Country of Exiles (13 page)

Among the speeches was one by Jonathan Tisch, CEO of Loew’s Hotels, who told his audience that the United States “is losing market share” in the international travel and tourist business. “We’re missing our greatest opportunity to sell the best thing we have—ourselves.” Americans have “a wonderful sense of place,” Tisch said, “so let’s take advantage of that. Let’s sell that sense of place.” “If we don’t market our product, no one else will.”
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Nearly everybody packed into the gold ballroom of the Sheraton Washington Hotel was in the business of selling place. “We should market what we have,” said Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of the many state tourist directors present, “Our Indian mounds, the blues, the Civil War.” Charles Garfield, host facilitator for the conference and a former NASA official, asserted that “we have the greatest product on earth—the U.S.A. But how do we market the U.S.A.?” Judson Green, president of Walt Disney Attractions, warned, “We must market the brand U.S.A.” or “our market share will be lost.”

Many people in the room seemed to feel the gravity of these claims, none more so than Bill Clinton, who knew, firsthand, the economic power of the travel and tourist business. He grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, during a period—1954 to 1965—when that city was famed for its tourist attractions: its Versailles-like bathhouses and hotels, such as the Arlington, among the most elegant in the South; its numerous nightclubs, like the Belvedere and the Vapors, on the east side of town, where many people (including Virginia Kelly, Clinton’s mother) came to the play the roulette wheels and craps; and its long, big, popular
Oaklawn Racetrack on the west side of town, which Virginia Kelly also frequented, just blocks away from Clinton’s boyhood home.
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“This industry,” the president said, “has been near and dear to my heart since I was a little boy,” and “I have dedicated myself to helping” it “grow.” Travel and tourism give us insight into “the common humanity of us all,” he said. They allow us all to become “aristocrats,” deepen our “understanding” of others, and help break down “the differences” that divide us. “They are also tailor-made for the global economy,” “a powerhouse generating more than $400 billion in revenue and providing more than 10 percent of the world’s income and employment.”

Other speakers, among them Toby Roth, Republican congressman from Wisconsin (now retired) and the most zealous exponent of this industry in the House of Representatives, rang changes on these themes. Roth argued that “given that America’s big companies are downsizing, all the new jobs are going to come from travel and tourism.” This sector “is the wave of the future economically and politically.” Greg Farmer, the undersecretary of the Tourist and Travel Administration (TTA) within the Commerce Department, and himself a product of the Florida tourist trade, pressed the New Frontier theme. “Thirty-five years ago,” he said, “JFK gave us a vision. Today, we join hands to give all Americans jobs and equal opportunity. Travel and tourism is the rising star of the global economy.” “This is a
GROWTH INDUSTRY
which touches every aspect of American business.” He urged his listeners to imagine “all the bedsheets and bath towels for the 3.4 million hotel and motel rooms in this country.”
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The late secretary of commerce, Ron Brown, agreed. Indeed, none more than Brown, whose attachment to this industry could hardly have been rivaled by that of anyone else
in the Sheraton, felt the force of the rising-star argument and the meaning of all the bedsheets. The son of the manager of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, he, like Clinton, had tourism in the bones. (“I grew up in a hotel,” he told the crowd. He was “born into tourism,” said his friend Congressman James Overstar.) He believed utterly, he claimed, in the promise of this great industry. It will “beat down barriers that separate nationalities.” It will “open new doors” and “create jobs.”
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A joint effort of Washington and the tourist and travel industry, this conference was held to promote a new national tourism strategy that would, as the event’s media kit put it, “make the American travel experience second to none.” The conference was organized, in fact, to inspire the industry to come up with its own national agenda (as Congress was about to cut off funding for the TTA) and to impress on the American public that it was no longer a fringe business but, in Clinton’s words, “an indispensable part” of the new economy.

