1.5 The Rise of the Tourist Industry in the U.S.

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” (2001, p. 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, 2001, p. 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 (2001) 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. (p. 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, 2001, p. 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 Civil Rights Movement.