TOURISM

Leisure travel is usually defined as voluntary, round-trip, and not related to employment or permanent relocation. Within that broad description lies the story of the American tourist as a mirror of social and economic trends, including the democratization of experience, the contest between artificial and natural environments, and the fragmentation of travel interests into niche specialties. But it is also the story of a 300-year effort to use various sources of information to discover a balance between predictability and serendipity, image and reality, and active and passive forms of enjoyment.

Democracy and Discomfort

Leisure tourism has always been directly shaped by the availability, comfort, and price of transportation. Travelers from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century lacked control over almost every aspect of the journey, including schedules, routes, and levels of amenity. Geography, the technological limitations of the age, and the whims of those providing the service were the primary determinants of the direction and distance of journeys. The more spacious comfort of ship travel was mainly available between major ports, forcing other travelers to accept the crude conditions of land travel. Native trails had often determined road routes. Even the so-called turnpikes were little more than dirt-surfaced gaps between the trees. Those who lacked their own horses were left to the mercy of unpredictable stagecoach schedules. Limited carrying capacity, crude springing, lack of good ventilation or heat, and seating composed of leather straps guaranteed an uncomfortable journey. Travelers were crammed together in a commingling of strangers of both sexes and all social classes, over which they had no control. Breakdowns, washouts, and wrecks were common.

The lack of choice in overnight accommodations posed another unavoidable problem. Inns were unpredictable extensions of their proprietors' personalities, and they varied in comforts; most were rude affairs. Travelers became temporary family members at smaller places, especially in the South, but even larger hostelries offered little privacy. Patrons slept in large common beds, undressed and dressed in front of strangers, and ate at long tables. Sleeping space and dining were first come, first served, especially the food, which emerged almost entirely from a frying pan filled with fat. The same fare was offered during the day to passengers on coaches that stopped to change horses and drivers. Travelers suffered passively, and even those who possessed one of the rare guidebooks to roads and inns that had begun to appear by the 1730s had no real control over where their coaches stopped. It was not until 1794 that the first structure built as a hotel opened in New York City. Boston's Tremont House (1829), with a lobby, parlor rooms, and private sleeping rooms, is regarded as the first modern hotel.

Besides the physical discomforts, leisure travel before the mid-nineteenth century encountered the constraint of general social disapproval. The religious upbringing of most Calvinists allowed nothing so frivolous. The issue was irrelevant to most Americans who labored under sixday work weeks and strict Sabbath observances. Health reasons provided elites who could get away from the daily grind of earning a living with the justification for travel either to escape the summertime epidemic season back home, or to "take the waters" or the clean air of spas, springs, and seashores for curative purposes. The town of Cape May, New Jersey, was founded in 1621 and began attracting seaside visitors around 1790. It grew as one of the earliest tourist areas because it became accessible by steamboat in the 1820s. By that time, Nahant, Massachusetts; Perth Amboy, New Jersey; and Newport, Rhode Island, all on the Atlantic, drew thousands of guests to large hotels, as did such inland places as Saratoga, New York. Improved turnpikes and stagecoaches also allowed the springs of western Virginia to become tourist destinations by 1830; White Sulphur Springs opened a new hotel in 1858. Gradually, the vigorous social life of parties, fencing lessons, horse racing, shopping, and gambling replaced the pretense of improving health. Saratoga Springs, discovered in 1767, began permitting games in the 1820s and opened a racetrack in 1863. By then, those who advocated leisure travel had begun justifying wholesome recreation as a necessary source of the kind of relaxation that would restore workers to peak efficiency without descending into vice.

The nascent travel industry quickly accepted any innovation and the resultant widening of choice. America's canal-building frenzy extended the range of leisurely sightseeing. The boat was smoother than land travel, but limited by fixed routes, seasonal shutdown, and the walking speed and frequent change of animals. Low bridges interfered with riding on the roof, the only place to escape the stifling heat of summer. Well-to-do leisure travelers often grumbled that the common table forced them to mingle with immigrants, native farmers, criminals in transit, and other travelers. And everyone inhabited a single cabin, sitting by day on cushions that were pulled out or placed on shelves let down from the walls at night. Only a carpet suspended from a cord separated the women's sleeping space from that of the men. Meanwhile, as sail gave way to steam, transportation on lakes and rivers became a quest for speed and luxury that was first enjoyed by elite passengers, who enjoyed the luxury of private stateroom, barbershops, libraries, and fine food.

