester. London alone ballooned from a city of around 1 million in 1801 to become the world’s largest city in 1891, with a population over 5.5 million. Railroads developed alongside and in conjunction with the technological advances of the industrial era, providing transportation that would eventually be affordable to the masses, enabling them to escape the crowded industrial cities of Europe and the northeastern United States. In turn the booming U.S. economy created a fast-growing American middle class with the leisure time and money to travel the nation from coast to coast.

In addition to enabling individuals to escape crowded, polluted cities, the railroads provided women and African American men with work. Over 100,000 women moved West with the railroad to work at Fred Harvey’s rapidly expanding number of restaurants known as Harvey Houses. These women helped pioneer the West and many married and settled down in frontier towns. In turn, African American men were hired to work aboard the trains that ferried passengers around the nation. In fact, some railroad magnates intentionally scouted for railroad workers living in the Jim Crow South, enabling generations of African American men to mobilize in a way that enabled the formation of the the Civil Rights Movement.

"Meals by Fred Harvey," 1876 to 1945

Before railroad companies began to prepare and serve meals in the 1860s, passengers were fed by entrepreneurs who hawked meals and snacks that varied from tasty to downright odious. As railroads experienced rapid expansion, so too did the types of entrepreneurs who catered to passengers, eventually giving rise to “news butchers” who sold reading material alongside sugary and salty foods that primed passengers to buy sodas, lemonade, and ice water to quench their thirst. The Englishman Fred Harvey was first exposed to the indignities of these meals while working as a mail clerk for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. In order to provide quality meals to westward-bound travelers, Harvey proposed opening a network of restaurants. Harvey first approached his employer Kansas Pacific. After they turned him down, he met with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (Santa Fe for short), which jumped at the offer. The first Harvey House, as the restaurants became known, opened in Topeka, Kansas, in 1876. By the turn of the century, the Harvey empire would include 65 designated restaurants, 60 dining cars, and 12 hotels. Luring Americans westward, Harvey served countless Americans the best meals they had ever eaten and transformed the Grand Canyon into a tourist destination. Perhaps most importantly, Harvey created jobs for 100,000 single women, half of whom remained out West.

Initially Harvey Houses were staffed with men who were not altogether dependable. The chaos of life in the West meant that waiters might arrive to work late or visibly injured by a barroom brawl or fail to show altogether. In order to provide dependable, friendly service, Harvey began hiring women in 1883. The first Harvey Girls proved such a success that women were soon hired to serve as waitresses at almost all of the railroad station restaurants. During the late 19th century, women who worked in the public sector and served male customers were perceived as sullied or compromised in some way. Harvey worked to raise the public perception of his female wait staff. The advertisement for Harvey Girls and the interview process itself were aimed at sorting out "wild" women. The ads called for "young women 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive, and intelligent" (Poling-Kempes 42). New hires were inevitably white.

Harvey Girls wore black dresses that began at the bottom of the neck and ended six inches above the ground. Make-up was verboten. New hires would sign on with a stipulation that they remain unmarried for the length of their first contract. In return, Harvey waitresses were housed in dormitories with strict curfews. Male kitchen staff slept in separate quarters. Harvey House employees worked upwards of seventy hours a week, and the most exceptional among the women could rise all the way to manager. Working and living alongside one another created such a bond among Harvey House workers that many stayed on the job for life and became highly respected founders and members of Western communities. Most Harvey Girls took pride in their work and felt part of a large, extended family. The women felt protected by the Harvey system, despite the wild, at times violent, environs. With the ability to travel and engage daily with tourists from around the world, Harvey wait staff gained independence and sophistication within a safe environment. Harvey Girls embraced the West and this affection was well-reciprocated, as their reputation raised the role of waitress from a suspect job for a woman to a respectable and competitive profession.

When Harvey opened his first hotel, the Clifton House (1878), in Florence, Kansas, he hired one the the country's best chefs to run the restaurant. Offered an enormous salary and creative license, chef William Phillips left Chicago's Palmer House for rural Kansas, where he would help set the standards that propelled Harvey Houses to culinary stardom. With the Clifton off to a successful start, Harvey aimed even higher. Inspired by European resorts, The Montezuma hotel was built to take advantage of hot springs outside Las Vegas, New Mexico. To staff what would be the largest wooden building in the United States, Harvey journeyed to his favorite hotels to poach chefs, maître d's, and waiters to work at the Montezuma, which soon drew a famous roster of guests, among them Theodore Roosevelt, Jesse James, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan.

