The tourist gets there without the experience of having gone. For him it is all the same: going to one place or to another. Today it is only by going short distances, which we still traverse on land, that we can have the experience of going any place. When I have driven from Chicago to a summer resort in nearby Indiana or Wisconsin, or when I used to commute from a suburb to the University by train or by car, I have had more variety of sensations, have observed more varied scenes, and have met more varied people, than I did when I went from New York to Amsterdam.
For ages the sensations of going there were inseparable from the experience of being there. Nowadays, “Getting there is half the fun.” “Rome,” announces the British Overseas Airways Corporation, is “A Fun Stop.” And there is nothing more homogeneous than fun, wherever it is found. Now we can have plenty en route. United States Lines advertises:
You’re just 15 gourmet meals from Europe on the world’s fastest ship. Caviar from Iran, pheasant from Scotland … you can choose superb food from all over the world, another rewarding experience in gracious living on this ship. There’s a pool, gym, 2 theatres, 3 Meyer Davis orchestras. It’s a 5-day adventure in the lost art of leisure.
In an accompanying photograph we see how “Mrs. Leonard Kleckner shows off her dogs to Chief Officer Ridington. This great modern ocean liner has dog kennels with a veterinarian and a dog-walking area.” Shipboard swimming pools, cocktail lounges, and the latest movies! “One of the World’s great Restaurants sails for Europe” whenever a Holland-America liner pushes off from New York. The experience of going there has been erased. For it we have substituted all the pleasures of de luxe relaxation. Even better than at home.
If we go by air, then too we are encompassed in music, and enjoy our cocktail in a lounge with the décor of the best resort hotel. In 1961, TWA began showing first-run movies on a special wide screen in the First Class section of its Super Jet flights. A full-page color advertisement for Lufthansa, German Airlines, portrays the attractive Miss Dietland von Schönfeldt—a typical Lufthansa stewardess, of “gracious background, poise and charm, intelligence and education” who, of course, speaks fluent English. She “Invites You to an Unusual Supper Party.… Every flight is a charming, informal Continental supper party, eight jet-smooth miles over the Atlantic.”
The airline stewardess, a breed first developed in the United States and now found on all major international airlines, is a new subspecies of womankind. With her standardized impersonal charm she offers us, anywhere in the world, the same kind of pillow for our head and the latest issue of Look or The Reader’s Digest. She is the Madonna of the Airways, a pretty symbol of the new homogenized blandness of the tourist’s world. The first airline stewardesses were the eight girls hired by United Airlines on May 15, 1930; their union was organized in 1946. By 1958 there were 8,200 of them employed by American-owned airlines. They were being trained in a program which lasted about six weeks. The general requirements, as a careful reporter summarized them, were that the young lady be twenty-one to twenty-six years old, “unmarried, reasonably pretty and slender, especially around the hips, which will be at eye level for the passengers. She should have been to high school, be poised and tactful, have a good disposition and a pleasant speaking voice.” Stewardesses with similar qualifications were later trained for service on trains and long-distance buses.
Cabral’s company, which went from Portugal to India in 1500, did not, of course, have the advantage of slender-hipped, smooth-voiced stewardesses. They spent over six months at sea. They could not help knowing they had really gone somewhere. In the days before refrigeration or canning the passenger cuisine was not for gourmets. Fresh water was rationed, and fresh fruits and vegetables were not to be had. Scurvy was the plague of seafarers. Typhoid, typhus, and malaria were rife.
The Mayflower passengers were at sea for nearly two months, from mid-September to early November, 1620. On arrival William Bradford reported, “They fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the periles and miseries thereof, againe to set their feete on the firme and stable earth, their proper elemente.… Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles.” Knowledge that they had come so far stayed with them even into the second generation. Increase Mather gave over the first chapter of his catalogue of divine providences to “remarkable sea-deliverances.” These were as important in the American experience as were the forests or the Indians.
For Americans moving westward in the nineteenth century, their ways of living together en route shaped their lives on arrival, just as the proverbial forty years during which Moses led the children of Israel from Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land shaped them into a nation. As westering Americans organized against the perils of the trip they framed constitutions and by-laws which prepared them to organize new communities at their destinations.
Now, when one risks so little and experiences so little on the voyage, the experience of being there somehow becomes emptier and more trivial. When getting there was more troublesome, being there was more vivid. When getting there is “fun,” arriving there somehow seems not to be arriving any place.
The tourist who arrives at his destination, where tourist facilities have been “improved,” remains almost as insulated as he was en route. Today the ideal tourist hotel abroad is as much as possible like the best accommodations back home. Beds, lighting facilities, ventilation, air conditioning, central heating, plumbing are all American style, although a shrewd hotel management will, of course, have made a special effort to retain some “local atmosphere.”
