Cheeseburger in Paradise: Tourism and Empire at the Edges of Vacationland

In 1917, cartoonist John T. McCutcheon and his wife, Evelyn, went looking for an island. It would have to meet certain specifications: "It should have waving palm trees, long stretches of white beach, and a trade wind blowing fresh and sweet across the lagoon, where a low, rakish craft lay at anchor." The genesis of this desire may have been on a trip to the Philippines, where John McCutcheon and a friend had once "sat by the rail of a lazy little transport and picked out promising atolls where they might reign as kings," but the fulfillment of their dream of island ownership came true in the form of a little island near New Providence in the Bahamas.¹ There they expatriated, on a seasonal basis, from both the United States and the twentieth century, playing out fantasies of piracy and colonialism, perhaps aided by the absence of prohibition in the British colony. They rechristened their island kingdom "Treasure Island," and built on its northern side a tower from which to look out for pirates, and on occasion hang pirate effigies.² They hosted friends in guesthouses, managed a household staff, and imagined themselves "King and Queen, even in bathing suits."³ Treasure Island was the kind of extraordinarily exclusive vacationland available only to the well-connected, wealthy elite of U.S. society, but the aspirations behind it found expression in the increasingly elaborate resorts that expanded through the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

U.S. tourists promoted and took advantage of infrastructural development, faster transportation, and the expansion of formal and informal U.S. empire; they pushed continually outward in search of leisure, relaxation, entertainment, intoxication, enlightenment, and adventure. The constantly shifting pleasure periphery in which they recreated cut across national and cultural boundaries.⁴ As border sites from Niagara Falls to Tijuana, colonies from the Virgin Islands to Alaska, and resort areas within U.S. boundaries from Mackinac Island to Las Vegas became objects of tourist desire, they often underwent dramatic changes. Flocking to vacationland's frontier, tourists obeyed impulses both to play and possess. In pursuit of these goals, they read guides and travelogues, plotted itineraries, compared destinations and accommodations, and chose among available modes of transport. Like the McCutcheons, they drew from literature and history, mapping themselves onto imagined geographies and writing themselves into narratives of discovery and conquest. When they traveled, tourists worked to live out diverse and often contradictory fantasies. They did not always succeed. Disappointment was an almost inescapable feature of modern leisure travel, but the pursuit of the perfect vacation produced consequences, large and small, for sojourners, hosts, and their societies.

In recent years, scholars of American studies have followed U.S. travelers into the transnational peripheries of U.S. power and culture. Those scholars have increasingly paid attention to the ways in which tourism, along with its promotion through a variety of media, has reshaped U.S. culture, consumerism, and empire along with travelers' destinations. Dennis Merrill, in his study of U.S. tourism in and relations with Latin America, proposes that examining "peoples immersed in the rituals of modern leisure yields a more complex and arguably more well-rounded understanding of modern imagined communities" (241). Tourism promoters enacted potential vacationers' imaginations, employing evocative narratives, music, and images that would circulate widely, beyond those who would actually make the trip. The most successful promotional...