The success of Fred Harvey Company would continue well past its founder's death in 1901. Harvey's son, Ford, had begun taking over the day to day operations of the ever-expanding business in the 1890s, so he was well prepared to take the helm by the time his father died. Although Ford was the business mastermind who kept the company thriving and expanding until the Second World War, the name Fred Harvey Company remained unchanged and the business continued on the same trajectory it had honed long before Harvey's death. Ford's passion for nature, however, shaped one of the most successful projects of the Harvey empire and its development of the West—the creation of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination. An avid outdoorsman, Ford was bewitched by the Grand Canyon. To enable visitors to linger in the area, Ford built El Tovar Hotel. Opened in 1905, El Tovar was a stunning luxury hotel perched twenty feet from the canyon rim. Tourism to the Grand Canyon rose annually from 44,000 in 1919 to over 300,000 in the mid-1930s.

The system at work in the Harvey Houses was so efficient that they bid on and won the catering job for the Columbian Exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Working in conjunction with Chicago's Wellington Hotel, Harvey prepared and served a seated indoor lunch to 4,500 invited guests and provided ham sandwiches, doughnuts, and coffee to the crowd of 60,000 that gathered outside.

Eventually World War II would prove the beginning of the end of Harvey Houses, which rose to the challenge of feeding the troops. The need to feed thousands on their way to war drew the best from the Harvey Girls who maintained their professionalism despite the raucous and often ill-mannered throngs of soldiers. The Harvey House culinary standard, however, could not match the demand for turning out an exponential increase in meals. By war's end, the glorious American institution began its slow fade into history.

Dining with "George," 1867–1930

Railroads enabled adventurous women to venture West as Harvey Girls. They also helped mobilize African Americans, many of whom sought to flee the Jim Crow South. Working for the railroads enabled African American men to crisscross the nation and, in so doing, to create powerful networks, forging lives of promise within a violently racist world. Railroads provided many African American men with the income needed to attend college, to open their own restaurants, or to become professional railroad workers earning enough money to rise from working to middle class.

One man revolutionized the comfort of transcontinental travel—George Pullman. The first sleeper car was introduced in the 1830s, but lacking adequate suspension, it shook and battered its occupants. Hardly a luxury experience. It would take until 1864 before Pullman created a comfortable sleeping option, also known as the “palace car.” Larger, heavier, and loaded with more wheels and springs, Pullman’s sleeper car cost five times more to manufacture than a regular car. A consummate businessman, Pullman offered to use a sleeper car to ship President Abraham Lincoln home to Springfield, Illinois, after he was assassinated in 1865. U.S. citizens lined the train tracks to pay their respects, and soon America’s wealthiest men were purchasing their own palace cars.

In 1867 Pullman introduced the first “hotel on wheels,” “The President,” with a kitchen and dining room attached to the sleeper car.s Pullman’s luxury cars were used by such illustrious Americans as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and President Roosevelt. In order to ensure the best service available for his train cars, Pullman hired newly emancipated African American men to staff them. By the 1920s, over 10,500 African American Pullman porters rode the rails. Pullman hired Southern Black men because many had been trained in service positions and were well versed in service etiquette—namely, how to simultaneously "disappear" while catering to each passenger's whim and need. Work aboard Pullman dining and sleeper cars required that the server act variously as chambermaid, butler, and waiter for demanding, at times, inebriated passengers.

By 1868, Pullman had designed and built the designated dining car, which revolutionized train travel. Dining cars not only enabled passengers to remain onboard during their entire journey, but they also drew and kept new customers with excellent meals and service. A journalist from London exclaimed that meals eaten aboard Pullman dining cars had the power to banish a trio of ills that plagued the railroad traveler—namely dyspepsia, discontent, and ennui (Dining 45). Staffing needs and luxurious meals kept the expenses high. A steward, four cooks, and six waiters were needed to prepare and serve dinner for 36 people in one seating. The sheer cost of food procurement likewise added to the high cost of running a dining car. In 1890, for example, the Union Pacific served steaks that weighed 2¾-pounds each. The food served aboard dining cars became so luxurious and required so many men to prepare and serve that the cars would always operate at a loss—a fact that eventually led Pullman to hand dining operations over to the railroads.