Stirred by air travel, international hotel chains have grown phenomenally since World War II. In 1942 Conrad Hilton took over his first hotel outside the United States, the Chihuahua Hilton, just over the border in northern Mexico. “I felt,” he later recalled “that by organizing week-end bus excursions with guides, large-scale entertainment at the hotel, an all-expenses-paid holiday, we could make a very good thing of it—which we did.” At the end of the war Hilton Hotels International, Inc., was founded. “What used to be a month-long vacation trip,” Hilton explained, “is now almost a week-end possibility.… The airplane is here to stay. Americans not only can but want to travel farther, see more, do more, in less time.… Father Junipero Serra set his California missions a day’s journey apart. Today you can fly over the whole string in a few hours. If we were to set our hotels a day’s journey apart, we’d be around the world in no time. So perfectly sound business is in line with national idealism.”
Hilton changed his slogan from “Across the Nation” to “Around the World.” The Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, opened in 1947, the Castellana Hilton in Madrid in 1953, the Istanbul Hilton in 1955—and these were only a beginning. By 1961 Hilton Hotels were also operating in Mexico City and Acapulco, Panama City, Montreal, Cairo, West Berlin, St. Thomas (Virgin Islands), Santiago, and Honolulu. There were associated hotels in Sydney, Melbourne, and Queensland. Hotels were under construction in Port-of-Spain (Trinidad), Athens, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, London, Teheran, and Rome, and projected in Paris, Mayaguez (Puerto Rico), Tokyo, Addis Ababa, Bogotá, Dorval (Quebec), and Tunis.
The spirit of these new hotels was well expressed in Conrad Hilton’s own account of the Istanbul Hilton opening in 1955, to which he brought a planeload of American celebrities and news makers. “When we flew into Istanbul for the opening with our guests from America, Carol Channing, Irene Dunne and her husband, Dr. Francis Griffin, Mona Freeman, Sonja Henie, Diana Lynn, Merle Oberon, Ann Miller, representatives of the American press, John Cameron Swazey, Bob Considine, Horace Sutton, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Cobina Wright, not to mention my very old friend, Leo Carillo, who once owned a deer named Sequoia, there is no question but that we all felt the antiquity, romance and mystery of this ancient city.… I felt this ‘City of the Golden Horn’ was a tremendous place to plant a little bit of America.” “Each of our hot
els,” Hilton announced at the opening, “is a ‘little America.’ ”
I have been in both the Caribe Hilton and the Istanbul Hilton and can testify that both are models of American modernity and antisepsis. They are as indistinguishable in interior feeling and design as two planes of the American Airlines. Except for the views from the picture windows, you do not know where you are. You have the comforting feeling of not really being there. Even the measured admixture of carefully filtered local atmosphere proves that you are still in the U.S.A.
IV
THE SELF-CONSCIOUS effort to provide local atmosphere is itself thoroughly American. And an effective insulation from the place where you have gone. Out-of-doors the real Turkey surrounds the Istanbul Hilton. But inside it is only an imitation of the Turkish style. The hotel achieves the subtle effect, right in the heart of Turkey, of making the experience of Turkey quite secondhand.
A similar insulation comes from all the efforts of different countries which are or hope to become “Tourist Meccas” to provide attractions for tourists. These “attractions” offer an elaborately contrived indirect experience, an artificial product to be consumed in the very places where the real thing is free as air. They are ways for the traveler to remain out of contact with foreign peoples in the very act of “sight-seeing” them. They keep the natives in quarantine while the tourist in air-conditioned comfort views them through a picture window. They are the cultural mirages now found at tourist oases everywhere.
Oddly enough, many of these attractions came into being, rather accidentally, as by-products of democratic revolutions. But soon they were being carefully designed, planned in large numbers and on a grand scale by national tourist agencies eager to attract visitors from far away.
The modern museum, like the modern tourist himself, is a symptom of the rise of democracy. Both signal the diffusion of scientific knowledge, the popularization of the arts, the decline of private patronage of artists, and the spread of literacy among the middle classes. Collections of valuable, curious, and beautiful objects had always been gathered by men of wealth and power. There had long been private museums, but these were seldom open to the public. In ancient days, and especially before the printed book, museums and libraries had been closely allied, as in Alexandria, for example. Of course, there had always been some works of art especially designed for public display, as in the Pinacotheca (a marble hall of the propylaeum on the Athenian Acropolis) or in the forum of Augustus in Rome. At least since Roman times, the best collections of the works of art and of learning were privately owned. And the first modern public museum was the British Museum, established by Act of Parliament in 1753. It had been inspired by the will of Sir Hans Sloane, who on his death that year left the nation his remarkable collection of books, manuscripts, and curiosities. On the European continent most of the great art museums are part of the booty which the rising middle classes have captured for themselves in the revolutions since the late eighteenth century. The Louvre, which had been a royal palace, became a public art museum after the French Revolution of 1789.