The conference testified to the status of the travel and tourist trades, which by the nineties offered more Americans more work than any other business outside of healthcare. But the conference stood for something else as well, something without which T and T would have been a much diminished enterprise. That something was gambling, or, more particularly, the casino economy, which had matured into a tourism staple. Historically, tourism and gambling were relatively separate activities (despite the example of cities like Hot Springs), but by the nineties they were almost interchangeable, mingling in new ways and places. Tourism and gambling as a team, as a blurred partnership in “entertainment and fun” (as the industry put it) had even infiltrated Indian reservations, which, despite their complex histories, many Americans often thought of as exemplars of place-rootedness.

But what did the future hold for such supposedly place-rooted
communities when they marketed themselves to make money, treated place as mere fantasy and play, or no longer took it seriously as the historical backbone of cultural life? Tourism and gambling were central to the new service economy, and they were undermining place in an attempt to revitalize it.

In the 1950s and sixties, few people cared whether or not Americans could compete in the international travel and tourist business. Let Bermuda, Monaco, or Greece sell themselves in marketing campaigns. The United States simply was what it was—a world power. In this climate, tourist dollars constituted only a small fraction of the nation’s overall productive strength. By the nineties, however, not only was tourism employing more than 10 percent of the workforce (up from 6 percent in 1970) but American tourist and travel experts were agonizing about a “crisis in market share in the world’s tourist and travel business.”
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In many states (Utah, the Dakotas, California, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and others) and in many cities (New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Santa Barbara) tourism ranked first or second in importance as a source of wealth and employment. Counties, towns, and cities that had never relied on tourism before, had never thought of “selling place,” now relied on it to make up for the drop in manufacturing; in this business, at least, Americans could not be undercut by corporations moving to Mexico or Indonesia. The natives still had their places, for what they still were worth, to sell.

In the 1990s nearly all of New York State, from New York City up through the Hudson River Valley and all along the old
Erie Canal, witnessed a decisive shift to tourism. Even New York’s Putnam County, among the most rural and undeveloped counties in the state, created its first tourist bureau in 1995, to “bring in money” and “sell the area,” as Republican county leader Robert Pozzi put it. “Putnam is the best-kept secret in the state until now,” said the bureau’s first director, Valerie Hickman, a recent immigrant from South Africa. “It’s very exciting to see what’s developing here.”
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On the other side of the country, the people of Wallowa County, Oregon, out of desperation caused by the loss of mining and logging jobs, had even invited the Nez Perce Indians into the town to help build a brand-new tourism economy. In the nineteenth century, the federal government forcibly exiled most of the Wallowa Indians to an Idaho reservation, while those who remained behind were driven into Canada by angry whites; now, in one of the many curious twists of the age, the Nez Perce tribe was back in Wallowa, attracting “tourists by the busload,” as a local resident reported.
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Indians themselves had turned to tourism as a way to survive on their reservations. Starting in the 1970s, tribes as diverse as the Hopi in Arizona, the Penobscot in Maine, and the Cherokee in North Carolina operated ski lifts, dammed rivers to build lakes for pleasure boating, and conducted powwows to capture the tourist trade.
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From the late eighties on, many powwows—no longer unique ceremonies—were carnival events, spectacular drawing cards in which Indians from several tribes gathered to dance and sing, decked out in colorful feathers, and in beaded costumes worthy of Busby Berkeley. By the mid-nineties, Japanese, German, and English tourists were flooding into South Dakota, eager to live in a tepee for a week or more as part of a “cultural immersion” summer program offered by the Sioux tribes in the region.
Around the same time, the state of New Mexico established the first “full-fledged Indian tourism office” in the country.
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Year by year, casino gambling has also become big business. Before 1920, “there was only one place in the world where one could play roulette”—and that was Monte Carlo.
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In time, other casinos were opened to serve the middle-class market on the Riviera and along the French coast near England.
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But, in America before 1990, casinos existed only in a hot desert in Nevada, along the seedy beachfront of Atlantic City, and in Puerto Rico. Eight years later, twenty-eight states had casinos, some housed in more than seventy riverboats from Iowa to Illinois, self-contained gambling dens legally and culturally (if not literally) cut off from life on shore.
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Casinos transformed old “drowsy shrimping port” cities such as Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, into “tourism boomtowns,” according to the
Wall Street Journal.
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On a smaller scale, floating crap game palaces called “cruises to nowhere” proliferated, docked along eastern cities from Florida to New York, ready to set sail for international waters in pursuit of the ideal nowhere setting for the toss of the dice.
¹⁴