By the end of the century, dining cars had become an essential luxury, one railroads needed to keep passengers returning. While European-trained chefs created each railroad's signature menus and dishes, dining car stewards kept careful track of supplies. If an ingredient ran low, the steward wired ahead to have it replenished at the next stop. Eventually, railroads established commissaries, which served as the logistical hub where food, dinnerware, and linens were stocked. Commissaries eased the onboard work of chefs by portioning meats and fish, although all rolls, biscuits, and pies were still baked on board. The Bureau of Railway Economics reported that 50 million meals were served aboard trains in 1924 alone. This included 800 million pounds of beef from 70,000 cattle.

Railroad employees agreed that dining car work was among the most difficult. Stewards were typically European immigrants with extensive experience in restaurant management. To serve as a dining car chef, an individual had to be able to prepare all the dishes offered by the railroad and be skilled enough to do so in a six-by-four-foot space that could easily reach 135 degrees. The chef was typically assisted by three cooks. According to a poll conducted in 1921, over three-quarters of dining car cooks were African Americans. White cooks tended to be hired by Western railroads. Rule manuals were memorized by every worker. The manuals covered everything from how to handle a difficult passenger to food safety regulations. Two complaints against a dining crew member, and he was out of a job.

Because of the demands of dining car service, many men were hired who had experience working in men's clubs or hotels. In the words of Chef George Fulton of the B & O:

you had to be an acrobat to work in the dining-car kitchen. Your legs would go one way and your stomach the other from the movement of the car, but you had to maintain your concentration. Quite often you'd be working on fifteen to thirty dinner or breakfast orders at one time, and you had to hold onto your wits. (Dining 122)

Dining crew not only needed to be dexterous and nimble, but also needed the stamina to cover shifts that often extended from 6 a.m. to midnight. In 1926, dining crew worked upwards of 340 hours a month, or 85 hours a week. Many subsisted on three hours sleep a night. Given the danger of working with flames and hot liquids aboard a moving train, surprisingly few injuries were recorded, which speaks to the professionalism of dining car crews. One report investigating railroad work hazards concluded that within the dining car, "the chief hazard was the exposure to extreme heat.... as marked as that for furnacemen or mill hands employed in an iron or steel works" (Dining 132).

From 1867 to 1902, Pullman staffed the dining cars, which he leased or sold to the railroads. Before long, however, Pullman realized that the dining cars could never make a profit, so he turned the staffing and operations of the dining car over to the railroads. By the time Pullman ceded operations, however, Pullman cars had become inextricably associated with African American service, and railroads, by and large, continued to hire African Americans. One Harvard scholar defines African American Pullman workers as agents of change who spread ideas throughout the nation, helping create a network that ultimately powered the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many skills honed on the job, African American porters, waiters, and cooks perfected the skills needed to survive, and even succeed, within a white culture that demeaned and, even, reviled their very existence.

African American railroad workers forged networks of communication and conveyed messages of uplift and empowerment. This became especially important after the passage of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Prior to its passage, affluent African Americans had traveled to tourist destinations in the Northeast. But as scholar Myra Young Armstead explains:

Racial proscriptions against blacks were already spiraling after the Supreme Court's declaration in 1883 of the unconstitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had sought to make hotels and other such facilities accessible to African Americans. After Plessy, these proscriptions proliferated by law and custom all over the country. Black vacationers, regardless of status, increasingly found accommodations at mainstream travel destinations closed to them. (138)

With the closure of public facilities to African Americans and the ongoing violence resulting from the Jim Crow laws proliferating in the South, railroad workers cohered a web of communication throughout the nation that would eventually help empower the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which would grant African Americans the right to enter white-occupied public facilities without threat of violence or arrest.

