Pilgrimage and Propaganda: The American Newspapermen's Tour of Norway in 1927

Abstract

6 Pilgrimage and Propaganda: The American Newspapermen's Tour of Norway in 1927 by Terje I. Leiren Historically, Norway was seen as a land from which emigrants left, not a land to which tourists came. But at the same time that Norway was becoming an emigrant country in the nineteenth century it was also being discovered by tourists. One of the earliest of the nineteenth-century tourists to visit Norway, Henry David Inglis, wrote in 1829 that he chose to visit there rather than take the more popular Grand Tour of the continent because it "was yet an unexplored country." In characteristically romantic fashion, Inglis wrote that he was attracted to Norway by "the difficulty of conveyance thither, - ignorance of the language, - and the absence of any popular object of attraction."1 As the century progressed, the romanticism of Inglis gave way to the realities of travel for many subsequent visitors. The overall primitive nature of the roads, in addition to the scarcity of hotels, created obstacles but did not discourage a growing number of visitors . A few entrepreneurs, such as Thomas Bennett in 1849, recognized that there was money to be made from the tourists when he began renting carrioles and carriages from his office in Oslo. Traveling through the countryside from posting station to posting station these travelers and tourists probably made the faraway lands of Europe and America seem much closer to many of the Norwegians they encountered. Gradually, the national authorities, too, came to recognize the economic impact they were having. 197 198 Terje I. Leiren By the end of the nineteenth century, beginning with members of the travel industry itself, efforts were being made to market Norway as a tourist goal, principally in England. A central figure in this effort was Ferdinand Louis Scarlett, a physician who had begun to work as an agent for the Thomas Cook Travel Bureau in 1877 and who, subsequendy, perhaps more than any other individual , helped to develop the Norwegian tourist industry.2 By 1902, as the third major wave of emigration from Norway was about to begin, Norwegian government officials also began to take note of the tourism potential. In that year, for the first time, statistics on visitors to Norway were kept by the Central Bureau of National Statistics.3 On February 9, 1903, the National Association for Tourism in Norway was established to coordinate the growing efforts of those organizations involved with tourism and to support the expansion of tourism as a source of income for Norway. Spearheading the efforts were Hans Hagerup Krag, the Norwegian Director of Roads, and Jorgen Lovland, the Minister of Labor, both of whom recognized the potential benefits of tourism to economic growth and development of the infrastructure. It became evident to Krag and Lovland, among others, that Norway could sell her spectacular scenery by appealing to an increasingly mobile European and American population with its growing disposable income.4 Conscious efforts to take advantage of the tourist traffic began cautiously and grew slowly prior to World War I, when they were effectively stalled. In the years following the war, however, renewed efforts focused initially on the dissemination of information through lectures, slides, and film showings.5 As early as 1907 the National Association for Tourism had invited a group of Danish journalists to visit Gudbrandsdalen. A follow-up to that initiative lay dormant for nearly two decades before the Norwegian government, in cooperation with the Association and several other organizations, invited twelve British journalists to visit in 1925. They toured the country for two weeks in June and in August a group of fourteen French jour nalists were invited for a similar tour.6 Then, in 1927, the Norwegians reached across the Atlantic to a seemingly natural constituency for a third group of visitors - twelve American newspapermen, four of whom were Norwegian Americans.7 Pilgrimage and Propaganda 199 An examination of this tour, its background and its consequences , provides the opportunity to examine early Norwegian efforts to "sell" the country as a tourist goal. In addition, by including Norwegian-American newspapermen, the initiative appears to have been, partly at least, directed at the Norwegian immigrant community in America. The four...