At the same time, Las Vegas, the world’s premier gambling metropolis, underwent a burst of growth. A new species of casinos appeared after 1994, integrating theme-park rides, high-tech excitements, and a new family-friendly marketing approach. The Luxor Hotel, owned by Circus Circus Enterprises, was erected, a colossal Egyptian pyramid of black glass, across the way from the equally new MGM’s Grand Casino/Hotel and blocks away from the Mirage’s Treasure Island with its imitation tropical rain forest. The New York–New York Hotel/Casino made its debut in 1996, linked by a walkway to the MGM Grand, and noted for its phony Manhattan skyline with its giant Statue of Liberty and towering replica of
the Empire State Building. In October 1998, at the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, mogul Steve Wynn planted his Bellagio Hotel/Casino; among its many unique features was a 8.5-acre lake and a Gallery of Fine Art, where visitors might view paintings and sculptures by Europe’s and America’s finest artists, from Monet and Van Gogh to Lichtenstein and de Kooning. By early 1999 Las Vegas contained more than 100,000 hotel rooms, a figure no other city in the world could come close to equaling.
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Then, of course, there were the Indian reservations, hardly what one might call nowhere. Indeed, these communities were supposedly unique places that Indians had struggled to transform from alienating prison camps imposed on them by the state into “islands of Indianness,” controlled by Indians themselves, with historical identities, loyalty to ancestors, and a deep sense of place.
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Since 1990, nearly 150 Indian tribes (out of 500) have built casino-type operations across the country from California to Connecticut.
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Indians could take credit for bringing casinos to states, cities, and regions that never had them. The Pequots and Mohegans introduced casinos to Connecticut (grossing a $1.5 billion in 1997), the Oneidas to New York State, and the several Sioux tribes to Minnesota. The Confederated Tribes of the community of Grande Ronde operated Oregon’s only casino, called Spirit Mountain; and the Kotenai tribe in Idaho managed the only hotel-casino complex in that state. The Puyallup Tribe in Washington State brought a $21 million casino riverboat, the Emerald Queen, to that city, its first Las Vegas–style gambling enterprise.
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Many tribal casinos were small-scale, often heart-wrenching attempts to escape poverty. The Oglala Sioux casino, the Prairie Wind, in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, sits in a corner of the nation’s second largest reservation. The casino is a speck in a vast stretch of open plains where antelope run and a sea of rolling grass seems never-ending; it had done little by the late
nineties to lift the poverty of Pine Ridge.
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Elsewhere, however, many of the new Indian casinos, from the Viejas business near San Diego to the Oneidas’ Turning Stone casino-hotel outside Rome, New York, were huge and rich, affecting not only the reservations but the regions in which they existed.

Gambling quickly became a highly lucrative feature of the tourist-entertainment universe. Developers everywhere sought to link tourism and gambling into a total package and to offer a diversified range of entertainment to children as well as adults. We must “integrate gaming with entertainment and retail,” said Edward DeBartolo, Jr., chairman of Simon-DeBartolo Real Estate Investment Trust (the biggest of all the REITs), in 1995; this “is the wave of the future.”
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Kevin Costner agreed with DeBartolo. The thirty-five-year-old Costner cleared a $60 million profit for his efforts in the 1990
Dances With Wolves
, a film which emphasized the spiritual purity of Indians—in this case, the Lakota Sioux tribe in South Dakota—at the expense of the corrupt whites. In 1995, Costner, flush with the windfall from such films and looking for profitable places to invest it, embarked with his brother, Dan, on the erection of the Dunbar, a supposedly world-class vacation resort named for the character Costner played in
Dances With Wolves
.