Nowadays a visit to the best art museums in Europe is often a tour of the vacated residences of magnates, noblemen, and monarchs of the pre-democratic age: in Florence, the Uffizi and Pitti Palaces; in Venice, the Doge’s Palace; in Paris, the Louvre; in Vienna, Schönbrunn. Beautiful objects, taken from scores of princely residences, are crowded together for public display in the grandest of defunct palaces. Painting, sculpture, tapestries, tableware, and other objets d’art (once part of the interior decoration or household equipment of a working aristocracy) were thus “liberated” by and for the people. Now they were to be shown to the nation and to all comers. Common people could now see treasures from the inner sanctums of palaces, treasures originally designed to adorn the intimate dining tables, bedrooms, and bathrooms of a well-guarded aristocracy. At last everyone could take a Cook’s Tour of the art of the ages for a nominal admission fee or free of charge. Statesmen saw these new museums as symbols of wide-spreading education and culture as monuments and catalysts of national pride. So they were. Today they remain the destination of tourist-pilgrims from afar.
To bring the paintings of Botticelli, Rubens, and Titian into a room where one could see them in a few minutes, to gather together the sculpture of Donatello and Cellini from widely dispersed churches, monasteries, and drawing rooms for chronological display in a single hall, to remove the tapestries designed for wall-covering in remote mansions and hunting lodges, and spread them in the halls of centrally located museums—this was a great convenience. But there was one unavoidable consequence. All these things were being removed from their context. In a sense, therefore, they were all being misrepresented. Perhaps more was gained in the quantity of people who could see them at all than was lost in the quality of the experience. This is not the question. The effect on experience is plain and undeniable.
Inevitably these museums—and others made later on the defunct-palace model—become major tourist attractions. They still are. It remains true, however, that, almost without exception, whatever one sees in a museum is seen out of its proper surroundings. The impression of individual works of art or of a country’s past culture as a whole, whenever it is formed from museum visits, is inevitably factitious. It has been put together for your and my convenience, instruction, amusement, and delight. But to put it together the art commissioners have had to take apart the very environment, the culture which was once real, and which actually created and enjoyed these very works. The museum visitor tours a warehouse of cultural artifacts; he does not see vital organs of living culture. Even where (as in the Prado in Madrid or the Hermitage in Leningrad) one visits what was once a private museum, the original collection has been so diluted or expanded and the atmosphere so changed that the experience is itself a new artifact. Only the museum itself is quite real—a functioning part of a going concern. The ribbon across the chair, the ancestral portrait no longer viewed by its descendant, is a symbol of the change. Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.
Of course, there remain sites all over the world—Windsor Castle, the Medici Palace in Florence, the Hindu rock carvings at Elefanta, Japanese Imperial Palaces, and countless churches, shrines and temples—where works of art remain in their original sites. But in nearly all Tourist Meccas much of the tourist’s sight-seeing is museum-seeing. And most museums have this unreal, misrepresentative character.
The museum is only one example of the tourist attraction. All tourist attractions share this factitious, pseudo-eventful quality. Formerly when the old-time traveler visited a country whatever he saw was apt to be what really went on there. A Titian, a Rubens or a Gobelin tapestry would be seen on a palace wall as background to a princely party or a public function. Folk song and folk dance were for the natives themselves. Now, however, the tourist sees less of the country than of its tourist attractions. Today what he sees is seldom the living culture, but usually specimens collected and embalmed especially for him, or attractions specially staged for him: proved specimens of the artificial.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, international expositions have increased in number and grown in prominence. They usually have some solid purposes—to promote trade, to strengthen world peace, to exchange technological information. But when expositions become tourist attractions they acquire an artificial character. From the London Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851 and the Exposition on the Champs Elysées in 1855 down to Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition in 1933–34, the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958, and the annual Cinema Festivals in Venice, modern expositions have been designed for propaganda, to attract foreign tourists and their currency. An exposition planned for tourists is a self-conscious and contrived national image. It is a pseudo-event for foreign consumption.
The rise of tourist traffic has brought the relatively recen
t phenomenon of the tourist attraction pure and simple. It often has no purpose but to attract in the interest of the owner or of the nation. As we might expect, this use of the word “attraction” as “a thing or feature which ‘draws’ people; especially, any interesting or amusing exhibition” dates only from about 1862. It is a new species: the most attenuated form of a nation’s culture. All over the world now we find these “attractions”—of little significance for the inward life of a people, but wonderfully salable as tourist commodity. Examples are Madame Tussaud’s exhibition of wax figures in London (she first became known for her modeled heads of the leaders and victims of the French Revolution) and the Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong. Disneyland in California—the American “attraction” which tourist Khrushchev most wanted to see—is the example to end all examples. Here indeed Nature imitates Art. The visitor to Disneyland encounters not the two-dimensional comic strip or movie originals, but only their three-dimensional facsimiles.
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.
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