The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising and Mass Tourism in Postwar America by Richard K. Popp (review)

Media studies scholar Richard Popp’s history of Holiday, an innovative American magazine promoting and advertising travel in the generation after World War II, serves as a prism through which to understand a unique period of American consumer society—not only the emergence of a mass American Wanderlust but also the high water mark of mass marketing of “sensation gathering” travel in an age of corporate and “consensus” affluence. Though a specialized study, it reaches beyond the revised dissertations often published by university presses, to situate the topic in the broader literature of modern consumer culture, tourism, and the advertising history. It also makes learned and germane references to films and influential popular culture. Despite the fact that Popp’s focus is on magazine history, not the social history of mass tourism or really the tourist industry, a fact that may leave the reader with unanswered questions, he has selected a magazine of great importance in revealing a very important transition in American tourism and consumer history.

Popp introduces his topic with a comprehensive, if data sparse and familiar, survey of the rise of the two-week vacation, the expansion of automobile and rail tourism, and the merchandising of travel in the 1930s. He shows how World War II set the stage for mass holiday making by advertising campaigns offering tantalizing images of postwar pleasures and by inducing employer concessions of holiday time in lieu of wage increases. But his real contribution is to the history of magazine market research in the launching of Holiday. This Curtis publication broke from the old standard of mass advertising magazines by tapping into a newly aroused middle-class desire for travel. The key was to recognize not just an income-segmented market for advertising but to identify “psychographic markets” based on lifestyle and attitudes favorable toward tourism. Popp links Holiday and its editorial and advertising policy to a broad ethos of “classless” affluence and progress advanced by 1950s corporate America.

The heart of the book, however, is a brief but sophisticated reading of Holiday’s “destination profiles” that tantalizing readers with a rich array of travel stories, both domestic and foreign, often written by famous authors (from Jack Kerouac to William Faulkner) identified with these sites. Holiday broke with the “guidebookishness” of National Geographic with emotional appeals to inexperienced middle-class travelers and stressed an “experiential ethos” of adventure and “personal transformation” (104). Both stories and ads grew more sophisticated with promotions designed to direct tourist crowds to less-trodden sites and convince readers that travel was channeling the American pioneer spirit. Holiday abandoned familiar travel clichés by featuring stories of the challenge of the primitive old West or the romantic “otherness” of Puerto Rico (while attempting to eliminate fears of poverty and danger of such places). Holiday attempted to go beyond iconic images of France, for example, to appeals to the sensuality of the French countryside and village. The magazine also learned to appeal to the more affluent and experienced tourist with appeals to those discriminating travelers seeking an adventure away from the crowds.

Popp shows how a segmented market appeal in Holiday anticipated trends in the 1970s and the popularizations of VALS (Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles) research as well as Thomas Frank’s Conquest of the Cool in the countercultural advertising of the late 1960s. Though I wonder if the downturn of Holiday’s model of mass holiday making begins in the early 1960s as Popp argues (rather than the 1970s), he clearly identifies a shift away from optimistic expectations as American businesses pulled back from extending holiday time, Americans seem to withdraw from curiosity about the wider world, and more important, favored consumption over free time as compared to other affluent societies. Those hoping for an explanation of this contrast or why Americans seem to deviate...