Image and Destination

After 1850, the railroad not only brought major cities within a day's ride of hundreds of such new destinations as the Catskill Mountains and Cape Cod, but its new comforts changed attitudes about the landscape through which it traveled. The rising importance of images coincided with America's embrace of Romanticism and its emotional quest for beauty. Wilderness areas that had once been considered frightening and uncivilized wastelands attracted travelers in search of the kind of scenery depicted in paintings of the Hudson River School and described by such writers as James Fenimore Cooper. Nationalistic beliefs, which now held that the vast rugged territories were what set America apart from Europe, transformed the landscape to America's mythology and fed the fascination that made a visit to the now-precious wilderness a matter of patriotic pride. For instance, early-nineteenth-century travelers through Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, spotted what seemed to be the profile of the "Old Man in the Mountain." By the 1830s, a New England tourist industry had been born. Some even argued that the wilderness that had once been scorned should now be protected. As early as 1831, painter George Catlin called for "a nation's park containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature's beauty" (p. 261). By the 1840s, there were early daguerreotype images of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

As the volume of tourism increased, aspects of travel became less costly and more diversified. Resort accommodations began to serve a broadening spectrum of classes. Trains and cheaper rooms allowed the middle classes to identify upward in their tastes. In the 1850s, the railroad allowed Atlantic City to become Philadelphia's accessible beach, displacing Cape May as the most popular coast destination. Even day-trippers out from the city could walk the sands once trodden by the very rich, who had already fled the hotels for more private "cottages," which were actually grand summer mansions. Other elites tried new resorts, some of which were built by the railroads. Rail traffic also initiated the earliest forms of urban tourism—to see human, as well as natural, wonders—which had first appeared before the end of the eighteenth century. Tourists not only visited the increasingly venerated patriotic sights of Boston and Philadelphia, but also gazed with wonder at urban waterworks and city parks, where nature had been tamed.

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a new and unexpected type of tourist had also emerged. Instead of seeking beautiful vistas, tourists of this type came to observe with macabre fascination the site of military battles or even the locations of tragic fires, steamboat explosions, and other events involving loss of life. After viewing images of these events depicted in popular lithographs or reading about them in a cheap book (part of the disaster genre that had begun to appear), they set out to see for themselves. The site of a deadly 1826 avalanche in New Hampshire's White Mountains became a major regional tourist draw. Visitors wanted to use these hallowed places in an attempt to share the experience of what happened there and to inquire about the larger significance of why it occurred. Even before the Civil War ended, veterans, families, and civilians began to flock to cemeteries and battle sites, transforming such places as the sleepy village of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, into a major tourist destination.

Western Parks and Eastern Images

The completion of the East-West rail link at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 established tourism as a coast-to-coast industry, but it was initially limited to elite travelers who rode the new Pullmans. Rail travel to the West grew primarily after prices became competitive, especially on the part of the trip east of Omaha. By the end of the century, the completion of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific routes also drove down Union Pacific fares and brought the vast West within middle-class budgets. These travelers were also responding to two new sources of information and image. One was the travel agent, who simplified the ticketing process, found the best fares, and influenced the choice of destinations. The other was the mass production of printed and photographic images of the West, which were consumed in eastern population centers. Popular fiction and travel guidebooks provided verbal accounts, while the steel engravings in Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's, and other magazines fixed visual images. By the 1870s, the mass production of stereopticons gave photographers influence over which scenic spots people would seek to visit. The use of lithography and four-color printing in throwaway brochures helped catalyze a popular fascination with these places that increased the market for tourism. City people thus joined in the concern that the westward expansion of agriculture might bring about the loss of places of natural beauty to development. In 1872, Yellowstone National Park, the first, established the model for the subsequent Sequoia, Yosemite, and Mount Rainier Parks.

As the first owner of the land, the federal government could set aside large preserves at minimal cost, but these spots were isolated from transportation and lacked money for amenities. The answer came, once again, via the railroads. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the carriers began building elaborate "railroad realism" palaces, which attracted tourists with a compromise between predictable urban hotel amenities and the surrounding cultural heritage. The Florida East Coast's Ponce de Leon Hotel, built in 1885 in Saint Augustine, reflected the state's colonial past, as did other railroad properties constructed during the 1880s boom. Throughout the Southwest the Santa Fe Railroad featured Native American imagery and the Spanish mission heritage in the architecture of hotels, restaurants, and depots. Thus, when the Great Northern built Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone in 1902 and Glacier Park Lodge eleven years later, both incorporated huge logs and stones, reflecting their natural surroundings. The visitor's dollar also bought atmosphere as well as shelter in other large non-park resorts, such as the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan, and White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Urban luxury became part of the ersatz experience of "roughing it." These hotels coincided with the growing popularity of "outdoor sports," like hunting, fishing, and horseback riding. Vermont's first summer camps for children appeared in the 1890s. The railroads also moved into dude ranching, another artificial encounter with the West. In all parts of the country, the addition of observation towers, handrails, bridges, paved roads, cabins, wells, and other injections of human engineering were acclaimed as "improvements" over nature.

