1.10 Chapter Conclusion
Whereas early travelers journeyed to find food, to explore new lands, to find natural riches and unknown civilizations, and to undergo religious pilgrimages or to proselytize religion, by the 16th century wealthy individuals began to undertake the Grand Tour—a rite of passage for young men, consisting of several years of travel during which they were fashioned into learned, polite, engaging, physically fit, cosmopolitan, and courageous leaders. The Grand Tour straddled exploration and tourism. Whereas the Grand Tour was the purview of the wealthy, the modern tourist trade required affordable access to transportation, lodging, and meals. Prior to the development of railroads in the early nineteenth century, travel by carriage or horseback made long-distance journeys uncomfortable and dangerous, even for the well-heeled. Over the course of the nineteenth century, technological advances made transportation via railroad increasingly affordable. Following the U.S. Civil War, the new nation began to introduce a series of National Parks, and railroad companies began to promote these sites as tourist destinations in order to attract passengers. They also built luxurious hotels and restaurants throughout the West, monopolizing on the grandeur of the new National Parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872. Railroads pioneered the early tourist trade, as did those workers who serviced the trains, restaurants, and hotels that began to proliferate during Westward expansion. This chapter focuses, in particular, on the Harvey House restaurant waitresses and Pullman porters who labored upwards of 80 hours a week in the early years of the tourist trade, ensuring that tourists were well-fed and transported in comfort. The introduction of the automobile at the beginning of the 20th century transformed the meaning of travel. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, travel within the United States was promoted as a form of nation-building and as an act of patriotism. By the 1940s, the increasing affordability of the automobile had begun to shift travel toward a celebration of individual freedom and identity-formation. By the end of World War II, transport, lodging, and eateries had become widely accessible to the white middle classes in the United States, enabling the rise of mass tourism. War-ravaged European countries, focused on rebuilding their economies, turned to the United States for lessons in how to rapidly create successful tourist industries, initiating an international tourist trade. At the same time, an alternate, silenced history evolved in the shadows, one that featured those Native Americans who were divested of their lands by the US government and the railroad companies. It also featured the enslaved laborers, who, once freed, were incorporated into the new United States as workers who built and serviced the growing tourist infrastructure. Although African Americans traveled throughout the United States prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its passage enabled them to legally travel in safety throughout the United States for the first time in their lives.
Further Reading
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Burke, E. (2005). A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043-h.htm#A_PHILOSOPHICAL_INQUIRY (Original work published 1757)
DeBlanco, A. (2005). Melville: His world and work. Vintage.
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Hall, M. R.-S. (2014). The Negro traveller’s 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. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.987898
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Watry, E. (2023, May 15). Westward ho! The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the transformation of Yellowstone National Park, part two. Yellowstone History Journal. Retrieved March 1, 2025, from https://yellowstonehistoryjournal.substack.com/p/westward-ho-the-1915-panama-pacific-39d
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