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6 going off the beaten path Authentic Places and the End of an Era A s the 1950s drew to a close, Life devoted an issue to the fastchanging face of American leisure. Russell Lynes, editor of Harper’s Magazine and author of an earlier, famed table of highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow interests, revisited the topic to create a typology updated for the new decade. Lynes classified the recreational pursuits of the “Aristocrats,” “Upper Bourgeois,” “Lower Bourgeois,” and “Peasants,” noting their tastes and preferences in eighteen areas ranging from reading matter to vacationing. The author maintained that whether you rated as an aristocrat or a peasant had less to do with your wealth, background, or occupation than the zeal with which you pursued your leisure interests and the amount of deference you paid to “experts” in those areas. According to Lynes, aristocratic vacationers were “Discoverers of Little-Known Islands,” always on the lookout for pristine areas. Upper-bourgeois tourists were “Museum and Cathedral Chasers,” while their lower-bourgeois counterparts scrambled through “12 Countries in Three Weeks.” The former spent a week learning the nuances of a single cathedral town, while the latter were whisked through whole countries so quickly they could barely remember where they were. Peasants, or those who “couldn’t care less” about making their “leisure original or constructive,” were “World and Other Cruise Takers.”1 Lynes was not alone in commenting on Americans’ changing vacations habits—especially the move toward an “off-the-beaten-path” sensibility. In a 1961 cover story, Time noted the same shift. “Having succeeded the British as the world’s most relentless travelers,” the newsmagazine noted, “Americans are becoming increasingly jaded with the major tourist encampments.” The article laid out a narrative of postwar vacationing in which American travelers first flocked to Britain and France, then on to Italy and Spain, and finally on going off the beaten path 129 to the Caribbean. The crowd caught up with them at each spot, though, and by the early 1960s, trendsetters were squeezed to the far ends of the earth— Tahiti, Fiji, India, Nepal, Thailand, Kenya, Zanzibar, Antigua, the Greek Isles, and other novel destinations. Six weeks later, Newsweek also featured a cover story on the topic: “Summertime ’61: Vacations Off the Beaten Track.” As the decade wore on, the off-the-beaten-path narrative continued to gain steam.2 “Searching for Some Fresh Identity” As Lynes and others had sensed, many Americans’ travel tastes had started to change by the late 1950s. Some people were simply looking for new places to go. Others hoped to get away from crowds that, for them, had grown unbearable at popular sites. One Atlantic Monthly correspondent complained of being so “hemmed in by hundreds of thousands of half-familiar faces and seersucker suits” that “there are times when you can’t see the Europeans for the Americans.” Bernard DeVoto vowed to never again write about New England’s vacation charms after viewing the summer crowds in 1955, calling the coast of Maine “a jerry-built, neon-lighted, overpopulated slum.”3 Exasperated with the crowds streaming into Washington, D.C., for the city’s annual Cherry Blossom Festival, one newspaper editor issued a call to chop the trees down. “Hordes of tourists trample us natives into a pulp,” he railed. “Savage children from the hinterland hurl bowls of food at you, flying elbows tattoo your ribs, people from Dubuque shout greetings . . . to people from Walla Walla.” This sort of antitourist screed was partly rooted in mass culture critiques. But it also pointed to a backlash that had made its way into the larger travel boom narrative.4 American Express first noticed its clients in Europe going off the well-worn circuit in the mid-1950s when they started renting cars to escape the crowds. In the world of guidebooks, Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day appeared in 1957 and soon became a bible for young Americans looking to “rough it” across Europe. Domestically, vacation mecca Miami Beach saw a rash of empty hotel rooms in the late 1950s for the first time since the war. Industry watchers speculated that the missing tourists had moved on to the Caribbean. New visitors to the islands were lured by plummeting airfare, tropical beaches, and brand-new resorts constructed with middle-income Americans in mind.5 The tourist migration was partly the product of waning prejudices toward areas outside Western Europe. “People with money and plenty of time to travel...

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