Railroad workers distributed the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender throughout the South, helping fuel the First Great Migration (1915 to 1940), during which African Americans fled the Jim Crow South. Heeding the call of the Defender and other messengers of racial uplift, 1.5 million African Americans migrated north, where they settled in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis. As Southern African Americans relocated to urban centers throughout the country, they created vibrant communities. Black migrants were largely limited to jobs in factories and in the food industry, so they took service work aboard railroads and in hotels, restaurants, and private homes. As they had in the plantation-era South, many African Americans worked in service to whites. A growing number, however, began feeding and servicing Black communities. Since many migrants hungered for familiar comfort foods, Black entrepreneurs opened public eateries that served down home menus.

As migrants fled to urban neighborhoods, they brought along their vibrant music culture. Soon venues catered to folks who wanted to dine while listening to their favorite blues musicians. Many celebrated figures began their careers traveling the Chitlin' Circuit—a series of urban venues that welcomed Black musicians and drew enthusiastic crowds from the 1930s through the 1960s. Created in response to Jim Crow segregation and named after the iconic dish chitterlings—boiled and fried pig intestines—the Circuit drew musicians who played throughout the south as well as in the urban north.

Before railcars were requisitioned for military use during World War II, African Americans musicians such as Duke Ellington traveled by private Pullman car to avoid the humiliation and danger of riding in segregated buses and railroad cars. The Jim Crow system varied from state to state, with some requiring separate rail cars for African Americans and others segregating passengers by a partition. To help travelers navigate the system, Reverend R.H. Boyd wrote a guidebook to assist train passengers in 1908. To house the millions of African Americans traveling, whether on musical tours, for railroad work or other business, or to flee the Jim Crow South, large African American hotels began to open in big cities. The Majestic in Cleveland, for example, opened in 1902 to serve African Americans, eventually opening a restaurant, followed by a jazz club. It also housed a barber shop, drug store, tailor, beauty parlor, and laundry, making it a welcoming hub for African Americans. Working on the railroad allowed many workers to afford to stay in hotels such as the Majestic

By the early 1900s, the Pullman Company was the largest private employer of African Americans, enabling many to rise to the middle classes, fueling the development of Black hotels, restaurants, and resorts. The economic benefits and social connections that African Americans formed while working for the Pullman Company launched many brilliant careers, including that of Malcolm X, and helped educate and empower generations. So, too, working for the Harvey empire enabled 100,000 independent women to exert agency in a way not previously imaginable—to move into the middle class through hard work, determination, and grit. In opening the West and uniting the nation, the railroads created economic freedom and geographic mobility for many working class women and African American men, who eventually became part of the newly expanding middle classes. In so doing, these individuals gained the agency and voice needed to demand the right to vote and the right to sit at the very same tables they served.

On the Road

Just as the railroad would help to unite the country, enabling tourists and travelers to journey from one end of the nation to the other, the rise of the automobile would transform the American landscape, which began to fill with paved roads, interstate highways, and gas stations. To feed, board, and entertain Americans traveling by automobile, entrepreneurs built restaurants, bars, drive-through coffee and sandwich shops, motels, and roadside attractions. Some families built roadside cabins for travelers, while others started boarding houses or let rooms in their homes.

From 1900 to 1929, the number of automobiles manufactured in the United States rose from around just over 4,000 to 23 million. In 1903, a doctor and mechanic completed the first transcontinental drive. The trip from San Francisco to New York, which took over two months, required these pioneers to traverse rough-hewn roads, frequently filled with holes and scattered with debris. Blowouts and engine repairs proved constant companions. To meet the need for safer travel, a good roads movement began to sweep the nation and the American Automobile Association (AAA) was founded. It launched the magazine American Motorist, which printed images and articles that promoted transcontinental touring. Organizations, companies, and individuals invested in the good roads movement, began to depict transcontinental travel as a patriotic duty and roads as a way of binding the nation.

In 1914, the Page Company launched its “See America First” series, eventually publishing 21 guides that crafted a simplified, Anglo-centric national narrative. According to an American Studies scholar,

The [“See America First”] guides presented American history in a series of stages: Indian life in harmony with nature, Spanish exploration and colonization, English colonization and settlement, the founding of the American Nation, Anglo-American conquest of the Indians, expansion westward, and present-day progress. This narrative served to delineate the origins of and the evolution toward the achievements of the Progressive era. Interestingly, these guides were written during a time of increasing black migration to northern cities, institutionalized Jim Crow laws, and rising nativism and immigration restriction. (Schaffer, 199)

