Book Review: The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America, by Richard K. Popp

Abstract

The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America. Richard K. Popp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 204 pp. $39.95 hbk.Americans have long been known as mobile people characterized by seemingly insatiable wanderlust. In 1961, Time magazine proudly proclaimed nation's citi- zens to be the world's most restless travelers. It is easy to imagine this instinct for mobility as expression of national genetic trait. Richard K. Popp's book The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America does valuable service of showing how, in fact, this trait has been carefully culti- vated and shaped by tourism, advertising, and publishing industries. Wanderlust may come naturally to many Americans, but postwar culture of tourism described here was guided by many helping hands.Popp, an assistant professor of media studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, identifies number of factors that set stage for postwar travel boom, including widespread institution of two-week paid vacation, development of an expansive network of roads, craze of automobility and consumer credit industry that facili- tated it, and government efforts to promote tourism during Depression era. Equally important, however, was creation of mindset that taught Americans they were sup- posed to travel, that their two weeks of paid vacation should be spent on road. As Popp describes it, middlebrow and nationalist cultural narratives converged to position travel as a shared activity that constructed and affirmed group identity for those who sought to be real Americans. The creation of these narratives is focus of book.One major strength of book is Popp's discussion of emergence of travel magazine Holiday, created by Curtis Publishing in 1946. Popp demonstrates how magazine was carefully formulated using market research to reach that segment of reading public most attractive to potential advertisers in tourism business. These readers had income necessary for travel and, more importantly, had values that allowed them to spend freely on themselves, either for entertainment or for self- development. Popp rightly identifies this as precursor to trend toward market segmentation that affected magazine industry as whole in postwar years as television took away their general audience. Holiday enjoyed several decades of popu- larity with its travel stories, destination features, enticing photos, and advertisements for everything related to tourism. Even Jack Kerouac, America's iconic postwar trav- eler, wrote for it. As Popp suggests, magazine made an effort to cultivate particu- lar way of seeing and understanding tourist locations in way that soothed readers anxieties about travel by replicating readers' preconceived ideas of place and pre- sented them through lens of middle-class desire.The middle-class focus of postwar travel narratives fit in well with cold war cul- tural constructions. …