Nature's Nation Revisited

See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 . By Marguerite S. Shaffer. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 2001. 429 pages. $55 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).

Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places . By Cecelia Tichi. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 320 pages. 2001. $45 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

There are many ways to approach the relationship between humans and the landscape described in two new books by Marguerite Shaffer and Cecilia Tichi, but the interdisciplinary framework of tourism seems most useful. Shaffer's See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 is literally linked to this theme, for it charts the transformations in tourism between the completion of the transcontinental railroads and World War II. Tichi's Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places is not specifically about travel, but the places she examines tend to be ones at which travelers congregate, such as Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone, or, in the case of the moon, spots many dream of visiting. Both books describe how Americans in the past two centuries have used interactions with the landscape to define, explore, and critique notions of national character. As John Sears has argued, the commercial and cultural practice of landscape tourism that emerged in the early nineteenth century was essential to "America's invention of itself as a culture."¹ This connection between travel and the emergence of an American identity reflects the important insights of sociologist Dean MacCannell, who has identified tourism as a model for the formation of modern subjectivity.² Reversing a several-hundred-year trend denigrating the crassness of the tourist, MacCannell explained that travel allowed people whose daily lives were characterized by the disjunctions and alienation of urban industrial life and work to find a comforting unity in the cultures and environments of others. Shaffer and Tichi both attribute to the American landscape the kind of reassurance and artificial wholeness that MacCannell finds essential to the modern tourist's quest. Both authors effectively link their topics with white, middle-class Americans' attempts to come to terms with an expanding urban-industrial culture. Each author is particularly interested in gender, especially in how engagement with the landscape invited women to question cultural conventions, although both books would have been made richer by reflections on the experiences of members of other marginalized groups. There are important differences between the books, of course, in terms of both subject and approach.

See America First focuses on what Shaffer calls "national tourism," a large-scale middle-class phenomenon she distinguishes from the more elite and regionally oriented picturesque tourism of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Shaffer's eyes, national tourism was a "ritual of citizenship" that offered tourists discomforted by the social and cultural disruptions of the time a reassuring sense of unified national values and aspirations. As she explains, because the development of tourism in this period was so dependent on the government and big business, it provided less an escape from industrial culture than an opportunity to come to terms with it. The book's chapters survey the individuals, groups, and corporations involved in the creation of national tourism. Shaffer also pays attention to the development and expression of the touristic desire through analysis of advertisements, guidebooks, travel writing, and souvenirs.

Shaffer points out that it took more than the means of travel to tempt tourists to vacation in the West. Developers needed to devote money and other resources to stimulating their imaginations. In the years following the Civil War, much of the literature about the transcontinental railroads was geared toward settlement and investment. But some railroad owners and local boosters understood that the burgeoning mass media could be used to create a more temporal interest in the West. The Northern Pacific Railroad pioneered this development, producing promotional tourist materials even as it was laying track. In the 1870s, Northern Pacific's backer Jay Cooke hired Nathaniel Pitt Langford to publicize the Yellowstone region, facilitating the creation and dissemination of newspaper...