World's Fairs

World's fairs expanded the notion of tourism in new ways. The 1876 Centennial Exposition filled Philadelphia's Fairmont Park with a spectacular building that not only drew 9.9 million to celebrate the nation's emergence as an industrial power, but also advertised the notion of seeing the rest of America. Fast-growing Chicago was itself a tourist attraction when it wrestled the right to host the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition from older cities. Over its six-month run 27 million visitors crowded over 600 new hotels. Both fairs involved rearranging parklands to accommodate dreamlike exhibit buildings. Fair goers saw the trip as an efficient, yet thrilling, substitute for travel, since everything worth seeing from around the globe had been collected, cataloged, and displayed as if in some wondrous department store. Both fairs seemed to be windows into the future. Large natural wonders were reproduced in miniature, while some industrial displays such as the Centennial's Corliss Engine were of overwhelming proportions. Armies of workers kept the fairgrounds clean and safe, while the careful study of guidebooks enabled visitors to prechoose what they wanted most to see.

Souvenirs allowed exposition visitors to carry home physical reminders of a pleasant experience as well as remove all doubt that they had made the trip. It was an old custom. Such items as small stones collected at a scenic site also allowed nontravelers to share the experience by gazing upon or touching a part of the destination. (On a more spectacular scale, that has been the function of moon rocks brought back by astronauts.) Early souvenirs also included guidebooks and luggage tags. Commercialized souvenirs, which began to be produced and sold at the tourist destination in the mid-nineteenth century, not only enhanced profits, but also allowed the manufacturers, the sellers, and the host city or tourist attraction to control their own image. The 1893 Chicago fair brought a quantum advancement in souvenirs. There were trinkets of every description and huge books filled with the recently invented half-tone images. Visitors could send home the new picture postcards, recently approved by postal authorities. A well-placed "X" marked on the card often denoted where someone had stayed or eaten or stood.

One of the most controversial decisions made by directors of the Chicago fair was to demand license fees from amateur as well as professional photographers. Although the policy gave the exposition greater control of its own image, it ran counter to the developing trend of democratizing the tourist experience. When George Eastman decided in 1888 to broaden his market by making the photographic process inexpensive and simple, his portable Kodak camera gave its users the ability to customize their souvenirs and control their lasting visual histories of their trips. By placing themselves in the pictures, they were able to provide absolute proof of travel authenticity. The black box and the demand that everyone stand still for a shot became so ubiquitous that they helped generate the term "Kodakers" as a somewhat derisive term for ill-mannered tourists.

The city also remained the focus of various types of tourism. Rural folk in particular were curious about urban life and were commonly found clutching guidebooks and gawking at skyscrapers. Meanwhile, money, time, and information continued to limit access to leisure travel for the urban working class to summer Sundays. The bicycle, once limited to the wealthy because of its cost, dropped in price during the 1890s; this new affordability gave workers access to local tourism that was not controlled by fares and timetables, a hint of what the automobile would later allow. Those Philadelphians with funds for the railroad ride could visit Atlantic City, which erected a large wooden pier in 1870. For wage-earning New Yorkers, a railroad, ferryboat, or transit ride brought them to Coney Island, a hodgepodge resort, catering to all classes, that had emerged after 1870 and thrived for much of the next century. Enterprising captains transformed older ships into tour boats that circled Manhattan and ran to spots surrounding New York harbor. The Chicago working class crowded commercial beaches and lined up to ride weekend lake excursion steamers to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Michigan City, Indiana. It was the Midway of the 1893 fair, in particular, that expanded America's notion of leisure by combining the Ferris wheel and other amusements with anthropological displays that were designed to provide a popular form of fake travel to foreign cultures. They could even find artificial "danger" wandering among the Midway's foreign market stalls or looking out across Chicago from one of the Ferris wheel cars. Later, visitors who had traveled thousands of miles to see the Columbian Midway would be able to patronize the same kinds of passive entertainments at urban amusement parks.