The Lincoln Highway, which stretched from New York City to San Francisco, was completed in 1915. In 1926, American Motorist featured a series of articles showcasing the nation’s most scenic roads.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, roadside lodging was still hard enough to come by that travelers took to camping at state and national parks, a trend further fueled by the Great Depression. Travelers increasingly took to the road with tarps, army surplus tents, canned goods, and cooking equipment. Companies maneuvered to create camping amenities. The Colman Lantern Company, for example, began to sell gas camping stoves. By the late 1930s, trailer companies hit their stride, manufacturing campers replete with fold-out beds, stoves, and sinks. With no designated camping spots aside from the National Parks, the millions of Americans who took to the road, sleeping under tarps and tents and inside of trailers, began to settle themselves on the side of the road. Makeshift camps proliferated and garbage and human waste created by campers began to mar the countryside.

The great camping boom was fueled, in part, by the Great Depression, which forced many Americans into tents and camping trailers on a permanent basis. In response to nationwide financial distress and unemployment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated the New Deal, which put millions of Americans to work building highways, bridges and state parks with designated campgrounds, restrooms, and garbage cans. The New Deal also put 6,600 writers, editors, and researchers to work through the Federal Writers Project (FWP). It employed the literary likes of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Zora Neale Hurston. Among the many projects undertaken, the American Guide Series would become the most celebrated, with over 10,000 writers from around the country working on the project from 1935 to 1943. Led by Henry G. Alsberg, a journalist who covered the Russian Revolution, the project created guides covering 48 states and the territories of Puerto Rico and Alaska, a handful of major cities (Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia), scores of towns, and, even road touring guides (U.S. 1, Oregon Trail, and Ocean Highway). The guides canonized American life, providing travel information alongside essays on American architecture, folklore, history, ethnic studies, nature, and geography. As historian and American studies scholar Margarite S. Shaffer summarizes:

In collecting and codifying American history and traditions, in celebrating economic and industrial development, in documenting everyday people and their work across the American landscape, the guides tapped into a rising tide of cultural nationalism that sought to revive American culture during a moment of crisis. (219)

The final volume in the American Guide Series, published in 1943, would mark the beginning of the end of prescriptive travel writing.

The introduction of the automobile followed by the building of a national highway system began to shift the ideology of tourism from one focused on nationalism and nation-building into one celebrating American individualism. No other travel narrative represents this shift more powerfully than Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Kerouac hitch-hiked and drove back and forth across the nation, getting to know the working classes, the hobos, and the downtrodden of the nation. In doing so, he helped inaugurate the countercultural movement, which openly rebelled against nationalism and promoted anti-establishment beliefs. Despite its anti-establishment stance, On the Road presents an unadulterated celebration of white male virility—an American modern twist on the Grand Tourist. Rather than hobnobbing with the European elite, Kerouac embraced the common American, working alongside field hands, jumping on trains to sip liquor with hobos, and thumbing his nose at mainstream middle class American culture.

Yet another segment of the United States was represented by The Negro Motorist Green Book. Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book provided an updated list of places where African American travelers could safely sleep, eat, and visit without fear of being arrested or violently attacked for traveling after dark. Examined in juxtaposition, On the Road and The Green Book illuminate one another and the United States in striking ways. One tale celebrates white male privilege and the freedom of the open road and the other book was developed to help combat the subjugation, violence against, and, segregation of African Americans from mainstream historical narratives and mainstream American culture, which literally forbade African Americans from occupying public facilities alongside whites.

Driving while Black was so dangerous in the 20th-century that Victor Hugo Green, published an annual guide to help African Americans navigate the United States, which was pockmarked with sundown towns—the name for towns that passed laws making it illegal for Black individuals to be in public between sunset and sunrise. Some sundown towns actually rang gongs to alert Black workers it was time to leave or risk being arrested or, in worst cases, lynched. The Negro Motorist Green Book provided an essential life-saving guide for Black drivers. Green and his wife Alma compiled and published the annual editions, which listed places where Black travelers could eat and sleep. Often these were homes where drivers could spend the night and dine on a home cooked meal. The guide also listed other black-owned businesses where travelers would be welcomed, including gas stations.

