Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture by Will B. Mackintosh

Abstract

Reviewed by: Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture by Will B. Mackintosh Thomas Weiss (bio) Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture will b. mackintosh New York University Press, 2019 244 pp. When I first read Daniel Boorstin's remark in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Harper Colophon Books, 1964) that "the modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events" (79), I presumed he was reacting to a large number of tourists that had crowded in on his holiday, and I thought he was overreacting a bit. There are boorish tourists that make many of us cringe, but to ridicule an entire class of travelers seemed a bit much. Little did I realize that writers had reacted this same way over two hundred years ago, long before the swelling crowds had appeared at prominent tourist destinations. The details differed—Boorstin criticized the inauthentic while the earlier critics critiqued the useless and frivolous—but they shared the idea that travelers differed from, and were superior to, tourists. Selling the Sights is the history of how this basic dichotomy arose, why tourists came to be held in low esteem, and why that early opposition to tourism continues to shape our views about the meaning of travel today. At the start of the nineteenth century, very few Americans were touring and destinations were limited, primarily to mineral and hot springs, but after the War of 1812, the number of tourists and their destinations began to increase. In the mid-1820s, boosters began to collectively label these northern destinations the "Fashionable Tour" or the "American Grand Tour." The trends continued upward as additional destinations sprung up along the Fashionable Tour route, and travelers struck out for new territories in the Ohio River valley by the 1830s and the Great Lakes by the 1840s. All of this was driven by a number of factors: increased incomes; many improvements in transportation, including the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825; and, importantly in Mackintosh's view, the publication of guidebooks. Initially the guidebooks focused on providing information on how to get to the sights, but as the transportation system improved, they evolved into marketing the destination. Mackintosh stresses that these guidebooks were a strategy not only to [End Page 965] inform travelers but also, more importantly, to define their experience. The travelers' experiences were shaped by what they read in guides, which "covered a limited number of fixed routes, highlighted a handful of desirable destinations, and articulated an increasingly stable set of cultural meanings for those routes and destinations" (53). These books brought about a transition from an experience in which an individual made all the arrangements, and thus "produced" his or her own travel, to a system in which he or she purchased tickets on one or more modes of transportation. Mackintosh very deftly draws on some of the many travel diaries, memoirs, and essays produced by early travelers to show what this transition meant for them; what was gained and what lost; and how their expectations changed. By the 1830s, some travelers questioned the value of the experiences described in the guidebooks "because they seemed overly fashionable, superficial, and perhaps even dangerously meaningless." Those who continued to take the "well-beaten paths in order to have well-understood and fundamentally predictable experiences" came to be known as tourists (86). Numerous satirists, including Washington Irving and Mark Twain, had a field day with the topic, and Mackintosh presents a detailed and nuanced account of this literature and its changing focus over time. Interestingly, much of the satire written before 1850 was directed primarily at British visitors, especially those who wrote about their travels, because they were seen as "'gentry [who] regarded their trashy experiences as of so much moment to society at large that they absolutely committed them to print'" (123), and because they made some nasty or condescending remarks about the United States. With the satire having been aimed at British visitors, I wondered whether American tourists were as frivolous and "dangerously meaningless" as depicted; or whether there were only a few of them around, none of whom wrote...