Leisure in Prosperous Times

Prosperous times provide the volume of discretionary spending that invariably ignites growth in the tourism industry. Elites develop travel patterns that are out of reach for mass-market tourism. The 1920s saw the wealthy and upper middle class travel outside the United States in record numbers. Travel abroad on a new generation of luxury steamships allowed many to escape Prohibition in style. Americans in the hundreds of thousands poured over the sights of Europe or traveled around the world on a southern route that opened in 1927. Domestically, the railroads responded to competition from the automobile by increasing the class distinctions of their accommodations, adding premium-fare fast trains of luxury equipment. Pulling against the elitist trend was a combination of democratization and individualization of the domestic mass market to include modest budgets. Larger and more powerful autobuses made it possible to make over-the-road runs profitable. A local company that carried Minnesota iron ore miners to work consolidated its service with others and became Greyhound Lines. Buses became less expensive and geographically more flexible alternatives to rail travel. Moreover, the mass automobile ownership engineered by Henry Ford began to have an impact on leisure travel after World War I that was so great that rail ridership in America, which had peaked in 1920, began to lose passengers to the automobile. A planned auto vacation meant that prosperous working-class families could now afford the luxury of individualized leisure travel, setting their own route and schedule. Campers, tourist cabins, and Kodaks were part of what could be considered a new outdoor economy that altered the identities of whole regions. For instance, although improved railroad access to Cape Cod after the Civil War had resulted in a few scattered resorts, the automobile transformed the area into a unified destination in the 1920s.

Out west not only did the U.S. highway system simplify the process of staying on the right road, but the volume of traffic that these routes generated tended to create a linear tourist economy across states that had previously seen little spending from strangers passing through on trains. Grand Canyon and Zion (1919), as well as Grand Teton (1929) added to the roster of National Parks in the West, but the 1920s saw the concept applied to the East with the creation of Lafayette (1919), Great Smoky Mountains (1926), Shenandoah (1926), and Mammoth Cave (1926). It was also becoming clear that parks were subject to a self-destructive fate. That is, the democratic goal of encouraging all Americans to share the uplifting benefits of visiting the parks would result in crowds so large that they would destroy the natural reasons for creating the parks in the first place. That problem had not been considered during the first few decades of the National Park system and remained manageable in the era of rail tourism. In 1927 Scenic Airways began flying over the Grand Canyon, but the advent of automobile tourism brought the first bitter wrangling over the impact of traffic and the presence of private concessionaires to serve tourist needs in National Parks, a debate that continued into the 2000s.

It was perhaps appropriate that two individuals who had profited most from this new automobile tourism would fund two new tourist destinations that were born in the 1920s. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil money paid for the archaeological research and physical rebuilding of the ruins of the colonial capital of Williamsburg, Virginia. Meanwhile, Henry Ford embarked on the creation of Greenfield Village, which consisted of dozens of historic structures from around the world plucked from their context and relocated in a re-created nineteenth-century small-town neighborhood. The adjacent Henry Ford Museum housed a variety of mostly industrial artifacts that rivaled the Smithsonian's collections. Both places were, in a sense, artificial destinations that became immensely popular.

Depression, War, and Travel

The devastating business collapse and soaring unemployment of the Great Depression left many Americans on the road, but only to drift from place to place in search of work. The Grapes of Wrath could hardly be called sightseeing. Resorts cut services, seashore cottages sat empty, and several major city hotels went bankrupt. But the decade did lay the groundwork for the future, and travel was intimately connected to selling the idea that industrial design would contribute to an industrial revival. During the 1930s, railroads began to embrace lightweight streamlined equipment that promised not only to slash operating costs, but also to run at higher speeds that would attract Depression-era passengers back to trains. But declining ridership forced reductions in the frequencies of other trains.

Nothing expressed that idea more clearly than the decade's two major world's fairs. The themes of both events were futuristic, and leisure travelers arrived with the expectation of being uplifted, excited, and amused. The first, Chicago's Century of Progress (1933–1934), proved profitable despite the hard times. Corporate sponsorship, which was obvious in the overt commercialization of exhibits, eased funding, while a greater emphasis on amusement instead of enlightenment gave the affair a more escapist flavor than its 1893 counterpart. Hard times may also have enlarged attendance by making Americans believe that if they could afford only one trip it should be to a world's fair. Automobility not only reduced travel expenses, but the whole family was able to sleep in the car or at one of dozens of auto camps. The larger New York World's Fair of 1939 to 1940 drew on the same styles and themes. Visitors came to see what lay ahead for them, including television, superhighways, air travel, and the products of chemistry. As the world was moved toward an explosion in international relations, the 1939 to 1940 fairs also emphasized themes of democracy and government service.