In the 1930s, Victor Green struck a deal with Standard Oil to sponsor the Green Book, which sold many of the 15,000 copies published annually (Harlem World). In a pioneering move, Standard Oil not only sold the Green Book at its Esso gas stations, but also hired Black workers and sold hundreds of Esso gas station franchises to African American entrepreneurs (Sorin, 109). Despite Standard Oil’s sponsorship of the Green Book and Black-owned Esso franchises, however, not all Esso stations serviced African Americans. Nonetheless, the Green Book helped travelers navigate to safe gas stations throughout the country. Eventually Victor and Alma Green began serving as travel agents, planning vacation cruises to Africa, South America, Europe, Canada, and the West Indies, enabling African Americans to escape the racism of their home country (Sorin, 204).

Although African Americans could travel freely abroad, they were often terrified while traveling within their own country. Sorin recalls that in her own childhood, her family never visited national parks, as “the idea of hiking without protection of any kind brought to mind white lawlessness an even lynchings” (216). As Sorin explains in Driving While Black, however, the mobility provided by automobiles coupled with the safe accommodations, eateries, and entertainment listed in the Green Book helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement. Like the railroads, cars enabled the exchange of ideas and forged strong transcontinental connections, uniting African Americans in their fight for desegregation.

Just as Cleveland’s Majestic hotel featured in the annual Green Guide, so, too, did many of the restaurants and hotels that housed Civil Rights leaders and activists as they galvanized forces across the Jim Crow South. Martin Luther King Jr. held countless meetings at the A.G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama. The Gaston served as a defacto local headquarters during the 1963 Civil Rights Birmingham campaign to boycott businesses and galvanize mass protests against one of the most violently racist cities in the world. As peaceful protests were met with increasing police violence, the Ku Klux Klan held rallies, police arrested and jailed Black children, and King sat in jail having been arrested for violating Alabama’s law against mass protests. From there King wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which summarized his decision to mobilize masses in the public streets of the city. It also served as a reply to the criticism he faced from religious leaders who urged him to hold back the protest and wait until negotiations could turn the tide of violence. King wrote to all those who opposed the protest:

when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim ... [;] when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky ...[;] when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you... —then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (1963)

On May 11, Civil Rights advocates and local white leaders reached a truce, and the protests were called off. The next day a bomb was detonated at the A.G. Gaston Motel and at the home of King’s brother. Fourteen months later Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2017 President Barack Obama designated the motel as part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument (Sorin, 245).

The Age of Air Travel

Whereas the United States experienced domestic bombings against its nation’s minorities, Europe and Japan were ravaged by World War II. Rather than turning to rebuild and heal the country and its infrastructure as Europe and Japan were required to do, the United States turned wartime industry and technology into wealth for the masses. As Europe began to rebuild its cities devastated by aerial bombs and military incursions, it looked toward the United States as a model for how to develop its tourist industry. The United States not only modeled a lively tourist industry, but it also provided millions of dollars via the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan. Although the majority of American dollars went into rebuilding European agriculture and industry, which had been decimated by war, a great deal was funneled into tourism. As Zuelow explains,

whereas agriculture assured that people were fed and industrial expansion promised ample growth and a chance to close the dollar gap, tourism offered jobs, larger markets, improved infrastructure, an influx of currency, and even an opportunity for Americans to gain cultural capital by visiting the old country. (151)

In 1946, Europe galvanized considerable energy into forming the International Union of Official Travel Organization (IUOTO), which hosted its first meeting in London, drawing representatives from 41 countries. Soon the European Travel Commission (ETC) was founded and joined forces with the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) to facilitate travel across borders and to build the hotels and additional infrastructure needed to support a rapid expansion of the tourist industry. In order to draw American tourists—who were flush with cash and also notoriously particular about comfort, food, and lodging—experts from throughout Europe traveled the United States to study its hotels and other components of its tourist industry. They returned home to implement significant changes to suit American tourists. They did so, however, while adhering to their own national style and aesthetic. For a few years, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland launched a joint marketing campaign to lure tourists from the United States. Their success was so pronounced that Asia, South America, and Central America followed suit (Zuelow, 151–153). The focus on promoting international tourism paired with the rapid technological advances in aviation achieved during World War II, launched the global tourist industry as we know it today.

