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1 the new mobility Travel and Leisure in Depression and War S urveying the state of American leisure in 1940, historian Foster Rhea Dulles described a nation remade by a half-century-long revolution in play as workweeks grew shorter and a massive amusement industry sprang up around Americans of all incomes. Dulles was not alone in this observation. Indeed, it would have been tough for any thoughtful observer not to notice the arcades, movie houses, ballparks, and beach attractions that had filled American communities since the late nineteenth century. Tourism occupied a unique place in this development, serving as almost an exclamation point to arguments about just how democratic leisure had become. Although relatively few Americans could tour extensively at the time, hopeful commentators saw vacation travel following the same groove of democratization recently cut by more modest forms of leisure. So if cheap urban amusements and a relaxed work ethic meant that short blasts of fun were now a fixture in industrial modernity’s weekly rhythms, the integration of long stretches of leisure into the annual calendar was the next natural step. As Dulles contended, “The wealthy could make the fashionable tour in 1825, the well-to-do built up the summer resorts of the 1890’s, but every Tom, Dick, and Harry toured the country in the 1930s.”1 Life echoed his point, trumpeting in 1940 that “more than they ever dreamed they could vacationing Americans travel.”2 In celebrating tourism’s newly egalitarian nature, Life and Dulles voiced what was quickly becoming the received wisdom of the day: the United States had become a culture of mass mobility where pleasure travel was a common, and expected, part of life. According to this narrative, vacationing gave flight to a uniquely American wanderlust that, while buried deep in all citizens, had until then been realizable only by the affluent. Mass mobility heralded a new 12 the holiday makers era in which constraints, whether they be distance, time, or budget, could no longer hold Americans’ will to move in check. Mobility, in this regard, was part physical and part mental phenomenon. While it described movement through space, it also spoke to a desire to break out of the everyday environment and experience someplace new. Observers in the world of commerce were no less enamored. As Business Week reported, the “far flung travel business—ranging from the nation’s biggest banks and railroads to Coney Island hot dog stands and penny arcades”—was an already big industry on the verge of becoming mammoth. Analysts valued the trade at $5.5 billion in 1939 and estimated that the average American spent 7 percent of his or her annual budget on leisure travel, making the trade by some accounts third only to the automobile manufacturing and steel industries.3 In some parts of the country, tourism had already become what one observer called “the big ‘cash crop.’” Considering the depressed economic climate of the 1930s, businessmen were doubly impressed by the trade’s resiliency. Like other sectors of the economy, it suffered early in the decade. But unlike most, it rebounded quickly and proved almost immune to the 1937 recession.4 One part egalitarian social trend and another part economic dynamo, mass tourism was thus emblematic of the booming consumer culture observers hoped would take hold in the 1940s. Mass tourism grew out of a number of distinct, but interrelated, developments over the interwar years. Americans adopted new ideas about leisure and living standards, while employers made vacations a common benefit. Within this context, tourist travel was redefined as a folkway of consumer culture, or a shared activity that constructed and affirmed group identity. Vacations were a sort of ritualized mobility, providing Americans with a liminal period outside the structures of everyday life to exercise autonomy and see what lay over the horizon.5 Tourist travel, in turn, tapped into and helped fuel a heightened geographic curiosity that ran throughout popular culture. Radio broadcasts, movies, and photo magazines were like one side of a coin, backed by the era’s cars, ships, trains, and planes. Both seemed to render distant places close at hand. The Second World War put a hold on mass tourism, but it also provided a crucial period when American travel culture was codified and augmented in important ways. At home, rations and travel restrictions kept civilians more stationary than they had been in years. These constraints, and the feelings of deprivation they stirred...

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