Hard times also forced families on modest budgets to enjoy tourism close to home. The Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project produced new information sources in the form of inexpensive state guidebooks that encouraged city dwellers to visit museums and otherwise act like tourists in their own cities. The guides also suggested automobile touring routes and provided scenic and historical detail about the towns and sites along the way. This type of tourism inspired such communities as Sarasota, Florida, and Taos, New Mexico, to create celebrations designed to draw in the tourist dollars. Finally, in several states the Civilian Conservation Corps literally paved the way for future tourism by cutting roads in undeveloped areas and building log cabins and lodges that grew into state park systems.

World War II gasoline and tire rationing virtually halted discretionary automobile use, while military travelers took priority over civilians on trains and planes. The war also interrupted futuristic ideas that had been displayed at the 1930s fairs and were to impact postwar tourism. One was the superhighway displayed at the 1939 Futurama exhibit. The multilane, divided, and limited-access highway took realistic form in the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which would be the model for postwar interstate travel. Not only were auto excursions cheaper for families and able to liberate them from timetables, but postwar cars promised new levels of comfort. Even streamlined trains with "vista-domes" for scenic routes, new economy sleepers, and fast all-coach trains could not stem the loss of railway passenger share. The railroads chose the hundredth anniversary of Windy City railroading to stage the Chicago Railroad Fairs of 1948 to 1949. These events advanced the techniques of creating artificial entertainment environments that attempted to re-create other places and time periods. Animatronic characters talked to crowds, which also filled grandstands for a pageant that celebrated an idealized account of America's history and technological progress. Although the fairs failed to stem the national decline in rail tourism, they were significant as a sign of Chicago's growing interest in attracting urban tourists to supplement its industrial base.

Leisure Travel: Everywhere or Nowhere

During the last half of the twentieth century, the tourist industry was pulled simultaneously in many directions, leaving leisure consumers with a bewildering array of choices. One model, the once-scorned landscape, could be found in the West, where tourism benefited from a broadening definition of the term scenic "destination." Artifacts of the disappearing mining industry took on new life as quaint tourist attractions. Played-out mines and ghost towns were part of Colorado's reinvention as a leisure destination, with a tenfold increase in tourists between 1946 and 1964. The same was true of South Dakota's old mining districts, as well as its desolate Black Hills. The 1941 completion of Mount Rushmore's four sixty-foot-high presidential faces represented the transformation of nature into human-made symbols; the sixteen-year process of carving them had served to advertise the feat. Later, such human creations as the Saint Louis arch were similarly designed to draw tourists.

Meanwhile, those who went west by car passed by hundreds of signs advertising such non-natural attractions as "Pioneer Village" in Minton, Nebraska, a large private museum funded by plastics inventor Harold Warp; "Rock City" in Georgia, which evolved from a private estate on Lookout Mountain, overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee; and South Dakota's Wall Drugs, which offered free ice water in order to draw Mt. Rushmore traffic to a small-town pharmacy that later expanded into a giant general store. At a time when few people traveled with advanced motel reservations, the local economies of towns along the tourist corridors benefited from impulse stopovers inspired by roadside signs. These smaller attractions have amounted to small-town Chamber of Commerce tourism, a low-key and localized promotion. Gradually, towns and regions began to grasp at anything that might possibly bring in tourist dollars. Other manifestations of this type could be found within a few hours' drive of major cities. These places are characterized by the displacement of the original scenic attraction by fast-paced rides, museums, and shows that depend on shocking rather than stimulating the senses. For instance, in the late 1950s a Chicago radio personality named Tommy Bartlett introduced water-ski shows at the scenic dells of the Wisconsin River. This began the transformation of the adjacent town into a concentration of dozens of family-oriented amusements and eateries reminiscent of a carnival Midway. Similarly, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, remains better known for its mass of neon signs than for its original attraction, the splendor of the nearby mountains.

The postwar years also saw the principles of mass production, mass marketing, and nationalization combine to create corporate tourism. The rise of franchise food and chain motels during the 1950s was obviously a manifestation of an automobile culture, but it also resulted from what seem to be contradictory demands. Vacationing Americans increasingly sought new destinations each summer instead of repeat visits to the same cabins. But they also demanded greater predictability in getting there, in part because interstate highways, frequent jet departures, and greater media-provided knowledge of once-remote parts of the country created the perception of a shrinking nation. At the same time, lower long-distance telephone rates and the increased use of travel agents resulted in itineraries that were preplanned instead of impulsive. These advancements tended to promote the convenience and predictability of national chains of motels and franchised food.