Further Reading

Primary Sources

Armstead, M. B. (2005). Revisiting hotels and other lodgings: American tourist spaces through the lens of Black pleasure-travelers, 1880-1950. The journal of decorative and propaganda arts. Vol. 25, The American Hotel, pp. 136-159.

Boswell, James. (2005). Journal of a tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6018/pg6018-images.html (Original published in 1785)

Boyd, H. (2016, April 14). "Victor H. Green and his indispensable 'Green Book'." New York Amsterdam News 14 Apr. 2016: 30.

Burke, E. (2005). Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. John C. Nimmo; Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043h.htm - A_PHILOSOPHICAL_INQUIRY (Original work published in 1757)

Green, V. H. (1949). The negro motorist green-book. V. H. Green. http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/87_135_1736_GreenBk.pdf

Hall, M, R-S. (2014). The Negro travellers guide to a Jim Crow South: Negotiating racialized landscapes during a dark period in United States cultural history, 1936–1967. Postcolonial Studies. 17.3: 307-319.

Johnson, S. (2005). A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2064/2064-h/2064-h.htm (Original work published in 1775)

Kerouac, J. (2007). On the road. (Original work published, 1957). Penguin.

Melville, Herman. (2017) Moby-Dick. (H. Parker, Ed.). (Original work published, 1851).W. W. Norton.

——. (1996). Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. (Original work published, 1846). Penguin.

Twain, M. (2006). Innocents Abroad. American Publishing; Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm

Veblen, T. (1934). Theory of the leisure class. The Modern Library; Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/theoryofleisurec00vebl/page/n5/mode/2up

Secondary References

Arneson, Eric. (2001). Brotherhoods of color. Harvard University Press.

DeBlanco, A. (2005). Melville: His World and Work. Vintage.

Dolin, Eric Jay. (2007). Leviathan: The history of whaling in America. W. W. Norton.

Fried, S. (2010). Appetite for America. Bantam.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2025, January 30). Know-Nothing party. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party

Goldsmith, S. (2020). Masculinity and danger on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. University of London Press. https://openresearchlibrary.org/viewer/bd3dd294-36c4-4de4-adf1-5fd629103286

Harlem World. (2020, August 11). “Harlem’s Victor Hugo Green’s The Green Book.” https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/harlems-victor-hugo-greens-the-green-book/

Heffernan, T. F. (1990). Stove By a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex. Wesleyan.

McKenzie, William A. (1990). Dining car line to the Pacific. Minnesota Historical Society.

Mulligan, T. (2019). Dining a la Pullman. Garbely.

National Park Service. (n.d.). The A.G. Gaston Motel and the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. Retrieved on March 20, 2025 from https://www.nps.gov/articles/ag-gaston-motel-birmingham-civil-rights-monument.htm

Page, S. J. and J. Connell. (2020) Tourism: A modern synthesis. Routledge.

Philbrick, N. (2001). In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Penguin.

Poling-Kempes, L. (1989) The Harvey girls. Del Capo.

Porterfield, J. D. (1993). Dining by rail. St. Martin's.

Schaffer, M. S. See America first: Tourism and national identity, 1880-1940.

Smithsonian. (n.d.) “Family camping.” National Museum of American History. https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/america-on-the-move/online/family-camping

Sorin, G. (2020). Driving while black: African American travel and the road to civil rights. Liveright.

Sullivan, M. A. “Romantic attitudes toward nature.” Art History for Humanities. Bluffton College. https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/art/19c/rom/nature.html

Tye, L. (2004). Rising from the Rails. Henry Holt.

Watry, E. (2023, May 8). “Westward Ho! The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the transformation of Yellowstone National Park,” Part One. Yellowstone History Journal. Accessed March 1, 2025 at https://yellowstonehsitory journal.substack.com/p/westward-ho-the-1915-panama-pacific

–––. (2023, May 15). “Westward Ho! The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the transformation of Yellowstone National Park,” Part Two. Yellowstone History Journal. Accessed March 1, 2025 at https://yellowstonehsitory journal.substack.com/p/westward-ho-the-1915-panama-pacific-39d?utm_source=publication-search

Weiss, T. (2004, June). Tourism in America before World War II. The Journal of Economic History. 64(2), 289–327. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3874776

Wulf, A. (2015). The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. Knopf.

Zuelow, E. G. E. (2016). A history of modern tourism. Palgrave MacMillan.