This quest for predictability also promoted the concentration of a larger share of the tourist industry into a more limited number of highly advertised destinations. Serendipity gave way to theme park tourism, which grew out of the mind of Walt Disney. He understood more than almost any other leisure entrepreneur why American families sought predictability. His travel empire was rooted in several aspects of the World's Columbian Exposition, where his father, Elias Disney, had been employed as a carpenter. The young cartoonist visited the world's fairs of the 1930s, but later revealed that he had been influenced most by the 1948 to 1949 Chicago Railroad Fair. Disneyland, which opened in 1955, and its Florida counterpart (1971) offer a heavily promoted one-stop package that revived the 1893 characteristics of fantasy, ersatz danger, cleanliness, orderliness, family accommodations, and an overwhelming choice of activities. Meanwhile, Six Flags, Great America, and other theme park companies also used the 1893 formula, especially the Midway, as an outdoor department store of rides and attractions.

The rise and evolution of Las Vegas as a leisure destination is a recapitulation of modern tourism history. The original 1950s transformation of the insignificant railroad town grew out of gambling and the raffish reputation that accompanied a state where divorce was a principal industry. The town was a haven for those who defied the American scorn for gambling and excessive alcohol, but fans were willing to travel thousands of miles to see national celebrities manufactured by the entertainment industry. By the late 1980s, Nevada had lost its gambling monopoly when Atlantic City siphoned off East Coast business. Most states adopted ubiquitous lotteries that were geographically placeless, and many others licensed casinos that were regional draws. The 1990s saw "the Strip" hotels of Las Vegas replaced by Disneyesque resorts that combined gambling with safe, clean, family-oriented fantasy environments that imitated faraway times and places.

Tourism became a new cornerstone of the American economy, but many remained uneasy about it. The tourist endured as the object of scorn for critics who complained that leisure travel was by nature an artificial experience. Despite the jobs created by servicing postwar travelers, their presence also revived the debate over the idea of the self-destructive attraction: Did the crowds in fact overwhelm and alter the very attractions they came to see? The roads and campgrounds in the National Parks clogged, while the new technologies of snowmobiles, off-road vehicles, and hiking and climbing gear prompted some visitors to attempt to personalize their itineraries. Such debates were especially cogent as cutting-edge travelers broadened the variety of travel experiences. Some targeted exotic parts of the world for ethnic or cultural tourism; others based their journeys on the quest for new kinds of eating or even sexual experiences; still others created itineraries based on searching out the fine arts. There is also a continuing popular fascination with visiting the "shadowed ground" scenes of assassinations and disasters. Unexpectedly, something as simple—and artificial—as 100 highly decorated fiberglass cows drew tens of thousands of tourists to Chicago during the summer of 1999. By the end of the twentieth century leisure travel was so broadened in its definition that it was in danger of having no definition at all.

Unpredictability remains the most predictable characteristic of the leisure travel industry. Air-conditioning reduced the importance of climate as a motivation for escape and made the South an attractive summertime destination. The 1960s prognostications that everyone's shortened workweek would lead to long periods of leisure travel have reversed themselves into a trend of longer hours; the cell phone and Internet have begun to make it impossible for some to separate themselves completely from their work. When they can go, the short vacation has often replaced the multiweek family hegira of the 1950s. Moreover, surveys indicate that Americans continue to feel guilty about getting away at all. The slowdown of the national economy and the fear and the security-related inconveniences that followed in the wake of the 11 September 2001 tragedy demonstrated how the tourism industry sat atop a shaky foundation of discretionary spending. Foreign visitors virtually disappeared, and Americans chose to stay near home. Airlines cut fares and cities scrambled to find new lures. Las Vegas began to forsake "family entertainment" for the more adult themes of sex, liquor, and gambling.

Perhaps symbolic of the constant change: In May 2003, the great stone face of the Old Man in the Mountains—one of the oldest tourist attractions in American history and New Hampshire's principal symbol—tumbled off its mountainside. State officials were faced with the choice of accepting nature, trying to reposition the giant boulders, or replacing the formation with a fiberglass reconstruction.

See also: Air Travel and Leisure, Automobiles and Leisure, Niagara Falls, Railroads and Leisure, Summer Resorts, Urbanization of Leisure, Vacations

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Perry R. Duis